Barclay's Premier League: Burnley vs. Arsenal 4/11/2015

In popular memory, sports break down to fleeting moments -- the brilliant goal, the pennant-winning home run, the career-ending knockout.  The rise of the highlight as a feature of first evening news programs and then Internet videos confirms this.  What can get lost is the mundane, work-a-day aspect of so much sports broadcasts.  The soccer match I'm going to write about tonight, despite being fairly important for both teams involved, oozes with that average, week-in-week-out feel.  It's a match between the second-best team in the league and the second-worst, where the result was never in doubt.  The British commentator at one point makes a wry quip that Arsenal star Mesut Ozil wouldn't have circled this match-up on his calendar when he signed up with the club, with the implication that, despite being given a plum TV spot, few fans would do the same.

European soccer leagues, where the most important domestic title is won in the round-robin league and not a knockout tournament, place more importance on these ordinary matches -- last year, a slip-up against lowly Crystal Palace may have cost Liverpool the title.  This importance is offset by the disparity in quality in these leagues, where most games involving elite teams are seen as a fait accompli, and any unexpected result is seen as a major embarrassment.  This game is theoretically vital for both teams -- Arsenal need to win if they have any prayer of catching up with league leaders Chelsea, while Burnley need to haul themselves out of the relegation spots, but the difference in stature between the two seems makes it seem anything but epic.

And indeed, the gameplay is far from memorable.  It's one of those games that is euphemistically called "scrappy", meaning basically that there are a lot of fouls and clumsy passes, and neither side performs all that well.  Arsenal score once and seem to be content to hold onto their lead for the rest of the game, with both of their highly-touted forwards rather muted.  Burnley put through a few good efforts on goal, but all are comfortably saved.  The game ends up as everyone envisioned it, and the commentary immediately begins focusing on the future: whether either team can achieve their goal before the end of the season.

Even the goal is scrappy, with the ball wildly careening around the goalmouth before bouncing off Aaron Ramsey's knee and into the net.  It's a play that seems more the result of numbers and dogged determination than actual skill, although doubtlessly Arsenal have practiced such set-ups on the training ground ad nauseum.  The number of strikes and deflections before the goal seem only fitting for a game that was defined more by hard work than brilliance.

So why do we watch these games, beyond a bizarre investment in the fates of professional athletes who have momentarily pledged allegiance to a particular brand?  Do we just gamble two hours of our time in hopes that something exciting will happen?  There is the fact that these games are part of an ongoing narrative, a narrative that at times threatens to overwhelm the action -- but the main beats of these stories, Arsenal's surprising ascendancy and Burnley's gritty struggle to remain in the Premier League, have been repeated better elsewhere, as in Arsenal's 4-1 triumph over Liverpool the week before or Burnley's improbable victory over defending champions Manchester City.

But still, there are operatic tones to the game that engross even as the stop-start play repels.  Burnley emerge as genuinely heroic figures, or perhaps tragic ones.  Every week, they seem to be trapped in a Sisphyean struggle, battling against the inevitable power of money and history [1].  In seemingly every game the commentators remark that they have put up a good performance in a losing effort.  In another context, their constant fouls would be seen as no more than dirty -- witness the hatred reserved for midtable Stoke City -- but here they take on the air of pluck, a lightweight intelligently tossing sand into his much larger opponent's face.  One constantly has the feeling that Burnley is not far away from a heroic equalizer, but despite Arsenal doing everything to let them back in the game, the moment never fully comes.

If you're into English nationalism, which many Premier League fans are, there's an added resonance to Burnley's struggles.  This is a team composed predominantly of non-celebrity English players, with names like Tom Heaton and Danny Ings, hailing from a small and predominantly white city and playing out of a stadium named Turf Moor.  They seem to have strolled out of a hazily-remembered but often discussed footballing past.  On the other hand, Arsenal is a team who were among the first to bring in foreign players, and are now dominated by them -- they are sponsored by Air Emirates, whose name adorns both their shirts and their stadiums.  I'm not suggesting that the gallantry of Burnley is entirely dependent on nationalist sentiments, but one finds a hint of them in an announcer's shocked statement that not one Arsenal player on the field is English, or the frequent press grumblings about "foreign mercenaries".  If we are inclined to gravitate towards underdog stories in sports, we must remember that such stories can be used to any kind of political end.

In the end, the game is forgotten almost as soon as it is over, with both teams heading towards more important chapters in their stories.  Perhaps there are those in the stands who will look back on this game as a landmark, their first live match or the site of a first date, but for most it will vanish into the endless roil of spectacle and boredom.  Arsenal are competing for different stakes than Burnley, but they are also finding themselves struggling against the weight of already-established history, with a large gap between themselves and the leaders and a dwindling number of games to make it up in.  Nick Hornsby once wrote that soccer fans exist in a constant state of bitter disappointment, and insignificant but tragic games such as this provide a clue as to why.

[1]Which is not to say that Burnley is noncommercial, or in any way rebelling against the oligarchical nature of modern soccer -- if anything, their goal is to become a major brand just like Arsenal.  But in sports, teams come to embody things that are not entirely logical.

Frontline: Separate and Unequal/Omarina's Story

In this two-part episode, PBS's venerable investigative-journalism series Frontline takes on the issue of education in America and its unequal distribution.  Education is one of those issues that everyone says is important to them on opinion polls, but rarely forms the subject of mass debate.  For TV producers, education is a less visually exciting topic than crime or medicine -- there's no such thing as a "teacher procedural".  Learning, at least as practiced in contemporary schooling, is a process that takes place over years, mostly through dull-as-dirt lessons and repetitive work.  For another thing, there are few political loyalties to flare up when it comes to discussing education, as both U.S. parties are committed to the same (disastrous) neoliberal education policy.

Even when people talk about education, they have a way of not really talking about it.  That extends to the most recent Frontline episode.  In the first segment, the question is all about distribution of education funding, but in this discussion schooling is talked about like a concrete and measurable resource which various groups are fighitng over.  Obviously, funding is an important aspect of education in a capitalist system -- underfunded schools can't provide the same programs and opportunities that richer schools can, which results in students having even less opportunity to pursue their own interests and learn organically.  But still, the episode struggles to express, visually and verbally, what "good education" is.

That difficulty is key to the segment's central conflict, between a group of affluent Baton Rouge residents who want to secede from the city's school system and a municipal authority which wants to hold on to its shrinking funding base.  The secessionists argue that Baton Rouge schools are too poor to save, and that they must start again with a new town.  The opponents of the newly-proposed town, Baton Rouge's mayor among them, argues that this desire to separate is rooted in race and class and is akin to the "white flight" that bankrupted inner cities in the 1970s.  Frontline implicitly takes the latter side, editing the program so that anti-separation talking heads always get the final word in, but there's little way to tell if complaints about the quality of education are actually valid.

One school's principle tells us that it has recently been upgraded to a "C" school from a "D" one, but we have little idea of what that means.  On the other side of the argument, we hear that this school has a notorious record for fights, many of them uploaded to YouTube, but again it's hard to say what the causes of these fights are or whether they compromise the process of education.  We get generic shots of students listening and doing homework, but again it's hard to see a direct relationship between the school's funding and the ability of children to actually learn.

