Sunday, August 30, 2009

Mad Men, "My Old Kentucky Home": The decline and fall of Roger Sterling

A review of "Mad Men" season three, episode three coming up just as soon as I loan you my glasses so you can write this blog entry as me...
"No one thinks you're happy. They think you're foolish." -Don
"That's the great thing about a place like this. You can come here and be happy, and you get to choose your guests." -Roger
"My Old Kentucky Home" is one of those "Mad Men" episodes where very little seems to happen in terms of story, but where the atmosphere and character work are both so rich that plot becomes irrelevant.

Class, and the challenges and disappointments that come when you move from one class to another, are the big issues at work in this one. We spend a lot of time at Roger and Jane's country club Kentucky Derby party, where Roger and Betty and Pete (all of whom grew up privileged) feel right at home, and where Don and Jane (who didn't always have silver spoons) feel they're out of place. Jane retreats by drinking heavily and not eating at all, while Don finds temporary refuge in the club bar, where he bonds with a fellow climber of the social ladder, Connie (played by the fine character actor Chelcie Ross). Connie talks of growing up dreaming about what life must have been like in a fancy house on a hill; now a wealthy man, he knows that "It's different inside."

Connie's not the only person to understand that lesson by the end of the hour. Harry, despite his own ascension at Sterling Cooper, fits in no better at the party than Don. Joan throws a party of her own, where she learns that the vile Dr. Greg is the one gaining social standing due to their marriage, when she had always assumed she was benefiting from him. We meet Paul's old college buddy Jeffrey, who reveals that all of Paul's scholarly affectations are a put-on from a former scholarship kid with a thick Joisey accent, and we see that Paul's insecurity at being found out keeps him miserable.

The one person relatively content in their move up in class is Peggy, who partakes of some Jeffrey-supplied weed - after delivering possibly the funniest "Mad Men" line to date: "I'm Peggy Olson, and I want to smoke some marijuana." - and, high on the stuff, tells her overprotective new secretary Olive that she's doing just fine as a single career woman who lives her life the same as the men around her.

Peggy is inside, but she still sees with the eyes of an outsider, as do people like Don and Connie. But the characters who have always been upper class are too far inside to have any idea how their world really looks, or how it's going to change. Roger has no idea how offensive his blackface performance of the titular song will seem in only a few years (let alone how disturbing it is with nearly 40 years distance). Pete and Trudy don't recognize how sad their well-rehearsed Charleston is. Dr. Greg has no more idea how valuable Joan is to his career than Harry did during her brief stint with the television department.

Let's start with Joan, who didn't have much to do in the season's first two episodes. We see that Greg is the same prideful, violent oaf he was when he raped her in Don's office last season. He hates not getting his way, and he especially hates being reminded that his wife is often smarter and more worldly than he is. Joan, at least, has gotten better at handling him, as she shuts down the argument about the seating arrangements before things get too physical. But as the dinner party goes on, and she starts to get clues that Greg isn't quite the hospital superstar she thinks he is (he killed a patient due to a surgical error, and the chief of surgery's wife doesn't have a high opinion of him), Joan's ability to grin and bear it becomes more strained. When a flop sweat-covered Greg all but pushes her into playing her old accordion(*) to entertain the guests - and to distract everyone from thinking about his "bad result" - she chooses Cole Porter's "C'est Magnifique," whose lyrics are about the kind of perfect romance Joan wants to pretend she has. The melancholy look on her face suggests anything but.

(*) And I'm told that's actually Christina Hendricks playing the accordion. Don't be surprised if this episode leads to a boom in accordion lessons for and/or sales to young women.

If Joan's world is getting smaller and sadder as time goes on, Peggy's finally realizing that her own world is full of nothing but possibility. She's becoming more and more like Don, going through multiple secretaries and sampling a bit of the counter-culture to expand her sense of perspective. Elisabeth Moss has been maybe my favorite part of the season so far; she still plays Peggy as somewhat Sphinx-like, but the character and the performance are both much more confident and funny and sexy than they were even late last season. I'm sure Peggy has some tough times ahead, but it's a real pleasure to watch her ascendant and in command the way she is here.

Peggy's storyline also puts Paul together with Smitty (though Smitty's buddy Kurt has yet to appear this season) in one of the more interesting culture clashes "Mad Men" has to offer. Paul and Smitty are maybe five years apart in age, but generationally they seem as far apart as Paul is from Bert Cooper. Paul wants to seem older than he is, and is so insecure about his standing that he has to constantly recite his credentials. Smitty, on the other hand, is content with his youth, and even celebratory about it. It's so rare to see anyone on "Mad Men" this comfortable in his own skin - even if this is a persona Smitty assumed in the same way Dick Whitman became Don Draper or Jersey Paul became cultured Paul, it's a persona he's made his peace with - that he becomes an interesting, amusing foil for nearly every other character on the show. I remember Joan having no idea how to respond to Smitty's flirtation in last season's "The Jet Set," and I would love to see Smitty have to work directly with Pete on something.

Because the episode spends so much time at Sterling Cooper and at Joan's apartment, and because the Derby party is more of an ensemble piece, this is a more Don-light episode than usual. But the scene with Connie reminds us again of the very different world Dick Whitman grew up in, and in the present, we see that even though Don and Betty are both making more of an effort in their marriage, there's still a gap that can't be closed. Don will always feel out of place in Betty's life because he can't tell her who he really is. (I doubt he'd feel comfortable even telling her a relatively safe story like the one about parking cars at the roadhouse.) And in Betty's reaction to the attentions of Henry Francis, we see that her dalliance with Captain Awesome in "Meditations in an Emergency" didn't so much satisfy her need to understand adultery than it gave her a taste for it, or at least for what she's missing from Don. Don's trying, really trying, but it's been a long time since he looked at Betty with the awe and hunger that was on Henry's face when he asked to touch her belly. Before that encounter, Betty warned Don that she wanted to get some dancing in before the night was over; after it, she told Don she wasn't in the mood to hit the dance floor.

There's also, of course, some leftover tension from their separation, which comes to the forefront when a drunken Jane mentions it to Betty, who doesn't like that Don's former secretary (and Roger's current unpopular wife) knows about this, and who maybe wonders if Jane was with Don before she was with Roger. And Roger has the bad timing to come upon what looks like Don making a move on Roger's wife, just as Don once walked in on Roger actually making a move on Don's wife.

After briefly enjoying the role reversal, Roger falls back on his sheltered, delusional belief that his old friends are all just jealous of him. Just as he doesn't understand that blackface is past its sell-by date, Roger doesn't recognize that he's become a bad joke in his old social circles: a mid-life crisis cliche who has no discernible function at work, who's drunk all day (though never as impaired as his wife is here) and who has no idea he's becoming as obsolete in America at large as he is at Sterling Cooper. So long as he has his country club membership, and can retreat on the old comforts that his class provides, he can avoid facing reality.

The story of Sally stealing five bucks from Gene may not at first glance seem that connected to the rest of the episode. It's a well-played vignette about how difficult life is with Gene in that house, even (or especially) on days when he's relatively lucid, and it also shows that Sally is trying to learn how to lie like her parents do so often. But it's important to note that, in the happier moments, Sally's bonding with her grandfather by reading passages from Edward Gibbon's "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire." What's about to happen to the America of this era won't be quite as drastic as what happened to Rome, but thanks in part to the complacency and willful ignorance of people like Roger Sterling, Gene is more prophetic than he realizes when he tells Sally, "Just wait. All hell's gonna break loose."

Some other thoughts on "My Old Kentucky Home":

• I should say that, while Jane is usually a fairly unlikable character, "My Old Kentucky Home" did make me feel some sympathy for her. Yes, she got what she wanted by landing Roger, but she's in way over her head socially, she knows everybody hates her, and on top of that, Roger (in terms of stature and possibly finances, based on how quickly he seems to be burning through the PP&L sale money) is no longer the man she thought she was marrying.

• Also, shocking as the blackface moment is to modern sensibilities, the concept wasn't entirely dead after Roger's day. In the early '90s, Ted Danson got in some hot water for donning blackface for a Friar's Club roast of his then-girlfriend Whoopi Goldberg. (Goldberg later said she helped him come up with the idea as a response to the hate mail they were getting for their interracial relationship.) And Spike Lee's 2000 movie "Bamboozled" was all about blackface, albeit with black actors donning the makeup themselves.

• It took me until second viewing to realize that the Peggy/Paul/Smitty scenes were largely taking place in Paul's office, and not Peggy's, as the layout was identical. (I'm assuming it was the same set, redressed.) When Peggy moved into Freddy's old office late last season, guys like Paul and Harry were outraged that The Girl got her very own office before they did. Apparently, the firings by the PP&L folk cleared out enough dead weight that Paul doesn't have to share anymore.

• I couldn't help noticing Gene tell Sally, "Go wash your teeth." I assumed that was some outmoded phrasing, but "wash your teeth" turned up over 40,000 hits on Google (albeit compared to over 800,000 for "brush your teeth"). Is it maybe a regional thing?

• Michael Gladis, who plays Paul, and Rich Sommer, who plays Harry, don't look exactly alike, but their build is similar enough that I imagine they were confused for each other early in the show's run, which in turn led to the joke here where Paul offers to borrow Harry's glasses and pose as him at the Derby party.

