Category: Television

Tell Us Something Pretty.


“Even though the show was cancelled in 2006 after just three seasons, it lingers at the forefront of fans’ minds. Any devotee of Milch’s drama will tell you that once you’ve responded to its magic, it’ll sink roots into your imagination and flower there.”

“You cannot f**k the future, sir. The future f**ks you.” Ten years after its premiere and seven years after the hoopleheads of HBO wrought its untimely demise, Matt Zoller Seitz pays homage to Deadwood, the original bookend to The Wire: Whereas The Wire dramatizes the interminable decay of a city’s municipal institutions, Deadwood showed why they were needed in the first place, especially when a Great Man of means and no small ambition, like George Randolph Hearst, comes a-knockin’.

Of course, Deadwood also remains one of the most highly quotable television hour-longs around. The one I tend to use most these days: “And you, Mr. Wolcott, I find you the most severe disappointment of all.” “Often to myself as well.”

At Canaan’s Edge.

“‘Eric Overmyer and I have taken on a project that was already in HBO’s development stable,’ he wrote. ‘We have agreed to go into a room with Taylor Branch and others and see what can be done for a six-hour miniseries.'”

The Baltimore Sun reports that David Simon is working on a MLK mini-series for HBO, “based on the celebrated book trilogy by Pulitzer Prize-winner Taylor Branch…But as per Blown Deadline’s development projects, this is behind another miniseries project for HBO that is closer to production and that we hope to be announcing shortly.”

The Bayou of Madness, Pt. II.

“Much has been made of the connections between True Detective and the cosmic-horror tradition…and rightly so. But what’s largely been missed is that the cosmic-horror genre — rooted, as it is, in humankind’s subprime position in the pecking order of the universe — is deeply entwined with the character of Louisiana’s physical and cultural landscape.”

In Slate, Adrian Van Young delineates True Detective — and Lovecraft’s — debt to Louisiana, one of the cultural crossroads and borderlands where shadows linger and tricksters thrive. “Lost cities, liminal realms, and cosmic fear come more or less naturally to Louisiana…The chief-most horrors of the show are not voodoo curses or tentacled monsters or consciousness-destroying plays, but environmental slippage, religious perversion, badly mangled family trees. True Detective wears the cosmic-horror genre and its lineage, in other words, not unlike the Mardi Gras masks being worn today all over its native state. The mask is scary, sure enough, but what’s underneath can be even more frightening: one place in the U.S. where anything, it seems, can happen.'”

Also, for a more prosaic take on HBO’s current hit, see the credits for Law & Order: True Detective, below.

Doc What Now?


“Gene Wilder’s weird and wonderful comedic talents made the Doctor both more alien and more popular than ever before, making the show a surprise break-out hit even with UK Audiences. Wilder still holds the record for longest tenure in the role and still occasionally refers to himself as The Doctor.” What if Doctor Who was American?

Scorpy, Get Your Drums | Doctor & Danny.

“[T]he film would follow John and Aeryn’s son, D’Argo (or Little D, as we will always refer to him). Because their baby was exhibiting a set of interesting powers that made him a magnet for galactic villains, we find that John and Aeryn hide their son on Earth to grow up. Now the kid is 19 and ready to go into space with his parents.”

I’ll believe it when I see it. Nonetheless, word comes that a possible Farscape movie is in the works. “Monjo is [also] said to be writing a show that would star Dinklage as a dwarf detective for HBO.” Er…wouldn’t “detective for HBO” get the point across?

Also in Sci-Fi TV news, Peter Capaldi’s forthcoming Doctor gains an additional companion in Samuel Anderson. “Anderson will play Danny Pink, a teacher at Coal Hill School where companion Clara Oswald (Jenna Coleman) also teaches.” — Coal Hill also being the school the Doctor’s granddaughter attended way back in 1963. (Also not surprising that, to compensate for the lack of a “good boyfriend” doctor, they’d add an age-appropriate foil for Clara.)

