Seeking Ferret

-There's been some really good writing this season, but the show feels like it lost a trick when it lost Robbins and Kepner. Particularly Kepner, I think. The show's ability to balance serious melodrama against tonally consistent silliness largely rested on Kepner's shoulders since Cristina left, and they don't really have anyone who can hit those notes as effectively now that she's gone. So this season has often had quite effective dramatic sequences, but not as many effective comedic sequences. The hijinks at Catherine's party just didn't land as well as they would have if Kepner had been around to stir shit up.

-I kind of love how low drama Meredith is these days. She's just so fucking past it. She's a mother of three, she has two 'sisters', and she has her friendships with Karev and presumably still as much as possible with Cristina, and she has her awesome career. Those things are all that matters to her. If she gets to sleep with a hot doctor sometimes, that's nice, but it's not essential. If the hot doctor has drama, she can drop him until he figures his shit out without messing with her priorities.

-My new alltime favorite Grey's Anatomy scene was in the episode 2 weeks ago with the kid math whiz. Qadri, Schmitt, Bailey, and Pierce striding through the doorway because they all heard the Math Bat Signal is the best thing Grey's has ever done. :P They are the best geeks, they really are. And Grey's can never go to the Bailey is a Giant Geek well often enough for me.

-This past week they did a Very Special Episode about sexual assault, and I thought they handled it quite well, though again I missed Kepner. In the hospital setting they had a way to tell the story from a perspective you don't see that often, how to balance medical obligations and legal obligations with basic human obligations. And the Jo backstory stuff was painful but well-acted, but show, don't you dare mess with Jo's marriage on me.

Being in the throes of a ton of Where on Earth is Carmen Sandiego feels from festivids, I eagerly consumed the new Carmen Sandiego.


Its premise is to try to fashion Carmen, historically often something of an ambiguous villain (in the vein of the Riddler, where it's not clear that she actually wants to get away with her crimes, and it's not clear if she has any malice at heart), into an anti-hero. Carmen is reimagined as a vigilante thief, orphaned and raised at the VILE academy until she realizes that theft comes at a human cost, and she thereupon rebelled. Since then, she teams with the resourceful Bostonian thieves Zach and Ivy (omg the accents!) and the mysterious white hat hacker known as Player to steal stolen treasures back from VILE and return them to their 'rightful' owners.

It is... not exactly the premise I thought we were being sold. Pre-release conversation that I heard centered on the image of Carmen as a Latina revolutionary whose acts of theft were efforts to combat European hegemony and cultural appropriation, Robin Hood for the colonized. But this is a weak subthread of the series and one that wasn't well supported by the facts. Carmen's origin story as an orphan raised on an island of criminals weakens to the point of non-existence her connection to her colonized heritage, and VILE as the antagonist is the kind of corporate bait and switch we're used to on television where the use of an explicitly evil antagonist obfuscates the fact that the same crime is perpetuated routinely by generally well-meaning people. You know, like how Marvel didn't use actual Nazis as the villains for Captain America, but used 'HYDRA' instead, and how it rendered a lot of the films' messages incoherent or problematic. The true face of culture theft is not mustache twirling supervillains, it's apparently-well-meaning liberals...

Carmen's Road to Damascus moment comes when a teenaged Carmen is in Casablanca trying to follow VILE for personal reasons and a Moroccan archaeologist explains the concept of national treasures to her. Which is such a white savior premise that it barely moves the needle for me that she is Latina. And rather than, you know, steal back the Elgin Marble for Greece, or return Iraqi antiquities looted during the Gulf Wars, she's re-stealing national treasures stolen from museums by the explicitly evil VILE and returning them to those museums without interrogating the idea of museums. If this version of Carmen Sandiego is in fact about the moral complexities of fighting cultural appropriation, it is not very good at it. The closest we get to an acknowledgment of cultural hegemony is the Ecuador episode, where Carmen and a VILE criminal are engaged in a race to recover a culturally valuable historical coin from a shipwreck- Carmen, so she can give it to an Ecuadorian archaeologist; the VILE criminal so they can give it to their bosses to sell on the black market. But again, this does not grapple with cultural hegemony or appropriation in any serious or thoughtful way; VILE as an entity shifts focus away from the real problems of colonialist looting.

