Category Archives: Kay Gardella Memorial TV Review Blog

television reviews

Mad Men Season 6 Finale — Wherever You Go, There You Are

Kay Gardella Memorial TV Review Blog, ,

If living a lie is killing you, and you make your living by lying, where does that leave you?

We started the season with Don reading The Divine Comedy, and it’s felt like a slog through hell. The preacher who gets kicked out of the whorehouse had a point – maybe the worst thing is not believing that God can forgive you — that change is a possibility, redemption possible. It’s as good a definition of hell as any.

Certainly, the starting place for many in recovery is belief – if only in some kind of abstract power greater than yourself. Maybe, just maybe, Don is getting there. Maybe a god with a sense of irony set up the other preacher – the asshole in the bar who makes the remark about RFK and MLK Jr– in order to provoke Don into finally punching him. What better way to hit bottom, than to do it while finally standing for something? Remember after MLK Jr had been killed, when Megan and Sally went to a rally, while Don stayed home and then took Bobby to the movies, and both the women gave Don that “what a pathetic excuse for a human” look.

He may have been drunk and disorderly, but at least he was engaged.

So what else happened? None of the carnage we might have feared. Megan is not dead, but the marriage might be – which is not a bad thing, given that Don married her in a desperate attempt to (again) reinvent himself, and when he tried to remake her in his image and failed, he gave up and got into bed with a neighbor’s wife. Sally is not dead either, and after months of alienation, perhaps Don’s moment of honesty with his kids, might be the beginning of their reconciliation although that’s way too neat, fake, and unlikely. The thing that is likely, is that Sally is getting a hell of an education for a future as a memorist or fiction writer.

Ted does the right thing for his family, but still comes off as a douche, leaving poor Peggy to her embittered future, unless she and Stan get a clue, partner up in life and work and start a new kind of agency together.

In the season premiere, we met our first double of Year 6, the soldier about to go to Vietnam. We sense he won’t make it back, but will die as Dick/Don should have. There were tons of other doubles – Jim and Roger, Ted and Don, and of course Don and Bob. The season ends with Benson ascendant and Draper fired. We also see alcoholic Duck, who was fired by Don, walking in to the agency with Don’s replacement. But the biggest surprise surrogate of all is Mrs. Campbell. Don almost runs away to California. Mrs. Campbell takes a cruise. Don creates a campaign with the slogan, “the jumping off point, which features an empty suit left on a beach, and all the clients can see is death. Where’s the body? It’s not Don who vanishes at season’s end, it’s Mrs. Campbell Was she pushed? Did she change her name and start again? Or did she jump? Leap into the unknown?

What will the final year bring? While people may gripe that the show isn’t what it used to be and hasn’t been since maybe the pilot, one of the good things is the way in which it continues to surprise.

Despite the feel-good sentiment of Moon River, one hopes Joan holds her own and doesn’t rekindle her“romance.” with Roger. Joan is all about trying to do the right thing. She fails regularly, but Roger just brings out the worst in her – fooling around with a married man, careless sex on the street while your rapey-husband is in Vietnam, prostituting yourself to save the agency because he didn’t try to stop you. (Joan and Peggy, each with her own career path and path to or away from love, provide another mirror.

It will be a letdown if Don starts going to AA meetings and begins to recover from his alcoholism. Despite the idea woven in that we can all be forgiven, we can’t all just start over. He can’t drop the Draper persona. He deserted the army and stole another man’s identity. There are consequences. He can’t really leave advertising either. There’s nothing else he knows how to do. You need tools and support to fight addiction. He has neither. He drinks because he’s an alcoholic, but he’s an alcoholic in part because he’s self-medicating. Living a lie and lying for a living is stressful, and other than sex, tobacco, and alcohol Don’s got nothing to fall back on. Addiction is a progressive illness. While Don may now be grasping with the beginning of the skill-set for recovery, it’s a bit like a man wondering around the desert who just found enough water to maybe stave off dehydration for another hour.

