Paradise Hotel has to feel the ridge

When reality TV was young and uncorrupted, Fox aired an ingenious show called Paradise Hotel. It was the genre at its peak, back before VH1 turned reality TV into contests over whether C.C. Deville would bang the white methadone addict or the black methadone addict and every other show involved retards seeking home improvement.

Paradise Hotel made it up as it went along, in an earnest, dramatic, straightforward way. Its characters were attractive alcoholics who wept and brawled. Salon's Heather Havrilesky made a study out of it. Here, she summarizes a typical Paradise Hotel moment:

Remember, kids, there's no prize, at least not one that they've announced. Amy is ripping Keith a new asshole simply because this is paradise, and she's staying at at the most exclusive hotel in the world, and never, not in a million years, did she imagine that Zack would be cast out of paradise ... forever.

But then, Amy is concerned only with the here and now, and remains unaware of the show's obvious mind-blowing cultural significance and the stigma it carries. Keith, on the other hand, seems to sense just how doomed the inhabitants of paradise are. Unfortunately, he only manages to blurt out that they're acting like a bunch of 2-year-olds before he settles into a dumbfounded silence.

The original Paradise Hotel turned on the drama that inhered in a man called Dave, who Ms. Havrilesky describes as "a moderately intelligent, mildly unattractive man, [cast] into the pits of moron hell." While the other characters passed out drunk, screamed and wept and hooked up in shoddily built cabanas, Dave quietly plotted their undoing. Pasty, slightly chunky, hatchet-faced Dave was the Guy Fawkes of Paradise Hotel. His ultimate downfall was the greatest plot line in the history of reality TV.



Paradise Hotel is back! And in an extraordinary development, it seems to equal the original.

This is due in part to the casting of Ryan, who's been categorized as "the surfer" despite being from New Jersey. Ryan is just 25 but due to his badly sun-damages skin, he looks at least 10 years older. He's dumber than a standard poodle and looks and acts like he's going through heroin withdrawal. This is attractive to the women of Paradise Hotel.


On the late-night TV-MA version that airs on Fox Reality, things turn blue. Ryan ferries Chelsea into the bungalow he ostensibly shares with Lauren, and we see a naked Ryan with his privates blurred. An obscured camera angle follows and the dialog summarizes a handjob gone wrong.

Ryan: Feel the ridge?
Chelsea: Yes.
Ryan: It gets better as it gets harder.
Chelsea: Yes, okay.
Ryan: No, you need to feel it as it gets harder. ... No, you didn't get it, you didn't feel the ridge. You have to feel the ridge.
Chelsea: ... Yes I did. It's ... nice.

She walks out on the handjob, and later Ryan finds himself on a date with Tanya. Tanya reminds you of a girl who cried a lot in high school, and not the kind of crying that comes because she's sweet and insecure and maltreated, but the kind of crying that comes because the back-up cornerback wouldn't hook up with her despite her new nosejob and the fact that her dad just bought her an Audi. She's not particularly nice, not particularly pretty, and has a sense of entitlement that runs deep.

Ryan thinks that they have a lot in common, which sounds about right. "Tanya's a cool girl. She's got the party thing going on. A lot of fun." Tanya says, "I'm like, I sometimes make out with my friends and people, but me, I like really don't need alcohol to make out with people." Through his glassy-eyed, heroin-withdrawal morass, Ryan observes, "Tanya's been mentioning how she loves to make out, hook up and stuff. I'm definitely into that kind of thing."

What helps put this show over the top is the editing and production values. It's portrayed as a serious morality play, a story where values and integrity are at stake. Ridges are felt and drunken fights begin and everyone has the most intense night of their lives. It's good to be back in Paradise.

Bow before my prescience

HBO aired The Sopranos season finale again tonight. It was great revisiting the series's final scenes. The fights over the concluding restaurant sequence took too much oxygen out of the room. We were all so worked up about how the series would end that we forgot to pay attention to the fine points of what David Chase et al. gave us.

I've wanted to revisit the Tony Soprano death debate in light of some recent comments by David Chase. My post on the subject may be the most-read piece in this site's history. It still receives frequent Google hits and message-board links. My original observations included the following:

• Literally all that happened was people going about their business in a diner. That was it. People in a diner, shot very artfully, very tensely, in utterly mundane activities. Obviously we're waiting for something bad to happen. ... We expected something sinister -- that's the way these stories are supposed to end. Instead, dinner happened.
• This is, however, a microcosm for the problem with the Death Theory. It's based on pure guesswork (as well informed as it might be) rather than anything that actually occurred on screen. You buy into it, and you're required to take several leaps of faith unsupported by actual events. Leaps of faith, by nature, aren't rebuttable. If you believe that an entire subplot unfolded, wherein AJ was tailed off-screen by an assassin, it's hard to have a conversation grounded in what we know. Knock it down, and another speculative answer is always in the offing.
• There seems to be a certain impulse to find support (any support, no matter how thin) for a preordained, desired conclusion. As a result, the death theories rely heavily on wild conjectures (see above) and iron faith in thoughtful but unproveable guesswork about what may or may not have happened off-screen (in a series that never relied on Macguffins or off-screen twists) regardless of observable evidence.

I'm not always right. I completely mis-read the Duke rape prosecution. I was somewhat vindicated in thinking that the 2006 Michigan team shouldn't have a title berth.

On The Sopranos finale, I give myself an A+. Per David Chase:

Breaking his silence months after the HBO mob drama ended its run, he is offering a belated explanation for that blackout at the restaurant. He strongly suggests that, no, Tony Soprano didn’t get whacked moments later as he munched onion rings with his family at Holsten’s. And mostly Chase wonders why so many viewers got so worked up over the series’ non-finish.

***

Chase says the New Jersey mob boss “had been people’s alter ego. They had gleefully watched him rob, kill, pillage, lie and cheat. They had cheered him on. And then, all of a sudden, they wanted to see him punished for all that. They wanted ’justice’...

“The pathetic thing — to me — was how much they wanted HIS blood, after cheering him on for eight years.”

In the days, and even weeks, after the finale aired June 10, “Sopranos” wonks combed that episode for buried clues, concocting wild theories. (Was this some sort of “Last Supper” reimagined with Tony, wife Carmela, son A.J. and daughter Meadow?)

Chase insists that what you saw (and didn’t see) is what you get.

“There are no esoteric clues in there. No ‘Da Vinci Code,”’ he declares.

He says it’s “just great” if fans tried to find a deeper meaning, but “most of them, most of us, should have done this kind of thing in high school English class and didn’t.”

He defends the bleak, seemingly inconclusive ending as appropriate — and even a little hopeful.

A.J. will “probably be a low-level movie producer. But he’s not going to be a killer like his father, is he? Meadow may not become a pediatrician or even a lawyer ... but she’ll learn to operate in the world in ways that Carmela never did.

“It’s not ideal. It’s not what the parents dreamed of. But it’s better than it was,” Chase says.

The skinning of the Dillon Panthers

The first two scenes of this week's Friday Night Lights showed everything that's gone so wrong with this formerly great show.

