Song of the Day: Television, "The Fire"

Mad Men Delays

With the contract up, is it possible for Matthew Weiner to just take Mad Men to another channel? Because this is ridiculous. AMC is demanding 2 additional minutes of advertising in each episode, a cut in the cast budget, and additional product placement. For one of the top 10 greatest shows of all time and a show that essentially created the new AMC, this is outrageous.

Historical Image of the Day

Back to the historical images. This week will take a broad look at the 1970s.

The Electric Company, the classic PBS 1970s kids show.

The Killing

This looks like a very promising television show.

I'll Take Tobias in the Banana Stand with the Cornballer

An Arrested Development Clue game sounds pretty awesome to me.

The Baltimore Police Commissioner Versus David Simon

The Baltimore Police Commissioner got cranky over how The Wire supposedly gave the city a bad image:

At the Jan. 8 Amplify Baltimore event, Bealefeld told audience members that the show was the "most unfair use of literary license that we've borne witness to," according to video posted on YouTube.

"I heard all this stuff about, 'Well there's crime shows about L.A., about New York, about Miami,'" Bealefeld said. "You know what Miami gets in their crime show? They get detectives that look like models, and they drive around in sports cars. And you know what New York gets, they get these incredibly tough prosecutors, competant cops that solve the most crazy, complicated cases."

"What Baltimore gets is this reinforced notion that it's a city full of hopelessness, despair and dysfunction. There was very little effort - beyond self-serving - to highlight the great and wonderful things happening here, and to indict the whole population, the criminal justice system, the school system."

It's always a bad idea to attack people who are not only smarter and more creative than you are, but who are also right. David Simon, creator of The Wire responds:

It is my understanding that Commissioner Bealefeld - by finally choosing to emphasize the quality, rather than the quantity of arrest - has been able to reduce the homicide rate somewhat in our city. If true, this is not only commendable, it is a long time coming. Too long, in fact.
Interestingly, the newspaper that covered his department began making the argument to do exactly that as early as 1994, in a series of articles entitled "Crisis In Blue" (Ed. note: part two can be found here) that carefully articulated the disconnect between the Baltimore department's aggressive street-level prosecution of the drug war and the root causes of violence in the city. The arguments were furthered in a book entitled "The Corner" that was published three years later. After a new election cycle, however, those arguments were ignored in favor of years of "zero tolerance" of minor street crimes and an obsession with street-level drug enforcement that actually de-emphasized quality police work and led to marked declines in arrest rates for major felonies.  

Later, when a mayor sought to become governor using public safety as an issue, the same police department went further down the path, emphasizing widespread street arrests of dubious quality and legality. This did not reduce crime so much as it violated the civil rights of many city residents and led to the widespread alienation of our jury pool, with many city jurors no longer willing to trust the integrity of testifying officers - a problem that will plague Baltimore law enforcement for years.

Furthermore, on behalf of Mr. O'Malley's political aspirations, many supervisors in many police districts were engaged in a prolonged campaign to improperly downgrade U.C.R. felonies to misdemeanors so as to further the political claim that crime was under control. This was common knowledge throughout the department and was much remarked upon privately by respected veteran supervisors and investigators, themselves frustrated at the practice. Nonetheless, aggravated assaults became common assaults. Armed robberies became larcenies. Rapes were unfounded.

I do not recall that Commissioner Bealefeld - when he was rising through the ranks during those years - made strenuous public objection to the department's misdirection, to its statistical flummery, or to the decline in arrest rates that resulted as quality police work was de-emphasized in favor of juked stats.  Perhaps he did so in private, to little avail. And perhaps now that he is in a position to act, he is taking a better path. Again, as a resident of Baltimore, he has my wholehearted support if this is the case.

But publicly, let me state that The Wire owes no apologies -- at least not for its depiction of those portions of Baltimore where we set our story, for its address of economic and political priorities and urban poverty, for its discussion of the drug war and the damage done from that misguided prohibition, or for its attention to the cover-your-ass institutional dynamic that leads, say, big-city police commissioners to perceive a fictional narrative, rather than actual, complex urban problems as a cause for righteous concern. As citizens using a fictional narrative as a means of arguing different priorities or policies, those who created and worked on The Wire have dissented.

 

Commissioner Bealefeld may not be comfortable with public dissent, or even a public critique of his agency. He may even believe that the recent decline in crime entitles him to denigrate as "stupid" or "slander" all prior dissent, as if the previous two decades of mismanagement in the Baltimore department had not happened and should not have been addressed by any act of storytelling, given that Baltimore is no longer among the most violent American cities, but merely a very violent one.

