Wholly Schmidt!

Wouldn’t that be something? Eloquent, wild-west, zombies! But no, I’m talking about Aaron Sorkin’s latest, “Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip.” It’s a show about a show; Studio 60 is the name of their sketch-comedy show on fictional network NBS. Think of it as SNL, except, well, think of it as SNL. The pilot set us up with the show’s director, or manager, or whatever a fake Lorne Michaels would be called, having a sort of breakdown, interrupting the opening skit on live television and ranting about everything wrong with the show, the network, the FCC, the religious right, basically everything in the entertainment culture of television. He’s fired on the spot and the two previous directors (Matthew Perry and Bradly Whitford) are brought back to the show by NBS’s new head of something or other (Amanda Peet). It’s an unpopular move with the network suits who want business as usual and conventional PR damage control, but Peet is set up as our plucky, iconoclast, entertainment mogul with a heart of gold. Peet, Perry, and Whitford are our heros, basically falling in with the sentiments that got the old guy fired, but hopefully from a position to make a change in the show/industry instead of going out in a blaze of unemployment glory.

Sorkin gave us West Wing (and that sports show I never watched but heard good things about), and it’s pretty obvious after about five minutes of Studio 60. It’s the same dialog, it’s even a lot of the same cast, and it’s awesome. It’s a very specific kind of awesome though, which brings me to the Deadwood comparison. Here’s a quote from someone* on a forum I frequent:

Sorkin writes this odd little world where nobody ever walks away from a conversation thinking “damn I should have said X” because they always have the perfect response right on the tip of their tongue.

That said, it’s not bad, but I’m waiting to see if there’s any heart to the show. At this point it just feels like chess pieces being moved around the board while Sorkin develops the metatextual issues he seems more interested in.

He hits the nail on the head. Sorkin is writing situations; conflicts and relationships. His dialog is clever and smart, but interchangeable and impersonal. I’m not complaining; he’s giving us a lot of entertainment, but banter and interesting plots won’t be enough for some people.

David Milch, creator of Deadwood (and plenty of other stuff I guess, but Deadwood’s all I’ve seen), almost drove me up the wall because he couldn’t do anything but write characters. As a show on HBO, you expect a little bit of freedom from the reset-button of most ongoing TV shows. People can be introduced and killed off whenever it suits the story; a story which can be constantly moving forward and changing directions. You don’t have to return things to the status quo at the end of each week. There are examples of that in Deadwood, but there are so many more examples of times Milch needed to kill off or write out a character, but he apparently couldn’t bring himself to part with them. Characters that seemed trivial on introduction were kept around far longer than they proved interesting, often with new and very boring stories that felt tacked on to the show just to justify the people.

By the end of the final season, it felt like we were losing half of each episode to characters we had no interest in for reasons we couldn’t fathom. Luckily, the other half was really really great, and Milch does his own fantastic brand of dialog. I’m not sure what it’s indicative of, if anything, that both shows have such great dialog (though very different in style); I guess just that I enjoy that a lot (see also: Firefly).

Caveats ahoy! We’re only two episodes into Studio 60, and I don’t know who’s actually behind the writing issues with Deadwood. Maybe Studio 60 will tank or simply be cancelled, it wouldn’t be the first time a good show got the axe (see also: Firefly), and maybe Milch was fighting every step of the way with some crazy SAG clause that kept his actors around longer than he could use them; I don’t know. It was just interesting to me that two shows I’ve recently enjoyed a great deal would have such peculiar but perfectly opposing faults.

*I’d give credit, but it’s just some guy’s forum screen name. If he reads this and asks, I’ll happily clarify; he really did a great job summarizing

Oh happy day! A new issue of Ultimates! This pleases me. Here we go:

• 52 #21
• Action Comics #843
• Batman #657
• Cable & Deadpool #32
• Eternals #4 (of 6)
• Justice League of America #2
• Ultimates 2 #12

Any week with an issue of the Ultimates is a good week; throw in Eternals and the JLA and things should be downright fantastic. Are they? Find out!

