Serial Killings

In the good old days of three-network, limited-choice TV, when the season ended for an ongoing series, there was little thought of writing the final episode on a cliffhanger. But now it is de rigeur. I guess we can blame the Crosby girl who shot JR, which led to the terrorists on "Dynasty" who staged the amusing Moldavian massacre, which left the entire cast with pretty blood spots on their cheeks. All of this was satirized in a season-closer of "The Simpsons" in which Mr. Burns got plugged. (Interestingly, I was hosting the exec producers of that show in a summer TV-writing course, when one of the students horrified my guests by revealing his knowledge that Maggie was the culprit).

I suppose the plethora of viewing choices leaves contemporary execs nervous about sustaining their audiences; hence the now requisite plot or emotional suspense twist over which viewers are supposed to fret for the summer months. Silly, but we're not talking highbrow culture now. Personally I wouldn't mind a bit of closure for a change, but 'tis not to be. The serialization of episodic TV is now a fact of life, as much as the third-place finish of every superior "Survivor" candidate and the appalling choices for "American Idol." Some of my preferred programs ended their seasons with a nice combination of both; others were maddeningly elusive.

"24" completed its best season with the most satisfying developments. The show backed away from its histrionic violence this year, and produced some terrific characters, though most of them were in the Presidential subplot--the marvelously mad Martha Logan, her Nixonian asshole husband Charles, and faithful agent Aaron, who managed, amazingly, to survive the normal character purge that wiped out Palmer, Michelle, Tony and Edgar. Logan's perfidy was finally exposed, and he was taken away by the Feds, but my bet is that he is too deliciously slimy a villain to be exiled. Look for him to weasel his way out of his conviction, either thanks to all-powerful Paul McCrane or a pardon from Vice President Ray Wise, who (as we couch potatoes remember well) killed Laura Palmer. And we can't lose Martha! The show did a nice parody on itself in the segment when Martha seduced Charles in order to stall his departure. That occurred at 5:59. Commercial. By 6:01 the President was putting on his tie again. As usual, though, Jack was able to dispose of the two major bad guys with remarkable ease after failing for 23 hours to make a dent in their fiendish plots. His ultimate kidnapping to end the day was totally appropriate, as the Elephant in the Room for the entire year was what the Chinese would think when they heard their nemesis was actually alive. It also sets up a potentialo"Manchurian Candidate" type plot-line for next season.

"Prison Break," a program to whicn I came late, offered a satisfying escape for most of its characters, and the ascendancy to office of Patricia Wettig as the evil Vice President who framed our hero. I find it most interesting now that Presidents are being portrayed as devils incarnate, with the exception of Geena Davis, whose Goody Twoshoes moderate Republican was eventually shelved by American Idol. Hmm. Dastardly, conniving presidents. I wonder where that idea came from?

"Lost" tried to have it both ways, and I'm beginning to think that it is just a dancing dwarf short of being as irritatingly elusive as anything on "Twin Peaks." Michael's departure to freedom with Walt provided a neat bookend to Walt's capture in last year's cliffhanger, which precipitated much of this season's activity. The revelation that the "button" was actually a functioning device to save the South Pacific from some weird electromagnetic disturbance was intriguing. But I still wonder, what's with the numbers? Couldn't the button just be pushed without 4-8-15-16-23-42? As for the apparent destruction of at least one of the hatches in an eerie ultrasonic explosion, that's actually the sound of JJ Abrams whacking off on his typewriter. Okay, I suppose Desmond pulled off a sacrifice, and we can await the fates of Eko and Locke. (Incidentally, I could swear I saw Locke--the actor--wanderingly alone at the Luxor casino last week). Does he have a job or not? I don't think the Island wants him dead. I do think Michael and Walt are in deep shit. Also facing some turmoil are Jack, Kate and Sawyer, now prisoners of "The Others." Next season will see the revelations about this colony, likely the remnants of some Dharma experiment gone bad. As for the Portuguese chess players in the Arctic monitoring the explosion half an earth away and reporting back to Desmond's fiancee--well that certainly ties everything together in a nasty little knot. Sheesh.

Other series finales were not as comprehensive in their scope, though they did offer some askew visions. Two of them, "Medium" and "House," both lapsed into full-hour dream sequences, a hoary device I thought "Dallas" might have ruyined once and for all, except that this is another generation. I still like "Medium" despite Patricia Arquette's one-note performance. Also annoyingly one-note is Dr. House, who is shot in the gut by a disturbed patient before falling into his 48-minute coma. Why wasn't he shot in the mouth? Give that fucker a Prozac already, laced with Remoril. He is so annoying.

