New in Nerve

"Class of '99", a "report card" feature about the directors who helped make 1999 the most exciting movie year of my adult life, and what they've done with themselves in the ten years since.

Part of what I wrote had to be chopped for space reasons, and in the name of egotism, the wide-ranging nature of the subject at hand, and the possibility of hurting Kevin Smith's feelings, I'm tacking it on here:



BRAD BIRD: Bird first attracted attention back in 1987, with Family Dog, a hilarious animated short that was shown on TV as an episode of the anthology series Amazing Stories. It says a lot about the animator's plight that it would be almost ten years, by which time Bird was a veteran of TV series such as The Simpsons, The Critic, and King of the Hill, before he was able to get a studio to let him begin working seriously on his first feature: The Iron Giant, which was based on a book by Ted Hughes. Bird's extraordinary graceful, beautiful crafted Cold War fable was a high point in an especially good year for animation, but the movie tanked commercially amid charges that Warner Bros. had botched its marketing campaign. Bird might have seriously despaired at his prospects of ever getting to direct another feature, but in a lucky piece of synchronicity, he was invited aboard Pixar to develop his idea for became The Incredibles. (In 1999, Pixar itself released Toy Story 2, which had been made for the direct-to-video market before the suits realized that it was too good not to open in theaters.) The Incredibles proved to be such a blockbuster success that Bird was pushed into the director's chair for Pixar's Ratatouille. He's currently working on his live-action debut, the historical disaster picture 1906.



KEVIN SMITH: Smith's early films had the full benefit of the freshness of his writing talent and the full drawback that, as a visual artist, he has the eye of the average bat. It seemed kind of appropriate that Clerks (1994) looked like unedited security camera footage, and the indie sex comedy Chasing Amy (1997) connected with its audience in a way that made them very forgiving of its washed-out look and static frames, but Smith tried very hard to push himself for the 1999 religious satire Dogma, not just working to get some visual energy into the movie but even hiring the likes of Alan Rickman to make his dialogue soar.

The results, while pretty much confirming that Smith and Martin Scorsese are never going to really seem to be in the same profession, might have been the zenith of Smith's indie-moviemaking-as-fanzine-production approach. For a while there, he seemed to care, if only about applying his wit to subject matter where he had something to say. But ever since then, Smith has frittered away what career he has left in a case of terminal drift. Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back (2001) and Clerks II overestimated the world's enthusiasm for his in-jokes about himself, his friends, and his "View Askewniverse", just as the attempted game-changer Jersey Girl (2004) badly miscalculated in its assumption that anyone was interested in seeing him explore his warm and tender side. Smith also maintains a public presence as a stage monologuist, talk show guest, sometime character actor--basically, any job that mainly requires him to talk. But as a director, his last brilliant idea, in last year's Zach and Mira Make a Porno, seemed to be to cast the movie in such a way that people might go see it because they thought it was the new one from Judd Apatow.

DOUG LIMAN: Liman had a big critical and commercial success with his second feature, Swingers (2006), but unfortunately for him, the media made such a fuss over the fact that the movie had been written by one of its stars, Jon Favreau, and that he and his co-star, Vince Vaughan, actually hung out together, that a lot of people wound up under the impression that they'd made the film by themselves. (It was as if the media somehow knew that, in just a year, they'd be all agog over Matt 'n Ben after Good Will Hunting and wanted to practice.) Liman's 1999 Go, while not nearly as big a hit, did manage to be funny and energetic in a way that felt both fresh and moderately slick. It was a calling card picture that suggested that Liman might have the chops to make big commercial movies and also that he might be restless and talented enough to have things on his mind that he'd like to explore in smaller projects between big-money gigs. Liman wasted no time in making good on the first half of that supposition with The Bourne Identity (2002), which established the template for the franchise to come, with its star, Matt Damon, crediting Liman for saving his career. Liman went on to direct Brad 'n Angelina in Mr. and Mrs. Smith, which showed that he could sometimes take the dumbest, noisiest project off the rack and make something passably entertaining out of it, and Jumper, which proved that, yeah, sometimes, but not always! He recently finished Fair Game, starring Sean Penn and Naomi Watts as Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame, which might give us a clue about whether Liman does have anything on his mind. Either way, just to be on the safe side, his next project is Jumper 2.

