Mantracker 6-05: Priscilla & Colt

The dual trends of reality television and cable proliferation has produced a host of shows that manage to produce several seasons without the vast majority of the population being aware they exist.  Such is Mantracker, a Canadian[1] reality series that my too-complicated wildcard system happened to stumble across.  It's a cheaply-produced show, obviously formulaic, and on some levels laughable, but critics would be foolhardy to ignore the vast bulk of cable detritus, which taken together is a pretty significant cultural phenomenon.  So down the rabbit hole we go.

As much as I can gather from one episode, Mantracker is basically The Amazing Race (or, more accurately, extreme tag) crossed with the plethora of nature-based reality shows, with the titular mantracker (given a name in the intro but mainly referred to by "Mantracker" or "Tracker") filling in the role of grizzled host.  The format involves a team of "prey" travelling on foot across the wilderness, trying to evade the team of "Tracker" and "Sidekick" (yes, that's the actual name the show gives him), who don't know where they're headed but get to travel on horseback.  It's a basic one-off competition format, with the contestants either winning by reaching the finish line or losing by getting caught.  There's a bunch of extra stuff to attempt to balance out the asymmetric nature of the game, but that's the gist of it.

Of course, the fact that this chase takes place across wilderness -- in this episode the Canadian shield -- is crucial.  For one, the setting helps change the central metaphor of the competition from "tag" to "hunting", which is much more dramatic.  Moreover, the wilderness provides inexpensive beauty -- when the drama of the series fails, the opportunity to experience nature from the comfort of our sofa is enough of an appeal.  There are even a number of educational bits about local wildlife (possibly just there to justify government grants).


The natural setting also helps produce an ideology in which the show is meaningful.  "It's more than just a game," the overly-agressive narrator insists in the opening.  "This thing called Mantracker is a return to the animal instincts hidden deep in the human DNA."  It doesn't really get much more explicit than that, folks.  Mantracker positions itself as a return to something real -- the wilderness, life-or-death struggle, and biological imperative -- in contrast with the postmodern world.

This is a distinctly gendered discourse.  Priscilla is constantly portrayed as an anchor on her husband Colt, ranked (very scientific-like) as having less physical ability and being easier to capture, and the narrative of the episode goes on to confirm this.  On a broader level, the nostalgia for a time when trackers on horses were really societally important is at least in part a longing for a physical, masculine world where men could actually fulfill all the aspects of their traditional gender identity.

The narrative of the episode plays out cyclically: the prey come up with some plan or scheme tto fool the tracker, and we then cut to the tracker immediately figuring out what they've done.  Priscilla & Colt are portrayed in the time-honoured manner of minor villains, making half-hearted jokes about the tracker's age and scheming about leaving prankish traps for him, which the tracker interprets as nice gifts in one of the episode's more amusing interation.  The usual reality TV staples are all used in an attempt to create tension, ranging from confessional interviews to pre-commercial previews which make the upcoming events look much more dramatic than they actually are.  (In one egregious exampe, the preview suggests that one of the teams encounters a bear, which never comes close to happening.)

For all these tricks, though, there isn't much actual tension in this episode.  Whether it's the imbalance of the format or simply the weakness of these two particular contestants, Priscilla and Colt never really seem to have a prayer of winning.  The tracker basically finds them not far from the starting line and lets them get away, presumably because they need to fill up an hour with this chase.  Reality competition shows usually don't ask for much suspension of disbelief, as their format openly and obviously forces competition and drama, but this scene ruins any ideas that the narrative is not entirely predetermined.  On a slicker-produced show, I might have bought Priscilla and Colt's escape, but here it comes off as blatant manipulation, which kind of spoils the whole "survival of the fittest" aspect.  But that's the danger with reality television.  The producers may think they're in control of what really happens, or at least what makes it to air, but so often reality is in control of them.

Next week: "That's the only connection I have between my Mom and I.  It's not a weapon!"

