TV

Hold everything - have you been watching the new HBO series In Treatment? If not, you MUST.

If you don’t have HBO, that’s no excuse. You can watch full episodes on the HBO site, and you can also grab the free (for the moment) download from iTunes. I don’t have any TV service at all, and I just watched the first five episodes in a row on the computer. I’d thought I’d just watch the first one and then do other stuff… but I couldn’t.

To learn a little more about the show, I recommend David Bianculli’s post here. Otherwise, just watch it and thank me later. By which I mean, post a comment and tell me what you thought (actual thanks are purely optional). I’d also be very curious to hear from anybody who’s seen the original Israeli version.

To the complete non-surprise of people who know me well, I’m geeked for this one:

How geeked? Geeked enough to make my a self-portrait a la Simpson over at the Simpsons Movie web site, which was kind of a fun little activity - I recommend it.

On the other hand, even I am not geeked enough to go to the Burbank Kwik-e-Mart. I hear the line has been down the block. For what? You get inside, and it’s a regular 7-11 with a few extra Simpsons knick-knacks. Whatever. I bet a lot of people probably drive by and just instinctively stop and go get in line, figuring that if all these people are waiting in line there must be something good when you get to the front.

This clip of the next, um, Welsh IdolWales’s Got Talent was just too delightful not to post. Check out the reaction from an auditorium full of kids who showed up hoping to hear the next Kelly Clarkson:
(Via Andrew Sullivan, whose blog is, I swear to you, not the only other one I ever read)

As we used to say back in the undergrad Fine Arts dorm, “SANG, boy!”

I was just listening to an episode of the reliably interesting radio show This American Life called “Quiz Show.” The second of the episode’s three segments was about the MIT Mystery Hunt, an annual event where teams of intimidatingly brainy puzzle geeks race each other to the solution of a puzzle concocted by the previous year’s winning team. The following passage about what the reporter calls “‘A-ha!’ moments” traveled the boomerang path of irony to cause me an “A-ha!” moment of my own:

Are absolute Answers a human construct, while the underlying Truth in nature is not knowable in such terms? I was immediately reminded of the works of filmmaker David Lynch, in particular his briefly brilliant TV series Twin Peaks, which aired in the early 1990’s.

A typically atypical Twin Peaks scene.

As many will recall, the plot of the show concerned the question of who killed Laura Palmer, the high school homecoming queen in an obscure northwestern logging town. The ABC network promoted Peaks by following the “Who Shot J.R.?” paradigm, and did so quite effectively - at the outset. Lynch was in no great hurry to resolve the Laura Palmer case, sticking instead to his own general style: the seemingly straightforward narrative meandered through a landscape of imagery as strange and disturbing as it was visually striking. Perhaps inevitably, the series soon proved to be as daunting a challenge for network publicists as it was for viewers (apart from a small number of die-hard fans, of which I was one).

One could look at Twin Peaks as a continuous series of “whys,” and indeed, many have. Why the dancing midget, and why was his dialogue recorded backward and played back forward? Why didn’t Agent Cooper’s susceptibility to bizarre visions of midgets and giants disqualify him from becoming an FBI agent? Why does the log lady carry a log around, and is it always the same log or does she have, like, a collection of them? As much fun as these “whys” are, they are incidental to the overall purpose: the series as a whole represents one big Why.

The following paragraph contains a SPOILER. If you are planning to watch the Twin Peaks DVD set and don’t want to know who killed Laura Palmer, consider yourself alerted.

When the murder’s resolution confirms the presence of supernatural elements, the Sheriff comments, “I’ve lived in these old woods most of my life. I’ve seen some strange things, but this is way off the map. I’m having a hard time believing,” the mystical Agent Cooper responds, “Is it easier to believe a man could rape and murder his own daughter?” Satisfying though these lines were, they were also uncommonly pedantic for David Lynch. They were not at all uncommonly pedantic for prime time network television; in fact, I’d lay odds that pressure from ABC forced Lynch to plainly spell out something that his best work would only imply. Finding out WHO killed Laura Palmer is incidental to the essential mystery of why she was killed.

When puzzles like the ones in the MIT Mystery Hunt are solved, that’s it. Done. It’s solved. Completion feels good, which is why there are puzzle junkies, why the spongy psychological term closure has become popular, and why TV networks don’t like unresolved murders. I’m no different in this sense: I like having all the loose ends tied up as much as the next guy. Ultimately, puzzles and TV shows provide frameworks for delivering little completion fixes. We seek them out because out in the day-to-day world they just don’t happen too often. You will almost surely never know why you didn’t get into grad school ten years ago, or why the thieves picked your car. But when you solve the Sunday crossword, it helps. It reminds you that answers exist, and you do sometimes get them. However, when a TV show cops out and spoon-feeds you an answer it helps less, because the answers most often seem unsatisfying. Good dramatists of any medium know that questions are more compelling than answers, and that the only worthy answers are ones that lead straight to more questions.

Maybe I’ve overlooked the full significance of the segregated Survivor season. Or, maybe people are giving it more credibility than it merits.
From BBC:

Officials in New York are campaigning to stop the broadcast of a new series of reality show Survivor which divides contestants into ethnic “tribes.”

City council officials are to stage a rally on Friday to urge New York-based CBS network to pull the 13th series of Survivor, due to air from 14 September… New York councillor John Liu told the Associated Press: “The idea of having a battle of the races is preposterous.

"How could anybody be so desperate for ratings?"

In a post- Who Wants to Marry a Millionaire world, I didn’t know people were still bothering to ask that question.

…Hispanics Across America founder Fernando Mateo called the move an “offensive and cheap trick” to boost ratings. "The participants will be held to the daunting and unfair challenge of representing an entire race of people," he said.

I think this is where I’m missing the outrage bus. I can’t take seriously the notion that any four people represent all the qualities and capabilities of an entire ethnicity - much less any four people who would be selected to be on Survivor.

[Mateo continued,] "What will it mean for a team - a race - to fail in a battle of wits and strength against another race?"

It will mean that the team lost. For that team’s race, it doesn’t mean shit. Let us not forget that we’re talking about Survivor here, a game so capricious that its "All-Stars" season was won by a featherweight sorority girl using the ingenious tactic of riding her boyfriend’s coattails.

On the other hand, there is something to the argument that the show will promote racial divisiveness. The reliable pundidiot Rush Limbaugh has already jumped on the Survivor story to use it as a launching pad for some of his typical bigotry, followed by an indignant denial that anything of what he said was racist. I don’t care to reprint what he said on my blog, but those who’d like to can read about it here.

I’m still of the mind that CBS and Mark Burnett should be given the benefit of the doubt. Calling for them to pull the show, as the New York officials are doing, is only going to solidify their resolve to run it and may indeed boost their ratings. Ultimately, I continue thinking that it’s all a tempest in a teapot. After a few episodes, I don’t see where this season of Survivor is going to look different than any of the past seasons.