SCREEN MACHINE | ISSUE 5 | TELEVISION by Screen Machine

OCTOBER 2013

ISSUE 5

“TELEVISION”

OCT 2013

ABOUT THIS ISSUE CONTRIBUTORS on p.1 FROM THE EDITOR on p.2

ESSAYS A NEVER-ENDING STORY by Brad Nguyen How television moves beyond the values of traditional film narrative. p.4 THE WEIGHT OF INHERITANCE by Elliott Logan An assessment of the importance of endings, now that Breaking Bad has ended. p.11

MYSTERIES OF HOUSTON …AND ST. PAUL, AND PORTLAND, AND VACCAVILLE by Huw Walmsley-Evans An appreciation of Unsolved Mysteries. p.22

REVIEWS Elizabeth Stigler on BAR RESCUE on p.29 Andrew Gilbert on ADVENTURE TIME on p.31 Robbie Fordyce on BORED TO DEATH on p.34 Anders Furze on ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT on p.38

CONTRIBUTORS Robbie Fordyce is a doctoral candidate in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne. His research interests include post-autonomist Marxist media theories, the political usage of computer networks and film theory. Anders Furze recently completed an honours thesis exploring industrial and theoretical perspectives on screenwriting at Monash University. He blogs at film247.tumblr.com. Andrew Gilbert studied film at Columbia College and is currently based in Chicago, working on his Masters in Gender Studies. His favorite film is Robocop. Elliott Logan is a Masters student at the University of Queensland. Brad Nguyen (editor and illustrator) is an Honours student at Monash University. His writing has appeared in Senses of Cinema, Meanjin, Kill Your Darlings and Overland, and he blogs at inalldirections.tumblr.com. Elizabeth J. Stigler is a PhD student and Graduate Teaching Assistant in the Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies Dept. at the University of Kansas. Her current research examines the queer performance of gender on post-makeover bodies in conjunction with narratives of passing/outing. Huw Walmsley-Evans (essays editor) is a Brisbane-based film critic and academic and holds a doctorate in film, media, and cultural studies from the University of Queensland. His research examines film criticism as a cultural institution. He can be found at @hWalmsleyEvans.

This issue of Screen Machine was commissioned with funds from Copyright Agency Limited.

FROM THE EDITOR

his issue of Screen Machine is about “television.” The themes of previous issues have been formal qualities, or narrative thematics, and we have asked contributors to attend to manifestations of said ranging across all screen media. This is our first issue that has been about a particular medium. Attending to “television” specifically rather than our usual “screen” remit allows for two moves: it both opens us out on to the broader media world from a fixed starting point, acknowledging the

increasingly trans-media nature of what is consider television, while also allowing us to narrow down to a particular set of texts that are somehow emblematic of the televisual. No doubt television is having a moment, but we are intrigued by the journalistic, public, popular discourse on television. This has it that we are living in a “golden age” of “quality” television. For many this is demonstrably true, an uncontroversial statement. But this is a truism more often repeated than explored. Its

! moves have already become clichéd. How many more articles, podcasts, interviews, panel discussions, and documentaries do we need glibly asserting that feature films are dead, serial television is the new king, and that each new cable serial represents a cultural high water mark? The trouble with this sort of talk is twofold: it negates critical distinctions between different texts by lumping them all in the same (problematic) category of “quality long-form television,” and it obscures the interest in, and value of, other genres and formats. These other formats make up the vast, vast bulk of what television is. Rather than hagiography or triumphalism, the essays and reviews on television in this issue are concerned with how television really functions, what it’s really like. Brad Nguyen offers an account of televisual storytelling in contrast to its cinematic equivalent, usefully speaking of their disparate aims rather than their relative merits. Elliott Logan provides a micro examination of Nguyen’s macro observation in his essay on the misplaced reception emphasis on the conclusion of Breaking Bad. This piece is a fitting coda to Logan’s long-term relationship with this program as a fan and researcher. It reads like the definitive final word on much written about series. Robbie Fordyce’s and Anders Furze’s reviews of two lighter outgrowths of “golden-age” television—

Bored to Death and Arrested Development (Season 4) respectively—are remarkably well modulated insights into these programs’ success and shortcomings as sides of the same coin. Meanwhile Andrew Gilbert’s review of children’s cartoon Adventure Time, Elizabeth Steigler’s review of watering hole makeover show Bar Rescue, and my own essay on Unsolved Mysteries are all exercises in lavishing critical attention on less obviously deserving objects. Gilbert finds his to be kids’ fare courtesy of Bunuel and Jorodowski, Steigler finds hers to be an exercise in cultural homogenisation, and I find mine to be an alternative vision (to the “quality” serial) of what it is that television is and does best. Of course there is no such thing. Contemporary television is a wide and interesting place and to define it or forecast its trajectory is folly. It’s better to try to give a more thorough and balanced accounting of this thing that so preoccupies us as it presently stands. Hopefully this issue of Screen Machine provides this in some measure. Huw Walmsley-Evans Essays Editor

Brad Nguyen

A NEVER-ENDING STORY Television opens up the possibility to move beyond the values of traditional film narrative.

lmost sixty years after François Truffaut coined the phrase “la politique des auteurs,” critics still depend on the idea of the work as the product of one individual’s intention. It is still as if artistic value hinges on the ideology of the exceptional individual. But if this idea seems to some implausible given the collaborative process of producing a film, it seems much more untenable for television,

where series often see a rotating cast of directors, writers and actors. Attempts to reinstate the cult of the auteur have been made through the veneration of figures such as showrunners, show creators or executive producers. Still, auteur theory, insofar as it pins all the artistry of a work on the personal vision of a single person, remains a difficult lens through which to view television. Perhaps because of this, we still see resistance to the idea that

show’s success frequently slowed the last three seasons to a crawl. The beautifully shot but structurally pointless “Fly” episode is a case in point; any episode that causes a critic to gush over “the Aristotelian unity of time and place” immediately deserves suspicion.

television can even be art. David Auerbach’s recent essay in The American Reader, “The Cosmology of Serialized Television,” is but one example: [P]restigious shows habitually promise viewers more than they can possibly deliver. They trumpet themselves as Art and Social Commentary in order to obscure their more fundamental structural flaws. The result is inferior Product.1

Auerbach’s “Cosmology” is a useful account of television’s limitations, yet there is something inadequate about it as a work of criticism. You can sense it in the way he dismisses elements of a series as “structurally pointless” or his obsession with continuity or the way he hinges the entire artistic value of a series on its ending. In short, Auerbach berates television for its inability to become what the critic Manny Farber dismissed in the sixties as “white elephant art”:

The “structural flaws” Auerbach complains of pertain mainly to television’s inability to build its narrative efficiently and coherently towards a satisfying conclusion either because shows are often launched without a planned ending or because industrial conditions impose uncertainty on the time to be taken to conclude a series — shows’ lifespans are prone to being artificially shortened by premature cancellation, but they can also be artificially lengthened:

Masterpiece art, reminiscent of the enameled tobacco humidors and wooden lawn ponies bought at white elephant auctions decades ago, has come to dominate the overpopulated arts of TV and movies. The three sins of white elephant art (1) frame the action with an all-over pattern, (2) install every event, character, situation in a frieze of continuities, and (3) treat every inch of the screen and film as a potential area for prizeworthy creativity.2

Breaking Bad mastermind Vince Gilligan (who also happened to be the second funniest writer on the X Files) has enough of a sense of the shape of the series—it’s a classic morality tale, after all—that ignorance is not proving too much of a problem. But timing certainly is, and the need to stretch out a clearly limited plot to milk the

Woe that television should always fail in its white elephant endeavours. Woe that television

David Auerbach, “The Cosmology of Serialized Television” in The American Reader.

Manny Farber, “White Elephant Art and Termite Art,” 1962.

is not more like Robert McKee’s ideal Story where every moment is either set-up or payoff, and where all these set-ups and payoffs together constitute the artist’s Grand Statement. Of course, fans of television are not prone to such melancholy. One is quite used to hearing sentiment among television fans such as, “Season one of Show X is the best but I enjoyed the metafictional quality of the later seasons,” or, “the dialogue of Show Y in season 3 is really sharp even if the subplot involving the estranged mother didn’t work so well.” Our capacity to appreciate television is generally not constrained by the need for the series to work as a cohesive whole. This constitutes a major difference between the way films and television are produced and received. Television differentiates itself from film precisely in its approach to endings — The dream of a film is to nail the perfect ending. The dream of a television show is to last forever. A television show does not propose a story—in the traditional sense of a beginning, middle and end—so much as it proposes a world and narrative logic that functions in the same way that the chorus does in jazz music: it is a base that one improvises off, elaborates on or reworks over time. Seinfeld is a “show about nothing” in which the comedy arises from farcical situations caused by the characters’ pettiness and shallowness. Gossip Girl is a show about love affairs

