A Deadwood listicle!

What makes the western so intriguing and just straight-up instructive is its purity, a word I am loath to employ. But "purity" gets at how the western boils down the complexity of a nation state to its scrappy origins (and yes, that includes the lies told about said origins). No zip/tax codes, no gerrymandering, no urban planning, sometimes no dwellings of any sort, e.g., The Naked Spur (Anthony Mann, 1953), none of the contrivances of modernity that obscure like cobwebs the socio-legal carving up of space. The western is so spare that, at its best, it forces you to ponder why you are sitting where you are right now, a land acknowledgement avant la lettre. 

The benefit of a western series is that it has time to trace the processes by which initial land grabs congeal into a modern nation state. And HBO's Deadwood is peerless in that category. Despite the coruscating personalities on display (Al Swearengen is as attractive/repulsive as Tony Soprano), Deadwood makes it easy for once to think in the macro, to swerve away from the micro concerns of the characters and ponder the changes wrought by the newspaper, the railroad, the telegraph, etc. The latter accoutrements threaten to bring not only law and order but transformations in consciousness the residents of Deadwood could never have foreseen. My favorite moment in this regard is one lasting not even a minute, as evanescent as a stranger passed on the street. 

In Season 3, Episode 9: "Amateur Night," Samuel Fields (Franklyn Ajaye) visits the bank on his way out of town. He's chatting with owner/teller Alma Ellsworth (Molly Parker) but a line of customers has formed behind him. Alma eyes the line with concern as Fields babbles on. "I got a life to live of my own," he tells her. "As do all here in the camp," Alma responds tartly, causing Fields to notice at last the impatient customers snaking to the rear. "Sorry to hold you all up," he says sheepishly as he makes his exit. In an urban context, this exchange would prove too banal to narrativize. But to the denizens of a burgeoning 1870s town, waiting in close proximity to strangers is a new phenomenon requiring significant adjustments in expectations and behavior. It might even take on the contours of a novelty as it shades into loitering, a development which causes the ever-irascible Trixie (Paula Malcomson) to complain, "A lot of shitbags hang around a bank. Did you ever fuckin' notice?"

In short, Deadwood serves as the Prestige TV version of Wolfgang Schivelbusch's landmark 1977 tome The Railway Journey. As such, it doesn't lend itself well to listicling. The transformation of "our very perceptual experience of nature itself," to quote Wiki, takes precedence over individual gripes and local skirmishes. But below is an attempt to schematically rattle off the lows and highs of the series.

What's Bad About Deadwood (not much!):

1. Native Americans are, at best, a structured absence in Deadwood. The most prominent Native American character is a severed head in a box which Al uses for autotherapy like Yorick. Local tribes could have at least populated the margins as an ironic presence à la Beau Travail. Or they could have functioned as a nagging reminder of the bloody conquest of nature at the hands of white settlers.

2. Creator David Milch did not know what to do with his women characters. Once free of their respective pimps, Trixie and Joanie Stubbs (Kim Dickens) are unmoored and never self-actualized. Calamity Jane (Robin Weigert) should have been in every episode (see below). Alma has nothing to do in the 13-years-aborning movie. Etc.

3. Viewers could have used more glimpses of the indifferent Deadwood public along the lines of the bank scene described above. We know controlling the newspaper and, later, the wire is crucial for Al. But scenes of the public reading the paper would have driven home that importance.

4. No fault of Milch (from what I gather) but ending the series with Season 3 in 2006 left us unmoored. And while Deadwood: The Movie (Daniel Minahan, 2019) was a welcome wrap up, it came off as a preposterously tardy half-measure more than anything.

What's Great About Deadwood (not much!):

1. Every damn thing else!

Other notes:

Best character: Calamity Jane (below), easily. Robin Weigert, we are not worthy of your ability to remain barky and hammered for so long.

Character I initially hated but came to appreciate because he was so crucial to the narrative(s): E.B. Farnum (William Sanderson). What a worm, though!

