→ November 23, 2011
→ By

The Wire, season two.

The Wire: The Complete Series is on sale again on amazon for almost 60% off, at $85.49 – perfect timing for me, as many of you have asked for my thoughts on season two, which I just finished watching on Friday.

I get why so many of you warned me that season two might be disappointing; some said it’s the worst season, or just not as good as the first, or just so different that I might not like it. I wouldn’t say any of that held true for me, though – it was just as good as the first, in large part because it was so different, and aside from one complaint about the plot I would be hard-pressed to offer any negative sentiments.

Again, for the handful of you who haven’t seen the series (I’m fairly certain I’m the last one on this particular ship), The Wire follows an ad hoc group of Baltimore police officers who, under the charge of Lieutenant Cedric Daniels, form a major case squad to pursue drug dealing operations. In season two, the squad has been spread to the winds after the end of the Barksdale case from the first season, but gradually Lt. Daniels puts the group back together to pursue a vendetta for a police commander, Stan Valchek, who is angry with the leader of the dockworkers’ union over the placement of a stained glass window in their local church. (Seriously.) That case mushrooms into a sprawling investigation that links the union to white slavery, black marketeering, and a source of drugs for Proposition Joe’s gang (which is a good thing, because we need more Proposition Joe).

The feel of the season is different because of the change in theme. The first season was very much about the inherent fallacy behind the war on drugs, and how ineffective and expensive that battle is likely to be. The second season revolves around the decline of blue-collar employment, which, like the drug war, is behind the economic and social decay of many older American cities. The dockworkers are struggling and their union head bets it all, in effect, on double-zero, putting illegally gained funds into lobbying efforts to dredge a nearby canal and increase port traffic. Those funds are the proceeds of payoffs from smugglers, who attract the attention of the police when one of the containers contains the bodies of thirteen dead women who were being smuggled into the U.S. to work as prostitutes, likely under duress.

The new storyline brought in a host of new characters, most strong, led by the union leader, Frank Sobotka, and the port officer who ends up joining the major case squad, Beadie Russell. Sobotka’s story plays out almost like a classical tragedy – he’s probably doomed from the start, and is so heavily invested in his work that he’s ignorant of the impending danger to members of his immediate family. (Ziggy, his son, was one character I could have done without, or simply done with less of; I almost felt sorry for him when he finally snapped, but then again, could anything we know of his history really excuse what he did?) And Sobotka is faced with some difficult choices, ones with nothing but gray area, because of his moral and political responsibility to his fellow dockworkers.

Russell was a little less well-formed than Sobotka, and her development from security guard to investigator wasn’t as well written as the development of Carver in season one from goofball to surveillance expert (although I suppose this season showed that was a fluke and he just regressed to the mean). The Russell character worked more because of how Amy Ryan played her, almost like she was trying to shed the stereotypical soft female cop image and develop some toughness, much of which falls apart in the final episode. People win Emmys for that sort of thing – that is, when the Emmys are aware that the series exists in the first place.

The expansion to the docks comes at the expense of the Barksdale storyline, although the writers did a solid job of keeping that thread alive throughout the season so they can pick it up again at a future point. Avon Barksdale remains in jail, so Stringer Bell – still the strongest central character in the show from my point of view – becomes more central, even ordering the murder of a potential turncoat and setting up a hit on someone Barksdale hired to work for the group. Bodie’s attempts to grow into some sort of leader within the Barksdale crew was one of the stronger points in the first half of the season, but was dropped for the second half as the focus shifted more and more to the docks. His scene in the flowershop, while insanely silly, was a highlight of the season for me.

That one complaint about the plot I mentioned earlier was pretty significant, even if it was probably realistic (and here comes a spoiler). The FBI agent who tips off the Greek about raids and eventually about Sobotka felt like a tacked-on element, as if the writers needed to ensure that this case wasn’t a total win for the cops, with very little on the agent’s true motivation for protecting a murderous mobster. Is he unaware of the Greek’s body count? Does he view that as an acceptable tradeoff for the information the Greek provides, especially on terrorism? Is this sanctioned by his bosses? Will he ever face any consequences? I get that a rout for the cops would seem too network-police-procedural, and absolutely not realistic, but to have them sunk because of a leak from outside their group, felt like a deus ex machina for the bad guys – a less compelling resolution than we saw in season one.

* I’m not sure what was funnier – Proposition Joe’s response to Sergei’s comments about family (“I got motherfuckin’ nephews and cousins fucking all my shit up…”) or McNulty’s one line when they finally move in on the white slavery operation (“You’re late”), but I remain continually impressed by the writers’ ability to weave in humor without interrupting the flow of the narrative. If you think about it, not only is that more like real life than the idea of separating humorous moments from everything else, but it’s the natural human response to stress, anxiety, or sometimes even grief or despair. It should appear everywhere, and should be seamless. That doesn’t make it easier to write, but it does mean it’s important to make the effort.

* And the wait for the payoff on the “Why always Boris?” joke – one of the longest I can remember in any TV series – was absolutely worth it. I wonder if that was planned from the start.

* So does anyone else think FedEx knew they’d get tremendous word of mouth by hiring the actor who played Bodie to appear in one of their new commercials, or was it just their own dumb luck?

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , ,
→ November 17, 2011
→ By

Top Chef S9E3.

Sorry I skipped last week’s episode, but I’ll do my best to blog each week from here on out.

* Not discussed enough in the debate over purchasing cooked shrimp (which was an obvious reason for an elimination) is the idea of serving shrimp cocktail at all on Top Chef. I fail to see any way in which that could be turned into a potential winning dish, and it absolutely screams 1970s cocktail party – or bad hotel buffet. And it’s not Mexican. The fact that the pink team never thought, “Hey, this is probably a terrible idea for a dish,” is disturbing.

