Elsbeth and the tech bro’s panic room [Media Notes 190]

I’ve been watching episodes of Elsbeth off and on. It’s a spin-off of The Good Wife and The Good Fight. Elsbeth Tascioni is an eccentric attorney assigned to the New York Police Department on a consent decree. She functions as a sleuth in each episode. I’m interested in episode 36, “Bunker Down” in season 3 (airing on Nov. 13, 2025). Here’s how Wikipedia characterizes the episode:

Paranoid fintech [financial technology] billionaire Craig Hollis traps his crisis manager Anders Whitman in Craig's state-of-the art panic room, erratically believing that Anders will report his "indiscretions" to his company's board of directors.

Hollis is presented as particularly eccentric and willful in his ways. I couldn’t help but think of this as a deliberately nasty satire of an archetypal billionaire. Perhaps it was Hollis's glee in all the gadgetry incorporated into the room.

High tech billionaires are not particularly rare in movies and TV. But this one somehow struck me as a particularly nasty depiction. Not twirling mustaches nasty – he was clear shaven – but nasty. I’m wondering if we’re in for a rash of such characters.

Once again, the appeal of The Rockford Files [Media Notes 164 B]

Once again I find myself working my way through The Rockford Files thinking, “Gee, this is my intellectual comfort food, I should write a post about that.” And once again I discover, “Hey! I’ve already written that post.” And so I have.

That means that, to justify this post, I’ve got to cover new material, so I will. Here’s what I said in that previous post:

Garner is a handsome middle-aged man, six feet and perhaps an inch or two tall. He plays an easy going character, James Rockford, who is masculine without being macho. He can handle himself in a fight, which he frequently has to do, but he’s not a martial artist or a superhero. He’s competent, but vulnerable and takes his lumps. He likes sports, going to games, going fishing, often with his dad. He’s single, but is attractive to women, and kind. He’s had affairs in the past, and has one or three in the course of the show, he may even have been close to marriage.

Much of the appeal stems from the fact that he’s an interstitial character, if you will. He falls between the keys, lives in the cracks. While he makes a living, just barely, he’s not chained to a 9-to-5 job. He’s not been broken to harness.

I also noted that he doesn’t live within the confines of work mode. He’s not a slave to Homo economicus.

Moreover, he’s not married. His police buddy Lt. Becker is married, but Rockford himself is not. We do see Becker’s wife in a handful of episodes, but that’s all. She’s there as an adjunct to Rockford’s relationship with her husband. That’s all she could be in the show. So it doesn’t make sense to have her in too many episodes. She’d be in the way.

But why couldn’t Rockford himself be married? We know that he’s thought about, maybe even came close in the past. But married himself? How would that change the dynamic that makes the show work?

What if he’d married his attorney, Beth Davenport? It seems that they’d dated in the past and she pretty much confessed that she’d thought of him as a husband. Well, if they’d have gotten married, what kind of life would they have lived? I can’t imagine her living with him in that trailer; that’s not at all her style, not at all. Nor can I imagine him living her life style, with the elegant apartment. What of his PI business? Would he have taken it upscale to suit her clientele as a lawyer? I don’t think so.

Now, can I translate that paragraph into a statement about audience preference? That is, whoever finds Rockford appealing, male or female, finds him appealing as he is, an interstitial bachelor who likes women, dates them occasionally, and has longer term affairs, but that’s it. Whatever the basis of the show’s appeal, it’s incompatible with marriage as we currently conceive it.

Now, David Chase wrote and produced many episodes of The Rockford Files. But he’s best known as creator of and writer for The Sopranos. Marriage is central to that show, both Tony’s relationship to his wife and his two children, in addition to his many responsibilities as a gangster. What I’m suggesting is that, in a way, Tony Soprano is a Jim Rockford who’s married. Obviously, they’re very different types of people. Tony Soprano is overbearing, aggressive, and violent in a way that Jim Rockford his not. And if Jim Rockford is interstitial, then Tony Soprano is interstitial on steroids. And where Jim had is lawyer, Beth, Tony Soprano had his psychiatrist, Jennifer Malfi. That’s a very different kind of relationship – and I note that Rockford’s most substantial affair within the show was with a (blind) psychiatrist.

What interests me is that neither Rockford nor Soprano are “broken” to work mode. They make their living in (something like) play mode. I’m thinking something like: If you want to center a program around a Rockford-like character AND have him be married, you have to make him a gangster to do it. That is to say, our conventions about men, women, and marriage are such, that that’s what you have to do.

Do I believe that? Not quite. After all, I just made it up. It’s worth exploring with shows like Breaking Bad and Ozark, both about married couples (forced) to live on the wild side. The Hunting Wives? Sex/Life? Hmmmm....

Galloway: “You’re about to see the clip economy take over our TVs”

From the transcript, Galloway speaking:

40:33 I think China quite frankly I hate to say it at a certain level has one AI. We just haven’t woken up to that yet. I would agree.

40:39 And then two you’re about to see the clip economy take over our TVs. I think the biggest show on television

40:47 uh from Netflix or someone else is going to be a 60-minute compilation of two and three minute videos similar to what you

40:55 see on reals or Tik Tok. I think that’s about to wash over the traditional streamers you’re going to see.

Some years ago I had the idea of making a feature film entirely out of previews, carefully conceptualized and stitched together. The feature would be organized around an ensemble of, say, a half dozen to ten actors who keep on recurring in the previous in various combinations. The previews would span, say, ten or 20 years of fictional time, with the actors aging over the course of the previews. The whole thing would be constructed so that we can infer what’s going on in their lives from what we see in the previews, even though the previews would be based on a variety of genres: romantic comedies, science fiction, drama, horror, fantasy, period pieces, farce, and so forth.

