At this, the end of the spring television season, it seems that it might be time to go ahead and own up to something.

I am all about the good television. There’s nothing better than TV that makes you whip out the Beckett or Dickens comparisons, or TV that seems transcendent of the form and leaves you gasping for appropriate superlatives. That sort of television is why I do what I do.

I also watch The Real Housewives of New York City. I have seen bits and pieces of all of the Real Housewives franchises, actually, but have been watching this season of RHNYC with increasing astonishment? Horror? Fascination? Dismay? Disgust? …Pleasure? Well, clearly, since I kept watching it week after week. These things can be said about many, many reality shows, and I don’t necessarily want to think about that phenomenon more broadly right now, but I do want to think a little about why this specific season of RHNYC has been extra specially bonkers.

It’s been clear that this season of the show has attained truly impressive levels of insanity, and that it’s come from a few different sources. Several intense feuds have helped keep everyone at a high pitch of emotional angst, thanks to the perpetually shifting allegiances and weeks-old betrayals that often flare up again in the presence of new insults. Each woman has some motivating trauma in their personal lives that has helped keep them at each other’s throats, and however scripted the vacations, parties, lunches, and chance meet-ups may be, the real ire these women feel for each other has been quite convincing. The biggest feud has been between Jill and Bethenny, whose ongoing rancor splits the group into teams and sparked further drama between Alex and Jill, LuAnn and Bethenny, Ramona and Jill, and basically every permutation thereof. In addition to all of that, Kelley’s apparent breakdown fueled many episodes worth of anger, speculation and finally, resigned concern for her mental health (an angle which the women have agreed is best but which the show refuses to deal with).

Within the last several years, television has begun to capitalize on the pleasure of watching a show that’s hard to follow, which can be said about everything from Lost to The Wire to Private Practice. After a season like this, there’s no question that Real Housewives has become as crazy and complex a multi-plot soap as any scripted show. Why is Alex mad at Jill again? Oh right, there was that thing Jill said about Alex’s kids at that department store party, which calls back to some snide comments Luann made in season one. What has made this show so much more complicated to follow as a viewer is that half of what fuels these intricate, constantly shifting relationships happens outside the perspective of the show. The editors do as best they can to show us how one comment at a party creates a rippling impression that someone dislikes someone else, but so far, the Real Housewives franchises have had to work around the drama created when one woman says something to a tabloid about someone else, or leaks private information to a blogger, or makes a snide comment on twitter. It’s hard to depict every aspect of these women’s anger toward each other, but even harder when the things that make the most drama aren’t even on the table.

This is what has made season three of RHNYC so remarkably bizarre. The fame of being reality show stars has fully coalesced with the process of being on a reality show. Unlike The Hills, which chose to just ignore the fact that its subjects were now also celebrities, RHNYC often tries but fails to draw the same boundaries. Much of what fueled the Bethenny/Jill feud was probably Jill’s anger that Bethenny is getting her own reality show, but that goes unmentioned. At the same time, there was no way to show how angry Bethenny was at Jill without mentioning that Bethenny’s pregnancy was somehow leaked to the gossip blogs. So this whole season, in addition to being all the typical nuttiness and jealous, was also a mess of slowly disintegrating borders between reality and the reality show.

I’m not going to try to claim that what resulted was in any way classy (much though Countess DeLesseps may disagree) or dignified, but I’m also not going to claim that I didn’t watch it. And in admitting that I watched, I have to also admit I found it bizarre, upsetting, and entertaining.

After yesterday’s post about one-off episodes, I remembered that Fringe did an unusual, noir-esque musical episode earlier this year, and I missed it because I had sort of given up on Fringe. I figured I’d give it a shot, and found myself struck less by that one episode as a stand alone musical episode, and more by how much better Fringe has gotten in its second season.

Much of what plagued the show in its earlier episodes was its insistence on the concept of fringe science, the idea that scifi favorites like telepathy, kinesthesia, teleportation, or invisibility are all possible within the framework of current scientific knowledge. This meant that each episode was invested in a two-part structure where something cool or really gross would happen (how could that woman’s skin have been peeled off her body without a single incision?!) and at some point, pseudo-scientific explanations would bear the burden of explaining how that could ever be possible (perhaps if our neural networks were enhanced…). In some ways, this is still what’s happening in Fringe, as most episodes are still well endowed with gross creep-out scenes and the characters are still weighed down by the necessity of explaining how cancer could become an infectious disease spread by skin-to-skin contact with the language of modern science. It’s a formula that has worked well in the past, most notably for The X-Files, but for too long, Fringe was unwilling to walk too far down a road that’s extremely necessary for keeping a structure like this alive. From the beginning, The X-Files was focused on the existence of things outside human understanding – Mulder really believed those aliens were out there, Scully was around to try to find more earthly explanations for those weird corpses. When things got really weird, too weird for Scully’s science, there was never any need to strain those darned neural networks for some possible answer. It’s aliens. They’re here, and they’re killing humans.

Fringe resisted its own version of “it’s aliens” for far too long, preferring instead to throw up the smoke screen of a sinister corporation performing eugenics and alchemy in the basement. Finally, though, the second season gives in to the inevitability of outright scifi, and by the end, it’s a fictional universe full of doors to another world where people ride Zeppelins, MLK was President, and everyone has evil doppelgangers. And immediately, everything is just so much more fun.

Surprisingly, the special musical episode has nothing to do with this alternate universe, and is merely the result of a much more quotidian drug-induced story that Walter Bishop makes up for the benefit of Olivia’s young niece. Which is why Fringe’s stand alone episode is actually much less interesting than its bigger story arc through the end of the season. As entertaining as it is to see all the usual characters dressed as 1940s noir detectives and gangsters, it’s much less interesting for a show to briefly create an elaborate alternate world for the purposes of a single episode when there’s already an unexplored elaborate alternate world just waiting for further attention. An alternate world filled with doppelgangers and Zeppelins!

The musical noir episode does get one thing right. Noir = funny hats.

I’m still watching the season’s finale episodes, but it’s easy to see that as a scifi show, Fringe is now all in. It finally feels J.J. Abrams-y, even including a reference to a character seeing a big floating red sphere. Even so, the show does has some ups and downs, as the newfound wholehearted scifi bent still leaves the show caught somewhere between an episodic and a fully serialized form. But at least now it’s got its tone straight, and there’s no more confusion about whether we’re supposed to actually believe it’s possible to make dead people talk by re-electrifying their brains. It’s a shame it took Fringe nearly an entire season after Leonard Nimoy was first a guest star for the show to find its scifi footing, but it’s better late than never.

I’m almost caught up on Breaking Bad – I’ve watched all except last week’s episode, but I wanted to write about the episode that aired two weeks ago, at the same time as the Lost finale. It was one of those scenarios where I watched all of twitter get really excited about that night’s Breaking Bad episode, and I thought “Huh – I wonder if I’m going to remember that there’s some supposedly astounding episode in season three by the time I actually catch up.” There was no question. “Fly” stands out from Breaking Bad in the same way that “Pine Barrens” seems distinct in The Sopranos, “Exposé” is a separate thing from the rest of Lost, or “The Body” is markedly different from the rest of Buffy. I love this about television, and I think it’s something unique to the form – the strength of the episode structure means that each episode always has the potential to be very, very different than what’s come before. It doesn’t happen often, and many of the more sophisticated, narratively interesting shows attempt to undermine the episode as a structural force, so that one episode flows into another with very little resistance. Deadwood used this technique to an extreme, often beginning episodes exactly where the last one left off. Some of this fluidity is undoubtedly underlying the concept of the television series as being “novelistic,” as a weaker episode structure more resembles the role held by chapters of a novel. But even in those cases, the residual force of the episode as a unit combines with the reality of producing television (each episode may have a different set of writers or a different director; each episode has its own budget for guest stars, special effects) to make it perpetually possible that any given episode might be something completely weird and different.

Such was the case for “Fly,” an episode that abandoned every cast member except for the two leads, and stuck them in an underground lab while they tried to kill a fly for nearly the whole hour. Alan Sepinwall writes that episodes like these are called “bottle episodes”: episodes produced with the goal of costing as little as possible in order to reserve money for guest appearances or awesome explosions in the season finale. “Fly” uses only two of the show’s actors, and it takes place entirely on sets already built for the show almost all of which are indoors, which cuts out the expense of shooting on location. It would make sense for an episode like this to be a departure from the show’s typical tone or style of storytelling, and in some ways that was the case. There were no gorgeous wide shots of the desert or sudden gross-out images of a decapitated head attached to a turtle. It was not a depiction of Walt being torn between two different lives, as so much of Breaking Bad has been – none of the usual scenes where a cell phone call interrupts an important life event, or Walt is called away from his meth deal by a family emergency. Still, “Fly” was overwhelmingly invested in many of the things most characteristic to Breaking Bad. It was an episode that allowed both Walt and Jesse ample time to consider the narratives they have constructed about their lives and to think back through their past actions and work out what went wrong. And somehow, even in the restrictive space of the lab, “Fly” manages to ratchet the tension so effectively that by the end, I was actually covering my eyes while Jesse teetered on the unstable top step of a ladder.

“Fly” is like nothing so much as a Beckett play, and so it’s no wonder many people hated it. There’s no action, nothing happens, why is he so obsessed with that stupid fly, what are they even talking about right now, etc. etc. etc. Episodes like these, those that stand out from the rest of a show, tend to be controversial. (Think of how many people hated “Exposé,” myself included). In many instances, it’s because an audience member may not care for whatever it is that specific episode is doing – if you really hate Beckett, you probably hated “Fly,” and that’s okay. If you cannot stand musicals, then Buffy’s musical episode will leave you cold, and nothing Joss Whedon did would ever make you feel otherwise. I do think, though, that there’s something deeper happening when an audience resists one particularly unusual episode of a television show. Those episodes can feel a little like a violation, or a betrayal of a contract. We know by now that an episode of Buffy is supposed to look and sound like one thing in particular, and we’ve been watching for the past six seasons because we like whatever that is. The idea that any random episode could just go off the rails from what we anticipate is unnerving, because it upsets the norm and hints at an instability we didn’t previously realize existed.

This is exactly the reason that shows can jump the shark, but it’s also the reason that television can be so fascinating over the long term. Even the shows most inextricably rooted to a formula have the potential for a single episode to derail the status quo. In any week, the show you’ve been loving as Happy Days may choose to send the Cunninghams to Hollywood, thereby giving Fonzi a chance to waterski over a marine predator. But on the other hand, every new episode is also an opportunity to be a costume drama, or a farce, or some bizarre metafictional exploration of minor characters. Or a Beckett play – but just for an hour.

So remember yesterday when I said one of the shows I was planning to watch this summer was Party Down, and I said it in a way that suggested it was going to take up a lot of time and require some significant viewing investment?

Between writing that blog post and writing this one, I watched twelve episodes of Party Down. Yeah.

I would have watched the show much earlier if I’d realized that it’s made up of essentially the entire cast of Veronica Mars, plus most of its writers, plus Jane Lynch. I also would have watched the show earlier if I’d realized how funny the premise could actually be – the main characters are a group of caterers, and each episode features them working a different event. These range from standard parties like weddings, silent auctions, and backstage parties to more unusual affairs, like an adult entertainment awards show. The show takes place in Los Angeles, and the catering staff is made up of wannabe actors, comedians, and writers whose job forces them into daily contact with the people they so desperately want to become. Everyone wants to become famous, that is, except for the main character Henry, who actually had a breakthrough acting job as a tagline guy on a beer commercial and has since abandoned any hope of a further career.

Adam Scott as Henry on Party Down

It would be easy for Henry and his merry band of misfits to look unrelentingly jaded, but the whole thing is improved by the presence of Jane Lynch’s character Constance, who sincerely loves every party she’s attending. She claps with more enthusiasm than the weary guests at fundraisers, she is thrilled by surprise guest appearances, she is overcome by the dénouement of a sweet sixteen party. Balancing Constance’s dedication, Party Down Team Leader Ron Donald sees each event as a stepping stone toward his ultimate goal as franchise owner of a Soup ‘er Crackers buffet, and his repeated insistence on professionalism is matched only by his deeply-held self-doubt. As a result, the show takes on the quality of a Christopher Guest movie, where everyone approaches each event at a completely different angle of earnestness and someone is always dropping a tray full of appetizers.

Jane Lynch as Constance

The other sustaining force of the show is the whole caterer premise, which allows each episode to bring in a new cast of guest stars and forces the staff to deal with a new bunch of completely crazy, slightly famous people. In this way, Party Down is like an inversion of HBO’s Entourage, a show it references in the second season as Roman and Kyle debate which of them would be Turtle and which would be E. (Kyle insists, of course, that he’s actually the Vince of the group.) It is the same formula of a group of people striving for success in Hollywood, but has a much funnier and more clear-eyed perspective on what these people are trying for so badly, and how much more unlikely it is for them to achieve anything.

Slingin' 'derves at the Brandix Corporate Retreat

From a structural standpoint, I love the concept of each episode being a different party. It gives each episode an easy shape and purpose, but it also lets every episode have a completely different tone. That conceit prevents Party Down from ever being predictable, but in addition, a show that is so breezily comfortable at both a twenty-year high school reunion and a hard-core metal backstage party has to also have a pretty solid sense of itself.

Shame on me for letting this show slip through the cracks for so long.