Daddy Issues

I won’t be the first to observe that there are a lot of shows on television that center largely—if not entirely—on relationships between fathers and children.  Some are from the fathers’ standpoints, some from the children’s, some have absent fathers, some have present fathers, some have multiple fathers…but they’re all about what it means to be, or have, or not have, a father.  Don’t be fooled by the fact that some of them are about surrogate fatherhood—father figures rather than literal genetic fathers.  They’re still father stories.  In fact, there are too many for me to list, and that's not counting the ones I'm about to review.  I started making a list of shows with fatherhood as a major theme that I’ve watched and/or reviewed recently (here were my first few, in no particular order:  The Blacklist, Resurrection, Chicago PD, Brooklyn 9-9, Dads, The Crazy Ones, Warehouse 13, Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D, Intelligence) and then threw my hands up, realizing that I was going to spend my whole afternoon listing TV shows rather than thinking critically about them.  There are fewer about motherhood.  I can list a bunch that at least touch on motherhood as a central topic, and maybe even focus on it (Playing House, Mom, Once Upon a Time, Continuum, Major Crimes)—but the existence of counter-examples doesn’t undermine the point:  fatherhood is a trope, and a dominant one at that.  I’m guessing that’s a symptom of tv-creator demographics—more show creators, writers, and executives are men with kids than women with kids—but that’s pure speculation. 

It won’t be the least bit original for me to observe that television also has a dominant vision of fatherhood.  (There are of course many exceptions, but that’s true of all tropes.)  Fathers are protective and demanding, and often emotionally distant.  They are powerfully, even irrationally, motivated by the desire to protect and/or mold their child.  They have high standards and (unlike mothers, whose love is generally unconditional), fathers’ love is conditioned on whether those high standards are met.  Fathers’ love and pride in their child is effusive when their child meets the standards, but woe betide the child who does not live up to them.  Even the best of fathers—and here I’m thinking of Coach Taylor, arguably the best father figure in the history of television—kinda fits the mold.  Like the vision of woman as unpredictable sexual force, this one is far from new.   It’s so old it’s boring, and yet TV hasn’t given it up as a go-to father mold.

One thing that really stands out this week, as I mourn the offensive, tragic deaths in Santa Barbara and celebrate the explosion of awareness-raising that is #YesAllWomen, is how proprietary this father-narrative is.  I doubt this is a particularly new observation, but the dominant narrative of fatherhood is one of ownership.  It’s the father’s job to protect his child.  It’s the child’s job to be loyal to the father.  That strikes me as radically different from the more dominant motherhood narrative, which casts the mother as defender rather than protector, and the child’s job as love rather than loyalty.  These are subtle distinctions, perhaps, but meaningful ones, because they shift agency between parent and child.  The protection narrative is all about the parent’s decisions.  The defense narrative is all about the child’s decisions.  The loyalty narrative is hierarchical.  The love one isn’t.

In this configuration, it’s fathers, not mothers, that force their children to make the tough moral choices.  Mothers support their kids’ choices, and sublimate themselves to them.  (Or when they don’t, it’s a plot point.)  Fathers, on the other hand, have already staked out their own moral positions, and when children stray from them (whether that straying is a good idea or a bad one), it’s difficult, and they face consequences.  Often, a story of children struggling or suffering is framed as being all about the father’s (real or feared) inadequacy as a protector, guide, or role model—the "manpain” trope.  (So named because although it’s the child/woman/etc. who’s struggling, it’s the man's pain that wesee.)  And often, differences between fathers’ priorities and children’s wishes drive the story.  Even the shows with significant mother characters (and there are quite a few), end up being about the benefits and drawbacks of being claimed by a father and sharing, or rejecting, his ideals.  In Rizzoli & Isles and Intelligence, for example, the mothers are interesting characters—but it’s the fathers whose claims on their children force the toughest calls.  Or to put it differently: tv children seldom rebel against their mothers.  They seldom have to.

