The Deadliest Catch, 2010

"He will die. He did die." That, apparently, has been the paradox for fans of The Deadliest Catch, a reality show about fishermen. This commentary by Brian Moylan on Defamer, about the death of the ship's captain, is fascinating. It's fan stuff, but it's also a critique of what's at stake in documentary art in the age of reality television.

Lost, X-Men, Narnia, Agee

As a child, I knew I wanted to be a writer: I wanted to write X-Men. A few years on, I still wanted to write X-Men, but I also wanted to write The Chronicles of Narnia. I worried about how I'd get the books I loved -- The Great Brain series, Susan Cooper's eerie folk nightmares, The House With the Clock in its Walls -- once I was too old for them. I imagined standing at the counter of the Open Door, the bookstore in which my mother and I spent hours, as a grown-up, with a stack of children's novels: "For my nephew," I'd lie.

What I liked most about many of these stories -- X-Men, The Dark is Rising, The Chronicles -- is that they didn't seem to end. The X-Men, never. The Dark is Rising, not really. The Chronicles, yes; but it was so dull compared to the rest of the story that one could imagine the last book as nothing more than a giant typo.

I drifted away from writing in high school, and went off to college determined to be an actor or a biologist, maybe a forest ranger. (I would have made a great ent.) Instead, I read James Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, and I was back to writing. What was remarkable to me wasn't that the book didn't end; it was that it never really began. Or rather, it began over and over, each start a crescendo and a failure, proof of Agee's contention that language was a lie, forever inadequate to the "cruel, radiant symphony of what is."

I still like X-Men -- at least, when Joss Whedon was writing a series -- and I return now and then to Agee. But I no longer need endless stories to make me feel safe -- children fear endings -- nor Agee's angst-filled failures to make me feel honest. Writing is mediation; a negotiation.

But television? Its adolescent stories keep hope and nihilism alive. That is, most series are conceived with no clear end in sight. That's the hope. And most are built around a repetition of crescendoes -- none moreso than Lost, the series that has lost hope (the end is in sight). Each new season, almost every new episode, implied a new beginning, as the story returned us to the events that had set the story in motion, each time flogging us for failing to understand what had been right before our eyes and promising us that this time it would be different, this time we would proceed with the necessary information, this time the story would have meaning. And, of course, that was a playful deception, too, because the story always had meaning; it just kept changing. Every episode was an illustration of Faulkner's chestnut: "The past isn't dead. It isn't even past."

But maybe, sometimes, it should come to an end -- so that it can avoid ending. So argues Graham Hilliard on KillingTheBuddha.com.

There’s a moment in the third season of Lost, ABC’s soon-to-conclude serial drama of time travel and philosophy, that might have made a perfect ending to the series. Jack, the surgeon-cum-tribal chieftain whose impetuousness drives much of the show’s conflict, has delivered himself into the hands of his enemies, “The Others.” A rescue party of his friends has arrived at a gated camp to find Jack sprinting toward them, eyes ablaze. Before they can react—before they can move toward him or aid his escape—Jack looks over his shoulder, raises his hands, and catches a football. He grins at the captor with whom he’s been playing, and he spikes the ball. Cue credits.

It’s a devastating scene—one of the finest in the show’s history—and a stunning conclusion, had it been allowed to serve as one, to a narrative whose success was built not on revelation but mystery. Though Jack has long been established as the series’ central protagonist, the notion that he has switched sides is just possible. We’ve seen the creeping petulance that has marked his behavior since midway through the first season, and we’ve begun to question our own loyalties. Jack has been alone with the Others for days, furthermore, and their motives and practices are unknown to us. That Jack may have turned is both shocking and quietly plausible. In its mastery of timing, characterization, and narrative momentum—the very ingredients that made the show successful in the first place—the moment is a tour de force. It’s an exclamation point. A bang of an ending rather than a whimper.

