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#386 – Across the Wire to Treme

Friday, May 7th, 2010

moving on after the flood.

Wendell Pierce as Antoine Batiste on Treme.

On of the most fascinating things about David Simon’s already-fascinating new television series, Treme, is watching the actors from the widely-heralded show The Wire transition into their new roles. Or, a better way of saying this might be that I feel myself as a viewer making the transition from their old roles to their new ones.

Most directors and actors would try to make a clean break, to begin again with radically new personae. However, one brilliant decision made by Simon, along with Wendell Pierce and Clarke Peters, seems to have been to retain a number of the mannerisms of their much-beloved Wire characters, Detectives “Bunk” Moreland and Lester Freamon, at the start of the series and then slowly, almost imperceptibly, bring us into their new characters. At first, I thought I was watching “Bunk” and “Lester” in some strange spin-off. But soon, scene by scene, the old characters began to dissolve into these new, intriguing figures of the struggling trombonist and the Mardi Gras Injun chief returned to rebuild his crew.

This technique of starting where we left off and then slowly but surely making the characters new has made for an effective bridge from The Wire to Treme. For Simon and his actors had to know that their audience would be measuring the new series up against the old one. By giving us familiarity at first, the show succeeds, to my mind, in saying goodbye to The Wire and introducing a completely original set of characters, a different overarching dramatic sensibility for the series, and a new perspective that will yield insights about post-Katrina New Orleans.

Using a bit of the familiar to take us to a new place, Simon, Pierce, and Peters allow us to watch Treme on its own terms rather than as a watered-down remake of The Wire.

Final note: There’s a nice conversation about the show over at the American Prospect website.

Image: HBO.

Posted in Culture Rover, Television Culture | 1 Comment »

#377 – Newscasts from The Office

Friday, April 2nd, 2010

pseudo-reality television and the news on timescast.

The newly-launched TimesCast daily web video by the New York Times takes us into the newsroom to get a quick, digitized sense of what stories the crack staff of the Old Gray Lady are following and writing. Watching the webcast, a strange new kind of pseudo-reality itself becomes newsworthy.

The webcast wants to bring the viewer into the Times as if we were watching a really good PBS documentary—”The Making of The Day’s News” or some such show. Or perhaps a great documentary film, such as War Room. Or maybe we are watching a reinterpretation of the final season of The Wire if David Simon had actually thought modern journalism was a success and not a total failure.

But that’s not the real story. I’ve buried the lead. What is most peculiar about the webcast is that it comes to feel like episodes of a reality series, or better said a pseudo-reality series, such as The Office. On TimesCast, the newsroom drama starts to overshadow the drama of the news.

We see recurring characters who seem like they are “acting” at being journalists. They are “making a newspaper” even as they are, in reality, making a newspaper. We start to follow them as recurring character-types even though we are supposed to imagine them as mere vessels for the stories they are following, investigating, and writing (oh, there’s the well-chiseled but pompous senior editor; there’s the aspiring reporter; hey, what is he wearing today? WHAT is he wearing today? And so on).

We not only become voyeurs for the famous Page One meeting, but are taken into conversations between editors and writers that come across as mock-spontaneous dialogues—conversations about real issues that start to feel staged by the presence of the camera. One is left thinking: do these conversations actually occur in the newsroom, or are they entirely fabricated for the cameras, or some in-between combination of the two?

I think what’s most fascinating about TimesCast is precisely this in-between quality. The show wants to rewrite The Wire, but in the ambiguous space between cinéma vérité and staged performance, TimesCast more weirdly starts to seem like a sequel to The Office than a rebuke to David Simon.

For here is the presentation of “reality” (real people making the news) done in a way that keeps shading into the feel of a pseudo-reality show (inevitably calling to mind the camera work and acting styles of The Office). And the pseudo-reality show mode of The Office, we should recall, was brilliant exactly because it imitated the reality show style that first gained popularity in the 1990s. Which, we should recall, itself was a fictionalized version of “reality.” Big Brother is watching, but it is we, the viewers, who are watching Big Brother. Real World is realer than real precisely because it is hyper-mediated, dramatized, and, ultimately, unreal.

The Office is a show about many things, but it is primarily about the effort to find something real when you have the nagging feeling that, in the modern work wasteland of postindustrial corporate capitalism, nothing is. The show’s creators make a new and painful type of comedy out of the absurd pointlessness of clerical and managerial labor. After all, does anyone really care, either on the show or in the viewing audience, that The Office sells paper?

