EPISODE 310: LOOK HOMEWARD, NINJA
POP CULTURE SPIRIT WOW
Poor kids and all the unrealistic self-expectations sword-based video games are putting on them....:(
Just started Play All, a little book of essays about TV shows. It’s by Clive James, the great Australian essayist, novelist and poet; it’s his reflections while binge-watching shows with his daughter in these last years of his life. (He’s 78 and has terminal leukemia.)
The book is a quick read, and God am I enjoying it. Here's James, in a chapter on Band of Brothers, riffing on sequel The Pacific, and producer Steven Spielberg: “Hour after hour, we seem to be watching the kind of old movie whose trite production values Spielberg was seen into the world to rescue us from. He did The War of the Worlds better than this. Even his epic comedy 1941 was better; and the only other thing that 1941 was better than was the nineteenth-century Irish potato famine.”
Or here he is coming at David Tennant in Broadchurch:
In Britain...there is always yet another show about a gifted but rebellious middle-ranking policeman banished to a provincial seaside town who redeems his reputation by solving the sort of murder case in which everyone in the districts is a suspect. (When an actor famous for playing Dr. Who was cast as the middle-ranking policeman, he grew a weird half-beard to prove that he was serious, thereby becoming, I thought, the only weirdly half-bearded middle-ranking policeman in England. I thought he looked like D.H. Lawrence after an unsuccessful night with Frieda, but one of my female advisers assures me that I am underestimating both the prevalence and the attractiveness of the weird half-beard.)
Hmm. Never noticed it before but it is a little half-beard-y, isn't it...
I love when a TV article or book makes me notice new things about a show I thought I already understood. Like The Sopranos: I’m not the biggest fan in the world, I can’t enumerate all the things that happened to all the characters let alone when, but I did watch it and I do feel like I have a pretty good sense of what it was about.
(Although, fun fact, it took me a couple years to actually watch the show because I really did think it was about a family of singers from Jersey. I was like, Who is watching this garbage? True story.)
But reading James I found myself suddenly realizing that the key to the show for me was not Tony but Dr. Melfi (Lorraine Bracco), the psychologist he visits. I tuned in week after week in large part to see what would happen with her character.
A lot of that expectation is the genius of the writing and performance, which always kept Melfi at a distance. (Almost always.) Really as the show starts she’s just like us, entering into this insane world of Jersey mob life for the first time. But because we come into the story alongside Tony, we end up seeing Melfi through his eyes, as a mystery, a puzzle, infinitely inscrutable. Unattainable (and therefore endlessly attractive). In a way the show is King Kong, and she's Fay Wray.
For me Carmela could never hold a candle to Melfi – or not at first, anyway, because Carmela didn’t seem to be in touch with her own life. In fact her existence was is all about pushing the truth away, not seeing what’s there, or when that proved impossible forgetting what she has seen. Really, Carmela is what Tony wishes he could be, and cannot.
In latter years that changes somewhat. Her relationship with the Italian hitman Furio shows her that more is possible. This being The Sopranos, “more” here means a more authentic relationship with the violence she’s embraced as a part of her life. Or at the least – because in a lot of ways Carmela’s attraction to Furio is another way of hiding from the truth, just in romance rather than suburbia – her feelings toward Furio helped her see that she has feelings, that she is more complex than the storyline she’s assigned herself. Furio might just be a more European Tony, but he is the doorway into her seeing that there is more to her than what she has agreed to.
On one level Sopranos was all about the stories that families tell themselves, wasn’t it, the internal fictions they live by (and also with – always, there is some burden there; some things are not allowed to be discussed, or even seen). One of the ongoing questions of the show is what will Meadow and AJ do with all this once they’re old enough to know. But to use a favorite Australian word, that’s a furphy, a false path, because on some level they know it all already, and the real issue for them is the same as their parents: how will they continue to shoulder this terrible burden, and will they take a greater journey into truth?
Down deep, I admit, I always wanted Tony and Melfi to get together. It was clear they had chemistry, even before we got to know her well. And I just wanted to see what that would like, how she would respond, what it would reveal of her.
Come on, look at them, they're great together.
Sometimes I even thought it could be good for him. But of course that’s crazy, isn’t it. Everything he touches gets burnt, burnt badly, and eventually he destroys. Melfi would not have been any exception. Maybe she’d have been killed; maybe she’d have ended up like Carmela. Either way the person we knew would have been destroyed. There is no permanent survival strategy for life with a 800-lb. gorilla. ++ James on Artie, the owner of the restaurant where the Sopranos always eat:
On the most subtle level of mental torture, Artie, the restauranteur, who by his gift for foolish investments has brought his business to bankruptcy, is saved by a loan from Tony. Being saved by Tony ensures that he will be enslaved forever. Artie is a family friend but he is not family, so friendship earns him nothing except misery: he will have to keep smiling while he continues to let Tony eat for free. Once, Tony and his family ran up a tab that was rarely paid. Now it will never be paid. Artie’s torment shows in his compulsively merry face, and shows the true cost of being in the mob’s grip.
This book is so good. Buy it now. (It’s $7. DO IT.) ++
These memes are suddenly all over the place and they are wonderful. ++ Hill Street Blues creator Steven Bochco died on Sunday. In his fifty years in television, he did a lot of incredible things. He helped invent the primetime serialized drama, with season long arcs and big casts. From what I’ve read, he got the idea of from daytime soaps, which I think really puts things in perspective: What is Breaking Bad, really, if not the craziest version of a telenovela?
