Seeking Ferret

I've been watching Entourage lately because it's on Amazon Prime and sometimes I don't like to think very hard. It's a very good show to watch when you don't want to think, because it will never make you think. But it's also not as terrible as I'd glossed by osmosis. I've been enjoying it quite a bit, partway through Season 3.

It's a very gentle humor, is the thing that has most surprised me. You hear in osmosis mostly about foul-mouthed, manipulative Ari Gold, and about the scathing satire of Hollywood excesses, and those things are present in force, but the heart of the show is friendship and optimism about Making It. The boys are confronted again and again with choices between friendship and personal benefit and most of the time, they choose friendship. It's a very sweet show, a lot of the time.

Also, I find Ari's Judaism in some ways much more compelling than I find Josh Lyman's (his alter ego, as they are both the foul-talking, manipulative, power-hungry fictionalization of Emanuel brothers). "The Bat Mitzvah" was instantly one of my favorite Jewish episodes of any show, highlighted by Ari's sweet speech to hsi daughter followed by him hilariously skipping the inevitably interminable candlelighting ceremony, but Ari's Jewishness is an always present and uncomfortable and potent part of the show, in really sharp ways. He is a walking, talking stereotype, and it is not a positive stereotype, but he owns it comfortably and he owns its limits. There's a really well-done moment in early Season 3 where Dom, the newly out-of-jail member of Vince's entourage, meets Ari and asks him "What kind of fag name is Ari?" The moment is ugly and is in the nasty tradition of homosocial no-homoing that is undeniably an essential part of the show's humor, but it's also kind of a proud moment for Ari, because he hears it, hears all the othering inherent in the line, and he does the most unthinkable thing possible for Ari. He swallows his tongue, because he knows that he is better than Dom and that he is above responding to an idiotic anti-semitic slur [It's worth noting it's also the kind of anti-semitic slur you usually won't see on television treated as being anti-semitic, because it's too subtle and a lot of non-Jews will insist it's not anti-semitic, just making fun of his weird name. I admire Entourage for going there.]. Ari can play the cheap, manipulative Jew for all it's worth, but he won't let anyone else paint him that way. The power he has over his identity as a Jew, the blessing and the curse, is really inspirational, actually.

About Entourage's approach to women, I think I have to be measured. It is not, in general, a show that is good at writing detailed and compelling female characters. It is, without question, a show that objectifies women a lot of the time, that treats them as trophies to be won by the men, sometimes as commodities to be purchased. It does not overtly depict sexual violence, but it does joke about sexual violence. And all the homosocial no-homoing (this show hits all the queerbaiting tropes, starting with 'it's not gay if it's in a threeway' and going downhill from there) is definitely misogynistic. So yes, there are big problems with the show's approach to female characters.

But I think the show says interesting things about its female characters sometimes, in spite of or because of its problems. I think there is likely a realism to the mercenary relationships between the entourage and the groupies, that the deliberateness and intentionality with which Entourage depicts the choice of the many beautiful women we see to trade sex and relationships for status and favors is an intentionality that is truly present. In a way, I think there is something admirable about that over other media portrayals of groupies. It is clear to Entourage's writers that the women of Entourage are not being fooled into sex. They are making a calculated decision to have sex, for their enjoyment, for their benefit, for their advantage, and they are often shown as being more intelligent and thoughtful than the males that they are sleeping with. As much as it is a show that is overtly about the performance of masculinity, it is much more covertly but sometimes just as cleverly about the performance of femininity. There's a great scene, for example, where Johnny Drama goes to a plastic surgeon to talk about getting calf implants because he's insecure about his skinny legs, which he believes are costing him jobs. The waiting room scene, a room full of artificially-enhanced women back for more, is an entree into the world of people the show has otherwise only shown as arm-candy at parties. In the waiting room, these women talk knowledgeably about the community they are a part of. The women of Entourage are their own creations.