Instead we get Leverage-style heists against VILE while she is pursued by a Sterling-meets-Clousseau ACME detective named Chase Devineaux who is convinced Carmen is just a thief no matter how many times his partner points out that she seems to be helping them out. Which is fun enough! I love Leverage, I love Carmen Sandiego as a character, but... if the idea is that Carmen is opposing kyriarchy, Carmen SHOULD be just a thief in the eyes of the law. Validation from ACME would actually undermine her character role. Notably, the Ecuador episode is one of the only episodes where ACME's storyline does not involve chasing Carmen. Because it's the only episode where Carmen's restorative justice does not involve giving the paintings back to a legally determined 'rightful owner' but rather to a morally determined 'rightful owner', ACME has no place in the story.

ACME is literally described in the show as a law enforcement/surveillance agency EVEN MORE SECRETIVE THAN VILE. ACME is committed to the preservation of everything that is wrong with Western Civilization. ACME cares nothing about jurisdiction, nothing about rule of law, and everything about the exercise of hierarchical power and maintenance of the status quo. ACME in this rendition is a terrifying concept that Carmen should be just as opposed to as she is to VILE. But of course that doesn't happen, this is a corporatist Carmen Sandiego as produced by Netflix. We can't actually tell stories that demonize the police or problematize its status as an agent of the state.


There are things worth praising about the show. The artwork is bright and elegant, and although the animation is fairly simplistic most of the time, it works, and occasionally a scene will dazzle. And having recently gone through Where on Earth in some detail, I was delighted by the many callbacks. So many iconic visual moments got re-worked, so many returns from fun characters. I think my favorite callback was when Carmen used meat to decoy some guard dogs, as she did in the finale of Where on Earth. Such a little detail, it conveys how much affection the new show has for the history of the franchise. Then, too, many of the antagonists are familiar from past incarnations of the franchise. I do wish the sense of overweening impossible ambition had made it over to this show more intact. In Where on Earth, Carmen steals the Boston Tea Party! She steals the Colosseum! At best in the new show, Carmen steals the Magna Carta, or all of the world's Vermeers. The action is not on the same scale.

The storytelling on a character level was quite well done. Carmen's personal arc over the nine episodes of the first series is really effectively told, with some nice payoff in the finale to seeds planted in earlier episodes. Zach and Ivy and Player are somewhat less fully realized, but there is room for backstory episodes on them to flesh out their lives in the future. Julia and Devineaux and Crackle and Tigress are all interesting characters. And I really liked Paper Star in the limited time we saw her.

As educational material, well... I just got through obsessively watching Where on Earth, and that show is much, much denser in geographic and cultural educational content than this one, but also much more overtly and tediously didactic about it. I found I was mostly fastforwarding past the C5 corridor lectures about the key landmarks of the places Zach and Ivy were traveling to, and I never fastforwarded past anything on the new show. But that's both good and bad. I think children's media has gotten less didactic than it was when I was a child overall.

A Simple Favor

Mystery thriller starring Anna Kendrick and Blake Lively, directed by Paul Feig. EXTREMELY gay subtext. Fun and mostly engaging, but with occasional lulls and some headscratching plot twists. But mostly if you want to watch a movie where Anna Kendrick and Blake Lively flirt with each other, you should check this out. Highly recommended on those grounds.


The Good Wife Season 1

Enjoyable, thoughtful legal drama, with a really smooth balance between arcy stuff and case of the week. I mean smooth like a whiskey metaphor- the case of the week stuff helps the arc stuff go down smoothly. On really arcy shows I'm sometimes anxious because I know something will resolve unpleasantly but I don't know if I'm going to be anticipating it for one episode or ten, and that really bothers me. I thought The Good Wife would be like that, but it's thus far been reliable at balancing out that anxiety by giving you reliable case of the week happy resolutions. It's a show full of anxiety-causing material deliberately designed to minimize those anxieties.

