E Y E W E A R, THE BLOG - FREEDOM MEANS BEING UNAFRAID TO WRITE WHAT YOU THINK

I will not go into the roll call of A-list names who wrote, directed, and acted in, True Detective Season 2, except to say that the 8-part film noir cop drama set in the 21st century recently aired to mainly hostile, at times hectoring reviews. These can be divided into two categories - those that pined for the brilliant Season 1, and those that found Season 2 poor in its own right.  We can dispense with the first easily - you cannot claim Lear is not Hamlet and act all sad.  This is a new work.  Move on. The second complaint was nuanced, but mainly revolved around the themes and structure of the new season - that it lacked drama, interesting character dynamics, that the dialogue was artificial, stilted and sometimes absurd, and that the finale lacked punch. The kindest words suggested it was High Camp - so bad it was good, a romping mess. I beg to disagree.  This season was a complete dramatic work of Intertextual accomplishment - a very mature Tradition ...

STEVEN TIMBERMAN ON TELEVISION IN 2014 How good was 2014 for TV? So good that there is no critical consensus. Years past saw a relatively small list of television shows dominate the critical conversation – The Sopranos, The Wire, Breaking Bad, Mad Men, Deadwood , maybe a sprinkling of Friday Night Lights or Lost if the critic wants to feel particularly transgressive. Shows written before 1999 are seen not as genuine predecessors but chicken scratch compared to the gorgeous calligraphy to come. It remains one of the things I love about American television – with ample time and a steady hand a relative newcomer can easily track down and absorb the medium’s accepted canon. A medium in relative infancy has no room for the gloriously messy and anarchic world of literary publishing. And then 2014 happened. With Walter White’s conclusion told with deadened clarity, critical consensus collapsed. Critics went from arbiters to advocates – for the single-minded True Detective , the of...

We live in the Renaissance of the Dramatic Television Series - everyone knows the list to trot out: The Sopranos, The West Wing, The Wire, Damages , even Game of Thrones, Homeland, House of Cards (American version), The Killing, The Bridge , and, of course, the badass Shakespeare of our time, Breaking Bad . This is not news. This is the given world of our time - television drama is as good or better than any novel or play a contemporary master can throw at us. There is no book by Philip Roth , or Martin Amis , or Atwood , or play by Stoppard , or Wilson , any better than The Wire or Breaking Bad .  Maybe as good.  Not better. I therefore did not expect the crowning achievement of this whole excess of excellence to be an 8-part series starring two actors who I rather disliked until a year ago - Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey . Then came True Detective . There will be no spoilers here.  I am not going to say much - it has all been said.  But let me say ...

STEVEN TIMBERMAN ON THE RETURN OF VERONICA MARS Veronica Mars should never have worked. A hard to describe show on a little known network, with a mishmash of tones and genres somehow expected to sing together. The recipe for the show reads like a parody of a parody – Buffy without the demons, Nancy Drew with an edge, X meets Y with a dash of Z. High school hijinks standing side-by-side sun-soaked noir with dames in short skirts. And yet, here we are – Veronica Mars endures. The Veronica Mars movie has been heralded as the newest wave of direct-to-audience content, and demonized as yet another way for movie studios to wring consumers dry. I don’t care about that. We’ve seen Arrested Development return, NBC announced plans to reboot their derivative Heroes , and Jack Bauer returns to kick unholy amounts of ass in a few scant weeks. But shows are more than buzzwords – the best products are able to capture lightning in a bottle at a specific time and place. 24 fed into our...

I always found Simon Schama vaguely annoying - but no more.  His Story of the Jews is a masterwork of TV history.  This is hardly new territory.  Few stories are more familiar than that of the exodus during biblical times; and the Holocaust is a known tragedy.  However, Schama finds a series of through lines - tropes, images, concepts - chief among them the book, language, itself - to trace the journey of the Jews.  Never boring, often exceptionally moving, and invigorating in its intellectual muscle, Schama trembles, berates, mourns, laughs, observes, and finger-wags - he lives - the processes he explores.  Indeed, last night's episode (Episode 3) became like a the best kind of moral thriller - a terrible historical tragedy - as we saw Moses Mendelsohn , that great mensch - build bridges with German culture and society - a bridge snapped in two by Wagner in 1850, with the repellent publication of Judaism In Music - and from there, anti-semitism re-emer...

