Even if you didn't like season one, American Crime is must-see TV this year

The fun of the seasonal anthology series is that not liking the show now does not necessarily mean you won't like it forever.  So what if one season is bad?  The next season is a completely different story with totally different characters.  The possibilities of that slate-wiping are endless.  (Of course, the same team of writers are most likely going to be working on the show, so you could end up disliking it in any iteration.  Five seasons of empirical evidence have shown that American Horror Story is always going to be bad to me.  So it goes.)

Put simply, I didn't enjoy ABC's American Crime very much last year.  Network drama has been frustratingly staid in recent years, so I appreciated the first season's efforts to transcend broadcast expectations.  But in an effort to be more than "just a network drama," the show oversold its prestige factor.  What resulted was a season of television that shouted "THIS IS IMPORTANT" at the audience at least three times per episode.  And despite its declarations, most of its points about race, class, and crime were lazy and surface-level.

So regardless of the new beginnings season two promised, I wasn't very excited about more grandstanding and chest-puffing from creator John Ridley.  The fact that the male-on-male sexual assault angle this year felt like it was pitched down the middle for that kind of self-importance only made things worse.  And yet, the first three episodes of the season have done nothing but blow away all expectations.

The show narrows its scope this year
Season one focused on the aftermath of a home invasion in Modesto, California that led to the death of veteran Matt Skokie.  But from that simple premise spun all manner of tangents, introducing characters and subplots that barely felt related to the core of the story.  It felt like the season wanted to address race and class issues in America, but couldn't find a way to connect those themes to the narrative without making the murder feel like an afterthought.  The second season tells a different story, one that involves an underprivileged male student at a private school in Indianapolis who is allegedly raped by a member of the prestigious basketball team at a party.  Unlike last year, season two locks into its central story and stays with it, roping in the same themes Ridley was toying with in the first season without any wandering.

Essentially, both seasons are about the ripple effects of a single crime, but in the first season that crime feels like it swallows up a whole city, while the second season's crime is rooted in an individual community.  That tightening of focus proves to be the right move.  Where American Crime often felt like it was biting off more than it could chew in season one, this year is a perfectly sized morsel.  So far, season two has been significantly more straightforward, and that's one of the reasons why it's so much more compelling.

Season two corrects many of the first season's mistakes
You'll know you're in good hands very early into the premiere, when Ridley (who wrote and directed the episode) subverts expectations that the audience might have, not just based on years of television viewing, but also from watching his own show last year.  There's a scene where Kevin (Trevor Jackson), the African American star of the basketball team, is driving down the street and blasting rap music when the lights from a cop car begin flashing in his rear-view mirror.  But once the cop pulls up aside him, it's revealed that the he's a friend of the family and just wanted to relay a message to Kevin's mom.  It's a small moment, but one that lets you know that this season isn't interested in the pat story turns it may not have been able to resist in the past.

Another moment introduces us to basketball coach Dan Sullivan (Timothy Hutton) sneaking a video of a cheerleader doing a provocative dance during practice.  Our first instinct is to groan at another creepy teacher plotline, but a few scenes later we learn that it's his daughter, and he's only recording her dance to show her mother what their child gets up to at school.

The first three episodes haven't entirely rid themselves of the anvilicious details that dragged season one down.  A scene in the premiere involves members of the basketball team passing around pictures of various female classmates in the locker room after practice.  "I so wanna rape that," one of the players says about a girl, and the clunk of that inelegant line threatens to drown out the rest of the scene.  Another scene features two black teens making out while a Kendrick Lamar song intones "Complexion don't mean a thing" in the background.  But these moments are much easier to swallow when they happen once or twice an episode as opposed to once or twice per scene.

It also accentuates season one's positives
Even in its less interesting narrative moments, the show was always a visual powerhouse.  Season one tried to present itself as "more than your usual network drama" in many ways, but the one aspect where it completely succeeded was in its cinematic direction.  This season is no different, and now that they are servicing a story that's more compelling, the visuals take on even more weight.  Ridley and his team of directors frequently employ tight, searching closeups.  These episodes are full of emotionally charged scenes, and you get to see all of the subtleties through the micro-expressions on the characters' faces.

Many of the actors who appeared on the show last year make a return in season two, and they all get the opportunity to show their range by playing characters who are much different from the ones they played in the previous season.  Felicity Huffman, Timothy Hutton, Lili Taylor, and Regina King are all giving incredible and nuanced performances.  Some new actors, like Hope Davis, get added to the rotation and fit right into the ensemble too.  But what's most impressive are the younger actors, who carry the most weight, given that the crime of the season is centered around them.  Season one's biggest acting weak spots were all found within the teenage characters, but Trevor Jackson, Joey Pollari, and Connor Jessup rise to the occasion.  With such rock solid work from the whole cast, the season is able to sell moments that could otherwise come off as overwrought.

We're only a third of the way through the season, so it could easily fly off the rails, sinking into all of the pitfalls it has managed to avoid.  But evidence from these three episodes alone indicate that everyone involved has figured out what they're doing, and are executing a carefully constructed plan.  If that's the case, we may have one of the best network drama seasons in a long time on our hands.

Love, happiness, and the beautiful lie of UnREAL

There was a directorial move that happened over and over in the first season of UnREAL, Lifetime's excellent new series about the behind-the-scenes workings of a Bachelor-esque reality show called Everlasting.  A scene would start with a tight shot of a moment between members of Everlasting's cast, and just as it starts to feel like a genuine point of connection, the camera peels back to show the artifice behind it all.  Just beyond that real moment is an array of lights, cameras, and crew; all peering intently, trying to figure out how they can warp this scene into something that will provide the most entertaining television.

Every character has to remind themselves and the people around them that they're crafting a show, with almost every episode featuring some variation of the line "none of this is real anyway."  But is it quite so simple?  Sure, there's manufactured drama and contrived scenarios galore in UnREAL and Everlasting.  Yet there are real stories unfolding too.  A mentally ill woman desperately trying to cling to her job and her sanity at the same time, a repressed woman coming to terms with her sexuality, a rich playboy seeking redemption.  Therein lies the magnificent tension of the show, the way that reality tends to bleed all over "reality."

UnREAL is a deeply cynical show.  It offers a glimpse at the top-down process of a group of ruthless, ratings-minded people packaging up the myth of True Love to an American audience that will eat it up.  They've gotten to a point where they can predict how the public will react to every event, coming up with preset rules to follow: "sluts get cut," black women never win, the suitor that all of these women are competing for has to be likable.  In last Monday's season finale, executive producer Chet thinks he's come up with an incredible idea -- having bad girl Britney come back in the final round after an early exit at the beginning of the season -- only to be reminded that the show has done the very same thing three previous times.  Everlasting is programmed to a tee, but sold under the illusion that it's getting bigger and better and fresher.

The producers of Everlasting are the means by which the show is able to concoct the best possible results.  And the contestants are merely their playthings -- twist them up and watch them go.  But the level of gamesmanship goes beyond that.  Everybody is producing everybody.  As a result, there is plotting to the show in the truest sense.  Many of the best moments come from the complex web of deceit the writers spin: a character manipulating another character into manipulating another character; or somebody thinking they know the game somebody else is playing, only for that person to be playing a second game.  Lies, both big and small, are being sold everywhere.

And perhaps the biggest lie of all is the idea that any of these people can find happiness and fulfillment, either professionally or romantically.  If that's the goal, then they're searching in the wrong place.  After all, some of these women are looking for love in front of a camera, and the audience on the other side watches with hope that somebody will find it too.  One of the most brilliant aspects of the season finale is that even Quinn and Rachel start to buy into the lies they sell, mistakenly thinking that they've found something real in Chet and Adam, respectively.  You may not be able to find love in a hopeless place, but UnREAL deftly fools everyone into believing they can.

How Halt and Catch Fire became one of TV's most fun shows

I was always more of a fan of Halt and Catch Fire than most people.  Critics gave the pilot above average reviews, citing their skepticism about AMC only sending out one episode, and getting hung up on very thin similarities between it and Mad Men.  Meanwhile, I thought it was a compelling start, one promising enough to earn an A- in my Pilot Talk series.  While I felt like the show struggled to fully realize the potential of its first episode over the course of its 10-episode debut season, getting bogged down in its own self-importance and delivering some uneven storytelling, I still found this look into the beginning stages of the computer age a relatively painless way to spend an hour.

