A pop culture education

Most parents will tell you that part of anticipating a child coming into the family is looking forward to sharing one's culture. And pop culture is a lot of that. Noel was shaped by the records in his father's collection; I devoured the classic books on my parents' shelves. We were excited about introducing our children to the things we loved.

That ended up being on a slower timeframe than I think we had imagined. Yes, we shared some classic children's literature when they were young, but it took a while for CG to develop an interest in the television, music, and film that consumes her parents' lives. AA, meanwhile, has always gone his own way and developed his own obsessions; we worried, early on, that he would have nothing to talk about with his peers, but it turns out that Pokemon is a universal language (thankfully).

Another factor, though, is that it turns out the easiest way into popular culture's archival depths (aka the stuff that was meaningful to us when we were younger) is by way of current culture. And those entry points need to have some family appeal. They need to be things that we can watch or listen to with our child. CBS's Supergirl, for example; we made plans early on to include CG in our viewing of it, based on the creative people involved, its empowering messages, and the geek appeal factor. But once we're all hooked, when the show makes references to other parts of the DC universe (or even does a version of a classic story, like its retelling of Alan Moore's "For the Man Who Has Everything"), it's a simple matter to give those ancillary materials to CG and let her expand the connections.

We all treasure the moments when we bond with our children over shared culture. But those moments aren't really the heart and soul of a cultural education. As suggested by those records of Noel's dad and those books of my parents, the most important thing is to leave a lot of culture lying around, and wait for your kids to burrow their way in, by any route they choose. CG uses our Amazon Echo to stream music from our collection while she reads, and sometimes we can suggest other artists she might like. She developed her love of comic strips from the many collections with which we seeded her shelf. But as rich as our libraries might be, they'd be a prison if that's all she ever explored. She made her own way to manga and anime, and together she and Archer have ventured into gaming and design, areas their parents would never have been able to lead them.

And now they teach us, and amaze us. That's the part that we didn't know enough, years ago, to anticipate, and it's the part that now seems most miraculous.

A new season

Tomorrow I turn 48 years old. You know, as long as there's a four in that tens column, I still feel young. And in two years when that changes, I'll probably feel young anyway.

I haven't written much in the last year. A post a quarter, maybe two. It's because I've been busy, of course; in my down moments I haven't felt like doing much other than knitting, sitting, watching TV, hugging my daughter. But it's also because this past year has been All About Me, and even though this is my blog, I've never been comfortable treating it as a therapist's couch. I haven't wanted to show up every few days and repeat the same stuff about my mid-life crisis.

But you know what? I think that's finally over. I made the decision to leave administration, and despite some lingering backward glances at the extra money, I'm happy about that every day. I couldn't be prouder of Noel and the awesome work he's doing at his brand new publication. I'm bringing to a close a period in my life where I practiced weekly television criticism, and reclaiming those evenings as time to do something other than work. And I've gotten an immense, humbling outpouring of praise for that work as the series I cover come to a close -- a thousand times more readers than I ever could have imagined, and hundreds of people saying nice things about what the work has meant to them. My promotion application for full professor is making its way up the chain of command. I've even gotten a couple of recent invitations to speak at conferences, related both to my theological work and my criticism. My research excites me, my book is underway, and there's a stack of other projects I hope to get to someday. It feels very much like I've made it to where I wanted to be when I started out.

Maybe it's the end of weekly writing about television that has prompted me to come back here. I've learned a lot about writing from blogging every day for years; I put much of it to use writing on short deadlines two and three times a week. I wouldn't like to see those muscles atrophy. (I'll need them for all the books I have to write.)

And while I've been away, my kids have been growing. I love to write about my kids. They are endlessly fascinating. People tell me they like to read about my kids -- well, about Archer particularly. He's done amazing things while I've been writing elsewhere. I don't want to miss the chance to get the stories down, and to share them. (I'm inspired here by amonthofson.com, Matthew Baldwin's lovely project about how his classically-autistic boy interacts with the world.)

So let's see if we can meet here more often, shall we? Teaching, writing, television, kids, theology, movies, sports, and the occasional self-indulgent state-of-the-Donna report. Hope it turns out well for all of us.

