But this one’s the weirdest, by far.

In case any of you labor under the misapprehension that wrestling is real, this clip should resolve that matter.

Here’s the gist:  In the aftermath of a miscarriage, a husband cheats on his wife.  In attempt to reconcile, they move with their teenage daughter from Boston to Los Angeles… and into a Murder House.  It has literal demons to compliment their metaphorical ones.

The horror is overblown, and derivative… and compelling.  An episode of AHS tastes like a slice from a cake baked from ingredients borrowed from LOST, Scream, Twin Peaks, and True Blood (the twisting-your-partner’s-head-180-on-her-torso-as-you-sex-her-while-covered-in-blood True Blood.)

Plus, there’s an Extra Ingredient that several reviews have called “psychosexual,” but which you wouldn’t be wrong in labeling “f-ed up.”  You’ve seen sexually threatening ghost-demons before, and you’ve even seen sexually threatening ghost-demons reproducing with humans, but you’ve never seen sexually threatening ghost-demons reproducing with humans while sporting a latex bondage gimp suit.

It’s too light a word to suggest AHS pays homage to numerous classic films. (The score doesn’t just borrow from that of Psycho; they actually licensed the score from Psycho.)  So unabashed is the willingness to mooch from this and that horror movie, and so stong is that f-ed-up Extra Ingredient being added to the recipe, the result somehow comes out feeling new. I guess I don’t care if the ghost story I’m hearing at the camp fire is unoriginal, as long as its being well told.

So that’s what’s bothering me.  Is this being well told?  Or is it a rehash of everything we’ve seen before, with lots of Extra Ingredient splashed throughout?  On one hand, I’m drawn to this show because it’s unlike anything I’ve seen (which is different that calling it original) and I’m excited any time television can offer something new.  Then again, I worry for our society when we’re all so overexposed to storytelling that depravity is the only direction left to explore.  In a world with so many channels that one must shock to stand out, Extra Ingredient can be applied too liberally, blurring the lines between trash, art, and porn.  This morning, Entertainment Weekly gave Human Centipede 2 a B+.

The obvious question is whether the writers can sustain horror-movie tension episode after episode.  And even more in doubt is whether a satisfying conclusion can be reached.  After the blue balls served up by the finale of LOST, are we willing to tolerate being manipulated by AHS?

The creators, Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuck, also created Glee together, and Murphy was behind Nip/Tuck.  It’s too early to draw conclusions about AHS, but there are commonalities between the other two shows–no matter how different they are otherwise–that might provide hints in what we can expect here.  Both Glee and Nip/Tuck fill their worlds with largely unlikable characters.  Or, at least, those characters can turn on a dime to become unlikable, as long as it serves the tension of a scene.  Exposition and story logic will be tolerated only if they don’t get in the way of the sensational bits.  Camp is to be embraced, and premises are heavy-handedly stretched to their logical extremes.  Character consistency will be happily thrown to the wind if it can set up a song or a surgery, or, I’m guessing, a ghost going boo.

All of which leaves me fearing I will have the same relationship with American Horror Story that I do with Nip/Tuck and Glee: after each episode, I’ll curse myself for having wasted another hour, swear that I’m done with the show for good this time, and tune in the following week.

Revised version of a posting originally from
May 8, 2007.

–

Sometimes the title of a post speaks for itself. Here are my thoughts about some of the worst changes to Television over the last 25 years or so.

#10.  Inescapable commercials
Commercials are going to be a theme for this list. We’ll start with the fact that they now bleed into the shows themselves. You do your duty and watch your two minutes of messages from our sponsors. But now the advertising bleeds into the actual content. It’s harmless enough that the network pops their logo onto the lower right corner. Heck, it’s actually almost helpful when you’re channel surfing. Not helpful? The motion graphic ads overlaying the bottom third of your screen telling you five or six times during your show about how you should watch some other show. I’m already doing what you want, watching your network, is that not enough for you any more?  (A fantastic parody arose, back when Joe Millionaire was frequently chased across the bottom of the screen by money-grubbing female suitors. The Simpsons did their own, animated version of the ad, with Homer distracted by the intrusion.)

