Television

Christian’s folly

SARA FAITH ALTERMAN — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 16:59:17 GMT

His Own Worst Enemy
Two men. One body. It sounds like the title of a squeamish sequel to “Two Girls, One Cup.” But the good news is it’s just the premise of My Own Worst Enemy , Christian Slater’s foray into the world of crappy small-screen dramas that use a lexicon of jargon in order to sound “sciency.”

WHAT HAPPENED, CHRISTIAN? You used to be so sly, so sexy. Now you keep running those possibly meaningful hands through your greasy, thinning hair.

Two men. One body. It sounds like the title of a squeamish sequel to “Two Girls, One Cup.” But the good news is it’s just the premise of My Own Worst Enemy, Christian Slater’s foray into the world of crappy small-screen dramas that use a lexicon of jargon in order to sound “sciency.”

Slater’s Henry Spivey is a regular golly-gee working man who lives a regular life with a regular wife and kids. The twist: not only does Henry have a government-operative alter ego named Edward Albright, but, through the magic of thoroughly improbable television bio-technology, he doesn’t even know that Edward exists! Turns out “Henry” is just a cover, one who is blissfully unaware of his nefarious other self. It’s like a combination of Fight Club, The Truman Show, and the Bourne trilogy, without all kinds of fussy nonsense like good acting and writing to get in the way of what Slater does best — quizzically raising his eyebrows.

When Henry morphs into Edward, and vice versa, he first experiences eye-squinting lightheadedness (indicated by a mélange of unintentionally comic wincing); that’s followed by a blackout and then total dissociation. This Jekyll-and-Hyde switcharoo is made possible through — what else — a computer chip the government planted in Henry/Edward’s brain that allows Edward (the Alpha personality) to control whose identity is front-and-center at any given time. That is, until the chip goes haywire and we get Henry becoming Edward becoming Henry becoming Edward at random intervals. Thanks to this glitch, Henry becomes aware of Edward’s existence, and the two-in-one doppelgänger begin to communicate with each other by recording video messages on a cellphone.

Which raises the question: if government-employed scientists could invent technology that allows one man to split his Freudian id/ego/superego three-fer between two personalities, why can’t they just fix the damned thing when it breaks? Or implant Henry/Edward with a new chip?

Besides plot idiosyncrasies, the show is riddled with terrible acting and bouts of amateurish cinematography that may or may not be imbrued with deeper meaning. Were any of the characters remotely likable, it might warrant reading something into repeated fleeting shots of miscellanea like, say, Henry/Edward’s hands folded in his lap. But they’re not. So it doesn’t.

Secret-agent meh

RYAN STEWART — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 18:57:11 GMT

NBC’s Chuck is a concept in search of a show
Though Chuck is programmed as a comic-action hybrid, it doesn’t do either particularly well.

UNREALIZED: The idea of the super-nerd as superspy is always good, but Chuck isn’t much more than an idea.

Almost a year after the Writers Guild went on strike, the TV schedule is still screwed up. Writers couldn’t write pilots for the new TV season, and so the networks had fewer new programs to choose from. Which means that many of last year’s new shows that otherwise might not have survived to season two now get a second chance. Like Chuck (Mondays at 9 pm), which has already snagged a full-season order from NBC. That’s good news in theory, but Chuck remains a fun concept in search of a show to match it.

The title character (Zachary Levi) is a nerd in the throes of post-college malaise. He works at the help desk in a big-box electronics store, where, after a series of bizarre events, he winds up with a collection of government secrets beamed directly into his brain, Matrix-style. That makes him an asset to the CIA and the NSA, which use his brain to aid them in matters of national security. Chuck has two federal agents protecting him: John Casey (Adam Baldwin), the type of guy who winks at a photo of Ronald Reagan during target practice, and easy-on-the-eyes Sarah (Yvonne Strahovski), who’s attracted to Chuck — except they can’t go out if she’s assigned to him. As for those secrets, Chuck’s only way to access them is to see something that triggers the data, which come to him in flashes reminiscent of the visual flourishes in Requiem for a Dream. So he has to do a lot of field work. Season two thus far has centered on a MacGuffin device that also contains all the intelligence found in Chuck’s cranium — if they can find it, he can have his old life back.

The idea of the super-nerd as superspy is a great one (as Get Smart proved), but Chuck remains more potential than actual. Part of the problem is with Chuck himself: he’s not a total dweeb, just an ordinary nice guy who happens to know a lot about computers. It doesn’t help that Levi looks like a cross between John Krasinski and Adam Brody (Chuck and The O.C. were both created by Josh Schwartz.). Conventional Hollywood wisdom would probably hold that a show focused on Chuck’s definitively dorkier best friend, Morgan (Joshua Gomez), wouldn’t work, but it could be an interesting experiment.

Bad girls

SHARON STEEL — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 19:55:00 GMT

Fashion deathmatches on Stylista and The Rachel Zoe Project
One of the accepted truths of the fashion world is that it’s utterly bizarre.

WEIRD SHIT: Stylista’s Slowey plays to the stereotypical editrix archetype by hamming it up as a Miranda Priestly–esque harpy.

One of the accepted truths of the fashion world is that it’s utterly bizarre. So no surprise that this month’s fiscal apocalypse has done little to shatter the hopes of thousands of sharply dressed strivers who dream of toiling behind the scenes at a major fashion magazine. (Don’t believe me? Just read some of the electronically tear-stained posts on the Ed2010.com message board.) In fact, of late, the coveted gig of Fashion Editor has morphed into a professional Holy Grail. Particularly for anyone who’s ever watched Ugly Betty, The Fashionista Diaries, or The Devil Wears Prada, rolled his or her eyes heavenward, and sighed, “OMG, I could do sooo much better.”

It’s also a given that people who succeed in fashion like pain; what’s more, they enjoy learning how to manage and manipulate it. Anne Slowey and Rachel Zoe — the respective stars of Stylista (CW, Wednesdays at 9 pm beginning October 22) and The Rachel Zoe Project (whose finale aired this past Tuesday on Bravo) — specialize in deflecting and absorbing the cruel agonies of their jobs. Much has already been written and gossiped about these shows, and though the details differ (in a masthead shake-up, Slowey gets blamed for undercutting former Elle fashion director Nina Garcia; Zoe was recently dubbed a “pox on humanity” by Times television critic Ginia Bellafante), the premise is the same. These women have chosen to put themselves forward as the face of two distinct fashion brands, and thus they’re fair game for the kind of vicious public judgment usually reserved for badly photo-shopped actresses, designers entering rehab, and models who eat dirt on the catwalk.