Summer's end

Labor Day weekend is the unofficial end of summer, but the weather has picked this moment to give us a last blast of heat and humidity. In the wake of Tropical Depression Isaac, which brought us some much-appreciated rain, the heat index is soaring into the triple digits again. Regardless of how it feels, though, some things are coming to an end, and other things are beginning, just as they do every year.

I'm focusing on the things that are ending. It's not just nostalgia or regret; some of those things I'm glad to see end, at least temporarily. Two of my major summer writing projects, the TV Club Classic coverage of Sports Night and the regular coverage of Breaking Bad, are going on hiatus until next year, and it's a relief. Those pieces take a lot of concentration, time, and anxiety every week, and it will be nice to have them off my plate for a while. Sports Night's last season 1 post went up this past Wednesday, and Breaking Bad's last episode of the current half-season is tonight. It's still a couple of weeks until the other shows I cover regularly (How I Met Your Mother and Modern Family) start their seasons, so I've got a nice break coming up.

It's also pleasant to have the kids' birthday party and the Ravellenics behind me. Last week I went to the Rhea Lana sale and bought most of the clothes they'll need until next spring (I hope). I still haven't cleaned out their closets of too-small items, or unpacked the bags of jeans and jackets I hauled home from that sale, but at least I'm more than halfway ready for colder weather. And with all the Ravellenic administration in the past, I've gleefully started what I hope is a binge of knitting things to keep other people warm, whether they are friends or strangers in need.

We've been having our master bathroom remodeled this summer, and that's nearly done, too. The pace would be considered too leisurely for people more outcome-focused than ourselves, or for a room where the loss of function is more disruptive. But we're just proud that we've gotten the process underway after years of knowing it needed to be done.

That's also the way I feel about starting a conversation with a financial planner this summer. We haven't finalized much yet, but stuff is in the works: more life insurance, rearranging some assets to provide more focused retirement funds, college savings, and an easier way to keep track of it all. I'm so pleased with myself for finally moving in this direction after living so long with the uneasy feeling that I wasn't properly taking care of business, that I'm not in too much of a hurry to get everything signed and squared away; it's enough that the ball is rolling.

Maybe this change of seasons isn't really about things ending, or about us moving on. It's about not having wasted the time we've been spending. And that goes for time with the kids, too, which right now is not a matter of long looks backward, but lovely moments that still linger in the now.

Pay attention

Noel made us some delicious sandwiches out of leftover delicious meatloaf for lunch.  While we enjoyed them, we watched the National Geographic series Brain Games.  The episode was about attention and inattention, and featured several games and illusions designed to show the viewer how focus, multitasking, and selective inattention work.

Afterwards, Archer disappeared into the front room and came back with his own versions of the demonstrations.  "Mom, I want you to pay attention to the colors of the poker chips on the table," he declared.  "Pay close attention!"

Then he put a poker chip on the table and ran out of the room.  A second later he ran back in and put in another poker chip, and then did it again.  At this point I began laughing uncontrollably, because the sight of him running in and out was so amusing and fast-paced, and also because I thought he was trying to simulate the "flicker" tests shown in the episodes -- stop-motion sequences where elements are changed while the viewer try to keep track of the changes.  He kept on bringing the chips, one by one, eight, nine, ten, running in and out as fast as he could, while I howled with laughter.  Directed to keep my attention on the chips, I couldn't help watching him trying to keep a straight face as he acted as the star and stagehand of his own illusion.

Several iterations in, I saw that he had something in his hand other than the poker chips, and idly I looked to see if it was still there when he came back.  It wasn't.  Noel, who was watching with amusement, said, "Is that one of their Pokemon DS styluses?"  And that's when I understood which of the show's demonstrations he was trying to replicate -- the ones where because you are paying attention to something in particular, you miss an incongruous element like a person in a gorilla suit walking through the scene.

"Did you notice anything unusual, Mom?" Archer asked once he finally finished his shuttle run.  "Were you carrying a pencil?" I asked.  "It was a Tepig DS stylus," he said triumphantly.  "That was a surprising thing to appear in the poker chip event.  You weren't expecting it, so you might have missed it."