#9.  Closing credits… with MORE commercials
Look, somebody made that entertainment you’re watching, for free.  Time was, a comfortable theme song outro would usher out the show, and the mother each contributor to the production would get a split second of screen time pride.  Instead, the credits now rush by, accelerated to a barely legible pace, squished into the half of the screen not being occupied by yet another commercial.  Heaven forfend the viewer get up and pee before s/he’s hooked into the next show, or at least treated to a seventeenth reminder of what will be playing later that night.

#8.  ”Supersizing” and off-hour programming
At first it seemed like an actual bonus. Networks were offering extra minutes of your favorite shows. What could be better? But soon, especially in combination with shows that run just a couple minutes late, it’s clear that the networks’ true motivation is to trap us into staying for their other shows. Last week, thanks to supersizing and an E.R. wedding event, Scrubs was on from like 9:18 to 9:57. Sunday, the DVR wouldn’t let me record Entourage at 10 because my housemate’s recording of Desperate Housewives runs until 10:02. Come on, networks. Give us a break, and go back to fitting it into a grid.

#7.  “For Ordering Information…”
This one is more a problem of the cable and satellite companies than of Television itself, but it proves an annoyance to my viewing experience, so I’m including it. When I sign up for TV, and I get a hundred channels, or whatever, I want THOSE channels. I don’t want to see a blank screen accounting for each channel I DON’T get, encouraging me to dial an 800 number so that I will get it. Plus, empty call-to-order screens are no longer isolated to the 600 and 700 tiers, as they once were. Now there are channels I don’t get randomly littered throughout my Time-Warner offering. When I want to surf, I want to surf, and all the boxing pay-per-views and Latin Disney channels get in the way of that.

#6.  Reality
This one’s a little obvious, but neither can it go unsaid. Sure, I’m severely biased, as someone who wants to write for television; the fewer scripted shows, the fewer opportunities for me to get a job somewhere. Yes, the pendulum has finally started swinging the other way, and prime time reality TV is on the outs. Not soon enough, to my mind. But we still see reality shows, with their minuscule production costs, plaguing summer programming, cheaper for the nets than even paying the royalties on a repeat. I’d rather see a rerun, frankly, than the latest installation of people whoring and humiliating themselves.  Let us not forget the reality show’s ugly cousin, the prime time game show. Who Wants to Be a Millionaire nearly ended ABC when they relied on it too heavily. Now we have NBC happy to put Deal or No Deal into any available slot, happy for the high mid-range ratings, rather than testing out new programming.  People, all I can say is please. Please stop watching these shows. Like so many things in life, if we ignore them, they will go away.

My mom likes to insist that she never watches reality television. Well, just American Idol. Idol is such a ratings juggernaut that the other networks just get out of its way. Tuesdays and Wednesdays are owned by Idol, and no one even pretends they can compete. Do you think Lost came back to Wednesdays at 10, instead of its previous 9 p.m. slot, because ABC wanted to run lots and lots of According to Jim? Nope. So I lose a job opportunity on not just one network, but also its competitors.

Stop watching. For my sake.

#5.  ”Stay tuned…”
You want me to stick around through the last commercial. I get it. Scenes from next week’s episode? That might be worth a couple minutes more of my attention. A “bonus” scene from tonight’s Battlestar Galactica? Pretty weenie, and I wish you’d stop, but at least it’s something. However, telling me to stick around for more My Name Is Earl, and then there isn’t any? Not cool. That’s called lying.