[1] This may help to explain my ignorance of this show, as I (like most Canadians) don't pay any attention to Canadian TV.

UFC 1

Mixed martial arts is one of the few sports, and certainly the most successful one, whose invention took place in modern memory.  There are weird predecessor fights like Muhammed Ali fighting Antonio Inoki and whatever shit Helio Gracie got up to, but as an ongoing sport and not a freakshow it mainly dates back to the early 90s.  The consequence of this is that pretty much the entire sport has been recorded and is available for perusal by both legal and not-so-legal means.  And what's more, due to the relatively slow schedule, one can actually watch, say, all of the UFC events in order.

Doing this would, I imagine, have a curious effect.  On the one hand, the seemingly discrete fights and tournaments would merge into a broader narrative, one about the rise and fall of particular fighters, and the quest for legitimacy by the sport in general.  Narratives are what draw us into sports, and the narratives of mixed martial arts have the benefits of being largely true.  When we like a fighter, it's because of the way he presents himself, not because he's been slapped with a jersey with our hometown on it.  UFC 1 contains an easy narrative, one that's been reworked into founding mythology by the promotion in its later days: Royce Gracie, the smallest man in the tournament, comes in and beats everyone else because he simply has the better technique, and in the process demonstrates the efficiency of his Brazilian jiu-jitsu style over less effective martial arts.  In the new UFC intro video, the first thing we see is this event's fight between Royce Gracie and Ken Shamrock.

At the same time, there are moments of narrative discord.  This is, again, the case with all sports: the facts rarely fit the predetermined narrative exactly.  The plucky underdog hometown team makes a decent showing but goes down in the quarterfinals.  The intimidating, dominant fighter gets laid on for three rounds by a dorky wrestler.  And so on and so forth.  We can see that even in the heavily mythologized UFC 1: the finals are not Gracie/Shamrock, but Gracie against the now-forgotten kickboxer Gerard Gordeau.  Gracie/Shamrock itself lasts under a minute, and while being one of the more competitive fights, still looks very sloppy compared to modern MMA grappling.  At the same time as sports tend towards narrativization, they resist it.

UFC 1 (the "1" was, of course, added in later) hardly looks like the start of a global sport.  It portrays itself as an one-off exhibition of martial arts, and the one-night tournament format certainly doesn't suggest attempts at an ongoing league.  It's very much a competition between sports, with the matches subtitled as "Boxing vs. Jiu Jitsu" or "Kickboxing vs. Karate".   Speaking of the graphics, they evoke less of a sense of epicness and more one of 80s cheese.  Which has kind of come back around to epic again.

(Wait, is that GSP?)

There's a general sense throughout that an 80s martial arts movie has escaped the limits of fiction and entered into the real world.  The announcers do their best to sell it as a legitimate competition, by focusing on the nebulous "strategy" and the martial arts credentials of the fighters involved, but they don't really have the kind of legitimating framework that Mike Goldberg and Joe Rogan (today's UFC commentators) now do, and it's hard to make up these kind of things on the fly.  Curiously, though things are much more brutal than the present-day sport -- in the first fight, Gerard Gordeau knocks out Teila Tuli's teeth, two of which were allegedly embedded in his foot for the rest of the night, while the commentators bemoaned the fight's early medical stoppage -- there's much less focus on the brutality.  There are no nu-metal highlight reels of brutal knockouts, and no direct comparisons to the gladiatorial arena like there was in one long-running UFC intro.  Watching it, it's kind of hard to decide whether it's barbaric or totally lame.

Of course, UFC 1 has an ending fitting for an 80s martial arts movie, with the small foreign guy in a gi winning everything despite seeming to be an underdog.  However, to some extent the fix was in.  The Gracie family was a major force behind the creation of the event, and it was designed to showcase the effectiveness of their style.  You can tell this early on from the fourth commentator who seems to be there entirely to heap praise on Brazilian jiu-jitsu.  That's not to say that it was Gracie against a bunch of tomato cans -- Ken Shamrock was certainly a legitimate competitor who would go on to have a storied career -- but he was far from an underdog.

