If you needed a reason to get a Crunchyroll premium subscription, Spy x Family is it.

If nothing else, Spy x Family is a great homage to classic spy series from the Cold War era like Get Smart, It Takes a Thief, Mission: Impossible, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., I Spy, and The Saint (in which Roger Moore plays a better James Bond than when he was cast as James Bond).

You know, back in the good old days when we could safely assume that democracies were superior to autocracies and the good guys acted on behalf of the greater good.

In Spy x Family, the European setting is roughly based on East and West Germany during the 1960s, though this East Germany is economically freer and more politically turbulent than that East Germany. A better comparison might be Taiwan and post-1997 Hong Kong.

Operating under the code name Twilight, super spy Lloyd Forger has been tasked with establishing a diplomatic back channel with reclusive party leader Donovan Desmond. Desmond's sons attend Eden Academy, so Forger's handlers conclude that the best cover story is for Forger to enroll his child at the academy.

To do that he will need a child. And a wife. And a dog. A family, in other words.

He rescues Anya from a shady orphanage and arranges a paper marriage with Yor Briar, who has reasons of her own to shed her single status. What Forger doesn't know is that Anya is a telepath and Yor is a professional assassin. And the dog can see the future, except only Anya can communicate with him.

Because of her psychic powers, Anya is privy to the secret lives of her pretend parents, though this knowledge is filtered through the eyes of a precocious six-year-old child (who is probably five but said she was six because she knew that's what Lloyd wanted and was desperate to get out of the orphanage).

As far as Anya is concerned, her top priority is keeping the family together, as fake as it may be, while helping Lloyd complete his mission. And while Lloyd and Yor are always telling themselves they'll go their separate ways, they find themselves growing increasing comfortable with their artificial family life.

There are additional sitcom complications, such as Yor's younger brother being a member of the State Security Service (the equivalent of the Stasi). While Yuri is aware that a foreign agent named Twilight is in the country, he is is too flustered by Lloyd's marriage to his sister to realize that he's right under his nose.

Yuri is equally unaware of his sister's sinister side job. Undoubtedly one of those siloed need-to-know things.

Directors Kazuhiro Furuhashi and Takahiro Harada deftly walk a thin line, keeping the tone of the story simultaneously smart and silly without being stupid. Lloyd's side missions are quite thrilling in their own right too.

If we could go back in time, the perfect cast for a live-action version would be Dick Van Dyke and Mary Tyler Moore as Rob and Laura Petrie from The Dick Van Dyke Show. I'd love to seem them play against type and switch on a dime from normal (if somewhat goofy) middle-class parents to steely-eyed operatives.

The difference between the two leads is that Yor naturally defaults to Laura Petrie mode. For her, assassin really is just a side gig. Switching out of full-time spy mode is more difficult for Lloyd.

The second half of the second season reverses the roles. Yor is sent on a mission that constantly throws her into precarious situations that call on her talents as a cool and competent cutthroat killer. In her absence, Lloyd has to figure out how to be a full-time father figure.

In the universe of secret superheroes, the controlling half of the dual personality—Clark Kent or Superman, Bruce Wayne or Batman—will ultimately determine the direction of the narrative. For Bruce Banner and the Hulk, the conflict arises out of the irradicable nature of the struggle.

This is the question that Lloyd will ultimately have to answer. The decision would end the show in its current form, but given such wonderful characters, I would very much like to see how our family of spies adapts after the Berlin Wall falls.

Spy x Family is a well-crafted series where the long arc of the show can be stretched out without frustrating the audience, allowing the writer and director to get creative with one-and-done episodic plots. Exactly what former network executive Paul Chato identifies as the recipe for a successful television series.

Crunchyroll has both seasons of Spy x Family and Spy x Family: Code White. Tubi has five seasons of The Dick Van Dyke Show and six seasons of The Saint.

Labels: anime, anime reviews, business, crunchyroll, geography, politics, streaming, television reviews

Tubi has anime and Kdrama channels but nothing specific to Jdrama. Tubi doesn't have language filters either, so the only way to sift through Tubi's catalog, aside from third-party sites like Reelgood, is to look up specific titles, actors, and directors, or do global searches for Japan and Japanese.

Even there, the Tubi search engine is fuzzy, so the hits will be all over the map and may have nothing to do with Japan. And because Tubi licenses just about anything as long as it's cheap and available, everything from art house to grindhouse to documentaries and travelogues will show up in the results.

I've curated a list of Japanese language titles on Tubi I thought were worth a second glance. I will update this list on a semi-regular basis.

• Kamen Rider: Kuuga (2001) A young Joe Odagiri sets this entry in the long-running franchise apart from the rest. Alas, it suffers from the monster-of-the-week formula and is further hurt by the bad guys having no clear-cut motivation, which turns it into serial-killer-of-the-week. The body count is astronomical. But you can watch it to enjoy Joe Odagiri and a talented supporting cast.
• By contrast, Kamen Rider: Zero-One (2020) follows the George of the Jungle (1997) rule: "Nobody dies in this story. They just get really big boo-boos." Zero-One also illustrates how far budget CGI has evolved in twenty years. Alas, good CGI can't compensate for bad scripts. The series might have worked as a smarter Terminator prequel than the usual but instead gets painfully repetitious.
• Liz and the Blue Bird (2018) is a side story from Kyoto Animation's Sound Euphonium franchise. The movie revisits the first season from the perspective of two members of the high school brass band (supporting characters in the main series) as they rehearse a duet to be featured in the prefectural band competition.
• Onihei (2017) is based on the crime novels by Shotaro Ikenami. Heizo Hasegawa is police superintendent with an intimidating reputation (oni means devil). He and his men specifically investigate crimes of theft, armed robbery, and arson. This action-heavy Edo period police procedural doesn't flinch from depicting the complete lack of due process rights afforded to suspects at the time.
• Priest of Darkness (1975) shares a similar premise with Zankuro (2001). Like Ken Watanabe's Zankuro, Shintaro Katsu (of Zatoichi fame) plays a tea master with a high social rank but a meager stipend. Constantly hustling to pay the rent, he and his little gang settle disputes, investigate crimes, and dispense unofficial justice around the neighborhood.
• Sonny Chiba again plays the historical figure Yagyu Jubei in Shogun's Mission. Jubei's brother is an inspector on the famed Tokai Highway. Yagyu Jubei and his band of ninjas tag along as his bodyguards. This is classic road movie material with at least one big fight scene per episode. The Japanese title translates as "Yagyu's Unruly Journey."
• Thus Spoke Kishibe Rohan (2017) is a live-action spin-off from Hirohiko Araki's JoJo's Bizarre Adventure series. I never got into the latter but quite like the former. Kishibe Rohan is a mangaka who investigates paranormal mysteries for inspiration when he gets writer's block. Basically he and his editor are Mulder and Scully. Issei Takahashi does well in the lead role.
• Speaking of road movies, from 1962 to 1989, Shintaro Katsu made twenty-six Zatoichi films, along with four seasons of the Zatoichi television series. Each episode has the itinerant blind masseur running into a bunch of bad guys who will get sliced and diced in his inimitable style by the time the end credits roll.