I think it's also interesting in the light of liv's recent thoughtful posts on the subject of emotional labor, how much of the intra-entourage storytelling is questions about who is performing how much emotional labor within the group. Who pays for dinner, who cooks breakfast, who cheers someone up when they've had a breakup, who breaks bad news to someone, who convinces someone that he's making a bad decision. Given the collective immaturity of the boys, it's kind of stunning how functional the entourage is, how they've cumulatively devised a division of emotional labor that keeps the household running. What's kind of striking in this regard is that I haven't seen any plotlines at all, 3 seasons in, where the boys have ever contemplated offloading any of this emotional labor to women. The scenario is about as completely homosocial as it is possible for it to be, as I mentioned earlier.

So far, Fresh Off the Boat has been really funny. With B-99 on some kind of sweeps related hiatus and Parks and Rec over, it's the only sitcom I'm watching. They use the limited acting range of their child actors in smart, measured ways. They milk Constance Wu's comic timing for everything it's worth. They do great work with all the dramatic irony of the retro setting. They drop brilliant and daring one liners and trust that they'll hit ("Superstition is like racism. Every generation is a little better than the one before"). In a way, that is the problem with the show. The only show in twenty years to center a Asian-American family, and it is really, really good. It lets the networks say "See, if the quality is there, we will show diverse content." The same networks regularly air colossally unfunny shows about white families.

I wonder if a useful way to quantify diversity may be with Sturgeon's Law: When 90% of the content about a group is crud, we no longer have a diversity problem.


Also, I would like to register my protest that Agents of SHIELD went from "Melinda", easily the best episode of the second season (p.s. sanguinity, if you're ever going to watch an episode of AoS, this is the one to watch. Ming Na's acting range is stunning.), to the one with 'frenemy' in the episode title, wherein Coulson decides to ally with Ward for no particularly clear reason except to give Admiral Adama more proof that Coulson's a maniac. NO. DON'T TEAM UP WITH WARD.

I remain highly curious of how Age of Ultron will affect the show. Tickets for that are already purchased. :D

On Tuesday's Agent Carter, we saw the return of the 'Howling Commandos'. Well, sort of. The group as constituted in Captain America was very nearly an entirely different group. The only continuity was Dum Dum Dugan as the leader of the group. But that's also only sort of true. There's another form of continuity to the Howlers, which is its relationship to the comic book series.

In Sgt. Fury's Howling Commandos, Dum Dum Dugan is second in command to Sergeant Nick Fury, but the rest of the squad is a strange token squad, with a single Italian, a single Jew, a single African-American, a single Southerner, all working together to kill Nazis. The Captain America movie replaces Nick Fury with Cap as the white guy in charge, and swaps out a couple of these ethnic groups for different ones, but preserves the idea of the Howlers as the token squad.

So when they are bringing back the Howlers in Agent Carter, they want to preserve this. I presume they called Derek Luke, the actor who played African-American Howler Gabe Jones, and I guess he was unavailable, because they scrambled to plan B: Must have the black token in the Howlers, so let's cast another black Howler. They do this, search through the list of names of Howlers in the comics, and name him Sam Sawyer, and consider their problem solved. In a sense it is. The Howlers as the safe harbor in the midcentury armed forces where outsiders can find a family is a theme of the episode, and Happy Sam serving alongside Dum Dum and Junior and Peggy reinforces the theme.

Within the continuity of the relationship to the comic books, problems emerge. Sam Sawyer of the comics wasn't a Howler, per se, He was their commanding officer, the lieutenant who sent Sgt. Fury and his ragtag crew on their missions. So casting a black actor as Sam Sawyer as just a regular Howler has a few metanarrative problems. There's the problem of the character getting a de facto demotion along with the cross-racial casting. And there's the problem of Sam Sawyer's personality from the comics not being transplanted along with the cross-racial casting.

Sam Sawyer is known as Happy Sam. Why? Because as the CO of the misfit Howlers, he spends most of his time yelling at them at the top of his lungs. It's called irony, I guess. Agent Carter Sam Sawyer is also called Happy Sam. Why? Because he is a little bit happy-go-lucky, apparently. The nickname inherits some nasty racial implications when it's removed from its original context.