The Boys [Media Notes 187]

David Colman, The Emmy Awards Are Afraid of This Vulgar, Gory, Brilliant Show, NYTimes, July 19, 2026.

Last week, a raft of intelligent, watchable, enjoyable shows were nominated for the Emmy Award for outstanding drama series, the TV version of the best picture Oscar. Each of these prestige TV shows made tart references to our current moment. “The Pitt” dealt with ICE in the E.R. “Slow Horses” and “The Diplomat” dramatized the dangers of cynical political expedience. “The Gilded Age” and “Paradise” produced two very different takes on oligarch-itecture. “Your Friends & Neighbors” wallowed in larcenous suburban finance dads in midlife crisis, while “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms” jousted with how to transcend one’s “low birth.” The only show to truly depart from dramatic realism was “Pluribus,” a sci-fi show about a space virus that made virtually all humans highly agreeable zombies, making you wonder if this is what life will be like living in a world ruled by A.I. agents.

But in the end, none of them actually tried to capture the grand farce of a moment we’re in. They didn’t even come close. Each of them is too polite, too nuanced, too, in the end, moderate — centrist, even.

And then there’s The Boys, which captured our current moment, where it’s “as if we’re living in a burn-it-all-down age of greed, mayhem and corruption.”

There was one show, however, that hit this head-on — and it’s not “Industry,” HBO’s finance-and-cocaine drama that was also snubbed by the Emmys this year. It’s Amazon Prime’s “The Boys.” The superhero spoof, which ended its five-season run this May, received not a single Emmy nomination in a major award category. Despite the fact that it dared to land savage, serious and entertaining punches about everything warped in American culture — corporate greed, celebrity worship, moral hypocrisy and how they all fit together. [...]

For those unfamiliar, “The Boys” is set in an alt-present-day United States, where superheroes (“supes”) are real and abundant. But instead of renegades valiantly saving the world from doomsday plots, they’re more like substance-abusing superinfluencers: entitled, narcissistic pursuers of fame whose high-profile “saves” are frequently stage-managed photo ops. They often offhandedly end up killing bystanders. The supes — especially the elite supe group known as “The Seven,” a parody of DC’s Justice League — are controlled, weaponized and monetized by the company that came up with the chemical to create them: Vought International, a corporate octopus whose business interests range from Disney-style entertainment to pharmaceuticals to military contracts.

The gullible public laps up all the supe mythology — especially that of Homelander, the all-American, charismatic leader of the Seven whose authoritarian megalomania drives him to take over the Oval Office, having naysayers locked up in detention camps (or just laser-visioning them in half) along the way.

For what it’s worth, I was hooked from the first season in 2019, while the Trumposaurus was finishing off his first term.

This vulgar world of corporate-branded superheroes isn’t just an ironic conceit; it’s a brilliant, subversive lampooning of our politically divided, social-media-addicted, celebrity-hypnotized society — and, in the words of the “Boys” showrunner Eric Kripke, of the “powerful and selfish people using social media to intentionally tear people apart for their own selfish interests.”

It may not be subtle. But neither is the era we live in. The Shakespearean scramble of “House of Cards” or “Succession” (both repeat Emmy winners for outstanding drama series) seems quaint by comparison with what we get on newsfeeds every day. [...]

You might wonder why a show that focuses on the superheroes isn’t called “The Supes,” but that’s really the point here. The characters putting the plot into action aren’t the supes, but “the boys,” the four men, and eventually two women, who commit themselves to destroying the company and the supes who are making their world a living hell. Even if some have superpowers, they don’t know what they’re doing. They take insane chances. They fail over and over and keep getting outsmarted by Vought — until they don’t. The show’s real heroes, working outside the official system, pursue their impossible task no matter how the deck is stacked against them. And that is how they win.

There’s more at the link.

Why Do I Like Veronica Mars? [Media Notes 178]

I watched the series when it first aired back in 2004-2005 and liked. It seemed a bit like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, not with the mythology and such, but in underlying sensibility. We have a teenaged girl undertaking an adult role in the world. Buffy had to save it, Veronica merely solved mysteries, first of all the mystery of her best friend’s murder & her mother’s disappearance, which, I suppose, are cosmic enough.

Here’s how Wikipedia describes the show:

Veronica Mars is an American teen neo-noir mystery drama television series created by screenwriter Rob Thomas. The series is set in the fictional town of Neptune, California, and stars Kristen Bell as the eponymous character. The series premiered on September 22, 2004, during television network UPN's final two years, and ended on May 22, 2007, after a season on UPN's successor, The CW, airing for three seasons total. [...]

The character Veronica Mars is a student who progresses from high school to college while moonlighting as a private investigator under the tutelage of her detective father. In each episode, Veronica solves a different stand-alone case while working to solve a more complex mystery. The first two seasons of the series each had a season-long mystery arc, introduced in the first episode of the season and solved in the season finale. The third season took a different format, focusing on smaller mystery arcs that would last several episodes.

That’s a start.

Neptune is a small town not far from the Mexican border. It’s got a rich side and a middle class to poor side. Both sides meet in high school, where they clash. Veronica’s middle class; her murdered best friend was rich. So that’s part of the tension and the vibe, Veronica shuttling between the two. Her boy friends are from the rich side. Her running buddies, not so much. One of them is a Hispanic head of a biker gang. It’s an interesting mix.

I supposed I could say that Kristen Bell sparkles as Veronica, but I’m sure Veronica would cringe at the word “sparkles,” probably Kristen too. Heck, I cringe at it as well, but there it is. Enrico Colantoni plays her father with deadpan cool. You may have seen him as Mathesar in Galaxy Quest. Come to think of it, Veronica Mars has Galaxy Quest undertones. Overtones?

You get the idea.

One of Anthropic's 4 Superbowl Ads

Bari Weiss: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO) [175]

5,684,675 views Oct 13, 2025 #lastweektonight
John Oliver discusses the Paramount Skydance merger, how they’ve named Bari Weiss the new Editor-in-Chief of CBS News, and what her editorial history and perspective mean for the future of U.S. journalism. Plus, some notable moments in the history of the Upper West Side.

Mom – The family sitcom has come a long way since the 50s and 60s [Media Notes 173]

Mom (2013-2021) showed up on my Netflix feed sometime within the last month. I saw Allison Janney on the clip, a plus, as I liked her as C.J. Craig in The West Wing. I saw it was a sitcom. I’m certainly in the mood for a sitcom. And that title proclaimed, “family wholesomeness,” and yes, that’s there. But it’s not the wholesomeness of the sitcoms I grew up with. 

From the Wikipedia entry:

Set in Napa, California, it follows dysfunctional mother/daughter duo Bonnie and Christy Plunkett, who, after having been estranged for years while both struggled with addiction, attempt to pull their lives together by trying to stay sober. [...] Mom received acclaim from critics and audiences for the writing and performances (particularly Janney's), as well as for addressing real-life issues such as: alcoholism, drug addiction, teen pregnancy, addictive gambling, homelessness, relapse, cancer, death, erectile dysfunction, domestic violence, overdose, palsy, rape, obesity, stroke, ADHD and miscarriage; and for maintaining a deft balance between the humorous and darker aspects of these issues.

Whoa!

I grew up with, for example, Father Knows Best:

The series, which began on radio in 1949, aired as a television show for six seasons and 203 episodes. Created by Ed James, Father Knows Best follows the lives of the Andersons, a middle-class family living in the town of Springfield. The state in which Springfield is located is never specified, but it is generally accepted to be located in the Midwestern United States. [...] As before, the character of Margaret was portrayed as a voice of reason, and Jim's character was that of a thoughtful father who offered sage advice in response to his children's problems. A responsible man, he loved his wife and children and would do whatever he could to give them a better life. Jim was a salesman and manager of the General Insurance Company in Springfield, while Margaret was a housewife. Their home was located at 607 Maple Avenue. One history of the series characterized the Andersons as "truly an idealized family, the sort that viewers could relate to and emulate." As the two eldest children aged from teenager to young adult, Betty (1956) and Bud (1959) graduated from high school and attended Springfield Junior College.

That’s a different world, very different.

I wonder how much daytime soaps changed over the same period?

BTW, I’ve now finished the first two seasons (of eight) of Mom, and will continue watching, though I don’t know whether or not I’ll go the distance. All that stuff that Wikipedia passage mentions, I’ve seen much/most of it in these two seasons. It’s light and enjoyable, which is what I was looking for. That is to say, it really is about family solidarity, even if the families involved are dysfunctional and centered on single moms. Every episode has one, two, or three scenes in an AA meeting. So we’ve got scenes of dysfunction in action, AA meetings (for a little distance), and reconciliation. For the most part, it works.

Sex and the City Redux [Media Notes 165]

Jake Nevins, The ‘Sex and the City’ Resurgence Has a Secret Ingredient: Contempt, NYTimes, July 9, 2025.

More than two decades later, we are experiencing a “Sex and the City” resurgence. First came the premiere, late in 2021, of a limp postscript of a show called “And Just Like That …,” which is currently trudging through its third season. Then, last year, the original series arrived on Netflix, introducing the show to younger viewers, who took more to its screwball cadence than its bygone sense of glamour. “Sex and the City,” they found, was bizarrely suitable to the tongue-in-cheek conventions of internetspeak, and so the show has lately birthed a whole litany of memes. In almost all of them, the characters are treated as objects of amusement, not aspiration.

One clever joke poked fun at Carrie’s tendency to listen to her friends’ predicaments and then respond with exasperating recapitulations of her own. Charlotte remarks on, say, the earthquake that hit New York City last year. Miranda, always smug, insists that the Richter scale is obsolete, while Samantha, always horny, wisecracks about a man who made her walls shake. And of course Carrie, whose pick-me solipsism has become a point of fascination for newcomers, declares that “Big is moving to Paris!” — wrenching the conversation back to the emotionally unavailable tycoon who would torture her for years before dying, unceremoniously, of a Peloton-induced heart attack.

This is how we’ve all come to regard the ladies of “Sex and the City,” even those of us for whom they once represented some pinnacle of refinement: They now read like parodies of themselves, characters we regard with a sort of loving derision. It’s a testament not only to the comforting rhythms of the sitcom format but also to this show’s genuine achievements in characterization: No matter how much these women annoy or exasperate us, we know them so intimately that we can always imagine, with a reasonable degree of both accuracy and scorn, how each might react to any given topic.

And this is what makes “And Just Like That …” such a strange and fascinating product: It is a reboot that feels, at times, openly hostile to its own source material and even to the characters themselves. It cannot seem to resist subjecting them to mounting humiliations, either in a clumsy effort to atone for the minor sin of the original’s tone-deafness or, perhaps, because viewers actually want to see beloved characters tormented this way.

From realism to camp:

“Sex and the City” worked, in part, because of these women’s conflicting attitudes toward men, marriage and sex; their brunches could be the site of juicy gossip but also ideological combat. Now they are a monolith: insecure, maladjusted to contemporary mores and, fortunately for them, extravagantly wealthy. Their debates have been pruned back; instead, the show wants to teach them lessons, and it matches them with equally stylish and well-heeled women of color to help them along. The characters are bizarrely estranged from their origins — they register as lab rats in a sadistic experiment with camp and caricature.

