The Geezer Niche

I'm sure the marketing guys are all over this one but I've just noticing a to-me-surprising phenom in TVland: call it "the geezer niche."  In short, old guys.  Not exactly wise and loveable old guys like Life with Father, and not really figures of quaintly comic charm like Scrooge or Santa Claus although there may be some comedy involved.  I'm noticing a more nuanced and modern variety.

I suppose you could start with Coach Ernie Pantusso (Nicholas Colasanto)  on Cheers and  Sergeant Phil Esterhaus (Michael Conrad) on Hill Street Blues, although in both cases, the ticket of admittance may be that they were graceless enough to die in mid-narrative.  Aside from that I don't remember anything precisely geezerish about Coach.  Rather, I'd mark him down as a good, dependable funny man whose most memorable contribution may be that his passing opened the door to the young Woody Harrelson (currently verging towards geezerhood himself in True Detective).  Esterhaus is perhaps a better candidate, as one recalls the mix of hilarity and horror he generated by his lust after benign affection for a high school cheerleader.  

You get a bit more benign horror in Holling Vincouer (John Cullum) on Northern Exposure--Vincouer who wouldn't marry his pubescent sweetheart because she was too old for him: the Vincouers are long-lived and monogamous and Holling fears he would outlive her.  We also know that Vincouer's grandfather ate Ruthanne's grandfather in a snowstorm, so just edgy enough to be funny without upsetting matters.

I suppose others have noticed but I'm just now picking up on the idea that there is a streak of comedy in another and more genuine geezer--Corrado Soprano, "Uncle Junior," (Dominic Chianese) in The Sopranos, perhaps the only one of the despicable lot who could get his hand caught in a piece of heavy machinery without coming to a horrific end.  But there seem to  me to be a subtle shift here; whereas Esterhaus and Vincouer were charmers with just a bit of edge for entertainment, you get the impression that Corrado is a genuinely rotten human being who somehow achieves his moments of charm almost in spite of himself.

Which brings me to the one who I'd place one who stands alone--Roman Grant, the polygamous patriarch in Big Love.  As a wise man once asked--has Harry Dean Stanton ever made a bad  movie?  The answer is yes but it's a detail: his rendition Roman might get a few black chuckles but he is overall one of the most compulsively watchable villains in TV history.

]And finally--I still don't quite what to do with the one who started me down this rathole: Louis Kaester, "The Commodore" in Boardwalk Empire.  I'm still in Season 2 but so far I'd say he is as resoundingly awful a human being as Roman Grant.  Yet you can't help noticing how much fun Dabney Coleman seems to be having with the part.  He comes across as nothing so much as an old stage hoofer who figured he'd never get a job again, and can't fathom his own good fortune--I bet he blew off the invitation was a prank.  A genuinely awful human but still, as a certified geezer myself, I'd say being shot with an arrow by a naked Diana is a pretty cool way to go.

[Yes, he ain't dead yet.  But considering what comes after, I'm fancying that he might wish he was.]

House of Canards

After two trial episodes of Neflix' House of Cards, Chez Buce has sent it to the shower, declared it the weakest link, held it chopped and said "you're fired."  There might be good stuff later on--there were some moments even in these two--but so far, it sounds like the auteur is an Englishman who feels the need to explain American politics to the yokels even though he doesn't understand it very well himself.  One of the saving graces of the original was that Francis Urquhart always you that little twinkle as if to say hey, it's only an entertainment.  The American cast doesn't seem to find anything funny in anything.  Perhaps they have read the rest of the script.

In Which I Hate, Hate Hate a TV Show (And Watch it Anyway)

Against my better judgment, I just spent most of an hour watching the third episode of Aaron Sorkin's Newsroom. It was almost unbearably awful: a relentless drumbeat of cheap shots and preaching-to-the-choir that made Rachel Maddow look like Walter Cronkite.*  Mrs. Buce, not quite so revolted, said "Oh, it's Sorkin.  You saw the same thing in West Wing."  Well, sorta kinda, but not really. I liked West Wing, at least the early seasons. Of course you knew all along that Sorkin was the very model of beltway conventional wisdom and that Jed Bartlett's was the best government since Rome under the Antonines.  But mostly he didn't let his politics distract him from telling a good story.  This time, it seems, all bets are off.

This is a shame for more reasons than I can count, but one is surely this: American right-wing populism, whatever it horrors, is almost certainly a far more complicated and I suspect interesting story than anybody in Sorkin's inner circle appears to suspect.    I'm not sure that it is anywhere on TV yet: maybe Breaking Bad, although I haven't watched it.  But so far, the one thing you can tell before is that as an analyst of current American culture, Sorkin doesn't even get out of the gate.  

