Internet Commentator

You can put a bit of butter on the spuds there André

Abiola suggests that one can determine much of a society's merits by its attitudes towards extranational dating:

I believe one can tell a great deal about the true nature of a society by the way its men behave upon seeing or hearing of "outsiders" (however defined) becomeing involved with "their" women: do they find it a matter of no great interest and keep going about their business, or does each and every instance of an outsider openly cavorting with female members of the in-group set the local gutter press on the trail for blood?

This put me in mind of a popular advertising campaign here in the 1980s for Kerrygold butter which featured an Irish woman bringing her French paramour home to meet the parents. Their initial suspicion gave way to an invite for dinner, in preparation of which the gallant Gallic gentleman offered "Ees zer sumsink I can elp?"

More TV gripes

I suppose after the BSG gripe it's only right that I detail one of my other whinges. My wife is more of a Cold Case fan than I am so I probably watch it more regularly than I otherwise would. My main problem with this show is not the odd suspension of suspension of disbelief but rather a structural problem to do with the way each narrative is handled.

The premise of the show to follow a particular murder Philadelphia PD's cold case team investigate and solve. This is portrayed by use of parallel narratives. As Lily Rush and her associates interview witnesses and suspects, their testimony flashbacks relate the story leading up to the murder. The first structural problem with this is that there's no particular reason for the stories to be synchronised. If you are piecing together the sequence of events up to a murder, it is surely more likely that these would arrive out of sequence.

The second structural problem is the narrative consistency of the flashbacks. The story is meant to be told by a series of individuals and yet appears as that of a single narrator. The depiction of character A by character B is consistent with his depiction by character C. This is particularly problematic when one of those interviewed inevitably turns out to be the perpetrator. You would think he would have a more self-serving narrative and be more inclined to send them on a wild goose chase and away from individuals who might possibly incriminate him. And yet, it's frequently the case that the eventual perpetrator provides them with the lead they need.

As far back as 1950, a solution was found to this problem. If Cold Case adopted a Rashomon-style format, it's hard to see what would be sacrificed. The flash-back story would have to be truncated as it would be told several times, from several viewpoints. But you would have a much more interesting storyline, and it would be much easier to accomodate the type of evasiveness and diversions you would imagine to characterise the testimony of people involved. Plus, the team would be forced to weigh and compare each person's testimony without assuming everyone to be telling the truth.

BSG gripe

I mentioned previously that I had a low suspension of disbelief threshold. With shows I like, such as 24, I'm prepared grant quite a bit of leeway and I do like Battlestar Galactica a lot (so much so that I'm probably not going to wait until Sky shows the controversial denouement of the current series here). But, I have to confess that there's one thing that bugs me a lot about BSG and it probably bugs me a lot more than some of the more notable gaping chasms in the plot (like, for instance, if they've been travelling for so long, how come they're still within a sufficiently easy jump distance from Caprica that Starbuck can pop home and back on a quick errand stopping by her flat to cancel the milk?) and that is the depiction of the media: in particular, the President's Whitehouse press room style briefings.

Now, the entire population travelling amounts to about 50,000. This is barely more than the population of my home town and less than that in the North Louth area served by Dundalk which has two newspapers, a half a radio station and no TV channel sustaining probably two or three political correspondents. It's just unthinkable that there would be enough people among BSG's 50,000 sufficiently interested in the minutiae of politics to make it worthwhile for a whole roomful of political hacks to devote their time to covering President Roslin's every uttering. What irks me the most about this is that it's a lazy way of inducing a bit of empathy - "See: Their president is like our President " - when BSG generally makes a decent attempt at portraying exactly how different things might be for people trying to maintain their civilisation and traditions in such a precarious existence compared to how things were back on Caprica before the attack.

