This is the first of 12 or 13 blog posts that will be posted on a monthly basis from now until this blog's final post in December 2017.
I was skeptical about Donald Glover's Atlanta when FX first announced in 2014 that it picked up Glover's creation, his first TV series since his departure from Community, the offbeat cult favorite where he continually killed it each week as Troy Barnes, a high-school football star trying (and failing) to suppress his nerdy side (like that time when Troy, in what has to be my favorite acting moment from Glover on Community, was so excited to be in the presence of his childhood hero LeVar Burton that he turned catatonic). A half-hour comedy about a trap rapper and his manager cousin trying to get by in the rap game? Disquieting visions of "Entourage for the Atlanta trap scene" danced in my head when FX first hyped Atlanta. The world doesn't need another half-hour piece of boring lifestyle porn where the lead characters constantly bang anything that breathes in the most opulent of settings and the storyline with the biggest stakes would be "Is Vince Paper Boi doing or not doing the movieA3C?"
Another disquieting vision I had was that Atlanta was going to be a weekly half-hour ad for Glover's musical career as Childish Gambino. Glover is a good example of an actor/rapper whose beats, frequently provided by Community and Creed score composer Ludwig Göransson, are solid, but his bars leave a lot to be desired. I was never a fan of Gambino's corny verses about his Asian fetish.
Gotta have fetishized at least 3 asian chicks before u can really appreciate Childish Gambino's music
I caught up on Atlanta season 1 on FX on demand, about a few weeks after the season concluded, during a couple of breaks between chapters for a manuscript I've been working on since August (chapters that I, by the way, ended up having to delete from the manuscript because I found myself thinking, "This material isn't gonna work as a YA novel anymore. A Jim Rockford-type Pinoy should be the audience surrogate, not a precocious Richie Brockelman-type Pinoy," so I got rid of all the teenage characters). Atlanta, which took home the Best Comedy Series and Best Actor in a Comedy trophies at the Golden Globes earlier this month, exceeded my expectations. As a half-hour single-camera comedy about the rap game, thankfully, it's more Taxi than Entourage.
Sure, Atlanta is frequently funny (three words: secret revolving wall), but Glover and his writing staff's brand of humor is tinged with Taxi-style melancholy, particularly about how working-class adult life often feels like you're running in circles. That melancholy reflects Glover's belief, as he once said during a 2016 Television Critics Association press tour panel, that "you watch Master of None and it's a very optimistic look at millennialism, [but] I'm pessimistic about it. I feel like we kind of fucked up."
There's nothing lifestyle-porny about Atlanta. Neither are there any moments of blatant product placement for Awaken, My Love!, the surprise Gambino album Glover dropped one month after the Atlanta season finale, save for a cameo by the Awaken, My Love! cover artwork on a bookshelf in the "Juneteenth" episode. The non-rap Awaken, My Love! is also the first-ever Gambino release I've genuinely liked from start to finish, aside from whatever the fuck Bino was doing with his voice during "California."
The show is an exploration of, as Joshua Rivera put it in GQ, "the stress and pain of being broke," particularly when that broke-ass person is both a creative and a POC, like Earn Marks, Glover's Ivy League dropout character, and, to a lesser extent, his cousin Alfred (Brian Tyree Henry), a.k.a. the trap rapper known as Paper Boi (not to be confused with Paperboy, who recorded the 1992 one-hit wonder "Ditty"), who's more economically stable than Earn, thanks to income from drug dealing, but he's not exactly on the level of Future/Gucci Mane-type wealth yet. "Ballin," singer/songwriter Bibi Bourelly's current ode to finding ways to "treat yo'self" when your savings account is empty, could be an unofficial theme song for the daily hustle of either Earn, who becomes Alfred's manager, or teaching assistant Van (Zazie Beetz), Earn's ex and the mother of his baby daughter (I wouldn't be surprised if Bourelly's extremely relatable song surfaces on Atlanta during its second season, which is currently scheduled to air in 2018, partly due to Glover's upcoming gig as young Lando Calrissian).
I think beaches are overrated, and so are swimming pools and waterslide parks. Look, I'm no neckbeard who hates to go outside, but at around college, I outgrew the beaches, pools and waterslide parks I used to spend time in as a kid during some summers and just completely lost interest in the concept of them as enjoyable places to be.
That South Parkepisode where Cartman gets frustrated about first-graders continually pissing in the pool triggered my latent germophobia about pool water, and then decades later, an episode of Ben Schwartz's Disney/Titmouse cartoon Randy Cunningham: 9th Grade Ninja that used kids' leftover snot from waterslide parks as a plot device (don't ask) confirmed my growing suspicions about the grubbiness of waterslide parks. When you're a kid, you're unconcerned about such things. When you're an adult, splashing around in water for hours to keep the heat from killing you loses all its appeal after you discover better and cleanlier ways to keep the heat from murdering you, like a cold beer or an iced tea. Even California-loving Best Coast frontwoman Bethany Cosentino has said she gets creeped out by the idea of swimming in the ocean. I believe I have a clip of her thinking about having to do that.
Hello there, Dubsmash. And so long, Dubsmash. Whenever The Today Show starts acknowledging the existence of an app or meme, its 15 minutes of coolness are immediately over.
So I may not care anymore for beaches and pools, but I'm always running into escapist literature that's ideal for beachside or poolside reading. One of my favorite recent trade paperback collections of a comic book storyline is especially ideal for beachside or poolside reading--or summertime reading anywhere--because of its summertime setting. I highly recommend it also because it's simply an entertaining arc from a superhero comic that's special for not being a typical superhero comic and for being tailor-made for comics readers like myself who find most superhero comics to be either puerile or unreadable due to overly complicated backstories or convoluted and clumsily written tie-ins to unwieldy crossover events.