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Labels: anime, anime lists, anime reviews, crunchyroll, kyoani, samurai vs ninja, streaming, television reviews, tubi

Tubi has anime and Kdrama channels but nothing specific to Jdrama. Tubi doesn't have language filters either, so the only way to sift through Tubi's catalog, aside from third-party sites like Reelgood, is to look up specific titles, actors, and directors, or do global searches for "Japan" and "Japanese."

Even there, the Tubi search engine is fuzzy, so the hits will be all over the map and may have nothing to do with Japan. And because Tubi licenses just about anything as long as it's cheap and available, everything from art house to grindhouse to documentaries and travelogues will show up in the results.

I've curated a list of Japanese language titles on Tubi I thought were worth a second glance. I will update this list on a semi-regular basis.

• Bakuman (2013) presents an unflinching account about what it takes to become a manga artist. The process has largely gone digital in the last decade and emanga outsell paperbacks but the merciless challenges of the creative process haven't changed. Check out Sleeper Hit (2016) on Viki for a more modern take from the publisher's perspective. Also see my longer review.
• Daughter of Lupin (2019) is a live-action spin-off of the popular anime action comedy. Like Marilyn Munster on The Munsters, Hana is the only normal person in her odd family. She's a librarian engaged to a police officer from a family of police officers, which causes no end of comedic problems when her crime family gets framed for a series of crimes they didn't actually commit.
• Lupin the Third (1971–2023) Along with six television series, there are at least fifty Lupin the Third movies at the latest count. Tubi has about three dozen of them.
• Pinwheel Hamakichi's Spell (1992) A disgraced Edo period police officer, banished from the capital for accepting a bribe, returns five years later to search for his daughter. Still respected as a detective, he is prevailed upon to solve crimes in an unofficial capacity, and makes ends meet by selling pinwheel toys from a roadside stand.
• Shadow Warriors (1980) Sonny Chiba reassembled the cast and crew from Shogun's Samurai (1978) to play ninja leader Hattori Hanzo (like Yagyu Jubei, a documented historical figure). By day, he's the layabout owner of an Edo bathhouse (if you're looking for gratuitous nudity, look no further). By night, he and his ninjas fix the nasty problems the shogunate wants swept under the rug.
• Steamboy (2004) is about a boy named Edward Steam. Yes, the whole thing is that obvious. This steampunk adventure takes place in Victorian England and includes a big nod to George Stephenson, the "Father of the British Steam Railways." If nothing else, the constant whirring, hissing, clanking, and grinding of gears will be a visual delight for any gearhead. Also see my longer review.
• Summer Days With Coo (2007) Coo is a kappa, a mythological water-dwelling reptile with a penchant for cucumbers and sumo wrestling. The story asks what happens when a fairy tale character ends up in modern suburban Japan and meets a boy named Koichi. Based on the novels by Masao Kogure.
• Toradora (2008) As both a plot device and a well-used anime trope, perhaps no anime series exemplifies the tsundere character type better than Ryuji Takasu and Taiga Aisaka in Toradora. This high school romantic comedy works on every level and ends on exactly the right note. Tubi has English dubbed and Spanish subtitled versions as well. Also see my longer review.
• Uzumasa Limelight (2014) looks at the samurai action genre through the eyes of an aging stuntman who has difficulty getting cast in new productions after spending his entire career on a weekly historical drama like Abarenbo Shogun, that was on air from 1978 to 2008.

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Labels: anime lists, anime reviews, jdrama, streaming, television reviews, tubi

Tubi has anime and Kdrama channels but nothing specific to Jdrama. Tubi doesn't have language filters either, so the only way to sift through Tubi's catalog, aside from using third-party sites like Reelgood, is to look up specific titles, actors, and directors or do global searches for "Japan" and "Japanese."

Even there, the Tubi search engine is fuzzy, so the hits will be all over the map and may have nothing to do with Japan. And because Tubi licenses just about anything as long as it's cheap and available, everything from art house to grindhouse to documentaries and travelogues will show up in the results.

I've curated a list of Japanese language titles on Tubi I thought were worth a second glance. I will update this list on a semi-regular basis.

• Blue Thermal (2022) follows Tamaki Tsuru as she learns to fly gliders in the college soaring club. The movie makes the common mistake of cramming in too many plot points from the manga, and relies on angst as an excuse for doing really dumb stuff, but the unique subject matter kept me interested.
• Cats of Japan (2020) is a cute travel documentary about cats lounging around and being cool. The kind of show to watch when you just want to kick back and relax.
• Detective Dobu (1991) is an Edo period Columbo, whose slovenly and bumbling ways disguise his keen mind and relentless drive to catch the criminal (although Columbo never drank as much as Dobu does, if at all). The series covers the same material as the earlier made-for-television movies, also on Tubi.
• Crisis: Special Security Squad (2017) Shun Oguri heads a secret team of specialists tackling threats the regular cops can't handle. In both good and bad ways, it's pretty much by-the-numbers for the genre.
• The Great War of Archimedes (2019) The first six minutes documents the sinking of the battleship Yamato. The rest of the movie is a political drama (that feels like a stage play) about how Admiral Yamamoto tried to scuttle the project in favor of building more carriers. Also see my longer review.
• Kamen Rider Zero-One (2020) This comedy action series in the long-running Kamen Rider franchise could be a Terminator prequel. Enjoyable in small doses as practically every episode is the same and not all that different. It gets old fast if you don't pace yourself.
• The Life of Bangaku (2002) is an Edo period action comedy starring acclaimed actor Koji Yakusho as an expert swordsman who is simply too honest and principled for his own good. Directed by Kon Ichikawa.
• Shogun's Samurai (1978) was broadcast in Japan as The Yagyuu Conspiracy. Sonny Chiba stars as the historical figure Yagyuu Jubei. Together with his brother and father, Yagyuu carries out a palace coup in order to install Iemitsu as the third Tokugawa shogun, and then has to deal with the violent blowback.
• Zankuro (2001) Ken Watanabe is a retainer of the shogun during the Edo period. Despite his position in the low aristocracy, his bad habits and his mother's spendthrift ways constantly outstrip his stipend, leaving him to moonlight as a bodyguard or executioner or detective, whatever it takes to make ends meet.

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Labels: anime, anime lists, anime reviews, japanese, japanese tv, jdrama, streaming, technology, television reviews, tubi

The Shogun miniseries debuted on NBC on September 15, 1980. It ran for five consecutive nights and a total of 12 hours, garnering the highest weekly Nielsen ratings in the history of the NBC network.

Two months later Ronald Reagan would be elected in a landslide. A year later, IBM launched the IBM PC. Japan had the second largest economy on the planet. Japanese automakers were leaving Detroit in the dust and Sony was the Apple of its day. Serious people were seriously predicting "Japan as #1."

(And I was studying Japanese at BYU.)

