I Liked This Too!: Bates Motel

Given it’s upfronts week, I feel like I should giving pithy reviews on 3 minute trailers with vague descriptions, but I’ll wait until next week and choose favorites and least favorites. Today I’ll just start my summer series: I Liked This Too! about the shows without too much critical acclaim over the past season.

First off, Bates’ Motel on A&E, a campy drama loosely advertised as a prequel to Hitchcock’s Psycho set in modern times. I’ve tried my hand at some of the more critically approved camp-series like Revenge and Vampire Diaries but they haven’t been able to hold my attention, even with the ridiculous twists and turns of story. I think because I haven’t been able to attach to a character, not even superficially. (I should go talk to a therapist about my internal angst over liking/not liking pop culture entities.)

But even though I can’t figure out how much Freddie Highmore’s distant depiction of Norman Bates is a conscious choice I’m interested, Olivia Cooke’s Emma is one of my absolute favorite teenage girls that has come out of television, and of course Vera Farmiga’s Norma Bates performance is masterful (as Ken Tucker noted.)

As part of a surge of horror tv shows (ie: The Following, Hannibal) I’m enjoying this one the most (I stopped watching The Following after two episodes and I really like Hannibal). I think it’s the unfazed weirdness that doesn’t seem to take itself too seriously ambiance I’m enjoying. 

Criticizing Criticism

Since the passing of acclaimed critic Roger Ebert, (which I know was about fifty news cycles ago just bear with me) I’ve been thinking a lot about the role of criticism and the idea of tastes and labels.

I will admit, I don’t have the most conventional tastes at all times, though I wouldn’t call myself an eccentrist by any stretch. Barring a few summer months in college I still cannot fully get on the T-Swift Express while even some of the most ardent hipsters have a first class ticket, I’m still a couple steps removed from the Nick/Jess obsession that has overtaken even the most coldhearted tv critics, and I’m not sure how to stay interested in The Vampire Diaries despite critic approval and twisty twisty twists (I find none of the men save maybe Jeremy attractive, and I think that may be at least 40% of the appeal for some people).

I mention these three because there appears to be a general consensus that they’re good and if you don’t like it, you’re lying or wrong (holler at me about all the Taylor hate, but in my circles it’s a ten to one ratio of defense to criticism) and the default is you have no legitimate claim to your opinion.

When faced with the dilemma of not enjoying a piece of culture it’s unwelcome to feel like a degenerate. I often wonder how taste is determined and how I came to be a sensitive, apathetic curmudgeon.

I prize my opinion above others too, but there should be be space in this world for people to genuinely dislike things you like. Maybe I  should figure out how to write about it.

(I’m not exactly sure how, but this link was in my draft of this post, so I’ll just stick at the end: Tim Goodman on TV’s Hottest Trend: Hate Watching)

oh where or where can she be?

I just noticed that I hadn’t posted anything since August, which seems kind of crazy to me since I’ve been mulling about half-ideas since then. Some of which have turned into one or two sentence drafts in my WordPress (and more on Evernote).

And pondering why, outside of common laziness, I am less prolific than in my dreams. I have two theories.

1. My discomfort of recycled content. I know it’s all the rage and all of my favorite websites does it alongside their original content, so maybe borrowing some piece of news or idea can only help improve any original works I can produce. And if nothing else, would be a nice little place to collect bits (even though I post/reblog on my tumblr multiple times a day). And if I use something else, I feel like i have to elaborate much more than the time I would prefer to spend on that topic right this second. I should just put my inadequacies aside and just practice.
   
2. Data overload. I spend so much time trying to keep up with my twitterfeed (I really need to learn to love the unfollow button – my primary account follows 517 users at the time I write this), tumblr, googlereader feed (rip), and read linked articles, I have few precious moments not interacting with information. This is more a sign to start filtering more instead of adding something else to worry about on a regular basis

But I’m going to try to work on this macro-blogging thing, more for me than for you (my non-existent readers). This post is just a kick-me sign from myself.

Caring: The Enemy of Cool.

