Inessentials

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.]

Very big spoilers for The Box, A Serious Man, and Days of Heaven

Biblical allusions were once standard fare in literature, and film has seen its fair share of epic tales of biblical heroes. But (with one notable exception) it has been at least forty years since Bible stories were winners at the box office. More than this, references to the Bible have never been as important to classical cinema as they have been to classical literature. References happen, but they’re not as central to understanding cinema as references to other films, popular music, or Shakespeare. Cinema (with the exception of the one mostly forgotten genre) is much less interested in the stories of the Bible than it is in many, many other things. So I was a bit surprised to view three films in the past month that draw on the Bible in three different reasons.

Richard Kelly’s The Box takes a sci-fi story that had been worked over a couple times before and adds in Kelly’s unique blend of half-baked ideas to make his most successful film yet (successful artistically, not commercially). Norma (Cameron Diaz) and Arthur (James Marsden) get a button in a box from a mysterious stranger (Frank Langella) who tells them they have 24 hours to push the button; if they push it, the get $1 million dollars but someone they don’t know dies; if they don’t, life goes on as normal. Kelly’s tale is surprisingly suspenseful, even after it incorporates bizarre elements of the supernatural. The Box, like Southland Tales, overstuffed with references, but to no discernible purpose. What are we supposed to make of the Jean-Paul Sartre references, for instance? More immediate to our purpose, what is the point in connecting Arthur and Norma (and the other button-pushers) to Adam and Eve? In each case, a woman pushes the button. Is there some misogyny lurking in this decision? The mysterious stranger is a Serpent figure (from out of this world), and their consequence has Tree of Knowledge-like implications, but what exactly are these implications? Kelly seems content to make the reference, even if it clouds what’s really going on. But the sneaking suspicion in all three of Kelly’s films is that there is nothing deeper going on. There’s just a story crammed full of references. There are a lot of ideas, but none that are fully pursued, none that make the film stronger, none that are important because none matter to the story. No one needs to know the story of Adam and Eve to understand what is happening in The Box, and the references to that story only muck things up.

On the other hand, A Serious Man from Ethan and Joel Coen can only be understood if one is familiar with the biblical story of Job. Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlberg) watches his life fall apart, and his journey of anguish parallels that of Job’s. Gopnik even visits three rabbis who mirror the advice offered by Job’s three friends. A Serious Man is less effective than other Coen Brothers films at presenting a world in which we sympathize with a protagonist cut adrift in a cold, heartless, amoral world. But it nicely summarizes some of those themes. When the film ends with a tornado, it is hard to make sense of what is happening unless one is familiar with the story of Job. When God finally appears to Job (chapter 38 of the eponymous book), it is after a devastating wind. When the film leaves off this deus ex tornado, we see that the Coens are reinforcing what the film hammers all the way through: either the world is random and nothing matters, or there is a God out there who is just screwing with us. God isn’t going to save the day, because our lives show us that if there is a God, then the universe isn’t just disinterested, it’s a cruel joke. Knowing how Job ends is essential to understanding why A Serious Man ends where it does.

Finally, Days of Heaven, the wonderful 1973 film from Terrence Malick, takes a more traditionally literary approach to biblical allusion. The story of Days of Heaven (which hardly matters in a Malick film, where you just want to soak in the gorgeous images and fascinating edits) centers on a trio of early twentieth-century drifters. When Bill (Richard Gere) meets new people he says that his girlfriend (Brooke Adams) is really his sister. (Why? For Malick, it doesn’t matter. He just does.) This story recalls three different accounts in Genesis where Abraham and Sarah (twice) and Isaac and Rebekah are travelling in a foreign land and the husband introduces the wife as his sister. This ends badly for the local leader, who takes the wife/sister as his own (either wife or harem) and then suffers for it, before the truth is revealed and all is restored. In the film, this suffering happens in the form of a locust plague, which is a smart way of connecting to another Pharaoh story. Malick’s allusion deepens the appreciation of his film without depending on it. It doesn’t matter in Days of Heaven as it does in A Serious Man when and how the film diverges from the story to which it alludes. You don’t have to “catch” the reference to appreciate what he is doing, but your appreciation is deepened when you do. By treating the wife-sister narrative as an archetypal story, there is no need drop clues about what the writer-director is thinking, as Kelly too often does. The story speaks for itself, and if you are familiar with the Bible, history, literature, film, you’ll further appreciate what is happening, but you can enjoy it plenty even if you don’t.

