I Come to Praise and Bury: On Rubicon and Terriers

It's been a dismal fall for new TV.  While a lot of returning shows have come back strong (The Good Wife, Community, to a lesser extent Dexter and How I Met Your Mother), most of the fall pilot slate was dire, and even promising and prestigious series like Boardwalk Empire and The Walking Dead have proven underwhelming.  Amidst this dross and disappointment, however, I still managed to find two new series to get excited and even fannish over.  Naturally, they've both been canceled.

Of those two cancellations, the one that rankles less is Rubicon's.  There are a lot of things this show did well, and in some cases these are things that no other show on TV is doing, but it wasn't good TV, and for a substantial portion of its run it was even quite bad.  A lot of this is down to bad luck--originally conceived as a modern callback to 70s conspiracy thrillers, in which Will Travers (James Badge Dale) an analyst for a government think-tank, investigates the seemingly accidental death of his mentor, Rubicon was heavily retooled shortly into its production run, and its creator, Jason Horwitch, was replaced with Henry Bromell, who shifted the show's focus from conspiracies to workplace drama.  This was entirely the right move, and the episodes that downplay Will's investigation in favor of his colleagues' actual work are among the best in the show's run, but the change came too late.  Having established its central mystery, Rubicon was yoked to a story, and a main character, that were both significantly less interesting than what was going on in their background.  I don't know if Rubicon would have been a ratings success if it had debuted as a drama about intelligence work, but it certainly would have been a stronger and more successful show.

Before I get too far into Rubicon's strengths, I should be very clear on its weaknesses, chiefly the fact that the first five episodes of the show's run are terrible: slow, moody hours in which characters lapse into Meaningful Silences so often that the whole exercise threatens to topple into self-parody.  It's common by now for cable series with relatively short seasons to start with slow episodes that set up the season-long story, then build up a head of steam and start barreling down towards an explosive season finale, and viewers will therefore often indulge a series that starts slowly, especially if it has a pedigree as impressive as Rubicon's, which comes from the producers of Mad Men and Breaking Bad.  Rubicon abuses that trust, however, and there's something almost insulting about its obvious certainty that viewers will keep tuning in for the weeks it takes Will to realize what we will have worked out simply by knowing the series's genre--that his mentor was murdered for knowing something he shouldn't have.  One of Rubicon's core goals--the only one that carries over when the show's emphasis shifts around episode 6--is to demystify its genre, make it mundane and familiar (you see this most clearly in its villains, who are hammily, mustache-twirlingly evil and yet suffer from the ordinary indignities of modern life and old age: one of them tries to reason with his spoiled daughter over her car insurance and complains that he can't smoke indoors, another pays his secretary for sex and, on a day when he isn't in the mood, lets her bully him into giving her money nonetheless), and it therefore makes sense that Will doesn't immediately leap to the conclusion of a murderous government conspiracy behind what initially seems like just a tragic train derailment.  But five whole hours of watching him discover hidden clues in gifts given just before the accident, or puzzling over codes, is not only stultifying but makes it harder and harder to believe all the other characters' insistence that Will is brilliant and intuitive.

Rubicon starts to work when it opens up its world, moving away from Will to his colleagues and to their work--synthesizing the cumulative output of dozens of intelligence agencies into a picture of what is going on in the world and where the next threat to America's safety is coming from.  These characters--Will's boss, Kale Ingram (Arliss Howard), and his team Grant (Christopher Evan Welch), Miles (Dallas Roberts), and Tanya (Lauren Hodges)--are for the most part shown doing what all of us do when we go to the office: talking about their home-life, being goaded into working harder by their superiors, complaining about working late.  The difference being that these people have the safety of millions in their hands, and one of Rubicon's greatest accomplishments is to make it clear how even this vocation can sometimes be the same as any other job--tedious, difficult, and frustrating--and how, despite their best intentions, these qualities can distance the characters from the real-world implications of their work, the lives that it saves and costs, leaving them to obsesses over their relatively quotidian problems.  Grant is spending too much time away from his family, and his government work doesn't pay enough to support them in the style to which, he believes, his intelligence and education should allow them to become accustomed.  Miles spins himself into a tizzy over catastrophes that he is helpless to affect, and won't admit that his marriage has ended.  Tanya, the newest member of the team, is having trouble adjusting to the emotional rigors of the work (for example when the team is asked to determine whether intelligence about the location of a terrorist is sufficiently trustworthy to justify an air-strike in a populated area), and medicating with drugs and alcohol.  I've seen some viewers complain about Rubicon's look, the fact that the characters work in cramped, decrepit offices and use outdated technology like dial phones and IBM workstations--a far cry from the smart-screens and glass walls that have become ubiquitous in cop and spy shows--but this seems like part and parcel of the show's efforts to make intelligence work seem ordinary.  Anyone who's worked in an office, much less a government office, will know that unlike on TV, you never have the latest technology at your fingertips, and that grime and mess are what you get when a lot of people spend a lot of time working hard in a place that belongs to none of them.

I found myself thinking about Rubicon a lot when I was writing my post about Stargate: Universe, because I think that at their core the two shows are trying to do very similar things--taking an occupation, either real or imaginary, that we tend to think of as glamorous and heroic, in part because the stories that are told about it usually fall on the pulp end of the scale, and trying to make it mundane, bringing home the fact that the people who engage in that occupation are, just like the rest of us, often too preoccupied to be heroes and adventurers.  But while Universe falls into every trap laid by modern television's fascination with the dark and the transgressive, and can only defuse the heroism inherent in its story by giving us characters who are petty, self-absorbed, and unqualified for their jobs, Rubicon quite reasonably assumes that anyone working for the organization at the show's center would be smart, motivated, and willing to sacrifice quite a lot for the greater good.  It gives us those characters, and then shows us how, for all their good intentions, they fail, simply because they're human beings living in the real world, not characters in a James Bond novel.  Like Universe, Rubicon tries to emphasize its characters' ordinariness by having them speak 'naturally,' pausing to find the right word and sometimes failing to do so, but in this show, the writing and acting are both strong enough that a brief silence, or a look, can convey volumes.  In one wordless scene, Kale, who until that point had been the closest the show had come to fielding a Bond-ian super-spy, is enjoying a domestic moment, reading in bed beside his sleeping partner Walter.  Something troubles him, and for the next few minutes he silently sweeps their apartment for bugs.  Having found and disposed of the device, he gets back in bed, pauses to collect himself, and lays a hand on the still-sleeping Walter's shoulder, protective, but also seeking comfort.  In another moment, Miles is working with another analyst, Julia, with whom he'd previously flirted and gone out for a drink.  The season-long crisis is heating up and there's clearly no time for the two to discuss their fledgling relationship, but in a momentary lull Miles smiles at Julia and reaches for her hand, and all our questions about where they stand are answered.  Not all of this low-key characterization works--when the team recommends the air-strike that so troubles Tanya, Grant's journey to his superior's office to deliver that recommendation is interrupted by a symbolic and unsuccessful attempt to flick a speck of dirt off his shirt--but on the whole Rubicon manages to make its characters seem entirely human and sympathetic, and to bring across both the challenges involved in their chosen line of work, and their reasons for choosing it.

Except when it comes to Will.  Even as the office storylines, both professional and personal, get more and more interesting, Will remains mired in his investigation.  He pursues this investigation doggedly, ignoring advice, warnings, and threats.  This should make him seem heroic and principled, but instead Will comes off as stubborn, inconsiderate, and ridiculously, improbably lucky--during an FBI lockdown of his building, for example, he manages to sneak unseen into his office, which allows him to discover that a listening device placed there had been removed, and to conclude that whoever placed it there works in the building.  In some ways this is another example of how seamlessly Rubicon transplants the conspiracy story into the real world--when the hero of a standard conspiracy thriller is told by a source that to give him classified information would jeopardize their jobs or lives, they are usually throwaway characters we don't care about, but Rubicon draws these characters well enough that we can't ignore the risks they're taking.  The problem is that Will does ignore those risks, and that he himself is so closed off that while we're sympathizing with the people who put themselves on the line for him, he is hard to sympathize with.  Dale came to Rubicon fresh off what should have been a star-making turn on HBO's The Pacific, where he managed to convey his character's intelligence, humor, and passion with a single look, so the fact that Will is such an emotionless blank is clearly a choice, and one that should have worked.  Will has been emotionally shut down since the deaths of his wife and daughter (on 9/11, no less), and his investigation forces him to engage with the world--in positive ways, as when he starts a relationship with his bohemian neighbor, and less positive ones, as when he deals with the aftermath of killing an assassin in self-defense.  But there's something very arrogant and off-putting about Dale's performance.  He never really sells Will's grief for his dead loved ones, his anger at the perversion of justice happening around him, or his determination to prevent further loss of life.  It's hard not to conclude, finally, that the events of the season are nothing more than an intellectual puzzle for Will, a protracted and costly expression of his need to understand, to know, to be right and in control, and yet the show doesn't commit to that reading of the character either, leaving an empty hole at its center.

In the season's final two episodes, Will's investigation dovetails with the team's pursuit of a terrorist named Kateb, who is planning an attack on US soil.  There are some very bold choices in these episodes--doubly so, as they both frustrate viewers' expectations from this kind of story, and clearly demonstrate the writers' belief that, despite its terrible ratings, Rubicon would be granted a second season.  Even if the renewal had happened, I'm not sure I would have said that the season ends well--reintroducing Will into the office storyline allows him to take over it, and overshadow the more developed characters, and the season doesn't so much end as stop--so for all the praise I've heaped on Rubicon, I can't offer it any but the most qualified recommendation.  I'd like it to be watched, and not just by television writers eager to embrace the fashion for 'realism' who maybe need a few pointers in how to do it well.  There are characters here, like Kale, Grant, Miles, and Tanya, who I would have loved to spend more time with and that I'd like other people to get to know (if only because the actors, Howard and Roberts in particular, deserve recognition for their work).  I can't feel too sorry for Rubicon as it aired, but I do regret the show that might have been, the workplace drama about people with an unusual, challenging, important job who are not always the superheroes they need to be to do it well.

Terriers, on the other hand, is a show whose cancellation leaves me full of regret.  Its single season is one of the most perfectly-formed seasons of television I've ever seen, and it quickly became one of the highlights of my TV-watching week.  Which makes it a little embarrassing that I have so little to say about it.  The show's ardent fans--particularly the writers at the AV Club, who have been lobbying for its renewal and greeted the news of its cancellation with wailing and gnashing of teeth--have expended a lot of effort trying to understand just why a show this good should have so thoroughly failed to find an audience.  It's not as if the story, which follows unlicensed private investigators Hank Dolworth (Donal Logue) and Britt Pollack (Michael Raymond-James) as they tramp around the Southern California town of Ocean Beach, solving, and sometimes committing, petty crimes and getting in way over their heads when they stumble upon a shady real estate deal that leaves several people dead, is particularly highbrow, and unlike Rubicon Terriers courts its viewers, dropping them into the action of the season-long mystery in its pilot, interspersing that investigation with well-crafted and engaging standalone stories over the course of the season, and delivering plenty of laughs, most of them rooted in the rapport between Hank and Britt, who are as deeply devoted to yanking each other's chains as they are to looking out for one another.

