Frescorts

BBC reports about rentafriend.com and discusses whether it's a good idea or ruining humanity. Clearly this has already been covered by Bryan Fuller.

Now all we need is a hug machine:

Dexter: Just Blood

Showtime’s dark drama Dexter (don’t blame me for the alliteration – after all, the show is based on a book called “Darkly Dreaming Dexter”) is about a forensics expert who’s also a serial killer. But wait! He’s a moral serial killer who only kills bad guys, so he still qualifies to be the center of a whole television show.

I had heard this line explaining Dexter so many times from people saying the show was excellent over the last couple years, and frankly I was a bit turned off by this summary of the premise. A serial killer anti-hero seems like such a gimmick: we’ve seen anti-heroes abound in critically acclaimed television recently – think Dr. House, Tony Soprano, Malcolm Reynolds (from Firefly), and even Jack Bauer breaking all those laws. A gimmicky serial killer show doesn’t interest me much as a concept. Who needs another crime drama? And serial killers are so Other that they’re not that psychologically interesting to me, unlike those other anti-heroes.

But I finally caved – partly because Dexter is on Instant Watch on Netflix and mostly because my sister started watching it. My sister being intrigued by a show is a good indicator that I will be, too, whether I initially like to admit it or not (see, e.g., Firefly & Doctor Who). So I watched the first episode, and then the whole first season.

Dexter, as both a show and a character, troubles me. They trouble me so much that this is a snapshot from my computer camera as I watched the second episode:


This show certainly trades in its share of blood and gore, and those who like that part of crime shows (or, say, liked the Angel of Death scene in Silence of the Lambs) will be satiated. I, on the other hand, don’t particularly like it. I’m either creeped out, or – more likely – disappointingly unmoved by fake gore because I keep thinking, “Hmm, I wonder what the techs used to mix that blood.” The sneer of disgust in the above snapshot isn’t me being grossed out by a murder scene, actually. It’s me watching the credits and thinking about the show in general. And yet I watched it, because I kept clinging to the theory that this show is more than it seems. I still think so, even though I’m not totally convinced.

(By the way, I also don’t find the show that funny, as many people on Netflix say. Yes, the sister has her moments and Dexter has some pretty dry jokes, but this isn’t a dramedy or a macabre black comedy about a serial killer (which has been done to perfection in Keeping Mum, a delightful movie I highly recommend). It’s a cruel little show that keeps your attention with a weird twist on the anti-hero trope and a bunch of blood.)

On the one hand, Dexter as a main character seems like a clever ruse by an inept writer who was tired of hearing that his characters weren’t lifelike or human enough. Creating a “loveable monster,” which is how Dexter is billed on the books and the DVD blurb, seems an easy out. A guy who has no human emotion is supposed to be an unconvincing character, right? This is no offense to the author Jeff Linsday. I haven’t actually read the books so I don’t know if they’re any good. But it certainly seems like a cop out.

The show also seems to cop out with respect to the larger themes it engages. Other shows about unlikable characters grapple with mortality, morality, and religion by creating equally articulate but oppositely opinioned supporting characters (one of the reasons I like House so much). Dexter, on the other hand, just starts from the premise that some people deserve to die; the only grappling comes with the question, “Yeah, but does that mean it’s OK for a serial killer to kill them?”

By creating a non-human main character – less human even than anthropomorphized animals and aliens in other shows – Dexter is no longer a human we have to condone or condemn. Instead he becomes a symbol of rightful anger and bloody justice. He is an outlet for viewers, who believe in the death penalty in overwhelming numbers, who hear about killers going free on legal technicalities (and who may remember O.J. Simpson), who live vicariously through the righteous vengeance of television characters. But vengeance isn’t ours, even in made-up books and television, and I find myself extremely reluctant to relate to Dexter or “root” for him as so many fans claim to do. The show ultimately rests the likeability of its main characters in an assumption about the inner cruelty of the viewers, and this conceit is what disturbs me the most about the series. That the show is popular seems to indicate that many people agree with this conceit, which is what disturbs me the most about the viewers of this show.

On the other hand, maybe the show and its viewers are more nuanced than that. The plots and overall arc of the first season are compelling and downright good storytelling. The multi-episode arc involving another mysterious serial killer is good (and I don't want to spoil it), even if parts of it are pretty predictable (as in, I figured out who it was the first scene he/she was in, even though there was no positive identification for several more episodes.) The actors are good, too, and some of the side stories of intra-office politics are delightfully raw and nuanced. Many of the side characters inspire empathy as well, such as a painfully honest cop who is separated from his wife because he told her about the one time he cheated on her.

Better still, even though the show revolves around a character who describes himself as neither human nor monster, Dexter does become slightly more human throughout the first series, once the premise is firmly established that he’s not. This might be because it’s impossible to create an interesting character with no emotions, but I like to think that the show is trying to break down what we think it means to be human.