Why does this matter, and why am I thinking of it now?  Because it’s just one of the many ways that we teach men that their opinions and decisions are more important than women’s opinions and decisions.  If the result of a child disagreeing with its father/man is good drama, and the result of a child disagreeing with its mother/woman is…well, there’s no result, because as far as we know, the mother  never had an opinion other than the child’s to begin with—then what do we learn?

So.  Here’s a new crop of shows about—or at least prominently featuring—fathers and father figures.    And while I don’t mean this as a wholesale indictment of the shows, I regret to report:  even the good ones don’t do much to challenge the proprietary father trope.

 

Crisis (NBC, new-but-already-canceled.  Action/adventure.)

Watched:  first five episodes

Premise:  Ex-CIA agent kidnaps the children of powerful people to force those people to help him achieve an ill-defined goal.

Promise:  The premise revolved around a father who was so unbalanced and proprietary about his daughter that when he was (he thinks unjustly) separated from her, he freaked out and created the kidnapping plot that drives the show.  But let’s face it, I don’t care how terrible the government conspiracy (or whatever) is, and how bad it is for America, and how unjustly you’ve been framed, etcetera, kidnapping a bunch of kids and threatening their parents is no way to establish your worth as a father.  All it demonstrates is that you’re a possessive, unbalanced extremist.  So that was our starting point.  From there, the show never had quite had a center to find.  It simply didn’t know who its main characters were.  Was it a show about the kidnap victims?  (Sometimes.)  The parents?  (Sometimes.)  The kidnappers? (I think this was what the show thought it was, although that made the whole thing feel eerily like a con without a mark.)  The kidnapper’s conspiracy-theory motivations?  (It veered into this, but a conspiracy’s pretty boring without characters to care about.)  The law enforcement agents and their search to figure out the puzzle?  (Eventually, I think, yes.)  And in case you think I'm exaggerating:  no one even asked the kidnapper “what do you want?” until episode three.  As a result of this unclarity, the show’s emphasis was all off: it picked the least dramatic of the “dramatic moments” to show us.  It rushed through what felt like essential steps:  how did the FBI get its information?  What was it like when these parents learned that their children had been kidnapped?  Instead of giving us those, it gave us other “big reveals” that didn’t feel particularly dramatic or important, and a series of unintentionally hilarious things like the father’s ridiculously specific, meticulously hand-drawn “conspiracy notebook.”

I had been saving my review this show to include it in a post I plan to make someday about how I decide when to give a subpar show “a chance” and when to cut it off after an episode or two.  This one I chose to give a chance, despite a deeply weak pilot, partly because I knew that after the pilot, they brought in a consultant I respect a lot to try and improve the show.  And it worked:  the show did legitimately improve.  The dialogue got snappier, the core issues came into focus.  It decided, rightly I think, that its main characters were the law enforcement agents trying to prevent catastrophes.  It hinted at longer arcs that might have become interesting.  But even so, it still forewent some of the emotional beats that would have made it really impactful.  And even the cleverest doctor can’t save patient with an untreatable disease, and that was the situation here.  

Verdict:  the premise always felt like a limited series, and this series effectively limited itself.

Turn (AMC, new.  Historical costume drama.)

Watched: first three episodes

Premise: Espionage and intrigue in the American Revolutionary War.

Promise:  This show presents an original premise based on actual history—the formation of the first spy ring in America—and executes well.  The pilot takes a bit of time to start making sense, as it lays out who is who and what their priorities are, but it comes together, and by the end of the first episode we have a pretty good sense of what’s at stake and what the obstacles are.  The characters are complex, interesting, and as sympathetic as they need to be (but no more).  It’s well acted, and gorgeously filmed, and true to the ethos of its historical material, even if it fudges historical details (which it definitely does).  Three epsiodes in, it’s still not so much the story of what the spies did as how they became spies.  At first, that felt slow to me—show me the spying already!—but in retrospect, it’s exactly the pace the show needed, so we understand who these people are and why they are making such risky choices.

