Movie Review--Edge of Tomorrow

I suppose it is evolution, but science fiction films have only two ways to go; rehash old plots and premises, or develop new, even more implausible plots.  The Tom Cruise movie Edge of Tomorrow, redubbed Live Die Repeat, has it both ways; it creates an implausible plot that feels oddly familiar.

This is yet another film, following The Last Samurai and Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds, where the film makers seem to be saying that it doesn’t matters if every other character in the film dies, as long as Tom Cruise is alive at the end then the film has a happy ending.  How much this can be attributed to the ego of the actor and how much is happy coincidence I do not know.

The film (I am unsure by what name to call it) begins five years after aliens called “mimics” (the name is never explained; they don’t really mimic anything) have landed and basically conquered Europe.  The humans are preparing for an all-out assault because they think they have developed a weapon that can defeat the mimics, a full-body armor suit with built in weaponry.  For reasons that are not adequately explained, the general in charge of the assault decides to take the opportunity to pull a prank on an American captain in the PR department (Cruise) and put him in the front lines, where he is certain to be killed.  To be fair, Cruise plays his character as such a self-centered jerk that it seems plausible that he ticked off a high ranking officer and deserves the prank, although killing someone for being a jerk seems a bit harsh.

Anyway, during the assault, Cruise manages to do something that causes him to die and then wake up the previous morning.  The film then becomes a cross between Groundhog Day and the opening scenes of Saving Private Ryan, with Cruise bumbling around the battlefield until he is inevitably killed, restarting the sequence again.  Fortunately for the audience, he eventually finds someone who knows what is happening (Emily Blunt) and she neatly exposits the plot.  The only hope for the human race is if during one of his rebirths Cruise can get to the Head Alien (called Omega) and kill it before he dies and goes back to the equivalent of Go.

The scenes where Cruise wakes up over and over are handled well, although one is reminded of the genius of Groundhog Day where it never felt repetitive.  The constant restarts do begin to drag a bit, although seeing Emily Blunt shoot Tom Cruise in the head over and over and over does have a certain cathartic capacity.  How much you buy into the plot is entirely based on your level of credulity; I found it slightly more implausible than the average Doctor Who plot.

I am loathe to give career advice to Tom Cruise, who has had one of the most storied, long-lasting careers in Hollywood, but Tom, you have to accept that it is 2014.  You are in great shape, but you are also old enough to be Emily Blunt’s father’s older brother and at some point that fact is going to bubble up in the audience’s subconscious.  After a string of hit after hit (despite the occasional Far and Away or Days of Thunder) he has hit a dry patch.  Oblivion failed to reach audiences, and Jack Reacher was a major flop.  Now Edge of Tomorrow performed so poorly in theaters despite a notable supporting cast and A-list writers and a director, it had to be re-named for DVD release.  Tom Cruise needs to look for more age-appropriate material; start playing fathers, scientists, that sort of thing.

I can’t recommend Edge of Tomorrow, or whatever it is called, unless you are one of those science fiction fans with limited discretion.  It isn't nearly as bad as its reputation has become, but it also isn't nearly as good as some of those year-end top ten or twenty lists that include it say it is.  It’s worth watching on DVD; heck the scene of Emily Blunt doing push-ups is worth the DVD rental.

Goodbye Stephen Colbert and Craig Ferguson

I am going to talk about a couple of things I know almost nothing about, but that’s never stopped me before.

This week two shows ended their nearly ten year runs, one garnering more attention than the other.  I didn't watch these shows regularly, but I did watch their finales.  My reaction was maybe I should have watched both of them more.

The more high-profile departure was the ending of the Colbert Report.  It received a lot of attention because a) it is on in prime time; b) it won two Emmys as best variety show and would have won more if its mother ship The Daily Show hadn't (deservedly) won ten in a row; and c) its host is moving over to fill David Letterman’s huge shoes at the CBS’ The Late Show.

The high point of the finale was Colbert bringing back nearly every guest he ever had, including luminaries like Henry Kissenger (I honestly thought he died years ago), George Lucas, Big Bird, Mark Cuban, Willie Nelson, Randy Newman and Keith Olbermann (unfortunately wearing the bubble gum pick sport coat he wore on his show that week).  They all sang “We’ll Meet Again” as the band played on and on and on, repeating the same verse over and over.

The other show that the bell tolled for was Craig Ferguson’s The Late Late Show, and if anything he topped Colbert.  First off, he didn't end his show with a star-studded sing a long, he opened with it.  While not including any former secretary of states (although I’d have to check, they went by pretty fast) it was an impressive array of talent, including a very pregnant Kristen Bell (she looks adorable, then I remember it’s the spawn of Dak Sherpard and I get squicked out), Henry Winkler, Mila Kunis, Samuel L. Jackson, William Shatner, Quentin Tarantino, Jon Hamm, and many more (including Bishop Desmund Tutu).  They sang “Bang Your Drum” by the Scottish band Dead Man Falls, all the while beating on a variety of percussion instruments (including, disturbingly, Bell’s prominent belly).

I have to say the total effect was one of the most joyous moments in television viewing I can remember.  Unlike Colbert’s choice of “We’ll Meet Again,” (which is a song about false optimism that gets mistaken for real optimism just because we won World War II; remember it’s what played over the nuclear devastation at the end of Doctor Strangelove), the song Bang Your Drum played as an anthem for Ferguson, a former punk band drummer, with the repeated riff “Keep Bangin’ On” sounding like a personal motto (“Keep bangin’ on/and your day will come . . . No one lives forever/there’s business here you've got to finish.” 

Also, while the celebrity line up maybe wasn't as impressive as Colbert’s, the fact is that Colbert will be taking over for Letterman and if I were cynical I might suggest a lot of celebrities would want to remain on his good side.  Ferguson, toiling away in the wee hours of the AM, had a fraction of the following of Colbert and has an uncertain future, so I’d like to think that the celebrities that showed up either really liked him, or were obligated by their contract with CBS (although I can’t imagine that CBS can make cast members of The Big Bang Theory do anything they don’t want to do).  The group on the Colbert Report mingled around while singing; everyone on Ferguson’s show looked like they were having a blast.

Ferguson followed with an interesting interview with Jay Leno, who amazingly admitted that he didn't always pay attention to guests that bored him on The Tonight Show, and then concluded with a surreal ending that referred to the famous endings of Newhart, St. Elsewhere and The Sopranos. 

I had watched The Late Late Show only a couple of times, being of an age when I am unlikely to be awake at that hour of the morning.  I did VCR it a few times just because I heard it was odd, and it was.  Ferguson danced to his own drummer, and the producer of the show, David Letterman, let him.  Letterman once was the guy who refused to follow the conventions of late night talk show, until he BECAME the conventions of late night talk shows.  As with anything improvisational the results were hit and miss, but (unlike Jay Leno, apparently) he was always trying to entertain. 

So adios to Stephen Colbert and Craig Ferguson.  We’ll meet again; just keep bangin’ on.

Did they learn nothing from Zoolander?

Did they learn nothing from Zoolander?

The website Five Thirty Eight estimates that Sony stands to lose $100 million from scrapping release of The Interview over terrorist threats (the site also points out that the studio could recoup some of this if they released the film on Video On demand, but Sony said they wouldn't do that either). Of course that’s just money, and doesn't include the prestige Sony would have gotten when The Interview was festooned with dozens of Oscar nomination and Golden Globe award nominations.

