Atonement vs. The Great Gatsby: Adapting Novels with Great Prose

 

I recently watched two movies. The first was Joe Wright's 2007 adaptation of Ian McEwan's novel Atonement. The second was Baz Luhrmann's adaptation of The Great Gatsby that came out earlier this year. I enjoyed Wright's Atonement more than Luhrmann's Gatsby for a host of reasons[1], but one of the main ones is that Atonement works so much better as an adaptation of its source material.

On paper, they're both highly faithful renderings of their respective books. Adaptations often get blasted for how they change or omit plot details from the source novel (Harry Potter, anyone?), but amazingly, the stories of both Atonement and The Great Gatsby make it onto the big screen nearly intact, save for a few lines of dialogue here and there. It isn't the plot where Atonement succeeds and Gatsby fails as an adaptation. Where these two diverge is in how the directors treat the mechanics of the texts themselves.

The original novels of both Atonement and The Great Gatsby are beautifully written. The prose styles of McEwan and Fitzgerald are so sparkling, soulful, and witty in each of these books that they would be the main attractions for the novels if the plots themselves weren't so engaging. Which is a problem when you're adapting a book into a movie, because movies don't get to use prose.

So, both Wright and Luhrmann had to figure out how to translate the beloved prose styles of their respective source materials into something filmmable—an unenviable task if there ever was one.

What I found so great about Wright's direction in Atonement was not only how gorgeous it was (and it is breathtakingly so) but that its specific brand of gorgeousness is reminiscent of McEwan's prose in the novel. A hallmark of McEwan's writing in the book is how the novel's narration follows the different characters as they walk about the physical spaces in which they live, then reflects the characters' fears, fantasies, and desires onto the descriptions of the objects they interact with. It is this technique that Wright's direction manages to evoke, using lighting and carefully framed shot to accomplish the same effect as McEwan's style. Glares and colors reflected across the faces of the protagonists reveal their thoughts and inner conflicts, and intimate close-up shots on objects or body parts describe the fixations of the characters. Best of all, Wright puts enough faith in his audience and his own direction to avoid expositional dialogue or voiceovers to reiterate what the camera work has already told us. Wright manages to transform the writer's vocabulary of words, sentences, and punctuation into the language of film, and the result is stunning.

Luhrmann, on the other hand, chooses not to translate the mechanics of Fitzgerald's prose into film but the themes. What's so remarkable about the writing in The Great Gatsby is the depth of character insight it provides through the narrator Nick's observations of the people around him. The richness of the metaphors Nick draws out of the characters is at once sardonic and elegiac, and it despite the Roarin' Twenties setting, it feels only the slightest bit tipsy, never raucous. The direction in The Great Gatsby does not resemble Fitzgerald's writing in the slightest. It's instead Luhrmann doing the very Luhrmann-esque thing of juxtaposing modern pop glitz with a period setting in an attempt to make a thematic statement about the story. In Luhrmann's Gatsby, the wildly zooming and panning camerawork depicts Gatsby's parties with kaleidoscopic intensity, colorful and incomprehensible as a 2013 club. The intent, I think, is to bludgeon the audiences with an overload of images and sensory input until they feel the emptiness of the spectacle along with the bored characters. The direction reveals less about Fitzgerald's style and more about the themes he develops in the novel, those of the hollowness of wealth and the narcissistic problems of the American Dream.

I don't have a problem with a director ditching the tone or the style of a novel in favor of injecting the movie with his or her own directoral voice, especially when the voice contributes to thematic insight. That sort of thinking often leads to the very best sorts of adaptations, the ones that forge unique identities as works of art on their own merits (see Apocalypse Now). The problem is that Luhrmann's direction is so redundant with the themes already present in the story's plot and the ever-present voiceover narration that it practically cancels itself out. We already have a plot that shows us how decadent and careless the characters are and Tobey Maguire's voiceover (which, by the way, recites large passages from the Fitzgerald's text verbatim) underlining the characters' virtues, vices, and motivations. Do we need the over-the-top direction to circle, highlight, and draw flashing arrows to these ideas, too? Not really. Unfortunately, circling, highlighting, and pointing is about all the direction does.

