Photogenic Memory

I assume most everyone has a vast collection of photographs, both printed and digital, that are purely narcissistic pleasures for their owners. Blurry shots of people half-remembered, images of white hot smiling ghosts caught in the instantaneous glare of the camera’s flash, we’ve all got them. Despite their flaws, we pore over these photographs lovingly from time to time, perhaps whenever they need to be packed up for moving or during family holidays when the only other people in the world who might be remotely interested in your personal photographs are assembled under one roof. These mementos become visual cues which spark our reminiscence, sometimes supplanting our memories entirely with the confined, rectangular image. As you age, pictures from years gone by take on an ethereal sense; despite the hard evidence, it’s difficult to accept that the retard in wrap-around Oakleys and a Hypercolor t-shirt is actually you. But it is you, assuredly and incontrovertibly. And if you don’t want anyone else to see this picture, you’ll cough up some hush money.

I’ve long felt that some ostentatious marriage ceremonies could have been served better if a wedding photo shoot was staged for the benefit of an album or albums, and then everyone changed into comfortable clothes for a casual outdoor picnic. I’ve attended many weddings with so many collective events, costumes, vendors and guests to wrangle, all within a set schedule, the bride was almost always having a full-blown panic attack while the groom sat and stared, a future victim of post-traumatic stress disorder. Why go through all of that shit? The point of the thing is that everyone gets together, celebrates a great love and (more importantly) showers the happy couple with money and gifts. In twenty, thirty years, all you’re going to remember is the photographs anyway, so save some money and a lot of stress: stage the wedding, invite your most wealthy relatives out for a nice celebratory dinner. If you’re lucky, they’ll pick up the dinner check and you can spring for a wedding videographer complete with green screen.

Since many of our memories are comprised of what we see in photographs, it’s no wonder that some photos get augmented or thrown out along the way. Memories that are too painful, too embarrassing to lug around for the rest of your life. There are many defaced high school yearbooks, photos torn in half so that an offending party is excised, carefully cropped jpegs in everyone’s personal collections. When we fuck around with our own pictures, it’s really not a big deal: they’re our property, these images and the memories they inspire. That we wish not to remember, we simply choose to forget. But when I think that some images are manipulated by nefarious forces, perhaps to show public figures in a particular light or to omit events from history entirely, I get a little creeped out. To be frank, in the digital age I assume this happens more often than not. I don’t even upload photos to my computer without adjusting for red eye and tastefully editing for content, I can only imagine the high-level image manipulation happening behind the scenes of Prevention magazine.

The mind-boggingly talented media watchdog András Brém tipped me off to this bit of historical retcon, in the form of movie advertisements being slipped into reruns of popular sitcoms, in this case How I Met Your Mother. It’s the kind of thing that makes me chuckle nervously while tugging at my shirt collar, for while no one with a modicum of personal standard would ever defend the artistic integrity of How I Met Your Mother, those familiar with the program will know that the entire story hinges on continuity, the protagonist telling his own story in retrospect, reflecting on years that specific episodes actually aired. So when a scene from an episode that aired–and therefore took place–in 2007 shows a subtly-placed movie poster for The Zoo Keeper, well it kind of throws the timeline all out of whack. It’s like if we changed FDR’s first inaugural address so that he said, “…the only thing we have to fear is fear itself, and not taking advantage of half-price Wednesdays all summer at Taco Bell,” or dredging up footage of Fred Astaire to sell modern vacuum cleaners. Which, incidentally, somebody already fucking did.

In the grand scheme of things, no one does or should give a shit if some stupid movie is being advertised in reruns of an even stupider television show. I suppose it devalues the already struggling cultural currency that is prime-time television, though if that common denominator gets any lower we’re going to have to come up with a number lesser than negative infinity. I suppose that they show the book edition of The Zoo Keeper instead of a DVD or something else innocuous in one scene could be considered an attempt to promote literacy (Really, you should read the book. Kevin James gets raped by a llama in it.) But if we blithely accept this kind of manipulation, when does it end? Should we expect to see Fred Flintstone fiddling with his iPhone or Hawkeye from M*A*S*H spouting anti-North Korean propaganda in syndication? When we look at old photographs, can we be positive that events played out as shown? Considering the high number of humiliating shots I have of myself, I’m kind of banking on the hope that they’ve all been doctored.

You don’t click on hotlinks, and I don’t blame you. But you shouldn’t miss out on the spectacular portfolio of András Brém, which can be found at http://www.flickr.com/photos/andras_brem/sets/72157594377053631/. You would know that, if you clicked the hotlink on his name above.

When I Grow Up, I Want to Work In a Cubicle

Just finished watching the entire run of canceled TV sitcom Better Off Ted on Netflix, and I have to say it was a pretty funny show. The plot centers around Ted, single dad and middle manager at the evil and manipulative Veridian Dynamics corporation where bumbling scientists in the Research and Development department make merry through their ludicrous antics. There’s also a flaccid love triangle and a father-daughter relationship that never quite took off for me, but mainly it’s all about wacky hijinks that result from applying untested technology to everyday situations, with hilarious results. This show features Portia de Rossi, who I knew from Arrested Development, and her role as Ted’s boss (and sometimes lover) is one of the best on the show. Really, everyone seems to play their respective roles reasonably well, and while I can’t imagine a massive groundswell of cultish support demanding this program back on the air, it is certainly an enjoyable two seasons and probably should have run longer given atrocities like Two and a Half Men and King of Queens that run for two presidential terms or longer. But that’s really just splitting hairs. Shit like King of Queens should never have made it to air in the first place.

