Diane Keaton, George Hamilton and Al Pacino star in
The Godfather: Part III (1990-R)

The problem with Godfather III is that . . . it’s not Godfather I or Godfather II. It’s a good, not great, gangster movie and certainly deserves to be included in our Top 100.

But it will always be compared with the two movies that preceded it. And in that comparison, it will always come up short.

GF3 has an interesting story and a stellar cast. Coppola and Mario Puzo, who wrote the script together, used real events—the suspicious death of Pope John Paul I and the multimillion dollar scandal at the Vatican Bank—to bring us an updated Michael Corleone, struggling to go legit in a world that, he quickly learns, is as treacherous and cutthroat as the criminal underworld from which he came.

Those storylines gave the writers a chance to offer social commentary, and they didn’t hesitate. Their targets: the hypocrisy of big institutions—the Church, banking, politics—and the greed and venality of the men who run them.

“The pope’s doing exactly what you said he would,” attorney B. J. Harrison (George Hamilton) tells Michael after John Paul I begins to clean up the Vatican mess.

“He should be careful,” Michael replies. “It’s dangerous to be an honest man.”

After meeting with Vatican bankers, Michael offers this take: “We’re dealing with the Borgias.”

Finally, there is this exchange between Michael and Don Licio Lucchesi (Enzo Robutti), the Sicilian politico with ties to the banks, the Church and the Mafia.

“You are a man of finance and politics,” Michael says. “I don’t understand either.”

“Finance is a gun,” says Lucchesi. “Politics is knowing when to pull the trigger.”

Pacino brings the right blend of weariness and cynicism to his third turn as Michael. Diane Keaton is back as the long-suffering Kay (although we have always wondered how a volatile Sicilian like Michael ended up with the prim and proper New Englander; God, we miss Apollonia).

Andy Garcia is perfect as Sonny’s illegitimate son, Vincent Mancini. He’s smoldering and short-tempered like his father, violent and always on the prowl. Who else but Sonny’s kid could turn making gnocchi into a sexual dance?

There are several other memorable moments, but not enough of them to elevate this film to the level of its predecessors. Which is the problem.

They say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, but for our money, Coppola and Puzo went way over the line in trying to mimic—or revisit—some of the great scenes from the first two films.

For openers—literally—there’s the big party after Michael receives the papal award of Commander of the Order of San Sebastian for his philanthropy. Connie (Talia Shire, back and showing more balls than some of the male gangsters) does the Italian folk song right out of the wedding scene from Godfather I.

There’s also the scene where Joey Zasa (what a great name for the Joe Mantegna character) is walking through Little Italy during a festival as hit men close in on him. This is simply the updated version of the classic scene from Godfather II when young Vito Corleone stalks Don Fanucci. This time it’s Vito’s grandson Vincent stalking the mob kingpin who is about to be murdered.

And the series of murders carried out while Anthony Corleone (Franc D’Ambrosio) makes his operatic debut in Palermo is nothing if not a repeat of the climatic Baptismal scene that puts the stamp of evil on Michael Corleone at the end of Godfather I.

The originals were great cinema.

The replays were . . . replays. We’ve already seen them and there’s no way they can be matched.

So why bother?

That, we guess, is the central question for anyone who watches this movie. Why was it necessary?

Clearly, Paramount wanted to dip its beak one more time and Puzo, Coppola and Pacino all realized nice pay days. The film grossed over $66 million in the United States alone and garnered seven Academy Award nominations, including one for Best Supporting Actor for Garcia. But it was shut out on Oscar night—the only film in the trilogy not to win one of the coveted awards.

Puzo originally wanted to call the movie The Death of Michael Corleone, but Paramount balked. The story is, however, a morality tale with a basic lesson—evil is punished. Michael Corleone’s attempt to repent is too little, too late.

With Godfather III, we know how the final chapter in the Corleone saga ends. The Americanization of the family—the goal that Don Vito sought—is completed. But in giving us an ending, Coppola and Puzo have robbed us of imagining how it might have been.

And imagining how it might have been is sometimes better than seeing how it all turned out.

HIT: Andy Garcia brings a spark to his character that is reminiscent of so many performances in the first two Godfather movies. Unfortunately, not too many other actors bring their A-games this time.

MISS: Sofia Coppola’s portrayal of Michael Corleone’s daughter Mary is a drag on the story. Ms. Coppola has since won praise and built a career for herself as a director, like her father. Her role here was ample evidence that her future lay behind the camera, not in front of it.

She “won” two RAZZIE Awards for her performance: Worst Supporting Actress and Worst New Star. Her father did her no favor by casting her in this film.

WHAT THEY WROTE AT THE TIME: “The Godfather Part III isn’t just a disappointment, it’s a failure of heartbreaking proportions. . . . The film completes the story of Vito Corleone and his sons . . . but in supplying the final chapter of the saga, it also sullies what came before. It makes you wish it had never been made.”—Hal Hinson, Washington Post

REALITY CHECK: Several of the characters involved in the Vatican Bank scandal were based, not so loosely, on individuals linked to that financial boondoggle. The Swiss banker in the movie is modeled after Roberto Calvi, chairman of Banco Ambrosiano. Like the character in the film, Calvi was found hanging from a bridge. While authorities first ruled it a suicide, it later was considered a murder. The death of Pope John Paul I from poison in his tea was also based on rumors that swirled around the demise of the Pontiff. And Don Lucchesi, the Sicilian politico with ties to the Mafia was a not-so-subtle reference to former Italian Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti.

REPEATED WATCHING QUOTIENT: Only a diehard Godfather fan would want to revisit this and since you have the options of instead re-watching Godfather I or II, why waste your time on this one? But if you must, maybe the best way to take a second look is with the reissued DVD that tells the whole story chronologically.

BET YOU DIDN’T KNOW: An early draft written by Puzo was built around a storyline that had Anthony Corleone working with the CIA to rub out a South American dictator. There were several other versions before Puzo and Coppola put this one together. Robert Duvall was originally going to reprise his role as Tom Hagen and would have had a big role in the financial wheeling and dealing and legitimization of the Corleone family. But Duvall balked at the pay he was offered (which was substantially less than Pacino’s salary). Instead, the script was rewritten with Hagen dead and his son (John Savage) playing a minor role as a priest who gets assigned to the Vatican.

CASTING CALL: Winona Ryder was set to play Mary, but bowed out so that she could appear in Edward Scissorhands (1990). Several others were mentioned, including Julia Roberts, Laura San Giacomo and Linda Fiorentino before Coppola settled on his daughter and rewrote the script so that the character of Mary was younger.

Just imagine a scene with Fiorentino and Garcia making gnocchi. It could have gotten the film an X-rating.

BEST LINE: Everyone knows and repeats the classic lament Michael utters when he realizes he can’t get away from Cosa Nostra: “Just when I think I’m out, they pull me back in!”

But there are several other keepers as well.

We especially liked Michael’s response to his son Anthony during their argument over Anthony’s decision to leave law school and pursue a career as a singer. Anthony tells his father he loves him, but doesn’t want to be part of his world.

“I have bad memories,” he says.

To which Michael, with a straight face, replies, “All families have bad memories.”

Say what?

VIOLENCE LEVEL: Sporadic, but when it comes, it comes with a rush. Shootings, stabbings, poisoned cannoli.

BODY COUNT: We figure about three dozen. There were so many bodies dropping during the helicopter assault at the Atlantic City casino that it was impossible to get an exact count.

***

Join us as we count down the greatest gangster movies of all time — a new entry every Thursday! Click here to see what you’ve missed so far.

[Reprinted from The Ultimate Book of Gangster Movies by George Anastasia and Glen Macnow. Available from Running Press, a member of The Perseus Books Group. Copyright © 2011.]

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Photos courtesy of ©NBCUniversal, Inc.

Yvette Nicole Brown has bad news for fans of NBC’s brilliant and sadly underrated comedy Community. “[The show] is going to end someday,” says the actress before quickly adding in her pleasantly reassuring voice, “but it’s OK.” Brown, who has played the caring, if sometimes judgmental, Shirley Bennett for three seasons approaches Community’s potential cancellation with a mixture of equanimity and optimism. “My first introduction to this business is that things end,” Brown says (a reference to the short-lived ABC sitcom The Big House on which she appeared with Kevin Hart), “but it’s not the end of the world.”

