One Year of Blogging & Two Months of Catch-Up: Mad Men, Girls, True Blood & Louie

It’s been one whole year here at jofumtv.com! Huzzah! Thanks so much for reading my ramblings and though nuggets. I’ve truly appreciated all the support for my little endeavor.

It’s also been nearly two months since my last post, wherein I predicted Eventual Winner Phillip Phillips would win American Idol. A surer bet had never been made.

So to celebrate, I played a bit of cultural catch-up, briefly acknowledging two shows that completed their seasons in these past two months, AMC’s Mad Men and HBO’s Girls, and discussing two shows currently on the air, HBO’s True Blood and FX’s Louie. Needless to say, there are spoilers ahead…

Mad Men

As a whole, this past season of Mad Men never quite rose to the soaring heights of season four’s Don Draper spiraling descent into depravity (case in point, the best hour of television ever: “The Suitcase”), but the series is still head and shoulders about the rest, even in its fifth year. While we were treated to indelible water-cooler moments this season, Megan performing “Zou Bisou Bisou.” Joan ending her relationship with her rapist husband. Peggy leaving SCDP. Pete getting punching the face. Twice!, I can’t help but think there was so much potential from the premiere episode that was never fully explored. These somewhat missed opportunities included more discussions of race, we only very briefly met Dawn, the new African-American secretary, and the explosion of youth culture, aside from our visit with the teens at the Rolling Stones concert. But that’s Mad Men, a slow-burning atmospheric buildup of character history that zigs when you expect it to zag.

Another small quibble I had with this past season was with the broader storytelling strokes. Perhaps as a nod to the ever-loosening societal standards of the latter 1960s, the visual symbolism has more overt than ever this season (Don has a rotten tooth that needs to be extracted! Don looks down into an empty elevator shaft!) and the dialogue more on the nose (“Everything you think is going to make you happy just turns to crap,” whined Creepy Glen). Granted, this sense of overbearing gloom and grime was well-suited for the characters’ disappointments and frustrations.

The natural climax of the season, Lane’s untimely demise, was heartbreaking to a fault, but felt a tad bit unearned. Dare I say, the introduction of Chekhov’s forged check felt forced and contrived? Are we really to believe that Lane felt so much shame about his financial difficulties that he wouldn’t ask any of his fellow partners for help? Had this storyline been introduced more subtly, rather than abruptly in episode ten, I would have felt the whole proceedings would have been less hamfisted. Still, Lane’s suicide gave the final two episodes an emotional and propelling drive forward.

Mad Men is still a television series at the head of the class, and if anything, this season gave to the world my favorite quote of the entire series: “SURPRISE! THERE’S AN AIRPLANE HERE TO SEE YOU!” I love you, Joan Holloway.

Girls

Plain and simple, Girls is my favorite television show of 2012 so far. Chief writer, director, and star of Girls Lena Dunham’s voice is so confident and so distinct that the television landscape will never be the same again. Dunham has created a fully realized world inhabited by characters both fearless and flawed, selfish and vulnerable, witty and more witty. These women, Hannah Horwath, Marnie Michaels, Jessa Johansson, and Shoshanna Shapiro, are disarmingly complicated, making their lives all the more relatable. Not only that, but Dunham has written one of the most compelling male characters in recent television history, Adam Sackler, who is all at once magnetic and disarming.

To be sure, Dunham’s character, Hannah, is high on opium tea when she spouts the enduring line of series: “I may be the voice of my generation. Or, at least, a voice of a generation,” but, boy, does she ever make a statement for herself. One that both Hannah and Dunham certainly live up to by the end of the season.

And did I mention the soundtrack? The impeccable soundtrack selection for Girls tapped into the raw and vibrant attitude of this generation: from Marnie and Hannah cementing their friendship and dancing out their frustrations to Robyn’s “Dancing On My Own,” to Marnie Facebook stalking Charlie while listening to Demi Lovato’s “Skyscraper,” to the whole gang rocking out to Lady’s “Yankin” in the season finale wedding. The music cues in Girls are priceless.