A lot of the show’s humor generates around the fictional Veridian Corporation’s evil business and employment practices, and in fact most of the show’s conflict is created as characters wrestle with their consciences in deciding to implement some cruel Veridian policy that will cause everyone to lose their hair or something. It’s a pretty funny premise, put to good effect when the show runs phony public relations commercials during the program that highlight Veridian Dynamic’s brazen callousness. It was interesting to me that unchecked corporate greed and disregard for human life was being poked fun at in this way: on the personal level, a kind of shrug and a What are ya gonna do about Coca-Cola grinding the bones of corpses to be used in making their new biodegradable bottles? is accepted, even expected when you consider how powerless one person is against a multi-national corporation. But to make light of employees shirking work and committing minor acts of industrial sabotage because their employer is heartless and evil as a given, well it comes across as a little too self-satisfied for its own good.

It’s not like people have always accepted the corporate structure. There’s loads of essays from the turn of the last century decrying one business trust or another, or trying to hold accountable the faceless members of a board who claim they are inculpable for some resultant tragedy. In fact, workers’ unions were essentially fomented to stand up against these burgeoning companies, so that the individual would have some representation when speaking to a monolith. Today, many unions have corrupted themselves into powerlessness, and the benefits of belonging don’t seem as apparent. But the need to demand community from global corporations is bigger than ever. To accept that these businesses will do whatever they can get away with for their bottom line is dangerous. Many of these companies are bigger than a lot of countries, so what they consider an acceptable loss really freaks me out.

Better Off Ted didn’t tackle this issue, and it didn’t pretend to. It was just a sitcom, but I believe it did reflect some current attitudes about the state of the world. It’s tough to see what’s wrong with Wal-Mart, where we get our deep discounts, or Viacom, which is merely a company which owns a lot of media. But by amortizing our needs with the needs of everybody else, these behemoths fail to recognize the individual. That scares me, because I have some pretty special needs. I pray some corporation will start catering to those of us who write ALF fanfiction in our underwear while sipping Hi-C Ecto Coolers. Until then, these massive companies have failed to meet their customers halfway.

Artists are Fucking Assholes

In producing a variety of pointless creative ventures, I’ve had the opportunity to work and interact with many different artists. I do this for two reasons: one, because my craft and ambition are severely lacking, and two, so I can split the forthcoming derision and jeers with another person. Frankly, I’m more prone to blame the whole thing on them: “I didn’t want to make a Ku Klux Klan robe out of Tyvek home insulation! It was all her idea!” Whatever the case, I’ve known many artists that are proficient in a variety of media, and by and large I can say that most artists you’ll meet are fucking assholes.

Interestingly, artists seem to align their poor behavior along their chosen form of expression, meaning that a musician will be a different kind of an asshole than a writer, though they both be assholes. Here’s a short list of the kinds of experiences I’ve had with certain kinds of artists (or arteestes, as many prefer to be called):

Musicians

The rare times you’ll see a musician wearing a wristwatch, know that it is just for show: no musician can actually tell time. People that make music are habitually late to everything, and seem to operate on their own internal clocks. Perhaps musicians can’t understand numbers except where they define a time signature, because they appear to have a fuzzy concept on money and value as well. A music maker will either work themselves to the bone for a pittance, or fart around and waste time yet expect a bundle of cash for it. Whatever they’re paid, most musicians will spend their money on drugs and booze anyway. Musicians like free liquor, well-worn concert t-shirts, and people that take their inane chatter seriously. Musicians dislike sunlight and fiscal responsibility.

Painters and Sculptors

It is said that a picture is worth a thousand words, and if you happen to talk to the artist who made a particular piece, you will probably hear all of them. No painting or sculpture can ever be bad, in the creator’s eyes, merely misunderstood. And they’ll have no compunction about explaining it to you until you understand or acquiesce. These types of artists don’t ascribe to normal social conventions like tact or bathing, and consider their implementation to be a kind of oppression. Despite the fact that they work in visual mediums, a lot of these artists look like slobs. Painters and sculptors like weird caffeinated drinks, expensive art supplies, and unventilated gallery shows. Painters and sculptors dislike supermarket cheese and commercial art.

Actors

Some artists pursue art because they want to share beauty with the world, or because they believe they have something important to convey. The only reason people go into acting is to escape their shitty childhoods. A profession where people are paid to lie, acting should be very emotionally taxing, and yet off stage or behind the camera actors are usually more mercurial and prone to hissy fits than anyone else. There may be genetic reasons behind why so many actors are sucseptible to bouts of sickness which cause them to cancel on their engagements at the last minute. Actors like attention, melodrama, and wearing scarves. Actors dislike monogamy and other actors.

