An unruly mob living in tents, regularly forced to relocate, demanding respect from corrupt elites, beaten and sometimes killed by the de facto authorities. Until we get a closer look at the style of tents or the way they dress, we could be watching a scene in Zucotti Park, Tahrir Square, or the latest original show on AMC, Hell on Wheels. Mark my words, lives will be lost, and pepper will get in someone’s eyes.

AMC couldn’t have picked a better time to air a show about desperate people working killer industrial jobs for “The One Percent.” When conservative pundits write off Occupy Wall Street protesters as hypocrites for owning iPhones or other brand-name gadgets, Hell on Wheels is the show that should be running on those devices to keep them motivated.

At first glance, the show fits the typical Western formula: our anti-hero Cullen Bohannon wants revenge on men who murdered his wife. But much of what we see is his day job with the railroad, taken as a cover so he can get close to the murderers. Like most of us (somewhat less than 99%?), he sells his labor to get by, but he’s alienated from the product and the profits. It’s a day job which he barely maintains, sometimes shirking his work duties in pursuit of a man who needs killing. As a bonus for viewers who hate crappy jobs and crappy bosses, we follow Bohannon as he attempts to murder his immediate superior in the first episode. Another disgruntled worker beats him to it. Later we get to see a worker take down his boss in a bare-knuckle boxing match.

Lily Bell almost gets killed with her surveyor husband because of an unsafe work environment, or you could call it a failure to clear their development plan with disgruntled local residents (the Cheyenne). She spends a few episodes letting her late husband’s employer dangle before she hits him up for workers’ compensation pay for the death of her husband, using his precious survey maps as leverage.

Other working stiffs on the show include several ladies of negotiable virtue and some Irish brothers in the Magic Lantern entertainment industry, already making forays into pornography. They may be independent operators, but presumably all of them have to pay protection to madams, pimps or local bosses like the Swede. There’s a young man facing the dilemma that many of us have with jobs, whether to follow the traditions of his family (become chief like your father, defend against invading white men) or his chosen career path in the church.

The reason 99% of these people are sweating and straining in the mud is that Thomas Durant and a few faceless investors stand to profit from it. He’s our Wall Street whipping boy. An abridged list of Durant’s crimes or dick moves on the show include demanding his men keep working when payroll is two weeks late, bilking the government, extorting and bribing a senator, embezzling, and pushing extra arrows into a dead employee so it will look like a more brutal massacre in news photos. Although his second in command The Swede believes Bohannon committed murder, Durant effectively pardons him, not because he considered the merits of the case, but because building the railroad is more important to him than justice.

If Durant hasn’t demonstrated every transgression the Occupy movement attributes to Wall Street, he probably did it off-screen or hasn’t got around to it yet.

Hell on Wheels doesn’t show protests in forms familiar to a modern audience, but it’s a history of the One Percent giving the 99% good reasons to protest. Only a few of these characters behave in ways that you’d confuse with protesting. Reverend Cole’s message of nonviolence and morality makes him sound like a modern activist, but he doesn’t focus on the morality of economics like Occupiers do. He’d be content if all the workers got baptized, quit their whoring and drinking, and peacefully continued building Durant’s railroad through Indian Country. Ferguson might be the closest thing to an activist on the show, constantly pushing for more rights, becoming apparently the first Black “walking boss” in the company, brazenly attempting to desegregate the whore house, and walking off the job when payroll is delayed.

The other character who would fit perfectly into an Occupy encampment is Bohannon. In some episodes, he’d be the cop telling protesters to unlink their arms, pick up their junk and clear out. Like the modern enforcers for Wall Street, Bohannon doesn’t share the massive wealth of Durant or the One-Percent, but he’s compensated by them for keeping workers in line. He’s willing to get down in the dirt and wrestle with Ferguson to stop even one person from striking.

In other ways, Bohannon seems to have a lot in common with Occupiers. He has legitimate grievances like they do. His wife was killed and probably raped by Yankees, who also burned down his barn with his son and the freed slave who raised him hiding inside. Bohannon knows he won’t get justice by working through the Yankees’ system. Like Occupiers, he faces a monolithic, entrenched enemy that stands in the way of his goal. Unlike the Occupiers, he might be able to get a taste of justice without directly confronting the system.

I don’t know exactly what the Native American storyline has to do with Occupation, or marginalized people pushing back against an overreaching ruling class. Okay, maybe they’re a little related. The Cheyenne don’t seem to include non-violent direct action in their repertoire of protest tactics, so they’re different in that way. Like the protesters, their chances of unbalancing the One-Percent seem slim, but they will probably do some damage before the dust settles.

Enough with the similarities. What lessons does HoW have for #OWS?

First, contrary to what Bohannon advises the freedman Elam Ferguson, don’t forget your past. You probably won’t be able to anyway. Go ahead and dwell on it. If you’ve been treated like property or three-fifths of a human all your life, use that to fuel your fight with the system. Ferguson and Bohannon bring a lot of pain down on their own heads while trying to get justice, because they can’t forget their past. But so far they’re making progress toward their goals.

More importantly, Occupiers can learn from Hell on Wheels that violence gets results. Reverend Cole tries to head off violence with negotiation, but he’s only delaying the confrontation. Bohannon resorts to violence in the very first scene of the series, and plenty of situations along the way. So far it’s helped him get information, rescue Mrs. Bell and get revenge on a few killers. It didn’t get the results he wanted in the boxing match with Ferguson, but we see lots of success from Ferguson’s perspective when he resorts to violence. He gets revenge against Johnson and wins the fight against Bohannon. Without his threat to walk off the job and backing it up with a fight, he might not have been promoted to walking boss by Bohannon, and Durant wouldn’t have given ten cases of whiskey to the workers as a kind of interest on their delayed payroll. The Swede even allows freedmen into the saloon for the fight, “for one night only,” presumably the first time it has been desegregated, again thanks to Ferguson’s willingness to fight.

The one situation where aggrieved characters might not get positive results from the use of violence is when the Cheyenne eventually confront the Army. So far, their use of violent tactics has generally paid off. Maybe the lessons will change in future episodes.

The last lesson is that this historical fiction about our past could be a vision of our dystopian future. In lawless lands, before law was established in a territory, an organization like the Union Pacific took it upon themselves to act as local sheriff and executioner. They fill the gap where laws should be. Durant issues laws. The Swede and other middle-managers enforce Durant’s law. After the attempted lynching, it seems like Bohannon and Ferguson have become outlaws and fled. But there is no law in the camp, no one authorized by the government to enforce laws. They’ve violated the will of the Swede, and have to act like outlaws because the Swede acts like a lawman.

But that’s history. At some point, law was established and everything got better. Laws were written by people fairly elected, who authorized police or military or bureaucrats to enforce the laws, and it was about as good as it could get. Maybe we’re still in that heyday.

(To say that law was “established” when Whites conquered the territory assumes that the humans already living in that area had no laws of their own, or that their traditions were not cool enough to count as laws. Maybe the attacks by the Cheyenne count as enforcing their laws. Without trying to pin down a definition of “law” or looking up a history of actual Cheyenne traditions, let’s just say that not many Whites would have obeyed the laws of the Cheyenne either way, so it was lawless land as far as they were concerned)

In a fantastical future world where corporations and One-Percenters acquire more power and elections become more entangled with money, elected officials or their appointees would no longer represent the will of the people. Corporations would take over. Or they’d keep the government around as a public relations department, to convince their subjects that it’s still a democracy and everything is fair. Their arbitrary rules would lack the authority of laws created by a democracy. It would become a lawless land where plutocrats could take it upon themselves to write their own rules and appoint sociopaths like the Swede to enforce their rules.

But maybe there are some actions Occupy Wall Street could take to make sure that wacky dystopian vision of the future remains as implausible as Zardoz or Robot Holocaust.

[Does Bohannon represent the modern dilemma to either climb the social ladder or embrace one's proletariat roots? Should these laborers be telegraphing their grievances, 160 characters at a time? Sound off in the comments! - Ed]

A screen test report on Rob Northrup by the serials department of Republic Pictures is reported to have read: “Can’t sing. Can’t mashup videos. Can write a little.”

Related Posts

• The Overview: They Live
• #OccupyBroadway: “Newsies” and Occupy Wall Street
• The Impact of an Arrow to the Knee
• L.A. Noire and the Video Game Value of Work
• Open Thread for November 4, 2011

Episodes 1 and 2

THE MIDTERMS

While Josh recovers from surgery, the staff launches support for midterm Congressional races. Charlie gets distant with Zoey, Toby obsesses over the extremists responsible for the attack, Bartlet obsesses over a former rival, and Sam urges a friend to run for office.

From the standpoint of craft, I admire the use of the midterm races as a narrative device to speed up time and get Josh back on his feet. It’s eminently plausible that the White House would spend twelve weeks in crisis mode, defending incumbents and boosting challengers. This keeps the audience from having to jump back and forth between Josh’s bedside and the Oval Office, which is fortunate.

I also admire how Sorkin tells the story of Charlie shying away from Zoey almost entirely off-camera. When I saw how that arc began, I grew dangerously bored. There are few tropes more rusted than a hero choosing to keep his love at bay because of (bitter sigh) his enemies. Thankfully, not only is it resolved within an episode, it’s resolved almost entirely off-camera! Zoey passes through rooms, looking for Charlie but not finding him, and at one point even addresses a question to Leo, off-screen, while another scene is starting. We forget all about it until the happy ending, where they make out on the White House porch.

(Since these are the first episodes of The West Wing I’ve seen, I never realized how much of a coup it was when Matthew Weiner landed Elizabeth Moss for Mad Men. She’s a gem of an actor)

Speaking of anticipating my objections, the plotline with Sam recruiting his college buddy to run for office is a refreshing change from last week’s idealism. Sam brings Tom and his wife Sarah to the White House, pitching them on a golden opportunity: the chance to run for Congress with the President’s endorsement. Given Bartlet’s record approval ratings, it seems like a sure thing.

Except, of course, it isn’t: a few sticky details in Tom’s past prevent the President from endorsing him, which costs him the race. The scene where Leo breaks the news to Sam hurts, especially because of its inevitability. Sam made the promise to Tom in good faith, but can’t back it up. It’s not a case of him choosing between his friends and the White House – he can’t choose. It has to play out the way it does, in disappointment. Serving the interests of an institution forces you to make shitty calls sometimes.