One can begin to discern this in his quarterfinal fight, against boxer Art Jimmerson ("ranked 10th in the world by the IBF!").  Jimmerson comes in wearing one boxing glove, an absurd moment that would soon go down in UFC lore.  This was caused possibly by the ad-hoc rules summit[1] between the fighters that only highlights the unstable foundation that the entire event rested on, or it may be a comically literal attempt to embrace the mixture of martial arts -- one hand to box, one hand to grapple.  In any case, it's the boxer that comes off looking like a fool, as he is flabbergasted by the ground game and taps out despite not seeming to be in any particular submission hold.  Even next to the sumo fighter Jimmerson seems like a joke.

Once again, this seems to be according to plan.  The commentators predict and then describe Jimmerson's loss as caused not by his own skills but by being a boxer -- he's said to have "too many rules" and to be too limited in a "real fight".  This is a deliberate shot across the bow of the most developed combat sport, and an argument that mixed martial arts (a name the sport had yet to officially adopt) is more "real".  The rivalry between boxing and MMA continues to this day, with everyone from fans to promoters routinely getting in arguments about it, and the UFC using Jimmerson as a fall guy might be the first shot fired [2].

Gracie/Jimmerson also plays into another curious factor about this first event: most of the fights are rather one-sided.  None of the fights go past the first five-minute round, and the only one that seems really competitive is a sloppy but enjoyable slugfest between Zane Frasier and Kevin Rosier.  This is mostly because of the uneven development of skills, but in a way it adds a kind of verisimilitude -- after all, most streetfights are quick and one-sided.  The present-day UFC, with its carefully even matchmaking, comes off as more of a sport but less of a spectacle.

And that's the comparison that one can't help but make.  The UFC today is in many ways what UFC 1 disavows.  The opening credits state that there are "no rules, no judges' scores, and no time limits" -- all things that the current product has, and for good reason.  Mixed martial arts has become a discipline just like boxing has, dependent on its rules, and of somewhat questionable application in a real fight (can you imagine Ben Askren in a bar brawl?)  The weird combination of brutality, 80s cheese and spectacle has morphed into a sleekly marketed, carefully regulated sport.  It's a sport I really like, and the dominant narrative of the sport cleaning itself up and becoming legitimate after these early wild days isn't wrong.  But something's been lost since this crazy, fly-by-night first UFC, and even if we've gotten something better in return it's hard not to miss it.

Next week: "At first I thought it must have been a dream, but I had these waffly black and blue marks all over my leg, and my complexion was totally cleared up."

[1]The early UFC events were often marketed as having "no rules", but this is mainly a marketing ploy -- low blows, eye gouging and biting were banned, along with a host of unstated rules that the system couldn't have functioned without, like no weapons.  The "no rules" bit is, however, one of the few attempts to market this early product for its violence.

[2]The modern UFC more or less repeated the Jimmerson fight when they brought in James Toney to fight Randy Couture a few years back, showing that these early freakshows sometimes pop up in the modern professional product in what could almost be described as the return of the repressed.  Toney faired about as well as Jimmerson did, although he got paid a lot more for it.

Samurai Girls 9: The General's Return

Warning: ANN describes this series as "Objectionable Content: Significant" and, well, that pretty much sums it all up. I've stayed away from blatantly NWS images, but there are still some chicks without pants. Get back to work, drone!

Bad shows exist. Bad shows exist in great quantity, much greater than good shows. This is true in the low-stakes world of simulcast streaming anime. While streaming has got shows like Wandering Son or The Tatami Galaxy to an American audience legally and conveniently, every season seems to bring a new heap of cookie-cutter fanservice shows onto the hallowed halls of Crunchyroll and Youtube. It's easy, as critics and fans, to demand that all these bad shows vanish, even if we know it will never be done. But I don't think the dialectic is as simple as that. Simple "guilty pleasure" shows with a broad appeal often underwrite the more ambitious critically praised projects, which are often loss leaders. Networks have born their critically acclaimed shows on the back of cheap-but-popular reality shows. Major publishing houses can only afford to publish "literary" authors because of all the money they're swimming in from the Dan Browns of the world. Hell, you could even make a case that The Wire wouldn't exist without Sex and the City, as heretical as it seems to say that.

