The cinematic phenomenon that would retroactively be known as film noir began in a world without television. This fact has several bearings on the issue of discussion, but the main focus of this essay will be to show how this film cycle, its traditions and its sentiments, has integrated itself not only into a world with television, but into television itself. As television programming has moved steadily toward an easier, cheaper and more accessible form of entertainment than the movies, many televisual genres have been born, from the classic soap opera (The Bold and the Beautiful, Dallas) to quirky drama-comedy (M*A*S*H, Northern Exposure) to simple horror shows (The Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits). The questions before us are, what of television noir, how has it happened, and does it succeed? Read the rest of this entry »

I was having a bed-time gander through Chris Turner’s Planet Simpson the other night, and I came across his chapter on Bart as Punk Icon. Turner’s observations are astute, and more than valid (his basic contention is that Bart Simpson rekindled for the West a sense of jubuliant individualism and anarchy that had most notably been achieved in the past by the likes of Joey Ramone and Johnny Rotten), but reading his argument, I came across the quote that both spawned the conception of this jotting and gave it its title. I found the idea interesting, so I thought I’d write it down real quick, float it, see what people make of it. Read the rest of this entry »

Steven Weber looking ready to steal Christmas

The Shining is, at its core, a story about “human monsters”. The phrase is used more than once in King’s novel and deserves its place as a pivotal concept to his story because it is not a horror fable with social subtext, but one about social horrors with a supernatural backdrop. To those who are only familiar with Kubrick’s version, a brilliant film but poor adaptation, one very fundamental difference between the two should be addressed. In King’s vision, Jack Torrance is not The Madman in a Horror Film. He is a damaged, alcoholic, unfulfilled writer with a history of anger management, one who tries with all his might to be a good man and fails. The Shining is his story, and it’s a tragedy. Read the rest of this entry »

There was a time when television long-form narrative drama was restricted to the soap-opera or the occasional linked Agatha Christi adaptation on the abc. In the last 20 years, however, our understanding of what can be done with commercial television’s long form narratives have shifted and they have begun to borrow from their generic and technological neighbors. Northern Exposure, Six Feet Under and The Sopranos have moved familial, community based drama away from the exclusive realm of the Soap Opera and blended it with comedic, cinematic and suspenseful elements from film and serial fiction. These dramas allow their white, middle class audiences (like me) to vicariously experience an exotic life of crime, danger and wild sexual abandon from the completely safe confines of their living rooms. Many of these dramas project themselves into environments which are distinctly ‘other’ to the safe, suburban lives of their audiences. They tempt the audience by asking them “what if you were a gangster?” or “what if you worked in a funeral home?”. Now we have a series which takes the sex, drugs and violence of its predecessors and thrusts it squarely into the world of the American white middle class. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Weeds: Read the rest of this entry »