This season, I couldn’t help but wonder: Why did I still find all of this entertaining, even pleasurable? The show’s writing is meek, its pacing haphazard, its story lines bizarre. Yet it digs in its stilettos until you can no longer resist, remaining compulsively watchable by virtue of sentimentality or schadenfreude or maybe some narcotic combination of them both.

Perhaps this is where the show was headed all along. Early seasons of “Sex and the City” aimed to be shrewd and realistically adult; the ladies still drank in dive bars and ate hot dogs at Yankees games, following HBO’s tradition of sexy naturalism. But along the way, the show moved from vérité to very Vogue: It grew sillier, more luxurious and fantastical. By the time the second “Sex and the City” movie was sending these characters on a first-class flight to a fictional Abu Dhabi, the franchise seemed to have dispensed with any pretense of realism whatsoever and gone full camp. And now, as the characters negotiate the indignities visited upon them by the revival, it’s as though they’ve crossed over into something else entirely — some kind of beyond-camp puppet state that feels hypnotically watchable.

I've got some notes about Sex and the City in this post: The Seven Year Itch, Mad Men, Sex and the City [Media Notes 117].

Cobra Kai, Saturday Night Fever, & American Politics [Media Notes [157]

I’ve now watched the final episodes of Cobra Kai and I’ve found them satisfying. Not only have the various personal and interpersonal issues been wrapped up in reasonable ways, but so has the central philosophical problem, if you will, that has been with us throughout the series, the difference between the offense-first style of Johnny Lawrence’s Cobra Kai, and the defense-and-balance style of Daniel LaRusso’s Miyagi-Do.

I don’t want to go through how the interpersonal issues have been resolved. If you’re curious, watch the videos, or at least read the plot summaries. It’s this philosophical issue that interests me. It interests me because it extends beyond this franchise. One aspect of is there in John Travolta’s break-out film, Saturday Night Fever (1977). Beyond that, and here I’ll conclude this note, I want to turn to contemporary US politics.

Two fighting styles

The Cobra Kai style emphasizes maximum aggression, “no mercy” is one of its watchwords. The problem with this style is that, when you crank it up to 11, it turns to cheating to insure victory. That failing has been a constant theme throughout the series, first as John Kreese enters the story in the season finale of season one, and is amplified when Terry Silver enters the series in season four.

The Miyagi-Do style, which animated the franchise in the first film, The Karate Kid, is more austere and spiritual. It emphasizes balance and defense. In a fair fight, between well-matched opponents, a Miyagi-Do fighter may beat a Cobra Kai fighter. If not, well, those are the breaks; it was a fair fight. The problem though, is that when confronted with opponents who care little for such things, and who are willing to cheat, the Miyagi-Do fighter has no defense and will lose.

That’s the situation we face in the final episodes. The series manages a subtle, perhaps even complex, resolution of the conflict, though perhaps détente is the better word. Needless to say, and given the conventions governing such stories this isn't really a spoiler, the cheaters are given a resounding come-uppance. The ending is a happy one.

The dance is more important than winning

Saturday Night Fever (1977) comes down on the side of fair contests. John Travolta played Tony Manero, who worked a deadend job in Brooklyn and lived for the dance floor, where he was king.

To reprise a short post from 2013:

In the movie [Tony Manero] sets out to win the dance contest at the local disco. A Hispanic couple danced better than he and his partner did, but he gets the prize anyhow. Why? He is well-known at this particular disco, he is Italian, and so are the folks who run the disco.

It was in inside job. It was corrupt.

Though winning seems to have meant everything to him, he rejects the prize because he feels he didn't deserve it. It turns out that his dedication to the craft of dancing means more to him than the prize. Until he lost this contest he didn’t know that.

Thus to accept the tainted prize would be to assert that dancing, in itself, is of no consequence. If dancing is of no consequence, then what’s the value of being Tony Manero, dancer?

In this case, it wasn’t the opponents who cheated, it was the judges. But the result is the same. Manero turned down the trophy and, following his dance partner, left Brooklyn for Manhattan where, we assume, he seeks a better life.

The parallel with Cobra Kai should be obvious. Dance is for Tony Manero what Miyagi-Do is Daniel LaRusso. For that matter, the same is true of Johnny Lawrence and Cobra Kai. However, the nature of the story has Cobra Kai up against vicious opponents who want nothing less than crushing victory. A legitimate loss to such an opponent would mean injury, possibly severe injury at best, if not death for the loser.

Contemporary American politics

A simple, partisan version goes like this: The Republicans, the conservatives, and above all the Trumpistas (including the Muskovites), will stop at nothing to grab power and win. Democrats, progressives, liberals, however, believe in the rule of law, in adhering to norms, and following procedures (to the ends of the earth if necessary), and will thus lose a political battle rather than go against those established laws, norms, and procedures. Consequently they are losing, and losing bigley, and are powerless before the Musk-Trump juggernaut.

That picture is too simple. But I crafted it to bring out the similarity between the contemporary political situation in America and the themes in these two stories, Cobra Kai and Saturday Night Fever. If the rules are important to you, you will play by them, win or lose. But if winning is everything, then you must be willing to break the rules.

As for the TRUE situation in contemporary American politics, are you freaking kidding me? How would I know? It’s complicated and, like everyone else, I’m biased. Work it out for yourself and get back to me.

Ralph Macchio interview • Kobra Kai [Media Notes 156]

Sarah Bahr, Ralph Macchio on Getting In His Final Kicks in ‘Cobra Kai’, NYTimes, Feb. 7, 2025.