Though some fans may disagree with Brown, she is right. Like all television shows, Community has a shelf life and its expiration date seems imminent in light of recent events. After a four-month midseason hiatus, Community returned to its Thursday night time slot earlier this year. On May 10, NBC announced that Community would have a fourth season, though it would only consist of 13 episodes. If that news wasn’t bad enough, Community is also being moved to Friday nights. Then, only a few days ago, it was announced that Dan Harmon, creator and executive producer, would not be returning for what many are assuming will be the show’s final season.

For her part, though, Brown is taking the potentially bad news in stride. Though she won’t find out what is in store for Greendale’s band of merry misfits until July, she knows what she would like to see happen. “It’d be great if [the writers] could work out a graduation scenario,” she says. After a brief pause, she adds, “Although the study group doesn’t really excel at school.”

Browns assessment of the characters’ strengths is fair. In three seasons, the group of community college students has been more successful at playing paintball, chasing monkeys through air ducts, and building blanket forts than actually performing in the classroom. “We’re blessed to have [fans] who will take the ride wherever we take them,” Brown says. Community has been anything but an ordinary show, vacillating between standard narratives and “concept episodes” which most please the show’s ardent fans but alienate others.

Yvette Nicole Brown fields fans’ questions at Comic-Con in 2011.

For Brown, the fans are one of the most satisfying aspects of being on the show. “They’re like ‘A video game? Sure! Zombie apocalypse? Yes!’” she says, referring to two specific episodes, “Digital Estate Planning” (Season 3, Episode 20) and “Epidemiology” (Season 1, Episode 6). Is Brown surprised that fans are so rabidly loyal to a series that prefers spaghetti Western homages to typical sitcom storytelling? “I’m not really surprised anymore. I’m eternally grateful, but not surprised.”

Community has become best known (and loved) for episodes that take television archetypes and twist them inside out (see “Paradigms of Human Memory” and “Cooperative Calligraphy in Season 2) or become 22-minute long references to film and pop culture (specifically, “A Fistful of Paintballs” in Season 2 and “Regional Holiday Music” in Season 3). For Brown, the concept episodes are rewarding to watch, but not always pleasant to film. “The paintball episodes were very difficult to shoot,” she says, explaining that, without padding, a paintball to the center of the back can really hurt. She also admits that the recent episode “Virtual Systems Analysis” was a bit of a mystery to her until it aired. “I was on set like ‘What? Who?’ But then when I saw it, I was like, ‘Ooookay.’”

Though she has been acting for over a decade, it wasn’t until Community that Brown found a show that would provide steady work and mass exposure. And to think, it almost didn’t even happen. “I really wasn’t going to audition for Community,” she says. “I had had a really wretched pilot season [in 2009] and I had pretty much decided to take my ball and go home.” Thankfully, she ended up auditioning and getting the part of Shirley, which, in less talented hands, may have become a one-note character. In Brown’s hands, though, Shirley is as complex and damaged as any of Greendale’s students. “I love that [the writers] are making [Shirley] more independent,” says Brown while reflecting on her character’s development. “Her story arc was that she’s a wounded little bird who was betrayed by her husband (played in later episodes by Malcolm Jamal Warner) and raising two kids on her own. Now, she’s come full circle and is able to fly.”

Brown is not affecting a cheerful disposition for the sake of the interviewer. One gets the sense that her upbeat, positive attitude is genuine and not a façade that disappears as soon as the interview is over. Like her character on the show, Brown radiates warmth and comfort, though that’s pretty much where the similarities end. Unlike Shirley, Brown does not speak in a sing-songy falsetto or delight in poking fun at someone’s tiny nipples (as Shirley did in Season One with Joel McHale’s character, Jeff Winger). Though, like Shirley, Brown is a practicing Christian (an uncommon occurrence in Hollywood), her faith does not prompt her to pass judgment on others’ beliefs or lifestyles.

There is no doubt Brown has enjoyed her time on Community, especially working with her co-stars who make it impossible not to break character while filming. “Jim Rash (who plays Dean Pelton) gets me a lot,” she admits. “No matter what they write for him, the vocal cadence in which he will say it will always catch me by surprise.” Rash is not the only problem child, though. “Danny [Pudi] (Abed) makes me laugh by his faces and his ability to not laugh. Donald [Glover] (Troy) does not break often, but he’s the most common reason other people break.” So who is the most entertaining cast member? “Ken Jeong (who plays Chang) will make himself break because he will say his own line and laugh because he delights himself so much,” Brown says, chuckling at the memory.

Though she remains optimistic about the future of Community, one aspect of the fourth season does seem to bother her. “With the 13 episodes [of Season Four], we’re four episodes away from the magic number we need for syndication,” she says with a twinge of regret in her voice. “It takes 88 episodes, so that 13-episode order puts us four shy. I’m praying that if it does end this year, we’ll get those back four at least so Greendale can go on to live for years and years and years on channel 9 in Peoria or wherever.”

Fans, of course, would love both syndication and at least six seasons and a movie (a reference to Abed’s obsession with the cancelled TV show The Cape), the reality that Community may be coming to an end is difficult to ignore. But, who knows? Maybe NBC will release some webisodes this summer to help connect to a wider audience before the new season. As for Brown, she’s happy to help however she can. “Any time they come up with something interesting or fun to promote the show, I’m on board.”

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House and Wilson have an important decision to make.
©2012 Fox Broadcasting Co. Cr: Byron Cohen/FOX

First things first: Dear Creators of House – Thank you very much for the happy ending (and for the last eight seasons). Dear Powers That Be At Fox – In the closing minutes of the show, we see Chase taking over House’s position at PPTH. I think I would much rather watch “Chase M.D.” than that show with the firemen Jesse Spencer is doing over at NBC. Could you perhaps pencil it in for later?

So, everybody got to be right tonight – House did kill himself, more or less, and he and Wilson hit the road a la Thelma and Louise (minus the final leap into the abyss). We got final appearances not only from Chase and Dominika, but from Kutner (Kal Penn), Amber (Anne Dudek), Cameron (Jennifer Morrison), Stacy (Sela Ward), Martha M. Masters (Amber Tamblyn), and Thirteen (Olivia Wilde). The one name conspicuously absent from this list is Lisa Edelstein as Cuddy, but Andre Braugher did turn up as Dr. Nolan.

The plot for tonight’s episode was fundamentally quite simple: House is lying on the floor of a shooting gallery, next to the corpse of a recent patient who was also a junkie. Smoke is coiling up through the floorboards as the building goes up in flames. As in the final episodes of season four and five, House hallucinates and debates with his former friends and associates as he wonders whether to bother escaping.

Kutner appears first, pointing out how apt it is that, at this moment, House would hallucinate a friend who chose suicide. He’s followed by Amber, who apparently speaks for his intellect, telling him that his love of puzzles is what keeps him alive; the “eternal nothingness” of death is simply boring. When Wilson dies, he’ll cry, and then go on to the next puzzle. Stacy, his ex-wife, appears next (somehow I never quite believed in that relationship). She hands him a baby, the child he might have had, tempting him with visions of domestic happiness, and telling him that she and Cuddy are not the only women in the world capable of loving him, as we get a glimpse of House and Dominika (House opts for a team of cheerleaders instead). She says that he always let Wilson be his conscience, and perhaps he’ll be better on his own. Cameron appears last, in the initially surprising but very effective role of his angel of death, telling him that maybe he’s given enough, and suffered enough, and it’s time to let go. (Excellent work from Jennifer Morrison here.)

Through flashbacks, we learn about his contacts with the patient who led him here – but plenty of ends are left dangling. (And was that “blah blah blah” dialogue inspired by the Supernatural episode “Tall Tales,” which I just watched again last week?) Meanwhile, Foreman and Wilson, who’ve realized House is missing, track him down. They’re walking towards the burning warehouse (I assume it’s a warehouse) when they see House inside; a flaming roof beam blocks him from view, and then the building explodes in flame.

House’s friends and colleagues gather for his memorial service, each speaking about his legacy in their lives. But just as Wilson finally departs from the script, talking instead about what an ass House was, his phone starts ringing, and there’s a not-so-cryptic text… “Shut Up You Idiot.” House switched his dental records with the dead junkie’s, effectively faking his own death. Only Wilson is let in on the secret.

We end with the two of them on the road, on motorcycles, in black leather jackets. The sun is shining, the trees are green, a river sparkles in the sunshine, and Robert Sean Wilson is sporting a surprisingly badass mustache. “When the cancer gets bad…” he begins. House cuts him off: “Cancer is boring.” The two drive off as the song “Enjoy Yourself (It’s Later Than You Think)” plays on the soundtrack. ( I’m guessing the version by Louis Prima. Anyone?) Everybody dies, but we’re not going to have to see it.