His recreation was so exuberant, so inventive, and so perfect as a handmade, spur-of-the-moment version of what he had seen that I was overcome with delight.  Yet even better -- he grasped what the show was doing with its games for the viewer, what the point of them was, and tried to illustrate that, taking on the role of host narrating the action and director manipulating the audience.  Best of all, he wanted to include all of us, and the funniest part of the activity was watching him make his "I'm trying not to smile because my role is completely serious" face as he dashed to the table and then back out of the room, time after time.

Half hours of cheer

At this time of year, Noel likes to put searches for "holiday" and "Christmas" on the TiVo and see what comes up.  This year he's harvested a bumper crop of Christmas-themed sitcom episodes from all across the TV spectrum, from Happy Days and Bob Newhart to Becker and 8 Simple Rules For Dating My Teenage Daughter.

The plots are pretty standard.  People obsess over getting the right gifts for each other.  They try to find the perfect tree.  They attempt to make up for the shortcomings of Christmases past by engineering an ideal Christmas in the present.  They get sloshed on eggnog and sing carols and do what everybody does in sitcoms: bond with their families, natural or engineered.

I find myself touched by this slow parade of sentiment.  Christmas doesn't necessarily bring out the best in sitcoms in terms of originality or humor.  But it's that family element that almost always comes to the fore and reminds us what our culture makes of its entertainment and its holidays.  We're too independent to be completely tied down to the families we were given, but we long for the acceptance and closeness and belonging that only family can afford.  And so all these shows hinge on us assembling something to do that job for us.

Watched all in a row, the message can't help but come across.  I'm lucky to have a family that loves me.  Especially at Christmastime.  And especially since we don't have to go through three acts in 22 minutes to get there.

Throw another chocolate bar on the grill

This Hershey's commercial has been running during college football this season.  It shows people in slow motion passing around s'mores, digging into s'mores, tossing the ingredients for s'mores to grillmasters who are assembling s'mores.  These people are wearing football jerseys and are in a crowded, energetic parking lot.  They're tailgating.

When I saw this commercial for the first time, I was waiting for the ironic payoff.  I thought it was going to be like those commercials for ranch dressing that show people in idyllic settings completely dominated by ranch dressing -- bowls of it, mugs of it, stockpots of it.  The joke is both that the item is out of place, and that people are being inordinately delighted by it.

But the Hershey's commercial is apparently playing it straight.  Tailgating and s'mores, it says, are an All-American pairing, one we all grew up with.  When you go tailgating, instead of meat grilling and beer being poured, all you see are graham cracker sandwiches with gooey marshmallow and chocolate filling.

Is this true?  Do people make s'mores at tailgates?  It's been a long time since I spent a lot of time in parking lots before ball games, I admit, but surely things haven't changed that much.  Or is this a bid to get s'mores out of the scouting and camping ghetto and into the mainstream with barbecue, Mom, and apple pie?

End of days

In June 2008, Noel began rewatching and writing about Buffy The Vampire Slayer for the A.V. Club's TV Club Classic.  It was a serious gap in our pop culture credentials as a couple.  We missed the initial run of Buffymania in the late nineties, and by the time we were trying to catch up a couple of seasons in, we didn't catch the fever by watching it every night in syndication, despite our best efforts.  So when the TV Club Classic format debuted, it was a natural for us -- but in a different mode from NewsRadio, my first effort in the format.  Rather than something we loved being revisited, it was something that most of our readers would be more familiar with than we were.

Noel brought me along for the Buffy ride (which includes picking up the BTVS spinoff Angel at the point in the series continuity that it premiered).  And with the framework of watching, writing, reading, and being shepherded along by commenters who seemed to enjoy seeing the series again through the eyes of complete newbies, we got past the not-quite-Buffyesque first season and quickly appreciated what was so special about the show.  We quickly became huge fans.  Instead of being a pop culture blind spot we needed to fill out of a sense of obligation, the two episodes we watched every week became a much-anticipated highlight.

A little less than three years later, Noel has reached the end of Buffy. There's still more Angel to go, but there's no doubt that leaving Buffy behind marks a milestone as significant as embarking on the series in 2008.  I personally feel a sense of accomplishment and community, working my way into the dialogue and discussion that remains so important to people of the generation immediately behind mine.