I just happened to watch these films in near succession, but I like how they represent three different approaches to allusion. There’s postmodern name-dropping (Kelly), required background reading (the Coens), and archetype (Malick). Malick’s is simultaneously the most subtle and the most successful, but I’m not convinced that this is essential to the approach; it’s at least as likely that Malick is the most talented of the filmmakers (all of whom I admire a great deal).

My wife and I snuck off to see the Oscar-nominated animated shorts at the local theater before they disappeared into the void on Friday. It was an immensely pleasant experience, in part because these short films are clearly labors of love, crafted by people who may be taking their first shot at a film with (modestly) wide distribution, so it is easy to feel sympathy for the creators. And, heck, even if you don’t like a film it’s only going to last about 8 minutes, right?

Catch a run-down of all the short films here: http://www.shortshd.com/theoscarshorts/ (They are also all available to purchase from iTunes.) Here are four highlights from the ten or so shorts that we watched.

Granny O’Grimm’s Sleeping Beauty

Although this film had more apparent flaws than many others of the night, it easily packed the most laughs over its six minutes. Watch the whole film below.

Wallace and Gromit: A Matter of Loaf and Death

Wallace and Gromit are two of the most beloved characters in film history, and any new episode in their on-going adventures is to be treasured. Nick Park has refined the stop-motion animation style into its definitive form over the last two decades. This adventure is nearly identical in plot to the earlier ones (Wallace falls for a girl, hijinx ensue, Gromit saves the day), but that’s not why we watch. We watch because we are cinephiles or Anglophiles, punsters or funsters, have kids or feel like kids. These films are so sweet-natured, even in their frightening sequences, that they infect you with good cheer. (And a craving for stinky cheeses.) A Matter of Loaf and Death is more franticly pace than earlier installments, with faster cuts (which means more set-ups for Park and friends). I can’t wait for the next one.

Logorama

The winner for best animated short at the Academy Awards was Logorama, which was perhaps an even more pointed political statement than giving a documentary award to Michael Moore. This was easily the most daring and conceptually innovative film of the night. Constructed almost completely out of brand logos, the film reads like a big postmodern joke at the way in which American culture is saturated with corporate branding. When the film’s story get’s going, it reveals a similarly postmodern mash-up of Tarantino dialogue, Michael Bay action sequences, and CNN round-the-clock “news” coverage. However, like many such attempts to skewer advertising, it must do so by becoming an advertisement. When watching the film, you look for all the fleeting jokes (that’s a GOP elephant! that mountain says The North Face!), so you end up searching out the very corporate brands that the film presumably wants you to dismiss. As one-time viewing, perhaps we can see this as an important step: we raise our consciousness of how steeped in branding our culture is, so that we can defiantly reject it. But in doing so, we give an audience to the very images we are supposed to reject.

Watch the first 45 seconds below.

La Dama y la Muerte (The Lady and the Reaper)

My favorite film of the night was also took a strong ethical stand, but more effectively than Logorama, partly because it did so only casually. To avoid the spoilers that follow, watch all of La Dama y la Muerte before continuing. (Don’t skip the closing credits.)

The frantic chase sequences recalls Looney Tunes, but does so in an innovative, visually daring style unto itself. It begins in a realist mode (the bedroom), but quickly devolves into a hyper-real locale (the hospital room), and continues in an exaggeration of the classic Chuck Jones style (the morgue). So it’s fun to watch. But it’s also a surprisingly touching story of a woman who is prepared to die but is forced back to life by a doctor. (“Famous Doctor Saves Another Miserable Life” reads the magazine cover on the wall. “I feel like a god.”) More effectively than Million Dollar Baby, it presents a way of understanding how a person might choose to end their life with dignity rather than continue it. Perhaps because of its Spanish origins, the film presents a mythology that combines Catholicism (there is an afterlife where we can see our loved ones), Indo-European folklore (the Grim Reaper), and classical Greek mythology (River Styx, Cerberus) to pose a challenge to medical technology that can prolong life. Perhaps most remarkably (and in direct defiance to Catholicism) it gets a laugh out of suicide, and leaves the viewer accepting that this was perhaps the right choice for the woman.

