TV Watch: If "Food Network Star" has often felt a bit wheezy in Season 9, it's still had its moments

Easily the dopiest challenge of Season 9 of Next Food Network Star was Episode 4's "Dinner and a Movie," in which three-person teams not only had to create a dinner suitable for a genre of movie -- romance, Western, and musical -- but do a trailer for it. Team Musical (Rodney the pie man, Chris, and Lovely) sang, God help us. Click here for a preview of tomorrow's Episode 6.

by Ken

In fairness, by Season 9 of anything it's apt to be a tough haul to find new things to do or new ways of doing things. There's no question in my mind that the first few seasons of what is known now as simply Food Network Star were the best, because we learned so much about how shows are both conceived and, even more, produced, and I suspect that the Food Network executives themselves, notably programming chief Bob Tuschman and marketing and branding chief Susie Fogelson, were forced to clarify in their own minds what they're looking for in their on-air personalities.

Bob and Susie have hardly been in evidence in Season 9, which has been mostly entrusted to Food Network stars Bobby Flay, Giada De Laurentiis, and Alton Brown, which is fine, I guess -- their general role as coaches and judges makes more sense and works better than last season's strange experiment of having them serve as mentor to a team each chose from among the ranks of the not-quite-finalists. You could see the pressure to try something new, even if this something new seemed pretty self-evidently silly.

You'd think that the quality of individual seasons would depend above all upon the mix of talents and personalities chosen, but that hasn't been my experience (speaking as someone who, as best I can recall, hasn't missed an episode of any of the seasons), I think because some law of nature seems to dictate that in winnowing the heap of audition tapes down to a cadre of finalists, you always seem to wind up with the same sort of mix:

* a handful of people who are so obviously unfit that you wonder how they could have gotten through the screening process;

* at the other extreme, another handful of people who ultimately turn out to have something distinctive to share in the way of culinary knowledge and skills combined with the kind of personalty that will actually draw viewers (note that it usually takes a number of weeks for this group to assert itself);

* and then all the people in between, who clearly have some of the desired qualities but not enough of them, including a fair number who might at some point present the complete package but can't figure out how to put it all together.

I don't blame the producers for not being able to refine the talent-selection process more successfully. Is there any occupation where it's been figured out better? I think the above breakdown of talent potential relative to ultimate achievement might be applied to a lot of other walks of life.

One thing the coaches and judges have hardly any control over is the pace at which contestants come to know themselves well enough to draw on what it is they might have to offer. On the most basic level, it remains astonishing how many "finalists" (I put finalists in quotes because in most seasons the people we see in Episode 1 are the "finalists" from the off-air selection process) have apparently never thought to ask themselves why viewers might want to watch their TV show. Even after all these years of judges talking about contestants' "culinary point of view," it continues to come as a surprise to an alarming number of the newbies that they need to have one just as a basic component of some reason for viewers to tune in their show.

It's more understandable that contestants don't understand how exposing it is to do a show like Food Network stars do, and how unprepared they are for being exposed in this way. This remains true despite the large number of contestants in previous seasons who have undergone convulsive on-camera traumas over just such issues. (In every season at some point at least one contestant is going to break down in tears.) We humans don't often reflect on how un-self-knowing we are.

Sometimes the lack of self-knowledge is simple and factual. There was the highly personable, attractive, and even knowledgeable young Brad, who thought he had solved his "culinary POV" problem by presenting himself as "the professional chef," with no clue for many weeks as to how inappropriate and self-defeating moniker that was for him to be claiming. Eventually a run of rocky encounters with people who might fairly present themselves publicly as "professional chefs" sort of sank in. Being smart can be dangerous if you aren't aware of the limits to your smartitude.

Sometimes the lack of self-knowledge is equally basic but harder to recognize for the person affected. I'm thinking of this season's Danushka. I suppose it's harder for extremely attractive people to ask that hard question of why people might want to watch them on Food Network, since nearly all of their life experience has consisted of people always wanting to watch them. But Danushka, who apparently can actually cook, judging from the judges' responses to a number of dishes she prepared, not only seems not to have thought about what would make people watch her show, but she seems shocked to be told how arrogant and dismissive she comes across on-camera. Of course, when it comes to on-air loathsomeness combined with utter obliviousness to same, no one is ever likely to touch Penny from Season 7, who week after week -- until she was finally put out of my misery -- made at least this viewer want to see her suffer an unimaginably horrific and torturous demise.

Still, the judges do try to point the contestants in the direction of greater self-understanding. The most striking case so far in Season 9 has been the camera presentation in which Chris, who had seemed a pleasant fellow with some cooking skills but not much profile, mentioned that food had healed his "broken life," and Bobby Flay picked up on it, obviously recognizing a story similar to his own. With some difficulty Chris explained that he had been a drug addict and general substance abuser and that food had given him something to hold onto and rebuild his life. Everyone in the room was astonished and electrified, and suddenly I suspect that everyone watching as well had a completely new image of Chris. He explained to Bobby that he found this difficult to talk about, which I don't doubt, and Bobby, bless him, pointed out that what he has accomplished in getting his life together is a success story.

It's not that anyone expects Chris to talk about his former "broken life" every time he's on camera. It's that it's a key part of who he is, and how he relates to food and cooking and sharing with other people, and a part of him that, as he comes to feel more comfortable with the road he has traveled, can make him distinctively relatable for a lot of viewers.

It might not occur to many people that a show like Food Network Star might be a good place to learn more about people. To me it's still, nine seasons in, what's most appealing about the show.

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TV Watch: I'm going to try again, but I still won't be able to communicate the brilliance of Aaron Sorkin's "Sports Night"

JEREMY [Joshua Molina]: Not fitting in is how qualified people lose jobs.
ISAAC [Robert Guillaume]: Yeah, but a lot of the time it's how they end up working here. . . . It's taken me a lot of years, but I've come around to this: If you're dumb, surround yourself with smart people; and if you're smart, surround yourself with smart people who disagree with you. . . . You fit in on your own time. When you come to work for me, you show up to play.

-- from "The Hungry and the Hunted,"
Season 1, Episode 3, of Sports Night

by Ken

As I wrote a few weeks ago, one of the things I started looking at during my recent "holiday" from work was the DVDs of the astounding 1998-2000 TV comedy Sports Night, of which Aaron Sorkin was the creator (his first TV series), the nearly exclusive writer, and one of the executive producers. I remembered the show being out-of-this-world good. On re-viewing, I was in a continuous state of mind embogglement. When I finally zipped through the last four or five episodes of Season 2, and realized I had miscounted and there were no more episodes to watch, I was even angrier than ever, not to mention more despondent, that there were only two seasons, 45 episodes to watch.

Sports Night, to back up a bit, was a third-place 11pm-nightly cable sports-news show on CSC, a sports cable network owned by Continental Corp., whose tycoon owner had lured Isaac Jaffee (Robert Guillaume) out of a planned retirement, following an illustrious journalism career, to create and run the show. The regular cast included anchoring-and-writing partners Casey McCall (Peter Krause) and Dan Rydell (Josh Charles), executive producer Dana Whitaker (Felicity Huffman), senior associate producer Natalie Hurley (Sabrina Lloyd), and assistant producer Jeremy Goodwin (Joshua Malina), plus a battery of control-room virtual regulars, and a host of memorable recurring and one- or two-shot characters. (Before she was House's Dr. Cuddy, Lisa Edelstein did two terrific episodes as Dan's nemesis, sports newscaster Bobbi Bernstein.)

Since that previous post I've been despondent about how little justice I did to the show in trying to communicate its dazzlingness -- brilliant writing, uniformly brilliant cast (down to the smallest roles -- and a spectacular ensemble), brilliant direction (with the look and feel set by Thomas Schlamme, also an executive producer, who later collaborated with Sorkin on The West Wing and a show even more unjustly unappreciated than Sports Night, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip), all-around brilliant production work (including brilliant music by ABC's amazingly inventive jack-of-all-musical modes W. G. Snuffy Walden).

But none of that means anything if you don't actually see the shows. What's worse, although I've mentioned them in the past, this time I didn't call attention to the show's achievement in capturing three of the most compelling and heartbreaking romantic relationships I've seen on any screen in any form, those of --

SN assistant producer Jeremy Goodwin (Joshua Malina) and senior associate producer Natalie Hurley (Sabrina Lloyd)

Continental Corp. analyst Rebecca Wells (recurring guest star Teri Polo) and SN co-anchor/writer Dan Rydell (Josh Charles)

SN co-anchor/writer Casey McCall (Peter Krause) and executive producer Dana Whitaker (Felicity Huffman)

I found all three every bit as powerful in the re-watch, and was even more impressed by the careful delineation of the effects of the failures of all three; after a breakup, the feelings don't necessarily stop. (In fairness, I should note that in what turned out to be the final episode, it appeared that Natalie and Jeremy were going to get back together, and maybe also Dan and Rebecca, who had suddenly returned from the West Coast.) This time through I was also more compelled than before by the relationship that was never meant to be, between Dana and hot-shot lawyer Gordon (the best thing I've seen Ted McGinley do, especially noteworthy in his prickly interactions with a jealous Casey).

