→ May 23, 2012
→ By

Sherlock, season two.

Season two of Sherlock, which just aired here in the U.S. for the first time, turned out to be even stronger than season one, in part because the characters are so well developed, and in part because the bromance between Holmes (Benedict Cumberbatch) and Dr. Watson (Martin Freeman) seems so natural at this point, as if the two actors have been doing this for years. The only real negative of the season is that it will be so long before we see a third set of episodes, especially on this side of the Atlantic. (My writeup on season one went up in February.)

As in the first season, the middle episode was somewhat weaker than the two surrounding it, with the first episode the strongest of the troika. Irene Adler’s dominatrix character is fascinating – with her clothes on or off, it’s all good, really – and the tense flirtations between her and Holmes were absolutely electric, even though it’s clear he has (or will simply admit to) no interest in sex with her. The crime he’s solving is almost secondary, and she seemed a more convincing adversary than Moriarty because her methods of social engineering are so foreign to Holmes. An American police procedural would have played up her professional life, whereas this episode focuses instead on layers of intrigue and the aforementioned dialogue between the two main characters.

The second episode, derived from the one full-length Holmes novel, The Hound of the Baskervilles, takes the setting and some core elements of the original story and adds a host of modern twists, including a play on our worst fears about our governments and their research into weapons of mass destruction. The solution hinged on Holmes guessing a password rather impossibly quickly, which I’d peg as a copout; it’s a neat trick, but not that likely on the first try, and any decent network security setup would lock an account after an attempt or two. (Wouldn’t the modern Holmes carry a cracking program on a USB drive? Or is that too easy?)

The final episode, “The Reichenbach Fall,” brings an unexpectedly early confrontation between Holmes and his nemesis, Jim Moriarty, played diabolically by whats-his-face, clearly having the time of his life. Based on the story “The Final Problem,” in which Holmes originally dies, only to have it later revealed that he merely faked his death after public outcry forced Conan Doyle to hit control-Z, “Reichenbach” turns the tables and puts Moriarty on the offensive, destroying Holmes’ life from the inside-out with a cleverly plotted, intricate trap, from which Holmes can extricate himself only through his own death – or so it appears. The whole detective-as-suspect plot device is quite hackneyed at this point, but I’ll give the writers points for the Richard Brook twist, and for crafting the scheme so tightly that Holmes does indeed appear to be trapped when we reach the final clash between the two antagonists. I’ll get to the end of this episode, the subject of much speculation online (which won’t be answered until next year as the show becomes victim of its own success), later on, to avoid spoiling anything for those of you who haven’t seen it.

This season felt faster and tighter than the first one, which I think is in large part because the three episodes in season one had to spend time introducing us to the main characters and developing their relationships with each other. Cumberbatch and Freeman have a very easy chemistry and superb timing, enhanced by British series’ willingness to keep the pace up rather than slow it down to accommodate an audience looking for large print and short chapters. It feels like smart television because it is smart television, rapid-fire, witty, and demanding. It should have you talking long after each episode is done. To wit…

–

Spoiler alert: I’m discussing the end of season two, episode three below. Just stop reading if you haven’t seen it.

Seriously, go away.

For those of you who have seen it, it seems like some suspected elements of Sherlock’s faked suicide are, if not obvious, quite likely to be true. We have Sherlock’s conversation with Molly, where he says he expects he’s going to die and needs her help, a plea that remains unresolved at the end of the episode but that we know would be fulfilled because Molly is inexplicably smitten with the great detective. We have the flatbed truck that starts up the moment Sherlock’s body is about to hit the pavement. And we have the cyclist who hits Dr. Watson at the moment he’s about to cross the street to see to his friend, leaving Watson on the ground and quite groggy when he stands up. I submit that the grogginess is the fourth clue.

Here’s my theory, although it is a bit tinfoilhatty: Sherlock landed in the truck and threw a cadaver, supplied by Molly and rigged to bleed from the head on impact, to the sidewalk, obscured from witnesses by the truck. The cyclist clocked Dr. Watson and somehow drugged him – perhaps a gas like that from the previous episode – so that he wouldn’t be able to properly examine or even identify Sherlock. (That gas would make him suggestible, meaning one member of the crowd could also have been a plant from Sherlock, there simply to tell Dr. Watson it was Sherlock’s body and that he was dead.) This would explain Sherlock’s confession to Dr. Watson, which was wildly out of character for him – it was an act, yet one that, oddly, didn’t set off any alarms in his only friend’s mind.

This leaves a few unanswered questions: Why was Molly, who was on Moriarty’s radar after they had a few lunch dates (seriously, Molly, are there no other fish in the English sea?), omitted from the final hit list, while Holmes’ landlady and Lestrade were included? Who notified the other two shooters (we can assume the hitman assigned to Dr. Watson witnessed the suicide) that Sherlock was presumed dead? Why did the kidnap victim scream upon seeing Sherlock’s face? And, really, why did Moriarty kill himself? I believe he is actually dead, as Moriarty dies in the original story, “The Final Problem,” that inspired this episode. I can’t imagine the writers deviating that far from the source material, and the Moriarty character, who only appeared in two of the original stories anyway, is pretty well played out from here. But why would he die of his own hand, leaving himself unable to witness Holmes’ final humiliation?

Feel free to discuss any of these spoilers or questions in the comments; I assume anyone who’s made it this far has already seen the full season.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , ,
→ April 2, 2012
→ By

The Wire, season five.

If you’re new to these recaps, you should start with my notes on previous seasons – on season one; season two; season three; and the longest post, on season four.

I’ve held off a bit on writing about season five of The Wire for two reasons. The obvious one was work – the end of spring training is always a sprint between daily games, keeping up with draft stuff, and, you know, actual assignments, like columns and podcasts. But I also wanted to create some distance between myself and the material (I finished the series on the 23rd, watching the last two episodes back-to-back on a flight home from Charlotte) to see if my impressions of the season would vary in time.

They really haven’t, however: Season five just wasn’t that good. It’s a sad ending to what was otherwise such a phenomenal achievement in television.

There’s a laundry list of problems with season five, but I’ll limit myself to three. One is that the entire season feels rushed. The show adds another setting, the Baltimore Sun newsroom, and cast of characters, including old Homicide favorite Clark Johnson. Yet without shedding many characters from previous seasons, we’re left with the same sixty minutes per episode spread out over an ever-increasing number of subplots and characters, so the newsroom folks don’t get the development they need, and every one of them remains two-dimensional after the series finale – particularly the setting’s villain, Scott Templeton, whose motivations are never sufficiently explored. The increased character density means we also get less time with series stalwarts like Omar, McNulty, Marlo, and Carcetti, all of whom receive plot treatments far more superficial than what we’ve seen before. The explanations, if you could call them that, for McNulty falling off the wagon and into a ditch fell far short of the standards set as recently as season four for character development and background. Add to all of those issues the shorter season length, ten episodes instead of twelve or thirteen, and the need to tie up as many storylines as possible before signoff and you have a season that feels like a compliation rather than a coherent set of stories.

The second is co-creator David Simon’s proximity to the material. The Templeton storyline is Simon’s vengeance on a real-life coworker at the Sun, Jim Haner, whom Simon accused of fabricating quotes and events while also accusing the Sun‘s editors and management of protecting their star reporter. Templeton is a flawed character, but is more fleshed-out than the simpering managing editor Thomas Klebanow (who talks like a damned grief counselor) and executive editor James Whiting, both of whom are depicted as willfully blind to Templeton’s malfeasance because they only see the potential for awards and a Hail Mary play to save the newsroom. I have no problem with Simon wanting to use his platform to decry plagiarism and fabrications by reporters, but it watched as if no one edited him down from his pulpit.

And finally, the serial killer storyline, the one thing that ties just about everything together other than the Omar plot, was so implausible and so far out of left field that I found myself wishing I could skip through those scenes (I couldn’t, because the series is otherwise so tightly plotted that you can’t skip anything, ever, or risk becoming hopelessly lost) and get back to the routine street violence. The idea that straightlaced Lester would be so consumed with his desire to nab Marlo that he would engage in an illegal endeavor that would jeopardize not just his and McNulty’s careers but would jeopardize the case against Marlo and the careers of people like Cedric Daniels is too far gone for my suspension of disbelief to encompass it. Yeah, I caught the parallels between Templeton’s fabrications and McNulty’s, but that literary flourish doesn’t justify the departure from four seasons of severe realism.

