The Pop View

I feel asleep at the switch and never even noticed that this blog hit the five-year mark two weeks ago. Celebrate we must, even if belatedly.

I point you to my first post, which references my only piece of legitimate cred: once getting linked by Romenesko. In five years, this blog has never gotten close to such heights.

A lot of my initial posts seem pretty ephemeral, but a view are worth revisiting.

This post on Disneyland’s Enchanted Tiki Room was really popular for a long time. This post on John Oswald may be my first analytical thoughts on hip-hop, a subject to which I would repeatedly return (like this defense of sampling; plus, see here and here). I remain pleased with this post on The Magnificent Ambersons; the film is overdue for another viewing by me.

Even though the accompanying songs can no longer be downloaded, I still remain absurdly fond of this post on Sinatra. I was captivated by this low-budget video from the band Group Sounds. I think they ruined it with this revised official version, but the original version is thankfully still available via YouTube. That same year, OK Go got a lot of attention for “A Million Ways,” but “Things Fall Apart” was also clever in its own way.

In August of 2005, I noted how crazy it was that the four-year-old video for the Avalanches “Frontier Psychiatrist” kept popping up, like it was a brand new thing. Just recently, I informed somebody via Twitter, that it was not a new thing. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

Also, some thoughts on The 40-Year-Old Virgin, The Wedding Date, and Shattered Glass (featuring a cameo appearance from Adam Penenberg).

That’s just a few highlights from the first few months of The Pop View, so I encourage you to browse the archives.

The Pop View | Housekeeping | 07 26th, 2010 | No Comments »

As is my wont, I’ll try to make a point, circling around it repeatedly, unable to just kill the thing.

And thus it is, again, that I have to once again revisit my point on movement and progression in television storytelling in order to make a point I forgot to make.

This review of a Hung episode by the always magnificent Todd VanDerWerff says it exactly right:

The characters’ situations change, but they keep repeating the same thematic beats over and over and over. This is sort of like the pay cable equivalent of a crime procedural where the characters just solve the same cases over and over and over.

Yes!

Chuck – a show I often love – really wore me out last season with the way it would clumsily hit some theme over and over.

“Chuck wants to be a spy!” Characters would actually say it out loud that bluntly. And then the next episode, they’d say it again: “I know you really want to be a spy, Chuck.”

Two rules are revealed here. One, the old writing adage to Show Not Tell. If a character is frustrated, find some way to show that frustration. Don’t have him say, “I’m so frustrated.” Two, at some point, he’s going to have to do something about that frustration (This is my Movement and Progression argument). He shouldn’t just say every episode that he’s frustrated and then when we all get bored with that, just change the situation because it’s been milked dry.

A show can do the same thing over and over. For many years, Law & Order was very successful at it. But that approach isn’t going to work for every show.

The Pop View | Television | 07 26th, 2010 | No Comments »

Here are my biases about television programs.

I like TV shows about something. Anything.

Even Seinfeld – famously, a show about nothing – actually was about something: Modern alienation, the annoyances of those around us, the selfishness of humanity. Everybody Loves Raymond has things to say about dysfunctional family dynamics.

I have previously written about Veronica Mars, a show that was film noir set in high school, but also was a show that was absolutely about class warfare and other things. My feeling is that if a show isn’t about something, then it’s just a show where a bunch of stuff happens.

I prefer shows that progress over time.

I’ve mentioned this before (here and here), but it’s probably worth mentioning again. If you’re not running somewhere, then you’re just jogging in place.

If you watch the initial episodes of The Mary Tyler Moore Show from 1970 and then jump to the final episodes from 1977, you’ll notice character changes. Mary Richards became a stronger person. Lou Grant became more willing to show his softer side, at least to some.

If you watch I Love Lucy over time, you can tell the passage of time by things (Little Ricky’s age, the season they moved to Connecticut), but not by changes in character.

Look at The Brady Bunch. By and large, the stories didn’t change; the characters didn’t change. They added Cousin Oliver.

