Paul Levinson's Open Salon Blog

Mad Men Season Three Finale: The Best of Times and ...

Mon, 9 Nov 2009 00:11:44 -0500

Well, it was the end of the world in last week's Mad Men 3.12, in every way for most of our major players, especially for Don. Tonight's surprising, satisfying altogether brilliant Season 3 finale reversed that. It was the best of times, for everyone, especially including Don, especially regarding his business. And as for his personal life - I'll get to that.

Taking care of business first: Don turns the absorption of Sterling Cooper by McCann into a tour de force triumph of the best of Sterling Cooper coming together, one by one, under the momentum Don starts, to form a new company, Sterling, Cooper, Draper, and Price (Lane - the British exec).

Here's how it happens: Don convinces Cooper, and the two walk into Roger's office and convince him. It takes Don praising Roger, and admitting he hadn't acknowledged Roger's strengths (schmoozing clients). Don asks Peggy to join - she says no. She's tired of being dumped on and berated by Don, whatever the name of the company. Don and Roger go to see Pete - he's praised, by Don, who acknowledges that Pete has valuable understanding of "aeronautics, teenagers, and the Negro market" (what a quintessentially perfect-pitch phrase for the end of 1963). Pete's in. So is Harry Crane (who still looks Isaac Asimov, praise in my book). So, too, is Lane Price, who's come to enjoy the American pace of life, and not enjoy at all the way his lords in London treat him. Don goes back to see Peggy, and admits to how he's been unfairly tough on her (because he sees her as his "extension"). Peggy says, and if I don't go with your new company, you'll never speak to me again? Don answers, no, I'll keep trying to win you over to our company. Peggy's in. And Joan is back with the upstarts, too.

Cosgrove and Kinsey are not invited. Will they be, next year? Will Sal be invited, right after the closing credits of this Season 3 finale?

Whatever happens, this was one of the most exhilarating, even joyous, interludes ever to be seen on Mad Men.

And Don's personal life? Not so much. Betty definitely is ending their marriage. Don evolves from hurt to furious (when Roger tells him about Henry) to accepting, to some extent - he tells Betty he won't fight on her this. This shows - as does this entire episode - that Don, though seriously flawed, is made of some very good stuff.

As is Mad Men, which this season seemed not too flawed at all. We've finally broken through the web of Don Draper deception that covered, and sometimes risked smothering, many a previous episode. But this season in general, and the last two episodes in particular, were as top-notch as television, any narrative medium gets.

I can't wait for Season 4.

8-min podcast review of Mad Men

See also: Mad Men Back for 3 and 3.2: Carvel, Penn Station, and Diet Soda and 3.3: Gibbon, Blackface, and Eliot and 3.4: Caned Seats and a Multiple Choice about Sal's Patio Furniture and 3.5: Admiral TV, MLK, and a Baby Boy and 3.6: A Saving John Deere and 3.7: Brutal Edges ... August Flights in 3.8 ... Unlucky Strikes and To the Moon Don in 3.9 ... 3.10: The Faintest Ink, The Strongest Television ... Don's Day of Reckoning in Mad Men 3.11 ... Mad Men 3.12: The End of the World in Mad Men

And from Season Two: Mad Men Returns with a Xerox and a Call Girl ... 2.2: The Advertising Devil and the Deep Blue Sea ... 2.3 Double-Barreled Power ... 2.4: Betty and Don's Son ... 2.5: Best Montage Since Hitchcock ... 2.6: Jackie, Marilyn, and Liberty Valance ... 2.7: Double Dons ... 2.8: Did Don Get What He Deserved? ... 2.9: Don and Roger ... 2.10: Between Ray Bradbury and Telstar ... 2.11: Welcome to the Hotel California ... 2.12 The Day the Earth Stood Still on Mad Men ... 2.13 Saving the Best for Last on Mad Men

And from Season One: Mad Men Debuts on AMC: Cigarette Companies and Nixon ... Mad Men 2: Smoke and Television ... Mad Men 3: Hot 1960 Kiss ... Mad Men 4 and 5: Double Mad Men ... Mad Men 6: The Medium is the Message! ... Mad Men 7: Revenge of the Mollusk ... Mad Men 8: Weed, Twist, Hobo ... Mad Man 9: Betty Grace Kelly ... Mad men 10: Life, Death, and Politics ... Mad Men 11: Heat! ... Mad Men 12: Admirable Don ... Mad 13: Double-Endings, Lascaux, and Holes

20-minute interview with Rich Sommer (Harry Crane) at Light On Light Through

Bones 5.6: A Chicken in Every Viewer's Pot

Fri, 6 Nov 2009 18:11:27 -0500

Well, I've often said that truly good combinations of mystery and comedy are as scarce as hen's teeth, and none do it better than Bones, as tonight's episode 5.6 about a murder in a chicken coop so tastily shows.