Even in those worst moments of season one, Halt and Catch Fire always struck me as the kind of show that could take "the leap" in its second season.  All the pieces were there -- great cast, talented group of writers and directors, terrain relatively unexplored on television -- they just weren't quite fitting together yet.  Of course, shows like these can just as easily flounder, and it wasn't difficult to imagine this series settling into being another mediocre AMC show.  It could have doubled down on its fascination with Joe MacMillan (Lee Pace), the enigmatic software salesman who consisted mostly of platitudinous speechifying and very little depth.

Luckily, it went the way of improvement -- we're halfway through the show's second season, which has been a lively, massively entertaining piece of television.  And this marked growth is no mystery either.  The creative success of Halt and Catch Fire can be attributed to a few key changes.

The show rebooted its premise
Season one's story engine was driven by Joe's quest to reverse engineer the revolutionary IBM personal computer, roping in downtrodden former system builder Gordon Clark (Scoot McNairy) and post-collegiate programming wunderkind Cameron Howe (Mackenzie Davis).  Part of the problem with that is that it's only a season long story, and it was difficult to imagine what the long-term version of the show would be.  They could've tried to stretch things out even though history was not on these characters' sides, but showrunners Christopher Cantwell and Christopher C. Rogers realized that there weren't many more places to take this IBM plot by the end of season one.

Instead, the show embodied the maverick spirit of its characters and wiped everything off the table.  Season two found the show taking place a year after the events of the season one finale, where Joe left Cardiff Electric and Cameron started up her own company called Mutiny.  Time jumps haven't been a revolutionary choice for a long time, but this fast forward feels like such an important move for this series to make.  As opposed to trying to force a way for the show to be centered around Cardiff again, season two has refocused its story on Mutiny, a company aiming to be at the forefront of computer gaming and online interactivity.

The lead and secondary characters have swapped roles
As a result of this shift in subject matter, Halt has also been forced to change its perspective too. Season one was primarily the Joe and Gordon show.  Most of the story was devoted to trying to peel back the many layers of Joe, or Gordon wrestling with his past failures and dissolved dreams.  Cameron and Joe's wife Donna (Kerry Bishe) had roles, sure, but they were mostly in relation to the two male protagonists.

By necessity, season two has reallocated its weight strongly towards Donna and Cameron in their trials and tribulations at Mutiny, and it's all the better for it.  (Now, the unemployed Gordon is playing the traditional role a wife character would play, sitting on the sidelines and screwing things up any time he takes a step off the bench.  Meanwhile, Joe has spent most of the season on an entirely different playing field.)  Of all the various character permutations on the show, Donna and Cameron have always been the best, even back in the first season.  They're just fascinating foils for one another, and watching the ways their approach to work and womanhood clash has been the biggest treat of this year.  Season two has also done wonders with making them more engaging characters on their own too.  Donna was never the wet blanket wife archetype that critics consistently tried to box her into during the first season, but we're really seeing that now.  She's kind, supportive, strong-willed, and comes with a whole set of hopes and dreams that make her one of the most fascinating and likable characters on TV.  The Cameron of season one was very inconsistently written, but season two has gotten a handle on her petulance, manifesting it in ways that may not always make her enjoyable to watch, but reliably compelling and logical.

There's no real precedent for a show making its two male leads take a backseat in favor of two female characters, and it's a big reason why Halt is so gripping this year.  Most of that is due Mackenzie Davis and Kerry Bishe's electrifying chemistry.  Davis and especially Bishe are giving two of the year's best performances.  "10Broad36," last Sunday's excellent episode, provided Bishe with an opportunity to give an Emmy-worthy tape, as Donna slowly unraveled after the pressure of keeping all of the threads of her life together finally became too much.  This ultimately lead to her decision at the end of the episode to abort the baby she found out she was carrying at the beginning of the season, and Bishe plays every moment with such power and grace.

It has gone through the natural process of finding itself
Television shows rarely come out of the gate as the strongest versions of themselves.  Time is needed for everything to gel, for everyone involved to get on the same page about what show they should be making and execute that idea.  Much of Halt and Catch Fire's creative uptick can be traced back to that simple explanation: the show needed a while to figure itself out, and now that it has gotten that, it's charging on full speed ahead.  Just look at how much stronger the direction has been this season.  There may still be too many dutch angles, but there's an exhilarating, kinetic feeling to the handheld scenes at Mutiny that was absent last year.  And the directors are smart about framing choices, especially Larysa Kondracki, who continuously set characters against a backdrop of machines and progress in "10Broad36."

The writing is much stronger too.  This year, the show especially seems to get off of on playing around with dramatic irony.  Almost every character holds a piece of information that others don't.  With Gordon's illness, Donna's terminated pregnancy, and whatever Joe may have up his sleeve looming in the mix, the tension comes from waiting for all of these precarious secrets to come crashing down.  And of course, we as the audience know so many things none of these characters do, simply because their present is our past.  It's a complex house of cards that the writers are building.

Watching the critical turnaround on Halt has almost been as fun as watching the show itself.  Critics have been writing pieces left and right about this fantastic second season, and this collective feeling of falling in love with a show along with rest of the world has provided a joy that has few competitors.  So here's another article extolling the virtues of Halt and Catch Fire season two.  Hop on the train and feel that joy with us.

What's going on with Hannibal this season?

Season two of Hannibal was a rip-roaring run of television, one that confirmed the show's status as one of the best things airing.  It all culminated in the shocking bloodbath of "Mizumono," a finale that left the audience with a collective feeling of breathless anticipation for season three, just to see what creator Bryan Fuller and his team of writers would come up with next.  Naturally, these early stages of the show's third season have been about reckoning with the events from last year, putting the pieces of this world back together after Hannibal Lecter so thoroughly shattered it.

Fuller reintroduced everyone back into the mix slowly, teasing fans with a hypnotic and tense premiere episode that only featured Hannibal and his partner-in-crime/hostage Bedelia Du Maurier.  After a year of waiting to see who made it out of "Mizumono" alive, Fuller cleverly (or cruelly, however you prefer to think of it) made us wait another week.  Episode two flipped things with a mostly Will and Abigail affair, only the latter was revealed to be a figment of the former's imagination.  Jack's survival gets confirmed in "Secondo," the following episode, and by episode four we learned the fates of everyone involved in the season two finale, as we saw that Alana lived, but not without significant emotional and physical damage.

In these episodes, the show moved at a dreamy, leisurely pace, and the visuals had a woozy look to match.  The first three installments were all directed by the great Canadian director Vincenzo Natali, who amped up the beauty on what was already unquestionably one of TV's most gorgeous shows.  This wasn't his first time in the saddle -- you might remember him from his two directorial efforts last season, where he was able to deliver some imagery that deviated from the show's usual style without feeling completely alien (see: his truly mesmerizing, amorphous sex scene in "Naka-Choko").  Natali is less interested in the grotesque tableaus established by David Slade in the pilot than he is in gauzy scenes that dissolve together and layer over one another.  I love his half-lucid approach to visualizing scenes, and his work in "Antipasto," "Primavera," and "Secondo" resulted in some of the most stunning shots in Hannibal history, which is saying something.

Brian Reitzell's score seems to have found another gear too.  He has a way of finding clashing, abrasive sounds and blending them together for a wild and hair-raising effect.  Hannibal is hardly a scary show, but you wouldn't know it from just listening to Reitzell's score.  Just a few notes are enough to make you leap out of your seat.  His sonic wizardry couples with the stable of directors' haunting imagery to create a wholly original aesthetic value that makes you wonder just how this show ended up on TV, let alone NBC.  It feels like watching an hour long avant-garde film every week.

If only the story felt as satisfying.  While it's nice to bathe in the show's sumptuous style, the narrative has no forward momentum so far this year.  A little breather post-"Mizumono" was probably necessary, but these first few episodes have felt less like a change of pace and more like outright stalling in search of a plot.  Things are proceeding in a circular motion, as the story continually doubles back on itself.  We've gotten numerous flashbacks to the second season (as if anyone could ever forget it), and even the new material will do something like present Will in Florence, but then shift into reverse, spending two whole episodes showing the process that lead he and everyone else to that point.  There's elliptical and then there's just plain dithering.