Okay, maybe that last part is fantasy, as the closest Seth Rogan will get to an Oscar is when James Franco lets him see his notice that he got an Oscar nomination (I could be wrong; I still have trouble believing Jonah Hill’s obituary will start with, “The two-time Oscar nominee died from . . .”).  But still it is a big hit to a studios bottom line when they finance and promote a film for holiday release and they have to pull the plug at the last minute.

The sad thing is, this all could have been avoided.  In his review of the film Zoolander, Roger Ebert noted he felt some discomfort at the movie’s plot about an assassination attempt on the prime minister of Malaysia over child labor laws. Ebert had a simple solution—it’s a comedy, so make up some funny-sounding country name (something ending in –istan would work now) and run with it.  No one would get upset if you threatened to kill the fictional leader of a fictional country.

Heaven knows there is enough material out there.  Make the fictional leader look like a composite of world dictators; give him Kim Jong-un’s diminutive stature, Saddam Hussein’s mustache, Idi Amin’s girth, and hilarity ensues.  Make a film about North Korea and lose $100 million in profits.

Obviously, the current leader of North Korea lacks his father’s sense of humor.  Kim Jong-il didn't raise any issues with the negative (but still somewhat sympathetic) portrayal of him in Team America: World Police.  There was nary a complaint about the portrayal, or the fact that the Academy snubbed the movie for an Oscar nomination for his character’s song, “I’m Rone-ry.” 

So, memo to Sony executives: in the future, don’t make films about anyone who could be mistaken for a real person.  Ever.  No character in a Judd Apatow film could ever be mistaken for a real person, and his films not only make money, but they aren't threatened by terrorists (unless you count the reviews for Funny People).

I don't understand the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame

I don’t understand the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

I wanted to do a thorough lambasting of the institution, but frankly I am so flummoxed by the seemingly random approach of who gets in and who doesn't that I can’t form a cogent argument.  Surprisingly, research on the Internet brought me no clarity.

Where to begin?  Let’s start with the idea that, to some extent, there seems to be a bias against commercial success.  It’s like if you actually made decent money as a musician, you sold out and aren’t “cool” enough to be in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.  Of course acts in the Hall like Bruce Springsteen and James Brown sold a lot of records; presumably if you never got a recording contract you won’t be getting a call from the Hall.

But commercially successful rock acts like The Doobie Brothers and Chicago have never even been nominated, despite being eligible for decades. The Doobies aren't in the Rock Hall of Fame?  With that name?  Long Train Runnin’?  China Grove?  Black Water?  Not even a nomination?

I had to laugh at one list of Hall snubs I came across that discussed the injustice of a certain singer not being in, despite the fact that he had released three albums that had been met with low sales upon release. Wow, three whole albums!  That is a lifetime production worthy of enshrinement, especially since no one heard the albums when they were released.  And no one bought them! What better evidence could you have that he was an artist before his time?

Then there is the genre issue.  I know you can’t define “rock and roll” with any precision, and people will disagree on whether ABBA can be classified as a rock band.  But I think I can safely say that I own every rock and roll album produced by Run DMC, which is zero.  In checking several lists of snubbed non-entrants, I find an odd assortment of country artists (Willie Nelson, Dolly Parton), disco artists (Chic, nominated and rebuffed 9 times) and rap artists (LL Cool J).  While I acknowledge that a handful of artists deserve enshrinement in multiple Halls (Johnny Cash definitely belongs in both the Rock and the Country Halls of Fame) why don’t they focus on getting all the deserving rock acts in and then look around for artists from other genres?

Then there is the “Really?  Him? Or Her?” argument.  For example, Cat Stevens was inducted in 2014.  I've got nothing against Cat Stevens, I like his work, but seriously is he really Hall of Fame material?  He’s the musical equivalent of a middle infielder who hit .270 lifetime going to Cooperstown.  I love, love, love Randy Newman (his Faust concept album is amazing), but he had a couple of minor pop hits in the 80’s and wrote a few hits for others, most notably Mama Told Me Not to Come.  He should be in the songwriter’s Hall of Fame, but he’s in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a performer, not a songwriter.

I want to complain about Green Day going in, but that’s just me feeling old.

Unlike the Baseball Hall of Fame, I have no idea what the standards are for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.  You have to be popular, but not too popular.  It helps to be a rock act, but that’s not a deal breaker (James Taylor isn't exactly in the same rock and roll league as Little Richard).  Some well-known rock acts get right in, others aren't nominated after decades.

I guess rock and roll immortality is like pornography; you know it when you see it.  Except I don’t.

Mad Men has only itself to blame for Golden Globe shut out

We all think we’re so clever.  Especially if you are a successful television executive who has developed a hit show that “breaks the rules,” you think you are going to think outside the box and pull something over everyone else.  But the inevitable fallout often is that you will only be fooling yourself.

The creators and producers of Mad Men had a great idea; instead of producing a final 13 episode season, they’d copy Breaking Bad and split the final season into two 7 episode arcs.  This would mean that instead of racking up awards for one year, they’d win twice as many awards over two years!  Brilliant!

Except the Golden Globe nominations were announced and Mad Men got zippo.  None.  Nada. Zamboni.

Breaking Mad Men into two 7-episode “seasons” diluted the brand to the point where nothing stood out when nomination time rolled around.  Mad Men’s seasons have tended to be erratic, but built to a strong conclusion. Featuring only seven episodes for nomination purposes meant that the performances couldn't be judged in the context of the full season.  Don Draper may do something inexplicable in episode 5 that pays off in episode 12, but if episode 12 is broadcast in 13 months, it remains inexplicable.

And when it comes to television awards, momentum is everything.  It’s almost as if shows earn “slots” in certain categories, and the default is the show will get a nomination in that slot unless something changes.  The West Wing went from great to mediocre when Aaron Sorkin was pushed out as showrunner, but it kept getting Best Drama Emmy nominations because it owned a slot.  And of course Golden Globe slots translate to Emmy slots many months later.

Mad Men had a best drama slot, a best actor slot for Jon Hamm, a best actress slot for Elizabeth Moss, a best supporting actor slot for John Slattery, and (for Emmys) slots for direction and writing.  Now when its final “season” rolls around next year, nothing is certain.  In the vast, ever-expanding television landscape, it is easy to discard an old reliable if something newer and shinier comes around. 

The most criminal Emmy snub of all time was Hugh Laurie never winning Best Actor for House, but the fact is he wasn't even nominated for House’s last season. The same fate might befall Jon Hamm, who was a sensation when Mad Men first debuted (and won a Golden Globe in 2008) but who gets little press these days (and his film career hasn’t exactly taken off).  I've never been sold on Hamm as a great actor; I've often thought he was a minimalist actor that allowed people to project what they felt about Don Draper onto him.  But anyone who could nail the final monologue in The Wheel has to have some acting chops.

The bottom line is Mad Men got greedy.  They thought they could get two bites at the award apple by stretching their “final season” over two seasons.  And now they've been shut out at the Golden Globes. Time will tell if this has any repercussions on the Emmy nominations when they come out in several months.

What do you get for $12 million a year?

Phil Jackson, the Zen Master, the most successful coach in NBA history, accepted a job last spring with the New York Knicks as General Manager.  The price tag was $12 million for five years, or $60 million.  $60 million isn’t Kobe Bryant money, but you could pick up a couple of good power forwards and a point guard for that kind of cash.

The good news for the Knicks is that their investment is already paying dividends.  Under Jackson’s leadership, his hand-picked coach, and the vaunted “triangle offense” the Knicks are well on their way to having a good shot at the number one draft pick next year in the 2016 draft.