Filmmakers

Being the youngest of all media discussed in this essay, you’d think that most filmmakers would be humble and mindful of past masters. To the contrary, no artist wants accolades for reinventing the wheel more than the person behind the camera with the megaphone. In another life, these people might be fascist dictators; in this reality, they are curt taskmasters who, when they need their shoelaces tied, will employ thirty-two assistants, one for each eyelet on their shoes. Directors and producers are some of the most loathed people in existence (mostly by the people they work with), ranking slightly above proctologists but well below trained ninja assassins. Filmmakers like trespassing, yelling, and making people stand still for long periods of time. Filmmakers dislike disobedience and editing film.

Writers

Never call a writer a “writer,” instead call him or her an “author,” unless you like being haughtily corrected. Writers tend to regard deadlines with suspicion and will usually miss their target dates out of spite. People who write will never say “hide” when they can say “obfuscate,” will correct your use of a semicolon, and often mispronounce words that they’ve read but never heard spoken. They are also fat and have stupid names like Reggie. Writers like solitude, comfortable chairs, and the letter “e.” Writers dislike paper cuts and criticism.

Babs, They Did You Dirty

Batman is often projected as an inconsolable loner, someone so emotionally distant and single-minded in his crusade that no one can ever get close to him. Funny thing, really, since Batman works with a gang of no fewer than half a dozen superheroes at any given time. Suffice to say, if you slip on a pair of tights and a domino mask in Batman’s town, you’ll be working for him soon enough whether you like it or not. It’s a wonder that criminals even attempt to cause mischief in Gotham, it being the best-patrolled city in the fictional DC Universe.

Batman’s cadre of muscular weirdos are organized via a high-tech Bluetooth (or maybe Bat-tooth) system of intelligence gathering and dissemination. This system is controlled by the enigmatic Oracle, who we, the readers, know is Barbara Gordon, daughter of Commissioner James Gordon and one-time Batgirl. Barbara “Babs” Gordon was the first Batgirl, she whose fiery tresses streamed from beneath her cowl and whose reversible skirt could turn into a cape. All that changed with the publication of Alan Moore’s The Killing Joke, a Batman story where the Joker shoots Babs in the spine and photographs her naked in an attempt to drive her father insane. That doesn’t work: Commissioner Gordon is seemingly none the worse for the wear after enduring a surrealistic ordeal at the hands of the Joker, Batman captures the Clown Prince of Crime who presumably gets carted off to Arkham Asylum. Everything is as it was before, ready for the next installment of Batman where he’ll probably slap Killer Croc around while Robin hops about making whimsical puns.

Except for Barbara Gordon. She wound up crippled for life.

I have to thank the brilliant and wonderfully talented Sarah Velez for opening my eyes to this inconsistency. Because, for people whose lives are too full of joy to scrutinize such things, characters become critically damaged and bounce back to a full recovery on a regular basis in comic books. In fact, superheroes routinely die and come back to life. There are very few permanent changes to the status quo in comics: whatever given facts you know about a character are almost always immutable in the long run. To make this point even more cruelly, within the Batman universe alone there have been so many miraculous recoveries and lives after death that Barbara Gordon sticks out like a sore, wheelchair-bound thumb. Batman, himself, had his back broken and still resturned to full power to kick the crap out of a pretender to his throne. Yet Babs sits behind an array of computer screens, sending intel to any garish acrobat that skirts the rooftops of Gotham with an earpiece in.

I didn’t notice this inconsistency at first because, well, by and large I never gave a shit about Batgirl. Similarly, I never cared about Ace the Bat-Hound or Bat Mite or any of the other ancillary characters that padded out Batman Family. It just seems uncreative, really, to hit paydirt with Batman and then saddle anything that has a pulse with a pointy-eared cowl and a bat silhouette across its chest. It’s ironic, because if Batman was real–which is to say if dogs wore bedroom slippers and people walked on their hands–there certainly would be scores of Bat-wannabes. But as long as I am believing that there is a reality where citizens condone a maniac shooting zip lines along the roofs of Gotham City, I prefer to believe that he’s the only one doing it.

I would be remiss to sell Batgirl short, however. Batgirl is one of the most recognized characters in Batman’s many media incarnations. And unlike quickie characters like Bat Woman (the original one, not the post-Crisis lady), Barbara Gordon has a rich back story and a tight DNA connection to one of the main people in Batman: Commissioner James Gordon. So while I was never a huge Batgirl fan, I never mocked her stories like I did, say, Alfred Pennyworth’s. I took it for granted that she hung around, and suffered the occasional romantic tension between she and Robin whenever that cropped up.

But the bigger reason I didn’t notice how fucked up it is that Barbara Gordon has been left in a wheelchair is because her newer incarnation as Oracle is so awesome. Using her as a conduit for information has made Batman almost totally unstoppable: through Oracle, he has access to city plans, blueprints, surveillance camera feeds, and just about anything else that can be divined via computer. I think Batman is the first hero to make such use of the information superhighway, and it would be difficult now to imagine him doing his work otherwise. Oracle is so awesome, she’s even spawned her own successful and long-running comic book series, Birds of Prey where she’s the point person for a team of lady heroes. The comic birthed an awful television series that died after thirteen episodes, but I don’t blame Oracle for that.

