Agents of S.H.R.U.G.

I won't spend too much time on this, but let's talk about S.H.I.E.L.D. For being born from a medium that's thrived on serialization for close to a century, I've probably only seen one superhero television show that's ever worked, and that was Smallville (but only the first handful of seasons; talk about outstaying your welcome). S.H.I.E.L.D. isn't Smallville. I tried to keep my expectations low, and I wasn't even planning on watching it last night at all, but you know, people get bored. I was bored, and S.H.I.E.L.D. bored me further. These fragmented sentences should probably mean something, but they don't. Let's also blame that on S.H.I.E.L.D.

The bullet points (without actual bullet points): I thought it was predictable, unoriginal, and had that incessantly quippy Joss Whedon dialog that makes normal conversation sound overly dramatic and insufferable. I wouldn't want to spend ten minutes with any of these people, let alone 43 of them for 24 weeks. You shouldn't, either, because you probably watched all of this go down before on the first season of Heroes.

To be fair, I think it hits a good time slot, though. Kids will eat this stuff up, and at 8pm. it's positioned to do very well with the 8-14 set. Does that mean I should be fairer to it because it might be aimed more for a younger crowd? Nope, I still thought it was a weak TV pilot. Broad appeal is one thing, but it sure didn't appeal to me.

Can it get better, though? Probably. I have a feeling that enough dough will be tossed at it that Disney will at least try to buy it into quality (for better or worse). I'm sure ratings were through the roof, too, and unless the show turned off more people than just me, the old maxim that quality doesn't matter if people are buying it will hold true. It's a good premise for a TV series, though, so part of me is pulling for it in some deep recess that's a sentimental sap for my Marvel reading days. Let's hope that they turn things around over the next few episodes, but I'm just not that psyched for b-list Avengers characters.

But a Gotham Central/ Commissioner Gordon TV show? Yes, sir. YES, SIR.

Concessions and Complaints

Fine, internet. You win. I started watching New Girl not so long ago and found that it's pretty dern funny, just like you kept telling me. Wait, you say, shouldn't blogs that normally concern your typical nerdery talk my ear off about "decent" TV like Mad Men or Boardwalk Empire? Probably, but you'd be unfairly throwing NG under the bus as I have for these past two Schmidt-giddy seasons. Hold your pretense at bay and go enjoy them (especially the first one).

I find that it has a fair amount of heart like a lot of great, enduring sitcoms had, but what really makes it stand out is the writing. Each individual character is very clearly voiced, and none of them stand out as a main character to be followed outside of the titular Jess. But even she takes a gracious back seat to the three male roomies much of the time, whom can riff capably with each other at a rat-a-tat speed. Pay careful attention and you'll get your requisite goofball nerd references, but tossed in with such left field nonchalance from its turbo-douchiest club turd character that it doesn't seem like pandering ("There are plenty of things to be down about; the deficit, air pollution in China, The Hobbit wasn't very good..." -a personal favorite).

But since the third season of the show has started, it's time for me to calmly lay out my objections for its current course. By the end of the second season, NG succumbed to the siren call of all sitcoms by consummating the love affair of two main characters, Jess and Nick. Now, yes, nearly every television show does this, but you can probably count on one hand the sitcoms in which it works. I like NG enough that I don't want it to devolve into the idiotic soap opera latrine that Friends spent ten years digging. While I applaud the fact that the show took two entire seasons to commit to this sort of character development -restraint by many television shows' standards- it's an awfully fine line to walk having two characters become intimate and make that show not turn into a grating shmoop-fest.

Having said all of that, let's examine a couple of the shows that actually pulled it off and why:

Cheers
Seasons: 11
Why it worked: Diane left
Cheers is fondly remembered as one of the most consistently funny television sitcoms in the medium's history. Part of the reason for this is that main character Diane Chambers (played for five seasons and in late-season cameos by Shelley Long) left the series after season five. Womanizing bar-owner and washed out ball player Sam Malone (Ted Danson, the other main character) carried on a long standing on again/ off again relationship with Diane, something of a social class opposite, through most of those seasons, and her leaving the show forced the writers to find a way to reinvent it without sacrificing both the original premise and the clever interactions of several of its characters. It turned out to be a blessing in disguise. Even Long didn't want to rehash the same stories over and over, as most shows where leads share a romance often find themselves doing, and Sam could return to being a bar-owning Lothario. The introduction of Kirstie Alley reintroduced the cat-and-mouse game that Sam played early on with Diane but with an opposite result, which lead to some genuinely funny television.