I think the defining characteristics of a truly terrible show is that it doesn’t know what it is about; its creators have nothing to say; things happen, but they never add up to anything.

Movement Is Progress

These two elements are tied together: Being About Something and Moving Forward. I can most easily demonstrate this by pointing to shows where this doesn’t happen.

On a drama, what you end up with is a lot of soap opera-style Sturm und Drang, leavened with the occasional touch of deus ex machina. There’s a lot of yelling and running around. Things happen and then they’re gone, leaving no trace behind.

On a sit-com, you end up with nothing but gags, strung along like popcorn on thread. The characters are straight men, stooges and quipsters. If a couple are in a loving relationship, you still go for the jugular on a joke, because it’s funny. Who cares about consistency? It’s all about the laugh. Those characters are Joke Delivery Vehicles.

So…

• Be about something.

• Acknowledge the events of the past, even if obliquely.

• Be willing to change, to move forward.

• The events should mean something to the characters, even if the issues are seemingly trivial. If they don’t care, why should we?

The Pop View | Television | 07 26th, 2010 | No Comments »

Thanks to Mo Ryan, we have some comments from J.J. Abrams at Comic-Con about the issue I discussed previously:

“I’m just less personally interested, naturally interested in non-serialized shows,” Abrams said. “I enjoy the investment and the anticipation and the characters and what’s going to happen… To me that’s the thing that always grabs you. I think they [the networks] want [serialized stories] too — they just don’t know it. When they talk about stories, stories imply time” and progress.

TV Week quoted more of Abrams from the session:

I think typically [the TV networks] are not [interested in serialized stories]. They want shows that can repeat, the studios want shows they can syndicate… When they talk about stories, stories imply time. Stories imply inevitability and some kind of progress… It’s very weird, because ultimately the serial is ALWAYS going to be what people are going to remember. What do they remember about ‘Cheers’? Sam and Diane, not a great joke.

I’m not necessarily arguing against self-contained episodes. i just find that never acknowledging what happened before is artificial.

The Pop View | Television | 07 23rd, 2010 | No Comments »

Following up in my last post on dramatic conflict…

I’ve said this before; I’m saying it again. One of my frustration with older modes of visual storytelling was the constant amnesia.

Long ago, television series (and comic books) always told standalone stories. And that’s okay. Lost and Fringe told big long stories. The Sopranos and The Wire had a more novelistic approach. But a show like The Mentalist tells a new story each week. And that’s okay.

But when I think about the shows of my youth, in the late Sixties and early Seventies, it just seems strange.

Let’s say it’s a medical show. The doctor hero gets personally involved with his patient. They form a real relationship. He saves her life, but they realize they can’t be together and she has to leave. Tearful goodbye.

And then the next week, it’s like it never happened. The doctor never mentions her. Maybe next season, he falls in love with another patient.

This drives me crazy.

I understand that there’s more than one way to do it. I’ve read debates in recent months among some who argued whether standalone episodes are better than mythology-driven episodes (e.g., The X-Files). But it’s always seemed artificial to never acknowledge the past. We viewers remember what happened before, so why shouldn’t the characters?

(See this old post for similar comments along these lines.)

The Pop View | Television | 07 22nd, 2010 | No Comments »

Drama is about conflict.

Right?

“Would you like a story about two people who always get along and everything in their life is great?”

Uh, no.

How you execute conflict is the variable.

I could do a cop show about police in conflict with criminals. And all the police officers are terrific people. But I could also do a show about deeply flawed people who sometimes come into conflict with their fellow officers – maybe their conflict is with themselves.

Your cop show could be more like Dragnet and Adam-12, or like Hill Street Blues and NYPD Blue. There will be conflict, but what kind? Deep, rich, complex conflict or a cheaper variety?

(Recall that the cheapest form of conflict on a police drama is the rebel cop whose superior is always threatening to have his badge.)

