Mandel Maven's Nest Quality Television


I, Nora Lee Mandel, am as much an auteurist with TV as I am with movies, as TV has become a writer's medium as the producer.

[Q]uirky shows . . . always test poorly. They need time to build an audience. . .I don't want to be one of those "hour" guys who is all bitter about reality TV. . . The slot machine of television. Keep feeding it quarters and eventually you'll hit the jackpot. But if a network like Fox can't nurture and properly launch a scripted hour--it's becoming the network that develops interesting programming, then drops it. The network where I don't want to watch what's cool, because my heart will be broken. . . I am ready. I have now made my bones. I've worked with great people, proven that I can run a show, and it's time for me to create my own. Well, you know-- it seems like a really weird time to try to do that. . . I'm too tired to be mad. It's hard to be mad when they pay you this much money. . . You know, if you position the thing to fail it's going to fail. . . And it's like "More proof that something odd can't survive" -- when you have your hands around its throat.
---from an interview with Tim Minear, producer of the quickly cancelled by Fox Wonderfalls (complete unaired season out on DVD; all rerunning on Logo network) and Firefly in The New York Times, by Emily Nussbaum, "Same Night, Same Channel, Same Giant Bummer," 4/18/2004


[John] Landgraf, [the president] of FX. . .raised a more basic point for the basic cable channels: “One of the challenges everyone faces is, are there more quality shows than the audience can humanly watch?” in The New York Times, by Bill Carter, “Cable TV Is Having Breakout Summer”, 8/9/2007 NO! (especially if they are available On Demand for time-shifting


From the days that Stephen Cannell put his mark on Wiseguy by creating the arc to Steven Bochco's revolutionary continuing story lines of Hill Street Blues (2 seasons out on DVD) to the revealing domesticity of Marshall Herskovitz and Edward Zwick in thirtysomething and My So-Called Life (in DVD box set), I learned to follow the writer who chooses to work in TV as an art form, particularly those with a vision and a story to tell in dramas. So my Q or whatever scores are also high for: Paul Abbott, J. J. Abrams, Judd Apatow, Paul Attanasio, Edward Bernero, Chris Carter, David Chase, Robert Cochran, Tom Fontana, Jane Espenson, Diane Frolov, Bryan Fuller, Tim Kring, Lynda LaPlante, Michael Loceff, David Milch, Ronald Moore, Siobhan Byrne O'Connor, the Palladinos, David Shore, David Simon, Aaron Sorkin, Thania St. John, Joel Surnow, John Wells, Joss Whedon, Jacqueline Zambrano. Every time you watch a so-called reality show you're giving these brilliant architects less real estate in the TV world to build on! (let alone other creative union members.) Here's my recommendations on the writers to watch what they have to say. Full creative credits are at the IMDb. All times are Eastern.

Lilith Watch: Critical Guide to Jewish Women on TV


24 (on Fox. Season 7 coming in 2009 after a end-of-2008 November Sweeps week prequel. A & E is running earlier seasons and other days are in syndication -- I have no idea how you folks watching it that way can keep of which "day" you're watching. 6 seasons out on DVD, 1st season re-released enhanced. Soundtrack available. Renewed for 2 more days.) The producers of La Femme Nikita rebound from that cancellation (so why can't they find a role for "Michael"?) by sticking it in the eye of the imitative Alias with this thrilling, complicated, violent ride through a single exhausting day in the life of a government agent trying to prevent an assassination (the first season) and a nuclear bombing (the second season) and a plague (the third season) which was really a devilishly clever way for the producers to get a 24-episode commitment from Fox. On Charlie Rose in May 2005, producer Joel Surnow explained that Season 1 was influenced by movies, like The Day of the Jackal, In the Line of Fire and Three Days of the Condor, but since 9/11 they've been more influenced by the real world.

I originally filed this under HUNK 'O' METER because not only do we get Kiefer Sutherland and Carlos Bernard, but also in the first season a coupla hunks with Eastern European accents who kept getting killed off, and a few other hunks who it took awhile to figure out if they were good guys. But the stories are just so gripping, involving, and creative that I now officially consider this "quality." The multi-tasking screens remind me of the 1965 World's Fair's dazzling showcases, but actually serve a simultaneity purpose. The 2nd season closer twist really got me looking through past episode guides to figure out where that loose assassin came from in the 1st season. The former Penney Johnson should have gotten nommed for an Emmy for her turn as Lady MacBeth -- whew, and folks used to criticize Hilary? Loved her version of Bette Davis in The Little Foxes.

The third season played very effectively on our current fears about terrorism and hazards and really giving Reiko Aylsworth a chance to show her stuff. Ah, the fourth day is once again full of Lady MacBeths and Damsels in Distress! As Frank Rich wryly noted in The New York Times on January 9, 2005: "As 2005 begins, we must confront the prospect that a fictional TV action hero is more engaged with the war on terror than those in Washington who actually have his job." Yeah for "Tony" --much embittered by his experiences --to returning to save the day -- but once he declared his love to his ex we knew he was doomed as everyone other than "Jack.") But Season 6 is no longer "the worst day of my life" - so which one was? (updated 5/20/2008)

From Maureen Dowd in The New York Times 1/18/2005 in Looking for a Democratic Tough Guy, or Girl: "If the Democrats are like the dithering Desperate Housewives, the Republicans have come across like the counterterrorism agent "Jack Bauer" on 24: fast with a gun, loose with the law, willing to torture in the name of protecting the nation. Except "Jack Bauer" is competent. . . Whatever else you can say about the Bush crowd, they stick to their guns, even when they can't shoot straight."
The Wall Street Journal on 3/24/2006, The Pilot Season's Magic Number by John Lippman, finally took notice of 24's impact on TV networks with lots of imitators: "A TV show with a dominant, continuing story line 'works like a 13-hour or 24-hour movie,' says [agent] John Bauman. . .And that has attracted talented screenwriters. 'Writers really want to write for these shows because they are character-driven.'. . .TV writers. . . say they find the serialized format a breath of fresh air in the Hollywood smog of formulaic dramas. 'You can develop a character and that's pretty interesting,' says Jack Orman, a former executive producer of E.R.. . .
But attracting writers isn't the main thing driving these shows. As with most things in Hollywood, economics is key: 24 has become a big seller on DVD, and DVD sales are a growing part of TV industry profits. The sale of TV shows on DVD last year rose 19% to an estimated $2.6 billion, accounting for nearly 20% of the overall DVD sales market, according to Adams Media Research, which tracks the video market.
But unlike buyers of traditional TV shows on DVD, who typically want to rewatch favorite episodes, a large number of 24 DVDs are catching up with episodes they missed, so they can join in seeing the live broadcasts, says Mike Dunn, president of Fox Home Entertainment. [Lippman conveniently doesn't point out that this math only works for a vertically integrated product of studio, network and distributor, such as also with HBO, which not all quality shows have the luxury of being birthed in such a conglomerate.]
So far, consumers have bought nearly three million DVDs of 24--equivalent to the DVD sales of a movie that has done about $50 million in ticket sales. That accounts for 'a large chunk of the revenue for the show,' Mr. Dunn says. In addition, although reruns of such dramas traditionally fare poorly on broadcast TV, they can perform well on cable networks since they have the flexibility to run a marathon of back-to-back episodes, as Fox's FX channel has done with 24. [Not since Season 2, I think.] Overall at Fox, sales of popular series repackaged as DVDs now generate more than $200 million annually, the company says, about the amount it used to earn from sales to local stations of reruns of such shows as Cops and The Simpsons before the syndication market cooled in the 1990's.
The Longest Day Enters the Hardest Season, New York Times, December 5, 2004, By Joe Rhodes
For no particular reason, except possibly to torture himself, Robert Cochran keeps a neatly typed story/character grid from the first season of "24", the real-time television spy thriller he and Joel Surnow created four years ago, pinned to the bulletin board of his otherwise memento-free office. It's a comprehensive episode-by-episode cheat sheet of the actions and interactions of every major character, the pivotal plot points, the timing of every twist.
It was all there, six episodes' worth, meticulously planned before the pilot was even broadcast: every exploding, collapsing, double-crossing, fate-of-the-nation, assassination-plot cliffhanger that would soon turn "24" into the most talked-about television show of 2001.
Considering the complexities of the plots, and the fact that each season's 24 hour-long episodes (with a ticking countdown clock on screen at all times) sketch out a single crisis-filled day in the life of the nation, a precise outline would seem indispensable. Except, it didn't work out that way.
"That was the furthest ahead we were ever able to plan," Mr. Cochran says, wistfully, walking over to the first-season grid, touching it as if it were some kind of long-lost relic. "We were able to plan ahead maybe five or six episodes a couple of more times that season. In the second season, maybe three or four."
And this year?
He looks a little embarrassed. "This year, I would say ...none."
Hard as it is to believe - and Mr. Cochran says no one from the outside ever believes it - the writers of "24" are pretty much making it up as they go along, this year more than ever. And when the fourth season debuts on Fox on Jan. 9 (it then moves to a new Monday-night time slot), they will be doing it in the midst of wholesale cast changes, embarking on dramatically new story lines and further testing the loyalty of an audience that has already seen practically every major character - including Agent Jack Bauer, the show's world-weary centerpiece played by Kiefer Sutherland - disgraced, compromised, tortured and, in some cases, killed. . . . besides Mr. Sutherland, only one member of last season's cast will return (though many of the departed will make brief appearances over the course of the season).
. . ."We love the characters and we love the actors, but we just ran out of things for them to do under the configuration we had set up," Mr. Cochran says, explaining why he and Mr. Surnow felt such drastic changes were necessary. "I'm not sure the network was thrilled, but we'd really put the characters in positions where there was no place to go with them."
For the record, the network was not thrilled. "I did have doubts, of course - anyone would," says Gail Berman, Fox's president of entertainment, when asked how she initially reacted to the idea of revamping one of her network's highest-profile shows. "But '24' is just a different animal. It has an audience that has come to expect the unexpected."
. . .But inevitably he gets drawn back into the counterterrorism maelstrom and once again finds himself facing a day in which lives will be at stake, terrible things will happen and naps will not be an option.
Beyond the existence of terrorist sleeper cells in America, Mr. Cochran and Mr. Surnow won't talk much about future story lines - partly because they don't want to spoil the surprise, partly because they still don't know how things are going to play out. "Every season is like a brand-new jigsaw puzzle," Mr. Cochran says, trying to explain how it is that, four seasons in, the seven-person writing staff still can't manage to work out the plot more than a week or two in advance. "If we could figure out what the magic formula is, we'd be thrilled. But we haven't been able to do that."
"Sometimes," he humbly says, "it's just hard to think of good stuff. And everything on this show affects everything else. If I'm sitting at my word processor and come up with what I think is a great idea for a character, then I run next door and find out that maybe they've just killed that character. So now I have to go to that writer and say, 'No, don't kill that guy. I need him.' Well, now that other episode is completely screwed up. So we have to sit down and rethink that other episode and if part of it is already shot, we have big problems.
"So we go back, tear things apart and put them together in way that will accommodate what I want to do in the next episode, and by then we're only a week away from shooting. Then, of course, the production people will come in and say, 'We can't do this' for some technical reason. So we tear it apart again. By the time we do all that, we're lucky to make it."
Characters often get painted into corners, and sometimes, the writers freely admit, the last-second solutions are less than elegant. . . ."Sometimes the show runs strictly on adrenaline and velocity," says Howard Gordon, who shares executive producer credits with Mr. Cochran and Mr. Surnow. "Our job is to make sure the train is moving fast enough so that, even if there's a hole in the track, it'll keep going.
And all of that, Mr. Gordon believes, hinges on Mr. Sutherland's portrayal of Jack Bauer, an intense and often grim character constantly forced to make horrible choices - sometimes including the killing of innocent bystanders – to save lives and protect the people he cares about.
"Jack is this really tragic character," Mr. Gordon says. "He's really the walking damned. He can't have the life the rest of us have. He kind of bleeds for our sins."
It hasn't been all that easy for Mr. Sutherland either. "Season one was difficult," the actor acknowledges. "It was an act of faith. And after making 48 films, you end up a little low in the faith department. There were so many things being done at the last minute, it kind of scared me. But now I trust that they'll work things out." That includes the radical changes in the cast, the individual members of which - himself included - he considers less important than the show's innovative format.
"The format could go on forever," he says. "They could make it about a firefighter's worst day. Or someone in the Army. Or a woman who's pregnant, and her car has broken down."
Of course, he doesn't know whether the producers would ever consider anything like that. But then again, neither do they.
The Twist for '24' May Be in Its Ratings by Neil Amdur, The New York Times, January 14, 2006
"The rituals will begin again this weekend - the ticking clock, a country in crisis and Jack Bauer trying to save the world. For millions of 24 fans, the start of the fifth season brings back-to-back two-hour episodes Sunday and Monday on Fox, and please, no phone calls until the show is over. Maintaining its prime-time grip on a loyal (some might say addicted) following can prove challenging, especially since 24 now has competition in the terror business from other shows. Its producers' answer has been to ratchet up the threats, which seem to mirror real events, from bioterrorism to torture. Last season's plots included a middle-class, Islamic sleeper-cell family in Southern California, nuclear footballs, deadly rocket attacks, strained Sino-American relations and a shaky American president. Woven through this political mosaic were countless personal subplots within the show's counterterrorist unit that, at season's end, left A"gent Bauer" (Kiefer Sutherland) presumed dead, in the tradition of James Bond, Jack Ryan and Jason Bourne.
But as one of Bauer's antagonists noted wryly in Season 3, 'the guy has more lives than a cat.' Promotional trailers on Fox are trumpeting "Jack Is Back" in large type, and the newly released DVD set of Season 4 includes a 10-minute prequel of Season 5, with Bauer, looking shaggy in a hooded sweatshirt, on the run in Chicago.
The larger question is whether 24 can build on its average viewing audience of 12.1 million from Season 4 (an increase of 20 percent over the previous year) and sustain enough new and plausible plotlines to complement its trademark split-screen images and tense action sequences. Or will viewers shift to newer, equally edgy terror-themed shows like Showtime's critically praised Sleeper Cell, or The Unit, which will begin on CBS in March starring a familiar 24, face, Dennis Haysbert?
Joel Surnow, who created 24 with Robert Cochran, said in a telephone interview from the show's offices in Chatsworth, Calif., that some of the new season would necessarily entail 'Jack Bauer kicking down doors and saving lives.' But he continued: 'You have to find inspiration with new sets of characters or stories. Those are as important as the necessity of stopping the bomb or the weapon of the season.' . . .
The new season creates a fresh identity (at least at the outset) and more maneuverability for "Bauer", as he works anonymously in the California oil fields. 'There's a freedom in the character that's never existed before,' Mr. Sutherland said during a recent phone interview. 'He wants to make it without any obligations to himself or anybody else.'
Mr. Surnow, Mr. Cochran and Fox network executives have moved past their initial concern that constructing a 24-episode season in real time was impossible for viewers accustomed to weekly resolutions. The show reaped the dividends of Fox's gamble last year to open Season 4 in January for the first time, with two-hour segments on successive nights, the first following a ratings-heavy N.F.L. playoff game. (Another playoff game will precede Sunday's opener.) Starting in January instead of September also allowed the show to run continuously until its May season finale without the weight of reruns that might slow momentum and viewer buzz.
Last season's doubleheader was seen by 15.3 million viewers on the first night and 13.3 million on the second, according to Fox. In reaching its 100th episode this year, 24 has become Fox's most upscale show and its strongest franchise behind American Idol. The series is being shown around the world, syndicated reruns are airing on cable and local channels, and DVD sales of last season were 56 percent higher in the first week than sales for Season 3, according to Fox. (DVD sales of Seasons 1 through 3 have totaled 2.5 million units.) Fox has also decided to pair 24 and its successful new series, Prison Break, on Mondays, with Prison Break returning to the schedule in March.
Another barometer of the show's impact is the increased traffic on various Web sites that vie not only as "spoilers," with advance plot clues that may or may not be accurate (one such site is "The 24 Insider," at www.24spoilers.tvheaven.com), but also offer debates about the plausibility of various high-tech gadgets and escape mechanisms.
Fox executives prefer to avoid commenting on plot specifics raised by Web sites, but Peter Liguori, the president of entertainment for Fox, said, 'it does deepen the audience relationship to the show' and gives viewers a choice on how much they want to know in advance.
The willingness to take on sensitive issues has worked for 24. Last season, before Sleeper Cell took viewers inside Islamic terror minds, 24 turned the Iranian-born actress Shohreh Aghdashloo's portrayal of Dina Araz, the matriarch of a Muslim-American family, into a painfully realistic performance. Clifford Peterson, a professor at Ramapo College in Mahwah, N.J., plans to use material from the current season as part of a course on terrorism next fall. 'It has raised a number of issues before it was raised by the media,' Mr. Peterson said. 'That's a real contribution the show makes beyond the entertainment value.'
The show's audience composition also belies certain stereotypes for action-based dramas. Last season, according to Fox research, 53 percent of the audience was male, 47 percent female. The previous year, it was 52 percent female, 48 percent male.
Mr. Sutherland said the positive audience response to his character 'working alone as a lone wolf' has challenged him. He cites Bauer's tearful breakdown in a pickup truck at the end of Season 3 as his most poignant moment to date, but both he and Carlos Bernard, who plays the long-running character "Tony Almeida", described a scene they recently shot together as 'awesome' and among their most satisfying.
Unlike Mr. Surnow, who envisions as much as an 80 percent audience turnover by the end of this season, Mr. Sutherland said he felt that the core viewer had remained since the first season.
That may include the chairman and chief software architect of Microsoft, Bill Gates, an otherwise infrequent television viewer. Mr. Gates told The New Yorker in October that he watches 24 while on the treadmill and would be prepared to discuss Season 4 more fully after he spent several days with the DVD. On how long the show can continue to hold its grip, Mr. Sutherland says, "as much pressure as it is to stay in real-life confines, that question of how many bad days we'll allow is how many the audience will tolerate." (Copyright 2006, The New York Times Company)
Character Surviving So Jack Bauer Can Live Another Day, by Coeli Carr, The New York Times, January 15, 2006
On Day 1 of 24 - the Fox series that each season chronicles an eventful day in the life of the Counter Terrorism Unit - "Tony Almeida" was inscrutable and shadowy, a guy who would almost certainly turn out to be a mole. The next season, Day 2, he fell in love with his colleague "Michelle Dessler" and, a proven good guy, was handed the reins to the agency. On Day 3, married to "Michelle", "Tony" almost lost her to a deadly virus and then committed treason to save her from the clutches of bad guys. And on Day 4, disheveled, haggard and broken, he emerged a third of the way into the season as still the only guy that "Jack Bauer", the unit's star agent, trusts with his life.
'There are not many shows that allow you to play that kind of evolution in a character,' said Carlos Bernard, who plays Tony Almeida. Day 5 of 24 begins tonight, and Tony returns not as an agency employee but as the owner of his own security business.
Mr. Bernard's "Tony Almeida" and Kiefer Sutherland's "Jack Bauer" are the only characters who have endured from the beginning of 24. 'It has to do with the style of the show in that, between every season, there's this year-and-a-half-or-so gap, and you're able to imagine the change in the character and work in what has happened in between,' Mr. Bernard said of the plot developments that have shaped his portrayal of "Tony". 'Between the third and fourth seasons, I was obviously put in jail, was released, started drinking and my marriage had broken up. There was all this I got to feed into the character.'
Howard Gordon, an executive producer of 24, said, 'Because we get only one glimpse of this one day in their lives, we have this obligation to dramatize how people have grown in this time.' Mr. Gordon has high praise for Mr. Bernard's acting. 'It's a charisma thing," he said. 'Even just the way his head is slightly cocked, his voice is always a little bit low so you find yourself leaning a little bit forward to listen to him.'
The performance is so appealing that it may have extended Tony's life span. 'On several occasions, Almeida has survived first drafts where he died,' Mr. Gordon said. 'And then we said, 'Aw, we can't kill Tony.' He's kind of the character with nine lives.'
Mr. Bernard's character is also unobtrusively Hispanic, in contrast with many Hispanic characters on television whose ethnicity, Mr. Gordon said, 'becomes their kind of character, rather than the situation they're in.' The low-key approach suits Mr. Bernard, who grew up in Chicago and whose mother was from Madrid. 'I like that, because you know what? There are Hispanic-Americans in the workplace and it's not an issue, they do their job,' he said, adding that the only time "Tony" spoke Spanish on the program was during the first season, when he questioned a colleague - 'very briefly, just to drive a point home to her' - who had betrayed the team. (Copyright 2006, The New York Times Company)
From As the Plot Thickens, No One Is Safe by Kate Aurthur. The New York Times, March 14, 2006
"In playing "Tony" for five years, Mr. Bernard always wondered when his number would come up. 'My feeling every year going into the next year was, listen, if there's an interesting story line, great, let's do it,' he said on the telephone last week. 'But if there's not, it's time to move on, really. Creatively, I didn't get into acting to play one character my whole life.' Tony was supposed to die in the season premiere, along with his wife, "Michelle", who blew up in a car, and former "President David Palmer", who was shot. Howard Gordon, an executive producer of 24, said that Mr. Bernard suggested that "Tony" last longer into the season to try to avenge "Michelle"s death. He and the writers agreed it was a good idea, partly because the idea of killing three popular characters in the season opener seemed risky. 'It was just so depressing that it felt overwhelming,' Mr. Gordon said."
So while everyone else cringes at the torture and right-wing conspiracy politics, I still watch for the hunks, and the strong women who love them on this show – every fan was thrilled when this character was revealed in Day 6 to have married the now promoted to National Security Advisor “Karen Hayes” played by the non-young, non-dumb blonde Jayne Atkinson. Even The New York Times noticed one of my long-time TV favorites in one of their series on TV character profiles on 4/1/2007 by Walter Dawkins in Walk Tightropes. Teach Yoga. Fight Terrorists: “On the Fox drama 24 Bill Buchanan, the stoic, by-the-book chief of the Counter-Terrorism Unit, is the steady face of calm in a maelstrom of frantic activity. No matter what the crisis — exploding nuclear bombs, deadly virus attacks or political assassinations — Buchanan is a rock, and he remains unshaken as Jack Bauer and company race to save the day.
That’s why when Buchanan briefly lost his temper after the nuclear terrorist Hasan Numair escaped the unit’s grasp in this season’s fourth episode, it was as explosive as anything else that hour. “We have to do better than we’re doing and we have to do it faster,” he yelled at his staff in a show of emotion that was both uncharacteristic and memorable because of it. ‘There have to be moments where he loses it,”‘ James Morrison, 53, who plays Buchanan, said. ‘If you pick those moments where he does have that quick explosion, then everyone will take notice.’ But it’s his unwavering composure that makes Buchanan essential. ‘We feel like we don’t want to take his hand off the steering wheel because it’s so steady,’ said Howard Gordon, an executive producer of the show. ‘He’s sort of the grown-up in the room, the straight man for other people who certainly make it a more colorful place to watch.’
Mr. Morrison’s take is that ‘workers relate to this guy because he’s willing to question his own decisions and beliefs and allow the people around him to blossom and to be themselves because he trusts them.’ Buchanan is straight-laced and buttoned down, but Mr. Morrison’s career has been an eclectic one. Raised in Anchorage, Alaska, he would often take jobs with his father, who worked at a construction company, building highways. Mr. Morrison began his acting career as a clown and tightrope walker for the Carson & Barnes Wild Animal Circus. He said he didn’t enjoy the experience and quit after injuring his back in a fall. ‘But it did prepare me for being an actor because as bad as it can get in Hollywood trying to make a living, nothing compared to how bad it was in the circus.’
He worked as a truck driver, waiter, furniture stripper, landscaper and busboy while crisscrossing the country acting in regional theater, doing small movie roles and making television appearances on shows like Quantum Leap, L.A. Law and Frasier (he played Lilith’s new husband). He landed his first regular role on the Fox science-fiction series Space: Above and Beyond [That’s where I fell in love with him.], in the mid-’90s, and got the role of Buchanan on the fourth season of 24.
Mr. Morrison is also a certified yoga instructor and has been teaching at the Center for Yoga in Los Angeles for five years. He said yoga helped him in playing Buchanan. ‘There’s so much insanity and so much dysfunction in the story that it craves an element of balance,’ said Mr. Morrison, who lives in Los Angeles with his wife, Riad Galayini, and their 7-year-old son, Seamus. ‘I’m a yogi, and that’s what I try to bring wherever I go.’
Now that he is a mainstay on 24, he said, he no longer asks the show’s hairdresser every week if his character has been killed off yet. But asked if Buchanan would ever bite the dust, Mr. Gordon said: ‘The prospect of it is so nauseating to me, but as we all know, no one’s ever completely safe on 24. I will say that if we were to do it, it would have to be an extraordinary death.’” (Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company)