The chicken part led to fine puns, which I'll just let simmer without pulling apart. And there was also a pig in this episode - not the male chauvinist kind, but a real pig - which provided the emotional foundation of the story.

Angela, who was been abstinent for months, is channeling her pent up emotions into concern for the plight of pigs. She asks Bones to contribute to save one - Bones refuses. (Don't hate me, but I'm 100% with Bones here.) Angela is hurt, and says she can't see how she could be such close friends with Bones, since they have almost nothing in common. And now Bones is really hurt.

This opens up the best part of the episode, as Booth tries to advise and support her. The two have been getting closer and closer this season, in a gradual, realistic, emotionally satisfying way.

Bones supports Booth as well, as he misses a call on seeing through a killer's deception. He's still recovering from his days in a coma, and this, too, is refreshingly realistic in a television show. Bones assures Booth that she trusts him, whether he's 100% or not.

He advises her to contribute to Angela's cute little piggy fund. Well, I already told you how I feel about that. And Angela should be getting beyond that by now, anyway. She's no longer refraining from sex.

Good for Wendell, the lucky recipient. Good for us. And even good for Jack - I have a feeling this may be the beginning of a reunion with Angela, though maybe that's just chicken pot pie in the sky.

Okay, I'll stop writing now. I don't want you to wring my neck.

6-min podcast review of Bones

See also Bones: Hilarity and Crime and Bones is Back For Season 5: What Is Love? and 5.2: Anonymous Donors and Pipes and 5.3: Bones in Amish Country and 5.4: Bones Meets Peyton Place and Desperate Housewives and Ancient Bones 5.5

V Returns to TV

Wed, 4 Nov 2009 18:11:18 -0500

Kenneth Johnson's original 1983 mini-series V - along with its 1984 sequel V: The Final Battle - was oddly one of my favorite television shows. Actually, it still is. But I say "oddly," because although the story was trite - aliens landing on Earth, claiming they want to help us, only to eat us - the media savvy and political implications were compelling.

Damon Knight's 1950 short story "To Serve Man," adapted into one of the most enduring Twilight Zone episodes in 1962, told the story best. Aliens land, cure our illnesses, bring peace, want happiness for us - because they view us as livestock. V in 1983 expanded this story to show the aliens - The Visitors - manipulating the media, and provoking underground freedom fighters all over the world who discovered the truth about The Visitors. Indeed, V posted a dedication "to the heroism of the resistance and the freedom fighters, past, present and future." In 1983, freedom fighters encompassed everyone from the Hungarians who bravely stood up to Soviet tanks in the 1950s (viewed as heroes by most Americans) to Contras fighting the Sandinistas in power in Nicaragua in the 1980s (viewed as heroes mostly by Ronald Reagan and his supporters).

Tonight's V had political analogies, but a little more obvious and less complex than the 1980s version. Tonight's Visitors promise "universal health care," a clear and unnecessary shot at the good work Obama and the Democrats are trying to do right now in Washington. A more apt connection was made tonight between the Visitors and terrorists.

Actually, the Visitors are referred to as the "V's" in this incarnation, and I prefer the "Visitors". But V 2009 does have Father Jack Landry (Joel Gretsch, who played Frank Vasser on Journeyman), which opens up some good theological threads (I'm suspecting his superior might be a Visitor undercover), and Lost's Elizabeth Mitchell has a top role as Erica Evans.

The new version also has the winning mix of good and bad Visitors, and Visitor-collaborator and rebel humans as the original, as well as some echoes of Battlestar Galactica (the Visitors as Cylons), and an appealing media criticism component, so I'm going to give it a chance. And kudos to ABC for stepping up with science fiction a lot more than once this decade - Lost, Invasion, FlashForward, and now the return of V.

5-min podcast review of V

Mad Men 3.12: The End of the World

Mon, 2 Nov 2009 16:11:01 -0500

Skeeter Davis's The End of the World played under the closing credits of Mad Men 3.12 tonight, and it came pretty close to that in many, but not all, ways...

We knew it would be coming. But the logical time was the Season 3 finale - which will be on next week. Instead, Mad Men surprised us with a kick in the heart tonight, which started as a cold day with no heat in the offices of Sterling Cooper, proceeded to too much heat being pumped out, and soon showed us the television in Harry's office, which told us it was November 22, 1963.

It was painful to see those news clips again - worse than painful, as it always is, but also always instructive. Don's says everything will be fine, but of course it won't. In many crucial ways, our country has still not recovered from the assassination of John F. Kennedy. I know that some of the tears I quietly shed as I watched the funeral of Teddy Kennedy this summer were for JFK.

And, yet, incredibly but not surprisingly, that wasn't the worst of it for Don. The assassination and the emotional cauldron it creates makes Betty realize she no longer loves him. Significantly, it's not just what Betty found out about Don's assumed identity - in a crucial scene the night before assassination, she still looks with love at Don as he takes care of their baby in the middle of the night. But after the assassination and Don's reaction to it, Betty gives Henry an incandescent smile that's the happiest we've seen from her in the three years of the series. Another brilliant performance from January Jones, and Jon Hamm, too.