I had a thought while watching this week's "Cotorno": Is this show just not as interesting now that everybody knows what Hannibal is up to?  The first two seasons wrung buckets of tension from dramatic irony.  Everyone watching knows Hannibal's true nature, and we're just waiting for the characters on the show to catch up.  Season two raised the stakes even more, presenting Will as the only one convinced of Hannibal's evil for the majority of the episodes, and introducing a new level of gamesmanship between the two.  Now that everybody is aware of Hannibal's murderous ways, it's just a straightforward race to get him, rather than the mystery it was in season one or the cat-and-mouse game that existed between he and Will in season two.  Because the show can't move too quickly and have Hannibal get caught, it runs the risk of turning him into a supervillain, always two steps ahead even when it seems like he isn't, and somehow scampering off just in the nick of time.

Really, the problem boils down to structure more than anything.  Season two was breathlessly paced, constantly lunging forward with reckless abandon.  Even the trial episode near the beginning, which seemed to be most people's least favorite episode last year, moved the story forward much more than anything we've gotten so far this year.  Season three probably couldn't ever match that, but the first season didn't have a bullet train narrative either, and it worked out fine.  What it did have was the underlying structure of its cases of the week to hold everything together.  We live in an age where the word "procedural" gets a reaction similar to a baby being forced to eat vegetables, but it's awfully valuable in giving episodes a structure while you play around with longer narratives in the spaces between.  Without that, season three is waffling under the weight of its own intense serialization.  After all, even season two had a case of the week in over half of its episodes.

These complaints aren't show-killing ones though.  Season three may be a step down from its first two seasons, but a limping Hannibal is still stronger than almost everything else on television.  Plus, there has been some compelling material amidst the sluggishness.  As mentioned before, "Antipasto" was a great premiere, and this season has continued to explore its most fascinating theme: the idea that it's both terrifying and liberating for somebody else to truly know you.  If nothing else, season three has emphasized just how brilliantly laid out season two was, giving so many characters different motivations for wanting to seek vengeance against Hannibal Lecter.  We're only five episodes in, so things could come together eventually and render all of these points moot.  I just hope it happens sooner than later, especially given that this season could very well be its last, if nobody else picks it up after NBC cancelled it.  So get it together, Fuller and crew -- stop stalling and show us your design.

Forget the STD metaphor, It Follows is really about the fear of getting older

The most crucial scene in It Follows, this year's indie horror movie sensation, is disguised as a relatively minor one.  Young college student Jay (Maika Monroe, of last year's The Guest) is on date with Hugh (Jake Weary), a guy she just met, when she proposes that they play a game while waiting in line at the theater.  In this game, one must look at their surroundings and pick somebody they'd want to switch places with.  The other person then has to guess who that person would be and why.  Jay predicts Hugh would want to switch places with a guy in the crowd who has a hot girlfriend.  Hugh tells her she's incorrect, and points to a couple and their young son.  She assumes he means the dad, but no, he actually means the kid.  "Must be nice to still have your whole life ahead of you," Hugh remarks wistfully.

Once their relationship progresses a bit, Jay and Hugh have sex for the first time in his car, after which he chloroforms her.  The film's premise is then laid out simply and economically: Jay wakes up tied to a wheelchair, and Hugh explains that he's passed on a curse to her by having sex with her.  She will be followed relentlessly by a mysterious, murderous entity.  It can only be seen by those with the curse, it can take on the form of any person, and even though it's slow, it's not dumb.  The only way to get rid of this curse is to pass it on to somebody else, but if they get killed, the curse just reverts back down the line of transference.

It's easy to see that premise as one extended metaphor for STDs -- I mean, the film is essentially begging for that interpretation.  After all, it's about a supernatural force that's exchanged through sexual intercourse, something that follows you and haunts you constantly.  And indeed, many viewers have picked up on that explanation and ran with it.  But consider a secondary, deeper-seated metaphor, one that's clear from the aforementioned scene between Hugh and Jay at the theater.  It Follows is a horror film about the fear of aging.

Writer-director David Robert Mitchell landed on the scene with his feature-length film The Myth of the American Sleepover, a dreamy panorama of teenage life on the last weekend of summer vacation in the suburbs of Detroit.  It got rave reviews at film festivals, and though I personally wasn't crazy about it, I did love the hazy mood of it all.  Either way, I don't think anybody could've guessed that his follow-up would be this.  It Follows exhibits such a technical mastery and distinct visual style that it feels like somebody with 10 films under his belt, not one.  The best trick in his repertoire is his use of the slow pan, circling around these perfectly choreographed scenes to give more visual information and map out the geography of a setting, priming the viewer to prepare for terror coming from any direction.  He uses those elegant, glacial camera movements time and time again for the film's many ingeniously constructed setpieces.

But though the film may be a gigantic leap-forward on a filmmaking level, it's very much in tune with his debut on a thematic and textural one.  That film was all about bottling up the experience -- the look, the sound, the mood -- of adolescence.  This one does the same, only in more oblique ways.  Though they may initially be skeptical of the veracity of what Jay is going through, she has her younger sister Kelly (Lili Sepe) and her two friends Paul (Kier Gilchrist) and Yara (Olivia Luccardi) to stand by her through this ordeal.  Mitchell puts such care into carving out the interpersonal relationships here, and the film would work well even without the horror plot, solely on the strength of their characterizations.  They become something of a Scooby Gang on their quest to rid Jay of this evil.

There's such an aching nostalgia for youth in the way he captures the specificity of being young.  The way the characters lay around in bed, curled up beside each other.  The way they spend vacant time, sitting on the porch playing cards because there's nothing better to do.  The way they watch old black and white movies and goof around.  It's a romantic view the film takes on, as if everything after is going to be all downhill from here.

But the clearest evidence of the film's true aim of being about the anxieties of getting older is in its many scenes where a piece of literature is read aloud.  The first instance is a scene where Jay is sitting in English class, a day or two after she's had the curse passed down to her.  Her professor is reading T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" to the class, but Jay is too distracted by what she sees outside of a window: "It" staggering towards her in the form of an old woman.  Prufrock is a rambling, disorienting poem, but one of the prevailing interpretations is that it's about aging and decay.  It's no coincidence that as we hear a poem about a man who has "seen the moment of [his] greatness flicker," we see this harbinger of death inch closer and closer in the frame.

Or consider the film's penultimate scene, which would otherwise seem like it has no purpose being left in the final cut.  Throughout the film, Yara is reading Dostoyevsky's The Idiot on her little clam shell e-reader.  After the climactic showdown with It lands her in the hospital, there's a scene that's just her reading this excerpt of the book to the rest of the gang:

"When there is torture, there is pain and wounds, physical agony, and all this distracts the mind from mental suffering, so that one is tormented only by the wounds until the moment of death. But the most terrible agony may not be in the wounds themselves but in knowing for certain that within an hour, then ten minutes, then within half a minute, now at this very instant--your soul will leave your body and you will no longer be a person, and that this is certain.  The worst thing is certain."

It's Mitchell last way of saying: death is coming for you, no matter what.  You can try to avoid it, but it will catch up to you eventually.  Sounds like something else in this film.

When you're young, you feel invincible.  Darker days may be in store, but you don't have to worry about that for now.  Your whole world is those card games on the porch on lazy afternoons.  But then at some point, a rewiring begins to happen.  Adulthood encroaches -- slowly, then all at once -- and with it comes an awareness of your own mortality, your eventual decay.  It Follows knows that that's the greatest horror of all.

Breaking down last night's brilliantly directed hour of The Americans

At the end of the breakout second season of FX's riveting Cold War spy drama The Americans, Philip (Matthew Rhys) and Elizabeth (Keri Russell) Jennings learn that the KGB wants them to recruit their teenage daughter Paige (Holly Taylor).  After a season of them united in their front to keep Paige away from her burgeoning interest in Christianity, season three has found them at loggerheads with each other over how to react to this news.  This week's episode, "Open House," continues that boiling plotline, but comes at it from an indirect and artful angle, thanks to some spectacular direction from Thomas Schlamme.

Schlamme is famous for his work on The West Wing, which was known for its signature "walk and talk" scenes, but he's been doing a terrific job on The Americans since the show's inception, and "Open House" is by far his best work to date.  This show has always been able to generate meaning in subtle ways -- simple glances on The Americans can conjure up just as many emotions as a plot twist would on another program.  Schlamme takes it up another notch by making sightlines the entire thematic underpinning of the hour.

Fullmetal Alchemist (2003) vs. Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood (2009)

I missed out on Fullmetal Alchemist during the peak of its popularity for reasons both practical and superficial.  On the former side of the equation, I wasn't yet into anime to a large extent and I could never catch it at the start of its run on Adult Swim.  On the latter, I was kind of turned off by it because most of the people who loved it were the type of people I hated in middle school.  So my impression of the show was solely based off the snippets I'd seen in promos and bits of buzz that wandered into my ears.  From that, I had assumed it was just a simple shounen show where the main characters fought a series of escalating baddies.  And instead of magic or super powers, these people fought with alchemy, or "science magic," if you will.

