Doctor Who: Your Next Favorite Show

Trying to explain to my non-nerdy friends why Doctor Who is probably the greatest show on television is a challenge because its premise is so overtly sci-fi—the last of the Time Lords travels through time and space with a female companion (and sometimes her boyfriend), having adventures, saving the world, and exploring what it means to be human.  I find myself saying, using the same language as Friday Night Lights fans, “But it’s not about time travel! It’s about the triumph of the human spirit!”

It’s hard, I know, to get past the show’s overabundance of esoteric wibbledy-wobbledy time-wimey...stuff. The Doctor can reincarnate as different actors, for example, and the series currently airing is a reboot of a show from the 1960s, so the three doctors of this iteration are technically the 9th Doctor (Chris Ecclestein), the 10th Doctor (David Tenant) and the 11th Doctor (Matt Smith).  The companions also come and go, too which can be sort of confusing: there's Rose (the sweetheart) and her boyfriend, Mickey (the bro); Martha (the not-Rose); Donna (the misfit); and Amelia (the other sweetheart) and her husband, Rory (the dope).  But that’s all you need to know!  That’s it!  Everything else gets explained in the show, and if it doesn’t, it doesn’t matter!  Because as I’ve explained before, it’s not about the technicalities and pseudo-science.  It’s about humanity! WATCH IT.

If you still aren’t ready to make the commitment, I’ve put together a list of some of the most important episodes.  I’m not going to say that you should only watch these episodes because obviously you should watch ALL OF THE EPISODES but these will give you a pretty good idea of the best and worst of Doctor Who.

First Episode Where It Gets Really Good: Season 2: Episode 4:“The Girl in The Fireplace”

Okay, so the first season is pretty universally agreed to be not great. The 9th Doctor lacks the intensity and charm of the 10th doctor and the boyish enthusiasm of the 11th, and the first season never really gets away from cheese and camp. This episode marks the beginning of the show’s maturation. Rose is at her best—confident, witty, and independent—and David Tennant’s 10th Doctor begins to show his emotional volatility and his disregard for the consequences his lifestyle has on the lives of those he touches. After a first season of run-ins with campy aliens more flatulent than frightening (literally, there are farting aliens), the clockwork villains in this episode are both imaginative and creepy. And as a final mark of the show’s step away from frivolous camp, this is the first episode to explore the consequences of the Doctor’s time travelling; if time is inconsequential to him, how do his actions affect those for whom time is inescapable?

The Worst Episode: Season 2—Episode 10: “Love & Monsters”

This episode aired after one of the most intense, brilliantly written episodes of the whole series, and it’s just THE WORST.  It starts off following this adorably British guy named Elton who gets involved with this group of people who are trying to find the Doctor, but mostly end up being friends and starting an Electronic Light Orchestra cover band.  So then this alien enters the scene and BLAH BLAH BLAH it’s awful, but in the end, Elton’s girlfriend becomes a sentient slab of concrete with just a face.  They make a joke about their sex life.  It’s uncomfortable.  The whole episode is campy and episodic and a throwback to the not-terribly intelligent episodes that started the series.  There may be worse episodes in the first season, but it’s the disappointment after coming down from such an amazingly complex episode that makes this one such a stinker.

The Best Episode:  Season 3—Episode 10: “Blink”

It’s hard to describe how terrifying this episode is because, in true Whovian fashion, the description of it sounds really stupid.  The episode stars Carrie Mulligan (Carrie Mulligan, you guys!) as a video shop clerk who keeps uncovering strange messages from a mysterious man warning her that she’s in danger.  She works to uncover the mystery ploddingly, but eventually discovers that she’s being pursued by an ancient race of aliens called the “Weeping Angels” which appear as statues but advance toward you as soon as you stop looking at them.  I KNOW IT SOUNDS STUPID BUT IT’S TERRIFYING!! The episode demonstrates a central conceit of Doctor Who—the mundane and unavoidable suddenly become a source of great danger—and the episode plays out like the best and most suspenseful Hitchcock.  If you only watch one episode of Doctor Who, make it this one; you won’t be able to stop.

Saddest Episode: Season 4—Episode 13: “Journey’s End”

Remember how in Battlestar Galactica, they FINALLY get to Earth and they’re all happy and celebrating and then at the end they’re all standing on the desolate, radioactive beaches, and staring mournfully into the cloudy sky?  Take the feeling you felt watching that and multiply it by a million and you’ll know what it is to watch “Journey’s End.”  This is the last episode for the Doctor’s most misfit companion, Donna, played by the brilliant comedienne, Catherine Tate.  Donna is sarcastic, biting, outspoken, and loud, but painfully insecure.  Despite being exactly what the emotionally complex 10th Doctor needs, Donna is never convinced that she is clever enough to be his companion.  At the end of her run in the show, Donna is not only given the opportunity to become infinitely intelligent, but she also gets to see herself the way the Doctor sees her: as a wonderful, capable human being, worthy of love and respect.  AND THEN IT ALL GETS RIPPED AWAY IN A TERRIBLE MOMENT OF TRAGIC IRONY.  You’ll need, like, eight boxes of tissues.

Scariest Villians: The Silence: End of Season 5/Beginning of Season 6

Picture this: You’re just living your life, making dinner, chopping up some onions at your kitchen counter, maybe listening to some Pandora and singing quietly.  You turn around to grab something out of the fridge and BAM! there’s a 7-foot-tall vaguely human creature wearing a suit and standing in your kitchen.  This creature looks at you, instructs you to kill yourself, then tells you to turn around.  The second you take your eyes off of it, you immediately forget its existence while it still lurks behind you, but subconsciously pour rat poison in your soup.  (That was a terrible example, sorry.)  Could you imagine what a menacing threat such a species could pose?  It could be standing behind you constantly, at work, at school, in your bedroom, in your car, and you would never know.  They could exist in the White House, in the offices of business leaders, in the homes of our friends and families, dictating the course of human affairs for—what? years? decades? centuries? The storyline involving the Silence is masterfully written and composed, and it’s some of the creepiest, scariest television you’ll ever watch.

True Blood: Or, What Happens When Your Guilty Pleasure Gets Boring

Good news, friends! True Blood Season 4 came out on Blu Ray/DVD!  So I made my roommate buy it so that I could FINALLY watch it because, really, who can afford HBO? (Most of my friends can, apparently, given their obsession with Game of Thrones.) (Who am I kidding? They’re all Millennials mooching their parents’ HBO Go accounts.) (Which, by the way, you can’t get without actually ordering actual, which seems like a terrible business plan.)  So of course I paid absolutely nothing for it, but was it worth the $35 I forced my roomie to spend? Um, well, probably not.

Apparently Sookie is a fairy now, which is a thing that kind of gets forgotten mid-season.