The result is that while Atonement feels vibrant and inventive in how it finds ways to turn prose into cinema, The Great Gatsby feels stale and merely derivative of Fitzgerald's most obvious insights. Wright's direction bursts with ideas, but I can't find a meaningful original thought in Luhrmann's.

All that is to say: boy, I sure liked Atonement a lot better than the The Great Gatsby.

Until next time.


1] One being that I just don't like Luhrmann's directing style. I find it kitschy and jittery, and it tends to mute other important aspects of his films, like acting and writing. All Moulin Rouge! did for me was make my eyes hurt.

How Breaking Bad Has Set Itself Up for Finale Success

Two months from now, there will be no more Breaking Bad. Ever.

I probably don't need to tell anyone reading this blog that Breaking Bad returns this Sunday to air the first of its eight final episodes. Heck, I probably don't need to tell anyone who doesn't read this blog, either. The last several months have brought us the ends of a few notable shows (The Office, 30 Rock), but the anticipation surrounding the final half season of Breaking Bad is at a fevered pitch not seen for series finales since the end days of Lost or even The Sopranos. Go scroll through the homepage of any entertainment-covering website, and I guarantee you you'll see at least one feature or ad about Breaking Bad. As far as television events go, it's kind of a big deal.

If I were Vince Gilligan, though, I bet all that hype would be at least a little double-edged. 'Cause, you know, good series finales are freaking hard to pull off—especially when they're as hotly anticipated as this one is. Just ask Seinfeld or The X-Files or Battlestar Galactica (or, despite what I might argue, half of Lost's fanbase). There are a lot reasons why finales are hard, many of which I, being only on the viewing side of things, am probably ignorant of, but I can think of two main reasons why a lot of modern TV shows stumble when it comes to wrapping it up: scope and expectation[1]. Basically, a show's scope gets too broad to adequately bring to a conclusion (e.g. The X-Files or Battlestar Galactica) and/or the rest of the show primes the audience to expect a different ending than they end up getting (Seinfeld or, um, Battlestar Galactica again). Either way, it's unsatisfying.

But I'm not that worried about Breaking Bad. In fact, I'd say it has a really good chance of delivering a great finale, even when others of its ilk have failed. And that's because it's done a bang-up job of both controlling the scope of the show and managing its audience's expectations.

You could say the writers of Breaking Bad have a "wealth" of talent...

okay, I suck at captions.

First of all, let's look at scope. Now, Breaking Bad is a magnificently ambitious series, one that has somehow transformed its almost-jokey premise of a chemistry teacher becoming the best meth cook in the Southwest into an honest character study with propulsive plotting and resonant themes of capitalism, family, the war on drugs, and the nature of evil. The series has the sweeping feel of a thriller, the emotional nakedness of the best small-time dramas, and the towering destructive impulses and moral implications of a Shakespearean tragedy, and Walt's series-long descent into his own arrogance and depravity is more thorough and psychologically nuanced than any other character arc I can think of. There are very few shows in the history of television that have told a heavily serialized, series-long story as coherent and rewarding as Breaking Bad's.

So yeah, there are all sorts of great things about Breaking Bad's ambitious storytelling. But one thing that separates BB's ambition heading into its finale from that of, say, The Wire or Lost (shows with a similarly serialized bent and propulsive narrative) is how tidy it's been in its telling of that story. Looking back at the whole series, it's surprising just how few loose ends the show has left to tie up in these final eight episodes. Save for the cryptic flash-forward to Walt's 52nd birthday, we have no lingering mysteries to solve or cryptic character motivations to figure out as we watch these final eight episodes. In fact, the one plot left to resolve is the same one the show introduced in its opening minutes of Walt telling his video camera that "This is not an admission of guilt": whether cancer or crime will destroy Walter White. Fifty-four episodes into the story, the show's focus is as sharply on Walt and his family as it was in the pilot.