Character who improbably turned out to be a hottie: Whitney Ellsworth (Jim Beaver)

Obviously essential character but one who remained a usually inert cipher: Sheriff Seth Bullock (Timothy Olyphant)

Ian McShane as Al let off most of the fireworks but don't sleep on this astonishing performance: Powers Boothe as Cy Tolliver

Time it would take you in each episode to require the emergency room if you took a shot every time some variation of "fuck" or even ("cocksucker") was uttered throughout the showy, Shakespearean dialogue: 20 minutes tops and that's a conservative estimate. More like 10 depending on the alcohol and one's tolerance.

Item: Mad Men Series Finale a Disappointment!

To be sure, Mad Men is one of the great experiences in television history - trenchant, consistently surprising, enormously provocative, delivering the narrative goods while bedizening the entire edifice with modernist trills, all that and so much more. Unfortunately, it couldn't escape the attendant disappointments of that most dreaded televisual necessity - the series finale. 

In this, the creator of Mad Men, Matthew Weiner, who wrote and directed the series finale, "Person to Person," is hardly alone. Even an underseen show like Rectify (Ray McKinnon, 2013 - 2016, SundanceTV), which matches Mad Men in subtlety and overall brilliance, junked its hard-won delicacy with a trite, utilitarian ending. Such is the fate of most serial narratives; by their very nature, they are bound to disappoint. They borrow the structure of soap operas but unlike soap operas, they must end at some point. We then mourn the loss of the interplay between episodic verticality and serial horizontality that gripped us over several seasons and years. The series finale of Six Feet Under circumvented this problem since the show concerned death, the most final ending of all. And The Sopranos ignored the problem altogether by stopping, not ending. But, in general, from what I've heard about shows I haven't seen (Game of Thrones, Lost) to shows I've completed (Breaking Bad, Succession, Ozark), serial television will one day let us down. 

To start with the godawful, Weiner brings Peggy Olson's (Elisabeth Moss) story to a close with...wait for it...the formation of a heterosexual couple, the most rote method of ending any narrative. Stan Rizzo (Jay R. Ferguson) professes his love for Peggy and Peggy professes back. "I want to be with you. I'm in love with you...I love you, Peggy." "I can't believe it. I think I'm in love with you too. I really do." What, is this the Friends finale? It's not as if the coupling was an unforeseen development; certainly, one could glean some sexual tension between the two throughout the series. But apart from the fact that this ending apes the ending of literally hundreds of thousands of other narratives, the device comes off as cheap and mechanical for two reasons.

First, the formation comes not just in the last episode but almost at the very end of the final episode, with barely ten minutes to spare. Apart from a brief peck between the two before the final scene, this is the last we see of them. The eleventh-hour nature of the device registers a panic over Weiner's apparent need to get the formation in under the wire. Like the ending of an Harlequin romance novel, it arrives as an unexamined imperative rather than a reasoned dénouement. In fact, it's actually worse than a Harlequin because at the very least, we can pick up another Harlequin novel and get back to the tensions we so desperately loved, forgetting the clockwork coupling that occurred on the last page. Here, we enjoy no such luxury since there are no episodes left. Weiner strands us with the most cliché method of tying up loose ends imaginable. 

Second, the formation fails to preserve any of the ambiguity that made Mad Men such a compelling watch to begin with. As Sean O'Sullivan writes, "the synthetic unity of a show...depends fully on...the specific ways in which the variances and interruptions force us to navigate seriality’s inevitable lacunae of space and time – the negotiation among different physical environments, and the temporal omissions within and between episodes, and within and between seasons." (120)* The keyword here is "force" because Mad Men required the viewer to do more narrative bookkeeping than most series - filling in gaps, making connections, gaining one's bearings, determining time and even space, etc. With Stan and Peggy expressing their love for one another (finally!), Weiner shuts the door on this story thread. There's nothing left to negotiate. 

This may seem a preposterous thing to say about a series finale. But negotiation need not cease with the literal end of an episode or series. Indeed, one measure of a great TV show is its ability to keep us negotiating with it long after we've taken it all in. Compare how Weiner afford us a last glimpse of Betty Draper (January Jones). We know she will soon die of cancer. But instead of a Terms of Endearment-caliber death in a hospital, Weiner shows her smoking at the kitchen table while her daughter Sally  (Kiernan Shipka) does the dishes. No dialogue. Sally's future is unknown and thus the moment vibrates with possibility instead of clicking into a preordained narrative position. Even Roger Sterling's (John Slattery) coupling with Marie (Julia Ormond) has a breezy, almost matter-of-fact aura to it that lies in marked distinction to the doctrinaire formation of the Peggy and Stan couple. In Broadway terms, Roger and Marie sing a fine number that only Great American Songbook scholars recall whereas Peggy and Stan blast out the 11 o'clock number or the bombastic Act One showstopper. 