So why am I including this in my “fathers” post?  Partly because I didn’t want to wait any longer to post my review…but I have principled reason, as well.  Many—most, even—of our hero’s most difficult choices have to do with his relationship with his politically powerful father.  His father is an inevitably and unavoidably important force in his life, and his struggles and frustrations with his father—his need to alternately please, placate, deceive, and betray his father—are never far from his decision making process.  (Note:  I can’t remember his mother, who is presumably dead, being mentioned even once.) 

That said, I am signed up for the long haul on this one, with two provisos.  First, war is ugly and gross, and the technological constraints and fighting styles of the Revolutionary War made it particularly so.  We got a few moments of graphic violence in the pilot, and we’ve seen a few more (although less dramatic) since then.  I hope the show resists the temptation to be graphic; it can get across the violent, dangerous, disgusting nature of what was happening without showing it to us, and although the brutal consequences of the show’s intrigue aren’t exactly beside the point, they’re also not the center of the story I want to watch.  Second, the women are, so far, mostly foils and motivators for the men.  I don’t mean to imply that that isn’t true to history, or that stories about women as supporters, figuring out how to get by in a world where they had to do the enemy’s laundry, are uninteresting.  Far from it:  the women of the time had to be incredibly strong, both physically and emotionally, to carry out their responsibilities.  But at the moment, their strength isn’t on display so much as their vulnerability.  I really want to see something more substantial about the women than “please, don’t do something dangerous, your son and I need you.”  There are strong hints that at least one of the women has a lot more in her than that.  So please, show, make that happen, because everything else about you is very promising.

Verdict:  Pending the provisos, I’m in.

Penny Dreadful (Showtime, new.  Supernatural costume drama.)

Watched: First three episodes

Premise: Vampires, monsters, and mediums, oh my.  Period horror featuring characters from Victorian classics like Dr. Malcolm Murray, Dr. Victor Frankenstein, Dorian Gray, etcetera.

Promise:  After the pilot, I thought the whole thing was so vague and atmospheric that was actually a bit hard to tell how promising it was.  The pilot is essentially getting the band together (a process that continues through episode 2 and into episode 3), and it appeared that the show would mostly involve secretive people trying to understand vampirism, something that’s mostly been borne out in later episodes.  It featured a lot of “dramatic reveals” and unexplained creepy special effects, but little actual story.  In fact, the second episode wasn’t really better—we meet more characters, but aren’t given much reason to like them.  The story builds but withers, so we are left with little idea where it’s going.

Now, after three episodes, the story is still pretty thin on the ground, but it turns out to be mostly a meditation on the nature of a father’s responsibilities toward his children.  The band, it appears, has been convened by Malcolm Murray to rescue and/or cure his daughter Mina, who has been kidnapped and/or turned by vampires.  He expresses a lot of angst over his inability to protect her, and clearly feels it is his obligation to save her.  We have little sense of her opinion on the matter, as she gives onaly a few vague hints of her existence in her few ghost-like appearances.  But the really interesting fatherhood relationship isn’t Murray’s, but Frankenstein’s.  Dr. Frankenstein is quite young in this depiction (in his 20s, I’d hazard) and there’s a complicated mix of tenderness, struggle, pain, and horror in the relationship between Dr. Frankenstein and what he creates.  I won’t say much more than that to avoid spoilers, but suffice it to say that the father has a lot to learn from his creation, and vice versa.  

So I still have no idea whether the show is any good.  Perhaps it’s building.  And I would be remiss if I didn’t point out that the art direction and cinematography are stunning.    But perhaps the third episode, which I found intriguing, was an anomaly.  And even if it is building, the show still has a lot of problems.  Even its best, most thought-provoking moments are interspersed among bizarre, sexualized scenes that are much “edgier” and more explicit than the plot demands, and seem designed only to be shocking.  Generally, these scenes involve victimizing women, sexualizing them, presenting them as the bearers of an eerie, sexualized power, or (often) all three.  Indeed, here as in many depictions of the Victorian era, women are all either gentry or prostitutes.  Although this show gives lip service to a reason for the choice (specifically, the industrial revolution:  a prostitute explains she’s “off to go do a job a machine can’t do, at least not yet”), it’s still an unnecessarily degrading historical inaccuracy that just keeps getting perpetuated in stories about the era.

