You say "absurdly self-referential," and I say "conceptual artist"

Danny Pudi and Gillian Jacobs in Community. Photo courtesy of fanforums.com.

This fall, many media outlets are trumpeting the resurgence of comedy on TV, based on the enormous ratings pulled in by The Big Bang Theory, Two and a Half Men, Modern Family and New Girl and seeming fatigue with reality shows and heavily serialized dramas. Reality shows like The X Factor and expensive sci-fi dramas like Terra Nova have been pulling in solid numbers, but they're a far cry from their smash predecessors American Idol and Lost, while a number of underwhelming dramas (The Playboy Club, Charlie's Angels) came and went with barely a whisper. Compared to the enormous buzz surrounding comedy offerings like New Girl and 2 Broke Girls, dramas and reality shows are looking weak indeed.

It was a little shocking, then, to read a recent headline on Splitsider.com that asks if the 2011-2012 season is the worst season for sitcoms in a decade. (For the record, the author ultimately concludes that it's only the third-worst season for new comedies since 2000; apparently the sitcoms of 2002-2003, 2000-2001 and 2007-2008 were worse). After completing the list, it becomes clear why the author chooses to bash himself against the impenetrable wall of the TV pundit elite. The top three TV seasons for comedies are, in order: 2009-2010 (the premiere year of Community, Cougartown and Modern Family); 2001-2002 (Andy Richter Controls the Universe, Scrubs, The Tick and Undeclared); and 2008-2009 (Better Off Ted and Parks and Recreation). In other words, the "best" years for sitcoms were the years that spawned low-rated critical darlings like Parks and Rec, Community, Scrubs and all the short-lived, too-edgy-for-primetime series that premiered in 2001. The 2003-2004 season, meanwhile, falls midway down the list, because apparently the reviled Two and a Half Men cancels out the genius of Arrested Development.

This piece brings into sharp relief the divide between critical adoration and popularity. Modern Family and The Big Bang Theory aside, almost all the shows the author categorizes as "good" spent most of their existence with the fear of cancellation hanging over their heads (if they even made it far enough to worry about being cancelled). If you were to look at The A.V. Club's TV page on a Friday morning, you could be forgiven for thinking that Community was the most popular show in the history of television. Meanwhile, out in the real world, The Big Bang Theory pulled in four times the viewership of Community, while Rules of Engagement (which is apparently a show that appears on television) had triple the viewership of Parks and Recreation.

There is a really fascinating dynamic at play here between the opinions of critics and what's popular with the masses. Unfortunately, this dynamic is often reduced to a simplistic game of childish name-calling, with the fans of quirky, low-rated shows maintaining that only old racists and uneducated, NASCAR-loving hicks could ever stomach Two and a Half Men, while those who chuckle at Jon Cryer's antics on those shows are bewildered by the fact that anyone could find the absurd, self-referential antics of the Greendale study group funny. It's oddly reminiscent of the "dialogue" (read: angry shouting) between the pansy-assed, liberal, Obama-supporting commie bastards and the prejudiced, out-of-touch, heartless capitalist pigs. (In the immortal words of Liz Lemon, "Yeah, suck it, I do read the paper!")

A disconnect between what is considered "good" by the critical establishment and what is popular is nothing new. There's a reason that the most critically acclaimed movies of 2010 (ranked by Rotten Tomatoes) were Waste Land, a documentary about a Brazilian artist photographing garbage pickers, and Into Eternity, a "meditation on human folly, punctuated by philosophical and historical references" by conceptual artist Michael Madsen. They may have gotten 100% good reviews, but the words "conceptual artist" make me want nothing more than to watch robots smash each other in Transformers 5: Planet of the Earth (once again, with much thanks to Liz Lemon). And it's not just The New Yorker passing out these reviews; the Philadelphia Enquirer and The Washington Post were among the publications that endorsed these films.