Stylista follows 11 naive fashionistas vying for a one-year junior-editor spot at Elle under Slowey, now the fashion-news director, and creative director Joe Zee. Slowey plays to the stereotypical editrix archetype by hamming it up as a Miranda Priestly–esque harpy. After entering and tossing her coat onto a faceless assistant’s desk, she strides into a room, purses her vamp-red lips, and doles out a cold little introductory speech: “If you’re going to live in my world, you either get it or you don’t. So let’s see if anyone gets it.” Challenges range from preparing her breakfast tray (“I only do almonds if they’re soaked overnight”) to dressing mannequins with pre-selected pieces. The contestants themselves are immature and tediously bitchy; Slowey’s staged, sniping critiques of their work actually feel refreshing by comparison.

The good news

SARA FAITH ALTERMAN — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 03:14:04 GMT

David Alan Grier fills "TV's black hole" with Chocolate News
When David Alan Grier promises that he’s “filling TV’s black hole” with his chocolate flavor, you know it’s gonna be good.

SPIT TAKE: Spot-on in his parodies, Grier also delivers the kind of shocker that so much other comedy merely promises.

When David Alan Grier promises that he’s “filling TV’s black hole” with his chocolate flavor, you know it’s gonna be good. Or at least provocative. Comedy Central’s Chocolate News (Wednesdays at 10 pm, debuting October 15), which features Grier (a former In Living Color cast member and perennial TV presence) as the host of a mock news-magazine series, aims to bring an African-American perspective to the media satire game, using a combination of prose, bro’s, and ho’s.

The show is part sketch comedy, part socio-political commentary, part awkward racial stereotyping, all served up in Grier’s signature crisp, theatrical delivery, as a series of archetypal character parodies that are unabashedly on point. For the debut episode, Grier offers thespian diatribes about current events and pop culture, asking, of the state of hip-hop, “When did ‘Fight the power’ become ‘Wait till you see my dick’?”

Of course, one can’t help but balance rhetoric like that with a series of hip-hop video pastiches. The sketch-comedy world doesn’t lack for these: thuggish rappers, ejaculating champagne bottles, juicy-assed B-girls in tiny skirts. Chocolate News energizes the tired concept with a series of over-the-top PSAs starring Grier as “Phat Man” — a grill-baring, Building-19-tracksuit-sporting, poor man’s Biggie Smalls who spits dirty rhymes about No Child Left Behind and suicide prevention. These segments are visual orgies with a message. A message that you shouldn’t leave the “mothafuckin’, ass-droppin’, booty-poppin’ child. The child. Don’tcha leave that child behind.”

Grier also reprises his spot-on Maya Angelou impression, as seen in 1997 on Saturday Night Live, with a resplendent Grier-as-Angelou hawking Butterfinger candy bars, Fruit Loops, and Pennzoil. Here, the “former poet laureate” delivers radiant spoken-word verse that illuminates Barack Obama (“You have a mocha choke hold on the American dream!”) and gives John McCain a well-deserved kick in his wooden Chiclet teeth.

The first episode even gives us what many “cutting-edge” comedy-related TV shows, films, and books only promise: shock. In the very last sketch, white people are negotiating the right to use “the N-word.” A sharply square Willie Garson (most recognizable from his Sex and the City stint as Stanford Blatch, the token gay dangling from Carrie Bradshaw’s social charm bracelet) punctuates the otherwise hoky and predictable sketch by calling the gentleman with whom he’s negotiating, well, a nigger. Without hatred, without irony, just affably naive, self-entitled, post-negotiated-agreement. I can’t recall the last time I did a legitimate spit take watching a TV-comedy bit.

Robot love

JON GARELICK — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 23:32:44 GMT

Terminator ’s wonder years
Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles is ostensibly sci-fi action adventure. It may be the best teen drama for adults on TV.

MILF FROM HELL: What’s a mother to do when her boy really is the savior of mankind?

Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles (Fox, Mondays at 8 pm) is ostensibly sci-fi action adventure. In fact, it plays as maybe the best teen drama for adults on TV.

As you’ll recall from the end of the second Terminator movie, Sarah (in a role created by Linda Hamilton) was on the run with her son John, the future leader of the resistance movement fighting the totalitarian Skynet computer and its army of cyborgs. She worked in the present to save the future through the agency of her son, with the help of a reformed Arnold Schwarzenegger, who sacrificed himself at the end of that chapter of the story — the “last” Terminator.

On The Sarah Connor Chronicles (the first season has come out on a Warner DVD), a new generation of Terminators is again in pursuit of the now-teenage John Connor, and there’s conflict over a new computer known as the Turk that contains the digital DNA that will make possible the eventual creation of Skynet. Sarah is in the middle of two struggles: to preserve the life of her son, and to prevent Skynet from being born.

All well and good — and who cares. Skynet, the Turk — a premise is a premise. What matters here is the story of a single mother trying to protect her son while the son tries to be a normal teenager. The beauty of The Sarah Connor Chronicles is that it gives this primal set-up a cosmic significance — and a cosmic irony. Every mother thinks her son is the savior of the world (God’s gift to mankind) — but for Sarah Connor, this fiction happens to be true.

Lena Headey as Sarah is dark, beautiful, drawn, tough, and scary, in a low-maintenance shag of black hair, eyes wary, unsmiling, as good with a 12-gauge as Hamilton was. Thomas Dekker as John could be an emo-boy-in-waiting — if mom and he didn’t have to keep fleeing every time their house explodes. The complication comes with the entrance of Cameron (Summer Glau), a “good” Terminator in the guise of a teenage girl sent from the future to protect John.

Headey and Glau are perfect foils — hot-blooded real woman versus . . . a robot. As for Glau and Dekker, well, what sexually inexperienced teenage boy doesn’t want his own beautiful robot-doll woman? If John Connor were 14 rather than 16, his character would be impossible — as all 14-year-old boys are.