(Photo source: Errant Critic)
You don't need to have read prior TPB collections of issues of writer Matt Fraction's excellent (and recently concluded) Marvel Now! title Hawkeye to get into Hawkeye: L.A. Woman, although the prior issues are all worth reading, especially Hawkeye #11, an inventively told detective story written from the point of view of a dog and cleverly illustrated by David Aja (with minimal and mostly garbled dialogue by Fraction). The 2014 TPB, the third collection of Fraction's Hawkeye comics, collects Hawkeye Annual #1 (the only issue in the collection illustrated by Javier Pulido, whose minimalist artwork I enjoyed during the Vertigo title Human Target) and issues 14, 16, 18 and 20. All you need to know about Fraction's incarnation of Hawkeye prior to L.A. Woman is that there are two non-superpowered archers who share the mantle of Hawkeye: one of them is recently divorced Avengers member Clint Barton (who, in the Avengers movies, is happily married to a civilian played by Linda Cardellini and raising kids with her out in the Midwest), and the other is the much younger Kate Bishop, a Young Avengers member who may be much better at this hero thing than her mentor Clint. The series alternates between Clint and Kate as the protagonist and follows what both of them are up to when they're not Avengers, and those adventures range from espionage-related peril to slightly more mundane matters like Clint trying to get his apartment building's broken satellite dish to work during a holiday season that's disrupted by tracksuited Russian thugs whose every other word is "bro."
The Russians' addiction to "bro" and the reduction of dialogue in issue 11 so that it's down to only a few words the one-eyed, pizza-loving dog known as Pizza Dog understands (like "collar" and "ex-wife") are hallmarks of the offbeat sense of humor of Fraction, who envisioned Clint as "the Marvel Universe's Jim Rockford" in his update of Hawkeye (the decision to alternate Clint's stories with Kate's is reminiscent of the two-or-more-stars-sharing-the-same-title-role format of another James Garner show, Maverick). Like The Rockford Files, Hawkeye is distinguished by both tongue-in-cheek humor and a bemused hero who'd rather be enjoying a rooftop barbecue with his neighbors (or a show on his DVR he's been itching to catch up on) than stopping trouble, but he always winds up helping out the downtrodden anyway. The Fraction series' parallels to The Rockford Files are particularly visible during the L.A. arc, in which Kate tires of Clint's uncaring attitude and self-destructive streak, packs up everything that belongs to her, like that purple Emma Peeler catsuit made famous by the non-Marvel Avengers (as well as one thing that doesn't belong to her, Pizza Dog), and escapes from New York to L.A., where she starts a private investigation business from her laptop and housesits for the summer a beachside trailer that looks exactly like the Malibu trailer Rockford called home on the show.
That's not all that's borrowed from The Rockford Files. Fraction takes two of Rockfish's occasional sidekicks--Gandolph "Gandy" Fitch, an ex-con who was played on the show by Isaac Hayes, and Marcus "Gabby" Hayes, a private eye who was played by a toupeed Louis Gossett Jr. (and was also a precursor to Tom Selleck's Lance White, a sharp-dressed rival of Rockford's)--and turns them into a newly married gay couple who lives near Kate and tags along with her on her cases. Gandy is renamed Finch, while Marcus gets to keep his name but loses the rug. Finch and Marcus help out Kate as she makes mistakes as a detective along the way but eventually blossoms into both this weird cross between Katniss and Rockfish and a self-sufficient person with a life away from the two father figures who have alienated her (Clint and her actual father, an oily businessman named Derek). Kate's youth and inexperience as a gumshoe might remind Rockford Files fans of another occasional sidekick of Jim's: Richie Brockelman, played by Dennis Dugan, who went on to direct all those terrible Adam Sandler movies that sound like fake Hollywood turkeys David Chase would have made up in one of his Rockford Files scripts that poked fun at SoCal living or how much SoCal pizza sucks ("This ain't a pizza. It's a grilled cheese sandwich").
L.A. Woman also reminds me of the high-quality writing of both Veronica Mars and Terriers, two SoCal P.I. shows that are worthier successors to The Rockford Files than any past or even future attempts to revive Rockford without Garner, whether it's David Shore's unseen and rumored-to-have-been-terrible Rockford reboot pilot with Dermot Mulroney, which failed to get picked up by NBC a few years ago, or the Rockford movie project Vince Vaughn wants to star in and produce. The late Garner's classic show was a once-in-a-lifetime, lightning-in-a-bottle thing that was so infused with Garner's distinctive personality and the late Stephen J. Cannell's equally distinctive creative voice, which is why I'm always skeptical of Universal's attempts to recapture that lightning. When not even the creator of House can get it to work, that's how difficult it is to revive Rockford.
Initially, I was mildly skeptical of the idea of Vaughn playing one of my favorite TV characters. But now I'm way more skeptical. I just can't buy Vaughn anymore as the everyman that Garner was (it would be like getting The Hard Way/The Specialist-era James Woods to play Rockford). Also, ever since Vaughn has become more upfront about his political views, I've been concerned about a Republican who worships guns and has equally strange and bothersome views about race playing a far-from-conservative hero who didn't care for guns (but wasn't afraid to use one) and whose attitudes towards race mirrored those of Garner's in real life, because he's likely going to alter the reluctant-about-guns aspect of the character so that it would be more aligned with his politics. If he does that, then the character's not Rockford anymore. He might as well be Mike Hammer. Now if Vaughn were playing Mike Hammer, that would be a more interesting and perhaps more worthwhile movie.
So now that True Detective's second season has emerged as an unwatchable disaster and is far from the career boost Vaughn must have expected, this Rockford movie project--which, when we last heard about it, was being given a rewrite by 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi screenwriter Chuck Hogan--is threatening to become more of a reality. If this fucking reboot ever gets made, I wouldn't be surprised if L.A. Woman turns out to be--just like Veronica Mars and Terriers before it--the better Rockford update. Kate may be female and extraordinary with a bow and arrow, but she's already more convincing in the role of an everyman detective than Vaughn will ever be, due to the relatability and humanity both Fraction and a terrific guest artist, Annie Wu, a Venture Bros. storyboarder and the current artist on DC's reimagining of Black Canary as a goth-y rock musician, bring to the character of Kate.
