On the Lovability of Losers

"Loser” is one of those epithets I don’t feel terribly comfortable with.  What is a loser?  I find very unsettling the idea that a person might not have any potential for success, which is what the term connotes.  (I feel equally uncomfortable with “winner,” by the way, which not only connotes a sort of artificial perfection, but also implies a zero-sum game.)  But as much as I might resist the epithet, “loser” is definitely a valuable species of character—the character who lacks ambition, skills, or both, who tries but fails, who doesn’t understand what the rest of the world wants to see, or who’s just plumb unlucky.  TVTropes lists something like 25 different categories of loser for a reason. 

It’s not surprising that losers often make good television.  It’s encouraging, and even heartwarming, to watch an underdog succeed, and it’s usually more comfortable to watch characters who are flawed than characters who are perfect.  Perfect is boring and/or angering.  Flawed leaves room for hope.  Losers’ problems often mirror our own and make us feel a little better about our lives.  And some loser characters are downright classics:  Homer Simpson, Al Bundy, Chris from Get a Life, Louie… These shows are about losers we kind of like, even if we often don’t admire or identify with them.  We’re rooting for them to learn, to change, to get luckier, to succeed against the odds—whatever it might be, we want them to have a positive outcome, for once, once in a while. 

What I wonder is what makes the difference between those classics and the others—the losers who evoke schadenfreude, or depression, or frustration, or anger.  I think there are even more of those than the lovable ones.  I expect the line is different for different viewers—which is why there are so many shows that walk that line, and so many losers who fall on the “other” side of the line for me.  I appreciated the artistry of Napoleon Dynamite, and its dialogue is timeless, but it didn’t make me happy.  The film didn’t ask us to laugh with them, it asked us to laugh at them, and although I found it funny, I was ashamed of myself for feeling that way.  What puts them on one side of the line, and Homer on the other? 

With loser-dom in mind, and my general distaste for shows that disrespect the legal profession, I'm giving five SimonBakers (the maximum number) to Rake (Fox, new, dramedy), a show that seems custom-made to make me want to throw things.  As far as I can tell, the main character, played by Greg Kinnear, is a sexist, gambling, attorney with poor impulse control who should be disbarred for any number of reasons, who manages to hold on to his law job by his fingernails, and we're somehow supposed to root for him.  I didn't think it was possible to make a law show I'd want to watch even less than Franklin & Bash.  Guess I was wrong. 

Enlisted (Fox, new.  Sitcom.)

Watched: pilot

Premise:  Bad News Bears meets the military.

Promise:  A military hero returns to base to train a group of misfits, each with a different problem—unathleticism, lack of intelligence, bad temper, overenthusiasm, etc.—and finds that they’re more promising than he originally took them for.  There’s a good bit of comic potential here, but there’s also a lot of potential for tired stereotyping, and the pilot indulges at least as much in the latter as the former.  The episode culminates in a wargame exercise at which the group finds its own way to succeed, which is encouraging, but I don’t have the energy for a bunch of episodes about these characters fumbling around.  I’m sure it’s aiming for M*A*S*H, but it has a long way to go to get there.

Verdict:  Ultimately heartwarming and occasionally amusing, but it fumbles enough that I’m unlikely to tune in again.

Chozen (FX, new.  Animated sitcom.)

Watched: pilot

Premise:  Gay white rapper tries to recapture his career after being released from prison.

Promise:  The main character is a well-meaning but generally unintelligent stoner, who was falsely imprisoned when he was very young and now wants to return to the rap career he was just beginning when he went to prison.  He rounds up some of his friends from his youth, but has difficulty adjusting to life on the outside.  If it sounds more sad than funny to you, you’re right.  It’s produced by the same team as Archer, which I adore, but it has more in common with its other producers’ show, Eastbound & Down.  Like Archer, Chozen is actually quite competent (at rapping, as Archer is at espionage) – but Archer’s unlikeability is smoother, more upbeat, and more surreal than Chozen’s rougher, more depressive variety.  I’m also a bit confused by the show’s decision to make Chozen a stoner rather than simply unlucky.  It seems inconsistent not only with the character’s backstory (where was he getting marijuana in prison?) but also with his naiive, generally innocent personality.

Verdict:  Doesn’t really work for me.

The Spoils of Babylon (IFC, new. Comedy/melodrama miniseries)

Watched: First two episodes

Premise:  High-concept television half-hour miniseries purporting to dramatize a melodrama, ‘70s-style.

