Frequently Asked

I recently gave an interview with an up-and-coming genius journalist at Northwestern, the beautiful and talented Jessica Torres-Riley, having to do with my job as a recapper and moderator at Television Without Pity. I loved her questions and -- yeah, you know me -- loved even more the opportunity to talk about myself. Here are some of the questions, some of the answers, and some bonus questions asked by a friend which I've also answered.

Q: How did you get involved with Television Without Pity?

A: I became involved with TWoP (Mighty Big TV in those days) in the summer of 2001. I came across the site on a Google search for something random, and I loved it, just the quality and the spark of the writing. I had no idea that it was a phenomenon or anything -- even in those days it was a pretty big deal, but I'm not a person that spends a lot of time on the internet.

So I just thought, you know, these are funny people, they watch TV like I do. They think hard while it's happening. TV goes through their blood.

I think one of the major attractions of the site all along has been this kind of conspiratorial or personal effect it has on people. It's very one-on-one, I think, for most people.

(The recaps, anyway. The forums are a separate issue. I didn't even know those existed until I came on as a staff writer a couple years later. That minority of people who are primarily posters on the forums has created a separately beautiful community which -- at the time -- had little to do with me. I think they are awesome, but at the time I wasn't even aware. They were very nice about my early attempts at recapping, though, I found out later. Mists of Avalon represent!)

So I wrote to the editors/founders of the site, offering to recap a TV movie that was coming on like that week, and got two polite refusals back, and that was it. Only my concession letter -- an ambitious, unprofessional, mortifying move -- was funny enough that they ended up giving me the TV movie, and that was my first recap (The Mists of Avalon). I pitched a few more Extras, different things that caught my eye, for a couple of years. Probably half of those, I got to do. And then I did two or three in the same week, including one suggested by my editor.

That moment, as a freelancer, when they actually assign you something, that's huge. That's validation, like something out of a television show, and I will never forget it. And then I was hired-hired, and it changed my life in every way. It was a long time ago, and I was just peeking out writerly pride, so it was a big deal. Now, we've got more staff than we can assign, but back in the day, I was all about the brute force.

Tara (Wing Chun) and Sarah (Sars) and Dave (Glark) are and always will be gods and goddesses to me. They gave me the opportunity to grow and twist and change -- and whine like a motherfucker every step of the way -- throughout the life of my career working with them. I have been a kid with my first job, this total artistic cliche nightmare bullshitter, the kid that makes friends with the school nurse. I demanded fifty times what any sane boss or editor would give. But they nurtured my voice, and that makes them heroes for me.

Now that the site's grown I don't suggest this as a way of getting "in," as I say, but they gave me that opportunity and watched me stretch those muscles, and complain and moan, and were loving and corrective every step of the way. And I'm sure a lot of the time they wondered if I was just malformed or born wrong, and corrected me as well as they could. But they believed in my voice, and my take, and worked with me to get there.

(Now that I'm working with other venues, like MSNBC or whatever, I've gotten a few letters about how "a stronger editorial voice" is what turned me from the fevered madman to a regular journalist or whatever. And I get it, because it's a different voice, but that seems like a particularly ignorant backhand slam to them -- they nurtured my voice in the same way that my lovely editors in other markets do.

And don't get me twisted: TWoP is a market that accepts what I do, and that's amazing. Another market or site demands a different voice, and I'm willing to go there, but in terms of creating Jacob as a writer, TWoP is crazy elastic, which is a gift from above.

I write in a particular style for every show, every episode, and the editors have always worked around that, and sharpened it into the best it could be. When I am assigned a new show, or a show starts a new season, part of my thrill is just finding out who's going to be writing the recaps. Every new show is a new Jacob, and i'm often surprised at the voice that comes out.

Like Gossip Girl: that's a very unique blend of my own innate emotional and sexual obsessions, my reflections on the class differences and meaningless evaporative stuff that seemed to matter so much at the time, and the "TWoP snark" voice I thought I'd abandoned. I love it. But I love just as much the brass-balls seminarian bootcamper quiz-guy from The Apprentice, or the surprisingly religious and oracular Jacob that wrote about Doctor Who, or the fever-dream hypnotist of Farscape, or the ecstatically civics- and spirituality-minded Jacob that tells us about Battlestar.

Which, if you like that specific voice or not, has never been down to the editors. They are kind, good and brilliant people, and believed in me. Don't blame them if you don't like the recaps, because it's all me, with them desperately reining me in. Yes, the stories are all true. But more importantly: how lonely would my life be, without all those Jacobs enriching it? I don't expect anybody to jump from Idol to Battlestar just because of my writing. But occasionally they do, and the thing I thank just after those people is my opportunity to develop so many of those voices at once, for cash money. You couldn't ask for a Clarion or graduate program so intensive and so immediately responsive. Because when you're a recapper, everytime is NOW, and every up you fuck, you're going to be informed in ten minutes. It's magic.)

So anyway, sorry, then after those came through and I did them, I was offered American Idol. It was the summer of 2004, so even though I got the assignment in like July, I wasn't going to be writing until January, when Idol comes on. So I moderated unpaid for a few months, to ramp up. Now, of course, the moderators are paid, but back then it was the price of admission, and nobody minded.

Q: What do you enjoy about recapping?

A: I think the recapper is called upon, as a consequence of the form, to fulfill three basic roles: humorist/critic, storyteller, and couch buddy. You're there as a critic and joke-teller, but you also have to tell the story of the episode in a way that makes sense (and hopefully is artful as a separate piece, or at least well-crafted), but you are also there -- in somebody's living room -- each week, talking to the reader about an experience the two of you are sharing.

It takes longer to read a recap (God knows especially one of mine) than it does to watch the show, which means that your presence in a reader's life, a diligent reader anyway, is a pretty powerful thing. I think the job of a recapper is to balance those three roles. I love all three of them, and in hindsight it's pretty obvious that balancing them is not only difficult, but very subjective. Any given reader is going to say, "More funny, less criticism! Less funny, more personal stuff," and that's just the appeal of having lots of very attentive readers.

(Similarly, if you hate it -- and sometimes they really have -- you hate it more than you've ever hated anything in your entire life or previous lives or however much hate your stuffed animals can hate. And I trust those haters more than I do the fans of the writing, because you are being given a chick in the armor to write past. And depending on how intense they are, or how community-building that devotion to dislike is, maybe they don't see an effect. But every word, positive or negative, really does make an aggregate difference. We're all just doing the best we can.)

Then, too, it's a serious writing lab with a vicious turnaround cycle. Depending on the show and format of the coverage, you've got either 12 hours or five days to put something together, and once it's up, it's up. And the feedback -- I think in part because of the personal response of the reader, because of how it gets read -- is instantaneous, and very visceral. So just about the time you've decided for yourself whether a given piece or paragraph or concept or writing trick worked, which feedback is worthwhile and which is subjective to the reader, which things to incorporate moving forward and which things to drop, while remaining true to your voice ... there's another episode on, and you have to start the process over. Any skill I have at writing, it's because of the TWoP bootcamp. It was my first writing job -- in some ways my first job period -- and that has been, and continues to be, an exhilarating learning curve.

Look, firstly I am a novelist. Any reader can tell you I think easier in longer forms, unending blah-blah gigantic forms of arc and story and character, than I in the short term. That's not bragging, I wish I could tone it down. But the fact is, I can't just think about what's happening, I have to deal with why it is happening and what will happen because of it. It's a recapper failing, I think, but it's my brain. I have to live here.So I've written three novels, meaning that I've put to paper three complete stories that are even longer than usual. I don't know if they'll ever see the light of day, and frankly I don't care. I would love to shape them into something salable. But that's primarily about me, and it's between me and my beloved agent.

Available for human consumption, we're talking about TWoP. You can love the recaps or hate them, you can take in the detail and literary quality that's hopefully brought to them, you can appreciate or not the extra layers of interpretation and story that cone in, you can enjoy the humor if that's what you're there for. But ultimately, you're coming to TWoP to see somebody's response to an episode. I don't think anybody's under any illusions about the "recaps" actually filling in the blanks.

I mean, I do try to do that, I hope it's comprehensible, even with all the extracurricular references and poems and religious texts and whatever, but we also have a responsibility to bring an art to it, in its own right. Firstly, I'm not adding anything: it really is first response. I really am, quietly and secretly, just that pretentious when I'm watching the episode. In my head, watching an episode of the show really is that overblown and emo and detailed and hypertexted. I don't go back later and talk about Persephone or Pi or whatever: that's what's happening when I'm watching, so that's what I bring to the recap.

And more than that, I'm really, really tired of "snark." I don't think there are many of us that are capable, or interested, in turning out boilerplate "snark." If you want to hear the same jokes you've been hearing for ten years, you're going to need to look to someone less original or interesting than the current staff. We've done snark. We've done "guilty pleasure." We can do that shit in our sleep. But I think the spirit of TWoP is a bit more searching and powerful and intellectual than that.

Sars always said (usually defending my psychotic ass) that "recaps don't mean one specific thing." Heaven help us if they did. I'm more interested in really testing those limits, that snarky definition, than I am in recapitulating a house style that's ten years old. We set the standard before I was around, and the rest of the internet took up that standard before I was around, and that's what "recap" means. But I'm not satisfied, and I don't think any writer could be for very long, with recapitulating the classic recap. I want to bring the information to the reader in a newer way. The challenge -- to me especially, obviously -- is in drawing the balance. And god knows I'm not the champ at that. Luckily, I have readers who are generous enough to follow along, and wonder if "recap" means what we all thought it did.

Q: What appeals to you about TWOP?

A: It is a community of people engaged in their entertainment. It is of prime importance to me, as an idealistic person, that people engage with their entertainment, and deliberate about what they are putting in their bodies. Not avoid any particular thing, or gorge on some other thing because it's intellectually trendy, but just to taste whatever it is with their whole tongue. I think the quality of any given piece of television whatsoever is completely contingent on the viewer.

A canny person can get as much out of so-called "guilty pleasure" TV -- either a clue to the bigger societal picture, or a little self-examination -- as somebody else gets out of watching "Hardball." The mere act of watching a high profile show, either current events programs or that HBO "it's not TV" thing, is not enough to make you smart, or well-read, or eloquent, or thoughtful, or anything. That's borrowed ego, it's a reflected halo.