Others might reasonably argue, however that it is not sixty hours of The Wire that will require decades for our city to overcome, as the commissioner claims. A more lingering problem might be two decades of bad performance by a police agency more obsessed with statistics than substance, with appeasing political leadership rather than seriously addressing the roots of city violence, with shifting blame rather than taking responsibility.  That is the police department we depicted in The Wire, give or take our depiction of some conscientious officers and supervisors. And that is an accurate depiction of the Baltimore department for much of the last twenty years, from the late 1980s, when cocaine hit and the drug corners blossomed, until recently, when Mr. O'Malley became governor and the pressure to clear those corners without regard to legality and to make crime disappear on paper finally gave way to some normalcy and, perhaps, some police work.  Commissioner Bealefeld, who was present for much of that history, knows it as well as anyone associated with The Wire.

We made things up, true.  We have never claimed otherwise.  But respectfully, with regard to our critique, we have slandered no one.  And to the extent you can stand behind a fictional tale, we stand by ours - and more importantly, our purpose in telling that tale.

 

Respectfully,

 

David Simon

Baltimore, MD

Ouch. 

AMC

Matt Zoller Seitz on why AMC shows are so great.

Sterling's Gold

Does Matthew Weiner ever sleep?

On Tuesday, Grove Press, a publisher once known for daring fare like "Lady Chatterley's Lover" and "Tropic of Cancer," announced that it will release "Sterling's Gold: Wit & Wisdom of an Ad Man," a real book inspired by the autobiography that everyone's favorite silver fox wrote on "Mad Men."

Sadly, "Sterling's Gold" will not include any actual biography, which means no detailed reports of what really happened that night after Roger lured Joanie into a hotel room with a brand-new fur coat. But it will include 10 color photos from the show (we're hoping at least, say, 10 of them feature Joan) and a confessional introduction by "Mad Men" creator Matt Weiner, written in Sterling's voice.

"I'm not a writer," it says. "On some level, that's a point of pride because it steered me away from the cliche of autobiography. I had no desire to waste your and my time trying to turn a list of events into a campaign of triumph."

TV Replacing Film as Storytelling Medium of Choice?

Jim Emerson explores this question, riffing off this A.O. Scott article.

I don't know--there sure hasn't been a lot of buzz around American cinema in the last couple of years. It's all about sequels and technology. The Hollywood studios are showing about as much creativity as network television in the 1980s. Meanwhile, I don't think TV has ever witnessed such a peak of quality and creativity. I suppose we have The Sopranos to thank for this. One might make the argument that The Sopranos is one of the five most important TV shows ever, for this reason.

In the end, I'm a film guy. But I'm also a quality guy and if my viewing habits begin to combine old movies and new TV in equal measures, well, I can think of worse things.

The Changing Country

Despite what racist white people are organizing to stop, the growing dominance of Latinos is pretty unstoppable. Evidence? How's this for you?

Univision was the most popular network among television viewers aged 18 to 49 years old last week, the first time a Spanish-language station has beaten the English ones in this key demographic in the United States.

That's not going to happen every week of course, but the fact that it's even possible is pretty amazing.  This may seem relatively minor but it's precisely this kind of evidence that historians use to track societal changes. So it's possible that historians of the future will see last week as a key turning point in American history. We don't always realize change when it happens around us.

Drinking and Watching

Like Wendell Jamieson, I increasingly find my drinking habits heavily influenced by the films I am watching. I first started noticing this in the last year as I've engaged in television series for the first time in a decade. I realized when watching Deadwood how much more straight whiskey I was drinking, sometimes backed with a beer, sometimes not. After finishing that show, I've moved on to Mad Men, which of course has spawned a whole literature on the nation's alcohol habits in the early 1960s. And while I haven't been drinking old-fashioneds like Don Draper, I have significantly increased my consumption of martinis and Manhattans, while my drinking of straight whiskey has declined just as much.

I like the idea of trying to match my alcohol with the movie. I can't be too exacting--after all, while I have a not small amount of alcohol in the house, I hardly have the money for everything. But I can be in the ballpark most of the time. Of course, when it's a movie I haven't watched before, I have to guess what the alcohol of choice will be. Last night, I watched Lukas Moodysson's fine film Together, about a Swedish commune in the early 70s. I figured that since they were Swedes, vodka would be the drink of choice. I was wrong (it was wine) but whatever. It's fun to guess.

Leno

Is there anyone less funny than Jay Leno? Sorry, I don't think showing how stupid people are is very funny, particularly when that's your only bit.

So I'm happy to see that his new show is not doing well in the ratings. Here's his performance on Monday compared to other shows in the 18-49 demographic:

6.5 House
4.6 Big Bang Theory
4.4 Two and a Half Men
4.3 CSI Miami
4.1 Dancing With The Stars
3.5 How I Met Your Mother
3.2 Accidentally On Purpose
2.7 Heroes
2.3 Castle
1.8 The Jay Leno Show
1.2 One Tree Hill
1.1 Gossip Girl

This is really good news. NBC is trying to be lazy and not develop new programming. Leno takes 5 hours a week off the table for them. While I doubt their replacement shows would be good, at least they wouldn't be Leno.