True Blood

Save for the always fabulous and ever bitchy Pam de Beaufort, played to perfection by cast MVP Kristin Bauer, and her misgivings as a new maker, True Blood has been so listless, anemic, and downright difficult to sit through this season. What has been lacking so far is a true sense of cohesion stemming from a compelling big bad. The early season tight-knit pulpy charm of Bon Temps with a small core of characters has now sprawled out of control into an ever-expanding universe of supernaturals. When it’s been revealed that every character has an exhaustive supernatural background, does that make anyone special?

Even worse, is that for the majority of this fifth season, True Blood‘s characters have been spinning their narrative wheels and running around in boring circles. As the storylines multiply by the minute, my care for the characters decreases proportionally. Do I care about Sam and Luna, the little weregirl? No. Do I care about Terry and the second-rate smoke monster from Lost? No. Do I care about the misadventures of Sheriff Bellefleur’s butt? No. I hope that now that Russell Edgington is a true force to be reckoned with, we can finally witness the raw chaos that we’ve been promised this season. Peace is for pussies, Russell? Bring it on.

Louie

If there appears to be any thematic exploration in these first three brilliant episodes of Louie, it’s that we seldom say what we mean; but if we did, wouldn’t it be wonderful? Of course, any guess at a theme could prove to be futile by the time the next episode rolls around, as Louie is just as unpredictable than ever in its third season. Nevertheless, the thread of not fully expressing what one means is woven throughout the first few half-hours.

In the premiere episode, Louis C.K.’s girlfriend, April, played by Gaby Hoffmann, reads Louis’ uncomfortable body language and subtle grimaced facial expressions like a book and comes to the conclusion that Louis wants to end their relationship, so she does the dirty work for her. Louis need not speak a word.  Through deft acting, Louis speaks volumes with his silences. In the following episode, Louis C.K.’s youngest daughter tells a simple joke: “Who didn’t let the gorilla into the ballet?” and gives the simplest punchline: “Just the people who were in charge of that decision.” Louis explains to his audience in his stand-up routine that he loved this joke, that the seeing the absurd logic of it all through the eyes of a child imbued the joke with profound hilarity.

I was simply floored by Louie‘s third episode of the season, “Miami,” my favorite episode of the series thus far. I was struck by its honest depiction of Louis’ genuine and confounding feelings for another guy: a lifeguard, Ramon, who rescues him from ocean and takes him on a freeing and whirlwind journey through the “real Miami.” Every complexity of male-male heterosexual relationships is on naked display, leading up to a brutally uncomfortable conversation between the two men. Louis simply cannot admit what he is feeling, that he enjoys spending time with Ramon, or even say in the simplest of terms, that he isn’t gay. Instead, he stammers out to Ramon, “First of all, I have zero anything…” unable to verbally admit that Ramon’s assumptions about Louis’ feelings are true. Thus both men tiptoe gingerly around their words, neither one wanting to offend the other. Their capper conversation is both amusing and bittersweet in its sincerity.

Louis C.K. closes out “Miami” with his astutely observed stand-up material:

Heterosexual men have a big burden that we put on ourselves which is that we want to be identified as heterosexual men. We’re the only ones that care […] And, it’s a drag for us, because there’s a lot of things that we maybe could do that might be nice, but we can’t ’cause someone will think we’re gay. We can’t even throw some words around. You can’t really throw ‘wonderful’ around so much. You can’t say ‘wonderful,’ unless you say it in like a gay voice to be funny: ‘Oh, it was wonderful. Ha ha ha. Like I would ever really say that.’ ‘No, but it was wonderful. It was.’ I can’t just say that about anything. ‘No, that strip club was wonderful. It was wonderful.’

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And as an added bonus, I just have to end this post with a GIF of what I’ve been looking forward to the most this summer season:

The triumphant return of Breaking Bad and Jesse Pinkman’s exuberant enthusiasm for science.