And will anyone care anymore, watching Timescast, that the Times sells newspapers? What is on sale here, exactly, as we gaze at this strange new genre of reality television as it uneasily dances between the real and the staged?

Those questions remain to be answered, but what better mode to think about how the news gets made (or should that be how “the news” gets made?) than through this unstable and uncertain movement between the actual and the constructed, the fictionalized and the truthful, the mock-up and the paper of record.

Between just the facts, ma’am and all that’s fit to print is where TimesCast seems to cast its spell—and break its story.

Posted in Culture Rover, Digital Culture, Journalism Culture, Television Culture | 1 Comment »

#375 – Novel Television

Saturday, March 13th, 2010

david thomson on the age of “home theater.”

Andrew Garfield and Sean Bean in Red Riding: 1974.

In “Murder in the North,” David Thomson not only reviews the captivating new television trilogy, Red Riding, but also analyzes the current state of television watching.

He emphasizes not only the content of recent shows we watch on the tube, from The Sopranos to re-released films on DVD, but also the experience of watching television in the age of what Thomson calls “home theater” (think 500 channels on, satellite networks, Tivo, DVR, and “the new screens that we are buying, as big as CinemaScope windows”).

…a change is in the making—call it home theater, if you like, if you still feel confident about that word ‘home.’ It’s the grim huddle of people who’ve given up going to the movies for their fancy new screens—plasma, digital, or HD, but the feeling is that at last television looks like something. It’s not exactly photographic; rather, it involves a digital or electronic sheen that seems to thrill young people.

The essay is a kind of meditation on the phenomenology of television viewing. We watch the shows, but in the age of the digital, the shows are also watching us, which is a way of saying that the intriguing new forms of shows such as Red Riding are, for Thomson, linked to the lives we are leading as we watch them.

…there are series that are works of visual conjuring just as some old movies now enter a Borgesian library of variants. Their pursuit tends to be meditative, solitary, and unnerving. It resembles reading.

We burrow into our dens, domesticated, feeding on addictive flashes of possible insight. But, as with the characters on Red Riding, we are also terrified. We can’t make sense of the whole. We are lost—or is it Lost?

Whatever it is, it’s captivating—and it illuminates the ways in which television is returning to older modes of artistic captivity.

So Red Riding is a secretive modern novel meant to be exhumed on your own; when you go to let the dog out afterward you hear the wind moaning and you feel nervous of the dark in your own yard. You don’t follow or master this film, yet it’s alluring enough to keep you at attention.

With shows such as Red Riding, Thomson claims, each of us navigates “a culture of TV series and elaborate DVDs.” New details and clues get “unpeeled before our eyes.” Events such as the final scene of The Sopranos need to “be seen over and over again.” But nothing quite adds up.

This is the new world, segmented into chapters, streamed to bits, parceled out into niche experiences in darkened corners. It’s not a comforting space, but it is one that opens up new avenues to collective revelation through, paradoxically, grave isolation. Watching in our own homes, we glimpse the channels that keep us connected, unable to break free. We are alone here, caught in the blue ray beams.

You can’t like it, because the life it shows is forsaken and mean-spirited. But the looking is overwhelming. The abiding feeling as it unwinds, as you strain forward to discern details, is ‘I have to see this.’ …In its edgy beauty and grisly hesitation, Red Riding is a new kind of television—it is like somber music played at home and alone.

Though we are confused here, home alone, we are also fused, linked into the fiber optics and the optic fibers that increasingly define our togetherness. The new “home theater” is a space up for grabs, a compacted zone of private and public, a consciousness-making chamber, a mood machine, a stage set that might, via remote control, actually dramatize our very enchanted difficulties and our very difficult enchantments.

Posted in Culture Rover, Digital Culture, Media Culture, Television Culture | No Comments »

#373 – Indebted to the Federal Government

Monday, March 1st, 2010

when it comes to debt, the federal government remains a valued brand.

You wouldn’t think companies would want to be associated with the federal government in any way these days. But when it comes to debt, the state remains viable as a commodified brand.

Images of the White House and Capitol predominate in advertisements for private, for-profit debt settlement companies. These ads are presented in mock newscast style, as if they were public service announcements.

It’s as if the state, declared dead, cursed for its tax collecting and other infringements, now returns, like a zombie. Only now it’s a puppet government. Corporate CEOs pull the strings. Dollar signs appear in the eye holes of the masks. Interest accumulates on stage.

