I hate that I hate Legion

This blog is generally built on positivity.  When I first started it, I would occasionally write a negative piece, but I've gradually moved away from them, to the point that the only time I will write about a show I don't like is in the Pilot Talk series where I review the first episode of new shows.  For me, it's much easier to write from a place of enthusiasm than from one of hatred.  If you asked me to explain why I like a piece of art, I'd easily be able to rattle off multiple points to back up my argument.  My reasons for disliking something are a little tougher to nail down.  It's more of an ineffable feeling with dislike, in my opinion.  And ultimately it boils down to the fact that it takes me so much time to write that I'd rather devote my energy to the many things I actually enjoy.

Which brings us to Legion.  Everybody seems to love FX's new Noah Hawley drama about a lesser known corner of the X-Men universe.  The praise has been off the charts and it's only getting more effusive. I was fully ready to embrace this show -- I love FX, I love X-Men, I love shows that aren't afraid to be different.  I should love Legion.

But here's thing...I just don't.

In general, I'm not a huge fan of Noah Hawley's style.  I liked season one of Fargo and liked season two less but still well enough, but my goodwill towards both were despite Hawley's idiosyncrasies, not because of them.  Part of the reason why I liked the second season less than the first was because it felt like the show was marked with an increased of being pleased with itself.  Again, this is something that's hard to quantify, but there was a smugness to season two of Fargo that left a bad taste in my mouth.  Not to mention the fact that it was met with "this is movie-level quality" and "this is by far the best show on television" hosannas.  Because Fargo was such a critical success, and because FX practices placing alot of trust in its creators, it seems like Hawley was given carte blanche with Legion.  That's the only way to explain the way his tics have been amplified thousandfold here.  The quirky and wry tone, the winking references (there's a character who's literally named "Syd Barrett"...ha ha?), the haphazard structure to the story -- it all melds together for an experience that makes me want to rip my hair out in annoyance.  And what's worse is that I'm almost completely on an island with this opinion.

For its entire run so far, Legion has proven that it's all style and no substance.  I don't necessarily mind a show that favors style over substance.  I love style!  But what is irksome about Legion is that it has the false pretense of containing substance.  The show purports to be a deeply psychological show, arguing that its obnoxious exploratory memory sequences are just a lens through which it examines mental illness and trauma.  All it really does, however, is use mental illness as a shorthand for depth.  What is the show really saying about these issues?  Not much, once you dig past its wacky flourishes.

Maybe I'm just being a hypocrite.  After all, I'm usually a big fan of these go-for-broke seasons where it seems like the creator is just doing whatever they want with no care for how it's received: the final season of The Sopranos, season five of Mad Men, season two of Girls.  The closest relative to this season of Legion is Mr. Robot's divisive second season, which I loved.  But for all its stylistic ostentatiousness, season two of Mr. Robot was deeply character-centric.  Perhaps main character Elliot got less examination than one would expect, but the season really dug into supporting characters like Dom, Angela, and Darlene.  Its machinations gave the audience a much deeper understanding of what makes them tick, increasing our ability to be invested in their stories.  There are two more episodes left of Legion this year and I don't feel like we've been given much reason to care about David or his flat "romance" with Syd.  All of the characters on the show are dull ornaments lost in the brush of its trippy larks, which makes it hard to care about anything that happens in the story.

There's nothing about the show's gonzo, psychedelic style that feels honest either.  The fourth episode garnered advanced praise for how out there is was, with critic Alan Sepinwall tweeting that it was the weirdest episode of TV he had seen since Twin Peaks aired in the early 90s.  So I approached the episode with optimism, hoping it would be the one that finally turned me around on the show.  Instead, I came away disliking it more than ever and was completely vexed by the David Lynch comparison.  When I watch Lynch's work its strangeness seems genuine, like the product of someone who is truly a weirdo.  In contrast, Legion's oddball sensibility feels artificial, like Noah Hawley is constantly bludgeoning us over the head with how much of an auteur he is.

So everybody's favorite show on television right now is currently my least favorite show I'm watching, by a very large margin.  I take no joy in hating it though.  I truly do want to like it!  There's a fun genre show in there under all of the masturbatory flights of fancy.  The worst part of it all is that this is a show so unconventional and outre that disliking it leaves you vulnerable to being accused of "not getting it."  I can assure you that I get Legion.  I just don't get why everyone else is putting up with it.

