Tag Archives: overanalyzing tv

He’s a Ghost, and He Writes to Us! Ghostwriter!

Over the summer, when some friends were over at my house for my birthday, we somehow ended up talking about the old PBS shows that you all know I love. When we talked about Ghostwriter, someone mentioned the music video the kids made to a song called “You Gotta Believe.” I said I was pretty sure it was on YouTube somewhere, broke out my computer, and sure enough, there it was.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wODIc8ohbg4]

A friend had gotten me an Amazon gift card for my birthday, so that incident inspired me to spend it on Season 1 of Ghostwriter on DVD! I just recently got around to watching it, and I have to say, it holds up REALLY well.

So, here’s where I describe the show for those of you who were not fortunate to discover this gem of public television when you were in elementary school. Ghostwriter was a live-action show set (and filmed on location) in the Fort Greene neighborhood of Brooklyn. It was about a group of pre-teen kids who were the only ones who could see a ghost they called “Ghostwriter.” Ghostwriter only appeared as swirls of color, and he communicated by rearranging letters to form words. The kids could only communicate with him by writing to him. They called themselves “The Ghostwriter Team” and, since Ghostwriter could read things that they didn’t have access to, they solved mysteries with his help. They wore black pens on string around their necks, and when they needed to get the whole team together, they called a “rally,” where they wrote “Rally” and their first initial so that Ghostwriter would carry the message to everyone.

Jamal was the first team member to see Ghostwriter. Only the audience knows this, but Ghostwriter actually came out of a book in Jamal’s basement that he and his dad knocked over when looking for a trunk for Jamal’s sister to take to college with her. Jamal was slightly full of himself but was also usually the leader and the peacemaker of the group. He lived in an old house with his parents and his awesome grandmother, Grandma CeCe, a perpetually cheerful letter carrier.

Lenni wrote songs (including “You Gotta Believe”) and raps that sound like, well, a twelve-year-old wrote them. Her widowed father was a jazz musician, and they lived in a loft apartment with a big electric keyboard. Although she wore the world’s weirdest clothes, even by early 90s standards, she was the one I wanted to be my best friend.

Alex and Gaby were siblings who lived below Lenni, behind their Salvadoran family’s bodega. They shared a bedroom and were constantly bickering, but could also be very sweet to each other. Alex loved to read mysteries, had female penpals all around the world, and tended to think in grandiose terms (like, when Jamal first suggested forming the Ghostwriter team, he wanted them to have secret video cameras in their boots). The aptly named Gaby never shut up and always wanted to be the center of attention, but she was also really observant and often picked up on things that other missed.

Tina was an aspiring filmmaker constantly found with a Camcorder. Her parents were from Vietnam and owned a tailor shop, and when Alex met her, it was love at first sight. The two of them eventually began the adorable kind of relationship that tends to happen with middle schoolers.

Rob. *sigh* Oh, Rob. Rob was my first crush, EVER. And I have to say, my eight-year-old self had good taste. He had that cute, floppy, 90s hair, and he was a very shy writer. His dad, whom he often clashed with, had just gotten out of the air force and he’d spent most of his life moving around, which made him reluctant to trust new friends. He also made REALLY bad decisions sometimes, like looking for someone in an abandoned subway tunnel or going to a hotel room alone to confront the villain. But he was awesome– when he first joined the team, everyone told him he could ask Ghostwriter anything he was wondering about, so he asked, “Is Elvis dead?” Nothing ever came of this, but I always thought that Lenni kind of had a thing for him, too.

In the second season, they introduced a couple of new team members—Hector, a kid whom Alex tutored (and who grew up to be a Real World cast member!), and Casey, Jamal’s younger cousin. That season also included the aforementioned music video, Ghostwriter traveling through time, pre-10 Things I Hate about You Julia Stiles, and, sadly, the departure of Rob, who moved to Australia. I can’t wait until that and Season 3 come out on DVD.

It aired on Sunday nights, and the format was pretty cool—before showing the new half-hour episode, they’d show the episode from the week before, so that you could either refresh yourself or see what you missed last week. Four or five episodes made up a case, and before the new episode aired, a narrator would recap the clues and facts from the previous episode. I used to write down all the clues in a casebook that I’d made and try to solve the mystery myself. Some of the mysteries were the kind of thing you’d expect middle schoolers to get involved in—a group of video gamers stealing kids’ backpacks to use their quarters to practice at the arcade, someone putting up smear fliers to sabotage Alex’s campaign for school president—but some were actually pretty intense, like Jamal being falsely accused of setting a store on fire or barrels of a hazardous chemical being buried in the community garden and making everyone sick.

