On today's Hollywood Prospectus podcast (our first bicoastal production!), Andy Greenwald and I talk about the victory of Omar Little in Grantland's Smacketology tournament of characters from The Wire. We discuss our favorite lesser-known characters and the strange genius of The Wire auteur David Simon. Speaking of strange genius, we also hit the return of Community and the larger phenomenon of how audiences can be possessive of a television show. And an HP podcast wouldn't be complete without a walk by Herschel's farm, so Andy and I take stock of The Walking Dead as the show violently heads toward its Season 2 finale.
Heads up: We throw some Season 1 Game of Thrones spoilers around like a bunch of dwarves drunk on wine. And our discussion of The Walking Dead is recommended only if you've seen Sunday's episode. Don't say we didn't warn you!
What about my boy Scott Templeton? Scottie boy! The intrepid Baltimore Sun reporter who conjured maudlin newspaper gold out of thin air — you want a wheelchair-bound kid sitting outside Camden Yards on opening day? Boom! How about fabricated nights under the overpass with Baltimore's down-and-out population, cowering under the specter of an (also fake) serial killer who targets the homeless? What, you say? Templeton, along with Jimmy McNulty's season-long manic episode and David Simon's positively tumescent self-righteous streak, submarined the final season of the best TV show ever made? Well, you know what? You're wrong, idiot face. I am loud and I am right! Did you even watch The Wire? Yeah, Templeton made up his stories and got caught, but he got the Pulitzer anyway! Can't you see he won THE GAME? He's more trill than Stephen Jackson firing his biscuit outside an Indianapolis strip club. Templeton FTW. Can't believe we left him out our damn Smacket. Smmfh.
Well, here is a development of note: The Bachelor host Chris Harrison told Access Hollywood that he personally asked miraculous Denver Broncos quarterback Tim Tebow to be the show's next bachelor — and that Tebow said yes! Harrison explains, “I’ve actually met Tim Tebow. I met him about becoming our next Bachelor. I think he’d be a great Bachelor ... He did say yes ... but he would never do it. He has a little job called quarterback for at least another year.”
Take a minute. Process the information. Go ahead, let it sink in. OK, ready to discuss?
Every week in this space, Grantland pop culture correspondent Andy Greenwald will run down the happenings and mishappenings in NBC’s Thursday comedy night done mostly right. (Note: The order reflects newsworthiness, not quality. Although occasionally the two just might overlap.)
1. Parks and Recreation
To be warm, fresh yet familiar and never stale -- this is the impossible challenge of every successful sitcom. (Also of every loaf of bread, but despite recent evidence to the contrary, Grantland is not a food blog.) Last night, Parks and Recreation pulled off this tricky feat as it has for much of its campaign-centered fourth season. “Operation Ann” was as cozy as a throw pillow with Joseph Stalin’s face on it, deftly playing with the audience’s expectations and well-earned trust in ways that left me as giddy as Ron Swanson on a scavenger hunt.
Buckle up, GRTFLers, next week we are adding The Challenge: Battle of the Exes to the fray. What does that mean? That means that you should write a few of your dumbest friends, make a wager, and hold yourself a draft. What was that? No chance? I guess that’s cool, too. Next Wednesday, in anticipation of the premiere, we will be revealing The Challenge-specific rules, our draft results, and a little extra something-something that methinks will make The Challenge fans happy. Or confuse them. Most likely both. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves: There was plenty of weird this week on Jersey Shore and The Bachelor to tide us over until next week when The Challenge’s alchopsychoholics come marching in:
Earlier this week AMC canceled a panel for The Killing at the Television Critics Association press tour. Ostensibly, the reason was “scheduling conflicts,” although everyone assumed the network feared a mob of rampaging critics, hurt and betrayed by The Killing’s non-ending, rising up as one autonomous being to wreak havoc in revenge. Looks like those critics might have just transferred their vitriol over to 2 Broke Girls?
Polish the biscuit jars and iron the broadsheets! Downton Abbey’s back for a second season of irresistible nonsense (pronounced, of course, with the emphasis on the first syllable). The classist — if not quite yet classic — British drama turned a colony of skeptics into the United States of Anglophilia last year, thanks to its expertly told tales of upstairs/downstairs intrigue in a post-Edwardian English manor. Created by footman-fetishist Julian Fellowes (Gosford Park), Downton chronicles the doings at the eponymous edifice, home to the kindly Lord Grantham, his American wife and three comely daughters, and a staff so gossipy they’d make Harvey Levin blush. Into this figgy pudding steps Matthew Crawley, a distant cousin and, thanks to the sinking of the Titanic and the Granthams’ lack of sons, the presumptive next Earl of Downton. Crawley’s a posh blond solicitor but has enough proletarian habits — rides a bike, dislikes butlers — that he’s basically seen as a bomb-throwing radical by his hosts, particularly Lord Grantham’s sniffy mother, the fearsome Dowager Countess (played by Dame Maggie Smith), who eyes Crawley and his meddling, medically inclined mother, Isobel, like a police dog watching a freegan in Zuccotti Park.
