Mad Love

The cast of AMC's Mad Men
I can come off as a snob sometimes, especially when it comes to art. I like to be challenged by my entertainment as much as I want to be entertained by it. Those people who have “Kill Your Television” bumper stickers are full of shit. Really. Hey, I’m all for getting people to watch less TV, especially kids. In fact, I don’t think children should be allowed to even see a movie picture until they’re at least five years old. Like the late great George Carlin used to say. Get a stick. Go out and play. You’ll learn a lot more than you would watching purple dinosaurs.

But that doesn’t mean I condemn all TV. I think the boob tube gets a bad rap and it’s not just by people who don’t work in the business. I cannot tell you how many of my colleagues claim they don’t watch TV. Yep, you heard me right – TV writers who do not watch TV. Or claim they don’t anyway. Can you say “self-hate”. Christ, could you be any more transparent?

Me, I'm one of those people that loves TV. And right now, I think it’s an entirely supportable argument that there’s better art on the small screen than the big one. Take a look if you doubt believe me. I mean if you’ve ever watched even one episode of a great TV show, you would appreciate the power of that amazing little box of wires and lights (to paraphrase Edward R. Murrow).

Purists might argue with me, but I say that (with the exception of comedies) we are currently in the Golden Age of television; that there’s more really great shows on then ever before.

I had feared that the end of The Wire, The Sopranos, Six Feet Under, Deadwood, The Shield and soon, Battlestar Galactica, would mean the end of an era, but there’s a lot happening on TV that makes me hopeful.

I hear David Simon’s new show is going to seriously rock – for starters, it’s set in New Orleans and will feature an awesome soundtrack. I have high hopes for Sons of Anarchy, too. It's a very cool-ass take on the outlaw biker world which just wrapped year one on FX. Tell you what I like about this show – even if you don’t know anything about outlaw biker clubs (and I don’t know much) you can tell the writers care about their subject. It just bristles with authenticity and yet it handles the whole world with a kind of fairness that sometimes gets lost when writers try to outsmart themselves. I came to it late but I like it and I’m looking forward to next season.

I don’t love Alan Ball’s True Blood (like I loved Six Feet) but it does have its moments and I like the acting a lot. Even though it’s getting canceled, I totally dig the look and idea of Pushing Daisies. I wish Barry Sonnenfield could bottle what he did on the pilot and make a movie like that. As much as I enjoy his work, the excellence of the pilot for this show (which he directed and produced) makes me think he could do a lot better on the big screen. I also think Shonda Rhimes is one of the most original voices working in Hollywood today. Grey's Anatomy has it's down moments, but when it works, it absolutely kills. (And I would kill to be in a writing room with her). I'm not as into it as I thought I'd be, but I acknowledge the greatness of Breaking Bad produced by Vince Gilligan another of our great current writers of TV.

But these days, I'll tell you what I'm really in love with, or more precisely who I’m in love with and his name is Don Draper.

Some shows are defined by a great cast, others by their unique take on a world, and still others by their writing or their finely drawn characters and some even work combinations of these attributes. There are shows I watched just for how good they look. A select few bring you into their world in such a way that you find yourself completely transformed. To me, right now, that show is Mad Men.

The show, for those of you who haven’t seen it yet, is set in the early 1960s, centered around a rising young advertising executive with a mysterious past, a darkly brooding man who is trying to figure out why having everything isn’t making him happy.

There's so much in each episode even though it seems like nothing is going on. I could be wrong but it feels like a creative choice. This show is all about the subtext, all in the nuances, which doesn't make it any more smart or doesn't mean you have to be "in on the joke," it's just its style of storytelling. And, frankly, the reason I think it's brilliant is because this was the reality of this time in America. It's not that we're all that different than we were then, but we didn't show our foibles as much. It was what we did then, we hid our skeletons in the closet. It was expected of us. It's not that it wasn't happening, it was just happening behind closed doors. And this show is set at a moment in our history when the doors were starting to open.

It was a moment of real, concrete change, where traditions of all kinds – religious, racial, sexual, social -- were about to be blown to pieces, literally and figuratively. Those last days of America’s so-called innocence, before Cuba and Vietnam, Birmingham and Kent State., Dallas and Memphis.

When I began watching it, I didn’t know much about Matthew Weiner, the producer (except that he'd been a writer and producer on The Sopranos), but I wondered if he was a fan of the works of John Cheever, the 20th Century American writer famous for his explorations of post-war suburban landscape. (My feeling was confirmed when I mentioned this to a friend, he showed me an interview Weiner did for Variety in which he mentions he was influenced by Cheever).