As for other preordained narrative developments, it seemed inevitable that the series would have to end in the west and not just the west but California. And not just California but the very edge of the continental United States. With America fully colonized by 1970, the only frontier left for Don Draper (Jon Hamm) to conquer is the one within. So he must perform yoga on a rocky precipice, the Pacific Ocean raging behind him. Weiner then cuts to the infamous Coca-Cola ad repurposing the New Seekers' "I'd Like to Teach the World to Sing (In Perfect Harmony)." Robert Christgau deemed the song the worst single of 1972 presumably in disgust over how easily Madison Ave. was able to commodify the 1960s counterculture. And indeed, that's how it sits at the very end of the series. 

Most critics and viewers (and Hamm too) assume that Draper goes back to McCann Erickson to create the ad (indeed, McCann Erickson is the agency that did actually create the ad) and co-opt the inner light for the soda-swilling masses. I find the maneuver too conceptual for such a tight connection. And pinning its effect to a Draper cause drains the device of its ambiguity. Given the gargantuan disappointment of the Stan/Peggy thread, I'm inclined to ignore the final moments and even main characters and flash back over the ambiguities and expansions I loved so dearly. 

For instance, Bob Benson (James Wolk) was a far more compelling creation than Salvatore Romano (Bryan Batt). If a character is known to be gay, then you can punish that character, a fate that befell Salvatore and, of course, Batt who was out of a job once Salvatore was axed. But Benson never showed his cards and was thus fascinating from the jump. With his fixed smile and potentially evil machinations, he was queer not gay, unable to be categorized or commodified. And the secretaries served as an unexpected Greek chorus to let some air out of the main stories. Ida Blankenship (Randee Heller) and Caroline (Beth Hall) were desexualized workers who could get away with not being unduly preoccupied with the allure of Don and Roger. Shirley points to a world outside when she exits the series by telling Roger "advertising is not a very comfortable place for everyone." And while Meredith (Stephanie Drake) initially came off as a ditz, she revealed more layers as the series progressed. In the final episode, she echoes Shirley when she tells Roger that “there are a lot of better places than here [i.e., advertising].”

As for Joan (Christina Hendricks), probably my favorite main character, I wanted more of and for her. She always deserved far more than she got but Weiner used her as a measure of the two-steps-forward/six-steps-back nature of women in the workplace. Still, I hope what I'm detecting is happiness in her final moment as she runs her own business out of the apartment she never moved from despite financial windfalls below her station. 

Once more - one of the greatest television series of all time. Now to check out The Sopranos again to see if it's still toppermost in my eyes. 

* Sean O'Sullivan, “Space Ships and Time Machines: Mad Men and the Serial Condition,” in Mad Men: Dream Come True TV. Gary R. Edgerton, ed. (London: I.B. Tauris, 2011).

Monthly Top Ten: May 2022

1. Chunky. Now I know why various internet dorks were ripping on me for preferring to read comic books on pdf. I had been unzipping my cbz/cbr files and scratching my head about what to do with the resulting jpgs, often opting to turn them into pdfs. So Chunky, an app for reading comic books on cbz/cbr, has been a revelation. It's reacquainted me with old favorites like Julie Doucet's eternal Dirty Plotte (can you imagine what Muratova or Żuławski could have accomplished in adapting her work?!?) and introduced me to some new favorites such as...

2. Yuichi Yokoyama: Iceland (Retrofit, 2017). Retrofit calls Yokoyama "the creator of neo manga" which here means a slice of indigestible avant-garderie. At 92 pages, the story is no such thing, a sci-fi-I-guess concatenation of disconnected narrative beats. Gawky close-ups and jagged lines flatten the space into one long scream. It seems like a found thing, a energy pulse from the future awaiting a consumption that may never come. 