Via Reel Fanatic

The Muppet Show

Jon Gutierrez lays out the 10 weirdest moments in Muppet Show history. And he gets the utterly bizarre nature of the show right:

How the hell did The Muppet Show ever get on the air? Imagine it from a TV executive's point of view: a weekly variety show, in an old vaudeville theater, featuring puppets, and a mix of A, B and C-list celebrities that catered to both kids and adults. That's not a pitch... it's a just list of random words that don't go together

You should check out the top 10, but here's a few of my favorites.

Here's Miss Piggy sexually harassing Rudolf Nureyev:



Vincent Price covers James Taylor:



Peter Sellers musing on identity and the comedian before reciting Richard III and squeezing chickens at the same time:



And Alice Cooper trying to get Kermit to enter into a Faustian bargain:



I can't imagine any show assuming knowledge of Faust in 2009, not to mention a show ostensibly for kids. It's my feeling though that no one knew what that meant in the 1970s either, but TV writers engaged in sort of cultural uplift during this period until executives told them to knock it off.

Via Edge of the American West

Rushkoff on Colbert

I don't have a TV at the moment, so I have to watch TV on my computer. As such, I watch it in bursts rather than in entire TV shows--I watch pieces of Maddow and clips from The Daily Show.

Douglas Rushkoff was on Stephen Colbert the other night, and it's a burst of TV worth watching.

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Douglas Rushkoff
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor Jeff Goldblum

It May Be A Little Late, but For What It's Worth...

"American Experience" on PBS is about Dr. Walter Freeman ("the lobotomy guy") tonight. It may be on re-runs, too - definitely worth checking out (though it's pretty disturbing at times).

...It turns out, it's not too late - PBS has put the whole hour-long show up online here. It was pretty well done, particularly in contextualizing Freeman's lobotomies by examining the ways America "treated" and dealt with patients with mental issues. At the same time, it wasn't overly sympathetic - yes, it had an abundance of Freeman's co-workers and children on it, but it also did a pretty good job highlighting that he was a man often consumed more by his personal quest for "triumph" than for the goodwill of any of his patients.

A Possible New Year's Resolution

I know this is a strange New Year's Resolution for an academic to make, but I'm wondering if I should vow to watch more TV this year.

Sure that sounds crazy. Don't I have better things to do with my time? I'm not sure. The sheer amount of quality shows of the last 5 years that I have either not seen or have seen very little of is staggering. The only shows that I have more than passing familiarity with are Deadwood, Arrested Development, and Curb Your Enthusiasm. Even The Sopranos is a show I've probably seen 5 episodes of. I've never seen an episode of Rome or Big Love or The Wire. I've never seen Weeds or Mad Men. I think I've seen about 10 minutes of an episode of Monk.

So maybe I should watch more TV. What else am I missing?

Link of the Day: Deadwood and Language

Deadwood is one of my favorite television shows of all time. It appeals to me on so many levels. Not only is the acting great, but, for once, a western tries to be historically accurate in ways that matter to me. Filth, language, social relations. Welcome to the Old West.

But of course the greatest part of the show is the language. Combining the conventions of Victorian Era American English with the most vile swearing known is genius. While the actual swear words have changed some over the last 130 years, making an actual recreation of the period's language untenable for a television show, Deadwood captures the spirit of language so well.

Over at Acephalous, there is a great post on this, made greater by the fact that Jim Beaver, who played Ellsworth, writes in the comment thread. Which would pretty much be the greatest thing ever if that happened to me.

Also, fuck HBO for canceling Deadwood. Cocksuckers.

Historical Image of the Day

Scene from "Battle of the Network Stars." I'm sure Cosell thought his interview with Gabe Kaplan was the finest moment of his career.

"Ugly Betty" on Cable in Latin America

So, the Sony cable station in Brazil has started advertising that it will be broadcasting the hit-American TV show "Ugly Betty" this month. What could possibly be wrong with that? Well, only that the world has already seen this show.

That's right - "Ugly Betty" is an English (the language, not the country) version of an immensely popular Columbian show called "Yo Soy Betty, la fea" (commonly known as "Betty, la fea", the moniker it had when it was on when I lived in Costa Rica). "Betty la fea" was so popular that it has been broadcast throughout the world (among other places, in Austria and Japan), and made the rounds throughout Latin America, including Brazil and Mexico (where non-native novelas almost never do well). Sony even seems to be somewhat aware of the obstacles of re-selling a show that people have already seen. Their main line for advertising? "Ugly Betty. This time, she's even uglier."

The thing I love most about all this (and the thing that is most culturally imperialistic) is that, by broadcasting "Ugly Betty" on cable here, they have exported the American version of a Latin American program back to Latin America. It's like the multi-national, multi-cultural version of "The Producers," only instead of making a movie based on a musical based on a movie, you just get a Latin-American translation of an English adaptation of a Latin American show (in its manifest national forms).