The main objective to my post about ‘positive pop culture’, is to say it’s okay to like things. A friend wrote this post about guilty pleasures, and the Pop Culture Happy Hour people talked about pop culture guilty pleasures while arguing about why the concept exists. If you like something, if something brings you some sort of joy in life, why should you feel guilty about it? Others have touched on this notion before

Willa Paskin wrote that “caring is, of course, the enemy of cool” in her article about Schmidt on New Girl, and argues that Schmidt will never be considered cool by his peers because of this attribute, but that he is more mature because of it. At the end of this season’s Christmas episode of Community, Abed says “I like liking things”, which makes him the bane of the study group for much of the episode.

Being cynical is easy. Not caring is easy. It means you don’t have to label yourself as anything and no one can judge you based on those assumptions. The epitome of cool, mysterious. But it’s a negative space, a space of judgement over enjoyment. Criticism is important and realizing your cultural consumption habits can have bigger impact taken as whole, but it’s also okay to like problematic things (kind of necessary if you want to like things at all) and it’s okay if other people like things that you don’t or if you like things that other people don’t.

As summer turns to fall, and fun turns to work, let us all remember it’s okay care and to be invested in things, even things outside our control.

It’s Mindy!

This is a bit late in coming, but not too bad. Now that summer’s (almost) here, most scripted television is on hiatus and the networks have announced their fall line-up. I have to admit there aren’t too many shows I’m chopping at the bit to watch, but there are a handful. Of that limited number, Mindy Kaling’s highly anticipated first named “Mindy” then “It’s Messy” before settling on the better than “It’s Messy” worse than “Mindy” “The Mindy Project” is on the top of my list to watch.

Developed from her execution of  The Office character Kelly Kapoor, Mindy’s brand of unabashed femininity and quick wit, has become a model for many smart, feminine (or not), young women today in a similar vein to Tina Fey. Hopefully The Mindy Project  will be Kaling’s 30 Rock and we can say we knew her when. (As if writing for and acting in a critically acclaimed comedy show and writing a best selling book of essays isn’t already a great accomplishment.)

I think something we’ve all learned (or relearned) this year, is to not expect every show starring women or center around a woman to speak to all women and not to get bent out of shape when it doesn’t reflect our specific situation or personalities; that not every person of color has the same experiences and that everyone deserves to tell their story. The quality of any program is about execution, not topic.

Pilots are flawed measures of a series, but I’m excited to see what Mindy has up her sleeve for this show.

it’s just a tv show, or the Glee problem

I’ve been told  I take tv (and movies) too seriously. I like to say I accept their role in shaping personal and social perspectives and don’t pretend to be above the influence (or maybe just pretend I’m above the influence but not everyone is). That middle America doesn’t care about representation of women, minorities, and social issues in pop culture doesn’t really matter because they’re worried about their own problems like the unemployment rate, taking care of their ailing parents, or their own disintegrating sanity. That the only role tv and film should aspire to is entertaining the public.

And it’s the privileged who are able to say this the most because they already see their stories.  They see perspectives similar to theirs validated for the rest of America and other parts of the world to consume, they hear their voices.

To deny that you get at least some social cues from your entertainment choices is to passively accept them. Or to dismiss pop culture’s role as reflection of the era it’s created in because vampires aren’t real is a farce; emotions are still real. I don’t understand the point of storytelling if not to tell a story or the idea that anything can exist within a vacuum.

If we don’t critique shows by the rules of the universe they live in and their intended responses, then how else? I’m a bit baffled by the assertion that a show and its creators shouldn’t be responsible for the issues they decide to take on. If Glee wants to take on serious issues, it has every right to do so, but can’t call foul when others call them out for half-heartedly inserting issues like teenage bullying/suicide and domestic violence without proper follow-through. It can’t give reductive explanations and force problems many real people deal with on tertiary characters and then congratulate itself for bringing up the issue at all, or lean on the fact that they managed to portray a white, male, homosexual coming out with grace, dignity, and understanding. Glee gets a lot of criticism because it asks to be taken seriously when it tries to highlight serious issues, that’s the context. If the creators elevate the show to educational levels, then it behooves critics and audiences to judge the show at that level (which it ultimately fails at – I love Glee as a satirical comedy and the journey of a handful of high school kids with a song in their heart, but it should stop shoehorning serious issues into episodes already stuffed with plot).