He also helped develop the idea of the drama built around an anti-hero; there is no Sopranos, Deadwood or The Shield without NYPD Blue’s Andy Sipowitz, and probably no Sipowitz without Hill Street Blues’ crazed Mick Belker, either. (There’s definitely no Belker, Sipowitz, Soprano, etc. without Archie Bunker. All Hail Norman Lear.) He was the first to try a TV comedy without a laugh track or studio audience, first in the 1987 Hooperman and then in Doogie Hawser, M.D. It was a big risk, sometimes the audience didn’t get it. But today that, too, is the industry standard.
(He also produced some real dogs, like his CBS comedy Public Morals, in which female cops dressed as prostitutes to bag johns (it lasted one episode), or the infamous Cop Rock, in which cops and robbers sang about their emotions. (It lasted eleven; TV Guide called it “the single most bizarre TV musical of all time.”) Even L.A. Law, though it won a bunch of Emmys, is hard to take seriously beyond the fake tans.)
When I think of Bochco I think of the opening credits at the start of Hill Street Blues. The music can get a little cheesy (I don’t know if that’s a guitar or a synth in there, but oh golly is it 80s), but the underlying melody, fragile and plaintive, tells you everything you need to know. Life can be hard, but there is beauty here and hope.
Five Fun Facts about Steven Bochco
At the end of its first season Hill Street Blues was ranked 87th out of 96 shows on the air. Audiences just didn’t know what to make of its morally ambiguous characters. It’s actually the lowest rated TV drama ever to get a second season.
Bochco is often considered the first TV showrunner – that is, the first writer to also be in charge of production of every element of a TV show. In fact, that’s not true, the first was Rita Lakin, who after her husband died worked her way all the way up from secretary to writer to show creator of CBS’ Executive Suite and NBC’s Flamingo Road. (Here’s a great interview with her.)
Bochco liked to play with puns in the titles of episodes. When censors initially gave him trouble over a Hill Street episode entitled “Moon Over Uranus”, he proceeded to name the next two episodes “Moon Over Uranus: the Sequel” and “Moon Over Uranus: The Final Legacy”. (He also had “Fecund Hand Rose”, “A Case of Klapp” and “Fuchs Me? Fuchs You!”) (The title of this newsletter also comes from him.)
In order to get ABC to do NYPD Blue, Bochco and Bob Iger sat down, drew drawings of people naked and wrangled over which “parts” could be shown. (Really.)
The Bochco Productions credits of the guy playing a violin that follow at the end of every Bochco show is actually an animation of Bochco’s father Rudolph, a concert violinist.
++
Since I seem to have fallen into some kind of classic TV well, here’s one more for you: M*A*S*H* is currently celebrating its 35th anniversary, and Hollywood Reporter did one of its great oral histories with the cast and crew for the occasion. Whether it’s talking about the pressure the producers faced from CBS to make it less sad, as it struggled at first against ABC’s Wonderful World of Disney; the genius of Alan Alda; or the playfulness of the set, it’s pretty fantastic.
So, what was M*A*S*H's secret? The dramedy about the trials and tribulations of a Mobile Army Surgical Hospital unit during the Korean War was really a love story. In building the landmark series, its cast and crew forged a bond of love and respect that lives to this day: a love for truth in storytelling, a love for the audience they were entertaining and a love for each other.
++ (IN LIEU OF) LINKS ++
A Postcard a Week:
Saw this idea in Anne Friedman’s newsletter; it sounded worth considering: "When my sister Angèle turned 18 (I was 25 at the time), my present for her was that I would send her one postcard a week for a year. I like sending physical mail, and I wanted us to get closer : with almost 8 years between us, we grew up at very different times. And I did it ! I sent her 52 postcards, one every week. I sent a lot of them from France, but also from anywhere I happened to be traveling to. She kept them all ! I am really happy I did; she got to know me better as a person because of it (I told her EVERYTHING in those postcards, from the most intimate interrogations of my life to mundane things like a tea I was just drinking in a pastry shop in Vienna). I loved the process also : it could be straining at times, but it was an exercise in love and patience and consistency."
The Hidden Virtue of Wasps:
I realize that not everybody reading this is a comic book fan. Which is all good. What is an evangelist for if everyone already believes?
About a year ago, Marvel put out a comic book called The Unstoppable Wasp about super-smart Russian girl Nadia, who flees to the United States after spending the first part of her life trapped in a sort of assassination school. You know, like you do. (Ask me about throwing stars!)
It already sounds way too super hero for some of you, doesn’t it? I hear it in your polite silence. Stay with me people!
Instead of being yet another story of a teenager with some kind of powers who fights crime blah blah blah future movie blech, Wasp is this super sweet story about how hope and kindness are all that's important.
Despite everything she’s been through, Nadia comes to the States filled with happiness and positivity, and decides to search out other girls who are smart like her and start a lab where they can create things that will make the world better. She calls the project “G.I.R.L.” – Genius In action Research Labs -- and the girls she recruits are just as fantastic and interesting as she is.
Here's one glorious page, in which the girls work together on a big problem over the course of a day.
I just love the way the artist shows the passage of time.
And if all of that is not cool enough, at the end of each issue there are interviews with two real-life women who work in scientific fields. It’s a perfect story to give a child, grandchild, nephew, niece or friend.
But I recommend it for yourself as well. I know, it's ridiculous, what self-respecting adult reads comic books other than this weird priest you follow.
It’s all in one, it's very cheap... Why not find out?
Be good to yourself. And "let's be careful out there...."