There's no reason why Terriers shouldn't have been at least a modest success, and attempts to figure out why it instead became one of the new season's lowest-rated shows have concentrated on the show's title and what was apparently a confusing publicity campaign that led some potential viewers to conclude that this was a show about dog-fighting.  To my mind, however, the problem is much simpler--Terriers has no hook.  For just about every series that I love, and quite a few that I don't care for, I could come up with a single sentence that encapsulates what the show does well and why it's worth watching: The Good Wife has the best female characters on TV; Dexter actually gets how to maintain a moral distance from a sympathetic character's immoral actions; Glee has Sue Sylvester.  If I had to come up with a one-sentence pitch for Terriers, the best I could do would be: it's really good.  Which is as true as it is unpersuasive.  When TWoP recapped the series pilot, they likened Terriers to Veronica Mars, which I think gets at the heart of why this show is unsellable.  If Veronica Mars is Southern California-set noir with a twist--that the main character is a teenager girl and the show's action takes place in a high school--Terriers is Veronica Mars without that twist, just plain old Southern California-set noir.  My reaction to the pilot, meanwhile, was that it was well done but familiar, and though I'm glad I stuck with the show I think that this was an accurate assessment.  There was never anything new or original about Terriers, no standout quality to the show.  It was simply very good in almost every respect--the stories, both standalone and season-long, the characters, the dialogue--and though this is both admirable and, sadly, unusual, it's also very hard to sell.

So what did win me over to Terriers?  Mainly, I think, it was the characters.  Logue has made a career out of playing amiable (and sometimes not so amiable) slackers, mostly in comedies, and it's a shock and a thrill to find him digging beneath the surface of that type to create Hank, a well-intentioned, principled man who somehow manages to destroy everything good in his life.  A former cop whose alcoholism cost him his job and his marriage, Hank initially seems to be disaffected and cynical.  In the pilot, an old drinking buddy hires him to find his missing daughter, which leads Hank and Britt to a real estate developer, and eventually to the friend's death.  Enraged, Hank vows to uncover the developer's shady deal and bring him down, which seems to set up a very familiar noir story about an antihero who rediscovers his love of justice.  What the rest of the season reveals is that Hank is proud, self-righteous, and often blinded by his prejudice against the rich and powerful.  All of these flaws lead him to misread situations, bite off more than he can chew, and to vastly overestimate the amount of control he can exercise over the world around him.  Hank is often admirable and heroic, but that heroism comes at a price that he somehow never ends up paying himself, but takes a terrible toll on the people around him.  What's most interesting about this portrait is that it leaves us, like Hank, looking at the damage he's caused and wondering where the wrong turn was.  Every step that Hank takes makes sense at the time, and each is motivated by a desire for justice, and yet they often lead to terrible destruction.  It's a wonderfully slippery take on a character that initially seems so simple, and I would have loved to spend more time puzzling it out.

Britt is a great deal more straightforward.  A former burglar turned straight under Hank's influence (and that of his girlfriend Katie (Laura Allen), whose own attitude towards Britt's criminal past is sometimes disturbingly ambivalent), Britt starts the season as Hank's sidekick and spends it coming into his own, developing his PI skills and his understanding of Hank's limitations and fatal flaws.  Despite his criminal past, Britt is sweet, lovable, and always ready with a joke, and Raymond-James could have coasted on these qualities.  Instead he imbues Britt with intelligence and a bit of a dark side.  He doesn't downplay Britt's lack of maturity, his recognition that he's done terrible things, or his capacity to do them in the future.  Still, Britt is most interesting when he's playing opposite other characters.  He and Katie are deeply in love, but the relationship has reached the point where it needs to either get a lot more serious or collapse under its own weight, and one of the season's central questions is which way it will fall.  There's a lot standing in Britt and Katie's path--he's not quite ready for serious commitment, and she may not be able (or willing) to act as the calm moral center of his tumultuous life--but also a lot to be gained, and the uncertainty of their fate quickly becomes as nail-bitingly tense as the season's central mystery and Hank's journey towards both salvation and damnation.  Britt's partnership with Hank, meanwhile, is the one entirely positive force in his life, and for Hank it is the one relationship where he is doing good rather than damage (for now).  It's the crux of the characters' lives and of the show.  With typical thoughtfulness (and demonstrating the sort of subtlety that probably got them canceled) Terriers's writers avoid the most common trope of partnership-based shows.  Britt and Hank are not the most important people in each other's lives.  There are people that they love more than each other and relationships that matter more to them than their partnership (I do not, for example, think that they make a particularly slashable couple, though I'm sure there are those who disagree).  But that partnership is what makes all those other relationships possible, and when they falter--when Hank burns his last bridge with his ex-wife, or when Britt and Katie flame out--it's there to support them.

Unlike Rubicon, Terriers ends well--there are some false notes in the resolution of the central mystery, but not many, and the season's storylines are tied up so well, and yet in a way that leaves an opening for further adventures, that one can only assume that the show's writers were preparing both for the possibility of renewal and cancellation (the show's final scene, in particular, seems to gesture at the two possibilities).  Which is yet another example of how this show shot itself in the foot by being too clever, too low-key--I'm sorry that Terriers is dead, but the season ends at such a perfect stopping point that even my sorrow is muted.  On the other hand, this means that I can recommend it without reservation--you will absolutely fall in love with Hank, Britt, and their world, but you won't be left too heartbroken when their story ends and it sinks in that there will be no more of them.

Strange Horizons Reviews, November 29-December 2

Matt Denault kicks off this week's Strange Horizons reviews with a very interesting discussion of Darin Bradley's Noise, which he concludes is less interested in the post-apocalpytic setting that's been trumpeted in the book's promotional material than it is in its narrator's crumbling mental stability, and then makes some observations about Bradley's construction of that narrator that reminded me of my own reactions to The Social Network.  Chris Kammerud talks about feeling and cookery in his review of Aimee Bender's The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake.  And Jonathan McCalmont explains, in no uncertain terms, why Robert Rankin's The Japanese Devil Fish Girl and Other Unnatural Attractions is "an utterly lamentable piece of writing."

Strange Horizons Reviews, November 22-26

This week on Strange Horizons, Paul Kincaid is very excited by Richard Powers's Generosity, a novel he calls "one of the most impressive and convincing novels about science I have encountered in a very long time" and much more besides.  Michael Froggatt reviews Believe in People, a collection of Karel Čapek's popular journalism.  Čapek is best-known in the English-speaking world for pioneering the use of 'robot' to describe an artificial worker in his play R.U.R (most recently reference in Dollhouse), but he was also writer (perhaps most notably of the hilarious and moving War With the Newts) and a journalist, and Froggatt discusses how this collection reveals his various interests and preoccupations, including politics, which, for a Czech writer in the years before WWII, was a fraught topic indeed.  Finally, Sara Polsky discusses King Maker, the first volume in Maurice Broaddus's proposed trilogy, which relocates the Arthurian myths to an American inner city, and finds the execution of this intriguing concept somewhat wanting.

Sorry about the recent dearth of proper content.  Getting acclimated at Strange Horizons has coincided with a bit of a dry spell in my reading and TV watching (or rather, there's a lot of TV that I plan to write about, but probably not until December when various seasons wrap up).  That will hopefully change in the coming weeks.

Strange Horizons Reviews, November 15-19

This week on Strange Horizons, T.S. Miller reviews two works that deal with artificial intelligence in the context of gaming, the internet, and the modern technology industry: Ted Chiang's novella The Lifecycle of Software Objects and Greg Egan's novel Zendegi.  Nick Hubble reviews the reviewer when he discusses Bearings, a collection of Gary K. Wolfe's reviews from 1997 to 2001.  A second volume, and a book of essays, are upcoming.  Finally, Michael Levy reviews Hiromi Goto's YA novel Half World, and in a bit of synchronicity, Goto herself discusses the novel at Omnivoracious.

Strange Horizons Reviews, November 8-12

On top of my own review, this week Strange Horizons featured the second installment of Alvaro Zinos-Amaro's series on Isaac Asimov Presents the Great SF Stories.  It's an in-depth look at some classic science fiction shorts, some by familiar names, some with familiar premises (in this installment, Alvaro discusses the story that would inspire The Day the Earth Stood Still).  The review of the first volume is here.

Matt Cheney, in his inimitable style and typical thoughtfulness, discusses the film version of one of the most talked-about outsider SF novels of the last decade with Six Views of Never Let Me Go.

Finally, John Clute's column Scores appears this week, discussing Connie Willis's Blackout/All Clear.

Review: Sleepless by Charlie Huston

My review of Charlie Huston's first foray into science fiction, Sleepless, appears today at Strange Horizons.  I had an odd journey with this book.  Its first hundred pages are so self-serious that it shades into unintentional comedy, but by the time I turned the last page it was a strong contender for one of my favorite reads of 2010, along the way avoiding a lot of pitfalls of SF written by outsiders to the genre.  Read the review to find out why.

The Social Network

When I first heard about The Social Network, I had what I imagine was a near-universal reaction: why would anyone want to make a movie about Facebook?  That bewilderment persisted even as the film's buzz and reception grew more and more ecstatic, so that it wasn't until a few weeks ago, when I finally gave up and let myself look forward to seeing it, that a more pertinent reason for feeling dubious about The Social Network presented itself: this is an Aaron Sorkin film about the internet.  Whether he's getting back at TWoP moderators by having his West Wing characters describe them as chain-smoking, muumuu-wearing Nurse Ratcheds, or bemoaning the fact that just anyone can start a blog and use it to say that Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip is not God's gift to the television medium, or blaming the internet for the birther movement, Sorkin's attitude towards the internet seems fueled by equal parts ignorance and disdain.  Even aided by Ben Mezrich's research into Facebook's founding, it seemed unlikely that Sorkin would be able to comprehend the site's importance, the effect that it's had on online and offline life all over the world, and the new kinds of relationships and communities that it has enabled.

