Unapologetically Adult

Probably the hardest thing to accomplish when depicting a famous superhero before they became one is sacrificing the tropes we've come to identify with them. Mark Clamen in Critics at Large suggests that Gotham more than compensates with a compelling backstory.

Dark City: FOX's Gotham

Donal Logue and Benjamin McKenzie star in Gotham, on FOX

"…with a very few examples of cruelty he will be more compassionate than those who, out of excessive mercy, permit disorders to continue, from which arise murders and plundering; for these usually harm the community at large, while the executions that come from the prince harm particular individuals." Machiavelli, The Prince 

"You can't have organized crime without law and order." Don Falcone, Gotham 

I was surprised how much I enjoyed the premiere episode of Gotham. I had pre-set expectations for FOX's much publicized Batman-without-Batman prequel series, and they were mainly skeptical. Ten years of Smallville(especially the more tortured plot and character elements of its final season) loomed large in my mind as September approached. As fun as the notion of a story set in Gotham years before the arrival of its caped and cowled crusader might be in theory, Gotham seemed a project destined to be over-burdened by a famously established future continuity and a wealth of film and television adaptations of the Batman universe. Developed for television by Bruno Heller (The Mentalist, HBO's Rome), the show promises to tell the largely unwritten story of a young James Gordon, destined of course to become Police Commissioner Gordon and Batman's best official defender, but who for now is still a rookie detective finding his way in a thoroughly corrupt police department. However, if the pilot is any indication of its ambitions, Gordon (Benjamin McKenzie, Southland) is merely the face of the show's real main character, the city of Gotham itself.

Robin Lord Taylor and Benjamin McKenzie in Gotham

Gotham comes to the small screen with all the advantages and disadvantages of stepping in to a well-established, deeply beloved and (to some) exhausted franchise. It has a built-in audience of viewers but an equally large audience of waiting naysayers whose expectations can never be satisfied. But it also has advantages over other "young" series (e.g. "young Merlin", "young Superman" or even now, amazingly, "young Mary, Queen of Scots"), which come with a primarily teenage cast and inevitable teen storylines. Gotham is in contrast an unapologetically adult show – even if its youngest characters, young Bruce Wayne (David Mazouz, Touch), and Selina "Cat" Kyle (Camren Bicondova) with her preternatural agility, pixie haircut and unexplained goggles, are already shaping up to be the show's most intriguing. Batman and Batman stories come in all flavours and styles – from the colourfully camp to the morbidly existential – but its universe is no stranger to moral ambiguity, something that this show thoroughly embraces.

Poirot R.I.P.

As Agatha Christie's iconic detective Hercule Poirot came to a conclusion on television, Shlomo Schwartzberg revisited the series in Critics at Large with fond nostalgia.

The Virtues of Old Fashioned Pleasures: TV’s Poirot

Note: the following contains a spoiler

I’ve been checking out some recent mysteries on TV and more and more, I can’t help wondering why so many of them really fail to gel as good drama or become convincing stories. Alan Cubitt’s The Fall, yet another serial killer series – can that trope be dispensed with once and for all? – offered up an interesting depiction of fraught police work in Belfast, Ireland, and a fine performance by Gillian Anderson (The X-Files) as an independent but socially oblivious police inspector who doesn’t care whose feathers she ruffles as she conducts her investigations. Yet it became progressively less compelling over its five-part run (it’s been renewed for a second go round) namely because its conceived serial killer became less and less believable. Despite a neat plot development in episode five, the series, which didn’t but should have wrapped up this particular storyline, was distinctly unsatisfying. Top of the Lake, co-created by Jane Campion (The Piano) and Gerard Lee is a wonky drama about a 12-year-old pregnant girl who goes missing in rural New Zealand. That’s certainly a provocative premise but the seven-part drama – which I’m about halfway through – is hobbled by Campion’s usual tin ear for how people actually speak and a pallid lead performance by Elisabeth Moss as a cop who gets involved in the case. American Moss (Peggy from Mad Men), is a good actress but her part is poorly written and in Top of the Lake she seems to be trying so hard to get her New Zealand patois right – it sounds okay – that she mostly forgets to act. (The less said about Holly Hunter's monosyllabic and lazy performance as the leader of a feminist commune the better.) If not for a fascinating turn by Peter Mullan (Trainspotting, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows) as the missing’s girl’s rough hewn, criminally minded father, I don’t think I’d be sticking with it at all. Cubitt and Campion ought to take a gander at the long running TV incarnation of Agatha Christie’s famous Belgian detective Hercule Poirot to see how snappy mysteries should be done. Poirot may not be as edgy or topical as their two shows but it’s superior television nonetheless.

