. . .

• The Shield was the best show on TV this year. I've had my doubts about the show before, specifically in the show's attitude towards Vic. Any show/movie/book that has an evil main character runs the risk of over-glamorizing that character.¹ Just look at the cult that's surrounded Tony Montana of Scarface.² Vic is a bad cop and thoroughly evil person, but since he's funny, charismatic, and his adversaries (Claudette, Dutch, Aceveda, etc.) aren't sympathetic, a good portion of the audience ends up rooting for Vic to succeed. Anyway, The Shield's season finale, where Claudette lays out Shane's confession and the crime scene photos for Vic to see, at least let me know where the show itself stood on Vic's behavior, even if that probably didn't convince any of the show's less thoughtful viewers.

• Mad Men, if you've never seen it but are considering watching it, is not for everyone. Remember how The Sopranos got towards the end of its run, with a lot of atmosphere and not much plot? Remember how there were still enough mob drama elements in it that it kept the casuals teased that something more was coming³? Mad Men is like that. Very little happening, but everything happening, if that makes sense.

• The Office:

  • • I really hate Jim. At the beginning, he had that emo-boy, unrequited love thing with Pam that made him pretty sympathetic, but now he's just a smug asshole, and has a completely unearned superiority complex over the rest of his coworkers. However, the show recognizes this and comments on it.⁴. Jim isn't awesome; he's a deeply flawed person, as opposed to a sitcom character.⁵

    • That's something I really like about this show – its willingness to let its characters be mediocre. In most other sitcoms⁶, when Pam went off to “art school”, she would have passed with flying colors. Instead, she straight-up flunked out and came crawling back to Scranton, her terrible receptionist job, and a married life with Jim in Jim's parents' house. The look on her face in that scene as she came to grips with her failure was sad and wonderful at the same time.

    • Michael, well really, Steve Carell holds this show together. I'm just in awe of his performance at times. If he ever leaves, they should just shut the show down, because no other actor could carry this thing.

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    Footnotes:

    1. The reverse – “good” characters being hated by the audience – can also be a problem. The Jedi in various incarnations of the Star Wars universe are generally lame, forcing me to cheer for Darth Vader and the Emperor, and for George Lucas to turn Darth Vader into a irritating, lovesick little bitch in the prequels. Another example would be me rooting for that crackhead to kill David in that episode of Six Feet Under, or more precisely, for anything to happen.

    2. The Sopranos' creators noticed this problem but tried to solve it by making the entire show unwatchable for the last three seasons. Mission accomplished.

    3. Remember all the hilarious, hysterical speculation about how the finale was going to be so incredible, and then nothing happened? That was awesome.

    4. See the fake survey Kelly wrote up in “Customer Survey”, and also cokehead Ryan's criticisms of Jim when he was trying to force him out last season.

    5. Which he is, of course, but you know what I mean.

    6. Example: in How I Met Your Mother, how Ted is apparently some superstar architect, when he's really just an annoying douche.

Labels: TV