What will become of Don now? What does the finale have left to tell us? If I could imagine that Mad Men could continue without Don, I'd almost see suicide as his next move.

But maybe not. Don still has some reserves of strength. People land on their feet in strange ways on Mad Men. The same terrible end of November that split Don and Betty have pulled Pete and Trudy closer.

What an episode. I'm looking forward to watching Dexter now - I could use a breather from the angst - a contest of serial killers would be relaxing.

But what an episode ... in addition to all of its other superlatives, it may well be the best fiction ever on the screen about the impact of November 22, 1963 on a stratum of Americans, influential and otherwise...

And I'll be back here next week, after I've seen the Mad Men finale.

Listen to a little of Skeeter Davis's The End of the World

7-min podcast review of Mad Men

See also: Mad Men Back for 3 and 3.2: Carvel, Penn Station, and Diet Soda and 3.3: Gibbon, Blackface, and Eliot and 3.4: Caned Seats and a Multiple Choice about Sal's Patio Furniture and 3.5: Admiral TV, MLK, and a Baby Boy and 3.6: A Saving John Deere and 3.7: Brutal Edges ... August Flights in 3.8 ... Unlucky Strikes and To the Moon Don in 3.9 ... 3.10: The Faintest Ink, The Strongest Television ... Don's Day of Reckoning in Mad Men 3.11

And from Season Two: Mad Men Returns with a Xerox and a Call Girl ... 2.2: The Advertising Devil and the Deep Blue Sea ... 2.3 Double-Barreled Power ... 2.4: Betty and Don's Son ... 2.5: Best Montage Since Hitchcock ... 2.6: Jackie, Marilyn, and Liberty Valance ... 2.7: Double Dons ... 2.8: Did Don Get What He Deserved? ... 2.9: Don and Roger ... 2.10: Between Ray Bradbury and Telstar ... 2.11: Welcome to the Hotel California ... 2.12 The Day the Earth Stood Still on Mad Men ... 2.13 Saving the Best for Last on Mad Men

And from Season One: Mad Men Debuts on AMC: Cigarette Companies and Nixon ... Mad Men 2: Smoke and Television ... Mad Men 3: Hot 1960 Kiss ... Mad Men 4 and 5: Double Mad Men ... Mad Men 6: The Medium is the Message! ... Mad Men 7: Revenge of the Mollusk ... Mad Men 8: Weed, Twist, Hobo ... Mad Man 9: Betty Grace Kelly ... Mad men 10: Life, Death, and Politics ... Mad Men 11: Heat! ... Mad Men 12: Admirable Don ... Mad 13: Double-Endings, Lascaux, and Holes

20-minute interview with Rich Sommer (Harry Crane) at Light On Light Through

Lie to Me

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 20:10:37 -0400

I thought it was long since time that I checked in with a review of Lie to Me, which last night aired episode 5 of its second season on Fox.

It's one of my and my wife's favorite shows, and along with 24, Bones, House, and (formerly) The Shield, makes Fox easily the network with the greatest number of cutting edge, entertaining series on television.

Lie to Me serves up a riveting variety of stories - including politics, police work, and all manner of business and personal relationships - all tied together by Dr. Cal Lightman's genius is reading facial expressions and body language for truth and falsity of communication. The science is sound - Paul Ekman, whose work I examined in my own PhD studies, is the source of the science and an adviser to the show. Tim Roth's acting is brilliant and volatile as Lightman, and the supporting case is stellar, too.

My favorites are Kelli Williams as Lightman's partner Dr. Gillian Foster - I've enjoyed her work since she was Lindsay on The Practice - and Monica Raymund as Ria Torres, one of the hottest women on television. Unlike Lightman and Foster, who studied their way to facial expression mastery, Ria is a natural, which gives her an intriguing packet of advantages and flaws in comparison to her bosses.

Lightman is divorced from Zoe Landau, played by Jennifer Beals, whom I'm glad to see continuing on television after a fine run in The L Word. Foster is divorced, too, and is certainly in some kind of love with Lightman, who feels the same way about her. But their attraction so far is less erotic than Bones and Booth, if equally under the surface.

And even the more minor characters are unusual, including Brendan Hines as Loker, who veers between going by the book and taking matters into his own hands, and Mekhi Phifer as FBI Agent Ben Reynolds, not quite willing to do whatever Lightman asks, but coming through in the end in one way or another.

The series engagingly grapples with the ethics of colleagues who can easily know more about each other than any of them would want, and the pros and cons of reading the lies of their clients. Mix into that some great photos of real politicians and other public people with lying eyes and faces, and you have a series that is at once more realistic and out of left field than just about anything else on television.

I'll be reviewing episodes more regularly from now on. You can't see my face, but I can assure you that's true...

7-min podcast review of Lie to Me