Pop Obsessions

In the early years of television a program's fan base could never fully influence a network's decision to keep it on the air. But now in the age of social media, a fan can let his pop obsessions be felt by its creator Veronica Mars is a perfect example as it is now a film thanks to those fans of the television show. Why the obsession with it? Mark Clamen goes into detail last year in Critics at Large before the film was released.

Veronica Mars and the Promise of Life after TV

Kristen Bell, the once and future star of Veronica Mars

One topic that television fans never tire of – and I count myself among them – are favourite shows cancelled too soon. My own list is long, and grows with every passing year. A couple of years ago I wrote about five such shows, and I could add many more: Terriers, Awake, Party Down, Better off Ted, How to Make it in America, or the criminally underappreciated Knights of Prosperity. The reason why it’s fun to talk up the shows that never make it out of their second seasons (or even sometimes their first) is that they were cancelled at the top of their game. They had no time to stumble or even hint at their weak spots. Two standard-bearers of the brilliant-but-cancelled genre – Judd Apatow’s Freaks and Geeks and Joss Whedon’s Firefly – were barely given the chance get their bearings before their respective networks pulled their plugs.

Zeitgeist Redux

Mad Men has just begun its seventh and final season. Many are split on whether or not the show has successfully caught the temper of the era of the Sixties. Even so, the late David Churchill (who passed away just before Season Six got under way) got to the divided heart of the matter in this review of Season Five in Critics at Large.

When Passion Overwhelms Skill: Season Five of Mad Men

Caution. Many, many spoilers are included.

I had a friend in university who wanted to be a writer. His eventual degree was in English (I don't remember which area he concentrated on). He did all the right things to become a writer. He wrote stories and plays; he was a consistent member of a writer's group. It was his passion. There was only one problem: The things he was really good at, his greatest skills, had nothing to do with writing. Economics and Math were his strengths, ironically, the areas he had no passion for. (He took a course on each subject in his first year and received very good marks – he never took another class in those fields.) Now the thing he had nothing but passion for? He was okay at it; but if I'm being honest, he was missing three key ingredients to be a great, or even good writer: sweat, skill and imagination.

Strange Hybrid

There's probably nothing worse in a dramatic series when it loses its nerve and jettisons its strongest ideas, as David Churchill discovered watching the BBC mini-series Exile.

When Mash-Ups Won't Mash: BBC's Exile

Jim Broadbent & John Simm in Exile

Exile is a strange hybrid. On one hand, it is a heart-felt family drama about the troubling nature of illness in the aged. On the other, it is a thriller whose main character tries to unravel crimes from the past in Ramsbottom, a town outside of Manchester, England. The biggest problem this BBC miniseries from 2011 (released on DVD last month by BFS Entertainment) faces is that it never finds the necessary connective tissue between the two genres they have mashed together. It is almost as if they don't have the faith that a story about a disgraced man, Tom Ronstadt (John Simm – the British Life on Mars), forced to come back to his childhood home and face up to the fact his once vibrant, talented newspaper-man father, Sam Ronstadt (Jim Broadbent – Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince), is in an Alzheimer's Disease death spiral, would be enough to hold an audience.

Beyond Cable

More and more people are abandoning cable, or at least, turning online to stream and download television shows. One popular site to take advantage of this is Netflix, which launched House of Cards and Orange is the New Black. Mark Clamen examines the latter in Critics at Large.  