Oracle has become something of a handi-capable idol to comic book fans everywhere, making her miraculous recovery an even more remote possibility. That, claims DC, is reason enough not to return Babs to her walking state, particularly since a few other waifs have adopted the Batgirl name (if not the precise mantle) with reasonably good effect. And for handicapped fans, I’m glad for them. But it’s still fucked up. There’s no reason an entirely new character couldn’t have been introduced, or even dredged up from days of forgotten comics lore, who could have become Oracle. Alan Moore himself was shocked that DC decided to keep Barbara in a wheelchair: he never intended The Killing Joke to be canonical, and even if it did become part of Batman’s continuity, he assumed she would be repaired and walking around right as rain like every other fucking hero in comics. But that didn’t happen. The Flash died and came back to life twenty years later, but Barbara Gordon still rolls around on dubs.

I think it all boils down to misogyny, personally. While there have been plenty of female heroes who have been battered and broken only to make a full recovery, it’s safe to say that they’d never leave Green Arrow in a wheelchair. Hell, they’d never leave Jimmy Olsen in a wheelchair, and he’s not even a superhero (well, most of the time he isn’t). But Batgirl, being a kind of second-string female in a very macho comic where a grown man horses around with a teenage boy, she’s okay to make an example of. It’s fucked up, and despite that I think Oracle is a great and integral character to the Batman universe, I can’t read the comic anymore without thinking about the disservice that’s been done to this fictional person.

If you’re the type of person who doesn’t click hotlinks, then please visit Sarah Velez’s website at http://sarahhorrocks.wordpress.com/. She’s really talented.

Reaper Deserved to Die

I am not ashamed to admit that I found the Buffy the Vampire Slayer television show to be quite clever. There are about four obvious directions a narrative can take when given a title like that, and when the story instead goes a different, fifth direction, you’ve got to give it some props. Sure, it kind of collapsed at the end, despite attempts to invigorate it with gratuitous sex, and though in my opinion it never quite reached the heights I thought it capable of, Buffy… was a good show. It also helped create a hybrid genre: prime-time youth-oriented supernatural dramedy, a monstrous marketing cutlass that has never been wielded capably outside of the hands of Joss Whedon. It’s a lucrative demographic with a relatively low bar to hurdle, and since most of them employ the old reliable three-act storytelling formula, these programs can be churned out like bargain hot dogs sold behind the glue works factory.

I’m not really drawn to these supernatural serials, so it’s no surprise that I completely missed Reaper, a show that ran on television from 2007-2009. I vaguely recall commercials for the show, but the way it was presented coupled with my own assumptions about it turned me off completely. I became acquainted with Reaper recently through netflix.com’s video streaming option, since I had watched a couple of episodes of Mad Love and the same Jack Black-type dude is in both shows. I have to admit, I was initially impressed. Despite Kevin Smith’s involvement, I thought it employed a reasonably clever premise and had a tight cast of characters where everyone’s role was well-defined and purposeful. That was the first season.

To bring people who haven’t seen the show up to speed: Reaper is about a guy named Sam whose parents sold his soul to the devil before he was born. When he turns twenty-one, the devil shows up for his due and employs this hapless kid as a reaper–which is a bounty hunter who sends escaped souls back to Hell. The reaper works at a Home Depot knock off during the day with his two buddies, a chubby mischief-maker named Sock and a line-towing good boy named Ben. Plus, Sam has a retarded, easily manipulated boss and the girl of his dreams also works there just to mix it up a little. Reaper’s strength is the relationship between Sam and the devil, with whom there is always a catch. The roles of Sock and Ben as the reaper’s conscience are also enjoyable. The show didn’t blow me away, but I was enjoying it for the first season, especially towards the conclusion where we learn that Satan is Sam’s actual father.

Before tackling the mess that is the second and final season of Reaper, I’d like to say that Reaper was a really fucking bad name for this show. Who came up with that shit? When I think of a reaper, I think of the Grim Reaper, that scythe-swinging herald of death in a Jedi robe who escorts people to the Great Beyond. I don’t think of some whiny kid who sends souls of already dead people back to Hell because, apparently, Hell is just some kind of shitty jail that can be broken out of. I mean, the premise is dubious but that isn’t the problem. I’m willing to accept on blind faith that Hell is a revolving door prison and the devil employs shy nerdlings because he’s just an asshole like that. But why cock it up and call this kid a reaper? You could call him Soul Hunter or the Devil’s Henchman or Hell’s Retrieval Officer and people would have at least an inkling of what he’s about. That Reaper didn’t even try to include the word “devil” in the title is disheartening. The pun fodder there is tremendous.

From the beginning of the second season, all misgivings about the show’s presentation are made irrelevant as it quickly begins to go off kilter. Sam’s earth dad, who died at the end of the first season, comes back as a zombie for no good particular reason. A group of rebel demons seeking to unseat Satan attack Sam, and then one of them becomes Ben’s girlfriend. And then some old Indian dude gets hired at the fake Home Depot. Also there’s this other nauseating plot line where Sock wants to fuck his stepsister. There are so many confusing sub-stories and meaningless extra characters, I feel like Reaper’s second season existed solely to give some jobless industry people a paycheck. What was a tantalizing, promising premise becomes a slurry of confusing character introductions and conflicting plots that left me thinking, “I don’t think I want to finish the second season of Reaper.”