At 5 wins and 21 losses, the Knicks are one of two NBA teams with a sub-.200 record (the other is the hapless Sixers, who at least have the excuse of trying to stink).  On a pace to win 16 games, 8 less than last year, the Phil Jackson magic has yet to take hold in the Big Apple.

Of course the whole thing was doomed from the beginning.  There are a lot of things team owner James Dolan could have done to improve the team, but bringing in a designated guru wasn't one of them.  The question is how soon will he realize that and stop the bleeding by firing Jackson.

Phil Jackson has always been the most overrated coach in basketball history.  He won six rings in Chicago, not because of his “triangle offense” but because he told everyone, “Okay guys, get the ball to Michael.”  He won three rings in Los Angeles with two Hall of Famers, Shaq and Kobe, in his starting line-up. He picked up two more rings with the Lakers, but he never won a title without having the most talent on the floor (Pat Riley coached the Heat to a championship with Dwayne Wade and a bunch of guys named Fred).

The Knicks have been playing with the “triangle offense” this season, and it obviously isn't the magic formula it has been purported to be.  Jackson and his acolytes have always made the “triangle offense” out to be something only Stephen Hawking could understand, so Jackson had to hire a head coach with no coaching resume but who had played in that system.  Fine, except that apparently Carmelo Anthony is having trouble learning the finer points of the triangle.

Phil Jackson has always risen and fallen with the quality of his team.  When his team consisted of Jordan and Pippen, or Shaq and Kobe, he won.  We his top two players were Kobe and Lamar Odom, or Kobe and Smush Parker, not so much.  That’s the way it is with all coaches or managers; few rarely make THAT much of a difference. Maybe Joe Torre managing all those ego deserves some credit; coach K keeping Duke a perennial powerhouse as well.

But James Dolan thinking that paying Phil Jackson $60 million would turn the Knicks into title contenders was just another sign of how dysfunctional that organization is.  My only question is, how can I persuade Dolan to give me some of that money?

Sleepy Hollow's Sophomore Slump

The biggest breakout hit television show of 2013 was probably Sleepy Hollow. The show, which combined US Revolutionary War history, New England folklore and the Book of Revelations, was innovative, chaotic, and deftly combined humor and horror.  Then Fox broke the news that it was going to be renewed, but they weren’t picking up the back nine episodes leaving viewers with a first season of only thirteen episodes.

There was some speculation at the time that Fox had decided to utilize an “HBO” strategy of only doing thirteen episodes per season, which improves the quality by reducing the quantity of episodes produced.  How can network dramas compete with cable dramas when the latter spreads its creative juices over 13 shows per year while the former have to spread themselves thinner over 22 episodes?

It now appears that Fox’s decision was well considered.  A show as crazy, insane, and delirious as Sleepy Hollow needs lots of time to develop its story lines.  One can argue that some of Lost’s course corrections in seasons four and five might have been avoided if they had only had to produce 13 episodes per season, even as fans were clamoring for more than 22.

Sleepy Hollow has suffered from a major sophomore clump.  The show still has the chemistry between stars Tom Mison (as Ichabod Crane) and Nicole Beharie (as “Leftenant” Abbie Mills), which is almost enough.  But almost everything else that made the show special has evaporated away.

One thing the show did was build an impressive ensemble, supplementing Mison and Beharie with Orlando Jones, an excellent comedic actor (who rose to prominence as the spokesman for 7-Up who coined the phrase “Make 7 Up Yours!”) who did good work in the somber role of Beharie’s boss.  They also added Lyndie Greenwood as Beharie’s sister Jennie, a bad ass ex-mental patient who was as comfortable operating outside the law as Beharie’s Lieutenant Mills was operating within it. And then there was the best addition to the cast, Fringe’s John Noble as Henry Parrish, a “sin eater” who turned out to have sinister motives.

In their second season they've unwoven the fabric they stitched together last season.  Jones’ Frank Irving has been confined to a psychiatric institution for most of the season, rendering him mostly harmless (except for implausibly losing his soul because he signed a contract with a pen that cut his finger). Jennie has mostly gone on errands.  Parrish took a central role in the second season’s plot, but he’s mostly been relegated to hatching far-fetched plans that fail, leaving him taunting the main duo over nothing.

And then there is Hawley.  Hawley is Sleepy Hollow’s Nikki and Paolo.  For those of you unfamiliar with Lost, that show attempted to expand the cast by integrating two previously unseen characters named Nikki and Paolo into the Island population.  Fans hated them as superfluous and they were ultimately killed off.  Hawley was added to Sleepy Hollow to . . . I’m not sure, provide sexual tension for Abbie and Jennie (because Ichabod, a married man, would never consider anything improper)?  Anyway, he’s come across as some hipster doofus who is merely a convenience when the heroes need some mystical weapon.

And then there is Katrina (played by Katia Winter), Crane’s wife.  The show did her no favors in season 1, trapping her in purgatory where her interactions with the other characters were extremely limited.  In season two she’s escaped purgatory but is still useless, volunteering to be held hostage by the Headless Horseman so she might learn of his plans; except that he doesn't have any plans, and if she ever did learn anything she’d probably do more harm than good communicating them to Crane and Mills. Her ever-lasting love with Ichabod was supposed to be one of the bedrocks of the story, but now they've agreed that if they stop the Apocalypse they should go on a break (which may give Ichabod and Abbie a window of opportunity, although one would hope Ichabod could avoid Ross Geller's perpetual "We were on a break!" whining).

The show has had to go further and further afield to maintain the crazy plot lines that made season one such fun.  In one episode, Ichabod and Abbie search for the Biblical Sword of Methuselah, which is not only hidden in upstate New York but is guarded by a Gorgon.  You know you are stretching when you combine Biblical prophecy, Masonic mythology, and Greek legends.  So much of the plot seems contrived and made up as they went along that it is hard to take the show seriously, which is a necessary element of a horror show.

There is still much to recommend Sleepy Hollow.  Unlike most network TV shows, it is trying to be imaginative and unpredictable.  Crane’s “fish out of water” situation is still mined for humor (after riding a motorcycle for the first time Crane dismounts and declares, “I . . . WANT one of those!”). And the acting is first rate when the actors are given something to do.  But for how long can two people defeat the forces of Evil until Evil starts to look sort of incompetent?   It’s like Buffy the Vampire’s Season Seven, when Buffy fought the First Evil and First Evil just kept swinging and missing.

Maybe with shows like Sleepy Hollow, networks should consider shorter runs.  The pressure to keep a standard procedural or rom-com is hard enough, but a show known for crazy plots and unexpected developments?  The creators may need more time to work out the details.  Or maybe the answer was discovered by the creator of Fargo, who did one crazy season and will re-tool next year.

Maybe shows should try to live forever.  Twinkies have a long shelf life, but that doesn't make them good.

Who can you make fun of anymore?

I recently realized I am a member of a special minority group.  I don’t exactly know when it happened, but I am apparently a member of the only ethnic group that can be made fun of on television.

Keith Olbermann frequently mentions that the name of a certain football franchise is the last racial slur you can say at work and not get fired.  Maybe, maybe not.  CBS has a new situation comedy whose entire premise is based on ethnic stereotypes; the show will probably get cancelled, not because of audience outrage but because, well, it isn’t very good.  The show is The McCarthys and of course I am talking about the Irish.

Years ago there was a show called Bridget Loves Bernie about a Catholic girl who married a Jewish boy, and it was considered edgy.  Television is now much more homogenized.  There are shows with inter-racial couples and gay couples without it being a plot point.  Few TV characters actively practice any organized religion. Yes, The Sopranos was nothing but a bunch of Italian stereotypes, but for some reason people accepted it as realistic (there were some protests at first, but they died down once the Emmys started piling up).  The idea of a TV show about a family of Polish origin who weren't that bright wouldn't be considered, even by Fox.  But the Irish are still fair game.