That said, while I love the direction I have a hard time with the tone. I’m glad they didn’t make Tom an overt racist, instead sprinkling his past with spinnable elements – a preference for white juries, membership in an all-white fraternity. This is good, because we shouldn’t be supporting Sam for casting aside his racist chum; we should be sympathizing with him for letting a friend down. And yet – jury selection? an old fraternity? These are the elements that cost a candidate the Presidential seal of approval? Did Sorkin actually know who was in Congress at the time of writing?

Also, while the scene where Tom and Sarah confront Sam in his office is great, Sarah unloads an awful lot of venom. This over a Congressional run that wasn’t even a dream of theirs three months earlier. I have several friends who’ve made failed Congressional bids, and they all have successful careers, happy marriages and the support of their friends.

But, of course, the point of the scene isn’t to be realistic but to forebode. Something tells me that this is going to come back to haunt Sam, perhaps the thunder pounding outside and the dark-eyed woman snarling, “If we ever get a chance to screw you in the future …” Is this what passes for foreshadowing in Sorkin’s writing? Was the gun that Josh got shot with stolen from above his fireplace in S1, perhaps?

I find Toby’s concerns about the legality of his proposed witch-hunt even more quaint than Leo’s concerns about Tom. What would an 18-year-old watching this show for the first time – someone whose political consciousness was formed during the War on Terror – think of this story arc? There might be a statute that prevents the FBI from going after people tangentially connected with an extremist group? Cheap shots at the [last / current / next] administration aside, this was old news even when The West Wing was being written. The Clinton Administration had no problem going after domestic terrorists (of which there were a few in that time), or using tools like extraordinary rendition.

I can’t swallow that someone who researched the details of the White House as meticulously as Sorkin did could be so wrong on the tone of its staff. But of course, Sorkin isn’t wrong, because he’s not telling a story about real White House staffers. He’s telling a story about conflicted, passionate heroes who happen to work in the White House. Sorkin’s protagonists are always deeply passionate people, whether they’re working in sports broadcasting (SportsNight), sketch comedy (Studio 60 …) or social media (The Social Network). Sorkin’s acknowledged embellishments in the story of the founding of Facebook don’t make The Social Network a less compelling story and, I suppose, neither do Sorkin’s embellishments of how Democrats act when they have power.

This is also the episode where Bartlet goes off on a rant to a Dr. Laura stand-in. I mention it now but I’m going to talk about it later, because it ties in better with “And It’s Surely to Their Credit.” But here it is, since I know you love it so:

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eD52OlkKfNs

The episode ends with the staff sitting on Josh’s stoop, passing a bottle of wine and saying, “God bless America.” And they mean it, too. I would have written it off as cheap fluff were it not for my girlfriend sitting next to me, who observed (unprompted) that that’s the sort of thing White House staffers probably say. And while I’m not sure I agree with that, it’s definitely the sort of thing we might hope White House staffers would say (especially if it’s an administration we like). And to take it one further, it’s the sort of thing a White House staffer might say, not out of deep sincerity but out of a conscious imitation of what they imagine a White House staffer is supposed to say. We are all conscious of the roles we’re expected to play to varying degrees, and sometimes we make choices based on the role rather than our desires. I imagine you can’t get to the White House, the most powerful office in the history of the human species, without being very conscious of the meaning of roles and images.

Sitting around with your coworkers and saying, “God bless America” with throaty solemnity is simultaneously unrealistic and very likely to happen. That’s the sort of weird pageantry that the White House and The West Wing demand of us.

IN THIS WHITE HOUSE

Sam’s humiliation on TV at the hands of a conservative writer gets compounded when Leo offers her a job. CJ panics over a slip of the tongue to a junior reporter. Toby and Josh coordinate a summit between the President of an African country and a panel of pharmaceutical CEOs on lowering the price of HIV drugs.

You wouldn’t think a show this dense with plot, character and verisimilitude would need to pad out a script with fluff. But consider this exchange between Leo and Ainsley Hayes when he offers her a job:

AINSLEY
Yes, sir. I’ll ask again: for what purpose was I brought here today?

LEO
So I could offer you a job.

AINSLEY
I’m asking because I do not think that it is fair that I be expected to play the role of the mouse to the White House’s cat in the game of, well, you know the game.

LEO
Cat and mouse?

AINSLEY
Yes. And it’s not like I’m not, you know… the fact that I may not look like some of the other Republicans who have crossed your path does not mean I am any less inclined towards…

LEO
Here it comes.

AINSLEY
Did you say offer me a job?

LEO
Yes. Associate White House counsel. You’d report to the Deputy White House Counsel, who reports to the White House Counsel, who reports to me.

AINSLEY
I’m sorry… A job in this White House?

I know that’s Sorkin’s attempt at being clever, but it just drags. It adds nothing to the narrative. We know, before the scene even begins, that Leo’s going to offer Ainsley a job. We can guess, based purely on what we know of her character, that her feelings will be conflicted. There’s no reason that this scene had to take three minutes. There’s no reason it couldn’t take 30 seconds.

This is one of my least favorite Sorkin tricks. It’s his homage to screwball, the machine gun patter of Cary Grant comedies of the 30s and 40s, but it rarely works. I never thought I’d find myself missing the laugh tracks of Sports Night, but at least they gave a script room to breathe.

It’s not purely a stylistic flourish, of course. It’s important that everyone in a Sorkin script be smart. We see lots of characters who act as villains, or as obstacles, or as comic foils, but they’re very rarely stupid. Ainsley may be confrontational, and she may be defending people that Sam considers reprehensible (gun owners), but she doesn’t mouth hollow rhetoric. She has smart, or at least clever, rejoinders to every point he makes, rejoinders that she deploys with lightning speed in her Round 2 with Sam outside Leo’s office.

You think because I don’t want to work here it’s because I can get a better gig on Geraldo? Gosh, let’s see if there could possibly be any other reason why I wouldn’t want to work in this White House? This White House that feels that government is better for children than parents are. That looks at forty years of degrading and humiliating free lunches handed out in a spectacularly failed effort to level the playing field and says, ‘Let’s try forty more.’ This White House that says of anyone that points that out to them, that they are cold and mean and racist, and then accuses Republicans of using the politics of fear. This White House that loves the Bill of Rights, all of them – except the second one.

This works even with the pharmaceutical company CEOs, who make it out of “In This White House” without being painted as venomous lizards. Yes, they’re stiff white assholes who are out of touch with the people their HIV medication serves – sub-Saharan Africans, who have a rate of HIV infection that makes the Black Plague look choosy. But there are legitimate reasons why flooding the nation of Kundu with HIV drugs won’t work. The CEOs may be callous but they’re not villainous.

No character in The West Wing, whether on the side of the angels or not, ever lacks for a comeback. This makes for stimulating dialogue and gives everyone depth, or at least the appearance of depth. But it can also make the conflicts fake and stagey. When all you have is Final Draft, everything looks like a monologue. No one expresses their feelings through a hurt look, or quiet reflection, or a wordless gesture, when there’s an opportunity to rant.

“The Midterms” was a sharp, strong episode, because everything flowed into one theme: the merit of holding fast, even when it seems like your efforts are futile. Sam’s faith is tried when he has to disappoint his friends; Toby’s faith is tried when the FBI can’t hunt down extremists. But everyone cleaves together because they believe that the system has merit.

In contrast, “In This White House” doesn’t have as strong of a theme. Ainsley tries to provide one with her clunky capstone monologue – that, despite disagreements, the staff of the Bartlet Administration are “righteous.” But where does CJ’s adolescent evasion of a feared felony charge fit into that theme? Or the existentialist muddle that comes from trying to aid African politics? The moral of this story is …?

AND IT’S SURELY TO THEIR CREDIT

Ainsley Hayes deals with her first week of working in a hostile White House. CJ chases down a disgruntled general. Sam tries convincing Josh to sue the white supremacists behind the men who shot him. Bartlet tries recording the weekly radio address despite several distractions.

If “In This White House” was a setup to the developments in “And It’s Surely to Their Credit,” I get what Sorkin was trying to do. It’s not the best choice, since an episode should stand or fall on its own merits, but it makes “And It’s Surely …” that much stronger. There is a theme to this episode, unlike “In This White House,” and it’s a theme that strikes right at the heart of the series.

This episode is replete with people rattling off trivia to win arguments. When CJ is facing off with the retiring General Barrie, she answers each of his criticisms of the President, and of recent defense strategy, with not just a string of facts but with meaningful insight as well. Sam tries to excite Josh about suing the Klan by delivering a series of precedents (all real, by the way). Abbey forestalls Bartlet’s excitement by launching into a list of historical women whom the U.S. has yet to honor. And there’s a recurring debate over whether a lyric came from Gilbert and Sullivan’s Pirates of Penzance or H.M.S. Pinafore.

GENERAL BARRIE:
Two divisions, the 10th Mountain Division at Ft. Drum and the 1st Infantry in Germany, have been rated C4. That’s the lowest of four possible readiness grades. It means, “Unfit for service.”

C.J.: No sir. Again, with all respect, I hate to disagree, but it means unfit for service based on the Pentagon’s “two war” doctrine. It’s based on how fast these divisions would be able to extract themselves from their peacekeeping mission, retrain on home bases, and ship off to a second of two, full-scale Gulf-War-sized conflicts.

In three of these four instances, victory goes to whoever has the best grasp on the trivia at hand. Abbey gets Bartlet to mention women who need to be honored in his radio address. C.J. gets the general to back down, not only answering his points but also leveraging some knowledge about military history to extort his silence. And Sam convinces Lionel Tribby that “He is an Englishman” comes from Pinafore, not Penzance by citing his history with the Princeton Gilbert and Sullivan Society.

Having a more complete knowledge of precedent is the key to victory over your opponents in The West Wing. We see that in a few other places, and will doubtless see it again, but it’s bold here. You prove that you’re right by proving that you know more about the subject than the other guy, and you prove what you know by reciting it at hummingbird speed. He who has the best memory for quotes wins.

