My Journey With Mad Men

Mad Men is truly an interesting piece of the American pop culture miasma. I am pretty sure that it is art because the first time I watched it I thought it sucked. Movie and television critic Todd Vanderwerff noted once, in a review that I am too lazy to look up, that it can take people a long time to “get” Mad Men. Many never do. But for those who do, the persistence of watching eventually pays off and what the show is doing will finally click into place for you. And once it does you start to appreciate the complex sweep of the show’s ambitions from a new light. For me this started to happen in the 2nd season, which I guess says a lot about me as a person that I watched a show I didn’t really like for 1 1/2 seasons just because I had nothing better to do.

I remember watching the pilot episode on a DVD I checked out from the library and it all seemed so rote. I couldn’t understand why everybody was raving over this show about a typical 1960s marriage, with the unhappy housewife and unfaithful husband. But I pushed through it, gradually at first in fits and phases, but eventually in a more sustained manner once I moved to Singapore and had to fill up my time living in cramped student housing hiding from the sweltering heat. And eventually, I don’t know, it did kind of click. I guess for me it was when I realized that while the themes were pretty well-traveled, especially if you’ve ever picked up a Richard Yates book, Mad Men was doing something different. For me, that realization started with the structure.

As Todd Vanderwerff also pointed out, each episode of this show was more like a short story than part of an overarching 13-episode season. The show was far less interested in being a plot-driven serialization and much more interested in creating a very intimate and realistic exploration of the inner lives of its characters. Untethered from the Plot Fairy it could dive into its characters and their lives. It could experiment with style (like in the drug episode) and with structure, making characters do things that actual people do even if that undercut and ran against what we as viewers have been trained to expect from plots.

Don’s sudden, yet oddly organic, marriage to Megan is a good example (it’s one of the moments I thought to myself, Hey this show really has the balls to be truly different). Or my personal favorite, the fourth episode of the final season where Sterling Cooper realize that McCann is going to absorb them and the partners launch a spunky plan to save the agency. In a normal show, this improbable and mildly idiotic plan would have carried the day so the audience could experience the catharsis of seeing their favorite characters triumph one last time. But in Mad Men the plan is simply halted in mid-stride in an anti-climactic way and the characters are left to contemplate, as real people would have to do, how they want to carry on in the face of a rather crushing disappointment, swept along by forces they cannot really control. That’s good writing. Because that’s real life.

Before I get to some of the other things I really liked about the show, I do want to acknowledge that I understand why not everyone gets Mad Men. There are a few glaring liabilities that it carried more or less from end-to-end in its run. The first is wooden, stiff acting. This was epitomized in the character of Betty Draper. Why did January Jones portray the character in this way? We will never know for sure, unless someone has already asked Matthew Weiner about it. But she acts like an automaton. I get that the character is supposed to be distant and cold and somewhat unlikable, but I never understood this choice and it just never worked for me.

It leads one to wonder whether Weiner instructed the actors to act woodenly, like they were fabricated steel rods. Vincent Kartheiser certainly portrayed Pete Campbell in a strangely off-putting way, like a person pretending to act the way he thought a normal human being was supposed to. Maybe this was a conscious choice that Weiner made because he wanted to give the impression that everyone in the cast was just putting up and projecting a false image of what they wanted to world to see. With Kartheiser this weird stiffness eventually became quite a reliable running gag, but with Betty it never seemed like she nor the writers were in on the joke. She was just stiff and uninteresting. Trying to pass off bad acting as a conscious artistic choice? I never felt this worked.

But then again, maybe Weiner is actually just bad at casting people and doesn’t really know what he wants from his actors or what good acting is. The most glaring evidence in support of this theory was the character of Glenn who, it turns out, is Mathew Weiner’s son. Glenn was a blight on the show. He ruined any scene he was in and should never have been in the show in the first place, let alone been a recurring character who was supposed to actually be important to both Sally and Betty’s character arcs. Glenn was garbage. He exists in the show merely due to nepotism. But it does make you wonder, if Weiner was willing to put his shit-ass actor of a kid in the show, were there other elements of the show where he put blinders on as well?

This brings me, in a roundabout way, to my other major criticism of the show which is the way it portrayed the 60s in general, but especially the way it portrayed California. California was written as this mythical, mystical fantasy land where staid, uptight New Yorkers could go and unwind. This was folded into the theme of Don’s fake identity (another liability the show carried around for years), asserting basically that California was an oasis where Don could go and indulge his real self, far removed from Madison Avenue and surrounded by the liberating influence of hippies and drugs.

This concept of California as not just a different place but almost a different reality from New York was played up very hard and very excessively and, frankly, it sucked ass. It was like a guy from New York who had never been to California wrote these scenes, based on what he imagined California was like from having watched some old stock footage. Generally speaking, that is what much of the show’s “perception” of the 60s was like - fractured, weird and obviously the reinterpreted memories of someone who had lived through the 60s only vaguely, as a young kid perhaps.

In a twist no one saw coming, Matthew Weiner was born in Baltimore in 1965. This series, then, is basically just the way he remembers the world of his childhood, including this weird Othering of California and an overly stylized idea of what hippies were. By the time Weiner was 15 and coming into his own as an adult who could more accurately perceive the world, the era of Alex P. Keaton as a hero for the American middle class was upon us and the 60s must have appeared in his memory like a distant bit of fog that he couldn’t quite touch. I am sure, although I have no evidence other than my brain, that all of this warped Weiner’s memories of what the world of his early years was like and that ended up forming the basis of Mad Men.

Remarkably, in the non-California scenes, this fogged lens ended up being one of the show’s greatest strengths. Because it is safe to say that the world of Madison Avenue ad men, as envisioned in the show, never existed. Sure, looking back on the long arc of history wealthy privileged white people, usually guys, like to imagine that that was the way it was. Suits fit perfectly, ice cubs clinked majestically in highball glasses, and the world was just as it should have been and always would be.

Thanks to immaculate production design and exacting attention to detail, Man Men excelled at pulling us into this seductive, dreamy illusion of what life in the 1960s was for white American men at the top of their professions. Of course, this world never really existed on the way it was portrayed, but as a fever dream of Matthew Weiner’s stylized memories it worked brilliantly at creating this manufactured yet exquisitely textured facsimile of the 1960s. And over time, I came to love spending time in that place with those characters.