And on one level, the community at TWoP is good about puncturing that. But by the same token, there are groups on TWoP that are willing to engage with and give weight to stuff that I think the average viewer would either ignore altogether, or watch with some kind of hang-dog "guilt" about how they're engaging with something they can't apparently justify. Two lazy approaches that have nothing to do with fulfilling your own desires in a present and dedicated way.


Q: I see that one of the shows you recap is American Idol, which is consistently one of the most popular shows on TV today. How do you think the online communities and commenting enhance viewers interaction with the show?

A: Online discussion of this show, in particular, fascinates me. Firstly because Idol is such a case study of where our country is at, at any given time. Because it's the biggest show in history, the stories that it tells and the personae that it brings to us are immediately illuminating. The archetypes that the show produces for our consumption, and the order in which America votes them off, are so key to understanding where we are as a nation. I truly believe that. The word "zeitgeist" gets thrown around a lot, but I mean: that's American Idol. Your week-by-week Tarot reading for America.

But the internet is NOT America. Online communities like TWoP are a self-selected fraction of a fraction of a fraction that leaves out some pretty major groups of Americans, for the most part. So there's an interesting skew between the TWoP consensus and the overall American consensus. And in some ways I think that promotes the superiority complex of any online discussion or group, so it's to be expected, but the really fun thing about TWoP in particular is the rational minority among the fans who actually try to follow the show as fans of the phenomenon, rather than falling into the trap of obsessing over a particular persona from the show. That's something that I really think is specific to TWoP: not "how has this perceived conspiracy hurt my favorite's chances," but, "let's talk about whether or not it's possible that there's a conspiracy at all." And that intellectual approach to the show as a whole, as a packaged entertainment product that is doing a GREAT job of being successful, that's something I've only ever seen on TWoP.

So to expand that, the genre shows I've written about like Doctor Who and Battlestar Galactica involve different fans and different concerns. At some points I've been mystified, by the obsessive attention paid to a given detail that I, from a story point of view, overlook. I treasure those other viewpoints, and wish always to incorporate them into my own. My only wish, as a passive waiter or as a moderator, is that everybody watching the show taste it with their whole tongue. You must conquer your entertainment, own it utterly, if it's going to take you anywhere.

Recaps, moderation, off-site comment, blogging here, whatever, my number one priority is to say, "Mickey Mouse is a four-fingered rat, his friend Donald wears no pants, and there's a social inequity between Pluto and Goofy, because they're both dogs but one of them is a pet and the other one can vote, or legally marry, or whatever." Get on the internet, get the information, make up your mind. Don't come to me or anybody else and ask for the answers, because that makes you sad and lazy.

And I think even the house style, the snark, is basically asking the same thing: think about what you're putting in your body before you put it in your body, ask what it means and what it says, about America and about you, before you sign on.

Q: Have you found that participating in the online community has changed the way you watch television?

A: Not really. Possibly, after writing recaps for years, I have changed. I tend to approach any show or movie from the producer's or writer's point of view, thinking about what works and what doesn't, or what should happen next, or how this act should be structured, and I know that's a recapper thing. Because I do not EVER want to write for television, it sounds horrible. But I do tend to figure things out a lot faster than I used to, or maybe am supposed to, that kind of thing -- because the recapping is a training job for noticing things and making patterns. It's an introduction to storytelling like no other, which I really appreciate.

Although I guess there are a lot of things that really seem to vex the posters in the forums that don't bother me anymore, although they used to. So I guess just seeing the same complaints over and over, or learning to anticipate the reactions of other viewers, has made me more dedicated to seeing what's on the other side of that. The N+1 response. Which has, in my actual life, helped me to look completely insane on more than one occasion, even if generally that N+1 turns out right in the end.

To be honest, I've always been weirded out by the fandom situation. It's like, the readers and posters are the people eating the meal, and the showrunners and writers and actors are cooking the meal. And then there's me, kind of awkwardly serving the meal. As a creative person, as a novelist with my own stories to tell, it's a weird place to be. I think a lot of recappers just enjoy talking about TV, and I do too.

But there's something about being involved with fandom, and being involved (and privileged to be involved) with the creation of fandom factions, like the TWoP Battlestar fans or the TWoP Farscape fans, or the Who fans, this LINDA we created out of sixty years of history or whatever, is of immense pride for me. I love those people and I'm proud to be part of them, but that's all them. I don't get to play in that sandbox. I love them from the outside, by writing about those shows and telling them how brilliant they are.

So I'm the waiter, not the cook or the diner. That's weird. I would much rather play with my own toys, in my own sandbox. And one day, I will. But meanwhile, I am having so much fun playing critic and doll-player on those terms. And the benefits as a fan and writer of doing this job! The writerly part, analysis and character and all that, obviously. But as a fan! I can tell you every episode title of every episode of BSG, why it matters, who was in it, who guest-starred, who this and who that... There are readers who still hate me because in my transition from viewer to writer I made some wild -- I mean really disgustingly dumb -- mistakes, like what planet is which and what kind of spaceship different from some other spaceship.

I realized eventually that it mattered -- and I'll frak you up if you say it doesn't -- but also have made it a point to apologize in the next recap for mistaking things, or hearing a wrong line of dialogue. Some readers hold onto that stuff for years, you know. I think it's great. I love that, because it's a constant reminder that firstly, I owe these people my rent, and secondly, these people are teaching me new ways to love the show. I always want new ways to love the show. This year, I loved Idol more than I ever have -- and got BURNED! I hated a couple weeks more than anything I've ever hated, because I finally after like twenty years let myself get involved. And of course, here come the emails: "Are you clinically depressed? You hated Idol two weeks in a row, much more poisonously than when you just didn't care..." And I'm like, "Trust me, I actually love it now, I just randomly got two shit weeks in a row."

Nobody who reads your recaps hates the show. Even 7th Heaven. Even that show, we loved most what we hated most, and out of that comes great comedy. Even "snark." But I feel bad when I honestly fucking HATE an episode of a show, because that's an automatic diss on people that liked it. People, in a lot of cases, who generally agree with you. So of course, the first thing they think is that you've gone mentally unstable. And anybody else, I mean, that would be farfetched. Me, they know how delicate that tightrope walk can be, so they give me a little leverage. Do not print that part.

Q: Would you say you watch more television to be involved with conversations online?

A: Not me. I watch everything I moderate, but I would do that anyway. And I try not to get too involved in the conversations online, A) because it's not something I would do anyway, and B) I feel like there's an authority issue where some posters have trouble drawing the line about the weight of my opinion. Which is, you know, zero.

But I think because lots of posters come to the site as a bulletin board, they can't be expected to understand that it's primarily a content-driven site with forums attached. So the recaps, for example, end up seeming to them like super-posts with ten times the power of a normal post. Which is silly, so I try to keep those lines from getting blurred by staying out of conversations, or making clear that I'm taking off my moderator hat and recapper hat and putting on the fan hat. I do it seldom, though, because it's just not my thing.

I love it, I love the communities that it's created, and I'm proud of them, especially things like Doctor Who and Battlestar where I feel like I was privileged to even be a part of creating this giant, living, vibrant and wild group of fans, but I don't really take part.

Q: Do you have a "day job" or are you able to support yourself primarily working for TWoP? Do you read or contribute to any other sites that talk about television and pop culture?

A: I've done both. Right this second I'm writing for MSNBC and Radar magazine, doing other freelance things, so I'm pretty busy. With freelancing as my day job, TWoP fits in well with that. But in the past it's been harder to balance with a regular office job. Like this month, I have three shows going, so I'm working like every night, and dealing with the forums... it's close to six hours a day, three or four days a week, between writing and modding.

I've worked myself to death with that schedule, basically, in the past. So supplementing just TWoP with freelancing is a mental health move, some months out of the year. I mean, I try to live by the whole "adapt & overcome" mantra, so I am always looking for ways to work more efficiently, but if I had an office job in April or May, I'd end up homicidal.

q: What is the best and the worst thing about writing and modding for the site?

A: That's actually four questions, but I am going to answer the shit out of them. You know how I roll, right?

The best thing about moderating for the site is getting to read everybody's thoughts about the show in question. I find the Hills boards as fascinating as the Battlestar ones, and I do try to tell all my assigned forums how much I love them regularly. Because I do. The most cantankerous is the BSG set, the most adorable is The Hills, the most paranoid si Big Brother, and the most anarchic is Doctor Who. There's a well-known moderator maxim, just discovered by the newer recruits, that the flavor of crazy of your particular show equals the particular crazy that your posters will be. It's true like mothereffing astrology.

(One thing casual readers might not know is that we have super crazy forums discussing every single show or moment ever aired on TV. And even if you know that, you might not know that last year we took on paid moderator staff to cover them. The only recappers who transitioned were me (Bayliss) and Kim (Pembletom, totally not planned!) and Susan (Strega, moderator name still Strega). So that was a huge shift right there.)

The worst thing about moderating is trying to explain basic things and not making headway. Like, we have really strict rules on the boards. Really harsh, perfect, wonderful rules. I looooove them. They're easy to follow, if you get it. They solve problems ten posts down the line by nipping in the bud in the first place. "Don't do this thing. Not because it's bad, but because if you X, I know from pattern recognition and thousands of posts a day that somebody is going to do A, B and C, and that's a mess the moderator cleans up, so don't do X, please."

And it's like if you say, "Don't do X," if you say it in the site rules,and in the Show-specific rules, and in the MOD Q&A thread, and at the top of every page ... how many personal gold-embossed invitations to decency do people need? Those are all requests to follow the rules, and clarifications if for whatever reason, so when people act like they never knew it, that bums me out. And when they persist, you have to cut them off. That hurts me, but it's worth doing. Because hopefully and eventually, you have a conversation about the show whose quality still rivals that of anything on the internet. Considering how crazy important TV is to our country and our world, that's saying something. I'm proud to be involved with that, no matter what cosmetic stuff happens from time to time.

Three: The thing I hate about recapping is the thing I was talking about before. The fact that, because I'm an employee and moreso because I'm recapping, my opinion matters. DUDE, my opinion doesn't matter. It's an opinion, that's how it works. So you get a lot of mommy-defiance and "well you said this, but I thought that" and it's like, "I'm not telling you what to think, I'm telling you what I think." Which is really the opposite of telling people what to think. I just feel like -- and this applies to the mod thing too -- people assign way to much power to you, because they are desperate to do so.