By the end of the decade, Sony Corporation owned Columbia Pictures and Mitsubishi bought Rockefeller Center. Only seven years after that, Mitsubishi lost a billion dollars on the deal and sold off its controlling interest. The real estate bubble burst and Japanese fell into a decade-long recession.

(And I was teaching English in Japan.)

But at the time, Japan was the China of today, with a critical difference being that Japan was and remains a stalwart ally of the United States.

So credit NBC with great timing. But also credit the network for broadcasting a pretty good product. Based on the 1975 novel by James Clavell and starring Richard Chamberlain and Toshiro Mifune, Shogun gave its American audiences a westernized version of a classic NHK Taiga historical drama.

Meaning "big river," the Taiga is a big-budget (by Japanese standards) hour-long drama that runs from January to December. Each year it tackles the life of a notable historical figure. This year, the 16th century female clan leader Ii Naotora; next year, the 19th century general Saigo Takamori.

Unlike Shogun, the Taiga drama strives for sufficient accuracy to use everybody's real names, and does its best to faithfully recreate well-documented events. Though with forty or so hours to fill, a healthy amount of fiction will inevitably backfill the scarcer stuff that historians are confident happened.

Taking place after the death of Toyotomi Hideyoshi in 1598 and before the Battle of Sekigahara in 1600, Shogun is mostly fictional filler. But the miniseries does nail down the time frame and the principal characters, and does a reasonable amount of justice to the historical context.

Richard Chamberlain's John Blackthorne is based on a real person. Will Adams was the English captain of the Dutch-flagged expedition. Confined to a single year, at the end of which Tokugawa Ieyasu defeated Ishida Mitsunari at Sekigahara, Shogun can't help but downplay what a fascinating figure he was.

It also downplays the cruelly ironic turn of history that would take place in his lifetime. Every indignity suffered by the Protestant sailors at the beginning of Shogun would be visited upon the Jesuits a hundred fold. One explanation for this reversal of fortunes is made clear in Shogun, and another is alluded to.

Made clear is the geopolitical insult of the Treaty of Tordesillas, which "divided the newly discovered lands outside Europe between the Portuguese Empire and the Crown of Castile." The reason alluded to was Portuguese involvement in the mid-16th century trade of Chinese and Japanese slaves.

Restrictions on Catholicism in Japan began in earnest under Ieyasu's predecessor, Hideyoshi. Shogun mostly ignores this to keep the Jesuits around as the bad guys. It became a draconian ban under Ieyasu's son, culminating in the systematic annihilation of the Christian community after the Shimabara Rebellion in 1638.

Martin Scorsese's Silence (based on the novel by Shusaku Endo) explores this at length (if you can stomach two hours of man's inhumanity to man vividly illustrated).

Along with the suppression of Christianity, the Edo period of Tokugawa rule was characterized by a strictly-enforced sakoku (isolationist) policy. But Ieyasu did employ Adams to negotiate limited trading rights with the East India Company and the Dutch, though they were confined to a small port off the coast of Nagasaki.

Until the mid-19th century, information about the outside world trickling in from Europe became known in Japan as rangaku (蘭学) or "Dutch learning." Though it was an Englishman that made it happen.

Shogun is not without its anachronisms, stereotypes, and soapy subplots. But as a Hollywood version of Japanese history, it does an all-around better job than The Last Samurai or 47 Ronin. Not merely a noted moment in television time, some forty years later, Shogun stands up well to a second viewing.

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Labels: japanese culture, japanese tv, movies about japan, nhk, pop culture, shogun, social studies, sony, television, television reviews

I was a Japanese major in college when Shogun debuted on American television. The subject of one's scholarship appearing in popular culture is always just cause to take up academic arms against superficial ways a complex subject is so often reduced to in the mass media.

Shogun provided plenty of material for the easily outraged.

The propensity to treat a foreign culture as an extended episode of Ripley's Believe It or Not! is known as "Orientalism." It's a valid criticism, though keeping in mind that that the biggest Orientalists in the world are Orientals. Ditto "Occidentalism."

The more blatant Orientalist sins are found in the middle arc of Shogun, which, frankly, slows to a drag. The political scheming and deal-making that would soon shatter the fragile regency and lead to the Battle of Sekigahara was going on elsewhere. So Blackthorne hasn't much to do.

Instead we get a tedious soap opera, poor language acquisition skills, and a crash coarse in Nihonjinron, a nativist philosophy that was all the rage in the 1970s and 1980s. Nihonjinron argues that everything about Japan is unique, special, and unlike anything else in the world.

And every Japanese, by dint of being Japanese, is born a zen master.

Not only James Clavell, but pretty much the entire media establishment bought into it hook, line, and sinker. As a result, any silly assertion could be justified on the grounds that it was "Japanese," including all that pop-psychology blather about "living in the moment" and whatnot.

In part, I believe that writers of Clavell's generation were trying to comprehend Japan's role in WWII. Thus the huge influence of Ruth Benedict's The Chrysanthemum and the Sword. Written during the war, it helped spawn the modern Nihonjinron movement after the war.

I remember my Japanese professors of Japanese being the most annoyed about the absurd business with the pheasant and the depiction of seppuku (harakiri) and kiri-sute gomen (切捨御免) as being well-nigh ubiquitous.

Meaning "to cut down without regard," the latter refers to the "right" of the samurai "to strike with sword at anyone of a lower class who compromised their honor." As portrayed, it's about as historically accurate as gunfights at high noon were in the 19th century western United States.

Meaning, it happened. Now and then. Certainly not as often nor as casually as suggested in Shogun (and countless home-grown samurai actioners). Killing commoners was a bad idea in an agrarian society with limited arable land and a staple crop that requires a lot of care and nurturing.

Actual armed conflicts were more likely to erupt between high and low-ranked samurai, hence the term gekokujou (下剋上), meaning "juniors dominating seniors." The legendary "revenge of the 47 ronin" began with two high-ranked provincial lords getting into a tussle in Edo Castle.

The Meiji Restoration was in large part driven by lower-ranked samurai revolting against their masters, up to and including the Tokugawa shogunate.

But let's make love, not war. Orientalism doesn't get any sillier than the scene in which Blackthorne is offered a foursome. The only difference with practically the same material in You Only Live Twice is that James Bond is randier than Blackthorne. And takes himself less seriously.

Of course, the message of this Oriental "exoticism" is that everybody is having better sex than stuffy old us. Though given the current birth rate in Japan, that particular message seems to have gotten lost somewhere along the line.

We also get a de rigueur mixed-bathing scene. As far as that goes, you'll have to look long and hard to find a mixed public bath in Japan these days, though it was once commonplace.

U.S. Consul Townsend Harris was shocked by the practice back in the 1850s. He was reassured by one of his more anthropologically-minded friends that "the chastity of Japanese women" was due to "this very exposure that lessens the desire that owes much of its power to mystery and difficulty."

Which brings us to a running joke in the Shogun miniseries that happens to be pretty spot on. Again, it was Townsend Harris who observed that the Japanese "are a clean people. Everyone bathes every day."

