AFOS Blog Rewind: Mr. Robot season 1 brought us a summertime mystery as intriguing as "Is Picard a goner?" and "Is DiCaprio still asleep?"

Mr. Robot creator/showrunner Sam Esmail and his actors picked up the Golden Globe for Best Drama Series earlier this year.

The second season of Mr. Robot begins this Wednesday on the USA network, three days after the network surprised the Internet by pulling a Beyoncé and posting the entire first half of Mr. Robot's two-part season premiere on Twitter, Snapchat, YouTube and usanetwork.com for only approximately an hour and 50 minutes. After that nearly two-hour period, USA deleted the episode from the four platforms--an enigmatic and cold-hearted move straight out of the titular hacktivist's playbook. So from August 5, 2015, here's a repost of my discussion of the first six episodes of Mr. Robot's compelling first season.

I still remember the date: June 18, 1990. Star Trek had killed off major, non-redshirt crew member characters before (Spock at the end of The Wrath of Khan and Tasha Yar on The Next Generation). But on that date, The Next Generation looked like it was about to go a step further and actually write its captain off the show. What the hell was going on? Was Patrick Stewart's contract not renewed? Did he piss off the Next Generation showrunner? Did he piss off someone from the Minoxidil Mafia?

June 18, 1990 was when The Next Generation finally stepped out of the shadow of the original Star Trek and proved at the end of "The Best of Both Worlds, Part I" that it was going to take certain chances with its storytelling--or rather, boldly go where no Star Trek incarnation had gone before. Sure, The Next Generation had done a few excellent episodes before--"A Matter of Honor," a standout hour where Riker temporarily serves on a Klingon ship, immediately comes to mind--but "The Best of Both Worlds, Part I" upped the ante with an especially tense hour full of possible changes to the show's status quo and moments of Starfleet being under attack in ways that hadn't been seen since Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home.

On the old Star Trek, the Enterprise's most powerful antagonists, whether it was a starship-devouring machine or an actual god, would always be defeated or outwitted by the Enterprise crew in less than an hour. But the Borg, which the Enterprise-D first encountered a year before in "Q Who," were so powerful and unstoppable during "The Best of Both Worlds, Part I" that they clearly weren't going to be put down at the end of act five, especially after they transformed Captain Picard into one of them and assimilated his skills as a commander and his knowledge of Starfleet so that they could now attack the fleet's weaknesses. And it all ended with the most memorable final line in a Star Trek story--Riker saying, "Mr. Worf, fire"--until Picard's "Five-card stud, nothing wild... and the sky's the limit" line at the end of The Next Generation's final episode, that is.

It was one hell of a way to start the summer. I really thought "The Best of Both Worlds" was going to resume the following September with Picard floating around in a white robe and playing a golden Vulcan harp. A few discussions of the impact of "The Best of Both Worlds" have tended to say, "This was before the Internet, so over the summer, Next Generation viewers shared their excitement over the cliffhanger in the most old-fashioned ways: over the watercooler, phone chats, the convention at the Ramada, telegrams, carrier pigeons..." But because these are Star Trek fans we're talking about here, many of them have always been computer-savvy, and the ones who were the most computer-savvy were actually ahead of everyone else communication-wise in 1990 when they speculated over Picard's fate on things called BBSes. Remember those?

Once in a while, a really juicy mystery comes along in the summer and rocks the pop culture world. In 1990, it was "Is Riker going to kill Picard?" In 2010, it was "Is Leonardo DiCaprio still in the dream world? Because that damn top wouldn't stop spinning!" Summer's supposed to be the time for dumb blockbusters and breezy escapism, not thought-provoking and dystopian narratives. So thanks a lot, Mr. Robot, for ruining the summer with your hacktivist leanings, your mistrust of corporations, your frustrations with economic inequality, your moral ambiguity, your clever use of (often moody) music, your unreliable narrator who can't tell apart reality from his imagination and your handful of nifty mysteries that are the next "Is Leo still asleep?"

Mr. Robot is the story of Elliot Alderson (Rami Malek), a morphine-addicted, anti-social Manhattan cybersecurity expert whose skills as a vigilante hacker attract the attention of the titular anarchist (Christian Slater), who recruits Elliot to help him and a band of hackers known as "fsociety" take down corporate America, particularly a conglomerate called E Corp. I can't think of another previous hour-long drama that debuted in the summer and was as stylish or as eerie or as playful about its storytelling as Mr. Robot. People who were born before the Vietnam War--that's all this blog's fucking readership seems to be made up of--will probably say to me, "There was The Prisoner. That premiered in the summer." First of all, stop flaunting your age and all the things you've gotten to watch and read. Second of all, I'm much younger than you. Am I supposed to care that The Prisoner was a summer replacement for Jackie Gleason's variety show? (Really? That's like if Red Skelton temporarily lent his time slot to Superjail.) I first encountered The Prisoner in the same way everyone else has: Netflix and not at all in the summer. I'm supposed to be impressed that you watched The Prisoner before everyone else was watching it? Give it a rest, alright, hipster?

"Is Christian Slater real?": Mr. Robot brings us a new summertime mystery as intriguing as "Is Picard going to be killed?" and "Is DiCaprio still in a dream?"

I still remember the date: June 18, 1990. Star Trek had killed off major, non-redshirt crew member characters before (Spock at the end of The Wrath of Khan and Tasha Yar on The Next Generation). But on that date, The Next Generation looked like it was about to go a step further and actually write its captain off the show. What the hell was going on? Was Patrick Stewart's contract not renewed? Did he piss off the Next Generation showrunner? Did he piss off someone from the Minoxidil Mafia?

June 18, 1990 was when The Next Generation finally stepped out of the shadow of the original Star Trek and proved at the end of "The Best of Both Worlds, Part I" that it was going to take certain chances with its storytelling--or rather, boldly go where no Star Trek incarnation had gone before. Sure, The Next Generation had done a few excellent episodes before--"A Matter of Honor," a standout hour where Riker temporarily serves on a Klingon ship, immediately comes to mind--but "The Best of Both Worlds, Part I" upped the ante with an especially tense hour full of possible changes to the show's status quo and moments of Starfleet being under attack in ways that hadn't been seen since Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home.

