Mile
Zero

I've been watching more than my fair share of BBC shows on DVD lately--Extras, Torchwood, and Life on Mars in particular. These range in quality from brilliant, decent enough if you ignore the first season, and thoroughly enjoyable, respectively. The 2000s were clearly a good decade for television on both sides of the Atlantic. That said, there's one crucial difference between the best shows in the US and the UK, as far as I can tell. The kinds of people who get starring roles in British television are markedly different from the people who star in American shows: they look like real people.

Watch, for example, Ashley Jensen's brilliant work as dim-witted actress Maggie Jacobs on Extras. Jensen's deft touch keeps Maggie from being the kind of stock "village idiot" sitcom character that the show itself lampoons, and adds a particular sting to the awkward humor. It's the kind of role that very few people could pull off with such charm, and really should have led to a wealth of future lead roles for Jensen. Maybe on British TV it will, but here it got her a bit part on Ugly Betty, perhaps because she's neither outrageously thin or glamour-model pretty.

Or compare the casts of the UK and US versions of The Office. The remake features a lot more variety in casting than most American television (and kudos for that), but the leads have still been assigned to thin, conventionally-attractive people. John Krasinski is a great, funny actor, but it's still hard sometimes not to see him as a bizarro-world Martin Freeman, and just as difficult to picture someone who looks like John Krasinski being stuck in a dead-end paper company job. Slate's Seth Stevenson gets to the heart of this when reviewing the remake of Life on Mars, noting that the cast in general is better-looking and better-known than the original--and that the new casting completely undermines the show's interpersonal dynamic. Even within genres, this holds true: there's not a single person on the entire cast of Torchwood who's as sexy as the least-attractive Galactica crew member, and while the latter is a better show, it's still kind of hard to understand how the ragtag fleet maintains such flawless fitness and perfect skin on a diet of algae and moonshine.

Why the difference? Is it that the larger pool of American talent makes it easier to find people who are both talented and blandly good-looking? Is it some kind of institutional mandate brought on by publicly-funded media? Ultimately, who cares? Diverse casting isn't a magic bullet, and there are still plenty of BBC programs I find unwatchable (confession: The IT Crowd bores the crap out of me). But there are certainly a lot of cases where it makes a show better (including many American shows: The Office, The Wire, and 30 Rock come to mind), and it's got to be healthier for the viewing audience.

Tonight the very last episode of Battlestar Galactica will run its course, closing out what may have been one of the greatest science fiction shows ever to run on television--dark, unpredictable, and surprisingly well-acted. I'll miss it, but I'm glad it's going out on its own terms.

BSG has always been driven by twin engines of character and crisis. It is, as I wrote once, a show about constantly ratcheting up the pressure on its protagonists in new and interesting ways. Eventually, everyone either cracks or is compressed into their core, like Saul Tigh standing up to declare that "Whatever else I am, whatever else it means, that's the man I want to be. And if I die today, that's the man I'll be." The writers have not always been successful at this dynamic--Lee Adama's fat suit period, for example--but they've hit the mark more often than not, with devastating results.

Along the way, they've also managed some impressive social commentary. The show has addressed both sides of insurgency, talked about waterboarding and torture, discussed abortion, been called chauvinist and defended as feminist. There have been episodes about vengeance, abuse of power, and reconciliation. And surprisingly, few of them have tried to wrap the issues up in a bow for the viewer. BSG is comfortable with moral ambiguity in a way that most television sci-fi has never achieved. The UN even held a panel this week about the show, albeit using it as a way to introduce the students in attendance to the important issues that international government faces.

I have to note one of my favorite parts of that panel, when Eddie Olmos channels Admiral Adama for a passionate rant on racism and human rights:

...I detest what we've done to ourselves. Out of a need to make ourselves different from one another, we've made the word 'race' a way of expressing culture. There's no such thing--and all you high school students, bless your heart for being here. You're a hundred champions right now that are gonna go out understanding this. The adults in the room will never understand it. Even though they'll nod their heads and say 'you're right,' they'll never be able to stop using the word 'race' as a cultural determinant.

I just heard one of the most prolific statements, done by one of the great humanitarians [gestures to Craig Mokhiber, Deputy Director for the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights], he's really trying to organize and bring us together, and he used the word race as if there is ... an Asian race, an indigenous race, a caucasian race, or a Latino race. There's no such thing as a Latino race. There never has been. There never will be. There's only one race, and that's what the show brought out. That is the human race. Period.

Now, the pressure comes, why did we start to use the word race as a cultural determinant? The truth is that over 600 years ago, the caucasian 'race' decided to use it as a cultural determinant so it'd be easier for them to kill another culture. That was the total understanding. To kill one culture from another culture. You couldn't kill your own race, so you had to make them the Other. And to this day, I spent 37 years of my adult life trying to get this word out, and now I end up well-prepared, as the admiral of the Battlestar Galactica, to say it to all of you:

There is but one race, and that is it. So say we all!

At that point, the gallery literally erupts with people shouting "So say we all!" It's a tremendous moment. And it is impressive that any television show, much less a show on the (temporarily) Sci Fi channel, could inspire that kind of discussion and passion for social justice.

Leading up to this final episode, the pace may have lagged a little. Personally, I've always enjoyed BSG's willingness to mess with its audience by killing off characters or radically rearranging the setting. There was talk at one point, during the writing strike, that the show might have ended with the episode that became the middle of this season: humans and cylons landing on Earth together, only to find an uninhabitable, radioactive wasteland. I still kind of wish they'd done that.

But I'm glad they're getting a chance to wrap things up, and also that they're quitting while they're ahead, relatively speaking. With a show like this, the worst thing that could happen would be to drag it on for another four or five seasons. It's definitely better to go out with some kind of plan, instead of a whimper and a cancellation notice. So grab your gun and bring in the cat.

Boom boom boom.

Every season (or every chapter, more like) of The Wire has its own theme. The first covers "the street," the second "the supply," while the third chapter turns to "reform." Those three, taken together, also form one of the show's most compelling arcs: the tragedy of Stringer Bell, and it's tempting to call them the greatest achievement of the show. But it's the fourth season, purportedly centered on education, where The Wire begins to tip its hand, slyly hinting at a more ambitious goal than simply masterfully-written entertainment. It's there, in other words, that we start to see the emergence of a new theme for the show beyond each yearly installment.

What makes season four so different? Essentially, it downplays the procedural, cat-and-mouse aspects of the first three seasons. There are still cases being worked by the police--Herc's missing camera, Bunk's intervention in Omar's wrongful arrest--but the narrative arc of cops vs. dealers takes a back seat to Michael, Duquan, Randy, and Namond (the four corner kids introduced in this season). Unsurprisingly, the writers have a hard time keeping the level of tension up without a caper to solve, and so the show takes a more leisurely pace.

But in a lot of ways, the slowdown suits The Wire a great deal. At the heart of creator David Simon's critique of the police institution in Baltimore, there's always been the belief that the lack of support for smart, high-level casework in the department not only allows the drug trade to flourish, but actually encourages it by swamping the legal system in corner arrests that it can't possibly handle. The fourth season is his chance to show how that happens without the distractions of "better" cops, like McNulty and Freamon.

From a wider view, however, The Wire has never been a typical procedural show. It can't be: it's rooted in the realities of Baltimore, not the fantasy crimelabs of CSI. Above all, it refuses to treat either side of the drug trade as inhuman or irredeemable--in this, The Wire stays far from the caricatured authoritarianism of Law and Order. Simon and the show's other writers don't want scapegoats, they want to show that the corner gangs are actual human beings--ones that have grown up in experiences that shape them differently from most viewers, but not so much that we can't feel a kinship with them.

In the book that he co-authored with his Wire collaborator Ed Burns, The Corner, they write (on the topic of welfare):

... To do more than tender the bribe would require empathy, charity, and connectedness, and in thirty years we have summoned up nothing close.

Empathy demands that we recognize ourselves in the faces at Mount and Fayette, that we acknowledge the addictive impuse as something more than simple lawlessness, that we begin to see the corner as the last refuge of the truly disowned. Charity asks that we no longer begrudge the treasure already lost. And connectedness admits that between their world and ours, the distance, in human terms at least, is never as great as we make it seem.

It becomes clear, when even the limited amount of separation between citizen and criminal allowed on The Wire is minimized, that this is part of Simon's point: to give viewers a perspective that forces their empathy, charity, and connectedness to emerge. Gangsters like Slim Charles, Stringer, or Bodie are shown richly and warmly, but without dismissing the destructive actions they often take (Slim Charles, especially, is so enjoyable to watch that it's sickening to be reminded of his work as a hired killer). Even the show's most unrepentantly villainous characters, Chris and Snoop, have an inner life and a complicated relationship with the world around them.

They aren't so different from us, Simon is saying. As with Stringer Bell, they could very well be us, if it weren't for the warping effects of the drug world. That's the perspective that gets lost when the battle against drugs becomes a "war," and the opposing sides are reduced to soldiers. It could be a genuinely transformative viewpoint for many people. Which is why it's such a shame that The Wire is the greatest show that nobody ever watched.

When the SciFi Channel started a Twitter feed for a character on Eureka that automatically follows anyone who mentions the show, I thought that was creepy, but also a little clever.

When they started doing cross-promotions for the show involving Degree brand deoderant, using the commercials that spoof home shopping channels, I thought that was kind of blatant, but I have TiVo, so I never had to watch them.

When they started having fictional characters on the show pitch for Degree during commercial breaks, I thought that was really blatant--but again, TiVo.

When Degree started to show up prominently in placement positions around the show, to the point that it started to look like a parody of product placement, I thought that was getting close to the line of what I could comfortably watch, but I still kind of liked the show, so I put up with it.

But when they wrote an episode about an artificial second sun, and one character walks into a lab and says "So, I understand you're working on a compound that could keep someone cool under the most extreme conditions," and then Degree is sitting right there on the desk in a close-up shot...

Well, that would be when I stop watching. If anyone from NBC is paying attention--say they've got some poor intern whose job is to track the zeitgeist across unread corners of the Internet like this one--you might want to consider ending that particular promotional experiment. Or at least hire better writers to do the shilling.

Miguel Ferrer is a national treasure.

Microsoft's spoof video of their own marketing, formatted as "Bruce ServicePack and the Vista Street Band," has been making the rounds, giving people an excuse once again to mock the company (John Gruber: "It epitomizes Microsoft's culture and institutional bad taste") by entirely missing the point. But the best Microsoft internal videos are still these British Office spinoffs, which make Gervais' David Brent a "management consultant" after his disastrous Wernham-Hogg career.

There's two more clips here and here.

This morning I finished season one of The Wire, HBO's long-running cop show. And if I didn't love it for its pragmatic worldview, its left-leaning sociological outlook, and its flawed protagonists, I would almost certainly love it just for this scene of McNulty and Bunk investigating an old murder scene.

I guess it's not explicitly clear from that scene, but the writing is superb, and usually not composed entirely of profanity.

I lost my first Leatherman on the way back from France--forgot to pack it in my checked luggage, and didn't realize it until I was almost to the gate. I forget how many times I had flown with that little orange tool while I was on the forensics team at GMU, which made it all the more galling to lose it to airport security.

I bought the Leatherman in the first place to replace the pocketknife I carried. I had a knife because it's a handy thing to have, and because I wanted to be Macgyver when I grew up. But the knife kind of freaked people out--it was a four-inch flick blade, and I enjoyed the snap of the wrist required to open it maybe a bit too much. It made people think I was some sort of psycho cannibal survival fetishist, when in real life I could no more survive in the open wild than I could flap my arms and fly.

The Leatherman was a lot less threatening, since it's basically a pair of pliers mated with a Swiss army knife. No-one is threatened by a Swiss army knife or a pair of pliers. Besides, I was sick of trying to use the pocketknife as an impromptu screwdriver. It's possible, and it feels very resourceful the first time, and then after that you just feel like an idiot.

When I lost the first tool to the Charles de Gaulle security team, I went to Price Club and bought one of their bubble-wrapped packages with one of the original Super Tools. The Super Tool is basically the worst of both worlds between a pocketknife and the smaller Leatherman I'd been using before. It is a hefty chunk of stamped stainless steel, which immediately began tearing holes in the pockets of every pair of pants I own. The knife on it is large enough to scare passersby again, but it's located inside the handle of the pliers, which means that it takes five minutes just to get it (or any of the other blades/files/screwdrivers) out. And then once you have any of the blades/files/screwdrivers out, they're locked into place with a hellishly-resilient leaf-spring release, so it won't close on you (which is nice) but it'll flay the skin off your thumb while you try to put it back.

So I'd finally had enough, and this weekend Amazon shipped me another Leatherman Juice like I'd had before, relegating the larger version to my messenger bag, where I will hopefully never need it again. Some people might wonder if I needed either one in the first place. But I tend to find that the moment I don't have a pocketknife of some kind handy, I tend to need one. Even just here at the office, there's always packages that need to be opened, or equipment that someone would like to have rackmounted, or a tape that's broken and needs to be rewound. Yeah, I'm sure I could find a screwdriver or improvise something eventually, but why bother? Besides, coworkers appreciate having someone handy around.

Also, I still have dreams that I'll be trapped in the hold of a falling airplane, or need to defuse a bomb using only toothpicks and a bag of M&Ms. I never actually watched a lot of Macgyver as a kid, but the idea of it really stuck with me--plus, I was reading a lot of Heinlein at the time, and the creepy libertarianism didn't take but the jack-of-all-trades competency worship did. Nobody likes to be in a situation where they feel helpless. Maybe carrying a Leatherman or a pocketknife is just a psychological tool for maintaining some kind of control. Maybe it's a symbol of wanting to be able to fix things and solve problems. Or maybe I've just gotten used to it after so many years, and it's force of habit.

In any case, if you're like me, you may enjoy Wikipedia's List of Macgyverisms, including icons showing whether a problem was chemical, optical, physical, or explosives-related. I'm not really threatened by violence in the media, but it is nice to read a set of plot synopses for a show that explicitly rejected violence and guns in favor of invention and loosely-sourced scientific knowledge.

There's a throwaway joke during the first season of Dexter for the obsessive serial killer fiction audience: the titular character, fearing suspicion by his own police department, sneaks in and removes his alias from a list of controlled-substance purchasers. The name he erases is "Patrick Bateman," also known as the American Psycho.

It's worth a snort, and thankfully the show is smart enough not to dwell on it any longer. But it's interesting in that the two characters could barely be farther apart, except for their shared interest in murder. Bret Easton Ellis's killer yuppie was obsessed with meaningless pop culture and acquisition. The running gag of the novel was that Bateman's homicidal tendencies were barely separable from the greed and narcissism that he shared with his colleagues.

Dexter Morgan, on the other hand, comes across as a reluctant psychopath. Michael C. Hall pulls what menace he can out of the character, but his fangs are basically pulled early--Dexter's an amoral killer, but his foster father trained him to act normal and only kill other murderers, which turns the show's "shocking" twist into something more like a very grisly arrest sequence. We're never really in doubt that the people Dexter kills are anything other than scum, so we're disinclined to feel bad when he offs them. The impulse is really nothing more than the usual cop-drama bad-guy punishment sequence made more explicit (and perhaps, for much of the audience, more darkly gratifying).

This is a little unfortunate. I've come to prize fiction that makes the audience uncomfortable with its protagonist, which a show about an unrepentant serial killer could have certainly accomplished. But it also gives Dexter the opportunity to explore slightly more fertile emotional ground. Even when he's hunting his rival, the Ice Truck Killer, Dexter's real conflict is with himself: he's been pretending to be a normal, caring person for so long that he begins to become that person, although he tries to deny it. He tells us again and again that he's emotionless, but can't stop himself from enjoying the company of the people around him, and becoming upset when they're taken away.

Dexter lacks the vocabulary to express this directly, which is one of the pleasures of Hall's performance. He claims to have chosen his girlfriend for her "damaged" fear of intimacy, but is oddly charmed as she comes out of her shell, and off-handedly refers to her as "enchanting." His worries about his sister are tangible--"If I could have feelings at all, I'd have them for Deb," he says, unaware that he protests a bit too much. The pangs of feeling are still muffled, but the overall progression of the show is to raise their outlines and see how the character reacts.

What's still unclear is whether Dexter's human side is something that always existed in some form, or if his pretense is beginning to take more concrete form. I think the scripts are trying to say that it's the former, but the latter is a lot more fascinating. It's cynical, but also optimistic: it expresses a hope for change, and that a person could reinvent themself into the face that they present to the world. Which is kind of a nice message, for a show about a blood-spatter expert who kills people according to a twisted moral code in his off-hours.

And now, A Bit of Fry and Laurie: