Season 5 of Mad Men starts on Sunday. It's been on hiatus for 12 years, and it might be hard to remember season 4 without some of the Mad Men related info linked below. With such a long break, there's been quite a bit of Mad Men news floating around. In order to cut it down a little, most of this stuff is from the last week or so. Don't try to eat it all in one sitting you'll get a stomach ache and have to sleep off your hangover on your office couch.
-Although, Matthew Weiner has asked reviewers with advanced copies of Sunday's premier not to discuss key details in their previews, such as the year this season takes place, Weiner is changing a song featured in the episode because it wasn't released until 6 months after the episode takes place. 'Look of Love' was released at the beginning of 1967 placing the episode in, or around, the summer of 1966. This is about a year after Season 4 ended. Maybe this is subterfuge?
NBC's Community has a minor character (nick)named Magnitude, who overwhelmingly speaks in just a single catchphrase -- "Pop Pop!" Both the character and the phrase have unexpectedly taken off. Here's their first appearance:
The Wrap's John Sellers has written an oral history of Magnitude where show creator Dan Harmon (along with actor Luke Youngblood and staff writer/character creator Adam Countee) fills in the character's surprisingly rich backstory. Highlights:
Harmon: In the end, I really liked Magnitude because I realized that the reason he calls himself Magnitude is because it stands for Magnetic Attitude.
Countee: This guy has a nickname within a nickname. The layering of the character, I thought, was so funny and so brilliant. That little nuance spoke volumes about who this kid is and who this kid is trying to be.
Harmon: At some point, we had to give Magnitude a birthdate. And someone decided that he was 16 years old. We were like, "That's hilarious." He's, like, some kind of weird prodigy. There is also a deleted couplet from the election episode. Magnitude is up there talking, and the dean applauds his bold urban flavor. And in response to that, Shirley, in the audience, says, "Bold urban flavor? Please. That boy's from Barbados. His father's a cardiologist." So, there's some biographical information to add to the canon.
Weirdly, when I lived in Chicago, my roommate Bob:
looked surprisingly like Magnitude (same haircut, same glasses, same attitude)
BOTH his parents were cardiologists
the family wasn't from Barbados -- they were from Nigeria.
He disappointed the entire family by getting an MA in psychology, then dropping out and spending all day listening to Gang Starr, drinking brandy, and reading books about conspiracy theories and the paranormal. He was easily the best roommate I ever had.
On January 6, 1973, the anthropologist Margaret Mead published a startling little essay in TV Guide. Her contribution, which wasn't mentioned on the cover, appeared in the back of the magazine, after the listings, tucked between an advertisement for Virginia Slims and a profile of Shelley Winters. Mead's subject was a new Public Broadcasting System series called "An American Family," about the Louds, a middle-class California household. "Bill and Pat Loud and their five children are neither actors nor public figures," Mead wrote; rather, they were the people they portrayed on television, "members of a real family." Producers compressed seven months of tedium and turmoil (including the corrosion of Bill and Pat's marriage) into twelve one-hour episodes, which constituted, in Mead's view, "a new kind of art form"--an innovation "as significant as the invention of drama or the novel."
"An American Family" was a hit, and Lance Loud, the oldest son, became a celebrity, perhaps the world's first openly gay TV star. But for decades "An American Family" looked like an anomaly; by 1983, when HBO broadcast a follow-up documentary on the Louds, Mead's "new kind of art form" seemed more like an artifact of an older America. Worthy heirs to the Louds arrived in 1992, with the debut of the MTV series "The Real World," which updated the formula by adding a dash of artifice: each season, a handful of young adults were thrown together in a house, and viewers got to know them as they got to know one another. It wasn't until 2000, though, that Mead's grand claim started to look prescient. That year, a pair of high-profile, high-concept summer series nudged the format into American prime time: "Big Brother," a Dutch import, was built around surveillance-style footage of competitors locked in a house; "Survivor," a Swedish import, isolated its stars by shipping them somewhere warm and distant, where they participated in faux tribal competitions. Both of these were essentially game shows, but they doubled as earthy anthropological experiments, and they convinced viewers and executives alike that television could provide action without actors.