Read the whole essay at this blog's big sister site, KillingTheBuddha.com

Joss Whedon and James Marsters, "Spike," Buffy the Vampire Slayer

The new season of Battlestar Galactica just launched, and Lost will soon be found again. There’s even another Flight of the Conchords coming. To prepare, I returned to the source of the new golden age of television: Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I re-watched season five. After Lost, the pacing seems positively stately, with impossibly long scenes for TV. Buffy's still much better writing about, you know, human beings, but the flab within it, the exchanges that are simply pedestrian means of transporting us onto the next interesting moment, is more visible. And yet, Buffy was a deeper character study than even that of Tony Soprano. The Sopranos was brilliant right to the end, but it stopped seriously developing its characters after the fourth season. By then, we knew all we were going to know; what remained was to watch Tony and his associates come to the same realization.

Buffy creator Joss Whedon and his writers (and actors) not only created truly complex characters, but also truly complex people. There was no end to their "development," because there was no end to their lives (until, of course, there was).The character who interested me most in this regard as I re-watched Season 5 (and parts of the subsequent seasons) was the absurdly vain vampire Spike (James Marsters), a cartoon bad guy to begin with who slowly claws his way out of the grave of cliched villainy. Of course, Spike was created to be the most interesting character; but the first time I saw Buffy, back in re-runs on FX years ago, I resisted. Like most nerdboys, my favorite character was Willow, the nerd-witch; but the most interesting character to me was Tara, her shy, clumsy girlfriend. Spike was just too obvious.

Or so I thought. Now, I think Spike may be the emblematic character of the new golden age of television, a character who simultaneously embodies the limits and the possibilities of sequential drama on a small screen.

In season five, we see Spike becoming more and more infatuated with Buffy. He puts a blonde wig on half a mannequin, dresses it up in a turquoise top, and begins developing a relationship. In episode 11, he buys a box of chocolates and practices presenting them to the mannequin in preparation for an apology to Buffy, for revealing to her that her human boyfriend, Riley, is cheating on her with vamps. He imagines her response, and answers; imagines another response, and snaps at her; again, and he smashes the chocolates over the mannequin’s head.

The scene presents a subtle mockery of Buffy and of television. Spike has no difficulty imagining Buffy’s predictable responses; his angry retorts are those of the show’s writers pushing back at the conventions of TV drama. But they’re also signaling a more interesting development. Spike, the buffoonish bad boy, both understands Buffy well enough to play her part in his mind and hates this impotent knowledge enough to react with psychotic rage. Viewers seeing the episode with no knowledge of the show’s future might have thought, “cute, weird, and foreboding.” And all three adjectives are on the mark, but not as one might expect.

Well, one might expect that Buffy and Spike are bound for romance. And they are. But it’s not going to be as simple as the TV conventions Spike tries to smash. Yes, he makes an effort at being a good vampire, but it never really works. He’s not a good vampire. He’s the bad boy character. Granted, in a less imaginative show — The O.C., for instance -- the bad boy would turn out to be misunderstood and fundamentally noble. But the Buffy/Spike romance will evolve because Spike’s essential wickedness reflects Buffy’s resentment of her responsibility as the slayer and what we are told are the “dark” sources of her powers. Spike is Buffy’s dark side – “the monster in the man” – as Spike tells Riley, the now-displaced good guy boyfriend.

And yet, their romance is real. That’s what makes Buffy, the show, brilliant – Joss Whedon and co. don’t try to defy convention, they dive into it and come out the other side in a weird world where Spike and Buffy can be lovers, a world so strange that it’s more familiar than anything else on television. The Spike and Buffy pairing doesn’t simply mimic emotional truths we all know in greater depth in our own lives, it adds to our store of knowledge about the human condition.

