Summer doesn’t just mean blockbuster movies; it also brings about the official end of the TV season. Even though the era of “peak TV” means that the traditional TV-season model is crumbling, we still thought the summer would be a good time to circle back and examine some shows and trends from the past nine months. We talk about shows we love and shows we think get too much love! Where do Last Week Tonight, Girls, The Last Man on Earth, Better Call Saul, Brooklyn Nine-Nine, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, The People vs. OJ Simpson, Catastrophe, and, yes, Love fall on that spectrum? Listen to Marisa, Sara, Nathaniel, and Jesse talking TV to find out!
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Jesse is a cofounder of SportsAlcohol.com even though he doesn't care for sports or alcohol. His favorite movie is Ron Howard's The Paper. I think. This is what happens when you don't write your own bio. I know for sure likes pie.
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Dear Jesse and Marisa –
I have a radical idea: how about you guys watch the Sports Night DVD’s I lent you and watch The West Wing on Netflix before generalizing Sorkin’s work? It’s not nice to judge people at their worst.
Your pal,
Rob
Eh. Sounds risky. Pass.
(I have actually seen an OK, if very far from complete, number of West Wing episodes. I’ve probably seen more West Wings than Star Treks, maybe?)
NOTHING YOU JUST SAID IS OK
WHO AMONG US SAW THE SORKIN STEVE JOBS MOVIE **AND** LIKED IT?
I’ve seen A Few Good Men, but that just means I know he can do better.
I’ll get to it! I have to watch every movie with Steve Jobs to see how they match up against Pirates of Silicon valley.
I’ve seen Sorkin at not-his-worst–A Few Good Men! The American President! That just means I know he can do better.
But you *only* talk about the bad shows and hold them up as what Aaron Sorkin is like (I mean, it’s clearly what he’s like now, but you know what I mean).
RE: Last Week Tonight
1. That Show Is Great and I’m really into some of Oliver’s now-rote deliveries (like when he turns to an image of Caillou and starts yelling “Fuck You, Caillou!”).
2. I generally I don’t get complaints like Nathaniel’s about how this is preaching to a liberal choir. Isn’t that conservative media’s entire strategy? Isn’t that how they’ve been winning the culture war in this century? I think there’s a ton of validity to normalizing opinions that might not be universally accepted.
3. I would also push back on whether the audience knows about the issues Oliver covers ESPECIALLY the one you brought up: public stadium financing. As the sportsalcohol.com person who follows sports the closest, people definitely don’t know about this because it is happening more than ever. The Atlanta Braves (a terrible organization and not just because I’m a Mets’ fan) are actually taking it further and Bloomberg recently did a long investigative piece about how all their minor league stadiums are team owned but publicly financed. I actually thought the Last Week Tonight segment didn’t go far or deep enough. They had a clip of that crazed Phoenix Coyotes fan haranguing the Phoenix City Council for not wanting to pay for their stadium without noting that she wasn’t even a Phoenix resident. They also completely ignored Marlins Park, which I think is the most egregious example or extorting a municipality for hundreds of millions of dollars directly against their own self interest.
I’ll concede #3, as I’m sure you’re right that the audience doesn’t know the specifics about public stadium financing as he covered them. I certainly don’t have a command of that data, but I had read about the subject before and did have a pretty negative impression of public stadium financing, just like I did with stuff like the lottery or televangelism. I do think I’m holding the show’s location against it a bit. I know everybody hears about that kind of stuff for the first time somewhere, so I’m sure I’m betraying a bit of cynicism on my part to think that the subjects they cover aren’t blowing the minds of people who pay for a premium cable channel and watch the liberal British comedian’s show (or even the folks who pass them around online). And that’s all fine! I may bristle at the notion that this show is comparable to a news apparatus like Fox News, but I agree that there’s obvious value in getting those ideas expressed and having people watch them. And I like being pandered to as much as anybody else (though I sometimes find the predictable rhythms of the show more jarring than comforting, and I don’t really understand why; maybe because it’s weekly instead of daily? I can’t figure it out). So before I wander too far into the weeds, I’ll reiterate that I really enjoy the show! I really like John Oliver! They occasionally employ people I know and am very fond of! I even agree that there’s value in having the stuff he covers discussed in a short, amusing video clip. We were just asked to bring a show that we considered overrated to the recording, and since I don’t really watch any shows I don’t actually like, I was left trying to come up with a reaction to the reaction. So I’m not actually talking about anything I particularly would want the show to do differently, but rather an issue that I was already able to easily solve myself by just ignoring any headlines that mention John Oliver and not reading any articles about the show. This isn’t a new problem with Oliver, as it happened with Jon Stewart and Colbert too, but the breathless coverage of each new clip of him “annihilating” or “decimating” some person or issue in Vulture or the Huffington Post seemed like a perfect example of overrating (and also seems to reward the show for the more stunty advocacy stuff they do, which I don’t think they’re as deft with as Colbert was). But, as you point out, while I’m grumbling about headlines and articles that I don’t even read any more, I could be wrong since he did seem to the move the needle in the net neutrality thing.