L.A. Woman is such a loving ode to the '70s SoCal P.I. genre that even Elliott Gould's Philip Marlowe from another great '70s SoCal P.I. genre piece, the Robert Altman version of The Long Goodbye, shows up in the form of a new mentor for Kate, an obscure '70s Marvel reporter character named Harold H. Harold. Like Gould in that classic movie, Harold, reimagined by Fraction and Wu as a rumpled P.I. who resembles Gould, is seen shopping for cat food in the supermarket. L.A. Woman is essentially a regular P.I. story about both the alluring and corrupt sides of L.A. that happens to have a masked supervillain as one of the bad guys: Kate's nemesis Whitney Frost, a criminal mastermind who goes by the name of Madame Masque.
Frost's recently announced first appearance in the Marvel Cinematic Universe as an adversary in the upcoming second season of Agent Carter makes L.A. Woman worth picking up for Agent Carter fans who have never read Fraction's Hawkeye and may want to familiarize themselves with Madame Masque, who will be reimagined as a '40s Hollywood actress on the Marvel Studios show. Just like how Agent Carter is a spy show that pits its non-superpowered protagonists against larger-than-life villains straight out of a superhero show and is extremely accessible for people who don't like the superhero genre, Hawkeye, especially during Kate's L.A. arc, is a crime comic where the only superhero comic-ish things about it are the presence of Madame Masque (at one point in the arc, Kate wonders, "What if Madame Masque is the reason why everything in L.A. sucks?") and the occasional cameos by Spider-Man and Wolverine.
With Hawkeye, Fraction wanted to reinvent the superhero comic--and largely succeeded by not approaching it as one. Hawkeye arose from Fraction's frustrations with the inaccessible storylines of most present-day superhero comics. "I think we as an industry fell into this pattern of not caring about new readers anymore," said the Casanova and Sex Criminals creator to the L.A. Times in 2013. "There's a way that you can do it that isn't the clumsy, awkward way that it used to be done where characters refer to themselves in the third person, thinking back on who they are and how they came to be. You don't have to write every comic as if it's the first comic someone's ever read, but you do have to write as though you would like new people to read your comic--which is kind of what Hawkeye is all about."
Artwork by Annie Wu (Photo source: Wu)
The series also arose from Fraction's changing views on heroism and his boredom with dourness in superhero comics, which made him long for what he's described as "the Stephen J. Cannell-ness of it all." Fraction was interested in presenting a counterpoint to Batman. "The older you get, the more you live in the world, it's impossible not to look at Batman through class and race," said Fraction to Paste last year. "Batman is a rich white billionaire who beats up poor brown people and the mentally ill. That's weird, right? Kinda weird. A billionaire, punching poor people. But the idea of a guy who came from nothing and stayed just a couple steps away from it, but can't not help you move a couch, that's interesting."
L.A. Woman is a great example of the down-to-earth hero who "can't not help you move a couch," embodied by Kate in this particular arc. She's also a hero whose adventures benefit from a killer soundtrack that's not of the typical John Williams kind. In the letters section of Hawkeye, series artist David Aja would provide a soundtrack for readers to listen to while reading Hawkeye. For example, two of the musical selections Aja listed for Hawkeye's Christmas issue were cues from Sergei Prokofiev's rousing score to the 1938 Sergei Eisenstein epic Alexander Nevsky. For the arc where Clint's ex-wife Mockingbird, Spider-Woman, Black Widow and Kate have to pull Clint out of trouble when he gets himself entangled in the latest predicament of his current girlfriend, a hot, Bridget Regan-ish thief named Cherry, Aja curated a mix of Frank Zappa, surf-rock and fusion tunes like Lalo Schifrin's 1976 disco instrumental "Black Widow" (intended to accompany Black Widow's Grand Central Terminal pursuit of Cherry), Schifrin and Dizzy Gillespie's 1977 collabo "Unicorn" (intended for Kate's badass fight with a pair of Russian thugs) and Herbie Hancock's 1976 jam "Spider" (chosen for the pages where Clint gets slapped around by a plainclothes Jessica Drew, a.k.a. Spider-Woman). As for the classic Pizza Dog issue, Aja's soundtrack consists mainly of jazz to enhance the detective story vibe for Pizza Dog's hunt for a murderer.
Disappointingly, the TPB editions of Hawkeye omit the playlist info. I have no idea what sort of tunes were intended as the soundtrack for the L.A. arc, but I discovered that re-reading the L.A. Woman TPB with tons of La Luz tracks in my headphones works like gangbusters. Or maybe it should be La Luz tracks together with one of Best Coast's love letters to California needle-dropped for the moment when Kate adjusts to SoCal life. There's a propulsiveness to the all-female Seattle band's surf-rock sound that makes their tunes the perfect soundtrack for Kate's arrow-slinging adventures in L.A. and the vibrant visuals of both Wu, who cites Edgar Wright and Nicolas Winding Refn as among her storytelling influences, and colorist Matt Hollingsworth, who brings a consistency to the palette of the arc, despite the many differences in penciling styles between Wu and the more minimalist Javier Pulido.
One of the few complaints from readers about Fraction's Hawkeye was that the wait between issues would frequently take too long for them. The advantage of reading comics in TPB form, which is how I mainly read comics these days, is that TPB readers like myself don't have to worry about waiting. I don't know what it was like for Hawkeye readers to sit and wait for months for the L.A. Woman issues to come out when they were first released. But that would have definitely messed around with the momentum of the arc and prevented me from enjoying the arc in the manner I got to first enjoy it and the manner I recommend to anyone: as light summertime reading, like so many other well-crafted crime novels I've read in the past, whether they're graphic novels or prose novels. The craftiness of L.A. Woman and other equally satisfying crime novels just like it outdoes wading in snot and chlorine any day of the week.
Jack Sheldon's rendition of "The Long Goodbye" from the Altman film of the same name, a film L.A. Woman pays tribute to, is in rotation during "AFOS Prime" on AFOS.
