A Few More Russell Peters

Jamie Weinman, Macleans TV Critic, and a writer I often read and agree with, has me shaking my head in disagreement this morning, in a post where he roots for the demise of NBC's Outsourced, which is set to premiere this fall.

I really enjoyed the movie, and when I heard it was being turned into a TV show, I thought it was about time that we got a few South Asians on a show in North America. There have been sprinkles so far, with Anil Kapoor on the last season of 24, Kal Penn on House before he was hit by the politics bug, Reshma Shetty on Royal Pains, Aziz Ansari on P&R, and Archie Panjabi on The Good Wife, but the roles like that are few and far between for South Asian actors in North America, and especially in Canada.

At least in the UK there have been shows like Goodness Gracious Me, and The Kumars at No. 42. Toronto itself has a huge Bollywood scene (next year one of the major Indian movie awards shows will take place in Toronto), and yet when it comes to TV, as my South Asian actor friends tell me, it is a desert out there.

Personally I would like to see something like Outsourced turn that ship around and start to click. Amy Pohler is just fine and dandy, but I think I'd prefer to see more Russell Peters out there.

Bland is Not Necessarily a Pejorative

I got into a little bit a of a debate with Denis McGrath (currently one of the best screenwriters in Canada) about the show The Listener. I couldn't disagree with most of what he said, but regarding the term "bland," which is what he saw The Listener as being, I had a different opinion.

Here is an edited version of my take on the subject.

* * *

Remember what ol' Bill Davis said about bland? It works. Nobody watches Eureka for the non-stop thrill ride.

In The Listener you got Toby, and his buddy Oz. They show up at a scene, something bad happened, and they deal with it. There is no overarching dark government conspiracy (remember the suck that sort of arc brought to Intelligence Season 2?), no ticking time bomb, and they're not trying to get your adrenaline pumping before every commercial break. That is, it's not meant to be a 24, or The Border.

The heart of the show is Toby, which includes his friendship with Oz (which includes the well written and set up buddy humour), his relationships with different women, and his discomfort and confusion about who he is, and who he should be.

Where I live, in the Middle East, there is already enough life and death, tension, and terror to go around. Watching The Listener made me miss Canada in a way that Flashpoint, Durham County, The Border, and The Guard don't. I felt that sense of ease, that sense of a place where life isn't always lived on the edge of a knife.

The only other Canadian shows that give me that feeling are Less Than Kind and maybe Corner Gas. (Little Mosque just reminds me of where I live right now.)

And that's not a knock against those other shows, especially Flashpoint and Durham County, because Hugh Dillon and tranquility just don't mix. Anything he is in is going to have more than a little bit of a hardcore edge.

But that's not to say that hardcore edginess is always preferable to bland, because it's not. In fact, most often it is the other way around.

Bland isn't necessarily a pejorative. I never listened to Disc Drive on CBC Radio 2 in order to rock out on the way home. For many, bland is preferred, bland is what is called for, bland is what is wanted.

Take Canadian food, for example. I'm always hearing it labeled as being "bland," but by Hey-zeus I prefer that food to anything else in the world. My in-laws are often won't to call my food bland, as they go about preparing dishes that often either give me heart burn, or are so filled with little inedibles like cardamon seeds, and cinnamon bark, that I spend more time sifting through my food to remove them, than I do actually eating or enjoying the food. They say it gives flavor, I say it's a nuisance. Give me my bland any day.

Now when you look at most any CBS procedural, there is more than a little bit of bland there. What distinguishes Numb3rs from Criminal Minds, Cold Case, NCIS, The Mentalist, the CSIs and Without a Trace? Two things - the style of the show, and the MacGuffin. Otherwise they all have an ensemble cast, they are all based around law enforcement, and they all maintain only a light serialization.

Remember the old dictum in television writing that every episode has to be the same, but different? CBS follows that, but applies it to entire shows and not just individual episodes of a show.