(more…)

Every now and then, As often as they can get readers to spend their money, both Marvel and DC like to have Big Dumb Events (BDE). Usually called something more marketable like crossovers (or more pretentious, like “Civil War: A Marvel Event in Seven Parts”), they’re big stories that take place across the entire publisher’s universe, or at least on a larger scale than most normal monthly titles. Often this will mean a special limited series bearing the BDE’s title that (allegedly) gives you the main event in a half dozen issues or so, as well as bits of the story spilling over into regular monthly titles to maintain continuity across titles as well as scheduling can allow.

DC’s most recent BDE was “Infinite Crisis”, a big somethingorother that shook stuff up and killed people and changed this and blah and that and whatever. It’s not particularly important to our discussion (or in retrospect, particularly coherent), except that it kicked off their Lesser Smaller Event, 52. At the end of Infinite Crisis, almost all of DC’s regular titles jumped forward one year in their stories. The hook for the story of 52 is that we know basically how Infinite Crisis ended, but not the specific fallout from the events. Of note, Superman, Batman, and Wonderwoman were all MIA for the year.

I don’t know exactly how 52 was conceived; I’m not sure if they had this idea and structured Infinite Crisis to set it up, or if the idea came up as a result of the planning for Infinite Crisis (groundwork for BDEs is often laid far in advance of the event itself), but 52 is a fifty-two issue series that pledges to fill us in on the missing year with one issue every week for a full “real” year. The gimmick part of 52’s hook is that this comic is attempting to take place in “real time”. A week between issues represents a week for the characters in the story, while over in Batman’s regular comic he might be in one big fight scene for three issues over the course of as many months.

It’s an ambitious undertaking on several levels. Most of the best comics I read can’t even maintain a monthly schedule. For a comic to ship every week is a logistical miracle, even facilitated by having a big team of authors and artists working on the title. There are a lot of loose ends and stories to tell coming out of Infinite Crisis. If we buy that this really was all planned out from the begining, that 52 really will give us all the answers promised, that’s also an impressive feat of planning and foresight. Even if we don’t end up with satisfying answers to all of Infinite Crisis’s questions, competantly writing and pacing several stories at once in a single title is also ambitious.

52 #21 (or week 21) will be released this week, and as we approach the half-way point, there’s not a whole lot to say about it. I’ve been trying to throw together some quick impressions for all of the comics I buy each week, and 52 is never easy to analyze. Imagine telling someone about a new TV show you saw last night, but breaking down your impressions to each chunk of the show between commercials. Sometimes an issue of 52 follows a particular group of characters for the bulk of the issue with just a few updates on other stories going on, and sometimes it’s split evenly between four different stories. At 28 pages an issue, that’s a lot going on but with very little progress in any single story. Reviews, trying to analyze everything on a weekly basis, only drive home how silly that approach is. A character may be shown only briefly in a small scene one week and the reviewers will lambast it for not adding anything, not giving us any further characterization or plot details, when it’s actually just doing exactly what 52 should be doing: It’s giving us a week in the world of DC. It’s driving home the continuity and the connected nature of these characters in their shared world, even when their actions don’t specifically impact the other characters in that single issue. Every character doesn’t have to have a big defining moment or startling revelation to warrant inclusion, and not everyone deserves the same amount of “screen time” (though I suspect the editing team is probably aiming for that in the long run).

The bottom line is that there isn’t a lot to tell someone about 52 on a week to week basis, so I’m not going to try to. Week to week, there’s only one thing interesting about 52: Are they still on schedule? Have they still managed to publish a new issue every single week? So far, the answer is yes. I might pipe up from time to time if the art is significantly bad, or good, or if there’s some really big revelation or conclusion to a long running story. Those will be the exception though. It’s going to be very late in the series before we can look back and really start to make judgements about the stories we’re being given.