"Hangry" and "horngry" are different things and I learned this the hard way

Easily my favorite sci-fi show at the moment, FIRE COUNTRY is a dystopian drama set in an alternate timeline wherein America utilises slave labor to battle hazardous wildfires caused by a climate catastrophe brought about by the same insatiable capitalist expansionism that the inmates are charged with protecting, even at the cost of their lives.  Where do they get their ideas from?

The show brilliantly mixes satire of life under authoritarian rule with a knowing pastiche of soap operatic conventions akin to that seen in the original Starship Troopers, a comparison I think holds up even better when you see how both works show people to be treated as little more than disposable frontline soldiers in ultimately-unsustainable imperial enterprises.  Were one to walk blind into a room showing an episode of Fire Country, they could be forgiven for thinking it really was a television show with the depth of a puddle that goes beyond the expected conservatism at the heart of American copaganda and instead displays an outright contempt for a proletariat that is constantly reminded that it should be grateful to be allowed to die in service to a middle class that offers nothing more than a display of "claps and cheers" for a job well done rather than any material compensation for life-threatening and life-saving labor - a particularly brilliant joke early in the first episode establishes that the slaves are paid "two dollars an hour", so that within the fictional universe, it can never be claimed that these are actual slaves - but to assume Fire Country was harmful corpo-fascist propaganda would be a disservice to the talented and insightful satirists who have concocted such a wonderful critique of the moral vacuum at the heart of a slave economy.  What an age of television we've lived to see!

Why does every uncle I know try to screw me?

Between is basically Under The Dome without the scenery-chewing intensity of Dean Norris counting the seconds until he can go off the rails, or if you prefer, Between is Under The Dome done well, because as much as I love the scenery-chewing intensity of Dean Norris counting the seconds until he can go off the rails, this is literally the only good thing about the utterly awful Under the Dome.  Or if you prefer, Under the Dome is terrible.  Utterly terrible.  I saw a screen grab the other day from it - one with the girl back from the dead holding the pink glowing alien egg McGuffin thing - and laughed out loud because I had genuinely forgotten how side-splittingly hilariously stupid it could get when it wasn't about the scenery-chewing intensity of Dean Norris counting the seconds until he can go off the rails (copy and paste is such a great time saver).  Oh yeah, Between - it's no Under the Dome.
Mr Robot is similar to its fellow season debut Stitchers, only Mr Robot remembers to take itself seriously while Stitchers collapses under the weight of its own stupidity roughly 13 minutes in, and yes, I did actually check the time to see where I would think most people would call it a day.  They both begin with a similar premise of a socially-dysfunctional and unlikeable technological savant being dragged into the world of major crime, but Mr Robot sticks to its initial threads and weaves them into the narrative set in what is supposedly reality, while Stitchers instead plops for mild sci-fi and just keeps stacking tropes on top of each other like a Jenga tower, and I hardly need to tell you what the end result of even a well-played Jenga game ultimately is.  In the case of Stitchers, it crashes down around its own ears when it becomes The Cell - yes, The Cell, the movie where a writer person was paid to sit down and come up with a scene where a man drowns a woman in a Batman-style watery death trap and then hangs himself from meat hooks over her bleached corpse pleasuring himself.  That is what I took away from The Cell, and it is all that any sensible person should ever take away from The Cell, and certainly not any of the technological guff it uses to play out dying people's dreams onscreen or whatever that was going on in the rest of that film - I don't remember, really, and can you blame me what with the meat hooks thing?  The problem with Stitchers is really just that if you won't indulge its stupidity, it's embarrassing to watch.  Mr Robot fares a lot better, and while it's still slightly embarrassing that the show's idea of a social misfit is someone who says the things that can be read in any Twitter feed (the rich are jerks and people are stupid), it does at least have the charming new approach to this kind of material where its protagonist doesn't retreat into writing-crutch support structures and social interaction-enablers like higher education or "an elite strike team" (Stitchers manages to do both) but instead enters the world of employment and grinding drudgery, and the furrow it plows through this environment and the impact it has upon the protagonist and the narrative has turned up some interesting notions I won't mind seeing more of.