There were literary flourishes within the season that did pay off for me as a viewer, however, especially the underlying conceit that the players may change, but the streets will remain the same until the structures that govern (or fail to govern) them fall. Avon Barksdale fell, to be replaced by Marlo, who will be replaced by someone, perhaps Slim Charles. Omar’s gone, but Michael has stepped right into the void. One addict, Bubbles, escapes the streets, only to be replaced by Dukwon, with their closure scenes airing back-to-back in the final episode just to hammer that point home. The government’s continued cycle of rewarding superficial stats over honest results, and politics over performance, was actually the funniest part of that final montage, one bit I won’t spoil in case any of you haven’t seen it; I’ll just say it took me a while to figure out who was going to fill that void because the choice was so unlikely (and, yet, so ultimately predictable). That self-referential aspect, the way loops always close and minor characters (like Lester’s girlfriend) resurface, remains one of the series’ most enduring qualities for me. Those closures also give the series as a whole that novelesque quality absent in most series – these massive story arcs and entrances and departures of characters mirror those of great Russian novels and require degrees of attention and skill absent in so much modern fiction in all media. I just wish the final season had played out differently.

* Because I know someone will ask, I’d rank season five as the worst, and four as the best – but you can’t really call season four the best without attaching it to the groundwork laid in season three, can you? Season three didn’t stand well on its own for me, but the 25 episodes in those two seasons combined, slightly longer in episodes than a standard network season (and about a season and a half in show minutes), beat any season of any other TV show I’ve ever seen, and it’s not that close. I still maintain that season two is unfairly maligned, however; it was different, but in a good way, and even seeds planted on the docks bloomed in the series’ final few episodes.

* One thing I’ve puzzled over far too much is which Wire actor was most deserving of some recognition from the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, which completely whiffed on the series while wasting Outstanding Drama Series nominations on the likes of Joan of Arcadia, CSI, Boston Legal, and Heroes. (The Wire received just two Emmy nominations that I can find, both writing nods, one for S3E11, “Middle Ground,” and one for the series finale, “-30-.” It appears the Golden Globes can’t even say that much.) My answer was far from certain after four seasons, but season five clinched it: Andre Royo, for his portrayal of Bubbles. It probably didn’t help his cause with award committees that his subplot was always in the background, or that the character’s required range only became evident over multiple seasons, but his performance was the most compelling in a series full of compelling performances. Only Seth Gilliam as Carver saw his character develop that much over the full five years – but we all know the award shows love a good addiction storyline.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: ,
→ March 1, 2012
→ By

Top Chef S9 finale.

Last night’s Top Chef season finale answered the question: is Paul the ’27 Yankees or the ’07 Patriots?

* Sarah begins by talking about momentum; is there really a “hot hand” in the kitchen? Maybe if you grab a pan preheated to 500 degrees without using an oven mitt. Not that I’ve ever done that.

* Meanwhile, Paul is clearly full of nervous energy once he learns he’s in the finale. Either that or he was mainlining Red Bull in between takes.

* Challenge: Hey, we’re cooking! Create a four-course menu in the restaurant of your dreams. No gimmicks beyond the selection of sous-chefs, which is done by having a selection of eliminated chefs plus two renowned chefs, Barbara Lynch and Marco Canora, each prepare a single dish for Paul and Sarah to taste; those two then select the dishes they liked and get the chefs who made them. I have no problem with this except that having the two expert chefs compete seemed a little silly.

* The group even includes a few of the chefs who were eliminated before reaching the final 16, among them the infamous butcher Tyler Stone, who has to be here just for the comedy potential; and Ashley Villaluz, who I remember because she’s really cute, even in those thick-framed eyeglasses. (Or, especially in those thick-framed eyeglasses.)

* Paul chooses first … and gets Barbara Lynch with the first pick. Hugh says this “is like getting Albert Pujols for a tee ball game.” I need Hugh to be a permanent addition to the Judges’ Table. Paul also gets Malibu Chris, who did an Asian-inspired dish to try to get Paul to choose him (bromance alert!), Ty-Lor, and Keith.

* Sarah gets Nyesha and immediately pigeonholes her (or says she will) as her saucier. Nyesha’s fierce, a shoo-in if they do another All-Stars show in a few years, and this feels like taking your best hitter and asking him to drop a bunt in the two-hole. Sarah tries to pick Heather by taking a dish that’s on Heather’s restaurant’s menu (good logic) but instead gets Tyler and then insults him in front of everyone. She ends up with Heather anyway as well as Grayson, so the team is pretty strong outside of Butcherboy.

* Marco doesn’t get picked. That’s got to hurt. Some head-hanging as he, Ashley, and the other guy whose name I can’t remember slink off.

* Meanwhile, I can’t decide if the editors just tried to make Tyler look bad, or if he did it all by himself. Asking your chef a ton of questions to make sure you’re not screwing something up doesn’t bother me – remember Restaurant Wars, Sarah? – but pushing the sous vide technique when Sarah said she’s not comfortable doing something for the first time in the finale or just flat-out disobeying her instructions is really out of line, and I don’t think you can edit that stuff in.

* But I do think the editors tweaked some of the footage of Barbara Lynch to make her look a little pushy in the early going. Later footage shows her very team-focused in the kitchen, and by the end, she was all praise for Paul, even saying “working with Paul is amazing” and she’s very “proud to have this opportunity.” How does Paul hear this stuff and still have no ego?

* The chefs shop at Granville Market, which is awesome. Every city should have something like that.

* Sarah, on managing Tyler: “(I’m) ‘trying to make Tyler feel like I actually give a shit.” Again, the red light means THE CAMERA IS ON.

* Contrast Tyler’s style to one clip we see of Ty-Lor asking Paul for a quick demo on preparing the radishes. Professional and fast. Could be editing, but in this case, I doubt it.

* They spelled Keith wrong (“Kieth”) on the assignment board. It’s a five-letter, one-syllable name people. And it’s not that uncommon: Keith Hernandez. Keith Sweat. Keith Richards. Keith Moon. Keith Urban. Maybe I was supposed to be a musician.

* First big hiccup for either chef comes when the crab for Paul’s first dish develops an off flavor overnight. Keith says the “crab sat overnight,” but where? On the counter? In the fridge but unwrapped? There’s a mistake in there that we never hear about. Paul was prepared with a backup plan, having bought spot prawns he wasn’t otherwise using, which is impressive. (Also good: Canadian wild-caught spot prawns are an environmentally-friendly shellfish option, as populations are abundant and traps do minimal damage to the habitats.)

* To the food: Paul leads with a chawanmushi with those spot prawns; the first group raves, but the second batch is all overcooked and is easily the worst dish either chef served. Second dish is grilled sea bass (loup de mer, which I think is really branzino) with clam dashi and pickled radishes, earning raves for aesthetics and depth of flavor; Tom says it’s “hard to fault this,” so I guess he’s in a good mood here. Third dish is a congee with eggs, uni, fried kale, and smoked albacore; Tom says not as interesting as other courses, Cat loves fish says it doesn’t fit, but it seems to have worked on a more subtle level, with Bill Terlato apparently saying it’s the best thing he’s ever eaten. (I can’t take Cat Cora seriously as a judge. Is she really on par with the other chefs who appear on this show? She’s just here to promote her new Bravo program, right?) Dessert is coconut ice cream (frozen with liquid nitrogen!) with puffed rice, candied kumquats, mangosteen, Thai chili foam, and jasmine gelee; it’s a beautiful dish, and the judges were pleasantly surprised by the heat in the foam, with Tom saying Paul “really knocked it out of the park” but Hugh quibbling with the texture (too hard) of the puffed rice. Outside of the custard fiasco for group two, it sounds like Paul nailed it the rest of the way.

* Sarah starts very strongly with a squid-ink tagliatelle with dashi, coconut, and raw spot prawn dish that may have been the best-reviewed dish of the night. She follows with a rye-crusted steelhead with caramelized fennel sauce and pickled beets; judges love the fish, but she didn’t cook the beets at all (rookie error? Don’t you at least heat the acid and blanch the beets?) and there was probably too much fennel; there’s some irony here, as Butcher Boy was pushing her to sous vide the beets. That dish caused some legitimate drama when her fiance found a pinbone in his fish, but Sarah went into crisis mode and checked all dishes still in the kitchen to remove any stray bones. (I’ve still never found a great way to remove them without damaging the flesh – needlenose pliers are the best option, but I usually end up tearing some of the surrounding fish.) The fish was well-cooked and even Bev said she liked the crust.