* Store-bought tortillas. You knew that was going to come back to bite someone, right? Have these chefs watched the show before?

* Given how unattractive the tres leches cake was, and the history of early eliminations for chefs who make dessert, Heather just got her ass saved by the rest of her team. Not only was it leaning – she blamed the heat in the kitchen, which is possible, except aren’t chefs on this show always complaining about the heat in the kitchens? – but it was decorated like an Easter bonnet (I think Hugh said that), not for a quinceañera. They didn’t love Dakota’s cake, but at least it looked the part.

* Was it odd that we didn’t get an individual winner? I haven’t seen enough of the early seasons (I jumped in halfway through the Voltaggios’ Shermanesque march through season 6) to know if this is unusual. Potential winners for me included Chris J.’s green chile, mushroom, and oaxaca empanadas, Beverly’s short rib taco with kimchi (recipe is kind of missing the part where you cook the short ribs), Chuy’s braised goat birria, and Paul’s shrimp ceviche in yuzu with corn salsa. I’d love to try that last one with a firm-fleshed white fish. (One note on Chuy’s recipe: The peanut salsa calls for 3 cups of peanuts, 8 guajillo chiles … and 1/8 tsp of cumin. Really? A good three-fingered pinch of cumin is really going to make a difference in two pounds of spicy, crunchy peanut butter? Come on.)

* Slightly surprised Chris C. – who is Anthony Dinozo from NCIS – didn’t get called out for a dish that was a little simple for Top Chef. I guess it was extremely well done.

* Did any chef actually believe they’d face a live rattlesnake in their quickfire boxes? They’re poisonous. Bravo is not going to risk a fatal snake bite on Top Chef.

* The whole “…, bitches” meme needs to die a quick and painful death. Not only is it incredibly derogatory towards women, just about everyone sounds like an idiot saying it. You are not Rick James. Stop it.

* Contrast Chuy’s leadership style – not loud, but clearly in control, leading through advice and example but never by scolding or patronizing anyone – with Sarah’s. Sarah seemed to want to be in control yet totally uncomfortable being assertive without talking down to her teammates (and Lindsay was 1A to Sarah’s 1 here). I didn’t see accountability for the shopping errors anywhere, which should come down to proper menu planning and clearer directions to the other half of the team. You can’t run a team of eight anythings without someone taking the lead. If Sarah had gone home instead of Keith, it would have been fully justified.

* What a huge boost Hugh Acheson is to judges’ table. He’s hilarious and oozes common sense; Tom Colicchio can be funny, but his humor often comes off as dismissive, whereas Hugh can be just as critical but his delivery is far more good-natured. His blog on the show is a must-read – he’s just as funny in print, with his post on this week’s episode poking fun at maybe half the chefs in the competition, and even a fellow judge or two. (“Padma double dips. There a lot of innuendo.”) Gail Simmons might be better-looking, but she doesn’t bring half of Hugh’s humor or insight to judges’ table.

* I skipped the first Last Chance Kitchen, but watched this one to see how my namesake made out. Interesting to see that the chefs didn’t know of LCK’s existence. I thought the concept might be dumb, but this challenge was very straightforward – no gimmicks, heavy emphasis on the food. I won’t spoil who won this face-off, but one comment is that the winner’s dish follows a structure that has, at least over the past three seasons, proven very successful on Top Chef when it’s executed properly.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: ,
→ November 4, 2011
→ By

Top Chef, S9E1.

Buyer’s guide to first basemen is now posted for Insiders. I’ll have one of these up every day next week, Monday through Saturday.

Spoilers abound, so hold off if you haven’t seen it…

* In general I approve of this format – 29 chefs who must cook once (or twice) to qualify for the final sixteen. I think it could really open things up to a dark horse or two whose abilities won’t play so well through an audition process but will play up when s/he is actually putting food in front of the judges. It also had the benefit of weeding out the colossal douchebag right off the bat (although, if his abilities matched his own opinion of them, we’d be stuck with him for a few more weeks … and really, how do you get on this show without an ounce of butchering skills?). I do worry that we’re headed for a 14-person battle for a single chef’s jacket, which seems a little unbalanced; they could have just gone with yes/no, and if they ended up with more than 16 in the yes group had a cook-off to determine the final spots.

* I hate seeing it spread over two episodes across two weeks. Make it two hours on one night. I’m not burning up with suspense here; I’m just mildly annoyed that it was cut off so abruptly.

* Back to the douchebag – I don’t remember his name – but 1) He can’t be real, can he? Could he be so lacking in self-awareness to think that this act would play with chefs five to twenty years his senior? And 2) Slightly weak to let Grayson’s dish get blown up by another chef’s mistake. Tom’s point, that she was wrong to assume Chef DB could handle it for her, makes it a slap-on-the-wrist infraction, not a “you’re more than 50% likely to go home now” type of error. Get her another tenderloin. Let her incorporate a little meat from another cut so there’s at least more food on the plate. I’d much rather see a competitor go home due to her own mistake than due to a competitor’s.

* Fear the Beard. I’m just sayin’.

* “I’m a culinary artist.” Kind of like “I’m a groundball pitcher.” Just shut up and generate some groundballs already.

* That said, the first chef to use that phrase, Chris Crary, did deliver on the claim that his style is like Richard Blais’. I don’t know if he’s got Richard’s technical skills, but he put out one of the most elaborate dishes we saw and the judges approved.

* Knew Sarah Grueneberg was a lock when she chose the pig skin as long as she didn’t seriously screw it up – the judges generally seem to reward risky choices if the execution is even adequate – but it seems like her repertoire is mostly Italian cuisine. Does that mean she’ll be limited in later challenges that require knowledge of, say, east or south Asian styles?

* Chris Jones reminds me of someone – a musician? an actor? – and it is driving me insane because I can’t figure out who it is.

