When Good Shows Go Bad

My friend James is a Pink Floyd completist which is why he bought the Roger

Waters album Music From The Body (possibly the worst album in the history of rock & roll, although Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music comes close) and which is why I watched the season 7 1/2 finale of Mad Men. Mad Men was once a great show but which has outstayed its welcome recycling ideas and plots endlessly until all the originality and spark has gone. For a show that makes a ton of money for its network you have to wonder too how the back projection is so utterly incompetent: the scenes in the light aircraft and in the moving cars are so poor you wonder if they are meant to be meta-textually bad, a deliberate breaking of the 4th wall via dodgy back projection, which Quentin Tarantino did so well in Pulp Fiction. But this I think would be to give Mad Men too much credit. The show has gotten boring and cheap. 

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Americans make the best television in the world but almost every good American show you can think of hangs around too long. Battlestar Galactica's 4th season was an utter disaster, Arrested Development's long awaited 4th season was a huge disappointment, the Sopranos got boring at the end, even Breaking Bad got long in the tooth. Few show runners can resist the lure of money, the idea that if they make enough programmes they'll get a syndication deal...but they should resist. There is another way of doing business. The British way. 2 seasons of 6 episodes and you're done. You'll always leave the fans wanting more and quality will never suffer. Who did this? The Office, Fawlty Towers, Flight of the Conchords (which was on HBO but had very much a BBC sensibility) etc. etc. I can think of fewer examples of drama series doing this alas, but in general the longer a show goes on the more bereft of ideas it becomes. Even my beloved Louie is beginning to get a bit stale. And don't even talk about The Simpsons...
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(Incidentally, as probably all of you already know, the concept of 'jumping the shark' was invented for the Happy Days episode in which Fonzie jumped over a shark in water skis - still a better idea than killing Kara Thrace and resurrecting her as an angel.)

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If you can't go the British route the 2nd best thing to do is to get your show cancelled in the 2nd or 3rd season while its a cult but not a ratings success. I sometimes imagine what Breaking Bad would have been like if it had ended with Walter White killing The Chicken Man or if Battlestar Galactica had been cancelled right after they had discovered the fake Earth or Mad Men hadn't made it out of the first season or if Arrested Development had stayed dead...The showrunners and creators wouldn't be as rich but they would have the sympathy and love of their fans and peers alike and as Orson Welles famously said "in Hollywood everyone thinks it's all about the money but the real currency is respect." 

Game Of Thrones S2E1, S2E2, Mad Men S5E2

Lena Headey's good but Peter Dinklage steals the show as usual

It's been 12 years since I read A Clash of Kings which is the second book in George RR Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire sequence. I have only vague memories of that novel but Game of Thrones S2E1 surprisingly brought a lot of those memories from the depths of goodness knows where. The episode begins in the aftermath of Eddard Stark's death as various houses jockey for power in Westeros. The episode nicely captured many of the diverse strands of the novel and brought us up to date with the characters from Game of Thrones. As usual Peter Dinklage stole every scene he was in and in fact, if you'll notice, he's been given top billing. From what I remember of Clash we get to know even more characters than were in GOT and the civil war on Westeros becomes even more complicated. I don't know how the TV series is going to cope with all this without shortchanging some of the actors or compressing some of action.  
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Anyway S2E1 was all about scene setting and recapitulation and it did it pretty well. We got some nice Northern Irish landscapes in S2E1: several different Ulster forests, a piece of beach that looked a bit like Whitepark Bay and snowy volcanic vistas that definitely were not Ireland and must have been Iceland. E2 established a few more characters and laid the seeds for a bit of a story that I do remember about Greyjoy. It was nice to see Richard O'Brien popping up as Greyjoy's dad. Plenty of T&A in episode 2 for the pervy TV reviewers complaining about the lack of it in E1. Good use of British regional accents too in these episodes: as well as Yorkshire we got Geordieland, Welsh, Scottish, mild Ulster and soft Irish, as well as Peter Dinklage's dodgy home counties voice.  
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Not much happened in the two episodes but the strands of future conflict were definitely laid. GOT S2E1 B+ S2E2 B
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Regarding Mad Men E2, like the blogger in the New York Times, I too was surprised to see them go the Frasier route with January Jones's pregnancy. We already had someone close to Don die of cancer so it would have been bathos to give Betty cancer too. There was therefore zero dramatic tension and the lameness of the storyline readily became apparent. I have a feeling that the writers on Mad Men dislike January Jones as a person so they've been thinking up ways to humiliate the character. Maybe. Mad Men S5 E2 C-