I feel a little guilty.  I am coping with some rather personal stressful stuff at the moment, and to unwind, I have started to watch the Breaking Bad season as it starts up again, on Netflix.  I had thought to write another critical love poem to this greatest of TV shows, to compare it to Shakespeare , to speak of how Heisenberg - that co-opted alias - is now synonymous with complex evil, as Iago was.  But then I think of Egypt - and a far more complex evil swims into view - or rather, a more evil complexity - for politics and people seem to mix badly some times, and there seems no clear answer in that tragic moment for that great country - because of such confusing paradoxes - the legitimate government was overthrown for being a tyranny in utero, and the new saving revolution is seemingly more steeped in blood than the last guardians of so-called Democracy.  How to praise the depiction of one man's ruination, when in the history of today, unfolding, we see a whole...

The news that the 12th incarnation of Doctor Who - the BBC's flagship sci-fi series, and a sacred pop culture cow to some - has been announced, and it is Peter Capaldi , that sweary Scot from that poli-sci show - is a bit of a let down.  If one considers that Britain's leading TV/film icons of serial success - James Bond, the Doctor, Harry Potter, Sherlock Holmes, Poirot, Robin Hood - are white males - it might have been hoped that, this not being 1963, but rather fifty years later, the Beeb might have actually made the good Doctor a woman, or someone of Black, or Asian - or Other - descent.  It might have actually been thrilling to ask that chap from The Marigold Hotel , for instance - or Gillian Anderson .  Of course, Idris Elba would have been great - but he was likely busy, given he will win the Oscar this year for playing Mandela .  Capaldi is a brilliant comedic actor of extraordinary timing and energy.  His Doctor Who will be fun and thrilling.  Wha...

Sad news.  Larry Hagman has died, but for most of the world that has ever watched a TV set, he isn't the hapless husband dreaming of a genie (though he was that), or the troubled alcoholic who suffered various medical ailments (that too) but the ultimately iconic figure of J.R. Ewing - arguably the most popular anti-hero (okay, villain) of all time on American television, and by extension, globally.  It is hard now to comprehend, but once Dallas was an event of the first order, in terms of popular culture; and its recent enjoyable second coming is now in doubt.  Let's hope the show runners were as devious as their best character, and plotted a way to keep things going without their eminence gris.  Hagman, you'll be missed.  You put Texas on the map for a billion people.

Episode 11, Carrie is distraught Yes, that's right, the new telly sexy star of the moment in Blighty is Claire Danes , playing the bipolar CIA intelligence expert who loves Jazz, lives alone, and doesn't want there to be another terror attack on US soil on her watch.  She replaces Ms. Lund, the dour Scandinavian police detective of the infamous jumper.  Poor Carrie, in episode 11 of season 1 of Homeland , has gone all mental without her pills after a bomb-trauma.   This is good for mental health sympathy.  This is good TV.  But is it propaganda?  Who cares.  Bring it on.   Eyewear like Obama loves the show. Claire Danes in Homeland

The news that the 500th Simpsons episode is done and dusted should be a time of global lament, not joy.   The Simpsons was once one of the smartest, sassiest, and yes, most post-modern, TV shows of all time - indeed, it will always be noteworthy for its first few brilliant seasons.  However, it has long become a tedious rehash, cheapening its satire of media and society by becoming that worst sort of bore - the hanger-on at the party with the lampshade on, who doesn't know when to go home.  23 seasons is enough.  The thought of two more is just groan-inducing.  Someone should get a big yellow rubber (eraser) out, and start cutting back...

In my Canadian adolescence, 60 Minutes was a TV event.  These days very few things are much-watch, at the time, but this stopwatched event was such a thing, and the best of it was the lively and often pugnacious little segments that Andy Rooney ended each episode with.  It is a sad time when Rooney is no longer with us to cock a wry eye at the world and its foibles.

Sad news.   Peter Falk , the great American actor with the glass eye and the peculiar drawl, best known for playing Columbo , arguably the best-loved TV detective of popular culture, has died.  He was also a character actor known for taking challenging roles in art-house films, such as Wings of Desire , A Woman Under The Influence , and Husbands .  His first TV role was in 1957, and his last was in 2009.  In that 53 years, nothing he did equalled, in terms of sly charisma, the brilliance of Columbo , the highwater mark of intelligent adult entertainment drama on US television during the 1970s and 1980s; it was certainly always a special night when a Columbo show was on.  What I loved about the shows (as did my father) was how the unassuming, seemingly bumbling rumpled detective, who always smoked a cigar and referred to his wife, was actually a genius, more than a match for the psychopathic narcissistic killers he would eventually outwit - usually brain surgeon...