Orange is the New Black: Not Your Father’s Prison Series

Vicky Jeudy, Taylor Schilling (centre) and Dascha Polanco on Netflix's Orange is the New Black

July has been a good month for Netflix. On July 18th, the online streaming service made television history when it received its first ever Emmy nominations, nine for the Kevin Spacey dark political drama House of Cards (including Most Outstanding Drama) and three for its much anticipated reboot of Arrested Development. Much e-Ink has been spilled in recent months on the minor televisual revolution that Netflix has sparked with its recent spate of original programming, but both nominated shows launched with a built-in audience, boasting the Hollywood heft of Spacey and Arrested Development’s longstanding cult following respectively. But with the premiere of Jenji Kohan’s new prison comedy-drama Orange is the New Black, Netflix enters a new era, with a series that seems to have earned its critical (and popular) acclaim entirely on its own terms. Two weeks before its premiere on July 11th, Netflix renewed the series for a second season. With only a few familiar faces, strong writing, and an innovative narrative, Orange is the New Black is simply great television however it comes to our screens.

The Glass Teat Reborn

As network and cable television has grown better in the last couple of decades, writing about it has become more substantial, too, as Mark Clamen wrote about in Critics at Large when he reviewed Alan Sepinwall's book about that change.

The Revolution Was Televised: Alan Sepinwall Takes On TV’s New Golden Age

It has become almost cliché in some circles to proclaim that television – American television in particular – has never been better. Quality television is no longer, as it was for decades, confined to BBC adaptations of Jane Austen or Masterpiece Theatre on PBS. In the past fifteen years, television has grown into a genuinely popular art form, finally embracing all of its strengths as a medium: the ability to tell long, complicated stories rich in complex characters, compelling writing, and morally and narratively risky storylines. With new technological innovations (DVDs, Netflix, DirecTV) and the rise of the new business models that came with satellite TV and the ever-expanding cable universe, television is no longer a disposable medium. Shows are produced not only to be watched, but to be re-watched. We used to rent the shows we watched, but now we can literally own them. Television series like The Sopranos, Deadwood, The Wire, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Breaking Bad actually reward our attention, instead of discouraging it. The more you watch these shows, the richer they become. The impact of these shows successes – both artistically and commercially – is being felt across the whole television universe, and that story is far from over. That television has decidedly entered a new Golden Age is apparent to all of us who love the medium – what is less talked about is that TV criticism has grown up just as much in that same period. This new age of television has been paralleled by the rise of new and exciting forms of writing about television – and Alan Sepinwall is among the best of the new breed. 

Corruption

When the late David Churchill encountered BBC's Copper, a period crime drama that premiered in 2012, he wanted its 19th Century grit to be believable. According to this review in Critics at Large, they got it right.

Playing It Real: Showcase and BBC America's Copper

Tom Weston-Jones in Copper

Whenever a television show set in a time period that is not present day comes on the air I'm always curious to see if the characters will be true to the era; or will they be so infected with 21st century sensibilities that, no matter how many period details they get right, the characters just don't ring true. That was in my mind when the first episode of the new series Copper on Showcase (in Canada) and BBC America (in the U.S.) hit the airwaves four weeks ago. So I could not have been more pleased when the pilot episode started with our ostensible hero, Irish-American Detective Kevin Corcoran (Tom Weston-Jones) and his crew, stopping a bank robbery. This is what they did: They waited for the bank robbers to emerge from the bank with their ill-gotten gain (they had received a tip beforehand) and then they followed them. When the robbers entered a secluded alleyway, Corky (as he's called) and his men bushwhacked them. They basically killed the men in cold blood and, before the chief detective can arrive, they pocketed half the money.

Justified

If there is a writer who can shape the contours of a character precisely through dialogue, it's Elmore Leonard. John Corcelli wrote about Leonard's particular gifts last year in Critics at Large.