When Ralph Macchio was first approached about doing a “Karate Kid” series about the adult lives of Daniel LaRusso and Johnny Lawrence, he was skeptical.

“I was like, ‘I’m a car salesman?’” said Macchio, who starred in the original 1984 film as Daniel, a teenage transplant to Southern California, who learns karate and defeats his bully, Johnny (William Zabka), on the mat.

“They didn’t have me at hello,” he said.

But at a meeting that lasted over three hours in the courtyard of the Greenwich Hotel, in Lower Manhattan, the creators Josh Heald, Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg won him over with their vision for that series, “Cobra Kai.” It wasn’t only a nostalgia play. It also looked to introduce a whole new generation of karate kids.

It's the two generation angle that I've found most interesting. On the one hand we have Daniel and Johnny pick up where they left of two decades ago. But they've both got kids, and those kids are into karate too. And they've got their own dynamic between each other and among the other kids. So we've got this rich interaction between these two dynamics.

From the interview:

Is there a specific moment when you remember saying, “Daniel LaRusso absolutely would not do that”?

There’s a scene in Episode 5 of this season when Daniel punches Johnny in the face. And I said, “It really has to be warranted.” And they said, “Well, he’s off-balance, these things are going on,” but it’s not just that. That was a debate because it’s a great scene for William: He gets punched in the face, and he normally would have punched back, but he doesn’t, which is a beautiful thing. It shows his growth. I don’t know if we agreed completely whether it was warranted enough, but at the end of the day, we shot the scene. It works. There’s redemption. But I wanted that to be hotter so there would not be a question of why he would lash out at that.

What was it like watching a new Kid, Xolo Maridueña, effectively play the Daniel role as Miguel?

I don’t like being the old guy, but I like being the guy telling them stories from back in the day, and they all lean in, and they love hearing them. And I’m quite inspired by their work ethic — I remember standing here watching Miguel put the headband on. Xolo was just coming out of his shoes with excitement, and it was just like: “Wow, I was in this backyard painting fences before you guys were born. And now I’m teaching you how to paint the fence and wax the car.” It’s the one time I got truly emotional early on in the show.

Later:

How are you like and not like Daniel?

I’m far more analytical and prepared on the upfront for as many curveballs as possible. I’m not a complete control addict, but I like to hear something out and digest it before I jump. But Daniel — because it makes it far more entertaining — jumps first and then deals with the repercussions later.

We’re very much alike in the sense that his family, his mom, his mentor in Miyagi, are what he holds the highest. He’s a good-hearted person who cares and is vulnerable yet open and positive. That’s who I’d like to believe I am. [...]

If you got to choose how your character died ——

—— going off a cliff with the ultimate spinning tornado kick.

There's more at the link. 

The final episodes of Cobra Kai air tomorrow.

Nobody Wants This [Media Notes 148]

I watched the first three episodes of Nobody Wants This in a single sitting. Loved it. I eagerly anticipated watching the other seven episodes. Which I did over the next day or, I don’t know, was it three? Anyhow.

Don’t get me wrong. I still liked it. But not quite so much, perhaps that was because I’d become habituated to it. Still, if this sort of thing interests you, by all means, watch it. You’ll like it.

But then, maybe you won’t. Here’s what Jessica Grose had to say about it in The New York Times:

As I tore through the 10 episodes of this (admittedly) very bingeable show, I had the dawning realization that it seems to hate not only Jewish women. It seems to hate all women. Pretty much every woman on the show is depicted as superficial and relationship-obsessed.

Joanne and her sister have a successful podcast that neither of them can be bothered to do any real work for; at one point, Joanne is quick to blow off a business dinner that could net them a huge payday. They crave the affirmation and attention of teenagers and describe themselves as “mean popular girls” who are going up against the other mean popular girls — the Jewish women. Their mother is a New Age flake they’re very dismissive of, despite the fact that she’s sweet and seems to care deeply about them.

Yikes! So maybe you won’t like it. & maybe I should be ashamed of myself for liking it. Still, Grose and I agree on one thing, it’s bingeable.

&, u know, it’s TV, not real life. Nor do I hate women, at least I don’t think I do.

Anyhow, it’s a romantic comedy. Blonde shiksa, who’d never even heard the word until she meets hip Jewish rabbi. They fall in love, naturally, or perhaps not so naturally, who knows. It’s TV.

And she doesn’t fit into his world, not at all, except for him, and may his older, and much taller, brother, and brother’s daughter who’s having her bat mitzvah. There’s tension, and comedy. Anyhow, I’ve been a fan of Kristen Bell, who plays the shiksa, since Veronica Mars. So maybe that’s it.

But, come to think of it, the final episode did bug me. We’re clearly being set up for a second season, which is how these things go. As the show ends – spoiler coming up – what had been looking like a wedding-coming-up after all the storm and stress seems out of the picture. Why? Because she couldn’t talk herself into converting. And that bugged me, not that I wanted her to convert, but, maybe that’s it, that things were crashing and burning on that old work (his) vs. family conflict. He needs her to convert for the sake of his career. But she can’t bring herself to do it.

It’s as though this Jew/Gentile business has been used as a cover for that work/family business – see my post, The Family Man & work-life balance [Media Notes 146]. It’s a bait and switch. I suppose they’ll work it out in the next season. We’ll see.

Tin Pan Alley: Soundtrack of America

This is from a wonderful series of short documentaries that Lucafilm produced to accompany its TV series, The Adventures of Young Indiana Jones.