• Pete and Trudy's Charleston was the second time in three episodes where Vincent Kartheiser has been able to show off some ridiculous yet limber dance skills. His legs almost seem to be made of rubber for parts of this one. The dance seems absolutely like the kind of thing these two might throw themselves into learning; they can't have children (though it's clear Trudy still longs for them), so instead they find another way to compete with the couples around them by rehearsing and rehearsing their dance steps to show off at an occasion like this.

• I'm hoping Carla is more involved this season, as she has a unique perspective on the Draper family. We see that she's already figuring out how to deal with Gene, and she's savvy enough to realize, just as Gene did, that Sally stole the fiver before she "found" it.

• The real world comes up a few times, as we're reminded that the First Lady was pregnant at this point (it wouldn't end well), and that the '63 Kentucky Derby took place on the same day that New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller married his second wife, Happy. As alluded to in the brief discussion of that, the marriage (only a month after Happy's own first marriage came to a legal end) was a major turn-off to many Republican voters. It not only damaged Rockefeller's own national ambitions (though he'd wind up as Gerald Ford's appointed VP), but arguably was the beginning of the end for the national dominance of the more socially moderate wing of the Republican party, since the marriage to Happy led to Barry Goldwater getting the '64 nomination, which led to Ronald Reagan's ascension, etc, etc. I bring this up in spite of the usual No Politics rule only because Roger is a classic Rockefeller Republican, and the ascension of people like Goldwater will likely create yet another part of his life where he's going to be left behind.

• A few people complained last week that their recording was cut off before the show ended. That's not going to stop, unfortunately. The episodes are now all going to run a couple of minutes past the hour to allow for more commercial time (while simultaneously keeping Weiner from having to cut any story time), so until/unless AMC and the various programming guide services can get their stories coordinated, I'd strongly advise padding your recordings by at least 3 or 4 minutes, though theoretically you should only need 2.

Finally, I want to again commend you guys on both your insightful comments and on your sticking to the commenting rules even as the number of comments each week rises to a level not seen on this blog for anything but maybe "Lost" and "Battlestar Galactica." You're bringing up things I didn't necessarily think of, and you're playing well with each other. On the internet, those two qualities are still an unfortunate rarity. So thanks.

What did everybody else think?
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Hung, "This Is America; or Fifty Bucks": Suit up!

I'm on vacation, but I got to see tonight's "Hung" (and last week's, which I didn't write about) before I left. No time to offer any thoughts beyond my fear that Tanya is setting herself up for major trouble with Lenore, but for those of you watching, I figured I'd offer up a chance to talk about what's going on. What did everybody else think? Click here to read the full post

Friday, August 28, 2009

Sports Night rewind: "Eli's Coming" and "Ordnance Tactics"

Okay, folks, it's "Sports Night" time again, and Linda Holmes from NPR's Monkey See blog has once again been a life-saver in helping this project get done amidst my vacations and other summer distractions. Her thoughts on "Eli's Coming" and "Ordnance Tactics" coming right up...

What I love about Dan's discussion of the title song in "Eli's Coming" is that it's so obviously a real thing – either Aaron Sorkin or someone he knew had the same misunderstanding of the song that Dan did. It's too offbeat to be made up.

What is made up is the ridiculous conclusion to the Bobbi Bernstein story. Let us indulge for a moment the fantasy that Dan could plausibly forget that he slept with her and that he was ever in the entire country of Spain. (And if his memory of it is THAT wiped out, why does he look at the picture and remember her as Roberta?) If, indeed, Bobbi went by "Roberta" and knows she looked completely different, then she never would have been so confused in the first place about why he didn't remember. As soon as Dan balked, she'd have explained it: “I went by Roberta then. I had braces and red hair [or whatever].” And who has their picture taken in a hotel room next to the towels with a one-night stand? Who took the picture, Housekeeping? It's just stupid. It's a stupid, backwards-justified story idea that's there for an admittedly interesting reason.

I think what they were trying to accomplish here was giving Dan something to think about as far as his own behavior as he considered Steve Sisko's treatment of Rebecca and Gordon's treatment of Dana. I think the idea was something like, "Even nice guys accidentally hurt women by not treating them gently enough." It's a little patronizing, but it's well-intentioned, and it would have been nice if they hadn't chosen such a numbskulled way of executing it.

The slow car accident that is Dan's relationship with Rebecca also progresses nicely here. The news that Steve is visiting her is bad news and everybody instinctively knows it. And yes, it's worse that it's on Saturday, even though nobody can exactly articulate why. And then, of course, it gets cleared up, and Dan doesn't like the answer.

As for Dana and Casey, they're still mid-ugliness from the Fedrigatti incident. I have to admit to having never quite understood why Dana handing the show off to Sally to produce so that she could go to dinner would be quite such a betrayal to Casey for a single night. They all have nights off; they all get to go on vacation. That Casey finds it quite this heart-mangling of a personal slight has always seemed off to me. I mean, he's screwed up in the head because he's upset about Sally and Gordon and all of that business, but the level of outrage toward Dana seems out of proportion, no?

But the meat of "Eli's Coming," of course, is that this is how the show dealt – admirably, I think – with Robert Guillaume's stroke. Even with the writing clearly on the wall that he'd be gone a while and might be different upon his return, they kept Isaac on the show and created a story of his absence and recovery that capitalized perfectly on where they were trying to go with the delicate maneuvering between Isaac and the network.

It is always such a sad punch in the gut to me when Jeremy tells Dana, in that way that people do when they are working to believe their own optimism, that it could conceivably take four hours to get into the city from JFK. I think that's even worse than seeing Casey break the news to Dan.

One sports-related nitpick for which I must credit Alan: You would never be covering the Sweet 16 on a Saturday. Sweet 16 is Thursday. Elite Eight is Saturday. OOPS.

The bomb scare in "Ordnance Tactics," I admit, has never held my interest. Yes, it is a stand-in for the larger story of being under siege, of being threatened, of the possibility that the building – that the show – will fall down. But Dan and Casey's overreaction seems out of character.

What I like better is the political mess Dana is in. J.J. shows up to make his usual vague threats and promises about what he will do for her if she takes him into her confidence. It's exactly what he did with Isaac when he (presumably) planted the quote – he's trying to create trouble, or threatening to create trouble, so that he can be the guy who solves it. He's just odious, but again, he sees himself as a guy who's doing his job and looking out for himself.

But as little as I care for the bomb scare, I care about this Jeremy/Natalie dance even less. All he's suggesting is that they "temporarily" (a word he stresses over and over) stop seeing each other. If it's temporary, then they're not breaking up. That's the difference between temporary and permanent. One is breaking up, and one is, presumably, just not spending so much time together. And if it's temporary, then WHO CARES?

We do return here, though relatively briefly, to the Gordon/Dana/Casey/Sally business that's been on a simmer. After Casey half-accuses Sally of having Natalie passed over, Sally says, "You know, for someone I'm sleeping with, you don't say the nicest things to me." I really do wish that she'd been allowed to not be quite so wounded. It irks me that Casey and Dan have both, over two episodes, played out the "don't forget that it hurts women if you sleep with them and aren't nice enough afterwards" routine. It feels a little retro, the idea that women always need to be sent flowers and so forth. Sometimes, women don't care about you, either.

Also, this is what makes me like Casey less. When he says, "How many people know about us?" the implication is clear. And the implication is, "You'd better not be telling people." As I said last time, it is a basic violation of the respect you owe the people you're sleeping with to communicate to them that you wouldn't want anyone to know on account of how other people would react. It's degrading, for lack of a fancier word, and it's a little sad when, right after that, she asks if they're sleeping together tonight as usual. It makes Sally seem desperate and grasping, which she didn't need to be. And then, of course, she freakishly overreacts to Dan's entrance, and all of a sudden, the last remaining professionally competent woman on the show is acting like a complete psycho. Fan-TAS-tic.

I can't bring myself to get all upset about the “We're women” speech Dana gives at the end, which sounds like nothing no woman would ever say. Women pretend everything is fine, while men air all their fears? What planet are they producing this sports show on, anyway?

At any rate, this is all setup for the final three episodes of the season: “Ten Wickets,” “Napoleon's Battle Plan,” and the season closer, “What Kind Of Day Has It Been?” Look for things to get a lot trickier over the course of those three episodes.

Thanks again, Linda. Again, my hope is to find some time to watch and write about all three remaining episodes in one post sometime before the end of the month. You won't know when (because I don't), but keep watching the skies.

What did everybody else think?
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The Wire, Season 2, Episode 12: "Port in a Storm" (Newbies edition)

And so we've come to the end of our look back at "The Wire" season two, and that means it's the last time (for this summer, anyway) that I'll have to tell you that we're doing this in two slightly different versions: one for people who have watched the entire series and want to discuss it from beginning to end, and one for people who've only gotten through season two (or, at least, haven't made it all the way to the finish line) and don't want to be spoiled. This is the newbie version; click here for the veteran edition.

Spoilers for the season two finale, "Port in a Storm," coming up just as soon as I look at a table full of heads...
"The world just keeps turning, right? You guys move onto something new. No one looks back." -Beadie
"Always" is a word that comes up several times in "Port in a Storm." The episode's epigraph is of The Greek, amused, telling an airline ticket clerk that his travels are about "Business. Always business." When Prop Joe expresses concern about the dope Vondas is leaving on the docks, Vondas assures him, "Always, there is more." And when Avon is lecturing Stringer about how the rules of business school can't always be applied to the drug business, he tells him, "The street is the street... always."