This world-building was one of the show’s great strengths. It recreated a lost era out of the impressions that era left on its maker. Even if it failed to align with reality, the impressionistic world that Mad Men did create was so alive, so sensual and so fun to hang around in that for many people that was enough to hook them on the show. They may not necessarily have been interested in what the show was doing to subvert traditional story structure or plotting, or the novel things it did with its characters.

But for many people the fun of Mad Men was just a throwback to an imagined era of American Greatness, where they could revel in the comfort of hanging out with Don Draper wearing an immaculate suit and tossing back Old Fashioneds in a bar with real mahogany and leather booths. Sometimes you can still find steakhouses like that (Billingsley’s in West LA, which used to be owned by Barbara Billingsley of Leave it to Beaver, was just such a place), and they are like little time capsules. Mad Men brought us back to that place every time that it aired.

But what elevated the show is that beyond it’s world-building, and the total lack of fucks it gave about traditional plotting or storytelling, was what it did with its characters. Mad Men sought to create fully textured, real people. Don Draper is obviously the focal point here, so lets start with him. The basis of Don Draper’s character is something that is universal to the human condition: he didn’t like who he was as a person. Not as a character in a show, who had to go through some manufactured bullshit journey where he learns and them embraces some shallow value like self-sacrifice or some shit, but as a human being. He didn’t like himself. And he was terrified that someone might discover who he really was.

So he created this carefully constructed persona of Don Draper. The show hit that nail on the head much too hard and directly in the first season with the whole Dick Whitman thing. I think this is because someone at AMC told them they needed some kind of hook, some soapy element in the first season because a bunch of middle aged wealthy white people ruminating about their unhappiness wouldn’t cut it. And so they came up with this. But really, that is making the subtext text in a kind of obvious and irritating way and the show, as it grew more confident over the years, moved away from that gimmick (like how Don told Megan off-screen about the Dick Whitman rhubarb and she didn’t give a fuck). But anyway it comes back to the same basic point: Don doesn’t like himself, so he creates this image for the world and he wants to sell them on it.

The fact that Don is also an ad man is just another layer of interesting complexity because not only does he sell people around him on the image of himself that he wants to project, but he makes his living selling the stuff companies make to people by tricking them into thinking they want it. And when he does his best work, like in Season One’s Carousel, he is able to craft the perfect ad by channeling what he really wants. But really all you have to do to understand Don Draper is realize that he is projecting to the world an image of who he wants to be, the person he thinks the world will accept. And people buy it. But once someone gets close to him and learns who he really is, finds out about his imperfections and his character flaws, he becomes distant. Not because he hates them, necessarily, but because he hates himself and holds it against them because they found out who he really is. Now that is a realistic, complex character. Those are real human emotions and motivations. This isn’t “Is the responsibility of wearing a Spider-Man outfit too much or no?” It’s grounded in real human things. You rarely see such a thing in TV or movies.

The character work on this show was just great throughout. Peggy’s evolution had the same textured, realistic dimension as Don’s. That is to say, her “evolution” didn’t happen because the plot needed it, or because her “arc” felt unsatisfying. It happened because, like, that’s basically how you might expect a career-minded self-doubting Catholic woman trying to break through in the 1960s to experience things. The waves of self-doubted, the triumphs, the ego. It all, or most of it, squared at the end and it made you feel like this character was a real person, with real feelings and real problems. And that is vanishingly rare in TV or movies.

But that’s not all. The show then took all this realistic, painstaking character work and did something more with it. It used it to contrast with and illuminate the passage of time. So the whole show, especially once it was a hit and they knew they could go as long as they wanted, is about moving through time and how people and their circumstances and the world around them change. People you know die. Your career options and aspirations and opportunities change. You have kids. World events happen to you, and the way everybody experienced those events, usually through the prism of the Sterling Cooper offices but sometimes not, was a really interesting thing that the show did.

In this way it showed that character arcs in a movie or a TV show are bullshit. People don’t start out a certain way, then experience events, and ultimately end up changed after going through an epiphany. That is fabricated bullshit. People are who they are, and they struggle against history trying to locate themselves as best they can in a chaotic flood of happenings and shifting fortunes. And the show really captured that - aside from the overdone 60s and California stuff.

It is, in addition to everything else, a show about how people grapple with the world and their place in that world as it changes. Roger had to deal with his own mortality. Don had to deal with his divorce and his kids getting older, and then the failure of a second marriage and how society was beginning to see marriage and women in a different light. Joan had to adapt her identity to a workplace where women were gaining more agency and she feared missing the boat. They all had to deal with a world where black people were asserting their rights and technology was coming for their jobs. The world changed around them and because the character work was so good, we were invested in how they changed with it, as people do.

The writing and the jokes were whip-smart, too. The structure was innovative. The character work was beyond good. The world of Mad Men is one that sucks you in, full-stop. But the ending left something to be desired. If there is one thing I hated about Mad Men - beyond the terrible California scenes, Betty’s acting and Glenn being in the show - it was the ending. This is, I believe, related to the way the show treated California as this kind of salvation from the soul-sucking work of manufacturing a glossy facade for public consumption and profit. Come to California, it seemed to say, and Be Yourself and you will Be Saved. That is the worse kind of twice-washed hippie-dippie bullshit I ever heard. But there is evidence that Matthew Weiner actually believes in that new age guru shit.

The evidence is the way the show ended, with Don on a downward spiral until he goes to a - what else!?! - hippie commune on the West Coast and “discovers himself.” He then writes the famous “I'd Like to Buy the World a Coke” ad. Now, there are two ways you could have viewed that episode. One is that it’s a cynical way for Don to take his personal anguish and suffering and use it to sell more cokes! But the other way, and the one Weiner acknowledged he was going for, is that Don actually does reach a state of catharsis or peace with himself and the Coke ad, which is in its ultimate analysis just a way for a huge American corporation to sell fucking sodas, is the apotheosis of his spiritual journey. Those things don’t jibe. They don’t match. And they don’t make no fucking sense together.

It makes you wonder if Matthew Weiner is really the genius we thought he was all along. It’s not really my place to question that, as the show he produced is I think without question one of the greater works of American culturana in the last one a half decades. But it does make you wonder, if the whole time he was making this show about cynical people who don’t like themselves and try to manipulate the public into buying things they don’t need, if maybe he missed what the message was the whole time. To end on that note, a happy note that says yeah advertising is shit and it exploits peoples doubts and insecurities to make them into good consumers, but it can also unite the world and help this troubled man transcend his demons…. What show were we really watching all along?

