The Leftovers 1.03: Two Boats and a Helicopter

I knew that the episode that finally introduced Matt Jameson would be a good one. And it really, really was.

The episode is called “Two Boats and a Helicopter,” which I’m assuming must be a reference to the age-old Christian joke. A man is on his porch during a flood and a woman comes by in a boat and offers him a spot. He says, “No, God will save me.” The water rises and he moves to the second level of his house and another boat comes by with several people in it, and they offer him the ride as well. “No, God will save me.” Finally, he has to move to the roof and a helicopter comes by and drops a ladder. He waves it away and says, “No, God will save me.” Suddenly a rush of water comes by and the man drowns. He goes to Heaven and sees God and says, “I believed you would save me! Why did you forsake me?” And God says, “I sent you two boats and a helicopter, what more did you want?!” This is an episode about looking for signs, and needing to know which ones to follow, and which to ignore, and most importantly, knowing when to help yourself.

Matt Jameson is the minister we’ve seen on a number of occasions handing out pamphlets about the bad people who disappeared during the Departure. We’ve seen him on street corners with people throwing things at him (“occupational hazard,” he says in this episode), and surprisingly, getting a hug from Nora Durst in the previous episode, despite us assuming she’d sock him in the nose.

In this episode we find out that his flock has weakened: during an impassioned sermon where he tells the story of a young boy who asked God for something wicked and then suffered the consequences, we see his congregation consists of eight people who don’t even seem to be paying attention. He’s deeply in debt, unable to pay the full-time caregiver who stays with his wife during the day, and he’s about the lose his church if he can’t come up with $135,000 within 24 hours. So he retrieves a couple of money rolls he has hidden, goes to a casino, and manages to gamble the money at the roulette table to turn it into $160,000. But... he doesn’t make it to the bank on time, and loses the church anyway.

It sounds like a pretty standard plotline, but the greatness of this episode lies in its details.

Why does his wife — Donna from The West Wing — need a caregiver? Because she’s in a catatonic state and needs round-the-clock care. After answering questions about “Mary” with a curt “she’s fine” all day long, we’re led to assume that whoever this Mary person is, she’s at home and depressed and he’s staying out all day as an escape. When he first returns home to find the caregiver sitting morosely on the couch, we think that’s her. But it’s not; that’s Roxanne, the caregiver who hasn’t been paid for three weeks and is pretty pissed off about it. When he does go to see Mary, who is, for all intents and purposes, a vegetable, we see him deal with her with so much love and tenderness that you forgive him everything else he’s done in the episode. So far we’ve seen people who lost loved ones during the Departure, as well as those who are left behind in depressed states. But what about those whose current state of illness rests entirely in the events of the Departure itself? Matt and Mary were driving down a road when the driver of a car coming towards them suddenly disappeared, and the driverless car just slammed right into them. If there were ever a case of shit happens, this is the epitome of it.

But then Matt, the Episcopalian preacher, is suddenly surrounded by people who believe the Departure was actually the Rapture (same letters, just rearranged). They believe that only the good and holy went up to Heaven, and it’s the bad ones who stayed behind. How could an Episcopalian minister be left behind? How could a minister’s wife? Did they do something bad? Who’s going to come to his sermons now that they think he’s a bad person who can’t be trusted; after all, he wasn’t taken up into the sky with the holy ones.

And that’s why Matt devotes his life now to trying to break down that misconception, reminding people that pedophiles, murderers, drug dealers, rapists, and generally awful people were among the innocent, that the Departure had nothing to do with God’s Plan, and instead is an unexplained incident. “If we can no longer separate the innocent from the guilty,” he says, “all our suffering is meaningless.”

He must convince people that what happened wasn’t the Rapture, because he can’t live in a world where he was one of the ones who’d been left behind.

This isn’t a man who’s lost his faith, though; to the contrary, he’s watching everywhere for signs, hoping that God will show him that he’s doing the right thing. He tells his meagre congregation the story of a 10-year-old boy who has all the attention until a baby sister comes along, so he prays to get the attention back. When he is stricken with cancer, he fights it and survives, and then must face the question: was he punished or rewarded?

We can’t answer this question, just like we can’t say why these people suddenly left. Matt can’t offer a suggestion as to where anyone went, but he believes that their Departure was a test, “not for what came before, but after,” as he tells Nora Durst, who turns out to be none other than his sister. “If it’s a test,” she replies, “then you’re failing it.”

He needs to hold onto the church, because he truly believes he can lure his flock back through his pamphleteering. He needs people to believe that what happened wasn’t the Rapture, so much so that he’s willing to hurt people to do so (including Nora, when he reveals to her that her husband had been having an affair). He doesn’t care that he’s alienated most people from himself, and doesn’t see that even if he were to convince them that the Rapture took the guilty along with the innocent, no one will come back to his church because he makes them think the worst of people.

He needs to believe he’s doing the right thing, but is thwarted wherever he believes he sees a sign. He asks his congregation to pray for eight-year-old Emily, who is in a coma in the hospital. When he goes to the hospital to see her, she’s gone; she’d revived and went home. His face lights up. “My congregation prayed for her this morning!” he excitedly tells the porter. “She woke up last night,” the porter replies, reminding him of the futility of everything he does.

