Inessentials

I’ve been watching The Vampire Diaries recently, which is a really entertaining, surprisingly capable show that scratches my itch for marathon-able genre television. It reminded me, though, of something that I’ve seen repeated in a lot of other vampire mythologies. Well, okay, I’m really only familiar with The Vampire Diaries and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and I’m pretty sure it’s not in all vampire stories, but it seems to have become one of the key points that all vampire stories need to accept or deny. I want to know: why do vampires respect property laws?

Vampires, the stories go, are not allowed to enter a house where a human being lives. Once that person dies, they can enter. Otherwise, they must get an invitation (usually, an invitation from the human habitant) in order to enter. Some myths allow the vampire to later be expelled, others don’t. The point is, vampires are bound – physically prevented somehow – from entering a human residence.

Perhaps this says something strange about me, but I find it much easier to go along with a story about vampires than I do to go along with a story that assumes (1) that property rights are natural and (2) that property-ownership is a non-vague metaphysical relation. Allow me to elaborate.

Some folks think that I stand in an ownership-relation to my body. I own my body. By extension, when I work the common land that belongs to everyone or no one, I make that thing mine by mixing my labor with it. (Yes, it’s called the labor-mixing argument. It’s in John Locke’s Second Treatise on Government if you want the history of the idea. Homework: How did Marx exploit this principle?) I then have a natural right to whatever I’ve labored on. Slowly, by extension, and in ways that are not always clear, we extend ownership to many things that I didn’t mix my labor with. Usually, I paid for it and that makes it mine. Using arguments like these, some people see the right to own property as a natural right, one that applies to all human beings just because they are human beings. This is distinct from a legal right which is a right that applies only because the laws of the place I live say so. (More homework: Are civil right different from these two or identical to one or the other? What about human rights?)

Property rights as legal rights make a lot of sense to me. Property rights as natural rights don’t seem that plausible to me. The way to make them plausible, I think, is to say that they are natural in virtue of some aspect of human beings (or, more generally, rational agents), particularly something about the way they naturally congregate into societies.

What seems like a really bad way to argue that property rights are natural rights is to find support in either (1) the physical constition of the universe (that is in nomological law) or (2) in some broadly logical principle about objects and their relations (a metaphysical law). Nothing about my physical make-up as a member of homo sapiens logically requires that I be able to own property. And nothing about me as a physical being or as a rational agent seems to require it either (although some will disagree at this point).

All this means that it strikes me as extremely unlikely that the universe as it exists or as it would exist if there were vampires would be one that makes it a truth of the world that vampires must respect property lines. (I’m assuming a very plausible principle here: fictional worlds are like are own in every way not specifically marked as different. E.g., The world of The Vampire Diaries has gravity like ours and New York City has the same layout, but there is a place called Mystic Falls, there are vamipres, and so on.)

And while we’re at it, why the doorstop? Why not the curb? Property lines are ambiguous. And furthermore, whether or not someone lives at a place is vague (there are cases where it is not clear that I live there or I do not live there). I mean, have you ever tried to file taxes in two states? It’s a nightmare. How likely is it that there is some property principle in the universe (like gravity,or two objects can’t coexist at the same place at the same time) that is non-ambiguous and non-vague?

Vampires? I can roll with that. Ownership as a nomological or metaphysical law? That’s what bugs me.

UPDATE: I just watched TVD s1 e20, where Damon makes the following statement about threshholds, “Hotels and short-term leases are a gray area. Play it by ear.”

UPDATE 2: And to clarify, my objection is not that there can’t be vague objects in nature. (There’s no sharp border between a mountain and a valley, for instance.) It’s that even if property rights were somehow natural (which I don’t think they are), there’s no non-arbitrary reason for there to be a sharp cut-off (the doorstep/window) for something ambiguous and vague like where property lines end.

Lost spoilers through the series finale (6.17)

Note to readers: The first two sections are boring background. Feel free to skip ahead to the more interesting discussion in part three, below the video.

“I once was lost.” – John Newton

I’ve not always been kind to Lost. Maybe even a little harsh. I first came to the show from my dad, who was a fan. When my brother bought him the first season on DVD, I borrowed it and dug in. I found it very effective at times, with fun mysteries about rumblings in the jungle and weird smoke and a light shining out of the ground. But those fun moments were a little too few and far between for me. The format of the first season, with its on-island stories broken up by single-episode flashbacks developing each character’s history, both made the (to me) more interesting on-island stories move too slowly and was too dependent on the acting of its cast, who (especially that first season) were of varied abilities. Locke story? Yea! Jack story? Ugh. And so on.

I would step away, then try again at various points. I would rewatch a previous season or handful of episodes when I felt the push to try again. After enjoying a season four catch-up (DVRed off of Syfy when it was still Sci-Fi) to watch season five, my wife and I just couldn’t handle the week-to-week viewing of a show we just weren’t enjoying very much. So we gave up. For good, I thought. When season six rolled around in 2010, I’d skim through my Twitter feed on Wednesday mornings, catching some reactions to the previous night’s episodes while doing my best to avoid spoilers in case I did want to dig in again.

“I’m lost in the world. I’m down on my mind.” – Kanye West

Then all hell broke loose. Friends of ours who are not particularly television addicts were rushing home on Tuesday nights for their weekly Lost viewing, but they were increasingly annoyed by the slow pace of season six. And boy, did they hate the finale. So few answers! What about this? What about that?

Honestly, it left me a little intrigued.

But also a little put out. I didn’t feel a part of this fan community. I had never watched that closely for secret signals about what was going on. (If pressed, I could probably remember half the numbers of that famous sequence.) So after the hullabaloo died down, I began suggesting to my wife that we attempt a rewatch. From what point was a tough answer, but we settled on season four. That turned out to be a pretty great choice because I loved that season on the rewatch. The on-island stories were moving along swiftly, the new cast of characters included some stronger actors with richer stories to embody, and there were lots of intriguing questions rising to the forefront. I once again lost interest in the beginning of season five. Way too much time off-island. Glacial plotting. Until it got awesome with a few episodes left. And finally, turning to season six, I realized this was a show I loved. Or rather, in seasons four through six Lost became the show I always wanted it to be: not a collection of short stories with a couple mysterious strands running through it, but a creatively, structurally, and emotionally ambitious story with strong characters who made decisions without enough information and lived with consequences that they didn’t understand.