On the old Star Trek, the Enterprise's most powerful antagonists, whether it was a starship-devouring machine or an actual god, would always be defeated or outwitted by the Enterprise crew in less than an hour. But the Borg, which the Enterprise-D first encountered a year before in "Q Who," were so powerful and unstoppable during "The Best of Both Worlds, Part I" that they clearly weren't going to be put down at the end of act five, especially after they transformed Captain Picard into one of them and assimilated his skills as a commander and his knowledge of Starfleet so that they could now attack the fleet's weaknesses. And it all ended with the most memorable final line in a Star Trek story--Riker saying, "Mr. Worf, fire"--until Picard's "Five-card stud, nothing wild... and the sky's the limit" line at the end of The Next Generation's final episode, that is.

It was one hell of a way to start the summer. I really thought "The Best of Both Worlds" was going to resume the following September with Picard floating around in a white robe and playing a golden Vulcan harp. A few discussions of the impact of "The Best of Both Worlds" have tended to say, "This was before the Internet, so over the summer, Next Generation viewers shared their excitement over the cliffhanger in the most old-fashioned ways: over the watercooler, phone chats, the convention at the Ramada, telegrams, carrier pigeons..." But because these are Star Trek fans we're talking about here, many of them have always been computer-savvy, and the ones who were the most computer-savvy were actually ahead of everyone else communication-wise in 1990 when they speculated over Picard's fate on things called BBSes. Remember those?

Once in a while, a really juicy mystery comes along in the summer and rocks the pop culture world. In 1990, it was "Is Riker going to kill Picard?" In 2010, it was "Is Leonardo DiCaprio still in the dream world? Because that damn top wouldn't stop spinning!" Summer's supposed to be the time for dumb blockbusters and breezy escapism, not thought-provoking and dystopian narratives. So thanks a lot, Mr. Robot, for ruining the summer with your hacktivist leanings, your mistrust of corporations, your frustrations with economic inequality, your moral ambiguity, your clever use of (often moody) music, your unreliable narrator who can't tell apart reality from his imagination and your handful of nifty mysteries that are the next "Is Leo still asleep?"

Mr. Robot is the story of Elliot Alderson (Rami Malek), a morphine-addicted, anti-social Manhattan cybersecurity expert whose skills as a vigilante hacker attract the attention of the titular anarchist (Christian Slater), who recruits Elliot to help him and a band of hackers known as "fsociety" take down corporate America, particularly a conglomerate called E Corp. I can't think of another previous hour-long drama that debuted in the summer and was as stylish or as eerie or as playful about its storytelling as Mr. Robot. People who were born before the Vietnam War--that's all this blog's fucking readership seems to be made up of--will probably say to me, "There was The Prisoner. That premiered in the summer." First of all, stop flaunting your age and all the things you've gotten to watch and read. Second of all, I'm much younger than you. Am I supposed to care that The Prisoner was a summer replacement for Jackie Gleason's variety show? (Really? That's like if Red Skelton temporarily lent his time slot to Superjail.) I first encountered The Prisoner in the same way everyone else has: Netflix and not at all in the summer. I'm supposed to be impressed that you watched The Prisoner before everyone else was watching it? Give it a rest, alright, hipster?

Netflix's DVD rental service allowed me to marathon The Prisoner over the course of only three weeks one winter, while people who first caught The Prisoner on CBS in 1968 had to experience it from June to September. Now I know how they must have felt when they stumbled into this show that came out of nowhere and tried to figure out what exactly was going on while they were sweating buckets. I assume the two or three viewers who watched The Prisoner that summer exchanged theories about Number One's identity via Western Union.

Created and showrun by Sam Esmail and renewed for a second season, Mr. Robot came out of nowhere as well and has turned into USA's most talked-about original show since the earlier days of its "blue skies" template, which made hit shows out of breezy high concepts like a San Francisco ex-cop with OCD (Monk) and a spy who gets burned by his agency and finds work in Miami as a modern-day, pre-Denzel Equalizer (Burn Notice). So USA's association with the dark Mr. Robot is a bit of a surprise because of its reputation as the "blue skies" network, but it's not like USA hasn't tried to cloudy up the blue skies aesthetic before. Suits takes place in a frequently chilly-looking Manhattan (it's actually Toronto, which explains the chilly look) where ruthless litigators blurt out "shit" every other minute because USA won't let them say "fuck." But aside from lousy weather conditions, numerous S-bombs, law firm power struggles and angsty sex with Meghan Markle in the file room, that show is really just lifestyle porn like USA's Hamptons concierge doctor show Royal Pains--or Entourage or long before that, Dynasty.

Meanwhile, Mr. Robot is USA fare at its cloudiest. Elliot's social anxiety disorder and depression aren't played for Monk-style laughs. He has noble intentions about wanting to protect the few people he can relate to, whether it's his co-worker and childhood friend Angela (Portia Doubleday) or his therapist (Gloria Reuben), but he goes about them in creepy, invasive and online stalker-y ways. Sociopathic E Corp vice president Tyrell Wellick (Martin Wallström), one of Elliot's antagonists, beats up homeless people to blow off steam and will do anything to get his hands on the position of E Corp CTO, whether it's gay sex or busting in on the wife (Michele Hicks) of a CTO candidate (Brian Stokes Mitchell) while she's on the toilet and propositioning her. The show gets to say "fuck" (even though, like the S-bombs during daytime repeats of Suits, the F-bombs are censored by USA). The characters are into much harder drugs than the weed Suits hero Mike Ross preferred in the first season. Mr. Robot is escapist in the same way Breaking Bad was escapist--in other words, not very much, unless you're the kind of viewer who rooted for Heisenberg to conquer the meth trade and liked to frequently call Skyler a "cunt" for getting in Heisenberg's way, which would make you certifiable.