But it was a pleasure, not a chore, because Joss Whedon has such a playful and energetic approach to serialized television.  I fell in love with all his characters, enjoyed their company every week, and cared deeply about their fates.  I'm happy they will always be there for me to revisit, but there will never be a first time again for discovering their stories.  That's over -- forever.

Finishing and starting

I've been looking forward to this weekend for a long time.  Noel's back, I'm off the clock at work (unlike last weekend), and sleeping late, crafting, and spending time with the kids are the only things on the agenda.  Bonus: Noel and I are going out to dinner and a movie tonight so we can catch up on all the news and gossip, and see a movie our critic friends are crazy about -- Drive.

But on the other hand, I've been aware for a while that this weekend is the last chance to draw a deep breath before I leave for Japan next Saturday.  At work this week I'll be working frantically to get everything set up for my week-long absence; at home I will have five TV Club pieces to complete, three of which will need to be done after the shows air (the other two I can write ahead of time, although I'm not going to get the screener for one until mid-week).  It's been a while since I wrote about television "live," as it were, typing up notes immediately after the show is over and posting them without much time for reflection.  It's a different way of writing, and I'll have to get back in the groove quickly; the first two episodes of How I Met Your Mother and Modern Family air back to back on Monday and Wednesday, respectively, and I'm taking over Project Runway from the masterful John Teti on Thursday.

That means there won't be much downtime in the evenings to get my bearings.  No matter what I get done or don't get done, my departure on Saturday will come when it comes.  I have to remind myself that I can sleep on the fourteen-hour transoceanic flight ... well, except for the time I have to spend grading the freshman papers that will be turned in on Friday.  Rest may have to wait until the flight back on September 30.

Appreciation

I was a little afraid that the last post in my four-year run of NewsRadio recaps would sink into the internet little noticed.  Season 5 of the show, after Phil Hartman's tragic death, is problematic for many fans, and I figured I would have lost some of my readers in this final summer when that was the topic of conversation. The readership for the series was never massive in the first place; certainly it was far from the most popular feature on the site, more of a niche audience at best.

But it's been an amazing week, as readers came out of the woodwork to express their appreciation.  I resolved early on to try to thank everyone who commented with a compliment or a pat on the back, and the lovefest went on for the entire week.  In addition, I've gotten a steady stream of tweets expressing sadness that the series is over.  Some people have even praised the writeups in comment sections, blogs, and columns around the web.

The comments on the article were the best, though.  Some said they had never watched Season 5 before, but gave it a try because of my writeups.  Some said they only just found the TV Club in the last week, but were now rewatching the whole series and reading along.  Some talked about how they never knew many other folks who liked the show, and had found a whole community among readers of the feature.

I know the end can't last forever.  But it's been incredible dragging it out as long as possible, and having the readers play along as if they didn't want it to end any more than I did.

You think you can?

Tonight marks the end of my second season covering the reality TV competition So You Think You Can Dance?  I am perhaps the least qualified person writing about this show and getting paid for it.  I've never taken a single dance lesson in my life.  My best friend in high school was an accomplished dancer, and I'll never forget her teaching me a simple routine to dance with our glee club.  As a chunky teen, I'm sure my insistance on being in the front row during the performance delighted exactly no one.

But though I know next to nothing about dance, I find this show one of the better reality competitions around.  It draws almost exclusively well-trained contestants to its auditions, and while it perhaps oversells the abilities of its finalists compared to the mass out of which they were plucked, at least it doesn't indulge deluded amateurs the way American Idol regularly does.  I like to watch people who know what they're doing.  And the training comes with a culture that is infinitely more charming.  The contestants have received innumerable critiques and been to countless auditions in their lives, and they know how to take praise and criticism.  They don't argue with the judges or stake their appeal on idiosyncratic assertions of quality, ignoring the opinion of experts as elitist and irrelevant.  Dance on this show is clearly something you have to study long and hard to know how to do, not something that any of us could wake up and decide to be famous at.