To my surprise, it's actually quite a morally, emotionally complex show.  In many ways, it reminds me of Avatar: the Last Airbender, not least of which is the fact that you can look at both from a distance and dismiss them as shows for children, but upon further inspection reveal themselves to be mature in their themes and storytelling.  Fullmetal Alchemist, especially in its introductory episodes, is steeped in loss.  Following the untimely death of their mother, Edward and Alphonse Elric take up alchemy and ravenously devour ancient texts in an effort to use its powers to resurrect her.  However, their attempt at playing God backfires and they pay a hefty price, the loss of Ed's right arm and left leg and Al's entire body.

The beginning of the show milks the tragedy of the Elric brothers for all it's worth, but that's what makes their journey so compelling.  Along their quest to find the Philosopher's Stone, a device that will help them get the pieces of themselves that they've lost back, Ed and Al are constantly reminded of the choices they've made, not just from the parts of them that are literally missing, but from the various people they come across.  Using alchemy as a way of trying and failing to deal with loss is a theme that comes up over and over; the show is almost a Fringe-level examination of the physical cost of pushing science to its limits.

One area where Fullmetal Alchemist does skew younger is in its sense of humor.  The comedy is absolutely dire, relying on simple jokes that repeat incessantly over the course of the series.  You'll understand that Ed is insecure about being short, that Hughes loves his kid, or that people initially assume Al is the Fullmetal Alchemist pretty early on.  That doesn't stop the writers from continuing to tell variations of those jokes, the already low response from it diminishing each time.  Occasionally, the comedy is used as a shorthand way of effectively fleshing out characters.  Part of the reason why a certain character's death about a fourth of the way through the show has so much impact is because the running joke about the character is what establishes the stakes of their story.

But whenever the show threatens to fall off its axis, it always has Ed and Al's dynamic to fall back on.  Their brotherly relationship is the rock that holds everything together.  They've lost their mother, and their father abandoned them when they were younger, so now they're the only family each other has.  The fierce devotion they have to one another is what drives their quest to return their bodies to a normal state.  Ed and Al's relationship is so strong that the story stumbles a little bit when it tries to bring conflict into the mix.  Al's suspicion, and subsequent anger, about the possibly that Ed manufactured his memories just doesn't feel true to the character.  Luckily, it's a storyline that comes and goes rather quickly.

Fullmetal Alchemist is also about the surrogate families that build up throughout the series.  Though Ed and Al are orphans, they've got their childhood friend Winry and her grandmother, who are there to provide physical aid (Winry uses her skills as a mechanic to fix Ed's mechanical arm) and emotional support.  Then there's Colonel Mustang's squadron, the gang of misfits who are united by their faith and loyalty to their leader.  Even the homunculi, the artificially created humans who make up the villains of the series, are bounded by their burden, their desire to be human.  It's not just the families we're given that matters, but the families we make as well.

Like many of the longer running anime that are based on manga, the show began putting out episodes at a faster pace than the source material, and had to deviate the story from its original path.  This led to an emphasis on the conflict between the state and Ishbala, which recalls the real life Middle East.  In fact, lots of the second half of the series feels like an Iraq War allegory.  Between the excessive military occupation, the idea of a government invading land to serve their own means (finding/testing out the Philosopher's Stone), and keeping information and motives from the general public, the real-world implications just pile on.  The city of Liore also has some Middle East parallels, in that a corrupt leader gets overthrown, but that only causes more chaos and mayhem.  "Dog of the military" is a phrase that comes up over and over again throughout the show.  It's a series that explores what it means to serve a country, to follow orders even when you don't fully understand or agree with them.  Moral gray areas abound, effectively portraying the atrocities of war that are committed on both sides.

Much like Avatar: the Last Airbender, one of the best things about Fullmetal Alchemist is the deep well of empathy that it contains.  Throughout its run, there are a few characters who remain purely evil, because most of the villains stick around long enough that we're given reasons to sympathize with them.  Most of the show's most tragic arcs come from those who don't start off on the side of good.  For example, Scar is introduced as a fearsome villain, an alchemist killer with a no-mercy attitude.  But when you actually learn why he has a grudge against state alchemists, your perspective on him completely changes.  Likewise with homunculus Lust, who causes destruction in search of the Philosopher's Stone because she wants to use it to become human again.

The ways in which we strive toward humanity is at the forefront of the series.  It tackles this idea literally with the homunculi's quest for the Philosopher's Stone, and in a roundabout way with Ed's desire to get his and Al's full bodies back.  But it's also all about the ways in which we try to do the right thing, to not compromise on our morals, but occasionally fall short.  Many of the characters are struggling under the weight of past sins or present predicaments.  Nobody comes out unscathed or uncompromised.

The overflow of themes and ideas Fullmetal Alchemist has is matched by the vast array of characters, an ensemble it has an excellent handle on.  There are so many varied and distinct characters in the bunch, and the show has a way of bringing back people who seem minor and then making them vital to the overarching plot.  It speaks to a larger point, which is that it's much better paced than most anime with 50 episodes.  That's probably because the show keeps its "filler" episodes clustered in the beginning, which helps you get a better sense of the characters, so you'll be fully invested once the plotting intensifies.  But even in the later stages of the show, it's able to incorporate some experimental episodes, such as the one that focuses on what Mustang's squadron does in their downtime (Avatar parallel #457: "Tales of Ba Sing Se").  All throughout its run, Fullmetal Alchemist mixes tones -- it could do light or funny or dark or somber -- but the narrative stays cohesive.

The conclusion of the series, which brings all of the ongoing storylines to a head, stumbles in a few crucial ways.  It's not an unqualified failure, but the final couple of episodes are by far the weakest of the series.  They are just way too overstuffed and, without giving away any specific details, they introduce some over-the-top, idiotic ideas.  Plus, for a show that's so grim and uncompromising, the ending feels very cheap and unsatisfying.

Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood was created, in part, to make up for that ending and the fact that the original 2003 series went off in its own direction in the second half.  Now, with the manga complete, Brotherhood would be able to follow its source material to the letter.  So this 2009 sister series benefited those manga purists who were infuriated by the original, and if fans of the previous version found something to like in it too, then it'd be icing on the cake.

The biggest problem with Brotherhood is that it assumes that viewers have already seen Fullmetal Alchemist '03.  Of course, almost everybody had seen the latter, but the choice to simply barrel through the story in the first 13 episodes doesn't make for an enjoyable viewing experience.  In that early stretch of episodes, it feels like a soulless imitation of an anime I liked quite a bit and didn't need another version of.  There's so much emotional shorthand that not only make the beats work less in the present tense, but hurt future moments that lean on the foundation laid in the beginning.  The origin of the Elric brothers doesn't have one-fourth the power that it does in the original series, there are crucial scenes and episodes centered on Maes Hughes that are cut out, and Colonel Mustang isn't given enough scenes with the Elrics to establish their relationship.  Most of the humor in Fullmetal Alchemist was already execrable, but Brotherhood injects even more lazy and sometimes egregious (Izumi vomiting blood gets played for laughs!) comedy.  Most of all, the first arc is just plain boring.

Many of the characters end up feeling poorly handled.  Where Scar was an intimidating, but soulful character in the original Fullmetal, he comes off like the generic "badass anime villain" throughout most of Brotherhood.  A character like the first Brigadier General gets killed off before we even get to know him.  The 2003 Fullmetal had the intelligence to devote an episode to Barry the Chopper in his murderous human form, so that his reappearance at the 5th Laboratory as a hollow suit of armor has more impact.  Brotherhood just introduces him at the 5th Laboratory and fills in his backstory with a crudely animated sequence.  However, the show's biggest transgression comes from the writing of the homunculi.  Here, they are far less complex and thematically resonant than in the original series, where they were given backstories and motivations beyond an evil plot.  Brotherhood seems content with having them be manifestations of Father's sins.  So when Lust dies in the 2003 version, it's tragic because we've seen her origin and desires; in the 2009 version, it's simply a triumphant defeat of the bad guy.  And the less said about the Greed 2.0 storyline, the better.