Incredibly too, I made no mention of the way Sorkin incorporated the stroke suffered during the first season by Robert Guillaume, who played Sports Night's boss, managing editor Isaac Jaffee. The news of Isaac's stroke became the final blow in an amazing episode called "Eli's Coming," in which Dan's misunderstanding of the Isaac had already been under enormous pressure from corporate parent Continental Corp to slash costs and make the show softer. With him out of commission, the hugely increased pressure fell on Dana. Nor did the pressure subside when Isaac returned. A happy consequence -- for viewers if not for the Sports Night crew, at least initially -- was Isaac's hiring of a consultant in Season 2, which meant a clutch of dazzling episodes for William H. Macy (Felicity Huffman's real-life husband, of course).

In the earlier post, I did transcribe a whole little scene from Episode 11 of Season 1, "The Six Southern Gentlemen of Tennessee," one of the most remarkable episodes of a series that was hardly ever less than remarkable. It's a scene in which Casey, lost in self-congratulation over a triumphant appearance on The View, is confronted by "the assistant wardrobe supervisor for Sports Night as well as two other shows here at CSC" for having accepted credit on the show for dressing himself so sharply. The young woman, whose name Casey doesn't know (it turns out to be Monica), tries to make him understand how easily he could have given proper credit to her boss. The role of Monica was a one-shot appearance by the future Donna Moss of West Wing, Janel Moloney, and it never even occurred to me that I might be able to find a picture from this scene.

I'm not going to rehash the whole scene, though if you're inclined, you'll find it in the original post. Here's just the bit related to the picture:

MONICA: "Can you tell me which of these two
shirts you should wear with [the gunmetal tie]?"

MONICA [holding out a striped tie]: Do you know what color this is?
CASEY [staring down at his desk again]: Well, it's gray.
MONICA : It's called gunmetal. Gray has more ivory, and gunmetal has more blue. [Without pausing, as she reaches for two shirts she was carrying and holds them up. ] Can you tell me which of these two shirts you should wear with it?
CASEY [now looking at her and the shirts]: Uh, I don't know.
MONICA : No, you don't. There's no reason why you should. You're not expected to know what shirt goes with what suit, or how a color in a necktie can pick up the color in your eyes. You're not expected to know what's going to clash with what Dan's wearing, or what pattern's going to bleed when Dave changes the lighting.

Mr. McCall, you get so much attention and so much praise for what you actually do, and all of it's deserved. When you go on a talk show and get complimented on something you didn't, how hard would it be to say, "That's not me, that's a woman named Maureen who's been working for us since the first day -- it's Maureen who dresses me every night, and without Maureen I wouldn't know gunmetal from a hole in the ground"? [Soft music comes up.] Do you have any idea what that would have meant to her? Do you have any idea how many times she would have played that tape for her husband and her kids? [CASEY looks down, abashed.]

I know, I know this is when it starts to get busy for you. [Heads back to the garments on the chair.] I hope I didn't take up too much of your time. [She continues fiddling with garments.] Please don't tell Maureen I spoke to you. She'd be pretty mad at me.

In case you haven't gotten the idea, Aaron Sorkin is not just a brilliant writer, he's a brilliant writer for actors. And he also seems to have a thing about working with really terrific actors. I wish I could show you what Janel Moloney did with that extraordinary little set piece. I was about to say "written by Sorkin," and I assume it was, but the credit for the writing credit for the episode is Sorkin plus Matt Tarses, David Walpert, and Bill Wrubel.)

MY SPORTS NIGHT RE-WATCH WASN'T
A STRAIGHT ONCE-THROUGH-IT-ALL

A number of times I found myself going back through episodes I'd already re-watched. And in more than one case when I was trying to track down the source episode for a remembered scene or plot line, I started picking out those that seemed "possibles" based on the brief plot synopses but was slowed down immeasurably when I found myself unable to stop an episode once I'd started it, even when it became clear that it wasn't the one I was looking for. There are episodes that in the re-watch I re-watched two, three, four, or more times.

And one scene in particular has been haunting me. It's from Episode 3, "The Hungry and the Hunted" (the writing is credited to Sorkin alone), and in it Jeremy, whom we saw being interviewed and hired for his assistant-producer job in the pilot episode, has gotten "the call" -- Isaac and Dana are sending him out to produce his first field assignment: a hunting segment in the Adirondacks. When he returns, Natalie has seen the edited footage, which looks fine, and he claims that everything went fine. But Isaac already knows that something happened, something bad enough to have required his being taken to the hospital.

Isaac "invites" Jeremy to join him and Dana in his office, and finally drags the story out of him. (Happily, I didn't have to transcribe this; I found the episode script online.)

JEREMY: We shot a deer. In the woods near Lake Mattatuck on the second day. There was a special vest they had me wear so that they could distinguish me from things they wanted to shoot, and I was pretty grateful for that. Almost the whole day had gone by and we hadn't gotten anything. Eddie was getting frustrated; Bob Shoemaker was getting embarrassed.

My camera guy needed to reload, so I told everybody to take a ten-minute break. There was a stream nearby, and I walked over with this care package Natalie made me. I sat down, and when I looked up, I saw three of them: small, bigger, biggest. Recognizable to any species on the face of the planet as a child, a mother, and a father. Now, the trick in shooting deer is you gotta get 'em out in the open. And it's tough with deer, 'cause these are clever, cagey animals with an intuitive sense of danger. You know what you have to do to get a deer out in the open? You hold out a Twinkie. That animal clopped up to me like we were at a party. She seemed to be pretty interested in the Twinkie, so I gave it to her. Looking back, she'd have been better off if I'd given her the damn vest.

And Bob kind of screamed at me in a whisper, "Move away!" The camera had been reloaded, and it looked like the day wasn't gonna be a washout after all. So I backed away, a couple of steps at a time, and I closed my eyes when I heard the shot. Look, I know these are animals and they don't play bridge and go to the prom, but you can't tell me that the little one didn't know who his mother was. That's gotta mean something. And later, at the hospital, Bob Shoemaker was telling me about the nobility and tradition of hunting and how it related to the Native American Indians, and I nodded and I said that was interesting, while I was thinking about what a load of crap it was.

Hunting was part of Indian culture -- it was food and it was clothes and it was shelter. They sang and danced and offered prayers to the gods for a successful hunt so that they could survive just one more unimaginably brutal winter. The things they had to kill held the highest place of respect for them, and to kill for fun was a sin. And they knew the gods wouldn't be so generous next time. What we did wasn't food and it wasn't shelter and it sure wasn't sports. It was just mean.

My first reaction when the episode first aired in October 1998 was (and is): Wow! My second reaction was (and is): Can you imagine what it must be like to be an actor in a series and get your script and in it see something like this written for you?

What I didn't remember so well was the rest of the scene. Watching it again (and then again), it blew me away.

ISAAC: Jeremy, why didn't you tell us how you felt about hunting when we gave you this?
JEREMY: Because you told me you spoke to Mark Sabath at USA Today.
ISAAC: Yeah, but what --
JEREMY: In fact, I know you must have spoken to him before you ever hired me.
ISAAC: Of course I did. I also spoke to Dave Heller at the Free Press and Tom Monahan at the Sacramento Bee.
JEREMY: And they all said pretty much the same thing.
ISAAC: Yes. They all said that Jeremy Goodwin was a bright guy with a world-class understanding of popular sports, but that he didn't quite fit in and there was little chance that he'd advance in their organization.
JEREMY: Due respect, Mr. Jaffee, but I have $80,000 in college loans to pay back. My instincts told me to shut the hell up and do what I was told.
ISAAC: Your instincts were wrong.
JEREMY: Not fitting in is how qualified people lose jobs.
ISAAC: Yeah, but a lot of the time it's how they end up working here. Now, you had an obligation to tell us how you felt. Partly because I don't like getting a phone call saying I've put one of my people in the hospital. But mostly because if you feel that strongly about something, you have a responsibility to try and change my mind. Did you think I would fire you simply because you made a convincing argument?

It's taken me a lot of years, but I've come around to this: If you're dumb, surround yourself with smart people; and if you're smart, surround yourself with smart people who disagree with you. I'm an awfully smart man and Mark Sabath is an idiot. He had you and he blew it. You're gonna do great here. But you gotta trust us. You fit in on your own time. When you come to work for me, you show up to play.

I'm going home. You don't know us very well. So if it's hard trusting us at the beginning, maybe it'll help to know that we trust you. Good night. [ISAAC exits.]