If there's a common thread running through all this, it may be that it's shocking to realize how few completed movies have been made by so many talented people in the course of ten years. I don't know that it would have been anything but a fool's errand to try to guess, back in 1999, where any of these people were headed, but I would have been surprised if I'd been told that most of them would average, at best, three films a decade.





It's always been hard for people who care about doing good work in movies to fulfill their visions. Another Class of '99 alumni, Kimberly Pierce, had a huge critical success and a moderate commercial hit with Boys Don't Cry, for which its star, Hilary Swank, won the Academy Award for Best Actress. Since then, she's directed one movie, Stop-Loss, about the practice of extending the terms of U.S. military service people and ordering them back to combat zones after their official contracts have expired. A look at how national issues impact the lives of young people in rural small-town America, it shared many of the qualities that audiences responded to in Boys Don't Cry, but it was released at the tail end of a movie season spent hammering away at the conclusion that movies about the Iraq War are always dogs, and it got buried. In the years between her two pictures, Pierce wasted her time on a whole slate of projects that, for one reason or other, got derailed on the way to the first day of shooting.



On the other hand, earlier generations of directors managed to keep working at something even as their dream projects caught fire on the side of the road. People like David O. Russell and Paul Thomas Anderson see themselves as artists, and it's understandable that they don't want to waste their creative lives on hackwork, just as it's surely no accident that the most prolific members of the Class of '99 have tended to be those who've been most comfortable grinding out stuff that the studios are happy to fund. Anderson spent some of time between Punch-Drunk Love and There Will Be Blood doing a service for his hero, the late Robert Altman, hanging around the set of Altman's last movie, A Prairie Home Companion so that the insurance company would have the reassurance of knowing there was someone there who could jump in for the ailing, 80-year-old director. Altman was a notoriously ornery bastard who fought with the studios his whole career, but he also made four features between 2000 and his death six years later, seven features between 1990 and 1999, and 15 between 1970 and 1980. Between 1982 and 1989, a period traditionally thought of as his lost years, when no studio would look at him cross-eyed, Altman made six features released to theaters, five filmed plays made for television, and the HBO mini-series Tanner '88. He didn't really find his voice as a director until he was in his mid-40s, and as soon as he had a name he could trade on, he was raring to work.

I'm also not sure what to make of the fact that such current directors as Soderbergh and Richard Linklater, who are older than most of the Class of '99 by only some five to ten years, have been so much more prolific, with Soderbergh directing twelve features (while also becoming very active as a producer for other directors' projects) and Linklater directing nine (including the just-released Me and Orson Welles). Both these guys belong to a continuing tradition in American film of directors who've had trouble doing exactly what they want learning to do their best with what they can get off the ground. They had to learn to pick their battles. Do the Class of '99 represent a break from that? Maybe they're the first generation of American directors who haven't had it hard enough.

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Run!

Newsweek is taking flak for its decision to use a photo that Sarah Palin posed for when she did a shoot for Runners World as its cover image, accompanying a story timed to coincide with the publication of Big Moose's new memoir. The emerging consensus among all right-thinking people is that, by not respecting the invisible divide that Palin expects the media to honor between those moments when she's playing regular gal slash pin-up queen and those when she expects to be Taken Seriously (such as when she has a book out), the magazine has indulged in sexist behavior. I dunno, maybe. For my part, when I saw the cover, I immediately thought of the dust-up from a year ago, when Newsweek ran a cover photo of Palin that was attacked for giving a too-close view of the candidate's insufficiently airbrushed face. I don't expect Newsweek to acknowledge this, but I wouldn't be surprised if the real point the magazine was making is that, with Palin, you can't win for losing: the same people who get angry if you take her on her own terms--and the Runners World photo was widely disseminated earlier this year, with no complaints that I can recall about the way Palin looked, though there were a few murmurs from people who felt that they'd seen more respectful uses of the American flag--will also complain if you just shoot her as a normal person and hold back on the glamour lighting and makeup and frame the image in a way that's seen as less than laudatory regarding her looks.