"It's easy to think that Mr. Robot is Pump Up the Volume's outlaw DJ Hard Harry, released from jail 25 years later and realizing that using ham radio to bring down corrupt school administrators isn't enough any more. That's not a knock on Slater, whose performance here traffics in his signature sharky charisma without overdoing it. It's just that the show's revolutionary spirit is essentially as juvenile as Hard Harry's," wrote Dennis Perkins at the A.V. Club. Perkins' mixed review of the Mr. Robot pilot proves why judging a TV show based solely on its premiere episode is now such a mistake in the age of slow-building storytelling on hour-long dramas that aren't procedurals. That pilot was a little too Dexter-y for my tastes, from the method in which Elliot collects as trophies a digital memento of each of his targets (a quirk that hasn't really appeared again on the show) to the choice of a pedophile as the first scumbag we see Elliot take down, a simple way to get the audience to immediately side with the main character's brand of justice (in Mr. Robot's pilot, the pedo's a coffee shop chain owner who's a child pornographer, while in Dexter's pilot, he's a pastor who killed the kids he abused). Unlike Pump Up the Volume, Mr. Robot has veered away from the romanticizing of Elliot and his point of view that took place in the pilot and is evolving into an even murkier and not-at-all-juvenile show, although Elliot's gripes about society are perfectly valid.

The show has interestingly started to morally complicate Elliot's crusade in ways that Dexter ended up rejecting (it gave up on challenging viewers to question the titular serial killer's vigilantism and basically admitted "He's the hero we need"), as well as add grim consequences to that crusade. After joining forces with fsociety, Elliot's targets have started to include ordinary working folk in addition to pedos and unapologetic criminals, and in "ep1.43xpl0its.wmv," fsociety's heist movie-style plan to infiltrate the Steel Mountain facility requires Elliot to trace the online footprint of a schlubby Steel Mountain tour guide and use the info he picked up to talk this man into giving him access to the facility's climate control system. The minute I noticed that the schlub was that poor gay guy Briscoe and Logan were unable to save from getting shanked in prison at the end of the classic 1994 Law & Order episode "Mayhem," I knew Elliot was going to psychologically destroy him (and feel awful about it) and that it was going to be difficult to watch. I wonder if Elliot is headed towards a Walter White-style heel turn and will lose his soul while trying to protect others. At the rate fsociety is going in its takedown of the corporate world, it's as if Elliot is one Lily of the Valley plant away from poisoning an innocent little kid.

Not a Burger Stand becomes a viral sensation and makes me ask, "Why doesn't this kind of joint exist up in Northern Cali?"

As someone who used to listen to No Respect repeatedly, I will probably nail this. (Photo source: Not a Burger Stand)

Down in Burbank, a city that, thanks to late '80s-era Nick at Nite's Laugh-In reruns, I can't refer to without channeling Gary Owens and calling it "Beautiful Downtown Burbank," the chalkboard specials at a burger joint called Not a Burger Stand have gone viral. Not a Burger Stand's specials, which the Burbank restaurant posts on its Tumblr and Facebook pages, are accompanied by terrific re-creations of TV and movie characters by illustrators Lila Gonzalez and Kyle Carrozza. These specials also offer the kind of wacky discounts that are atypical for a burger stand but aren't surprising to see coming from a restaurant that's right next to Hollywood and the voiceover industry: customers get discounts if they order in the voices of--or dress up as--the characters that Gonzalez or Carrozza drew on the chalkboard. It's a really clever way to both run a business and see how terrible everyone's Matthew McConaughey impressions are.

I wish one of Not a Burger Stand's specials was "Order the Cap'n Crunch Fried Chicken and Funnel Cake in Cap'n Crunch's voice and get 10% off," but nobody who was born after 1988 knows what Cap'n Crunch sounds like. However, these other specials would be fun to order, especially for someone like me who's a fan of many voiceover artists and actually practices doing a few impressions of celebrity voices. These discounts make me think, "Damn, we need a burger joint like this up in here in the Bay Area so that I can trot out my '60s-era Sean Connery or my Tracy Morgan and get 10% off a burger."

(Photo source: Kyle Carrozza)

If you're just like me and you've never seen The Lego Movie, and then you stumble into some business where you get 10% off if you sing "Everything Is Awesome," but you have no idea how the Lego Movie theme goes, it goes a little something like this:

I didn't weep for Oberyn, but I felt bad for all the Latino viewers out there who hate it whenever a likable Latino character gets killed off on white television. "Ritchiiiieeee!," screamed Esai Morales, right after he saw the end of "The Mountain and the Viper" that night, even though the Viper isn't named Ritchie.

(Photo source: Lila Gonzalez)

"Brokedown Merry-Go-Round" Show of the Week: How It Should Have Ended, "How Godzilla Should Have Ended"

Every Friday in "'Brokedown Merry-Go-Round' Show of the Week," I discuss the week's best first-run animated series episode I saw. By "the week," I mean from late Thursday at midnight to the following late Thursday at 11:59pm. Today's Show of the Week has a bizarre and difficult-to-pin-down posting schedule, but its latest episode debuted online last Friday morning. "Brokedown Merry-Go-Round," a two-hour block of original score tracks from animated shows or movies, doesn't have a schedule that's as difficult to pin down. It airs weekdays at 2pm Pacific on AFOS.

Starz Digital Media's How It Should Have Ended series/channel is always reliable for a few grins or light chuckles over its short parodies of laughable plot holes and denouements from recent Hollywood blockbusters. In its latest installment, HISHE tackles Gareth Edwards' Godzilla reboot, and HISHE writers/voice actors Tina Alexander and Daniel Baxter get in a few good digs about the collateral damage caused in the Edwards film by Godzilla's battles against the MUTOs (Massive Unidentified Terrestrial Organisms).

"Oh, sure, when Godzilla destroys half the city and kills the unstoppable threat to save the world, everyone cheers. But when I do it, everyone gets all grouchy and judgmental," whines the Henry Cavill version of Superman during "How Godzilla Should Have Ended." He shows up in MUTO battle-ravaged San Francisco to shame both Godzilla and the unusually cheery survivors and is still butt-hurt over Superman comics readers' negative responses to the violence in Zack Snyder's Man of Steel. (I'm starting to realize that the reason why the 2004 Dawn of the Dead remake remains Snyder's most satisfying movie is mainly because of the screenplay by Guardians of the Galaxy director James Gunn, and not so much because of the contributions of the simple-minded neo-con that is Snyder. Have you ever listened to Snyder speak? All he says during interviews or commentraks is "Awesome" or "Blablabla's such a rock star.")