Am I the Only One Who Doesn't Really Like The Handmaid's Tale?

So I think we can all agree that The Handmaid’s Tale is both a timely and important piece of television, given where we are right now as a society. And I should also admit I have not read Margaret Atwood’s novel, so I’m not exactly a Handmaid Expert. But as I was watching the first two seasons of this series, starring Peggy Olson of all people, I found myself not liking it very much. This then caused me shame, for surely something that everyone agrees is Very Important ought to also be something that I like, right?

But I didn’t. And I think there are basically two reasons for this. The first is that this is difficult material to adapt. Really tricky. Atwood’s book primarily takes place inside Offred’s head, so the world of Gilead is interpreted for us through her perceptions and thoughts. This is very difficult to translate onto the screen because you can’t access an actor’s internal monologue. If they are a good actor, some of this can be bridged through, you know, good acting, but there is a limit to how much internality one can get from the screen. Most people trying to solve this problem end up relying quite heavily on voice-over to do the heavy lifting, and there is quite a lot of that in the Handmaid’s Tale. Maybe too much.

This is just a tricky problem inherent in any adaptation like this, which is so much about the way this particular character is experiencing events. In the book, the world-building is done through what the character is going through, but that doesn’t work quite as well when you try it on television. The world of Gilead that Atwood created is truly interesting, sprawling, bizarre and disgusting. But Offred’s centrality to the narrative, and as our narrative lens, deprives Season 1 of opportunities to really explore this world (Season 2, freed from the source material, does explore the world of Gilead much more broadly). It would have been nice, perhaps, to explore this weird theocratic shit-hole in more depth, rather than just being trapped in a room with Peggy Olson narrating her internal monologue for much of Season 1. That’s why adaptations are tricky; you have to make tough decisions about fidelity to source material and what will work and what won’t and it doesn’t always play.

The second reason I didn’t like the show is more straightforward. I absolutely hate the way it is filmed. It is almost 100% tight close-ups and shallow focus. Many, many people have heaped praise on the show’s aesthetic, so I may be in the minority here but I just don’t care for the visual look of it at all. I understand why they chose to shoot it this way - it’s meant to emphasize the suffocating nature of the Gilead regime, it’s meant to convey a sense of claustrophobia and oppression. Aright, I get that. But it still looks like shit, because you can’t fucking see anything that’s going on in the frame ever. It’s usually just one or maybe two giant heads or bonnets bobbing around the screen. Is Paul Greengrass a consulting producer on this show? I just don’t like the way it is filmed. At all. And that turned me off.

I do think the themes that the show deals with are interesting, and the ideas are also quite fascinating. But I just don’t quite agree with the choices the team made in adapting it for the screen. In my opinion, this story probably works better, and conveys its ideas more sharply, as a book. In Season 2 the show started branching out more, exploring more of the world of Gilead and introducing more conventional plotting than we saw in the first season (suicide bombings, a delicious season finale cliffhanger dripping with hints of Charles Bronson-style vengeance).

These things make the plot more interesting, in a conventional way, but also move it further away from what the book was doing, which was exploring the personal hell this woman was being forced to endure. I bet in the next couple seasons it turns into a fully-fledged Hunger Games shebang about a violent rebellion or something. Sure that would be more interesting (there will be more explosions) but it gets away from the subtle, nuanced exploration of women’s rights and how oppressive regimes can grow up around us (although it never really sold me on that because the show plays very fast and loose with the details of HOW exactly these theocratic weirdos gained power).

I will probably watch Season 3, because one must watch shows that all of society agrees are Very Important, and also I’m curious to see if Peggy kills Fred and his awful wife. I just hope that as the carnage starts to rain down upon these heathens, the show will shoot it using wide angle lenses.

TV Review: Why Season 2 of Westworld Sucked So Bad

Do you remember the end of Blade Runner, another movie about life creating life, when the ending subtly hinted that Deckard is a Replicant and, once you get it, it blows your mind? Well I’m pretty sure Jonathan Nolan remembers it too and when he was pitching Westworld it probably included a line about, “Wouldn’t it be great to make a show where that happens, but with every single character!?!” And then HBO gave him one hundred million dollars.

Seasons 2 of HBO’s Westworld is blood-blisteringly awful. It just totally and completely sucks. There are so many reasons why it is bad, but first I actually want to focus on the positive. Which is Season 1. Season 1 of Westworld was great. I mean, I watched most of it while on a layover in the Beijing Airport when I had nothing else to do and my debit card wasn’t working so I couldn’t get drunk, but I still think it holds up. It sets up this very complex, involved world. It raises some interesting questions about creation and consciousness and life. It looks great. It’s engaging. It’s got just the right amount of twists, which aren’t all that telegraphed. It was equal parts mystery, community college philosophy, great acting, great set design and great world-building all doled out in measured, even doses. When it ended on that cliffhanger I was on the edge of my seat!

The lesson executive producer Jonathan Nolan took from this experience was that audiences love unnecessary ambiguity and ridiculous twists, cultivated in an over-the-top and extremely slow and fragmented narrative, and that he should quadruple down on that. He’s like a guy with one of those t-shirt cannons shouting “And YOU get a twist! And YOU get a twist! EVERYBODY gets a twist!” Honestly, he should be put in jail.

The show still looks great. It still has great actors, doing the best that they can. But it really slid right into a dung pile. Let’s start with the main thing that made this season so ulcerativey awful. The narrative. Why is it structured this way? It is needlessly complex, told out of order, apparently just so they could hide a “twist” at the end. This decision truly enraged me for the simple fact that it is so, so utterly unnecessary. I mean, I get it that the Nolan brothers have some kind of genetic deficiency that prevents them from telling a story in a linear fashion, even if a non-linear narrative makes no sense. Memento told out of order? Makes perfect sense. Genius even. Twisting up Dunkirk’s narrative? No good reason whatsoever. But listen, that is never gonna stop these whackadoos, because they love it for whatever reason.

But here’s the thing, telling the story out of sequence in Season 1 worked really well because you don’t know it’s a nonlinear narrative until they reveal it. So thinking that everything you’re seeing is one straightforward story right up until it’s not is genuinely surprising, and it’s a clever twist. Moreover, it feeds into some of the bigger issues the show is toying with, such as how these ageless robots can totally un-tether you in time and place and turn meaning on its head. Great. That works for a variety of reasons.