The thing that really strikes me upon re-watching it is that, despite the acting not exactly being Oscar-caliber, this was a very intelligently written show for kids. Its purpose was to help kids with their writing skills, but it accomplished that in such a subtle way that I only realize now what I learned from it. They snuck in a lot of lessons about writing concisely, capturing the way a person speaks, writing persuasively, and how to get your point across. Rob says at one point that the good thing about writing is that, unlike talking, you can work on it until you get it right, and that’s a line that I really took to heart.

It also touched on some surprisingly serious issues, like gang violence, drugs, and alcoholism, which kind of shocked my sheltered suburban self when I was a kid. In my favorite series of episodes, a homeless poet Rob is friends with disappears, and they eventually discover that he is a Vietnam vet and took off on his own. They don’t actually say “PTSD,” but that’s obviously what he had, and those episodes make much more sense to me as an adult. They often introduce some character subplots that didn’t have to do with the case, too, like Tina’s older brother rebelling against their Vietnamese parents and Lenni being uncomfortable with her father dating again.

The team hoped that one day they would solve the ultimate mystery: who Ghostwriter really was. Sadly, the show was canceled due to lack of funding before that could happen, but a little Internet digging turned up what the answer to that question would have been!

Other random thoughts on these episodes:

These kids are so early 90s cool, yo. They wear their orange baseball caps backwards and write their own rap songs.
The role was recast after the first two cases, but for those, you know who played Jamal’s dad? FREAKING SAMUEL L. JACKSON!
Wow, the police on this show suck. On the episode where Jamal is accused of burning the store, the cops just let everybody waltz in and mess up their crime scene and Lenni picks a key piece of evidence right up off the floor. Also, in the episode with the poisonous barrels, how on Earth was the team able to figure out who dumped them before the cops were?
Alex and Tina had the cutest first kiss EVER. They were hiding in a truck when a criminal they were chasing spotted them, and Alex said, “Well, whatever happens, at least we’re together,” before giving her a quick peck on the lips.
Sometimes I have a hard time remembering life before the Internet. This show reminds me about things like card catalogs and encyclopedias.
I don’t know if I’ve ever mentioned this, but I have a freakishly good memory. I remember the weirdest details of things that happened years ago. And frankly, I am amazed at how well I remembered this show. The only thing that’s different is that the kids now look so YOUNG to me! These kids really were about the age of the characters they played.

You know what? If you’ve never seen this show, I think you need to remedy that. GHOSTWRITER PARTY AT MY HOUSE!

Blog Swap!

Coll-EGE!

Katie Recommends: The Killing

4 Replies

With Mad Men not coming back until next March, I had a hole to fill in my TV schedule. So I started watching AMC’s newest show, The Killing, which is apparently based on a Danish show called Forbrydelsen.

And boy, am I glad I did. There are only three episodes left this season, so it’s a bit too late for you to start watching, but I definitely recommend DVR-ing the reruns or watching the whole season when it comes out on DVD.

Each episode documents one day in the investigation into the murder of seventeen-year-old Rosie Larsen, who, after a high school dance, was found dead the trunk of a car in a lake. The car belonged to the campaign of Darren Richmond, a city councilor running for mayor of Seattle. The detective investigating the case, Sarah Linden, was about to leave Seattle for California to get married, but as she gets further into her investigation, her departure looks less and less likely.

The story is told with no flashbacks and has three main storylines: Linden and her replacement, Stephen Holder, investigating the murder; the Richmond campaign’s struggles in the aftermath of the killing; and the grieving of Rosie’s parents, Mitch (for Michelle) and Stan.

I won’t go into detail about the suspects or motives for those who haven’t seen it, but it’s very suspenseful and well-acted and I never want an episode to end. If you’re an X-Files fan, Linden, played by Mireille Enos, reminds me so much of Dana Scully—a petite, VERY SERIOUS redhead who’s consumed with her work.

The show isn’t perfect—there’s a lot of implausibility, including there only being two detectives on the case, leads they didn’t follow up on sooner, and the fact that it is constantly pouring out (I’m told it doesn’t rain that much in Seattle). But it’s very, very good and easy to get addicted to.

Other shows I’ve been watching:

Glee
When this show premiered, everyone loved it because it was so different from anything else on TV. But the tide has turned and now no one can speak about Glee without complaining about it. Everyone, it seems, has a problem with something about this show. Obviously conservatives don’t like the gay characters. Other people complain that a character is reinforcing a stereotype, or that a character needs a love interest, or that Character X isn’t getting enough screen time while Character Y is getting too much and there’s not enough focus on Ship A and too much on Ship B. Oh, and Rachel is an annoying diva, Finn’s voice isn’t good enough, the characters are inconsistently written, and Will is unprofessional. Plus, it’s gotten too episodic and preachy. Did I miss anything?

I’ll give you that the episodes are a bit preachier and more episodic (“The Religion Episode,” “The Britney Spears Episode” “The Prom Episode”) than they used to be. But everything else is just complaints about things that have been there from the beginning.