It's like our anniversary lunch at Hooters all over again

Don't mind me, I'm just... erm... cleaning up some old 1980s comics I scanned.  Yes.
Watching Marvel's Daredevil, and bearing in mind the forced and unnatural scripting of its nearest competition - The Flash and Arrow - and gosh but they sure make that whole "doing a decent superhero tv show without looking like we're ashamed of doing a superhero tv show" thing look easy.
I never really had a problem with the Affleck movie like many others did - I found it to be a perfectly serviceable and entertaining action flick - but I did think it suffered from an uneven tone and mixed direction, with the NYC depicted coming off in much the same way the city did in the 1990s Ninja Turtles movies.  By comparison, the small-screen version of Daredevil is consistent in its tone, takes itself seriously to the point that there are episodes where people just stand around crying for no discernible reason, action scenes happen with minimum shakycam so you can actually tell what's going on, and rehashing of a lot of The Wire's schtick certainly helps distract from some of Daredevil's more predictable beats, though it generally avoids most of the usual traps of superheroes on tv.
I think I could have done with more character meat, a less brown costume, and a final fight that didn't go on forever, and the Kingpin is a bit rubbish, too, being very similar to the sheriff from noted tv car-crash Under The Dome, but I can see people going "oohhh daddy issues so he has depth" and liking him for that, but I'm kind of sick of that kind of villainy and would have preferred to see the version of the character that Kingpin sees himself as: a righteous man with good intentions who gradually became a monster in pursuing admirable goals - he even quotes some Biblical parables alongside the usual plastic Catholicism that plagues both televisual drama and the Daredevil comics, so there was potential for that to happen.
As it is, Vincint D'Onofrio handles the material well, and Charlie Cox as Matt Murdoch/Daredevil does a blubbery-lipped emo-hero just dandy.  The action scenes - while very good - sometimes betray that they're only there for their gimmick value, with an overlong "homage" to the infamous corridor fight in Park Chan-wook's Oldboy (I am crediting the Daredevil production staff with not being so culturally thick-eared that they're homage-ing the dreadful Spike Lee remake) being a particularly glaring offender in that it contributes nothing to the episode's story and feels tacked-on.
Still, there are worse problems for a superhero tv show to have than for the punch-ups to be a distraction from the story.

Wild tigers do not have the qualities of a good president.

I am not drawing today because I have finished up my projects and can have a day off or two before I jump into the world of Dredd for a one-off that combines my two favorite things (post-apocalyptic fascists and polar bear-related murder), so I have been watching a marathon of CBBC's Wolfblood©, a werewolf show that makes a big deal about not being about werewolves to the point that one character mentions werewolves and is immediately berated as a fool because "it's Wolfblood©, not werewolves!"  So this werewolf show full of werewolf mythology like inadvertent transformations during the full moon is not a werewolf show at all, nor is the mythology ever explored in the context of shape-changers or tricksters even though this would give the show an in-built rationale for the arbitrary changes of character or introduction of new superpowers from nowhere that drive a lot of episodes and would also double as a metaphor for The Puberty, no, this is about Wolfbloods©, the completely original made-up and copyrighted concept of BBC Wales, and as werewolf shows go, it's not a patch on MTVs Teen Wolf, but relative to the rest of CBBC's output, it's much better than it has any right to be apart from some confusion in the scripts between what is branding and what is actual storytelling to the point that you will wince everytime someone says the word "Wolfblood©" even though you are watching a television show aimed at 8 year old girls.
Apart from being a functional paradigm for the show itself, the episode "Eolas" is especially hysterical for how wrong-headed and clumsy it is in utilising subtext to the point that it is almost impossible to read the story as anything other than "lying to children about serious stuff is okay" because their deference and respect of their elders is not something which has to be constantly earned and their formative opinions are not to be encouraged if divergent from accepted wisdom.  It centers on a plot McGuffin that is essentially "children learning to meditate is the same thing as them taking drugs and will lead to hanging out with working class people who are all crooks" and yes, I know that chain of logic and the conclusions drawn doesn't make a lick of sense, but this is actually what happens.  A child meditates, it blows her mind and she ends up taking a truck ride with a stranger to the middle of a city where she seeks out poor people who immediately try to rob her.  The cliched story structure of the average episode means that rather than be painted as the actions of plain old middle English bigotry, the anti-meditation slant will turn out to be the result of Experience, and lo and behold, we discover that the middle class housewife decrying meditation as evil used to have a cousin who was into meditation and it ruined her life.  Yes really.  The message of the story, stripped away from the ludicrous specifics, is thus that children are wrong to question their elders because their elders only lie and hide things from children when it is something they really need to know about in order to make an informed decision.  As I say, aside from being an outright irresponsible moral, it makes not a lick of sense in isolation as a story in itself - it only makes sense if you've seen lots of other sci-fi shows that explore the theme of addiction through allegory and don't need the show to actually join the dots in a coherent manner for you as a viewer, but even speaking as someone who has watched far more sci-fi and fantasy shows than could possibly be healthy, this is a story about a shrill housewife shouting at her child to shut up, and then being proven absolutely right to do so because children are all fuppin' idiots.