* Her third course was veal cheeks and sweetbreads with polenta and persimmon sauce that looked, um, “rustic” on the plate, and was probably her worst dish, with every component but the cheeks getting criticism somewhere, particularly the texture of the polenta, which she then blended to smooth out for the second seating. Hugh also thought the sweetbreads were overcooked. I love persimmons, and could see a persimmon sauce with a rich meat like veal cheek or sweetbread being outstanding, but pairing that with polenta (which I’ve never seen without some kind of cheese as a binder) sounds like an off-note in my head. But the hazelut cake with roasted white chocolate ganache was a home run, particularly the ganache. Padma – I knew I liked this woman for some reason, aside from her stunning good looks that is – looks at Sarah and says with distaste dripping from the corners of her mouth, “I hate white chocolate.” (I do too. It’s not even actually chocolate.) But Sarah roasts it in a low oven for a half-hour to start to caramelize all that sugar, prompting one judge to say that she “turned it into caramel.” The dish was really striking on the plate as well. I confess that I’d rather have this precise dish with an almond cake instead of hazelnuts, but hazelnuts have always been my least favorite nut – there’s a specific chemical in there that, as often as I’ve had them, I just can’t get used to, and it triggers a mildly unpleasant aftertaste. This sucks, as it ruins Nutella for me.

* Before I get to the results, two interesting notes. Paul refuses to blame Keith for the problems with the chawanmushi: He won’t blame Keith in the kitchen, in the confessional, or at Judges’ Table. This is how you lead.

* Also, I think the producers, for once, undersold a dramatic element – Paul’s father breaking down when he sees his son in the finals. We hear from a lot of chefs on this show that their parents questioned their career choices and often weren’t proud of their chef sons/daughters, so winning this show would be some sort of redemption. (I’ll leave the question of whether pride earned in this way is really that valuable to a therapist.) It came up with Paul and Bev this year, at least, but we didn’t get much follow-up here in the one instance where the chef and the formerly disapproving parent were reunited on camera.

* Judges’ Table: Judging appears to be close to a dead heat, with Tom saying it was the best food ever in a finale, something he reiterated in his by-the-numbers blog entry. But he said what I thought they were trying to say on the show, something that was edited down to maintain suspense: Paul’s menu was more ambitious and showed greater dexterity in managing and manipulating flavors and textures, right down to the less beautiful but more thrilling dessert. And Paul, the Chef of Destiny from pretty much the first episode, is Top Chef. I am pleased. But I’d still gladly eat at Spiaggia, Sarah’s restaurant. (And, for what it’s worth, I think Emeril would have picked Sarah.)

* And that wraps a very up-and-down season of Top Chef, but one that finished with two really strong challenges that returned the focus of the show to the food. The best chef won, and the gimmicks gave us lots to snark about. I can’t complain too much.

* I started these recaps as a lark because the one blogger whose recaps I was reading just missed the mark for me, and I had too many stray thoughts I wanted to write down as I watched. It turned into a pretty popular feature here – I’ve had scouts, agents, and even a player’s father comment on them when I’ve been out at games – and led to a great personal thrill, writing for the official Top Chef site on Bravotv.com. Thank you all for reading and commenting. I’ll pick it up again whenever Top Chef returns.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: ,
→ February 29, 2012
→ By

The Wire, season four.

Daniels: What’s this kid to you?
Prez: I don’t know. He’s one of my students.

There appears to be a very strong consensus among critics and serious fans of The Wire that season four is its pinnacle, perhaps the greatest single season of any American TV series from any network. I won’t say that I disagree with that assessment, but that I find it very hard to view season four outside of the context of the three seasons that led up to it – season four stands strongly on the foundation laid by 37 prior episodes that established storylines, developed characters, built tension, and began a form of social criticism that draws on traditions that predate the medium, a kind of angry exposure of societal injustice and hypocrisy that called to mind the angry righteousness of Native Son. The Wire always had a point to make; season four is where that point got made.

The end of season three saw the demise of the Barksdale gang and the rise of a new, more ruthless drug kingpin on the west side of Baltimore, Marlo Stanfield, who lacks the charisma of Avon Barksdale or the intelligence of Stringer Bell, ruling his territory and crew like an authoritarian dictator, disappearing enemies and buying allegiances when he needs them. The investigation into him sputters due to the lack of bodies – a void undetstood by the viewers, but not by the investigating unit – and city politics, allowing a new storyline built around four new characters and one familiar one to take center stage.

Prez turned in his badge during season three, but resurfaces here as a math teacher in one of Baltimore’s failing public schools; four of his students, Namond (son of Barksdale enforcer Wee-Bey), Randy, Michael, and Duquan (“Dukie”), each of whom earns his own subplot. I would challenge any viewer to watch this season without becoming emotionally attached to these at-risk kids, each of whom started life with a negative balance and only one of whom ends the season with any real hope for improvement, thanks largely to the intervention of an adult who goes well beyond his duties to save a kid from jail or death on the corners. I always found Prez a little hapless as a detective; when he showed aptitude for the problem-solving aspects of the job, the camera always seemed to look on him as an object of pity, as if we should be proud that the slow kid finally found something he was good at. Even watching him slug his father-in-law (who had it coming) had that underdog feeling to it. In season four, Prez becomes a fully-realized character, a man who may have finally found his calling after leaving a job that never fit him, justifying (on some level) his presence as more than simply awkward comic relief. But Prez also becomes our conduit to not just another aspect of urban decay but to the missing piece to fill in the puzzle of the plight of the American urban underclass that this series documents. As it turns out, the problems with the streets and corners start inside the broken homes that line them.

–

No spin on a knuckleball. You still can’t tell how it’s gonna break.

Whether David Simon started The Wire to tell great stories, to criticize the actions and policies that were (or are) destroying inner cities in the northeast and the rust belt, or both is immaterial, because the result is clear: the series tells phenomenal stories, longer, deeper, and more intertwined than on any other American TV series I can remember, but always with a clear (if occasionally preachy) message about why. When I was younger, if a network series wanted to cover a major social topic, they would do a Very Special Episode; The Wire was, in that parlance, a Very Special Series.

The macro story here is the decline of the city, at least since the start of season two, since you might argue season one was primarily about the folly of the war on drugs. Adding the failing education system and the way city politics and bureaucracy perpetuate that failure (although the teachers’ unions come in for little to no criticism here) in season four only makes the overall picture more dismal. The police are corrupt. The schools are hopeless. City Hall is only concerned with numbers and elections. The FBI is too busy chasing terrorists to look at homegrown crime. The war on drugs only increases misery, but no one wants to consider decriminalizing them for fear of a backlash. Any attempt to start a small business to help the community and maybe create a job or two will be met with unreasonable regulations – or a need for bribes. And so on. You couldn’t paint a much bleaker picture unless you wanted to turn it into a series about zombies roaming across a post-apocalyptic wasteland.

The trick of The Wire is its ability appeal to your emotions without manipulating them, especially hard because we’re now talking about a season that revolves around kids who are swimming upstream against a current that is trying to drown them. The writing veered as close as it’s come to preaching with the storyline in the schools, with scenes that can’t help but leave the viewer angry – but could they have been written any differently? Stories of failing inner-city schools no longer make the front page because they’re too commonplace, and because (I presume) readers are resigned to these situations as unfixable. Pouring more money into the system hasn’t helped. Testing creates massive incentive problems, which becomes a subplot this season. But more than any other cause, lack of structure and support at home shows up in reality and in season four as a major cause, if not the major cause, of the failing schools.

(I did find the academic project, removing ten disruptive kids from classrooms and educating them holistically while avoiding the standard curriculum, a little contrived, but because it got us another season of Bunny Colvin – and the bittersweet restaurant scene – I won’t complain.)

Even watching the drug dealers of Baltimore recognize the benefits of cartel behavior – the “New Day Co-Op,” meeting in a local hotel conference room – keeps the show grounded in the drug-war theme that was established in season one and continued, often below the surface, in seasons two and three. It also had the benefit of giving me more of my favorite character, Proposition Joe, whose prank phone call to gather intelligence on Herc rivals his “nephews and cousins” line from season two for the biggest laugh I’ve gotten from the series.

–

A good churchman is always up in everybody’s shit. It’s how we do.

Where season four did set itself apart from the previous three seasons was in the depth of writing on individual characters. Earlier years weren’t superficial, but didn’t get as far into motivations as season four did, and there was too much emphasis on current actions relative to character history. Putting the four kids at the center of the show for a full season allowed the writers to focus on past and present because for junior high school kids those two things have little separation between them, and in the case of these kids, the issues from their pasts are still active during the show. Nowhere did this have the same impact (no pun intended) as it did in the storyline involving Michael and eventually Stanfield enforcer Chris Paltrow toward the end of the season. (Spoilers ahead.)