3. Blutch: Peplum (New York Review Comics, 2016). In his helpful introduction to this reissue of the 1998 Cornélius French original, Edward Gauvin likens Peplum to a remix of Fellini's Satyricon, itself a remix of Petronius' Satyricon. Blutch (né Christian Hincker) follows a group of bandits as they drag a cumbersome frozen woman around the Roman Empire. Tony Shakespearean dialogue (including a straight-forward retelling of the murder of Julius Caesar near the beginning) clashes with coarse outbursts ("Will you shut up?!"). The picaresque narrative throws up a never-ending supply of barely explained dangers. In a sense, Peplum is all clash, with characters, all of whom seem either dead or on the brink of dying, fucking and fighting one another in splotchy environs. An extremely disturbing epilogue does nothing to tie up loose ends. The authorial voice mimics an infant's inability to transition between tones, laughing or bawling within a moment's notice. But a fever-ridden infant. And one with a working knowledge of Roman culture.

4. The Big Gay Comic Book: Volumes 1 and  2 (Bluewater, 2014). Quite the opposite of the two titles above, The Big Gay Comic Book recalls the infamous Rock 'N' Roll Comics from the late 1980s/early 1990s - cheesy pre-Wikipedia biographies of popular musical icons. Here Madonna, Tom Daley, Kathy Griffin, Anderson Cooper, RuPaul, Keith Haring, Lady Gaga, etc. get the same treatment. Poking through the cheese are some bizarre moments as when Robbie Williams breaks the fourth wall in the Kylie Minogue entry or when the Cher title begins with what one presumes to be a stalker claiming intimate knowledge of Cher only to be revealed at the end as Chaz Bono (!). 

5. Vanessa Bayer and Jane Treacy’s Must Haves (QVC, 2022). Do watch Showtime's choking-on-your-tongue hilarious I Love That For You, a half-hour comedy about Joanna Gold (Vanessa Bayer), a woman who fakes a cancer diagnosis and becomes a star on a home shopping network. After you've downed a few episodes, there's a mind-bendingly meta treat for you streaming on QVC. In order to promote the show she co-created, Bayer occupied QVC for an hour with longtime host Treacy selling clothes and jewelry including a herringbone bracelet with a lobster clasp which plays a key role on I Love That For You. You find yourself laughing at nothing in particular, just the crazy fact that this exists. The most disorienting instance of the contradictory pleasures of capitalism since the Oil of Olay musical The Road to Glow.

6. Opening Night (John Cassavetes, 1977). The incomparable Gena Rowlands (92 in a few days!) stars as Myrtle Gordon, an actress who changes the play in which she's starring because she sees no hope in the fiftysomething main character, a situation that may reflect her own life as a feted professional of a certain age. As a portrait of the difficulty women experience in controlling their own destinies, Opening Night is peerless. And even on a strictly narrative level, where Cassavetes is supposedly deficient, the film keeps you on the edge as you fear opening night may never happen. But Cassavetes clearly didn't know what to do with Sarah Goode (Joan Blondell, 47 years out from her film debut, one year away from her role in Grease, and two years away from her Christmas 1979 death), the playwright whose words Gordon changes. One presumes this is because as an even older woman, Goode has accepted her lot and internalized whatever disappointments have come her way. But that is a truth worth telling too, one we glean in fits and starts from previous rehearsals of her play, and her apparent acceptance of Gordon's changes at the very end of the film feels false. Then again, applying standards of realism to Cassavetes is always a fool's game, no matter how raw his films come across. Instead, it'd prove more fruitful to put Opening Night in conversation with two subsequent films, (the first awful, the other one of the finest films of this century), it may have influenced - Noises Off (Peter Bogdanovich [who shows up in a brief cameo at the end of Opening Night], 1992) and Esther Kahn (Arnaud Desplechin, 2000).

7. A Night in Heaven (John G. Avildsen, 1983). A good movie is lurking somewhere within this Joan Tewkesbury-penned mess about a community college professor (Lesley Ann Warren) who discovers a student (Christopher Atkins, angelic) she flunked in Public Speaking is a stripper. But it was clearly mangled on the way to theatres. At times, it feels like you're watching the sui generis omnibus train wreck Night Train to Terror (Jay Schlossberg-Cohen, 1985). Several scenes lead into narrative dead ends. Basic story information is either needlessly elaborated or given little air. One crucial conversation plays out in a master shot as if no coverage was available or the editor neglected to use any of it. Still, like the "Special Fan Edition" of Empire Records (Allan Moyle, 1995), the phantom good movie within would be less fascinating than the tattered corpse before us here. At the very least, it's an excellent teaching tool to convey the difficulty of telling even the simplest story with cinema. 

