Chuck has been kind of…odd lately. Any show that builds its major conflict around a will-they-won’t-they relationship and then resolves that conflict has to find a new way to create forward momentum, and for a while, Chuck was floating around in a giddy honeymoon period. I’m thinking in particular about the train episode from last season, when the fight sequences were all about taking advantage of two prime fighters working in sync, and the whole thing was fueled by happiness.

The interactions between Chuck and Sarah lately has lost some of that giddiness, which is perfectly fair, but it’s been replaced by My Silly Boyfriend Thinks We Should Read This Stupid Self-Help Book bad-sitcom level comedy. It’s as though having put Chuck and Sarah together, the only thing the show can think to do is pluck at the superficial flaws, unwilling to either push them forward meaningfully, break them apart irrevocably, or just leave them alone for a while.

It’s not as though last night’s episode fell flat, especially with Armand Assante and an enormous marble Captain Awesome statue – something about the absurd affairs of Costa Grava appeal to me, as does the opportunity to say the word Generalissimo as often as possible. Still, it’s frustrating to see that the most creative thing Chuck has been able to do with its two main characters now that they’re in a relationship is reduce them to awkward miscommunication humor. It’ll be Mr. and Mrs. Smith but without the exciting assassination plotline, and what is the point of that?

Step back for a moment. These are two characters who have both experienced an immense amount of familial trauma relating to unreliable or absent parents, and that has to affected both of their perspectives on monogamy and trust. I know this is a spy caper. It would be unrealistic and inappropriate to watch Chuck and Sarah sit down and have a thoughtful, heartfelt conversation about their mutual abandonment issues. Because they have both completely sidestepped any kind of acknowledgment of those issues, though, all of the practical emotion (anger, concern, nostalgia, regret) gets funneled onto poor Ellie, who comes off as nearly schizophrenic in her attempt to encompass the show’s immense untapped reserve of every emotion that is not a direct byproduct of cute relationship ineptitude.

It’s the beginning of the season, so I haven’t given up hope that things will pick up, but at the moment, it’s weird to feel like Chuck and Sarah are the immature, emotionally under-evolved representatives of Buy Moria.

There were several things I found difficult to believe over the course of last night’s episode. The first thing that I still can’t believe is that I thought for any moment that the ridiculously accented Bobby Kennedy was supposed to be real. If I’d paused it and thought about the potential ramifications – SCDP is instantly propelled into stardom, runs major democratic campaigns and takes over Manhattan, it would have become clear that of course it wasn’t actually Bobby Kennedy. But really, if I’d paused it and just thought about the phone call, there’s no way I wouldn’t have realized that absurd Kennedy impression was a joke. Next, I can’t believe Betty is actually so childish and petty that she would move away just to separate Sally and Glen (and by result, in some twisted way, force Sally to act out again, thereby upping her weekly therapy and allowing Betty to continue seeing the child psychiatrist). It’s not as though it’s implausible, given Betty’s stellar parental record, but it was still astonishing. What I could accept, no problem, were Betty’s fabulous sunglasses as she spotted Sally sneaking away and leapt furiously out of her wood-paneled station wagon.

The biggest piece of the episode that I found nearly impossible to believe was that the partners of Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce couldn’t see Don’s “Why I’m Quitting Tobacco” gesture for what it was – a brilliant piece of advertising. This is just my gut reaction theory, but that full-page ad creates a generational jolt of a very different kind than the standard “oh right, women were second-class citizens!” reminder that Mad Men has been so effective at administering over the last several seasons. The show has become comfortable with playing with historical juxtaposition, frequently through representations of gender or race, but also through smaller-scale details like the enormous, new-fangled Xerox machine or the advent of The Beatles. We love them and they work largely by playing with familiar aspects of life in 2010 that we are also aware have changed dramatically over the last several decades. Images of pregnant women drinking get to be astonishing and self-congratulatory for the audience (“we know better than that”), but they work partly because they’re not that astonishing. We know that we think about pregnancy differently now than we did then, and we understand that a fax machine would have been a magical thing.

