Tag Archives: Deja Viewed

Deja Viewed: Mad Men


Ask Google ”What are the greatest television shows of all time?”, and she’ll promptly display a horizontal bank of names, with corresponding photos. There’s no number to designate rank, but if one were to read left to right, the first ten would look as follows:

The Sopranos; The Wire; Breaking Bad; Fargo; Oz; Mad Men; The Shield; Deadwood; True Detective; and Better Call Saul.

Two things stand out on the list. One, Vince Gilligan created two of them, Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul. Two, they all have crime and death at the core of their story lines.

Except Mad Men.

If anything, the story line of Mad Men should barely constitute a daytime soap opera, let alone a prime-time drama: A New York advertising executive in the 1960’s struggles with alcohol, womanizing and a spiraling All-American family life, in that order.

The show, which turns 15 this year, would offer no murder plot, no gang syndicate, no crime, really, to speak of besides the white collar variety. The only significant death happened before the show’s first episode. These Mad Men were racist, sexist, and as poetically merciless as The Sopranos or The Wire in their worldview of America as fading corporate sellout.

That Mad Men managed the transcendent feat bloodlessly makes the show arguably the highest TV achievement ever.

Embodying that malaise is adman Don Draper (Jon Hamm), a creative arts director who doesn’t buy the American Dream because he sells it on TV and magazines. Well.

If Tony Soprano is the Washington on the Rushmore of Hollywood’s iconic TV anti-heroes, Don Draper is its Lincoln. Creator Matthew Weiner, who served as a producer on Sopranos, created his greatest anti-hero since, well, Tony Soprano. Instead of a Mafia don, we get a Madison Don.

But make no mistake: a sharp suit does not soften the ugly edges of the character draped in it. This anti-hero is as much anti as hero, maybe more. Tony and Don both depart the series smiling, but at least you knew Tony was smiling at the image of his family. The frustrating beauty of Mad Men is you can never really tell if a character is being honest — or selling an image they honestly want to be.

One way to measure a show’s IQ is to count how many times a character has a facial reaction NOT seen by the other characters in the scene, particularly dramas. Mad Men specialized in the unshared epiphany.

What may ultimately set Mad Men apart among TV historians is its sense of history. Set from 1959 to 1970, Mad Men feigns being a show about the 60’s. But it really chronicles the birth — and death — of the Baby Boomer generation. We watch with Don & Partners as events such as the Kennedy and King assassinations and the Civil Rights movement leave our heroes crippled and dog paddling in a rising corporate tide. But like Breaking Bad, it’s all black comedy, many times laugh out loud. Even the final scene is so droll you won’t know if you’ve been won over or flim-flammed.

Which is Mad Men’s ultimate point. Are you loved and happy, or playing someone who is? Is there a difference?

Seasons 1, 5 and 7 are the show’s best, in that order. The First for its novelty; Fifth for its Conradian Hero’s Arc, and the Seventh for Hero’s Return. Lady Lazarus, the 8th episode of season 5, may be Mad Men’s best episode, period. Written by Weiner, Lazarus is the show at its narrative and artistic zenith — with a stunning final two minutes that rival any two final minutes. Period.

Combine the show’s needle drops (from the Beatles to the Stones to Frank and Nancy Sinatra) with its meticulous attention to historical detail, and you have, essentially, Ken Burns with dramatic flair.

Sold.

Deja Viewed: The Wire


It took two decades, but The Wire has finally reached its proper literary altitude. Feel free to unfasten your seat belt, recline your tray table and roam about about the cabin.

You see, this cabin is one of the few to showcase a television show that has entered the realm of high art. Elite club membership includes Hill Street Blues, The Sopranos and The Simpsons — stratospheric television achievements that elevated the medium that hoisted and foisted them as a newborns.

Maybe the epochal delay (the show is celebrating it’s 20-year anniversary this year) came from its unique DNA. The Wire may be America’s the first and only (intentional) five-sided television show. The police drama about life in the streets of Baltimore was divvied into five chapters of working America: crime; labor; politics; education; and journalism.That HBO even greenlit such a corporately-suspicious show is worth noting — along with the cold reality that no network, including HBO, would greenlight it today.

Which makes The Wire less a history lesson than an archeological find, a glimmer in a gold pan.

And one need look no further than Episode Two to find the treasure. Michael K. Williams played Omar Little, a scarred, poor gay gangbanger who served as a modern-day Robin Hood. Or Robbin’ ’Hood. Omar steals from gangs to feed his own, which is still victimized, but far less vicious. When Omar’s lover is ensnared, tortured and killed within “the game,” we become something more than spectators.

Consider the road The Wire could have taken, but did not. Any TV show could take that spark and stare at the candescent glow of a clever police procedural until disinterest reduced it to ember.