Here’s another example…

It’s no original thought to point out that movies like to rely on physical conflict, especially fights and chases. I recall seeing Splash in 1984 and initially thinking it was one of the best movies I’d ever seen. The conflict was like this:

• A man who can’t swim falls in love with a mermaid.
• A human, who must live on land, must try to forge a relationship with a mermaid, who must return to the sea.
• A regular guy must summon the moral strength to love a mystical creature.

Those are conflicts. But, right at the moment when Dr. Walter Kornbluth throws water on Madison, the movie turn into a chase involving government scientists. (Reminiscent of the way E.T. switched from a story about a relationship between a marooned alien and a boy to a chase involving government scientists.)

Too often, dramatic conflict consists of pointless bickering between characters, physical action in place of emotional struggles, stereotypical conflicts we’ve seen a million times before, and so on. Sometimes, the conflict seems like spinning plates, just a way of filling time on screen, never adding up to anything.

There must always be conflict. But what kind and to what end?

The Pop View | Film, Television | 07 21st, 2010 | No Comments »

Y’know, this is blog is not a bulk-oriented outlet, in terms of content. Never has been. Some of that’s procrastination, some of it’s due to limited time, but some of it comes from not having something original to say about events.

So, it’s unusual for me to weigh in on something that everybody’s already talking about. But, I just wrote about how Miley Cyrus and other young female performers seem caught up in playing this game that the entertainment industry foists on them. And I think this “Olivia Munn on The Daily Show” story is related.

Short version: The blog Jezebel whacked The Daily Show for being sexist (based, in part, of the hiring of Munn as a new correspondent). The Daily Show pushed back. People weighed in.

This article by Amanda Hess accurately lays out the possible explanations for the state of female employees of that television program:

• Jon Stewart is an outright sexist, guilty of the charges.
• The Daily Show is just emblematic of the sexist nature of television or the comedy industry; if they are sexist, so is everybody else.
• The rate of hiring female correspondents on The Daily Show just demonstrates the ingrained prejudices our society has about the funniness of men and women.
• Jon Stewart is just failing to take into account the ingrained sexism of the system; by not taking deliberate steps to counteract them, he is enabling sexism (even though he may not be sexist himself).

Hess comes down on the final explanation:

In order to challenge structural inequalities and actually recruit the best people for the job, the men who run comedy—men like Stewart—will have to do more than just not be overtly discriminatory.

Ta-Nehisi Coates makes the excellent point that you could have easily written a similar blog post about the “unshakeable whiteness” of magazine journalism. But I think that Munn and Coates, while they rightly call out Jon Stewart and The Daily Show for letting themselves off too easily, touch on an important of the original Jezebel post: Why pick on The Daily Show?

This Slate article from Emily Gould – who formerly worked for the Gawker media empire, which Jezebel is part of – offers an explanation. Bloggers must have “page-view-generating skills” and their “careers are dependent on maintaining their stats.” They way you attract traffic (and thus ad dollars) is through firing people up with controversies; readers typically respond with invective-filled comments.

Gould says that the feminist blogosphere has a tendency to tap in “outrage world.”

[These blogs are]  ignited by writers who are pushing readers to feel what the writers claim is righteously indignant rage but which is actually just petty jealousy, cleverly marketed as feminism.

All of this goes to demonstrate what my own personal response was to this “controversy.”

Yes, Jon Stewart and the producers of The Daily Show are being a little smug in declaring their feminist leanings.
Yes, Jezebel was being even more smug in singling out The Daily Show for attack. (Are they the most sexist show on television or just a great target?)

But, the important thing to recall is that the event driving the whole outrage is that The Daily Show hired Olivia Munn as a new correspondent. Previously, Munn’s reputation probably has been based primarily not on being funny, but on posing in swimsuits and jumping into a giant pie dressed in a French maid’s outfit.

So, that’s bad, right? She was hired for her looks and sexiness. The Daily Show hires its first female correspondent since Samantha Bee in 2003, and it’s a woman who dressed up in a Slave Leia outfit.