David Simon (who co-wrote the script with Ed Burns) is a former newspaperman who chooses and uses words carefully. There's a point to that repetition of "always," and that point is driven home in the closing montage(*): There is no changing any of this. No matter how clever or well-meaning the cops might be, there will always be men like The Greek ready to exploit human weakness. There will always be people looking to buy and sell guns, and drugs, and even human beings. There will always be little guys left behind by progress. There will always be toughs and gangsters and soldiers, and there will always be a new case for people like Lester and Bunk to move on to, no matter how hard that is to process for someone as relatively un-jaded as Beadie Russell.

(*) This season's montage brought to you by Steve Earle's "I Feel Alright."

There's a sense of hopelessness throughout "Port in a Storm," which is structured much like season one's finale, "Sentencing." The detail gets some mid-level players, but the big targets get away, and it's clear that our heroes didn't even make a dent in things. The FBI's presence causes more problems than it solves, the death of a key witness (Wallace last year, Frank this year) prevents the detail from getting to the major players, and a talented investigator (first Jimmy, now Beadie) is wasted aimlessly driving a vehicle around the port. And there's also time devoted to setting up the following season's storyline, as Bubbs turns Kima and Jimmy onto Joe and Stringer's new business arrangement.

But in many ways, it's even grimmer than "Sentencing." While it seemed obvious that Frank was walking to his death at the end of "Bad Dreams," we (and Beadie, and the stevedores) still have to get an up close and personal look at his mutilated corpse. (And damn if his eyes don't seem to be looking right at Beadie, even as Chris Bauer is doing a good job of playing dead.) And where the season one montage at least climaxed with a laughing Omar - the one character on the show who follows the rules of more traditional filmed entertainment, and the one allowed to exist outside The Game - sticking up a drug dealer, here we end on a grieving Nick shuffling through the rain, trailed by the U.S. Marshal who's preparing him for a new life far away from the one he's always known.

As I asked last year at this time, why do we watch this show if it's going to give us nothing but tragedy and despair? And as I answered myself, we watch it because it's so profound, and moving, and funny, and well-acted, and thrilling even as we know things aren't going to end well except for the worst of the worst.

This was a controversial season at the time it aired, and it remains one. The port story was such a jarring shift from the drug case of season one. And (don't worry, newbies, I'll be vague here) most of these characters will be ignored, or only seen briefly, in later seasons, creating the sense that this season had little to do with the larger picture of the series.

Me? I love season two. The performances by people like Chris Bauer, Al Brown and James Ransone are among the best the show will feature in roles big or small. Sobotka is one of the more complex characters on a series that prides itself on giving depth to even the worst people (like Vondas' affection for Nick). There are so many standout moments from this year that come to mind when I look back on "The Wire" as a whole, whether it's Ziggy struggling to light his cigarette after killing Double-G, or Frank under the bridge, or Brother Mouzone going all Dirty Harry on Cheese, or Jimmy trying to recreate his car accident.

And whether or not the stevedores factor into the narrative down the road, I think this season is just as important thematically as any other. This is not just a show about drugs, or cops, or gangsters. It's about a city, and it's about America, and it's about showing how the system is letting so many people down, whether they're black dope slingers like Bodie or underemployed white guys like Nick.

But even if you want to focus on the drugs, season two is an essential part of the puzzle. Season one is about how a drug crew operates, and later seasons will show how cops and politicians have failed to adequately deal with the drug problem, how kids grow up to be soldiers, and how the media's failure to cover this (and the public's disinterest in the small bits of coverage) allows the problem to perpetuate itself. Here, meanwhile, we get a sense of how the drugs come into the country in the first place, and how men like Vondas and The Greek enable men like Stringer and Prop Joe. Like the poster says, it's all connected, and even if Nick Sobotka and D'Angelo Barksdale never got to meet before one went into witness protection and the other was killed, their lives were as intertwined as they were parallel to one another.

And because "The Wire" on so many levels is a critique of a purely capitalist society, attention must be paid to a season in which the chief villains represent capitalism at its purest and most cruel. They're fake - Vondas is using an alias, The Greek isn't really Greek, the rosary beads are just an affectation and not something he cares about, etc. - in every way but one: they will do anything and hurt anyone to keep the money rolling in.

Always.

Because I've been on vacation most of this week, and because I've hit a lot of the larger plot and thematic issues in my reviews of the previous episodes, let's move straight to the bullet points:

• Getting back to the idea that Frank's death prevents the detail from nabbing Vondas and The Greek, does it really? I know it seems that way, but even if he had shown up at the detail office the next morning, he doesn't know The Greek's name, nor Vondas' real name, nor does he know what hotel they could be found at. They only discover the correct hotel because Lester and Bunk are able to scare Sergei with the death penalty, and the timetable on them gathering all the evidence to make that work wasn't really affected by Frank's death, was it? Nick gives them the Philly info on the same day Frank would have.

• The focus on the port story meant that some of season one's characters got short shrift. Omar is gone for most of the season's mid-point, and the finale is the first we've seen of Bubbs and Johnny in a long time. Meanwhile, the appearance by Detective-turned-Officer Santangelo leaves Sydnor as the only surviving season one character of note to not pop up at any point this season.

• One minor quibble with the finale, though I acknowledge it's something that had to be glossed over given everything else that was happening: given the difficulty the detail had even finding, let alone tailing, Stringer and Avon a season ago, how did Kima and Jimmy get a tail on Prop Joe and/or Stringer so easily?

• Though Valchek may be the petty bastard who set much of this tragedy in motion, and though his absolution of Prez is tied up in his own pride (the apology letters have to explain that Stan could only be hurt by a sucker punch), he does have a very human moment when he looks at the latest photo of the surveillance van and realizes he did, in fact, have some affection for Frank. Can anybody translate what he says in Polish at the end of that scene?

• Robert Colesberry, the series' lead non-writing producer, made his directorial debut on this episode after a long and distinguished career behind the scenes, but not behind the camera, in movies and TV. As the man whom David Simon credits the most with helping come up with the series' visual style, Colesberry unsurprisingly was a natural in his first stint in the director's chair; I especially love the shot of the stevedores standing over Frank's corpse, and the way Nick's confession to the cops is shot with Frank's photo directly over his shoulder, with the shot shifting focus between the living nephew and the dead uncle at various points. Tragically, Colesberry - who also dabbled in acting on the show as bumbling Homicide veteran Ray Cole - died before season three really got up and running.

• Frank's death, and Ziggy's incarceration, and the disintegration of the union are among the season's bigger tragedies, but on some level I'm just as upset at that shot of Beadie driving aimlessly through the stacks. She went from someone who didn't know or care much about being a real cop to someone who displayed a real talent, and at times passion, for investigation. Emotionally, she's probably better off - the crimes always weighed harder on her than they did on the rest of the detail - but it still seems like a waste.

• I wouldn't call Pablo Schreiber a weak link exactly, but because the show's casting is so uniformly good, and because most of the other actors come across so naturally, Schreiber's more mannered performance as Nick often seemed a half-step out of sync. But the man really brings it in the finale, both with the rage burning in Nick's eyes as he sits in Frank's trailer and thinks about killing Vondas to the anguish on his face as he stands at that fence and contemplates his past and his future.

• As I said when Agent Koutris first appeared, some fans initially believed that he was corrupt. But the idea was always supposed to be that he was an honest agent who had done a moral calculus and decided the intel he thought he was getting from The Greek was worth more than whatever crimes The Greek committed because Koutris kept him on the street. The fact that Fitz is mad at himself, but not at Koutris, once he realizes what happened, suggests that this is just the way things work at the Bureau.

• One of my favorite things about the storytelling style that Simon, Burns and Colesberry created is that they're happy to simply stop and show characters thinking. There's a lovely extra beat after Stringer asks Brother Mouzone who shot him, and you can see the very sharp Brother wondering why Avon's number two is so curious.

• Again, the show is always very fair about seeing multiple sides of issues. Even though it's very clear that the writers are in favor of the patient, cerebral Ed Burns style of policing, and even though Herc and Carver are supposed to represent the reckless, pointless head-busting approach that's largely ruined the Baltimore PD, their frustration at having to play pack mule for the detail is understandable - and funny. I think anyone would be justified in asking for a transfer after spending an entire case doing the scutwork - note who had to do all the hard labor for the warrants judge a few episodes back - and after being left sitting on Nick's house long after Nick had turned himself in to a member of the detail.

• The brief scene at Daniels' home confirms what was already clear back when he assumed responsibilities for the 14 Jane Does in "Backwash." His marriage to Marla is over in everything but name, as he's now sleeping in a spare room and she couldn't possibly be colder to him. The irony, of course, is that Daniels' unit did turn those 14 red names to black, and in the process boosted his standing with Burrell and Rawls, but Marla has already decided that the man running the newly-official Major Crimes Unit is not the man she thought she married.

• The scene where Louis Sobotka shows up at Frank's trailer and tells Nick "Let's go" is a real testament to the economy with which "The Wire" creates characters. Here's a guy who's had only a handful of scenes throughout the season, but we know him (and we know the Sobotka family) well enough by this point that it's a big moment when he tells his son it's time to stop messing around and face the consequences of what he's done.