This phantasmagorical entity dances across the proscenium, casting a mere shadow of actual state power on the backdrop. Nonetheless, the lingering power of even the commodified image of the federal government reminds us that we may yet have witnessed the final curtain for state power.

The debt settlement companies in these advertisements imitate New Deal alphabet soup federal programs in their names. And they echo the Obamanian call for the continued role of government in their slogans. The NMHC—the National Mortgage Help Center—declares, “Let’s get through this together!” after showing an image of President Obama himself and mentioning the federal stimulus act of 2009.

Notice, though, if you log on to the group’s website, an important disclaimer: “The ‘National Mortgage Help Center’ is not affiliated in any way with any government program. The National Mortgage Help Center is a for profit business that educates the general public and works with attorneys and brokers to reduce monthly mortgage payments through loan modifications.”

How American it is, then, to see the federal government at once so trivialized and yet so crucial. The public interest, corporate interests, and plain old interest collide in debt collection.

But there remain bills to be settled yet.

Posted in Advertising Culture, Culture Rover, Economic Culture, Television Culture | No Comments »

#359 – The Presidency: Late Night Edition

Tuesday, January 26th, 2010

first time as comedy, second time as farce.

We thought we elected Conan O’Brien to the presidency—here would be a breath of fresh air: smart, sharp, competent, analytic, funny, truthful, even radical—only to find Jay Leno reinstalled.

Posted in Comedy Culture, Culture Rover, Political Culture, Television Culture | No Comments »

#336 – And Now For Something Completely Different

Sunday, October 4th, 2009

michael palin stresses comedy’s changing role.

A lot of contemporary comedy seems self-conscious. It’s almost documentary, like ‘The Office.’ That’s a very funny show, but you’re looking at the human condition under stress. The Pythons made the human condition seem like fun.

- Michael Palin, quoted in “On Comedy’s Flying Trapeze,” by Charles McGrath, New York Times

One can surely find exceptions, but Palin’s comments seem spot on. Comedy was about breaking free ecstatically in the 60s and 70s, whereas contemporary comedy has oddly become the opposite. On “The Office,” “The Daily Show,” and, in deeply ironic mode, “The Colbert Report,” among other programs, comedy has become a call for restraint and common sense.

This isn’t a bad thing. It just is. And it is still funny. But it also has a larger significance.

In the 1960s, laughter marked what John Cleese called, in the New York Times article, “screams of liberation” against the limitations of society. But in a contemporary public culture that sometimes feels as if it has no more limits, less and less structure, and fewer boundaries of civility or standards of decency, comedy is no longer the clarion call for freedom. Goofy satire worthy of Aristophanes no longer does the trick.

In the 60s, the goal was to show that the emperor had no clothes. In the 2000s, when the clothes off various emperors were finally torn off, what we then saw were obscene and indecent abuses of power. And in the last year’s health care debates, we learned that efforts to engage in civic dialogue only resulted in screams of a different sort — not cries of liberation but coordinated efforts at distortion and obstruction.

Comedy becomes a barometer for this situation, but this barometer is a strange one, for it can make the weather as well as measure it. What role comedy will play beyond the Bush years of undisclosed locations, bungled wars, inept governance, and economic meltdown and subterfuge remains to be seen. But it’s not liberation we need anymore. We need something completely different.

So maybe it is good that contemporary comedy seems almost moral, with fish slapping replaced by ironic modes of fingerwagging. The “screams of liberation” have become dire sighs of exasperation. And once those sighs are exhaled at “the human condition under stress,” perhaps we will be able to breathe again with a bit more ease.

Posted in Civic Culture, Comedy Culture, Culture Rover, Public Culture, Sixties Culture, Television Culture | 3 Comments »

#331 – The Public Health

Wednesday, August 19th, 2009

struggles over the care of bodies private and public.

What has been most fascinating about the otherwise utterly scary town hall protests by radical right wingers around the U.S. (guns and swastikas anyone?) is that these protests point to a larger struggle going on currently in Obama’s America: the struggle over who will control representations of the American public.

It is odd, but somehow fitting, that this larger contest over representing the public is taking place through an issue that is most of all about the intimate and private dimensions of our lives: the health care of our bodies.