First it's Landry waking up in bed next to Tyra. He's shirtless. They fumble awkwardly. Landry does his Landry bit that worked wonderfully when he played sidekick to Matt Saracen but feels painful when he's the center of attention. (Landry being the center of attention -- it would be like if halfway through Boogie Nights, the movie turned focus to Philip Seymour Hoffman's Scotty. It hurts.) Tyra clumsily dresses and jumps through Landry's bedroom window. In the back of the shot is Landry's dad, doing some kind of yardwork. Folk emo plays. We note that Landry's bedroom wall has a chart of the Periodic Table, the kind of telling detail to expect from this show, but not nearly enough to redeem the sitcom-quality opening sequence. Cut to Landry's dad, having spotted Tyra jump out the window of his likable but clumsy son. He's taking care of the trash. (Question: Does that signal to us that Landry's cop-dad thinks that Tyra is trash, or that he's going to be the one to clean up the mess? Time will tell.)

Then we segue to Landry's counterpart, Riggins, who's also shirtless and getting out of bed. He looks out the window and see his older brother embracing the same next door neighbor who was the subject of Riggins's affection last season. Poor Riggins!

Next it's Coach Taylor waking in bed with Tami. The new baby is between them. "I've gotta get goin'," he says. "Well that just sucks," she says. We see him in a diner. The local radio station plays overhead. Dillon's sportstalk guys talk about Coach Taylor as a "Judas." Walking out to his car, Saracen approaches him and apologizes to Coach for the fact that he and Julie broke up. Saracen stammers in that earnest Saracen way that made us like him so much in the beginning, and then he walks off.

Riggins is at practice. New Coach is punishing him again. Riggins has been punished by New Coach in every episode. This time he carries a tire overhead while New Coach badgers him with a series of taunts. Riggins staggers, then drops the tire. He's fainted. Poor Riggins! "Get up, Riggins!" screams New Coach. "Get up!" The players gather around him, and the next shot is Riggins on a stretcher, loaded into an ambulance. Pan to Landry, looking ridiculous in football gear; Saracen; Smash; and Street. All are concerned. Poor Riggins!

Roll credits, playing the theme music that once made me tingle but now makes me recoil.

More melodrama and nonsense has happened before the credits than we'd expect in three episodes last year. We've already had reminders of why everything has gone so bad.

Poor Landry, and poor Jesse Plemons, the actor who plays him. Last year Landry was a touch of comic relief and purity in a pretty dark show. A smart kid, he laid low. He was friends with Saracen. Saracen was a functional orphan at home. Landry was unloved at school. They looked after each other. It wasn't more complex than that. Their relationship was recognizable. They seemed like real high school kids. Three episodes into Season 2, and Landry has killed a potential rapist by bashing his skull. Now he's waking up shirtless next to Tyra. The window-hopping hijinks ensue, the dad spots this, and we're off to sitcom city. I'm sure Landry was pleased to get laid, but the mangling of this morning was bad for the show, and hence bad for us.

The Riggins collapse was another piece of farce that shouldn't have any place in the show. Guys collapse in football practice; every August there are a couple stories about kids dying this way. But now the show is just playing with us. This is not how it's supposed to be done on Friday Night Lights. We saw Jason Street taken down and paralyzed in the pilot episode. A year later, they're practicing blatant manipulation, filmed in the most dramatic way possible, his body tied to a stretcher and key character kneeling down, looking concerned.

Not to worry, though: It was just a close call. The writers were only manipulating you. Riggins isn't dead! He was just dehydrated, as we learn when we get back from commercials. Lyla Garrity happens to walk past his hospital room, where she stops in to see him. Awkward exposition follows, and then Lyla invites him to church. Minka Kelly overacts via facial expressions; she suddenly seems like she belongs on the CW. "You can be lost in Dillon, you know," she says.

And then we find out that Street is going to go to Mexico for stem cell treatments. And then things really start to go downhill.

The episode features Tami slapping Julie when she finds Julie frenching the Swede in his car. Landry fears that a lost watch is going to tie him to the murder, and that the police are going to find him. (A moment of silence, as we reflect on the horror that such a setnence exists.)

In the middle of the Friday game, Saracen punches Smash on the field. Bedlam breaks out -- what in the heck? Looks like New Coach can't keep the team together!

Then there's the hideous relationship between Saracen and the caretaker hired to tend to his mentally ill grandmother. I shudder to think about where this might be headed. Last week she found titty magazines under his mattress. This week we learn that she's from Guatemala, where her father is a teacher and her mother runs an insurance office. She's only in America to get a nursing degree and to help people. Hence, she can't ... do Saracen's laundry.

But she can give him a massage and sing to him in Spanish. It's a song she learned from her grandmother. By now it's only a matter of time before Saracen and the Guatemalan home healthcare worker share a tender moment, make out, and probably bang. Then something will happen and Matt will be confused. Based on the writers' decisions so far, she'll probably get harassed by the Minutemen or some kind of anti-immigrant group, and then Saracen will punch and/or kill them for being mean to her.

It's off the rails. Stick a fork in it. The writers and producers are murdering this show, but it's slow death. They keep toying with us, throwing in a handful of moments reminiscent of what made Season 1 special, only to bastardize it a few minutes later. The good FNL sneaks in when Buddy Garrity meets Riggins at the hospital. Someone over 18 needs to sign Riggins out, and luckily it's Buddy. This is appropriate because Buddy's now alone in the world, just like Riggins. They've alienated the women in their lives, and both like liquor. You get the feeling that Riggins could be Buddy Garrity one day, if only he had some polish and social grace.

They drive past fields. Garrity blames Riggins's collapse on New Coach. New Coach has been pushing the guys way too hard in the blazin' sun, showing no mercy, practices running over 15 minutes. "It's no wonder you passed out," says Buddy. "Actually," Riggins says, "I think I passed out cuz I was hung over, Mr. Garrity." Buddy pulls over. He turns deadly serious. He doesn't ever want to hear Tim Riggins say that again. "I've seen you play with a hangover many times, and you played like a champ. This is because of that coach. This is all about McGregor, and I don't want you to put any of it on yourself. Okay?" "Okay." "Okay."

That stretch was sterling stuff. The writers have put Buddy in a quasi-physical confrontation with his wife, but otherwise, Buddy, Riggins and Coach Taylor are the only two characters not yet betrayed by the show's writing staff. Among most of the principals, the performance remain flawless. There are some Minka Kelly problems, but the writers haven't been helpful to her. She's born again, after all -- one of the only new themes that I find convincing. The problem may not be her performance so much as adjusting to the newfound righteousness of her naive, entitled character. I still can't help but feel like she's underwater. Kyle Chandler, Connie Britton and Zach Gilford are as good as ever. The show might be better if we just put the three of them in a diner, talking for 60 minutes.

I might need to quit this. Tonight I dropped in a DVD of Season One, which I bought back in August, when I was looking forward to Season Two in a way usually reserved for Michigan football and Hold Steady albums. Watching series' the first two episodes was a reminder of what made the show so special in the first place -- the way that all the drama unfolded in conversations on front steps and smoky restaurants. Everything was between the lines. The show knew how to use silence. There was a meaner edge, one that didn't need to be communicated with slapping and fistfights. The drama was all about adjusting to the threat of failure, and a very real sense that when these people were away from the escape and promise of high school football, they lived in a very unhappy world. There wasn't room for error. The terror was failure and alienation, not being caught by the cops for killing a rapist. Season One hardly made a false move.

Twin Peaks suffered the same fate. It had a fanatical but small fanbase and critical acclaim. It wasn't a commercial success, so the plots shifted. They became tidier. The viewership didn't grow with the show losing its soul.