And – I really liked it. I’m grateful not to have been put through some Titanic-style tearjerker of an ending that would have hung like a cloud over future viewings of early episodes – I’ll be able to enjoy the characters in the future without being haunted by the fact I’ve already watched them die horribly. There are far worse notes to end on than warm, funny, and a bit sentimental. I think the creators managed both to give us some sort of closure and kept things somewhat open-ended, and I think that in doing so, they showed a certain savvy and tact concerning the way viewers relate to ongoing shows, as opposed to one-shot narratives such as movies and novels.

I was happy to see that Wilson’s cancer really paid off in narrative terms, rather than just making us very sad. Instead, it becomes the motive for House to “kill” the hated self he’s been trapped with all these years and, once he’s literally selfless – there’s a death certificate on file for Dr. Gregory House, M.D. – he’s free to be as generous as he wants.

I’m also glad I didn’t have to watch the show’s creators smash up the world of the show as thoroughly as Joss Whedon and company did in the finale of Buffy (which made me feel, at moments, they were only too happy to see the last of Sunnydale). Instead, this finale reminded me of the ending of my second-favorite Buffy episode – the underrated “Lie To Me,” from Season Two. In the shows final moments, Buffy and her mentor Giles wait at the grave of Buffy’s grade school crush, who chose to become a vampire rather than die slowly of a brain tumor. Buffy asks Giles to tell her if life ever “gets easy”:

Giles: What do you want me to say?

Buffy: Lie to me.

Giles: Yes, it’s terribly simple. The good guys are always stalwart and true. The bad guys are easily distinguished by their pointy horns or black hats and we always defeat them and save the day. No one ever dies, and everybody lives happily ever after.

Buffy (affectionately): Liar.

This is essentially the ending that the creators of House gave us tonight: I know these characters aren’t going to live happily ever after, but I’m glad they let that be the final image we have of them.

And now to the issues fans will no doubt be debating for ages to come:

Did House plan this? We never do see what happens with the patient between the time that House finds the twig in his neck vein, and when he’s lying dead on the floor of the shooting gallery, having presumably OD’d. Is this the final version of the patient’s earlier offer to take the fall for flushing the hockey tickets down the toilet? If the patient – a fatalistic former stockbroker who preferred being a heroin junkie – was willing to give up his freedom, could he have volunteered (or been persuaded) to OD for a cause, so to speak? Even if it was all a plan, I can see House being conflicted and frightened enough to hallucinate his old companions – Greg House is not coming back out of that building. (And could some of them, especially Stacy, have been hinting at a possible future?)

I can see House carefully crafting a trail for Wilson and Foreman, engaging Dr. Nolan in conversations about his junkie patient and the lure of artificial oblivion, making an appointment with a hooker, then deliberately standing her up, leaving the half-eaten Chinese food in his apartment, making sure the patient’s fake address would lead people to the right neighborhood… But how could he have timed the fire to coincide with Wilson’s and Foreman’s appearance?

Or was it a spur-of-the-moment thing, House going on a genuinely self-destructive bender, then taking advantage of a fortuitous convergence of events? But if that’s the case, how did he have the presence of mind to disappear and take care of the dental records? The thing with the records suggests to me that it was planned in advance… The arguments can go either way, and I suspect they’re meant to.

And when Foreman finds House’s old ID badge in his office, and smiles to himself, has he guessed the truth?

Finally, does anyone else think Stacy’s scene in the warehouse was probably written with Lisa Edelstein in mind?

Let the debates begin. Either way, House seems to have done a very good thing, by doing a very bad thing. And that’s more satisfying, in the end, than seeing him either suddenly reform or succumb completely to his own dark side. Leave to House (show and character) to find a way to do both.

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The Christmas episode of Mad Men always feels strange, as the show airs in spring and summer. Watching the characters wander around chilly, under-saturated New York City streets in heavy wool coats while we on the east coast are breaking out summer linens and shorts is always bizarre. Last night’s episode was exhilarating and melancholy for all of SCDP – and for us. Since there are so many tiny arcs each season and so many characters with whom we have to keep up, interactions between our favorite characters are at a premium. It’s why Peggy telling Don to shut up was so satisfying, and why Lane and Pete’s fisticuffs were so hilarious. The show neatly balances the office politics of SCDP with the home lives of our characters, and while the two are intertwined, they don’t always overlap.

Who knew Harry would fall so eagerly into Krishna? Photo credit Jordin Althaus/AMC.

In “The Christmas Waltz,” we catch up with Lane. Poor Lane. A few episodes ago, we saw him bartering for his son’s expensive private school tuition, and now he’s reaping what he sowed. He asks SCDP’s bank for a credit extension of $50k so he can collect his own Christmas bonus to pay back debts owed – and when Don nixes Christmas bonuses until next week, Lane forges a check to himself. We’ve seen some of our other characters hit rock bottom, but this is Lane Pryce’s miserable rock bottom. Pete and Lane are both phenomenally unhappy, struggling with desires they can’t quite reach – and Lane only continues to dig himself into a thorny pit of lies with everyone around him.

Speaking of Pete, he’s been working Jaguar for months, waiting like a vulture for someone to go down in flames. Once that gent was weakened, Pete went in for the kill and got SCDP a chance at representing Jaguar. Pete’s annoyance with Don’s lackadaisical attitude toward work is now constantly on display. “You may need to work past 5:30,” he sneers when Don bemoans the amount of work the Jaguar pitch will require. Like an impetuous teenager, he says aloud that no one’s giving him the reaction he wants from this “blessed event.” What he actually means, in his asshole way, is “No one loves me. Love me!” But as Bert Cooper notes, it’s lemons, but we still have to make the lemonade. No respect for Pete.

Kinsey: A changed man? Photo credit Jordin Althaus/AMC.

Last night also sees the return of one Paul Kinsey (Michael Gladis). Kinsey, who was always a bit of a hippie (moreso than Harry Crane, who’s now the resident “bohemian”), was left behind in the move from Sterling Cooper to SCDP and apparently followed a downward trajectory in the interim. Kinsey’s been struggling to get hold of Harry Crane for lunch for ages, and when Harry finally relents he finds Kinsey in the midst of the Hare Krishna. Looking sublime and pleased, Kinsey drags Harry into the worship. In his geometric plaids and heavy wool coat, poor Harry is an ugly duckling surrounded by swirling Indian tapestries and long-haired hippies. Mother Lakshmi, a pretty young brunette who appears to be with Kinsey, whispers seductively in his ear, and he loses himself completely in the chanting. Read more…

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Holmes and Moriarty come face to face.
Photograph: BBC/Hartswood Films/Colin Hutton

Doing the Reichenbach Falls as part of the Sherlock series? I love it. The idea is so self-indulgent, such a shameless bit of emotional cheating, that I can’t decide whether to stand up and salute or get behind it and shove. The original story being called The Final Problem makes it even easier to crowbar Georges Gusdorf in: “No trick of presentation, even when assisted by genius, can prevent the narrator from always knowing the outcome of the story he tells – he commences…with the problem already solved.” For The Reichenbach Fall, of course, not only does the narrator know how this ultimately turns out (which Doyle didn’t when he wrote The Final Problem) but the story knows it and the audience knows it. The situation offers enormous possibilities for either sleight-of-hand or massively sentimental wallowing, as we all watch John’s emotional breakdown knowing that it will all be fine. (Maybe Sherlock’s final graveyard appearance is an admission that there’s no point trying to play this one for suspense, it’s a tearjerker and isn’t pretending otherwise.)

We start with a self-consciously stylish piece of choreography as Jim Moriaty breaks simultaneously into the Bank of England, Pentonville Prison and the case in which the Crown Jewels are kept, using a smartphone. Well, the latter involves a diamond, some chewing gum and a fire extinguisher, which is pretty good fun in low-tech heisty way. Now, this is the premise of the episode. What it asks us to accept in order for the story to get going. So it seems unreasonable to carp. But am I the only one who feels that if you can use a mobile phone to break into three of the most secure places in Britain in the first five minutes, then we should probably all pack up and go home?

Of course it turns out that this was just a stunt by Cheeky Jim, that he wanted to get clapped in jail so the next stage of his evil scheme could begin. (Thus making this sequence a show-off version of the bank robbery at the beginning of Prison Break, minus the tattoos and the plot-essential topless structural engineering.) But I did get a vague feeling that this opening was slightly sawing through the branch it sat on: if we are intended to engage with the mechanics of crime fiction which this show deploys, it might help if that whole edifice wasn’t rendered a bit obsolete by a few keystrokes from a magic handy at the beginning. I was, however, looking at all this from the wrong angle, according to a friend. Gatiss and Moffat, she explained, are science-fiction writers who can’t really script technology. Hence the whiff of the sonic screwdriver about the MacGuffin at the centre of this episode: a computer code which can bypass all security systems. It just can. No, don’t try to work it out. Stop thinking about it right now. Onto the next paragraph, quickly please.