Of course you still need to see it. On-screen it's just words. But entrust Sorkin's words to the care of actors of the caliber he always seems to work with, and . . . well, wow!

You could see in a lot of the critical response to the first season of Sorkin's current show, for HBO, The Newsroom, that a lot of people who pay lip service to Sorkin's genius don't really mean it, or at least don't really understand wherein that genius lies. Often, for example, they're people who saw West Wing as a roman à clef about White House life, and told us which real-life Clinton aide equaled which WW character, totally missing -- as I've written here -- that the show was Sorkin's romantic fantasy, written and produced as realistically as humanly possible, of how a White House could function if you took people with the same potential and allowed them to behave just a tad more idealistically.

Maybe it's only natural that someone who writes real-life romance as penetratingly and sympathetically as Sorkin should be in general outlook a romantic fantasist. It seems to me obviously true as well for his vision of the TV news business in The Newsroom, which is why hitting him over the head for incorporating hindsight into shows built around historical events is so totally beside the point. This might matter if the Newsroom episodes were documentaries, or even intended as fictional re-creations of how those actual events unfolded in the media. The point is that all the things his characters are allowed to know are things that people in their position could have known, and in this romantic fantasy it's fair game to imagine how differently events could have unfolded if people had done their jobs with just a bit more character, a bit more appreciation for the consequences.

Sports Night too was a romantic fantasy. It's important that the show-within-a-show Sports Night was not a ratings magnet; it was unabashedly a no. 3 show. But the people involved, starting at the top with Isaac, were trying to do something different, something more honest and informing. Without saying that there are no bosses in positions like Isaac's who share his belief about employees "fitting in," I have to say that it still impresses me

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TV Watch: James Gandolfini (1961-2013)

Tony takes care of business in "College" (Season 1, Episode 5).

by Ken

It so happens that a couple of nights before word reached us that James Gandolfini had died of a heart attack in Rome at 51, I watched most of a Sopranos episode that I happened to notice on one of the HBO channels.

I missed the beginning, but it was easy enough to recognize as the season-opener (Season 5, as it turns out) that includes a TV-news announcement about the paroling of a large number of mob inmates, which served as a means of injecting a clutch of new characters for the upcoming season, though I was reminded that the two really important ones didn't actually appear until the season's second episode. (That would be Tony Soprano's cousin Tony Blundetto, played by Steve Buscemi, who had directed a couple of Sopranos episodes, including what may be the most famous single one apart from the finale, "Pine Barrens," and the pain-in-the-ass "old school" New York captain Phil Leotardo, played so memorably by Frank Vincent.)

I bring this up for, basically, the same reason I've brought up Sopranos-related subject fairly regularly over the years here at DWT: The show is tightly interwoven in my cultural consciousness. My mind is in an ongoing state of bogglement at the achievement of creator David Chase and the simply astounding company of associates he assembled, on both sides of the camera, to pull the project off: writer-producers, actors, and all the crews. I've never had any reason to doubt that the show was in every way Chase's vision, but it couldn't have been done without that enormous number of hugely talented people, brought in from a staggering range of backgrounds, and enabled to work as a team.

Obviously the most visible face of the enterprise was Gandolfini as Tony. It's hard to disagree with all the tributes that have poured out since the awful news Wednesday. I don't think it's possible to overstate the success of his contribution, giving us a character who could withstand and even flourish under the enormous amount of screen time he racked up over the show's six seasons. We were compelled by him as a dominant but constantly struggling force in both his families, his real one and his, er, professional one. There was Tony's likable side, but also his monstrous one.

I was surprised to be reminded, in checking the records, that the episode that for me at least permanently changed the relationship with Tony happened as early as No. 5 of Season 1: "College," in which Tony drives his daughter, Meadow, to Maine for a round of college vists and spots a mob informant who has been living in Witness Protection, and after an elaborate cat-and-mouse chase winds up strangling the guy with a piece of wire. Boy, did that drive home how Tony's business went beyond "waste management."

(I see in the Wikipedia episode guide: "The episode was rated as the best of the series by Time magazine and was ranked #2 on TV Guide's list of 'TV's Top 100 Episodes of All Time.' " Also, "James Manos, Jr. and David Chase received the Emmy for Outstanding Writing for a Drama Series for their work on this episode." I was also reminded of a charming detail in the episode: that at Bowdoin College Tony "is struck by a Nathaniel Hawthorne quote on display in the admissions office: 'No man . . . can wear one face to himself and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which one may be true.' " Is that wonderful or what?)

On one point, though, I'm going to disagree with a widely voiced accolade for Gandolfini: that he "made" the show, that it couldn't have succeeded nearly as well without him. Again, I don't want at all to diminish his achievement, but that achievement was as the most visible member of the Sopranos team.


Consider just one aspect of Tony: his utterly baffling irresistibility to women. Yes, he buys lots of them (namely, anytime it suits his pleasure), but we see time after time women who are unable to resist his, um, "charm." When I describe this as "baffling," I don't mean to say or even suggest "unrealistic." We know that such things happen in the real world, and are for a lot of us a source of fascination. You could have a jolly time "explaining" Tony's magic touch -- the attraction of power, of danger, and so on and so on. The writing of those six seasons' worth of episodes will sustain all manner of fascinating discussion. But I'm going to argue that the achievement was mostly in the writing and in the reaction of all those intersecting actors. I don't think Gandolfini "did" anything to make it credible; it was made credible by the way all those other characters clearly (and credibly) believed in Tony's irresistibility.

I think it's important to remember that it was David Chase who chose Gandolfini for the role, and Chase had been casting both expected and unexpected actors as mob figures from the highest echelons to the lowest for a long time -- his "mob" episodes of The Rockford Fils are some of that extraordinary show's most wonderful. I think it's safe to say that nobody except Chase would have made such a choice. I would assume that the quality above all that commended Gandolfini was his ability to credibly portray a North Jersey Italian-American lug of a head of household, off of which so much of the show would play. And it was a brilliant choice. I just want to suggest that there were probably any number of other choices he could have made, and the show would have worked just as well, because the writing, ensemble, and production would almost surely have been good enough to make any of those other choices work.

I've mentioned before that I saw Chase, as part of a panel of Sopranos people appearing before a cheering audience while the show was still in production, field a question from an audience member: Could the show have been done for a broadcast network? (We know that Fox was supposed to do it originally but turned chicken.) Clearly the question was intended as a sort of self-congratulatory hat tip to HBO, for its tolerance of the terrible language and terrible behavior. But Chase took the question literally, thought about it briefly, and replied that yes, he thought it could have been. Adjustments would have to have been made, but yes, it could have been done.

Still, it was James Gandolfini who was chosen, and who for six seasons produced episode after episode of such remarkable work. Every time I dip back into The Sopranos, I find that it looks as good as it ever did, if not better -- because with some removal in time and additional exposure, I not only treasure things I've already noticed (including many I've noticed and forgotten), but see all sorts of things I didn't before.

ONE ADDITIONAL NOTE: THE FRIENDS OF DAVID CHASE

Here's where it pays to be an attentive viewer, at least a more attentive viewer than I often am. In that Season 5 opening episode I was talking about, with the TV-news report about the outflow of all those mob parolees, there's an interview with a self-proclaimed Mafia expert about the significance of the development. It was only while I was sifting through Sopranos material for this post that I discovered that the blowhard was played by Matthew Weiner, who had just joined the team as a writer-producer in Season 5. In fact, Episode 2, in which Tony Blundetto and Phil Leotardo are actually introduced, was his first Sopranos writing credit.

I've read that Weiner had already written and unsuccessfully shopped a pilot for what became Mad Men before he was taken on as a key member of the Sopranos team for Seasons 5 and 6, and that David Chase had seen the script and that was one of the reasons he hired him. We also have one of the longtime key Sopranos writer-producers, Terence Winter, serving as the creative driving force for Boardwalk Empire, and Mitchell Burgess and Robin Green masterminding Blue Bloods -- and of course erstwhile Sopranos cast members all over the tube. The show, beyond its own merits, seems to have served as a TV academy of sorts.

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TV Watch: Maybe "Graceland" only seems "formulaic" because the characters aren't (yet?) terribly compelling

by Ken

Normally I wouldn't try to write about a show like USA's Graceland after only two episodes, especially when I'm so conflicted about it. It's always possible, for example, that once I've absorbed all the characters and circumstances piled on us in these early episodes, it will all fit together more credibly and interestingly. The problem is, I don't know how many more episodes I'll be sticking around.

Anyone with shouting range of USA's promos knows that Graceland is the name given to a California beachfront house seized from a drug lord and repurposed into an undercover residence for a bunch of undercover agents from several federal agencies -- in the case of the TV show, mostly FBI plus a couple from DEA and one from Customs. For the record, we're told that there really is such a place, and stuff similar to what we see happened there. Luckily, no stress is placed on the historicity of the stories, so that's one thing we don't hae to worry about.

