What is public TV good for?

The New York Times's Charles McGrath asks whether public TV is worth saving:

The average PBS show on prime time now scores about a 1.4 Nielsen rating, or roughly what the wrestling show “Friday Night Smackdown” gets....

Scanning the PBS lineup, in fact, it’s hard to detect much of a bias toward anything at all, except possibly mustiness. Except for “Antiques Roadshow,” all the prime-time stalwarts — “The NewsHour,” “Nova,” “Nature,” “Masterpiece” — are into their third or fourth decade, and they look it.

If those comments distress you, go to the reader comments, where you'll find plenty of hyperventilating ("In the wasteland of television there are but two channels I want or need: PBS for the quality and depth of shows that exist nowhere else, and NESN to be able to watch the Red Sox."), and it's entirely possible that one or two of the respondents are under 80 years old.

OK, if you don't have cable, you might enjoy being force-fed middlebrow programming by PBS. And even if you have 300 channels, I'm not aware that any of them caters to people with terrible taste in music the way PBS does. Otherwise, its bright spots are so few that it's easier just to forget it exists.

There Will Be Deadwood

Maybe three or four times a year I'll go out to a movie. This weekend There Will Be Blood made the coveted short list of films I'll see even if it means associating with other people. Imagine my joy when the central character in the movie, an oil-drilling entrepreneur played by Daniel Day-Lewis, has a long speech about how he hates every other person on in the world! He drinks their milkshakes, in case you haven't heard. Not only was it a great movie, there were similarities with one of my three or four favorite TV series, Deadwood. The second and third seasons of that show also feature a character (mining magnate George Hearst) who has a long speech about his own misanthropy, and how he views other people as pests to be swatted away while he "listens to the earth." If you like one, you should like the other. That is, unless your favorite part of Deadwood is the assortment of stong, distinctive female characters. Not much of that in There Will Be Blood.

"Lost" vs. the presidential debate

I watched both last night. The Clinton/Obama showdown tried the patience of the most dedicated policy wonk -- at least in the first half hour, which was all about the minor differences between the two candidates' health insurance plans. So it was a treat to move to Lost afterward, and I was never so happy to be shelling out the extra 12 bucks a month for a DVR. How did I sit through all those commercials back in 2007? As I flew past the chaff with my thumb on the fast-forward button, I noticed that ABC was relentlessly pushing a new show that was premiering after Lost. Remember when a TV network could force a show into becoming a hit by scheduling it after another hit? Yeah, I don't miss that either. No doubt half the people watching Lost live immediately logged on their computers afterward to check the message boards anyway. Good luck, dumb-looking new ABC show! Anyway, Lost is all about the flash-forwards now, which reassures me that the producers actually have some thoughts on how they're going to end this thing in 2010. They're also making it impossible to kill off certain characters before then, which makes me wonder if ABC is assigning bodyguards, chauffeurs, and food tasters to certain cast members.

TV diary: better Treatment

HBO's In Treatment -- which is trying to become the first scripted late-night sensation since, I don't know, Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman in the 1970s? -- got a bit more absorbing last night with the introduction of Wednesday regular patient Sophie, a teenager sent to therapy because of suspicions that her bizarre accidents are actually the result of suicidal tendencies. The first session between a shrink and patient is one of the most worn-out situations in TV and movies, as Tuesday's In Treatment episode with Blair Underwood showed. The patient is always skeptical and even contemptuous of the therapist, who calmly accepts the hostile comments and finally throws out a question that puts a dent in the patient's armor -- just before saying, "I'm sorry, but our time is up." Doesn't anyone on TV ever go into therapy expecting to get some good out of it? But at least Sophie (Mia Wasikowska) was amusingly hostile, peppering the therapist played by Gabriel Byrne with questions such as "Are you this much of a pain in the ass with your daughter?" and "Why can't you just act like a professional?" Maybe the cliche works better with teenagers, who naturally like to test authority figures, rather than adults like Underwood's character. At any rate, hump day seems to be the best day for this series so far.

A smear against Blue Man Group?

From Boing Boing: A guy in Chicago is suing performance artists Blue Man Group, claiming that they dragged him on stage during a show and forced an "esophagus camera" down his throat while he struggled to break free. Sounds like an absurd claim to me, and he apparently has no witnesses, but a local TV station plays it down the middle (see written report and video). If a local newscast isn't able to offer some clarification on whether it's safe to go to the theater without the protection of a hockey mask, I don't think I trust its weather reports either.