Don Draper, the show’s central character, played wonderfully by Jon Hamm (he's that hot guy in the picture to your left), lives in Ossining, New York where Cheever lived and where back in the early 1960s my parents were buying the house I grew up in.

Like Cheever’s stories, the themes of Mad Men are rooted in the main characters, who are, like most people, not what they seem. It's just like advertising, about which my Dad used to say, “the big print gives it to you, the small print takes it away.” The real world of Mad Men is simmering under the surface.

It’s the same thing that fascinated Cheever (and Updike, Rick Moody and others) who saw the modular sameness of suburban streets and their perfectly-trimmed lawns, white-washed fences and happy (mostly white) families, and couldn’t jibe it with the melancholy faces they saw on commuter train every morning. All this happiness and nobody’s happy.

Don feels like a guy in one of these stories. A man who seemingly has everything he’s ever wanted, realizing suddenly that it’s not filling up the hole in his gut. Part of it is the not knowing – he has a line in the middle of the second season about how he can't seem to feel anything - he's numb to everything. In the show, Don is doing what people like him do – he’s looking for answers, trying to find some kind of anchor to the world, something that makes him feel he’s not alone.

This theme runs through almost every character's storyline.

The cast is tone perfect, especially Hamm who seems to have walked right out of Breakfast at Tiffany's. John Slattery, who plays Don's boss and friend Roger Sterling, is particularly good. His dialogue rat-a-tat-tat-tat's off his tongue like machine gun fire.

The women are all fabulous -- ranking as some of the best female characters I've ever seen on television. They could have easily sunk into cliches of their time, but they almost never do. Betty Draper (January Jones) as Don's suffering, seemingly dumb-blonde wife who turns out to be much more complicated. And Peggy Olson (Elizabeth Moss) as the secretary who wants a seat at the table with the guys.

The sets are amazing and fun as hell. One thing that's hard to get used to is how much smoking they did then. Hard to imagine but it wasn't that long ago where you could smoke inside bars and on airplanes and in elevators. I mean there's a part of you that wants to put a "cigarrette smoking will kill you" as a running warning on the bottom of the screen.

It's not just the smoking. They drink a lot too -- everybody has a bottle of booze and two glasses in their office. (The old school journalist in me totally loves this part). And they drink and drive. It's as jarring as the oh-so-casual racism and sexism. It's all tightly bound up in a martini-cool soundtrack.

The show is more than the sum of its parts -- it says something interesting about its world and ours and the characters take us on a journey that's so far been rich and compelling. Some of it is uncomfortably heavy, but I like that the writers aren't trying to sugar coat an innocent time, like the world only got fucked up when we modern folk arrived. It's dark, yes, and brooding and there's been one or two off-course storylines, but the devil is truly in the details. This is one ride I'm thoroughly enjoying.

The Lights Go Out

Noir Healdsburg, June 2007
The response to last night's "The Sopranos" series finale has been pretty fierce. There's a raging argument on a writer's board where I belong that's drawing some pretty strong reactions.

The Los Angeles Times hated it, reporting that the show's fans felt "robbed". So did Hollywood inside blogger Nikki Finke, who said it was "terrible". But the New York Times and Salon.com dug it.

The verdict is that the majority of viewers hated it and felt cheated. Boohoo.

I loved it. I mean I loved it as soon as it happened and I still love it right now as I sit here and write about it. I thought it was perfect. And I've been telling my friends for weeks that I thought Chase would go out quietly, that he would not take the obvious route out.

This show has always been more about family in America than crime in America. It has been about the narrow line between doing good works and being selfish, about the battle between the workplace and the American Dream and raising a family in a world where people fly planes into buildings on lovely September mornings. So what if the family happens to be murderers for a living? It's the normalness of their life at home that captivated us. It's how easily we were able to relate to them and how similar they are to us, much more than we so smugly imagine.

And it was always going to come back to family. Nobody knows what the future holds for any of us. Why should Chase have to lay it out like paint-by-numbers? What's wrong with saying, "look, we’re just turning the cameras off on these people but nothing ends, nothing ever really ends." Life goes on. With you or without you. Birth, life, death – the world spins on.

If Chase owes us anything (and I'm not sure he does), it’s the purity of his vision and his art. And he delivered that at a consistently high level for seven years. I never felt this show had a major misstep. (The only stumbles I felt were when Nancy Marchand died because I think Chase wasn't finished with Livia).