I guess what's supposed to be interesting is the "double undercover" -- that each of the house residents is undercover in his/her enforcement cases, and then returns "home" to a running undercover identity, the idea being that people in the area are vaguely aware that they're, well, something out of the ordinary, but that each has invented for him/herself a personality that provides cover for themselves and the house.

At the center of the story, at least so far, are the two smartest guys ever inducted into the FBI -- the preppy-cute new graduate, Mike, who's all rulebook and earnestness, and is assigned against his wishes (he wanted to be assigned to D.C. to begin his ascent to the directorship of the bureau) to Graceland where the roost is ruled by the stubbly-rugged-cute Briggs, who used to be rulebook-earnest but somewhere along the line became a rule-maker unto himself -- who apparently still usually gets his man but by unorthodox means that make the higher-ups nervous. In fairness, they also seem nervous about what the heck he's up to. And we learned late in the first episode that the reason Mike had been dispatched to Graceland is to spy on Briggs.

Already a suspicious mind is on alert: If Briggs is so smart, how can he possibly not figure out why Mike has been inflicted on him? Well, in fact, there were earlier indications of suspicion, and by the end of Episode 2 we know for sure that he does know, which I mention because it's typical of a lot of the detail of the show: None of it may be wildly plausible, but most of the things one might point to as too improbably really could happen.

Briggs the wily veteran who has learned the real ways of the world, as opposed to what he learned in FBI School. Mike the straight-arrow newcomer who becomes the butt of his housemates' jokes. Lauren the earnest agent who becomes dangerously emotionally involved with Danny, the agent who's shot in the pilot episode. And so on and so on. All of it could happen, probably does happen in real life. Reduce each of the characters to a tagline and the setup can sound formulaic. And while it's not that the cast, for all its obvious prettiness, is inept -- the boys and girls can talk and walk, often at the same time and at a rapid clip. There just isn't, or at any rate so far doesn't seem to me to be, much that's really grabbing about any of them.

I think the relationship that has come closest to grabbing me is Mike's with a dog who latches onto him on the beach. I assumed the dog was going to follow him home, and the housemates would fight about whether the new guy can have a dog. Apparently not. But when the dog reappeared in Episode 2, I perked up. So far the only thing I know I want to see more of is Mike and the dog.

So far, the plots also seem kind of schematic, which again probably is just a fancy-sounding way of saying that I don't much care about them. I suspect TV construction in the way each episode builds so far to a climax of danger and supposed suspense at the scene-of-danger of the undercover operation du jour. Again I can't dismiss this automatically as implausible, because I suppose such things do often happen in serious undercover operations. So what I probably mean is that the elaborate setups seem to me more like plot mechanics than anything I'm apt to really care about.

Sometimes our behavior tells us more about what we're thinking than our thinking. I left the pilot of Graceland optimistic -- I thought the show would be worth returning to. And I did return this week. But about 20 minutes into the show I happily relinquished my attention to something else I was trying to do. Oh, I do that a lot; I'm often trying to multitask (rarely successfully; these days I'm usually lucky if I wind up getting one thing done). And I knew the DVR was recording the show, and I could catch up on it anytime. But afterward, I didn't have any great desire to do so, and in fact I wound up doing it mostly because I wanted to see if the show might be worth writing about this week. (I still don't know.)

Johnny (Manny Montana), Paige (Serinda Swan), Mike (Aaron Tveit), Jakes (Brandon Jay McLaren), Briggs (Daniel Sunjata), and Charlie (Vanessa Ferlito) -- I think I've got 'em right, but I wouldn't swear.

It seems worth noting that the show was created by Jeff Eastin, who gave us USA's White Collar. This is interesting because White Collar has all the things that Graceland doesn't so far seem to: characters and relationships that really imprint themselves on the viewer: con man supreme Neal Caffrey (Matt Bomer), his FBI handler Peter Burke (Tim DeKay), Neal's strange-underworld pal Mozzie (Willie Garson), Peter's devoted wife Elizabeth (Tiffani Thiessen), Neal's assorted lady friends. Oh sure, the shows have plots, but it's the regular characters I tune in to see.

For the record, Season 5 of White Collar apparently won't come our way till fall. Also for the record: USA Network has absolutely the worst website I've seen, at least for anyone who's trying to extract information about its shows. If everyone involved in maintaining the website were shot, it would be hardly any loss -- least of all to the website.

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TV Watch: Please, please, don't watch "Million Dollar Listing" on account of anything I'm about to say

MDL's Boys of NY: "I Feel Pretty" Ryan, "I Hate
Schnitzel" Fredrik, and "My Hair! My Hair!" Luis

by Ken

I let slip last week that I have been known to watch Bravo's Million Dollar Listing. I'm not proud of this. Still, maybe it's something we ought to talk about.

It started with the original version of MDL, which is to say the version that's now called Million Dollar Listing L.A. or something like that, now that there's a Million Dollar Listing New York. But, significantly, my habit didn't start at the start of MDL. From the Wikipedia entry, I see it took the producers a season or so to settle on the eventual format, where each episode intersperses the week's exploits by three high-price-listing real-estate agents who are in fact the stars of the show.

At any rate, they're the reason for watching it, and I'm not sure I can explain why. Maybe it's because they're all so whacked out, and so variously whacked out, that it's possible to feel superior to them even while watching them living their lives of madcap luxury and excess.

From the Los Angeles show we get some information about the demographics of high-end real-estate pushers: Two-thirds are Jewish (Josh Flagg and Josh Altman), and two-thirds are gay (Josh Flagg and Madison). Alert readers will have noticed that a full one-third is Jewish and gay. I draw no conclusions from any of this. I'm just reporting here.

Malibu Madison [right] is a cutie pie living a high life and trying to find himself, or perhaps wondering why he doesn't have a special someone in his life, though no viewer will be deeply mystified. Still, there's something sweetly childlike about him.

That's not a problem for Josh Flagg, who already had a partner by the time we found out he was gay. What Josh F also has is a rich upbringing and a charming ancient Grandma whose business history includes inventing North America, or perhaps just buying and selling it. When he's not selling real estate, Josh is mostly concerned with finding more than merely two ends of a candle to burn, and yet there's something endearing about his heap of neuroses.

I don't find burly straight Josh Altman terribly endearing, but as with the others there's some interest in seeing him in the context of his family, including a brother who seems to be somewhere between his best friend and keenest rival. Meanwhile, Josh A seems to have found love in a way that gave the show a juicy plotline: He hooked up with Madison's assistant, Heather, whom Madison believes to have committed an act of personal betrayal.

(I haven't even mentioned the twerp Josh A replaced, the preposterous Chad, who looked about 15, though in fact he was quite a bit older, and seemed to believe that he had discovered the secrets of the universe en route to building a real-estate empire that would make him master of the world, more or less. He took himself so seriously that I don't think he understood he served mostly as comic relief -- I suspect it was his discovery that people were laughing at him that made him quit the show.)

MDL L.A. has notched five seasons, and I gather a sixth is in the works. It's goofy, and hilarious, and . . . something else I can't put my finger on. I've got this terrible feeling that when Season 6 rolls around, I'll be recording it for watching it when nothing else seems quite to suit my mood.

Strangely, the New York version, while following the same basic format, seems to me very different. For one thing, although multimillion-dollar dwellings aren't my turf, in New York they're in neighborhoods that are familiar to most locals, and indeed many of the actual locales where homes are being bought and sold are familiar. By contrast, L.A. for me is mostly a fantasyland, and so it seems for a lot of the strange people we see walking through the one or two transactions each of the heroes is pushing in a given episode.

I should make clear, by the way, that I have next to no connection to the real-estate market. I've never bought as much as a square foot, and the closest I've come to selling any is when my mother was selling her apartment in Florida, her only asset, and the price she got was going to determine how long we would be able to pay the tab at the senior residence she was moving into. At first I made the erroneous assumption that the real-estate schmo she was working with was on our side, was looking out for our interest. In time I discovered that no, he was only on his own side, looking out for his interest -- which was "deal" as opposed to "no deal." By contrast, a difference in sale price that would have been significant to us was of no consequence to him, once it was translated into commission terms, not to mention the downside of having to find and deal with other potential buyers for the same measly commission.

One thing that's fascinating, though not terribly surprising, is that these guys all think the business about them, not quite grasping that they have jobs only because people actually do need to buy and sell real estate. Some of the pushers are better at making deals happen than others, and even at making their clients feel "happy," but just like my mother's guy, they're rarely honest with them about money. On the whole, these guys make one wonder if car salesmen have been given a bum rap; at least they may not be at the bottom of the selling heap.