Brotherhood (on Showtime repeated frequently and On Demand. 2nd season of 10 episodes just completed. 1st season of 12 episodes on DVD, 2nd season of 10 episodes on DVD. Renewed for third season of 8 episodes) Another Son of EZ Streets (streaming online and 4 episodes available on DVD; also showing on Sleuth TV). Won a 2007 Peabody Award for: “Uniformly splendid acting and a strong sense of place characterize this serial drama about two Providence, R.I. brothers, a rising politician and a smalltime gangster, and their morally compromised pursuits of the American dream.” More theatrically operatic than the more realistic The Wire, but wonderfully uses Providence, RI for rich local detail and incestuous claustrophobia of a small, corrupt city almost as well as that uses Baltimore. It builds on Showtime's own Street Time for family criminal issues, crossed with the bare knuckle politics of The Yards, which understood Queens the same way. Annabeth Gish is again a politician's wife as she was on West Wing, but her character has more layers and she explodes on screen here with drugs and lovers, and has become the captivating, tightly wound center of the series. The wives cross the lines of the old neighborhood connections as much as the guys, though Fionnula Flanagan may chew the scenery as a mother as those on past Showtime series -- Sharon Gless in Queer as Folk or Blythe Danner in Huff. Jees, Showtime doesn't even on its Web site give us the Biblical quotes whose citations are the title of each episode. You have to go to TV.com for that.
So we got to see Jason Isaacs be as sexy as he was even briefly in Nine Lives and an arc on West Wing even if his character is full of vengefully brutal violence -- but with a college student? What a relief to hear him a few episodes later explain why he's taken up with his married ex: It's good to talk to a grown-up. And how do they deal with two Jasons while filming - by their last names? Philip Noyce is an executive producer and directed the first episode is how they found yet another Aussie to take over our TVs and hearts, Jason Clarke from Down Under.
"Sanyutta II:10" was unusual, and not just because the title referred to a Buddhist text rather than the usual Christian Bible, but that it was written and directed all by women -- the writing/producing team of Dawn Prestwich and Nicole Yorkin and director Leslie Libman, who has been involved with a lot of my favorite gritty shows that are usually seen as male bastions but have strong women characters, including The Wire. So it was particularly significant that the closing scene was one of the most powerful and complex sex scenes I've seen on TV since La Femme Nikita. Husband "Tommy Caffee" (Clarke) had to pick up wife "Eileen" (Gish) in the middle of the night at a distant police station after she was found angry in the woods and use his political connections to gloss things over. She was high on cocaine and guilt after dumping a kitten there, but she would only admit to the latter. The camera looks in on their kitchen the next morning as she is the über dutiful mother sending off their three daughters efficiently to the school bus. He wanders in (looking quite sexy in his undershirt). She takes his shirt from a hanger and, back to him, almost embraces it. She brings it to him: I ironed your shirt for you. (The last time we saw them make love was while changing the sheets on their bed.) She helps him on with it and the camera caresses the shirt. They intently look at each other - you can certainly tell they are not thinking about putting that shirt on but taking it off. They very slowly kiss in close-up, then the camera is back in distance as they all out lustfully embrace full body to every body part, he spins her around to go at it on the kitchen counter, her shoes falling to the floor and her legs clinging to his thrusts. He comes fast but does she? Is this amends? Payback? Her desperately seeking from him the thrills she's been getting from drugs and the lover who now won't return her calls? He slowly kisses her again and they each methodically re-button their clothes. He struts off to work as she smoothes down her clothes, left there alone in the kitchen. There's a fine line between anger and lust.
She hit rock bottom by the end of the first season with a druggy affair, so her husband rejected her through most of the second. But in the penultimate episode “Call Letter Blues 1:2-6” by Henry Bromell she forcefully re-staked her claim: You, me, the girls, this insignificant little house, I’m not sure my life doesn’t have anything outside of it. So I’ve decided to fight for it. And the episode closed with her looking like a still life portrait from an Edward Hopper painting, as directed by Alik Sakharov. This season also featured really cool music over the closing credits in each episode, though Showtime’s web site doesn’t provide a music guide for this show that it does for it’s others. (updated 2/9/2008)

An analysis that crosses from TV to film - from The Los Angeles Times, July 10, 2006, Fighting Irish: A new clan is muscling in on Hollywood's Italian American gangs, and they're not singing soprano By Lynn Smith
. . .Now, a scruffier, more reckless group is muscling its way onto center stage to sate that audience fascination for crime, corruption and unruly families: the Irish Americans.
These characters drink hard, fight hard and love hard and think nothing of settling slights with violent payback. Their families are often large enough to include criminals, priests, cops, politicians and the labor movement in the extended clan, though any of them is as likely to be crooked as any other.
With histories tying them to their communities over generations and with so many tendrils of connections, these Irish American clans open a wide swath of story possibilities to explore, at a time when Mafia families appear to have run their course.
David Chase, the creator of The Sopranos 'has killed the Italian mobster for all time,' said Blake Masters, co-executive producer of one of the new Irish-themed TV shows: Showtime's Brotherhood which premiered Sunday, about two brothers on opposing sides of the law in Providence, R.I.
Following later this fall and winter will be an Irish American movie from Martin Scorsese and a new TV show from Crash writers Paul Haggis and Robert Moresco.
follows the complex and ever-shifting alliances of the "Caffee" brothers — "Tommy", a state politician, and "Michael", a brutal criminal — who each sport identical gang-style tattoos on their wrists. "The Caffees'" extended family lives in a working-class neighborhood in a dense, industrial-looking section of town with vestiges of powerful public unions and ward politics. The city's decaying homes, shops and factories suit its characters, who are marked by resentment and suspicion, good and evil, Masters said.
'Tommy"s family may be upwardly mobile, but success isn't necessarily the goal. 'In the Irish ideal, you're going to get beat down by the cops, you're going to get your neighborhood stolen, of course you're going to lose your job, so you bond in these clans,' Masters said. 'And so the style with which you go down swinging is important.'
Some say it's about time Irish American mobsters get their cultural due. "There hasn't been any definitive movie that really showed the Irish American gangs," said Jon Favreau, director of Made, a 2001 comedy about low-level gangsters in New York's heavily Irish and Italian Hell's Kitchen. 'There is a lot of fantastic mythology surrounding them. A lot of those stories are 40 years old now. They're ripe for reinvention," he said.
'One of the things about the Irish American underworld, it always overlapped into politics and police and the labor movement, so there's a lot to work with there,' said T.J. English, author of Paddy Whacked a history of the American Irish underground that the History Channel turned into a documentary this year. One character, Boston's Whitey Bulger, the last of the larger-than-life Irish American outlaws, has yet to be explored in either television or film. Facing arrest for murder, Bulger vanished in 1995.
Both Brotherhood and The Departed, a film due this fall from Scorsese, owe something to Bulger, often viewed as the murderous seed in a large family, and his brother Billy, president of the Massachusetts Senate for years. The Departed, a remake of an Asian film about a police mole infiltrating the mob who meets a mob mole infiltrating the police [Infernal Affairs (Wu jian dao)], is Scorsese's second foray into the Irish American gang world after 2002's Gangs of New York.
The new wave of storytelling details the sharpest double-edged elements of the Irish American culture already stamped in the popular imagination as a rough-and-tumble world where almost anything goes, but one in which religion and guilt still play a key role. Characters played by James Cagney in such films as 1931's The Public Enemy ("Mike", an upstanding soldier tries to help his wayward brother, "Tom") or 1938's Angels With Dirty Faces ("Jerry", a priest, tries to help his childhood friend "Rocky", a criminal) set the stereotypes.
More recently, Irish American characters moving into the middle class can't escape their troubled milieus. Plots, sometimes dark to the point of dreary, often pit brothers or former childhood friends against one another. In Mystic River (2003) and FX's Rescue Me (starting in 2004), men cross over to the wrong side of the law almost as easily as not.
The troubled, violent childhoods of the three main characters in Mystic River — an alcoholic ex-con, a mental wreck and a homicide detective — resurface when one of their children is murdered. A false accusation is enough to lead one to stab and shoot another in retribution.
In Rescue Me, Denis Leary stars as the belligerent "Tommy Gavin", a tormented New York fireman and relapsed alcoholic whose best friend [and cousin] was killed in the Sept. 11 aftermath. This season, "Gavin" violently beats his brother for sleeping with Gavin's ex-wife, then explains to a friend: That's the way we settle things in my family. We're Irish; we're real Irish. We don't talk it out…. We find out who's responsible, find the person and beat the living … out of them. A recent episode in which Gavin seemingly rapes his ex-wife and walks away smirking drew a stream of complaints from viewers who thought the character had gone too far over the line.
Working-class Irish American brothers also appear in The Black Donnellys, a quirky NBC series scheduled to begin airing in January 2007. [streaming online for free with limited ads, quickly cancelled, all episodes out on DVD] These brothers watch one another's backs as they come of age in Hell's Kitchen, the home of the Westies, a gang that flourished from the 1960s to '80s. The show, created by Haggis and Moresco, takes its name from a real Irish Canadian family massacred in 1881 but is based on Moresco's childhood on Manhattan's West Side. Moresco had five brothers, and said some family members lost their lives to that underworld. On the show, the brothers' father is killed by the gangsters.
Haggis and Moresco have visited this territory before: EZ Streets, a short-lived 1996 series, told sophisticated and brutal tales of Irish American cops who infiltrate a gang. Three years before The Sopranos, it was 'way ahead of its time' and frightened advertisers, said Joe Pantoliano, who played the gang leader and went on to play a mobster on The Sopranos.
One 1990 film, State of Grace, starring Sean Penn and Gary Oldman, came close to an accurate portrayal of the real Westies gang, English said. But the story, about a good guy who reunites with a childhood friend who is now a gangster, was too full of clichés, he said.
Moresco said he and Haggis, both of Irish descent, strove to avoid predictability in The Black Donnellys. The brothers may pay the usual price for taking care of one another, but they laugh all the way to jail. 'They have great fun', Moresco said, 'even when they're looking down the barrel of a gun.' The narrator, an inmate called "Jimmy Ice Cream", also has a humorous penchant for tall tales, adding to the idiosyncratic feel of the show.
Brotherhood also tries to avoid stereotypes; for instance, the writers said they deliberately did not include a priest in the family. The "Caffee" women also feature prominently as a drug-addicted wife and a shrewd matriarch.
To inform the 'texture' of their production, Masters and co-executive producer Henry Bromell (Homicide) said they interviewed the governor of Rhode Island, state senators, representatives and police chiefs. But they had to be careful, Masters said. 'I didn't know who was on whose side.' Needless to say, as immigrants have assimilated and old neighborhoods gentrified, it's not that easy to find a gang-ridden Irish or Italian immigrant neighborhood to film in anymore. 'New York has reinvented itself,' Favreau said. A search for locations in Hell's Kitchen five years ago, he said, showed there were no bars left that felt 'in any way intimidating. They felt charming and rustic at worst. The name, Hell's Kitchen, was the scariest part.'
Neither is it easy to find American actors with the lived-in faces to play strong men with family obligations and battle scars. 'Most young American actors have been boys all the time,' Masters said. His two leads, Jason Clarke ("Tommy") and Jason Isaacs ("Michael"), are Australian and English, respectively. However, two other actors, Kevin Chapman (who plays crime boss "Freddi Cork") and Brian Scannell ("Silent John"), grew up in rough neighborhoods in Boston and offer a rare touch of authenticity, Masters said. Authentic Irish American actors were in such demand, in fact, some were also cast in The Departed, which was shooting at the same time. They had to travel back and forth from Providence to Boston, Masters said.
Favreau suggested the success of the projects has less to do with how well they mine reality and more with the myths and legends that surround Irish crime — and how well filmmakers make use of them. If it doesn't work out, he suggested another frontier to be explored: Jewish gangsters. 'They were pretty tough.'" (Copyright 2006 Los Angeles Times)

City Of Men (repeats on Sundance Channel. I reviewed all 4 seasons on DVD.) (emendations to review coming after 10/4/2007) The team behind City of God (Cidade de Deus) continues the saga of the children of the favelas. Just from viewing Episode 1 - "The Emperor's Crown" you knew this was different than anything else on TV as it took a dry lesson about Napoleon's conquering of Europe and Brazil and brought it to life as battles between drug-dealers for hills, money and obeisance. Season 1 consists of episodes 1 – 4. Season 2 is episodes 5 – 9. Season 3 is episodes 10 – 14. Season 4 is episodes 15 – 19. The full arc concluded in the film City Of Men (Cidade Dos Homens). Antônia is a femme take on musical life in the favelas, first as this film, then as a follow-up TV series – will Sundance bring us that too? (updated 2/29/2008)

Curb Your Enthusiasm (on HBO - repeated various times throughout the week and On Demand. 6 seasons on DVD. ) Larry David, co-creator of Seinfeld, takes his homage to George Burns's groundbreaking TV persona and techniques even further. I was no fan of Seinfeld when it was on first run, finding the four lead characters just too misanthropic. But in living a Groundhog Day experience of my family forcing me to watch the reruns every night, I've started to laugh at them. Curb is even funnier, as it creates more sympathy for the curmudgeon "Larry" character as it shows him and his actual pretty obnoxious friends amidst the foibles of life in contemporary, successful L.A.-- --after all he is the one who blows up over the waiting procedures in his doctor's office, uses a water bottle and a collectible doll in unlikely places, and makes sort of un-PC comments in a PC group--who is a victim of very funny coincidences that he's not entirely innocent in fomenting. The showdown Larry accidentally set up between the survivor and "The Survivor" was bust a gut funny in the penultimate episode of the 4th season. I keep specific tabs on the hilarious Jewish woman characters Susie Green and Anna. (updated 1/29/2008)

Dexter (on Showtime, repeated frequently and On Demand. 2 seasons on DVD. Renewed for 3rd season. Edited version on CBS.) From the serial killer's viewpoint, set in Miami, the first season was based on the first book in what became a series Darkly Dreaming Dexter by Jeff Lindsay, and is an excellent adaptation into a mini-series format, retaining strong colorful characters and expanding situations very cleverly (particularly with the flashbacks to step-father "Harry", the threatening ex-boy friend and extending the murders and the interaction with the murderer even surprisingly changing the ending). I don't usually like TV shows or movies with narration but this one very effectively maintains the arch tone of the first-person book. I presume the next season will be based on the next book, so I'll wait to read that one until afterwards. (7/28/2008)
Epitafios (Epitaphs) (on HBO Signature Channel and repeated On Demand with English subtitles, 13 episodes) Kudos to HBO for bringing us unilinguals international television! Produced in Argentina for HBO Latin America, this is noir, serial killing revenge episodic television that tells one continual story, like 24 and Prison Break, (though sometimes the camera work drags out the tension or really manipulates our POV). Gliding camera work, beautiful urban settings (Buenos Aires), characters haunted by their pasts and their past relationships, with intriguing, charismatic actors. Julio Chávez is channeling Jean Paul Belmondo and the sexual tension is really maintained through to the very end. Of course it has HBO-frank sex, violence, heartbroken romance and language (with only a few laughable mis-translations in the easy to read yellow subtitles), but this is was beyond CSIs and feels more like such recent European crime thrillers as The Memory of a Killer (De Zaak Alzheimer) or gritty Brit mysteries with way higher body count. (And cigarette smoking.) Lots of plot twists and dead bodies but completely addictive! Even as we learn more and more about the serial murderer (we meet him about half-way through) and ever more macabre imaginative ways to kill people and get away with it (even if a couple of times it was a bit too slippery that he got away). (updated 12/28/2007)

Flight of the Conchords (on HBO - repeated various times throughout the week and On Demand. Renewed for a second season. 1st season on DVD. EP of studio and live recordings out. Full album in 2008.) It took me almost the whole first season to really get into this satire of the music business. At first I thought “the fourth most popular folk music parody duo in New Zealand” were a one trick pony of satirizing old music videos. And I didn’t particularly like all of Eagle vs. Shark which co-starred deadpan Jemaine Clement and was directed by Taika Waititi (though listed on the IMDb with the last name Cohen) who also directed several episodes of the TV series. But Bret McKenzie is so endearing and their Consul Manager “Murray” (Rhys Darby) so hapless, that I really got into their very funny efforts to build their fan base beyond their one sycophantic groupie “Mel” (Kristen Schaal) and to get gigs. Plus I like the filming on the Lower East Side. So the music video satires became just an added benefit. Thanks to my nephew Eliav for alerting me to to their 5-part A Texan Odyssey (updated 3/24/2008)

Friday Night Lights (2 seasons on DVD. 3rd season of 13 new episodes, taking place almost a year later, will air first on satellite-television provider DirecTV, beginning Oct. 1. Then, early in 2009 on NBC.) Based on and having some of the same problems as the film Friday Night Lights (thought I haven't yet read the same-titled book by Buzz Bissinger that also had the subtitle A Town, a Team, and a Dream). So I originally had this under HUNK 'O' METER because the eye candy is irresistible, from Kyle Chandler (who I've been a fan of since Homefront through Early Edition (1st season on DVD), both of which show up on various cable channels now and again, and was so sorry he was quickly killed off with no comment on Grey's Anatomy) and long-haired Taylor Kitsch and the other young football players, especially the shy second-string QB "Matt" with his thing for ‘Julie”, the daughter of the coach, who is late to realize the implications when he advises the kid to let off steam: Do you have someone you're interested in? Get her into the back seat of your car. In the second season, “Leave No One Behind” by Aaron Rahsaan Thomas had me in tears for “Matt” with his weeping line Why does everyone leave me? . The second season episode “There Goes the Neighborhood”, as written by David Hudgins and directed by Jeffrey Reiner, teased us girls and women who watch the show for Kitsch as “Tim Riggins”, by having the daughter and aunt ogle him, even as the mom chides them for inappropriateness, as in real life he My Scion’s age.
As the 2007 Peabody awards said: “No dramatic series, broadcast or cable, is more grounded in contemporary American reality than this clear eyed serial about the hopes, dreams, livelihoods and egos intertwined with the fate of high-school football in a Texas town.” The coach's wife (played by Connie Britton) is definitely not a Barbie doll, and her prickly but loving relationship with him while exploring her new guidance counseling job and wifely obligations is key to making this more about small town life than just about football. Even the coach had to admit My wife is always right. (in "Nevermind" by Jonas Pate, the same episode where "Lyla" tried to get her crippled boyfriend to watch a quad sex ed tape) when she insisted that the "no pass, no play" policy had to include the ballplayers actually doing their own school work - can they read? But the directing, production design and community feel in Texas are wonderfully involving. Nice expansion into the Murderball-like story line for the injured player, like the side story of Josh Henderson's injured vet in Over There. And I do know zilch about football - even though I did join the Pep Club in high school to sincerely try to learn but the guys who were explaining rules, plays and strategies to us were so condescending that I gave up. But every now and then there's a recognition that this does take place in a school and there might be classes in math, English, social studies, etc.
”It’s Different For Girls” by Andy Miller may have been a bald effort to try and get us chicks to watch and turn the tables by having the football team attend the cheerleader competition (though shown as a ploy by the coach to keep his intellectual daughter “Julie” away from the sweetest replacement quarterback in sports – though his “Matt chat” backfires when she rebels and –shock—starts taking an interest in football with him). But heck if its focus on the double standard in a small town even makes us sympathize with perfect cheerleader “Lyla” as the Mean Girls escalated their war against her as a slut for cheating on the crippled quarterback with his best friend (who really is desperately in love with her in a poignant triangle as he altruistically reaches out to both of them to reconcile amidst The Scarlet Letter opprobrium going on, though a few weeks later we learn he never actually read that assigned book). Are the father/daughter relationships as the anchors, not with the mothers, to appeal to the guy viewers? But the post-partum mother/daughter stuff in the 2nd season has been really raw. It was a bit forced for the Coach to suddenly point out that she had been on her college’s varsity volleyball team, though it does make sense that they shared a sports interest when they met, but the volleyball team that he oversees as the forced-to-be-aware of Title IX-Athletic Director does bring girls, like the tall bad girl “Tyra”, into the sports story line well (though the continuation of her romance with “Landry” doesn’t really make sesnse.)
Nice upgrade of the usual music on the show with Jose Gonzalez’s “Storm”, and so a music guide is helpful. (updated 5/25/2008)
The producers are about to learn the lesson of Homicide and Boomtown that Nielsen families don't like shaky camera work. Jason Katims defended the style in a TV Guide interview: "One is that it's not being done for the sake of doing arty-looking stuff. What I respond to stylistically is that it doesn't feel like a typical television drama. You feel like you're really in this world. We shoot on location in Texas, and we haven't built a single set. That said, there are moments when the camera movement gets in the way and we have definitely made adjustments to ensure that the camera doesn't get in the way of enjoying the show. It will be a little less dizzying, but we are not changing the style. It's shot 95 percent handheld in real locations, largely in available light. To me, focusing on somebody's foot tapping or how somebody's holding their hands does inform you about what's going on in the scene. In quiet scenes there will be less jumpy camera movement. It's still the same style; we're just taking care to make sure that we can slow the camera down at moments."

