TV Review: Mad Men Season 2 is What Great Television is All About

Great television to me is when the medium is used to take film and stretch it out in time until it has the depth and texture of a great novel. The Wire did this, as did The Sopranos at its best and The Shield. Mad Men, which is at the midpoint of Season 2 is right there at that sweet spot and this weeks episode "The New Girl" is one of the best hours of TV all year. It encapsulates what's different from Season 1, itself stellar.

The first season was very much centered on the work life and play of Jon Hamm's sleek Don Draper, the creative director of early 1960's ad agency Sterling Cooper and the course of Peggy Olsen who goes from secretary to copywriter under Draper's tutelage. Elisabeth Moss, who plays Peggy, is every bit as deserving of an Emmy nom as Hamm and lets hope they catch up with her next year. Peggy with her enormous eyes is emerging in her own way as a lead character and counterpoint to Don - she's capable of seeming coltish and inscrutably cold all at once.

This is deepened in the current season which takes us from work into the family lives of these characters. Don's marriage to gorgeous Betty (played to heartbreaking perfection by the delectable January Jones) seems to teeter on the edge from moment to moment with both husband and wife too aware of how easy it is to break their vows. Peggy's family which is proud and dissaproving of her all at once. Slimy Pete Campbell played by Vincent Kartheiser with weaselly perfection crows about his wonderful sperm to his crestfallen wife upon learning that he isn't to blame for their difficulty conceiving.

This week brought us two scenes that are fulcrums on which the entire series will pivot, and on which Don and Peggy spin. First is the advice Don gives Peggy in a flashback - a keystone as it turns out to both of their characters: "Get out of here and move forward. This never happened... it will shock you how much it never happened."

Phew I got goosebumps when he said it.

Then there was Peggy's scenes with the mercenary Bobbie, a woman who has a measure of power and independence in a man's world but who still finds herself helplessly entangeled with Don. Bobbie sizes Peggy up and tells her she should act like an equal to Don to get ahead, but "... you can't be a man. Don't even try. Be a woman. It's powerful business when done correctly."

When Peggy firmly asks for the bail money she fronted Don earlier in the episode and he pays up sheepishly she says "Thank you Don", a big change from her usual "Mr. Draper."

The theme of the show gets stronger and deeper throughout the season and the episode: we invent ourselves. We have the power to be who we want to be, not who we are. The problem is knowing what it is we want to be.

DVD Review: Relive the Golden Age of The Grit-Com with Barney Miller

With the rollout of practically every show that's ever been on television to DVD, there has been a conundrum that's especially endemic to older shows. For many older shows, it took a season to really hit their stride and figure out what they were about and what kind of stories they were telling. Subtle cast changes and behind the scenes shakeups mean that often the first exposure to a show on DVD is not really indicative of what made the program a hit.

So it was with Barney Miller. The show sprang out of a pilot called The Life and Times of Barney Miller and the first season hewed to the initial template -- sensible no-nonsense but sensitive Police Captain Barney Miller and the balance between his family and work life. Though it's a solid and entertaining first run, by the end of the season it became clear that his interaction with his wife (played by Barbara Barrie) and daughter were not nearly as interesting as his co-workers and the revolving cats of crazies that found their ways behind the bars of their Greenwich Village precinct.

Still, since we are by nature an orderly species and most people would prefer to watch a show on DVD in the order of it's run, the powers that be at Sony issued season 1 to test the waters for interest in the program. Not surprisingly, interest was muted in a Season that was atypical and didn't play to the shows evolving strengths.

Four long years have passed until Sony finally has seen fit to release Season 2, now out on DVD, and it's about time. Here is where the classic Barney Miller template is set. Though Barrie is still in the opening credits and shows up a few times the focus is squarely on the precinct house.

Hal Linden, who plays the titular character, is the calm sea of reason in a workplace -- scratch that-- a city full of lunatics. The comic vision of this sane man and his crew inhabiting a crumbling building is an obvious response to the deepening institutional malaise of the mid-70s. There's a wonderful added quality of catch-22 in the fact that Barney typically spends much of his time trying to unbook his prisoners and set them free from the tiny jail cell they call "the cage."

