Hugging It Out

October 12th, 2009Blog1 comment

Hey, I’m sick! So it’s a great time to partake in the modern tradition of watching episodes of TV series back-to-back on DVD, like chain smoking television.

I’m finally tackling a couple of TV shows that I’d been putting off for a long time — both of them because they pushed me away with their premises: Entourage and The Wire.

Entourage: I already live in LA and I already have to deal with this stuff, so why would I want to watch a TV show about it? Plus I’m wary of TV shows and movies about making TV shows and movies. Once you’ve seen The Player you’re essentially done.

The Wire: I’m used to turning the critical thinking parts of my brain off when I watch TV. I only turn them back on when I’m studying a particular TV show (The Sopranos) or reading its script; for some reason The Wire felt inscrutable every time I tried to watch it. And when you’re already really busy, it’s difficult to make time for something new to chew on. So I kept bouncing off this show instead of getting into it.

Also: Baltimore? I can only take Baltimore when it’s presented with singing and dancing, like in Hairspray. But ugly, crime-riddled, crackhead Baltimore? I’d rather watch something on the Food Network.

But man: Now I can definitely say that when I was avoiding both of these shows, I was missing out.

I’d seen a few scattershot episodes of Entourage here and there — enough to know what was going on, but I never started at the beginning until now. And I’ve been saying that I’ve been having a lot of Entourage moments lately, and I wanted to understand exactly what it was that I was referencing.

Okay, so this show is a little hokey sometimes. It covers silly moments like Drama getting new headshots at the Apple Store — reminders that this is a teevee show about LA, like Mad Men shows kids running around in front of their mothers with plastic bags over their heads: They’re pretty on-the-nose reminders that the show is about the early 60s when people didn’t know any better. But when Entourage gets going it is very entertaining. Ralph Macchio and Bob Saget cameos, I’m looking at you!

It also has some lovable freakin characters. Jeremy Piven’s character should get his own show. I think this could be accomplished by an end-of-season cliffhanger where Ari Gold accidentally murders the four guys and then the next season starts up without them. Then you have a great The Shield-like situation where Ari constantly has to cover up for their deaths while putting deals together for Jack Black. I’m only half-joking about this, I think it could be a good move. Adrian Grenier could still be part of the show — maybe show up as a talking fish that haunts Ari’s dreams like Big Pussy Bonpensiero.

Anyway, I was surprised to find myself making it all the way through to the first disc of Season 2 and then immediately pushing up the rest of the Season 2 discs on my Netflix queue. That’s when I know I’m hooked.

This show is a bit of a cryptogram, and I knew that it would take serious thinking while watching it in order to get it. And I knew I would like it — I just needed the right time to start watching it in order to get into it.

And now I’m into it.

What I like about this show is that it presents a situation that is utterly hopeless, yet manages to find little moments of hope inside of it — of people just trying to make it through each day. And that is so antithetical to the much-lauded American Dream of making a home run, winning a million bucks and living happily ever after — this show is about real life, real people trying to survive in a shitty city on the decline (sorry, John Waters), spending their lives slogging through just trying to live. They put in their time, man. And there’s something more beautiful and more humane about that because it’s real.

The show also reminds me about that old idea about the banality of evil. Evil is always happening in small ways around us, often as a result of randomness — being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Morality is a pretty lofty concept, and it’s sometimes outside the realm of everyday living.

So I rarely say this, but these shows make me realize that I need to watch more TV.

Maintenance Update: There was some weirdness linking to last week’s radio interview on Vocalo, so here it is now:

Vocalo 89.5 Interview on Year Zero.