To Hell and Harry

GERALD PEARY — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 23:12:34 GMT

Hell Girl, The IT Crowd
American hetero pornography is, most often, a fantasy celebration of exhibitionist sluttiness, itchy whores on their knees, opening their legs, without a moment’s hesitation or a flicker of shame.

HELL GIRL: Anyone want to revel in teenage shame and humiliation?

American hetero pornography is, most often, a fantasy celebration of exhibitionist sluttiness, itchy whores on their knees, opening their legs, without a moment’s hesitation or a flicker of shame. The primal Japanese porn scenario is different: a sad-faced female is at the center, trembling and virginal, often a “schoolgirl,” and she cries and shrieks as she’s humiliated, penetrated, and soiled. I’m not able to explain this abiding Japanese pleasure in masochistic suffering, but it certainly reappears in a non-pornographic guise in the strange, unhappy anime Hell Girl, a Japanese series dubbed into English and showing on IFC starting this Tuesday, September 30.

Each program is about a kind, vulnerable middle- or high-school student who’s beset by troubles, brought so low and treated so wickedly and unjustly, that there’s no way out, except maybe suicide. Hell Girl dwells in excruciating close-up, as does Japanese porn, on the agony, the distress, the intense psychic pain — and four of the initial five episodes sport attractive young (animated) schoolgirls as their protagonists. Middle-schooler Mayumi is victimized by a pack of bullying mean chicks who make it appear that she’s stolen money and has been going to the bad part of town and cavorting with sordid boys. She is publicly shamed by their sadistic lies — and this is Japan! Teen Ryoko has, for an entire horrid year, been stalked by a cruel policeman. He leaves erotic messages on her e-mail; he breaks into her home and lays a dress on her bed. Ryoko is going mad, but the authorities will do nothing to help her.

All the narratives are the same: innocence unprotected, defiled, defeated. There’s just one slim hope: get to your computer and, at midnight, avail yourself of a weirdo Web site, HellCorrespondence, where you can get help from Hell Girl — but at what a price! A forlorn-eyed, zombie-like teen who resides with her grandmother in the country, Hell Girl hands you a crude straw voodoo doll. Untie the string around the doll’s neck and Hell Girl goes into action. She freaks out your enemy, then ferries him or her to Hell.

A happy ending? Not on your life. If you contract for Hell Girl’s services, you too will end up in Hades when you expire. Damned if you don’t, and truly damned if you do. Why should these poor adolescent-aged kids be faced with such a dilemma? But they are, and each episode ends with the troubling knowledge that the young protagonist is punished for all eternity! Whew! Hell Girl may fly in Japan, but this bummed-out American felt done in after watching the first three pessimistic programs.

I love the ’90s

RYAN STEWART — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 20:03:11 GMT

The CW’s new 90210
When the CW did not send out screeners of the pilot of 90210 some observers took that as a bad sign.

TIME WARP: It’s still a teen show — for the teens of yesteryear.

When the CW did not send out screeners of the pilot of 90210 (Tuesdays at 8 pm) — its update of the popular ’90s teen soap Beverly Hills, 90210 — some observers took that as a bad sign. Was the new show so bad that the network had to do an end run around the press? Others took it as a good sign, confirmation that the new 90210 would be ideal guilty-pleasure viewing.

As it turns out, both groups were wrong. The new 90210 is on exactly the same level as the old 90210. Which is to say not particularly good, but endearing and goofy enough to yield some memorable moments down the line.

The focus is on the Wilson family: dad Harry (Rob Estes), mom Debbie (Lori Laughlin), and the two kids, Annie (Shenae Grimes) and Dixon (Tristan Wilds — he’s the adopted African-American son). They’ve moved to Beverly Hills so they can better care for Harry’s troubled mother, Tabitha (Jessica Walter). The kids enroll at West Beverly High School and culture shock ensues. Annie stays out past curfew with a local rich kid; Dixon persuades his teammates to release some pigs on a rival school’s campus. Meant to be up-to-date, it’s all very familiar: who hasn’t seen TV teens stay out past curfew and pull pranks? The show’s creators, Gabe Sachs and Jeff Judah, worked on the brilliant, short-lived NBC series Freaks and Geeks, which eschewed teen television clichés; it’s disappointing to see them resigning themselves to such weary storylines. They do, however, deserve credit for not trying to pander to teens: though there is an implied fellatio scene, 90210 is tame and sanitized compared with, say, Degrassi.

Or maybe Sachs and Judah aren’t trying to appeal to teens at all. This new edition seems aimed more at the twenty- and thirtysomethings in the audience who are nostalgic for the 90210 of their youth. Self-referential in-jokes abound. “What is that girl, like 30?” a teacher remarks about one student, as if aware that many of the actors playing high-schoolers on the original show were close to 30 off screen. Two original cast members are back: Kelly Taylor (Jennie Garth) is now a guidance counselor at West Beverly and Brenda Walsh (Shannen Doherty) is the new drama teacher in town. It’s hard to imagine teens caring about these characters, let alone the storylines surrounding them. Some current high-schoolers weren’t even born until Beverly Hills, 90210’s third or fourth season, so this isn’t really their nostalgia. The modern elements feel odd — Annie’s friend Erin has a video blog, but it comes off as a pasted-on conceit. Even a scene where Dixon’s playing video games with one of his bro’s is anachronistic: instead of huddling over some generic Mortal Kombat clone, shouldn’t they be playing Call of Duty on XBox Live?

Sight unseen

JOYCE MILLMAN — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 14:09:28 GMT

The fall TV season flies without pilots
Hollywood writers are no longer walking picket lines, but their 14-week shutdown of TV production reverberates through the 2008-’09 fall season.

SOUL-SICK CHARM: Simon Baker stars as a fake psychic on The Mentalist.

Hollywood writers are no longer walking picket lines, but their 14-week shutdown of TV production reverberates through the 2008-’09 fall season. The strike, which lasted from November 5, 2007, to February 12, 2008, disrupted the fall pilot-shooting season, and the networks are still playing catch-up. New fall series are traditionally unveiled to advertisers in May and TV critics in July, but not this year. In fact, critics have yet to see pilot episodes of many of the new shows. So when it comes to recommending which newcomers are worth the time, your guess is as good as mine.

ABC
There are only two new shows on ABC’s fall slate, and one of them is a heartwarming family game show (OPPORTUNITY KNOCKS, Tuesdays at 8 pm; starts September 23). The other is a touch more intriguing. David E. Kelley (Ally McBeal, The Practice) has remade the endearingly odd BBC crime-drama/sci-fi series LIFE ON MARS (Thursdays at 10 pm; October 9), in which a cop gets hit by a car in 2008 and wakes up, still on the force, in 1973. The original version (seen on BBC America) was a retro delight, from the ’70s stylings to the prickly interplay between enlightened modern detective Sam Tyler and pre-PC commanding officer Gene Hunt. ABC’s version does have one big selling point, however: Harvey Keitel as Hunt. “Bad Lieutenant” indeed.

CBS
The big news for CBS is not a new show but a new leading man: Laurence Fishburne succeeds the departing William L. Petersen on CSI (Thursdays at 9 pm; October 9).

I was able to see rough versions of some of CBS’s pilots. WORST WEEK (Mondays at 9:30 pm; September 22) is a remake of the British sit-com chronicling the humiliating misadventures of a well-meaning shlub as he prepares to marry his pregnant fiancée. It’s excruciatingly awkward comedy of Meet the Parents proportions. The most promising show on CBS’s fall slate is THE MENTALIST (Tuesdays at 9 pm; September 23), which stars Simon Baker as a phony psychic who helps the “California Bureau of Investigation” solve difficult cases. As he did in the underrated series The Guardian, Baker plays a flawed, charming, soul-sick character with great subtlety. The sit-com GARY UNMARRIED (Wednesdays at 8:30 pm; September 24) stars Jay Mohr as a newly divorced dad floundering in the dating pool. THE EX-LIST (Fridays at 9 pm; October 3), starring Elizabeth Reaser (Grey’s Anatomy), is a romantic comedy drama about a woman who revisits her old boyfriends after a palm reader proclaims that one of them is the man she’s destined to marry, but only if she weds within the year — if not, she’ll stay single forever. Any woman who forces her boyfriend to watch this show will suffer the same fate. British actor Rufus Sewell plays a biophysicist consulting for the FBI on crimes involving science in the drama ELEVENTH HOUR (Thursdays at 10 pm; October 9). CBS is still working on this one at the 11th hour; the original pilot has been scrapped.

Science? Or fiction?

RYAN STEWART — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 18:30:39 GMT

J.J. Abrams’s oddball Fringe
“It’s not an exact science,” Dr. Bishop says. His wise-ass son Peter interjects: “It’s not even science.”

BOSTON BUMMER: And a plane full of dead and decomposed people at Logan is just the beginning.

There’s a moment during the two-hour pilot of Fringe (Fox; Tuesdays at 9 pm), the new science-fiction series from creator J.J. Abrams (the man responsible for Lost and Alias), in which Dr. Walter Bishop, a mostly mad scientist, describes a procedure by which two people can share the same dream. It’s the kind of thing that can help an investigator get an eyewitness account from someone who’s in a coma, even if said procedure is basically just a high dose of hallucinogens. “It’s not an exact science,” Dr. Bishop says. His wise-ass son Peter (Dawson’s Creek’s Joshua Jackson) interjects: “It’s not even science.”

Peter’s sledgehammer subtlety make it clear, if you hadn’t already guessed, that Fringe will deal with some things that are, well, a little strange. The first episode introduces us to Olivia Dunham (Anna Torv), an FBI agent who’s called in when a plane lands at Logan Airport and every passenger on board is found dead and decomposed. After further research, Olivia learns about the experiments of Dr. Bishop in the field of “Fringe Science” and concludes that he might be able to help with the investigation. But he’s been institutionalized, and only immediate family can visit him, so she has to locate his estranged genius son Peter. Even though Peter has a poor opinion of dad, he doesn’t require much convincing to play along, and soon Dr. Bishop is sprung. The case gets solved, and a higher-ranking fed, Phillip Broyles (Lance Reddick, who played Daniels on The Wire), offers Olivia a job working for him to unravel even stranger mysteries.

In interviews, Abrams has said that he’d like Fringe to play a little different from Lost — he’s suggested that Fringe episodes will stand on their own without necessarily advancing the show’s larger plot arc. The hope is that viewers can jump in without being up to speed on every episode. Although this strategy worked for sci-fi cult favorites Buffy the Vampire Slayer and The X-Files, it carries some risk here. Without the long-form storytelling, Fringe boils down to a procedural.

Blood sucks

JAMES PARKER — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 19:45:20 GMT

HBO does the ‘Southern Vampire’
With regard to this whole nouveau vampire thing, this revitalized appreciation for the undead, I should declare myself at the outset a more or less complete philistine.

BLEACHED: As Sookie Stackhouse, True Blood’s telepathic waitress heroine, Anna Paquin seems a little lost.

With regard to this whole nouveau vampire thing, this revitalized appreciation for the undead, I should declare myself at the outset a more or less complete philistine. There’s very little goth in my veins; I have no feel for the crypt or the curlicue. The vampire, as a figure, attracts me only in a remote and æstheticized sort of a way — like an Impressionist, say, or a Bolshevik. So I haven’t read Anne Rice, and I haven’t read Stephenie Meyer, and I haven’t read Charlaine Harris, on whose “Southern Vampire” series HBO’s new drama True Blood is based. I have seen Harris’s picture, however, and she looks like a lovely, jolly, un-vampiric woman.

Were you a fan of Six Feet Under? Because True Blood (which premieres this Sunday, September 7, at 9 pm) is written by Alan (American Beauty) Ball, who also directs a few of the episodes. The opening credits are great — bottleneck-blues thump over fretted images of snakehandlers, swamp shacks, midnight roads, trembling Pentecostalists, etc. And the premise is . . . interesting: after thousands of years of stakes-through-the-heart and garlic bulbs shaken in their faces like maracas, the vampires are comin’ out. They want respect, they want to lead normal lives. Above a liquor-store counter, a TV is making shrunken chat-show noises — Bill Maher is on screen, archly quizzing one of the brides of Nosferatu. “We’re citizens,” she insists, “We pay taxes, we deserve equal rights.” What? Rights for vampires? Surely this is liberalism run mad! “But doesn’t your race have a rather sordid history?” asks Bill, voicing the obvious concern. “Well, now that Japanese have perfected synthetic blood. . . . ” Ah, the Japanese. Bless their industrious hearts.

