Mad Men Series Finale: Thoughts

I started watching Mad Men because I wanted to see the aesthetic I remembered fondly from such TV shows as Bewitched and The Dick Van Dyke Show.  Who could forget Larry Tate's mustache (not to mention Doctor Bombay's)?  Or Dick tripping over the hassock?  Mad Men through a haze of UHF nostalgia.  I was born too late to watch these programs live, but their syndication colored my childhood.

Mad Men was a great show, but not a great great show, like The Prisoner or the first few seasons of Lost.  It was a little too self-conscious, a little pretentious in its attempt to be art.  Occasionally it dipped too deeply into absurdity, like when the English guy got his foot eaten up by the riding mower or the fistfight between Pete Campbell and Lane Pryce.  And, of course, it had to insert itself into 2010-era presidential politics with an unnecessary dig at Mitt Romney's father, which took you out of the show and reminded you who was making it.  But it held my interest over seven seasons with excellent performances and some genuinely good writing.

I don't have strong feelings either way about the finale.  It could have been any other episode, which makes sense: it's its own fully realized world, and will continue to turn when we've stopped watching it.  Don may have made the Coke advert at the end, or he may not have.  With evidence for both, the question becomes an exercise in mental masturbation.  The inevitable comparisons to the ambiguous finale of The Sopranos are tedious insofar as that show's long gone, too, and we'll never know.

As the finale lacked any semblance of a plot or organizing theme, I'll take it character by character.

• Don: A somewhat expected series of events: he goes to the hippie retreat and contemns it as expected, but later experiences an epiphany that opens him up to what it has to offer.  His last phone call with Betty was brutal and ugly, leavened only by the "Birdy" at the end.  Don's connection to the man at the encounter group who finds himself invisible is, by its nature, a very transitory thing.  Don is only invisible now because he's gone, and he's only unneeded because his dying ex-wife told him so.  Don fills up a room: you can't ignore him.  He can't be a nobody: he's just too big.  Om.
• Peggy: I wasn't terribly entranced by the declarations of love between her and Stan because it meant that their extraordinary, charming, platonic friendship would end.  They're both great, extremely likable characters, and it's a shame that their dynamic will now change.  At least I won't have to watch it disintegrate.
• Pete: They didn't give him much to do.  I liked the symbolism of Pete giving Peggy a cactus, and her holding it between them during their brief good-bye.  The issue of their baby is indeed a prickly matter.  Trudy Campbell will probably hate it in Kansas.  She's also the voice of Unikitty.  
• Betty: Dying has not changed her essentially toxic, self-absorbed nature, and I feel terrible for her kids.  It's awful that Bobby's close to setting the kitchen on fire in an attempt to make dinner because his sick mother won't tell him or his father that she's dying.  Bobby and Gene are adrift.  If there's a villain in this season, it's Betty.  It doesn't reflect well on Don that he let her talk him out of going back to New York immediately.  Just an awful situation across the board, making an unlikable character even less likable.
• Joan: A very odd, compressed relationship with the Bruce Greenwood character that needed to have been teased earlier to make sense at the end.  Her story's conclusion lacked punch, or even interest.  Will she be successful?  Do we care?  Should we?

Nice to see that Roger's having a good time in Paris, but he's always having a good time, except when he isn't.  Ken's still missing an eye.  I wish he'd return to writing.  Harry's still a slimeball: yay!  Megan was thought of, but not missed.  Same with Henry.

I was hoping for a last-minute return of Sal.  Didn't happen.

Yes, I Watch Cartoons

My preschooler typically watches about a half hour of TV a day, perhaps an hour or two on weekends.  He used to watch more.  Obviously, we try to minimize exposure to the television for several reasons, none of which are relevant here, and he'll likely end up watching more TV as he gets older.  But for now, he doesn't watch much.

Unless he's sick.  Then there's nothing else to do except watch TV.  Ugh.  I watch with him, in large part because I want to know what kind of media he's absorbing and, if necessary, put it in context and answer his questions.  What follows is a rundown of some of the shows we watch.

Breadwinners: This is, hands down, my favorite of his TV shows.  It has no educational value in either academics or ethics, which is just fine.  Full of potty humor, terrible bread puns, and horrible cartoon violence.  I love it.  It follows the adventures of two ducks named Swaysway and Buhdeuce as they deliver bread to the hungry ducks of their world, called Pondgea.  Our favorite character is The Breadmaker, the god of all bread.  You don't know funny until you hear your preschooler boom out, "Oooooh YEAHHH!" in his high little voice, trying to imitate gravelly rumble of The Breadmaker.  Every episode is a classic.  Five out of five stars.

Sanjay and Craig: This one runs a close second, and if baking bread wasn't my hobby, I might like this one more than Breadwinners.  Extremely gross and quite funny.  The friendship between the boy and the snake is actually quite nice, and its ups and downs sometimes veer into didactics (but not intrusively so).  All of the characters are brilliant, especially Remington Tufflips, whom I like to imitate when circumstances allow.  It's also not afraid to venture into some very bizarre, even psychedelic territory.  The best episode is Flip Flopas for gross-out humor, satire, and weirdness.  Five out of five stars.

