TV Roundup: Breaking Bad

While its more famous and popular older brother Mad Men* gets most of the attention from AMC’s crop of original programming, Vince Gilligan’s Breaking Bad is quietly putting an astonishingly high-quality. In fact, I’m going to make a bold claim: Breaking Bad is the best thing I’ve seen on television since The Wire ended its run in 2008.** Having seen up through the third season of this amazing show, I want to talk a little about it. Hard as it’s going to be, I will refrain from spoilers.

TV Roundup: Season One of Archer, Battlestar Galctica, and Boardwalk Empire

Today I’m debuting what will hopefully become a fairly regular addition to this blog. I write movie reviews with some frequency and have mentioned television quite often, but I have yet to actually review tv shows. In accordance with this being the lair of the Film Czar, that changes today. And yes, I consider television to be film. After all, TV shows are filmed, no? (I plan on writing an essay comparing and contrasting the two media some day, but that’ll have to wait).

I don’t have the time or patience to individually review episodes of television—I recommend this blog for that—so instead I think I’ll step back and review whole seasons of shows after I finish them (or however far I get with a show with which I decide not to continue). I’m starting with three cable shows, for all of which I recently finished the first season. And why not do it alphabetically? So first up is FX’s Archer.

Archer, Season 1

What if there were an American James Bond, only instead of a suave gentleman he was a juvenile, petty, petulant man-child? This is essentially the premise of Archer, a consistently funny animated show that comes, somewhat surprisingly, from FX (it looks like, and has the sensibilities of, something from Adult Swim or Comedy Central).

The 5 Levels of Serialization

No, not that kind.

Welcome to the first installment of the one-part series, 'Paul's Pet Theories'. In this one, I talk a little about the structure of tv shows.

Television is the least self-contained of any of any narrative media. If it lasts, a show can easily have twenty hour-long episodes for six or seven years, while a movie series is considered long at four installments. But the way that the showrunners choose to use this time varies wildly. Some have but one long story they want to tell. Others tell a different one every episode, while still others fall somewhere in between. This is the concept of serialization, and, in my opinion it falls into five main categories*. The essential question that I use to figure out where a show falls is this: how much will what happened last episode affect what happens in this one?

(*)Anything that reflects true reality (as opposed to reality television) is not included. I.e. sports and news.

Level 1:
These are the shows that offer the lowest barriers to entry and, as such, are quite popular on networks. A viewer can start watching in season four without having seen it before and understand perfectly what's going on. While no show is ever truly free of continuity, the members of this group try. Many cartoons, whatever their intended age group, fall here. The other most populous level 1 subgroup are the procedurals. A level one crime procedural would, for example, have a new case every week (with perhaps the occasional two-parter) with very little connection between them. We'll learn about the characters' backstories, but they will typically serve only to flesh them out and have little actual bearing on the plot. These shows always have a status quo that, some level of cast change aside, rarely changes. If Kenny can die in one episode and be back the next with no explanation, or just never dies at all unless his character is 'written out' of the show, it's level one. Reality shows, for obvious reasons, are rarely level 1, but most game shows are.

Examples:
Family Guy, South Park, Futurama, Modern Family, Saturday Night Live, Robot Chicken
Spongebob, Animaniacs
Jeopardy, Wheel of Fortune, MythBusters, Iron Chef
CSI (LV, NY, & Miami), Law & Order, Cold Case, Without a Trace

Drawing the Line

Over the last couple of days, it began to strike me just how much good television there is out there. Too much, really, for me to follow all that I would like. There are a dozen channels putting out original scripted content in the United States (plus BBC), including all of the various cable services. While there is a lot of crap, to be sure, most of the networks have multiple shows I am interested in, and that's not even getting into programs that have finished their run. It's too much.

In a lot of ways, we are living in a golden age of television. While the age of shows that are watched by everyone in America is over ('Seinfeld' and 'Friends' were probably the last of that breed), the rise of cable has compensated many times over. Cable shows have a number of competitive advantages over their network brethren, not the least of which is expanded potential content. Even the basic cable channels can have more mature and sophisticated material then the broadcast networks, to say nothing of the premium channels. A show that twenty years ago seemed edgy (like 'Miami Vice') now seems quaint compared to 'True Blood' or 'Dexter'.