I've seen every episode of Breaking Bad, or, to be more precise, I've seen a little under 3/4 of Breaking Bad. The missing little bit over a quarter comes from all the fast forwarding I have done watching seasons 3 and 4 on my computer. To me, in any given episode something like half of it is worth skipping (usually the home bits with the White family, Skylar in particular), but the episode on last night had almost nothing worth skipping, and Skylar herself has gotten more interesting as a character the badder she herself has broken. I still think the show isn't great, and the picture of the drug empire Gus has established is odd, for example, he is associated with some German based multinational, but has one, one, guy he really trusts to guard him. Unlike on the not as equally flawed Wire, whitepeople's favorite show ever, the writers of Breaking Bad don't seem to understand how massive drug cartels work, and aren't interested in creating the ensemble cast necessary to do so. This of course makes sense because it did not start out as a show about cartels and multinational drug conglomerates, but the flaws in the conception of the drug empire are always slightly glaring. On the Wire, for example, it took them almost an entire season to know even what Avon Barksdale looked like, and he never touched anything, not money, drugs, or guns.
As a necessary side note, I have to, as a whiteperson, tell some sort of Baltimore story, which thankfully I have because I grew up in the DC suburbs an hour away from charm/crack city. When I was in high school, Baltimore was where you went when you hit 18 for strip clubs, and where all the cheap punk shows were, always in slum neighborhoods that you did not want to be out in at night, or even during the day most of the time. This was in the post crack wars era when things were hardly safe, not that they are now. I have been offered enough drugs at Lexington Market, where the signs in the bathroom strictly prohibit showering in the sinks, to know that the city still has its problems. The oddest thing about the city is the extent to which the weeds have overgrown the city. I have a friend who grew up in a federal period three story beautiful town home, and two blocks from his house they have excellent crack you can buy. The 'safe' whiteperson neighborhoods abut the crack slums in a way I have seen in no other city. There must be some sort of iPhone app to exploit this, I'm thinking some sort of color map that gradates green to red (or, perish the thought, black) mapping out the streets. Whoever develops this, I just want the credit for the idea.
As a show, Breaking Bad suffered from the typical third season slump. I know from a screenwriting friend, that most shows have their first and second seasons planned out, and then have no idear what to do after they get picked up for a third. Clearly with Breaking Bad, they were ready to stop the show at the end of the second season and kill Walter off, leaving his family with however much money he had at that point. The third season of Mad Men (and the fourth) was terrible compared to the first and second, as was the third season of Deadwood. Both decided that the protagonists of their respective shows (Don Draper and Al Swearengen) were more interesting as some sort of crippled anti-hero, and were basically stripped of their verbal and physical power. Did Don say anything worthwhile in the whole of season 3? Anything as good as "I don't have a contract." Breaking Bad's main problem is, of course, that its protagonist is its antagonist, and it has taken the show basically two seasons to work towards creating someone we, as an audience, can get behind. Gus obviously isn't a real option, as excellent as he is, and finally, in the past couple episodes, Jesse has emerged as something worthy of audience backing. I give the writers of the show the limited credit they deserve for finally figuring out how to go about brining Jesse to the front. Because I don't care about it much, I won't talk about how coordinated the story lines were, or how excellent the final shot of the episode was, looking down on Walt in the womblike crawlspace under his house, crying in a fetal position, bald like a baby. I will only say that as an audience member, our desire for the good to end happily and the bad unhappily as Wilde so aptly defined fiction, seems to finally be being satisfied. The show has created such a terrible sob in Walt that watching him cry like a bald little baby after being tazed by a cattleprod was deeply satisfying.
Showing posts with label Reality Television. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Reality Television. Show all posts
Monday, September 26, 2011
Wednesday, March 16, 2011
I'm not an asshole, I just act like one on television
So based on David Bianculli's review, I watched the first couple of episodes of NBC new show Next Great Restaurant, and it took only those two episodes to help me re-realize why I am refuse to watch almost all network reality TV. I don't know if it is their budgets, their casting, or their audience, but cable televisions reality programming (minus MTV) has just that dusting of panache necessary to keep me from feeling manipulated. Or, their manipulation is just subtle enough that I am kosher with it. At least on Bravo and whatever network Project Runway is now on, they just show you that they are using Glad Press-n-Seal, I don't have to hear the facetious opinions about how great the stuff really is. Next Great Restaurant really is great if you can bear through its bluntness to see the deep, ontological problems it presents about our country.