That's not to say that the show hasn't taken detours from that initial premise. Along the way, we've had all sorts of colorful characters added to the fray, some of which have drastically changed the course of the story. Who of us could have guessed after first viewing the pilot that Walter White would eventually cause an airline catastrophe or become the master meth chef for a drug-overlord-posing-as-fried-chicken-entrepreneur? But unlike similar world-expansions in other shows, these additions have never threatened to usurp or derail the show's central concern. When compared to other landmark series of the modern television era (such as The Wire, Lost, and even Arrested Development, which all used additional characters as opportunities to stray from their original premises), Breaking Bad is remarkably inbred in that all plots and characters connect back to Walt. And when characters and plots cease to serve the Walter White story, Vince Gilligan and his writers have been smart enough to wrap them up (R.I.P. Mike, Gus, Jane, and *sob* Gale), to the point where the cast of characters now, midway through Season 5, is just about as big as in the pilot. Seriously, when your role in the story is over, you either get killed or permanently hospitalized (hey there, Ted). As crazy as it can be mid-plot, Breaking Bad does a great job of cleaning up after itself[2].

This guy was no longer part of the Walter White story. 

All that is to say, the scope was carefully moderated. It never got so huge that it overshadowed the show's center, which is Walt and family. And now, with only eight episodes remaining, that's proven to be a huge asset for the writers, since it means that there's only one or two main subjects to address before closing time. Which brings us to our expectations as an audience.

Really, what do we expect from the show's finale? In most cases, when a series nears its final episodes, fans have little mental checklists of everything that has to happen before the show bids farewell. These usually come in the form of resolutions or explanations. We want to know what the Island is, or if Liz Lemon will have kids, or if the Baltimore PD will catch that pesky Marlow Stanfield, or if George Michael and Maeby are related.

But do we Breaking Bad fans have those sorts of checklists? What do we know has to happen by the end of the show? What do we expect? Aside from explaining the "52" flash-forward, I'd say the only real questions to resolve at this point are "Will Hank catch Walt?" and "How will Walt get his comeuppance?" There are no lingering characters to check in on, no mysteries to resolve. Just forward plot momentum. The show has been so good at closing off subplots and weeding out wandering characters that the writers pretty much have a blank slate to work with, as far as our expectations are concerned. We of course want the finale to be "good," but aside from vague expectations about Jesse, Walt, and the immediate White family, we don't have any clues as to what "good" looks like.

And I don't mean to oversimplify things. It's really hard to write something "good," even when there's no pressure at all. So there's no question the Breaking Bad team has had quite a challenge in creating the show's conclusion. To please fans, these final episodes will have to be exciting, funny, poignant, and emotionally satisfying, and that's not a task to sneeze at. But by narrowing the show's scope and managing our expectations, Vince Gilligan and Co. have already sidestepped two of the main pitfalls that series finales often run into. And besides, these guys have already proven themselves to be storytellers of the highest order over the last four and a half seasons. Why lose faith in their abilities now?

So, what do you think? What are you feeling about Breaking Bad's imminent end? Optimistic? Pessimistic? Wanting to call Saul? Wishing Vince Gilligan would get with Chris Carter to resurrect The X-Files? (Or is that just me?) Well, tell me about it in the comments! I'd love some comments.

As for myself, color me optimistic (not to mention super excited) for these last episodes. Hurry up, Sunday night! I'm ready to watch some Breaking Bad!

Bitch.

Until next time.


1] I want to stress the word modern in that sentence. These reasons mostly apply to the current era of TV, where ongoing storylines, continuity, and character arcs play a central role in the majority of scripted TV. In the halcyon days of more episodic, pre-'90s TV, it was still hard to make a good finale, but for different reasons that I won't get into here.

2] It's interesting to note that AMC's other flagship show, Mad Men, has taken the opposite approach in preparing for its conclusion next year. That series has made its storytelling so diffuse and its cast of characters so expansive that, aside from touching on Don, Peggy, and a few other principle figures, we don't need the show to give resolutions to any of its myriad of subplots and narrative cul-de-sacs. Michael Ginsberg or Glen may never get a proper sendoff before Mad Men closes its doors for good, and that's okay because the show has been structured from the beginning to leave loose ends. If cleaning up after itself is Breaking Bad's storytelling ethic, then Mad Men's is to leave its story so messy that just tidying up the biggest pieces is an accomplishment.

Where Have You Gone, Velvet Underground?: How the Indie Scene No Longer Seems Interested in Lou Reed and Company

The Velvet Underground was an New York City-based rock band who, under Andy Warhol's management, permanently altered the landscape of popular music through its blah blah blah blah. You know the story. Or if you don't, the introduction to the band's Wikipedia article can bring you up to speed with the highlights. Calling the Velvet Underground influential is one of the oldest lines in rock criticism, so I'm not really going to spend too much time defending it. Plenty of more insightful ink has already been spilled on the topic; no use rehashing all that here. The Velvet Underground's output is a landmark in music history, one that has inspired many an artist. You won't here me arguing that point.