Promise:  This show is all over the place.  It’s got at least two framing devices:  it opens with the novel’s down-and-out author telling us what we’re going to see, and then we see the main character narrating the story in flashback in what we presume is an audio suicide note, and then at last we get to the story underneath.  It’s got an amazing cast, but a very odd premise—it focuses, as far as I can tell, on a lifelong forbidden love between step-siblings starting in the 1930s and continuing until the 1970s.  Its humor is absurdist and surreal, which could be hilarious, but it often misses the mark—the gag, for example, of having the male lead’s wife played by a mannequin (voiced by Carey Mulligan) is a cute gag, but it can’t carry an episode of television.  In fact, that’s true of most of the jokes:  they can’t carry the weight assigned to them.  It’s very inside-baseball, mocking the tropes of ‘70s melodramas, which is probably funnier if one is familiar with those tropes.  Overall, it misses the mark about as often as it hits—it’s always melodrama, but not quite funny enough to be funny and not quite serious enough to be serious.  It also reflects its idiosyncratic casting—a bunch of very serious actors plus Kristen Wiig.  Most of the time, she’s emoting, while the other actors are just acting as if they’re in a serious drama.  The result feels off-kilter—which I presume was the objective.  But just because the show does what it wants to do doesn’t mean I find it terribly entertaining.

Verdict:  If you thrive on absurdity and/or have a deep knowledge of ‘70s melodrama, give it a try. Otherwise it’s safe to miss.

Broad City (Comedy Central, new. Sitcom.)

Watched: pilot

Premise:  Two broke young women navigate the vagaries of life in New York.  Or, Slack in the City. 

Promise:  The show has the low-fi feel of a web series ported to TV, which is exactly what it is.  Two Upright Citizens Brigade alumnae lead the show, and fill the remaining roles with recognizeable comedians.  The show airs directly after Workaholics, which is a good match tonally—the women of this show have the same sort of intensity in their underachieving as the guys on Workaholics, or It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, or Wilfred…and I suppose it’s progress to see a slacker show about women join the many about men.  There’s a “Girls” vibe, too—these young women have the same sort of misdirected, youthful energy as the Girls—but this is more straight-ahead comedy.  The pilot centers around the women’s attempt to make money to support buying pot and playing hooky from work by, among other things, returning a bundle of pilfered office supplies to a store and using a Craigslist-esque service to find a job cleaning a guy’s house in their underwear.  I find it extremely difficult to identify with the choices they make, so it’s a bit hard to watch—but the gags are sometimes funny, and as baffling as their choices are, the main characters generally mean well.  The humor is at once wacky and low key, and the show recognizes and capitalizes on its characters’ flaws without apologizing for them.  It doesn’t make me want to watch the show regularly, but it does make me understand why others would—and why Comedy Central pulled it up into the big leagues. 

Verdict: I’m not the target audience, but I respect the show’s appeal for others.

 On the DVR/Unreviewed:  The Assets, Chicago PD, Helix, True Detective, Bitten, Under the Gunn, Looking.

Women's Intuition

There aren’t a whole lot of capable, independent female TV heroes.  A couple of this winter’s new premieres feature women billed as protectors of men, excelling at jobs usually associated with men:  a Texas Ranger (Killer Women) and a Secret Service agent (Intelligence).  And they’re as competent as billed—both very good at their jobs—but despite their disparate professions, they have two things in common:  intuition and vulnerability.  In Killer Women, the lead’s effective investigation draws predominantly on her unique ability to understand women—to get in their heads and understand their motivations better than the men around her, even in the face of evidence tending to contradict her intuitions.  In Intelligence, the co-lead is assigned to protect a high-tech intelligence operative who is perfectly capable of looking after himself—except in situations that require intuitive or emotional (rather than logical) reasoning.  For that, he needs his female protector.  And in both shows, the women, putatively protectors, end up relying on the men around them for safety almost as often as they provide it themselves.  Apparently, their core competencies are intuitive.  Is this something we presume about women?  That they’re physically and/or emotionally vulnerable, but provide value by understanding people?  Maybe it’s true—I know plenty of women who understand people exceptionally well—but I don’t think of it as a particularly gendered trait.  In fact, I’d be very surprised if research showed any connection at all between gender and intuition.  So I wonder where the idea of “woman’s intuition” came from.  Is it a way to marginalize women away from more privileged skills like logic, reason, and technical problem-solving?  Is it associated with a survival narrative, in which those historically granted less power became attuned to the nonverbal cues of the more powerful?  Is it a way to associate women with non-physical value?  To maintain the privilege of male intellect?  I wonder.

