Showing posts with label television. Show all posts
Showing posts with label television. Show all posts

April 2, 2012

Best. Season. Ever.

Audacious Epigone has calculated a good answer to an old question: When was The Simpsons at its best? He averages by season the rankings of individual episodes on IMDB.com, which is a pretty reasonable approach. IMDB ratings are biased toward the tastes of youngish male fanboys ("Worst. Episode. Ever."), but who better to evaluate The Simpsons? And they aren't rating seasons as a whole, just individual episodes, so any preconceptions the raters may have about which was the best season enter into the process less. Sample sizes for individual episode ratings are typically in the 500 to 900 range, which aggregates to over 10,000 per season.

The curve for the first eleven seasons is pretty elegant. The average episode's rating goes up each year from season one to six (with seasons five and seven almost as great), then declines every year through season eleven. The peak years were 5-7 and the big dropoff was in 9-11.

That would fit with my subjective impressions: the show just kept getting better for a number of years, then reached a remarkable peak of consistent excellence in the mid to later 1990s. 

The curve of the first half of the graph is very similar to a professional athlete's career, even though The Simpsons were largely a collective enterprise with a fair amount of turnover among writers.

Off the top of my head, the athlete with the most similar-looking career productivity graph might be Chicago Cub Ernie Banks, who started out as a slugging shortstop, a rare and valuable combination, then blew out his knee and had to switch to first base, where his offensive productivity no longer made him exceptional. But his personality made him popular in Chicago,  and playing in Wrigley Field inflated his statistics, so he had a long career even after his prime.

March 23, 2012

Bad Men and the new pornography

I can't afford cable TV, so I don't see the big new serial dramas until they come out on, say, Netflix or Hulu for Roku. And then I usually reach the limits of my interest after about six hours: Breaking Bad? Good show! I sometimes wonder what happened to Malcolm's dad after the first six hours of his new life of crime. Well, I guess I'll never know. Downton Abbey? Good show! But not quite good enough to get me to watch more than six hours of it, even though the first season is only seven hours long and the first six hours have gotten us all the way up to England's peaceful summer of 1914 and I have this vague hunch that the season finale has some kind of big historical surprise twist up its sleeve. But six hours is my limit, so I guess I'll never find out what happened in August 1914. Something big, I'm sure!

I realize movies are out of fashion, but I do like to point out that they have one virtue over more 21st Centuryish forms of entertainment: noninterminableness. You sit yourself down in the movie theatre and, then, 115 minutes later, they make you go home. 

Speaking of antinoninterminablebness, Mad Men is back for its 23rd season (note: check this before posting) of soft core porn for women with the better sort of degrees, but with a new purpose: to avenge Trayvon Martin! Or, at least, that's what it appears from this review in the NYT:
There was no question that “Mad Men” would get around to the civil rights movement. From the start, racism was the carbon monoxide of the show: a poison that couldn’t always be detected over the pungent scent of cigarettes, sexism, anti-Semitism, alcoholism, homophobia and adultery, but that sooner or later was bound to turn noxious.
That promise was made in the opening scene of the premiere episode of Season 1. The first face on screen is a black one in profile, that of a waiter carrying a tray of cocktails across a bar crowded with white, mostly male customers. ...
It’s the show’s willingness to put its characters in the context of the times, and not whitewash the white men, that gives it an edge and keeps a drama that in its fifth season has gotten — let’s face it — a little old and soapy, interesting to watch. Particularly at this moment, when the case of Trayvon Martin, the Florida teenager killed by an armed neighborhood watch volunteer, has become a heated cause, the 1960s look a lot like prologue. 
Don and his colleagues are flip, self-centered and oblivious, no different from the many privileged Americans who stood on the sidelines and averted their eyes. They are the ones who ended up on the wrong side of history and whose testimony is usually left out of the textbooks, like the bourgeois Parisians who collaborated — faute de mieux — during the Nazi occupation, the South Africans who welcomed cheap labor under apartheid or the cadets who set fire to the clothes of the first female cadets admitted to the Citadel military college. 