Well, it's been fun. With any luck, we can finish up the series next summer with a look back through season three, which was the last one to air before I started my second career as a blogger.

What did everybody else think?
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The Wire, Season 2, Episode 12: "Port in a Storm" (Veterans edition)

And so we've come to the end of our look back at "The Wire" season two, and that means it's the last time (for this summer, anyway) that I'll have to tell you that we're doing this in two slightly different versions: one for people who have watched the entire series and want to discuss it from beginning to end, and one for people who've only gotten through season two (or, at least, haven't made it all the way to the finish line) and don't want to be spoiled. This is the veteran version; click here for the newbie edition.

Spoilers for the season two finale, "Port in a Storm," coming up just as soon as I look at a table full of heads...
"The world just keeps turning, right? You guys move onto something new. No one looks back." -Beadie
"Always" is a word that comes up several times in "Port in a Storm." The episode's epigraph is of The Greek, amused, telling an airline ticket clerk that his travels are about "Business. Always business." When Prop Joe expresses concern about the dope Vondas is leaving on the docks, Vondas assures him, "Always, there is more." And when Avon is lecturing Stringer about how the rules of business school can't always be applied to the drug business, he tells him, "The street is the street... always."

David Simon (who co-wrote the script with Ed Burns) is a former newspaperman who chooses and uses words carefully. There's a point to that repetition of "always," and that point is driven home in the closing montage(*): There is no changing any of this. No matter how clever or well-meaning the cops might be, there will always be men like The Greek ready to exploit human weakness. There will always be people looking to buy and sell guns, and drugs, and even human beings. There will always be little guys left behind by progress. There will always be toughs and gangsters and soldiers, and there will always be a new case for people like Lester and Bunk to move on to, no matter how hard that is to process for someone as relatively un-jaded as Beadie Russell.

(*) This season's montage brought to you by Steve Earle's "I Feel Alright."

There's a sense of hopelessness throughout "Port in a Storm," which is structured much like season one's finale, "Sentencing." The detail gets some mid-level players, but the big targets get away, and it's clear that our heroes didn't even make a dent in things. The FBI's presence causes more problems than it solves, the death of a key witness (Wallace last year, Frank this year) prevents the detail from getting to the major players, and a talented investigator (first Jimmy, now Beadie) is wasted aimlessly driving a vehicle around the port. And there's also time devoted to setting up the following season's storyline, as Bubbs turns Kima and Jimmy onto Joe and Stringer's new business arrangement.

But in many ways, it's even grimmer than "Sentencing." While it seemed obvious that Frank was walking to his death at the end of "Bad Dreams," we (and Beadie, and the stevedores) still have to get an up close and personal look at his mutilated corpse. (And damn if his eyes don't seem to be looking right at Beadie, even as Chris Bauer is doing a good job of playing dead.) And where the season one montage at least climaxed with a laughing Omar - the one character on the show who follows the rules of more traditional filmed entertainment, and the one allowed to exist outside The Game - sticking up a drug dealer, here we end on a grieving Nick shuffling through the rain, trailed by the U.S. Marshal who's preparing him for a new life far away from the one he's always known.

As I asked last year at this time, why do we watch this show if it's going to give us nothing but tragedy and despair? And as I answered myself, we watch it because it's so profound, and moving, and funny, and well-acted, and thrilling even as we know things aren't going to end well except for the worst of the worst.

This was a controversial season at the time it aired, and it remains one. The port story was such a jarring shift from the drug case of season one. And (don't worry, newbies, I'll be vague here) most of these characters will be ignored, or only seen briefly, in later seasons, creating the sense that this season had little to do with the larger picture of the series.

Me? I love season two. The performances by people like Chris Bauer, Al Brown and James Ransone are among the best the show will feature in roles big or small. Sobotka is one of the more complex characters on a series that prides itself on giving depth to even the worst people (like Vondas' affection for Nick). There are so many standout moments from this year that come to mind when I look back on "The Wire" as a whole, whether it's Ziggy struggling to light his cigarette after killing Double-G, or Frank under the bridge, or Brother Mouzone going all Dirty Harry on Cheese, or Jimmy trying to recreate his car accident.

And whether or not the stevedores factor into the narrative down the road, I think this season is just as important thematically as any other. This is not just a show about drugs, or cops, or gangsters. It's about a city, and it's about America, and it's about showing how the system is letting so many people down, whether they're black dope slingers like Bodie or underemployed white guys like Nick.

But even if you want to focus on the drugs, season two is an essential part of the puzzle. Season one is about how a drug crew operates, and later seasons will show how cops and politicians have failed to adequately deal with the drug problem, how kids grow up to be soldiers, and how the media's failure to cover this (and the public's disinterest in the small bits of coverage) allows the problem to perpetuate itself. Here, meanwhile, we get a sense of how the drugs come into the country in the first place, and how men like Vondas and The Greek enable men like Stringer and Prop Joe. Like the poster says, it's all connected, and even if Nick Sobotka and D'Angelo Barksdale never got to meet before one went into witness protection and the other was killed, their lives were as intertwined as they were parallel to one another.

And because "The Wire" on so many levels is a critique of a purely capitalist society, attention must be paid to a season in which the chief villains represent capitalism at its purest and most cruel. They're fake - Vondas is using an alias, The Greek isn't really Greek, the rosary beads are just an affectation and not something he cares about, etc. - in every way but one: they will do anything and hurt anyone to keep the money rolling in.

Always.

Because I've been on vacation most of this week, and because I've hit a lot of the larger plot and thematic issues in my reviews of the previous episodes, let's move straight to the bullet points:

• Getting back to the idea that Frank's death prevents the detail from nabbing Vondas and The Greek, does it really? I know it seems that way, but even if he had shown up at the detail office the next morning, he doesn't know The Greek's name, nor Vondas' real name, nor does he know what hotel they could be found at. They only discover the correct hotel because Lester and Bunk are able to scare Sergei with the death penalty, and the timetable on them gathering all the evidence to make that work wasn't really affected by Frank's death, was it? Nick gives them the Philly info on the same day Frank would have.

• The focus on the port story meant that some of season one's characters got short shrift. Omar is gone for most of the season's mid-point, and the finale is the first we've seen of Bubbs and Johnny in a long time. Meanwhile, the appearance by Detective-turned-Officer Santangelo leaves Sydnor as the only surviving season one character of note to not pop up at any point this season.

• One minor quibble with the finale, though I acknowledge it's something that had to be glossed over given everything else that was happening: given the difficulty the detail had even finding, let alone tailing, Stringer and Avon a season ago, how did Kima and Jimmy get a tail on Prop Joe and/or Stringer so easily?

• Though Valchek may be the petty bastard who set much of this tragedy in motion, and though his absolution of Prez is tied up in his own pride (the apology letters have to explain that Stan could only be hurt by a sucker punch), he does have a very human moment when he looks at the latest photo of the surveillance van and realizes he did, in fact, have some affection for Frank. Can anybody translate what he says in Polish at the end of that scene?

• Robert Colesberry, the series' lead non-writing producer, made his directorial debut on this episode after a long and distinguished career behind the scenes, but not behind the camera, in movies and TV. As the man whom David Simon credits the most with helping come up with the series' visual style, Colesberry unsurprisingly was a natural in his first stint in the director's chair; I especially love the shot of the stevedores standing over Frank's corpse, and the way Nick's confession to the cops is shot with Frank's photo directly over his shoulder, with the shot shifting focus between the living nephew and the dead uncle at various points. Tragically, Colesberry - who also dabbled in acting on the show as bumbling Homicide veteran Ray Cole - died before season three really got up and running.

• Frank's death, and Ziggy's incarceration, and the disintegration of the union are among the season's bigger tragedies, but on some level I'm just as upset at that shot of Beadie driving aimlessly through the stacks. She went from someone who didn't know or care much about being a real cop to someone who displayed a real talent, and at times passion, for investigation. Emotionally, she's probably better off - the crimes always weighed harder on her than they did on the rest of the detail - but it still seems like a waste.

• I wouldn't call Pablo Schreiber a weak link exactly, but because the show's casting is so uniformly good, and because most of the other actors come across so naturally, Schreiber's more mannered performance as Nick often seemed a half-step out of sync. But the man really brings it in the finale, both with the rage burning in Nick's eyes as he sits in Frank's trailer and thinks about killing Vondas to the anguish on his face as he stands at that fence and contemplates his past and his future.

• As I said when Agent Koutris first appeared, some fans initially believed that he was corrupt. But the idea was always supposed to be that he was an honest agent who had done a moral calculus and decided the intel he thought he was getting from The Greek was worth more than whatever crimes The Greek committed because Koutris kept him on the street. The fact that Fitz is mad at himself, but not at Koutris, once he realizes what happened, suggests that this is just the way things work at the Bureau.

• One of my favorite things about the storytelling style that Simon, Burns and Colesberry created is that they're happy to simply stop and show characters thinking. There's a lovely extra beat after Stringer asks Brother Mouzone who shot him, and you can see the very sharp Brother wondering why Avon's number two is so curious.

• Again, the show is always very fair about seeing multiple sides of issues. Even though it's very clear that the writers are in favor of the patient, cerebral Ed Burns style of policing, and even though Herc and Carver are supposed to represent the reckless, pointless head-busting approach that's largely ruined the Baltimore PD, their frustration at having to play pack mule for the detail is understandable - and funny. I think anyone would be justified in asking for a transfer after spending an entire case doing the scutwork - note who had to do all the hard labor for the warrants judge a few episodes back - and after being left sitting on Nick's house long after Nick had turned himself in to a member of the detail.

