Pilot Talk 2014: Halt and Catch Fire

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.

Sundays at 10:00 PM on AMC

Has any cable network ever had a faster fall from grace than AMC did?  It has only been about six years since the "AMC is the next HBO" narrative started revving up around the rise of Mad Men and Breaking Bad, but it feels more like 60.  The Killing was the last time that I watched a full season of one of their shows, and my patience has grown so thin with their programming that I didn't even make it to the end of the pilot of Turn.

Thankfully, Halt and Catch Fire is much better than the network's recent fare, and it's probably their best pilot since The Walking Dead's in 2010.  The story centers around Joe MacMillan (Lee Pace), an oily tech pitch man who finds himself restless with the state of the industry and hopes to make a major move to shake things up.  When he begins working at a new company, he enlists the help of fellow employee Gordon Clark (Scoot McNairy), a once-hungry computer builder whose ambitions have been dulled by family life and legal trouble.  The pilot is essentially a "getting the gang together" episode -- the ragtag team is later rounded out by Cameron (Mackenzie Davis), a fresh out of college coder -- but it does so in such thrilling fashion.  If there's one thing about it so far, it's that the show has style.  The use of 80s music is more glitzy than say, The Americans, but it's all in tune with the themes of the show.  Ultimately, it's about operating outside of the rigid rules set by the business structure of the tech world.  "Halt and Catch Fire" may seem like a silly and wordy title at first, but it refers to a technological term that reflects what the main trio of renegades are trying to do in sparking a computer revolution.

What makes the prospects even more hopeful is that creators Chris Cantwell and Chris Rogers circumvent pitfalls that lesser shows would be more than happy to tumble right into.  They do this with Gordon's wife, Donna (Kerry Bishe), who also has a job in the tech industry, adding stakes to her husband's decision to risk his career by joining up with Joe.  It's a move that subverts the nagging wife cliche effectively: she doesn't complain because of a lack of understanding -- that she does understand makes her hesitance about Gordon's decision all the more important.  It would have also been easy for the show to drown in technical jargon (or just be incredibly boring, like Turn), but they smartly make the story about the power moves that are put in action as a result of all that jargon.  Halt and Catch Fire may not wind up being the show that ushers in a second era of quality television for AMC, but it certainly ends their streak of complete misses.

Grade: A-

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.

"A Sea of Split Peas" introduces Courtney Barnett as a talented rambler

Courtney Barnett makes it look easy.  If you watch the 26 year-old Australian singer-songwriter perform, she exudes a lackadaisical charm -- her hair slightly tousled, her shoulders slouched a bit, her left-handed guitar picked with her fingers.  And when you actually pay attention to the songs that she's playing, there's an off-the-cuff nature to them too.  A Sea of Split Peas, her 12-song double EP, is a conversational record.  Each of the tracks feel less like songs and more like a saunter through the tangled wires in her brain, where you are treated to observations like "I got drunk and feel asleep but luckily I left the heater on / And in my dreams I wrote the best song I've ever written...can't remember how it goes."

The biggest hit on the record, "Avant Gardener" -- a verbose, discursive tale about some sort of asthma attack she has while gardening -- is the epitome of Barnett's rambling style.  Somehow it manages to start off in a mundane place ("Sleep in late, another day") and over the course of five minutes, it casually ends with a trip to the hospital and an inhaler prescription ("I was never good at smoking bongs," Barnett notes in response to her inability to use the inhaler correctly).  The song functions much like a story told to a friend, full of diversions and extraneous details, and you get to know so many character details through these little lyrical alleyways.  "Reminds me of a time / when I was really sick and I / had too much pseudoephedrine and I / couldn't sleep at night," she remarks at one point, taking a break to tell a story within the story.  She even finds the time for comedy in the genius line, "The paramedic thinks I'm clever 'cause I play guitar / I think she's clever 'cause she stops people dying."