and backstabbings amongst the super-rich youth of Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Game of Thrones is about political intrigues and the machinations of power in a fantasy-medieval setting. They are headed nowhere in particular even if they maintain a minimum level of narrative momentum. The important thing for the audience is that the series stay true to a certain dynamic. By contrast, a film usually gives us a central conflict that already signals how it will end. A television show is, at its essence, only a situation. Thus understood, the miniseries is generally not really televisual. It is true that television enabled the mini-series to come into existence, but narratively speaking the mini-series only differs from the film in degree, not in kind. It is only a matter of the beginning, middle and end of the story being spread across more hours. If film critics want to grudgingly admit that Todd Haynes’ five-part Mildred Pierce is okay as far as television goes, this is not such a great concession because its achievement lies in how it draws its story of mother and daughter conflict towards its powerful conclusion with masterfully meticulous plotting. It is a fine work but in a strictly filmic sense. Similarly, Olivier Assayas’ three-part Carlos, for all its interest in following the facts of the historical record, is a wellstructured statement on the shifting power dynamics in global terrorism. One truly televisual mini-

series is Raúl Ruiz’s six-part Mysteries of Lisbon, in which the deceptively simple event of a boy searching for the truth of his father’s identity sets off a domino chain of people recounting their personal histories, diverging across time and space in potentially endless fashion:

televisual eternity. The first asks, “Doesn’t the mystery of the boy’s paternity ultimately constrain the narrative? The story poses a question to be answered and, once answered, the story is over.” True, it is common for a television series to introduce a central mystery signalling a narrative resolution. In The X Files, it is the mystery of what happened to Mulder’s sister. In Twin Peaks, it is the mystery of “who killed Laura Palmer?”. In Lost, the mystery is what is the nature of the island? But in a truly televisual work, such “central mysteries” function as MacGuffins. They propel the story forward yet answering the questions does not constitute the series’ raison d’ être. Rather, such series exist to multiply mystery, not to negate it. Therefore, any answers conceded must be accompanied by several new mysteries. Here is a truly distinct philosophical position where the truth is always, as The X Files tells us, “out there” rather than in a classical film situation where the truth is “in the final scene.” A central mystery fails as a MacGuffin when a series’ level of intrigue is not compelling enough to justify the perpetual postponement of closure. Twin Peaks and The X Files still hold up today even though we know they eventually fall apart towards the end and that, in any case, their mythologies were made up as they went along. This is because of their accomplished and striking sense of mood and atmosphere; their compellingly irrational

If I search a word for the film I come with at least two: “sliding” and “labyrinth,” the labyrinth of the soap opera. Soap opera is an organism with an excellent liver which digests anything. So, by using it, one may do things. One may do Balzac, or sheer shit… If we apply to Mysteries of Lisbon this “Bordwell’s Paradigm” idea, we will not know whether in this case the film should be described as narrative or as experimental. Narrative, it is not, since it does not respect either the three acts, nor the central conflict, nor the theory of the will so peculiar to the American film: “someone wants something.”3

Mysteries of Lisbon uses the trope of a “search for identity” merely to set up a precise dynamic: characters revealing secrets to one another, stories nestled inside stories like Russian dolls, dramas of mistaken identity. It is a televisual dynamic such that one could hypothesise Ruiz extending his narrative games to eternity, even if reality inevitably dictates otherwise. Two questions arise from Mysteries of Lisbon’s example of

Interview with Raúl Ruiz.

case, the work’s nature is primarily filmic, offering the pleasure of self-contained classical storytelling but on a grander scale. Everything leads surefootedly towards a narrative climax. The second kind of finale ties everything up but in a tacked-on, unconvincing manner. Buffy the Vampire Leaving in the audience’s mind the impression of the Slayer, an otherwise show’s hypothetical eternity. good show in the televisual sense, did this by introducing (and imagery. The more contemporary resolving) a plot of apocalyptic series Lost will, I suspect, not hold proportions with the fate of the up so well over time. With its whole world in the protagonist’s generic and all too literal visual hands. This finale stood in stark style, Lost’s implausible plot contrast to earlier seasons of twists often came off as mere Buffy, which had quite a modest delaying tactics rather than being dynamic. Early Buffy was about compelling in their own right. For taking everyday high school the great televisual works of problems and transposing them mystery, there is a strong onto a supernatural narrative. If, imperative to grip the viewer with for example, the problem how the narrative unfolds rather involved a teacher seducing than just working towards the students, the teacher would be promise of resolution. imagined as a monstrous praying The second question asks, mantis to be defeated by the “Well if the televisual dream is of vampire slayer and her friends. eternity, what then is the purpose Extending the show meant mining of a series' final episode?” The the limitless tensions of high answer is that it depends on the school life as fodder for plot lines. nature of that final episode. Some The false-feeling epic conclusion finales tie up everything perfectly in which the whole town of revealing the show as the product Sunnydale is destroyed, of careful plotting and planning discarded the allegorical richness by the show’s writers. Such was of early Buffy but it does not follow the case of Babylon 5, conceived that the conclusion robbed the and happily produced as a finite earlier seasons of their televisual five-season series. But in such a quality. For the critic, it is a matter

of appreciating televisual work moment to moment rather than attempting to synthesise the whole of a series into a single Masterwork. The third kind of ending is truly televisual, not resolving much and leaving in the audience’s mind the impression of the show’s hypothetical eternity. The high school drama-comedy What could be less Lynchian than simply Freaks and Geeks gave us resolving the question of good and evil? one of television’s great televisual endings. In its finale, the characters splinter off in unexpected directions with the idea that their fuck you televisual ending. Its coming-of-age tribulations will final image shows the hero Dale continue but sadly without us to Cooper deranged and laughing witness it. The Wire offers a maniacally, possessed by the curious example. Each season same evil he’d been fighting was planned to elaborate on throughout the whole series. It specific themes (of alleviating the could not end any other way for problems of drug crime, of what could be less Lynchian than governmental or educational simply resolving the question of reform) and to develop certain good and evil with one character arcs much like a film triumphing over the other? For does. But its ultimate Statement, Lynch, ethics is a televisual about the structural resistance to obsession and this holds equally change in public institutions, is a true for his film work. This point is televisual one: The show important to note, because it progresses as if the characters shouldn’t be forgotten that some believe they are in a film—going of the great works of cinema are, about their business, identifying in a sense, televisual works. Ozu’s problems, working to overcome Floating Weeds is televisual in that obstacles—until they realise that it posits its melodramatic plot as they are in a televisual situation in only a moment in the eternal which their problems will never stream of generational conflict. La really be resolved, that their Dolce Vita is televisual in that struggles are eternal, and it is at Marcello is driven by an this point that the seasons always impossible, never-ending quest end. to find meaning in his bourgeois Twin Peaks gave us a great life. Bong Joon-ho’s Memories of

Murder is televisual in that the elusiveness of the killer turns the narrative spotlight on the sheer passion of the protagonists’ search for truth. What kind of possibilities for storytelling does televisual eternity open up? It means that once you have a frame, one can be freed from the compulsion to conscientiously move the story towards an ultimate conclusion. Instead, one can be like one of Manny Farber’s termite artists:

complaint is misplaced because it characterises as a flaw what is television’s strength: its ability to tell stories without justification.

Good work usually arises where the creators (Laurel and Hardy, the team of Howard Hawks and William Faulkner operating on the just half of Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep) seem to have no ambitions towards gilt culture but are involved in a kind of squandering-beaverish endeavor that isn’t anywhere or for anything. A peculiar fact about termite-tapeworm-fungus-moss art is that it goes always forward eating its own boundaries, and, likely as not, leaves nothing in its path other than the signs of eager, industrious, unkempt activity.²

Television has a mountain of “experimental” episodes in which the possibilities of what can be achieved within the frame of the series is pushed to its limit. The X Files had one story rendered as an episode of Cops in its seventh season. ER broadcast an episode live to air in its fourth season. Buffy had its musical episode in season six. Now, remember Auerbach’s complaint about the “beautifully shot but structurally pointless ‘Fly’ episode”? Such a

Elliott Logan

THE WEIGHT OF INHERITANCE An assessment of the importance of endings, now that Breaking Bad has ended.

e have a misguided tendency to try and rest too much weight on the narrow point of endings in serial television, a tendency whose risks and dangers are obviously heightened at present, so soon after the long-anticipated ending of Breaking Bad. The risk and danger of this tendency is that, in our shallow-focus obsession with making the unwieldy, sprawling mass of a

long-running television show fit upon the head of a needle, we might miss what we found so compelling to look at all along. And, if the tipping point of the end canâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t hold the weight we put on it, we might see the once-loved but now-fallen bits and pieces scattered around the ending as the broken refuse of a failed attempt at definitive cohesion. Our desire to make these pieces fit in this unlikely and

improbable way is eloquently plumbed by television and literature studies scholar Sean O’Sullivan in a short blog post for the website In Media Res.1 O’Sullivan’s bite-sized essay is a wonderful piece of writing that happily returned to clear my thoughts as the approaching end of Breaking Bad wound up a confusing clatter of keyboards all over the world. O’Sullivan’s piece is not about Breaking Bad, with its ending declared and prepared in advance by Vince Gilligan and his team, but a different kind of serial television ending, that of Deadwood, which was sadly, unexpectedly cancelled by HBO just prior to the broadcast of its third season ending, a point at which the cast, crew, and audience were all secure in the knowledge there would be two more seasons to follow in the years to come. O’Sullivan looks in particular at a wonderful piece of footage, an extra on the DVD set of Deadwood. It features the series’ creator, David Milch, wandering the abandoned set of the cancelled show, reflecting in his characteristically idiosyncratic manner on the “idea of the end of a thing” in serial television and in human life. In the fragment of that footage which O’Sullivan posts alongside his essay, we arrive at the moment during which Milch

reflects on the close of William James’s life, when the philosopher was asked on his deathbed “if some truth had come to him as a result of the approaching end”. Milch says that James responded with a question of his own: “What has concluded that we should conclude about it?” Milch explains James’s question by discussing how the very human desire for our lives to carry allegorical force, which would see them as moving towards a definitive moment that could cast everything up until that point under the light of truthful revelation, is a “childish” one. The reality of human life, and its expression in serial television, is quite different: In this medium, you have to assume that every episode, in one way or another, is the end of things, and that the audience gets a sense of an ending, and that the miracle is that life goes on. Well, and then one day, the miracles stop. The biggest lie is that we are entitled to a coherent and meaningful summarising, a conclusion of something which never concludes.