The supporting cast in the early seasons is dominated by the great Abe Vigoda as over-the-hill sardonic Sgt. Fish. Vigoda has an offbeat line delivery that turns clunkers into laughs, his stone face conveying the world weariness of someone who's seen it all and would rather forget. His decaying health and frequency of urination are a constant source of jokes, as is his exasperation with his wife, Bernice. The irony is that Vigoda, who is still alive, is a health nut in real life and was probably in better shape than anyone else on the show.

Ron Glass played Harris, a sharp-dressing intellectual black cop. The desire for a literary career would become more pronounced in later seasons as most often he is paired up with exasperated Puerto Rican cop Chano Amenguale, played by Gregory Sierra. By Season three Sierra would be gone, replaced by diminutive Ron Carey and the superb Steve Landesberg who shows up twice here -- first as a fake priest and later as his soon-to-be regular role of the philosophical, dry Dietrich.

Max Gail as the ex-Marine with the hard-to-pronounce name Wojohowicz ("Just like it's spelled!") , Jack Soo as Japanese-American cop Yemana round out the regulars. Meanwhile a pre-Alice Linda Lavin drops in as a sometime precinct cop and foil for Wojo, Squiggy shows up as a student pot dealer, and the city falls apart.

Watching these episodes on DVD is to immerse yourself in the dark humor of New York's "drop dead" days when the city was running out of money and the federal government refused to help. The reactions of old time cops like Fish and especially James Gregory's great Inspector Lugar to the changing world around them carries as much truth as humor.

Through comedy the show manages to draw sympathetic portraits of all kinds of deviant and what today might be considered ho-hum behavior. Miller is tolerant of gays, some drug use but not pushers, prostitution (the woman selling $60 dollar buttons for the bicentennial is a particular highlight) and mental illness.

Most importantly, the show is generally quite funny and character driven, mostly (though not always) avoiding Very Special Episode syndrome. Here's hoping Sony keeps up the Barney Miller DVDs because as good as Season 2 is, it really gets going in 3, 4, and 5.

Sony typically skimped on any extras so here's a great blooper from Season 3. The cast was working at 3:30 AM, not atypically for a show that was known for it's constant fine-tuning and around the clock shoots.

TV Review: Welcome Back SNL -- Now Go Away!

Even in its best years (1976-1978 by some measures) and best individual shows Saturday Night Live has been patchy. This is a consequence of the pressures involved in turning around a new, topical sketch-comedy show every week. During the Dick Ebersol years in the mid-80s between Lorne Michael's leaving and his return, SNL started to use more filmed bits -- many of which were funnier than the live stuff. But that was then.

Unfortunately this is now, and now SNL is as unfunny as its ever been. The cast is willing and talented, but the writing well seems to be dry as a bone. At least here is proof that the writers really were on strike all those months.

Right now the big hubbub is over the now obligatory debate spoofs that SNL trots out every election year. The highwater mark for these were Darrell Hammond and Will Ferrel's brilliant Bush versus Gore series in 2000 which were so spot-on that Gore's people used them for debate prep. This year's set features Amy Poehler doing a passable Clinton and Fred Armisen in mocha-face doing an equally passable Obama. Poehler gets the glib, but she doesn't quite get the cadences right on Clinton, or the regal fierce repose with which she listens to her opponent. Armisen has the Obama look down, and some of his speech characteristics, but he too fails to locate something essential that would make this rise to the level of a great impression.

Of course there is also the debate over a white guy playing a black guy. To me the most resonant complaint is how seldom the equation is switched and you have a black performer playing someone who is white, especially someone in the public eye. That being said, I don't think there is any intentional harm beyond a somewhat hamfisted impersonation.

The sketches themselves (this Saturday's was essentially a better rewrite of last week's) really have only one point this time around -- the press is beating up on Hillary and fawning over Obama. There is some truth to this -- so much so that the real Hillary unwisely brought it up in the last debate. However there is much more to the dynamic between these two candidates that some halfway decent writing and performers who have really dug into the characters could make comedy hay from. Again the Bush/Gore series was funny because it got at both candidates strengths and weaknesses. SNL seems afraid to mock Obama -- much safer to go after the press. Clinton, despite being mocked as pushy and hard-to-take, seems to come off best but we never see the killer instinct that attracts and repels.