I watched the show with my wife, apart from the fan communities that were listening to showrunner podcasts and debating clues and constructing timelines and predicting where the show was going. Other than the general sense from friends and twitter buddies (and one afternoon in which I read Jason Mittell’s Lost Wednesday posts on Antenna) I’ve been able to watch it (1) without the questions that gnawed at the show’s devotees and (2) in one relatively compact stretch. Both of these factors presumably made a difference in how I watched. But I’ll leave it to smart folks like Jason Mittell to work that out.

I’ll focus on something slightly different. I knew from others that the show’s finale was religious, but I didn’t know the specifics. (Alison Janney is some kind of angel who decides who was good and who was bad? Or something?) I also knew that people were unsatisfied that so many questions were left unanswered. At the forefront of my mind in watching season six were not questions about how the Dharma Initiative got to the island or how the donkey wheel placed people in Tunisia. I wanted to know, “Why aren’t people digging this as much as I am? Why am I loving this so much when so many friends whose television opinions I respect dislike it so much?” What follows is my (inadequate) attempt at a (partial) answer.

“We are building a religion.” – Cake

With the possible exception of Angel, which was built around the idea of redemption (what it is, why it matters, how to get it) and secondarily around the nature of prophecy, Lost is the most religious show I’ve ever watched. First, I’ll say how it’s religious, which should lead naturally into my reasons for appreciating the final season (and especially the finale) more than the more devoted fans.

• Religious Themes: Central to Lost, at least in its middle seasons, was the conflict between faith and reason played out between John Locke and Jack Shephard, respectively. This conflict became more nuanced in the later seasons, as Jack’s arc took him from “man of science” to “man who was convinced that his life had purpose, despite there being little more than a gut feeling telling him this.” Locke went from faithful servant of the island to dead. Importantly, both end up in the same place in the end, but for most of the last two seasons the show was in favor of a “reason tempered with humility of the unknown” approach that Jack came to embody and which allowed him to be the island’s savior. (Nothing in those early seasons suggested to me that Jack was a Christ-figure, but that’s how the finale played it.) There were plenty of other religious themes, including the nature of prophecy (again, parrallels to Angel), the existence and nature of free will, the role of authority, the possibility of miracles, and the search for meaning. Lost was a pretty religious show, at least from season two on.
• Religious Mythology: But Lost went beyond merely entertaining questions about religion, and built its own religious mythology. It borrowed from existing religions to create its own set of myths, symbols, and rituals. (I don’t want to play up to much the notion that “Lost fans are like religious devotees,” but lots of people set out Tuesday nights the way that religious practitioners set out their holy day.) More interesting to me is the way that Lost gloriously defied reducing any of its symbolism, imagery, and ideas to a specific religion. It probably borrowed more from Christianity than other religions, but the show really creates its own set of artifacts, heroes of the faith, and symbolism in a way that few shows attempt. It borrows liberally from other religions, but puts them to its own use in creating a mythology built on common archetypes (twin brothers, games, individual sacrifice) that has its own specifics. Protect the light at the center of the island! Turn the donkey wheel! Trust Jacob! Don’t trust Jacob! Lost created a fictional universe with a set of moral principles, focal stories, and religious perspectives that goes beyond typical world-building. (Side note:I was a little annoyed at the stained glass window in the church(?) in the finale that included symbols from various religions; this suggested a that the show was more about the unity of all religions rather than creating something new out of them, which is the reading I prefer.)
• Religious Readings: Lost also provides a unique, although obtuse entry into thinking about how people approach religious texts and the parallels for television shows with rich mythologies. Here’s four rough groupings of how people approach religious texts … and Lost. (1) There are those who expect extremely detailed, accurate, and literal reconstructions of religious texts. They might, to point to one contemporary instance, determine that Jesus Christ is returning on May 21, 2011, based on a combination of interpreting vague phrases (“rumors of war”) and interpolating from specific chronologies. They expect their religious texts to provide all the answers to all the questions they bring to it. These folks aren’t more or less religious than others, nor are they all crazies. (But those May 21 folks are a little crazy.) Perhaps the Gemara era of Talmudic commentary might represent this sort of precise, detailed approach that expects coherence. These interpreters expect a level of detail and foreground a kind of interpretation that parallels (in some, but obviously not all ways) the kind of answer-seeking that marked many Lost fans. (2) Other folks approach religious texts with a set of non-religious questions. What can this text teach us about the culture at the time? About literary form? About the sociology of religion? Similarly, some folks (the kind most likely to write books about Lost) are interested in what Lost can tell us about television, about America, about our desire for meaning and community. (3) Another set of Lost viewers is primarily concerned with the stories or the characters. They don’t care about what the island really is or whether there is a scientific explanation of Locke’s ability to walk after the plane crash. They care about these people, they marvel at their stories, and they want to know what happens to them. And plenty of folks approach the Upanishads or the Koran or the Book of Ruth as a collection of really great, emotionally powerful stories. In both cases, we can learn things from these stories, the way we learn things from any great stories. (4) Finally, some folks expect that religious texts are collections of stories, often gathered from multiple authors and even more editors, that more or less hang together, and which generally tell a coherent narrative, but do so not by filling in all the details but by leaving things so open that there are any number of ways to make it consistent. Plenty is left open to interpretation and plenty is left underdetermined because the point was never to fill in all the details but to tell parables, allegories, and other good stories that are compelling and instructive.

These groups are not exhaustive, nor are they mutually exclusive. One could easily shift perspectives and embrace the value of these (and more). I prefer approach (4), with an interest in the careful analysis represented in (1) and plenty of external questions like those valued in (2).