When two pigeons get into a casino where he’s “conducting business,” he believes it’s a sign that he needs to go to that roulette table. And on his way back to the casino to do just that, he sees pigeons sitting on a traffic light that’s flashing red. And so he throws it all on red... and wins. And does it again, and again, until he’s up to $160,000. Does that mean it really was a sign from God?

No, because he first almost kills a man who tries to steal the money from him, and then the Guilty Remnants stage an attack so he’ll get laid up in the hospital for so long that he’ll miss the payment at the bank, and his church will be turned over to none other than them, a group he sought to help but who stabbed him in the back in return.

Is there a miracle in Matt’s future? Presumably if they cast Janel Moloney as his wife, they’re doing it because they need an actress in the part with some dramatic heft, and I doubt they’d cast her just to have her lying in a bed all the time. So perhaps his miracle really will come. He’s got $140,000 in his pocket (he returned the initial $20,000 to its container), after all.

The symbols throughout the episode weren’t just for Matt’s eyes; there were several in there for the viewers as well. Let’s do this old school, shall we?:

Did You Notice?

• The hymn numbers behind Matt during his sermon correspond to the following hymns in the Episcopalian hymnal: 518: Christ is the sure foundation; 656: Blest are the pure at heart; 602: Kneels at the feet of his friends; 376: Joyful, joyful, we adore thee. While the latter two are fairly common hymns in the Christian church, the first two seem to be directly related to the subject matter of the show.
•  Pigeons aren’t often mentioned in the bible, but when they are, it’s usually involving a sacrifice of some kind.
• Matt’s wife’s name is Mary, the same as the mother of Christ and Mary Magdelene. Just as Mary Magdelene washed the feet of Christ, in this episode we see Matt, who is set up as a flawed Christ figure, washing Mary.
• I didn’t mention the opening credits last week, which is when we saw them for the first time, but I wanted to mention them now because they are spectacular. Using Christian imagery, we see the Departure as many of those left behind see it: as some sort of act of God, ripping their loved ones from them. But the violence and agony of the painting begs the question: what sort of God would do this to people?
• Matt’s coma-induced dream is filled with imagery, from a church filled with people (many of whom are GRs, which is prescient indeed) to a murky-sounding singing as if they’re underwater, a suggestion that he’s being baptized, but into a new world that might not be a good one, to a place on fire where a little girl named Laura (a reference to Laurie?) asks why no one is doing anything, to him having sex with his wife before the accident, and her morphing into Laurie, which then causes his body to catch on fire. Did he have an affair with Laurie? Does he believe Mary’s accident is his fault and he’s going to hell?
• During that dream, when he first passes into the vestry, you see him sitting on a table and a doctor comes in and says, “I’m sorry, Matthew, but it’s spreading,” an indication to the audience that he, in fact, was the 10-year-old boy who overcame cancer after wishing he could have more attention, and we’re seeing an eerie flashback to his parents finding out the news.
• And just to link back to Ye Olde Lost days for a moment, did you notice that on the roulette table, the second number, which changed his 40,000 into 80,000 (before that became 160,000), was 23?

An excellent episode! What did you think?

The Leftovers 1.02: Penguin One, Us Zero

There was some discussion in the comments after last week’s episode of whether Damon Lindelof has no more originality in him and just keeps writing stories where mysterious things happen with no explanation, or whether Damon Lindelof is a humanist who explores how people react in dire situations, and I loved reading the back and forth from everyone, both positive and negative. As I always said with Lost and every show, the comments are a place for everyone.  

I’ll be perfectly honest: for four years, I’ve felt like an apologist for Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse, and I’m not. Sure, Lost had its flaws and faults, but for me, it was a fantastic show, and I adored that finale. Many people didn’t, but many people did, and I’m tired of people who cannot wait to meet me just to say, “That finale SUCKED” just to see if it’s going to get a rise out of me. It won’t. I enjoyed it; I don’t know why I have to apologize for having loved it, or why people feel it’s necessary to point out all the flaws as if they’re trying to take away this thing that I love. Trust me: I’ve studied every frame of that finale and wrote a 22,000-word piece on why it works: you’re not going to convince me otherwise.

Just a couple of weeks ago I was introduced to someone, only to discover that the only reason I was being introduced to her was because she thought the Lost finale sucked. Once I realized why she’d been told she needed to meet me, I was already standing in front of her and had no way to excuse myself from the conversation without looking rude, so I looked at her and joked, “Well, maybe give me 15 minutes and see if I can change your mind!”

“No, you won’t,” she replied, without a smile. “Because you would be wrong. Damon Lindelof is the devil.” And that’s when I just excused myself from the conversation, not really caring if it was polite or not. The devil? Really? Wow. No wonder the poor guy left Twitter; with fan thought processes that simplistic, I’m thinking he’s better off leaving social media altogether and actually doing something productive with his time.

I’m not an apologist for Lindelof; I simply love the way he thinks, and his constant examination of human nature — he does not believe we’re inherently evil, but inherently good, as he showed for six years on Lost. Despite comments to the contrary, I respectfully think he’s not presenting some overly Christian viewpoint, but quite the opposite, saying that our connections with each other are more important than our connections to some big bearded deity in the sky. As I’ve said for four years, he doesn’t write to the end game, but instead his writing reflects the lives we live. When you wake up tomorrow morning, are you going to know exactly how that day is going to end, and just live your day working to that ending? Or is it just possible that things might happen that you don’t see coming? At some point in your life has something mysterious happened that had no explanation whatsoever? Or can you explain away absolutely every single moment of your life and the lives of those around you?