But the assumption was made that because she posed in a bikini, she couldn’t also be funny and talented. I kind of love the advice she gives here to people who may be offended. This recent interview reveals somebody who gets it about the debate surrounding her.

I’m prepared to give her a shot. I haven’t loved every correspondent on the show. So, if she stinks, she’s earned the right to fail on her own.

Compared to my previous post, when I lamented that young woman (and teenage girls) felt like they needed to vamp it up to be taken seriously, Munn is 30 years old. She can dress as she likes. I’ll simply judge her performance on The Daily Show as to whether she can be funny.

If it’s wrong to hire a woman for a job just because she looks good, it’s also wrong to assume a woman can’t be talented just because she looks good.

(As for how I feel about Munn’s predilection for doffing her clothes, I think of it as Liz Phair Syndrome. I was deeply unhappy when Phair pulled her “sex kitten” moves in 2003, but she’s an adult and that’s her choice. Either I like the records she puts out or I don’t.)

UPDATE: This article by Maureen Ryan fills in a lot of details about the current situation of women in the entertainment industry, especially behind the camera.

The Pop View | Television | 07 12th, 2010 | No Comments »

This article in yesterday’s NY Times caught my eye, since it’s about young fans of Miley Cyrus possibly being turned off by her new adult moves. It didn’t resonate with me because I’m a Miley hater (that said, I don’t care for her, personally or artistically) or because I disapprove of her acting beyond her years (although I do disapprove).

What struck me about it is how old this all is.

See this essay I wrote ten years ago about Britney Spears. These are thoughts from a decade ago, long before the really crazy stuff. At the time, I made it clear that it wasn’t just Britney, but also about all young actress and pop singers that were encouraged to make the transition from adolescence to adulthood through sexualization. I’m not sure how far this goes back – the Fifties, the Thirties – but I suppose it was the Nineties when it became ritualized. Star in a sit-com as a teen. Show ends (or is canceled). Pose nude in a magazine. Cast off your girlish ways and enter womanhood!

Actually, I can recall TV’s Nancy Drew, Pamela Sue Martin, posing for Playboy in 1978. She was 25 years old. But by the late Nineties, we had the so-called lad magazines like Maxim and FHM which were a respectable step below Playboy. No big thang to pose for those publications, right?

What I find depressing is the predictability of it all. I understand that it’s difficult for any performer to transition into adulthood. The few who make it stand out (Jodie Foster, Justin Timberlake). But it seems that these folks are encouraged (probably rather strongly) to act out in edgy ways to destroy their youthful image and seem more adult. But not adult in a bought-my-first-home way, but more in a got-my-first-DUI-arrest fashion.

Lindsay Lohan is a sad sight, but she’s walking familiar ground.

The Pop View | Music | 07 10th, 2010 | 1 Comment »

Long-time readers of this blog know that I continue to maintain a keen interest in the culture of Los Angeles, since I am a former Angeleno. Being a bit of a foodie, I have also followed the growth of the food truck phenomenon in recent years, with such business offering better food and promoting their business via Twitter and Facebook.

There are a few food trucks that have begun to regularly visit the neighborhood near my office (see my Twitter list) and I definitely appreciate having the new eating options.

In Washington, DC, the trucks seem to have identified areas where they can easily just pull up to the curb and start selling. But I’ve long wondered how this worked in other cities.

For example, see this 2009 news story about police hassling food trucks in the Wilshire District (spelled out in some more detail here). Currently, the food truck operators are battling efforts by Los Angeles City Councilman Tom LaBonge’s efforts to shut them down.

As this Los Angeles Business Journal story notes:

[The SoCal Mobile Food Vendors Association] faces its biggest test yet in a pair of City Council motions introduced by Councilman Tom LaBonge on June 11. LaBonge’s district includes a Miracle Mile strip where more than a dozen food trucks line up daily. He is seeking to ban food trucks from parking in metered spots in Los Angeles and to set up special parking zones for them.

(Also, check out this radio report on the issue.)

From a tipster in L.A., I’ve now received word on a brand new angle to the whole mess. Check out this report from the front lines (Click the links for documenting photos).