Is there a double standard regarding the way Palin is treated in the media? "Double standard" may not begin to scratch the surface. Conservatives like to pretend that the media treat Palin as mentally vacant and unqualified because they're stereotyping her as a dumb woman (and also as a dumb small-towner, and a dumb gun owner, and a dumb believer i family values, etc., etc.), but at the same time, a lot of the hipper conservatives like to talk up her sexiness, and not just because the post-Reagan Republican party will be looking for another charismatic leader with "movie star" qualities until the last dog dies. They also think that, by celebrating Palin as a woman who, in the words of the Republican strategist Leslie Sanchez, is "embracing her femininity in a very strong and powerful way", they can help her seem looser and more appealing than the liberal feminists who would never vote for Palin but see something offensive in the "exploitation" of her MILF-ness. Palin is a prime exploiter of it herself, but even as she winks and poses her way through public appearances, she still reserves the right to complain about not being taken with the kind of air-stiffening solemnity reserved for dying elder statesmen who once leaned over to light Churchill's cigar at Yalta. There's not anything especially unique in that: she poses as the mom who's still got it the same way that George W. Bush posed as a regular guy you'd like to have a beer with and never feel intellectually inferior to. But it turned out, to the shock of many, that deep down, Bush actually wanted to be respected for his brilliant, bold decision-making. That's where the danger really lies.

There's probably no danger that Palin will ever rise as high as Bush did, and you can take the inclusion of the word "probably" there as proof that I'm inclined to hedge my bets in case of, say, an extraterrestrial attack wiping out half the population or somebody dropping acid into the water supply on Election Day. The poll numbers that everyone has been citing as she does her book tour show that six out of every ten Americans think she's unqualified to be President, and the real question that raises is, what the hell is wrong with four out of ten Americans? I suspect the number would drop to at least three in town if there were some way to filter out the number who claimed to think her qualified to be President just to be contrary, whether this is the latest way to show all-purpose scorn for politics of any kind--it might be the new "there's not a dime's worth of difference between George W. Bush and Al Gore", and it wouldn't be any more or any less stupid--or if it's just people showing their resentment by thinking that, while Palin's an idjit, people would be more respectful of her is she weren't both an idjit and a mother or an idjit and a hunter or whatever category through which they relate to her and feel that the barbs thrown her way are somehow directed at them, too.

Other politicians, from Reagan to Bush the Younger, have buffed their personal images to a fine glow and run on them, so that they were able to snag the votes of people who didn't really agree with them on much. But they did have agendas. At least since TV came in, it's been the politicians who didn't have some strong, appealing presence to serve as a counterweight to their ideas and beliefs who've suffered at the polls. If Palin brings anything new to the game, it's that what hard-core cynics claimed about Reagan and Clinton and maybe all of them is actually true for her: she has the personal story (which is largely untrue, but which she loves so much that she probably believes it, just as Bush probably believes to this day that he was the real war hero in the '60s, protecting Texas from the Vietnamese) and the camera-friendly act but no real beliefs or goals towards which they might serve a purpose. I find it hard to believe that she really wants to be President, though I can see her getting so determined to rub it in the doubters' faces that she might end up running just to prove them all wrong. And her way of explaining this line of reasoning will invoke motherhood and demand to know who dares say that if you've raised a pack of kids, you're not qualified to take on the world. Palin may not be much of a reader, but somewhere inside her, the soul of Erma Bombeck is alive and churning out copy.

Because the core base of the Republican party is this seething mass of resentment, and because nobody likes hearing motherhood dissed, there will always be a small but strong section of the conservative movement that, heedless of its effect on any election, will always be ready to break away from "the elites" and follow Palin to Hell, or at least to the edge of the Bering Strait. What this means is that people like David Brooks, who'd like to have their party back in a way that won't embarrass the hell out of them at the weekend barbecues, but who feel some obligation to keeping the party alive and spread out, will be forced to spend Palin's moments in the sun making appropriate noises about how awful it is that some people don't love their mothers and aren't comfortable with their sexuality and would rather read a book while sipping a latte than go to a hootenanny or the church square dance, while praying to God that Palin gets offered a TV show or something and just goes away and can fracture their party no more. There are double standards, and there may even be triple and quadruple standards, and then there's Sally Field in Sybil...