This particular season, the show's eighth, has featured perhaps the highest level of professionalism in the eventual top pool.  Last night's final performance show was strangely lacking, perhaps because of the number of original pair dances each contestant learned and performed -- four in various styles, plus a solo.  But I have high hopes for the final results show, which over the years has elicited some of the most inventive group routines ever exhibited by the program.  And whoever wins the title of "America's Favorite Dancer," as producer Nigel Lythgoe rather pompously said last week, "the winner is daaaahnce."  Annoyingly phrased, but actually true.

No, thank YOU

It was a beautiful day today.  After a week of triple-digit temperatures and what seems like months of triple-digit heat index readings, it rained last night for hours on end.  We woke up in the morning to cool air and green everywhere.  It felt like the long summer of doom and conflict was finally over.

And then today featured the bittersweet appearance of my final writeup of NewsRadio for The A.V. Club. I received so many wonderful expressions of thanks for the series, and was able to thank many of the commenters who have shown up week after week and summer after summer for their companionship and contributions.  It was a lovefest.

Today, in other words, was the perfect remedy for plunging stock markets and general worldwide worrisomeness.  Everyone was generous and kind; the world was full of light and life.  I came home to a delicious home-cooked meal and hugs from my intelligent, happy children.  Tomorrow's troubles can wait until tomorrow.  Today was a beautiful day.

End of an era

Tomorrow morning, my very last recap of NewsRadio will post on the A.V. Club website.  I've been writing about the show, one of my all-time favorites, for four summers, encompassing five seasons.  It's been a labor of love, and a lot of wonderful people have come along for the ride, watching along with me and commenting each week.  I've learned a lot from them and made some new fans and friends.

I'm not going to able to find another show to revisit that has the same combination of appealing features for me.  NewsRadio was a traditional-format sitcom I have championed for more than a decade as one of the high points of the form and of broadcast television, despite its lack of ratings success.  In many ways it sparked my interest in treating television seriously and trying to understand how it worked.  Some sitcoms aspire to be little more than competent ephemera, but anyone who tuned in with more than a passing interest could immediately see that it assembled the elements of comedy with elegance, invention, and a deep passion for the possibilities of the form.

When I come back to TV Club Classic, probably early next year, I'd like to do another show that has a similar level of cult interest and formal excitement.  NewsRadio established me as something of a multi-camera sitcom specialist (although I have no formal training to support that status), but I can't think of another show that fits the bill -- relatively short run, underappreciated, pushing some envelope.  If you have any ideas, leave 'em in the comments.

The biggest stage

Last night was the premiere of Breaking Bad's fourth season.  It's been more than a year since season three ended; an entire cycle of Emmys have come and gone, meaning that the show and its personnel are not nominated for anything this year.

For some programs, such a long break would spell danger for devoted fans.  A show might come back and find its viewership has evaporated, people having long since moved on to the next big thing, or forgotten the thread of its convoluted plot.

But the lengthy hiatus has only caused Breaking Bad's popularity to grow.  The season four premiere last night was the show's most watched episode ever, beating the previous season's first episode by thirty percent.  It appears that the show's fans spent much of the last year, and certainly all of the past month, badgering everyone they knew to start watching.

And the heightened interest and bigger audience translates into a shockingly huge comment section for my first recap of the season.  Twenty minutes after the show ended, there were 100 comments; everytime I refreshed thereafter, the number seemed to grow by leaps and bounds.  Right now, about 20 hours later, there are over 800 comments.  That's getting up into territory I associate with Noel's immensely popular writing on Lost.  It's a scale with which I am entirely unfamiliar; my writeups of How I Met Your Mother and Modern Family, two network comedies with much larger viewerships than BB (though certainly a less avid or cultish fan base) might draw a couple of hundred comments, while my "classic" writeups of NewsRadio struggle to reach half that.

I certainly can't attribute the activity to my writing; fans of the show gather to discuss it, not what I said about it.  Nevertheless, at that level of interest, there are more people reading what I'm writing, even casually and cursorily, than anywhere else my work appears on the site.  It's a daunting prospect -- to know how to do what I do best while at the same time giving such a sprawling group what they might want.

Authorship

You know that Kindle single I was writing about yesterday?  It became available today in the Amazon Kindle store.

