The True Death

Our long, sexy, national nightmare is over.  This past summer, perennial WTF generator True Blood finally met the True Death and concluded a seven season-long run on HBO.  And while I can’t say that I’ll really miss the show, I am going to miss always knowing that there was something on TV that would make me shake my head and mutter, “well, okay…” 

True Blood started ridiculously strong back in 2007.  In an era where every single story emphasized the misunderstood, sympathetic, chaste, teenage nature of vampires, True Blood’s malicious, randy bloodsuckers were a breath of fresh air.  There was no “romantic” staring into each other’s eyes scenes, no “they just don’t understand us” soliloquies set to classical music.   You got the sense that the entire cast and crew of the show read about 30 pages of an Anne Rice novel and said to themselves, “well this is boring as hell” and then immediately got to filming a butt sex scene while covered in blood.

YES!

Because the show’s mission was always to showcase adults, the initial storylines functioned as a mature, if telegraphed, metaphor not for growing up or some other theme ripped from Joss Whedon’s notes, but for social issues like racism, anti-gay bigotry, and the American South’s continuing struggles emerging into the 21^st century.  (Sorry, southern readers.  You know it’s true.)  And while the show was never subtle about its issues (the opening credits featured a billboard sign reading “God hates fangs”), it made up for its lack of grace with original storytelling and fresh visuals that hadn’t been used before.  If you haven’t seen the show, the first time a vampire is staked it will make your mouth fall open. 

The first season featured an erstwhile murder mystery as a framing story to introducing us to a world where vampires have “come out of the coffin” (what is this thing you call subtlety?) and organized, more or less, under two factions – those who want to integrate into society and live among humans thanks to a new synthetic substance called True Blood that mimics human blood thus negating the need for vampires to feed off humans, and those vampires who still believe that they are the superior race and that humans should be subjugated, not cohabitated with.  Later seasons ran with this tension, showing more and more about how vampire society worked and the ways in which the rest of the world had adapted or not, including the rise of “fangbangers” who are humans who have a sexual proclivity with vampires and drinking blood and even vampire-focused legal offices that only operate at night and help vampires who have been undead for many years figure out what their legal rights are to property owned while they were living.  Add that to a healthy dose of graphic sexuality, and you're at least going to be entertained for an hour each week. 

Did I mention the ho-yay?

All of this world-building made for fascinating watching.  Even as the show began to jump off the rails around its fourth or fifth season, seeing how the creators imagined how the most mundane aspects of everyday life would be managed in a world where vampires were real (a specialty airline service with UV-blocking windows caters to the vampires who wish to travel abroad) was always still interesting.  And if you couldn’t get into the subplots involving werewolves, fairies, shapeshifters, or witches, you always at least had the recurring southern gothic drama between the townspeople of Bon Temps, Louisiana, to keep you occupied. 

Unlike the characters, however, True Blood was not destined for an eternal life and began to age.  Plotlines got more and more ridiculous, the show developed an unhealthy tendency toward melodrama such that the speechifying and campy grandstanding of the later seasons stand in stark contrast to the more nuanced and, at times, genuinely scary first few seasons.  Where the first two seasons played with the audience’s expectations about reality and mystery, the show in its later life preferred to keep strictly to over-the-top plot contrivances and characters behaving like characters instead of people. 

An assemblance of well-developed, three-dimensional characters that were sadly never seen again after season three. 

Nothing is more illustrative of this trend that season seven’s insistence upon finding a way to bring lead characters Sookie and Bill back together.  True Blood was premised on the story of diner waitress Sookie Stackhouse falling in love with Bill Compton, a nearly 200-year-old vampire who is the first of his kind to make himself known to humans in his small Louisiana town.  Sookie and Bill remained the show’s primary couple for the first three years before starting to breakdown in season four.  By the start of the final season, it is well established that both characters have moved on, however the writers couldn’t resist the chance for an easy bookend and piled on the nostalgia to create a final story arc where both characters realize that they are Meant To Be or something.  This is particularly remarkable considering that neither character in the novels that serve as the show’s source material ever comes to any similar consideration.  Thanks, Hollywood. 