But is it still inspiring artists?

Ironically, this question came to me after listening to the most recent album from Foxygen, a band that is without a doubt inspired by the Velvet Underground. If you haven't already, go give Foxygen's latest, We Are the 21st Century Ambassadors of Peace & Magic, a few spins. In my reckoning, it's one of the year's best albums, and also one of the funnest, especially if you're into late-'60s-style psych rock. The album takes tons of cues from that era's heavy-hitters, including the Rolling Stones, the Beatles, and any number of bands captured on the Nuggets compilation, and it spins those allusions into a playful homage.

But as much as McCartney and Mick Jagger have left fingerprints all over the record, the reference point that stuck me most was that of the Velvet Underground, particularly from the poppier Velvet Underground/Loaded iteration of the band. There is, of course, that famous Brian Eno quote that "everyone who bought one of those 30,000 copies [of the first Velvet Underground record] started a band," and Foxgen is definitely one of them, at least metaphorically (the band members' birth dates preclude them from actually being around for the first pressing of The Velvet Underground & Nico).

The influence is most pronounced on the album's second track, "No Destruction" (embedded below), but you can hear VU touches in all the songs, from the "Herion"-style, slow-to-fast percussion/organ sections in "On Blue Mountain" to lead singer Sam France's channeling of Lou Reed's drawling monotone pretty much throughout the album.

We Are the 21st Century Ambassadors of Peace & Magic is only Foxygen's second album released since Jagjaguwar Records picked them up in early 2011 (I have yet to listen to their first album, Take the Kids Off Broadway), which makes them relative newcomers to the music industry. And as I got to listening to this newcomer's album more and more over the past week, I realized that I couldn't remember the last time I heard another new band that sounded remotely like it could be one of those Eno 30,000.

Of course, pop and rock radio has never had very much to do with the Velvet Underground, but where the lack of VU influence is sort of surprising to me is in the (for lack of a better term) indie music scene, an arena that has embraced the Velvet Underground sound in the past. Looking at the current generation of headlining indie darlings (Animal Collective, Vampire Weekend, MGMT, Fleet Foxes, Bon Iver, Janelle Monáe, etc.) it's hard not to notice how distinctly un-VU most of them sound. Sure, it can be argued that none of these bands could exist in their current form without the foundations laid by the Velvet Underground, but when it comes to what they sound like[1], the Beach Boys, the Band, Prince, world music, and, um, '80s adult contemporary[2] seem like more relevant touchstones than "Sister Ray" or "Sweet Jane." There are a few exceptions (The Men and everybody's-favorite-2013-debuting-band Savages come to mind), but those are notable more for their rarity than for their place within larger trends. Compare that to the rise of indie music in the '80s and '90s, when bands like R.E.M., Belle and Sebastian[3], the Pixies, Joy Division, and My Bloody Valentine found creative potential bursting out of every nuance of the Velvet Underground's distortion-meets-NYC-underbelly sound.

I can think of two reasons that might explain the weaning of indie music from the Velvet Underground. First, perhaps the Velvet Underground sound became too much of a default template for indie music, and maybe this made the deviations from VU territory become more innovative and therefore more emulated. If you look at the best (or at least the most notable) indie rock records from about a decade ago, when current-gen bands would have been forming their sound—Funeral, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, White Blood Cells—a lot of them became known not for their use of VU-inspired noise and distortion but for the addition of electronics, nontraditional instruments, and pre-VU genres like folk and the blues. So maybe it was those elements that seemed fresher and more inspiring to younger artists, causing electronic dance music and Americana to replace post-punk and noise rock as the go-to sounds for indie bands.

Second, there's the increasing influence of hip hop and R&B on the scene, two genres that have never felt very much of the Velvet Underground's pull. When the mid-2000s thrust indie music into the mainstream, it tore down a bunch of the self-imposed stylistic barriers surrounding indie rock (guitars, whiteness), and put the scene into a conversation that included not just Arcade Fire and the Shins but also Outkast and Beyoncé. When Pitchfork has more to say about Kendrick Lamar, Frank Ocean, and Kenye West than the new My Bloody Valentine and David Bowie albums, you know something has changed in the indie world.

