TV Series Hits & Misses

"Alright then, girls: what's your favourite show?"

As soon as the kids hit that post-Arthur, pre-adolescent state of loud opining, “Family Time” around the old TV set became just a bit fraught. We've never subscribed to cable or satellite, and since bandwidth in this part of Canada is still spotty, we opt for DVD sets — occasionally rented from the town's sole video store, but usually borrowed from the library or purchased for peanuts at various outlets. Here are some series we've road-tested, in no particular order, beginning with the dud that surprised me most:



The Twilight Zone (original series): Fail. The girls were content with the widely-absorbed stand-out episodes, but have zero desire to follow that up with more. The younger (13 years old) doesn't mind this show in small doses, but the older (15) hates, hates, hates it. There are a couple of reasons for this reaction, I think. First of all, it is a product of its time which is somewhat lost in translation to ours. The writers of the time were heavily steeped in the stage work of the day, and each episode plays like a Cliff's Notes for Ibsen or O'Neil. It's all about Freud, then, and the women come off particularly badly (“Stop trying to be my mother, Jane! Can't you see you're killing me?!”). More than that, however, in the philosophical debate re: free will vs. determinism, Rod Serling falls squarely on the side of Fate. I've had to accept the unhappy truth that this television series plays best to late-adolescent beta males.

Star Trek: The Original Series: Modest Success. The girls enjoyed the melodrama, especially in the more boisterous episodes, and incorporated the catch-phrases into their everyday conversation (“Are you out of your Vulcan mind?”). However, repeat viewings, which would gladden the old man's heart, are completely out of the question. I haven't yet tried TNG on them (still too expensive). My wife suspects they might like it better.

The Beverley Hillbillies: Modest Success. From a Sixties point of view, the show was hopelessly square. But is that really such a negative? From a broad yuks point of view, it's still good to go.

Gilligan's Island: Hit! If another American television series has generated as many long-standing debates as this one, I've yet to hear of it. They're all debates about the nature of gender and sexuality, mind you, but still: I don't see any discussion boards alight with observations rendered from Six Feet Under. Gilligan exceeds all expectations, because we happily lower them the moment we sing the theme-song.

Speaking of lowered expectations . . .

"Hello, ladies!"

Bonanza: Hit! Those of us who grew up on MAD Magazine recall this show as an endless horse opera about four grown boys, none of whom could hold onto a woman. Seeing it again with pre-adolescent kids was an eye-opener. Most episodes were in fact adroit morality melodramas, many which explored thorny social issues that have yet to be resolved. Also, there was something about the slender-hipped Michael Landon that kept the girls asking for more. Although a lean physique in cowboy garb was not enough to recommend:

Wanted: Dead or Alive: Fail. The vehicle that brought Steve McQueen to the public eye failed to elicit anything but a “meh” from the girls. In fairness, although we now lionize McQueen in memory, he was frequently an on-screen dud.

"How can I get through to those girls?"

I Spy: Fail. A revolutionary series for its bi-racial co-protagonists and exotic on-location international hijinx, the plot manipulations were, alas, onerous and poorly-paced, The girls abandoned it after a single episode. I tried a few others before following suit. Both Culp and Cosby were incredibly sharp customers (the commentary tracks are worth the time), leaving me to wonder if their (quite valid) personal concerns weren't included at the expense of story momentum.

The Man From U.N.C.L.E.: Hit! At its heart this is a series about two good-looking guys (particularly the Russian) of small stature who get ordered into trouble, then weasel their way out through charm, intelligence and the modest application of muscle. Even the much-lamented third season hit the right notes often enough to keep us hooked. One curiosity: when I asked the girls for a favourite episode, I got vague answers. U.N.C.L.E. is one of those shows best remembered as a vast collection of favourite moments.

Smallville: Modest Success. To be honest, it's a huge hit with the girls, but after four seasons I couldn't bear to watch any more. A group of clear-skinned twenty-somethings pretending to be high-schoolers, holding on to secrets that get them into trouble, especially once the snogging starts — it dawned on me that I was watching a high school fantasy. Too prurient for my tastes.

The Waltons: Modest Success. Same as Bonanza, only with girls, and fewer Colt Peacemakers. None of the fellas were quite as dishy as Little Joe, alas.

The Muppet Show: Borderline Fail. Another show of moments, the ones that work are often corny, off-puttingly nostalgic, or (best of all) just plain weird. The moments that fall flat, though, are sickly sweet and/or earnest to a fault. And then there's the Raquel Welch episode. If there's anything creepier than sexist hippie dudes drooling over a bombshell in a bikini, it's sexist hippie dudes doing the same with felt puppets on their hands.

Somewhere there's a five-year-old boy who doesn't understand why he's feeling so strangely.

Black Adder: Hit! Boy, did this surprise me. I can remember watching this show in my early 20s and thinking its acidity was almost toxic. But that was then and this is now. The entire family loves watching the vile Edmund Blackadder abuse his witless cronies (especially Baldric).

"If I know girls, and I believe I do, they're going to enjoy watching as I demean you!"

