TV Question Qorner: Vampires, mouse poo, and the prime snore-ective
Flash Forward. In the DVR timeslot face-off with The Vampire Diaries, this lost….Yeah, I know. Cool premise; irritating execution, for two reasons.The first: Sonya Walger.I just can’t care.
The second: The idea that this happened to everyone in the world is really interesting, but in an hour-long action drama, it’s hard to show the aftermath realistically — and unfortunately, you have to try, or the audience is going to keep noticing the ways in which you don’t do it.Why isn’t there more chaos on the ground?Why haven’t the FBI and Homeland Security assigned more agents?Why does Dr. Sonya have time to stitch up a stuffed animal given the level of destruction the flash must have caused?No matter how you play it, or don’t, it becomes a foregrounded distraction.
I have other complaints with the show, which I won’t be watching again, but they all tie back in to my perpetual complaint about time-travel-based storytelling and the failure of showrunners to spend a solid few days working out, provided they can’t work with the external logic, how the internal logic is going to function.
Hoarders. I won’t lie: I watch the show to feel superior.But…it isn’t working, because even when the hoarder du jour is an annoying pill who calls ten meetings to cry all over the 1 800 Got Junk guys for throwing away whatever obviously useless jetsam, and the excavation team is exchanging looks over the tops of their dust masks all, “Yeah, sorry we put a tiny dent in your Library of Congress-sized MOUSE POO COLLECTION, Bonkers McNutbag,” I can’t really enjoy it — hoarding is a disease. Nobody tries to be like that, and the issue with most of the show’s subjects is that they can’t try NOT to be like that.
If it’s already gotten to the point where a court has taken away the kids, threatened to evict them from the property, someone’s called Animal Control…does anyone involved really believe that, once a TV crew turns up, these people will catch their snaps now and say to themselves, “I guess it’s really serious”?It’s not a snap they can catch in the first place, or they’d have done it before a judge sent their children away.
In a few cases, yes, maybe it just got out of control back in the day, and one big cleanup weekend followed by thoughtful administration of shelter-mag articles on keeping things tidy will take care of it.But that one guy who lived with his drunk dad, and his dad is hoarding wine bottles, and — with the dog shit and the bits of ribbon, and on and on?It’s like giving a Halls mentholated cough drop to Camille: the gesture is so insufficient, it seems intentionally mean.
Law & Order: Criminal Intent. They really think it’s a good idea to get rid of D’Onofrio, Erbe, and Bogosian?I’ve gotten over the bent-at-the-waist, know-it-all-y D’Onofrionics some time since, but the Bogozh casting, weird as it seemed at the time, worked for me.
Not everyone is keen on the addition of Jeff Goldblum to the cast. Slate‘s Nathan Heller is jarred by the quirk, although I don’t see why, given that Goldblum’s character is, uh, basically D’Onofrio’s character; Nichols is better at the piano and less twitchy, but as far as the volume of the quirk, it’s about the same.But the prevailing wisdom is apparently that USA wants to make L&O: CI more like Monk.I can see the wisdom, sort of: 1) Monk is ending soon, and 2) L&O: Mothership‘s openers have started to look more and more like CI‘s.It’s a procedural, though — that’s why I watch it.That’s why most people watch it, for cases, not character beats.Goldblum fits on the show, for me, and it’s a franchise that can take on some recasting water and not go under, generally speaking, but I’d feel more comfortable if I thought it had to do with adjusting the above-the-line-talent budget for basic cable.
Nothing against Monk, but y’all already did that, and I didn’t watch it, so…I don’t know.
Models of the Runway. Didn’t someone on the production team think to point out, before the season began, that, unless a rogue designer calls a motherfuckin’ walkoff (tm Daniel V) every week, the designers will likely stick with the models who have succeeded for them and whose quirks (and measurements) they know?And that this could quickly devolve into tedium for both participants and viewers?And that being the case, shouldn’t production have set it up so that the designers had to switch out models every week, and not just when it became increasingly clear that the selection portion of the show had no dramatic point, so that viewers wouldn’t feel like the terms had been changed — or that production doesn’t know what they’re doing?