I was in Little Rock waiting to pick up the kids from SLUFY when I saw the announcement from the A.V. Club's Twitter feed.  When I went to the single's Amazon purchase page, I was delighted to see that both Noel and I are credited as authors (Noel filled in for me at least once in each of the three seasons, and he did an interview with Breaking Bad's creator Vince Gilligan that's included in the e-book), along with editor Josh Modell and cover illustration Danny Hellman.

It occurred to me that I should make sure the single is linked to my Amazon author page, so I went to Amazon Author Central and clicked the link to add items to my bibliography.  Amazon's search engine then presents to you everything with your name on it, and you can click buttons underneath to claim the item as your book.  In a few minutes, hours, or days, after some algorithm confirms it, the items appear on your author page.

I flipped through the pages, skipping over the children's books by Donna Bowman Bratton, and not only found the Breaking Bad e-book, but also -- surprise and joy -- the upcoming volume of essays Cosmology, Theology, and the Energy of God that I co-edited with Clayton Crockett, which is due out from Fordham University Press in November.  The book has appeared in Fordham's catalog, but this is the first I've seen it available online for pre-order.

So whether you're in the mood for some great televised drama or some energetic theology, I've got you covered at Amazon!  Either or both make great gifts for a loved one -- or why not treat yourself?

Back to the lab

A few years ago, I took on the job of writing about a brand new drama on basic cable.  It was the second original series produced by a channel better known for showing the same second-rate movies over and over.  Most of the people involved with the show were relatively unknown quantities, or were best known for material quite different from the show's premise.

The show was Breaking Bad, one of the best shows of our era or any era.  And thanks to my lucky break, I've been writing about it for the last three seasons.

The fourth season premiere is this Sunday, and I'll be writing about it again.  Connected with that premiere, the good folks at the A.V. Club have put together their very first Kindle single.  It's a collection of my posts, episode by episode, combined with interviews and other related content that's appeared over the run of the series in our publication.

I wrote a new introduction for the collection, and it should be available in the next day or two.  What a cool reward for one of the most fortunate gigs a TV blogger could ever get.

Sports Shouting

Noel's insightful essay on ESPN, sparked by the release of a lengthy oral history of the network, appeared today on the A.V. Club and has precipitated quite a bit of thoughtful commentary.  Here in middle age we are often astounded to look back and see what pieces of media used to feel fresh, exciting, and indispensable to our lives.  Did we leave them behind, or did they leave us?

I think about this every time I see a promo for Desperate Housewives on ABC and find myself astonished that the show is still on the air.  During its first couple of seasons we watched it religiously -- everyone who wanted to be part of the cultural conversation did.  And then the cultural conversation moved on, and yet the show somehow kept going, sustained by a demographic who aren't a part of that conversation.  It feels like a coelacanth when you run across it -- a living fossil.

SportsCenter is like this, too.  Time was, youngsters, when SportsCenter was appointment television.  It was the only place on the dial where you could get the sheer volume and breadth of highlights, delivered with panache.  Now the show not only seems to be merely a parody of the genre it spawned, but also appears to be going out of its way to actively alienate me and people like me, with little effort expended to actually comment on the highlights and as many tired catchphrases and empty panels of experts spouting meaningless opinion as they can pack into their hour.

Have these shows and their networks changed, or have I?  Is my distaste for their style a function of getting older and leaving the target demo, or are the shows the ones that survived too long, drew the wrong lessons from the prevailing trends, got complacent and synergistic, and stopped caring about the people who forgot them or grew to despise them -- people like me?

When are they going to get to the fireworks factory?

We're headed to Hot Springs at the end of next week for our annual theme park trip (family motto: Creating Memories!).  Last year, in addition to the water park and amusement park, we went to the big observation tower and saw some of the sights downtown.

This year I've got a dream.

We sometimes watch the Science Channel shows "How Do They Do It?" and "How It's Made."  It's one of my absolute favorite types of television -- factory porn, you might call it.  Specialized machines doing specialized jobs.  Cutters, crimpers, computers, conveyer belts, spinning and whirling gears that mix and shape and press and package things.

Today the topic was rubber bands.  And lo and behold, the factory making the rubber bands was Alliance Rubber in Hot Springs, Arkansas.

Turns out Alliance Rubber has been churning out rubber bands and other specialty rubber products since 1923.  The shots of the factory floor inspired my dream.  What if we could tour the rubber band factory on our trip?