This brings me back, as promised, to Bartlet’s rant to the Dr. Laura stand-in at the end of “The Midterms.” Bartlet proves he knows the Bible better than she does by rattling off a number of barbaric punishments, chapter and verse. The implication, unspoken but obvious, is that Exodus and Leviticus are full of lots of monstrous trivia that nobody lives by today. The President wins because he has more data on his side. “That’s how I beat him,” he tells Toby at the end, referring to an earlier political opponent he’s been stressing over.

I’m leaning on this point because it’s a distinctly Sorkin choice. The staffers of the Bartlet administration are heroes because they have facts and precedent on their side. But we could just as easily imagine a staff that was heroic because they disregarded precedent. “To hell with tradition,” Sam might say. “So what if no one’s ever sued the Klan because of a tenuous connection to some lone wolf assassins? Let’s beat a new trail!” It wouldn’t even be that jarring of a story. We’re more accustomed to our heroes doing new things than wrapping themselves in the mantle of the old.

Or let me put it another way. Suppose Leviticus 18:22 said homosexuality was an abomination, but none of the other chapters of Leviticus said anything too bad. Would Dr. Jenna have won that face-off?

But The West Wing isn’t about breaking with tradition. It’s steeped in tradition. The staffers aren’t pioneers; they’re magistrates. They know all the twists and turns of the institution of democracy, and they prove it by keeping every obscure detail at their fingertips.

This, I suspect, is a large part of The West Wing‘s appeal. It tells smart people that their mastery of details is not only valuable, but a sign of goodness. It’s a Kantian ethic: right emerges not from right ends, but from correct action. Correct action – fidelity to the facts; knowing Pentagon readiness standards or Leviticus verses better than anyone – naturally flows into right ends. The categorical imperative tells us to keep our eyes on the path; that way, we’ll know we’re doing the right thing.

We must live and act morally, per Immanuel Kant, not because it makes us feel good but because it is our obligation. Acting to attain pleasure or satisfaction or just the warm certainty of rightness is utilitarianism, the way of Locke and Bentham and J.S. Mill. But doing right simply because it’s the right thing to do, regardless of how it makes us feel, is deontological. We do the right thing not because we derive pleasure from it, but because it is our duty.

Duty is the other major theme of “And It’s Surely …”. When arguing with Ainsley about Penzance, Lionel cites “Penzance or Iolanthe … one of the ones about duty.” “They’re all about duty,” replies Ainsley. This observation pops up more than once in the episode. Gilbert and Sullivan’s musicals are all about duty. They all involve formal societies, whether under the flag of England, Japan or a pirate fleet. The protagonists are torn between their hearts and the obligations of their social status. Fortunately, comic twists at the end allow them to fulfill both (you’re secretly a noble! everyone marries everyone else!).

Ainsley Hayes joins a Democratic White House out of a sense of duty. She feels drawn to the pomp and tradition of American government and will jump at the chance to serve it, even if it’s under an administration she disagrees with. General Barrie claims that it’s his duty to alert the public to “staggeringly dangerous vulnerabilities” in the American defense posture. CJ points out, however, that the General is following his heart, not his duty, and that his own sense of protocol is weak. Everyone argues about and wonders over what their duty entails and how best to live up to it.

And that’s one of the most striking tones of The West Wing. Conservative critics may have struggled with the show due to Sorkin’s liberal politics, but the characters are hardly radical. Nothing they propose is radical. Rather, they spend significant portions of each episode arguing over which of them hews closest to tradition. Toby looks for a legal precedent to justify sending the FBI after the Klan. CJ panics because she thinks she’s leaked grand jury information. And everyone in the White House staff has an opinion on Gilbert and Sullivan.

It’s easy to throw an old framework up against the wall and put a bullet in its head in the name of revolution. It’s hard to work within the system and still get the changes you want. And while yours truly would say that working within the system isn’t always worth it, I still recognize the appeal.

Related Posts

• OverWinging It: Season 2, Episodes 1-2
• Underthinking It: Immanuel Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals
• The Death of the Author and of Katy Perry
• The West Wing: Where To Begin?
• Episode 170: Guy who makes the craft services who feeds Aaron Sorkin

Does Alec Baldwin exist in the 30 Rock universe? As in, the actor, separate and apart from the character Jack Donaghy?

Read on for arguments both for and against this, and vote at the end of the article!

First, a quick recap: at the end of Season 5 of 30 Rock, Jack’s wife is kidnapped in North Korea. Since this was prior to Kim Jong-Il’s passing, this allowed for a few hilarious Margaret Cho performances of the Dear Leader as the self-aggrandizing moviemaker-cum-dictator. The episode gives us two clips of the movies he made with Tracy Jordan. The first an untitled spy-action thriller:

"I defuse bomb, black partner! Hasta la vista, baby!"

It’s hilarious in its own right, but the second one is even better: Kim Jong-Il’s version of Glenngary Glen Ross:

"Put that coffee down! Coffee for closer only!"

(Note: YouTube clips of these scenes are unavailable, but the entire episode is available on Netflix Instant Streaming.)

Yes, that’s Kim Jong-Il in Alec Baldwin’s famous role from the movie. Alec Baldwin, as in, the actor who plays Jack Donaghy on 30 Rock. The movie Glenngary Glen Ross clearly exists in the 30 Rock universe. But does that necessarily mean that Alec Baldwin does too?

The real Brian Williams on a fake NBC show on the real NBC

Before we answer that question, let’s consider how 30 Rock handles awareness of real-life pop culture. For the most part, it is highly aware of it. The show-within-the-show The Girlie Show is on real-life network NBC, and NBC personalities like Brian Williams and Jerry Seinfeld have made cameo appearances on 30 Rock as themselves. The dialogue is littered with references to real NBC shows, other networks’ shows, and real movies.

But explicit references to TV shows and movies that feature 30 Rock stars are typically off limits. Instead, references come in the form of thinly-fictionalized versions of the real thing: The Girlie Show stands in for Saturday Night Live, and Tracy Jordan’s movies and antics borrow heavily from Tracy Morgan’s real-life movies and antics. We as the audience can fill in the blanks and make the connections between the fictional version and the real-life version, but we still require that separation in order to maintain the suspension of disbelief required to accept that this fictional slice of NBC can exist in an otherwise real-life media environment.

So given those rules, how do we handle the existence of Glenngary Glen Ross within the 30 Rock universe?

One option would be to discard it entirely. This scene plays during the end credits, which is separated from the rest of the episode by a commercial break. It’s a portion of the episode reserved for throw-away jokes that most people won’t even see because they’ve moved onto something else or the DVR stopped recording. But that wouldn’t be very Overthinking It of us at all to dismiss it outright. So let’s move to the next option: to consider that both this movie and Alec Baldwin exist in the 30 Rock universe. If this is the case, the show has chosen to avoid the Alec Baldwin issue entirely. To my knowledge, outside of the Kim Jong-Il scene, the show has made no explicit references to Alec Baldwin, either through his movies or his real-life persona. This works fine from the point of view of us, the audience, watching a TV show. We don’t have to deal with the jarring collision of a character and the actor that portrays him/her like we did in Oceans 12, in which the characters attempt to pass off Julia Roberts’ character as…Julia Roberts. There’s even a Bruce Willis cameo:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zN3IqLnwLVc

But consider the media-savvy characters of 30 Rock. They’re constantly referencing pop culture and would surely be familiar with Alec Baldwin’s movies and his many memorable roles and lines. They would point out the physical resemblance between Donaghy and Baldwin and the resemblance between Donaghy’s cutthroat business sense and the Glenngary character’s “Third prize is ‘you’re fired’” cutthroat business sense. It would be a constant source of material for Liz in situations when she’s trying to gain the upper hand on Jack.

But they never do these things. So maybe Alec Baldwin doesn’t exist in the 30 Rock universe after all. This is our third option: that an actor other than Alec Baldwin plays the “Coffee is for closers” role in Glenngary Glen Ross. This is a more convenient scenario, and it avoids all of the issues mentioned above. But it brings up its own set of issues. Based on Kim Jong-Il’s affinity for the scene, this mystery actor turned in a memorable performance in Glenngary. Did he go on to do other work? Is he a substitute for Alec Baldwin in his other movies, like The Hunt for Red October and Beetlejuice, or do they not exist at all? What about the other Baldwin brothers? Do they and their movies exist? And what about Team America: World Police? Who is Kim Jong-Il’s #1 actor shill in that movie?

"Arrec Barrwin!"

Does it even exist at all? I hate to think of a world in which Toofer, Lutz, and Frank haven’t seen Team America: World Police.

Troubling questions abound in all three options, which is why I’m not settling on any of them and leaving it to you, the readers! Consider the evidence carefully and cast your vote in our poll:

Also, duke it out in the comments and attempt to persuade others of your choice. Everyone who votes for the first place answer gets a Cadillac El Dorado. Everyone who votes for second place…you know the rest. I don’t think you want to be left in third place.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wVQPY4LlbJ4

Related Posts

• Open Thread for June 10, 2011
• Not Ready For Primetime: Cast Sizes in 30 Rock and Studio 60
• Towards a Theory of Television Snackability
• The Musical Talmud, Think/Counter-Think Edition: “Party in the USA”
• 30 Rock: The Most Liberal Show on TV?

Watching Season 2 of The West Wing, Sorkin’s magnum opus, helped me lay a finger on it. I haven’t been turned around all of a sudden from a Sorkin skeptic to an Aaronite. But I’m able to better articulate my feelings. And since that’s one of the core missions of Overthinking It – putting inarticulate feelings about an unexamined work of pop culture into academic language – I think my time was well spent.

Onto the analysis! This inaugural entry examines the two-parter that kicks off Season 2, “In The Shadow of Two Gunmen.” Future entries will hopefully have more than two episodes, because otherwise we’re here for a while.

S2E1 starts off seconds after the finale of S1, with gunshots ringing out from a window as President Bartlet (Martin Sheen) exits some public event. The President catches a stray round. Secret Service rushes him to the hospital, where he’s quickly treated and saved. Josh Lyman isn’t so lucky, however, taking a direct hit and going into surgery. As he lingers in critical condition, he (and apparently other members of the staff) reminisce on how they joined the Bartlet campaign a few years ago.