This week the real Hillary showed up to rebut the sketch and she was charming, funny, and very likable. Poehler as "Hillary" stopped in as well. But ultimately it served little purpose as entertainment and probably as campaign fodder as well.

The rest of the program, this week and last week, took a quick nosedive from the opener. The salvation last week was a great guest spot by host Tina Fey on Weekend Update that was an impassioned and funny pro-Hillary plea. There was also likable zealot Mike Huckabee, who was funny as usual. This week's Republican guest was unlikable zealot Rudy Giuliani, who was unfunny and pointless. Not unlike the show.

TV Review: The Wire Season 5 -- Bringing Dickensian Baltimore to a Close

Wendell Pierce as Bunk

Being called the best show on television is a hell of a burden to carry. Season 4 of HBO's drama The Wire won wide acclaim from critics, if not Emmys or Golden Globes noms, and show mastermind David Simon has set up this fifth and final season as a coda for his themes of a dying metropolis and its struggling inhabitants.

He and his team have done a pretty good job, though Season 4 probably still stands so far as the show's high water mark. This is due to a canny balance between the life of the children on the streets and the wheeler dealers in the halls of power that was breathtaking in it's sweep -- failing public schools, crime statistics manipulation, venal machine politicians, backstabbing police politics. This all while creating and maintaining a huge cast of defined realistic characters and scenes of subtle humor and grace that could leave the viewer chortling right after misting up.

The new season, which is about at the halfway mark now, adds the newspaper business to Simon's beat -- the fictional Baltimore Sun standing in for Simon's ex-employer, the uh, Baltimore Sun. Much has been written, especially in Slate's TV Club, about Simon's axe to grind with the Tribune Company -- The Sun's owners. The Slatesters seem to find the journalism subplots to be weak links in the season, and I agree it's hard to get worked up over the slash in newsroom budgets when a character like Bubs, who has spent 4 Seasons in thrall to drugs, is trying so hard to get right.

That being said the various strands are starting to dovetail, as a decimated police force (the mayor -- like Corey Booker in Newark -- was left a surprise deficit by the previous corrupt administration and has had to choose between the cops and the schools) and a bottom-line oriented sensation seeking media organization begin to collude in shady ways.

I find the political stuff mesmerizing -- it's typical of the show that after a heartbreaking season of watching underfunded schools spit these kids out, and a reform-minded if mercenary mayor win election -- Simon asks us to see the consequences of what we so dearly wish for. "Fix the schools!" On The Wire every choice has consequences and repurcussions and in Season 5 this fervent wish on the part of viewers and characters alike means the police have to suffer through a barebones budget and the big case that could bring down drug dealer Marlo Stanfield being put on the back-burner.


Andre Royo as Bubbles. Give this man his Emmy already!

The cast of The Wire is a big part of what makes the show so extraordinary. Dominic West is sort of the known quantity, brought back to prominence this season as in season 1 as lusty boozehound Detective McNulty -- back off the wagon, on the hunt for some strange, and in the midst of a collossal con job. Wendell Pierce as his partner Bunk is scintillating, shifting effortlessly between concern and disgust for McNulty. Lance Reddick, newly added to the cast of Lost, gives Daniels a noble resigned wariness. Clarke Peters brilliant survivor Freamon, Andre Royo as the aforementioned Bubbles who should have been given every television acting award in town by now, Michael K. Williams as Omar -- TV's only gay hold-up man with the power to make a whole city block run for cover. The list goes on...

The bottom line is that I can't wait to see how the rest of the season unfolds, and anyone who appreciates not just good television but great film ought to see every season of this fantastic show. Season 5 won't win any converts, and may not be the place to start (that would be Season 1, fool) but this is the kind of show that you want to put in a time capsule or the Library of Congress. The Dickens comparison has been made quite a lot (Charles, not Kim) to the extant that in one of the newspaper scenes there is a lot of fun poked at the Dickensian reportage expected on the city's schools. Truly though, great television is the closest film comes to the scope of a great novelist, and this will be the fifth in what has been a great set of books.

Here's a key scene from Episode Two -- McNulty staging a murder scene with Bunk looking on:


And a bonus -- Isiah Whitlock Jr. as corrupt politician Clay Davis has become legendary among Wire fanatics for his way with the word "shit". Here's one of his best utterances, from last week's episode.