Ultimately, appreciating the last season of Lost is about adopting approach (3) or approach (4). The first approach will set you up for disappointment. The second is interesting, but not one that the show really cared about. (Unlike, say, 24 or The Wire, which emphasized their real-world applications.) The fourth approach is the one I most closely identify with in the interpretation of religious texts, so I think by being removed from the fan communities that emphasized (1), I tended toward this approach and was thus able to get more enjoyment out of the final season. And while the show often flirted with (1) and mostly focused on (3), the finale was really focused on (3) and, especially in those last fifteen minutes, on (4). Having spent most of the final season thinking about how little interested I was in answers of the sort that (1) expected (I could barely remember the questions), and only mildly interested in (2) and (3), I think that I was a better position to appreciate such an ambiguous finale. This doesn’t mean that the show doesn’t hang together; it may fit together as tightly and coherently as the first approach expects. But I never expected everything to be explicit, everything to be answered, everything to be tied together. (Again, this is only partly because of this taxonomy of religious reading; I was also primed by other viewers to expect a lot of questions remaining unanswered.)

Religious texts mostly don’t make things explicit when they are telling stories. (They often do that elsewhere.) They tell you parts of the story: the parts that answered someone else’s question or that portrayed a particularly resonant idea. And as in most religious texts, Lost is about people without enough information, making monumental decisions, the consequences of which they don’t understand. Occasionally the gods/God/showrunners step in with another piece of the puzzle, either directly or surreptitiously. But mostly we live in ignorance, trying to learn a little more, fitting together the pieces, knowing that ultimately even if it all fits together we’ll live most of our lives without all the pieces in place.

As in Lost, so in life.

[Having written all this now, I am interested to go and read others' interpretations of the final season and especially the finale. Perhaps I'll even update this afterwards.]

There’s been some talk recently about Community‘s “Pierce problem.” (And by “recently” I mean two whole weeks ago, which is basically forever in Internet Time.) Notable critics Jace Lacob, Alan Sepinwall, James Poniewozik have all written about it, as have many others. Emily Nussbaum connected it the show’s (possible) Chevy Chase problem. I don’t know (or care very much) about connections between Pierce’s character on the show and Chevy Chase the actor. But I do find it odd that Community has been singled out for its portrayal of Pierce, when so few shows even bother to have a character over the age of 60.

Community is fundamentally about the difficult necessity of forming and maintaing social groups, how they shape individual identities, and how they force a person to embrace new ideas and abandon old ones. Shirley’s religious convictions are tested, Jeff’s proclaimed moral relativism is shattered, Abed’s social skills are stretched, Britta’s self-righteousness is excoriated, and so on. Fundamentally, the show values human connections over almost any other ideal. Pierce, a generation older than anyone else in the group crystallizes this problem beautifully.

At first it seems that Pierce is simply out of touch with a younger generation, but over the course of a season and a half it has become clear that Pierce has never learned how to be a friend. Perhaps because he came to have his fortune early in life and on his own, he never saw himself as having peers, which may be one of the bases for friendship. (I’m really tempted to analyze all of Community’s relationships based on an Aristotelian taxonomy of friendship, but I’ll spare you. Perhaps just glance at this.)

In any case, Pierce plays a central role in the life of the group. Firstly, he is a “ghost of Christmas future” to prevent Jeff Scrooge from pulling out of all human relationships that are roughly equal. Both Jeff and Pierce entered the show only able to use people for their own advantage. Jeff is consistently caught between that old way and a new way in which he gives of himself for these other people. Jeff can still change, although the logic of the show isn’t settled enough to say whether the creators think he will. Pierce can’t change, without some character-breaking life conversion. (The connections between Jeff and Pierce probably go deeper. For instance, Noel Kirkpatrick of Monsters of Television suggested to me that that there similarities are further shown in their attitudes towards Annie.)

Secondly, Pierce represents the difficulty of people of different generations becoming friends. Perhaps the Pierce character is sometimes too convenient in throwing together stereotypes of a generation (self-made, casually racist) but the show at least attempts to find ways of fleshing out his character, even if some of those have been dead-ends. The character is limited in how much it can be fleshed out, but it is limited for good reason: Pierce has become so ossified in his personality that there is not much possibility for change. That, again, is a (possible) difference between he and Jeff.

Compare this, for a moment, to the portrayal of an older generation on two other very good shows, Parenthood and The Good Wife. In both cases, the shows created a parental figure so despicable that nearly every other character (and, in turn, the viewer) can’t help but despise them: Zeek Braverman (Craig T. Nelson) and Jackie Florick (Mary Beth Piel). These two characters served a single function on the first season of their shows. Zeek is the patriarch and the single largest problem in the lives of each of the now-adult children are how they were formed by his overbearing persona. Jackie is the prim, judgmental mother-in-law who is supposed to draw additional(!) sympathy for the embattered Alicia Florick. Both of these shows had to work extra hard in their second seasons to find some reason for us not to hate these characters, but they had dug themselves a huge hole at the outset.

I point to these other (very good) shows to demonstrate just how hard it is to write interesting older characters, and to point out that Pierce in the first season was a leg up on comparable (albeit dramatic) characters. (Good luck finding a sit-com where an older character isn’t just a horny boss or a dotty aunt or Betty White/Fred Willard in a cameo.) Pierce isn’t just a plot-mover (although like any character he has been used that way at times, notably on “Advanced Dungeons and Dragons”), he’s a legitimate member of the group whose story arcs are as central and important as any other character on the show (with the possibly exception of Jeff, who is the de facto lead in the ensemble).

Put another way, on Community the “Pierce problem” is the same as the Jeff problem and the Annie problem and the Troy problem: how much are they willing to give up to be a part of this group? Some episodes a character like Pierce or Abed or Britta mostly just pushes the story along, but that’s the nature of an ensemble show.

I don’t care if Pierce becomes even angrier, even meaner, even more recalcitrant, because sometimes that happens to people. If Community were ever to have a Pierce problem, it would be that the character is no longer funny, which on a sit-com is the only real problem you can have that doesn’t involve Charlie Sheen.

