Archive for September 29, 2014

Terence Winter is coming

September 29, 2014

I interviewed Boardwalk Empire creator Terence Winter about the end of the series — and the start of his new one with Martin Scorsese, Mick Jagger, and Bobby Cannavale — for the TV Issue of Rolling Stone, on stands now. Says so right there on the cover and everything. I hope you like it!

“Boardwalk Empire” thoughts, Season Five, Episode Four: “Cuanto”

September 28, 2014

Power is a performance. It’s a matter of knowing your audience, picking up on whether you should be funny or scary, when to play to the cheap seats or act with awards-caliber subtlety. Isn’t this the obstacle faced by Steve Buscemi in the minds of many viewers? His quiet, hangdog intensity as Nucky Thompson is an outlier in an era of volcanic, Byronic TV antiheroes. But that’s the point: For all his successes before and after Prohibition, Thompson’s decision to become more than “half a gangster” has forced him into a role he can’t quite master. As Boardwalk Empire hits the halfway mark of its final season in tonight’s episode — “Cuanto” — it examines the nature of that performance, and those of other characters who’ve found themselves shoved onto stage.

As a boy, the future chairman of the boardwalk is brought before the Commodore, who offers the young Nucky a glimpse of his grand plans for the Jersey shore (and an unwitting peek at his collection of photos of sexualized young girls), grinning when the kid notes that this is Atlantic City “as you wish it to be.” That wish includes everything from a stronger transportation infrastructure to segregated housing. But Nucky’s ability to follow along does nothing to placate his boss. “You think you’re a smart boy.” “If I say yes, you’ll think I’m boasting. If I say no you’ll think I’m lying.” “Don’t try to parse me.” The boy is trying his best, but this command performance is unscripted, in front of the toughest crowd in town.

So he’s naturally flabbergasted when he and his brother Eli are rewarded for going off-book. After catching them breaking into the Commodore’s hotel for a taste of the good life (read: indoor plumbing), Sheriff Lindsay takes the Thompson boys to his own house for a home-cooked meal with his kind, politically minded wife and smart, friendly family. They eat good food, they tell corny jokes, they negotiate a role for the patriarch in Mrs. Lindsay’s temperance crusade, over which the Sheriff conspiratorially shares a nod and a wink with Nucky. It’s too much for the kid, who breaks down crying at his first glimpse of a life that’s emotionally rewarding — a life where he can simply be himself. Cut to an hour later, when he’s asking the Sheriff to assassinate his own father. The terms with which Lindsay demurs are revealing: “Don’t go where you don’t belong. Don’t take what isn’t yours. Don’t pass your burdens on to others. Don’t make me do my job — because I will.” Know your role, Deputy Sheriff Thompson.

The rest of my review of tonight’s Boardwalk Empire for Rolling Stone continues along these lines.

“Lost,” A to Z

September 22, 2014


L:
Locke

The quintessential fan favorite, Locke was a role-of-a-lifetime situation for actor Terry O’Quinn, the equivalent of Ian McShane’s Al Swearingen on Deadwood or Bryan Cranston’ss Walter White on Breaking Bad. The revelation of his paralysis — magically cured by the Island — in the standout fourth episode “Walkabout” hooked many viewers on the show permanently, and his twinkle-eyed charisma and ferocious drive to master the Island’s mysteries were perpetual series highlights. Though he helped cause the destruction of the Hatch in Season Two, Locke ultimately failed as the Island’s would-be guardian, murdered by Ben Linus in a seedy hotel and never returning in the flesh. He was the avatar of Lost‘s great secret theme: that some people get lost and never quite find themselves again.

M: Monster
Unseen for what felt like ages, the Monster was slowly revealed first to be an amorphous black cloud, then a shapeshifter that could take on the appearance of dead figures from the castaways’ past, then as a Locke impostor determined to destroy the castaways — and then as the immortal Man in Black, Jacob’s brother and opposite number. In this last, true form, the Monster became the show’s true Lucifer figure, as the Man in Black’s escape from the Island would supposedly mean the end of the world. But it was arguably better suited to the show as a protean, shadowy figure of menace, transforming itself according to the expectations of its viewers — just like Lost itself.