Deciding, I suppose, that they needed to top that somehow, Season 2 opens with multiple story lines taking place across multiple time periods, featuring an orgy of flashbacks - and for what? I found it so convoluted, just for the sake of being confusing, that it didn’t even warrant me expending the effort to track all these threads. In fact, it made me kind of angry that the show had such a high opinion of itself, that it actually expected me to try and keep track of all this bullshit. I’m not saying that it’s an affront to human dignity, but it’s certainly bordering on a human rights violation.

And all of this stupidity was inflicted on me because the show is so in love with itself. It is so in love with its mystique and philosophy, and that hubris just burns a hole right through the screen. There is no other way that a show would do the things Westworld does in Season 2 unless it had an unfaltering sense of its own place in the scope of human greatness. But - and this is critical - it doesn’t earn that. I mean, in many ways the show is actively bad, a festering pile of turdulence, so for it to act like we should be grateful just to be eating this garbage they are putting out is frankly insulting. For one, because everything is so impossibly and needlessly complex in this show you wind up with these really inelegant, clunky, and just frankly terrible exposition dumps.

They are not trying to carefully build the world anymore (as they did in Season 1), but to just have characters tell you about the world. Look at when Bernard and Elsie (who apparently has been chained up in a cave for 10 episodes???) go to visit the Cradle. Now, of course these two characters should already know what the Cradle is. Yet Bernard feels compelled to explain it to Elsie, as if she doesn’t already know. And spoiler alert - even when they do these cheats with shitty ass exposition, it doesn’t make the ideas land any better. The Cradle is just another in a long line of stupid, badly-described stillborn techno-babble. My favorite bit of unintentionally awful dialogue was when Bernard, in a moment of revelation, exclaims: “You’re not coding the Hosts. You’re using the Hosts to de-code the guests!”

A-ha! Not even Jeffrey Wright can polish that turd. This is simply inexcusably bad writing. It doesn’t have to be bad. Star Trek: The Next Generation proved that if your characters, your setting and your plot are on-point you could cram the stupidest techno-babble gobbledygook into Data’s mouth and people would love that shit! But Westworld just ignores those other very important components of good story-telling and goes right to the nonsense, believing that audiences are so in love with nonsense that they will tolerate all this lazy writing. It’s the kind of thing that happens when you have a hit on your hands, and people stop pointing out when your ideas suck.

Some critics, such as Todd VanDerWerff, have toyed with the idea that this is intentional, in some ways. Like Samurai World is actually supposed to be a conscious send-up of bad samurai movies, because the park is catering to rich white people whose only knowledge of Japanese culture would come from bad samurai movies. That is like trying to out-think a marmot. Why did that marmot just run up in that tree and start rubbing its butt on a branch? Maybe it’s a comment on the neo-Platonic relationship between land and animal in post-colonial America. Or maybe it’s a fucking marmot and that’s what it does because it has a brain the size of an acorn. I mean, we don’t really need to stretch our metal faculties to figure out why Samurai Land plays like a worse impression of a bad Samurai movie. It’s because it was hatched in the brain of Jonathan Nolan, who is drunk with power and pseudo-genius, and he thought that this sequence in Japan was wonderful, dolerant art.

Now, Todd has also evinced a certain degree of ambivalence toward this project. He suggests that the show is really meant to be played like a game, rather than enjoyed like a television show. If you engage with it, by constantly trying to guess what the twists are, then you will find it to be much more enjoyable. True, that does explain why the show is so bad, because it incentivizes the writers to simply try and make it as complicated and twisty as possible, without reference to whether those choices play well from a narrative, thematic or character standpoint. It’s all about the twists, and so they will just try to keep one-upping themselves with new twists, and even more confusing and fractured narratives, and even more weak attempts to pass off mealy pop philosophy that wouldn’t even get a B in Intro to Western Thought at SMC as some kind of transcendent commentary on life, reality and society.

But of course, as M. Night Shyamalan proved fairly conclusively, making twists the cornerstone of your filmmaking philosophy suffers from diminishing returns that will accelerate over time. I just feel cheated, you know, that they took a good premise (thanks to Michael Crichton, a simple man with an abiding love for negligent theme parks) and have run it into the ground by breathing the fumes of their own self-evident genius. The show still looks great, and if they had just treated it with a modicum of restraint, instead of trying to stupify and wazzle us at every turn, then Season 2 might of lived up the promise of Season 1. But instead we get this dodolerant cacophony of noise and garbage, one which has created a mystery it doesn’t dare solve for fear of losing it’s audience. The result is a zombie of a thing, stumbling about without any purpose through fractured narrative timelines, lurching through exposition dumps while trying to find the next twist that will feed the gnawing hunger in its stomach.

TV Review: The Ending Ruins the Haunting of Hill House

It looks like Netflix has another hit on its hands. Premiering just in time for Peak Spooky Season, the newest iteration of Shirley Jackson’s classic 1959 novel tells the story of a family and its fraught, twisted psychological relationship with each other and a creepy old mansion - and so far, people are loving it. The story itself is heavily reworked, so it would be more accurate to say that it draws inspiration from Jackson’s novel rather than being a straightforward adaptation, which may have bugged purists, but is something I actually like. This piece of literature has been adapted many times, so it’s nice to see a bit of originality in the way its approached this time, taking the themes and the setting from the original and giving them new legs.

The show is about the Crain family, and their shared trauma from a brief summer spent in Hill House, a creepy old mansion that Mr. Crain and his wife purchased and lived in with their young family in 1992 in order to flip it. The youngest Crain children are terrorized by visions and ghosts, and something terrible happens in the house resulting in the death of their mother. The truth of this terrible thing is withheld until the finale, of course, with most of the plot driven by little driblets and hints of what it might be doled out in measured doses. The show spends most of its time dealing with the lasting impact that terrible thing has had on the five Crain children and their father over the years. It flashes back and forth, rather effortlessly, between the Past and the Present, using different color schemes to drive home the time shifts. The Past is bright and sepia-toned; the Present dark, washed out and dreary.