I would be remiss not to discuss Kevin Smith, or at least explain why I thought the show was okay initially despite Kevin Smith’s influence. In a word, Kevin Smith sucks. His ideas and execution are of a caliber that should get the highest grade in any public high school, but no more. Of his movies, I’ve only watched four or five–but what am I supposed to so, sit through twenty-plus hours of bullshit before I can effectively determine that Kevin Smith is a hack? Chasing Amy is like an eleven year-old’s understanding of relationships and homosexuality, Dogma is from the mindset of a kid who challenges the Catholic church right after confirmation. Kevin Smith is an emotionally stunted buffoon, whose thoughts and ideas should be relegated solely to comic book forums and conventions. And even at that, he’s not the worst offender in films. I mean, I can somewhat enjoy Mallrats despite its shitty pacing and unlikeable characters.

Yeah I’m Pretty Into Gotham Central

I don’t think I’ve ever watched a full episode of a police show other than Police Story starring Leslie Nielsen. I’m just not interested, really, in the interpersonal relationships of overworked police officers and their frightening, dangerous lives. I like some forensic detective shows and I’ve read plenty of true crime pulp paperbacks, but it’s the cop drama shit that leaves me cold. I love the theme song to Hill Street Blues yet never sat through an episode.

However, due to my uncontrollable man-lust for Batman stories, I was very interested to read Gotham Central, described as “NYPD Blue meets Batman” by DC’s own publicity copy. The series ran some years ago, I just never got around to reading it. I finally read the series in its collected hardback editions, and it’s pretty righteous.

I think that a series like this could only work for Batman (at least in the DC Universe) because Gotham is the only city where the police have the luxury of resenting its protective superhero. In Metropolis you’ve got Superman clobbering mountain-sized aliens and swatting away nuclear missiles while people are milling about on their lunch breaks. Even though he causes incredible amounts of property damage, what are you going to tell Superman? Knock it off? Besides leaving yourself open to innumerable monster attacks, Superman is someone you want to keep on your good side. Batman is just a man in a funny costume who beats the snot out of a lot of other human beings in funny costumes, which is what the cops are supposed to do. I think that this same series set in Metropolis would be an insider’s look into a Superman Fan Club. Gotham Central, not so much.

The story centers around the Major Crimes Unit of the Gotham Central Police Department, which is notorious for its corruption and inefficiency. The M.C.U., mostly hand-picked by Commissioner Gordon, are the only stalwart defenders of justice on the whole force, unwilling to take bribes or legal shortcuts to get their perps. They resent the Batman for, well, making them look silly essentially, and the rest of the GCPD resents the M.C.U. because they can’t be bought.

The first problem with this series is that Commissioner Gordon isn’t in it. Faithful followers of Batman will know why, but any casual fan who decides to pick up the series will want to see Jim Gordon. Harvey Bullock, the slovenly one-time foil for Batman also isn’t on the force, though he does figure prominently in one story arc. Again, there is a perfectly cogent reason why Bullock isn’t a cop, but if you don’t follow the overall Batman continuity religiously, then you might miss him. It could definitely be argued that Gotham Central is not a series for the occasional Batman reader, being that it’s a sort of meta story within the overall Batman series. But that’s lazy, I think. Any comic book should be able to stand on its own merits and appeal to new readers consistently, rather than manifest as some overworked, entrenched plot line only obsessive compulsive types can enjoy. Save the headier stuff for graphic novels.

A more interesting character omission is Batman, who makes a few cameo appearances but is otherwise barely seen at all. This is clearly by design, since Batman is considered to be a myth by most citizens of Gotham City and many of its rank-and-file police officers. The only ones who know for sure about Batman are the detectives in the M.C.U., being that they have control of the famous bat spotlight on top of the police station (though a citizen, an intern of the M.C.U., must turn it on and off since the GCPD publicly disavows any knowledge of the hero). Of course, Batman still figures prominently into every storyline, being that the detectives are either chasing down one of the members of his rogues’ gallery, or they are actually chasing him.

Gotham Central is a look behind the scenes of the Batman universe: what happens when supervillain evidence gets misplaced, how much emotional damage is caused by the haphazard actions of goofy-looking psychopaths, how police officers feel about being relegated to being Batman’s backup squad. Notably, Gotham Central ran during Batman’s War Games story arc, when the Caped Crusader commandeers the GCPD to combat a citywide gang war, resulting in some casualties and a lot of police resentment. The M.C.U. dismantles the spotlight on the station roof and emotions boil over as we see police officers’ helplessness against this high-flying vigilante. It was some compelling drama for a comic book.

And that it was a comic book is really my one gripe: Gotham Central did not need to be a comic book. It could have been served just as well–perhaps better–as a series of novels that delve into the inner minds of these characters. It might have also made a good cop show (and could have, if Warner Bros. hadn’t put a moratorium on Batman TV shows at the time). But for a comic book, there isn’t a whole lot of action and a there is quite a bit of people standing around saying “$@#!” to each other. However, as my girlfriend pointed out to me, would people have bothered to read it if it wasn’t a comic book? And the answer is that I would have, but I would be the exception. Batman is a comic book superhero, no matter how much I wish he was my pal.

As a fan of Batman, I really enjoyed Gotham Central. The writing was tight and well-paced, the art served the story well, and I pretty much devoured the whole series in two evenings. The series ends on a sad note as the DC universe started to reorder itself through the incomprehensible events of Final Crisis, which ironically put Jim Gordon back as Commissioner of the police department and reinstated Harvey Bullock’s badge. So it’s like Gotham Central was all a dream, a nuanced, gritty dream where everyone speaks in symbols and punctuation.