Central to the right wing’s goals when disrupting town hall meetings was not only to shift public debate itself, but also to recast perceptions of who the public was. Whether coordinated or spontaneous or both, these protests rippled through the mass media with a new representation of public opinion: of what “the people” of the republic, the citizens, us in the U.S., were thinking.

Being noisy, putting private bodies and voices into public forums (or what passes for them), was an effective way to re-represent whose political opinions were legitimate and worthy of explicit political representation, in other words of who the public was and what they desired. Right-wing protesters transformed what seems to be, demographically-speaking, a small fringe population into the population writ large: the people were speaking, their protests suggested as they circulated through the media, and this public was saying that they might have to water the tree of liberty with their “natural manure.”

The struggle over the representation of the public is largely a matter of scale and mode of expression: in a mass society, an effective roar by a few citizens can overwhelm quieter but more widely-held opinions. And, if you think about it, what do we think and want, anyway? Privately, I would wager, many Americans have quite complex and intricate attitudes, particularly when it comes to the issue of health care. So the individuals in the American public, and the concept of the public itself, are both very amorphous.

And yet, in a democracy, the public is an essential — perhaps even required — concept. Whether one argues that consent gets manufactured in this public, or that opinions can arise authentically from debate and discussion, in order for democracy to be democratic, it requires a public. This social body has to arise out of private citizens whose opinions, whether freely-formed or manipulatively forged, define what seems normal and right. More importantly, this public’s opinion, its perceived beliefs and values, give ballast to the actions of the state. Without the public, in a sense, there is no democracy — even a questionably democratic one.

So the public and how it gets represented is very important. Maybe this is why the left as well as the right has been spending so much time exploring how it might function now in the age of the blogosphere. Could a new kind of public emerge from online interactions of opinion and information? What sort of public?

The health care debate is becoming a test, in a sense, of the left’s ability to represent the public that supported and elected Obama. The idea (always a distortion) that the left was a small group of “latte-drinking” liberals controlling the larger American public no longer holds in post-Obama America. But then, what sort of public replaces this representation by the right of the left over the last ten or twenty years?

Yesterday, we began to see that new, amorphous public coming into view. Progressives were able to pressure their representatives in the House into making the “public option” (interesting appearance of that word, in this case as a representation of the state) a non-negotiable item for the health care bill that might emerge in Congress. And Internet-savvy activists flooded television and other forms of media to represent the constituents of those House reps — which we might call “the public,” of course, that is demanding the “public option.”

It helps, too, that the mass media itself has had to respond to these changes in the public by representing progressive voices and bodies. A station such as MSNBC is doing this for commercial gain, but commerce, like politics, is rooted in perceptions of who the public is and what they want.

Was it any accident, then, that this dramatic change in perceptions of the public debating — and the public debate over —health care occurred the same week as Netroots Nation? Probably just a coincidence, but a telling one. “Changing the face of progressive politics,” which Netroots Nation declares as its slogan, has everything to do with putting a new face on the public: who is in it and what it desires.

It turns out the health care of individual bodies has everything to do with the care paid to the social body. We live and die by what we think the public is and want it wants.

Posted in Civic Culture, Culture Rover, Mass Culture, Media Culture, Private Culture, Public Culture, Television Culture | 1 Comment »

#325 – Drama Therapy

Wednesday, July 29th, 2009

on the couch, in treatment turns therapeutic culture inside out.

in_treatment_211

Gabriel Byrne as Paul Weston in In Treatment.

Behind the gentle guise of the therapeutic culture of self-help in America often lurks the harsher ethos of up-by-the-bootstraps self-reliance. In either case, a nasty form of the ideology of liberal individualism dominates. It’s all about the self-involved “I,” not the collectively-conscious “we.”

Though imported from Israel, the HBO drama In Treatment succeeds in turning this therapeutic culture of self-help on its head. It does this by using, of all things, therapy.

Stripped down, for the most part, to two actors engaged in extended stage-drama dialogue, with only the occasional intrusion of non-diegetic music (one of a number of the show’s occasional lapses into what New York Times critic Alessandra Stanley called “Lifetime movie territory”), the show insists that the self is deeply social and that only by coming to terms with this inextricable socialness can the self be set free.

When the show is at its best, the language — both spoken and gestural — thickens. Words and glances resonate with therapist Paul Weston’s own predicaments or with the stories of other patients.