I’m really not sure what the best performances on television were in 2010. Did you watch Louie or Terriers on FX? Then you don’t need me to tell you how great Louis C. K. and Donal Logue and Michael Raymond-James were. Perhaps you watched Community‘s ensemble kick everyone’s asses around the comedy block. And there’s an overlap between critical lauds and industry awards for actors like John Hamm and Tina Fey. But I’m more interested in the performances that we just didn’t appreciate enough in 2010. Perhaps they were on shows that don’t get a lot of talk from the critics I follow. Or they may have been overshadowed by bigger, better, or arbitrarily chosen performances on their show. So here is a list of performers that I thought were very good to excellent but didn’t seem to get talked about much in the reviews or tweeters I follow. The usual restrictions apply, in that I haven’t seen many of this year’s much-talked about shows, including Breaking Bad and The Good Wife.

So, here we go with Unheralded Television Performances in 2010, and the performers who may have drawn attention away from these achievements.

Olivia Williams, Dollhouse

The focus: Enver Gjokaj

Gjokaj gave what was probably my favorite performance of 2010, as they only truly believable doll in the Dollhouse. When he became Topher, it instantly became one of the great impressions in the history of television. But in a subtler position, Olivia Williams gave us a cool but never cold, strong but never invincible, tricky but never tricked Adelle DeWitt, head of the Los Angeles dollhouse. Simultaneously, she gave one of the strongest supporting roles of the year in Roman Polanski’s The Ghost Writer. A great year for her.

Ray Romano, Men of a Certain Age

The focus: Andre Braugher

Braugher got the Emmy nomination, and I have no complaints about that. Scott Bakula got a good share of attention for his fine performance here, coming off his guest stint on Chuck. But this little-watched TNT drama, created by Romano, got its emotional center from Romano as the core of this trio of friends. Whether hanging out at their favorite diner, running his party goods store, or contemplating his failures as a father to his nervous preteen son, Romano brought a somewhat slack-jawed but always compelling look at a man struggling to keep his life circling the drain rather than running down it.

Joshua Jackson, Fringe

The focus: John Noble, Anna Torv

There’s a lot of love for John Noble’s performance as Walter Bishop, which has improved since his awful first season. And Anna Torv was asked to do a lot in the front half of the third season, and found a way to pull it off. But it seems that nobody has mentioned the fine job that Jackson has done playing charming but not smarmy, serious yet never self-serious. He manages Noble’s performance as Walter with aplomb and has found a delicate way to convey Peter’s friendship with Olivia.

Andrea Anders, Better Off Ted

The focus: Portia de Rossi, Jonathan Slavin, Malcolm Barrett

I wrote in my Best of 2010 list about de Rossi, Slavin, and Barrett. But let us not forget Anders and her kooky, energetic, and occasionally hilarious performance as love interest to Ted Crisp. Her role was tough because she was asked both to be the grounded, sane one next to de Rossi, Slavin, and Barrett, and the crazy, unhinged one next to Jay Harrington and her mostly anonymous coworkers. And she did it.

Ken Marino, Party Down

The focus: Lizzy Caplan, Adam Scott, Jane Lynch

Caplan was wonderful. Scott was serviceable as the audience’s entry point into Party Down Catering. Lynch got a lot of the kudos for her performance in the first season. But Marino’s lovesick Ron Donald with his Soup R Crackers franchise dream was both more emotionally moving and more hilarious than any of the other three. In a really wicked ensemble that only got better when Megan Mullally joined the cast in season two, Marino stood out with his puppy dog looks and killer comic timing.

Aimee Teegarden, Friday Night Lights

The focus: Connie Britton, Kyle Chandler

Some characters are great because of the actor’s performance. Some characters are written so beautifully, it’s difficult to know how much credit to give the actor. Teegarden falls into this latter category. A little stiff and wooden in the early seasons, she’s now become my favorite authentic representation of teenage life on television over the last ten years. The Taylor family oozes authenticity, and while Britton and Chandler get most of the credit, Teegarden deserves credit for holding her own in scenes with them and finding a way to let the writers develop compelling stories of love, friendship, and learning around her character.

Amy Poehler, Parks and Recreation

The focus: Nick Offerman, Chris Pratt, Aziz Ansari

It seemed that NBC was developing P&R as a star vehicle for SNL alumna Poehler. At times the first season felt that way. But the ensemble quickly developed and Offerman, Pratt, and Ansari gave performances so beloved, that Poehler became a little lost in the lovefest. So consider this a mild corrective to that.

Neil Flynn, The Middle & Garrett Dillahunt, Raising Hope

These are two uneven but occasionally hilarious shows that don’t get a lot of attention. Nearly all of Raising Hope‘s best scenes include Dillahunt, who helps elevate so-so material with fabulous line readings. I know him mostly for more dramatic roles (including this year’s excellent film Winter’s Bone), but he’s even better in a comedic role. Flynn takes a nearly opposite approach, toning down every would-be joke until it seems he’s trying to turn The Middle into a low-key family drama. He manages to be a wonderful combination of classic daddy-knows-best sitcom dad and playful yet lackadaisical partner in crime.

1. Community

Is it the funniest show on TV? Most weeks, yes. (But it gets some serious competition from #3 at times.) But it’s also a rich, warm, smart, sophisticated, superbly acted, sharply written show. That’s why it’s number one. Unlike Modern Family, which throws some sentimental goop onto the ends of its shows in the least compelling manner possible, Community has built a cast of characters who genuine like each other and who we can care about, so when it goes for sentimental it succeeds beautifully. It seems the greatest divide among the passionate fans of the show is just which episode is the greatest, which says a lot about how many truly excellent episodes of television it has already given us. Funny, smart, sexy – will you marry me, Community? (I’ve previously written about Community here.)

2. Terriers

Oh, Terriers, how we loved you so. You brought us so much humor, so much intrigue, so much Donal Logue. You will go down as one of the all time great one season wonders. You reminded us that great characters can be funny and tragic, and that the best stories are sometimes the least conclusive. We praised you in life, let us praise you in death. And for those of you have yet to experience the charms of Terriers, let me tell you that it even with some unresolved stories, it is well worth your time to watch all 13 episodes.

