From the perspective of a graduate student in the humanities, it’s impossible to watch HBO’s Hung without becoming fascinated by the character of Tanya, played by Jane Adams. The premise of this new show is a comic twist on an old plot – fallen into desperate times in a tough economic crisis, our protagonist turns to the world’s oldest profession in search of some extra cash. As the title would indicate, however, the plot pivots from tragic loss of virtue into a comic scrabble for money because (ha ha!) the prostitute is a dude.

Dreaming of financial security, suggestive bottles and sausages

Hung is most essentially a tale of the recession. Ray lives in Detroit, where he is unable to repair his burned-out home because he’s three months late on his adjustable rate mortgage, and layoffs plague the school where he coaches basketball. (Happily, as Ray explains in the second episode, no one’s going to fire a basketball coach when there are still art programs to axe). Desperate to fix his home so that he can reclaim his children from his ex-wife, Ray decides to capitalize on his one unique asset, and begins figuring out how to become a part-time gigolo. It’s dark, but it’s also funny – he’s a guy, so we don’t have to worry about his emotional wellbeing, and horny older women are always good for a ridiculing laugh.

Setting aside my simmering resentment at the gender inequalities that allow this role reversal to be wry rather than sad, I admit in all honesty that the show is actually funny. For me, though, the humor comes largely from Ray’s amazing pimp. Tanya is exactly like every ridiculous creative-writing stereotype you’ve ever seen, but watching her apply her MFA to exploiting and marketing a male prostitute is just hysterical. Much as she would love to devote her life to a line of breads and pastries with laminated poetry baked inside, Tanya takes on pimping with gusto, quickly re-branding Ray as a “happiness consultant.” Tanya also knows enough to connect Ray with a personal shopper, who can recommend his services to her wealthy clients. She’s not perfect (she knows Ray needs to wear a suit, but gets him an ill-fitting cheap one), but Tanya is ambitious, exploitative, and imaginative. Who knew pimping and creative writing had so much in common.

Tanya, pitching the "happiness consultant" business model

The show takes pleasure in its free license to pun endlessly on male anatomy (see above sausage image), all while persistently tempering that juvenile instinct with a steady stream of ripped-from-the-headlines economic indicators. In other words, Hung is a comedy of physical and financial emasculation, but baked somewhere inside is a laminated poem about the underappreciated benefits of a graduate degree in fine arts.

Two new science fiction programs premiered last week – the BBC’s absolutely incredible miniseries Torchwood: Children of the Earth, and SiiiiiighFy’s new hopeful network-builder, Warehouse 13. It was a big week for science fiction television, but the coincidence of their simultaneous releases draws attention to the surprising parallels between the shows. BBC’s Torchwood has already run for two seasons, an uneven spinoff of the British national television treasure that is Doctor Who, and this miniseries extends and thoughtfully develops the show’s original premise. In a Doctor Who universe, extra terrestrial contact with earth has been occurring for centuries, and Torchwood is a secret group of scrappy in-the-know conspiracy nuts with a mission to protect earth from aliens (and often, vice versa). Under the noses of regular folks, Torchwood contains, destroys or befriends any non-human Earth dwellers, allowing us all to go on with our incurious quotidian lives. Over on Warehouse 13, two misfit FBI agents get reassigned to an enormous secret bunker in South Dakota, a well-hidden vault for all things alien, mystical, superhuman, or just unexplained. After initially grumbling about their unusual job descriptions, Pete and Myka get down to the business of tracking down weird, magical stuff so that good hardworking Americans don’t have to expand their worldviews. Fear not, citizens! Avert your eyes from the strange, eerily seductive older woman with that fetching comb in her hair, she’s just being possessed by the spirit of Lucrezia Borgia.