The essay includes this tidy and maybe prescient quote from Mark Andrejevic's 2004 book Reality TV: The Work of Being Watched:
The Illinois housewife who agrees to move into a house where her every move can be watched by millions of strangers to compete for a cash prize exhibits more than an incidental similarity (albeit on a different scale) to the computer user who allows Yahoo to monitor her web-browsing habits in exchange for access to a free e-mail account.
Here's another thought. Traditional game shows are spectacles of consumption, plus luck. Think "The Price is Right" or "Supermarket Sweep," where you try to win household and luxury goods based on your knowlege about household and luxury goods.
Now, game shows/reality TV are overwhelmingly about work -- "American Idol," "Survivor," "The Apprentice," "America's Next Top Model." The incentive at the end, if you win, is that you'll get enough fame and exposure that you'll win the right to continue to work.
The aspiring model/singer/washed-up celebrity who agrees to go on stage and engage in cutthroat competition with other aspirants to satisfy the whims of mercurial judges exhibits more than an accidental similarity to unpaid interns and at-will employees who can likewise be cut loose at a moment's notice.
We're all in the prize economy now.
PS: I still think Chappelle/Puffy's rant starting around 4:20 is one of the funniest things I've ever seen.
"So here's some advice I wish I would have got when I was your age... Live every week like it's shark week." - Tracy Jordan
In its 24th year, the Discovery Channel's Shark Week is really coming into its own on the internet. At least on the meme-filled internet of Tumblr/Twitter/Reddit etc. Add in the clever guerrilla marketing of having sharks appear off the coast of Cape Cod and NJ this past week, and you've got the makings of a media phenomenon I can hardly bear.
In case you missed it on Friday, NBC announced that the October 14th episode of 30 Rock will be performed live. In fact, they'll be performing 2 shows, one for the East Coast and one for the West Coast. (Pro tip: Air the opposite coast's episode before the next week's show.) I am, of course, excited to see the Tracy Morgan/Tracy Jordan combo live.
Incidentally, the Wikipedia entry for Live Television is jam packed with interesting nuggets such as an incomplete list of notable live television episodes (West Wing, 2005. ER, 1997). Also, the last scripted series to "do it live" regularly was Roc in 1992.
I get giddy around big television events. The Lost finale this weekend certainly qualifies and a big question is, "Will fans of the show be satisfied with how it ends?" From Seinfeld to the Sopranos (for different reasons), series finales have a history of being disappointing. In this way, it's almost easier when a show is canceled because then we get to blame the network as opposed to the writers. That said, I want to be satisfied Sunday. LOTS of other people are talking about Lost this week. Here's what some of them are saying:
I'm ready for the final chapter, ready to see how it sums up the season and brings the series to a close. I'm ready to watch meaning (which, to be clear, is different than answers)... But will the meaning leave us in despair, or take us into happily ever after?
What makes Lost so special is that it never spelled things out for us the way a normal TV show does. It defies formula in a medium that regularly rewards it. Lost asked us to get lost within the show and to be satisfied with being lost for most of its run. TV almost never operates that way.
The show had one good season, its first. It was very, very good ...but none of the seasons since have approached that level, and the current sixth season, rushed, muddled and dull, has been the weakest.
To me, some of the trick of Lost has been that some things are important and some things aren't...And that doesn't bother me at all, because that's part of constructing a convincing universe.
I'm not saying there aren't major mysteries of Lost that I don't want solved...But I've accepted at this point that the running tally of questions I've had about the show will likely never be answered...I don't want them to be. Why? Because the answers would probably suck.