The original Howling Commandos is informed by a weird, problematic form of 1960s liberal paternalism and it doesn't quite translate to modern understandings about race. So as long as you don't think about the act of translation, I don't think there's anything obviously problematic about this part of the episode. But I think their choice to make a translation is worth thinking about, and I think we have to conclude that on those terms, the result is pretty unfortunate.

Danger 5 Season 2 is coming out. We're up to Episode 4.

Danger 5 doesn't really do parody, as we know it. It also doesn't really do pastiche. I'm not sure I have the word for what they do, because it sits in the same territory as those things, but it isn't those things. Surrealist pastiche, maybe? There's a thing they accomplish on a consistent basis, which is to make you think they're heading for a trope, and then they subvert the trope not by subverting the trope but by doing something so out of left field that it's not even in the same ballpark as the trope.

In general, my love for this season is not quite as unabashed as my love for Season 1. I mean, obviously there are problems with Season 1 aside from the intentional problems, but the writing is so sharp that my tendency is to overlook them. Season 2 has been clunkier. Outside of the simple episodic formula that drove Season 1, there have been fumbles to reestablish characters and storytelling devices. I think they're also running into the limits of using so many one-note characters. The characters have felt out of character, compared to their static Season 1 versions, and the tactic of subjecting them to new pressures has not really had results that were either emotional resonant or even very funny. Their fridging of Claire in the first episode was frustrating on feminist grounds and has not been used effectively since.

On the other hand, I've enjoyed every episode more than the previous one, and episode four was the one that most had the feel of a season 1 episode: the strange geopolitics of the Vatican, the goofy fast food, the matrioshka doll phone, the Pope marionette, and ultimately Hitler's macabre Dantean descent. McKenzie felt most integrated into the team and Pierre, Tucker, Jackson and even to some extent Ilsa had actual emotional arcs. There were more quotable lines.

So I'm holding out hope for a clean finish to the season. It's even possible that some of the bad parts have been deliberate, since the show's using more continuity than it did in season 1 and there may be payoff to delayed jokes. We'll see, I guess.

Re: Aaron Sorkin's The Newsroom:

Season 3 is pushing my rage buttons a hell of a lot less. There seems to be some self-awareness creeping in. There seems to be more awareness on the part of the writers that Sam Watterston has been playing Charlie as an incompetent drunk, Olivia Munn has been playing Sloane as a flighty flake, and the only reason why Jim Harper isn't the worst boyfriend in the world is because he's on the same show as Will McAvoy. The scene in the first episode where Charlie and Will try desperately to come up with an inspiring speech to make during the Boston Marathon bombing coverage was effective along these lines, as was the scene where Maggie apologizes for monologuing because where she works, that's how everyone talks. Being on the same page as the writers, that this is a show about people who are really good at reporting the news and really terrible at life, is making it less enraging to watch.

It's also given them the freedom to take the show into darker places. Neal is in Venezuela and may spend the rest of the show there. Will is in jail and may spend the rest of the show there. I would be really delighted if Will spent the rest of the show in jail, though I kind of doubt it will happen, but sending Will off to jail to Schubert's Ave Maria was a baffling regurgitation of Sorkinian tics that kind of worked dramatically. Will managed to be both a hero and a jackass boyfriend in that scene, and it's thought-provoking and unlike a lot of things on the show, startlingly human.

If Sorkin thinks this show is a good defense of the value of traditional journalism in the face of internet media, he needs to take a long hard look in the mirror. Sometimes it seems like Season 3 is actually that look in the mirror, but sometimes reading Season 3 that way requires us to root against all the ensemble characters and root for the guest stars, and that's a little uncomfortable to do even when the guest stars include BJ Novak and Mary McCormack. But oh, man, Charlie and Sloane, if you couldn't tell that your meeting with the potential buyer was a setup for a screwjob, you need to go back to business school fast. When the ensemble characters are this incompetent, it becomes easier to root against their nonsense ideology. It becomes easier to root for the triumph of the internet as a coming together of technology and community, when the heroes of the old guard are laughable buffoons.