Back in the 16th century, Europeans didn't. So the first time he's told to wash his smelly self off, Blackthorne reacts as if he's been told to jump into a volcano. Though it doesn't take him long to think better of the practice (especially when he gets to share the tub with Yoko Shimada).

Blackthorne never quite conquers the conjugation of "to be," but the o-furo is one cultural practice he has no problem accommodating himself to.

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Labels: history, japanese culture, shogun, social studies, television reviews

It's hardly "serious" fiction, but the miniseries Shogun takes Japanese history more seriously than most recent Hollywood productions. One exception is Martin Scorsese's Silence. Scorsese stuck closely to Shusaku Endo's book and hired BYU professor Van C. Gessel as a consultant.

Gessel discusses the experience in the lecture featured below (the audio quality is unfortunately poor).


Shogun is also based on a novel. James Clavell did his homework too. But nobody sells 15 million copies of anything conducting a graduate course on medieval Japanese history and anthropology. So Clavell methodically runs through a checklist of every "educated" stereotype on the subject.

And probably promulgated a few new ones. This isn't necessarily a bad thing. Stereotypes persist because of their utility. If 15 million people can be persuaded to read a 1152 page melodrama about Japan's Warring States period at the end of the 16th century, maybe they'll be game for more substantive fare.

But how does the miniseries otherwise hold up as a cinematic experience? Sure, it clunks rather loudly at times. But all things considered, better than I expected it would.

Shogun looks like a NHK historical drama from the early 1980s. That's a criticism and a compliment. It was shot at Hikone castle, Himeji castle, and at the legendary Toho, Shochiku, and Daiei-Kyoto Studios. It's nice to see real Japan in a movie about Japan.

The Last Samurai was shot in New Zealand, 47 Ronin was shot in Scotland and Hungary, and Silence was shot in Taiwan. This isn't all the fault of Hollywood. Japanese politicians haven't quite grasped the idea of local film commissions that recruit big budget film productions and cuts through the red tape on their behalf.

One advantage of building sets and shooting in places like New Zealand is not having to matte out the backgrounds. As Akira Kurosawa once noted, "Japan's penchant for power lines and retaining walls has left little unspoiled scenery for movie makers."

Shogun director Jerry London employed the same cheats as Masato Harada did shooting his 2017 historial epic, Sekigahara: high and low angles with tight fields-of-view (which is less annoying when the castle in the background is a real Japanese castle).

Shogun co-star Yoko Shimada wears too much makeup and the wigs aren't terribly convincing. Again, what you'd expect in a NHK drama from forty years ago. They've greatly improved in both departments since, though the chonmage (丁髷) is still a challenge.

The chonmage hairstyle lasted well into the 19th century. It's essentially a reverse Mohawk, hard to pull off without leaving a bump across the forehead. Issei Takahashi in Naotora wears one about as good as I've seen—except when viewed from the back.

But it's a costume drama, so—costumes. Richard Chamberlain wears a hakama quite nicely. But knowing a little more history (and being exposed to a lot more Japanese television) than I did back then, what first upset my suspension of disbelief was the casting of Ishido.

There's no arguing with Toshiro Mifune as Toranaga, nee Tokugawa Ieyasu, though sans the chonmage that in contemporaneous portraits Ieyasu is always depicted sporting. I suspect that Mifune, as well as Kaneko, simply didn't want to go through all the bother, the kind of thing an actor can get away with if he's a big enough star.

But casting Nobuo Kaneko as Ishido only made me grin. The problem is that Nobuo Kaneko resembles a Japanese Edward G. Robinson. Maybe they wanted to be obvious and have a heavy play the heavy.

Ishido's historical equivalent is Ishida Mitsunari, who led the Western armies against Ieyasu's Eastern forces.

Mitsunari was only forty-one at the Battle of Sekigahara. He was a capable administrator who single-highhandedly kept the regime viable as Hideyoshi turned into a paranoid Shakespearean villain, executing anybody who challenged his legitimacy or threatened the succession of his son and only heir.

Mitsunari made a lot of enemies as Hideyoshi's enforcer. He also lacked battlefield experience, not having fought in Hideyoshi's two pointless Korean campaigns. As a result, keeping his allies on the same page was like herding cats. Many simply disliked Ieyasu more than they disliked Mitsunari.

Ieyasu as well usually left the fighting to others. A wily politician and negotiator, he convinced (bribed and coerced) several of Mitsunari's generals to either sit out the fight or defect to his side. The cataclysmic battle was over in a single day, despite half of Ieyasu's army arriving a day late.

As one of history's great might-have-beens, Mitsunari has long been ensconced in the pantheon of Japan's heroic losers. As such, he is invariably played by a dashing young actor, like Shun Oguri's portrayal of Mitsunari in Tenchijin (also sporting a great chonmage).

In the run-up to the Battle of Sekigahara in 1600, Mitsunari and Ieyasu jostled for political control of the regency created by Hideyoshi before his death. Sort of a Japanese version of The West Wing circa 1599. Alas, that's not the kind of material to make an American miniseries about.

There not being enough time or budget to show the battle itself, we're simply told about the subsequent events. This is unfortunate, considering that Adams himself removed the cannon from his ship, accompanied them to Sekigahara, and commanded the battery. Ieyasu had many reasons to prize the man's company.

So in order to place our protagonist in constant peril, Shogun exaggerates the importance of the Jesuits and the Portuguese in the months before Sekigahara. They mostly operated in and around Nagasaki. These confrontations foreshadow the fate of Japan's Christian community and the disastrous war soon to engulf Europe.

And Blackthorne's verbal spats with Father Alvito (Damien Thomas, whose Japanese isn't as "native" as his backstory suggests but is nevertheless quite good) make for better drama than the melodramatically overwrought romantic interludes with Mariko (Yoko Shimada).


Mariko is far more interesting as a spot-on illustration of the highly syncretic nature of religion in Japan, which can seamlessly blend Buddhist practice and Christian belief without a second thought. In fact, this may be the most accurate reading of Japan's contemporary culture in the miniseries.

But speaking of melodramatic excesses, rumors of conspiracies to assassinate Ieyasu really were rife. Though they never materialized, the Machiavellian Ieyasu leveraged them to his own advantage. And so do writers of historical fiction, such as Keiichiro Ryu's Kagemusha Tokugawa Ieyasu.

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Labels: history, japanese culture, japanese tv, language, nhk, shogun, television reviews, translations

Two contemporary Sherlock Holmes adaptations are currently in production. A third installment of the James Bond steampunk interpretation with Robert Downey Jr. may be in the works. Reruns of the definitive Jeremy Brett version can be found on a local PBS station.

And Basil Rathbone, doing a blend of both the traditional and the sort-of mid-20th century contemporary thing, is all over Amazon, Netflix, and Hulu.

So it's not like the world has been clamoring for yet another Holmes and Watson police procedural with-a-twist. Instead, Fox went biographical and came up with Houdini & Doyle (with a fictional addition: Rebecca Liddiard as pioneering policewoman Adelaide Stratton).