 8. Top Gun (Tony Scott, 1986). Criminally boring. Upped a notch for not just the too-short volleyball scene but for Maverick deciding that jeans would be appropriate attire for beach sports. D-minus. Just for the record. 

 9. U.S. Marines Pride Month tweet. Hi, gay! Happy Pride Month! Astonishingly tone-deaf in the wake of the murders in Uvalde (and Buffalo and...), the U.S. Marines have color coded six bullets to resemble the rainbow flag for this most gay of months. Someone somewhere must be proud, probably Adorno in his Super Egotistical way. 

10. The criticism of Kieran Press-Reynolds. You couldn't ask for a better tour guide through what we'll (and he'll) call internet music - the fly-by sounds you hear on TikTok, Roblox, YouTube, Soundcloud, the like. Hyper, long-winded, pockmarked with links, chuffed to create new genres, his essays replicate the amped-up one moment, luded-out the next tenor of the Euphoria generation. His newest piece is on Swedish collective Drain Gang and their de facto pope Bladee whose music "has become constitutional for a rising swarm of offbeat internet artists shooting off in a plethora of directions and shaping the future of music, even if some washed purists whine that it all sounds like liquid ass." You don't want to be one of those people, now do you? So read up. Here's hoping he avoids the path of his daddy Simon who lost his pioneering spirit once he turned 40 and/or had a baby. 

Severance (created by Dan Erickson, 2022)

The Mr. and I zipped through Severance on Apple TV. I'll start with the bad, end with the good, and then I have a question. I'll speak in generalities to avoid SPOILERS.

Bad: 

1. One of my many problems with TV is that it's near impossible to discuss a series without spoilers. That's the case with some films but it's magnified with TV because the stories go on FOREVER.

2. Speaking of which, no matter how intense the final episode was, it still doesn't wrap shit up, yet another problem I have with TV. Life is short. I don't want to wait a year or two for the perpetual second act!

3. Why in GAY hell did the creators have to append a hetero escape clause to the office scenes at the last damn minute and pretty randomly, almost rotely? The surface narrative already hinges on the hetero as made clear by the very last line of the entire season. So why is it necessary in BOTH worlds? Oh yeah - to generate stories, right? How about generating DIFFERENT DAMN STORIES, though? Work isn't enough of a story generator?!? Gimme process, institutions, work, WERK! ARGH!!!!!!!!! 

4. Will historians 1,000 years from now be able to tell the difference between the final episode, directed by Ben Stiller, and the bomb defusal skit from the (great!) Ben Stiller Show? Does history repeat itself first as farce, then as standard operating procedure?

Good:

1. Set design? Chef's kiss-plus, especially its role in the many decentered compositions, e.g., a character squeezed into one slice of the frame by the nothingness of an office divider or wall.

2. GENERALIZED SPOILER. It was canny for the creators to dive into being severed from non-work life because so many spheres of our lives are, to borrow a phrase from the show, emotionally inconvenient for us. As such, this series would pair quite nicely with The Lost Daughter (Maggie Gyllenhaal, 2021).

3. The final episode was as hilarious and it was nail-biting, a difficult trick to pull off. So if someone asked me to relate Severance to film, I would posit that it is a mixture of Minority Report (Steven Spielberg, 2002), Groundhog Day (Harold Ramis, 1993) with just a dash of Eyes Wide Shut (Stanley Kubrick, 1999).

4. I might be Captain Obvious here is but Dylan George (Zach Cherry) is the hero of the series.

Question and GENERALIZED SPOILER:

Why does a certain higher-up freak out that severance may be unraveling at the end of the season when she has already exhibited rage over being fired? 