It's a good thing, then, that The Social Network is in no way a film about the internet.  It's a film about business, about class, about the clash between old money and new ideas, and between Wall Street and Silicon Valley.  It's a film about being a nerd, but it is not a film about the internet.  The film is framed by discovery depositions in two lawsuits against Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg)--by his former business partner Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield), alleging that he was driven out of the company he helped created, and by Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss (Arnie Hammer playing both roles with Josh Pence as a body double) and Divya Narendra (Max Minghella), who claim that Zuckerberg stole the idea for Facebook for them--but the events that these depositions flash back to span only the site's first year in existence.  They cut off when Facebook reaches its millionth subscriber--a drop in the bucket, as the film's closing credits concede--and thus well before it achieves its current cultural significance.  As the film ends, Facebook is still restricted to a small number of prestigious colleges, and Sorkin makes much of the appeal that exclusivity holds for Zuckerberg, who creates the site as a substitute for the Harvard final clubs to which he hasn't been invited.  But Facebook has long since been open to just about everyone on the planet with an internet connection, and the decision to make that transition is left out (perhaps because, in reality, exclusivity was not the site's purpose).  The early cut-off point also means that The Social Network fails to address the growing concerns about Facebook's violation of subscriber privacy and its vulnerability to identity theft.  There is, in short, no discussion in The Social Network of why Facebook works, what it means to its subscribers, and how it has changed the online world.  Indeed, the film could easily be a story about any smart young person who comes up with the next big thing, and has to deal, on the one hand, with an entrenched business establishment that wants to exploit him without understanding what he's created, and on the other hand, with the friends who have helped him get started but who are now a drag on his ambitions.  Sorkin and director David Fincher make riveting stuff of this story, but if you didn't know a thing about Facebook going into the movie theater, you'd probably walk out still wondering why the site was important enough to make a movie about.

Rather than being a film about the internet, or even about Facebook, The Social Network is a character study of Zuckerberg.  Or, more precisely, of Sorkin's version of Zuckerberg.  For convenience's sake, I'm going to keep referring to characters and events in the film as if they were their real-world analogues, but it should be noted that the film takes copious and often derogatory liberties with the truth, and is probably best thought of as a work of creative nonfiction, one that borrows significance from reality (and from the pretense that it is representing it accurately) while telling what is either a fictionalized story or just plain fiction.  Just as he did in his last film, Charlie Wilson's War, Sorkin has changed the facts of history and its players to suit the narrative he wanted to tell.  The crucial difference being that while Charlie Wilson's War was a quintessentially Sorkinish story--at least once Sorkin was done with it--The Social Network is neither the sort of narrative, nor does it have the sort of main character, that he tends to gravitate to.

Sorkin has always written about people--usually men--who are the smartest guys in the room, and his Zuckerberg is furiously intelligent, but he lacks the decency and compassion that Sorkin protagonists usually possess.  Whether they're fighting for justice (A Few Good Men), governing (The American President, The West Wing, Charlie Wilson's War), or even producing popular entertainment (Sports Night, Studio 60), Sorkin's characters are trying to do good and make the world a better place.  They're not motivated by personal gain, and certainly not by the desire for status and money, as Zuckerberg and his business partners are.  The closest thing to a typical Aaron Sorkin character in The Social Network are the Winklevoss twins, who hold off on suing Zuckerberg and Saverin because they're "gentlemen of Harvard" and find the idea of squabbling over money and going to court over who thought of what first distasteful.  That's an attitude that would have sat well in Sorkin's White House, whose inhabitants were above such petty concerns as money and status and tended to shake their heads over the litigiousness and money-grubbing of American culture (left unsaid is the fact that the West Wing characters, like the Winklevosses, already have money and status, which ties into my observation that the show often seemed to take place in the corridors of power of a monarchy, not a republic), though in The Social Network it's played for laughs--unlike Sorkin's idealized White House, the real world has no room for gentlemen. 

Zuckerberg is everything that the Winklevosses are not--physically unimposing, unsophisticated, unpopular, middle class at best, and, though the film doesn't make much of this, Jewish.  There are a lot of people like him in Harvard, hungrily looking in on the exclusive parties and clubs of the elite, but Zuckerberg is the sort of person who is left out of any party, even the ones he throws.  With a mouth that runs a mile a minute, eyes that seem to bore into whoever or whatever they're looking at, and absolutely no concern for, or recognition of, the feelings of others, Zuckerberg is all brain and no heart, and as the film's events unfold he alienates both friends and strangers with a mixture of arrogance, selfishness, and rage at a world that hasn't yet handed him everything he wants simply for being the smartest guy in the room.  It's a brilliant performance, and Eisenberg, Sorkin, and Fincher are to be commended for it, but it's not a person.  Zuckerberg is a type--the Angry Nerd.  There's nothing individual about him, nothing that doesn't conform to that type's familiar tropes--arrogance that conceals feelings of inadequacy and inferiority, social ineptitude, resentment of those who are wealthy, attractive, and popular, fear and incomprehension of women that quickly shades into hate.  The Social Network is a sufficiently good film, and Eisenberg is a sufficiently actor, that Zuckerberg always feels human.  It's clear that he has feelings, and that those feelings are neither unusual nor unfamiliar.  Like all of us, he wants to be loved and accepted.  But there's nothing unique to Mark Zuckerberg in this portrait, nothing that makes him a single, individual person rather than an emblem of an entire technophilic, socially maladjusted class that creative types like Sorkin enjoy poking at, possibly because they find them utterly terrifying.

The Social Network opens with a scene in which Zuckerberg is dumped by his girlfriend, to which he responds by posting vile invectives about her on his LiveJournal, and creating a website on which one can rate the attractiveness of Harvard's female undergraduates.  It ends, several years later, with him desperately refreshing her Facebook page, hoping that she will approve his friend request.  The implication is that Zuckerberg created Facebook, made billions of dollars, and changed the face of the internet because to do all these things was easier, for him, than to simply apologize.  This is a conclusion of Rosebud-ish triteness, and though there is a profitable comparison to be made between The Social Network and Citizen Kane, a crucial difference between the two films is that Zuckerberg isn't nearly as rounded a character--compelling and charismatic, even through his cruelty and selfishness--as Charles Kane.  Neither is he as monstrously evil as There Will Be Blood's Daniel Plainview, another modern attempt at the Kane type.  In fact, it's difficult to see just what he's done that makes him eligible for the Kane treatment.  Bad business practice?  The film is adamant that Zuckerberg both stole the Winklevosses' idea and drove Saverin out of the company with nothing to show for his initial investment in it, but it also makes it clear that none of these people had what it took to make Facebook what it is today.  What Zuckerberg did was wrong, but if he hadn't done it, there probably wouldn't have been a billion dollar company for Saverin and the Winklevosses to sue him over.  The film recognizes this even as it paints them as victims, but it doesn't extend the same generosity to Zuckerberg.  In the end, it's hard not to conclude that Zuckerberg is damned not because of what he's done, but because of what he is.  "You're going to go through life thinking that women don't like you because you're a nerd," his soon-to-be ex-girlfriend tells him in the film's opening scene.  "I'm here to tell you, from the bottom of my heart, that it won't be because of that.  It'll be because you're an asshole."  It's a line that defines both the character and the film.  An asshole is what Zuckerberg is and it's what dooms him to misery, and the fact that along the way he's made a billion dollars is entirely ancillary to both of these facts.

In the end, maybe The Social Network is about the internet, in the sense that it reflects Sorkin's distorted view of it, as a means of elevating sociopaths like Zuckerberg to the kind of power and wealth that a civilized society would deny them, for their and everyone else's protection (but then, keeping power out of the hands of people not smart or compassionate or worthy enough to deserve or use it wisely is a theme that underlies a lot of Sorkin's writing).  It's hard to deny that Facebook, which so often rewards shallowness and cruelty, and which has been manipulated by its creators for greedy and exploitative ends, lends itself to this interpretation, but that's somewhat akin to John Sutherland reading Amazon reviews and concluding that there is no worthwhile criticism of books on the internet.  None of which is to say that The Social Network is not a good film or that it doesn't deserve the plaudits that have been, and will be, heaped upon it.  Eisenberg in particular should be singled out for his work, and Sorkin's feat of making, of a story in which people sit in front of their computers a lot and come up with the revolutionary concept of a relationship status indicator, an engrossing and exciting experience, should certainly be rewarded.  But it's not a film that says much to me--not about the internet, and not about being a nerd.  I already know a lot more about both of these subjects than it does.

Ch-ch-ch-changes

July marked AtWQ's fifth anniversary, and in a few months I'll be celebrating my 30th birthday, and these two milestones coming within relatively little time of one another meant that 2010 featured a lot of stock-taking and some serious thought about what the next step in my life, personal and professional, was going to be.  Which is how I ended up involved with ICon 2010 and the SF Encyclopedia, looking for ways to diversify and mix up my experience of fandom and my role within it.  So this summer, when Niall Harrison mentioned that Strange Horizons's editor-in-chief (and freshly-minted World Fantasy Award winner) Susan Marie Groppi was stepping down, and that he was thinking of putting in for the position, I found myself thinking about the soon-to-be-vacant reviews editor job.  The more I thought about it, the more it seemed like the right next step for me to take, and I'm pleased and proud to announce that I've taken it.

In my admittedly biased opinion, Strange Horizons's reviews department is the best in the field, and for breadth of coverage and quality of writing I think it can hold its own alongside some of the best-respected online and print review venues in any genre.  I've enjoyed writing for the magazine, but more than that I've enjoyed reading it, discovering books I might never have otherwise read, and opinions that I could nod my head to or argue with.  Niall, who I have no doubt will do fantastic work as editor-in-chief, left big shoes to fill, and I'm more than a little nervous about stepping into them.  Nervous, but also excited, and hopeful that I can maintain the review department's high quality, and make my own mark on it.

If you're not already reading Strange Horizons's reviews, I hope you'll stop by to take a look (I'm going to start linking to the week's reviews from here every Friday).  And remember that the magazine's fund drive still has a week to run.  There's a prize raffle for donors, and another one for anyone who mentions the fund drive on their blog, so please consider doing one or the other.

Recent Reading Roundup 28

October was a good reading month for me, and November may continue in that fashion, if Richard Hughes's The Fox in the Attic turns out to be as good as its first third promises.  In the meantime, however, here are the books I've read this month.

1. Every Man Dies Alone by Hans Fallada - It seems that every few years the English-speaking world discovers a European author whose works on the Holocaust--preferably published posthumously, after their death at the hands of the Nazis--it can celebrate as the latest, most authentic, and most heart-rending exploration of What It Was Really Like.  I skipped Irene Nemirovsky, and felt rather good about that choice when the ecstatic praise for her novel Suite Francaise gave way to foot-shuffling at the internalized anti-semitism of her earlier novels, and later revelations of her own affinity towards fascism.  I was all set to give Hans Fallada the same treatment when Bookslut's Jessa Crispin began raving about his novels Every Man Dies Alone (also published as Alone in Berlin) and Wolf Among Wolves.  For the first hundred pages of Every Man, it seemed that I had made a mistake, as Fallada, whose altercations with the Nazis during their rise to power and WWII eventually led to his commitment to an insane asylum, seemed to be writing German apologia.  His characters are either innocents who are just trying to get through the war without losing anyone they love, or greedy, lascivious villains, and it just so happens that the former are apolitical, and, if they are members of the Nazi party, have only joined it in order to get by, while the latter are devout Nazis.  As the novel opens, working class couple Otto and Anna Quangel receive the news that their son was killed on the front, while postwoman Eva Kluge learns from her ex-husband just what their son's work for the SS storm troopers entails.  They vow to rebel, in their own small ways.  The Quangels begin distributing anonymous postcards critical of Hitler, the Nazis, and the war, while Eva resigns from the party and leaves Berlin for the countryside.  Meanwhile, the Quangels' neighbors, the Persickes, plot to rob an elderly Jewish neighbor, and an acquaintance of Otto's, Emil Borkhausen, blackmails Eva's ex-husband Enno, who has come under the attention of the Gestapo.
   