The “Why I’m Quitting Tobacco” piece almost works the same way. A modern audience knows that tobacco advertising will be a source of endless tribulation and congratulates Don on being on the right side of history from a public health perspective, even if Peggy derides an employee who asks if Don will quit smoking. But my admiration for the letter was not really for its historically fortuitous stance against big tobacco; I loved it because it was smart, unexpected, and re-positioned SCDP as a company in control of its future. It immediately struck me as effective because it looks like a public relations maneuver that would happen at a canny modern company today, and it comes across as ahead of its time. It’s not hard to believe that an employee would get flack for dating a black woman because this is a part of our history we’re proud of having changed; it’s much harder to believe that an advertising strategy this calculating and self-conscious would be misunderstood, because it’s not easy to face up to how comfortable we now are with advertising “shenanigans.” This is an aspect of ourselves and the way media has changed that we think about much less than we do things like women in the workplace or joint custody. It’s so difficult to believe that Sterling, Cooper, etc. don’t love the ad because this is a historical rearview mirror we’re less familiar with consulting. Maybe we forget that advertising innovation wasn’t always synonymous with stunt advertising we were bombarded with stories about Taco Bell buying the Liberty Bell or half.com purchasing the town of Halfway, Oregon.

One more thing on the list of things I couldn’t believe about last night’s episode: how completely and surprisingly effective I found Don’s voiceover. Since it happened, I’ve been crossing my fingers every time Don even looked toward that little notebook, and I was really leery when I saw him put pen to paper in this episode. Instead of the overwrought SATC musing from last time, though, this was almost a vindication of the previous voiceover. We watch Don sit down, rip apart his previous diary entries, and begin to write what appears to be a personal, vulnerable account of why he’s quitting tobacco, fueled no doubt by the disturbing return of Midge as a heroin addict. The shot of him sitting contemplative at his desk in the Village segues into the familiar “sad Don goes swimming” shot, and then that voiceover fades away as a new one begins – still Don, but this time he’s pitching a campaign, not quietly considering the human condition.  What we get turns out to be a fabulous bit of wizardry, where the personal account turns into the public declaration and Don’s honest, open tone actually restores the calculating, intelligent, and still unreadable personality underneath the outer persona.

Can’t wait for next week!

On occasion, if it’s a particularly compelling season, I really enjoy Top Chef. I’ve written here in the past about how much I also liked Top Chef Masters, because it’s a pleasure to watch talented people do something well. For those reasons, and also because I have been known to pull out a KitchenAid mixer on the weekends, I was really looking forward to the latest in the franchise, Top Chef: Just Desserts. Pastry chefs! Stupid title pun! Sounds good!

I’ve tried to give it a few episodes, but Just Desserts is exactly what I was hoping it wouldn’t be. I’m a girl, and I like to bake, and I was hoping that some of the machismo of the Top Chef aesthetic would elevate my hobby to a serious, challenging, not-quite-so-femme profession. The main Top Chef is full of slow-mo shots of very sharp knives puncturing brightly colored fruits, lots of crisp blue, silver and orange tones, and its kitchens are full of people barking at each other, often to the tune of “there’s no crying in the kitchen!” This is not to say that it’s a firmly hetero reality show – it’s on Bravo, for pete’s sake. But Top Chef seems most comfortable with a fairly butch style of queerness, and while this no doubt suggests some obvious and problematic connotations between masculinity and seriousness, this is just what I was looking for in a reality show full of cupcakes, pink frosting, and (ack!) chocolate.

So I turn on Top Chef: Just Desserts and am first confronted with the words “Just Desserts” rendered in glossy, chocolate colored cursive font underneath the familiar logo. Next we get cupcakes, bananas, and other similarly cute foods rendered in neon shapes in the background – these aren’t so bad, except that it seems like everything on the show has to be explicitly dessert themed. The contestants live in a house with pink and brown diagonal stripes painted on the walls, and I don’t remember being hit over the head with adorable themed décor on regular Top Chef. Okay, so the styling isn’t great, but what about the actual competition? It’s hard not to read into the locations and challenges offered to Top Chef versus Just Desserts, even though some it must be due to Top Chef’s well-established pedigree. Still – Top Chef contestants go to NASA. Just Desserts contestants go to a fog machine heavy “Mad Max meets Cirque du Soleil” aerialist performance from an unknown troupe of wacky theater people wearing bondage and burlesque themed outfits.