The final season is slightly mitigated by sheer number of Easter Eggs tossed in to appease long-time viewers.   The return of several fan-favorite characters, as well as the reunification of several others, helped to send the show off properly even if several other major characters, Tara and Alcide being the two most prominent, are given some of the most abrupt write-offs in the history of television.

So Hail and Farewell, True Blood.  I won’t miss your convoluted storylines, but I will miss Eric.  I won’t miss your unfortunate tendency toward saccharine storytelling, but I will most definitely miss Pam.  Actually, thinking on it, Pam is the thing I’m going to miss the most.  Someone get Kristin Bauer van Straten a pilot, STAT.  Meanwhile, I remain confident that television audiences have not lost their taste for WTF programming.  In any case, Salem is going to have some large, bloody shoes to fill.

Oh, Pam.  You can keep sassing me/slitting my throat for another ten seasons. 

Psych-Out

Another day, another series finale review. This time, guest-blogger Priya tackles the Psych finale. --Maggie Cats

For the uninitiated: Psych is at its core a criminal procedural with a twist. Shawn Spencer (played by the hilarious James Roday) masquerades with the Santa Barbara Police Department as a psychic detective. The twist? He's not really psychic, but is really good with deductive reasoning and sees details that no one else can. Together with his BFF Gus (Dule Hill, whom I LOVE) and a great cast of characters at the SBPD they solve crime and engage in entertaining tom-foolery.

What worked for the show was just how un-serious it was. In an era where CSI, Law and Order, and other macabre shows fill the airways, Psych always took its crime with a level of tongue-in-cheek ridiculousness. With guest stars like Cary Elwes playing an art-thief con artist, or Ally Sheedy as a nefarious crazy villain (who was just one member of the Breakfast Club to appear on the show) they upped the ante each week. 

Psych was also incredibly successful in pulling off the comedy-as-parody routine. Many episodes each season would take on a theme that mimicked other shows and movies. For example, the penultimate episode was called "A Nightmare on State Street" and involved Zombies and classic shots from horror movies that scared me silly.

So what about the finale? Did they do it justice? I think so. The creators took the hour as an opportunity to circle back on some eight-year long jokes with surprising guest stars (Val Kilmer!) while giving friends one last glimpse of team Psych in action. In the finale episode, Shawn tries to give Gus one last case as he tries to tell him he is closing down the business to move to San Francisco to be with his lady love, Juliet. In the end the show gave us a satisfying conclusion. Spoiler Alert! Gus moves to San Francisco where they may have to compete with Monk in the consulting biz....and they live happily ever after. Shawn, Juliet, and Gus. One big happy family.

Also, the theme song is pretty awesome.

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HIMYM Finale

I watched the first two seasons of How I Met Your Mother, but then had to give it up because it conflicted with too many other shows that were higher on my priority list. But I've stayed aware of the plot developments and have followed the...shall we say, vocal, reactions to the finale. Personally, I thought it sounded like the perfect ending, but that's clearly not the only opinion on the subject. Reporting from the ground (and the eye of the hurricane) is TV Slut guest-poster Priya, who puts it all in perspective. --Maggie Cats

It's not entirely unexpected that following the How I Met Your Mother finale that the internet, as my roommate stated, exploded. Like the LOST finale, people tended to gravitate towards the "we're good with it" to "virulent hatred" sides of the spectrum.

So the question is "was the finale a betrayal or...wait for it...the natural end to a the story Ted has been telling us all along?" For nine years we've been teased with glimpses of this elusive woman: A heel, a yellow umbrella, a classroom. The entire series lurched towards this one fact: that the show would end when Ted found his soulmate.

Of course in the intervening years we got to know 'the gang:' Marshall, Lilly, Barney, and Robin. We knew pretty early on that any of Ted's previous relationships, including the one with Robin were doomed, she was after all 'Aunt' Robin. We believed the premise and the implied promise. The show would end with the mother. We knew how it would all end.

Let's detour for a moment. For me this show was about more than just that final one hour we got this Monday. I told another one of my roommates that for nine years once a week I've had 20 minutes of joy. A show that made me laugh and surprised me with songs (Nothing Suit's me Like a Suit!) and slap bets; Crazy-Hot Scales, and Marshmallow adorableness; DOWISATREPLA, Cockamouse, and Challenge Accepted!