Okay! 

Having watched six and a fraction episodes of the first season of Mad Men, quite enjoying the first 115 minutes before boredom began setting in, allow me to point out that my 2009 review in Taki's Magazine explains it all. For example:
While watching Mad Men, Weiner affords us ample opportunity to congratulate ourselves on how much progress we’ve made. For example, most of the black characters in Mad Men have servile jobs. Today, of course, things are infinitely better. Black men are seldom seen in servile jobs (unless they are African immigrants or gay). In fact, black men aren’t seen in any jobs as much anymore: ten percent of black men were out of the work force in Don Draper’s 1960 versus 24 percent in booming 2000. Indeed, black men aren’t even seen at all as much anymore because a million are now locked away in prison. (The incarceration rate of black male high school dropouts was one percent in the Bad Old Days of Dwight Eisenhower’s last year in office versus 25 percent in Bill Clinton’s glorious finale.) 
The kicker to the joke is that Mad Men, despite being set in New York, is filmed in LA, where Latinos have been imported in vast numbers to fill the servant jobs that today’s upper-middle class whites no longer trust blacks with. Yet Hispanics are even more invisible to the Hollywood elite today than blacks were then.

The one thing I would add about Mad Men is that it's becoming more apparent, year by year, that 21st Century women of the educated castes who watch Mad Men find themselves increasingly sexually bored by all the pathetic, politically correct weenies of their own class. That's Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner's big conceptual breakthrough: that women these days are aroused by men masterful enough to violate today's thought crime taboos, if the ladies can simultaneously maintain plausible deniability that they are actually shocked, shocked by all the old "racism ... cigarettes, sexism, anti-Semitism, alcoholism, homophobia." Mad Men is not actually a satirical put-down of the past; instead, it's designed to be a titillating turn-on for the present. 

January 8, 2012

"Breaking Bad"

I finally got around to watching Vince Gilligan's Emmy-winning AMC TV show Breaking Bad, and I like this dialogue from the first season. Two DEA agents in Albuquerque, one white and one Mexican-American, are searching drug dealer Krazy-8's lowrider car and discover the control box for making it bounce up and down:
Hank: "Ay yi yi, Gomey. It's a culture in decline." 
Gomez: "It's a rich and vibrant culture." 
Hank: "It's a car that jumps up and down. What the hell, you people used to be conquistadors, for Christ's sake."

It's a theme of the show that whites also are in cultural decline, as suggested by character names. The two meth cookers are Cal Tech grad turned high school chemistry teacher Walter White and an old student he flunked named Jesse Pinkman, who calls himself "Cap'n Cook" in burlesque of that most admirable of middle class Englishmen.

August 2, 2011

Free verse versus Larry David

I'm reading The Tribal Imagination: Civilization and the Savage Mind by veteran anthropologist Robin Fox. He started out as a structuralist in the tradition of Levi-Strauss, then absorbed a more Darwinian approach. His 1967 book Kinship and Marriage is in the structuralist mode: it sketches out every conceivable kinship arrangement, and then cites examples for as many as exist in the real world. People love making up complicated rules.

He's got a chapter on rhythm and rhyme in poetry. Rhythm appears to be older and more universal, while rhyme didn't enter mainstream Western poetry until medieval times, perhaps from Arabic and Irish influences. I did not know that.

An amateur poet himself, Fox has a digression in which he denounces free verse that I liked for the unexpected direction it went:
A generation arose after the rebellious sixties that decided the only way to deal with rules you don't like is to abandon the. Thus you are rule-free and hence happy. 
You are never rule-free. If you abandon one set of rules, then you must invent another with the same ratio of arbitrary content to noise, because the essences of rules is redundancy; they enable you to predict the world and live forward in time, which is what the neocortex is for in the first place. We do not respond like lower animals to immediate emotional demands; we mediate them with rules; our neocortex controls our limbic brain. And like rhyming, it is all about anticipation and predictability. 