This episode focus a great deal on protocol. It’s easy enough to say, as showrunner, “the President gets shot and is rushed to the hospital.” But Sorkin chooses to focus on how the President is treated at the hospital. How does the Secret Service call ahead? How does the head nurse handle the sudden boost in security and medical attention required for the President as an inpatient? We get a few scenes devoted to this: someone making the call for ambulances to be diverted to other hospitals; the Vice President being spirited away from a photo op; Bartlet being wheeled in under heavy guard.

Why is process so fascinating? Why do we as an audience willingly sit through scenes of secret agents walking through layers of security (True Lies, the James Bond series), or lab technicians moving evidence from plastic bags to glossy monitors (CSI, NCIS), or code words being exchanged and nuclear launch keys being turned (countless examples)? Because process is evidence of reason. It means someone sat down and thought, “How should the launching of a nuclear missile (for example) be structured?” And it means the structure has been taught and rehearsed.

Reason is reassuring; chaos is frightening. If the President gets shot, we don’t want to see people screaming, crying or shoving each other out of the way. We want calm, commanding men with Southern accents and unflattering haircuts, like Secret Service agent Ron Butterfield, saying things like “GW! Blue, blue, blue!”

As the crisis at the hospital unfolds, a crisis of conscience plays out in flashback and in parallel. Leo McGarry, former Secretary of Labor, tries to poach Josh Lyman from John Hoynes’s team for the upcoming Presidential race. Lyman has just blown up in a Hoynes strategy meeting. “I don’t know what we’re for!” he says. McGarry asks him to come to Nashua, New Hampshire, to hear Bartlet speak.

On the way, Lyman stops off in New York to say hi to his pal Sam Seaborn, working for a law firm that’s helping to construct a nest of shell corporations and legal transfers to protect an oil company from future liabilities. Seaborn seems disappointed that Lyman is still working for Hoynes (“he’s not the real thing, is he?”).

It turns out, of course, that Bartlet is the real thing. He gives a speech at a VFW in Nashua that maybe twenty people attend. The few bits we overhear are bafflingly dry economics lectures, the sort of thing we’d expect from a “liberal New England academic” (Lyman’s words, not mine). The turning point, however, comes when Bartlet is grilled by a constituent on voting against a milk subsidy:

Yeah, I screwed you on that one. I screwed you. You got hosed. And not just you. A lot of my constituents. I put the hammer to farms in Concord, Salem, Laconia, Pelham, Hampton, Hudson. You guys got rogered but good. Today for the first time in history, the largest group of Americans living in poverty are children. 1 in 5 children live in the most abject, dangerous, hopeless, back-breaking, gut-wrenching poverty any of us could imagine. 1 in 5, and they’re children. If fidelity to freedom of democracy is the code of our civic religion then surely the code of our humanity is faithful service to that unwritten commandment that says we shall give our children better than we ourselves received. Let me put it this way: I voted against the bill because I didn’t want to make it harder for people to buy milk. I stopped some money from flowing into your pocket. If that angers you, if you resent me, I completely respect that. But if you expect anything different from the President of the United States, you should vote for someone else.

This is the speech that convinces Lyman to jump ship. This is also the speech that angers Bartlet’s other aides enough to the point that Bartlet fires them, leaving no one but Toby Ziegler and Leo McGarry on his staff. This leaves room for the enthusiastic Lyman to recruit Seaborn, while Ziegler flies out west to pick up C.J. Cregg. So this, right here, is the turning point that puts Bartlet in the White House.

First, could someone please explain what “if fidelity to freedom of democracy is the code of our civic religion, then surely the code of our humanity is faithful service to that unwritten commandment” means? Diagram it on a whiteboard. Rewrite it with synonyms. Something. As far as I can tell it’s gibberish. If Sorkin writes Bartlet like this to make him sound impressive, it’s a con game.

Of course, maybe Sorkin writes Bartlet like this to make a deeper point: that Bartlet is too smart for his own good. Bartlet means well – he voted down a milk subsidy so that poor kids could buy milk, after all – but he’s too ivory tower. This is why he needs the dream team of Ziegler, Lyman, Seaborn, McGarry and Cregg around him. He has all these great ideas, but he needs more savvy operators to help him communicate them.

Communication is a key theme of The West Wing; the first two episodes (I’ve seen) make that obvious. Three of the key cast are staff members tasked with communicating, not setting, the President’s agenda: Ziegler, Seaborn and Cregg. When you have a show that reflects the creator’s values that closely, such focus means something. Sorkin clearly believes that his beliefs are of immense worth to America, but that they haven’t always been communicated as effectively. If only the right people said the right words at the right time, America’s opinions on (say) civilian gun ownership would turn around overnight.

There were 36 homicides last night. 480 sexual assaults. 3411 robberies. 3685 aggravated assaults, all at gun point. And if anyone thinks those crimes could have been prevented if the victims themselves had been carrying guns, I only remind you that the President of the United States was shot last night while surrounded by the best-trained armed guards in the history of the world.

So says C.J. Cregg in a press briefing, early in the afternoon on the day after Bartlet has been shot (S2E2). Let’s take the stats Cregg reads off at face value, even though I strongly doubt that the DoJ would have its act together enough to collate the police blotters of even the fifty largest metropolitan areas in the United States and present the findings to the White House Press Secretary within eight hours of the President being shot. I also find a few grains in “the best-trained armed guards in the history of the world”; I imagine some of the more paranoid dictators of the Eastern hemisphere could match the Secret Service. Hell, SO14 has been dealing with Provo IRA bomb threats for years, and they have their act together.

But, again, take those facts for true. Assembling them in time for a press briefing must have taken a heroic effort. Reeling them off, in parallel with a shooting attack on the President, is a conscious choice. Why bring it up? Because Bartlet is such an ideal leader that every part of his life is a reflection of his values. His shooting demonstrates how common handguns are in American culture and how they can be used to violent ends – the unspoken conclusion being “better efforts to control them would have kept those people, and the President, safer.”

Note, however, that Bartlet’s shooting does not demonstrate the increased need for surveillance of suspected violent offenders without a warrant. It could. If Cregg can assemble a list of shooting victims overnight, she can surely assemble a list of crimes that could have been prevented if only the cops had tapped the perpetrator’s phones. But she doesn’t. Two shooters coordinated with a third spotter to take potshots at a Presidential convoy, a feat that takes planning, communication and audacity. They all shared ideological ties (white supremacy) that encourage violent action against the administration of the U.S. The lesson here? Relax surveillance restrictions against terrorist cells Keep handguns out of the hands of criminals.

So why does the Second Amendment get the red pen and not the Fourth? Because Bartlet’s life has to be a reflection of his values. Everything he does, he does for a reason; everything that happens to him happens to him for a reason. Even if the reason doesn’t touch him directly – Bartlet wasn’t the target of the attacks; his African-American aide, Charlie Young, was – things gravitate toward him because of his importance. It’s not that Bartlet’s staff had to seize the opportunity to speak out against gun violence because he was the victim of it. Bartlet was a victim of gun violence because he supports gun control. Not rationally – it’s not like the white supremacists were making a pro-Second Amendment stand – but metaphysically. It’s guns vs. Bartlet and Bartlet has to win.

In the face of such a supernatural power, the appropriate response, of course, is faith. Lyman sees Bartlet give his amazing speech and he believes. But even greater than Lyman’s faith is Seaborn’s, who sees Lyman react to Bartlet’s speech and is convinced to jump ship as well. Similarly, Cregg is willing to pack up and move east based on Ziegler’s conviction that Bartlet is a good man.

But faith doesn’t merely inspire decisions. Having faith is a transforming alchemical process. Donna has no real experience with a political campaign and little grounding in her life, but she believes, more than anything, that she can help Lyman. “I think I can be good at this,” she says. “I think you might find me valuable.” On that, and on the look in her eyes, Lyman is willing to take her on.

As a public service announcement to the students who read us, let me assure you: this never works.

Throughout the S2E2 flashbacks, we’ve also come to grips with Bartlet’s stubborn grumpiness: his tendency to snap at subordinates when pushed to a conclusion he doesn’t like. Lyman and McGarry correctly diagnose this as stage fright: Bartlet’s fear of the pressure of running for President. At the end of the episode, after seeing Lyman off to the airport, Bartlet turns to McGarry and says, “I’m ready.” Not, “I need your help” or “We can do this” or “I have a secret plan to turn this country around” (all of which are implied) but “I’m ready.”

“The readiness is all,” to use the same line from Hamlet that Martin Sheen himself uses in The Departed. What distinguishes these characters from other characters is not their qualification for the job. Lyman’s a Congressional aide for Hoynes, but Congressional aides can be bought in bulk at the Falls Church Costco. Ziegler, as he confesses in a bar in New Hampshire, has zero successful political campaigns under his belt. Seaborn is coming off a stint as a corporate lawyer and Cregg has just been fired. The only thing that qualifies them for their job is the choice to take it. They saw the light – the promise of putting a good man in the White House – and chose it with enthusiasm.

To step out of analysis mode and into personal taste for a moment: this is what bugs me the most about The West Wing. The West Wing is about the Presidency of a man who perfectly embodies middle-class liberal values. I’m bothered not because I find those values distasteful, but because the man championing them is such an avatar. He’s as realistic as John Galt, the hyper-rational embodiment of Ayn Rand’s values in Atlas Shrugged. I can’t picture Bartlet smoking a cigar, or yelling at a valet, or coming to work upset because the Patriots lost last night, or anything else that doesn’t flow organically from his beliefs. (I may be proven wrong later this season, but that remains to be seen)

If The West Wing is supposed to get me excited about democracy or America again, Bartlet is the wrong guy to do it. If the system needs a perfect man surrounded by a perfect team in order to work, then the system doesn’t really work. I would be much more impressed with a show about a centrist compromiser and his team of shopworn hacks who happen to produce progressive policy against everyone’s expectations. But I don’t expect that.

And yet.

I kept comparing The West Wing to The Wire while watching. This is an unhealthy habit and one that’s unfair to Sorkin. Since I already believe that The Wire is the single greatest thing that the medium of television has yet to produce, every other show will pale in comparison.