I don’t know Lindelof personally, but I would bet that’s what he’s working towards: looking at things that happen to us on a daily basis and how we respond to the unexpected. In real life, it’s someone who cuts us off and then shouts obscenities out their car windows at us. What the hell is that guy’s problem, and isn’t he the one who just drove like a maniac? Shouldn’t I be shouting obscenities at him? It’s a mystery.

Now, would I write a show around that incident?

Of course not. Boring.

So to explore these ideas of human nature, Lindelof goes bigger: what would happen to a bunch of people trapped on an island with no explanation of how they got there or why? What would happen if 2% of the population just suddenly disappeared?

In both cases, these fantastical events are simply the catalysts that he uses as a metaphor to explore real-life responses to it. That guy who cut you off in traffic? In the big picture, a menial thing that you’ll never remember on your deathbed, but when it happens you think it’s the WORST THING EVER, you’ll tweet and Facebook about it, you’ll rant about it at work all day, and it’ll entirely affect everything.

And then something truly terrible happens in your life, and you forget every stupid thing you’ve complained about for the past year.

On Lost, those people were trapped on an island, but we identified with it because they responded and dealt with things just like people who are lost in their everyday lives, not tethered to anything in particular, questioning the decisions that got them this far, wondering why. In The Leftovers these people are reacting to people who literally disappeared, but we can watch it as an examination of people who suddenly lose someone with no explanation. Ever had someone break up with you without offering any valid explanation? Or a loved one die quite suddenly with no obvious medical problems? What does it feel like to be suddenly left alone? How could they do that to you? Why is this happening to you?

That is what this show is about. Lost was about the people who disappeared. The Leftovers is about the people who have been left behind by the people who disappeared.

Lindelof isn’t a writer who keeps writing the same material, but a man looking to explore all facets of human nature in its darkest, lowest moments. And that’s why I love what he does. I appreciate and respect comments to the contrary, and welcome them as long as they actually have something backing them. You want to point out that The Leftovers has a number of flaws, can drag at times, and frankly, is a little too damn dark and could use some humour? Hey, I’m right there with you. I wish there was some humour in this aside from joking about the celebrities who were taken, and that we could see a bit of a lighter side at times, but I’m willing to give him more time. I’m intrigued by Christopher Eccleston’s minister character, and the fact that, despite the girls understandably thinking she’s going to punch him in the nose, she gives him a hug on the way past him. What’s the story there?

So now, onto the second episode. We go from a gory and violent ambush against a man who might be a charlatan, might be the real deal, but generally surrounds himself with Asian girls while purporting to heal bigwigs with deep pockets. And Tom Garvey steps up to save Christine, the one girl Holy Wayne thinks is the most important above all the others. Tom becomes a killer in order to obey Wayne’s orders to protect Christine at all costs, making Wayne an even slipperier character. Who the hell is this guy? Can he be trusted at all? And why is Christine so damned important?

Meanwhile, Kevin is dealing with people thinking he just might be a dog-killing crackpot, and by the time the dog killer’s pickup truck shows up in Kevin’s driveway, I started to think he just might be one, too. But when Jill and her friend show up in the doorway and take the beer from the guy, and then Jill asks who he was, I was relieved. Thank goodness this wasn’t just a figment of Kevin’s imagination. Kevin is drawn to this guy because he acknowledges something that Kevin’s been feeling all along: that the world is no longer the place it once was, and that “these are not our dogs, not anymore.” Other people think Kevin’s going crazy, but this guy suggests Kevin might be the only sane one around. At least he’s not burning his brother’s clothes (and dentures) in the front yard.

One of the reasons people are waiting for Kevin to lose his shit is because his father (despite his protestations to the contrary) has already lost his. We see him in the mental institution — kissing Mayor Lucy — and he seems to be pretty together, until he begins talking to the voices around him. And when he does, he tells Kevin that they will try to contact him with a message. Earlier that day, Kevin put a bagel in the conveyer-belt toaster oven and it never came out, as if things just disappearing into thin air will just become a way of life. But when his father tells him this he decides he needs to go and find out if that bagel did, indeed, disappear. Maybe he’ll reach in and there will be a note from beyond? Or he’ll find a croissant? But no... it’s just a burnt bagel. I thought this moment was a bit of humour (which, I must say again: there NEEDS TO BE SOME HUMOUR IN THIS SHOW), in its rendering of Occam’s razor: sometimes the easiest explanation isn’t that the bagel got sucked up into some Holy Bagel Rapture, but that it goes stuck in the gears — like every friggin’ bagel I’ve ever stuck in one of those stupid conveyer-belt toaster ovens — and is burnt. From now on, Kevin, just use the damn push-down toaster.

Meanwhile, over at the GR house, we find Meg Abbott finding out the hard way that it’s not as easy as she thought it might be to become a Guilty Remnant, as she’s stuck in the Pledge House for weeks. Laurie is assigned to her and has her cutting wood and keeps taking her things, but she doesn’t seem to be getting to her. It’s only when she finally reveals that, like Meg, she was escaping a life that seemed to others to be ideal, that Meg finally realizes she’s not alone.

