The Golden Age of TV: There's a Fucking Seinfeld Bus

Seriously, there's a Seinfeld bus going around on college campuses to raise awareness about Seinfeld. Apparently someone is getting a bit antsy about Seinfeld's cultural hegemony. Newsflash: Seinfeld is bland. In today's TV Golden Age, Seinfeld is an ancient dinosaur that the kids aren't interested in.

Also, the AV Club is funny:
http://www.avclub.com/content/hater/further_adventures_in_press_4

The Golden Age of TV: Actors You Just Can't Get Enough Of

Since Ive been busy, I haven't been able to support my Golden Age of TV idea as much as I wanted. I only got two posts out, and I've been planning this one for a while and never got around to it. So this'll be the last Golden Age of TV post for a while, unless I get less busy and more inspired in the real near future.

There's a certain brand of actor out there that I just can't get enough of. And I mean that literally, not figuratively. Figuratively, I just can't get enough of, say, Michael Caine. But hell, Michael Caine was a major leading man for three decades and has been a major character actor since. You could watch a Michael Caine movie a week and it would take you years to watch every movie with either a lead role or meaty supporting role.

Phillip Baker Hall is another matter altogether. I figuratively cannot get enough of him. But I also literally can't; I've only ever seen one movie where he has a leading role (Hard Eight), although I know there's a couple more out there. But for the most part, if you want Phillip Baker Hall, we're talking bit parts. We're talking 10 minutes in Rush Hour, 5 in Rush Hour 2, 15 in Zodiac, 7 in In Good Company, and some Holiday Inn Express commercials. That's what you have to wade through to try to get enough Phillip Baker Hall.

So I'm devoting the rest of this post to unobtainable actors, actors who I couldn't get enough of figuratively and literally, but who, unlike Hall, have found a place in The Golden Age of TV where they're beamed into our house once a week. Many of these actors started in TV before I was born or when I was a wee one, spent most of my lifetime in films, and have finally returned to the small screen, now that it's worth watching.

1.Tony Shalhoub
Show: Monk
Leading Film Roles: None

Tony Shalhoub is the king of this category. Either while enduring or after leaving the depressingly dull sitcom Wings, Shalhoub was a supporting actor ace, Coening it up in The Man Who Wasn't There, Barton Fink, and Miller's Crossing, and just plain being awesome in Men in Black and Galaxy Quest. But those 5 roles combined probably don't have an hour of screentime. Now, with Monk, you can see Shaloub on camera for an hour every single week. It's like striking character actor gold.



2.Bruce Campbell
Show: Burn Notice
Leading Film Roles: 5-10

Bruce Campbell's career can be broken down into three main categories: cultish lead parts in a handful of movies (Evil Dead, Bubba Ho-Tep), bad lead roles in terrible TV shows (Brisco County Jr, Jack of All Trades), and miniscule film roles in everything from Coen Brothers movies to McHale's Navy. Suffice to say, after you've watched the cult movies, there wasn't much left worth watching just for Bruce, until Burn Notice. As a spy's sidekick, Bruce is a hard-drinking, hard-punching ladies man in a Hawaiian shirt. I hope the show goes on forever, and I would watch it just for him.



3.James Cromwell
Show: Six Feet Under
Leading Film Roles: 0-5 (pretty much just Babe)

Like many others of my generation, I was first exposed to Cromwell in that masterpiece that is Babe. Since then, I'm still looking for another leading role for him. Sure, he's great in great stuff like L.A. Confidential and The Queen and in crap like I, Robot and The Sum of All Fears. Unfortunately, I haven't seen Six Feet Under, but the evidence is piling up that I need to. I'll probably be the only person watching it for James Cromwell, though.



4. Alec Baldwin
Show: 30 Rock
Leading Film Roles: 0-5 (in comedies)

Alec Baldwin's career as leading man in dramas and action movies pretty much disappeared on impact. But since that career imploded in the 90s, SNL fans have known that he's one of the funniest people in the universe. But to see him being funny, you had to either Youtube SNL, acknowledge the fact that The Departed is actually an action-comedy, or sit through dreck like Along Came Polly, Cat in the Hat, and Elizabethtown. Now you can just turn on the TV and relish 30 rock. Although I do recommend The Departed.


5.Ron Perlman
Show: Sons of Anarchy
Leading Film Roles: 0-5

I'm aware of the ancient Ron Perlman holy grail, Beauty and the Beast, which is just a bit before my time. Outside of that, you've got the Hellboy twofer, Jean-Pierre Jeunet's City of Lost Children, and bit roles in everything from Alien Resurrection to In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale. That's not pretty. There's only been one Sons of Anarchy episode so far, but it was a good un, and Perlman was great as the Godfather of a biker gang. I assume it will only get better.