3. Parks and Recreation

I’m pretty sure I could sit and watch Leslie Knope recount Friends episodes for hours on end. Sadly, we only got about 90 seconds of that in “Telethon,” one of the many hilarious episodes from the show’s second season. Happily, P&R has created one of the strongest ensembles on television, who take their already solid scripts and find ways to ground them in the absurdities of every day life. (I’ve previously written about Parks and Recreation here.)

Read the rest of this entry »

The Price Is Right is perhaps the only place on television where you can consistently find expressions of pure joy. There’s certainly a good deal of happiness in a show like Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, but it requires a journey through a family’s greatest sorrows. It’s also easier for scripted dramas to explore dark places, moments of tragedy and even triumph. But pure joy? Almost never.

Game shows can fill a lot of needs in our lives, but The Price Is Right has the singular ability to demonstrate the communal nature of joy. Having your name called (“Come on down! You’re the next contestant on The Price Is Right!”) leads to eager jumping, flailing, and hugging/climbing over each person in your row as you make your way down. The audience participates in a way uncommon in game shows, shouting suggestions and cheering on friends and strangers alike. Unlike the recent rash of Japenese-inspired game shows that feed off of humiliating others, The Price Is Right remains a place in which people join together in celebrating minor accomplishments. The games shows inspired by the popularity of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? also encourage isolating the individual. And it’s no surprise that Regis Philbin would be the only one who looks as if he is enjoying himself on Millionaire. Compare that to Bob Barker and Drew Carey, who are the least expressive hosts imaginable, rarely showing more emotion than cracking a smile, and smartly so, since any effusiveness on their parts would take the show (even further) over the top. Barker or Carey can stand while they are hugged, kissed, and nearly knocked over by excited contestants celebrating their victory or their opportunity.

The community of The Price Is Right is not just constituted by the studio audience. Viewers are drawn in by the host looking directly into camera and the showcase models exhibiting the prizes for us. Sit in a doctor’s waiting room or the holding tank at a automotive repair shop, and you’ll find that the show most likely to draw everyone’s faces toward the television is The Price Is Right. The joy is both intensely personal, as we watch a person jump up and down, screaming, and also communal as people cheer on their peer. It’s a rather wonderful thing to watch on TV.

If I am right that The Price Is Right is the rare show that allows housewives, frat boys, and retired grandparents to join together in expressions of shared joy, it is also problematic for encouraging these expressions through material consumption. The Price Is Right has been doing product placement since long before Spiderman reached across the room for a Dr. Pepper or Big Mike took a bite out of a Subway sandwich on Chuck. And the expressions of joy that I came here to praise are expressions of joy at the opportunity to win stuff. Hardly a person in the country won’t recognize “… a new car!” called out in your best Rod Roddy impersonation. The greatest expressions of joy on television are for getting a car, a boat, or a trip to the Eiffel tower, and we encourage this by watching a show whose purpose is to reward people for knowing the cost of common (and increasingly uncommon) consumer products. The two shows most like The Price Is Right are Let’s Make a Deal, which shares some of the community feeling, but in a detached, silly way, and Supermarket Sweep, a low-budget alternative that tries to capture some of the energy of The Price Is Right and its rewarding of pure consumerism. But neither has managed to stay on television as long (Deal is back with Wayne Brady after a long absence from television) nor be as successful in their runs.

The Price Is Right‘s success, I think, has to do with its unique ability to showcase and encourage shared joy. Like other shows, it can test our knowledge of trivia and allow us to compare ourselves to the show’s contestants. But unlike reality competition shows such as Top Chef or Jeopardy!, where we can see expertise exhibited but in an arena designed to pit players against one another and promote tensions, on The Price Is Right everyone is encouraged to cheerlead each other. You may not get to compete for a prize, but you are primed to cheer on those who are.

How rare is that? Almost as rare as joy itself.

As those who follow me on twitter have noticed by now, I’ve been intrigued by the way that Carlos has blurred the lines between film and television. Carlos is a docudrama about Carlos the Jackal, the infamous assassin, terrorist, revolutionary, mercenary, myth, and public enigma. Carlos was produced for French television by the highly respected filmmaker Oliver Assayas. It aired this week on the Sundance Channel over three nights, running over 5 hours in total. Although produced for French television and aired on American television (before a shorter theatrical cut hits a few theaters), it was almost completely ignored by television critics, while being hailed as a masterpiece by many film critics. What’s going on here?

Carlos, it seems, is a mini-series. The Sundance Channel calls it “an epic 3-part miniseries.” The Internet Movie Database calls it a “TV mini-series.” But this television mini-series is being ignored by television critics while being discussed by film critics. For support, notice that Metacritic has Carlos listed as a film, and all twelve reviewers are primarily film critics. Sites that do both film and television criticism, like The A.V. Club, have Carlos filed under film. Furthermore, film critics are largely discussing Carlos as a film, with only a brief mention that it was made for and originally aired on French television. (Andrew O’Hehir at Salon.com is the only film critic I’ve found who calls Carlos a mini-series and the only one to at least attempt to make a connection between film and television.)

Why have television critics ceded this highly praised mini-series to the film critics? I’ve got a few ideas.