The show The McCarthy’s is about a typical Irish family, meaning they live in Boston, drink to excess, and are fanatical about sports (except for the one gay son, which makes him a different stereotype). What a nuanced, well-rounded portrayal of an ethnic group.  What next, a show about an African-American family on welfare whose children are good at sports?

I’m not aware of any organized protests against The McCarthys, but then I haven’t looked.  Usually you don’t have to.  Last week an organization made news by protesting Direct TV’s ads featuring an alternate version of Rob Lowe who couldn't go to the bathroom with someone else in the room.  The shy bladder people have a spokesman, but not the Irish?

I've a good mind to go down to me local pub, grab some shillelaghs, get some boy-os and knock some sense into the executives at CBS.  That is, if I can get anybody off their bar stools or not eating Lucky Charms.

TV Review: Benched

Networks have brands, just like floor cleaners or potato chips.  CBS has crime procedurals where people hug at the end (see my blog posts about Scorpion).  Fox has comedies that are so crude that commentators on Fox News complain about them.  USA has programs about attractive people having career crises.

That description of USA programming applies to Royal Pains (attractive doctor with career crisis), Suits (attractive fake and real lawyers having career problems), Burn Notice (attractive spy has career crisis) and White Collar (attractive thief has career crisis).  That format is now being applied to a sitcom about lawyers that is the antithesis of Suits; the lawyers in Benched buy their suits off the rack (Macy’s is probably outside their budget) and they don’t drink 30 year old scotch after settling a multi-million dollar case.

That sort of practice was the career of attorney Nina Whitley (Eliza Coupe) before she melts down at a law office meeting where she is passed over for a promotion (only on television do women as gorgeous as Coupe get to complain about not getting a promotion because she isn't attractive enough), which happened moments after her ex-fiancée told her he was getting married to someone else.  Of course a talented, highly trained lawyer like Nina would have no choice but to go to work for the Public Defender’s office.

Her first day at work does not go well; her clients are not Fortune 500 executives but the scum of the Earth, the assistant DA is her ex-fiancée, and she manages to get herself stuck straddling the swinging door to where the prisoners are held.  But she improbably pulls out a victory at the end, so she won’t quit and look for an even more demeaning job.

I've said before that you can’t judge a pilot by its premise.  In the hands of the right people, the silliest premise can be turned into gold (Lost had probably the stupidest premise of all time and it won a bunch of Emmys).  If Benched can flesh out the characters surrounding Nina, there is comedy potential only hinted at in the first episode.

The fact that the show stars Coupe is a huge plus.  She was the only late-season cast addition to Scrubs that I cared for, and I liked her a lot.  I tried to like her next show, Happy Endings, but I just couldn't.  A lot of people loved the show; maybe I couldn't get past Elisha Cuthbert not in a bear trap.  Coupe is beautiful but not in a cookie-cutter way, and she has comedic timing and a way with physical comedy.

It also helps that her co-star is Jay Harrington, looking much scruffier than he did when he starred on Better Off Ted, one of my favorite sitcoms of this century. I don’t think Harrington and Coupe will be this century’s Sam and Diane, but they have an easy chemistry similar to that which Harrington had with Andrea Anders, his blonde co-star on Ted.

USA has created a nice cottage industry creating shows that rarely get Emmy consideration but last long enough to find syndication. The pilot has too much exposition to carry to have much time for laughs, but with the entirety of the criminal underworld at their disposal there is room for development, and Coupe is a gifted verbal and physical comedienne. Given the dearth of decent sitcoms on television, this potential is something I hope they don’t squander.

The TV Season Thus Far

I would say that this television season has been a disappointment, but that would imply that there were some positive expectations to begin with.  There were no shows with enormous “buzz,” like last season’s Agents of Shield.  There were no unknown quantities that had network support, like Lost.  Everything was vaguely familiar, and nothing looked like it would break out as a hit.

What can you say when the best new comedy of the season is already gone? I am referring to You’re the Worst, FX’s boundary-pushing comedy about two horrible, terrible people who discover they have “feelings” for one another [insert air quotes and eye roll].  In most fiction love makes good people better, but in this case two self-absorbed, emotionally stunted narcissists actually reinforce each other’s baser natures. Chris Geere and Aya Cash play Jimmy and Gretchen; he’s a pretentious British novelist (although no one is buying his book) and she’s a publicity manager for a rap group with the worst case of arrested development since the characters on Arrested Development. Both of them are shocked when a one night stand (that pushes the limits of what can be shown on basic cable) turns into something more.

Making Jimmy and Gretchen look relatively respectable by comparison are their friends; his roommate Edgar is a Gulf War vet with PTSD (and who may not have been playing with a full deck before being sent overseas), while her friend Lindsay is a coke-snorting sex addict.  Lindsay, trapped in an unhappy marriage to a dweeb she has nothing in common with, spent the 8 episode run descending further and further until she ended up abandoning her husband, frantically trying to do coke off her own boobs. 

You’re the Worst managed to make the two main characters grow while not falling into the trap of “love making them better people.”  She finally cleaned up her apartment, which looked like the inside of a teenaged boy’s closet, and he gave her a key to his place when hers burned down. Because the show had done the heavy lifting on their character development, it felt like progress and not a plot device.

The only other new show I am enjoying this season is The Flash, the second attempt at adapting the DC staple to television. The 1990 version was campy, while this version is (dare I say it) more realistic.  Grant Gustin as the titular character (known as Barry Allen when not in costume) does a great job of balancing the over-eager youth in a system where letting things slide is the norm (I like the detail that he is actually a very good crime scene technician).  Cavanaugh exudes oily charm as the scientist who is ostensibly helping him but has a hidden agenda, and Jesse Martin provides a solid anchor as the cop who is a surrogate father to Barry.  The villains of the week have been a tad silly, but maybe that’s not a bad thing compared to some other overly-serious shows.

This brings me to Gotham, the biggest disappointment of the season so far.  The premise, characters, and setting are all absurd in the extreme, but every character in the series (and every writer writing it) appears to be oblivious.  One of the dumbest plot contrivance of all time was the reaction of the police to a vigilante who kills people by attaching them to weather balloons that fly away; it never occurs to the police, not even “good cop” Jim Gordon, that the people will eventually come back down one way or another. No one sends up a helicopter to track the balloons, no one checks wind patterns to see where they might be blown, everyone just considers the victims as good as dead as soon as they float off, and both Gordon and his no-good partner are shocked when someone points out the balloons will eventually pop at high altitude, letting gravity take its course.  The performances are still entertaining, but they need to get off of origin stories and establish a more complete environment.

I am frustrated with CBS’ Scorpion, because I want to love it and CBS is watering it down to where it is difficult to like (I had the same reaction to last year’s Intelligence).  The CBS format is like the opposite of the Seinfeld “no hugging, no learning” mantra.  One character has to learn a lesson in every episode, usually something about trusting oneself or trusting ones friends.  It doesn’t help that the “geniuses” in the show don’t act like geniuses; they act like what stupid people think geniuses act like. I’m sticking with it, but it is on thin ice.

Constantine is obviously designed as a Friday night companion piece with Grimm (and if you had told me when it began that Grimm would last four seasons, I wouldn’t have believed you). I’ve only seen the pilot, and it was obvious that the show was re-tooled after it was completed, so we will have to see how it develops. I generally don’t like shows or movies where evil is all powerful, yet can be defeated by muttering something in Latin. I want rules, rules that make sense and are understandable within the fictive universe. Constantine may develop those rules, but until then I am skeptical.