This may have been unavoidable. Fans rallied against a likely cancellation by NBC, and renewal followed. Sometimes it's bad to want more, though. Season One gave us perfect closure. Good novelists know what to leave out and when to end the story. The Office (the real version) had just 13 episodes and didn't waste a second. Now I'm stuck with the memory of Landry as a murderer and Lothario, Tammy punching Julie and Saracen starting on-field fights before getting a neck massage from his grandma's home healthcare provider. It wasn't meant to be like this.

New hot garbage on HBO

A synthesized script of HBO's Tell Me You Love Me:

WHITE WOMAN (annoyed): Why aren't you interested in my feelings?
WHITE MAN (annoyed): Are you kidding? I fucking love you.
WHITE WOMAN (annoyed): Act like you mean it.
WHITE MAN (horny): Let's make love, romantically.

PAN TO PASTY MALE ASS. IT THRUSTS.

WHITE WOMAN (annoyed): Do you think about the sales clerk at 7-11 when we fuck?
WHITE MAN (annoyed): Uh-oh! Not this fight again!

PAN TO CRYING LADY, WITH PASTY MALE ASS IN FOREGROUND.

FOLK EMO BEGINS TO PLAY.

WHITE WOMAN (annoyed): Feelings fucking matter, too.
WHITE MAN (insecure): Is my ass fucking edgy enough for HBO?
WHITE WOMAN (annoyed): It's our "intimacy" that makes this fucking edgy. That, and lighting.
WHITE MAN (insecure): I fucking love intimacy.
WHITE WOMAN (annoyed): Let's fucking quarrel some more! Fuck, why don't we fucking quarrel some fucking more? Fuck!

PAN TO PASTY MALE ASS.

WHITE MAN (insecure): I can't believe they canceled John From Cincinnati for this shit.
WHITE MAN and WHITE WOMAN (dejected, in unison): Furtive masturbation.
WHITE WOMAN (annoyed): Everything is fucked.

CAMERA PANS TO PASTY MALE ASS.

FADE OUT

An Open Letter

To my erstwhile Lost-watching friend:

Remember that time I made everyone dinner, and then CrimeNotes loaned me his first season DVDs of Lost? We watched it together, through those first couple episodes. And then the following week, we watched a couple more. And then the week after that. And it ruled. We laughed, we freaked out, we tried to decode one of the smartest and most ambitious shows we'd ever seen.

And then, you stopped coming by to watch with me. Was it something I said? But I kept watching because I couldn't just not. Especially not with those DVDs just sitting there, like eggs about to hatch or something and they were there, just sitting there! I couldn't not watch. And then dmbmeg said she'd watch with me one night, because she's been a viewer from the start, and loves it. And you said it was OK, that we'd catch up.

But it's not the same. (No offense, dmbmeg. I love watching with you.) I need to watch this with someone who is as new to it as I am. I need to have someone else to discuss this with. Even raising some issues after season one with CrimeNotes, he blabbed about something that hasn't happened yet. It's minor, but still, I didn't want to know they [highlight to reveal spoilers] discovered a giant foot. I already had the part about the sickness or disease or whatever that starts to infect them ruined by something I stumbled across while reading. And I've heard people talk about the others, and the tail section and all that.

And now, I'm eight episodes into the second season. I've almost lapped you. I know you said on my roof the other night that you were so over it, that you thought it was all "gimmickry" or whatever. I'm not buying it. I know what it's like to try to convince myself I'm not that into something (like college football right now) and it's just not true. I want you to come on back. We can watch the end of Season One together. I'd certainly benefit from a rewatch. And I need someone else with an agile and razor-sharp mind like yours to help me decode. This is a show that almost demands a discussion section. Everyone else has already seen it, and would probably tip me off to some things I don't want to be tipped off to.

So please, come on back. I can tell you that the dude you think is so hot figures prominently in the next couple episodes. I'll also make vegetarian fajitas or even a floplette with eggs fresh from the greenmarket. It can be like it was.

I can't do this alone. It's a two-person job.

-- Flop

It should go without saying that spoilers in the comments would be completely unwelcome. Such misbehavior would be a bannable offense. This is not a Lost discussion forum. Please keep in mind that although I've been catching up, the recipient of this open letter is far behind in her watching. And there might even be some people who haven't seen episode one, too.

Jerry's kids

Seinfeld debuted in 1990, when I was 13 or 14. Like everyone, I love the show, and even its angry stepson, Curb Your Enthusiasm.

Let's talk about Seinfeld's sixteenth episode: "The Chinese Restaurant." It may be the first great episode in the series, centered entirely around the wait for a table in a (wha?) Chinese restaurant. George is trying to access a payphone to break up with a girlfriend; Elaine becomes increasingly desperate to be seated. She breaks out observations like this:

Remember when you first went out to eat with your parents? Remember, it was such a treat to go and they serve you this different food that you never saw before, and they put it in front of you, and it is such a delicious and exciting adventure? And now I just feel like a big sweaty hog waiting for them to fill up the trough.

In retrospect, not many things seem as revolutionary now as they were at the time. Louis Armstrong played old music and Van Gogh painted pretty pictures -- neither guy seems like a rebellion. We forget how Seinfeld's observational, slapstick-free humor parted from the good comedies (Cheers, Night Court) that came before, and how odd it was to have relatively plot-free episodes about the lives of a group of platonic friends. When Seinfeld started, it wasn't just funny, but something entirely new.

This episode changed more than is dreamt of in your philosophy.

Seinfeld infiltrated everything, and that's what we're here to talk about. The literary critic Harold Bloom has argued that before Shakespeare, people didn't know how to process themselves and the world -- that those conversations we have inside our heads were not so complicated, that Shakespeare, in Bloom's words, "invented the human as we know it." It's hard to accept that kind of judgment at face value, yes, but I think that Harold Bloom's basic point -- that a Shakespeare can come along and fundamentally change the way we think about ourselves, and the stories that write themselves in our heads -- is sound. Bloom's observation isn't that we individually read Shakespeare and are affected, but that he captured something about human psychology that changed the way everyone viewed themselves, whether we've read the plays or not.

In its skilled hands, Seinfeld raised triviality into an art form. Go back to that episode at the Chinese restaurant: Inconveniences and nuisances, small roadblocks, petty dramas like an interminable restaurant wait or payphone politics, we all have them. Take the episode where Elaine finds herself on a subway trip interrupted by stalls and power failures: It's another universal, set in New York but speaking to someone trapped in traffic in Phoenix. Seinfeld took these universal, trivial things, observed them closely, and tilled them into fertile creative material.

Harold Bloom. I would have been traumatized, too.

Seinfeld isn't Shakespeare, and I'm not Harold Bloom (for two things, I'm not morbidly obese and haven't [yet] traumatized Naomi Wolfe) but lately I'm wondering if Seinfeld hasn't done something similar to what Bloom described. I'm not talking about the show's use of irony -- this isn't some Jed Purdy handwringing about how horrible it is that people aren't more sincere.

No, what Seinfeld spawned is an preoccupation with little things, and a belief that our own inconveniences, superiorities and minor frustrations are in any way interesting. Before you disagree, consider recent conversations that you've had with minor acquaintances and co-workers. A significant percentage of them probably involved these small frustrations. Only rarely do people talk about actually doing things, or recommend something good that they came across. All smalltalk is painful, but a distinctly Seinfeldian whining and a mistaken idea that these things are amusing, they're something different.

