Steven Harper Piziks

So I finally had a look at REACHER.

Huh.

The show is based on Lee Child's books. The premise is that Jack Reacher is an overwhelmingly tall, hugely strong guy who enjoys a good fist fight. He wanders the country as a nomad--literally walking, since he doesn't own a car--and whenever he arrives in a new town, some kind of Awful Event happens, and Reacher is pulled into solving it.

The show is total white male wank fantasy. Reacher is tall, impossibly well built, freakishly strong, defends his woman, maintains his massive build by eating nothing but junk food, never, ever works out, always knows what to do, fucks like a snorting bull, notices everything, misses nothing, remains stoic even in the face of family tragedy (except for one scene where a single, manly tear trickles down his chiseled cheek), owns nothing but somehow manages to get his hands on cool cars and big guns whenever he needs them, and can take multiple hits with a crowbar without breaking a bone or even getting bruised. And he has a black sidekick, so he can say he isn't racist.

He's what every good old boy thinks they are, knows they aren't, and secretly longs to be.

One of the more interesting things (for me) to watch is the camera work. Alan Ritchie, who plays Reacher, is several inches shorter than the character is. So they compensate with camera tricks--having Reacher in the foreground, while other characters are in the background, putting Ritchie on a box so he can tower over someone in a close-up, using overhead shots that disguise everyone's height, and so on. They get quite clever about it, but once you notice it, you can't stop.

Having said all that, I found the show fun to watch, especially since Reacher keeps taking his clothes off. You won't find ground-breaking anything here. It's an occasionally gory action-thriller with a few sex scenes thrown in, but for what it is, it's a good show.

Since CBS All-Access made a pile of I LOVE LUCY episodes available, I've been binge-watching them.  I have . . . observations.

--It's great fun looking at the 1950s lifestyle, even if it's the Hollywood comedy version.  The historical and pop culture references (I had to look up who William Holden and Richard Widmark were) are also a lot of fun.  And it's interesting to look at the appliances and how housework was done.  We see the impact of "new" appliances like washing machines, dryers, and electric irons.

--This is definitely Lucille Ball's show.  You can almost see her standing behind the writers and the director saying, "This is MY show, bitch!  I get the last line, the last shot, the last joke.  I get the screen time.  You forget that for one minute, and VOOP! You're gone."  You can tell she ran that show with an iron fist.

--There's no television in the Ricardo living room. Although a couple episodes revolve around a television, the TV always quietly vanishes the rest of the time.  The Ricardos also make reference to a shower, but we never see a bathroom.  I can't even tell where it's supposed to be--there's no door anywhere on the set that would lead to one!

--The show never, ever has a subplot.  It's only one continuous story.  It's weird, to a modern viewer.  FRIENDS, as a counter-example, always had a B story and often a C story.  By modern standards, the show's plots are often slow, and the jokes spaces way far apart.  In an episode of FRIENDS, every line is a joke or a setup for a joke.  On LUCY, you can go four or five exchanges before someone says something funny.  I just watched one episode in which Lucy and Fred fall asleep on a ferry, and three full minutes are nothing but them sleeping in weird positions.  Expectations were different back then!

--The scene early where Ricky tells his son "Little Red Riding Hood" in Spanish is one of the funniest damn things I've ever seen, and it deserves a lot more recognition.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=re-k5m0OsTY

--A lot of the show wouldn't fly today, and is sometimes unnerving to watch.  Ricky threatens to hit Lucy many, many times.  Also many times, Lucy acts scared that Ricky will beat her when he finds out about her latest shenanigans.  And I've counted three times so far when Ricky literally bends Lucy over his lap and spanks her with a look of ghoulish glee on his face.  After one of these incidents, Lucy visits Ethel, who tells her to have a seat.  "I don't think I can," Lucy says in a pained voice, and she remains standing.  In other words, Ricky beat Lucy so badly she can't sit down. Holy shit.

--When the Ricardos move to Hollywood for a season, we get to see how powerful Lucille Ball was. The season sports an endless parade of A-list Hollywood stars, including the aforementioned William Holden.  The show has him get blasted with a tray of cream pies in a restaurant, and there's one shot of Holden sitting in his booth, covered in goo, and you can see he's desperately trying not to laugh--in no small part because if he did, they'd have to do it all over again! The scene was apparently an audience favorite because every time the Ricardos ran into another male star on the show, he'd ask, "Did Lucy really hit Bill Holden with a pie?"  (Also apparently, these stars lived in real-life terror that Lucy would require something equally sticky of them!) 

