I think I may have gotten it wrong, or at least partially skewed. The promotion and publicity generated around Mad Men led me to believe that there’s more to it than I now wonder if there is. And while I knew it was coming and likely to be good, I seriously underestimated FX's latest series Damages.
The second of six episodes of the AMC network’s Mad Men aired this week. It's still all of the things I originally wrote -- the production design, photography, set decoration, etc. are great. But the writing is... well... okay. Just okay. Mildly entertaining but some distance from shows that grabbed from the very beginning.
For grabbing from the start few shows compare to the pilot episode of The Sopranos. Buy, rent or borrow the DVD of the first disk of Season One (obviously), and see for yourself. That first episode was deep enough and compelling enough that we were given memorable characters and a fairly complete view of Tony and his world. If the following six and a half years of storyline had never happened, the pilot could have stood alone as a great hour of television. Guess that's exactly what a pilot is supposed to do. This also makes me think that from the start Mad Men’s producers and writers knew they had six episodes.
Now let me swing from mildly entertained to entirely blown away.
Damages on FX which premiered this week is close to as good as TV gets. Seriously. In fact, the script for the pilot and the storylines it sets in motion are so engaging that I'm fearful that it will be difficult for the show to sustain that level of quality. Exec Producers and creators Todd Kessler, Glenn Kessler and Daniel Zelman certainly aren’t household names. Yet. The Kesslers both wrote and produced for The Sopranos. Zelman is and actor, turned writer, turned producer whose career has clearly reached a new level. Longtime Sopranos Producer and episodic Director Allen Coulter rounds out the team in those same two job functions and on the pilot did, as should be expected, a masterful job.
What's not expected, but probably should have been, is the writing. I'm a huge fan of FX, dating back to their blazing new territory in basic cable five years ago with The Shield. Nip/Tuck a year later was a fitting addition to the envelope's edge. In 2004 Rescue Me just confirmed that they were serious about putting shows on the air far sharper than network fare. Well, if the show Damages is based on scripts one half as rich as that of the pilot for Damages, FX clearly has a new top dog.
Check out Damages on FX. It will be run several times before the next episode Tuesday, 7/31.
Posted by: Nick Griffin on Jul 29, 2007 at 10:22:53 am
Here we are in the dead of summer. The "Big 4" US television networks have made it obvious that their programing strategy is to make summer viewing so painful with shows like "America's Got Nausea" that when regular fall programming returns, viewers will be relieved to get back "Dudline trolls for Perverts" and "Better Ideas Come From Fifth Graders." Wait. That last one's my belief about most TV programming, not an actual show title.
So is it any wonder that anyone watching summer TV and having an IQ above the celsius temperature of ocean water has to cruise the cable networks to avoid lapsing into a coma?
There's always HBO, the gold standard of cable -- and TV in general for that matter. Problem is there's just not enough HBO original programming to fill more than an evening or so a week. And as long as I'm commenting on HBO, have you seen the new half hour 'Kiwis come to New York' comedy "Flight of the Conchords?" Subtle yet at times fall down funny -- especially the song lyrics in love songs like "You're so pretty you could be a part time model" and "Love is like a roll of tape." I'd watch Conchords for the highly inventive design / camera work alone, so the New Zealand humor comes as a bonus.
But I digress. Most summer TV is awful and just about the only things worth watching are on the cable networks. One of the more heavily promoted has been this week's debut on AMC of "Mad Men," a series about the Madison Avenue advertising world, circa 1960. Created by Sopranos writer / producer Matthew Weiner, "Mad Men" goes beyond portraying an era. It lives, eats and breathes it. Actually saying that it drinks and smokes the era is more accurate as those two activities are made to dominate virtually every scene. "Should we drink before the (client) meeting or after... or both?" asks an art director of his boss. And if second hand smoke could come off a TV screen, "Mad Men" would have its audience in the cancer ward by mid-season.
As to the surface subject matter of advertising just before our culture passed into the modern world, Mad Men seems to get it right. At least in this first show. There were researchers and the occasional insightful idea in those days. But for the most part, advertising of that time had changed little from the work done in the thirties and forties. Simply put, it sucked. Maybe this is because, as portrayed in Mad Men, everyone was drunk most of the time.