Monty Python's Flying Circus: Hit! In fact, the girls enjoy watching it more than I do. Fellas my age have committed the funniest sketches to memory. The other sketches, while still amusing (usually), are sluggishly paced. It's remarkable that something as rough around the edges as the Flying Circus became such an enormous hit. But its success with the teens indicates there is still something there there.

And the award for Startling, Unqualified, Absolute Hit Without Peer goes to . . .

. . . (would you believe?) Get Smart!



A friend who's written for television tells me this show is the bane of every writer's existence, because when pitching to producers, the moment inevitably comes when the writer hears, “You know what I'm really looking for? The next Get Smart.” It will never happen, because the next Get Smart will look nothing like the original Get Smart, which made innocent fun out of mocking just about everything The Establishment placed in high regard. These DVDs have seen, and continue to see, a great deal of use.

Runners up: Fawlty Towers, and the first four seasons of The Simpsons.

Currently watching: Lost. Another conversation-generating desert-island TV show, this one is a big hit with the girls, a modest hit with me. Sawyer and Said are the draw for the females in this family. I wish Kate had some appeal, but alas, she (really, really) grates on me. That's not the fault of the actor (Evangeline Wilson, a lovely young woman who digs deep for the desperately needed nuance) but the writing: Kate is not so much mysterious or even misunderstood as she is poorly-conceived. The writing for the other characters, though, is mostly pretty sharp.

Potential fodder for the future:

Friday Night Lights looks very promising. In another year or two, Mad Men might also make the cut.

Stay tuned.

Carnivàle vs. The "Kill 'em Young" Manifesto

"Golly, but I miss those 'Bottle Episodes'!"

I took my time getting around to watching Carnivàle. There were so many ways I could experience disappointment. The DVD packaging was fabulously evocative, suggesting the creative love-child of Flannery O'Connor and Stephen King. What if the show didn't live up to my expectations? Worse still, what if it did?

When I finally sat down to watch, the show hit a happy middle note. The episodic development of characters and narrative had a charmingly primal roughness. Season 1 was all ennui and suggestion, fostering expectations that the series might fold itself into a Lynchean sort of Fabulist Mobius Strip.

Instead, shortly after the midway point in Season 2, questions began to be answered. For a show as grievously truncated as Carnivàle, there are some very clear pluses and minuses to this particular tack. On the plus side, once certain pieces fall into place it's fun to go back to the early episodes and see where surprise conclusions were pointedly alluded to. On the minus side, it becomes crystal clear exactly where this television series was pointed and, frankly, the trip doesn't look worth the ride. Which brings me back to the plus side: I'm as grateful for what I've been spared as I am for what I've seen.

If you're among the legions of disappointed viewers who still want to know what was going to happen next, I can tell you. The carnival was going to split into factions pitted against each other by shady manipulative types. The guys you thought were good were going to cross the line with their behaviour, until the fateful confrontation between Brother Justin and Ben Hawkens is mired in profound ambivalence. Both camps would experience defections, and confusion of identity. There were going to be surprise resurrections, as well as prophecies that were either beacons of hope, or cunning deceits. And finally, by the end of Season Six, there would be an apocalyptic sloughing off of . . . .

Ah, but you've already seen this show. That's because the guy whose hand was heaviest on the till at the end of Carnivàle's first season bolted to another network, where he saw the thing to its proper completion. I'm talking about Ron Moore. And, yes: I'm talking about Battlestar Galactica, which managed to slip directly into its Decadent Phase at the very end of Season Two, and stay there to its conclusion in Season Four. And which, coincidentally enough, has a narrative arc that bears a striking resemblance to the Carnivàle “bible” laid out by creator Daniel Knauf at the beginning of that series (viewable here, at the HBOCarnivale Discussion Group, as The Gospel of Knaufius).

Another trait Galactica has in common with Carnivàle is its “bottle” episodes, where the epic comes to a screeching halt and the characters get to interact with each other and set up scenarios for subsequent episodes. These episodes are usually given over to the junior writers in the stable, while the seniors figure out how to plant teasers that lead to the big surprises that keep viewers hooked. Those are the episodes that get me looking at my watch and wondering if I couldn't just skip ahead to the next barn-burner (the answer is usually, “no” because I will have missed five minutes, or even 30 seconds, of crucial “reveal” planted by the Story Chief).

Even a show as brilliantly executed as The Wire couldn't escape these occasional doldrums, which is as it must be, I suppose. It does keep me wondering, though, if there is any creative team that has the wherewithal to keep generating narrative momentum for more than three seasons. I'll let you know if I ever find one that does. In fact, stay tuned: our family has just discovered this wacky six-season show that looks like it might have some potential. It's called Lost.

Post-it note: over at the Onion AV Club, Todd VanDerWerff is giving Carnivàle some frame-by-frame analysis. His attentiveness more than makes up for my crass generalisations.