The saddest part of the episode (and the one that makes Aimee and Jill even more annoying than they’ve already been) is the section focusing on Nora Durst. The woman who lost her husband and two children on October 14th still drives around in the SUV with the little stick-people stickers on the back showing a happy million-dollar family, plays The Chipmunks CDs while she drives so her imaginary children will enjoy travelling in the car, and keeps a bag of jellybeans in the glove compartment as a treat for them. The girls cruelly follow her around after she purposefully pushes a coffee mug off a table in the café as if she gets off on people letting her get away with things out of pity, and they follow her to the house of an elderly couple looking to collect benefits for losing their son. She asks them questions that are hurtful, and they stop her after she asks if their son knew more than one language: “Charlie had Down’s Syndrome,” they tell her bluntly. She apologizes, and tells them that she has to continue asking. “To your knowledge,” she says, with a pained expression on her face, “Did your son have more than 20 sexual partners?”

Why does Nora do this job in particular? Is it a Norm Peterson thing, where the company figures others will allow her to ask these questions because she carries around even more pain than they do? Or is there some catharsis in it? By inflicting these questions on others, could she be perhaps alleviating some of her own suffering from having to answer them herself? Is it a form of group grieving? Or passive-aggression?

The title of the episode is “Penguin One, Us Zero,” and it refers to the blow-up penguin in the psychiatrist’s office. He tells Kevin that he uses it for his children’s therapy sessions when they need to work out aggression. Everyone in this episode is working out some sort of aggression in one way or the other, whether it’s shooting dogs, stealing jellybeans, knocking mugs off tables, chopping wood, or slaughtering the people at Wayne’s compound. But no matter how much aggression they take out on others, it’s not removing any of their own pain. That penguin just keeps popping right back up again, but everyone else is unable to move much of the time. “She’s gone,” Patti writes on her paper at the end of the episode, and she’s wrong: Meg isn’t gone, but has chosen to stay with the cult. However, she’s chosen to leave the real world and join a world of silence and chain smoking. Not exactly a penguin who bounces back from the blows that come at her.

Once again Max Richter’s music is ace. However, it would be nice to hear some original music from Richter: hearing music that I know really well playing throughout every scene is becoming a distraction for me. (However, I was thrilled to hear Ty Segall’s “Thank God for the Sinners” playing on the radio in the twins’ Prius.)

While I’m happy to be back in the world of Damon Lindelof, I can understand and appreciate the skeptics out there who feel like they were burned once, and just want to disappear like Kevin’s bagel. And it’s for that reason that, despite enjoying these first two episodes, I do hope the pace picks up soon, and we find some humour embedded in there very soon, or else Lindelof’s audience might just disappear in the same fashion as that 2%.

But then again, one of those departed was Balki Bartokomous. And I remember that while Lost was good in the beginning, it didn’t become stunning until the fourth episode. So I’m actually quite happy knowing that I’ll be one of the leftovers still watching, no matter what.

The Leftovers: 1.01 "Pilot"

"The pope, I get the pope. But Gary fuckin' Busey? How did he make the cut?!"

It boasts the same executive producers as Lost and Friday Night Lights. You must have known I was going to write about this puppy. (Spoilers ahead for the pilot episode.)

The Leftovers is based on a novel by Tom Perotta (who also wrote Little Children, a similarly unhappy book) about a world event where 2% of the population (140 million people) just suddenly disappears, leaving the other 98% behind. Bewildered, overwhelmed, and questioning everything they ever knew, those who are left behind can't mourn their loved ones because they don't know what the hell just happened to them. The Religion vs. Science debate heats up, and people become embroiled in arguments and fights over what really happened on October 14th. 

Of course, the most obvious response is that it was The Rapture, that God chose his most beloved people to rise up into Heaven, leaving the rest behind. This, of course, wouldn't explain why there are so many questionable people who disappeared, or babies and children who were left behind. But it doesn't stop people from suggesting that was it. 

And the ones who are left behind are obviously the point of this story. Recently my aunt was telling me how every year she would put a notice in the paper memorializing my grandmother on the day she died. After a few years of doing this, her husband gently said to her, "You know, your mom can't see you doing this." And she said, "It's not for her. It's for those of us left behind." Funerals are never for the ones who are deceased, nor are the grave sites and tombstones: they're for the rest of us, those who have to go on living without those people, giving us something solid and concrete to remember them by. 

And after whatever the hell it was that took those people on October 14, it left behind people who are confused and broken, and don't know how to go on. This isn't a universe like in Brian K. Vaughan's brilliant graphic novel series Y: The Last Man, where every man but one dies, with planes falling out of the skies, governments toppling, and armies becoming obsolete. Or like the one in Flashforward, where everyone sleeps for two minutes and once again planes fall out of the sky and cars crash and trains derail and many people die. Or the one in Revolution, where the electricity suddenly shuts down and planes fall out of the sky (Christ, I never realized how many apocalypses begin with planes crashing down) and the world goes dark and many people die. This is a relatively small percentage of the population, and there's no real answer as to why. 

But we're human beings: asking why is the key to our existence, and what sets us apart from the animals. Without that question, we don't seem to have any motivation to go forward. And this opening episode of the series is a perfect illustration of what the world would look like if random people just suddenly... disappeared. The main focus is the Garvey family, revealed to us beautifully one by one as actually being connected, right to the very last (and most shocking) one of all. This is a family where the mother disappeared, where the father became police chief after his own father — the former police chief — lost his mind. Where the son is working for some sort of therapist/mystic named Wayne who brings people peace, and "unburdens" them for serious wads of cash. Where the daughter is in such deep emotional pain she barely talks, is going through normal adolescent heartbreak, but must do so with the added burden of a mother who isn't there. Where the mother... didn't actually disappear, but is a member of a strange cult of smokers who dress in nothing but white clothes, and don't speak, but believe that smoking proclaims their faith, and that anyone who is talking about the Disappearance, theorizing about it, or continuing to breathe clean air is simply wasting their breath. (OK, their "platform" isn't exactly clear, but presumably will become so in the coming episodes.) We see how hard it is to just go on when you don't have any answers, when the entire world has changed around you, when religious nuts are running rampant, and when the Ninth Doctor turns out NOT to be a Gallifreyan time traveller but an American reverend who has abandoned his religion and spends his time trying to convince people this is NOT the Rapture, people, listen up! 

The episode opens beautifully, with a harried mom at a laundromat trying to do a million things at once as her baby screams and screams, but she's multitasking and giving instructions over the phone and getting her laundry done and absolutely nothing is going right, and then... poof, her baby is gone. We don't see him disappear (did he just pop out of existence? float up into the air? disappear slowly?) and that's far more effective than if the writers had chosen to give us one scenario. Instead we only see the aftermath: a crying child whose father has disappeared, a car crashing because the driver is presumably no longer driving, and a mother distraught that the child she was too busy to comfort is suddenly gone. The opening scene comes full circle when Kevin Garvey, getting drunk at the bar, runs into the woman from the laundromat, who is similarly drinking her own problems away. 

Garvey tries to get his wife Laurie to come home, but she's entrenched in the new group. Liv Tyler's character, Meg, can't smile even though she's planning a wedding, and we wonder who she lost. Was it a husband? A previous fiancé? We get one very quick, brief flashback to what Kevin Garvey was doing at the moment of the Disappearance, and it's clear he was having an affair of some kind. At the "Heroes Day" gathering, a woman named Norah Durst gets up to talk about how she lost both children and a husband. Not only is she alone, but she still believes they're out there somewhere, and she tries with some difficulty to refer to them in the present tense. But she also has to deal with the looks she gets every day: if it was the Rapture, they seem to be thinking, then why did the rest of your family go but not you? 

This seems to be haunting those who are left behind more than anything. It's a new world where, as the dog killer at the end says, things are no longer the same. "They are not our dogs, not anymore," he tells Chief Garvey, and he could just as easily be referring to everyone. They are not the same, they've been changed by this. Kevin has nightmares of killing a deer, and seems to see the deer everywhere he goes. A stag would typically represent peace, stability, love, and gentleness, and all those things are gone, ripped apart by the Disappearance that just took 140 million people away like a pack of wild dogs. 

This is a show written by Damon Lindelof (Lost) and directed by Peter Berg (Friday Night Lights) and the influence of the two shows can be spotted throughout:
*Congressman Whitten, who goes to see Wayne to become unburdened, is Buddy Garrity
*the security guy who meets the truck is Peter Berg himself, who always makes a cameo in his shows
*Tom asks Whitten, "So you're from Texas, huh?" and Whitten says, "How did you know?" like a little in-joke to FNL fans.
*there are clearly Daddy Issues going on throughout the show, whether it's Kevin dealing with his own father or Tom dealing with Kevin.
*Tom is seen reading Albert Camus's The Stranger, which, if I were writing a book on this show, I'd know what one of the chapters was going to be
*the flashbacks are quick, but Lindelof specializes in showing how the present has been shaped by the past, and that is one of the cornerstones of this series
*the constant science vs. faith arguments
*the biblical Easter eggs (when Kevin is flipping the radio you hear someone proclaim "Corinthians 15!!" which is the chapter in the Bible in which Christ's resurrection is retold by Paul)

And of course, there are the trademark Lindelof questions here:
*what exactly is the cult in white supposed to represent, how did they form, and what do they hope to achieve? why cigarettes?!
*why does Tom have slash marks on his back?
*why did Laurie leave her family behind?
*what is up with Wayne? Why does he have a bunch of bikini-clad Asian women hanging around his pool? What does he do in the room to "unburden" people?
*what was happening in everyone's life before the Disappearance?
*what the hell happened on October 14th?

I wasn't sure what I thought of the show at the halfway point, but by the end I was really enjoying it. From the super-scary sculpture in the park to the fact that in a crisis, we tend to divide and argue rather than connect and heal, the tone of the pilot episode was almost pitch-perfect, introducing us to a dark world that looks like our own, but with even more grief and heartbreak. And the music, by one of my absolute favourite musicians Max Richter (the piano music playing throughout much of it is from his sublime record The Blue Notebooks, which I highly recommend and probably listen to three times a week), sets an atmosphere and tone much like Michael Giacchino did on Lost and Explosions in the Sky did on Friday Night Lights.

So, at least for the first episode, I'm hooked. Are you? 

Tonight... on HBO

Tonight two shows premiere on HBO: one a brand new anthology series, the other a much-anticipated return.