My favorite monthly section in old Source magazine issues was "Hip-Hop Quotables," in which the Source editors printed out their favorite new rap verse of the month, from the first bar to the last. "Tip-Top Quotables," which I've named after that Source section, is a collection of my favorite quotes of the week from anywhere, whether it's a recent TV show or a new rap verse. "TTQ" won't appear on this blog every week. It'll appear whenever the fuck I feel like it.
* "Tell him that snoring is usually a sign of a condition called sleep apnea, which causes a lot of people to die in their sleep. Be like, 'Here, Google it.' And then he'll be so scared he'll never be able to sleep again."--Kumail Nanjiani, giving advice to an Esquire reader about how to deal with a roommate's boyfriend who snores too loud
* "We've got some very attractive rewards at every level. For instance, $10,000 lands you in a signature CNN mass-shooting coverage six-box. For $25,000, you get to take molly with Fareed Zakaria. What what! For $5 million, CNN will air a 24-hour, two-week hunt for your lost car keys."--Jon Stewart, announcing his Kickstarter to buy CNN
* "Tony played it like a failed Scientologist."--Sam Rockwell, recalling to MTV News his Galaxy Quest co-star Tony Shalhoub's hilarious performance as a constantly stoned, non-Asian TV actor playing an Asian character, which Shalhoub based on constantly stoned Kung Fu star David Carradine, '70s TV's most infamous example of a non-Asian playing an Asian
(Photo source: Pia Glenn, the writer behind the #TimeTitles hashtag, which is a mockery of this)
* "That is not good. The only time when you are happy to hear the words 'Maggots were found' is when you are a maggot whose family was lost at sea."--Last Week Tonight's John Oliver, joking about a news report of maggots being found in prison food supplied by a shady subcontractor
* "Garner was an expert at pulling the viewer into the action and acknowledging the ridiculousness of most television storytelling without quite breaking the fourth wall. He was the guy who crawled out of the screen and sat beside you munching popcorn on the couch."--Todd VanDerWerff, Vox, "James Garner has died; these five roles will remind you of his greatness"
* "If Netanyahu is so bothered by how dead Palestinians look on television then he should stop killing so many of them."--Benjamin Wallace-Wells, New York, "'Telegenically Dead Palestinians': Why Israel Is Losing the American Media War"
The legendary James Garner died yesterday at the age of 86. The following is a repost of "Watch The Rockford Files and call to see if Paul can score some weed," from January 16, 2009. In the '09 piece, I mentioned my goal to watch every episode of Garner's classic show, which I became a fan of several decades after it was cancelled.
I still haven't completed that goal, and I should really get my ass to Netflix Instant and marathon the hell out of Rockford again because Netflix has every single episode of Rockford (including the ones where Garner's knees were clearly wrecked, yet he didn't lose a beat and remained a trooper through it all). And also because Garner was truly one of the greatest.
(Photo source: Soref.TV)
Your friends do it and you've probably done it too: catch up on a show your lazy ass has put off watching by setting aside an entire weekend to view the DVD box set in one marathon sitting. Back when 24 first hit the DVD market, various writers who missed the first season chose to catch up with the show on DVD and recapped in real time what it was like to watch the first-season discs in one sitting, while a writer I used to work with picked the '80s version of The Twilight Zone for his weekend DVD marathon. A couple of years ago, those writers inspired me to do a similar marathon thing with the box sets of another cult show: The Rockford Files, Stephen J. Cannell's clever reinvention of the private eye genre, which starred James Garner in his signature role as rugged everyman gumshoe Jim Rockford.
Alright, so it's not quite a marathon. I haven't even viewed all 123 episodes yet, but my goal is to eventually see them all on DVD or via Netflix's media player for PC users. As of this writing, I haven't reached season five yet.
I picked Rockford because I was a fan of Veronica Mars (which starred Forgetting Sarah Marshall's Kristen Bell, a Star Wars geek who should have Jedi mind-tricked the CW assclowns into bringing back her show). Before I started renting the Rockford DVDs from Netflix, I had only caught Veronica's spiritual granddaddy once or twice on cable, so I wanted to better acquaint myself with Rockford on DVD, where it's uncut and commercial-free (on Hulu, it's not commercial-free). The older the series, the more it gets chopped up by syndicators to accommodate commercial breaks, which grow annoyingly longer with each passing year. So that must mean Adventures of Superman reruns will eventually be edited down to 10 minutes, and George Reeves' flying sequences will be sped up so badly it'll look like the Metropolis underworld slipped some crank into the Daily Planet watercooler.
Rockford still draws a cult that's pretty rabid, though not quite as huge as Veronica's online fanbase. Slackers like the main character's pal in Ben Folds Five's "Battle of Who Could Care Less" dig Rockford reruns because Jim is one of them. They identify with a hero who'd rather go fishing with his father Rocky (Noah Beery) than do his job. The fans who still visit the alt.tv.rockford-files newsgroup continue to exchange favorite Garner wisecracks, and a couple of fan sites list every wacky message Jim received on his answering machine during the opening credits.
On disc, Rockford has aged better than most '70s shows, thanks to quirky, sharp and timeless scripts penned by staff writers like Cannell, future Sopranos creator David Chase and Juanita Bartlett. Seventies TV comes in three modes: schlocky (the Krofft variety shows, anything with Glen A. Larson's name on it), sanctimonious (M*A*S*H, Norman Lear's shrill shoutcoms) or a hideous mash-up of both (Hawaii Five-0, the "Fonzie gets a library card" era of Happy Days). Rockford is one of the few '70s shows I've seen that's neither of the above, and whenever the series did address a serious issue--like the flaws of the grand jury system in its most celebrated ep, the Bartlett-scripted "So Help Me God"--it did it with class and zero preachiness.
This is an illustration of The Rockford Files that I did for a compilation of my blog posts that I was planning on self-publishing last year, but I decided to pull the plug on the book. I didn't realize until after completing all the artwork for the book that you can't put out a book if there isn't anybody out there who's going to buy it. Well, nobody out there is going to buy it, so for now, the book is dead (like that version of Rockford with Dermot Mulroney as Jim and Beau Bridges as Rocky, perhaps the only role in that unseen pilot that was perfectly re-cast).