The King of Comedy.

“‘If you want to find the ur-texts of “The Producers” and “Blazing Saddles,” of “Sleeper” and “Annie Hall,” of “All in the Family” and “M*A*S*H” and “Saturday Night Live,”‘ Frank Rich wrote in The New York Times when he was its chief theater critic, ‘check out the old kinescopes of Sid Caesar.'”

Television pioneer Sid Caesar, 1922–2014. “Albert Einstein was a Caesar fan. Alfred Hitchcock called Mr. Caesar the funniest performer since Charlie Chaplin.”

At the Bayou of Madness.

“For many fans of weird fiction, the surprising appearance of this madness-inducing play into what ostensibly appeared to be just another police procedural was a bolt of lightning. Suddenly, the tone of the show changed completely, signaling the descent into a particular brand of horror rarely (if ever) seen on television.”

In io9, Michael Hughes explores True Detective‘s many references to The King in Yellow, an 1895 collection of short stories by Robert Chambers, and a “fictional play…that brings despair, depravity, and insanity to anyone who reads it or sees it performed.”

As Molly Lambert of Grantland pointed out of HBO’s dark and addictive mini-series, “True Detective’s closest relative is Twin Peaks, which mined similarly nocturnal depths. Both shows espouse mythologies that feel extremely personal to the creators but also eerily universal, tapping into the same brain waves as paradoxical sleep.”

For his part, show creator Nic Pizzolatto recently talked about his debt to another Weird Fiction author, Thomas Ligotti. “I first heard of Ligotti maybe six years ago, when Laird Barron’s first collection alerted me to this whole world of new weird fiction that I hadn’t known existed. I started looking around for the best contemporary stuff to read, and in any discussion of that kind, the name ‘Ligotti’ comes up first…[H]is nightmare lyricism was enthralling and visionary.

On top of everything else, True Detective also has one of the more captivating credit sequences in recent years, as per below. (It apparently owes a heavy debt to the work of artist/photographer Dan Mountford.)

Obviously She’s Not a Golfer.


“Lipinski glided around the rink in a white v-neck and bathrobe, all while holding a White Russian. Yes, there is a beverage there, man. I like pretty much all things Lebowski-related, so I support this, but feel compelled to call bullshit on that not being a real White Russian. Unless they just used really heavy cream in it, which would be very Dudelian.”

Can’t say I’m a big watcher of the Olympics — I don’t think I saw a single second of the London games in 2012, but I was in dissertation mode then — and particularly the Winter Olympics. But you know what would get me to partake? More Lebowski-themed numbers. Tara Lipinski channels the Dude for Jimmy Fallon’s last week at 12:30 (who, Roots be damned, bid his farewell with Dr. Teeth and the Electric Mayhem.)

Twelve + Three = The Doctor’s New Duds.

“Lifelong Doctor Who fan Capaldi said: ‘He’s woven the future from the cloth of the past. Simple, stark, and back to basics. ‘No frills, no scarf, no messing, just 100% rebel Time Lord.’ Doctor Who boss Steven Moffat said the new era meant for a new outfit. He said: ‘Monsters of the universe, the vacation is over — Capaldi is suited and booted and coming to get you.'”

Peter Capaldi’s Twelfth Doctor has chosen his duds and, as the comparison above by Tom Spilsbury illustrates, he’s gone pretty Pertwee — which is fine by me. As far as my favorite Doctors go, Jon Pertwee is a close second to Tom Baker. Anyway, very crisp, clean lines. I like it.

Also I neglected to post this earlier, but here’s Moffat on where the show is going with Twelve: “The last two Doctors have been brilliant, and have been your ‘good boyfriend’ Doctors. But the Doctor isn’t always like that. There is the sort of Tom Baker, Christopher Eccleston end of the spectrum, where he is mad and dangerous and difficult…We need the kick-up-the-arse Doctor, in a way, to frighten you and make you think, oh, it’s a different show again.” Yes, please.