In a departure from the slow unfolding of mysteries and weirdness that defined the first and second seasons of the show, this year’s storyline was pretty straight forward. This season follows the story of a medium who gets possessed by a Spanish necromancer who got tortured by some Catholic vamps in the 15th century.  The medium’s name is Marnie (adorable) and the Spaniard’s name is Antonia Gavilán de Legroño (whoa).  Anyway, since necromancers can control the dead, this vamp-hating witch is super scary to the vampires of Louisiana, given that they’re dead and she can control them and make them go out in the sun. So they have to figure out a way to bring her down.  Other stuff happens, too, like Eric losing his memory, Tara being a lesbian for a minute, and Alcide being scarily buff, but most of the episodes revolved around Marnie/Antonia being kooky and Sookie waffling between her two beaux.  BORING.  And if there’s anything that you don’t want your sexy dirty guilty pleasure to be, it’s boring.

Marnie/Antonia. Also played Aunt Petunia. No lie.

The first seasons of True Blood drew their awesomeness from their incredibly insular and isolated storylines.  Bon Temps was delightfully dystopic, a backwater town somewhere in Louisiana, lawless, plagued by vampires, where strange deaths and freaky stuff occurred without major consequence. Life revolved around Merlotte’s, Gran’s house, Sam’s trailer, Lafayette’s pleasure palace.  The outside world existed, sure, in Fangtasia or with the vampire that Lafayette scores V from, but the focus is inward, on Sookie and Bill, on Tara, on Sam, with each of their dark secrets unveiling slowly.  All of their drama was important because their drama was all there was, and nothing else existed.  Because of this disconnectedness, all this sex, violence, and supernatural freakiness made sense; it was backwards Louisiana, with bogs and swamps and crocs and vamps.  None of the characters’ actions—from killing to making new vampires to driving drunk—had any long-term consequences because the outside world just simply did not exist.

Seriously 90% of why I watch the show

But by incorporating more characters and casting a wider net into the world of vampires and the supernatural, the show loses a lot of its charm.  By focusing so much on the American Vampire League and the beleaguered quest for vampire acceptance, suddenly the community’s setting and the smallness of their world becomes a hindrance.  Why does the AVL have such a vested interest in Louisiana as opposed to, say, California or New York?  And if Louisiana is so important, how can four vampires get away with walking down a city street with grenade launchers and attempting to blow up a Wicca store? (The answer is a repelling spell, I guess.  But still.) The show obviously has to grow, but by expanding the smallness of Bon Temps too much, the very heart of the show—it’s dark, claustrophobic dinginess, so disconnected from the real world that it feels believable and entirely whole—has gotten lost.  The world got too big, and while I think the writers are trying to reverse that by killing A MILLION CHARACTERS all at once (even Tara??) (BYE Y’ALL!) (But seriously, I’m going to miss Tommy’s butt.), I don’t know that we’ll ever be able to return to the foggy, sweaty, isolated paradise that is Bon Temps.  At least I can rest assured that I didn’t waste any money on it.

But Christopher Meloni is going to be in the next season, so I’ll probably still watch it. (SVU FTW!!)

Star Trek: Notes From an Enterprise Apologist

Disclaimer: This post is all about Star Trek.  You've been warned.

Trekkers almost universally dislike Enterprise, the prequel series that aired in the early 2000s after Deep Space 9 and Voyager  went off the air.  It was the Star Trek series that officially killed the franchise (although one could also argue that the abysmal movies that came out around the same time may have had something to do with it).  I recently watched the entire series and was totally surprised by how much I still liked it.

Enterprise was airing when 24 was one of the most popular and critically acclaimed shows on television.  Jack Bauer created and then came to define the American obsession with the anti-hero, giving rise to Dr. House, Christian Bale’s Batman, every character on The Shield, Walt from Breaking Bad, Robert Downey, Jr.’s Sherlock Holmes, Dexter. In a television culture obsessed with über-smart badasses who intentionally break all the rules to get things done, where was there space for Jonathan Archer and the dewy-eyed optimism that defines Star Trek?  The truth is, there wasn’t.  Attempts to make the crew of Enterprise more badass (They don’t follow the Prime Directive! They stole that warp coil from that helpless ship! They’re helping overthrow the Vulcan High Command!) made the Trekkers cry out with disgust that the show had departed from Star Trek’s original ideals (they cry that out a lot, just FYI), and attempts to adhere to the idealism of the franchise’s premise just made anti-hero-obsessed viewers retch uncomfortably.  The show was doomed to fail.

You can tell it's edgier because Archer is dirty and sweaty most of the time.

But here’s the thing, friends: Enterprise is good. And this is coming from a self-professed Trekker (No, I don’t attend conventions, and no, I don’t read the books.  But I’ve seen every episode of every series except DS9 and am very versed in the canon).  The premise, for those of you who have lives in the real world, is that this is the first warp 5 Star Fleet ship, the first that is fast and efficient enough to be able to actively explore the galaxy, and pre-dating the Original Series by about 50 years.  The series’ first two seasons are pretty standard Star Trek fare: exploring strange new worlds, seeking out new life and new civilizations, boldly going where no person has gone before.  Space is a bit lawless without the Federation to back them up, so Enterprise gets into a bit more scrapes than its later incarnations, but they’re still making peace and doing the right thing.

Facing declining ratings in the first two seasons, Enterprise changed its name (now Star Trek: Enterprise), theme song, and episodic story-telling in its third year to create a season-long arc wherein Enterprise is forced to navigate The Expanse (aka the Bermuda Triangle of space) in search of a many-specied alien race hell bent on destroying Earth.  The overlying storyline—that Earth and these Xindis are manipulated pawns in an even larger temporal war—was HUGELY unpopular amongst Trekkers and normals, but it afforded this franchise a little much-needed badassery.  In the end, of course, its Archer’s idealism and dewy-eyed belief in diplomacy that ends up saving the day, but along the way, he’s faced with impossible dilemmas that Picard, Kirk, and Janeway never had to deal with and  he makes decisions very different than the ones those self-righteous captains would make.  The season speaks to current events in a classic Star Trek way, but sometimes throws in an unexpected bad decision that makes humanity seem more…human.

This is the most evil of the Xindi types.  He's downright coldblooded.

But, you guys, the fourth season is incredible!  Rather than trying to create a season-long story line to draw in viewers from shows like 24, newly-appointed executive producer Manny Coto started writing shorter multi-episode arcs that were more closely tied to the traditional Star Trek canon, that dismantled some of the tropes of the franchise (Earth’s post-Xindi xenophobia, for example, is a marked departure from the franchise’s utopian visions of civilization), while laying the groundwork for the future series and addressing, in typical Star Trek fashion, topical ideas.  The episodes where Archer and T’Pol basically overthrow the Romulan-influenced and corrupt High Command by unearthing the true teachings of Surak, the father of Vulcan logic was AMAZING, full of twists and turns and deus ex machina, tearing apart the infallibility of the Vulcans while still legitimizing the people that they would eventually become.  The three-parter with Brent Spiner that delved into Earth’s Eugenics Wars, when our quest to create genetically-enhanced super soldiers started a worldwide war that killed over 30 million people was equally great.  Or what about the two-part “Through the Mirror, Darkly” which opened and closed, unexpectedly, entirely in the evil Mirror Universe (including a reshot title sequence celebrating Earth’s military triumphs) which not only tied into the Mirror Universe episode in The Original Series, but ended on an epically campy (and thus epically Star-Trek) ending?