So the vampires are like . . . outsiders. Marginalized. Discriminated against. “GOD HATES FANGS,” proclaims a roadside sign. Ho-ho. And now they’re entering society. People are having sex with them, and not just that droopy vampire sex you see in the movies.

In recent years, the erotics of vampirehood have tended to function as a corrective to the hegemony of porn, privileging pallor, languor, swooning, and submission over the sunbed glow and the hard-on that never sets. The vampires of True Blood are raunchier than that. Nastier, if you will. Grrrr.

Scout's honor

CHARLES TAYLOR — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 16:34:16 GMT

Burn Notice ’s honest con job
In the popular imagination, the spy is always cool, sophisticated, elegant — in other words, European.

BE PREPARED: Jeffrey Donovan’s Michael Westen is such a straight hero, you could imagine him in an ad for Arrow shirts.

In the popular imagination, the spy is always cool, sophisticated, elegant — in other words, European. The American contribution to pop imagination, the private eye, is more suited to our native character: brash, wisecracking, two-fisted.

One of the great jokes on Burn Notice, which is now in its second season on USA (Thursdays at 10 pm), is that it gives us an American spy who is neither a Continental wanna-be nor a shamus by another name. Instead, Michael Westen (Jeffrey Donovan) is another established American icon: the Boy Scout.

Resourceful, industrious, clean-cut, helpful to others, honest (okay, a practiced undercover con man, but only in the name of righting wrongs), Michael, as played by Donovan, is such a straight hero, you could imagine him in an ad for Arrow shirts. Even his cravings are healthy: he consumes so much yogurt that manufacturers must be fighting one another to buy ad time on the show.

The premise of Burn Notice, which was created by Matt Nix, is that Michael, a spy for some unnamed US agency, is abruptly “burned.” That is, he’s deprived of his clearance and his identification, his assets are frozen, and he’s dumped in a city — in his case Miami — on a kind of indefinite probation.

The backstory has Michael trying to discover who burned him and why. And the show’s creators are smart enough to treat his quest as comic investigatus interruptus. Every week, he’s guilt-tripped into helping some poor sap who’s stumbled into a situation that requires someone to outsmart a set of baddies who think they’re infallible. What follows, in voiceover and deftly edited sequences, is the meeting of Bob Vila, Mr. Wizard, and 007’s Q, in which Michael concocts surveillance devices, booby traps, and other handy gadgets from — all together now — common household items.

Since gadgets by themselves don’t get the job done, Michael’s good deeds entail luring the bad guys into a con. And it’s then that Amesbury native Donovan, posing as some overeager or impossibly cool player, really shines. He lays on the kind of Boston accent that Matt Damon fakes and Mark Wahlberg does naturally, and the result is peculiarly American: refusing to be intimidated by the villains he’s putting the squeeze on, he acts like a Southie kid who’s lucked his way into Hugo Boss suits and who eyes every sharpster who crosses his path as some foreigner not to be trusted. He’s a sharpie in lout’s finery, and what tickles you is the surface brashness and buried shrewdness.

Cry babies

SHARON STEEL — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 16:05:50 GMT

Teen talent wails on High School Musical: Get in the Picture
The top brass at Disney knew full well what they were about to unleash when the original High School Musical premiered on the Disney Channel two years ago.

DESPERATE FOR DISNEY: But for how long?

The top brass at Disney knew full well what they were about to unleash when the original High School Musical premiered on the Disney Channel two years ago. Acting on their instincts — and in the process giving life to a number of insidiously successful million-dollar cottage industries — they modernized a timeless formula into something today’s young things would obsess over to the point of distraction. Boy meets girl; they’re different, but they both love to sing; drama unfolds; lifetime friendships are formed; repeat. One sequel and a gazillion licensing deals later, High School Musical 3: Senior Year is almost upon us. And pending that film’s theatrical release, Disney is hard at work pumping every last bit of commercialized fairy dust it has into the HSM brand.

Its most recent venture is the reality show High School Musical: Get in the Picture (ABC, Mondays at 8 pm), and this one embraces the wholesome antagonism that has surrounded HSM from the very beginning. The original movie, though squeaky-clean, stars actors who have since gone on to have their naked post-shower pictures circulate on the Internet, obtain nose jobs, and leak quotes about wanting to cross over into other, non-Disney projects as soon as HSM is dunzo. It’s safe to assume that at first the veterans — much like the new kids who are competing to Get in the Picture — just desperately wanted to be a part of the Disney family. But once your fantasies are dangled in front of you like a pair of freakish, glittery mouse ears, naked desire tends to trump playing nice.

The initial four episodes of Get in the Picture called to mind the sort of boring train wreck that characterizes every new American Idol season. Thousands of teens attended open castings on both East and West Coasts, and the show assembled a “faculty” of vocal, acting, and dance instructors to judge their trials. Nick Lachey served as the objective host and requisite “Guys, I’ve so been there” pep-talker. Once the top 12 were chosen, the battle could get under way. At stake is a lead role in a music video that will run during the HSM 3 end credits — not to mention an exclusive talent agreement with ABC and a recording contract with Walt Disney Records.

Not by George

MIKE MILIARD — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 23:06:26 GMT

Robot Chicken: Star Wars
A long time ago, on a bricks-and-mortar soundstage far, far away, the last great Star Wars movie was made.

HIGH-QUALITY CINEMA Great stop-motion animation is better than bad CGI.

A long time ago, on a bricks-and-mortar soundstage far, far away, the last great Star Wars movie was made. The sad truth is that, since that day in 1982, many of the parodies, mockumentaries, riffs, mash-ups, and fanboy homages out there in interstellar cyberspace have been far better than any actual Star Wars film.

Hardware Wars, Spaceballs, Chad Vader, The Family Guy’s “Blue Harvest” episode, Eddie Izzard’s “Death Star Cantina” bit (the stand-up version, or the Lego re-enactment) — each is more entertaining than, say, that awful Attack of the Clones scene where Anakin and Padmé go ga-ga, gamboling with the tick-cows in a digitally rendered Naboo field. Or, I suspect, the forthcoming computer-animated Star Wars: The Clone Wars, in which George Lucas finally surrenders to his CGI fetish and gets rid of live human beings entirely.