And that's good. I like seeing music scenes going in new directions. Great as it is, the Velvet Underground isn't the be-all, end-all of music, even rock music, and I welcome the chance indie music has to kill its idols, so to speak. A lot of thrilling things are going on in the music world now, and I'm all for the new ideas coming out of those exciting transitions. Sometimes it's nice to have a good ol' throwback, though. And that's when I put on that new Foxygen album for the fifth time today.

But, then again, I could be wrong. Maybe you think I'm totally missing out some great new bands. Maybe you think there hasn't really been a big change in the VU's influence. Or maybe you think my reasons for the change are complete garbage. Or maybe you just want to share some related anecdote. Don't be shy: share it in the comments! Make your voice known! I'd love to hear from y'all.

Until next time.


1] A tricky game if there ever was one. If you listen hard enough to the nuances, anything can sound like it was influenced by anyone. But let's not overthink it; I'm just talking about the main sonic aesthetic of these bands.

2] Two years later, I am still confounded by the production choice to turn one of Bon Iver's prettier tunes into a Michael Bolton song.

3] Who have in recent years excised the hazier VU sound present on early albums like If You're Feeling Sinister in favor of the sunnier territory of power pop and '70s FM. Not that there's anything wrong with that. Just sayin'.

Lost Again: Good Plot Twists

The Lost rewatch continues! Woot woot! Now that my wife and I have gotten a couple more seasons under our belts, I want to share something else about the show that's struck me the second time through. It's actually really obvious to anyone who's watched the series (and even more obvious to anyone who's read the title of this post), but heck, I'll say it anyway: Lost has great plot twists.

Before I go on, I just want to preface this by saying that I'm going to mention a few major plot points, so if you haven't watched the series yet, be ye forewarned. Here there be spoilers.

Also, for the sake of clarity, let's put a definition in place. When I say plot twist here, I'm not talking about the general idea of something surprising happening, even though that's pretty much the actual definition for the term. In this post, what I mean by "plot twist" is the Twilight Zone/Sixth Sense type of twist. You know, "He was dead the whole time" or "It's a cookbook." The sort of late-in-the-game revelations that dramatically change how you think about everything that came before it.

So: spoilers and a reductive definition of plot twist. Got it? Good.

Think back to some of the great Lost twists. Locke is in a wheelchair at the end of "Walkabout." Desmond lives in the hatch in "Man of Science, Man of Faith." Anthony Cooper is "Sawyer" in "The Brig." These are compelling reveals and rank among the most memorable moments in the show. But what makes them so memorable? Well, I argue that, like most great twists, it has a lot to do with character.

To explain, let's look at one of Lost's more iconic examples. In the final minutes of the Season Three finale, "Through the Looking Glass," Lost gives us its most sublime twist ending when, in what we assume to be a flashback, Jack pleads, "We have to go back, Kate," revealing that: 1) This is not a flashback but a flashforward; and 2) Sometime in the future, Jack and Kate get off the Island. And all the Losties collectively gasp. What a twist!

 
Now, memes aside, there are plenty of reasons why fans have found that particular twist to be so striking. For one, it's a clever inversion of a basic Lost storytelling device, the flashback. For another, it pushes the story into uncharted territory unlike anything that's come before it on the show (hey, the characters know each other off the island now). But I think the main reason we care about that moment—the main reason, in fact, that we're interested in those other two reasons—is that it's a moment that is primarily about the characters.

Think about it. The reveal isn't that amazing in terms of plot. It's not exactly revolutionary to say that some of the characters make it off the island at some point in the future. Along with survival, getting off the island is the primary motivation for most of the characters, so finding out that a couple of them succeed shouldn't be surprising. And yeah, it's a clever structural trick, but Lost had been experimenting with its flashback structure as early as Season Two. It's unexpected, sure, but the flashforward reveal is no more clever than, say, Desmond's lucid flashbacking in "Flashes Before Your Eyes." There's nothing inherent in the idea of flashforwarding that should make it one of the show's most memorable moments.