Straight Talk: Elmore Leonard's Raylan

One of author Elmore Leonard's great gifts, as previously demonstrated in Maximum Bob and Get Shorty, is his unique ability to shape his characters specifically through their dialogue. In Raylan (HarperCollins, 2012), Leonard’s 30th novel, the story of a sharp-shooting U.S. Marshall, the author continues his talk-driven style in fine fashion. Raylan Givens, is the lead character in the FX series, Justified, that just ended its third season. (The series is based on the characters in Leonard’s short story, "Fire In The Hole," published in 2001. The first episode of the series is an adaptation of that story.) Justified stars Timothy Olyphant as Raylan Givens, whose claim to fame was as the sheriff Seth Bullock in Deadwood, the superb, but short-lived HBO series. (Interesting how he went from a law enforcer in one era to a U.S. Marshall in the modern era)

The character of Raylan Givens often reads like the John Wayne of old: a man with grit and a moral code. For Leonard, whose characters are often flawed, that cliché isn’t celebrated. Givens is good, but he drinks too much, often gets into fights that he loses, and is often a little too flexible with the law. He wears a cowboy hat at all times, even though it’s not part of the uniform, and fancies himself a ladies' man. But most of all, he considers his actions in the light of criminal activity as “justified.” And the way Leonard shapes his stories the reader can’t help but agree. It’s Given’s strong moral code that engages you. Givens is a Marshall, after all, whose job is to collect felons on the lam and bring them to jail. It’s a job he does well even if he bends the rules from time-to-time.

Family Units

The depiction of family life on television has changed dramatically from the models of the technology's early years in the Fifties. Shlomo Schwartzberg examined that change in a piece on Modern Family for Critics at Large.

The (Funny) Way We Live Now: Modern Family

The cast of Modern Family

Note: The following contains Spoilers

Modern Family (ABC), like The Big Bang Theory (CBS), is an excellent comedy that offers up likeable, compelling characters while not forgetting to make the viewer laugh. But while The Big Bang Theory is an old-fashioned – in style – comedy, with a laugh track, videotaped before a live audience with a two camera system, Modern Family is a more modern creature, a filmed on location, single-camera show without a laugh track. But just as The Big Bang Theory also uses hip lingo and au courant situations,Modern Family displays a taste for old-school humour, pratfalls, slapstick and the like. Melding those two disparate elements make it a very unique series indeed. The best two comedies on television both can claim that stature, allowing each to make their distinctive mark.

Wining

Since David Churchill knows as much about wine as he does about arts criticism, there was no one better to set loose on Oz & James in Critics at Large. 

Bloody Nora That's Good: Oz & James Big Wine Adventure: California

James May & Oz Clarke

Growing up lower middle class in small town Ontario, I never had any exposure to fine wines, or for that matter, wine at all (except for the occasional bottle of Mateus or Baby Duck my parents would buy). Beer and whisky were the preferred beverages around my home for the adults in my life. How it came about that I now make my living writing and talking about wine would have made my 14- or 15-year-old self laugh his arse off. But that's what I do. In 1990, I was working in a wine and spirits retail store. The manager, for some reason, asked if I wanted to set up a fine wine corner in the store. I knew nothing about the beverage, so why he asked me I have no idea. But, since I was bored doing little more than stocking shelves with Bacardi Rum and working cash, I said sure.

Deduction

The interest in Sherlock Holmes has never really waned over the years (including the 2012 novel, The House of Silk) which lead Shlomo Schwartzberg to suggest some significant reasons as to why in Critics at Large.