One of the best parodies around is Seth Green & Matthew Senreich’s stop-motion Robot Chicken: Star Wars (Warner), which aired on Adult Swim last summer and has just been released on DVD. One almost wonders whether it’s as good as it is because of or in spite of Lucas’s blessing and participation.

First, fair warning: the main feature here is over quickly. It’s just 22 rapid-fire minutes. But the extras, which include deleted scenes and short making-of documentaries about production design, puppet fabrication, and stop motion, are just as entertaining.

For a show as gleefully crude as this one, it’s remarkable how much work and craftsmanship go into each lightning-fast set piece. But it’s also worth remembering that the clunky, labor-intensive look of stop-motion animation is really cool — especially to older Star Wars geeks who were weaned simultaneously on Ray Harryhausen fantasy fare, like 1981’s Clash of the Titans. And certainly in comparison to the stylized, facile-looking 1’s and 0’s that Lucas now adores. His added CGI scenes tainted the late-’90s re-releases of the original trilogy; computer effects were relied on far, far too heavily in the prequel trilogy; and the digital animation in The Clone Wars — at least in the clips I’ve seen — seems blocky and cheap. But that’s just one fan’s opinion.

A fan who’s also of the opinion that these quick-cut shorts, some only a few seconds long, are funnier than an open-mic night at the Mos Eisley: a Saturday-morning commercial for Admiral Ackbar cereal (with imitation crabmeat!); a late-nite ad for Max Rebo’s Greatest Hits (with obligatory Joey Fatone duet); Boba Fett, helmet off, coming on to a carbonite-frozen Han Solo; a Bespin weather forecast (“Cloud City will be cloudy this evening, followed by clouds”); Emperor Palpatine ordering take-out while ripping Darth Vader a new asshole for getting the Death Star blown up (“That thing wasn’t even paid off yet! Do you have any idea what that’s gonna do to my credit?”).

Found farce

MIKE MILIARD — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 16:05:40 GMT

Spaced makes it to DVD
Simon Pegg is funny.

FEY APPEAL Pegg’s may be the famous name, but the real discovery here is Jessica Hynes.

Simon Pegg is funny. Anyone who’s seen Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz knows that. So why has it taken us so long to find out about Jessica Hynes? Known by her maiden name, Stevenson, back when she created the BBC series Spaced with Pegg and director Edgar Wright in 1999, Hynes is a comedy dynamo: pratfalling, deadpanning, and decked out in thrift-store chic, she’s a little like a North London Tina Fey.

It’s a mystery why Spaced: The Complete Series (BBC) has taken this long to be released stateside on DVD. As Saturday Night Live’s Bill Hader says, in an effusive packet of press blurbage from high-profile fans (Patton Oswalt, Diablo Cody, Eddie Izzard, Judd Apatow), Spaced is “the show we American comedians watch and say, ‘How the hell did they get away with this?!’ ”

For Spaced novices: Pegg plays Tim Bisley, a comic-book artist who works in a comic-book shop (with a boss whose name is Bilbo Bagshot). Hynes is Daisy Steiner, a writer who doesn’t do a whole lot of writing — she’s far too busy being bubbly and babbling, doting over her miniature schnauzer, Colin.

Tim and Daisy, platonic friends, decide to pose as a “professional couple” so they can apply for an exclusive apartment. Not that their landlady, Marsha (played to pickled perfection by Julia Deakin), who’s never without a bottle of wine in one hand and a lit fag in the other, is all that picky. They get the flat and soon find themselves neighbors with Brian Topp (Mark Heap), a conceptual artist who deals in “anger, pain, fear, and aggression.” (“Watercolours?” Daisy asks. No, he says. “It’s a bit more complex than that.”) Tim’s best mate, Mike Watt (Nick Frost), a militaristic geek with detached retinas, and Daisy’s fashionista friend Twist (“my parents were hippies”), played by Katy Carmichael, round out the cast.

Over Spaced’s two too-short seasons, we follow the quotidian existences of these six characters, who co-exist, as one promotional blurb puts it, “in a world perched precariously on the edge of normality.” But though these humdrum lives may lack a certain élan, they’re related to us with a cartoonish joie de vivre: flashbacks and flash-forwards, jump cuts, rapid-fire edits. Tim is a video-game addict and a movie geek, and the funniest thing about Spaced is how these banal lives — clumsy romantic entanglements, joblessness, procrastination — are presented using the language of silver-screen epics, sci-fi movies, and horror flicks.

Visions from Lilliput

JAMES PARKER — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 21:46:43 GMT

The rise of the minisode
In a sense, every successful portmanteau word represents a narrow escape.

In a sense, every successful portmanteau word represents a narrow escape. The adventurous designers of the combination spoon/fork, for example, could easily have called their invention a foon. And the gaffes available to Sony Pictures Television, when it decided last year to produce five-minute Web-friendly versions of a heap of popular shows, were without limit: tinyvision, teewee, the dinkyNet. . . But sound æsthetics prevailed, and just as the fork with spikes was named a spork, the condensed TV episode enters the language in righteousness as a minisode.

One could argue, however boringly, that in the phenomenon of the minisode — which proclaims its retention of the “full narrative arc” of its original, even as it scrunches that into near-nonsense — our culture is presenting yet another symptom of intellectual decline, creeping ADD, capitalist brain acceleration, or what have you. Twenty-five minutes with the Minisode Network on YouTube (it also runs on MySpace, Crackle, Joost, AOL Video, and Verizon Wireless) were enough to convince me otherwise: the minisode is its own thing, a kind of minimal, calligraphic rendition of the original story, rather illuminating in the spareness of its strokes. Did I say strokes? An episode of Diff’rent Strokes came in at just over four minutes and still seemed purgatorially long. Most of the old-school comedy dramas, in fact, are mercilessly deconstructed by the minisode, each one boiled down to its rag of a plot and its three haggard jokes. Larry Hagman frowns and jiggles the ice in his drink in I Dream of Jeannie; Edna Garrett mugs maternally through The Facts of Life; almost nothing else seems to be happening. The form rejects filler, but what if filler is all there is?