In poetry and music, we like it when we can predict what comes next, but we also like it when it surprises us. It's all good. In general, human beings have liked poetry and music a lot. (Obviously, some poetry or music is better than others at combining interesting and powerful patterns of satisfaction and surprise: the fourth movement of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony is better than, say, 99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall. But, people will sing even 99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall for quite some time if they don't have anything else to do.)
... Rule creation is an "appetitive" activity for us. One might even say (metaphorically) that we have an instinct to make rules ... In some sense it does not matter what the rules are as long as we have some; which exact rules we have will be determined by adaptation and history and no little accident. ...

Think of the great defining drama, the Orestia, the Hamlet, of the post-sixties generation: it was Seinfeld. Seinfield  was to the post-sixties people what Siegfried was to the Third Reich. And it was about rules. Every episode dealt with the search for rules in a generation that had dispensed with them. What are the rules for dumping a girlfriend; for the copyright on children's namess; ... for double-dipping; for putting people on your speed-dial list; ... for "regifting" unwanted Christmas presents; for calling after ten at night ...

I made a similar point in an early Taki column: Larry David: Alice in Blunderland. Seinfeld wasn't a show about nothing, it was a show about rules.

July 16, 2011

Murdoch and Pellicano scandals II

In a sign of the times, analogy questions were eliminated from the SAT a few years ago. 

These days, people don't seem to be very good at noticing that news story X, which everybody currently agrees is the biggest and most unique and most newsworthy story of all time, is an awful lot like news story Y from a few years ago, which everybody has completely forgotten about already and didn't even pay much attention to while it was in the papers.

For example, as I pointed out in my last Taki's Magazine column, the wrongdoing in the ongoing brouhaha over Murdoch newspapers in London hiring a private investigator to tap into voice mail is an awful lot like the wrongdoing in the last decade's now forgotten Hollywood scandal in which moguls and stars hired private investigator Anthony Pellicano to wiretap people they wanted to abuse.

And yet, if you check Google News,

Murdoch hacking

brings up 25,900 news media pages. But,

Murdoch hacking Pellicano

brings up exactly one page.

Personally, I found the Pellicano scandal pretty interesting because it played out in the 2000s like a nightmarish episode of that 1990s sit-com about show biz, The Larry Sanders Show, which was owned by comedian Garry Shandling and his agent Brad Grey, now head of Paramount Pictures. Larry Sanders was a very meta comedy: Shandling, who had often been a guest host for Johnny Carson, had turned down a late night talk show host job to make this sitcom about a late night talk show host. Real celebrities guest starred playing themselves engaging, behind the scenes, in scandalous behavior. 

If the 1990s were the peak era for sit-coms, which seems plausible, I think it can be argued that Larry Sanders was the third best, after The Simpsons and Seinfeld. Indeed, Seinfeld and Larry Sanders match up very well with each other, and I'd only give Seinfeld the nod because that purported "show about nothing" actually featured the best farce plotting in the history of American television. Comparing characters and acting, Shandling/Sanders was better than Seinfeld/Jerry, Jeffrey Tambor / Hank was almost as good as Jason Alexander / George Costanza, and Rip Torn / Artie was even better than Michael Richard / Kramer. None of the female characters on Larry Sanders quite match up to Elaine, but there were a number of good ones. 

Amusingly, Shandling, Grey, and Linda Doucett, who played Larry's sidekick Hank's secretary Darlene on the show, were all involved in the Pellicano scandal. The wrongdoing was much bigger than just them, but they're as good a place to start as any.

