TV Roundup
Mm, mm, good...
As I’ve said ad nauseum now, it’s a golden age of television — the stuff on the small screen is much better than most of what’s on the big ones — and there’s nothing I like more than to sit down with an Obama Brand TV Dinner (see pic above), and watch me some home entertainment. Here’s a quick look at what I’ve been looking at.
Justified. This is currently the best show on TV — the best one I’m watching anyway. For all I know, Mob Wives is Shakespearean. But in the eyes of this old crime writer, Justified is crime writing like it oughta be. The tough guy dialogue is sharp. The hillbilly characters are riveting. The deep Kentucky setting is fascinating. The scenes of violence are exceptionally well done: they’re genuinely tense and frightening. There’s a sort of running gag that the villains of the piece are almost universally stupid and ineffective — but that doesn’t stop them from being scary and threatening. You know they’re never going to make the big score, but that doesn’t mean they won’t kill you in the process of trying.
Great cast. Timothy Olyphant has elevated himself here from second rate movie hero to star. Walton Goggins, who was Shane on The Shield, is, within his range, as good as any actor alive. Nick Searcy should have more scenes; he’s hilarious. And Joelle Carter is expertly taking her character on its arc from beautiful loser to beautiful fearsome gangster, and have I mentioned she’s beautiful?
The seasonal storylines can be a little meandering, but all in all, this show is top-notch and keeps getting better.
Spartacus. Some of you may suspect I watch this over-the-top gladiator drama because it has more naked women per episode than all other TV shows combined, and that just shows what sick, low minds you have. But man, the women really are beautiful! The third season got off to a wobbly start. The tragic death at 40 of the original star, Andy Whitfield, was a setback and it took a while for Liam McIntyre to fill his sandals. But what really hobbled the drama was the ham-handed Hollywood feminism. Is it really women’s highest aspiration to be second-rate men? There were fight scenes here that pitted 5-foot nothing girls with swords against muscled male monsters — and we were expected to believe the girls might win. It’s just dopey and it ruined some of the episodes for me — especially on a show that has some fantastic female plot lines involving real, strong women doing real, strong but womanly things.
Nonetheless, if you could ignore that nonsense, by the final episodes, Spartacus had got its footing back. What distinguishes the show is that, at its best, it manages to resolve genuine emotional issues through sword fights and sex acts. It’s like a comic book with sub-text. When it’s good, I confess, it reduces me to my 12-year-old self and I stare at the screen in a kind of rapture thinking, “Cool. Girls. Swords. Girls…”
Mad Men. For me, the true arc of the story ended with the assassination of JFK. Don Draper represented the decay of fifties America: a fraud living out a lie of marriage and heroism while peddling a fictitious American dream. The fall of the Draper marriage and the death of Camelot was what the show was about. We’re only a few episodes into this season, but so far the plots seem to revolve around things that might have happened but didn’t. And there’s some race stuff and Viet Nam stuff, which feels forced and unrealistic. All the same, great acting, highly intelligent writing, and amazing sets and costumes make this kind of impossible to stop watching. Not sure how long that’ll be true, but so far, I keep tuning in.
And now it’s dinner time. I gotta go marinate the dog. Here, Dash!
Agree with Justified. Having lived near the area where it happens, it is really only an exaggeration of real life. Its a place that if you weren’t born there, you will never be from there, as the state cop told Raylan in one episode.
A close second, that you left off, is The Walking Dead, jmho. Can’t wait until the next season.
Here’s mine: Justified, Blue Bloods, Game of Thrones, and Sons of Anarchy. Not sure where they fit on your scale, but there you go.
Agree about Mad Men. One problem that US TV has, it doesn’t follow the artist’s credo – when your piece is finished, then stop.
Agreed K, Mad Men, the times ive watched has been lets play dress up and manufacture history.
PS The Finder is fun!
Justified is simply fantastic. Mad Men is…wobbly sometimes. I like it, but I’m not sure what the point is.
I tried watching Spartacus, but I couldn’t stop comparing it to Rome–which is probably the best show I’ve ever scene. The gravity of Rome was almost unbearable at times. Spartacus is just porn in comparison.
Scene=seen. I wasn’t trying to be punny.
One of the most fascinating things about Justified is that it’s based on a character from 2 Elmore Leonard novels. After those 2 novels, the author wrote a short story where the main character was returned to his Tennessee roots, and that’s what the show is based upon. The fascinating thing is that while Leonard gets credit as an executive producer, he doesn’t write the episodes–others do. Reputedly they wore t-shirts that read “WWED” as in “What Would Elmore Do?” until series star Timothy Olyphant said “Well he certainly wouldn’t wear a stupid t-shirt!” Anyway, the plotting is recognizably Elmore Leonard. I know this sounds weird, and there are a lot of writers for whom this *isn’t* the case, but with Elmore Leonard, you can actually recognize his plots. I never read the novel “Get Shorty”, but I could have told you that he’d written the book based on watching the movie. A gangster from back East who’s too honest to be a Hollywood producer? Seriously, that’s obvious! There was a sequence in the first season of Justified where a hit man from Detroit or somewhere showed up for an episode, and intimidated two crooks, threatened them, until one of the guys just up and shot him dead. Vintage Leonard…but he didn’t write it.
A couple of years ago I read a book about Winston Churchill during World War II, and how he wrote his history of the war afterwards. Turns out he *didn’t* write the history, not in its entirety anyway; he had research “assistants” who did much of the writing for him. One of them recounts in the book that they got very good at sounding like their boss. The screenwriters at Justified can lay claim to the same thing, though of course Elmore Leonard isn’t exactly Winston Churchill…
Justified is great . He is so ‘Dirty Harry” politically incorrect and Joelle is smoking hot