See the hair?  That's evil Mirror Universe hair.

The fourth season found exactly what the first two seasons were looking for: a way to demonstrate humanity’s failings while at the same time showing its desire to improve itself and legitimizing the utopian civilization that came later.  Star Trek: Enterprise performed the amazing feat of justifying the weirdness and campiness of The Original Series while still being interesting and cutting-edge.

I apologize that this post has been one big nerd fest, but if you understand only one thing, I hope it’s this: Star Trek: Enterprise is the most underrated of the franchise’s incarnations and I think we all need to give it a second chance.

Voyager is still the best, though.

Guilty Pleasures and Guilty Feelings: GCB (by Sam)

I think the phrase “guilty pleasure” gets tossed around a lot, so much so that now it means “I pretend to ironically like such and such a show because it makes me feel better about the fact that I actually like it.” But I honestly feel guilty that I enjoy watching GCB, that I laugh out loud at Kristen Chenoweth, that I view each of the show’s plot points as a logical progression from the previous one, that I turn off my capacity for critical thinking and just enjoy. I mean, take my other guilty pleasures: True Blood, Teen Wolf, Skins. I can tell you why I love each (Sookie is so sassy and Eric is so gross and hot! It’s puberty and sexual realization in a werewolf metaphor! They make bad decisions but they really care about each other!) and I can tell you why each is trashy and trite. But when asked what I think about GCB, I can list a litany of things that I hate about it—it’s misogynistic, it’s formulaic, it’s one-dimensional—with only a few things I like—it’s funny and the men are hot. And yet, I keep watching! WHY?? Is this what it’s like to enjoy television without ruining everything by deconstructing it? What a terrifying world we live in! No, but really. I’ve spent as many weeks as the show has been on thinking about what I’m going to write about this show. I have a Word document full of half started paragraphs about how anti-woman the show is, about how Texas is apparently filled with painfully fit men that all have the same tan color-tone with varying levels of hairiness, and about how the show challenges the hypocrisy in Christianity without challenging Christianity itself. I even tried to compare it to Mad Men, friends. It went something like this:

 “Man Men is also condemned as being horribly sexist, that it romanticizes a horribly oppressive time for women and minorities. But Mad Men is inspired in its representation of women because it never at any point implies that any of the female characters could break out of the horribly constricting constructions that society places them in if they’d just try harder. Even in the forth season, when Peggy is talking to the hippie guy about African-Americans and she says, ‘Maybe if they worked as hard as I did, they’d be where I am’ (I’m paraphrasing), it emphasizes not how far Peggy has come from her hard work, but how far she hasn’t. Despite the fact that her brains and gumption have gotten her this position in the firm, she is still asked to get the men their drinks, she is still judged by the size of her breasts and the shape of her legs, she is still referred to with the pointedly sexist language of “frigid bitch.” By portraying complex, strong, intelligent female characters painfully constrained by unconscionable gender roles, being infantilized and exploited, it doesn’t glorify the system that put them in those roles; rather, it forces the viewer to ask, ‘What kind of sick world do we live in if even women that incredible are seen as weak, stupid, or somehow unworthy of respect?’ If we transfer that lens to a show like GCB, can’t we see these misogynistic creations as symptomatic of a world that created the Real Housewives and…ummm…pity them?” 

See how that didn’t quite work out? The fact of the matter is that every time I sit down to write something thoughtful or even just funny about GCB the insipid subject matter leaves me with nothing. I can talk about how Kristen Chenoweth is hilarious as always, or how I think Annie Potts plays a fantastic matriarch (though now I’m thinking about Reba and liking it more). But then I’m just ignoring the terrible misogyny running rampant throughout the show. But the worst part is, I ignore that very thing every time I tune in. It’s soulless, mindless entertainment without the redemptive catch-all of irony. So I’m not going to encourage you to watch it. Just know that, if you don’t, I won’t judge.

 If this is what having a real guilty pleasure is like, I gotta say, it’s pretty rough.

Smash: Come on, Eileen

Good news, you guys! Smash is getting a second season given its lackluster but steady ratings, which is a shock to all of us that thought the show would implode from the weight of all its excess storytelling. This most recent episode was entitled “The Coup”, which could not be a more fitting title given that the lead writer and creator of the show has been ousted, citing the fact that she was attempting to drown the viewers in melodrama. Since this development last week, the show has already lobbed off two unnecessary storylines—writer Julia’s affair with actor Michael and her son’s legal troubles—which, thank God. Now can we work on weeding out Derek and Ivy’s relationship and find a real love story? Nevertheless, there was still an excess of unnecessary story line in this episode (Why was Eileen’s daughter there suddenly? Why did Ryan Tedder from One Republic need to guest star for that three-line cameo?), but strangely it was not the most frustrating part of the episode.

Bernie wasn't in this episode, but doesn't she look great last week? 

The workshop ended with mixed reviews, so the coup in this episode is that director Derek and producer Eileen decide to ask that awesome band, One Republic, to write an abysmally pop-tacular (it was pretty terrible, right?) song for Marilyn behind writers Tom and Julia’s backs, using understudy Karen to perform it/pitch it to the rest of the crew. Obviously, it failed, given that, you know, it was totally unprofessional. Tom and Julia were pissed, Ivy was scandalized, and Karen realized that she’d unwittingly made the biggest mistake of her career and now had three new enemies. It finally takes Eileen’s daughter and personal assistant Ellis (ELLIS?!) to diffuse the situation. The whole story was ridiculous (no way would anyone believe original pop songs like that could ever carry an entire musical), but the most frustrating part was Eileen’s role in the whole debacle.

That's One Republic in the background, in case you couldn't tell. 

Listen, I understand that this is Eileen’s first post-divorce solo run at producing a musical, but on what planet would decades of work in show business leave her this inept? I’ve never been involved in the production of a musical (unless you count my high school’s production of Les Mis, which, let me tell you, was a tour de force), but even I could guess that undermining your writing team by creating some piece of crap song and then asking them to create other piece of crap songs in the same vein is probably going to be problematic. I get why Derek did it, and I understand that overly-trusting Karen was misled. But why did it take Eileen’s 20-something daughter to give her professional advice before she realized the whole situation was not only insensitive, but just bad business? She’s been in this business for years! Also, apparently Ellis has switched teams (he said, outright, to his “girlfriend”, “I want to try producing”), and Eileen has latched on to his ill-advised espionage and his forcing himself into the production process and rewarded this behavior by stealing him from Tom (in Julia’s pitch-perfect words, “I’d say good riddance, but we’re still stuck with him”). I’m glad that Ellis is staying on the show because Julia’s animosity towards him is probably my favorite dynamic in the show, but Ellis’ brown-nosing and interference is painfully obvious, and the fact that Eileen encourages it undermines her professionalism. Get it together, Eileen. Your ineptitude and doe-eyed love of “slumming it” in bars that serve $7 martinis (do those exist in New York? They don’t in Minneapolis) make you unlikeable, but not in the fun I-love-to-hate-you way, but more in the get-off-the-screen kind of way. Her character needs a new direction as much as the show does.