But creator David Simon, a former police reporter with the Baltimore Sun and author of Homicide, had no interest in flame — or navel — gazing. His octagonal intention was to examine the crumbling foundations beneath the feet of the city dwellers in Baltimore.

And thus America.

Colleges now teach The Wire and its themes as a course. President Obama called it the greatest television show of all-time. That it was nominated for only two Emmys — and won neither — effectively eliminating the venerated award as legitimate metric of quality.

Seasons One and Four are the show at its apex. Ironically, Simon’s look at journalism is the weakest chapter, largely because he views through the lens of a newspaper. Papers were already on life support by 2007, and the final season feels more like eulogy than observation.

And there’s no getting around the heavy lifting required to fully digest the show. I’ve watched the series four times now just to unpack its dense, tracer bullet dialogue. Simon filmed in Baltimore and used locals (some with felony records) to infuse scripts with current street and police slang. The language is so casually raw and the violence so blithely graphic, The Wire may have earned an NC-17 rating were it a film.

Fortunately, it’s not. Instead, it is a game-changer. The Wire may boast the longest list of anti-heroes ever committed to teleplay. From Omar to the alcoholic Detective McNulty to the psychopathic drug kingpin Marlo Stanfield, it’s often hard to tell who is antagonist and who is protagonist, which is Simon’s larger point.

And this may be The Wire’s: “The game” is an octagon, at least. And no one leaves uncut.

Deja Viewed: Fargo, Season II


One reason that Fargo the TV series is not more popular is because people think that it’s the small-screen version of Fargo the movie.

The error is understandable. Television has made a cottage industry out of taking films and stretching them into longer (more profitable) home entertainment. Think Snowpiercer, Watchmen, Friday Night Lights. Movies, but with commercials.

Fargo is not a movie with commercials. Fargo is a Coen Brothers trivia game with commercials. No Country for Old Men, The Big Lebowski, Miller’s Crossing and just about every movie Joel and Ethan Coen ever made are referenced in the series, which has spanned four seasons (so far), a half-century of ”true” crime stories and one zealous Coen Bros. fanboy, show runner Noah Hawley. If you play a Coens-reference drinking game, you are hospital-drunk by the half hour mark of any episode.

Hawley pays homage to the Coens the way Paul Thomas Anderson kneels at the altar of Stanley Kubrick: with an awe, reverence and an attention to the master’s style that cannot help but mimic brilliance, thus producing its own.

And nowhere is that more evident than in the second season, in 2015, perhaps the greatest 10-part crime story ever told. Which makes sense, since it’s a sly take on the greatest one-part crime story ever told: The Book of Job.

The Coens (who serve as executive producers) and Hawley have never said as much, and the season’s symbolism — particularly the neon blue UFO that plays such a critical role — is debated even now.

But the Coen Brothers have made careers out of religious parables, and Hawley has likewise chocked the series with biblical references. And season two is Sunday school with action sequences.

Consider these divine parallels with the bible and Fargo’s 1979 ”true crime” story about a couple that stumbles into a massacre at a Minnesota diner (spoilers abound):

  • The series begins when the target of the killing (Joan Cusack) tells a cautionary tale about Job’s plight to her murderer.
  • The hero, Trooper Lou Solverson (Patrick Wilson) is a man of unwavering virtue seemingly cursed by evil. Criminals menace him, cowards undercut him, his wife has cancer and his entire family faces existential uncertainty.
  • The villain, O’Hanzee Dent (Zahn McClarnon), pursues our hapless couple with a devilish determination — with flames as his licking backdrop.
  • The series ends with a cryptic conversation between the Devil (Hanzee) and an unnamed character known only as ”The Book.” The Book explains that the outcome of the ordeal was never in doubt. Is that you, God?

The story of Job seems tailor-made for the Coens, because no one has ever known quite what to make of Job.

The title character of the Book of Job is a confounding figure for Christians, Muslims, Jews, and those of any faith who have tried to incorporate the story over millennia. The tale goes like this: Job is a perfectly righteous and God-fearing man whose good deeds have brought him prosperity—children, an estate, good health. But then God enters a wager with Satan, who claims he can make even goodly Job curse the deity. Soon, Job’s servants are killed. His children are killed. He is afflicted with painful boil. His life is a waking nightmare. But he refuses to curse God for what has befallen him. When he is at death’s door, God mysteriously spares him.

Similarly, Solverson refuses to surrender his belief in the good of people or the rule of law. He, too, is brought to death’s door until a mysterious savior: the Close Encounters-style UFO. In a literal Deus Ex Machina, the orb distracts a killer, allowing the hero to shoot himself out of an impossible pickle.

Much has been made of the UFO, its message, and Fargo’s larger statement about humankind’s treatment of each other.

But, like Barton Fink, Blood Simple and No Country, bafflements may be the point. The Coens love bafflements. Apparently, so does Hawley.

And, for the record, this is not a true story. Just a timeless one.

https://youtu.be/D5HDbBm6doU