Many of the songs on the album involve the opposite sex in some way, but even when she's dealing with conventional subject matter, she manages to find an unconventional approach to it.  "Lance Jr." candidly opens with, "I masturbated to the songs you wrote."  But lest the guy get any ideas, she later says, "Doesn't mean I like you man / it just helps me get to sleep / and it's cheaper than Temazepam."  Barnett has a tough, no-nonsense attitude towards the men in her songs.  On "Out of the Woodwork," she dryly tells a former paramour, "Just because you're older than me, doesn't you have to be so condescending," and later she gives the sly dressing down, "It must be tiring trying so hard, to look like you're not really trying at all."  She has the ability of ruthless efficiency, cutting straight to the bone with lines like "I may not be 100% happy but at least I'm not with you."  But when she wants to, she can also be extremely tender, as seen on  "Anonymous Club," which is all about the simple act of human connection.  It's a song that's stripped bare and stretched wide, finding her at her most sincere and romantic.

However, Barnett doesn't only rely on the template of the love song to pack an emotional wallop, as seen on "Are You Looking After Yourself," the album's centerpiece.  It's structured like a conversation between her and a loved one -- probably older, maybe a parent.  The  loved one asks "Are you working hard my darling?  We're so worried." "I don't want no nine-to-five telling me that I'm alive," Barnett responds, more concerned with freedom and individuality.   Her elder asks her if she's saved some money for rainy days, but she's just thinking about her friends in bands, who are "better than everything on the radio."  Finally, there's a turnaround at the end, as she comes to the conclusion, "I don't know what I was thinking, I should get a job."  She then resolves to get a dog, get married, have some babies, and watch the evening news. In just a few lines, she captures the negotiation between early 20s aimlessness and real-world responsibility with a piercing poignancy.

"Are You Looking After Yourself" runs for nearly eight minutes, complete with a four-minute guitar squall at the end.  Barnett isn't afraid to let songs stretch out elsewhere on the album either.  Many of the songs expand past the point where she's finished with what she has to say, giving way to extended instrumental outros.  The seven-minute somber ballad, "Porcelain," slowly builds around a central melody before unleashing a staggering piano solo.  But for the most part, these codas don't really grow or transform -- they just remain locked in a powerful groove, a direct contrast to the wandering lyrics.

At its core, however, A Sea of Split Peas is sweet, simple rock 'n roll music.  The instrumentation feels very loose -- jagged guitars, limber basslines, playful drums -- but it's all of a piece with Barnett's casual vibe.  The record has a little bit of garage rock ("History Eraser," "Canned Tomatoes (Whole)"), boozy bar rock ("Scotty Says"), and even some country twang ("Out of the Woodwork," "Porcelain").  It's a mixture that keeps the record moving along without its bare bones nature becoming mind-numbing.  Each of the first 11 tracks feel like a bunch of friends assembled to bang out a song really quickly, and then the album ends with "Ode to Odetta," a lovely tune that features a lone Barnett on the guitar.

There's something magically all-purpose about this record -- it's an album for when you're sad, when you want a laugh, or when you just want to stare into the middle distance and listen to some high-quality songs.  This is a record that teaches you how to listen to it as well.  What at first feels oblique and off-kilter just becomes natural, and eventually, tuneful.  For instance, "Avant Gardener" has this odd delivery where it feels like Barnett emphasizes the wrong words in a line, rising too early and singing just slightly off-key.  However, it just adds to the song's strange charm.  (That charm becomes even stranger when you discover that she actually has a terrific voice.)  Courtney Barnett might make it look easy, but A Sea of Split Peas contains a clear vision and a level of depth that can't be faked.

Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.'s first season was better than it was given credit for

When I wrote about the pilot of Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. last September, I said that it was a solid debut and a fun introduction to the world adjacent to the Marvel Cinematic Universe.  The characters were a little bit broad, but that -- and many of the other rough elements -- were to be expected when you only had the pilot to go on.  There was a give and take to the pilot; it showed the limitations of what the budget could achieve, but also the interesting stories that could be told from the show's point of view.  For the most part, critics and audiences alike felt similarly about the pilot, but more and more complaints began to flood in during the following weeks.  With the high expectations and even higher budget that came with the show, it was bound to leave some disappointed, but the gripes went beyond the level of mild annoyance.  These alleged problems were deeply ingrained within the show's foundation, from the lame characters, to the cheesy dialogue, to the cheap-looking action.