Strange possessed hair accessory, Warehouse 13

It’s not a terribly original premise (see most memorably, X-Files, Men in Black, also The Matrix, The Middleman, etc. etc.), but what makes these two shows so interesting in juxtaposition is their perspective on who watches these valiant, insightful, open-minded watchmen. On Warehouse 13, Pete and Myka may have left their ladder-climbing FBI careers, but they’re still important members of a federal system. Although dismayed by the new assignment, they are persuaded to trek out to South Dakota because it’s a “matter of national security.” Your friendly neighborhood weird-things experts, Pete and Myka’s job is to help the government protect us from stuff we won’t be able to cope with. The first two seasons of Torchwood also used a lot of that “we worry so you don’t have to” rhetoric, but Children of the Earth takes a turn toward the paranoid (and certainly more interesting). When children across the world start speaking in unison, Torchwood would love nothing more than to jump into action, but other factions within the British government label them a threat and order them assassinated. Doctor Who often strides into official buildings, reassuring everyone that he’ll save the day, but the members of Torchwood spend this miniseries fleeing capable Black-Ops assassins intent on their deaths.

Torchwood headquarters, the government is watching

Science fiction has always given us access to explore fears about the unknown, and has often famously been an opportunity to create allegories of our more familiar, less frighteningly authoritarian governmental overlords. 1984 and Brave New World are classic warnings against human complacency, cloaked in premises that feel fictional enough to still be enjoyable. But like Eureka, both Warehouse 13 and Torchwood: Children of the Earth capitalize on the coexistence of our known world with a cooler, weirder parallel reality, which makes the reassuring competency of Pete and Myka extra-cozy and the possibility of chilling governmental mercilessness and self-interest way more scary. Of the two, Torchwood is undoubtedly the better, more thoughtful, and more gripping television experience, and I think it’s largely because of the show’s willingness to disassociate its characters from any feel-good national interest. They didn’t get a shiny new popular President across the pond, and it’s not hard for them to believe that a government can turn against its people while whistling a happy tune. Warehouse 13, on the other hand, begins its pilot episode with Pete and Myka protecting an unseen President from what turns out to be a blood-activated killer mask. Guess which show makes for stronger, more intelligent television.

I haven’t watched much of anything while away on vacation, although I’m dying to look at the return of Eureka, Nurse Jackie, the new show Drop Dead Diva and HBO’s new show Hung. The one thing I have been doing while away, weirdly enough, has been watching sports, which…heh. It’s like a whole foreign world out there, where phrases like “Home Run Derby” and “polka-dot jersey” have great, opaque significance. Among my favorite “wait, what’s going on?!” moments so far have been watching tiny Little Leaguers running around in the outfield trying to catch balls hit by the comically-named Pujols, as well as watching a cyclist get treated for a possibly broken collarbone without actually ceasing to pedal his bike. Unfortunately, I don’t feel capable of producing much critical thought on television sports coverage, because I ask questions like “where do The Nationals play?” and receive answers like “well, The Nationals are a team from DC, but that guy’s shirt says National because he plays for the National League.” Huh.

So until Thursday, there’s not much in the way of TV insight, except for maybe, “baseball players make terrible commercial actors” and “Tour de France announcers seem to delight in telling stories about the necessity of ‘nature breaks’ while cycling.” In the mean time, check out the thoughtful comment in disagreement with my post about 10 Things I Hate About You.

Inspired by this Slate piece by Troy Patterson, I attempt my own game of Remote Roulette to more fully explore the offerings of summer television. During the prime time schedule, I used a random number generator to pick which channels to watch, the better to experience previously unknown depths of summer programming. Warning: what follows may be upsetting.

8:15, FOX: So You Think You Can Dance. A couple is dancing to a song about addiction, the woman dressed in a ripped red leotard (to signify sadness? To suggest that addiction is bad for your wardrobe?). Someone named Nigel tells the woman to put her hair back more, because he can’t see the power in her eyes. “That power that you had, and knowing you had that power, was very powerful.”

Why is she doing that with her face? And the red leotard of sadness.

8:26, Food Network: A rerun of Chopped, where chefs run around frantically trying to cook a meal out of wacky secret ingredients. This woman appears to be pairing duck breast with a ricotta-filled chocolate crepe. I’m dubious.

8:36, The History Channel: An episode of Monster Quest, looking for unusually large bears. The announcer is trying to make me frightened about the possibility that a bear could be somewhere near one of the Monster Questers. Bears dislike surprise, particularly when sleeping. Apparently bears are like me. Weirdly literal clichéd metaphor quote: “You have to fight tooth, claw and nail, no pun intended, because he’s going to kill you, and he’s going to eat you.”

8:40, Discovery: Mythbusters. Shockingly, it’s impossible to grow a diamond with peanut butter and sand.

