Lost In Translation

The Best TV Series From The 00's

The AV Club is making Best of the 00's lists and they recently did one on TV series:

1. The Wire
2. The Sopranos
3. Arrested Development
4. Freaks and Geeks
5. Mad Men
6. Breaking Bad
7. The Office UK
8. Lost
9. Deadwood
10. The Shield

My list is as follows:

1. The Wire

2. The Sopranos

3. Mad Men

4. Arrested Development

5. The Office U.K.

6. Deadwood

7. 30 rock

8. Breaking Bad

9. Curb Your Enthusiasm

10. Six Feet Under

Honorable Mention: Freaks and Geeks, Flight of the Conchords, Dexter, and Veronica Mars.

Mad Men in The Atlantic

There's a great article in the November edition of The Atlantic on Mad Men: 

Some elements of Mad Men’s appeal have been nicely explained by Charlie Rose (who can always be counted on to embrace the conventional wisdom) in that inimitably sycophantic, answering-his-own-question-that-isn’t-even-a-question way of his: “Why has this so resonated, especially with critics and people who like smart writing and tightly drawn characters?” he pronounced in an interview with the show’s creator, Matthew Weiner, and two of its male stars, Jon Hamm and John Slattery. The writing—and the direction, photography, and (with one important exception) acting—is superlative, the show is dramatically compelling. Moreover, as Rose’s customarily reverential invocation of the critics suggests, not just Rose but also Mad Men’s affluent, with-it target audience are particularly susceptible to liking whatTheNew York Times’ Arts and Style sections tell them to like (30-plus articles in two years!). Add to this the meticulous, lush styling and art direction, which make the series eye candy for its (again) target audience, already in thrall to the so-called mid-century-modern aesthetic—an appeal that’s now further fueled by the slimline suit/pencil skirt marketing tie-in with Banana Republic, that canny purveyor of upper-mass-market urbanity. Then there is the miraculous Hamm, playing the lead character, Don Draper. Here is an actor who at once projects sexual mastery and ironic intelligence, poise and vulnerability. That alchemy has created the greatest male stars, from Gable to Grant to Bogart to McQueen to Clooney, because it wins for them both the desire of women and the fondness of men. So the show’s white-hotness was all but predetermined.

Kings

This write up at slate makes me want to see Kings, I am a big Ian McShane fan from the brilliant Deadwood:

Kings is a retelling of one of the Bible's most gripping episodes, the story of David and Saul. Aging King Saul and his young protégé battle for the throne, for the adoration of the people, for the love of the king's daughter, for the approval of the prophet Samuel, and for the blessing of God. The backdrop is a divided nation recovering from decades of war. Both men are heroic, both are flawed. It's a tale crammed with violence, sex, and intrigue. Why on earth did no one ever think to dramatize it before?

In Michael Green's version, King Saul of Israel has become King Silas of Gilboa, played by McShane, who makes an even better modern monarch than he was an Old West saloonkeeper. David, a shepherd in the biblical tale, is now "David Shepherd," who wins glory in the pilot episode by rescuing Silas' captured son Jack and disabling one of the enemy's unstoppable tanks. (The tank, of course, is called the "Goliath.") The other star ofKings is the kingdom itself. Gilboa is the most original creation of the show, a nation that is modern and Westernized in every respect—cell phones, cable news, nightclubs—except for one: It is ruled by a totalitarian monarch, and that monarch is literally blessed by God.

More Mad Men Links

There's a link I found on a Mad Men discussion board about contemporary novels set in the suburbs from the NY Times:

Like the suburbs themselves, the suburban novel seemed for a while to go out of fashion: too old, too square, too white and middle class. Except for a few die-hards like Rick Moody and A. M. Homes, the younger novelists were apparently moving out and taking up residence in new fictional territory.

They were writing historical novels, like Kathryn Harrison and Brooks Hansen; they were traveling to Eastern Europe and reinventing magic realism, like Jonathan Safran Foer; they were working on brainy, Foster Wallace-style epics; like Alan Furst and Jonathan Lethem, they were working the fertile ground where so-called literary writing intersects with genre fiction; or, like Jonathan Franzen in ''The Corrections,'' they were writing novels in which the suburbs had been abandoned by the young and were inhabited now by the old and the gaga.

No one was left back in the old tree-shaded neighborhoods, a reader could be forgiven for thinking, except for the two Johns: Updike and the ghost of Cheever, gloomily surveying the well-kept lawns and the empty swimming pools and wondering where all the action had gone.

Also there's a great site that's called The Footnotes of Mad Men, which cites historical facts that drive story lines on the excellent AMC show.

Mad Men's Women Writers

I came across an interesting article on the abundance of female writers for Mad Men:

"The truth is that a lot of these moments that seem period and horrible for women come directly from experiences that I and the other women writers have had in our lifetimes," says Veith, one of seven female writers on the show's nine-person writing team.

"Like the [first season] episode 'Ladies Room' where Peggy goes into the bathroom and there are women crying. That came from [consulting producer] Maria Jacquemetton's life experience.

That's not the only office drama Jacquemetton says she's seen firsthand.