That's right. The two men really did know each other. But this is less about Holmes and Watson than it is about that other recently resuscitated Fox crime-fighting duo, Mulder and Scully. Doyle wanted to believe—in the supernatural. His pal Houdini thought it was a big con.

Doyle (6'1") and Houdini (5'6").

The Fox series takes place at the turn of the 20th century in London. Doyle has killed off Sherlock Holmes at Reichenbach Falls (1893) and not yet resurrected him (1901). In the meantime, he's produced a monograph about the Boer War (published in 1900).

Marconi's upcoming 1901/1902 transatlantic radio transmissions are mentioned in the first episode.

To be sure, Houdini's career as a debunker of spiritualists took off in the 1920s, which led to an irreconcilable rift between the two men. That was after Doyle lost his first wife in 1906 and a son in 1918 (WWI). In 1900, his interest would have been more of an abstract curiosity.

Of course, Houdini immediately raises the same objections as have critics ever since. But as Kate points out,

Sherlock Holmes would not have found [his creator's] interest in spiritualism odd. Not a Sherlock of the nineteenth century anyway. Spiritualism—at least initially—was greeted by the scientific community as a possible scientific advance. If humans could create a telegraph that communicated around the world, why couldn't humans create a device that communicated beyond this world? Scientific American offered an award to the first person to prove the existence of the afterlife.

Modernity hasn't changed things all that much. Galileo is a contemporary police procedural similar to Numbers, though featuring a physicist instead of a mathematician. The "supernatural" events in episode 3 have exactly the same cause as in episode 1 of Houdini & Doyle.

And the bystanders in both, a century apart, react pretty much the same too. Observed G.K. Chesterton, "When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything." Like Mulder, we all want to believe.

So Doyle and Houdini started out in pursuit of the same goal. As Kate explains,

From the beginning, Conan Doyle was admittedly more optimistic and Houdini was miles more skeptical, but their mandate, at first, was the same: to uncover hoaxes and find the real thing. They split when Conan Doyle thought they had found the real thing and Houdini continued to maintain that all spiritualists were frauds and hucksters.

Setting the series well before the relationship crumbled allows their characters to approach the subject, as I've noted, in Mulder/Scully terms, with firm convictions but minds fairly open to change. It's a good way to go.

So far, the Doyle/Houdini/Stratton trio works well enough and doesn't unduly disturb the demands of verisimilitude. Stephen Mangan's Arthur Conan Doyle has his beliefs, a family, and a dying wife. Michael Weston's Harry Houdini, in contrast, has doubts and a brash American attitude.

There's not a whole lot of there there. However good he is at the attitude thing, he needs more material to work with, starting with more locked rooms to literally break into.

It appears he's being kept single to make room for a relationship with Rebecca Liddiard's Stratton, which may work as long as it doesn't get soapy. Miller and Liu deserve a lot of credit in Elementary for creating romantic tension without creating any demand for actual romance.

But when it comes to developing a secondary character arc, Martin Freeman's Watson on Sherlock sets the high watermark. He not only becomes more interesting as a person the more we learn about him, but becomes more interesting—and valuable—as Sherlock's partner.

Coincidentally, Michael Weston previously crossed paths with Sherlock Holmes on Elementary as a sociopathic addict trying to drag Sherlock back to his dissolute life. The question is whether they can make him that interesting again without making him that much of a human disaster.

In episode four (season 1) of Murdoch Mysteries, Doyle similarly pairs up with Detective Murdoch. But while Murdoch is an almost stoic empiricist, he is also (like Scully) Catholic, which lends a nuance, depth, and ambiguity to their debates that Houdini & Doyle has yet to achieve.


In story terms, once the convoluted backstories got pushed aside, I've found Miller's Sherlock in Elementary to be closer to canon, Cumberbatch's Sherlock being too Moriarty-centric, more wrapped up in grand conspiracies than cozy mysteries.

Only a puzzling secret in Houdini & Doyle so far, and that's enough. Making faith vs. doubt a weekly theme risks turning the series into a James Randi seminar. Forget the old artsy cliché of "taking chances." Shows like this more often need the courage to rely on the "simple and believable."

Labels: japanese tv, religion, technology, television reviews

I have a fondness for movies about the end of days like, well, End of Days. The world doesn't necessarily have to end. But the devil does have to shown up to get his due. Call the genre "Miltonesque" because, as they say, Milton gave the devil all the good lines in Paradise Lost.

These are often the smartest movies about religion, even when dancing right up to (and over) the edge of camp. It's one thing to posit "evil" as a mindless Manichean force like gravity or radiation. But if the devil is going to argue his case on screen and in person, he's going to have to make sense.


Pointing to performances by Ray Wise in Reaper, Peter Stormare in Constantine, and Al Pacino in The Devil's Advocate, I argue that what makes them such compelling devils is that "they're bad with reasons, motivations, and no apologies."

Much in the same way that the structure of the police procedural disciplines the storytelling, tackling the big philosophical questions in an accessible, story-driven manner disciplines the dialectic. And now to the above list we can add Welsh actor Tom Ellis as Lucifer Morningstar. Yes, that Lucifer.

The devil, you see, is on a sabbatical from hell, and has camped out at a posh nightclub in Los Angeles. There he meets Detective Chloe Decker (Lauren German), who is investigating the murder of one of his patrons. It doesn't take long for Lucifer to conclude that solving crimes is a simply brilliant way to pass the time here on Earth.

So now we have the eschatological police procedural.

Meanwhile, Mazikeen (Lesley-Ann Brandt), Lucifer's demonic chief-of-staff, and Amenadiel (D.B. Woodside), a bounty-hunting angel, form an uneasy partnership in order to get Lucifer back in Hell where he belongs. Lucifer is in no mood to comply, despite discovering that he's slowly becoming mortal, an alarming fact he treats with fascinated delight.

Lucifer hearkens back to Angel (before Whedon cluttered up the cast and the storylines) and the Spike-centric episodes of Buffy. It's also the theme of Hellsing. Alucard (that's Dracula spelled backwards) joins forces with Van Helsing largely because modern evil is so boring.

It should come as no surprise that Neil Gaiman, Sam Kieth, and Mike Dringenberg have creation and writing credits, from the characters they developed for the DC Comics series The Sandman. Gaiman knows his British apologists (C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, G.K. Chesterton, to start with), or maybe he just breathed it all in growing up.

The penultimate scene in the first episode has Lucifer getting his partner shot because he doesn't want her to kill the bad guy. This echoes the conclusion of Screwtape Letters, in which death is seen by the tormenting demons as a defeat for the devil.

As far as Gaiman's Lucifer is concerned, death is a cop-out. He wants the wicked to suffer. He wants the punishment to fit the crime in the most exacting terms imaginable. After all, he explains, he doesn't perch on your shoulder exhorting you to sin. That's all the work of human free will, not him.

And yet he gets all the blame. Well, then, the sinners deserve all the punishment.

The devil as the supreme legalist also hews nicely with Mormon theology, according to which God and the Devil differ not so much in ends as means. The real question is not salvation, but the cost to the soul. And the question on Lucifer's mind is the cost to his own.

