It’s been painfully obvious over the past several weeks on the blog, but just in case you hadn’t noticed my shameful, repeated absences – I’ve been doing some stuff. Namely, stuff that has involved lots of cross-country travel, late-night trips to Home Depot, a surprising amount of ribbon tying, several frenzied IKEA trips, brochure gathering, a UHaul rental, a fabulous meal at Momofuku Ko, frantically skimming that Dickens classic Sketches by Boz, dodging through crowds of people dressed as sci fi characters trying to get a photo of William Shatner, illicitly disposing of massive amounts of cardboard in campus recycling bins, etc. etc. etc. It’s been a strange, awesome six weeks.

You may note that TV viewing did not make it into the list of prominent activities, and although that is accurate in comparison to my normally TV-saturated schedule, I did manage to strategize one aspect of the craziness to coordinate with some television watching. We have been painting our new apartment, which means that while my husband is at work, I am at home doing all of the edges and trim so he can do all of the rolling. And while I sit, painstakingly working my way around doorframes and windows (I accidentally wrote “paintstakingly” har har), I’ve been watching Northern Exposure.

It’s a show I remember seeing occasionally on daytime reruns when I was about ten, and have since rediscovered as an appealing, funny, comforting, gently surreal portrait of a tiny town in Alaska that reminds me as much of Twin Peaks as it does The Gilmore Girls. Cicely, Alaska was founded by two lesbian patronesses as a highbrow artist’s retreat and salon, and in the mid-nineties of the show, is now home to a parade of wacky personalities. There’s a retired astronaut, a recently imported Jewish doctor, a radio DJ who reads Whitman and Dostoyevsky, a laconic Inuit office manager, a cheerleader and her seventy-year-old lover, and a host of other bizarre characters.

John Corbett as Cicely's radio host

What I discovered in my paint-fume laced Northern Exposure marathon sessions is that I had inadvertently chosen the ideal show for a divided attention, because it somehow manages to be funny and engrossing while also having almost no plot. There are no long arc mysteries, there’s a tiny hint of sexual tension between two characters that hardly counts as a developing story much less a soap opera, and the single-episode plotlines are so relaxed and mundane that they’re more like single-episode premises. A Russian classical musician, who has been to Cicely before and whom everyone likes, returns for an episode. Ed, the town’s resident filmmaker, has an idea about filming a guy who makes wooden whistles. In one episode, everyone gets the flu. It’s like watching a show where every script is copped from a small town newspaper, and the biggest stories of the day are not necessarily the fact that there’s an annual blood drive, but who’s running the blood drive, and whether they need more volunteers to bake cookies, and how much money they need to put up a new stop sign, and the fact that it’s been above 70 degrees twice this week even though it’s only May!

Darren Burrows as Ed Chigliak

The series is often meta-fictionalized through Ed Chigliak’s amateur filmmaking efforts, and it’s telling that his preferred form is the portrait – his films are almost always brief portrayals of inspiring people around town, he rarely works with a script or even a fictional concept, and his favorite subject matter is everyday life.

I love plot. So much of my pleasure in narrative comes out of anticipating what’s going to happen next, and watching all of the pieces fall together. But Northern Exposure is a lesson in the possibilities of a long story where the story is the least important aspect of narrative, and all of that energy and forward-drive gets displaced onto singular characters and a setting that is both unusual and familiar.

I love the BBC’s new Sherlock, a modern adaptation of the late-Victorian Conan Doyle classic by Doctor Who wizard Stephen Moffat. I should mention as a starting point that I’m a Sherlock fan in general, and am a sucker for pretty much anything with a Dr. Watson and a deerstalker hat somewhere in its production.

Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson: totally not on a date

As a modernized version, Sherlock does suffer from a severe dearth of deerstalker hats, but what it lacks in natty headgear, it amply makes up in canny production decisions, a fully realized and persuasive Holmes, and some winking gestures toward the history of Sherlock Holmes adaptations that manage to be fun without seeming burdensome. The Watson/Holmes relationship in particular is the subject of frequent jokes and raised eyebrows as they are repeatedly taken for a gay couple, a nice way to incorporate both the many queer readings of Holmes and the more conservative insistence on an asexual, unsullied detecting machine.

“Detecting machine” is a useful phrase for Sherlock Holmes, and Moffat’s biggest achievement with the miniseries is his completely convincing answer to a question that necessarily underlies any modern procedural, and especially an updated Sherlock – what is the point of a guy like Sherlock Holmes in the age of the internet? Bodies can be scanned to discover all of those telling inconsistencies, train timetables and moon phrase calendars no longer need to be memorized for convenient access, and why would someone need a photographic memory of every shoe brand in the world when a search engine will remember it for you?