This Is What a Family Looks Like

Kay Gardella Memorial TV Review Blog, Politics and Culture, , , ,

So, I will now be watching two “young adult” shows on ABC-Family. Switched at Birth was a guilty pleasure that turned out to be a justifiably great show.  The summer premiere is next week. Yay! The Fosters, is a new family drama, with a too-cute name. It’s the story of a family, two moms, the biological son from a previous relationship, two adopted kids and the new foster girl. The way I figure it, if it pisses off the so-called “One Million Moms,” it deserves a chance. That’s why I shop at JC Penney.

Having briefly worked on the outskirts of the foster care system in Vermont, I find the premise not unrealistic. I’ve met families like these – adults who’ve built families by taking in kids that need them, and often spend their working lives serving the community as well. In this case, one mom is a cop, and the other a vice-principal at the bestest charter school ever.

The pilot throws a few curve balls. One mom is black, the other white. The adopted kids are Latino twins – Jesus and Mariana. Jesus takes medication, and though it’s not stated, it seems to be for ADHD. Mariana is “the good one,” but she has some secrets. Brandon, Stef the cop’s biological son, is a talented musician, the oldest, and an understated hottie. His girlfriend is a bit uh possessive, or maybe just a run of the mill mean girl. All of them go to a magical charter school on the beach (!) where teachers go by their first names, and the cafeteria is probably organic. Callie, the new girl, was recently sprung from  juvie, but by the end of the pilot, we find out she landed there trying to protect her cross-dressing kid brother. And just to throw more into the mix, for no good reason, other than “family drama” Stef’s new work partner is her ex-husband, Brandon’s father.

The acting is good, and the writing has a bit of depth. I was impressed by one scene with Stef’s boss, where a bunch of stuff about their relationship — including its boundaries, was nicely implied. That had to have been thrown in for the adults. Nice touch.

I wonder if they’ll make having two moms seem as cool as being deaf? All I know is if I were Callie and I landed at that school, I’d do just about anything to stay. At one point, Stef talks to Lena about making space for the growing brood and says, “We’re not The Brady Bunch.” But really, given how functional this blend is, they aren’t very far from it.

I’d say ABC has another show families can watch together, and even olds like me can enjoy. If you don’t have cable or missed it, you can check it out here, free and legal, and/or watch this trailer:

(Enjoy this review? Isn’t it strange that Marion, who loves these sappy television shows writes hard-hitting transgressive fiction?)

Awwr Matey! How to End TV Piracy

Kay Gardella Memorial TV Review Blog, Politics and Culture, ,

Stumbled across an article in Forbes from back in April, referring to a New York Times columnist’s confessing to illegally using someone else’s HBO-Go password to watch the premiere of Game of Thrones. GOT is known as the most pirated show on television.

I know piracy is prevalent, but I wonder how much of it comes from people with cable who just aren’t paying for premium channels.  How many people who would have subscriptions forgo them in order to stream or download illegally? I don’t imagine too many families or even groups of roommates sitting around someone’s tablet searching for a none “broken” illegal link to a program. If you’ve got a cable television subscription, it’s not a big deal to add a premium station or two.

The real issue is that more and more people are choosing to opt out of watching “television”  the old-fashioned way, and are now watching exclusively through the Internet. Most network shows are available albeit with commercial interruption free the day after they are initially broadcast.

Some shows do have to be paid for. AMC offers episodes of Mad Men and The Walking Dead through Amazon for $1.99 an episode. Viewing legally means not having to worry about picking up malware and viruses, or deal with pop-up ads and other annoyances. This in addition to its being both ethical and legal. I’m sure people use illegal sites to watch AMC offerings anyway, as some people just can’t wait until the next day or love the idea of getting something for nothing, but my guess is that there is less stealing going on proportionally than for HBO. This is because neither HBO nor Showtime offer an option for non-subscribers to watch current programming legally. You can get a cable or satellite television subscription or you can wait a year or so for the disks.