The way in which the process of education vanishes in this conversation is indicative of liberal discourse around the issue.  Here, education is a commodity like any other that can be distributed equally or unequally.  Liberals prefer to distribute it through the government, while conservatives want to edge it towards the marketplace.  There is no room here for debate about the purpose of education, pedagogical technique, or a wide-ranging critique of the system a la Ivan Illich.

What this Frontline story does point out is the way in which school inequality can't be broken down into a private-public dichotomy.  Under the new town, both school boards would be public, but there would exist a substantial inequality between two ostensibly public schools.  There's a brief mention of the pattern of "white flight" which suggests that this is not an isolated or new phenomenon.  Without the drastic step of making a new town, many white middle-class families essentially did the same thing in the 1970s by moving to suburbs and draining the coffers of actual cities.  What the program doesn't mention is the way in which current government policy such as Race to the Top, the very programs that separate a C school from a D one, exacerbate already-existing divides.

This is perhaps an inborn limitation of Frontline, and of any PBS program.  It can examine quite cogently a controversy or an instance of corruption or a minor scandal.  It can in some circumstances even raise a criticism of an entire system, as in an episode last season that raised doubts about the use of forensic evidence.  But structurally it's a product of the government, and it can't create a fundamental critique of any major institution, private or public.  Any corporate-owned network would be unable to do the same for the same reason.  Still, it doesn't take too much thinking to realize that Baton Rouge is not an isolated incident, and knowledge of a conflict like this -- one which is largely unknown outside of its local area -- can help to create a broader critique.  So even if Frontline can't be a voice for a truly radical critique, it can perhaps help to contribute to a general awareness about the world and the systems that govern it.

The second part of the episode, "Omarina's Story", further highlights the class divide in education across the United States.  This is a follow-up to an earlier episode, which I haven't seen, about a program to intervene in middle school when children show the first signs of going off the rails.  This seems like the usual technocratic silver-bullet narrative, in which Omarina is the shining exemplar.  In this segment, we learn that she has been accepted to Brooks, an elite private high school.

Omarina's presence at Brooks could be seen as a confirmation of America's essential meritocracy, but to its credit Frontline never presents it as such.  The point is not that there is a black inner-city girl at a prep school full of rich white kids, the point is that the prep school is full of rich white kids to begin with.  "Omarina's Story" suggests that many poor children -- Omarina suggests that her brother is just as smart -- could accomplish the same things if it weren't for systemic problems.  The scenes of her struggling adapt to a new environment imply that tokenistic scholarship programs don't do anything to make an environment less privileged and less alienating to people who come in without a sense of economic privilege.  When she has to come home to visit her brother in the hospital, she becomes a gripping character, caught between two worlds.

The narrative presented here is rather schematic, like a scientific experiment: Omarina succeeds with the intervention of the program, but her twin brother Omarlon (the control group, if you will) slides into a life of crime without the program.  But anyone who thinks about it for a minute will realize that not everyone who receives middle-school intervention will go on to Brooks.  What about the impoverished kids who are nurtured to a steady attendance record and a B average?  From the academic perspective their lives have been improved, and they may perhaps have a more comfortable adolescence (and that may be enough).  But will they really have more opportunities once they get out of high school?

"Omarina's Story" provides a better sense of what education is than "Separate and Unequal" does.  In this short, education is very much an affective relationship, with the close and nurturing relationship between Omarina and her teacher Miss Miller stretching beyond middle school itself.  Robert Belfans, creator of the "middle school moment" program describes it as "that sense of shepharding that kids need to tell them that not only an adult cares but that an adult can help them".

But there's a way in which this narrative removes any kind of agency or intelligence belonging to Omarina herself.  The narrator begins by saying that Omarina probably wouldn't be there if it wasn't for Belfans' intervention, then describes her as "lucky" that her middle school had the program he created.  In this way "Omarina's Story" becomes not Omarina's story at all, not the story of a black girl achieving remarkable things but the story of a white man's genius.  There's a sense throughout the segment that Omarina's own voice is struggling to overcome the more authoritative one of the documentary.  She reads an essay describing her life as a "one-way street", but instead of dealing with her concerns the teachers simply praise her eloquence.  The narrator says that "she didn't know it, but she was starting down a path that so many other students take" -- even though her comments suggest that she was well aware of the systemic problems in her area.  This, too, is a problem in talking about education: that in focusing on administrative process programs like Frontline can silence the very children it is attempting to help.

I don't mean to suggest that this should be a story of individual achievement either.  The infrastructure that supported Omarina is undoubtedly important, but there needs to be a way of talking about it that doesn't diminish Omarina's own intelligence.  This is perhaps the true difficult in describing education, or describing any kind of institution: how to maintain both structural analysis and individual agency.  It is not surprising that a PBS documentary does not succeed in untangling this knot.  But Frontline's flaws do a lot to remind us how even the most well-intentioned and earnest attempts to engage with the institutions and systems that rule our lives are constrained by our culture's imaginative limits.

American Masters: Good Ol' Charles Schultz

American Masters is a series of documentaries shot in a variety of styles about a variety of subjects, but all tied together by the idea of artistic mastery. What is most notable about the title is the way in which it puts the individual artist ahead of their works – after all, the show isn't called American Masterpieces, perhaps because that would infringe on another PBS band. But there's a pervasive sense that art, instead of being interesting in itself, instead bestows importance on individuals who become truly important.

It would be easy to knock down the series, or at least this episode, for its unreconstructed auteurism. After all, the author has been dead for half a century, and was scarcely outlived by the director or the cartoonist. But I'm not interested in condemnation right now. Rather, I'm curious about why we talk about art in this way, and what artistic values biographical reading supports.

Of course, the first and foremost reason why American Masters is about artists and not about art is because it is easier (or at least more familiar) to tell stories about people than texts. We are used to the patterns of a life story, particularly the life story of a gifted artist: promising childhood, harrowing maturation, success, corruption, old age, and finally a well-mourned death. “Good Ol' Charles Schultz” quotes Citizen Kane in its opening minutes, and draws several implicit parallels between its subject and film's most revered character. The story is already written, and all that remains is to change the particulars of the fiction to those of reality.

By contrast, how would you make a 90-minute documentary about Peanuts the comic strip? There isn't a lot of plot to recap, nor would there be a point to doing so even if there was one. You could talk about the strip's cultural impact, or attempt a critical analysis, but at that point it starts turning into a dissertation committed to screen, and it's hard to think of a way to make such a thing visually compelling. Of course, “Good Ol' Charles Schultz” could also be a dissertation, albeit one that would not pass much muster in today's academic environment. Which raises the question: is there a possibility for criticism on television?