The kind of TV that adapts itself most readily to the minisode, in fact, is resilient mutant super-trash TV — daytime talk shows, soaps. Ricki Lake was more or less made to be minisoded: from premise (“The bitch gave me chlamydia!”) to moral (“This is not an easy show to sum up, but I think we can all agree that the children are of the utmost importance. . . . ”) all in 4:57 or less. A minisode of The Young and the Restless in which Nicki and Victor exchanged vows while Ashley recorded a tearful video message for Abby seemed to me an admirable display of dramatic economy. The plot moved smartly. The characters were vivid and alive. The posters in the YouTube comments box certainly seemed to dig it: “I hate his new wh*re of a wife she a gold digger why can’t he see that?” wondered MoonGoddessFox. Equally immune to abbreviation is the obstacular ugliness and frenzy of The Three Stooges: the minisode, in fact, might be the format that finally permits me to get to grips with this very unsettling body of work.

Life of Don

JON GARELICK — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 21:01:19 GMT

Mad Men ’s dark nostalgia
Mad Men continues to take us back to a time we think we know.

THE MAN: Don Draper is his own his mise-en-scène.

Mad Men continues to take us back to a time we think we know. The AMC hit series (Sundays at 10 pm) established itself last year with its freakishly restrained portrait of Madison Avenue advertising executives. Here was the life of 1960: unchecked office racism and sexism, copious cocktails at lunch and around the conference table. A fist fight breaks out between a couple of junior executives, and their bosses blithely ignore it as they wait for the elevator. A senior executive barfs his lunch in front of a major client and is let off with a perfectly reasonable explanation: “Oysters.” Here’s over-the-top behavior presented amid the understated mise-en-scène of subdued lighting, starched Hathaway shirts, ubiquitous cigarette smoking, and brilliantined $5 haircuts.

As Season 2 dawns, it’s 1962, and Valentine’s Day — a holiday invented by advertising. JFK is president, and Jackie’s tour of the White House is on black-and-white TVs everywhere. A callow ad man brings his wife a heart-shaped box of chocolates, urging her, “Come on, open them, I want one,” before proceeding to eat them all as Jackie talks about the “architectural unity” of the Roosevelt Room.

At the offices of the Sterling Cooper agency, the minions of creative director Don Draper (Jon Hamm) sit obediently waiting for the boss in a conference room with a platter of untouched half-sandwiches. Is Don playing hooky? Having one of his afternoon extramarital trysts? No, he’s at the doctor’s office for a long-overdue physical. His blood pressure is 160/100, and the doctor prescribes what any good doctor in 1962 would prescribe: more relaxation — and Phenobarbital. Don is 36 years old. Then, a leisurely lunch of meat and whiskey at a neighborhood bar.

Don finally shows up at the meeting, aloof, unrepentant. He brushes off the first glib pitches for the new Mohawk Airlines campaign: “It has to be advertising for people without a sense of humor.” More tag lines are suggested and brushed off until Don rears back and, with only a hint of impatience, explains: “It’s not about the majestic beauty of the Mohawk nation — it’s about adventure.” Ah-ha! Don Draper is still the man.

Draper is all repression and mystery, but his big secret was exposed last season: he’s an orphan, his mother was a prostitute, and he’s living under an assumed identity. A psychological MacGuffin, perhaps, but good enough. Don may be an actual bastard, but he’s also conflicted. “What an interesting character,” my wife marveled after an early episode. “A tortured hypocrite.”

Working girl

CHARLES TAYLOR — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 17:30:37 GMT

In Plain Sight’s straight talk
On USA’s nifty summer series In Plain Sight , Mary McCormack, as federal marshal Mary Shannon, joins the select league of those who’ve made jeans, tank tops, boots, and leather jackets into an American fashion statement.

PROUD MARY: McCormack is fluent in the hard-boiled American language of smart-ass.

On USA’s nifty summer series In Plain Sight (Sundays at 10 pm), Mary McCormack, as federal marshal Mary Shannon, joins the select league of those who’ve made jeans, tank tops, boots, and leather jackets into an American fashion statement. McCormack is a tall, robust woman with long, straight dirty blond hair, and Mary Shannon’s uniform (and it is a uniform, as much as Giorgio Armani’s ever-present black T-shirt, or Batman’s cape and cowl) is an expression of both our native casualness and her utilitarian no-nonsense approach.

Mary is stationed in Albuquerque, and her assignment is to settle people into the witness-protection program. Some, like the little boy who sees his father’s dealings with drug kingpins, are innocent witnesses. Others are scumbags getting a second start by spilling what they know.

The terrific thing about Mary is that — minus a smidge of compassion for the innocent — her approach isn’t that different with either class of witness-protection entrant. Not a romantic or a dreamer or prone to sentimentality, she doesn’t expend a lot of time deceiving people about the lousy deal of life. In fact, getting a chance to start over is, she recognizes, a damn sight better deal than those of us who play by the rules get. Her empathy comes out in quirkier ways — like including a copy of Playboy in the bag of groceries she buys for a young Russian girl entering the program. The feds have promised this sad-sack Masha a boob job, and Mary proffers the magazine as if it were the Sears catalogue of mammaries.

It’s her own life that doesn’t lead her to expect happy endings. Her home is crowded by her airhead mother (Lesley Ann Warren, who isn’t getting the material she needs in order to dig into the edge of desperation in her performance) and sister (Nicole Hiltz), both of them fond of chemical substances in the liquid and powder form. And her relationship with a would-be major-league pitcher is stuck on the rocky road between sweethearts and fuck buddies.

I hope that the creator, David Maples, doesn’t make the mistake of starting up a romance between Mary and her partner, Marshall (Frederick Weller, whose offhand delivery is growing on me), as the erotic/professional tension between them is not only very pleasing but a convincing description of a coed work relationship powered by mutual respect. Maples has executed a smart reversal of the cliché of the sawed-off tyrant of a boss by making Mary’s, Stan (Paul Ben Victor), so in awe of her that he might be her subordinate.

Criminal intent

ADAM REILLY — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 22:10:29 GMT

Ed Burns on writing Iraq
Ed Burns — former Baltimore homicide detective, Vietnam vet, and long-time writing partner with David Simon, both on the The Wire and on Generation Kill , spoke with the Phoenix about the new series.

GET YOUR WAR ON: The response Dave Simon (left) and Ed Burns (right) wanted from Iraqi vets was: “They got it.”

The wages of war: The creators of The Wire take on Iraq in Generation Kill. By Adam Reilly.

Ed Burns — former Baltimore homicide detective, Vietnam vet, and long-time writing partner with David Simon, both on the The Wire and on Generation Kill, spoke with the Phoenix about the new series. Here’s some of what he had to say.