Maybe she's just distracted by that vest. 

The show is obviously undergoing some major changes and you can see that the writers are trying to cut off all the excess and hone in on the things that are working: the professional rivalry between Ivy and Karen as well as each woman as a character; Tom and Julia’s working relationship and Julia’s family (without all the adoption, legal issues, and adultery); Ellis’ millennial feelings of entitlement and his overall evilness. But can what’s happened be undone? Will Smash turn into a really quality television show and, like with Parks and Rec or Star Trek: TNG, we’ll just forget the first season ever happened? Who knows? But if not, at least we know we’ve got a second season of it.

Smash: It's All About Relationships

Okay, so remember two weeks ago when I said that the most interesting part of the show is the fact that the two potential stars, Karen and Ivy, are actually very nice but that the ambiguity about who deserves the part would be dispelled because Ivy is obviously going to end up sleeping with the director, Derek, and get the part not based on her merits? Well, I TOLD YOU SO. Except not quite in the way I expected. Ivy is strangely invested in making her relationship with Derek work in a non-sexual way, which is weird to me because dude’s a big toolbox, but it adds this strange naiveté to her character that is both annoying and endearing. Meanwhile, writer Tom is absolutely indignant when he finds out Ivy is sleeping with Derek (because, yes, when it comes to relationships with men in power, it’s always good to jump to the conclusion that the woman is a power-hungry witch willing to sleep her way to the top) until he finds out that Julia had an affair with Michael, the guy they cast to play Joe DiMaggio (it happened in sepia tones on the Brooklyn Bridge, apparently), and then decides it’s all okay. I expected that Tom would be upset and I was surprised by his eventual complacency with it but I was disappointed that the whole story played out in the course of a single episode. These conflicts are unexpectedly interesting and draw out personality traits that I wouldn’t expect from these characters; unfortunately, thus far, the stories have all been resolved way too quickly.

The promotional shots for this show are AWESOME.

Meanwhile, cut to Tom’s personal assistant, Ellis, who is apparently not gay (REALLY!?) and is evil. Or not evil, but just well-meaning and misguided? I can’t tell. It’s hard for me to believe that someone who wears that many sweater vests and smiles so dopily could be so sinister, but I’m sure, like a siren, he is luring me in to kill me. In a way, Ellis is like the entitled hipster Millennial, shaking up the establishment, demanding things he doesn’t deserve, and causing way more drama than he’s worth by claiming that Marilyn was his original idea. I think the writers were trying to portray Julia in a bad light when she gives points out that mentioning that you like Marilyn Monroe in passing doesn’t mean you came up for the idea for a musical, but everything she says makes sense in the face of Ellis’ bizarre idea that he’s integral to or deserves to be part of the creative process. I like that Julia hates him and makes no effort to hide it, getting increasingly exasperated by his weirdness. It’s like he’s a psychopath who has easily won everyone over except the one person who’s creeped out by his weird lack of empathy and then becomes the psychopath’s Cassandra-like victim, trying to show everyone he’s totally nuts while he slowly turns her friends against her (see: The O.C. when Oliver tries to steal Marissa by turning everyone against Ryan and Luke, or that one episode of House when the psychopath tries to get 13’s medical license revoked). It’s one of the only totally professional relationships in a show that’s largely about how show business affects personal relationships.

Look at those eyes. EVIL.

The first three episodes, in fact, have been entirely about trust and relationships, rife with past infidelities, overt displays of caring (mostly in monetary form), and power dynamics. The relationships are varied and interesting and open to a lot of complication, but, thus far, it’s like the writers have just been reading these people’s connections and past experiences off of a character map instead of letting these things come out organically. Did we need to know Julia had an affair with Michael in the same episode that his character (complete with wife and child) is introduced? No. Did Ivy and Derek need to sleep together in the second episode? Probably not. Did we need to establish in the first 10 minutes of the first episode that producer Eileen is in the midst of a divorce and doesn’t have the money or clout to get this show created? Not at all. These first three episodes have laid out a smorgasbord of conflicts with trite little back stories instead letting these enticingly complex storylines play out on their own. So if we’re talking about relationships, I think Smash needs to learn to trust its viewers enough to slow down its rabid storytelling and let these characters and their relationships speak for themselves.

SMASH: How the Pilot Smashed My Dreams for a Quality Television Show

I really dislike pilots. I can only think of three that are honestly good (The O.C., Friday Night Lights, and Glee, and I’d add LOST to this list if the show weren’t so dumb), the rest of which sit in a range from passable to abysmal. (Remember the pilot for Pushing Daisies? I’m surprised the show got made.) Pilots tend to be overwritten and annoyingly expositive, like 43-minute indie films written by recent college graduates who have to include one out-of-place scene because it’s sort of autobiographical and profound and has been festering in their post-adolescent minds for years (see: Gilmore Girls and Lorelei’s stupid conversation with the bursar’s office for Rory’s school). Even when I think pilots are well-crafted, it usually requires the distance of an entire season of character development before I can forgive two-dimension characters shoved into contrived situations.

I’m saying this as an explanation for my lukewarm response to NBC’s new smash, SMASH, which aired on Monday to much buzz. Like the sucker that I am, I was drawn in by the impressive list of stars. Emmy-award winning actress, Debra Messing? Academy-award winning actress, Angelica Huston?! KATHERINE MCPHEE?!

I'm such a McPhan, you guys.

The idea of a process show about creating and producing a Broadway musical, complete with songs and dance numbers, solidified my desire to tune in. I imagined a process-type show about creating a musical, about watching this production unfold from its conception to its last performance. I imagined that characters would exist in separate worlds until they were introduced to the project slowly, allowing for character growth, intrigue, and drama. Unfortunately, this episode, like most pilots, disappointed.