I knew from osmosis I'd love Alicia and Kalinda and Diane and Will, but nobody prepared me for liking Logan Cary. But I do! Matt Czuchry is such a perfect casting, he plays privileged jackass so well. Every move he makes says I went to Harvard, but because Czuchry gives Cary a humanity too, that privilege foils Alicia's dark edges really effectively.

I particularly appreciate how carefully the show sets up that Alicia is constantly aware that other people are watching her and having opinions about her. From the opening shot of the series, periodically revisited, of Alicia performing the role of The Good Wife, the show explores her awareness of others' awareness in so many different, subtle ways. But it's almost never a topic of the show's dialogue, this is a theme the show explores exclusively in blocking and camera angles and meaningful glances. Which is really cool and filmic.

I'm also really enjoying the judge stunt casting. It's a neat calculation the showrunners made, that those sort of former star actors who are having a career lull either on purpose or by the vicissitudes of the industry would love to take on a guest role as a judge that doesn't take up much time that'd risk them losing out on other work, but lets them push themselves as actors. Peter Riegert, Ana Gasteyer, Joanna Gleason, etc... It's fun.


Slow Burn Podcast

Not exactly what it sold itself as: The show introduces itself by claiming it's going to be about stepping through the Watergate scandal as it was experienced by people as it unfolded, rather than in the retrospective way that history books/movies convert it into a narrative. But Watergate is simply too complicated and multifaceted to actually step through in any kind of meaningful step by step way... I knew that going in, and had hoped that the podcast would revel in that sprawling glorious chaos, but it only had eight half hour episodes to work with, so that was never going to happen. Rather than retelling Watergate, Slow Burn is about taking a close look at eight key figures or events in Watergate that aren't usually reported in detail. By looking at these smaller narratives, the podcast implicitly (and explicitly, eventually) asks that central question: How does the strange, chaotic, unpredictable flow of news and events that people are struggling to process as they come out somehow converge and convert itself into a set of composed narratives that are transmitted as history? Are individual moments inevitable as they seem in those composed narratives, or were they subject to the unpredictability of human whim?

I wanted something more sprawling, which I had thought was promised by the opening, but the podcast itself was ultimately satisfying and illuminating for what it turned out to be instead.

Season 2, about the Monica Lewinsky scandal, is coming out now and I'm finding it equally fascinating. There's a great, gripping moment in episode 4, which I just listened to, where a female reporter recounts the details of Lewinsky's growing relationship with Clinton, and as she relates a set of details that wouldn't have been out of place in a romance novel, she lets out a giggle. Then she recoils at herself, recalling that it's now 2018. "This isn't funny," she says. "But I can't help but laugh." As a nation, we are rethinking once again the relationship between sex and power, and it's really interesting to rethink the Lewinsky scandal through the new lens, and to watch the people who grappled with the scandal back then have to force themselves to reexamine everything they believed.

It's also great to set the two seasons besides each other... The Lewinsky scandal exists, almost definitionally, in comparison to Watergate. Every early scandal of the Clinton era got a Gate name- Travelgate, Troopergate, etc... The notion of a special prosecutor and their wide purview to investigate stems from Watergate. The way all the figures interviewed knew and told each other at the time that the coverup was worse than the crime... Watergate is the story of this unthinkable thing happening, of a president being brought down by a scandal when everyone involved told each other that it could never happen. Clinton's scandals take place in a landscape where everyone knows that it's possible for scandal to take down a president.

AP Bio NBC TV sitcom

I raced through the 13 half hour episodes this week. I'm... unsure what to say. I was fascinated and riveted, but I suspect for a lot of my flist, it would just read as straightforward patriarchy horror.

The premise of AP Bio is that Jack Griffin, the main character, was a successful philosophy professor at Harvard until he had a depressive episode associated with the death of his mother and the success of a rival and was fired by Harvard. He moves into his mother's house in Toledo, OH and wangles a job as an AP biology teacher on the basis of his Harvard credentials rather than any demonstrated ability to teach high school students advanced biology. On his first day he marches into class, informs his maladjusted, intensely nerdy students that he has no intention of teaching them any biology and that if anyone reports him to administration, he will fail them. Locked in a game of chicken between teacher and class, the students pass the semester serving Jack's aimless agenda of pointless and petty failed revenge attempts against his academic rival from Harvard days, while working behind his back to find a way to learn biology in spite of him.