   The further I got into Every Man Dies Alone, however, the more complicated and thought-provoking the novel became.  The middle parts of the novel are mostly concerned with the battle of wits between Borkhausen, Enno, Gestapo Inspector Escherich, who, under pressure to discover the distributor of the Quangels' postcards, uses Enno as a patsy, and Frau Haberle, a woman whom Enno cons into protecting him by playing on her antipathy for the Gestapo.  It's a dance driven by fear and selfishness--Esherich knows that Enno is innocent but is terrified of his superiors, Frau Haberle tries to get Borkhausen off Enno's back but is undone by his stupidity and short-sightedness, Enno himself tries to play the noble rebel, but quickly reveals himself to be greedy and cowardly.  These chapters read like a grimmer version of the middle segments of The Master and Margarita, in which characters struggle in vain to discover just the right sort of lies with which to placate a vast bureaucratic machine that devours and guilty and innocent alike, only to realize that there is no right way to behave, that the only way to survive is through luck or power.  It's a take on Nazi Germany--as a very, very, very dark farce--that is unlike anything I've ever read before, and it achieves what the earlier chapters of the novel put my off by attempting, making the German characters, guilty and innocent alike, seem pitiable without sweeping their complicity in their current predicament under the rug.  In its final third, the novel returns to the Quangels, whose luck finally runs out and who find themselves imprisoned, tortured, and subjected to a trial whose outcome is a foregone conclusion.  At the same time, the war turns against Germany, and incursions into its territory, including bombings of Berlin itself, occur with increasing frequency.  That the Nazi regime is crumbling, however, makes no difference to the Quangels (who aren't even aware of this fact, entombed as they are in Gestapo prisons), nor is it their resistance that brings the war to an end, as the novel stresses when it reveals how few people the seditious postcards reached and affected.  That the Quangels are both doomed and ineffective injects a measure of realism to their principled resistance in the last days of their lives, and tempers the righteousness of the novel's final chapters.
   
   It's a bit of a shame, therefore, that Every Man Dies Alone ends with an epilogue that returns to Eva Kluge, who has disowned her son and adopted Borkhausen's, a runaway whom she is teaching good values and who represents the bright future of Germany after the defeat of the Nazis.  It's a return to the stark division between Good and Bad Germans of the novel's early chapters, which the intervening segments had worked so hard to complicate, and a reminder that Every Man Dies Alone was written not for foreign readers but for Germans in the immediate wake of WWII, and is thus a little more consoling than a reader in 2010 would like.  That said, the novel was written in only 24 days, and Fallada died soon after completing it, so it can certainly be forgiven a few rough patches, especially in light of the power of much of its narrative.


2. The Cost of Living by Mavis Gallant - This is the third collection of Gallant's stories that NYRB Classics has published, containing previously uncollected work spanning twenty years in the career of the Canadian-born writer, whose affinity for France eventually led her to relocate to Paris.  Some of the stories in the collection are set there, and focus on the difficulty of immigrants trying to adapt to the city, and on life in the outer reaches of its bohemian society, but others follow characters in Canada, the US, and elsewhere in the world.  Early stories feel very typical of post-war, post-modern short story writers, focusing on strained marriages, lost children, and lonely women, who are brought to life with shocking deftness and in prose so beautiful that it rivals that of the author of the collection's foreword, Jhumpa Lahiri.  In "Autumn Day," the narrator is a young army wife who has joined her husband in post-war France and is renting a room in an out-of-the-way farm while they wait for a housing assignment.  The farm is the setting to her introduction to Europe, to the still-painful ravages of the war, to marriage, and to sex.  In "Thieves and Rascals," a couple is informed by their daughter's boarding school that she has run off with a boy for a weekend, and is being sent home.  They spend the day waiting for her, trying to understand her behavior, and bumping up against the predatory nature of relationships between men and women.  In the title story, the narrator, a music teacher who ran off to Paris years ago, is joined by her sister, now wealthy after the death of their parents, and introduces her to bohemian Paris, causing a clash of cultural and sexual expectations.  In "Bernadette," a liberal Montreal couple thoughtlessly condescend to their poor, uneducated maid, but are brought up short when she turns up pregnant.  In all of these stories, Gallant hones her sentences into fine stiletto knives, crafting images, characters, and sharp observations with only a few well-chosen words.  Later stories, written in the 60s and 70s, shift into more experimental styles and discussions of history, such as the French-Algerian war or the French labor protests in the late 60s, that I have less affinity for, and I thus found these less affecting, but they are still magnificently written, and I will certainly be seeking out NYRB's other collections of Gallant's writing.


3. The Luzhin Defense by Vladimir Nabokov - There was a time, after reading Lolita and Pale Fire, when I was set to make my way through Nabokov's whole bibliography, but somehow that conviction faded away.  The Luzhin Defense is the first Nabokov novel I've read in years, and it more than whets my appetite for more of his writing even though, as the author notes in his foreword, it's a novel most beloved by readers who don't care for his other work.  I can see how that would be.  The Luzhin Defense, which follows the short, sad life of the eponymous chess grandmaster, is a great deal less coy than Lolita and Pale Fire.  There's still a lot of game-playing here--quite literally, of course, and Nabokov makes much of chess imagery and images of game-playing when he describes Luzhin's early life as an unloving, remote child who only comes to life when he discovers chess, and later his attempts, as an adult, to relinquish the game after his obsession with it leads to a nervous breakdown, and to build a normal life with a woman who falls deeply in love with him.  But the one thing Nabokov doesn't play with is the reader's emotions and expectations.  Unlike Lolita and Pale Fire, it's clear what we're meant to be feeling and how we're meant to react to the characters.  Even straightforward Nabokov, however, is pretty twisty by everyone else's standards, and the novel's tone and register change swiftly, from tragedy to dark comedy and back again, as Luzhin's detachment from reality is used alternately for humor and pathos, and as that detachment begins to shade into mental illness.  This is all handled with such incredible skill that I feel more than a little presumptuous praising it--does the world need me to tell it that Vladimir Nabokov was a damn good writer?  Still, he was, and in the space of only 200 pages brings Luzhin, his wife, and her uncomprehending family to vivid life.  It's also refreshing, given the ubiquity of the sports narrative even in stories about cerebral exercises like chess (for example in The Player of Games, which I read immediately before The Luzhin Defense), to read a novel that doesn't treat its main character's complete immersion in a game, and their inability to deal with life outside of the confines of that game, as something normal and healthy.  I don't know if liking The Luzhin Defense means that I won't like the rest of Nabokov's writing, but I'm certainly feeling motivated to find out.


4. Fantastic Night by Stefan Zweig - This is an Israeli-published collection of some of Zweig's short fiction, including the novellas Fantastic Night, Letter from an Unknown Woman, Chess Story, Twenty-Four Hours in the Life of a Woman, and Amok.  After loving Zweig's last work and only novel, Beware of Pity, I was shocked to discover that there are some who consider him sentimental and populist, because it seemed that Pity took what could have been a sentimental story and made something sharper out of it.  These novellas demonstrate that Zweig was not always so clever.  Chess Story is the best of the bunch, describing a match between a mercenary, uncouth grandmaster, and an older man, a former dilettante who immersed himself in chess in order to survive torture by the Nazis.  Its comparison of the two players' attitudes towards the game is interesting, but carries a definite whiff of class prejudice.  The older player represents the old world--he was a lawyer for the now-defunct Austrian aristocracy and was tortured because he had knowledge of their concealed money--while his opponent comes from a working class background, and is described as a boor for whom chess is but a means to achieving fame and fortune.  Still, this is by far the least sentimental story in the collection, whose characters are forever vowing eternal love or service, preparing to die for their love, for their sins, or for shame, and writing each other long, overwrought letters about these experiences (all but one story in the collection has a frame narrative, usually a letter or manuscript).  It's also a little disturbing just how frequently the suffering characters are women who do not behave in a socially acceptable manner.  In Unknown Woman, the title character can only consummate her love for the recipient of her letter, a wealthy playboy, by convincing him that she is a prostitute, which eventually leads to her and her child's deaths.  In Amok, a doctor in a German colony first insults, and then vainly tries to save the life of a woman who has become pregnant out of wedlock.  Zweig was a product of his time so I can't blame him for seeing this sort of behavior as beyond the pale (or for recognizing that his society did) but as a product of mine, his emphasis on women's inappropriate expressions of their sexuality, and on the suffering they endure because of them, makes me even less likely to buy into the sentimentality of his stories.


5. The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin - OK, I give in.  For the better part of a decade I've been left out of the party that fandom has been holding for Le Guin.  I admired her, to be sure, and liked a lot of her writing, but I didn't quite feel the overpowering love that a lot of fans seem to have for her writing.  Even The Left Hand of Darkness, which I liked a great deal, left me with some reservations.  Now I've read The Dispossessed and, yeah, I get it, because this is an incredible novel--beautifully written, inventive, and still, forty years after its publication, so very different from any work of science fiction I've ever read.  Shevek is a member of a utopian group that, nearly 200 years ago, left its home on the planet Urras for a hardscrabble but hopefully egalitarian life on its moon, Anarres.  A physicist whose work has long been stymied by jealous colleagues, and whose desire to collaborate with Urrasti colleagues is viewed with distrust, Shevek travels Urras in order to complete his work, to learn about Urras, and to spread the word about Anarresti way of life.  What's most remarkable about The Dispossessed is how effortless it seems when really, Le Guin is doing so many things at the same time: laying out the founding philosophy of Shevek's society, describing the ways in which that philosophy is implemented in every aspect of Anarresti life, and the ways in which human nature subverts and corrupts it, describing various nations on Urras and their reactions to and perceptions of Anarres, as well as the reactions that individuals and groups on Urras have to Shevek's presence, and finally, telling Shevek's own story, from his childhood to his meeting with his partner, to the early stages of his career, to his growing disillusionment with the scientists and officials around him, and his realization that even an anarchist society will eventually develop structures and hierarchies, to his decision to travel to Urras.  All of these elements blend together into a story that is compulsively readable even though hardly anything exciting happens--Shevek's career goes through ups and downs, he's separated from his partner and child and then reunited with them, he is alternately entranced and disgusted by life on Urras.  I also appreciated the complexity of Le Guin's construction of both Urrasti and Anarresti societies.  Though it's clear that she's on the latter's side (and though I think that in one respect, at least, her construction of utopia strains credulity--I don't believe that simply setting out to create a society free of racial and sexual prejudice is enough to abolish it from both the conscious and subconscious levels, as Anarres has done), she doesn't shy away from showing us what's good about Urras, and what's bad about Anarres, and from concluding that even the kindest and most fair society needs to be shaken up from time to time.  The Dispossessed ends on as low-key a note as it began with, but nevertheless I found myself wishing that it had gone on for much longer, so that I could spend more time with Shevek, and on Urras and Anarres.