It would be inaccurate to say that “Good Ol' Charles Schultz” doesn't include any actual criticism. Throughout the special we see numerous Peanuts strips, presented one panel at a time, the neatest way of translating serial images to video. These are sometimes accompanied by narration by one talking head or another, and sometimes presented without comment other than the implicit link between the strip and the biographical material surrounding. The first of these, documenting the first strip of Peanuts, has some commentary on how shocking or emblematic its bitter punchline was, although this mostly falls into the “Why is this art great?” genre of criticism. Later strips will be approached chiefly for their resonances with Schultz's life.

Said life presents an interesting challenge for the filmmakers. Schultz did not follow the Behind the Music trajectory: there is no crash and no sordid scandal, just ever-mounting success. He was not a reclusive genius, or a tortured artist. There are dramatic moments, but it does not fit into an easy dramatic arc. But this inability to fit a narrative mold is perhaps what gives the story of Schultz's life the amount of power that it has. You could also, perhaps, say the same thing about Peanuts – that beneath the generic cartoony exterior there was a kernel of bitterness and alienation that spoke to the feelings that people felt but couldn't share.

As mentioned above, the opening moments of “Good Ol' Charles Schultz” are also the opening moments of Citizen Kane. This is the boldest directorial act in what is otherwise a fairly standard PBS episode – it takes a lot of cajones to place your public television documentary about a newspaper cartoonist in direct proximity with the Greatest Film of All Time (c). The opening shots of Kane are juxtaposed with the familiar (and familial, for the typical North American kid weaned on Merry Christmas Charlie Brown) images of the Peanuts characters, and a Peanuts strip in which Lucy spoils the film's famous ending for Linus. These opening shots establish a kind of thesis: that despite the obvious aesthetic differences between Peanuts and Citizen Kane, they have many underlying similarities, and absolutely deserve to take place in the same canonical situation. By having Lucy proclaim “Rosebud is his sled” as the opening credits of Kane roll by, “Good Ol' Charles Schultz” alerts viewers to the fact that it is essentially spoiling its own conclusion by telling you its central point right at the beginning.

The explicit justification for this comparison is that Charles Schultz watched Citizen Kane dozens of times in his life, and there must have been some parallels that drew him to the film. This statement is, in some ways, a reading of a reading: it is telling us what Schultz thought of Citizen Kane, and then suggesting how we should think of said thoughts. The documentary implicitly assumes that Schultz loved Citizen Kane because he identified with it. But there are many different motivations for watching, reading, or otherwise studying art – escapism is just as likely as identification [1]. “Good Ol' Charles Schultz” assumes that good art is art that relates to real life, here the very specific real life of Charles Schultz.

But even in this formulation, there's a dual nature to identification. The text is identified with the lives of both reader and writer – hence both Citizen Kane and Peanuts reflect Schultz's life. All of which raises the question of whether director David van Taylor's reading of Peanuts is just as personally motivated as Schultz's reading of Citizen Kane. The presence of the director and the reasons for his interest in this topic have been scrupulously removed from the documentary we have before us, so as to cut off what should logically be an endless chain of interpretation. This is perhaps not a flaw in biographical criticism, or identificatory reading, but a sign that analysis is never so neat as American Masters often makes it look. Criticism has a funny tendency of leaping out of bounds and catching the critic in a way they never anticipated.

If we didn't get the message already, we then immediately see a photo of a young Schultz with a sketch of Charlie's Brown head fitted over it. They aren't really a match, at least no more than any person's head would resemble Schultz's broad, universalizing character designs. Maybe this image becomes, instead, a symbol for the looseness of artistic comparison: just as Charlie's Brown head can fit any head, so can the themes and tropes of Peanuts map onto any life in the way this documentary does for Schultz. Or at least that's how I would like to think of it.

Still, one of the talking heads poses an interesting point in this sequence: “What does it mean to draw 18, 977 comic strips? Drawing fifty thousand times Charlie Brown's head? You must be looking for something”. This is one of the distinctive qualities of the comic strip as a form: it is an endless, daily repetition, less a bolt of inspiration than a constant effort. It's this workmanlike nature of production that makes comics easy to dismiss as art. What the aforementioned quote, placed prominently right before the title sequence, does is to reverse this assumption by turning this production schedule into proof that Schultz was in fact a tortured artist drawing on inner emotional dissatisfaction. This claim is highly questionable – the artists of Hi & Lois and Hagar the Horrible have also drawn the same thing thousands of times, but we are less inclined to assume that their work stems from a deep melancholic longing. The film briefly touches on the idea of process, but quickly abandons it for more psychologizing.

The psychological experience of toiling away at a comic for decades could be a potentially fascinating subject, but it's the one that we have the least ability to understand. Schultz left a huge amount of material for any prospective biographer. He was not a Salinger-esque recluse, but maintained a modest public persona as a kind of jovial uncle. The documentary includes numerous clips from interviews and a goofy hockey-themed promotional video [2]. American Masters is able to give us some idea of how Schultz thought about his art and the world. But what interviews don't preserve is everyday experience, the sense of routine and habitus necessary for the production of so regular an art as a daily comic strip. There is no way to archive or replay the experience of a life.

So the question of what it means to draw Charlie Brown's head fifty thousand times is perhaps unanswerable, or at least unanswerable by so functional a TV program as this. Still, “Good Ol' Charles Schultz” does pay a decent amount of attention to the habitus in which Schultz lived. In particular, the segments about Schultz's Xanadu-like residence in California, which projected the kind of idealized and sanitized family life that Peanuts never believed in, have a kind of genuine power if only because of the strangeness of Schultz's ersatz living situation. That private encampment, of course, was a form of suppressing the fault lines in Schultz's family that would eventually lead to divorce – a classically Freudian narrative.

The psychoanalytic lens taken throughout suggests that Schultz is in some ways a tragic figure, an artistic genius caught in arrested development and consigned to the Sisyphean task of drawing the same characters every day for sixty years in search of inner peace. But American Masters also wants to celebrate its subjects, and that is certainly true here, as seen in the plentiful testimonials and visual evidence of Peanuts' incredible success, both commercial and critical. So the documentary ends up at a kind of impasse: Peanuts is simultaneously the product of a tragic yearning and an artistic masterwork that brought joy to millions. I actually don't think these two narratives are contradictory, and I've always believed that art can be more than two things at once. Picasso and Dostoevsky, for instance, made great works of art drawing on the inner problems that eventually doomed them – their art was great for the world but harmful to them. Schultz, as presented by American Masters, is a kind of suburban American version of that tortured-artist narrative, with the demons less dramatic and the success much more popular and less high-cultural.

The ease with which such comparisons can be made suggests that this narrative about Charles Schultz's life ultimately doesn't tell us much about Peanuts: any other acclaimed work of art could easily have taken its place. Biography makes poor criticism, but maybe that's because it's not meant as criticism. Perhaps it would be fairer to judge American Masters as producing biographical narratives. On that level, “Good Ol' Charles Schultz” is more of a success. It's not exactly riveting, but it has a bit more style than your average PBS documentary, and there's enough fairly interesting material. But it still leaves me hungry for a TV show that would genuinely engage with works of art.