It's a story about privilege, particularly white and male privilege, in a small scale, low stakes setting. Jack should not have his job and the reason he does is because he is white and male and has a white male's ability to skate without facing the consequences others would for similar actions. At the same time, in meaningful ways Jack has lost everything. It seems strange to talk about this rejected, depressed loser as someone who has avoided consequences. AP Bio is intensely interested in this contradiction, in the differences between aggregate privilege as a member of a class and individual privilege, or lack thereof.

AP Bio is also interested in the American education system, which it conceptualizes as a workplace full of uninspired and poorly trained teachers which is being asked to fulfill important intellectual and emotional needs for hundreds of impressionable and vulnerable young people.

In a striking and funny sequence in the 12th episode, when the school principal is up for an award, he asks his teachers to do a model lesson while they are observed by the superintendent and other judges. Nearly all of them, regardless of subject, construct a papier mache volcano as part of their lesson: Building a volcano was taught to them in a schoolwide continuing ed seminar last summer, they explain, and when asked to put together their flashiest, most exciting lesson plan, it independently occurred to all of them.

Set against this kind of inanity, the show asks, is there something to be said for elitism? Is there something to be said for Jack Griffin's Harvard polished genius, his rude gift for complicated philosophical nuance? After all, midway through the season, all of his students independently elect to read his dense, sophisticated treatise on the philosophy of death, and to have conversations about its meaning on their own, following in the wake of their indifferent leader. Maybe individual genius, inarguable and incontestable inborn talent, has value on its own that we are crowding out of the conversation in education as we focus every more narrowly on standardization and results?

No, concludes AP Bio, that is stupid. Morality and mutual obligation and community matter even if they court inanity and the suppression of individuality. And that is a fascinating and prickly conclusion.

Nailed It Netflix show

This show is my aesthetic.

The premise of Nailed It is that the host, comedian Nicole Byers, sets three moderately competent amateur bakers (the sort who can pull off a tasty birthday cake for their daughter, for example) the task of making a Cake Boss kind of art cake, in an unfairly short time frame. The show is deliberately setting them up for failure, and when they fail, the show laughs at them.

But it's not a mean-spirited show! Everybody is in on the joke. The contestants are not deluded into thinking that they're master bakers, and they go on the show prepared to give it their all, knowing they won't succeed, and if things go well, maybe they'll pick up a few baking tricks along the way. So you're not laughing at the bakers, you're laughing with them. The task they were asked to do was beyond them and so they can take pride in accomplishing as much of it as they did. But the show isn't 'inspirational' about it, either. They don't pretend that failing at making a fancy cake is an accomplishment, just because they tried and put something on the judging table. Sometimes trying isn't actually enough. I love how realistic the show is about the value of failure and its limits.

It also is brilliant at picking at the unreality of crafting reality television. These show blur the distinction between the work of a professional and the work of an amateur- if you just did what they show on the show, you too could make an elaborate cake in the shape of a car. But professionals have all sorts of advantages in training, practice, equipment, time, and money that are often hidden in the cinematography. An amateur baking at home isn't going to be able to bake four times as much cake as they'll actually need, to make sure they select the best tasting, best looking cakes to provide to their customers. They don't have the time, the ingredients, the oven room, the amount of baking pans to do things like that.

There's a great moment on Nailed It when they're making cupcakes in too short an amount of time. All three of them botch the icing, because they didn't have time to let the cupcakes cool before applying the icing. The solution? They were supposed to have used the provided blast chiller to cool the cupcakes rapidly so the icing didn't melt and collapse. But of course they didn't know to do that! Nobody has a blast chiller at home! We just allow more time to let the cupcakes cool!

I'm up to date on The Orville and one episode behind on Star Trek Discovery.