Themes emerge in the merest reference, the quietest comment: one week everyone is leaving things behind at Weston’s office; the next week, all are caught along the ethical boundaries of the professional and the personal; and even as large questions about life and death, love and loss, threaten to become banal, or at least mundane, small tragedies and shards of memory suddenly become deeply significant. Nothing seems to make sense, and yet everything feels like it is connected; or, as often happens in therapy, everything suddenly makes sense, it falls into place, but the mystery of the deepest linkages moves elsewhere.

As the shows two seasons unfold, the distinctive details that emerge with each patient start to reveal common narratives: shared stories of personal formation. But the narratives never become one and the same. These characters remain individuals. Indeed, their respective stories are enriched by their shared traits.

Enlivened by excellent acting all around, the stories of In Treatment pivot on Gabriel Byrne’s ability to signal ambivalent emotions with the smallest gulp in the throat, the slightest turning-up of his lip, the rise of a brow, the hunch of a shoulder, and the ability to keep his eyes focused and narrow. Only a great actor could hold the show in place, and could, as an individual, give the story over to collective interaction.

Byrne and In Treatment put therapeutic culture on the couch. When the show is at its best, it gives the lie to self-help. Without ever saying it out loud, In Treatment applies the talking cure to the myths of liberal individualism. In the process, it lets slip (in a political as well as a Freudian way) that the self can only be made whole in the social web of its incompleteness.

Image: HBO

Posted in Culture Rover, Television Culture | No Comments »

#301 – Buying Into It By Buying Out of It

Saturday, April 4th, 2009

advertising the recession.

Remarkable to see how quickly the current recession is surfacing in television advertising.

Perhaps it marks how much of a challenge the economic crisis is to the existing order of things. Where once advertisers urged us to spend conspicuously, since happiness was “priceless,” now ads caution us against profligacy. Turns out there is a price tag. The debt is coming due.

But, these ads insist, just because we misled you before does not mean that you should question the larger logic and system of consumerism. Instead, these ads seek to contain the new mood of thrift and anxiety within the old consumer order.

Various fast food commercials, car rebate ads, and other ephemera from the consumer spectacle interpellate us: “Quick! You, Consumer, you can buy your way out of this mess by buying into it even more!”

At this juncture, there is no space within the ads to address the deeper problems and issues we now confront. All they do is associate (brilliantly) their products with the new desires, regrets, and urges of our times. The affective economy of consumerism remains intact even as the affect changes.

Yet, it remains to be seen where these new emotions, desires, angers, loathings, and worries will carry us. Can we see glimpses of alternative worldviews and ideologies through the cracks of the consumer dream machine? Or just new ways of authorizing the same old orders and charges?

Most stunning of these ads is Fidelity’s “Turn Here” campaign, which urges us — against all other evidence — to trust our money to the very financial system that screwed things up so badly in the first place.

Addendum: “The Hard Sell: How Mad Men Spin the Recession,” Mother Jones

Posted in Advertising Culture, American Culture, Consumer Culture, Culture Rover, Economic Culture, Political Culture, Popular Culture, Television Culture | No Comments »

#296 – Deep in the Heart of Texas

Friday, March 27th, 2009

mingling sentiment and sophistication on friday night lights.

Principal Tami Taylor (Connie Britton) and Coach Eric Taylor (Kyle Chandler) on Friday Night Lights.

In Slate’s TV Club, Hanna Rosin made the off-hand comment that the television show Friday Night Lights is “a strange hybrid of sentimental and sophisticated.” This stuck me as one of the best explanations of the show’s ability to find new emotional authenticity among melodramatic plot lines.

The sentimentality comes in the stories, but the sophistication comes almost entirely in the modes of presentation. As Rosin notes:

The themes are not so different from middlebrow dreck like, say, Touched by an Angel — honor, heart, the power of inspiration, staying optimistic in the face of bad odds. The show is hardly ever knowing. Hannah Montana is also a TV teenager, but she would be an alien dropped into this version of America. And when the show goes dark, it’s on Oprah’s themes — missing fathers, serious illness, divorce. Yet, there is something about the show that transmits “art” and makes it inaccessible. It’s not tidy, for example, either in its camerawork or the way it closes its themes. It insists on complicating its heroes and villains, as we’ve discussed, which is why we like it.

As Rosin begins to explain, FNL explores melodramatic content without offering the standard cues of melodramatic form. This is how it breaks new ground as a television show. The approach dignifies the characters, even when they are at their worst. It honors their struggles, even when we are witnessing are the same, sad, old stories of the heartland.

Image: Courtesy NBC.