This points to an overall theme for these assorted animated shorts (and, come to think of it, for this website), which is that pop culture can be revealing in the stories it tells us about who we are and the lives we live. Even eight-minute cartoons can be expressions of attitude or summaries of philosophical thought experiments about how we do think or how we should think about the world we encounter. Euthanasia, the afterlife, how advertising affects our perception of the world, how our experiences shape the stories we tell about the world. Heady stuff for simple cartoons.

Significant spoilers for Avatar; medium-sized spoilers for Aliens

When I was a kid, my favorite movie was Return of the Jedi. (Now known as Star Wars VI.) It’s not that I was especially fond of the Ewoks. Any kid knows that their treehouse homes are way cooler than the Ewoks themselves. It took me many years to realize it, but what fascinated me about Return of the Jedi is that the Star Wars universe suddenly was transplanted into a verdant forest. After the khakis and browns of A New Hope and the blacks, whites, and grays of The Empire Strikes Back, to suddenly see the speeder bikes racing through a lush forest of greens made the whole world more real. I grew up around forests, and seeing speeder bikes and light sabers in a forest was the coolest thing ever. Ever since, I’ve found science fiction stories set in wooded areas to be very compelling. (Similar for fantasy stories like The Lord of the Rings, or sci-fi set in that other great untamed area of Earth, the sea.)

So I was pre-disposed toward the world of Avatar, created by the man who made The Abyss (about strange life in the ocean depths) and Aliens (about the strange interaction of biological life and mechanical steel). Watching the film, I was struck by Cameron’s fussiness. Here is a man who never leaves an inch of frame unfilled. Showing off his command of technology and filmmaking, Cameron plugs every scintilla of his computer-generated world with some creepy-crawly, some background figure, something to fill the frame. When depicting the rich world of Pandora, this adds to the thrill that I felt watching Return of the Jedi as a kid. But over the course of 162 minutes, I did find myself occasionally yearning for the sparse landscapes of No Country for Old Men, a film content to let its characters drift through barren landscapes and barely decorated hotel rooms. Like the Coen Brothers used those repeated shops of nearly empty landscapes to engross the viewer in the moral emptiness of the universe they depicted, Cameron uses the lush greens and blues of Pandora to demonstrate the biological and spiritual connection the Na’vi have to their planet.

As a side note, Cameron also seems to forget about his camera. He’s so interested in filling the frame, that he forgets the cinematic possibilities of changing viewing angles. Of course, he expertly crafts the flying scenes, but it is not until a rush down the halls of a spaceship (strongly reminiscent of the Alien films) that we see the camera put in motion in a way that adds to the storytelling, rather than just showing off the admittedly wondrous world that Cameron and crew have created.

And of course, this world is supposed to be made even more life-like by Cameron’s embrace (and advancement) of 3-D technology. And I must say, at times I was really sold on the tech. Watching a spaceship glide through space, like we’ve seen a thousand times in Star Trek and Star Wars and a dozen other outer-space epics, I had never seen one quite as realistic as the ship at the beginning of Avatar. At other times, though, the 3-D effects were simply laughable. Any shot with multiple foci (for instance, a character walks across the foreground, a computer station sits a bit further back but still in focus, and more activity occurs at a distance in the background) comes across in the comical style of Captain EO. And fast moving characters were very choppy, at least in the theater where I watched. (I’ll be interested to see if that is still the case in 2-D.) Frankly, I’m glad I gave Avatar a chance in 3-D, but it will be a long time before I bother watching another film in 3-D. The pain and price just aren’t worth the payoff. It was barely worth it this time.

But back to the world of Pandora. Cameron presents the Na’vi as a mish-mash of indigenous peoples who have more to teach the “civilized” than the “civilized” have to teach them. As morality tales go, this one is a groaner. As a good liberal, I prefer it to a paean to the military or a we-can-do-no-wrong propaganda campaign. But the deadly serious New Age-y religion (captured in an unintentionally hilarious group hug-and-swing that recalls the Wachowski Brothers’ dance marathon in Matrix Reloaded) and the uber-intense way that Cameron enforces his point is, shall we say, less than subtle. And like many attempts to show how much we Westerners have to learn from indigenous peoples, the film slides into a subtle form of liberal racism. You see, these savages are noble savages. Look at how they commune with the animals they kill for their survival. Look at how connected they are to the world around them and each other. (Succinctly captured in those three oft-repeated words, “I see you.”) Clearly, the film pounds into our brains, we Westerners have much to learn about ourselves and our world from the National Geographic sort. As if to bring out a big yellow highlighter to make sure we don’t miss the point, the central characters among the barely clothed Na’vi are motion-captured and voiced from three African-American and one Native American actors. So the only time we see people of color in the film, that color is blue. (The lone exception is Michelle Rodriguez, whose Latino skin is two shades darker than her lilly-white pals.) I’m not claiming that James Cameron is a racist in any strong sense of that word. That word is too important. But his film does reveal a tendency to paint (blue?) a portrait of people of color as noble savages who could teach a thing or two to white Westerners who come after their resources. And that is a subtly racist message, at the very least in its racial essentialism, which is one short step from stereotyping, and in its praise of “noble savage” qualities in native people.