[1]I've been looking into different modes of study for a “serious” academic project, so maybe it's just because of my current circumstances that I'm seeing resonances in this documentary. Regardless, if you're interested in further theorizing about why and how readers read, Rita Felski's Uses of Literature is one of the best books I've read on the subject, and certainly the most approachable to a non-academic audience.

[2] The amount of video material available on Schultz makes the film a bit more visually interesting than a documentary on, say, a nineteenth-century novelist, but it also has the effect of demystifying Schultz. One wonders if, a couple decades down the line, we'll be able to work up reverence for authors whose entire life is available through banal Twitter feeds.

The Weekly Wipe 1-01

The Weekly Wipe is ostensibly a new series, but it really isn't. Charlie Brooker has been doing his sardonic examination of television, the news, and the weird spectacle that results when they intersect for four series of Screenwipe, two series of Newswipe and various one-off specials, as well as his columns. The Weekly Wipe name seems to mostly signify that the show has moved to BBC2. The theme song is the same as previous Wipe series, and the opening graphics are in the same vein as Brooker's previous shows. As such there is little to nothing in the way of introductory material, and really noting to tell a new viewer what the show's all about. There's a reassuring aspect to this, especially for a long-time fan. Brooker has probably made enough programs that he no longer counts as a jaded outsider to the world of television, but he still acts like one. It's a routine that might have grown old if it weren't for the continued amount of material that the inane world produces.

Brooker's role is to be a kind of surrogate TV watcher: while he is ostensibly the object of our attention, he is really a kind of ally on our side of the screen, helping us react to the true objects of the program. This is the same kind of relationship between viewer/subject and object that is present in shows like Mystery Science Theatre 3000. We are literally watching someone watching TV, but they are watching TV better than we ever could, never lacking a witty remark or a cogent analysis.

This triangulated viewing is sort of insidious and sort of disruptive. It is insidious because it makes us forget that we are watching a product of the entertainment industry and, in the case of the BBC, the state: by making Charlie Brooker an ally in our cynical viewing of television, The Weekly Wipe allows us to forget to apply the same cynical lens to Brooker himself. The Weekly Wipe, a product of the media as much as anything else, masquerades as the anti-TV show. Like AdBusters, it literally sells us the idea of not buying.

But this is perhaps too cynical. There is a generally disruptive edge to Brooker's point of view. What he calls attention to is not the worst of television (although the egregiously bad usually does make an appearance) but the sheer banality of most of what the medium broadcasts, endless hours of C-list celebrities doing trivial tasks, news presenters waiting around for something to happen, and go-nowhere discussion of minor political scandals. Call it the vast wasteland argument redux: with thousands of hours of television produced every day, most of them are not so much offensive as oppressively meaningless.

Brooker makes the unusual decision to start this episode with a barrage of actually significant news stories. He begins with strife in North Africa, about which he can barely manage a joke, then moves on to Iran's space program, followed by a ruckus about a Jimmy Saville caricature appearing on a British kid's show. All of these are quick, twenty-second bits, but already in them there's a kind of trajectory from serious, real-world issues which Brooker's snark-infused, pop-culture-saturated view can barely address, to issues of media representation which are more awkward than anything else. These items are never brought up again in the episode, but their presence suggests the possibility of a different Weekly Wipe, a perhaps more serious show that focused more on what's soberly termed “current affairs”. Maybe something more along the lines of Newswipe. By opening Mali and then immediately jumping into The Tweenies and Lance Armstrong, Brooker almost seems to be engaging in a moment of self-critique: “Sure, we could have a serious discussion about a bloody war that you don't know anything about, but that's not what either of us are here for”. Brooker both gestures towards the higher aims of a program like Newswipe and dismisses them in one motion.

The actual opening bit is an analysis of Lance Armstrong's public “fall from grace” and how it was a media spectacle from beginning to end. Whereas sports media played Armstrong's steroid trials as a tragedy, Brooker pictures it as a comedy, where a man continually denies what everyone knows and then finally makes a tearful confession, expecting all to be surprised. The truth of the matter is that Armstrong has very little to apologize for, especially when most of his opponents in the Tour de France were also doping, but Armstrong plays the whole thing with such awkward self-seriousness that it's hard not to laugh. The clip where he responds to accusations by saying “I'm sorry you can't believe in miracles” is particularly hilarious.

As such Brooker has very little work to do. The attraction of The Weekly Wipe and its predecessors is how they put together these news stories, which one has undoubtedly heard told several different ways through our diffuse but strangely repetitive media, in a way that is both concise and captures the story's inherent ridiculousness. This episode uses the ad clips that try to sell Armstrong's tell-all with Oprah like a pay-per-view boxing match, which would have otherwise been instantly lost to the archives, to reveal how Armstrong's confession was a media-generated spectacle from start to finish. Brooker makes a good crack about Armstrong visibly turning into Tony Blair, but his commentary is really superfluous.

The conclusion to the segment focuses on Channel 4's coverage of the news, which featured a long series of man-on-the-street interviews of “people sitting on or near bicycles”. This is exactly the kind of banal, material I discussed above, which is meant to be instantly forgotten as the dead air of 24-hour news networks. But this is the material that the news is turning to more and more, as budgets are slashed and social media starts breaking stories: instead of figuring out what's going on, news anchors are content to ask you what you think is going on. This is democratic and even in some ways admirable, but it does make one wonder what the point of watching the TV news is when you can just read Twitter directly. By going into the memory hole and retrieving this unremarkable segment of television, The Weekly Wipe highlights the mental bankruptcy of the contemporary news media. Instead of spending ten minutes interviewing strangers on bikes, which probably took up the better part of some poor anchor's day and a lot of film, they could be trying to figure out what's going on in, oh I don't know, Mali – there's that bit at the beginning again.

The next segment moves into even further inanity with a segment on Splash!, which might as well be titled Diving with the Stars, except that might have actually been another show (my memory is hazy on this). Brooker describes the show as trying to cash in on the feel-good moments of the Olympics, but ending up as just another reality show with C-list celebrities doing inane tasks like falling into water. What The Weekly Wipe is so good at is focusing on the parts of TV we're not supposed to think about, and are barely supposed to remember: advertisements, for one, but also filler shots like the ones of Olympian Tom Daly wandering around poolside in his suit, meant to be self-serious window dressing but highlighted as absurd when isolated from context and given a pithy description by Brooker.

Notably, the surprisingly extensive dissection of Splash! focuses not on what Splash! wants the viewer to take away from it – the identity of the “celebrities”, the athletic prowess of Daly, funny moments and inspiring moments – but rather the overall structure of the program, and how hollow it is. In this it's not too different from the work I've been doing on this blog, although with pithy jokes instead of extensive theoretical tangents. For instance, Brooker calls attention to how, since diving only takes about five seconds, there's a lot of filler, that TV white space I was describing above. Reading a text against the grain doesn't always mean proclaiming it terrible or revealing all of its hidden reactionary agendas. Sometimes it means looking at the contradictions and suppressed contexts. Other times it just means paying attention to the 67 minutes of a NFL game that consist of standing around, instead of the 11 minutes of play you're supposed to remember.