A point: It's one thing to introduce a note of realism to prospective sellers, who we see often (always?) have deeply delusional beliefs about the value of their property. But they then negotiate listing prices they have no intention of bringing in, or fighting for. But just recently we saw a buyer, presented by Fredrik (wasn't it?) with an offer almost $1 million below the listing price, tell him in anguish that financially he couldn't come out of it with less than $4 million (and you'll have to trust me that this seemed to be a dead-serious statement of his financial reality, not an emotional outburst) -- only to be persuaded that he was "happy" with the offer he accepted for something like $3.675.

Fredrik, from Sweden, is the canny veteran of the New York trio. For the record, he had never heard of schnitzel when some was thrust upon him, and he dismissed it as some awful fried stuff. Ryan, a former soap actor, is almost as in love with selling real estate as he is with himself. Someday perhaps he'll discover that he's not either as great-looking or as charming as he thinks he is. Then there's the cast newcomer, little Luis, the battling newcomer to the cast. (For the record, the New York cast is only one-third gay: no-schnitzel Fredrik.)

The New York pushers, while perhaps less likable than their Los Angeles counterparts, are somehow actually more interesting. The show has also been shrewd in running story lines involving particular apartments across episodes; lately I've actually found myself looking forward to seeing what happens next. (The current season has also included a heavy dose of reality in the form of Superstorm Sandy, an especially potent force since the MDL NY guys tend to be focused on Lower Manhattan.)

But please, don't think I'm trying to encourage you to watch the thing. Isn't it bad enough that one of us is?

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TV Watch: Revisiting Aaron Sorkin's first TV series, the incandescent "Sports Night" (with notes on "Arrested Development")

On-air, without pants (don't ask -- it's too complicated to
explain): Dan (Josh Charles) and Casey (Peter Krause)

CASEY [in the Sports Night co-anchors' office, with pants]: Hey, you want to get involved with this?
DAN [reading Forbes magazine with cover story "The Wealth of Cities"]: I so don't.
CASEY: Didn't you used to care about these things?
DAN: Yes.
CASEY: So it wasn't that long ago that you did?
DAN: Yeah.
CASEY: I mean, it was like yesterday.
DAN: Right.
CASEY: Now when I say "yesterday," I'm not speaking metaphorically. I mean it was yesterday. What happened to your values?
DAN: I find that maintaining them is a lot of work. I take a day off every now and then.
CASEY: You take a vacation from doing the right thing?
DAN: Yeah. I don't loot storefronts or anything, but once in a while, when I consider the effort it takes to diligently adhere to a moral compass, I take myself out of the lineup and rest for the next game.
CASEY: I swear, you could run for Congress and win.
DAN: Not with a goatee.
CASEY: Yeah, that's true.

-- from "Mary Pat Shelby," Episode 5
of Season 1 of Sports Night (4:53-5:25)

by Ken

I originally made the above transcript, or most of it, while I was whizzing through Season 1 and the Episodes 1-8 of Season 2 of Sports Night during my recent period of enforced inactivity. But then I set the chicken-scratched transcript aside, returning to it only now, only to discover that I couldn't make out the word in Dan's last line which turned out to be "goatee." And since I hadn't made any note of which episode this scene came from, I was stuck. In fact, I couldn't even remember what the great moral crisis was that Dan was declining to get involved with; I just thought this little scene was so spectacularly written, based on an incredibly precise understanding of the relationship between the Sports Night co-anchors, and acted by Peter Krause (Casey McCall) and (Dan Rydell).

The only thing to do was to hazard some educated guesses about which episodes it might have come from, and start recanvassing the DVDs. It proved to be anything but a burdensome labor. In fact, I had almost the opposite problem: Even though it had been only a couple of weeks since I just watched all these episodes, I found that every time I started one up again, I was unable to interrupt it, even once I was pretty sure it wasn't the one I was looking for.

Eventually I found the episode, and understood why I couldn't make out the word "goatee." I had forgotten that early on in this episode Dan was announcing to everyone on the show his intention to grow a goatee, and everyone was telling him what a terrible idea that was.

I was also reminded what the great issue at stake was. Sports Night's head man, managing editor Isaac Jaffee (Robert Guillaume) had scored the great coup of getting a studio interview with a football player in the news for allegedly assaulting his girlfriend, but after they promoted the daylights out of the story for a day, the player's handlers announced a nonnegotiable ground rule: No reference could be made to the girlfriend, Mary Pat Shelby. The handlers knew how hard it would be for the producers to say no, with their ratings bonanza on the line. Not surprisingly, however, there was resistance among the show staff -- though not with the involvement of Dan.

Meanwhile, though, executive producer Dana Whitaker (Felicity Huffman) had sent her senior assistant, Natalie Hurley (Sabrina Lloyd), to the Meadowlands to do a pre-interview with the player, knowing his hostility to the idea of women in the locker room. As the Sports Night team eventually realizes, he wound up assaulting her. This changes everything, since Dana hasn't agreed not to mention the new incident. When she makes the case that they are after all a news organization and it would be humiliating for them not to break their own story, she takes it one step too far, arguing that Natalie wants her story told, prompting Dan to interrupt and tell Dana that she had him until that last point -- that it was quite clear to him that Natalie didn't want her story told. (At the time no one on the outside knows the identity of the woman the player was seen exposing himself to and manhandling.)

Which prompted this exchange:

CASEY: I thought you were taking a break from moral accountability.
DAN: I threw in one for nothing.
CASEY: Hmm.

Dana subsequently negotiates a deal with the player's handlers, whereby Natalie will deny to one and all that anything improper happened in the locker room, in exchange for allowing the subject of Mary Pat Shelby to be discussed in the on-air interview. But eventually she comes to her senses and realizes that, much as Natalie doesn't want to have her career shattered by being dragged into the story, her story has to be told, and just before air time Dana cancels the interview, and tells the handlers and the player to leave. One of the handlers, Evans (Ray Wise), vents.

EVANS: You're all gonna be the laughingstock of broadcast news.
CASEY: We're pretty much used to that by now.
ANNOUNCEMENT: Three minutes to air.
DAN: Folks, I'm pretty sure I heard my boss ask you all to leave the building.
EVANS: This is a third-place show on a fourth-rate network.
DAN: Yeah, but that's all gonna change once I grow a goatee.
CASEY: He's just crazy enough to do it.

I haven't watched the Sports Night DVDs over the years, in good part because I had vivid recollections of running into technical troubles with the discs almost from the outset. As best I can tell from my recent re-watch of the first four discs, the first one really does have a defect that causes a skip in the pilot episode, but otherwise they seem to track OK. And the shows themselves! My goodness! You really have to watch them to appreciate the level of their brilliance, which is unflagging. Every episode is a "highlight reel" from start to finish.

It starts with the writing, of course. It's hard to imagine anyone other than Aaron Sorkin having the vision to see how much could be incorporated into a show about a nightly sports news broadcast, and nobody writes better for actors -- especially actors of the quality of these. There isn't anyone in the very large cast whose work seems to me anything less than spectacular.

In my re-re-watch today, I couldn't stop myself from looking once again at a scene in Episode 11, "The Six Southern Gentlemen of Tennessee," after Casey has appeared on The View and scored a great personal success. On the show he had the ladies of The View falling over one another to lavish praise on him for his appearance on the show, in particular his selection of ties. There's a comment about how sexy a man who can dress himself is.

Later in his office Casey is approached by a wardrobe-bearing young woman who diffidently asks if this is a good time. Anyone who knows Sorkin's next series, The West Wing, instantly recognizes Janel Moloney, who went on to make such an indelible impression as Josh Lyman's assistant, Donna Moss. She asks him if he knows her name, which of course he doesn't; we've established earlier in the episode that Dan knows everyone involved in the show, while Casey doesn't even know the names of most of the people who work on it. She introduces herself as Monica, the assistant wardrobe supervisor, and in a scene of astonishing delicacy and power rips into him for taking credit for dressing himself when in fact he has nothing to do with it -- it's all done by her boss, Maureen. He deserves all the other praise he receives, she says, but in the face of praise he didn't deserve, how hard would it have been to credit the person who was actually responsible for it, and how much would it have meant for Maureen to be acknowledged?

NO, SORRY, THIS IS NO GOOD

I went back and did one of my clumsy transcriptions.

CASEY is in his office sitting on the front edge of his desk contentedly watching a tape of his View appearance, including Starr Jones saying, "Well, I think you should know that a man who knows how to dress himself is a very sexy thing," and Casey replying, "Which is why so many of us are drawn to Carot Top." A young woman carrying assorted wardrobe items knocks on his open door. He shuts off the video.