But the issue of race pales (ha! a pun!) in comparison to Cameron’s shockingly anti-military message. Watch movies for long enough, and you’ll see your fair share of anti-war films. But you’ll have to watch a long time to find a film that is not only so anti-war, but anti-military. What’s the difference? An anti-war film chronicles the terrible consequences (on soldiers, civilians, the land) of waging war. It may emphasize the futility of war. But it can also present soldiers positively in the face of these terrible evils. Even anti-war films can present soldiers as heroic, brave, virtuous, and wise. Cameron’s film bluntly opposes the very idea of a mechanized military. We consistently are presented with a contrast between Colonel Miles Quartich (Stephen Lang), the film’s clear villian, and every other character in the film. He’s not a scientist who just wants to learn, like Dr. Grace Augustine (Sigourney Weaver). He’s not a noble warrior like Tsu’tey (Laz Alonso). And when given the choice, he chooses evil (=Western =militaristic =colonial) when Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) chooses good (=indigenous =communal). The film’s only other villain is Parker Selfridge (the always-welcome Giovanni Ribisi), who stands in for the cash-hungry mission leader who is here to rape and pillage the land for profit.

In case the trailer or the description so far hasn’t made it clear, the film is a thinly disguised allegory for the war in Iraq, with that thin disguise coming in the form of an allegory of colonization of North America, with just a splash of Vietnam for color. Like a said before, the film isn’t exactly aiming for subtle.

What strikes me about the message of the film is how it inverts many of the images of Aliens, which Cameron directed nearly 25 years ago. In Aliens, Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley enters a giant walking robotic suit to battle the titular alien, who is a queen defending her progeny. In this story, the hero uses technology to defeat an alien biological life form that is following its biological imperative to defend its young. In Avatar, a similar suit is used by the evil Colonel Miles Quartich to defend himself against a tribal leaders defending their clan. The same images of a technological exoskeleton fighting an alien are used in both films, but to remarkably different effects. In one, a battle between mothers is made equal by human technology. In the other, military technology is the very evil that is being battled, since it is what enables the destruction of these people, their home, and their sacred places. It’s as though Ellen Ripley, at the end of Aliens decided to join the acid-for-blood alien and fight the Company because, after all, what business do we have on her world?

Avatar is an ambitious film that holds an interesting place in Cameron’s corpus. Its images suggest Aliens, but its message suggests The Abyss. For a big-time Hollywood director, Cameron has always been a critic of moneyed power, and he takes that further in Avatar then he ever has before. It’s visually rich (maybe too rich – I recommend a strong shot of espresso to ease digestion), and thematically blunt in a Steven Spielberg manner, but, like many of Spielberg’s films, a rather stunning filmmaking achievement.

Spoilers for Angel (Season 5) and House (Season 4)

My official Best Television of the 2000s list will feature only shows that aired at least three seasons in the 2000s. I am making this restriction because one of the marks of a great show is its ability to sustain its stories and characters over a long period, and three seasons seems as good a cut-off as any. Also, since the traditional television season runs from fall to spring, I’ve decided to include seasons that began in the fall of 1999 and I am ending with seasons that concluded before fall of 2009. That means that shows debuting in fall, 2009, are ineligible (Community, Modern Family), and it also means that on-going shows that debuted in spring, 2009, are ineligible unless they had the bad fortune to be cancelled immediately; that means no Glee, Dollhouse, Parks & Recreation, Castle, or Better Off Ted. Those shows got too late a start to be included in the best of this past decade, as I am arbitrarily determining it. Because of these restrictions on my count-down list, I thought it appropriate to say a little bit about a few shows that didn’t make the three season cut-off, but were spectacular nonetheless. I’m also including three shows that I think managed to pull off one truly great season amidst a number of less spectacular ones, and those are included at the end. Below are the highlights, in alphabetical order.