--The show was so popular that they got Rock Hudson to appear as himself in one episode.  The audience clearly didn't know he was coming--you can hear the gasps of surprise when he strolls onstage.  And here, your sharp-eyed reviewer caught something.  We all know today that Hudson was gay, and the studio guarded this fact strictly back then. Can't have your #1 box office draw and sex symbol be a poof!  But when Hudson appears on LUCY in a scene with a swimming pool, he strolls past a group of sunbathers.  As he passes by, in what seems to be a bit of improv, he stops and strikes up a brief conversation with a Handsome Shirtless Man, completely ignoring the Lovely Bathing Beauty sitting right next to him.  The studio must have had a whole litter of conniption kittens!  See for yourself:



--The breathless sexism in the show is staggering.  When Lucy and Ethel try to open a dress shop, it's a miserable failure.  When Lucy and Ethel get jobs in a candy factory (famous scene), it's a miserable failure.  When Lucy and Ethel start a mail-order business, it's a miserable failure.  Any time Lucy gets a job outside the home, it's a miserable failure.  Because, you know, she's a woman.  Lucy is expected to have Ricky's breakfast on the table, including fresh-squeezed orange juice, when he walks out of the bedroom in the morning, and she's expected to have supper on the table when Ricky gets home.  She doesn't do it because she's good at it, or because she's handling the home chores so he can work.  No, she's clearly doing it because HE EXPECTS IT and he'll be upset if she fails to do so.  Ricky also treats Lucy like a child when it comes to money. He gives her a literal allowance each week and he "audits her books" every so often. Lucy, of course, is terrible with money because she's a woman, and we know women can't handle money.  (I think it would have been funnier--and edgier--if Lucy handled the money and gave Ricky an allowance, but they had to keep this a secret so everyone wouldn't make fun of Ricky.)

--By today's standards, Fred it astonishingly mean to Ethel, calling her a cow, calling her fat (and she clearly ain't fat), carping and criticizing her every move.  She's no angel with him, either, but she rarely snarks about his appearance.  According to the stuff I've read, Vivian Lance couldn't stand William Frawley. She was outspoken that the studio shouldn't have cast someone twenty years older than she was for her husband.  I actually agree.  In an attempt to create a foil for Lucy and Ricky's happy marriage, they created a couple that come across as mean and spiteful to each other.  We never see moments of love or tenderness between Fred and Ethel, and we never see the reason they got married in the first place, especially with their age difference.  I think the studio should have cast a younger man for Ethel's husband and given them at least an occasional moment of affection.

--The show is still entertaining and funny and watchable, even after 65 years.

I watched the first episode of DC Universe's TEEN TITANS with a wary optimism.  The previews weren't very good.  But I told myself that this is sometimes idiocy from whoever makes the preview.  As a Titans reader who still owns a NEW TEEN TITANS #1 comic from the 80s, I wanted to know what they were going to do with the team.

The short verdict is that it was pretty good.  Not great, but pretty good.

SOME SPOILERS FOLLOW

The badness?  Big-ass mistake putting Starfire into a hooker outfit.  That awful dress and that ratty fur coat struck the worst of the wrong notes in the entire musical scale.  Yes, she was apparently doing undercover work of some kind that required her to dress this way, but there were any number of things she could have worn.  The coat, which was deservedly maligned on-line, made her look trashy in a bad way.  This show is also very bloody, and not at all in keeping with the tone of the comic.  The Titans have always been a more light-hearted version of the Justice League, but they ran dark.  It's not done badly; I just didn't like it all that much.  And they changed Raven from a cool, confident woman with a deadly secret into an emo-goth girl who isn't very likeable.

The goodness?  Robin was perfectly cast.  The story is pretty good so far, and long-time readers of the book will have a pretty good idea of where this all is going.  I want to see more of Beast Boy, who barely got a cameo in the first episode.  I like their interpretation of Raven's soul self and how it works.