Moffat’s Sherlock answers this question in the traditional way – whatever human technology may be, Sherlock Holmes is just a weird, mesmerizing guy, and his powers of deduction are a part of his appeal as a mysterious character. As is pretty obvious watching Sherlock, Moffat’s Holmes bears a striking similarity to another lean, socially awkward, oddly intelligent, timeless character, and the decision to portray Holmes at an early, unformed stage in his career bears out further comparisons with Moffat’s youthful Dr. Who. Their long, narrow faces and dark mops of hair make them nearly twins, but where Dr. Who’s hilarious goofiness occasionally reveals dark, scary glimpses of his real self, Sherlock Holmes’ serious work ethic gives off a glint of humor every once in a great while. Similarities aside, these two characters make the same points about their impressively long-running fictional franchises: the world around them may change, but an appealing character will stay relevant.

At the same time, Sherlock uses some smart visual devices to cue its viewers into the way Sherlock’s brain works, and to impress a current audience with his enduring acumen. As Holmes scans a crime scene, observes a clue, or even does research on his mobile phone, a visual annotation accompanies his train of thought. The cloud of textual notes – “wet,” “clean,” “unhappily married,” overlay Sherlock’s field of vision like an embedded augmented reality app. Rather than needing our smart phones to take in an image of the world and parse it for useful data, we can just look through Sherlock’s (and Sherlock’s) frame of reference. It’s also incredibly similar to Heavy Rain’s solution to in-game detection. Sherlock Holmes is still interesting as a character, but he’s also still extra-human, even in a new technological paradigm.

What’s different now is that where 1900’s Sherlock Holmes seemed to have skills outside the power of any other human being, 2000’s Holmes has observational powers only inaccessible to other humans with no laptop, cell phone, or microscope. This is part of what makes Sherlock so effective and arresting. There’s no question that Sherlock Holmes still has an intellectual edge on everyone else, but the gap is no longer as large as it used to be. Sherlock Holmes’ quirks – his single-mindedness, his dogged obsession with puzzles, his reliance on nicotine and other stimulants, his general lack of manners – these are no longer just wacky side characteristics. Sherlock weaves Holmes’ deductive skills more firmly into his weird personality, and makes it obvious that any yahoo with an iPhone is not immediately the next great detective. To be Sherlock Holmes, you’re also going to have to be kind of a (compulsive, obnoxious, insensitive, fascinating, brilliant, possibly gay) jerk.

If Joan Holloway Harris could have seen what’s happened to Don Draper after building a life based on what he thought was expected of him, completely ignoring the many incompatibilities and red flags along the way, perhaps she’d be less anxious to get pregnant (for what we now know would be the third time). “The Good News” illustrated three different positions along the same trajectory: Don goes to California to try to recover from his disintegrating life, only to learn that it’s possible for life to break down even further, Lane Pryce is just starting to cope with a broken marriage, and Joan is doing her best to create a life based on the same model that these two men have so aptly demonstrated.

I didn't realize until making this image, but that chandelier is trying its best to stab Joan's husband

Lane’s failed marriage is useful as a foil for Don’s single man debauchery, but Joan is a more productive comparison for what happened between Betty and Don. Her husband is gone at all hours, he’s joined the army (like both Dick and Don), he treats his wife like a child (when he’s not raping her), and Joan clings to an image of marriage that relies on Hawaiian themed dinners and heating up your husband’s leftovers. Out in California, young people are having sit-ins at Berkeley, smoking grass and discussing politics, but Joan’s image of success is circa 1958, and so it’s almost eerily out-of-place to watch her trying to become a successful working woman while she’s still caught on an outdated image of herself at home. This is where Don has been for the past several seasons – he dates Midge and goes to performance art shows in the Village, and then goes home to his Coca-Cola ad wife. If Joan really understood where Don’s decisions have landed him, I wonder if she’d be able to make another choice?

As for Don, Anna Draper’s impending death seems to leave two paths open to him. Alan Sepinwall commented in his post that Anna is the last person tying Don to Dick Whitman, who can look at him and say, “I know everything about you, and I still love you.” Because of this, he says, Anna’s death will forever bury Dick Whitman, and that whole early part of Don’s life will be gone forever. I suppose that’s possible, but it seems so unlikely based on Don’s track record. Every attempt to squash his former life has led to its inevitable and ever-more-potent reoccurrence. Further, Don’s relationship with Anna may be the last remaining tie to Dick Whitman, but that means she’s also the last remaining witness of Don Draper as a persona instead of a person. When she dies, the last barrier between Don Draper as an act and Don Draper as a man will fall away, and Don will be the person he has made himself into. Even though Betty and Bert Cooper may know about his former life, it’s a very different thing to see it, and unless Betty is somehow able to use Don’s lie in a custody battle, every Dick Whitman-related conflict in Don’s life will totally dissolve.

So these seem to be the two options – Dick Whitman dies, and we discover that he was the only thing holding Don Draper together, or Dick Whitman dies, and Don is finally free to make himself something new. Maybe I’m too hopeful, but if I am, it’s because the episode invites us to be optimistic. This is the first time Mad Man has indulged in a signal of renewal as blatant as the New Year, or telegraphed its shifting times as obviously as “Gentlemen, shall we begin 1965?” and it’s hard not to take that as invitation to look forward. Things may still be bad in New York, but somewhere out there in California, Stephanie’s dancing to the Beatles and seeing the future.

Actually, I’m pretty sure Dickens was a fan of jam.

I am still here, fully ensconced in a strange world where everyone chuckles appreciatively at a reference to eating one’s own head and the biggest daily obstacle is that someone’s using a Norton edition when everyone else is using a Penguin. (The Norton, of course, was taken from the later completed novel editions, while the Penguin comes from the earlier serial edition first published in Bentley’s Miscellany. What, you didn’t realize how different they were? Oh ho, you’re in for a treat.)

It’s hard to think about anything other than Dickens, frankly – a trap this person clearly fell victim to while registering his or her car. Occasionally I get flashes of TV or new media -related ideas, among them, “Were Dickens’ sketches the YouTube videos of his day?”, “What is it we like about really long stories if it’s not plot?”, and, “If his insistence on repeated public readings of the most violent scene in his corpus, the scene in Oliver Twist when Sikes murders Nancy, did indeed contribute to Dickens’ premature death (as was argued by a lecturer this morning), do we need to worry about the health of such TV violence aficionados as the Davids Chase, Milch, or Simon?” (Answers: Yes, hmm, and I hope not.)

At the moment, though, television looks like a far-off vision of the future when seen from a world emphasizing daily Victorian teas and frequent discussion of the New Poor Law. Better luck tomorrow.

I’ve written in the past about a peculiarly strong affiliation TV writers have claimed with nineteenth-century novels, and especially with Charles Dickens, and the many qualities of his work that are useful for people who think about television today – Dickens’ serial publishing, his focus on urban spaces, his melodrama, his intricately woven plots. It’s something I have continued to muse about over the past several months, and it’s a topic I feel especially drawn to expound on this week. Because I am at Dickens Universe.

Yes, Dickens Universe, a week-long Dickens-themed conference/workshop/summer camp/party held at UC Santa Cruz every year, and featuring lectures from Dickens scholars, seminars for graduate students and members of the general public, workshops on writing, pedagogy, and presentation skills, and nightly parties with themed cocktails that coordinate with the current year’s primary text. (This year: Oliver Twist and Sketches by Boz. Last night’s drink: Nancy’s Heart of Goldschlager cocktails.) It’s an unusual space for academics, something that combines graduate student development opportunities with a forum for peer feedback, and then adds in the nearly unheard of element of presenting one’s ideas to an audience outside of the academy. It’s pretty great, really, and not just because each day’s schedule includes two coffee breaks, a Victorian tea, post-prandial potations (yes, really), and the aforementioned nightly party.

I came to Dickens Universe well aware that ol’ Charlie has been actively re-appropriated in the world of television as a father of intellectually respectable mass entertainment of a form not unlike Lost or Deadwood or Damages or [insert multi-plot serialized show here]. I was also aware that from what I’ve found, most references to television’s nineteenth-century analogues have been whittled down to just one authorial figure, a jovial Dickens perched in the background of today’s television landscape. Wilkie Collins, Anthony Trollope, Elizabeth Gaskell, or Thomas Hardy are nowhere to be seen, much less Balzac or Flaubert. What I have been surprised to discover is that at least colloquially, many Dickens scholars have performed the same kind of singular appropriation, only in reverse.

Where interviews and critical pieces about television reference Dickens over and over, Dickens scholars reference one show – The Wire – with similar fervor. I’ll admit, some of this is at least prompted by me. “I work on television,” I say, and the near-unanimous response is “The Wire!” But I hasten to add that it would certainly be here whether or not I were here, frequently bringing up TV. On the Universe’s first full day, graduate students and faculty got into small groups to brainstorm teaching ideas about Oliver Twist, and when we reported back to the big group, we ended with a giant list of possible avenues for further discussion. We had the novel as a form, affect theory, Dickens as a social reformer, caricatures and characterization, thingness in Oliver Twist, Oliver as the novel’s vacant center, negative depictions of marriage, etc. etc. etc., and as a suggestion from one of the groups, The Wire. In connection with Oliver Twist, they mentioned that season four might be particularly relevant.

It is particularly relevant, of course, but so would a discussion of melodrama, serialization, violence, audience, and any number of other things about television more generally. Right now, though, I find the selection of that singular touchstone show to be sort of satisfying. Television seems to have picked Dickens, and in turn, Dickens scholars have picked The Wire. Even if it’s somewhat unfair on both sides, the symmetry is too pleasing to pass up.

If the dominant question from Mad Men’s premiere – “Who is Don Draper?” – is still in effect when reading last night’s episode, then it’s pretty clear that right now, Don Draper is a disgusting mess. The lines between his personal and professional lives, previously so carefully intact, have blurred beyond any reasonable limit, and those disintegrating boundaries result in some of the worst behavior we have ever seen Don Draper display. Somehow, his treatment of Allison is much, much worse than his neglectful, occasionally abusive relationship with Betty, his paternalistic dismissal of Sally’s teacher Ms. Farrell, or even his aggressive, S&M-tinted affair with Bobbi Barrett. Allison was compassionate and impressively competent, and to see Don so out of control that he cannot stop himself from taking advantage of her is to see him at his worst. (At least, I can only hope this is his worst.) Even the one constantly inspiring aspect of Don – his stunning skill as a creative director – is nearly absent from this episode. We see several instances of Peggy struggling with a growing appreciation of her own different advertising perspective, but we never get one of those classic moments where Don’s talent as a piercing social observer belies his own terrible conduct. He is rumpled, drunk, and pitiable.

It’s not hard to see why, and as SCDP’s new consultants quickly note, his advertisements are an excellent starting point for reading Don’s Christmas-fueled misery. Faye Miller, the customer evaluation researcher, points out that Don’s Glow-Coat commercial is certainly about someone’s childhood, and it’s easy to pull that thread through Don’s previous work. His concept for the Kodak Carousel is most obvious, of course, with its overt use of nostalgia and familial sentiment, but you can see it even in the smaller campaigns he develops with Peggy in the previous seasons. The initial idea for Mohawk Airlines is something to do with stewardesses wearing short skirts, and with Don’s direction, Peggy moves toward focusing on the return rather than the departure, away from watching the city disappear beneath you, and toward “What did you bring me, Daddy?” At this point in his career and this place in his divorce, Don has a harder time finding his way back to those nostalgic ideals he once mined for advertising gold, and the family-friendly Jantzen campaign turns into a playful joke about censorship and the risqué bikini. Through his outward actions, it’s easy to dismiss Don as a liar and a cheater, but his ads make it clear how crucial his belief in the possibility of an intact family has been for his perception of himself.

I wrote a lot last season about how carefully this show is tied to the calendar year and to the insistent commemoration of holidays – most importantly for season three, that fabulous Halloween which ended in Sally and Bobby dressed as a gypsy and a hobo while Betty relentlessly peeled back Don’s costume. This is the first Mad Men Christmas, as well as Don’s first Christmas without access to that unrealistic but persuasive image of his loving, stable family. It’s no wonder he’s a mess.

Not that it excuses the way he treats Allison, or explains the full extent of his downward spiral into alcoholism. But even if it’s not excusable, Don’s extreme behavior becomes less unusual inside the context of everyone else’s response to the holiday. Peggy sleeps with her boyfriend, against her initial better judgment, Roger is forced to put on a Santa costume to placate Lee Gardner, Jr., Joan leads the most spirited, sexy Conga line in human history, and in my favorite part of the episode, creepy, too-knowing Glenn returns to give Sally some pointers on being a child of divorce. If Mad Men holidays have always been moments of stress or revelation inside Sterling Cooper, (last 4^th of July, some guy’s foot was cut off with a rider mower!), Christmas is a kind of emotional lightning rod. The whole company puts on an elaborate show of cheeriness and raunchy goodwill for the Lee Gardner, Jrs. of the world, playing games where they pass each other oranges under their chins and dressing as Santa, despite the fact that they are all inwardly fuming, disintegrating, or surrendering. Glenn’s vandalism is so satisfying because it gleefully punctures that outer pretense. And as with every holiday on the show, this Christmas is also a marker of larger segments of time passing – SCDP must employ new customer evaluation specialists, Lee Gardner, Jr. shows up at the party expecting something like a “Roman orgy” and then takes everyone’s photos with a brand-new model of Polaroid camera, Bert Cooper shakes his head sadly about impending socialism.

“I don’t hate Christmas,” Don says. “I hate this Christmas.” It is Mad Men’s particular genius that “this Christmas” is both so historically specific and universally human.