The animus towards Man of Steel is mostly because your latest film was such a goddamn slog, Supes, whereas Godzilla's isn't, although it's marred by Aaron Gray-Stanford-Brown-Whatever-the-Fuck's two-hour-long impression of a block of wood. As The Daily Dot astutely noted, Godzilla suffers from a boring white guy problem and is part of a long line of Hollywood tentpole blockbusters that opt for the least interesting characters as their leads. Out of a cast that includes Ken Watanabe, Bryan Cranston, Elizabeth Olsen, David Strathairn, Sally Hawkins and Godzilla, Edwards chose to center the film around the individual with the least charisma or personality? This is the same problem I had with Edwards' previous sci-fi film, his 2010 indie breakthrough Monsters. It's a film about Mexico experiencing first contact with giant alien creatures, and it's told not through the eyes of any of its citizens but through the eyes of the most annoying white hipsters since those douches who gentrified the barrio side of Arlen and slipped salmon into Enrique's fish tacos?

I wish "How Godzilla Should Have Ended" (which, like all other HISHE installments, boasts some impressive background art by Otis Frampton) focused on the Edwards reboot's boring white guy problem. But any HISHE short that has some fun at the expense of the tiresome 9/11 imagery in tentpole blockbusters like Man of Steel and Godzilla--and pits Gipsy Danger from Pacific Rim against Zilla in an amusing one-sided battle--is fine by me.

"Brokedown Merry-Go-Round" Show of the Week: The Boondocks, "Breaking Granddad"

Every Friday in "'Brokedown Merry-Go-Round' Show of the Week," I discuss the week's best first-run animated series episode I saw. "Brokedown Merry-Go-Round," a two-hour block of original score tracks from animated shows or movies, airs weekdays at 2pm Pacific on AFOS.

You can tell it's been a mediocre week for animated TV shows when the strongest piece of animated TV is an episode of The Boondocks' fourth and final season, the only season that was completed without Aaron McGruder's involvement. For those who forgot that The Boondocks is still on the air, McGruder exited his own creation under circumstances that still remain mysterious, even after he posted on his Facebook account in March an unusually benign message of thanks to Sony Pictures Television and Adult Swim for the show's first three seasons. A writer from The Root compared hearing the news of McGruder's departure to "buying tickets to a Public Enemy show only to find out that Chuck D is no longer with the group." Sony claims McGruder exited because he and the studio couldn't come to an agreement over the fourth season's production schedule.

Getting the full story behind the tight-lipped McGruder's departure is about as likely as Dr. Dre dropping Detox. I bet we won't know the full story, perhaps due to legal reasons, until a few years from now (which would be much longer than the amount of time it took for Dave Chappelle to address his fans after he quit Chappelle's Show because he was dissatisfied with sketches that he felt were making white people laugh for the wrong reasons, the same issue that's currently fueling the debate over whether or not Leslie Jones' controversial SNL monologue about slavery is "coonery").

For now, what McGruder's departure has left us with are episodes that mysteriously don't contain any writing credits (the "Created by Aaron McGruder" credit has also been erased from the opening titles, just like when Matt Groening took his name off a Simpsons/Critic crossover episode he despised) and have so far been mostly limp rehashes of earlier Boondocks episodes, with very little of the effective social commentary that distinguished past McGruder-scripted gems like the Peabody-winning "Return of the King." The Boondocks is the latest show that's stumbled creatively after the creator who was so essential to crafting most of the show's greatest hits went ahead and bounced (exhibit A: the departures of Gene L. Coon and Gene Roddenberry from the original Star Trek; exhibit B: Dan Harmon's Sony-related absence during what's come to be known as the "gas leak year" of Community).

Though "Breaking Granddad" is another example of how much the gas leak year of The Boondocks pales in comparison to the seasons when McGruder was involved and was proud to leave his name on the product (the episode is another one this season that doesn't contain a writing credit), it's easily the funniest of the three fourth-season episodes that have aired so far. That's not due to the Breaking Bad gags, which mostly fall flat and are riffs on just the events in the Breaking Bad pilot episode and no other episode in Breaking Bad's history (spoofs of network or cable dramas have never been The Boondocks' strong suit; the third-season finale, which aired 120 years ago, was an underwhelming 24 spoof that showed signs that maybe it wasn't a good idea for McGruder to agree to a fourth season). What redeems "Breaking Granddad" is all the genuinely funny satirical material about hair-care products for black people, a subject that's never really been satirized on an animated show before (the plot has the Freemans inventing and selling a gel that both relaxes and lengthens hair). Even though "Breaking Granddad" is watered-down Boondocks, it's still more daring than late-period Simpsons, even when the latter experiments with CG animation for one episode (which it did this week with the okay-but-still-not-up-to-classic-Simpsons-level "Brick Like Me," a story set mostly in a Lego world fantasized by Homer).

This whole fourth-season arc, in which Robert Freeman (John Witherspoon) winds up so broke that, like pre-cancer-diagnosis Walter White, he's taken a job at a car wash owned by Uncle Ruckus (Gary Anthony Williams), is straight-up character assassination. Sure, Robert's always been a loser, but he's never been as dumb as Riley (Regina King). It's hard to buy that Robert would be so clueless that he'd lose ownership of his house and be forced to sell both himself and his grandsons into slavery. I'm getting the feeling that McGruder left because the storyline wasn't his idea and even he thinks it's inane.

Or maybe it was McGruder's idea and he felt burnt out from both the show and dealing with Sony (he's since moved on to creating a live-action Adult Swim show called Black Jesus), and leaving The Boondocks was the only thing that would make him happy. McGruder has a history of sometimes appearing to be bored with his own creation, especially back when it was a comic strip. Too many of the strip's post-9/11 weekday installments were lazily drawn rehashes of the same scenario--Huey sits and watches some idiotic soundbite on TV--and towards the end of the strip's run, McGruder stopped drawing it and left the illustrating duties to an uncredited artist.

