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Pop culture dispatches from the Great Lakes

Television

Costuming Mad Men from Beginning to End

May 19, 2015 by Becky Bean Leave a Comment

mm_end_frame-0-1280-0-1024

As Mad Men comes to an end, there are thousands of articles being written about “The End of an Era.” I’ve always been drawn to the costuming work that Janie Bryant has done on the series, because it goes above and beyond anything that other television shows are doing. I could write for days on each and every costume created for the show, but I’d like to focus on the journey that each of our main characters made from the first episode to the last one. While the characters grow and change, we can still see bits and pieces of who they once were ten years ago. [Read more…]

Posted in: Mad Men, Television Tagged: Costumes, Mad Men, Television

The End of an Era: Reflections on the Mad Men Finale

May 19, 2015 by Alex Bean 3 Comments
A fitting end.

A fitting end.

Alex:

Mad Men is over. This is still a difficult idea to process. When Becky and I did our binging re-watch a few months ago I kept trying to remember where and when I was as each big episode queued up on Netflix. I originally watched the premiere on a friend’s couch, because that’s where 20-year-old Bean lived in the summer between his Sophomore and Junior years of college. I caught up on seasons two and three in my apartment in Hyde Park in between sessions of frenzied Master’s Thesis writing. Season 4 was in a crappy starter apartment. Season 5 was in a high rise I always sort of felt like a tourist in. I moved in the middle of both the 6th season and the first half of the 7th. On Sunday night, I watched the series finale from the living room of the grand condo that Becky and I bought six months ago. [Read more…]

Posted in: Mad Men, Television Tagged: Mad Men, Television

Netflix is My Girlfriend

March 18, 2015 by Jason Fabeck Leave a Comment
Hey there, lover

Hey there, lover

[Read more…]

Posted in: the Internet Tagged: advice, film, job, Netflix, sexbox, Television, writing

Why You Need to Binge-Watch House of Cards This Week

February 23, 2015 by Gina Watters Leave a Comment

house-of-cards-5-970x0Courtesy: Nathaniel E. Bell/Netflix

House of Cards, the Netflix original series is back with season three this Friday, which means that if you haven’t seen them yet, you have just enough time to binge-watch seasons one and two. And here are five (spoiler-free) reasons why you should.

[Read more…]

Posted in: Drama, Television Tagged: Binge-watching, House of Cards, journalism, Kate Mara, Kevin Spacey, Netflix, new media, politics, Robin Wright, Television

Our Month in Popular Culture: November 2014

November 3, 2014 by Travis J. Cook Leave a Comment

We here at The Addison Recorder read stuff. We also watch stuff. And play stuff, even. Sometimes, that stuff is interesting. Sometimes we just need to talk about whatever pop culture ephemera occupies our time. Which brings us to this column. Moonwalk on.

[Read more…]

Posted in: Round-Ups Tagged: Agents of SHIELD, Amy Poehler, Bad Feminist, bears, Delta Green, FIFA 13, Gilmore Girls, H.P. Lovecraft, Horse Feathers, John Oliver, Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries, Roxane Gay, RPGs, Television, The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, Twitter, video games

Pam Poovey, Hero

February 13, 2014 by Christina Brandon Leave a Comment

Everyone, meet Pam Poovey of Archer:

Gif of Pam Poovey

She’s the bold, brash, randy human resources director at the spy agency ISIS (or was until it got shut down on account of treason against the US government). She rivals the show’s namesake (and “world’s greatest secret agent”) with her ferocious libido and her unapologeticly gross humor befitting a ten year-old boy.

 

Ever one for an adventure, she makes me think of this quote from Jane Eyre:
It is in vain to say human beings ought to be satisfied with tranquility: they must have action; and they will make it if they cannot find it.

Pam does and says things I often keep to myself, and that’s part of why I love her; she’s me, only way more ballsy. Without further ado, here is Pam Poovey, Hero: [Read more…]

Posted in: Television Tagged: Archer, FX, Pam Poovey, pop culture, Television, TV

Recorded Conversations: the (cultural) object of our affections

June 29, 2012 by Alex Bean Leave a Comment

Welcome to “Recorded Conversations,” an occasional feature where all the Addison Recorder editors contribute their thoughts about a question, idea, or prompt. Everyone will chime in, and then we see where the conversation wanders. The question for this first Conversation was posed by Alex Bean:

Question: What cultural object (movie, music, show, book, play, whatever) do you find yourself coming back to again and again over the years?

—

This is a pretty wide-open question, but I like that for our inaugural run of this feature. It means that there’s lots of room for all of us to play around and explore what makes us tick. Personally, I thought I knew what direction I was going to go with this question, but as I sit here my mind is changing. Initially, I had thought to make my answer something like John Ford’s seminal The Searchers. If I had to pick a favorite movie that would be it for a whole variety of reasons.

But, the question posed is not about favorites per se, but about what we can’t seem to get enough of. The object that I return to time and again is not The Searchers, or Deadwood, or any of my myriad other favorites. No, I always find myself inexorably drawn to sit down and enjoy that grand staple of American television: the sitcom.