Verdict:  I have a sort of morbid curiosity about it, but I’m not that hopeful.

 

Gang Related (Fox, new.  Law enforcement drama.)

Watched: pilot

Premise: LAPD cop with divided loyalties serves on anti-gang task force while continuing to help a gang boss.

Promise:   Yup, this show’s hero is a dirty cop.  I suppose he’s mostly well-intentioned—he owes his life to the gang boss, who has him convinced that by joining the LAPD, he’s helping the gang turn legit—but in pretty much any other show, the main character would be a bad guy.  And frankly, the gang task force’s tactics are so cruel (we pin crimes on the gang family’s wives and children to put pressure on the criminals!) it’s hard to sympathize with either side here.   This poor guy has two father figures—the gang boss and the gang task force leader, both of whom claim ill-disguised ownership of him and demand his loyalty, and both of whom use methods so abhorrent that I wonder why he doesn’t just change his name and move to Canada.  In other words, it’s all the moral greyness of Graceland, but with none of the fun.

The pilot was full of tired tropes about law enforcement, and its “grittiness” reads as brutality.   Torture is a first resort, and over the course of the pilot we see someone get his arm broken, someone get branded, someone get tased in the privates, someone get straight up tortured with a cleaver… and that doesn’t count the shootings.  Once again, basic civil rights are impediments to justice.  Civil rights here are represented by a female D.A. who is investigating the unit and also happens to be the daughter of the task force leader (no conflict of interest there!  Or, more importantly, an example of rebellion against father! Whee!).  We have a few more women:  some small-role players who serve as targets for our men’s lust or civilizing influences demanding affection; the dragon-lady leader of the Korean gang (bonus racism!); and the sole woman on the task force.  The Korean leader and the cop both seem like sadists—which I’d say was misogynistic, but actually, I am pretty sure everyone on this show is a sadist. 

Verdict:  I found it hard to get through even an hour of this.

On the DVR/Unreviewed:  The Red Road, The 100, Last Week Tonight, The Night Shift.

Droll Shows

I’ve reviewed a few comedies lately that don’t aim for a steady stream of laughs, but instead aim for wry observations about the deeper truths of society or human nature.  Some are single-camera half-hours, others are hour-long.  I wouldn’t call these dramedies—I tend to associate that term with hour-long light-fiction dramas like Desperate Housewives or Glee.  Instead they tend toward dark, generally satirical humor.   I don’t think it’s a particularly new genre.  British TV has been doing these for a long time, and HBO and FX long ago made them the bread and butter of their comedic lineups. But for whatever reason, they seem trendy to me right now.   Perhaps I’m just noticing them more lately, or noticing their spread to more mainstream TV outlets.  Perhaps we need these shows now, as we acclimate to the more modest dreams of a new economic normal.  Perhaps they resonate with our superiority complexes:  the schadenfreude of watching someone else suffer from (or at least struggle with) their amusingly bad decisions, mixed with the knowledge that our lives, or at least our decisions, are almost certainly better than theirs.  These shows are personality flaws on parade, but their characters aren’t unsympathetic—we can understand their decisions, even if we might not identify with them.  We may not like them much, but a part of us, at least, wants them to succeed. 

All of today's reviews fit into that category, in one way or another, although they're all quite different from each other.  Satire, mockumentary, sitcom, hour-long.  And I can’t tell whether it’s a coincidence that today’s entry could just as easily have been called “shows about guys.”  I don’t mean to imply that there aren’t women in these sorts of wry-truth comedies, or even that the women in the shows aren’t interesting.  (Playing House and Getting On are each about interesting women, and are very different from each other.)  The women in today’s selections range from the token (in Silicon Valley) to beacons of sanity and competence (in Fargo).  But as I think about it, the critical mass of wry-truth comedies are about men.  Satires about women (I’m thinking here of shows like 30 Rock, Parks & Rec, and The Mindy Project) tend to be much more traditional laughers, which are more generous to their characters and forgiving of their flaws.  But maybe that’s just the ones jumping to mind at the moment. 