Thankfully, there are a few saving graces that make it easier to get through the first half of Brotherhood.  It boasts much higher production values than its predecessor, across the board.  Even when the story drags, episodes immediately light up when an action sequence rolls around.  They're excellently paced, choreographed, and directed; a marked improvement on the already great action from the original series.  It takes a while to get used to the art -- thinner lines, rounder faces, manga-styled designs in the comedic moments -- but the characters designs are so unique and interesting that they can translate well to any style.  Many of the voice actors from the original reprise their roles, and like Fullmetal Alchemist, Brotherhood has a superb English dub.

At 64 episodes, 13 more than the 2003 version, Brotherhood has more room to expand, and it does so with great success.  In Fullmetal Alchemist, it was almost as if "the state" was the only real piece of land that existed other than Ishbal, whose location was unclear, but felt like it was somewhere nearby.  Brotherhood actually gives "the state" a name -- Amestris -- and gives it bordering nations with names and actual people who inhabit it.  Sometimes that leads to the inclusion of characters like Prince Lin and Princess May from Xing, a fictional nation heavily based on China, who are completely annoying and uninteresting.  But more often than not, learning more about the world of Brotherhood improves the show.  It's no surprise that the series actually starts to become good around the time that Ed and Al travel to the North.  Those episodes feel like we've had our eyes opened to a whole new world, complete with its own mythology and way of doing things.  It reminded me of The North in Game of Thrones: frighteningly cold, gigantic wall that stands as a barrier from dangerous enemies, misfits and sinners charged with protecting it.

The second half of the series improves leaps and bounds upon the first half, starting from that portion in the North and leading into the action-packed finale arc.  Its biggest strength is to be found in Roy Mustang's progression as a character, which is so satisfying that it's hard to imagine why the original didn't go in that direction.  (The likely answer is that this part of the manga wasn't finished yet, but his arc in Brotherhood feels so logical that all roads would seem to lead to it.)  He becomes the show's richest, most complex character, a man who wants power but also has a desire to remain good while doing it, and slowly realizing that that may be untenable.  His actions also factor into the finale's political intrigue-filled coup, which amps up the tension tenfold.  Great action sequences occur across multiple fronts, with deft cross-cutting between them all.  It's gripping, exciting stuff.

Brotherhood pulls out every happy ending imaginable for its conclusion: Mustang gets his eyesight back, Ed and Winry basically end up together, Al gets his body back, Havoc gains the ability to walk again, there's a new Selim.  All of it is a little too pat, but it's an otherwise sweeping, grandiose, and very moving closer.  While it ends up being more successful than the ending of Fullmetal Alchemist (2003), it's hard to deny that both finales are thematically fitting for their respective series.  FMA '03 was more about loss, so the ending was a bittersweet one, forever reminding us that sacrifices are necessary.  For Brotherhood, which was always a more traditional story, the ending is more hopeful.  The latter is very much about the cycle of violence that humans inflict on one another, which is what the homunculi capitalize on.  So the ending is humanity finally breaking that cycle and making steps toward peace.

Ultimately, I preferred the original Fullmetal Alchemist as a complete experience.  It's more consistent, darker, and more nuanced than Brotherhood.  The latter has its own unique pleasures, they just take longer to appear.  If you want a faithful adaptation of the manga, go with Brotherhood; if you like liberal adaptations, FMA 03 is the one to go with.  Of course, you can always just kiss 50 hours of your life goodbye and watch both like I did.

Exploring the adolescent sexuality in It Felt Like Love and Young & Beautiful

We're at the particular point that exists between the summer and fall seasons of TV where there's almost no shows with which to occupy one's nights.  Luckily, that also coincides with the period when some of the smaller indie movies that came out earlier in the year start hitting Netflix streaming.  This past week, I decided to capitalize on this confluence of events and catch up on some films that I missed out on in 2014 so far.  Two of those -- It Felt Like Love and Young & Beautiful -- happened to form accidental mirrors, taking on adolescent sexuality in distinct and fascinating ways.

Young & Beautiful is the latest film from French auteur François Ozon, whose work is usually characterized by its exploration of human sexuality, and this one is no different.  It tells the story of Isabelle (Marine Vacth), a girl who has just turned 17 while on summer holiday with her family.  She quickly loses her virginity to a visiting German boy, and though it's hard to gauge her reaction to the ordeal, it's clear that it had some kind of effect on her, since she decides to become a prostitute once summer ends.  The film chronicles her deep descent into the world of prostitution, as she lies about her age (20) to the much older men she sleeps with and keeps this double life secret from her family.

Where that film follows a headlong dive into the treacherous waters of sex, Eliza Hittman's feature-length debut It Felt Like Love is more like a timid dipping of the toes.  Lila (Gina Piersanti) constantly lives in the shadow of her more sexual and outgoing best friend, Chiara (Giovanna Salimeni).  She's more of a watcher than a participant, tagging along as the third wheel whenever Chiara hangs out and canoodles with her revolving door of boyfriends.  Taking in information is the way she learns what people her age do and, by proxy, what she's supposed to do.  It's that pressure that makes her pursue Sammy, a college guy in the neighborhood, so aggressively.  Hittman perfectly captures that feeling of infatuation, the confusion of lust.  Lila doesn't even know why she wants what she wants, but there's something that tugs away at her nonetheless.

The story of Young & Beautiful is very much of a time and place.  The structure is neat, parsing out Isabelle's journey in four seasons.  Each season has its own tone and is paired with a different Françoise Hardy song, giving the film an episodic feeling.  Location choices progress as time does, and with each season change we are reoriented with Isabelle's head space through the spaces she occupies.  The summer scenes are full of bright beaches, representing her budding sexuality, while the fall and winter sequences increasingly find her cloistered in houses and hotel rooms.

Meanwhile, It Felt Like Love feels as if it takes place in an endless summer.  The film languidly follows these characters who mostly just hang out at the beach, lay around in bed, and party in dark houses.  It doesn't have any obvious signifiers that let you know where it takes place either.  Instead, it's just an amorphous teenage wasteland -- it could be set in any time and any place.  Where Young & Beautiful uses settings and seasons to emphasize the specific sexual history of Isabelle, It Felt Like Love could be a stand-in for anybody's teenage experience.

The two films also diverge in terms of technical style.  Ozon shoots Young & Beautiful with a very removed sense, all static shots and medium-length framing.  The sex scenes are graphic, but feel rather austere, as if we're observing them half-lidded and from far away.  That style matches the nature of Isabelle herself, given that it's hard to get a gauge on why she does what she does or how it makes her feel.  When the film cuts from the summer portion (where she's just lost her virginity) to the autumn portion (where she is already having sex for money), it's completely jarring.  As a result, we spend the rest of the film in search of a meaning that we never get.  Isabelle is meant to be observed, not necessarily understood.

On the other hand, It Felt Like Love strives for intimacy with every shot.  Hittman's swaying camera gets up close and personal, focusing on bodies -- the way they move, the way they bend and curve, the way they collide and rub up against each other.  The scenes are impressionistic, but the impression they leave is strong.  Not many words are spoken between the characters, but the emotions roll off of them like waves, to the point where there's almost no purpose in talking.  The way the camera slides up against Lila, you can always see the feelings conveyed on her face, every bluff and tell.  Unlike in Young & Beautiful, no sex is actually shown.  The implication is all that matters.  It Felt Like Love is overflowing with sexual energy.

Everybody is constantly trying to control Isabelle's sexuality in Young & Beautiful.  The prostitute-client transaction makes it such that she is at the command of her johns, and the sex is based upon their requests and desires.  When her mother finds out about what Isabelle is doing in her free time, she reacts harshly, excoriating Isabelle and forcing her to see a therapist.  Her mother does whatever she can to make sure her daughter isn't turning tricks.  All of these efforts, from her mother and the johns alike, are an attempt to make Isabelle's sexuality something that they can bend to their will.  But try as they might, sex is about pleasure for Isabelle, and prostitution is a decision all her own.

Sex is more an obligation for Lila, some kind of box she has to check off.  Adolescence rests squarely between childhood and adulthood, and is a period where most are desperate to leave the former in the dust by play-acting like they're already entrenched in the latter.  It Felt Like Love is all about the ways in which teens are desperate to look, feel, and be older than they are.  On numerous occasions, Lila mimics things that make her appear grown up, hiding that she knows less about sex than she lets on.  Not even she, it would seem, knows whether she actually wants to have sex or if she's just pursuing this older boy to catch up with everyone around her.