"Peggy assumed that Paul Kinsey in Season One wanted to talk to her and valued her opinion, and it turned out he really just wanted to date her. That's something that has certainly happened to several women on the staff, including myself, in our early days out [in Hollywood]," she says.

"Men like women, and women want to be valued for more than just being attractive, and sometimes those things intersect. That's certainly not something that's decade-specific."

30 Rock: Conservative?

There was a thought provoking article about the politics of 30 Rock in Slate recently that is a worthwhile read:

30 Rock will have its Season 3 finale next week, and, barring an unforeseen plummet in viewership, the curtains will close on some good news. Thefirst and second seasons averaged 5.8 million and 6.4 million viewers a show, while the typical Season 3 episode has brought in more than 7 million. That's a small but happy triumph for a series that's flirted with oblivion since its start—even if it's a triumph many onlookers saw coming. This season premiered just a month after Tina Fey crafted her devastatingly ditzy Sarah Palin impression on SNL and became, for a spell, the fourth-most-famous woman in American politics. It was all but guaranteed that Fey's newfound celebrity would give her baby a boost.

Bill Moyers Interviews David Simon

Here's a great interview by Bill Moyers with David Simon, I miss The Wire.

Burn Notice

Burn Notice is another entertaining TV series set in Miami (like Showtime’s Dexter), but this one, unlike Dexter, is about a former spy, Michael Weston (played by Jeffery Donovan) who has been given a “burn notice.” He is no longer has the support of the government and all of his money and assets have been frozen. He ahs landed in Miami where his mother, brother, and a former agent friend Sam (played with roguish charm by Evil Dead star Bruce Campbell) live. His ex-girlfriend gunrunner (played by the lovely Gabriella Anwar) an ex-IRA operative has come to Miami help him and reignite the romance. The voice over narration by Weston explains the ins and outs of covert ops and how to manipulate commons goods into bugs, explosives, and other tools of the trade. All in all, it’s a very entertaining show.

30 Rock Meets WKRP in Cincinnati

I don't know about you, but I was a big fan of NewsRadio in the day, great cast, here's a tribute form Slate:

With hindsight and a tour through the new box set NewsRadio: The Complete Series, the show comes into focus as a misunderstood amphibious creature of the airwaves. It was caught between the graying era of the classical, even stately, situation comedy (multicamera setup, live studio audience) and the later wave of faster-paced, more densely scripted shows (Arrested Development,30 Rock, The Office) that placed the sitcom format inside quotation marks. A running gag on NewsRadio was that fresh-faced WNYX station manager (Dave Foley) looked like "a 14-year-old in a business suit"; NewsRadio, too, carried an air of benign inappropriateness, and that was part of its charm. It sometimes played as if a brave delegation of Tina Fey's writers had traveled back in time to join the staff of WKRP in Cincinnati.

Ostensibly, NewsRadio was a jigsaw of wacky-comedy archetypes. Dave Nelson (Foley, of the Canadian sketch troupe the Kids in the Hall) was the wide-eyed Midwesterner new to the city; as the almost-wholesome straight man, he evoked Bob Newhart with a side of Richie Cunningham. Dizzy redhead receptionist Beth (Vicki Lewis) was a compulsively sarcastic hybrid of Lucy Ricardo and Eve Arden. Earnest dimwit reporter Matthew Brock (Andy Dick, an alumnus of the short-lived Ben Stiller Show) was a little bit Gilligan. And anchor Bill McNeal (the unsurpassed Phil Hartman) was The Mary Tyler Moore Show's Ted Baxter all the way: brashly incompetent, operatically pompous, missing a superego and slightly befuddled for the lack of it. (Bill's stentorian cluelessness reached an apex of sorts when he became a pitchman for Rocket Fuel Malt Liquor.)

Yet NewsRadio felt coolly detached from its stock setups, partly because of its revolving door of indie-comedy guest stars, including the pre-Daily Show Jon Stewart (as Matthew's unlikely twin brother) and Stiller cast members Janeane Garofalo (as Dave's unhinged ex-girlfriend), David Cross, and Bob Odenkirk (as members of Dave's college a cappella group, Chock Full o' Notes)—and Stiller himself, as a shark-eyed fitness-club manager who won't let Bill out of his membership contract.

Time To Watch Dexter

There's a great article in Slate that praises the virtues of everybody's favorite serial killer, Dexter. Michael C. Hall's performance is remarkable.  I think my only beef with the show is that the supporting characters are pretty thinly drawn in comparison the darkly complex Dexter. Get on the bandwagon:

Showtime's Dexter, which finishes its third season on Sunday, inherits cable TV's complex-hero tradition and takes it a step further. If Sopranos-generation cable put us in moral check, Dexter pushes us to checkmate. The Sopranos got us to relate to a mobster, The Wire to enlightened drug-dealers and rogue cops; but Dexter somehow gets us rooting for a full-on serial killer—and hoping he never gets caught.

You can't help but recoil from Dexter Morgan (Michael C. Hall), a stone-cold killer who plastic-wraps his murder rooms with the mechanical precision of a die-cutter. But you can't help but love him, too. He may be a serial killer, but he's a rational serial killer, one with a strict code: He only goes after killers who've slipped through the justice system.