People are used to authority figures, either to agree with them or to fight them. The hardest part of my job is convincing them that I'm not one. I'm a guy, who loves a thing. I'm not your mommy. If I tell you to knock something off, knock it off. That's not a judgment on you, that doesn't mean you're a bad person -- it's a reminder of the rules. Fucking knock if off, and we'll go back to talking about the show. The end. There's nothing more important or epic or victimizing to it. And the hardest thing about it is, you cannot convince people of their own agency. You cannot tell people to take control of their opinions, to express them, to say it without recourse to "I may be in the minority, but..." None of that. You cannot tell people to have the strength and beauty and courage of their convictions, because that defeats the purpose. Which I am willing to ignore unless it contrasts the rules of the site, which it ... does, so cut it out. Knock it off.

And the best thing, question number last, the very best thing about writing for the site is this: I get to swim every week in something very important. I get to touch the great big brain of writer, actor, viewer, commentator, and what it becomes. I get to swim alongside that monster like a killer whale, and report back. What's better than that?

If you're not buying, in the particular shape I'm selling this week: no skin off your back. Complaining about the form the recaps take is like busting into a party you weren't invited to, and then complaining about the food. If you don't like it, well, it wasn't written for you. We're sure that you're very nice, and clever, but it's not meant for you. Go crash another party. We love you nonetheless, and hope to see you next week.

The bottom line is that story is all we have. The oldest societies on Earth, the writers and editors of today's reality TV segments: they all know it. They told our stories back and forth, into myth, and so on. Story is what we are. I get to tell those stories in a way that nobody else does. I get to play storyteller AND story-explainer AND court jester. The best things you can be. I get to midwife story, the heart's blood of our humanity. To both tell us what is happening, and why the story is happening the way it is happening. The how and what, but also the why. There's not a fuckload of jobs that give you that many opportunities to touch God, or magic, and pass it along. And that's how seriously I take it.

And trust me, I'm throwing in as many jokes as I can along the way.

If you have any questions, I'm here to answer them. Be classy, be smart, and be cool, obviously, but I'm serious: On my approval, this post could keep getting longer forever and ever, and I'll credit whoever asks the question as I add it to this post. My dream is to make this "Frequently Asked" post an ongoing, wonderfully transparent thing.

Just be nice. You can ask the most frakked-up question in history, but if you ask it in an awesome way, or at least politely, I will answer the fuck out of it. I am well aware of my weaknesses, and I can share info on that as easily as everything else. Even something like "Why is the recap for X episode of Y show so fucking pretentious?" Or, for example, "What's with the obsessive hatred of X writer of Y show?"

I'll answer it, and thank you for giving me the opportunity. I really do find myself just that fascinating. And if your question is dickish, give me an email and I'll answer it in private, because I care and I want you as a reader. But it would be nicer if you made the question blog-ready to start with. My grandma always told me, "Breeding tells," and as sick as it is, that's how I live. Show your breeding, and we'll have a talk. Either way.

And here they are: Question One, from Kelly H.

Interesting insight into your side of the TWoP recapping world. I'm sort of curious how your few weeks of bad mood affected your moderating on the forums, if at all? It seems like that - especially when combined with how emotional/involved fans can get - might have been a bad combination.

Good question with a stupid answer. The answer is No. It's my job. Whether or not ten teenagers sing shitty songs for forty-five minutes has nothing to do with whether or not people stay on topic, remember where their shift key is, or allow their fellow posters to question David Cook's perfection.

My "bad mood" lasts precisely the forty-five it takes to watch/write/think about the episode. It has no bearing on the entirely separate proposition of the fans themselves. This isn't my first barbecue. But even if it were, the entire point of the job is keeping that stuff separate.

Who do you cast as the Scorpio of the Cylons? I would love it to be Tory.

Only Scorpios ever ask this question. I've always put the Eights as Scorpio, not just because of the Six/Virgo Eight/Scorpio thing, but because of all the secrets. I'm thinking primarily of S1 Boomer: she's very sexual, she has secrets she's not even interested in dealing with, but she's very emotionally responsive at the same time. She's very smart, and very adaptable. Although, as you say, all that fits Tory now too.

Given the quote above, what's the flavour of the BSG board?

There's a hard-science fascination with the mechanics and fake science of the show that seems very life-or-death. I don't know if other sci-fi show fans are like that, I'm guessing that they are. So what's most specific to BSG is the political stuff. There's a lot of parliamentary procedure and worrying over the details of governance, that kind of thing. The Farscape people are also like this, but more emotional about it. BSG fans are like, "But how can we make this discussion more equitable without denying the central truth of our differing opinions?" And then there's the whole lifeboat thing, because the show is so perilous and the ratings and attention paid the show are so up and down, that translates too.

Read On

Stanley & Myra Say Fuck It

I.

All of the wedding presents were in what the kids used to call the "very back," the fifth-door back-facing child seats that Stanley and Myra forgot to fold down when Tommy was old enough to sit in the back seat without pulling hair or throwing food, and Stanley and Myra were alone in the car for a moment of blessed silence between the hall and the reception, and Myra was eating the nuggets out of a Happy Meal they'd bought and as she ate them they tasted like a quiet guilt in the back of her mind because when the girl at the window handed Stanley his change back in the drive-through her eyes had flicked back through the car, to the back and the very-back, and noticed that there were no kids there:

And Myra had the strangest desire to call out to the girl at the window that there was a child waiting for the Happy Meal, it wasn't for the grown woman next to Stanley in what the kids used to the call the "jump seat," it wasn't because they were strapped for cash but just because her girdle was feeling tight as it was and she didn't want a whole meal, an adult-sized meal, didn't even want to eat what they were calling a Big Kids Meal, just a regular tiny Happy Meal like the kids used to get when they were kids, before high school and before the wedding, when everyone was bite-sized and the children lived on ketchup and were too young for rock and roll television or sex or programming the TiVo and looking down at her like that little slow girl in Tommy's class that hugged her once outside the school because she thought Myra was her mommy, because all mommies look alike, less so to the children than to strangers but more so than to the mommies themselves, but also to the mommies themselves:


In the very-back were all the wedding presents, between the hall and the reception, in blessed silence as Stanley drove, taking the long way without saying any more than a subtle little smirk as he missed the exit, and Myra knew he wanted to keep in the still and the quiet again, because everybody goes crazy and everybody deserves to go crazy and everybody secretly looks forward to going crazy on the day of a wedding so they can tell their friends if they cried or not, if they wept and why, if it was Gloria all grown up so lovely in her dress or just the power of love and romance as those two youngsters those two children finally clasped their hands and put on their rings and stood together in front of everybody and smiled and wept and grew up right before your eyes and went off on their honeymoon and they maybe you'd never see them again, but for now there was still the reception, and all the presents, and this what they were:

There were two blenders probably, and a couple of games of Parcheesi or so it sounded; there were mixing bowls in glass and in ceramic with that characteristic corrugation down the side, what did they call that, and what too did they call the glassware, you used to see it all the time; there were books both funny and sincere and sometimes both; there were dirty gifts and clean gifts and gifts for cleaning; there were gift certificates and cards and overnight stays and spa weekends and beauty products and grills for Gloria's boyfriend, now her husband, all the home products and beauty products and jewelry that a man could ever need, a watch and a good pair of cufflinks or two and a joke garter from his brother the best man; there were larger packages too that sounded that clanking metal like a microwave with the glass plate inside gone off its rockers and rotators; there was a car safety kit with red and black cables and a tire pump and a jack, she knew because the paper ripped in her hands as she was carrying it in her hands with their veins and wrinkled paper skin, feeling like she was helping, feeling strong for a moment as she carried it, before she dropped it; there were hopeful but no-pressure hints at babies, grandchildren, nieces and nephews; there was house paint for a new tradition:

And over in the driver's seat there was Stanley with his smell like old tobacco and his kindly wrinkled face like oak and his hand first on her knee and then upon her thigh like a secret joke between the two of them and no sign but the smirk on his face and the sparkle in his eyes, and past him there was a car of teenagers driving too fast, somewhere else, looking like strange and beautiful alien creatures from Stanley's old magazines, or out of a forest, going who knew where to do God knows what, and all the secrets and the things we don't want to know about our children, so we don't:

And before them on the road there was the next exit, and the next, and past them there was the reception and standing in line on heels for the first time in gosh years because when you're a librarian nobody expects you to wear heels, ever, and though she'd gotten pregnant with the oldest, Gary, too young for nursing school, she thought that nurses too could get away with wearing flats or soft old lady shoes every day of their lives, but probably had less time to be thankful for it than did librarians, who spend all day telling the world to whoever will listen, and shelving books that nobody will read, and sneezing in the dust and the silence and grinning in humiliation whenever the electronics got messed up by accident or by divine design, and a million things to do, and Gloria being downright nasty with Tommy about the CD player, and Myra trying to help him figure out the correct buttons on the awful thing at the rehearsal dinner and Gloria acting like he was slow, when all we are is not as fast as our eldest sons and daughters;

And out the window on her right there was the exit passing by again, and the next, and down there Stanley's hand upon her thigh, and past the exit sign there was the damned reception and Stanley's awful sister that was still alive and her husband that always looked at Myra and made her wish she had hair growing out of her moles and wasn't wearing a girdle at all, so he would look somewhere else; and Gloria's boyfriend now husband whose name, Myra told herself again and again, was Ted and not Todd, Ted and not Todd, although who could blame her with Gloria only coming home now every couple of years, you could confused Ted Not Todd with a boy on the television for all the exposure Myra and Stanley had to him, and even when they did visit it was nothing more than recitation and his resume telling us where he came from and what college, where he was going and where the best city was for his practice, as though by accident and not design as far away from Stanley and Myra and Ted Not Todd's awful parents and the whole kit and caboodle, and Myra recognized something fundamental, something true, just as she looked out and saw a long straight cemetery, as she saw the lines of white stones and crosses and carvings curving out orthogonal and then wrenching straight as they came parallel on the highway, and the thing, the fundamental thing that Myra recognized was this:

