February 24, 2008

A Good Week of Television

Every week, as I watch shows, there’s usually at least one show that bugs the hell out of me. Maybe it’s because I’m no longer watching Numb3rs and no longer putting any thought whatsoever into Stargate Atlantis, but this week gets a perfect score. Even Medium—surprisingly, the weakest of the shows I watched this week—didn’t fill me with rage or disappointment. It wasn’t a horrible episode; it just wasn’t particularly noteworthy.

Breaking Bad (AMC) — So, are they getting the band back together or not?

Getting a glimpse of Jesse’s home life was more than a little uncomfortable. It’s interesting to consider his backstory; in many ways, he reminds me of several of my own friends, who lashed out and turned to drugs in high school—not to sell, but just because they had the hormone-induced belief that life was so rough and they had it so hard, when in reality they were naïve, sheltered suburbanites who had it pretty easy. Jesse strikes me as the confused, misguided type who would believe coming from money makes his life more difficult, but who knows for sure? They dropped a few hints (my favorite being Jesse confiding to his brother that they treat him better, and the brother vehemently disagreeing), and I admire them for only dropping hints and letting us draw our own conclusions.

And then there’s Walt, whose home life is crumbling after he admitted to his wife that he has cancer. Now that the family is rallying around him with expensive oncologists and procedures, I’ve finally figured out how they’re going to extend this premise. Walt’s as desperate as he ever was, but now he’s going to use the money to try to save himself, rather than to save his family after he’s gone. I’m not sure if that’s better or worse. Either way, I’m hooked.

Jericho (CBS) — Okay, I’m back on board the Jericho train as of this week. It’s mostly just goofy fun with an ambitious premise (like executive producer Jon Turteltaub’s National Treasure movies), but I can’t say no to goofy fun when there’s so little of it on television. There’s a lot of goofiness, but often it’s not much fun.

I can’t help wondering what’s going on with King President and the “Cheyenne government.” It’s kind of funny how this show has turned creepier now that Jericho citizens have more information about what’s happening in the outside world. Meanwhile, the soapy stuff has gone back to effectively—if melodramatically—developing the characters, instead of overwhelming the rest of the show.

I’m trying not to get too attached because its low ratings (even lower than the premiere) suggest it won’t last longer than this truncated season. I hope it does. Despite the goofiness of it, it’s CBS’s best dramatic series. Yeah, that’s right. I’m calling out their thousands of procedurals and saying a post-apocalyptic soap opera is better. Keep it around, CBS.

Lost (ABC) — KATE HAS AARON?! What the hell? This episode didn’t really grab my interest until that moment—now watch, the writers will do nothing but flashbacks until next season.

Otherwise, not the best episode, not the worst—I wouldn’t exactly call it filler, because unlike other serialized shows loaded with filler (24, J’accuse!), Lost spends its “filler” time with character development. We’re learning a little bit more about the boat people, we’re establishing a new dynamic between Locke and Ben that—let me guess—will end badly for the easily duped Locke (try saving him from himself, taller ghost Walt), we’re getting more island weirdness in the sense that it’s been more than a day for the chopper to take a 20-minute flight (more hinting from last week’s 30-second test flight taking 30 minutes). We’re even getting another layer to the future mystery, in the form of hints regarding what the “Oceanic Six” told the outside world once they left the island.

One minor nitpick: I’m not a lawyer, but even I noticed the complete bass-ackwards hilarity of the defense presenting its case before the prosecution. Also, one of the charges rattled off is bank robbery, which is always a federal crime (and would therefore be tried separately from this state offense). Also, she killed Wayne in Iowa, not California. I could see them doing a change of venue if they thought a California jury would be more impartial than an Iowa jury, but seriously? One of six survivors of a flight from Sydney to Los Angeles, and they’re going to allow it to be tried in L.A.? Hard to believe. I don’t even know if they can make a venue out-of-state unless it’s federal. Come on, Lost writers—surely you spoke with a lawyer or two before the strike. Either you didn’t ask them research questions, or it’s time to get a new one.

Medium (NBC) — In this very special episode of Medium, Allison gets sympathetic deafness when she starts to dream of a deaf girl. Aside from typically great acting from Patricia Arquette, and another appearance from Anjelica Huston as the mildly creepy AmeriTips investigator, there wasn’t much more to the episode than the deafness. I applaud the show’s sound designers for the sequence in which Allison’s hearing slowly came back, but otherwise it felt sort of like a throwaway episode—predictable mystery, not a lot of meat to sink into. Should I be expecting more, after two weeks off the air and last year’s exceptional season?

Monk (USA) — I’ve been amazed by this show over the course of the past season, up to and including this finale. Last season, the writing of the mystery aspects improved exponentially. I don’t know if there is some kind of fan consensus on this, and the writers took the time to course-correct (if so, I applaud them), or if they just recognized quality issues and took it upon themselves to fix them. My biggest problem with the show, almost since it started, was the combination of lame-brained mysteries and Monk fish-out-of-water hijinks.