This is the thing. Glee is not a show meant to be taken too seriously. It’s a farce. It’s not, and has never been, in any way realistic. I mean, the first episode had Will planting pot on Finn to blackmail him into joining the glee club, for God’s sake. And personally, I don’t watch it because I want something to relate to or because I ship any characters. I watch it because it’s funny and sweet and has good music.

Also, keep in mind—this is the only show on TV that has characters with such diversity of races, religions, sexual orientations, sizes, and abilities. It does its best to show each character positively, and it cannot please everyone. With all the whining about various Issues on sites like the rapidly-getting-on-my-nerves Jezebel, I’m not surprised that so many other shows are less diverse. Showrunners figure they’ll never be able to satisfy everyone and just stick with casts of white heterosexual characters.

Modern Family
This summer I’m going to be catching up with the Season 1 DVDs. I just started watching this season and I love it. But who doesn’t? It’s gotten all kinds of critical acclaim and awards and isn’t doing too badly in the ratings, either. This is one show that manages to hit all the right notes—it’s often laugh-out-loud funny, every single character is likeable, and it’s often very touching without being sappy. The characters could so easily be clichés—trophy wife, doofy dad, ditzy teenager, flamboyant gay guy—but instead they manage to come across as real and full of personality as well as funny. The acting is excellent, and basically, if you’re not already watching this show, you should be.

Jersey Shore
What can I say? I love this show and I can’t wait for the new season. I know a lot of people think this show is a sign of the apocalypse. It’s true that the people on it are ridiculous and not people you’d ever want to know in real life, but…well, sometimes they’re funny and entertaining, too. And no one on the show is all bad. Okay, I’m done trying to justify it. Let me have my guilty pleasure!

Gilmore Girls

2 Replies

Apparently, writing about the ten-year anniversaries of things I like is becoming a pattern because here I am, documenting another such milestone. Today is the tenth anniversary of the premiere of Gilmore Girls.

If you’ve never seen this show, rent the DVDs ASAP. For those of you not lucky enough to be a fan of the show in its heyday, let me give you a little crash course. The show follows Lorelai Gilmore (Lauren Graham), a bubbly, fast-talking hotel manager who is thirty-two in the first season, and her daughter Rory (Alexis Bledel), sixteen when the show starts. I think you can do the math. Lorelai and Rory are super-close and interact more as friends than as mother and daughter. They live in a picturesque town in Connecticut called Stars Hollow, full of quirky townies who find any excuse to celebrate something and, at town meetings, argue over things like whether they can have two “town troubadours.” In the pilot episode, Rory, a bookworm who dreams of attending Harvard, is accepted to a prestigious private school. Lorelai is thrilled, until she realizes that she can’t afford the tuition. So she swallows her pride and asks her snobby, upper-class parents, Emily and Richard, from whom she’s been semi-estranged, to help her out. They agree, but only on the condition that Lorelai and Rory join them for dinner every Friday night.

The show ran on the WB (and later the CW) for seven seasons, following Rory through three years of high school and four years of college. It had a very distinct style of dialogue—super-fast conversations sprinkled with pop culture references. When a character says one thing, then changes his mind quickly afterward, Lorelai’s quick with the Chinatown reference: “My daughter, my sister, my daughter.” In the pilot, Rory’s awkward reply upon learning that a cute boy has just moved to town from Chicago, is, “Windy. Oprah.” Michel, the snooty but lovable concierge at Lorelai’s inn, retorts, “To me, you are the teacher in the Charlie Brown cartoon.” When Lorelai and Rory argue, this dialogue comes out in about fifteen seconds:

LORELAI: Are you mad?
RORY: Yes.
LORELAI: Right. Because I’m dating him?
RORY: Because you lied to me.
LORELAI: I kept information from you.
RORY: Information that I should’ve had.
LORELAI: Information that would’ve come out eventually, like the Iran-contra scandal.
RORY: So you’re Oliver North?
LORELAI: No, I’m Fawn Hall.
RORY: Mom!
LORELAI: Well, she was much prettier.

There were tons of romantic subplots, too—I’ve heard the show described as a “romantic comedy soap opera.” My favorite one involved Luke, the gruff diner owner with a heart of gold, whose friendship with Lorelai eventually develops into something more.

It was a really amazing show: moving without being too sappy, funny while still being relatable, romantic without making romance the singular focus of the show. While I didn’t like the way some plotlines developed in the later seasons, my memories of this show remain nothing but positive. I made a group of friends based on our mutual love of the show. In college, I bonded with the girls on my floor over this show. I converted at least three roommates into fans.

Like Sex and the City, it was a show that had elements of both fantasy and reality. Rory was in high school when I was, and I could relate to her anxiety about preparing for college. There are elements of small-town life that I found relatable, but I doubt that there’s anywhere on Earth quite like Stars Hollow, where people hold wakes for cats and time the town’s only stoplight to be red for as long as it takes for the town’s oldest resident to cross the street.