I make a point of mentioning class warfare, too, because there's also a strange setup to the show where everything seems to be geared towards a stereotypical depiction of a working class provincial community, from the bodhrán soundtrack, Scottish folk theme song, the cast having names like Shannon, Madeline, Rhydian, the rural setting, and of course the folklore that informs the premise of the series itself (werewolf folklore being uncommon in England compared to elsewhere because actual wild wolves are extinct there - a fact the show itself points out more than once), yet the setting is a "slightly Northern" England that doesn't actually exist outside television idioms like the cafe from Friends or the school full of kids who don't have mobile phones or internet access in a year beginning with a 2, and the end product resembles more a picture of a community of summer-cottage residents.  But perhaps I'm being unfair as there's no overt class, religious or racial divide in this community beyond what we can read into it as viewers, and what we see without looking too hard is an implicit understanding of an unspoken dominant monoculture where - tellingly - the only people who are excluded are those from "outside" who express elements of cultural identity that doesn't gel with groupthink.  There's no talk of people's jobs in this supposedly remote community, no hint of what people actually do for a living, and it is very, very hard to see a great deal of the text concerning "wild" Wolfbloods© as anything other than gypsy-bashing to the extent that the overall story arc for the lead family is essentially that they're hiding their racial and cultural identity from their neighbors and close friends because they're ashamed of it.
I accept that it's asking too much of a tv show aimed at kids these days - on top of the story making any objective sense - to not reinforce class prejudice when the other tv shows from which it derives all its ideas and plots are telling kids to make fun of differences rather than celebrate them alongside everything else that makes each and every one of us unique and beautiful as people, and the auslander is thus necessary in Wolfblood© only to instigate or foment conflict amongst the community and threaten the dominance of the prevailing orthodoxy - but never as a good thing, not even when challenging lies, dissembly or outright bullying both emotional and physical.
In this, Wolfblood© is a conservative and cowardly show, but somewhere in there I think there is the potential to be something a lot better with a bit of seasoning and experience, and even if that is never realised, then... well, it's only CBBC.  It's not like anyone cares what their kids are watching, anyway.

Friday 25th September 2009

Telly season starting in earnest now, with new shows debuting and old favorites/habits returning. In no particular order, the current viewing season has brought us House, Community, Glee, Eastwick, Greek, NCIS: Los Angeles, CSI: Miami, Crash, Modern Family, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Fringe, Heroes, Mercy, Flashforward, the Forgotten, the Good Wife, the Vampire Diaries, Supernatural, Castle, Melrose Place, Bones, 90210 - pretty busy watching period for me. The only new show I'm wary of is Mercy, as me and medical dramas haven't got on since I tried to watch the first season of Grey's Anatomy and found it an aggressively smug and hateful show full of unlikable characters I would have little hesitation in punching in the mouth. Melrose Place I'm not sure what to make of, as I've never seen the original, though the name - via pop-cultural osmosis alone - brings up assumptions of glossy Los Angelinos and soap operatics about their privileged never worked an honest day in their life problems, but it started with a murder and that was enough to intrigue me, even if the rest actually is glossy Los Angelinos and soap operatics about their privileged never worked an honest day in their life problems - all it needs is a naive actress who swings both ways and it'd be complete trash. As it is, it's just kind of trashy and lacking in substance.
NCIS: Los Angeles is trash, however - absolute, unapologetic trash of the first order. I've never watched an episode of the parent series, so I'm at a loss why I gave this one a shot, but the credits revealed that it starred both Chris 'Batman And Robin' O'Donnel and LL Cool J, so my ass was watching this bitch just to see what kind of car crash occurred, and it was just terrible enough to be compelling in the same way that CSI: Miami and Bones are.
Good Wife is typical courtroom stuff but inoffensive enough that I'll probably watch another episode, while Flashforward is laughably derivative and stiff Sci-Fi Channel reject material that pads out the minutes with leaden plotting and shameless lifts of the establishing moments of Lost, and I honestly can't think why I'd watch another episode - none of it is particularly terrible, it's just that none of it is particularly good and there's not an ounce of originality on display.
Modern Family is cynical on the surface, but has a happy ending up it's sleeve in the form of a face turn for the homophobic dad played by Married With Children's Ed O'Niell, and while happy endings were once played-out on tv, they're now so rare that this comes across as a welcome bit of schmaltz that makes the rest of the cynicism and misanthropy more palatable in much the same way that House's season opening happy-ending moment of rare euphoria for the title character was.

All in all, the new season is off to a good start, but we'll see what I'm still watching in a month's time.