Mad Men S5 E1

Much modern film making is based on the false premise that people change. Executives want the characters in their films to arc and grow and learn things about themselves over the space of 120 minutes. Its silly of course because very few adults grow or learn things or change. Thats why most movies are so bad: they're centred around this central untruth and they feel completely artificial. (That and the fact that the core audience for films seems to be 14 year old boys). 
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Television is different. In TV you don't have to have growth. In TV you can go to the planet of the week, jump through the time gate, have Kirk fall in love with Joan Collins, watch Joan Collins get hit by a bus and leave. Famously on Seinfeld the mantra was "no growth, no hugs," which seems about right. Even on a show like Modern Family which ends each episode with a one minute voice over detailing what the characters "learned" over the previous 22 minutes, essentially they're fibbing because the reset button is pushed and everyone is exactly the same for the very next episode. 
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This is why Mad Men is so comforting. In five seasons no one has really changed at all. Don is still moody, introspective and a horn dog. Pete remains a spoiled, ungrateful little shit. Peggy is smart, sassy and insecure. Roger constantly cracks wise to cover his deep misery, angst and depression. We want these characters to stay like this. Its what we're used to and we like it. S5 E1 has been criticised in some quarters for its lack of action and the fact that everyone seems the same. To me this is not a pertinent critique and is applying the standards of one medium, film, to another, television. In fact the opening episode was pretty good. The plot such as it was, was about the surprise party Megan threw for Don's 40th birthday. She scandalised a couple of people by doing a little song and dance number. Don was upset not by the song and dance but by the fact that all sensible people on planet Earth hate parties and only the completely insane enjoy surprise parties or having a party at one's own house. 
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I liked the lightness of touch of S5E1 (Harry has become a great comedic staple, seeing Pete's gun again etc.), the gags (Roger's quips and Pete's evil practical joke about the Staten Island Ferry terminal) and the grown up resolution to some of the storylines (the guy with the wallet wasn't a complete asshole). For me the best part of the episode wasn't Megan and Don attempting to ruin the white carpet but the lovely scene between Joan and Lane Pryce the two most human characters at SCDP. Both of them were feeling vulnerable and sad and both had the emotional capacity to comfort one another. Nice. 
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A great start to S5. A-. 

Mad Men Sucks?

For four years Mad Men haters have been sitting in their decidedly non Danish Modern armchairs waiting patiently for the backlash to begin. That is not a long time, and they should consider themselves lucky, I've been waiting for the Harry Potter backlash for a decade and it still hasn't arrived. Fortunately for the Mad Men heretics their time may be now. In a well argued piece in the New York Review of Books Daniel Mendelsohn attempts to demolish Mad Men using the Karl Rove method of attack - going after the show via its strongest bastions by hurling ballista at the writing, the directing and the acting. Mendelsohn got in my bad books almost immediately in his article by talking snarkily about "popular entertainments," here we go I thought he's going to go on for a couple of thousand words about how Mad Men isn't as deep as novel, because of course he's writing in the New York Review of Books, after all, not Entertainment Weekly; but then he had the wit to defuse that bomb by mentioning the TV shows he does like:

shows as different as the now-iconic crime dramas The Sopranos and The Wire, with their darkly glinting, almost Aeschylean moral textures; the philosophically provocative, unexpectedly moving sci-fi hit Battlestar Galactica, a kind of futuristic retelling of the Aeneid;

which are the ones I like too (obviously he must not have seen the final episode of Galactica which catastrophically ruined the entire mythology). Mendelsohn continues: 

With these standouts (and there are many more), Mad Men shares virtually no significant qualities except its design. The writing is extremely weak, the plotting haphazard and often preposterous, the characterizations shallow and sometimes incoherent; its attitude toward the past is glib and its self-positioning in the present is unattractively smug; the acting is, almost without exception, bland and sometimes amateurish. Worst of all—in a drama with aspirations to treating social and historical “issues”—the show is melodramatic rather than dramatic. By this I mean that it proceeds, for the most part, like a soap opera, serially (and often unbelievably) generating, and then resolving, successive personal crises (adulteries, abortions, premarital pregnancies, interracial affairs, alcoholism and drug addiction, etc.), rather than exploring, by means of believable conflicts between personality and situation, the contemporary social and cultural phenomena it regards with such fascination: sexism, misogyny, social hypocrisy, racism, the counterculture, and so forth.

That a soap opera decked out in high-end clothes (and concepts) should have received so much acclaim and is taken so seriously reminds you that fads depend as much on the willingness of the public to believe as on the cleverness of the people who invent them; as with many fads that take the form of infatuations with certain moments in the past, the Mad Men craze tells us far more about today than it does about yesterday. But just what in the world of the show do we want to possess? The clothes and furniture? The wicked behavior? The unpunished crassness? To my mind, it’s something else entirely, something unexpected and, in a way, almost touching.

I started losing interest in Mad Men in Season 3 and while I'm not quite in the haters camp I think Mendelsohn makes a lot of decent points. However TV, like cinema, is a visual medium, and it doesnt hurt that Mad Men cast several beautiful actresses in leading roles. Is it all about the visuals then? You can read the rest of Mendelsohn's piece at NYRB, here.