They're also entirely reactive. Like all the best Seinfeld moments, the person is caught in a tangle that someone else started. You're never the person who does things, you're the person who sees things, the rubber that bounces the glue. Isn't it wacky that the wireless company is a dick?

Those awful commercial for the Sonic fast food chain? Seinfeld. "Lazy Sunday?" Seinfeld. Those stories about your dry cleaner, your subway trip, the waitress at lunch? These are boring things, but we don't recognize them as boring anymore because more talented people have turned them into entertainment. Not recognizing the distinction, we think that they're all entertainment.

Seinfeld has given everyone an illusion that these things are more important than they are. A rude service employee or a transportation inconvenience become stories to share. It's not enough to shrug it off and forget it.

You may think that I'm wrong in three respects. First, you might say that people always talked about these things. Not true. You're mistaking boring conversations with people trying to be cute about boring topics. No book, movie or TV re-run that predates Seinfeld features these kinds of fetishized conversations. But Dave Eggers or Jonathan Franzen? Friends, Entourage or Sex in the City? It's glib, clever minutia. The average conversation with your parent or aunt and uncle might be boring (more weather stories, please) but their not gilded with pissy fake cleverness. The boring conversations that people 35 and under have, they're Seinfeld's spawn, and we're Jerry's kids.

Second, you might say that Seinfeld is a symptom, not the cause. That's possible. Reality Bites made clear that half-witted, self-absorbed podlings were the new Punk. Without Seinfeld, what's now mistaken as "wit" might have been earnest. The mind reels.

Third, maybe you think that the post-Seinfeld norm isn't a bad thing. Maybe you think it's fun to hear these stories -- they're relatable and simple and you like telling them. They're like little helpings of junk-food conversation. No harm done, and I'm being a dick for thinking all of this is bad.

Colleague in Elevator: How was your weekend?
CrimeNotes: Fine.
Colleague: What did you do?
CrimeNotes: [Pause.] Went to a bunch of parties and saw a band. [Pause, and if feeling talkative, add:] Read a biography about Cicero/watched a bunch of football. [Resentful pause.] What did you do?

Cue story about trip to beach and supposedly funny thing that happened on the train back.

Do you see what I did right there? I tried to be all fucking clever and amusing with a bullshit anecdote about something trivial. I'm here to fuckin' amuse you? What do you mean funny, funny how? Tell me, tell me what's funny?*

Apparently, no one ever does anything.** Don't complain to me about being bored.

*Goodfellas was released the year Seinfeld debuted. That was a good year.
**And then I'm the asshole because I have to go and blow up a conversation because I can't sit through another half-assed anecdote. The next thing you know, I'm described as "mean" and some girl is crying in the corner because I didn't smirk at the story about the check-out woman who couldn't get the milk to go through the scanner correctly. Thanks, Jerry.

Recommended with enthusiasm

Damages on FX had excellent advance word, but now it's come along and exceeded every possible expectation. Yes, yes, another show about lawyers, but the thing here is that it's entirely about fierce commercial litigation: None of the cute shit you get from David E. Kelly, where the clients are transvestites or lovable murderers. None of that monotonous Law & Order proceduralism. Damages is about smart, blistering, serious people fighting over hundreds of millions of dollars -- here, it's pension litigation, of all fucking things.

Its pilot episode didn't have a single cheap moment, from its glossy opening sequence of the Manhattan streetscape through its closing burst of White Stripes. Glenn Close comes out roaring. As with Dangerous Liaisons, she's always the smartest, toughest person in the room. The pilot is packed with great moments and conflagrations, each of them developing convincingly and naturally. No one is a good guy, no one is exactly a bad guy, and the pilot episode develops a special, almost unbearable tension. Almost Se7en-quality tension, but now I'm at risk of overpraising. The creators have said that they won't include a single courtroom scene. Given the staleness of the genre, this is a great thing.

Watch me.

For just $6.99 you can purchase from iTunes an album by a Scottish band called The View. Sometimes a person gets tired of flexing analytical skills learned in 400-level English class just to understand an album, only to realize that no one involved is having fun. Barely out of their teens, these guys aren't trying to deconstruct New Wave or show off what they learned in art school. "Hats Off to the Buskers" isn't going to change your life, but it's a burst of unpretentious, enthusiastic fun.

Enjoy the video of "Wasted Little DJs."

Tired cliché

Lost and Friday Night Lights both got stiffed when the Emmy Award nominations were announced last week, which is both 1.) idiotic and 2.) unsurprising.

These kinds of awards, they're better as period snapshots than contests about merit. Voters have to judge quality in real time, and as a result, the winners of these things are works that satisfy traditional criteria extremely well. The Sound and the Fury didn't win the Pulitzer Prize -- something called Scarlet Sister Mary won instead, and the year that The Great Gatsby came out, the award went to a novel called So Big. The Rolling Stones never won a major Grammy; with a few exceptions, any list of Grammy winners reads like an encyclopedia of bad taste. That phrase about genius never being recognized in its own time is a trite cliche, but its true: most great works are initially received as abrasive, strange or profane.

I'm too big of a man to give a shit about these things, but still. Lost is about halfway through its run. It's the most complicated and ambitious television show ever, more than even The Sopranos or Twin Peaks. It will be tough to judge the series until it wraps -- it's established so many complex storylines and characters that a botched ending could ruin the whole project. There better be boatloads of resolution.

John Locke doesn't care about your award.

The problem, I think, is that Lost is told more like a novel than a weekly TV drama. Some individual episodes can seem boring and inconclusive, when in fact they're setting up a slow-burn payoff or detailed character exposition that leads to something bigger. The rewards are enormous. This incredibly ambitious show is frustrating in small doses, and then, after a couple dozen episodes, you learn how to watch it. I've been re-screening the first two seasons on a loop for the past few months, consistently impressed by how small moments foreshadow a payoff 20 episodes later. It is set all over the world: African rebellions, the first Iraq War, Siberia, modern hospitals and the rural South. The final episodes of the most recent season -- with massacres and executions and heroic self-sacrifice -- were at least as impressive as The Sopranos' excellent last chapter. The problem, I think, is that a lot of people view it as a serial drama like 24, not a long-form accounting about free will and science.*

On NBC, Friday Night Lights is more conventional. Its cast of attractive teenagers playing football in a small town would do fine on the WB. But instead this is a show about loss and isolation. Dates, games and teenage sex are things characters do to pass the time and distract themselves from the divorces and isolation and the feeling that whatever is in their future, it probably isn't good.

Coach Taylor doesn't care about your fancy award == only winning state.

This is a marketing problem for NBC. The show isn't light enough to appeal to Laguna Beach types, but a show about football in rural Texas isn't a natural sell to West Wing viewers. Critics love the show but confuse the issue even further by insisting that it isn't actually about football. Obviously, it is. Sports means something more than scores, and here's a show that understands that. Your dad may be serving in Iraq, leaving you to care for your mentally ill grandmother, so that game on Friday is your chance to be in control and find vindication. Everything about sports is the collision of biography and escapism.

Friday Night Lights is subtle and detailed, as specific and observational as Lost is broad and symbolic. They're both unconventional television, executed extremely well. Instead, this year, the Best Drama nominees include two medical shows (Grey's Anatomy and House -- I've never seen either), Boston Legal (never seen it), Heroes (never seen it; no use for it) and The Sopranos. Except for The Sopranos, these shows come from a long lineage going back to Marcus Welby, M.D., The Defenders and George Reeves. The may be fine, and never having seen them, I can't say anything negative, except to note that Lost and Friday Night Lights could be as great as any novel or movie this decade. Conventional stories, told extremely well, have their place.