I have given up on Forever, which was conveniently plotted and relied too much on the charm of its lead actor. In one episode the medical examiner who lives “forever” (played by Ioan Gruffudd) investigated a bogus anti-aging clinic, and when he got their client list his adopted son’s name was on the list; it turned out he had just asked for some information. First, the fact that out of the 8.5 million inhabitants of New York City he would know someone on the list was absurd; second, the potential danger was diffused so quickly it was as if it was only put in the show to create the promo for the episode. I wish that New Amsterdam had lasted longer and was available on DVD.

I don’t see things improving on network TV anytime soon.  But the good news is that HBO and CBS just announced independent streaming services, so many soon I won’t have to get 500 cable channels to watch 13.

Tanks but no tanks

One of the best quotes about sports is Herm Edwards’ oft repeated statement, “You play to win the game.”  It’s a great quote because it’s true; you may say you’re doing it for the exercise, to build camaraderie, because it’s a way to reduce stress, but the fact is, if winning wasn’t the reason to play the game, you wouldn't keep score.

That is why I think some people getting overly worked up when they see someone breaking the code and not trying to win.  There is reportedly a great deal of animosity aimed at the Philadelphia 76ers, who seem to be going out of their way to not win basketball games.  In the parlance of sports, they are “tankers,” a team that intentionally loses in order to have a better chance of getting a high draft pick before the next season.

The main source of annoyance seems to be the fact that in the 2014 draft the 76ers’ first pick was Joel Embiid, an excellent player who just happened to get seriously injured at the end of the college season, meaning that the 76ers will be playing without him this season.  Their other first round pick, Dario Saric, is committed to playing in Europe for two years.  So the worst team in the league used two top ten picks on players who can’t help them immediately, increasing the odds that they will get a high draft pick next year.

There’s the rub—the phrase “increasing the odds.”  The NBA knows something about tanking, and so invented a lottery system to discourage the practice.  Being bad doesn't guarantee you a number one pick, only a higher probability of getting a high pick. But the 76ers’ action seem to demonstrate that the NBA didn't go far enough, and some teams (and apparently commissioner Adam Silver) wanted to go further. They proposed “reforming” the lottery to give the worst teams a lower chance of a great pick, and some better teams a shot at a pretty good draft pick.

But there are two problems with what the NBA proposed.  First, it doesn't eliminate the incentive for tanking.  If you are willing to tank for the certainty of getting the number one pick, you’ll also tank to increase your odds at getting the number one pick.  If you are a lousy to mediocre team, you don’t have a lot of options: try hard for an 8^th seed and get blown out in the first round of the playoffs, or sink down and increase the chances of snagging a future superstar for next to nothing.

The second problem is that weakening the NBA Draft undermines the very purpose of the draft—to equalize the distribution of talent by giving bad teams the chance to force the best players coming out of college to play for them.  Under the current system, since 1985 only four times has the team with the worst record gotten the number one pick. That means the lottery system has failed 25 out of 29 times. If the point is to give teams with bad records a chance to become good, you have to reward the worst teams whether they are bad through incompetence, bad luck, or design.

If you want to discourage tanking, the draft is not the way to do it.  It probably isn't feasible, but the way to stop tanking is something akin to relegation, where for example if you “win” one of the NBA’s four worst records three years in a row, the franchise would be kicked out of the league and replaced by the best D-League team.  Or take away revenue sharing money from teams that don’t spend it productively, or create a rookie contract system that means winning the lottery equals paying big bucks to an unproven college player. The draft is for re-distributing talent, not punishing teams for not trying.

Besides, “tanking” is subjective.  The Spurs have been penalized by the NBA for not playing their best players in every game; is that “tanking” or merely an excellent strategy for not over-working players? Are fans of the Charlotte Hornets or Orlando Magic that disappointed when the visiting 76ers lose by 20 points late in the season?  And it’s not like TNT will be broadcasting a Sacramento Kings/Philadelphia 76er match on Christmas Day.

The issue isn't settled, and most NBA insiders expect the league to try and solve the tanking problem again sometime during the season. Thank God our best minds are trying to solve this problem instead of developing a vaccine for Ebola.

The NBA Solves the Problem of Quarters Divisible by Four

They played a very special basketball game a couple of nights ago. How special?  Each quarter was 11 minutes long!  I know, wow, what great mind thought of that!  The evil geniuses at NBA Inc., that’s who.

Was there such a hue and cry for shorter basketball games that this bold experiment was necessary?  Not really.  People mostly complain about baseball games lasting too long, and football can get a little long, but few people were writing angry letters to Sports Illustrated about the length of basketball games. So what does shortening a games from 48 minutes to 44 minutes accomplish?

Well, over the course of the very long NBA season (basketball, which was invented as a winter sport to be played indoors when the weather was bad, now has its season end in late June) a lot of very valuable players get injured.  Derek Rose has been out two years; Kevin Durant has a stress fracture in his foot; that sort of thing.  Shortening a game by 4 minutes would shorten the overall season by 328 minutes (82 times 4) or the equivalent of nearly seven games, not even factoring in the interminable playoffs.

The genius if this plan is this—if the NBA spared its player’s seven games worth of stress by shortening the season by seven games, then each team could sell 3 or 4 fewer season tickets, costing owners money in lost revenues from tickets and concessions.  Owners might be tempted to ask players for an adjustment on their contracts, paying them 8.3% less than they had agreed to. The television networks which just signed a hefty contract with the NBA might want some of their billions back for having 8.3% fewer games to broadcast.

But shaving a mere 4 minutes off each game saves the delicate balance.  Owners keep their revenues, players keep their salaries, and networks have the same number of games to air. The only person getting screwed is the fan, who gets 8.3 less product for his entertainment dollar. And the athlete who might have a shot at setting some lifetime statistical record who now won’t because his seasons will be 8.3% shorter; John Stockton’s lifetime assist record and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s scoring records are safe.

Leave it to sports team owners to face a problem with an obvious answer (players break down during a long season; shortening the season by seven or eight games) and find another answer that lets them keep all their money. The next thing you know they’ll be selling small beers for the price of a large; oh wait, they've done that already.

TV Review: The Flash

Once Upon a Time, comic book heroes used to be fun. There was such a thing as camp. The absurdity of super-villains being fought by a guy in a cape and colored underwear was treated as the silliness that it, in fact, was.

Then Tim Burton turned Batman into Goth, and Christopher Nolan transformed the story of young Bruce Wayne becoming the Caped Crusader into an opera.  Gotham continues this tradition on Fox, although the show has been pushing the limits of unintentional comedy lately (when a vigilante starts killing people by attaching them to ascending weather balloons, it never occurs to Detective Jim Gordon or his partner that eventually, somewhere, the bodies will return to Earth).

But the newest incarnation of The Flash, on The CW, brings the funny back. It promises to out-camp the 1990 version, thanks to better special effects technology and a somewhat more accomplished cast.

For the uninitiated, The Flash is about a crime scene analyst named Barry Allen (Grant Gustin) who acquires the gift of super speed when he is struck by a lightning bolt caused by a strange experiment at a nuclear laboratory.  Treating a premise like that seriously would work about as well as putting on a Chekov play with chimpanzees.