Each of the first five episodes introduces and tells the story of each of the Crain children, now in adulthood, and their strained relationships with each other and with their dad and the various ways they have chosen to deal with their shared trauma. It is basically like a supernatural family drama, and it works because the acting and the casting are superb, so the family and its dramas feel real and compelling. Sure, the fact that their trauma may or may not be of a supernatural nature helps make it more interesting than your typical bullshit family spats over dinner, but fundamentally there is a dynamic at play in a work like this that you couldn’t pull off if the characters didn’t feel like a real family, with all the strains and bullshit and secrets and petty jealousies and tiny triumphs and love that go one between real family members. And this family has a real texture and feel in the way they relate to one another, so it works. It’s like Bloodline. But with ghosts.

Structurally, the narrative takes a bit of a Rashomon-style approach, viewing those summer months in Hill House through the subjective perceptions of each character. The younger kids had the closest run-ins with whatever supernatural presence was haunting Hill House, while the older kids were spared the worst visions and have thus grown up being highly skeptical of the supernatural roots of their trauma. Instead, they chalk everything up to mental illness and poor Mr. Crain, (played as a young man by Eliot from ET!), gets blamed as a basket-case. So the narrative adds layers, and reveals mysteries, as we see how each family member experienced those terrible months differently.

Stylistically, the show is well-made. There are jump-scares, and creepy-crawlies. There is a virtuoso sequence the night before a funeral that features extended single-take tracking shots, and reads almost like a stage play in the way the camera explores the space and the characters confront one another, dredge up secrets, and bicker over old grievances. The 1990s scenes set in Hill House are very good at hitting just the right notes of longing and nostalgia, using bright and warm colors to make those idyllic days before these terrible things happened seem especially haunting and innocent and inaccessible now. Depictions of an idealized past should be like that, because even when there are no ghosts involved, you can never go back again.

But the show commits a cardinal sin - it burns its best idea midway through. Episode 5 deals with Nell, the youngest Crain child, as she struggles with an apparition known as The Bent-Neck Lady. This was something the show invented, not taken from the novel, and the ending of this episode was flat-out great. I won’t spoil it, but it’s just a great and terrifying sequence that is also a real gut-punch and is one of the best ghost story twists I’ve ever seen. The problem is, this leaves the plot running on fumes for the next 5 episodes as it tries to top that showstopper. And unfortunately, it can’t. All the secrets that it holds back about the terrible tragedy the family experienced at Hill House are finally revealed in the finale, and it falls totally flat and cannot come anywhere close to that Episode 5 shocker. In fact, I truly hated the final episode, and felt cheated because the build-up is not just not satisfying but its very poorly executed, opening with these really stupid fantasy sequences.

And when we finally do have all the secrets laid bare, it’s just kind of disappointing. All that build-up… and that was the best they could come up with? Show-runner Mike Flanagan should have structured the narrative so that Episode 5 was the finale, because that is clearly the best episode he had in his arsenal. By burning it midway through, it really put the show at a disadvantage from which it could never quite recover. A shame, really, but the show is still mostly enjoyable as a family drama revolving around supernatural mysteries. Just wish it could have finished on the high note it deserved.

TV Review: Jungle Gold Perfectly Captures The Casual Exploitation of Developing Countries by Westerners

The synopsis for Discovery Channel’s Jungle Gold, which kicked off the first of two seasons in 2012, tells you all you need to know about this shitty fucking show. A pair of Mormons who lost their shirts in the collapse of the real estate bubble are seeking an even greater fortune in the rough-and-tumble gold mining frontier of Ghana. The show, during both seasons, chronicles the drama of just how badly two unprepared doofuses can fuck up a small-scale gold mining operation in a poor African country while committing multiple illegal acts and embodying every possibly negative stereotype that makes people throughout the world but especially in developing countries detest the United States.

The first season was a ratings smash hit, featuring uncountable instances of casual exploitation and arrogance committed daily by a pair of clueless Americans brought up to believe that the entire world is their personal play-ground. The climax of the season was when George, a beefy Mormon cowboy, choked out a local farmer who attacked the dig site with a machete. This was played for high drama, and the danger of the steamy Ghana jungle proved to be an irresistible draw for audiences back home.

The second season, which flopped, featured the bumbling prospectors having to flee the country after the Minister of Mining and Natural Resources issued a warrant for their arrest after the first season finally aired in Ghana and he saw how flagrantly they were flouting the law. Illegal small-scale mining in corrupt resource rich countries by foreigners is nothing new - but bringing a Discovery Channel film crew and broadcasting it to the entire world in the name of entertainment and notoriety is perhaps the epitome of idiotic American hubris.

Leaving aside the overall authenticity of the show (there are clearly a few staged moments of manufactured drama and questionable camera cuts), there are still abundant genuine instances of these two tall, broad-shouldered Americans bribing local officials, fighting with villagers, and destroying property in impoverished rural towns with a flagrant sense of entitlement that is simply maddening. They come into Ghana and walk all over it like they own the fucking place. There could not be a more perfect symbolic representation of Western exploitation of resources in countries that have lots of mineral wealth but little else.

For these guys (who truly suck at gold prospecting by the way), Ghana is there merely to have its gold extracted by them to make their fortunes and they don’t give a fuck about anything else. Sure, they pay lip service to sharing some of the profit from their claim with local village heads, and further claim their dig site employed a lot of locals. Sorry. That’s not good enough. That doesn’t give you the right to waltz into another country, stake a claim to a piece of its natural wealth and declare that it is your God-given right as an American just trying to make a buck to take it back home with you. Even worse is that this was then packaged by Discovery and sold to a simpering mass of other Americans who delighted in the danger-by-proxy of these buckaroo adventures in Ghana.

In the second season they enlist the help of a shady local fixer named Dave Thomas. Now it should be obvious that a white guy living in Ghana named after the founder of Wendy’s who runs a local church ministry and claims he can get you a mining concession is not to be trusted. But of course, George and Scott are equipped with the savvy of your typical walnut and immediately enter into a partnership with this guy. The most infuriating thing about these ass-cats is they continually declare that everything they are doing is legal and above-board, because Dave said he would take care of the concession and mining license (which, shockingly, he never actually produced before they are chased out of the country). Now using a shady fixer to bribe local officials to obtain an illegal mining license is not, it should go without saying, legal and above-board. But this is George and Scott we are talking about, so of course we need to say that because they have a fairly pronounced aversion to reality. “It’s just so unfair,” George laments, as a Discovery Channel-funded helicopter whisks them to Accra so that mobs of machete wielding vigilantes don’t hack them to death. “You do everything right and legal and official and you end up getting accused of something like this.”