More of the same, probably executed extremely well. Insert trite cliche.

Additional resources and trivia Lostopedia; The Lost Community; 59th Annual Emmy Nominations; and online streaming of Friday Night Lights episodes. Hilariously awful Grammy winners for Record of the Year include Olivia Newton-John for "I Honestly Love You" (1975), Captain & Tennille for "Love Will Keep Us Together" (1975), Kim Carnes for "Betty Davis Eyes" (1982), Toto for "Rosanna" (1983), "We are the World" (1986), Bobby McFerrin for "Don't Worry, Be Happy" (1989), and Shawn Colvin for "Sunny Came Home" (1998), and many, many others.

*And many other things. I'm on board with this excerpt from a book called Living Lost by J. Wood: "Lost draws on a specific sense of 21st century isolation and distress; it taps into some very here-and-now concerns, and speaks to the audience’s deeper lizard-brain psyche as it weaves its sophisticated tales. The pilot begins with a close-up of Jack’s eye as it opens and the pupil contracts, drawing the audience in, and drawing our attention to the importance of perception; from the outset, scenes are framed through detailed, personal lenses. As Jack’s eye opens, the plane has just gone down, leaving a number of survivors stuck on an isolated island unable to communicate with the wider world. Something unseen on the island seems to be hunting them, and they don’t know when the next attack may come, in what way, or by whom. At first this “ghost fear” of an impending attack seems to come from something monstrous, then becomes more tangible with the arrival of the Others, characters a lot more pirate-ish than dinosaur-ish. By the second season, new threats emerged from within their own group, and the specter of an unknown disease requiring quarantine loomed in the background. These story elements, which continue to be written on a week-by-week basis, are phantom parallels to our real concerns since September 11, 2001. What Lost does so successfully is take these very real concerns straight off the front pages, abstract them into their psychological impression, and then crystallize that sense back into the framework of the narrative. These characters aren’t being threatened by otherworldly aliens or vampires, creatures normally only seen on the screen or in pulp fiction; this situation involves the psychodynamics of terrorism that the contemporary audience experiences in the everyday world and plays it out on television 24 times a year."

Early summer reviews and previews

The Pesthouse, by Jim Crace. A kindler gentler version of The Road, this book has some fine sequences but doesn't add up to much. Lead character Margaret was convincingly drawn but she wasn't much of an achievement, and her male counterpart Franklin contributed little. There were fine sequences involving a plague that swept a village, and a stay at a cult-like compound called the Ark, but this book struggled to distinguish itself from The Road's power. What's most interesting is that Cormac McCarthy and Jim Crace both set road novels in a blighted post-apocalyptic rural America. Once I finish Don DeLillo's new book Falling Man, I'll probably do a long write-up that no one will read about post-9/11 novels and writers confronting the void.

Other books, which no one will read: Nemesis by Chalmers Johnson, the third of his American Empire trilogy, didn't add much to The Sorrows of Empire. I've been re-reading some of the essays in Joseph Mitchell's Up In the Old Hotel, which I read my first summer in New York (six fucking years ago!) and is even better now. I remain sad about not liking The Yiddish Policemen's Union.

John From Cincinnati. This show might be the fucking awesomeness and the triumph and the tits and that's the truth. I've read comparisons to Robert Altman, which seem not inaccurate but not quite there, and it's been called "surf noir," which doesn't seem quite right, and to me it's got a certain feel of serious Coen Brothers (Blood Simple; Miller's Crossing) before they got all flip. (If, like me, you've been saddened by recent Coen Brothers output, No Country for Old Men had a great response at Cannes.) The marketing unimpressive, the premise exhausting, but this is may be underpromising and overdelivering. Magic realism isn't normally my bag but I'm finding these characters more interesting than any on HBO since Six Feet Under and The Sopranos dropped out of the birth canal.

Flight of the Conchords. I hated the first episode and originally planned to write a merciless bashing. The second episode had better footing. It's nothing special -- it would do fine on NBC -- but it's engaging enough and unlike Entourage appears to be about people who actually do things and have conversations and shit. I sort of wish they'd shot for something trickier than a couple of hipsters living on the Lower East Side: What if the dudes were from Alabama, and instead of playing boring indie lameness they did some kind of weird Robbie Fulks country music, and the show didn't have such a smug tone? It's a step up from HBO's string of nightmares (Lucky Louie, The Comeback, Entourage, Tourgasm).

(Pedantic digression: they clearly live in a one-bedroom on either Forsythe or Chrystie Street, but there are a bunch of exteriors shot around Brooklyn, and why the hell was one of the musical sequences (which I don't think add much to the show) set at the Marcy Avenue stop at the JMZ? I spend half the time trying to figure out where they are in the city and what they're doing there.)

Big Love. Like the axiom about Chinese food (which I've never found true) Big Love is always filling at the time, and then an hour later you're hungry. Always engaging, somewhat affecting, its stories have never amounted to much, but with such strong actors and a premise with legs, I always enjoy it. This season has centered more heavily on Barb, the smartest and most likable of the group. I find myself rooting for Barb and wanting her to pull away; for Bill to get his comeuppance; and for his son (a bigger tool than AJ Soprano) to get smacked into reality.

The White Stripes, Icky Thump. Sheer fucking fun, a total thrill, goddamn son. "You Don't Know What Love Is ..." is the missing track from Sticky Fingers. Listened to it in bed this morning and tried to imagine the song with Mick's voice and it worked. "St. Andrew ..." is fearsome: it brought to mind the acid-trip sequence in Easy Rider. "St. Andrew ..." segues into "Little Cream Soda," which sounds like music to get murdered by. I'm not a White Stripes cultic and tend to underestimate them, then every time I put on one of their albums I have small epiphanies. This time, there's no diversion like "It's True That We Love One Another" or "Passive Manipulation." The album is exciting and relentless.

Unrelated: There's a trailer up for Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood, based on an Upton Sinclair book and starring Daniel Day Lewis. It will surely be awesome-assed.

Books to read:

• Falling Man, by Don DeLillo. The reviews were tough, but the first 25 pages are excellent, something close to his old form after disasters Cosmopolis and The Body Artist.
• On Chesil Beach, by Ian McEwan. Based on the New Yorker excerpt, I don't expect to like it.
• Black Dogs, by Ian McEwan. A palette cleanser.
• Cloud Atlas, by David Mitchell. I didn't like the first two sections, but it may be a slow-burn kind of book.
• Mrs. Dalloway. To the Lighthouse is the only Virginia Woolf I've read.
• Moby Dick. A re-reading is overdue.
• Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx is Burning, by Jonathan Mahler. I like sports, politics, and New York.
  
• The Assault on Reason, by Al Gore. I've been reading too many of these kinds of books lately.
• Nixon and Kissinger, by Robert Dallek. Maybe?
• Cicero, by Anthony Everitt. Probably not going to happen. Studied some of the Greeks in college, but the Romans are a gap in my edjukayshin.

The Spree has traded in their robes.

Upcoming shows:

• Wilco. Even though the new album blows.
  
• The Polyphonic Spree. They're not a band to "get into," but their live shows are an awesome, crushing spectacle.
  