The Sticky [Media Notes 147]

I loved this series, a taught six episodes, one of the best I’ve seen. Here’s Wikipedia’s succinct characterization:

The Sticky is a 2024 dark comedy television series set in Canada and starring Margo Martindale and produced by Jason Blum and Jamie Lee Curtis. It is loosely based on the Great Canadian Maple Syrup Heist.

Writing in The New York Times, Margaret Lyons says:

There is one timeline, and the screws tighten precisely and constantly. Things move from “ … should we?” to “ack!” with a winning urgency. This tidiness, though, can sometimes feel like oversimplification, with lines that land as childish and pat. “Look at you and look at me,” the villain says to our hero. “What makes you possibly think you can win?” One yearns for the musical number that would follow this in a Disney movie.

[The delicious] Margo Martindale stars as Ruth, a woman who has run afoul of the local syrup licensing rules but is desperate for money because her husband is in a coma. She teams up with an in-over-his-head mob underling (Chris Diamantopoulos) and the security guard at a syrup warehouse (Guillaume Cyr), and they form an imperfect but endearing trio. Hot on their tails are the warm local cop and the icy big-city cop.

I agree, mostly, but I don’t yearn for that Disney musical number. Make no mistake, I love Disney, at least the great animation features, but all things in moderation.

Yes, there are holes in the plot and action, moments where one says to oneself, as one does: “Are you freakin’ kidding me? Not possible.” But who cares? Those moments pass quickly.

It looks like we’re set up for an interesting second season, where Jamie Lee Curtis, playing a mob enforcer, appears to come back from the dead. Between this and Everything Everywhere All at Once, she’s been going great guns in her “I’m middle aged, get over it” mode.

When will we see more?

My Streaming Diet [Media Notes 145]

I’ve written previously about my posting habits over the long-term, posting charts showing wide variation over time, with periods lasting two to four months where I post very little, between longer periods with many posts per month, over a 100 in recent years. I’ve attributed this to mood swings; I’m depressed during periods when I’m not posting much. 

 

What do I do with my time when I’m not making many blog posts? I’m streaming a lot of movies and TV programs on Netflix and Amazon Prime and watching more YouTube videos that I otherwise do. I’ve been keeping a list of movies and TV programs since sometime in 2018. I’ve decided to post that list online as deep background for an article I’m preparing on my mood swings.  

 

The list is simple. I list the titles by year, and then by whether or not they’ve movies (films) or TV programs. I define movies as titles that are somewhat over an hour long and that reach a definite conclusion at the end of the title. This, I realize, is a crude criterion. There may, of course, be sequels. Everything else is a TV program. TV programs typically have multiple episodes and may or may not continue the same plotlines in the same story from one episode to the next. TV programs tend to have (somewhat shorter than) half-hour episodes or (somewhat shorter than) one-hour episodes. 

 

The distinction is rough, but reasonable. The list says almost nothing about how many episodes to a TV program I watch. In many cases I’ve watched all of the available episodes, which may stretch into the hundreds in some cases. I’ve watched some titles more than once and I’ve generally listed the title more than once.

* * * * *

2018 more or less

TV

Bourdain: A Cooks’ Tour, Parts Unknown
Death in Paradise
Shetland
Iron Fist
Luke Cage
Jessica Jones
Lilyhammer
The Get Down
Samurai Gourmet
The Ranch
The Chinese Mayor
The Crown
Sunny in Philadelphia
Bordertown
Sherlock
Master of None (Aziz Ansari)
Hip-Hop Evolution
Sense8
Fyre
Grace and Frankie
Jack Ryan
Lost in Space, S1
The Man in the High Castle
Transparent
Sneaky Pete

Movies

Jurassic Park, 1, 2, 3
Gimme the Loot (2 graffiti artists)
Sand Castle (war in the Middle East)
Road House (Patrick Swayze)
Indiana Jones, all of them
Ex Machina
One Mississippi
Running Man
American Playboy
Spectre
Wild Card
Julie & Julia

Why is Cobra Kai better than one might have expected? [Media Notes 143a]

When Cobra Kai first showed up on Netflix back in 2020 I noticed it – Oh, the karate kid continues, that’s nice – but had no interest in watching it. But then I read something, perhaps this piece in The New York Times, indicating that it was actually rather good. So I decided to give it a try.

I liked it, I actually liked it. It’s a martial arts movie, and I’ve got a minor interest in such movies. But it’s got more going for it.

You may remember that back in 1984 there was a film called The Karate Kid, which was about a teenaged boy who is mentored by a middle-aged Japanese handyman and karate sensei. The film did fairly well and was followed by a couple of sequels. I have a vague recollection of having watched, I don’t know, that last half of the original film on TV at some time. But that was the extent of my involvement.

Cobra Kai is a sequel to those films, but with a twist. Rather than pick up where the original series left off, it starts when the teenaged protagonist of the original film have reached early middle age. Here’s how the Wikipedia entry explains the premise:

Thirty-four years after being defeated by Daniel LaRusso in the 1984 All-Valley Karate Tournament at the end of The Karate Kid (1984), Johnny Lawrence suffers from alcoholism and depression. He works as a part-time handyman and lives in an apartment in Reseda, Los Angeles, having fallen far from his wealthy lifestyle in Encino. He has an estranged son named Robby, from a previous relationship, whom he has abandoned. In contrast, Daniel is now the owner of a successful car dealership and is married to co-owner Amanda with whom he has two children: Sam and Anthony. However, Daniel often struggles to meaningfully connect with his children especially after his friend and mentor Mr. Miyagi passed away prior to the series’ beginning.