The less said about the Carnivore plotline, though, the better. As Will is an awful human being, Jim is an awful human being and a particularly awful boyfriend, and I am desperately praying that Hallie's realization of this fact is permanent, because no, you do not need to return to that emotionally abusive relationship, Hallie. But I really like that Hallie has been given the intellectual and emotional integrity throughout this plotline to never doubt herself no matter how big a jerk Jim has been.

I do wonder if there is something spiritually damaging about being a social media-oriented journalist in a company built around clickbait, and I think Hallie wonders, too, but I think she's shown making peace with it. The point isn't whether what she writes is clickbaity, the point is whether what she writes is good- emotionally compelling, thought-provoking, honest, and challenging. The internet will make changes both for the good and for the bad, but it will make changes- and Hallie has the brains and integrity to roll with those changes. Good riddance that she's no longer at the mess that is ACN.

I mainlined all of Alpha House season 2 as soon as it came out. It was incredibly delightful, with a joke complexity density rivaling Arrested Development or 30 Rock. Highlights

-Senator Laffer owning an authentic Bush.

-The whole Mormon soaking thing. A slow build leading to an unbelievably hilarious series of images.

-Senator Bettencourt miserably registers voters in North Philadelphia, knowing that every voter he registers will be a vote against him.

-Janel Moloney as a Republican Senator. Let me repeat that. DONNA MOSS, REPUBLICAN SENATOR. Yelling at Bradley Whitford. Working while on a treadmill in her office... IN HEELS. Wielding a pistol in the Capitol in a bold stand for gun rights.

-EVERYTHING JOHN GOODMAN DID. THE REALITY SHOW. THE BONFIRE. THE DISARMAMENT. THE FRONT PORCH CAMPAIGN. THE CIRCLE OF CIVILITY. THE HUSTLE FOR SEXUAL ASSAULT LEGISLATION. JOHN GOODMAN IS A COMIC GOD.



I'm watching Gotham- I don't think I mentioned, but of course I couldn't resist. It's a pretty bankrupt premise that I'm still waiting to see what the point is, but so far I'm enjoying it despite its sort of pointlessness. Penguin is wonderful, Fish Moony is amazing, and I'm liking that Jim Gordon is so ethically compromised already, though in the wake of this most recent episode it remains to be seen how far they're willing to take that. They brought things to a head much faster than I thought they would, which is a relief, and yet it beggars the question of where the writers think they're taking this show.



I'm watching Agents of SHIELD still, of course. I've been mostly disappointed by S2 so far, though the most recent episode was my favorite by far. Mockingbird is great! Mack is great! I want my FitzSimmons back together. I still wish Agents of SHIELD were the FitzSimmons show. But the show is plagued by the difficulty of juggling all the new characters and character relationships. Coulson/Skye was the heart of Season 1 emotionally, and Director Coulson/Agent Skye in this season has been just completely adrift. There have been episodes in this season that, with all of the new dynamics being juggled, saw the plot get completely botched. The Agent May vs. Agent May fight was great but it was surrounded by probably the most wretchedly dumb writing the show has ever seen, in which any questions about whether May could trust Coulson and vice versa were sabotaged by the stupidity of the dialogue.


I finished the Wheel of Time about a month ago. I'm not sure what to say about it because it is so big and powerful a literary achievement that it's hard to get a grasp on its significance. Ten thousand pages or more, hundreds of characters, dozens of plotlines, all maneuvered, sometimes clumsily and sometimes brilliantly, toward a single climax lasting most of a thousand pages. A climax that manages to tie up an immense number of loose ends without seeming forced, yet certainly not an effortless climax. The Wheel of Time is impressive because it is enjoyable in spite of its many faults, because somehow over the course of its tremendous length, the good outweighs the bad more often than not.

Some observations:

-Brandon Sanderson could never quite get Mat Cauthon right, especially his sense of humor. But he did a pretty amazing job of writing Mat Cauthon, gambling general, in the finale given that handicap.