• The brief scene at Daniels' home confirms what was already clear back when he assumed responsibilities for the 14 Jane Does in "Backwash." His marriage to Marla is over in everything but name, as he's now sleeping in a spare room and she couldn't possibly be colder to him. The irony, of course, is that Daniels' unit did turn those 14 red names to black, and in the process boosted his standing with Burrell and Rawls, but Marla has already decided that the man running the newly-official Major Crimes Unit is not the man she thought she married.

• The scene where Louis Sobotka shows up at Frank's trailer and tells Nick "Let's go" is a real testament to the economy with which "The Wire" creates characters. Here's a guy who's had only a handful of scenes throughout the season, but we know him (and we know the Sobotka family) well enough by this point that it's a big moment when he tells his son it's time to stop messing around and face the consequences of what he's done.

And for the final time this season, here come some veterans-only thoughts on how the events of this episode will play out through the rest of the series.

• As alluded to above, this is the last we'll see of most of the port characters in any kind of significant role. Beadie gets involved with McNulty, and Vondas and The Greek come back into play with Marlo and Joe in the final season, but aside from brief season five cameos by a now-homeless Johnny 50 and by Nick protesting the opening of new waterfront condos, we're done with these people. And to reiterate a point from that Nick cameo, David Simon told me that the idea was Nick left the witness protection program, as many people do, because he missed his old life; if Vondas or The Greek know he's back in Baltimore, they don't much care, because the case is years old and they feel confident they can get out of town quickly should any new problems arise.

• Vondas' "My name is not my name" line works as the antithesis of Marlo's "My name is my name!" speech from season five, and nicely illustrates the difference between the two organizations. Vondas and The Greek care only for money, where Marlo's primary concern is power and respect. Marlo's name is all he cares about; Vondas' name is just a tool to use so he can remain anonymous and count his cash.

• And getting back to Johnny 50's homeless future, I wonder if Simon and company had that in mind at all with the brief clip during the montage of Lala dragging a plastered Johnny away from a corner. With the union taken over by the feds, with his two best friends either in jail or in witness protection, and with the general level of alcoholism among the stevedores, it's not at all hard to imagine Johnny climbing inside a bottle for a few years and emerging to find himself living in a shanty town.

• The Major Crimes Unit becomes a more or less permanent thing, and will operate out of that off-site building in the Southeastern for the rest of the series' run.

• Once again, we see a police document referring to Cheese's last name as "Flagstaff," when in season four it will become Wagstaff to tie him to unacknowledged son Randy.

• Carver and Herc leave for the Western district, where Carver will learn how to be a good cop from Bunny Colvin, and where Herc will stay ignorant as ever.

Well, it's been fun. With any luck, we can finish up the series next summer with a look back through season three, which was the last one to air before I started my second career as a blogger.

What did everybody else think?
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Monday, August 24, 2009

Nurse Jackie: Season one post-mortem with Liz Brixius and Linda Wallem

When I was at press tour earlier this month, I spent a few minutes talking to "Nurse Jackie" showrunners Liz Brixius (she's the tall one on the left) and Linda Wallem (on the right) about some unanswered questions from the first season (click here for my review of the season finale) and where they see the show going next year. Our conversation coming right up...

Something that's come up with a lot of my readers is about the logistics and the reasons behind Jackie keeping her family a secret from the folks at the hospital. How does she do this? She's been there forever and the kids are not that old. Presumably, she was pregnant at some point.

Brixius: ER nurses, the ones that Linda and I spoke with, you'll do maybe 3 years at St. Luke's, then go up to Harlem and do a thing, then go down to Bellevue. All Saints isn't going to have her entire history.

Wallem: I think people were thrown off by the (Judith Ivey) episode, they thought they had worked together for years. They had, but not necessarily at that hospital. And from our own experience of not being sober, what you do is you compartmentalize with your lies. It fuels the drama. You like to keep things separate. Season two, it's going to be a little harder for her to do that.

Brixius: It's not particularly original for us to say it, but if you build a better mousetrap, you get a smarter mouse. It's fun to watch Jackie navigate her own contraption.

How much, in your minds, does Jackie actually care about Eddie, and how much is she just using him to get the pills?

Brixius: She loves him. That's the complicated part of it all. People will say, 'Well, why would she (do that) with this amazing husband at home?' But you know what happens? You go to work in an ER, and it's like a tour of duty. You're watching people die, every single day, watching people come in with their guts spilled out. All you want to do is save their lives, and you can't go home and tell your husband who runs the bar that this is what your day was, and expect him to understand. But the guy next door in the pharmacy, he was there when you were trying to keep someone out of pain.

Wallem: But also part of being an addict is, whether it's a pill or a drink or a person, more is better. We both have that experience in our sordid past in the '80s.

Well, also the episode where we found out they were high school sweethearts, that clicked something for me: Okay, he's perfect, but it's been forever.

Wallem: Right, and we were trying to have fun also, that Eddie connects with her in an intellectual way.

Brixius: They have conversations about quantum physics.

Wallem: So it's kind of fun that - again, more is better.

First year of a show, there's a learning curve. Are there certain things that, looking back, you thought, 'This really worked, maybe this didn't, maybe more of this, less of that'?

Brixius: No. I think that the show taught us what it was as we were doing it. We had a few pre-conceived notions, like, for example, Zoey was going to be more of a traditional protege, O'Hara was going to be an icy blonde American clinician. When these actors came in, they nailed it in ways that we hadn't imagined, and then the way they inhabited the characters informed what Linda and I saw going forward. So, we don't ever go very far down the road in terms of something we think isn't going to work. We're just following our guts, and that tends to work out nicely.

Wallem: And we were blessed with Showtime's guidance on this. (Network president Robert) Greenblatt is amazing, we get great notes from him.

Brixius: He's guardrails, so we don't go off the road. He'll let us go a while, but he'll put up guardrails if he needs to. Every once in a while he'll go, 'My experience says that won't work, take it another direction.'

The one character who has come under a microscope is Akalitus. It seems like a lot of her stuff is tonally quite different from everything that's happening on the show. Is that something you've noticed? And are you comfortable with that?

Wallem: We are, and it's fun to us because Anna Deavere is an actress who usually plays characters that are so serious. I think you're going to find out more about her next season. Yeah, there were times we tended to get a little wacky with her, but gosh, we had a blast with her.

Brixius: And we like the wackiness, because what we're trying to do in a half an hour is convey the total absurdity of what an emergency room is like. You can't have Jackie play absurd, because Edie's not an absurd actress, ever. O'Hara has her own levels of absurdity, Zoey has her kind, but everything they deal with was very dire. So if you need comic relief, a really fun and surprising place to get it from would not necessarily be the hospital administrator, because that's a little on the Hot Lips (from "M*A*S*H") side, but if Anna Deavere Smith is playing that, it goes against any expectation you've ever had of her, and she's genius. So it's fun.

The actress you got to play the older daughter, Grace, is so good.

Wallem: Isn't she amazing? Ruby. She amazes us. To be able to grasp what's going on, that young. We are thrilled with her.

And she has me very worried, though. I watch her watching her mom sing "Up On the Roof" and I think, "Uh-oh."

Wallem: I know. And next season, we're dealing more with the anxiety. What do you do with a kid who has this anxiety disorder? We've gotten a lot of feedback from parents whose kids (have it), and they've been very thankful. We were bent on not doing your typical cute, well-scrubbed kids. We're really pleased with how they came out.

Thematically, what would you say the story of this season was, and what territory do you want to explore next year?

Brixius: Thematically, this let us introduce to you the chaos of an ER through this one woman's life. That was it. Opening up what that world is. Next year is...

Wallem: ...more of her life. It's what she has to do...

Brixius: ...to deal with the consequences of season one.
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'Nurse Jackie' season finale review - Sepinwall on TV

In today's column, I look back over the first season of "Nurse Jackie," which ends tonight starting at 10:30(*). I'm on vacation, but in lieu of a finale blog post, I have the transcript of my conversation with showrunners Linda Wallem and Liz Brixius set to go live right after the finale.

(*) And yes, I'm aware the finale has already aired On Demand, but we're following the air schedule, so no commenting on the episode until tonight at 11, after the interview post goes up. Click here to read the full post

Sunday, August 23, 2009

Mad Men, "Love Among the Ruins": A change is gonna come

A review of "Mad Men" season three, episode two coming up just as soon as I enjoy a drink that sounds like a floor...
"Let's also say that change is neither good or bad. It simply is. It can be greeted with terror or joy: a tantrum that says, 'I want it the way it was,' or a dance that says, 'Look, it's something new.'" -Don Draper
The '60s are famous as a decade of great social change. So far, "Mad Men" has taken place on the front side of that change, but now that we're in 1963 - and now that we see that Roger Sterling's daughter is scheduled to be married the day after John F. Kennedy will be assassinated - we know that seismic changes are coming, both to Sterling Cooper and the world it tries to depict in its advertising.

