It seems inevitable that after two relatively light-hearted, standalone episodes, Chuck would have to return to a darker, multi-episode plotline format for the final few episodes of the season, and it also seems appropriate that the groundwork for that plotline would be a focus on Chuck’s mind. The ultimate goals of this show have always been about that uncomfortable computer lodged in Chuck’s brain – either he wants it out, or he needs to put it back in, or he can’t control it. It makes sense that now Chuck is finally in a place where the Intersect is almost fully integrated into his life, it becomes a threat to his mental stability. And, as it’s nearing the end of this season, the rhythms of this show dictate that we return to Chuck’s brain as the primary battleground. The premise of the plotline is also respectably plausible inside of a show where plausibility has remarkably little traction. I can well believe that the presence of an incredibly powerful computer that can control both your thoughts and physical actions would eventually require some serious mental gymnastics to try to stay sane.

Still, the lead up to this revelation about the potentially threatening Intersect seems way too sudden, and I’m sure it’s a result of this bizarre, abbreviated season arc. Maybe a minute or two of Chuck waking up from a disturbing dream would have been a better use of time in the previous episode than watching Ellie and Awesome hang out with Evil Justin in Africa. The tone of “Chuck vs. the Tooth” also felt oddly equivocal – this is scary, and the moment when Chuck walks into that mental institution is meant to be honestly frightening. But as soon as we begin to actually worry that Chuck is going crazy, we get a jolt of funny from Merlin or the other spy-crazies. The conversation with Casey and Sarah was a great example of this unevenness. When they sit down to talk with Chuck at the hospital, he immediately launches into his whole spiel about the tooth, and plays the Insane Conspiracy Theorist role for laughs. The gravelly voice, the desperate request for Sarah to give him her hand, the silliness of hacking up the tooth, “the truth…is in the tooth” – all of these are meant to be funny, and they are funny as long as we believe that Chuck isn’t actually unbalanced. Except, as Sarah’s subsequent concern and Christopher Lloyd’s dour therapist make clear, we are supposed to be worried for Chuck. Either we can laugh at the hilarity of Chuck playing the role of a crazy spy, or our fear that Chuck is in danger of losing himself is legitimate, but it’s hard to keep them working at the same time. “Chuck vs. the Tooth” tried to have it both ways, and I don’t think it really clicked.

All that said, when tuxedo-clad Morgan was the recipient of the objectifying Buy More slo-walk, I almost spit out my iced tea.

I want to write about Treme, and Doctor Who, and also Friday Night Lights, which returned to NBC for its fourth season on Friday night. I want to write about all of those things, but I cannot, because I’ve spent the last few days pounding through the first season of Breaking Bad, and at the moment, my entire TV brain is consumed by how amazing and disgusting and brutal that show is. I had planned to hold off writing anything about it until I actually catch up through season three, which is currently airing on AMC, but the downside of that decision is that I can’t write about anything else, because all I’m watching right now is Breaking Bad.

At the same time, I’m watching Breaking Bad much more slowly than when I blast through a season of The West Wing or, yes, Friday Night Lights, because to watch more than two or three episodes of Breaking Bad in a single day is to flirt with soul-crushing despair. I’ve been hearing that seasons two and three are even better, and I’m both thrilled and worried by that assessment, because if this show gets any more harsh or unrelenting, I’m going to have to rock myself to sleep while whimpering softly.

What does a show have to look like in order for me to be this concerned about my own mental well-being? It helps to start with a sufficiently bleak premise – Breaking Bad’s protagonist is a guy named Walter White, a high school chemistry teacher in Albuquerque, New Mexico who decides to start cooking meth after being diagnosed with stage three lung cancer. He does it largely for the money, as he’s worried about how to support his wife, disabled teenage son, and unborn baby after he’s gone. Even though Walt’s motives are primarily mercenary, though, there is an aspect of this venture that taps into something deeper about his character. Meth is a way to make money for his family, but Walt is also awake, and frightened, and challenged, and sexual, and violent for the first time in his life. I imagine this feature of Walt’s character will become more developed in the next seasons, but when it surfaces very briefly in season one, it’s almost scarier than the rest of the show.