Silicon Valley (HBO, new.  Single camera sitcom.)

Watched: first three episodes

Premise: Satire about a startup in current day Silicon Valley.

Promise: There’s a moment in the pilot in which a character observes that programmers travel in little herds: “There's always a tall skinny white guy, short skinny Asian guy, fat guy with a ponytail, some guy with crazy facial hair and then an east Indian guy. It's like they trade guys until they all have the right group."  It’s a funny joke in the moment, and although it doesn’t quite mirror the cast (which is less diverse than the quote’s version—it replaces a couple of the archetypes with yet another average white dude, hooray) it highlights that this is a story about guys. The only woman with any consistent presence is both sympathetic and competent:  she’s a translator, of sorts, between the eccentric venture capitalist and our ragtag programmers—but any other woman is there as a foil for our guys rather than as an actual person.  Mostly they’re there to show just how uncomfortable and inept these guys are around women, which is mildly humorous, but tends to reinforce the image of women as having mysterious sexual power over men—especially these men, who fall squarely into the programmers-as-socially-awkward trope—and little else.

More to the point, the quote hangs a lantern on a larger problem with the show, which is that it’s not really even about its characters.  Just as the women are foils for the men, the men are foils for the absurd, almost Dadaist system that the show’s creators want to mock.  Just as Office Space mocked the cubicle farm, this mocks the tech world, and it does so quite well…but the characters are as much types as people, so it’s hard to care about them.  One cares instead (to the extent one cares) about their absurd situation.

All that said, it’s a story about mostly-sympathetic characters trying to figure out who they are in a hostile, confusing world that overvalues some things about them and undervalues others.  And it has moments of utter brilliance, mostly in its small observational details (an executive in toe sneakers; a self-important jerk bellowing “who ate my fucking quinoa again?”) rather than its broader comedy. 

Verdict:  As satire, it’s brilliant.  As a group of people to spend a half hour with each week, it’s so-so.

Sirens (USA, new.  Single camera sitcom.)

Watched: first two episodes

Premise: Follows the lives of three Chicago EMTs.  Adapted by Denis Leary from a British sitcom of the same name.

Promise: It has taken me a long time to review this.  In fact, its whole first season has ended, and I'm not sure whether it's coming back.  My delay isn't because I've been waiting to generate any particularly interesting observation, but because it didn’t ever quite fit with the other shows I was reviewing.  In fact, it’s generally nondescript.  It’s bantery, but not particularly funny, drawing most of its humor from jokes about its main characters’ love lives.  One character is gay, another is reeling from the end(ish) of a long-term relationship that he sabotaged, and a third is a boy-scout type with (one presumes) little relationship experience.  There are a few sweet moments as we see how much these guys genuinely care about each other—but mostly it felt like what I imagine men’s locker-room humor would be like, and not particularly inspired for that.  

Verdict:  Too funny to be serious, but not funny enough to be funny.  I lost interest early.

Review (Comedy Central, new.  Single camera sitcom/mockumentary.)

Watched:  whole season.

Premise:  Instead of reviewing restaurants or movies, a reviewer reviews life experiences as requested by his viewers.

Promise:  I hadn’t realized, when the show began, that it would have a season-long arc.  I thought it was just one of those cute Comedy Central mockumentary shows based on some comic's clever idea.  But I was wrong:  What began as a light entertainment, bordering on the silly and pointless, became darker and more complex over the first few episodes, as we watched our reviewer gradually sacrifice his life and (to the extent he began with it) his sanity for the sake of his uncompromising devotion to the show.  As the season continues and terrible decisions pile atop unfortunate coincidences, we feel for him, while understanding he has only himself, to blame.  It's dark humor, but no less funny for its darkness.

Verdict:  worth picking up on Netflix or the Comedy Central app.

Fargo (FX, new.  Drama.)

