Stranger Netflix Things

At some point, hearing “Netflix Original Series” began making me cringe, much the same way hearing “tour de force” in movie reviews caused me to tense up nearly 20 years ago. While Netflix has both revived and independently produced some amazing material, that label went from applying to 3 different series/movies to more than 120, all within a span of fewer than 5 years. Think about that number. And then think about how many failed shows appear on the classic networks every year. And now think to yourself, “So is it possible that Netflix doesn’t always make good shows?” The third season of Orange is the New Black, for instance, is a pretty mediocre half day of television, and while the fourth season did improve it, it was still remarkably little payoff for the time investment. Yet, because it’s a show lauded under the label of “Netflix Original,” it will receive greater acclaim than it is likely due. (None of this should underwhelm the fact that it does, indeed, happen to be a show with a mostly female cast, filled with diverse and interesting people and some truly amazing actors.)

Enter into the world I faced prior to watching Stranger Things. Okay, so the show is good. It is most decidedly NOT the epic level return, blissfully, to the 1980s that people claim. It is also short, which I don’t mind but do think helps to keep the “good” moniker going higher. It’s atmospheric and pretty but feels just like any number of other 1980s sci-fi/horror/fantasy stories in so many ways that I have a hard time calling it “original” and not a “throwback.” (Not to mention, I see modernism creeping in all the time, such as when Joyce references that she “worked on Thanksgiving.” It seems unlikely to me that this was true in 1983 but would believably be included to gain the sympathies of a modern audience where retail stores are lauded as heroes for closing at 10 PM the night before Thanksgiving and not opening again until 4 AM on Black Friday.)

I’m not intending to pick apart the show to the nth degree but I do think people have oversold it to me as being the “best.”

Meanwhile, I also have the urge to rename everybody in the show with character names from Freaks & Geeks. Has anybody mashed that up yet? (Though I suppose technically F&G takes place earlier than Stranger Things does.) EDIT: Apparently you just have to leave it to Reddit, because they have done exactly that.

Halt to Catch Fire

In an apparently futile attempt to fill the hole left in my life (and heart) by Mad Men, I’ve been show shopping recently. Maybe it’s just too soon but all of the good “replacements” have already gone.  I watched Breaking Bad years ago. I don’t actually like Boardwalk Empire, though for the life of me I can’t articulate why that is, since it would seem to be everything I love: period drama, character depth, Steve Buscemi. I really enjoy The Americans but I’ve watched it already.  Same with  Bomb Girls, Manhattan, Bletchley Circle and Hell on Wheels. What’s next?

Note: There are some very mild and minor spoilers for the first season of Halt & Catch Fire.

Following the AMC bandwagon, I decided to spend some time pouring through Halt and Catch Fire, especially since I had oral surgery recently and was laid up in bed.  I’m well aware that AMC has a penchant for damaged male leads (Don Draper, Walter White, Cullen Bohannon) and for creating drama in a foreign context (the 60s, a druglord’s inner circle, the 1870s, a zombie apocalypse) but they tried to create a reduction of those two things with H&CF that just didn’t quite work.

It’s not a bad show by any means. It’s interesting and I’m a technology geek (it’s my profession) so there’s a fair bit of good nerdiness going on to appease me. Nonetheless, what ends up happening is that there’s a little too much contrivance. I don’t understand Lee Pace’s Joe. He’s vying for success, he’s fighting, he’s fighting, he’s giving up and refusing to do anything beneficial. He’s blowing things up and making the world go; he’s blowing things up and making the world fall apart. I can’t say I get exactly what I’m supposed to feel when I watch him and that makes it hard for me to get behind his story.

But Artie! The World’s Strongest Man is his boss. That’s nice, at least.  John’s motivations are somewhat clearer by the end of the first season but they also start out slightly murky. The difference is that I know what John wants but I have no clue what it is Joe seeks. None. One of the hallmarks of enjoying Mad Men was the fact that Don Draper didn’t know what he wanted and we knew that. I don’t know if Joe knows what he wants or not. How do you carry a character drama with that lingering?

Enter Gordon. Gordon is a geek, through and through, and he’s largely sympathetic, which does set up a nice contrast to the Joe character, so their partnership makes sense.  I can enjoy watching Gordon but he, too, seems to go to extremes at points, ones that aren’t necessarily unfounded but ones which make the show harder to understand. His wife, Donna, e.g. the replacement narrator from the 9th season of Scrubs, is also a geek but has put aside a lot of her geekery for the ends of running a household, bringing money home, and keeping her husband sane. Her character has some of the typical repressed housewife elements (even though she is not a housewife) but her intelligence is constantly proven out rather than pointed out, and I appreciate that, too.