House, M.D. (on Fox Tuesdays at 9 pm. 3 seasons on DVD with extras. Rerunning on USA Fridays at 11 pm and other times.) Ho hum, I thought, another medical procedural. Then my eye caught the long-haired (since trimmed unfortunately) Aussie hunk (who you can see a lot more of in Swimming Upstream) on the show, Jesse Spencer (as "Dr. Robert Chase") -- and how come all the nurses etc. aren't hanging all over him? He's GOT to be the best lookin' guy at the hospital! At least "House" does tease him about conquests but in the first season we only saw him ONCE flirting with an X-ray technician and ended up doing an angiogram on the patient's wrong leg and was then terrified that "House" will fire him (an ongoing fear that led on him to spy for the not unrealistic fundraising machinations of Chi McBride and the Board of Directors.). He at least got some personal time off skiing - -in Switzerland? --just to be set up as the rich kid vs. Omar Epps as “Dr. Foreman” though in "Forever" we got mysterious hints that I'm not rich. when he uses vacation time to get extra work. They played on his looks in the 2nd season episode "Autopsy" by producer Lawrence Kaplow. The dying 9 year old patient flirts: I like hearing you talk. and, as a colleague comments to "House" She stole that kiss from Chase. What have you done lately? He got to do a U.S. take on the kind of mistakes that happen weekly in the BBC America series Bodies in a way that tied in his haunted relations with his super doc father “Dr. Rowan Chase” played in “Cursed” by Matt Witten and Peter Blake, by Patrick Bauchau, similarly imperious in The Pretender, where we found out “Chase” has surprising depths of anger issues because his father abandoned him to his alcoholic mother, who drank herself to death when he was 15. There’s a foreshadowing line from “House” that this woeful tale would make him appealing to “Cameron”.
But then I fell in love with Hugh Laurie as "Dr. Gregory House" setting me on the frustrating alternate plane of reality goal of how the heck would I get this character to fall in love with me? (In the 3rd season he proffered an anagram for his name: “Huge Ego, Sorry”.) He's smart as heck and actually seems interested in intelligent women so I'd have a chance right? Listen for dialog that has a lot of R's because Laurie says that as a Brit that's the hardest American accent he has to do, as in "federal court order." Will the writers try to do R-less or R-dominant scripts for him? He says he gets cranky motivation by resenting that Spencer gets to talk with his natural accent. (And he plays a mean air keyboard as a fan of The Who -- though it was a bit confusing that he would have the same theme as CSI: NY. So why do they have him listening to opera in the 2nd season?) In the 3rd season finale “Human Error”, when “House” victoriously diagnoses God’s error, at the expense of keeping his team, nice conclusion of his playing a new time-for-a-change-guitar along to Josh Ritter’s “Good Man” from Animal Years (which was on my Best of 2006: “These chords are old but we shake hands/'Cause I believe that they're the good guys We can use all the help we can/So many minor chords outside/I fell in love with the sound/Oh I love to sing along with you/We got tunes we kicked around some/We got a bucket that the tunes go through/Babe we both had dry spells/hard times in bad lands/I'm a good man/for ya, I'm a good man”). The brief music selections are terrific for a show for grown-ups.
The wonderful Robert Sean Leonard is ostensibly playing a Jewish doctor - huh? named "James Wilson (" (fans think maybe his mother was Jewish), whose name is more significant for standing in for “Watson” with “Holmes”. But I even matched the POTW – Patient of the Week with celiac sprue and I didn't see that coming as the key to the mother/baby intestinal problem!
"Three Stories" by executive producer David Shore was so fascinating - what a great surprise that he did win the Emmy for writing (plus the Humanitas Prize). His writing supervision was described at the 2008 Banff International TV Festival: "Shore doesn't care about the medicine," said [writer David] Hoselton in his standing-room-only session, referring to the show as more of a character study. "I don't think the audience cares about the medicine. A few people are really fascinated, but generally we care about characters.” Hoselton called Hugh Laurie's titular character an "iconic figure" who half the viewers love and half love to hate, but all find fascinating. "When the other characters are trying to get at House's emotional core, trying to analyse him, figure out what makes him tick, those are the most satisfying scenes. Shore will always say, 'Where's the heart in this scene? Where's the heart in this story? Why does House care about this case? Why do we as an audience care about this patient?' If the patient lives or dies, we want the audience to have an emotional reaction to that, even if House doesn't. House might not care if the patient lives or dies, he just wants to solve the case. But if the audience feels that way, then we've lost them." Hoselton expanded on the writing process in this interview, as did Pam Davis.
Hip hip hooray to the producers for bringing in my favorite Sister Sela Ward as an age appropriate ex! And her past is linked to his pain --. The 2nd season Sweeps Week sexual tension not only had Ward's "Stacy" doing match and point with Greg -- just as she was wavering, she shut the door over his unethical use of her private shrink records - so she's as good at solving legal mysteries as he is medical. Apt characterization in "Failure to Communicate" by Doris Egan when "Stacy" compares "Greg" to "curry vindaloo", whew, yeah he could burn the roof of your mouth. Please Sela stay and come back! In "Skin Deep," nice use of Ryan Adams's "Desire" (from Demolition) to hint to the audience that "Dr. Wilson" is right that his post-"Stacey" pain is psychological, but surprisingly no reference to Lot's daughters. Bringing her on helped divert "Dr. Allison Cameron" (Jennifer Morrison as the weakest link in the series) from being annoying stops in trying to find his soft heart, if not more, under his gruff exterior, though her efforts to use negotiating strategy with him were amusing. Thank goodness he found a way to get her to stop trying to date him, though I got foreboding when she sweetly told him: I realized it's not that you couldn't love anyone. It's just that you couldn't love me. When she quit at the end of the 3rd season, she just as sweetly put her hand on his arm with I will miss you.
So why isn't this just in the HUNK 'O' METER? Because with quality co-producers Shore of Traders and Paul Attanasio of Homicide this is one of those shows where good writers are subverting the procedural format to tell good stories about complicated people. Even though my friend The Infectious Disease Specialist says the medical information and diagnostic procedures are grossly inaccurate (confirmed in a recent TV Guide piece) which is probably why sometimes it's impossible to follow - but could that be because he has a certain amount in common with "Dr. House"? John Mankiewicz's (of Karen Sisco) script for "Socratic Method" had me in tears three times!
For Sweeps Weeks there's episodes focusing on the attractive residents – or maybe just to borrow a successful ratings page from the sex-obsessed Grey's Anatomy, and heck every one else on the Web drools over Laurie so no point here repeating here why he's a frequent guest on Jay Leno. The Ms. Goody Two Shoes resident --we learned the previous week that she didn't cheat on her dying husband, whom she had married only out of sympathy, though she in the 3rd season claimed it was The Real Thing, even though she had fallen in love with his best friend--goes through an HIV scare on "Hunting" by Liz Friedman, gets doped up on E and sexually attacks the Aussie, who diagnoses her wide pupils just before he lets her tear off his clothes. He later gentlemanly pointed that "the sex didn't suck", even as she later in the season belittled the length of coitus; so far that's mostly used to damage their reps within the hospital - though I may be the only one watching the show for Spencer, I was the last show fan to know that the co-stars were dating in real life shortly before they were engaged and I did think that would kill any on-screen chemistry or writers' temptations – hmm, will their later break-up make things more difficult on set? For Valentine’s Day, the series winked at this relationship, and on “Chase”s image by having “Cameron” continually be the aggressor in the third season’s “Insensitive” by Matthew V. Lewis: “Dr. Cameron” talking uncharacteristically very quickly: I still think true love is out there. I just think it’s very far away, possibly in another galaxy. We may need to develop faster than light travel before we can make contact. So I’m thinking we should have sex. “Dr. Chase” quizzically: That makes sense. “Dr. Cameron”: Despite the wisdom of pop songs, there’s no point in putting our lives on hold until love comes along. We’re both healthy and busy people, and we work together so it's convenient. “Dr. Chase”: Like microwave pizza? “Dr. Cameron”: And of all the people I work with you’re the one I’m least likely to fall in love with. “Dr. Chase”: Like microwave pizza. “Dr. Cameron”: The point here is to make things simpler, not more complicated. Some day there’ll be a time to get serious about someone. Meanwhile, we’ve already had sex once and didn’t get weird about it, so… “Dr. Chase”: I get it, I get it. So, what if I’m offended by your judgment? “Dr. Cameron”: Then you’re not the man I’m looking for. She walks away. He hesitates for a moment, then smiles and follows her. While everyone else follows the arc of “House”s addictions and revealing lines about “Cuddy” and “House”s relationship, I may be singular in enjoying how the series continues to play on the real off-screen relationship, as in “Top Secret” by Deran Sarafian, when they are bored watching a patient in the overnight sleep lab and she gets up to leave because she thinks he just wants to prove “House” and “Foreman” wrong: “Cameron”: Well, it’s not his sleep pattern. “Chase”: We can’t leave. If we don’t monitor the whole test House won’t accept the results. He’ll just make us do it over. “Cameron”: It doesn’t take two doctors to monitor what is clearly going to be a normal polysonogram. “Chase”: Oh, so you want me to stay. “Cameron”: You’re the one who said there was something wrong. < “Chase”: I never said it was a sleep disorder. “Cameron”: You want to flip for it? “Chase”: Just go. “Cameron”: Oh, come on. Don’t be a baby. Fine, I’ll stay. He smiles with satisfaction. She gets a glint in her eye and arches her eyebrow towards the bed: You know what we could do. He: Here? She: Why not? We’re surrounded by empty rooms with beds in them. He: Yeah, and video cameras too. She: So we’ll turn them off. He: Yeah, that’s all I need, House or Foreman walking in on us. She: We have the keys. He: No, what if he wakes up? She, slowly extending her long legs on the counter: All right, suit yourself Next they’re passionately kissing while coming into another room with a bed while quickly undressing each other, he looks up at the camera and she throws her blouse over it. And of course Foreman walks in to the monitoring station to find the patient calling desperately for help. The two, disheveled, come in asking what’s going on. “Foreman” is pretty suspicious afterwards, and excuses about going to get coffee aren’t flying. “Cameron” to “Chase”s wide-mouthed amazement: All right already, we confess. You caught us. We snuck into one of the sleep labs to have sex. We shouldn’t have done it while we were supposed to be working and we’re sorry. Now can we move on? “Foreman” laughs: House will do Wilson before you do Chase. “Cameron”: No. You will do House and Wilson before I do Chase. Now can we get back to work? “Chase”: She did me once. “Dr. Foreman”: She was stoned! The couple are arguing in the office- She: So what did you want me tell him? The truth? He: No, but you didn’t have to be so convincing. She: Don’t worry, I’ll make it up to you. He, uncomfortably twitching: This is getting out of control She, taking off her glasses and leaning in to him seductively: Don’t pout. He: A patient came down with an infection while we were getting our rocks off. She: Do you want to stop? He: No, but I don’t want to get caught either. She: Do you think I do? He: You certainly didn’t go out of your way to keep the volume down when we were in the sleep lab. She, laughing: I couldn’t help that. Why would I want to get caught? He: Maybe you want to give House a reason to get jealous. She: I’m over House. All this is is uncomplicated sex. Don’t try to make this anything more. He, trying to be, um, firm: I’m not doing it at work anymore. She, with a smile: Wanna go grab some lunch? When they come in late to review x-rays, “House” is suspicious as they’re a bit mussed: Where have you two been? “Cameron”: Lunch, why? What happened? She later challenges him on his requests for information about a patient until “House” yells at her to follow his orders, while “Chase” gives her a look, I didn’t feel the need to ask him personal questions. She, defensively: I’m over him. He: Just making an observation. At the conclusion, “Superfly” plays on the soundtrack and “House” realizes his residents are missing without having cleared off their desks. “Chase” is half-undressed in a dark janitor’s closet passionately kissing “Cameron” when “House” walks in on them: Sorry, looking for an extra large trash can. “Chase”, abashed: Since when does he clean anything up? “House” walks away with a very satisfied smile.
In the following “Fetal Position” by Garrett Lerner and Russel Friend, the couple is nervous. “Cameron”: That was weird. He caught us with your hand up my shirt. He’s got to have a reaction to that. Think that’s what the vacation [plan] is? “Chase”, very sarcastic: Yes, the pain of losing you has obviously forcing him away. She: Maybe he’s planning something He: Maybe he just doesn’t give a crap. She: Do you think he just stumbled into that closet? He knew that we were there, and he wanted us to know that he knew. He: Or, you wanted him to know, and now he does, and you’re annoyed because he doesn’t care. “House” uses their secret against them to his boss when she says both “Cameron” and “Chase” came to her protesting his procedures: Cameron had concerns. Chase just agreed with her because he didn’t want to lose his all-access pass to her love rug. “Cuddy” is startled: They’re sleeping together? “House”: If by sleeping together you mean having sex in the janitor’s closet. “Cuddy”: Here? “House: No, the janitor’s closet in the local high school. “Cuddy”: I’ll deal with them after I deal with you. “House:” Aw, come on. Let’s gossip some more. “Cuddy” confronts “Cameron” in an unexpected way: Dr. Chase, dating Chase? Can only end in one of two ways. “Cameron” is open-mouthed: House told you? “Cuddy”: You get married and live happily ever after. Or somebody gets hurt and you two can’t work together and I have to fire somebody. “Cameron”: I would hate to see my personal life become such a burden to you. “Cuddy”: I’m telling you this for your own good. “Cameron”: Then I assume you’re going to have the same conversation with Chase for his own good. “Cuddy”: Chase isn’t the one going to get hurt here. Is this sexism or that everyone thinks he’s the dog and not, in fact, her? “Cameron” confronts “House” while he’s in some machine: My social life is my social life. “House”: Couldn’t agree more. What goes on in the privacy of a janitor’s closet is nobody’s business except-- “Cameron”: She told me to end it. Is that what you want? “House”: I was actually hoping she’d fire one of you. “Dr. Chase” is giving a procedure to the pregnant patient, a famous photographer who has said she gets good shots by waiting for the truth to appear in her subjects, when he happily spots a lovely photo of “Cameron”: When’d you take this? The photographer: You should keep it. “Chase”: Oh, I see her all day at work. I don’t need it. Photographer gets ready to sneak his photo, as he smiles while looking at the picture: Maybe you want to see her after work? I’m right, right? I saw the way you look at her. He smiles at “Cameron”s photo and murmurs thanks as he takes it away. Which leads “Chase” to ask “Cameron”: Did House say anything else? about us? “Cameron”: I thought you didn’t care about his reaction? Trying to make him jealous? He: I like my job. She, hmm, not revealing the truth: He can’t fire you just because we’re together. He:We’re not together. And House can do whatever he wants. When “Chase” supports “Cameron”s diagnosis, “House” is sarcastic: Oh! Sticking up for your girlfriend! Who says chivalry’s dead? “Foreman” is taken aback: He’s not joking? “House”: Be patient. She’s going through all of us. She’ll get that jungle fever eventually. That gets “Cameron”’s goat: I’m not going through anyone. “House” points at “Chase”: You love him? That sure startles “Chase”. “Cuddy” tries to get them back on the emergency: This can probably wait until after you biopsy Emma’s liver right? “Foreman” quizzes “Chase”: So the sleep lab? You and Cameron not sleeping? How serious is it? “Chase”: It’s nothing. She’s only doing it to make House jealous. “Foreman”: So why are you doing it? “Chase”: You kidding? “Foreman”: Better not hurt her. “Chase”: She already has a big brother . . .You obviously care very deeply about her. “Foreman”: I’m not protecting her. I’m protecting myself. A heart-broken, love-sick Cameron? She’ll be more unbearable than she is now. The patients are saved and “Cameron” is packing up the photographer’s camera as “Chase” casually asks: Wanna grab a bite? then offers to walk with her to bring the bag. “Cameron”: When did she take this picture of you? You look so . .? “Chase”: I’m smiling. I have a nice smile. “Cameron”: No, I’ve never seen you like this. She got you to glow. What were you doing? Wha’d she say to you? He realizes, but protests: I always glow. and he gentlemanly takes the camera bag. In the closing, to Lucinda Williams’ “Are You All Right”, we see that the photographer has taken another candid of the couple doing a procedure together, with “Chase” clearly looking longingly at the oblivious “Cameron”.
In “Airborne” by David Hoselton, the cat (“House”) is away so the mice are playing, or as most fan sites refer to them as, the ducklings. “Foreman” groans at their joint diagnosis Anything else you two guys want to agree on? “Chase”: What, you have a problem with us agreeing? “Foreman”: No, I have a problem with the other thing you are doing which makes me question your motive for agreeing. The couple searches the patient’s house for clues. “Cameron” asks him: Is Foreman right? Did you agree with me because of our relationship? “Chase”: Relationship? She: You know what I mean. He: You mean because of our lack of a relationship. She: I mean because we’re having sex. He: Yes, Foreman’s right. I thought you were completely wrong about the medicine but I agreed with you because I thought you’d do me in some new way. She smiles seductively and startles him by taking him by the lapels and pushing him onto the bed: Then well-played. He: Come on, we’re supposed to be looking for toxins. She, playfully and pushes on top of him: I thought we agreed it was a brain tumor. He’s nonplussed by the cat and whispers: He’s watching. She, starting to take off his clothes: Haven’t you had anybody watch before? She turns him over with a giggle. Back at the hospital, “Foreman” is even more annoyed as their giggling at the lab like high school dates in bio class. She to “Dr. Wilson” about their search for toxins: Big waste of time. “Chase”: Medically. “Foreman” has been warning “Cameron” and she is dismissive: It’s just sex. “Foreman”: There’s no such thing. “Cameron”: Are you saying that women can’t separate the physical from the emotional? “Foreman”: No one does it well, women do it worse. “Cameron”: You just want it to stop because you think it’s affecting-- “Foreman”: Me! Yeah! Amidst a heated diagnosis debate, “Cameron” turns to “Chase”: What do you think? “Foreman” is very sarcastic: Here’s a cliffhanger. When “Chase” does agree, “Foreman” shakes his head: The sex better be damn good. Later, “Cameron” concedes: We were wrong. Which means Foreman was right. “Chase”: Maybe Foreman’s right about us too. Maybe we should just stop all this. I mean if it’s affecting our jobs. She: It’s not affecting our job.. He: We had sex in a patient’s bedroom, a bedroom we were examining for toxins. Yeah, now our judgment is right on. She: All right, no more sex in patients’ bedrooms. No more sex in patients’ homes. No more sex with cats watching us. Any where else you want to cross off the list? And the cat reference gives him the clue to the source of the patient’s problem. “Chase” to the rescue! Leaving for the night, with him gentlemanly opening the door, she, with a mischievous smile: Nice catch. I think even House would be impressed. . .Any idea how you want to celebrate? He: I want more. She: I thought you were getting a little worn out, but. . He: That’s not what I meant. She: I know. I was just hoping you’d take the hint and pretend you hadn’t said that. He: I want this to be more than it is. She: I thought we were clear. He: In the beginning but you can’t tell me you--. She: Yeah I can. And I don’t. It was fun. That’s it. Now it’s over. And she walks away, while A Fine Frenzy’s “Hope for the Hopeless” plays in the background, from the appropriately titled album “One Cell in the Sea”. TV Guide 4/20/2007 included the scene (at least I think they meant this one, not the following week’s) as a “Watercooler: What We’re All Talking About” moment photo of the close-up of the shocked face of “Dr. Chase”: “Love Hurts on House-- Everyone warned Cameron about hooking up with Chase. But it was Chase who got his heart broken when he asked to take their fling to the next level. The scene was so brutal we forgot the actors are a real-life couple.”
Their strained relationship helped “House” solve a testosterone mystery in “Act Your Age” by Sarah Hess. The two residents are arguing about a possible diagnosis, getting louder and louder. “Foreman”: Enough! I take it you two aren’t sleeping together anymore? We test for everything. “Chase”: Good! Then I can go home. She: Since when does ‘we’ not include you? “Chase”: House is going to call us idiots. Might as well be a well-rested idiot.Good work. for handing “House” the useful pathology report. She, furious: He went home! “House”: Work smart, not hard. . . And take ‘Employee of the Month’ with you. She protests about them working together, “House” smirks a I know. and the couple exchange murderous looks. They are again arguing about the case, about the sick kid’s parents, but now even in front of “House” who protests: Hey, don’t make me turn the hose on you two. Chase is right. Go check the house. She: You’re intentionally punishing us. “House”: By making you do mean do your jobs? It does seem kind of cruel don’t it? They stalk out to the elevator together, she throwing him an angry look. But the kid’s older brother stops her with a bouquet: Dr. Cameron, I got you flowers. For what you did for my sister. “Cameron” smiles broadly: That’s so sweet. “Chase” is suspicious: Does your dad know you’re down here? and finds and reads the note, giving her a sarcastic look: ’Congratulations on your bundle of joy.’ Something you forgot to tell me? She laughs indulgently: Take these back to where you found them. “Chase” calls over a guard: Could you be sure these flowers and this kid get back to where they belong? But she asks them to wait, takes out one flower, bends down to the boy and gives him a kiss on his cheek. He looks triumphantly at “Chase” who glares back. They are at the kids’ house searching for toxins, but “Chase” is bugged: Why did you take the flower? Why did you kiss him? She: Because he was sweet. And he’s 8. He: You’re trying to make me jealous, aren’t you? She, sarcastically: Oh yeah, I want you to profess your love for me. Oh wait, you already did that and it caused me to end our relationship. He calling after her as she walks away: You’re enabling a thief. And a delinquent. as he reads out teacher notes about the boy’s fights and detentions. I know, bad boys, hard to resist. She: It’s a crush. Harmless. He: It’s never harmless. She: So I’m learning. He: So this is us now? We snipe at each other? He continues, softly, as they’re looking for evidence cramped under the bed. This isn’t right. You dumped me. You don’t get to be mad. She: We had a really good thing. You broke the rules. I’m angry. I’ll get over it.
“Foreman” is suspicious that they are agreeing again, when they come back about what they found. “Chase” and “Foreman” are doing a scan together and “Chase” is defensive, even as “Foreman” claims he’s not interested: For the record, Cameron is the one who broke it off. . . I wanted more. She didn’t share my feelings. “Foreman”: I feel like I’m in a similar position. . .You’re an idiot. Either she’s lying or she’s actually emotionally detached. Which one sounds more like Cameron to you? “Chase, confused by the differential diagnosis: Neither. “Foreman”: You’re may have to choose one. “Cameron” is on her way in and challenges the brother for being on the wrong floor, who asks back: Is that other doctor your boyfriend? She insists no and says he should go back to dad. He persists: But do you like him? She: He’s a friend. The boy persists: But do you like him like him? She’s weirded out a bit, as he notices her attractively tight pants. I could be your boyfriend. She’s nonplussed: I think that wouldn’t be fair to the girls your own age. He sounds sage: He seems like a tool. She protests that he’s being rude, but he pats her ass with a grin. As the ducklings figure out it must be an environmental source from the samples she has brought back from their home, “Foreman” rolls his eyes at another late night ahead: I’ll leave you two alone. She: You’re kidding me right? Later, exhausted, she offers “Chase” a tip on a broken coffee machine. You were right. The 8 year old kid grabbed my ass. I shouldn’t have encouraged him. He grins, relaxed: I was a boy once. I know how they think. She smiles: You were a pervert at 8? He: Hmm, maybe 11. She: I didn’t realize you were going to get hurt. I’m sorry I’m missed my cue. (Not sure I heard that line correctly.) He: You didn’t. You have feelings for me. You come back to me again and again. She, backing off: For sex. It’s a simple -- He, taking her hand: Come on, you have feelings for puppies and patients that you barely know, yet when it comes to a guy that you worked with for three years, had sex with, spent the night with? You’re telling me that you feel nothing? Absolutely nothing? And the boy comes charging down the hall yelling at the top of his lungs: Get away from her! Don’t touch her! I’ll kill you if you touch her! and attacks “Chase” onto the floor and bits him on the arm. She calls “House” at home as he watches wrestling: The big brother has a crush on me and he bit the crap out of Chase., who accuses the kid of being a sociopath. “House” calls back: He’s got a crush on you. He’s acting logically. He’s being aggressive about it. Hormone-aggressive. Better figure out what’s killing the girl because her brother has it too. I agree with “House”s comment about possible symptoms to her: You’re much too skinny to be menstruating. but even he is taken aback when she plays “the dead husband card” to get the father to consent to extreme surgery. She walks into the locker room, as “Chase”’s getting ready to leave, he’s anxiously looking at her as she notices flowers on top of her locker with a note “Not Stolen”. She smiles: They’re beautiful. I thought about what you said. And I really don’t want a relationship with you. He, trying hard not to look crushed: Hmm, Allison, I know you liked flowers. He walks off and she keeps looking at the flowers. “Dr. Cuddy” sums up the episode’s story lines: So many people. So much energy and drama just trying to find someone who is almost never the right person anyway. It just shouldn’t be so hard.
But then in “House Training” by Doris Egan, “Dr. Chase” persists while they’re monitoring a scan: Also, I just wanted to let you know, should you change your mind, I’ll be available. She, exasperated: Don’t you get tired of hearing me say it? I have no intention of going out with you, or having sex with you or doing anything with you except work. He: You don’t have to make a big deal about it. I jut thought I’d let you know I decided that Tuesdays would be a good day to do that. (Joke – that’s the series’ broadcast night.) She: You did not suddenly fall in love with me. You were looking for something and I happened to be there.. He: OK, that’s fine. No need to go on about it. She: We need to put this behind us. He: OK, understood. She: But you keep bringing it up. He: You’re the one still talking. Look, I’m not demanding anything from you. I’m not following you home. I’ve got no expectations. A gentle, polite reminder once a week is hardly stalking. She’s open-mouthed stumped until they get a surprise result on the scan. He continues in the next episode “Family” by Liz Friedman in between testing samples: And it’s Tuesday. Got nothing to do with Foreman or House, just it’s the day I remind you I like you and I want us to be together. She, sarcastically: Thank you. I’d forgotten. . .You really going to do this every Tuesday? He: If I take the day off. I could say it Wednesday. She: Why don’t you just say it four times now and leave me alone for a month? “House” amusingly refers to their relationship in an interchange about work relationships: “Dr. Wilson”: How many hours a day do you have to spend with someone before they're basically family? “House”: Good point. But first, I gotta tell Cameron and Chase that they're violating God's will. The following week in “The Jerk” by Leonard Dick, “Chase” managed to continue wooing through gritted teeth even amidst a heated argument, when “Cameron” accused him of sabotaging “Foreman”s NY job interview: You think I’m a petty vindictive jerk? It’s Tuesday. I like you. She retorts: I know. See you next Tuesday.
The 3rd season finale “Human Error” by Thomas Moran and Lawrence Kaplow brought their relationship to a crisis when “Chase” angrily speaks up about “House”s misbegotten efforts to retain “Foreman” – and “House” immediately fires him: You’ve either learned all you can. Or you haven’t learned anything at all. Either way it’s time for a change. She’s quite flustered when he informs her and Foreman: It makes no sense. . .He always makes sense., but when she turns around “Chase” is gone. She confronts “House”: Why’d you fire Chase? “Dr. Cuddy” immediately comes to his office as well: Why’d you fire Chase? “Dr. Wilson” immediately comes in: What the hell is wrong with you? You fired Chase? “Cuddy” instructs: Unfire him! He: Sorry you're in the wrong room. My name on the door, my team, my decisions! “Dr. Cuddy”: My building, my floor, my people! He obnoxiously stands firm, even calling “Chase” to ask for a test result: You’re indispensable. But you’re still fired.
“Cameron” is so mad that she won’t even help “Foreman” with a procedure, convinced he was complicit. Later she gives him a going away present, but she has her jacket on to go out, as “House” comes in, being his usual medical detective: Say ‘Hi’ to Chase for me. You’re wearing lipstick. She does find “Chase”, calmly enjoying a big sandwich and fries at the local diner, and they exchange “Hey”. He’s surprised to see her: You look great. She: You know that House firing you had nothing to do with you. He: The why doesn’t matter much. She: You’ll only wind up staying. House will call you and probably yell at you for not showing up. He: It’s OK. He’s right. It’s time for a change. And you were right too. The whole Tuesday ‘I like you’. It was silly. Don’t give me that look. Don’t feel sorry for me. Getting this job was the best thing that has ever happened to me. Everything about it. And losing it, well I think it’s going to be good too. She: I’ll miss you. He, ever hopeful: Have you got time for a drink, or something? She, pulling back: I think I should go. He shrugs a yeah and goes back to a relaxed lunch. I think the next sequences were edited a bit out of order, based on what she’s wearing, but we next see her very nervously outside a door. It’s his and when he answers, for some reason still wearing his cap. She: It’s Tuesday. He, slowly, taken aback: No, It’s Monday. She: I know, just I didn’t feel like waiting. He grins, puts his hand to her head and kisses her quite sweetly out on the stoop. She is next quite happily handing her resignation letter to “Dr. House” in his office: I’ve gotten all I can from this job. “House”: What do you expect me to do? Apologize and beg Chase to come back? She: I expect you to make a joke and go on. I expect you to be just fine.
I am disappointed that the 4th season only gives us glimpses of “Chase” and “Cameron” amidst the somewhat silly American Idol try-outs of the fairly bland new team, where everybody gets a chance to tell “House” off about what the selection process really reveals about him. But by the end of the season, the new personalities had all jelled, as the writers figured out how to have them all play off “Dr. House”, climaxing in the surprisingly emotional and creatively shot Season 4 2-part finale. (updated 6/25/2008)
For a more positive take on "Dr. Cameron" that doesn't even mention how jealous she was of "House"s ex: She Has a Thing for Older Doctors. Especially Jerks. By Joyce Millman, in The New York Times, March 26, 2006
House might have been conceived as a medical show, but it quickly evolved into a delicious Gothic romance, topped by a swirl of chick-lit froth. The acerbic, quirkily handsome doc (Hugh Laurie) with a bad leg is the sort of haunted Byronic figure who stirs in women the urge to nurture and redeem. To quote Dr. House, in an example of the show's self-referential sarcasm: "I'm not sad, I'm complicated. Chicks dig that."
It is Dr. Allison Cameron's painful, yet kind of pleasurable, duty to play Jane Eyre to House's Edward Rochester. The only woman on House's staff, "Cameron" (Jennifer Morrison) is 20-something, brilliant and lovely in a shy-mouse way. While in college, Cameron married a man dying of cancer; she is still atoning for her failure to save him. She wears man-tailored vests over girlish puff-sleeved blouses, like body armor over fragile feelings.
Unlike the misanthropic House, Cameron believes in the goodness of humanity. She is empathetic to a fault, the champion of the weak and helpless. She can be humorless and judgmental. She's a bit of a drip. But even if she's hardly a strong female role model, Cameron is appealingly flawed and awkward. She's Bridget Jones with a brain. She tries hard, yet falls short.
In an episode last season, Cameron haltingly told House: "People dismiss me, because I'm a woman, because I'm pretty, because I'm not aggressive. My opinions shouldn't be rejected just because people don't like me." It was a disarming moment. And House fell for it, clumsily reassuring her that "people" do like her. Cameron pounced. "Do you? I have to know," she asked. Cameron was in love with her boss! Why didn't we see it coming? In the pause that followed, House, the older authority figure, leaned on his cane, blue eyes blazing. Cameron faced him with bright hopefulness. The sexual tension was exquisite. "No," he finally replied.
Cameron pursued House anyway, with a tenacity that veered close to sexual harassment. Near the end of last season, she quit her job because he wouldn't admit that he loved her, then agreed to return if he'd go on a date with her. On their date (the pivotal episode "Love Hurts"), Cameron wore her heart on her sleeve, confident that emotional honesty could penetrate House's defenses.
She prodded him to express his feelings about her. Bad idea. House: "You live under the delusion that you can fix everything that isn't perfect. That's why you married a man who was dying of cancer. You don't love, you need. And now that your husband is dead, you're looking for another charity case."
"I'm twice your age," he continued. "I'm not great looking, I'm not charming, I'm not even nice. What I am is what you need. I'm damaged." House's words cut to the core of Cameron's motivation and personality. They also acknowledged the hold his walking-wounded allure has over the show's female fans. It still isn't clear whether House is really uninterested in Cameron, or if he rejected her to protect her from his cynicism. But the ambiguity only enhances his mystique.
This season, Cameron has pulled back from House. Trying to shed her goody-goody image, she took crystal meth, became a wild-haired minx and had a one-night stand with a fellow resident, Robert Chase. As any reader of chick lit (or Gothic romances) can see, Cameron is now at the point of the story where the heroine is determined to get over the unattainable object of her longing. And just as she does. . . (Copyright 2006, The New York Times Company)
There is a pattern of the patient, let alone the doctors, having a crucial secret in each episode (hoo - "Dr. Chase" knew the dominatrix!), but it's still surprisingly moving. "House"s mantra that "Everybody lies." (memorably in “Fetal Position” he added: Even fetuses lie.) caused a blow-up over a decade ago between me and my heart-attack stricken sister-in-law's cardiologist, who had the same philosophy, but she's since apologized. A Colleague of My Infectious Disease Dr. Friend agreed more with this article from The New York Times, July 19, 2005, by Sandeep Jauhar, M.D.
Magical Medicine on TV: On the Fox television show House a misanthropic, pill-popping, grizzled über doctor named Gregory House leads a group of impossibly bright young physicians in the department of diagnostic medicine at a teaching hospital in New Jersey.
Dr. House and his team solve medical mysteries with the flair and resourcefulness of private investigators. On a recent show, doctors made multiple visits to the home (even the school bus) of a teenager with convulsions before determining that he had a rare pesticide poisoning.
My wife, a general internist, finds the show absurdly "unrealistic." "Doctors don't do that," she cries whenever a House physician blithely ignores the boundaries of medical subspecialties. (The same doctors, for example, might perform cardiac catheterization, gastrointestinal endoscopy, bone-marrow biopsy and liver ultrasound.) I agree the show is unrealistic, but for a different reason. It portrays a world where doctors have time to solve problems.
I have worked in teaching hospitals in New York for seven years, first as a resident and now as an attending physician, mentoring residents and fellows. Over this period, I have discerned a gradual decline in the intellectual climate of these institutions. It has been dispiriting to watch. Of all the places one might expect doctors to be curious about medicine, teaching hospitals should be first.
Young doctors I work with today seem disengaged and mentally fatigued. With patient rosters of 15 or more, they are preoccupied with getting their work done. Interesting cases tend to generate anxiety, not excitement. Mysteries are, by and large, abhorred.
recently met a pulmonologist, a soft-spoken woman who told me that she used to work on the staff of a teaching hospital in New York City but had gone into private practice a few years ago. I asked her why. "I loved to teach," she replied sadly, "but the residents and fellows just didn't seem to want to learn. They had other things on their minds.
"I met an intern the other day," she went on. "He was asking me questions about a case we were managing together. I told him that it was wonderful to see a young doctor so curious about medicine. He said: 'Thank you for saying so. Now can you tell my chiefs because they are always telling me that I am too inefficient?' "
Doctors in teaching hospitals today are operating in a kind of Zip drive, where patients are compressed into smaller and smaller space. There are probably several reasons: sicker patients, quicker patient turnover, administrative pressures to cut costs, even rules limiting work hours.
Work-hour restrictions, which limit residents to 24 hours on call, with 3 additional hours to hand off patients, were instituted in 2003. They were supposed to improve the learning environment, but in fact they have had the opposite effect.
Today I see staff reflexively calling consultants, not because they have legitimate questions but because they don't have the time or inclination to think through a difficult case for themselves. Unlike Dr. House, no one wants to take on challenging cases, so they are tossed back and forth between consultants.
In his 1999 book Time to Heal: American Medical Education From the Turn of the Century to the Era of Managed Care. Dr. Kenneth Ludmerer, a Washington University physician and historian, bemoaned the deteriorating intellectual environment in teaching hospitals.
He wrote: "Most pernicious of all from the standpoint of education, house officers to a considerable extent were reduced to work-up machines and disposition-arrangers: admitting patients and planning their discharge, one after another, with much less time than before to examine them, confer with attending physicians, teach medical students, attend conferences, read the literature and reflect and wonder."
Today, everyone in medicine wants a number, a lab test, a simple objective measurement to make a diagnosis. Unlike Dr. House, few have the time or patience to cope with uncertainty. We want to make medicine easier than it deserves to be, easier than it actually is.
Which is why I like to watch "House." The show reminds me of the wonders of medicine. It allows me an hour each week to relish the magic and mysteries of my profession, even if it's only on TV. Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia (on FX, Wednesdays at 10 pm, repeated frequently, Seasons 1 & 2 on DVD, bonus scenes and episodes pop up online. Renewed for 39 more episodes in addition to the 13-episode 4th season starting Fall 2008.) I watch few sitcoms, but I admit that I have caught and laughed with most of these outrageously misanthropic shows. I cannot figure out how their underused bar stays in business, and I thought the addition of Danny DeVito in the 2nd season would be a silly gimmick, but these three clueless guys with their sister/gal buddies and dad just keep sinking lower and lower in what they’ll do for their own selfish purposes – hilariously. They poke fun at every sense of ethics and political correctness. Even their promotional ads are funny. (7/16/2008)