Before escaping his trial via a little heavy-handed witness intimidation, Moraity has convinced the criminal underworld that Sherlock has the code and framed Sherlock for the kidnapping of the British ambassador’s children. Still no longer content, he proceeds to manufacture a false identity for himself as a journalist who helped Sherlock fake all his cases. Thus the detective finds himself on the run from a series of international assassins (who turn out to be protecting him under Mycroft’s orders, and thus probably find all this running a bit unnecessary), the police who believe he has spent the last few years on a combined crime spree/ spoiler binge, and the press who are shocked, shocked I tell you, at the news than a journalist would assist anyone in making things up which were not in fact the case. It all comes together on the top of a building, and Sherlock is offered a choice: everyone he loves dies, or they live on believing he was a murderous fraud.

With this episode we’ve clearly reached “high concept” territory. The plot has shrugged off any expectations that it will make sense, or could be followed analytically. Which is rather a good thing, since it frees up the audience to listen to what the episode is actually saying. Listening to Sherlock is an odd and enjoyable experience, since the show doesn’t so much have a subtext, or indeed a text, as surtitles. Every now and then someone will scream The Point Of It All at you – which I suppose is necessary when you’ve cast the inscrutable, or simply illegible, Cumberbatch in the main role. It’s like watching a silent movie where everyone dashes around excitably and then a card flashes up informing you that “She Surrendered All For Love” or “The House of Stuart has fallen”. Either that, or it’s like playing a game of incompetent and increasingly irritable charades, where someone cracks after fifteen minutes of baffling mime and yells the answer: “Paradise Lost, for sod’s sake! Are you all utterly moronic? Paradise Lost!”

The first few times it happens you cringe, as someone points out helpfully that OTHER PEOPLE SEEM TO HAVE EMOTIONS, BUT SHERLOCK DOESN’T, or JOHN AND SHERLOCK ARE SORT OF LIKE A COUPLE, HAVE YOU NOTICED? But once you get used to it, it’s quite fun, and it frees up the writers to produce some really splendid one-liners. They hit you in the face like a custard pie, but it is terrifically enjoyable: “I always hear ‘Hit me’ when you talk, but usually that’s not what you’re saying’” – “Do you think you could survive for just a few minutes without showing off?” – “I don’t have friends. I just have one.” You have to sit through stuff like “Alone is what I have. Alone protects me.”, “Nope. Friends protect you”, but you get Martin Freeman producing a line like “Would you…just for me? Stop this. Just stop it.” and making it work.

Listening to the show also lets you hear what it’s anxious about. To cite my better-informed friend again, Sherlock has been worrying away at the idea of gaslighting recently. The Hounds of Baskerville played with the idea of not being able to trust your own senses – and even briefly toyed with the fear that someone you love is deliberately doing this to you. The Reichenbach Fall took a similar idea in a different direction: how far can you trust what you think you know about people? And, from Sherlock’s point of view, how hard can you cling to what you know is true, to your sense of who you are, when everyone is saying you’re someone else? By the time the final face-off happens, with its superhero aesthetic of chins and lapels jutting upwards off tall buildings, the emotional ground has already been covered. Moriaty’s crime lies in what he had to do to get Sherlock alone with him against the skyline – this business with snipers and failsafe codes is a bit of a distraction.

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All tuckered out. Right as rain in less than a day.

Photo Credit: Carole Segal/AMC

Tonight’s episode of The Killing manages a decent blend of the investigative, the emotional, and, to a lesser extent, the political. It’s a feat the show has been trying to pull off since its first season, and one that it rarely manages to accomplish. I’m not saying that the series played every chord perfectly in Sayonara, Hiawatha, but it did it better than in most previous installments.

The Killing tries to be about three different angles of the same story- the Larsen dealing with the death of Rosie, the investigation into her murder, and the Richmond campaign. For this concept to work, the show needs to give equal, or at least comparable, weight to all three elements. (And I’m just mentioning those three since they are the ones that have lasted throughout the entire series. I still think the show made a mistake by dropping many of its other branches, such as the impact on the school/Rosie’s friends.) While the series spends time on the Larsens and Richmond, you usually get the sense that these storylines don’t carry the same importance as Linden and Holder. But tonight, all three elements felt as though they had value.

The increased presence of the other characters served the additional function of giving the detectives’ scenes more poignancy because they weren’t just an excuse for Linden and Holder to stand around brooding. Their moments regularly moved the story forward, and their rebel attitudes work better for them as rogue investigators than as actual cops. Even their return to the casino this week was a better sequence than their original investigation from two days ago. And this time I’m pretty sure Holder was pretending to be drunk, as opposed to me thinking he was presenting to be drunk when instead he was just Holdering.

How Not To Run A Campaign…

Photo Credit: Carole Segal/AMC

However, their attempt to involve Richmond in their investigation came across as kind of sloppy and even stupid. Tonight, they ask him to use his influence with Chief Jackson to get them back into the casino. Even if Richmond did have significant pull with her, which I doubt since she still hasn’t backed his campaign, her lackies beat up one of the two detectives on their property two days ago, which led to a massive manhunt on their closely guarded premises as well as significant fall-out that should be yet to come. Not to mention that one of them isn’t even a cop anymore.

Regardless, Richmond agrees to try to help them. During a meeting with Chief Jackson where he proposes the building of a Native American museum, Richmond asks her for permission, but Chief Jackson refuses. He stops the meeting and wheels out, thus (presumably) losing her support. I don’t know if the intent of the show is to show the collapse of a campaign following a tragedy, but the Richmond campaign has seemed incredibly poorly run throughout the season.

Richmond tries to maintain his integrity, but Jamie tells him he can’t run a clean campaign if he wants to win. I’m pretty sure the “clean campaign” argument was not just covered last season but blew up in Richmond’s face. Gwen continues to flounder in her position when she tries to blackmail Mayor Adams by telling him that she will tell her father that he had sex with her when she was 14. Believing that this will cost him her father’s support during his run for Congress during the next cycle, Adams lets Gwen know that her father knew and that this tactic was pathetic.

The uncharacteristically depressed and conflicted Mitch Larsen

Photo Credit: Carole Segal/AMC

On the emotional side, we don’t just get the sadness of the surviving members of the Larsen clan but acknowledgment that Rosie was a real person and not just a corpse we’re supposed to believe our characters care about. Stan continues to be overwhelmed as his eldest is suspended from school after killing baby birds. Although I understand the complaints about this show overdoing the mourning angle, Brent Sexton has done a good job over the past couple of episodes, and his anger, frustration, and desperation to be a good father despite being alone has made him a stand out among the cast. The scenes he had with his sons in this episode overpowered Linden’s tears as she cried into Jack’s coat realizing she no longer has him to haul around anymore. (Though, to be fair, Enos also played it well.)

Mitch Larsen returns to the series and meets with Rosie’s biological father, David Rainer, who surprisingly isn’t a character we’ve met before under a different name. He’s just an average guy who met with Rosie and was impressed with her zest for life. He is unaware that she died, and I’m left to wonder how big the Rosie Larsen scandal actually is. Even if “dead teenager found in the trunk of a campaign car” wouldn’t make national news, “assassination attempt on politician related to the murder of a teenage girl” almost certainly would. This is the age of the Internet and 24/7 fear mongering cable news, and the Rosie Larsen case has to do with the mysterious death of a young white girl.

Through various channels, we learn that Rosie was planning to leave Seattle the night she died but witnessed something involving Michael Ames that lead to her death. On the mysterious 10th floor of the casino, she went onto a balcony to look out at the city one last time. Following Rosie’s path, Linden notices a key card stuck between the floorboards in the still under-construction 10th floor. As she tries to grab it, she’s knocked unconscious. Based on Show Law, no one will care or do anything because the attack occurred on Native American soil.

Additional Thoughts:

• Carlson telling Holder that he’s risking his career by remaining as Linden’s partner seemed like a weird comment. Can he be the partner of someone who isn’t a cop (i.e. has turned in their badge)?

• Wouldn’t a better question from Carlson be, “when did you get out of the hospital?” or “shouldn’t you be on leave?” If he’s trying to prevent Holder from getting back on the case, which he transferred to “County” so you know it will never get solved, play up the “you were beaten and left for dead yesterday” angle.