Unpacking U.N.C.L.E. — Phase One

Merry Christmas to me — and to my family, since we have collectively reached the stage where the television can no longer be watched in seclusion. This was cause for some mild anxiety on my part: while we all seem to be on the same page when it comes to Get Smart, Star Trek and the occasional Bonanza episode, I Spy was given a unanimous thumbs-down and The Prisoner was greeted with cool disdain. As for The Man From U.N.C.L.E., it had been years since I last watched an episode, and what I remembered didn't recommend itself.

However the packaging is so gee-whiz kewl! that I momentarily belayed my misgivings and wallowed in its flashy, evocative gim-crackery. When it came time to give the show a spin, I recalled Robert Fulford's dictum that the history of a television series falls into four periods — Primitive, Classic, Baroque and Decadent — and cued up the second season (In Living Color!) first.

It's a hit! Judging from the first half-dozen episodes in season two, it looks like The Man From U.N.C.L.E. found its groove early and shifted from Classic to Baroque the minute it introduced color. At this point the writers still took the characters, peril and complications seriously enough to maintain genuine narrative tension, while the acting and direction indicate that everyone involved was happy to be there.* U.N.C.L.E. builds on the myth of the office as the place where all the fun happens. Napoleon Solo gets grabby with the secretary in a fashion that would land him in irons today, but whenever he encounters the fairer sex on the field, he and his buddy treat them as an inconvenience if not an outright annoyance. Indeed, everything about the field is an inconvenience. The action can take place in an exotic (inevitably fictional) foreign country where the women are lush and the gadgets are shiny, but both the women and the hardware end up complicating the job, which exists to be completed so that the agents can return to the office as quickly as possible. Compared to the froufrou interiors of various embassies and lairs, the aesthetic inside U.N.C.L.E. headquarters is starkly utilitarian. But then that's the aesthetic to most rumpus-rooms from the same era. And there are hints aplenty that these cool kids do enjoy a good rumpus.

Most U.N.C.L.E. fans regard the first season as the best, with the second and the fourth seasons falling behind respectively. Apparently the third season more than qualifies as The Decadent period. The actors speak ruefully of those episodes, which slid into a level of camp that made Batman seem the very embodiment of subtlety. Even the Time Life packagers apologize — more than once — for its inclusion in the set.

That may be the unwatched season in this house. The other three, mind you, remain in demand. Stay tuned for further thoughts, once the contents of the briefcase have been exhausted.

Phase Two

*One episode begins with heartthrob Ilya Kuryakin deep undercover as a street troubador in South America. He strums his guitar, flamenco-style. Then he begins to sing: “Hava Nagila, Hava . . . .” For those keeping track, we are observing a Scottish actor playing a Russian posing as a Hispanic musician singing a Jewish folk song. This is the generation that invented irony.

The Boxed Set, Continued: Resistance Is ... Futile?

The impulse DVD purchase sure ain't what it used to be, now that video-on-demand is so very accessible. Throw in the chastening effect of considerable personal experience and it's a wonder I buy DVDs at all. How many times have I dropped $25 or more on some “special edition” of a movie I remembered oh-so-fondly, only to take it home, pop it in the player and realize within 20 minutes that I was reheating a turkey? Even if the movie is my personal Citizen Kane the fact is I'm still getting older, time is moving faster, and the list of yet-to-be-seen “Don't You Miss It!” material is growing exponentially by the day.

So how is it my weekly visits to Costco keep rocking me on my heels, despite this jaded state of mind? It's Christmas, of course: the season for boxed sets. I rifle through the display the way I once rifled through hockey cards. “Got 'im, got 'im, need 'im, got 'im . . . uh . . . mm, future rental . . . got 'im,” etc. Springsteen & Co. enticed me last week. This week I saw Costco selling the complete Man From U.N.C.L.E. for the exact same price ($78).



Yowsa, what kitschy packaging! Time-Warner-HBO certainly knows how to appeal to the boy inside the man (and really: how many women get excited by DVD packaging?). If they had Saran-Wrapped the AMT model to the “briefcase” there's no earthly way I could have resisted the lure, even if I'd fasted for 40 days and 40 nights.

But resist I did — just barely. It helped to keep several recent and relatively inexpensive disappointments top-of-mind. I couldn't pass up The Prisoner for $30 — the classic Patrick McGoohan vehicle, of course, not the recent reheat. When I sat the family down and played the first disc, the reaction I received was . . . well, let's just say that my reciprocal reaction to Glee is more ebullient. And even I had to admit this recent exposure was a mixed bag of tricks. As with Star Trek: TOS, much of The Prisoner's enduring charm lies in its period-piece curiosity factor. If the viewer isn't braced for trippy-hippie hijinx and scenery-chewing histrionics, it is difficult to make much of a case for the show's intellectual content. (I had to wonder which acid flashback was the greater torment: The Village or The Banana Splits?)

More pertinently, this summer I picked up the first season of I Spy (five bucks!) a series often touted as the most superior of the Bond spin-offs, what with its interracial duo and international location shoots. Watching it for the first time, some forty years after it first aired, I can certainly acknowledge the innovation and risks that Culp & Cosby took. The first episode sends the two off to China to intercept an athlete intent on defecting to the Reds. The athlete is obviously modeled on Muhammad Ali, and Cosby's character stifles a very convincing impatience with the man's ego and political naiveté. But this is a 90-second scene in an episode that swings a heavy moral hammer to considerably less effect than Roddenberry did, and concludes with a merry little chase-on-foot through the slums of Hong Kong. Family Verdict? “Dad, please. We'd rather watch The Prisoner.”