The show has yuppies and whitepeople of various flavors (some ironically making fun of Southerners, because hey, why not poke fun at the people in our country with all the guns fighting our wars for us who can actually fix and make things. Others talking about how it is their dream to open a healthy, portion-controlled restaurant, and they didn't really want to be a lawyer after going to Harvard Law School, after finishing up in the Peace Corps. One of the putzy yuppies' dream is to open a grilled cheese fast food chain; it's no Kierkegaardean defining commitment, but who am I to question to ontology of someone that wants to melt cheese on bread for a living) pitching their 'concept' about their chain of fast food restaurants. One would think that say, food, would be their concept, but apparently that isn't teleological enough for most of America, so they have to have an idea being the idea. Needless to say, I never knew our country was so Platonic, but hope springs eternal as the saying goes.
The basic premise, which is a mash-up of various other reality tv shows (BBC's The Resturant and Dragon's Den in particular), is ten 'people' have to compete to open the proverbial next great resturant. Their 'prize' is a small, three resturant franchise in three prominent American cities (New York, LA, and, of course, Minneapolis) with financial backing coming from 4 investors who also serve as the judges of the show and its producers, which means they are making money hand over fist, with ample references to their own restaurants (try to go 5 minutes of watching the show without hearing how Steve Ellis owns Chipotle. In fact, next weeks 'challenge' takes place in a Chipotle, because how else to learn about creating a resturant than working as an order-taker at a fast food place). The show amplifies the speed of things by advertising that by the end of it, if it actually makes it through sweeps, you will be able to go into one of these restaurants, and reinforces this by showing you how long until the winning restaurants open. From a cultural criticism perspective, there is almost too much in it to talk about, but, needless to say, everyone has a sob story or some sort, because success can only come to those who've lost of a mother, or job, or dog or whatever. The irony of crying and shvitzing about how your mother died when you were 16 against the backdrop of Japan become the new Chernobyl and Pakistan having devastating flooding all last wet season is a little hard to take, but never underestimate people and television to make mountains out of molehills, and to universalize the most personal, and really, small troubles. We aren't talking about living Job's confronting God in the form of the whirlwind, but that doesn't seem to stop them from engaging in malignantly narcissistic behavior. A particular highlight from the episodes so far is their selection of an Indian man who wants to start a chain of southern Indian restaurants, but did not give him access to any Indian chefs, so he had to have a Swede cook for him, Apparently finding an Indian chef was simply outside the resources of NBC Universal. Half the people can't cook and don't know anything about cooking, and see the creation of a franchise as just another type of techne.
The show really gets at the sped up pace of modern life, and the lack of connection with place or past. With all the talk of concepts and logos and the techne of running a resturant, there is almost nothing about being with the world and within the world. To the show, its contestants, and its judges, New York is LA is Minneapolis is Shanghai, as long as the logo is good enough. It is odd to desire a lack of place, but this is, I suppose the modern condition. Or, put another way, the modern way of being is to either not have a way of being, or to have a way of being so flexible that you can be anything. Machiavelli had the great insight that man is infinitely more malleable than the ancients ever thought. For Plato and Aristotle, there was a Natural Right and it dictated certain ends. Machiavelli, having seen Christianity ravage the West for hundreds of years, coming out of a hierarchical, stratified Catholic culture, saw that you really could make man into anything you wanted, that, as Pascal would say a century later, custom is man's nature. Lots of ink has been spilled about how unreal reality tv is, but I don't think those that see it this way are sensitive to the ontological shift that has taken place in the past decade. This is what I suppose the post-modern hyper-realists like Baudrillard talked about, but it isn't the reality of something that never really was, it is the amping up of something actually there, hyper-reality in the sense of being more real than reality. So if you are a putz, reducing hours and hours of tape down to 4 minutes of screen time doesn't simulate putzness, or put putzness upon your being, it purifies your putzness. The casual view, most viewers, correctly do not draw any distinction between reality and reality tv because one does not exist.