Brooker's figure is not, however, that of the critic, and he would probably never use phrases like “reading a text against the grain”. His persona is that of the everyman sitting on the couch and yelling at the TV – the everyman-turned-critic. If Brooker does not give us virtuoso close readings of a given television show, it is perhaps by design. The boorish shouts and one-liners that intersperse TV clips suggest to the viewer that critical viewing is ultimately not difficult and arcane but is within all of our mental grasps. Seeing criticism like this can be empowering in a way that academic discourse is not. However, there are risks to this egalitarian promise. The first is that we might come to believe that shouting at the TV is enough, and that being able to joke about the crap we watch makes us immune to its effects. The second risk is that we might instead just choose to watch cultural figures like Brooker or Joel McHale on The Soup digest our culture for us, turning their criticism into just another product to be consumed.

Brooker experiments later in the episode with adding additional voices to The Weekly Wipe, suggesting alternative models of criticism. This is something that Brooker has done throughout his run, with the most notable other voices being the short films of Adam Curtis, which practice more wide-ranging cultural criticism, and the monologues by Doug Stanhope. Curtis is unfortunately nowhere to be found, but Stanhope does have a segment situated around his perspective as an American.

This Stanhope segment is a bit different from earlier ones, as it cuts between Stanhope giving a monologue to the camera, sitting on a couch in the middle of the road (the natural dwelling place of Americans). The two speeches seem absolutely identical, with a perfect flow between them, and this highlights the artificiality of Stanhope's schtick. Stand-up comedy is meant to sound spontaneous and effortless, like someone speaking off the cuff or going on a rant about something that's been bugging them, but of course in reality it is carefully prepared, practiced, and memorized down to the last word. The way this segment is edited suggests that ultimately, while Stanhope may pretend to be the libidinal voice of the common man, his comedy is ultimately a produced routine like anything else.

The content of Stanhope's routine is interesting because it seems to go against the , and not just because it argues that, as Brooker sarcastically summarizes, “America is great”. Stanhope argues, with some degree of irony, that all of America's base entertainments and trashy products are something to be celebrated. He describes a hypothetical British person's amazement at the options on a breakfast menu and the bizarre way in which Americans pour drinks. Stanhope's premise is faulty here, as it's doubtful that any Briton would be surprised by American culture, which has infested the rest of the world. Still, there is something to his argument. All other things being equal, it is better to have ten different ways to do your eggs, or frozen hotdog-on-a-sticks. These things may be trashy and in bad taste, but they make people happy. We have to pay attention to the insidious underside of this abundance – “the wars and the torture” that Stanhope refers to – but that doesn't make the abundance itself bad, as the AdBusters clan would have it, but the ways in which the abundance is produced. Even when it comes to the junk television that Brooker likes to lampoon, surely it's better to have 500 channels of junk like we do today than to have 3 channels of junk like in the 60s.

This kind of crass hedonism, whatever its merits, goes distinctly against the ethos of Brooker's critical practice. It is the editorial reply designed to give balance. Stanhope's segment also acts, like the opening clip from Mali, as a way of suggesting the limits to Brooker's work. By cross-cutting between separate but identical routines, The Weekly Wipes suggests how ironic and humorous approaches to popular culture can be entirely complicit with the culture industry. Stanhope believes that he is in on the joke, but the real joke is that it doesn't matter whether or not you're in on the joke, because you're still eating at Denny's just like the unironic slob next to you[1]. Brooker at his best aims to elevate his criticism beyond a mere ironic knowing, and Stanhope's segment shows why.

There are two new segments for the new series which attempt to add more voices to play off Brooker's. One is “Points Off You”, which mostly consists of Brooker reading the vilest and most inane social media comments on the events he's been discussing. He does dredge up some bad comments, but so could anyone with a working Internet connection, and Brooker's comments just seem like obvious chiding. One could accuse this segment of the same “let's see what on Twitter” approach as much of the contemporary news media. The other is something of a panel discussion on Django Unchained with two nervous British comedians, which never really goes anywhere, mostly because it requires Brooker to be the straight man against the not particularly outrageous guests. In these two segments the series is attempting to engage with different voices, even in a purely confrontational way, and introduce some different-looking material from previous Wipe shows. But thus far The Weekly Wipe is not really sure about how to execute these segments, and it shows.

The best voices here are made-up ones, the everyman duo of Barry Shitpeas and Philomena Cunk. Brooker uses these characters as a kind of counterexample to the cynical but informed viewing he practices in the bulk of the episode. Barry and Philomena suggest not so much that TV viewers are stupid, but that an uncritical viewing of television gets you to believe some very stupid things.

In this episode we get their reactions to the serious nature doc series Africa. This segment produces the funniest lines of the episode, with descriptions of animals such as “hairy men monsters, tall horse monsters that run around like deck chairs would if deck chairs ran, and these kind of vagina head monsters that fight in ponds” or “looks like they filmed Rocky in two giraffes by mistake”. There's a kind of childish, almost endearing quality to Barry Shitpeas's ignorance that makes him the most strictly humorous character on any of Brooker's programs.

But in their own way Barry and Philomena reveal as much through their commentary as Charlie Brooker does. The ignorance of their characters allows them to be convinced that there are no people in Africa, which reveals how Africa erases millions of suffering people and millennia of African culture in order to make a nice animals how. The Weekly Wipe uses willful stupidity as another way of reading against the grain. It applies intelligence to a dumb show like Splash! and applies stupidity to a supposedly intelligent and highbrow show like Africa, and both approaches work well. There's a kind of power to brazenly ignoring the cultural codes that we all take as a given, which is why TV characters from Homer Simpson to Tony Soprano captivate us as much as they repel us.

The segment that follows is Brooker's attempt at a serious political riff, this time on the gun control debates in the USA. The overall argument is that America is a country gone mad, and not mad in an entertaining, goofy way like Stanhope argues. The music drops down into a deeper register that suggests a mounting doom underneath the silly distractions of television. There are a few great bits in this segment, such as footage from an office training video that suggests employees run and hide in the event of a shooting, but for the most part it doesn't feel that different from something that would air on MSNBC. Brooker is not saying anything controversial or even original, and by locating the problem strictly in America he allows himself and his primary audience to take a distanced perspective that doesn't require any self-reflection or really any action more than a tut-tutting about the barbarians across the pond.

This risk is always present throughout Brooker's work, as well as in similar series such as The Daily Show and The Soup. It's easy for a viewer to come away from these programs thinking they are superior to the shows that Brooker mocks, that they are sitting at the cool kids' table and all that is needed to fix the world is for other people to stop being such idiots. An effective politics, to say nothing of a meaningful life, requires both self-examination and a capacity for empathy with others despite their problematic traits. If we start believing that we are better than other people because of the products we buy or the TV shows we watch then we are falling into capitalism's lies no matter how much irony we may do it with.

I would argue that Brooker falls into this trap much less than, say, Jon Stewart. While The Daily Show presents a cheering crowd and a supporting cast that lionize Stewart as a heroic truth-teller. Brooker, on the other hand, almost always appears alone, sitting on his couch in a dimly-lit room. If he is a target for viewer identification, he is also a sad image, a withdrawn and bitter loser who takes his rage out on harmless TV spectacles. To align ourselves with Brooker through the act of viewing is also to call into question what we're doing watching TV in the first place.