After using karate to defend his teenage neighbor Miguel Diaz from a group of bullies, Johnny agrees to teach Miguel the way of the fist and re-opens Cobra Kai. The revived dojo attracts a group of bullied social outcasts who find camaraderie and self-confidence under Johnny’s tutelage. The reopening of Cobra Kai reignites Johnny’s rivalry with Daniel, who responds by opening the Miyagi-do dojo, whose students include Sam and Robby, leading to a rivalry between the respective dojos.

Whereas The Karate Kid had Johnny Lawrence as the bad guy (“villain” doesn’t seem quite the word) and Daniel LaRusso as the good guy, Cobra Kai is not so polarized. Both men get to be jerks and both get to be decent and sympathetic. But they maintain their antagonism and work it out through their respective dojos, Cobra Kai and Miyagi-do.

So we’ve got action on two strata, among the adults and among the teenagers. The teens are motived by their own romances and beefs and join one dojo or another in the process of working things through. But Johnny and Daniel pick up the conflict from their youth and use their dojos as a vehicle for working it out. That conflict is cloaked in different martial arts styles. Cobra Kai blunt, aggressive, and brutal while Miyago-do strives for ‘balance’ and is more ‘spiritual.’ The stylistic difference is obvious in the fights ¬– of which there are many – and is the occasion for much conversation throughout the series. There’s even an attempt to blend the two styles in opposition to yet a third dojo which shows up in the middle of the series.

Which is to say, things get complicated. More actors, more complex interactions, kids moving from one dojo to another as their relationships between one another and with their elders shift. By the second or third season the two dojos are fighting of karate dominance in San Fernando Valley. By the sixth season – in process, 10 episodes are online, the last five will come next year – we’re talking about dominance of world-wide (teen) karate. Somewhere in this process we see genuine evil, with people getting seriously injured and even killed.

So, what do we have? A conflict between two teenage boys gets reignited in their early middle age where it becomes amplified into a war for dominance of the karate world. On the one hand, it’s rather ridiculous, adults using their dojos as vehicles for working out their conflicts. How Freudian! [Indeed. Think about that for a minute, think about it very seriously.] The series is aware of this and indicates that awareness in various ways. 

It’s brutal, but also lighthearted and funny. And there’s plenty of fighting, well-choreographed, and well filmed. It’ll be interesting to see how things end.

* * * * *

And exercise for the reader: Like so many things these days, this series just begs for a Girardian interpretation. On the one hand we’ve got mimetic desire operating on individual relationships. But we’ve also got larger scale sacrificial rhythms revealing themselves in the various gang battles and organized tournaments. Who are the scapegoats?

Nobel House [Media Notes 139]

I’m talking about the miniseries from 1988, not the James Clavell novel on which it is based. Yikes! Not sure why I sat through all four episodes, but it did.

It stars Pierce Brosnan as Ian Dunross, Tai-pan (head) of Struan & Company, a Hong Kong trading company with roots dating back to whenever. Struan’s is stretched thin financially and vulnerable for take-over. So an American corporate raider comes along and teams up with a Hong Kong rival. The game is joined by an opium dealer hoping to cash in on a compact made when Struan’s was created way back when, and the China Great Wall International Trust Corporation (in the PRC). Alongside this we have a horse race, a Chinese mole in the Hong Kong police department, a mid-level Hong Kong bank, a disloyal son, and of course, pretty women, three of them.

It's all very complicated. Intrigue abounds. Some bed-hopping. Frequent reference to “face,” “joss,” and “the way things are done in Hong Kong” (which seems to be deeply mysterious). Halfway through there’s a big fire in floating restaurant which provides a lot of spectacle, but doesn’t seem to have much effect on the plot, though many of the principle were in the restaurant at the time. But then, toward the end an apartment building collapses, killing two of the more or less bad guys, making it much easier to resolve things in favor Struan & Company. Yipee!

The whole thing was slathered in corporate intrigue and hijinks, with a couple of dashes of Orientalism and a bit of sexism on the side. Quite a piece of work.

Aaron Sorkin: As a fictional president, Trump would be "simply implausible"

Marc Tracy, Aaron Sorkin Thinks Life Still Imitates ‘The West Wing’, NYTimes, Sept. 19, 2024.

We are speaking to each other the day after the only scheduled debate between the two presidential candidates this year.

If I had scripted last night’s debate, you would have said that I made Kamala Harris fight a straw man. A lot [of shows and movies are] going to be written about this time that we’re living in now. But my prediction is that you’ll never see Donald Trump as anything but an offscreen character. You’ll see him on a television set on the news. Because he is simply implausible.

There is a movie coming out about Trump, but to your point, it is set 40 years ago.

Sebastian Stan is playing Trump in the ’70s and ’80s. I mean President Trump. Even saying it doesn’t really sound right.

It has been a pretty dramatic summer politically. What have you made of it?

Over the years, cable newscasters have used the phrase “‘West Wing’ moment,” as in: “There’s a clash over the debt ceiling. There’s not going to be a ‘West Wing’ moment.” They’ve used that to mean: an unrealistically high expectation of character triumphing over selfishness, and in the real world, there are not “‘West Wing’ moments.” I believe that the morning Biden stepped out of the race, that was a “West Wing” moment. That’s the kind of thing we write stories about.

Community in House, M.D. [Media Notes 135 B]

When I wrote yesterday’s post about House, M.D. I figured I might have more to say about it, but I didn’t have any explicit plans to do so. When I woke up this morning, I had an idea or two. These ideas center around community.

In this case we’re dealing with community on two levels. On the one level there’s the local community centered on our protagonist, Dr. Gregory House. This community includes his boss, Dr, Lisa Cuddy, his team of associates, Dr. Eric Foreman, Dr. Robert Chase, Dr. Allison Cameron, and his best friend, Dr. James Wilson. This local group then “shades out” through the hospital more generally. On another level there’s the community at large. This is where the patients come from. The hospital serves that community.