No George. You know what’s unfair? When people from wealthy Western countries come to Ghana to exploit it. When a pair of Mormon schemers who lost their shirts speculating in real estate get thrown a life-line of cash from their father-in-law and use it to bribe their way into an illegal mining concession so they can steal what rightfully belongs to the people of Ghana. You know what’s unfair? Hundreds of years of colonial exploitation that left society and politics and institutions totally fucked up and vulnerable to continued exploitation by the very same Western people who caused this mess in the first place. And it’s simply blisteringly, astonishingly infuriating and wrong of those people to then claim they are the aggrieved ones, that the situation is somehow unfair to them because their casual, entitled exploitation of a country’s natural resources - for the purposes of making a fucking TV show no less! - was thwarted.

The only fair thing about this show is that it didn’t get picked up for a third season. The most unfair thing? That you guys weren’t arrested and thrown in a jail cell in Accra. That’s not fair.

TV Review: Last Chance U Is So Much More Than Football

I must admit, I was a bit late to the Last Chance U bandwagon. I was sitting around on the couch one afternoon nursing a hangover when Netflix helpfully suggested I might like it. And let me just say that we, as a society, ought not fear turning the sovereignty of our lives over to all-powerful algorithms if this is where they will lead us. I loved this show. Loved it. And I ended up watching it backwards, from Season 3 to Season 1, which is probably not optimal.

So what elevates this series over and above your typical 30 for 30? There are a number of obvious things, such as the deep and essentially unrestricted access that Greg Whiteley’s team got. There is the fact that chronicling a football program from training camp to play-offs is inherently a winning formula, documenting the elation of close wins, the crush of defeats and the little dramas that play out behind the scenes. There was the fact that Season 1 made a huge splash by ending with an all-out brawl. There was the beautiful cinematography of thrilling football plays but also of life in sleepy Southern towns, the shrewd editorial decision to just shoot the players and the staff and the locals, let them tell their stories in their own words and have the audience parse the meaning.

The production was also fortunate to find compelling student athletes with charisma and charm and life stories that were interesting and illuminating and heartbreaking. They were lucky to find someone like Buddy Stephens, an almost perfectly flawed central character around which the action pivoted. Aeschylus couldn’t have written a better character. They were lucky to find someone like Brittany Wagner, who could serve as a foil to Buddy and ground the drama of football in something deeper and more meaningful, and subtly shine a light on how fucked up and backwards a lot of this system is.

But ultimately what elevates this series above a simple 30 for 30 is that it uses football as a window through which to view so many different layers of American society. It was genius on Greg Whiteley’s part to suss out these programs that are widely ignored and focus on their redemptive potential. Not just redemption for the players, many of whom have clearly been failed by society, but redemption for these small Southern towns left behind by the country, redemption for these coaches who had their own dreams go unfulfilled. The show so perfectly captures how all these cogs in the American Dream are working together, lifting people up while simultaneously grinding others to dust.

My first impression of this show was that it was really smart to open on establishing shots of these run-down, middle-of-nowhere towns that for some astronomically obscene reason are home to immense football stadiums. These static shots of dilapidated stores and empty streets populated by old white Southerners tell us so much without saying a word. They establish a sense of time and place, of bucolic country life in a small-town with nowhere to go. They convey just how much value, both economic and social, is being invested into these football programs, which also goes some way toward portraying this weird farm league’s very existence to game the system as a uniquely hucksterish American invention. And they show the yawning chasm separating the residents of the town from the football players propping it up.

The cast of student athletes is too large to detail individually, but a few general things are really clear. One is that society has clearly failed a great deal of these mostly black kids. They come from broken families, where their personal stories often include one or both parents having been killed or sent to prison. They often grow up poor, without access to the basic things that drive success in later life, sometimes struggling just to find someone who genuinely cares about, and it’s clear that society in many ways has let them down. Now, we can argue forever about how much individual responsibility plays a role in this outcome, or whether society is to blame for not providing opportunities and disadvantaging them economically and socially at every turn from the get-go. But either way, it’s clear that life has been a struggle for a lot of these kids, often through no fault of their own, and the one avenue that provides them an opportunity is football.

It is hard to over-state how important football is to these players, and how they excel at football while flailing in the classroom. This says some interesting things about how we as a society value rote learning in a classroom setting and rubberstamped degrees, privileging it over something like athletic ability. A Bachelors Degree is just a box to be checked off for your typical middle-class white person as they march on toward their life as a middle manager in a software company somewhere. But for disadvantaged black kids coming from poor neighborhoods, who don’t have access to the same resources, and have to flail against social structures that for a variety of reasons throw up roadblocks at every turn, just getting a passing grade in a Community College Art class is a struggle.

So what’s the solution? Well it’s not to tackle the problem at its root, for that would involve confronting a hundred years of structural racism and other social problems that run bone deep. The solution is to set up this smoke and mirror football program where kids who messed up in Division I can come down and serve out a purgatorial sentence in Mississippi, focusing on football, keeping their heads down and doing the bare minimum to pass classes designed to pass them, until they can get another shot at a big-time school. The vast majority of them will not even make it to Division I, and even if they do the odds are even more vanishingly small that they will make it to the NFL and earn real money and outrun the roots of their problem, which is a country that has let them down and, frankly, unless they are making Primetime plays on ESPN doesn’t give a fuck about them.

This is what Last Chance U so eloquently, without saying a word, reveals in its more sublime moments. This entire JUCO system is a band-aid for more serious and deeper problems. I mean nobody is going to think about it that way when you’re in the stands watching a game, but that’s what it is. It’s a band-aid for the exploitation of student athletes, and a band-aid for the underlying reason why these athletes are in a position to be exploited in the first place, which is that our society provides them with very few other options. It is sad to see the coaches explicitly acknowledge this, telling their athletes that this is a game and they need to do it, to go through the motions, to pretend like these values are important just convincingly enough so that people on the outside can feel good about the deception. It is both heartbreaking and amazing to see how much they have invested in football, and whether and how they overcome their own personal failings, their families’ failings and the failings of an unfair system to get where they want to go.