Because this is a danger in this type of reality-show environment, and when model selection was a part of Project Runway proper, it only factored into the show when something happened.I don’t disagree with the decision to split off the show, but if it is its own show, you don’t have the luxury of hoping the designers decide to make things dramatic for you.You have to build in the unpredictability from the beginning, or you may have no show halfway through.
This season of PR has its detractors; I’ve disagreed pretty strongly with various judges at times, but I don’t think it’s as boring as some reviewers.But I feel like MotR would have done better on Bravo, because that team is more accustomed to covering its bases.
The Vampire Diaries. It’s a lightweight hour of TV, but it usually makes the interesting choice, so while we’ve seen this done before, TVD does a creditably entertaining job with it.I wouldn’t push the show on anyone, but it’s smarter than you’d expect.
Ian Somerhalder is kind of fun as the bad guy, too, but the writing sells him out somewhat in the “seen this done before” department.He’s one of those villains who has no motivation other than his own villainy and/or the conversion of others to same, and Damon’s monomaniacal focus on turning Stefan to the dark side has already gotten boring.Stefan’s ploddingly resolute response: equally boring.I admit that I don’t watch the show with studious attention — it’s often on while I do chores — but why is that approach to the conflict necessary?The show has other conflicts built right into it, and it’s much better at nuancing those; why couldn’t it do the same with the fraternal relationship here?
Somerhalder is doing his best to Terence Stamp the role, but as written, the character is just a sleazy dick; is it too late for the writers to throttle that back, or do we just have to hope they change course and kill him off?
Tags: Daniel Vosovic Eric Bogosian Flash Forward Hoarders Ian Somerhalder Jeff Goldblum Kathryn Erbe Law & Order: D'Onofrionics (tm Wing Chun) Law & Order: Mothership Models of the Runway Monk Project Runway Sonya Walger Terence Stamp The Vampire Diaries TV Vincent D'Onofrio
So much to say re: Flash Forward and MotR, but on the fly I just have to say HEEEEEEE! to the photo of Emperor Zod! Awesome, awesome, awesome.
I don’t know anything about the structure of “Models of the Runway,” but maybe they could do what they did last season on “Make Me a Supermodel” – send the girls on go-sees, give them photo shoots, etc. Some of those girls are horrible on the runway; that should count against them. No matter how many times Heidi says it, this is not a competition for the models. Their placement in the competition is completely dependent on the designers. There’s no point to the spin-off.
Well, if the TV show “The Vampires Diaries” is anything like the books, which I read so long ago I had to refresh w/ Wikipedia to remember the main plot points, Damon isn’t going anywhere. And his motivation will become apparent soon. But if history tells us anything, TV/movie versions of books are often butchered, so who really knows? I am just enjoying Somerhalder hamming it up.
Thanks for the info review of FlashForward. The 2 eps are sitting on my DVR, but I haven’t been able to muster the energy to watch. There’s always one show that I record for a while but eventually just delete. I suspected FF would be that one for me this year, so you just helped with that decision. Thanks!
I actually really liked the Eames and Nichols pairing they put in the season finale. Erbe’s really good at being what is more or less the straight man and can bust out the, “Okay, Quirky McQuirkerson, moving on…” without seeming snotty about it.
My husband and I are really enjoying “Flash Forward,” but my husband pointed out that it’s basically a one-note show — once they figure out what caused the flash forward, that’s it. Plus, as of April 29, 2010, they’ll know whether or not the visions of the future are real, so there’s that bit of tension gone. We’re still watching, though.
I think MotR would have been a lot more interesting if the judges booted one model every week, based on their walk / backstage attitude. Or if the models had had to vote one of themselves off each week. I like the behind-the-scenes look, but it doesn’t make for riveting tv.