One Season

Andy Barker, P.I.

Andy Richter and Conan O’Brien teamed up for a Thursday night mystery-comedy hybrid that only aired four episodes before being yanked. (Six were filmed.) Featuring a stellar supporting cast around beat-down everyman Richter, the show exhibited remarkable comic timing over its first few episodes. When Andy Barker, CPA, moves into the office formerly held by a private detective, he finds people mistaking him for a P.I.; he may not know how to handle a gun, but he can handle your taxes when it’s over.

For fans of Chuck, Remington Steele, accounting

Firefly

Perhaps the greatest science fiction show to ever air on television, this series brought a legion of new fans to Joss Whedon. Its fans called themselves “Browncoats,” and turned Firefly into the most essential television show of geek culture in the 2000s. But is it any good? Beyond good, this show’s 13 episodes (shown, as jilted fanboys like to point out, out of order by the evil Fox Network) created a fully realized world from the first episode. The pilot is too slow and too long, but beginning in the second episode, this outer-space A-Team demonstrated that stories about vigilantes fighting against an evil centralized power could somehowstrike a chord with viewers during the Bush administration. Like many great shows, the most essential member of the cast was the location, in this case a creaky old spaceship with more smuggler’s holds than the Millenium Falcon. Wonderfully cast, with a sly sense of humor that combined Whedon’s subversive expressivism with Ben Edlund’s comic exaggeration.

For fans of Battlestar Galactica, The Tick, men in tight pants

Freaks and Geeks

Freaks and Geeks is remembered today as the greatest dramedy, the greatest high school show, the show most like your own life, and the show that launched a thousand careers. This brainchild of Judd Apatow and Paul Feig told the story of high school from those least interested in remembering it. Surprisingly, those of us who had successfully blocked our own experiences found glorious catharsis in watching the failures and (very occasionally) successes of the two bands of outsiders (those intentionally existing outside the system and those too nerdy to fit in comfortably). Essential viewing for people who love television.

For fans of Glee, Friday Night Lights, awkwardness

The Middleman

An unrepentant throw-back to a sillier form of science fiction and fantasy shows, The Middleman proved that sharp writing and smart characters can make great television using the flimsiest of CGI. When a smart young artist (Natalie Morales) working a temp job gets nearly eaten by a mutant science experiment, her unflappability catches the eye of The Middleman (Matt Keeslar) who recruits her as his sidekick. There’s perhaps never been a show in the history of television that required so many repeat viewings with a pen and paper handy to unpack its jokes and references. Often times, an episode would pick a theme (Die Hard, sixties rock band The Zombies) and build as many references as it could into its 44 minutes. This show never achieved the critical mass of devotion it deserved.

For fans of Get Smart, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, meta-humor

Chuck

Chuck has found unexpected life, being renewed for a third season that begins this January. This is the only show on this list still on the air, so catch this bandwagon while its still hot. (Wow, now that is a mixed metaphor.) Chuck Bartowski is a hard-working Buy More employee whose brain, due to unexpected help from his college roommate-turned-nemesis, becomes the living computer that stores all of the US government’s information. This is a fun, funny, sexy, silly blend of action and comedy that really found its stride in its second season. The best thing to happen to Mondays since Memorial Day.

For fans of Alias, Eureka, Adam Baldwin

Flight of the Conchords

Immigration. Unemployment. Bureaucracy. Topics for a gritty documentary somehow became occasions for the musical comedy duo to perform their songs. Each episode is a poorly constructed attempt to cram three pre-established songs into 30 minutes of story. Somehow, despite the obvious problems with this plan, the show managed to create moments of sublime comic awkwardness squeezed between occasionally brilliant, occasionally boring musical set pieces. In its way, it was one of the most ambitious television shows of the decade.

For fans of Dead Like Me, The Ben Stiller Show, Michel Gondry

Life

In its strike-addled first season, Life was a gritty cop drama, light-hearted character study, and on-going mystery in absolutely perfect balance. No procedural has ever managed to so perfectly blend those three elements as well as Life did in that first season. Its second season renewal came with strings attached: bigger (and subsequently less plausible) weekly hooks, less of the on-going story arcs, and Donal Logue as the new police captain. The second season fell to merely an above-average cop show, but was fortunately able to tie up many loose ends in its memorable series finale. The show drew out a nice parallel between generic Eastern religion’s emphasis that everything is connected and the basis of good detective work, which is following connections. Unlike most shows that attempt to make a character religious or philosophical, the writers were fully aware that the form of Zen being practiced by Charlie Crews is a watered-down, pop psychology version of Zen, which kept the show from ever falling into self-parody.