N: The Numbers
Hurley’s winning lottery ticket. The Hatch’s serial number. Rousseau’s broadcast. A bunch of soccer players’ jerseys in the airport. Wherever “4 8 15 16 23 42” appeared, which was pretty much everywhere, fans took notice. Their actual meaning? They were how Jacob labeled the “candidates” among the castaways for his position as the Island’s protector, and took on a sort of universal mystical significance because of that. But that was just a McGuffin. The sense that everything was somehow connected — that was the point.

O: The Others
The sinister figures whose appearances were terrifying (and seemingly supernatural) in the early seasons, the Others were slowly revealed to be quasi-suburbanites whose misguided fanaticism about the Island led them to commit any number of atrocities, including the slaughter of the utopian science hippies called the Dharma Initiative. The show’s writers were never more inventive than when they peeled back a new layer off the Others to reveal some strange new wrinkle to their strange cult. Bonus: the White Walkers in Game of Thrones are called “The Others” in the original A Song of Ice and Fire novels, but Lost‘s shadow was long enough for the name to be dropped for the small-screen adaptation.

P: ”Pilot”
Lost‘s first episode — half of the two-part series premiere, the most expensive pilot ever produced by a network at the time — is as close to a perfect hour of television as you’re likely to find. Its opening sequence masterfully adds one disorienting element to another: an opening eye, a lush bamboo forest, a wounded man in a tattered suit, a dog, a bottle of airplane liquor, an empty sneaker, unidentifiable mechanical and human noises. It all climaxes with Jack Shephard’s emergence on to a beautiful beach and straight into a chaotic crash site. In a country still raw with post-9/11 trauma, the pilot’s air-crash imagery and hints at terrorism (remember when Sawyer viewed Sayid as a suspect?) dealt directly with our collective fear, as genre art is often uniquely suited to do. “Guys…where are we?” asked Charlie in the pilot’s final line. Millions of viewers stuck around to find out.

Here’s the L-M-N-O-P from the Lost A to Z feature I wrote for Rolling Stone in honor of the show’s 10th anniversary. Lost is the first show I ever wrote about for a paying gig, back in my Wizard days, and the responses I’d get to my posts about it at this very blog all those years ago are what encouraged me to pursue writing about television any further at all, o my relationship with it is one I value a great deal. I hope you dig the piece!

“Boardwalk Empire” thoughts, Season Five, Episode Three: “What Jesus Said”

September 21, 2014

Ironically, the underworld is the one place where our antihero’s real-life inspiration — Nucky Johnson — made a legacy that lasted. As the host of the 1929 Atlantic City Conference, a multiethnic gathering of crime bosses from across the country whose ranks included such Boardwalk Empire characters as Meyer Lansky, Charlie Luciano, John Torrio, Al Capone, Bugsy Siegel, Waxey Gordon, Jake Guzik, and Owney Madden, Johnson was a pivotal player in the organization of the criminal network known as the National Crime Syndicate. This in turn was a crucial step on the road to the establishment of New York’s “Five Families” and the nationwide governing body called the Commission by Luciano and Torrio several years later, following the bloody resolution of the war between Joe Masseria and Salvatore Maranzano.

But the Atlantic City Conference – like Arnold Rothstein’s murder in 1928, like the stock market crash and the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre in 1929 – falls in Boardwalk‘s seven-year gap between its fourth and fifth seasons. Generally, Boardwalk‘s storytelling instincts are sound, particularly in building to big climaxes, so that’s a decision worth trusting. Lining up the end of the show with (presumably) the final consolidation of power by Luciano and Lansky makes sense — and hey, nothing’s stopping us from deciding that Nelson Van Alden and Eli Thompson were Capone’s St. Valentine’s Day triggermen on our own. But given the fictional Nucky’s envy of Joe Kennedy’s legacy, cutting the real Nucky’s single greatest contribution to American history is a curious choice. However, Nucky’s conversation with Lansky in Havana, in which it’s revealed they haven’t seen each other since 1928, means the Conference never even took place in the Boardwalk universe — so it’s possible that the show’s simply playing with the timeline.

Either way, Nucky’s empire as it currently stands has narrow boundaries, and establishing them cost him everything. His sister and parents, including his abusive father, are dead. His brother Eli is in hiding. His surrogate father and son — the Commodore and Jimmy Darmody, respectively — both turned on him, and both died for it. His closest companion for years, Eddie, killed himself. He lost his first wife, Mabel, in childbirth and his second, Margaret, when she could no longer stand him. His relationship with his nephew Willie is cordial enough, sure, but as Kennedy notes, that’s a very thin reed to hang a life on.