Michael’s visceral, negative reactions to any attempt by adult males to establish clear bonds with him were always odd, but about halfway through the year it became obvious that his reactions were some kind of latent response to prior abuse, likely sexual abuse, by a male authority figure earlier in his life. (It later becomes apparent who the culprit was, and why Michael makes the choices and sacrifices he makes as a result.) When Michael reverses course and asks Chris, who, for all of his coldness during murder after murder, shows peculiar flashes of empathy, even for victims (assuring them it will be quick), Chris’ emotions come to the surface with a fury that reveals a profound, unhealed emotional wound that explains not just the violence of his fulfillment of Michael’s request but the dichotomy in his own character, a murderer with a sensitive side that actually fits him, not one that was grafted on by writers to make him less repellent.

The camera has always liked Cutty Wise, as actor Chad Coleman has this mournful expression along with a deep, deliberate style of speaking that draws your attention even when he’s not in the middle of the action. Yet season three used him more as a prop in plotlines about the difficulties of reintegrating into society after incarceration and the hurdles city government puts in front of small businesses than as an individual character involved in micro stories. Here, his gym is thriving as a center of community activity, with all four boys spending time at the gym, two forging uncertain relationships with Cutty that lead, of course, to violence, but also to one of the season’s few slightly hopeful outcomes.

The one individual story that didn’t grab me was the mayoral campaign of Tommy Carcetti, who, despite getting a little more depth this season (as opposed to the raw ambition of season three), can’t command a scene like a credible fast-rising politician character should. I also never really doubted the outcome of the election – why would we be spending so much time with him, and seeing a resolution in the middle of the season, if he wasn’t going to win? What happens after he takes office is less a function of him and more of the moral hazards rampant in democratically-elected governments. Even the identical character played by an actor with stronger oratory skills would have been more effective.

–

Carver: You know what this is? This is one of those enabling relationships.
Herc: Enable me, Carv.

I think we all recommend The Wire, you to me and now me to everyone who’ll listen, because it is smart, compelling television, infused with bright and dark humor, a show that deserved a wider audience when it was alive and will get that audience , come hell or high water, now that it’s gone. But people should watch The Wire not just for its entertainment value, but because it is a social document, one that treats serious issues seriously, that handles characters like people rather than like tools of the writers, and that shows an essential understanding of the economics of behavior that drive all aspects of our lives. You do not need an econ degree to watch or enjoy this show, just as you do not need one to respond to incentives in your daily life. But you will get an education watching the show, if only in the way that a real education forces you to think critically about issues and search for answers, to ignore easy solutions and to question the pat responses you get from authority figures. It’s showing up on college syllabi, as this two-year-old Slate article attests, and not just in film studies classes. It is an American landmark, a work of protest disguised as a police procedural that, like its best characters, ignores the boundaries set out for both genres in the name of the greater good. There may be, or have been, better American series out there; I’m not well-watched enough to say more than that I haven’t seen one. But rather than elevate season four above the three that preceded it, I’d prefer to simply elevate the series, and hold that season four’s greatness is merely a testament to the vision of its creators, and to the strength of all of the material which laid the groundwork for it.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , ,
→ February 23, 2012
→ By

Top Chef, S9E16.

This week, no gondolas, no ice blocks, no skiing, just one small gimmick and a lot of actual cooking.

* Sarah is going to get killed again for her comments in the confessionals, and some of that criticism is justified. Saying “this is how it was supposed to be” in reference to these three chefs in the finals is all kinds of wrong – Paul, sure, but I’m of the opinion that Edward was probably one of the three best chefs on the show this season, and that Nyesha was wronged with her early elimination. Winning the World Series doesn’t make you the best team, but it makes you the champions. Getting to the Top Chef final three doesn’t make you one of the three best chefs on the show, but it makes you a finalist. I just can’t buy some kind of predestination aspect to the show, or the idea that this proves that these chefs were the best.

* Then Sarah says of the Quickfire challenge, “Asian food is not my forte, thank god Beverly went home because she would have nailed it.” The red light means the camera’s on, Sarah.

* Quickfire challenge: Cooking with one of three Top Chef Masters contestants (including last season’s winner, Floyd Cardoz), make an Asian influenced dish – but you can’t talk to your teammate, and must trade off in the kitchen every ten minutes, with the experienced chef taking shifts one and three and the current contestants taking shifts two and four. That means the experienced chefs do the concept and most of the mise en place, leaving the contestants wasting time trying to figure out what the big idea was and what’s already been done. Wouldn’t one sentence, or ten seconds of talking, have made this a much more reasonable test of the contestants’ cooking skills rather than their powers of deduction?

* I was surprised to see how easygoing the experienced chefs were – we knew Floyd was like that, but Anita Lo and Takashi Yagihashi were also pretty low-key; other than having strong concepts and hoping their teammates would continue those visions, they seemed to have no qualms about playing second fiddle.

* Paul ends up making a sashimi with mirugai (giant clam) with a yuzu dashi sauce, fried white fish, cucumber, scallions … but adds too much Thai chili at the last moment and blows the dish. I got the strong sense he would have won the challenge (and the $20,000 prize) otherwise. “Ashamed Paul Qui” sounds like a meme waiting to happen.

(Side note: My wife thinks Austin Scarlett of Project Runway deserves his own meme, along the lines of “MEANWHILE … IN JAPAN.” If you’ve seen him on camera, you probably understand.)

* Lindsay probably had the toughest challenge, with Anita coming up with a “scallops three ways” dish that was nowhere near evident to Lindsay after the first switch. The concept was great – reflect three different Asian cuisines on one plate – but it seemed like Anita chose a concept that would work for one chef working start to finish, not for a challenge with three blind handoffs. Lindsay only does two of the three intended ways, and her Chinese sausage overpowers the delicate flavors of the scallop.

* Floyd makes a curry, but Sarah says she’s not comfortable with curry. These two worked together better than the other pairs – it looked like Floyd focused on the curry itself while Sarah went after the proteins, crab and a rice flour-dredged cod. Emeril thought their dish needed more acid, but Padma loved the amaranth greens, which apparently grow quite well in warm climates and reach harvest size in 30 days, so I need to track down some seeds. Anyway, Sarah wins, giving Floyd the quickfire win that escaped him during his Top Chef Masters run (even though he won the whole season).

* Elimination challenge: For 150 guests at a “fire and ice” cocktail party, each chef must make one dish and one cocktail, and the dish must contain at least one hot and one cold element. They do get bartenders to assemble the drinks, so the chefs only have to make sure the elements are ready.

* These chefs are so damn collegial in the kitchen it almost made me want Heather back. Almost.

* Sarah goes with a baked cannelloni, made from scratch (which she says is crazy, but really, that’s the kind of thing you have to do to win on this show), with a spiced sformato (a thick Italian custard) that’s frozen on an “anti-griddle” so it will melt and form a cold sauce over the warm pasta. Her cocktail contains gin, kumquats, and mango, which sounds great if you’re sitting on a Caribbean beach but doesn’t really sound like it works with pasta.

* By the way, is an anti-griddle powered by anti-matter? If an anti-griddle hits a griddle, will the universe collapse upon itself? I heard “anti-griddle” and felt like Lady Violet did when Downton got its first telephone. Hugh Acheson said in his blog post that no one touched the anti-griddle during his time on Top Chef Masters, and Sarah nearly cost herself a spot in the finals because the machine over-froze her sformato.

* Paul makes a lobster stock, tearing claws off lobsters before killing them – I hear he also likes to twist the heads off live puppies, just for practice – using it as the base for a very elaborate dish with king crab, lemon ‘snow,’ and a Pan Am cocktail with kaffir lime, palm sugar, and rum.

* Lindsay, who says she’d pull a Ronnie Lott if she sliced her finger off while cooking today, goes with a halibut over a “fiery” celery root remoulade, tomato broth, tomato ice, and raw kale. I’m not sure if the kale was supposed to be raw, but I find raw kale totally inedible. Steam it, wilt it, saute it with cured pork, bake it, whatever, it’s all good, but raw kale has a very fibrous texture that I find really unpleasant.

* Judges’ table: Sarah gets dinged for the frozen mousse, and for the cocktail not working with the dish. The judges love her pasta, the cocktail on its own, and her overall ambition. Paul had some temperature issues, and Tom goes on about the arugula garnish, although I thought Paul’s comment (he wanted the fresh, peppery flavor) made sense, at least from a concept standpoint. Otherwise, he seemed to nail his dish in every way, yet again. Lindsay cooks her fish perfectly, but the raw kale costs her points and the dish overall was kind of boring (mostly per Tom).