Sherlock Holmes Redux: The Great Detective Lives On

Sherlock, the recent brilliant BBC-TV series re-imagining and updating of the Sherlock Holmes stories to the present day are, of course, not the only times The Great Detective has been re-worked for television, films and books. And as a long-time aficionado of the Holmes canon – and someone who had the privilege in 1987 of writing a tribute piece in The Toronto Star to Arthur Conan Doyle’s immortal hero on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of Holmes’ first appearance in print – I must confess I’ve more often than not been happy with how the adaptations of Holmes’ adventures have turned out in print and on screen. These include the distinguished Basil Rathbone-Nigel Bruce movies (14 movies made between 1939-46); Billy Wilder’s cynical, but entertaining The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970); and Murder by Decree (1979), which cast Christopher Plummer as Holmes and James Mason as Dr. Watson, investigating the murders committed by Jack the Ripper. Two other productions feature men who think they’re Sherlock Holmes: the allegorical and moving 1971 movie They Might Be Giants, with George C. Scott, and The Return of the World’s Greatest Detective, a surprisingly decent 1976 TV movie with Larry Hagman. Interestingly, both of those featured a female Watson, thus anticipating this fall’s CBS series Elementary, with Jonny Lee Miller (Trainspotting) as Holmes, and Lucy Liu (Charlie’s Angels) as Watson. The post Conan Doyle novels have also often been good, with Nicholas Meyer’s excellent Holmes’ pastiches, The Seven-Per-Cent Solution (1974) and The West End Horror (1976) at the top of the heap. (Meyer's third Holmes pastiche, The Canary Trainer: From the Memoirs of John H. Watson (1993), though worthwhile, isn't as inspired.) In fact, I can only think of a few duds (though I have studiously avoided most of the Holmes in America novels as that seems to me an attempt to pander to an audience that should be content with the London- or European-set adventures of the man). I’m not enamored of a couple of films, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes’ Smarter Brother (1975) and Young Sherlock Holmes (1985), nor of Caleb Carr’s 2005 novel, The Italian Secretary. (Carr, who wrote The Alienist, has always been better at the idea than the execution, which is a polite way of saying he’s not a very good writer.) Mostly, though, the results in bringing back Holmes and Watson have been pleasing to watch or read. The latest Holmes novel, Anthony Horowitz’s The House of Silk, as well as the recent DVD release of a criminally underrated Holmes movie, the 1976 film adaptation of The Seven-Per-Cent Solution, bear that out.

The House of Silk (Little, Brown & Co. – 2012) is the first new Holmes novel to have been authorized by the estate of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (they only approved of The Italian Secretary), which means the detective himself won’t undergo too drastic a change in the novel. He can’t thus be cast as physically frail or beginning to lose his faculties as he was in the powerful Michael Chabon Holocaust-themed novella The Final Solution (2004), an unfortunately named story as it’s also what the Nazis called The Final Solution to the Jewish Problem, their euphemism for the proposed genocide of the Jews (I don’t know if Chabon or his publisher came up with that distasteful title). Nor can one expect the fantastical elements of Neil Gaiman’s inspired, award-winning short story, A Study in Emerald (2003), which successfully and chillingly melded the world of Sherlock Holmes with that of horror master H.P. Lovecraft. (It was the only story that stood out in the themed Holmes/Lovecraft anthology Shadows over Baker Street.) And in fact, despite the easy breeziness of Horowitz’s book, and its convincing recreation of Victorian England, I was wondering what would allow The House of Silk to distinguish itself from the many Holmes novels that preceded it.

Rescued

While 9/11 became part of the texture of many television dramas, it was Rescue Me that dealt with the tragedy in the most direct way. Shlomo Schwartzberg wrote about the show and its legacy in Critics at Large a year before it wrapped up.

Rescue Me: Flawed But Arresting

The following blog contains spoilers.

Is Rescue Me the best flawed show on television? I’d argue it is, but ever since its debut in the summer of 2004, the FX series (from the same cable network that brought you The Shield, Nip/Tuck and Damages) has divided audiences, who either like its incisive drama and outrageous humour or decry its juvenile tendencies and perpetually adolescent characters. Actually, they’re both right as this maddeningly uneven TV series can be as frustrating as it is engrossing.

Centering on the actions of the firefighters of Ladder Company 62 (aka 62 Truck), a Harlem-based firehouse, post 9/11, Rescue Me is an ambitious show that tries, and often succeeds, in capturing a specific moment in time: that of the slowly recovering shell-shocked New York City and the attendant worries, fears and attitudes held by those brave heroes who paid such a high price during the September 11 terrorist attacks. (An estimated and unprecedented 343 firefighters lost their lives in the collapse of the Twin Towers.) But this is no reverent show, extolling people only at their heroic best. The firemen, led by Tommy Gavin (Denis Leary) are a profane, womanizing and, in the case of Gavin, an alcoholic lot, as apt to cheat on their partners as they are to risk their lives by running into a burning building.