Also on sale (same price as Boxes Boss & U.N.C.L.E.) is the complete Get Smart, which remains far and away the best DVD investment I've made — one increasingly unlikely to ever be usurped. Get Smart has the period-piece curiosity factor in spades, of course. But more than that, it's remarkable how much better this series was at conveying the same social commentary as the material it was spoofing, while retaining a capacity to entertain through nearly five decades. In fact, now that I think of it, the case could be made that time has only added to the series' already formidable entertainment cache.

And so the U.N.C.L.E. briefcase was returned to its place. And I returned to mine, where I could settle for the better value of another go-round with Agents 86 and 99, while gently nudging the imagination through remembered projections of fevered deprivation.

Links: DVD sets: The Man From U.N.C.L.E. (A), I Spy (A), The Prisoner (A). Note the on-line cost difference. And it's increasingly difficult for me to maintain my resistance after reading this guy. Thankfully, there is also this guy.

Pleasantly Surprised: Short Clips

I dread trips to the video store. When one child is 13 and the other 11 — and both are daughters — the critical gulf between entertainment values is nearly unbridgeable. So far as the girls are concerned, my choices are knee-jerk, spectacular failures. A recent happy exception, however, has been season one of Star Wars: The Clone Wars (A).

Of course, it's not like the Lucasfilm drones have reinvented the wheel. During the first episode my wife and I exchanged a glance that read, “How many before we get to call it quits?” Each episode averages 25 minutes, so we committed ourselves to three.

Quelle surprise: we got hooked! The writers and directors have cooked up some punchy confections for such a seemingly modest platform. There are tropes aplenty, but any student of commedia dell'arte will tell you tropes are the distractions entertainers wield in order to pull off the necessary surprises. In this regard, and in the visuals (especially impressive on these newfangled flatscreen televisions), season one of The Clone Wars delivers with panache. If you enjoyed any of the films (and I only enjoyed the first two) you will almost certainly find something to enjoy in this series.



President Bush The First famously groused that he wished there were more families like the Waltons and fewer like the Simpsons. I hate to admit it, but as entertained as I've been by Matt Groening's kinetically dysfunctional cartoon family, I actually find myself agreeing with the former President's sentiment.

It was not always thus. In my memory, The Waltons resided as a hokey bastion of conservative (read: “insular”) family values. Imagine my surprise, then, when I unpacked season one (A) and discovered a very conscious and deliberate exploration of liberal values. Pa Walton is an Emersonian mystic, Ma a devout Baptist; the rest of the family runs the gamut. Each is acutely aware of their individual biases and takes pains to put these aside and give due consideration to points of view they might originally find disagreeable, and doing what they can to cultivate common ground with difficult people. The resulting stories are often quite affecting.

This is only the first season, mind you. Given how long the show ran, I'm guessing the knife-edge of acuity eventually dulled into a blunt hammer (“Hamner”?) of sentimentality. But at this point even my 13-year-old is engaged by the thought-provocations of season one. See you tomorrow night, John Boy.

*****

Last but not least, as with directors, there are rock singers I would love to love, but don't. Since Tom Petty has already been raised tangentially, I might as well come out and admit I've generally been cool toward his work. Hard to say why, really. He's aggressive, a trait I very much like in my rock 'n' roll; he's also self-pitying, which can appeal on occasion. Clearly he got the mix right for a great many fans — just not for me.

Enter Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers: Runnin' Down A Dream — a four-hour(!) documentary directed by Peter Bogdanovich, another talent I'd love to love. Given this less-than-promising set of circumstances, it's a wonder I bothered with it at all. But my curiosity got the better of me when I noticed that Q Radio host Jian Ghomeshi asks every single one of his musical guests if they've seen this movie. Obviously Petty and Bogdanovich left quite a thumb-print on Ghomeshi's consciousness. Ghomeshi is a sharp guy with no small insight of his own; I had to wonder what, exactly, was the deal with this doc?

Only when I watched the movie did it finally register with me just who Petty has influenced/worked with/been influenced by — namely, everybody who was anybody in the last 40 years of rock 'n' roll. Even if you're not a fan of Petty's music, the man and his entourage have amassed an enormous quiver full of very entertaining stories, many of which have amusing video footage to match. I've watched this doc twice, and while I could have done without the footage of his current show (a typical late-in-life “extravaganza” where the jumbotron does all the heavy lifting) it remains an engrossing and revealing film about a scene that used to be The Only Show On Earth. Highly recommended, with one small word of advice: break it up into 40 minute installments (A).

Monty Python's Flying Circus: What Happened To The Love?

McNally-Robinson in Winnipeg was selling the complete Monty Python's Flying Circus box o' DVDs for a criminally low price, so I went ahead and passed them the plastic (here's the Amazon listing, for a great deal more than I paid). Once we arrived home we unpacked the box and started watching.