Political issues come up again in the episode's final segment, in which Brooker gives a sarcastic commentary to a fawning BBC interview with Prince Harry, who is currently bombing Afghan civilians. Brooker mocks the banality of the report, as well as Harry's remarks comparing the war to a video game, but he really doesn't touch on the ideological underpinning of the report, which tries to make a brutal war of occupation into a soft human interest story using the image of the Royal Family as a bizarre synecdoche of modern Britain. Brooker presents this interview as banal fluff, putting it in the same category as something like Splash!, but that doesn't really capture the sickness of a news media that would air something like this.

Brooker is at risk of becoming a cuddly curmudgeon, the type of figure that gets paid to come out and do his misanthropic schtick to a cheering audience. Or he could use his program as the opportunity to do genuine criticism in the public sphere, showing viewers a new way to look at not just TV but the world around them. This episode has more of the former, but it has enough of the latter to keep me interested. If there's anyone that can validate the meta TV show as more than just a simulacrum, it would be Brooker.

[1]Did The Weekly Wipe set Stanhope up to look bad? I don't know, and intent really doesn't matter. I wouldn't put it past Brooker and his crew to intentionally use Stanhope as a foil for Brooker's cynicism. But the style that makes this segment so exposing could just stem from an attempt to promote Stanhope's stand-up show, or from a director who's been watching too much Louie.

The Reem 1-03: Back Home

We're in the midst of a kind of renaissance for sports documentaries, especially on television. ESPN's 30 for 30 series is the standard-bearer here, and has some level of objectivity, but most of the genre exists for explicitly promotional ends. Despite being essentially commercials, these documentaries are often quite compelling, visually striking, sophisticated pieces of cinema.  HBO's 24/7 series, used to promote its boxing pay-per-views, was the first to attain this kind of quality, and 24/7 has been followed in mixed martial arts by both the UFC's official Primetime shows and a bevy of fan-made web videos. Of this latter set The Reem stands out as a trendsetter.

The Reem is a strange mixture of hype video and cinema verité. It's shot in slick black and white and set to a soft hip-hop soundtrack that imposes a sense of flow and rhythm onto seemingly mundane moments like Alistair Overeem playing video games or walking through an airport. Some would say that this is just a very ordinary video dressed up in flashy film-school techniques, and there's a degree of truth to that. But technique matters, and even aside from it there's an undeniable charm to The Reem that deserves consideration.

A big part of the series's appeal is the quiet charisma of the athlete at its centre. Alistair Overeem is a masculine fantasy, a physically massive and incredibly conditioned man, once a lanky kickboxer but now grown into a literally larger than life figure. Joe Rogan used to sell Brock Lesnar by saying that he looked like the man who would play the cage-fighting world champion in a movie, and Alistair Overeem arguably fits that description even more. (For one thing, he doesn't have a tattoo that looks like a dick on his chest). And despite this he is quite soft-spoken and reserved, possessing a quiet confidence but not bragging about it much. When Overeem takes a limo home from the airport, he seems kind of abashed by the luxury, as if acknowledging the ridiculousness of his own success. Even when he attempts to call out Fedor at the end of the video he is polite and complimentary of Fedor's ability. Watching The Reem is not to imbue godlike traits in an ordinary man, as the average sports narrative would have you do. It is to begin to think of an almost supernatural man as ordinary.

The usual brash and arrogant sports personality often seems to stem from social awkwardness and introversion (in MMA, Brock Lesnar and Nick Diaz are the best examples of this phenomenon). Overeem seems to be the opposite -- his quiet nature belies an internal arrogance that it's hard to not get drawn into. It's this arrogance that cost him his last fight[1], and it's on display here when he points at a wall and remarks that "all my [championship] belts will be coming there". It's kind of hard not to be drawn into Overeem's outsized ambitions, especially when his physique seems to promise that he can accomplish all these things, and he makes for a strangely likeable protagonist. There is, after all, a thin and perhaps nonexistant line between arrogance and charisma.

The scene where Overeem looks at his trophy case is interesting as a whole. In one sense, this scene is a further confirmation of the promotional nature of The Reem, serving as a device to highlight all of Overeem's accomplishments over his decade-long fight career. But the scene works much more effectively than, say, a highlight video would. Trophies tap into Walter Benjamin's ideas of the historicity of objects. Benjamin believed that objects carried historical moments with them better than human memories did, with the ruin being a prime example. The trophy serves a similar purpose in this scene, acting not so much as a proof of victory but as a trigger for memory. Overeem spends the most time lingering on a small, dinky-looking plaque he won for his second fight. He says "Even that stupid plastic card thing that came with my second fight... I know what effort I put into it, I know what tensions came with that fight, I know I was always very dedicated...".  Overeem values the trophy not as an object in itself or as a marker for accomplishment but as a trigger for memory, a physical representation of the past.

From here we move into a training sequence that takes up most of the episode. The training montage has become a cliché by now, but The Reem uses it in an interesting way. Instead of the heavy epic-rock music from classic training montages like those in Rocky or The Karate Kid, the subdued but steady beats from earlier scenes simply continue. There's a kind of fluidity to the cuts between different shots of Alistair's training: instead of building to a crescendo, they're strung together in an abstract and obscure but fascinating way, a bit like visual jazz. There's the sense of process, of repetition and slow building, and the impression that all of these things - Overeem visiting his family, playing video games, training, fighting -- are all part of one continuous pattern. It's easy to see why the gym (traditionally the boxing gym, but a MMA gym serves the same purpose) has been so attractive to filmmakers from Clint Eastwood to Frederick Wiseman.  The gym combines ordinary, procedural reality, with the hyperreality of fight sports.

We get a bit of a sense of the other members of the gym, from Alistair's less-famous teammates to his trainers, but they are very much supporting characters, spending most of their interview time praising Overeem and establishing him as truly special. Overeem does stop to put over Siyar Bahadurzada, who would go on to achieve a bit of name recognition among MMA fans, although nowhere near as much as Overeem. Once again, the larger-than-life picture the other interviewees paint stands in pleasant contrast to Overeem's seemingly subdued personality.

It is a bit shocking to see Golden Glory painted in such an idyllic light, given how far south things between Overeem and them would go. In many ways this episode (unintentionally) sets up a status quo that is later dramatically knocked down. The episode also (more intentionally) lays out a path for the rest of the "season". Alistair lists his goals at the end in a combined interview/call-out, setting his sights on a fight with Fedor, the DREAM heavyweight title, and the K-1 grand prix. Not all of this would go according to plan, but "Back Home" establishes a clear pattern that affected audience's expectations. In this it is perhaps not so different from a typical TV show after all.

[1]There's a strange time displacement in watching and talking about this episode when you haven't seen the rest of the series but know what happens to Overeem in the future. It's like being spoiled, but not exactly.

