I spent a few days out of town, and now have spent the last two fighting a cold, so this post will be extremely brief.
But while attempting to fend off this cold (we’re at a bit of a stalemate at the moment), I will point out that when you’re feeling ill, comedies are MUCH better to occupy yourself than dramas.
Which may be why last night’s presidential debate was a godsend.
TONIGHT: Finally, the triumphant return of Happy Endings (and another show that has managed to grow on me a bit, Don’t Trust The B—- in Apartment 23), which I wholly expect will cure my cold completely.
When you fall in love with a television show, it’s almost never an all at once, love-at-first-sight type deal; it builds up, over time, a collection of little moments and jokes (or dramatic scenes, or explosions, or whatever it is that you like) over the course of a number of episodes.
That being said, you can probably find (and point to) a moment, a joke that turned you, when you realized that you were in it for the long haul. On 30 Rock, it took the “Captain Needa” joke to really hook me in:
On Community, although I enjoyed the pilot much more than most people I know, it was really the moment between Abed and his father in “Introduction to Film” where the show really first showed its heart (I can’t find the moment but here’s the short film Abed makes that affects his father):
And last night’s Ben & Kate was what really did it for me; it was the episode that really showed the heart underneath it all – a heart that we knew was there, but for the first time, the show really let us see.
It tied together three successful stories (Ben and his sadness over losing out on the future he thought he had, Kate and her old friend coming to an understanding that although they’re in different places in their lives, they’ll still be friends, and Tommy’s runner that reveals his own regret and why he’s so mad about once loaning out fifteen dollars) that all fundamentally explored the notion of past vs. present and our expectations of how our lives will go vs. how they actually go.
To top it all off, they How I Met Your Mother-ed us (in a good way) by using a little bit of unreliable narrator technique to show us that the idea that Kate spent her birthdays alone wasn’t quite true – earning a nice, heartfelt moment without getting cheesy.
And for me, they provided something even more important: that moment that hooked me. That made me realize that I’m in it for the long haul.
Apologies for the delay in posting – this was meant for Monday, but work circumstances kept me from being able to complete it until today.
Sunday night I watched two shows that highlight for me the problems with audience expectation – in that the expectations directly affected my overall enjoyment of each show.
I generally try not to let expectations overwhelm me – after all, if something is good, it’s good, right? In the case of an hour of television (or half hour, or movie… you get the idea), it should be judged objectively, on its own merits.
Of course, that’s a nice little theory, but not how things work in actual reality. Here we compare and contrast. Here we judge you against yourself, against your potential and the bar you’ve set for yourself.
A simple explanation for why certain people win debates, and for why on Sunday I found myself enjoying The Walking Dead more than Homeland.
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Let’s begin here: The Walking Dead is not an amazing show.
It’s a good show. It’s an entertaining show. It fundamentally captures more or less everything that you’d want from a zombie show, has some talented actors within its cast, and all in all does what its supposed to.
But for most of its two year existence, I’ve judged it against the expectations within my brain. The expectations that a show with such a pedigree (with Frank Darabont and then, after he left, Glen Mazzara at the helm) and subject matter (who doesn’t love zombies?) could give us a show that could approach the greatness of the rebooted Battlestar Galactica (which I still rank among the greatest shows of the past twenty years, easily – and if you haven’t seen it, you don’t know).
Alas, The Walking Dead has never quite lived up to my expectations. Some odd characters who somehow never managed to be fully fleshed out despite two seasons of exposure to them (looking at you, T-Dog) and a rather large number of episodes focused on inaction left me often considering dropping the show from my rotation. Although to their credit, every time I felt that way, they’d somehow pick that moment to give us something like this:
I mean, that’s just unfair. I was all set to quit and then they did that to me.
But I have moved away from my initial point, which is that two seasons of feeling only loosely connected to the show means that I’ve come to expect only moderate enjoyment from the show, and when they returned this Sunday with, overall, a pretty enjoyable episode with the requisite jump-scares and modest victories followed by bad luck/tragedy, I found myself getting pulled in. And so my modest expectations were surpassed.
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Homeland, on the other hand, gave me an episode that I was mildly disappointed in.
Don’t get me wrong; it’s still easily one of the best shows on television right now (although how high a bar that is can be debated), but this show is, in a lot of ways, a victim of its own success. The first season of the show was so entertaining, so tense, so nerve-wracking, that it is almost impossible for the show to top – and now, because the show has evolved from its first season question (is Brody a sleeper agent/can Carrie prove it) to its second season conspiracy (how does Brody manage to keep his position in government and keep doing wildly illogical things for abu Nazir/can Carrie prove it), the show is putting itself in a situation that:
1. Is taking the show from its hyper-real (but believable) first season to a land of 24 logic (Brody being able to see the imminent attack on abu Nazir and text him in the last episode, Carrie being allowed to wander around the CIA unaccompanied in this one).
2. Is exposing the flaws in the Brody/Jessica storyline – mostly in the sense that because Jessica is becoming a larger part of the second season, it’s becoming clear that they haven’t fully figured her out yet (her “we need to think if we’re going to stay married” rant to Brody was pretty much like every other “we need to think if we’re going to stay married” rant in television history).
Is this unfair? Absolutely. I’m picking at nits here. But that’s the point. Because I’ve come to expect a certain level of entertainment/sophistication from the show, I end up disappointed (rather than still enjoying a good hour of television overall) because of my belief that they can do better.
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So taking us back to Sunday night, two shows, one with modest expectations at best, one which I have impossibly high hopes for. And while the latter was still probably better in most regards, the other was flashier, more visceral, and most importantly, surprised in its effectiveness.
And that’s how Mitt Romney won the first Presidential debate of 2012.