I know that nine-year-old me would have loved that, and I'll bet my kids would love it, too.  There's no information about visiting the factory on their website, but there's a phone number, and by golly, I'm going to be calling it.  In fact, this idea has opened up a whole new world of Creating-Memories opportunities for me -- beyond the tourist destinations and standard attractions.  If there's a factory around making something, I think we should be wearing hard hats and watching those big machines at work.

One more time we're gonna celebrate

As the clock started edging closer to 10 am, I got more and more nervous.  You only get one shot at this, and I was hoping I hadn't muffed it.  What if no one read, or commented?  What if everyone read and hated it?  What if I'd made a terrible error or missed something obvious?

When you write for a site with a million viewers a month, even if you are one of dozens and contribute only occasionally to obscure parts of the site, there can be a lot riding on your work.  Triple that when you are reviving a feature that has become important to a loyal group of readers.  When it's time for that first post, you can't help but experience some anxiety.  What happens today might determine whether people come back next week.  It might determine whether people remember the feature with fondness and give the site credit for its excellence, or whether they consider it a joke or a lost opportunity, or whether it fades quickly back into the morass of the internet.

Today the first post for the last summer of TV Club Classic reappraisals of NewsRadio, my favorite television show of all time and a true cult classic, appeared at 10 am Central time precisely.  And to my great relief, for the rest of the day the comments rolled steadily in, both from readers who have been following along since the summer of 2008 when I began writing about it and from those just discovering that somebody out there is talking about NewsRadio.


One of the magical things that can happen in Web 2.0 is the creation of an unintentional community.  People gather around something they care about, sometimes in an unlikely place that wasn't exactly built for their obsession, like the comments section of a publication.  Norms and mores develop, enforced by the community.  Vigorous discussion is encouraged, but questioning of core values may be squelched.  The location, shifting forward in time week by week and season by season as the host publication marches on with its mission, becomes like an online meetup, an event that community members look forward to for its own sake.  Friendships and antagonisms develop, members gain and lose reputation, personalities manifest themselves in greater detail, and a kind of gratitude for the little miracle of this accidental gathering can hover around it like a halo.

There are times when we can take possession of something -- treasure it, value it, make it ours by virtue of the fact that no one has laid claim to it.  I think some of the folks in these scattered TV Club communities feel that way about not only their shows, but the discussion to which they return week in and week out.  It's even stronger when the show has been neglected, or has lain fallow for a while, or isn't currently in the mainstream of the cultural conversation, but it can happen on a show as overexposed and obsessively, ubiquitously analyzed as Lost, where Noel's recaps gained a devoted and idiosyncratic cult following of their own.

This last season of NewsRadio is divisive; some feel it's a sad downhill slide, some feel it's underrated. I don't know if folks will keep showing up for the next three months to talk about it.  But I'm glad they came back for this first post, if only to say goodbye once again to Phil Hartman.  In a way, I know that I don't have to do much for this to happen -- just provide the space and a few conversation starters.  I aim to do much more, of course.  But the pressure isn't what I made it out to be.  The community of commenters isn't responding to me but to each other -- to what they've built, and what meaning it bestows on each of us who claim it.

Final voyage

Summer at the A.V. Club means TV Club Classic.  During the year we focus on covering current shows week to week, but in the summer when new episodes are thinner on the ground, many of us turn to writing about shows from the past, reconsidering them in light of history or sometimes experiencing them for the first time.

I've been writing about NewsRadio since June 2008, taking on two seasons that first summer, then a single season every summer thereafter.  It's been one of my all-time favorite shows since the mid-nineties when it started airing, and has attained a cult following since then as one of the most underappreciated comedies the television medium has ever produced.  The response to its reconsideration in TV Club Classic has been most gratifying.

And now we're at the final season.  That would be bittersweet enough, but it's also a post-tragedy season for the show; in between the last episode of Season 4 and the first of Season 5, Phil Hartman -- a mainstay of the cast, and the man behind one of its most popular characters -- was murdered.  Jon Lovitz joined the cast in the wake of this loss.  A lot of fans of the show find this final season problematic.  They feel like it's not the same without Hartman, that Lovitz didn't fit in, that the show lost its way and should have ended on an earlier high note, that the whole thing is just too sad to contemplate.