Episode of the Week: Fargo - "Buridan's Ass"

Episode of the Week is a recurring feature devoted to examining a notable episode from the past week of television.

Season 1, Episode 6

Gus: When a dog goes rabid, there's no mistaking it for a normal dog.  And here we are...we're supposed to be us -- people.  We're supposed to know better.  To be better, you know?

 Molly: Must be hard to live in this world if you believe that.

What a wonderful week of television we've been blessed with.  In the last 6 days, there's been Mad Men's gorgeous "The Strategy," two more installments in Louie's enthralling "Elevator" series, the soul-crushing "Echo" from The Americans, and Hannibal's shocking "Mizumono."  Any number of these episodes could've been chosen to be discussed for this Episode of the Week feature.  (Heck, I could've written a solid 600 words about that breathtaking sèance scene in this week's episode of Penny Dreadful alone.)  But what differentiates "Buridan's Ass" from the rest of the pack is that it's an episode that truly signifies that Fargo is kicking into high gear.

Fargo has always been a show about inertia -- how decisions beget similar decisions -- but it's never been more clear than in this episode.  In the pilot, Lester Nygaard did a very bad thing by killing his wife with a hammer.  It would've been the wise thing for him to just own up to it and face the consequences right away.  However, creator Noah Hawley knows that people often do the easy thing, and the easy thing to do is to follow the current of that initial bad decision.  So Lester just makes one bad decision after another.  Over the course of the first five episodes, riding the wave started by the murder of his wife, he lies about his role and hides evidence to keep his foothold on freedom secure.  All the while, he's got this bullet -- a niggling reminder of his guilt -- lodged in his hand, and when it finally causes him to be admitted to the hospital, not even his own brother believes he's innocent.  This episode finds Lester in the deep of his own mistakes, as he concocts a plan to escape from the hospital and attempt to frame his brother for the murder.  While Lester may not be somebody we're supposed to root for, watching the gears turn in his head as he plans out his scheme in Walter White fashion is a bit exhilarating.  If he's going to be caught in his own inertia, he might as well try to be intelligent while doing it.

The same works for the flip side of the equation.  From the very beginning, Molly has been painted as the show's symbol of unwavering good.  She's been given many opportunities to just let the case go, choosing to assume that Lester is harmless like the rest of her colleagues do.  And sure, it'd be wise for her to not risk her life or her job pursuing the truth.  However, once she began to have suspicions about Lester, she couldn't stop herself from going forward -- it's the easy (and right, in her case) thing to do.

And then there are people like Lorne Malvo, who just exhibit chaos.  He's less concerned with doing the "good" thing or doing the "bad" thing than he is with doing the thing that will cause the most destruction, as seen by his Rube Goldberg form of torture on Don Chumph.  In a way, Chumph is a victim of inertia in his own right.  He was doomed the day he decided to join forces with Malvo, and the slow crawl to his ultimate fate reaches its end in "Buridan's Ass."  The same could be said for Stavros, whose cycle of trouble began when he found that bag of money in the snow many years ago.  Convinced that Malvo's games are some sort of punitive act from the heavens, he finally decides to put the bag back where he found it.  But we know that anybody who approaches Malvo's orbit gets pulled in and spit out.  Only Malvo himself is allowed to make a clean getaway.

The forces of good, evil, and chaos converge in the episode's climactic shootout between Mr. Numbers, Mr. Wrench, and Malvo in the middle of a massive snowstorm.  It's a suspenseful, well-constructed scene, starting out with the three assassins and then bringing Molly and Gus into the mix for good measure.  Were it not for the bloody carnage, the characters popping in and out of this hypnotizing wall of white would almost feel like a dream.  Setpieces rely on geography and spatial reasoning, but the disorientation caused by the snow just makes the showdown even more intense.  The scene is unbroken tension for about 5 minutes, before cutting to the equally disorienting raining of fish that Stavros' bodyguard and son get caught in.

The universe of Fargo is a moral universe.  It's all about right and wrong, rewards and punishment, whether its divine or otherwise.  Yet what it also does is show how hard it is to know what the right thing to do is in any situation.  Gus Grimly is essentially the embodiment of that idea.  His first difficult decision came in the pilot, when he chose to let Malvo go, for fear of dying and never getting to see his daughter again.  This episode is just another crisis of conscience for him when he chooses to shoot blindly into the storm, not knowing whether he's helping Molly or damning her.  There may be good actions and bad actions, but "Buridan's Ass" understands how easy it is to get lost in the fog.