Happily for my blood pressure, I also today happened onto an approach far more interesting and far more likely to move the ball down field. It's Josh  Barro's new Business Insider piece on why Toronto's clown-show mayor  is almost worth taking seriously.  Here's a takeaway paragraph:

So in addition to producing a fountain of amusing news-of-the-weird stories, Rob Ford presents a useful cautionary tale for the often-cozy business, government and labor elites that govern large cities. If you allow people in the less-glamorous parts of town to come to believe that you do not care about their interests and needs, they may toss you out and replace you with a populist, “straight-talking” buffoon who energetically demonstrates that he does -- even if he is totally unfit to run a city, and might be the sort of person who smokes crack.

 Aaron, next time you set out to break a lance for good government, you might want to put Barro on your speed dial.  Might make for a far more interesting show.

*Afterthought: only after writing the above did I stumble on a snippet called "Aaron Sorkin has Answers for Haters of 'Newsroom.'"  Interesting, but I'm not sure it addresses the point I am trying to make here.

Second afterthought:  I'm getting some blowback from which I infer that some people thought I was actually expressing fondness for the Tea Party here.  Oh nonononono;  I think the whole enterprise is calamitously misguided, and the leadership mostly vile sacs of pestilence.  But it's interesting even so, and the mainstream incomprehension can be fatal.

The Antidote to Zero Dark Thirty

I haven't seen Zero Dark Thirty but I certainly have heard the buzz about the allegedly awful torture scene (Torture works!  I saw it in the movie!).  It seems to me the foil might be the scene in Homeland where Saul takes the suspect on a 30 (odd) hour auto trip and slowly, slowly, slowly softens her up.  Recall my friend Scott's insight that if you sit up listening to anybody until three o'clock in the morning, you hear a lot of  boring stuff but once in a while you hear something really amazing.

I'm very much of the anti-torture party but I think it's only fair to acknowledge one limitation of the more sophisticated Saul technique: it takes training, and skill.  I haven't any doubt that there are people who know how to do it--and not just in Netflix--but I bet the demand exceeds the supply.

A couple of loose footnotes about Homeland: one, in two different scenes (so far) we see our hero and a lady (different ladies) drunk and giggly.  Well, not seriously drunk; let's just say spifflicated. Still, they're about the most convincing drunk scenes I've ever seen.  Related: Claire Danes does a marvelous job of convincing you that she is a pill junky, just one pop away from ionospheric orbit.  In both cases, I'm  sure you have to credit the actors but I bet the director had something to do with it.  Come to think of it, the only* other time I remember seeing her was in Romeo and Juliet, where I thought I thought she looked the part but didn't quite know that she was supposed to do with it.  Somebody must deserve the credit for bringing her out.
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*I need to get out more.  Noted.

Homeland: The Lie Detector

Unencumbered by cable but awash in Netflix, Chez Buce is just now getting around to Showtime's Homeland.  I was a skeptic in the early episodes; it seemed a bit clumsy and improvisational in its set-ups.  Just wait, Mrs. Buce said, these things time.

Tonight we did Episode 4 and I suspect she's right again--that bit about the lie detector test is one of the cleverest bits of plotting I've ever seen.

[Oh, I didn't give away anything.   You knew a lie detector was coming.  Just keep your eyes open when it shows up.]

John Le Carré and the Aesthetics of Humiliation

Mr.and Mrs. B. have been imbibing BBC version of John Le Carré's, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. That would be the 1979 mini-series with Alec Guinness, not the current movie (that comes later). And I'm struck by the general air of grunge, of seediness that haunts the whole enterprise. Some it surely is intentional, deriving from the novel itself. Some is, I suspect, a tad more accidental. The almost comical amateurishness of the sets, for example,  like the stuff they used to market as self-parody in the old Bullwinkle cartoons (and the telephones have cords, bleah). But I suspect part of it just derives from the larger atmosphere. Though this is 1979, we're still at the end of the long and debilitating case of the grippe that swept over England when it woke up to the fact that was broke, without an empire, and generally an also-ran in the competition for national greatness.  And it brings you up short to reflect that we're actually functioning after the Beatles, the Swinging Sixties, the Carnaby Street revolution: crushingly, almost none of these characters seems to grasp the fact that his entire career has been a total waste of time.

Humiliation enough right there, had you known what was happening to  you--and George Smiley, at least, for one does appear to know.  He also know that he's being shamelessly cuckolded by one of his nearest and dearest.  To watch it, to enjoy it all, you pretty much have to share his own bleak sense of his own disgrace.  This theme of humiliation, not bye the bye, is also the theme of  my true favorite post-war British flic: Sunday, Bloody Sunday, where we see Glenda Jackson and Peter Finch both having their nose rubbed in the fact that they're not the lover they wanted to be.   


1979: way past the pull  date for the post-War malaise.  Meanwhile, the clattering you here at stage right would be that rough beast herelf, her hour come round at last.