I think Rockford Files is cool for many of the same reasons Hatfield does, and I assume Universal does too. That's why, despite getting sued by understandably disgruntled Rockford Files star James Garner and feuding with him in court for more than a century, the studio brought the show back in the '90s as a series of TV-movies with Garner and the surviving cast and then tried to remake the show on TV with different stars twice (and ended up failing both times--the second attempt couldn't even find anyone to play Rockford). And now, Universal, perhaps spurred by the comedic film version of deceased Rockford Files creator Stephen J. Cannell's 21 Jump Street, announced the other day that it plans to attempt to reopen The Rockford Files again, but this time as a feature film with Vince Vaughn as star and producer.
Vince Vaughn? Yeah, I can see him as Rockford. Fast-talking con men are Vaughn's forte, and the taco breakfast-craving P.I. could be a fast-talking con man when he needed to be, like in the "Jimmy Joe Meeker" episodes.
But Rockfish got his ass whupped a lot, and he had knuckles made out of Kleenex. If the screenplay retains Rockfish's discomfort with fighting, I'm going to have a helluva hard time buying that Vaughn--who's taller than Garner and whose signature characters are in-your-face and physically intimidating grifter types (the kiss he plants on the shocked priest played by Henry Gibson in Wedding Crashers always comes to mind)--can be overpowered in a fight.
Still, at least it's not Dermot Mulroney.
And now, Hatfield nails exactly why everyone from Mulroney to Vaughn wants to be Rockford:
When I hooked up my analog-to-digital TV converter box a few months ago, I found that I was able to receive a few channels that my rabbit ears had not ever accessed. One of these channels is RTV (the Retro Television Network), which airs The Rockford Files every weeknight at 10. I remember watching it some as a child in the 1970s, but I am enjoying it much more as an adult. (It's not really a show for kids; it moves kind of slowly, and the main characters are not very flashy.) My newfound love for The Rockford Files (and for RTV in general) is partly nostalgia (for my childhood, for the '70s), but part of it is the fact that Jim Rockford, the self-employed private detective ("$200 a day, plus expenses"), is such a great creation. I love that he lives in a run-down trailer in the parking lot of a restaurant by the ocean in Malibu. (How is it even possible that a person can live in a trailer in a parking lot in Malibu? Today, with real estate the way it is, that would not be believable. Today, the likes of Jim Rockford--anyone who is anything other than super-rich--would not be able to afford to live anywhere near Malibu, dilapidated trailer or not.) I love the chummy, sweet relationship Rockford has with his dad, whom he calls "Rocky," as everyone else does. I love that he keeps his gun in the cookie jar and wears polyester wash-and-wear slacks that do not flatter his chubby bum. (This was before people worked out, before TV stars had to be all fit and muscly and healthy and botoxed and facelifted and perfect and inaccessible and unrealistic and cookie-cutter boring.) Rockford smokes and eats dollar tacos and drives without a seatbelt. He's a straight shooter, taking everything as it comes. He's always getting jumped by bad guys, but he never really gets angry; mostly he sighs a lot, grumbles a bit and gets on with it. I like him.
Thanks to beyond, deux for mentioning my "Ask for Babs" mix. What do I gotta do to spread the word about this mix? I'm new at this. I'm often not comfortable promoting myself. I'll be satisfied if at least one another blog or Twitter feed besides beyond, deux mentions the mix.
Here are the connections between each "Ask for Babs" track (besides the Universal connection, of course).
1. Nigel Godrich, "Universal Theme," Scott Pilgrim vs. the World: Original Motion Picture Score, ABKCO
2. Alan Silvestri, "End Credits" (from Back to the Future Part III), Hollywood Soundstage: Big Movie Hits Volume I, Varèse Sarabande
Scott Pilgrim/Back to the Future connections:Scott Pilgrim and the Back to the Future trilogy are FX-heavy flicks with constantly bullied loser musicians as heroes; the Pilgrim film is nostalgic for '80s and '90s 8-bit video games like the BTTF game for the NES.
2. Alan Silvestri, "End Credits" (from Back to the Future Part III), Hollywood Soundstage: Big Movie Hits Volume I, Varèse Sarabande
3. Rose Royce, "Car Wash," Car Wash, Motown
BTTF/Car Wash connections: Fancy-car porn; pop star cameos; the BTTF fanfare is in the same key as the Car Wash theme.
3. Rose Royce, "Car Wash," Car Wash, Motown
4. Public Enemy, "Fight the Power," Music from Do the Right Thing, Motown
Car Wash/Do the Right Thing connection: Both films have multiracial ensemble casts and wall-to-wall soundtracks and are set over the course of one day.
4. Public Enemy, "Fight the Power," Music from Do the Right Thing, Motown
5. J.J. Johnson, "Willie Chase," Willie Dynamite, Hip-O Select/Geffen
Do the Right Thing/Willie Dynamite connection:Willie Dynamite star Diana Sands appeared with Do the Right Thing star Ruby Dee in the stage and film versions of A Raisin in the Sun.
Willie Dynamite/Scarface connection: Both films are crime flicks with huge followings in the hip-hop community.
6. Giorgio Moroder, "Tony's Theme," Scarface, Geffen
7. Jan Hammer, "Chase," Miami Vice: The Complete Collection, One Way
Scarface/Miami Vice connections: '80s; Miami; gangsters; synth-pop; drugs (speaking of which, the second soundbite during "Tony's Theme" is from Jon Stewart's cameo in the Universal cult favorite Half Baked, in which a blazed Stewart mentions Scarface and another Universal film starring Al Pacino, Scent of a Woman).
7. Jan Hammer, "Chase," Miami Vice: The Complete Collection, One Way
8. Stu Phillips, "Knight Rider," NBC: A Soundtrack of Must See TV, Tee Vee Toons
9. Timbaland and Magoo, "Clock Strikes (Remix)," Blackground
10. Busta Rhymes, "Turn It Up (Remix)/Fire It Up," Elektra
11. Punjabi MC, "Mundian To Bach Ke," Sequence
Miami Vice/Knight Rider connection: Both shows were NBC hits that aired at about the same time (and for one season, on the same night).