Here’s How We Know that Television Writers Have Zero Fucking Integrity

It can certainly be said that I watch too much television. I’m an old hat at watching too much television, having put in four- and five-hour days of watching TV before I was in junior high school. You’ll never find me extolling television’s many virtues: truth be told, it has very few. However, when you want to be passively entertained, and you don’t mind being subtly mocked by the very thing that’s entertaining you, television is your best bet. Advanced television viewers can suffuse themselves in the hyper-irony of MTV reality programming, but most of us will have to do with the idiot box’s written offerings.

How I Met Your Mother on CBS is about one and a half notches better than your average moronic sitcom. The only thing that sets it apart from other programs, except for more recently-debuted shows which are ripping it off, is that we already know how the series ends: the main character meets the woman of his dreams and marries her. How I Met Your Mother is actually told in retrospect, a narrator relating the events which led up to meeting the mother of his children to his children. It’s a reasonably clever premise, one which demands continuity and therefore regular viewing. Often an episode will employ storytelling devices you don’t see too much of in prime time. Plus, Neil Patrick Harris is a very capable, funny actor: I dare say the show would be unwatchable without him.

So we’ve been going on for however many millions of seasons already, each episode getting closer and closer to the Mystery Woman that is the lead character’s future (or present?) wife. There have been hints throughout the series, points where the future married couple have brushed past each other at a party or whatever, but from the vantage point of the viewer, we haven’t met this woman yet. I assumed that, for the sake of keeping continuity and an overall story arc that wouldn’t just peter out and diminish the entire series, it was all coming to a preordained conclusion, hopefully sometime before I start collecting Medicaid. I mean, these television writers, they’re artists too, right? They got into the business because they had a bunch of great ideas to share with the public, they wouldn’t want to belittle their own talents by beating this thin premise into a dead horse? Right?

Wrong. I’ve just found out that How I Met Your Mother has been extended to the 2012-2013 season. What this means up front is that we’ve got at least another year and a half before we meet this invisible, fertile dream woman. But the implication is that the writers of this show have not devised a cohesive, finite storyline, but just a stupid premise, a lazy storytelling device which can be extended or shortened at will. This shouldn’t be a big surprise, but it’s sort of disheartening. The show isn’t How I Met Your Mother, it’s How I Milked Your Studio. It’s not the story of these characters, but the story of how the writers and producers can buy their fourth summer homes.

Most people reading this probably wonder why I am assailing a show like How I Met Your Mother in the first place. It doesn’t profess to be high art, it’s a diversion, a fictional story that impacts nothing real unless we allow it to. But I know that it isn’t like this everywhere. The best example I can think of is to compare the BBC and US versions of The Office. The BBC version is two seasons long and only becomes redundant by the end of the second season. The US version on NBC has been running for-fucking-ever and is painful to watch these days. We could demand more, and not even a lot more, just a little more. How about instead of pitching unending premises, people start pitching tight story lines? Three’s Company put the sitcom premise shit to bed thirty years ago.

Big Bang Theory Isn’t That Fucking Good

I’ve been watching seasons of the CBS sitcom Big Bang Theory on DVD recently. It’s a decent sitcom with a serviceable premise: four genius-level nerds with differing and severe social disorders cope with life in Los Angeles, city of beautiful people. Plus, a hot chick lives across the hall from two of them which adds to the stammering merriment. It’s pretty satisfying in the way I feel that most television should be: each episode is fairly well encapsulated and the situation resets to its default by the time each half hour is up. In the current season I’m watching, season three, the main character begins dating the blond woman from across the hall, but this is no more a progression in the story as it is fodder for several more ludicrous premises.

So I’m pretty okay with Big Bang Theory. However, I find it unbelievable that it’s the highest-rated sitcom on Thursday nights and one of the highest-rated comedies on television, period. Thursday night, my patient readers and millions of television watchers will recall, is when NBC runs three hours of comedy programming, at least an hour of which is worthwhile. And the kicker is that one of the more worthwhile shows, Community, goes up against Big Bang Theory head-to-head each week, and loses.

If you’ve never seen either show, well you’ve probably stopped reading this essay by now. But if you’ve seen both shows, then you might be as befuddled as I. Using my New York myopia, I can see how Big Bang Theory might be more palatable to middle America than Community, but the former blows the latter away in ratings every week, practically quadruple the number of viewers. And part of me (the same New York myopia, just a different facet) feels like Big Bang Theory wouldn’t sit will with the Bible Belt and fundamentalist America. I mean, the show’s theme song describes the creation of the universe through the big bang theory and goes on to detail evolution. The main characters are physicists trying to determine the behaviors of subatomic particles. And there was even one episode where the most autistic character decried Christmas as a pointless sham. I don’t think that would fly in Kentucky.

Seems to me that the real culprit here is the Nielsen ratings system, a technique developed by Arthur Nielsen in the 1920s to establish demographic groups, then applied to radio in the 1930s, and finally to television in the 1950s. Even armchair statisticians would be thoroughly impressed with Nielsen’s model, which extrapolates the entire nation’s television viewing habits from a small sample. There’s only one flaw with the Neilsen ratings system, and that is the system doesn’t really work.