In both Young & Beautiful and It Felt Like Love, the protagonists get in a little bit over their heads.  Isabelle decides to become a prostitute without fully being able to deal with the implications of being underaged when the job goes wrong.  Lila pursues a college guy and winds up getting more than she bargained for by pretending she's readier than she actually is.  Yet neither Hittman or Ozon judges them for it.  Instead, they both acknowledge the universal messiness of sex.  Though the two films may be different in terms of style and form, they effectively navigate the weeds we all have to trudge through at some point in our lives.

Offering a mea culpa on You're the Worst

Every critic has reviews where they feel like they were off base or that their words didn't do a good job of reflecting how they actually felt about something.  In that regard, I'm certainly no different.  In my year and a half of writing this blog, I've written some reviews that I don't necessarily stand by anymore: my Star Trek Into Darkness review, which reads like a B when I thought the movie was a C-; my negative review of Earl Sweatshirt's Doris, an album I later grew to really enjoy; and my pilot review of Halt and Catch Fire, a show that later stumbled in a way that didn't reflect an A-.  It looks like I might have another one on my hands with You're the Worst, one of FX's two new summer comedies.  I gave the pilot a C-, but I wonder if my judgment of the previews got in the way of reviewing the actual show, because I've become quite a fan of it.

Part of the reason why I've warmed up to the show is that it has softened the edges of the two leads, Gretchen (Aya Cash) and Jimmy (Chris Beere).  My biggest complaint about the pilot was that Gretchen and Jimmy were so unlikable, and in a way that made them uninteresting and not enjoyable to watch.  Now, they still say and do horrible things, but there's less of a wink-wink, "ain't I a stinker?" air to it.  Plus, it doesn't hurt that the jokes have gotten better.  Showrunner Stephen Falk and his crew of writers have been gradually delivering stronger scripts with sharp, biting humor.  It's much easier to stomach the antipathetic nature of the characters when you're laughing along with them.

The show takes place in Los Angeles, and it's really about the city in a low-key way.  It populates the world with weirdos and people who are just as terrible as Gretchen and Jimmy, contrasting the bright prettiness of the city with the off-color people who inhabit it.  Even Gretchen and Jimmy's jobs -- she's a PR executive, he's a failing novelist -- feel very Hollywood.  You're the Worst uses these professions to have its leads come into contact with the colorful characters of Los Angeles, like the rapper that Gretchen is representing.  He's a clear Tyler the Creator analogue, complete with a skateboarding, cargo short wearing crew of lackeys, and he's just as obnoxious.  The show's fourth episode, "What Normal People Do," perfectly skewers Hollywood with Edgar's (Desmin Borges) storyline, where he initially thinks he's met other war veterans, only to eventually discover that they're just actors who are studying him for an upcoming movie.

Edgar, who is Jimmy's roommate and best friend, along with Gretchen's best friend Lindsay (Kether Donohue), round out the show's small cast.  Though it may be limiting, having only two supporting characters has allowed the writers to flesh Edgar and Lindsay out in a short amount of time.  The first few episodes featured them solely bouncing off of Jimmy and Gretchen, but the most recent couple have shown that they're able to hold their own in individual storylines.  In the process, they've actually revealed themselves to be the heart and soul of the show.  The writers have done an excellent job of handling Edgar's past wartime activity, making his PTSD quietly sad, but not depressing enough to throw off the tone of the show.  Meanwhile, Lindsay's marital problems and self-esteem issues are fertile material for them to explore in the future.

Despite its title and my initial criticisms, You're the Worst is one of the sweetest comedies on television.  Gretchen and Jimmy are slowly coming to grips with the fact that they actually genuinely like each other, despite his hatred and her fear of commitment.  First, their pairing appeared to be a union of two people whom nobody else wanted, but now it's transforming into them being together because they truly want each other.  They're beginning to compromise on their hard-hearted beliefs, subtly making each other better, kinder people.  It's a surprising joy to watch.

Like Married, the new show that airs before it, You're Worst still feels a little bit too shaggy and small.  Yet there's also something charming about its ragged nature.  I was watching with the wrong lens at first, and now that I've adapted to the rhythms of the show, I can see that the pilot was pretty solid.  And it's only gotten better, funnier, and more assured in the past few weeks.  The cast is great, the jokes are strong, and the heart is there.  If it keeps improving at this rate, You're the Worst could become one of TV's best comedies.

Bunheads vs. Gilmore Girls

The common pitch to get people to watch Bunheads is, "Did you like Gilmore Girls?  If so, then you'll probably like this."  After all, those who were fond of Amy Sherman-Palladino's brand of lightning-quick dialogue and breezy, female-centric stories on Gilmore Girls would find it easy to settle into Bunheads, which ported over the former's charms with few adjustments.  The parallels didn't stop there either -- both shows featured Kelly Bishop filling the brittle elderly woman role, the relationship between Fanny and Michelle mirrored Lorelai and Emily's, Truly had a bit of Sookie's sweet but neurotic qualities, and Paradise was essentially a west coast Stars Hollow.  In fact, the similarities proved to be too numerous for some, who accused Bunheads of being a cheap imitation of Gilmore Girls, and even those who like both mostly prefer the latter.  So I'm here to deliver a rare and controversial opinion:  I like Bunheads more than Gilmore Girls.

Though I prefer Bunheads, if you were to break both shows down to their individual qualities, Gilmore Girls would still have some advantages.  For example, Bunheads didn't have the great sense of history that Gilmore Girls had.  In a way, Bunheads was about a makeshift family, and the show's 18 episodes were about building the kind of history that Gilmore Girls already had implanted into its DNA from the beginning.  In true Amy Sherman-Palladino fashion, much of the crucial events in the Gilmore family happen offscreen, in this case years before the show even premiered, beginning with Lorelai getting pregnant and running away from home at 16.  The bundles of pain, regret, and disappointment in the relationship between Lorelai, Emily, and Richard were so precariously stacked that the writers were able to convey so much about them through so little.  Those years and years of bruised history were always something that they could fall back on for a meaty story ("Christopher Returns," "Dear Emily and Richard," etc).

But Bunheads had some tricks of its own too.  It took all of the common elements in Amy Sherman-Palladino's wheelhouse and added something crucial: dance.  In the short time that Bunheads on the air, its dance sequences were the best thing on television, bar none.  Performance elements in shows tend to be a way to express subtext without doing it through dialogue, and some of the dance sequences in Bunheads did that, as in episode two, where a dance sequence underlines how much the girls appreciate Fanny.  But sometimes they were capable of transcending the point of being a mere thematic device, and instead became a visualization of raw, primal emotions.  Each of the dances on the show -- no matter how small -- were always varied, visually dynamic, well-choreographed, and most of all, shot in fluid takes that went unbroken for impressive lengths.

Part of the reason why it could get away with such sequences is that it was, at its core, a much darker show than Gilmore Girls.  While Gilmore Girls might have been about a woman who ran away and had a kid at 16 years old, the darker aspects of the show were always balanced out by its WB-ness, small-town quirk, and that prevailing sense that everything would ultimately be okay.  Bunheads, on the other hand, had a sense that everything may not be okay, but you have to learn to adapt and make do.  On Gilmore Girls, Lorelai's life is pretty stable -- she has a wonderful daughter, her own business, and many friends in Stars Hollow.  Between Michelle's failed dance career, dead husband, and new role of responsibility that she's not prepared for; she's floundering much more.  Minus a few boat-stealing, home-wrecking stumbles along the way, Rory Gilmore's seven-season arc consisted of everything going her way.  The four bunheads don't have it as easy as special genius Rory, however.  Boo is stuck with a body type that will never be conducive to a successful dance career, Sasha is struggling with what to do in the wake of her parents' divorce, Melanie's anger issues sometimes cause her to violently lash out, and Ginny loses her virginity to a boy who couldn't be bothered to give her the time of day afterward.  While some people may like the lighter fare that Gilmore Girls provides, the dark core of Bunheads is something that lingers with me much more.

In an LA Times article, Amy Sherman-Palladino emphasized that Gilmore Girls and Bunheads were both products of the eras in which they aired by pointing out the differences between their construction.  Among them, the most notable was the insight that each Gilmore Girls episode consisted of three acts, while a Bunheads episode consisted of six.  As a result, Bunheads felt like a faster-paced show, since it had to structure the episodes around more act breaks.  Both shows are still notable for their relative lack of plot, but Bunheads was better at giving off the impression of forward progression.  This makes Gilmore Girls easier to skip around on, and Bunheads better to watch in linear chunks.

