The Unmaking of “Modern Family”?

We’ve been enjoying “Modern Family” this year.  It’s not a perfect show, but it has a good amount of laughs that leave you happily vaguely uncomfortable (you know, in that good way that happens when you laugh and feel kind of wrong doing so but can’t help), a rather odd sensation for a network comedy program.  We’ve had plenty of this on cable shows – hello Larry David! – but nothing like it since the end of “Arrested Development.”

[Quick Sidebar: Don't get me wrong.  I have lots of uncomfortable moments watching network sitcoms.  But the discomfort is in the witnessing of god-awful writing and acting.  Sitting here right now I can't think of 2 good network sitcoms, and I'm not sure that really there is even one good one.]

Now then, “Arrested Development” is probably the show that “Modern Family” is most compared to.  There seem to be two reasons for this – the focus on a single extended family, and the commitment to the comedy of outrageousness.  But “Modern Family” is not as good as “Arrested Development,” which set the bar exceedingly high for just how far out on the plank it would send its characters.  It had no shame – or better, its characters had no shame.  ”Modern Family,” on the other hand, always returns to resolution by the end of the episode.  (By this, I mean, that by the end of each episode, we’ve resolve the problem of the episode.)  There’s nothing inherently wrong with this, as almost all network sitcoms do.  It just doesn’t make for great tv.  Enjoyable?  Sure.  Transformative or even riveting?  No, not really.

What does the show do well?  Although it’s stretched as thin as it can be in terms of representing different types of families – traditional one with three kids, gay couple with adopted Asian child, patriarch with a second and younger Latina wife and her child – it doesn’t get trapped in this stretching too far.  I like how, for the most part, it treats these different iterations of “family” quite naturally and doesn’t draw undue attention to its attempt at diversity.  There’s comedy with each one and playing with expectations for each of these families is pretty central to what the show does.

Ed O’Neill is excellent in the role of Jay, the family patriarch.  I’m tempted to go so far as to say that he is rather droll, and Sofia Vergara is quite good as the surprisingly sweet and thoughtful second – and much younger – wife, Gloria.  As Vergara plays her, Gloria goes beyond any stereotypes of the Latina bombshell, even while physically embodying one.  Gloria’s son, Manny, is hilarious and J.’s favorite on the show.  He gets big laughs for looking for love at a fairly early stage – apparently he’s an old soul.

Eric Stonestreet, playing Cameron, one half of the gay couple, comes close to playing things over the top but is incredibly likable, sympathetic, and engaging.  My favorite moment in the entire show was learning that he once played college football as an offensive lineman at a Big Ten university.  A brilliant use of backstory!  Finally, I would want to mention someone who is something of a bit player – Reid Ewing does an amazing job of playing Dylan, the good-looking, music-playing but doofy boyfriend of Haley.  The song he wrote for Haley was an immediate classic.  (I’d post it here but there seem to be some restrictions with it.  There’s a YouTube video that ABC made that serves as a “faux” video for the song, but it’s nothing like the shock of when Dylan played it for the first time on the show.)

My problem with the show is ultimately something inherent in the structure of the program.  For some reason, the creators of the show decided to impose a frame on the show that implies that some sort of documentary is being made about the family.  At various moments in the show, individual characters are shown sitting or standing and directly speaking into the camera as if they were speaking in response to something an interviewer has asked them, or as if they were clarifying the motives for their actions in the previous scene – as in “Big Brother” or other reality television series.

While “Arrested Development” used Ron Howard’s narration as a framing device, a tool likewise used in “The Wonder Years” and “How I Met Your Mother,” the direct-camera address is something different.  Many shows have done this over the years, most notably “Malcolm in the Middle,” another family-centered comedy, which serves as something of a related ancestor of “Modern Family.”  But what this format really invokes, in this case, is an actual documentary about a family – the famous, and perhaps infamous, “An American Family.”  This seminal 1970s PBS documentary distilled over 300 hours of footage into a twelve-episode program that provided an uncomfortably close portrait of a family as it collapsed and broke apart.  It ended with the couple separating and the wife filing for divorce.

With the title of “Modern Family” evoking this classic documentary of a family unravelling, along with the primary aesthetic choice of the breaking of the fourth wall, the show seems to want to put itself in alignment with a particular genre of family dysfunction and play it for laughs.  It’s not the first time that comedy shows have done this and it won’t be the last, but I think the decision to break the fourth wall – a technique I often enjoy – is not only distracting but aesthetically inappropriate and ill-conceived in this instance.

The problem with the way that the actors address the camera, albeit within the personae of their characters, is that this direct address removes us from the actual narrative of the show and takes us out of the action.  Ironically, although they are commenting on events on the show or on the theme of the show, ie., “Can people change?”, the technique doesn’t move us deeper into the narrative but instead helps us recognize how the show is constructed, scripted, framed to fit a theme and a particular storyline.  It helps us see the architecture of the writing, though not in a way that furthers the story itself.  Because the actors are speaking as their characters, and not as themselves, there is a “pretending,” a fiction, that what the audience is witness is something close to reality – like a documentary.  But the audience is well aware that “Modern Family” is a sitcom on ABC at Wednesdays at 9:00 pm.  It is not a documentary and we know that it isn’t.  Why are the producers trying to frame the show with this device that is usually meant to evoke “reality” or cinema verite?