So I'm interested enough to keep on watching.

All my students were buzzing about the Netflix show 13 REASONS WHY.  I'd heard of it, of course.  I knew about the controversy.  And I knew, even without watching, that it in no way portrayed suicide accurately, and I had no desire to watch it. 

But then I found out a high school friend of mine, Brian d'Arcy James, was in it as the father of the suicide victim.  Brian mostly does stage work on Broadway (he's currently playing King George in HAMILTON), so I rarely get to see his work.  Most recently I saw him in the movie SPOTLIGHT, and it's always fun to see him perform.  So I decided to give 13 REASONS a look.

I lasted about five episodes.

I suppose I should warn about spoilers in the following, though the show has been out for months, and I don't see it as my job to protect anyone from plot spoilers after that long.  But I'll be nice. SPOILERS.

The show was absolutely awful.  Part of it, I'm sure, is that it does cater completely and unabashedly to the teenaged crowd, and there's really nothing in it for adults.  That's okay--I can enjoy a teen show on its own merits.  But . . .

The premise:  A teenage girl commits suicide (and the show was bad enough that I can't remember anyone's names, so I'm reduced to giving them epithets), and a few days after her death, a set of cassette tapes appears on the doorstep of the main character.  The tapes are an audio diary from Suicide Girl explaining, in detail, how thirteen different people drove her to kill herself, and, she says on the first tape, if you don't listen to all of them all the way through, something awful will happen.  "You're being watched," she says (feeding into the adolescent feeling of being the center of the world and that everyone is always watching you).

Okay, we all know suicide doesn't work this way.  Netflix was even pressured into putting a little disclaimer at the beginning of the first episode to this effect.  But a disclaimer doesn't stop me from thinking, "This would never happen" and "That would never work" and "This isn't remotely possible," which yanks me constantly out of the story and reminds me that I'm watching a fake for fake fakey-fake TV show.  I can't even pretend it might possibly somehow be a little bit real, which wrecks the viewing experience.

Suicide girl, you see, goes through some world-wrecking bullying at school which culminates in graphic sexual assault (I didn't get that far, but I read about it) that is so bad it drves her to kill herself, but she somehow manages to hold it all together long enough to formulate and execute an extensive, Machiavellian postmortem revenge  plan with dozens of moving parts that hold together without input from her.  She narrates the tapes in a chipper, snarky tone with no sign of being upset or unhappy. 

Seriously.  I have an easier time believing in an magical island full of warrior women created by Zeus, or a skinny kid from Brooklyn being transformed by a mysterious drug into a super-hero than this.  If Suicide Girl is so smart and savvy and together while putting this plan off, why doesn't she ask for help?  Or get her revenge while she's alive to see it?  Hell, why not just run away and leave the tapes behind as 13 Reasons Why I Ran Away?  None of it makes any kind of sense.  Easier to believe in giant apes living on an uncharted island than this.

The characters are also unlikable and uninteresting.  Every one of them.  There's Football Boy (the eventual rapist) who heads up a coterie of friends who hang out in his rich parents' pool house (which is bigger than most people's houses) and is for some reason worshiped by the entire student body (in reality, most students at a high school can't name the quarterback, nor would they care).  He drinks, does drugs, and beats up smaller students.  We also have Suicide Girl's Bitchy Best Friend, who gets into a fight with her over a boy (of course) and slaps her in the cafeteria.  We have Camera Kid who peeps into windows and takes pictures of Suicide Girl while she's dressing.  We have Asian Lesbian-in-the-Closet Girl who is being raised by two dads but is somehow too closeted to admit she is herself lesbian.  (WTF?  So being adopted and raised by two men turns you both gay and closeted.  I was ready to punch the fucking screen at that one.  Or just knock the writers' teeth so far down their collective throats that they could chew their own shit as it came out their asses.)  We have Miscellaneous Teens who spread half-naked photos of Suicide Girl around with their phones and make fun of her about it.  I wouldn't have wanted any of them in my classroom, let alone in my life--or on my iPad.