The State of Limbo

Of all the arguments made criticizing the decision to "prosecute... the self-described mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks, in a Manhattan federal courtroom", the idea that it's intolerable because (in the words of New York Representative Peter King) "We should not be increasing the danger of another terrorist strike against Americans at home and abroad,” has to be the most adorable. I thought New Yorkers were supposed to be a tough people who'd be eager to get a shot at somebody who'd tried to bring them down, not a pack of wusses who are terrified that putting a mass murderer on trial is to be avoided because some other potential mass murderer might take offense. Seriously? Of course, King is a Republican, which means that he belongs to a party that thinks that the previous President of the United States and the people in charge of his Justice Department proved that they were the right people to deal with terrorism by taking their eye off the ball and letting an atrocity take place on U.S. soil. When Bill Clinton had his last meeting as outgoing President with George W. Bush, he urged him to regard al-Qaeda as his top domestic security priority, and Bush, maintaining consistency with his new administration's comprehensive "A.B.C. (Anything But Clinton) policy, brushed the advice aside and gave John Ashcroft his leave to focus on such important matters as the rumors that New Orleans had a whorehouse in it. In a Republican politician's notion of Real America, you prove that you're tough enough to deal with terrorism by not taking it seriously as a threat, and then you show that you're keeping our country safe, and paying tribute to the values that Islamic extremists find so offensive, by circumventing the legal system and digging a hole to stick terrorist suspects in, then making speeches about how manfully you're dealing with the problem and hoping they'll quietly die in their cells.

Rudy Giuliani, the guy known in Republican circles as America's mayor who couldn't get elected dog catcher now in the city he ran for eight years, has complained that by actually putting terrorists on trial instead of pretending they've been projected into the Phantom Zone, “we have regressed to a pre-9/11 mentality with respect to Islamic extremist terrorism.” He adds that "This is the same mistake we made with the 1993 terrorists who attacked the World Trade Center. We treated them like domestic criminals, when in fact they were terrorists.” I had no idea that anybody thought that, by trying the perpetrators of the 1993 WTC attack and sticking them in a cell for the rest of their lives, the government had made a terrible mistake. What downside was there to that strategy that I missed? It didn't result in an unnecessary and distracting war, it didn't give al-Qaeda a recruiting tool that stayed on the front pages for years and years, it didn't amount to a shrugging admission from top U.S. government officials that any lunatic with a bomb who said that our system doesn't work kind of had a point, and it fucking got done. I kind of doubt that Giuliani would think it was a testament to the effectiveness of our system if Mahmud Abouhalima had still been cooling his heels in some detention center at the end of the Clinton administration, seven years after the WTC bombing, and if I have a pretty good idea of what he'd say if the official explanation for this was that if he were put on trial and the case achieved closure, it would put the country in danger. I suspect that his response would include the exclamation "Mwah-hah-hah!!"

Nobody thought that treating people who performed terrorist act as criminals was wimpy or ineffective before September, 2001, and in fact, if the subject had come up--say, in reference to Bill Ayres or somebody--a law and order type like Giuliani would likely have taken the position that to accept such characters' claims to be soldiers at war with the state would be to dignify and flatter their fantasies that they were something other than common crooks. Anyone who suggests that it's too dangerous to have people like Khalid Shaik Mohammed awaiting trial on domestic soil is simultaneously flattering the old boy and revealing a very poor grasp of the state of the U.S. prison system. It's much more likely that someone who's been exonerated by DNA evidence or shown to have been framed by prosecutors and the cops will have trouble getting released from prison than that anyone, even someone who's Islamofascistic as all the bedamned, is going to bust out.

The real reason that the Bush administration went to work selling the idea that terrorists are, like Roman Polanski, some sort of superior race of uber-villains who cannot be beaten by normal means is that this fantasy simultaneously flatters those in authority--especially those who are by nature weaklings, incompetents, and cowards, who need authority to indulge in strongarm tactics to just feel that they're up to their jobs--while giving them absolution for their mistakes. It means that they have to be given absolute power to grapple with monsters who in turn are so powerful themselves that you can't really blame our fearless leaders if they can't actually defeat them--and in fact, the first couple of years of the War on Terror were full of reminders from the administration spokesman that another big attack was all but inevitable and that it would be wrong to blame these well-meaning good people in charge for not being able to prevent it.

The new book The Ground Truth: The Untold Story of America Under Attack on 9/11 by John Farmer, the senior counsel to the 9/11 Commission, details the confusion that reigned on September 11, 2001 and describes how much time and energy were devoted, in those early days of a new era, to drafting a false narrative describing the response to the attacks as unified, clear-headed, and supremely competent. Given the form that response ultimately took, it would be a strange thing if it had been the final result of a chain of action set in motion by smart, clear-thinking people who knew what they were doing. The Bush administration and other conservatives, both in government and the media, were quick to see 9/11 as an opportunity to justify their own desire for power and secrecy, which they could claim were essential tools in a new kind of fight that had rendered traditional niceties and basic common sense "quaint."