The value of “Modern Family,” what makes it a good show, is the deep level of discomfort it creates in its viewers.  We laugh even while we cringe; we laugh because although we know we’d make better decisions than these characters do, it’s fascinating to see what might play out if you had to follow that small white lie to your wife with an elaborate hoax that ultimately was always doomed to fail.  Like watching an accident, it’s hard to turn away.  But the characters’ outlandishness and ridiculousness is undercut by the technique of direct address and the fiction of “reality” in the overall frame of the show.  It lessens the impact of what is at the heart of the comedy.  We don’t laugh because we feel that these characters are like us – God help us if they were!  But that’s the ultimate implication of the direct address, the pretending that these are regular people giving us a look at the inner workings of their lives.

In order for this show to ultimately succeed, it must abandon this technique, as it undermines the very thing the show does well.  And I wouldn’t mind if it didn’t stop trying to resolve everything by the time the 30 minutes are up.  Someone tell the producers to watch more “Sports Night” and to combine it with “Curb Your Enthusiasm.”  Of course, that might be asking too much of a network sitcom.

The Best Band, Part 2

The following is an expanded and edited version of a previous post.

As a follow-up to Reckoning, R.E.M. travelled to London to record the album that became Fables of the Reconstruction.  By all accounts, it seems to have been an absolutely miserable time.  They were working with a new producer and putting the album together in a classically brutal London winter, and all of them seemed to be struggling with homesickness.  What emerged from the recording sessions was an album with a deep melancholia that only led me – and many other college-age students – to embrace them all the more.

“Can’t Get There From Here” was an odd single to serve as the opening release for the album, and didn’t really garner them more publicity or fans than had embraced Reckoning.  It’s a bit of a weird song, coming on strong in its opening but only periodically truly taking off, though it fits very well into one of the album’s main themes – the South and the function of storytelling in that cultural milieu.  That theme is demarcated in the second song of the album, “Maps and Legends,” and is found in such songs as “Old Man Kensey” and “Kohoutek,” both of which emphasize setting and character in the lyrics more than Michael Stipe had done previously.

“Feeling Gravity’s Pull,” “Auctioneer,” and “Life and How to Live It” complement the brazenness of “Can’t Get There From Here,” with a harsher guitar than the band had previously shown coupled with an atmosphere of tension.  These songs seem to me to be why critics have not always embraced the album as a success.  On the other hand, ”Driver 8,” the second single released from the album, carries over something of the sound of the two previous albums, with a strong sense of melody combined with lyrics that appear both inviting and distant at the same time.  As is appropriate for any train song, it has a driving beat that is somewhat unrelenting and that propels things forward.  It’s a natural follow-up to “So. Central Rain” from Reckoning, and it always makes me feel like rain. Much of the album does, actually, which we might account for by considering where the band recorded it, I suppose.  But I think there might be something more to it than that, something on one hand tied to the first song of the album – “Feeling Gravity’s Pull” and its visualization of what it means to be and feel earthbound and lacking any sense of transcendence.

The dominant mode of the album, ultimately, is a rather slow tempo, a mode which was present in the band’s first two albums, with “Perfect Circle,” “Talk About the Passion,” and “Camera” as exemplars not of ballads but of a slowed-down, impassioned beat that tends to match a deeply searching lyric.  I’ve suggested that Fables has a melancholic vibe to it, and that it makes one think of rain, and much of this has to do with the large number of slower songs that dominate as you proceed through the album.  In fact, I’d identify five of the album’s last seven songs as of this type, with three standouts in particular.

The first of these is “Green Grow the Rushes.”

“Green Grow the Rushes,” with its imagery of workers taken advantage of, registers the band’s frustration with making an album away from home, their desire for a different notion of labor, and a frustration with labor itself.  On one hand it’s easy to read this as an allegory of the work of putting together the album itself and the frustration with the recording and the labor that was going into a product that was not satisfying the band.  Ultimately, though, the song reads as something of a Marxist embrace of the noble laborer, a class notion that through the song becomes lyrical, resonant, and deeply haunting.  Here are the lyrics:

The wheelbarrow’s fallen/Look at my hands
They’ve found some surplus cheaper hands
Rubbing palms and pick and choose,
who will they choose? Here is the news.

Look at that building, look at this man/Halloed and whitewashed
Gone to find a cheaper hand/He’ll offer a pound, offer a pound.

Green grow the rushes go/Green grow the rushes go
Green grow the rushes go
The compass points the workers home

Pay for your freedom, find another gate
Guilt by associate, the rushes wilted a long time ago
Guilty as you go

Stay off that highway, word is it’s not so safe
The grasses that hide the greenback
The amber waves of gain again/The amber waves of gain

Green grow the rushes go/Green grow the rushes go
Green grow the rushes go
The compass points the workers home

One of the hallmarks of Fables is that you can start to hear Stipe better and better than on the previous two albums, and this is one of the songs that – though still a bit murky – we can hear him begin to have greater faith in the efficacy of his words.  Throughout the album he has been weaving stories, but here he relies on images to propel the song forward and it works as something closer to a poem, if not a painting.  He sings the lyrics with a real sense of passion, with Mike Mills matching that with an onrush of feeling in what he is singing just underneath Stipe, a harmony that kills throughout the whole song. The song comes across as a gentle but insistent call to reorient our thinking about class, about labor, about the nature of work.  It’s something of a call for revolt.

Next, consider “Good Advices,” which has one of my favorite lyrics ever: “I’d like it here if I could leave and see you from a long way away.”

As with “Green Grow the Rushes,” what I love about this song is the way that it doesn’t let up, or let the listener off the hook.  There is no extended instrumental section, and the bridge takes you right back to the verses.  The band is privileging the lyrics in these songs and it shouldn’t surprise us.  Stipe plays with language in the song, as he has in the past, but again his enunciation is much further than it was in past albums and his confidence in what he is writing and how he is singing is marked by the way that the vocals come further and further to the center of the recording (or the performance, in the above clip).

Finally, the last song of the album, “Wendell Gee,” a wonderfully wacky song that escapes characterization.  The song focuses, like many of the other songs on the album, on a particular individual and the story he has to tell.  Here are the lyrics:

That’s when Wendell Gee takes a tug
Upon the string that held the line of trees
Behind the house he lived in
He was reared to give respect
But somewhere down the line he chose
To whistle as the wind blows
Whistle as the wind blows with me

He had a dream one night
That the tree had lost its middle
So he built a trunk of chicken wire
To try to hold it up
But the wire, the wire turned to lizard skin
And when he climbed inside
There wasn’t even time to say
Goodbye to Wendell Gee
So whistle as the wind blows
Whistle as the wind blows with me

There wasn’t even time to say
Goodbye to Wendell Gee
So whistle as the wind blows
Whistle as the wind blows with me
If the wind were colors
And if the air could speak
Then whistle as the wind blows
Whistle as the wind blows

Here is the band performing it live, acoustic, in a studio.  Stipe really lets his twang out in this version, and man the band looks young:

Most of the lyrics on the album are pretty dark and most of it feels like something you should be listening on a gray-sky day with a cigarette in one hand and a shotglass in the other.  But this song has a certain sweetness that is unmistakeable, even if opaque.  The sense of myth that pervades the story here carries to conclusion what Stipe set out in the second song of the album, “Maps and Legends.”  At the same time, though, the song clearly is in opposition to the sense of feeling earthbound that the band lays out in “feeling Gravity’s Pull.”  ”Wendell Gee” is all about transcendence, all about what might happen once you “crawl inside.”  He finds it, and he makes us want to as well.  After the brutal cynicism of “Good Advices,” “Wendell Gee” sends us off with the sense that if we can just better attune ourselves to our surroundings, to nature, to the wind, we might be able to locate something that takes us out of ourselves into something larger and greater, something worthwhile.  Coupled with “Green Grow the Rushes,” this song, it seems to me, is one of the band’s first attempts to articulate a politics that asks us to look beyond ourselves and to engage with the world outside of us.  This politics is passionate – these songs are deeply impassioned – but perhaps more notably this politics is personal in the sense that it envisions politics on an individual and not societal level.  There is no preaching here, no bully pulpit speechifying of the type we would see with “Exhuming McCarthy” and “Welcome to the Occupation.”  It’s music that seduces us, of the type the band also produced in two songs on Life’s Rich Pageant, their next album – “Fall On Me” and “The Flowers of Guatemala.”

Fables is a complicated album, imperfect, moody, elusive of our grasp.  R.E.M. was firing on all cylinders in the mid-1980s.

The Best Band

I’m biased, in that I’m of a certain age.  For me it has to be REM, The Smiths, or The Cure.

I came “of age” in the 80s, and it was the age of cds.   I distinctly remember hearing my first albums on this new technology of compact disc.   Obviously the sound was great.  A radically different experience from 8-tracks and a whole new game from the tapes that so many of us had relied on.  (For those too young to know, we used to tape radio stations for new songs and hope to catch new groovy songs.  Tape.  Not good quality.)  Of greater importance to me, though, was that the music was different.  Tears for Fears.  U2.  All sorts of Brit imports with interesting hair.

One band stood out to me and that was REM, perhaps because they were the American band, the sole American Band that in 1983-86 seemed to actually matter, at least to me.  Don’t get me wrong, I listened to Michael Jackson just like everyone else did, and Phil Collins, and I had grooved on the Gap Band and obviously Prince.  I knew rap was on the way and loved Run-DMC as much as anyone.  But there was something about this band from down South.

REM seemed real and authentic.  They sang of a world I knew nothing about – places, experiences, a way of life that was totally foreign to me.  And while I liked the Brit thing going on – for instance, who did not love Elvis Costello from 1978-1984??? – it was great to hear this thing going on in American music that wasn’t dictated by the New York scene but was still one-of-a-kind.  Digging on The Cure was a lot of fun at college and that Robert Smth had not only a look but a sound of his own.  I was and remain a fan of The Smiths to as much a degree as is possible.  But REM.  Murmur is a great album, and I listen to it often.  But in my book, there has never been a band on fire like REM was in the making of Reckoning.

Here, live, is the track that sets the stage:

I love Stipe’s hair, the guitars, the everything in this clip.  I love “Harborcoat.”  The jangly guitar against the steady drum, the vivacity, the playfulness, the harmonies, the playing with language.  And that’s about the weakest track on the album.  Please see other songs.  I have yet to see something that betters this album in the last 25 years.  It’s rock and roll at its finest – a band at its apex right here.  At the time I was digging other bands, and I’ve loved others since…but this captures the band at its best. Lyrically, the band did some fascinating things in this album and followed them with the stunning Fables of the Reconstruction and Life’s Rich Pageant, which only solidified their place at the top lyrically but especially ideologically and musically.

The best song, though, then and now, continues to be “Letter Never Sent.”  If ever a song takes me back to a time it is this one: “If I’m moving too fast, here is my new address.”

This song equals the mid-80s to me, and part of that is because it’s part of an imperfect album that works so very well as an album.  There’s nothing I would change about Reckoning, and nothing of any of their first three albums, truth be told.  I know I’m partial, but this is still the best band in the world to me for what they were able to do over a span of those three albums from about 1983-1987 – capture perfectly a time and place like no other band has in my lifetime.  The Beatles and Stones?  Probably.  But REM in the mid-80s were independent in a way that didn’t exist in music back then and doesn’t now.  They were the best band of that decade and the best until Kurt Cobain started doing his thing.  They forced you to deal with what they were doing.  They were the best band in the world.

The Word, Performance, and Performer of the Decade

On October 15, 2005, on the pilot episode of The Colbert Report, Stephen Colbert introduced a segment called “The Word.”  That first night his first word was something he called “truthiness.”  Colbert defined this term, not actually a word at the time, as something that a person knows to be a truth, even without evidence, logic, facts, or engaged thinking.  It was a truth, he said, that one knows in his gut.

Colbert’s reference to “gut” thinking that night and later when he used the term made clear that this word was meant to apply to a type of thinking that was valorized in the Bush Administration from 2000-2008. In his campaign for president in 2000 and during his administration, George W. Bush repeatedly referred to the value of thinking from his gut and proclaimed the worth of his instincts.  (Who can forget how he said that Vladimir Putin, longtime leader of Russia, was someone he could work with, someone who was a good man, because he had looked into Putin’s eyes and seen his soul?  Yikes.)

Colbert’s “truthiness” seemed most linked to the war in Iraq.  Whereas the war in Afghanistan was clearly connected to the Taliban’s support of Al Qaeda and the attack on 9/11, the war in Iraq never had a clearly articulated logic for why it should occur.  The Bush Administration offered an ever-revolving series of reasons for why we should invade – Saddam Hussein’s tyranny, a link between Irag and Al Qaeda and Hussein’s involvement in the 9/11 attacks, Iraq’s stockpiling of weapons of mass destruction, and other reasons.  Although the administration never offered concrete evidence of the link to 9/11, for instance, members of the administration repeatedly asserted a connection between planners of the attack and member of the Iraqi administration. When it comes to WMDs, of course, we’re still looking for those and the “evidence” that Colin Powell presented to the United Nations in argument for invasion seems a bit sketchy, to put it gently.

The power of “truthiness” was in its resonance with current events and it announced The Colbert Report’s intentions to be fully engaged with the world of politics and to take on the hypocrisy, the falsifications, the mismanagement, and the hubris of those in power.  The show, in other words, was a worthy follow-up to The Daily Show.  But whereas Jon Stewart had been hosting The Daily Show, with its take on daily political stories, with a not-very-repressed air of “Are you shitting me?” wonderment, Colbert built on the persona he had created in his appearances on The Daily Show.  In those appearances, Colbert had increasingly taken to producing knee-jerk responses to questions and events and a refusal to back down from those responses even in the face of factual evidence that demonstrated that his responses were overly partisan, wrong-headed, or just plain wrong.  When Colbert moved to his own show, this persona was the one he brought with him and the one he has stayed in for over four years.  ”Truthiness,” then did not only refer to the Bush Administration, but also was meant to refer to Colbert’s persona itself, and indeed to the very ethos of The Colbert Report.  And that was part of the genius of the satire.  The show mocks the very thing that it refuses to ever abandon in terms of its representation.  Colbert does not go out of character.  Ever.  But the satire of that character is ever clear, and the satire of the type of thinking that this character embodies is just as clear.  And biting.

Which brings me to what I would call the performance of the decade.  This was not a musical performance, nor a stellar bit of acting, nor a dramatic reading of a poem or novel.  It was Colbert’s performance at the 2006 White House Correspondent’s Dinner on April 26, 2006.  At this dinner, at the invitation of the correspondents, Colbert gave a 16-minute speech and screened a 7-minute video for the guests at the dinner and a television audience.  Here is the performance:

There are a number of things that are amazing about this performance.  The president is two seats away from him as he presents this truly devastating critique.  Most of the media there don’t seem to get that this is a) really really funny and b) really really devastating.  Colbert never cracks character, he never leaves the persona, which makes the reading of the satire a bit more difficult I suppose, but doesn’t ever change its bite.  It is a brave and bravura performance.  He calls the president to task as he sits just feet away, but does it in such a way that the audience is left doubly uncomfortable.  They’re not sure whether to laugh or cringe.  Because they are also under attack in the performance, for their refusal or negligence in actually engaging with the Administrations lies and obfuscations and lack of evidence, the correspondents don’t seem to know whether it is okay for them to laugh or whether they should be insulted (they should feel both).  Colbert was out on the plank by himself but he never stopped or slowed down.  He kept going on.

The performance itself came under attack in the media as not funny, irresponsible, disrespectful, and inappropriate.  But it caught on virally through word of mouth and rather quickly became a sensation. It was the embodiment of speaking truth to power, as the saying goes.  Not “truthiness.”  Truth.  The performance had everything to do with truthiness, with thinking from and by the gut, with trusting your instincts even in the face of evidence to the contrary.  And the performance was, I believe, central in the turn again Bush.  Stephen Colbert became one of the most central political players on the national stage because he called “bullshit” when the media that was responsible for this refused to do the thinking or legwork required to do so.

That’s why “truthiness” is the word of the decade, and why Colbert is the performer of the decade.

(How To Grow Up) To Be a Famous American

In the past year, my son has had occasion to read a few selections from a series of books called the “Childhood of Famous Americans.”  He has read four of them – on Harriet Tubman, Thomas Edison, Walt Disney, and Jim Thorpe – and enjoys them enough, but I’ve come to realize that he likes the focus on childhood more than the overall story of the person’s life.  In fact, as the title of the series makes evident, these books are centered on the subject’s childhood almost more than their overall lives.  While this is fine and good, I suppose, it’s also kind of odd considering their great achievements came later in life.  Well, I should say it’s odd until you recognize the ideological underpinning of the series and its indebtedness to core American mythology.

The roster of subjects for the collection includes many figures you’d expect: George Washington, the Wright Brothers, Susan B. Anthony, Martin Luther King, Edison, etc.  There are also some wild cards: John Muir, Harry Houdini, Jim Henson, Disney, and Roberto Clemente.  It’s not these people are not worthy of inclusion or didn’t lead outstanding lives; it’s just not really clear what the criteria for selection into this pantheon are or how the choices are made.  Plus, I’m not sure Clemente would have identified as American!

What does seem essential for individuals to be included – or at least essential for their stories to have been, is some semblance of the American Dream to be at play in their path to success – especially in relation to their ability to overcome hardship.

The back-cover copy of my son’s Jim Thorpe: Olympic Champon, the latest one he finished, claims that the series offers “lively, inspiring, fictionalized biographies” for readers to enjoy.  These three adjectives are quite revealing, if we take a moment to consider them.  Certainly readers will hope that the stories are lively and engaging – most books seek to be so, if only as a way to keep the reader reading, and hopefully to come back for another book in the collection.  But why inspiring?  And inspiring how?  Moreover, why the need to fictionalize?  Aren’t these lives dramatic and inspiring enough?  Aren’t their achievements worthy enough of inclusion?  What exactly is being fictionalized in these biographies, and to what end?

All of which goes to say (or ask): what’s the function of these texts?  Each of them seems to have at its core some fundamental dramatization of the American Dream.  Central to each story seems to be that the path to success must include overcoming adversity or suffering.  Great things can happen for those who locate ways to not only survive but who can actually locate their central character in the battle over suffering and adversity.  The series, much like the Dream itself, argues that struggling through the hard times enables you – in fact is virtually essential to your ability – to achieve success.

There’s a long history to the series. There are over fifty of them, and if you scroll through Amazon you’ll find lots of different editions, let alone different subjects.  But all the books seem to be set on the same narrative arc.  Each subject’s childhood tends to be the time where his/her character is determined – either through the good example of parents/teachers/mentors or through the ability to overcome marginalization, danger, or suffering.  The choices one makes as an adult, in other words, are determined by the crucible of our experience in our childhood.

(By the way, the formula obviously works – the series gets quite a spread in our local Barnes and Noble, and as I said, Amazon is rampant with these books!)

Ultimately, the link between pedagogy and ideology goes beyond the limitations of political party or even a liberal/conservative split.  At the heart of these narratives is a belief in two things.  The first of these is that our childhood determines who we will become; moreover, our ability to negotiate the travails of our childhood successfully helps determine who we will be.  There’s a hint of determinism in this, in that what happens early in life controls what happens later, but ultimately our circumstances don’t determine who we will be.  Rather, it is how we respond as individuals to those circumstances that will determine who we will be.  We have free will, agency, the ability to shape our future, based on the choices we make.  In America, we believe that we make choices freely and independently and that these choices determine what happens for us.  This adds up to a core belief in individualism triumphing over determinism.

The second belief that is fundamental to these stories is that those people whose stories are worth telling are those who have gone down this path.  Aren’t there stories of great and wonderful and successful Americans who didn’t have to travel down this path?  Which presidents were left out?  Which captains of industry?  Technological innovators?  I don’t think Bill Gates would make the cut, not with his upbringing.  But there aren’t many more famous Americans living today, or those whose global reach has touched as many people – either in terms of his business or his philanthropy.  Bill Clinton?  Sure. Jack Welch?  Sergey Brin?  Hmm.  And where are the artists?  The writers?  Other than certain types of musicians, few contributors to the arts are even on the list.

All in all, it’s worth checking out what publishers are selling to our kids – not just in terms of who is included, but the underlying logic for why they are included.  I’m not even fully against what they’re selling here, though as a parent I must say that I’m not looking to create adversity or struggle for my children.  Maybe it’s because I don’t care if they’re famous or not or because I think of success based on a different set of criteria than implied in these books.  Or maybe it’s because I have a sense of balance and proportion and can recognize a bunch of hogwash when I see it.  That’s why it’s called the American Dream, not the American fact-based narrative.

I’m all for believing in core mythology as a construct, but as a foundation of how I live my life or teach my kids to live theirs?  That’s just crazy.

Fibs, Prevarications, Falsifications, Misrepresentations

Lie to Me, on Fox Monday nights at 9:00 pm, seemed to me to begin as a show that I would sum up with this representative bit of dialogue:

Good guy: “You’re lying.”

Bad Guy: “No, I’m not.”

Good Guy:  ”You are. I can tell.  The lines of your mouth are moving just so and your eyes crinkle a bit when you lie.”

Bad Guy: “My God!  You’ve got me – I admit everything!”

In other words, the show didn’t seem particularly sophisticated in its approach to storytelling, nor to its approach to thinking about detection.

But having watched a number of episodes this year, I must say that the show is starting to grow on me and evolve nicely in its complexity.  It has a main storyline that drives each plot, but the show’s development of its secondary characters – especially Loker (played by Brendan Hines), Torres (Monica Raymund), and Agent Reynolds (Mekhi Phifer) – has done much to enrich these storylines with secondary arcs.  Tim Roth has been extraordinary as lead character Cal Lightman – his acting has been as good as anyone I’ve seen on television in a long time (and I say that as avowed devotee of Gabriel Byrne in In Treatment).  Roth’s ever-shifting facial expressions, his shrugging of his shoulders, his slouch and dragging of his feet – rarely do we get to see an actor on television use all of his body as effectively as he does.  Every week is another revelation.

I’d love to see more of Jennifer Beals as Lightman’s ex-wife (who wouldn’t?  Even my wife loves her!), but she’s only on rarely.  Hayley McFarland does fine as Lightman’s put-upon daughter who is something of a do-gooder.  The weak link right now is Kelli Williams as Lightman’s partner Gillian Foster.  Her role is very poorly defined and she’s somewhat flailing in the role, apparently looking to ramp up the drama, but seemingly only because she doesn’t have very many useful lines, let alone a useful part to play in any of the episodes.

Roth is the reason to watch the show, for sure, at this point.  But it has been nice to see the program improve from its beginning as a crime show wherein some “scientist” kept insisting to the bad guys that they were lying and them confessing for no good reason in the face of his barrage.  It’s at least serviceable now, if not great watching.

It Might Be Time to Say Farewell to The Closer

The Closer began its fifth season the other night and I watched, out of habit more than out of desire.  The show has had a great deal of commercial success for TNT in its run, but I’m not sure I’d call it much of a critical success.

The show began with a “fish out of water” premise: Assistant Chief Will Pope (played by veteran character actor J.K. Simmons) brought to Los Angeles as his Deputy Chief in Major Crimes an associate he had known in Atlanta, Brenda Leigh Johnson.  As portrayed by Kyra Sedgwick, Brenda was a heavily accented transplant who had trouble negotiating her way around Los Angeles, in terms of the geography as well as the police department.  She seemed to have a lot of quirks, and was something of the offspring of Tony Shalhoub’s Monk and Vincent D’Onofrio’s Robert Goren (from Law and Order: Criminal Intent) in her combination of perspicacity as an investigator with her deep social ineptitude.  Although most of the Major Crimes unit quickly could recognize her ability to close out a case once she got the suspect in the interview room, at first, few in the department trusted her or respected her, which was reinforced by her past romantic relationship with Will Pope, which eventually helped lead to the breakup of his marriage.

While she seemed to have moved on from that relationship, it was clear in the beginning of the show that he was still interested.  She, however, quickly formed a liking for Agent Fritz Howard of the Los Angeles FBI branch, and there was some tension in the first few seasons as these romantic rivals vied for Brenda’s affections.  But that narrative tension was pretty much always ameliorated by the obviousness of Brenda’s preference for Fritz.

After about the second season, as her relationship with Fritz solidified, so did Brenda as a character.  She started to lose some of her quirks and became rather normalized.  At the same time, the show started to emphasize the members of her team to greater effect and these characters evolved into the ones driving the overriding plot arcs of the show: Sergeant Gabriel, Lieutenant Provenza, Lieutenant Flynn, Lieutenant Tao, and Detective Sanchez.  As the actors playing these roles got the chance to command more of the camera, the show became less of a star vehicle for Sedgwick and more of an ensemble.  In many ways, that element still dominates and is probably the strength of the show.  Brenda is less and less of a quirky fish out of water and more of a neurotic and not always very pleasant boss who is very good at her job.  Another way of writing that sentence might be that Brenda isn’t very fun to watch.  Her costars are, though.  While the beginning of the show posed her as something like Monk and the show has having the comic elements of that show, that dynamic has changed in that now Brenda has little comedy to her character but her co-stars have lots.  They get all the good lines.  Brenda is something of a bore.