MONICA: Excuse me, Mr. McCall?
CASY [gets up awkwardly and moves behind his desk, then sits down]: Yeah?
MONICA: I'm sorry, is this a bad time?
CASEY: For what?
MONICA: I'd like to ask you a question, but if you're preparing the show, if this is a bad time, I can come back . . . .
CASEY [looking down at his desk]: What's your question?
MONICA: Well, uh, what's my name?
CASEY [finally looking up, then at her]: What's your name?
MONICA: Yes.
CASEY [gets up]: Um. [Walking across the room] What are we doing right now?
MONICA [setting garments down carefully on a chair]: If this is a bad time, I can just come . . . .
CASEY: I'm sorry, I'm not very good at remembering names.
MONICA: Who was the number-two man on the Boston Red Sox staff in 1977?
CASEY [pausing, as if he doesn't want to answer]: It was Ferguson Jenkins.
MONICA [smiling slightly]: I'm the assistant wardrobe supervisor for Sports Night as well as two other shows here at CSC. I think you hurt the feelings of the woman I work for. Her name is Maureen, and she's been working here since the day you started.
CASEY [starting to shuffle back to his desk]: Well, I know Maureen.
MONICA : Can I ask you another question?
CASEY: I'm sorry I didn't know your name.
MONICA [holding out a striped tie]: Do you know what color this is?
CASEY [staring down at his desk again]: Well, it's gray.
MONICA : It's called gunmetal. Gray has more ivory, and gunmetal has more blue. [Without pausing, as she reaches for two shirts she was carrying and holds them up. ] Can you tell me which of these two shirts you should wear with it?
CASEY [now looking at her and the shirts]: Uh, I don't know.
MONICA : No, you don't. There's no reason why you should. You're not expected to know what shirt goes with what suit, or how a color in a necktie can pick up the color in your eyes. You're not expected to know what's going to clash with what Dan's wearing, or what pattern's going to bleed when Dave changes the lighting.

Mr. McCall, you get so much attention and so much praise for what you actually do, and all of it's deserved. When you go on a talk show and get complimented on something you didn't, how hard would it be to say, "That's not me, that's a woman named Maureen who's been working for us since the first day -- it's Maureen who dresses me every night, and without Maureen I wouldn't know gunmetal from a hole in the ground"? [Soft music comes up/] Do you have any idea what that would have meant to her? Do you have any idea how many times she would have played that tape for her husband and her kids? [CASEY looks down, abashed.]

I know, I know this is when it starts to get busy for you. [Heads back to the garments on the chair.] I hope I didn't take up too much of your time. [She continues fiddling with garments.] Please don't tell Maureen I spoke to you. She'd be pretty mad at me.
CASEY: I won't. Monica . . . .
[She leaves.]

Sports Night is also one of the most spectacularly well-directed series I've ever seen. Sorkin explained at the time that he didn't know how to "write for television," so he just wrote and trusted to fellow executive producer Thomas Schlamme, the show's principal director, to turn it into television, which he did brilliantly. The show had a look and even a sound that remain unique.

The obvious question is, how has such a show -- as fine as anything that's ever been done for TV -- remained so obscure? One answer is probably that from the get-go it lost all the audience that assumed it was about sports, which it really isn't. Another answer, or substitute for an answer, is a reminder that it barely managed to remain on ABC's schedule for a second season, and failed to make the cut for a third. Looking back, this is mind-boggling. But the show's ratings were never robust, and even though some of the ABC programming execs reportedly admired it, there was nothing like the personal commitment that, say, sustained Seinfeld through it's ratings-rocky early seasons. The fact is that TV marketers seem to me notoriously awkward about knowing what there is to promote in their shows and promoting it to viewers who might be interested.


SHADES OF ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT

In which connection it's hard not to think of Arrested Development, which had the good and bad fortune to be put on the air by Fox. Good fortune because Fox has shown itself open to some genuinely innovative programming, bad fortune because the network has shown itself not only inept at promoting such shows but unwilling to stand by them. Nevertheless, Arrested Development managed to survive for three seasons.

Last weekend I happened to be at my friend Richard's upstate, and since he has Netflix, on Sunday when the 15 new episodes produced for Netflix went up, I got to watch the first. There was some dissension among the ranks at our viewing, but I thought it was just fine, and look forward to seeing the whole shebang, in some form or other. It struck me as a little weird when I read that Netflix's stock took a plunge because people haven't been singing universal hosannas for the new episodes.

I'm actually sitting on the DVDs of Arrested Development's three original seasons, ever since Amazon offered them as one of their daily "gold" specials. I remember how much pleasure those shows gave me when they were aired originally, and wonder if I'm apprehensive that they won't delight me as much on re-viewing. One of these days I'll screw up my courage. Sports Night sure hasn't disappointed.

By the way, Arrested Development fans, if you haven't seen the video of the 2011 New Yorker Festival's "Bluth Family Reunion," featuring almost the whole cast along with series co-creator and creative overseer Mitch Hurwitz (with co-creator Ron Howard appearing rather spectrally via what sounds like the world's cheapest cell phone), newyorker.com has recently reposted the whole thing. Watch it.

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TV Watch: "Maron" -- So why not watch? I mean, it couldn't hurt you, could it?

"There's no such thing as a career in comedy," Marc informs his mother (Sally Kellerman), who has mastered the technique of talking to her son without actually listening, in Episode 2 of Maron, "Dead Possum." No, this isn't an actual embedded clip, but you can view the clip here. I'm sorry I couldn't embed the clip for you, but when I did, I lost all my paragraphing in the whole post. (I'd like to see some manager or software nitwit at our bloghost killed for this. If nothing else, it would teach him/her -- though I'm guessing it's a him -- a lesson. But does anybody care what I'd like to see?)

by Ken

As longtime readers know, back in the days of Air America Radio (does anyone remember Air America Radio?), I had a pretty intense involvement with comic Marc Maron as cohost and comedic driving force of the network's brilliant morning show, Morning Sedition. AAR was such a miasma of managerial arrogance and incompetence that it's easy to forget that it put some pretty decent programs on the air, in particular that dazzling morning show, which was hilarious as well as politically dead on target. And despite the truly stupefying ineptitude of the people who ran the network -- who surely deserved to be executed, several times if possible -- the show was building a fan base most everywhere it was heard, despite the best lack-of-effort of said managerial nincompoops.

The nincompoops, being too stupid and broadcast-illiterate to have any glimmering of the caliber of property they had under their roof, did their best to dilute it and make it a conventionally dimwitted morning radio show. And then they did the only even stupider thing they could think of to do: They canceled the show. These were people so ignorant, they had no clue how hard it is to develop such a property. Since that was the point at which it would have needed overseers who knew how to nurture it and make it grow, naturally the cause was hopeless. The only thing the lowlifes knew, apart from stealing the money they were paid for their stunning incompetence, was how to destroy what could have been a cornerstone of their franchise. All they had to do was pull the plug, and that was one thing they knew how to do.

The show's demise left a lot of us fans angry and bereft. In the years since, I've seen Marc Maron's name a number of times involved in projects of one sort or another, and when I was able to sample them, they seemed to me okay but nothing I needed to involve myself with.

Now IFC is giving us a half-hour show called Maron Fridays at 10pm -- and, judging from a quick search on my online cable guide, pretty much any other time of the week you'd care to watch. If you check your listings, you can probably still catch both episodes that have aired so far, "Internet Troll" (with guest Dave Foley; no, he's not the Internet troll) and "Dead Possum" (with guest Denis Leary, who's also a producer of the show). You can also watch full episodes online.

The premise is this Marc Maron character in the show is a fellow in mid-life who pursued a career in comedy which didn't quite turn out the way he had hoped; ditto for both of his marriages. He found himself not only single once again but reduced to doing a podcast in his garage in the L.A. area, which caught on and began attracting celebrity guests. As Marc himself explains in any media forum to which he can cadge access (including on-cable behind-the-scenes features), the TV character is pretty much himself, the major difference being that on the show he's acting.

He also notes that the casting of Judd Hirsch as his father (that comes up in Episode 3, next week) gives him a better father than he has in real life, something he assures us he has reported to his real-life father, who was apparently a little jumpy about the show. It seems unlikely that that made Dad less jumpy.

In Episode 1, Marc was freaked out to find out that he had that Internet troll, whom he tracked down with the sidekickish assistance of podguest Dave Foley. In Episode 2, podguest Denis Leary enabled him to track down the source of the mysterious stench he had noticed in his house: a dead possum in the crawl space under the house. (The concept of a crawl space, it turned out, was new to Marc.) I've found both episodes entertaining enough to continue watching, though I have to say the neurotic-self-loathing-comic thing seems awfully famjiliar, from maybe about a zillion sources, a number of which struck me as funnier. Still, the show is pleasant enough. I do have to wonder, though, if "pleasant" is where a show like this really wants to be going.

As I thought back to my one incandescent Marc Maron experience, Morning Sedition, it occurred to me that however personal Marc may have allowed himself to get on MS, the show was never about him, and he was almost always hilarious, with all that neurosis being released so dazzingly into the political cosmos. I can see where he might think that the one thing he has left which is uniquely his is his own life. However, I'm thinking that perhaps the last thing he might want to be doing is a show that is entirely about himself. Hey, it's just a thought.