But the shot of Margaret's wedding invitation aside, the changes people are either struggling against or embracing in "Love Among the Ruins" are on a smaller scale. The Draper/Hofstadt families are grappling with a new dynamic where Gene has to be treated like a child rather than the patriarch. Peggy wants to change the way her business works when it comes to selling to women, but in the end settles for changing her approach to men (even if just for a night). Roger doesn't understand why his marriage to Jane has irrevocably changed all of his personal relationships, and the new British overlords of Sterling Cooper don't seem to want to change their old business model to accommodate the new thinking of their American colleagues.

But as Don tells the Madison Square Garden representative, change is inevitable. The seasons change (and Don enjoys the feel of fresh grass under his fingers as he watches Sally and her teacher dance around the maypole), attitudes change and relationships change. You can't stop it. So the best thing you can do is find a way to make your life work around the change.

Don, despite his slip with the stewardess last week, is still making an effort to change, and to be a better husband to Betty. We know he didn't get along with Gene even before senility became an issue, and yet when he sees Betty wracked with guilt over the idea of her brother and sister-in-law becoming her father's caretakers, he goes alpha male and assumes control of the situation to make his wife feel better. William notes that Don has no family, had no people at the wedding, and in previous seasons Betty has complained that Don shows no interest in making her family his own. In this instance, he's willing to bring Betty's father permanently into his home because he knows it will make her happier. It's one of the more generous impulses Don has had of late. (Though even it's bolstered somewhat by a negative emotion, since Don dislikes William and takes obvious pleasure in sending his family back to Philadelphia without the Lincoln.)

And then Gene's midnight mental trip back to the days of Prohibition (he hears a police siren in the distance and assumes it's a liquor raid) makes both Don and Betty realize that having Gene live with them may be a much more drastic change than they had anticipated. Yet the situation isn't all bad; you get the sense that Don and Betty are happy to have Gene there for the family photo after Sally's dance.

At work, Don has a relatively easy time fixing things with the MSG people after Paul turns his pitch into an outraged ode to old Penn Station. But he has a much harder time understanding why Pryce's bosses back in London can't see how valuable the deal will be for Sterling Cooper long-term. During our interview about the season premiere, Matt Weiner said this about the folks from PP&L:
The British have come here because we're great. They're redefining how things are done. But at the same time, they feel everyone needs a parent. That's their attitude.
Here, they're being too much the parent who knows best, when they should be recognizing that the son has a broader range of vision than they do. I suspect this is not the first time Pryce has butted heads with Don, nor will it be the last. (Though I hope this doesn't turn into a Richie/Ralphie situation where every season, Weiner brings in a new money man to cause Don problems, and not just because Jared Harris' accent is too good not to keep.)

But if Don can't bring Pryce and the Brits around to his way of thinking, he does eventually get through to Peggy on the subject of Patio. Though Peggy is now comfortable enough to openly disagree with Don (in one-on-one situations, at least), he's still her mentor and professional role model, and you can see how disappointed she is when he's just as turned on by Ann-Margret singing "Bye Bye Birdie" (he says it "makes your heart hurt") as the more callow likes of Pete and Harry.

Where Peggy is understandably interested in pushing to change the way Sterling Cooper sells products to women, she has the bad luck to catch Don in a bad mood. (Just as poor Pete did at the end of "Flight 1" last season.) Demoralized after the meeting with Pryce, Don bluntly tells her, "You're not an artist, Peggy. You solve problems. Leave some tools in your toolbox."

Now, since she gave up the baby, Peggy has deliberately walked her own proto-feminist path. She's now at the point where she doesn't understand a woman like Joan any more than Joan understands her. But frustrated first by this account, and then at not getting approval from Don, and at constantly having to deal with the sexism of her time and workplace, she decides to see how the other half lives. First there's her Ann-Margret pantomime in the bedroom mirror, and I love how Elisabeth Moss just turns the teenage girl thing on and off like she's flipping a switch. And then, satisfied that she can play the role, she picks up a college boy at the local bar. They're roughly the same age, but she seems years older than him (and certainly more sexually experienced), and she certainly never wants to see him again. But at the same time, there's sincerity in her voice - as much as you can read anything into the show's most inscrutable character - when she tells the kid, "This was fun." Might this evening lead her to a more carefree personal life? Whether it does or not, the experience allows her to set aside whatever irritation she feels for Don(*), and the next morning she's back in his office, just another colleague, the previous day's conflict forgotten.

(*) When Peggy is pretending to be the dumb secretary for the college boy and complains, "My boss is a jerk,"she seems to be using her real current issues with Don to enhance the performance.

I find it really funny that Peggy borrows Joan's joke about the subway in the same episode where Roger confronts Don about their estrangement, since I thoroughly believe that Don is as mad at Roger about stealing his "move forward" line to use in dumping Mona as he is that Roger violated Don's various codes about privacy and personal ethics by hooking up with Jane. Don may be a problem-solver some days, but in his heart he's an artist, and he just won't tolerate plagiarism of his words.

Aside from maybe Harry Crane, Roger is the character on the show who most strongly symbolizes the side that's going to be left behind in the cultural revolution. (Even Bert Cooper seems more forward-thinking; if nothing else, he was in on the Hentai boom decades early with that octopus painting.) Roger doesn't think about the future because he's too busy thinking about himself. He irrevocably transformed his life by leaving Mona for Jane, but he expects everything to more or less remain the same. He doesn't think Don should feel betrayed by Roger using him as the excuse (and the words) to leave his wife. He expects Margaret to be happy and smiling and eager to welcome homewrecker Jane into the family. He even expects Mona to make some pretense of being nice to him.

Roger wants things the way they were, not the way they are, nor the way they'll become. And because we know his daughter's wedding is scheduled for November 23, and that JFK will be killed on November 22, we know Roger's going to get an up close and personal view of one of the most transformative moments in our country's history. Knowing Roger - and knowing what Matt Weiner told me about the way history is viewed by the people living through it - we're going to see Roger too wrapped up in the ruin of his daughter's wedding to notice the larger story.

Some other thoughts on "Love Among the Ruins":

• Patio was, indeed, the awful first name of Diet Pepsi, though it only lasted into 1964. I can only assume that the commercials featured a Chevy Chase type explaining that "It's a floor wax and a diet cola!"

• It's always funny to watch Michael Gladis play Paul as the youngest old man in New York, but in this case, history will have proven Paul right, as the outrage over the dismantling of Penn Station (you can see a picture of the old interior here) will lead to the creation of the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission.

• I'm also amused whenever whenever Pete goes all Dychman blue blood whenever he's in the presence of people who come from old money. In many ways, Pete's similar to Don; he doesn't really know how to be a human being, but he can fake it in the right situations if he can remember which persona to adopt.

• Born in Indiana but largely raised in South Africa, Embeth Davidtz is one of those actresses where I'm never quite clear what her real accent sounds like. But she fits in nicely next to Jared Harris as Pryce's wife Rebecca, and seems just the kind of brittle, overly-cultured type who would make Betty feel uncomfortable (and inadequate) around.

• I can't be the only viewer who gets angry at the merest mention of Joan's husband, can I? It appears that he's only allowing Joan to keep working at Sterling Cooper until he gets promoted to chief resident, at which point he becomes the breadwinner and she becomes a baby machine. Grrr...

• Gene brings over steaks from Pat's, which raises the eternal question for anyone who has either lived or spent significant time in Philadelphia: Pat's, Geno's or Jim's?

• When Gene appeared last season in "The Inheritance," a number of fans pointed out actor Ryan Cutrona's resemblance to John McCain, and suggested that Matt Weiner was making some sort of commentary on the then-presidential nominee. But Cutrona had already appeared in the first season, more than a year before McCain had gotten the nomination. And now I'll remind you of the No Politics rule, and let's let this be the last that this comes up, okay?

Speaking of the commenting rules, I should say that you guys were great last week with all your comments. You pointed out things I either forget to mention or hadn't noticed, and just as importantly, you played well with each other. Even though I didn't bring up the rule about at least skimming all previous comments before posting your own, there was very little duplication among the comments. So good on ya.

That being said, iTunes recently goofed and for a few hours made next week's episode, "My Old Kentucky Home," available for download. And apparently, a number of people did download it. So it's at this point that I need to remind you about the No Spoiler policy here on the blog. Simply put, I don't want any discussion of that episode. I don't even want discussion of the previews for that episode (even though AMC's previews for the show tend to be opaque and/or misleading). Not a word. Are we clear about that? Good. And that being said...

What did everybody else think?
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Friday, August 21, 2009

Are you ready for the summer (to be over)?

We're a couple of weeks from Labor Day, and the day after that, the fall premieres begin with the likes of "Sons of Anarchy" (which will again be a regular staple on the blog) and "Melrose Place" (which will not be). To brace myself for the deluge, I'll be taking the next two weeks off, give or take a couple of days late next week. I already have a "Mad Men" post set to go Sunday night, and a couple of "Nurse Jackie" posts for Monday, and I'm going to use some of my in-office time next week to deal with "Mad Men" episode three and the final "Wire" season two review.

Beyond that, though, expect more or less radio silence from your friendly neighborhood critic between now and September 7 or 8. Catch you when I'm all vacation'ed out.

(And for those wondering, the new blog logo theme is "straight men on classic sitcoms who had the ability to be just as funny as the lunatics around them." An underrated ability, in my book.) Click here to read the full post

The Wire, Season 2, Episode 11: "Bad Dreams" (Newbies edition)

Almost to the finish line on "The Wire" season two, folks. As always, we're going to look back in two slightly different versions: one for the people who are watching the show at roughly the same pace I'm writing about it and don't want to be spoiled on what comes down the road, and one for people who have watched the entire series and want to be able to talk about all of it. This is the newbie version; click here for the veteran edition.