That they saw a national cataclysm as an opportunity doesn't make them monsters: FDR must have seen Pearl Harbor, on some level, as an opportunity to finally get us into World War II, and while Martin Luther King was surely horrified to see fire hoses and dogs turned on civil right marchers, he would have been a fool to not also see that the violent excesses of the worst segregationists would rebound to his benefit. But the results of the Republican response to 9/11 was monstrous, because they politicized terrorism and overreached in their lust for power without doing much in the way of actually, productively fighting terrorism, to the point that Bush could effectively call off the search for Bin Laden because it was an unwanted distraction from bringing regime change to Iraq. In 99 cases out of a hundred, "secrecy" in government seems to end up being less about protecting the country from dangerous forces than about protecting those in power from having their own crimes and blunders made public knowledge, and after the first steps were made in the War on Terror, Bush and company had to devote an increasing amount of their time in office to pushing for measures designed to keep the legal process in limbo so that they could continue to pretend that they hadn't fucked up. By beginning to decide, more than nine years after the attacks of September 11, 2001, who among those accused can be prosecuted and where and how, the Obama administration is actually doing something. For a Republican party that doesn't believe in governing, only in P.R., that has to seem like a low blow, if not a violation of natural law.

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@#$%&*!!

The first thing you have to understand about the New York Times' decision to run a front page story about the increasing frequency of the use of the word "douche", as a term of abuse, on network TV is, it was not a slow news day. Why did they do it? Certain things are obvious at the outset. Obviously, someone must have lost a bet. And for reasons that I cannot know and may be outside the bounds of media criticism, someone with the power to decide what stories get covered in the Times thinks it is very important that the children of the reporter, Edward Wyatt, be pelted with rocks and dogshit every second of their public lives and be held upside down in the toilet stalls for a certain portion of every school day. Still, after Whitewater, Wen Ho Lee, and the WMDs in Iraq, it's easy to forget that, tucked in among its large-scale bullshit hoaxes that affect world events, the Times also likes to make mischief with the occasional story that is both ridiculous and trivial. Remember that, at the time when actual journalism about the Bush administration's ad campaign for a new war was most urgently needed, then-Times editor Howell Raines instructed his minions to mount a full-scale assault on Tiger Woods for his failure to devote his life and career to ending gender segregation at certain golf courses. I don't know what chain of command sanctioned the douche report, but I do not doubt that, at some point, someone examined the project, looked up to the skies, and humbly murmured, "This one's for you, Howell."

Wyatt, who is good enough to concede right in the body of the text that there's no story here, because "the word 'douche' is neither obscene nor profane" (adding, a bit sheepishly that "this usage is certainly offensive to many people"), naturally references George Carlin's thirty-seven-year-old "Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television" routine, which is about what the Times article were about if it were about something. (Since "the word 'douche' is neither obscene nor profane" and so has never been the subject of any official ban that current use of the word violates or overturns, it goes without saying that the article isn't about anything.) That routine appeared on Carlin's 1972 album Class Clown, which I first got ahold of some years after it was released, at which time I was quick to conclude that its first side was probably among the greatest works of art ever made. "Seven Words" was hidden away on the second side, but it was that side's high point and did make for a rousing finale.

The words, which I have been able to remember much more easily than the ten commandments or the names of the seven dwarfs, were "shit", "piss", "fuck", "cunt", "cocksucker", "motherfucker", and "tits". I remember listening to it and getting the impression that I was receiving actual, de-classified information about the inner workings of society, and I also remember feeling disappointed, and a little betrayed, when I found out that Carlin had slapped the list together based on his own observations rather than that he had jotted the details down from some memo he'd liberated from the Department of Broadcast Standards and Practices. I actually made this discovery when I listened to the sequel to "Seven Words" that was included in the follow-up album Occupation: Foole, in which Carlin noted that, by including both "fuck" and "motherfucker" as separate individual entities, he may have double-dipped. On reflection, he also confused the issue a little by including "cocksucker" as one the seven deadlies while adding, as a sort of footnote, that "cock" itself was a "two-way word" that was acceptable or unacceptable depending on its intended meaning. I learned on my own that it's possible for a word to graduate to two-way status when it becomes so familiar from popular usage that it's decided, by whatever cabal decides these things, that it must be okay to use it so long as it's not used in the most graphic possible sense of its meaning. Thus it was that I was startled, at some point in the 1980s, to hear someone on my TV set say "pissed off", and then to hear it again and again, so that it seemed that a memo had been circulated announcing that it was okay to use that variant of "piss", and everyone who got it resolved to make up for lost time.