True Detective is the hotly tipped new series that stars Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey. It's always a huge deal when movie actors appear on TV shows, even if, in the case of Harrelson, TV is where they got their start. And in the case of True Detective, the hype is entirely deserved. The story is about two detectives, Rust (McConaughey) and Martin (Harrelson) are being interviewed about a case that happened in 1995. Part of the story is set in the present, with the two men being interviewed separately, but the majority of it is set in 1995, where Harrelson and McConaughey are not only playing characters 18 years younger, but doing so believably. Now they're cynical and either part of the system or fighting against it; back then they were thrown together despite kinda hating each other, and that becomes the central story. The actual rape and murder of a young woman found in a weird ritualistic pose right out of Hannibal is secondary to the relationship between these two men — who they were before they met, who they are now that they're together, how they cope with one another... and the mystery that the viewer is forced to ask in every episode: what drove them apart, and what happened during the investigation?

I don't want to say much more than that other than to say this show has smart, witty writing, tour de force performances from Harrelson and McConaughey, and a gripping story of a murder investigation conducted by two polar opposites. This is an anthology series, which means at the end of this season this story will be over and we'll move on to a new cast, new case, new setting. Here's hoping next season can capture some of the magic that this season will.

And in the other corner is Girls. I loved the first season, despite not always liking the characters. By the second season, I kind of despised the characters, due to the fact that none of them has a single redeeming quality. There's Jessa, the self-involved artiste who never thinks of the consequences of her ridiculously selfish actions; Shoshana, the funny one who is almost too silly, incredibly annoying, and often clueless; Marnie, the wince-inducing girl who makes her own bed and then whines about having to lie in it; and at the centre of it all, Hanna, the little girl who refuses to grow up, waltzing around in her little girl clothes and not having one shred of sympathy for any of the troubles going on around her. She's the person who no one would be surprised to hear utter the words, "I'm so sorry about your mother's death, but can we bring this back around to my e-book now?"

And yet... I couldn't stop watching. I hated them — HATED THEM — and if the entire foursome were hit by a city bus, I'd just shrug and think oh well, and hope we could see more of Adam and the other guys, who are far more sympathetic and entertaining. And yet... they make me laugh, and I feel their pain, and they all have human moments, and I think Lena Dunham is a freakin' genius. Do I think she and Hanna are the same? Absolutely not; I think she's purposely created a despicable character because they're so much more fun to explore. Nice girls are boring. I will admit the sudden season 2 introduction of, "Oh look, Hanna has some weird OCD problem and has to be medicated and has a weird neck tic she's never had before and OHMYGOD DID SHE JUST SHOVE A Q-TIP ALL THE WAY IN HER EAR?! (More horrifying to me than anything on The Walking Dead, by the way) seemed completely out of left field, as if Dunham thought that maybe she'd made Hanna SO despicable people would stop watching, so she had to create a problem out of Hanna's hands to try to explain why she seems so incapable of empathy.

And yet... Dunham makes it work. In season 3 the girls are all back together, sort of broken, Hanna is back on her meds, and everything seems like it just might have a whiff of normal until Adam's crazy sister shows up, and then the rollercoaster begins all over again. And in every episode, we see Hanna's tits, and Adam is part sociopath and part puppy dog, and Marnie sings and you are loudly begging her to please stop oh please stop you are embarrassing yourself, and Shoshana talks so fast you think the actress might be some remarkable robot fashioned by her real-life father (David Mamet), who clearly brought her up to perfect the metronome style way of chatter he forces his actors to adopt, and Jessa does something to piss someone off... and you can't wait for the next episode.

Check them out, and let me know what you think!

Girls on HBO: Not a SATC Rehash

Trying to decide if you should watch HBO’s new comedy series, Girls? Worried it’s going to be too much of a Sex and the City ripoff? Well, worry no more. While a knowledge of Sex and the City is almost a necessary precursor to fully understand the subtle humour in this show, Girls is a very different series.

Starring series creator and writer Lena Dunham in the lead role of Hannah, it’s about four women who have come to NYC to find the awesome that they had watched on Sex and the City, and instead find it’s a really expensive place with not as much to offer for four regular girls who don’t look like (or have the seemingly bottomless income of) Carrie, Samantha, Miranda, and Charlotte.

The opening moments of the show give it a Rushmore feel – that awkward dinner conversation where one’s life changes completely. From there Hannah, who thought she had the world in her hands with her free internship as a copy editor, her tiny apartment she can barely afford, and her occasional hook-up with her fuck-buddy (you simply cannot call him a boyfriend), suddenly has to find a real job and wake up to not being carried by her parents any longer. After 25 years, they’ve decided it really is time for her to be independent.

The best way to describe the dialogue on the show is Michael Cera–like. Dunham is wonderful in the lead role, and talks with the unfinished sentences hanging in the air like Cera is known to do. “I thought we were going out tonight but now I see you have other plans, so…” Zosia Mamet, who plays Peggy’s friend Joyce on Mad Men (where I often think her dialogue falls really flat because they just don’t give her the right lines), is awkward and lovable in this show as the girl who rarely stops talking, wants everyone to be her friend, and is pretending to be someone far more experienced than she is. She is the one who brings up Sex and the City most overtly with an onrunning monologue about which character she most identifies with.

Allison Williams plays Hannah’s roommate, the pretty girl who’s tired of her well-meaning, good-looking, but tres boring boyfriend. Jemima Kirke rounds out the girls as Jessa, the Brit expat who is cool because she’s a Brit, who has experienced more than the other girls, but it hasn’t exactly made her a better person. In fact, as we quickly discover, it’s created some serious problems for her.