"Desperate Housewives," already clearly on the artistic decline, said goodbye to poor Alfre Woodard, who I'm sure was glad to be relieved of her burdensome plot line. Kyle McLaughlin, he of "Twin Peaks," is now firmly ensconsed as the new George for next year's episodes, having run over Mike and starting to date Bree. If it weren't for Marcia Cross and her incredible cavalcade of inappropriate lovers the show would be totally useless. It's only two weeks since that finale and I can hardly recall what happened to the other three housewives, and certainly don't care. Mark Cherry had better start work on another pilot while he is still marketable.

Honest-to-goodness finales of defunct series were much kinder, in general, to their characters. "West Wing," true to its liberal wish-fulfillment, left viewers with the nicest transition possible between administrations, as the Bartletts departed for Maine, the Santos's got settled in, and half the original cast got to stay on with White House promotions. Even leaker Toby was pardoned. Well, given the reality, don't we need this kind of escapism? And "Will & Grace," hardly a TV juggernaut but a milestone of sorts, ran an episode that covered about twenty years of its pairs futures, with them looking none the worse in their middle age. Somehow, given the characters' backgrounds, cosmetic enhancement seems fitting. Also, they are projected to live apart with their respective partners, raise children that resemble themselves (a neat trick for Will, though I suspect it is his genes), and reunite at their children's wedding. Unless, of course, there's a new Constitutional Amendment by 2020 banning gays from attending weddings as well.

Memorial Stadium

First I'd like to acknowledge two of my small coterie of faithful readers: Phil, whose fretting over my prolonged absence from this arena prompted a concerned phone call; and Terry, my baseball fan fan from Texas, whom I don't know at all but whose literary taste is obviously impeccable. Since I actually spoke to Phil, I've decided to address this blog to Terry's interests.

My theme is Memorial Day, but since the closest connection I have to the military is a brother who broke his wrist during basic training with the National Guard, I will eschew commenting on the tragedy of lives lost in foreign wars, justified or ridiculous like the present one. For me Memorial Day has always been less about the goings-on at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier than of the battles on-field in the baseball stadiums of America. Before Camden Yards was contructed in Baltimore's warehouse district near Eutaw Street (did I spell that right?), the Orioles would play their games in Memorial Stadium. Arenas of course are no longer named after heroes, baseball managers or patriotic concepts but after whichever corporation shells out the cash for the foundation.

The last weekend of May, climaxed by Memorial Day, thus became more of a seasonal demarcation point from the onset of spring to the arrival of the summer months. It is at this juncture in the year when baseball standings are first to be taken "seriously," with a third of the season gone and a good cross-section of opponents faced so that a reliable pattern begin to emerge.

This year's season has borne out--so far--a lot of my expectations (except, unfortunately, for the woebegone Bronx Cheers, still cursed by their confrontation last year with Jesus). To no one's surprise the Yanks and Red Sox are At It Again, though the advantage for the rest of the season goes to Boston, whose players are maintaining their helath unlike the Yanks with all their pesky wrist problems. Also, Toronto is entering the trio and functioning rather like Ross Perot in 1992. Toronto is not likely to win this season but their strength will handicap either the Yanks or Sox for the post-season, as the seasonal record of the second place team is likely to be diminished by the competition from the East.

The AL wild card, at this juncture, appears probable from the AL Central, with Chicago maintaining their strength (actually improving themselves with the resurgent Jim Thome), and the startling surge of Detroit. The Tigers unaccountably have the best record in baseball, thanks to a healthy blend of talented young-uns and seasoned vets like Magglio Ordonnez and Pudge Rodriguez. They also have added two excellent starters to their rotation, Justin Verlander and Kenny Rogers. (Rogers will help buttress them for the season, but beware when the playoffs come, Tigerland!). In their unbalanced schedule, Chicago and Detroit will be able to amass a cornucopia of wins from the crud in the division, which means a listless Twins team and an appalling bunch from Kansas City, likely to lose at least as many as the Tigers did a short three years ago (119). KC has won 11 games so far this year, which when tripled comes to 33. That would mean 129 losses. Mama Mia!