The Orville, from day one, has been pretty clear about what it is as a show, and it's not what we thought it was going to be or what the trailers promised. It's not a space sitcom full of Family Guy style jokes. It's not in the Galaxy Quest vein. It's a pretty straightforward episodic modern take on Star Trek, created with deep respect for Roddenberry's ideals. Its particular lens on the material is a focus on the mundane: What if life in Starfleet was like a typical modern office? Your boss's boss is generally a decent guy but he sometimes says sexist things and he's in the middle of getting over an ugly divorce that sometimes bleeds his personal life into his professional life. Some of your co-workers are so burnt out they couldn't give a shit as long as it doesn't affect them. Your manager is way too inexperienced and seems uncomfortable giving orders. The fart jokes from the trailers, it turns out, weren't pointless sitcom props- they're character beats about how Starfleet means you are living 24/7 among your co-workers, and that means figuring out how to share bathrooms with people who are not like you. It's surprisingly well done.

I've been enjoying it, for the most part, though its basic mundanity sometimes blends awkwardly with its Roddenberry idealism. The Very Special Episode about transgender issues didn't quite fit together for me- the jokiness clashed with the seriousness of the question, making the question sometimes seem more trivial than it is. But I loved some moments from the episode- I loved seeing the human crew initially confronting the question from a position of revulsion- of course we in the Federation don't decide the gender of an infant, we let the infant grow up and make their own choice! It's no more obviously the right position- the Federation still clearly is a culture where cultural programming about gender roles matters. Still, it's so striking in just the right Star Trek way to say "Let's posit a future where a liberal orthodoxy about transgender issues has been completely adopted as a cultural norm... how does that liberal orthodoxy react to people taking a different approach to gender issues?"



Then there's Star Trek Discovery. I have no idea what to say about it yet. I don't understand it as a show. The first two episodes don't feature the ship Discovery that the show is named after, or most of its main characters. They're decent television, and the special effects are spectacular and leave The Orville in the dust, but they don't seem to have much connection to what the show is in its next two episodes.

It seems to be wrestling with what does Starfleet look like at war, except that unlike some past versions of the same, it doesn't entirely seem to be working from the expected premise that Starfleet at war is a fundamentally irresolvable tension. The first two episodes revolve around a mutiny driven by a violation of the apparent principle that Starfleet never shoots first, then the subsequent two episodes seem to revolve around a captain who has been charged by Starfleet to do whatever it takes to win the war. What does this version of Starfleet stand for? I don't know. What does this version of the Klingon empire stand for? Other than speaking endlessly in subtitled Klingon, making ST:D practically a foreign film, I don't know. Thus far, there's been very few scenes in the show not on the Shenzhou, the Discovery, or a Klingon vessel. Almost nothing on alien worlds, very little about alien races besides the Klingons and Vulcans. There is so little of what we expect from Star Trek here.

Amidst this general confusion of purpose, I've enjoyed moments. Sonequa Martin-Green's Michael Burnham, the only character on the show who's been at all fleshed out, is intriguing and well-acted, the brilliant loner so convinced of her own competence that she thinks as long as she survives and gives it her best, she can take everyone else along with her. Jason Isaacs has made the most of his limited work so far, giving off an extremely Shatnerian vibe in spite of the very different material he's being given to deliver. Anthony Rapp has been fun as a hardass engineer, and Mary Wiseman has been really effective as a mood lightener as Cadet Tilly.

I'm going to keep watching both shows- it'll be interesting to see where they go.

Oh man, when I was a kid I used to run home after school to watch Batman reruns on WPIX 11. I'm pretty sure I didn't know they were reruns, I just knew that they were awesome. I was obsessed with the show, with the POWs and the BAMs and the ZAPs. My grandmother sewed me an Adam West Batman costume for a birthday one year and I proudly strutted around the house.


When I heard the news this evening, I popped in my DVD (I have two complete sets, a bootleg set from before the official DVD set was released, and the official release) and watched The Bookworm Turns/ While Gotham Burns, which I remembered as always being one of my favorite episodes. Roddy McDowall as the Bookworm, a failed novelist turned thief, who conceives of his crimes as novels, with serial chapters and plot twists galore. I watched and I remembered little preteen Ferret, thrilled to death with the idea of a crime where having memorized the complete works of Hemingway and Cervantes could help one crack the case. Where the villain pauses before executing his crime to remind his henchmen that in Burns, it's "the best laid schemes o' mice an' men', not 'the best laid plans'. Adam West's Batman was always absurd (He stops Robin while in the midst of climbing sideways up a building to remind him to always climb with two hands on the rope; He stops the Bookworm's gang before a fight to remind them to set aside their glasses lest they get damaged.), but there was a message behind it: a message about the power of intelligence and moral behavior to triumph over brute strength and selfishness. Crime doesn't pay.