Guess Who's On TV?

One downside of not watching much TV: you miss out on a lot of popular culture.  So I never knew until 20 minutes ago that the more-or-less champs of churchy TV are (ready for it?) the Mormons.  Sure enough,it turns out that long before Big Love, the Mormons were making (or at least hiring) some of the most professional, most effective "public service" TV anywhere.  So at least Rollo Romig in The New Yorker who can't say enough good things about the Mormon spots that he watched as a child back in the  70s.


And how do they compare to Big Love?  Can't say for sure, but if you take Romig seriously, they might be better.  It happens I have seen a bit of Big Love, and I like it: imaginatively scripted with convincing and surprising plot elements (and the villainous Harry Dean Stanton is a total hoot).  But the scripting has always seemed a bit flaccid to me: somehow they haven't been able to come up with writers as good as those we learned to love on The Supranos or maybe even Mad Men. Maybe the Big Love crowd should simply have outsourced to the makers of the old TV spots.

What is it with Mad Men

Mr. and Mrs. Buce have been catching up on Mad Men, thanks to Netflix Qwikster, although for the life of me, I'm not sure why. I read all this stuff about how it's a nostalgia trip, about the great days when men were men and we all sat on top of the world. Actually I was alive and sentient in those days; my life certainly was not what I see on screen, although I'm willing to assume that some people probably be that way

The trouble is, all those people--they are all worthless pieces of crap not particularly evil, not particularly reflective people who keep getting themselves along with friends and strangers in whole boatloads of unspeakable trouble.

I started to write that they were "monsters" but that's the thing, they're not monsters; they're just people who do appalling things in unappalling ways.   They're like nothing so much as the Germans I read about in Claudia Koonz' The Nazi Conscience--all those good people who just drifted along in a fog of self-approval, never for a moment thinking what a mess they might be making of things.

My friend Dave says he doesn't like to watch movies about people doing stupid things because he always wants to yell out "don't do that or the bunny winds up in the pot!" Wonder if David is enjoying Mad Men. Can't say I am, yet oddly, I keep coming back for more.

Afterthought: I guess I'll make one exception--Joanie.   Joanie's a hustler and she's hard as nails, but she's way low on the self-deception meter, and she gives good advice.

Roseanne Waxes Nostalgic

Roseanne remembers life on Roseanne:

I grabbed a pair of wardrobe scissors and ran up to the big house to confront the producer. (The “big house” was what I called the writers’ building. I rarely went there, since it was disgusting. Within minutes, one of the writers would crack a stinky-pussy joke that would make me want to murder them. Male writers have zero interest in being nice to women, including their own assistants, few of whom are ever promoted to the rank of “writer,” even though they do all the work while the guys sit on their asses taking the credit. Those are the women who deserve the utmost respect.) I walked into this woman’s office, held the scissors up to show her I meant business, and said, “Bitch, do you want me to cut you?” We stood there for a second or two, just so I could make sure she was receptive to my POV. I asked why she had told the wardrobe master to not listen to me, and she said, “Because we do not like the way you choose to portray this character.” I said, “This is no fucking character! This is my show, and I created it—not Matt, and not Carsey-Werner, and not ABC. You watch me. I will win this battle if I have to kill every last white bitch in high heels around here.”

Go read the whole thing.  

Afterthoughts: Little Miss Sunshine

Mr. and Mrs. Buce watched Little Miss Sunshine the other night and okay, it pretty much lived up to its hype. But, some afterthoughts:

• What’s the vulgar, knockabout, five-o’clock-shadow father doing with that failed-up WASP of a son? Oh, it’s a comedy? Well, all right, then.

• We’ve got a genre now, haven’t we, of what you might call “Lisa Simpson” movies, aka “Meadow Soprano” movies, where a horrendously dysfunctional family throws a daughter with the culture, maturity and balance of a Radcliffe dean. Life with Father for the new millennium, I suppose.

• It was funny. I laughed. I paused the play while I went to the bathroom. But I gotta tell ya, it hit kind of close to home. No, no, I never lived in a family quite so Olympic-style and clapped-out as this one. But I did spend some of The Best Years of My Life living from paycheck to paycheck, one steel-reinforced boot tip away from the street, driving crap cars and gnawed by the constant awareness that all kinds of people were depending on me and I hadn’t a clue how, or even whether, I could pull it off. My, those were the days—and it’s a bit of a stretch to think of it as “ entertainment.” Yech. What time is Reno 911!?
  

TV Like it Used to Be

Mrs. Buce and I have been watching some of the old First Churchills series on DVD—the one that inaugurated “Masterpiece Theatre” on PBS way back around 1970. I never saw it the first time, though I think all my friends did: I must have been humping to get tenure. It's fun to watch now, dated in ways that are both startling and intriguing, chiefly, I guess, because we are seeing it through the filter of so much that has gone since. This was a simpler time, before Blackadder, before Mel Brooks said “It's good, being the king,” before “Masterpiece Theatre” degenerated into “Mawsterpiece Theatre,” and became a downmarket version of itself.