Gloria and Ted Not Todd were practically strangers and they could go wherever they wanted and do whatever they wanted, because something about marriage meant that they were the new center of their family, that they'd cut the threads that bound them to their mothers and their fathers and that their house was now the center of the universe, the firstborn, with all their ducks in a row, eldest son and eldest daughter, moving away across the universe in a blind red stretch as far as the wind could take them, but perhaps Myra thought perhaps it worked the other way too, and she could take flight just as they had done, perhaps Myra and Stanley with the clothes on their back and the money in their wallets could just keep driving forever into the sun, just say have done with the whole mess now that Tommy was out of the house they could:

Fold the very-back seat down in the station wagon and put their stuff in it, or a more limber woman could climb back there and hurl all the wedding presents out the windows one by one and Stanley would never have to stop again, never stop that station wagon again until they were safe and sound with nobody there to bother them, and the blessed silence could stay still forever and there would be no noisy reception music and no awful relatives and no Gloria with a stranger's face, and would they care, and did she care if they did, and Stanley's hand upon her thigh, and when she looked at him with that smirk on her face too now it erupted into a grin, the real truth of smiling like the sun with no thought of dentures or laugh lines or the wrinkles in her neck, just a smile that said:

Stanley, we are here and they are there, where they belong, and we belong nowhere anymore, and that means we belong everywhere, and as long as we're together we can just keep driving with your hand on my knee or on my thigh, and I'll throw all the wedding presents out of the windows one by one, because they are slowing us down, Stanley, can you hear me in the blessed silence saying, Stanley, we are here and they are there where we belong, and even though she didn't say a word he heard her nonetheless, always a firm marriage, always a strong connection the two of them had, only stronger with age and the hard times and the softer times too, and his hand tightened around her thigh and he squeezed her like a young strong man, like she saw in her mind's eye when she pictured him, and they smiled at each other and said:

"Fuck it."



II.

They distributed the wedding gifts to the immigrants and homeless citizens of in a pawn shop neighborhood in Pensacola, and headed north. Stanley suggested turning off their cell phones they never really knew how to use and chucking them out on the side of the highway. Myra was happy to see him so excited about the process. They went back ten minutes later to collect them because of Rosie, the middle one, who at the age of fourteen went green and never went back, and was now a lesbian on top of it. Rosie wouldn't approve, and Myra felt bad about the environment. Once back in the car, they lost ten years each.

What had begun as a quiet, slow, subtle process was speeding up, the faster they drove, and the more things they dumped the faster went the ride. Myra found that she could slip off her shoes and stick her feet out the window, like Gloria used to do on family trips, and once she attempted that, she realized it would be nothing at all to slip her girdle off, under her dress. That one she threw out the window and didn't even feel bad about. Even though elastic plastic doesn't biodegrade, it made the car go five miles faster per hour, which took a good seven years off.

Stanley at forty-three years of age still had a strong thickness to his back, like a slumbering bear. Myra remembered lying in bed with him, when Tommy was still little, and marveling at the size of Stanley. Just the sheer size of him, like a wall in the bed with his back to her, so high she felt she could almost climb it. This was decades before the advent of the Sleep Number bed, which equalized them in more ways than one. She liked her mattress firm and he liked it soft, which meant at night his back was of a more manageable size.

Myra softly raked her fingernails down his arm, watching the hairs rise, and he looked at her coyly, but they were both wary of stopping the car. She wanted to go faster and she wanted to tease him as he drove. She could see his breathing under that grey suit, and the way that it was speeding up. She thought just with that tiny, subtle touch she'd probably given them another six years, but it was an invitation to a party they didn't yet want to reach. Go faster, faster. She thought that it was said in silence, but his laughter made a mockery of quiet. She turned up the air conditioning and it smelled like Stanley used to, that old tobacco smell, and she rolled down the windows.

Myra realized she was hot. She was perspiring after twenty years of cold, always too cold, rheumatoid arthritis and hemochromatosis and all the words you're supposed to remember just because they apply to your body. A thing you hardly know on a first name basis anymore, unless that name is Pain or disappointment. But her body was waking up as they drove, and Stanley's too, and it was a celebration and a reunion she'd somehow expected but wasn't quite sure of until it was happening. Hello, it said. And hello, said she, and smiled. And then she said hello to his.


III.

They were forty when they reached the state line. They stopped the car and stared at each other for awhile to make sure they wouldn't age, and then opened their doors carefully, and finally he turned off the engine and they stepped out of the car. They bought peaches and drove down the road a while, turned off into a grove. The juice of the peaches and the soft firm flesh of them were delicious in a way nothing had been delicious since Stanley's first stroke, when the world tasted like peanuts and then whiteness to them both. They made love; strong love, like beasts, hungry and laughing and wet in the moss. They dozed there and when they woke they were nearly thirty-five.

Back in the car they headed to the coast and took a dip in the ocean. It was salty and warm and sweet, as though the summer had arrived their first. She'd never seen the beaches of Georgia, how they bend and recede and curve around the land in a gentle hello. The old people on their porches waved at the young people in love, laughing and splashing in the surf, and when she came back to the car she realized she had nothing clean to wear, so they bought clothes at a store, dripping and giggling in the air conditioning, and changed outside, by the car. A little boy pulling a wagon saw them, and laughed, and for a while they were embarrassed until they remembered they were just kids, in the summer in Georgia, with peach stains on their clothes and the salt of the ocean in their hair, and they laughed back and waved.

Stanley decided on boxer briefs, and Myra decided on a thong. She didn't like it, exactly, but the feeling every now and then reminded her of her decision, and she would look down at her flat, taut muscles and the tennis legs she'd had so long ago, and laugh, and run her fingers through her hair. Stanley fidgeted in his boxer briefs but allowed as how they were comforting, in a way. "Like a tiny man holding your balls for you," he said, and they laughed out loud.

She reached out and turned on the satellite radio thing Gloria bought them for the rehearsal dinner, and wondered briefly how the reception was going. At least they'd attended the wedding, all hours and hours of it. Gloria would be older than her, now. The thought excited her. All the music on the radio was pretty and insistent, but too glossy for her tastes. She remembered the radio when the kids were younger, the country before it went western and the rock before it got hard. She'd loved the Beatles once, dancing around the kitchen with a baby on her neck, almost entirely unashamed. She wondered if the satellite radio thing could find the Beatles for her. And it could.

South Carolina, North Carolina, all of the Carolinas. Stanley kept asking if they could pull over, but she just wanted to keep going, faster and faster. Light speed, she told him. Nothing less than light speed. At the north border they did it against the car, Myra bent over the hood, and she watched the sunlight on a field of sunflowers instead of his face. Before they got back in the car, they did it again, this time in the gravel. She loved the pebbles pressing against her back as much as she loved Stanley's mouth at her neck, nipping and kissing, and the funny sounds he made. They'd learned a thing or two, back before they said fuck it, but they'd never had a chance to use that knowledge like this. She almost thought she'd lose consciousness at one point, staring past his beautiful, searching face at a crow wheeling in the sky.


IV.

They bought acid from a goofy white kid in Severna Park, Washington. He talked like a little black boy but was as white as the albino man back home, with red hair like Gloria's and covered in freckles. His hat was backwards. He looked stupid, mentally ill. But he sold them the acid, and some ecstasy for later. She asked him where they could go dancing, but didn't want to be rude by specifying what kind of club.

She didn't want to say "not a black club," because she could hear Rosie in the back of her mind screeching, even though it was really just because the music seemed so demanding. And more importantly, she didn't want to bring up the little boy's confusion about his race. So she said she would take his suggestion under advisement, and smirked again at Stanley, who shook his head. Equal parts wonderment at her, and complete exasperation with the child.

They "dropped" the acid at the door of the club he'd suggested, and were greeting with metal detectors. She was afraid she'd set them off, because of her hip, but as they walked closer she realized she couldn't feel the steel there anymore. It just felt like a hip. She walked through with a bounce and realized that her breasts were drawing stares.

Stanley put his hands on her body in the middle of the dance floor, and they moved together, sinuous and striking. All the people, young people, as young as Stanley and Myra, stared: they'd never seen two people so very much in love. When she went into the bathroom to reapply her lipstick, she realized two things: they were probably in their late twenties now, and you should never look into a mirror when the acid's coming on. She'd remind Stanley about that later, but not soon enough. He said he saw the ghost of his father with the ghost of his grandfather inside, and that he briefly became a horse. She said that was sexy, and took him back to the dance floor, and she rode him until they both came right there. Nobody seemed to notice. Then the song got soft and quiet, and they shook their heads at each other, laughing. They needed something more. Something faster.


V.

These people took them to a house show that a couple of cool bands were playing at and they said they could just leave the car at the club because the cops were so heavy down there in that part of town so it was actually safer, and neither Myra nor Stanley wanted to admit that they were worried about being too far away from the car for too long because what if they started getting older again, but really they were both realizing that it didn't come from the car or from the miles per gallon, it came from saying Fuck it, so they said Fuck it a few more times and that cleared their minds, plus, their friends suggested, maybe they were feeling so paranoid in part because they were tripping balls, which caused Myra and Stanley to look at each other bemusedly and ask, "Are we tripping balls?" but the lights of the police cars going faster, faster all around them were sending up the whole park in sparks and flames of blue and red and the cars seemed to multiply like giant friendly black and white killer whales, into a vast herd of them with their plaintive undersea song, and once they agreed that this was the effect happening around them they had to admit that they were, for good or ill, tripping balls, so they said Fuck it a couple more times to be safe and then they were at the party:

You couldn't tell if they were good or bad, or boys or girls, but they were gorgeous and you could just tell that inside themselves they all carried a secret and special light with amazing consequence, to which their new buddies replied, "That'll be the E," and of course it was, and then Stanley's hand accidentally touched her hair by accident, and it sent shockwaves of awesome through her whole body past the thong to her high-heeled shoes and right back up again, and she pushed him over sideways like a lady wrestler into a soft couch and they made out, and everybody laughed but they quickly got bored, and Stanley and Myra devoured each other, and sooner or later somebody else got involved, somebody with a secret and special light of amazing consequence, and then two or three more, and then the whole party was saying, Fuck it, and getting younger, and the lights of their consequence began to grow brighter, and there was a heat building in Stanley's body and a hunger, and the reason that Myra knew this was that she felt it too, and it was beginning to frighten her, except probably, he said, between bouts of kissing and the silence as the crashing waves of their bodies licked up into the sky and back down again into their ocean, he said, and he was probably right, that it was more than likely just the massive amount of drugs they'd done, and them never having done this before, and all around them the beautiful young people nodded and bent themselves back down to the task at hand:

And somewhere in the ocean and the lights Myra realized that they needed to get the hell out of there, because between the heat and the skin everywhere she felt like she was in an ocean that had nothing to do with Stanley and very little really to do with her, and that was not what she was going for, and she tightened her hand around his shoulder and he pulled back just a bit, his face red where he was kissing her, and he looked into her eyes and nodded, and they pulled themselves from the lovely human wreckage, and walked right out through the door and into the yard and the sunlight, and under that brittle sun they realized a thing they had forgotten in their jealousy, which is that even a very young body has limits, and they had somewhat surpassed theirs. They slept in the car for a few hours and then headed west, into the frontier, and I will tell you this:

By the time they reached California they were twenty and holding, and set the car on fire, in the desert and started to run, and the looks of the old men and women, the fifty and forty and thirty-year-old men and women, the disapproving stares and the hushed whispers and the well-meaning advice to slow down, take it easy, be quiet, stop shouting, stop laughing, stop asking questions, stop doing everything that is good:

Well, maybe I'll tell you the story another time, about when Stanley and Myra said Fuck it for real.