For a time it seemed that Tolstoy’s famous admonition about the relative happiness of families might apply to television as well. But the truth is more depressing: There are many bad TV shows, but most of them are terrible in the same dispiriting ways. Few, of course, are as jaw-droppingly horrendous as Work It, a retrograde shame-spiral of a series that hates women nearly as much as its viewers will hate themselves. But this detestable disasterpiece doesn’t even have the courtesy to be interesting in its inanity; it’s merely the latest (and, hopefully, the last) in a head-scratching run of new network shows aimed at what is apparently America’s least served demographic: misogynists.
Look, I am not going to lie to you, this week in reality TV was a net loss. This form of entertainment is a value proposition: You sacrifice your time, your pride, and your perception of yourself as a mature, educated human being. In return, you receive the value of watching mouth-breathing, fame-seeking, cocktail-tossing caricatures maniac their way from one contrived scene to the next. In most cases it is a net positive; this week it was not. The three current shows in the GRTFL, Real World, Survivor, and Baseball Wives, are all the current underwhelming iteration of a previously successful franchise. They are the Lakers of reality TV shows.
You are reading this right now and saying to yourself, “Why would I read this fool’s column about reality TV when this week in reality TV wasn’t interesting?” A very fair question with a simple answer: You should read this column because dumping hate juice all over something you didn’t enjoy is just as much fun as celebrating something you loved. You don’t want to agree with that statement, I understand. It feels wrong to admit that to yourself. Ask yourself, doesn’t the most passionate and hilarious dialogue about a movie come when you have just walked out of it? Isn’t it nearly as satisfying to watch your rival team Dallas Cowboy away wins as it is to watch your own team Tim Tebow them? It's not nice to drown everything in hate juice, it’s not cool, and it’s not how your mama raised you ... but it is fun. So grab your umbrella and strap on your goulashes: Forecast calls for a hate storm.
Movies are no country for old men. Or old anything, really: women, dogs, even Spider-Men. And so one of the instant pleasures of Luck, HBO’s new prestige drama that premieres in January but sneak-previewed last night, was watching hungry lions like Dustin Hoffman and Nick Nolte shake off the indignity of paycheck sequels and tabloid benders and roar and stomp like the bad old days. Even below the fold, David Milch’s horseracing series is packed with more well aged hams than a Barcelona tapas bar, from veteran mustache Dennis Farina to grizzled “that guys” Kevin Dunn, Richard Kind and John Ortiz. Even onetime heartthrob Jason Gedrick is on-board, though, at 46, he looks less like a teen idol and more like the sort of no-hoper who might stalk and murder one. All this experience and all these wrinkles add an immediate gravitas to a show about racetrack desperation set in one of those seedily picturesque parts of California they don’t show you on the postcards. Future episodes promise appearances by other talents pushed past their Hollywood sell-by date, including the ferocious Joan Allen and the immortal Michael Gambon. If nothing else, Luck is guaranteed to showcase more ravenous dinosaurs than Fox’s Terra Nova.
A jalopy pulls up at a Klan meeting with two masked men. Richard and Jimmy, recognizable by Jimmy's distinctive teen-dream bang-tendrils and Richard's hat, hop out and start firing. They take prisoners for crimes committed against Chalky White's gang. In Philadelphia, Manny The Butcher is hiding in a synagogue, laying forth on crime and punishment. "Everyone's a crook." I bet you say that to all the crooks. Manny also has a bang tendrils situation (this hairstyle is called "The Nazi Youth"). Perhaps he, too, was once a heartthrob. Manny says he wakes up sometimes feeling like he's still a 12-year-old kid with all the important life decisions still yet to be made. Don't we all? Manny's biggest problem is named Waxy Gordon. All this Waxy buildup is trifling (sorry), but Nucky is willing to consider it for a fee, burning off hostility about his trial. The guards watching Chalky's headquarters open the gates for Jimmy and Richard, each driving one jalopy. Jimmy gives Chalky the package, money from the Klan for the victims, plus the three racist gunmen. Dunn Purnsley smiles thinking about torturing them. Jimmy asks Chalky to broker a meet with Nucky.
Richard and Jimmy share a milkshake through two straws. No they don't, but they look like they want to. Emily Schroeder practices walking on her crutches while the maids supervise. Owen Sleater once again politely (i.e., crushingly) ignores Katy. Esther Randolph demands a shaved cherry ice in the heat. Career womyn, always wanting cold slushies. Margaret Schroeder is there to see Esther, along with her creepy priest buddy. She dismisses the creepy priest for some one-on-one lady time with Esther. Margaret tells her how Hans Schroeder was a drunkard and cheat who beat her and their children. Esther asks whether Margaret would rather be portrayed as "helpless" or a "gold digger" during the trial. Esther presses Margaret to corroborate the case against Nucky in order to leaven the guilt of her blood debt. Margaret doesn't like Esther's bloodthirst for her common-law boyfriend.