The script was absolutely rabid in its storytelling. The amount of plot they crammed into a one episode could have filled an entire half a season. In the course of this single episode, the writers conceived their musical, wrote three songs, found a producer, auditioned a director, and whittled their audition pool down to two possible stars. It was established that writer Julia (Debra Messing) is adopting a kid and having marital woes, that producer Eileen (Angelica Huston) is getting a high-profile and expensive divorce, that writer Tom (Christian Borle) and director Derek (Jack Davenport) hate each other for reasons unknown, and that Karen (Katherine McPhee) is a girl-next-door Iowan transplant with the cutest boyfriend ever. The characters are all placed in easily-recognizable tropes (I’m eager to see if the homosexual character will have as advanced a non-professional storyline as have been established for the heterosexual characters, because, right now, he’s got nothing except being annoyingly nice, which is our new expectation for gay characters), which will hopefully be deconstructed as the show progresses. Nevertheless, despite its efforts to be exactly what you expected of it, SMASH actually dealt an interesting hand with the two women vying for the lead role in the musical. While watching the promotions for the show, you may have thought that his was a homely-girl-next-door-underdog-battles-experienced-but-less-talented-vixen situation, but in actuality, both women are incredibly nice, and pretty equally talented, and trying to achieve their dreams despite unsupportive parents. There’s this air of ambiguity about who is going to get the part and, more importantly, who deserves the part, which could turn into really quality character drama. Are they going to destroy that ambiguity by having Ivy, the blonde, sleep with the director? Probably. Judging from the next-on teasers, I’m guessing this ambiguity is an oversight the show’s writers will be addressing. Which one will get it? Probably not the one who sleeps with the director...

So while what I had hoped for was an engaging plotline with characters unfolding slowly over the course of many episodes, what I got was an intense hour of slapdash, very punctuated story-telling establishing easily-identifiable character types with very little non-clichéd conflict. But such is the fate of pilots. Perhaps the show will slow down now. Perhaps less emphasis will be placed on spectacle and more on the logistics of writing, producing, and performing in a Broadway show. Or perhaps I’ll stop watching after 3 episodes and put my Monday nights to better use, namely, watching old episodes of Parks and Recreation and Mad Men or playing Zelda. But if there’s one thing I’ve learned from my years of TV-watching, it's to never judge a show by its pilot.

Deck the Halls!: Sam's Guide to Christmas Cheer

Christmas time is here! The halls are bedecked, the stockings hung by the chimney with care, the glittery tinsel providing and choking/lead-poisoning hazards to curious kitties everywhere. But maybe you’re not quite feeling the Christmas Spirit. Maybe the lines at the malls are just pissing you off. Maybe you’re feeling downright Grinch-y. Well, as a person whose entire raison d’être is Christmas, I thought it might be helpful to offer a guide to easing oneself into the joy of Christmas. With me as your swami, your Scrooge-y exterior will wash away, and soon you’ll be watching Miracle on 34th Street while cross-stitching stockings for the neighborhood poor.

My advice, first and foremost, is to avoid ABC Family’s "25 Days of Christmas". As tempting as watching an adorable, young, round-faced Daniel Radcliffe might be, do not succumb. Mostly because, even though there’s a Christmas scene in it, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone is not a Christmas movie. If we held every movie to that standard, then Mean Girls, Sleepless in Seattle, and You've Got Mail would all be considered Christmas movies. And let me tell you, you’re not going to be feeling too jolly when Harry is melting Quirrell’s face off with his bare hands. Plus, airing Harry Potter is just a ruse to get you to watch their absolutely abysmal original programming. Christmas in Handcuffs? Christmas Cupid? They’re like softcore porn for the whole family. Melissa Joan Hart’s career is dead, you guys. Let’s stop trying to resurrect it.

If you’re going to watch original programming, go for Lifetime. What they lack in quality they make up for in sincerity, and there’s nothing like watching Kristen Chenoweth fall in love while snowflakes that never melt fall gracefully on her golden curls to get you in the Christmas spirit. If you’re not a fan of Lifetime Original Movies (which is probably why we’re not friends) and still want to watch something Christmas-y without diving into Christmas glee of Elf, try watching Christmas episodes of your favorite TV show. The Chrismukkah episodes of The O.C. seasons 1 and 2 never fail to get me in the Christmas spirit (I weep every time Kirsten emerges from the closet crying, finally accepting her father’s illegitimate love child as her half-sister and the girlfriend of her adopted son), and, while quite heavy, the Christmas episodes of The West Wing will certainly give you fuzzy yuletide feelings. Just get your box set, pop in what’s usually the second disc, and let the holiday cheer wash over you.

It’s also necessary to ease yourself into Christmas when it comes to music. While just turning on your local Christmas radio station may be temptingly easy, switching over without proper preparation is the height of folly. My friends, there is some terrible Christmas music out there, and radio stations don’t generally make a distinction between the joyful and the awful, playing whatever they want with no regard to the fledgling Christmas-y feelings they are destroying with "Christmas Shoes" and "Grandma Got Run Over By a Reindeer" (the feature-length cartoon version of that song is frequently aired on the "25 Days of Christmas", just so everyone gets how awful that promotion is). I guarantee you that if you turn one of those Christmas stations on, within four songs you’ll switch back to NPR. So again, it’s important to ease yourself into the Christmas spirit, much like the proverbial frog in the pot of boiling water. Start with a Christmas album by a band you normally enjoy. She & Him just released a Christmas album, Pink Martini has a fun omni-holiday collection, and Sufjan Stevens has a whole freaking anthology. If that’s still too much to handle, make a playlist of some high-quality, non-Christmas music and throw a few of your favorite Christmas songs in. That way, “Call Your Girlfriend” will be followed by U2 singing “Baby Please Come Home”, thus lighting the tiniest flame of Christmas spirit in your cold, busy, unfeeling heart.

And once that spark is there, it’s easy to grow it into a blazing bonfire of yuletide joy! If you can successfully avoid the annoying things about Christmas ("25 Days of Christmas", television ads featuring Christmas, malls) and immerse yourself in the wonderful aspects of the holidays, every day can become jollier and jollier! Everyone has their own path to eventual oneness with the Christmas Spirit, and it’s important that you follow your own personal way. Perhaps you watch those old Claymation Christmas films and wallow in nostalgia for Christmases past. Perhaps you listen to a million different versions of “Merry Xmas (War is Over)” on Pandora while making your millionth Christmas list. Or perhaps, like me, you watch sappy Christmas movies like Love Actually and It’s a Wonderful Life, and, yes, Elf and weep with unadulterated Christmas Joy. Do whatever works best for you.

But if all else fails, just listen to Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas Is You.” There’s so enough Christmas Cheer in that song to make even the grinchiest of hearts melt with love.

In Time: Not Worth Your Time

I feel like I should start this post off with some sort of pun about time in which I remind you that time is literally money in the film, In Time. Like, “I promise I won’t waste your time.” I say this because the first third of the movie made sure that its audience understood that time is literally money. It’s a pretty radical and confusing concept, so let me spell it out for you: People age until they’re 25 and then they get one extra year. The people have a limited amount of time to live, so they exchange it for various goods. What’s more, they are paid for their labor with more time. So when a person says, “I don’t have time for that,” in this society, they are referring both to the literal idea of time as a force that moves consistently forward and the currency that they use. Time is money. Money is time.

But seriously, if you run out of time, you die. You “clock out”. Say you miss the bus on the way to pick up some time from your son. If you don’t run, you could run out of time. And then you’d die. This happened to Justin Timberlake’s mom. She was running, she ran out of time, she made an awkward noise, and she died in his arms. So time is actually time, an ever-ticking clock counting down to your death. If you keep getting time, you keep living. If you run out of time, you die.

