Robert David Sullivan

Critics, binges, and blind spots

New Yorker music critic Ben Greenman writes about the challenge of keeping up with everything in his field (using the band Vampire Weekend as an example), a problem that television critics are getting more familiar with:

So what’s a critic do when he or she must venture forth into a world filled with unheard acts? There are roughly three options. The first involves dogged and vigilant compensatory research: maybe there’s a week spent filling in gaps regarding mid-seventies Genesis, or late-nineties R.E.M. I once knew a critic who would set aside a week each summer to listen to all the albums he thought he had missed through the first half of the year, and another week around the holidays to catch up on the second half of the year. After many years like this, he began to suffer from anxiety attacks, which may or may not have been related. The second option involves critics pretending they have listened to albums that they in fact have not heard. This is called “lying,” and it goes on a fair amount. [...] The third, and easiest, way for a critic to deal with gaps in her history is just to leave them there. [...]

That first option is often taken by TV critics and viewers, leading to the disgusting habit of "binge watching" a series over a few days. I agree with Matthew Gilbert: "The binge [...] tamps down your imagination, as it eliminates those between-episode interstitial periods when your impressions run wild."

I have some blind spots as a TV critic. I've only seen a few scattered episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, missed out completely on Downton Abbey until only a couple of months ago, and have yet to see anything of Homeland, Parenthood, Revenge, or Scandal. I've been making detours to less popular shows (Enlightened, The Hour, Rectify) that took up a lot of time because they demanded to be seen in their entirety. But even when these shows grab my attention, I feel that they'd lose their power if I watched three or four episodes in a day. I wouldn't appreciate the subtleties of character development or enjoy things like the closing-credits music that put a button on each episode. I probably wouldn't notice plot holes as much if the episodes came at me quicker, but if I want to give my mind a rest, I can go to the movies.

As platforms for TV series proliferate — Netflix! Amazon! — my blind spots will surely grow. But it's still worse for a music critic, who is expected to know every major artist of the past 50 or 60 years. It's otherwise regrettable that television is so forgetful about its past (just try getting a lot of web traffic for an article about a show that aired last century, other than Star Trek and Seinfeld), but I can feel safe knowing that almost all of the buzzworthy shows on TV now will be completely forgotten in a few years.

TV reads: Awesome Don Draper, mockumentaries, zombie Community, Jon Cryer, MTM

Here are some worthwhile pieces on TV from the past week.

• Time's James Poniewozik reviews last week's "Don is back!" episode of Mad Men and makes a good point about the divided fan bases of shows with asshole protagonists:  "We will indulge them, at least if we’re not the ones being hurt by them, so long as they are charming and optimistic and capable. Their job is to win and be awesome. [...]  This may also, in part, explain why antihero shows like Breaking Bad, Boardwalk Empire, and The Sopranos have a vocal set of fans who love stories about the characters’ areas of competence — be it drug dealing, Mob hits, or advertising — and hate family drama and pillow talk."

• Christopher Guest’s mockumentary series The Family Tree premieres on May 12, a few days before The Office has its series finale. The Boston Globe’s Matthew Gilbert reviews the show here (paywall); he also examined the mockumentary in 2010, as the genre settled into a groove: “They reject the strict artifice of conventional sitcoms — the timing, acting style, and choreography — in favor of real-life atmosphere. […] They convey to us a sense of what it might be like to be in close proximity to rare birds such as puffed-up boss David Brent of the British “Office’ or deluded sitcom has-been Valerie Cherish of The Comeback.”

• NBC's Community is coming back for a fifth season, reports Todd VanDerWerff: "This [...] officially turns Community into the new Rules Of Engagement, in terms of programming strategy. Obviously, Community is a much better show than Rules, but both are produced by Sony Pictures Television, both have seen surprisingly long runs, and both turned into utility players in the face of their networks not really having anything else." A lot of fans just want to put the show out of its misery after a stupefying season finale; I wouldn't be surprised if it comes back with a run of strong episodes. NBC has almost certainly given up on trying to broaden its appeal, and I'm curious to see what the show will be like without any backstage drama.

• The A.V. Club’s Will Harris has a great interview with Jon Cryer that covers working with Charlie Sheen on a never-hip sitcom and doing a Robert Altman movie in which the director flung fake bird shit at him. I’m most interested in the sitcom The Famous Teddy Z, which got critical buzz but didn’t make it past one season. The entire pilot episode is embedded in the A.V. Club interview (as of now). It couldn’t have been helped by the insanely 1980s, Miami Vice-light opening credits, which led into a low-key, WKRP-type workplace sitcom.

• After NBA player Jason Collins came out as gay, former Cheers co-producer Ken Levine revisited that show's episode in which one of Sam's former baseball teammates comes out of the closet ("The Boys in the Bar"). The episode was a hit with the studio audience until the very end: "There’s nothing a writer craves more than hearing big laughs. Now we’re at the end. The two gay guys lean in and kiss Norm, and… Silence. Dead silence. You could hear crickets." 

• Jaime Weinman responds to Salon writer Willa Paskin's assertion that The Mary Tyler Moore Show is good but not very funny when watched in 2013. (Paskin compares it only to 30 Rock, so I don't know if she simply doesn't like the pace of three-camera sitcoms.) Wienman ponders how classic TV episodes are usually disappointing to people who didn't experience the thrill of discovering them: "A great episode of a favourite TV show, like a great song by a favourite artist, is one that jumps out and hits you as being better than the level of the person’s usual work (even if that usual level is very high). It is what you’ve come to expect from the work, and yet more than that. You were expecting the normal level of entertainment, and unexpectedly found that it was on a higher plane. That unexpectedness is what burns the experience into your memory."