Girls is produced by Judd Apatow (whose last outing on TV was the amazing Freaks and Geeks) and arose from Lena Dunham’s indie film, Tiny Furniture (for which she won best first screenplay at the Independent Spirit Awards). It has a very rep feel to it, and the actors on the show feel fresh and inexperienced, exactly the way they should. This show does not have the polish of Sex and the City, and often feels as uncomfortable as a Ricky Gervais show, but because of both of these things, it feels unique and new, not something recycled. I worry that many people will avoid this show thinking it’s some sort of Sex and the City retread, when in fact, this show is very much its own, and while it doesn’t try to be the voice of a generation, it’s certainly a voice… of… some generation.

Girls debuts tonight on HBO Canada at 10:30.

HBO's Luck

If, like me, you're not going to be watching the Super Bowl tonight (I can't even watch it for the commercials, since in Canada they pre-empt the American cool ones with Canadian boring ones) I'd like to recommend HBO's new series, Luck. It just started last week, and I know many of you are watching it already, but if not, it's worth changing the channel for.

The series, created by Deadwood creator David Milch and directed by the always amazing Michael Mann, follows three key storylines. In the main one, Chester Bernstein (played by Dustin Hoffman in his first TV role), a mobbed-up gambler, money launderer, casino operator (name that money-based crime, he's probably done it), has just gotten out of prison, and with the only person he trusts, his chauffeur Gus (Dennis Farina), he puts together a new scheme involving the Santa Anita racetrack. Using Gus as his frontman, he buys a horse from a trainer, Turo Escalante, and thus begins their entry into this world.

Meanwhile, Nick Nolte, in the most poignant story, plays Walter Smith, a sad trainer who's been around the block many times, trying to trap lightning in a bottle one last time with a young horse whose father Nolte had trained, loved, and lost.

And on the frontlines of the races are four guys, led by Kevin Dunn, who have scored HUGE and are now trying to find a way to circumvent the IRS while finding an even bigger payday (of these, my favourite character is Renzo, played wonderfully by Richie Coster). On the edges of these stories you have the stuttering Joey Rathburn, played by Richard Kind (who I still think of as the lame grasshopper in Bug's Life), an agent for the jockeys, and one of those jockeys, Rosie (Kerry Condon), trying to convince the trainers to use her full time.

As is typical of any David Milch show, the dialogue can be complicated and very long. Don't pick up a magazine or check the internet during an episode or you'll be lost in about two minutes. There are times where the dialogue felt a little wooden and stilted, but necessary, such as when Dustin Hoffman relates, in a long monologue, exactly why he went to prison in the first place, to his friend Gus, who knows EXACTLY why he went to prison. But the audience needed to know, and Milch uses this scene as shorthand to convey to us some background. Often (and occasionally unfortunately), Milch never subscribed to the "Show, don't tell" theory of writing.

Also, unless you know something about horse-racing, there are details in here that can be a little over the average viewer's head. In the first episode, the foursome at the races attempt a gambling strategy that made no sense to me, and partway through the episode my husband and I were looking at each other, saying, "Uh... are you following this?" In the second episode, the plot revolves around a tournament that I didn't understand, either. BUT... in both cases, about 2/3 of the way through the episode, one of the characters finally explains what is happening. Milch clearly realized that his audience wouldn't necessarily know about horse-racing, so he provides the explanations through his characters (usually one person acts as the spokesperson for the audience, saying they don't understand what's happening, and another explains).

The acting, which comes as no surprise, is stellar. The actual horse races will have you on the edge of your seats, and the edits between the closeups of the jockeys and the faraway shots is so seamless I was convinced Kerry Condon had been trained as an actual jockey, before I read an article about her real-life award-winning jockey stand-in. As with most HBO series, the first couple of episodes contain a lot of set-up. It's hard to name a single HBO series that had such an amazing pilot I was hooked from the first episode. But, as with most HBO series, once you get past that first or second episode, what remains is a stunning series that only HBO has proven to deliver for so many years. What other series could pull a cast like this together... for television? Luck is proof that television has finally surpassed movies as being the superior form of storytelling.

Luck airs on HBO and HBO Canada at 9 p.m. on Sunday nights.

Big Love Finale: Saying Goodbye to the Sister Wives

Tonight HBO’s wonderful, complicated – and, at times, just plain loony – five-year series Big Love comes to an end. It’s the story of Bill Henrickson and his three sister-wives: Barbara, his first wife and mother of his three eldest children; Nikki, the second wife who was brought up on a strict polygamous culture and is the mother of his two blond-headed boys; and Margene, the young, wide-eyed girl who loves Bill unconditionally and who is the mom of his three youngest. (Warning: Spoilers for all five seasons are ahead...)

When the show began, everything seemed peachy for the Henrickson family. He had three neighbouring houses – one for each wife – and a monthly schedule where he would spend certain evenings with each wife. This was worked out by Barbara, taking various “womanly” things into consideration, and when the series opened we saw that Bill was taking Viagra just to keep up his stamina. As a female, married viewer, I immediately identified with Barbara, as many women who watch this show probably do. She married Bill first (when there were no plans for a polygamist family) and is the only one of the women who knows what it’s like to be his one and only. But then Barbara got sick, and he brought Nikki, a girl from the insane Juniper Creek compound where Bill grew up, to help nurse her through her cancer. Barbara, worried that she might die, talked it over with Bill and agreed that he should marry Nikki, so she could be his life partner, provide him with children, and help ensure his place in the “celestial kingdom.” But then Barbara got better, and now realized she had to share her husband with someone else. And then Margene came along, and Barbara once again encouraged Bill to marry her (we find out this season that she actually felt lonely with Nikki and wanted a woman around who she could talk to). And now with two other women sharing his affections and giving Bill children when Barbara no longer could, Barbara began to wonder if this really was the best thing for her.