The cast includes the always reliable Jesse L. Martin as a police detective who learns Barry’s secret (and is the father of the girl Barry has an unrequited crush on).  Martin invests his character with immediate gravitas thanks to his time on the Law and Order TV series. The cast also includes the wonderful Tom Cavanaugh, with his patented quirkiness dialed down from eleven, as the brilliant physicist responsible for the nuclear accident who now wants to help Barry harness his potential.

But unquestionably the most brilliant stroke of casting is John Wesley Shipp as Barry’s father, serving time in prison for the murder of Barry’s mother.  Shipp played Barry Allen/The Flash in the 1990 series, and it is a hoot seeing him now play the parent of the same character. Barry’s mother died under mysterious circumstances, and with his new powers Barry hopes to uncover the truth and free his father.

There are some other bits of business set up in the pilot, such as an unsmiling woman scientist and a happy-go-lucky technician who work with Cavanaugh to monitor Barry’s development, and the fact that Barry’s crush is having a secret affair with her father’s partner.  And Cavanaugh’s character is harboring a Great Secret.

I hope The Flash doesn’t go the way of its parent show, Arrow; that show started off interesting, but then the backstory started to make no sense and I couldn’t distinguish the star of the show (Stephen Amell) from a block of wood.  Gustin imbues Barry Allen with some of Andrew Garfield’s vibe in The Amazing Spiderman, and if he doesn’t take things too seriously this show could be a lot of fun.

Interestingly, the tone of the show meshes somewhat with that of Marvel’s Agents of Shield, which follows it on another network.  Tuesday nights just got a lot more interesting.

TV Review: Mulaney

So, exactly how bad is the new Fox sitcom, Mulaney? It reminded me of what a bad Saturday Night Live sketch would be if they decided to do a parody of a stereotypical bad sitcom. It wasn't like they tried to make it funny and failed; it was like they tried to make it awful and succeeded.

The show has been compared, favorably and unfavorably, to the classic Seinfeld, and you can’t help but recall the early Seinfelds when every show began with Jerry Seinfeld doing stand-up. John Mulaney begins his show with his stand-up act, the only difference being that jerry Seinfeld is maybe one of the five best stand-up comedians of all time (George Carlin, Lenny Bruce, Bill Cosby, Richard Pryor . . . okay for now) and John Mulaney is not.

It is the sort of sitcom where the main character’s wacky friend bursts into the doctor’s office where the main character is waiting, yells “I’m not crazy!!!!!!” to the assembled crowd, and then squirts massive quantities of hand sanitizer on her hands.  Why is she going to her friend’s doctor’s appointment? Who enters a doctor’s office full of strangers yelling, “I’m not crazy!!!!!!”? Why would anyone remain friends with someone who behaved like that? Then again, why would a man tells his doctor he suffered from “frequent urination” when he wanted anti-anxiety medication because he was nervous about a job interview?

Seinfeld drew laughs from taking real life situations and blowing them up to gigantic proportions. Mulaney bears no relationship to anything remotely resembling the universe the rest of us inhabit. Every character on the show behaves like no one you would ever meet in real life, or on a bad acid trip.

I've said before that it is sometimes difficult to judge a sitcom by its pilot. Mulaney is so cynically constructed to be a carbon copy of other not-very good sitcoms that I can’t imagine it improving. Lucky for me, I don’t have to waste my time finding out.

TV Reviews: Selfie and A to Z

Pilots for sitcoms are hard to evaluate, because they not only have to be funny, but they have to establish the premise, introduce the characters, and leave the door open for more wacky adventures next week. Often, one of two things will happen: either the pilot will be lovingly crafted over years by the writer, creating a brilliant half-hour playlet that subsequent episodes can’t come close to; or the writer has to make a bunch of compromises with corporate suits just to get the pilot made, but then when the suits are too busy to hover over the series, the true quality can emerge.

One hopes the latter will happen with Selfie, a modest new sitcom on ABC’s Tuesday night line-up. The pilot shows signs of corporate meddling. “Hey, can we get a gratuitous shot of Karen Gillian in her underwear? You know what’s funny? People spilling barf on themselves. Can you put that in?”

On other hand, the show is a variation of Pygmalion, which was once turned into a little movie called My Fair Lady. So there is definitely room for growth.  The show also features two extremely likable stars, Karen Gillian (Doctor Who, also Guardians of the Galaxy although you’d never recognize her) and John Cho (the Star Trek movie franchise, the late lamented Go On, Sleepy Hollow). A lot of sitcoms have lasted longer than a season with worse casts than that.

The twist on My Fair Lady is that there Eliza Doolittle’s burden was her poverty; in Selfie, Eliza Dooley’s problem is due to affluence.  Gillian’s Dooley is a top sales person at a pharmaceutical company (I think; I wasn't quite clear on that) who has a bad social media day (see the reference to barf, above) and realizes that she needs fewer Facebook friends and more friends that actually like her. The pilot spent so much time setting that up that they neglected the back story on Cho’s character, Henry Higgs (the names aren’t exactly subtle), a marketing analyst (again, I think) whom Dooley begs to help her connect more with real people.

It’s plain to see what Dooley hopes to get out of the arrangement, but it is less clear why Higgs wants to help her.  Other than the fact that she’s gorgeous, but that doesn't seem to penetrate his consciousness in the pilot, so who knows? Higgs finds everything about her annoying, yet he seems to feel the need to help her because the plot demands it. One can only hope future episodes flesh out this relationship more thoroughly (speaking of flesh, did I mention Gillian was in her underwear in the pilot?).

The producers of How I Met Your Mother did the nearly impossible; after a build-up of eight years, they cast an actress as the titular Mother who was as wonderful, charming, beautiful, and winning as advertised. They then killed her off, but never mind. It is with that background that I approached the new NBC sitcom A to Z, starring the Mother herself, Cristin Miloti.

This pilot strikes me as the first kind I mentioned, so cute and precious that it feels like someone spent a long time getting all these details just so. But once the pilot is over, even though we are promised 25 more episodes (each named after a letter of the alphabet, just like a Sue Grafton novel). The pilot for A to Z is intricately plotted with lots of flair, from flashbacks to voiceovers (for the record, I am in favor of anything that provides work for Katy Sagal), but one doubts the writing staff can keep up that level of intricacy.  How cute is the pilot? The male lead’s name is Andrew and the woman’s is Zelda (A to Z! Get it?).

While the show lovingly spools out the details of the relationship of the central couple, played by Miloti and Ben Feldman (almost unrecognizable from his brilliant turn as Ginsberg on Mad Men), it relies on standard sitcom tropes for the supporting cast, including a stereotypical obnoxious best friend for him, a stereotypical over-sexed best friend for her, and an oafishly obnoxious boss for him. Since she works for what she refers to as a horrible law firm in the pilot, one assumes she’ll have an obnoxious boss in the future.

The pilot is too cutesy to be laugh out loud funny, and when it swings for the fences it whiffs big time. Feldman and Miloti have great chemistry (I suspect Miloti would have chemistry with a spice rack) but people don’t watch sitcoms for chemistry. Sam and Diane had chemistry on Cheers; they were also really funny.

The NFL and blackouts (that have nothing to do with concussions)

The United States was a simpler place forty years ago. The United States Postal Service had a monopoly on mail delivery, any questions you had could be answered by looking in an encyclopedia, and the only performance enhancing drugs athletes took were uppers. Oh, and football teams really wanted you to come to the games.

The threat of expansion of cable networks (remember when TBS and WGN were exotic?) led the Federal Communications Commission to promulgate a rule that allowed all major sports in America to prevent the broadcast or dissemination of the descriptions or accounts of a professional sports contest unless that game had been sold out 72 hours in advance. This was actually progress over prior rules, which had blocked the broadcast of local sporting events even if they had been sold out.