Rory Gilmore is one of my all-time favorite characters -- yes, I know that I'm boring -- but Bunheads having four teenage girls in its main cast allowed for the show to have a wider perspective.  Sasha, Boo, Ginny, and Melanie all had distinct personalities from the start of the show, allowing for more opportunities to have the audience identify with them.  Gilmore Girls may have given Rory people like Lane and Paris to bounce off of, but Bunheads explored female friendships in a far more complex way.  These were four girls who had their disagreements, but they were ultimately people who cared deeply about one another.  Plus, as much as I defend Alexis Bledel, the four actresses on Bunheads were much better than her.  (Have I mentioned that they danced?!)

Bunheads may have had female friendships down, but nothing can touch the mother-daughter relationship that's central to Gilmore Girls.  Rory and Lorelai's relationship is without a doubt the greatest mother-daughter relationship I've ever seen on television, and as much as Bunheads tried to hint at a slowly developing kinship between Michelle and the four girls, they couldn't come close to the two Gilmores.  Their sister-like closeness may not be something that we all aspire to, but it's admirable and enjoyable to watch nonetheless.  It's what makes their slow drifting in the show's later years all the more powerful.  The show's other mother-daughter relationship, Lorelai and Emily, gives Gilmore Girls another advantage.  They're almost like the flipside to Rory and Lorelai, their years defined by distance instead of an airtight bond, and even when they do have moments of mutual understanding, it's always informed by the tenuous strings that tie them together.  Once again, Bunheads attempted to create something like it with Michelle and Fanny, but it also couldn't compare to the execution on Gilmore Girls.

Ultimately, the Bunheads vs. Gilmore Girls debate runs into the same problem that Joss Whedon fans do when they compare Buffy and Firefly.  Gilmore Girls lasted seven 22-episode seasons and its length provides a breadth of quality that Bunheads just couldn't match.  The cumulative magnitude of "They Shoot Gilmores, Don't They?," "The Incredible Sinking Lorelais," and many of their other best episodes outshines the sum total of Bunheads' run.  We also never really got the chance to know Paradise like we got to know Stars Hollow.  The side characters on Bunheads felt like great characters, but those on Gilmore Girls felt like whole people.  On the other hand, Bunheads wasn't afforded the time to last long enough for us to get tired of any of those side characters (can you imagine still finding Truly amusing in season seven of that show?)  Its star burned short, but we got to remember its overwhelming brightness as opposed to the slow fade of Gilmore Girls.  Should Gilmore Girls get more credit for spreading its high quality out over a few seasons or should Bunheads get the edge because it never lasted long enough to stagnate?

Perhaps it's actually simpler than that.  I missed Gilmore Girls the first time around, so Bunheads was my first exposure to Amy Sherman-Palladino's work.  Meanwhile, most people watched Bunheads after they'd already seen Gilmore Girls.  So maybe it's just a matter of which of the two shows one watches first determining their favorite.  I guess we'll never truly know.  But really, guys, Bunheads is better.


Gilmore Girls Week ends here.  Don't miss Monday's overview of the entire show, Tuesday's essay on season four's "The Incredible Sinking Lorelais," Wednesday's look into Rory Gilmore's dating history, and Thursday's list of the show's 10 best episodes.

A look at Rory Gilmore's dating history

There's an old TV adage that says, "Happy couples aren't very interesting."  Though we want stability in our real life relationships, it's generally not what we want from our television couples, give or take an Eric and Tami Taylor.  That's the reason why fictional couples don't last very long -- eventually, even those for whom you most fiercely rooted to get together run the risk of stagnating.  If that's the case, then it's natural for a show that ran as long as Gilmore Girls did to have its two main characters go through so many relationships.

In my piece on Monday where I did an overview of the show as a whole, I mentioned that Gilmore Girls tracks Rory Gilmore's entire adolescence over the course of seven seasons.  While not everybody knows what it's like to go from a prestigious high school to an Ivy League university, there is something universal about the basic coming-of-age she experiences.  It makes sense (and is somewhat amusing), then, that on her way she cycles through many of the male archetypes that one is likely to date in their young adult years.  The shipper battles are intense within the Gilmore Girls fandom, and much blood has been shed over Team Dean vs. Team Jess debates.  (Meanwhile, the few Team Logan members remain hidden in a corner.)  But really, all of the internecine squabbling is pointless, because I have this theory that we're supposed to feel the same way that Rory does about the men on the show at any given moment.  Gilmore Girls is a show from the perspective of these two women, so it's natural that our opinions -- or mine, at least -- about people change when theirs do.

I was too busy nursing my own crush on her to care much about the boyfriends, but regardless of whom you prefer, you can't deny that Rory Gilmore is very crappy at relationships.  From making it obvious that she has feelings for Jess when she's still with Dean, to later sleeping with Dean when he's married to another woman, her bad decisions with men are the one major flaw in an otherwise great person.  So without further ado, let's delve into these boys and their respective archetypes:

Is Hannibal vs. The Americans the new Breaking Bad vs. Mad Men?

During the years that they were both on the air in the same calendar year, Breaking Bad and Mad Men were the two shows that battled it out for the unofficial title of Best Show on Television.  For the most part, there was very little question about the two shows' superior quality.  Both had a hand in ushering in the era during which AMC was seen as the new powerhouse network, an era that seems to have ended just as quickly as it came.  But even though many TV fanatics could agree that these were the two best shows on television, they were split on which one was actually the best show on television.  One's preference served to define them in some way: were you the kind of person who had a stronger response to Mad Men's sleek literary style or Breaking Bad's pulpy morality tale?

Now that Breaking Bad is over and Mad Men is entering its final season in a week, there's a void that's been left at the core of the television landscape.  Justified is near the end of a weak season, True Detective's quality doesn't quite match its pedigree and praise, and Enlightened was cancelled just as it was making a case for its place atop the TV Parthenon.  The two shows that appear to be the common response to the "what's the best show currently on television?" question are Hannibal and The Americans.  It's a pairing that doesn't seem to be as battle-ready as Mad Men and Breaking Bad were.  Those two had the benefit of being on the same network, centered around anti-heroes, and indebted to different aspects of The Sopranos.

At first glance, The Americans couldn't be more different from Hannibal.  One is a network drama while the other one is on cable.  One is about a serial killer, the other is about a pair of Russian spies in the 1980s.  But the coupling of the two brings out some interesting parallels.  Both were a part of the wave of great new television shows in 2013 -- a wave that included other potential contenders for the Best on TV title like The Returned, Rectify, and Orange is the New Black -- and while I admired them during their first seasons (The Americans ended up at #20 on my best of 2013 list, Hannibal at #12), I could never cross into the territory of fully loving them like many others did.  The Americans and Hannibal each had a cool vibe -- the latter in its clinical process, the former with its tight control and restraint -- that held me at a distance.  Yet in both shows, I saw something that implied those first seasons were only setup for when we got to the true fireworks factory in their second seasons.

Breaking Bad and Mad Men both had assured debut years, only to blow those respective seasons out of the water with their sophomore efforts.  If the parallels were to hold, it would only be fitting for Hannibal and The Americans to do the same.  And for the past 6 weeks, they've done just that, completely surpassing any kind of expectations that I had at the start of the year.  I predicted that The Americans would have a gigantic leap in quality in 2014 in my write-up for the show at the end of 2013, but if I'm being honest with myself, that was more of a wish than a guarantee.  It has had a leap though, mostly because the stakes feel so much higher this year.  Even in the first season, the show was always as much about a marriage as it was about spies (if not more so), and so far season 2 has stressed that point even more, after Philip and Elizabeth find the dead bodies of their two comrades and the couple's daughter when a mission goes wrong in the premiere.  The reminder of how much their duty is putting their family in danger is one that has hung heavily over these first six episodes, informing every decision they make, without it ever feeling heavy-handed.

Like Hannibal, The Americans is about the push and pull between its two main characters, and the marriage between Philip and Elizabeth is more layered and complex than ever.  Season 2 has delved deeper into the idea of roles and the way they factor into these people's lives.  It's about how their roles as spies and their roles as partners bleed into one another in ways both intentional and not.  This year, every character is crumbling under the weight of their own deception.  To match the complicated emotions running through the characters, the plot is even knottier this year.  You'll often have to watch each episode twice to get it, but you when you do get a grasp of it, you realize it's some crackerjack spy storytelling.  It's dizzying to see how many threads showrunners Joe Weisberg and Joel Fields are tugging at, crossing and looping them around each other masterfully.  The lid is kept so tight on the show that when it finally comes off and the plot intersects with the relationship drama, it's thrilling, devastating stuff.