-The metathematics of the Wheel of Time are pretty central to its point... The heroes of the Horn spinning out in every generation, the Dragon reborn again and again to fight the same battle over and over again against the Shadow, names translated into new myths with every Age, Tel'Aran'Rhiod as the one constant- the world of dreams, the world of storytellers, the world where if you believe something more strongly than someone else, your story is imposed on the world.

Given this, the point of Rand's ending is that he gets to live a life that isn't part of a story now. But I still want that story desperately, because of my love of metanarrative. I want to know what life is like for a messiah after he has provided salvation, after he is not longer ta'veren. I guess I need to read The Name of Wind now, eh?



I've also been lightly bingeing on Meg Cabot, when I don't want to think. All of her non-Princess Diary stuff is weirdly fascinating. She blends genre fiction with teen romance as well as anybody. The Airheads series is really dark and kind of awesome.


And lastly, I did a reread of Jill Pinkwater's Buffalo Brenda, a seminal book of my childhood and an anthem to weirdness and letting your imagination introduce you to new and exciting fun that always makes me laugh and laugh and laugh.

New show for me to hatewatch this year, which has neatly supplanted Sleepy Hollow in that regard, is Scorpion. It is so much fun to be able to shout angrily at the screen so often.

"No, Walter, genetics doesn't work that way! No, Walter, computer networks don't work that way! No, Walter, autism doesn't work that way! No, Walter, ethics doesn't work that way! No, Walter, packets of salt don't work that way!" [I am also kind of enjoying having a terrible human being named Walter on my screen again. I miss you, Walter Bishop.]

I also like that it is a show about teamwork. Like most procedurals, the writing is built on the premise that every ensemble character has to in some way contribute to the solution each week no matter what, and since Katherine McPhee's character is not a 'genius', it is delightful to watch the writers scramble [in a terrible, misogynistic, elitist way] to figure out what her contribution can be every week. This week her contribution was pointing out that she knew more about being a retail cashier than they did, and then yelling at the team a bunch.

Also, the show reliably gives me explosions.

CAN WE TALK ABOUT HOW THERE WAS A GRAGGER ON THE AGENTS OF SHIELD FINALE? AND IT WAS FROM AGENT TRIPLETT'S BOX OF OLD HOWLING COMMANDOS GOODIES, WHICH MEANS IT PROBABLY BELONGED TO IZZY COHEN, RIGHT? SO APPARENTLY IZZY COHEN WAS INVOLVED WITH SHIELD AFTER ALL, YAY! AND HE WAS MAKING ALL SORTS OF RIDICULOUS GADGETS FOR THEM, WHICH MAKES SENSE SINCE IN COMIC CANON HE'S THE MECHANIC, RIGHT?

I WANT ALL THE FIC ABOUT IZZY COHEN AND HIS EXPLODING GRAGGERS. ALL THE FIC. EVEN IF I HAVE TO WRITE IT MYSELF, WHICH I PROBABLY WILL.


THERE WAS A GRAGGER IN THE AGENTS OF SHIELD FINALE!!! AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!

In general, I've really been enjoying Brooklyn 9-9 lately... the ensemble is so on and in-character that they're able to mix it up in unusual combos without breaking the energy of the team- we got a Terry&Jake subplot this week, and a Gina&Jake plot the other week, and both were funny in different ways for the show. And I appreciate that they feel comfortable enough in the Hitchcock & Scully jokes to subvert them with the secret bathroom storyline, not to mention the upside down shooting joke and the Scully singing opera bit.

But damn I am not happy with where they've taken Peralta/Santiago. Terry telling Peralta that the reason he wasn't happy despite his professional successes is because of Santiago was like the opposite of the place I was hoping this would go.

As I noted in my previous post on the show, what I liked about Peralta/Santiago was that it was clear that they were attracted to each other, they acknowledged this attraction, and they were not going to act on it because Santiago was too emotionally intelligent to date a person like Peralta.

It wasn't generic UST, it was a very specific unresolved relationship dynamic that worked for the two of them because it was open and honest and even sometimes contributed positively to their work relationship. And there was a path forward for the relationship, because if Peralta ever matured enough to be worth Santiago's time, maybe she would accept one of his invitations. And if she didn't- if it didn't work out because she was seeing someone else, or because she just decided she wasn't interested anymore- he would be able to accept also that because of his newfound maturity. This was what the show was supposed to move toward, under the mentorship of Holt.