Except that it majorly changes how we think about the characters. In the flashforwards (which we think are run-of-the-mill flashbacks at the time) shown throughout "Through the Looking Glass," we see Jack, the moral center of the show, acting very unheroic and immoral, caught in an increasingly dire downward spiral of drug abuse and bad facial hair. Once the end-of-episode twist lets us know that the flashbacks are actually flashforwards, we realize how miserable Jack will be once he leaves the Island. We remember that all the characters, even Jack, were doing pretty poorly before they crashed on the Island. They were lonely. They were drug abusers. They were handicapped. On the Island, however, they beat all that miserableness through community and faith. But once they escape the would-be purgatory of the Island, they go back to being miserable, even heroic Jack. And now he regrets his choice to get off the Island. The flashforward takes an idea the show had hinted at before and makes it explicit: the characters' desire to get off the Island is not in their best interest. They are better off with each other. Live together or die alone.

In short, there's a lot more character analysis than plotting going on in this twist. And that's something I think it shares with most of Lost's good twists and most good twists in general. Twists are most meaningful when they affect how we view people. "Walkabout"'s ending is great because it affects how we view Locke. He's not a safari badass; he's a sad, lonely man finally realizing his dream. Or, to use famous non-Lost examples, the endings of The Sixth Sense and Citizen Kane are so incredible because they change the protagonists of their respective films. Malcolm (i.e. Bruce Willis) helps the boy because he needs to ease his literally restless soul. Charles Foster Kane uses his dying breath to call for Rosebud (the *gasp* sled) because he longs to return to his youth, to relive his now-wasted life. These twists add depth to their characters that connects them to audiences in ways that go beyond just describing them as "the lonely psychologist" or "the regretful business tycoon."

I'm not denying the visceral appeal of a well-told story turning in unexpected directions. But what I think separates the great twists from the merely exciting ones is the humanist touch. Exciting plots thrill us, but great plots teach us something about the characters and, in turn, about ourselves. At its core, all art is about humanity and how we react to elements bigger than ourselves: to God, to nature, to communities, to sin. Art, the "empathy machine," as Roger Ebert called movies (and by extension, I think, all good storytelling), gives us the emotional connection to internalize those ideas about humanity. Without that human connection, plot and its twisting is pretty empty[1]. 

Until next time! 


1] I'm sure we can all name countless examples of empty plot twists, many from the very minds who brought us the great ones. Rod Serling and M. Night Shyamalan are kind of the elephants in the room when it comes to plot twists, but there are tons of other examples, too. Let this be a warning, Christopher Nolan; You've come close.

Shows You Should Watch: Slings and Arrows

Welcome to Shows You Should Watch, the first post in what I hope to be a recurring feature of this blog! The basic premise here is that I talk about a random TV show I like that doesn't seem to get as much recognition as some other famously great series. I actually have a whole long introduction to this piece, but it got to be so long that I just annexed it to the end of the post rather than making all of you trudge through it at the beginning. So, if you're interesting in reading my inspiration for making this feature, scroll on down to the end and read the would-be prologue. If you don't feel like slogging through all that ponderousness, though, just continue right on to the main event.

Show: Slings and Arrows (2003-2006)

Slings and Arrows is a Canadian show, and to be honest, I have never watched another Canadian television series in my life, nor have I ever asked a Canadian about his or her television viewing. So I can't really give any insight into this show's place in Canadian TV history or even if this show is more well-known there than here in the States (the wealth of awards it gathered seems to indicate it was a hit on some level, if only critically). What I do know is that Slings and Arrows is wonderful.

A large part of that wonderfulness comes from just how out-of-place the show feels in the television landscape. A lot of that has to do with the premise. Slings and Arrows is about the struggles of the various employees of a modern Shakespearean theater festival as they try to finish the theater season after the untimely death of their artistic director, Oliver. An old colleague of Oliver's, Geoffrey Tennant (played impeccably by Paul Gross), takes up the role of artistic director after Oliver's passing, and each of the show's three seasons focuses on Geoffrey's challenges in staging a different Shakespearean tragedy in Oliver's absence—Hamlet in Season One, Macbeth in Season Two, and King Lear in the final season.