Being that this is L.A. and no preacher will get anywhere near him, hopefully the answer will come from his shrink (Rachael Harris). With some backroom coaching from Amenadiel, the result in episode 6 is a counseling session worthy of the King Follet Discourse.

When he's not debating whether the unexamined life is worth living as an actual human being, Tom Ellis plays Lucifer as Ferris Bueller on his day off from Hades. The lovable rouge, the bad boy constantly surprising himself by doing the right thing.

He and Lauren German cook up the kind of chemistry we see between Jonny Lee Miller and Lucy Liu on Elementary, where the sparks can fly without the risk of veering into rom-com territory. When she calmly parries his seductive entreaties the first time they meet, he leans in and peevishly asks, "Did my father send you?"

There's a whole lot of theology packed into that question.

Woodside and Brandt's uneasy relationship mirrors that of the leads. They dominate the screen whenever they take over a scene. In particular, Woodside's commanding presence versus Ellis's devil-may-care attitude is a great illustration of opposites that are different sides of the same coin.

Lucifer is currently scheduled for a 13 episode run on Fox. At this point, the "morality" arc seems to be working its way towards an inexorable conclusion. While I expect Lucifer to get his wings back and not end up a literal fallen angel, I couldn't spell out how this is going to happen or what might come after that.

Even if nothing comes after that, Lucifer will still make a great one-and done, sporting a metaphysical heft too rarely seen in a prime time genre series.

Related posts

Christianity is cool
Constantine
Devil of a role
Hellsing
Lucifer (Fox NF)

Labels: anime, deep thoughts, eschatology, hellsing, miltonesque, movies, pop culture, religion, television reviews

A common criticism of the recent spat of Jobs biopics is that he is unfairly depicted as a nasty piece of work. Pirates of Silicon Valley is no exception. I can understand why: screenwriters and actors alike are drawn to the operatic drama of human conflict like rats to cheese.


But it gets awfully samey (sorry, Tolstoy). And at only 100 minutes long, watching Steve Jobs rant and rave (and Bill Gates drive a bulldozer) draws time and attention away from more interesting subjects.

I would have preferred less melodrama and more documentary. Though for that, there's always Robert Cringely's definitive account, Triumph of the Nerds. And more recently, Silicon Valley (the hardware side) and Something Ventured (the finance side).

In cinematic terms, Pirates of Silicon Valley looks like the made-for-TV movie it is. Even so, Noah Wyle as Steve Jobs, Joey Slotnick as Steve Wozniak, John DiMaggio as Steve Ballmer, and Anthony Michael Hall as Bill Gates handle the material quite well.

When playing off each other, Wyle and Hall do such a good job illustrating their wildly contrasting personalities that I wish they'd invented more scenes for them to be in together, out of whole cloth if necessary. Because the abstract moments in this movie are the best ones.

The narrative is occasionally interrupted by "interviews" with the main characters (the actors). In one scene, John DiMaggio as Steve Ballmer steps literally through the fourth wall to comment on the historical moment in which IBM allowed Microsoft to license DOS to anybody.

It was that agreement that would eventually hound IBM out of the PC business it created, not Apple.

DOS licensing begat Compaq and Dell and a thousand other makers of "beige box" IBM PC clones, which begat the Windows/Intel hardware standard, which was adopted by Linux and, ironies of ironies, even Apple. Which is why an iMac can dual-boot Windows.

Unfortunately, the rest of the movie doesn't follow the tone set by that scene. This docudrama about people thinking outside the box is pretty buttoned down. It needed more goofy moments illustrating creativity at play, rather than telling us how brilliantly eccentric everybody was.

Related posts

The accidental standard
The blind spot
Back to the digital future
Something Ventured

Labels: movie reviews, tech history, technology, television, television reviews

I have no interest in the whole zombie thing. Not in Night of the Living Dead or the numerous copycats. Not in The Walking Dead. Zero. (Well, I did like the Mythbusters "Zombie" episode.) In any event, I mostly eschew the horror genre except where there's a strong eschatological element.

So I wasn't planning on watching iZombie, the latest paranormal police procedural from The CW. But it happened to be on and I happened to have nothing else to do. Zero expectations.


And you know what? It's really good! I mean, hands down, the best new series of the year. (I wanted to like Backstrom, but the pilot was so clumsily executed that I haven't gone back for another look. Maybe it's gotten better.)

Rose McIver (previously Tinker Bell, of all characters) is an ER doctor infected with a "zombie" drug (conspiracies are at play, but we've wisely been told nothing about them so far). She transfers to the morgue, where she can blend in better with the non-living dead and eat the occasional brains.

The thing is, this brain-eating (don't worry, it's too comically aware of its inherent goofiness to be gross), occasionally gives her flashes of the victim's last memories, and sometimes temporarily imbues her with their personalities too.

Down in the morgue, Rahul Kohli plays her intrigued colleague (he keeps his London accent while McIver sheds her Auckland roots), who covers for her "eccentricities" while searching for a cure. That he would do this out of sheer scientific curiosity is totally believable.

Malcolm Goodwin takes up the Agent Booth role, utilizing her insights to catch the perpetrators. Her excuse is that she's a psychic; he doesn't care as long as they solve cases.

Rounding out the cast, her family and ex-fiance fret about her constantly, staging the occasional "intervention": they think she's going through a "goth" stage because of lingering PTSD from her traumatic exposure to the "drug" (explained in the media as a bad batch of recreational drugs).

Like I said, I smell an X-Files style conspiracy in the works, but as long as they keep the stories episodic and the conspiracies in the background, I'll go along for the ride.

The series originated as a comic book series and uses comic panels effectively at the start of each segment.

The pilot episode gets the mood just right: dark, to be sure, but never somber; silly when it's supposed to be without getting stupid; and it even works in some upbeat character development without turning saccharine. A bit of Quincy, a bit of Bones, a bit of Angel (including a Spike look-alike).

In my book, that's the right recipe to make a show worth watching. (You can see the first episode here.)

Labels: science fiction, television reviews

That's what Kate calls the character of Anne Shirley in Kevin Sullivan's Anne of Green Gables: The Continuing Story.

The CBC production of Anne of Green Gables (1985) follows the novel pretty closely. But for Anne of Green Gables: The Sequel (sometimes titled Anne of Avonlea) two years later, Sullivan combined material from the next three books (mostly Anne of Avonlea and Anne of Windy Poplars).

I thought it worked rather well (and dispensed with most of Anne of the Island, that I didn't much like).

The compressed timeline required significant changes. In Anne of Windy Poplars, Anne has graduated from college and is hired as the principal of Summerside High School. But Sullivan did a good job weaving the themes together and paying off--even improving upon--the major plot points.

For Anne of Green Gables: The Continuing Story (2000), Sullivan tried to do the same thing with the rest of the Anne series. The problem is, Anne's House of Dreams is a domestic melodrama and by Anne of Ingleside she has a passel of kids.

So instead he turned to the last three books in the series. Except the last three books are specifically about Anne's children.