It turns out, there’s also lots of crying on Top Chef: Just Desserts. We’re just four episodes in, and there have already been too many weeping jags, mental breakdowns, and hissy fits to count. Almost every contestant is either too sensitive to put together a plate of food, or requires seventeen dramatic outbursts to bake a cake, and this emotional frailty cross all boundaries of gender and sexual orientation. Even worse, instead of the countless declarations of how much the competition means to them and how ambitious and driven they all are, Just Desserts is plagued by contestants who sort of wish they were somewhere else. No one’s blaming a parent who misses his children or sons and daughters who worry about their families’ health, but the spin here is markedly different. If you miss your children on Top Chef, you say, “I can’t believe how hard it is to be away from my son, but he’s the fire that keeps me here, and reminds me how strong I need to be.” When you miss your children on Just Desserts, or the competition stresses you, you collapse and then offer yourself up for elimination. The conclusion is clear and straightforward: people who bake are teary, self-doubting wimps who like things that are pink, fussy, and easily damaged.

Sigh. Guess I’ll have to go back to Ace of Cakes or for my less gendered televised pastry needs.

It’s premiere season, and so by all rights I should be watching all of the new programming. You know, Mike and Molly and The Event and Chase and Blue Bloods. Instead, I’ve been watching Gilmore Girls. It’s not as though I haven’t seen Gilmore Girls before, or that I haven’t seen it enough that I could probably recite entire three-minute-long reference-laden exchanges. In fact, it’s a show I have a hard time even being critical about – like Dorothy Sayers, Weezer and the complete mythology of Star Wars, it feels too deeply embedded to think about as something outside of myself. I feel apologetic for rather than distaining of its obvious low points (ooh, seventh season…), its WASPy wonderland backstory that barely pretends to have endured hardship and independence, its absurd reliance on dialogue that runs two hundred words a minute, its pitifully poor representation of non-white characters (the hilariously, inhumanly strict Kim family, the snobbish and prissy French concierge), its unbelievably cheesy credit sequence – these things are mere blips on my critical radar.

Which is why this blog post is not a “wasn’t Gilmore Girls ridiculous?!” post, but rather a “allow me to appreciate a single episode of Gilmore Girls at length” post. Because on re-watching, I feel moved to express the complete, utter brilliance of the Gilmore Girls dance marathon episode.

The premise of “They Shoot Gilmores, Don’t They?” is a twenty-four hour forties-themed dance marathon, exactly the type of bizarre, anachronistic, weirdly intense community event perfectly suited to showcase the singular strangeness of Stars Hollow. It’s an impressively well-constructed forty three minutes of television, beginning with the small-scale tension of Lorelai’s determination to finally beat Kirk in the marathon and ratcheting all the way up to a full on, life changing public breakdown. Unlike some episodes where the wacky hijinks seem to be a mismatch for the seriousness of the events, or the relationship drama overwhelms everything else, or the Stars Hollow spirit becomes obnoxiously twee, the dance marathon episode is one of the best examples of the show reaching a well-balanced tone. It’s funny and sad and has just enough Dave Rygalski to also be adorable. We get plenty of the older members of the town, and Taylor Doose’s sleepy reminiscences of his one-time career goal (magician) give the character some much-needed dimension. (Okay, not a whole lot, but tender childhood memories are actually quite a step forward for him). There’s a tiff between Jackson and Sookie that is both plausible and easily fixed, Mrs. Kim’s hilariously awful eggless egg salad sandwiches provide a foundation for Lane and Dave’s burgeoning relationship, and all of it serves to establish the backdrop for one of the show’s most traumatic and contentious relationship plot points – Dean breaks up with Rory, and Rory connects with Jess.

Whatever one’s opinion on Dean vs. Jess, the circumstances created in the episode which lead up to the big breakdown are really, really well done. Rather than build some stunning betrayal or overwrought confession of love, Jess just sits in the bleachers while Rory and Dean dance. Rory, whose character in the show’s early years often borders on tooth-achingly sweet, gets a chance to make a mistake for once, and goes on and on about how annoying, how provoking, how disgusting and silly Jess is behaving. Understandably, Dean finally gives up, and walks away from his relationship with a girlfriend clearly obsessed with another guy. Despite the cliché of a love triangle plot, the scene in the dance marathon is unusual in its ability to make the break-up everyone’s fault, and it ends on a note of misery rather than a much more cloying scenario with Rory running into Jess’s arms as Dean glowers in a corner. There really is nothing else like that final scene, as Lorelai and Rory embrace in the center of the gym while Rory weeps and Kirk, victorious, does laps around them to the sounds of the Rocky theme song. It’s a perfect encapsulation of the show at its best. We’re left with the two protagonists coping with their latest emotional crisis as Gilmore Girls’ own special brand of crazy literally encircles them, and an entire, weary town dressed in vintage forties clothing looks on.