Reading these complaints every week made me feel like I was on an island, since I was generally enjoying the show.  I never really understood the ambivalence that people had about the characters.  Back in my review of the pilot, I noted that Skye's effervescent presence made her a good entry point into the show, which is what made all of the internet vitriol towards her even more baffling.  Some of it I could understand -- after all, there was no logical reason for the team to keep her around in the first few episodes -- but most of it seemed very nitpicky and sexist ("Why does she have great hair?  She's a hacker!").  Aside from some difficulties understanding their accents, people were okay with Fitz and Simmons, the best characters from the beginning.  Their rapport was entertaining and Whedon-esque, making them the kind of funny and lively people who were easy to root for.  I found Agent Ward to be as much of a blank slate as everybody else did at first, but I warmed up to him once they fit some moments of levity into his grizzled persona.  Plus, Brett Dalton is much better than previous Whedon planks like Marc Blucas or David Boreanaz.  If anything, Agent May was the one weak link of the team.  People were willing to overlook it because she kicked butt in the first few weeks, but she's bland -- a fact not helped by Ming Na-Wen's one note acting.

Eventually, the show became this thing that the internet just enjoyed hating.  It seemed like everything the show did, no matter how small and inconsequential, was subject to harsh criticism and caviling.  Even things that would get a pass on other shows got ripped apart when they appeared in this show.  People liked to shout "Arrow is better!" when complaining about Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., since they're both comic book shows and the two of them exist on opposite sides of the Marvel vs. DC battle.  While I don't watch the former, I do recall people being pretty displeased with it in its early days too; something that's been forgotten now that the show has gotten better.  With Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., there existed this weird paradox of people being aware that Joss Whedon had minimal involvement in the show -- it's run by Jed Whedon, Maurissa Tancharoen, and Jeffrey Bell; all lieutenants of Joss -- but still holding it to the standard of his work.  (In the process, they've also elided over the fact that, with the exception of Firefly, all of his shows had major first season growing pains.)

The problems with the show didn't lie in the characters or the dialogue, but in its procedural elements.  From week to week in the early going, it was basically just NCIS but set in the Marvel universe.  There's nothing inherently wrong with that premise, and anybody who thought this show wasn't going to contain procedural elements is very naive, but the cases felt a little dull and formulaic for the first few weeks.  The problem was that the show was trying to serve too many masters.  Like Dollhouse, it was clear that the first few episodes were the network's vision, and in this case ABC strived to make Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. a four-quadrant hit.  Unlike Dollhouse, which was able to cut loose once it didn't have to deal with network interference, this show is just too much of a financial investment for the excess cooks to ever leave the kitchen.  Plus, it existed in this weird middle ground in the Marvel universe.  It was never going to get the same amount of national exposure that the movies do, so the writers couldn't introduce a major plot point without effecting those films.  The result was a program that was stuck between its water-treading procedural structure and tiny bits of serialization, its family-friendly adventure leanings and darker undertones.

Even with the show's center being tugged at from all directions, it still managed to be solid and enjoyable.  It may not have been the deepest, most engrossing television, but it was a fun way to spend an hour.  When the show found a way for its case of the week to have a heavy character focus, it was at its strongest.  It's no surprise, then, that "F.Z.Z.T." was the first great episode.  It gave a spotlight to the show's best character (my darling Simmons!), had a real sense of danger and stakes, and delivered some emotional storytelling.  They followed things up with seventh episode "The Hub," another great episode that smartly expanded the world and introduced new characters into the mix, while also giving Simmons and Skye a fun team-up in the B-story.  These episodes didn't signify a complete leap for the show -- in fact, Thor: The Dark World aftermath episode "The Well" immediately followed "The Hub" and is one of the worst episodes of the season -- but it was an indication that the writers were slowly finding their footing.

If "F.Z.Z.T." was the first great episode, then "T.R.A.C.K.S.," the 13th episode of the season, was the first excellent one.  Because of the nature of the show's production cycle, the Marvel house style it was beholden to, and the fact that Joss Whedon wasn't really a part of the creative process, there didn't seem to be much room for the classic experimental Whedon episodes.  "T.R.A.C.K.S." was the first episode that felt like one, with its setup that plays out multiple times, but from different perspectives.  It's a fun gimmick on its own, but one that works even more because it's implanted in a propulsive, action-packed story.