And ultimately, that is what makes this show so great. It has great moments of drama, of sadness, of real feeling. It’s populated by compelling and fascinating and heartbreaking characters, who can be their own worst enemies or their own saviors. It lifts up and shows, viscerally, just how much football means to people throughout the country, and what life is like in the forgotten parts of America.

But it also peels back the layers of what is underpinning wealth, class, privilege and inequality in this country and kind of lays bare, in an oblique way and indirectly through the lens of game, what is going on at a deeper social and systemic level. Why do so many of these kids have parents who have been incarcerated? Why have they failed to acquire certain basic social or educational skills, and why are those the skills that determine future success in life anyway? A lot of them, when speaking to the camera, seem like basically good, decent, intelligent individuals. Why is society not serving them the way it should? Last Chance U wrestles with these deep, unanswerable questions, questions that get at the heart of what America wants to be but isn’t, all the while dressing it up in the guise of a basic redemptive football story. But it’s so much more. And that’s what makes it absolutely great filmmaking.

TV Review: Evil Genius and Netflix's Addiction to True Crime Stories

Evil Genius: The True Story of America's Most Diabolical Bank Heist, is the work of a particularly obsessed journalist spanning over a decade. It is quite gripping, a bit mystifying and overly long. In that sense, it shares many of the qualities of another Netflix true crime docuseries, the one that made the company fall in love with the genre: Making a Murderer. True crime is having a bit of a moment, with the wild success of Serial and HBO's The Jinx spurring a cottage industry of similar productions that take long, in-depth looks at the criminal justice system and tabloidy crimes.

It's not hard to see why. Ever since Truman Capote pioneered the genre with the un-put-downable In Cold Blood, there has been no lack of market for tales of evil people committing perverse acts for reasons that often remain incomprehensible. Audiences are fascinated by the titillating, bizarre and compelling details of true crime stories. Biographies of serial killers have long captured the interest of a particularly morbid segment of the public because there is an inherent fascination in what makes people commit such horrible acts against fellow human beings. Entire cable networks have sprung up devoted to covering every bloody detail of these cases. 

The opening episode of Evil Genius makes it all too clear why. It lays out the basic facts of the case, which are bizarre and tragic and utterly compelling. In 2003, a Pennsylvanian pizza delivery man robbed a bank using a gun fashioned to look like a cane, something straight out of the demented underworld of Dick Tracy. He was quickly apprehended by police, but claimed he had been coerced to commit the crime and had a bomb around his neck. He was carrying detailed pages of hand-written instructions, basically constituting a scavenger hunt he needed to complete in order to unlock and free himself from the device. Before the bomb squad could reach him, the device detonated, killing him. The show includes footage of this utterly bizarre and horrifying sequence of events.

This scenario almost defies belief. It's the kind of thing you see in a movie and think, That can't possibly be real. But it did happen, and is the only recorded instance in which a bank robber  actually had an explosive device detonated while committing the robbery, apparently under the orders of a third party. The next three hours of the series set about figuring out who that third party was, and trying to uncover the motivations for the crime and arrive at some kind of explanation.

Ultimately, the show doesn't really clarify the big questions, like why it was done. We can only guess and infer, and the facts of the case are too bongswaggled to arrive at a satisfying sense of closure. This is often the case with these true crime stories, and it comprises an important part of their allure. There simply may not be a satisfying explanation or sense of closure. Maybe people just commit these acts because they are evil. The idea that evil is ungoverned by reason, that it flows throughout society and manifests in unpredictable ways is what makes these shows so hard to turn away from, and also so terrifying.

My main criticism of this series is that it is too long, and too singularly obsessed with the titular Evil Genius: Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong. Marjorie, a woman suffering from mental illness, obviously coordinated and carried out the bombing. The evidence strongly suggests that she and her accomplices never intended for Brian Wells to get to the end of the scavenger hunt. The bomb had a timer, and it would have been pretty much impossible for him to go to all the locations as directed in the instructions. It seems very likely, then, that whoever did this simply wanted to create chaos, challenge the police and demonstrate their intelligence and cunning to the world.

The show is mainly the work of Trey Borzillieri, who had been reporting on the case since the beginning. He struck up a close relationship with Marjorie, almost certainly too close, and his skewed objectivity heavily influences the narrative. The series goes to great lengths to establish that Marjorie is a uniquely intelligent, deeply disturbed person, and it seeks to uncover some mysterious depths in her cold, terrifying gaze (the effect that she had on people when she looked at them is mentioned several times). But that is where the show gets tripped up, by trying to Hannibal Lecterize Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong, who died in prison in 2017.

The back-end of the show spends a lopsided amount of time airing interviews that Borzillieri conducted with her while she was in prison. In the interviews, she has the demeanor and mannerism of a fucking batshit crazy person, ranting and raving about her own intelligence and the unfairness of the world (not unlike Donald Trump, actually). Giving this person the platform that they want to erect a monument to their own criminal genius is itself problematic. This is compounded by the fact that Borzillieri is clearly obsessed with this woman, in her motivations, in what we are repeatedly told is her almost super-human intellect, her facility with lying and complete disregard for other human lives. 

I saw very little of that intellect on display. What I saw was a mentally disturbed person who committed a fairly clever and sophisticated act of especially heinous murder simply for the sake of it doing it. I would wager, however, that many people are intellectually capable of pulling off a similar murder. They simply choose not to. And the reason Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong chose to do it is not some unfathomable mystery, but simply that she was an insane sociopath with serious mental problems. Watching this person lie with fluency about the evilness of her own nature felt both exploitative and not particularly interesting. The murder itself is fascinating, in a horribly morbid way. The efforts to uncover the people behind it, complete with a dead body in a freezer, were also hard to look away from. But watching this person rant and rave to a journalist who was so obsessed with her that he spent a decade and a half trying to get to the root of what makes her tick - something feels wrong about that.

True crime stories always walk a fine line between being entertaining, informative and exploitative. By their very nature they use human tragedies to create shows that are designed to attract viewers. In this case, I think the show put too much of a spotlight on Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong, treating her with almost a kind of awe for the way she unapologetically stands outside the boundaries of human behavior and norms. If the show was slimmed down to just the facts, ditching the cult of personality aspects, it would have worked better and run less risk of delving into exploitative territory. Still, it was hard to turn off so I guess I am complicit with the rest of society in being unable to look away from the scandalizing details of a ghastly true crime story.

All of which, of course, means Netflix is almost certainly going to keep pumping out more of these.

