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.

You Can Do It...

So mere hours after last week's post I decided to meander over to the gym after my glorious half day of work where I promptly threw my back out. I've been couch-ridden almost since then, today being my first day back to the land of the living. This has afforded me two things: dozens of uninterrupted hours of Dragon's Dogma: Dark Arisen while my loved one is at work, and about as much time for personal reflection because these moments were not what I'd call entirely eventful. As such, here are some stray thoughts from the past few days. Enjoy them with your favorite cola beverage.

It seems as though I'm a minority here, but I hate, hate, Kanye West's appearances on Saturday Night Live. Part of it is probably the sentimentalist in me that demands that nobody mess with such a revered stage (and yes, haters, it is a revered stage), but Yeezy's hijacking of the environment has always come off as the worst kind of pretentious, making him look like more of an asshole than he probably already is. I'm not knocking his music --in fact, I like it a lot-- but, dammit, these performances make Val Kilmer's god complex look the opening to the Mary Tyler Moore Show. Observe last year's desecration:

 

That new Star Trek flick certainly is the cat's pajamas, no? Fun performances by the whole cast and a twist that just about anybody that's even heard of Trek saw coming made for a pretty relaxed experience, and that's counting some pretty thrilling action sequences. I guess my beef with it is that it relied a little too heavy on old lore to really "get it," and the absence of that is what made the 2009 reboot so darn snappy. But hey, if this is the way things are going, I'll hop on that train.

Dude. House of Cards. I mean, right? That Kevin Spacey sure can deliver fascinatingly cruel dialog. I'm only about five episodes in, but I'm already praying to that Netflix higher power that more's on the way. Now that we're rapping about it, Hemlock Grove wasn't bad, either. But it lacked one crucial ingredient: Verbal Kint telling me that he "loves [his wife] like sharks love blood." Spec. Tacular.

Tomorrow, a new album by The National will explode upon my ear drums. I'm pretty jazzed about this.

Ok, so Dragon's Dogma. I was putting off playing it until the price dropped, and then the announcement last year that a rerelease was coming gave me no more excuses, especially after all of the positive word of mouth that it was something of a flawed gem. Color me surprised, but I was good and smitten with it, and can soundly agree with that praise. Technical mess that it was, I had plenty of opportunity over the last few days to bum rush through the game twice (the second time is pretty short with NG+) and enjoyed the exploring and the boss combat, even though the rest of it was kind of mediocre upon recollection. Some of the larger battles were totally bogus, though. The Ur-Dragon fight (the original game's super-boss), was completely unwinnable in a straight melee throwdown, which is downright crappy design. When you have to bail out of the fight so you can reclass to a long-range character you know that someone didn't think this whole thing through.

The expansion stuff, though, was chock full of what I like to call Total Bullshit. Now, the level designs were great, and even a little inspired until the whole thing started to repeat. The Dark Souls influence was worn proudly on the sleeve here, and that alone is the key to my heart. What's baloney, though, was the arbitrary and asinine spike in difficulty when boss monsters would just randomly appear, forcing you to run like and idiot through the environments so you don't get wiped out. For a location that was obviously built to be explored thoroughly, I found this to be a cheap way to artificial inflate the difficulty of the game for high-level players. I made it through the end of the Dark Arisen stuff this morning, and I was satisfied with it, but in no way does it demand my patience for a second trip through, even though Doc Brown and his sidekick Shaniqua can probably put up with this mess much better than their first go 'round. Since I wound up with a platinum trophy in this game as a silver lining to a weekend of freakish pain, I'm guessing that DD:DA will begin it's long, glorious life as a dust collector starting this very evening. Still, if this is the direction Capcom is taking with the (hopefully) upcoming Deep Down, I'd be a liar if I wasn't down, too.