So yeah, there's a lot of Shakespeare. Television has had its share of showbiz series, but I can't think of a single one that is so focused on the production of a work as wholly non-contemporary (let alone challenging for modern audiences) as Shakespeare's output. I mean, the word "Shakespearean" has been used to describe a handful of shows from time to time, but to have Shakespeare's plays themselves as the central thematic device feels completely fresh and unprecedented to me. And I do mean central thematic device. Extended periods of each episode are devoted to Geoffrey conversing with Ghost Oliver (did I mention that Geoffrey might be mentally unstable and is visited by the ghost/hallucination of his old director?) about how each play's themes translate onto the stage. As a former English major (even one who does not particularly care for a lot of Shakespeare), I found all the literary analysis fun, and even if Lit Crit isn't your cup of tea, the analysis is always grounded in the various crises of the show's characters, so it's both intellectually and dramatically rewarding.

If that sounds dry and academic, that's just my awful prose. For all its Shakespearean settings, Slings and Arrows is first and foremost about living, breathing people and the laughs and heartbreaks that come from spending time around them. It's is a very lively, funny show with a penchant for black humor and light satire. The show gets a lot of comedic mileage, for example, out of the pratfalls of the festival's manager in his attempts to scrounge up money for the company, and there are a lot of nice jabs at the whole "commerce vs. art" tension. And then there's Geoffrey's hilariously smug rival, Darren Nichols, a director whose high-concept ideas (the picture above is his vision for Romeo and Juliet) poke all sorts of holes in self-serious theater.

But it's also an achingly sad show. The main characters are all funny and likeable, but they are also lonely, miserable people, broken by narcissism, hurtful relationships, and unhealthy obsessions. I've already mentioned Geoffrey's mental instability and Oliver's death, and these two main tragedies set the tone for much of the other character work as well, with mortality and isolation oppressing all the characters throughout the series. Aside from Oliver's death (which happens in the pilot), this isn't really a show life-or-death stakes [1], but the the conflicts in each season nudge every character toward the realization that their lives and those of the people around them will not last forever. And in these moments of realization, the show becomes desperate and beautiful in its humanity.

A lot of TV dramas use patches of humor to relieve the sense of tragedy, but what's remarkable about Slings and Arrows's combination of tragedy and comedy is that the two aren't at odds with one another. In Slings and Arrows, there is no "comic relief" like there is in Mad Men, for instance, or Lost. The comedy is not an aside to distract from the tragedy but it is instead intrinsically woven into it. Slings and Arrows depicts its drama and humor as different expressions of the same broken humanness that drives its plot. In doing so, it links comedy and tragedy in a way that's rare on TV (outside of Freaks and Geeks, that is, and maybe the U.K. version of The Office). It's actually quite appropriate, then, that Slings and Arrows is so concerned with the works of William Shakespeare. Like the most interesting of Shakespeare's plays, it finds that comedy and tragedy lie on the same emotional spectrum. And in making that discovery, it becomes occasionally profound.

So yeah. If you can find it, I strongly recommend Slings and Arrows. It's not without its flaws (for instance, it has a penchant for stringing along irrelevant romantic subplots in its second and third seasons as a way of filling the void created by Rachel McAdams leaving the show—yeah, she's in this show, too!). But at only eighteen episodes, the series goes by fast enough not to let those flaws boil into genuine irritants. The whole show used to be available to stream on Netflix, but unfortunately it expired earlier this year. You can still get the seasons by disc delivery, though. However, Amazon Prime still has it up for streaming, so if you're interested in just sampling it, that might be the place to go.

Until next time.


----

And now the intro.

Back in June, Entertainment Weekly threw down the gauntlet that all entertainment-covering publications throw down at one point or another: they declared their "all-time greats." Specifically, they made lists of their choices for the 100 all-time greatest movies, TV shows, books, and albums.

Now, I love lists. As much as it can be reductive to quantify works of art as "good, better, best," I can't deny the debt I owe to such rankings, and without them I would have missed out on some truly great stuff. Lists are nice because they're such a fantastic tool for introducing folks to works that they wouldn't normally approach and to spark discussion of said works (even if those discussions sometimes boil down to, "Nuh uh, man, It's A Wonderful Life is totally better than The Seventh Seal![2]").