But more significantly, it shows us both the fantasy and the reality of mother-daughter relationships. Lorelai is the mother every teenager wishes she had. She wears Urban Outfitter T-shirts, gorges on junk food, refuses to learn to cook, and has never met a witty comeback she didn’t like. But she’s a friend to Rory as well as a mother. When Rory goes through a breakup, Lorelai is there helping her “wallow” in the sadness, and when she finds out from Rory’s teacher that Rory got a D on a paper, her reaction is to leave the school, saying, “It’s just that if Rory got a ‘D’, she’s not feeling too good right now and I’d really like to be there.” She knows her daughter well enough to know that Rory must have studied hard and is mad at herself for not doing better. In real life, how many parents would do that instead of yelling and screaming?

That’s why we see, through other characters, the reality of mother-daughter relationships. Rory’s best friend Lane plays the drums in a rock band and hides her CDs under her floorboards while playing the part of dutiful, religious daughter to her strict Korean mother. And one of the best parts of the show is watching Lorelai interact with her mother Emily. Played by the wonderful Kelly Bishop, Emily wants desperately to be closer to her daughter but doesn’t understand her and is unable to let go of her own views of the world in order to do so. No matter what strides they make, old hurts are still there, and Lorelai and Emily’s relationship will never be anything less than difficult.

It’s hard enough to be friends with your mother as an adult; as a teenager, it’s damn near impossible. I think that’s one big reason why this show stuck with so many of us: we saw in it the hard realities of family life as well as a fantastic glimpse of what we wish family life was.

The ATM, or Automatic Teller Machine

6 Replies

Recently, when I was home from work over Presidents’ Day Weekend, I watched a show I spent a lot of time watching as a kid: Sesame Street. Recently, I’ve discovered a bunch of clips from old Sesame Street episodes on YouTube, and I’m surprised at how entertaining they still are to me as an adult. How can you not love Cookie Monster as Alistair Cookie on Monsterpiece Theater?

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dSiVZ524yW4]

Or “The Beetles” singing “Letter B”?

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIpB-pCMfBE]

Or Ernie dancing himself to sleep as Bert grumbles?

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kk1Y4xo4XJ4]

Or an orange singing Carmen, in a clip that was probably done by an animator on drugs?

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z8TqOTe3ODc]

So imagined how disappointed I was to sit down and discover that the unthinkable has happened.

After forty years, Sesame Street has been dumbed down.

Gone are the pop-culture references that only parents watching along with the kids get. Rather than a cute commercial about the letter F, we get some Muppet on the street trying to get kids to say “finger” and “foot” as examples of words beginning with F. The show is divided into segments, with Ernie and Bert appearing as cartoon characters (blasphemy!) in one of them. Another is “Elmo’s World” and goes on for fifteen minutes. Elmo, a character good in small doses, is basically the star of the show now, with characters like Big Bird reduced to brief appearances in “Elmo’s World.”

The rest of PBS is in a similarly sorry state. (Yea alliteration!) Most of them are now cartoons, except for insipid shows like Barney and Teletubbies. Personally, that disappoints me a lot. And I know I’m not the only one. Back when I did my 25 things, in #12 I reminisced about the old PBS shows and I was amazed at how many people commented in agreement.

I was such a PBS kid. Until middle school, it was practically the only channel I watched. If I ever have billions of dollars, after I end world hunger and most major diseases, I’ll donate a ton of money to PBS with the stipulation that they need to create more intelligent, well-written shows for kids—shows like these ones:

Ghostwriter
Word! This wasn’t just a fantastic kids’ show; it was a fantastic show, period. I had some episodes on video, and upon re-watch, they’re still genuinely entertaining. The show was about a bunch of pre-teen kids in Brooklyn who were friends with a ghost they dubbed “Ghostwriter” whom only they could see. Ghostwriter couldn’t see, hear, or talk- just read and write, and he appeared only as a circle with a couple of curvy lines over it or as multicolored swirls of words. With the help of Ghostwriter, the kids solved mysteries that went over the course of four or five episodes.

I was so obsessed with this show. The character Rob was my first-ever crush. I’d write down all the clues and try to solve the mysteries on my own. I entered a contest and was thrilled to get one of the consolation prizes—a pen on a string like the kids on the show used.

Square One TV
Another high-quality show. It was all about math, and although it was aimed at elementary schoolers, they had a lot of short songs, skits, and cartoons like on Sesame Street—examples include “8% of My Love,” “ Nine Nine Nine,” and “The Mathematics of Love.”