To be fair, Waste Land and Into Eternity are probably great films. They're just not appealing to a large demographic of people. And, as much as it pains me to say it, the self-referential absurdity of Community and the inside-showbiz jokes of 30 Rock might not interest a lot of people either. I like to think that if more people tuned in to these shows they'd find the following they deserve, and I could certainly be right about that. Of course, the three people who saw Into Eternity probably think the same thing, and they could be right too. So let's not be too mean to the people who choose to watch Two and a Half Men; they might just be turned off by descriptions of the show as "absurdist" and "experimental" in the same way hearing "conceptual artist" makes me want to curl up on my couch and watch reruns of Saturday Night Live until my brain rots. And even if I love Community and you love Rules of Engagement, we can probably agree on one thing: a half-hour comedy, no matter which comedy it is, is still more consequential than Jersey Shore can ever hope to be. Oh, wait...

"Parents" just don't understand*

Blythe Danner and Richard Schiff as Reagan's parents in "Parents."

Up All Night started out promising, but a little rough. The show hadn't quite figured out what tone it wanted to strike, veering between the realism of Reagan (Christina Applegate) and Chris (Will Arnett) learning how to cope with parenthood and the zany, 30 Rock-esque antics of Maya Rudolph's Ava. Last night's "Parents" still suffered a bit from sudden shifts in tone but, despite a few flat moments in the Ava storyline, the episode was a great example of how the series is coming into its own.

"Parents" was excellent in large part because the episode dealt with a relatable subject: the tense, regressive relationships that often spring up between parents and their adult children. Tension between parents and children is hardly something new on TV - I talked recently about the toxic parents of The Big Bang Theory - but Up All Night, as usual, presented a lovely, nuanced portrayal of Reagan's relationship with her mother Angie (Blythe Danner). Watching Reagan act like a teenager whenever her mother appeared was not only funny, but an honest depiction recognizable by anyone who has been held to a curfew when home from college. Reagan diving behind the couch and sobbing into a pillow that no one understands her were hilarious, but they were also instantly identifiable to anyone who has been in a similar situation.

It helped that Danner's portrayal of Angie showed that she was a problematic woman without being unsympathetic. The character could have been Dr. Beverly Hofstadter, but rather than playing her as an ice queen Danner chose to play her as a somewhat selfish and pompous, but still caring, mother. It helped that her relationship with her husband, Richard Schiff's Dean, was warm and relatable. Dean's gentle ribbing of his wife's continued insistence that the party thrown for her book release was "embarassing" was a beautiful example of the way this show understands the interaction between long-term couples. This understanding comes up in Chris and Reagan's relationship as well. The moment when Chris points out to Reagan that the reason no one understands her is because she's talking into a pillow is both funny and comforting, showing the ease of the couple's relationship and the way they rely on each other.

My favorite moment in the episode, however, had nothing to do with either Reagan or Angie. That's not because I didn't love their character arc, but because Arnett and Schiff did such a beautiful job with the scene where Chris confides in Dean about his newfound fear of death (the result of an expiration date on a lifetime subscription to Sports Illustrated). Dean, a therapist, doesn't try to counsel Chris or talk him out of his fear. Instead, he opens up and, in a lovely moment of catharsis for both characters, confesses that death terrifies him, and reveals his solution: alcohol. The scene is played for laughs, but neither Arnett nor Schiff goes over-the-top with their performances, imbuing the moment with a real poignancy.

As usual, the rough spots in the episode were centered around Ava. Her scenes weren't all bad - in particular, her reminder to Reagan that her mother could be a lot worse was great, and Rudolph's delivery sold the line about her mother's partner, a jazz drummer called the Captain - but her complete inability to remember anything about her crew seemed overly detached, even for Ava. Dale's death montage was certainly funny, with its repetition of the one picture of the dearly departed sound technician and shots of his W-4 form, but Ava's insistence on singing over the montage seemed oddly tone-deaf (figuratively, not literally). "Parents" showcased how well the show can mix humor with realism; if only it could figure out how to mix Chris and Reagan with Ava.

*I apologize for the forced Will Smith reference. It's late, and it just happened that way.

Shaving your head won't save your soul

Shane gives himself a haircut in "Save the Last One."

Last night's episode of The Walking Dead exhibited all the show's usual problems. There were way too many boring conversations, the women were painfully useless, and the script decided to bang the viewer over the head with symbolism. As EW.com's Darren Franich pointed out, Rick and Lori's conversation about the deer and the beauty of life was the equivalent of Hamlet constantly explaining that his fascination with actors and plays is representative of the absurd falsity of his surroundings. It's painful.