Now All Doctor Who Until the End

Syfy has not only canceled Caprica, but has pulled it from its schedule, promising to air the first season's remaining episodes some time in 2011.

Look, it's not as if you couldn't see this coming.  Hell, you could see it coming the moment the idea of a space-adventure-less, soap opera prequel to Battlestar Galactica was bandied about, and Caprica's pilot pretty much confirmed that this was not a show interested in wooing either Galactica's fans or Syfy's traditional viewership (which Syfy is now trying to with the just-announced, and hilariously-titled, Battlestar Galactica: Blood & Chrome).  Nor, to be honest, can I find it in my heart to grieve too much for a show that seemed already, in its last few episodes, to be veering towards Galactica's mythology in an all too familiar way.  I liked some things about Caprica, and thought that it had serious problems, and if I ever manage to watch the entire first season I might write about both, but the one aspect of the show that kept me coming back was that it seemed disconnected from Battlestar Galactica, and a lot more thoughtful and interesting about issues--religion and religious fundamentalism, prejudice, terrorism--than Galactica ever was.  In the episodes aired this fall, however, the handling of some of these issues verged on Galactica-esque ham-handedness, and one character was even revealed to be in contact with Six-esque projection.  Which means that even if the second season had happened, I might not have tuned in. 

So what's frustrating to me this morning isn't so much the news of Caprica's death as the fact that that death is just the latest in a long line of flawed-but-interesting science fiction series (with, incidentally, meaty and prominent roles for women)--The Middleman, The Sarah Connor Chronicles, Dollhouse--that have been killed off over the last few years, leaving science fiction fans with a pretty barren TV landscape populated mostly by shlocky Spy Fi, feather-light monster of the week series, and third-rate Galactica and Lost imitations.  There's a reason that every single show that I've written positively and at length about in the last year has been a mainstream series--because no one is doing interesting, or even particularly watchable, work in TV science fiction, and though things are slightly better for fantasy (I may not like True Blood but I can respect its accomplishments, and I'm looking forward to HBO's Song of Ice and Fire) and horror (please let The Walking Dead be good), I'm not seeing much hope on the horizon for science fiction.  Right now, the only show that approaches decent science fiction on TV is Doctor Who, and that should be a sad commentary even for people who love it.

A Shire of Shopkeepers: Thoughts on The Hobbit

The most that can be said for the dwarves is this: they intended to pay Bilbo really handsomely for his services; they had brought him to do a nasty job for them, and they did not mind the poor fellow doing it if he would; but they would have done their best to get him out of trouble, if he got into it, as they did in the case of the trolls at the beginning of their adventures before they had any particular reasons for being grateful to him.  There it is: dwarves are not heroes, but calculating folk with a great idea of the value of money; some are tricky and treacherous and pretty bad lots; some are not, but are decent people like Thorin and Company, if you don't expect too much.

Last week's news that the long-beleaguered production of The Hobbit is finally getting on its way, and that certain roles, including Bilbo and Thorin, had been cast, sent me back to the book itself for the first time in nearly a decade.  I reread The Lord of the Rings every few years, but The Hobbit is less dear to my heart and thus less frequently returned to.  What brought me back this time was the desire to gain some grounding in the text from which to wonder how Peter Jackson and Philippa Boyens were going to adapt the novel, which in my recollection was childish and episodic, into something of a piece with their Lord of the Rings trilogy.  With the exception of Martin Freeman as Bilbo (possibly the most inspired piece of casting of the last few years, if only because it's made me realize just how much Bilbo and Arthur Dent have in common), the names being bandied about for the film's major and minor roles left me scratching my head.  Richard Armitage, who has smoldered as John Thornton in North & South and as Guy of Gisborne in Robin Hood, seems an odd choice to play Thorin, whose only heroic moment in The Hobbit happens off-page, and who is otherwise pragmatic, unromantic, and avaricious.  And to make much of the rest of the dwarfs, who are barely more than scenery in the book, seemed even stranger.  Both choices indicate that Jackson and Boyens are trying to create another fellowship to mirror the one in The Lord of the Rings, and to focus the film on derring-do even though it's mostly through trickery (and a lot of luck) that the day is won.  For a while in the early aughts just about every adaptation of a fantasy novel into film was marred by its producers' thoughtless determination to imitate the epic style and scope of the Rings films, whether or not the source material could support this--the first Narnia film was a particularly bad example.  Looking at the casting for Jackson's Hobbit, I couldn't help but wonder if he was in danger of making the same mistake.

Tolkien's celebrated affinity for worldbuilding means that The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings clearly take place in the same invented world, but it's precisely at those points that the two works overlap that the differences between their Middle Earths are most apparent.  There is danger in The Hobbit, and the characters face many merciless, amoral foes.  But evil, which drives the antagonists in The Lord of the Rings, is absent from the book--its villains are merely bad.  There is, as well, no sense of grandeur in The Hobbit, nor of the high stakes that are perpetually in the background, and finally the foreground, in The Lord of the Rings.  Nowhere is the gulf between the two books' tones more apparent than in the chapter "Riddles in the Dark," which Tolkien rewrote when the idea for The Lord of the Rings began germinating in him.  In the chapter's original version, Gollum bets the ring willingly and accepts its loss with good grace.  The new version feels very much as if Bilbo has temporarily stepped into another novel--a grimmer, darker one--which is exactly what he has done, but which leaves The Hobbit, and particularly those later chapters in which Bilbo cavalierly uses the ring (which in the new "Riddles in the Dark" is treated as a character with its own desires, as it is for the whole of The Lord of the Rings), feeling rather wobbly (a similar wobbliness afflicts Gandalf's attempts to explain, at the council of Elrond, why he spent so much time and energy assisting Thorin in his quest to regain his grandfather's treasure, and why this victory was significant in the war against Sauron). 

To put it simply, the characters in The Hobbit don't care about the same things that the characters in The Lord of the Rings do.  They don't want to save the world; they're not interested in vanquishing evil.  They just want to get paid.  The whole novel is driven by money, and the desire to gain or regain it.  The quest driving the novel could easily be reconfigured as one for revenge, or to reclaim a lost birthright, but the dwarfs themselves leave no doubt that what they're after is the legendary treasure of Thror--as Bilbo himself points out late in the novel, to defeat Smaug would take a hero, whereas the dwarfs have brought with them a burglar.  The villain of the piece is a dragon, which many myths and fairy tales link with avarice and possessiveness--to sleep on a pile of gold is the ultimate expression of greed for its own sake--and Smaug, whose reaction to the theft of a single item from his enormous hoard is "the sort of rage that is only seen when rich folk that have more than they can enjoy suddenly lose something that they have long had but have never before used or wanted," epitomizes these qualities.  The good guys, meanwhile, are banking on making bank--it's never stated out loud, to Tolkien's good fortune, but reading between the lines it's easy to guess that Gandalf is helping the dwarfs in expectation that he will be compensated, and even Bilbo, the most adventurous and least greedy character in the novel (who is also the richest, at its outset), holds on to the note promising him a fourteenth share of the treasure throughout his travails.  There is, on both their parts, a sort of businesslike attitude, like the one attributed to the dwarfs in the quote that opens this post--a sense that, though they would probably still go above and beyond the call of duty even if no money was at stake, seeing as it is at stake, they expect to be paid.

Money, and specifically Thror's treasure, drives much of the plot of The Hobbit.  When Thorin is captured by the forest elves, he refuses to state his business in the Mirkwood, fearing--with, we're led to believe, some justification--that their king will only release him in exchange for a share of the treasure.  When Bilbo and the dwarfs escape the elves and arrive in Lake Town, the people are overjoyed at the return of the king under the mountain, but the master of the town fears for his business ties with the forest king.  Smaug is killed, with relatively little fuss and almost no input from our heroes, several chapters before the novel comes to an end, and what takes up these remaining chapters is a dispute over how to distribute his hoard: the people of Lake Town and the elves initially believe that Thorin is dead and march on the mountain to claim the treasure for themselves; when they discover that he is alive, they demand compensation for the destruction of Lake Town; Thorin refuses, and a tense and volatile siege follows.  The further I read in The Hobbit, the clearer it became that the disconnect between it and The Lord of the Rings wasn't one of tone or complexity, but of subgenre.  Tolkien, who is credited with inventing, or at least codifying, epic fantasy, wasn't practicing it here.  Instead, The Hobbit reads like a very strange cross between sword & sorcery, whose characters are mercenaries rather than heroes, trying to make a buck rather than save the world, and the modern reaction to Tolkien's own conception of epic fantasy, which replaces honor, chivalry, and noble kings with messy political systems whose rulers are more concerned with accruing power and wealth than in triumphing over evil.

In other words, the argument can be made that Tolkien's starting position for both Middle Earth and his take on fantasy was closely in line with what modern fantasy writers are doing today.  That he, like them, imagined a fantasy world in which people sought money and power, and thought only of their own petty concerns.  The difference between Tolkien and modern fantasists is that he didn't like what he saw, and set out to change it.  The Hobbit is quite decidedly set against greed and the desire for wealth, not only through the character of Smaug, but through Thorin and his reaction to regaining his grandfather's treasure.  When Bilbo and the dwarfs are set loose in Smaug's hoard, the effect that the gold and jewels have on them is explicitly likened to a magic spell, a lingering effect of the dragon's presence, and Tolkien uses the same terms to describe this spell that he will later use to describe the lure of the ring.  Bilbo's theft of the Arkenstone is described almost as a compulsion, and recalls Pippin's obsession with, and theft of, the palantir.  Characters who value gold above all things come to a sticky end--Smaug, Thorin (who forgives Bilbo only when he knows that he is dying, and can't take the treasure that Bilbo stole from him to the afterworld), and even the master of Lake Town, who steals the money meant for the town's reconstruction, then dies alone in the wilderness.  Bilbo, meanwhile, learns to relinquish wealth--he gives up the Arkenstone, and his fourteenth share in the treasure, in the hopes of making peace between Thorin and the besiegers, and when he returns home takes only a small reward from the dwarfs, and even leaves unmolested the treasure that he and the dwarfs took from the trolls on their way out.