If you look at it this way, the show raises questions it never discusses. In a way, this is more skillful than the shows I love (like House) that hit you with a Big Issue 2x4 whenever an interesting ethical or philosophical tension arises. And the questions raised by Dexter are both important and complex: If we fake intimacy, is it still intimate? What are the limits of anti-Kantian ethics in terms of preventing harm to others? Do we feel more compassion for Dexter because he’s a foster child with hints at a horrible past, and if we do, why? Can we really mitigate the evil of serial killing by saying, “Oh, but you had a bad childhood”? And that raises the question of the whole premise: can we really mitigate the evil of serial killing by saying, “Oh, but you killed the bad guys, at least”? Why is Dexter the serial killer our hero, but Ice Truck Killer the serial killer our villain, when they are so clearly linked? Ultimately, how can we say someone is irreversibly good or bad? And what do we do about it if we can make such a determination?

That a television show can raise so many questions, especially about what it reveals about the people who watch and like the show and the main character, reveals some hidden mastery. I’d like to think so, at least. And so who am I to judge my fellow viewers who may be thinking on this level, too, rather than simply using Dexter as an outlet for bloody justice or merely blood?

So, even though I started with that grimace, I did end up entertained by some good storytelling and intrigued by some interesting questions. All in all, 3 stars.

Pushing Daisies (as promised)

OK, I promised an explanation of why I love Pushing Daisies. Now that the series is cancelled (only three more episodes to go!), it seems sad to write about it, but since I've been spending the last few days trying to convince my sister how amazing the show is, here I go:

The main premise of Pushing Daisies is a bit confusing, and I'm sure it was its demise. Ned is a pie maker who can raise the dead with his touch -- this includes people, animals, and plants. If he touches it again, though, it dies. Plus, if he raises something from the dead for more than one minute, something else of equal "value" dies (e.g., a person for a person, or a plant for a plant). The words make it sound hokey and stupid, but the result is much more magical.

The first magical thing is that Ned's girlfriend is someone he raised from the dead. This means he can never touch her. My sister hates this, but I think it's amazing. First of all, it's very old fashioned. I'm reminded of the censorship days of movies and television, when love stories had to be chaste even if sexually charged -- Ned and Charlotte (aka Chuck) even sleep in separate twin beds with a nightstand in between like all the sitcom couples of old.

Also, I'm pretty sure all romance is about not getting what you want. If you never get it, it's a tragedy. If you get delayed gratification, it's a comedy. Pushing Daisies pushes this definition and creates a tragicomedic relationship. Boy gets girl in once sense, but in another he doesn't (and never will).

The second magical thing is that death becomes malleable. One of my main gripes with modernity is we care so much about death -- we're so afraid of it. Maybe this is just my youth talking, but I'm not sure why we are so scared. Shows with death tend to try to drive this home, making death as sad and overwhelming and ugly as our society perceives it to be (see, e.g., House, every cop show ever, every mob show, even Six Feet Under). Pushing Daisies doesn't make light of death, but it isn't afraid of it, either. People die horrible deaths, but it's never gruesome. And since people can come back to life, but the story doesn't have time for them to go into shock or horror about being dead, it's nice to see characters who don't have a problem with being dead, either. (This reminds me of other Bryan Fuller shows, such as Dead Like Me, which was also brilliant).

The third magical thing is Kristin Chenoweth. She's just amazing -- a funny little spitfire who would be the grounding normal character of the series, if she weren't so quirky herself. In fact, all of the characters are quirky. It's a bit forced at times, but it's nice to know that people don't fit into neat categories -- the hardboiled detective also knits and makes pop-up books, and the shut-in aunts are former synchronized swimmers.

Finally, I love the production design of the show -- I absolutely love the costumes, which tend to be all over the place from 40s to 70s, but always are amazing. I love the visual jokes (Chenoweth's character is named Olive, and she recently got a rain slicker with olives on it, and Emerson Cod the detective's slicker had fish on it). And I love the myriad movie visual references, especially since they are so Hitchcock-heavy (The Birds, Vertigo, Psycho and Suspicion have all been copied. I'm really hoping for the key scene from Notorious before the end of the series, but that may be asking for too much).

Sure, there are faults with the show. The strange premise is often bent or broken -- some things come alive and others don't, but there's no real rhyme or reason to it (dead leaves but not wood? dead fruit but not other baking supplies?). There are a couple of camera and editing problems -- a visual joke involving a one-eyed aunt in the pilot episode was done backwards, and it drives me nuts every time I see it.

But its faults are easily forgotten when weighed against the fact that there's really nothing else like it. For people who like movies and old-fashioned TV more than reality TV or procedural dramas, this is a wonderful show. Plus, Lee Pace is hot.