However, the episode was absolutely redeemed by the final scene. After coming back from the overrun high school carrying the medical supplies that could save Carl and telling a sad story about how Otis had sacrificed himself in order to save the Grimes boy, Shane escaped to the bathroom. While Shane shaved his hair in order to hide a missing patch of hair, a flashback showed that Shane, down to his last bullet, had shot Otis in the leg, escaping while a horde of walkers feasted on the poor EMT.

I'm a huge fan of this development. I hate Shane. He is just the worst. Watching the show trying to make him into a sympathetic character was painful because it just didn't work; there was nothing relatable about him. However, the turn into full-on darkness suits Shane well, because it seems like a completely logical move for his character. The man tried to rape Laurie at the CDC, after all; it's too late to make him into anything less than a villain. I also think this could be a good development for Rick, who has been awfully passive as of late. Pitting him against Shane could give Rick the kind of concrete goal that he hasn't had since the disastrous ending of the CDC mission, something the character sorely needs.

As far as the rest of the episode was concerned, there were ups and there were downs. I enjoyed the Daryl and Andrea storyline, largely because Daryl's tough, no-nonsense demeanor kept the worst aspects of Andrea's selfish whining in check. That hanging zombie was pretty cool too. Carol was, as usual, a useless pile of hysteria, and I am way past the point of caring about Dale and Andrea's fractured relationships. On the other hand, the scene between Glenn and Lauren Cohen (who may be named Maggie on the show, but who will always be The Vampire Diaries' Rose to me) was beautifully underplayed, and was also the most that Glenn has gotten to do this season.

The Walking Dead continues to be a frustratingly uneven show; when it's good, as it was during the Shane and Otis scenes, there are few other shows that are better, but it frequently grinds to a halt so that the characters can have a painfully obvious conversation that saps the story of any suspense. If things keep going like they did tonight the show could finally start living up to the potential of the pilot. Of course, this being The Walking Dead, there's every possibility that next week will return to the deadly dull status quo, but I'm hoping that the newly villainous Shane will breathe some re-animated life back into the proceedings.

Halloween special: the creepiest "Fringe" moments

Some delicious, strawberry-flavored death for Halloween. Photo courtesy of furiousfanboys.com.

Halloween is tomorrow, and we all know that there's only one TV show that provides enough scares, gore and general creepiness for the holiday. And no, it's not The Walking Dead or American Horror Story. It's Fringe. So, in honor of All Hallow's Eve, come feast on a gallery of Fringe's creepiest, crawliest, downright grossest moments. (Warning: the pictures below are not for the faint of heart. Proceed with caution.)

Exploding Heads

Photo courtesy of ugo.com.

Fringe has featured multiple instances of exploding heads during its three-year run. In The Cure, a woman's head explodes in a diner after undergoing an experimental treatment to cure Bellini's Lymphocemia. And in The Box, a midget with unfortunate luck agrees to babysit a mysterious box for Thomas Jerome Newton, only to have it blow up his head with soundwaves. People of the Fringe universe: never agree to hold onto someone's mysterious box. It won't end well for you.

Suffocated by your own skin

Photo courtesy of tumblr.com. 

It was bad enough when, in the opening minutes of Ability, a newspaper vendor was suffocated by the skin that grew over every orifice in his body. But when the parasitic skin problem - spread by contact with a chemical agent on a two-dollar bill - killed an FBI agent by growing over the tracheotomy tube Olivia had inserted in the guy's neck, that was just awful. And by awful, I mean fantastic in the grossest possible way.

Spiderman

Photo courtesy of io9.com.

Before Jacksonville aired, we knew that the instability between the two universes was problematic. But nobody knew the extent of the problem until we saw poor Ted Pratchett, merged with his Other Side self on the floor of his office building, his own face staring at him out of his stomach. Let's deal with that whole Earth-2 instability thing, shall we?

Chucky's got nothing on this plaything

Photo courtesy of scifimania.com.