I think you have touched upon, also, that there’s a slight smugness to some of Oliver’s stuff that he usually gets over by being a bit self-deprecating and English and reasonable, but sometimes it lingers. I think that’s why I don’t love all of his repeated joke structures, because usually the structure is not so clever that I love seeing it over and over (Kimmy Schmidt and 30 Rock certainly have a few structures they use a lot, like verbal misdirection using common cliches, and I never tire of it), and they seem so pleased to hit those buttons. Maybe that’s also why I was so bewildered by his insistence that he’s after the best possible jokes, not advocacy. Many weeks I see him doing pretty strong advocacy with pretty good jokes.
But I do like the weekly format; I don’t really have the time/inclination to watch the Daily Show, the Nightly Show, Samantha Bee, all the mainstream late-night, etc., etc. One Oliver per week with frequent breaks is MANAGEABLE (though I realize Bee is also only weekly, and the segments of hers I’ve seen are pretty strong).
#ladycrimes #feminism
#NotMyChristian
I do watch all the Children of Jon Stewart and I should have mentioned that Sam Bee’s show is definitely the best. And I strongly agree that Oliver saying he’s just in it for the jokes is just crazy, but I’m trying to limit my comments to ideas you didn’t cover.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fw41BDhI_K8
The Kimmy Schmidt stuff is fascinating. First off, I read conflicting essays from Asian Americans about the show this year. I read one opinion that thought Dong’s portrayal in Season One was flawed but showed promise and then went off the rails in Season Two. I also read something that took the exact opposite tack: they found Dong to be really offensive Season One but heading in the right direction in Season Two.
I generally agree with Jesse’s point that you don’t have to be responsive to criticism, online or elsewhere. However, Tina Fey seems to boast some cognitive dissonance on the issue (similar to the way John Oliver just lying about being in it for the jokes). She claims to ignore that sort of thing, then went HARD after critics. I thought it was kind of funny when that one person ceased to exist, but that one episode was mostly filled with strawmen to deflect against some legit criticism. I found Titus’ song as Murasaki to be very touching, so what do I know?
I think that’s also a product of having writers. Fey doesn’t write every or even most episodes of UKS. I can imagine her writers pitching her the Titus/Murasaki thing and her liking it and saying go with it. Sam Means is the credited writer there, so it’s entirely possible that *he* reads the internet. She may be straight up lying but she has plausible deniability, at least.
FWIW (very little, as a white dude who never has to worry about poor representation), the main thing I noticed about Dong in Season Two was that he was being kind of an a-hole about his entirely fake marriage. I wonder if that was the off-the-rails element, that he seems kind of cowardly in his decision to just keep his head down and embrace his sham marriage? It certainly made the character less appealing to me as a love interest for Kimmy. I thought he came off sweet, smart, but a little out of his element in S1, a nice complement to Kimmy’s resourceful naivete.
I think out of all of the greater sportsalcohol.com crew, Sabrina and I are the only ones who watch Game of Thrones. I don’t think it’s a great show. It’s not high brow (though it think it might be), it’s incredibly problematic, the writing is uneven, and it’s pacing has been weirdly constrained by both its epic scope and that it ran out of source material. I can’t speak for everyone, but I think there are a lot of people like us who watch it in spite of its flaws.
It does have some things going for it: great performances, direction, production values, costumes, etc. Every dollar is on the screen. It’s very WATCHABLE. It’s also something that you can talk and talk and talk about, even if you have a lot of problems with it. I think it definitely sucks the air out of other conversations about TV when you see, for example, how much coverage the AV Club gives it compared to other shows (2 recaps, a video segment, and a predication piece on top of new stories). I was at a party with my wife’s (much younger) coworkers and friends and Game of Thrones was the subject we could all discus as a group. More than cars, restaurants we like, even the party itself.
I watch it too! I think it’s really good! I also think it would have been a perfectly fine choice for the “pick a show you think is overrated” part of the podcast, since it really is good in a way that feels easy to overstate in the current landscape of talkin’ ’bout TV (particularly on the internet, as illustrated by your AV Club example). It’s fun and compelling elevated pulp that often enough has some meat and real thought put into the fantasy/heroic narrative tropes it deconstructs (or embraces). It also has that terrific production quality and excellent cast. But I also find it personally interesting because of the way it’s changed in my estimation through conversations like this. Because it’s so involving to watch, it’s pretty easy for me to just say “ooh, I love this show” when it’s actually on. Then I have a kind of knee-jerk reaction against it when it gets thrown into discussions of the Great Dramas or the best shows of the year (or all time), and I get all “come on, guys, it’s not The Wire or Mad Men or something.” But then I have to remind myself that while it’s not doing the things those shows do, it is doing a pretty impressive and singular job of what it’s setting out to do, so I do think it’s pretty special.
I thought I’d seen enough to at least know what people were talking about in conversations, but then people in my office started talking about warging and I was all NOPE.
lol warging. GRRM is praised for eschewing the magical elements of fantasy, but I’m guessing by people who only read (or couldn’t get through) the first book b/c warging (also dragons, ice zombies, Faceless Men, dragonscale, whatever those fire priestesses do, etc.).
I think I’m stealing Nathaniel’s thought here when I say that Game of Thrones really sneaks the magic in very slowly. In the beginning, it’s just nudity and violence, then dragons, then straight-up sorcery and all those other things you mentioned. It’s like the show knew it might turn off some people if it brought out the magic right away.