SpongeBob SquarePants: What can anyone say about SpongeBob that hasn't already been said a thousand times?  The sheer number of episodes available at any time makes this program the Law & Order of cartoons.  It's clear that in the earlier episodes they were going for a Looney Tunes look, which altered over the years (and years) as digital technology improved.  There are some very funny parts to it, and despite its age, it rarely falls into repetition.  Club SpongeBob is probably my favorite episode, but there are so many good ones that it's hard to choose.  Four out of five stars.

Caillou: Every parent loves to hate Caillou, but my son just loves it.  Caillou whines, he complains, he's a massive pain in the ass, but that's what I like about the show: it deals with real stuff with a kid who's a lot like a real kid.  Other than the lack of hair.  It's extremely inoffensive and shows children how someone like them deals with typical preschooler situations.  My only problem with the show is the mom, who's the Mary Sue of children's television: used to be a ballerina, a ringette champion, a singing expert, an astronaut, etc., and is now just Mommy.  And they make the dad seem somewhat bumbling and incompetent, but that's typical of most television.  The episode my son likes the best is, likely, Rollie Racers.  Three out of five stars (my son would rate it higher).

Team Umizoomi: My son doesn't like Super Why as much as I wish he would, but he loves Team Umizoomi. Umizoomi is about math, Super Why's about literacy.  The songs are really quite good and there's a predictable pattern to the events in the program so that you know what to expect each episode.  It's for really little kids, so there's nothing in there to be concerned about.  The audience participation part is good (like Super Why and Blue's Clues), so as long as my little boy shouts out the answers at the screen, I figure he's not too old for it.  All the episodes are pretty good with no stand-outs.  4 out of 5 stars.

It's a much different TV world out there from when I was a kid watching hours of Josie & The Pussycats, Far Out Space Nuts, and H.R. Pufnstuf.

American Horror Story Season Two: Impressions

Over the course of the last few weeks, I watched the second season of American Horror Story after having been assured by its fans that it was better than the first season, which featured Dylan McDermott crying and masturbating in the early episodes and was generally mediocre.

Unfortunately, I found the second season about as mediocre for similar reasons.

The writers did absolutely nothing to make you care about any of the characters, including Kit Walker, arguably the only "good guy" in the show.  None of them were likable.  You have to like the characters to care about what happens to them, and in horror, very bad things are supposed to happen to them.  One gets possessed by the Devil, one gets raped, many get killed horribly, etc, and it wasn't the least bit affecting.  The reporter character was simply venal and without charm; sister Jude lacked pathos despite piddling late-season efforts to achieve it; and Bloody Face, once unmasked, lacked menace.

It was a mishmash of horror themes that lacked a single unifying thread.  Alien abductions, demonic possession, Nazi experiments, and serial killers: all thrown against the wall, and none of them stuck.  Wouldn't it be interesting to see what the Devil thinks about Gray aliens kidnapping people and experimenting on them?  You won't find it here.  Despite that the story took place, for the most part, in an asylum, they barely touched on an extremely important theme: perception vs reality.  Crazy people and people on drugs often perceive reality as different from what it actually is.  That idea could have been used to show insanity.  It didn't.  There was very little madness in the madhouse.

The show suffered from some very clumsy storytelling elements that should have been taken out.  When the reporter character escapes from Bloody Face, she just happens to get into a car with a crazy, suicidal man?  Really?  That was the best way the writers could think of to bring her back to the asylum?  Didn't make sense.  The subplot with Ian McShane was entertaining, but only because Ian McShane was in it.  Certain characters just dropped off the face of the show for long periods without rhyme or reason.  Story arcs ended abruptly.  We don't get closure in real life, so we want it in our fiction.  Unfortunately, we didn't get that here.

The ending was banal and without surprise or tension.  While it was nice to see Dylan McDermott with his clothes on, his character lacked menace, and it was obvious what would happen to him in the end.  The alien kids end up becoming a lawyer and a doctor, respectively. The Nazi self-immolates.  Kit gets beamed up.  By then, I didn't care.

The show did have one bright spot: the Angel of Death.  She was awesome.  I loved every scene with her in it, even though she was underutilized as a character.

Is Your Television Full of Ghosts?

Well, according to Stefan Andiopolous' book Ghostly Apparitions, no.  It's not.  But it was intended to be a medium.  A spirit medium.

BLDGBLOG discusses the book in an article titled, An Occult History of the Television Set, and writes:

So, while the television itself—the object you and I most likely know as the utterly mundane fixture of family distraction sitting centrally ensconced in a nearby living room—might not be a supernatural mechanism, it nonetheless descends from a strange and convoluted line of esoteric experimentation, including early attempts at controlling electromagnetic transmissions, directing radio waves, and even experiencing various forms of so-called "remote viewing." 

Read the whole thing to get an interesting glimpse into early attempts to explain or display the universe through electronic means.  This includes the hidden universe: so-called spirits, ghosts, the dead, etc.