It’s only in talking to Sally Wheat – long-distance love interest, business partner, and the closest thing he’s had to a friend in the entire series – that Nucky feels truly at home. In moment so sweet it’s shocking for a show like this, the two of them listen to “Happy Days Are Here Again” together over the phone. Suddenly a relationship between two Prohibition Era bootleggers becomes recognizable to anyone who’s ever enjoyed a favorite song with a loved one over videochat.

Well, I used my knowledge of mafia lore and close reading of film to try to predict the end of Boardwalk Empire AND compare a very sweet plot point to using Google+ Hangouts in my review of tonight’s episode, so I’ve probably peaked.

HuffPost Live redux

September 15, 2014

I’ll be on HuffPost Live again at 5pm today, talking Boardwalk Empire and the 10th anniversary of Lost. Tune in here!

Comics Time: July Diary 2014

September 15, 2014

At first glance, Gabrielle Bell’s six-panel daily diary comics don’t have a lot in common with the Mines of Moria sequence in Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings . Or at any number of subsequent glances, I suppose. But the more Bell I read, the more I think they share a primary strength: a sense of space, of environment. Autobio slice-of-life comics, by the nature of what most of us tend to do with our lives every day, often consist in large part of conversations, either with a small number of other parties or within the head of the diarist as they go about their day. Unless those conversations reference a specific landmark, cartooned depictions of them can, and often do, devolve into dialogues that could be taking place anywhere, or nowhere. They have all the spatial context of action figures or dolls or sock puppets held aloft by the cartoonist, one in each hand, and made to speak with the voices of the participants.

Not so with Bell, and not so in the most recent iteration of her annual July Diary project. Hers is a world where rooms, furniture, streets, buildings, and human bodies are arrayed in a three-quarter cheat to the audience, enabling us to see into corners, grasp the depth and dimensionality of each space. Her inimitable spotted blacks — little jagged-edged rectangular smudges — set off the surfaces of the objects with which she is surrounded, and pool in the wrinkles of her characters’ clothes like ink. It’s impossible to look at a Gabrielle Bell diary-comic page and reduce it to stick figures against a blank backdrop, any more than you could do so with the fellowship of the Ring dodging orc arrows as they flee down those crumbling steps. Her apartment, her garden, the streets of her neighborhood, the wilderness surrounding the trailer where her mother lives following the house fire that understandably dominates the diary — Bell makes them distinct, inhabitable, navigable spaces. That her rigid, six-panel grid closes those spaces off is a feature, not a bug. Each panel feels like a tiny, beautifully constructed diorama, where Bell and her acquaintances will act out the same moment forever.

I reviewed Gabrielle Bell’s July Diary 2014 for The Comics Journal.

“Boardwalk Empire” thoughts, Season Five, Episode Two: “The Good Listener”

September 15, 2014

Elsewhere, Gretchen Mol demonstrates why she may be Boardwalk‘s MVP as Gillian Darmody. This has always been a show that’s had a hard time with its women, even more so than many of its macho peers. Margaret has often felt tangential to the action (remember that sex-ed subplot?). Angela Darmody’s entire story depended on her not being able to do anything she actually wanted to do. Nucky’s string of showgirl girlfriends (beginning with the delightfully batshit Paz De La Huerta) had little to do but be frivolous and naked. The two women around whom Chalky’s storyline centered last season, his daughter Maitland and singer Maybelle White, were both fascinating — and were each gone by the finale.

Gillian is different. As a character, she’s required to get naked on command as much as anyone — it used to be her job as a showgirl, and her route to continued influence over the Commodore; now, in an insane asylum following her unwitting confession to a murder last season, it’s a condition of her imprisonment. But her nudity has a terrible energy to it, informed by her rape when she was a girl, and her subsequent determination to turn that victimization to her advantage. Here, that energy is reflected in the freakish image of a room full of mental patients erupting out of strait-jacketed bathtubs like aliens from chest cavities. When Gillian herself finally emerges, slowly and deliberately instead of in a panicked fit, her naked body is both a come-hither and a middle finger all at once. That’s part of what made the shaggy-dog-joke nature of her caged-heat storyline in this episode so satisfying. No, her female warden isn’t the queer-predator cliché she seems; she’s just one woman bargaining for a taste of the good life with another woman who fought tooth and nail to taste it herself.