And we have Doormat Boy, the viewpoint character.  He receives the tapes and starts listening, but can't bring himself to listen to more than five seconds at a time before anxiety takes over and he has to stop.  Here's where things become even more unbelievable.  Doormat Boy, we learn, is something like the ninth or tenth person to get the tapes.  The tapes have been passed around from teen to teen, and everyone keeps asking Doormat Boy if he's listened to "his" tape yet (the tape that talks about his role in Suicide Girl's death).  When he says he hasn't, the asker always shouts, "What are you waiting for?  You have to listen!!"  But Doormat Boy can't do it.  And why?  Because if he did, the show would be over.  The show needs him to listen to one tape per episode.  So, against human nature and every bit of reason in the universe, Doormat Boy listens to one bit at a time.

Doormat Boy always does what the person next to him says.  Suicide Girl orders him to be her friend, and so he does.  Football Boy's friends pressure him into drinking, so he chugs a beer.  And, of course, Suicide Girl orders him to listen to the tapes on the first cassette, and he does.  I heard that later he starts standing up for himself, but I wasn't willing to wait for it.

Suicide Girl herself is a nasty little bitch.  She's mean and snarky to her friends.  She walks all over Doormat Boy.  She calls him names (the fact that she calls him by a series of demeaning nicknames instead of his actual name turns into a running joke).  Whenever she asks him for advice and he gives it, she says something cruel to him in return, and when he finally gets up the gumption to protest about it, she simpers at him and walks away.  She starts arguments with her friends and parents over inconsequential matters just to have drama in the episode.  Bitchy, nasty, unlikable.  If I was supposed to feel sorry she was dead, by Episode 5 I wasn't.

I also couldn't swallow the idea that no one tells anyone else about the tapes.  Ten-odd teens have gotten hold of these tapes, and they've told their friends about them, but NOT ONE PARENT has learned of them?  No.  Just no.  Someone would talk about it to an adult.  Or an adult would find the tapes by accident and give a listen.  Or they'd stumble onto their teenager listening and demand to know what's going on.  ("Why are you listening to a tape?")  There's no way something like this would remain a secret when this many people know about it.  I've seen it in action.  Just last week at school, a kid kept spraying stink bomb aerosol in classes as a prank.  It was supposed to stay a huge secret who was doing it.  But within twenty minutes, someone ratted him out.  Someone ALWAYS talks.  Always.  The tapes would be public knowledge in a matter of hours.

And why DOES everyone do what Suicide Girl says on the tapes?  Sorry, hon, but you're dead.  You don't get to reach out of your grave and tell other people what to do.  If I got a bunch of cassettes from a dead person that said, "Go to Spot A in town and listen," I MIGHT continue listening, but I definitely wouldn't go to Spot A to do it.  My overall instinct would be to return the tapes to Suicide Girl's parents, untouched, or maybe to erase them and throw them out.  I certainly wouldn't obey orders from beyond the grave, if for no other reason than a feeling of "Fuck you."  Yet on this show, every single person follows orders.  Another point of disbelief.  No one erases the tapes or throws them away or says, "Fuck this!"?  Sure.

And Brian's role as Suicide Girl's father?  Well, he was barely given enough screen time for me to form an opinion.  He's an adult in a teen drama, so he'd shown up in maybe four scenes by the time I stopped watching.  I'm glad he got the chance to be on what's inexplicably a hit show, though.

When I got halfway through Episode 5, I realized I was watching the show out of a sense of duty more than any enjoyment, and that I actively disliked bringing it up on Netflix.  There was nothing redeeming in the show, nothing fun or interesting to watch, nothing that made me look forward to more.  The show actively pissed me off, in fact.  I decided to remove the show from my queue, and you know what?  I felt a strange sense of relief. 

No more banal adventures of Doormat Boy and Suicide Girl.

Netflix has remade the 80s sitcome ONE DAY AT A TIME.  The difference?  The working-class single mom now heads up a Cuban family.  Grandma lives with them, and she's played by (surprise!) Rita Moreno.  Schneider isn't so much the building super as a slightly batty trust-fund baby who has nothing better to do than to hang out with the family.

It's a fun show, and I'm enjoying it.  It takes a number of issues facing the Hispanic (Cuban) community head-on: preparing for a quinceneras; families split up by deportation; veterans and the VA; veterans and PTSD; discovering a teen child is gay; figuring out how to balance being Cuban with being American.  Lydia, the grandmother, has a particularly poignant story about her role in the Pedro Pan flights from Cuba in 1962.  Like all families, they fight, make up, worry about money, deal with divorce, and hide and reveal secrets.  The main point?  This Cuban-American family is just like yours.

