Tag: Television

Draper Daniels

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I just recently came across this article in August 2009’s Chicago Magazine, a brief tribute by Myra Janco Daniels to her late husband, Draper Daniels, who was the primary inspiration for Mad Men‘s Donald Draper. It’s interesting to see where fact and fiction diverge, and it’s also the touching story of a reluctant romance. Here’s how he (first) proposed:

One day, after he had been with us for about two years, Dan came into my office with a card in his hand. By this time, the firm had been through several buyouts and mergers and I had a funny feeling that he was about to tell me of another one. I asked, “Are you going to sell me with the next merger?”

“Not exactly,” he said.

He showed me the card. On one side, he had written out his own best character traits. Then he turned it over. On the other side he had written out mine. Mine were better than his, so I knew he wanted something. I thought, What in the world has got into him?

“I’ve been thinking about this for nine months, Myra,” he said, “and I think we would make a great team.”

I said, “I think we are a great team. Think of what we’ve accomplished so far this year.”

He said, “I’m talking about a different sort of merger.”

“Oh.”

“Yes, I’ve decided I’d like to marry you.”

I lost my voice for a moment, because I had never thought of the man that way before—and had no idea he had thought of me that way. Dan was twelve and a half years older than I and had been married before. I was against divorce in those days. But more importantly, I was happy with my life. I told him that.

“All right,” he said. “Let’s talk about it again tomorrow.” And then he walked out whistling—which, to me, was one of the most maddening things anyone can do, particularly under the circumstances.

My assistant said, “Did you get another account? Mr. Daniels seems very happy.”

I went home early and called Len, my fiancé, back in Washington. I told him what Dan had just said.

Len laughed. He knew Draper Daniels. “Come on,” he said. “He’s pulling your leg.”

The next day I wrote out a note and had it placed on Dan’s desk. “Merger accepted in fifteen years,” it said. “Today, let’s get some new business.”

 

LOST: The End

Matthew Eilar2 Comments

There will never be another episode of LOST. Throughout Season 6, an annoying ABC promo blared “The time for questions is over.” Well, now the time for answers is over too. Like the audience as a whole, I am deeply divided.

Part of the problem is that “The End” was answering many different questions: Was this a good episode of LOST? Does this change my perspective on Season 6? Was there a coherent series-long arc? Was it worth it? I’ll try and tackle these questions one at a time.

Was this a good episode of LOST?

This is the question that I feel most comfortable answering with an unequivocal “Yes.” There was as good a mixture of character moments, action, and mythology as you’re going to get in a LOST episode (actually, it now occurs to me that many of the all-time great episodes, “The Constant,” “The Economist” “Walkabout,” most of the season finales, also contain that balance). While the writers have talked at length about how they see Season 6 as a mirror to Season 1, I think that the series finale contains tonal elements from every season of LOST: the fight over the heart of the island hearkens back to the first discoveries of island properties in Season 1; as noted by Smokey in the episode, the Jack/Locke conflict and descent into the heart parallels some of the hatch conflict in Season 2; the walking back and forth on the island from Season 3 (just kidding, but kind of not really); the on-island/off-island dynamic, and the snazzy clothes from Season 4; the sci-fi elements from Season 5; and the sentimentality from Season 6.

There were some great lines and exchanges; my favorite is probably Locke’s quip about how Jack was the obvious choice for Jacob’s successor. There was some great acting. If you had told me at the beginning of the season that I would be on board for a Jack-centric finale, I would have rolled my eyes. Jack has been the standout character from this season, however, and I thought he completely earned his dramatic moments in the episode. Also great work from Terry O’Quinn (the cold-hearted badassery in the Rose/Bernard/Desmond/Locke scene was chilling). I was grateful that we got a real resolution for Richard Alpert and Frank Lapidus, as well as some nice moments from Jin and Sun (who were criminally underused by the show both this season and for the second half of the series).

As an episode of LOST, it was perfectly fine, and indeed one of the better episodes of the series.

Does this change my perspective on Season 6?

This answer is a little more complicated, because it breaks down into two questions: Was there a direction that the events of Season 6 were moving towards? and Am I (the viewer) satisfied with the way that they got there? The answer to that is yes, and not even close.

Unlike some people out there, I don’t have a logical problem with the ending scene. The way that I interpret the ending is that when Jughead was detonated, the combination of the losties’ proximity to the blast and the extreme emotion of their desperation, hope, and love created an alternate universe in which they and those they love are fulfilled (this is because the island is a place of both physical (aka electromagnetic pockets) and spiritual energy). I didn’t take Christian’s “everybody here is dead” [pf.] to mean that the church, or alternate timeline, was purgatory, but rather a reassurance to Jack that in a sense he is dead, but he [Jack] also made himself another life in which he could be fulfilled. It’s a little mushy, but it makes sense with what we know of the heart of the island and the sidewaysverse material from this season.