Production Designer Bob Shaw and Director of Photography Phil Abraham made the debut episode just about visually perfect. It should also be mentioned that Soprano's alum. Alan Taylor directed the episode. The nightclub and restaurant scenes rival anything the world of cinema has ever created for the period. In the offices of ad agency Sterling-Cooper, Shaw has given us a world of late '50's / early '60's sterility, where the sets scream of all that was clean, new and plastic in the business world of that time. About the only element that I found jarring was the secretary removing a cover to reveal the "overwhelming technology" of an IBM Selectric typewriter. Guess the propmaster wasn't at the top of his game that day because the typewriter used was the squared-off model from the late 60's, early 70's and not the original Selectric which would have been in use in the early 60's. Small detail. I'm probably the only one who noticed.
The show's photography is also appropriately clean and crisp, drawing very little attention to itself except when it's providing transition elements like the phenominal overhead view of workers entering their 1960-ish office building. This is not to say that Mad Men is shot in the style of 1960's cinematography, as much of today's audience would find that un-watchable.
So what about the storyline? Is MadMen worthy of the hype it's received? Certainly Exec. Producer and show creator Matt Weiner knows what he's doing. The series debut does a nice job of introducing the major characters and laying the groundwork for plot lines to go in any number of directions. But for now that's all we have, the start. Too soon to know if, as viewers, we'll learn to care what happens to any of these people. I, for one, plan to be watching Mad Men's six episode initial run to find out.
Posted by: Nick Griffin on Jul 22, 2007 at 11:03:47 am
What? Is this one of the only places on the net where no one is complaining about how The Sopranos ended?? Well I, for one, cannot let this silence continue.
CAUTION: If you haven't seen the ending of The Sopranos and intend to, stop reading now and go to another post. You've been warned.
My first thought was, "WHAT! Of all the times for my cable to go out... box to fail... relatively new TV to die." Then the end credits came up and I realized that the 15 to 20 seconds of grey silence had been David Chase's answer to how the 86th and final hour of The Sopranos would end. I laughed out loud. Brilliant!!! (Or, as they say in Jersey, "F***-ing Brilliant!")
First, it didn't matter how he ended it, most people would be pissed off by what it wasn't: "Tony shouldn't have a) gotten whacked, b) been arrested and gone to prison, c) turned state's evidence, d) had an anxiety attack and died on the spot..." And my favorite, " e) Tony wakes up and realizes he IS the traveling salesman he dreamed about." Doesn't matter what it was, large numbers of people would have found any ending unacceptable. So instead Chase and his brilliant writers built the tension to the max and, like a sharp smack across the face, left us hanging there to draw our own conclusions as to what happened. DOUBLE F***-ing brilliant.
The next day I started hearing about all the things I didn't catch even BEFORE thinking how clever this ending was. The guy who was sitting at the counter glancing around nervously was Phil Leotardo's nephew. The two who came into the diner near the end were the two guys who attempted to kill Tony in the first season. There were other cuts to nervous glances around the room. And the piece de resistance: I was reminded that in the first show of this current run (part II of the sixth season for anyone who is counting) Bobby, in a philosophical moment describes death to Tony as something you "probably don't even hear when it happens." Ba-Da-BING! TRIPLE F***-ing brilliant!!
I will miss new episodes of The Sopranos and I am PERFECTLY satisfied with how it ended.
Posted by: Nick Griffin on Jun 12, 2007 at 5:50:03 pm
Does anyone else have Imus on MSNBC on this morning? They're doing a remote from Boston and one of the three (or four?) cameras they're using doesn't have the pedistal properly set. It is CRUSHING the blacks into an almost posterized look.
How does a major (sic) network like MSNBC allow something like this to happen? Are these rental cameras that no one checked before they went on the air this morning? Are they operating without CCUs and going straight into the switcher so they can't correct this in the field?
Gee... maybe this blog thing will provide a new way to vent.
Posted by: Nick Griffin on Mar 16, 2007 at 5:23:41 am