Scrubs
Seasons: 8 (No, the last one doesn't count)
Why it worked: The writers probably hated each other
Scrubs, to be fair, was a haphazard television show in terms of tone and overall quality. The early seasons were constructed to be reflective of life after college, with all of the uncertainty, fear, and eventual triumph or defeat therein. Roughly around the third season, the series grew closer and closer into a cartoon show staffed by live actors. While still funny, main characters went from seeming like real people with TV-necessary quirks to being neurotic caricatures that needed to be slapped in the face. Among them were main characters John "J.D." Dorian (the star and narrator of the show) and Elliot Reid whom both worked at Sacred Heart Hospital as interns before making a name for themselves later in the series as attending doctors. Throughout the show, J.D. and Elliot would occasionally hook up and even date, but it never lasted to the end of any given season. They even spent entire seasons apart and dated melange of guest stars, something the show was sort of known for. Routinely, the writers would bemoan the "will they/won't they" relationship of the characters (as seen as extras on the DVD sets, sorry I can't find a link), so J.D. and Elliot would often go down in flames in terrible ways, freeing the characters to be interesting in their own right. By the time the show was really winding down in season 7, the writers relented and let the two of them connect, and by the time the proper series ended with season 8, it was perfectly clear that the show was never about their relationship as it was about characters becoming functioning, confident adults. Love was clearly only part of that for them.

Coupling
Seasons: 4
Why it worked: Brevity + narcissism
Coupling was a smart, dirty U.K. sitcom that ran from 2000-2004, with each season spanning a mere six episodes apiece. Unfairly pegged as "the English Friends," Coupling took the premise of its erroneous comparison and bent it just enough to make it unique. Perhaps that two "main" characters of the show, Steve and Susan, got together during the first episode of the series, but the three guys/ three girls dynamic that revolved around love and sex took care of the problem immediately without sitting on the fence about it. Or so you might think; during the third season, the womanizing Patrick began a committed relationship with the vain Sally, and it worked, and partly because the show simply didn't give itself a lot of time to dwell on too many bad stories. The other key ingredient was that Patrick and Sally were completely full of themselves with just enough earnestness underneath to make them seem like people you've probably run into in your own life. Sure, they were more of side characters in the grand scheme of things, but the constant narcissism made for good comedy, even in its weak sauce final season. If anything, they were the Schmidt/ Cece analog that New Girl has been building stories around since season 1.

It is clear that New Girl does not share the qualities that helped these other shows survive the Burden of Booty. While it might seem as though the Scrubs method is the best chance it has, and I would wager more bagels that you can probably eat that it's the route the show will take, the fact that there is no real central character to follow for reflection might make this romantic trip uphill that much harder. I suppose we'll just have to sit back and let Jess and Nick show us on Tuesday evening at a time.

Grand Theft Hair

So are you at home playing GTA V? I am not. That isn't to say that I'm opposed to taking the -day- week off of work to play a monumentally hyped game is a bad idea, but you know, Grand Theft Auto never did it for me. In general, really, open world games don't really seem to be my bag. No one trait of these games -- be it the driving to the fighting -- never really seem built well enough that I could forgive so many other flaws, so I tend to get bored with them quickly. I do like the writing, though, and I used to love watching friends of mine drive aimlessly through Vice City at night while listening to Mr. Mister, but from a raw gameplay perspective, I guess my interests always lay elsewhere.

But I can't exactly say I'm playing better right now. Yes, the emphatic arm-waiving that resulted in the first five hours of Shin Megami Tensei IV has since cooled. It was as hot and heavy as you'd find in a freshmen dorm, now cranked down to conversations about whose turn it is to fold the laundry. Still, I'm plugging along through it in hopes that things pick up now that I'm kicking it in Tokyo, so let's keep our demon fusing fingers crossed. Outside of that, it's been Hitman: Absolution, which is yet another game I would have never played if it weren't for PlayStation+. Stealth murder games are really just large, elaborate puzzles staring bald men in black suits, a concept that doesn't change my life into a Maxell ad. It's fine so far, but, you know.

Anyway, I hope all of you mischief-making bank robbers out there are showing Los Santos what's what.

Summoning

Last night, after much hemming and hawing, I finally began to play Shin Megami Tensei IV. Why the long wait since I mentioned starting it July? Mostly because I'm an idiot, apparently. I only wanted to play through the introduction and found myself, four hours later, finally tearing myself away from it because the 3DS battery was giving me the blinking red Morse code of "turn it off and go to bed." Even now, several hours removed, I want to run right over to my handheld wonder machine and get back to demon fusing.

That's not a feeling I get very often anymore. I find that it's probably because I'm getting older and have had enough video game experiences at this point that very little surprises me. So why the strange excitement to play (and, therefore, expound upon) SMTIV? Maybe I'm like Don Draper and only like the beginnings of things (in that non-infidelity sort of way), I guess. Everyone likes new games that they just start, I suppose. But when I think about it, and remember my mindset last night, it seems as though this new(ish) 3DS JRPG is scratching an itch that I've been having for months now.