Thus, while time is money, it is also just time. DID I BLOW YOUR MIND?

I know this might be a bit much to understand, but luckily for you, the writers of this movie not only painstakingly explain the time-is-currency concept, but continue to beat you over the head with it until you get it. Or until it’s not just Justin Timberlake’s failure as a dramatic actor that makes you want to leave the theatre.

On a somewhat related note, Justin Timberlake is a totally unconvincing crier. This is the first time he really gets into the weeping and the wailing that I’ve seen, and I get the feeling that he’s never done it before, as if he emerged the womb as douche-y and self-important as he is now. Timberlake does well in roles that are basic variations of his bro-tacular self (The Social Network, Friends with Benefits, Alpha Dog), but when it comes to being dramatic, it’s totally un-engaging. Even when he tries to act dramatically in limited way, like trying to make us believe that his character fears “clocking out” (as opposed to how Timberlake would react to imminent death, which would be to simply smirk and say, “I’m too cool to die”) , his shiny patina of douche elicits nothing from his audience but boredom.

But Timberlake isn’t the only downfall of this movie. I suppose that the whole time is money thing is supposed to be some sort of profound metaphor for the realness of poverty and the rigidness of our modern conception of time, but honestly, the way that this movie bastardizes an actually interesting idea is completely distracting. Riddled by poor acting, poor writing, and an awful production quality, the film spends so much time trifling with the superficiality of this future society that it totally gives up on producing any sort of coherent or valuable plot.

(Speaking of which, apparently in the future, we’ll be really into remaking vintage Dodge Challengers and then covering them entirely in matte. Who has time for side mirrors, man? Hydraulic touch doors, though? That’s a necessity.)

While I’m guessing this movie wanted to leave me with questions about Robin-Hood-esque nobility and other complications characteristic of cerebral action movies (What does this mean for society? Is this our natural course as capitalist consumers?), I instead spent a lot of time asking questions about how a movie with such a great idea and seemingly large budget could be created without some sort of continuity editor. Surely someone should have pointed out that they keep changing the way they exchange time between people. Or suggested that, since this movie is so annoyingly obsessed with time, maybe time should pass as quickly in the film as it does in real life (so much time ticking towards death is spent kissing in slow motion). Or perhaps pointed out that the script never quite explained how Timberlake and Amanda Seyfried got their hands on that random armored truck. (Seriously. It just randomly appeared. Either that or I fell asleep.) I wish I could say that this film took on too much, that it neglected the continuity and plot details because the over-arching themes were just so important, but I can’t. I feel like the producers just decided that Justin Timberlake’s face was enough of a draw and decided to get drunk. And honestly, that’s probably a better use of your time as well.

The West Wing: All Grown Up

Watching The West Wing almost a decade after the show’s airings is an exercise in nostalgia and surprise. Because the show aired during a very formative period of my intellectual and political life (the time where idealism and self-importance is high enough to make one think one could change the world, but not high enough to make one think Atlas Shrugged is the most misunderstood piece of genius ever conceived), I think I’m abnormally aware of the paradigm shift that’s occurred since the show aired and how it has tainted much of the idealistic self-righteousness that drives every episode. Viewing the show now through the lens of a post-Bush II, mid-endless-war, mid-Arab-Spring consciousness tarnishes the idealism of the show, not because it seems self-defeating or dewy-eyed, but because it no longer seems idealistic.

Let me preface my subsequent scathing criticism by saying this: There are still incredible moments in The West Wing. The episode where Donna, Josh, and Toby get left behind in Indiana and finally, at the end of the day, Donna says, “I have such an impulse to knock your heads together…Eight modes of transportation, the kindness of six strangers, random conversations with twelve more, and nobody brought up Bartlet versus Ritchie but you.” Or in the first season when they decided to let Bartlet be Bartlet and they all dorkily stand and say, “I serve at the pleasure of the President,” but each with mildly different wordings. Or that episode where Leo has to testify before Congress and be questioned about his alcoholism, but Bartlet agrees to take the Censure to protect him. The show is funny, fast-paced, intelligent, and it has its intense moments of idealism.

But the central tenant of the Bartlet Doctrine (and something which I and my friends ate up with a spoon) is a morally ambiguous imperialism masquerading as a morally infallible humanitarianism. The West Wing isn’t 24 by any means, but the same cultural milieu of Islamophobia that produced and made wildly popular a show about the pursuit, capture, and torture of soulless “terrorists” also shaded what could be regarded as the antithesis of 24. After “Isaac and Ishmael”, the alternate universe episode in which the staff members and a group of students attempt to grapple with the complexities of domestic security and the understanding that Islamic extremists (read: not normal Muslims) perpetrate attacks on America, the show quickly begins to classify the leaders of the Islamic world as women-beaters and malevolent fundamentalists, spewing diatribes about “Death to America”. The show fixates on antagonistic Islamic countries while juxtaposing the unerring righteousness of America: the “Ayatollah” condemns his son’s medical saviors as heathen kidnappers while Bartlet convinces the reluctant doctor to fulfill his Hippocratic Oath and perform life-saving surgery on the boy; the US may be selling arms to Qatar, the evil nation that beats its women, but the US government has CJ and Nancy to, you know, make a scene and cry or whatever. What’s more, not only do the governments of Arab countries harbor terrorists, but countries like Qatar welcome them into their political ranks! The conniving, plotting Qatari minister is an incredibly convenient bit of story line that effectively vilifies Arab governments and portrays them as beyond diplomacy, beyond rationality. (I will admit, though, in light of the whole Iran-maybe-tried-to-assassinate-the-Saudi-ambassador thing, my point here might be moot.) Meanwhile, positive relations with Arab countries are barely mentioned; only when they exercise antagonism or political opportunism are they the focus of the Bartlet White House. It’s an incredibly narrow-minded approach to the Islamic faith and the complexities of foreign relations and leaves Arab allies out in the dark.

But this moralistic imperialism doesn’t only extend to Arab countries; rather, the Bartlet White House feels dangerously self-righteousness about Africans as well. And while the argument could be made that humanitarian intervention not only ignores the role that colonial exploitation played in the creation of atrocious poverty, but also perpetuates it, the liberal idealistic impulses it stirred in my 12-year-old self were hard to shake. The United States stepped in on behalf of the victims of an authoritarian government committing genocide! But a decade later, things look different. The invasion of Equatorial Kundu can be seen as an allegory to Rwanda or Sudan and the genocides that many feel the United States could have and should have militarily quelled, but the invasion, the ease with which US forces dominate the country, and the jerk-ish way Bartlet gloats to the Kundunese ambassadors that he’s taken their airport, all easily draw parallels to the ill-fated and morally-questionable invasion of Iraq. Watching the show again now, what seemed like Idealism, the triumphant intervention on behalf of the downtrodden, is suddenly no longer noble and just, but imperialist, ignorant, xenophobic. The cultural milieu of the show seems so out of date and uninformed that it frankly makes me uncomfortable.