O’Sullivan draws this lesson from Milch’s reflections: A three-season series is not a limerick. Our principles for evaluating its final gesture cannot plausibly replicate those we would employ for evaluating the rim shot of a joke. Serial storytelling, at its most interesting, is about the present tense. It is about the precious feeling of a moment suspended between past

Sean O’Sullivan, “The Idea of the End of a Thing,” In Media Res, 26 April 2012.

and future, a weekly performance separating the history that cannot be changed and the possibility that can only be imagined.

wonder and meaning, to the way it was able, and will perhaps continue, to carry such remarkable force as television storytelling.3 Amongst the flurry of writing on the final episode, which in most quarters has concentrated on deciding whether, or to what degree, Walt was redeemed, some attention has fallen on the apparent lack of dramatic material and time given to the series’ central female characters, Skyler and Marie.4 One interpretation of this is that it signals on the part of Vince Gilligan a reluctance to tread into the territory of these women, their losses, and their hopes or nightmares for the future, lest it interfere with his putative project to wield these last 56 minutes of his show like a wand that could magically undo the earlier, massive history of Walt’s enormous moral collapse, built-

For O’Sullivan, this principle can be taken to support the idea that the second-to-last episode of Breaking Bad, the excellent “Granite State” was arguably the last episode of Breaking Bad... This is a show that lives in the gaps between episodes, in the speculation about how the final shot will play out and lead on, given its tantalizing gestures. Fittingly, the last shot here—of a half-empty glass of Dimple Peach on the counter, its drinker vanished—sets up the strands of what-could-be for next time. What happens when there is no next time?2

In some interesting ways, the final episode “Felina” shows us what happens “when there is no next time”, and also shows us what it might look like to live in a world in which “there is no next time”. In doing so it profitably casts our minds back to some of the show’s most compelling moments that rely, for their power, on human possibility, its promising openness but also its suffocating, potentially liberating, limitations, which Breaking Bad was able to so poignantly tap and explore. More than any ending, it is these moments “in-between” that hold the key to Breaking Bad’s

If you’re curious, Adrian Martin and Girish Shambu’s journal Lola has a wonderful essay by film scholar Andrew Klevan that explores film’s capacity to express the in-between: Andrew Klevan, “Expressing the InBetween,” Lola, Issue 1, 2011. 4 The kind of writing I’m talking about, which maybe I mainly come across on Twitter, is the depressing chatter about the series’ "bad fans" and the extent to which Gilligan’s realisation of the last few episodes either refuted or played to their perverse, misogynistic and juvenile perspectives on the series.

Sean O’Sullivan, “Story Land,” Kritik, 23 September 2013.

up over five years of storytelling.5 What strikes me, though, about the treatment of Skyler and Marie in the final episode is not the absence of material or action they are given in general, but the way this seeming absence is handled in particular. What is common to both characters in the episode is the extent of their stillness and isolation. The two sisters feature in only one sequence, comprising two scenes, which hinge around Walt’s rumoured return to Albuquerque from his exile in an isolated hut on a frozen hillside in rural New Hampshire. In the first scene, Marie telephones her sister to let her know that Walt has been sighted back in town, and that the police do not understand his motives, but that there is speculation of some kind of terrorist plot, or that Walt plans to kidnap Walt Jr., who has been put under police surveillance as a protective measure. In his review of “Granite State”, O’Sullivan noted how Hank’s murder in the previous episode, the traumatising “Ozymandias,” placed Marie in a paralysed state that reflected the thrust of the final season’s storytelling in general:

magic of magnets; much of this was story as the cold sheen of alignment, of pitiless event and consequence, and not transformation. Marie, bereft and lost in thought, does not even get the comforts of home, whisked away from another crime scene.

In “Felina,” Marie is back at what remains of her home now that Hank has been buried in a hole that may never be found, but she is not pictured as being at home in it. Unlike her sister, Marie does not sit, but stands as she speaks on the phone, not in her bedroom but in what seems like a generic hallway or living room. The conversation, although touched with a hint of anxiety by the uncertainty of Walt’s return and what it may bring, is fairly benign. In one of the few consolations there is to be taken from the episode, the relationship between the two sisters seems somewhat mended, perhaps by Walt’s much-discussed phone call in “Ozymandias”, in which he puts across a display of overwhelming malevolent power over Skyler, intended to convince the police that he alone bears the full weight of responsibility for what in fact came to be the couple’s shared crimes. Somewhat like Marie, Skyler’s domestic situation is one of displacement and immobility. She sits alone in a chair by the small window of her cheap ground-floor apartment, which is fitted with the same furniture that once rambled through the space of the family’s three-bedroom ranch house, but

Forget the breathtaking invention of “Dead Freight,” or improvised fugue states, or the yeah-bitch

See Maureen Ryan, “Breaking Bad Finale Analysis: Walt’s Takeover was Complete (But Hard to Buy and Unsatisfying),” Huffington Post, 1 October 2013.

that now crowds around the walls and up the ceiling, creeping in on the little room to move that remains. Even once she has ended her call with Marie, and Walt emerges from beneath the pillar concealing his phantasmic presence, Skyler stays rooted to her chair throughout their pivotal conversation, as if in a kind of living rigor mortis, one arm held in the habitual crook of the chainsmoker. As Walt slinks away, from a distance he watches Walt Jr. arrive from school, dressed in combat boots and camouflage fatigue pants, as if preparing for a future of endless, pitiless combat against the world. From across the dilapidated courtyard Walt watches his son enter the flat, and then he walks away, his silhouette muted into a haze by the window we watch him through and the white gauze of sunlight into which he fades. We are not shown Skyler and her son sharing the same space together. These are the final domestic images the show gives us of its main characters. If for Marie, Skyler, and Walt Jr. these are barely images of home at all, instead images of isolation, claustrophobia, paralysis, and resignation in the face of a future that promises only endless hostility and pain, it is because Walt has left with them with a world that no longer holds the potential to nurture anything like home for any of them again. For each of them, the catastrophes of the past have erased any benign possibility they could ever have

entertained. Walt’s family are shown as having been left by him to face a life in which malign necessity has blotted out their future horizons, leaving each in a condition without direction or end, that is to say, without a world to inhabit at all. The strength of the tension between the expansion of a future horizon of possibility and its slow submission to an ever-darkening shadow of past necessity was, perhaps unavoidably, more powerfully in play in the series’ earlier moments, when the forward movement of story felt more like it had the potential of a drink spilled across a knobbly and bowed wooden countertop, rather than one poured down the slick plastic sides of a funnel. One of the most brilliant and tragically touching scenes in this respect is from the season two episode “4 Days Out.” At the episode’s beginning, Walt spies a glimpse of his MRI scan, which shows a threatening cloud consuming a portion of his chest. Presuming he is near death, and therefore afraid he is running out of time to finish building his legacy, Walt convinces Jesse they need to use up all their precursor methylamine in one marathon cook, over four days in the desert. The excursion is immediately a source of tension between the troubled partners. Walt’s sudden urgency forces an interruption in the fragile bloom of Jesse’s romance with, and sense of domestic commitment to, his girlfriend Jane, and so the

beginning of the four-day enterprise is marked by squabbling, distrust, contempt, and insult. However, over the short course of one the series’ best cooking montages, there is an incremental sedimentation of their ambient companionship. This is measured in small gestures of mutual trust and care, such as the tenderly fond look Jesse casts at Walt as the older, sickly man sleeps, relying on his protégé to supervise the cook overnight. However, after triumphantly cooking more than a million dollars worth of meth, the pair once again disintegrates into shared antagonism and contempt when they discover Jesse has drained the RV’s battery by foolishly storing the keys in the ignition. Having eventually run out of solutions—the RV’s fuel destroys the generator during an attempted jump-start, and handcranking the device only brings them closer to fatal dehydration— Jesse inadvertently prompts Walt to build a replacement battery from scratch. The sequence of the battery’s construction is astonishing for the way Bryan Cranston’s performance brings to life our sense of Walt’s “unattained but attainable self”,6 and the quiet

tragedy of his inability or refusal to more fully realise it. The peculiar force of the sequence is difficult to put into words, and becomes even harder upon revisiting it, which serves to remind us of how unprepossessingly functional the action can seem. This is because Walt’s explanation of the battery can be primarily understood as

Cities of Words: Pedagogical Letters in a Register of the Moral Life, Cambridge: Harvard University Press 2004. The potential of Cavell’s work on Emersonian moral perfectionism to be a (perhaps tragic) companion to our experience of Breaking Bad is tremendous. Consider that Cavell summarises the idea as being about a condition in which an individual in a malleable world, recognising themselves as “enchained, fixated,” sets about a path of selftransformation, undertaken through some process of education and its discussion with a friend, through which each individual “is drawn on a journey of ascent to... a further state of self... determined not by natural talent but by seeking to know what you are made of and cultivating the thing you are meant to do”, a transformation of the self that finds expression in the “imagination of a transformation of society into... the view of a new reality, a realm beyond the true world.” Stanley Cavell, Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome: The Constitution of Emersonian Perfectionism, Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1988. A provocative diversion between Emerson’s idea and its expression in Breaking Bad is found in the different effects of this “thing you are meant to do” on the world in which it is done.