When we get behind closed doors...

Last night HBO premiered the half-hour drama In Treatment, which will run five nights a week for nine weeks, with each episode depicting a therapy session in almost-real time (one character every Monday night, another every Tuesday night, etc.). Based on the first episode, I'm willing to commit, mainly because of Gabriel Byrne as the therapist and because the premise, borrowed from a highly successful TV show in Israel, is intriguing -- even though Monday's patient isn't very interesting so far. One moment I did like: At the end, when the patient runs out of the office in great distress, Byrne starts to follow her but stops short at his own door, as if he's afraid to cross the threshold. Is he a prisoner of his profession? It struck me that most of my favorite TV series show what goes on behind closed doors. The Sopranos, of course, also had the voyeuristic appeal of letting us spy on therapy sessions, and the The Wire lets us see what happens behind the scenes not only in a police department but in a big-city mayor's office and, now, in the offices of a major daily newspaper. That may be why I don't care for reality shows (it's not voyeurism if the participants are actually performing for the camera) or sci-fi series (in an entirely fabricated universe, there's not as much tension between the scenes set in public and those set behind closed doors). And this might explain why, given my druthers, I'll take a movie or TV series with a lot of sex (private) over a lot of violence (well, at least garishly public violence like shoot-outs and car chases). But maybe we all have our own kinks and perversions to explain our TV-watching habits.

The Clintons meet the Klingons

Hmm... I watched the Democratic presidential debate tonight, and if the polls are correct I'll have no problem staying nonpartisan for the general election. I expect that any damn I might give for who wins will be eliminated on February 5. In other TV news, I've been catching up on shows I've never or rarely seen in order to come up with a "best" list. Without a Trace is pretty bad, based on the episode I just saw -- which followed the Murder, She Wrote rule that any guest actor who gained fame as a sympathetic character (in this case, Chad Lowe from Life Goes On) is going to have a juicy confession scene. But the original CSI is easier to take, going from the few episodes I saw over the long weekend. Less preachy than Law and Order, less melodramatic than Without a Trace. The original Star Trek is as silly as I remembered it. I can't get over everyone in the universe speaking English.

"The Wire" moves to Mayberry

The Wire, which is now No. 12 with a staple gun on my in-progress list of Top 100 TV shows, has become more accessible to casual viewers, thanks to the addition of a laugh track. Radosh.net has a sneak preview. Of course, when Bunk accidentally locked himself and McNulty into "the box" this weekend, it was an obvious homage to Barney Fife repeatedly locking himself and Andy into a jail cell on The Andy Griffith Show. I can't wait to see The Wire's equivalent to Opie start earning some money on the corner.

Brothers and Sisters and Banality

I think I agree with the Boston Globe's Matthew Gilbert on the TV series Brothers and Sisters, though I haven't seen it as much as he has. I couldn't get through an entire episode because of the music, which has the same suffocating whimsy of the Desperate Housewives soundtrack. There's something about the music and directing style of most broadcast network serials (add Grey's Anatomy and Dirty Sexy Money to the list) that make them a completely different animal from cable offerings such as Mad Men and The Wire. The only one I can stand now is House, MD, which has its own flaws but has a mercifully unobtrusive score.

Offensively inoffensive TV

This sort of thing really makes me wary of watching anything on the major TV networks. From the AP:

A scene in TV's Desperate Housewives that used Philippine medical education for a punchline prompted angry calls from viewers, an online petition demanding an apology and criticism from Philippine officials. In the season premiere that aired Sunday on ABC, Teri Hatcher's character, Susan, goes in for a medical checkup and is shocked when the doctor suggests she may be going through menopause. ... "OK, before we go any further, can I check these diplomas? Just to make sure they aren't, like, from some med school in the Philippines?" Susan fires back. Viewers called the network to complain but the number of callers wasn't available, an ABC spokesman said Wednesday. As of Wednesday evening, more than 30,000 names were attached to an online petition seeking a network apology. ... ABC said it was considering editing the episode.

If an ill-informed and self-absorbed fictional character isn't allowed to say anything ill-informed and self-absorbed, I don't know why I would waste my time watching the TV show she's on. The chilling effect of ABC's "maybe we'll edit this out" statement scares me away from a series like Dirty Sexy Money, which is ostensibly about badly behaving people with money. I'm afraid it even makes me reluctant to watch Friday Night Lights, given how many story possibilities must be off limits on NBC. (There is, for example, the rule against TV characters choosing to have abortions.) Thank God for even below-par HBO shows.