Whether I am satisfied with they way that they arrived here is a completely different story. With the final puzzle pieces in place, the time spent at the Temple at the beginning of the season seem like even more of a waste. In interviews, Darlton have been saying over and over that this is a character-driven show, and that Season 6 would come around to the same tone as the character-driven Season 1. I’m OK with that. I’ve generally enjoyed the small, non-action, non-mythology character moments in this season. What I’m not OK with is wild goose chases like Sayid’s “disease” or the tragicomic way that Jin and Sun never crossed paths, or Sun’s inability to speak English. Those aren’t character moments, those are character gimmicks. Plus, it’s hard to take the writers seriously when, in the final season no less, LOST has churned through unexplored, interesting characters like Dogen, Illana, and the Temple crew. A lot of the Season 1 character conflicts are closed: no more daddy issues plotlines from Sawyer, Jack or Kate, no more Sun/Jin marital conflict, no more “Don’t tell me what I can’t do.” And yet the writers chose to revisit old territory (without adding much to the story or the characters) rather than advance a new plot. I’m not OK with that*.

In fact, I’ve never felt more betrayed by the show than when Kate kissed Jack. I thought that the writers had learned their lesson from Season 3, that a) Jack and Kate don’t have much natural chemistry, and b) the audience is incredibly tired of the Jack-Kate-Sawyer love triangle. I supposed I could have guessed that the show might dip into that well one more time after this NYT interview:

While the mythology was important, first and foremost the show was about the characters. I think that a lot of people care much more about what’s going to happen to Kate. Is she going to end up with Jack, is she going to end up with Sawyer?

I think this shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the show’s audience. Of course it is the characters that keep the show engaging. The writers are right when they say that the weakness of LOST-clones like FlashForward is that they spend too much time on the mythology early, before their audience becomes invested in the characters. At the same time, I (and nobody I know) didn’t much care whether Kate was romantically linked to anybody anymore.

Season 6 also has a huge problem that I would like to hear the writers explain: if the alternaverse was created when Jughead exploded, did the events of season 6 matter at all? We’ve seen crossovers between the timelines in wounds, Desmond, and (perhaps) Jack looking up at the sky and seeing a plane (do we know if it’s the plane?). This would suggest that events on the island can affect the other timeline. At the same time, Christian says that everybody dies sometime, suggesting that no matter what happens in the original timeline the characters will be there*.

*Also, how annoying is it that in interviews and in podcasts, the writers tried to discourage the use of the word “alternate” as in alternate timeline?  That’s basically the big reveal.

In short, I do think that the season completed a coherent story arc. It remains, however, one of LOST’s weakest seasons, albeit with some standout moments. Given that the show had an end date scheduled three years ago, and that this was the final season, I find it incomprehensible that they wasted so much time.

Was there a coherent series-long arc?

This is the tough question. It really pains me to do so, but I’m going to have to answer no.

This has been the preemptive defense of the series from the writers: a) LOST is a character driven show, and b) it would ruin the drama to explain every mystery, every mechanic (e.g. midichlorians). As I wrote above, I agree with the former. I don’t agree with the way that they use the latter as a defense.

My feelings can be summed up by commenter retro on the AV Club (in response to, “The show was always about the characters.”):

False. The show was about a fucking magic island that the people had to deal with. It’s easy to write characters losing and gaining relationships; it’s difficult to wrap up a mystery in a satisfying way. At some point, darlton said fuck the mystery, let’s make it seem like that was never the point. It’s a shitty copout.

This comes close to how I feel. I think that there’s a pretty big gap between “We don’t want to explain the mechanic of how the pool in the Temple brings someone back to life” and the way that they ended the show. In fact, we know this based on the way that the show handled the Dharma Initiative in seasons 4 and 5. The show didn’t get bogged down in the minutiae of how the project was financed, or the connection between Widmore and Paik, or the specific nature of the projects that were being researched at the stations. But we did get a satisfying sense of closure, a sense that the time we spent speculating about that plotline wasn’t time wasted.

That security wasn’t present in the final storyline. It was never established why the island mattered in the first place. It’s a cork. For what? We don’t know. We don’t know that the smoke monster is bad, except that it upsets us when he kills people. We don’t know how the island relates to the real world. As far as we know, the worst that would have happened if Smokey had succeeded is that the island would have ceased to exist. We don’t know why that’s bad.

And this is why I have a problem with the self-righteous attitudes from the writers about character. It’s hard for me to be invested in a character when I don’t understand why they are making the choices and sacrifices that they are. It’s not enough for Jack to make a sacrifice. There’s no chance that I will be invested in that action unless I understand what Jack is thinking about, what options he’s presented with, what’s weighing on his mind.

Ultimately, the writers did not have what it takes to close on the series. After the doldrums of Season 3, it looked like after they had planned their ending, the series would tighten and form a greater coherence. That paid off in Seasons 4 and 5. Unfortunately, it didn’t continue through Season 6.

Was it worth it?

Absolutely.

Peter Krause

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I’ve recently had an unscheduled marathon of Peter Krause. I’m most of the way through the first season of Six Feet Under, just finished watching the Sci-Fi miniseries The Lost Room, and have been enjoying the new NBC series Parenthood.