The AL west contains the most disappointing team so far, the Los Angeles Angels Whom Los Angeles Might Give Back to Anaheim. Disappointing production from a slew of highly-touted rookies has kicked them down to the cellar, but they have a chance to recover because all the AL West teams are flawed. Seattle's expensive free agents have been huge busts; Texas still has that good line-up but lousy pitching that will melt by July; and the A's are always scrambling for runs. I'll still opt for the As to win the division once their young pitchers get untracked.

Now, my friend Terry seems to be a National League fan. As a proponent of the Phils and Diamondbacks he is in for an interesting if ultimately frustrating year. I am following both teams closely this season because players from these teams compose a quarter of my Rotisserie Team. So I cheer for the peppy Chase Utley of the Phils, a talented second baseman; and from Arizona, starters Juan Cruz and Claudio Vargas, closer Jose Valverde, and center fielder Erick Byrnes. Byrnes is my replacement for the tragically disabled Hideki Matsui, and if Erick can give me two-thirds the production of the Yankee I'll feel fortunate. Cruz gave me a seven-inning shut-out yesterday, but also gave up nine runs in less than an inning last week. So it goes.

But both teams have shots at their respective divisional titles, since there are no shoo-ins this year with the possible exception of the Cardinals. Arizona could finish anywhere in the NL West, as could all the otherteams; never have I seen a division so balanced and so, well, mediocre. The Dodgers, despite physical problems and awful relief, are making waves as I thought they would, and Colorado has moved into contention with some good wood in their line-up. San Diego has that pitching, the cooperative ball park, and Khalil Greene hitting homers. And the Jints are never far out of it.

The Phils wil be fighting in a three-way scrum with the Mets and Braves for ther NL East crown, but the runner-up here may survive into the Wild Card because they can feast on the lowly Nationals and Marlins. The Mets have the most rounded team and good karma; adding El Duque, a seasoned winner, may put them over. The Phils need for Cole Hamels and one of their other pitchers to become stoppers, for their relief corp is not as strong with Billy Wagner now hurling in Queens. The Braves always seem to figure things out in the end, but after 14 straight division championships, the odds begin to favor a down year. I think the Mets and Phils will both advance.

I'm not all that impressed with the Cardinals, but with Rolen, Edmonds and super Albert in that line-up it's hard not to favor them over upstart Cincinnati and a less fortunate Houston Astro team, suffering from Clemens' departure and Pettitte's disappointing start. I still like the Brewers as an up-and-comer but there may not be sufficient pop in their line-up. And they require more consistency from Doug Davis and something, anything, from Ben Sheets.
The Cubs are spiralling downward and Pittsburgh at least has Kansas City around so that no one will notice how consistently lame they have become.

Everything will change, of course, once Roger Clemens decides whose ten million dollars he's willing to take for two months of mercenary work.

Cheers and Jeers, Over and Out

Now that the Great American Election is over, and Taylor Hicks has won (thanks to those millions of Alabamans who voted 25 times each), the television season has come to a whimpering end. I'm so frustrated by the sudden lack of anything to Tivo that I'm actually writing again. But to stay on topic, I will analyze the conclusions of the many series that kept me casually rapt the past month or so.

"American Idol" actually grew duller as the series went into ist final eliminations. Once Chris Daughtry absorbed his jaw-dropping expulsion the show seemed to lose its credibility. It seems only hayseeds can win this one. That is not to say that Katharine McPhee was a better singer than Taylor Hicks (though I think she is). She was not distinctive enough and couldn't bring sufficient energy to her numbers to counter the spasodic gyrations of Hicks that could have easily been dismissed as bad Elvis. Her strength is the slow seductive ballad, which is limiting. I don't fret for Kat, though. Her looks and counterintuitively unspoiled personality will carry her far. Living in L.A. won't hurt either, though Kat's bailiwick will certainly be Broadway, like Diane DeGarmo, a previous runner-up who's been doing "Hairspray." Kat can slide right into Belle in "Beauty and the Beast" or Fantine in "Les Miz." Not a lot of dough there, and her album won't sell as well as Taylor's. I'd buy it though, and wouldn't be caught dead playing a Hicks CD.

As popular as this show is--and it is Fox's Gravy Train special--it is getting tiresomely formulaic and almost as predictable as "Survivor." If I had to hear one more "Hey, Dog, check it out!" from Randy I might have thrown a brick into my HDTV. I'm getting to like Simon more and his coworkers less. I agreed with Simon's early "karaoke" judgment of Taylor's appeal, and also give him credit for backstepping to acknowledge, at least, his populist appeal.