If HBO-Go offered services to people who don’t have cable television, or allowed one-time streaming of current episodes for a per episode fee, they’d be able to cut down substantially on theft. If all channels offered access to their shows at the same time as they are broadcast, they could probably defeat the pirates and make more money.

The premium stations wanted to make Internet-only subscriptions available, but the cable companies prohibited it. Runaway piracy of popular programs is a by-product. Understandable that these dinosaurs want to put off extinction for as long as possible. But how long until everybody gives the boot to cable television as we know it? The cable companies are like the publishing houses and bookstore chains of a few years ago, dismissing e-books as a fad when they should have been figuring out a new survival strategy.

(Enjoy this post? Marion’s books are so cheap, you don’t have to pirate them!)

The Office — Escape from Scranton

Kay Gardella Memorial TV Review Blog, , ,

When the American version of The Office first appeared, it was condescending in a Hollywood way, written by people who may have once, briefly, worked in a setting similar to Dunder-Mifflin, but always believed they were destined for better things, and got the hell out as soon as they could.

Over time, however, it became habit-forming. Steve Carrell made Michael Scott’s need to be loved idiosyncratic, terribly funny and somehow a reflection of everyone’s inner-narcissist. Contrary to rumor, he was not the terrible boss we’ve all had. He might have shared some traits with bad bosses, but most truly horrific employers want to be feared, not loved. There was also, of course, Jim. From the beginning Jim, and to a lesser extent his beloved Pam, were our surrogates. They were young.  They were not weird. They were more than their jobs, and they fell in love. Communication was not great. It took Pam a while to see what should have been obvious.

Other characters also developed into full-fledged human beings although it took some longer than others. Angela, the office mean girl, needed to be taken down a few dozen pegs before we could consider liking her. As for Oscar, if I’m not mistaken, until the last couple of seasons, he seemed mostly to be there as two-fer, and to make Michael’s jokes that much more embarrassing. Dwight remained eccentric, but matured. Andy’s arc was the strangest. He started out as Continue reading The Office — Escape from Scranton →

You Can’t Reboot Character

Kay Gardella Memorial TV Review Blog,

I may be talking out of my butt here because I haven’t seen the latest Star Trek movie, but here’s why I’m having doubts about the whole “reboot” enterprise. (Warning: There is an unavoidable BIG spoiler coming, regarding Into the Darkness. I will give two more warnings.)

When I saw, the first Abrams’ version, I liked it because it offered the promise of new adventures with the original characters. Not only that, but because it was a reboot – anything could happen. Characters we love could die without messing up the old timeline because the old timeline had already disappeared, which is not the same as saying it never happened. It did. Old Spock is proof of that.

Did I have reservations? Sure. I hated the idea that Spock – moral, upright Spock, was somehow responsible for the destruction of his entire planet – or rather setting in motion, inadvertently, the forces that led to its destruction. That felt like too much for him to bear. But it was an entertaining movie, and the parts I might have thought about went by too quickly for me to think about them.

However, this past weekend the better half and I watched Star Trek IV – The Voyage Home, and combining that with reading meh reviews for Into the Darkness, I’ve been thinking about what might have gone wrong.

We don’t love original, old-timey Star Trek for the cheesy sets, the mini-skirts or the way the computer screens light up. We love it because of the accidental chemistry between Kirk and Spock. We love it because as Edith Keeler said to Spock regarding where she thinks he belongs, “at his [Kirk’s] side as if you’ve always been there and always will.”

It’s about the characters, stupid.

And here’s the thing about iconic fictional characters, the more we get to know them, the deeper we love them. Experience changes them. Maybe not in big ways, but in subtle ones we watchers and readers track. We learn information over time. Holmes has a brother, Moriarty is his mortal enemy. There are cases that don’t go the way they should and these leave a mark forever. For Holmes, Irene Adler will always be “the woman.” Picard takes up an alien flute after his probe experience, and is never the same after the Borg’s get him. We know what it means when he plays that flute. Spock takes Jim out of “this damned place” (Spoiler is coming on next page. There’ll be a final warning!) Continue reading You Can’t Reboot Character →