Lost (on ABC, Thursdays at 9 pm, Streaming free , with limited commercials, kept up for a few weeks after broadcast, and bonus Missing Pieces webisodes that the writers are being paid for. 3 seasons on DVD. Renewed through 2010.) We not only get sweaty hunks - the heroic doctor, the blue-eyed loyal brother, the sulky blond (and yeah, I want his dimples and rebel attitude to win over the woman he Humphrey Bogart-ish calls "Freckles"), the guilty father, the domineering husband and the adorable Hobbit -- who will get even more appealing as their beards and hair grow out on the island, but strong and/or interesting women characters with secrets and a sprinkling of Australian accents as the doomed plane was taking off from Sydney. I love that the mysterious island is part magic realism, part Stephen King-spooky, part Lord of the Flies gritty. It's probably best to see it as an extended mini-series if the writers (yeah - including Buffy the Vampire Slayer alum David Fury now getting to play at the grown-up's table) can keep it going, including flashing back to the characters' previous lives. Doubtless we haven't gotten to know all the survivors yet either. Surely among the rest of the other 44 are two Jews who can build separate synagogues that the other refuses to enter, per the old joke. Abrams smartly brought on board as producers, directors and writers fellow "genre geeks" from Joss Whedon's universe of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel. The kind of folks who pick characters' names with all kinds of symbolic significance, like The Frenchwoman Rousseau vs. Locke, etc. etc, more than I can keep track of. I want it clear that I was voting for "Sawyer" --James" to stay alive on the island! And yeh he finally got the girl in the 3rd season in the midst of his whole Cool Hand Luke/Planet of the Apes animal-instinct cages thing going on. Grungily, but sexily. There's so much exhaustive analysis of this show online that I'm not even going to try to keep up comments. As “Kate” said in “Left Behind” in the third season, by Damon Lindelof & Elizabeth Sarnoff: He didn't exactly tell me. Welcome to the wonderful world of not knowing what the hell is going on. Maybe listening to the songs of Previously on Lost will help. (updated 5/30/2008)
This is a terrific analysis of how it compares to other of my favorite sci fi shows:
On the philosophical underpinnings. and Getting 'Lost': Show pursues TV's most elusive genre -- mythology. Or maybe that's not it all. By Matthew Gilbert, The Boston Globe, October 27, 2004
On Lost 46 plane-crash survivors are stuck on a remote Pacific island. Or at least they might be survivors; they might also be souls in purgatory, hovering between heaven and hell, defending their lives on the sands of judgment. Or at least they might be on a sandy island; they might also be inside a Truman Show --like zoo, or on a planet where polar bears thrive in tropical climates. If indeed those beasts in the Lost forest are bears, and not emissaries of God, or grotesque alien creatures, or Mulder, Scully, and the Log Lady on a journey to the Hellmouth.
Feeling out to sea?
Then you're right where Lost creator J.J. Abrams wants you to be. You can't assume anything when it comes to his compelling new show, except that it's a big hit for ABC and that right now you're reading an article about it. It is a classic example of TV's most challenging and elusive serial format, the mythology show, a genre whose number includes Twin Peaks, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Smallville, Roswell, Carnivale, Abrams's Alias, and, of course, The X Files. . .
On a mythology show, everything you know is suspect -- a cigarette, as The X Files made all too plain during its 1993-2002 run, is never just a cigarette. Mythology TV writers aren't in the business of selling certainty. They're all about pulling viewers into the guesswork and paranoia of a giant mystery, leading them on with a trail of cryptic clues. Abrams may have titled his series after the castaways, but he wants viewers to feel a little lost, too.
Mythology shows tend to attract lively, game audiences. Nighttime soaps such as The O.C. and Everwood, require a similar commitment to ongoing plots, but they don't ask viewers to do a lot of work along the way. They explain themselves. A mythology show, however, makes its viewers into cosmic Sherlocks who must keep finding the hidden truths in an only partially recognizable universe. Mythology writers expect rigorous, un-couch-potato-like viewing -- and they get it, sometimes in spades. There are countless websites devoted to the likes of The X Files, Lost, Millennium, and Dark Angel, where avid fans turn their theories into communal-shrine art. Many of these sites also publish "fanfic" -- fan fiction -- that finds members spinning their own tales about a show's characters. Unlike most TV viewers, mythology devotees are not passive listeners to the stories the box is telling them.
And with such dedication to labyrinthine puzzles, mythology fans deserve a payoff. It behooves TV mythology creators and writers eventually to unite years of disparate plot tips and evasive disclosures. They don't need to force events to a hokey resolution, but they do need to reward viewers with a glimpse of the big picture.
In this way, The X Files is the embodiment of a failed mythology show. Ambitiously, across a decade, creator Chris Carter threw thousands of provocative morsels at viewers hungry to understand his unique mind trip. But ultimately, he failed to assemble the pieces into a satisfying, sensible whole. He squandered his audience's good faith. It was as though he'd extended the mythology beyond any possibility of cohesion in order to keep making money on it. Every sweeps period, it seemed, and with the theatrical release of the movie, The X Files ads were promising resolutions that never came. The series mythology began to feel relentlessly circular, like hearing a long game of "Dungeons & Dragons" on a tape loop.
That Abrams is now behind two mythology series -- Alias, along with Lost, which he co-created with Damon Lindelof -- proves he's a bold fellow indeed. They're hard products to conceive well, and they're hard sells with audiences, as recent mythology flops such as Tarzan and Wolf Lake have proven. Alias, which returns in January, has shown great creative energy during its three-year run; but its core mystery is approaching The X Files overripeness. If he wants us to have faith in his vision for Lost, Abrams needs to show us he still has control of his vision of Alias and its knotty Rambaldi business.
And, the best mythology shows are truly about unique vision. Usually tinged with the supernatural, if not out-and-out science fiction, they are to the medium what "Star Wars" is to the movies, or what Ursula K. LeGuin novels are to literature, or what comic books are to the magazine rack. They look altogether different from the rest of television, with highly stylized set designs that suggest distant, even surreal territories. Carnivale is a visual masterpiece that takes you far away in time and place as it showcases the catastrophic tension between the preacher and the outlaw. It's set in an evocative, alien location -- a world invented by show creator Daniel Knauf, who had far less fortune with Wolf Lake.
While an original series such as Desperate Housewives charms, its world looks and behaves like a version of our own. Mythology TV worlds are more organic products of the imaginations -- and some would say the collective unconsciousness -- of its creators. They're pure figments of human fantasy, nightmare, wish, fear, rapture, grief.
Remarkably, many of TV's mythology shows are contemporary iterations and revisions of the sort of archetypes Joseph Campbell once mapped out. Most of them are built on Campbell's Hero journey -- the Hero's initial refusal of the call, for example, which last week found Jack (Matthew Fox) on Lost vehemently -- but temporarily -- rejecting his role as leader of the survivors. Abrams has given us the archetypal animal in the enchanted woods, if, of course, that presence is indeed an animal. And he has given us John Locke (named after the "tabula rasa" philosopher and played with keen ambiguity by mythology icon Terry O'Quinn, whose TV credits include Harsh Realm, Millennium The X-Files, and Alias), who could be Jack's Mentor, and who could also be the Shapeshifter of the piece. After all, Locke did rise from his wheelchair after the plane crash.
It would be quite an exaggeration to suggest that mythology shows, which include Angel and Farscape , are as enduring as the myths we've inherited from the ancients. In thousands of years, Sydney on Alias will be electronic dust, while the goddess Diana may still be alive in our cultural memory -- the name of a moon shuttle company, perhaps. Television is a medium of transience -- less so, as it stretches its shelf life on cable, DVD, and Internet fan sites, but still fleeting. And while myths are told and retold and kept alive by interpreters, TV's mythology shows are told only once. Attempts to duplicate them and expound upon them can lead to copyright problems. Even fanfic is discouraged by studios; disclaimers must appear on stories, and no profits may be collected for them. But still these shows have ancient archetypes at their root, as they update and perpetuate them.
Like their heroes and heroines, mythology shows are the antithesis of prime time TV's big monsters, Scylla (crime dramas) and Charybdis (reality shows). Unlike the CSI and Law & Order series, they don't solve a murder and then provide viewers with a tidy denouement. And unlike Survivor and The Apprentice, they evade direct statement and self-analysis. They deliver their realities in the peripheries of the storytelling, in the hints that are dropped ever so carefully over time.
That's why the instant success of Lost is as surprising as it is deserved. As each episode explores its characters' back stories, and adds to a dramatic tapestry that will include events both off and on the island, it doesn't grant the instant gratification of most shows. It invites us to imagine possibilities, welcoming our crazy theories about Purgatory and alien abduction and government conspiracy. For an hour a week, it encourages us to get lost in a few uncommon daydreams.
© Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company
Good Season 2 interview with producers and Season 3.