Also getting very formulaic is "The Apprentice," the only spring reality show not yet concluded. In an upset, the last two female contestants were cast aside when they started to criticize each other cattily in the Boardroom. If they had been men, the phrase "cattily" would not have been applicable, which underscores a certain sexist double standard from the Donald, who usually expects his candidates to fight for their lives. The two finalists, then, are Metrosexual Britisher Sean and Very Jewish New Yorker Lee. Sean is suave and smooth but seems to have been coasting through the competition. Lee is very young, rather grating, but feisty and very, very intuitive. This is a hard one to predict. Trump, a slave to appearances, may simply prefer the handsome guy over the dweeb. On the other hand, with Old George heading off to retirement or the Great Miami Beach in the Sky, it might behoove Trump to bolster his Semitic ranks.

The three other major Reality programs all provided satisying conclusions, which somewhat allayed my rooting frustrations, since my Rotisserie Team has been dreadful and cellar-dwelling. (Jeers to the Cheers!) "Survivor," following its recent pattern alternating athletic guy champs with designing women, fell into the lap of Aras the Lithuanian from Santa Monica, who at 24 has an MBA and played pro basketball in his ancestral land. He was a decent sort and hard not to like. The same went for B.J. and Tyler, the so-called "hippies" who gladhanded their way around the world on "Amazing Race." Just short of being annoying, they outplayed some neglibible competition. The producers really manipulated the editing to make them the sympathetic heroes, so I felt a little used.

The "American Idol" spin-off from Simon Callow, "American Inventor," was a bit tedious, because the inventions that were displayed did not rock the imagination. Rather than go for glitz, the producers emphasized the Horatio Alger angle for the contestants to maximize the emotional power of their stories, while mining as much comic relief as they could from the hopelessly tacky inventions of the early rounds. Eventually the finals came down to a vote that seemed to disregard the inventors' personalities and focus on their gadgets. The four finalists were a chest device to help train pass receivers, a dangerous extension of a tandem bicycle, a nifty but simple word game, and a cradle to save babies form getting killed in auto collisions. I didn't cast my phone ballot, but I would have gone with what the plurality decided. It's hard to vote against saving babies.

More about the plethora of satisfying ("24") and unsatisfying ("Desperate Housewives") finales in my next edition.

Oh-for-April

It's been about six week since I made my last blog entry, and by now I'm sure I'ver lost all my readership with the exception of a few very close friends and of course the Bush Administration's Blog Squad. Even Terry from Texas has probably given up on me, which is a shame, because I would have had plenty of caustic things to say baseball-wise about the goings-on in April. But the news for my loyal readers is, ta-da, I'm not dead yet, even if they think so in Hollywood.

I've taken this hiatus for several reasons. Firstly I have developed a tired-arm condition, diagnosed as recently as today as emanating from an ulnar nerve problem, which manifests itself mostly when I type at the computer. Bad posture, the bugaboo of Jewish mothers everywhere, is finally backing up on me. I also suffered from blog fatigue, a pseudo syndrome marked by personal ennui with my own tired repetitious blatherings. Okay, I may be smarter and more articulate that than most, but after two hundred fifty blog entries I am beginning to exhaust my trove of philosphical insights. The rest is commentary concerning other people's repetitious flounderings (see Bush Administration, above).

I am also sadly aware that there are probably over 80 million blogs (no exaggeration) so maintaining my own is the height of conformity. Wow, there are even more blogs than there are stations on my cable. And if I can't keep up with the latter, how can I hope to reach a populace whose attention is divided among 80 million websites? So this becomes more of a private diary on a very public platform. Only as a means to exercise my writing skills does this engagement have any purpose.

All that being said, I still do have opinions, and was not in a coma the month of April. I've just been bemoaning the physical decline of myself (and more urgently, my poor dog, vomiting away and under constant antibiotics); the appalling performance of my baseball rotisserie team, mired at the bottom of the standings along with other former annual winners like the Atlanta Braves; and the fact that I have really no opinion whatsoever about the so-callled Immigration crisis. I do have a thought regarding the high price of gas. It is this: TOUGH SHIT. Stop buying SUVs, stop driving everywhere for every reason and clogging ourt nation's arteries. Acknowledge that the situation is not an oil-company construct but the natural development of market forces caused by emerging economies in Asia. Do something about developing alternative energy sources, and not just the pie-in-the-sky hydrogen engine but using some of our excess corn to produce ethanol, which powers most of the car engines in Brazil.

We are such a bunch of fucking whiners.