Why doesn't anybody remember the Pellicano scandal when they're ranting about the Murdoch scandal? I don't know. The LA Times did a bad job of covering all this hometown bad conduct, but the New York Times was better. Here's the beginning of an article from the New York Times:
A Studio Boss and a Private Eye Star in a Bitter Hollywood Tale
March 13, 2006 
By DAVID M. HALBFINGER
and ALLISON HOPE WEINER 
TEMECULA, Calif., March 12 — The phone rang in Linda Doucett's desert ranch house here in the late spring of 1998. It was her ex-fiancé, the comedian Garry Shandling, calling. Again.
Mr. Shandling had called several times that year to talk about his lawsuit accusing Brad Grey, his longtime manager and friend, of enriching himself at his expense. Now he was asking Ms. Doucett to testify for him. 
Then, Ms. Doucett recalled in an interview, Mr. Shandling brought up something he had never told her before, about how Mr. Grey had responded to another suit, which Ms. Doucett had filed against Mr. Shandling and Mr. Grey's company for sexual harassment and wrongful termination two years earlier. 
"He was going to use Pellicano," Mr. Shandling said. 
"Who's that?" she asked. 
"He's this guy Brad worked with," Ms. Doucett recalled Mr. Shandling as saying. 
She said he added that Mr. Grey "was going to hire this really bad guy to say bad things about you — but I didn't want to do it." 
The guy in question is Anthony Pellicano, the celebrity private detective who is at the center of a mushrooming federal investigation that has consumed Hollywood for months, and who was indicted on wiretapping and conspiracy charges last month. And her recollection suggests that Mr. Grey, now the chairman of Paramount Pictures, had dealings with Mr. Pellicano as early as 1996 — at least three years earlier than has so far been detailed publicly. 
Her account is backed by another person's grand jury testimony, according to someone close to the investigation who insisted on anonymity for fear of angering prosecutors. The grand jury witness, this person said, gave an independent account that substantially agreed with Ms. Doucett's. 
Hiring a private investigator is common practice for wealthy people in contentious lawsuits, and Mr. Pellicano, a tough-talking transplant from Chicago who cultivated an image of menace, had many clients. Many of the rich and powerful in Hollywood who used him say they were unaware he was committing crimes. But prosecutors are skeptical, and they are trying to determine which of Mr. Pellicano's clients knew about the acts that have led to his indictment. 
In any event, no case, perhaps, better demonstrates how Hollywood movers and shakers appear to have used Mr. Pellicano in disputes with those who had less clout than the drawn-out saga of Mr. Shandling, Mr. Grey and Ms. Doucett. 
Mr. Grey, one of the most influential players in television and talent management, rose to an even higher perch in Hollywood a year ago, when he was named to head Paramount. He has been interviewed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and testified before the grand jury investigating Mr. Pellicano. His lawyer has said Mr. Grey has been repeatedly assured that he was not a subject or a target of the investigation. 
Mr. Grey declined numerous requests to be interviewed for this article, or to have his lawyer be interviewed. On Sunday afternoon his spokeswoman, Janet Hill, issued a terse reply from Mr. Grey to five written questions submitted by The New York Times. 
"As I've said in the past, I was casually acquainted with Anthony Pellicano," Mr. Grey said in the statement. "I had no 'relationship' with Mr. Pellicano until my attorney, Bert Fields, hired him in the Garry Shandling lawsuit. The fact remains that I had no knowledge of any illegal activity he may have conducted." 
Mr. Fields, one of Hollywood's most sought-after litigators, also has denied knowing of Mr. Pellicano's illicit activities. 
The Doucett-Shandling episode is only one of more than a dozen situations detailed in a federal indictment of Mr. Pellicano in which an influential insider, represented by a top entertainment lawyer who in turn hired Mr. Pellicano, sought to exert his or her will over a much weaker industry outsider. In each case, prosecutors say, Mr. Pellicano set out to maintain that imbalance of power through extralegal means. 
When Mr. Pellicao was working on behalf of the former superagent Michael Ovitz, lawyers in the case say, his targets were Mr. Ovitz's ex-underlings, minor industry players and bothersome reporters. When Mr. Pellicano worked on behalf of the billionaire MGM mogul Kirk Kerkorian, it was against a woman to whom Mr. Kerkorian was briefly married. When he worked on behalf of the Canadian media heiress and aspiring actress Taylor Thomson, it was against Ms. Thomson's former nanny. 
The Shandling-Grey case can be seen between the lines of the federal wiretapping and conspiracy indictment of Mr. Pellicano. Prosecutors charge that from January to March 1999 Mr. Pellicano had a police source do unauthorized background checks or otherwise illegally gain information about Mr. Shandling; Ms. Doucett; Mr. Shandling's personal assistant, Mariana Grant; his business manager, Warren Grant; his friend and fellow client at Brillstein-Grey Entertainment the actor Kevin Nealon; Mr. Nealon's wife; and his friend Gavin de Becker, a security consultant. The names of Ms. Doucett, Ms. Grant, Mr. de Becker and Mr. Grant were all on a witness list in Mr. Shandling's lawsuit against Mr. Grey at the time, lawyers and people involved in the case have confirmed. 
To Ms. Doucett, the federal investigation gets at the core of something that has long infected Hollywood. "This isn't about $10 million going between this movie star and that movie star, and wiretapping," she said in her first extensive interview on the subject. She refused to comment on matters she had agreed to keep confidential but was forthcoming on other aspects of her relationships with Mr. Shandling and Mr. Grey. 
"It's about little people being pushed around," she said.