6.Harvey Keitel
Show: Life on Mars
Leading Film Roles: 0-5

Martin Scorsese's original method muse quickly became a second, third, or fourth fiddle to the De Niro juggernaut. Since his brief heyday as a leading man, he's mostly just done crap or been an ensemble player in quality stuff like Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, and Get Shorty. He's coming to the small screen this year in Life On Mars, the second attempt to do a U.S. remake of a show about a cop who goes back in time to the 70s (or something. Believe me, this whole situation has me confused). The role doesn't look huge, but I'll check the show out, just for Keitel. This one is pure potential.



Well, I'm sure I left lots and lots of people out. And I notice this post is totally missing the ladies; I guess Kyra Sedgwick would count, but I'm afraid I don't know her as a film actor and I haven't seen a single episode of The Closer. So I need some help here. Post away.

The Golden Age of TV: HBO Pulls the Plug on Preacher

It has been widely reported that HBO has decided not to proceed with their plan to adapt Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon's long-running comics series Preacher into a television show. This is some of the worst news that people who are fans of excellence have received in a while, with one very minor silver lining. You can read the whole story over at Newsarama, but here are my thoughts:

When I said this is bad news for fans of excellence, I meant it. You see, there's been a great deal of excellence going on in comics for the past two decades, and a great deal of it has hit the silver screen. But there are a number of absolutely fantastic series that have not managed to make the big screen, for the simple reason of length. When Batman or Spider-Man is made into a movie, the creators have decades of material to choose from, but that material is not arranged into a coherent plot, and it's up to them to make a movie out of it. And smaller projects featuring great recent comics have been made - like 300, Wanted, or V for Vendetta - but these have one single plot that (with modification) can be turned fairly easily into a movie.

But lingering beyond moviedom are some legendary series that took years to make and have 50 or more issues. Comics like The Sandman (the grandaddy of them all), Ex Machina, Transmetropolitan, Lucifer, Y: The Last Man, Fables, 100 Bullets, Doom Patrol, and yes, Preacher wouldn't make sense as movies. These stories often take a decade to tell and occur over the course of many years; to attempt to condense this long-form storytelling into 110 minutes would require the worst form of synecdoche. Some of them perhaps could survive the Hellboy treatment, with one of their more important stories serving as an origin/launching point for future adventures. But most of them are less episodic than Hellboy, and that means there's only one option to tell the whole story: TV.

The problem is, the comics revolution brought with it violence and dirty words. Those things don't play that well on networks or even regular cable. And even if they did, we're talking serious storytelling, the kind that you wouldn't trust the people responsible for Friends or Malcolm in the Middle to tell. So for as long as I can remember (at least, since the Golden Age of Television began) fans have called for the very best long-running comics series to be made into shows by the people that brought Sopranos, Deadwood, and The Wire to life. Only on HBO can you get the mixture of elements that would make these comics work on the screen: commitment to long-form storytelling, excellent acting and production values, willingness to show violence, gore, and sexuality, and the cultural cachet to turn these long beloved comics into legitimate landmarks of American culture.

Preacher was supposed to be the test case for this project. It's a little older than most of the other series I mentioned, and although it's not my favorite, it's certainly one of the best. If HBO could take Preacher and make it into a viable television series, the sky was the limit. No longer would we have to dread the upcoming film versions of our favorite comics, certain that 8 years of storytelling would get ripped up and rewritten into a single nonsensical movie. Instead, we could just sit back and relax while stories that were serialized over years were adapted over years by the best creators on the small screen.

There are a few pieces of good news. First, the man behind the Preacher series was Mark Steven Johnson. He was writing and executive producing, and he previously wrote Jack Frost (the Keaton vehicle), Daredevil, and Ghost Rider. His Preacher might not have been what we wanted anyway...

More importantly, Johnson said that HBO kiboshed Preacher because it "was just too dark and too violent and too controversial." Now, on the one hand, that's pretty scary: HBO is backing out of a violent and controversial show? And this defeats my point that HBO is the only place these shows could live. But, on the plus side, Preacher is one of the most violent and controversial pieces of comics literature ever made. So just because Preacher was too dark doesn't mean that 100 Bullets would be.

Both of those caveats aside, this is some bad news. True, D.J. Caruso's plan to do Y: The Last Man as a trilogy might be even better than an HBO show. What 3 2-hour movies would lose in nuance (when compared to five 12-hour seasons), they might be able to make up in superior budget and style. But Preacher would have been a giant step forward for bringing long-running comics series to life, intact and unsullied. I don't know when the next chance will be, but I'm hoping it's soon.