All this isn't enough for Tolkien.  He doesn't just want to make the point that money is evil.  He wants to say that it isn't even important.  Modern fantasy writers consider characters like the dwarfs in the quote above, who are decent enough if you don't expect too much from them, to be the holy grail of the genre, but for Tolkien, characters who were businessmen rather than heroes were worse than useless.  The final chapters of The Hobbit see the petty concerns of the novel and its characters subtly replaced, making way for the ones that will occupy The Lord of the Rings.  Bard of Lake Town, who is described as grim-faced but steely, and is the descendant of the last king of Dale, is a proto-Aragorn, and when he slays Smaug the people of Lake Town mutter that the master of the town "may have a good head for business ... but he is no good when anything serious happens!"  The novel climaxes with the army of Thorin's cousin Dain about to face off against the joint forces of the men of lake town and the elves of the forest, though the elven king is loath to start a "war for gold."  The battle is interrupted by the arrival of a goblin army, which gives them all something serious, something meaningful, to fight over.  At the end of that battle Thorin is dead, the more open-minded Dain is king under the mountain, Bard is cemented in his leadership role (and later rebuilds Dale), and the first shots of The War of the Ring are fired.  As much as The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings differ in tone, at the very end of the first novel one can sense the second coming into being--it describes a world passing from an age of commerce to a heroic age.

Of course, Tolkien was no communist.  Bilbo decides to renounce treasure, but not all worldly possessions.  He still returns to the Shire an even wealthier man than he was before, and his first act upon returning is to drive off those who would claim his property.  Tolkien may not like the pursuit of wealth as a goal in its own right, but he certainly has no objection to being comfortably well off (so long as you don't work too hard to make that money, I suppose).  So in its own way, I find The Hobbit even more reactionary and troubling than The Lord of the Rings--probably because the battle between good and evil feels more remote from my every day concerns than the questions of the role that money and the pursuit of it play in my life.  At the same time, it's a reminder that, for all that we like to mock Tolkien for his linguistic obsessions and compulsive worldbuilding, he had a very definite worldview, which he expressed in his novels with skill and intelligence.  That's something worth remembering even if we don't like what he was trying to say.  I can easily imagine Peter Jackson pouring a heroic story into The Hobbit's mold, and I might even enjoy that movie, or at least find it less disconcerting than I did this reread of the novel.  But a part of me wishes that he will try to tackle the novel as it is, just to see what he, and we, make of it.

The Player of Games by Iain M. Banks

On the last installment of my quest to read all of Iain M. Banks SFnal output (I will get to the non-M novels one of these days, I promise), I sadly concluded that though there's a lot that I admire about Banks's writing, particularly his flights of invention, his flashes of humor and wit, and the grand achievement that is the Culture, there's always something a little off about his novels.  They've been, at various points, too shapeless, too sprawling, too caught up in the fun of spinning exotic locations and breathtaking set pieces, and, most crucially, too muddled in their handling of their themes, and particularly of the Culture sequence's repeated questioning of the right of an egalitarian, socialist, humanistic utopia to interfere in the business of other civilizations and impose its values upon them.  Along comes The Player of Games, the second Culture novel, which is as perfectly formed and streamlined as other Culture novels have been meandering, whittling away the complications and digressions which have enlivened, but also weighed down, Banks's other novels to reveal a single, linear narrative and a very straightforward story that arrives at its point like an arrow slamming into a bulls-eye.  In terms of craft and construction, The Player of Games is undoubtedly the best Banks novel I've read, and one of the most enjoyable to boot.

Jernau Morat Gurgeh is the Culture's most accomplished and celebrated player of games, a master of games of skill, strategy, and intellect from dozens of civilizations, and he is bored to death.  In Consider Phlebas, the first Culture novel, and in later novels in the sequence, those who oppose it invariably return to the argument that the Culture, an anarchist utopia governed by artificial intelligences, breeds decadence and hedonism in its citizens, makes them soft and vulnerable, and deprives them of a sense of purpose and meaning, and in the early chapters of The Player of Games Gurgeh seems to embody all of these flaws.  He has dedicated his life to the trivial and meaningless, to becoming the very best at artificial competitions with no objective value and no real world purpose, and all it's brought him is unhappiness.  He cuts an unimpressive figure in the novel's first segment, drifting from party to party, and from lover to lover, in a haze of bitterness, envying and undermining the happiness and enthusiasm of those he encounters, desperate for a new challenge.  What soon becomes clear, however, is that in some ways Gurgeh is decidedly unCultured.  He cares about winning.  He wants to be the first to achieve certain victories.  He wants to play for stakes.  In a conversation with a family friend, he muses that one of the games he's mastered was imported from a culture where it was played for wagers of money, where losing a game had real world consequences, often disastrous ones. Did bringing the game to the Culture, where money doesn't exist, Gurgeh asks, diminish it somehow? When a drone he's befriended offers to help him win a perfect game at one of his specialties--an achievement unprecedented within the Culture--Gurgeh is so hungry for the accomplishment that he cheats.

The opportunity to save both his soul and his reputation comes to Gurgeh in the form of a representative of Contact, the Culture's outreach division, who wants him to travel to the empire of Azad and play the game of the same name.  Normally, Gurgeh is told, an imperial system is too inefficient and cumbersome to support a spacefaring civilization, but Azad's empire--ruled by an aristocracy, obsessed with hierarchy, bolstered by codified social, racial, and sexual prejudices, and engaged in the conquest and subjugation of its neighboring species--has survived into this phase of the species's expansion because of the game from which it takes its name, a game that models the empire itself.  All social positions, from the lowliest clerk to the emperor himself, are won by playing Azad, and the philosophy of playing the game successfully is also the philosophy of ruling the empire.  The Culture, having concluded that to attempt to dismantle the empire from without would bring about only loss of life, and cause the survivors to resent their conquerors even more than they did their former oppressors, has chosen a tactic of diplomacy, and dispatches Gurgeh to play in Azad's great games, a months-long tournament in which the emperor himself plays for his throne.

The idea of a game that models reality can't help but resonate with a reader in 2010.  Online multiplayer games like Second Life have sought to mimic the full complexity of reality, while other, more fantastic games derive much of their appeal from allowing players to develop nuanced relationships and alliances.  Writing in 1988, Banks would most likely have been thinking of role-playing games and tabletop games.  In both periods, players of games have had to contend with the accusation that they are investing time, energy, and money in unreal achievements and meaningless victories, and The Player of Games can therefore be read as geek wish-fulfillment: imagine if all your years of playing D&D somehow endowed you with the necessary skills to rule a fantasy kingdom.  There is, in fact, a very familiar fantasy story at the core of The Player of Games, the one about an underdog or an outsider who gains fame and fortune by besting the ruling elite at their own game.  As he would later do in Matter, Banks, by standing outside the fantasy setting and telling its story from a remove, not only changes its genre to science fiction but questions its underlying assumptions--that a game is a good basis for a system of government, that an outsider, however skilled, will be allowed to triumph over the established ruling class, that it is possible change the system by playing by its rules. 

It's interesting to compare The Player of Games to Suzanne Collins's The Hunger Games, another science fiction story which posits a political system that is structured around, and shaped by, a game.  But where Collins imagines that the system and its basic assumptions can be challenged from within the game (I speak here only of the first book, not having read the sequels), Banks tells a more complicated tale.  Unsurprisingly, Azad the empire is more than willing to pervert the purity of the game in order to ensure its own survival--when Gurgeh meets one of a handful of female players, she informs him that she has little chance of making it past the tournament's first round, which is played in groups of ten, as the supposedly randomized system never places more than a single female player in a group, allowing the other players gang up on her; in The Hunger Games, the protagonists' defiance of the game's rules galvanizes the public watching at home, but when Gurgeh advances to the tournament's higher levels, he is informed that, as a condition of being allowed to play, he will have to participate in the falsification of reports that he has lost.  In fact, to call such acts a perversion of the game is to miss the point, because the purpose of Azad is not to shape the empire but to reinforce its status quo, and though outside interference is sometimes necessary in order to achieve this goal, most of the time the game achieves it on its own.  To win at Azad one must think as an Azadian, to value force of arms over diplomacy, conquest over cooperation, possession over sharing.  And, as we discover while following Gurgeh up the tournament's rungs, the more proficient and successful one becomes at Azad, the more appealing these values come to seem.

There is action in The Player of Games--before opting to politely ask Gurgeh to fake a loss, the Azad government tries to eliminate him by making several attempts on his life, and trying to entrap him in a compromising position with two Azad women--and there are the typical Banksian feats of invention, such as the holy planet on which the final games are held, whose single, planet-girding equatorial continent is repeatedly swept by a moving, never-extinguished wall of fire.  But the business of the novel is the game itself, Gurgeh's repeated matches against the increasingly skilled, increasingly desperate opponents the empire throws at him, culminating with a game against the Emperor Nicosar himself.  The novel is essentially constructed like a classic sports movie, with challenges and setbacks offset by triumphs, and it is a tribute to Banks's skill that he manages to make a relatively long sequence of these--Gurgeh plays six games in the tournament, most of which last several days and sometimes take a whole chapter, or several, to describe--seem effortless and engaging.  Like Walter Tevis in The Queen's Gambit (whose final segment, in which the chess genius heroine travels to Russia to beat the Communists at their own game in a politically charged tournament, bears more than a passing resemblance to The Player of Games), he manages to make the exchange of move and counter-move and the formulation and reconsideration of strategies both thrilling and believable, even though, unlike Tevis, the game he's describing is entirely invented.  What's revealed in these descriptions is how much Gurgeh is changed by his encounter with Azad, the empire and the game, how both make him crueler, more ruthless, more eager for victory.  How they foster in him feelings of possessiveness and sadism that should be foreign to a Culture citizen.  This is overdone at points, but as a metaphor for immersion in a foreign culture, and the loss of identity that can accompany it, the game is quite compelling.

