Leftovers and Then Some

As it rains Bengal tigers and Great Danes on this mid autumn Oregonian evening, I have some catching up to do. If I were to say "Here goes nothing", you have every right to turn this off right now. Instead, I'll press on like a cheap fake fingernail.

Not since Twin Peaks has there been a TV series right up Cherney alley like HBO's The Leftovers. I got hooked on this during a late summer vacay to Denver, though I only caught the first season, but this damn thing haunted me from the moment I feasted my eyes and brains upon it. Based on Tom Perotta's novel, this odd duck of a program about the aftermath of what could or could not have been The Rapture is everything I want in a show and more. At turns weird, dramatic, satirical, touching, maddening, funny, brutal, confusing and most of all melancholy, The Leftovers owes its success in my eyes to not several people. Naturally it begins with Perotta's source material, but enough cannot be said for the Herculean efforts of showrunner Damon Lindelof. The cast is absolutely magnificent with not a sour apple in the whole crazy bunch-Justin Theroux, Carrie Coon, Amy Brennerman, my new girlfriend Ann Dowd and a career topping performance by Scott Glenn. I fell so madly in love with this, I headed to my nearest library for season two as soon as I returned from Colorado, then got HBO for a month for the grand fiinale. Totally worth it.

I've had a hankerin' (no g required) for some New Orleans fare for many a year. I don't know if I'll ever get

to that part of the world, but I've craved some of the delectable cuisine to the point that I considered running away with the circus until Ringling Brothers went out of business and Cirque du Soleil said "Non!" Anyway, I got my wish when my stepson Matt treated my wife and I to an evening at Acadia, a New Orleans bistro here in Portland. Oh cher, this was some good eatin' (again, sans g).

The barbecue shrimp starter about did me in as I dipped my bread in its devious broth of butter, pepper, lemon and white wine, filling me to the point that I was almost too stuffed for the entree. But I roughed it with an amazing jambalaya. My wife went for a soft shell blue crab and crawfish etoufee while Matt dug into a nice fat pork chop that would choke your mama if she had trouble chewin'. (no g spot here neither) Dessert was a bread pudding from heaven with a sauce to die for which justified the heaven reference. Top this off with some delicious (and potent) bar beverages and four star customer service, Acadia gave us the best dining experience in years.

I had the good fortune of having yet another theater group tackle one of my scripts, Murder: The Final Frontier. The Brickstreet Players of Clovis, New Mexico came in right after Song of the Canyon Kid closed in Minnesota to announce their desire to produce said murder mystery this October, making it the second production of this show this year. And it went right back to its roots as a Halloween offering. So thank you to Brickstreet as well as the Mantorville Theatre Company, San Luis Valley Theater Company and Sugar High Theatricals for a great year.

That's four shows in four different states. This is like the Electoral College. I could get elected this way.

Curses, Spoiled Again!

Recently, I settled in for a free weekend of HBO provided by my cable service, a perfect opportunity to catch up on programs I no longer watch on a regular basis since I dropped the pay network last year. This afforded me the chance to binge on season 5 of GAME OF THRONES. Of course, this meant I had to commit to 10 hours of TV viewing that I could have spent...well, living perhaps? Enjoying the summer? Emerging from the darkness to the sunshine and, perhaps, breathe fresh air?

Nah....... That stuff's overrated.

HBO GO 'Way

Back in the late 80s, comedian Doug Ferrari had a great riff about cable TV.
"You know HBO stands for? 'Hey! BEASTMASTER's on!'"
And we've come full circle, which is why I have broken up with Home Box Office after several years.
It's been a good run. They blazed a trail for what I consider the Platinum Age of Television with THE SOPRANOS, THE WIRE, DEADWOOD, et al. Their documentary series has been stellar as well as their original films, recent examples being TEMPLE GRANDIN and BEHIND THE CANDELABRA. Much of the rest of their programming has touched the stars also. The book DIFFICULT MEN by Brett Martin delves into how this network took command early and how it has lost its footing.