I pay for the BBC - everyone with a TV set in the UK does.  Last night's BBC 9 pm show, Episode 2 of Series 2 of Luther , was more than a waste of money.  It was a criminal waste.  The first series of Luther was shocking and thrilling.  Last night plumbed the depths of evil enacted for entertainment - what is sometimes called "torture porn" - a genre more or less invented by the makers of the films Hostel and Saw ; it is a cynical genre, that knew that eros and thanatos thicken and congeal in the human imagination, and that people will pay to see bad things happen to good-looking people.  Fine for cinema - but public TV need not follow such bottom-feeder trends. The Luther episode featured a bound police officer being branded; a man's hand crucified with hammer and nail; and fourteen children kidnapped on a schoolbus, gassed liked during Nazi Germany, and graphic discussion of how their bodies could be destroyed by acid.  Each of these acts is repeatab...

James Arness , who played Marshall Dillon for 20 years on one of American TV's greatest, longest-running and most-beloved shows, Gunsmoke, has died at the age of 88.  Arness, who was six-foot-six, had a tragic personal life in that his wife and daughter predeceased him due to drug overdoses.  He will be much missed but is a rock-solid part of the cultural landscape of American popular culture.

The Shadow Line is a travesty of epic, jump-the-shark proportions - mannered, shouty, preposterously OTT, and filled with every nasty cliche dialled to 11 of British grime and copper TV and film - gum chewing nasties, fey rent boys, sadistic thugs, and soft-spoken spies with trilbys and gloves.  Okay, so what?  Well this was a huge BBC investment, a flagship series.  And up next in the never-ending crime flow is Luther , a fun series, to be sure, but one filled with more ultra-violence, shouting, and cop cliches.  TV, it is fair to say, is now better in America (much like fiction and poetry is). There has been no ongoing British TV series of the last decade as brilliant as The Wire or The West Wing or Mad Men .  This is not about acting chops - The Wire was manned by Brits.  Style?  The British (and Irish) invented it.  So what is the problem?  Well, it is cultural, and the rot is spreading.  Simply put, British drama is inflected ...

Sad news.   Ken Taylor , the screenwriter who adapated The Jewel In The Crown into the second-best British TV series of the 1980s, after Brideshead Revisted , has died.

I have post- The Killing blues, after completing the Box Set marathon.  British viewers will know that, recently, a moody 20-hour Danish TV series from 2007 (now being aired in America as a remake with the same name) caught the imagination of the mystery-mad UK.  Combining aspects of The X-Files (the paranoia, the flashlights/torches, the man-woman detective team, the creepy ambiance and techno theme), The Wire (complex examination of politics, the media, and schools, as well as police procedure), and Prime Suspect (enigmatic determined female DCI up against a thick-skulled patriarchy), The Killing is one of the best TV shows Eyewear has ever seen.  Britain wanted the nerdy wool-knit sweaters Sarah Lund, detective, wore. This is not the place for a spoiler alert, but the only problem with the brilliantly twisty show (with its superb silent montage sequences at the end of every episode) is that its dramatic structure was so literate (combining Ibsen and Shakespear...

Sad news.  The laconic comic at the heart of US cop-shop top sitcom Barney Miller , Steve Landesberg , has died today.  One of my favourite shows growing up, along with Welcome Back, Kotter .

Last night BBC 2 aired a 50-minute dramatisation of Christopher Reid 's magnificent long poem, "The Song of Lunch", which I think takes its place now, beside "The Rape of the Lock" as vers de societe classic.  Reid is part of a generation of major English poets who have somehow been sidelined by the NextGen - so that James Fenton, Craig Raine, Charles Boyle  are, though of course widely-known, somehow not treated with the kid gloves afforded to Kid Armitage and Sundance Duffy.  Well, Reid is tops in my book.  The production was marvellous,sad and very funny, and superbly well-acted, though Rickman seemed perhaps overly-distracted, and Emma's neck was not as long as in the poem.  It made me think the whole thing was a reverie, whereas in the text, it seems more vividly nightmarish - the lunch is happening, the crisis is real.  I am not sure the fellow cast as the original owner of the bistro was funereal enough; and the Eliot-look-alike was too fat and sho...

ITV's new drama Downton Abbey is a perverse, facile and cheap remake of Brideshead Revisited-Middle March-Upstairs Downstairs , that relies on the evil of glamour to seduce the TV viewer into accepting aristo-porn for actual literary fictionality.  As a simulacrum of class, this works - but compared to the authentic engagement of works like The Wire and Mad Men , this is history as a catwalk, snobbery on tap.  I confess to enjoying this hollowed out work, to a degree, which plays like Dynasty in black tie, but also pulling back in repulsion.  What it says about Coalition-era Britain in 2010 is more than what it says about 1910 or so, when it is set, in an Edwardian world about to be "shattered" by WW1. The doomed estate of the title represents centuries of assumed status and privilege, thrown into chaos by a legal question which seems to be allowing a commoner, a middle class lawyer, to inherit the pile, if not the posh.  The man of the house, avuncular, wise, ...