If there's one flaw in The Player of Games, it's that Gurgeh doesn't see what any reader will guess, simply from the novel's sports story shape, and what the narrative itself hints at quite heavily--that there is a political reason for his presence in Azad, and that despite their protestations to the contrary, Contact want him to go all the way to the final round and play against Nicosar.  That final game, unsurprisingly, models a war between the Culture and Azad.  It is in playing this game that Gurgeh, who has by that point become at least partially subsumed into Azad culture, for example participating in the cruel sport of Nicosar's court, and is obsessed with winning the tournament, discovers that he has always been playing as the Culture: "He'd habitually set up something like the society itself when he constructed his positions and deployed his pieces; a net, a grid of forces and relationships, without any obvious hierarchy or entrenched leadership, and initially quite profoundly peaceful."  Playing Azad becomes Gurgeh's way back to the Culture.  Throughout his and Nicosar's match Gurgeh thinks of their game as something intimate and beautiful, but when he speaks about it with Nicosar, the emperor expresses disgust: "you treat this battle-game like some filthy dance.  It is there to be fought and struggled against, and you've attempted to seduce it."  Gurgeh, whose previous attitude to Culture values had been entirely cavalier, is shocked by this glimpse at the naked ambition and lust for conquest that underpin both empire and game into a simple and heartfelt affirmation of the Culture's creed, admitting that though, as Nicosar says, life isn't intrinsically fair, "it's something we can try to make it ... A goal we can aim for,  You can choose to do so, or not.  We have."  The novel's ending reads like a version of War Games in which the game-playing computer not only averts nuclear war by concluding that the only winning option is not to play but also causes the collapse of the Soviet Union.  Instead of starting a war with Azad, the Culture sends Gurgeh to play it, so that it can avoid not only the destruction of Azad but the loss of self that it will incur by becoming a conquering, colonial force.

Of all the Culture novels I've read, none have been so firmly on the Culture's side as The Player of Games.  Other novels have featured sympathetic characters--in Consider Phlebas, the lead and main point of view character--who voice harsh criticism of the Culture, its arrogance in imposing its way of life on others, the near-religious zeal and self-righteousness with which it pursues this goal, its blindness and dismissiveness towards other, not entirely illegitimate, ways of life.  Most other Culture novels involve a certain degree of cold-blooded number crunching on the part of Contact and Special Circumstances, weighing an incalculable loss of life here against an even greater one there, and the chance of some greater good down the line.  This is all a sham, of course--Banks is always on the Culture's side and wants us there as well, but he usually makes us work for that conclusion, and feel a little guilty for reaching it.  Not so in The Player of Games.  Not only is the novel's emotional arc that of a man who loses his identity as part of the Culture, and then finds it where he least expected it, but the novel works very hard to make Azad as cruel and off-putting as possible.  In one sequence, Gurgeh, who is on the verge of losing to his latest opponent and feeling somewhat philosophical about this, is galvanized into playing as he has never played before by a tour of the capital city's slums.  Over some half-dozen pages, he sees indigents dying in the gutters, starving women selling themselves, gangs beating ethnic minorities while a crowd watches impassively, the mad paraded in the streets for the public's amusement, and the poor wasting away in an overcrowded, understaffed hospital.  By the end of the novel there can be no doubt that it is evil, and that the Culture is not only right to try to topple the empire, but justified in its means of achieving this.

Much as I enjoyed The Player of Games, this lack of ambivalence towards the Culture gives me pause.  It reinforces the sense that the reason the novel is so successful and enjoyable is that it aims lower than other Banks novels, and is a great deal simpler.  Part of the fun of the Culture novels is their ambiguity, their cheerful admission that the Culture, in trying its best to do the right thing, may be committing a terrible wrong.  This is not to say that there is no playfulness or subversion of expectation in the novel--on the issue of immersion in a foreign culture, for example, The Player of Games is impressively slippery, simultaneously arguing that it is impossible to embrace one cultural identity without losing another, and that culture imprints too deeply on a person's psyche, expressing itself even when it's supposedly been abandoned.  But it seems almost wrong for a Culture novel not to be ambiguous about the Culture--if nothing else, it seems strange for the second Culture novel to be so cheerfully pro-Culture, especially coming as it does on the heels of the dour, cynical Consider Phlebas.  One needs, I think, some grounding in how the Culture works, from novels like Use of Weapons and Excession, to inject the necessary measure of ambivalence into the novel's flag-waving, and I certainly wouldn't want The Player of Games to be anyone's introduction to the Culture.  It stands to reason that a novel as straightforward as The Player of Games--a straightforwardness that extends to its structure as well as its themes--will be less complex, less subtle, than the ones that ramble and present a problem from many different angles.  Maybe that's the trade-off one makes with Banks, and maybe this is the place to conclude, as I did at the end of my review of Matter, that he will never write a novel that I consider entirely perfect.  Still, The Player of Games leaves me more hopeful about Banks's skill than Matter did, and more eager to seek out more of his novels--if only so I can find in them what's missing here.

Thoughts on the New TV Season, 2010 Edition, Part 2

After the appetizer, the deluge.  This post doesn't even cover all of the shows that premiered in the last week.  It leaves out the interchangeable lawyer shows (The Defenders, The Whole Truth), the forgettable cop shows (Chase, Blue Bloods, Law & Order: Los Angeles), and the lamentable comedies (Better With You, Raising Hope, Running Wilde).  Which is not to say that the shows I am going to write about have won my heart, or are even going to get the chance to do so.  Though I will probably keep watching at least a few of these to see if they get better (and am still watching Nikita for the same reason, though increasingly asking myself why I bother), there's been, as yet, no Good Wife this season, no show that came out the gate completely irresistible (though Terriers, which has maintained its promising blend of well-crafted characters and slightly sleazy mysteries into its third episode, comes closest).

• Boardwalk Empire - This is probably a case of high expectations working against a good but not quite stellar show.  Boardwalk Empire is HBO's latest prestigious, no expense spared production.  Plus, it's a period piece about an important time and place in American history (Atlantic City in 1920, the eve of Prohibition, when the city becomes a gateway for bootlegged Canadian alcohol).  Plus, it's a crime drama.  How can one help but expect a cross between Deadwood and The Sopranos?  Perhaps inevitably, Boardwalk Empire fails to live up to such a fantastical hope, but even taken on its own merits, it falls a little short of what it might be.  The historical recreation feels a little honky-tonk.  This might have something to do with the period--the 20s are a weird decade to get a handle on, a period in which the 20th century finally shook off the last vestiges of the 19th but still hadn't arrived at the stylistic and cultural conventions that would define it--and the setting--a resort town naturally gravitates towards the gaudy and kitsch.  But what's missing from Boardwalk Empire is the magic that Deadwood achieved seemingly without trying, of making the visual tropes of a by-then hoary and cliché-ridden genre not only fresh, but lived-in and immediate.  Boardwalk Empire feels historical, and thus remote from present-day concerns, in a way that Deadwood never did.
  
  This is particularly strange when one considers how relevant the series's topic should be.  The main character is Enoch "Nucky" Thompson (Steve Buscemi), a local politician and, as one of his lieutenants describes him, half a gangster, thoroughly comfortable with graft, election-rigging, and vice, but still a kind, warm-hearted man.  As the person in control of the Atlantic City waterfront, he initially sees Prohibition as an opportunity to become rich, as he ups the price of now-illegal liquor and creates supply lines to New York and Chicago.  His new partners, however, are not your friendly neighborhood crooks, enablers of the sins of the flesh who are kind to women and small children, but serious bad guys, with whom Nucky may be too soft to deal.  This should be a familiar story, in an era in which the lessons of Prohibition have been so thoroughly ignored, but instead it feels familiar in all the wrong ways--we know where Nucky and the rest of America are going, how this ill-conceived and high-handed attempt at social engineering will instead create and help to cement the power of multiple organized crime empires that will adversely affect the lives of millions of people.  At least in its pilot, Boardwalk Empire feels as if it's just taking us through that familiar story one beat after another, rather than using a historical backdrop to tell a new, or perhaps timeless, one.  It could be that that's what the show is interested in doing, but so far it seems to be indulging in some of historical fiction's worst excesses--an infatuation with period detail and a sentimental treatment of the past.  When Nucky's reckless protege steals a shipment of whiskey--with the help of a young Al Capone--and kills its couriers, it feels less like a horrible murder than a historical reenactment, too cute and dressed up to be truly affecting.  For all that it's well done--and despite Buscemi's strong presence at its center--so far that's my reaction to Boardwalk Empire as a whole.


• Lone Star - Another case of a show undermined by high expectations, though this time I'm having trouble seeing where those expectations were coming from.  EW's Michael Aussiello and The AV Club's Todd VanDerWerff have both called Lone Star the best pilot of the fall, and NPR's Linda Holmes has called its abysmal ratings--which have resulted in the first cancellation of the fall--a sign of the American public's ingratitude and lack of appreciation for cable-style quality shows, and a sure guarantee that networks will stop trying to make them.  But a network attempt to ape cable dramas is exactly what Lone Star is, with all the flaws and compromises that implies.  The main character, Bob, is a con man who has been working an oil scam in two Texas towns: Midland, where he has taken in his sweet, working-class girlfriend's parents and all their friends, and Huston, where he's wormed his way into the confidence of an oil tycoon, in part by marrying his daughter.  Raised into grifting by his father, Bob is still partnered up with him, but growing more guilty and more determined to stop the people he's come to love from being destroyed by his actions, and he ends the pilot by breaking with his father and deciding to turn his lies into truth--while concealing his double life and remaining married to, and deeply in love with, two women.
  
  Lone Star is well made, but at almost every turn it's possible to see that where a cable series would be willing to challenge its audience, this show has been made less threatening, and its rough edges filed off.  So Bob is sweet and tormented (and James Wolk does a good line in staring soulfully at the camera), still under his father's thumb but really an idealistic and loving person determined to do right.  There's no examination in the pilot of his complicity in his actions, of the inherent dishonesty that would have to lie at the very heart of his character in order for him to have so thoroughly deceived everyone who loves and trusts him, and at no point are we invited to feel anything but sympathy and pity for him.  Similarly, his two love interests are both adorable to the point of flawlessness, his father is not just manipulative but emotionally abusive, repeatedly telling Bob that no one will ever really know him or love him, and his Huston wife's rich family are slimy and distrustful.  So no, Lone Star was probably never going to be challenging, quality drama, but it might have been a good high-concept soap, focusing on familial and business intrigue as Bob and his father try to outsmart one another and Bob's two lives come close to colliding.  Instead, the pilot and second episode spend more time and energy on melodrama than they do on con stories, and it's therefore a little hard to see what we missed with the show's lightning-quick cancellation.