The sad truth is that the well is running dry and this sort of pay service is going the way of the dinosaur. Recent shows have been blah at best, though HBO can still trot out a classic like GAMES OF THRONES or BOARDWALK EMPIRE every now and then, but there are other platforms out there to find the shows you want to see. This is true in the case of the critically lauded TRUE DETECTIVE. As far as GIRLS, a show I admired in its first season, well...that appears to have been a momentary fling. Season Two gave me the hives. And if I have to see Lena Dunham's bare arms one more freaking time, I'm going take a permanent Sharpie to that goddamn Alice in Wonderland tattoo of hers. Get some sleeves, sister.
But their movie choices they've made available are laughable at best. They seem to have purchased Blockbuster's back catalog before that pterodactyl croaked in the tar pit. The greatest hits of the 80s and 90s? Hardly. Never mind BEASTMASTER. How about BEETHOVEN, that irascible St Bernard laugh riot? Oh, what a lovable lug!
Their platforming is archaic and desperately need of a revamp. One channel blurs into another with no distinction except Latino and Children's. It's laziness. It's just filling air time like every other cable channel except it costs extra. And adding an app offering the same crap ain't exactly moving forward, only sideways.
So as HBO goes the way of the dodo, as do I in the opposite direction, slowly evolving as I attempt to wean myself off the cable teat.

 We wish HBO well in its future endeavors.
  

Bad LUCK

The last time I attended a horse race was back in the 1980s. My brother Doug, who loved to play the ponies as much as our dad, took me to the track at the Alameda County Fair. In the home stretch of a race late in the day, one horse in the middle of the pack took a tremendous fall, end over end and breaking its neck. Though the procedure been blocked from the race attendees following the accident, it was obvious was what was occurring when the covered dead horse's body ended up a flat bed trailer and driven away. I didn't stay for the rest of the races, waiting for my brother outside the main gate.

I recalled this story when I heard that HBO had cancelled Luck this last week.

HBO premiered its gambling drama Luck this past winter, a show with an extremely high pedrigree what with the heavyweights involved. Created by Deadwood's David Milch, excutive produced by Michael Mann and with a cast featuring both Dustin Hoffman and Nick Nolte. After a slow build, Luck instantly become addictive, not unlike gambling itself. One of the high points of each episode were the brilliantly staged horse races themselves, brilliantly staged and edited for maximum effect. These scenes came with an unfortunate price. In the filming of these scenes, accidents have occurred, resulting in the euthanizing of three horses. Not being able to insure that these would not happen again, HBO has decided to pull the plug on the show due to safety concerns. Both Milch and Mann have agreed and Luck will end its run after one season even though it had been renewed for next year.

Though Luck has the potential to be another classic series in the HBO stable, they made a wise decision scrapping it. To be realistic, I doubt they would have made this call if Luck was pulling in True Blood or Game of Thrones rating numbers. Despite the best cast on TV: Hoffman (his best role in years), Nolte (superbly understated as an aging trainer, a performance that makes me eat my ass-hat comments in the previous Oscar blog), Dennis Farina, Joan Allen, Michael Gambon, Jill Hennessey, Kevin Dunn, Richard Kind and so many more, Luck was an expensive bottom feeder in the audience department. To continue in light of this controversy would be folly on HBO's part. No amount of Hollywood magic (stock footage, green screen, motion capture, CGI) would be able to match the intensity of those racing scenes. Without them, the show might as well be set in video poker parlor. HBO wouldn't pony up the extra dough (so to speak) anyway.

So, I guess you could say HBO is shit outta Luck.

Wasn't David Milch really tempting fate by naming a show Luck?

He's in show business. Surely he understands the concept of the phrase:

"Break a leg."

They shoot horses, don't they?

Bye, Bye LOVE

Didn't Fred MacMurray have a TV series where he played a polygamist? Yeah, you know...

MY THREE WIVES.

Oh, silly me. That was Bill Paxton in BIG LOVE. My goof.

The saga of Bill Hendrickson and his hat trick marriage came to a sad, but somehow fitting conclusion on HBO. I'll miss this ragtag bunch of Utah-ites and their plural relationships. Boy, talk about extended families... As uneven as this show could be, BIG LOVE was always a better show all around than the similarly formatted DESPERATE HOUSEWIVES, often airing at the same time, ironically enough. HOUSEWIVES bills itself, at least for Emmy consideration, as a comedy, but I've always found the humor, well, desperate. It was never as good as its first season. BIG LOVE, on the other hand, played it straight, even at its soap operatic craziest. It helped that it was always fast paced, sometimes at such a quick clip that it lost control. But it never strayed far off track always thanks to its core themes of family, faith and richly developed characters portrayed by a finely honed ensemble cast. Bill Paxton reinvented himself with BIG LOVE as patriarch Bill Hendrickson. Before this, Paxton was probably the most reviled (not by me) character actor of the last twenty five years.