ABC does the same thing with it's bevy of reality shows, which are very bland, and very successful. Perhaps that is why the heavily serialized shows do well there. Some sort of counterbalance, perhaps?

I'd argue that NBC had, by far, the best shows on network television last year and this year. They were the funniest, most intriguing, most original, and usually the most exciting. Shows like Medium, Chuck, Life, Kings, 30 Rock, Heroes, The Office, and Friday Night Lights all were, or are, great shows. But they kept getting their butts handed to them by CBS every week.

About the only thing seemingly keeping NBC afloat is the stellar quality of the shows coming out of the USA Network (Monk, Burn Notice, Royal Pains, In Plain Sight, Psych), which is NBC's wholly owned basic cable subsidiary. The reason why the USA Network is successful in this regard, is that they have taken the bland dictum to heart. All their shows are light dramedies, with large elements of humor, quirky protagonists, and light serialization. In a word, they are CBS, but with a better sense of humour.

I liked The Listener from episode one. I felt it was a pretty good show, that got better as the season progressed, and by the end of the season, it felt like the show started to really gel. It never became an action packed thrill ride, and the progression of the storyline was miles away from Damages. So yes, it could seem bland, at first. But it depends on how you look at it.

I saw the show as comforting. It held my interest, had some funny moments, and mostly ended up being an hour well spent with my wife. Bland was what we wanted, bland was what we needed, and bland let us relax after a stressful day when our kids were finally asleep.

Which is why I say that bland is not necessarily a pejorative.

Provincialism, Eh?

A little while back I found myself getting a bit annoyed at Jaimie Weinman's dismissal of The Listener. I'll admit I got a bit heated, and wish there was an edit button so I could smooth out a few awkward statements, but my central complaint remains the same.

During June, the wife and I watched The Listener from beginning to end. It's still airing in Canada now, but it had already aired around the world, garnering some pretty eye opening ratings.

I don't what it was that made us like the show as much as we did. At first it was just nice seeing Toronto as Toronto on television, looking a heck of a lot nicer than I remember, and a heck of a lot nicer than where I live now. But as we watched the first few episodes, we found ourselves enjoying the "non-detective" elements - the repartee between Toby and his partner, the funny side bits where the glaring boss walks in on them, the light tone, and the back story. Eventually I found myself agreeing with Weinman a bit, in that I found the "mystery" elements less satisfying.

My wife loved the partner elements, and at some point in every episode, she would laugh out loud. The fact that almost everyone in the show seemed not only normal, but like someone who would believably be living that sort of life was also a selling point. Mind you, I did think that Charlie was a little too good looking for her role. The tight fitting outfits reminded me a bit too much of the usual CBS method of making female detectives wear tight pants, and form fitting t-shirts with plenty of cleavage.

Other than that small quibble, there wasn't much to complain about.

What I liked most is that, from a sci-fi perspective, Toby really has no guide to go by but himself. Also, he has control over his own gift. In Medium, Alison has no control over her gift, she just goes to sleep and a dream comes along. In season five, there were some hints that her dreams may be "heaven sent" in a manner of speaking, but all Alison can really do is sleep and hope to dream the right dream. In the Ghost Whisperer, Melinda is usually a passive receptacle for whatever spirit bumps into her. Toby, on the other hand, can actively go out and use his gift, and as the show progresses, he gets smarter in how he uses it.

I like that the writers really thought about the implications of not only the gift, but of others learning about it, and how they could interact with Toby. In one episode, when Charlie is tied up and held at gunpoint, she could communicate with Toby without the bad guy knowing, allowing him to successfully fool the bad guy into thinking that Charlie's back up had arrived. As the season progressed, and more people became privy to Toby's gift, the level of danger he was in began to increase, and events began to spiral out of control.

A number of my colleagues here had watched the show and loved it as well, and it has performed solidly in Canada so far. As far as the negative critical reaction goes, I guess it may just boil down to the self-critical nature of Canadians, because the show is a heck of a lot better than 90% of what was on the US Networks this year.