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aDqrW85RECE]

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q53GmMCqmAM]

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6DzfPcSysAg]

But the best part of the show was “Mathnet.” It was a Dragnet parody featuring two detectives solving math-related crimes over the course of five episodes. It was hilarious—lots of jokes that only adults would get and recurring gags. There was one episode where they kept talking about an ATM, and every single time they said ATM, they added, “Or, automatic teller machine,” which is actually how I know what ATM stands for. And I honestly did learn a lot about math from it—I knew what the Fibonacci sequence was way before we covered it in school.

Wishbone
Wishbone was a really cute Jack Russell terrier who lived with a twelve-year-old boy named Joe and his mother and loved the classics of literature. Every episode would retell a story like Romeo and Juliet, Silas Marner, or Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, among many others, with Wishbone playing one of the main characters. Meanwhile, in the real world, there’d be a story going on with Joe and his friends Samantha and David that closely paralleled the classic story being told. While they often left out a lot of details, the re-telling was usually pretty faithful. Even in college I was drawing on things I’d learned from this show—I didn’t read The Tempest until then, but had seen it portrayed on Wishbone.

Where In the World is Carmen Sandiego?
This was a game show, and when I was seven, my life’s ambition was to be on it. There was one multiple-choice round with questions about geography; then a memory game round where you had to find the loot, the warrant, and the criminal in that order; then having to locate seven countries on a map of a certain country within forty-five seconds. The grand prize was a trip anywhere in the lower 48. There was always some kind of funny segment with the host, Greg Lee, in the chief’s office—something would happen like the chief’s head falling off or a rude message from Carmen Sandiego herself. I was so sad to hear that Lynne Thigpen, who played the Chief, died in 2003. The theme song and various other songs on the show were sung by the incomparable Rockapella. By the way, it turns out I couldn’t have been on that show anyway—Wikipedia tells me that the contestants had to be from the New York City area. But if I had been, I would have been awesome.

Let Us Now Praise Betty Draper

6 Replies

WARNING: Herein lie massive spoilers for pretty much every episode of Mad Men that has ever aired.

An awesome season of Mad Men has just ended, and I’m sad that I have to wait until next summer to see more of Don Draper & company. Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce? While the whole season was leading up to at least some characters leaving, that was completely not how I thought it would happen.

However, there’s one thing I keep hearing from all over the place that’s been bugging me, and I want to address it here. People on the Internet, people I know in real life, and professional columnists have all been bashing Betty Draper. Sometimes their dislike of the character extends to January Jones, the actress who plays her.

I think Betty deserves a post in her favor, and that’s what I’m going to offer here.

I could point out the worse things that other characters on the show have done, but I think that would be pointless. If you watch the show, you know that no one is completely likable. Virtually every main character has had an affair or said or done something offensive at some point.

But Betty seems to get on people’s nerves like none other. I actually think one of the main functions of her character is to make the viewer uncomfortable, and the writers accomplish this by making her more than a stereotypical 1960s housewife. The stifled-in-the-suburbs thing has been done to death, both in mid-20th-century settings (see: Revolutionary Road, the “Mrs. Brown” parts of The Hours) and modern times (Little Children, American Beauty, even Desperate Housewives, to some extent). The idea that a 1960s woman could feel unfulfilled as a mother and housewife is hardly new. So the writers didn’t make her someone obsessed with making the perfect dinner, feeling pressure to always have a spotless house, wishing for an occupation in which she’d get to use her brains, etc.

Instead, Betty’s a bit more complicated than that. It’s not that she sits around pining for a life other than that of a suburban housewife—it’s that she’s unhappy but doesn’t quite know what to wish for.

Betty did go to college and had a career before she met Don. The significance is in what her career was—a model. This past season, Betty’s father mentioned that she was a fat child, but I’d forgotten that Betty herself mentioned that in the first season while recounting how she didn’t realize how much weight she’d lost until her high school home ec teacher pointed out that the pajamas she was making were too big. Betty’s mother, who died shortly before the start of the show, was apparently very concerned with appearances, and I think Betty’s career as a model was a reaction to that—validation that she was beautiful to other people. Betty talks to her shrink in the first season about her mother , saying, “She wanted me to be beautiful so I could find a man- there’s nothing wrong with that.” She’d been taught that beauty was all she needed to get by, and when she landed a gorgeous, successful, smooth-talking husband, she likely thought that was her happy ending. But that, of course, wouldn’t have led to the backlash against her that inspired this post.