Hakku Ryouran Samurai Girls (or Samurai Girls, as I'll call it here for sake of my sanity) is one of that horde of fanservice shows that comes with every new anime season. In particular it's in the semi-historical fanservice genre, a genre started by the sadly influential Ikki Tousen, in which half-naked girls re-enact historical battles, usually from the age of the samurai. The result is a heady mixture of sex, violence and nationalism not usually seen outside of sporting events. (Sengoku Basara could be said to be the fujoshi equivalent of this type of show.)

flomu over at Yukko Thursday suggests that watching a random episode of a show divorced from context can in fact be a good way to evaluate said show. I can see the logic in this. Instead of being concerned with the plot events of a particular episode, what changes from the norm, the outside viewer can view the norm and the specific -- the series-wide generalities and the episode-only specifics -- at once. Certainly not every review should be like this, but it wouldn't help for some to be, and this one certainly is. My wildcard randomizer happened to land on The Anime Network's streaming website, and in particular this episode. I haven't seen any of the previous episodes, and probably won't ever.

I don't entirely grasp the plot, but the plot's not really important for this kind of show. Here's what I managed to pull together: it's the modern day, but samurai are still a thing, except they're all hot chicks. The hot chick samurai gain their power by having sex with their lord. A bunch of samurai chicks are competing to bone this one lord, but he wants to really understand their true feelings. An evil samurai chick with an eyepatch shows up, strips for the lord guy and tries to seduce him, but he's too much of a Nice Guy so she just hypnotizes him to... do something. Then the evil eyepatch chick fights a bunch of other samurai chicks. Some of these chicks are "master samurai", except apparently later we find out there are no master samurai, and they have to clone some from the DNA of the general and the annoying redhead girl who is I guess the main character. idk.

Oh, and the pig-tailed chick whose role in the plot I still can't figure out keeps getting knocked out, which is admittedly kind of funny.



All of this is tosh. The real story of Samurai Girls is of a poor creative art director stuck on this thankless borderline-pornography project. Instead of just taking the cheapo anime style and cranking up its trademarks (big eyes, small mouth), as is usual for the genre, Samurai Girls actually has an interesting and aesthetically appealing visual style. There are some sequences here that wouldn't look out of place in your usual noitaminA-esque prestige show, such as the black-and-white pan up to the airplane at the start of this episode. Ironically, the further the show gets from sexploitation and the Barbified bodies of its girls, the easier on the eyes it is.

The main visual effect used here is the heavy inking of the characters' outlines, making them look extremely cut off from the world around them, almost two-dimensional. Transitions from scene to scene are made by having the screen splattered with ink and then fade away, directly linking creation and the tool responsible for that creation. In a way the art of Samurai Girls seems to be a bitter commentary on its storyline, portraying the characters as exactly as two-dimensional and artificial as they are. The whole thing is made to look like a perverted old man playing with paper dolls. (A more positive spin on this style would be that it lets the audience know that the show isn't taking itself too seriously, and that they should feel free to sit back and enjoy the boobies, although that's kind of problematic as well.)



(The pixelated-ness of that screenshot is my fault, but feel free to take it as another directorial technique.)

The series director is listed under the pseudonym of KOBUN, which furthers my "genuine artist who needs to put food on the table" suspicion. He makes a pretty solid go of it, managing to work in the visual imagery discussed above while fulfilling his genre obligations -- the camera, taking the idea of male gaze to extreme ends, never misses an upskirt shot or flash of breast, managing to competently capture the action on screen while taking the most sexualized view of it possible. This is a skill, albeit a disgusting one.