It felt more like a novel to me than a series and I’ve always watched it as a whole body of work, rather than an episode or a series of episodes or even a season.

Any other sort of ending would seem cheap to me. There’s not going to be a ‘wrap up’ movie because that would make everything before it meaningless. I would go as far as to argue that if you were surprised by this ending, then you weren't paying attention to what Chase has been doing for the past seven years. He left clues in every corner, almost every week.

What are we left with then?

Somewhere out there, the Soprano family is doing its thing, for better or worse.

Life goes on.

How fucking perfect is that?

Game 2 - Do or Die

Looking Up
I didn't say it was going to be easy.

To call tonight's NBA Finals Game 2 a must win for LeBron and the Cavs is stating the obvious but I think it's interesting how few observers seem to be giving them a chance. San Antonio's dominant performance in Game 1 is a big reason for this but I'm still not backing off of my prediction of a Cavs series win.

I think LeBron will not be as easily shut down as he was in Game 1, if only because every time a team has slowed or stopped him, he's found a way to make them pay the next time. If anything was apparent after the Cavs stormed back to beat Detroit in the Eastern Conference Finals, it was how quick a study of the game LeBron is. I expect nothing less from him on the biggest basketball stage there is. This is going to be LeBron's domain for foreseeable future. He has already shown his understanding of these moments and how important they are for his legacy. And he’s never said he wants that legacy to be about anything but winning.

The Spurs played great in Game 1. They almost played a perfect game. But still, if you take out the can’t-miss third quarter where the Spurs opened up a 15-point lead, the Cavs were pretty much in the game. The Spurs lead at the half was five points. If the Cavs stay within a basket or two of that, their fourth-quarter 13-4 run might have helped them steal the game.

I saw signs of LeBron figuring out the defense in the fourth quarter. He was getting better looks and the coaches were getting him into better position to make shots. I also think the Cavs were surprised at the intensity of the physical play under the basket. You would think after playing Detroit, it wouldn’t get any tougher but there’s a degree increase when you get to the Finals. Refs seem to let the teams play more and they allow more contact. If you’re gonna score, you’re gonna have to earn it.

This almost always is a shock to players playing in their first Finals. It takes two or three quarters to get a feel for it and I think that and the hyped up feeling that’s natural for first-timers, might have put the Cavs at a real disadvantage.

It’s a big hill to climb but I like the Cavs chances of stealing Game 2.

Ciao Familia

I’m a t.v. writer and while I don’t say much about it here, I can’t let tonight’s “The Sopranos” final go by without a personal goodbye.

I don’t know if it’s the best show ever on t.v., but it sure was unique. Creator David Chase and his staff created not merely a series, but a weaving, sometimes meandering turnpike through the soul of America, pitting our trumped up pseudo morality against our insatiable appetite for violence.

You can trace this back to the first season when Tony, on a college trip to Maine with his daughter Meadow, discovers a former colleague turned informant. When he sneaks off during one of Meadow’s interviews to garrote the rat to death with his bare hands, you are without even realizing it, rooting for him to succeed. When the guy’s eyes bulge out and he breathes his last breath, dropping to the ground in a heap, it is a satisfying moment for Tony – and us. It’s these sorts of feats of magic that make this show so compelling and kept me turning in faithfully.

I think Chase will choose to fade out rather than go out with a bang, because his series has always been so novelistic, and as outlandish some of his characters, his anchors have always been real life. Or it could be a bloodbath. But I will miss "The Sopranos," if only because it’s one more smartly written show leaving the airwaves, but what I’ll mourn is the failure of American television (especially the networks) to learn the right lessons from this show's success. That is that characters count and stories need room to grow, that chopping up one-hour dramas into more parts rather than less is killing storytelling. That we need bad characters as much as good ones, that wrong vs. right doesn’t necessarily have easy answers and that the audience is smarter than we think.

The hole in my heart might yet be filled by David Milch’s newest series, “John From Cincinnati,” which follows Tony’s last hurrah tonight on HBO. I have high hopes for this series and the coming season of “The Wire,” and trust HBO will keep the good stuff coming.

But allow me a moment to grieve for what feels like the end of an era.

Thanks David Chase et al and the fabulous cast and ciao Tony and Chris and Sil and Paulie Walnuts and Janice and Hesh, Meadow and A.J., Bobby and Big Pussy and Uncle Junior, and Dr. Melfi of course and Tony's ducks and Carmella. Especially Carmella.

Un amico non è conosciuto finchè è perso. (A friend is not known til he is lost. - Italian Proverb).