I should note that Intelligence features a second very capable female character—Marg Helgenberger as the head of a CIA intelligence program—and she carries the role well, field-marshaling in a way that is neither gender-specific nor neutered.  She’s just a leader who happens to be female, which I understand is, incidentally, quite common in the intelligence community.   So I’m not trying to say that these shows represent a universal problem—only that these shows provide an opportunity to examine our cultural assumptions about what it is to be female.  How often do we assume that women are more intuitive, or more vulnerable, than men?  

Killer Women (ABC, new.  Law enforcement procedural.)

Watched: first two episodes

Premise:  Female Texas Ranger in a man’s world solves murders with female perpetrators/suspects.

Promise:  This show has a sort of retro vibe that’s a lot of fun.  It’s not deep, or gritty, or particularly thought-provoking, but it’s a reliable, somewhat sexy, crime-solving hour.  It feels like a procedural from my youth—straightforward investigation using a combination of gut intuition and solid police work, interspersed with predictable developments in the characters’ personal lives.  It’s hard to put my finger on exactly what feels retro to me—it has something to do with the filming, but even more to do with the fact that the mysteries can be solved by taking only one or two steps away from Occam’s razor.  The result is formulaic, but in a way I find comforting rather than boring.  Like Hart to Hart, or Magnum, PI, or the old Hawaii Five-O. 

I really like the strong female investigator angle, and I’m totally charmed that this one plays the trumpet.  (Yay for women brass players!)   I also really love that she’s a survivor, thriving in a man’s world.   I like that she’s able to express her sexuality without sacrificing her professional competence.  But for all of those good things, the show is remarkably un-feminist.  I’m not speaking here about show’s gaze, which is overtly voyeuristic about the female characters.  That doesn’t bother me, particularly.  It’s that all of the women in the show are, in one way or another, victims.  The lead is a survivor of spousal abuse, and I appreciate her strength in that context, but the show creates drama by highlighting the ways in which she is still at the mercy of her abuser.  The female perpetrators have—at least in the first two episodes—been inspired to crime by the fact that they are victims of one sort of another.  So the show gives us two models of female strength: fortitude, and snapping—but it only gives us models of strength-as-reaction.  It doesn’t present any models of strength-as-basic-personal-trait.  The show also leans pretty heavily on the tiresome trope of a woman who is good in a man’s job but has a messy family life.  By implication, divorce, poor romantic judgment, and complicated family are the cost of competence.  I’m thinking here of shows like Motive and In Plain Sight.  Actually this show has a lot in common with In Plain Sight – the lead has personality that’s crunchy on the outside but has a soft, compassionate, romantically-needy center.  It’s a character type with lots of dramatic possibilities, so I can’t fault the show for relying on it—but it doesn’t feel terribly new, either.

Verdict:  Entertaining procedural, but don’t look to it for any sort of deep social commentary.

Intelligence (CBS, new. Spy procedural.)

Watched: first two episodes

Premise: Jake 2.0 meets Person of Interest meets Chuck without the humor. 

Promise:  This show has a difficult setup—Josh Holloway’s character is given a computer-enhanced brain that makes him, by design, more or less perfect.  He has infinite knowledge, unmatched physical ability, and the ability to literally control computers with his mind.  So it struggles to find weaknesses for him and purposes for its other characters.  It settles on judgment, emotion, and hardware, things that even infinitely good software can’t provide.  So the supporting characters are one person who provides emotional support and acts as a backstop of physical protection; one person who directs him (providing judgment); and a couple of people to address hardware issues.  It makes a decent ensemble, but my guess is that the main character’s near-perfection is going to provide a recurring struggle from a storytelling perspective.  Two episodes in and I’m already getting a bit tired of his emotional fixations.  I’m not even going to get started on the troubling elements of a hero that has infinite access to every piece of information about every person in the world.  It uses things like “you should really have different passwords for your work and home accounts” as jokes.  Clearly we are not supposed to think about the privacy and civil rights/civil liberties implications of this show.  So for the moment, I won’t. 

The show is visually gorgeous—production itself is very lush, and layered with cool special effects—and there are hints of fun interplay between the characters (particularly the father-son technical team).  The show generates good tension and excitement, and has a good engine for both individual episodes and longer arcs.  The result is solid, although not always remarkable.

Verdict:  Solid CBS procedural.

On the DVR/Unreviewed:  The Assets,  Chicago PD, The Spoils of Babylon, Enlisted, Helix, True Detective, Bitten, Chozen.