* Tom tweeted right after the show about the arugula comments:

* Paul wins the challenge, Lindsay goes home. It fits the general theme of Top Chef: You win for ambition, and you lose for failures in execution. Lindsay didn’t execute all that well (the raw kale, the supporting ingredients overpowering the flavor of the fish), and she showed the least ambition. Sarah failed to execute one major element, but her dish was much more ambitious than Lindsay’s.

* Sarah’s parting comment, that she knew it would be her versus Paul in the finals, will probably get even more criticism than her opening shots, but this one I understand: If you’re going through this competition, you envision yourself in the finals, and in this case, how could she envision herself facing anyone but Paul? Perhaps it’s not something you say on camera, but it is entirely logical to think that way.

* So, ignoring the fact that this challenge already happened several weeks ago, how dominant a favorite would Paul be against Sarah in the finals? It takes so little to cost a chef a challenge at this late stage that I hate to say he’s more than a 60/40 favorite, even though he’s owned most of this season.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: ,
→ February 16, 2012
→ By

Top Chef, S9E15.

If you’re here, you probably saw my guest post on Bravo’s site ranking the final four chefs, with the usual dose of sarcasm along with the analysis. If you’re new to the dish because of that post, welcome! I also chatted with our internal PR folks about how the Top Chef opportunity came to pass.

Top Chef: Texas goes to Vancouver … I would poke more fun at the show’s geographical confusion, but Vancouver is awesome, especially for food, so I’ll let it slide.

* No Quickfire this week, just three “events,” with the winner of each event going on to the final three (turns out we have two more episodes, not just one), and the one chef who doesn’t win any of the three events going home. I like this format – the playing field is even, and you actually have to be the best in something to move on.

* That said, some of the hoops involved in the events before the chefs could really start cooking were absurd. The first one gives the chefs 22 minutes to cook a meal on induction burners in a moving ski gondola, which poses no end of problems for the chefs. Paul mentions getting motion-sick; Lindsay points out that they’re cooking at altitude (so the air pressure is lower and water boils at a lower temperature) and that the burners aren’t perfectly level. There are a ton of ingredients, including a lot of proteins, but Bev makes it sound like there isn’t much hardware available. At the midpoint, each chef must jump out of the gondola as it makes its turn, choose another ingredient from a small and weird set available on a table at the station, jump back into the gondola, and incorporate the new ingredient into the final dish. This is slightly bonkers, yet less bonkers than what comes later.

* The guest judges here are all former Olympic athletes, nobody with any food expertise, and none of them was even half as prepared as Charlize Theron. I need to get my agent on this, stat.

* Bev chooses to go with a raw dish, a salmon tartare; cold dishes can win on Top Chef, but I think the judges look askance at raw dishes, something not helped by Bev almost apologizing for serving something raw. The judges despise weakness. Anyway, Bev does get points for her horseradish-anchovy crème fraiche and for mixing textures with the raw fish and crispy capers and panko bread crumbs.

* Paul can’t get the lamb to brown, so he calls an audible, debones it, breaks it down further, and sears again to try to cook it through. This has to be an induction-burner issue – I’ve never used them, but I imagine it’s a big shift from a gas flame to induction. I’m assuming next week’s elimination challenge will involve giving each chef a book of matches and an axe and sending them into the forest to cook. Paul’s lamb is underseasoned, although Gail liked his curried enoki mushrooms. He certainly had a ton of elements with a wasabi crème fraiche and juniper gastrique as well, but if the protein isn’t good, you don’t win, and Paul was on the bottom.

* Sarah was pretty strong start to finish in this episode, and she proved me wrong by getting out of the regional Italian cuisine box with everything she cooked. In the gondola, she cooked chorizo with caramelized onions, deglazed with prune juice (her extra ingredient), gooseberries (for acid – they are a complete pain in the ass to cook with too), pickled mushrooms, and almonds, with a pancetta crème fraiche underneath the sausage (the one element here that sounded weird to me – the dairy might cut the heat if the chorizo was spicy, but that’s another tart element on top of 2-3 others). The gondola is cold enough to freeze ingredients/elements that aren’t on the burners. The judges’ only criticism was that the prune juice didn’t come through in the final dish, although she finished third.

* Lindsay panics that she didn’t cook enough salmon, so she cuts it in half and serves smaller portions, which the judges don’t notice. She seems to be increasingly prone to these mental miscalculations, or at least the editing is making it look that way. The creamy red quinoa ‘risotto’ with chorizo (recipe here, although I think the red farro should be red quinoa) sounds amazing, definitely something I’ll make at home, and she served that under the salmon and topped it with a horseradish vinaigrette. Lindsay wins with much praise for the quinoa and the perfectly-cooked salmon, although the judges say no one really screwed up. I think the final decision for Lindsay over Bev was hot over cold. I love a good salmon tartare, but Bev skipped the biggest challenge in the gondola – working with the burners.

* Second event: Free your ingredients from ice-block prisons (Michelangelo-approved?) and thaw them before cooking. Psycho jokes abound, which is too bad as Hitchcock made at least a half-dozen better movies, as the chefs attack the blocks with ice picks. No one gets stabbed, although if Marcel was on this season he might have wanted to keep his distance from the others. Meanwhile, Paul wins the Lady Byng Trophy for helping Sarah and Bev break apart their chosen blocks. Did anyone try slamming one ice block against another just to break them down into more managable chunks? Moral of the story: Next year’s chefs should pack blowtorches.

* Sarah goes with vegetables because they’ll thaw as they cook (good thinking), but her pea and spinach soup with turmeric and cream separates as she cooks it, and it seems like she couldn’t re-emulsify it with the hand blender.

* Beverly uses ice or snow to make up for the lack of liquid ingredients available to them, which I thought was pretty clever as long as the snow she chose was, um, white. Anyway, her seared scallops with a red wine-citrus reduction over couscous earned pretty high marks; Gail thought the sauce was heavy but Padma praised her for the rare Top Chef couscous success. Is couscous really that hard to cook? Maybe I haven’t been doing it right.

* Paul gets the prime ingredient, the king crab – maybe he felt guilty about this, so he helped the ladies afterwards – and poaches it (in what? I missed that), serving it with toasted almonds, mango chutney, and sliced brown butter. He wins. I think Bev was ahead of Sarah, not that it matters.

* Third challenge has Bev versus Sarah. I’m sure that’s a coincidence.

* “Oh my God, she has a gun.” Third challenge involves humiliating the two remaining chefs by forcing them to do a mini-biathlon, cross-country skiing and then shooting targets to earn their ingredients. This really had zero value other than to make them look like klutzes – and I will confess right now I would have fared no better – but in the end, they both had plenty of ingredients, and the judging really came down to who did the better job in the kitchen, not who was more successful at the nonsense parts of the challenge.

* My wife asked a pretty good question – what if either chef had hurt herself while skiing? The two chefs did collide, but I think it was because Beverly was going the wrong way. I have no idea how that happens.

* Bev chooses to slow-roast her Arctic char, while Sarah braises her rabbit leg, both big risks given the time limitations, but risks tend to win on Top Chef, especially late in the season.

* Bev is looking for coconut milk and lemongrass, but finds none in the kitchen. Are we seeing – dare I say it – a little pantry bias here? Hide the kittens!

* Sarah mentioned roasting the rabbit loin, but I think her final dish was just the braised leg with sliced rabbit heart, cherries, hazelnuts, and a “kraut puree” of cabbage. I put Sarah at the bottom of my rankings for Bravo’s site because everything she’s cooked seemed to sit in a narrow range of regional Italian cooking, but this was outside of that box – she called it German, my first thought before she said that was Austrian, but either way we’re not in Lazio any more.

* Beverly’s char had a celery root/truffle sauce, an onion/beet compote, and shaved fennel. Gail praised Bev for taking a risk by putting strong, earthy flavors (more suited to game, perhaps) with the fish, but Tom felt the char disappeared because it was underseasoned. Obviously, I didn’t taste the finished product, but thinking through all of those flavors, I’m finding it hard to see how the char would stand up to the truffles, the onions, and the pronounced anise flavor of the fennel.

* Sarah wins, and given the judges’ comments it made perfect sense. Her elements worked together better than Beverly’s did. I’m pretty sure Padma was crying when Bev did her “thanks for the opportunity” soliloquy. I think becoming a mom has made her into a softie.