However, the FCC just voted 5-0 to issue a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking that says that they want to repeal the rule. The fact that this decision will have very little impact on the nature of sport fandom sort of proves just how antiquated the rule is in the first place.

Why the change of heart? The FCC Notice provides a detailed history of the blackout policy, which was a temporary law that expired in 1974 and was then perpetuated as an FCC rule in 1975. You have to remember that when baseball games were first broadcast on radio, some owners felt that if you gave away the games for free on the radio no one would go to see the games any more.  It never occurred to them that the radio broadcasts were free advertising for the games (a book titled Lords of the Realm nicely details the history of baseball owners being complete idiots; it didn't start with George Steinbrenner).  Initially even sold out football games were blacked out, which seems overkill.

But lest we dismiss these concerns too cavalierly, at one time NFL games not being 100% sold out was a more common fact of life. Yes, last year only one game was blacked out, but in 1974, before the current rule was adopted but statute enforced the policy, 59% of NFL games were blackout out on local television. However by 2011 only 16 games would be blacked out, and then only in four cities (Buffalo, Cincinnati, San Diego and Tampa).

In 1975 the FCC found that “[g]ate receipts are the primary source of revenues for some sports clubs,” a fact that is no longer true for the NFL. Testimony before the FCC established that gate receipts now account for a mere 20% of team revenues, while television revenues are three times more important at 60%. The sad fact is that in places like Tampa, they show the NFL Red Zone cable channel on their jumbotron, trying to lure fans to the stadium with the promise of televised highlights.

What is the NFL’s response to this seemingly reasonable acknowledgement of the evolution of NFL marketing? According to NFL spokesman Brian McCarthy, “The NFL is the only sports league that televises every one of its games on free, over-the-air television. The FCC;s decision will not change that commitment for the foreseeable future”  That’s great. However, as I posted a few weeks ago, less than 10% of households still watch a TV set attached to an antenna, so that’s sort of irrelevant (and makes me wonder about the Monday Night game shown on ESPN). Second, the teams in the NFL play only 16 games per season, compared to 82 for basketball and 162 for baseball (to loosely quote great Baltimore Orioles manager Earl Weaver, “This isn't football; we do this every day.”). So the number of football games telecast is still paltry compared to the number of NBA and MLB games. Third, as pointed out in the FCC Notice, football is the only sport with an exclusive contract for network coverage of its games; baseball allows teams to make individual contracts with local broadcasters (that are NOT blacked out; the Commissioner’s office testified that MLB teams broadcast 151 out of 162 games per season).

So the NFL spokesman appears not to know what he’s talking about.  No surprise there.

What the NFL is saying is that it is committed to broadcasting all its games for free, and to do that it needs a rule blacking out the game if it isn't sold out. So, in order to make all games available, some games will have to be unavailable. That logic is similar to that of the US in the Vietnamese war when we said the only way to save a village was to destroy it.

Today, the blackout rule does seem to be a relic, given the NFL emphasis on TV revenues over gate receipts, and if it goes away not many people will notice. However, given how newer stadiums are emphasizing the TV presentation by installing bigger jumbotrons, and that many fans seem to prefer the home theater experience to paying high parking fees to pay large amounts for bad tickets at a stadium with limited replay, cut ins from other games, and (God help us) fantasy updates, maybe in the future the NFL will have increased difficulties selling out games. Instead of denying fans the chance to see the game, the NFL should try and find ways to make the stadium experience better.  Like lowering prices.

TV Review: How to Get Away With Murder

The new Thursday night entry on ABC is called How to Get away With Murder.  It is about an attractive African-American woman who is a top criminal defense attorney who wears red leather outfits while teaching first year criminal law at a prestigious law school and who recruits students to work with her in high profile criminal cases.

This premise is so outrageous it makes Lost look like a Ken Burns documentary.

Where to begin?  No top criminal defense attorney teaches a regular first year class at a major law school.  They are too busy putting in billable hours to take time off to teach first year law.  A top criminal defense attorney may teach a third year seminar, but first year professoring is pretty much a full time obligation (although I did have a civil procedure professor who was on a sabbatical from practice).

Second, what she is teaching is not anything resembling “law.”  For example, one student ingratiates herself to the professor by calling optometrists, pretending to be the secretary of a prosecution witness, and learns that the witness is color-blind.  And what legal theory does that support? All of her stratagems are based on facts, not legal principles, so the kids aren't learning anything about law.

The professor has each member of the class take 60 seconds to offer their best theory for a defense to an actual murder case.  These are first year students who know nothing about law, certainly less than any actual member of the bar, yet she spends a couple of hours (it’s a large class) listening to their uninformed, half-baked ideas.  Ideas that they are given 60 seconds to present, so heaven forbid the explanation be the least bit complicated or require legal research.

The winners of the competition get a highly prestigious position at her law firm. Despite the fact they know nothing about law.  And aren't licensed to practice. And, again, know less than just about any person who actually had finished law school and passed the bar. And they work at her firm while maintaining a full law school work load (she makes it clear in the pilot she expects the students to ditch their other classes while working on her case).

The preposterousness of the premise is matched by the insipidness of the plotting.  One of the eager first year students gets a bright idea late at night and so goes to the professor’s house (which is inexplicably on the campus). He arrives at the dark house, rings the bell, and when no one answers he tries the door and finding it unlock walks in.  Who walks in to a strange house at night when no one answers the door? He walks in on the professor occupied in flagrante delicto with a hunky detective.  I guess they were too distracted to hear the doorbell or the student yelling “Professor Keating! I’m breaking into your house late at night because I have something important to say!”

For years now I’ve said the Lost episode titled “Eggtown” set the record for most boneheaded legal errors in a single TV show, but How to Get Away With Murder’s pilot may break the record; I can’t say for sure as I threw in the towel about 2/3 of the way through.  In Eggtown, a character was being tried in Federal court on California for state crimes committed in Iowa, the defense was allowed to call a witness before the prosecution (because the prosecution’s opening statement, which has zero evidentiary value, was “devastating”), the main witness for the prosecution was allowed to talk with the defendant before the trial, and the sole witness for the defense is someone who met the witness months after the crime took place and who was in love with her.  That’s a load of BS to top, but How to Get Away With Murder topped it in under 40 minutes.  Congratulations.

Heaven knows I know that any realistic show about the law would be as boring a watching paint dry. And yes, I watched Allie MacBeal faithfully as she filed lawsuits against God and sang karaoke instead of putting in billable hours.  But there is a limit to how far outside the lines you can color before you have to conclude that the show is science fiction, taking place in a parallel universe where human concepts of logic do not apply.

I like science fiction, but How to Get Away With Murder was just too far out there for me to buy into. I just hope the show doesn't inspire hordes of impressionable college students into thinking law school looks like a lot of fun.

Maybe Weird Al isn't that weird after all

I've always been fascinated by the mayfly-like lifespans of pop acts.  One hit wonders are one thing, but if you go back and look at the length even a super group has on the charts, it’s a wonder anyone produces a second hit album.  Okay, there are outliers like The Rolling Stones who will be touring three years after Keith Richards dies, but on the other hand The Beatles lasted (in America) from 1964 to 1970, six years.  ABBA lasted eight years, from 1973 to 1981. Sheryl Crow first hit the top ten in 1994 and last hit the top 20 in 2003, a nine year span.