1. The death of the mini-series While once a key component of television programming, mini-series have largely fallen by the wayside. It’s been a long time since North and South, Lonesome Dove, and Brideshead Revisited. Television criticism has grown exponentially in recent years, but this has occurred after the demise of the mini-series, so there is almost no precedent for television writers reviewing these sorts of events.
2. The HBO phenomenon And what precedents there are for television critics reviewing mini-series have been almost exclusively historical dramas like Band of Brothers and John Adams on HBO. But HBO has recently been airing a number of made-for-TV films that have been reviewed as films by film critics. Temple Grandin is one recent example. HBO intentionally situates itself apart from television, as in its famous slogan, “It’s not TV, it’s HBO.” That makes it easy for film critics to make forays into television.
3. Oliver Assayas There are also elements of Carlos in particular that make it more attractive to film critics. For instance, the filmmaker is a former film writer turned writer and director, and he is regarded by many as one of the most creative and talented filmmakers working today. So when Assayas does television, it gets film critics’ attention, just as Spike Lee’s HBO documentaries did.
4. Film festivals Carlos did screen at a couple film festivals in its full-length version, including the influential New York Film Festival. So while the theatrical version of Carlos, not yet released, is not the version being reviewed by critics (at least in the current round of criticism), its mini-series version has been screened a couple times in American festivals.
5. Filmic predecessors There is also a precedent for critically lauded films to have their origin in international television. Most famously, Krzysztof Kieślowski’s The Decalogue, made for Polish television in 1988, was screened at some art house theaters in the US, often as a part of film festivals, and then later revivals. More recently, The Best of Youth, made for Italian television, came to US theaters. (I saw it over two glorious nights at the Oak Street Cinema in Minneapolis; it remains one of my favorite film-going experiences.) So film critics have some familiarity with European television that is screened in US theaters.
6. US-centrism of television critics Finally, as the last point suggests, while film critics are decidedly international in their criticism, television critics remain a pointedly US-centric bunch. A few will venture into Canadian television or the highly praised British sit-coms and anthologies, but television criticism in the US remains firmly rooted in the history of television in the US. It is not yet an international effort.

What difference does all of this make? I believe that it matters how we watch television and film, and good criticism address the medium through which the content is delivered. Understanding why Carlos was shown on the Sundance Channel (spun-off of the Sundance Film Festival) instead of on network television or HBO matters. Appreciating how our experience of Carlos can be different if we watch it in a movie theater or on a television matters. Knowing that Carlos is available on-demand on your television before it is released in theaters matters. Placing Carlos in the context of French television as opposed to American television or international film festivals matters. Calling a television mini-series “cinematic” (as a compliment) matters. And, perhaps most importantly, situating Carlos in the context of the television mini-series can lead to a different set of questions and assessments than situating it in the context of French cinema.

When only film critics review Carlos, we miss half of the potential entry points into analyzing an important piece of … television? cinema? art?

UPDATE: In his interview with Sam Adams of The A.V. Club, Oliver Assayas addresses a few of these points. A couple things to note. 1.) He was frustrated that the “film” (his term) could only be shown on French TV. 2) He says it “exists simultaneously” on television and film outside of France. 3) Because it was essentially green-lit as three television movies, he had a larger than usual budget.

Tonight is the premiere of the fifth season of 30 Rock. Despite its poor ratings, NBC has kept 30 Rock on the air because it usually cleans up at the Emmys and because it is a critical darling.

Oops. Did I say “is”? I meant “was.”

Last season, 30 Rock suffered from the dreaded double whammy of any critical darling: Emmy backlash and critical fatigue. What is Emmy backlash? Shows that do well at the Emmys consistently lose their critical champions because by winning many Emmys (a good thing), it excludes other shows that critics and TV fans think are also deserving (a bad thing, apparently). People begin to list shows that were better than the Emmy winner in that particular season. Suddenly, shows that made us laugh or cry or tense up all seasons suddenly appear to have massive flaws that gnaw away at us. If your show is experiencing any of these symptoms, it may have Emmy backlash. Consult a script doctor immediately.

Critical fatigue is a related phenomenon. Some shows (Chuck comes to mind) become critical darlings, but fail to live up to critics’ high expectations. Really, this is a problem for critics rather than shows, since the shows may not have changed at all, but the critics’ viewing experience has. Chuck may not have been ambitious enough or it may have been too ambitious, depending on what the critic thought Chuck could and should be. It fails to meet expectations. Critics lose interest in championing the show. In a case like Chuck, this fatigue may be legitimate. Weighing perceived benefits to the cost of championing the show, a TV fan or critic may not want to put the effort into hyping the show.

The case of critical fatigue surrounding 30 Rock is a bit different, I think. In this case, the overriding critical complaint about the show is that it hasn’t grown any: its characters are thinly drawn, its plots are being recycled from earlier episodes, these jokes were used before. All of these lead critics and other viewers who watch shows intensely to conclude that the show is less funny than it used to be. But this is only because critical viewers typically watch shows in order even when there is no particular reason to do so. Apart from a few mini-arcs and the occasionally callback, there is really no reason to watch 30 Rock in order. But most of us do. So we recognize the same jokes, the same plots, the same everything. Then we begin to notice that Kenneth, who seemed like a breakout character that first season, has broken out into nowhere. Tracy’s glorious non sequiturs now seem like a stretch. And why did we ever think Jenna was funny?

But here is the problem: The last season of 30 Rock was as good or nearly as good as the previous seasons. Why do I think that? I apply the new viewer test. Would a new viewer of this show, entering at the fourth season, think this show is as hilarious as in-order viewers thought the first two seasons were? In this case, I think the answer is probably yes. (Or at least, close enough to being as good as not to justify the critical disparity.) For someone who hadn’t seen these plots before, there would be no reason to expect more from Liz and Jack’s relationship or to have grown tired of the use of guest stars that draw away from the strengths of central characters.

Now, there’s no easy cure for critical fatigue. The new viewer test is really just a check on our intuitions about how funny a particular season is. In fact, we might do a variation of the new viewer test called the syndication test: if this episode showed up out of order in syndication, would we think it is as funny as the earlier episodes? I suspect many comedy series that last four or more seasons will see a marked improvement in critical judgment if we apply either of these two tests.

Critical fatigue, I suspect, is a side-effect of the particular sort of careful viewing demanded of critics. This form of viewing and criticial analysis is particularly well-suited to the long-developing dramas that have become the calling card of “quality television.” As a point of comparison, because the characters change little over time and the plots often follow the same beats and twists, popular procedurals like CSI and Criminal Minds tend to get little critical attention even though they are typically the most watched shows on television. That’s just the way it goes. Contemporary television criticism, which is getting more refined and more impressive, hasn’t yet found a way to adjust to procedurals and, I am arguing, the later seasons of television comedies.