For fans of Castle, Burn Notice, staying out of prison

Pushing Daisies

Abandoned by film, television became the home of screwball dialogue in the 2000s, and not even Gilmore Girls or 30 Rock could manage Pushing Daisies‘ speed. More brilliant color and wacky quirkiness than any show should rightfully be able to manage, Barry Sonnenfeld somehow managed to create an engaging dream world in which a pie maker brings people back from the dead and solves crimes along with the love of his life whom he can’t touch, a crabby detective, and Kristin Chenoweth. Death has never been so funny.

For fans of Dead Like Me, Wonderfalls, color

UPDATE: Silly me. I left Kings off the list. Great modern fable.

Long-Running Series with One Great Season

Angel (Season 5)

Angel never discovered what it could do well until its final season, by which point fans’ whiplash was so great from its overhauls each season that no one knew what this show was any more. However, by having Angel go to work for the evil law firm Wolfram & Hart, Joss Whedon and Tim Minear wisely guided the show into complex thematic territory: at what point do you stop protesting the system and find a way to work within it? Mirroring Whedon’s own complex relationship with the Fox Network, Angel and his band of merry men try to be constructive from inside a destructive system. And by bringing Spike over from the now-finished Buffy the Vampire Slayer, shooting for darker, more gothic horror, and achieving more sublime humor, the fifth season became by far the series’s best. Watching Angel is worth it simply for the show’s finale, which is perhaps the finest final episode in the history of television.

The Closer (Season 1)

A weaker knock-off of England’s Prime Suspect, The Closer began its run on TNT as a law & order procedural with the added element of watching an unknown, and therefore untrusted, female cop head LAPD’s Major Crimes division. A breadth of capable acting by the supporting cast grounded Kyra Sedgwick’s head-flailing approach to characterization. In later seasons, the show became unbearable in its explorations of Deputy Chief Brenda Leigh Johnson’s inexplicable relationship with her boyfriend Fritz, unnecessary relationship with her adopted cat, and unwatchable relationship with her family. But in that first season, The Closer was a smart woman-in-the-workplace drama with workable stories about how only she could wrangle a confession out of the bad guy.

House (Season 4)

Modeled on Sherlock Holmes, Gregory House, M.D., is a jackass to everyone, including his trusty confidant, his busty boss, and his team of diagnosticians. The writers always knew how to write for House (or Hugh Laurie’s indelible performance at least made it seem that way), but he was always surrounded by thin, unnecessary characters led by Cameron, the whiniest female lead this side of Felicity. So when House fired his staff at the end of Season 3 and began Season 4 by whittling down an auditorium full of candidates, new life was breathed into this occasionally stale medical drama. House was allowed to be his devastatingly truthful and hilariously cruel self and a better cast of supporting characters stepped in. The writer’s strike created some story-telling problems for the back half of the season, but it was still an audacious reinvention that amazingly worked, at least until Season 5 became too enamored with the Foreman-13 story.

Nearly spoiler-free discussion of The Wire, The Sopranos, and Lost

Critical consensus is that The Wire is the best television show of the decade, and probably the best show in the history of television. Perhaps despite being the best, though, the show is not particularly influential. Media scholar Jason Mittell recently wrote that The Wire, like Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks, is immediately recognized by informed viewers/listeners as a great work of art, but also recognized as completely inimitable. You admire it, you are in awe of it, but you don’t attempt to do what it does. Perhaps partly, you are intimidated, but more importantly it seems like something that it would be impossible to try and copy. So not only do you not try to examine why it is successful and then copy it, you don’t even try to draw any lessons from what makes that show great. Its greatness is unique and its uniqueness is inimitable.

In comparison, I’d like to add that despite being vastly inferior to The Wire, The Sopranos may be the most influential television show since Friends. (Possible exception for Survivor.) And while I felt the show was consistently over-rated and I lost interest in the show after two seasons, I do think The Sopranos had a much bigger impact on television than The Wire. The variety of its influences is as notable as the intensity of its influence.