Medium Quality

I forgot to mention this the other day, but I was quite heartened by the news that Medium, the NBC procedural, found a new life after cancellation. CBS, the network that actually produces the show, decided to pick it up for the fifth season, and for once a quality television show has managed to avoid the axe that befalls so many other quality shows out there.

A little while ago I started putting a few thoughts together as to why I like Medium.

Depiction of Domestic Life

I actually cannot think of another show that has such a realistic portrayal of ordinary domestic life. The details are just so well done. I mean, the parents are scruffy in the morning, wearing pyjamas that no respectable Hollywood type would be caught dead in. The kids go through breakfast like the messy chaotic ritual that it really is, with fruit loops on the table, some in, and some out of the bowls, milk splashed liberally around, Mom rushing to get everyone packed into the car and off to school so she can get get to a part time job...you get the idea.

Morality

In most of the characters, even the odd recurring ones, there is a certain gravitas and moral ambiguity, and you are never always sure on which side of the line people will fall. As events occur, characters change, and how they respond to the world shifts, changes, evolves.

Writing

One scene that really stands out for me was when Joe DuBois, the husband, after being laid off from his job at an engineering firm, is sitting in the unemployment office, undergoing his weekly round of humiliation in order to get what little benefits he is entitled to, is given a full-on bitch-slap by, of all people, Alvin from the Cosby Show. As DuBois complains about answering the same stupid questions every week, Alvin looks him in the eye and says (paraphrased slightly) -

"Mr. DuBois, you're a smart man. You're highly educated, so why are you waiting for someone else's permission to earn a living."

At first, completely missing the point, DuBois just gets confused, Later, at home, when he sees his kids, he loses faith in his Dad-ness when he is unable to help them with a little science project. It really sinks in that he really is that passive, he really hasn't stretched himself and really, truly tried. Not just at that moment with his children, but in his hunt for new work, and in his quest to support his family. And that night he comes up with a way to increase the efficiency of solar cells, and suddenly he starts taking his own, and his family's destiny into his own hands. Or at least tries to. Which brings the realities of domestic life and economic exigencies back into the picture.

The Ability to Inspire Terror

Terror in this show does not come from the big monster, or the raving lunatic, though from time to time a few of those are trotted out for a round of play, but in the soft, ordinary, benign happenings that will irrevocably change or destroy your life.

One scene in particular, about a boy in a toy store, was truly one of the most horrifying things I have ever witnessed on television. The Dad is talking to his boss, he doesn't want to, but is pressured into a conference sales call, and while he is distracted, his son sees a funny clown puppet and walks toward it. As the clown puppet moves away, on the back of a man who is not fully visible (only the clown is really shown) the boy follows along, and then he is gone. What followed was horrifying - the way that the abuse is carried out, the way the scene is shot, how music is used, and the how the child is shown laughing and finding everything just so funny, all while the viewer is rendered entirely speechless by the contrast between the quirky Mr. Rogers-ness of the tone, and terrible thing the audience knows will happen very, very soon.

Characters

The key actors in this show are spot on. In fact, unlike with many other shows, especially other procedurals, there is nothing about any of the leads in Medium that irks me or puts me off the way they do on other shows. I never could get really into shows like Criminal Minds, Without a Trace, or Close to Home, because there was always one or two characters who were simply unrecognizable to me as real, normal people. In Medium, even if they come on the show sparkling and super-human, like the hot blonde from the Mayor's office, they quickly end up becoming very humanized, like the former hot blonde from the Mayor's office who becomes a needy and frumpy Mom-to-be.