* Very excited to see Hugh Acheson, who was the best part of Top Chef: Masters S3 because he’s hilarious, as one of the judges. Anyone have his cookbook (A New Turn in the South: Southern Flavors Reinvented for Your Kitchen)?

* Hey Richie – is this the hairstyle you wanted? That is a good look on exactly … no one. And, more to the point, a palate that’s well off the median (he said a ‘salty’ palate – does that mean things taste salty to him even when they’re not?) is a serious handicap in this kind of competition.

Your thoughts?

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: ,
→ September 23, 2011
→ By

The Hour, season one.

I wasn’t aware of the existence of the BBC series The Hour (official site) until I caught Alan Sepinwall’s positive review of it in August, and as a fan of highbrow British drama and of one of the series’ three stars, Dominic West (a.k.a., Jimmy McNulty), added it to the DVR queue. Its combination of suspense, complicated interoffice relationships (romances and rivalries), and subtle jabs at modern Western governments did not disappoint, even when the show didn’t quite deliver the slam-bang finish my American sensibilities anticipated.

“The Hour” is the show within this show, a new BBC newsmagazine program that debuts in 1956, just as the Soviets are about to crush an uprising in Hungary and Colonel Nasser is about to nationalize the Suez Canal. This propitious timing coincides with a more personal intrigue that consumes the program’s chief reporter, Freddie (Ben Whishaw), who receives a desperate attempt for help from an old friend, the daughter of the wealthy aristocratic family that took him in during the Blitz. “The Hour” is produced by Bel (Romola Garai), Freddie’s ex-girlfriend and a controversial choice as producer because of her gender, and Freddie finds himself passed over for the anchor’s chair by the ambitious cad Hector (West), who appears to be all style but develops over the six episodes into a man of substance – or a man who wants to have substance but can’t fully commit to it.

Although Hector and Bel end up in the sack – really, if you couldn’t see that coming, I have some bad news about Santa Claus – the relationship between Hector and Freddie is the most fascinating of the show. Freddie is naturally jealous of Hector’s ease with women and affair with Bel, but Hector sees in Freddie an intellectualism and persistence that he wishes he had. Freddie purports to scorn Hector, but on some level desires his respect, not realizing he’s already earned it.

The Hour‘s creators have also done an excellent job of filling out the roster beyond the Big Three with complex characters who work as more than just mere props and set the show up well for future seasons (there’s at least one more in the pipeline). Clarence, Bel’s boss, is the most central of these, a longtime company man who must shield the show from would-be government censors but also has personal motives for his actions, including one revealed in a brief, impassioned speech to Freddie about this show being the opportunity for which he’s worked his entire career. There’s also a ton of groundwork laid for the future in Hector’s marriage to Marnie, whose executive father has been instrumental in advancing Hector’s career. (Marnie is played by Oona Chaplin, whose grandfather, Charlie, appeared in a few films of his own.)

The drama of putting on a weekly news program isn’t in and of itself much with which to sustain a show, so the writers have written most of that into the background, waiting until the final episode to shift it to the front of the plot, at which point it ties together Freddie’s intrigue story, Hector and Bel’s affair, and the threat of censorship into one very tense program, with a plot twist during the live broadcast I truly did not see coming. Instead, the writers relied on the intrigue, the romance, and the discussions of actual events in the Suez and Budapest to keep up the tension in the first five episodes, as well as the tremendous performances by all three of the central actors, particularly Whishaw as the sleep-deprived reporter whose search for the truth encompasses both political and personal ends.

I’ve seen some criticism of the show in the British press that compared it to the American series Mad Men for its setting in a previous era and heavy use of the look and style of that time period, but it reminded me more of a British made-for-TV movie from 1988 called A Very British Coup, in which a populist Labour Party candidate becomes Prime Minister, only to face a wide-ranging conspiracy by entrenched commercial interests to remove him from power. That film, like The Hour, does tension the hard way, through words and characters plotting rather than through the threat of physical harm. It’s a tough trick, and I even found myself falling into the trap in the final episode of season one, when, after the show-within-the-show has concluded, the final piece of the spy puzzle is placed, but quietly, without a weapon or an officer of the law in sight. I find films, TV series, and books written in that way to be very satisfying because I feel more involved in the tension – putting a protagonist at the end of the gun barrel is easy, so easy it’s brutally overused – but I could easily understand someone seeing The Hour‘s dialogue-driven plot as dull for the very same reason. Your mileage may vary.

You can watch The Hour on amazon instant video, but it doesn’t appear to be on Netflix instant streaming yet.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , ,
→ September 20, 2011
→ By

The Wire, season one.

When I finally started watching The Wire in June or so, I didn’t intend to write about it here because I feel like no show of the last ten years has been written about, and written about so well, as this one. Enough of you have asked for my thoughts that I changed my mind, but I’m not sure I can offer you anything new on the subject.

I was a big fan of Homicide: Life on the Street, Wire creator David Simon’s previous show, also based on Baltimore on a nonfiction book Simon wrote, and a show that stood out for the depth of its characterization rather than its use of the crimes themselves as the primary generator of narrative threads. The show made Andre Braugher a minor star – it should have made him a major one, but the show was buried on Friday nights at 10 pm for much of its run and never found the audience it deserved – and did win four Emmy awards over its run, including one for Braugher, so at least it was noticed by the industry if not by the viewing public as a whole. It was also one of the first shows I can remember that used the ensemble cast as a true ensemble; Braugher was the best actor, and the best character, yet was never singled out in the writing as the show’s main star beyond his character’s story arcs. You watched for the group, not just for him.

That casting and writing mentality – that the ensemble is bigger than the sum of its actors – is the great separator, in my mind, between The Wire and just about any other show I’ve seen in any genre. The acting is strong, the dialogue is strong (still stylized, just not as much as your standard formulaic network crime drama), the plotting is intricate, but at the end of the day, it is the idea that the stage that unites all of these players is the true center of the show that makes The Wire such compelling viewing.