8:45, KOFY: Law and Order: CI rerun. “She kills her young. She kills her lovers. And you? You, Ella? You’re both.” Uuuuugh. Yes, ominous strings, I understand what you are telling me.

8:51, back to So You Think You Can Dance: “It’s like when you make fresh-squeezed orange juice, and you put it on that thing, and you squeeze it, and the juice has to come out. You gotta get all the juice out. You gotta get it, you gotta finish it, you gotta do the whole damn thing. AND YOU DID THE WHOLE DAMN THING. UNREAL. UNREAL.”

8:54, USA: NCIS marathon. I’m going to move on.

9:00, VH1: The Great Debate. Several D-list celebrities debate Star Search vs. American Idol, and the discussion quickly breaks down into Ed McMahon vs. Simon Cowell. American Idol wins, because “winning Star Search is a stepping stone, but winning American Idol is a milestone.”

9:05, History Channel: New episode of Monster Quest. Am surprisingly fascinated by attempt to verify or disprove something called the Patterson film, the most famous footage of a sasquatch. You know you’ve made it when you’re on a History Channel episode with the words “Sasquatch researcher” under your name.

9:11, A&E: Dog the Bounty Hunter. WHAT IS WITH THAT MAN’S HAIR?! It seems like hair that long would be a liability when brawling with felons.

9:30, back to Monster Quest. No word yet on the Patterson film. Apparently it makes a huge difference that this dude thinks the film was taken with a 15mm rather than 25mm lens, because this means the sasquatch was 7 feet tall. You’ve convinced me, History Channel!

Teaser for a new FOX reality show called More to Love – essentially a new version of The Bachelor, but for insecure, overweight women. Clearly a sign of the apocalypse, particularly after accepting the existence of Bigfoot, rendering this game of Remote Roulette entirely beside the point.

Digging through the library today, I found several other images of the telephonoscope as it was imagined in the late nineteenth century. These are all from a book called La vingtième siècle (The Twentieth Century) written and illustrated by Albert Robida in 1883. Written as a speculative account of the year 1955, The Twentieth Century is full of impressively prescient futuristic devices like subways, public telephones, submarines and helicopters. Robida also imagines female emancipation and military service, correspondents reporting live from war zones, and the ability to see and hear projected images of women doing sexy things in the privacy of your own home. Quite the visionary, that guy.

Telephonoscope: a necessary item for your boudoir

Some big screen telephonoscope options.

Ooohhh, she’s rolling down her garter…

Meanwhile, in the twenty-first century, I’ve been fascinated this week by a different kind of futuristic speculation about the possibility (necessity?) of new liberal arts. Written and published by a bunch of new-mediay people, the entire text is available as a free PDF, and makes for an entertaining, semi-snarky, thought-provoking browse. Among other recommended courses of study, these new liberal arts include attention economics, photography, reality engineering, and inaccuracy. I’m not sold on attention economics as a new liberal art, but I’d love to sign up for video literacy.

Last night, ABC Family aired the first episode of a television adaptation of the 1999 film 10 Things I Hate About You. As partially demonstrated in my previous post on The Secret Life of the American Teenager, my feelings about ABC Family are mixed.¹ On the one hand, there are shows like that one, which are almost unbearably awful. On the other, though, there are shows like Greek, which is actually quite entertaining, or last summer’s completely amazing and inevitably short-lived The Middleman. Allow me a moment to mourn the loss of that silly, well-written, clever, hysterical, earnestly fun-loving show.

Right, moving on. Given ABC Family’s track record, I was concerned about the whole 10 Things I Hate About You project. How to extend a plot beyond its original Taming of the Shrew scope? How to fully express that movie’s insouciant, tongue-in-cheek, intertextual tone? How to improve on Julia Stiles and Heath Ledger?! I was pretty certain it was going to make me claw my eyes out.