MI-5 (was on A & E, but they seemed to have burned off the 3rd season in a Saturday matinee marathon with no promotion that I caught some of by accident; re-running on BBC America on Wednesdays at 9 pm with the same outrageous cuts. The 1st 3 seasons were available On Demand as “the director’s cut” -- Yeah! So each episode was about 45 minutes on cable, and 53 minutes On Demand, but with the 4th season, BBC A stopped offering it On Demand. 5 seasons are on DVD, but by how the Brits counts series, not by how it was shown in the U.S.) A & E showed such a brutally edited version of what the rest of the world saw as the series Spooks, taking a one-hour show and editing it down to 45 minutes, that it was choppy and confusing to the point of near incomprehensibility. And then, gee, they wondered why the ratings were not great! On DVD uncut is what the rest of the world considers the first two seasons. Here's where to see Matthew MacFayden pre-Pride & Prejudice.(updated 6/12/2008)

Mystery Mondays/Nitro Tuesdays/Thriller Thursdays on BBC America (In prime time then repeated overnight but I’m having trouble with the endings being cut off on the overnights some how so I end up with unsolved mysteries. I wish more were made available on BBC America On Demand with no commercials. The "Crimes of Passion" label is an anthology excuse for showing one-off TV movies as mini-series.) are terrific slices of grit, but almost all of them feature appealing hunks. British series at their maximum are much shorter than the U.S. standard season so BBC A has to keep importing many series, though they don't always bring us all of the episodes and some are brutally cut incomprehensibly to fit in the commercials. But these are deliciously franker than U.S. procedurals or TV murder mysteries, from language to gore to situations. Some are repeats of series previously seen without commercials in the U.S. on PBS, such as the original version of Touching Evil and Second Sight.
But they are also terrific tales -- from Waking the Dead (2 seasons on DVD), Silent Witness, Vincent, Eleventh Hour (which was a bit science-silly) and Wire in the Blood (5 seasons on DVD) which go way beyond CSI in emotionality; Night Detective (which was franker about racial issues than most U.S. cop shows); Murder Prevention Unit (which shows cops as violently compromised but more tortured than on The Shield as they violate what would be 1000's of U.S. laws in a Minority Report crossed with Prime Suspect - and am American version is being developed); Sea of Souls (darker than Medium and more intellectual than Supernatural) and the similar Afterlife, to Vice (which really got into how that beat can affect the cops, like L & O: SVU); to Murphy's Law (which this last season was very-The Wire-like in getting down and grubby in the drug world as it played out like a mini-series with one complicated case, fueled by a magnetic James Nesbitt miles away from his comic turns in the likes of Coupling - especially cynically having an Afghan drug importer claim terrorism info to help the Brits get in good with the Yanks). Murder City is more imitative of U.S. TV cop shows. Innocent is almost identical to a brief similarly titled U.S. series. The terrific Jekyll is being played as part of Supernatural Sundays, but is also On Demand. (updated 5/9/2008)
Life on Mars is a neat splicing together of CSI and NYPD Blue as a DCI gets transported back to the bad old days of instinctual, low tech, sexist, cigarette-smoking cops so he comes across to them as Sherlock Holmesian. American re-make being prepared, even with an interesting cast it’s having problems. (updated 7/28/2008)
But BOO to giving us a very cut up version of the otherwise mesmerizing Conviction! They showed us Bodies extended with commercials so why can't they give us all of this twisty tale that's hard enough to follow as it is. Worst editing botch they've ever done, and that's saying something. They're now as bad as AMC with Hustle and A&E with MI:5 (Spooks). (updated 1/27/2007)
U.S. TV has intermittently seen the lanky appeal of Scotsman John Hannah, who in his native TV series is as incomprehensible to the American ear as Robert Carlyle is (similarly seen on BBC A in Hamish MacBeth - 3 seasons on DVD). Various PBS stations and BBC America are playing Hannah’s frank medical examiner investigative series McCallum (all out on DVD), where he seems to spend as much time naked in bed as he does in his lab -- and I cannot keep straight his character's on-again, off-again relationships. BBC America at various times is rerunning the four episodes of Rebus, based on the Ian Rankin novels (and new ones with a different actor), where he plays a seriously flawed detective in an Edinburgh that I had no idea was as drug and organized crime infested as the Baltimore of The Wire, when I can figure out what's going on through the thick Scottish brogues (so now I want to read the books the series is based on), though we'll be getting a new Rebus soon. Bravo has shown his Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. He popped up in a couple episodes of Carnivale on HBO. He even took a small role as a friendly cop in an episode of the new Miss Marple series on PBS's Mystery.(updated 10/27/2007)

Mad Men (On AMC, Sundays, repeated overnight and also under look around for free On Demand on digital cable. 1st season on DVD.) After one viewing I’m hooked in the scathing satire of 1960 Men in Grey Flannel Suits, all the sexism, cynicism, racism, anti-Semitism, etc. Looks great, acted great! I finally got the triple pun in the title (Madison Avenue, Ad Men, crazy), reinforced in this guide to NY. I give a critical look at the Jewish women characters Rachel and others. See the documentary Helvetica for background on the design changes the series illustrates. Peabody award winner 2008.
Season 2 opens 18 months after the Thanksgiving cliffhangers of Season 1, at Valentine’s Day 1962. (updated 7/28/2008)

The Naked Brothers Band (on Nick, Saturday at 8:30 pm, Movie and Battle of the Bands on DVD) Inaugurating TeenNick-- gee wonder why they don’t call it NickTeen-- it’s the first I've watched anything there since The Adventures of Pete & Pete, one of my all time favorite family shows. Mom/Director Polly Draper first did a movie-length Spinal Tap-like take on her sons that was LOL charming funny with cute pop music too ("Crazy Car" etc.). I love that it’s NYC-centric, satirical about fighting brothers in bands yet age-appropriate believable. Sure it pokes fun at grown-ups, but they’re in on the fun. It gets a bit harder to sustain as the kids get older and even more self-aware, but so far so good. (9/8/2007)

The Office (Still repeated on BBCAmerica frequently, and some PBS stations. Both seasons and follow-up "Christmas special" available on DVD.) I got fooled at first by the mockumentary approach, with the characters talking to the camera and no laugh track, but it's Dilbert meets Spinal Tap. Virtually none of the characters are sympathetic, rather they remind you of annoying people one has actually encountered and had to deal with in real offices. Instead of the lovable faux family workplaces in American sitcoms, here instead we have the petty battlefields amidst confusing management and financial imperatives more like the Real World. Only a creator, Rick Gervais, could have the guts to play the really annoying manager! This is in effect the misanthropic Curb Your Enthusiasm in an office setting. After watching each episode a couple of times, I realize that one reason the humor seems particularly dry to an American is that I don't get the geographical or local pop culture references or Brit slang, especially in the mumbled asides: "territorial Army" - is that the Reserves/National Guard? What's a "benny"? "Stephen A" responds to me: "Territorial Army: Army training that some people do over the weekends and holidays. Since Britain's army is so small, they could find themselves in combat if things got serious. The real Army calls them 'weekend warriors.' Benny: Possibly a reference to a character in Crossroads - an old British soap. He made Joey from Friends look like Einstein." Tim Jenkins responds: "'Benny' is indeed a character in the soap Crossroads. However, I suspect (but can't be sure) that the phrase used in The Office would have been 'having a benny' - I think the nearest U.S. equivalent would be 'hissy fit', or you could replace 'cow' with 'benny' in Bart Simpson's trademark 'Don't have a cow' phrase. So basically a temper tantrum." The American version is too nice, but I only watched the pilot.
Okay, I was a snob, and for almost 3 seasons I resisted the U.S. version (on NBC Thursday nights at 8:30 pm, deleted scenes streaming free online weekly. Long season renewed for next year. 3 seasons out on DVD) – but heck, with bringing on all those Daily Show talents, it is gosh darn funny, as I catch up via repeats, even if the romances are far less subtle and realistic than the original. But I am as caught up as the rest of the country in the subtle doings between the poster boy for beta males “Jim” and sweet “Pam”. (updated 9/8/2007)

Prison Break (on Fox Mondays at 8 pm and streaming free online. 2 seasons on DVD. Renewed for 22-episode 4th season – with “Sarah” – and her head.) I initially watched for entry on my HUNK 'O' METER but Wentworth Miller and Dominic Purcell are quite charismatic and we even have Frank Grillo for more episodes than I expected and I certainly was not disappointed on that front, but lo and behold, the cheesy idea turns out to be a fun thriller, with great pacing and as attention-keeping a continuing story thread as 24. I've been impressed by the writing and production talent -- Marti Noxon, Zack Estrin, Michael Watkins, Matt Olmstead from past quality drama faves of mine -- who know how to put across a cool story. And the production design is nicely noir looking. So yeah, I'm hooked. Welcome William Fichtner! Even if he's way too inside "Michael"s head in figuring out where the escapees are, his flawed, "Inspector Javert"/Fugitive-type obsession is intense! He was captivating in Invasion last season, as well as his many indie movie roles, so it's nice to see him find quality TV recognize his appeal. And we even got a kiss and a hug! (updated 3/29/2008)

Rescue Me (4th season of 13 episodes on FX Wednesdays at 10 pm and repeated overnight and during the week; episodes run an extra 5+ minutes. Renewed for 4th season. 3 Seasons on DVD. Soundtrack out.) is Denis Leary and Peter Tolan's caustic and funny, yet sympathetic and moving documentation of the continuing impact of 9/11 on firefighters and their families (marriage is referred to as "The Beast"), with basic cable language and situation freedom that Third Watch doesn't have. (I document those aspects at World Trade Center In Memoriam: In Sight and Sound.)
Nice to see almost as much of the talented hunk Daniel Sunjata as we saw in the play Take Me Out, here in a bigger role as a firefighter than his mild-mannered lab technician in Law and Order: SVU. Though both Tolan and Leary are from Massachusetts (hence their emphasis on hockey and incorrect assumption that NYC houses have garbage disposals), this is filmed here in NYC and feels authentic, complete with the ethnic biases, sexism and homophobia.
Unconventional rock 'n' roll selections that even resisted using the Fontella Bass classic over the titles, opting for the Von Bondies "C'Mon C'Mon" from their major label debut Pawn Shoppe Heart instead. In "Gay" that's Tom McRae's song "Stronger Than Dirt" from the CD Just Like Blood with the beautiful and appropriate lyric: But I am stronger than you/And I am braver than you/And I will still be here/When the dust has cleared will you/Will you, will you, will you. . ." The closing song for "DNA" was "When All Is Said and Done" by Tyrone Wells from the CD Snapshot-- with appropriate lyrics like "I walk across the bridge of death alone".
But a major plot point in the episode directly repeated one from Third Watch, let alone crazy, destructive girlfriends were from The Beat.
Nice touch of subtitling the subtext of conversations between fathers and sons as these adults can't directly communicate emotions. The rookie is so endearing -- especially when he beds older women and fat chicks. Hope we see more of James Badge Dale of 24 as Leary's brother. The Season 1 finale combined all the best elements of the series in a really moving montage. In Season 2, no way did I buy the Lieutenant's affair with the call girl when the rest of the series is so realistic - so whew, that it concluded with a hardheaded look at male fantasies. But, c'mon c'mon, poor "Tommy" is virtually Job. Whew! Lots of print and online chatter about the ex-wife rape episode - what you thought "Tommy" wasn't outrageous?
Funny short that's a pre-Season 3 treat.
I am monitoring their hilarious skewering of Jewish women in Season 4, though I got behind on transcribing the full satirical dialogue. (updated 11/5/2007)

Shameless (Sunday nights at 9 pm and other overnights, showing UNcensored on Sundance Channel, unlike the edited version on BBC America, which never got to Season 2. They’re showing Season 3 - but will Sundance show all the episodes from the UK’s Channel 4 – 50 and counting into 5 seasons now that it’s been bought by the company that destroyed AMC as a movie channel? ) Yes, the Manchester accents are virtually indecipherable, and I may just have to figure out how to get closed captioning onscreen. Paul Abbott's semi-autobiographical tale of a large family of siblings largely fending for themselves though fiercely protective of each other and their drunken father is outrageous and completely unpredictable, going beyond any family on U.S. broadcast, basic cable or premium TV. Even though I wait breathlessly for each moment that James McAvoy is on the screen (falling in love in real life with his onscreen co-star) and he’s probably the reason Sundance picked it up, but I love the roller coaster ride that is this rambunctious family that quirky doesn't even begin to describe, as even the most serious issues and unexpected behaviors are fodder for blunt and pointed humor and poignancy. The scabrous Christmas special was only played once overnight on BBCA during the holidays and of course I managed to tape it wrong so didn't get to see the whole thing so I was thrilled that my new DVR worked so that I could catch the Sundance Channel repeat of that too even while I was out of town. OMG – did I cry when in the 2nd season “Steve” had to leave “Fiona”! And then again when she left to join him! (updated 7/20/2008)

The Shield (Tuesdays at 10 pm on FX - the episodes run over the hour by several minutes– doubtless will be repeated during the week and overnight. 6 seasons out on DVD. Earlier seasons being rerun uncut on Spike Friday nights and probably cut in syndication.) Somewhere between Oz and Homicide literally, in terms of law enforcement stories (including a girl's murder haunting a detective), and in terms of quality, this is as-brutal-as-basic-cable-gets. Inspired by the infamous Ramparts division in L.A., this trawls the dregs of criminal and law enforcement behavior with in-your-face camera style, language and frank situations. The bent cop at the center has the fascination of the abomination; his twisted heart of gold is defended as viciously anti-criminal whatever their color or orientation. I'm getting into the nexus of the personal/professional of his and his motley cohorts, especially his Mutt and Jeff sidekicks, (especially the one with the surfer dude haircut).
Though unfortunately in the 2nd season we saw less of their side lives, such as a beat cop tortured by his homosexuality-- in the third season we more of them over-compensating to be adults in their personal lives, as well as at work a cerebral detective continues to try to fit in, and the great CCH Pounder towers over them all in her meatiest role yet as a detective who is both trying to do a damn good job and supervise them on route to a much-wanted promotion (and she wuz robbed of an Emmy nom).
Whew, as with the very best cop shows, the Captain's decision NOT to shoot a perp in revenge made for wrenching, superior television. Great season with a complex Glen Close! But Internal Affairs nemesis Forrest Whittacker had me actually rooting for corrupt "Mackey" and he too should have gotten an Emmy nom.
2006 Peabody Award winner: "Riveting, densely layered adult entertainment – and more. No cop series has posed harder questions than The Shield about how far we're willing to let law-enforcement officers go to keep us safe." Aussie Alex O'Loughlin in Oyster Farmer hunked up the team one season. (updated 3/24/2008)

The Treatment (On HBO, each weeknight and repeated overnights and weekends, and On Demand in advance. Renewed for a 2nd season, with new patients.) Completely addictive, despite the complicated nightly schedule, as you absolutely have to keep up with each patient, as they all come into play at the end of the week. Especially riveting are Gabriel Bryne as the unethical, overly-personally-involved shrink, Dianne Wiest (love her clothes, too) as his forceful shrink “Gina”, and the inestimable force-of-nature Michelle Forbes as his wife. Though the manipulative “Laura” (Melissa George) drives me crazy, I’m enthralled by the guilt-ridden pilot “Alex” (Blair Underwood), the psychically damaged gymnast “Sophie” (Mia Wasikowska) and the warring couple (Josh Charles and Embeth Davidtz). Though it’s based on an Israeli TV series Be 'Tipul created by Hagai Levi with Ori Sivan & Nir Bergman, none of the U.S. characters so far seem to be Jewish. (updated 6/25/2008)

The Wire: The Best Novel on Television (my detailed "McNulty" and “Prez”/music-centered episode guide)


GONE BUT NOT FORGOTTEN: WATCH FOR REPEATS ON CABLE OR ON DVD/VIDEO

100 Center Street (A & E is rerunning it now and again) Feels like the prequel to Oz. It's both grittily realistic and theatrical. Creator Sidney Lumet combines the '40's TV feel of 12 Angry Men with contemporary language and situations, though the new season is going more for sentimental poignancy. While there are some ethnic stereotypes, this put NYPD Blue sharply in its place. Alan Arkin leads an interesting, multi-ethnic ensemble in his best performance in years. Lumet was even more actively involved in the second season, with the positive of more interesting dialogue and drama -- but a stale feeling of naive, out-of-date liberal causes and issues (how is that free legal service paying for itself?), and intentionally no mention of post-9/11.

American Family (on PBS stations various times. Rerunning on Si TV) The first season last year (available on DVD) started out as run-of-the-mill soap opera with the PC gimmick of a Latino cast and a video journal, probably because it was developed for commercial television. But by the last few episodes the creator, noted filmmaker Gregory Nava, rose to new cinematographic and storytelling heights, particularly in a breath-taking one-take episode, "Silence of God," (sadly neglected at the Emmys) that also served as a catalyst for all the characters, and on into emotional episodes recalling the Zoot Suit Riots ("The Hat"). Season #2 is now billed by PBS as a 13-part mini-series "Journey of Dreams." Featuring many of the hunks from the disappeared Showtime series Resurrection Boulevard, it jumps a bit pretentiously between past and present, reality and dreams to try to present perhaps a too sweeping account of The Chicano Experience in war and peace, but is certainly the most beautiful show on TV since Carnivale. It's also nice to see a more realistic view of the impact of 9/11 and of soldiers in the Iraq War than such jingoistic shows as JAG. (updated 2/18/2006)

Arrested Development (All 3 seasons out on DVD. According to Hollywood Reporter 7/27/2006: "licensed simultaneously to Internet portal MSN, and cable channels HDNet and G4 for a three-year period starting in September [2006]. Comcast-owned G4's deal covers basic cable rights to the series, which ran from 2003-06 on Fox, while HDNet will have exclusive high-definition television access to the show. G4 will begin running the series daily in a primetime slot in October [2006]; HDNet will air the show with two back-to-back episodes on Wednesday nights starting in September [2006]. MSN will debut its presentation slightly later than the other two licensees because it is creating an interactive, fully featured environment in which to show "Arrested." All of the episodes will be available on demand throughout the license period rather than scheduled to be shown one at a time.) Brash, satirical way to deny that a grossly fiscally irresponsible real estate family named "Bluth" whose family patriarch, as usual in TV Land written by Jewish men, here produced by Mitchell Hurwitz, is played by a distinctively Jewish actor (Jeffrey Tambor-- and his wife is played by Jessica Walter who also frequently plays Jewish mothers) but he was cast at the last minute) converted to Judaism in prison and uses it as shrewdly entrepreneurially as Madonna's kabbalah promotions. It is blessedly free of a laugh track, tapes on many sets and has an absolutely delightfully absurd dysfunctional family. Jason Bateman, as the sane keystone--as sane as a widower with a teen son can be bicycle-riding in L.A. while living in a model home with one's adult siblings-- is an adorable, simply lovable straight man who gets off wry zingers as the others throw impossible situations at him. Also love the jabs at corporate malfeasance a la Tyco etc. One of the few sitcoms since Seinfeld where you can re-watch episodes and laugh just as heartily again and again. (updated 8/27/2006)

At Home with the Braithwaites (BBC America repeats on weekday afternoons. 2 seasons out on DVD.) Utterly charming! Both LOL funny and poignant as each member of the family goes through hysteria and happiness. How typically un-American that a family comedy can have bad language, a lesbian daughter, a knocked-up sister (though with the usual TV outcome at a clinic), and a husband in an affair. As a fund raiser, I was impressed how accurate the story line was about the difficulties of setting up a foundation, from legalities to accounting to program evaluation and nepotism issues as the housewife tries to keep her lottery winnings secret from her family. The first season is a marvelous introduction to setting up a philanthropy; the second season got a bit silly. The Welsh Mine All Mine (mini-series on BBC America, will probably get repeated) also very amusingly deals with a suddenly wealthy family but one with no philanthropic interests. (updated 3/24/2006)
This is a much better show than the similar-themed but even soapier Windfall (NBC, Thursdays at 10 pm), which so far would primarily deserve a place on the HUNK 'O' METER alone just for D.J. Cotrona, Jon Foster, Jason Gedrick and Luke Perry, who I have followed through many cancelled shows, as I wonder if NBC will even play the 13 filmed episodes as a full summer fill-in. (6/12/2006)

Attachments (mini-series was on BBCAmerica, maybe they'll repeat it or PBS will pick it up - seemed unfinished, as if the BBC cancelled it half-way through or maybe there'll be another season) The first dot-com drama. The varied Brit accents are a bit thick and BBC America's censorship of language was annoying, but you can still figure out the VERY frank, very original, very contemporary roller coaster situations (stopping a porno site squatter, cyber sex with a venture capitalist, payola deals with old friends, siblings, friends and lovers intruding with various sexual proclivities).

BallykissAngel (rerun on BBCAmerica various times; also on some PBS channels. 4 seasons out on video/DVD.) This is a good reason to get digital or satellite TV, to have access to this quirky Irish series that was previously only available on some PBS outlets, even with having to tolerate cheesy interrupting commercials. Characters have come and gone, actors have died or moved on to movie careers (yes, we BallyK fans will have known Colin Farrell before he became a hot Hollywood hunk), but now through six seasons the tone and gentle realism of this small titular town continues to charm and absorb. Don't let the "G" rating fool you; this is sophisticated family fare. Also on BBCAmerica (repeated now and again) has been Haimish MacBeth (2 seasons on DVD), a similar take on a Scottish village, with a surprisingly calm Robert Carlyle, but with heavy brogues all around the town. And Monarch of the Glen (7 seasons on DVD, with an extra bonus of The Last Monarch: A behind the scenes special featuring members of the original cast, soundtrack album available. Pops up both on BBCA repeats and PBS.) is another cute collection of quirky characters with the added touch of class and tradition vs. modernity conflict in the Scottish highlands, and isn't the Laird of the Manor cute so no wonder he had several ladies interested --even if the resolution of the relationships wasn't as interesting as the competition. But they do keep coming up with new interesting faces. And even when he's gone for good they manage to rope in other easy-on-the-eyes relatives to carry on and keep the stories both sweet and poignant on the clash of tradition and modernity. (updated 10/27/2007)

Best of Youth (La Meglio gioventù) (in the U.S. shown theatrically in two seatings of 3 hours each and on Netflicks as 2 separate requests. Being shown on the Sundance Channel as a mini-series it was intended as.) proves that Italians have learned the art of the long-form television mini-series that the British have long mastered.
Covering a somewhat same period of the baby boom generation as In A Land of Plenty, it has more of the generational feel of individuals caught up in history as we have usually seen in British mini-series about end-of-the-eras or World War I, such as Brideshead Revisited and Jewel in the Crown. U.S. mini-series were more successful as sweeping historical epics, even when they were also family sagas like Roots and Centennial; when the networks tried to interpret more recent history, as in The Sixties, the set characters sped through Zelig and Forest Gump-like in happening to be at the right place at the right time; perhaps the several seasons combined of the NBC series American Dreams could be considered comparable in showing how the times that are a-changing affect a family.
Best of Youth is being released in the U.S. in movie theaters, though I'm not sure even shown in two parts of three hours each how edited it is from the original format, as other grand European mini-series like Berlin Alexanderplatz, Das Boot and Fanny and Alexander were originally only shown in the U.S. in truncated theatrical versions as even PBS seems averse to television with subtitles so we rarely get to see the best of world television. Comparison to the Italian film The Leopard is unfair as that was not created in the same format and covers a shorter period of historical time.
Best of Youth combines charismatic acting, leisurely directing amidst beautiful scenery in several parts of Italy with writing that takes the trajectories of complex yet consistent characters' lives believably and searingly affected by uniquely Italian experiences of the baby boomers' young adult years through middle age, without the American tendency to reject or regret youthful ambitions, through the lens of local natural disasters, violent political activities, judicial battles against the Cosa Nostra, European economic changes, with regional variations, that Americans rarely see in movies.
The focus is primarily on two brothers from the 1960's almost to the present, played by two actors who must be the equivalent of George Clooney and Richard Chamberlain in Italian television. Alessio Boni in particular as Matteo captures the screen with such tortured macho dynamism that it's no wonder he's gone on to play Heathcliff and Dracula in other mini-series. His Paul Newman-like startling blue eyes become a talking point of the series and a continuing visual leitmotif. Similarly, the physical differences between the two actors help to point up the different paths the brothers take through life, even as the casting of other family members to look like them is eerily effective.
The series is particularly good at capturing the camaraderie amongst old male friends over the years and the intimate interactions of members of a family, particularly with children, with a strong theme of the importance of both as an anchor. Unlike in American TV where women are adjuncts as the girlfriend/wife/mother, the key women here are crucial fulcrums in the brothers' lives and have separate intellectual, psychological and emotional demands.
The emotions are important here -- grief is shown very movingly, with more pain and tears than American culture usually allows. In one extended scene, we see a grieving mother walk slowly up a long flight of stairs in numbed silence and gradually see her revive as she learns of surprise news about her son.
There are of course some coincidences of family members' and friends' paths crossing at key junctures, but the story overall grips us.
The pop music selections, American, European and Italian, are wonderfully evocative. (3/19/2005) (updated 12/18/2007)