Just because not all shows seek to provide a higher function doesn’t mean when one does we should handle it with kid gloves and a trophy for trying. I’m not sure why creators of pop culture should get a free pass on their actions and the ideas their works create under the guise that “it’s just a tv show”. It’s just like every other form of communication, the fact that the characters are fictional is irrelevant to the message it expresses.

There’s entertainment for entertaining, and then there’s entertainment for entertaining-plus. When you put yourself in the latter camp, you justly deserve to be condemned when it doesn’t live up to its plus. Even noble intentions doesn’t excuse poor execution.

three cheers for positivity

From Late Night With Jimmy Fallon to Parks and Recreation to The Muppet Movie positive comedy is back and ready to make you laugh and feel good, all at once!

I’m thrilled I get to watch couples who genuinely like and support each other such as in Up All Night and Happy Endings instead of wives who are put off by their lazy husbands and husbands who can’t stand their nagging wives. The old tropes are excessive, sexist, and generally not all that funny or interesting.

I recently (if you define recently loosely) watched two lovely documentaries, Bill Cunningham New York and Being Elmo, that follow two incredibly optimistic and grounded individuals who love what they do. These two are a couple of my favorite movies in the past year because they don’t feel gimmicky. These men have pure passion for their work and for the finer parts of humanity, their enthusiasm for life leaves me feeling hopeful without it being overwrought.

It’s refreshing to see so many optimistic, but not sentimental portrayals of life in pop culture. It’s not about everything being great and working out, or even that people are ultimately good. It’s just people, being people and living lives that semi-resemble our own with laughter and friendships and some heartbreak, but nothing earth-shattering or overly dramatic. When watching Late Night, you can tell Jimmy Fallon genuinely just enjoys his life and his job; same can be said about Leslie Knope in Parks and Recreation or even the employees of The Office’s fictional paper supply chain Dunder Mifflin are more-or-less satisfied, or reaching fulfillment. Our favorite workplace marrieds, Jim and Pam, have found some peace in selling paper since Jim’s got the girl and Pam’s dream of being an artist has been put on hold. Ultimately, isn’t that was life is about, finding joy in where you are? We all can’t live the glamorous life of the creative-types depicted in most of entertainment, some of us are office workers or local government drones, but there’s still joy in the living, still humor and drama, celebrations and heartbreak.

There’s something for smart criticism and negative commentary, an important part of culture to tell harrowing stories of heartbreak and the worst parts of humanity, but that’s not all of it. Sarcasm and biting wit have a place, but for a while it has overshadowed sincerity and joy, because there’s a lot of that in life too.

So sing a happy song, and the whole wide world will sing along.

Glee: the anti Friday Night Lights

Let me be very clear, my three and a half year relationship with Glee has been volatile, but we’re finally in a very good place. I loved it, was angry at it for not living up to my expectations, hated it, hated myself for sort of still loving it, we took a break, and now I love it again, mostly. And I know it’s critically panned, but I’m invested. It’s high-octane, it’s ridiculous, it’s best when it doesn’t take itself too seriously, and it’s too full of stories to properly tell one, but at least it’s entertaining. I’m emotionally invested and I’ve come to accept the over-the-top performances, the incoherent storytelling, the shifting tone from episode-to-episode, and the fact that the world Glee resides is some odd alternate universe made up in tv land, thus allowing me to suspend disbelief more often than not. (But Burt winning a seat in the US Congress?! And Will was his campaign manager?! That’s one thing I still can’t wrap my head around, but even with all its inconsistancies, this show is at its worst when it deals with the adults.)