Spoilers for "Bad Dreams" coming up just as soon as you get me two hot dogs and a strawberry soda...
"You know what the trouble is, Brucie? We used to make s--t in this country. Build s--t. Now we just put our hand in the next guy's pocket." -Frank Sobotka
When we get to this point of each season of "The Wire," I tend to rail a lot against the screenwriting crimes committed by George Pelecanos. In season one, he killed off Wallace. Here, he sends Frank Sobotka walking to his apparent doom. In later seasons... well, you veterans are probably already cringing in memory of what Pelecanos did to your favorites.

But it's reductive to single out these penultimate/Pelecanos episodes just because they often (but not always) feature the deaths of beloved characters. Yes, the deaths hit, and they hit hard, but all the non-lethal parts of them hit nearly as hard. This is the point in each season where things that had often seemed like intellectual abstractions start to take on emotional heft - when you see how much misplaced faith Nick has put into his relationship with Vondas, when you see Beadie smile at a job well done in tailing Vondas to his hotel room, when Frank nails Bruce and the state of the American industrial economy to the wall with the line I quoted above.

David Simon likes to compare each season of "The Wire" to a novel, and Pelecanos' episodes always have the sensation of reading the last 70 or 80 pages of a really good thriller - one like, say Pelecanos' own "The Turnaround" or "The Sweet Forever." What may have taken a long time to read in the early going now flies by. You know the players, the conflicts, the stakes, and now you just want to see what happens next, and whether people come to the end you want for them or not(*). So some of the power of these episodes tends to come from their position in the season, but it also comes from the fact that Pelecanos is really, really good at this. Simon has said that in season one, several of the big moments that wound up in Pelecanos' "Cleaning Up" were originally going to be in the Simon-written finale, but George's take on them was so strong that Simon let him handle it.

(*) What's funny is that, for all the talk - including by me - about how Pelecanos and Simon are such kindred literary spirits, his books on average tend to be more optimistic than "The Wire." They're operating on a much smaller scale than what the show is doing - "Drama City," for instance, is what a season of "The Wire" would be like if it were only about Cutty - and not everyone's story turns out as well as they deserve, but the success rate is generally higher, and the overt bad guys (as opposed to the systemic problems) tend to get bumped off in the end. Pelecanos is always much more brutal to Simon's characters than he allows himself to be to his own.

Obviously, the killer sequence here comes at the very end, as Frank's fate is irrevocably changed during the long walk from his truck to where The Greek and Vondas are standing. It's a testament to how well the series has trained its audience that Pelecanos' script and Ernest Dickerson's direction can mine so much tension from a point of view montage of a fax being sent, transferred by mail cart to a secretary, and entered into a computer.

There are shows that try to get a lot of mileage out of springing surprises on their audience - only giving them a small part of the story so their minds can be blown when they find out the whole truth. "The Wire" rarely operates that way. Like the Greek dramas Simon likes to talk about, it tends to lay out everything that's going to happen well before it happens. It doesn't cheat, doesn't hide. It turns you into an omniscient observer of this world, and then it drives you crazy because you know how badly things are going to go, and when you see characters who don't know as much as you do. There are so many moments in "Bad Dreams" alone where I wanted to scream (or have screamed) at the screen, trying to warn characters about fates that in my head I know are unavoidable.

I want to tell Omar not to trust Stringer. I want to scream for Kima to pay attention to the old man in the sweater walking past her in the parking garage. I want to tell Ronnie to not let Sobotka leave the detail office under any circumstance, even if that would require Herc and Carver to entertain him with a song-and-dance number while they waited for Frank's lawyer to show up. And you know I shouted like hell the first time I saw Frank walk toward The Greek, even as I knew the info in Fitz's fax was slowly, inexorably making its way to Agent Koutris' computer.

But it's a TV show, not an interactive experience. Ronnie can't hear me any more than Stan Valchek can listen to reason, and so Frank walks out of the detail office and into the hands of a couple of ruthless international gangsters.

Dammit.

I like that even in this episode, even as Frank is being set up for what looks like a permanent fall, the show allows him the depth that marks him as one of the more complicated characters in the show's history. As Rafael Alvarez said in his comments about "Backwash," "Frank Sobotka was a very smart man who often mistook his heart for his brain." And so the show is allowed to admire Frank's ends - as it does when he puts in a hard day's work in place of Little Big Roy, and as it does when he gives Bruce a piece of his mind - even as Louis Sobotka is invited to cut right through all of Frank's self-rationalizations, and to tell him that trying to save the union doesn't justify turning Louis' son into a drug dealer. (Imagine how angry Louis would be if he knew about the role his brother played in the deaths of the Jane Does.)

An incredible performance throughout the hour, and the season, by Chris Bauer as Sobotka. He's gotten more post-"Wire" work (including his current stint on "True Blood") than someone like Larry Gilliard, but none of those parts have been as rich, as complicated, or as compelling as Frank.

As we did at this point in season one, we see the case coming together, but not as strongly as it should be. Ziggy not only killed off Double-G, he gave The Greek advance warning to clean out both the warehouse and electronics store - the latter because Jay Landsman was too tunnel-visioned to alert Lt. Daniels, or secure the scene, or do anything that might have led the detail closer to those 14 open murders. (To Landsman's credit, he at least recognizes how badly he screwed the pooch, where he wasn't quite as remorseful when he failed to alert Jimmy about a Barksdale-connected murder in season one.) They had Frank in the office, ready and willing to cooperate, but they let him go because Ronnie wasn't stubborn enough to tell Frank to call a lawyer then and there. And thus far, the only person in custody who seems willing to talk is White Mike, who probably wouldn't recognize The Greek any more than Kima did.

It'd be enough to make you cry... if, that is, "The Wire" hadn't already told you that tears won't be enough.

Some other thoughts on "Bad Dreams":

• The other major story of the episode pits our two larger-than-life bad-asses against each other, as Omar buys into Stringer's story and goes after Brother Mouzone, only to realize that the gut-shot man calmly praying to his deity couldn't possibly be the same one who tortured and mutilated Brandon. Though if Omar is savvy enough to see this, why would he believe Stringer in the first place? Butchie could smell something off about things when Joe approached him in the previous episode, and it's not like Stringer didn't have a previous face-to-face opportunity to share this information with Omar.

• The HBO.com recap of this episode takes a literal reading of Ziggy's line about how "the same blood don't flow for us, pop" and suggests that Ziggy is letting Frank know that he knows they're not biological father and son. But there have been enough mistakes in various recaps on that site over the years (on this show and on "The Sopranos") that I don't take them as gospel, and I always viewed that as a metaphor; Frank is Ziggy's father, but Ziggy inherited none of his father's abilities or temperament. Either way, a haunting scene from both Bauer and James Ransone, particularly when Frank has to watch his son walk back into the holding pen and realizes he can't protect the kid anymore from the awful fate he's trapped in. (And it's a fate that Frank set up, by putting Ziggy's cousin and best friend in business with The Greek in the first place.)

• Though nobody on the detail recognizes The Greek (they assume the man in the fancy suit must be the boss), it's still a pleasure to watch Beadie successfully tail Vondas - and, almost as importantly, to see that Bunk and the others trust her to do it. As The Bunk says, she has come a really long way from the clock-puncher we met at the start of the season.

• While The Greek seems to be utterly without emotional attachments (making him more like Stringer), it's interesting to see that number two man Vondas is (like Avon) capable of letting business be complicated by his affection for certain underlings, in this case through his odd surrogate father relationship with Nick.

• Don't blink or you'll miss David Simon as one of the reporters out for Sobotka's perp walk. He's the one shouting out, "Is it just you or is it the whole union?"

• Even amid the tragedy of this one, we get some good nickname-related humor, including Sergei lamenting, "Why always Boris?" and more wacky stevedore nicknames like Big Roy (a small guy) and Little Big Roy (a huge guy).

Coming up next: The season comes to an end with "Port in a Storm," as the detail tries to put a charge on Vondas and The Greek, while Stringer has to deal with the mess he made with Brother Mouzone.

In theory, you'll see that review a week from today. But, as mentioned in several other posts this week, I'm going to be taking some vacation days next week (and will be away for all of the following week), so no promises. Worst comes to worst, you'll get it sometime during that week after Labor Day, when I'll be back at work full-time.

What did everybody else think?
Click here to read the full post

The Wire, Season 2, Episode 11: "Bad Dreams" (Veterans edition)

Almost to the finish line on "The Wire" season two, folks. As always, we're going to look back in two slightly different versions: one for the people who are watching the show at roughly the same pace I'm writing about it and don't want to be spoiled on what comes down the road, and one for people who have watched the entire series and want to be able to talk about all of it. This is the veteran version; click here for the newbie edition.

Spoilers for "Bad Dreams" coming up just as soon as you get me two hot dogs and a strawberry soda...
"You know what the trouble is, Brucie? We used to make s--t in this country. Build s--t. Now we just put our hand in the next guy's pocket." -Frank Sobotka
When we get to this point of each season of "The Wire," I tend to rail a lot against the screenwriting crimes committed by George Pelecanos. In season one, he killed off Wallace. Here, he sends Frank Sobotka walking to his apparent doom. In later seasons... well, you veterans are probably already cringing in memory of what Pelecanos did to your favorites.

