Last Season's Television

Well, it took me most of the summer, but I finally finished watching last season's TV series. The ones I follow, anyway. This entry contains spoilers for the first season of 24, the first season of Enterprise, the first season of Smallville, and the third season of The West Wing, so if you haven't seen them yourself, you might want to give it a pass.

24, as most people probably know by now, is a show that occurred in real time; each episode featured an hour in the life of counter-terrorist agent Jack Bauer on the day of the California Presidential primary. Bauer investigates an assassination threat to candidate David Palmer (no relation to the 1970s keyboardist/arranger for Jethro Tull, this Palmer is black), and soon learns that his wife and daughter have been kidnapped to ensure that he doesn't interfere. It turns out it all ties in to a mission Jack executed in Bosnia, and terrorists who want revenge on both him and Palmer. Palmer, meanwhile, is dealing with a threat to his candidacy involving his son and daughter.

Aside from the real-time nature of the show - which is very well executed and to be applauded that they stuck with it for the whole season - the main innovation in 24 is its use of split-screen. They use it to depict actions occurring in parallel, to transition between scenes, and to briefly catch the viewer up on what the various characters are doing lately.

24 is very well-acted; Kiefer Sutherland as Jack has certainly resuscitated his career, and he does a great job. The main strength of the writing is its ingenious nature: Putting the characters in tight situations and finding ways for them to get out of them without feeling like they're cheating us.

However, 24 ultimately doesn't stand up so well because it places too much value in being clever. It works very hard to keep the tension and suspense high, but it doesn't deliver a payoff to make us feel happy that we're watching it. In the whole season, there was only one moment where I went "Yes!" when something good happened, and that was when Tony shot the killer who was about to kill Jack's wife. It wasn't a roller-coaster ride, it was just non-stop tension, and I felt like I wasn't being rewarded for sitting through all these horrible things the characters were going through.

Although the final showdown behind Jack and the villain is satisfying, the series otherwise lacks a denouement. Some characters disappear without having their story resolved (the turncoat kidnapper Rick who befriends Jack's daughter Kim; the woman at the very beginning to delivers the ID to the would-be assassins; Palmer's son; and the ramifications of the execution of Kim's friend who's kidnapped with her are never seen), and the whole season ends with the death of Jack's wife, which completely fails to bring closure to the story.

I realize, of course, that the season ends with this point of dramatic tension to lead into the next season, but I think that's cheating. It made me feel used at the end, and when you get right down to it there just wasn't enough here for me to want to watch the second season. 24 contained many interesting elements, but ultimately it couldn't deliver a gestalt which felt like rewarding television.

Enterprise is the latest of the "second generation" Star Trek series, although this one takes place before the original 1960s series, and before the Federation was founded. Scott Bakula is cast as captain Jonathan Archer, commanding humanity's first (eponymously named) starship. Relations with the Vulcans are strained, and humanity is an unknown in the cosmos.

Alas, Enterprise feels like warmed-over Next Generation, and as readers of my Star Trek page know, that's not a good thing. Short on plot, almost devoid of characterization, there's nothing new or exciting here. Least of all Bakula's acting, which runs the gamut from wooden to strained (or maybe that's his character's personality; it's hard to tell). The first season ended with a time travel cliffhanger, so I tuned in for the season premiere a few weeks ago, and was left with a feeling of, "Yup, that's pretty much just how I thought it would turn out." So that's enough of Enterprise for me.

By contrast, I came to Smallville with low expectations and was not just pleasantly surprised, I've become quite a fan. A reworking of the Superman mythos, this one is about Clark Kent (Tom Welling) in high school in Smallville. He has a crush on Lana Lang (Kristen Kreuk), whose parents were killed in the meteor shower that accompanied Clark's spaceship when it arrived on Earth, and he's raised by the well-meaning Kents, Jonathan (Will Schneider) and Martha (Annette O'Toole, who is still yummy after all these years, ahem). Also, Lex Luthor (Michael Rosenbaum, who steals ever scene he's in) is assigned to run the Smallville branch of LexCorp by his father (John Glover, pulling out all the stops to seem sinister). Lex is somewhat amoral, but trying to do the right thing, and he befriends Clark, to Clark's father's dismay.

Set against this backdrop, we learn that Kryptonite can mutate humans to give them super powers. As a result, as well as being a moral drama (Clark growing up, Lex going bad), Smallville is a sort of "teen soap opera meets The X-Files". Many of the episodes have a feel of "bad guy gains powers, runs amok, Clark finds out and cleans his clock", but as the season progressed the characters deepened and the back stories of the villains and guest stars became more compelling.

Although probably not a candidate for "TV show of the decade", Smallville is consistently entertaining and not as shallow as you'd expect. I'm definitely back for the second season of this one.

The consensus seems to be that The West Wing has gone downhill since its inaugural season, and I won't disagree. The first season was novel, and funny, and moving. Great television all around. The second season felt not as novel, but it had the running theme of President Bartlet's MS and the question of whether or not he'd run again driving it. This third season has floundered around with the President gearing up to run but not really running, and various cast members getting into romances - or not - and dealing with their personal issues. It's felt, well, mundane.

This despite the moral dilemmas surrounding a terrorist threat in the last few episodes, and the astoundingly anticlimactic death threat against CJ during the same period (boy, I just about threw something at the screen when I saw how that one ended; what the heck was the point?). There's been some genuinely good material in here (a lot of it involving Abby Bartlet, and Oliver Platt as the White House Counsel), but some key supporting characters of the first two seasons have disappeared or faded into the background, notably CJ's paramour from the press corps Danny Concannon, and conservative firebrand Ainsley Hayes. And now Rob Lowe will apparently be leaving his role as Sam Seaborn, which seems hard to imagine.

I'm hoping that the fourth season will pull back from the big, scary threat plots and finally get down to brass tacks on the campaign trail, as the show desperately needs to find its direction. It's still smart and funny, but it feels like it's too soon for it to be having these sorts of problems. In any event, I will still be sticking around to see what develops, and will probably stay with it until it stops being smart and funny.

By the way, I caught part of the second season finale recently, which goes out to the strains of Dire Straits' "Brothers in Arms". Not for the first time, I wondered why I'm not a Dire Straits fan. Moreover, someone recently pointed out to me that one of my favorite Jethro Tull albums, Crest of a Knave, has a strong DS feel to it. Although Mark Knopfler and company are fine musicians, I think I just find their music kind of boring. Knopfler's guitar style seems to minimize the potential of the instrument, and the songs seem sparsely - even unimaginatively - arranged, like updated Bob Dylan, really (and I'm no Dylan fan, either).

Anyway, that has nothing to do with television. It seems like they're a band I should like, on the surface, but despite repeated efforts I've never been able to get into them.

For this coming year, I decided to drop 24 and Enterprise from my schedule. However, I'm adding Birds of Prey (from the creators of Smallville, and assuming it's any good), and I'm going to give Firefly a try (though I missed the pilot and don't have high hopes, as it looks like a western trying to be science fiction).

Beyond those, I'm sticking with Smallville and The West Wing, as well as the Justice League cartoon (even though it's not nearly as good as the team's previous animated series, Batman, Superman and Batman Beyond). That seems like enough television for anyone.

Well, except maybe for Laurel!