@Mary Beth: Is the time within the show proceeding at the same pace as our time, though? If each episode is a day or two later than the previous one, they can spin out 6 months of fictional time as long as they want.
@ Maria: same here! The menacing stare…the pleather-trimmed costume…KNEEL BEFORE ZOD!
re: “Hoarders” – preach it! The whole thing feels like an exercise in futility, and invariably at the end of each episode I feel sort of deflated, although I can’t seem to stop watching. I sort of feel for the “organization counselors” who invariably start out determined and chipper and usually end up sort of…grimly resigned, as the hoarder carefully sorts through a box of reciepts from 1997 one…at…a…time.
Oh, Hoarders. I just watched an episode, then threw out some old day planner pages (from September 2009). But I don’t think I can keep watching Hoarders– it angries up the blood.
Re: Hoarders – WORD. If you saw Obsessed (and if you haven’t, it’s time to start the Googling process), A&E obviously knows how to deal with this. Therapy, therapy, some more therapy, and then some additional therapy. But for some reason, Hoarders turned into How Clean Is Your House? and… no. These aren’t people who are behind on their cleaning and it’s become unmanageable – these are people collecting used paper plates from back when people used to dare to enter the place. Ugh. Though, the show that my friend and I affectionately refer to as Fags Crying & Cats Rotting was quite an impressive episode in a lot of ways, not least of all random dialogue:
Gay Hoarder: [crying] I’m gonna throw up.
Therapist: You feel like you’re going to throw up?
Gay Hoarder: No, I’m going to make myself throw up.
Therapist: …that not… really necessary
re: Hoarders – Yeah, the lady (with TWO houses full of crap) who called a zillion meetings with the oh-so-patient 1-800 junk guys pissed me off, then I felt bad because it’s an illness and she can’t help being a pill, then she would start up again and I’d get annoyed…it’s a vicious cycle. I still DVR it but I don’t always watch them all the way through.
Ever since you (and Wing) wrote that book, I have been using “D’onofrionics” in regular everyday language. Because it fills a linguistic need! Also, the variant ‘d’onofrionic’, as in how you refer to your friend who, out of nowhere, reminds you that the word for ‘sidewalk’ is the same in Russian as in French. “After a few drinks, John becomes increasingly d’onofrionic.”
This is what you’ve wrought, Sars.
@attica: I must give all credit to Wing for wreaking that, actually. Heh.
ETA: Coincidentally, going through some old photos just now, I found the one @Maria took years ago of me and D’Onofrio on the street. I’ll try to scan it today.
re: FlashForward, I had the same problem with the first episode. There just wasn’t enough turmoil for the amount of carnage there must have been. Every car on the road at that moment in a car accident – how is it the doctor gets to go home that night? And how do the two main characters even manage to get home given the snarl the roads must be in. They were so busy getting to the part where the hero gets to dig into the mystery that they were playing down the trauma.
[As I was saying before the power in the building went out…]
@Sars – HEEEEEEE! I always think of that photo op when I see the D’Onof. “Are you Vincent?”
Better than thinking of his father, who taught Drama at my high school, and was exactly as insufferable as you’d think was to have raised Senor Self-Important over there.
I cancelled my Season Pass for FlashForward after the first ep. It bugged me that they made it home that night to kiss their daughter good night, when I just remember the chaos of NYC after 9/11 and then the stupid blackout. If there was that type of devestation in the show, there’s no way they’d be able to navigate the streets to get home. Pissed me the hell off.
I was also bugged by how quickly they were putting things together.
And, Seth McFarlane? Really?
@Ted: I know just the episode of Hoarders that you mean! That lady who thought she probably had about twenty cats, but actually she had like 45 of them…plus like 37 ROTTING CARCASSES? I just felt bad for that boy, though. His father was clearly the root of his problem. I hope he moved out.
A few weekends ago I watched a marathon of that show, and when it was over I completely revamped my filing system so as not to someday have a room full of 10 ft. piles of old syllabi and student essays.