Fortunately, "Breaking Granddad" doesn't rehash material like how the strip would recycle that same damn pose of Huey parked in front of the TV or how the season premiere (with special guest star Michael B. Jordan as a Chris Brown-esque celebrity) laughlessly recycled the much more hilarious "Tom, Sarah and Usher." This week's episode is the first (and judging from King's comments to the press about behind-the-scenes infighting over the direction of her show's writing, most likely to be the only) time I've ever felt like The Boondocks' fourth season wasn't a complete mistake.

Memorable quotes:
* "Well, you see, I'm a little short on cash. [Sound FX of the woman on the other end of the phone line hanging up.]"

* "Oh, thank you, Jesus! Always knew if I pretended to believe in you, it would pay off someday!"

* Boss Willona (special guest star Jenifer Lewis): "Don't you get it? These bitches would put napalm on their hair if it would make it straight. Put a warning label on it!"

* "The ironically named hair gel is the hottest-selling on the market, but experts claim a single jar contains enough high explosives to destroy a small plane or a Prius."

In 2008, I sort of predicted Breaking Bad would blow up like Gus Fring

Tonight, AMC's Breaking Bad ends its run as one of TV's most genuinely nail-biting and nerve-wracking hour-long shows/trending topics, so I've unearthed from January 23, 2008 the review of the Breaking Bad pilot I wrote for another blog, which quickly folded. I'm not surprised that particular blog folded. It had the shittiest blog name in the history of shitty blog names.

As my pilot review points out, Breaking Bad wasn't the first cable drama to revolve around a morally ambiguous protagonist--or three, if you count Jesse and Skyler. But since its premiere, Breaking Bad has emerged as one of the better-made dramas with that kind of protag (while some of the other shows that you'll see me refer to at the end of the 2008 review, like Weeds and Dexter, won't stand the test of time like many individual Breaking Bad episodes will--especially the right-wing fantasy that was Dexter).

It's interesting that the series finale of Breaking Bad--a signature example of "the age of the anti-hero" on cable--airs the same night that Showtime debuts Masters of Sex, a promising period drama that many critics are praising for veering away from the violence and nihilism of both the age of the anti-hero and the shitty newer dramas that are rehashing much of the morally ambiguous material that Breaking Bad has explored so well, but these newer shows are doing so to diminishing returns (one of these poorly received shows is AMC's own remake of the British cop show Low Winter Sun; like a Phish hater once said in Esquire about why he hates Phish's cover of Jay Z's "Big Pimpin'," these Breaking Bad wannabes know all the right notes, but they don't know what they mean). If Masters of Sex becomes a hit, will it usher in a new era for cable dramas and kill off the age of the anti-hero--just like how I presume Breaking Bad will kill off most of its entire cast tonight?

Return with me now to those thrilling days of AMC yesteryear, when the network's original series department was synonymous not with Heisenberg, zombies and Don Draper but with just Don and some PBS-y single-camera comedy called Remember WENN--and when Bryan Cranston used to look like a constipated Ned Flanders.

***

This is a snapshot of the original 2008 post. I'm not going to bother linking to that inactive blog. That blog was so ugly, every time they updated it, God killed a kitten.

The original series department over at AMC (Alleged Movie Classics) had a major breakthrough last year with Mad Men, and it looks like it has another winner on its hands with Breaking Bad. Bryan Cranston, who frequently stole scenes on Malcolm in the Middle (remember Hal's roller disco act?), is at his tragicomic best as Walt White, a meek, terminally ill Albuquerque chem teacher who turns to cooking crystal meth to support his pregnant wife and disabled teenage son. I caught Breaking Bad's premiere episode on Sunday night, and this seven-week series looks promising, although like Malcolm, there are way too many shots of Cranston in his tighty-whiteys.

(Mad Men may be AMC's first original series to attain Sopranos-level success, but it actually isn't the channel's first series. Back during AMC's much-missed, commercial-free Bob Dorian/Nick Clooney days--when female nudity and curse words weren't wussily censored from AMC's broadcasts of late '60s and early '70s movies like they were during the airing of Breaking Bad's risqué pilot--the channel produced and aired Remember WENN, a cult favorite about the staff of a '30s radio station.)

Breaking Bad reunites creator Vince Gilligan with Cranston, who guest-starred in the Gilligan-penned "Drive," one of the few good eps from The X-Files' later, lesser seasons (TNT reairs that particular ep all the time, yet I never get tired of seeing it). The desperate, cancer-stricken Walt recalls Cranston's "Drive" character, a redneck carjacker who suffers from a condition that will cause his head to explode if he stops moving. Don't you hate when that happens?

The series' unconventional Albuquerque desert backdrop is an inspired choice. It makes Cranston's lower-middle-class doormat look even more minuscule and beaten-down than he already is. Plus it's nice to see an hour-long drama that wasn't shot in L.A., New York, Vancouver or some other overused coastal city. (Albuquerque seems to be turning into the it location for cable dramas. USA's upcoming show about a female Federal marshal, Karen Sisco In Plain Sight, has been filmed in the 'Bu as well.)

Jimmy McNulty, Omar Little, Vic Mackey, Tommy Gavin, Nancy Botwin and Dexter Morgan, your morally ambiguous corner of the cable dial just got a little more crowded. Make room for Mr. White.

My last few reviews for Word Is Bond

I joined the Word Is Bond crew in March, and since then, I've been enjoying writing about artists I'm familiar with (Bambu, Adrian Younge) and artists I'm not so familiar with (The Doppelgangaz). Here are links to--and passages from--my first five album reviews for WIB.

The Doppelgangaz, Hark (March 12, 2013)
"I don't think I've ever heard bursitis mentioned in a hip-hop track, let alone any kind of track, outside of Al Bundy and his elderly musician friends singing a 'We Are the World' parody about how 'We are the ones who wear bifocals and have bursitis.' That's an example of how unique and original The Doppelgangaz are as storytellers."



Bambu, The Lean Sessions (March 19, 2013)
"The new EP may be far from a last hurrah for a skilled emcee who'd rather devote more time to family and community activism, but if Bambu wants to completely quit the game, The Lean Sessions proves that he has a future as an astute TV critic ('Man, they keep killing black people on Walking Dead, so I switched/Breaking Bad been my shit, that 40-ounce got me blitzed')."