Read the whole thing there.

October 19, 2010

The Land of the Defunct Empires

From my column in VDARE:
The F.B.I.  announced charges last week against 73 Armenian gangsters, almost  half of them in the  Los Angeles area, for running the largest Medicare fraud in history.

Or—to be strictly accurate—the largest the FBI yet knows about.

The indictment alleged that most of the defendants were "were Armenian nationals or immigrants and many maintained substantial ties to Armenia." They laundered their ill-gotten gains in Las Vegas casinos and/or couriered them back to Armenia.

Michael J. Gaeta, head of the New York F.B.I. office’s Russian Organized Crime Squad, explained: “New York and the U.S., to them it’s a big pot of gold, and they’re coming after it. And with the world getting smaller, it’s much easier for them to do it.”

Among the arrested: Armen Kazarian of the pleasant LA suburb of Glendale, who drives a $350,000 Rolls Royce Phantom. Kazarian is only the second “vor” (the ex-Soviet equivalent of a godfather) yet charged in the U.S. 

I’d never previously heard the term “vor” but I must say, it has a ring to it—like capo di tutti capi or Keyser Söze.

Why was Kazarian in this country in the first place? He was granted asylum in the U.S. in 1996. But he subsequently returned frequently to Armenia to oversee his transcontinental criminal doings.

Naturally, this got me thinking about TV crime dramas.

Law & Order has been the most successful drama in American television history. Counting its countless spinoffs, about 900 hour-long episodes have aired. L&O’s two-decade old formula has been to take a scandal from the news, add a murder, and then show that the richest, whitest, and most conservative character dunnit.

This year, however, NBC shut down the New York-based flagship show and substituted Law & Order: Los Angeles. ... The Wednesday, October 20 episode “Sylmar” will explore the national security threat posed by ... blue-eyed, blonde Americans who espouse extremist Islam:
Deputy District Attorney: “An All-American jihadi terrorist cell …”

Assistant District Attorney: “With enough explosives to take down the Staples Center!”

You can't make this stuff up. (Or, at least, I can't.)

Read the whole thing there and comment upon it below.


August 2, 2010

Why movies are better than TV

You hear often these days about how continuous plotline television dramas, such as Mad Men, are better than movies. Their endless length allows for novelistic detailing, etc etc.

But one great thing about movies can be that they begin and then they end. Take The Hurt Locker. You meet some soldiers in Iraq who dismantle bombs for a living. That's pretty  interesting. But, after a couple of hours, even dismantling bombs is starting to get a little old. Suddenly, in five memorable minutes, it's over. Sgt. Will James comes home from Iraq, gets lost in the supermarket, talks to his baby son about why he loves his jack-in-the-box, and makes a decision about how he wants to live his life. Cue the Arab heavy metal and it's a wrap. 