The West Wing is still captivating as a wonderfully written and engaging piece of television, still incredibly entertaining, heartwarming, and charming. But watching it now at times makes me feel jaded, pitying the hapless middle-schooler so enamored of this fictitious and seemingly flawless White House. And it makes me wonder: What will we feel about the award-winning television shows of today? Will we find our idealization of the 1960s distasteful? Will Glee be considered paradoxically homophobic? Will we scoff at the moral relativism of shows that glamourize the drug trade, like Weeds or Breaking Bad? What about our cultural climate makes our favorite television shows so entertaining?

Food for thought, I guess. In the meantime, I’m going to keep watching.

Glee: My Final Plea for Less Sue

The premise behind the character of Sue Sylvester is this: She’s the cut-throat coach of the cheerleading squad, which, like most cheerleading squads in movies or television shows, has won nationals a bajillion times. She is ruthless and evil because she is the best, because, like the great Zeus or the manipulative Hera, she will smite any threat to her dominance. Her sabotage for the Glee Club comes not from personal vendetta or hatred for any particular person or group, but from a Machiavellian desire to maintain her dictatorial position (and her excessive funding). The most vulnerable she gets is when she admits that her wish to be Madonna was thwarted by a perm gone awry, or when her sister dies (and even then she shows no weakness, just stoic anger). This is the Sue Sylvester that was funny, the one who could justifiably say things like, “You think this is tough? Try being waterboarded!”

But somewhere along the way, Sue lost traction. She’s lost her place on top, and now the (admittedly well-worded) insults and sabotage of New Directions just smack of desperation. Sue Sylvester is no longer totally sure she’s a god amongst men; instead, she’s a petty, vindictive crazy person irrationally attempting to bring the Glee Club down. And it’s not particularly funny. When Sue was the top-dog, raining down insults upon the misfit Glee Club and demanding ever-increasing recklessness from her minions the Cheerios, it was hilarious; she was the crazy dictator, sharp-tongued and maniacal, undermining the confidence of self-conscious teens just for the fun of it. Now, though, the tone has changed. Sue is no longer single-mindedly out to promote herself and Cheerios; instead, her only reason for living is to destroy the Glee Club. But that desire to bring them down is now the motivation unto itself, which is just annoyingly pathetic. The things she says aren’t funny anymore—they’re sad and uncomfortable—and yet the writers spent an entire episode—the season premiere, no less!—shoving joke after painfully pathetic joke down our throats. To make things worse, because the Glee Club is doing so well (they went to Nationals, they’re a happy family, they’re singing fun songs!), not only does Sue just seem like an annoyingly misguided bully, picking on people cooler than her to make herself feel better, but it also taints the happiness and fun of the Glee Club. When Schue launches a counter-offensive against her, it’s no longer the heroic overthrow of an evil dictator; rather, he’s just taking this woman whose life apparently has no other purpose than to demean and destroy something that doesn’t actually affect her and ripping her apart, when, really, he should just be finding her a freaking hobby or something. This isn’t Mad Men or Breaking Bad or something, guys; it’s a show about singing high schoolers. So when the bad guy isn’t easily hate-able and the heroes seem vindictive and childish, it makes for bad television.

Watching singing teens struggle with high school is fun. Watching adults act like children isn’t. And I swear to God if Blaine hadn’t been the essence of cuteness in that bow tie and those high-water red pants singing “It’s Not Unusual”, I probably would have given up right then and there.

But the second episode this season demonstrated that when the show sticks to the actual teenagers, quality television is created. Quinn’s sudden change into a reincarnation of Angela Chase from My So-Called Life has been super controversial (people seem to either love it or hate it), but at least it’s interesting. I love that the return of her unwanted child has turned Quinn into Gollum, vacillating between a sweet-talking people pleaser eager to get her life back on track and a hoarse-voiced shell of her former self, hell-bent on getting back her precious—I mean baby.

I’m also digging that Kurt and Blaine are finally hitting some relationship snags (when Kurt told Blaine to transfer to McKinley, because he wanted “to be with [him] every waking moment” I almost turned the television off). When the directors of West Side Story asked Blaine to read for Tony, even though he promised Kurt he’d only audition for Bernardo, I just knew things were going to get real. Kurt’s audition piece was wonderful, full of acrobatics and an incredible singing voice, the fact is that, like Artie said, he’s “too…delicate.” (Also, he sings alto, not tenor, which apparently escaped everyone’s notice.) It’s obvious that the amazingly-charming, less-falsetto-reliant Blaine is going to get the part, and it’s going to cause some serious DRAMZ. You could just see the total devastation in poor Kurt’s porcelain face.

And see, it’s reasons like that why I’m actually excited to tune in next week. I want to know what happens with Kurt and Britney’s competing campaigns for class president, I want to see the drama between Blaine and Kurt, I want to see if Rachel can get into that “exclusive performing arts school in New York”, and I want to see more baby drama with Gollum—I mean Quinn. And if the show sticks with the kids and leaves the adults alone, I think this season could be pretty promising. Leave Sue in for the bit parts, make Schue grow up, and let the kids act out their own drama.

Things I Learned from Captain America

I didn’t really expect to like Captain America: The First Avenger. As you can see, it wasn’t even in my July faves. I love superhero movies, sure, but I wanted to think of myself as someone who would be more into X Men: First Class, absorbing the subtleties of questions about assimilation and the plight of the societal Other, viewing Charles Xavier and Erik Lensherr as the mutant Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. DuBois. But when confronted with the blatant pro-America propaganda that was Captain America: The First Avenger, I was completely sold. The film contained explosions and violence and revenge and badassery (which I generally enjoy, but with a critical, ironic eye), but Captain America was just such a nice guy that I was completely fine with him killing whomever he wanted. So when I emerged from the theatre, no longer the intellectual pacifist I thought I was, I decided to do a little reflecting about the movie and why I was so easily won over. So here are 5 things I learned from Captain America: The First Avenger:

1. In the equation “Captain America versus Tank”, Captain America always wins. You think that giant tank with the cannon that disintegrates people instantaneously is going to prove a match for one man with no armor but a dorky-looking shield? Well, you’re wrong. Captain America is going to win. Always. Like, it’s not even hard for him. He just casually tosses his shield and the thing blows up. Or he just punches it. This is the power of American might. Although I wonder how he’d do against a Transformer.

2. There is such a thing as muscular perfection, and Chris Evans has achieved it. There’s a very fine line between being nicely built and being deformed-looking. Jake Gyllenhaal is one side of that line; Arnold Schwarzeneggar is on the other. Chris Evans sits directly on that line. Homeboy was looking good in Fantastic Four, but when he emerged from that futuristic pod all shiny and plastic-y, he looked like the very essence of a G.I. Joe action figure (the modern ones, not the flat-chested, pudgy ones from the ‘40s). If Captain America is supposed to embody the might and spirit of America, there aren’t many specimens of more virile maleness than Chris Evans.