This brings me to Cameron Howe, played by Mackenzie Davis, who happens to remind me greatly of Cobie Smulders playing Robin Scherbatzky in How I Met Your Mother. My major defense to this is that they’re both pretty Canadian actresses but that isn’t it. It’s the voice, a very invulnerable and self-assured tone put over an independent but still frightened personality.  I appreciate what Cameron as a character brings to the story but I have a huge bone to pick with the tech aspect of this. I’m so tired of the “girl hacker” stereotype in media. She’s always skinny, with nontraditional hair (style or color or both), with nonconformist clothes, attitudes, and musical taste. She is also snarky, hyper-smart (smarter than the boys), unemotional, and a confirmed loner. In fact, I’d say that the best part about Cameron is when she undoes a lot of this to be someone more “real,” e.g. trying on mainstream clothes (but not wearing them), and when she goes rogue to form her own company, inviting Donna to join her.  Are you possibly understanding why Peggy is my Mad Men favorite?

It’s a little bit grating to my technological self to hear explanations of technology and programming, though I can forgive this on the basis that the vast majority of viewers probably aren’t familiar with the true inner workings of computers, much less the 1980s “IBM Compatible” phrase. (There was at least one scene in the pilot, though, where the hardware that was being disassembled was clearly more “modern” and I found myself wondering why nobody would have considered 3D printing some 30 year old components. Come on! That’s what modern tech is for!) The overwhelming, point, however, which is about creating the “future” is relatively enjoyable. I suppose what I seek from a second season is a bit more of the larger world. The COMDEX plot line and the introduction of the Mac128K brought some of that up but that took a long time to arrive.

Maybe what I really want is a show that just goes into the tech from a more sophisticated perspective but that’s not terribly realistic, either. Hollywood rarely ever gets tech right (and I STILL joke about Skyfall and its hideous representations. They plugged a known violent terrorist hacker’s computer directly into their production network! FFS!) and Halt and Catch Fire gets pretty much everything right so I really should not be complaining. I haven’t given up; I’m interested in seeing the second season, but I don’t know if I would have watched this show if Mad Men weren’t gone.

PS: The show’s reference to the famous Mac commercial amused me.

PPS: That commercial was parodied  on Futurama more than a decade ago, and since I draw my blog title from my all-time favorite show (Futurama) I have to make note.

Sad Fans: The End of the Mad Men Era (Yes, Spoilers)

Though Mad Men concluded beautifully it’s still hard to move on. Much like it’s always been hard for Don Draper to truly move on. Zing! Don, of course, has repeatedly shown great aptitude at appearing to move on but his frequent visitations into his past, to his old loves, and his old lives, pretty much suggest that he will never really be anything but someone trying to hide in an identity that’s just a little too big for him.

But Don is smiling! He made a Coke ad for McCann-Erickson! Okay, okay, yes, it does seem that perhaps Don has recognized at least part of who he is and has learned how to manipulate that aspect of himself to achieve a “modicum of control” over his own destiny. Good for him. But what am I supposed to do now that there’s no more of him to watch?

For eight years I watched Mad Men with near religious fervor. Other than Community, which has drastically changed, Mad Men was the only show in my queue that I began and ended in real time. In other words, I started watching it as it aired and kept up with it as it aired. There’s never been an occasion for a first-time Netflix-style binge. In many ways, that alone made the show special for me. I expect that a binge viewing of Mad Men would not create the same feelings of remembering and nostalgia that a prolonged better-part-of-a-decade climb did. After all, Anna Draper mentions that her husband (Lt. Donald Draper) wanted to marry her sister, who “looked just like [her] but with two good legs,” and many episodes go by, only for us to see oh hey, Anna Draper’s sister, who does indeed look just like her with two good legs. Freddy Rumsen disappeared at the beginning of season two only to return several more times. As I have always put it, Mad Men always tricks you into thinking that its forgotten something when, in fact, it’s just waiting for the right time to punch you in the soul. (A moment for Sal, please.)

I’ve always expected that this was how Don himself lived life. Every time he thought something was put away, it came roaring back. Usually his feelings. But possibly also his concern that he might be found out for being the deserting traitor he could rightly be called. (This element generally being used to trace the emotions more than the plot.) The visual and skillful, colorful, vintage-period shots were perfect for the messages being traced but the true artistry of Mad Men has always been in the idea that it reflects a life. Characters don’t “do” much but a lot happens.

As I sat to finish watching the finale via Amazon Instant Video on my Roku player, I realized that when I started watching Mad Men in 2007, Netflix Instant was mostly a fever dream of a couple dozen bad made-for-tv movies and television episodes and my original means to obtaining MM episodes was through a $60/month cable subscription that I kept for Comedy Central, FX, & AMC. There were no Roku players. There was no AIV. I couldn’t use my Prime subscription to catch up on back episodes. Any missed episodes had to be retrieved from OnDemand services. In many ways, that recognition journeyed on with me as I thought about the show itself. I sat with it for nearly a decade, a time during which Android and iPhones came to power, a time during which Breaking Bad came and went (2008-2013), and a time during which the United States saw ever more economic despair and divisiveness in politics. Maybe it’s a form of escapism to sink into the perils of someone else’s life, to try to work out fictional problems with hope and finger crossing, but I’m still going to miss it.