So my job of writing about this season is difficult.  I haven't seen this season since it aired, and don't have vivid memories of much of it.  I hope that I'll be able to argue that the season is better than its reputation, but until I get farther into it, I can't be sure.

It's also an opportunity to approach the show in a different way, though.  Over the past few years the critical reputation of the show has grown tremendously, and my job has become a dissection of why it is brilliant.  That's a gratifying role, and readers have been very complimentary, by and large, of my performance.  But it might be interesting to make an argument whose outcome isn't already a matter of cultural consensus.

I have the best readers in the business -- they really know their stuff.  And they may disagree with my assessment of this season, as has sporadically happened with episodes with controversial reputations.  I'm looking forward to working through this season with them; maybe we'll both discover something we didn't know before.  That would be a great ending to four years and five seasons that have already changed the way I approach watching and writing about television.

Step up to the drop

When Million Dollar Money Drop premiered in December, Noel TiVoed it on the grounds that Archer would like the money calculating aspect.  What we couldn't have foreseen is that it's become a weekly staple for our family.

Even though the show partakes of many of the post-Who Wants To Be A Millionaire tropes that make almost every contemporary game show nigh-unwatchable -- a flashy Thunderdome set, overly talkative contestants, the apparent belief that waiting thirty seconds for the music to finish and a predetermined outcome to occur makes for compelling television -- it's got some surprising strong points that keep us coming back.

The premise is that the contestants (who compete in teams of two) start with a million dollars is $20,000 bundles.  They must place those bundles on platforms corresponding to answers to a question.  If they're not sure if the answer, they can hedge their bet by dividing the money among multiple platforms (with the caveat that they must keep one platform empty).  Incorrect answers are trapdoors down which your money tumbles; the correct answer platform stays horizontal, and whatever money you've placed there is available to use in the next round.  There are seven rounds.  The early questions have four answer choices, reduced to three in middle rounds, and finally to an all-or-nothing two platforms for the final question.  A clock counts down the time that contestants have to place their money; in an interesting twist, they get more time in later rounds.  They can exercise a one-time "quick change" option in early rounds to give themselves additional time to move money.

The game puts a premium on trust, intuition, and relevant information.  Typically the two contestants will end up throwing whatever they know about the answers at each other as they move money and the clock ticks down.  Often what they say is completely unrelated to the choice in front of them, and if they have to spend too much energy determining that, there's less time available for being sure of their choice.  Ideally at least one of the contestants will know or be able to figure out enough about the answer choices to make a decision -- then they have to convince their partner to trust them, even though the partner's instinct is usually to hedge the bet.  The questions are usually of a continuum variety, where incorrect answers are hard to eliminate because they appear somewhere on the continuum.  For example, one question asked the best-selling variety of Girl Scout cookies.  Unless you happen to know that information, your task is going to be to make some sort of logical argument to eliminate the less plausible bestsellers and focus on the ones that make the most sense.  But all the answers were Girl Scout cookies, so there was no way to use pure common knowledge to make a choice.

A fun little side game for the view is taking the answers (which are revealed first) and guessing the question; it's surprisingly easy, but that doesn't make it any less satisfying.  And of course, as the contestants decide how much money to divide among various answers, the running commentary at our house is whether we would be confident enough in our methods of logical inference to go all-in on one answer, or whether we would try to stave off bankruptcy by leaving a couple of bundles on other answers.  Having $100,000 or less, though, especially before the last couple of rounds, is hardly worth it; you can't break up $20,000 bundles so there's no way to make nuanced probability wagers.

And finally, there's the undeniable thrill of reminding yourself just how much money is going down those chutes when the contestants decide to hedge just a handful of bundles on a wrong answer.  One bundle buys a basic car; two buys a nice car; three buys a boat.  Five bundles is what we paid for our house.

Around our table half the fun comes from our children picking up on our preferred answer and making it their own.  "It's Thin Mints!" they scream in frustration.  "Put it all on Thin Mints!!"

Never thought I'd be watching another game show with dramatic lighting and a "never thought this would be my career path" host like Kevin Pollak.  But here we are -- and I must say it's fun.