Sometimes they manage to find a happy marriage between these two elements of the show, but sometimes—often enough to be annoying—the writers decide to hang the entire episode on Tony Shalhoub’s performance, allowing gags that are more excruciating than hilarious run on far too long. I’ll never forget the first time I questioned my sanity for even watching the show: sometime in the second or third season, Monk is finally given the opportunity to retake the entrance exam and be reinstated as a cop. It was about five minutes (that felt like the entire hour) of Monk trying to even out the lengths of his pencils. Tony Shalhoub is a great actor, and Monk is a great character, but this was painful.

The fifth season started to improve the mysteries and rely less on overdoing the Monk-ness of it; in fact, they even started using the ensemble more effectively, leading to interesting character development and relying less on Shalhoub to magically make an episode great. However, it’s the sixth season that solidified Monk as a show with legitimately good writing, both in terms of mystery and character. I hope they keep going this way, because Monk had its best season since the first, which is a rarity for a show that’s been on this long.

As for the episode itself, it worked perfectly to further develop the Trudy mystery without solving it. I thought Monk would solve it, but his nemesis Dale the Whale (first played by Adam Arkin, then by Tim Curry, and now by…some guy) has apparently seen to it that Monk won’t solve the case. Meanwhile, Dale the Whale spearheaded a gubernatorial assassination plot after befriending the lieutenant governor, which is what all this was about in the first place. Sheriff Scott Glenn was in on it, and Monk is finally off the hook for the six-fingered frame-up.

The plot wasn’t the great thing about the episode—though as I said, the mystery was much more compelling and difficult to solve than usual. The great acting demonstrated by our leads is what really sold the episode. Traylor Howard and Jason Gray-Stanford both grieving, Ted Levine’s obvious guilt over helping Monk fake his death but keeping it from their closest friends…all great character stuff and great acting, proving once again that Tony Shalhoub isn’t the only actor who makes this show worth watching.

Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles (Fox) — I have seen the future, and it is Bubbles.

Sorry, I promised I wouldn’t make a lot of jokes or drop a lot of Wire references, but the casting of The Wire’s great Andre Royo as one of Derek Reese’s future friends makes me wonder if this is a ploy. I mean, he’s dead in the current timeline, right? So why would they cast ringers (the other three were folks I recognized, just not from a show that’s running concurrently) for a one-off guest spot? Answer: it’s not a one-off. This is my theory, at any rate.

This was a great episode. I had my doubts about their portrayal of the future dystopia matching the grimness (and greatness) of the movies, but it seems even a modest TV budget can approximate the special effects of 1984 and 1991. Beyond that, it really brought the creepy. I want to know what was going on in that cyborg piano basement. What the hell, show? The future also gave us a legitimate reason to distrust Cameron, which has been a nagging concern of mine.

A friend of mine, who also watches the show, came up with a theory when I told him I didn’t think Cameron was a bad guy—if she was, why not just kill John? His speculation started with the idea that she was there to undermine the Connors’ progress in fighting the future in the present, which I shut down by saying, again, why not just kill them? There’s no progress to undermine if he’s not alive to make any. He elaborated on the theory by suggesting the circularity of the future, something we’ve seen portrayed on the show. Whether it’s resistance fighters building banks in the ’60s or cyborgs storing metal for future manufacturing, there’s an idea that the future is feeding on the knowledge of the past. They take their knowledge of the past, then either go back to try and change it (resistance) or preserve it (machines).

So Cameron is there not entirely to undermine their progress, but to see their progress. They’re taking her on a guided tour of what’s necessary to fight the future—and she gets to know exactly what she needs to do to preserve it. I don’t know if this is where the writers are headed, but if they are, I’m on board.

The Wire (HBO) — I can’t say much more than, “I hope Scott Templeton is going down—way down.”

Beyond that, though, I guess I should say it’s nice—and again, contradicting all the reports of how biased Simon’s Sun characters are—that we’re seeing younger reporters like Alma and Fletcher putting forth quality work.

The Marlo mystery is heating up, though. I have the feeling the clock represents geographic coordinates—some kind of prearranged longitude, and the clock is latitude, or vice-versa. I don’t think it has anything to do with time, because why wouldn’t all the second hands be at 12? The deeper they take the serial killer thing, though, the worse off all of them are going to be. That’s a story with legs, and I don’t think it’ll be as easily ignored as McNulty originally thought. Like he said, “The problem with a red ball is, sooner or later people start treating it like one.”

I’m concerned about Mike and Dukie. Dukie’s efforts to find a job, I’m sure, won’t end well. I have this fear/suspicion he’s going to end up getting Omar, either to prove he’s hard or to get the reward money so he can get the fuck out of Dodge. I hope I’m wrong, but it’d be more surprising (and less network-stupid) than the inevitable Chris-Snoop-Omar Reservoir Dogs triangle shooting.

Oh, and Clay Davis’s pronunciations of “Prometheus” and “Aeschylus” = comedy gold. He has really shaped up to be one of the great Wire characters.

D. B. Bates is a film critic and television viewer who has often shouted at fictional characters who probably wouldn’t listen to him even if they could hear him and existed in reality. Interested in explaining to D. B. the many ways he got it wrong? E-mail him.

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