Watched: first two episodes

Premise:  An assassin and generally malicious troublemaker (played by Billy Bob Thornton) leaves chaos in his wake in 2006 Minnesota.

Promise:  This 10-episode limited series is thematically and tonally tied to the film, and shares the film's laconic nature and offbeat dark humor, but it has an entirely different cast and story.  The show is beautifully filmed, and populated by big-name actors.  All (big and small-named alike) are able to hold our attention even through the show’s matter-of-fact treatment of improbable, dark, and sometimes gross plot twists.  That's a testament to their skill:  the show's quirkiness could easily feel manufactured, but most of the time here it just feels like a trait of the show's world.  Thornton’s character is part participant, part catalyst, bringing chaos and crime to sleepy communities whose underbellies were—until his arrival—safely hidden from view.  Most of the show’s characters embody the mundanity of evil, making the most selfish decisions seem ordinary.  We all like to think of ourselves as people who wouldn’t do any of these things—and indeed, we wouldn’t— but we can see, sometimes, how these characters would.  The show makes me feel a bit as I do watching Justified—like I’m glad I don’t live in this almost cartoonishly amoral world, but I appreciate getting a glimpse into it.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that the pilot came across as intensely misogynistic.  The second episode turns it around, to a large extent, as we come realize that by far the most sane, competent people in the place are female—a police officer, and a teenaged girl whose father, played with beautiful subtlety by Colin Hanks, is just about the only sympathetic man on the show.  Still, though, most of the show’s women are either wives or strippers (whether by profession or voyeurism), and the show takes a very dim view of the wives, who are all harridans, gold diggers, or most often, both.  (At this stage in my viewing, the jury’s still out on the strippers.)   But the men aren’t much better—with a few exceptions, they’re just as craven, cruel, and stupid as their wives.  So I don’t think it’s misogyny.  I think its misanthropy.  In fact, it is that very misanthropy that gives the show its wry-truth humor.  And if, as I assume it does, the show gradually becomes the story of the police piecing together what’s happened in this town, those likeable characters will go an awfully long way toward making that misanthropy feel just. 

Verdict:  well done.

On the DVR/Unreviewed:  The Red Road, Crisis, The 100, Turn, Last Week Tonight, Penny Dreadful.

Women be CRAZY.

If I’ve been harping a bit lately about how women are portrayed on TV, it’s only because a lot of shows in the last few months that have brought the topic to the fore.  On one hand, that’s good:  more shows about women could mean more opportunities for female actors (and one hopes, more female writers, directors, producers, etc.) to show their stuff.  Plus, more shows about women could mean more opportunities to portray a variety of female characters.  It goes without saying that there are so many different ways of being a woman, and portraying the rich variety must be the inevitable consequence of more shows about women….right?  That’s one possible take away from wonderful shows with female leads like The Bletchley Circle, and Call the Midwife, and Continuum, and Orphan Black.  But actually, that list is a pretty stark reminder that none of those shows are produced by U.S. networks.  As much as I want to encourage more shows with female leads, I am a bit surprised at how little variety I’m seeing in the newest wave of American fare.  The trend here, instead, seems to be shows about how women exert unpredictable, illogical sexual power over men.  I'm not saying it's the only theme we're seeing, but it's awfully common.  Really very common.  It isn’t a new trend, of course.  It’s a true classic--as old as stories are.  So maybe I shouldn’t be as surprised.  But I really thought we’d be tired of it by now.

Black Box (ABC, new.  Drama.)

Watched: Pilot

Premise: Successful neuroscientist hides her severe bipolar disorder from colleagues and all but a few loved ones.