But it's reductive to single out these penultimate/Pelecanos episodes just because they often (but not always) feature the deaths of beloved characters. Yes, the deaths hit, and they hit hard, but all the non-lethal parts of them hit nearly as hard. This is the point in each season where things that had often seemed like intellectual abstractions start to take on emotional heft - when you see how much misplaced faith Nick has put into his relationship with Vondas, when you see Beadie smile at a job well done in tailing Vondas to his hotel room, when Frank nails Bruce and the state of the American industrial economy to the wall with the line I quoted above.

David Simon likes to compare each season of "The Wire" to a novel, and Pelecanos' episodes always have the sensation of reading the last 70 or 80 pages of a really good thriller - one like, say Pelecanos' own "The Turnaround" or "The Sweet Forever." What may have taken a long time to read in the early going now flies by. You know the players, the conflicts, the stakes, and now you just want to see what happens next, and whether people come to the end you want for them or not(*). So some of the power of these episodes tends to come from their position in the season, but it also comes from the fact that Pelecanos is really, really good at this. Simon has said that in season one, several of the big moments that wound up in Pelecanos' "Cleaning Up" were originally going to be in the Simon-written finale, but George's take on them was so strong that Simon let him handle it.

(*) What's funny is that, for all the talk - including by me - about how Pelecanos and Simon are such kindred literary spirits, his books on average tend to be more optimistic than "The Wire." They're operating on a much smaller scale than what the show is doing - "Drama City," for instance, is what a season of "The Wire" would be like if it were only about Cutty - and not everyone's story turns out as well as they deserve, but the success rate is generally higher, and the overt bad guys (as opposed to the systemic problems) tend to get bumped off in the end. Pelecanos is always much more brutal to Simon's characters than he allows himself to be to his own.

Obviously, the killer sequence here comes at the very end, as Frank's fate is irrevocably changed during the long walk from his truck to where The Greek and Vondas are standing. It's a testament to how well the series has trained its audience that Pelecanos' script and Ernest Dickerson's direction can mine so much tension from a point of view montage of a fax being sent, transferred by mail cart to a secretary, and entered into a computer.

There are shows that try to get a lot of mileage out of springing surprises on their audience - only giving them a small part of the story so their minds can be blown when they find out the whole truth. "The Wire" rarely operates that way. Like the Greek dramas Simon likes to talk about, it tends to lay out everything that's going to happen well before it happens. It doesn't cheat, doesn't hide. It turns you into an omniscient observer of this world, and then it drives you crazy because you know how badly things are going to go, and when you see characters who don't know as much as you do. There are so many moments in "Bad Dreams" alone where I wanted to scream (or have screamed) at the screen, trying to warn characters about fates that in my head I know are unavoidable.

I want to tell Omar not to trust Stringer. I want to scream for Kima to pay attention to the old man in the sweater walking past her in the parking garage. I want to tell Ronnie to not let Sobotka leave the detail office under any circumstance, even if that would require Herc and Carver to entertain him with a song-and-dance number while they waited for Frank's lawyer to show up. And you know I shouted like hell the first time I saw Frank walk toward The Greek, even as I knew the info in Fitz's fax was slowly, inexorably making its way to Agent Koutris' computer.

But it's a TV show, not an interactive experience. Ronnie can't hear me any more than Stan Valchek can listen to reason, and so Frank walks out of the detail office and into the hands of a couple of ruthless international gangsters.

Dammit.

I like that even in this episode, even as Frank is being set up for what looks like a permanent fall, the show allows him the depth that marks him as one of the more complicated characters in the show's history. As Rafael Alvarez said in his comments about "Backwash," "Frank Sobotka was a very smart man who often mistook his heart for his brain." And so the show is allowed to admire Frank's ends - as it does when he puts in a hard day's work in place of Little Big Roy, and as it does when he gives Bruce a piece of his mind - even as Louis Sobotka is invited to cut right through all of Frank's self-rationalizations, and to tell him that trying to save the union doesn't justify turning Louis' son into a drug dealer. (Imagine how angry Louis would be if he knew about the role his brother played in the deaths of the Jane Does.)

An incredible performance throughout the hour, and the season, by Chris Bauer as Sobotka. He's gotten more post-"Wire" work (including his current stint on "True Blood") than someone like Larry Gilliard, but none of those parts have been as rich, as complicated, or as compelling as Frank.

As we did at this point in season one, we see the case coming together, but not as strongly as it should be. Ziggy not only killed off Double-G, he gave The Greek advance warning to clean out both the warehouse and electronics store - the latter because Jay Landsman was too tunnel-visioned to alert Lt. Daniels, or secure the scene, or do anything that might have led the detail closer to those 14 open murders. (To Landsman's credit, he at least recognizes how badly he screwed the pooch, where he wasn't quite as remorseful when he failed to alert Jimmy about a Barksdale-connected murder in season one.) They had Frank in the office, ready and willing to cooperate, but they let him go because Ronnie wasn't stubborn enough to tell Frank to call a lawyer then and there. And thus far, the only person in custody who seems willing to talk is White Mike, who probably wouldn't recognize The Greek any more than Kima did.

It'd be enough to make you cry... if, that is, "The Wire" hadn't already told you that tears won't be enough.

Some other thoughts on "Bad Dreams":

• The other major story of the episode pits our two larger-than-life bad-asses against each other, as Omar buys into Stringer's story and goes after Brother Mouzone, only to realize that the gut-shot man calmly praying to his deity couldn't possibly be the same one who tortured and mutilated Brandon. Though if Omar is savvy enough to see this, why would he believe Stringer in the first place? Butchie could smell something off about things when Joe approached him in the previous episode, and it's not like Stringer didn't have a previous face-to-face opportunity to share this information with Omar.

• The HBO.com recap of this episode takes a literal reading of Ziggy's line about how "the same blood don't flow for us, pop" and suggests that Ziggy is letting Frank know that he knows they're not biological father and son. But there have been enough mistakes in various recaps on that site over the years (on this show and on "The Sopranos") that I don't take them as gospel, and I always viewed that as a metaphor; Frank is Ziggy's father, but Ziggy inherited none of his father's abilities or temperament. Either way, a haunting scene from both Bauer and James Ransone, particularly when Frank has to watch his son walk back into the holding pen and realizes he can't protect the kid anymore from the awful fate he's trapped in. (And it's a fate that Frank set up, by putting Ziggy's cousin and best friend in business with The Greek in the first place.)

• Though nobody on the detail recognizes The Greek (they assume the man in the fancy suit must be the boss), it's still a pleasure to watch Beadie successfully tail Vondas - and, almost as importantly, to see that Bunk and the others trust her to do it. As The Bunk says, she has come a really long way from the clock-puncher we met at the start of the season.

• While The Greek seems to be utterly without emotional attachments (making him more like Stringer), it's interesting to see that number two man Vondas is (like Avon) capable of letting business be complicated by his affection for certain underlings, in this case through his odd surrogate father relationship with Nick.

• Don't blink or you'll miss David Simon as one of the reporters out for Sobotka's perp walk. He's the one shouting out, "Is it just you or is it the whole union?"

• Even amid the tragedy of this one, we get some good nickname-related humor, including Sergei lamenting, "Why always Boris?" and more wacky stevedore nicknames like Big Roy (a small guy) and Little Big Roy (a huge guy).

And now we've come to the veterans-only part of the review, where we talk about how events in this episode will play out in the finale, and over the course of the series:

• Sergei will again have to suffer being called "Boris" by Marlo in season five, though as I said at the time, I felt that was an attempt at stretching out a running gag at the expense of character, as Marlo doesn't seem the type to be aware of the existence of "Rocky & Bullwinkle," let alone Boris Badenov or any other stereotypes about Russia.

• As Nick learns in the finale, Frank was a fool to listen to Vondas' pitch, because there's no way he could have made Ziggy's confession go away. That does raise the question of what would have happened without Koutris' urgent call. Maybe Frank survives that initial meet under the bridge, but Vondas gets to him once he realizes they can't make the case go away.

• Stringer, of course, has gotten far too cute with Omar and Brother Mouzone, and that will come back to bite him in season three - while leading to the greatest superhero team-up since Superman and Spider-Man took on Doctor Doom and the Parasite. In retrospect, I wonder how things would have gone down had Stringer just bluntly told Avon, "Look. You're in here. I'm out in the real world. I see how things are going. Muscle, even Brother Mouzone's muscle, isn't going to solve our long-term problem, because everybody knows we've got no product, and the only person willing to sell it to us is Joe. I've just arranged to make us a ton of money, and if you have a problem with that, we can talk about it after you've gotten out and I've handed you your cut." Or would that have just ended the partnership even sooner? It's "The Wire." You can't change the fates. I just really want to sometimes.

Coming up next: The season comes to an end with "Port in a Storm," as the detail tries to put a charge on Vondas and The Greek, while Stringer has to deal with the mess he made with Brother Mouzone.

In theory, you'll see that review a week from today. But, as mentioned in several other posts this week, I'm going to be taking some vacation days next week (and will be away for all of the following week), so no promises. Worst comes to worst, you'll get it sometime during that week after Labor Day, when I'll be back at work full-time.

What did everybody else think?
Click here to read the full post