So when we turn to 30 Rock and the other returning comedies this season, I encourage us all to watch (if we can) with the fresh eyes of a new viewer, or at least the blurry vision of a future viewer watching out-of-order syndication. I suspect we will all enjoy the returning comedies a good deal more.

For the last three months or so, I’ve been dealing with an eye condition that makes my right eye blurry, very sensitive to light, and occasionally painful. The treatment for it includes (temporarily) making the eye even blurrier and keeping it dilated all the time. It’s a condition I have had before, and one that I will probably have periodically for the rest of my life. The treatment takes months, but it quickly becomes such a regular part of my routine that I hardly think about it. Because one of eyes is always dilated and out of focus, it changes the way that I interact with technology, so I thought it might be worth sharing some of these altered interactions.

I wrote all this for two reasons. One, I wanted to chronicle (for my own benefit) what it is like when I have this problem, so I can deal with it better in the future. Second, I thought it would be helpful to point out the ways in which I experienced technology differently because of a relatively small difference in my physical condition from most of the technology-consuming public. As ever, I am trying to reflect on who I am and how I engage with the world around me, although this time I’m less interested in the content of what I view than the physical conditions in which I view it. So bear with this unusual (and probably boring) post.

Tom Cruise in shades, from Top Gun

There are basically three things I have changed to deal with the problematic eye.

1. I avoid bright lights. This doesn’t just mean not going outdoors when it’s sunny. It also means keeping the lights off at home, even at night (where the glow of the TV is often the only light source).
2. When I am near bright lights, I wear sunglasses. This includes almost situations when I am outside the house.
3. I wear an eyepatch. Yes, an eyepatch. Even in low light settings, it can be a strain on my eye to be near any light (even the backlit glow of a computer screen). Add to this the fact that my problem eye is always out of focus, and suddenly using an eyepatch can be a very helpful way of seeing things more clearly.

These three changes have an impact on how I engage with various technologies that depend heavily on eyesight. I don’t have a smart phone and I don’t use my iPod for watching video, so I’ll leave those aside.

1. Movie theaters. I simply refused to stop seeing films at the theater because of my eye. So I typically wear sunglass through the previews, when the house lights are still on, then switch to the eyepatch for some or all of the main show. Being in a dark theater isn’t too bad, depending on the brightness of the film. Since I’m especially sensitive to light, I’m particularly aware of the difference in how films are lit. Big Hollywood studio films like Knight & Day, for instance, are considerably brighter than moody indie flicks like Winter’s Bone. Not only is there a difference in lighting techniques (not least Winter Bone‘s greater reliance on natural light), but these choices result in how much light comes through the film strips themselves and therefore how much light reflects off the large white screen and back toward the viewer. Winter’s Bone is more consistent in its color palette and brightness (from outdoor to indoor and from daytime to nighttime scenes) than Knight & Day is from car chase to warehouse gun fight. Other than noticing this, my unequal eyes don’t make a great deal of difference when watching a movie at a theater. It is a bit harder to focus when not wearing the eyepatch, and I do have less depth perception when wearing the eyepatch. But, surprisingly, if I am sitting from the middle to back of the theater, having zero depth perception hasn’t made much of a difference in how I see the film. The closer I move to the front of the theater, though, the greater an impact it makes. In watching Inception, I sat near the front of a crowded theater, and I was losing too much by wearing the eyepatch. It may be that Inception keeps its background in focus more often, or I was more often drawn to the details of the dreamscapes, and thus I need both eyes to take in what is happening, but I suspect that most of the problem stemmed from sitting closer to the screen, where it is more difficult to take in the whole screen with one good eye.
2. 

   How 3-D glasses work from 3dglassesonline.com

   3-D movies. 3-D is completely lost on me because I can’t focus with one eye. So among the many reasons to be skeptical of this “new” technology is that it is (like many “advances”) going to leave some people unable to participate. Since my eye started acting up, I saw only one 3-D film in theaters, How to Train Your Dragon. Watching with only one eye focusing through the 3-D glasses and one not focusing very well is very comparable to watching without the 3-D glasses (based on my mid-movie experiment). Watching with an eyepatch under the 3-D glasses makes 3-D even flatter than traditional film. (I think this is often true of 3-D even with both eyes working, but it is always true if you’ve got one eye covered.) My wife hates 3-D because it gives her headaches to wear the 3-D glasses over her regular glasses, and I avoid it because it so rarely improves a film. (I gave Avatar a “B” when I saw it in theaters, but I suspect it would be no more than a “C” if viewed on other formats. But that is the exception.) (And, yes, I do believe it is legitimate to grade films differently based on the medium employed.) But trying to watch 3-D with one good eye reminds me of how technologies affect people differently depending on their bodily circumstances.

3. Live theater. Going to watch a play is nearly impossible, since I can’t see the stage from the cheap seats (the only ones I can afford). Distance viewing is very difficult, and it is extremely frustrating to be unable to see what is happening on stage. Even if I can handle the lights, which is already a strain, the frustration over watching blurry shapes move around leads me to avoid traditionally staged plays. There is a small black-box theater that I love, that perhaps I could handle because I would be close enough to the action, but I haven’t tried it.