Promise:  The show follows Grey’s Anatomy in the schedule, and mostly conforms to its soapy mode, right down to the character-name pun in the title.  In that context, it provides a relatively unflinching look at how disruptive severe bipolar can be, and the many challenges it can pose not only for those who have it, but also those around them.  I’m not saying it’s a terribly realistic image of the illness, but just as Oz showed an accelerated version of prison’s parade of horribles, this show does something similar with bipolar.  But it does so in a soapy way, which for my part anyway, crosses the line into sensationalizing it.  (For reference, Homeland is a less sensationalized depiction).  I’m also annoyed by the show’s illogic.  I struggle a bit to square her career success with her cavalier attitude toward her diagnosis, which implies she doesn’t value her career overmuch, but I can get past that.  The bigger issue is her secret-keeping.  It’s not that I expect people to go around talking about their mental health (although nowadays it’s more common than it has been in the past)—it’s that if there’s anyone I expect to go around talking about their own mental health, it’s someone who is renowned for studying mental health and trying to reduce the stigma of mental health disorders.  And of course when she’s manic she becomes hypersexual.  I know that’s not an uncommon symptom, but that doesn’t make it any less exploitive.  

Verdict:  Sigh.  More sexy unpredictability and emotional fragility from a woman who could be portrayed as a survivor who overcame mental illness.  Ho hum.

Salem (WGN, new. Supernatural costume drama.)

Watched: First two episodes

Premise:  Politics and witchcraft in colonial Massachusetts.

Promise:  It's nifty that WGN is making original programming.  And the show did something right, because it got me to watch the second episode.  On the other hand, I was really just watching it to see whether the show was as awful as I feared.  Answer:  yup.  The show is aiming, I presume, for a sort of Game of Thrones grittiness.  I presume that’s part of what attracted the cast, a pretty impressive collection of Nikita and Fringe alums and other up and coming actors—but, sigh, it’s such a bad goal.

The show takes some explaining, so here goes:  its setup, as far as I could tell from the two episodes I watched, is thus: Mary loved John Alden, an anachronistically  humanist chap played with long-haired broodiness by Shane West.  John went off to war and became uncommunicative, largely because he was captured.  Believing him to be dead, Mary had someone use witchcraft to abort his unborn child.  This event was correlated with, and possibly the cause of, Mary’s selling her soul to the devil and turning evil.  I say possibly because although Mary’s anger and malice are manifest, the show makes no meaningful attempt to explain why she is angry, malicious, power-hungry, and generally evil.  After turning evil, Mary married, tortured, and magically dominated one of the head Puritans in town, and used her newfound influence to create a secret conspiracy of witches to amass power in Salem.  John therefore returns from war to find this state of affairs:  His former girlfriend is secretly evil, and Cotton Mather is hunting the (very real) witches, who in turn are trying to use the witch hunt to turn the town’s Puritans against each other.  Yep, that’s exactly how I learned it in history class.

I want to be clear here:  in this show, Cotton Mather (who for no apparent reason sleeps with prostitutes in this version of history) is as close as we get to a good guy.  And he’s not entirely wrong:  there are witches, and they are totally evil.  There’s a not-so-subtle implication running through everything that women’s power is mysterious, sexual, and evil; the direct enemy of love and romance.  I say this despite the fact that not all of the witches are women, and not all the women are witches—that doesn’t make up for the fact that it’s the ladies who are holding the town captive and committing straight-up murder by proxy.  In fact, aside from one plucky rebel, nearly all of the women in this show have traded their empathy and humanity for the power of an explicitly satanic, creepy, and unambiguously erotic form of witchcraft.  And if that seems sexy to you, think again:  it’s mostly writhing and muck.  Plus, bonus racism:  the witches (or at least the main character) seem to be in the thrall of the only non-white character in the show—an ambiguously Caribbean woman who is never given a last name and is (what else?) a witch—who seems to be either pulling the strings or egging the witches on for her own nefarious purposes.  Why?  Because she’s exotic, I guess.

Verdict:  In case you’re on the fence, check out this quote (scroll to bottom of page) from one of the show’s creators.

Bad Teacher (CBS, new.  Single-camera sitcom.)

Watched: Pilot

Premise: Cash-strapped airhead becomes a teacher in the hope of marrying a rich single dad.  Based on the movie of the same name.