You might think that a re-assembled dead ballerina dancing while hooked up to a puppetry system that resembles a medieval torture device would automatically be the creepiest thing to happen in any given episode. However, if you thought that, you are obviously not familiar with Fringe. The undead dancer is absolutely trumped by the shot of the unfortunate man who received her corneas in a transplant, standing in the dark while Olivia's flashlight illuminated his empty, bloodied eye sockets. I didn't include that picture, because it still haunts my dreams.

David Robert Jones falls to pieces

Jones was already looking pretty bad by the time we got to "There's More than One Of Everything." The teleport that he used to escape from prison had ravaged him, leaving us with glimpses of boils and pus behind bandages. But then, Jones was interrupted during his escape to the Other Side when Peter closed the portal with Jones only halfway through, leaving the man to sink to the ground with half his body missing. Those alternate-universe portals need to be handled with care.

Steak in a can

Photo courtesy of tv.com.

The dystopian future that Peter visited in the third-season finale "The Day We Died" might not have seemed that bad. Sure, there were terrorists blowing holes in the universe and massive quarantine zones, but someone had discovered the cure for aging (or so I must assume, since everyone looked the same age as they had ten years before). But then, Peter and Olivia started to make a romantic steak dinner. With steak from a can. A can. We must avert this future at all costs, people!

On TV, the 99 percent become the one percent

Kat Dennings and Beth Behrs shop at Goodwill on CBS's 2 Broke Girls. Photo courtesy of zap2it.com.

Much of the discussion about TV this fall has focused on the resurgence of the comedy and the corresponding decline in serialized dramas and, especially, reality shows. This conversation often overlaps with discussions of the current economic downturn and, more recently, the economically-driven anger that has erupted into the Occupy Wall Street movement. Most analyses - including this one from the New York Times - draw a link between economic troubles and the resurgence of comedy by citing the tendency to escapism. This explanation is almost always accompanied by a reference to the flourishing of screwball comedies and musicals during the Great Depression, because, at least according to people who write about popular culture, when times are hard viewers want nothing more than to forget their troubles by watching Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers dance.

This may be true, but the escapism explanation becomes problematic when you look at last week's ratings. Four of the six leading shows last week were half-hour comedies; Modern Family led the night, immediately followed by Two and a Half Men, both of which beat out the World Series on FOX and NBC's Sunday Night Football. It's the sixth-ranked show, however, that throws a wrench into the escapism theory, as CBS's 2 Broke Girls slid into the top ten, just below The Big Bang Theory.

It's not that 2 Broke Girls isn't funny (although sometimes it isn't; seriously writers, the endless vagina jokes are not edgy). Instead, the reason that Girls' impressive ratings can't really be ascribed to escapism is that this show is, in fact, about two young women existing right around the poverty line. I mentioned in my review of the show that this perspective was refreshing, particularly given a TV landscape that, since Roseanne went off the air, has contained almost no characters for whom money is a real, pressing issue. (It's even more surprising given that one of the co-creators is Darren Star, the man who launched a craze for $600 shoes with Sex and the City). Unlike the many unrealistic portrayals of twenty-somethings who live in enormous apartments, wear designer clothes and eat out every night, Denning's Max is living paycheck-to-paycheck, crippled by debt from unpaid student loans and working two jobs in order to make ends meet.

This case is made in an excellent piece on ThinkProgress.org. Not only does 2 Broke Girls present a realistic portrayal of the lifestyle that most people live, it also points at the reasons underlying Max's poverty. In "And the 90s Horse Party," we learn that Max has been digging herself deeper into debt by only paying off a minimum amount every month and letting the interest pile up. This particular problem is one that contributed to the current economic situation, as people took out loans they couldn't afford and never managed to earn enough money to pay them back. More importantly, however, the show indicates a solution for Max. Smart Caroline (who is a pretty interesting character, as opposed to Stupid, Shallow Caroline) who, let's not forget, has a business degree, teaches Max that she needs to "figure out the interest rates on her credit cards and start paying down her student loan debt because she can't discharge it in bankruptcy." This is a really, really useful lesson, and one that many people haven't managed to learn.