For the four or five of you who haven’t seen this series, season one follows an ad hoc task force in the Baltimore city police department as they identify and investigate a large drug-dealing operation in the city’s housing projects that is also responsible for up to a dozen murders. The show gives more or less equal time to the members of that drug cartel, all African-American, running their criminal operation in an efficient, business-like manner, led by Avon Barksdale and his consigliere Stringer Bell. The good guys can be bad, the bad guys have some elements of good, and there is no question where Mr. Simon’s sympathies lie on the twin subjects of the war on drugs and drug decriminalization – but it’s never preachy the way most network shows (I’m looking at you, Law & Order: SVU) are when they try to get topical. Season one of The Wire shows the impact of the war on drugs and lets those results speak for themselves.

You have to dig fairly deep into this show to find poorly drawn or stock characters – over the course of 13 rich episodes, the writers show us multiple sides of at least a dozen central characters, most amusingly Wee-Bey, and show significant development of at least half of those, including cops Pryz (screw-up nepotista to dedicated researcher) and Carver (clock-puncher to hardcore surveillance guy … but with a twist in the final episode of the season) to Barksdale lieutenant and nephew D’Angelo (grows a conscience) to addict/confidential informant Bubs. Yet even those stock characters have their value, such as personal favorite Proposition Joe (whom I quoted in last week’s chat) or Ed McMahon-in-uniform Jay Landsman.

And then there’s Omar Little, whom I think is the show’s most popular character – a violent, ruthless thief who also speaks unusually formally (never swearing), abides strictly by his own set of ethics, and is gay. He only appears in a handful of episodes in this season before absconding, but he’s the best example of the series’ stylized speech – you may never encounter someone who speaks like this, but it is so memorable and so clever that I can forgive the departure from reality.

For my money, though, the star of season one is Stringer Bell, played (to my shock) by an English actor, Idris Elba, now the star of Luther. Bell is a brilliantly conceived character, the brains behind the Barksdale operation, taking economics classes in the evenings, running front businesses as actual businesses, devising codes and changing protocols, and ordering murders when necessary. Elba infuses this character with tremendous gravity between his baritone voice and this one facial expression where he drops his chin without lowering his eyes, delivering a look that could pin a thought in midair and drop it to the ground without a fight. If he’s on the screen, I don’t want to miss a syllable.

Some scattered remaining thoughts from season one:

* Many of you have told me you consider this the best series in TV history, but I haven’t seen anywhere near enough television to offer that judgment. I actually don’t like most scripted TV series; the medium isn’t the problem, but the industry serves the mass audience a product that just doesn’t speak to me. The best TV series I’ve seen isn’t a series by our standards – that would be Foyle’s War, a British detective series that airs in roughly 90-minute self-contained episodes, with just a few per season. It’s more a series of short movies than an American-style TV series. It’s nothing like The Wire in setting, look, feel, time, or place, but it is everything like The Wire in intelligence, wit, and tension.

* So I mentioned the other day that Unforgiven was the only movie for which I can remember walking out of the theater before the film ended, and the scene that did it was when Eastwood’s character (EDIT: I got this wrong – see the comments) kicked the tar out of English Bob, after which we saw Bob’s companion urinate down his own leg. My wife wanted out at that point, and I can’t say I disagreed, even today: The use of someone pissing himself as comic relief is such unbelievably weak writing that I’d be ashamed to laugh at it, and as a demonstration of terror it’s rather over the top. Contrast that with Wallace’s final scene, when he realizes he’s trapped and that the person who ordered the hit isn’t around to countermand the order. He’s done, and he’s shocked, scared, betrayed, and when he loses bladder control, it’s mentioned in passing by Bodie as a way for the writers to heighten the emotion of the scene – not for cheap laughs. That wasn’t the part of the scene that made the strongest impression on me (that would be Poot having to tell Bodie to shut up and pull the trigger, then taking the gun and finishing the job himself, showing how much of Bodie’s tough-guy act was just that, an act), but it is a testament to the strength of the show’s writing.

* Speaking of Andre Braugher, if you haven’t seen his FX series Thief, for which he won his second Emmy for Best Actor in a Dramatic Series, the entire six-episode run is available for free on imdb.com. Braugher is the clear star here, but the plotting on The Wire reminds me more of this series than any other I’ve seen.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , ,
→ April 6, 2011
→ By

New ESPNU show + Through the Desert app.

As you might have heard on Wednesday’s podcast, I’ll be appearing on a new studio show on ESPNU called College Baseball Live, every Thursday night at 7 pm EDT/4 pm PDT from now until May 12th. (There’s one more show on May 19th but I had a scheduling conflict.) The show will cover college baseball in general, with an emphasis on the SEC, as well as a modicum of draft chatter, and will be followed by an SEC game of the week, beginning this week with South Carolina vs. Tennessee. I’ll appear again on a brief postgame show.

This is probably as good a time as any to mention that I’ve also signed a new contract with ESPN, which has made much of this year’s extra content across all media possible. I have always appreciated the comments from readers who ask me if I’ll join their favorite team’s front office, but this is where I want to be right now, not least because life on the media side has always worked better for my family.

My weekly Tuesday column yesterday was on some rookies who were surprising Opening Day roster additions.

–

Reiner Knizia has been as aggressive as any game designer in licensing his games for iOS app development, producing a few of my favorites so far (notably Samurai and Battle Line). His two- to four-person boardgame Through the Desert is now available in a beautifully rendered app, but on the iPod Touch there are some implementation issues that have made the game trickier to play.