* Bottom line on this episode is that no one really screwed anything up, and despite some absurd conditions, the best food seemed to win each time. We didn’t have many bad decisions, and there was virtually no drama outside of the heavily-edited scenes from the car at the top of the episode. I’d really like to see the final two episodes just focus on the cooking, given who’s left and what’s at stake. No more hoops till next season, please.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: ,
→ February 9, 2012
→ By

Top Chef, S9E14.

The top 100 is up. Here’s the first part of the list (it’s spread over four pages), the top ten prospects for each organization, and ten eleven prospects who just missed.

—

Fortunately, this week’s episode of Top Chef did not include any has-been comedians, just real cooking for some pretty elite guests.

* Last Chance Kitchen winner: It’s Bev! You knew it would be Bev. I’m sure her food was great, but forgive me my suspicion of anything that reeks of narrative. Sarah is still hepped up on bitchy pills, ripping Bev for being “off in Bevland” and saying she doesn’t want a ticket there. Apparently the food in Bevland is pretty good, Sarah. You might want to check it out if you ever get your head out of Italy.

* Quickfire: blindfolded pantry raid. Goofy, but certainly the idea that you should be able to identify ingredients by touch and smell has merit. Winner gets a choice between a new Prius or a guaranteed spot in the finals. This seems weak to me – you get to the finals by winning a quickfire?

* The footage of the chefs groping around the kitchen while blindfolded wasn’t all that entertaining, although Tom had an evil laugh going. There’s food on the floor and shellfish loose in the fridge. Cleanup on aisle artificial drama.

* Bev accidentally gets avocado, but she’s making fish, which is a pretty natural pairing. I felt like she could have won this thing if she’d cooked her fish through, but I think Tom feels about fish the way I do – if it’s not actually being served raw, it needs to be cooked to at least medium-rare. The shot of Bev running across the kitchen with the fish in one hand and her ten-inch chef’s knife in the other, tip pointed out, was terrifying. Her food may be great, but I wouldn’t want to share a kitchen with her.

* Ed gets pork casings instead of pancetta but makes lemonade, figuratively, by using the casings (pig intestinal linings, high in connective tissue) to make a broth for his soup. That’s the kind of cleverness the show should be rewarding, in my didn’t-taste-the-food opinion.

* Paul’s shrimp is also a touch undercooked. I don’t like raw shrimp, and I think undercooked shrimp has a really weird, unpleasant texture, so I could understand Tom’s immediate, negative reaction to the dish. Do you ever wonder (as I do) if the judges subconsciously hold Paul to a higher standard, because he’s so far ahead of the group?

* Lindsay makes fish with bulgur wheat at charred greens on top, putting her right in the middle of the group.

* Sarah makes corn soup with roasted mushrooms and peaches. Tom loved it, and she should get points for a non-obvious flavor combo, although nothing there was as clever as Ed’s broth. She wins, which I think is her first Quickfire win, and takes the guaranteed spot in the final four, which Ed labels a lack of confidence. I would have called it lazy, but your mileage may vary. And does anyone doubt that Sarah’s motormouth would have been in fourth gear, ready to run over any other chef who made that same choice? (Hat tip to my wife for raising that last point.)

* Elimination challenge: make a dish to impress your mentor. At least two of these mentors have been on before as judges or as Top Chef Masters. Waterworks commence immediately. Tito, give me some tissue.

* Ed can’t get fresh oysters so he chooses canned smoked oysters instead. Chefs on this show often pick ingredients they should know you can’t always get at whole foods, and never seem to remember how often a chef has been sent home for using one substandard ingredient, whether it’s canned or precooked or just not top-quality. Everyone loves his pickles and crisped pork belly skin, though.

* Lindsay makes errors of self-doubt by overloading a Mediterranean fish dish with a cream sauce and some dried herbs that she probably added too late for them to hydrate and mellow. You don’t get a lot of cream in Mediterranean fish plates because the regions where fish is central to the cuisine have typically had less cattle husbandry.

* Beverly takes a huge risk by cooking to order in the wok for eight people, making gulf shrimp and BBQ pork Singapore noodles. That’s a sensible risk given the history of the show, though – there’s substantial upside in showing you have a skill most others don’t, and can organize yourself to the point where you can pull this kind of fast, last-minute cooking off successfully.

* Paul takes a bigger risk by serving a cold sunchoke and dashi soup that’s assembled tableside with what was apparently a very delicate balance of seasonings across all of his ingredients. (Before Paul, when was the last time someone won an elimination challenge with a chilled/cold dish?) Hugh hasn’t blogged yet this week, but Gail wrote that it was the best Top Chef dish she’d ever had, and that the decision here wasn’t particularly close.

* Judges’ table: I told you who won. He and Bev move on, only to go to the stew room where Sarah gives Paul a big hug and Bev the finger. Paul showed wisdom in knowing when to stop adding ingredients or flavors. Comments like that from judges make me think Paul would succeed in any season, not just in this weak crop.

* No mentors at JT, just Tom, Padma, Hugh, and Gail. Gail loves everything but the smoked oyster sauce, and can’t explain why. Hugh points out that Ed had a great dish under there and buried it with one bad choice. Tom gets all double-u-tee-eff on Ed for using canned oysters. Hugh has the money line, of course: “you need to go to the store and see what’s great in the market and cook from there.” Everyone should cook like that.

* Ed is eliminated and says he was knocked out by Beverly. Uh, no. You were knocked out by a canned oyster. But I’ll still try your braised brisket with bourbon-peach glaze recipe from the latest issue of Bon Appetit.

* Final three: Paul and Lindsay are still standing, and I will take Bev over Sarah.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: ,
→ February 8, 2012
→ By

Sherlock, season one.

My annual ranking of the 30 MLB farm systems is up for Insiders. The top 100 follows tomorrow, with chats at noon ET (Spanish) and 1 pm ET (English).

—

I admit to some reluctance to watch the BBC series Sherlock, which takes the famed detective character and reimagines him in the present day, solving crimes loosely based on some of the original stories by Arthur Conan Doyle. I didn’t expect to like a series that so dramatically alters the setting of the original, and inevitably changes the character as well, but it’s surprisingly well done and engaging despite the occasional bit of TV-friendly drama to keep the hoi polloi interested. (The first season just aired on PBS’ Masterpiece Mystery last month.)

Rather than directly adapt Conan Doyle’s stories into individual episodes, series creators Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss chose to write new stories based on one or more of the originals, stretching them out to about 88 minutes apiece, with three episodes per season. Benedict Cumberbatch, who played a significant supporting role in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, plays the title character, a “consulting detective” who solves crimes the police can’t and keeps a blog on his exploits, infusing Holmes with substantial charisma despite his incredible aloofness and professed disinterest in human connections. Martin Freeman (of the UK version of The Office and the middling film adaptation of Hitchhiker’s Guide) plays Dr. John Watson, an Afghan war veteran paired up with Holmes by chance, forming an uneasy working relationship that’s more balanced than the partnership in Conan Doyle’s works, with Watson actually standing up for himself when he thinks Holmes is merely trying to humiliate him. (It doesn’t work, but at least he tried.)

The first season comprises three episodes, with the final one the tightest all around as the characters had become more developed and the crime (and its solution) was more clever and intricate. The first episode, “A Study in Pink,” has to get the two main characters together and define all manner of relationships within the show, and then has a drawn-out standoff between Sherlock and the killer because the BBC asked the producers to add another 30 minutes to the original hourlong show; the second episode was more focused on the crime, but the denouement was also over the top and involved a character who threatens to throw off the show’s equilibrium. The series does put Sherlock in danger a bit too often – while he did die in one of the original short stories, only to be resurrected by a recalcitrant Conan Doyle due to reader demand – even though we know he has to live till the next episode, making the drama from those scenes seem a little false, although I suppose it would be just as absurd to have the main character never find himself in any jeopardy at all.

Comparing Cumberbatch’s Holmes to the character from Conan Doyle’s stories is an exercise in frustration; I view the new Sherlock as inspired by the original character, rather than a mere adaptation. The series puts Sherlock in more situations that explore his lack of social skills, and Watson is more than just a foil for Holmes’ genius, providing commentary on Holmes’ bizarre behavior and personality. I did find myself regularly comparing this Sherlock Holmes to another TV character inspired by the literary one, Dr. Gregory House.

House is an unlikely protagonist for an American TV series, an antihero who aims for perfect rationality in his life and behavior, who solves cases for their puzzle aspects rather than any human elements, who abhors religion and other forms of authority, an unpleasant character you like because he’s clever, not because you love to hate him. Yet despite his claims of rational thought, he shows a malicious streak under the guise of flouting authority or establishing how much his superiors need him, whereas neither the literary Holmes nor the new BBC version exhibit any such behavior. Cumberbatch’s Holmes can be insulting – his line to Watson and a police officers, “Dear God, what is it like in your funny little brains? It must be so boring,” is brilliantly dismissive – but there’s no malice involved.