State of the Tube

As television programming has improved dramatically over the years, TV critics have emerged like Alan Sepinwall, whose chops are as sharp as the shows they write about. Mark Clamen, in Critics at Large, recently review a promising collection of his work.  

The Revolution Was Televised: Alan Sepinwall Takes On TV’s New Golden Age

It has become almost cliché in some circles to proclaim that television – American television in particular – has never been better. Quality television is no longer, as it was for decades, confined to BBC adaptations of Jane Austen or Masterpiece Theatre on PBS. In the past fifteen years, television has grown into a genuinely popular art form, finally embracing all of its strengths as a medium: the ability to tell long, complicated stories rich in complex characters, compelling writing, and morally and narratively risky storylines. With new technological innovations (DVDs, Netflix, DirecTV) and the rise of the new business models that came with satellite TV and the ever-expanding cable universe, television is no longer a disposable medium. Shows are produced not only to be watched, but to be re-watched. We used to rent the shows we watched, but now we can literally own them. Television series like The Sopranos, Deadwood, The Wire, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Breaking Bad actually reward our attention, instead of discouraging it. The more you watch these shows, the richer they become. The impact of these shows successes – both artistically and commercially – is being felt across the whole television universe, and that story is far from over. That television has decidedly entered a new Golden Age is apparent to all of us who love the medium – what is less talked about is that TV criticism has grown up just as much in that same period. This new age of television has been paralleled by the rise of new and exciting forms of writing about television – and Alan Sepinwall is among the best of the new breed. 

Promise Lost

It can be fully acknowledged that television (especially on cable) will tackle subject matter that even movies seldom touch. But that doesn't mean they always do it well, as Mark Clamen pointed out in Critics at Large when he encountered the first season of Showtime's The Big C.

The Big C Gets a C+

It is no longer necessary to make the point that television is currently a lot better than film. TV series are drawing not only A-list actors (Glenn Close and William Hurt on Damages, Sally Field in Brothers and Sisters, Holly Hunter on Saving Grace, to list just a few), but also A-list directors (Agnieszka Holland has directed episodes of The Wire and Treme, and most recently, Martin Scorsese directed the pilot of the much-anticipated Boardwalk Empire, which premiered last night). Television has come a long way, and TV viewers are richer for it.

To a large degree, the increasing richness of television can be traced to its overall honesty – television’s willingness to show us things which are uncomfortable or ugly, and its ability to illuminate the details which make the lives of our favourite characters so intriguing. But there are shows with all the right ambition, shows which, despite their potential and intriguing subject matter, fail to live up to their own promise. The Big C is one of these shows.

Typecasting

Their are actors who never can escape the roles and images they create on the screen. Two of those, who Susan Green discussed in this piece from Critics at Large, couldn't be more inconically different.

Random Viewing II: Beauty and the Brute

As an adolescent, I was glued to CBS every Friday night for The Twilight Zone. After weaning myself from the addiction to attend college and then live without a television in young adulthood, it’s been possible to catch up with missed episodes whenever the US network SyFy holds a marathon – which the cable channel did during the recent holidays. Although thinking that by now I’ve seen the entire Rod Serling oeuvre, I tuned in and found one of the best stories the show ever produced: “Two,” which first aired in mid-September 1961, addresses the issue of mutually assured destruction. Such topics apparently were popular with the peacenik intellectuals who penned and directed these scripts during a Cold War era marked by nuclear weapons proliferation.

TV News 101

Aaron Sorkin has been on something of a roll since The West Wing and The Social Network. But on the HBO series, The Newsroom, Mark Clamen in Critics at Large finds the roll has come to a slight halt.

The Newsroom: Aaron Sorkin Speaks Truth to Stupid

Jeff Daniels, Dev Patel, Sam Waterston and Emily Mortimer in The Newsroom, on HBO

Contains minor spoilers for the first episode of The Newsroom.