The phrase is Emerson’s, from his essay “History”. Stanley Cavell takes it up in his reflections on what he calls "moral perfectionism," as it is explored in certain works of literature and drama in relation to some Hollywood films. See Stanley Cavell,

By season five, the possibility of education and companionship between Walt and Jesse is irrevocably shattered.

exposition, specifically meant to warrant our understanding of, and faith in, this improbable technological rescue. But this means that it could be perfunctorily delivered to get it out of the way, giving only enough time and attention to the scientific details so that Gilligan and his writers could rest easy in the knowledge that those of us who daydreamed through grade ten chemistry are on the level, sufficiently armoured against the ever-present threat of scepticism, deadly to the forward thrust of a story. Instead we are shown Walt’s enactment for Jesse of the battery’s construction and function, with close-ups of his hands grasping the materials, such as sponges and handfuls of bolts, holding them up for the younger man, and showing him

how they fit and work together, testing and plumbing Jesse’s knowledge of the chemical processes. These are images of a father figure showing his chosen son the world and instructing him in its powers. What is at stake in this is expressed when Jesse hazards a guess as to what will serve as the electrolyte: “So the, ah — the sponge is the electrolyte?” This wrong answer prompts not just a patient corrective from Walt, but, after a moment, a smile and a quiet laugh that carries something like a suffusion of pedagogic warmth, which we see change the entire energy of Walt’s involvement in the task. From this point he seems to become consumed less by the building of the battery for any practical reason, than by the desire to

impart to Jesse the knowledge underlying its design. Most crucially, though, Walt’s manner here serves as a charge for Jesse’s interest and belief, his anxiety now transformed into an energetic and happy curiosity. It is, near the end of the second season, a rare moment of contact between Walt’s current, criminal self and his abandoned life as a scientist and teacher. And so the scene’s expression of his capacity to positively transform Jesse’s disposition to the world is a measure of the value of this fragile meeting, between Walt as he is, and as he could be. It is a promise that his better self is still available to him, and that its renewal and continued realisation is a matter of the daily fostering of his contact with it, and with others for whom he can demonstrate his human attachment through acts of caring. The tragedy of the moment is found in how quickly, easily, and quietly this contact and attachment is lost or let go. Rapidly enthused by his revitalised role as a teacher, Walt’s task turns fully to that of education. “And, now,” he continues, twisting a length of copper wire, the urgency of construction put on hold for an examination, delivered in an increasingly theatrical and playful register, “what shall we use to conduct this beautiful current with, hm? What one particular element comes to mind?” Jesse’s answer, drawn up with apparent difficulty, seems to betray the

frustrating, seemingly insurmountable depth of his ignorance: “Wire!” Walt’s disappointment is immediate, severe, and seemingly total. His bitter provision of the answer, as if washing the very taste of copper from his mouth, immediately snuffs the flame of his earlier warmth and energy, returning him to something more like a hunched sneer as he drops the materials back on the bench, like the fall of a gavel declaring his final judgment and refusal of further consideration or conversation. It is a quiet but terrible expression of Walt’s failure to keep alive his potential as a teacher to his chosen student, and a reminder of the very everydayness of the self’s moral constitution, and its daily rebuilding of the world for better or worse. By season five, the possibility of education and companionship between Walt and Jesse is so irrevocably shattered by the long history of their various ordinary and extreme moral failures, of themselves and of each other, that it could only be explored as a ruin or ghost of what could have been, rather than what might still be. In this light, and in respect to the weight of expectation that greeted the finale, it seems worth considering how season five intensifies the show’s interest in the relative permanence and impermanence of different things. The description above reveals how the battery scene in season two’s “4 Days Out” is more than

the exposition it needs to deliver. It is also an expression of the fragility of our belief that we can reliably preserve something of worth by transmitting its value to those who will inherit the world from us. Inheritance is of course one of the major drivers of the show’s action and so is also a major subject of its drama, given that at least a substantial aspect of Walt’s motivation to pursue a criminal life is to leave behind something of himself, in the form of financial security for his family. The problem of money as a monument, however, is its very fragility, and its status as a commodity object, one pile of cash being indistinct from any other, and its worth only measurable by the number of notes and the figures stamped into their fabric. This problem is a useful hinge for Breaking Bad’s drama across its seasons, but comes into the foregrounded centre in the second half of season five. This is because, by this point, the end is set, and starts its increasingly rapid ascent from behind the horizon, coming into view as a distinct point, funnelling us towards a moment of alignment at which the remaining possibilities for Walt to build his monument of cash will reach a singularity and disappear. A key moment for the relative weighing of what can be inherited is the murder of Hank at the beginning of “Ozymandias”. The contrast between Walt and Hank’s respective capacities to fulfil the role of father, including

above all things the education of the young, is set up in their first scene together in the pilot episode, when to Walt’s discomfort Hank excites the attention and curiosity of Walt Jr. by showing him and teaching him about his 9mm Glock handgun, what can be taken as his possession of an emblem for how to inhabit manhood. In season five’s first part, this is more fully realised during the storyline in which Skyler has the children temporarily cared for by the childless Hank and Marie, who are able to finally try out their untested potential as parents. What each father figure possesses that is able to be inherited is tested at the beginning of “Ozymandias”, when Hank is shot dead in the desert after he and his partner Steve Gomez are ambushed while arresting Walt. The two men’s killers figure out the site of the arrest is where Walt buried his money, inside the same style of plastic barrel that, across the series, is repeatedly used to dispose of corpses that have been melted in acid and erased from the earth. After digging up Walt’s putative legacy, the gunmen drag Hank and Steve’s dead bodies through the dirt, unceremoniously sling them into the deep hole, and cover them up with sand, their grave anonymous, rendered a featureless patch of this landscape that played so crucial a part in the series’ cosmic imagery of transformations occurring beyond the realm of human

experience and witness. What does Gilligan mean by replacing this cache of cash with these corpses, like this? I take it that he means for us to think about the relative permanence and impermanence of what these two men, Walt and Hank, have each built that might outlast them on this earth. The idea that the money is organic and so is prone to decomposition is introduced in the final episode of the season’s first part “Gliding Over All” when Skyler tells Walt that the pallet load of cash she has been hoarding for him needs to be protected from silverfish and moisture. Hank’s death of course puts his body in a state of decomposition as well, and the placement of this body in the money’s hiding place asks us to recognise some common state between the fragility and impermanence of the money and that of a dead human body, and so therefore also of a live one. But this claim to the impermanence of Hank’s achievement of his life should be tempered by the stoic heroism with which Hank greets his death, by refusing to grovel to his killers as Walt does, declaring his name and title for one last time. This is because Hank’s courageous stand is a reminder of an earlier, pivotal point in Hank’s season three storyline: his acceptance of his moral responsibility for his assault on Jesse, which required him to surrender his identity as a DEA agent. Hank’s is one of the lonely acts of moral acknowledgment in

the series, and serves as a measure of the strength and goodness of his marriage to Marie. It is soon after paid-out, however, by his ambush at the hands of cartel assassins, who wound and paralyse him moments after he telephones Marie to tell her “I think we may be okay”. Hank makes something like an even more triumphant version of this phone call to Marie just prior to his fatal ambush in “Ozymandias”. Like Walt’s brief renewal of faith in his capacity to teach, it is an everyday moment of care for and belief in another person, which is not so much evidence of Hank’s love for Marie, but rather that very love itself. And in their conversation and teamwork, we see that Hank and Marie are a man and woman who have been able to build a world for each other in which the expression of love through acts of caring can be acknowledged, and in which failures of that acknowledgment can be recognised and overcome. It is an expression of the possibility of love and care as good things that can find their everyday grip in the world, and it survives Hank’s death in Marie’s memory of him. Weigh this against the fact that at the end of “Felina” the barrels of money are never found, and Walt’s much-diminished legacy is organised to find its way to his son under a different name; even that so basic dignity of his life’s achievement is surrendered as a lost possibility.