Bryan Cranston as Walter White on Breaking Bad

Almost, but definitely not quite. My fear for my mental stability has a great deal to do with Walt, but is mostly a product of Breaking Bad’s uniquely brutal style of storytelling. Essentially: terrible, unthinkably awful things happen on this show, and then you have to deal with it. I wrote last week about the magical erasable quality of most traumatic events on network television shows, and Breaking Bad is the ultimate inversion of that formula. There are a lot of ways this manifests itself on the show, but two features stand out. First, the show has a gruesome attentiveness to the details of physical decay. Walt coughs constantly. It is a debilitating, hacking, paralyzing, gasping for air cough, and the show has no problem derailing the momentum of a plot line so that we can sit and watch Walt cough for a few seconds. There is a difference between knowing a character has cancer, and never being allowed to forget that he has cancer, and Breaking Bad is really only interested in the latter. In the same light, corpses, broken glassware, dirty ventilation filters, basements, and the New Mexico landscape are all painfully present on the show, and if Walt breaks a piece of glassware, the show is almost more interested in watching him sweep up the mess than why he broke it in the first place.

The other technique that dominates Breaking Bad’s storytelling is the use of incredibly long scenes. Where most shows give you thirty seconds or a minute of conversation at most before shifting our attention elsewhere, Breaking Bad is perfectly happy to linger on a scene as long as possible, particularly if it is incredibly painful to watch. In the third episode, Walt is trying to decide whether or not to kill a man, and he sits down on the basement floor and talks with him. They talk for nearly nine minutes, an eternity on television. No other character arrives, there are no cuts in and out of other scenes, there’s not even that much to look at. It’s two guys sitting in a dark basement, and one of them is deciding whether or not to kill the other one. We believe that gaps and breaks create suspense in fiction, so that when something dramatic happens at a commercial break, you have to wait to find out what comes next, and the waiting is excruciating. To some extent that’s true, but Breaking Bad is a study in the tension that refuses to let you look somewhere else. It’s too easy to decide to kill a man and then just do it – it’s so, so much worse to have to sit there, watching Walt try to puzzle through the consequences for killing him or keeping him alive.

I am definitely looking forward to watching the second and third season and seeing how this show develops. But there is a part of me that is absolutely dreading it.

…On the other hand, if sweeps week stunts are expressed in episodes like last night’s Community, then long live sweeps week!

I haven’t written much about Community, in part because it’s clearly been in flux over the last season. What began as something that looked very much like a sitcom with a strong streak of self-consciousness became an entirely different show last night with the episode “Modern Warfare.” Over the last several weeks, Community has been playing with how much meta it can actually get away with, and trying to find a line between being a show about community college kids that communicates by way of pop culture reference, and being a show about pop culture. The most recent example of this was an episode a few weeks ago where the study group became a mob conspiracy to control the distribution of chicken fingers in the cafeteria. Its clichés, satires, styles, and story were note-perfect, and all of the jokes about mob bosses, snitches, conspiracies, wealth, and families were hysterical spoofs of a specific genre of fiction. Underneath those comments, though, that episode was ultimately funny because a community college’s chicken fingers were the basis for a criminal organization. In the midst of Ocean’s 11 music as we watched the chicken fingers circulate throughout the cafeteria, it was the mob spoof that was funny, not the community college lunch.

Greendale - post-paintball apocalypse

“Modern Warfare” flipped the equation. It began with a fairly standard opening bit about how Jeff and Britta bicker and Shirley misses spending time with her sons, and shifted into a very Community-esque discussion of how Jeff and Britta’s lack of sexual tension was keeping them from being friends/Friends. Jeff then falls asleep in his car and wakes up to find the campus transformed into a post-paintball apocalypse battlefield. The rest of the episode follows the study group as they fight off the glee club, the chess club, and ultimately Senor Chang for the rights to priority registration, and the references rain down without stopping. Abed finds Jeff in a classic Matrix-style gunfight, the girls and the boys join forces after a classic female stealth attack in the bathrooms, and finally, a sweaty, dirty, undershirt-clad Jeff reaches the Dean’s office, railing against a war fought over a hollow, meaningless ideal. In the most obvious cliché of all, Jeff and Britta barricade themselves in the group study room and their bickering escalates into sex, before they then turn on each other. Truly, the whole thing was perhaps the most masterful spoofs I have ever seen.

Jeff Winger, action hero

Except… unlike the chicken fingers episode, where the humor came out of the absurdity of the criminal conspiracy, the humor of “Modern Warfare” was that this whole action movie was happening at a community college, and even though the bullets were all paintballs, the action movie was real. Abed begins by warning, “come with me if you don’t want paint on your clothes,” and it’s funny and stupid. Every time someone “died,” you expected him to deny the finality of his death by simply ignoring his paint-splattered clothing – it is, after all, just paint. But every fallen soldier stays dead, and as is demonstrated by the wound that kicks off the Jeff/Britta sexytime, the paintballs are more meaningful than actual blood. The spoof was allowed to expand without ever being punctured by its own silliness. It was funniest because at some point, it wasn’t even a spoof anymore – it was Jeff Winger, action hero.

It was awesome, is what I’m saying. And no, Community cannot do this over and over again, with each episode remaking Greendale into a setting for a different genre send-up. But the fact that it could do it at all, and do it so well, is seriously encouraging for the show’s future.

As I mentioned in my first post back on Tuesday, we are heading into May sweeps season, which means that all the big network shows are currently lumbering toward some giant, melodramatic, shocking, bloody, gooey cliffhangers. I think the place you can see this most clearly is Michael Ausiello’s May Sweeps Scorecard on EW – based on all the insider info he’s gleaned, Ausiello made an enormous fill-in-the-blanks list of the deaths, pregnancies, proposals, births, resurrections, and other special events that will be eating up TV these next few weeks. He’s already filled in several of his anticipated eighteen fatalities based on this week’s Lost, but the scorecard is still relatively empty. It’s early.

It’s just one of those vagaries of the television production world, the bi-annual presence of the Nielsen ratings sweeps, but I cannot get over how odd it is that we now have a season where television fictions all rise up simultaneously into frenzies of melodrama. For most of these shows, the bulk of the winter is a slow burn, where characters change in tiny, easily reversible stages, and the startling events that threaten to explode prematurely quickly die back down. On Lost, characters have been marching determinedly around that silly island, forging and breaking allegiances, pointing to creepy kids standing in the jungle, but never making much progress toward resolution. On shows like Bones, Booth and Brennan moved inexorably closer to a romantic relationship and immediately backed away before it could overtake the familiar episodic patterns. CSI, Law and Order, and NCIS continue to chug on as they always have, although Law and Order: SVU has increasingly begun to go off the rails into strangely burdensome emotional stakes – an attempt, no doubt, to wrest popularity back to NBC’s still-floundering 10pm timeslot. Rick Castle will never actually get together with Kate Beckett, even though her apartment did blow up a few weeks ago, and Dr. House is still a jerk.

But every May, just because it’s May, the months-long slow burn erupts into a full on conflagration, and the aim of the game is to present as convincing an argument as possible that the rules of the show you’ve been comfortably watching aren’t set in stone, despite what you may have thought. The characters you assumed were immutable and eternal will die in dramatic car crashes, or they will finally marry each other, or if it’s a J.J. Abrams show, the organization the protagonist assumed she was working for has all along been just a part of another, much more secret organization, and it’s actually evil. You watch, and you keep watching, because the show needs to keep alive the possibility that what you’re watching is progressing rather than repeating, and these fin de siècle gestures at the end of every season are crucial to that belief.

For a lot of shows now, particularly on cable and premium channels, that belief in progress and the possibility for real change is one that’s well founded. On Mad Men, Sons of Anarchy, United States of Tara, Treme and the like, characters have memories, and retain the experiences of previous episodes and seasons, so when a character dies or someone gets married, it tends to stick in a way that deaths and marriages often don’t on network shows. But you’ll notice, none of the shows I just named are reaching the ends of their seasons right now – two aren’t even on. Cable and premium channels work on a different audience model, and aren’t nearly as beholden to the Nielsen sweeps as the networks still are, and so they don’t participate in the annual month of May eruptions. I’m not suggesting that Bones and Booth don’t remember that they just kissed a few weeks ago, but that events like those, and particularly, events that crop up as a result of these May shenanigans, tend to be erasable. Characters die, and they do tend to stay dead, but the consequences of those deaths dissolve pretty quickly, leaving everyone about as cheerful as before come next November. When was the last time you heard anyone mention poor, disfigured, tragically dead George on Grey’s Anatomy? How about Edgar on 24? (Confession: I haven’t been watching 24 in a while, so maybe Edgar’s death is being mourned more fully than I’m supposing). How about that life-threatening brain tumor Allison had on Medium last season?

It’s May, the season of deaths, weddings, and babies on TV. Enjoy them now, because in most cases, they won’t last.

Oh Lost. Ooohhh Lost.

Look, I knew that people were going to have to die, and as we’re quickly running out of time, people were going to have to start dying fairly quickly. But it just seems so vindictive, and so utterly under-developed, for Sun and Jin to spend whole seasons trying to find each other, only to die immediately after their reunion. Lost has certainly employed this formula before, where a character achieves happiness and then immediately kicks the bucket, but it’s unnerving that neither Sun nor Jin brought up their now-orphaned daughter in their final moments. It’s so inconsistent with what we’ve come to understand about these characters that the formula in this instance seems marred by incompleteness. Similarly, Sayid is magically transformed into a zombie thanks to some infection for which we get no explanation, and then three words from Desmond seem to roll back the zombie incursion, and suddenly he’s all, “I, the Middle Eastern man with the terrorism connections, am going to blow myself up to save this submarine full of white people!” The change into zombie Sayid was given so much weight that his redemptive gesture comes entirely out of the blue.

The deaths in this episode did succeed in putting pressure on two somewhat opposing realizations about Lost: The Final Episodes. First, I had considered myself at least marginally protected from feeling much of anything about these characters. They have been pawns in this absurd game for so long that I truly believed myself to be immune to their emotional turmoil (Juliet’s death hardly bothered me, and Charlotte’s death last season left me cold). Meh, I thought. It’s going to be a blood bath. As it turns out, Sun and Jin’s death angered me much more than I thought possible on this show, or at least, much more than I thought possible for any character-related circumstance. (My anger at Lost’s habitual and childish reliance on pronouns to sustain suspense knows few bounds. “She is coming.” “He already knows.” “He’s waiting for you.” “You’ve killed her!” “He only wants to hurt you.” “They don’t know the difference.” “They want you dead!” Would it kill you to use a proper noun once in a while?!) Sun and Jin’s death was a reminder that I do still care about these characters, and I’ll tell you, I’m as surprised as the next person.

At the same time, all of the deaths in this episode were indicators of just how crucial it is that we understand exactly what the sideways world is doing, and how it impacts the primary timeline. It calls into question how seriously we’re supposed to take Sun and Jin’s deaths, how permanent they are, and what it means for any one to live or die on the island – after all, even Charlie’s death has been rewritten. It was so disconcerting to watch Sun and Jin experience that disturbing, albeit Titanic-esque drowning scene, only to then watch Jin stroll past John Locke in the sideways world hospital, carrying a bouquet for his wife.  The lullaby that Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof have been singing about this last season is that although the audience may not get the answers to every picky question they have about the island – what about that one bird that said Hurley’s name?! – the show will focus on bringing the characters to meaningful resolutions. Until we grasp which of these realities will win out at the end, all of these deaths and resolutions are provisional.

So many questions; so little time.

In other Lost news from last night, the finale on Sunday, May 23^rd has been extended to a whopping 2.5 hours, bringing the total running time of Lostapalooza up to 5.5 hours. And with the announcement of that extended run time, I suddenly realized that I am going to be out of town on May 23^rd. Somewhere in the middle of Arizona. Possibly in a tent. With no electricity. As you know if you follow me on twitter, this realization caused me no little amount of distress. Hooo boy.

After a productive and successful break, I’m happy to be back. Also happy to report that it looks like this whole TV business is going to be in my life for a while, so this blog becomes an increasingly useful place for keeping track of gut reactions, first impressions, and the occasional Dickens musings. For that reason, the List of Giant Things will probably be a continuing presence, and in the absence of interesting new episodes to talk about, I anticipate doing more casually analytic thinking about shows on a broader scale.

In the immediate and more extended future – it’s sweeps season! Final episodes of Lost! Mad Men returns July 25! Wacky summer TV season is nigh!

And, of course, the long coda to Chuck season three, which is currently well under way. Both last week’s “Chuck vs. the Honeymooners” and last night’s “Chuck vs. the Role Models” were a welcome return to that joyous, fizzy, spy-thriller romp mode that Chuck stand-alones do better than most other shows on TV. My question all along has been how Chuck would transition out of a pseudo finale and then back into an abbreviated six-episode arc, and the answer so far appears to be, “first we’re going to watch Chuck and Sarah do it on a train, then we’ll get Fred Willard and Swoosie Kurtz to show them the pitfalls, and then we’re going to do an arc about the Ring.” Which is fine by me. After what everyone now agrees was an unnecessarily long WTWT Chuck and Sarah stasis, it felt appropriate that the show would let them revel in it for a while.

The possibilities of a spy couple provide the show with some interesting traction; it’s well-worn territory, but largely because it can work so effectively. The last few episodes have made some explicit references to the healthy tradition of crime-fightin’ lovers, including what I am certain was a reference to The Thin Man’s Nick and Nora Charles in the “Mr. and Mrs. Charles” alias on the train and the Hart to Hart spoof in Morgan’s dream from last night. It may just be me, but I was also feeling some ‘30s screwball comedy vibe from the introduction of the tiger last night – but maybe singing “I Can’t Give You Anything But Love, Baby” only works on leopards. Clearly this screwball/romp/spy-thriller will be quickly modulating into something else, a move signaled by the cute Doctors Without Borders guy whipping out his Ring phone at the very end of last night’s episode.

But even inside of a larger save-the-world plot arc, this element of Chuck and Sarah as a couple does have interesting implications for the future of the show (if there is one, fingers crossed, knock on wood). The news hit yesterday that NBC has picked up a pilot from J.J. Abrams called Undercovers, about a husband and wife spy team, and I’ve seen thought about how this might affect Chuck going both ways. On the one hand, it’s obvious that this could work as a replacement show, a fun spy show made by a guy with a big name and a history in this genre. Ditch Chuck, and replace it with something bigger and buzzier. (That is definitely a word.) Conversely, if aired together or marketed as a pair, this could be a boon for Chuck, bringing it an audience it’s been sadly lacking since its premiere. Obviously I’m hoping for the latter scenario, but until NBC gives a firm signal about Chuck’s future, it’s all speculation.

Once again, I’m happy to be back blogging, and am looking forward to filling in the gaps of what I’ve neglected in the past week – most notably, Treme. Before I leave off with the meta-commentary, though, I do want to note that although I anticipate a long life for this blog, its immediate future may continue to be irregular for a little while. The default schedule will continue to be a post every weekday, but with an asterisk that reads, “every weekday, unless I’m driving/flying across the country, or someone is getting married, or I’m moving,” in which case it might be a little hit-or-miss.