As the depth of the ensemble grew, The Closer also added other characters to continue the sense of “color” that Brenda had originally brought to the narrative.  Sometimes the criminals have provided this – Jason O’Mara was especially compelling as a killer in an early episode and he got away, and the show brought him back for another appearance in a later season.  Last summer Billy Burke made for an especially ingenious defense attorney who also happens to be an especially ingenious murderer.  He too got away, and Brenda started to keep a photo of him on her desk because the case seemed to haunt her.  I’d be shocked if his character doesn’t return.

But the two characters who now provide the comic element of the show are Brenda’s parents, Clay and Willie Ray Johnson, played by Barry Corbin and Frances Sternhagen.  These two, with their Southern accents and their smalltown ways, embody the continuation of the “fish out of water” narrative that Brenda originated but which she grew out of as she acclimated to Los Angeles.  Clay and Willie Ray are not going to acclimate and they are not going to evolve.  As comic figures they are not supposed to, and their comedy derives from their very steadfastness.  They appear for visits every season and lighten the narrative while serving to remind Brenda of her roots and her family obligations in the face of her dedication to her job.  They’re not actually particularly interesting characters, in that they serve only narrative purposes and aren’t really drawn as compelling three-dimensional characters in their own right.  In a way, they are a good example of what is wrong with the show – the characters serve as little more than pawns in the plots.  Presenting and solving the crime are all that matter – the characters don’t.

As a formula, there is nothing inherently wrong with this – hello, Law and Order! – but the problem for The Closer is that it seems to try to be too many things at once – a serious crime show, a workplace drama with its tensions between the home and the office in terms of what Brenda pays attention to and who she ultimately sees as her “family,” and a bit of a comedy too.  The show is at its best when it dramatizes the tensions between Brenda and Fritz and her team in the office.  The comedy is enjoyable but doesn’t have much legs, and the mysteries are never really all that good, with the few notable exceptions mentioned above – and those were driven by the actors’ performances as much as by the writing of the show.

In fact, last season the show introduced a new character, Charlie, Brenda’s niece, who brought some valuable new elements to the program.  Charlie was a bit of trouble and the work of parenting her that Fritz and Brenda had to do brought out elements of their relationship that were new and revealed greater depth to each of them.  At the same time, Brenda couldn’t help herself in more than once getting Charlie involved in some of her cases – clearly an irresponsible thing to do, but again yielding some valuable dramatic elements.  I’m not sure we’ll see Charlie again, but her character was the best thing on The Closer last season.  This season has just begun, and I don’t see a lot of promise in it, I must say, unless the show can figure what it wants to be and gets down to the business of being it.

If Tony Shaloub Won Three Emmys, Then Why is His First Name Tony?

Monk ended last night, and while the two-part finale was not really a great one, that mediocrity certainly seemed appropriate.  The show itself was never really that good and the mysteries were of the type wherein close observation of the details of the case revealed the solution to the crime – all very Poe’s Dupin in terms of style and substance.  But that’s not to say that the show wasn’t important.  That, I believe, it certainly was.

Monk followed a formula most episodes, as the eccentric detective Monk – who operated as a consultant tot he police – would notice those details that escaped the police and tie together the pieces that others just weren’t able to.  His abilities were presented as a type of genius, but his eccentricities seemed to be the thing holding him back from integrating into the rest of society, let alone holding him back from reinstatement back onto the police force which he once had been part of.

Those eccentricities, of course, were the result of his wife’s murder, which sent him off the deep end and led to all manner of neuroses.  Through the seven years of the show he was never able to solve the mystery of her death, though he tried many times to do so.  The finale brought closure to the case, and to the show, even if it was somewhat unsatisfying as a narrative.

I’m not particularly looking to get into the details of the finale, though, nor of the feelings of closure, nor what happened with all of the supporting members of the show.  I’ll leave that to others.  I’m more interested in the show’s legacy.

Two things come to mind, the first of which was Tony Shaloub winning three Emmys for lead actor in a comedy while playing a detective.  I haven’t done one iota of research about this, I must admit, but I’m guessing that there haven’t been any other award-winning performances by an actor playing a detective, at least in the comedy category.  But since then, all sorts of detectives have been showing up on tv, and not just in the absurd category (there have been plenty of those, for a long while now).  The leads on Bones and House, while not exactly detectives are both essentially doing detective work and while these shows are drama, comedy is a central element in each of these shows.  Overall, the movement of detectives into the comedy category is a compelling one in terms of the genre, and I’m wondering where it will go over time (God, I’m hoping it extends beyond Psych).  There’s room for exploration in the merging of detective and comedy categories.

While James Gandolfini and The Sopranos were winning all sorts of winning Emmy awards and bringing HBO into the mainstream, Shalhoub and Monk were doing the same for USA.  Which brings me to the second legacy of the show: what it did for the USA network.  In my mind, it was Monk that really helped this network into a much broader viewing audience and critical acceptability (remember those late-night detective series they used to run in the 90s: a combination of mysteries and sex?  Weird.  And not good.)

Because of Monk, people check out USA.  There’s lots of reasons that people watch HBO, and reasons better than The Sopranos – hey The Wire! – but there haven’t been that many good shows on USA.  But people check it out.  And I keep looking for comic detectives who don’t have to overrely on neurotic tics to be a “character.”