11. Punjabi MC, "Mundian To Bach Ke," Sequence
12. Johnny Harris, "Odyssey (Pt. 1)" (from Buck Rogers in the 25th Century), Sunshine Sound Disco
Knight Rider/Buck Rogers connection: Glen A. Larson produced both shows.
12. Johnny Harris, "Odyssey (Pt. 1)" (from Buck Rogers in the 25th Century), Sunshine Sound Disco
13. Danny Elfman, "Main Titles," Midnight Run, MCA
Buck Rogers/Midnight Run connections:Buck Rogers is set in New Chicago and Midnight Run anti-hero Jack Walsh used to be a cop in the old Chicago; "Odyssey" and the Midnight Run theme are both heavy on the bass.
13. Danny Elfman, "Main Titles," Midnight Run, MCA
14. Oingo Boingo, "Weird Science," Best O' Boingo, MCA
Midnight Run/Weird Science connection: Danny Elfman.
14. Oingo Boingo, "Weird Science," Best O' Boingo, MCA
15. Nigel Godrich, "Chau Down," Scott Pilgrim vs. the World: Original Motion Picture Score, ABKCO
16. Dan the Automator, "Ninja Ninja Revolution," Scott Pilgrim vs. the World: Original Motion Picture Score, ABKCO
Weird Science/Scott Pilgrim connections:Weird Science and Scott Pilgrim are FX-heavy fantasy films with dorky youngster heroes; Pilgrim is nostalgic for the era when the Weird Science movie and TV series were made.
16. Dan the Automator, "Ninja Ninja Revolution," Scott Pilgrim vs. the World: Original Motion Picture Score, ABKCO
17. Randy Edelman, "Dragon Theme," Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story, MCA
Scott Pilgrim/Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story connections: Scott's temporary girlfriend Knives Chau is like the Bruce Lee of blades; scenes of action movie stars kicking the shit out of non-celebrities on movie sets; Asians who kick ass.
17. Randy Edelman, "Dragon Theme," Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story, MCA
18. Henry Mancini, "The Boss," Touch of Evil, Varèse Sarabande
Dragon/Touch of Evil connections:Dragon was about Lee having to put up with yellowface/brownface, and Touch of Evil had Charlton Heston in brownface; Lee starred in The Big Boss, and the Touch of Evil cue is called "The Boss."
18. Henry Mancini, "The Boss," Touch of Evil, Varèse Sarabande
19. Henry Mancini, "Main Title" (from Charade), Music from the Films of Audrey Hepburn, Big Screen
When NBCUniversal (now one word instead of two) added Sleuth to its stable of cable channels in 2006, it was an alright idea for a channel: Nick at Nite with guns. For its first couple of years, Sleuth's 24-hour lineup was comprised of reruns of NBCUniversal-owned cop or detective shows like Dragnet, Magnum, P.I., Miami Vice and the always-worth-revisiting Homicide: Life on the Street.
But like so many other channels, of course, Sleuth has strayed from its original purpose. These days, DirecTV channel 308 is an ill-defined dumping ground for reruns of current original shows from its sister station USA (Royal Pains, In Plain Sight)--and Walker, Texas Ranger. With content like a doctor show (Royal Pains), a cop show with very little detective work because of its focus on witness protection (In Plain Sight) and a cop show with no detective work that's only watchable when Conan O'Brien's around to butt in with snarky and appalled commentary (Walker), the name Sleuth doesn't make much sense anymore. Cloo--the new name that Sleuth will assume on a yet-to-be-confirmed future date a la the still-inane 2009 conversion of its other sister station Sci Fi to Syfy--makes even less sense. What's next? NBCUniversal rebranding USA as YouSA? (They also own Telemundo. Maybe they should rename it YouEse.)
Occasionally, Sleuth has done something nice like temporarily revive a show I've longed to see again (Keen Eddie, The Rockford Files) or air a 007 marathon or the surprisingly good 1973 made-for-TV caper movie/unsold anthology show pilot The Alpha Caper, which isn't on DVD and stars Henry Fonda as a forcibly retired parole officer who teams up with the ex-cons he used to watch over--two of whom are played by Leonard Nimoy and Larry Hagman--to hijack a shipment of gold. But otherwise, as a fan of the private eye and caper genres, I've found Sleuth to be a wasted opportunity, regurgitating too many of the same broadcast network procedural reruns that can already be found on USA (House, NCIS).
Unless it's airing a White Collar episode I've never seen before or a Burn Notice rerun with a useful spy tip I need to jot down, Sleuth isn't worth my time. The channel's so cheap it doesn't have any on-air hosts or any original programming that could have given Sleuth a distinctive personality, like how breezy procedurals have become USA's forte or how FX has become synonymous with edgy comedies and gritty and violent but intelligently written dramas (the only original show that Sleuth has produced is a 2006 I Love the '80s-style special about "America's Top Sleuths").
It's owned by NBCUniversal and it's called Sleuth (that is until the name change to Cloo takes place), so why isn't the channel diving into the NBCUniversal library, with its vast history of influential crime shows, and pulling out classic sleuthy properties like Columbo (R.I.P. Peter Falk) or the other NBC Mystery Movie shows? Shouldn't a channel called Sleuth be a little, uh, sleuthier?
Also, as someone who stopped finding Law & Order interesting after an ailing Jerry Orbach left the mothership (although the later pairing of Jesse L. Martin and Jeremy Sisto was a great and too-brief one during the mothership's Law half, as was the duo of Chris Noth and Annabella Sciorra on Criminal Intent), I don't think Sleuth needs to be another repository for Criminal Intent and Special Victims Unit reruns (TNT has exclusive rights to reruns of the mothership, which explains its absence on the NBCUniversal channels' schedules). Okay, maybe Criminal Intent is tolerable once every weekday, but a five-hour Goren-thon like the ones Sleuth often does is overkill. Plus, Sleuth is the sixth channel on the dial that currently airs Criminal Intent reruns, after USA, Bravo, Oxygen, WGN and the local MyNetworkTV affiliate. Enough already, man.