A pre-emptive strike in defence of CSI: Miami

When Frank fires up the exegesis engine on matters pertaining to the haunted fish tank, it gets ugly early doors for the logic-defying likes of Stephen Poliakoff (though I enjoyed 'Friends and Crocodiles' for all its gaps....was it a ham-fisted attempt to craft a paean to a type of capitalism that's light on its feet and long on intellectual wealth?), so he'll be able to train his eyes on the police procedurals that are really getting his goat, with 'CSI: Miami' coming in for some particular stick.  It will be developed at length through later posts and comments, but I think 'Miami' is the little albeit massively expensive show that could.  Critically, the programme's a widely derided ginger stepchild, but 'Miami' started out from a very, very low baseline: a preening male lead, a literally shaky female lead, an oddly robotic female supporting player was matched in bizarreness by another actor who conversed with cadavers.  And, to round things out, two male players playing investigators in a manner so inept that they could barely flesh out a convincing character if they'd been amalgamated.  So far, so bad...but dammit if the rejigged writing and production staff didn't somehow turn things around a little, particularly in terms of ekeing out halfway acceptable performances from most of its leads, once Kim Delany and Rory Cochrane exited the show.   Adam Rodriguez still isn't great but some of his tetchy interactions with Rex Linn's cop (underrated actor in my book) have helped him out a little and Emily Procter is, at least, one of Jerry Bruckheimer's more effective translucent blondes (fans of 'Cold Case' and 'Close to Home' will get what I'm talking about...friend Jerry is channeling Hitchcock in casting terms).   Sofia Milos is easy on the eyes, of course, but it would be nice to see her show some of the wit and passion she brought to any amount of thankless TV roles over the last ten years.  Outrageous quality claims cannot be made on behalf of any series that features David Caruso as a Cryptkeeper doppelganger with arms akimbo and any number of way out plot contrivances,  but I respect the show for having the plums to retool when needed.   'Miami' doesn't dwell on supposed sexual deviance as a surefire invocation of Thanatos in the way that 'Vegas' does nor has it committed the mortal sin of splitting its cast into two separate shifts and turning two great, likeable characters in Grissom and Willows into a smug Jedi Master and short-tempered harridan.  It's also a lot lighter in visual terms than the Gothamesque mise en scene of 'New York', but it is set in Florida, so Fincheresque gloom would not be a good look.   

Scenes from the Class Struggle in Balboa County

Take 'Battlestar Galactica' and series 3 of 'The Wire' out of the mix, and my confident assertion is that 'Veronica Mars'  (the unspoiled should avoid the site's episode guides on the site as it's a year ahead of the schedule here) is the best drama currently available on Rich Man's Telly.   The premise of an ostensibly peppy yet deeply alienated young blonde who leads a double life at high school doesn't eke out any new terrain, as any major Buffy dude will tell you, but the show manages to beautifully square away its arcs (the series character-defining mysteries) with its standalone episodic structure (tightly plotted cases of the week that often keep a viewer guessing 'til the last act).  It's very sharp on issues of class, as Veronica opines in narration that two kind of people inhabit her hometown of Neptune "millionaires and people who work for millionaires" but it's never really clear who the angels favour here as both sides of the tracks throw up their fair share of heroes and villains.  It blends comedy and occasionally wrenching drama with the lightest of touches and it's really very well-acted with brilliantly-drawn major and minor characters and a real find in Kirsten Bell, a young actor whose brilliant cameo in David Mamet's 'Spartan' first brought her to my notice.  The private eye stuff, absent shamus-beating, is absolutely spot on with plucky sidekicks, surrogate secretaries, secretive millionaires and duplicitous lovers all covering the Tropetown beat.   We're only up to episode three in series one on 112 Living TV and you could do a lot worse than tune in each Sunday evening at about 5.30 or 6 pm.  You have little choice, anyway,  as it seem there's no immediate prospect of a Region 2 DVD release.

Re: Morse-less

You can take it that I was rather unimpressed by ITV's Inspector Morse spin-off Lewis which aired last night. The one-off drama dealt with the return of the late Morse's sidekick, recently widowed and now Inspector, Lewis to Oxford and his investigation of a series of murders apparently connected to a family sports car company. It would certainly understate the case to say that the plotting was clunky. Bad enough that the story, initially at least, merely paraphrased the plot of Hamlet with a troubled heir, convinced that his uncle had killed his father, seduced his mother and acquired the "throne" of ownership of the car firm. We even had a Polonius (called Pollock) and an Ophelia figure who attempts to drown herself. But worse, just in case we didn't get the reference, there were any number of instances of crude signposting making explicit references to Shakespeare's doomed Dane. Surely the golden rule of hommage is that the participants in the hommage don't realise that they are making hommage. You don't get Washizi in Throne of Blood saying to Lady Washizi - "Hey, you know what? This reminds me of that Shakespeare play. You know? The one with the Scottish guy".