Writing

Oh, did I mention this before? Good. Because I want to bring much needed attention to this key point. The writing on this show is excellent, especially by the standards of big network shows. All the stuff I loved about Intelligence, Mad Men, and Breaking Bad, is in Medium. On many shows, there is a way in which things sometimes descend into large, loud, played out matters (politics, discussions of morality, etc) that get all preachy and deviate entirely away from story and character. Think some of the more annoying Battlestar Galactica episodes in season 3. But in Medium, like in Intelligence, Mad Men, and Breaking Bad, "issues" are not presented in black and white, and often operate under the primary pillars of story and character. When the "issues" are touched upon, it's just that. Touched upon, lightly, subtly, with a line here, or a hesitation there. And in this subtle gesture, impact the viewer, the discerning viewer, far more powerfully than might otherwise be possible.

In Closing

Look, there are other shows I look forward to more eagerly each week. Those shows (many of which were sadly canceled just recently) are all fun, sometimes hit and miss, but when they are good, they're good. But with Medium, the delivery is always solid. Like the temperature in Vancouver, the highs and the lows aren't very far off from each other, and what is left with is a show that is solid and consistent. And then there is the irony, the sweet irony that a show ostensibly about the paranormal, Medium ,has a far more accurate depiction of normal, everyday life, than pretty much any other show on US network television.

Mad Men are Coming

Summer is upon us, and that means the summer television season, which has quietly become the best television viewing season of the year.

Like a number of friends and colleagues I know, one of the key highlights of the summer is the return of Mad Men. In honor of that, is a little something I penned a while ago about why Mad Men appeals to men as it does.

My measure as a man was taken long ago, given to the tailor, and returned to me as a pastel pink long sleeve shirt, to be worn at the office, but only on Wednesdays.

Like many other Canadians with limited credentials, not much talent to speak of, and a poor sense of economics that lead to a mountain of school related debt, I found myself teaching English in Japan. The funny thing is, the world depicted in Mad Men is no fantasy down in the Nihon. There it’s the stuff of everyday life.

Workaholic men who drink and party with call girls after work? Why, every day, Kohei. It's what salariman culture is all about. The vast majority of women stay at home as "defenders of the home," and raise the kids almost as if they were single parents. Then, when the kids have moved on, and the men retire from work, a surprisingly large number of housewives find they miss the freedom they had when their husbands were away. Divorce, and English conversation classes quickly follow. It’s a twisted sort system, but it does have an equilibrium of sorts, which is why this system has withstood the onslaught of first, second, and third wave feminism.

For WASP North America, that equilibrium was never found. Instead the pendulum has shifted from one extreme, that of the Mad Men era, to the other extreme, that of the modern era. The WASP North America of the Mad Men era is almost a mirror image of Japanese society of today. The key, and crucial, exception being that divorce was verboten in 1960’s North America. We see that in the show itself, in the way the other women look on Helen like she is some sort of leper. Sure they envy her seeming fearlessness and competence, but they fear it as well. The women’s movement that later followed did away with this timid mindset. Women like Helen went from being a socially awkward minority, to being representative of a loud spoken and proud majority.

Of course women yearn for the same things that benighted throwbacks like myself yearn for. The difference is that for the modern, urban, North American man, the actions of a man like Don Draper, the good and the bad, are beyond the realm of possibility. That’s why we love watching him go about his manly affairs. Sure he makes a right cock up out of half the stuff thrown his way, but we wannabes know without a doubt that if we were Don, we’d live it up and avoid the nonsense. If we was Don, we’d do it right, jefe, no doubt. But the truth is that that sort of life is long past for the modern, urban, North American man. But not for women.

Sure men still leave their wives today, marry someone younger, or, like Woody Allen, decide they’ve found true love in the eyes of their daughter-in-law. But it’s just not socially acceptable anymore. The wink-wink, nudge-nudge is gone. It’s been replaced with cheery terms like alimony, Deadbeat Dad, and “I think we’ve grown apart, honey.” Men acting in the irresponsible manner they had in the past been accustomed to acting with impunity are today treated quite punitively, for the same behavior. For women, the opposite is true.