Granted it wasn't a perfect show--its terrible lack of main character diversity and that horrible Arcadian storyline--but I loved each character as they transitioned from point to point in their lives.

So when the credits rolled on the finale on Monday I was satisfied.True the storytelling for this season could have gone differently. I wish that Robin and Barney's wedding which lasted the whole season, had not resulted in us seeing their three years marriage over in a blink of an eye. But I think the finale highlighted what made this show important.

The gang. The big moments.

The idea that life is messy and that while one day matters and can go on forever, we might not always be in each other's lives as we change and grow.

Don't get me wrong, I think the fact that Ted finally meets Tracy (the mother) only to lose her to illness after seven years is tragic and maybe emotionally manipulative, but as this wonderful piece from the AV club says it wasn't the mother in How I Met Your Mother that mattered it was the How. (Also read: Slate on HIMYM)

So I was ok that Barney, despite trying for three years, really only changed with unexpected fatherhood, and that Marshall and Lilly dealt with life's trials through continued domesticity.

I have ALL THE FEELS.

But this story is about the mother right? And the LOST passengers were never in purgatory. In both cases we were never really lied to.

In the final moments of the finale, Ted's kids point out to their father that it's Robin who he still loves, and can still have. And I'll take a moment to acknowledge that after almost a decade of a revolving-door Ted-Robin relationship that finally ended with him letting her go just episodes ago; to have them end up together nearly twenty-five years later is frustrating for some. But after twenty-five years, after Robin lived her dream of traveling, and Ted had his kids -- the two reasons why they couldn't make it work--it's nice that they had a chance to try and be happy again.

So six years after losing Tracy, Ted steals a blue french horn and with deliberate symmetry, reminiscent of John Cusack's boom box, holds it up for Robin to see. It's a big moment.

It was romantic...-ish. I mean, at the end of the day, it's still a big blue french horn, right?

Let's close with this: In thinking about the end we can choose option "A:"

Lilly: "So what is this all just over now?"

Robin: "It doesn't have to be a sad thing."

Or Option "B:"

Lilly: "Oh god this is too real, Marshall's next."

Whatever the final decision, "Let's Go to the Mall, Today!

 

One Last Time (We Promise) With Breaking Bad

For the past six years, Walter White has reigned as the king of television on top of his empire of meth. As of last Sunday, the king is officially dead. Whether I mean that figuratively or narratively will be revealed later (I’ll warn you when the spoilers show up), but by any definition, America’s love affair with Breaking Badhas officially reached an end point with the series finale.

No, I'm not tearing up. There's just so much smoke in here suddenly.

But I come not to bury Walter White, but to praise him. And his wife Skyler, son Walt Jr., brother in law and DEA agent Hank, and the myriad of other Rosencrantzes and Guildensterns that made up the show that has been called the best television show ever. Despite a decidedly unglamorous setting (meth labs among unattractive downtrodden people in Albuquerque, New Mexico) and a cast of people who seemed, you know, real and not like caricatures, somehow this taut, tense little show found a way to worm itself into our collective bloodstreams and leave us just as addicted as the wasteabouts we were watching each week.

Through preternaturally solid and consistent writing, precision directing that would make German auto engineers jealous and award-winning acting, Breaking Badlet us see a story that started off utterly sympathetic and turned horrific. The basic premise, that sad-sack high school chemistry teacher Walter White learns that he has terminal cancer and so decides to cook meth with a former student to raise the easy money he needs to ensure his family’s survival after he’s dead, is well known, even for those who haven’t watched the show. What was fascinating though was how much the characters that we initially believed would be the victims, like wife Skyler, turned out to be just as morally ambiguous as the character we started off with. The cheap and easy classification of this show is that it is another in a long line of anti-heroes that we love despite knowing that we shouldn’t. What made Breaking Bad different, though, was that at his core, Walter was never an anti-hero; he was a villain, right from the start. We just didn’t notice it until we, like the rest of Walter’s family and associates, were so deeply enmeshed in the chaos that we couldn’t turn away from him.

In retrospect, we all probably should have seen the writing on the wall.