In The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt writes: “Only a man who does not survive his one supreme act remains the indisputable master of his identity and possible greatness, because he withdraws into death from the possible consequences and continuation of what he began.”7 And even then, Arendt goes on to note, such legacy slips the dead man’s grasp, because its transmission into history is at the mercy of its storytellers, and the memories and vagaries of their audience. The ongoing, as-yet unrealised consequences and continuation of what is begun are the stuff of serial storytelling. Arendt’s writing, along with David Milch’s reflections with which this essay began, reminds us that the final gesture of a person’s life is not a capstone that can give perfect and lasting shape to the now fixed unity of that life’s design. It is just another moment jostling for ever-shifting place in the ongoing “continuation of what began,” what David Milch, elsewhere in the video of his wandering on the set of Deadwood, calls “the continuous present which is the imaginative experience of participating in the watching of these shows.”8 We have a tendency to try and rest too much on the narrow point of

endings in serial television, on the final gestures of what we can consider to be their long, varied, and improvised lives. Breaking Bad, in its ending and elsewhere, warns us about the fragile impermanence of human achievements and their eventual meaning, and so against putting too much stock in our last actions as the ones that will carry the weight of our inheritance.

Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1998. 8 Quoted in Jason Jacobs, Deadwood, London: Palgrave Macmillan 2012.

Huw Walmsley-Evans

MYSTERIES OF HOUSTON â&#x20AC;ŚAND ST. PAUL, AND PORTLAND, AND VACCAVILLE An appreciation of Unsolved Mysteries.

nsolved Mysteries is my favourite television show. I like it better than shows that I respect a lot more, like Twin Peaks, or Deadwood, or The Simpsons, or the PBS Newshour; shows that are obviously transgressive or avant-garde or

politically, artistically, and culturally important in a more obvious way. I favour Unsolved Mysteries over these shows for the same reason that my favourite film is The Big Lebowski and not, say, Chinatown, or Blue Velvet, or Dead Man, or Sunset Boulevard. I

formulaic—do not "belong" to genres but are, rather, uses of them; they refer not to "a" genre but to a field or economy of genres, and their complexity derives from the complexity of that relation.1

could watch The Big Lebowski under any circumstance: if I had a headache or had just had some aromatherapy; if I were on death row (and how nice to live in a country where that’s only something that happens in movies) or had just won the lottery; if I had just had a big meal or if I had been fasting for days (again, something I only know from movies). Unsolved Mysteries is like this for me, too. I could watch Unsolved Mysteries in any context, in any state of mind. More than this, though, there are very many times in my life when all I want to do is watch Unsolved Mysteries, when Unsolved Mysteries is the only thing that will suffice. I say to my partner “I wish we had a Mystery to watch”---this is our shorthand---and she throws her head back and cries out in pain, as though a lack of Mysteries is causing her an acute, profound agony. I want to describe here some of the pleasures that can be had watching Unsolved Mysteries, to work through my attachment to a show that is so marginal in so many respects. I’ll locate interest in its history, in its aesthetic qualities, and its generic qualities. For me, Unsolved Mysteries is metonymous for its medium; it is television’s exemplar. What kind of a show is Unsolved Mysteries? This is both an easy and a difficult question to answer. John Frow tells us that

So it is with Unsolved Mysteries. An American TV series that began, so Wikipedia tells me, in 1985 with a series of three pilot episodes titled Missing… Have You Seen? Having had its beginnings as a kind of highbudget, televised version of theback-of-a-milk-carton, the series proper was titled Unsolved Mysteries to reflect the expansion of its purview to “include mysteries of all kinds.”2 Even the words “mysteries of all kinds” makes me tingle slightly. While the “missing persons” aspect of the show remained one of its signature story types, the opening titles of the most recent iteration of the show catalogue a vast range of storytelling possibilities as we cycle through “murder”, “fugitives”, “amnesia”, “missing”, “legends”, and “paranormal”. In her excellent explication and reminiscence of the show on the occasion of the untimely death of Dennis Farina, the show’s most recent presenter, earlier this year, Sarah D. Bunting aptly described Unsolved Mysteries as a “syndicated catch-

1 John Frow, Genre: The New Critical Idiom, New York: Routledge 2005. 2 "Unsolved Mysteries: Overview," Wikipedia, accessed October 2013.

texts—even the simplest and most

all, which married Time-Life’s Mysteries of the Unknown book series and the sticky, crookedlyprinted true-crime tabs from back in in the day.”3 A typical program might contain a grizzly unsolved murder, sightings of a swamp monster in the everglades (this is a real one; it turned out to be an escaped Orangutan), an eyewitness account of a UFO abduction, and the reuniting of an adopted child with their long lost birth parents. I have a friend who argues that most of the stories are tedious filler, and her official DVDs of the show, which organise discs by story theme, see the “murders” on high rotation and the “legends” gathering dust. While some stories are more substantial than others, with the violent crimes and disappearances far weightier than the more specious tales of ghosts and miracles, for mine a large part of the appeal of Unsolved Mysteries is the commodiousness of the term “mystery.” In this sense Mysteries bears some resemblance to the evening news, where seemingly disparate stories are brought together under the paradigm of “news values”. Perhaps we might speak of the eligibility of a story to appear on Unsolved Mysteries as dependent on “mystery values.” Just as with a news broadcast, the

entertainment value of a particular episode varies wildly from night to night. Some shows are wall-to-wall gold, while others are only intermittently compelling. Along with the crunching gearshifts between story types, this variability of interest is also part of the appeal. John Ellis writes about the difference between watching television and watching films in terms of the way of looking, and level of engagement, required by each. He suggests that the “gaze” of the cinema viewer “implies a concentration of the spectator’s activity into that of looking” while the “glance” of the television viewer “implies that no extraordinary effort is being invested in the activity of looking.” There is of course much to take issue with in this formulation of each medium’s mode of spectatorship, and changes to television’s content, apparatus, and viewing environment since the time of this formulation (1982) make it a nonsense when applied to contemporary experiences of television, at least without qualification. And here is mine: this binary remains useful in describing the experience of watching an episode of Unsolved Mysteries. I find I tend to oscillate between the glance and the gaze, letting less compelling segments wash over me and still following the story well enough, due to a familiarity with the generic plot structures, music cues, and other

Sarah D. Bunting, “Nobody Swore Like Dennis Farina,” Slate, 22 July 2013.

formal narrative markers. But then there are those stories that are completely compelling and enthralling, demanding a steady gaze rather than a distracted glance. This variability would only have been more pronounced in the show’s original iteration. I should explain that the majority of my experience of Unsolved Mysteries is of the most recent 2008--2010 incarnation. The original series, following the successful Missing… specials, ran weekly on NBC from 1987-1997 before moving to CBS and and then cable network Lifetime for more sporadic production, before its cancellation in 2002. This first incarnation of the show saw the Elliott Ness-ish host Robert Stack presenting and narrating segments and then (particularly with the violent crimes and disappearances) soliciting viewer assistance to solve said mystery. Because these mysteries were, at the time of first airing, “unsolved”, narratives would necessarily lack a sense of closure, and the strength of an episode depended on what fresh horrors had been prepared for that week’s slate. The most recent iteration of the show, while maintaining the ruse that the program maintains an ongoing life as a crimebusting institution, is essentially a “best of” the initial series. Mining its more than a decade of material, Farina’s Mysteries saw Stack’s material concertinaed to increase the number of stories that could be

covered in an episode: five stories to a television hour up from three or four. Where the previous show had provided updates on stories weeks, months, and years after their initial airing, reflecting the authentic grind of detective work, the repackaged episodes are able to edit out this intervening time to provide an “update” on the case. While this makes one wonder whether the newer version of the show might be more accurately titled Solved Mysteries, the interstitial banalities of actually running a crimebusting edifice in the form a television program are eschewed in the new version.4 But much more is lost than gained in the rationalisation of the Stack years. Not only have the bits of interstitial business that make the format been cut loose but the story packages themselves have been drastically re-edited. The hallmark of Unsolved Mysteries is its re-enactments or dramatisations of said Mysteries. These vary in effect from the absurd (ghosts, poltergeists, sighting of the Blessed Virgin Mother) to the chillingly sublime. However, whether substantial or nonsensical, the impact of these packages is diminished by their

4 To gain a sense of the “crime solving business” to “story” ratio of the old show, watch Australia’s Network Ten program Wanted, currently airing and flying the flag in my locality for this venerable television format.

park, for instance---is a favourite technique. These jarring stylistic strategies are always underlined with an ominous musical sting. Bordwell suggests that the intensification of continuity style in feature films may owe to a take-up of television’s formal strategies. However, in this comparison of different iterations of the same program, we can see how much norms and expectations have changed within television itself. Certainly if Unsolved Mysteries were producing new content in its latest incarnation, this would share the pacing and other formal strategies employed in the recutting of the old material in order to, as Bordwell has it, reach a “higher pitch of emphasis”. Perhaps it was the search for “a higher pitch of emphasis” that also saw the Stack years’ blood-chilling title theme music replaced by bombastic rock muzak. The original theme had been so terrifying that I never dared watch the show as a child. Like the X-Files theme and the vaguely paranormal imagery that accompanied it, the original Unsolved Mysteries theme had me sealing my eyes and ears with my hands and imploring my parents to change the channel.5 The impactfulness of the Unsolved Mysteries lay not only in its compelling narratives, but also

“…and she was never seen again.”

rationalisation. These are not only edited down for reasons of length, but also ratcheted up for style. David Bordwell locates in contemporary feature films an “intensification” of the traditional “continuity” style of American filmmaking. Among the “stylistic tactics” of this intensification are: “more rapid editing”, “bi-polar extremes of lens-legth,” “more close framings in dialogue scenes” and a “free ranging camera.” Working with pre-existing materials (no new segments were produced for the 2008-2010 show) only the first of these techniques is available to the program, and it is certainly heavily utilised. However, the effects of the other techniques are approximated in the editing room by freeze framing, zooming in on, and panning across, images. Cutting images of barely liminal lengths into earlier parts of the story to “foreshadow” later events---a few frames of the killer’s mug-shot into footage of the same man watching children play in the