Late Night with Jimmy Fallon 2/24: Paul Rudd

I'm almost not sure what to say about another episode of Late Night with Jimmy Fallon -- my first piece on the show a couple weeks ago kind of exhausted my comments on the format, and the content is by design not supposed to have a lot of depth (although sometimes the most interesting media can be that which is ostensibly shallow).  But my patented Episodist Random-Episode-O-Tron has pointed me towards it once again, so here are a couple observations on another episode of Fallon's little corner of late-night.

-This week is "Broadway Week", which at this point in the week consists of Fallon standing in front of a theatre plugging the show before the opening credits and a song from a Broadway musical instead of the usual indy-rock guests.  Still, it's nice to have a theme that separates this episode from the standard installment of Late Night, even though that mainly amounts to discovering in the interviews that apparently every celebrity has done a stint on Broadway at one point or another.  Since Fallon announces in this episode that next week will be "Bruce Springsteen week", apparently the theme idea is sticking around.

The Broadway performance this night -- a medley from Sister Act -- comes off pretty badly despite being the only Broadway-related thing on the show.  Songs from musicals are rarely great outside of their context, and this one in particular is a confused number where a bunch of people sing ecstatically in nun costumes for no apparent reason -- and if you wanted to see that, you could go to church.

-Speaking of hacky jokes...

The opening monologue still isn't very good, which is half because of the canned current-events "zinger" humour and half because Fallon is still uncomfortable doing stand-up.  Tonight's desk segment, which has basically the same kind of topic-joke-move on format, this time with a strained "Thank You note" theme attached, is mysteriously much funnier, although a lot of the punchlines are still sort of obvious.  Maybe there's a different pool of writers that work on these segments, or maybe it's just that the desk segment uses less zeitgest-y topics, ranging out for jokes about TV cliffhangers, sit-ups, and Popeye.  Or maybe it's just the "sentimental" music cue constantly re-starting, which flips between being annoying and hilarious like any good repeating gag.

-This episode's main guest is Paul Rudd, who is okay.  It's one of those moments where you expect a comedic actor to give funny interviews, but in his appearance here he just seems like a regular guy who occasionally makes an okay joke.  Rudd is a fairly popular actor, but he hasn't really developed a persona -- he can't "play Paul Rudd", and that makes for a forgettable, if perhaps unusually honest[1], interview.

The second segment eschews the usual game format for another, slightly rarer Fallon standby, the weird fantasy segment, in which Fallon and Rudd talk about (and display posters for) a realm of imaginary B-movies they starred in.  It's only really weird by the thoroughly mainstream standards of  late-night talk shows, but it is a nice twist on the usual snow job, and there's almost an endearing love for shitty movies that makes the later plug for a Tyler Perry film seem almost heartfelt.  The only issue, and this is one of Fallon's likeable flaws, is the inability of both guys (but mostly Jimmy) to keep a straight face.

-Movie promoters need to do a better job picking clips to show. The one for the movie Paul Rudd is ostensibly here to promote, Wanderlust, is a generic piece of lol-hippie jokes that doesn't really make me want to see the film but at least is a theoretically comedic scene.  When Gabrielle Union comes on, the clip for the Tyler Perry movie she's doing seems to be all set-up for some later joke that never comes.  Either something is going wrong at the switchbox or (and this is depressingly more likely) these are actually the best moments of the movie.

-Still, for all the ordinariness of this night's show, there are still some moments of strangeness poking through that make it worthwhile.  (Strangeness is latent in almost every piece of commercial fluff, it's just a question of how much the creators let it be expressed.)  Memorably, the keyboardist of The Roots spends an entire segment wearing googly eyes for no reason, with the camera constantly cutting back to him while Fallon tries to go about with his scheduled bit, as if pretending that nothing is going on.  With a bit lower budget and more strange facial hair, this could almost pass as a Tim & Eric segment highlighting the strangeness of conventional TV.

There's another moment of weirdness during the Rudd interview, when Rudd and Fallon set up the clip, but instead of cutting to the film clip it shows... a clip from Rudd's interview on David Letterman, with the exact same dialogue setting up the exact same clip.  This seems like a way of both guys calling out themselves on their artificiality and their replacability as cogs in the great media-promotion machine, and it works especially well because both of the exchanges seem natural in and of themselves -- it's only when placed together that the artificial convenience of them starts to stink).

(I'm half convinced that this is just something added into my avi by a merry band of pirates, because the two guys on screen don't react to it much.  If it is, big ups to the pirates for being creative in their vandalism.  If it's not, big ups to the show for a genuinely surprising moment.)

I'm not going to say that strange moments like these are what I watch the show for -- that's a cop-out, like saying you read Playboy for the articles.  The benign talk-show comedy, as easy as it is to mock and criticize, is also a genuine pleasure most of the time.  But it's the moments where the show bursts at its seams, where it shows awareness of its own limitations and is willing to scratch if not smash those walls, that I get snapped out of my stupor and sit up and take interest.

Next Week: "You go to the deepest heart of Appalachia, you will not find a town smaller than Chicago."

[1] I want to use "honest" here as distinguished from "candid", which means putting on a cry-ey face and airing strategically planned dirty laundry.  Sometimes, being honest means being boring.

Late Night with Jimmy Fallon 1/30/12: "Glenn Close, Emmy Rossum"

Jimmy Fallon raises the interesting question of how funny a late night talk show host has to be.  The late-night format has long settled into a format of half comedy, half celebrity adulation/promotion, and Fallon is undeniably talented at the latter part.  He has a kind of energy and clueless enthusiasm that makes you think that every night is going to be a great show, and that he's genuinely excited to be doing another interview with the Shameless people or some guy from Jersey Shore.  The value of hype men to society is very questionable, but it is a kind of skill, and Fallon has it.

As for the comedy... well, it's acceptable and inoffensive, and that's kind of the problem.  The late-night joke format is as ossified as the format of the shows itself.  The host describes a current event, makes a decent but kind of obvious joke about it, sometimes the sidekick adds in a comment, and then it's onto the next topic.  (Some of Fallon's desk segments, like "Pros and Cons", follow a similar format.)  The main issue is that the set-up to joke ratio is way out of skew (at least for the level of reward the jokes give), and the kind of ADD flitting from one news topic to another without any semblance of transitions.  It's not that all of the jokes are bad, but at the same time it feels as though this part of the show only exists because a late-night show has to have it.  The set is even dressed up to have an almost archaic, Vaudevillian look.

But of course, a late night show is designed to be conventional and inoffensive, the kind of wind-down fare you can watch before bed (or possibly fall asleep to) without having to think about.  There's nothing wrong with that function, and in some ways it's comforting to think about the continuity of comedians doing essentially the same show all the way back to the 1960s.  I'm not sure how many people watch TV this way anymore, but most nights on a network are structured in a distinct arc, starting off with some easy-to-digest comedy, moving into a (theoretically) more involving drama, and finishing off with news and a late-night show to wind down.  It's a full emotional experience you can get without leaving your couch all night.  And Late Night with Jimmy Fallon perhaps deserves to be judged in this context: I've found I enjoy it a lot more the later in the day I watch it [1].  I watched this episode at 2 AM and loved it.