The climactic high point of the Times article itself comes when Wyatt writes, in classic Timesspeak, that "Users of the recently popular word 'douche' defend its use, noting that it was invoked, usually with the suffix 'bag,' in the 1990s by the character Andy Sipowicz on NYPD Blue, an ABC series that frequently pushed the boundaries of network acceptability." What's left unsaid is that just saying the word "douche", without the suffix "bag", really lacks something. This is, of course, a judgement call. (I once got into a disagreement with a colleague who deplored the use of the word "asshat", because it seemed such a half-assed substitute for the more direct "asshole." I conceded the point but maintained, as I still do, that, partly because of its patent absurdity, the word non-word "asshat" is a tickling and pleasing word, maybe more so than the more graphically emphative "asshole", that lands with a satisfying thunk because of the concluding sound of the hard "t." "Douche" lands with a splat, though the adjective "douchey" is satisfying to my ears, so long as it is used sparingly.

Oddly enough, George Carlin did weigh in on the full and proper term "douchebag" back in the day, but mainly to make a point that is no longer applicable: he insisted, back in 1973, that it could only be applied to women. He would live to see a day when it came to be almost exclusively used as a term of abuse aimed at men, but so far as I know, he never acknowledged this or indicated whether he came to view this development as a triumph for feminism. Of course, "douchebag" also has a literal and non-pejorative meaning--helpfully summed up by Wikipedia as signifying "a piece of equipment for douching"--and the Times article goes for a big finish by bringing in "Timothy Jay, a psychology professor at the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts and the author of Cursing in America,” who speculates that “I would bet most kids today couldn’t tell you what a douche bag is.” There's not much you can do with a line like that besides file it under "Too easy to touch", cross-referenced with "Some of the jokes just write themselves."

The Short-Timers

My dear friends at the Onion A.V. Club (okay, "dear friends" might be pushing it, but seriously, I do know some of them) recently went end-of-the-decade crazy and published a string of ten-best lists, including one for "the best one-season wonder of 'oos. As with everything they do over there, it was a well-informed, thoughtful selection presented with wit and enthusiasm, but you can't agree with everybody on everything. That said, at the risk of sounding proprietorial (or confusing "proprietorial" with "pahtetic"), failed but good TV series are kind of my thing. I don't want to get into some pissing match with a swell bunch of guys who do recognize the virtues of Karen Sisco, Now and Again, and Pasadeno (generously included, albeit only as part of a "Bonus Five" of honorable mentions), even if they do rate them below such loads as Aliens in America, Invasion, and Jack & Bobby, and even if they do seem to be under the impression that Boomtown only lasted one season. (It's true that it was only good for one season, but that's not the same thing, not the same thing at all.) So think of this post as a supplement, not a correction, that's for sure.

(P.S. Firefly didn't make the list because it made it onto the A.V. Club's list of the best TV series, period, of the decade. You'll understand why I want to stress this point if you read the comments section at the original list, but I would never recommend that.)

1. ROBBERY HOMICIDE DIVISION (2001; 13 episodes): This intense, poker-faced crime series was created by Barry Schindel (Law & Order) and had Frank Spotnitz (The X-Files among its producers, but it was executive producer Michael Mann, not legendary for getting along and playing well with others, who took over its concept and shaped the finished product in his image. The show merits at least a footnote to Mann's filmography because it served as his introduction to the high-definition digital cameras that he's been using in his movie work since 2004's Collateral. The show itself was striking-looking, fascinating, and entirely out of fashion with the forensics trend then taking over network crime shows. It also doubled as a vehicle for career redemption for its legally challenged star, Tom Sizemore, who had served so admirably in Mann's Heat, and who delivered a no-nonsense performance here as the head of a bunch of reassuringly experience-looking crimebusters housed in the Los Angeles Police Department. Sadly, it turned out to be Sizemore's last hurrah; his drug problems, for a start, resurfaced and probably helped nudge CBS in the direction of canceling the series after nine episodes had aired. USA later aired the whole run (as they would later do with Karen Sisco), but the series remains unavailable on DVD.