In a TV landscape where financial troubles are alluded to, but almost never explicitly shown (when was the last time we heard about Annie's money problems on Community, much less were actually shown them?), a show like 2 Broke Girls is pretty damned groundbreaking. Not only does the series deal with two characters struggling to make ends meet, it provides a backstory for that poverty that is highly relevant. Most people don't end up poor because of one piece of bad luck, which is what happened in Glee's recession storyline last season; instead, they ended up there because of a system that encourages people to borrow beyond their means, and then penalizes them for their inability to pay back their loans. If this is escapism, it isn't doing a very good job. However, I suspect that people aren't watching 2 Broke Girls for the escapism; they're probably watching because the situation part of the sitcom is identifiable. Now, if only the comedy part would get funnier.

Women are misrepresented in the media: is this really a surprise?

Photo courtesy of sfwire.com

There's been a lot of talk about the representation of women in media, talk that is largely centered around Jennifer Newsom's documentary Miss Representation, which premiered on OWN last night. Everyone from FOX News to The Daily Beast has written about the film, detailing the disheartening influence that portrayals of women on TV, in films and in magazines have on women of all ages. The comments from young girls who are interviewed in the film are certainly heartbreaking; no woman should spend all her time obsessing about her appearance, much less the elementary school-aged girls interviewed for the film. The issue at stake here is certainly an important one; it just isn't as shocking as these news outlets are presenting it.

The article on The Daily Beast, for example, begins with a selection of shocking (and terribly sad) quotes from teen and pre-teen girls about the body image the media has forced on them, and then goes on to describe the way that Newsom "tackles Hollywood, TV news, advertising and politics - all against a backdrop of young women who consume all of it." It isn't until a third of the way through the piece that the author acknowledges that this issue certainly isn't a new one; even then, the many other films, books and articles that have discussed this issue - none of which are even mentioned by name - by saying that these pieces are outdated as a result of increasing media saturation.

This isn't really a problem with the article itself; I actually felt it was generally interesting, well-written and well-researched, which is more than I can say for many other articles found on the site. The problem here seems to be that, no matter how often this issue is brought to the public's attention, it fades out of public consciousness just as quickly. Of course, the very news media doing the reporting on the issue is certainly complicit in its burial; after all, the coverage of Newsom's documentary is found pretty far down on The Daily Beast's entertainment page. What's above it? A list of men Scarlett Johanssen has dated and an article about the many permutations of sexual partners on Jersey Shore.

The Daily Beast, busy correcting the misrepresentation of women in the media.

I think it's great that Newsom's documentary is getting so much attention. As a woman who has moments of absolute, pathetic self-loathing as a result of comparing myself to the women I see in the media, I completely agree that this is a problem that needs to be dealt with. (I've talked about it multiple times before, in fact.) And I'm a smart, confident woman who is generally pretty happy with her physical appearance (except for those aforementioned instances of self-hatred). I'm not an impressionable middle-school girl.

The problem here is the likelihood that Newsom's documentary will have no long-term impact. In 2006, the fashion industry became the center of a women-in-media firestorm when Brazilian model Ana Carolina Reston and Uruguayan model Luisel Ramos both died of complications from eating disorders. This led to attempts to create and enforce guidelines, including a Madrid Fashion Week ban on models whose BMI fell below a cutoff number and attempts by various fashion bodies to pass guidelines about model weight. Five years later, runway models are just as skeletal as they were in 2006 while fashion magazines are lauded for featuring "plus-size" models who are two sizes smaller than the average American woman. Is there any indication that the increased awareness of the issues raised in Newsom's film will fare better?

Pointing out these problems doesn't do any good unless it affects change in the media, and the media is nowhere close to the kind of major overhaul that Newsom's film posits as an ideal. The vast majority of high-ranking entertainment executives are men, and the most coveted demographic for advertisers is young men. Until the entertainment industry is no longer geared towards an advertiser's perception of what young men want (which, I should be clear, does not always correspond to what actual men want; most of my male friends care more about a woman's personality than whether she looks like Jessica Alba), the portrayal of women on television isn't going to change, no matter how many documentaries Newsom makes.

The real threat on 'The Walking Dead' isn't the zombies; it's the women

Sarah Wayne Callies and Melissa Suzanne McBride in The Walking Dead. Photo courtesy of hollywood.com.