#4.  The death of the theme song
We’re on commercials again, and this is really a corollary to #1, but it deserves its own mention. Because networks have pushed the commercials to be longer and longer, leaving producers less and less time for their actual content, theme songs have had to make room.  But that scrapes at the soul of a TV show! Would Cheers have been half as comfortable without its theme song? Would we remember the underlying love between Archie and Edith if we didn’t hear them sing before each episode? Would the A-Team have stirred my 10-year-old adrenal glands without the help of its opening song?Now we’re down to a super-compressed song with a few credits.  LOST gives us a theme song with one note. More like a sound effect, really.

I liked TV better when I could go where everybody knows my name.

#3.  Sensationalism
I hate local news. It actually angers me. I hate its ratings-driven fluff-mongering. I hate cable news for its polarizing over-examination of poppy “issues.” Remember when news was a straight-forward presentation of facts, ratings be damned? Neither do I, but I’m pretty sure that somewhere in my childhood, that’s what it was like. I get my news from the internet, BBC radio, and The Daily Show, which has oddly become one of the more respectable talk politics sources on the air.

#2.  The sound byte
Speaking of important news, when is the last time you heard a political candidate offer more substance than a talking point? Political debates are now a joke, with their 90-second statements and 30-second rebuttals, all for the sake of (supposedly) good television.

#1.  The commercial-to-programming ratio
The pilot episode of All in the Family is 26 minutes long. Today, a new sitcom gets 20 minutes, 30 seconds. No wonder no one wants to watch sitcoms any more. Producers don’t have time to tell a story! And in syndication, episodes sometimes get cut even tighter, leaving room for more commercials, at the expense of the jokes.When you catch a sitcom today, you spend 32% of that time on commercials. Hour-longs fare a little better, with only 27% commercial, but that’s still a ridiculously large fraction of your viewing time. Is it any wonder that HBO has done well with its original programming?

But let me not be merely the critic who grumbles about problems while offering no solution. I’m happy to offer networks a viable alternative. I get that it’s a business, and I get that this change in programming time comes from the continual conglomeration of networks into bottom-line corporations.  However, in the business world, competitive advantage goes to those who differentiate. With every network cutting deeper into programming time, the way to differentiate would be to do the opposite. Have FEWER commercials!

Advertisers currently insist that they should be paying lower rates to broadcast commercials, since DVR technology means people fast forward past the ads. But would you insist on fast forwarding through commercials if there were fewer of them? Or if there were less of the insipid ones, and more of the clever ones? It’s quite satisfying to watch an episode of Entourage or Weeds, with their 28+ minutes of quality storytelling. Imagine programs like that scheduled on a prime time major network. You’d watch that, wouldn’t you? So the networks can charge super premium rates for the one commercial, but it’s worth it to the advertisers because we audience members don’t even pick up our remotes when a good Super Bowl commercial plays.  Win-win-win.

Networks, feel free to give me all the credit once you’ve implemented my idea.

I’ll be the guy over here, not holding his breath.

It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia is coming off probation.  It’s still uneven, but the Kitten Mittons episode earned many points.

The Middle becomes a show I’ll follow.  It’s only favorite comedy number four or five, but I’ve genuinely laughed out loud, particularly at the characters of the two youngest children.

A little housekeeping: Weeds has lagged for me.  Where’s the show about a housewife who sells pot?  I’ve moved it down to “On the Bubble,” and could give up next season.  Meanwhile, I finally got through all the episodes of The Sopranos (which has me drafting a post on the top ten best series finales) and Sex and the City (and the movie, which, evidently, should not be criticized around my roommates.)

Giving the guy 5 nights of PRIME TIME a week? That was perhaps shrewd.   Times are tough.  Jay Leno costs about half for a week what a good show would cost for a night.  Maybe it’s a matter of standing out from the crowd, in a time slot dominated by procedural law, medicine, and crime.  And the minor hit the network will take for looking like they care more about the bottom line than about creating world class entertainment is probably survivable.

But to cancel John Wells-run Southland? Despite it’s reasonable critical success?  Before it even got a chance to begin a new season?  Boooo.