At comments sections and message boards about Terriers, FX's new San Diego-based series starring Donal Logue as a tenacious ex-cop-turned-unlicensed private eye and Michael Raymond-James as his equally tenacious ex-con partner, the show's viewers have constantly asked, "What is that catchy theme song? I've been whistling it all day long even though the co-worker next to me gives me this look that says 'urge to kill rising.'"
As a fan of The Rockford Files and Veronica Mars, I've been loving the hell out of this show, a superb beach noir in the vein of Rockford and Mars. Like those two shows, Terriers skillfully balances smart-ass humor with pathos and to borrow the words of Vulture's Emily Nussbaum, "takes its characters' moral lives seriously, without ever being pompous." The creation of Ocean's Eleven and Matchstick Men screenwriter Ted Griffin, Terriers is also the sole gem in what has been an unexceptional fall TV season.
Unfortunately, Terriers has been doing so poorly ratings-wise (Mars had this problem too--why is the P.I. genre ratings Kryptonite?) that Logue and Raymond-James have embarked on a cross-country tour to spread the word about their show and host episode screenings for college campus audiences. As a show of support for Terriers, I'm adding "Gunfight Epiphany" to daily "Assorted Fistful" rotation on A Fistful of Soundtracks.
Oh, and watch Terriers Wednesday nights at 7 Pacific (10 Eastern) 10 (7 for West Coast DirecTV viewers like myself) on FX. It's far greater than its misleading (and as Logue has admitted in interviews, poorly chosen) title would have you believe.
In just 50 or so tweets, Grimlock the Dinobot has emerged as a new insightful voice in the often stuffy and annoyingly middlebrow field of TV criticism. Nobody--not even the witty recappers over at the Onion-owned A.V. Club or the refreshingly not-so-stuffy, comic book-loving Alan Sepinwall--has enlivened coverage of the new fall TV season quite like the belligerent tyrannosaur has:
"me grimlock liked when grace park in bikini punched out surfer on five-0. hottest entrance since julie warner skinny-dip in doc hollywood!" (Tuesday, October 05, 2010 8:06 PM)
"me grimlock not miss rick sanchez. sesame street newsflash reporter kermit frog: he more credible journalist than rick sanchez." (Tuesday, October 05, 2010 8:00 PM)
"me grimlock not into unfunny nbc sitcom outsourced. me wish that call center get torched by mumbai gangsters in final episode." (Wednesday, October 06, 2010 11:45 AM)
I haven't been this riveted by the thoughts of a writer who's discussing TV since the time Armond White implied he wanted to spoon with Keller from Oz.
So what if TV Critic Grimlock, who launched his Twitter page with my help last Sunday (@TVCritGrimlock), has only one follower? Some talented writers are at their most interesting when they're a best-kept secret--or before they jump the shark, to borrow a TV-related phrase that, now that I've finally thought about it, is kind of as tiresome a term as "BFF" or "bromance."
From the Autobot homebase known as the Ark, Grimlock took some time out of his busy TV-watching schedule to discuss the fall season and the animosity towards Optimus Prime (and Dinobot teammate Slag and anyone who's a Decepticon) that occasionally seeps into his tweets, which always look e.e. cummings-esque because Grimlock doesn't quite understand the purpose of the Caps Lock key. To make this Q&A less irritating to read, all of Grimlock's words have been properly cased.
Tonight, prime-time takes another stab at adapting the DC comic Human Target when Fox premieres a much-hyped, Bear McCreary-scored series loosely based on Peter Milligan's Vertigo version, one of my favorite comics during its too-brief run. In a previous TV version of Human Target that was produced by Flash TV series showrunners Danny Bilson and Paul DeMeo, Rick Springfield starred as bodyguard Christopher Chance, who disguised himself as his victimized clients to throw off the bad guys and flew around in a pimpin' stealth bomber/bachelor pad that's the only thing I remember about the show. This time, Jericho co-creator Jon Steinberg is the showrunner, the master-of-disguise gimmick has been ditched, the stealth bomber has been left to rot in a hangar somewhere and Chance is played by Mark Valley, who will always be Keen Eddie to me.
Human Target reunites Valley with Con Air director Simon West, who also worked on the much-missed, Guy Ritchie-esque Keen Eddie, which first aired on Fox in the summer of 2003. Early reviews have said Human Target is less like the gritty Vertigo comic--which put Chance through one hell of a psychological wringer by having him suffer from an identity crisis--and more along the lines of lighter fare like The A-Team, MacGyver and Keen Eddie.
I doubt the new show will be as offbeat or raunchy as Keen Eddie, which premiered (and then died) a few months before Janet Jackson's Super Bowl XXXVIII halftime wardrobe malfunction caused the major networks to overreact and kill some of the fun out of prime-time by overpolicing their raunchier shows. There are certain storylines and bits of dialogue during Keen Eddie that teleplay writers probably can't get away with in today's post-Janetgate prime-time landscape--they're more likely to be able to get away with them on FX. Cable was where Keen Eddie belonged.
In fact, cable was where most of Keen Eddie's cult following first discovered the series. After Fox's top exec at the time--who was as impatient with Keen Eddie as the shit-for-brains NBC execs have been with The Tonight Show with Conan O'Brien--defied the wishes of other Fox execs who loved Keen Eddie and abruptly cancelled it, Bravo picked it up and debuted its unaired episodes.
The series, which last popped up on Sleuth a couple of years ago, is a lost comedic gem from creator J.H. Wyman, who currently co-produces Fringe, where Valley was briefly a regular before he moved on to Human Target. The Desert Storm vet-turned-actor was terrific as NYPD detective Eddie Arlette, who travels to London to track down an elusive drug dealer and winds up joining Scotland Yard. Eddie doesn't quite find his drug dealer (Crockett and Tubbs had far better luck with their nemesis Calderon on Miami Vice), but the fish-out-of-water falls in love with the city and takes a liking to both the British crooks he locks up (they're more like the not-so-dangerous oddball criminals from Barney Miller than the mustachio-twirling villains from Miami Vice) and his hot but snooty and argumentative flatmate Fiona Bickerton (a then-unknown Sienna Miller). The series was a love letter to London, where it was filmed on location on what was clearly a ginormous budget. Wyman's creation was too foreign, anarchic and weird for mainstream America (it wasn't dour and moralistic enough for them--the original CSI, the #1 prime-time hit that year, was more up their conservative-leaning, bodybag-filled alley). But it won the hearts of some TV critics (Marvin Kitman called it "a show that could have started something new, like how Miami Vice took police shows out of L.A.") and whoever were the three or four viewers who watched it on Fox. I was one of them.
Eddie is a roguish, down-on-his-luck crime show hero in the mold of Jim Rockford and Black Tie Affair's Dave Brodsky. If Rockford's Achilles heel was having knuckles made of Kleenex, Eddie's Achilles heel is thinking with his boner too much--one reason why this show wouldn't fly on prime-time today. Eddie's crush on his gorgeous informant, the mysterious gangster's moll who tricks him and the NYPD into busting down the wrong door, is the whole reason for his banishment to London. The series' most enjoyable running joke involves Carol (Rachael Buckley, who's even hotter than Miller but seems to have disappeared from the face of the earth), a Scotland Yard secretary Eddie nicknames "Miss Moneypenny," and the never-answered mystery over whether her flirtatious exchanges with Eddie about her tastes for crotchless panties or being on all fours are real or the figment of Eddie's oversexed imagination. But Eddie's a prude in comparison to his floppy-haired partner Monty Pippin (Julian Rhind-Tutt), whose off-duty sexcapades make Jimmy McNulty from The Wire look like a monk (even though because this isn't HBO, we never see Monty in the middle of one of his swingers club orgies).
Another highlight of Keen Eddie is its awesome, pitch-perfect soundtrack. The pilot episode underscored a drug bust sequence with the Archies' "Sugar Sugar"--an early indication that Keen Eddie was no ordinary cop show. For the carelessly compiled DVD release, which should be avoided at all costs, Paramount Home Entertainment removed many of the songs that helped make Keen Eddie such a memorable show, due to clearance fees Paramount refused to pony up for ("Keeping Up Appearances," an episode in which Eddie inherits Jimi Hendrix's Bentley, is utter shit without "Crosstown Traffic"). But the studio didn't lay a finger on the songs in the reruns, so whenever Keen Eddie turns up on cable, fire up the DVR.
Because of the arrival of Valley's first star vehicle since Keen Eddie, I'll soon be adding to the Fistful of Soundtracks channel's "F Zone" playlist some of the tunes that were cut out of the Keen Eddie DVDs: Madness' "One Step Beyond," New Order's "Crystal" and of course, "Crosstown Traffic."
Your friends do it and you've probably done it too: catch up on a show your lazy ass has put off watching by setting aside an entire weekend to view the DVD box set in one marathon sitting. Back when 24 first hit the DVD market, various writers who missed the first season chose to catch up with the show on DVD and recapped in real time what it was like to watch the first-season discs in one sitting, while a writer I used to work with picked the '80s version of The Twilight Zone for his weekend DVD marathon. A couple of years ago, those writers inspired me to do a similar marathon thing with the box sets of another cult show: The Rockford Files, Stephen J. Cannell's clever reinvention of the private eye genre, which starred James Garner in his signature role as rugged everyman gumshoe Jim Rockford.
Alright, so it's not quite a marathon. I haven't even viewed all 123 episodes yet, but my goal is to eventually see them all on DVD or via Netflix's media player for PC users. As of this writing, I haven't reached season five yet. On Inauguration Day Tuesday, Universal Studios Home Entertainment will release Rockford's sixth and final season.
I picked Rockford because I was a fan of Veronica Mars (which starred Forgetting Sarah Marshall's Kristen Bell, a Star Wars geek who should have Jedi mind-tricked the CW assclowns into bringing back her show). Before I started renting the Rockford DVDs from Netflix, I had only caught Veronica's spiritual granddaddy once or twice on cable, so I wanted to better acquaint myself with Rockford on DVD, where it's uncut and commercial-free (on Hulu, it's not commercial-free). The older the series, the more it gets chopped up by syndicators to accommodate commercial breaks, which grow annoyingly longer with each passing year. So that must mean Adventures of Superman reruns will eventually be edited down to 10 minutes, and George Reeves' flying sequences will be sped up so badly it'll look like the Metropolis underworld slipped some crank into the Daily Planet watercooler.
Rockford still draws a cult that's pretty rabid, though not quite as huge as Veronica's online fanbase. Slackers like the main character's pal in Ben Folds Five's "Battle of Who Could Care Less" (the source of the title of this post) dig Rockford reruns because Jim is one of them. They identify with a hero who'd rather go fishing with his father Rocky (Noah Beery) than do his job. The fans who still visit the alt.tv.rockford-files newsgroup continue to exchange favorite Garner wisecracks, and a couple of fan sites list every wacky message Jim received on his answering machine during the opening credits.
On disc, Rockford has aged better than most '70s shows, thanks to quirky, sharp and timeless scripts penned by staff writers like Cannell, future Sopranos creator David Chase and Juanita Bartlett. Seventies TV comes in three modes: schlocky (the Krofft variety shows, anything with Glen A. Larson's name on it), sanctimonious (M*A*S*H, Norman Lear's shrill shoutcoms) or a hideous mash-up of both (Hawaii Five-0, the "Fonzie gets a library card" era of Happy Days). Rockford is one of the few '70s shows I've seen that's neither of the above, and whenever the series did address a serious issue--like the flaws of the grand jury system in its most celebrated ep, the Bartlett-scripted "So Help Me God"--it did it with class and zero preachiness.