Tonight the third episode of The Newsroom, Aaron Sorkin’s new workplace drama, airs on HBO, and it pains me to admit that I’m not really looking forward to it. When the series – which is set in the anguished world of TV news production, and boasts an impressive ensemble cast including Jeff Daniels, Emily Mortimer, and Sam Waterston – premiered two weeks ago, I tuned in with cautious optimism.

On the plus side, the pilot episode marked Sorkin’s return to series television after five long years, since the final episode of Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip aired on NBC in 2007. On the negative side, well, Studio 60: a series which, like The Newsroom, came with a great cast (in that case Matthew Perry and Bradley Whitford), a promising premise, and great expectations. Sure, the show had intelligent characters, and the mile-a-minute dialogue that Sorkin so brilliantly employed in his two previous critically-acclaimed shows Sports Night and The West Wing, but Studio 60 quickly became bogged down by Sorkin’s own ambitions. By mid-season, the show’s big ideas about America’s so-called “culture wars” began to dwarf the characters and story, and more often than not its speeches felt like Aaron Sorkin debating Aaron Sorkin: staged political dialogues, voiced by Hollywood actors. It was smart, funny, and looked and sounded great, but it grew progressively more tiresome, until I began to look forward to its inevitable cancellation.

Gone But Not Forgotten

Friendships are built on the love we share of movies, music, books and television. One such program, for Mark Clamen in Critics at Large, was Terriers.

FX’s Terriers: Catch a Ride with a Trickster and a Travelin’ Man

Terriers (on FX)

For the most part, the FX Network was good to me in 2010. By mid-summer, they had already premiered three of my favourite new series of the year: in comedy, the hilarious and deeply original Louis C.K. vehicle, Louie; in animation, the surprisingly funny, edgy, and intelligent spy spoof, Archer; and in drama, the hard-boiled contemporary Western, Justified, based on the work of Elmore Leonard and starring Timothy Olyphant. (All three shows have been renewed and will bring us second seasons in 2011.) But the folks at FX weren’t done yet: on September 8th, they premiered Terriers. Created by screenwriter Ted Griffin (Ocean's Eleven) and The Shield creator Shawn Ryan, Terriers stars Donal Logue (Life, Grounded for Life) as Hank Dolworth, an ex-cop and recovering alcoholic, who teams up with Britt Pollack, his best friend and mostly reformed thief (played by Michael Raymond-James, True Blood), to open an unlicensed private investigation firm. Based on the early promos for the series, I had initially positioned the series in relation to The Good Guys, the good-natured buddy-cop show created by Matt Nix (Burn Notice), which premiered on FOX over the summer (and was cancelled last month). But halfway through the opening credits of Terriers (and the original theme song written by the show’s composer Rob Duncan), I knew I was going to be delightfully mistaken. With substantial characters and two charismatic stars, some powerful writing and subtle serial nature, Terriers would soon rise to the level of FX’s spring season hit, Justified. While often hilarious, the show was also carefully plotted, and offered a perfect mix of compelling characters, dark humour, and genuine intrigue. Unfortunately, by early December, FX announced that due to low ratings it was not going to renew Terriers. But whatever its future, Terriers will remain one of the few bright spots in what was an often disappointing new fall TV season.

Donal Logue (front) and Michael Raymond-James

Set in a beachfront neighbourhood of San Diego, and shot on location all over San Diego County, Terriers harkens back to the best of old and new noir storytelling. With its DIY private detectives and a cosy California town rife with corruption, conspiracy, and complicated land deals, it has a Veronica Mars—circa Season Two—feel. (I would like to say it’s darker than Veronica Mars, but to be honest, I’m not sure that’s even possible:Veronica Mars put the noir back in neo-noir.) But unlike most of the hard-boiled genre—be it on film or television—the central figure of this story isn't an isolated moral outlier but a pair of detectives, whose deep friendship is often the only point of stability in their ever-shifting universe. Even if, as detectives, Hank and Britt find themselves perennially getting in way over their heads, as friends their world is really never in question. Logue and Raymond-James were real-life friends long before Terriers was ever conceived, and this comes through in their comfortable dialogue and brilliant timing. Most of the show’s best moments happen between Hank and Britt as they sit in their rundown truck (which is the closest thing their struggling detective business has to an office): best friends who simply enjoy one another’s company.