Pilot Talk 2014: Fargo

Every TV season, networks bring out a new crop of shows, in hopes that they'll be the next big hit.  Pilot Talk is devoted to figuring out whether these shows are worth your time based on the first episode.

Tuesdays at 10:00 PM on FX

On the list of movies that don't really need a remake, Fargo would be very close to the top.  The 1996 Coen brothers classic crime tragicomedy is such a singular vision, so specific in its regional examination and so complicated in its morality, that it seems like something that could go dangerously wrong in hands belonging to anyone other than those two auteurs.  That reasoning is exactly why the FX show of the same name felt like such a bad idea from the very beginning.  The fact that the network came up with the concept and only consulted the Coens later was worrisome enough, but most of all, this adaptation just felt downright unnecessary.

It turns out that we should never underestimate America's smartest, most interesting network.  The original Fargo had an idiosyncratic world that we only got to see a corner of, and FX did the right thing by putting us back in it without necessarily giving us a remake.  Fargo the TV show is less a retelling of the movie's story as it is a repurposing, riffing on the same themes but at a different angle.  The show centers on Lester Nygaard (Martin Freeman, trying his best to transform his British accent into a Minnesotan one and not always succeeding), a beleaguered insurance salesman.  Lester can't seem to catch a break from anyone around him: his wife nags and harasses him, he gets beat up by his old high school bully early into the 90-minute pilot, and not even children show him much respect.  Showrunner Noah Hawley's script and Freeman's performance make you feel deep sympathy for Lester in the early going -- you can't help but want to just lend him a hand.

That sympathy is then used brilliantly later, when the episode really starts to come together, as everything turns on a moment of shocking violence committed by Lester.  Anybody familiar with the film knows that the plot also involves the main character having a part in an unforgivable violent act, but the show does such a good job of making Lester so milquetoast that even up to the moment, you think "but he won't really do it, right"?  It's a scene that tips the viewer off to what the show is really about, denouncing the idea of violent fantasy as a result of impotent rage, while implicating us along the way.  All you want is for Lester to do something for most of the episode, but then it's horrifying when you get your wish.  And yet the show treats it like an action that's simultaneously wrong and inevitable, which makes it all the more tragic and complicated.

Yet the show is not just about the misadventures of Lester Nygaard.  At its heart, Fargo is an ensemble drama, and the pilot spends much of its time introducing the show's colorful array of characters.  The bizarre Midwestern quaintness of many of them provide laughs, but they're not just cartoons.  In a short amount of time, they feel like people with rich, full lives; particularly Deputy Molly Solverson (newcomer Allison Tolman).  If there's one reason to consider the show worthwhile, it's for introducing the world to Tolman, who's such a warm and lively presence.  She could be written off as a retread of Frances McDormand's character in the movie, but this world needs a Marge Gunderson type to keep things from tipping over into complete darkness, and in that way Tolman is perfect.

But even the more recognizable actors breathe life into their roles.  Bob Odenkirk, Kate Walsh, and Colin Hanks all make an immediate impression; and we've still got people like Glenn Howerton, Oliver Platt, and Adam Goldberg coming along the way.  Then there's Billy Bob Thornton, who plays Lorne Molvo, a mysterious drifter who sets this bloody chain of events in motion.  Fargo's greatest quality is its ability to make a case for there being a show centered around any one of these characters, and its strongest case lies within Molvo, who is endlessly fascinating.  His mixture of nihilism, dark wit, and general oddness is like the show's style in a nutshell, and Thornton plays the part perfectly.

That this first episode was successful should come as no surprise on paper.  After all, it's got a loaded cast, an interesting sandbox to play in, and it airs on the network with the highest batting average over the last few years.  But there are so many ways that things like these go wrong that it's still completely unexpected for it to be this great.  In just 90 minutes, Fargo went from something I greeted with a cocked eyebrow to a show I welcome with open arms.  According to advanced reviews, the next few episodes improve upon the first one.  It's hard to wrap my head around the idea that anything could get better than the pilot, which excellently blends comedy with drama and delivers a wonderfully cinematic experience the whole way through.  Regardless, I'm ready for the ride.

Grade: A