Calling it quits on the alternative universe

Like John Fay, I used to be a fan of West Wing for its first few seasons. I have also noticed its serious decline in recent years so I'm relieved to see that NBC have finally decided to pull the plug on this increasingly preposterous series. The stubborn insistence on portraying a Democrat president for six years after the last one left office can only be explained by obtuse partisanship or inertia. Neither reflects well.

One of the things that was attractive about the earlier seasons was that there was some attempt to portray "the other side" honestly. I'm thinking of Josh's retort to Toby's assertion that drug companies' pills cost four cent to make: "You know that’s not true. The second pill costs them four cents; the first pill costs them $400 million" and Emily Procter's sympathetic Republican: Ainsley Hayes. The experience of writing good arguments and quips for that character ought to have given them a clue as to how they might have portrayed a Republican White House. If the writers and producers had any guts, they would have had Bartlett lose the first election. After all, it's a safe bet that a significant proportion of their viewers did actually vote Republican. Or perhaps, like the makers of the L-Word (of which more anon) they fancy that their viewing audience is solidly blue.

Instead they persisted with this alternative and increasingly irrelevant universe which foreswore the option of dealing with most of the issues which animate 2004-2006 era voters including, ironically, almost all Democrat voters, most of whom are driven to the point of derangement by the actual Republican president.

Quote of the day

It seemed like a good idea at the time to kill their father or mother, but later it's just damned inconvenient to have somebody mourning.

24 writer, Michael Loceff, interviewed by James Surowiecki.

Another 24 Hours

So, Jack's back. I've been eagerly awaiting the new series, ever since the previous concluded. It is one of the few arc-based shows to which I'm prepared to devote the sort of commitment required. One of the things I like about the various CSIs and Law and Orders is that you don't have to watch them in any particular sequence. Keeping up with a long convoluted storyline can be a real chore and it doesn't take much for something a little bit short of must-see to tip over into drudge-watch. What 24 shares with another arc-based series I rate - Battlestar Galactica, is the serious but necessarily abrupt way it contrives and deals with ethical dilemmas. Both series confront the viewer with lifeboat ethics, in the case of BSG, literally so and demonstrate how lexicographic orderings crumble in the face of scarcity. This sets 24 and BSG apart from most other TV shows, including some of those aforementioned shows I enjoy, which prefer to shirk such dilemmas and imply that an appeal to high principle will always suffice and will never lead to undesirable consequences.

But back to the new series...[Semi-spoilers inside]

Model Universe

I watched the BBC Drama Friends and Crocodiles last night with mounting irritation. Written by Stephen Poliakoff, it purports to chart the rise and fall of a hard-headed, pragmatic business model Poliakoff associates with the Thatcher era alongside the decline and resurgence of a fanciful, quixotic business model Poliakoff presumably imagines to be superior by chronicling the relationship between Paul, a working class boy made property millionaire, and his PA, Lizzie who goes on to better things.

Now, I am a bit of a stickler for internal consistency, I have a proto-post in mind about how suspension of disbelief ought to be earned and I might go into more detail about this but the idea is: I'm only willing to extend disbelief so far. For instance, take a Science Fiction film, leave aside for a moment all the usual impossible things one is required to believe before breakfast (such as faster than light travel), and consider, at least prior to the CGI era, the fact that aliens tend to be humanoid - of roughly similar size and appearance to us humans. This, I'm happy to accept - these aliens would be played by humans. This is an easy suspension of disbelief. What would be annoying to me would be a story line which depended on this "fact" (which is, after all, nothing but a convenient fiction), for example a concluding message that: "Hey, we are more similar than we are different, why can't we all just get along, alien and human, yada, yada, yada".

Something similar is in operation when a dramatist erects a little toy universe in which all the characters behave as he plans them to behave. This is fine, so far as it goes. Indeed, it is the basis of fantasy epics such as Lord of the Rings. What's not ok, is when this toy universe which exists under its own rules is held to say something interesting or relevant about the real world and this the precise problem with Friends and Crocodiles.