The writing, on the other hand, is done by a definite soft-porn hack. Ryunosuke Kingetsu, who writes this episode and nine others in the series as well as being the general series composer, has had his name attached to a star-studded roster of battling-boobs projects like Ikki Tousen and Queen's Blade (both produced by ARMS, the studio for this show), as well as some bottom-of-the-barrel video game adaptations. As I mentioned above, this is a genre that's been popular for at least a decade, and the best that can really be said about it is that at least it mostly sexualizes adult women.

The writing here is mostly a welding-together of whatever genres Kingetsu can get his hands on, with shounen action being the most prominent, although you can also see the form of the harem romance, slapstick comedy, sickly-sweet shoujo, and even a stab at high-concept science fiction all worked into this episode. In a way this genre hodgepodge is admirable, although Samurai Girls does none of these genres very well. Kingetsu is only well-versed in their lexicon of tropes: the evil seductress, the silly miniboss trio, the moment in a shounen fight scene where there's a huge explosion and, after the smoke clears, the adversary is completely unharmed. The fight scene that makes up a big part of this episode even mimics a shounen battle, with secondary characters standing around to explain what's going on to the audience. Later in the episode things start to resemble a mediocre sci-fi product like Jyu Oh Sei, as clones of the main characters show up in vats [1].

What's probably most noteworthy here is that even though this is an adults-only show, the genres it draws on are all juvenile, with storytelling techniques aimed at people who would not legally be allowed to watch this show. Of course, shounen and shoujo have a large fanbase outside of their target audience, for reasons both justified and not. Samurai Girls is, it would seem, pornography for people who don't want to grow up, who just want to hear their own childhood stories retold but now with full frontal nudity. This is probably most intense in the manchildish culture of otaku, but the West can't really cop a sense of superiority here, with all the infantilization that goes on in American porn.

But beneath all these hacked-together genre bits there are some more troubling things at play. (It may seem silly to rally at a soft-porn show for not being ideologically correct, but bear with me.) This is the way ideology functions -- through bad and good media, with or without conscious thought, so ubiquitous it seems like the unavoidable truth of the universe. The series has borrowed the ideals of the bond between a samurai and his general, which is in itself an ideological justification for a rigid class system, portraying domination as personal loyalty and sacrifice. In Samurai Girls the bond is sexual -- a male general and his female samurai make their "contract" by, well, you can guess the rest. On the one hand this is just a justification for all the cheesecake, but it also reflects something I'm awkwardly dubbing "sexualism" -- the cultural assumption that romantic and sexual relationships are the most and maybe the only significant ones [2]. Sure, all those old samurai movies may have talked about how great the bond of servitude was -- but wouldn't that bond have been better if they were doing it on the side? This is a natural technique of pornography, so I guess I could excuse its presence here, but it pops up all the time in other places -- such as the assumption that every close bond between characters (or sometimes people) is sign of a sexual attraction. The bromance genre (noxious in its own way) aside, the works of art about friendship or family or whatever are ridiculously outnumbered by those about capital-R Romance. The explosive growth of pornography, both soft and hard, can only add to this.

But in "The General's Return" it becomes apparent that not all sexual relationships are created equal. Gisen, the evil eyepatch lady mentioned above, is the archetypical whore/slut/other bad word, throwing herself at Muneakira, the male lead, and using her sexuality as a weapon. She literally hypnotizes him with her naked body. I am not making this up. Her actions are contrasted with those of the female lead Jyubei, who I believe is her sister or something, and believes in her catchphrase of "trust and bonding".