10 Things I Hate About You: The New School (from left, Bianca, Kat, Patrick and Cameron)

Not so! Listen, it’s not great. Several of the minor characters are ridiculous, the writing doesn’t exactly sparkle, and it’ll really depend on how they develop all of the characters and work out a whole season’s worth of plotlines. But it could have been worse. One of the early notable shifts is from a largely romantic-driven plot to something more like Gossip Girl, where much of the drama comes from locker-side politics and the infamous guillotine known as cheerleading tryouts. By flipping the introductory figure from Cameron, who is the new guy in school in the film version, to Kat and Bianca as the new girls in the television show, the focus shifts onto their attempts to adjust to school rather than an unnatural insta-romance. (The film version memorably sells that “love at first sight” moment by establishing Bianca’s beauty in a standard slow-mo, hair-flipping shot and then having Cameron/Shakespeare sigh, “I burn, I pine, I perish.”)

This sets up both interesting possibilities and easy pitfalls for the future direction of the show. I understand the need to establish a storyline outside of the original Shakespeare, and building a foundation of high school backstabbing is a reliable way to form a sort of perpetual motion plot machine – fights and friendships go back and forth, back and forth. But if that’s all it will eventually be, it’ll deflate quickly.

As Jezebel pointed out today, the real opportunity is the main character, Kat. In the course of the pilot episode, she can be spotted reading two different books, debating healthcare at breakfast, listening to NPR, and comparing the head cheerleader to Kim Jong Il. There’s certainly a dearth of high school-aged feminist icons on television right now (rest in peace, Veronica Mars), and if 10 Things I Hate About You manages to create a semi-believable, politically engaged female protagonist without then making her crumble under the force of dark brooding stares, it will have made something worth watching. Fingers tentatively crossed.

Feminists read! And also have awesomely snarky air fresheners.

^{1 I realize this blog has so far been entirely SyFy or ABC Family- focused. This is entirely accidental, and I blame summer television programming.}

I want to write more about the premiere of Warehouse 13 as well as this week’s new Torchwood: Children of the Earth miniseries, but for now, just a brief note to register my distaste.

Today, the SciFi channel has officially launched its rebranding effort, including some snazzy, hipstereque ads, the new paranormal military secrets show Warehouse 13, and most absurdly, the new name: SyFy. The rebranding is an attempt to draw in broader audiences by expanding beyond that particularly nerdy genre label, as well as finally having a network name and logo over which it can firmly claim ownership.

Aside from the name being…well, stupid, I’m feeling extreme skepticism that they’re going to actually expand outside of science fiction programming. Come on, guys, if you really want to sell me that this is now a whole new network, don’t close your first week of programming with a new SyFy original movie featuring eerily familiar monsters.

On the left, a sandworm; on the right, a sandw- excuse me, sand serpent

Above are images from the miniseries version of Dune on the left, and one from the new original movie Sand Serpents on the right. Gaping, toothy maw, sandy surroundings, humans dwarfed by huge beast, check check check. And really, don’t rip off Frank Herbert’s Dune, a book which you already adequately adapted back in 2000 when you admitted to being SciFi. If this is what new SyFy looks like, color me unympressed.

Oh, summer television. How I love you, how I hate you. During the summer, television gives us the eccentric, the unusual, the cheerful, the brightly colored, shows like Eureka, Mad Men, Hung, and Burn Notice. But these great shows are few and far between, highlights in an otherwise bleak landscape of uninspiring reruns, degrading reality programming, and the occasional launch of something new and truly awful.

Into that last category falls a show that just started its second season, and when it first premiered last summer, I thought to myself, “I seriously need a blog so I can whine about how terrible this show is.” Well, The Secret Life of the American Teenager is back, and I am now happily be-blogged, so here goes.

Man, I dislike this show. Truly astonishing in cloying sincerity, the premise is a 7th Heaven rewrite of the current trend of teenage motherhood plots. Poor young Amy Juergens, doe-eyed Disney Princess and unlikely, uncool band geek has been wickedly (wickedly!) tricked into premarital sex by the oh-so-cool, angry, un-Christian, unfeeling, and unpleasant foster child Ricky. She is pregnant. “How could this happen?!” she continually wails, and her wail is echoed by her insipid, dumb-witted, blabbermouth friends, her mother, and at last her father, who finally gets an answer. “How could this happen?!” he wails. “…Sex!” she cries, her giant anime eyes filling with tears.