The second segment is probably the most "pure" comedy segment, in that it's more devoted to getting laughs than fitting into late-night conventions, and it's easily the funniest part of the show.  In what's apparently some kind of recurring segment, Fallon presents viewers with a "do not read" list, presenting the goofiest titles the writers could find on Amazon.  This segment is a great fit for Fallon because it doesn't really require him to be funny, which he has trouble doing consistently -- the books, a product of the naturally absurd world of self-publishing, do the work for him.

This is followed by another recurring segment, "Battle of the Instant Bands", in which thrown-together audience members with musical talent have to come up with a song in a short amount of time.  (Normally I would wonder about the odds of getting two bands' worth of musicians in the studio audience, but then again, this is New York.)  Of course, the actual interesting part of this process -- the chaotic attempts to come up with a song and gel as some sort of group -- is not televised.  Instead, all we get is the final, remarkably polished performance.

This probably says something about the show: any moments that aren't a pure performance are excised.  Jimmy Fallon, and the larger tradition he belongs to, exists in a world where everyone is made-up and beautiful and everything is the finished product, with no indication of process or progress.  Everything is already great.  Even the audience members seem a little larger than life, apparently being sent from Hipster Central Casting.  I would almost say that it was fixed but, again, this is New York.

Oh, and the worse band wins because they have a cute girl and pandered, based on an audience applause-o-meter.  It reminds me of the one time I went to the Apollo Theatre, and this is another moment where the vaudeville routes of the show poke through.  This isn't really a self-reflexive version of the late night show a la Ferguson or early Letterman.  Rather, it's very conscious of the tradition it belongs to, and respectfully submits itself as a follower of tradition instead of mocking or questioning it as other shows do.  In some ways this makes Jimmy Fallon frustratingly conservative, unwilling to ditch late-night staples that don't really work well here [2].  But at the very least it has a deep knowledge of its forebearers and has learned from them, which we can possibly attribute to showbiz veteran and producer Lorne Michaels.

After this we get into the interview segments. The interview is in many ways the main draw of the show: it's what they announce at the top of the hour, and what usually takes up the most airtime (although this episode is more heavily waited towards host segments). It's worth noting, however, that this is a distinctly neutered version the interview as a form. It's more of a friendly chat with a minor celebrity, which segues into an advertisement for whatever the celebrity is currently involved in. So when Fallon sits down with Glenn Close, it's more or less a given that he's not going to ask her much about her craft as an actor, or roles she's done less recently, and that nobody will mention the rocky critical reception of her pet project Albert Nobbs. This is not so much a criticism as an observation that the performative aesthetic extends here: on late night, everyone is awesome, and no one ever makes a bad film.

These interviews are then a service mainly to the subject and not the audience. (The subjects of the interview aren't even described as such – the official terminology is “guest”.) But the audience, at least the ideal audience imagined by the genre – which is not too different from the ideal audience of the National Enquirer – does get something from this, which explains the format's enduring popularity. There's the idea that this is the celebrity in their natural form, not performing in one role or the other or having to justify themselves as they would in a harsher interview. Instead, the illusion is that the host, and by extension the audience, is just hanging out with this famous person – cracking jokes, playing games, talking about trivial things. Much like many sitcoms, it's a fantasy of friendship, although more of an impossible dream than, say, Friends.

Of course, on the talk show circuit the guests are playing a role no less than they are in their films: it's ultimately a performative space. But Glenn Close is playing the character Glenn Close[3], as opposed to the character of Albert Nobbs or Monica Rawlings or whatever, and that character is designed to be fun to (virtually) hang out with. So there's a pleasure for the audience even if they're aware that the interview is a disguised advertisement.

For the night's biggest guest Fallon usually takes a second segment to play a game with them, which usually seems to be some variant of charades. This is usually more entertaining than another five minutes of interview would be, and it furthers the goal of putting these celebrities in a seemingly casual hang-out setting. In this episode's variant, Glenn Close and her makeup-artist husband work magic on Jimmy's face. This is actually quite a well set-up gag: we're lead to expect an Albert Nobbs-level transformation, and then the chair turns around to reveal... Jimmy Fallon with a bunch of pieces of tape stuck to his face. It's a good joke, riffing off the silliness of the transformation trope, so good that they do it again with Glenn Close to diminishing returns (although it's technically better executed the second time around.)

After this there's an interview with Emmy Rossum, which sort of shows the pitfalls of this kind of interview.  Once again, we have the compulsive friendliness, which turns the short interview into mostly Rossum talking about her flight.  You could overhear the exact same conversation on the bus, and with lesser celebrities the hanging-out factor is a lot less appealing.  No one is going to say "Holy shit, it's like I'm actually chilling out with Emmy freaking Rossum."  This segment is over with in a blink, and other than Rossum's beauty there's not much to interest one in her or in the show she's there to promote, Shameless.  It's inoffensive, but on the other hand the segment is a waste of five minutes or however long it lasts.


The show closes out with a musical performance from Nada Surf.  If there's one thing that could be said to distinguish Fallon from his late-night competitors, it's the emphasis on music, which can be seen in both the house band (The Roots!) and his frequent musical guests who are actually the kind of hip up-and-coming artists that both (a)could genuinely use the exposure and (b)help give some cred to the show, which in most other ways is rather square and credulous.  Musical performance is always a little visually uninteresting, but not more so than an interview.  I do have to wonder, though, what's up with the guys in the crowd behind the band.  Did they watch the whole show from there?  Did they get special stare-at-our-musical-guests'-backs tickets?

(Unfortunately I couldn't find a good screencap of these strange individuals.)

All in all a perfectly harmless and mostly entertaining hour of television.  Nothing overstays its welcome, and one is never bored or forced to think.  But is it okay for art -- and we have to consider television to be art -- to be harmless?

That's a loaded question, of course -- Late Night with Jimmy Fallon shares little more than a medium with something like Breaking Bad, and asking it to be revelatory is like holding your morning newspaper to the standards of a literary novel.  The function these shows exist to serve -- a kind of mental cleansing before bed -- is perhaps an important one, even if it's the opposite of intellectual stimulation.  Of course, a lot of stuff can get slipped by you when you're not thinking, so it's important to consider the content of these shows even when they present themselves as trivial.  A critic has to walk a fine line between taking a show on its own terms and dragging it out of the way it wants to be defined.  So I think it's possible to define Fallon as both a fun hang-out show and a vapid cog in the great machine celebrity industry -- and it would be possible to excise either without destroying the show, and the genre it belongs to, completely.

Next week: "Live, from New York... it's Saturday Night!"

[1]Of course, this might be what makes late night shows such an effective advertisement for movies, TV, and other media properties -- they get you when your critical faculties are shutting off.

[2]The show would be much better, for instance, if they ditched the opening monologue and replaced it with perhaps another musical performance.  Hey, maybe The Roots could play a full song once.  That would be cool.

[3]In other words, the interview is about as real as those interviews you see at the start of porn films where the girl talks about how excited she is to do double anal. Er, or so I've heard.