I came to Parenthood first, so it was kind of interesting to see the different contexts that he’s worked in. In SFU, he plays a charming, but rootless young man who (at the beginning of the series) isn’t really sure what he wants to do with his adulthood. In both Parenthood and Lost Room, he plays a charming family man who is primarily motivated by his family.

What’s interesting to me is that Krause’s upbeat charisma is a constant through all his roles. In this, he reminds me of George Clooney. They may be in different roles, but their personal identity is so strong that it always comes across as well. I think this is a little different from one note, Michael Cera-ish acting. With bad actors, they don’t have the skill to understand, or create, the personality and identity of the character they’re playing. Good actors, even when they are bringing a lot of themselves to the role, allow their personality to become a part of the character, not overwhelm it. George Clooney is good at this, as is Meryl Streep, Geoffrey Rush and John Goodman.

Revisiting Community

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The last time I wrote about NBC’s Community, I was deeply ambivalent. It was a little to shiny and cutesy for me. Since then, I’ve become a semi-regular watcher, but once again, I think I’m going to stop watching the show.

One of the things that pisses me off is the free pass that the show seems to get from TV critics about the show’s racial humor. I think this pass is a result of two things, the fairly ( and depressingly uncommon) diverse and integrated cast, and the fact that every once in a while, the show has extremely witty race-based humor (see the clip above). For example, read this fawning passage from Todd VanDerWerff at the AV Club:

Community‘s about a lot of things, really, but one of the things it keeps buried until it’s useful to trot it out thematically is the fear of getting old. I mean, just aside from the fact that the show has an elderly guy and a middle-aged black woman as characters and actually takes them seriously beyond the stereotypes other shows would reduce them to, …

…As much as everyone loves the supporting characters on the show, Jeff and Britta are its heart, with Annie and Troy as reminders of who they were, Pierce and Shirley as ideas of who they might become, and Abed as the odd man out, observing and always commenting.

The thing is, I’m not convinced that the show takes these characters beyond stereotypes at all. Alyssa Rosenberg blogged about this in relation to Glee a few days ago:

I love, love Amber Riley, and I love Mercedes as a character who can declare “I’m worried about showing too much skin and causing a sex riot,” as an explanation for why she refuses to wear a cheerleading skirt, and I hate that the inevitable end consequence of having a big, sassy black girl is a story about eating disorders and a rainbow of high school students singing Christina Aguilera’s most saccharine song.  Why can’t she just be fabulous without consequence? Why can’t she have a boyfriend? Why are the show’s best, tartest couple reduced to sidekicks?  Why does the gay kid have to be semi-pathetic and clueless?

What this comes down to is that there is still work to be done, still decisions to be made once the casting is done. Both Glee and Community would have you believe that they are poking fun at the “sassy black woman” stereotype. But the shows never made that transition to treating their characters beyond stereotype, and so end up reinforcing them.

FX’s Justified

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I’m a big fan of FX’s new cop-drama/western Justified. It’s a seriously high-quality show, with really good regular actors and guest stars, great dialogue, and a kind of old-fashioned lawman + Southern Gothic nouveau vibe that I think is super cool.

It also stars Timothy Olyphant, who is one of those actors that is immediately the best part of a project. I first came across him in The Girl Next Door, which is generally a bad movie. Whenever  Olyphant and Emile Hirsch were on screen though, it became… cinema. Live Free or Die Hard gave him even less to work with, but he managed to be a plausible villain in roughly 12 minutes of screen time.*

It struck me the other day how atypical Justified is in my TV lineup (the things that I watch week-to-week). The first TV show that I got hooked on watching every week was LOST, and that gave me strong preference for serialized shows, or at least shows with a strong story arc. As my tastes have diversified, I’ve become a fan of stoner-comedy shows like Venture Brothers or Robot Chicken that don’t have anything near a serialized plot. But with the exception of some Law & Order comfort food, I can’t think of any dramas that I watch that don’t have a strong story arc.

But Justified is almost the definition of network television, just on a cable channel. There is no genre with such a connection to the rise of mass television audiences than the Western… Gunsmoke, Bonanza, The Lone Ranger. And while Harlan County, Tennessee is not the same as the West of 1950’s America, Raylan Givens is a classic American TV man. He’s handsome, can outshoot any gunman he meets, is kind to women, gets along with men, holds no racial, religious, or orientation biases, has casual fun in the bedroom,  and doesn’t worry too much about any of these things.

There’s not that many men that occupy that space on TV today.

*I won’t go on about Timothy Olyphant all day, but he has a couple of really entertaining early roles. One is as the clueless rookie sidekick to Delroy Lindo’s stolen car cop character in the awful Nicolas Cage/Angelina Jolie Gone in 60 Seconds. Another early Olyphant role was in a mediocre gay romantic comedy called The Broken Hearts Club. That one’s fun to watch both for Olyphant as a studly gay man (!) and for Zach Braff’s ridiculous performance as a horny gymrat.