I've had some second thoughts about the purchase. First of all, it's not as funny as I remembered. It's not like I'm stone-faced while watching: I'm usually smiling, and every once in a while something catches me off-guard and gets me giggling. But there are plenty of sketches which, frankly, are complete duds. I'd forgotten those, and for good reason.

Then there are all those sketches I hadn't forgotten, because for the past three decades I couldn't join a movie queue that didn't contain at least one person who felt obliged to mount a solo Spamalot performance. Words cannot describe my relief when The Kids In The Hall finally gained the higher hipster cred ("Lopez!").

Finally, there's the issue of the effect these jokers have on my daughters -- specifically, on their accents. Even a doting daddy-o gets weary when his girls insist on calling, "Faaw-thaah?" Of course, it could be so much worse: it could be, like, those two hosers with the toques, eh?

Sidney & Lou

As Sidney and Co. took turns smooching Stanley (and congrats to the lot of them, they deserved it, especially Fleury for that final, sensational save) I jumped from hockey to Elvis Costello's talk-show, where the intense Irishman was interviewing Lou Reed. This was the first I'd seen Costello's show, and my very first impression was, he runs a much tighter ship than he needs to.

My second impression was related to Lou Reed, who was once a distant something of a role model for me (romantic, prophetic poet, and all that jazz). I'd always had the impression Reed was a bad interview because he was an incredible asshole. Certainly there is no shortage of evidence when it comes to his capacity in this regard. But as I watched Reed react to Costello -- stifling impatience and reluctantly resorting to his very best behavior -- I began to wonder: does this man even have it in him to do this? I don't believe he does. After all the years he's been Lou Reed and abused (fill in the blank) I don't think he has the capacity to answer a straightforward question. His hard living has eliminated the required "processing" buffer.

The man is a casualty, in other words. He can still lean instinctively toward an apt lyric, but when it comes to mano a mano interaction, he's at a significant loss. The mano is nearly gone.

The Latest DVD Hit Series

I found a pack of Bonanza DVDs on sale for five dollars. I hadn't seen the show in years, so I parted with a fin and took the DVDs back to my private Ponderosa.

The four of us sat down to watch the first episode. When it was over, I glanced at my wife, and she rolled her eyes. Then we asked the girls what they thought. “I kinda liked it.” “Me too. I want to see the rest of them!”

Half-a-dozen episodes later I think I understand the appeal. As with Star Trek, Bonanza is a show firmly established within its own time, the 60s. Unlike Star Trek, where much of the social commentary is implicit, Bonanza's social commentary is explicit — and more emotionally compelling for it. A ten-year-old will understand a Star Trek episode like "Let That Be Your Last Battlefield," but she will viscerally get what racism is all about when she watches Hop Sing's nephew get beat up by Carson City thugs.

It also helps that the young Michael Landon is a tad dishier than, say, a young Walter Koenig.

A final word on the quality of the DVDs: wow, are they crappy. They look like an old VHS tape has been transferred to the new format. Throw in a copyright issue that prevents the use of the familiar “Bonanza” theme song, and this collection is a marked step down from something you might purchase from one of Hop Sing's nephews. Still, it's the best five dollars I've spent in quite a while.

But speaking of television...

Melanoma Blues

When you make it a habit not to make television a habit, you don't get blindsided by news that the well-paid, well-dressed financial reporters for network television are really televangelists by any other name. And while watching Jon Stewart scold Jim Cramer might deliver a modicum of catharsis to those of us with tenuous job security and dwindling RRSPs, the spectacle of it all is little more than a distraction.

Cramer is like most people who acquire his level of fame and wealth: he traded in what character he had to become a Personality. You could almost say he forfeited his soul to gain the world. I'm not shedding any tears over his public humiliation. But if we're going to live through this we'll have to shift our attention from the unsightly melanomas and address the tumors in the liver.

Introducing Old Spies To New Readers (And Viewers)

Agent 86 [Maxwell Smart] was a little boy who would go into flights of fancy and flights of empowerment but who really didn't think things through very carefully. Siegfried was [slips into Siegfried's voice] contemptuous, he vas supercilious, he always had za answer, und everyone was not as good as he vas [resuming regular voice] — but he was defeated by Max 100% of the time. And I can just imagine little kids saying, “Yippee! We bested the bad authority!” -- Bernie Kopell ("Siegfried"), interviewed.

Were we to apply the same analysis to James Bond, we might have to amend “little boy” to “adolescent boy,” but otherwise the template fits. And Sebastian Faulks adheres to the template, as laid out originally by Ian Fleming. Faulks' The Devil May Care (Amazon) takes place in the late 60s and Bond is in recovery. He's reeling. He's been the convenient punching bag for one too many villains, and he lost his wife in a botched attempt on his own life. Worse than that, the Rat Pack is now a bunch of has-beens.