Heh. I am watching Vampire Diaries online right now (I watch and surf at the same time). The pilot was sorta bad, but the newer episodes are way better than I would have thought.
@FlashForward: The credibility issues I can overlook if they are telling an interesting enough story. Whole suspension of disbelief thing, and the pilot was exciting enough that I felt the SOD was earned. But, I’m not sure they are going to be able to do that on an ongoing basis. The 2nd episode was already significantly less interesting than the first and I’m already bored with what his name’s I’m going to die whining. Yeah, shut up and go to White Castle. It reminds me of the Nine from a few seasons ago-stunning, exciting pilot where you could see the writers had a neat IDEA, but no idea how to turn it into an ongoing series.
@Hoarders: I don’t think I watch it to feel superior…its just so morbidly fascinating. And the self-deception of these people, with their plans to sell it on Ebay, or the scrap metal guy who thought he was sitting on a fortune in rusted out cars and beat up appliances? WHat I don’t understand is why the “organizers” aren’t tougher on these people-every episode its watching the hoarder freak out over their 1970 issues of Home Repair Projects You Will Never, Ever Actually Do or whatever, and the organizer being like ok, sure, whatever you say, like trying to be The Hoarder Whisperer or something. And I just want to reach through the screen and tear it out of their hands and File 13 it. I’m a toss everything person who purges the house top to bottom of useless crap at least once a year, and watching the show isn’t so much wanting to feel superior as self-torture.
FlashForward – I love a good borderline nonsensical yarn, don’t get me wrong. Hello, Lost, I miss you! But it makes me insane that they chose 10pm as a specific time for the flash forward. So now, everytime someone is, oh, you know – getting a sonogram, or calling a cupcake bakery, or taking a poop at the office with the sports section – I get indignant and irritated because it’s TEN O’CLOCK AT NIGHT. So, sadly, no more for me.
@ferretric: If you’re “a toss everything person who purges the house top to bottom of useless crap at least once a year”, then hoarding is NEVER going to be something you understand or sympathize with, though, is it?
If those folks were able to do that theselves, they wouldn’t NEED Hoarder Whisperers.
I don’t watch it. I can’t. My parents were children of the depression, and we were children of the recycling movement – and we all, ALL have squirrel blood. So you had “It could be useful someday!” people parenting children who were taught “Someone could use it!” [and apparently WE were supposed to store it for them], and every gene we have screams Hold Onto Something That Is Still Good. My sister has reached the point where she’s able to do some purging, and I’m reaching that point myself through just not caring about anything anymore, but it isn’t natural to us, and I can understand how a lot of those people got where they are.
I have an almost hysterically visceral reaction to “Hoarders”–even the promo spots. I leap right past “angry” and “depressed” into “I need to hit something” territory. Bagging and boxing and donating and discarding have become moments of joy for me, and the degree of delight I experience when I get rid of something–ANYTHING–is downright embarrassing.
You know that moment in “Rain Man”, when Cruise’s character berates Hoffman’s b/c he thinks the autism is an act, and that Raymond’s hiding under there somewhere, fully conscious of what he’s doing? THAT is how I feel about hoarders. I know it’s not true, I know that’s unreasonable of me, I know it’s mean. But I can’t help looking at that phenomenon and seeing it as someone’s deliberate attempt to nauseate the rest of the world.
@Jaybird, that’s the dirty little secret of mental illness, that many people in its grip are boring and annoying. And since they may act normal enough otherwise, it’s hard to keep in mind that they don’t MEAN to be boring and annoying, until you, as David Sedaris put in in an early essay, just want to clock them and yell “stop acting like an idiot and get better, damnit!”
When I worked at large bookstore, the crazies found me every damn day. It was like I had a neon sign over my head that said “Want to relate several disjointed, go-nowhere stories for hours on end? I’m your gal!”
You’d try to be nice, you really would, and listen and nod, and smile, because they were harmless, and lonely. And everyone’s brothers and sisters after all, right? And clearly these people had no support system, or if they did they’d exhausted them. So for the first five minutes I would be Mother Teresa with just a touch of St. Jude.