In just three episodes so far, we see subtle hints that Sherlock is aware he doesn’t quite fit in and might even be a little sad or ashamed about it, such as the time he lies to a potential client about how he knew the latter had recently traveled around the world. He’s arrogant, while House is misanthropic; Sherlock calls himself a sociopath (in response to the accusation that he’s a psychopath), but despite their shared focus on solving the puzzle for its own sake, Sherlock shows more glimmers of humanity in three episodes than House has in eight seasons. House has to rely on humor to make the show watchable, and with the show becoming less funny and its lead character more spiteful, the show’s quality has declined noticeably. Sherlock has some humor, but the stories and the two lead characters can drive the show on their own because there’s more to see and understand in the title character than there is in Dr. House.

Finally, it wouldn’t be a Klaw review of a British series without a mention of Foyle’s War, tied to Sherlock by (at least) a significant guest-starring role by Andrew Scott (who also appeared in The Hour). DCS Foyle is nothing like Holmes, of course; he has a normal range of emotions, but keeps them inside, producing a brooding, melancholy exterior that has become sharper with age. But what the two detectives do share is an attention to detail that characterizes most great literary detectives as well – crimes are solved when the investigator identifies some tiny inconsistency that exposes a wider range of evidence against the guilty party. Holmes solves his crimes through research, Foyle through interrogation, but both solve via deduction. The shows particularly differ in pacing, however – the London-based Sherlock moves quickly, not just in editing, but in dialogue and action, while Foyle’s War is almost leisurely and methodical, reflecting its bucolic setting and the illusion of peace while a war rages mere miles away. So if you’re a Sherlock fan looking for another British mystery series while you wait for season two to arrive here, give Foyle’s War a try.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , ,
→ February 2, 2012
→ By

Top Chef, S9E13.

Recapping the worst episode of Top Chef I’ve ever seen…

* First order of business is to discuss the guest judge this week, Pee Wee Herman. I was too old for his original kids’ show, and never quite got the hipster-chic of it. I really don’t care about the public-indecency arrest, nor do I think it’s germane to a discussion of his appearance on this show. The real problem with Pee Wee Herman is that the character isn’t funny – and an unfunny guest judge who spurs the other judges to try (and fail) to be funny creates a very awkward show that, for me, was unpleasant to watch even before we got to the elimination-challenge foolishness.

* Quickfire: Twenty minutes to make pancakes. I love this challenge, because pancakes are such a classic dish, very American, often badly done, like lead in the stomach, tasting just of buttermilk or of the artificially-flavored syrup in which they are drowned. A pancake is one of the quickest of quickbreads, and while I prefer waffles – better surface/interior ratio, so you get more browning and more crunch – I like the way this gave chefs a blank canvas.

* Was it just the editing, or were most of the chefs just eyeballing their batter? I’m obsessed about measuring ingredients for doughs or batters of any sort, usually with a scale.

* The ricotta pancake thing, for me, is a little played out, and two chefs employed it – lemon-ricotta from Lindsay, ricotta-buttermilk from Grayson (who used chiffonade of basil in her fruit topping, which I love, as it has a surprisingly sweet flavor). Ricotta does produce a really light, fluffy end product though, including the zeppole at Via Napoli in Epcot, so maybe I’m criticizing a trend that is more of a new technique. But we didn’t get a lot of unusual flours, which surprised me because it seems like an easy way to change flavors and textures.

* Probably worth pointing out how incredibly forced the laughter from the chefs was during this entire episode. Grayson at least seemed to have some nostalgia for Pee Wee’s Playhouse, but that was it. Herman’s “the best pancakes I’ve ever had” gag was lame – anyone who didn’t see that coming shouldn’t be allowed to drive.

* Ed wins by going Jackson Pollock with the batter so he serves mostly the crispy edges of pancakes without the doughy interiors. This reminded me of a customer-from-hell incident my wife and I witnessed in a Cracker Barrel in Elkhart, Indiana, in 1998 (a story I may have told before, so bear with me). The burly guy in the next booth, dining alone, orders the pancakes “extra crispy,” and right before the waitress leaves to put in the order, shouts, “did I emphasize crispy?” So, in a development as obvious as a Pee-Wee Herman gag, the guys sends back multiple plates of pancakes because they’re “not crispy enough.” To this day I really have no idea what a crispy pancake would look like or whether that clown ever got what he wanted, or what he deserved for treating the server the way he did.

* Elimination challenge: This was a new low for Top Chef, surpassing the previous low, set when Pee Wee Herman walked into the kitchen at the start of the episode. The chefs had to head out on bicycles to find their ingredients at the farmers’ market in the Alamo district, and then had to find restaurants that would allow them to cook their meals in their kitchens. This is ridiculous for more reasons than I can list, but I’ll start with these.

1. The show is called “Top Chef,” right? So what part of this challenge is remotely relevant to being a chef? It had little or nothing to do with cooking, or even running a kitchen, which I could argue is a relevant consideration for evaluating someone’s cheffing skills.

2. Requiring the chefs to ride all over town on bikes is a pretty big handicap for anyone who’s not in shape, or has bad knees, or is otherwise physically limited. And given how hot it was during the filming of this season, weren’t they asking for someone to get hurt or pass out?

3. It had to be more structured than the editing made it appear. The show’s producers arranged this with restaurant owners beforehand, right? I mean, clearly these restaurant chefs/owners aren’t that surprised to have a TV crew and a random cook show up and ask to use their kitchens, and the chefs keep showing up at the same places, which can’t be a coincidence. So did the contestants get a list of restaurants to hit? And were the restaurants separately compensated? (Or was it just for the free publicity?) They had to know beforehand so they knew they would be asked to write up bills for the chefs. And if I’m right, why not make that clear to the audience?

4. None of that part of the show was even a little entertaining, let alone instructive about food or cooking.

* Moving along rapidly, Ed decides he wants to get proteins at the restaurant, which seems kind of foolhardy; don’t you build your dish around your proteins? He ends up using chicken breast instead of what he hoped for, shrimp, and is nearly eliminated because of it.

* Grayson says, “game night at the Schmitz house, usually one of us breaks down and cries.” I hear ya, girl – Ticket to Ride matches can get pretty fierce.

* Lindsay falls way behind the other chefs in getting ingredients – again, what are we judging here? Then she loses the kitchen she arranged to use because they don’t hold her spot and Sarah shows up. We sure learned a lot about Lindsay’s culinary vision by watching her get screwed over like that. The judges criticize her dish for having a little too much goat cheese, and Pee Wee Herman keeps talking about how amazing it is to have food served in “little boats,” so apparently he’s never seen an endive in his life.

* Sarah makes a “chicken skin vinagrette,” but it wasn’t just from the fat rendered from the skin, since she crisped it on the grill. I haven’t seen a recipe yet but am very interested now. The judges loved her okra, crush her for not seasoning her perfectly-cooked soft-boiled eggs. Outside of that – and chefs do get the axe all the time here for improper seasoning – this could have been a winner as a reconceptualization of a classic dish, a formula that always plays well on Top Chef.

* Ed got a little weird about sharing the kitchen with the guy who actually owned the place, although he was better humored about it at judges’ table than he was in the confessional. I get the criticism of the chicken’s texture if he pulled it too early and didn’t allow it to carry over, but Gail’s comment that poaching in beef fat isn’t flavorful made zero sense to me. Everyone knows the last time McDonald’s fries were good was when they still fried them in beef tallow.

* Grayson makes stuffed chicken breasts, which I’m not crazy about since they tend to dry out fairly easily, especially cooked without skin, because you’re trying to get the stuffing to at least get hot if not actually cooked through, by which time the breast meet is dry. Tom loves the combo of ingredients and loves her butternut squash but not in concert with tomatoes. Weird that Grayson would get large chicken breasts at a farmer’s market – you’d expect smaller ones if they’re really free-range or pasture-raised.

* Paul remains wildly ambitious even when working in someone else’s kitchen. It also seemed like he got along the best with his hosts, which says the easygoing manner we’re seeing post-editing is probably legitimate. He worried, as usual, about the sweet/sour balance, which the judges liked as long as you got all of the elements at once. Only David Tyree could stop him now.