Read On

MAMAN FATALE: Is Every Noir Woman Some Gay Dude's Mother?

- Suddenly, Last Summer by Tennessee Williams
- Romeo Is Bleeding, screenplay by Hilary Henkin
- Running With Scissors, directed by Ryan Murphy
- The Devil Wears Prada, directed by David Frankel
- Misery, directed by Rob Reiner
- Macbeth, by William Shakespeare
- Cerebus, written & drawn by Dave Sim

Last night, a friend and I watched a double feature: Romeo Is Bleeding and Suddenly, Last Summer. Not wanted to give away the total nutsack craziness of the latter film, I couldn't explain to him why it was not only the perfect but the necessary complement to the film he'd chosen -- but watching the scope of Suddenly's total fucking weirdness dawn on him was more than fulfilling enough. It is a deeply strange, nearly perfect, viscerally upsetting film with a denouement as unbelievable and inevitable as that found in Bug, or Ellen Burstyn's Switch. I wish movies were being written that so closely approximated the raw, ugly, weird, personal creepshows we all carry around -- hell, I wish plays were still being written that were half so brave.

Romeo Is Bleeding, of course, follows Jack (Gary Oldman)'s adventures with the ladies: from his wife (Annabella Sciorra, doing her usual sexy-wounded emotional flipbook) to his mistress (Juliette Lewis, knocking yet another brain-damaged sex doll out of the park) to the cunning and magical hitwoman Mona Demarkov, played by the possessed and terrifying Lena Olin. While Roy Scheider's Don Falcone is nominally the source, or one half of the source, of Jack's misery, we are never privy to the whole story of Mona and Falcone's association. The story follows a repeating, telescoped sequential narrative: Jack (1) tests the waters of ethical relativism, (2) is rewarded in a small way by Falcone, (3) has sex with Lena Olin, (4) is offered a bigger reward to betray Falcone, visits his (5) wife and (6) mistress, and then (7) is punished mightily for his crimes.

The whole movie simply plays this sequence of events out several times, each time cranking up the pain and stakes of the iteration, until we end up at a brilliantly funny, ridiculously over the top version of the story in which Olin -- hands cuffed behind her back -- nearly murders Jack from the back seat of a Cadillac using only her dainty ankles, survives the resulting car accident, kicks through the windshield, grabs a suitcase full of money with her bound hands and an envelope of false ID in her mouth, and takes off down the street to construct an elaborate ruse in which she somehow procures Juliette Lewis, dresses Lewis up like herself, gets Oldman to shoot her, and then produces her own arm -- which she thoughtfully removed herself at some point while all of the other shit was going down -- and still manages to escape the legal system scot-free.

She is magic.

She's also a femme fatale, clearly, but one whose person and persona are so bound up with the universe of the narrative itself that we are never surprised to see her popping up out of nowhere, coming back from the dead, visiting Jack in dreams, straddling him in a variety of rooms and amputations, and haunting him long after her death. She's the Joker to his Dark Knight, the Tyler Durden to his Jack's Sense Of Oedipal Guilt. Romeo is a deeply personal, an almost Impressionist, film, which twists and manipulates the rules of noir and action so perversely around itself that in the end we feel like we're reading the diary of a deeply lonely man.

What's interesting, and subversive, is that the story is written by a woman, Hilary Henkin. Born in 1962, she's part of the Shane Black generation of smarty-pants action writers, but with a subtle and emotionally savvy touch that few reviewers seem to really grasp. I've just been through a thousand inches of Romeo criticism, and they all -- men and women alike -- seem to say the same thing: "derivative," "sluttish," "appallingly violent"; most of all, there seems to be agreement that Henkin, in telling her story, is trying to do the Boys' Club one better: to "out-Hammett Hammett." Or, even more insultingly, one female critic claims that "[Olin's] lingerie flaunting appears to be one of the film's main raisons d'etre."

1994 was not so benightedly long ago that this crap should be unexpected. It's not a perfect movie -- the voiceover and absurdly drawn-out end sequence are both laughably heavy-handed -- but it's an original film, and like anything else it deserves to be critiqued on its own merits.

I'm reminded firstly of Geek Fallacy #235, "This Unfamiliar Thing Is A Rip-Off Of Something With Which I Am Familiar." 235er involves constricting the entire universe and all creative artifacts in it to a private gallery, owned and curated by the loser who's talking. Your favorite band? I heard about five seconds of it, and I have to say that the A-G-E chord progression reminded me of a Rolling Stones song I saw in a commercial last week; therefore I am fairly certain that your favorite band is a ripoff of the Rolling Stones. The herky-jerky camera work of your favorite television show reminds me of the gritty autofocus tricks on my favorite television show, which was cancelled: therefore your favorite show is obviously a ripoff of my favorite television show.

Combine GF#235 with the mid-'90s "glass ceiling" obsession and you can see how they got there: hardboiled, ridiculous dialogue is a staple of the genre, but can you really picture it coming out of a woman's mouth? Or, by extension, her pen? Of course not: obviously she's trying to join the Boys' Club. Obviously, by using and exploiting the tropes of the noir style -- which by 1994 had disappeared up its own asshole anyway -- she's just trying on the slumpy suits and rumpled fedoras of her betters. What can a woman know about violence, or about the terrifying and numinous power of a sexy, squatting (Always with the squatting! In basques and garters, squatting all over the place!) Circe like Mona Demarko? Obviously, she's just aping the work of the stronger, smarter men -- the Dashiells and the Jakes and the Bogeys -- that came before. No way is she trying anything new. Right? It sounds like something I've heard before, so obviously there's nothing new here.

Except, of course, this is the same woman who has written, produced, co-written, ghost-written or polished some of the most loudly lauded and goofily beloved tongue-in-cheek action (Fatal Beauty, Road House), genre-establishing claustrophobic gothic incest remix satires (Flowers In The Attic) and straight-up genius political calls-to-arms (Wag The Dog, V For Vendetta).

Once you've watched Olin cackle her way through the fourth or fifth deadly iteration of the above sequence -- at one point asking, in all seriousness, if the shackled and toeless Oldman would prefer she fuck him with her prosthetic arm (the busy leather straps of which seem organically developed from her earlier complicated belts and garters, and which serve her breasts up like St. Agatha's, on a plate) attached or unattached -- it becomes clear that we're operating in a heightened reality. This is not, after all, an expose about the corruption to which policemen are sometimes, or FBI witness protection protocol, or a amputee's story of determination: it's literally being told by the narrator, to the narrator, as part of a semiannual self-flogging ceremony of guilt and flagellation.

Romeo gives us a world of all-consuming femininity, in which whatever the plan is, Mona's already thought five steps ahead. She infiltrates the personae of both Jack's lovers, replacing his wife Sciorra through gesture and in dreams and his mistress Lewis through actual costumery. In the final sequences, we learn that her ties to Falcone, Jack's other torturer and puppetmaster, are as mysterious and intimate as everything else about her. The bitch chainsaws her own arm off and then sets an entire building on fire with herself inside, but still makes her day in court. Jack finally kills her -- the movie's second act is built around the premise that he cannot bring himself to kill her until she has literally leveled his life around him -- but only on the way to killing himself. She fences him in with sex, with money, with temptation, with legal and criminal double-crosses, and even forces him to dig a grave for her archenemy (in a sequence that makes it clear she's only suffering him to live because she's down an arm): without Mona, the story falls apart.

Meaning that the story is fundamentally about Mona, or rather, about the relationship between Jack -- the Ego of the story -- and Mona, whose seeming demonic possession echoes the archetypal possession that fuels Jack throughout most of the story. She represents not only his shadow, the id temptation that puts his wife and lover and self into jeopardy, but also the dark aspect of his anima: she is his female Other, on whom he projects all of his own darkness, giving her mythical powers far beyond those of mortals.

Compare to director Peter Medak's other projects, which include an adaptation of Lawrence's The Rocking-Horse Winner and Species II -- both of which echo Romeo's devouring and dominating feminine stories, in their own way. (Species II in particular is interesting: the sequel doubles the original's Venus Flytrap sex/death naïve/horny heroine with her male counterpart, and then watches them fall into a mutually destructive dance of exploitation, death and sex, but expands the universe with a surprising amount of latitude given the male's viewpoint as the chase comes to a close.)

Which makes Suddenly, Last Summer the perfect follow-up. In this one, based on Tennessee Williams's 1958 one-act, two women catch Monty Clift's hapless doctor between them as they war over the rights to memory regarding the dead man they both still love. While the play was originally presented off-Broadway as a double-bill with Something Unspoken under the joint title of Garden District, the latter play's emphasis on the lesbian undercurrent (the eponymous unspoken "something") turns up the volume on the gay content in Suddenly, which is basically unnecessary and unbalances its noir effects and devilish religion.

Suddenly takes Olin's Mona Demarkov and makes her a god. Literal. Half the story takes place in an explicitly primal jungle of a New Orleans garden, while the rest of the scenes are set in a mental hospital. Katherine Hepburn's Violet Venable aims to get Elizabeth Taylor's character, Catherine Holly, lobotomized for reasons having to do with her faceless, voiceless son's sexual secrets, and pulls every string -- like a grande dame, Katherine Hepburn version of Mona Demarkov -- in order to make it happen, catching Clift and Taylor both in a web of deceit and Razor Magnolia denial. A Venus Flytrap -- "named for the goddess of love" -- originally seems to represent the devouring mother/aunt at the heart of the tragedy, but in the end it's revolved itself around to represent the willing sacrifice of St. Sebastian Venable himself.