Now, I've got nothing against trust and bonding, and something like that is probably at the base of most healthy relationships. Hell, this is in a way the language of sex-positivism: the problem isn't sex, it's mechanical objectified sex, and people should do it in a trusting, loving relationship. But these values are being used here in an age-old patriarchal dialectic: the lady versus the whore, the Sweet Girlfriend versus the Evil Sex Lady. This is made literal in Samurai Girls, as Gisen's seduction and Jyubei's "trust and bonding" become magical forces battling for Muneakira's soul, represented through flying colourful energy and everything. And at the same time we're being asked to objectify both, to ogle Gisen's exposed tits and blunt attempts at seduction even as we hate her for it. This is the refitting of "enlightened" attitudes about sex back into the familiar misogynist schema, and it's happened in far more important cultural arenas than late-night sexploitation anime.

There's also the spectre of nationalism lurking. We find out towards the end of "The General's Return" that there are no more master samurai being born in Japan, that the nation's much-vaunted protectors are dying out. Samurai Girls is a nationalistic fantasy as much as it is a pornographic one. In it the era of shogun and samurai has never ended, and Japan is powerful not in spite of its traditional culture but because of it. In the closing minutes of this episode the series sets up a new conflict: the quest to preserve Japanese culture against modern society, through the traditional morality ("trust and bonding") of Jyubei and Muneakira. Come for the tits, stay for the crypto-conservatism.

On one level, Samurai Girls is a qualified success: it isn't high art, but it's a competently executed genre production, even if that genre is as sleazy as it gets. Pornography is always going to exist in some form or another, so it may as well have the attempt at artistry that we have here. But on another level Samurai Girls is a profound defeat: a defeat of feminism and of anti-nationalism, a co-optation that can be felt down in the lowest fringes of the culture. Bad shows are important, if for no other reason, because it is when we are aiming only for cheap pleasures that we most thoroughly reproduce our ideologies.

Next week: Wilfred tries to convince me to leave my house.

[1] Whenever a show resorts to having rows of vats containing clones of one of the characters, it's probably time to abandon ship.

[2]For more on this see the bitter old spinsters over at Onely.

Eastbound and Down 1-05: "Chapter Five"

The Wildcard entry is a slot I put into my usual weekly randomizer to get me to explore the wider world of television as a form and not just examine individual pieces. The channel numbers on my cable service go up past 1800, which doesn't mean there are 1800+ channels, but that still means there's a heck of a lot more that makes up the vast morass of television than the handful of cable dramas and anime series that I regularly watch. Eastbound and Down is not an exceptionally strange thing to find at the end of one of these wildcard randomizers. It is, however, a strange path that lead me to it.

Through ample use of random.org I landed on Eastbound and Down not on HBO, where it originated, but on The Score, Canada's third-tier sports network. The show can certainly be described as sports-related, centred around an arrogant baseball star who returns to his hometown retired and broke. But despite this episode ending in a climactic pitching contest, the actual sport seems to be beside the point in Eastbound and Down. Even for a sports network to branch into scripted programming it seems like a show like Friday Night Lights, which focuses much heavier on the sport in question, would be a better fit. In part this is a product of the cobbled-together nature of cable television – if you can pick up a good show in syndication*, grab it, even if it doesn't really fit your network's remit. This is why most cable channels, at least most of the ones anyone watches, seem to have little to do with whatever their name implies. (Can you believe that TLC was once an educational network?)

But there's more than that here. The Score airs Eastbound and Down twice a week, after both of the WWE's weekly shows. This means that the sports network is now pretty much airing two nights a week of scripted programming. This isn't just network drift. This is a question of whether the essential nature of sports requires it to be a legitimate contest with an unplanned outcome.