As I writer, I’m not missing the double insult here.  First, scrap five weekly hours of scripted entertainment, meaning that many fewer jobs for us.  And then go cut a decent show from the new Writers’ Guild president, even though Mercy and Trauma are doing worse with critics, and struggling with ratings. NBC is lucky they have 30 Rock and The Office, or I might my tuner might never land at their frequency.

Brothers (FOX)
Has everything. Except laughs.

The Cleveland Show (FOX)
Jeffersons to Peter’s Archie?

The Forgotten (ABC)
Neither compelling nor believable.

Hank (ABC)
Laugh track’s taste sucks.

Mercy (NBC)
Every medical show, redone.

The Middle (ABC)
Huh. That didn’t suck.

Shark Tank (ABC)
Crap. Me, watching reality?!

Stargate Universe (SciFi)
Stargate: You’re no Galactica.

Trauma (NBC)
So many explosions! Meh.

Yo tambien.

Whatever your politics, few would accuse FOX news of actual journalism.  (Nor, any more, does MSNBC deserve the right to the word “news.”) Kudos to them, I guess, for being entertaining/”informative” enough to maintain eyeballs and make a buck.

But, man… The above theatrics from last week features the standard untruthful and inflammatory nature: “operate in a manner opposing my philosophy” I guess is the new definition of “disenfranchise.”  Yet amidst the bloviating, what really offends my sensibilities is Beck’s horrible “comedic” style.  (Sorry to use so many quotation marks, but this issue seems to beg them.  Am I wrong?  He thinks he’s funny, right?)

Here then, some advice to Mr. Beck from a comedy writer:

• If you’ve only got one joke, you don’t milk it a half a dozen times.  You get in and get out.  Or, ideally, you write some more jokes.  Your sarcasm about Cuba was the best writing.  Notice, no gas can.
• Don’t tip your hand and spoil your illusion.  I guess if you need to remind us it’s only water, for lawyers’ sake, then fine, have the little cartoon happen.  But lose the big white sign reading, ‘water’ from the canister.  It’s redundant.  Either way, you’re removing the steam from your gag; getting matches became pointless.
• Instead, douse your poor chump once at the beginning, really well, as you list offenses.  Get all the comedy from that moment possible, all at once.  THEN, spend the rest of your rant waving around a barbecue lighter as the chump cringes in fear that you’ll oafishly get close enough to ignite him.  See how much funnier that is already?  Plus, you drive home your point of carelessness in government.  THEN remind us it was only water, AFTER the whole gag is over.
• Don’t confuse your metaphor.  Is the chump uncomfortable because it’s gasoline, or because it’s cold?
• “We can disagree on policies… but some of us don’t agree on the policies.”  Huh?
• Really?  Slavery?
• Your landing needs work.  Calling for “and end to the games” doesn’t make sense, y’know… in the middle of a game.  Try a callback to your earlier gag, such as finally actually lighting your chump on fire.  You calm down, the threat of ignition is over, the chump exhales his relief but then you accidentally light him on fire.  Now, as he runs screaming in pain via whatever comedic special effect you’d like, or offscreen with sound effects, you drive home your point that this is how much Obama cares about the average American.

See?  Fixing the comedy even stengthened your thesis.  Should you need any help, Mr. Beck, I hire out as a consultant.  To anyone.  (Although in full disclosure, you I would charge extra.)

Kings was rich in mythology, but slow.  After the groundwork in the first hour, it was the duplicity and intrigue that showed up in the second hour that offers the most promise that it’ll get good.

Castle was cute.  Not cute enough to add to my overfull list of shows I follow, but if it were my genre, I’d be interested.  Remember Moonlighting?  That’s what they’re setting in motion.

Better Off Ted has promise, especially in its rich overall tone, but didn’t deliver the funny in the pilot.  This may have been a case of all the funniest jokes being spoiled by the trailers.

Scrubs phoned it in.  Sigh.