The show is well worth watching.

We have to take a moment to comment on how much we disliked--very well, hated--this last episode of Supergirl.  The main reason?  Indigo.

That, and stupid plotting.

(There will be spoilers.)

Indigo (played by Laura Vanderoort, the actress who was Supergirl on SMALLVILLE) was a villain-of-the-week, a relative of Brainiac. It was she who guided Kara's pod to Earth, for reasons that aren't made entirely clear in the episode.  She hates humans, also for reason that aren't made clear in the episode, and has decided to wipe them out.  Her method of doing so?  A single nuclear missile aimed at a single city.

Okay, then.

The trouble we have with Indigo isn't her concept--we're willing to take on an alien who wants to destroy humanity.  The trouble we have is how the character is handled.

First, we have her costume design.  Look at this thing:



The skin-tight body suit broke "no sexism" rule on Supergirl.  We've had a number of male villains, and not one of the THEM have strutted about in a bulgle-enhancing singlet.  But this character slinks around in tight blue spandex.  Sexist in the extreme.  But it doesn't stop there.  During the episode, we learn that Indigo has been having an affair with Kara's uncle Non.  Indigo is really an advanced computer program, and Non's sexual relationship with her reduces her to the level of mere sex toy, a glorified blow-up doll.  Can it get worse, you ask?  Why yes, it can.  After Indigo's inevitable defeat (by a man--Kara stands by helplessly and watches while Winn impossibly saves her), we cut to Non's laboratory, where he is laying out Indigo's chopped-up body on a table, cooing to her, "I only broke your heart. ... Are you ready to do it my way?"  It was creepy and disgusting, and not in the way the writers intended it.  If that hadn't been the last scene, I would have shut the episode off at that moment.

Speaking of Indigo's costume, could it be more obvious they're ripping off Mystique from the X-Men movies?  The character in the comics looks nothing like this design, so the show's choices are obvious.  Cheap, cheap, cheap.

Then we have plot holes galore.  The hero characters figure out Indigo wants to launch a nuclear missile through a completely impossible leap of logic that I couldn't follow even after I backed up the DVR and re-watched the scene.  It was absolute nonsense, and it was obvious they'd taped it quickly and hoped the viewers wouldn't notice.  We did.

They make a big deal out of the fact that the missile silo had no Internet access, and the general Indigo is tracking would somehow allow her to gain access to the silo when the guy arrives there.  When the general shows up at the silo, his iPhone (product placement!) rings. He wonders loudly why he's getting a signal.  He answers it, which allows Indigo, who can travel through computer signals, to zip through the phone and appear at the silo.

Except if cell phones don't normally get signals out at the silo, how did the general's phone get one?  If Indigo's control over computers somehow forced a signal, why would she need the general?  She'd only need to force-activate any radio-controlled device at the silo and wouldn't need the general at all.  And why was the general stupid enough to answer his cell phone in a highly-classified, hidden missile silo in the first place?

But now Indigo has taken over the missile silo and starts up the launch sequence.  Suddenly Winn, our resident computer genius, conveniently reveals to the good guys that several years ago he wrote a super virus that could take Indigo out.  (Why an Earth computer virus written years ago by a guy in a basement could hope to touch a Kryptonian super-computer that ran an entire civiliation, I can't imagine.  Good thing the Kryptonians didn't use IOS.)  All Winn has to do is upload the virus to Indigo and she'll be powerless!  Winn starts the upload.

Uh, guys?  Remember how a major plot point of the story is that THE SILO HAS NO INTERNET?  How is Winn uploading the virus?  This is not in the least bit addressed.  Major, major plot canyon. But the virus uploads merrily away, despite the lack, and we're expected to go along with it because Winn is just so handsome. Or something.

The fight scenes were also awful.  It looked like the actors couldn't remember their moves and were on the verge of losing their balance.  Usually the show's fight scenes are pretty good, but tonight they on NyQuil.

Sickening sexism, horrible writing, bad fight scenes--this episode has it all.  The "Spock's Brain" of Supergiril.