What kind of response have you gotten from the Marine Corps? Because this is definitely a warts-and-all portrayal of the Corps and its members.
First of all, we viewed for the Bravo 2 and Bravo 3 guys from First Recon [the two platoons focused on in the film]. They loved it; they thought it was their story. At Camp Pendleton [the Marine Corps base in Southern California], a lot of the enlisted officers were at first reluctant to get involved. Then, when they saw it, they gave us the thumbs-up. That was a big test. We did this with that audience in mind, just the way we did The Wire with cops and drug people in our mind as the audience.

Watching the film, I was repeatedly reminded that for a lot of people — including me — this is an utterly alien world. Is that something you were cognizant of, and if so, how did it affect the creative process?
Well, this is an opportunity to go into a world that you don’t have access to. In that sense it’s very much like The Wire. If you invest in this, you’ll see the elite of the young men who’ve been committed to war. And the opportunity to present this was a challenge that David [Simon] and I really enjoyed. We were writing to get those Marines to look at each other knowingly and say, “They got it.”

That’s all we can do. Then it’s up to the audience, as they come to it, to make their own assessments of what they’ve seen. In The Wire, you can decide these people are getting a bum rap and something should be done — or you can decide that these people are lazy and they deserve what they get. Evan Wright’s book [Generation Kill, on which the HBO series is based] can be read, I think, as a sort of anti-war book. But the Marine Corps Heritage Foundation gave it an award. It’s what you bring to it. Our job — if you’re going to invest in the series — is that we want it to be as close to reality as possible, so your investment isn’t cheated.

The wages of war

ADAM REILLY — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 22:04:39 GMT

The creators of The Wire take on Iraq in Generation Kill
The Iraq War poses a strange problem for the American public.

ON SITE: Generation Kill transforms Iraq from a theoretical problem into something you feel in your gut.

Criminal intent: Ed Burns on writing Iraq. By Adam Reilly

The Iraq War poses a strange problem for the American public. On the one hand, whether and how to exit Iraq — and what lessons to draw from the invasion and its aftermath — are crucial political, cultural, and moral questions. On the other, a broad swath of the citizenry has zero personal stake in what’s happening there. Most of us have never come close to fighting in Iraq; neither have our family members or our friends. We know that Iraq is a critical issue. But we also feel that it’s somebody else’s issue.

Generation Kill (HBO, premiering July 13 at 9 pm and running for seven consecutive Sundays) doesn’t change this reality. But the new Iraq War mini-series from writers/producers David Simon and Ed Burns, the team behind The Wire, does destabilize it, by providing a vivid, troubling portrait of what the soldiers unlucky enough to serve in Iraq experienced at the war’s beginning. If, like me, you’re fortunate enough to have been insulated from the human costs of the invasion and occupation, you’ll find that watching Generation Kill transforms Iraq from a theoretical problem to something you feel in your gut.

At the outset, the Marines of the First Reconnaissance Battalion aren’t an overly sympathetic bunch. Waiting for the invasion to start, they trade homophobic barbs, jerk off to Hustler, and rhapsodize about how awesome it would have been to drop the bomb on Hiroshima. Early in the first episode, a batch of earnest letters from American schoolkids arrives, and there’s a hopeful one that floats the possibility of peace. Corporal Ray Person (James Ransone), the mouthiest of the Marines, orates an immediate and eloquently obscene response: “Dear Frederick: Thank you for your nice letter. But I am actually a U.S. Marine who was born to kill, whereas clearly you have mistaken me for some sort of wine-sipping, commie dick-suck. . . . Peace sucks a hairy asshole, Freddy. War is the motherfucking answer.”

Tokyo roses

MIKE MILIARD — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 19:58:10 GMT

Jeopardy! Japanese style
It’s a special people indeed who can cast off the twin yokes of rigid history and a driven work ethic to spend time unwinding in Day-Glo game-show studios.

STARTO! Smack in the middle of the Tokyo megalopolis, stateside stereotypes run free.

It’s a special people indeed who can cast off the twin yokes of rigid history and a driven work ethic to spend time unwinding in Day-Glo game-show studios, tapping hand drums and howling with laughter at stunts like “Human Tetris” (players must contort their bodies to fit oddly shaped cut-outs in an advancing wall), “Human Bowling” (self-explanatory), “Do Not Laugh” (contestants who violate that rule are punched in the gonads), “Marshmallow Eating Contest” (with faces attached to a wall by rubber bands, players try, Tantalus-like, to munch the puffy confections dangling before them), and “Old Man Bites Tenderly” (don’t ask).

Heretofore, Americans who wanted to watch adults engage in such activities had to head to YouTube. But at long last, the network sages have responded. There’s the new Wipeout (ABC, Tuesdays 8 pm), a Japanese-inspired series that pits contestants against each other as they stumble and belly-flop over such obstacle-course stunts as “Big Balls” and “The Dreadmill.” There’s also Hole in the Wall, a program based on “Human Tetris” that’s set to premiere on Fox soon.

But the best of the bunch is I Survived a Japanese Game Show (ABC, Tuesdays 9 pm). Here, 10 Americans compete on a game show called Majide — which loosely translates as “you must be crazy.” What’s different from Wipeout, however, is that the contestants are battling in Japan. Moreover, the zaniness of the competition is like the gooey-chewy center inside a reality-show chocolate. Think of it as Survivor meets The Real World meets Lost in Translation.

Smack in the middle of the Tokyo megalopolis, stateside stereotypes run free. Cathy, from Staten Island, is the bitch. Justin, from Alabama, is the guileless good ol’ boy. Darcy, from Idaho, is the sweet small-town single mom. Bilenda, from North Carolina, is the sassy black chick. And Andrew, from Boston, and Olga, from Medford, do their part to up the Masshole quotient.

Nearly as entertaining as the game-show stunts is watching the Yanks grapple with Nipponese culture shock. Standing in Shibuya Square, with pedestrians swarming the streets like worker ants while towering neon signs pulsate with kana glyphs, middle-aged Ben marvels that he was “sitting on a couch in Punxsutawney” just the day before. In the house they share, things are even kookier. The beds are on the floor?! No shoes allowed!! Sake tastes like lighter fluid!! Dried squid!?! The toilet has . . . a remote control!!!