• Does Carlson have any idea that practically everything he does makes him seem more suspicious? He is almost as bad at being a boss/evil figure as Linden and Holder are at being cops.

• Holder’s “Ain’t no party without no trim” actually made me laugh.

• I could be imagining things, but I thought I saw Gwen’s picture on the key card.

• At the end of the episode, we see Holder’s ground level perspective of the entire hotel from the outside, and the room where Linden is sneaking around lights up. Holder tells Linden to turn off her flashlight, but she lets him know it isn’t on. Could a flashlight produce that much light? And even if it could, why weren’t any lights on in the room when we cut back to it? Unless the two rooms (the one Holder was looking at and the one Linden was in) were two different ones.

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The Network Logos

Grid from TVLine.com

And that’s it. That’s our fall schedule. I’ve given my thoughts on NBC, CBS, ABC, FOX, and The CW. And my first thought is– what a disappointing season. Admittedly, I tend to be cynical/pessimistic/overly critical, but it’s hard to pick out a show that really stands out, whether for me personally or for television in general. Do any of the offerings have any buzz around them? Any excitement?

I have shows that I am willing to try, but none reach that “must see” level for me. Last Resort probably looks the best, but it still lacks that wow factor. And the fact that it’s going against two of CBS and FOX’s biggest hits makes one wonder its chances at survival. Revolution looks to have good production values, but we’ve been burned by that type of series before, a lot. 666 Park Avenue looks more like a lark than genuinely chilling. And I’d like a better first impression from Vegas than “this might work…if it were on cable…and Dennis Quaid wasn’t the lead.” Elementary tries to have its cake and eat it too by adopting the insane modern Sherlock while making him remorseful and palatable for a mass audience. And ABC’s midseason replacement Zero Hour looks like the most ridiculous show ever made. Is a CW show (Arrow) really one of the high points of the season?

In the comedy realm, nothing seems particularly amusing. NBC might have ordered a large amount of sitcoms, but do any of them look funny? From the first promos, Next Caller looked the best, and that stars Dane Cook if you want an idea about how dire the situation is. ABC has overly invested in the family sitcom (is it due to Disney ownership?), and The Neighbors made an impression simply because it looks so insanely terrible that it might actually exist in that weird realm between terrible and good. The more I think about it, the more annoyed I am by Partners, a show whose stale ethnic and sexual orientation jokes make you wonder if its creators’ sense of humor has evolved since the 1980s.

If I had to guess the first show to be cancelled, I’d pick Partners with The Mob Doctor close behind. If I had to guess the success, I’d say Nashville, with 666 Park Avenue in second place.

So do any of you readers have any thoughts? Anything that strikes your fancy on any network?

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Photo by: CW

And we end with CW, as we rightfully should. Though we’re probably not too far away from it beating NBC in at least one time slot. Let’s wrap it up.

MONDAY:

8-9 p.m- “90210”
9-10 p.m. “Gossip Girl”
Coming Mid-Season: THE CARRIE DIARIES

Young adult girls engaged in sex and seediness makes this a natural pairing, one that hasn’t been attempted until this season. Though, to be completely honest, my memory of the CW line-up is spotty at best. Additionally, Gossip Girl is celebrating its final truncated season this fall, wrapping up its six season run probably before the close of the 2012. With Gossip Girl definitely ending and 30 Rock presumably ending this year, I wonder if 2012-2013 will bring us the finales of numerous long running shows.

The Carrie Diaries

Photo by: CW

Gossip Girl will be replaced with the Sex and the City prequel series The Carrie Diaries. Starting in 1984, AnnaSophia Robb stars as a 16-year-old Carrie Bradshaw, the character Sarah Jessica Parker made famous in the HBO show. From the first released still (see above), Robb looks like a 14-year-old playing dress up. Nevertheless, it seems like a good paring with 90210.

TUESDAY:

8-9 p.m- “Hart of Dixie”
9-10 p.m. “EMILY OWENS, M.D.”

Lady doctors! What will they think of next? CW Tuesdays puts together two shows about female doctors trying to make it in a man’s world.

Emily Owens, M.D.

No relation to Children’s Hospital‘s Dr. Owen Maestro

A geeky girl turned doctor played by Meryl Streep’s daughter Mamie Gummer, who doesn’t appear to possess lead appeal, begins her clinical training in a hospital where her high school crush and high school nemesis/romantic rival are also working. That must have been one smart high school. Or this is some sort of finale-of-Lost-esque hospital. Nevertheless, Dr. Emily Owens has to deal with cliques while proving herself and learning confidence and love and all that other stuff that apparently young doctors need to contend with. I’m surprised Dr. Owens isn’t giving narration in the clip.

The love interest, Will Rider, is played by Justin Hartley who previously played Oliver Queen/Green Arrow in Smallville, which leads us to…

WEDNESDAY:

8-9 p.m- “ARROW”
9-10 p.m. “Supernatural”

Wednesdays marks a significant change for the CW, and one that actually gives it a relatively strong night. Friday night stalwart Supernatural moves to the 9 pm hour and new series Arrow, based on Green Arrow, comes to television screens.

Arrow

Make your Batman Begins parallels … now.

As mentioned above, this isn’t Green Arrow’s first appearance on the CW. Smallville featured him as a recurring/regular character for a significant portion of its way-too-long (and way-too-stupid) run.

This time, Stephen Amell plays Queen- a playboy by day who becomes a bow-and-arrow wielding vigilante to right society’s wrong at night. The plot description seems to get much about the character right, though the blonde goatee is missing, and the people behind it are not any of the Smallville showrunners (executive producers are Greg Berlanti, Andrew Kreisberg, David Nutter, and Marc Guggenheim). It’s been awhile since CW had a male-demo hit, or even a male-demo show, and Arrow might be worth a watch… as long as they avoid love triangles, melodrama, turning him into a Batman knock off, and magical Kryptonite.

Still, any new live action DC product only calls to bring attention to the failure of the DC film division. Yes, Nolan’s Batman series was an incredible success and I still maintain that Watchman is one of the best of the genre, but Watchmen doesn’t have franchise potential and Batman is ending this year. Superman Returns was an ambitious failure and Green Lantern was an unambitious catastrophe. Man of Steel is probably not enough to make ground in a territory that’s been Marvel’s purview for over a decade. DC, on the other hand, has attempted a Wonder Woman series and an Aquaman series (also starring Hartley), both of which never made it to air. This misplaced concentration seems bizarre because no matter how long a show may run, pretty big odds say that it will never have the impact of a solid movie franchise. Especially when it airs on the CW.

THURSDAY:

8-9 p.m- “The Vampire Diaries”
9-10 p.m. “BEAUTY AND THE BEAST”

Beauty and the Beast

Speaking of Smallville, that show’s Lana Lang (Kristen Kreuk) returns to the CW as Detective Catherine Chandler. While investigating a crime, she becomes hot on the trail of supposedly dead Army doctor Vincent Keller who “when he is enraged, he becomes a terrifying beast, unable to control his super-strength and heightened senses.” You wouldn’t like him when he’s angry, and he’s always angry. Moreover, Chandler has to deal with her mother’s mysterious murder from years ago that might be connected to Keller. So they have that to contend with.

Isn’t the entire point of the beauty and the beast story that the beast couldn’t go back to being normal?

FRIDAY:

Photo by: CW

8-9 p.m- “America’s Next Top Model”
9-10 p.m. “Nikita”

And CW closes with America’s Next Top Model, a former Wednesday night powerhouse, and Nikita, which is entering its third season.

Next…my look at the entire season.

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Rod Steiger as Al Capone (1959-NR)

Long before Don Corleone or Tony Soprano, the face of Italian organized crime in America was Al Capone.

The difference, of course, is that Corleone and Soprano are fictionalized characters based on a type. Capone was the real deal.

Rod Steiger offers one of the best portrayals of the legendary “Scarface” in this straightforward account of the life of perhaps the most fascinating underworld figure in American history. In many ways, Al Capone was larger than life. And he seemed to enjoy it.

Unlike the mob leaders who came before him, Capone did not believe in operating in the shadows. He spoke with reporters on a regular basis, rubbed elbows with politicians and union officials and was a patron of the arts with a real love for both opera and jazz.

While his devotion to opera is captured here, the jazz component is left out. But the clubs and bars he ran in Chicago often served as venues for some of the best jazz performers in the country.