I think it worked many decades ago when the sampling was much lower. To have a television in 1950 was a big deal, they were expensive and often entire families and groups of neighbors huddled around them to watch the flickering screen. There were only three broadcast networks which ran during daylight hours; programming was limited. Now, most homes with televisions have two or three in them. The kids have their own, the parents have one in the living room, one in the bedroom. Often, people could be watching PBS downstairs and American Idol upstairs. So the notion of “household viewing” doesn’t apply as much any more. It didn’t even apply when I was a kid and would be watching Growing Pains in my room while my parents watched Some Boring Foreign Movie downstairs, and my grandmother would watch Dynasty or Some Shit on the first floor.

But the main problem with the Nielsen ratings system is the stupidly small size of the absolutely not random sampling of the populace by which they make their determinations. There are twenty-five thousand households participating in the Nielsen system–all of them by choice, all of them aware that they are contributing to these ratings–and that only constitutes 0.02% of the total households in America. So 0.02% of the television watchers in America determine which show is most popular, and therefore which show can charge the most for advertising. I don’t give a shit what anyone says, Community is far and away a better show than Big Bang Theory, though some manufacturers might not bode well the idea of advertising during a prime-time television show where the main character wears hair gel. And so these companies might have a vested interest in perpetuating the outmoded Nielsen technique.

Or maybe not. It may not be a great conspiracy, merely a bumbling, shitty system that we’re saddled with, even though the technology exists today that can determine viewers’ habits to a much more specific degree. Our own cable and digital satellite companies know more about America’s viewing habits than the Nielsen ratings system, for crap’s sake. It seems unfair that a relatively witty and creative show like Community must be relegated to obscurity, and probably an early cancellation, because this one statistics company has turned its sights on a lot of hardcore Big Bang Theory fans instead of taking a better sample. However, the fact that we’re using this antiquated system does give me some hope that perhaps people aren’t as entranced by American Idol as the numbers purport. Now I’m really kidding myself.

Well Parks & Rec is a Pretty Awesome Show

I was raised on the situation comedy, and by God that’s where I think television should shine. When crafted well, these half hour slices of life are so satisfying in their composition that it’s hard to tell which came first, the television or the television sitcom (NOTE: it was the television). It’s kind of disheartening to see how reality programming has obliterated much of the pre-scripted work that once dominated prime time. When you really look at it, most of these reality type game shows are merely opportunities for us to laugh and jeer at our fellow Americans. There’s nothing wrong with that, but we could do with fewer hours a week of it.

Television’s least-watched network is running three hours of situation comedy on Thursday nights, traditionally “their” night from when The Cosby Show was on, and perhaps even before that. It strikes me as a pretty ballsy “all in” kind of move, an attempt to plant their flag against other networks’ ratings powerhouses like Big Bang Theory and American Idol. I’ve been watching many of these NBC shows lately, and I declare that an hour and a half of this three-hour block of programming is worth your scrutiny!

It starts at 8 PM with Community, starring Joel McHale and Chevy Chase and other people you’ve probably never heard of. If you’re like me, you’ve noticed this show for the past year or so when it was plugged on Talk Soup, McHale’s show on the E! Network. Like everything plugged on that program, I ignored the publicity completely, until this year when I decided to watch an episode of Community, and learned that the reason it’s called Community is because it’s about a bunch of disparate people in a study group together at a community college. It’s a pretty good gimmick, at that: having taken classes at a community college, I can say that it might be the only place where people just starting out, or starting over, or just spending their retirement time all combine together to argue about dead philosophers. Upon starting to watch this show, I was afraid that I might have trouble taking Joel McHale’s smirking mick face seriously. And it is a problem. However, his character is pretty self-aware and in more recent episodes he’s mercifully been given less camera time. In fact, the most recent episodes have been where this show shines, as Community breaks the typical sitcom format and satirizes other popular movies and television programs. I could probably write a whole essay about this show, and perhaps I will eventually, but for now it should suffice to say that this show is worth watching.

After Community is a new show, having started mid-season, called Perfect Couples. I wanted to like this show a lot because it features Olivia Munn, who has not only induced many boners from yours truly, but is someone I think is reasonably funny and talented, and who I’d like to see succeed. This show is about three couples that are totally different from one another: you’ve got this totally combative couple, then this totally new age couple where the dude is all sensitive, and then a hapless “control” couple that routinely deals with shit from the other four assholes. It’s about as boring and stupid as it sounds. I don’t believe it’s really a problem with the acting, but that the premise is thin and a little ham-fisted, even for fans of romantic comedies. This show also features the waitress from It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, incidentally, though she sucks here for sure.

At nine o’clock, you’ve got The Office. The Office is NBC’s longest-running current sitcom accomplishment, but I think only the most die-hard fans wouldn’t say that the show hasn’t run its course. I don’t even watch it on Thursdays anymore, I catch it a day or two later On Demand or on hulu.com because my girlfriend isn’t interested in watching. I’m curious to see what happens with Michael Scott and Holly, but less and less as the weeks drag on and there is little in the way of interesting progress. And has there been a more annoyingly sweet television couple than Jim and Pam? The only satisfying solution to this show would be if Jim steps in front of a speeding bus one morning and turns Pam into an instant widow. If you’re caught up in the stupid melodrama like I am, then you can join me in my shame, but if you haven’t been watching The Office up to now, then there’s no point in starting. I can’t imagine this program will last another season past the next, which would still be about four seasons too many.

