On the night table: Ransom River (
Every autumn, I succumb to the lure of the new network TV season.
It’s TV Season(al) Affect Disorder, a flashback to my childhood when there was nothing but network TV, and the new season filled me with Christmas-like excitement. Everything on TV was
magical to me then. Yes, I was an undemanding child. I could play for hours
with one box of plastic bricks, never complaining that
there weren't enough to finish building anything. (Can I blame Legos
for all my unfinished home projects?)
But this TV season, I was temporarily diverted — like a bird is
diverted by a big pane of glass — by the government shutdown and members of
Congress whose idea of responsible rule is apparently “I’ll hold my breath till
the country passes out.”
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| A sign outside Sapore in Washington DC (credit: Outside the Beltway). |
Finally, even the most finance-training-lite members of
Congress seemed to realize that Federal borrowing and the home budget do have one thing in common: If you don’t pay
your bills on time, it can be very, very bad for your credit rating and the
interest rate you’ll have to pay, which increases the money you spend with
nothing to show for it.
All this made me late this year in sampling the new network TV season (via the DVR).
I blame Congress for that, and for getting me so riled up that my sampling turned
into a venting.
You might recall that last spring I was searching for a
replacement for Smash on my list of mindless-pleasure diversions after a hard day
at the computer. In addition to losing Smash, this past summer, Burn Notice
ended its run, and I've tired of Covert Affairs. They just kept putting the heroine into tight red
dresses and sending her out undercover to blend in.
So I thought I’d give a try to two new network shows that
sounded like fun. The Blacklist and Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.
I chose The Blacklist because I have an abiding affection
for James Spader and a weakness for criminal-helps-catch-the-criminal
stories (Hall of Fame: Silence of the Lambs & To Catch a Thief).
I’m not sure how I feel now that The Blacklist is apparently
the #1 new drama on network TV (okay, it has a short list of competitors). On
the one hand, I’m always glad when James Spader is getting steady work, and he's making a fine meal of the role. On the other, the pilot and episodes since have been, well, disappointing. I have some standards, even for my mindless-pleasure diversions. Ten minutes into the pilot, I knew the ‘twist’ that would eventually reveal itself in a later episode. The situations were preposterous yet predictable, and the
violence gratuitous and gruesome.
Now, understand that I have been known to enjoy preposterous — I watched Burn
Notice, for heaven’s sake, in which no matter what manner of explosions and
gunfire occurred, Miami
police never showed up, and Fiona always had a nice chunk of C-4 in her
handbag. But that show lived in a well established alternative universe, and
had a large dose of tongue-in-cheek.
The Blacklist will have a way to go to earn that license. In its pilot, for example, terrorists kidnapped a little girl (this
is how you knew they were really bad
men). She was being transported under protection, and the FBI had been warned to watch for a
diversion. But when coverall-clad workmen suddenly step out to stop only their
cars on a bridge, no one gets suspicious and so, while any viewer who isn't comatose
knows what’s about to happen, the FBI is startled by a hail of bullets. The bad
guys snatch the girl and rappel down with her to speedboats for escape. Yes, they proceed downriver in the open. Lucky for the bad guys, it doesn't occur to the FBI survivors to summon,
uh, helicopters that could, well, fly over the river and maybe find out where
they’re going or, you know, intercept them.
But mostly my vent is about the heroine. The creators and writers have
given her two of the most relentlessly recurring and annoying features of TV law enforcement females. One, she's too young for her resume, part of which was leading an FBI profile team; and two, she
seems to have never dealt with a dangerous criminal before, despite her pedigree, because she's completely flustered just talking to Spader’s character. This is how TV (and movies) like to show women are 'vulnerable': they make them look incompetent.
But what really set me off was that the character self-describes
as a b***h, then never shows one hint of it, not in the pilot, nor in the two successive episodes I watched. No biting sarcasm to a colleague, no unprovoked temper flare-up, not even a good story from her past about her having been impossible to deal with. When did just being a woman with a job become
synonymous with b***h? I could go on (and on) about what the writers/director did to the Helen Hunt character in
What Women Want, who is billed as legendarily tough, and turns out
to be, well, the kind of boss I’d run through a wall for. And then there’s the
Julie of Julie & Julia, who’s described by herself and a friend as a
b***h, and yet is so sweet, my insulin balance tipped.
Enough of that. On to the next.
I picked S.H.I.E.L.D. because it was created by Joss Whedon
(cue the Firefly theme) and stars the always reliable Clark Gregg, reprising his role in The Avengers
film (yeah, I know he got killed in that, but he’s, well, back). Alas, in its
pilot, S.H.I.E.L.D. was going for snappy chatter, and no one but Gregg could
deliver it. Though, to be fair, the chatter wasn't all that snappy to begin
with. The pilot’s plot revolved around a man who’d been given super
strength by villains and was about to (literally) explode from rage-inducing side
effects. A bunch of white people saved a black man from his fury. Too much
accidental (God, I hope it was
accidental) subtext there for me.
Successive episodes, however, have shown improvement. They seem to have given up on expecting the whole cast to deliver clever chat, relying mostly on a couple of tech geeks to talk fast with British accents, with uneven but promising results. And the writers have begun to acknowledge with robot jokes that the actor cast as the young hero is a bit stiff. And they ramped up Ming-Na Wen's role, a big plus. So, despite my vent, I'm sticking awhile with S.H.I.E.L.D.
But before I finish today, can I have a general vent about those promos that run across the bottom, and sometimes way up into, the
screen while I'm immersed in a story? (The worst is BBC America!) Are TV marketers congratulating themselves on being ‘hip’ with young
people while they’re giving viewers more reason to stampede away from broadcast TV?
And while I’m at it — I swear I’m almost done — let me slip
in an October grammar vent. Major
League Baseball & baseball TV: Could you please use part of the
off-season to teach the boys in the booth to conjugate the verbs “to go” and “to come”. It is not “He should have went home with that
throw” nor is it “He should have came in on that fly ball.”
That’s it. Thanks. I feel better now. I’m done with my mauvais vent.**
I’m going out to breathe some autumn air.
Deeply.
Then go watch an episode of Person of Interest. Though I’m
wondering why Mr. Finch, Mr. Reese and The Machine didn't see a lethal Congress
coming and do something about it.
* Two classical references. This makes me feel educated (rather than, say, pretentious). Chanson d'Automne is a moving poem about painful memory by Paul Verlaine, which defies English translation, in my humble but perfectly correct opinion, because you can't replicate the repetition of the vowel sounds, which suggest moaning. The opening line in Shakespeare's Richard III is "Now is the winter of our discontent..."
** Bonus. An opportunity to quote Verlaine and make a questionable pun.
Copyright 2013 Sheila York
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