I reviewed last night’s Boardwalk Empire for Rolling Stone.

9.11.14

September 11, 2014

As he followed her inside Mother Abagail’s house he thought it would be better, much better, if they did break down and spread. Postpone organization as long as possible. It was organization that always seemed to cause the problems. When the cells began to clump together and grow dark. You didn’t have to give the cops guns until the cops couldn’t remember the names…the faces…

Fran lit a kerosene lamp and it made a soft yellow glow. Peter looked up at them quietly, already sleepy. He had played hard. Fran slipped him into a nightshirt.

All any of us can buy is time, Stu thought. Peter’s lifetime, his children’s lifetimes, maybe the lifetimes of my great-grandchildren. Until the year 2100, maybe, surely no longer than that. Maybe not that long. Time enough for poor old Mother Earth to recycle herself a little. A season of rest.

“What?” she asked, and he realized he had murmured it aloud.

“A season of rest,” he repeated.

“What does that mean?”

“Everything,” he said, and took her hand.

Looking down at Peter he thought: Maybe if we tell him what happened, he’ll tell his own children. Warn them. Dear children, the toys are death–they’re flashburns and radiation sickness, and black, choking plague. These toys are dangerous; the devil in men’s brains guided the hands of God when they were made. Don’t play with these toys, dear children, please, not ever. Not ever again. Please…please learn the lesson. Let this empty world be your copybook.

“Frannie,” he said, and turned her around so he could look into her eyes.

“What, Stuart?”

“Do you think…do you think people ever learn anything?”

She opened her mouth to speak, hesitated, fell silent. The kerosene lamp flickered. Her eyes seemed very blue.

“I don’t know,” she said at last. She seemed unpleased with her answer; she struggled to say something more; to illuminate her first response; and could only say it again:

I don’t know.

–Stephen King, The Stand

STC @ SPX

September 9, 2014

I’m going to be at SPX, the Small Press Expo, in Bethesda, Maryland this weekend. I look like the person in the photo up top. I’m going to have work in the new Study Group Magazine #3D, which will debut at the show; I wrote a brand-new four-page comic about werewolves and secrets called “Hiders” that was drawn by Julia Gfrörer. Julia will also be selling our comic In Pace Requiescat, a pornographic extrapolation from “The Cask of Amontillado” by Edgar Allan Poe; I should have copies of Flash Forward, the horror comic Jonny Negron and I made about seeing and being seen, as well. I suspect you’ll find me mostly at Julia’s table, W34B. We look like the people in the photo at the bottom. SPX is a terrific show, and if you’re anywhere in the DC/Baltimore area and have any interest in alternative comics at all it’s well worth the trip. I would love to see you there!

Spoiler Alert

September 8, 2014

Here I am talking about The Leftovers, Boardwalk Empire, and Masters of Sex with Ricky Camilleri, Drew Grant, and Matthew Jacobs on the debut episode of Spoiler Alert, HuffPost Live’s new talk show about TV. Hooray!

STC on HuffPost Live

September 8, 2014

I’ll be talking The LeftoversBoardwalk Empire, and so forth on HuffPost Live’s Spoiler Alert show, tonight at 5:30pm. This link will take you right to the show when it airs. Hope to be seen by you then!

“The Leftovers” thoughts, Season One, Episode Ten: “The Prodigal Son Returns”

September 8, 2014

“I want to believe that I’m not surrounded by the abandoned ruin of a dead civilization,” Nora Durst writes as she prepares to leave everyone she’s ever known. “I want to believe that it’s still possible to get close to someone.” But even if it’s possible, she’s chosen not to try. The pain is too much to bear, as actor Carrie Coon’s almost unwatchable silent scream upon being confronted with grotesque simulations of her vanished family made clear. Here in the real world, with uncanny echoes of The Leftovers‘ breathtakingly paced season finale — “The Prodigal Son” — all around us, it’s easy to agree with her.

Look back, if you can stomach it, at the long horrendous summer we just suffered through. A berserk and benighted subset of the video game community targeted prominent women critics and creators with a campaign of trolling, harassment, and threats so severe that one victim had to flee her home. An apparent ring of hackers specializing in stealing female celebrities’ nude selfies began releasing them to the public en masse. Police in Ferguson, Missouri responded to citizen protests over the killing of unarmed teenager Mike Brown – his body exposed in the street for four hours – by essentially staging a days-long blue riot, aiming loaded weapons at civilians, arresting journalists, and firing teargas and rubber bullets seemingly indiscriminately.