• Besnard Lakes. They released a lovely and striking album, but this one is a roll of the dice.
  
• The White Stripes. Floor seats at the Garden, motherfuckers.
  
• The Hold Steady. Live at Prospect Park? Not the venue I'd pick for them, but they haven't had a show in the city for what feels like forever, and I'm feeling like a dry drunk.
  

I only go to theater for plays about politics. Frost/Nixon. I'd like to write a book about Nixon someday.

Seven reasons why Tony Soprano did not die (updated and expanded)

Note: post bumped and expanded considerably, for reasons explained below.

1. There is no actual evidence that anything bad was about to happen -- just people in a diner who we suspected were bad because we watch a lot of movies.
2. There is no way way that anyone with a motive to kill Tony knew that he'd be at that diner.
3. The Sopranos never relied on off-screen action and secret twists. We were privy to everything. It was filmed in the third-person omniscient. The theory of a surprise killer violates the show's narrative structure.
   
4. The show didn't romanticize violence. Violence was dirty, casual and explicit. The murder of its protagonist wouldn't be softened by climactic, artful, debatable twist. If David Chase wanted to kill him, we would've seen Tony blue and gagging on his own blood.
   
5. The show rarely offered closure. What makes you think it would start in the final episode?
6. Just desserts were not a theme.
   
7. The makers filmed an ending implying that he was shot, then rejected it.

Additional recommended reading:

• The House Next Door, Sopranos Mondays: Season 6, Ep. 22, "Made in America"
• Heather Havrilesky, "The Sopranos" Goes Dark
• The comments in Midwesterner's Guide, The Sopranos Finale
  
• Newark Star Ledger, "Sopranos" Creator's Last Word: The End Speaks for Itself

Update: Sincere thanks to Matt Zoller Seitz at The House Next Door for the link. It's an honor.

Update II: This little post generated some traffic. Since it was a summary attempt to knock down what I think is an errant reading of the episode, my comments were pithy and conclusory. A link to my seven observations, partnered with opposing views, was published on an HBO message board and later reproduced here at Comment No. 7. My original remarks, the opposing view, and my rebuttal follow below.

I wrote, "There is no actual evidence that anything bad was about to happen -- just people in a diner who we suspected were bad because we watch a lot of movies."

Opposing view: "The evidence is the way that Chase shot, cut, and scored the scene to indicate mounting tension; it's undeniable. I won't even go into the very long list of possible 'evidence' left over the whole season (and this episode in particular) to indicate Tony's imminent demise."

True on the first sentence. It was indeed shot, edited and scored in a tense way. We'll never hear Journey the same way again. Like "Sunshine of Your Love" and "Layla" (Goodfellas) or "You Can't Always Get What You Want" (The Big Chill), "Don't Stop Believing" has been commandeered.

On the substance: Literally all that happened was people going about their business in a diner. That was it. People in a diner, shot very artfully, very tensely, in utterly mundane activities. Obviously we're waiting for something bad to happen. On first view the tension was almost unbearable. I was a few minutes behind due to a mid-show phone call and I had to fight the urge to fast-forward the Tivo to see where it ended. We all had the expectation that something dramatic was about to happen (myself, I wasn't expecting a killing so much as a humiliating Henry Hill-style arrest) and it was filmed in a way to tease our expectations.

That doesn't change the fact that there was literally nothing occurring in that diner that indicated sinister doings. We expected something sinister -- that's the way these stories are supposed to end. Instead, dinner happened.

For the devotees of the murder theory: Why was it that Tony was staring up at his killer instead of an agent flashing a badge? Because of a line of dialog that Bobby uttered? (The exact line was, ""I bet you don't even hear it when it happens." Nothing about going black.) As someone noted elsewhere (I'd link back but don't remember where I read it) Bobby's death was anything but quick and silent. He saw everything and he suffered badly. (Poor Bobby.) If the penultimate episode illustrated anything -- Bobby, Sil, the innocent on the motorcyle -- it was that these acts of violence do not hit their victims that elegantly. They're not "cut to black" moments. They're ghastly and unromantic. Bobby was telling himself the kind of lie that some people need in order to live. This show was the anti-mythology; it vigorously deglamorized violence. You suffer. You don't get a cut to black. It's not that gentle.

I wrote: "There is no way that anyone with a motive to kill Tony knew that he'd be at that diner."

Opposing view: "Of course, there's an extremely simple way to find Tony Soprano at the diner. Follow his idiotic son (who'd never notice) to where he's going for dinner, and then simply walk in front of him as he's close to entering the door and go in first. Then sit at the counter and look for whom the son is joining, which is exactly what Members Only guy does."

This depends entirely on unsupported speculation. There was literally no evidence that this happened. I could speculate that Members Only Guy was the Russian after he underwent radical plastic surgery, or insist that evidence to the contrary it really was, in fact, Phil's nephew behind the counter. Rampant speculation isn't an argument.

This is, however, a microcosm for the problem with the Death Theory. It's based on pure guesswork (as well informed as it might be) rather than anything that actually occurred on screen. You buy into it, and you're required to take several leaps of faith unsupported by actual events. Leaps of faith, by nature, aren't rebuttable. If you believe that an entire subplot unfolded, wherein AJ was tailed off-screen by an assassin, it's hard to have a conversation grounded in what we know. Knock it down, and another speculative answer is always in the offing.

A note on the Members Only guy: This is a connection that I never would have made but-for the post-game commentary, but I think it's wildly off the mark to infer based on a jacket and episode title that he was an assassin. The entire closing episode had moments harkening back to earlier points in the series: the cameo by Hunter Scaglione (which I loved), specific lines of dialog ("Always with the drama."), the final act of sitting down to dinner. When the two black guys walked into the diner, and we were still anticipating some final act of violence, I of course remembered the botched hit on Tony. It never occurred to me that these were the same guys (as some initially and erroneously posited) but it certainly was an intentional nod to that episode. I'm guessing that there were many other points in this final episode that drew from past seasons that we haven't pieced together yet. This was a book-end, and it was symmetry. A guy in a Members Only jacket doesn't portend death any more than Hunter's reappearance portends a choir performance.

I wrote: "The Sopranos never relied on off-screen action and secret twists. We were privy to everything. It was filmed in the third-person omniscient. The theory of a surprise killer violates the show's narrative structure."

Opposing view: "This is totally untrue. There were many occasions where the show surprised us about things (mostly about who was or wasn't a rat; but there are other examples as well)."

Yes, the show often surprised us. We were surprised when Heidi and Kennedy sent Chris careening off the highway; when Tony killed Christopher; when Junior shot Tony; when the identity of Melfi's patient was outed at a dinner party; when Janice suddenly entered the world of the show; when Finn spotted Vito; etc. The show never lacked for surprise, but the surprises were rooted in on-screen human behavior. We might have seen some of Tony's paranoia as to whether someone was an informant -- but we never had a moment where a surprise informant burst on the scene, upending the story. We were in on Adrianna's machinations, for example. The one notable exception was Big Pussy back in Season 2, but that was a long, drawn out, carefully constructed, direct story line. It wasn't a jerk-the-neck twist. Contrast the way The Sopranos told its story with how Lost tells its stories. Lost (to brilliant effect) constantly keeps us guessing about (to borrow Rumsfeld's rhetoric) the unknown unknowns. The Sopranos occasionally had some known unknowns. They were rarely the fulcrum of a story. It never employed Lost-like "unknown unknowns." This is why I think that the Death Theory anchors itself to a narrative cheat not in the show's character.