The Chris Isaak Show (Showtime reruns it on various channels -- but watch out for trying to tape the over night showings as Showtime's schedule is screwy) I initially just put this under the HUNK 'O' METER because it's so gentle in its humor --the producers are after all Northern Exposure alumni--and not as satirical as it could be about the rock 'n' roll life. In addition to Isaak sort of playing himself (and I'm a fan who has all his albums), his real and pseudo-band mates (particularly adorable Jed Rees as his morally challenged, supposed keyboard player) are fun to watch, and sometimes even touching. Especially heart-tugging is the wonderful actress playing "Yola" his woebegone manager, Kristin Dattilo, who attempts to have a moral, conventional life and romances while being surrounded by sex, drugs, rock 'n ' roll, a mother in full mid-life crisis, and a temptingly cute, younger male competitor in her office. The musical and Hollywood guest stars a la The Larry Sanders Show are entertaining (but how come no soundtrack of the duets out?), but the nude counselor is just plain Showtime-typical gratuitous. Nice ark to the last season that led to a surprising, yet satisfying conclusion. (updated 3/28/2004))

Cold Feet (rerun on BBC America various times and they sometimes dole out fresh episodes now and then. 1st season out on DVD, but it's not clear to me how the Brit seasons match up to what we've seen here in terms of number of episodes.) A case study of how a British original is better than its American imitation. The quickly-cancelled American version of this show had a too pretty cast, cut down on the randy language and action, and slowed down the sprightly, crazy pace. The editing is key to what makes this older show being replayed after being on Bravo, quality, with its quick cutting of points-of-view among three friendly couples at different stages of relationships, marriage and children-raising. While some of the accents are hard to interpret for American ears, the character actors (some familiar from Brit TV shows previously shown here) are marvelous. (updated 2/18/2006)

Cracker (repeated occasionally on BBCAmerica. All episodes on DVD. The quickly cancelled American re-make is also out on DVD.) Finally being shown uncensored for language in the U.S. that other basic cable shows like The Shield think they're now daring for using, this classic cop show simply broke the genre mold and invented the TV forensic psychologist as well as Grit Brit cop shows and the flawed hero, such as House, M.D.. It has since been much imitated but re-watching amazes me that it's still powerful and original, as no other show has dared to have a lead character as flawed and unlikely as "Fitz" (Robbie Coltrane) and have such psychologically brutal interactions among the ensemble players. The personal literally bleeds into the professional and vice versa. Other shows have gone beyond with the visual violence, but this is still more shocking. I also think it was influential way beyond it's initial U.S. audience -- would James Gandolfini be possible as destructively flawed, un-matinee-idol-looking "Tony Soprano" without Fitz? Too bad Granada used cheap video so it looks like old kinescopes.
Quibblers online say the first episodes written by creator Jimmy McGovern were superior to later episodes by Paul Abbott (who also writes Shameless, as well as one of the American scripts), but I was so struck by the latter that I now will watch anything Abbott writes, and even American imitations of what he wrote, such as USA's gussied-up, watered-down, but still flashes of effective version of Touching Evil (streaming online). (updated 7/15/2006)

Dead Like Me (Sci Fi Channel rerunning the whole series at various times. Both seasons out on DVD.) While I was disappointed that I couldn't put this under HALL OF DAMES because the lead girl "George" is exactly like the sullen teenager I always warn my friends who are considering "having a baby" is what they'll really end up with for more years, the quirkiness of the whole mise en scène (the living and the dead) is charming. Though I cannot keep track of all the rules in this After World. So nice to see Mandy Patinkin --he only got to sing a bit at the end of the series-- and Cynthia Stevenson back on TV. Callum Blue's Brit "Mason" is kinda endearing. The second season charmingly developed each character, including their back story, as well as George's family, even if the deaths of the souls they reaped more and more became like Six Feet Under.
A TV movie was produced, with the possibility of a renewed series without Patinkin, but instead Bryan Fuller explains: Pushing Daisies “came out of a spin-off idea for Dead Like Me. And then when I left that show to do Wonderfalls I just put it in my back pocket where it was gestating. And when I went into Warner Bros. to talk about pilot ideas, I pitched out six or seven ideas and this is the one that [they] actually championed. . . We would have set it up so in season two George would have met this guy, discovered what he could do and touched her, she would get her life back, go back to her family for an arc of episodes. And then he would touch her again because she would have left all of her responsibilities behind. [It designed as] part of her growing up in the series. And he would have gone off to his own show. That was the plan. It kind of worked out that way. But not exactly as planned. [Laughs.]” (updated 11/5/2007)

Deadwood (on HBO channels various night repeats and On Demand. 3 seasons out on DVD. Soundtrack out. Still up in the air are two concluding two-hour movies.) I was at first truly torn whether to put this under HUNK 'O' METER as it does have captivating guys in Ian MacShane as the villainous yet complex opposite of his affable Lovejoy and beyond even his Power and Glory head lawyer in Trust, Keith Carradine for the first four episodes, and most especially a piercing Timothy Olyphant in an exquisite Dance of the Alpha Males. But David Milch is not just reinventing the Western -- he is demonstrating how an amoral, lawless, vividly profane, mostly male environment gradually lurches towards civilization and self-government, a sort of Lord of the Flies in reverse that John Ford implied in his Westerns and sexual tension that's straight out of Jane Austen. His extravagant effort to keep to historical accuracy in dirt, characters (like Wild Bill Hickok, Calamity Jane, and Sheriff Bullock, etc.), sets, profanity, and body count is riveting -- rivaling Oz. The highly stylized period language, which has much in common with Milch's earlier work on NYPD Blue can be hard to follow, so a fan has posted transcripts. Halfway through the first season the women started to get more complex as well, powerfully influencing events and emotions, and are even more active in the second season. The cinematography even looks like daguerreotypes.

While the opening music is by David Schwartz, HBO finally started IDing the closing songs, which is useful as they are not of the period. I picked up additional info at the HBO Forums from one of the producers, Jody Worth, who, along with a couple of the actors, started posting with the airing of Episode 3. He says that "all the end-credit songs were drawn from a list suggested by the journalist Jane Wallace":

In Episode 4: "Here Was A Man" -- when the town is reacting to Wild Bill's murder the mandolin music is "Iguazo" by Gustavo Santaolalla.
Michael Brook's music was featured, among other times, when Hickok's body was being viewed in the tent at the start of Episode 5: "The Trial of Jack McCall."
Snippets of the closing song of Episodes 1 and 10, "Hog of the Forsaken" by Michael Hurley, can be heard from the album Long Journey.
There's an error posted in the music list for Episode 11: "Jewel's Boot Is Made For Walking" - it's in fact "Snake Baked A Hoecake" performed by Calum McColl, from a children's album credited to Mike and Peggy Seeger and family. The Mississippi John Hurt song actually closes out Episode 12.
The title of the operatic season finale Episode 12: "Sold Under Sin" comes from the apostle Paul in Romans 7, 14-15: "For we know that the law is spiritual: but I am carnal, sold under sin. For that which I do I allow not: for what I would, that do I not; but what I hate, that do I." The fife and drums are playing "Lillibulero."

According to the actors who post, "Mr Wu is probably the only actor on the set who writes most of his own dialogue," as he speaks in genuine Cantonese. Two of the actors are in bands "with a mutual love of loud rock and roll and Townes Van Zan[d]t": John Hawkes' ("Sol Star") band is Space Brothers (so I guess he's really playing the drums in A Slipping Down Life) and W. Earl Brown's ("Dan Dority") band is Sacred CowBoys.

It helps to know that the second season takes place about six months after Season 1 concluded, so tensions and emotions that were building exploded easily. I could no longer keep up with the HBO Forum and won't even try to do any commentary compared to all that gets discussed there, including interaction with actors and writers. Coming someday: my transcription of David Milch's comments at the 92nd St Y on September 15, 2005 on "The Jewish Experience in the Old West". The George Hearst character had pithy advice for My Son the Election Law expert: Elections cannot inconvenience me. They ratify my will or I neuter them. (in "A Constant Throb" by producer Mark Tinker) followed in the season finale by an ominous look to his future as he responds nastily to the editor who has recovered from the beating Hearst ordered: I've stopped reading your paper. I'll have my people here start another one to lie the other way.
That finale, "Tell Him Something Pretty" by producer Ted Mann, also included what passes for poignant romantic banter in this searing series: The ex-prostitute "Trixie" is graphically explaining her strategy to get her paramour "Starr" election votes which will also expose her to the vengeance of Hearst, whom she had just tried to assassinate: "Starr": You selfish cunt. "Trixie": No one asked you to put me up. "Starr": That's right, my fucking choice. I'm not fucking afraid. "Trixie": I guess maybe I'm not either. "Starr" (choking): Not to die. "Trixie": Why ain't you clever. Ain't you fuckin' clever, you deep thinkin', fuckin' Jew. "Starr": Why bother with your boots then, Trixie, if you're goin'? "Trixie": Let me walk out myself! "Starr" throws her out the door: The fuck I will. At least I can say that I threw you out because you'd rather die than live with me! He sits and weeps. There's a knock at the door. He opens it to her -- and they embrace and cry. – but in the meantime Milch’s writing and much of the cast could be seen on the head-scratching one-season John From Cincinnati). At least we got to see Milch’s writing and much of the cast on the head-scratching one-season John From Cincinnati). (updated 8/21/2007)

Glasgow Kiss (mini-series on BBCAmerica) Promo'd as a "love story for grown-ups," this has a lot in common with Once and Again as these are two complex, mature folks with relationship and family baggage. The brogues are thick and the slang and geographical references go right past me. (I had to go to "The Scotsman" newspaper to learn that: "A 'Glasgow kiss', after all, is a hardman's calling card – a headbutt. It's a phrase that sums up all the knee-jerk prejudices outsiders harbour about the dear green place. We prefer a square [huh?] go to a snog [see what I mean?]. If a Glaswegian takes a lunge at you, the intention is more likely to be criminal than carnal. However, in this case, we're being double-bluffed – because this is a literal-minded interpretation of the cliché. Glasgow Kiss is about people kissing in Glasgow. It's making the point that even in a city notorious for its violence, tenderness and romance and non-threatening, made-for-each-other Mills and Boon eroticism can flourish.") But the romance and the reality are both charming and poignant, such as the passionate cri d'coeur by (BTW hunky) Iain Glen on the pain his mother-in-law causes him with her constant grieving over his late wife. And the career woman has much more competence than the love-tossed executive of Ally McBeal.
Another lovely, similarly romantic BBC America mini-series was NY/LON, with Rashida Jones as a Lower East Sider and Stephen Moyer as a London investment banker, even if it left us, boo hoo, hanging at seven episodes. Maybe the American re-make with Elisha Cuthbert will last longer to let us know what happens. (updated 3/29/2008)

Going to California (Showtime finished its first run after cancelling it but it is popping up every now on then on Showtime's extra channels) One showing of this whimsical series, which has a similar feel to The Chris Isaak Show and the movie Diner and I was already sold by its rock 'n' roll sensibility, sharp writing and of course guys who are easy on the eyes. Peter Himmelman is doing the music, like he does for Judging Amy. But I don't know if he's also picking the soundtrack selections, let alone the rock 'n' roll script references coz they're marvelous. But it's executive produced by a co-writer of High Fidelity screenplay so it just may be that Scott Rosenberg is knowledgeable. The characters do High Fidelity type lists like "4 hottest chicks in movies" with a debate about whether the gay guy in the car has a right to make a list on only aesthetic grounds. Crucial discussion was on whether it's enough in life to know that you can see Springsteen on tour every 4 years or if one should expect more from life. I thought this was just gonna be a guy road trip, but the lessons they learn from the women along the way (and the girlfriend still back home) are very moving, thanks to the women writers on the show. That's Old '97's, one of my faves, doing a specially-recorded theme song "Let's Get Lost Along The Way" -- for lyrics and an episode guide. Who would have predicted that the Air Supply song "I'm All Out Of Love" could provide the best screen epiphany since John Cusack held up a tape playing "In Your Eyes"? (and what a surprise for a song I can't get out of my head - turns out they're an Australian band). And here's two-degrees of separation to Russell Crowe:

Russell as rocker hits a Sundance high note
By Mark Caro, Chicago Tribune movie reporter, January 21, 2002
PARK CITY, Utah -- The Sundance Film Festival is all about discovering the future stars of film, but, still, everyone gets a little giddier when the current ones show up.. .
And late Thursday night, the Yarrow Hotel's lobby and entrances were crammed late with dozens of parka-wearing festival-goers, mostly female, who were desperately seeking tickets for a documentary about a rock band that has sold about as many albums as Britney Spears sells during a costume change.
If these fans couldn't snag a ticket for this 11:30 p.m. screening in a 250-seat function room, they at least wanted a glimpse of the band's lead singer-songwriter, who was due to introduce the movie. Russell Crowe has fronted Thirty Odd Foot of Grunts since it formed in 1984, and Texas, produced by the band, shows the fellas recording, rehearsing, swearing, goofing off and playing a concert in Austin.
"This is a home movie," Crowe, having survived the fan gauntlet, told the audience before the screening. His face was sporting what looked like a week's worth of beard; his hair was longish, flipping up at the back of his neck; and he wore a red flannel shirt and dark overcoat as he stood in front of the screen and lit up a cigarette. No one was about to ask him to put it out.
From the moment Crowe stepped to the microphone, audience members began snapping away like wannabe paparazzi until he stated with typical brusqueness, "No camera flashes while I'm talking." "This is not about superstars," Crowe told the crowd. "This is not about cutting-edge film technology. It's a slice of life."
Still, the vanity-project aspects are unavoidable; if not for Crowe's star power, no band of similar stature and quality would be able to get Sundance and Miramax to promote such an advertisement for itself.
That said, the movie does pretty much what it intends to do: It makes a good-humored case for TOFOG (the band's almost-catchy acronym) as a cohesive, rocking band that honors the tradition of storytelling compressed into three-minute pop songs. Crowe gets across his love for music, even if he probably didn't envision playing concerts where the crowds appear to be about 85 percent female. . .
After the screening, Crowe, several of his associates and Miramax and Sundance representatives retreated to a club on Main Street. It had a small stage, but Crowe said performing without his band mates -- who weren't in town -- would defeat the point.
Instead, none other than Graham Russell, half of the legendary Air Supply, played a solo acoustic rendition of "All Out of Love," and much of the club, including Crowe, joined in on the chorus. In fact, sing-alongs to sappy classics was a festival mini-trend; a few nights earlier, Swinton joined in a spontaneous, table-wide outbreak of "The Greatest Love of All" at a dinner for her new film "Teknolust."
But when Graham Russell entreated his friend Crowe to join him on stage for the end of the song, Crowe muttered one of his trademark salty phrases and stayed put. Afterward, the singer returned to the table, and Crowe said dryly, "Next time I show one of my movies, I'll stop it before the last reel and ask you to come up and act it out."
Copyright (c) 2002, Chicago Tribune

Homicide: Life on the Streets (On weeknights on Sleuth TV, except for 4 cross-over episodes with Law and Order that have run on TNT to high ratings -- leading Fontana to say: "The show still has life and they should show it on TNT." 7 seasons on video/DVD. Special complete series DVD package has: all 122 episodes plus all three Law and Order crossover episodes and the follow-up Homicide: The Movie, on a separate disc, the made-for-PBS documentary Anatomy of a HomicideAmerican Justice; Superbowl XXVII commercials for Season One premiere; Song listings about "The Board"; Inside Homicide with David Simon and James Yoshimura) So the head of NBC sends out a tape of The Sopranos and asks his suits why can't they come up with a series as good as this? Bone-head -- you had one and killed it with time changes, interference, and finally cancellation! So good it inspired the British TV writer Paul Abbott to create such series as Touch of Evil. Even the Emmy's mostly ignored it because it was shot grittily in Baltimore not L.A. (except for two writing awards for episodes that were breathtakingly superb--"Three Men and Adena" and "Subway" which was even the basis for a PBS documentary examining how brilliant it was and final acting awards for a masterful Andre Braugher). This series took the ensemble arc concepts into its characters' very souls with unsolved crimes and crimes that affected their very cores. The use of music was brilliant so you could use this reference site as to what's played though I'm not sure it's as complete as the original official web site. I don't know if the repeats include all the original music, as there's rights issues in syndication. There's a fan companion book that brings the music guide through a good part of the last season; the DVDs are also listing the songs. From The Village Voice 8/11/2004, Out of the Box by Joy Press: "Homicide: Life on the Street, which hit the air in 1993[, c]reated by Barry Levinson, the series single-handedly introduced many of today's top American independent filmmakers to television: Mary Harron, Whit Stillman, Ted Demme, Steve Buscemi, Lisa Cholodenko, Barbara Koppel, and [Miguel] Arteta all directed episodes of the show. 'Homicide was one of the great training grounds for indie directors—it was really a rite of passage for so many of us," says Arteta. "We were all broke after our movies and they gave us a chance and paid us. The show's style worked well—it was rough and handheld and it was about getting interesting performances.'" (updated 1/23/2006)
Aw, here's an unexpectedly romantic and artistic side story:
Dan Futterman, actor and Oscar-nommed scripter for Capote met his wife Anya Epstein (of the Casablanca/Boston Red Sox Epsteins) when he appeared on a 1999 Homicide: Life on the Street episode she had written. "For a writer-producer of a television show, there's no scarier phrase than an actor saying, `Listen, I have a great idea for a screenplay,' but she decided to take it seriously, for one reason or another. . . And she was extremely clear with me about the fact that I needed to have a narrative drive, I needed to have an outline where one scene led to another ... And that was a revelation to me. It's probably perfectly obvious to anybody who's written a screenplay before, but I hadn't. I think had I not met her at the beginning of this process, it would never have gotten done." From 'Capote' Screenwriter Humbled by Oscar Nod by Douglas J. Rowe, AP, 2/23/2006

In A Land of Plenty (10-part mini-series was on BBCAmerica, maybe they'll repeat it) A very frank, contemporary Upstairs, Downstairs that looks at dysfunctional, entwined families in pre, during, and post-Thatcherite England. Literately written, as it's based on a novel by Tim Pears, it benefits from the book's central organizational mode of being narrated through the eyes of a character who hides behind his camera, so TV is ideal for showing and focusing on the images as they're taken and for memories. The directing style changes to reflect each time period, from the slow languid days of childhood to punk rock rebellion and on to adult realities. The story is told somewhat chronologically, but also as flashbacks with flashforwards, as we see how childhood traumas and relationships are played out over their lives. The large, complex ensemble is brilliant, letting shine character actors we've gotten to see in much smaller parts in other TV series, such as Mystery and Gideon's Crossing. Particularly outstanding are the poignant pathos of Mary McCrory and Shaun Dingwall's sympathetic portrayal of her favorite son maturing over 15 years. (We've only seen him previously here as the secondary sidekick who shockingly died at the end of the Touch of Evil cop mini-series.) It was a bit confusing sorting out how the adult actors related to their child counter-parts, particularly as BBC America didn't do a "previously on. . ." or any voice-over explanation. Watching it once a week proved challenging to keep it all straight, so I taped it weekly then watched the bulk in an enthralled marathon. This is the inheritor of the excellent Brit mini-series tradition of The Jewel in the Crown and Brideshead Revisited.