“I’m a businessman, I serve the public,” Capone says early in the movie, as his rise from bodyguard for Johnny Torrio (Nehemiah Persoff) to kingpin of Chicago’s Southside is tracked.

Steiger captures the persona perfectly. His Capone is both cunning and volatile, not unlike the real-life character. He is the tentative but ambitious Capone, arriving in Chicago with (literally) hat-in-hand, finishing a beer that another patron has left on the bar in one of Torrio’s joints, grabbing some lunch meat with his hand and stuffing it in his mouth.

And he is the bold and audacious crime boss, with the fancy suits, big cigars and diamond stickpins who literally shoots his way to the top. He arranges for two hit men to take out Big Jim Colosimo (Joe DeSantis) as he and the mob leader listen to opera together. And when Torrio loses his nerve after nearly being killed by Dion O’Banion (Robert Gist) and the Irish gangsters from the Northside, Capone takes charge.

One of the best books—and there have been many—written about the man and the era is Get Capone by Jonathan Eig. Published in 2010, Eig’s book was written years after this movie came out. But both tell the same story, and tell it exceedingly well.

The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, the big mob confab in 1929 in Atlantic City and Capone’s retreat to Palm Island in Florida and his ultimate conviction on income tax evasion provide the outline for a story that in many ways defined an era in American history.

James Gregory, as the honest cop Schaefler, provides voice-over narration that offers commentary on both the underworld and the political corruption of the day. He succinctly describes the corrupt nexus of gangsters, elected officials and police that first came together during Prohibition and continued well after beer and liquor again flowed legally. “The underworld invaded the business world. The blackjack and the Tommy gun wore white collars and business suits.”

Steiger’s Capone never apologized for who he was or what he did. Some called him a Robin Hood. Others described him as the source of all evil in the underworld. In real life, Capone never shied from the publicity and often played off his tough-guy image, once telling a reporter, tongue perhaps in cheek, “You can get more with a kind word and a gun than you can with just a kind word.”

As for bootlegging, Capone never missed a chance to highlight the hypocrisy of Prohibition. When he sold liquor, he said, it was a crime. But when his wealthy customers served it in their homes, it was called “hospitality.”

Booze and broads and good times. Those were the 1920s in America. And Al Capone was in the middle of it all.

Dozens of actors have portrayed the Chicago gangster in movies based either directly or indirectly on his life and times. There was Paul Muni in Scarface and Robert De Niro in The Untouchables. Others include Neville Brand, Jason Robards, Ben Gazzara and, most recently, British actor Stephen Graham who plays the young Al Capone in HBO’s Boardwalk Empire.

But for our money, nobody captured Al Capone’s character better than Rod Steiger did.

HIT: Voice-over narration was used frequently in 1930s gangster films and too often came across as breathless hype. Here, Director Richard Wilson uses it with just the right touch and James Gregory is effectively matter-of-fact in narrating the story.

MISS: The gang warfare that rocked Chicago during Prohibition was fought partly along ethnic lines, with the Southside Italians battling the Northside Irish. But the movie tends to go over-the-top with the accents. All the Italians speak guttural English with lots of “deese” and “dems” and all the Irish have a lilting brogue.

WHAT THEY WROTE AT THE TIME: “A tough, ruthless and generally unsentimental account of the most notorious gangster of the Prohibition-repeal era, Al Capone is also a very well-made picture. There isn’t much ‘motivation’ given for Capone, at least not in the usual sense. But the screenplay does supply reasons and they are more logical than the usual once-over-lightly on the warped youth bit.”—Variety

REALITY CHECK: Sensitivity and censorship were in play when Schaefler ends his narration of the movie by noting that Capone was released from prison suffering from an “incurable disease.” Capone died of cardiac arrest, but it was brought on by advanced syphilis. The movie did not mention the disease, nor was there any depiction of the sexual carousing believed to be the source of Capone’s affliction. Several reports indicate that Capone conducted “personal interviews” with each prostitute hired to work in the brothels his organization ran in and around Chicago.

REPEATED WATCHING QUOTIENT: While this is one of the best of the movies about Capone, it is not the kind of film that offers the viewer much new in a second, third or fourth look. Once is probably enough unless you’re a real Rod Steiger fan.

BET YOU DIDN’T KNOW: The reporter Mac Keeley portrayed by Martin Balsam was based on Alfred “Jake” Lingle, who worked for the Chicago Tribune. Lingle was a “leg man,” a reporter who gathered information and phoned it in. He worked the crime beat in Chicago and had close ties to both Capone and the police. He was gunned down in 1930 in much the same way that Keeley is rubbed out in the movie. Like the Keeley character, Lingle had gotten entangled in mob business and had become less of a reporter and more of an expediter or go-between for various underworld factions and for the police. Several reports indicate that Capone had decided that Lingle’s “head had gotten too big for his hat.” But most sources indicated it was not Capone, but other gangsters who put the hit on the journalist.

CASTING CALL: Nehemiah Persoff, who plays Johnny Torrio here, had a recurring role as Capone’s bookkeeper Jake Guzik in the TV series The Untouchables.

BEST LINE: “Booze, gambling and broads—a guy could die happy in a place like this,” Capone tells Torrio shortly after arriving in Chicago while Torrio is showing him around the club that he owns.

VIOLENCE LEVEL: Lots of shooting, but none of the gory aftermath that dominates gangster movies of the current era.

BODY COUNT: Eighteen.

***

Join us as we count down the greatest gangster movies of all time — a new entry every Thursday! Click here to see what you’ve missed so far.

[Reprinted from The Ultimate Book of Gangster Movies by George Anastasia and Glen Macnow. Available from Running Press, a member of The Perseus Books Group. Copyright © 2011.]

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Photo by: CBS

Today we go through the ridiculously popular CBS, which is also the network I watch least. This year, the network canceled CSI: Miami, which is terrible news for that guy who is very late on Internet memes. Let’s see what we have.

MONDAY:

8-8:30 p.m- “How I Met Your Mother”
8:30-9 p.m- “PARTNERS”
9-9:30 p.m.- “2 Broke Girls”
9:30-10 p.m.- “Mike & Molly”
10-11 p.m.- “Hawaii Five-O”

CBS’ biggest comedy night says good-bye to what was once its most popular, and headline grabbing, show- Two and a Half Men (it moves to Thursday). That important slot is given to sophomore series 2 Broke Girls rather than to something more proven such as How I Met Your Mother. Though if they’re trying to re-engineer a line-up, it makes sense not to do it with an eight-year-old show, especially one that has enjoyed success in its current position for years.

Partners

The new show, Partners, is about what happens when two bros/business partners/best friends find their bromance challenged when one bro becomes engaged. Further adding to this premise is that one guy is straight (David Krumholtz of Numbers and the Harold and Kumar series) while the other is gay (Michael Urie). The straight one is super serious while the homosexual one is more of an emotional free spirit who is “prone to exaggeration.” I said “way to go against stereotypes” from the plot description alone, but the promo really shows how dependent the show is on that humor. And I have nothing against that type of comedy, but the jokes in the promo are pre-Archie Bunker stale. Their significant others are played by Sophia Bush and Ramona Flowers’ ex Brandon Routh, respectively.

CBS generally has a commercially successful track record with its comedies, and those that fail, fail quickly (How To Be a Gentleman). While the show doesn’t sound Read more…

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Photo by: ABC

Say what you will about ABC, but the network seems to give its shows a chance. Sure, maybe Pan Am didn’t fly (pun!) but a lot of the shows on the line-up this coming fall are newer series that, even without particularly strong ratings, warranted a second chance.

MONDAY:

8-10 p.m- “Dancing with the Stars”
10-11 p.m.- “Castle”

Midseason:

8-10 p.m.- “The Bachelor”
10-11 p.m.- “Castle”

The Cast of ABC’s Castle

Photo by: ABC

It’s a presumably successful line-up for the network and mixes a reality show I don’t care about with a procedural I don’t watch.

TUESDAY:

8-9 p.m.- “Dancing with the Stars the Results Show”
9-9:30 p.m.- “Happy Endings”
9:30-10 p.m.- “Don’t Trust the B—- in Apartment 23”
10-11 p.m.- “Private Practice”

Midseason:

8-8:30 p.m- “HOW TO LIVE WITH YOUR PARENTS (FOR THE REST OF YOUR LIFE)”
8:30-9 p.m.- “THE FAMILY TOOLS”

The Cast of ABC’s Happy Endings

Photo by: ABC

Tuesday nights seem to be shaping into one of two proven comedy nights for the Disney subsidiary. ABC apparently recognized the natural pairing of Happy Endings and Don’t Trust The B—- In Apartment 23- two shows about the lives of attractive, childless, late 20s/early 30s somethings- and put them together, even though they aired in the same time slot at different times of the year this season.