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TV Watch: Say, has anybody been watching this CBS "Golden Boy" thing? (Anybody at all?)

In seven years this very pretty -- yet strangely uninteresting -- boy, who has been on the police force for about ten minutes, is going to be the police commissioner of NYC. Does anybody care?

by Ken

Before I got sidetracked into wondering, in the post title, whether anyone actually is watching this Golden Boy thing (Tuesdays at 10pm ET/PT on CBS), I intended to ask such viewers as might be turned up: Are you making head or tail of it?

So much of it looks like NYC cop shows we've seen over and over and over, except more anonymous. I mean, here is this idyllically pretty boy Clark, who for all his sculptural beauty seems to have no sex appeal whatsoever, who has apparently been on the police force for about ten minutes and is already a detective, and we're told right out of the gate in seven years is going to be the city's police commissioner. And in every episode there are, um, flash-forwards to this mystical "seven years from now" future. Supposedly this is the story of how that happens (are they really expecting the show to last seven years?), but what is the story?

I haven't been able to shake the feeling that the genre here is sci-fi, and it will be revealed that the secret he's harboring is that he's an alien. Or maybe a bionic boy. Or something that explains among other things his connection to a sister who seem to have wandered in from a show about Future Sluts of America. I guess this could be believable, a brother trying to steer his sister away from the wrong path, but it all seems so schematic, so unhuman.

Then there are the cops around young Clark, who also seem to have wandered in, not so much from Central Casting (although there is that) but from Genre Cliché Central. They're all ambitious, and mostly corrupt, and Clark himself seems to have an inclination to the corner-cutting species of corruption. So maybe the story is what kind of cop he turns into who then turns into a pre-teen commissioner?

Amidst all this genre-teasing strangeness there's good old Chi McBride as Clark's partner Don, who everyone else thinks is just a lazy time-server hanging on till pension time, but who is really the old-fashione earnest and honest cop who believes in doing the right thing the right way. I'm not sure McBride is doing that much better an acting job than his castmates. It may just be the relief of watching someone work within a recognizable and identifiable character type.

It may be that I've just been sucked in by the CBS promotion department into thinking that this is supposed to be a Significant Show. But no, when I watched the preview showing of the pilot, I did have a sense that there was something going on here. However, I still don't know what, and even though I still have a bunch of unwatched episodes piled up on my DVR, the show is such heavy going for me that I don't know how quickly I'll be able to find out whether they solve the key mystery for me: what this show thinks it's doing.

Above all I notice that I don't have a lot of enthusiasm, each time I get through an episode, for doing it yet again. Which is why I'm wondering if anyone out there has figured this thing out. Is it worth pursuing?

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TV Watch: Newfangled ways of measuring time (1): From "Nurse Jackie" 5/1 to 5/2 (and "Mad Men" 6/2 to 6/3)

The new All Saints ER doctors: Carrie Roman (Betty Gilpin) and Ike Prentiss (Morris Chestnut)

by Ken

For any readers who noticed my recent disappearance, let me say that it: (1) was planned and (2) seems to have achieved its objectives with great success. I'm back home with a new knee that already seems to be working better than the original-equipment one, though that's not saying much.

It's an oddity of our times, though, that when the spring TV-season announcements were made, it occurred to me almost at once that I would be home for the Season 5 premiere of Nurse Jackie, and then home again in time for Episode 2 -- and ditto with Episodes 2 and 3 of Season 6 of Mad Men.

When we left Nurse Jackie, nearing the climax of what seemed to me a triumphant Season 4, I was apprehensive about the installation a showrunner of onetime Dexter showrunner Clyde Phillips. Two episodes in, I couldn't be a much happier camper.

It made excellent sense that Phillips wrote the Season 5 premiere episode himself, enabling him to make some basic changes he intended, like reinstalling director Gloria Akaliuis (Anna Deavere Smith), pharmacist Eddie (Paul Schluze), and of course Jackie herself (Edie Falco) at All Saints, moving Zoey (Merritt Wever) out of Jackie's apartment, and of course cleaning out some old characters (bye-bye, nurse Sam [Arjun Gupta] and especially Dr. O'Hara [Eve Best] and her new baby, who returned to England in Episode 1) and introducing some new ones, notably the two new ER doctors: the Landstuhl Army ER whiz Ike Prentiss (Morris Chestnut), who is sometimes taken at first glance to be a drug dealer, and slutty, self-obsessed Carrie Roman (Betty Gilpin) who lives entirely by -- and one might say for -- her looks. All sorts of possibilities seem loaded in both. Also, one notices that Dr. Cooper (Peter Facinelli), whose character had been softened in Seasons 2 and 3, seems to have been rather re-infantilized. Lovely moment when Coop is whiningly uncomprehending about being passed over once again for ER chief and Jackie looks at him and says, "Really?"

More important, Phillips seems to have confident control of this remarkable set of characters he's created, with Jackie's hard-won sobriety only depressing her further as soon-to-be ex kevin (Dominic Fumusa) pushes the end of the marriage to an especially brutal conclusion, pushing hard for sole custody of Grace (Ruby Jerins) and Fi (Mackenzie Aladjem). Of course, given the level of deception Kevin has awakened to, he has every right to an enormous well of bitterness, but the level of vindictiveness programmed in goes well beyond the best interests of the children. It's hard not to notice that Gloria is exhibiting alarmingly large memory gaps, so we can assume there are plot developements to be developed there.

I've already re-watched Episodes 1 and 2 via "On Demand," and noticed that by Monday next week's episode was available as well. That struck me as a sufficiently stark disruption of the natural order of time that I haven't been willing to go there yet. I'm not swearing, though, that I'm going to be able to hold out till Sunday, though.

Meanwhile the Mad Men season seems to me off to a more controversial but also generally satisfying start. It's looking, though, like an even grimmer season that the last couple, with the Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce agency now functioning in a more or less constant state of terror (to which everyone in a position of authority contributes in his/her own way) and Don Draper himself (Jon Hamm) losing pretty much all claim to audience sympathy. It looks to be a pretty bleak journey through 1968, but done with the customary skill and precision of Matt Weiner and his team.


TOMORROW: Another on-the-tube way of measuring my particular time lapse

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TV Watch: "Army Wives" soldiers on, taking large changes in stride

The old gang: Col. Joan and psychiatrist Roland Burton; now-Gen. Michael and Claudia Joy Holden (back), Roxy and Trevor LeBlanc (front); Denise Sherwood (back) and Pamela Moran (front)

by Ken

It's been awhile since I've written about Army Wives, but it remains one of the offerings on the TV schedule I look forward to most, and that's with the considerable cast turnover last season and especially the newly begun one, with the departures of, first, Pamela (Brigid Brannagh) and then Roxy (Sally Pressman) and now, apparently, Roland (Sterling K. Brown), who is shipping off to Baltimore.

And of course there's the loss at dead center of Claudia Joy Holden (Kim Delaney), one of the great characters in TV history, sort of the glue that held Fort Marshall together as the wife of Michael Holden (Brian McNamara), whom we've watched rise from colonel all the way up to three-star general. Of course change must be a basic fact of life on an Army post, and that has been reflected in the characters we've lost to personnel decisions, either the Army's or the characters' own, and more painfully to death from combat or natural causes.

Along the way of course new characters have been introduced, including a flood of them this season to replace the newly-departeds, but of the original core of "wives" -- the odd grouping of the wives of (originally) a colonel, a major, and two enlisted men and the husband of a lieutenant colonel, only Denise Sherwood (Catherine Bell), wife of now-Col. Frank Sherwood (Terry Serpico), remains. A new network has been formed, now including another general's wife, Jackie Clarke (Kelli Williams) and a few batch of enlisted men's wives (or ex-).

It strikes me as quite believable, though. That original group came together by chance and peculiar circumstance, and the special bonds that developed among them were special and probably nonrepeatable.

And the writers have found plenty to deal with in the characters efforts to cope with family situations and the basic reality that they're all there as part of the U.S. military machine, which means soldiers being sent off to both Iraq and Afghanistan. The characters have always been created so vividly, and with such respect for their individuality, that it's been easy to form strong bonds with them.

I assume the death of Claudia Joy had everything to do with contracts, but the writers made it almost unbearably poignant -- especially for husband Michael and the Holdens' surviving daughter, Emmalin (Katelyn Pippy); her older sister, Amanda, was killed off early on), and for best friend Denise (who herself lost son Jeremy a couple of seasons back). I've tended to assume that each season was the last, and each season I've been pleasantly surprised to find that it wasn't. I'm glad again.