The God stuff is weird, but follows. Violet remembers Sebastian's preoccupation with the destruction of a litter of sea turtles by carnivorous birds overhead through her own filter, that of a bereaved mother sea turtle, but the truth is that the give-and-take of Sebastian's mutually destructive and devouring relationships with everyone around him make him both a God of turtles and a sexual victim of ancient seagull sex rites. He is the recipient of fervent worship, by both his female relations and the young men of Cabeza de Lobo, but knows that ultimately he will be destroyed by their rapacious appetites. He is, offstage, a magical character in his own right, imbued even in death with so much power and secret knowledge that he almost seems more present than Clift himself. And again, we see identity slippage at the hand of the death mother figure: Clift, the protagonist, is eventually rewritten as a new Sebastian.

So why have Clift's character, Doctor "Sugar," in the story at all? Because there must always be a man who resists. Williams is good at writing the devouring female madness, because Williams has a shrieking madwoman in his head making him a good playwright and a very commonplace homosexual, but knows enough to know that without a male character standing apart, denying, or directly contradicting the emotional, neurotic, unconscious mass of crazy that comes with mommies and madwomen in his stories, he's just telling static stories about nothing at all.

Stories resolve conflicts. In the undifferentiated unconscious content that gives birth to dreams, stories and our every shadowed movement, there is no conflict, just as there is no time or distance or spatial relationships. Everything is now, everything is present. It's a big old mess. So to simply tell us a story of how crazy and scary women can be, without including a male or denying ingredient, means looking at an undifferentiated mixture of crazy. Which is not story, but in fact the first step of art therapy, which is by definition not art. What makes Sebastian Venable so interesting and significant is that, as Sugar's double, he is the man in the story who gave in to the susurrus of unconscious significance that threatens to devour men, in Williams's stories. He is fully invested, like Dionysus in the Bacchae: neither classically male nor physically female, but above and combining both; like the flower of the Venus Flytrap, which gobbles like a predator while resting gently in the garden, Sebastian is a female and male symbol of passion and androgyny.

The story takes place several months after Sebastian's death, as the title suggests, and the main action of the plot follows Dr. Sugar as he tries to bait first Violet and then her niece Catherine into giving up the truth about the murder -- a truth which is so bizarre and unbelievable that one can forgive both women for being driven mad by it, and by falling for the numinous trap of thinking that it represents the true and awful face of God. Sebastian is a sacrifice and apotheosis for them as well, God incarnate and sacrificed on an altar of hot, grimy, luxuriating decadence and sensuality. While Dr. Sugar, like Tom or Stanley in Williams's bigger plays, can stand apart and watch this happen and shake his head bemusedly, it's Sebastian who is forced -- by Violet's narrative, which she dominates just as she dominates the plot of the film -- to reenact his namesake's martyrdom.

For a historical example of the noir flytrap narrative, look at Macbeth. From the beginning to his sad end, he is hounded by magical, strange, witchy women. His fortune is told by actual witches from outer space, his entire path is written out by the original Mona Demarkov of course, and in the end he's defeated by whom? The only man on earth not "born of woman" -- not touched, that is, by the sick energy and magic of the whole world that encroaches slowly in on him from all sides, like happens when you end up in Silent Hill. Or think about Rob Reiner's Misery, in which a writer is caught between two crazy women -- one who sprung from his head like Athena, and the other who leapfrogs up the chain of command and becomes the boss of him in every way, literally creating the narrative of his life, his eating and shitting and ability to move, as he's doing the same for the fictional object of her obsession.

When I say post-Oedipal, I'm talking about two things which specifically inform the fictions of the last sixty or seventy years: non-normative sexuality and gender-imbalanced sexual development.

Firstly, the purely sexual connotations of the Oedipal conflict, as classically understood and referenced, are unavoidably inscribed with the heterosexual male viewpoint. This is fallacious in several ways, not least because -- if things were really that simple -- gay men and all women would get off scot free. That's not the case, however: in fact, all people, men and women alike, are born of women to this day. It's limiting and sophomoric to an insulting degree to ascribe the consequences of birth in these childish, giggling terms. (One might say, however, that while the Oedipal conflict directly relates to the Hero's Journey itself -- as a retreat from, descent into, and return from the oblivion of undifferentiated psychic content, or ecstasy, in all its forms -- it's the Nuclear Age, with its creepy focus on artificial family units and rigidly enforced gender rules, its top-down regulation of female and child sexuality that suborns all desire to the rules of the Father, that has really given Electra her strength, and her wounds.)

Or to put it another way: the opposite of the Oedipus Complex is not the Electra Complex, it's the Oedipus Complex. Our connection of the Mother archetype with both wish-fulfillment Eden and devouring, negative critic (from kritikos, "judge" or "discerner"), carries the danger of infecting our actual view of the world. By letting the former shade our worldview, we run the risk of staying infantilized -- as in the once-popular "Peter Pan" diagnosis -- or by engaging in subtle or overt warfare with the outside world. A disappointed Peter Pan sees the failure of Mommy to provide in every unfair detail of his life: the car he can't afford, the clothes she can't fit into, the job for which he is unqualified, the uselessness of her graduate degree. All cause and effect goes out the window when Mother archetype takes control of the spoiled adult child: if the world won't comply with Peter's wishes the way Mommy used to, then he'll just hold his breath until his face turns blue ... or become a serial monogamist, or regress to childhood and become an otaku, become bulimic, or otherwise demonstrate her dissatisfaction with the status quo by refusing to grow up at all.

Similarly, possession by a negative anima or Mother archetype takes advantage of and fulfills all fears and nightmares of powerlessness. By relieving the subject of his ability to make informed decisions -- or by making them futile, by overwhelming them with critique or bitterness -- these types of ego possession actually absolve the subject of any responsibility to himself at all. How much of the voice of depression is an inverted, bloated Mother archetype taking on the guise of self-hatred? What these stories warn against -- by describing its possibilities and procedures -- is the abandonment of personal power in favor of the controlling, poisoned anima.

The Devil Wears Prada and Running With Scissors are both fundamentally stories of children who, through trial and error, manage to make it out of their childhood alive, even as the worst and most hellish Mother possessions swoop at them again and again, like Williams's God-infused seagulls. Burroughs's memoir-filtered mother is expertly played by director Ryan Murphy and Annette Benning as a charismatic, secretive figure who controls and destroys the lives of others without a second thought; back to whom every strange desire and ugly event can be traced. While Hathaway's beleaguered assistant is a grown woman with common sense, and not a innocent young man, the narrative itself follows the same basic skeleton as any other devouring-feminine story: the hero resists a set number of slings and arrows, is tested and discovers love and a personal ethical standard, and -- this is key -- eventually repudiates and leaves the mother-dominated world.

Where things get dangerous is when we are unable to separate the unconscious and archetypal content of these stories from our own personal narratives: ask a straight male acquaintance of average intelligence about his views on women at the right time of night, and you'll get a psychiatrists-level survey of his mother's faults and virtues, universalized across the spectrum. This is so laughably common -- and so prevailing among the rules-setting, normative, male heterosexual definers of culture -- that we've forgotten to be grossed out by it.

Only when the details become too terribly personal -- as in Dave Sim's memorably loopy ass-hatted digression into the "gaping void" of femininity in the pages of his once-feminist comics -- or when something else ties the storytellers together do we realize anything is off. While Hilary Henkin is subversive and wonderful for telling her story in such big, crazy, 1994 terms, I'm seeing a certain commonality among the creators of these others stories.

Let's see: Suddenly was scripted by Tennessee Williams and Gore Vidal, and apparently the confusing, overly symbolic mess of an ending can be blamed on the Catholic Legion of Decency's interference with the script, and the homophobic compromises made and stances taken by producer Sam Spiegel and director Joseph Mankiewicz -- the former of whose mistreatment of Clift was so overt that Hepburn, once she was sure her filming was complete, spat in his face.

Prada is, while based on a female novelist's sub-par novel and taking place in a female-dominated and -coded environment, is commonly accepted as somehow related to the gay men's experience, a gay male fantasy played out entirely in female and gay male characters, aggressively feminized -- a modern-day Wizard Of Oz, in which the accepted cliché of gay men's lives are (like Sex & The City, we're constantly being told) played out by cardboard cutouts and surreal personae. Contrast, please, this film -- or the other big, execrable Rudnick-esque hits like Birdcage or In & Out -- with something like Brokeback Mountain or the more gritty gay men's narratives like Prick Up Your Ears, in which neither couture nor the devouring feminine have anything more than a vague symbolic presence -- and ask which one made more money, by virtue of its accessibility, its accordance with our accepted perception of the gay male as feminized, fussy, flighty eunuch. The more masculine the gay man in question is, whether on the screen or in real life, the more likely we are to judge him with the harshest terms imaginable: as a waste. "What a waste!" we say: and why? Because he's not playing the game, and without the game, what are we? We want our own stories told back to us, and that's true for everybody. But 90% of the world is straight, and needs the radicalizing spectre of gay sexuality -- which calls into question not only sexual identity, but also gender and, most importantly, the static roles of male/active and female/passive -- pushed into its little box. It's not evil, it's just the accumulation of desire; it's supply and demand.

Running With Scissors was adapted and directed by one gay genius of our time, Ryan Murphy, from a book by another gay genius of our time, Augusten Burroughs -- who was of course writing from his own experience. The Devil Wears Prada, directed by David Frankel, a Hollywood scion whose credits include Sex & The City and the shelved gay romance The Dreyfuss Affair, who had this to say about the continued Disney stalling of the project, back in the summer of '96: "Birdcage is the most conventional story about stereotypical, flamboyant gays who are hardly shaking up the system. What did Birdcage make possible? More Birdcages.''

I couldn't agree more, and God knows big-budget loads like Birdcage and In & Out are almost more embarrassing than the lion's share of the awful independent gay movies that followed, mired in their '70s self-obsession and self-pity, but it doesn't really answer the question at hand, which is: why do gay men tell these stories, over and over and over? Cause and effect rear their ugly heads again.

Picture this: Absent father, overbearing mother. Heard it before? Me too. It's a pretty common narrative.