Chekhov’s famous rule, adapted to the age of terrorism, might read something like this: “if a bomb is introduced in the first act, make sure it detonates by the last.” No, the ball-bearing-laden death vest created by the ardently tinkering tailor didn’t go off — at least not yet. But last night’s brilliant Homeland did end with a shocking explosion. The only apparent casualty? The CIA career of Carrie Mathison.
“The Vest,” the penultimate episode of Homeland’s first season, was an intoxicatingly intense hour, expertly spinning plots both external, as the depth and immediacy of Brody’s mission are revealed, and internal, as Carrie’s bipolarity bubbles up at the worst possible time. Any expectations I had for a pro forma resolution to all of the various storylines — Walker would be thwarted, Brody’s intentions would be smoothly shunted off until next season — went out the window almost instantly. It turns out showrunners Howard Gordon and Alex Gansa have been lulling us with slow builds and subtle twists all in the service of a much bigger bang. Like their nefarious creation Abu Nazir, Gordon and Gansa don’t fall back on clichés or “spy novel 101 bullshit.” Rather, they explode. And it’s a delight being caught flat-footed by them again and again. Everything we’ve seen up until now — Carrie’s fraying sanity, her relationships with her father, with Brody, with Saul — has been as meticulously constructed as that suicidal undergarment in Pennsylvania. And now it’s all paying off. Saul’s surprised and satisfied smile, after staying up half the night assembling Carrie’s color-coded terror timeline, was my own.
Editor's Note: Welcome to our series, Rembert Tries to Explain the '80s. Every so often, we'll e-mail 24-year-old Rembert Browne a video from the 1980s that he hasn't seen. Rembert will write down his thoughts as he's watching it, then we'll post those thoughts here. This week's installment was selected by our editor-in-chief, Bill Simmons: the first episode of Manimal If you have an idea for a future episode of Rembert Tries to Explain the '80s, e-mail us at hollywood@grantland.com.
Simmons seemed extra excited about this one. It's either going to ruin my holidays or be the best thing ever.
Every week in this space Grantland pop culture correspondent Andy Greenwald will run down the happenings and mishappenings in NBC’s Thursday comedy night done mostly right. (Note: the order reflects newsworthiness, not quality. Although occasionally the two just might overlap.)
1. Community
Near the end of Walter Isaacson’s best-selling biography of Steve Jobs, the topic turns toward the creation of the iPhone. Within Apple, there were dissenting opinions on whether it was a good move for the company to invest all of its resources in such an idyllic device — after all, the problem wasn’t the supply of mobile phones, it was just that the ones everyone had weren’t good enough. Even after the device’s introduction, Bill Gates, the unlikely populist, was dismissive as was his chief Microsoft deputy, Steve Ballmer. To Ballmer’s eyes, the object was too ambitious for the average consumer. “A phone,” he said, “is really a general purpose device.”
But the thinking within Apple was, of course, a little different. Jobs correctly bet the company on the notion that there were enough like-minded people in the world to make the costly, draining, and occasionally insane pursuit of perfection worth it. And eventually his highly personal, incredibly specialized device became the global standard.
Now, Community isn’t the iPhone (precious little about it is smooth) and Dan Harmon is no Steve Jobs (it’s hard to imagine him ever constraining himself to a 100% carrot salad diet). But underneath the stubble and Dr. Who jokes, Harmon does share some DNA with the late Apple CEO. From the very beginning, Harmon has rejected the notion that a major-network sitcom must adhere to certain emotional or crowd-pleasing beats and he’s bet big on the idea that audiences can keep up with an insane, Usain Bolt-like barrage of one-liners, references and call-backs. Over two and a half seasons of Community, Harmon has perpetually pursued the near-impossible over the merely good enough. The result has been a remarkable show that has, to my eyes at least, a relatively pedestrian batting average: no matter how hard you swing for the fences you simply can’t hit a home run every time. But when all the pieces fit together, as they did last night, Harmon’s dedication suddenly looks like the smartest thing in the world. The best compliment one could give Jobs was to say that we didn’t know we wanted his products until he invented them. The same could easily be said about Harmon. Until last night, I had no idea I needed a half-hour Christmas musical that Glee-fully eviscerated a more popular television show, and yet, in the end felt as warm and fuzzy and Annie’s inappropriate Santa costume. But it turns out I did.
The U.S. X Factor is kind of a snooze. Of course I watch it anyway. There have been times when, despite my general boredom at the song choices and homogenous religious messages in the interstitials, Nicole Scherzinger's elegant emoting made me a little misty. She has such a long neck. She looks like Cleopatra when she cries, and she cries for most of every episode. Watching Nicole Scherzinger cry is one of my favorite things to do with an hour and a half, even if I have to watch the rest of The X Factor to experience it. It's easy to imagine her private life as an almost Biblical epic full of huge, swelling tides of sadness and tornadoes of despair. Does she cry on the phone? Does she take off the huge earring on her phone-dominant ear before she does, and put her beautiful forehead in her hand, and get tears all over her neck? Does she cry every night as she worries about the ill-fated Dexter Haygood, mentally replaying the moment when overly punctual host Steve Jones cut her off before Dexter was eliminated, so that all she said to him before he left the show was one tearful word, "Dexter...?"