The Golden Age of TV

I don't watch that much TV. And I especially watch virtually no TV as it comes on the TV; I'm a Netflix TV guy. But even I have a few things to say about TV, as the new seasons start up and everyone notes, once again, that they're going to suck. I have no doubt that most of them will suck, and I certainly don't pay attention to what new sitcoms are going to be paired with Two and a Half Men. But in case you hadn't noticed, we're living in a golden age of TV. I'm probably not the go to person to talk about this, since I'm nowhere near as up on TV as I should be - I haven't seen a single episode of The Sopranos. But I have recently started filling out my knowledge of recent TV successes with shows like Curb Your Enthusiasm, The Wire, Deadwood, Dexter, and others.

The thesis of this post is that TV sucks, and by TV I mean the regular normative kind of TV: the kind of TV where every episode is exactly the same, follows the same formula, has no overarching storyline, has virtually no character development, etc. There was a time (aka the 50s) when the American mainstream wanted a reassuring and repetitive commercial art form, and they got it, and for some reason we've been stuck with it ever since. Occasionally, something great happens within this formula (like The Simpsons or Futurama) but regular, TV-TV usually delivers things more along the lines of Full House or CSI: Miami. I know both of those things have their fans, but they're not for me.

TV was pretty much this from 1950 through 2000.

But now we're not stuck with TV-TV. The revolution happened, and it happened by drawing elements from outside of TV's long and boring history of non-experimentation (for the most part, it also happened on pay channels, which is not a big surprise). Here's the ideas from outside of TV that I think have had the greatest impact toward making TV not suck.


1.The Godfather, Parts 1-60
Apparently, we had to wait 30 years for someone to realize that you could take a long-form, gritty, deep crime story, ala The Godfather, and tell it on TV, where it might be less gritty but could be even deeper and longer. Crime sagas were just begging to be epic TV shows told over years of deep and engaging episodes with an ongoing storyline, but no one did a good job of it until lately (various police procedurals, from Hill Street Blues onward, tried a version of this, but it rarely went outside the police procedural genre). And now we're practically drowning in (recently concluded) crime shows with an epic, overarching storyline. This is the genre that started the TV revolution, with The Sopranos, and if it's hit a low ebb now, I've still got years of DVDs to get through.
This Brought Us: The Sopranos, The Wire, Deadwood, Dexter

2.Christopher Guest on the Small Screen
In 1999, Larry David, the creator of the repetitive, bland, unfunny, and well-beloved show Seinfeld, did a one hour HBO mockumentary called Larry David: Curb Your Enthusiasm. It was a TV special, shot with a single camera and treated as if it were a documentary about Larry's life. As a fake documentary, it represented a bold and different way of doing comedy. Well, the idea was bold and different for TV - Christopher Guest had been doing it on the big screen for decades, and Woody Allen invented it in 1969 with Take the Money and Run. Seriously, Woody Allen invented it 40 years ago and it came to the small screen like five years ago. Still, I'm glad it finally came, and it's responsible for the best of TV Comedy.
This Brought Us: Curb Your Enthusiasm, The Office [UK], The Office [US], Arrested Development, 30 Rock

3.Did You Know Brian K Vaughan Writes for Lost?
The American people have told us at the box office, over and over again, that they have a taste for genre entertainment: science fiction, superheroes, neo-noir, etc. And in the comics world, those genres are being practiced with enormous success, particularly since they have a weapon movies don't have: the cliffhanger. Pair an exciting detective, science fiction, or superhero story with the cliffhanger, and then put it on TV, and you've got yourself a TV show only slightly less addictive than crack. It's no surprise that, when Lost started sucking, they hired comics writer and cliffhanger master Brian K Vaughan to right the ship (spoiler: he didn't).
This Brought Us: Lost, Heroes, Battlestar Galactica, Veronica Mars


4. This car has a dent in it. And another dent here, and another dent here.
Quirkiness sells. It sells tickets to Wes Anderson movies, tickets to Napoleon Dynamite, advertising time on NPR's This American Life, books written by David Sedaris, and thousands upon thousands of "vintage" T-Shirts at thrift shops (awesome!) or Urban Outfitters (posers!). People love watching awkward and slightly weird characters have disjointed but ultimately charming adventures. And it didn't occur to anyone to put them on TV? I think Seinfeld might be as close as it gets, pre-revolution...yuck.
This Brought Us: My Name is Earl, Monk, Flight of the Conchords, Six Feet Under

As near as I can tell, those are the big four. But I know that I left out a lot of great shows from the revolution, and I probably left out a lot of influences from movies and other media that helped bring about the revolution. And since I'm not the most TV savvy guy in the world, I need your help: What shows and trends did I overlook? Post a comment and put me in my place.