What's interesting, and telling, is that the narrative is written by straight men, who have no experience of organic homosexuality. I've just been through a thousand inches of attempts to circumnavigate the essentially and implicitly Othered experience of homosexuality, and they all -- men and women alike -- seem to say the same thing: "derivative," "sluttish," "immature," "neurotic," "appalling"; most of all, there seems to be agreement that gay men, in telling their stories, are joining the Boys' Club by describing their relationship to femininity and masculinity in weirdly heteronormative terms. Not the gay men's experience of femininity or masculinity, then, but what the heterosexual definition of culture would prescribe as everybody's experience of gender.

I'm reminded of Geek Fallacy #235, "This Unfamiliar Thing Is A Rip-Off Of Something With Which I Am Familiar." 235er involves constricting the entire universe and all creative artifacts in it to a private gallery, owned and curated by the loser who's talking. Your favorite band? I heard about five seconds of it, and I have to say that the A-G-E chord progression reminded me of a Rolling Stones song I saw in a commercial last week; therefore I am fairly certain that your favorite band is a ripoff of the Rolling Stones. The herky-jerky camera work of your favorite television show reminds me of the gritty autofocus tricks on my favorite television show, which was cancelled: therefore your favorite show is obviously a ripoff of my favorite television show.

Combine GF#235 with the mid-'00s backlash against the '80s-'90s entitled white bitching of ACT UP and other radical groups who alienated the definers of culture while disappearing up their own boring, self-destructive, lazy, mindless assholes -- and then screamed like toddlers when their Peter Pan dreams weren't fulfilled. By letting the dominant culture infantilize them, and rebelling against those self-defined cage walls, all they did was reinforce the "real" cultural perception that homosexuality was simply a deferment of sexual maturity: to reinforce the ugliest stereotypes by letting their poisoned animas and abused Peter Pan egos take the stage. Way to go, girls.

That's one narrative: that without a normalizing, heterosexual masculine influence, or with a powerfully -- magically? -- feminine force of great enough magnitude, the normal course of nature is somehow subverted. As a person who believes that every human being deserves -- and is required -- to know and love themselves intimately, all the way to the bottom, this is a contradiction I could never reconcile, even as a youngster. Somehow an a priori condition of my identity -- the gender and sexual lines against which we define ourselves, in terms of the twinned forces of life, sex/attraction and death -- was, thanks to the environment in which I had grown up, traveled back in time like some kind of submicroscopic quantum phenomenon?

Of course, to screech -- like Catherine in Suddenly, asserting her sanity from inside the insane asylum, unable to gain leverage against the culture-defining powers so threatened by her personal truth -- that these memories are mine, subjectively verifiable and real, is to get into an impossible argument. The one response you can't have, to the accusation that you are crazy, is that you are not crazy. It's like telling the witch hunter that you're not a witch. "I just happen to be a woman of intelligence who resists the dominant, masculine heteronormative paradigm," you could be screaming while they set you on fire.

I've written before about the inscription of patriarchal values, the logos, on our viewpoint, both in the abstract and in unending anecdotal exegeses. I've also performed deconstructive analyses of classic homosexual tropes in the same vein. I've discussed the experience of gay teens in this context, and what it feels like to except yourself from the entire mess, whether you're a real-life business executive or fictional celebutante.

What I've never really done is offer a real alternative to these narratives. Try this on for size: Perhaps the absent father contributes to an a priori sexuality by virtue of his absence, in the case that his assertion and enforcement of heterosexual behaviors would twist what's naturally there into a behavioral approximation of heterosexuality. Perhaps in his absence, the father avoids wrecking what was there in the first place, and establishes a negative space in which his child's desire and identity arise from actual experience rather than tradition. Likewise, the overbearing mother is expressed -- by straight and gay writers alike -- in the particular Peter Pan narratives of her son: the only people who tell stories are those people who have stories to tell. Which is to say, the only people that tell stories are those with conflicts that need to be resolved. It comes down to a self-selected population telling their stories, which align along both lines in a false positive that becomes universalized, and the myth of constructed homosexuality is born.

The radical element in this narrative, as in the lineage of classic noir, is represented by Romeo Is Bleeding, in the works of Kathy Acker and Karen Novak; in short, by the female writers whose need to tell the story of the devouring mother take their form in parallel to the more usual -- which is to say, canonical, which is to say male -- gay men's narratives. Every gay man whose healthy, nuclear upbringing still "resulted" in unaltered homosexuality speaks against this prevailing narrative, and every woman whose experience, as told, recapitulates the false ontogeny of the mythical gay persona, radicalizes the enforced gender and sexual roles that have come down through the accumulated power and narrative of our culture.

And if those voices are ignored and liminalized by the defined culture of their fathers, for whom Geek Fallacy #235 is a simple fact of life, in which we all take part -- even threatening and attacking when they're sufficiently well-stated, or too derangedly different from the accepted paradigm -- I don't know that we have many alternatives than to attack that paradigm head on, and speak our stories for ourselves, even as they light the coals beneath our feet.

You're not crazy, and you're not alone, but if both of those things are true, then the most hideous responsibility has just landed itself firmly on your shoulders, because there's nobody left to blame. If you're not crazy, and you're not alone, then why aren't you happy? That's the path you have to walk, alone. And it'll take you the rest of your life.

Read On

HOW I THINK IT HAPPENS MAYBE

My question was, what if DH Laurence decided to write a chapter of Dubliners but it was all about Britney Spears's vagina? Nobody could answer it, so I did it myself. Eliot on beats.

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O and don't they have their hair just right like werewolves in a song and don't they just look perfectly put together like pieces in a puzzle book with every hair just right and every hair plucked out of place and every hair arranged in a cartoon mystify guaranteed to put you in a Tokyo frame of mind, and didn't they surprise you when with hair like gilded silk they glided all in a row like maidens and true gentlemen down the lane, across the red carpet, into a thousand flashes bound like stars, and didn't it surprise you when you became like one of them, first a little bit famous and then a lot, and the flashes came for you? Didn't it sound just like a fanfare like a Phil Collins symphony of soft money and hard good times at three o'clock into somebody's car some strange limousine waiting at the curb for you and your soft time to continue, to drive on and ever on into the next place and the place after that until you didn't know and didn't care and then deposited like a baby like an orphan like baby Moses at the door at the stair at the back of the place where you laid your sweet head all alone upon silk and satin and five thousand threads, count them all, where you could lay it down and rouge and gloss the pillow up and louche and toss the fellow up and turn it all over, waking at noon and start the thing again, and on that twelfth day when it was time to repair and to rejuvenate, when there was someone on Rodeo that could do your makeup up and wipe away those days and nights, when it was time to go to work again and fill up and fall again and be somebody else again, o did you ever wonder who that was that they were making up? Did you ever think again of days spent living on the drag with not a shoe nor a fabulous gown nor anything but your name to your name and waiting for someone to see the talent, raise the talent, polish and love and praise the talent, to see the talent and pass the talent upstairs now to the next level and the flourish of the talent, to raise and praise and cage the talent, and didn't you know even then that somebody somewhere was hating you then even as they raised you up, and did you think on it after like a girl at the end of a Sunday sundae thinking, what is it that brought me here and do I have enough to last a lifetime? O and don't you feel the eyes upon your tender flesh bruising like a fruit as they turn you this way and that and press upon your navel and smell the rich and young fragrance of love arising like a bruise out of your tender flesh, and passing you on down from hand to hand to hand until one claw one painted lovely perfect hand reached out and caught you in its palm and curled its painted claw around your heart, not touching and not bruising and not caging but just holding and said this is it my kingdom for this year, I will hold and bear and love this fruit until we all can share? And do you remember what happened then, my girl upon the stair? My fairy, story, my fairytale, sorry, my darling dear my sweet thing that must meet this man and then the next, photographed in this position and moved again into that position and always with the good of your career and with only the strength and power of conviction and the future of your life on the line your career like a shining star in the distance toward which a claw and then your tender unbruised hand reached out reached for reached out towards and then the voice saying almost there, not close enough, almost there not close enough, just one more thing just one thing you mustn't do if you're not up to it but this could be the bigtime and this could be the one that separates you from the pack of up and coming young and blooming girls with pinking cheeks shall I tell you what it is and have you yet been waxed and where are you going tonight and what are you wearing tonight and have you thought about a thong or your big-girl panties have you thought about a thong or a brief or a bikini or what about this have you thought about this have you given any thought to please don't freak out but what about this idea and all the girls are doing it, those girls with cheeks who want to rise above the pack have you thought about just maybe possibly probably this: wearing nothing at all.

Read On

WHAT TO EXPECT WHEN YOU'RE EXPECTING TV

SO. The strike is over, and everybody's throwing these numbers around: episodes in the can, shortened season orders, lengthened season orders, production start dates, air dates, lots of blank spaces where the answers will one day appear. But what does it actually mean? Here are a few tips on what to expect between now and June.

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The Best News

Gossip Girl, the best show on television of all time, will be finishing out their original 22-episode order -- which you may remember was the very first full-season order of the season -- airing through June. Now, the quasi-finale was a great possible ending to the season, so really this is just good news on top of a stellar year, but it will be nice to see Queen B get her revenge on the UES sometime before we've all graduated high school.

I'm reminded of The OC's first year, when the baseball break was figured into the storylines, with a similarly powerful cliffhanger/break-point (Marissa's OD in the TJ). Obviously this break wasn't planned in the same way -- it's the usual 13-ep order that dramas get before they know whether they're cleared for the "back nine," or a full season -- but it worked out brilliantly here, within the strike's curtailment of the 07-08 season.

What To Expect: All of Manhattan crushed by a towering wrath so powerful and destructive that Cloverfield starts looking like a puppet show, from late spring to early summer; even more aggressive reruns until then.

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Less Awe-Inspiring, But Still Very Exciting News

Ugly Betty, Brothers & Sisters, Grey's Anatomy and House are all shooting 4-6 new episodes to finish out the season.

While the reaction to Grey's has been a little bit more so-so every year -- regardless of my continuing awe and love for the show's writerly (almost literary) ambition and skill, and inability to shut up about how much of a Writing 101 inspiration it is and should be for every writer, even/especially if some fans are vocally unhappy -- and House's overarching narratives are mostly not the point (although Olivia Wilde's 13 and the return of wonderful Anne Dudek's Amber are vitally exciting), it's a little sadder to see uber-serials Betty and Brothers possibly forced to crimp their own style to accommodate the strike-shaped hole in their season orders.