I have a tough standard for judging TV shows: they have to keep me occupied while I'm on the treadmill.  I don't like running, so a TV show that distracts me from the pain has to be =good=.

THE FLASH and SUPERGIRL keep me occupied nicely.  Good pacing, lots of action, lots of humor.

ARROW . . . has trouble. So much angst!

Seriously.  Way much.  In every episode, the plot screeches to a halt at least twice--and often more--in order to let a set of characters tear their hair out about how rotten their lives are.  Nearly all the characters are so wracked with ten kinds of guilt that it takes a third of the show to discuss it.  I could actually live with it, except IT'S BORING.  While someone wails and whines, I'm reminded that we're only on minute 13, and I have 30 minutes of pain to go.

And why is the angst boring? Because there's so freaking much of it!  Episode after episode, hour after hour, we have guilt trips, unrequited love, weeping, hair-tearing.  Come on, people!  You're bloody SUPER-HEROES!  Get your acts together!

So I find myself putting off ARROW.  Maybe I'll just let it quietly fade away.

But here's the cool thing--ARROW used to be the only live-action super-hero show on TV.  Since it was the only game in town, I had to watch it if I wanted a super-hero fix.  But now we have a number of super-powered heroes on TV.  I actually have a choice!  I can let a show go and not feel like I"m missing something.  I would have killed for this kind of thing when I was a kid.

We are in the awesome age of television.

Darwin loves horror movies.  I don't.  However, I drag Darwin to super-hero and action movies, so I put up with the occasional horror movie.

When I learned American Horror Story was featuring Lady Gaga this season, however, I thought it'd be cool.  Darwin could watch horror, and I could watch Lady Gaga, and we'd both win.  Plus--Kathy Bates!  I set the DVR to record the show, and when a few episodes had stacked up, Darwin and I settled in to watch.

Aaaand we didn't like it.  Didn't even get past the first episode.

The fish-eye lens (meant to mimic a hotel peephole, I suppose) got annoying really fast.  And every protagonist-type character acted like an utter idiot.  The two girly tourists in the opener had a hundred chances to escape, but took none of them, and in fact, did nothing but whine and scream.  The police detective showed up to investigate an emergency call with no help, even though we saw him work with an entire team just one scene earlier.  All the victims give in without fighting.  This horror trope I loathe more than any other, and this show has it over and over and over.  No one ever fights back or manages to get away?  Really?

Yeah, I know the storyline is meant to be outrageously Gothic, but style got in the way of story.  Many of the shots were so darkly lit, you couldn't see what was going on, and then when we shifted to the vampire child playroom, with the outdated video games, the change was so jarring, it jolted me out of the story and shouted, "Look! We're on a set!  Isn't the design cool?"

Even Lady Gaga's outrageous sense of style couldn't save it.

Darwin agreed with me.  We shut it off and deleted the recording.

Ah well.  There's always Supergirl.

M*A*S*H* is now out on DVD. I got the first disc from Netflix.

Couldn't even get through the first episode.

The show hasn't aged well.  I found Hawkeye annoying rather than funny or poignant--funny, perhaps, twenty or thirty years ago, but not now.  The show was heavily sexist and even misogynistic. Sure, you expect a certain amount of that from a show set in the 50s and filimed in the 80s, but when they did the montage of Hawkeye stalking a nurse he likes by hiding in her tent, in her duffel bag, in her locker, and even going after her in the shower, and she accepts this with a sigh and a shake of her head rather than a butcher knife, I became disgusted.  Major Houlihan was actually looking like a voice of reason, calling Hawkeye out on his bad behavior, but she's portrayed as a shrill harpy--and also a slut.  In fact, all the women are on the show to smooch it up or sleep with the men.  The stupid-ass laugh track, a staple of sit-coms from the period and accepted back then, grated on my nerves.  And when the main plot of the pilot settled into raffling off a nurse as a fundraiser, I had to stop watching.

I know the show got better as it went on.  I know that once Colonel Potter showed up and they got rid of dull, wimpy Blake, the show picks up and that once Frank Burns goes away and Winchester shows up the show improves further, but there are so many other shows to watch, and I realized this is one I don't really need to revisit.