Or perhaps the message will be that we should all find meaning in one another, instead of in some mystical riddle. (A swipe at religion? An affirmation of personal agency? A meta-critique of fans who take the show waaaay too seriously?)
It's all going to come down to this: is this a story about fate or choice? All along, many clues left us thinking it was a matter of fate: the numbers, the crazy mainland connections, Jacob's touch...
The show really had a lot of ground to cover this season in order to satisfy its loyal fans, but I think we all knew deep down that we'd never really know everything. Still, we were thrown several bones of juicy Island lure...
If you think of Lost as being one big novel...then the stuff that happened in Chapter Five ought to be meaningful in the final chapter. There ought to be a sense that everything was leading towards this ending...
Nothing that was key in the early seasons...is even in play. Even the ambiguities of "Across the Sea" now seem like attempts to shade the battle between mustache-twirling, murderous Smokey and his limp, Jesus-y antagonist.
And now we see that the writers have saved the explanation of the sideways universe for the finale. Even with all that extra time to play with, that seems like an awful lot to squeeze into the finale...I still find myself oddly trusting that they know what they're doing with this finale.
Did their deaths have meaning or were they just more victims of the seemingly endless battle between the Man in Black/Smockey and Jacob? This episode started the process of claiming that their deaths did indeed have meaning...
For a drama that traffics in philosophy, religious allegory, physics, and literary references from Jane Austen to Kurt Vonnegut, "Lost'' has a decidedly B-movie feel. After the remarkably cinematic 2004 pilot episode, set immediately after the Oceanic 815 plane crash, the adventure has been pretty schlocky.
With only two and a half hours to go, there's simply no way for the show to answer every lingering mystery still up for discussion. I'm not entirely sure that's a bug as a much as a feature.
If we give the writers a little grace and extend some patience, the suspense leading up to the finale of this television show could teach us something about faith in general.
We propped up the show with our eyeballs, our blog posts, our participation in those agonizing summertime internet Easter egg hunts. They created the whole thing, out of nothing...Let them end it their way.
For years series were canceled and disappeared without ceremony, but nowadays...it is more usual to aim for some sort of closure. (Just as it's become more common, in life, to think we need it.)
If we were to do a poll on which of the three retiring shows will have the longest and strongest afterlife, I'd bet the winner would be "Lost." Of course, the poll would be conducted on the Internet, which is sagging under the load of commentary...
Fates will be decided, questions will be answered, and one of TV's greatest series...will come to its conclusion. Not since The Fugitive, one suspects, has a series finale been greeted with such anticipation, and such dread.
Recently, Mat Williams hand wrote 288 of the lines Bart Simpson writes on the blackboard to open every episode. He used 20 white markers over 2 days to complete the work on the 22m long blackboard at Work Club, a London based ad agency. Clicking here will allow you to zoom in on any part of the blackboard, while clicking here will allow you to watch a video of Mat skateboarding through London and writing on the blackboard in a Bart Simpson mask.
Incidentally, there have been 463 episodes, and Bart doesn't write on the chalk board in the opening to all of them. To read a list of all the openings, go here. To SEE a list of all the openings, go here. There's an electrical outlet in front of Bart's knee in every season except season 1 and season 21. This might only be interesting to me.
NBC announced on Friday that Law and Order would be canceled after 20 years.* As the New York Times ably put it, "the wheels of TV justice will soon grind to a halt." City officials estimate that the show pumped about $1 billion into the New York City economy. And won't someone think of the actors.
Several casting directors for theater, film and television estimated on Friday that the majority of actors' resumes that came across their desks included "Law & Order" credits. Some actors who worked chiefly in New York theater, drawing weekly salaries of $500 to $1,500 for their stage roles, supplemented those paychecks by playing judges, jurors and police officers on "Law & Order." Pay for those jobs ranged from a few hundred dollars to $1,000 or so a week for only a few moments of screen time.
*They also announced that Heroes would be canceled, but I didn't know that was still on.