The Many Saints of Newark (Alan Taylor, 2021)

The problem with Peak/Prestige TV's serial narrative form is that, at some point, the shows have to end. And like the de facto soap operas that they are, they can't end, not without upsetting their rabid audiences. The Sopranos circumvented this problem with the (genius, godlike) decision to have the show stop as if it were a Warhol film rather than end like a traditional narrative. Naturally, that pissed off most of the fans. But they needn't have fretted. In the franchisescape that is mainstream media today, you simply have to wait fourteen years for another installment. Hence, The Many Saints of Newark, a prequel which David Chase is trying to pass off as a standalone film. 

Qua film, it's a mess. Taylor/Chase parade so many characters in front of us for the first twenty or so minutes that even seasoned Sopranos freaks will need a family tree (a common problem in many films, though, cf. Sidney Lumet's 1966 film adaptation of The Group). Eventually, though, it settles into a story about not a young Tony Soprano (Michael Gandolfini) but rather his idol Dickie Moltisanti (Alessandro Nivola), infuriating some fans all over again. 

But The Many Saints of Newark is not a film; it's a cog in the Sopranos franchise, one that will no doubt inspire another series especially now that David Chase has another HBO deal. After all, Chase will have all of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s to play with. So it doesn't matter how uneven or clipped or messy this particular film is. It will get ironed out with The Sopranos II c. 2023.

I will say that the use of music in The Many Saints of Newark continues Chase's mastery of distance. Van Morrison's title track from Astral Weeks plays over a romantic scene with Dickie and, at first, it sits uncomfortably on top. But the romance soon turns horrifying so that the Morrison track serves more as an ambiguous portent than a bucolic reverie. Even more bewilderingly, the scene ends with Mountain's hard rock "Never in My Life," a complete sonic 180. But it's a sound advance from the following scene with a young Tony in his room listening to Mountain through purloined speakers given to him (forced on him, really) by Dickie. It catapults the viewer out of the scenes in an attempt to gain some distance from the psychoses of these character-idols.

And there's a hilarious moment when Dickie visits his uncle Sally (Ray Liotta) in prison. Sally has become woke in lockup (meditating, eating healthy foods, listening to bebop) and asks Dickie to get him a copy of Miles Davis' Birth of the Cool. He brings him one along with other albums such as The Happy Trumpet by perennial dollar-bin artist Al Hirt ("He's on Carson all the time."). Sally tosses it aside as "not jazz" along with the rest of Dickie's clueless choices (anyone know what the other album is in the first screen grab?).

 Still, I'll be able to accurately assess The Many Saints of Newark only once HBO Max makes the inevitable/perpetual third act available. 

Grade: B+, the classic holding pattern grade

Mare of Easttown (Craig Zobel, 2021)

Yes, it was gripping. Yes, the acting was superb. Yes yes yes. But if writers/directors continue to indulge in the pitfalls of serial television narratives, then I should be able to review them with a rubber stamp. Mare of Easttown (to paraphrase what I wrote about Breaking Bad) builds up the intensity of single scenes but ignores how those events (especially the violence) impact the characters over the entire story arc. They just absorb the blows and move on. (Mild spoilers ahead but I'll keep it vague.) 

Take the scene in which Becca flies into a rage after seeing her ex-girlfriend Siobhan kiss Anne. Becca storms out of the house, knocking down Helen, Siobhan's grandmother (!), in the process. Helen goes to the hospital despite Mare claiming she suffered just a bump on the head. Mare checks in on Helen for one brief moment and then...the. incident. is. never. discussed. again! Becca completely disappears and it's as if the event never took place. It merely takes up (or, in an unkinder cut, wastes) time. 

And if that scene isn't monumental enough to ponder, then how about the death of a major character in episode 5? Sure, there's a bit of mourning. But by the end of episode six, it's as if that character had never existed. More time has been taken up such that every scene starts to feel like arbitrary filler, e.g., a mother sent on a wild goose chase to retrieve her kidnapped daughter. So then why was Mare of Easttown seven episodes? Why not 70? Why not 70 minutes? Can I get 7 minutes? Great television should be more than taking up time. No? Ok.