However, the mid-season replacements for the Dancing with the Stars Results Show do not follow this formula. They are family comedies, with which ABC is glutted. While I understand that these shows are playing off the success of Modern Family and that they are edgier than the network’s TGIF offerings, the weekly line-up is nevertheless saturated with Read more…

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House attempts to strangle a patient while Park
and the patient’s mother try to stop him.
©2012 Fox Broadcasting Co.

Sometimes the worst thing about being a pessimist is how often you’re right. I would have been much happier if the hopeful commenters on last week’s recap who said House’s reaction to Wilson’s scan could mean any number of things were right. But they’re not. Wilson is dying; without chemotherapy, he’s got about five months, and he’s refusing chemotherapy. Underlining the themes of loss, mourning, anger, and acceptance, the patient of the week is a nineteen year old who hears the voice of his little brother, who died ten years before. Tonight was mostly a sad, slow buildup to the series finale, and I’m left feeling a little like Erich Segal – What do you say about a beloved show and character who are dying?

Making my job harder is the fact that what seems like tonight’s comic subplot actually leads up to a final punch in the gut. For the sake of retrospective irony, I’ve marked the stages in this process with an asterisk.

We start with Wilson, turning off his alarm clock and looking shell shocked as, presumably, he remembers what’s going on. House shows up at his front door, and Wilson greets him by explaining he doesn’t want to do any more chemotherapy. House, understandably, doesn’t like this. It’s very painful, because I can see both sides – Wilson’s unwillingness to subject himself to even more pain, and House’s need to hold onto his best friend.

At the hospital, Foreman greets House with tickets for the upcoming hockey season,* which will start about a month after Wilson’s “expiration date,” as House puts it. He notes that Foreman is trying to be his new Wilson, and is not amused, though I think it’s sweet of Foreman.

The team is somberly watching videos of cheerleading routines – the new patient is a male cheerleader, like George W. Bush in his Yale days. But this cheerleader had a nosebleed bad enough to land him in the hospital. Still, House would rather talk about the 46-year-old male oncologist who’s refusing treatment, but the team wants to keep things normal. “Chase is gone, Wilson is dying, how normal can things be?” says House, and he’s got a point. Jesse Spencer’s departure leaves another hole. Chase knew how to be snarky at even the darkest moments, and I could have used that tonight.

Taub and Park figure out the patient is hearing something by the way his brain lights up on the MRI, which I think is pretty cool. When the team hits the patient’s smoke-filled dorm room, they find a picture of a prepubescent boy hidden in his sock drawer. “Creepy,” offers his stoner roommate. Not really – as anyone who saw the previews knows, it’s his dead brother. Whom no one in the family ever mentioned again.

Meanwhile, House drugs Wilson (again) and hooks him up to an IV. It’s not a secret dose of chemotherapy — he’s decided to give Wilson a foretaste of the oblivion of death, to convince him life is preferable. When that doesn’t work, he’s got Wilson’s first ever PPTH patient sitting at their lunch table – the boy is about to graduate, and go off to Princeton, and then to medical school, and here’s where I started flashing back to the episode where House hired a fake son for Wilson. It turns out the cafeteria is packed with alleged former patients of Wilson’s, who speak touchingly of the years they’ve lived since their diagnoses, before Wilson figures it out.

Taub, who regards House’s ultimate implosion from this blow as inevitable, drops by Foreman’s office to get his signature on a letter of recommendation he’s thoughtfully written himself, so Foreman won’t have to. It’s then that he notices the water flowing under the door of Foreman’s private bathroom. House has flushed the hockey tickets down the toilet;* he explains that he pranks Wilson all the time, so if Foreman really intends to replace Wilson…

Thirteen is back! Olivia Wilde has her hair in a bun, I assume to hide the fact it’s now blonde. Wilson wants to talk about what it’s like to live with a terminal diagnosis. She doesn’t see why he can’t give the chemotherapy a try. Wilson says he can’t envision spending the last months of his life in the chemo wards of PPTH; he just wants to spend his remaining time with family and friends – “friends or friend?” says Thirteen significantly.

House is leaving yet another message for Wilson’s parents and the team is arguing about the possible role of repressed grief in the patient’s case when they notice the sinks in one of the restrooms overflowing.* Park raises the issue of unresolved grief with surprising gentleness and tact while performing a spinal tap, but is distracted by the high pressure of the patient’s spinal fluid.

Thirteen talks to House while he sits watching chemo patients. House is understandably upset that Wilson is “angry because I want him to live longer,” but Thirteen urges him to accept Wilson’s decision. Wilson is sitting in his office when a white flag of truce – actually a handkerchief tied to House’s cane – comes fluttering in. It should be schmaltzy but I’m touched. House tells him he has dinner reservations – no parents, no nagging, just hanging out.

The patient’s mom shows up as the team is trying to figure out what’s up with the excess spinal fluid. The patient almost panics when she sees the photo of his dead brother on the bedside table, but then starts asking her about him. He tells her he can’t even be sure if it’s really his brother’s voice he hears, because he can’t remember it. Mom politely excuses herself to get a coffee; now that’s repression.

At dinner, House tells Wilson that’s he’s “ordered off the menu” for dessert: Oreos. Apparently this is an in-joke about a camping trip. House didn’t hang the bag with the rest of their food high enough to keep it safe from bears, and Oreos were all they were left with. It’s a sweet gesture, and they’re enjoying themselves, and Wilson starts to entertain the possibility of trying chemotherapy, when he catches himself. He says that House is trying to manipulate him, just as he always does. The horrible irony is that I don’t think House was really trying to manipulate him. At least, not entirely. House confesses that he does need Wilson around for as long as possible. Wilson says that their relationship has been all about House, but “my dying is about me.”

Wilson sits crying in his car, where he’s joined by House. House tells Wilson he clearly doesn’t want to die. Wilson says he needs his friend, that he needs to hear that his life was worthwhile and that House loves him. House says that Wilson won’t hear that unless he’s willing to fight. This was a very painful sequence to watch, and I have to say that Hugh Laurie and Robert Sean Leonard are really wonderful in it.

Maybe it’s a metaphor for all the pent-up emotions bursting out in this episode, but while the team is giving the patient an MRI, the ceiling bursts under the weight of flood water, destroying the MRI machine.* Taub is tending to Park and Adams in the ER when House finds them. Adams is disheveled and bleeding and mad, and for once I almost like her. House coldly informs them he’s “done with” Wilson, and then has his eureka moment when Park mentions that the patient mistook her for Adams (I didn’t quite get this). House hurries off to stick a needle in the patient’s ear – he should just get air, but he gets blood. The patient has a blood vessel which usually disappears in the embryonic stage pressing on his temporal lobe. He needs surgery, but he should be OK.

Taub confronts House about Wilson, accusing him of being “an ass” for expecting his friend to accept more pain. “Life is pain!” yells House. No one knows that better than he does. Do people think he hasn’t thought of ending it all? Everyone’s staring and Taub looks genuinely stricken. More good work in a painful scene from Hugh Laurie.

It’s not over yet. When Park tells him the patient is refusing surgery, because he doesn’t want to lose his brother’s voice, House tries to strangle him in order to prove his urge to live is even stronger. Park grabs his cane, and tells him “You’ve spent your whole life looking for truth, but sometimes the truth just sucks.” Meanwhile, Wilson tells Foreman he wants to leave his position immediately, because he’s not responsible for House’s happiness. Foreman gently suggests that Wilson has, in fact, made himself responsible by making his friendship with House the greatest constant in his life for twenty years.

As Hugh Laurie plays the piano, everyone finally makes up. Wilson shows up at House’s door, and the two settle their differences, possibly over Oreos. The patient has the surgery, and he and his mother look at old photos of his brother. The next day, House and Wilson are planning another hiking trip when Foreman comes in with the hospital lawyer. The hockey-tickets-in-the-toilet prank, which the firemen reported to the police, violated House’s parole. He has to report back to prison. For six months.

And the finale’s entitled “Everybody Dies.” Great.

So here we are, looking at the end. It’s all come down to House and Wilson. Thoughts?

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Photo by: FOX

The amount of new shows FOX has picked up (5) is remarkably small compared to the 12 discussed yesterday during my piece on NBC’s new schedule. I guess that’s the benefit of being a network with ratings. Not only that, but they tentatively know the days of their midseason replacements.

Let’s go through the week.