I’m not sure exactly when my love for the sitcom started. I can remember watching a lot of NBC’s mid-90’s greats like Seinfeld and Newsradio when I was younger. Tim Allen’s old series Home Improvement was definitely appointment viewing in our household. That’s unsurprising considering that my dad loved doing his grunty-hoot thing like it was going out of style (which it was). In high school I had the TV schedule memorized so that I could jump between comedy reruns, eliding around the heavy-handed nighttime soaps or dry procedurals. By college, my obsession was in full bloom. I can recall skipping student organization meetings in order to stay in my dorm and watch The Office.  When you’re a freshman who knows no one else on campus the funny people on TV can be a more welcome sight than the myriad strangers all around.

These days, much of my down time is filled by one sitcom or another. Be it a new episode of Happy Endings on Wednesdays, or queuing up an episode of Better Off Ted for the umpteenth time on Netflix while I play a video game, TV comedies are a constant presence in my life.

When you combine those two activities, you get Skyrim’s top-rated sitcom, “Shouting at Draugr”

There is an eternal tension in sitcoms that makes them endlessly consumable for me. Their most obvious function is to deliver jokes, which must rely on an element of surprise in content or delivery. But underlying even the most anarchic joke machine shows (such as Seth McFarlane’s many, many cartoons) is a finely-tuned narrative structure. The series has an established setting and cast of characters, which each episode disrupts in some fashion. These disruptions, such as Liz’s perpetual romantic troubles on 30 Rock,  are the motor behind the jokes. However, each episode must resolve its disruption within that same episode or else risk alienating the audience.

So, no matter how many times I watch The Venture Brothers, there is always that tension between the comic disruption caused by the Guild of Calamitous Intent’s half-brained attacks on the Ventures and the knowledge that the problem will be resolved within twenty minutes. It’s engaging without taking up my whole brain; hilarious without being challenging at the end of a long day.

Go Team Venture!

So, that’s me, what about all of you?

Read the responses from the other editors: Andrew, Travis, and -J.

Posted in: Recorded Conversations, Television Tagged: 30 Rock, Sitcoms, Television, Venture Brothers

Losing Their Funny Bones: Structural Failures in Sitcoms and the Decline of How I Met Your Mother and The Office

June 2, 2012 by Alex Bean Leave a Comment

John Krasinski in one of The Office's lower moments

 

This will hardly come as a surprise to anyone paying attention, but the American edition of The Office on NBC and How I Met Your Mother on CBS are closer to their last episode than their first. What might surprise some is just how badly these two mainstays of American TV comedy of the past decade are showing their age. In the past two months both shows lumbered across the finish line, wrapping up their most recent seasons, eighth for The Office and seventh for How I Met You Mother to little acclaim. In fact, much of the conversation about both have centered around questions as to why the series are even bothering to continue producing new episodes. Debates about the quality of the shows’ current output or their future endeavors aside, the twinned declines of The Office and How I Met Your Mother provide insight into the way American television creates and sustains comedies and why so many fall apart under their own weight.

The Office and How I Met Your Mother debuted only a few months apart in 2005, and quickly the kind of critically acclaimed but lightly viewed comedies that had popped up and been snuffed out, off and on, since I Love Lucy blazed the trail for TV comedy in the 1950s. The Office’s mockumentary style and cringe-inducing humor were lifted wholesale from its British predecessor, and when combined with a cast of reliable comedic talent led by Steve Carrell, lent the show much of its appeal. How I Met Your Mother was more traditional in its style and humor, it is a 3-camera sitcom shot primarily on 2 sets, much like Seinfeld, Cheers, and most every mega-popular sitcom since the aforementioned Lucy. Where it differed was in its narrative structure, centered on a framing device of a middle-aged dad in the 2030s telling his kids about how he met their mother, the show specialized in plots that featured heavy doses of asides and callbacks. Most every episode involved some kind of storytelling derring-do, having as much fun in the telling of its story as it did in the actual contents of the story.

Both shows then, had notable differences from the generation of mega-popular sitcoms that were being retired as they came on the air. Friends, Frasier, and Everybody Loves Raymond, shows that had won both massive audiences and critical acclaim, all left the air in 2004 or 2005, and left no clear successor in their wake. Shows like Arrested Development had won wide acclaim but not broken through with audiences, and both The Office and HIMYM more or less followed in that show’s footprints. They carved out a niche on their respective networks, produced consistently high-quality episodes for about 4 seasons, but never broke through as true water cooler hits. They were something more than cult hits and something less than comedy blockbusters, and in an era when TV in general was bleeding viewers every week that was good enough.