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TV Watch: Finally I understand why ABC hasn't been able to find a show to go with "The Middle," "Suburgatory," and "Modern Family"

Polly (Sarah Chalke, mercifully back to camera), stepdad Max (Brad Garrett), and mom Elaine (Elizabeth Perkins) in ABC's latest hit, How to Live with Your Parents (for the Rest of Your Life). In case you hadn't heard, Max only has one ball. You can see a "Just the Jokes" clip here.

by Ken

The things I do in the name of blogorific responsibility!

As we all know, ABC has -- for a change -- a hole in its Wednesday-night comedy lineup. Amazingly, the hole doesn't seem to have been plugged by this fall's The Neighbors, which I've seen described (and not pejoratively!) as a "suburban alien comedy." Somehow you could tell that The Neighbors wasn't going to be Third Rock from the Sun, which showed that you could actually have an "alien comedy" that was smart and funny.

So this week ABC was promoting a newcomer to the Wednesday lineup, a surefire hit called How to Live with Your Parents (for the Rest of Your LIfe)?" Well, okay, you think, shows with even hideouser titles have not totally sucked. No, I can't think of one offhand, but my memory isn't what it used to be.

Wait, two seasons ago CBS offered us $#*! My Dad Says, a breakthrough of sorts: a show whose name literally couldn't be pronounced. It wasn't horrible, but it wasn't good. More recently ABC itself offered us the resplendent Don't Trust the B---- in Apartment 23, which I've seen a supposedly respectable critic defend as some sort of breakthrough, though to me it seemed peopled with stunningly repellent characters I hoped would all become victims of the slasher who would be introduced in a mid-episode genre switcheroo.

It's hard to believe, but somehow I forgot to record HTLWYP (FTROYL). I actually checked ABC's "On Demand" listings, and it hasn't turned up there, at least as of yet. So I cooked up this idea of writing a post called something like "Say, did anybody watch that How to Live with Your Parents (for the Rest of Your LIfe)?"

But no, it occurred to me that I might be able to watch it online, and alas, I did. (You can too, here.) Now, it has to be possible to do a show about an adult child moving back in with his/her parents, which is certainly a theme for our times. And no, I don't mean the assaultively hideous (and now mercifully canceled) Enlightened, which at least does make it clear what a horror it is in this case for the afflicted mom, suddenly re-saddled with her monstrous self-absorbed leech of a brain-dead offspring (played, in somebody's idea of a joke, by actual mom-and-daughter Diane Ladd and Laura Dern). I've actually seen an admiring critic -- come to think of it, I believe it was the same critic who thought Don't Trust the B---- in Apartment 23 was something special who I've seen claim that Amy, the Laura Dern character, is "idealistic" and "pure." Say, is there drug testing for TV critics?

Even in the promos for HTLWYP (FTROYL), it was surprising to see so many familiar faces, or maybe I should say "recycled" faces. The tail-between-her-legs daughter-mom is Sarah Chalke, and while I am one of the few people who didn't think she absolutely sucked as "the other Becky" when Lecy Goranson took her college leave from Roseanne, and I watched Scrubs occasionally and would concede that she was by no means the most obnoxious feature of the show (with Zach Braff leading the obnoxiousness charge every week, how could she hope to be?), I cringed my way through an episode of this.

Like when her twerpy boss at the upscale food store where she's gotten work in the six months since she moved in with the 'rents turns out to be trying to get her attention to call that attention to the cute guy in the store, and she actually collars him for a date, is there anyone who doesn't know that it's going to be a disaster? At the same time, is there anyone who cares which species of TV disaster date it's going to be? For the record, he gets falling-down drunk, and forces Polly to draw on the services of her still-hanging-around ex-husband, the goofily Peter Pannish Julian (Jon Dore), who I think is supposed to be charming. You can decide that one for yourself.

Then there are Elizabeth Perkins and Brad Garrett as Polly's mom and stepdad, Elaine and Max. Elaine may in fact be a breakthrough sitcom character: a mom who's a rummy and a slut. The only thing you need to know about Max is that he has a stud or something in one ear, and he has only one ball.

I noticed online that one writer detects some influence from Arrested Development. See note above about drug testing for TV critics.

You may be thinking, it doesn't sound all that awful. Actually, I'm not making it sound as awful as I found it -- the details are just too preposterous, and nauseating.

But watching it did make me focus on, and I think finally understand, the problem ABC is having trying to plug the holes on Wednesday night. It all goes back to the fall of 2009, when The Middle and Modern Family were introduced as part of the network's newly created Wednesday comedy night. That's two genuinely first-rate shows -- one of them in fact looking like it's going to be one of the historic TV comedy triumphs -- introduced on the same night in the same season. How often does that happen?

But what I suddenly found myself thinking was: Nobody at ABC knows (a) how those shows got on its schedule or (b) why they were successful. Certainly neither has anything in common with anything else that ABC has offered in modern times as comedy. So how then would you intentionally introduce two more shows to fill out the two-hour block? Looked at this way, it's something of a miracle that the network last season came up with Suburgatory, which looked like it was just going to be endless cheap shots at boring suburbia (which I'm assuming is what the ABC execs thought it would be) as divorced father and blossoming teenage daughter George and Tessa Altman (Jeremy Sisto and the radiant Jane Levy) move from hip New York City to stultifying whatever-the-name-of-the-town-is. However, the writers have made it something quite different from that, involving basic issues of parenting and growing up, of fitting in and not, of insider vs. outsider status, of hopes and especially disappointments.

Again, it's about as far from an "ABC comedy" as one could imagine. And that, I think, is the ABC programming department's Wednesday-night problem: having to think as if they're not ABC programmers.

I think, by the way, that's how they came up with Happy Endings, which I see has just returned to the schedule. Weh's mir. As I recall, the same critic who thinks Enlightened's Amy is pure and idealistic thinks Happy Endings is something special. To me, it's Friends with a set of characters who might have been interesting and appealing but were instead made, by virtue of arrogance, abjectness, or just plain obnoxiousness, generally revolting. I really tried with this bunch, but in the end all I could think of was hoping that that slasher found his way onto this show too.

Meanwhile, this week Modern Family had a simply spectacular outing, and made what must be incredibly difficult look effortless. Pride of place went to the Dunphy household, with Claire (the astounding Julie Bowen, doing one of the tube's stellar characterizations)


OMG, IT'S THE RETURN (FINALLY) OF MAD MEN!

Two hours' worth on AMC tomorrow night. And next Sunday it's the season premiere of Showtime's Nurse Jackie, with the final season of The Big C launching Monday the 29th. Thank you, TV gods!

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TV Watch: Is there anything "Shameless"'s Frank Gallagher won't do if he's paid? (Not that we know of)

"Apparently, I've caused a ruckus because I said that gay folks deserve certain . . . civil rights. Rights that the breeders don't want to bestow upon me. [Chortles]" Watch this great clip from last week's episode of Shameless -- Frank Gallagher as impassioned gay-rights crusader -- here. (I had it successfully embedded but discovered that then I couldn't have any line breaks in the post. Sigh. I thnk someone should be shot, but then, nobody asked my opinion.)

by Ken

What? Is Frank Gallagher gay? This drunken galoot with six children (that we know about), who'll nail any woman who makes the mistake of getting within his nailing range -- gay? Well, as I recall Frank himself answering the question as put to him by somebody from his circle, he can be whatever he has to be. And in this case defending same-sex partners' benefits for city employees has served his latest pure-Frank freeloading scheme, to leech off the poor soul -- who isn't gay -- who has taken him in thinking Frank can help him as his AA sponsor.

Naturally, once Frank discovers just how effective his gift of gab can make him as a gay-rights fund-raiser, his sights are set higher than some lousy health benefits. He's a rain-maker now, and expects to be compensated accordingly. Which works swimmingly until he gets a better offer -- a new sugar daddy who wants to see him "cured" of his gayness, and not only is prepared to up the previous benefactor's ante but has a whole new fringe benefit to offer: the women who'll be brought to him as part of his "cure"! Okay, so things don't work out exactly the way Frank was fantasizing. He still knows how be whatever he has to be to make it pay.

It was, I thought, the best use the writers have found for Frank's customary verbal diarrhea (a character trait that William H. Macy is obviously supremely well equipped to enact). The key thing is that they didn't try to make him any more likable or justifiable. If anything, his shamelessly flaunted shamelessness adds a new level of monstrousness. But it was a brilliant way to add some dimension to the character, or at any rate to make an existing dimension more immediate. It occurs to me that when I go back to rewatch the earlier seasons' worth of episodes, I may be more intrigued and less instantly annoyed by the earlier uses of Frank's gift of gab.

All in all, I'd have to say that the Shameless team has had an outstanding season keeping the struggles and dreams of the Gallaghers and their friends going. I've never had any trouble caring about the struggle involved with all the other characters. But Frank himself has always been a problem for me. Suddenly I'm finding myself actually enjoying his, um, appallingness.

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