2 & 3. KINGPIN (2003, 6 episodes) & KIDNAPPED (2006-2007, 13 episodes): In the cable-and-Internet era, NBC has developed a weird habit of developing brave-new-world projects, giving its creators the freedom to do them right, and then getting cold feet when they hit the airwaves. This approach reached its zenith this year with Kings, but you could see it on display with both these shows. Kingpin, which seemed meant to be the network's attempt to woo both Sopranos fans and the emerging Latin audience, was a crackling serial thriller starring Yancey Arias, a terrific actor last seen lending some much needed and wholly unappreciated suavity to the doomed reboot of Knight Rider, as a Mexican drug dealer who, with no small degree of encouragement from his Lady Macbeth, an ice-blonde lawyer played by Sheryl Lee, decided to go all Scarface on his colleagues and competitors. The show was created by David Mills and employed a raft of smart writers (including Lloyd Rose, once the theater critic for the Washington Post) and hungry actors, but NBC chose to burn the whole thing off in a week as a misconceived "event" and then pointed to the disappointing ratings as an excuse not to keep the show going. Kidnapped was a more conventional but surprisingly snappy and hard-edged action soap, with Jeremy Sisto and Delroy Lindo trying to get Timothy Hutton and Dana Delaney's kid back from a band of villains that included Dr. Venture himself, James Urbaniak. Both series are available on DVD.



4. THE KNIGHTS OF PROSPERITY (2007, 13 episodes): This is the show that was originally pitched (by creators Rob Burnett and Jeff Beckerman) as Let's Rob Jeff Goldblum, only to be refitted as Let's Rob Mick Jagger after the actual Jeff Goldblum, who had originally considered participating, bowed out to take the starring role in a miserable pseudo-Monk cop show where he played an eccentric brainiac detective who spent entirely too much screen time talking to his dead partner for my comfort. (Oddly enough, Goldblum has since enjoyed a bit of a triumph doing pretty much the same act on Law & Order: Criminal Intent, minus the Haley Joel Osment angle.) The show actually stars Donal Logue as the leader of a gang of urban dogfaces (including the hilariously lugubrious, deep-voiced Kevin Michael Richardson and the oh-my-God-who-is-that-looking Sofia Vergara, currently featured on ABC's new concession to the oddball comedy audience, Modern Family) whose master plan to better their lives comes down to trying to concoct the perfect scheme to, yes, rob Mick Jagger. The premise would seem to have a short shelf life built into it, but the Jagger arc percolated with a very pleasant strain of insanity, and after it ended, the crew made plans to rob Ray Romano, which gave the series a chance to stage special guest star Romano's dramatic acting debut in a drug-fiend play. Not a lot of people saw that, because ABC stopped showing the series after nine months, then waited almost half a year and decided to show a couple more before pulling the plug permanently. The series remains unavailable on DVD.


5. THE COMEBACK (2005, 13 episodes): This HBO series stars Lisa Kudrow, then fresh from the end of Friends, as a veteran TV sitcom star named Valerie Cherish who is looking to jump to her next success, even as she inches away from the age where networks are comfortable casting women in leading roles. Her new project, Room and Bored, casts her in a wacky supporting role as "Aunt Sassy", drawing laughs and backing up a squad of uninhabited young bodies shoved up front of camera range. (The sweetest of these empty vessels is played by a way-young Malin Åkerman.) The Comeback, which Kudrow created with Michael Patrick King, is deep-inside show business comedy, complete with a cameo by the legendary sitcom director James Burrows, who, playing himself, couldn't look more cynically jaded if he were wearing a toga and sipping hemlock. When the show was first broadcast, I thought it might be a little too pitilessly far-inside (and said so here); the humiliations visited on the likable, decent Valerie by younger, meaner people as she tries to keep herself employed in an industry that wouldn't miss her as much as it pretends it would go beyond the comedy of embarrassment into something authentically painful. But Kudrow gives a fearless performance, and every year that Entourage hangs around for another damn season, this alternative view of Hollywood as a company town and fame as a trap seems a little more valuable. If you missed it and would like to make up your own mind, it's avaialble on DVD.