But keeping the comparison in mind forced me to be honest. Both The West Wing and The Wire rely on ensemble casts. Both are about ancient offices that most Americans think they understand (the Presidency; cops and crooks) but still have a lot to learn about. Both grapple with serious issues. And while Leo McGarry’s pronouncement of “Don’t mess with us tonight” may be sententious, it’s no worse than “This is Baltimore, gentlemen; the gods will not save you,” spoken by Deputy Commissioner Burrell in S1 of the latter show.

Finally, watching the team put up with Bartlet’s crankiness in S2E2, the parallel hit me: The West Wing is The Wire if Baltimore were a person.

Just once, I'd like to see a non-allegorical game of chess played in pop culture.

After a few seasons of The Wire, the endemic institutional failures of the city of Baltimore start to grind on you. The cops can’t get their job done, because the Mayors who appoint their commanding officers need headlines to get elected. Workers can’t feed their families because Baltimore is no longer a sustainable port. Kids can’t get enough education to break the cycle of poverty. After a while you will doubtless turn to your significant other and say, “How can anyone live there?”

And I get that. But as a Baltimore native, The Wire speaks to me on a far more personal level. That’s not just some fictional narrative about a city falling apart; that’s my hometown. That’s where I grew up. That’s my actual city sliding into the abyss, even if some of the names and faces are changed for HBO. And while I’ve moved away from Baltimore, I can’t turn my back on it.

Josiah Bartlet occupies a similar role in The West Wing. All the other characters are trying to make sense of him, figure out how to live with him, and live up to the potential he represents while gritting their teeth at his foibles. He’s an infuriating aspirational figure. Everyone wants to be worthy of him, even as they also wish he would sometimes shut up and get out of their way.

Being able to slot characters into those positions gave me the resolve to go on. So I’m not abandoning the experiment yet. More The West Wing next time, Overthinkers.

Appendix:

• S2E2 begins with a skinhead watching the early morning news of the President’s assassination, smirking around his cigarette. As he puts out the butt in his fried egg, we see a swastika tattooed onto the fleshy part of his thumb. I wonder if this is a bad guy. Were there frames on the cutting room floor where he kicks a box of kittens into a Girl Scout?

• I could not care less about the National Security Letter that Barlet was supposed to sign before going under, or why Bartlet didn’t leave under a tent, despite S2E2′s efforts to make me care very much. The idea that lack of legal precedent would stop a President from doing something seems quaint in the Age of Terror, for one. And not only do I not care about the policy implications, I don’t care about them as sources of drama. No one is taking the Oval Office to task for not having answers on these issues, except for some gentle, slow-pitch, compassionate questioning by Danny Concannon. What would be the consequence of leaving these questions unanswered for a day, or a week, or for all time? I sincerely hope that no further screentime is wasted on these.

• No one in the Sorkinium is ever at a loss for statistics. Seaborn can rattle off the specs of oil tankers without pausing for breath or referencing his notes. Cregg has her overnight shooting stats right at her fingertips. It’s a writing conceit, of course, but I like it. It makes people seem smart and TV needs more of that.

• When Bartlet was delivering his dry economic answers in Nashua, muted in the background while Ziegler is grilled by a campaign manager, I wrote down “Bartlet = Ron Paul for Dems” in my notes. Tell me I’m wrong.

Related Posts

• OverWinging It: Season 2, Episodes 3-5
• The West Wing: Where To Begin?
• Episode 53: Chekhov’s Bag Of Peas
• Think Tank: When Good Shows Go Bad
• Episode 49: Voodoo Smash

My holiday TV watching this past year, especially close to New Year’s, was dominated by two fine shows on very fine shoestrings:

Both Man Woman Wild and Dual Survival (the one with the hilarious, over-the-top name is also the one most likely to disappoint if you tune into it cold without reading a description) are lesser scions of the Man vs. Wild and Survivorman genre, which is basically Jacques Cousteau with God Mode turned off.

However, while some of the things Bear Grylls and Les Stroud do are supposedly impressive and/or actually dangerous — and while the solitude of the predecessor shows adds an element of psychological danger — Man Woman Wild and Dual Survival land squarely in Easy Mode. The two shows are very similar, taking the casts to exotic places and demonstrating how they might be dangerous were the situation to be different than it is. This crucible of intense exposure to intense natural intense dangers then brings out the core of the relationship between the two protagonists. Or something like that.

These are not shows about survival, they are shows about relationships. And most notably, they are virtually scripted shows without actual writers. How do these genres mix, what does the telltale doubles survival scene look like, and why? Find out more after the jump, IF YOU SURVIVE –

Man Dual Woman Survivor Wild

People who need people

When I say these shows don’t have actual writers, I’m not being coy. Dual Survival doesn’t list any writer credits at all, and the sole writing credit for Man Woman Wild goes to creator/star Mykel Hawke Pierce. What the shows do have are line and story producers, the producer/editors (or “preditors”) who grew reality TV from its scabby roots taking hold by Writer’s Guild of America labor disputes. Watch the shows, and you can tell within minutes that, even if the specific words are not formally scripted, the stories are crafted to track specific narratives.

In Man Woman Wild, Pierce, a special forces guy I takes his English wife, the aptly named and capable Ruth England, on treks in the wilderness to teach her about survival skills. In Dual Survival, Dave Canterbury, an army Special Reaction Team leader, trainer and sniper, takes Cody Lundin, huge hippie, on treks in the wilderness to have philosophical discussions about whether or not it is a good idea to wear shoes or fight alligators.

In practice, each show is a series of sketches, which resonated with me because of their similarity to improv scenes. Watch this fairly extreme scene from Dual Survival, which is nevertheless typical of the way the show paces and structures its text, whether it is written in the strict sense or not:

Let’s unpack this scene. What is it about? What is at stake?

Well, Canterbury has deliberately cut himself in order to show the audience a cool trick involving moss and gunpowder. Lundin is assisting with the trick. We can’t really believe Canterbury is in actual danger — this is a controlled dramatization; it is not as if Canterbury has been injured by accident, or that the show is like Jackass and the actors are comfortable hospitalizing themselves in the line of work.

It might not be apparent at first from this example, because Canterbury often does act like he’s on Jackass, doing potentially fatal things for no reason that put him at risk of hospitalization or worse, but the disclaimer on the in-bump from commercial communicates otherwise:

“This program depicts a survival scenario. Due to the extreme danger, Dave and Cody receive support when they are in potentially life threatening situations, as required by health and safety regulations. On some occasions, situations are presented to Dave and Cody so they can demonstrate survival techniques.”

So, we are not watching the show to see if Canterbury or Lundin are going to die. We know that isn’t going to happen on camera. But we also know this is not a strictly educational show; there is a sense of drama to it. The survival scenarios are, in the sense of how the scenes are performed, a backdrop or starting place for the more in-depth work, which is about the relationship between the characters.

The important statements in this scene, and the statements I always latch onto in Dual Survival, particularly because of my improv training, are the “I feel” statements, where the performers come out and tell you their emotional relationship with what is happening, usually hewing to very narrow and specific character traits. Canterbury is a thrill-seeker, down-home Southern, hostile to natural dangers, and machoistic, while Lundin is cautious, timid, in need of approval, and desiring a relationship of love and mutual respect with the earth. So, yeah, a huge hippie. Let’s look at the “I feel” statements from the previous clip:

“I feel like I’m cocked and locked; I’m ready to rock. Give me a knife.”

“I want you to walk me through this.”

“This isn’t exactly a comforting moment. The best-case scenario is we have a perfectly sealed wound on Dave’s arm. The worst-case scenario is we have Mount St. Helens erupting from Dave’s arm, we create a bigger wound, and Dave never speaks to me again.”

The emotional subtext of the scene is that Lundin is reluctant to conduct the stunt, because he is afraid of losing Canterbury’s friendship, whereas Canterbury is so stoked for the stunt that he is not considering the potential emotional consequences.

Now there is a scene! It’s certainly feasible the relationship between the two would become strained, even as it is infeasible that Canterbury is actually going to have his arm blown to pieces by the black powder. So the show tricks you into thinking it is about the survival scenario, which is somewhat staged and controlled, when really the survival scenarios present premises for scenes where the characters develop their relationships with one another.

The best scenes on Dual Survival and Man Woman Wild are like this — the performers relay their subjective emotional experience of events in such a way that it tells you about their relationship. Here’s another example — see how Lundin’s description of his feelings and philosophy contrast with Canterbury’s subjective, emotional account of getting the **** stung out of him by a swarm of bees:

Speaking from experience, scenes where characters have strong emotional points of view are much easier to improvise than scenes where the characters are relaying circumstantial information or doing something where the event itself is the focus. So, with the performers coming at each survival scenario from an emotional direction, it makes it easier to construct good scenes without a professional writer fine-tuning the words. The relationship is the goal, and you get to relationship through behavior, and you get to behavior through an emotional point of view.

Check out this scene from Man Woman Wild. One frequent structure for a scene to take is to communicate instructive survival information until the scene stalls, then make a bold declaration of how you feel about something. Ruth England does a great job of adding this humanity and subjectivity to the fairly ridiculous endeavors her overwrought, bandana’ed husband seems so steely about:

In some ways, I like Man Woman Wild more than Dual Survival — Ruth England’s commentary on how she feels in the different environments is some of the most interesting television on either show. But Mykel Hawke Pierce is an unremitting douche — the least genuine character on either show, and offensive in his adherence to gender role rhetoric. It is not a coincidence that what Pierce says is the most scripted — that he’s the only writer on either show — and that he is the least sincere and least communicative about his own point of view in scenes as well. He is, as they say, “forcing it.”

Because Canterbury and Lundin express their vulnerability and their feelings about the survival scenarios, and aren’t as dismissive in their feelings for each other as Hawke Pierce whichever his real name is about his wife, their scenes take on a more vivid life and are more interesting than Mykel Hawke Pierce’s scenes, even if Pierce’s scenes are more tightly plotted and a bit less ridiculous.

So, it’s notable that it is not good survival skills that make for good survival television, but sincere survival emotions.

Stayin’ Alive

These shows have another quality that stands out among television shows today — their protagonists are old by TV standards. Ruth England is 41. Mykel Hawke Piere is 46. Dave Canterbury is 48. Cody Lundin is 44. If you pick up a book on commercial TV or screenwriting, it might tell you that if you want to tell a story about people in relationships in their 40s, transpose it to teenagers or people in their 20s without changing the gist and it will sell better. How do these shows get away with having friendships and a marriage between middle-aged adults, when shows like actual Survivor and other reality TV lean so hard on the sex appeal of the young?

From a pragmatic sense, that’s because these people are very involved in producing the shows themselves, plus they have proven track records that are important for the show, and they play to an older audience.

But I think the answer within the show — the reason it feels right rather than just the reason it happened — is in the emotional context of their survival adventures. The characters go through many extreme situations every episode, and yet their personalities and relationships stay relatively stable. There is certainly risk — we don’t want to see Cody and Dave actually be upset with each other, or Ruth get really hurt or hurtful with Mykel — but the relationships have to maintain a certain stoic quality relative to the extremity of their material circumstances. In other words, it has to be believable that neither party is going to just go “f*** this” and leave. They have to be committed to getting through the episode, which means they can’t solve the relationship problems too fast by fleeing from situations a younger person would flee from (like, for example, your partner being a crazy person who stirs up killer bees’ nests looking for honey).

There is also a certain poise in the face of death that can grow with age, as well. These are people acquainted with mortality. They rarely totally lose their shit over the possibility they might die soon — they have clearly thought of it before. It doesn’t throw them into a blind panic. Survival entertainment is usually to an extent, power fantasy for those fearing death, but it’s one for which younger protagonists would in this case be iller suited.

Although I guess sometimes it does seem as if these people are 7 years old:

Or, maybe 8. Maybe:

Okay, okay, I guess the real way to make survival TV, as Bear Grylls taught us, is to do stuff with pee. Sometimes it’s all about the classics.

Related Posts

• Overthinking Lost: The Fate/Free Will Showdown
• Golden Phone Award: The Article That Just Names Some Reality Shows and That’s the Joke
• Episode 159: Talking out of My Expelliarmus
• The Blog Post or the Tiger
• To Coachman With Love: Pinocchio and Behavioral Therapy

Belinkie:

The Glee reviews on Gawker have become increasingly hostile. This makes me wonder, what are the TV shows with the sharpest drop-offs in quality/fan base? I remember Heroes started off super-popular, than crashed hard in its second season. Didn’t watch it, but it went from geek favorite to object of scorn in about six months.

Fenzel:

The OC

Shechner:
Chuck, though it’s less an object of scorn as it is an object lesson in quality control.  Perhaps sci-fi geeks have gotten used to being disappointed over time, whilst those of other genres are only now getting acquainted with the phenomenon?

Fenzel:
I always like to trot out Gene Roddenbury’s Andromeda at times like this. And that show had a Dantean descent through deeper circles of mediocrity every season. Although, hey, I like to trot it out anytime, who am I kidding?

Gene Roddenbury’s Earth: Final Conflict actually had a much sharper drop-off in quality. Although that was around Season 4, not season 1. The Canadian sci-fi show Lexx also fell _way_ off the map after season 2. Season 2 is pretty interesting and scary on a Dr. Who-ish level. Season 3 is straight trash.

But none of these shows are what I would call “very good” anyway. What makes them remarkable is just how terrible they got – specifically because they were sci-fi shows that changed production companies or some other syndication contract issue such that they lost their special effects budgets and found an arbitrary reason to either make characters who had previously worn a lot of makeup look like normal people as well as maroon their characters somewhere mundane and earth-like because they no longer had the budget to show spaceships.

I would say “The Weakest Link” qualifies. It was totally hot shit in the USA for almost exactly one year, and then it just totally bombed out and recorded a shitload of episodes for like PAX and the Game Show Network.

And, while I love it dearly, by the end, _24_ was at the point where _Hard Target_ was sending it concerned emails and scheduling an intervention.

“I learned it from YOU, Dad! I learned it from watching YOU!”

One big reason why sci fi does this so much is syndication. If the production of the show and the distribution and broadcast of the show are closely linked, a show isn’t likely to be allowed to suck and lose its entire following without getting canceled, and its budget isn’t likely to be cut so severely that its show concept just doesn’t work, but it can still get produced.

If you’re shopping around a sci-fi show, it’s unlikely you have end-to-end interest from a network. You’re niche programming looking to fill spots. And you’re seen as interchangeable. So it’s more likely a sci-fi show will jump from business partner to business partner – whereas if Fox doesn’t want to show Glee anymore, other than reruns, they probably just make a different show rather than make really cheap shitty episodes of Glee.

Also with sci-fi, you see the money onscreen, so it’s easier to know for sure when the producers hit hard times or the networks aren’t interested anymore.

Mlawski:

Twin Peaks is another example.  Also: AMC’s The Killing. The critics went nuts over the first episode, liked the second episode, and then by the fourth episode decided it was the worst show ever. And then came the season finale, which made most critics and fans  feel murdery.

Perich:

By “the critics” you’re including me, right? :-)

Mlawski:

Ah, true, true! I had forgotten about your Killing posts (sorry!), but, well, there you are :)

Perich:

I own up to my sins.

Shechner:

Actually, I’d disagree about Twin Peaks. Sure, the second season misses out on a lot of the core factors that made the first so great (really taking its time to emphasize ambiance over plot, for one…), but there’s still a lot of good stuff going on there.  For one, the series finale is one of the most impressively shocking pieces of avante guarde artistry ever put on national television, unless–like me–you tend to turn off the sound during super bowl halftimes and watch it instead while listening to Trout Mask Replica.

McNeil:

In light of Perich’s new undertaking, the West Wing deserves mention here.   For a lot of fans and reviewers, the show lost its soul when Sorkin left.  Personally, I really enjoyed the subsequent seasons. Their bleak look at the impotence of even the most powerful man in the world to effect change actually helps me deal with certain political disappointments of mine.  On a similarly noncommital note, I also want to mention Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Seemed like half of the show’s fanbase started bitching the second that Dawn showed up in Season 5.

So, readers, what shows disappointed you most in the end?  What makes a show go off the rails? Sound off in the comments!

Related Posts

• We ARE out of touch with America: OTI’s POPULAR Popular Culture Survey Results
• Gary Coleman (1968-2010)
• The 17 years of Jack: From MYST to Lost and DOOM to 24
• Episode 81: The Arsenio Hall Show
• Best Way to Kill a Vampire [Think Tank]

Although I don’t see the show making it onto my regular TV schedule, I do find its main character, Cullen Bohannon, kind of fascinating.

Ably played by ex-officio Clint Eastwood impersonator Anson Mount, Bohannon is meant to be a grim-eyed angel of death, stalking through the frontier wastes in search of vengeance and falling into the heroic role almost accidentally in the course of his travels. Which is pretty standard territory for a Western. The interesting part is that Bohannon’s a Civil War veteran, and he fought for the south.  The vengeance he’s after is war vengeance.  His wife had the misfortune of being in the part of Georgia what got marched through.

There’s also a Union veteran on the show.  Bohannon’s opposite number is a security officer for the railroad who is known mostly (only?) as The Swede. He has some trauma of his own to work through, having been imprisoned at Andersonville and having been forced to do unspecified… things to survive there.  The Swede is probably the best part of the show, for me.  His particular sour, gloomy brand of psychosis is an interesting take on the ‘vicious enforcer’ character we see so often on serial dramas about lawlessness.  And where you’d expect this kind of character to hew closely to his own twisted moral code, the Swede is charmingly corrupt, with a variety of hussles ranging from large-scale smuggling operations to shaking down local businessmen for beer money.  It’s like if we saw Chris and Snoop from The Wire going around selling pirated DVDs — the effect is somehow incongruous.

Making the tormented antihero a Reb is something we could overlook (especially since he freed his slaves voluntarily a few years before the war).  But when they go on to make the thoroughly villainous villain a Damnyankee, it starts to look like a pattern.  What an interesting and morally ambiguous decision!  How unusual!

No wait, what am I saying?  It’s totally usual.

Westerns have been working through the trauma of the civil war for quite some time now. That clip is from Michael Curtiz’s Dodge City (1939). And when I said that Bohannon is a Clint Eastwood character, I was talking pretty specifically about The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976), which is essentially the same setup, sans trains.  The hero of Cold Mountain (2003) is a confederate deserter.  Even Firefly, Joss Whedon’s space western, is pretty transparently about a space confederate.  (The Browncoats were on the losing side of a galaxy-wide civil war, and the people they were fighting against had a much better industrial base.) There are plenty of earlier examples too. One of the farmers in Shane (1953) is a hotheaded ex-confederate named Stonewall.  One of the passangers on John Ford’s Stagecoach (1939), Hatfield, is a genteel Confederate soldier turned gambler. In Wyler’s The Westerner (1940), Judge Roy Bean likes to dress up in his old Confederate army uniform on special occasions. (The historical Roy Bean did fight for the South, as a blockade runner, but they play it up here a lot more than they need to.)

Now, whatever else the Confederacy was — and it was plenty — it was a government.  Not a legitimate one, necessarily, but it did all the classic government stuff:  issue currency, pass laws, levy taxes, raise armies, stick it to the working man.  It quacked like a duck, is what I’m saying. But you would not know this to look at the Confederate characters in Westerns.  Being a Confederate for these guys isn’t a way of being part of a community:  it’s a way to mark yourself as outside of everyone else’s community.  Dodge City is unusual in that there’s at least enough Confederates to field a small men’s chorus, but even then, only one of these characters actually does anything else in the film. Being a Confederate in a Western is sort of like being a Goth in any other kind of movie. Every Goth I ever knew was into the scene primarily for the community, and pierced their soft bits as much out of solidarity as for any other reason.  Movie Goths are usually islands unto their own gothy selves.  And in Westerns, each Confederate is a confederacy of one.

That’s not to say that the Confederate characters in these movies are all exactly the same, though.  The earlier the film, the more of a big deal it is that the character took up arms against his country.  The pre-1950 characters are morally ambiguous:  Hatfield’s an antihero at best, Bean is an oddly sympathetic villain. In order to be reintigrated into society, they both need to die. Shane is an interesting case:  Stonewall is clearly part of society, but his role within that society is being kind of a hotheaded jerk, and that leads directly to his death.

What’s the takeaway here?  Dixie symbolizes… standing up for yourself in face of impossible odds?  Northern aggression?  Getting your ass handed to you?  There’s no irony in this music. It turns Dixie into the stuff of tragedy, and Stonewall’s death into something heroic.

The romanticization of the Confederacy is not in itself all that surprising, especially to readers who have ever visited the south.  What surprising is the fact that it gets more and more intense as time goes on — and that these movies aren’t being made by good ‘ol boys, but by latte-swilling coastal elites. (Or even by Italians!) By the 1970s, the ex-Confederate isn’t a side character anymore:  Josey Wales is the hero of the film, and although he’s still an outsider, he gets reintegrated into society not by death but by the love of a good woman.  By the time you get to the 90s and oughts, being part of society is no longer something you even want.  Mal from Firefly hates society, and the audience is never given a reason to think that he’s wrong to do so.  The hero in Cold Mountain just wants to get back to his wife — the rest of the culture can go hang, for all he cares.  And Bohannon wants only revenge, although we’ll see whether that lasts, or whether Hell On Wheels follows the Josey Wales model through to end). All of them are pretty well unambiguously heroic, at least where it counts.  Bohannon can be an ornery cuss, and Josey Wales spits on a dog(!?) on multiple(?!?!) occasions, but when the chips are down, they shoot the people that need shooting.

Why?  For heaven’s sake, why?

There are two reasons I’ve come up with, one simple, one more complicated, both utterly speculative.  The first is simply that America loves an underdog.  A Confederate soldier in the aftermath of the civil war has the cards stacked against him in the way that a victorious Union soldier does not.  The second explanation, which I like better, is that America can’t keep its wars straight.  The earlier films tended to make the Confederates problematic characters not because people were still holding a grudge about the Civil War, but rather because World War I (and eventually II) were fresh in everyone’s minds as good wars that America had done well to get involved in, making the idea of siding against America very hard to accept.  By this way of reckoning, Shane is “really” about the Korean War, and The Outlaw Josey Wales and the rest are “really” about Vietnam — wars where America’s moral high ground was much less clear.  The versions of the Confederacy (or rather — again — of the lone Confederate) that we see in each of these are revealing, especially with some of the later ones.  Josey Wales spends most of his time running around the backwoods trying to avoid the police, eventually settling on a farm where he’s effectively part of a commune.  He feels a lot more like a radical activist than he feels like a rebel. The Cold Mountain guy is, effectively, a draft dodger — another Vietnam archetype. And Bohannon, and Hell on Wheels? My first instinct is to say that it’s still Vietnam all over.  For all that our nation is engaged in multiple wars even as I type this, I don’t think that our national conversation on war has really moved past Vietnam yet. But I will point out that Hell on Wheels is the first Western I’ve seen that tries to grapple with the psychological fallout of combat in any meaningful way — and although that does still work splendidly for Vietnam, it’s also something that we hear a lot about with regard to the first Gulf War.

With this in mind, I think it’s quite interesting that the death of the Western as a viable genre coincides almost exactly with the end of America’s draft.  If the genre really is the way we process the drama of our most recent war, it may be that we no longer make these movies because we no longer feel like wars are something we really have to process, as a nation.  Like the fighting of them, that has fallen into the category of other people’s problems.

Related Posts

• Episode 161: Gordon Shumway Joke #4
• Overthinking Cowboy Bebop: Sessions 21-22
• Episode 99: Of Course It’s An Electric Dog

But to start, I’ll need your help.

There are apparently 7 seasons of The West Wing and I don’t plan to watch all of them. I’m a busy man. When I’m not shoveling coal into OTIS’s boilers, I’ve got a day job, a modest writing career, my own health to look after, and several ongoing series of award-winning television to watch.

Also, while Aaron Sorkin’s politics have always been a mild seasoning in everything he writes (including his shows about SportsCenter and SNL), I imagine there’s no escaping them in The West Wing. And I find Sorkin’s politics … well … I’ll save it for the actual series, but suffice it to say this won’t be TV I can just let wash over me.

So I’m going to watch one season. The question is: which one?

To forestall some obvious questions, don’t tell me that I have to watch the entire series from the beginning in order to really appreciate what’s going on. Even the most complex and sophisticated TV dramas allow for a late entry. For instance, you could start The Wire at Season 4 and only be as lost as, well, the rest of us who started at Season 1. “Wait, if Avon Barksdale’s in charge, why is the big guy with the glasses giving the orders?”

A good series should give us some expository hints, or at the very least a “Previously on …” recap, in order to clue new viewers in on any essential backstory. A series that requires complete investment from the first episode on is slacking in some of its obligations as a series. And I say this as a rabid fan of Breaking Bad, Mad Men and Game of Thrones. This makes my relationship to those series complicated, I know.

Besides, everyone knows that a TV series only has a handful of good seasons. The arcs where every plot twist feels like both a total shocker and something you should have seen coming. The episodes that generate most of the show’s favorite quotes. The turning points where every relationship gels into the form we always knew would come.

Time, skepticism and impatience prevent me from investing a full run in this series. So I’m asking you, the West Wing fans, to pick for me the season where I should start.

Cast your vote in the poll below. Voting ends midnight on January 1, 2012 – if you’re counting down for the ball drop in Times Square, it’s almost too late.

Related Posts

• OverWinging It: Season 2, Episodes 1-2
• OverWinging It: Season 2, Episodes 3-5
• Think Tank: When Good Shows Go Bad
• Episode 170: Guy who makes the craft services who feeds Aaron Sorkin
• Not Ready For Primetime: Cast Sizes in 30 Rock and Studio 60

It's time to take the tie off and bust some heads.

On November 25, 2008, the series finale of The Shield first aired on FX. Vic Mackey, the protagonist played by the inimitable Michael Chiklis, was an elite Los Angeles cop leading a special strike team of other elite cops against the most heinous crimes and criminals in gritty aughts-era Los Angeles. For seven seasons, Mackey used extreme measures to break through institutional, political and ethical barriers and get the job done – a strategy that led him on a downward spiral of lies and self-destruction culminating in one of the greatest series finales in the history of television. (SPOILERS FOLLOW.)

In that finale, “Family Meeting,” Vic Mackey received a reckoning for his sins more awful and ironic than anyone expected — three years of mandatory work behind a desk, in a poorly fitting suit, writing and editing reports. On one hand, it was a coup — a plea deal won through deft maneuvering and misdirection that let him off more than easy for the terrible corruption and human cost laid at his feet. On the other, it was a fate worse than death — for a man so defined by his potency and for whom nothing remained but his job, it was damnation.

But those three years are up. On November 25, 2011, three years from the airing of “Family Meeting,” Vic Mackey is free. His debt to society is paid — if not in full, at least to the greatest extent society managed to extract. On this very special Vic Mackey Freedom Day (follow #VicMackeyFreedomDay on Twitter), Overthinking It writers consider what they think Vic Mackey might do when he no longer has to keep his gun locked every day in the lockbox under his desk.

Note: We at Overthinking It love The Shield – many of us would gather to watch it together when in the same city, and we covered the spectacular end of its run on the site. The special podcast we recorded the night of “Family Meeting” is available for listening here. But now, let’s go to our Vic Mackey Freedom Day theories.

 
Perich

Before we launch into theories, I want to expand upon a theme that we touched on in the intro: the harshness of Vic Mackey’s sentence.

The Shield does an excellent job at turning Mackey from a sort of dingy anti-hero to a genuine villain over the last couple of seasons. He’s no longer cutting corners to bring down crooks or robbing gangsters to provide for his family. Now he’s cutting corners to stay out of jail for just one day longer. He’s throwing his teammates under the bus (the most heartbreaking moment of “Family Meeting,” for me, was Gardocki’s disbelieving scream as he realizes Vic has sold him out; yes, more heartbreaking than the other moments).

Given all that, what punishment would be bad enough for Vic? Death’s too good for him; a few moments of pain, then the release of oblivion, doesn’t pay back for all the anguish he’s inflicted. Going to jail’s the equivalent of a death sentence, perhaps, but you suspect that Vic, a fighter and a schemer, could find some way to come out on top. And that’s not acceptable. So what’s left?

How about a fate worse than death? How about a meaningless desk job that you can’t quit without going to prison? If there’s any fate worse for a man who constantly needs action and power, I can’t think of it.

(Then again, are there a lot of worse fates for anyone? Do you think he has a lot of friends around the office? Do you think he has any chance of career advancement? Is he even going to be able to list these three years on a resume when he’s done?)

So what’s his fate now that he’s free? I find it easy to imagine that the gang problem in South Central L.A. swells in his absence. Syndicates like the Byz Lats and the One-Niners rebuild their Central American contacts, becoming major players in drugs and guns. The problem escalates beyond Farmington’s limited resources and comes to the attention of federal counter-terrorist forces.

So Vic Mackey walks out of the office on the evening of his third year of (literal) wage slavery and finds a man his age with short blond hair waiting outside.

“Vic Mackey? My name’s Jack Bauer. I’m with CTU. I need your help.”

Fenzel

The world has changed a great deal since fall 2008. When Vic made his deal with ICE, the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers was only two months old, and the acute grip the attendant shock had on the world’s short-term credit markets and global trade had not yet relaxed. Since then, the prospects for a man like Vic Mackey — a middle-aged man with years of specific skills and experience — have changed significantly.

My take is the first cruel fact of Vic’s freedom is he will find it difficult to land a job at a police department — not just because of his awful record and lack of references, but because politics and economic strain have cut back spending and employment by state and municipal governments. Dutch and company on the LAPD have been fighting layoffs these last few years and seeing their overtime and budgets cut back. If Vic were already on the inside, he’d no doubt find a way to take advantage of the tense political environment, but it’s hard to see a way in for a guy who would be so expensive to hire with only a decade or two left of good work in him.

So finding a job in the public sector would be tough, as would finding employment with any large conventional private company, especially full-time private employment with benefits.

It seems natural for Mackey to look into defense contracting — specifically with homeland-security oriented private security companies, especially ones with international operations. America might have rejected the decidedly Mackeyish company Blackwater in 2009, forcing it to change its name to Xe Services — but under its new name, it continues to thrive.

I see Mackey headed to Northern Virginia, where he can work as a global consultant for companies looking for men like him — those willing to do whatever is necessary toward the general goal of fighting threats at home and abroad and the specific goal of ruthless self-interest.