MONDAY:

8-9 p.m. – “Bones”
9-10 p.m.- “THE MOB DOCTOR” in the fall and “THE FOLLOWING” in midseason.

With House going off the air a week from today, FOX Mondays (and FOX itself) has lost one of its longest running and most popular shows. Additionally, neither of its high profile Monday shows from this year- Terra Nova and Alcatraz (both of which I recapped for this site)- earned a second season. Deservedly so.

To begin the week, FOX gives us Bones, which I presume now holds the title of the network’s flagship drama. That will be followed by both The Mob Doctor and The Following.

The Mob Doctor

The Cast of The Mob Doctor

Photo by: FOX

The uncreatively titled The Mob Doctor (somehow The Good Wife works while The Mob Doctor just sounds lazy) stars Jordana Spiro late of My Boys and Dexter Season 6, which was probably the worst thing on television in 2011.

As the title suggests, The Mob Doctor is about a mob doctor. By day, Dr. Grace Devlin (Spiro) is a resident at Chicago’s Roosevelt Medical Center, but at night she performs patch-up work for the local mob in order to pay off her brother’s gambling debts. Doing it to pay off her “brother’s gambling debts” is the type of bad excuse shows use when they are too scared to give the lead character the dysfunction necessary to make him or her stand out from other protagonists. See, it’s not her fault, it’s beyond her control and she loves her family, so you can’t fault her for doing illegal work. Even the plot description refers to her normal patients as “a toddler” and “an elderly man” just in case we couldn’t get that she is a saint caught up in a bad situation. It’s this type of dedication to “goodness” that causes me not to have faith in the series.

Also of concern? “Covertly helping an aging mobster with his erectile dysfunction” gives too good of a sense of the awkward, unfunny humor that this show will employ. Some of The Mob Doctor will also deal with the double life Dr. Devlin must lead as she hides her night time activities from her friends and co-workers. The double life concept has proven exceedingly difficult for most television series to pull off.

At least it has Zeljko Ivanek.

The Following

The Cast of The Following in Seven-Style Scratchy Serial Killer Still

Photo by: Fox Broadcasting Co.

As I talked about in my NBC article, serial killers are in this year, and The Following is FOX’s entry into the genre. The Following stars Kevin Bacon as Read more…

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Martin Freeman as Watson and Benedict Cumberbatch as Sherlock Holmes
Copyright: BBC Pictures

So, Sherlock takes on one of the classics. The Hound of the Baskervilles becomes The Hounds of Baskerville. Say what you like about Mark Gatiss and Stephen Moffatt (no, really, go ahead, everyone else on the internet does) but they know how to tweak the antennae of Holmes geeks. A plural has been transported from one end of a phrase to the other! A definite article has mysteriously vanished! It must mean something. And indeed it does. They may be dealing in images and pictures and visuals and pretty young men’s faces, but they understand the very intimate and meaningful relationship many of their target audience have with grammar.

Of course it was all sheer misdirection – Hounds turned out to consist of one hound and one H.O.U.N.D., but playing fair was never part of the deal. (Classic move – they baited the grammar, then switched the typography.) I suggested last episode that Sherlock doesn’t raise the usual issues about translating Victorian prose into modern TV, but they certainly had a little fun with the problems of saying out loud things which might make more sense written down. Though there was an insistence here as well that TV has its own integrity and can’t be beaten by the prior claims of literature: when a character called Stapleton appeared in the plot some people (mentioning no selves) though they’d spotted the murderer. Any such snobs received a sharp one over the knuckles by the plot’s subsequent unravelling and learnt not to assume that this version of Sherlock can be neatly decoded by using the Holmes stories. If you want to watch Sherlock, you play by TV’s rules.

Beginning with a client who is haunted by impossible memories of his father’s death at the paws of a “gigantic hound”, we quickly zoom down to Dartmoor to discover that the beast is a local legend. They boys blag their way into a Ministry of Defence base, borrowing Mycroft’s credentials, and think they’ve found themselves a whistleblower when an unknown scientist unexpectedly vouches for them. There are a couple of false leads, involving the landlord of a local pub who keeps a savage dog on the moor to improve the tourist trade, and a set of mysterious torch flashes which turn out to be the signal for a local dogging spot. (“Dogging”, get it? Oh, look it up, I’m not using that kind of language on this site.)

This may seem implausible, but I spent a few years down in the West Country near Exmoor, and I have it on pretty strong local authority that those folks over on Dartmoor get up to all sorts, I shouldn’t wonder and are frequently revealed as no better than they ought to be. Everyone gets feelings of massive canine-type terror when they visit the sight of the killing, Sherlock twigs that it’s a hallucinogenic gas created by a secret military project and conducts an experiment on John to test his thesis, because sometimes your best friend and source of emotional nourishment seems a better option than a lab rat and rats are so much less forthcoming when it comes to the debrief. It all climaxes in a showdown at a gothic hollow (fitted with pressure pads to release the gas), various people cop it (including, somewhat unfairly, a dog) and the original killer tries to escape across a minefield which he subsequently leaves on the vertical rather than horizontal axis.

Amidst all this plot, we saw a notable development in Sherlock’s character itself, as we watched him shaken by the possibility that he was wrong. I find the attempts to diagnose Sherlock rather tedious. Is he a sociopath? A potential psychopath? A pathological narcissist? You may as well ask “How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth?” One of the pleasures of this series is the enigma at its heart: Sherlock may be any of these hiding under a conscious disguise as one of the others. Or he may simply be a blank slate onto which the audience can project their speculations. (That would explain his face. Or is it an expression?) But when we discovered that the H.O.U.N.D. project had involved hallucinogenic gas, and thus it was reality at fault and not Sherlock’s calculations, I don’t think it was a cop-out. He doesn’t need to be wrong, we just need to watch his mind grappling with the fear that he might be. Though if we accept that, we might find it difficult to object to the ordeal he put John through in order to discover the effects of the gas. Both involve standing outside as we watch someone struggling with their own mind, so who’re we to criticise?

The whole episode seemed to revolve around questions of perception and memory, and the way recognising something as impossible can’t stop it hurting you. Could that be the real terror at the centre of this version of Gothic: knowing it’s all a nightmare without that knowledge giving you any power to stop it? It certainly didn’t revolve around that plot, which was risible. A trail of evidence which ends in a murderer offing someone whilst wearing a t-shirt plastered with the name of the top-secret military project which developed the weapon used in the said offing? It’s a study in perception and fear, that’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

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This week marks the return of Betty Francis, the wounded whale. Betty, struggling to lose weight, bookended last night’s episode with her strategic consumption. Weiner continued to poke at the plight of the Jews in 1966, and Don’s secret, shameful past is bubbling to the surface without any disturbing effects. There are only four episodes left to go in season five. Pete Campbell’s dissatisfaction is snowballing while Don burns Ginsberg with the flames of hell. Manipulation is the name of the game.

Bits of happiness, divvied at strict intervals. Photo credit Jordin Althaus

Pete Campbell boards the elevator with the partners and smugly claims to have been the subject of an hour-long interview with his “new best friend Victor, of the New York Times.” Oh, don’t bother calling, they only seem interested in me, he says, with smarminess radiating from his pores. In retaliation, Cooper, always playing the peacemaker, sends Roger on a discreet mission: pitch Manischewitz to “normal people,” as opposed to the Jews. Naturally, Roger turns to the only two Jews he knows to arrange such a thing: he bribes Ginsberg and Jane.

During a portfolio update, Don notes shrewdly to Joan that most of the good work at SCDP recently has been Ginsberg’s. When Don Draper identifies a threat, you’re gonna want to back out of his way. Peggy and Stan know this, but Ginsberg hasn’t a clue – yet. Don snoops through Ginsberg’s folder (amusingly labeled “Shit I Gotta Do”), chuckling at the work he’s done thus far for Snowball soda. Then Don gets to work; these scenes are brilliant – Hamm consistently makes it look like the ideas are just floating up from the abyss. He pitches his idea – the devil, forked tail and horns, backed by the very flames of hell, sips a Snowball soda – to Creative. But the company wants to appeal to children, so a snowball striking an authority figure in the face is going to get the laughs, says Ginsberg. Peggy and Stan like Ginsberg’s take and Don tells them to go ahead with it. Ginsberg makes a few cocky comments: “It’s impressive you could not write for so long and then come back with that!” he says. “I’m glad I could impress you,” Don says, unamused. Peggy and Stan monitor the proceedings warily, waiting for Don to lay the smackdown.

Showdown. Photo credit Jordin Althaus

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