It’s a testament to how well Breaking Bad did things that the episode that sounds the most dull on paper, Season 3’s “Fly” which followed Walt and Jesse through one long, interminable night stuck in their underground meth lab and unable to leave because of a delicate chemical process all the while being tormented by a single fly that’s managed to find its way into the otherwise perfectly sealed lab, seem interesting and tense. Because no one just talked about the weather in this show and every line of dialogue could be interpreted multiple ways, we as the audience sat through 45 minutes of two men chasing a fly around a lab and couldn’t stop watching because we knew that what was really going on was that Walt was carrying a secret that he couldn’t tell Jessie – namely that the previous season, he was in a position to save Jessie’s girlfriend from dying and actively chose not to, mostly to keep Jessie loyal to him. The continual ratcheting up of tension and dread, which started with a terminal cancer diagnosis for a man who just turned 50 and who’s wife is seven months pregnant, meant that learning that your life is about to end ends up seeming like light-hearted fun by season five.

And so we watched Walter build up his empire, all under the nom de plume of “Heisenberg”, the Mr. Hyde to his Dr. Jekyll. Before long, it becomes clear that Walter has long since stopped making meth, and in the process becoming one of the most powerful drug lords in the southwest, just because he wants money for his family – he’s doing it because it’s the only way to get the respect and the fear that he’s long craved and never been able to claim as a low-paid, disrespected high school teacher. In the fifth season, Skyler, who has long since showed her true colors by helping Walt launder the massive piles of money that he’s acquired, brings Walter to a storage facility that she’s been forced to rent just to house the mound of money, well into the millions of dollars. “How much is enough?” she asks him. “How big does this pile have to be?”

Thus marking the first time in history a wife ever got angry with her husband for making too much money.

Walter agrees to retire, but not happily. We’re led to believe that Walter is corrupted by his experience, turning more ruthless as he amasses power, but in reality Walter was really just becoming what he always was inside. Walter White was the persona – Heisenberg was the reality. Meanwhile, just as he is out for good, his DEA agent brother-in-law finally makes the connection that the meth empire he’s been hunting for the last two years is being run by none other than his own family member, setting into motion a blitzkrieg of final episodes that bring us to the end of our story.

Spoiler-phobes, skip the next paragraph. I go back to spoiler-free mode after it.

With all this drama, then, it was odd that the series finale chose to go the way of safe television, an unconventional choice for a show that was so bound up in allowing the worst of all possible things happen to its characters. There was no ambiguous Sopranos-style ending here. As such, the episode felt like a victory lap, to use the phrase of my friend who watched it with me. The episode was almost fan-service, showing Walt outsmart everyone that he had to confront and even resorting to an almost Robert Rodriguez-level of ridiculousness involving a hidden machine gun in the trunk of a car. In the end, Walter’s family is ruined – his son hates him, his wife is broken an unemployable due to her association with him and has moved herself and her kids into a dingy basement apartment. The various drug dealers and kingpins are all dealt with, most of whom are killed outright. And in the end, we’re down to Walter and Jessie, the two who started this whole mess, staring each other down and the audience wondering which one is going to kill the other. Walt, knowing that his cancer has returned for good and that there is no survival for him now that his crimes have become public knowledge tries to manipulate Jessie one last time into killing him. Jessie, for once, is able to resist, telling Walt that if he wants to die so badly, he should kill himself and then tearing off into the night in a stolen car, weeping and broken but finally free. Walt however, unbeknownst to Jessie, has already been fatally wounded in the epic shootout that occurred moments before and makes his way over to the meth lab, appreciating the setup that produced the purest form of meth and was his signature contribution to the world. Walt collapses to the ground, dying as we always assumed he would – in his lab, just as the police finally arrive to arrest him for good, thus allowing the Scarface that we knew we shouldn’t like something like a final getaway. And a flight of angels sing thee to thy rest.

"I love you, meth bin. Never leave me."

And maybe it was because the final episode, while powerful and as satisfying as an ending to a beloved show can be, never really hit the high emotional stakes that I wanted to, but for me, the true finale was “Ozymandias”, the episode airing three weeks ago when Walt’s vast criminal empire finally comes truly tumbling down at the same time as several major characters are killed in the desert.  At the moment when Walter White finally allowed himself to rip off the mask and become the monster, the show utterly proved how fearless and rare it was. There have been “the best television show”s before and there will be “the best television show”s again. But here’s one that deserves its moniker, regardless of how monstrous or good the characters were.