Knizia’s Through the Desert ($1.99 for the regular game, $2.99 for the iPad/HD version) is played a board of hexes with several oases and watering holes scattered more or less evenly throughout it. During the setup phase, each player places one camel in turn, with players rotating until each player has placed all five of his starting camels. (Players begin with five camels, each a different color.) After the setup, players place additional camels (drawn from a communal pool) adjacent to those they have already placed, building “caravans” that can accumulate points in three ways:

* By abutting an oasis, which is worth five points.
* By crossing a watering hole, which is worth three points for a large hole and one for a small hole.
* By fully enclosing an area within the caravan; between the caravan and the edge of the board; or between the caravan and the small, impassable mountain range within the board. The player receives one point for each enclosed hex, plus any bonuses for surrounded watering holes.

The only restriction on placement is that a player cannot place a camel next to a camel of the same color placed by another player.

There are also game-end bonuses of ten points apiece for the longest caravan (most camels) of each color. The game ends when there are no more camels available in any of the five colors.

The game offers a lot of decision-making with zero randomness involved. I’ve found the bulk of my thinking during the game is spent trying to anticipate each opponent’s next move or two, both to see if I can block anyone and to make sure I’m not going to end up blocked. The problem is ultimately one of resource constraints – you can only place two camels per turn, your number of turns is finite (but not known exactly), and your number of possible moves is restricted by the board and opponent placement – with the board big enough that the game is different every time, especially with three or four players.

The app itself is perfectly stable, but the way the developers implemented the game has proven frustrating. For one thing, there’s no way to tell whose turn it is, and there’s no way to see the current score of any player other than the one whose turn it is. In the four-player game, the bottom row of hexes on the board is obscured by the silly waving carpet at the bottom of the screen, and I couldn’t figure out how to place a camel there. I’ve also found the hard AIs to be a little light – in at least a dozen games, I’ve only once had an AI player make a move to block me, and that came in a four-player game where one of the other AIs was about as challenging an opponent as a sack of hair.

The AI problem isn’t a huge deal since the game allows for network play, and the hard AIs are good enough to make the game a nice diversion. It’s just not as challenging as it could be, and the lack of any kind of scoreboard or indication of who’s up is annoying and completely avoidable. I’m hoping at some point there will be an update to at least fix the bottom-row glitch and provide a score option, although the AIs probably are what they are for the long term. I’d recommend the game if you’ve already grabbed the two I mentioned above as well as Carcassonne and Ingenious and are looking for a change of pace; if I see any improvements come down the line I’ll repost with a stronger recommendation. And if any of you should try the iPad version, let me know if any of these issues are resolved.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , ,
→ March 31, 2011
→ By

Top Chef All-Stars finale.

So I’m happy with the result, both because I think Blais showed that he was the best chef there over the course of the regular season (not just the playoffs), but because I like a good redemption story, and I didn’t want to see him implode after another last-second loss. I thought the sous-chefs gave him a pretty good advantage – for all the talk about Spike as a Marcel-esque anchor, he seems to be great on a team and more Machiavellian when it’s an individual challenge – and he showed more leadership than Mike, who listened to what his team proposed and then did what he wanted anyway. (It’s the fake-listening that bugs me; either you’re listening, or you’re not. If you want to be a dictator, that’s fine. Dictators who insist they’re not dictators are in the news enough these days without another one on Top Chef.)

Ultimately, though, it seemed like the better food won out. Both chefs slipped slightly on their desserts, but Richard (with big help from Spike) made the adjustment between serving one and serving two. The editing at Judges’ Table seemed to downplay the problems with Mike’s custard, but the shot of Marcel and Stephen eating it (mostly conveying their dislike through facial expressions) spoke volumes to me, since neither one of them is going to hold back. And Richard’s food seemed much more inventive across the board; even the short rib dish that was “conventional” had a purpose, showing he can do more straightforward cuisine but do it better than anyone else there.

* Loved seeing more Restaurant Wars. And I love how all the chefs involved seem to get so into it, even last night when the sous-chefs had nothing riding on it for themselves but pride. It proved an ideal way to end a great season.

* Carla, who won fan favorite, has to get her own show at this point, right? The villainous Marcel may have technical skills, but likability and accessibility matter as well, and Carla has both to spare, while her style of cooking – kicked-up comfort food – is extremely trendy and yet taps into a fundamental aspect of the American food experience. Blais offers the food I’d most want to travel and pay to eat, but Carla’s food is the kind I’d want to eat night-in and night-out.

* I appreciate knowing that the way to Gail Simmons’ heart is via pepperoni sauce … even though I have to say that it doesn’t sound appealing to me at all. I associate the flavor of pepperoni with how I ate when I was younger and didn’t really know food or the vast array of alternatives available; I’d reach for chorizo or andouille or linguica or about a dozen cured Italian meat products before I’d ever ask for a slice of pepperoni. But I’ll take Gail’s word for it that Mike’s “crazy business” was the real deal.

* How about Padma showing so much emotion in these last few episodes? First she tears up when they send Antonia packing. Then she gets choked up when Hubert Keller points out how hard it’s going to be to choose between Blais and Mike. And the hug she gave Blais at the end had a real “thank God you won” look to it. I’m not complaining, but I’m surprised after seeing her seem so much colder in the last two seasons. New Padma is much better to watch – these are real people competing, after all, and it’s perfectly fair to be emotional as long as your decisions remain objective. I’ve seen the fembot act from Heidi Klum on Project Runway, and it’s tired.

* And credit due to Tom for giving props to Mike after the loss – and the editors for including it. But I could have done without the shot of Mike’s wife looking so downcast after Blais won. It seemed mildly exploitative. Show the contestants; the family never asked be in that position.

* I’ve got an upcoming trip to Atlanta, so if anyone there scouts out Blais’ Flip burger place, I’d love an advance report – including whether the line is a mile long after his big win.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , ,
→ October 26, 2010
→ By

Top Chef: Just Desserts midpoint review.