I suspect as well that Megan Follows was already attached to the project. So Sullivan ended up with a mixed bag of story ideas written for an ensemble of younger characters, now played by a single person whose own character was by then completely out of sync with the original timeline.

The result, Kate points out, is a narrative mess, a scatterbrained script that jumps from one story idea to the next without paying off any of them, in the process turning Anne into

a sort of clean-living femme fatale. This week, she could end up with a German fighter pilot! Next week: the pool boy! A bucolic female James Bond.

Well, at least that means my idea hasn't been tried yet! There is more than enough good material in books four, five and six (Anne of Windy Poplars, Anne's House of Dreams, Anne of Ingleside) to create a contemporary television series. Hey, everybody's doing it with Sherlock Holmes.

I'm thinking of a lighthearted family melodrama about a GP and his wife returning to Prince Edward Island, where he sets up a family practice and she's an elementary school principal. Like the quirky Hampshire episodes in As Time Goes By, only featuring PEI as a major supporting character.

I can already imagine her kids suffering the twin tragedies of 1) ending up in a tourist trap in the middle of freaking nowhere (after living in, say, Toronto); 2) our mom's the principal! Aargh! And if you wanted to break a little fourth wall, 3) tourists can't stop observing that Anne look like, well, Anne.

Considering how popular Anne of Green Gables is in Japan, they could probably sign up NHK and the PEI Tourist Board as co-producers from the start.

Labels: anne, books, nhk, television reviews, thinking about writing

How old do you have to be to know what this group of actors has in common? Or even recognize them? And spot who is missing? Or remember when IBM made personal computers? (Click image to enlarge.)


The Personal System/2 from IBM was released in 1987. M*A*S*H premiered in the U.S. on 17 September 1972 and ended 28 February 1983. So the reference was already a bit dated, though reruns would have sustained the popularity of the series.

Maybe they thought having Harry Morgan (featured) with McLean Stevenson (not featured), and Wayne Rogers (featured) with Mike Farrell (not featured) would just be weird. Do actors hang around with the actors they replaced?

I can't remember Alan Alda doing much in the way of product endorsements and IBM probably didn't want to pay to persuade him. Ditto David Ogden Stiers, who does a lot of voice-overs for PBS. Alda was great on Scientific American Frontiers.

IBM exited the personal computer business in 2005 when it sold the division to Lenovo. That's the year I bought my ThinkPad. It still sported the IBM logo.

Labels: advertising, computers, tech history, technology, television reviews

To paraphrase Dirty Harry in Magnum Force: "An actor's got to know her limitations."

Ryoko Yonekura has carved out a niche playing tsundere characters: intelligent, competent, and indifferent to her own looks, presenting a brusque exterior to the world. Think Thirteen mindmelded with House.


Recent roles include a tax inspector, a SWAT negotiator, and a surgeon (currently scheduled for a second season), pretty much the same only different.

Though in 2012, she appeared in the Broadway production of Chicago. She's not just a pretty face, but she is picky about her medium of choice. She does a lot of television, some theater, but few feature films.

Actually, this is something I applaud. Actors who fit a particular character type and are comfortable playing it do much better in their roles than those who feel the incessant need to "act."

There are accomplished actors like Hugh Laurie who can so completely become a character that the brain struggles to connect them to previous roles (Bertie Wooster), and even to the real actor himself.

Ever since House, my initial reaction to seeing the Hugh Laurie on a talk show is: What's he speaking in a British accent for?

David Boreanaz isn't a "great actor," but he's more convincing being the latest version of a David Boreanaz character than, say, Meryl Streep, who's never anything but Meryl Streep pretending.

Kate points to Cary Grant as "the only actor I can think of, off the top of my head, who both utterly vanishes into his roles and who one never, ever ever ever ever forgets is Cary Grant."

I'm not a big Brad Pitt fan, but I believe he accomplishes this in Moneyball. Every now and then it occurred to me: Oh, yeah, that's Brad Pitt. And then I completely forgot who he was again.

Anyway, this year, Ryoko Yonekura goes back to high school in a series appropriately titled: The 35-Year-Old High School Student (Nippon Television).

"You gotta problem with that?"

This isn't Never Been Kissed. She's exactly what the title says. Except that, as with the House-like surgeon she plays in Doctor X, nobody knows who she is or what she's doing there.

It's a setup for an "issue" series: every episode deals with a "ripped from the headlines" issue about public education. From the flashbacks, Yonekura's character has (or had) every single one of those "issues" too.

This lends every episode a repetitive, "After School Special" vibe. And, frankly, if the only way you can deal with your mid-life crisis is by going back to high school, boy, are you ever screwed up.

The simmering pot of melodrama boils over in the two-part finale. A borderline sociopathic kid freaks out, the class bully gets his commupance (and repents), and everybody's issue gets resolved big time.

Think of all the angst and moralizing from all four seasons (so far) of Glee (minus the music and the comic relief) compressed into eleven episodes. That kind of thing.

But the writers can get away with it because, you know, it's Ryoko Yonekura. Honestly, I was impressed by how well she pulled it off. It takes real talent to sell such a preposterous premise.

Labels: crunchyroll, japanese tv reviews, television reviews

So I was reading Salvation of a Saint by Keigo Higashino. It's a mystery in the classic whodunit (or howdunit) style. I got to chapter nine and there was "Professor Yukawa." I stopped, looked again, and a light went on in my head.

"Oh," I said to myself, "this is Galileo!"

Galileo is a Japanese television series (Fuji TV) that's roughly a cross between Numbers and Bones, the only big difference being that the consulting detective is a physicist.

The series stars Masaharu Fukuyama as Professor Yukawa. Fukuyama made a name for himself as a pretty good pop singer.

He's a pretty good actor too. He played Sakamoto Ryoma in NHK's historical drama, Ryomaden (2010), and most recently starred in Hirokazu Koreeda's Like Father, Like Son (2013), which won the Jury Prize at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival.

The book doesn't introduce Professor Yukawa until chapter nine. In the second TV series (I didn't see the first until later), Kaoru Utsumi (Kou Shibasaki) is replaced by Misa Kishitani (Yuriko Yoshitaka), a character invented for the series.

A casting issue, no doubt, as the first and second series were made six years apart. Kaoru Utsumi only appears for about five minutes in the first episode, so I missed the connection. Professor Yukawa is far more prominent in the TV series.

(Incidentally, the first television series was broadcast in 2007 and Salvation of a Saint was published in 2008, which may explain why Detective Utsumi is listening to a Masaharu Fukuyama album on her iPod in chapter 24.)

As you can see, Fukuyama's Yukawa favors vests and tailored shirts while in the book he's often described wearing short sleeves or a T-shirt and maybe a leather jacket.


But once I made the connection, in a blink my brain automatically cross-linked all of the visual data from the television series to the book. It's a quite curious experience when that sort of thing happens in real time.

So now Masaharu Fukuyama is Professor Yukawa. He looks and talks that way, and his office is the television set. Even though they're not the same character, Yuriko Yoshitaka becomes Kaoru Utsumi because they essentially fill the same role.