I was a delicate child.

in its formal treatment of those narratives, and its impactfulness is undermined (markedly, if not completely) by its later intensification. While its reenactments are often maligned as “hokey” and “amateurish,” I find myself completely swept away by them. The early packages from the late 80s and early 90s in particular are characterised by long takes and ominous musical scoring that prefigures or parallels the presence of threat of the supernatural, or of violent crime, in ordinary American life that we associate with the formal strategies of David Lynch circa Twin Peaks,6 or Errol Morris circa The Thin Blue Line. Unsolved Mysteries, even in its more outlandish narratives, maintains at core a commitment to realist aesthetics. We can see many of the traits of realism that Andre Bazin catalogued in his examination of the neo-realist Italian cinema at play in Unsolved Mysteries: it is concerned with “actual day-to-day events” (most of the time, anyway); it is “first and foremost re-constituted reportage”; at the level of the plot the stories sound like “moralising melodramas” but nevertheless feel, on screen, “overwhelmingly real” owing to a “fundamental humanism.” A great deal of this realist

impact owes to the performance strategies of the show, which are also similar to those employed in realist cinemas. Bazin says that a striking quality of the early Russian cinema was its preference for “non-professional actors who played on the screen the roles of their daily lives.” Furthermore, Bazin claims that “it is not the absence of professional actors” that makes for realist performance, but rather “the rejection of the star concept and the casual mixing of professionals” with amateurs, or semi professionals.7 Unsolved Mysteries’ truth claim is underwritten in large measure by the use of actual victims, family members, and eye-witnesses not only in its talking head interviews, but as performers in its reenactments. Meanwhile, the unrecognizability8 of other player aids the illusion more so than the occasional paucity of performances detracts from it. But for all that’s lost in attention-seeking of Unsolved Mysteries compared to the source material from which it draws,

7 Andre Bazin, What Is Cinema? Volume II, Berkeley: University of California Press 1972. 8 For the most part. While some Unsolved Mysteries actors did go on to successful careers, they are a distinct minority, and were unknowns at the time of their performance. These include Cheryl Hines, a young Lisa McCune in an Australian UFO sighting, and Matthew McConaughey, shirtless as ever.

There arguably would be no Twin Peaks, and unarguably would have been no The X-Files without Unsolved Mysteries.

many of the main pleasures of the program remain in tact. These are baser, more irreverent pleasures that rely on a more knowing reading of the show. Bunting spoke to some of these in her Farina piece, such as comparing the delivery styles of the show’s two most prominent hosts. I laughed out loud at her critique of Robert Stack’s uniformly “glowering” delivery of lines like “and she was never seen again.” One of my favourite tropes of the show is the endless parade of stories that involve very compelling evidence of a murder (think D’Angelo Barksdale’s death in custody on The Wire), but that inevitably—I can always feel it coming—end up with the host’s narration informing us that “police ruled it… a suicide.” Cynically, I enjoy capping off a news report of a cut-and-dried homicide with a lusty “police ruled it… a suicide.” Another good sport for two or more players is to comment on the flatteringness or unflatteringness of the casting of parts in reenactments. And for those who choose to play themselves, it’s endlessly interesting to imagine how bizarre it would be for that person to the re-ennacting (with lighting, full crew, art-direction, costume etc.) the most traumatic or unsettling experience of their lives. Paying this kind of sustained attention to a show as marginal as Unsolved Mysteries is not about self-justification, or selfexploration. I like it, and I know

why I like it, though it was fun and interesting to make explicit some of those pleasures. Much more than the content of the analysis, the very act of providing sustained attention to this type of television is the critical gesture. With so much journalistic, essayistic, and academic critical attention paid to the “quality” (and yes, let’s retire that nomenclature for premium serial television) the conversation about the medium has of late been focussed on some pretty ponderous fare. Much of this conversation has been concerned with the idea that the medium has both “arrived” and in doing so usurped the position of cinema as the pinnacle of screen art/entertainment. But these are not the programs I think of when I think about television and its possibilities. When I think of television I think of something like Unsolved Mysteries, which is messy and contained and rich and shallow and dodgy and polished all at the same time. While you’re torrenting the finale of Breaking Bad I’m fine-toothing the electronic program guide on the DVR for a show made of a show from twenty years ago.

REVIEWS A BAR BY ANY OTHER NAME Review of “Bar Rescue” by Elizabeth Stigler

bartender’s abilities, to owner mismanagement. After the initial shock wears off, Taffer and his experts take between three and five days to retrain the staff, remodel the establishment, and reinvigorate the owner before riding off into the sunset to save other failing bars. Like any reality makeover show this one has its own personal gimmick: Jon Taffer’s temper. Almost 100% of the time, Taffer looses a verbal assault about cleanliness, over-pouring, or myriad other issues on the owner and/or staff within ten minutes of arriving. If the owner challenges Taffer or does not agree with his assessment, Taffer simply yells louder until the owner backs down, thereby asserting his dominance. This verbal pissing contest is essential to the construction of Taffer as the unquestionable authority, a role that is the lynchpin of the show. Taffer’s infallibility clears the path for him and his team of experts to impose anything and everything they deem necessary for success without interference. To ensure his sovereign status goes unchallenged, Taffer employs something he calls “bar science.” In this context, bar science legitimates Taffer’s executive decisions, lending credence to his insistence that chairs face a certain way and lights give off a certain brightness. To bolster bar

“My name is Jon Taffer and I’m one of the best bar consultants in the world.”

ince its debut in 2011, Spike TV’s Bar Rescue has had three successful seasons of renovating the “worst bars in America.” The premise is simple: a floundering bar makes a last ditch plea to “bar expert” Jon Taffer in the hopes that he will come save their business. Taffer arrives with his team of “experts” and proceeds to tear the place apart, railing on everything from cleanliness, to food, to

science, Taffer throws out demographic information on mean income levels and neighborhood dynamics coupled with appropriate drink and food wait times. He is also heavily invested in “flow patterns” often insisting that the reason a bar is unsuccessful is because the layout does not have a good flow, as though flow were a tangible object and not a temporal concept. Invoking the name of “science” elevates Taffer’s suggestions to the realm of fact and transforms him from a successful bar owner providing advice to struggling bar owners, to a scientist with the precise calculation for success. When bar owners question him or his methods they are depicted as ignorant fools questioning an established scientific process. The power afforded to Taffer by bar science allows him to rebuild each bar around the imposition of a pre-selected theme or concept. On almost every episode Taffer attributes a portion of the bar’s failure to its lack of defined identity, or lack of theme. To remedy this identity crisis, he and his team of experts select and impose a new, fresh theme. Each theme is purportedly selected based on an analysis of all the bars in the area so that Taffer and his team can determine what best suits the neighborhood. This in and of itself does not sound like a bad thing, until the superficiality of the selection becomes clear. In some of his most extreme transformations Taffer has taken

on a Pirate bar, a Character bar (where the waitstaff essential wore Halloween costumes), and “Mom’s Basement” (complete with board games and family photos) where the remodel includes scrapping the old theme entirely in favor of a new, “Taffer approved” one. Therefore, the problem is not the lack of an identity but rather the lack of a culturally normative one. According to Taffer, no one wants to go to a Pirate themed bar because it is, to use his word, “strange.” In addition to being easily relatable, the new concepts are almost always only superficially applied. For instance, in a recent episode Taffer selected a Steampunk theme and imposed it by hanging a few gears on the walls and naming a drink after Ada Lovelace, making it easy to miss the theme entirely. What is impossible to miss however, are the striking similarities between most of the renovated bars: soft lighting, some kind of focal point bar-top, inviting floors, and (more often than not) a new, computerised D.J. system. To distract from the fact that Taffer and his team are basically creating the same bar over and over again they select an innocuous theme and gingerly apply it in non-threatening ways. By hanging some decorative wall art, creating a few signature cocktails and changing the bar’s name, Taffer sells uniqueness in a paint by numbers kit. The implementation of a foreign,

expertly crafted, concept not only strips a bar of its potential for organic thematic development, it contributes to the homogenization of bar culture. It contributes to the idea that all bars should be comfortable for all people. Taffer is essentially creating a franchise of bars that ensure the same customer experience no matter the geographic location or demographic composition of its clientele. Perhaps the most significant component of bar science is the demand to view all customers as dollar signs. The entire remodeling process is structured around monetary concerns. All of Taffer’s decisions—from transforming the flow pattern to changing the menu—hinge on getting patrons to stay longer and spend more money. It could be argued that since these bars are in financial distress it is more than appropriate that money be the focus of the remodel. While the value of creating an economically viable bar should not be understated, it seems counterintuitive to American bar culture to strip customers of every identifying quality, save for their wallet size. One need only briefly reflect on the history of the American tavern to realize that bars were established as a meeting hall and outlet for community building. Even as cities became more populous and bars evolved, the desire for a “local bar” where everyone knows each other and feels welcome did not fade. By viewing

customers solely as profit margins and stripping bars of their unique flavor in favor of a diluted, universally appealing brand of “uniqueness” Taffer and his team are contributing to the destruction of the “local bar.” Perhaps he should rename the show “Taffer’s Taverns®” and be done with it. ! BEYOND WEIRDNESS Review of “Adventure Time” by Andrew Gilbert

he premise of Adventure Time is as simple as its artistic style. Two buddies, Finn the human boy and Jake the magic dog, are local heroes who reside in the land of Ooo — a post-apocalyptic earth that resembles a Super Mario World map populated by kingdoms, dungeons, and hosts of bizarre fantasy and sci-fi characters.