The tense, terrifying highway attack scene that opens "What Lies Ahead," the second-season premiere of The Walking Dead, was brilliant in the way that this show can be when everything goes right. The scene was excruciatingly long in the best possible way, ratcheting up the tension as the survivors crouched under abandoned cars on the freeway, staying silent and hoping against hope that the zombie horde shuffling past won't notice them. There is never a large-scale fight with the zombies in this scene, just unbearably increasing tension as IronE Singleton's (yes, that's how you spell it) T-Dog cuts his arm open, Laurie Holden's Andrea desperately tries to put her gun back together, and Norman Reedus' fantastic Daryl saves the day with his crossbow. It was a fantastic scene, and a great way to kick off the season. If only the rest of the episode had managed to keep it up.

I'm not going to go into the deadly dull scenes between Andrea and Dale or Shane and Lori - scenes that did nothing to move the story forward, and instead just rehashed the problems I didn't care about last season - the painful church interlude, or Rick's stilted opening monologue. Those aspects of the premiere have already been critiqued endlessly. Instead, I want to talk about one of the most worrisome aspects of the episode: the women of The Walking Dead.

Every problem in the episode was the result of female incompetence. The initial zombie stampede (that's not the right word... what's a really slow kind of stampede?) may not have been anyone's fault in particular, but it led to various situations in which the women were always to blame. Andrea's complete incompetence with a gun led to her near-death at the hands of a zombie; not only couldn't she reassemble her gun in order to shoot the thing, but her panicked squealing alerted the zombie that was already leaving to her presence, necessitating her rescue by Dale. Lori (Sarah Wayne Callies) spent the entire highway scene with her hand over Carol's mouth, because apparently the woman couldn't keep quiet on her own, even though the two young children in the group - not to mention the guy who sliced his arm open and was bleeding everywhere - had no problem shutting up. And then Lori's complete incompetence as a parent led to her son, Carl, getting shot while on a zombie hunt with Rick and Shane. (I'm barely forgiving Sophia for running from the zombies here because she is a child. Just barely.)

Even when the women weren't actively causing problems, they were conforming to every terrible stereotype imaginable. Andrea was being a pouty, spoiled princess who was angry because her gun was taken away after she proved herself completely incapable of using it; Carol dissolved into a pathetic mess as soon as anything bad happened; and Lori was, as usual, a shrieking harpy. The men, meanwhile, got to kill zombies, cut the zombies open, fix cars and generally be tough and manly. Look at the scene where our plucky band of survivors finds the church, and a few zombies within. Rick, Daryl and Shane burst in and take out the zombies with little-to-no fuss, while the women (and Carl, who is on a zombie-hunting expedition due to his mother's bizarre conception of what it means to be a good parent) huddle in the back, completely useless.

I do understand that Rick, Shane and Daryl are the only characters whose pre-apocalypse skill sets are applicable to their current situation. However, that hasn't stopped Glenn (Steven Yeun) or Dale (Jeffrey DeMunn) from picking up a few tricks. Andrea, Laurie and Carol all made it through the zombie apocalypse somehow - for a while, Laurie must have been on her own with her sister Amy - but apparently none of them learned anything during that time. It seems completely implausible that these three women made it this far, given their complete lack of skills that don't involve crying, whining and yelling. No wonder Sophia ran screaming away from that zombie; she must have just assumed it's the way her gender deals with these situations.

If The Walking Dead wants to become the show that the opening scene showed it could be, a few things need to happen. The story needs to stop grinding to a halt for boring conversations, Shane needs to either get a serious personality makeover or just die, and the writing needs to get better. The biggest problem, however, is that of the show's women. I know that the target demographic for a zombie show is largely male, but there are a whole group of women out here who love zombie movies, and who really want to like this show. We just need a female character we can relate to who isn't a complete basket case. I'm hoping that Lauren Cohan's upcoming appearance will help, but I'm a little afraid of what might happen. If the show's writers manage to turn Chuck's Vivian Volkoff and The Vampire Diaries' Rose into just another useless damsel-in-distress, I'm done.