There's this consensus that has developed around the idea of the show only becoming great due to the events of Captain America: The Winter Soldier.  While episodes like "F.Z.Z.T.," "The Hub," "Seeds," and "T.R.A.C.K.S." put lie to that notion, there's no denying that the show received a major shot in the arm starting with "The End of the Beginning."  For the first time, it felt like a genuine spy show, full of intrigue and twists as a result of the unveiling of Hydra in The Winter Soldier.  Finally the show had themes, exploring loyalty and what it means to serve, particularly in the wake of the only structure you've ever known crumbling to the ground.  With danger, stakes, and darkness added to the proceedings, the characters became more interesting, the drama more real.  For example, Agent Ward's heel turn was just the thing the show needed to shake up the dynamics of the group.  But things became more interesting outside of the team too, as the show introduced villains like Agent Garrett (Bill Paxton) and reintroduced Deathlok (Whedon alum, August J. Richards) and Raina (Ruth Negga).  In the late stretch of the season, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. became a close approximation of the original vision of the show that most people had in their heads when it was first announced.  It felt like an issue of a comic book translated to the small screen, full of banter that had spark and plotting that had a significant amount of zip to it.

This week's finale really embraced that comic book feel, with an appearance by Samuel Jackson as Nick Fury to top things off.  While it was fun, "Beginning of the End" wasn't necessarily the best episode of the final run.  It had some great scenes, but even some of those were undercut by one of the episode's main problems -- its adherence to the status quo.  Take the scene with Fitz and Simmons at the bottom of the ocean for instance.  It's the best scene of the episode, full of genuine heart and emotion, and backed by strong performances from Elizabeth Henstridge and Iain De Caestecker.  But then it reverses the impossible situation it sets up -- 90 foot swim to the surface, only one can survive -- by having them both make it out alive with relative ease.  Additionally, I'm not sure how I feel about Coulson becoming the director of S.H.I.E.L.D.  The appeal of this final stretch of episodes was that the team was stripped of all its power, and they became a ragtag bunch of outlaws instead of a superteam with unlimited resources.  The rebuilding of the agency could quickly return the show to its normal pre-Winter Soldier operations.  Things may seem different with the team because Ward has been imprisoned, but Agent Triplett essentially serves the same function, except he's a thousand times more boring than Ward ever was.

Even still, the finale leaves the show in a better place quality-wise than it was at the beginning of the season.  The real question going forward is whether every season will take on this same structure.  "End of the Beginning" and "Turn, Turn, Turn" made it very clear that the writers were handcuffed by having to wait for the events of The Winter Soldier to play out before they could take the story to interesting places.  Who's to say season two won't be held back by whatever is going to occur in The Avengers 2?  Fortunately, it seems like Whedon, Bell, and Tancharoen have a grasp on what made the first half of the season a bit shaky and have righted the ship, so maybe that won't matter as much next year.  The characters are there and the groundwork has been laid, so hopefully season two will continue the show's upward trajectory and become even better.

Pilot Talk 2014: Penny Dreadful

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.

Sundays at 10:00 PM on Showtime

Penny Dreadful is sort of a new spin on a standard Showtime milieu.  At first glance, the show seems akin to their pulpy period pieces like The Borgias and The Tudors.  That is, until a woman gets pulled through a window by an invisible force in the first five minutes.  As the name implies, the show takes after "penny dreadfuls," sensational books that were made popular in 19th century Britain.  But for being inspired by pulp novels, creator John Logan infuses the show with a kind of seriousness that you don't find in many shows about monsters and various other things that go bump in the night.  The pilot is wonderfully atmospheric, and uses its foggy mood as an obfuscation method, revealing so little about what's actually going on because it's too busy reveling in the scenery.  All of this makes it sound terrible, and it's true that some may find it slow, but at least in this first hour, it lays an interesting enough foundation to keep my attention.

Part of that comes from the people in front of and behind the camera.  The cast is filled with great actors -- Eva Green, Josh Hartnett, Timothy Dalton -- who infuse life into their characters.  On top of that, the pilot is one of the most technically impressive of the year.  Director J.A. Bayona (The Orphanage, The Impossible) delivers gorgeous visuals, filming dank castles and chilly exteriors with a hazy lens that adds to the atmosphere.  Shows like this live and die on the makeup and creature effects, and luckily, the monsters that pop up throughout the episode look high quality.  With an intriguing premise (that gets even more interesting in the chilling final scene), great visuals, and strong performances, Penny Dreadful is a surprise success.

Grade: B+