Promise: Yup, there are so many rich single dads in this community that our main character thought this was a good plan.  Spoiler alert:  it isn’t a good plan, not least because of course teaching is a job that one must do.  But the main character is airheaded enough to believe it is.  After all, the point isn’t to be realistic, it’s to make an amusing setup for a workplace comedy (the workplace here being a middle school), and a redemption story of an overdog learning that there’s joy in helping (and in the process developing relationships with) the underdogs.  In other words, it’s  Mean Girls meets Enlisted.  It wasn’t as awful as I expected it to be, although it’s still problematic in a number of  ways.  Its main problem is that although the show centers on mocking the shallowness of popularity, it often embodies the same shallowness it purports to poke fun at.  The main character exhibits a sort of mystical attractiveness-fu that makes everyone magically do what she wants, however silly or illogical that might be, and although the show almost certainly knows that’s unjust, its solution is mostly to make her use that power for good, rather than challenging the underlying justice of the power.  It also perpetuates a connection between un-prettiness and social desperation, which is undoubtedly a symptom of the same shallowness the show pokes fun at, but at the same time it all too often turns the un-pretty people into punchlines rather than making them likeable.  I would also be remiss if I didn’t mention a weird cartoonish/madcap streak running through the show (mainly embodied by the character of the principal, played by David Alan Grier) that sometimes makes the whole thing feel like a Disney Channel comedy.

Verdict:  like the title character, the show has more humor and heart than one might expect at first glance.  But it doesn’t do it well enough that I want to spend more time watching it.

Playing House (USA, new.  Single camera sitcom/dramedy)

Watched:  First three episodes

Premise: Successful career woman moves back to her small town to help her newly-single childhood best friend raise a child.

Promise: I waited to post this whole entry until I had the chance to watch this show, in the hope that it would be an antidote to the “women’s sexuality as a trap for unwary men” trope, and while it was—mostly—it has still taken me a couple of days to process my thoughts about the show.   It’s another one of those comedies that aims for wry truths rather than steady laughs, which is a popular genre nowadays despite being difficult to pull off—but I was optimistic, because at its core, it’s about women who support each other, and friendship, and chosen family, all of which make it deeply appealing to me.  But I have to admit, it pits professionalism against friendship in a way that hits close to home and makes me very uncomfortable.  I’ll admit, this may be a personal reaction rather than a universal one, but here’s the setup:  A successful career woman whose job is high-powered but personally draining comes home to her best friend’s baby shower in the small town where they grew up.  While she is there—squeezing conference calls in between social visits—the friend’s marriage breaks up, leaving the friend to handle motherhood on her own.  So the career woman quits her job and moves back to the small town to help her friend. 

The plots promise to revolve mostly around a few topics—their odd-couple friendship; the former career woman’s coming to grips with returning to this small town; and their awkward mix of sarcasm and good-heartedness, which together get them into and out of scrapes.  On an episode by episode basis, it’s got a sort of I Love Lucy or Laverne & Shirley vibe, and overall is cute and well-meaning.  Where I get stuck is back at the setup, where the show implicitly stakes out the position that it is impossible for a woman to care deeply about her work and be a good friend at the same time—or more specifically, that permitting work time to interfere with her social time makes her a bad friend.  Our heroine is redeemed when she quits her jet setting, international (oppressively demanding) job and takes on a more traditional womanly role, and please don’t think too hard about how these two are going to support themselves. 

Verdict:  I want to like it.  I want to like the way these two former “mean girls” are redeemed by growing up and finding their hearts; I want to like the story about how friendship can conquer all, and of sisters doing it for themselves.  But as a career woman, I feel mildly unwelcome.

Finally, I’m giving a SimonBaker to Faking It (MTV, new; sitcom), which is about high school students who are mistaken for lesbians and decide to carry on the charade for the sake of their social lives.  I would have watched it had I had the time, but the premise turned me off.  From afar, it seemed (a) sensationalized (b) like it probably trivialized the challenges that real high school lesbians still face.  Reviews have been decent, though. Perhaps it’s better than I feared.

On the DVR/Unreviewed:  The Red Road; Sirens; Crisis; The 100; Turn; Silicon Valley; Fargo; Last Week Tonight.