This guy spends a lot of time trying not to get killed.
HBO’s hugely successful and expensive fantasy series, Game Of Thrones, based on the popular novel by George R.R. Martin, doesn’t need any help from an independent blogger to prove its commercial worth to HBO, to find more viewers, or to get the green light for another season. But, being the landmark mainstream institution that it now is, I fear that it may be overlooked – or just not given a chance at all – by some discerning, sophisticated viewers who think that it’s mostly gratuitous junk. And that would be a mistake, because Game Of Thrones, at least so far, is a work of remarkable complexity and nuance.
A friend who recently watched the pilot at my urging complained that, owing at least in part to the copious female nudity and explicit sex, he felt “pandered to,” and speculated that perhaps the show’s producers had a mandate from HBO to show “so many tits per episode.”
This would be a bit like hearing, from someone who had just seen only the pilot of Buffy The Vampire Slayer, that the world doesn’t need another vampire show, nor is it satisfying, through watching the series, to participate in the further fetishization of the blonde American high school cheerleader. Both of those complaints may be legitimate as far as they go, but they don’t allow for the possibility of a particular show that turns the problem inside out by using cliched tropes as a springboard to subvert, play with, and re-align the viewer’s expectations. Read the rest of this entry »
Michael Scott, of The Office, has spent years making his indie feature, Threat Level: Midnight, starring his co-workers (season 7, episode 17). TLM, taken as a reflection of real life, makes no sense whatsoever. But its genius is that it is a very accurate reflection of movie-life. It borrows structurally from so many films that it does feel a little bit like a studio movie, even though it has no budget. As we watch it, we are also, implicitly, watching a whole series of popular films through the eyes of Michael Scott, cringing as he commits them to memory but fails to understand the relationship between the fiction and the reality that it more or less represents. Read the rest of this entry »
A friend recently forwarded me a job listing, by which I was both amused and horrified:
“We have reached the point where we can’t grow it any more on our own, and we aren’t very good at sales anyway. We should focus on the code while someone else does the bizdev. We have outsourced everything that can be outsourced and need someone to step in as head of marketing/sales…However, you should also be up to date. Like, if you don’t have an iPhone 4 or recent Android phone, or if you use Windows at home, don’t apply. It sounds arrogant, but you need to be comfortable with our stack and with the increasingly mobile nature of software. We trialed one person who was older and didn’t jive on this particular point, and it didn’t work for us. We are essentially looking for Alec Baldwin’s character in this scene.”
Rubicon, the espionage thriller that was the best new show since Breaking Bad, has been canceled after only one glorious season. According to polling systems that were antiquated and stupid even when Eisenhower was president, the show has been shown to be popular with the wrong age group: viewers over 50.
It’s no accident that the first episode of the new Doctor Who aired the day before Easter, i.e. yesterday. I wonder if American fans like myself would have been slightly less eager to download it right away (instead of waiting for it to be broadcast on BBC America, which won’t happen until April 17) without a vague idea that the two events were related at a deeper level.
Doctor Who is based on the same archetype as Jesus, i.e. the regenerating martyr. The Doctor is now in his eleventh incarnation (the program, in some form or another, has been going on for thirty-two seasons). Each time the current actor leaves the show, the character dies and then comes back to life in a new body (made from his old one). He has a new personality, but the combined knowledge and experience of all previous versions. Read the rest of this entry »