It amazes me that some people think Betty is a dumb bimbo. Is it just because she’s blonde and pretty? She can be childish and naïve, but we’ve seen plenty of evidence of her intelligence. She reads books like Mary McCarthy’s The Group, she majored in anthropology at Bryn Mawr, and she speaks fluent Italian. She said herself in one episode, “We all have skills we don’t use.” The thing is, though, I don’t think Betty consciously wishes for a life that’s more intellectually fulfilling, and that’s because she can’t fathom a life without a man. We saw something similar with Joan in the first season—Joan was genuinely surprised when she realized that Peggy wanted to become a copywriter for her career’s sake rather than to spend more time with Paul. It had just never occurred to Joan that she could find fulfillment in a career rather than marriage, and I don’t think it’s occurred to Betty yet, either. Subconsciously, I think she might want more out of life than being a housewife—after all, the happiest we’ve seen her all season was when she and the Junior League were successful at stopping the water tank, small as that accomplishment was. But that’s not really the point.

Shortly after her victory with the Junior League, she and Don travel to Rome, where she impresses everyone with both her looks and her charming command of Italian. Upon their return home, though, it’s back to her regular, boring routine. Don tells her flat-out, although he means it as a compliment, that he wants to “show her off” at an awards ceremony. This is just before Don reveals the truth about his identity, which in some ways adds insult to injury. Don has come from nothing to achieve this life that he’s carefully constructed for himself—successful Madison Avenue career, house in the suburbs, gorgeous wife, cute kids—and she’s merely a prop in it.

The problem is that she’s not quite sure how to be anything else. In the first season, while divorcee Helen Bishop intrigued her, Betty didn’t envy her. In fact, she and her friends seemed disdainful of everything about Helen. While she kicked Don out in Season 2, I don’t think she would have divorced him even if she hadn’t gotten pregnant because I don’t think she knows how she’d function as an unmarried woman. It’s not until she meets Henry Francis, someone who she feels could rescue her—symbolized by the fainting couch he convinces her to put in her living room—that she seriously considers leaving Don. Henry is actually a pretty boring character, especially compared to Don, and I don’t think Betty is in love with him as much as the idea of him as her knight in shining armor.

The interesting thing is that I think that people’s disdain toward Betty increased as the show went on. In the first season, she was childish and anxious and sad, and I think people were more sympathetic toward her then. She had a lot of emotions that she didn’t know how to express, which manifested themselves through her lack of control over her hands or her sobbing to a child that she had no one to talk to. She couldn’t even trust her psychiatrist, who was sharing everything she said with Don. Who wouldn’t sympathize with her?

But between the first and second season, a little over a year passed, and in Season 2, Betty gradually starts asserting herself more. Through most of the first season, she was in denial about Don’s affairs, and when she finally acknowledged them, she was more sad than angry, but in the second season she confronts Don directly when she gets wind of his affair with Bobbie. We also see a lot more open resentment towards Don and her children in general, and she becomes more and more unpleasant.

This is the wrong time to be writing this, seeing as how she just bombed as a host on Saturday Night Live, but personally, I think January Jones does a great job portraying Betty. That she’s made people dislike her character is, I think, almost an indication that she’s doing her job successfully. Sexism is big theme on Mad Men, and most of the time it’s much more overt—we get Pete telling Peggy to wear shorter skirts on her first day and Joan, lacking a term like “spousal rape” to label her experience, quietly going on with her life after her fiancé sexually assaults her. The sexism in Betty’s situation is subtler. We’re not hit with “OMG life as a suburban housewife is so oppressive!” because Betty hasn’t quite formulated that thought herself, so it’s easy to dismiss Betty’s unpleasantness as a character trait instead of a manifestation of the sexist world she lives in.

The great thing about this show is that you keep thinking about the episodes for a long time after they air. I actually wasn’t crazy about the Rome episode when I first watched it, but when it was over, I began to realize its significance. The episode gave us a glimpse of the intelligent, sophisticated woman Betty could be in another life. Ironically, most of the women Don has cheated on her with have, in fact, been intelligent, sophisticated women. If that’s what Don really wants, he could have had it if he hadn’t forced Betty into suburban conformity.

Off to watch the special features on the Season 1 DVDs now. Is it summer yet?

Call Me Elaine

10 Replies

I write a lot here about TV shows I like. Now, I’m going to write about one that everyone seems to like except me.

Remember that episode of Seinfeld when Elaine found herself dumped and fired, all because she didn’t like The English Patient?

Well, I haven’t been dumped or fired, but the reactions I’ve gotten to my declarations of hate for this show have been priceless. I’ve gotten all the cliché signs of shock: loud gasps, jaw drops, disbelieving stares, and “Really?” There are probably more coming when people read my next sentence.

I hate Arrested Development.

And I do mean hate. Not “couldn’t get into it,” not “okay but not my thing.” I strongly dislike the show.

I think I’ve given it a fair chance. I’ve seen the first three episodes (so I’m familiar with the characters, the premise of the show, etc.), the second season premiere, the second season episode “Meat the Veals,” and possibly another episode at some point that I can’t recall.

But I do not enjoy the show. I don’t find it funny, for one thing. I understand the jokes, but they don’t make me laugh. Occasionally, there’s a good line or plot twist (I will give you that “There’s always money in the banana stand!” was pretty funny), but they’re few and far between.