Questions, Probably to Remain Unanswered

 

As we head into the last episode of the third season of Mad Men, a few things I’m curious about:

 

Will we hear any more of Sal this season (or any other season)?  He was a central element of the first episode of the season – will he return for the last?

 

Now that Joan’s husband seems to have plotted out a future he can manage (and one where it’s not hard for us to imagine things not going so smoothly as he imagines: Vietnam), what will become of the redhead?  Will Roger set her up in a different job?  Will their relationship remain merely platonic?  They clearly seem like equals, and certainly the two actors have great chemistry together.  Will things turn sexual between these two again?

 

Peggy and Duck.  Was Duck’s immediate thought of his children, after hearing of Kennedy’s assassination the signal that this relationship is done?  At least romantically?  God I hope so.   But I don’t mind the possibility of Peggy looking elsewhere for work…

 

Which leads to Pete – will this episode take him out of Sterling Cooper?  Will he go elsewhere, with his clients?  Will Peggy join him?  Or will these two stay put?  Let’s not forget that Sterling Cooper is for sale – is it possible that the firm buys itself back?

 

Yeah, yeah, Don and Betty.  I’m more interested in Don at work.  What will happen with this?  What will Don’s work situation be?  He has a contract at Sterling Cooper, but the firm is for sale.  What’s the future hold for him there?  Will any more come of this weird Conrad Hilton storyline?  Will he “make up” with Roger?  I thought Don looked admiringly at Roger during Roger’s wedding toast – which was excellent, by the way – and wondered if there was a possible thawing out between the two on the cusp.

 

And sure, the marriage.  I have some interest there.  But I’m more fascinated to see what will come of the children in this episode and beyond.  There was a lot of attention paid to Sally Draper this season – is there any more drama to come?  Bobby started to emerge as well.  I’m curious to see if they will play a part in this last episode.

 

Betty is an interesting character, for sure.  But her current love interest, Henry Francis, seems pretty flat and I can’t figure out why he says he loves Betty – based on what?  Or why she would be attracted to him.  BORING.

 

My sense is that the episode will delve deep into Don’s past – the show does this as a touchstone in each season, and we’ve had a touch of it this year, as Don has dealt with issues of fatherhood and self-esteem stemming from his own upbringing.  (And then there’s Betty discovering the whole thing…)  The question for us is what the look into Don’s past will say about the present, about 1963, and about what will come for Don, his family, and the gang at Sterling Cooper.

About Life as a Highway

I heard this song briefly on the radio the other day.  I say briefly because I had to turn it pretty much right away.

The problem for me with this song isn’t the sentiment, or the lyrics, it’s that it is such a bad cover version.  Rascal Flatts seems to lack any soul – they seem to be the epitome of corporate country in all of its very worst manifestations: bleached, Californian rather than Southern, overly electric, lacking any allegiance to the blues or bluegrass.  It’s brutal to listen to.

Compare it to the version done by Tom Cochrane, who actually wrote the song.

Cochrane’s original has so much more bite to it.  He’s got the sense of having actually travelled to these places, not just the ability to pronounce the names of the locales.  His guitar is sharper, and meaner.  And his song actually has the sex element still in it, while Rascal Flatts has made theirs pure vanilla.

That’s the main problem.  Here’s the chorus: “Life is a highway, I want to ride it all night long.  If you’re going my way, I’m gonna drive it all night long.”  Yes, these lines connote living to driving – to engaging with life in the fullest.  Rascal Flatts seems to have recognized that.  But that only gets you a low “C” in English class.  Nowhere in their version do they seem to recognize the baser allusion going on in the metaphor and the overall lyrics: the sexual attraction between the “you” and the “I” and the implicit sexual congress taking place “all night long.”

Cochrane wrote it.  He gets it – he still has sex in his version, in his growl and in his great “gimme gimme gimme” ad libs as the song progresses.  What’s most stunning to me is that Rascal Flatts’ cover is so bland and so lacking in imagination that the lead singer copies Cochrane’s “gimme gimme gimme” line.  But he does so as if he’s enacting a six-year-old in a lego store – “I want this, and that, and one of those.”

In the Racal Flatts version, that “gimme” is a pure expression of greed, of wanton desire for more stuff, of commodity fetishization.  For Cochrane, that “gimme” is about more loving, pure and simple.  There’s something wanton there, but it’s more primal – lust and plenty of it.

For Cochrane, it’s song about urgency, about engaging with everything that life offers – and that includes great sex (and why not?)!  The video gets at it a bit with the couple and the camera’s focus on the woman.  It’s not heavy in its visual representation, but it’s there, it seems to me.  (It’s totally vanilla in the other one.  Sex won’t get a PG-13 rating!)

That seems about as good a summary of the two bands, and perhaps even provides a fundamental way of thinking about corporate country, with Rascal Flatts as the prime example of it: a band constructed with the purpose in mind not so much to make interesting music but to make loads of money, which in turn sings about commodity fetishization and making loads of money.  And has success doing just that.

It’s depressing to think about really.  But here’s a surprise.  Rascal Flatts’ cover version went to #7 in the Billboard Top 200.  Cochrane’s?  #6.  Maybe there’s still hope out there!