Despite its reputation for the quirky and bizarre, Adventure Time is not a cartoon about the strangeness of its characters, although at times it may seem this way. This surface weirdness is what allows the show to follow rather deep threads of relativity and time. It’s a cartoon about action and consequence. It’s about being and becoming. The bizarre assortment of characters illustrates a universe shaped by its contradictions and the tensions that arise from seemingly incompatible differences. Here morality exists on a spectrum, despite its heroes’ desires to vanquish evil. These elements are what distinguish Adventure Time from its equally successful contemporaries, shows like Gravity Falls and The Regular Show that share its penchant for surreal imagery and in vogue awkward humor. But they never reach the sublime heights that Adventure Time almost consistently does. It’s not because Adventure Time is the only good cartoon on TV, but the synthesis of its material and uniquely executed aesthetic is operating on a level removed from the rote conventions that the other shows seem unable to move beyond. Adventure Time has more in common with the cinematic worlds of Luis Buñuel and Alejandro Jodorowsky, works whose strangeness is often mistaken for a lack of content, or even, as the sole content itself. I’m not making this

comparison to be provocative, but in a perverse way, Adventure Time often ventures beyond the pale of accepted children’s subject matter while radically experimenting with established forms. It enters realms that are not wholly incompatible with a midnight movie or an art house succès de scandale. Consider the episode “Puhoy” where Finn winds up trapped in a new reality. The viewer is never fully keyed in on what this new reality is — a different dimension perhaps, or a hidden sector of Finn’s own plane of existence. It could also be a dream. But the show’s structure insists that these details are merely expository and exposition is only the vessel, not the content. The experiences he has there are no less profound because they are not “real” in the sense that we might like to understand them. This is not unlike the phantasmagoria of Buñuel’s The Phantom of Liberty wherein dream and reality are so intertwined they are indistinguishable to both the characters and the audience. The episode follows Finn as he lives an entire lifetime within this reality: his coupling with a partner and raising a family. He chooses to remain there until his death, which has him breaking through unknown barriers and returning to his original state as though he had never left it. He attempts to recall what happens to him but the thought evaporates like a quickly forgotten dream. But this act of forgetting does not negate what just happened and

what we the viewer just witnessed; it remains an alternate embodiment within the greater spectrum of experiences contained within Adventure Time. The series is filled with these moments of anarchic pleasure where no single perspective, reality, or ideology is absolute. In a seemingly contradictory nature, the show’s narrative logic is anchored by the relativism that governs its universe. New characters, mythic beasts, or entire races of people are not simply trotted out from beyond the frame like a Hanna-Barbera cartoon. The viewer’s entire standpoint is shifted in order to become totally immersed in the reality that we find the new subjects existing in. Most often this occurs geographically or temporally (like in “Puhoy”), but even the very relationship between characters and their own bodies are radically upturned, inverted, and shattered, as with the encounters with interdimensional beings and storywithin-story frameworks. The episode “Bad Little Boy,” which uses such a framing device, inverts a slew of character’s genders and, by extension, their sexualities. But instead of presenting a “girl version” of Jake and Finn, Cake and Fiona are entirely new characters with their own personalities and function as unique subjects within the landscape of the series. This switcheroo also re-conceptualizes the romantic-sexual tensions between Finn and the recurring

character of Marceline the vampire, not simply as a genderbending gag, but as an alternate reality that feels every bit as genuine as the one it supposedly mirrors. It becomes a parallel reality that the viewer can return to and not feel slighted out of a “real” episode of Adventure Time. Much of these thematic expeditions are made possible by the show’s penchant for narrative gameplay. Rarely are the episodes driven by exposition and plot, rather they mutate and transform from the constant unfurling of characters and situations. Frequently the show establishes loose frameworks that help to shape the characters’ movements and meanings. But even when Adventure Time is given over to exploration and silliness, the actions of the players always have unforeseen repercussions. Regardless of their ethical weight, these consequences will play out for the remainder of the series, sometimes re-emerging when least expected (“The Vault”) or causing immediate shifts in the character’s relationships to each other (“Frost and Fire”). In the case of “The Vault,” a minor figure from seasons past reveals a complex web of past lives, reincarnations, and the evolution of elements and characters. Adventure Time often grafts the structure of other modes of storytelling on top of its primordial goop of material. The narrative logics of adventure video games and science fiction

television are frequently invoked to shape the free-wheeling stories. But the brilliance is that Adventure Time is only ever evocative of Star Trek and The Legend of Zelda, never derivative or referential. It has done away with the need to explain every element in order to justify its existence—freeing up precious screen time for what really matters: the act of transformation and the pleasures of visual experimentation. What makes Adventure Time so singular to contemporary animation is that it has moved beyond reference and ironic quotations. It cannibalizes all forms of visual media and graphic storytelling and reconstitutes their patterns, logics, and common experiences into something new. It pulls from every direction that is conceivably modern and those with a familiarity with its sources may delight in recognizing their influences. This is part of the pleasure in watching, a pleasure that is not unlike viewing films made by cinephiles: the influences shape the content and the content reshapes the influences. !

MIDDLE CLASS PIPE DREAMS Review of “Bored to Death” by Robbie Fordyce

or its duration as a series, HBO’s Bored to Death was a long-standing interrogation of a number of different masculinities that were as fascinating in their development as they were in their typology. It is the primary characters that make the show more than just a “good” comedy. The informal reference to its genre as “stoner noir” captures the extent to which the characters engage in substances, as well as the privateeye procedural elements, but fortunately the show avoids associations with the worst of stoner comedy. In fact, Bored to Death offers a great deal in terms of pulp and postmodern literary references and an important and

underplayed reference is to Paul Auster which forms the basis of the show’s narrative. Paul Auster’s novel City of Glass was published in 1985. City of Glass’ core conceit was complicating the clear demarcations between its protagonist and Auster himself: in the book, an everyday writer named Quinn is coincidentally mistaken for a detective named Paul Auster, and enters into a bizarre and upsetting labyrinth of family history and mystical theology. Quinn assumes the role of a private detective largely through a serendipitous phone call, his love of crime novels allowing him to pass himself off as genuine. But the fortuitous appointment leads to a case that eventually eliminates Quinn from the novel. A confusing indistinction emerges that complicates first, second, and third person narration, and Quinn is—and I don’t use this phrase lightly—literally written out of the novel by Auster. Indeed, the question becomes: where, exactly, has Auster gone? One would suspect that the character of Auster, at least, has partly been incorporated into Bored to Death. Bored to Death takes a somewhat more light-hearted approach to the same trope, and points to the connection with Auster by giving his work a cameo appearance within the first season. The show borrows the core structural device from City of Glass, by complicating the relationship between the show’s

auteur and primary protagonist. Bored to Death stars a young Jewish writer in New York, named Jonathan Ames (Jason Schwartzman), who shares his name with the show’s writer/producer. The character Jonathan—in the midst of a postbreakup binge fuelled by white wine, pot, and Raymond Chandler—posts a “private detective for hire” note to Craigslist which leads to him taking his first in a series of cases. Stealing this device from Auster isn’t what’s brilliant about Bored to Death. The show is brilliant because of the construction of and engagements between the three primary characters, of which Jonathan is one. Jonathan sports a number of personas beyond his role as a detective: he acts as a writer for a magazine, as a writing teacher at a night school, and as his rather addled daily self. There are striking changes between some of these roles. His affectations as a detective provide him with a confidence that appears to be in all ways genuine, and his writerly persona has all embellishments of someone well versed in hobnobbing with the likes of Jim Jarmusch (who makes a cameo in episode three of season one). His detective role provides the narrative space to allow Schwartzman to portray other roles, and also has a reciprocal effect, insofar as Ames’ somewhat pathetic appeals to just “talking it out” are what lead to the resolution of most of the cases. He

solves his first case with a healthy dose of feminist psychoanalysis to break down a case of exploitative sexual role-playing. A later case is resolved by sneaking out of a BDSM dungeon in a gimp suit. Ames refuses to engage in violence in almost every case, barring two situations: his friend George (Ted Danson) requesting a punch to the face in an attempt to hide a gigantic herpes sore, and a boxing match at the end of the first season. This boxing match acts as the primary denouement to the season as the audience can revel with Ames in a shared glee for the beating of his antagonistic literary critic and primary bête noire Louis Green (played by the always infuriating John Hodgman). The strength of the focal lens that Bored to Death applies to masculinity does have its weaknesses, and one that is apparent is its focus on three white male characters to the exclusion of all others. The show is so absolutely dedicated to exploring the character of the three male stars that there are nearly no female characters of note whatsoever. A few women are presented in terms of their problems (alcoholism, infidelity, matronly behaviour), transgender individuals are included as ‘repulsive’, and the few non-white characters are crude clichés. Nonetheless, the masculinities at play make for a compelling trio. Jonathan’s two friends George and Ray complete the show’s holy trinity of masculinities. Ray (Zach Galifianakis) is a sensitive comic