Just watched an IA episode of a police procedural. And I was wondering- has anyone ever made a morally satisfying internal affairs episode on such a show? IA episodes have to be my least favorite trope of police procedurals because all police procedurals are morally bankrupt, or at least morally driven by the dictates of closing plots in 40 minutes or less. Yet we are still supposed to regard the protagonists as the heroes, or the premise of the show doesn't work. So an IA episode involves, for one 40 minute or sometimes 80 minute period, looking back at past episodes of the show from an external, absolutist moral lens. It makes no sense within the internal morality of the show, and given that as soon as the IA episode is cleared, usually by a deus ex machina that bestows no meaningful consequences on our heroes and often affirms their cloudy moral horizons as righteous, morality returns to amoral normal, it does not serve to create a new moral status quo.


Maybe the Wire achieves a successful IA storyline? I've only seen the first season, so I'm not sure, but I guess I could believe the Wire could pull it off because the Wire doesn't require us to think of the police as the heroes of the show and it doesn't require us rooting for their success.

Pitch, the new TV show about the first female Major League baseball player, was amazing!!!!

The baseball looked real, the story beats felt right but also felt realistic enough that they could drive a serious drama rather than a classic feel-good sports movie, and Ginny was awesome. I can't wait to watch more of this show.

Only Connect and University Challenge, my two British quiz show addictions, are rolling into second round action, when the shows really get going for me. I like just watching them as trivia challenges, but what makes them addictive is the continuity, which fosters rooting interests as you get to know the personalities of the teams. I'm not quite sure who my favorites are in either show, yet, but I know that pretty soon I'll have some, as we start to get more and more repeat competitors. Unfortunately, the most idiosyncratic teams are often the earliest to lose, especially on University Challenge, so my natural tendency to enjoy watching them doesn't really get time to take hold.

My enjoyment of those two shows is always tempered by the frustration of lacking context. I'm far better at American history trivia than most of the students on UC, but UC rarely asks American history questions. I'm far worse at British history, but UC is constantly asking to identify prime ministers from two centuries ago. And I'm at a complete loss when it comes to questions of British television that are staples of both UC and OC. The thing is that I don't mind knowing the answers, which is my problem. It is often the case that I see a question on Jeopardy I don't know, and the question intrigues me and leads me to doing some reading and learning. But when I miss a British pop culture question, I shrug and say "Of course I don't know that," and stop thinking about it. Which means that there is some significant fraction of the clues that I don't care about, which is the source of the aforementioned frustration: why am I watching a show where I don't care about so much of the content?

I'm still dispassionately watching Agents of SHIELD and mostly not enjoying it. I was puzzled by the inexplicable appearance of fake Ancient Hebrew scrolls written in a fairly modern Hebrew script and carrying a deep, orientalist sense of impending mystical doom. Puzzled because I don't think the concept was substantial enough to be offensive. I think the show's grasp of the nuances of bureaucracy remains shockingly and damagingly poor and it wrecks both the realism and drama of the show's intrigue storylines. But every once in a while they string together a five minute sequence that is properly tense and exciting and morally ambiguous. Though it's worth noting that the last of these ended with yet another black secondary character fridged out of nowhere.

I will say that the All-Simmons episode was pretty excellent, because it was uncluttered by all the nonsense that makes normal Agents of SHIELD episodes impossible to enjoy. In general, AoS would be much better if it had much more Simmons and much less of everyone else, is my general feeling. Though I would have liked the All-Simmons episode more if her companion on the portal world were female and the storyline less insistently heteronormative. I did kind of love Fitz's response to Simmons at the end; I think the writers' consistency in the Fitz will Always Save Simmons character beat is kind of nice because it does come without strings, but I feel like they've been more inconsistent on Simmons will Always Save Fitz than I find believable. On the other hand, I suppose that in the case of the one major betrayal of Simmons Will Always Save Fitz, her undercover HYDRA mission during Fitz's recovery, there's a good argument that Simmons somehow 'saving' Fitz would have been far more problematic.