* Can I just emphasize again how terribly unfunny this whole episode was? If Pee Wee Herman isn’t able to provide humor, what the hell is he doing here? Charlize had better insight into the food, and she’s hot. Just bring her back next time instead of letting some has-been comedian be a guest judge.

* Winner: Lindsay. Sounds like she just had the least flawed dish. Paul gets the thumbs-up as well, so I assume it’s fair to call him the runner-up this week.

* Loser: Given what we saw, which of course is a limited look, I expected Sarah or Ed to go home over Grayson. Grayson had a hell of a run though; she seemed early on like she lacked the range, but proved that she could succeed within her limits, and (not that it matters for judging) came off on TV better than anyone other than Paul.

* Last Chance Kitchen: Editing made Grayson look like the winner, but Ed betting the pack of cigarettes that it’s Beverly makes me think that’s who really won the LCK finale. Tom has the line of the week, funnier than anything PWH said, to Grayson: “I would not wake up this early in the morning just to fuck with you.” One preposition makes all the difference.

* Other LCK observations: Interesting to hear eliminated chefs, mostly men, now praising Beverly … Please stop saying “Asian” like it’s one fucking cuisine. Bev is Korean and her dish was more Thai than anything else; they’re no more similar than two European cuisines from different countries. It’s beyond annoying to hear Asian cuisine dismissed like it’s a gimmick, or some narrow style that could be summarized in a Dummies book.

* Final three: I’m sticking with Paul, Ed, and Lindsay.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: ,
→ January 26, 2012
→ By

Top Chef, S9E12.

Recap of last night’s Top Chef: Frozen Food Infomercial…

* Charlize in the stew room! I’m impressed – if nothing else, it looks like she didn’t big league anyone, and really is just a fan of the show. So she and I have … one thing in common. We can build a relationship on this, right?

* Quickfire: Prep three ingredients, then make a dish incorporating all of them. Guest judge this week is Cat Cora, who might be the least impressive TV chef I’ve ever seen. I did watch Iron Chef America for the first year or two that she was on it, and found her stuff less imaginative and a lot less appealing than any of the other Iron Chefs at the time; Boston chef Ken Oringer (of Toro, Clio, Coppa, and La Verdad – he’s legit) just destroyed her in one of the last episodes I watched before I gave up on the show. Cora may be a wonderful person, but given what I’ve seen from her on TV I’m not sure why she’s here.

* And then she criticizes the deep-fried bacon for not having “flavor.” Really? Deep-fried bacon lacks flavor? If you want to criticize them for not rendering the bacon at all, I guess that’s valid, although bacon fat is loaded with flavor, so really, what the hell was she talking about?

* Back to the quickfire … Padma looks like she’s wearing her boyfriend’s clothes, assuming she’s dating a lumberjack, or perhaps is just wearing his tablecloth. Then she refers to the prize money as “ten thousand smackeroos,” so someone forgot that she’s not at home talking to her baby.

* Chris J. and Grayson are one team, and their styles don’t meld that well, with Grayson – who nearly botches the fresh pasta beyond repair; I’d love to know what she did to rescue a dough so dry it was tearing in the roller – telling Chris to get a move on, and Chris saying, “Fast is slow, and slow is smooth,” reciting something he apparently once read in a fortune cookie. “Good fortune happy lucky big time for you and family.”

* Paul and Ed, the dream team combo, end up DQ’d because Paul forgot to cook the shrimp. He didn’t just forget to add them, as Bev did with her curried rice krispies – he didn’t even cook them. He might have been the last of the six chefs I’d expect to brain-cramp like that, even if he was once a dope dealer.

* Despite all their issues, including finishing in the final seconds, Grayson and Chris win, leaving Lindsay and Sara as bitter as raw radicchio. (Foreshadowing!) Sara says in the confessional that her dish was better, which would be entirely plausible if we’d ever seen her touch Grayson and Chris’ dish. No immunity, though, which makes sense since we’re almost to the finale.

* Elimination challenge: feed 200 people at a block party with your take on a traditional block-party dish, which is then twisted into a commercial for Healthy Choice, which pushes low-calorie, low-fat, low-salt, dishes made with cheaply-sourced factory-farmed ingredients and pretends they’re good for you. Anyway, how come I never get invited to these parties? I need to get my agent on this.

* Anyway, the chefs pick their dishes, and are then told to lighten them up because the sponsor says so. Healthier versions? Come on, it’s Top Chef, not The Biggest Loser. I want fat served on a bed of fat, topped with hollandaise.

* We keep hearing about how the chefs reduced the salt in their dishes. Is it unfair of me to expect a show that’s all about food, with chefs and judges who talk about fresh ingredients, to understand that for a person with normal blood pressure, salt is not a problem? If you’re not eating processed foods, and your blood pressure is fine, you’re not eating too much salt. I could understand saying that part of the challenge for the chefs is to force them to amplify flavors without salt, but please, stop repeating the myth that salt is unhealthful.

* The chefs only get two and a half hours, including prep time. They did know ahead of time, so they could plan accordingly, but on the flip side, the mise en place must have taken up half of that time.

* Lindsay and Sara are making meatballs. Sara switches to turkey, but other than seeing them come off the grilltop a little flat we don’t get much more info on them. Lindsay goes with veal and lamb. Why lamb in meatballs? That has to be the fattiest meat option available. I don’t really like lamb – just lost my taste for it all of a sudden – but when I’ve had ground lamb dishes, I always find them a little greasy. For a low-fat challenge, it seems like an odd choice. Lindsay binds her meatballs with Greek yogurt, which sounds weird, but she gets props for using chickpea flour, which I think is an underutilized kitchen weapon – I’ve used it for a slew of things, including savory crepes and fresh pasta. I’m also eager to try her quinoa and black pea salad with a garlic-parsley vinaigrette. (But did she really use garlic powder in the dish?)

* Grayson and Chris end up with chicken salad sandwiches, Grayson’s choice because Chris was too busy pondering the true meaning of “block.” Chris kills the mayo and uses a tofu emulsion, reminiscent of Alton Brown’s egg-less Caesar salad dressing, so not only is it lower in fat but it’s now friendly to people with egg allergies. Grayson is crunched for time, as always, but her choice to make the sandwiches to order turns out to be her trump card over Chris. I did think Chris’ watermelon salad side dish, with a frozen pineapple slush poured on top, looked far better than Grayson’s trendy watermelon salad with feta and whatever you lost me after you put goat cheese with watermelon.

* Paul and Ed push the envelope, of course, with their takes on a Korean dish called galbi, grilled beef ribs first marinated in a salty-sweet mixture and often cooked table-side in restaurants or at cookouts. I’ve never had it, but you pretty much had me at “beef ribs.” Ed refuses to tone down any of the fat other than trimming the short ribs, which is kind of a fool’s errand because there’s so much fat laced in the meat itself, and then pairs it with a white-flour steamed bun. Paul switches to ground turkey, mixes in eggplant, and serves it in a lettuce wrap with a white-peach kimchi and a nonfat yogurt-miso sauce. Paul says at judges’ table that he added eggplant for the fat, which I assume is just nerves talking because, um, it has almost no fat. Ed, meanwhile, has to deal with kids stealing his bread, which is also probably a sign it’s not health food.

* Winners: Paul, Lindsay, and Grayson. Tom loves Paul’s kimchi. Grayson stands up to Tom at judges’ table and I think rendered him speechless. Paul wins again, no shock, but he did have the most out-of-the-box dish, including the things he did to maintain flavor while losing fat, and apparently executed it.

* Losers: Ed, Sarah, Chris, although the judges say nobody really flopped. Sarah kind of gets a pass for a good dish that wasn’t as good as her competitor’s; the biggest complaint was uneven mixing of the salad, which sounds like a terrible nitpick. Ed loses to Deep Blue, but also gets points off for punting on the healthful part of the challenge and bullshitting the judges. Chris J. is the pretty obvious choice for elimination here, and I think he was the worst remaining contestant, at least in odds of winning the whole thing. Grayson blames herself for picking chicken salad, which didn’t play to Chris’ strengths, but he was there for the decision on what to cook and didn’t come up with a valid alternative.

* Last Chance Kitchen: Mystery Box challenge. Bev and Chris make almost identical dishes. Tom doesn’t say so, but I think the deciding factor may have been the white anchovy, which Bev integrated in her dish, but Chris didn’t after suffering chef’s block.

* Final three: I’m sticking with Paul, Ed, and Lindsay. I still think Sarah is too limited – both of her dishes in this episode were Italian-plus, at best – and Grayson is probably the weakest chef remaining. Looks like we’ll get a re-entry from LCK after next week’s episode.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: ,