6. UNDECLARED (2001-2002): At the time, this comedy about college life among the freshmen (starring Jay Barchel, Seth Rogen, Carla Gallo, and Sons of Anarchy's Charlie Hunnam) was Judd Apatow's inevitably doomed follow-up to Freaks and Geeks. Now it can be savored on DVD as a tasty morsel that kept Apatow and his talent trust occupied before conquering the world, or at least the movies. At the time, some people carped that it wasn't as great as Freaks and Geeks, and by God, it isn't. But then, with all due respect, neither are most of the movies, and it's sure a hell of a lot better than Funny People.

7. THE TICK (2001, 8 episodes): Patrick Warburton as a superhero dressed as a purple parasitic arachnid. Honestly, what else do you need to know? (Well, for one thing, it co-stars Liz Vassey, who has never looked more terrific or sullen.) Arguably the silliest thing on a list that already includes The Knights of Prosperity, but its silliness stems from its nobility of intent: like the underrated 1999 Mystery Men movie,it mostly eschews campy parody in favor of a weird kind of character comedy set in a world where costumed crimefighting is a part of regular life. (It's based on a comic book that I have never read and which had already inspired a '90s animated series that I have never seen.) Unfortunately, Fox never seemed able to get past its level of embarrassment over being associated with the show, despite the fact the A-list talent level involved. (Barry Sonnenfeld directed the pilot, Larry Charles was executive producer, and the writers included Christopher McCulloch, A.K.A. Jackson Publick. It was through his chores on the show that McCulloch first made the acquaintance of Warburton, which means that The Tick is the missing link in the evolutionary chain that eventually spit out The Venture Bros.) Reportedly upset by the high production costs that had been racked up in the process of the creators' drive to achieve what Cagney and Lacey fans used to call quality television, Fox waited forever to put the show on the air and were them quick to declare it a failure, but the whole show can now be enjoyed as God apparently intended, on DVD.

8.TV FUNHOUSE (2000-2001, 8 episodes): Robert Smigel's spinoff of his Saturday Night Live cartoons was structured as a parody kiddie show with sequences that paved the way for the even nastier yet somewhat better received Wonder Showzem. Some of the transgressive live-action stuff was more funny in theory than it was to watch, and Smigel, as later did Trey Parker and Matt Stone on Team America: World Police, found out the hard way that dreaming about doing freaky stuff with puppets may be a lark but actually working with puppets is back-breaking hard work that often looks it. But the show added to the bounty of the planet's supply of TV Funhouse cartoons by the rate of at least a couple an episode, and there's no way to not make that sound like the very good thing it is.

All I Have to Say About "Mad Men" Season Three Is...

...that last night's season finale shows how much better the show works when the sixties vibe they're emulating is closer to The Thomas Crown Affair, or even Ocean's Eleven, than L'eclisse.



Bored to Death also wrapped up its brief first season last night, and while the show may be a modest pleasure, it has proven something about Jason Schwartzman that I never would have guessed: when he's surrounded by the right people, it is possible to hardly mind him at all. The finale included especially standout work by Ted Danson, who at one point could be seen preparing for his big fight against Oliver Platt by hitting a punching bag as if he were the world's shyest bear gingerly tapping a beehive to ask if they could spare any honey, and three sexy minxes: Jenny Slate as Schwartzman's new stoner-chick love interest, a comedienne so spirited and flexible that she swung her dead-weight co-star around like a sack of potatoes while actually convincing you that she was into the little drone; Heather Burns as Zach Galifianakis's girlfriend, turned on by the sight of him stepping into the ring but then urging him to stay down for the count because "I want you in one piece tonight"; and Laila Robins, a born trouble maker who once damn near got Sam Waterston disbarred on Law & Order. The show is refreshing, and easy to forgive in its lapses, because the current of real, cross-generational affection between its characters feels real and prevents its cleverness from settling into something smug and preening. I liked the quiet moment at the end when Schwartzman asked Danson, the ever-immature father figure, if he thought they'd learned anything from their experience. "No," said Danson, "but that's okay. It's good to stay in the dark about things. It keeps life interesting."

Intentionally or not, that line stirs up memories of Larry David's famous dictum about imposing a "no learning, no hugging" rule on Seinfeld, even as Curb Your Enthusiasm's current season has focused on David's staging a Seinfeld reunion. Curb has two more episodes to go this year, which doesn't give David much time to remember that Leon, the black Katrina refugee who hasn't been seen since half a dozen episodes ago, is presumably still camping out in his house. If David never gets around to showing us Leon's introduction to Michael Richards, I'm going to end up wondering why he went to the trouble.