Against this backdrop Bond is called into duty, and performs to spec: he beats the bad guy in an early competition of wits, corrects an incompetent French waiter, snoops around a certified lair of evil while wearing nothing but his bathing suit — then receives the sort of physical punishment that kills most mortals.... I won't bother with the rest, because what matters is the entertainment factor. And I was as entertained by Faulks as I ever was by Fleming, which is to say: fair to middling.

It's possible that, as Michael Dirda suggests, Faulks stuck to the Fleming template just a little too closely. Even when I was a kid reading the Bond books for the first time I had the impression that the author finished the books in a state of exhaustion, not exhilaration; the dramatic high-water mark is usually achieved shortly after the halfway point, when Bond is captured and tortured. How he survives and escapes makes for a spellbinding read. The long slog back to his Jamaican retreat and the girl beneath the mosquito netting, however, is just that — a slog — and little more.

Faulks understands the appeal of Bond's physical torment, and pulls that narrative as tautly as Fleming ever did. He also takes advantage of Fleming's penchant for lectures. Again and again Bond receives accounts of the British Empire ruining the rest of the world while in pursuit of their own benefit and pleasure. In fact the villain's chief motivation is to punish Empire Britannia for her imperial transgressions. Bond doesn't bother to counter the accusations with rhetoric of his own, or even to register that he's heard the complaint. As he gets closer to his goal of defeating and killing the villain, he accrues a few personal motivations, but even those aren't particularly deep-seeded. His response is basically, “I don't care: you're going down.” Again: vintage Fleming.

But again, as the book winds down to its complete full stop, so does the author. I get the impression that Faulks considered the new assignment a bit of a lark, which is too bad. Had he applied himself a little differently, he might have actually improved the Fleming template.

As for Agent 86, the movie looks like it's a mess. I can't say I'm surprised: recapturing the charm of the original Get Smart television series is a nearly impossible feat. Kopell has it right: Max is a little boy surrounded by adults. With good direction Steve Carrell could probably hit the right “little boy” notes. The trickier role is Agent 99. In the show's first episode, when Barbara Feldon is introduced as Max's co-agent he looks her up and down and says, “Why you're a girl!” as if he can't decide whether to be insulted or completely twitterpated. 86 may be a little boy, but 99 is his babysitter — and no-one falls harder for a 16-year-old babysitter than an eight-year-old boy. What makes the predicament so delicious is the notion of near possibility: play your cards right, and the babysitter might just fall for you (and then what do you do?).

If there's a Hollywood writer who understands that, I've yet to make their acquaintance — Stephen Spielberg is probably the last director to get in touch with his inner-eight-year-old, and on this score he's getting a little creaky. But let's say the Get Smart movie-makers have the naif-babysitter mix just right: what are the chances they've peppered it with biting political-social commentary?

No, it's best to just stick with the original series — which is, to date, still the best DVD investment I've made on behalf of our family.

Gearing Up For Summer

Spring brings out the adolescent in me. When the snow melts and the sap starts flowing in the trees, I pull out the old albums I listened to in the carpeted basement rec-rooms of my friends. In the past I've washed windows and waxed the car to the strains of RUSH, Pink Floyd and the ever-present Zep. This year the soundtrack is Billion Dollar Babies (Amazon), continuing my renewed delight in all things Alice. And thanks to Yahmdallah I've reconnected with April Wine. Whenever I think my grade 9 soundtrack has run its course, someone comes along and reminds me of an album that fell behind the stereo. Very nice.

My reading habits experience a similar shift. My daughters have become curious about the Batman storyline, so I stopped by a comic shop and picked up Hush. Of course, I can't help but giggle when, after sharing a rooftop smooch with Catwoman, Batman monologs: "Can't you see that our relationship allows for the possibility that I may someday find you ... killed by The Joker?" But I don't want to be too ironic about the pleasure I find in the book. Jim Lee's artwork is dynamite, fun-house material, and Jeph Loeb's storyline parades the usual Arkham Asylum inmates through the pages until Batman figures out "who's behind it all."

Moving up the ladder of taste a rung or two, spring usually motivates me to pick up a travel book. On The Road was typical of my younger day, as was Zen & The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance. The Songlines by Bruce Chatwin was another such. This year I'm returning to Sam Shepard's Rolling Thunder Logbook, a collection of notes and reminiscences of his time on Bob Dylan's Rolling Thunder Tour. The pieces are short and evocative, easy to read between chores or while waiting for my daughter to emerge from her basketball practice. Is there a rock 'n' roll tour like this anymore? After reading Bill Flanagan's tedious account of U2's Zoo TV tour, I suspect the answer is a resounding "No."

And finally television: when I'm not watching hockey, I'll be catching up on Dr. Who, just to keep my geek bona fides up to snuff.

And you?

Firefly: I like it. She likes it. What went wrong?

While browsing about in one of the ubiquitous box stores, I noticed that Firefly: The Complete Series was being sold for a nickel shy of $20. “The Complete Series” sounds rather grand, but really we're talking about a total of 14 episodes since Fox TV canned the show after a single season of mediocre ratings. Still, twenty bucks is what some people charge for a single CD, so this looked like a value I shouldn't pass up.

In concept Firefly is as pure a Space Opera as you can get: a group of misfit smugglers pilot an old ship on the fringes of the galaxy, trying to avoid run-ins with the law. It's even got six shooters and horses, which should qualify it for a whole new genre: the Space Horse Opera. And I'll be hog-tied and warp-fried if the whole durn hash doesn't work.

I need to point out here that this concept doesn't just work for me (a soft touch for this sort of thing); it works spectacularly for my wife, who mostly regards my fondness for all things Trek with a raised eyebrow. Unlike the recent generations of Trek, where the method was to establish the new franchise with three seasons of creaky scripts and bad acting, Firefly begins with a bang, quite literally, and it never lets up. The central character appears to be fighting guerrilla warfare on behalf of some holy cause. Things go badly for his team, however, and he is forced to surrender. The story begins there, and picks up six years later when he's become an outlaw.

The show's intelligence (here's a good time to credit creator Joss Whedon) is in its leisurely unveiling of significant details. We know our hero is now apostate and grotesquely disillusioned, but only over the course of the season do we get any idea why that is or what's really taken place to get him there. He is, of course, struggling to figure out which values he still holds dear and which he can do without. Meanwhile, he is surrounded by a crew of strong characters, half of whom are strong women (no small appeal to viewers like my wife).

Firefly also doesn't skimp on humour, some of it of the shoot-and-throw-the-corpse-over-the-gunwales variety that you get in Spaghetti Westerns. And there a few winks thrown toward the concept's absurdities. But for all the fruitiness of the gig, it works excellently because the visual signifiers — six shooters, cowboy talk and character stock pulled straight from Gunsmoke — work as a shorthand that emotionally pulls the viewer in to the concept's trickier conceits: a slow and morally ambiguous struggle against an enormously corrupt corporation that values technology, material gain and corporate power, and doesn't hesitate to exploit the weaker members and discontents of its own society.

Despite the fact that Firefly in its entirety works better than all but a meagre handful of the (egad!) 726 episodes of Trek, it seems to have died quite typically from a spectacular case of network neglect. I should also say that my affair with Firefly started off on the wrong foot: a year ago I rented Serenity, the movie that followed hot on the heels of the series' cancellation. I couldn't finish it. It was like beginning a mystery with the last chapter. It's wrong, and it just doesn't work.

It also highlighted a peculiarity of sci-fi television — the fetish for perfectly coiffed hair. What is it about Space Opera (and as with everything else about the genre, Battlestar Galactica pretty much sets the standard in this department, too) that requires its heroes to look like they've just left the stylist's chair? Especially for a concept like Firefly, I'd think there might be some leeway in the hairstyle department. Make it more like Deadwood In Space, perhaps.

Anyhow, the hair is just one small nit to pick, and it's foolish of me to complain when the leads are all so easy on the eyes. Firefly is television at its best, and my wife and I are now among the slowly growing legion of fans who would dearly love to see its resurrection.

Fave Thing #5

This posting promises to be a messy bit of bubble and squeak, but here goes:

While my wife has been away, I've spent the closing hours of the evening watching episodes of Star Trek: TOS. It's a pleasant way to cap off the day: a mixed diet of nostalgia, a few revelations (I'd forgotten that Shatner, particularly in the first season, was capable of subtlety), and plenty of cheese to stick to the ribs of my imagination before I lay me down to sleep.

However, I'm taken aback by the chatter surrounding the proposed Star Trek film: namely, a prequel that chronicles the early adventures of Kirk / Spock / McCoy. This skirts dangerously close to parody — but then that's what the franchise has always done best, so why can't I join the falderal? Placing the vertically-challenged Matt Damon as “Kirk” next to the military bearing of Gary Sinise (“McCoy”) and the willowy Adrien Brody (“Spock”) is visual comic genius. What's not to love?

Well ... the voices, for starters. This trio of characters has been lampooned by so many improv groups, it's impossible to consider anyone attempting to do a serious job of it. Then there's director J.J. Abrams, whose track record elicits a perpetual chorus of, “Not bad, but I expected it to be better.” No, the whole proposal prompts me to search the farther reaches of cinema for a viable alternative to the franchise's usual ham-fisted tactics.

So why not animation? The last attempt might have been flat-footed, but there's been so much technological progress since then that I honestly believe a decent script and the right director (Brad Bird, maybe) just might give this nigh-unto-dead franchise a set of legs that could carry it into the 22nd century, if not the 23rd.

Then again, maybe not. There's some indefinable quality in animation that tends to set audiences at an emotional remove. Has anyone shed a tear during an animated film? If so, which films are we talking about: Dumbo? Bambi? Hm. Dim prognosis, indeed.

Still, someone should take this concept to the drawing board, and I nominate Ken Steacy. His sketchbooks are cheerfully optimistic, sensuous and lush without being overindulgent, and he's got a Tom Swift sort of enthusiasm for big technology. He's the man to get this thing off the ground.

Which brings me to Favorite Thing #5: Artist's Sketchbooks. Particularly comic book artists. Going through a few hundred Flikr slides (here and here) inspires me. It gets me thinking, “Why can't I do that? Or something like it? Why don't I quit with the Googling, scrape an edge to my pencil and start scribbling? Eh? Why not?”

H/T to Drawn (I might as well come clean: this is the page that got me excited about Steacy's ST potential). Also to DP Blowhard for this link. (Frankly, I'd hesitate to call Will Eisner “mediocre”: if you wonder what a back alley in the Bronx smells like, just read one of his books — you will taste the stench in the back of your mouth.)

Battlestar Galactica: A House Divided

We're halfway through the third season of Battlestar Galactica. My friends love it, my wife loves it, and the critics love it, too. But I'm afraid I've signed off, thanks to three words that appeared at the end of Season 2:

"One Year Later..."

Well, here's three more words for you: Jump The Fucking Shark. Geez, did that move ever piss me off! And since you asked, I'll tell you why: because there's no end in sight.

First of all, I'll acknowledge the obvious: 100% of the TV writers out there are looking for the goose that lays the golden eggs, and when they finally find it, 99.9% of them want that goose to live into a ripe old age. These people live from project to project, pouring their creative energies into one dead-end concept after another, and when one finally grows a shaky pair of legs the writers find themselves creatively sprinting from one episode to the next, hoping against hope to sustain interest, to increase the flow of advertising bucks, to generate ever larger audiences. They will work a concept to the point of exhaustion, then work it a little further, then take an absurd risk to keep it going because once the money starts coming in they know it's too good to be true. It will dry up someday. It could be they'll pay off the mortgage with this project; more likely, the gig will close by the end of the season, and they'll be knocking on producers' doors with their briefcase full of untried concepts.

I've got a lot of compassion for these people, but when my interest in their personal story eclipses my interest in the story they're selling, we have a problem. Enter: Galactica writer and executive producer Ronald D. Moore -- an interesting guy. He has a restless but surprisingly direct intelligence. He was responsible for some of the better episodes in the Star Trek franchise, and I'm curious to see what his next project will look like. I'm just not interested in Galactica anymore, because it has taken on a drearily familiar shape. As with its contemporary 24 and The X-Files before them, Galactica has hooked the viewer, and is gearing up to play it past exhaustion. Viewers of Galactica are going to have to brace themselves for one grim revelation after the next, each one suggesting the potential for coherence and resolution, in a creative environment where, in fact, neither is a possibility.

If the viewer has the stamina of, say, a Northern Pike, this is a game that could stretch for seasons on end. I'm too old to play the Pike ("Jackfish" is what we call 'em on the Prairies). I've got the fight of a Bass: I'll sure let you know when you've hooked me, but if you don't reel me in nice and quick, I'll be off before you know it.

The Post-Mortem: (for those one or two readers who might not have seen the conclusion to Season 2, Spoiler Alert) "One Year Later..." was a distasteful, downright campy act of disrespect to the viewer's intelligence. First of all, it transformed the preceeding two episodes into a trivial, 90-minute red herring. Laura Roslin's dark night of the soul, in which she struggles with whether or not to rig her re-election, has no real point to it. The writers could have let Baltar win the thing without her hand-wringing, because her moral qualms and near moral failure add absolutely no narrative currency to the story's "conclusion".

Secondly, "One Year Later..." is a high-school English Class exercise. We all did it with Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre. We even subjected the classics to a Monty Python "one year later" treatment. Similarly, Galactica. Poofy hair and floppy guts (I shudder to think what a naturally athletic guy like Jamie Bamber had to eat to resemble the Pillsbury Doughboy), and feisty, once-single women who have become married, embittered shrews ... "Will this be on the test, sir?" Gimme a break.

End Spoiler

Seems to me this was roughly the same stunt that lost me as a viewer of The X-Files. Chris Carter cooked up a season-closing cliff-hanger in which Fox apparently committed suicide, because he was now convinced beyond a shadow of a doubt that all his sleuthing for extraterrestrials was based on a fraud. The problem for me was a) I didn't for a minute buy that Fox might possibly be dead because b) the viewers had seen countless little flashes that indicated he was pretty much on the right track.

The whole stunt screamed of desperation, and only gave credence to Stephen King's ascerbic dismissal of the show as "a five-year cock-tease" (some three flaccid years before Carter was finally forced to put the series to bed). I'd have thought Moore was above such pedestrian carny stunts, but I'm clearly wrong. Not that Moore will lose any sleep over my disaffection. My wife still watches the show, thanks in large part to this "cognitive dissonance" that Adam Rogers is so fond of.

To my mind, the real television triumph is Deadwood. Three seasons -- or three-and-a-half, if you include the two forthcoming feature-length TV movies -- and that's all she wrote. It was gritty, had no shortage of gravitas or humour (an ingredient the Galactica stable seems oblvious to) -- in other words, plenty of that thar "cognitive dissonance" we seem to enjoy. And it quit before Al Swearingen morphed into Dr. Claw.

However, do keep me posted -- I always appreciate attempts to woo me back into the fold. But, most importantly, be sure to wake me up when it's over.