Adrian Younge

Ghostface Killah and Adrian Younge, Twelve Reasons to Die (April 14, 2013)
"Younge has taken elements of Morricone's sound--the fuzz guitar riffs that are highlights of Morricone's Danger: Diabolik and Once Upon a Time in the West scores, the chimes and the wordless melodies--as well as some touches from other film composers (like the sitar towards the end of 'The Sure Shot,' which is reminiscent of Manfred Hübler and Siegfried Schwab, or the piano licks that are all over the RZA's projects, like his Ghost Dog score), and he's brought his own stamp to them. Younge has provided Ghostface with the imaginary soundtrack for the superhero movie he must have always wanted to star in."

Trebles and Blues, From My Father (April 30, 2013)
"This kind of dramatic, trying-to-overcome-barriers material can turn kitschy or sappy. Think unintentional laugh riots like 'Accidental Racist' or any of the family photo slideshow videotapes that a lot of my Filipino parents' friends would subject their party guests to back in the '80s and were often soundtracked with ballads by Whitney Houston and Surface or, ugh, any non-Sid Vicious version of 'My Way' (let's face it, yo: Vicious recorded the only take on 'My Way' that's worth a damn). But fortunately, From My Father, an instrumental work as effective and beautifully crafted as The Blue Note, is neither of those things."

Eric Lau, One of Many (June 24, 2013)
"The best way I'd describe U.K. neo-soul producer Eric Lau's sound would be 'It brings to mind the minimalist production wizardry of Dilla, but without any recognizable samples and perhaps with a taste for crumpets instead of donuts.'"

The Arrested Development model home gets immortalized in Lego form (while somewhere, some other Lego maniac must be working on his recreation of the house from Spaced or the mansion from Fresh Prince)

(Photo source: Matt De Lanoy)

"As someone who just finished spending the majority of his life in prison, what happened with Legos? They used to be simple... Something happened out here while I was inside. Harry Potter Legos, Star Wars Legos, complicated kits, tiny little blocks. I mean, I'm not saying it's bad. I just wanna know what happened."

--Professor Marshall Kane (Michael Kenneth Williams), Community

When I was either seven or eight years old--back in a simpler time before the days when Lego started selling those licensed Potter or Star Wars playsets that currently baffle Greendale's biology teacher--I got bored with constructing vehicles or buildings with whatever remaining Lego bricks were lying around the house (God, those pieces are so easy to lose). So I tried recreating with those same Legos the set of The $25,000 Pyramid, right down to Dick Clark's podium. When I couldn't get it to look enough like Pyramid, I shuffled several bricks around and tried to convert it into the set of Jeopardy!

"Ooh, I know this one," says you the reader. "'What are things that look like shit?'"

Correct. Ding-ding.

My attempts to make Lego replicas of the Pyramid and Jeopardy! sets never looked as good as the work of Matt De Lanoy, a Lego master and Arrested Development fan whose remarkable Lego diorama of the Mitch Hurwitz creation's central setting, the Bluth family's model home, was the subject of an A.V. Club Chicago post that I recently stumbled into. De Lanoy's replica of the Bluths' crib is on display at a Lego Store in Schaumburg, Illinois all through April. It comes complete with the Bluths' stair car, the frozen banana stand (is there any money in this banana stand?) and even a tiny Gob figure with both his Segway and wooden black BFF Franklin.

De Lanoy's diorama has slightly raised my interest in Netflix's in-the-works revival of the hilarious Arrested Development, even though I'm kind of skeptical about how it'll turn out because so many reunion projects for TV have been such duds. However, I'm relieved that Arrested Development will return as a 10-to-13-episode series instead of as a two-hour feature film where it would have been impossible for every Bluth to receive substantial screen time.

While I have the patience to watch 10-to-13 nonstop episodes that I assume Netflix Instant will unveil all at once (that was how Netflix posted its eight-episode original series Lilyhammer) instead of week-by-week, I don't have the patience to play architect like De Lanoy does. But if I were more patient with Legos, I'd recreate the Chevy that a drunk McNulty crashed into an overpass column (and then crashed into the same column again to figure out why it happened--McNulty's always a detective, even when plastered) right before he banged that waitress at the beginning of the "Duck and Cover" episode from season 2 of The Wire. That smashed-up Chevy is overdue for a Lego replica.

Here are some other impressive Lego dioramas of shows and films that, like The Wire or Arrested Development, aren't as popular with Lego's juice box-sipping consumers as say, Potter or Star Wars:

Mad Men's "Nixon vs. Kennedy" episode by Devon Wilkop (Photo source: MOCpages)

(Photo source: Orion Pax)

March Madness March of the Day: "Attack" from Patton by Jerry Goldsmith

Aw, jeez. It's tough to pick for the "March Madness March of the Day" series just one march from Jerry Goldsmith's brilliant and rather subdued score from director Franklin J. Schaffner's 1970 biopic Patton (fun but disturbing fact: it was Richard Nixon's favorite movie and it might have influenced his wartime decisions, like the bombing of Cambodia).

There are four marches in Patton that stand out: the "Entr'acte" version of the General Patton march, the "Attack" version of that march, the German forces' march, which is distinguished by its bizarre time signature, and "An Eloquent Man," which merges both the Patton and German marches. I don't want to give two or more posts to Patton because there are so many other films with exemplary marches that I want to cover for the rest of the "March Madness March of the Day" series, so you win, "Attack."

Back when AMC stood for American Movie Classics(*) and its original programming--before the days of the esteemed Mad Men and Breaking Bad and the not-as-esteemed but spectacular-in-the-ratings Walking Dead--just consisted of a dramedy about old-timey radio called Remember WENN, AMC was old people's MTV. One of the few things I liked to rewatch on geriatric MTV when I was in college was the uncut and letterboxed Patton. You would think '90s AMC, with its serene graphics and older hosts like Bob Dorian and unexpected recent jailbird Nick Clooney, would find George C. Scott's language in Patton to be too salty to air, but fortunately, the channel kept its hands off the audio-off button during its airings of Patton. It could have pasted bleeps over Scott's saltiest words like most basic cable channels do today, but '90s AMC was too classy to bleep.

It was also too classy to interrupt its movies with commercials, so I could watch prolonged and uninterrupted chunks of Patton and be able to notice that for a film with such a famous musical component (the trumpet triplet, which represents Patton's obsession with reincarnation and was given a fading echo effect by Goldsmith with the help of a tape-looping device called an echoplex), Patton contains very little score music. There's only about a half-hour of it during Patton's nearly three-hour running time. The most effective film scores are ones that aren't so intrusive, and the Patton score is an example of that. It does its thing--like during the montage that traces Patton's winning streak on the German battlefield--and then gets out of the way.

The cue during that winning streak sequence is "Attack," which unleashes the pompous Patton march at its most pompous, as Patton heads for German Field Marshal Erwin Rommel's forces in Berlin and amps up the troops with "I'm gonna personally shoot that paper-hanging son of a bitch!," a line I was especially glad to see AMC keep because of Scott's wonderful delivery during that moment.

Patton producer Frank McCarthy and Goldsmith later attempted to capture lightning in a bottle again with another World War II general biopic, 1977's not-as-well-received MacArthur, which starred Gregory Peck and was directed by original Taking of Pelham One Two Three helmer Joseph Sargent. In the early '80s, Goldsmith arranged "The Generals Suite," which combined his MacArthur march with his Patton march and became a staple of his concerts. So why is the Patton march more interesting than the less subtle MacArthur one and why is it such a highlight of Goldsmith's oeuvre? Goldsmith Conducts Goldsmith album liner notes writer Derek Elley broke it down best when he said the Patton march is "a melody which, like [General Patton], has ambitions to glory but remains trapped in its own dreams."



(*) I think it now stands for Advertisers, Meth and Culo.

That is weird, that is bi-Sklar

On one of my favorite podcasts, the Sklar Brothers' Sklarbro Country from the incredibly prolific Earwolf comedy podcast production company, the sports-loving twin brothers poke fun at the batty behavior of sports celebrities and their often equally deranged fans with the same biting and wonderfully rapid-fire delivery they brought to their much-missed ESPN Classic sports clip show Cheap Seats. Randy and Jason Sklar are also huge boosters of indie bands like The Morning Benders and The Henry Clay People, so the beds and mid-show musical interludes in between the Sklarbitrations, Quick Hits, visits from Racist Vin Scully and Sklarson impressions (a.k.a. the Sklars' Johnny Carson impressions) are often indie rock tracks. An occasional hip-hop joint gets thrown into the mix because fortunately, the brothers' musical tastes aren't limited to the "flaccid, smarmy, girl-pant, bearded, fixie bike rock" that one Sklarbro Country fan amusingly complained about in the Earwolf site's comments section (he's right about the stupidity of guys wearing girl pants though).

You know how TV shows like The Sopranos, Grey's Anatomy and more recently, Breaking Bad have replaced terrestrial radio and MTV as a place to discover sounds by new artists whenever the shows utilize existing songs as either source music or "needle drops" for montages or action sequences (which led to several newspaper and music magazine articles declaring that "scripted TV is the new radio")? The beds and musical interludes on comedy podcasts are turning into another great place to unearth new sounds. Sklarbro Country was where I was first exposed to terrific tunes like The Morning Benders' "Cold War (Nice Clean Fight)" and Those Darlins' "Screws Get Loose."





When an ill track I've never heard before like Ana Tijoux's "1977" gets airplay on a series like Breaking Bad, I have to play detective and hunt for it online (that is if Alan Sepinwall doesn't ID the track on his blog, but he usually does so). Fortunately, the Sklar Brothers ID each tune for the listeners (and the guest comedians who are sometimes curious about a tune's title) as it's being played by their sound engineer, so I don't have to play detective, although I wish the brothers posted the track titles on the Earwolf site. Many Sklarbro Country listeners like myself have wondered where they could find playlist information. A few days ago, I discovered the Sklars have been posting playlist info, but on their WhoSay site (and in Twitpic form instead of as text for some bi-Sklar reason).

In addition to being a standout installment (I love the Sklars' takedown of Japan-bashing WNBA guard Cappie Poindexter, as well as special guest Kumail Nanjiani's takedown of "Crappy Henderson... what's her name?," whom he'd take more seriously "if the WNBA used regular-colored basketballs"), Sklarbro Country episode 34 is a good example of the show's inspired choices for existing songs. What other show goes from J Mascis to Warren G and the late Nate Dogg?

"Rock Box" Track of the Day: Beastie Boys, "Shambala"

Song: "Shambala" by the Beastie Boys
Released: 1994
Why's it part of the "Rock Box" playlist?: It's featured in the Breaking Bad third-season finale "Full Measure."
Which moment in "Full Measure" does it appear?: A Beasties instrumental from Ill Communication that contains Tibetan monk chants and references to Adam Yauch's Buddhist beliefs, "Shambala" accompanies the not-so-pacifist sequence where Mike (Jonathan Banks), the ex-cop-turned-cleaner who works for drug tycoon Gus Fring (Giancarlo Esposito), wipes out four Mexican cartel members at a chemical supply warehouse.

TV Critic Grimlock is the new definitive voice of TV criticism, so move over, Tom Shales--that is if you can move that hefty ass of yours

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)

"me grimlock not masturbate to fox news ladies because they sound so hateful and whiny like starscream." (Wednesday, October 06, 2010 11:41 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.

Around the world in 520 words

I don't keep track of the size of the Fistful of Soundtracks channel's international audience, but I know I get a lot of listeners from Europe. Some of them have mentioned AFOS in their tweets or newspaper pieces. A writer from England's Observer paper described my station's format as "tunes from films and TV, surprisingly listenable."

Over in the Netherlands, someone plugged AFOS in a Facebook post.

In Dutch, the post says: "Jimmy Aquino draait al sinds 2002 Film- en TV muziek op zijn eigen radiostation, altijd in themas. Omdat het voornamelijk een one-man-show is, worden de programma's slechts wekelijks geupdate. Naast de wekelijkse show wordt het station gevuld door een jukebox vol trailers en de bijbehorende muziek. Aquino weet niet alleen ongelofelijk veel van filmmuziek, hij tekend ook strips en schrijft korte verhalen."