More importantly, I don’t like the characters—any of them. If they were characters in a movie, they might be tolerable, but I find them all too annoying to want to follow their progress across three seasons. There’s an element of believability with them that’s missing, I think—not one character on the show seems anything like a real person, and nothing that happens seems anything like real life. I think the best comedy is rooted in truth, which is what differentiates this show from shows like The Office. Characters like Michael Scott and Dwight Schrute can do outrageous and, yes, annoying things, but there are things about them, and all the other characters, that you can recognize in people you know, and characteristics that make them relatable and likeable. And everyone knows someone like Jim or Pam or any of the other characters on The Office. But do you know anyone like Buster or Tobias? I don’t. Can you identify with any of the characters on Arrested Development? I can’t.

Other reasons for not liking it: George Michael having a crush on his cousin Maeby grossed me out. Too much of the humor is slapstick. And I think most people have an actor who irritates them for some inexplicable reason, and for me, that actor is Jason Bateman. I don’t know why—something about him just bugs me.

What bugs me even more, though, is the attitude Arrested Development fans have toward anyone who disagrees with them. Recently, I Googled, with quotation marks, “don’t like Arrested Development,” and it only turned up four page of hits. Most of them were things like, “The only people that don’t like Arrested Development are the people too stupid to understand it,” and “Funny how the people that don’t like Arrested Development type like 12 year-olds, and the people that do have the English language down pretty well.”

Funny how those people, who apparently think I’m stupid, don’t know that they should have said, “The only people who don’t like Arrested Development…”

From talking to people who like the show, both on and offline, that attitude seems to be the rule rather than the exception. You don’t like Arrested Development; therefore, you’re too stupid to “get it.”

But what I really don’t get is where this attitude comes from. Is it just because the show was canceled so early? Is it really that hard for people to understand that someone might not like it? Believe it or not, I know what it’s like to love a show that no one’s watching. A few years ago, I liked the extremely low-rated Six Degrees, and lately, I’ve become a bit of an evangelist for Damages, which has Emmys and a lot of critical acclaim, but not great ratings. But I realize, even as I encourage others to watch them, that neither of those shows will appeal to everyone. I’ve never needed to make myself feel superior to the people who didn’t watch a show I liked and led to it being canceled. But apparently, most Arrested Development fans do. It’s a show that intelligent, educated people are “supposed” to like, the way that you’re “supposed” to like indie music and foreign films. And the really funny thing about that idea is that, from what I’ve seen of it, the show relies pretty heavily on dumb slapstick gags that a five-year-old could understand.

Like any kind of cultural snobbery, this attitude pisses me off. It’s the same reason Aaron Sorkin’s attitude about Studio 60 provoked such a strong reaction in me, and the same reason I’m so bothered by music snobs.

But there have to be other people out there who hate Arrested Development as much as I do. After all, there weren’t enough people watching it to keep it on the air longer than three seasons. If any of them stumble across my blog, I beg of you—come out of hiding! I’m here to tell you that it is okay not to like this show, which is probably a new thing for you to hear. Despite what fans of the show may make you think, you are not stupid and neither am I!

And maybe, once you find me, we can figure out what the equivalent of Elaine’s, “Quit telling your stupid story about the stupid desert and just die already!” would be for Arrested Development.

Katie Recommends: Damages and Veronica Mars

2 Replies

This is the first time I’ve done a double recommendation. These are two shows that not enough people have seen, and if you’ve watched one and liked it, I think you might like the other. While their settings are nothing alike—Damages takes place in a New York law firm, Veronica Mars takes place in a California high school—they have several things in common. They both feature season-long storylines. They’re both full of twists and surprises. And they both have powerful women as central characters. So, without further ado…

Damages
I started watching this after hearing a couple of people sing its praises. The first thing to know about Damages is that the less you know about it before you see it, the better. I’m glad I didn’t know too much about it beforehand, so I’m only telling you enough to (hopefully) entice you to watch. Prepare for some very vague paragraphs where I allude to events I won’t explain.

So here’s what you should know: Glenn Close plays Patty Hewes, a high-stake litigator in New York. While she’s brilliant at her job, we learn early on that she’s willing to do unethical or illegal things to win her cases. She’s ruthless and sometimes evil (and no one does evil like Glenn Close), but oddly charismatic. As despicable as some of her actions are, she’s a great character, and Close absolutely deserved the Emmy she got last year.

Rose Byrne plays her young associate, Ellen Parsons, who, in the first season, is fresh out of law school. As the show progresses, Ellen and Patty’s working relationship becomes increasingly complicated. If you’re having problems with your boss, watch this show—I think it might make you feel better.