In Jane Green’s article “Marrying Mr. Wrong,” about her upcoming boom “The Beach House,” marrying a man, having four kids with him, and having him accommodate your wants and desires for decades is as nothing next to the quest for a soulmate, for fulfillment, for the breathtaking passion that is her undeniable right, because she deserves it. As the commentary on her Times article showed, response to Green’s point of view broke down into women who totally understood, and sexist pigs who want to subjugate women and stand in the way of a woman’s destiny.

Mad Men is Sex in the City for dudes. The difference being that the former represents a world long gone, and the latter is the world that is. Sex in the City tapped into the zeitgeist, while Mad Men taps into the bitter nostalgia of a lost age, an era unknown to the modern, urban, North American man, not because it is a soulless, superficial fantasy, but because us dudes can take it with us into our rooms, and for a short time, indulge in a consequence free fantasy that we love all the more because we know it’s not real and never will be.

Or do we?

Al Bundy is Back

Some good news on the TV front today. As it is upfronts week, all the major networks are revealing their fall schedules. Since NBC has given up on TV entirely, the other three networks have decided to pump out a significant number of series, easily twice as many new series as have been released in the past four to five years. And one of those new series being given the old test run, is "Modern Family," a mockumentary about middle class family life starring Ed...wait for it... O'Neill!

You see, I have this unorthodox view of Al Bundy as a role model for husbands and father everywhere. This thought, when spoken aloud in polite company usually brings a few sniffs and conversations suddenly shifted toward another avenue. But I always felt that Al has gotten the short shrift, so here is my take on him.

* * *

Al Bundy is a hero of our age. Long may he live on in memory.

I totally loved Married With Children when it was on, but I'll admit that back then a lot of the comedy was a bit over my head. The whole family life thing wasn't something I knew very well.

But after becoming a husband and a father, who comes home night after night, told to hand over the wallet, keep quiet, and not to embarrass anyone, I now "get" Al Bundy.

I can just see it now...fifteen years down the road, with teenaged daughters pushing me about this way and that, my wife openly mocking me in front of anybody...wait...I don't have to wait fifteens year for that!

Seriously, though. Al Bundy represented a whole sector of society that had usually been ignored on television. There are a lot of guys who go to work, day after day, to jobs they hate, bitterly resenting the loss of foolish dreams of days gone by, forced to live with the mistakes that have put their lives on mediocre paths. These same men, fully aware of their lack of talent or potential, and lacking the ruthlessness ever to grasp advantage out of the hands of others, instead console themselves to the idea that at least they are doing their duty, sad as it is. So they trudge on home, park their sad, beaten down cars, and walk through their front door, greeted by a chorus of "I need some money," "Daddy, I need you to drive me somewhere," and "How come John and Cindy can take a vacation every year, and we never go anywhere?"

Yet for all of that, there is love. A husband and a father who goes to work everyday, to a job he hates, and sticks around, day after day, letting the thrown stones and arrows roll off his back? That's love. Being there for your children, despite your limited means, and their constant disrespect and contempt for you? That's love.

Love is not merely a smile and a kind word. It's in what you do. It's in being there.

Just compare Al to the men next door. Steve Rhoades? Jefferson D'Arcy? They were both better looking, smiled more, and acted more loving toward their wives. But how did they stack up?

Steve abandoned his wife, deciding he'd rather be a park ranger. Jefferson was a former convict who refused to work a steady job, even when his wife begged him too, and who also was constantly involved in shady schemes where he would sucker Al into going along, to Al's detriment. An absconded husband and a sleazy grifter.

I think Al stacks up pretty well by comparison.

And in this new show, I really hope Ed O'Neill is going to make the transition that will convince studio execs that this is a show they want on the air.

TV and Storytelling

While I had watched TV, like everybody else I've known, since as far back as I can remember, I, like most people, never paid much attention to the TV business. And while I had favorite shows, I never really knew about cancellations, or schedule changes. If I caught an episode, or not, it was entirely dependent on luck and the TV guide. Besides, other than one or two shows, there was almost never anything on TV to get all that excited about.