Opposing view proceeded to state: "Also, I keep hearing this argument about first (POV) versus third person shots in the final scene. Certainly the majority of the final scene is in the third person, except for two significant exceptions: when we have Tony's POV when looking at the songs on the jukebox, and an important establishing sequence of shots which occurs throughout the scene: the bell of the door rings; then a shot of Tony's face; then there is Tony's POV of who is entering the diner. This occurs 5 times in the scene; but the 5th time, where Tony's POV of the door should be, we have 10 seconds of black silence."

Respectfully, I don't think this comment understands first person and third person. We see things happening, we see Tony watching things, but this description of how the sequence played does not amount to a first-person perspective.

I wrote: "The show didn't romanticize violence. Violence was dirty, casual and explicit. The murder of its protagonist wouldn't be softened by climactic, artful, debatable twist. If David Chase wanted to kill him, we would've seen Tony blue and gagging on his own blood."

Opposing view: "Sorry, I don't buy this at all. I think Tony's visible death would be much more anticlimactic. Besides, we've already seen Tony shot and bloody on two different occasions; the power of the final scene is that it breaks with the show's own 'traditions', and we never see or hear it coming."

We're not talking about what's dramatic or climactic, but rather, how the series treated violence, depicted violence and philosophized violence. For one thing, I don't think that Chase's intention was to give us a conclusion with resolution, and Tony's prior brushes with death don't mean that his death is going to come artfully.

The reason that we never see or hear it coming is simple: It didn't happen, and there is no existing reason -- existing in actual events that happened in the series, as opposed to guesswork built on rank speculation -- to think that it happened.

I wrote: "The show rarely offered closure. What makes you think it would start in the final episode?"

Opposing view: "Whether Tony died or didn't, there was no closure and never will be. How can you argue that if one of the possible outcomes of an ambiguous ending is true that this means there was closure; thus that particular outcome is not possible? Absurd logic."

The violent death of the show's protagonist is maximum closure.

And while I don't want to get into any kind of confrontational posture (we're all friends here), since a fairly open-ended remark was labeled "absurd," I'm going to make an observation about what I see as absurd: The way the Death Theory is articulated. There's a conspiracy flavor: "Oswald's shadows in the Life Magazine cover don't line up!" There seems to be a certain impulse to find support (any support, no matter how thin) for a preordained, desired conclusion. As a result, the death theories rely heavily on wild conjectures (see above) and iron faith in thoughtful but unproveable guesswork about what may or may not have happened off-screen (in a series that never relied on Macguffins or off-screen twists) regardless of observable evidence. I concede that the ending was somewhat ambiguous (that night I briefly entertained the death theory, concluded that I was clever, and then rejected it as meritless) but given that ambiguity and an interest in puzzling through what happens, there is nevertheless only one way to begin an analysis: Base it on what was depicted and what we know. There are only two pieces of evidence that support a death theory: A Members Only jacket (my own take: Urban Meyer wore a Members Only jacket after Florida won the national championship; Junior once golfed in Florida; a guy in the diner wore a Member's Only jacket; therefore, Urban Meyer and a miraculously sentient Junior arranged for Members Only guy to shoot Tony) and a line of dialog from Bobby that proved to be 1.) expliclty inaccurate and 2.) tragically naive.

I wrote: "Just desserts were not a theme."

Opposing view: "Some would argue that Phil's death was 'just desserts'. Others would say having Tony live, stand trial, and serve prison time (due to Carlo's testimony) would be 'just desserts'. This is purely subjective."

Fair enough. It is purely subjective. To me, this was a show where key villains (including not least of all Tony) literally got away with murder, repeatedly and shamelessly, while the innocents (ranging from a waiter unhappy with his tip, to a pregnant stripper, to a dude on a motorcycle, to the Buccos, to Adrianna, to a Rutgers student on a bike, to name just a few -- let alone the wives and children wrecked by immersion in the lifestyle) were the ones who suffered most. There was a very limited code of justice among these thieves, but only when honor coincided with self-preservation.

But to me, this is essential in how people view Tony's fate. To some extent, it depends on whether the show saw a world that allows for karmic payback, or whether its world was dirty, random and often inexplicable.

(By coincidence, as I type this, I'm listening to a Fresh Air podcast where Terri Gross interviewed David Chase in 2000. Chase states: "I don't really believe that whacking is that endemic to -- what I want to show is his daily life." That's what he showed, and that's how the series ended.)

I wrote: "The makers filmed an ending implying that he was shot, then rejected it."

Opposing view: "Actually, this could imply exactly the opposite: that Chase's own true feelings are that Tony does die, but he wants it to remain ambiguous enough to allow other interpretations. The original ending (as shot) leaned too heavily towards Chase's own 'Tony dies' suggestion, so Chase just cut it differently to leave it slightly more open-ended. It proves nothing else."

This is my weakest point. I don't know that it clearly cuts one way or the other, and I shouldn't have stated this so confidently. Peter Bogdonovich has said that he filmed a scene where he comforts Melfi. Whether there is any significance to discarded footage, or whether Chase just filmed a bunch of stuff so that the actors were left in the dark about what happened, is anyone's guess. It could be that he originally intended to end with the death but found the conclusion unsatisfying or unworkable. Final sequences are recut all the time. We're left with what we have, which may be hard to swallow. What we have is people eating dinner.

As a postscript, I should add that the fun of a great book or movie often is the ambiguity. A novelist or director finishes his project, unleashes it, and from that point forward it belongs to all of us. We intepret differently. In arguing this position, I'm not trying to deny that to anyone who loved The Sopranos (as we all seem to have) and read it differently -- it's more that I think the Death Theory is a wildcard and I'm mystified by the vehemence of its proponents.

A closing thought on "The Sopranos"

I was fully and completely satisfied. I didn't think that I'd get to write that. The show's first couple of seasons felt entirely original and engaging, but for most of the rest of the run, it alternated between seeming like a Goodfellas knockoff and an American Beauty knockoff. True, it was smart and superb and worth the price of the HBO subscription, but too often it left you wondering what all the noise was about. It ended instead in a return to form, with the kind of thoughtful, sinister, mildly self-deprecating sensibilities that made it such a pleasure in the first place. Maybe the worst thing that happened to the show was all the pressure and half-assed overheated punditry it garnered. The series lost itself from time to time. Tonight it brought it all back home, where it belonged.

Update: As Amish points out in the comments, first reactions on the internet seem uniformly negative. I don't get it. I replayed the final sequence twice. It was pulled off superbly. Every stranger in the restaurant was framed as a threat. Tony spends the rest of his life on edge. He visits Junior. At a certain time in his life Junior controlled everything. Now, not only is Junior sick and old and alone, but he remembers literally nothing. He put himself through a life of bloodshed and misery and came out empty. And Tony is a man who can't go to a diner without fearing that every stranger is about to assassinate or arrest him. Meanwhile, the episode touched back on all kinds of moments from its golden first season -- specific lines of dialog ("Always with the drama." "Try to remember the times that were good.") and the sudden appearance of an animal with metaphorical significance and even the cameo by Hunter Scaglione. The show was always at its worst and most confused when it placed plot ahead of character. Life doesn't have a lot of Kaiser Soze moments, and I'm glad there wasn't one tonight.