Top Chef: Just Desserts has reached its halfway point, and so far, I’m sorry to say I’m underwhelmed. I had pretty high hopes for the show, primarily because as both a cook and an eater I love desserts of all sorts – classic and modern, simple and complex, pastries and custards, you name it. Even though I understand the chemistry behind the transformations, there’s something thrilling about watching a handful of basic ingredients turn into a finished product that delivers flavors and textures unimaginable from the initial list of components, just because of a little know-how and the skill that comes from repetition.

But the emphasis of TC:JD hasn’t been the food so much, but the contestants, who seem to have been selected for their capacity to generate drama rather than their culinary know-how. As a result, the show seems to have more in common with Project Runway than with the original Top Chef, and while I watch Runway*, it’s primarily my wife’s show – our deal is I watch that with her and she watches the Top Chef series with me.

*I had to leave the room after the elimination on last week’s episode of Project Runway because I couldn’t watch the eliminated designer’s reaction, which seemed to me to reveal a lot of pain beyond the end of his time in the competition. I can’t imagine a life where something as fundamental to your identity as your sexual orientation leads to a gulf between you and your parents, and it’s clear that his parents’ treatment of him has had lasting, negative effects on his emotional state and even his self-esteem. It was brutal on its own, and to see that in light of the recent spate of news stories about suicides by gay teenagers … I couldn’t watch it. Just love your children, people.

The initial drama was high-strung (but apparently talented) chef Seth, who won the first quick-fire of the season and by the end of the second episode seemed to be suffering from some sort of mental illness or breakdown – I’ve theorized something along the lines of Asperger’s, although I am not a professional and recognize that you can’t diagnose someone through a television set. But his reactions to setbacks and inability to communicate with other contestants had to be evident to the producers during the interviewing process, and I can only conclude that they chose him for the show because they thought he’d be good television, rather than seeing him as an unstable person who, at best, would make other denizens of the house uncomfortable with his antics. His exit, after an unseen anxiety attack, was more than welcome if only because of the amount of time in each episode devoted to his weirdness and others’ (valid) complaints about it, although I find it odd that they didn’t show whatever meltdown he had right before the attack. (You put him on the show, and he does something crazy yet utterly predictable, and you don’t show it? Exactly how bad was it?)

No sooner was Seth out the door, however, than Heather H. loses her mind over some slight, real or perceived, from Morgan, although the edited version we saw made it appear that she volunteered to do the one group piece for her team by herself and then was annoyed that Morgan didn’t help her with it and won the overall challenge himself. Again, we’re seeing edited footage, but the complaint that he degrades women by calling them “darlin” doesn’t hold much water with me – it’s not an insult by itself, and he’s pretty clearly a charmer by nature, with that language just part of his overall act. Last week, there’s a pea-puree-style controversy when one of Heather H.’s items disappeared, and she’s blaming Morgan despite a total lack of evidence that he did anything, making her look like the paranoid nut job brought in to create drama after Seth left. That’s a lot of unnecessary, uninteresting drama for six episodes, and I haven’t even mentioned the apparently-depressed Heather C., the definitely-depressed Malika (with good reason – she was going through a divorce after her restaurant failed), or the angry Tania (thankfully ousted in episode 1). Was this really the optimal set of contestants, or merely the mix most likely to deliver water-cooler fodder for the show?

As for the competition itself, I thought after week 4 that three of the eight chefs remaining had separated themselves from the group – Morgan, Zac, and Yigit. I’m pulling for Yigit primarily because I’m most interested in his food; Morgan seems extremely skilled and I do like his ideas, but Yigit offers the best combination of pushing the envelope and technical ability, although I’d like to see him able to use his reported background in molecular gastronomy more, perhaps as we approach the finale. Zac appears to be very talented and might have the strongest sense of flavor of anyone on the show, although his personality is about as grating as a rusty Microplane, and the whole obsession with Gail’s shoes fell somewhere between creepy and stalker-ish.

Other thoughts…

  • I’m glad to see that Eric, the lone baker among a group of pastry chefs, is faring better in the various challenges, but if you’re going to invite a baker to compete on the show, at some point don’t you have to have a baking challenge? Some of the early competitions made him look sloppy and talentless, but the issue is that his talents are geared toward a different sphere of desserts.
  • Gail’s been a little better in her role as head judge after the first week or two, when her attempts to seem severe (a la Tom Colicchio) made her seem unlikeable, but her main issue now seems to be excessive awareness of the camera. She needs to just forget the camera’s there, because what she says is usually informative, but she’s coming off as stiff when I would wager good money that she’s nothing like that off air.
  • My wife and I both feel like Johnny Iuzzini keeps falling on the wrong side of the snark fence. There’s funny snark, and there’s vicious snark, and I think Iuzzini too often comes across as nasty, or at least cutting. If a contestant’s dish sucks, it sucks, but there’s a way to express that without conveying the sentiment that the contestant is simply incompetent and should stay out of the kitchen – especially when said contestant is standing right in front of you, already humiliated at his/her place in the bottom three (and often with the knowledge before judges’ table that his/her dish failed).
  • Erica’s soapy ice cream is a real mystery to me, and I wish they’d spent more time on that – or, in general, on why certain dishes failed. Soapy taste or texture is usually a case of too much baking soda or an otherwise basic (as opposed to acidic) product, but that wouldn’t apply here. Was there actually soap in the ice cream, perhaps from the last time the ice cream machine was cleaned? (That would be ironic, since the whole show is sponsored by a soap company. I imagine Dial executives hitting the ceiling when they saw the judges talking about “soap” like it was a dirty word.)
  • Was it just us, or were the judges awfully lenient about the “black” part of the black-and-white desserts challenge in the last episode? There was an awful lot of brown on those plates, as well as some purple. (My wife thought red should have been acceptable, since newspapers are black and white and “red” all over.)