Grade (and it's quickly dropping so I better get this in now): B-minus

Ratched (2020)

If indeed the characters in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (Milos Forman, 1975) are not paragons of realism, as I've always read, but rather symbols in an anti-authoritarian fable, then one should have no problem accepting the premise of Ratched which imagines an origin story for Nurse Ratched. Like Athena bursting forth from Zeus' head, Mildred Ratched (a typically game Sarah Paulson) enters into a series of grandiloquent events worthy of the soapiest mythology. Whether it's any good is another matter entirely. Sifting One Flew through American Horror Story, Ratched is total trash, preposterous and horribly written in parts, especially the juvenile Sharon Stone subplot. It also suffers from executive producer Ryan Murphy's risible penchant for correcting history so that in one story line, lesbians are sprung free from the barbaric Lucia State Hospital in 1947. But trash can be fun and Ratched lacks the Boomer baggage of the Forman "classic" even though it traffics in a similar kind of anti-intellectual individuality as when head nurse Betsy Bracket (Judy Davis) declares that doctors are unnecessary to the operation of Lucia. The real attraction is the Ross Hunter-worthy production design - dust-free sets, perfectly pressed costumes, screaming primary colors. Mamacita apparently cleaned Lucia because it sparkles like Joan Crawford's Brentwood estate. The  Northern California oceanside motel where Ratched stays is supposed to be ratchet (see what I did there?) but comes off enchanting instead. Sharon Stone's mansion is an Orientalist migraine. And the office of Dr. Richard Hanover (Jon Jon Briones), director of Lucia, can comfortably fit a 747 in front of the largest window in Christendom. 

Grade: B-minus (docked a notch for not stopping at a limited series)

Breaking Bad (2008-2013)

I finally finished Breaking Bad and while in terms of pure narrative locomotion certain episodes were gripping, it wasn't worth the 2 days and 14 hours (according to my new favorite site Bingeclock) it took to watch the series. It's a familiar problem with serial narrative - the writers build up the intensity of single episodes but ignore how those events (especially the violence) impact the characters over the entire story arc. They just absorb the blows and move on. And for a show so intricately plotted and relentlessly punctual, it gets sloppy with that larger arc. For instance, the baby just disappears for huge stretches of time. While babies cannot walk away in slow motion from exploding buildings, they depend on us for everything and are thus a constant presence...or should be. Also, I always felt a larger context governing The Sopranos, some distance from all the horrors, whereas Breaking Bad seems way more local in its concerns. The writers/creator are too in thrall to Walter White, in awe of his ability to withstand inhuman pressure and commit all sorts of agony. That said, I did like the fifth and final season quite a bit, mostly likely because I could feel the end coming. I was more moved by the last two episodes than the revered "Ozymandias" which I suspect is loved because so much of the narrative comes home to roost there.

So you're curious about Joan Crawford's General Electric Theater work...

Well, don't be. All three are risible attempts to generate Twilight Zone-style suspense and godawful twist endings by having characters act in ways antithetical to their nature. In "The Road to Edinburgh" (1954), Joan gives a ride to a drifter who fixed her flat tire. He confesses to her that he has just been released from prison after 17 years for murder. But he behaves like a complete psycho, becoming belligerent and obsessing on her appearance. Naturally, Joan tries everything to get away, especially when she learns that the police are on the lookout for an escaped prisoner. She does 80 to attract the police but when she's pulled over, they inform her that the man in her car couldn't be the escaped prisoner since he's just been caught! The poor innocent guy just needed a ride. He even gives her the money to pay for her speeding ticket leaving a tearful Joan to admit in voiceover, "I've never been so ashamed in my life." So he acted like a psycho...why?

In "Strange Witness" (1958), Joan and her wiry boyfriend Tom Tryon (future horror novelist and partner of gay porn icon Casey Donovan) bump off her husband (John McIntire). But the husband's blind friend stops by for a visit before the couple has time to hide the body. They manage to maneuver him around the corpse before eventually shooing him away. But later, he calls her from a police station to inform her that, oh hai, he had an operation and can see! So he pretended that he's still blind...why?

In "And One Was Loyal" (1959), Joan is an abused wife who cannot speak. A poisonous snake is planted in her husband's bed. Thinking Joan is trying to kill him, he charges at her, falls off a balcony, and dies at which point Joan can suddenly speak again. But who planted the snake? Was it Joan? Or was it the art-loving visitor who fancies her? Or how about the Malaysian house boy? Much the best of the three but the least dramatic, one hopes Newton Minow had this in mind when he deemed television a vast wasteland in 1961.