Where Glee excels in fantasy performance, Friday Night Lights was a realistic utopia. Jace Lacob tweeted that Friday Night Lights was a bout “dreams found and postponed”, not football. And that’s true, and does so with the grace of small town charm. It allows moments to breathe and knows that sometimes a look is better than a monologue.

But Glee is also about dreams, the process of finding them and losing them, but in spectacular fashion, laser shows and jazz hands required. From the start, the failures of the adults in this world (Will Schuester, April Rhodes, and Shelby Corcoran all have had unsuccessful or stalled Broadway dreams) cloud the aspirations of the most determined divas on the glee club (notably Rachel Berry, but later Kurt Hummel shared dreams of Broadway stardom and  Quinn Fabray inexplicably started desiring the stage and got into Yale’s school of performance arts – this show should recognize that many kids who are in their high school, or even college, theater problems don’t end up in the performing arts in adulthood). The dreams in Friday Night Lights are markedly more attainable than stardom. Coach Taylor is pretty content to be the head coach of a high school state champion football team in small town Dillon, Texas, and though we see the exuberance of college scouting with Smash Williams and Vince Howard, the goal seemed more about giving their mothers a better life than it was about becoming a NFL superstar.

It’s a show more focused on destination than the journey. This is one reason they are so awful at arcs. This season we’ve seen a political campaign fight and a production of West Side Story fizzle away after a handful of episodes, then off to the next spectacle. (Todd VanDerWerff of AV Club mentioned this Murphy-Falchuk habit in a review of American Horror Story.) Where Friday Night Lights is built on piecing together life’s small moments, Glee can’t seem to get away from them fast enough. For Glee, life’s just a succession of sprints, one not necessarily flowing into the next with the same context or history; Friday Night Lights treats life as a marathon, pacing events, working around disappointments and pitfalls, and celebrating successes.

If you’re watching Glee for consistent characterization, coherent storylines,  or anything grounded in reality, you’re probably watching the wrong show. As much as it’s hyped as bringing awareness to bullying and GLTQ issues, it mostly fails, and too often falls into stereotypes. When it pokes fun at itself in that meta way that is so popular, it doesn’t feel so much tongue-in-cheek as it just brings focus on its flaws, which doesn’t necessarily make it better or make the problem disappear. It treats bullying as a sometimes-problem. (It’s bad, but not when it’s funny!) And I can’t be the only one who thinks it has an Asian/race problem (which is also ingrained in Hollywood), treating most of the minority characters, with the exception of Santana Lopez, as glorified extras most of the time, especially Tina Cohen-Chang, an original member of New Directions, who still hasn’t received an arc of her own, nor has she been given a solo without being interrupted or choking, and inexplicably vanished from one recent episode without notice.

Glee started out telling a classic story of boy meets girl. In this case, jock meets musical theater ‘loser’, and continued to use the athletics/performing arts comparison throughout, especially in the first season watching Finn wrestle between his growing feelings toward Rachel, and his responsibilities to the mother of his supposed child. Season two was kind of a trainwreck as far as story. The season felt like a reboot, devoid of history from the first. The third season has found it’s main conflict with Rachel Berry and her decision of love (in one Finn Hudson), career (school in New York, eventual Broadway), and whether she can balance the two at the ripe old age of seventeen (unless that has been retconned and she is now eighteen). The plan as of now, is to continue to follow a few of these characters outside the halls of McKinnley next season; something Friday Night Lights only did sparingly, sometimes to the point of just background shot of Smash Williams playing a game on the television as a treat for regular viewers. While we saw the first generation characters get cycled back in to touch base with Dillon, it was obvious they had lives outside of the town, and the show.

Even down to their casting choices, Glee prefers big names to unfamiliar faces. It likes to remind you that this is not the world you live in. Britney Spears! Gwyneth Paltrow! Idina Menzel and Kristin Chenoweth! And most recently, Ricky Martin! (One of Rachel’s dads is Jeff Goldblum, and soon we will see Gloria Estefon as Santana’s mother.) This show does not do subtle, everything is heightened.