Betty's creator has said he's basically going to have to cram a planned 20+ episode arc into 17 episodes; this show is just hitting its stride, and while there's a certain candy-sweet anticipation to seeing the narrative explode even more quickly than we've come to expect this season, think of all the nutty Amanda and Mark situations that will probably get squished down to deal with Betty's incredibly boring love life, plus complications with the truly horrible sandwich man! (On the other hand, the second Betty's romantic bullshit gets ironed out, maybe she can go back to being likeable, plucky, smart, morally directed, and confident again -- you know, the reasons you loved the show to start with.)

Brothers & Sisters is such a sweeping multi-generational tale that its stories might not even be noticeably affected: the current Nora/Isaac storyline is pretty compelling, we already know where the Kitty/Robert stuff is heading, and I can't keep all the blonde homewreckers apart anyway. I mean -- though I am in love with the show -- there are parts I tune out: I can barely pay enough attention to understand all the stuff with Tommy's dead baby, for example. I literally could not tell you how that went down, even now. Maybe it's personal, but I think the show does such a good job of combining and recombining all of its hard-hitting players, and resolving most character arcs in three or four episodes before moving them around into new dramatic landscapes, that almost any episode could serve amicably as a finale or premiere. (Meanwhile Eli Stone's well-hammered pilot -- along with its heartfelt spirituality and post-Gore high-concept twist on legal drama -- can only mean safety and good things for the sibling series from the B&S creator.)

The Upside: All four of the shows left some pretty crazy things on the table, including a couple of huge cliffhangers, that I'd really like to see resolved; even at the expense of drawing things out even longer and more awesomely.

What To Expect: A hurried but hopefully not rushed end to all four show's overarching plotlines, perhaps a little-less-glossy dialogue than we're used to, and perhaps a tighter, more satisfying finish for the more digressive shows out of the bunch.

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The Post-Comedy Comedies

30 Rock, How I Met Your Mother, My Name Is Earl and The Office all have lots of episodes coming. Earl and Office especially, because they got major orders at the beginning of the season, so it's in their best interest to bring in as much content as quickly as they can before the season restarts.

If you asked me right now what's going on with The Office, I wouldn't be able to tell you, which is mostly down to the fact that something like half of the total season order was funneled into those grossly bloated and uninteresting double-episode nightmares. Angela's cat died, and Jan continues to suck. I'm sure there's more -- Ryan's a dick? Kelly's on Darryl now? -- but mostly, I don't see any truly dangling storylines in this unfocused season that needed clearing up. On the other hand, it really still is a great show, so it'll be fun to watch. Then, Earl ended right around the right time for a strike- or hiatus-break, coming to a seeming natural close (or reshuffle) of the quickly tiring jailhouse storyline, so we'll enter the remainder with open hearts and hopefully back out in the fresh air.

30 Rock and Mother share the distinction of being at the very top of their very cult-inspiringly games, and the benefit of being a tad less serial-minded than the other two. The 30 Rock storylines, such as they are, deserve a wrap-up -- too many loose ends for a Fall premiere -- but the show's crazy, wheeling momentum has always put in-jokey continuity over anything resembling drama or emotion. Which is, of course, a major reason 30 Rock is one of the best shows on TV, and we deserve the reward of new episodes, if nothing else.

On the other hand -- and not that there's anything bad about new episodes of TV's best comedy property -- but doesn't it seem like this show always gets sandwiched between the Superbowl and this week's American Idol Event? For a criminally underwatched show, it's kind of a sucky-yet-believable circumstance that the single trumpet of "New 30 Rock!" should be outmatched by the full brass shouts of "New TV! The strike is over!"

Weeds is a Lionsgate property, so it would have been fine from a month ago, and it's not scheduled to air its fourth season until this summer anyway. I'm dying to find out what happens next! I would love it if each season, Nancy climbed another rung: from street dealer to merchandiser to grower to -- now, I think -- trafficker... what will S5 bring, a run-in with Jack Bauer? A promotion to US Drug Czar?

Meanwhile, The New Adventures of Old Christine and Samantha Who? have a few episodes in the can -- seven and three respectively -- but only Samantha is even maybe expected to resume shooting for this season. Christine is better every season, and something I've only lately really fallen in love with, but a good seven-week run, especially right now while everybody else is gearing up, should give it momentum. (Does anybody else miss Jake In Progress as much as I do? No? How about Wendie Malick and John Stamos, we all love them, right? Man, I liked that show.)

Along with the totally awesome Notes From The Underbelly, which seems perfectly composed as an old-school "season replacement" type -- and carries the off-hand edgy torch for beloved failures like Sons & Daughters and Significant Others more than any other show on the slate -- to weather the storm, these are two of my favorite shows currently on air.

I'm happy to see them around at all, although I worry about Samantha after those last three episodes air -- the strike could be a boon or could be a death knell, depending on how the show's scheduled. It's the difference between limbo and a plumy spot after Dancing With The Stars, which is such a weird concept I can't even really deal with it. It's great to see such a perfect mix of subtlety, hilariously nasty/simultaneously compassionate writing, acting talent and humor in one place. Arrested Development may have resurrected the half-hour comedy, but the true heirs of that renaissance have only become clear in the last year, and I hate to lose even one of these gorgeous kids.

What To Expect: Are you familiar with the metanarrative concept? Expect every single comedy to hit fast and hard with strike-related humor, labor-relations etiquette and explanations, and general exuberant relief. God, 30 Rock could get a whole season out of the strike... Actually, that's exactly what's going to happen: Liz and Jack will be going head-to-head over the writing staff's demands. I feel it in my bones. I just hope it lasts more than an episode! I just excited myself!

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Don't Care A Bit

Smallville has four Supergirleriffic episodes in the can, and expects to shoot 3-5 more for the spring. I'm guessing that's it for our favorite dewy-eyed young heterosexual. Bones has four episodes ready to go, and may or may not be producing more for the season. I know it's a fan favorite, but I also know that the reasons have very little to do with writing quality, believable characterization, understandable comedic logic, or even human-like human beings. I also know that I watch it every week for the spastic woman who always offers everybody tea and whose inflections are guaranteed to be excrutiatingly bizarre every single time, and to see if any of the nerds are hot yet. It's coming, I can feel it -- my money's on the little gay one. We'll be tuning in, but I can't help thinking that somehow having episodes airing throughout the strike would have really put the show's weaknesses on shout, which would have been nice. TV being a craft, and the room for improvement being the biggest room of all, it would be nice to see Bones step up its game a little bit, going into 09.

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We Care A Lot

Battlestar Galactica's on track for the first of the two last demiseasons in April, and will blast into production on the last seven episodes of the last-last of the season next year. Of several nightmarish rumor scenarios that have been offered over the last few months -- from withholding the entire final season for 2009 to airing the thirteenth episode as a random "I guess this could work" finale, to chopping the season in even weirder places for the 2008 and 2009 airings, it looks like we're finally in the clear to see the two halves of the season they were designed to be seen. As a huge fan and a pretty critical viewer, I couldn't be more thrilled, but I'm guessing you knew that.

Lost, which I maintain gets better every season, has their whole thing mapped out, and the strike really messed with it: four seasons of sixteen perfectly mapped-out episodes. Which has already been broken down this year, when five episodes remain after tonight and six more may be shot -- which is a total of fourteen, not sixteen, and implies more of that narrative squishing on the way.

Terminator has just a few episodes in the can, with the future of the show TBD. You know how much I believe in and love the show, so I'm honestly hoping they burn through the rest while the industry brings itself upright. This is the show that the strike gave birth to, and I sincerely hope it sticks around; if any show deserved to be awarded the title of Post-9/11 Buffy, it's this show, and I think with time it'll generate the madness that characterized and still characterizes the incredibly still-voracious Buffy area of fan worship.

Bionic Woman: No new episodes expected. Ever. But don't cry! Even if that horrible news has shaken your faith in humanity, there's still Chuck, Pushing Daisies, and my secret favorite Life, all of which will be back in the fall, and all of which couldn't have broken at a better or more emotionally satisfying place.

What To Expect: Business as usual. Genre shows, no matter how great they are, all pull from the same pool: genre and action fans, two groups who are so used to being undernourished it sometimes takes an act of Congress to even get them to differentiate between good TV and bad TV. (Or at least this was true before Star Trek: Enterprise, Bionic, and the rise of Harry Knowles and his overcritical nerd-speak ilk... So now at least we have something to thank both of those entities for. If we have the internet to thank for anything, it's the growing sophistication of genre fare.)

Other Dramas: Dirty Sexy Money, another quiet favorite with a lot of heart and some pretty stellar performances, will have its last three produced episodes "tweaked" into a season finale. Seems pretty likely that it'll be back next fall, but a bummer, since the show has only been increasing its momentum with every episode. You can trust the staff to do the right thing, so I'm not as worried about how the narrative will suffer on this one.

What To Expect: D$M to turn up next fall in a field with a lot less of this pseudo-louche proto-S&TC crap we've been deluged with in the past few months. Once the Lipstick Mafia Big Shot bolus gets swallowed, and the movie finally reminds us that -- although we all watched it -- nobody really liked S&TC that much, D$M will be able to stand on its own, as a wonderful and witty story about the actualities of money and class.

...Um, storywise I have no idea, it's been too long. Nate Fisher and his wife will switch roles as he becomes more and more grossed out by the Darlings, while she falls more and more in love with their human vulnerabilities. A détente between various wives and trannies will fall apart into even more violence. Karen will continue to rock your ass off.

And then there's Friday Night Lights, which may or may not even exist as of today. I don't know what to say about this show that I haven't already said, but there aren't any episodes in the can and there doesn't seem to be a sustainable audience on NBC, no matter where they schedule it. The move to Friday night was a strong thought -- the competition is low, the family quotient of the show is unstoppably high -- but I don't know that it matters, at this point. I'm not turning the lights out yet, but I am worried. As is usual. To love FNL is to preemptively mourn it, no matter how much better it gets every single week.

What To Expect: Responding to an email offering a free place at a cast and crew luncheon, all five remaining fans of this show will be taken to a remote location and savagely beaten, then possibly murdered. That's literally all they can do to us at this point.

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