Google Translate's slightly malapropistic version in English says: "Jimmy Aquino has been around since 2002 Film and TV music on his own radio station, always themes. Because it is mainly a one-man show, then the program is only updated weekly. Besides the weekly show, the station filled by a jukebox full of trailers and the accompanying music. Aquinas not only knows an incredible amount of film music, he also signed comics and writes short stories."

I appreciate the praise, but like most blog posts that mention AFOS, it's not 100 percent correct about the details ("Because it is mainly a one-man show, the program is only updated weekly"). The Dutch listener is right about the Fistful of Soundtracks channel's one-man staff but somewhat incorrect about the weekly updating of episodes of the one-hour program that originated on college radio (which was also called A Fistful of Soundtracks). I do update the Wednesday reruns of that program each week, but I haven't recorded a new ep since "Dance Into the Fire" in 2008 because I've been underemployed for a while, and it's become too expensive for me to continue producing the program or to pay Bruce the announcer again to re-record the program intro in the reruns and introduce me as "Jimmy J. Aquino" instead of the now-outdated "Jimmy Aquino."

However, I haven't stopped updating the Fistful of Soundtracks channel's daytime playlists. A couple of weeks ago, I added to the "Chai Noon" playlist some Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge numbers from a new Shahrukh Khan soundtrack compilation and some tracks from the new Abhishek Bachchan/Aishwarya Rai movie Raavan, and then I added the Beastie Boys instrumental "Shambala" to the "F Zone" playlist after the Breaking Bad season finale devoted an entire sequence to "Shambala." This week's additions to "Assorted Fistful" are selections from Varèse Sarabande's expanded version of Michael Giacchino's Star Trek score album.

The above Dutch phrase "hij tekend ook strips" means "he has also drawn comics." Google Translate thinks the post says "he also signed comics." Yeah, I don't write comics. I just autograph them. The "Sampler" script and The Palace were actually the work of South Korean laborers.

DirecTV's 101 Network reopens Eyes

I was surprised to find out DirecTV's 101 Network has started airing this week all 12 episodes of Eyes, one of my favorite TV shows that were cancelled too soon. I thought the 101 was going to premiere Eyes back in July, but apparently there was some sort of delay.

John McNamara TV shows just never get any respect, do they?

McNamara is a former Brisco County, Jr. and Lois & Clark writer whose most entertaining creations have been shows built around antiheroes with no qualms about being unethical. Years before audiences were willing to embrace The Sopranos, The Shield, House, Rescue Me, Dexter, Mad Men, Breaking Bad and Nurse Jackie, all dramas with not-so-virtuous lead characters, McNamara gave us a shady corporate climber who sleeps in a cardboard box (1996's Profit) and a private detective who enjoys mind-tricking the criminals who wronged his clients a little too much (1998's Vengeance Unlimited).

But while Tony Soprano, Vic Mackey, Dr. House, Tommy Gavin, Dexter Morgan, the players at Sterling Cooper, Walt White and Nurse Jackie are amoral--somewhere in their bastardly selves lurks a conscience or whatever's left of it--Jim Profit was unabashedly immoral. Whether or not dark and detached central characters like Profit are the reason why McNamara's shows don't last more than one season, McNamara just can't catch a break, even when he crafts antiheroes who are still as shady as Profit and Vengeance Unlimited's Mr. Chapel but less insane and a little more likable, like he did with the gumshoes on Eyes.

McNamara's 2005 series centers on Judd Risk Management, an upscale private investigation firm made up of detectives who don't mind skirting the law to protect their clients. The P.I.'s include sexy master of disguise Nora Gage (Garcelle Beauvais-Nilon); buttoned-up, military-trained newbie Meg Bardo (A.J. Langer); Chris Didion (Rick Worthy, so underutilized as "the black Cylon" on Battlestar Galactica), a gay associate who returned to the firm after a leave of absence caused by a nervous breakdown; and Jeff McCann (Eric Mabius), who conspires with Trish Agermeyer (Natalie Zea), the firm's hot equivalent of Q from the 007 flicks, to hide their affair from another co-worker, Trish's dweeby husband Danny (Reg Rogers).

"Every character has a different back story, a different moral compass. I don't think in terms of 'he's bad' or 'she's good' or vice versa. The fun of this world is in exploring the duality of these characters," said McNamara to Zap2it.com interviewer John Crook in a 2005 article about Eyes. "This world that these characters are in has an effect on them, just as they have an effect on it. They are not machines moving through the investigation, chewing up facts and spitting them out. It takes a toll on their psyches."

Their leader--and perhaps corrupting influence--is smug smart-ass Harlan Judd, Tim Daly's most enjoyable role to date. After playing so many uncomplicated characters (the straitlaced older brother on Wings, the animated version of Superman, Dr. Richard Kimble on McNamara's 2000 remake of The Fugitive), Daly clearly relished embodying more complicated guys like drug-addicted screenwriter J.T. Dolan on The Sopranos and Harlan on Eyes.

"Harlan's way of keeping people off balance is something I totally identify with. My default setting is to make people not know whether I'm giving them shit or not. I think that I get that about him," said Daly to TV Guide interviewer Craig Tomashoff. "He sort of teases people, [and] I love teasing people. Most of the time, I'm not mean about it. I haven't been punched in a bar yet."

Daly may have been a lucky bastard inside bars and taverns, but he wasn't so lucky with the ax that was wielded by ABC, which cancelled his serialized show after five eps that weren't able to retain the audience that tuned in to Lost, its lead-in on the network schedule. Warner Bros. Television made the unaired Eyes eps available to stream on In2TV, their clunky precursor to Hulu, but I hated watching Eyes on In2TV, and the site didn't even contain the complete series, which still hasn't received an official DVD release. The 101's Tuesday night broadcasts of Eyes will mark the first time the complete series will be shown in America, which is why I'm firing up my DVR. Eyes ranks with The Rockford Files, Smoldering Lust/Black Tie Affair, Veronica Mars and Burn Notice as one of the best private eye shows ever made.