book writer who appears to be largely destitute for most of the first season and wanders from one seemingly ennui-stricken moment to another. His comic book writing acts as an outlet for power fantasies which are as emotionally juvenile as his relationships. Of the characters, Ray is by far the most Romantic, in the sense of constantly seeking out a sublime connection. Think of a huskier Caspar David Friedrich who wanders lost through the streets of Brooklyn, rather than wandering above the fog in Germany. Ray constantly seeks out relationships with friends and lovers alike, searching for ones that have significance. In most of his relationships with women he only manages to retain a tenuous hold, and yet any relationship that appears to have security is quickly abandoned under a glaze of dissatisfaction. In many ways, Ray’s total exploitability, by his lovers as much as by his friends, leaves him largely subject to the whims of others. Merging the depressed wandering of characters from the French New Wave with a totally un-selfreflexive comedy actor leads to a somewhat tragic figure for most of the series. Ray’s dedication to his friendship means he will drop almost anything he is doing to help Jonathan or George. In fact, his friendship with George is almost more interesting than his friendship with Jonathan, as the two are cast into fairly different class backgrounds, which allows for interesting juxtapositions.

George, on the other hand, is older, holds a job as a magazine editor, and yet has a persistent boyishness that is quite appealing to watch. He has disposable income, which allows the trio to purchase all manner of high tech spy gadgetry during detective sessions; it also funds the teams’ legal efforts, and prodigious weed consumption. Beyond his material presence in the script, George’s antagonism with his exwife’s new husband and professional rival drives much of the plot throughout the first and third season – leading to the aforementioned boxing match. Also, Danson delivers the scene in Bored to Death that sticks with me the most. It is a very brief, and oddly serious moment at the start of season two, episode four. George confides quietly in Jonathan his fears about his prostate cancer. “It just seems so unfair that we can be turned off like a—like a switch, like we never lived, like we never mattered—I don’t want to be turned off.” There is something so absolutely poignant about this brief patch amidst the general levity of the show that cuts through all my other expectations. For me and many others, George is the heart of the show – far more than Jonathan. The construction of these three characters is the primary strength of Bored to Death. If anything, these characters define the show as a boy’s fantasy world. They can be a detective, a soldier, a novelist, a comic book writer, a

boxer, a superhero, a gangster, and so on, but as Bored to Death plays out, it becomes clear that they cannot be a CEO, a dad, or hold a career. The characters are always childish – a fact that is reinforced when Jonathan’s father bails the troop out of a blackmail attempt. A recurring theme is each character’s obsession with their genitals. Jonathan develops anxiety about the size of his dick after being a reluctant partner to a two-man threesome with his current girlfriend. Jonathan later demands Ray follow him into the toilets to compare penis sizes (which Ray agrees to). George develops existential angst about his prostate gland, attributing his illnesses to karma for living life “like a demented god.” Ray in turn creates a semi-successful comic book character who gains his powers from having his dick touch the third rail in a train subway. Another element regularly addressed is their various inabilities in relationships with women. George has no shortage of girlfriends, and yet cannot get back together with his ex-wife; Ray always seems to be in a relationship, but never to a level that he wants; and Jonathan expresses extreme commitment issues at every opportunity. The anxieties are never particularly interesting in and of themselves, but the way in which the characters negotiate the issues is always interesting. Bored to Death is an unrepentant upper-middle class

fantasy about the finer things: wine, weed, and writing. Like Mad Men at its most depraved, the watching of the show is a hedonistic act - one can enjoy Bored to Death as a pure spectacle of consumption, disregarding the exclusion of non-white or nonmale characters of any note. The show is certainly one of the better expressions of the philosophical “good life” of erudite speculation on the meaning-of-it-all, and adopts lengthy discussions about sexual fear, parentage, competitiveness, and death. !

BINGEING AT THE BANANA STAND Review of the final season of “Arrested Development” by Anders Furze

“My favourite lines are so inside.” — Arrested Development Showrunner Mitch Hurwitz1

ell, we are all insiders now. Arrested Development’s confounding fourth season demands it of us, relies on us understanding everything there is to know about American television right now, from how Netflix is upending it to how this season was produced.

1 Denise Martin, "Arrested Development Post-mortem: Mitch Hurwitz Tells Vulture What’s Next For The Bluths," Vulture, 6 June 2013.

And if you are foolish enough to be unaware of these changes the show demands you jump onto Vulture or The AV Club or Deadline or The Nerdist’s Writer’s Podcast and catch yourself up. No other series relies so heavily on us being so fully aware of our status as viewers of a constructed television program. It is there in the muchdiscussed narrative structure, a noticeable departure from that of seasons one to three, resulting predominantly from two things: a complicated production context and host platform Netflix’s unique mode of television broadcast and consumption. As Eric Goldman notes, “many of the cast members had other commitments, ones that contractually superseded Arrested Development” leading to a show constructed of “characterspecific episodes, with the entire ensemble almost never appearing together.”2 Hurwitz and company take this atomisation of the ensemble and, in typical Arrested Development fashion, try to have it both ways. The show uses the absence of an ensemble to establish a running gag wherein the family is entirely missing from matriarch Lucille Bluth’s court trial. Yet it also tries to re-claim the familiar sense of a family interacting all at once by obviously green-screening actors together. Their bizarrely disjointed interactions become

comedic in themselves.3 It would be a risky move for season four to depart from fan expectations of a family “getting back together” were it not for the broadcast and consumption possibilities of Netflix, wherein an entire season is made available at launch, and each episode automatically starts when the previous one ends. In a traditionally broadcast show, delaying an episode focused on family matriarch Lucille Bluth until episode ten would risk alienating those of us who find her to be the comedic highlight of the show. Yet thanks to Netflix episode ten launches immediately after episode nine, or indeed whenever we want to watch it. Not only do these changes facilitate binge watching and thus less real-time spent away from favourite characters, they inform the structure of Arrested Development’s narrative. Much of its humour relies on us bingeing and thus connecting-the-dots across multiple, intensely selfreferential episodes. A favour George Sr. does for his son Michael in one episode seems benevolent, for example, whilst later in the season we discover that George Sr. expected a favour in return. Yet another episode extends this to an absurd level when we learn Michael grants George Sr. a favour in return, but only if George Sr. grants Michael

Eric Goldman, "Bluth Family Values," IGN, 18 June 2013.

Some of the most obvious instances can be found here.

another favour, and so on. The moment is funny partly because of the absurdity of the interaction and partly because the audience realises it has been played. How strange it is to be so constantly aware of the process of comedy making. Arrested Development’s narrative teaches us that an event is funny not just in itself but in how it is presented to us, and we relearn this lesson hundreds of times across a season that revels in playing these narrative games. It is a lesson that the show takes to absurd extremes. With its increasingly obscure forays into Jamesonian blank parody, the show treads into realms of comedy wherein how something is depicted is the only source of humour. Episode ten concerns the events of Lucille Bluth’s imprisonment (she lost the aforementioned trial), and its opening is presented to us in the style of the Real Housewives reality series. Rather than conventionally present the narrative information of how Lucille fell in with Asian triads whilst imprisoned, the show apes the formal style of the Real Housewives series to convey this information. There are fake credits for “The Real Asian Prison Housewives of the Orange Country White Collar Prison System” and direct-to-camera interviews. We are expected to find humour not in what is presented, but in how its presentation refers to a preexisting television series. It has become a convention of

contemporary American comedies to be intensely referential, and here the references are unstoppable. When it’s not busy referencing other shows (the cast of Workaholics playing airline check-in staff), it references itself (each episode begins with “here’s the story of a family whose future was abruptly cancelled”), and even does both (the ongoing Happy Days references and their connection to producer Ron Howard). This reliance on an “insider” audience hip to in-jokes reaches its nadir in episode four, wherein Michael starts to track down his family members to get their approval for a movie he is producing based on their lives. Both Ron Howard and Brian Grazer appear as themselves, their real company Imagine Entertainment producing the movie-in-the-show. Thus we have the same company and people producing the show wherein they appear as themselves, producing a movie based upon the lives of the family whose actors had to be similarly wrangled. The ultimate inside joke, this sequence relies on us knowing all this background information, or knowing that we don’t know and thus need to.4 It is not, as an

Brian Grazer, for example, was a man whose status as Ron Howard’s coproducer I was previously unaware of. But I knew that the comedy here relies on him being real outside the

isolated sequence, funny, we are expected to be aware enough of the show’s production context that we find humour in our ability to connect “Brian Grazer” to Brian Grazer. Because of this heavy reliance on jokes that are “so inside” and because of its reliance on the Netflix platform to generate its humour, season four of Arrested Development is probably the first truly authentic televisual product of the internet age. Yet if we are all now either insiders or a couple of clicks away from becoming so, if Arrested Development’s humour relies on us possessing a labyrinthine knowledge of American television or the means to acquire it, the question remains: where to from here? !

confines of Arrested Development, and a quick Wikipedia search confirmed it.