I think some fans’ and critics’ expectations of the show are different than the goals of the creators, which leads to disappointment. Not to say the show shouldn’t aspire for more consistency in plot and character development, because it would make for more enjoyable storytelling, but I sometimes wonder what some people expect when they’re watching the show. I’ve come to terms with the outlandish and enjoy myself much more for that. (I stopped watching after the front half of the second season because I was so frustrated and full of anger, and came back this summer with more open to what the show had become.)

I’m not telling anyone they should love Glee or that no one should complain. I have completely shallow, non-quality reasons I still watch this show. There will be many who think even comparing these two shows is sacrilege, one is a hearty soup and one is fluffy cotton candy, but why can’t you have room in life for both?

(And if you wanted, you can read this article by Heather Havrilesky in the New York Times a few months ago that also compares these two shows, but focuses on FNL.)

so wait, there are only twenty-four hours in a day?

And I need to make room for six to eight hours to sleep?

If I could forgo sleeping I might, but that’s what night owl me says; morning me will press the snooze button at least half a dozen times before rolling onto her back and checking her twitter and email for another hour before hopping to the shower. Since right now I don’t have a proper start-time, I end up ready to start my day later than I would prefer.

My media consumption habits, or media diet, a term my friend recently teased me about, are like many a-modern persons, insane and impossible to sustain. Try as I might, I always fall behind on one area of interest or another.

One of my most important “resolutions” (I am constantly making goals throughout the year) is to work on my time management. As you can tell from my morning routine, I have a lot of work to do. (Reading and writing more is also on top of this list, but really everything comes down to managing my time better.)

Below is just a collage of currently airing shows I want to start/catch up on this month. I might give myself two months for this list.

{Downton Abbey (four in!), Revenge, Vampire Diaries, The Hour, Game of Thrones, The Middle, Raising Hope, Louie, Shameless}

My Things of 2011.

A day late and a dollar short (well, a week late), but here are a few of my 2011 things. This is not a best of or a top # list, these are just a handful of things that kept me sane and happy in 2011.

Podcasts: Nerdist Writers Panel, Pop Culture Happy Hour, Radio Lab, Fresh Air, Weekend All Things

NBC shows: The network has become something of a cult favorite. Small on viewership if Nielson has anything to say, but big on the devoted fanbase. Some highlights of this year: Parks & Recreation and Community making a killer 8pm duo, Friday Night Lights ending its run on the network, Parenthood,  Up All Night becoming my favorite new show of the season.

CIA/Spy shows: Nikita, Fringe, and Chuck all keeping me entertained and invested to their characters with the bonus of ass kicking.

Politics and Government on my tv: Parks & Recreation, The Good Wife, Homeland. My favorite shows have a theme. Sort of.

British and Cable Television: My patience went through the grinder for part of this year, but thanks to short British and cable seasons (and the half hour comedy) I was still able to get my tv kicks in with a few, shorter, marathons of shows like Bored to Death, Luther, Misfits, Boardwalk Empire, Breaking Bad, and the like. (I have yet to watch Downton Abbey, partially because of my historical distaste for English periods, but I may get on that soon. Game of Thrones is also high on my list.) And of course my favorite new drama, Homeland, was on premium cable too.

Folk music: Head & the Heart, Mumford & Sons, Freelance Whales (okay, not folk but they don’t sound out of place!), Blind Pilot, Bon Iver, Fleet Foxes, Laura Marling, City & Colour, Band of Horses made up the bulk of my 2011 soundtrack.

Female music: Nicki Minaj, Grace Potter, Florence + the Machine, Adele, Lykke Li, Oh Land.

TV writers and critics on twitter: If 2010 was more about the political journalists in my twitter life, this year was the year of tv writers and critics. @tvoti, @MonkeySee, @Televisionary, @Poniewozik, @AlyssaRosenberg, @KenTremendous, @MindyKaling, and @DanHarmon are some who entertained me the most, especially in the second half of the year. (This list is far from comprehensive, I’m just spitballing.)

British prints: Erdem, Mary Katrantzou, and Peter Pilotto have made me swoon with their use of prints this year.