1. It convinced Hollywood actors that there were great roles for them in television. Dennis Leary, Glenn Close, and more came to TV in large part because they watched The Sopranos and found the stories so powerful and the acting so superb that they thought they could do better there than in Hollywood. The standard for dramatic acting was upped.
2. In what would become one of the most annoying trends on television in the 2000s, The Sopranos used therapy as a contrivance to give actors an opportunity to go mono a mono in scenes that seemed designed for an actors’ workshop. You could determine a show’s pretensions by how often its characters went to therapy (except for Monk, which used the trope for comic effect). By the time Gregory House, M.D., got around to it, he had to be fully committed to an asylum for there to be any plausibility in what was by 2009 a hackneyed plot device.
3. Want to get arty? Try a dream episode! We’ll have nearly silent scenes played out on a boardwalk, and everyone will want to get in on the game. Sure, Buffy also did it with “Restless,” but it was David Chase who codified the idea that inner turmoil over a tough decision should be visually represented in a dream episode or dream sequence. Protege Matthew Weiner would add a twist by making Don Draper’s dreams into daydreams and memories, but the basic model still holds.
4. Great television happens on cable. Drama found its home on cable, with each channel that wanted to make a name for itself finding a flagship drama that would define its ambitions (AMC’s Mad Men, SciFi/SyFy’s Battlestar Galactica, FX’s The Shield, Showtime’s Dexter). Each of these was an attempt to build a brand through HBO’s success with The Sopranos (and to a much lesser extent, Sex and The City and Six Feet Under).
5. Catholics get all the good stories. If you want religious characters on television, two rules apply: they’ve gotta be Christian, and they’ve gotta be nondescript or Catholic. Evangelical? Charismatic? Mennonite? And, God forbid, Jewish or Muslim or Buddhist? Good luck! The Sopranos reinforced the notion that guilt is what makes religion interesting, and Catholics hold the reigns on dramatic guilt. (The idea of Jewish guilt, with its siblings harping and nagging, get manifested in comedic roles, and we’re talking drama here.) Obviously, Big Love stands as an exception, but we all recognize how exceptional that sympathetic and unflinching portrayal of religion is. If you don’t want to play up the guilt, go the Reverend Lovejoy route and make the character nondescript and mainline, and then use that for a funny episode of how your sit-com family is conflicted over whether to take the kids to church.

I could go on and on about how The Sopranos either created or reinforced various ideas about television drama in its storytelling and in its prominence, but let’s get back to The Wire. What is The Wire‘s legacy?

Its legacy is not the complex, long-developing storylines. Attempts at that style of storytelling wore their Lost comparisons openly, or were soapy WB/UPN/CW teeny-bopper shows. No episode of The Wire (including the pilot) makes sense by itself, any more than a chapter of a novel could stand on its own. Lost built its mythology as it went and used mysterious clues to keep the viewer guessing, but The Wire presumes that you would understand each character had a backstory in the way that a newspaper article about the Great Recession assumes you lived through the financial crisis of 2008. It simply picks up mid-way through a story and lets the viewer fill in the rest. It does it without the wink to the viewer that Lost is always giving (there’s a polar bear on a tropical island, but we’re not telling you why!). It is played with a completely straight face, with a seriousness appropriate to a newspaper story.

Its legacy is not the quality of the acting, which was uniformly superb. The acting on The Wire is not showy the way it is on The Sopranos or even Mad Men. Who would you give an Emmy to in any given year? Obviously The Wire had some of the most memorable characters in the history of television, but even when the actors were doing their best work, there was no guarantee that they would get an Emmy-ready episode written for them. Just as each character is beaten down by the system, each performance is subsumed to the story of the city of an American city. (Maybe Baltimore should have won an Emmy?) And while other television shows openly stole actors from the stable developed by the superb East Coast casting, no one is giving Michael K. Williams roles like James Gandolfini is offered.

If there is any legacy for The Wire, it will be the way it elevated the possibility of television as an art form. People who don’t care about TV can find that they care about The Wire, just as someone with no art background can find the joy in a Christo and Jeanne-Claude. You tell your friends about The Wire the way that Mittell tells his friends about Astral Weeks. Referring to a remarkable run of films in the ’50s and ’60s, Mike D’Angelo recently wrote that Jean-Luc Godard was a game-changer who didn’t change the game at all. And that may be exactly what happened with The Wire. It was so great, so special, so revered, that no one really knows how to do more than name-check it.