Ted Danson plays Arthur Frobisher, the antagonist of the first season. He’s the CEO of a company reminiscent of Enron and is involved in a class-action suit by his former employees. The case plays out over the course of the first season, as Patty and her employees try to prove that he participated in insider trading and deprived his employees of their life savings.

The whole first season is like a 13-hour movie, and the narrative is non-linear. We begin with a flash-forward to six months after the story begins, and as the season continues, we get glimpses of what’s coming as the show jumps back and forth in time. And what’s coming? Well…let’s just say there’s murder, attempted murder, betrayal, and characters who aren’t what they seem to be.

Also, if you like surprises, you’ll be in for quite a few of them with this show. Towards the end of the first season especially, there’s one shock after another, and the best part is that none of them feel cheap. They’re all surprises that have been cleverly set up and make complete sense.

The first season is on DVD, and you should rent it as soon as possible. As for the second season…well, to give you fair warning, while it’s worth a watch, it’s nowhere near as good as the first season. There’s another season-long case, but the plot is unfocused and, sadly, the shock value is gone. But I’d still recommend it. It’s not on DVD yet, but I downloaded it from Amazon.

In the first season, the writing is nearly flawless, and the acting is fantastic all around. Aside from the people I mentioned, the cast also includes Zeljko Ivanek (who won an Emmy for Best Supporting Actor) and Tate Donovan, and Marcia Gay Harden, William Hurt, and Timothy Olyphant join the cast in the second season.

One other thing I appreciate about this show is how it features a powerful woman as its central character. While she’s not exactly someone you want to emulate, Patty is a commanding, high-profile woman who’s clearly in charge of anyone she fixes her narrowed eyes on—and no one ever questions it. Her being a woman in control is never the point; it’s just accepted.

Veronica Mars
I feel kind of stupid recommending a show that’s been off the air for two years, especially since I didn’t watch it while it was still on and was therefore part of the problem that led to it being canceled. But this is absolutely worth watching on DVD.

Veronica (Kristen Bell) is a high school student in Neptune, California who helps her father Keith (Enrico Colantoni) run a detective agency. (Yes, her last name is Mars, she lives in Neptune, and she drives a Saturn. But that’s thankfully as far as they go with the cutesy “planet” jokes.) Every week, there’s a mystery to be solved—anything from cheating spouses to kidnapping to high tech rumor-spreading.

But like Damages, there are season-long plotlines that are addressed every episode as well. In the first season, Veronica is trying to solve the murder of her best friend, Lilly Kane (Amanda Seyfried). Prior to the start of the show, Keith was the county sheriff, and when Lilly died, he accused Lilly’s rich father of the murder. The outraged community ousted Keith in a recall election, Veronica’s alcoholic mother left town, and Veronica, who had once been popular, was shunned by her old friends. She stuck by her father and uses the resources she has available at the detective agency to investigate Lilly’s murder. Also in Season One, Veronica is trying to determine who roofied and raped her at a party and why Lilly’s brother Duncan, her ex-boyfriend, suddenly dumped her not long before Lilly’s death.

In the second season, the season-long mystery involves a bus crash that kills several of Veronica’s classmates and may or may not have been an accident. While the first season as a whole is better, the second season has an absolutely shocking ending that I didn’t see coming for a second.

The third season takes place at a fictional local college, and rather than one season-long mystery, there are two smaller mysteries, one involving a series of rapes and one involving a murder.

For those who weren’t part of the problem, this was something of a cult show—which is a weird term to use about a show that doesn’t involve anything supernatural, but one quick Google will show you how passionate the fans are. But somehow, it never managed to find a wide audience. I blame it on the show being hidden on UPN while the network still existed, because I think this show would appeal to fans of a lot of other shows. If you like high school shows like The O.C., you’ll like it for the romance and teenage gossip that are never the point of the show but are always lurking in the background. If you like any of the dozens of crime dramas on TV right now, you’ll like it for the mystery. If you like shows like Buffy and Alias that feature a woman kicking ass, you’ll like it for the smart, tough, prickly title character. If you liked Kristen Bell on Heroes, you’ll love her here. If you liked Enrico Colantoni on Just Shoot Me or Flashpoint, you’ll love him as Keith, a very well-written character—you can see how Veronica picked up aspects of his personality. If you like attractive women, you’ll love it for the gorgeous Ms. Bell. If you like attractive men, you’ll love it for the gorgeous Jason Dohring, who plays rich boy Logan Echolls. And if you like Damages, you’ll like it for all the reasons I’ve already mentioned.

One warning—Veronica Mars has the worst series finale I have ever seen. It ends on a cliffhanger, but even if it didn’t, it would still not be a very good episode. So feel free to skip that ending, but all three seasons are on DVD, so you can rent those as soon as possible. And rumor has it that a movie is in the works, so give yourself a crash course now before it comes out.

Pure Bright Fire

Formerly a struggling single twenty-something