Now look at The Leftovers. Trolling-as-religion is one of its central plot points, with two separate denominations – the Guilty Remnant, with their callous performance art, and Rev. Matt, with his muckraking flyers – deliberately being assholes to make a point. Stealing photographs in order to turn private moments into a public spectacle was a core component of the cult’s master plan involving replicas of Departure victims. And law-enforcement complicity, even participation, in violence against the civilian population has been a constant: the Heroes Day riot, the brutal assault on Holy Wayne’s compound, the Feds’ black-ops methodology in destroying cults and incinerating members’ bodies, Kevin’s assault and kidnapping of Patti, and, tonight, the Mapleton P.D.’s half-assed efforts to stop the townsfolk from retaliating against the G.R. The show’s sociopolitical prescience is almost freakish.

Here’s the beginning of my review of the season finale of The Leftovers for Rolling Stone, which ultimately makes the case that as impressive as the show’s resonance with current events may be, it actually goes even deeper, laying out the cost of living when life is fundamentally meaningless and the struggle by which can attempt to eke some kind of purpose out of it anyway. This was really, really good television and I’m glad I was paid to stick with it to the end or I’d have missed it.

“Boardwalk Empire” thoughts, Season Five, Episode One: “Golden Days for Boys and Girls”

September 8, 2014

As its final eight-episode season begins, with tonight’s ironically titled premiere “Golden Days for Boys and Girls,” it’s time to be honest about Boardwalk Empire. Appropriately enough given the attention the show has paid to family traumas, HBO’s sprawling gangster epic has long suffered in the shadow of its siblings. It lacks the seismic influence of The Sopranos, where creator Terrence Winter previously worked; the acclaim and tonal versatility of Mad Men, helmed by fellow Sopranos alum Matthew Weiner; the relentless suspense and narrative arc of Breaking Bad, the era’s biggest crime show; and the epic-fantasy scope and pop-culture cachet of Game of Thrones, the network’s other big costume drama about bloody power struggles.

What it does better than 99% of its competitors, however, is mount pure sensual spectacle. No other show on television says so much about its world through sight and sound alone – via meticulously composed frames, thoughtfully arranged sequences, colors, voices, tics of performance, and, yes, gore, all designed to communicate the violent tragedy at the heart of Nucky Thompson’s story directly to the heart. Tonight’s season premiere offered ample evidence of this — as well as suggesting that Boardwalk Empire might very well be the New Golden Age of Television’s secret masterpiece.

I’m so excited to be covering the final season of Boardwalk Empire, a show I love and admire tremendously, for Rolling Stone. Here’s my review of the season premiere.

The 20 Best TV Shows About School

September 3, 2014
8. ‘The Wonder Years’

Put aside the Boomer nostalgia that erupts the second Joe Cocker starts singing during the opening credits. Yes, The Wonder Years is a period piece — and a fun one at that. (Remember the make-out party soundtracked by “In-a-Gadda-Da-Vida”?) But it’s also as good as it gets at depicting how your childhood relationships with best friends (Paul Pfeiffer) and crushes (Winnie Cooper, swoon) shape your experience of school with far more strength than almost anything in the curriculum or anyone on the faculty. The Sixties soundtrack, wardrobe, and pop-political references are cool and all, but all you need are your buddies.

Now that our long national nightmare of a summer is over, I wrote a list of the 20 best tv shows about school for Rolling Stone. It was fun!

Comics Time: Baby Bjornstrand

September 3, 2014

A thing comes into three lives, without warning or explanation. A thing leaves those lives in much the same way. The time between: Baby Bjornstrand, the new Renee French graphic novel completing and collecting the webcomic of the same name. In the past, I’ve written that the hazy, watery wasteland inhabited by Baby Bjornstrand‘s masked, hooded protagonists and monstrous fauna evokes a post-apocalypticism that is, if not belied, then at least transfigured by the comic tone of the proceedings. Now that the series is finished, that’s only true to a point. As the uniform proscenium staging of its panels suggests, Bjornstrand remains much closer to Samuel Beckett than Stephen King, despite French’s astonishing proficiency with painstakingly penciled menace. Yet its morose ending has a bite that doesn’t require the jaws of a monster.

I reviewed Baby Bjornstrand by Renee French for The Comics Journal.