“The human condition,” with its echo of disease, is an especially apt phrase for what drives Spike to woo Buffy and to respond with demonic anger when he fails to win her. It’s not that he’s a caricature, but rather that he’s rusty – it’s been 100 years since he actually was human. Like Anya, the vengeance demon who becomes mortal so she can be with nerdy Xander, Spike is learning how to be human. Not how to feel – he already does that – nor how to crush his feelings into conventional expression, but to express his feelings within the conventions of human behavior, the genre confines of being a person, without reducing them to clichés. The result is a bad boy who, when he finally does make a noble sacrifice at the end of the series, surprises us – astonishes us – with a goodness that was in no way predictable, nor even quite explainable. It’s neither in character nor out of character; it’s the irreducible complexity of free will exerting itself within the structure of a story.

(Counterpoint: Jaime J. Weinman, writing in Salon, thinks Spike ruined the show, by becoming its Fonzie.)

President Roslin, Battlestar Galactica, 2005

I've been hearing about the new Battlestar Galactica as one of the best things on television for a few years, but I foolishly resisted the hype. I say foolishly because I responded to the show just as friends do when I try to tell them that Buffy the Vampire Slayer was brilliant: Whatever, dork.

Know thyself: Dork, geek, and now, Battlestar fan. The show won me over with its patience. The first half hour or so of the pilot episode is dedicated to slow, ordinary life, and yet it's filled with dread. Not suspense, exactly, but something thicker and deeper beneath the surface. The plot is this: Forty years ago, the humans defeated their creation, the Cylons; the Cylons left and haven't been seen since. Life is peaceful and good. The Galactica is about to be decommissioned. The moment, as more than one critic has pointed out, is Clintonian -- the Cold War is over, and things are ok but not grand, and something is missing, and we're worried that something bad may be coming. It's a period of exhuberance for most and White Noise anxiety for the few. The ranks of the latter include Edward James Olmos as the brooding old admiral of the Galactica, who, warns in his farewell speech that you can't escape your sins. The past isn't dead, it isn't even past. And so it is with the Cylons, who return to destroy the world.

But before that happens, the show features a series of moments as good as one of the best Buffy episodes ever, "The Body." We see a handsome middle aged woman waiting in an elegant but sterile room. Sun filters in through skylights; the atmosphere is wan. Who is she? What is she waiting for? When a doctor finally enters, it's so obvious that we barely need dialogue; and get almost none, as a space ship lumbers overhead, obscuring their words. Cut to a scene of the woman aboard a space ship, which looks -- deliberately -- just like an ordinary airplane; mundane. She is, we gather, a politican, but not a very important one. Just a functionary. Her aide, immediately recognizable as the kind of young earnest hack that trots around Capitol Hill, asks her a question. She cannot respond, flees to the bathroom. Unbuttons her jacket, grabs her chest, heaves with repressed grief and shock.

And that's about all we know of the death sentence, perphaps breast cancer, of the woman who is about to become president of the survivors of the Cylon attack (by virtue of her position as 43rd in succession, following the Cylon's nuclear attack). It's slow and painful and very real, perhaps all the more so for its contrast with the fantastical story. Indeed, it makes the fantastical story much sharpe -- the cancer dread, so understated, is real. So then might be our fear of the Cylons, who, after all, are a metaphor.

I'm not ready to say for what. I've only seen the pilot and one episode. The latter is a bit weaker. One of the strengths of the pilot was that the same quiet observation with which we attended the president's diagnosis marked the approach of the director to the inevitable space battles. Geeks know there's no noise in space, of course, so that wins the show some realism points. More importantly, it forces the viewer to provide the soundtrack; and the usual "action theme" won't suffice. In the silence we confront the fact that the good guys will rally like David fighting Goliath, but to no avail. They'll be destroyed like anyone who terribly underestimates their enemies.

Alas, the director evidently overestimated the average viewer. The first regular episode features laser guns a-blasting and Cylons droning in space battle, standard sci-fi theatrics. What's left -- what makes the program still so interesting -- are the actors, particularly the president (Mary McDonnell). She quietly suppresses the horror of their post-apocalyptic condition as she carries on with leading them to survival. It's the silent dread of the pilot episode's space battles, or of an ordinary, horrifying prognosis -- an emotion I haven't seen portrayed on television since Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Whatever, dork.