My new obsession

Pushing Daisies is my new obsession. I found it last week and immediately fell in love. I've ordered Season 1 on DVD and watched all of this season so far at least 3 times each.



More about why I love the show to follow.

Doctor Who & Science Fiction

Recently I read a blog post about science fiction and how it's not very popular among women. one of Professor Somin's assertions caught my eye:

Casual empiricism suggests that most people with a strong interest in science fiction or fantasy literature developed that interest very as children or teenagers. I think it's very difficult to persuade an adult to take an interest in these genres if they never had previously.

Empirics aside, it must be noted that adults are not immutable in their interests. I have always avoided science fiction by and large. What little science fiction and fantasy I read comes dangerously close to being what I will call "literary fiction" -- fiction about books, history, etc. (but not historical fiction). Jasper Fforde novels are the prime example here. A couple Terry Pratchett novels are as deep I wade into science fiction. I've also always disdained of science fiction television. I pretty much can't stand any of the Star Treks, although I do like the original in small doses for its kitsch value.
So it surprises me greatly to tell you that my new TV obsession is the revived series of Doctor Who. I've thought about it quite a bit in the past couple weeks, as I've been devouring the first three seasons and part of the fourth, and I think I know why:

In the end, science fiction isn't really a description of the type of storytelling you're going to get. It's like "westerns" -- all you know is the location of the plot, not anything about it. The problem in the genre occurs when an author thinks that said location matters more than the rest of the story. When westerns are just cowboy and Indian shoot-em-ups, when science fiction devolves into monotone repetition of fanciful pseudo-science, then the genre is in real trouble. But if you dig beneath the surface, the new Doctor Who is really just an action comedy that happens to have made-up places and people. Star Trek is just a soap opera with the same (I know I'm going to get killed for saying that, but there it is -- all the episodes I've seen are so *serious*!). I like Doctor Who because though it caters to the obsessive sci-fi geeks who live for finding patterns hidden in the episodes, many of the story lines are basically just ghost stories littered with strange jokes. The quirky humor is everywhere: take even the fact that the doctor's space ship isn't some cool, sleek, "boys' toy" but rather a blue police box because the spaceship's cloaking device got stuck. There's plenty of sci-fi standbys like teleporting, but in the end the science doesn't matter as much as the plots and stories: the only two repeating "gadgets" are a blank piece of "psychic" paper and a "sonic" screwdriver.
And the use of historical plots as well as outer space plots makes the thing more like that "literary" fiction I like -- I geeked out a little bit when they visited Shakespeare and the Doctor quoted Dylan Thomas to the Bard but then told him he couldn't use it because it was "someone else's." My other favorite episode from that season (3) takes place in 1913.

So, maybe if we're all concerned about making science fiction attractive to girls as well as boys, maybe writers should take a hint from Doctor Who, which reaches about a broad an audience of British children as it can possible get. Or maybe that's just a commentary about British television and the forced ubiquity of the BBC.

Intellectual Property Update

Last week, a great website finally went out of beta testing: hulu.com. There, in a completely legal medium, I can watch tv shows and movies for free. I can even post them on websites, email them to people, or share them in other sites (like myspace or facebook) with customized start and end times. They have limited commercials through them, but so far seem less annoying that the studios' own websites for tv shows (although it still annoys me that it doesn't archive all the episodes for some shows, like Psych). And yes, the movie selection is pretty crappy so far. But let's give some props to network executives who do something other than whine about piracy, and instead work to serve consumers in a way that the extreme lack of quality control in the world of piracy is worth it.

And, besides, some of the movies and TV shows are good. Take, for example, Sideways or The Usual Suspects or Alfred Hitchcock Presents. Or, for less high class fare (but more likely something you decide to watch on a whim, which is what streaming access is for, right?) you can try out some guilty pleasure-type movies, like The Skulls. Yes, I'm embedding it. Because I can.

ANTM

Sometimes TV creates the best parody of TV. See now a pretty close representation of the essence of America's Next Top Model, from the brilliance of Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders:

3 lbs

3lbs, the television show named after the three-pound organ that is the human brain, aspired to be complex, intriguing, and provoking. Achieving such a goal should have come naturally; the show revolves around two world-class brain surgeons and one neurologist and the cases they encounter. Instead, it got cancelled in the US after 3 weeks, leaving five more episodes unaired. But, being in Bangladesh, I get to see all of them on the Hallmark channel, and I've seen four so far.

In a House-like format, each episode involves a case or two that include bizarre, medical-mystery-meets-medical-journalism symptoms and results. Of the episodes I've seen, each case highlights the enigma of the brain -- is it "wires in a box," as one character claims, or is the human brain (or the human pysche) more elusive than that?

