In the summer time, there's rarely any shows I want to follow from week to week. Since the advent of Netflix, I've been using the months between June and September to catch up on shows I never got around to when they originally aired.
It all started in 2007, with the Summer of Buffy. (Although my girlfriend and I liked the vampire slayer's show so much that the Summer of Buffyquickly morphed into the Year of the Whedon, with Angel and Firefly following).
This summer's viewing schedule also includes a vampire show, although one that hasn't -- at least so far -- done anything as fun or interesting as Buffy. Still, I think True Blood really started to find its footing by the time its first season finished up.
Certainly, I don't think the show's attempt at social commentary-- vampires standing in for gays -- worked that well. The parallel got kind of shaky with actual gay characters (including at least one gay vampire) in the mix. An allegory sort of falls apart when that happens. It would be as if George Orwell had his Animal Farm pigs actually reading Karl Marx.
But when True Bloodjust stuck to being a Southern gothic/murder mystery, it worked really well, giving us a world where vampires are the least abnormal thing out there (by the end of the first season, we've learned that there's also shapeshifters and werewolves -- and there's a difference between the two, dammit! -- out there).
And while I said I didn't think the political commentary was successful, I did enjoy the way True Blood created its own universe for vampires, one where a lot of the traditional mythology -- aversion to crosses and holy water, not being visible in mirrors or photographs -- was simply created by the vampires themselves so they could blend in. They're still no good in the sun, and still die from a stake to the heart. (And this being HBO, we're way past the puff of greenish ash that the staked-vamps on Buffy and Angel would produce. These vampires vomit out about a gallon of blood before turning into a gooey red mess.)
I wish my other supernatural show this summer had been this creative. Sadly, Millennium -- which aired between 1996 and 1999 on FOX -- was one of the most frustrating and uneven things I've ever watched.
I added it to the Netflix queue because it had a good pedigree (created by the X-Files' Chris Carter) and enough Internet word of mouth about a dense mythology.
But while Carter's name was in the show's credits, the spirit of The X-Files was nowhere to be found. Millennium -- about ex-FBI profiler Frank Black (Lance Henriksen) who gets psychic visions -- had little in the way of humor or charm. And at the outset, that was fine. Most police procedurals -- and that's basically what this was, despite the occasional presence of demons -- are about restoring order. On Millennium, even after the killers were caught, you got the sense that things still weren't going to be OK. The first season was bleak, the second more light-hearted, the third...was just dull, and seemed to be marking time until cancellation.
As for the mythology...it actually held together less than the one on the X-Files (and that took several seasons to become convoluted), because the show seemed to lose interest in it by the start of the third season.
That said, there were some pretty neat episodes tucked away in there. "Jose Chung's Doomsday Defense," a tongue-in-cheek film noir inspired hour featuring Charles Nelson Reilly (who played Chung on a similar X-Files episode). "Somehow, Satan Got Behind Me," in which four demons (in the guise of grumpy old men), sit around a doughnut shop, swapping Frank Black stories. In "A Room With No View," Black's serial killer nemesis Lucy Butler -- herself a demon, as the show would suggest -- kidnaps a group of young men, imprisoning them in a house and making them listen to the same piece of Muzak 24/7.
And sometimes, it was a show that would take chances, like turning over whole hours to Catherine (Megan Gallagher), Frank's social worker wife, or setting an entire scene to Patti Smith's "Land" (all 9 minutes of it) to illustrate an investigator's mental breakdown. Too bad no one was watching it. Low ratings killed Frank Black before his story could fully be told. Carter brought him back in late 1999 to guest star on an X-Files episode that was more fun and creepy than anything Millennium ever did.
I'm also rewatching the third season of The Wire (pictured above), which I'm starting to think may have been the show's best. It's probably the strongest season thematically, with the whole idea of "reform" applying to nearly every major character or plot line: Stringer Bell tries to turn the Barksdale drug organization into a real business, while his friend/partner focuses on a violent gang war (and because of that war, this was also likely The Wire's most violent season).
Newly paroled Dennis "Cutty" Wise wants to find some sort of meaning in life outside "the game." Jimmy McNulty, a smart detective and a stupid man, yearns to connect with something outside the job. City Councilman Tommy Carcetti wants to end the career of the city's ineffectual mayor. And mostly famously -- and tragically -- of all, Major Colvin creates "free zones" for drug dealers in an effort to reintroduce real policing to his district.
Of course, part of the reason I'm enjoying this so much is that I know how all these things will have repercussions in later seasons. Colvin will take his knowledge of the city's neighborhoods -- its corner boys and stoop boys -- and become a pretty good teacher. Carcetti will make as many compromises as his predecessor. McNulty will become a decent patrolmen, and later an extremely flawed detective (pulling off a stunt that still seems almost beyond the show's realistic world view).
I have two episodes left to go (including the 11th, or as I like to think of it, "The George Pelecanos Heartbreaker") and I'm already dying to watch season four. Until Mad Men returns in a few weeks, the only decent TV I can find is stuff I've already watched.
Tom Coombe
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