To bloggers, editors and reporters covering Food in Los Angeles:

My colleagues and I have worked at Wilshire Courtyard Plaza in the mid-Wilshire district for the past few years.  When the mobile food truck phenomenon took off last year, we were fortunate enough to have many trucks visit our location on a regular basis.  Most of the time, the amount of trucks would vary from a handful on some days, to upwards of ten trucks on other days.  But by May of this year, we seemed to have a consistently packed house of wall-to-wall trucks every day.

But then in June, the trucks dropped off dramatically at our location.  At first we couldn’t figure out why, but then realized it’s because all the parking spots were being claimed all day.  Further investigation revealed something suspicious.  The exact same cars were sitting there all day long.  They all were old junk cars, devoid of any personal belongings.  Some had notes instructing the driver of the car’s idiosyncrasies.  They all had the same parking garage key card within them (on the passenger seat or the dashboard).  All the cars received parking tickets early in the day; so early (9:08 a.m.) that it was obvious no one was putting money in the meters.  All-in-all, the cars clearly seemed part of some kind of coordinated effort to block the food trucks from parking there.  But who was behind it?

Today, we finally caught the culprits in action: by 8:59 a.m., a crew from Museum Square (the  building complex across the street) had parked the cars and was walking back across the street to go to work.  They seemed very concerned when we snapped photos of them.  From the way they were dressed, they appeared to be part of the building’s maintenance crew or administrative office.

While we’ve all heard various restaurants around town complain about losing business to the food trucks, this is the most organized effort I’ve seen to stop them.  They must have spent a few thousand dollars buying the cars, and are spending about $2,000 a week in parking tickets on these cars.  I can only presume they are looking out for the interest of the food-oriented businesses that lease space in the complex (Marie Callender’s, Johnnie’s Pizza, Baja Fresh, etc.), but I would be very curious to see other organizations pursue this story further.

Does this represent a new trend?

The Pop View | Food and Drink | 07 1st, 2010 | 3 Comments »

The regular broadcast season has ended and the summer shows are in full swing, so this is probably a decent time to reflect a little on the last nine months.

Generally, I was quite pleased. A few shows I wasn’t even really expecting anything out of (e.g., Modern Family, Justified) turned out to be among my favorites. I have mixed feelings about the final season of Lost, but I still love the show overall.  I never got into FlashForward or V.

Mostly, this past season drove home again the critical role of good writing.

It’s not terribly original to note that television really is a writer’s medium, as opposed to film. I’d go further and argue that good acting is important and a production budget can affect quality, but great writing can cover for those deficiencies, while the opposite is not true.

Much as I love Chuck, I finally grew weary of the way that show would tread the same ground over and over and then suddenly burst forward with dramatic change. The dialogue was too often “on the nose,” with the word “spy” appearing so often in the scripts that it would have made for a deadly drinking game. (Castle also got terribly slack, with the possible exception of the two-part episode about a serial killer stalking Detective Beckett.)

In comparison, look at The Good Wife or Lost, which generally trusted their viewers to get things without being beaten over the head.

In the past, I’ve written about the challenges of writing a show with a big mythological arc, and Fringe got even better this year at telling individual episodes that also feed into the larger narrative. For example, they did a quasi-musical noir pastiche (“Brown Betty”) that would normally have felt totally separate from the regular episodes (and a bit of filler, to boot). But instead, it illuminated Walter Bishop’s sense of guilt and gave a glimpse of potential reconciliation.

Television writing is at its best when the producers have a clear vision of what the show is supposed to be. Glee was quite inconsistent, ranging from smarmy and soapy to subtle and inventive. At the same time, while the writing on The Big Bang Theory is consistently funny, even though I wish the show were more ambitious.

I hope that’s what we can see more of next season: shows that are more ambitious, that trust their viewers more, that aren’t afraid to switch things up. There’s a difference between television that entertains and that which just kills time.

The Pop View | Television | 06 29th, 2010 | No Comments »