Meanwhile, Hannibal may not be as concerned with the concrete logic of its A to B plotting, but season 2 has had a similar ramp up in story.  This season opened on a scene showing Jack Crawford and Hannibal Lecter coming to blows at some point in the future, but instead of it feeling like a spoiler, it was just an indication of how the events would be proceeding this year.  The plot has moved way faster than you'd expect, with Hannibal's body count increasing and his sphere of influence increasing faster.  Season 1 ended with a reverse of what we've come to expect from this story: with Hannibal free and Will Graham behind bars.  You'd think that imprisoning the lead would handcuff the show, since so much of its hook last year was the complicated relationship between these two broken men.  But the battle between the two of them has only become more intense this year.  Being locked behind bars has caused Will to think of more cunning measures to prove his innocence, making desperate attempts to show that the guilt lies on Hannibal's head instead.

For Will, being trapped in his own head is far worse than being stuck in a cell, and the visual manifestations of his psychoses have only increased to reflect the darkness invading him.  If season 1 coasted along on its oblique dreamlike logic, then season 2 of Hannibal is pure nightmare theater.  The show's visuals are by far the most stunning on television, generating just as many chills from a simple framing choice as they do from an elaborate crime scene tableau.  This year, the sounds have stepped up to match the sights, with the score becoming more eerie and intrusive with each new episode.  Together, all of the show's technical elements serve to key the audience into the parts of the characters' inner psyche that they may not even be aware of.  Like the show's titular cannibalistic serial killer, Hannibal is equally concerned with the artistry surrounding its story.

So if these two programs are the new titans that will be battling it out for televisual supremacy, then which one is the Mad Men and which one is the Breaking Bad?  There's not a one-to-one translation, really.  There's something to the sophistication and emotional temperature of The Americans that is strongly reminiscent of Mad Men, but its tightly constructed plot is very Breaking Bad.  Hannibal's got a more immediately hooky premise in the way that Breaking Bad did, but its favoring of atmosphere over plot recalls Mad Men.  In the end, The Americans is more like Mad Men and Breaking Bad is more like Hannibal, which makes the battle even more interesting, since I like Mad Men more than Breaking Bad but Hannibal more than The Americans right now.

Mad Men and Breaking Bad both had second seasons that are some of the best television seasons of last 10 years, and while neither The Americans nor Hannibal have quite reached that level halfway through, they're not far off from the trajectory.  Together, all four shows are an example of the anti-sophomore slump -- the "sophomore skyrocket," if you will.  The internet has a need to pit shows against each other for no real reason, so the latter two are just next up in the queue now that the former two are on their way out.  So is Hannibal vs. The Americans the new Breaking Bad vs. Mad Men?  Sure, why not?

Space Dandy has renewed my boyish enthusiasm for anime

My history with anime began in the same way that it did for the majority of the people in my generation: watching episodes of shows like Sailor Moon and Pokemon as a kid.  Back then, I was too little to know what anime was, and those shows were grouped in with The Rugrats and Doug as just cartoons in mind.  It wasn't until I was around 9 or 10, when my love of anime reached its peak with the popularity of Dragon Ball Z, that I really started to understand what it was.  DBZ was like event television at that time.  Every boy in my 4th grade class was obsessed with it, and I remember hoping that my mom would pick me up from after school care in time to watch the latest episode on Toonami, lest I be unable to participate in the elementary watercooler conversation that occurred the next day.  (I'm sure there were some girls who watched Dragon Ball Z too, but if they did they were too busy pretending they didn't, in the same way that we were lying about not watching The Powerpuff Girls.)  I still loved many American cartoons, but I knew there was something different and exciting about Japanese cartoons like this one and Yu Yu Hakusho.

As I got older, Toonami changed its airing schedule from weekdays between 4 and 6 PM to Saturday nights, where it aired shows like Naruto and One Piece.  Despite more modern animation, those shows still shared the maddening decompressed storytelling of Dragon Ball Z, but the block led into Adult Swim's late night anime programming.  Here was where I was introduced to the work of Shinichiro Watanabe, whose Cowboy Bebop and Samurai Champloo continued the growth and sophistication of my taste in anime, redefining my expectations of the medium.  I loved Cowboy Bebop's maturity, its jazzy soundtrack matching the laid back pace at which the episodes progressed.  Many people regard Bebop as the best anime of all time, so while my love of it isn't a bold opinion, the fact that I prefer Samurai Champloo is.  There's just something about the blending of samurai action and hip hop brashness in the latter that really hit me back in high school, and its brand of melancholy registered more than Bebop's did.  Regardless, the two of them are basically my favorite anime ever.

Since then, my anime viewing has slowed down, to the point where I had given up on it for the last two years or so.  Even still, I consider myself such a Watanabe fan that I vowed I'd watch anything he worked on, no matter what my relationship with anime was at the time.  Well now, just that has happened, as his interstellar romp Space Dandy premiered on Adult Swim a few weeks ago.  (Aside from its notability for being Watanabe's first non-adaptation anime since Champloo, Space Dandy is also monumental because it airs in America before our friends in Japan get to see it.)  Initially, I was very wary, because Space Dandy was pitched as more of a straight comedy.  Even back when I was a more frequent anime viewer, I tended to stay away from comedy, because I generally don't have a Japanese sense of humor.  Bebop and Champloo certainly had comedic moments, but they weren't given the space to become tiresome in the way that the gags do in comedic anime.  The first half of Space Dandy's pilot certainly suffered from this problem, and the humor didn't really work for me.  I admired the old school charm of the show, but its tired meta humor and boob-obsessed protagonist weren't a good introduction.

Luckily there's a bit more to the show than that.  Things turned around in the second half of the episode, when the jokes fell away in favor of the show's artistic prowess.  The pure visual splendor on display, awash with vivid colors and psychedelic designs, was much more in line with the boldness of Watanabe's previous work.  That's where the true core of Space Dandy lies, in its ability to irreverently treat its world like a sandbox for its playful "anything goes" mentality.  The next few episodes still featured some of the hammy elements that nearly brought down the pilot, but it was always saved by just how wild the show was willing to get, offering up a new flavor with every new episode, and sometimes switching things up in the middle of one.  This extreme tonal variation is a Watanabe staple, but his previous shows never reached the pure comedic lunacy that Dandy does.

No episode exemplifies that sense of insanity more than "Sometimes You Can't Live Without Dying, Baby," the show's 4th episode.  In it, Meow gets bitten by an alien that turns him into a zombie.  The genius of the rest of the episode is in just how far it takes this standard concept.  Soon the zombie outbreak spreads -- even robot QT becomes zombified, her growl sounding like an autotuned R&B song -- to the point where Dandy himself becomes a zombie.  And that's just the first half of the episode.  It just keeps going and going with the idea, hilariously examining how life insurance changes in the wake of the zombie apocalypse.  The true star of the episode is the show's narrator, who languidly describes the progression of events, from the assassins in charge of killing the zombies so they no longer cash in on their insurance to the zombies' inexplicable love of malls.  But eventually even he can't escape the outbreak, as the episode ends with him somehow becoming a zombie as well.  It's a brilliant, bizarre, and ballsy episode that will be remembered as the show's first true sign of greatness if it ends up being one of the great anime of our time.

It'd be hard to match the ridiculous heights that the zombie episode did, so the show rightfully pared things down for its 5th episode, where Dandy bonds with an alien girl who's on the run.  It's the most Bebop-esque episode the show has had so far, matching that show's somber tone and showing a more mature side to the often juvenile Dandy.  Even still, at times it also seemed like a bizarre parody of those stories where an adult takes a troubled kid under their wing.  Further proof that the show can't be nailed down comes from its most recent episode, in which Meow and Dandy become embroiled in a war between the two species inhabiting a planet they land on.  The cause of the war: one side only wears vests and the other only wears pants.  At the point we find them, both species have been whittled down to only one member each, and Meow and Dandy get roped into things, choosing sides in this tiny and petty battle.  The severe incompetence displayed by both sides makes for a funny episode that only somebody with a truly warped mind could think of.

In just 6 weeks, Space Dandy has emerged as something truly special.  It's in rarefied air, belonging with shows like Community and Black Mirror when it comes to not knowing what to expect from it on any given week.  The show may have some rough edges and lapses into immaturity, but it's ultimately a fun way to spend 30 minutes.  If you're looking for the sophistication of Cowboy Bebop or Samurai Champloo, you're going to have to throw those expectations out of the door, because this is not either of those.  So just sit back and enjoy the ride, baby!