He believably conveyed the strong moral fiber and inflexibility of a man who was willing to sacrifice anything for his family and proved it right up the very end. As the wives, Jeanne Tripplehorn, Ginnifer Goodwin and particularly Chloe Sevigny as the duplicitous and eternally conflicted Nicky worked like an Olympic acrobatic team, balancing both comedy and tragedy effortlessly. BIG LOVE also gave sensational old pros another chance to shine, some brighter than ever. Harry Dean Stanton was sensational as the villainous Roman Grant, ably abetted by a soberly droll Mary Kay Place as his first wife. Bruce Dern chewed up the scenery ravenously as Paxton's rat bastard father. And Grace Zabriskie had her day in the sun every episode she appeared as Bill's mother, a typification of absolutely pure and true grit.

Yeah, I'm going to miss these wacky folk, but the writing was on the fall for the conclusion to this saga before it ran completely out of gas. The ending was handled rather clumsily however with the fate of one its main characters sacrificed in a too abrupt manner, almost as an afterthought to get to the final wrap-up. But I'll be damned if they didn't make it work just like they always did on this show. The tears at the end of BIG LOVE were well earned and the final reprise of The Beach Boys'"God Only Knows", covered by Natalie Maines was a perfect bookend to the best show about plural marriage ever. Take that, SISTER WIVES.

P.S. For more Mormon fun that you can shake a stick at, I recommend Jon Krakauer's book

UNDER THE BANNER OF HEAVEN.

P.S.S. I just scored a couple of tickets to THE BOOK OF MORMON, the brand new Broadway musical written by those irascible South Park boys, Trey Parker and Matt Stone.

Can I hear an AMEN?

Whaddaya Gonna Do?

For better or for worse, The Sopranos is over. Strike that. Thanks to the arrogance of David Chase, it's for worse.

Chase, the show's creator and the writer/director of the final episode, seemed to have painted himself into a corner and chose not only an ambiguous finale, but to also tread water for the entire hour. Could be he was in denial for the demise of his show or perhaps he really didn't want it end. Whatever the answer, Chase could not have come up with such a lackluster episode if he tried, which seemed that he didn't try at all. The storylines that had been painstakingly mapped out for years-mainly the New York/New Jersey war-was dismissed in one scene. Chase threw in Phil Leotardo's hit as almost a scrap from his dinner table. The AJ scenes drew out almost incessantly to the point that they were almost excruciating. There just wasn't anything compelling or even particularly significant about this episode. It all seemed like a throw-away.

As for the grand finale at the diner, I've stepped back on my original assessment and actually have to admire the way Chase set this up and how it paid off (or didn't, as the case may be). The blackout at the moment the bell on the diner door rang caused an entire nation to go "WHAAAAAAAAAAATTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTT?????????????!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!" 

Everyone thought their cable had gone out, including me.

Is it just me or are you too finding it difficult to get the song that Tony plays on the jukebox, Journey's "Don't Stop Believing" out of your head? (He could have chosen "I Gotta Be Me" which was another selection.)

So what do I think happened when Tony looked up? Nothing. Thanks, Chase. Turns out you were Jerry Seinfeld all along.

As a writer, I realize that the most difficult thing in the world is to come up with an ending. Is that what Chase was trying to tell us with Meadow's lack of parallel parking ability? Maybe every scenario Chase had come up with to end this thing that none of them fit, just like Meadow in that parking space.

As for the cynical view that this was all just a ruse to get a Sopranos movie, well, I wouldn't be surprised nor as disappointed as I was Sunday night. Still, it's rather telling that HBO didn't over-promote this finale or even include a retrospective preceding the episode.

Not to be a Sopranos apologist like so many critics (mainly The Oregonian's Peter Carlin), maybe this will look better in retrospect. Time has already taken away part of the sting from the initial shock and perhaps another viewing will prove that it actually wasn't as awful as it appeared the first time.

In the last scene in the diner, AJ reminded Tony to "focus on the good times". Okay, I'll focus on the good times instead of the popcorn fart the last show turned out to be. Disregarding that as a huge fan of the show, I will always say that The Sopranos was one of the best television dramas ever produced and I look forward to reliving that experience again in the future.

I still wish David Chase wasn't such an arrogant prick about it all.

But as Tony Soprano himself would say, "Whaddya gonna do?"