Granted, Hollywood hates making movies that end, stand-alone movies that aren't origins stories for trilogies. But they still do make stand-alone movies. And even the Lord of the Rings trilogy is about an order of magnitude shorter than Mad Men will turn out to be.

Stand-alone movies are especially suited for romances: boy meets girls, boy loses girl, boy wins girl. They live, presumably, happily ever after. That's awfully appealing.

At the end of North by Northwest, for example, which, like Mad Men, is about a tall, dark, and handsome Madison Avenue advertising man with a confused identity, Cary Grant is about to fall from Abraham Lincoln's nose on Mt. Rushmore. Thirty seconds later, all plotlines are resolved and he's on his honeymoon with Eva Marie Saint. Now, that's an ending!

But, television series like Mad Men just go on and on, turning into soap operas. So, mostly what happens in a series like Mad Men as it gets long in the tooth is that, to keep up interest and please enthusiasts, everybody sleeps with everybody, which is yucky.

Now, I'm sure Mad Men's creator Matthew Weiner would respond by citing detailed research he's done into the growth of STD rates in the 1960s, but, still ... yuck.

By the way, I suspect the obsessiveness about not revealing in reviews any "spoilers," which seems to have became dogma around the time of The Sixth Sense, has hurt the relative status of movies versus longform TV shows in elite discourse. Longform TV dramas such as Mad Men are discussed at vast length online the day after each episode, but movie reviews are stilted by the spoiler taboo.

The Hurt Locker is, once again, a good example: the power of the film depends upon the last five minutes, in which the adage that Character Is Destiny is illustrated with extraordinary economy. But reviewers aren't supposed to "spoil" the end of a film, so practically no reader could puzzle out from all the published verbiage about The Hurt Locker why it was a very good movie, or why he should even see it, which led to mass bafflement when it won the Best Picture at the Academy Awards ceremony.

To explain why The Hurt Locker may well have deserved its Best Picture Oscar, you really have to recount the contrast between the bulk of the movie in Baghdad and the few scenes close to the end back stateside (oops, I just revealed a spoiler). The Baghdad street scenes are shot through telephoto lenses that both illustrate the tunnel vision focus the bomb techs need to do their job, while simultaneously compressing the apparent distance between the near and the far into a disorientating, flat, and cluttered pictorial space that keeps the viewer from being able to discern what’s safely far away from the heroes and what’s close enough to kill them, which is, of course, the same question the heroes are constantly wondering about.

Then, near the end there's [SPOILER ALERT! AHHHHOOOGGGAAA! SPOILER ALERT!] a great fisheye lens shot in an endless breakfast cereal aisle of ex-Sgt. James befuddled by his new civilian duty of having to choose one box of cereal out of hundreds of offerings. (I spent an hour searching online last winter during the Academy Awards season for a still of that scene to illustrate the key to the movie, but none were available -- No Spoilers!)

A few minutes later, Sgt. James is shown back in The Suit in another super-telephoto shot of Baghdad, likely doomed, yet also fulfilled by choosing the fate his personality craves.

February 4, 2010

"Temple Grandin" on HBO

On Saturday night at 8pm, HBO is putting on a biopic with Claire Danes playing Temple Grandin, the high-functioning autistic animal sciences professor who is so interesting from a sort of sci-fi point of view, like HAL 9000 come to life. Her view, however, is that autistic people tend to have brains that function not like computers but like animals -- they can't see the forest for the trees. Animals are constantly spooked by small visual details that don't bother non-autistic humans because we barely notice much of what goes on around us that isn't relevant to our main trains of thought.

Here's a very positive review of the Temple Grandin film by Dorothy Rabinowitz in the WSJ.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

October 28, 2009

"Mad Men"

My Wednesday Taki's Magazine column on the TV serial "Mad Men" is up.

Read it at Taki's and comment about it below.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer