The Nature of Things

Do you watch the HBO show "Girls"? If you don't, I can tell you briefly that it follows the adventures of four friends, twenty-something girls in New York, as they flounder their way through relationships, jobs, life, basically creating mayhem and angst wherever they go.  Sounds a lot like a lot of other TV comedies, doesn't it? Things like "Sex in the City," "Seinfeld," even "Friends." The thing that sort of makes "Girls" different is that all those other shows generally have at least one character with whom you can empathize, one who is likable. All the girls on "Girls" are so messed up, so totally self-absorbed, that it is hard to feel sympathy for them when life sends hard knocks their way.  These are characters that are really...well, unlikable. And yet watching them has been somewhat like watching a train wreck for me. I just can't turn away. I have watched the show faithfully for five years now. This season...

"The Wire" premiered on HBO on June 2, 2002. It ran for five seasons, 60 episodes, and ended on March 9, 2008. I never watched it during that time and, in that, I was a member of the majority. The show was never particularly popular and never garnered big audiences. It also never won any of the major television awards, but it was greatly admired by critics, many of whom considered it one of the best television dramas of all time and it had a devoted hard core following. In all the years since the show ended, I've read time and again about how good it was and I've heard the same opinion expressed by my husband, who did watch it. All that praise from people whose opinions I respect made me curious and I decided that I needed to watch it at some point. HBO-GO makes it easy enough to do that, so this summer, I've been catching up with that twelve-year-old show. Now I see what all those critics were raving about. "The Wire" is excellent television. The UK...

So, we're coming to the inevitable end of the HBO series "True Detective." The final episode of the eight-part story airs next Sunday night and the internet is ablaze with theories about just how it will end. Throughout the run of the enigmatic series about serial abductions and murders of women and children in the bayous of Louisiana, we've been given clues and red herrings galore. There has even been the hint at times that one of the detectives investigating the cases - either Marty Hart or Rust Cohle - may be the murderer or may be involved. Certainly the detectives reinvestigating the cases in 2012 have a theory that Cohle is involved. So the question is, will these two turn out to be "true detectives" or is one of them a bad guy? In the broadest sense, they are both bad guys. Hart is a philanderer who threw away his family, his wife and kids, in pursuit of "something wild" to spice up his sex life. We know that he can be a violent man. He bea...

HBO's Louisiana bayou noir series "True Detective" has kept me looking forward to Sunday nights during this late winter period which has proved mostly barren for TV watching. The show features detective partners Rust Cohle (played by Matthew McConaughey), a metaphysical philosophy spouting loner, and Marty Hart (played by Woody Harrelson), the ultimate macho bearer of the sexual double standard who is a philanderer in his own right but who can't abide the thought that his daughters or wife or women in general might do the same thing. Were any two television detective partners ever more ill-matched? If you are unfamiliar with the show,  it's a bit difficult to describe the attraction - and the action. The events of the story take place over a period of about twenty years. Cohle and Hart had investigated the disappearances and murders of women and children in the 1990s and had ultimately supposedly solved the case and taken out the bad guys, for which they had recei...

Will McAvoy is a fathead. A pontificating, holier-than-thou, blowhard of the kind of character that I love to hate. The problem is I had really hoped to love him. When I first saw the promos for the new Aaron Sorkin show for HBO, The Newsroom ,  I thought it looked interesting. The cast was well-known for their good work, the idea of a series about a cable news show seemed relevant, and Aaron Sorkin is an award-winning producer and writer ( The West Wing , Moneyball, The Social Network ), so the whole thing offered the promise of keeping me entertained on Sunday nights this summer. So far it has been a disappointment, and it is mostly because of the character of Will McAvoy. He just sucks all the air out of the room for me. Jeff Daniels, who plays Will, is terrific, as, in fact, all the actors are in their respective roles. There really isn't a stinker among them. But the words that they are given to speak are the problem. Will seems to be channeling Eric Sevareid and his commenta...

Did you happen to see HBO's latest documentary, Birding: The Central Park Effect ? It premiered last night, but, if you care to see it, I believe it will be showing a few times later in the week or you can watch it on HBO On Demand, if you have that feature. It's worth a look if you are interested in birding or birds or even if you just have a concern about the environment and what is happening to it. I didn't see the show last night because I was watching the Astros game (Finally won one! Yay!) but I watched it today with my two cats. The bird photography and sounds were so realistic that it kept the cats' attention. In fact, it even had them jumping at the screen on occasion! The film follows a group of regular birders in New York's Central Park through a year of watching the birds there. Some of them are fairly famous (at least in some circles) - people like authors Jonathan Franzen and Jonathan Rosen - but most of them are just regular people, New Yorkers with t...

Okay, the second season of Game of Thrones on HBO is over, freeing up an hour of my time on Sunday nights to do...something else. At least until another HBO show comes along to claim my attention. It won't be True Blood which takes the time slot next Sunday. Not my cup of blood - er, tea. I had wondered how the writers were going to manage to squeeze all of the remaining action of the book into one episode and the answer was, they didn't. This season the writers and directors made significant changes to the stories of many of the characters . Moreover, some characters and several of the events of the book were dropped altogether. I suppose at least some of that was necessary to fit the time frames allowed by ten one-hour episodes. Which brings up another point. The books they are dramatizing are very, very long, and I really would like to see them expand the seasons a bit more, maybe to twelve episodes, so that there is a bit more time to spend on each character's story....

I saw an interesting article in the online magazine Slate today. It seems that David Milch of "NYPD Blue" and "Deadwood" fame has signed a deal with HBO to develop several of William Faulkner's works for television.  Since Milch does have a known - and successful - track record in television, Faulkner's works would appear to be in good hands. Moreover, HBO has a long lineage of doing quality series, so the addition of Faulkner to that lineage is something to look forward to. The story didn't specify which of Faulkner's many novels or short stories might be showing up on our home screens at some point in the future. Of course, several of his works have been adapted for the big screen in the past. Some have been successful adaptations, some not so successful, but Milch certainly should not be bound or influenced by any of that history. One hopes that instead he will look at the works with fresh eyes and with the thought of translating them for an aud...

I settled down with the hubby on Sunday night to watch a little television. We set the DVR to record PBS' Masterpiece and headed over to HBO for "Boardwalk Empire", their new series set in Atlantic City during Prohibition. This series, starring Steve Buscemi, is very good. It's well-written, well-acted, and it is about an interesting period in history. Moreover, it has characters that can engage one's empathy, people that one can care about. After that, "Bored to Death" came on, another well-written and well-acted show. This one, though, is a comedy, not a drama, and it is flat-out funny. It certainly kept me entertained. Next up was "Eastbound and Down." I watched a couple of episodes in this series last year and quickly decided that it wasn't for me, but hubby was going to watch it so I thought, "What the heck? I'll give it another try." Well, I won't make that mistake again! If you haven't seen the show, c...