Earl goes gay, The Office goes 10 minutes too long

I hope the writers of The Office are reading the message board for their show at Television Without Pity. This is a near-great show, but Michael's extreme stupidity has ruined a lot of episodes. I actually didn't mind the car-in-the-lake scene as much as the scene where he tries to take back "the turtles." But there seems to be a consensus emerging among fans: Michael is funny when he's overbearing, insensitive, and immature. He's not funny when he doesn't have the sense of a five-year-old. But I had a good TV night because My Name Is Earl had the most charming depiction of prison sex since Kiss of the Spider Woman. As someone already pointed out on the TWoP message board, Will and Grace was NEVER this gay.

Is "The Wire" worth $20 per episode?

That’s how much it would cost me. The cheapest way to get HBO at my new apartment is to order a “Digital Preferred” package from Verizon at $83.33 per month. It includes about 60 channels besides HBO, and I can do without all of them. I watch about one hour of TV per day (more when I stay up late, less when I stay out late). About half of that time is spent watching DVDs, either from Netflix or from my own collection. The rest is spent following a handful of current shows (mostly dramas like House and Mad Men, and a couple of comedies like The Office). But all of the shows I care about are available through iTunes (for $2 an episode) or through the networks’ own Web sites — except for HBO shows including Big Love and The Wire. I don’t need news channels, because I get everything I need from the Internet (including video reports from TV channels such as New England Cable News). I don’t need time-waster channels, for when I have a short attention span and just want something to accompany a glass of wine, because that’s what YouTube is for. I used to watch TV Land for vintage programs like Hill Street Blues and The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show, but now that it airs The Andy Griffith Show and Bonanza around the clock, it’s worthless to me. Turner Classic Movies has made me sick of Alfred Hitchcock and tired of The Postman Always Rings Twice, and it’s no competition for the vast Netflix library. So why would I pay for cable? But I would pay $20 a month just for HBO, and I’d pay a couple of bucks a month for a few selected channels like TV5 (the French-language network). When is Comcast going to offer a la carte pricing? Or when is HBO going to find a way to sell me their wares without going through cable providers?

Mad Men TV

Last week I added AMC's Mad Men to my summer TV diet (Big Love not being quite enough to fill the hot nights). The story of advertising guys and their wives/lovers, set in 1960, is unfolding with HBO-like slowness, but so far there's enough texture to keep things interesting. One gimmick is that characters are constantly doing things that are taboo today: smoking, drinking at all hours of the day, leering at women in the office, etc. Last week, a youngster was playing with a plastic dry-cleaner's bag (as in, putting it over her head and trying to breathe through it), and her mother simply warned her to hang up the clothes that were in it. Later, two children in a moving car not only went without seat belts, they stood and jumped up and down in the back seat. As my siblings and I always stood in the car, at least until our heads started to dig into the roof, this scene gave me a warm glow of nostalgia. (My gin and tonic also helped.) For a good summary of this new show, go to The House Next Door.

The Muppets present "The Picture of Dorian Green"

Old Muppets, including “one of the many puppets that have played Kermit,” have been donated to the Center for Puppetry Arts in Atlanta, according to the New York Times’s Brenda Goodman.

“At the moment, they have not been given the entire collection,” Cheryl Henson [daughter of the late Jim Henson] said in an interview on Friday. “We are assuming we are going to give them the best of our collection,” she added, explaining that the archive owned by the family consists of “a couple thousand” items, but that many have become too fragile to exhibit. “Some of our collection has gotten old; even in the last seven years it has deteriorated. It’s not that we’re holding back a large portion of the collection.” Built from foam and fabric, each puppet character had multiple copies because of performance wear and tear. The gift covered puppets that could no longer be used to perform…

This is very disillusioning. I should have known that Kermit was actually a number of interchangeable bodies (like Lassie). Apparently, he keeps his youthful appearance by banishing his aging selves to attics and museums, taking the Dorian Gray method to a whole new level. But it would have been more interesting had we seen Kermit, Fozzie, Miss Piggy, etc. develop bald patches, sagging skin, and discoloration as they got older, just like the rest of us. Why not teach kids about the ravages of life through the sun damage from Ernie and Bert’s trips to the nude beaches of Provincetown, not to mention Oscar the Grouch’s attempts to hide his hair loss with a comb-over? I guess if you want to see deteriorating puppets, you’ll have to rent Meet the Feebles.

Emmy awards: dick vs. poo

Emmy award nominations were announced this morning, and the hottest race is in the "Outstanding Original Music and Lyrics" category, where "Dick in a Box," the Justin Timberlake video from Saturday Night Live, is up against "Everything Comes Down to Poo," from the musical episode of Scrubs. Also nominated is "My Drunken Irish Dad," from Family Guy; "Merry X-Mas," from Mad TV; and the homoerotic "Guy Love," from Scrubs. Such pioneers of television as Rod Serling and Edward R. Morrow would surely be proud that the medium now rivals Broadway in its contribution to the Great American Songbook. As for the other nominations, all you need to know is that Elaine Stritch was nominated for her brief guest appearance as Alec Baldwin's mother on 30 Rock. Stritch is a treasure, and 30 Rock is a fine show, but there was no acting involved here; she's getting a Hooray, You're Still Alive nomination. (Though it's not quite as bad as the Ellen Burstyn fiasco from last year.) Where are the nominations for 30 Rock regular Jack McBrayer and guest Will Arnett? The geriatric (in thought, if not always in body) Emmy voters also continued their unfounded crush on David E. Kelley and all law dramas by giving a Best Drama nomination to Boston Legal. Overlooked in order to squeeze in this tired show: The Wire, Rome, Deadwood, Friday Night Lights, Lost, and The Riches.

But ya are, Blanche, ya are a supporting character!

A few years ago I saw Bea Arthur’s one-woman show (in Nyack, NY, just 15 miles up the road from Tuckahoe), and she had a throwaway line about having a better time on the set of Maude than on the set of The Golden Girls. I surmised that she and Betty White didn’t get along, since she had already worked with Rue McClanahan on Maude. But after reading William Henderson and Mark Peikert’s interview with McClanahan in the July 11 In Newsweekly (doesn’t seem to be online anymore), I stand corrected. Here’s what “Blanche” had to say about “Dorothy”: "What I hear from the public is that [Blanche or Sophia] are their two favorites. The rare person prefers Rose. And even rarer, Dorothy! I don’t know anyone who would pick Dorothy! … Of course, Bea always thought she was the star of the show. Not a big enough star, because she wanted to be Maude again and have other people supporting her rather than be one of the group. She never did feel comfortable as one of the group." The Golden Girls has never been one of my favorite sitcoms, but it’s a pleasurable enough half-hour largely because of Arthur. Hers is the only character that isn’t reducible to a cliché — as opposed to Blanche’s Southern belle, Rose’s Midwestern twit, and Sophia’s feisty old lady — and all the other characters are defined largely by Dorothy’s reactions to their absurdities. There was a reason why she was always seated at the center of the kitchen table, with Blanche and Rose on either side to feed Dorothy inspiration for her looks of exasperation and incredulity. And it was no surprise that when Arthur left the show, the other three actresses failed in their attempt to carry on (in a spin-off called The Golden Palace). Sorry, Rue, but I guess you’re not the first Blanche to delude yourself.

I can so quit you, Denis Leary!

Not much on TV this summer except Big Love and Flight of the Conchords, so I’ll refer you to Edward Copeland’s fun essay on why he quit watching Rescue Me and various other shows over the years. We seem to have similar taste, except that I followed Six Feet Under all the way to the end, and I couldn’t even get past the first five or six episodes of 24, thanks to my loathing for the perils of daughter Kim. I dropped Rescue Me last year, soon after the controversy over Denis Leary’s character raping his ex-wife (without that much resistance from her). I could accept that scene, and I could accept the idea that the firefighters on this show are screwed-up guys who are drawn to emotionally unstable women. But I couldn’t get over the predictability of the misogyny on Rescue Me. Why get actresses like Susan Sarandon and Marisa Tomei to guest star if you’re just going to put them in a never-ending parade of crazed nymphomaniacs? In all fairness, I should point out that the male guest stars on Rescue Me are just as horrible as the women, except that they don’t lust after Leary. (The chief’s brother-in-law, for example, should have had a Snidely Whiplash mustache.) But this doesn’t help the show’s predictability problem. Like Copeland, I quit The West Wing when I realized that almost all the dialogue could be assigned at random to any character, and no one would notice the difference. The point of no return for me was episode 49, when Rob Lowe’s character made an impassioned argument for abolishing the penny and Bradley Whitford’s character made fun of him for caring so much about something so trivial. By the next day, I forgot which character said what, since everyone on this show alternated between obsessing over minor things and making fun of another character for obsessing over minor things. NYPD Blue ended for me when Sipowicz’s wife was killed by a stray bullet, apparently just because the actress who played her decided to leave the show. (Just recast her!) I sprang Oz loose after Schillinger had Beecher’s son murdered and I realized the show was just a live-action version of Itchy and Scratchy. And Law and Order was dismissed when Angie Harmon became the pin-up assistant DA. My divorces from sit-coms have been more amicable, though. When they get too repetitive (Cheers, Everybody Loves Raymond), I just watch them less often. Things that make me laugh are too rare and valuable to just throw away.

Good riddance, Sopranos

I didn't say it, Josh Glenn of the Boston Globe did:

After viewing a few episodes, I decided that "The Sopranos" was an Aaron Spelling show, plus curse words and boobs, and returned the DVD without finishing it.

Not my opinion, Josh, but you're welcome to express it. That is, you would be if you hadn't violated one of Escar-go-go's cardinal rules of criticism: You can't trash a work of art if you can't name something in its genre that you like better. If you also name a TV drama that you respect and admire ("guilty pleasures" don't count), then you can dis The Sopranos. If you just don't like TV, no one cares what you think about a particular program.

The Sopranos: FOURTH best HBO series ever

I forgot about Lucky Louie! No, I mean The Wire, of course. Maybe. It could be a three-way tie for second between The Sopranos, Six Feet Under, and The Wire, but Deadwood is definitely on top. HBO is going to have a hard time living up to the standards it set during the past eight years.

The Sopranos: Third best HBO series ever

Three points: 1.) Escar-go-go got more hits during the two hours after The Sopranos aired than on any day since I started it, and almost all of the visitors came via search engines like Google. Since the blog must rank something like 1500th on a search result for the show’s title, fans must have spent a lot of time reading anything they could find. Bad news for HBO if they really expected viewers to hang around for John from Cincinnati. 2.) The Sopranos is so rich in detail that I haven’t yet seen any comment on the episode’s opening shot, a close-up of Tony’s head resting on a thick white pillow while organ music played on the soundtrack — as if he were in a coffin. (The music came from some art-rock song on a clock-radio that woke Tony up.) 3.) As brilliant as The Sopranos was, something was out of whack when it was allowed to run for 86 episodes (surely no coincidence, that number) when the more nuanced and expansive Deadwood and Six Feet Under fell short of that number. Sopranos producer David Chase made the entirely defensible decision to stick to a narrow view of the world (bleak, bleak, bleak) and eschew any real character development. Almost all of the characters fell into four categories and stayed there: those who became aware that they were living in a moral cesspool but ultimately chose to stay there (Tony, Carmela, A.J., Meadow, Christopher, Vito, arguably Johnny Sack); those who steeled themselves against ever looking down and thus had fewer sleepless nights than those in the first category (Livia, Uncle Junior, Janice, Phil Leotardo); those who were too intellectually limited or innocent to question their moral choices or realize they were making any (Adrianna, Bobby, maybe Artie Bucco); and comic relief characters who never showed enough depth for us to psychoanalyze (Paulie, Silvio). The only moral character was Dr. Melfi, who was tellingly absent from the last episode. Contrast The Sopranos to Deadwood, where self-righteous sheriff Seth Bullock and amoral proto-mobster Al Swearingen evolved over the course of the three seasons until each became more like the other. Some fans complained that Al became too soft or likeable, and some were upset that in the premature series finale Seth condoned the killing of an innocent woman for coldly pragmatic reasons. But it was believable and fascinating to see both characters put aside their mutual loathing for the good of the mining town of Deadwood — their version of “this thing of ours,” to use Mafia lingo. And on Six Feet Under, we watched the free-spirited Nate evolve into a selfish hedonist as the formerly repressed (and closeted) David turn into an emotionally open, compassionate partner and father. Again, many viewers were not happy with the changes, particularly to Nate. The Sopranos deserves accolades, but the fact that it was the most popular of all the HBO dramas proves again that viewers like plot twists but hate real surprises.