Belinkie

I will not be the last to suggest this: Vic Mackey, Private Investigator. I’ll give you a minute for the goosebumps to go away.

First off, he’s in Los Angeles, the city of Raymond Chandler. It may not be the era of L.A. Noire anymore, but there’s still plenty of capers a gumshoe can get into. Vic knows the streets, and he knows the police department. Hell, he knows the Mayor! If you need to find someone, scare someone, or blackmail someone, there’s no better man in the City of Angels.

Now obviously, he’s made a few enemies. A few thousand enemies. There are lots of people who want to run him out of town, or worse. But Vic was always good at finding allies, and he’s not the type to let people chase him away. I could see Aceveda ordering the police to shut down his detective agency, but I could also see ten ways Vic could fight that. The bottom line is that powerful people have a lot to lose, and Vic doesn’t have anything to lose. All he has to do is get some leverage on the right people, and the cops will back off and let him work. They’re still going to hate his guts, but it would be a lot of fun to see how Vic deals with being a pariah instead of a hero.

Honestly, Vic always reminded me a lot of Mickey Spillane’s ultra-violent detective, Mike Hammer. Hammer seldom let the bad guys live. Sometimes they shot first and he finished the job, but just as often he killed them in cold blood and made sure he had a good alibi. Let me quote from Wikipedia:

While other hardboiled heroes bend and manipulate the law, Hammer holds it in total contempt, seeing it as nothing more than an impediment to justice, the one virtue he holds in absolute esteem.

Gee, sound like anyone we know?

The police would often threaten to drag Hammer downtown, and sometimes did. But Mike Hammer had good P.R. on his side. The New York tabloids reported his exploits with relish, and the D.A. wasn’t going to come down on him too hard without hard evidence. Hammer was too smart to get caught doing anything, so he got away with everything. That’s the fine line Vic would be walking as a P.I.: he can operate with far more freedom than he ever could as a police officer, but the police are just waiting for him to slip up in the tiniest way.

And there’s one thing that all private detectives have in common: they love to have casual sex with a wide variety of femme fatales. Vic got his share of action during The Shield, but basically he tried to be a devoted family man. No more. Vic Mackey, Private Eye would be sleeping with every nightclub singer, heiress, mob boss’s daughter, sexy pool shark, doe-eyed librarian with a thing for bad boys, hooker with a heart of gold, blonde lawyer who should be smart enough to know better, and (of course) secretary in town. Every single case will involve him bedding at least one bombshell.

I want this to be a series, immediately. C’mon Shawn Ryan, nobody is watching The Chicago Code. Give us Vic Mackey, P..I.

Related Posts

• Shield Supplement 3
• Shield Supplement 1 [REPOST]
• Shield Supplement 2

A couple of weeks ago, we asked “Are we out of touch with America?” The answer would seem to be “yes.”  Click through for charts of your responses and some verbatim replies to the open-ended questions.

Thanks to the 445 of you took the time to take the survey.  For those who haven’t, it’s still open – take it here.

Clearly, I am not the only one out there who got a "D" in Spanish.

What do you like about Two and a Half Men?
The producers of these series (THM and BBT) have more than 50 years of experience in the comedy show world. They simply know how to make you laugh. Stupid, silly stuff is shown, and it doesn’t matter. I feel ashamed for their uncreative jokes, but I automatically laugh. And in the end, it feels good, provided I don’t think too much about what I just saw…

Don’t watch it “regularly” – more like “whenever ESPN’s not talking about football and I’m too lazy to turn off the TV”.

According to the comments about it, Modern Family is basically just like Arrested Development. If that's the case, why did AD fail while MF is one of the most popular shows on TV?

What do you like about Modern Family?
Modern Family is not Arrested Development, but it has a similar comic and narrative feel. It’s willing to do a smart joke that only 10% of the viewers will get and then move on.

Modern Family had lazy stereotyping to begin with, but is the closest you can get to the immoral, relentlessly evil/dumb characters and huge continuity of Arrested Development

Modern Family is the closest thing to Arrested Development you can find on TV.

Modern Family’s asides and subtler jokes remind me of Arrested Development. It’s broader jokes are wearing thin, however.

It’s very well-written and acting is outstanding; it’s reminiscent of Arrested Development in many ways.

Dysfunctional family life. Like Arrested Development but popular for some reason.

Modern Family has an honest kind of delivery of some absurd behaviors or lines that I find hilarious.

“Modern Family is funny” seems like a simplistic and not helpful answer, but…it’s funny. It makes me laugh. The humor is more happy and joyful than most other shows. Also Phil Dunphee is delightful.

I like the mockumentary style and its absurdity. I think it’s also nice that all these people genuinely care about each other and show that they care about each other; it’s refreshing.

I watch them with my family.

Theyre funny. I laugh. That is all.

As OTI’s token Brazilian reader, I love Sofia Vergara’s accent and crazy latin-ness

Sofia Vergara has amazing boobies.

If it's not your parents, who's watching this show?

What do you like about NCIS?
NCIS may be a blandish procedural, but it fills the gap where I used to have Law & Order (also, while this season is not as good for it, the characters have entertaining depth – e.g. Tony DiNozzo’s knowledge of cinema would make him a worthy OTI contributor if you could find him off-duty). (Unlike, say,

I enjoy the formula of NCIS. Its comforting to know that every episode will be the same and you can focus on the characters.

I’ve fallen in love with the characters on NCIS, plus you can’t go wrong with a good crime drama.

For NCIS, it’s the way that the group dynamic is scripted; it’s almost “Whedon-esque”

It’s simple ‘shut-your-brain-off’ TV. NCIS has a nice take on character development and a formula that works perfectly well. A mixture of investigations and gun fights, I enjoy it because it does all my thinking for me whilst entertaining me at the same time.

Freaky right-wing military cop family workplace procedural drama. Typical Bellasario fare. Only pop cult reference I share with my 85 yo mother.

Good work, elitist snobs!

What do you like about Criminal Minds?
Criminal minds, I like because it shows you the point of view not only of law enforcement, but also of the perpatrator of the crimes. I think it’s a fresh take on the police procedural genre.

I like how the main characters in Criminal Minds relate to each other (and I love Garcia!), but can’t stand the gore and torture porn aspects of it.

its on basic cable at roughly the time i’m sitting on the couch. so, convenience is really the word. oh, and joe montagna. he’s such a badass, have you seen thinnerer? that acid scene, it was like he was the inspiration for a taliban training video somewhere.

It’s on all the time and I can watch it while I farm for herbs in WoW.

Sometimes CM is so left field that it’s actually original. e.g.- The two episodes with David Carradine. How often does the woman run off with the serial killer?

First of all, amazing long-term character arcs. Second, giving victims agency and spending time with victim’s family. Third, 3/7 of the main ensemble are women (ignoring the nonsense of last season). Fourth, lasting physical consequences to stuff that happens (on at least three occasions – Reid’s leg, his drug addiction, and Hotch’s ear). Um… etc, etc? I could probably go on for ages.

Criminal Minds: More female characters than most crime/police procedurals; both female victims and non-victims have more agency than usual.

I watched Criminal Minds reruns for a few days, but decided the dark “arrive just too lately” was not as enjoyable as the CSI “arrive in the nick of time” formula.

Well. That's just lazy. Thanks to the 60+ commenters from the original article who cared enough to phone home.

What do you like about Mike and Molly:
Because they are fat, though the show seems to have given up on making that mean anything.

They make you laugh without making you think. They are pure escapism.

bc I like rom-coms, and this is novel bc they are plus-size.

What do you like about Fuerza Del Destino:
No hablamos espanol.

Nerds telling nerds to watch nerds. Let the navelgazing commence!

What do you like about The Big Bang Theory?
Big Bang Theory thinks a smart joke is made by taking a normal joke and adding smart-sounding words to it (often ignoring the true meaning of the words). It will then return to the joke to make sure you know that the writers used smart words and are, for that reason alone, much smarter than you are.

I enjoy the nerd culture on Big Bang. It’s like I am in on the joke… and the girl is hotish and ostensibly from Nebraska… oh and Blossom.

I live in hope of Big Bang Theory being a good advocate of geek culture. I am often disappointed..

Big Bang Theory: I’m a recent PhD, and having spent some of my time with Physics PhD, I find the jokes humorous.

I watch Big Bang Theory mainly for the character of Sheldon and also his incredibly absurd views on life and the comical way he expresses them. The other characters exist as foils to him as far as I’m concerned.

I like nerdy boys. My sister sort of got me into the show. The jokes are sometimes clever.

I like because it doesn’t have the same, average joe characters, that most sitcoms have; instead, they have people that are supposedly geniuses and that have the same types of problems of any other sitcom character, however the ways that they solve their problems are usually not average.

Star Trek / comic book / physics references plus the always-relatable story of needing to feel popular.

It manages to have extremely funny nerd characters without them being cheap stereotypes. It also does its research. I can’t remember it ever getting a geeky thing wrong.

Big Bang Theory: Good joke timing, good actors despite nerd stereotypes.

It’s got a wealth of interesting characters (including three strong, smart women who aren’t just decoration) and doesn’t talk down to its audience.

I can’t make it through a full episode of Big Bang Theory. It really is geek “blackface”.

Finally, I want to thank all of you who answered the final “Why do you hate us?” question with: “no, no, I love you guys.”   For those that didn’t get my attempt at survey-based humor there, “Why do you hate us?” was the response to EVERY possible selection for “Which of these shows do you want Overthunk?”   We weren’t bashing these shows—we genuinely haven’t watched them.  If anything, we’re bashing the people who market them.

I’ll post some of the favorite responses to the “Why do you hate us?” question in the comments.   Special shout out to the one respondant who called us “pretentiois assholes” for our perceived dislike of NCIS: Los Angeles.

In the meantime, how should we Overthink the Big Bang Theory?   Overview-style commentary?  Statistical analysis of Star Trek vs. Star Wars references?   What do you think?

Related Posts

• Think Tank: When Good Shows Go Bad
• “We are so out of touch with America”
• The Biggest Mistake in the History of NASA
• USA v. USA Network: When they watch Burn Notice, the terrorists win.
• The End of Movie Stars?