Old-timers will recall that this is the one that featured Susan Hampshire as Sarah, Duchess of Malborough, and John Neville as the Duke. She had already established herself as the The English Rose in British TV soapers like What Katy Did and the Forsyte Saga. He is as handsome as 40 yards of pine paneling and about as wooden, but the part doesn't require much of him except to look worldly wise.

Susan Hampshire has played variants of the type throughout the rest of her career, but perhaps the most interesting comparison is with The Pallisers, which brought the PBS franchise to its full maturity. The fascinating point is how they are exactly the same plot: a husband and wife--a couple-- who scheme and intrigue together to advance each other's careers.

I suspect the Brirtish/PBS audience has always been predominantly female and that's fine But lately the strong and memorable roles have always been solos: broken-winged birds in need of loving care like Inspector Morse, or women on their own like Jane Tennison (or, one is tempted to say, before just about everybody with a union card undertook to play one or another of the Queens Elizabeth). The Churchills; display of connubial chumminess seems to come from some place back of beyond.

The Sopranos RIP

(Caution, plot spoiler ahead-- The Soporanos Season #6).

Late in the only dull trip to Paris ever filmed, Carmela Soprano asks Rosalie Aprile about her dead husband and son. Forget about it, says Rosalie, it’s over.

Rosalie was telling us something the rest of us—at least the DVD watchers—are just finding out: The Sopranos is over. It outlasted Six Feet Under; it bid fair to outlast The Barney Extravaganza. It died, as so many Sopranos characters die, in a flash of violence: Vito Spatafore plugged Jackie Aprile in the back; so also Junior Soprano plugged his nephew Tony in the belly (Episode #66). Unlike Jackie, Tony reappeared, along with the rest of the gang, but transmogrified into a zombie for some sort of weird mismarketed video game. The series itself—The Sopranos we all knew and loved—is over, done, finito, kaput, bought the farm.

To be fair, The Sopranos, in going to sleep with fishes, did not, if you get my meaning, jump the shark: the directors seem to have been at pains to try to sidestep the kind of absurdity that makes so many good tragedies end in farce. But at a price: the price of not going crazy is to go slack, to kill time, to twiddle the thumbs, to play out the option. A dream sequence if perhaps forgivable, but not if it extends over two episodes. A gay plot actually has possibilities, although nobody seemed to know quite what to do with it. How anyone could make a trip to Paris actually boring is surely beyond most viewers’ ken, but there it is, ready to be recycled in film class as a horrible example (couldn’t we at least have had a bit of girl-on-Frenchie action with her Parisian date?).

This flaccid coda does have one curious byproduct, perhaps unintended. In seeing all the old characters replay all their old character-tics, it sinks in on us: these people really are like this; they are not going to change; there will be no eleventh-hour epiphany, the phone will not ring and the governor will not issue a reprieve. They are just a nasty, unpleasant, irredeemably worthless lot. This is a worthwhile insight, but not consolatory: the shock is gone; you just steel yourself for the next savage beating, and speculate on the odds that the victim will (or will not) survive.

There are bright spots: Vince Curatola as Johnny Sack, with all his seething intelligence, remains one of the most compelling pieces of characterization in the whole show, and it is a rotten shame to see him off to the big house. But this might be just that he came late to the party. Of the original crew, the only one that doesn’t seem to me to be just going through the motions is Michael Imperioli as Christopher Moltisanti: he has an unmatched knack for being convincingly dangerous and ugly, and yet at the same time retaining just a whiff of irony and self-criticism, so that for a moment you think he might be kidding—but it passes and you find yourself repelled all over again.

Too bad it happened this way, but it almost always does: every show is in competition with itself after the first few episodes, and the game gets tougher as the ante gets higher. About the only one of my own favorites that did not outlive itself is Sandbaggers, the unmatchable British spy thriller—but that may have something to do with the fact that the auteur disappeared in his small plane, never to be heard from again.

And I have to grant (to hope) that with a Seventh Season yet to come, there are possibilities of something better. I admit I am still curious to know what becomes of daughter Meadow, the Lisa Simpson of the Soprano family, the apple of papa’s eye and the one who looks like she just might grab her Ticket Out of this dead-end world—but my own guess is that she comes to an ugly end, perhaps at her father’s hand, surely before his eyes. That, and the more general question of who (if anybody) will be left standing when the King and the Queen and the Prince all die and Fortinbras returns from the wars—I admit it is enough to keep me suckered in until the end. But grumbling and full of nostalgia for the old days when the old days, when the series was really good.