Even at the peaks of their popularity and acclaim though, both shows suffered from some notable flaws. The Office’s mockumentary format meant that the Dunder Mifflin workers that TV audiences got to know so well were aware of their role as TV characters, since the premise of the show was that a documentary was being filmed about this particular office. This meant that the rhythms and agonies of everyday office life could be filmed realistically, and lent much to the blooming romance between Jim and Pam that defined so much of the first few seasons. However, it also meant that when the characters acted stupidly or unbelievably it tested credulity in ways that characters in a more typical sitcom would not. When Dwight climbed on the roof of a house during a corporate party to test the sturdiness of the chimney’s masonry or Michael camped in the woods to prove his managerial mettle it elicited as much eye-rolling as chuckling. No fools could truly act so foolishly in real life without sever repercussions, and since we were meant to believe that this was a real office such antics often acted as a drag on the show. This also lead to the writers taking liberties with the characters, changing their motivations and actions from week to week so as to meet the needs of being simultaneously ‘real’ and characters on a sitcom (i.e. the weekly guessing game of how smart Carrell’s Michael Scott or Ellie Kemper’s Erin Hannon were from week to week).

How I Met Your Mother’s unique narrative format also acted as an occasional wrench in much the same way. While individual episodes thrived on the narrative play, such as the sublime Pineapple Incident episode, increasingly the over-arcing narrative became a weight around the show’s neck. The initial seasons were thrilling in their ability to weave a great romance through the protagonist Ted’s everyday life with his friends. Hints of his future happiness would be dropped, and the audience has great fun guessing whether or not this girlfriend or that ex would become the much-awaited mother. As the series entered its 5th and 6th seasons though, and the search for his future wife dragged on with much repetition and only hints towards some kind of resolution, any sense of overall narrative momentum was lost.

For both The Office and How I Met Your Mother these troubling tendencies came to a head in the 2011-2012 television season. On The Office the departure of Steve Carrell from his leading role left the series utterly rudderless. Carrell’s performance had held together many episodes through sheer force of will, and the writers failed to prepare themselves for what was in essence a series reboot by writing all of the supporting characters into corners that did not allow them to step into the spotlight. The central couple of Jim and Pam were ensconced in family-building, having flirted with greater responsibilities or opportunities but failed to pursue them. Other characters, like Dwight or Andy had been under-served in the past, turned into weak caricatures of recognizable types that could not rise into the spotlight. This meant that the show spent most of the past season searching in vain for some vein of comedy to mine, taking turns with romance, corporate satire, and other plot shakeups but none took hold. The show’s core conceit had been stretched too thin, the characters had run out of stories, and the show spent each week wallowing around. It attempted to redo formerly winning plot-lines, perhaps most notably a retread of season five’s Michael Scott Paper Company. In the final few weeks it seemed to depart from recognizable office politics entirely, creating utterly unrealistic narrative twists like Catherine Tate’s odd Nellie usurping Ed Helm’s Andy simply by moving into his office.

On How I Met Your Mother the necessities of the over-arcing narrative meant that that show also fell back on old plot-lines. Cobie Smulder’s Robin briefly revived her romantic feelings towards both Neil Patrick Harris’s Barney and Josh Radnor’s Ted. Marshall and Lily (Jason Segel and Alyson Hannigan), the show’s resident married couple, spent the season vacillating on where to live suburbs vs. city) and how to start a family (baby now?), but without any real sense of play. For the most part, the show simply spun its wheels, introducing one-off characters and somewhat lazily wasting time while waiting for the Mother’s eventual reveal (presumed to be in the series’ final episode, which may be years in the future). A few episodes stood out, most notably the wrenching Symphony of Illumination, when Robin dealt with the news that she was infertile and would never have children by addressing narration to her imagined, never-to-be, children. But for much of the season viewers were treated to seeing Barney deal with becoming less a sociopath for the fourth straight season and Ted drifting ever deeper into outright douchbaggery, neither of which felt fresh or winning.

The problems in both shows latest seasons are, in essence, representations of the structural supports of nearly every American TV comedy. TV sitcoms are built on a very solid narrative structure. In essence, the show’s basic premise (documentary filmed in small office or dad tells his kids how he met their mom) must be maintained episode to episode. This means that the overall narrative can only move at a glacial pace, so as to make sure that the balance of the basic premise is not too upset. If Ted meets the mother while grabbing coffee one morning or the denizens of the office go about their jobs without comedic hi-jinks the entire endeavor could become dangerously unfamiliar to the audience. Since TV networks want their shows to appeal to as many viewers as possible, this means that no one in the audience who is even vaguely familiar with the series should ever be lost as to what is going on in a particular episode.  This works well enough for 50-75 episodes, but eventually the bloom comes off the rose and what once was fresh suddenly seems endlessly dull. Because of this, neither The Office nor How I Met Your Mother have been able to grow or change organically. Stuck in this strange stasis of a long-running sitcom world, they have responded by disappointing many of those who once loved them. Such a fate is hard to endure for a fan of any once-great show, but until every TV executive decides that the way to make money is to emulate the narrative chutzpah of outre series like Mad Men or Louie (about which more will be said in later essays from yours truly) it will befall many more series in the future.

 

Posted in: Television Tagged: How I Met Your Mother, Sitcoms, Television, The Office

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