Daryl Hannah, sporting the eyepatch

4. Computers. I keep my laptop’s brightness as low as it can go while still being brighter than the ambient lighting. And, frankly, my MacBook just doesn’t get dim enough for my comfort. I still usually wear an eyepatch, since looking at a computer screen through dark sunglasses is nearly impossible. That increases the strain on my good eye, so I need to relax it more often (close it or focus on something far away for a short while). The one thing that is really noticeable, though, is how difficult it is to watch embedded videos. Nearly all video websites, from Hulu to Youtube to almost every blog on the planet, has a white (or similarly light-colored) background. Videos, however, are typically dark, or at least darker than their surroundings when viewed on a computer. Watching streaming videos on-line is thus one of the most difficult things for me to do. I can lose a lot of quality by taking (some) videos to full-screen; otherwise, it’s a game of trade-offs between making the video bright enough to see and making the surrounding page too bright.
5. Television. My very accommodating wife lets me keep the lights off in our house when we are watching TV, and (with that adjustment) television is the easiest technology for me to engage in right now (at least for the size of our television and its distance away). Apart from the difficulty I have reading subtitles with my poor distance vision right now, television is the most accessible technology for me, in part because it is the most easily adaptable. I have control over the ambient lighting (unlike a movie theater or the area surrounding an on-line video), I have control over the brightness of the television set (unlike a movie theater), and I have control over starting and stopping it so as to give me eyes a rest.
6. Books. Books are perhaps the most difficult to parse. The eyepatch makes it very possible to read a book, but focusing at a reasonable distance puts a large strain on my one good eye, so it is difficult to read for any length of time. This is especially true as day turns to night, and my eye has been worked hard all day. So while reading is quite easy to do (an advantage over almost every other viewable technology), it is very difficult to read for long periods of time. Speaking of which, back to the dissertation…

The dilated eye

On Wednesday, Psych returns for its fifth season on USA, a network that has solidified a place as the most-watched cable network by developing original content branded around a helpfully loose “Characters welcome” theme. (See a good discussion of its branding and the role of genre at In Media Res.) Critical reaction to this show is some mixture of ignoring it and reviling it. And frankly, I’m not sure I disagree with a lot of the criticisms of the show: the writing is too on-the-nose, the acting is too mugging, the humor is too broad, the mysteries are too predictable, the lead character is too irritating (to other characters and to us), and… well, you get the idea. Even the score gets trashed.

Despite all of these (and in some of these cases, because of them), I dearly love Psych. There’s probably no show I enjoy watching more than Psych, none that makes me laugh more, and none that gets watched as quickly after the DVR records it. And it really comes down to one simple thing: Psych is funny.

Funny makes up for a multitude of sins. I’ll watch and rewatch a funny show far more quickly and more regularly than an otherwise superior drama. So when Psych‘s fourth season gets released tomorrow, it will soon make it into the DVD player for a second viewing, and probably a third viewing within a year.

There are some things to be said in favor of Psych. The supporting cast is stronger than Monk, a show that is viewed more positively by critics and Emmy voters. They’re about equal on the quirk-o-meter, for whatever that is worth, and both can attract some solid guest stars. But for me, the show works for one main reason: Dulé Hill.

Critics (and, I suspect, many fans) claim that the show lives or dies by the James Roday’s performance at the center of the show. Shawn Spencer is the fake psychic, after all, and he gets the most lines and the most story arcs. I can’t disagree that the show rests a lots on his shoulders. But what makes Roday’s mugging and irritation to others watchable is Hill’s Burton “Gus” Guster.

Gus fits into a particular subgenre of the bromance that I think of as the Male Black Best Friend. There are Lenny and Carl on The Simpsons, Phil and Lemm on Better Off Ted, Shawn and Gus on Psych, and (the fullest realization of this subgenre) J.D. and Turk on Scrubs. In each case, there is a pair of male best friends, one Caucasian and one African-American, who view each other as equals and are viewed by outsiders as inseparable. (The second half of Community‘s first season saw them pairing Abed with Troy, interestingly putting a twist on the formula by putting a character of Palestinian-Polish descent in the role of the white friend.)

With Phil and Lemm, the idea was that these are codependent coworkers who need each other to be successful. Lenny and Carl began as background figures, drinking buddies to Homer, but The Simpsons has generated a lot of humor out of their pairing. Scrubs pushed the bromance aspect farther than any show or film has yet done, but what interests me the most about it was that it gave Turk more stories and a greater depth of characterization than any other Male Black Best Friend, Guster included. Turk not only supported J.D. through residency and beyond, but he had an interesting and complicated relationship to Carla and had meaningful interactions with the rest of the cast. Gus has far less of that characterization and almost no relationships that aren’t mediated or interrupted by Shawn, and thus he suffers as a character. But he surpasses the others in the central role of the Male Black Best Friend: alleviating the white best friend’s perceived dorkiness by being equally dorky.

The joy of watching Psych for me is watching Hill’s performance as the Male Black Best Friend to a character that is built out of hamming it up and irritating others (including his father and those who sign his paycheck). Hill finds a nice balance between joining in with Roday’s antics and giving a look of sharp displeasure or an annoyed tone of voice that serves as a helpful counterpoint. Psych never passes up a joke, a reference to an ’80s film, an antic, or a farcical conclusion,(except in a handful of darker episodes near the end of the last two seasons). And there is simply too much silliness in the show for one character to carry without the show self-destructing. Many are annoyed at Tony Shaloub being nominated for his portrayal of Monk yet again, but that show is nothing without his performance. Roday’s take on Shawn is too thin to do the work of carrying the show single-handedly. So we have Burton Guster to carry us through, to take the weight off Shawn, to serve as a bridge to the somewhat more realistic characters on the show, and to ground Shawn.

This ancillary nature of the MBFF is disturbing insofar as it suggests that a television show can’t survive with a black lead or further contributes to racial tokenism. And there is probably something significant in the fact that Hill’s most famous role was on The West Wing, where he was a late addition to the cast, forced by NBC to address complaints about its whitewashed primetime lineup. To their benefit, USA has always promoted Psych as a two-lead comedy, but unfortunately that’s not how the show actually works in terms of stories or characterization. Gus is no more than the MBFF.

But I return to Psych because it is funny and because of Hill’s performance. In one of the show’s few (mostly) serious episodes, Shawn is tracking a serial killer and finds he can’t work under the stress, so he asks Gus to be his surrogate and lighten the mood. Rather than aim for mimicry, Hill delivers a performance as Gus that takes Shawn’s levity into absurdly literal territory and thus makes a joke of the very idea that Gus could be funny. But the real joke is that Gus is the funny one. Shawn is the class clown, the big-joke guy who can’t take anything seriously. Gus is the classic straight man who gets more laughs with an exasperated look than the wildly gesticulating man beside him.