Women first coming to the show will probably come at it with the same preconception: How could any woman DO this? How could you share your husband with another woman? How is it fair that he gets to sleep with other women and call it a “religious right,” but if you dared have an affair, it would be nothing more than a tawdry affair? How do these women live with the gender imbalance that exists in their lives? But then, as the first season went on, while these questions still bubbled below the surface, one couldn’t help but start to see things their way. All of these women always have other women to turn to, women who have their best interests in mind and who aren’t jostling for any position (well, except maybe for Nikki). They help each other with the laundry and with the housekeeping. They share groceries and menu-planning and cooking duties. They not only get help raising their own children, but they get the pleasure of helping raise new little ones constantly.

But this was an idealized notion of polygamy. When we traveled to Juniper Creek, we saw a different reality: where the women all dress in identical confining giant Laura Ingalls dresses; where the men use them for sex and baby-making but show them no love or affection otherwise; where they don’t confide in each other, but keep secrets, worried that any confidence will be used against them. Throughout the five seasons we’ve watched Bill’s family slowly come under scrutiny in the public eye, while the Grants at Juniper Creek fight for who will be the “prophet” (once again drawing in Bill, since Nikki is the daughter of one prophet and the sister of the other). We’ve been introduced to the creepy and crazy Greens, and saw Bill decide to shine a spotlight on polygamy and try to legitimize it in the public eye at what could be one of the worst cases of timing in history. At the end of last season, which was just rather psychotic (I’d like to pretend it didn’t happen in many ways), I said to my husband, “So... next season will they all get on a spaceship and move to outer space and hook up with some alien sister wives??” This shift in mood in S4 was signalled by changing the opening credits from this wonderful vision of the women skating with Bill to the sounds of the Beach Boys’ “God Only Knows” to a more ethereal song called “Home” by The Engineers while we watch images of them all falling through the sky in sexy poses in slow-motion. I love the song, hate the context of it, and long for that old opening (which, with the cracking ice, perfectly sums up this season).

The show is always at its best when it focuses on the personal issues of the family. Nikki’s overspending and secret ingestion of birth control pills while pretending to try to get pregnant. Margene’s dreams to be something more, getting a job at a QVC-type of TV show and harbouring a guilt-inducing crush on Bill’s eldest son, who is closer to her age than Bill is. Barbara’s inner struggle with the changing family and her desire to hold the priesthood, just like any man would.

And the reason season 5 has been SO good is because, aside from Bill’s foray into politics, it’s focused more on the family, which is what made it so good in the first place. All three women have been thrust into the spotlight when Bill outs them as polygamists at the end of season 4. Now Margene has lost her TV advertising job and is lost. That’s before it finally comes out that she lied about her age when she married Bill, and his “marrying” her and having children with her legally constitutes statutory rape (with Barbara as the accomplice). Yikes. Meanwhile, Bill refuses to recognize that any woman is capable of holding the priesthood, undermining Barbara’s desires. Nikki’s daughter (whom she had when she was really young and betrothed to this guy at Juniper Creek when she was in the Joybooks as a child, a guy who played Juliet’s husband on Lost and who ends up marrying Nikki’s mother and making her his latest sister-wife before trying to impregnate both Nikki and her mom through in vitro before they both fight back and burn down his clinic with he and his evil other sister-wife inside... no, really...) has come back to live with her, but because Nikki isn’t legally married to Bill, Bill can’t adopt the girl as his own. So he DIVORCES Barbara and marries Nikki. It was a whopper of a storyline this season, and brought our sympathies and affections back to the person with whom they originated: Barbara.

Now, as we enter the season finale, Barbara has some decisions to make. Bill’s about to go away for a long time if the statutory rape thing goes through. Nikki is legally married to Bill and is the only woman who can see him for conjugal visits. Barbara is trying to find herself – she’s begun drinking casually (something Mormons do not tolerate), she’s visiting her old church again, she’s continuing to vie for the priesthood, and she’s refusing to visit Bill’s new church. Nikki is happily at Bill’s side no matter what, and has gotten her wish at being his real wife, something she rubs in Barbara’s face every chance she gets. (Nikki is played beautifully by Chloe Sevigny, who manages to make you despise her for half the episode, and love her for the other half. Every. Time.) And then there’s Margene, who’s suddenly realized she’s in her early 20s and now won’t have a husband in her bed for 20 years. She’s got three children, but she’s worried that her sister-wives will resent her, because it’s her lie that will put Bill away to begin with.

So what will happen to them? It’ll be interesting if the family ends up entirely broken by the end of it. Part of me wonders if Bill will end up with only Nikki and her family, and Barbara will finally venture out on her own, which I would love to see. That leaves Margene on her own, but something tells me that no matter what she said about her age, Barbara won’t abandon Margene. Perhaps they’ll decide to stay together, as sister-wives without the intrusive husband. Now THAT would be an interesting step in a new direction.

Big Love airs tonight on HBO and HBO Canada at 9pm.