Yay! Now we can browse pregnancy tests on our lunch hour

Last week an absurdly large Walgreens drugstore opened on the site of the former Borders bookshop in Boston’s Downtown Crossing. It has everything you can find at the CVS a couple of doors away (but it’s unlikely to put that hall of horrors out of business), plus stuff like wine and un-American cheese for sad office parties. Boston Globe columnist Paul McMorrow is unimpressed: “The storefront at the corner of Washington and School Streets looks great, but the place stinks of low ambition. If a pharmacy that slings mediocre sushi is a sign of what’s to come from Downtown Crossing’s rebirth, the long-struggling neighborhood is headed down a very bad path.”

McMorrow wishes the space had become anything else (even a “multi-level roller disco”), but the Walgreens fortress is a logical outcome of the shopping district’s shift from what could be called hard retail (books, clothes, appliances) to the soft goods of junk food and skin creams. I wrote about this trend for the Globe in 2011 (“Next Stop, Downtown Noshing”) and tried to take an optimistic view: “The city has always been about the spaces where people can run into each other. So cocktail bars and food trucks will fill the gap left by Filene’s Basement and Tower Records.” Walgreens tests that optimism; miles of too-sugary energy drinks and potato chips do not serve the same function as a corner bar.

If we can’t get that roller-disco, we can hope that a medical-marijuana dispensary will open in the multi-story space that’s been vacant since Barnes and Noble abandoned it in 2006. At least its customers can take advantage of the abundance of junk food in the area.

•A dissenting view from the Boston Business Journal's George Donnelly: "It puts more people to work in the neighborhood. It’s open 24 hours. It’s a positive step forward, although not a huge one."

What have I been up to?

What have I been up to?

• Reviewing Veep and The Simpsons for the A.V. Club.
• Writing posts on urban revitalization and other public policy issues for the INCSpot blog.
• Getting ready for the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association national convention, to be held in Boston this August.
• Trying to think of another blog project to follow the Top 100 Sitcom Episodes of All Time.
• Tweeting like I just don't care.
• Wishing that a great job would fall in my lap.
• Hoping that a boyfriend falls in my lap.

 

 

Low-footprint infrastructure: The pedestrian staircases of Cincinnati and Brookline

Alarms about crumbling infrastructure usually concern big projects like highway overpasses and water mains. But the Atlantic Cities’ Sarah Goodyear found a relatively primeval transportation system that’s fallen into disrepair: the 400 pedestrian staircases on the steep hills of Cincinnati:

…the staircases of Cincinnati have long been in decline, with the city steadily reducing funding for their maintenance and eventually de-funding them altogether in 2011 as the municipal budget got squeezed. At the same time cities around the country are looking to build new pedestrian facilities in the urban core, or to improve what already exists, too many of Cincinnati's staircases are overgrown, littered with broken glass, and poorly lit. While steps in some neighborhoods attract runners looking to boost their heart rate, many others are perceived as dangerous places, incubators for drug dealing and prostitution.

Goodyear reports that a citizens’ group called Spring in Our Steps is advocating for repairs to the city’s sidewalks, alleys, and public staircases — many of them in lower-income neighborhoods. (Areas with both high altitudes and high incomes were not as interested in access to the streetcar stops at the bottoms of the hills.)

Boston is not noted for its pedestrian staircases (Beacon Hill residents make do with treacherously steep sidewalks). Next-door Brookline, however, has a plethora of them. WalkBoston catalogs many of them on “Brookline’s Secret Stairways and Paths,” a Google map.

Do you live near a pedestrian staircase in Boston or in any Bay State community? And is it in better shape than Cincinnati’s vertical drug markets?

Image from the Cincinnati Transportation and Engineering Department.

Kiss your infographics goodbye (if a South Carolina congressman has his way)

The Monkey Cage reports that US Rep. Jeff Duncan (R-South Carolina) is trying to kill the Census Bureau's American Community Survey, a key source of data for government agencies, private firms deciding where to locate or expand their business, and newspapers that create those "How We Live" maps and charts that readers love.

Duncan's bill would seem to limit the Census to nothing more than a head count ("a decennial census may only collect information necessary for the tabulation of total population by states"). This is one of the GOP's less well-known examples of anti-science nuttery, but a similar bill actually passed the Republican-controlled House of Representatives last year. Economics reporter Catherine Rampell covered the issue in the New York Times last May:

“This is a program that intrudes on people’s lives, just like the Environmental Protection Agency or the bank regulators,” said Daniel Webster, a first-term Republican congressman from Florida who sponsored the relevant legislation.

“We’re spending $70 per person to fill this out. That’s just not cost effective,” he continued, “especially since in the end this is not a scientific survey. It’s a random survey.”

In fact, the randomness of the survey is precisely what makes the survey scientific, statistical experts say.

Each year the Census Bureau polls a representative, randomized sample of about three million American households about demographics, habits, languages spoken, occupation, housing and various other categories. The resulting numbers are released without identifying individuals, and offer current demographic portraits of even the country’s tiniest communities.

It is the largest (and only) data set of its kind and is used across the federal government in formulas that determine how much funding states and communities get for things like education and public health.

For example, a question on flush toilets — one that some politicians like to cite as being especially invasive — is used to help assess groundwater contamination for rural parts of the country that do not have modern waste disposal systems, according to the Census Bureau.

Law enforcement agencies have likewise used the data to predict criminal activities like methamphetamine production.