I'm watching the Grinder, but I'm uncertain if I like it. Certainly I love Ben Savage and Rob Lowe and Mary Elizabeth Ellis and Natalie Morales playing off each other, they're wonderful comic actors. And sometimes the writing hits this really wry meta tone that I enjoy, where they are consciously undermining their own jokes as they're making them... it makes the show less funny but more amusing, if that makes sense. The Grinder's basic joke- that Rob Lowe thinks that playing a lawyer on TV prepares him to be a lawyer in real life- is not one with infinite legs, but I'm curious to see how the show evolves because it has so many good, slightly awkwardly fitting, pieces. And even that joke has lasted them longer than I expected because of a weird truth about life: It is possible, if awkward and deceptive, to impose a narrative on real life. And even though the elevator pitch version of the show is about the difference between TV lawyer and real lawyer, what heft the show has comes from the struggle of Rob Lowe's character to reconcile the narrative he believes life follows and the reality he encounters as he tries to live the narrative. And Ben Savage coming to terms with the fact that sometimes the world does obey Rob Lowe's ridiculous narrative.

This is a dangerous path for the show to tread, because as I said it involves deconstructing the jokes as you make them, and this tends to make the jokes less laugh out loud funny. When Rob Lowe hits on Natalie Morales's character in the office, it is, unmistakably, sexual harassment. But he's not doing it because he's a lecher, precisely. He's doing it because as a TV lawyer he's supposed to be a lecher, and he is following the script. This isn't quite funny, it isn't quite exploitative, I'm not sure quite what it is. It's somewhat clever, but that cleverness has limits. If the sexual harassment crosses some nebulous line I'm not sure I can define, it will make it impossible to like Rob Lowe's character, because it's one thing to cause minor harm to people because you're clueless and another thing to do things that cause serious harm to others because of that cluelessness. At some point that cluelessness stops being excusable, and the exploration of that line is where we'll find out how The Grinder's writers see the world.

I also watched the first few episodes of Grandfathered, which I am liking way more than I expected I would. Part of that is just John Stamos's pure charisma, turning bits that would just be about moving the plot forward into jokes. But it's also how un-tired the jokes feel compared to how you'd expect them to feel. Stamos's Jimmy is the vivid, fully featured character you'd expect, but his son Gerald- proudly feminist, proudly paternal, and profoundly incompetent- is just as evocative a creation. He foils Jimmy in surprisingly sharp ways that make him feel like a living person instead of a walking punchline. When Jimmy offers crude pickup artist mantras and Gerald rotely rebuffs them as disrespectful to women, the dialogue skillfully steers them to the realization of a middle ground where both of them have something to learn from the other about honesty and emotional communication. And that has had me thinking more than I expect a gimmick sitcom to make me think.

I also kind of love how they've designed characters to circumvent one of my biggest problems with smart modern sitcoms: the backslide joke. On shows like Parks and Rec, with smart but flawed characters, as the shows develop arcs of the characters confronting their flaws and dealing with them in progressively stronger ways, it's hard for the writers to resist returning for an episode to a joke that delivers reliable laughs but is dependent on the more sharply flawed version of the character from earlier in the show. The result is funny episodes that undermine the overall strength of the storytelling and make ensuing arc development feel less meaningful. In Jimmy and Gerald you have a pair of characters who you know will continually learn and get better but also reliably backslide... they're still getting mileage out of jokes about Jimmy not liking to be called grandfather despite the Aesop of several episodes being that he doesn't mind being a grandfather, because Jimmy is set is in his ways and will keep backsliding.


And then there is Brooklyn 9-9, which I do not love quite as much as I loved Parks, but it is my favorite currently airing sitcom. Halloween III went exactly where I expected it to go, but it was nonetheless incredibly satisfying. I find myself saving B-99 watching for moments when I need something that I know will make me happy, because B-99 is pretty guaranteed to make me happy.