Karina and Donal Logue as Steph and Hank Dolworth

In the end, Terriers is a show that is built on relationships: not only Hank and Britt, but Hank and his ex-wife Gretchen (Kimberly Quinn), Britt and his girlfriend, Katie (Laura Allen), Hank and his former partner, Gustafson (Rockmond Dunbar). Over the course of its 13 episodes, each of these relationships deepens and develops before our very eyes. Watch especially for the introduction of Hank’s brilliant and schizophrenic sister for a few episodes mid-season. With the character of Steph Dolworth—played by Karina Logue, Donal Logue’s real life sister—Terriers finally matures into the series it was meant to be. Their sibling chemistry shines in every scene they share, and Steph’s presence brings out the rich humanity and dark humour of the Terriers universe.

Doomsday

Doomsday stories were big subjects in movie theatres especially during the early Cold War years in the Fifties. They've made a comeback on television - big time - according to Susan Green in Critics at Large.  

It Can Happen Here: The Cosmology of Falling Skies

The end of the world apparently can’t come soon enough for Hollywood. While doomsday movies have been a staple for decades, the recent plethora of apocalypse fare hints at some sort of self-loathing in an industry known for boundless self-admiration. Or is it merely tapping into the collective consciousness of a populace that’s “facing a dying nation,” to borrow a poignant lyric from Hair’s “Let the Sunshine In”? Make that “facing a dying planet” and you have the current state of despair among those alarmed about the deteriorating environment and the ever-present peril of nuclear annihilation.

Now halfway through its ten-episode summer debut on TNT and already renewed for another season, Falling Skies substitutes an alien invasion for endangered polar bears and Pakistan’s arsenal. The somewhat derivative series begins six months after 90 percent of humanity has perished in the initial conflagration. Ragtag survivors in and around Boston band together to fight the “Skitters,” enormous spider-like sentient beings, and their even more gigantic metallic robots, dubbed “Mechs.” The chief writer and creator, Robert Rodat (Saving Private Ryan – 1998, and The Patriot – 2000) is a Harvard grad who reportedly still lives in Cambridge. Although ostensibly set in the Bay State, the series is shot in Toronto – the hometown of Graham Yost, who shares executive producer chores with Steven Spielberg. 

Geekland

It's always important to acknowledge the importance of fannish behaviour as a means to cultivate a true love of the arts. (If it ain't fun, why would you care?) Mark Clamen, in Critics at Large, examines one show that delves into the necessity of fannish love.

Comic Book Men: AMC’s Kinder, Gentler Reality Show

Kevin Smith (centre) and the rest of the Comic Book Men

AMC has come a long way since the premiere of Mad Men in 2007. Firmly establishing itself as a destination for original programming, the channel has had its ups (Breaking Bad) and downs (Hell on Wheels). But last Sunday, it stepped decisively into television’s 21st century with Comic Book Men, its first unscripted series. Yes, AMC now has a reality show.

For all the television that I regularly watch, I have to admit that reality shows rarely make the cut. I’ll watch (and enjoy) the odd episode of Amazing Race, but most of the unscripted shows currently on the air are often just too plain loud for me. The shows are too often populated by poorly drawn, unrealistic characters whose problems are usually the result of their own narcissistic reality distortions – quite simply not people I want to welcome into my home, at least not voluntarily. Nevertheless, the best of those shows can often be genuinely entertaining, and, like good film documentaries, can provide insight into people, worlds, and situations beyond the average viewer’s everyday experience. With Comic Book Men, AMC opens the door to the slightly mysterious kingdom of the comic book store. And now that it’s here, it feel almost like an inevitably. The world of comic book and sci-fi nerds is much more fashionable now than it ever has been. After all, the boys of The Big Bang Theory have been making comedic fodder of it for five successful seasons.