Okay, I’m cherry picking data; let’s not talk about Elvis, Elton John, or acts that were successful for decades like Sinatra. The fact is that if a pop act can last for more than a decade, they are special. Weird Al Yankovic first hit the top 20 of the US album chart in 1983. His latest album, Mandatory Fun, became his first number 1 album ever in 2014. That’s 31 years of accordion solos and song parodies; given that his gift is impersonating other acts, that demonstrates an amazing capacity for evolving with the popular times.

Weird Al Yankovic is a singular genius, literally. In a profession where imitation is the sincerest form of creativity, no one has EVER tried to copy what Weird Al Yankovic does, at least not on a regular basis. He has a knack for taking the melody of a hit song, finding the perfect way of changing the lyrics that both work with the music and are internally consistent, and afterwards it sounds like the song should have sounded that way to begin with. The rise of YouTube has fostered some imitators, but none operate on the scale Weird Al does.

Some of his early efforts are fairly obvious; it is no great feat of imagination to change “I Love Rock and Roll” to “I Love Rocky Road,” or “Another One Bites the Dust” to “Another One Rides the Bus.” But his creativity grew as he became more successful.  Converting “Gansta’s Paradise” to “Amish Paradise” is a stroke of genius, giving him not only one of his better parodies but also arguably his best videos.

Talking about videos raises another factor of his creative growth. From 1993 to 2003 he took over directing his own music videos, demonstrating additional skill in creating funny visuals to match the humor in his lyrics. His videos also reinforced his attention to detail; the parody of “Smells Like Teen Spirit” used the same actor who played a janitor in the Nirvana video, and the video for “Bedrock Anthem” was filmed on the same desert location that the Red Hot Chili Peppers used for their video.  It seems like Yankovic puts such confines on himself in order to be more creative.

As I mentioned above, another amazing facet of Weird Al’s success is his ability for follow the changes in the music industry.  He started out doing pop songs, but eventually produced parodies of rap songs, grunge songs, and songs whose genres have probably been forgotten.

Mandatory Fun is the first Weird Al album that I’ve heard that I have no idea what the source material is.  I am so divorced from modern music that the only melody I recognize on Mandatory Fun is Pharrell’s ubiquitous “Happy,” transformed into “Tacky.” But being unfamiliar with the songs he’s parodying doesn’t make them less funny.  “Foil” starts off as an ode to an alternative to Tupperware and devolves into warning about the Illuminati. “Word Crimes” is probably the first song in history to mention the Oxford comma and establishes Yankovic’s cred as someone who may act silly but he sincerely wants his fans to know the difference between “doing well” and “doing good.” The album ends with the epic, 8 minute long “Jackson Park Express,” an original song about a love affair that takes place entirely in a guy’s imagination during a bus ride.

I have some problem with the song “First World Problems.” First of all, the phrase “first world” no longer works; it was coined back when the Soviet bloc was the “second world” and non-aligned countries were called the “third world.” With the fall of the Soviet Union the phrase no longer makes sense. Second, the problems Weird Al details (a pixel being out on his laptop, not having small enough bills for vending machines) are not problems all people in first world countries have, they are problems rich people have. It should have been called “One percenter problems.”

I also find “Mission Statement,” a song that strings together meaningless phrases used by business consultants, to be kicking too easy of a target (it is also very easy to convert the phrases into lyrics as most end with a long E sound (synergy, efficiency, functionality)). The song is not a parody of any song in particular but is a general pastiche of Crosby, Stills and Nash’s style, down to sampling Suite: Judy Blue Eyes at one point (in addition to parodies of specific songs and original songs, Weird Al sometimes writes songs that are merely in the style of an artist; for example, Dare to Be Stupid was an homage to Devo).

Weird Al’s future has been the subject of speculation. An interview with a newspaper in Allentown, PA, was largely misinterpreted his announcing his retirement when what he said was a desire to do no more CDs but more digital distribution.  Part of the success of Mandatory Fun comes from his decision to release videos of the songs on the album for free on YouTube.  Leave it to Weird Al to adapt to the digital revolution.

Belated TV Review: Continuum

I’ll say it once—spoilers ahead.

I’m getting to this very late because for some reason I missed Continuum season 3 and just caught up with the entire season via streaming.  Continuum is an outlier, a television sci-fi show that sometimes has more ideas and better ideas than most literary science fiction.  In an era where much television science fiction is under-thought and over-wrought, Continuum is just about the sole beacon of light.

To recap quickly, the show is about a cop from 2077 named Keira Cameron (Rachel Nichols) who, while attending the execution of a band of terrorists, is caught up in the wake of their time travel device and is thrown, with them, back to . . . 2012 (they were supposed to travel back in time 5 years but missed). The group, calling themselves by the catchy name of Liber8, start plans to win the future by subverting authority in 2012; Cameron manages to insinuate herself with the local (Vancouver) police department, teaming with a hunky detective who has the very Canadian name of Carlos Fonnegra (Victor Webster).

I like Webster’s performance a lot; it is great that he establishes an immediate rapport with Keira, but there is zero sexual tension as her character tells him she is married (to her future husband).  He is a rare actor who can bring the beefcake but acts like he doesn't expect a woman to drop her panties at the sight of him. I also liked the dynamic between Carlos and the police cyber expert Betty (Jennifer Spence); it is immediately clear that she adores him (and is jealous of Keira), but he ignores her not because she isn't gorgeous, but because he is too just too self-effacing and clueless to notice her signals.

The series has always reveled in unclarity about motives; flash-forwards to the year 2077 reveal that Liber8 are pretty much psychotic murderers who are never the less fighting for freedom, while Keira is a descent, moral human being who defends a fascist corporate state. She spends much of the first season mooning over her son, wanting desperately to get back to him. But, realizing that Liber8 can prevent her world from ever existing, stays to fight Liber8 even as she slowly realizes that despite the high body count, they have a point.

She is helped by a teenager named Alec Sadler (Erik Knudson), who (in the future) invented all the technical gizmos that came back with her from 2077.  The younger version of Alec is able to communicate with Keira’s cerebral implant, view through her eyes, and monitor her uniform which, among other things, can make her invisible.

If it sounds a little confusing, it’s because Continnum has never shied away from some of the more troubling literary aspects of time travel. Early on, the mother of a character is killed before he is born, and he fails to fade away like Marty McFly.  At the end of season 2, Alec travels back in time a week to rescue his girlfriend, followed by Keira; the fact that there are now two of both of them propels much of the action in season 3.

The series grew more assured and daring in season 3.  One episode was set almost entirely in 2077; new characters were introduced as sort of “time cops” whose morality and aims were hard to suss out; a regular character was suddenly killed; and while Cameron’s police superior (Brian Markinson) embraced greater corporate control of the police department, her partner Carlos became increasingly uncomfortable with corporations treating the police as their personal security team.

One of the more frightening aspects of Continuum is how easy it is to project the current state of corporations into a dystopian future where there are no civil liberties and all decisions are made by a “corporate congress.” With US Supreme Court decisions giving corporations the right to spend unlimited amounts of money in the political process and impose the corporation’s “religious beliefs” on their employees, such a corporate controlled future seems a lot closer than 2077.

Towards the end of season 3, all of the characters begin to realize that there is no way to win “the” future because there is no “one” future, but a plethora of futures. Keira accepts that she can never return to her son, who no longer exists in the time line created by her time travel, just as Liber8 members realize that they may free one time line, but that means leaving their time line enslaved. This causes some major shifting of loyalties that none the less feels organic.

Season 3 ended with a doozy of a cliffhanger; here’s hoping that the producers of Continuum get a season 4 to prove that they weren’t just making it up as they went along.