Myself, I'm something of a lapsed JRPG apologist. For years I would defend them to anyone whom would listen, and if you took a peak at my library of games, you'll probably find a 60/40 ratio of this specific genre vs. a mishmash of everything else. But the vast majority of them are from the PS1-PS2 era --something of an Eastern role playing Age of Fire. It represented the better part of 10 years of my life where I was learning how to clearly identify the aspects of what made video games good and bad. Nostalgia aside, the trajectory of qualities I appreciated in the games within the genre has followed a slow, steady descent that's basically hit a subbasement sewer system in this current generation. Am I saying that gameplay for a JRPG these days is necessarily bad? No, I enjoyed playing Eternal Sonata and Final Fantasy X-2 on the merits of their combat alone. But as the last 10-15 years have gone by, the writing commonly found in these games began to bottom out, and as I get older, I cannot, in any way, justify sinking the time required to play one of them with a story that basically talks down to me. I have felt this way since finishing Final Fantasy XII; not the best, or even most compelling plot in the series, but it was one told in such a way that my intelligence and good taste weren't insulted. Since then, it's been a rapidly drying sea of pandering idiocy.

2009, then, was the year that I basically threw in the towel. BioWare released Dragon Age: Origins, which finally gave me the interactive storytelling I never knew I wanted, and Atlus published FromSoft's Demon's Souls --perhaps my favorite game of this generation-- that stripped away what had felt like unnecessary bullshit for years. Both were meaty, satisfying experiences from different sides of the RPG continuum that, essentially, ruined the traditional Dragon Quest/ Final Fantasy need that fueled not only a large chunk of my video game buying, but almost embarrassingly bigger chunks of my free time.

Last night, as I am wont to do around this time of year, I had a serious jones to play some Final Fantasy XII, but I can't; my (second) backward-compatible PlayStation 3 died on me about a year ago, and I'm stuck looking at around 50 games that are basically doing me as much good as a pet rock. Because I couldn't think of anything else to do with myself, in went SMTIV, and back came the memories. It was a tidal wave that I don't want to stop, and at this point, my expectations for the rest of the game are so high that it can only possibly let me down.

But it's only been about 4 hours, so who knows? Either way, I'm more excited to find out than I have been in years.

Some Friendly Advice about Friendlies

This will sound callous and, well, probably a little on the douchey side, but it is now Wednesday, and I have finally overcome my mangled physical state after a smashing weekend in Chicago. Why would I tell you this? Simple. I like video games. In fact, I like them more than I probably should. But that doesn't mean that I should live my life in sole slavery to them. Man does not live on bread alone, and sometimes, he needs the Chicago Cubs. You gotta get out there and meet people to make this listing boat we call life interesting, and the bleachers of Wrigley Field --that most sacred of a athletic holy grounds-- has turned into my preferred place to do it.

Yes, I suppose that above paragraph may sound strange, but hear me out. I've been to Chicago five or six times now, and I've had a pretty good track record for just meeting random folks and parlaying that into a real weekend hoedown. Case in point, this past Friday through Sunday. Now, before I explain this, let me make it abundantly clear that there is no clear necessity for liking the Cubbies, baseball, or even sports in general. I've found that $100 and an open mind to be a good cocktail recipe for a perfect, albeit boozy, weekend. The kind that should probably be sent away in the effigy of a Viking Funeral- kind of perfect weekend.

See, Wrigley is one of the last of the old guard of MLB stadiums; meaning, it's about as small as a shoebox. People are almost sitting on top of people in the park, so it's not exactly difficult to get to know your neighbor. But as cool as it is to sweat in the noontime sun of the left field lower deck with a large stranger on your dominant beer drinking side, there had to be another way. Thrill to the notion, then, of the apartment bleacher seats right across the street. See, to those not in the know, Wrigley was basically built in the middle of a residential neighborhood, and apartment gawkers could cool their heels on the rooftops while enjoying a free game. The stadium owners, ill content with this kind of arrangement, struck a deal with the local landlords. Now, onlookers have to buy a seat at a premium cost, but this cost includes an unending river of beer and more ballpark food than our left field friend could possibly eat. It's one hundred clams well-spent.

So step one is complete, and all that takes is a couple days off of work and paycheck. The other ingredient here is all internal. Now that you're standing there, two or three beers deep, and some dude walks by and complains that this game is crawling because it's only the bottom of the third inning (also obviously two or three deep), it's time to make some friends. Do you really care about this game? Unless you're a local, probably not, so go ahead and piss and moan right along with him. Get to know the other surrounding Cubs game drinkers. Make some friends. Talk a little shit. Ask stupid bar bet questions (personal favorites: "there are 6 team names in pro football, baseball and basketball that don't end in S, but who are they?" and "In the original trilogy, only 8 characters actually touch a light saber. Name them."). Pretty soon, the game is going to be over, someone is going to hit on that 6'5'' Amizonian princess you've all been gawking at, and then it's off to Wrigleyville for an evening in a bar with old arcade games and a batting cage. Does it matter that that these people think your name is Marvin but are too drunk to recall so they call you "Merlin?" No, and it's a nickname that you want to stick, anyway.

Is it easy for people to do this? Probably not. Will it make your weekend more memorable? Questionably. Will it make you want to go back to Chicago? I have found, empirically, that to be a yes. You have to get out there and live, people. Trust me on this.