If we view the essential point of sports as an attempt to determine who the best runner or fighter or soccer team in the country or the world is, then the answer seems like an obvious yes. But the entertainment complex that's built up around sports has a different point entirely. If our interest was essentially in the competition, then team sports wouldn't be so popular – after all, as far as burning athletic questions go “which billionaire can hire the best people that can play the confusing sport known as American football” is not really at the top of the list. But the reason people turn into a sports game isn't just interest in who's the better competitor. The main draw is a mixture of athletic spectacle and emotional catharsis shaped by the storylines developed by the commentariat. This is a description that could just as well fit the draws of pro wrestling – or, for that matter, a Harlem Globetrotters game or ballet or the football sequences in Friday Night Lights. This all stems from the turn of the millenium, when sports realized in pro wrestling (which was finally abandoning the remaining shreds of kayfabe) and drama realized in reality TV the same thing almost simultaneously: that as far as entertainment goes, it really doesn't matter if a story is real, fake, or something in between. Eastbound and Down is a lot further afield than this (there's no element of athletic spectacle and unlike the WWE it doesn't formally ape a sports broadcast), but it's easy to see how there's a small leap from following the troubles of a disgraced ex-player in real life and following one in fiction.

So, uh, Eastbound and Down. I've only watched one episode of the rest of the series, in a rare bout of channel-surfing some time ago, but despite being a heavily serialized storyline it's not really hard to follow. Of course, it doesn't hurt that this episode (the unimaginatively-titled “Chapter Five”) begins with a recap of sorts, in which a despondent Kenny records an “audiobook” lamenting his problems and his descent to normal people status. Typically we would expect this to be the end of his character arc – the arrogant athlete made humble who commits himself to a life among regular people and not looking down upon them. But in Eastbound and Down, this is the lowest point for Kenny. As much as we're supposed to laugh at his ego and macho personality, the show is also a kind of celebration of that all-American brashness, and in this episode it becomes clear that the narrative arc of this season is not about Kenny's reformation but whether Kenny can resist being reformed, whether his attitude will survive contact with his new mundane life.

In part this is just a function of the show's set-up. Eastbound and Down is basically centred around Kenny as the comedic disruptor: he walks into normal situations and makes them funny. Virtually every line that comes out of his mouth is made into a joke. Even lines that are there purely to advance the plot are twisted into laugh-lines through both a twisted dialogue style and Danny McBride's macho-casual way of delivering it. For example, in a scene with Kenny and Stevie just talking in a car, there's a dialogue exchange like this:

STEVIE: I hope we get in a car wreck right now, I do. I hope we get in a motherfucking car wreck. I hope we do. I hope we get in a car wreck and then we can live in heaven.

KENNY: I'm not gonna get into a car wreck because I'm an excellent driver.

STEVIE: You're excellent at everything. I fucking hate it.

KENNY: I'm thinking we should just sit here quietly now, not really say anything, and let you just kind of contemplate the news I just dropped on you and let me kind of contemplate on my own pains and sorrows right now.

In this exchange Stevie has the major joke (the bit about getting into a car wreck and living in heavan), but even as something of the straight man Kenny still twists everything through his style. His responses are versions of what would be expected but strange versions. It's kind of exhausting at times, the barrage of jokes that constantly comes out of his mouth. In this way it's the type of comedy typically made by episode director Adam McKay and producer and guest star Will Ferrel – a man with cartoonishly exaggerated vices (usually played by Ferrel, but here with McBride) interacting with a mostly sttraight world. The arc of these movies usually trends towards the redemption of the main character, but while they can be redeemed they can never be truly changed, because it's their vices that make them funny and draw us to the film in the first place. As much as we migh not like hanging around someone like Kenny Powers in real life, we like hanging out with him on TV for half an hour every week, because he makes us laugh, and to that extent as viewers we don't want him to change. For television this dilemna applies even more: if the show is to continue after the redemption arc, what's going to make the comedy work?

This is why, essentially, the climax of the episode and I believe of the entire season – the pitching context at the used car dealership – is not one of redemption but of un-redemption, of Kenny Powers reclaiming his old arrogance. Faced with his old baseball rival, Kenny misses a couple times before taking his eye out with a vicious bean. This is, of course, a parody of a climax, complete with slow-motion celebration and dramatic music that contrasts well with the fact that a guy just got his eye torn out Dan Dorrity-style – but in the narrative it's also a celebration of Kenny's return to being an egoistic asshole.