3. Stanley Tucci can’t not be funny. Even when he’s supposed to play this tragic German, ousted from his homeland by the Third Reich, whose serum was stolen and abused by a man he trusted, Tucci still makes hilarious little comments in his condescending but endearing Stanley-Tucci way. Same thing goes for Tommy Lee Jones, actually, who plays the Colonel Captain America serves under. Their ability to play themselves playing roles gives certain types of movies, like superhero action movies, a much-needed level of irreverence. I feel like these two actors were instrumental in drawing me into the movie, lulling me into a false sense of security before hitting me with that American ideal that the little skinny guy with compassion in his soul can rise to greatness and save the world.

4. Heteronormativity is incredibly satisfying. I cheered when Peggy Carter finally kissed Captain America as he sped off to his final act of heroism. I seriously did. And when Colonel Phillips made that sort of homophobic joke about also kissing Captain America, I laughed out loud. This is uncharacteristic for me, the gay feminist who enjoys making snide comments at the end of movies like, “Oh, of course, it wouldn’t be a satisfying end if there weren’t a heteronormative romance to reinforce straight male hegemony!” But at that point, an hour and a half into the movie, I was already so wrapped up in the jingoism and the explosions and Chris Evans’ sparkling blue eyes that when I finally got my monogamous male-female relationship, I ate it right up. I may have even jumped out of my seat and clapped a little. And it felt good.

5. America is awesome. Which doesn’t mean that the rest of the world isn’t awesome. Awesomeness isn’t a zero-sum situation. There are some smart, fatherly Germans out there, and the French can be kind of fun. Oh, and British girls are hot. And sure, bureaucrats and politicians are kind of sucky, and military men can be misguided, but our desire to do good and destroy evil makes us the most kickass nation ever conceived. If we weren’t the awesomest, then Steven Roger would have turned all red and gaunt like the evil German Johann Schmidt when he was injected with that serum. But he didn’t. He was just a skinny little guy from Brooklyn with a lot of courage, a love of country, and a desire to rid the world of maniacal madmen out for destruction and he became a hugely-muscled, finely-chiseled dreamboat with an equally big heart. And I can infer from this movie that we, like Captain America, deserve our super power, because we, like Captain America, got our greatness through compassion, humility, and an interest in helping others…Right?

So having learned these things, I can offer you readers only one piece of sage advice: SEE THIS MOVIE. It’s everything a superhero movie should be—enough so, in fact, to win over the most pretentious, hardened movie goer I know: me.

Smarmy Sam: A Plea to Lady Gaga

I’m post-Gaga.

There, I’ve said it. And this is a pretty big moment given that “Telephone” was my favorite song for about 6 months (“She’s so right! It is to hard to text someone with a drink in your hand-eh!”), right after “Paparazzi” was my favorite song for 6 months. But let’s face it: most of Lady Gaga’s new album, Born This Way, is downright boring. And, as a disappointed fan, Sam is pretty smarmy about it.

I was talking to a friend recently about Lady Gaga’s most recent musical endeavors, and said friend pointed out, “Nothing will ever compare to the way I felt when I watched the music video for ‘Bad Romance’. No matter how weird Lady Gaga gets, she will never be as unexpected as she was during that music video.” And she’s totally right. In the beginning with Lady Gaga, one never knew what to expect: Remember the bizarre tele-drama that was “Paparazzi”? Remember the novelty of the phrase “disco stick”? Remember how people thought she was so weird that she had to be hermaphroditic? Remember how “Bad Romance” was basically an Alexander-McQueen-induced psychotic break? And remember how she broke it all down and turned “Poker Face” into a dramatic piano ballad? She never turned off the Gaga and became Stephanie Whatever-her-name-is (even, to her critics’ derision, at her own sister’s graduation); she was always a pastiche of modern music culture, an amalgamation of high fashion, base sexploitation, and lyrical nothingness disguised by a brilliant dance beat. What was great about Lady Gaga was that you could just claim the haters didn’t understand her, couldn’t grasp that she was criticizing post-modern consumerism by become its most perfect product, offering absolutely no substance behind a shiny spectacle.

And as much as Gaga likes to avoid adding substance to form, the only way that works is if her songs are painfully catchy and weird. And the issue with this whole new album is that only a minority of the songs are catchy and absolutely none are weird, because her attempts at strangeness completely miss the mark. “Highway Unicorn (Road to Love)”, for example, is about—you guessed it!—a unicorn that leads a woman on the road to love. And Smarmy Sam just wants to sit The Gaga down and say, “Yes, I know, Gaga, that you think the only thing better than a unicorn is a gay unicorn, but here’s the thing: Ke$ha already released a music video with unicorns, and it featured James Van der Beek, who’s, like, the gayest unicorn. The also shot rainbow ray guns at each other. So let’s call that one a loss and find something else, shall we?”

I’m not even going to talk about the fact that she ate David Letterman’s cue card. Gross.

But Smarmy Sam will be honest with you here: at first, I was really disappointed with the boringness of the album more so than the cheap irony of it. “Edge of Glory” is just so un-Gaga, you know? It’s about a one-night stand, yes, and it makes some peculiar metaphors, sure, but the chorus is weirdly uplifting and decidedly accessible. Same thing goes with “Born This Way” (the song). Suddenly there is meaning behind her music? She now sings on behalf of something she believed in? But when the songs that were intentionally bizarre (“Judas”, the aforementioned “Highway Unicorn (Road to Love)”) felt like vapid echoes of her former strangeness, I realized that Lady Gaga had become unable to out-weird herself. Now that her audience expects the unexpected, is constantly waiting for her next bizarre outfit, meaningless song, melodramatic music video, then her weirdness just becomes normal and downright passé. So it isn’t the mainstream, more accessible songs that make this album boring; it’s the ones that try, unsuccessfully, to capture the strangeness and unexpectedness that defined Fame Monster. “Edge of Glory” is a fun pop song, worthy of a place on a summer playlist. “Highway Unicorn (Road to Love)” was over before it even started.

So I guess what I’m saying is this: In a world where everyone (Ke$ha, Katy Perry, Nicki Minaj, Britney, even J Lo) is trying to become more like Gaga, I think it’s time for the Lady herself to join me in being post-Gaga. Let’s dispense with some of the weirdness, and let the music speak for itself. The more mainstream singles are the ones that seem fresh, and trying to reach a new level of absurdity has fallen short. Lady Gaga made her name on the bizarre, but she is in no way dependent on it; she’s a talented entertainer with a real knack for the catchy. She could be the next Madonna, but, if she gets real now, maybe without the awkward sex phase.

So join Smarmy Sam in being Post-Gaga, Lady Gaga. Being so strange all the time has got to be exhausting. And it’d be cool if you didn’t burn out after two albums.