TV Review: Sons of Anarchy is Best Understood as Epic Biker Mythology

Sons of Anarchy was born during the Great Television Renaissance of the 2000s. It is often compared with other prestige cable hits like Mad Men and Breaking Bad, and pretty squarely falls in the time period when people began to realize that serialized television could be elevated to something beyond story-of-the-week cop and hospital dramas. It never reached the lofty critical status of a Mad Men, something which provoked an inspired blog rant by creator Kurt Sutter originally titled FOR ALL YOU FUCKING IDIOTS WHO CAN'T SEE PAST THE CUM STAINS ON YOUR KEYBOARDS.

But of course, Sutter is right. Sons of Anarchy is not high art - and it never aspired to be that, not really. At times, especially in the back-end of the series, it was pretty touch and go with quality. But in its best moments, and I am thinking here specifically about the Season 3 finale, it was exactly what it wanted to be: a grand, epic tale about biker outlaws that went for big broad emotions and themes of family, love, loyalty, betrayal and honor. These ideas were sheathed in a roughneck aesthetic where cool-looking dudes on motorcycles drove around California killing each other for various, often incomprehensible, reasons. When it was firing on all cylinders, it was a great show.

First of all, we have to admit that plotting was never the backbone of this series. It was usually a bonus if the plot made any sort of sense at all. Let's just take a look at the premise the show opened with: fictional Northern California biker town Charming serves as a kind of neutral Switzerland for bigger gangs throughout the state to purchase weapons from SAMCRO (Sons of Anarchy Motorcycle Club Redwood Original). SAMCRO is led by Clay Morrow, played by Ron Perlman as a larger than life figure who could have been drawn straight from Greek mythology. He cut a deal with the local sheriff to allow the gun running to take place, as along as SAMCRO guarantees that Charming stays quiet and free from violence. Charlie Hunnam as Jax Teller is the heir-apparent to the SAMCRO throne, both because his father co-founded the club with Clay and also because he is impossibly handsome. A vast constellation of interesting side-characters and foes fill in this biker cosmos, and play off one another in ways that would drive the action for another seven seasons.

However, the logic of this set-up falls apart pretty quickly as Charming becomes filled with gang-related murders over the course of the series. The clubhouse gets blown up more than once, and there are frequent shoot-outs and rapes and multiple local and federal law enforcement officials are murdered. Yet everyone continues for the most part to accept that SAMCRO is a necessary presence because, well lets be honest, that is what the story demands. Other plot threads veer off into ludicrous directions. An entire season revolves around - I am not making this up - an Irish gangster stealing a baby and absconding to Ireland with it. The characters come up with schemes that are basically gibberish, and their motivations and thought processes are all over the place. They will kill innocent people in one scene, then in the next refuse to allow a different innocent person to die for no reason at all except to please the Plot Fairy. They will cut deals with their enemies, betray them, get betrayed, make a deal with them again, get betrayed, then make yet ANOTHER deal with them. A school shooting makes an appearance for some reason at one point. The final season spends an awful lot of time with a dead-eyed child actor who basically ruined any scene he was in.

As the show progressed, it dialed up the sensationalism, the gore, the violence and the suffering pretty much just to boost its lurid appeal. There are extended scenes of torture porn, people getting their eyes gouged out, body parts cuts off, burned alive - anal rapes in prison were a particularly popular leitmotif. I don't have anything against violence, or even extreme violence, if it serves some purpose but a lot of the violence in Sons of Anarchy began to feel like the writers had run out of ideas and they knew this would at least appeal to the audience's baser instincts.  It is easy to see why some people, especially those looking for some kind of refined social commentary, soured on the show. No character motivation is consistent, the plot is gobbledy-gook, and eventually it just fell into a cycle of trying to top itself with increasingly outrageous and senseless violence.

On the other hand, the show makes a lot more sense, and works better, if it is viewed as a soap opera on a grand and epic scale, like a Greek myth. Much of the early seasons were driven not by the details of the convoluted schemes the characters constantly hatched only immediately to see them fall apart, but by the big and broad emotional and thematic arcs, like pitting the aging king, Clay Morrow, against the rising heir apparent, Jax Teller and the slow reveal of various buried secrets. It was about the big emotions that resonate with people across time and culture - love, jealousy, hate. It asked big, universal questions - Who am I? What kind of person am I? What are we doing this for? Like the Aegean warriors laying siege to Troy, SAMCRO explored these ideas through a wide range of distinct and compelling characters engaged in forever war with their enemies, bonded by ties of brotherhood that ran deep. It was really the perfect setting for the kind of big, cathartic moments that Sons of Anarchy reveled in. And when they worked, they really worked.

In the first few seasons, the show hit its stride exploring these bonds while the narrative momentum was carried along by the prospect of the Young Prince challenging the King. It had everything you would want in a great mythology: legendary warriors, family intrigue, betrayal, love and violence playing out on a grand and epic scale. This culminated in the Season 3 finale, where a long-con paid off in a way that, unlike in later seasons, was extremely satisfying on an emotional, character and narrative level and didn't feel cheap or totally illogical. After the show finally toppled Clay, it lost some of its reason for being. It tried to ask questions like, Is Jax a good man or a bad man? But by then it had become so desperate to come up with new shocking twists and turns, and Jax himself was such an inconsistent character, that the question had little relevance or meaning.

So, that is 7 seasons of this television show in a nutshell. The chase scenes were always great. The characters could make you laugh and make you cry and make you cringe. More importantly, they made you believe they loved each other deeply. And if you step back and just look at the big emotions, the epic moments and the sweeping mythology the series was trying to weave, you can almost excuse the fact that when you drilled down into it nothing made any fucking sense. And if Kurt Sutter had been trying to make a show that sought to plumb the depths of human psychology or took a deep dive into the fabric of American society, we might come away from the experience feeling like this show didn't live up.

But that's not, I think, what Sutter was after. He was going for scope, grandeur, drama. He wanted to craft an epic mythology and if we judge the show by that ambition I think it's a success, at least in the first few seasons. After all, you never hear anybody nitpicking the Iliad because Achilles is a totally nonsensical character who was dipped in a river by a God when he was a baby. No, you accept that he is what he is and he behaves the way that he does, and that's just the kind of story Homer is telling. Not that I'm equating Sutter with Homer, or anything.... although his character Otto Delaney does get blinded in the show....

I'll stop now.