Sort of the reverse thing happens if there are multiple data sources to choose from. When it comes to Sherlock Holmes, as soon as I'm done watching Robert Downey Jr. (whom I quite enjoy), Sherlock Holmes flips back to Jeremy Brett.

James Bond always reverts to Sean Connery.

Oh, and about that set. In Bones and Tokyo Broadcasting's Mr. Brain (the consulting detective is a neuroscientist), the sets are designed to look cool, not real. But Professor Yukawa's office looks like an honest-to-goodness applied physics lab.


As a bonus, now and then they do a real physics experiment or demonstration, such as racing a supercooled puck around a track.

Labels: book reviews, crunchyroll, japanese tv, personal favs, taiga drama, television reviews

On Weekend Edition Sunday (6/16/2013), Rachel Martin asked Joel Brenner, former senior counsel at the National Security Agency, what happens when the NSA "inadvertently discovers something suspicious" about an American citizen during its data mining activities.

Brenner answered that unless the information has foreign intelligence value, the analyst "forgets [he] ever saw it," the only exception being an "imminent threat to life or property," and he emphasized "a really imminent threat." Otherwise the intel is "discarded."

That is exactly the premise of Person of Interest. As Mr. Finch intones in the opening voice-over (written in 2011 by creator and producer Jonathan Nolan):

You are being watched. The government has a secret system, a machine that spies on you every hour of every day. I know because I built it. I designed the machine to detect acts of terror, but it sees everything: violent crimes involving ordinary people, people like you. Crimes the government considered irrelevant. They wouldn't act, so I decided I would.

In the real world, Mr. Finch's "Machine" would have to approach the size of the NSA's $1.5 billion, million square-foot Utah Data Center. And as it turns out, at the end of the 2012 season, we learned that the last known location of the "Machine" was on a train headed for Utah.


Though like Jane in Speaker for the Dead, it'd make more sense for the "Machine" to eventually infuse itself throughout the entire Internet, leaving its mainframe shell behind. Anybody who thinks they've found it will discover there's no longer any "there" there.

Hmm. So what does Jonathan Nolan know and when did he know it?

Labels: mainframe, person of interest, politics, robots, technology, television reviews

Continuing my ongoing rant from the last two weeks, the sad thing about Granite Flats is that the great idea at the core of the show could have been easily fixed in the scripting stage:

• Don't muddle up the plot lines. The kids want to find the UFO; Chief Sanders wants to exonerate Jenkins. Period.

 • Bring the JAG lawyer in from the start. Sure, make him young and inexperienced, but competent and eager. Learning that Sanders thinks Jenkins is innocent, he ropes in Sanders and charges ahead.

 • If the FBI guys really want to do everything on the sly, they can watch from a distance as the kids collect the pieces of the UFO for their school project. Because who would suspect a bunch of kids?

 • Make the pastor a retired army chaplain who figures out pretty quick what kind of mental state Jenkins is coming from and helps Sanders and the lawyer dig up what really happened in Korea.

 • They learn that Frank was at the scene of the motor pool explosion and have to get him detoxed from his Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test so he can remember what he saw and did.

 • Climax with a John Woo-style standoff when Chief Sanders and the FBI guys show up at the kids' clubhouse at the same time. That's when Sanders sees the scale model and everything clicks.

The story aside, I will say that Granite Flats is visually watchable. Digital cameras and editing suits have matured to the point that a competent cinematographer (Reed Smoot) can produce video indistinguishable from the standard Hollywood product.

The sets are good, the anachronisms not terribly distracting, the acting tolerable, though at times the actors communicate the opposite of what the script surely intended. But I blame that mostly on the lack of a competent and invested showrunner.

Meaning an producer with ultimate creative control of, and responsibility for, the story.

Granite Flats is the sum of bunch of parts. What makes Hollywood so good at consistently cranking out hundreds of scripted shows every season is a pool of showrunners who know how to knit the individual parts together into a cohesive narrative.

Oh, most of them I can't stand watching, but because of the substance of the stories, and less the structure of the stories themselves.

The substance was there to make Granite Flats great. Now with their first "scripted" show in the can, hopefully BYU-TV can stop patting themselves on the back long enough to realize how badly they screwed up the fundamentals of dramatic moral storytelling.

And get it right next time.

Related posts

Granite Flats
The negative aesthetic

Labels: granite flats, television reviews, thinking about writing

As Eric Samuelsen observes in his review, Granite Flats seems

defined by what's essentially a negative aesthetic. By insisting on creating an entertainment that doesn't have certain elements, they haven't really defined what they want to do instead.

One reason Granite Flats is a period piece set in the early 1960s, we're told in the "making of" segment, is because back then there wasn't all that nasty sex and swearing. But having donned heavy-duty blinders to shield us from such social misdemeanors, they left the barn doors wide open for a herd of felonies to stampede down Main Street.

There is a wholesome story buried in Granite Flats, about inventive kids working together to solve a puzzle using science and brain power.

But instead we're shown (repeatedly) that small town America is full of drunks, jerks, bullies, and thieves, everybody lies, the FBI can steal stuff from you without a warrant, the military can't be trusted (and certainly not when it comes to criminal due process), and the CIA wants to fry your brain. Not exactly "seeing the good in the world."

Even when it comes to "traditional family values," Granite Flats turns into a weird outlier.

Police Chief John Sanders is the only principal character with a "traditional" family. Arthur's dad is dead. Wallace's mother either divorced his dad or ran off (or both). Madeline's wackadoodle parents (a 1960's version of Sheldon and Amy from Big Bang Theory) both work and let her do whatever she wants so as not to "stifle her creativity."

These two characters could have been a lot of fun, but Madeline's parents present the same moral conundrum as the incompetent JAG lawyer previously mentioned: as hard as they are to take seriously, it's more difficult to see the point of the humor. Because in-between the sit-com moments, they engage in pointedly unethical behavior.

To give him credit, the pastor only lies once. Or twice. He's just ineffectual. He isn't married either, and I'd swear that in every scene with Beth, he's two seconds away from hitting on her.

I don't doubt that, aside from Jay Leno, Clint Eastwood, Roger L. Simon and a few others, Hollywood is a hotbed of knee-jerk liberalism. But the left-leaning plots you see on the screen are, more often than not, less a reflection of political bias than the need to feed television's insatiable story machine.

Putting "traditional values" under stress and holding them up for ridicule is the quickest, easiest (and the laziest) way to generate conflict and drama.

If BYU-TV can't script eight hours of television without resorting to malevolent government conspiracies, broken families, and milquetoast religious figures, how do they expect anybody outside the reddest state in the country to do so?

When they set out to make Granite Flats, BYU-TV clearly got caught up in the effect they'd imagined it'd have, how it was going to be Touched by an Angel redux, and didn't bother to nail down the script. Busy counting their eggs before they hatched, they forgot to turn on the incubator.

That rotten smell is the result.

Related posts

Granite Flats
Fixing Granite Flats

Labels: granite flats, religion, television reviews