Now, needless to say, this is kind of problematic. Kenny's machismo and other faults are mocked but celebrated by the show. On the other hand, less macho characters – such as his romantic competitor Terence or the bitchy city lady in this episode – are mocked a lot less warmly. Like the protagonists of Will Ferrel movies, while Kenny is a buffoon he's also meant to be a lovable one. In the A.V. Club review Nathan Rabin writes “I think by this point we love Kenny just the way he is: insane, arrogant and swimming with venereal diseases and substance abuse problems.” Kenny Powers and the comedic protagonist archetype he belongs to are loved because they embody pure untrammeled id: they can do and say the things that we know are wrong and a bad idea, but secretly wish we could.

I think there's a darker side to this character type too. There's a long line of loveable assholes which runs down the TV geneaology from Eastbound and Down to All in the Family, including such diverse shows as It's Always Sunny and The Sopranos. The loveable asshole is usually contrasted with a blue-state foil, the unloveable good person (Terence in this show, Bruce Mathis in It's Always Sunny, etc.) This is an interesting enough idea individually, but it's become so prevalent that it risks permanently inverting our morality. Read any forum or comment thread about The Sopranos and you'll find that the most despised characters are not the murderers and mobsters that populate the show but characters like Noah and the various psychiatrists who are only guilty of being kind of smarmy. This is the essence of red state politics: it's better to be ignorant than arrogant. If Obama was elected by playing Bill Cosby, then Bush the second was elected by playing Archie Bunker.

It's probably not fair to saddle that on Eastbound and Down, and it doesn't exactly fit the situation – after all, Kenny is more arrogant than any of his foils, but he does so in a more manly way, and that's supposed to make us root for him. The montage at the finale of “Chapter Five” where he embraces April in slow-motion after “winning” the pitching contest is obviously viewed through an ironic filter, but it's kidding on the square: we're supposed to celebrate as the he-man Kenny wins the girl from his effeminate rival. The audience's intended reaction is suggested by the reaction of the in-show audience at the dealership, who cheer on Kenny and take him as an inspiration to start living out their id and smashing stuff.

The love interest April also presents another problem with the “loveable asshole” character: women never get to inhabit this trope. If a woman does a tenth of the things that a character like Kenny Powers does, she's a bitch, and there's no such thing as a “loveable bitch” (see the “city bitch” in this episode, who is portrayed negatively for mostly just being bossy.) In the traditional sitcom the woman is there to be the ever-suffering wife, there to look hot and be the straight man and not do much else. To be fair April does get in some funny lines here, mocking Kenny's premature ejaculation in the previous episode, but there's an obvious visual difference between the genders here. The male half of the cast is a theatre of grotesques, with ugly faces and uglier hairstyles. April is a pneumatic brunette who's practically popping out of her shirt. The climactic kiss scene is reminiscent of those cartoons when an anthropomorphic cartoon critter would fall in love with a realistic-looking woman.

Eastbound and Down does have it's virtues. It's one of those shows that goes for a joke every three seconds and at that rate even with limited accuracy you're bound to get a lot of hits. Danny McBride's way of inflecting each line with Kenny is also quite wonderful, although it's worrisome that other than McBride the rest of the regular cast is outshone by two guest stars (Will Ferrel as a Ric Flair hairdo-sporting car salesman and Craig Robinson as Kenny's longtime baseball rival.) But there's still something that stops me from getting into it. The kind of ideological rant above might not have much to do with it – after all, what I've said about the “loveable asshole” can just as easily be applied to It's Always Sunny, a show I love – but there's still a lot of ugliness on screen, on an aesthetic level more than a moral one, and I have a hard time distinguishing between the ugliness I'm supposed to love and the ugliness I'm not.

* Strictly speaking this can't be called syndication, as Eastbound and Down only has thirteen episodes and not the hundred or so usually required, but the principle is the same. This is also a kind of ratings grab as syndicated shows always are, looking to capitalize on the recent E&D-related memes and ad campaigns.

Next Week: More of The Shield, now with Glenn Close.