• Detroit 1-8-7 and Hawaii Five-0 - There probably aren't two more different shows starting out on TV this fall, but Detroit 1-8-7 and Hawaii Five-0 have two things in common (three, if you count having numbers in their names): they're both cop shows, and they both take place outside the New York/Los Angeles/Chicago trifecta that dominates the form.  In both cases, the glimpse the shows grant of a new, different location, helps somewhat to elevate them above, respectively, a flawed pilot and a moronic premise.  Detroit 1-8-7 is aiming at the thoughtful grittiness of respected cop shows like Homicide: Life on the Streets and, more recently, Southland.  A strong, and refreshingly diverse, cast helps to bring it part of the way there, but the pilot is undone by its reliance on gimmicks.  The show is filmed like a mockumentary, but instead of stressing the show's realism and immediacy, the style calls attention to Detroit 1-8-7's falseness by being entirely unbelievable--at certain points that camera follows the policemen from outside of a moving car, or dodges bullets being shot at them, and there's never a sense that the characters are aware that they're being filmed and editing their behavior accordingly.  The writers also use the mocumentary format to catch up particularly slow viewers, inserting titles that differentiate the two cases being investigated, and even helpfully informing us that we are in the middle of a hostage situation.  This seems out of step with the kind of challenging, thought-provoking TV the show seems to be aiming at.  Another flaw is the show's unfortunate tendency to lapse into over-the-top humor, as when a rookie detective who has just chased down a suspect stops to take a call from his pregnant wife and begins questioning her about her contractions as his suspect gets away, or when the enigmatic Detective Fitch (Michael Imperioli) interrogates a suspect by staring him down until the street-tough hoodlum starts crying about his poor life choices and calling for his mother.  In general, in fact, I wonder whether Detroit 1-8-7 isn't putting too many eggs in Imperioli's basket, setting him up as the House of detectives--brilliant at his job, but a completely non-functional human being--which would, again, clash with the show's supposed realism.  All told, then, I'm not sure what show Detroit 1-8-7 is trying to be, and I'm not sure the show itself knows, so it's a good thing that it has the setting of Detroit, and its much-publicized troubles, to fall back on as it settles into itself.
  
  Hawaii Five-0, meanwhile, is about as far from gritty as it is possible to get.  The pilot is the best made, most enjoyable, and most ludicrous I've seen this season, sharply paced but moronically plotted.  It starts with Naval officer Steve McGarrett (Alex O'Loughlin, demonstrating significantly more charisma and screen presence here than he did in Moonlight and Three Rivers put together) being recruited by the governor of Hawaii, who gives him carte blanche to rid the island of an arms dealer who has recently killed McGarrett's father, and I think that's probably enough plot description to express just how ridiculous this show's premise is.  What's important is that McGarrett teams up with a disgraced former cop (Daniel Dae Kim), a New Jersey policeman who moved to Hawaii to be closer to his daughter (Scott Caan), and a green but tough rookie (Grace Park, already paraded around in her underwear twice), and together they fight crime, but in a new and totally awesome way that will probably involve lots of explosions and shoot-outs, even if it's not always the guy who directed the first two Underworld movies behind the camera.  It's a bit difficult to try to sum up my reaction to Hawaii Five-0, because on the one hand, this is a very impressive pilot that gets a lot done--introducing the characters and their sad backstories, putting them together, building the fractious but increasingly respectful partnership between McGarrett and Caan's character, tracking down the arms dealer, and shooting and blowing a lot of shit up--without ever feeling rushed or overstuffed.  On the other hand, this is such a stupid show.  Only two things keep Hawaii Five-0 from sinking under the weight of its stupidity--the sheer fun of the pilot, and the fact that it manages to establish Hawaii as a foreign place where the rules, and the people, are different (this also goes a tiny way towards explaining the show's reactionary slant, with McGarrett forming his team with the express purpose of hunting bad guys without having to deal with the pesky impediments of due process and civil rights, though the scene in the show's second episode in which he dangles a suspect off the roof of a hotel is hard to take).  Neither of these are enough to keep me watching the show, but successful popcorn entertainment is not easy to pull off (as so many other, less engaging pilots this fall have demonstrated), so I can't help but respect Hawaii Five-0 for achieving its goals.


• My Generation - From the best pilot of the season to the worst (silly me for thinking that there was nowhere to sink from Outlaw).  My Generation is another mockumentary, alleging to reunite with nine twenty-eight year olds who in 2000 were interviewed by a documentary crew on the eve of their high school graduation.  In theory, the concept has some potential, though perhaps not as an open-ended series.  But the execution is flawed on just about every level.  The characters are a bunch of stereotypes who project their issues onto the screen with neon signs.  The queen bee clearly doesn't love her rich kid husband, which we know because she can't remember how long they've been married and, in full sight of the camera, all but propositions a former classmate.  Her husband, meanwhile, is still hung up on his high school sweetheart, which we know because he wistfully watches their old videos and squirms uncomfortably whenever she's mentioned.  The former nerd is now a creep who lusts after his married, pregnant best friend (which we know because he ogles her in the nude), whom he has invited to live in his house while her suspicious husband is away in Iraq, and who longs for children of his own only to discover that he is infertile.  None of them seem to be aware of how much they're exposing to the camera, nor to possess the basic self-editing facilities that you'd expect from a normal, 21st century adult trained by and accustomed to reality TV--which means that the writers don't have to work hard, or at all, to expose their characters' secrets and hidden desires.  What's most unbelievable, and most damning, about My Generation, is that all the characters are still hung up on what happened to them in high school, that their high school friends, girlfriends, boyfriends, and crushes still loom gigantically in their minds, even at the tail end of their twenties.  We all know that American TV has an unhealthy obsession with high school, but it usually expresses this by setting an unreasonable number of shows in high school as it's happening, not by pretending that high school is something you never get over--a proposition that I believe most adults would find both terrifying and pathetic.


• The Event - Last week, after watching the pilot for The Event, I decided to hold off from writing about it until I'd seen the second episode, because clearly the show wasn't done setting up its story, which involves the kidnapping of a young woman on vacation so that her father, an airline pilot, can be forced to fly a plane into a house in which the president is staying, and a decades-old conspiracy to conceal the existence of nearly a hundred aliens (more or less--the exact nature of these beings is clearly one of those mysteries that the show is going to draw out for a while) who have been held prisoner by the US government since crash-landing in Alaska in 1944.  The second hour, however, does more of the same, frenetically shifting between past and present as it establishes both the series's backstory and its ongoing storyline, in which a previously hidden faction of the aliens begins to take violent action against humanity.  This is clearly the format that the show is going to take--enormous amounts of backstory combined with a fast-paced but opaque present day storyline focused on characters, such as the boyfriend of the kidnapped girl (Jason Ritter, who is usually quite good but falls curiously flat here), who have no idea what is going on and are just reacting to one crisis after another.  Which means that the comparisons to Lost--to which The Event is yet another wannabe successor--are entirely off-base.  Lost didn't have an elaborate backstory.  Its early episodes set up cryptic mysteries but were in no hurry to resolve them--mainly, as we now know, because the writers had no particular solution in mind.  The show that The Event actually recalls is Heroes, which like it was fast-paced and threw huge chunks of information at the audience on a weekly basis.  This would be a red flag even if The Event were half as good as Heroes was in its first season, but the show lacks the superhero series's irresistible hook and emotional punch.  Hereos was never great TV--even at its best it was indifferently written and acted--but it knew how to grab an audience, an ability that The Event seems to lack.  It moves as fast as Heroes did, but is nowhere near as compelling, neither in its story nor in its characters.  Without that ineffable secret ingredient, there doesn't seem to be much here to watch for.


• Undercovers - J.J. Abrams goes back to the spy game, this time with a Mr. and Mrs. Smith-inspired series about a pair of married spies (Boris Kodjoe and Gugu Mbatha-Raw) brought back in after five years' retirement.  The series jettisons both Alias's convoluted (and eventually nonsensical) mythology and its angsty tone, and both of these choices seem like good things until one realizes that, one, Undercovers is a comedy, and, two, the closest thing to a joke in the pilot is a (male) junior spy who fawns over Kodjoe to an almost romantic degree and considers Mbatha-Raw a distraction.  There are other quips and witticisms, and the two leads have a good patter, but there aren't nearly enough proper gags, or any laugh-out-loud moments, to justify just how frothy this show is.  That frothiness is also expressed in the almost perfunctory way in which the leads get back on the horse.  There's never a sense that they are bored or unhappy in their lives as humble caterers (who live in a palatial and luxuriously decorated home that is extreme even by the standards of TV lifestyle inflation), or that becoming spies again reintroduces a spark that was missing from their lives.  Though the characters tell us that they found it difficult to work as spies after they fell in love, we get no real sense of why they quit espionage, and why they want to go back.  And that's really what's missing from Undercovers--the thrill of living on the edge, and the exhilaration of falling in love.  It's a surface show, and that surface is nowhere near slick and exciting enough to justify watching.  If you want Alias without the angst or mythology, I suggest USA's Covert Affairs--which, incidentally, gives its female lead a lot more to do, and makes her a lot more kickass, than Undercovers does.


• No Ordinary Family - This is a series that starts out with the deck stacked decidedly against it.  Superheroes, and particularly the superhero origin story, have been hot for a while, which means both that there's a wealth of material that any new iteration is inevitably compared to, and that the audience is a little fatigued by the subject.  Even worse, the show, which sees a typical family gaining superpowers after taking an impromptu swim in a South American river, calls to mind two very specific points of comparison: on the one hand, Heroes, the last television version of the superhero story whose protracted devolution into a shadow of its early success was only mercifully cut short last spring, and on the other hand, The Incredibles, easily the best superhero story of the last decade and a work to which few television series of any stripe could hope to be favorably compared with.  No Ordinary Family doesn't overcome these hurdles in its pilot episode.  In fact, it proceeds with the kind of easygoing glibness that suggests that its creators are, in fact, unaware of just what a tough task they've set themselves, and think they can just walk themselves to an easy victory because, hey, everyone loves superheroes, right?  It's a slow, indulgent hour that hits so many familiar, if not hoary, beats that one almost suspects the writers of deliberate, self-aware irony when they begin it with patriarch Michael Chiklis explaining, to an unseen interviewer (a device used, of course, by The Incredibles), that his story is unusual and doesn't start the way his listener might expect.
  
  As the hour draws on it becomes harder and harder to gauge whether No Ordinary Family's creators are unaware of how well-trodden the path they're going down is, or whether they think it truly doesn't matter that they're bringing nothing new to such a frequently-told story.  Either way, the result is thoroughly unexciting, mainly because it differs from The Incredibles in one crucial way.  The Parrs were superheroes who had been forced to assume the guise of an ordinary family, and who, though they accepted their new roles with varying degrees of grace, were always wistful for that extraordinary life they'd left behind.  The fact that they were not ordinary, and were in fact somewhat disdainful of ordinariness, was the point of the film (and the source of its uncomfortable subtext).  No Ordinary Family's Powells, meanwhile, are ordinary people who have not yet become superheroes (only Chiklis's character fights crime in the pilot, and is still ambivalent about doing so).  Which means that the pilot is mostly concerned with the family's mundane problems--the Powells' strained marriage, their kids' issues with boyfriends and learning disabilities.  In good hands even this tired material could have been made interesting, but again, this is an incredibly lazy pilot, and neither the writing nor the actors seem to be working very hard to sell their familiar plotlines.  It's almost insulting how clearly No Ordinary Family expects to win its audience over with a concept, not with execution, and I for one have no interest in rewarding that belief.