The most natural tension of neuroscience is, of course, what makes us human, which is mirrored nicely in the science/religion dichotomy that crops up quite frequently in the first few episodes of the first season. This could make for a fascinating, unspoken dialogue in the series, a tension that keeps the subject of the show relevant and thought-provoking, rather than simply the fodder to give the characters something to do in addition to their more trite interpersonal interactions.

Instead, 3 lbs makes that dialogue spoken between the characters, which is somewhat necessary to explain the science and philosophy, but makes every character a little too much like "Exposition Boy!". The show tries too hard to be both scientific and poetic, and ends up failing at both. The science goes by fast, but not fast enough to think that these people know what they're talking about, and also not fast enough for me miss the fact that some of the science sounds surprisingly suspect. And in an attempt to be mystical and poetic about the brain, the show's creators establish bizarre visual tropes in each episode to represent the mental effects of the brain damage at issue in the show. The special effects are generally surreal or dada-ist (my favorite so far has been the hanging lights in the hospital corridors acutally being upside-down dandelions that have gone to seed), but they disappear too quickly for the audience to be able to process them or figure out how they fit into the reality of the show. Most annoyingly, it's often unclear who "sees" these visual effects -- sometimes they are clearly the experience of the patient, but often they seem to be created by the mind's eye of the cynical doctor (played by Stanley Tucci).

With these problem, 3lbs fails to be a stellar show. However, the three main actors prop up the show enough to keep it decent. Stanley Tucci plays the star surgeon, a brilliant but cynical, Dr. House-like character who doesn't like people that much except as brains to tinker with. Indira Varma plays the neurologist, who's much more new age-y and loves patients and people (think Dr. Cameron in House), and Mark Feuerstein plays the new guy who is Tucci's sidekick and is supposed to represent the wise and happy medium. All three actors are likeable, and try their best to overcome the cheesy, formulaic plots and interactions with "unsolved scientific questions." I for one am certainly willing to put up with a certain amount of plot stupidity for Stanley Tucci and Mark Feuerstein, though for completely different reasons. One's an amazing actor, and the other, well, is just fun to watch, if you know what I mean.... In the end, though, with better medical dramas on television (especially House, M.D., which has practically the same formula and characters) it's not surprising this show got cancelled so fast.

1.5 stars

Studio 60

When I was in elementary school, my dad told me that the most important day of my academic life was the first day of kindergarten. It's their first impression of you, he said. If you have a good first day, anything worse will just be a bad day. If you have a bad first day, good behavior will just be a pleasant surprise. While his summary of the past 17 years of my life might have been an overstatement, certainly it is true that you should always try to start off with a bang. You've got to have a great hook to keep people interested.

How disappointing, then, that Aaron Sorkin's new series, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, started off ...well, I'm not sure how they did it, but it started both slow and confusingly fast. We're introduced to characters, and then they're fired, seemingly to never come again (at least not in this episode or in anything I could find online). Some characters are fictional, but Felicity Huffman pops in briefly to play Felicity Huffman. The camera moves around a lot, but not in that smooth, hand-holding technique of the West Wing. Instead, we're given a lot of cuts and spinning around characters before we really get a chance to look at them. At the same time, it's almost boring because the plot line is directly taken from the 1976 movie "Network". The similarities are recognized by the script, but that doesn't forgive a pilot episode for having a lengthy, preachy monologue before we're ten minutes into the series.

But, mercifully, after the first segment, the show hits its stride. Little wonder that the actors who finally carry the script off are West Wing veterans Bradley Whitford and Matthew Perry. They understand that, for better of worse, Aaron Sorkin's dialogue requires a certain level of musicality -- Sorkin is a writer who loves writing, and his characters have to love language, too. Whitford and Perry's introduction into the episode also signal a shift from the Network-based plot, and the last third of the show felt eerily similar to certain episodes in West Wing or Sports Night ("What if she's for real?" is actually a line of Whitford's). From the introduction of those two characters, the rest of the episode seemed to fly by. The jokes got better, the dialogue got smarter, and I no longer felt like I was watching a cheap TV rip-off of a 70s movie that I didn't really like anyway.

It'll be intriguing to see where the show goes from here. I love Sorkin's writing, and once Schlamme calmed down from some impressive camera gymanstics in the first segment, the show found a great pace. And there's a lot of material that the Studio 60 team obviously is going to cover. The pilot introduced religious bigotry, cocaine addiction, and media self-censorship, and Sorkin is probably one of the few television writers who can address those issues without being too patronizing or didactic. I just hope he doesn't get carried away with his issues (as some of the weaker episodes of Sports Night did), and that he keeps the characters smart, inspired, and inspiring. That hope for intelligent television is, after all, what we like about Sorkin and why we tuned in tonight at all.

Best Commerical Ever

And by best, I mean weirdest.