#dear television

[daily-tech-character]

Day 137

↳ Dear Television from Doko Demo Issyo

GIF source

Submitted by @bingus-fringus

[whiteblobs-archival]

Dear Television / Terebi-San - (Doko Demo Issho)

[wildcard47]

Here’s what I do care about — and what, in my fantasy universe, Mad Men would spend its last episodes dealing with in lieu of the [Calvets] and Averys and Cosgroves and Chaoughs. I care about Pete and Trudy; I care about how they’ve changed with respect to each other and how they’ll continue to change. I care deeply about Betty. I want to see her and Joan run into each other. I want to see her and Don bicker over how Sally dresses. I want Joan to remember Lane. I want Bobby to show Don exactly how abandoned he is — how Don is recreating his own childhood in the son he refuses to see or miss. I want Peggy and Abe to meet up again and I want her to feel something about that. I want Peggy and Stan Rizzo to have a major, surprisingly intense fight about the Beatles or LSD that turns them into a couple. I want Peggy to confide in Stan. I care about Sally. I want Peggy to visit Ginsburg. I want Roger and Joan scenes, and (I’m sorry to say this) but, for dramatic reasons, I want Roger to die. I want the illusion Mad Men offers that erasures are clean to rip the paper it’s written on a little. I want something to matter. Just one little chicken coming home to roost would make it all feel a little less unmoored, a little less pointless as a viewing experience.

Lili Loofbourow, Dear Television

[aherman2006]

Let’s suppose instead that maybe what’s so unsettling about this program isn’t its lack of a heart but its lack of a plot. Now, The Leftovers obviously has a plot (and quite an intricately worked one at that). It’s about the myriad reactions that a small town has to the “Sudden Departure,” in which a small, yet not insignificant, portion of the earth’s populace simply disappears. The thing to note here, however, is that this happens offscreen, or, rather, in a series of small flashbacky jump cuts throughout the series. A few weeks ago, Kelly Braffett, Vulture’s recapper for the show, wrote, simply, “Not enough is happening on this series.” And, indeed, this is the point. Tom Perrotta characterized the fallout from the Sudden Departure in his novel thusly: “Nothing happened.” The thing that happened already happened. It’s over. That’s not what this show is about. These reactions have been somewhat puzzling, especially because it seems like we have just spent the past decade of the Commemorative Platinum Age of Television Genius patting ourselves on the back for watching serial dramas in which “nothing happens.” We talk about the bottle episodes and domestic details of shows like The Sopranos and The Wire, and we laud them for being willing to show nothing happening. But as much as those shows embraced the aesthetic of the ordinary and did in fact liberate our viewing habits from reliance on twist-a-minute plotting, they were also, if you recall, fairly plot-driven. What’s going to happen to Stringer Bell? Is Adriana going to get caught? Who’s going to kill Walter White? These shows were revolutionary in their slowness, but they weren’t uneventful or even terribly plotless. If anything, The Leftovers is what we get for praising the slowness of those shows.

Phillip Maciak, "Get Lost: Why You Should Be Watching 'The Leftovers'"

[millionsmillions]

"The trouble is that monsters have a lineage too, and our monsters have changed. Errol Childress is a quaint monster, a monster of convenience, a camp monster, a monster in drag. Monster, as every English professor likes to remind us, comes from the same root as demonstrate: a monster is supposed to mean, to signify, to instruct. Errol Childress has nothing to teach us, and neither does True Detective in its fond hope that these old manly genres can keep operating in the exhausted currency of mutilated women, or its insistence that evil somehow proclaims itself."

— Lili Loofbourow

[shannasouzou]

HOW ARE THERE NO NEW FALL SHOWS THAT I WANT TO WATCH?!

Yeah, a bunch of my favorites are coming back to the air, but this is probably the first year in a long time where I won't pick up a new show. But literally nothing looks good or interesting. 

So annoying. Guess I'll have to find old stuff to fangirl over.