The show has yuppies and whitepeople of various flavors (some ironically making fun of Southerners, because hey, why not poke fun at the people in our country with all the guns fighting our wars for us who can actually fix and make things. Others talking about how it is their dream to open a healthy, portion-controlled restaurant, and they didn't really want to be a lawyer after going to Harvard Law School, after finishing up in the Peace Corps. One of the putzy yuppies' dream is to open a grilled cheese fast food chain; it's no Kierkegaardean defining commitment, but who am I to question to ontology of someone that wants to melt cheese on bread for a living) pitching their 'concept' about their chain of fast food restaurants. One would think that say, food, would be their concept, but apparently that isn't teleological enough for most of America, so they have to have an idea being the idea. Needless to say, I never knew our country was so Platonic, but hope springs eternal as the saying goes.
The basic premise, which is a mash-up of various other reality tv shows (BBC's The Resturant and Dragon's Den in particular), is ten 'people' have to compete to open the proverbial next great resturant. Their 'prize' is a small, three resturant franchise in three prominent American cities (New York, LA, and, of course, Minneapolis) with financial backing coming from 4 investors who also serve as the judges of the show and its producers, which means they are making money hand over fist, with ample references to their own restaurants (try to go 5 minutes of watching the show without hearing how Steve Ellis owns Chipotle. In fact, next weeks 'challenge' takes place in a Chipotle, because how else to learn about creating a resturant than working as an order-taker at a fast food place). The show amplifies the speed of things by advertising that by the end of it, if it actually makes it through sweeps, you will be able to go into one of these restaurants, and reinforces this by showing you how long until the winning restaurants open. From a cultural criticism perspective, there is almost too much in it to talk about, but, needless to say, everyone has a sob story or some sort, because success can only come to those who've lost of a mother, or job, or dog or whatever. The irony of crying and shvitzing about how your mother died when you were 16 against the backdrop of Japan become the new Chernobyl and Pakistan having devastating flooding all last wet season is a little hard to take, but never underestimate people and television to make mountains out of molehills, and to universalize the most personal, and really, small troubles. We aren't talking about living Job's confronting God in the form of the whirlwind, but that doesn't seem to stop them from engaging in malignantly narcissistic behavior. A particular highlight from the episodes so far is their selection of an Indian man who wants to start a chain of southern Indian restaurants, but did not give him access to any Indian chefs, so he had to have a Swede cook for him, Apparently finding an Indian chef was simply outside the resources of NBC Universal. Half the people can't cook and don't know anything about cooking, and see the creation of a franchise as just another type of techne.
The show really gets at the sped up pace of modern life, and the lack of connection with place or past. With all the talk of concepts and logos and the techne of running a resturant, there is almost nothing about being with the world and within the world. To the show, its contestants, and its judges, New York is LA is Minneapolis is Shanghai, as long as the logo is good enough. It is odd to desire a lack of place, but this is, I suppose the modern condition. Or, put another way, the modern way of being is to either not have a way of being, or to have a way of being so flexible that you can be anything. Machiavelli had the great insight that man is infinitely more malleable than the ancients ever thought. For Plato and Aristotle, there was a Natural Right and it dictated certain ends. Machiavelli, having seen Christianity ravage the West for hundreds of years, coming out of a hierarchical, stratified Catholic culture, saw that you really could make man into anything you wanted, that, as Pascal would say a century later, custom is man's nature. Lots of ink has been spilled about how unreal reality tv is, but I don't think those that see it this way are sensitive to the ontological shift that has taken place in the past decade. This is what I suppose the post-modern hyper-realists like Baudrillard talked about, but it isn't the reality of something that never really was, it is the amping up of something actually there, hyper-reality in the sense of being more real than reality. So if you are a putz, reducing hours and hours of tape down to 4 minutes of screen time doesn't simulate putzness, or put putzness upon your being, it purifies your putzness. The casual view, most viewers, correctly do not draw any distinction between reality and reality tv because one does not exist.
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