But then, about a decade or so ago, TV got good. Really good.

As someone who loves reading, has confessed to having a detrimental addiction to reading, I should be the last person to admit to being a rabid TV watcher. Yet the two mediums are not entirely dissimilar. Especially when what I watch is solely scripted shows. Comedy, drama, dramedy, action, sci-fi, fantasy. And in each there invariably is a story that will suck me in. Not the disposable stories of older television, with no continuity, and no respect paid to whatever had happened previously, but real stories. TV has grown and become a true literary and storytelling medium. Some point to shows like The Sopranos, whereas I look to shows like Babylon 5, but both are illustrative of a change in the storytelling landscape that has resulted in great epic tales like Deadwood, Rome, Battlestar Galactica, The Wire, Life on Mars (UK), Life, Breaking Bad, Intelligence, Durham County, and so many more. And then there are shows which bring high spirits, laughs, and general good feeling whenever they're turned on, like Chuck, Monk, Psych, Burn Notice, and Corner Gas. Unlike a book, which you can only share with one person at a time, these shows can be shared with many, simultaneously. And I tell you, as much as our culture reveres the written word, the written word did not precede storytelling.

Think back to those summer camp experiences, sitting around the campfire, sharing stories. Go back before the rise of electronic media, and that was how most stories were told - aurally and before larger groups of people. Stories were communal experiences, which excited, delighted, amused, and frightened. And those reactions and emotions were shared by those sitting there, together, listening.

When the book became king, a lot of that was lost. Oh, sure, you could share your thoughts in retrospect, but there was none of the immediacy of the moment that made stories such an essential part of life. During the heyday of radio drama this immediacy was there, and it has always been there to one extent or another with cinema, but cinema has become far too pricey to be an everyday experience. But that's not the case with TV now, having become a real, true, storytelling medium, with writers and producers who actually care about the art of story.

Back to the Hippodrome

It had to happen, I guess. As predicted some years ago in Stephen King's now prescient novella "The Running Man," there would come a time when society's tastes would revert to a tradition as ancient as human civilization itself - the need for blood. Be it watching a public hanging in the nineteenth century, or rounding up the family for a picnic alongside the daily guillotine show in revolutionary France, the public's willingness to court death as a form of entertainment has never really waned.

In the time of the Roman Empire, as was made known widely through the film Gladiator, the Roman mob was kept sated with a constant stream of gladiatorial contests where two armed men entered a ring, and one man would leave standing. Failing having two armed men at the ready to square off, throwing some poor sap into the ring with bears, lions, or other decidedly deadly predators did just fine in a pinch. As Rome faded into the mists and gaudy fashions of the Visigoths, the Byzantine Empire carried on that tradition through their extremely brutal chariot races in the Hippodromes. It was an organized form of mayhem and death packaged well for public consumption.

The twentieth century seemed to change that for a while. With death and destruction through two world wars, numerous genocides, and more than a few worldwide epidemics, the need to witness violence as a form of entertainment waned considerably. The most violent event about was probably American football, until recently when the ultimate fighting leagues gained popularity.

Still, be it football or ultimate fighting, the contestants were not fighting for their lives, and nor were they poor saps stuck in a terrible spot. The wanted to be where they were, and were trained fully for their tasks. In other words, they were professionals, so whatever misfortune came their way came as much through their own doing as through the hand of capricious fate.

But things have changed, it seems. No longer content to see willing parties engage in potentially tragic events, the public wants unwilling participants hit head on by life changing tragedy. To sate this need, Fox has ordered up a brand new reality series, along the lines of Cops, except where instead of watching criminals get arrested, you get to watch as ordinary folk are fired from their jobs, and cast out into the world, all hopes, dreams, and plans shattered.

What's next? The death row reality hour? I wouldn't bet against it.