The Job (Available on DVD) A half-hour sit com on ABC that felt like a cable dramedy. Denis Leary and writing graduates of The Larry Sanders Show stretched the boundaries of a cop show in many ways -- no laugh track, humor and pathos all mixed up, rapscallion characters, crude language in outrageous situations. (updated 5/23/2005)

Lucky (cancelled by FX) Most women would categorize this under HUNK 'O' METER due to star John Corbett, and yeah I'm a fan of his since Northern Exposure, though I thought his Aidan never really made sense with Carrie on Sex and the City. But it's the dramedy writing, tone, unconventionally looking for TV eccentric secondary characters, along with the charming Ever Carradine (the younger girlfriend on Once and Again) that moved this over into quality after a few episodes. It took me awhile, but it grew on me. Similar sensibility to the now cancelled Keen Eddie from the broadcast Fox arm. These shows were just wrong fits for their networks.(updated 9/7/2003)

Oz (HBO will doubtless keep repeating it late nights and On Demand for awhile; 6 seasons out on video/DVD. 6th season has DVD extras of 3 audio commentaries ("Dead Man Talking," "A Day in the Death" and "Exeunt Omnes") with series creator Tom Fontana, cast members Terry Kinney, Eamonn Walker, Dean Winters, Scott Winters and writer Bradford Winters ; 30 minutes of deleted scenes ; Original cast audition tapes ; Exclusive extended cut of the series finale: "Exeunt Omne") This is where Tom Fontana fled from network TV when he couldn't do Homicide (see below) as frankly and brutally as he wanted to. Bring a strong stomach and a willingness to change your views about prison. Mesmerizing cast of New York actors (reincarnating on The Wire) and a few L.A. imports (who would have thought one of my hunky faves Phil Casnoff could pull off being a Russian hit man? who, too bad, died brutally like so many of the other characters). Unfortunately after seeing the actors so powerfully as low lifes it takes great self control to see them as nice guys in other roles. Surely any prison with this much violence would have been closed down years ago? But then the Supreme Court is deciding that right now. The series did finally limp out with a bit of a whimper. (updated 9/5/2006)

Project Greenlight: 1st Season - "Stolen Summer" (out on DVD) I hesitated to put a documentary series as "Quality TV." Plus it's very painful to watch, a Real World for movie fans. And completely addictive and involving. In my fantasy life, as I'm still pragmatic to know that I have no musical or acting talent let alone technical ability so couldn't be an actress (I never got over the discovery when I was about 6 that movies aren't real people, that they're hired actors at which I screamed "So they're kissing strangers?!") musician or director or fiction writer, I figured I could be a producer, helping to bring artistic vision to realization. Not after watching Greenlight! OMG, that is hard work! If you start watching in the middle you'll have no idea of the screw-ups that have been made to get to this point. As an administrator, I totally understand Chris Moore's (the executive producer's) fury at everyone for naiveté bordering on incompetence -- some blame has to fall to Miramax. But also everyone thought Miramax would just pony up more money to cover the mistakes as this was a high visibility project (which they did). I think Moore comes across as much more charismatic and creative than Affleck, whose solution to everything is to call Harvey on the phone and make demands. But the mistakes started from the first episode, when the selection committee, including Affleck and Damon and Moore, picked a script based on a passionate pitch by the writer, not on location and acting potential problems (i.e. basing a story around kid actors, a mistake they seem to be repeating for the 2nd round). Let alone his total inexperience -- shouldn't the guys in competition to have their movies made, at least the finalists, have been required to even film a short first? And bringing on a crew that the new young director was literally scared of so that pre-production clearly didn't have enough mutual communication. It was also interesting that in the early episodes this crew is presented to us as experienced, but once we're on set we see that Miramax saved money by having only a few experienced guys on board with neophytes in crucial positions so that the pro's get more and more frustrated and start plotting coups. Seeing the follow-through each week does make the review process for a script more understandable, seeing what's doable for what budget, etc. The classic episode was the realization when NO ONE had recognized the problems in advance of filming under the Chicago El! They had all just focused on the visuals and had saved a day's pay for a sound guy to come with them to scout the site -- did they leave their common sense behind too? Or back-up plans for outdoor shooting in case of rain? The intrigue on the set, the egos, and just the multitude of details, oy. No wonder at Sundance the producers were just relieved Stolen Summer got done. State and Main only hinted at the potential problems as comedy fodder, as it focused more on the actors and writer. How about the second second assistant director vs. the director of development? Or the DP deliberately screwing up shots? Or a whole episode on an overly complicated, un-thought-through beach shot that ended up on the cutting room floor -- no one realized the kid stars couldn't swim? Elvis Mitchell in the New York Times noted: "Greenlight makes the psychological violence in HBO's prison drama Oz look like cheerful problem solving." (revised 7/13/2003)

Project Greenlight: 2nd Season - "Battle of Shaker Heights" (I doubt HBO will repeat it, the movie is out on DVD) I thought no way are they going to let cameras document the agony again! Or why would I want to watch this again? And it started way too slowly with too much on creators Matt Damon and Ben Affleck with glimpses of J Lo in the background. But, darn, if it isn't pulling me in like rubbernecking a car accident! OK, so they learned to not award to a total neophyte director, by requiring short film submissions. They also figured out it was too much pressure to have it be a writer/director auteur and awarded separately to a writer and director. So how the heck could they award it to a directing team of two guys that would make the too-short process more complicated? And whose quirky slapstick style has very little relation to the selected script? (as opposed to the rejected woman applicant who was passionately committed to the script but not articulate about how she would direct it.) How could they yet again pick a script with a teen lead, making casting very difficult? (though Shia turned out to be the best part of the show) How could Miramax yet again insist on name actors for their tiny budget and short filming schedule? Once again, the more experienced crew members are manipulating the young 'uns. Most of all how could producer Jeff Bailis agree yet again to be humiliated on national television by his bullying boss Chris Moore? He's cut his bushy mane and tentatively gotten a bit more confident in his role, but it's still painful to watch him -- and this is the same guy who our Tampa cousins know from childhood as the effortlessly bright kid who aced his bar mitzvah with a satirical speech then concentrated on his true love of basketball and breezed through Harvard? Is it the editing that makes executive producer Moore look less like a bully and more like a hero when we agree with him that the directing pair are being "passive aggressive fucks"? Oy, what kind of directors are SO slow to get going on a one-day location shoot, give confusing directions to the actors, and call time-out for a heated hour+ meeting with the producers, such that they lose the light for a key scene? They are so passive in discussions that clearly the editors had to struggle to make an interesting TV show -- which we see when the two go ahead and do what they want w/o comment. They think Miramax is being obnoxious for going ballistic that they don't have a final edit of the movie ready until minutes before the test preview! But how much of what we're seeing, especially with the self-congratulation among the producers, is really Miramax doing publicity for the final movie? And after seeing the reviews for American Wedding why should we believe Moore's judgment? And this backfired, as it was Miramax's marketing executives who ordered the film to become more of a comedy, so the directors eliminated Shia's dramatic scenes that were the most moving in the shoot. So, much as I'm curious to see in a minor role Anson Mount of Tully, I never did even watch the final film on cable.(updated 4/10/2005)

Project Greenlight: 3rd Season - "Feast" (was on Bravo at unpredictable times) So the team saw some of the problems they had the first two go-rounds and tried not to repeat them -- no more coming of age stories with young actors, try to make money by issuing a commercial film, have the studio in more firm control, etc. So they settled on the horror genre. But it's still a fascinating train wreck to watch! They ignore their expert advisor Wes Craven who keeps pointing out that the script they want is too complex and expensive. They pick a more experienced but almost non-verbal, passive aggressive director who has no interest in being a studio for-hire but wants to do an auteur film. The studio insists on a team who undercuts the producers and director by being moles directly to them. And everyone stabs everyone else in the back! I hope that casting director doesn't work in that town again -- she accuses the director of nepotism while she only wants to hire her friends? Shades of HBO's Unscripted in more ways than one as Krista Allen was cast and we sure got a different, i.e. way less sympathetic view of her. At least the producers told her off a bit towards the end. This is the true horror film! Too bad the Weinstein/Disney/Chris Moore divorce means good-bye to this fascination of the abomination series that convinced me never to be a producer.(8/20/2005)

Remember WENN/The Lot (was on AMC) Yes, original fictional series on AMC, both by the same producers. Remember WENN was about the origins of radio, from a station in Pittsburgh. The Lot ostensibly took true back-lot stories about the evils of Hollywood and fictionalized them, such as Dorothy Parker as script writer, stars doped up to be docile, the power of the anti-Semitic press, the sanitizing of bio-pics, hidden gays, etc. The annoying inserted background explanations were replaced by commercials, but the dark cynicism is appropriate to the fool's gold atmosphere of Hollywood in the '40's. Both were witty and funny as they took cynical looks at the birth of mass media entertainment in the years just before and at the start of WWII. Both had beautiful period costumes, hair styles, and make-up.

The Sins (on BBCAmerica - repeated now and again) A British Damon Runyan-esque mini-series with Pete Postlethwaite getting to combine both comedy and pathos as a get-away driver with many daughters trying to go straight -- as an undertaker. Geraldine James, of many costume dramas, here plays a mob matriarch regally.

Six Feet Under (still being repeated on HBO channels or On Demand. Bowdlerized versions of the whole series on Bravo. All seasons available on DVD. 2 soundtrack CDs out.) While Peter Krause (of Sports Night) and Rachel Griffiths (of Me, Myself, I, Hilary and Jackie, and Amy) make a hot enough couple to qualify this outrageous dramedy about an undertaking family for the HUNK 'O' METER or the HALL OF DAMES, the quirky situations around dealing with death and family, and the writing for all the unpredictable guests and regular characters bring it to quality all around. Episodes written by creator Alan Ball (of American Beauty) are absolutely twistedly brilliant. The character development over the course of the first season was really involving. The second season we saw that they are all crazy. In the third season we saw that they are depressed. At least we weren't left with an obvious cliffhanger in Season 4. And kudos for being the only series on TV to realistically show abortion as a sensible choice handled intelligently by adult women. Though Season 5 hastened to start out showing how guilt-ridden she was. But then they all ended up crazy this season, -- though I seem to be almost alone in not thinking that was a jump-the-shark moment referred to below.
The last season is oddly turning into Dead Like Me with identical commentary on cubicle life and even a guest appearance by Cynthia Stevenson. I thought the finale was very moving, though only seeing the obituaries has convinced me that wasn't Claire's fantasies.(updated 4/3/2006)

From The Village Voice 8/11/2004, Out of the Box by Joy Press: "HBO prepared the ground for the indie-fication of TV—series like Six Feet Under, Sex and the City, The Sopranos, and Deadwood have brought cachet to the merger of big- and small-screen vision. 'When you think of Six Feet Under, any two hours of that show would add up to a very original, interesting independent movie, shot on the same schedule,' enthuses Miguel Arteta. Although best known for Chuck and Buck and The Good Girl, Arteta has regularly stepped in to direct series like Six Feet Under—something you wouldn't even know unless you happen to have a fetish for opening credits. [Of course I do!] 'The risks Six Feet takes,' says Arteta, 'the caliber of the writing, the approach to storytelling that defies category or genre—it's everything that we look for in independent cinema, except that it lasts 13 hours over the course of the year, instead of two hours in one night.'

As if to prove Arteta's point, Six Feet Under hijacked its viewers last month with an episode as devastating as any recent movie. The mundane, self-absorbed minidramas that plague the Fisher family were torn asunder, when halfway through a normal-seeming episode, the plot was derailed: David, the show's most gentle, reliably endearing character, picks up a harmless-looking hitchhiker who subjects him (and us) to a prolonged form of psychological torture. While many viewers felt this was some of the most powerful TV they'd ever seen, others felt violated. This highlights one of the problems with translating an art-house aesthetic to the living room: When you go see an "edgy" movie, you usually have some idea about what's in store. The deep understanding and affection for television characters that build up over a number of years makes the experience more intense. Arteta, who directed the episode "Terror Begins at Home" that dealt with the aftermath of the attack, says, 'Six Feet Under has taken such risks this season; we get to see David's character from so many more different angles than you would have time for in film. That's what TV can do that film can't.'"

Sleeper Cell (On Showtime, repeated frequently and On Demand. 1st season on DVD.) Some of the simplistic or not too credible action situations (targeting a shopping mall? Dodgers Stadium? assassinating Muslims right and left who they perceive as traitors to the cause? a meticulously planned attack that relies on recklessness?) keep me watching more for categorizing this as under the HUNK 'O' METER because Michael Ealy as an undercover, Muslim FBI agent is gorgeous, and the cell is full of hunks of all kinds of nationalities. But so is 24-- and the almost too uber-central leader played by Israeli actor Oded Fehr is very much like "Marwan" in "Day 4" -- but that guy wasn't spookily undercover as a Jew coaching a Maccabee sports team/security consultant. It's the multidimensional complexities of people's motives and actions that raises this above the visuals. We’ll never know if Our Hero was alive or dead at the end of the final season #2.(updated 2/15/2007)

Slings and Arrows (on Sundance Channel, 3 seasons on DVD with cast interviews, deleted and extended scenes, and bloopers. Box set of all the seasons has a bonus disc with actor interviews and backstage footage.) A zinger of a satire of contemporary theater (1st season hilariously yet intelligently explores Hamlet, the 2nd season MacBeth, the 3rd season King Lear), well I can at least confirm that the digs at fund raising and management of nonprofit organizations is completely on target in this Canadian mini-series. It's great to see Paul Gross again, who has been missing from U.S. TV for too long, but the whole staff is marvelous. This series inspired Fernando Meirelles to do a Brazilian TV series Sound and Fury. (updated 7/12/2008)

The Sopranos (Series ended, but still on HBO frequently and On Demand. Bowdlerized version on A & E. Complete 6 seasons out on DVD. The final season extras include: Commentary by cast members Dominic Chianese, Robert Iler, Arthur Nascarella, Steven R. Schirripa, and Stevie Van Zandt on four episodes: Soprano Home Movies, Remember When, The Second Coming, and The Blue Comet, Making Cleaver: Behind the scenes of Christopher's horror film, The Music of The Sopranos; Creator David Chase, cast, and crew discuss the songs from the show. 2 soundtracks out.) I thought with the demise of EZ Streets (streaming online and 4 episodes available on DVD; also showing on Sleuth TV) that the Golden Age of TV was over. But then along came The Sopranos. Wow! This is TV as Russian novel, more akin to European extended mini-series; you can't watch individual episodes in isolation as characterizations play out over several episodes and building on past episodes and from previous seasons. People are complex, both murderers and caring family members--everyone is duplicitous. And I'm not just favoring it because the exteriors are filmed near where I grew up in Jersey (did you hear the reference to a traffic cop as "The Scourge of Cedar Grove"? and the scene at The Fountains of Wayne--our phone number was one-digit from theirs for endless wrong numbers, or the traffic accident on Pompton Avenue) and the interiors are filmed in Queens at the Silvercup Studios. The 3rd season even matched the power and humor of the previous seasons, answering its critics about ethnic stereotyping and moral compasses with brilliant wit and devastating choices by characters we are totally involved with even as they time and again show just how ruthless they are. With Joe Pantoliano (of Memento) in the cast, EZ Streets really does meet this series -- and his character was obsessed with Gladiator so he's a two-fer in my book. The fourth season explored the personal as the political with dangerous implications for these families -- the brilliant, multi-layered "The Weight" episode had honor and body image made into a life and death matter of business and vengeance magnifying relations between husbands and wives, fathers and daughters. What channel did Adrianna find rerunning the show Murder One, whose theme music is on my opening TV page, to get lawyer advice from? The "Watching Too Much TV" episode also included an accurate description of corruption in HUD housing programs, exactly the kind of thing Har's been dealing with, only here it's nuanced with Tony's perceptions of Newark's changing "old neighborhoods" to "crack houses." Which then led to a mob war over another family wanting a cut. The finale was a brilliant intersection of the two families, as Tony waxed wise with a competitor and foolish with his wife.
The fifth season confirmed that the Sopranos live in North Caldwell, just up the street from where I grew up and never saw any bears, where our friends moved on up to from our neighborhood, and Tony's sister now lives in the next door town of Verona. Amidst still shocking violence and wrenching relationships, very funny commentary and in-jokes on TV writers this season, what with Steve Buscemi joining the cast as a regular, even poking fun at his own Emmy-nommed directing of the classic "Pine Barrens" episode, as he complains about "Carmela" ordering him to video a family party. The tensions within the two families are quietly ratcheting up and crossing over to devastating effects on all the participants, and us the audience. Another funny in-joke, with "Little Steven" Van Zandt of the E Street Band in the middle of the scene in his role as proprietor of the Badda Bing, "Tony" says: "Where the fuck you been? You're late!" Christopher replies: "The highway's jammed with broken heroes on a last chance power drive." Loved the season finale's ironic use of Van Morrison: "And we'll send you 'Glad Tidings' from New York."
The 6th season has quite accurate references to Livingston, North Caldwell and Fort Lee even when "Tony" was in purgatory in Hotel California. And yet another Russell Crowe movie reference when "Carmela" goes to rent Cinderella Man and discovers her son no longer works at Blockbuster. "Tony"s movie comment: Is that still a classic?.
The use of music continues to be a brilliant, unpredictable commentary on the action, so bring an encyclopedic knowledge of pop music, or here, through the 4th season, a great guide to the music and much more. HBO is now providing a concurrent detailed music guide at HBO. (updated 10/28/2007)
While screaming like everyone else who thought their cable went out at the series finale, I’ve come to love the idea that the Sopranos can sit around at an all American steak house, surrounded by unresolved threats and problems, not having really changed much or learned much, but will continue as a family. Here’s from their home town newspaper, the one that “Tony” gets each morning in his bathrobe at the end of his driveway, Newark Star Ledger: 'Sopranos' creator's last word: End speaks for itself by Alan Sepinwall, June 12, 2007
”What do you do when your TV world ends? You go to dinner, then keep quiet.
Sopranos creator David Chase took his wife out for dinner Sunday night in France, where he fled to avoid "all the Monday morning quarterbacking" about the show's finale. After this exclusive interview (agreed to before the season began), he intends to let the work -- especially the controversial final scene -- speak for itself.
"I have no interest in explaining, defending, reinterpreting, or adding to what is there," he says of the final scene. "No one was trying to be audacious, honest to God," he adds. "We did what we thought we had to do. No one was trying to blow people's minds or thinking, 'Wow, this'll (tick) them off.' "People get the impression that you're trying to (mess) with them, and it's not true. You're trying to entertain them."
In that final scene, mob boss Tony Soprano waited at a Bloomfield ice cream parlor for his family to arrive, one by one. What was a seemingly benign family outing was shot and cut as the preamble to a tragedy, with Tony suspiciously eyeing one patron after another, the camera dwelling a little too long on Meadow's parallel parking and a walk by a man in a Members Only jacket to the men's room. Just as the tension ratcheted up to unbearable levels, the series cut to black in mid-scene (and mid-song), with no resolution.
"Anybody who wants to watch it, it's all there," says Chase, 61, who based the series in general (and Tony's relationship with mother Livia specifically) on his North Caldwell childhood.
Some fans have assumed the ambiguous ending was Chase setting up the oft-rumored "Sopranos" movie. "I don't think about (a movie) much," he says. "I never say never. An idea could pop into my head where I would go, 'Wow, that would make a great movie,' but I doubt it. "I'm not being coy," he adds. "If something appeared that really made a good Sopranos movie and you could invest in it and everybody else wanted to do it, I would do it. But I think we've kind of said it and done it."
Another problem: Over the last season, Chase killed so many key characters. He's toyed with the idea of "going back to a day in 2006 that you didn't see, but then (Tony's children) would be older than they were then and you would know that Tony doesn't get killed. It's got problems." (Earlier in the interview, Chase noted that often his favorite part of the show was the characters telling stories about the good ol' days of Tony's parents. Just a guess, but if Chase ever does a movie spin-off, it'll be set in Newark in the'60s.)
Since Chase is declining to offer his interpretation of the final scene, let me present two more of my own, which came to me with a good night's sleep and a lot of helpful reader e-mails: Theory No. 1 (and the one I prefer): Chase is using the final scene to place the viewer into Tony's mind-set. This is how he sees the world: Every open door, every person walking past him could be coming to kill him or arrest him or otherwise harm him or his family. This is his life, even though the paranoia's rarely justified. We end without knowing what Tony's looking at because he never knows what's coming next.
Theory No. 2: In the scene on the boat in "Soprano Home Movies," repeated again last week, Bobby Bacala suggested that when you get killed, you don't see it coming. Certainly, our man in the Members Only jacket could have gone to the men's room to prepare for killing Tony (shades of the first "Godfather"), and the picture and sound cut out because Tony's life just did. (Or because we, as viewers, got whacked from our life with the show.)
Meanwhile, remember that 21-month hiatus between Seasons Five and Six? That was Chase thinking up the ending. HBO's then-chairman Chris Albrecht came to him after Season Five and suggested thinking up a conclusion to the series; Chase agreed, on the condition he get "a long break" to decide on an ending. Originally, that ending was supposed to occur last year, but midway through production, the number of episodes was increased, and Chase stretched out certain plot elements while saving the major climaxes for this final batch of nine. "If this had been one season, the Vito storyline would not have been so important," he says. Much of this final season featured Tony bullying, killing or otherwise alienating the members of his inner circle. After all those years of viewing him as "the sympathetic mob boss," were we, like his therapist Dr. Melfi, supposed to finally wake up and smell the sociopath? "From my perspective, there's nothing different about Tony in this season than there ever was," Chase says. "To me, that's Tony."
Chase has had an ambivalent relationship with his fans, particularly the bloodthirsty whacking crowd who seemed to tune in only for the chance to see someone's head get blown off (or run over by an SUV). So was he reluctant to fill last week's penultimate episode, "The Blue Comet," with so many vivid death scenes? "I'm the number one fan of gangster movies," he says. "Martin Scorsese has no greater devotee than me. Like everyone else, I get off partly on the betrayals, the retributions, the swift justice. But what you come to realize when you do a series is, you could be killing straw men all day long. Those murders only have any meaning when you've invested story in them. Otherwise, you might as well watch 'Cleaver.'"
One detail about the final scene he'll discuss, however tentatively: the selection of Journey's "Don't Stop Believin'" as the song on the jukebox. "It didn't take much time at all to pick it, but there was a lot of conversation after the fact. I did something I'd never done before: In the location van, with the crew, I was saying, 'What do you think?' When I said, 'Don't Stop Believin',' people went, 'What? Oh my God!' "I said, 'I know, I know, just give a listen,' and little by little, people started coming around." [There’s news reports that original lead singer for Journey, Steve Perry, kept Chase waiting to use his classic song until reassured that his 1981 rock anthem wouldn’t be remembered as the soundtrack to the death of “Tony Soprano” ]
Whether viewers will have a similar time-delayed reaction to the finale as a whole, Chase doesn't know. ("I hear some people were very angry and others were not, which is what I expected.") He's relaxing in France, then he'll try to make movies. "It's been the greatest career experience of my life," he says. "There's nothing more in TV that I could say or would want to say."
Here's Chase on some other points about the finale and the season: After all the speculation Agent Harris might turn Tony, instead we saw Harris had turned, passing along info on Phil's whereabouts and cheering, "We're going to win this thing!" when learning of Phil's demise. "This is based on an actual case of an FBI agent who got a little bit too partisan and excited during the Colombo wars of the'70s," Chase says of the story of Lindley DeVecchio, who supplied Harris' line. Speaking of Harris, Chase had no problem with never revealing what -- if anything -- terror suspects Muhammed and Ahmed were up to. "This, to me, feels very real," he says. "For the majority of these suspects, it's very hard for anybody to know what these people are doing. I don't even think Harris might know where they are. That was sort of the point of it: Who knows if they are terrorists or if they're innocent pistachio salesmen? That's the fear that we are living with now." Also, the story -- repeated by me, unfortunately -- that Fox, when The Sopranos was in development there, wanted Chase to have Tony help the FBI catch terrorists isn't true. "What I said was, if I had done it at Fox, Tony would have been a gangster by day and helping the FBI by night, but we weren't there long enough for anyone to make that suggestion." . . .
Since Butchie was introduced as a guy who was pushing Phil to take out Tony, why did he turn on Phil and negotiate peace with Tony? "I think Butch was an intelligent guy; he began to see that there was no need for it, that Phil's feelings were all caught up in what was essentially a convoluted personal grudge."
Not from Chase, but I feel the need to debunk the e-mail that's making the rounds about all the Holsten's patrons being characters from earlier in the series. The actor playing Members Only guy had never been on the show; Tony killed at least one, if not both, of his carjackers; and there are about 17 other things wrong with this popular but incorrect theory. “

State of Play (BBC America has rerun the 6-episode mini-series once, so may again hopefully as my video tape is lost. On the DVD we'll get to hear all the F-words that BBCA bleeped -- at least they left in the other 4-letter words. Yeh -- second series in the planning stages!) Yes, the Brit slang and legal do's and don't's of cops and journalists are as confusing for an American as the red herrings and I'm still not 100% sure of the plot conclusions, but, wow, Paul Abbott has written another groundbreaking series, this time creating an intense political crime and investigative journalism thriller in the tradition of Traffik. I love that he's perfected what American series haven't figured out to avoid jumping the shark: there's always a couple with chemistry who you're dying to see them jump each other's bones but a happy ending would be boring. These Brit series have them hit the sack in the middle, and inevitably one or the other betrays the partner, or is "an arrogant prick" or one turns out to be the murderer or enabler of the murder or some such so you're equally satisfied that they break up at the end. Bill Nighy outperforms Jason Robard's Benjamin Bradlee from All The President's Men by adding humor and quirks, but all of Abbott's characters are trademarked flawed. But were the American critics hormone-deficient not to be floored by James McAvoy as a cocky hack? (At least the Brits caught on - casting him as "Joe MacBeth" in Shakespeare Re-Told). I was hoping Abbott would show us "Dan Foster"s "Betty Blue" wife in the 2nd season, but instead there will be a US feature film Russell Crowe-starring version, foolishly without McAvoy. (updated 12/10/2007)
The State Within was BBC America’s pretty good effort at a comparable mini-series taking place in the U.S., with Jason Isaacs as a very sexy Brit ambassador. (4/15/2007)