At this point, I’d rank the remaining six contestants, best to worst, like so: Yigit, Morgan, Zac, Heather, Eric, Danielle. I think any of the first three could win, and I expect Danielle to be next out the door. The biggest gap in those rankings is between Zac and Heather, with another between Heather and Eric, but I think Yigit has the potential to blow away the field if the challenges give him more opportunity to show off his technical skills.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , ,
→ September 22, 2010
→ By

Boardwalk Empire and The Constant Gardener.

Two topics in one post, just because. You probably saw my post on why the pitcher win stat must die. Klawchat on Thursday.

—

Finally got around to the first episode of HBO’s Boardwalk Empire last night , and I think my expectations were so high that I was bound to be a little disappointed, even though there’s a lot to like. The Prohibition Era/Roaring Twenties is my favorite period in U.S. history, in literature, film, or even non-fiction, so this series is tailor-made for me. Everything looks spectacular (outside of a couple of weak special effects), both the sets and the costumes, and Steve Buscemi really grew into the role as Atlantic City boss Nucky Thompson over the course of that one episode after a weak beginning with his speech to the Temperance League. Jimmy Darmody, (played by Michael Pitt), Nucky’s driver, has a chance to be an even more compelling character as a bright, young, ambitious kid whose moral compass has been warped or smashed by his experiences in Germany in World War I. Eddie, Nucky’s butler, was excellent as a sort of anti-Jeeves, although the role doesn’t offer much substance. And Paz de la Huerta … well, her character (Lucy) is mostly just comic relief, but if she’s naked a lot I won’t complain.

That first episode had plenty of cliches, though, starting with de la Huerta’s dim-witted showgirl/gangster moll. The other major female character, the abused, immigrant wife Margaret Schroder, comes with a back story we’ve seen a million times – beaten and subjugated by a jealous, alcoholic husband, who eventually gets his compuppance at Nucky’s hands, satisfying the viewer’s desire for vengeance but avoiding the harsh reality that domestic violence wasn’t seen the way we view it today. I can’t speak to the historical accuracy of the portrayals, but did notice that they made the Italian guy (Luciano) the loose cannon with the bad temper and the Jewish guy (Rothstein) the money-obsessed guy who cheats in his business dealings, both of which felt like unfortunate stereotyping. The editing style, particularly the montage sequence at the end, involved so many jump cuts that I had a hard time following the multiple strands, and the final murder in the episode lacked any context whatsoever. The main antagonist to Johnson, other than Rothstein, is Agent Van Alden, rocking a Dick Tracy jaw line but lacking any kind of back story to explain his zeal for stamping out alcohol (there are hints at a religious objection, but religious faith alone isn’t much of an explanation for Van Alden’s determination or steely expressions).

Buscemi and Pitt alone are reasons enough to continue watching, and the series is one of the only ones I’ve ever seen where the visual appeal would make me tune in anyway, but I am hopeful that this episode is the one where they worked out the kinks, setting up some stronger storylines and better characterizations for the rest of the season.

–

If you’ve set your mind on hiding the truth, then the first thing you’ve got to do is give people a different truth to keep them quiet.

I’ve been slacking on my reading during the moving/unpacking process but did knock out John Le Carré’s The Constant Gardener last week. A suspense novel involving spies that is less a spy novel than an angry novel of social criticism, it elevates a straightforward story of a widower’s quest to identify his wife’s murderers into a morally important work that is seldom preachy or strident without cause.

The superficial plot is that of the murder of Tessa Quayle and her research/activist partner Arnold Bluhm; their bodies are discovered in the first chapter, and the next hundred pages or so deal with the mundane nature of the death of the wife of a foreign service official – from the funeral to the investigation to the “handling” of the widower. It’s a slow beginning, but gradually builds enough of the case to set Justin off on the track that leads to the ultimate plot, the role in those murders of the multinational pharmaceutical corporations behind a supposed miracle TB drug called Dypraxa, whose side effects have apparently been ignored as it’s being given to poor Kenyans dying of the disease.

Le Carré still plays to his strengths as a spy novelist by sending Justin off on a run around the world, three continents and at least five countries, fleeing both his former employers and whoever killed his wife. Justin’s titular interest in gardening only plays a small role in defining his character, but le Carré does add some complexity through hints that Justin’s mind may be either going or playing tricks on him, a point of view pushed hard by the British foreign service, who appear to be operating in the pay of those same pharmaceutical companies who may have killed Kenyans through their drug trials and hushed it up. Through Justin’s investigation, which brings him into contact with all of the remaining major players in the drug’s development and early trials, le Carré offers the pharmaceutical companies’ points of view – particularly that they gave the drug to people who were likely to die of the disease anyway – but clearly has little sympathy for it; there’s a righteous anger bubbling just under the surface of The Constant Gardener that wouldn’t work if he was advocating a more controversial point of view, but given the existence of a similar incident that may have inspired this book, it’s hard to take the contrary position. The novel doesn’t have the same tension or psychological emphasis as Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy or The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, but the author’s obvious rage at what he views as abuses of supra-national corporations takes their place to drive the book forward towards its inevitable, tragic conclusion.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , ,
→ April 13, 2010
→ By

Street Gang.

Michael Davis’ Street Gang: The Complete History of Sesame Street is one of my new favorite non-fiction books, both because it’s thorough, well-written, and shows the author’s strong affinity for his subject, and also because of my own affinity for its subject, a television show that defined my preschool years and introduced me to the Muppets, whose later “grown-up” variety show was in turn my introduction to both vaudeville-style humor and dark comedy.