From band geek to pregnant teenager

Like the soap operas this show so earnestly desires to distinguish itself from, everything that happens on the show looks like it’s being acted in a huge, unmiced theater – in order for the audience to comprehend the plot and the range of emotions, everything must be portrayed in enormous, super-stylized gestures. Upset fathers grip their heads and moan. Friends caught gossiping raise one hand over their mouths and arch their eyebrows, forming Marilyn Monroe gasps of “Oopsie!” In order for Amy’s younger sister’s sarcasm to break through the show’s candy-coating, she appears so sullen that she walks around in a living death, speaking in a chilling monotone with her eyes rolled to high heaven. Perhaps these gestures would be necessary if we were watching them all perform in a packed theater in Victorian London, but coupled with unbearably close shots of everyone’s face, the effect becomes nauseating.

Amy gives birth at the end of the first season, so the second season has to find some new drama (because of course, caring for a newborn doesn’t supply sufficient opportunity for heartfelt declarations and gnashing of teeth). To rehash its previous damsel-in-distress formula, the season two premiere focuses on Grace the Gorgeous Christian deciding to have sex with her hunky football star boyfriend Jack. This fall from grace (harhar) still isn’t quite enough melodrama, and the show ratchets up the stakes by then killing her father in a tragic airplane crash, forcing Grace to believe God has punished her for her sins. As Grace herself articulates in the next episode, these girls are punished for sexuality – Amy gets pregnant and God kills Grace’s dad. Amy brushes this off by retorting that her son isn’t a punishment,¹ but Grace remains unconvinced. “I had sex, and now Dad is dead. And he had a horrible death because I had incredible sex…if I hadn’t enjoyed having sex so much, then Dad would still be alive, and you know it, Mom.” Grace’s character allows the show to exploit an incredibly old paradigm: she is the virgin/whore, simultaneously innocent and lustful, weeping over her dead father while wrapped in the same pink and green striped comforter that was the recent site of her wanton indiscretion. Meanwhile, Amy’s caring but befuddled boyfriend Ben gawps at how much larger her breasts have grown while nursing her baby. The Secret Life of the American Teenager goes to the bank on all this sexy fallen virgin business while couching it in the language of a didactic Book of Virtues. It’s gross, and really unoriginal.

From wanton lover to grieving sinner

It’s also incredibly popular, which is one of the discouraging qualities of summer programming. Summer is sometimes an opportunity to try out new material, to do something different and let a smart, stylish show like Mad Men find an audience. But the same entertainment vacuum that allows people to stumble over Mad Men also builds audiences for shows like The Secret Life of the American Teenager.

¹ Just in case these characters weren’t generic enough already, Amy decides to name her son John. The name sounds forced and strange falling whole out of her mouth, as though she’s perpetually quoting from someone else: “my son, John.”

Something shifts during Eureka‘s third season. Although the show is recognizably the same, with the same quirks and plot structure and premise, something about the show’s perspective clearly changes, and I’d argue that it happens because of Degree for Men Absolute Protection Anti-Perspirant.

In its third season, Eureka is sponsored by Degree for Men, and rather than just use the typical “sponsored by” teasers and place anti-perspirant prominently around the set, sponsorship trickles down into the show’s design. Degree for Men’s appearance in the show happily coincides with the entrance of a new character, Eva Thorne, introduced as “The Fixer.” Her role is to make Global Dynamics more commercially productive, both by cutting departments that don’t make money and by increasing consumer-focused research. Ms. Thorne walks through Global Dynamics and introduces the new Consumer Research Products Lab, and as she explains that the lab is funded through “corporate synergy,” she clicks a button and immediately a Degree for Men logo appears on the back of everyone’s lab coats. Behind her, a man with the logo emblazoned on his chest waves his arm, seemingly impervious to the flames burning on his hand. (Like users of Degree for Men, he remains cool under fire.) In another episode, Sheriff Carter gets caught in a Groundhog Day experience and re-lives one day over and over again. His day begins in the shower, which he turns off and then immediately reaches for his Degree for Men – first at the start of the episode, and then again after time repeats itself.

Episode seven, “Here Come the Suns,” is certainly the most egregious example of this all-pervasive sponsorship. When a school science project goes awry and creates a second sun directly over the town, Sheriff Carter evacuates the town and then covers himself with a substance that protects against heat, allowing him to return to Eureka and destroy the extra sun. To prepare the viewer for the plotline’s relationship with its corporate sponsorship, the episode begins with another scene in Ms. Thorne’s Consumer Research Lab, where a man douses a dummy with flames as Eva explains: “It’s the latest next-gen technology Zane’s been developing for our sponsor. Over-engineered to keep you cool in the hottest situations.” Crates with Degree for Men labels litter the floor around the dummy.

Blatant, shameless, and silly as this episode-length commercial may be, I don’t believe it’s an entirely negative development for Eureka. Yes, it forces the show to produce episodes like “Here Come the Suns,” where the realization that a “heat protection formula” saves Carter from a star going supernova elicits a classic hand-to-forehead viewer response. Nevertheless, that same winking self-awareness also leads to one of my favorite episodes of the series, “What About Bob?”

The second episode of season three, “What About Bob?” seems like it should be the moment when the show goes irrevocably over the sponsorship cliff, never to return to artistic integrity. This is the episode that first introduces Degree for Men, when Eva Thorne walks into the new lab and clicks the button that turns on everyone’s evil overlord logo. And yet, to fully incorporate this new, self-referential tone, Eureka takes the idea of self-awareness and runs with it, building an entire subplot around the question of what happens when a television show watches itself. In the episode’s main plot, Sheriff Carter and Allison enter a sealed lab made to look like a primordial jungle where several researchers have lived in isolation for years. As Carter and Allison investigate the mysterious disappearance of one of the scientists, Carter’s daughter Zoë and several minor townspeople characters gather to watch events inside Lab 27 from a hijacked security feed.

The security feed from Lab 27 works like a reality show within Eureka, complete with rabid fan base, viewing parties, and excessive viewer commentary. Zoë watches because she’s worried about her dad, but everyone else watches for the drama. “You’ve gotta admit, the injection of new talent has really made this show fresh again,” Fargo says. Vince wonders “which one of the scientists is the red herring?” and Lucas suggests that “the arrival of Sheriff Carter has made it more procedural.” Comments like this, particularly Lucas’ suggestion that Carter makes what was a science-based show more like a cop show, broaden the self-referential eye forced on Eureka by Degree for Men to include the entire project of the show. What could have been a completely bizarre standalone moment of commercial self-awareness becomes a well integrated part of the episode.

And even when Degree for Men doesn’t kick off a metatextual lovefest, Eva Thorne makes arguments for what’s happening to Global Dynamics that are clearly meant to justify the changes in Eureka as well. “We’ve gotta start saving somewhere,” she says, and Zane makes the point even more plainly. “If we come up with a hot product in here, maybe Ms. Thorne won’t have to make so many cutbacks.” In other words, we’ve gotta sell advertising on this show somehow, viewer, and if this Degree for Men thing works, maybe we can afford to make a full season’s worth of episodes rather than stopping at just nine.

It’s hard to vilify shows that rely on sponsors to stay on the air, especially excellent and nearly-extinct shows like Chuck. (Thank you Subway and Alan Sepinwall). Do I wish it weren’t necessary to sell out in such a spectacularly thorough way? Certainly. But for the most part, Eureka manages the shift with characteristic charm and good humor, and the ability to laugh at itself smoothes over the many of the painfully obvious deodorant moments. I don’t know what will happen when season three comes back next week, but I assume from the continuing existence of pages like this one that the sponsorship will continue.

I’ve been watching a lot of Eureka lately. It’s coming back to the new SyFy¹ next week, which I’m excited about, but it really came to my attention as a show to think about when it became a topic of conversation among some sciencey people as a show they really like. I was a little surprised at its popularity, because it always seemed to me like one of those shows where the fiction overtakes the bounds of scientific plausibility (something that doesn’t really bother me, but is roundly disdained by others in my household). The more I watch, though, the more it seems like an important example of the possibility of a non-mediocre middle ground.

Eureka’s premise is that a charming, common sense, everyman, All-American guy named Jack Carter gets assigned to be the sheriff of Eureka, a top secret town full of geniuses. Most of the town is employed by Global Dynamics, a hidden facility sanctioned by the government and designed to create world changing scientific advances. Sheriff Carter’s job is to wade through the daily catastrophes associated with the creation of artificially intelligent military drones, satellites that beam aggression from space, devices that erase memory, etc. etc., while also administering common sense justice against those who use their geniusy powers for selfish purposes. He may not be able to spell corporeal, but he sure can sniff out a bad guy.

Mishap at the Eureka Dog Show

This premise allows Eureka to have its science fiction both ways – it reveres its genius townspeople, it delights in its super geeky setting, but the viewer’s experience of the scifi wackiness is always mediated by Sheriff Carter’s everyman perspective. The space that gets carved out between Carter and everyone else defines the show’s scifi-meets-real-life appeal: Carter lives in an omniscient smart house named Sarah who can anticipate his every need, but who nevertheless gets pissed off when he’s late for dinner. The town hot spot, Café Diem, lets you order anything you can possibly think of and prepares it out of its fission-run, warehouse-sized freezer, but Carter really just wants a burger. Science fair day at the Tesla School for Advanced Learning includes one entry that promises to be the next major development in medical digital imaging, but the school is still ruled by a coterie of gorgeous evil genius girls who mercilessly mock Carter’s daughter Zoë. Eureka lets the viewer imagine awesome scientific advances in the context of recognizable real life, while refusing to condescend either to its slightly stupid main character or its non-genius audience.

The middle ground here comes primarily out of the show’s combination of Carter’s police procedural street smarts and the scifi genre invisible man explodiness, but the impressive resistance to mediocrity comes largely out of its sheer quirkiness. The tone is set by the show’s opening credits, a ridiculously catchy cheerful whistling melody punctuated by odd minor intervals and a piano/washboard backup. That homespun whistle calls back to the Andy Griffith Show backbone that is built into Eureka, but those unexpected intervals cannily inform you that Carter’s Main St. is a different kind of place than Andy’s. Outside of the really masterful main credits, Eureka indulges in a familiar, comforting silliness – lots of covered-in-goo gags, geeky call outs to Doctor Who and Star Wars, Carter’s house is actually a woman jokes, and the unending, ever satisfying encounters between Carter and the scientists he tries to police.² The silliness, though, rarely falls from pleasurable familiarity into boring predictability. New monsters of the week, inventive solutions to mundane problems (your clothes keep cleaning themselves after you take them to the dry cleaners!), and the occasional ring of emotional sincerity prevent the premise from exhausting itself.

Eureka Main Street

Eureka’s writing, while fun, never really elevates it beyond its genre fiction format, and it certainly does not challenge the audience to examine their own lives or confront the existential futility of modern institutions or require them to follow seventeen interwoven plotlines. Still, its pleasant veneer of glossy entertainment acts less as a shell that disguises an empty core and more like a stylistic safety bubble. Inside the bubble, you can forget the implausibility of shared dreaming and instead snicker when the whole town experiences Sheriff Carter’s classic forgot-to-wear-clothes-to-work nightmare. Buried safely within the slick layer of quirk, you’re encouraged to set aside your fake science alert radar and resign yourself to comfortable, imaginative fictional pleasure. Eureka doesn’t take itself too seriously, but its premise and tone do offer some deeper insights. It is an amiable, friendly show, ultimately optimistic about science, the future, and human nature, and full of enough style and imagination to guard against blandness. It lauds common sense without dissing nerdiness, it values loving human relationships without devolving into sappiness (okay, it’s a little sappy), and even as it laughs at itself, it does so without undermining its own project.

All of which is not to say that Eureka is perfect – it certainly isn’t. Some monsters of the week fail to create an appropriate amount of panic, and the origin of any given problem is pretty repetitive (“You say there’s a problem with the flow of time? Who at Global Dynamics is working on a project about time? Lots of space debris headed our way? Say, isn’t someone at Global Dynamics working on a space debris thingy?”). And then there’s the issue of Degree for Men Absolute Protection, which… is a topic for another day. Still, at its best moments, Eureka allows the audience to imagine a future of scientific advances like clean water and air, vaccines for all diseases, and the end of drought and hunger, but it’s difficult to appreciate them from a large-scale perspective. Instead, we experience this edenic future within a familiar, American small town, full of self-cleaning clothes, cars that drive themselves, and houses that have dinner ready when you come home.

¹Yeah, that stupid rebranding is a whole different blog post.

²Carter, to evil scientist: “I’m on to you. I know you have a device that can create a worm hole, or uh, bend time, or make you invisible – a wormholing, timebending, invisibling device that…shields you from the mind.”

Pause.

Other scientist: “Yes. He said invisibling.”