Lost was a serious filler episode.  Some of the latest big questions seem like contrivances just to make plot happen.  (Why did Sun land thirty years in the future?  Why was Sayid miles from the landing point of Jack, Hurley, and Kate?)

Dollhouse got better. Not awesome yet, but markedly better.

The Battlestar finale was a loveable trainwreck.  The structure of the two-hours was all over the place, and there was a whole lot that was unsatisfying.  But, like in most of the series, you didn’t care about logic or unresolved questions as much as you cared about this cool Art taking place before your eyes.  Mary McDonald is a fantastic actor, and Edward James Olmos made me cry.

Dollhouse promises a rich mythology all of its own, apropos of a Joss Whedon story.  (Oops…)  The show centers around some super-secret corporation that hires out “actives” to the ultra-wealthy, providing them custom-built personnel perfect for handling extreme situations (or, it seems, dates.)  These agents literally get a new personality and skill set implanted in their brains, specially created for a mission, overwriting all previous memories.

But there are hints that the technology, the people, and the system behind everything are far from perfect.  The Dollhouse is under FBI investigation, its staff question the morality of what they’re doing, and trailer for the season promises us a rogue agent.  Some of the more interesting scenes in the show featured agents milling about in their blank state between missions, almost lacking in any personality at all.

In short, there are promises that we won’t only have pretty people and cool action, but also plenty of damage and consequence, exactly what one wants to see from a Joss Whe– uh… from a good pilot.

Production felt slick and together, as if we were in the middle of a series that had been on the air for a long time.  You might not have distinguished it from production design on the later years of Angel.  (I swear I’m trying, but the comparisons are hard not to make.  At least I’m not drooling, right?)  Many of the names in the credits will look familiar to Whedonverse fans, meaning there’s a team here ready to hit the ground running.

My main concern is casting.  For Dollhouse to maintain as a series, we’ll need hundreds of characters from Eliza Dushku.  She was perfect as Faith.  But her performance here didn’t have all the notes needed to put Dollhouse‘s pilot on par with Buffy or Alias.  I wouldn’t say Duskhu’s not up for it. But  I will say she’ll need to grow as an actor. If there’s anyone who can make that happen, it’s Joss. I LOVE JOSS! GO, JOSS, GO!  Welcome back to TV, buddy!

Awww, dammit…

Best aspect: Hints at the rich fabric yet to come.  Particularly intriguing was Amy Acker’s subdued performance as a Dollhouse technician/doctor, her facial scars begging one to ask about the story behind them.

Worst aspect: The gratuitous titillation and obnoxious network packaging.  It was all a bit much, and certainly proof that FOX is a bit out of touch with the programming they’re offering.  (Please, please, FOX, don’t Firefly this show.) Dushku with Summer Glau reminding the camera that we’re in for Friday nights of ass-kicking hot girls insults the intelligence of the audience tuning in to these shows. (Never mind that ass-kicking hot girls IS half the reason that they… we… are tuned in.  Just don’t insult us!)

Verdict: Foregone conclusion that I’ll watch every episode.  The degree of difficulty here is ridiculously high, seemingly offering us characters with no consistency, by design.  How do I root for a protagonist whose emotional stakes are not her own?  But this is a writing team who knew the difficulties going in, so I’m betting we’re good.  Even if they fail miserably, watching will be worth my time.

Odds of success: Joss Whedon has a built-in audience of hard-core devoteds.  The Sci-Fi network (not to mention years of datelessness) have trained geeks that Friday night is their time for television.  Battlestar Galactica is on its last episodes, leaving that Friday night crowd looking for a place to land, and that Dollhouse is smartly paired with Sarah Connor Chronicles.  Meanwhile, FOX programming is now in the hands of Kevin Reilly, the same man who gave The Office and 30 Rock the time they needed to bloom over at NBC.  Bare minimum and most likely, we have the makings of a cult hit.