At nine-thirty is my favorite show of these Thursday night offerings, Parks and Recreation. This is created by the same guys who did the US version of The Office and features the same phony shaky camera that is well overdone in movies and television by now. Yet this show seems to use it to good effect, or is good despite its effect, because I think its funny as shit. It’s about local government employees working for the Parks and Recreation department in Pawnee, Indiana, but the real payoff from this show comes when you immerse yourself into the stupid world of Pawnee. There are a couple of other nice things about the show which set it apart from sitcoms playing the same evening, like the genuine friendship between Leslie and Ann, which is unlike other catty relationships between women seen on much of TV. I highly recommend this show, I’ll probably write more about it later and repeatedly, as I intend to be the first internet geek to declare that this show is finished once it fails to make me guffaw appropriately in the near future.

After Parks & Rec is NBC’s other long-running successful sitcom, 30 Rock. I didn’t watch this show for years because 1) I kept forgetting when it was on, and 2) a show by members of Saturday Night Live about the behind-the-scenes stress of putting on a show just like Saturday Night Live, as I understood it, seemed too “meta” to me. 30 Rock is technically about the background of putting on a weekly sketch comedy show before a live audience, but the comedy is in the surreal situations and outrageous things Tracy “Tracy Jordan” Morgan does and says. It looks like this show is also past its prime, but it’s still pretty funny and worth checking out. Of all the shows mentioned in this essay, it requires the least investment; you’ll probably find an individual episode funny whether you follow 30 Rock faithfully or not.

The final show in this Thursday night laff-fest is Outsourced, which I’ve never seen. Chances are, you haven’t either. I mean, if you’ve faithfully watched the previous five comedies as per NBC’s recommended allotment, your eyeballs are pretty fried by now. It’s likely that you haven’t watched two and a half hours of straight television, but you get my point. In any case, I have enough stupid shows to follow and I don’t care about this one. It could be hysterical and I’ll never know. Unless it gets syndicated on cable or something.

Who the Fuck Decided Ryan Reynolds Would Be a Good Hal Jordan in the Green Lantern Movie?!

I know what you’re thinking. “Who the hell are Ryan Reynolds, Hal Jordan, and Green Lantern?” If you’re part of the one percent of the world that cares about comic book superheroes and their characterization in other media, then you might be thinking, “Here we go again, another vitriolic blog about how untalented Ryan Reynolds is and how unfit he is to wear the emerald ring of the Green Lantern.” If that’s you, I’m picturing you wearing a plastic viking helmet and a tight Camel cigarettes t-shirt from 1992 while sipping a 64 oz. Slurpee from 7-11. Just so you know.

This is not another essay about how Ryan Reynolds is a talentless hack who isn’t fit to wear Green Lantern’s domino mask. I mean, Ryan Reynolds is a talentless hack, but that isn’t why he’s poorly suited for the role. It’s not like I expected Harrison Ford to get it, there’s no point in using a good actor for a role that consists mainly of feigning astonishment at the cgi objects your magic ring will create in post-production. No, my problem isn’t with Ryan Reynolds being Green Lantern at all, it’s with his being Hal Jordan. Because anyone that knows anything about Green Lantern would say that Ryan Reynolds would make a better Guy Gardner.

It’s not exactly common knowledge that there’s more than one Green Lantern. There are dozens, in fact, each belonging to the Green Lantern Corps, an interstellar police force that keeps people from parking spaceships in the wrong dimension or something. Space is divided into sectors, and each sector has one Green Lantern to patrol it, except (of course) whatever sector contains Earth. For some reason, our sector requires several Green Lanterns to patrol it, Hal Jordan being only the first (well, second really…but I’m not going to get into that bullshit again). There’s also John Stewart, a rare Black superhero that doesn’t have the word “Black” in his name, and there’s a relatively new Green Lantern named Kyle Rayner, who is a cartoonist or something. There was even a chick Green Lantern named Jade and a leprechaun Green Lantern who served for a special issue called Ganthet’s Tale.

You really have to wonder why unemployment is so high when the Green Lantern Corps is hiring left and right. Who isn’t a member of this goddamned space clique? Anyway, yet another Earthling member is named Guy Gardner. He’s kind of the hard ass of the Green Lantern Gang, he’s got red hair (and is therefore a fiery, temperamental Irish lad) and wears a leather jacket and generally clashes with authority. He’s kind of a wry prankster with a violent streak, which is exactly the kind of role Ryan Reynolds was born to play! He’d be like Van Wilder meets George Lutz from The Amityville Horror. His brand of quipping douchebag would fit the role nicely.

Why there are so many fucking Green Lanterns patrolling Earth is really beyond me. The Justice League cartoon switched over to John Stewart as their primary Green Lantern because the producers knew that his being Black is the only thing that makes the character remotely interesting. With this summer’s movie we’ve got a mediocre actor portraying a fairly boring white dude. I hope there’s a lot of space boob in this movie.