But here's something else lists do: they create canons, and that's something to be a little more careful about. At their worst, artistic canons can be exclusive and focus critical attention on certain "elite" works while marginalizing all sorts of less-canonized groups and movements[3]. You get a little of this with the Entertainment Weekly lists. Sure, I think EW is right on the money by calling Revolver a great album and Citizen Kane a great movie, but almost everyone thinks they're great; look at previously published lists for any of the categories, and you'll see the same entries crop up over and over again until list-making begins to look like an exercise in rearranging preexisting pieces. There's something blandly patriarchal about putting these guys at the top again[4], especially when there are so many other interesting works to discuss that didn't even make these lists. And yeah, I realize that exclusion is a basic function of a list. That's part of what makes them interesting. And no, I'm not saying that frequent high-ranking on lists makes a work somehow inferior. But sometimes it would be nice to see more discussion of supposedly second-string works.

Which brings me (finally) to the main point of this ramble: Shows You Should Watch. Looking at EW's list for the greatest TV shows (the top ten of which you can view here), I was struck by how quickly the television canon has calcified. Out of all the media EW considered for their lists, TV is by far the youngest, barely pushing 60 years in age. Yet already the selections they made feel old-hat. The Wire, The Simpsons, The Sopranos, The Twilight Zone, Cheers, I Love Lucy—these are all shows that have featured in so many best-of lists by other critics that calling any of them the best show ever is about as easy and obvious as naming Citizen Kane or Star Wars the all-time greatest movie. Ladies and gentlemen, that's a canon if I ever saw one.

And I got to thinking that yeah, these shows are great, but there are so many other TV shows that don't get as much attention from critics and/or American audiences, especially not when most of the spots on best-of lists like EW's are taken up by all the Seinfelds and Twilight Zones [5]. So that's exactly what I'm planning on doing with Shows You Should Watch. In each post, I'll write about a different TV show that doesn't often seem to be considered among TV's all-time greats, but that I like just the same. I'm not promising that I'll be digging around the TV archives for the most obscure shows ever; this isn't an attempt to out-hip the TV canon. I'm not some TV guru that knows exclusively of "all the good shows," either. These are just random series that I've come across, not entries from some comprehensive knowledge of all things TV.

You may have heard of these shows before or even watched some of them. And that's great! What I want to do is stir up discussion about some less-talked-about series[6], so if you've watched any of these shows before, join in the discourse. The more the merrier! And if you haven't heard about one of these, well, that's great, too! Glad to introduce you.

I've already said that discovery of new works and discussion of those works are the chief delights of pop-culture lists for me. Well, it's my hope that this feature will serve the same function as a list in that regard and that those two qualities will be the chief delights here, too. Happy reading!


1] In his first-episode review of the show over at The A.V. Club, Todd VanDerWerff has an excellent analysis of how this lack of life-and-death stakes makes Slings and Arrows an "outlier" in the context of modern TV.

2] To anyone out there who shares this opinion, I'm right there with you!

3] For a great (and obvious) example of this, just look at how long it took English literature curricula in public schools to diversify out of the "19th-century white male" canon. Or, for a less politically charged example, look at how the rise of album-oriented rock criticism has all-but banished any artists performing prior the the mid-1950s from modern best-of lists.


4] Then again, kudos to Entertainment Weekly for putting some newer, less proven works in the list, too; I may be pretty ambivalent about Kanye West's My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, but it was nice to see a three-year-old hip-hop album crack the top ten albums, if only to shake up the status quo of obviously-great Clashes, Dylans, and Princes.

5] And just to be open here: I would have named many of these same shows myself if I were making the list. So I'm definitely not saying that most of these shows are not great. They are (at least, the ones I've seen, which make up six of the top ten, and a good deal of the rest). The point I want to make is not that these shows don't deserve the attention they get; it's that there are plenty of other shows off the beaten path in need of attention, too.

6] The Internet has made TV criticism and discussion so abundant that I'm positive that most of these shows have been discussed somewhere out there; heck, the reason I know about some of these shows is that I read about them on the Internet. So I'm not trying to out-hip TV criticism either. Chances are, I won't contribute a single new idea to the discussion of any of these shows, so forgive me if this all just seems redundant. But honestly, the probability that I will repeat someone's ideas on one of these shows is much smaller than if I were going to write on The Wire or something.