Instead, we've seen 9-9 fall into the trap that Mike Schur shows sometimes struggle with of how to keep the comedy consistent when there is character growth. Late season Parks & Rec episodes sometimes lapse Leslie Knope back into Season 1 mode for a single, confusing episode where she ends up re-learning the lessons she learned in season 1- that she can't do it alone, that she sometimes tries to bowl people over in her enthusiasm when she can get more done by trying to work together and compromise with people she disagrees with, etc... These episodes aren't just bad because they're not actually funny, they're bad because they compromise the character arcs of the shows.

Peralta has been taught several strong lessons by Holt, and as we've seen their relationship grow, we've seen evidence of that learning. In the beginning, Peralta listened to Holt because Holt was his boss and he had to. Now, Peralta listens to Holt because he knows he's probably right, even though it may be painful. The throwaway joke about Holt's injury in the cold open this week was a great example of the growth in their personal and professional relationship. It was the kind of casual cruelty you can only pull off with someone you trust.

The ensuing main plot involved Peralta trying to solve an unsolveable case. This should have been a story about his growth. This should have been a story about everything he has learned from Holt, synthesized with everything he has refused to let Holt strip away. Instead, it was a story about Peralta's inconsistent prodigy brilliance, untempered by Holt. Instead, the lesson Peralta seems to learn is that whatever partial maturity he has gained by figuring out how to work for his professional triumphs has just made him less happy.

Peralta needs to figure out that he can't depend on Santiago being there when he's ready for her. She's a person, not an object. Only then will he actually be ready for her. (Ironically, the show's masterful if panicked efforts at backing Boyle off of Diaz have been much more successful as character gestures for me)

This week's episode of Agents of SHIELD was all I ever asked for out of an episode of Agents of SHIELD, except for all the ways it wasn't what I wanted.

In the wake of the highly confusing but SHOCKING revelations from last week, Coulson is fed up with secrets. We have too many secrets. No more secrets, he says, and Ming Na with perfect comic timing tells him that she is sleeping with Ward. But, I mean, getting master Man in Black Phil Coulson to say that would be satisfying enough, and it had me very excited when I saw it, but the show managed to actually, for the first time, take the next step beyond asking an interesting question.

Coulson is given highly confusing but SHOCKING revelations this week about Skye and in a scene that perfectly mirrors the Agent Hill/Doctor Reverend Book conversation from the pilot, Melinda May tells him that she can never be told. AND THEN COULSON TELLS SKYE ANYWAY. Because he has changed his mind about secrecy, about what being a teammate is, about what being part of SHIELD means. SERIOUSLY, THIS IS THE EXACT EMOTIONAL MOVEMENT I HAVE BEEN DEMANDING THIS SHOW MAKE.

And in the background, there is a visit to SHIELD Academy, which is an excuse to talk about what SHIELD's mission is and what the point of being part of SHIELD is. There is an appeal to history: We are the ones who defeated HYDRA, we are the ones who oppose AIM and Centipede, everything Ward said in the pilot about how SHIELD is the Line between ordinary and monstrous is given solidity and depth by the Wall of Honor. And yet both Ward and Coulson speak the same line about the Academy: we have classes here on how to deceive and manipulate.


That being said, while I was really pleased that the show went there, I was frustrated that the show went there on such an interior episode because it's such an exterior problem. In America right now we are wrestling with the Snowden scandal because it asks questions about how the government handles secrets in relation to civilians. The show used language broad enough to speak to these issues, but they only directly represented stories about SHIELD keeping information from other parts of SHIELD. You would not be acting disingenuously if you interpreted the message of the episode as "SHIELD should strive for more internal transparency and maybe thin out its Level 6/Level 7/ Level 8 nonsense."

I'm choosing hopefully to read the message more broadly. A more substantial Samuel L Jackson cameo could do a lot to confirm that optimistic read, just saying.