Teachers (the Brit version on BBC America- NOT the U.S. sit com version - Season 1 completed -- please bring us more!) What took BBCA so long to bring this fun series to us - heck it's already been cancelled across the pond after 4 seasons with a Christmas special in DVDs and we're only starting to see it now. Especially as they've shown us other series with the marvelous Andrew Lincoln, and he really gets to shine here as a way too cool for his own good high school English teacher surrounded by women who are way smarter than he is. BBC A should bleep the frequent F word instead of blanking it out. I didn't see the sexy end-of-season one twist coming. Aw shucks, I liked Maggie the Cop but I guess that gave the writers fewer story options. Terrific Brit pop songs identified in the music guide that aren't all on the Brit-released soundtrack.
The very similar, but much more straight-forward Waterloo Road (on BBC America Thursday nights at 9 pm, repeated overnight and On Demand) covers almost identical territory with no satire or visual gimmicks and a lot more soap opera, so it's much more like Boston Public. (updated 7/10/2006)

Tell Me You Love Me (On HBO, could still show up On Demand. 1st season on DVD then cancelled.) I didn’t even catch this series until a marathon almost the last day it was first run On Demand – and immediately got hooked. While the sex scenes in Queer as Folk and The L Word are of mostly curiosity value to me, seeing sexuality as frank about fellow hetereos got my attention much more right away (even without foreplay that gets right to the deed in many different positions and places). The structure of following the struggles of four committed couples across different age groups is fascinating. I was surprised how the actors really got me involved, despite my initial qualms on casting. Sure the 20somethings “Jamie” (Michelle Borth) and “Hugo” (Luke Farrell Kirby was also the sexy Hamlet in the 1st season of Slings and Arrows), and then her rebound with Nick (an almost unrecognizable except for those blue eyes brunetted Ian Somerhalder from Lost) are gorgeous, but it was about more them being in a constant state of sex and naïve romance. Jane Alexander, getting to expand much more on her role in Feast Of Love, as the ‘60’s therapist dealing with these patients, her retired husband and a relationship I couldn’t quite understand with an old lover made me proud to have long white hair (She should submit to the Emmy’s the episode where she struggled to work while in shock from mourning her old lover .). But I was surprised how involved I got with the two couples who I couldn’t figure out how the 30’s and 40’s men (playing against their usual casting as more dorky guys) had landed two such beautiful, strong, smart, passionate women, but I got to really care about Adam Scott’s portrayal of “Palek” (what the heck kind of name is that?) fear of fathering with “Carolyn” (Sonya Walger) and if the Marrieds With Children (Tim McKay’s “David” with Ally Walker’s “Katie”) could make it (yeah, a pun). I re-watched the episodes and was absolutely enthralled even a 2nd time. But it wasn’t just the dynamic acting and naturalistic writing, but the look of the hand-held cameras, as directed by such indie folks as Patricia Rozema, Melanie Mayron, Ernest Dickerson, and Rodrigo Garcia (whose Nine Lives had a similar feel with slightly intersecting characters and is going on to produce his own HBO series.). There were a couple of weaker episodes out of the ten in the first season, but on the whole outstanding. Will the 2nd season follow the same four couples? (updated 7/28/2008)

Thick of It (on BBC America will doubtless be repeated, as American version in development) very funny 6 episode mini-series that updates the best political comedy ever on TV Yes Minister ((which is now out in complete DVD, after the incomplete release on video) by crossing the faux doc camera style of the original The Office with post-West Wing cynicism. How delightful to see Peter Capaldi in a comedy as the PM's Chief of Staff, as we usually see him in mopey mysteries or creepy thrillers. But I worked for a politician in another lifetime and absolutely the first thing they did every morning was to read the newspapers and spend the day directing their staff to run around to responding to their issues -- and that was way before the 24/7 news cycle. (updated 12/4/2006)

Third Watch (repeats on A & E or the Biography Channel erratically. 1st season on DVD.) The first season I only even watched paying half attention as the cops, paramedics and firefighters raced around in a geographically confusing fictional NYC (a precinct that stretches from Manhattan to Brooklyn to Queens?) because it was actually filmed here (even right in front of Har's office).

The second season we --wow-- were getting much more into the characters, one by one, their lives and the job's impact on them, particularly their relationships with their parents showing how they relived that through how they treated people. The "Faith" episode was notable for being one of the few network TV dramas to show a sympathetic, regular, main character choosing to have an abortion, a decision which resonated through the following seasons; significantly, it was one of the few episodes in the series written by executive producer John Wells.

The third season movingly incorporated 9/11 and its after-shocks into its story lines (see commentary and documentation at World Trade Center In Memoriam: In Sight and Sound), which really jolted the series alive and to a higher level of quality. Except for the season finale which was a recycling of the originally planned season opener, leading back to business as usual as E.R. as a cops-and-medics show (with some interesting ethics considerations), with mucho melodrama but at that point I was involved with the characters.

But the increased action had interesting impacts on the characters' personal lives, especially in scripts written by Queens Girl Siobhan Byrne O'Connor, who has come over from the more introspectively issues-oriented and grittier 100 Center Street and was later promoted to a producer, climaxing in a terrifically edited "Collateral Damage" (Part 2) episode directed by actor Skipp Sudduth ("Sully"), looking at love amidst the urban wreckage from maternal to lustful (with nice use of heartbeat drums). Until "Bosco" ("Maurice Boscarelli" played by Jason Wiles) at the end of the season finally learned he can't be lead around by his dick anymore off the ethical slippery slope. His complex relationship with his female partner "Faith" is fascinating -- she's fraternal, maternal and colleague complicated by the gender differences that could be sensual so leads die-hard (younger?) fans to "ship" them into a romance in fan fiction, but I prefer the many strains.

In the '03/'04 season, he is surprisingly finally growing up, recognizing his partner's injury as a consequence of his actions, and he has become an engrossing anchor for the show. He reluctantly ended up doing superior police work in the superbly realistic episode "A Call for Help," written and directed by executive producer Edward Allen Bernero (a 10-year veteran of the Chicago police force -- and some of the slang he uses are Chicago-ese not to be heard out of the mouths of New Yorkers, like the title and "jagoff"), which was also noteworthy for continuing this season's intense focus on a single case at a time, cross-hatched with inter-personal and intra-departmental rivalries and quips.

But - whoa, what's happened to "Bosco" now! We're only getting glimpses of him in his hospital bed. (I absolutely don't mind losing "Kim" and the Dimpled Philandering Hunk as their getting back together was boring so fare thee well to other series.) How is producer Simon Mirren related to Helen that he got her on the show? And what's with the gruesome serial killer that seemed more like the BBC series Wire in the Blood? Don't we have enough quotidian violent crime in NYC? O'Connor had wonderful dialogue in "Sins of the Father" as intersecting stories about relationships came together and exploded.

I certainly never expected with "Bosco" laid up in a hospital bed to have my heart stolen by "Brendan Finney" (Josh Stewart who for a WV native does a remarkably authentic NYC accent) turning into quite the quiet little hero and gentleman, especially with the aggressive EMT "Grace." And aw, shucks that Kiss him stupid! in "The Kitchen Sink" by Mirren was cute! I can't believe that I didn't figure out on my own that Josh is the adorable schmuck in the Levi's "Walk" commercial to Willie Nelson's "Always On My Mind." Now wouldn't it have been mature if we could see the other two consenting adults in a tentatively long term-directed relationship frankly discuss their birth control and safe sex options rather than get accidentally pregnant?

"Forever Blue" by consultant Angela Amato Velez was a tour de force: as a forceful commentary on the kind of dirty police that are glorified in The Shield, as tying up a long-running mystery in the series that was corrosively affecting many characters and brilliant casting to find young actors who stunningly looked like ghosts of the co-stars (though it was too flattering to male egos to have two of the heavyweight actors have their younger selves also be big boned, as it were. Hey we saw Charles Haid on Hill Street Blues and know what a hunk he was before he turned to directing!) Welcome to Manny Perez, who was so good on TV in 100 Center Street and in movies in Washington Heights; he got to recur a bit, even if he didn't solve "Cruz's" relationship problems. I cried during the last 15 minutes of the finale that poignantly wrapped up the characters' lives (though with a few inconsistencies). From 2003 on in particular, the series caught on to the Homicide-like tactic of closing each episode with a cool song and a montage showing the impact of the week's happenings on each character. Most of the music selections are identified in the useful season by season music guide.(updated 2/9/2008)

Here's explanations of the changes the series went through to the finale:
Lights out for Third Watch from northjersey.com on May 2, 2005 By Virginia Rohanstaff

For Molly Price, playing Faith Yokas has been a life-changing experience.
The New York precinct affectionately known as "Camelot" hadn't even been fully dismantled - or "struck," as industry people say - before salvage crews from another, very different East Coast drama arrived on the scene. "The prop guys from The Sopranos were walking through picking things," says Third Watch co-creator Edward Allen Bernero. "It was like, 'Guys, let us stop breathing before you come in and pick us clean.'
"Breaking up is hard to do - especially with a beloved, long-running show like Third Watch. The underrated NBC drama signs off Friday after six seasons. Like so many good series that leave before their time, Third Watch did not get much advance notice of its fate."
We were prepping the last episode. It was three days before we were ready to shoot, and we were prepping it as a season finale, when they said it wasn't coming back. In those three days, I threw out the script and wrote it for a finale," says Bernero, who directed the final "Goodbye to Camelot" episode. "It was very sad. Everything about that last episode, you knew was the last time."
Despite the show's lack of critical acclaim or major Emmy nods - it was never nominated in the best series category - it was by many measures a success. In 2002, Third Watch picked up a prestigious Peabody Award for a documentary-style episode that dealt with the 9/11 terrorist attacks more poignantly and powerfully than any other entertainment program on television. And despite all the night and time-slot changes, Third Watch fans followed the series faithfully: This season it averaged 9.2 million viewers per week -at 9 p.m. Fridays, one of the toughest nights of television.
Those fans are feeling bereft.
"I am sad, too. It hasn't sunk in, even though we've done all the episodes. It's difficult to accept," says Bernero, who would be open to doing follow-up television movies if NBC were so inclined. "I love these characters. This show is my family."
These characters were cops, paramedics and firefighters who inhabited a New York City that's rarely seen on TV. Bernero, who co-created the series with John Wells, says he was "more interested in Archie Bunker's New York than Law & Order's New York."
The very ordinariness of the protagonists may have been one reason NBC never really supported the series, and the network has not explained its decision to cancel the series."
I think there's a real prejudice against blue-collar shows on television," says Bernero, a former Chicago cop. "We're the only drama on television about blue-collar people. Our people don't wear suits. Our people didn't go to college. The show is wildly popular with blue-collar people, and in the Hollywood world, those people don't really matter. They want affluent people."
One of the most striking of the show's regular people was plain-speaking Police Officer Faith Yokas, promoted to detective this past season and played by Molly Price. Like many of the cast, Price regularly participated in some of the more dramatic stunts seen on network TV. Apart from the fact that the show's writers "had a very difficult time" letting Faith and husband Fred (Chris Bauer) be happy or sexual - "I never had a sex scene with my husband on the show ... in six years," Price says [sorry, Molly, not true!] -the North Plainfield native has no regrets."
I played her for so long I got to do everything imaginable," Price says. "I met my husband [firefighter Derek Kelly] on the show. I had my baby [while] on the show. It's kind of like that old saying, 'Baseball has been very very good to me.' Third Watch has been very very good to me. As I said to somebody, this is the longest relationship I've ever had, longer than high school, longer than college. ... On some level, there was really nothing left for us to say artistically."
Bernero, though, was caught short by the cancellation, even though he says Third Watch was "almost canceled every single year of its six years."
"I actually thought we were on the firmest ground we've ever been on going into this season," he says. "NBC has canceled [one of the few] shows on its schedule that didn't lose its time slot. ... The short answer is, good doesn't really matter to the networks."
In the finale, which was originally supposed to end with a cliffhanger, gangbangers assault the 55th Precinct station and set it afire, trapping Sergeant Cruz (Tia Texada) and police officer Monroe (Nia Long), while Bosco (Jason Wiles) and other police return fire. In the confusion, murderous gang leader Marcel (guest star Wyclef Jean) escapes. "I really think that it's going to be satisfying for our audience," says Bernero, who arranged for original cast members to return. Among them are Kim Raver (now on 24 ), Eddie Cibrian and Michael Beach. And memorable guest star Aidan Quinn also comes back. [umm, that must have gotten cut]
At the conclusion of the episode, there's an attempt at closure. "Fast-forward to a month later, we learn where everybody winds up, and that everybody's kind of fine," Bernero says. Well, actually, not everybody.
"One of the characters doesn't make it through the last episode," Bernero says. "I think personally, it's the right way for this character to end. And a character that wasn't going to make it - that wasn't going to come back - that character is going to be fine. I think people are going to be excited to see how everybody ends up."
After the dismantling of the fictional 55th Precinct - at King and Arthur streets (hence that nickname) - Bernero took home the shield on the wall that had proclaimed, "Welcome to Camelot." [He's seen taking it down.] It's a souvenir of one all-too-brief but shining moment in television known as Third Watch.
5 things you didn't know:
1. Many real firefighters appeared on Third Watch, and some of them were among the 343 members of the NYFD who lost their lives on 9/11.
Series co-creator Ed Bernero shares a "poignant example" that dramatically illustrates how the show was affected. "We did an episode about a blackout, and in the end, Sullivan and Davis are going in a police van to the scene of a riot. Every other person that's in that van died on 9/11." Filmed shortly before the terrorist attacks, "Blackout" was supposed to air as the 2001 season opener. Instead, Bernero says, "because of what the subject matter was, we ended up airing 'Blackout' as the last episode of the season" (on May 13, 2002) without any kind of on-air dedication that would call attention to those who had died. "The families wanted to own it themselves," says Bernero, explaining that producers were going to re-shoot that scene, but the families wanted it to air as a kind of private tribute to their loved ones.
2. Ever wonder why Amy Carlson's Alex Taylor died such a gruesome death while she was comforting a couple trapped in a car, which wound up exploding? Bernero explains: "I've seen people blown apart like that. I knew that I wanted her to die in an explosion, not saving somebody's life but just trying to keep somebody calm. It was a small thing she was doing, but an important thing. It was at the same time that we were being inundated by explosions in the Middle East. So many of these things are just responses to things I've seen on the news. I wanted to do something that shows just how horrible it is. I didn't want to sanitize. It was a combination of all of those things. It had nothing whatsoever to do with Amy." And what did Carlson think of her grand finale? "Amy was upset at first. She felt it was the death of a villain, not the death of a hero," Bernero says. "It was a really good point, but when I explained why it was happening, as an artist she understood my reason. And she was great."
3. Why did the marriage of Fred and Faith Yokas (Chris Bauer, Molly Price) have to break up? Bernero: "It had less to do with characters and more to do with the fact that we just really didn't have any more stories to tell. Also, they took Yokas away from work, and we always found Yokas to be more interesting at work. ... The one really bad part of the decision is that we lost Chris Bauer. He's an amazing actor, but we ran dry of interesting things." Price: "I had mixed feelings about it. I felt that the writers seemed to have a very difficult time for some reason, letting Faith and Fred be happy. It's kind of a comment on our civilization -that being happy is somehow boring or unrealistic, or that happiness is this elusive thing in our world."
4. When terrorists struck the World Trade Center, Price was a month away from marrying firefighter (and part-time actor) Derek Kelly, whom she'd met on the show. Price "struggled" with whether to participate in the documentary program, "In Their Own Words," which wound up winning a Peabody Award. She also wrestled with whether to postpone her Oct. 13 wedding. Price: "When [producer] John Wells originally called me, I didn't want to be a part of it at all. I felt that they were going to commercialize a tragedy. [Derek] was the one who said to me, 'We're the lucky ones. ... We should let people know that we're grateful.' ... We were just about to be married. I went out the morning of 9/11 to buy my wedding gown. [Derek] called me from the rig and said, 'Baby, I'm on my way to the trade center. I don't think you should go to Vera Wang today. I'll call you later and I love you.' It was six hours before I heard from him again. ... "On Oct. 13, we did get married. At first we were going to cancel it. We were going to funerals at that time, but [Derek] said, 'It's very healing.' People needed a reason to celebrate life." Their son, Jake, is now 18 months old.
5. Bernero had worked on Wells' short-lived Trinity, and after that was canceled, Wells asked if he'd like to co-create a show with him. Third Watch was a combination of the paramedics show Wells wanted to do, and the cops drama Bernero had in mind. "We just put them together," Bernero says. "He had the idea to do a paramedic show from stuff left over from ER, but he didn't think there was enough to make a whole show ... and then we ended up with the firefighters, because Eddie [Cibrian] was just so damn handsome we had to figure out what to do with him. Eddie tested as Bosco - Jason [Wiles] won the part - and we were leaving [walking behind him], and every office we passed, women would stick their heads out and comment about Eddie. We said we need to find something for him to do. And I said, 'Well, we don't have any firefighters.'

This Life (BBC America reruns Seasons 1 and 2 now and again less censored than when originally shown) It may be more soap opera than quality, but it sure is a lot more honest and frank than American ensembles about 20somethings. No hunks to qualify for the HUNK 'O' METER, no female role models for the HALL OF DAMES, just regular guys and gals muddling through their first jobs in the law and first house-sharing and a lot of other firsts -- and the sanitized and prettified American version of this show on NBC was quickly cancelled as it was unwatchable. I missed the two seasons the first few rounds they were on because the skittish channel put it on inconveniently at 10:30 pm. The afternoon replay was severely censored and edited, such that between the Brit accents (Welsh, Scots and all else) and slang and the bleeps it was sometimes hard to figure out if someone's being insulted or seduced. The constant warnings about sex scenes coming up are silly as with the editing it's less hot than the soap operas on the same time on broadcast TV, and are amusing when the warnings increase before scenes of two men kissing. Hopefully they've calmed down for this re-run. (updated 5/18/2005)

Traders (was running on Trio cable channel when it was still owned by Canadian television company, but the new owners pulled it before the repeat of the 2nd season was complete when they changed the focus of the channel. So much for Brilliant But Cancelled, even on the broadband version.) I had taken this outstanding, '90's Canadian "Bay Street" stock market/investment bank series from the go-go years off my list out of despair that we'd ever get to see more episodes after Lifetime dumped the first season, but then I got Trio and accidentally found they are running the first two seasons, though they keep changing the schedule so I've missed some and am catching up on the repeats. Yeah some of the financial finagling is a bit hard to follow, and is a smidgeon outdated what with the New Economy boom and bust, but on the other hand, what I learned here helped me understand the business pages better and the fundamental things of greed and risk still apply. Top notch acting and many of the co-stars in the excellent ensemble used this as a calling card for US TV and Canadian movies. I first watched for hunky David Cubitt and adorable Richard Roberts, but ended up rooting more for Sonja Smits and her hunky boxing coach. Now if Trio would just pick up the final two seasons! At least they don't censor the occasional naughty word. (updated 9/21/2004)

Undeclared (Complete series out on DVD.) This Freaks and Geeks(which is now out on DVD in 2 versions-- 6 DVDs or the limited edition 8 disc set for fans that of course I got - hey, I went to the Museum of TV & Radio to see the marathon showing of episodes that NBC never broadcast) -Goes-To-College" had everything -- good writing, realistic situations both funny and poignant, terrific cast of believable just barely college age teens -- including a very hunky young Brit, Charlie Humman (who we're told --as we can't see it here-- played the gay teen seducer in the original Brit Queer as Folk--calling Mrs. Robinson: he's only a year older than my older son!-- and even the return of one of my fave singer/songwriters Loudon Wainwright III into acting (previously he was on M.A.S.H.). (updated 8/15/2005)

Viva Blackpool (BBC America could yet rerun it as the flaccid American re-make was cancelled quickly on CBS, I hope as when they played the Las Vegas follow-up I accidentally taped it over other episodes.) I'm a fan of Cop Rock and the Dennis Potter lip-synch mini-series, but this mini-series went further in using pop tunes to illustrate a point and the song selection was far more varied than usual. For one, the actors sang along with the soundtrack. They also did outrageous choreography and fantasy scenes that illuminated character relationships. I particularly fell in love with David Tennant, so much that I had trouble seeing him as a villain in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire and a gritty TV mystery, and I get a kick out of his new Doctor Who as well. But also charismatic are David Morrissey as a shady entrepreneur and Sarah Parish as the wife caught between them (updated 12/10/2007)

The West Wing (not that you need me to point out this show what with all its Emmys, last and previous seasons repeat on Bravo frequently. 7 seasons on DVD.) A terrific cast and insight into characters, and you don't need me to tell you this is a literate verbal joust, the closest American show to the classic Yes, Minister (which is now out in complete DVD, after the incomplete release on video). Hey, I'm now siding with Cartographers for Social Justice and I do always mix up whether lyrics are attributable to Pirates of Penzance or HMS Pinafore. Though the New York Times thinks these literal references will leave with primo writer Aaron Sorkin. Emmy-winning Richard Schiff received the CCNY Alumni Association Townsend Harris Award alongside my Dad, and we'll forgive him that he's a Yankees fan. Hurrah for Mary Louis Parker's character's feminist romance (now I feel guiltier than ever for missing her on Broadway in Proof, but could this role convince the producers to cast her in the movie?) -- and cheers that she's a regular this season. And look what it took Bill Carter of the New York Times -- and NBC-- until 10/02 to figure out: "Some NBC executives have been less than happy with some of the ways Lowe has been used, thinking he has the kind of sex appeal that might keep more young women viewers loyal. Mr. Lowe has said he wants to leave, and his status on the show beyond this season remains up in the air." They EVEN had the boss's daughter re-visit with barely a hint of renewed romance, jees. So no wonder he left the show and moved over to the quickly cancelled, far less interesting Lyon's Den but with a lot more close-ups. At least Josh's assistant Donna got to flirt with Jasons Isaacs' sexy photojournalist before getting blown up in Gaza. Is it that I'm getting older or are they more misplacing the mikes or are the actors mumbling that it's getting harder and harder to understand what they are saying? And maybe I'm getting old and cynical, but they do seem to be treating issues far too simplistically - oh, yeah, a bunch of White House staffers can brainstorm a solution to the Middle East -- how condescending! Wasn't it also a bit white bread to have James Taylor perform the classic Sam Cooke song "A Change Is Gonna Come"? They're also missing the point in the presidential candidates they have up to replace "Bartlett" - all are inside the Beltway policy zonks who wouldn't be fun guests at a BBQ.Good show info fan site. (updated 11/7/2006)

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These Web pages obviously aren't joining the campaign to boycott Yahoo, but shame, shame, shame:
“Suppose that Anne Frank had maintained an e-mail account while in hiding in 1944, and that the Nazis had asked Yahoo for cooperation in tracking her down. It seems, based on Yahoo's behavior in China, that it might have complied. . . .( Representative Chris Smith . . . drew the Anne Frank analogy.) . . . Chinese court documents . . . say that Yahoo handed over information that was used to help convict [dissidents]. We have no idea how many more dissidents are also in prison because of Yahoo. . .Yahoo sold its soul and is a national disgrace.”
From China's Cyberdissidents and the Yahoos at Yahoo by Nicholas D. Kristof, The New York Times, February 19, 2006