it's tv after all

As The Sopranos wound down, or stopped short as it were, HBO premiered its new series John from Cincinnati, which I blogged about on July 3. Three episodes in I was intrigued: the show had such defiantly little exposition that I assumed I was watching some new experimental form of television narrative. It was, alas, just a badly written show. By the end of the ten-episode season, the audience still knew nothing about any of the constantly growing cast of shrill, surly characters. It was, in short, artlessly dour.

Sadly, HBO is at it again with its new series Tell Me You Love Me. It should be called Tell Me It's Not HBO. This time I am throwing in the towel after three episodes: I will not watch this awful show again.

Imagine a highlight, or lowlight, reel of the worst moments of needless bickering from every relationship you ever had. Then cast four different couples—all white, all straight, and all dressed in black and grey and living in modernist-designed homes—and give the characters no back stories, no jobs, not even last names, as far as I can tell. All they do is bicker in the most obvious ways. And there you have it: HBO's new Sunday night series. (I would say more, but I don't want to be accused of bickering.)

The hot new shows are all elsewhere: Mad Men on AMC, which HBO passed up, and the surprisingly good Californication on Showtime. There will be plenty more to say about them in subsequent blog entries. Tune in again soon, Reader: same blog time, same blog channel.

the brother from another Cincinnati

[Update: I have since changed my mind about this dreadful, humourless show. I would say more, but it's not worth the words.]

It has been a while since I saw John Sayles's film The Brother from Another Planet (1984), but there's no mistaking it as a primary source for the new HBO series John from Cincinnati. (JC, get it?) If there was any doubt, a line in episode 2 referring to John as a 'brother from another mother' provides suggestive corroborating evidence.

In the film, Joe Morton plays an alien who arrives in New York, where he is distinguished from the human beings by his muteness, his three-toed feet, and his ability to heal broken arcade games by touching them. On the HBO show, John sports a 1980's hairdo and wardrobe, including Sean Penn's classic shoes from Fast Times at Ridgemont High. At his arrival, various people and even a bird mysteriously wield the power of reviving the dead or healing grave bodily injuries. John's mission appears to be to heal the family of broken surfers and their supporting characters.

The great thing about the series so far, four episodes in, is that it is full of mystery with scant expositional help. In fact, there is virtually no exposition despite a steadily growing number of characters. The show does not go out of its way to be likable either. It feels more like a late season of The Sopranos or Six Feet Under, where multiple plots run simultaneously and new viewers can't possibly be expected to know what's going on, except that John from Cincinnati is that way right out of the gate. The show is apparently generating negative buzz on the internet, but I am already looking forward to each new episode.

I realize that HBO is expensive, but people who care about culture owe it to themselves to subscribe. The past ten years of HBO original series have been a true golden age of television. There has never before been serial screenwriting with such sophistication as one encounters on the typical HBO show. I hate to parrot corporate slogans, but, compared to everything else out there, they're justified in denying that their work is mere TV. No, reader, it's HBO.

don't stop

Warning: this entry contains spoilers about the Sopranos finale.

I was surprised to read in Monday's New York Times that Tony Soprano was alive and well after Sunday's series finale—surprised because I saw his consciousness flick off as the assassin's bullet entered his brain.

What's that, reader? You missed it when you briefly lost your cable signal? Even after Bobby Bacala's warning that you 'probably don't even hear it when it happens' from episode 78 was repeated in flashback in episode 85? Don't worry. I will fill you in on what you missed.

In an ending out of Six Feet Under—it even featured a driver-less car running over the head of its owner, as in SFU episode 53—Tony died surrounded by a vision of the people he loved most in the world, listening to his favourite song in a family diner, and sharing a plate of onion rings. The bells rings, he looks up, sees Meadow, and his consciousness ends. I'd call it the ultimate POV shot except that the final shot is not a POV but a close-up of Tony. That makes what happens next something like an internal diegetic cut to black, if that makes any sense.

Can we say of a novel or a television programme that something undepicted did indeed happen? I would never allow my literature students to get away with that. Be that as it may, until I see Tony Soprano again, I can only consider him dead, for what else could he be if he never lives again?

Even so, let's consider the argument that nothing happened at the end, that the narrative did not end according to the culturally expected rules of narrative. The one rule of narrative that no novel or television finale, no matter how experimental, can violate is closure. The Jane Austen heroine gets married, the bad are punished, the family members reconcile, and, on Six Feet Under, everything ends and everyone dies.

One recurring, distinct feature of The Sopranos was the show's avoidance of closure. Would there be any consequences from the asbestos dumping or the two Arabic guys reported to the FBI? And what ever happened with Valery, the Russian veteran of Chechnya lost in the Pine Barrens of New Jersey in episode 37?

In the bigger picture, David Chase as a writer has challenged himself and his audience to ask questions about the necessity of closure in narrative fiction. We don't experience closure in real life. Why should we expect it from fiction? And what, after all, would a more definite ending to The Sopranos have achieved? Bullet or no bullet, the series has ended. What distinct benefit do we derive from watching a story end neatly as opposed to messily or indefinitely?

Ending the way it did, the final episode achieved something different than any other long or serial fiction: it made the audience acutely aware of its traditional need for closure by refusing to satisfy it, and it invited them to see the limitations of that need. My earlier statements notwithstanding, it's quite pleasurable to experience such a provocation. Denying closure is as radical a move as a writer can make. I look forward to the climate of experimentation, but hopefully not direct imitation, that this bold gesture promises to usher in among the next generation of screenwriters.