My new guilty pleasure

Sometimes, a movie or TV show is so ridiculously over-hyped that one feels more inclined to gouge out one’s own eyes than bother watching. Case in point: I have yet to watch an episode of LOST, largely because during its run so many people of my acquaintance entirely failed to shut the fuck up about it for more than an hour or two. Now that it is over, I may opt to see what all the fuss was about. Maybe.

And then there is Glee.

Glee has been over-hyped the bejesus out of. (I’m fully aware of the grammatical inconsistency of that sentence, but am including it in homage to a similar phrasing used by my boss recently.) The trailers I saw made the show look so bad that the prospect of watching a full episode seemed a torture worthy of Abu Ghraib.

And yet, against my will, it has become my guilty pleasure.

It is by no means a televisual phenomenon on a par with The X-Files or Firefly or The West Wing. With any of these shows, I can rewatch an episode several times, dissecting and discovering, coming up with new evidence of the sheer genius with which the show was done. These are the literature of television.

Glee, on the other hand, is the novel you buy at the airport while your departure time whooshes by with nary a call for boarding. It’s a fun, largely surface-level diversion which is certainly worthy of the time you invest in it, but is unlikely to stay on the shelf to be watched time and again. Refreshingly, it doesn’t try to be anything more than that.

The music and choreography is (largely) very well executed, the cast is (again largely) talented and the balance between humor and melodrama is (etc.) well maintained. There are a few moments of painfully obvious auto-tune, or where even the greatest suspension bridge couldn’t quite hold up the disbelief, but on the whole it is done well.

Plus, even were I inclined to give up at this stage, the prospect of an episode directed by Joss Whedon and guest-starring Neil Patrick Harris and Idina Menzel would keep me going for the next however-many episodes it is until then.

So… yeah. I guess, on top of being a “believer”, a “Browncoat” and a “Wingnut”, I am now officially a “Gleek”.

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Playing with Dolls

Occasionally a television show comes along which just seems to stand head and shoulders above everything else – a shining beacon in a sea of dreck.

Right now, it’s Dollhouse that has so captivated my attention.

We are two episodes away from the season (and likely series) finale, and the first of those episodes screens tonight. 

The Friday-night timeslot has done the show no favors. Friday night is where shows go to die, and even a show with the cult following of Firefly had to buckle under the sheer force of “I’d rather go out and get drunk”.

Nevertheless, Dollhouse is a show with a phenomenal premise, one which could conceivably stay fresh long after most other shows would start to smell funny. For those uninitiated, the Dollhouse is an extremely secret organization in which people whose personalities have been removed can be imprinted with any traits, talents or skills necessary to fulfill the request of the Dollhouse’s clientele. Cue plenty of sex and violence, of course, but also some extremely well-executed mystery/crime/comedy moments; naturally, when the characters themselves are blank slates, almost anything can happen if the actors are good enough… and they are.

Under the surface, though, something is not quite as it should be; dolls (‘actives’) begin to remember past imprints, to show behavioral glitches. Add to this the dual threats of a Mulder-like agent doggedly investigating every lead on the Dollhouse, and the escaped former active known as Alpha.

It’s way better than I’m making it sound here. That’s because Joss Whedon is at least at the level of Advanced God, and I’m just, y’know, me.

The straight-up ratings numbers don’t look that good. The Live+SD and Live+7 numbers are somewhat healthier, though, indicating an appeal to certain demographics to which advertising is often targeted. Will that be enough to save the show? The meta-drama is still unfolding, but most people seem to believe that it’ll require that Fox make an astounding leap of Faith.

Hope is not completely lost. But it is fading.

This show going off the air so soon would be an absolute travesty given its potential.

If you had been watching but had given up on it, do me a favor and watch the trailer for tonight’s ep – perhaps you can rekindle your interest:

If you’re not going to be watching TV at 9:00 tonight but don’t mind leaving the TV on for an hour, tune it to FOX. If the show does get a second season, you will have my eternal gratitude.

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