There’s something crucial about this episode inside the larger arc of the series, which is why I’m so appreciative that this episode is successful. Rory has several other relationships after Dean – there’s Jess, and Logan, and Dean again, and Logan again, and even though those initial connections and subsequent break-ups are exciting and upsetting, none of them have the same force as this first collapse. It makes sense. The first relationship is perfect (even if it isn’t, really), and unprecedented, and after Dean leaves, it’s just not possible to imbue each new guy with the same promise of soul-matey idealism. When she moves away from Dean and into her relationship with Jess, Rory begins to shed her admittedly somewhat obnoxious preciousness, but with it goes her unusual, endearing innocence.

I’ve been referring to Stars Hollow as wacky, crazy and strange, but really, its underlying characteristic, and the force of its appeal, is something much more like innocence. Sure, you can point to the overt, often mocked nostalgia of Taylor Doose’s desire for old-fashioned ice cream parlor, but the whole town is markedly free from cynicism. The pinnacle of that quality is Luke Danes, whose curmudgeonly demeanor seems to promise the absent dose of real-world pragmatism, but time and again, his gruffness turns out to be an act and he faux-reluctantly takes part in the Winter Carnival, Film Festival, or in this case, Dance Marathon. The real pragmatism and brusque sarcasm comes from the outside, either through Richard and Emily Gilmore, or Chilton, or later, Yale.

It’s easy enough to point to Rory’s graduation from high school and moving away to college as the point when Gilmore Girls takes a turn, but for my money, it’s this episode. I don’t mean to suggest that after this point I think the show begins to fail, or even that some of its best moments don’t come after this point – the end of the third season is stellar, and I think the show is really on form all the way up through the fourth season. Eventually, though, the special Stars Hollow breed of insular, cheerful naïveté begins to parody itself. It doesn’t happen until much later, and there are many intervening events that contribute to the decline, but this episode feels like the first storm cloud in the lovely, unsustainable Edenic landscape. It is a fabulous, entertaining, effective storm cloud, and at the end, you get Kirk, jogging around the gym with his trophy held high.

It’s the last days of Rome at Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce, and I can’t help but wonder if the subplots in these last few episodes are building into a rhythm of collapse. A week ago, those Beatles tickets hinted at coming disappointment that is alleviated in the last moment as Megan hands Don the envelope with the tickets inside. Of course, the ticket device was the frame for a much bigger set of failures and disappointments, so by the time the tickets arrived, they were really just a reminder of their own relative inconsequence. The stakes were much bigger in last night’s little off-screen framing narrative: poor Trudy was back in a hospital room giving birth, and I kept waiting for the dark clouds on the horizon to build into a thunderclap, particularly with the comment about the baby being too large for Trudy’s pelvis. Like the Beatles tickets, though, Baby Girl Campbell made it safely into the narrative world, but it was clear she was born at a moment when her father’s company was falling apart, its future resting on a distant possibility of hope in the shape of Heinz ketchup. These two episodes seem like a set-up for a rule of three plot arc – first the tickets, then the baby, and next week?

I say this in part because it’s easy to see the really big storms growing, and to imagine their fallout. Faye seriously compromised herself, and the effect of her professional betrayal on her relationship with Don was strongly hinted in their posture, which mirrored Roger and Jane’s snuggling on the couch. You never want your relationship to be compared with a marriage where all the husband can think to say when dedicating his autobiography is “to my loving wife,” the most generic inscription imaginable. Between that breakdown and the undoubtedly poor decision to have an affair with Megan, regardless how sincerely she promises not to cry the next day, it’s easy to see that Don’s personal life will continue to fall apart. Professionally, the upcoming obstacles are even more obvious. Pete’s dissatisfied with Don, he feels undervalued at SCDP, and maybe Ted Chaugh will make him feel more loved. Without Lucky Strike, Roger has almost no role in his own company, and it might not even matter because he might not have a company for much longer. It’s nearing the end of the season (it’s the end of Rome), and big things are happening.

But I’m stuck on the Beatles tickets and Trudy’s baby because Mad Men has always been a show that thrives on detail, and that aspect was never more obvious then last night. The empire may be collapsing, the partners may be driven to poaching clients at a funeral for God’s sake, but we’re going to spend several deeply awkward minutes focused on a smear of lipstick on Peggy’s teeth. Oh the lipstick. Oh the cringing. The funny thing about that sequence was that it probably made the meeting go much more smoothly and quickly than it could have – my impression was that the clients, like myself, just wanted the whole thing to end because it was so awkward and gahhh. This is the same quality I’m referring to with the tickets and the Campbell baby: it’s a small aspect of the episode that snowballs into a painful and embarrassing sequence, and I feel like the season is preparing to perform the same mountain out of a molehill performance in a far more damaging way. Except the next time, the mountain won’t be revealed for the molehill it is; it will keep growing and gaining mass until it really is a crushing, insurmountable peak.

A last word on using physical metaphors to describe plot elements – it’s not like the episode’s title wasn’t asking for it, you know?

Last week I felt it was important to write about Lone Star before I no longer had a chance, and sadly, that fear has turned out to be well founded. Goodbye, best pilot on network television this fall. We hardly knew ye, mostly because too many of us are idiots who picked crappy programming over actual intelligent drama. As Dan Fienberg said, “this is why we can’t have nice things.”

In any event, the result of choosing to write about Lone Star last week was that I didn’t get to the season premiere of Chuck, a show certainly not unfamiliar with the prospect of imminent cancellation. The first two episodes did exactly what they were supposed to – after a brief flirtation with solo spy work, Chuck and Morgan are back on the job with the CIA, Sarah and Casey are on board with the season arc to find Chuck’s mother, the Buy More has been rebuilt, Ellie is pregnant, and as of last night, Jeffster is back in the house. In addition, Chuck has promised Ellie that he’s retired from the spy business, which means his reinstatement with General Beckman also rebuilds the necessary secrecy shenanigans. So yeah, it’s the opposite of Mad Men: everything falls apart at the end of the season, and the beginning of a season is all about putting it back together. The only element missing is Big Mike, who must surely be right around the corner.

Linda Hamilton and Isaiah Mustafa on Chuck

It is a relief to see Chuck and Sarah happily together, although last night’s comments about a relationship Achilles heel make me fearful that it won’t be allowed to remain cheerful for very long. It was also fun to watch the show deal with its many guest stars from the past two episodes, including Olivia Munn, Isaiah Mustafa, Lou Ferrigno and Linda Hamilton as Chuck and Ellie’s mother. I recognize that there are other opinions floating around about guest stars, but my take is generally that they depend on how open the show is to cast experimentation (Chuck being about as open as one could hope for) and how zippy the guest star makes things (not sold yet on Linda Hamilton, but Mustafa did a nice job last night as a far-too-well-trained Buy More employee). I also feel like it’s a little weird to begin a piece on guest stars by comparing them to bed bugs.

My concern about this season is that its central arc feels pretty derivative of what Chuck has done in the past. The search for Chuck’s father was catalyzed by Ellie’s impending marriage and her desire that her father walk her down the aisle. It worked well, and was a good way to keep Ellie and Awesome in the show’s emotional loop. This new search for Chuck and Ellie’s mother was initiated in a different way – the order came from Chuck’s dad, and Mrs. Bartowski’s associations with the evil Russian weapons organization suggest we may be heading for an Alias-esque questionable maternal loyalties situation. Still, I was disappointed by the subplot last night. I have no problem with watching Awesome freak out over Ellie’s pregnancy; that’s just some good old classic TV-fatherhood cliché material, and I’m all for it. The problem comes with the realization that Ellie’s pregnancy may be inspiring a wistful desire for her mother, which feels a little too close to the previous plotline for comfort. Surely a strong, powerful woman like Ellie can experience major life events without allowing her pining for lost family members to kick off an international missing persons investigation.

Happily, any dissatisfaction was at least temporarily displaced by the triumphant return of Jeffster, featuring an awesome Buy More wind machine sequence complete with Morgan working the fan. Man, I’ve missed those guys.

A while ago, I was writing about procedural narratives, and was discussing the way procedurals work by creating the illusion of change without ever actually changing. A show like CSI can go on forever, with characters leaving and coming back, serial killers rampaging around the office and employees being kidnapped, without anyone showing more than temporary signs of trauma. More importantly, the standard operating procedure (dead body, murderer unveiled) carries on without the slightest hiccup. Maybe the most exciting thing about cable television right now is the regularity with which that model is broken on HBO, FX, or AMC. There are procedurals on cable as well, of course, and I’m happy to admit to loving procedurals just as much as the next person, but it’s hard not to be drawn toward shows with less investment in maintaining a status quo.

I bring all of this up in the context of “Hands and Knees,” and also brought it up after the show’s season three finale, because Mad Men has done a masterful job of both maintaining the possibility that everything could come crashing down, as became frighteningly clear last night, and occasionally living up to that threat, as was the case at the end of last season. It helps that the entire show is built on the instability of Don Draper’s founding lie, because it lets the show flirt with discovery and dissolution every time the dam springs a leak. It started with Don’s picture being printed in Advertising Age in season one, continued through his confession to Betty and their divorce, and finally reached a stage of real threat when the FBI begins to ask questions in last night’s episode. While Mad Men has yet to perform a great unmasking of the So-Called Don Draper, it has obviously been willing to dismantle pretty much everything else in the show, and “Hands and Knees” made it seem likely that a much bigger crash is coming.

The truly remarkable thing about “Hands and Knees” is that by the end, very little has actually happened – the episode begins with Don promising to take Sally to the Beatles concert in Shea Stadium, and ends with the tickets safely in his hand. Nevertheless, by the episode’s conclusion, it’s clear that almost every lie ever told on the show is on the verge of collapse, and the doom is so imminent that it feels as though everything has already fallen apart. Pete manages to stop the investigation into Don’s identity at the price of a major account and Pete’s escalating rancor, while in the meantime, Don has a nervous breakdown and tells Faye everything. Betty toys with the idea of telling Henry Francis, which is where my money falls on how this whole thing actually comes down. Lee Gardner, Jr. tells Roger that the Lucky Strike account is gone, and even though he gives Roger thirty days to patch something together, the future of SCDP is clearly in doubt. Lane Pryce’s evil father arrives from London, wielding domination in the form of corporal punishment. And of course, Roger and Joan’s encounter from the previous episode results in Joan sitting in a doctor’s office in Morristown, contemplating her third abortion. In spite of all of these things, Don’s secretary Megan is able to cheerfully hand him the Beatles’ tickets at the end of the episode and smile that everything worked out, and manage to be both mostly right and terribly wrong in the same moment.

The music playing over the end credits – an arrangement of the Beatles’ “Do You Want To Know A Secret?”, the actual song being prohibitively expensive, I’m sure – was a nice tie in to both the Shea Stadium concert and the episode’s thematic threads. The secret I’d particularly like to know is whether Joan actually had the abortion. The episode left it carefully unspecified, but Alan Sepinwall seems to take it as a given that she had the procedure, while I was left feeling like maybe she didn’t go through with it. Thoughts?

What does one even say about this outfit?

I enjoyed “Hands and Knees.” It was well crafted, suspenseful and surprising, and even funny, namely in the scene when Don and Betty quickly shift into “the government is listening to our phones” mode and in the shape of Trudy’s unbelievably amazing maternity nightgown. But mostly I enjoyed “Hands and Knees” for what it promises about Mad Men through the end of its fourth season, and likely into its fifth. It seemed that with Don’s divorce and Anna Draper’s death, Dick Whitman would fade into the background, but he’s still here, making it possible for Don’s life to further disintegrate. Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce is not just a replacement of the old Sterling Cooper – its continued existence is no more assured than Don Draper’s.

I cannot even tell you how terrible Outsourced is. Despite my reservations, I felt it necessary for me to watch the first episode: I’ve been prematurely bashing it just because it took over Parks and Rec’s fall premiere slot, and although I feel the trailers were sufficiently off-putting, it does seem a little unfair to go around badmouthing something I’ve never even watched.

After watching the first episode of Outsourced, my primary concern now is that I did not voice my opinion vociferously enough. It manages to cross the barrier from being merely unfunny (admittedly, a cardinal sin for something that’s supposed to be a comedy), into being something that’s actively insulting. It’s like going through a checkout line at the grocery store, except when you hand the clerk your debit card, not only do you not get any food in return for your money, the clerk deducts $100 from your account and then punches you in the nose. In fact, in attempting to come up with an accurate portrayal of watching Outsourced, the best thing I could think of was my husband’s description of the experience of viewing Gone With The Wind, which he suggested was like “eating a candle that’s burning.” I suppose, however, that just illustrating my own reaction to the pilot is probably not enough to qualify this as a useful piece of writing, and so I turn now to why this show actually is so, so bad.

The Mid American Novelties call center

At best, Outsourced’s premise is ill advised. I’m not saying it would be impossible to make a funny show about an Indian call center for an American company, but the obstacles just seem so monumental as to bring the entire undertaking into question. Our protagonist (?) Todd is an attractive, white, all-American kinda guy who gets shipped off to India to manage the call center for the Mid American Novelties company, an organization that specializes in products like fake vomit, America’s #1 mugs, and, of course, Jingle Jugs, a set of women’s breasts mounted on a plaque that twitch in rhythm with Jingle Bells. This is the product Todd holds up in front of his call center and touts as the quintessential American product – sure, he says, no one needs it, but they can’t stop you from making it. The joke here is supposed to be “haha, the quintessential American product is a set of ridiculous novelty boobs that play Christmas carols,” and while that is a barrel of laughs, there are actually even less funny things going on underneath. As Todd holds the Jingle Jugs aloft, one of his employees instinctively reaches to make sure her sari is adequately covering her chest. So not only are Jingle Jugs funny, and the idea of them being an American product is funny, but the mere prospect of actual breasts is even funnier, and so is the idea that a woman would want to cover them up, particularly those crazy Indian women with their foreign ideas of modesty! Oh ho ho! What mirth!

The Jingle Jugs. So, so funny.

Really, the whole thing is built to be as insulting as possible, and manages to enact the racism it supposedly mocks at every turn. One of the classic opening bits is Todd’s introduction to the Indian office, where he goes around asking his employee’s names, only to find each one more incomprehensible or silly than the next. Todd either can’t hear or can’t understand these characters’ names, except for one guy with the name Manmeet, which Todd of course finds hysterical. Not only is Todd exempt from learning his employee’s names (because of course, they are absurd!), the viewer is also granted this exemption. No need to learn details about these people, dear American audience! They’re just here for you to laugh at. You know what else is funny? Indian food. Also Indian accents, Indian ignorance of American customs, and Indian religions.

I do have to be fair, though, there is one thing about Outsourced that made me laugh. Right at the end of the episode, I realized that the cans of soda have been changed to a fake brand, and the props that look like cans of RC cola actually read “PC.” I’ll admit it. I snorted out loud.

After doing my duty to Lone Star yesterday, it’s time to bite the bullet and write about Boardwalk Empire, which is as stunning as promised. In some respects, it comes off like the standard issue big-drama HBO show: many, many characters, complicated plotlines, distinctive setting, naked ladies, etc. etc. Of course, the previous list of characteristics also describes HBO’s True Blood, so the question is why True Blood was an absurd mess this season and why Boardwalk Empire is amazing.

Steve Buscemi as Nucky Thompson

To be fair, a show like True Blood is currently coping with a range of challenges Boardwalk Empire won’t have to deal with for a long time, namely, the structure of plot and character development three seasons in as opposed to the fresh slate of brand new narrative. It’s entirely possible that three years from now, Boardwalk Empire will be stretched between seven different unrelated stories and increasingly sloppy characterizations, but at the moment, everything feels surprising and looks gorgeous. Seriously, the Atlantic City boardwalk set is stunning, and I completely understand why Steve Buscemi’s character Nucky Thompson spends time just staring into store fronts: it is a fabulously detailed and persuasive set. And the choreography is…well, what you’d expect when it’s an episode of television directed by Martin Scorcese. There are some particularly great intercuts between toy soldiers falling down and real life violence and between the FBI raid and the liquor delivery hijacking, as well as some lovely shots of Nucky as he contemplates the boardwalk. The image below in particular reminds me of the moment before a silhouetted man in a bowler cap shifts from real life into a surrealist Magritte landscape, something that doesn’t seem far beneath the surface in a place with a preemie hospital/tourist attraction.

The show has so much going for it. Amazing setting and creative design, interesting characters crossing a range of social statuses, great historical moment, and even Steve Buscemi, who doesn’t immediately strike one as a leading man, works really well in the lead role. I was also pleased by the opening depictions of Nucky Thompson’s character and the dilemma that seems to be driving this episode into the rest of the season, because the forces Nucky feels caught between by the pilot’s ending are real questions rather than fake, predictable conflict. His fear of moving too deeply into violence and true gangster tactics is well justified, but so is his desire to take advantage of the obvious opportunity Prohibition offers, both politically and in the black market. The only major downside of the pilot is the deluge of plot and character introduction, which even the most diligent viewer might need to rewind occasionally if you didn’t catch relationship between Big Jim and Johnny Torrio on the first go around.

What I’m most excited about for the show’s future is to watch how it will develop in relation to the history it uses as a foundation. Unlike most big shows that come out of prose source material (like, for example, the aforementioned True Blood), Boardwalk Empire comes out of a non-fictional account of the history of Atlantic City, Boardwalk Empire: The Birth, High Times, and Corruption of Atlantic City. What does a long narrative look like when its basis is fact rather than fiction? The pilot seems to proactively offer an answer to that question in Nucky’s insistence that truth never get in the way of a good story, but I’m curious about how far that lenience will extend. Mostly I just want to watch the next episode – I want more Michael K. Williams than the pittance introduction he receives in the pilot!

I should really write about Boardwalk Empire, which by all accounts is amazing, and has already been renewed for a second season based on its very strong opening ratings. That review will come soon, and I’m sure it’s something I’ll be writing about again in the future, as it seems to be the second coming of The Sopranos, The Wire, and Jersey Shore all rolled into one. But before I get there, I feel compelled to write about FOX’s new show Lone Star, if only because it looks like there may not be many opportunities to do so in the future. Because Lone Star is really quite good – it’s certainly the best new show on network television this fall (yeah, I’m looking at you, Outlaw) – and apparently, no one at all watched it last night. So just on the off chance that someone reading this watches Lone Star next week, and somehow is also chosen as a Nielsen viewer, I fell like it’s necessary to make sure this gets out while it still can: Lone Star is good, and deserves longer than it will likely get.

The premise is not unfamiliar, but is new enough to the stable of well-known television plotlines that the show feels fresh. It’s a con man set-up, where Bob travels around Texas selling shares of an imaginary oil well and touting an equally imaginary new method of harvesting natural gas, and cannily managing to skip town the moment before people figure out his scam. The underlying idea is that while Bob is a talented, successful con man, he also wants to start living on the right side of the law, except he’s unwilling to give up either of the long term cons he’s currently running. Bob’s unwillingness comes not from his reluctance to abandon the get-rich schemes of each con, but because he’s in a relationship with two different women and gets to be two very different kinds of men. In Midland, Texas, he has a lovely girlfriend, a comfortable, relaxed suburban home, and a group of friends who love him. In Houston, he has a rich, attractive wife whose oil-magnate father wants to push Bob up the corporate ladder. Confronted with the necessity of picking one life or the other, Bob chooses both.

James Wolk as Bob on FOX's Lone Star

The pilot episode of Lone Star ends with this crucial decision, ensuring Bob’s continued commitment to both cons despite his grief over tricking honest people out of their money. It’s a slick, well-made episode of television. James Wolk is great as Bob, and manages to look and act a lot like Friday Night Lights’ Kyle Chandler, which could only be a positive thing. In an actual FNL connection, his wife is played by Adrienne Palicki, whose was amazing as Tyra Collette. Some of the pilot’s musical cues were a little overstated, but it’s easy enough to forgive in an otherwise enjoyable hour.

My hope was that Lone Star would have a chance to prove it could pull off the much harder part of its premise – carrying out a con man story over a long narrative, and figuring out how to keep its protagonist appealing while forcing him to continue lying to his loved ones. I have no idea what this plot line would look like eight episodes from now, much less a season from now, but I would love to find out. Maybe if we all pull a Tinkerbell and clap our hands if we believe in Nielsen, Lone Star will stick around for a while.