Street Gang focuses primarily on Sesame Street‘s prehistory, from conception to launch through its first season, a period loaded with bold ideas, coincidences, and enough drama to sustain a compelling narrative. Davis weaves personal histories of staff members, cast members, and Muppets into the overall history in a way that keeps the tale from becoming monotonous – as much as I enjoyed the book, it’s hard to create much tension when you know everything more or less works out in the end – and also enlightened me by giving new dimensions to people I’d only known as characters or names on the screen. Bob McGrath’s history as a successful singer and the amazing coincidence that launched Carroll Spinney’s puppetry career stood out as two of the more interesting back stories, excluding, of course, the stories of Muppets from Kermit to Bert and Ernie to Elmo, Zoe*, and Abby Kadaby.

*The Zoe story is as close as the book comes to out-and-out controversy, to me at least, because she was part of an entire makeover called “Around the Corner,” a show change that came from a top-down business plan rather than an organic development from the writers and Muppeteers. That plan was a direct response to the scourge of children’s television known as Barney – a show I have forbidden from my house, even though my daughter has at times asked to watch it, and if that makes me mean so be it – but also included elements of merchandising strategy, a reflection of the declining age of the typical Sesame Street viewer, and questions of whether a sanitized part of the neighborhood strayed from the show’s original goals of reaching inner-city kids and was perhaps motivated by the most subtle racism. The fact that a successful character emerged from this mess only adds to the relevance of the story, and another 20 pages on Zoe would have been welcome.

The star of the book is Joan Ganz Cooney, the determined, willful, yet wholly inexperienced (at first) life force of the project who sold the vision, got the show launched, and saved it (at the expense of The Electric Company, sadly) in a 1970s anti-public-television push in Congress. I felt grateful while reading about her refusal to let the show die or deviate from its mission, even through a difficult period in her personal life, because of how important those two shows have proven in my life. Sesame Street and The Electric Company influenced me in a number of ways – I watched both programs voraciously, as well as other PBS education fare from 3-2-1 Contact to Write On to the Letter People to a now-forgotten show called The Metric System to which I can still hum the theme song to another one with teenagers working at a newspaper and fighting some villain named “Dunedin” – of which their educational influence was only a part. I grew up in an almost completely white neighborhood; it wasn’t wealthy, or privileged, but it was nearly devoid of minorities; Asian-* and African-American students constituted under 2% of my high school’s total enrollment while I was there. Most mainstream television programs were all-white at the time, and if there was a minority character, the writing was forced and he’d end up somewhere between a mildly offensive stereotype and a horribly offensive one. Yet I grew up not just tolerant, but largely ignorant of skin color – it’s never really crossed my mind, no more relevant to the discussion of someone as his hair or eye color. I can’t prove the source of that character trait, but I think the ethnically mixed cast of both Sesame Street and The Electric Company played a major role in it – if you present an impressionable child with daily images of people of different races or ethnicities interacting in normal, even boring ways, he’s going to believe that that’s the way everything should be. And I also believe that these shows helped shape the dramatic change in attitudes from my parents’ generation to the generation after mine, or even from mine to my daughter’s; racism isn’t gone, but it’s been driven underground in much of our society, and overt expressions of racism or sexism will often get you shunned or fired.

*One of those Asian-American students was the best man at my wedding and remains my closest friend, even though he kicked my ass in Zooloretto the other night.

Of course, the educational aspects to these PBS shows weren’t lost on the two-year-old me – I read at a very young age and always had a thing for numbers, which I’m sure is a shock to you all, but my parents have never described doing anything unusual to teach me letters or words or math. If you watch an old episode of either Sesame Street or The Electric Company today, it’s hard to miss the almost propaganda-like educational agenda: They hammer the letter and number of the day into the child’s head, through repetition and through context, and the fact that thirty-plus years on* I can still remember songs and sketches is testament to how powerful and effective they were.

*We own the Sesame Street Old School Volume 1 DVD set, which I recommend more for parents than for today’s kids, and when my wife saw a sketch she hadn’t seen since the 1970s, about “two little girls and a little dollhouse,” she got all teary-eyed. That’s the power of Sesame Street.

Davis finishes the book with some notes on how the show has changed, including the shift in format to suit the Sesame Street‘s ever-younger audience. The original show had a single storyline of street scenes that carried through the entire show, with cartoons and sketches interspersed throughout. The new format gets that entire story out of the way in a single uninterrupted segment off the top, and of course the final 20 minutes are now devoted to “Elmo’s World,” a scourge on my existence that seems to insult the intelligence of any three-year-old who might have learned something from the first 40 minutes of the program. Unfortunately, it seems to me that they’ve dumbed the show down – yes, they’re trying to reach the one-year-olds plopped down in front of the set, but they have to be losing the three- and four-year-olds along the way. Shouldn’t “Elmo’s World” be its own show, rather than altering such a long-term success to serve an audience outside those covered by its original mission? My daughter seems to agree; once she outgrew Elmo’s World, that was it for Sesame Street in our house. She’ll watch Word World and Peep and the Big Wide World and Sid the Science Kid and Dinosaur Train – I haven’t gotten her hooked on the new The Electric Company yet, although I think it’s very good – but Sesame Street just bores her. Maybe I’m just being nostalgic, but that makes me a little sad.

Speaking of which, my one warning on Street Gang: Buy a pack of tissues. The prologue is a long description of the memorial service for Jim Henson, and his was but one of a series of major, often premature deaths to hit active members of the show’s cast and crew. Many of you are the right age to remember the episode when Mr. Hooper (played by Will Lee) died, and Davis includes the portion of the script where the adults explain to Big Bird that “Mr. Looper” isn’t coming back. It was a brilliant, award-winning episode, and the text plus the description of the cast members’ reactions will bring anybody down even as you appreciate how well it was written.

Next up: I’m halfway through Richard Russo’s Mohawk. I’ve also got Junichiro Tanazaki’s The Makioka Sisters lined up after that – if anyone has tackled it, I’d love to know how you liked it and whether it’s worth the time.

Filed Under: DVDs, Media, Nonfiction Tagged With: , , , , , ,