Illness and injury threaten that larger community. When a person is ill, they cannot participate fully in the community. When a person dies, the community is diminished. The hospital community exists to serve that larger community. The House-centered community operates within the hospital to serve that larger community.

The irony of the show is that at the center of this web of communal interactions we have an unpleasant misanthrope. House isn’t interested in the community. He’s interested in disease. What is the role of disease in the House community, if you will?

It structures their interactions, gives them purpose. In particular, differential diagnosis seems to be the central organizing activity in that local community. They meet, discuss and argue, and then go about their various tasks, usually assigned by House, who then may hang out in the office, while continuing to think, listen to music, watch TV, whatever. Those tasks will mostly take place elsewhere in hospital, though House’s associates will regularly venture outside the hospital to investigate patients’ homes and/or places of work.

The activity of differential diagnosis itself takes place through talk and writing on a white board. The talk is highly technical. I assume that it’s more or less technically correct, but I don’t know enough about medicine to judge that and I assume that’s true for most of the audience. What’s important is that we see the activity. We see investigation taking place. We experience diagnosis as a communal activity. How does this little community maintain itself in face of disease and under the pressure of the often at odds personalities of these doctors? That’s what we’re seeing. That’s what the show is about.

And then there’s serendipity. The process of differential diagnosis is driven by evidence, a patient’s symptoms and history, and by medical knowledge. And then there’s serendipity. Something accidental happens, someone notices something that might be totally unrelated to the case, but it sparks a train of thought the becomes relevant. Serendipity takes as to the edge of community, if not beyond it.

The upshot is that we see the social construction of truth, a construction that is tested in the process of treatment. The detective show does the same thing, but with a different set of procedures. We know that House was inspired in part by Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holms and we know that the character of Holms was based, in part, on that of a surgeon, Joseph Bell. So we’ve got a century’s worth of narrative history trailing behind House, M.D., with each title having its particular mix of ingredients. It’s my impression that most of the titles don’t focus on the process of reasoning as closely as House, M.D. does. But this is not the place to even begin to sketch out the coordinates of that space.

* * * * *

Addendum 7.3.24: I should have at least mentioned that, more often than not, the differential diagnosis is a race against death. Generally House and his team win the race, but not always. So, that’s what’s at stake in the various discussions about House’s disregard for procedures and dogged pursuit of the diagnosis. This is a show that forces us to confront and think about death.

What’s up with House, M.D.? [Media Notes 135]

House, M.D. has been on my to-do list for a couple of years. As you may know, it’s a medical drama than ran on Fox for eight seasons between 2004 and 2012. I watched it back then, and I watched in online since then. I’m now in the second season of rewatching it again.

I’ve got a simple question: What’s it about? Oh, I know, it’s about Dr. Gregory House who’s a world-class diagnostician at the fictional Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital in New Jersey. What makes it interesting is that House, while a very good diagnostician, is an unpleasant person. He’s rude, self-centered, difficult to get along with, and insists on doing things his way, which often puts him at odds both with accepted medical practice and with Princeton-Plainsboro. Nor is he particularly endearing with his patients. He’s also in chronic pain and, consequently, addicted to pain medication. Each episode is built around a single case, though there may be one or three simpler cases on the side.

Given such a thoroughly unpleasant central character, why was the series popular enough to run for eight seasons a get a bunch of awards? To be clear, I’m not questioning the merits of the show, after all, I’m now on my third time through. No, what I’m curious about is how it is that such a popular show could be built around such a thoroughly unlikable character?

Obviously, there wouldn’t be any show if House were incompetent. He had to have some redeeming quality, medical brilliance in this case. We’ve had medical dramas on TV since the fifties, and I’ve watched a bunch of them. I don’t recall any others where the protagonist was so unlikable and also of such a high level of competence. Those two things go together. Why?

Imagine another drama about a physician with House’s skills but who was more likeable, perhaps married as well, with a beautiful wife and cute children. That would be a very different show, and wouldn’t work. (Or would it?) We also need to emphasize that House is a fairly technical show in it features a lot of complex medical terms, some technology as well, and interior views of the body via special effects. There’s also the activity of differential diagnosis, which is on display 3, 4, 5, or more times during the show. That’s critical to the “texture” of the show. Off hand, the only precedent I can think of is CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, a forensics crime show that ran from 2000 to 2015, was a huge hit, and spawned a spin-off and several imitators. It also featured technical terms, apparatus, procedures, reasoning, and special effects.

I’m thinking that, as American culture is fairly anti-intellectual, ambiguous at best, making the protagonist unpleasant and in pain is a way of taking the edge off his brilliance – Yeah, he’s super-smart, but he’s also an unhappy asshole! I’m not sure I believe that, though it’s been on my mind for a while. It probably needs a better formulation, but I don’t know how to do it, and I fear that it would likely require a bit of apparatus-building.

One final remark, while the unpleasant and tortured genius doctor is at the center of the show, there are other important figures as well: his (female) boss, the Dean of Medicine, his best (and only) buddy (an oncologist), and his three associates, who changed as the show went on. None of these people are unpleasant in the way House is. Getting a good mix of associated characters is certainly part of the formula, but that’s true for all TV shows, movies, dramas, or narratives. What are the specific requirements of “compensating” for a character like Dr. Gregory House?

* * * * *

Given the prominence of AI these days, I assume someone’s working on a show built around an AI doctor. I note that Star Trek: Voyager has already done it, with its holographic doctor. But when that show aired, 1995-2001, AI was purely conjectural. That’s no longer the case. And that changes everything, no?