And then you’d realize this conversation is never going to go anywhere. It’s just going to loop back on itself over and over, and no it’s not like they could help it, or anything, but you couldn’t really help it either. And the annoyance started to build and build and BUILD, until you could clearly see yourself tossing this poor person in front of a moving bus so you didn’t have to hear ONE MORE WORD of this long and profitless monologue. Every damn day.
So anyway, I don’t watch Hoarders.
Jen, agreed, and to tie this back to another show: that’s what I liked about Monk, that they weren’t afraid to make him so irritating that there was a real possibility people watching would get fed up and change the channel (which I’m sure many did). That was why I preferred the Sharona character to the Natalie character, because Sharona was constantly annoyed at Monk and ready to kill him, though she cared about him. Because she was human. And he was incredibly annoying. Though he didn’t mean to be. I found that very realistic.
Hoarders: I can’t look away. I’m not a hoarder, but I do understand the impulse. It’s not about wanting to have shit all over your house, it’s about having a hard time making decisions (if you don’t throw it away, you haven’t made the decision — it’s a way of procrastinating) and about being afraid of letting go of things — not the thing itself, often, but the memories associated with it. I totally get all of that. I throw my junk out, and I feel a visceral satisfaction in doing that when I do it, but it’s hard to get myself to do it. If I have room to store it out of sight, I’ll do that. My place is pretty clutter-free, but I have a lot of closets, and there’s definitely stuff in there that I should get rid of but haven’t.
I get angry watching Hoarders too, and I can’t imagine saving a trillion old Pepsi bottles or my dog’s hair (though that dude had straight-up OCD) or a ton of old tax guides or what have you. But I can see how you get there, sort of. I also want to shake these people, and I also feel sorry for them, and I try to remember that their brains aren’t working right, they’re not just messy, lazy assholes. But it’s hard sometimes. And that constant challenge is why I’m so riveted, I guess.
I watched about two minutes of Flash Forward, because I thought the premise sounded interesting, but I just couldn’t stick with it because I had the same trouble suspending my disbelief. Namely, how did people who die before April 29, 2010 experience the flash? People with terminal diseases, or people who had suffered horrific injury immediately before the incident? Or people who were due for accidents between now and then — what did they see? Nothing?
@jen – you know, until now I hadn’t thought about the sonogram? The FBI agents being at the office (working and on the can) I could accept – I even liked the part where he was on the pot having a flash-forward of himself on the pot…but that could just be me, since junior high I’ve been convinced that if I’m ever in a nuclear blast (Cold War back then, terrorists now), I’ll be sitting on the porcelain throne when it happens.
I could even accept the bakery lady, but I live in NYC and I’m used to things being open very, very late.
But what doctor’s office is going to be giving routine sonograms at 10PM?
Some of the dialogue is also very, very off, particularly last week: why would an FBI agent visiting Germany go out of her way to start badgering a young agent of the German government (which is being fully cooperative) about the Nazi era? Especially when the actual Nazi here is in jail, where he belongs. I was glad to see the German character not just idly take it.
@ pomme de terre: one of the FBI agents saw nothing. He interpreted it as meaning he was going to die, and has now been told he was murdered between the “flash-forward” and April 29, 2010.
So apparently if you were dead you saw nothing.
Which raises the biggest problem I have with the show – the story is simply too big. What happened if you were asleep during the “flash-forward”, did you see your dream? What if you weren’t dreaming at the time? Did you see nothing? Well, then, how do you know if you were just asleep and not dreaming vs. being dead? This question would be a really big one for people in, say, the Eastern time zone of the US, where the visions would have covered approx 1 AM, when most people are asleep. The psychological impact of all this would be gigantic and would be affecting the world profoundly.
My former college-paper-colleague Troy Patterson’s take on “FF”‘s downward slide: http://www.slate.com/id/2232557?wpisrc=newsletter