HBO belongs six feet under

Once The Sopranos goes off the air, I'll be satisfied if HBO's Sunday programming alternates between airings of The 40-Year-Old Virgin and Animal House. They're the last remaining channel-stoppers in the network's rotation.

I blame Sex and the City.

HBO's reign has lasted through most of my young adulthood. I've watched The Sopranos from literally the first episode, when I still was in Ann Arbor in a house that thrived off free cable. I didn't find Six Feet Under's relentless intensity until halfway through the run, but I loved its depth and texture. Deadwood didn't match the other two, but it had great dialog and exciting villains -- if nothing else, it was a true original. Mike Nichols's mini-series of Angels in America ranked with any feature film in the last four or five years.

Now, HBO's calculated edginess has become a formula, as formulaic as three-camera sitcoms and dramas about criminal lawyers. The Sopranos violent melodrama begat Deadwood begat Rome, each less interesting than its predecessor. Six Feet Under, a domestic drama with a tragic arc begat Big Love, a domestic melodrama with a tragic arc. (Big Love is deeply frustrating. Its wonderful actors and strong moments added up to nothing in its first season.)

As much as any book, movie or television show that ever existed, Sex and the City lands squarely in the "not for me" category. I've learned not to bash it with the severity that it deserves -- doing so invites murder threats from every woman I know. Fine. But ladies, you also bear the blame for Entourage, which is even worse. Both shows are WB castoffs with bared boobs and eff-words.

Combined, they killed HBO's juice. Their moderate commercial success lowered the bar for the rest of us. HBO stopped taking risks and began pandering toward a broad middle. Put them on the WB or UPN, clean up the language, and no one could tell the difference.

In between, there have been ratings and creative disasters like Lucky Louie and The Comeback. Dane Cook's Tourgasm was a disgrace unworthy of MTV -- a weekly, barely edited infomercial that celebrated the lame jokes of an untalented man.

Naturally, HBO is a money-making operation. If lust and hate is the candy, if blood and love taste so sweet, they'll give them what they want. But they've diluted the brand. Instead of automatically Tivoing every new series, I scrutinize them fiercely, much more harshly than I would a network program. It's kind of like NPR broadcasting Howard Stern. It might make the network richer, but its mission would be gone. You wouldn't turn to it in the same way.

This could be interpreted as whining: "HBO doesn't make shows I like anymore. That makes me mad."

There's an element of that, true, but my grievance goes a little deeper. The network has stopped taking risks. Its new shows each fall into a certain HBO type -- The Sopranos stepchild, the Six Feet Under stepchild and The Sex and the City stepchild. It would be as if, in the wake of the success of The Larry Sanders Show, the network annually trotted out an "edgy" behind-the-scenes account of celebrity living.

Like The Comeback, Entourage or Extras.

I'm willing to give the network a long leash. I didn't love Rome, but I credit it for being original. Failure is one thing, creative laziness another. HBO's programming team has lost the plot. The Sopranos ends on Sunday, preceding a new show called John From Cincinnati, which is rumored to be a disaster.

On broadcast TV, shows like Lost, The Office, Friday Night Lights and even Ugly Betty regularly show more ingenuity and spark than anything HBO has introduced in the past five years. They don't feature "fuck," boobs or dicks, but at least they're original.

What's in their wallets?

It's almost impossible to bring up the fact that you've noticed a song by a band you like in a TV commercial without sounding as if you're trying to stake out territory as the most punk rockest by casting accusations of sellout. My roommate did this months ago while we watched an ad set to "The Bleeding Heart Show" by the New Pornographers. Although he's a self-confessed music snob, and prone to fits of anger at TV's excesses, he remained calm and resigned. Nevertheless, he seemed disappointed, but he probably wasn't. And that was before I speculated that perhaps the cost of living in Canada City is skyrocketing, and if selling one's work to a tacky online college is what it takes to keep that nice apartment on Maple Leaf Street just off Canadia Boulevard, then so be it.

And that's the natural impulse. You see a familiar song in an unfamiliar context, one that represents an intrusion into your life and you are stopped short. It happened to me the other day, seeing a 60-second spot featuring Shaun White, his floppy, coppery coiffure, and various assorted outdoor-hipsterian hangers on. White and his fellow extreme-sports enthusiasts bopped about the world with ease, thanks to his rewards-earning credit card, which allowed them to follow the whims of nature from powedery Alps to the swelling Pacific. All of this was set to a vocals-free "10 a.m Automatic" by The Black Keys (who are, not to put too fine a point on it, the second-greatest phenomeon to come out of Akron, Ohio).

I pointed the song's origin out to my co-blogger the other night as we awaited the start of Game 6 (and Akron's first-greatest phenomenon). Naturally, he immediately thought I was accusing them of selling out. I wasn't, but even so I struggled to not sound accusatory, as if my experience of that song is somehow diminished because they cashed a check in exchange for having produced an evocative and enjoyable piece of work. Because advertising is such a resented force in our lives (Question: do you think the heads of ad agency's have DVRs?), I think we have a strong, negative gut reaction to seeing a favorite song being used to hawk goods and services.



So how do I feel about my favorite bands "selling out"? Well, it's not their fault that advertising sucks. And much like I rationalized to myself shortly after picking myself up off the floor when I saw a Nissan ad set to The Cardigans' "Lovefool": Hey, tuition at Malmö University can't be cheap. good for them. I hope they enjoy the cash in good health.

And besides, it's tacky to admit this, I know, but maybe I wouldn't have ever come across and liked "Rhapsody in Blue" if not for all those United commercials on during football games when I was a kid. And that's an all-time favorite of mine.

I know, I know, but I can't stand Woody Allen movies.

"Lost" knows everything

Lost has rewired my synapses. Lost: it has riled and absorbed me, taking up a special spot in my brain usually reserved for Michigan football and the visceral emotion that I feel when recalling Atonement or my most recent Hold Steady concert. I try to stop thinking about it, but then I cannot. And now I am knee-deep in geek fan-boy mode, scanning message boards and blogs and re-reading recaps of episodes that I've already seen twice.

It has long stopped being a serial with heavy hooks. Pick up a syllabus to an intro class on philosophy, anthropology or religion, and the show covers half the topics. Its dozens of plotlines and dozens more characters are not (as I once thought) a card trick. There's substance here, dude, a virtuoso melding of plot in service of ideas about free will, sacrifice and social organization.

Lost. Here I've been thinking about The Sopranos in its closing hours, and suddenly, that show feels weak and sad in comparison -- As the World Turns with gunplay. This is not fair, I know, because the two don't need to be compared. The Sopranos has been great television, and I have loved it. Today I decided that the past three episodes of Lost have been more interesting, thrilling and disturbing than the final three seasons of The Sopranos.

In Lost, we've had patricide and the calculated massacre of a village, revenge killings and the island equivalent of political assassinations. The body count has been immense -- at least fourteen characters in the season finale alone, and (we think) probably one more. A major character stepped back from suicide and another elected to die in hopes of saving a friend.

"NOT PENNY'S BOAT"?

But none of it feels particularly forced. This isn't 24. The explosions come after long slow buildups, deep character development, ongoing references to Enlightenment philosophy and Old Testament prophets. They're not writerly plot twists intended to set up the next hour. No salacity here. At a certain point you punch yourself in the face and say, "This shit is on ABC? Have I been shortchanging the show because it's on a broadcast network? And how can something so deep and complex and tremendous be marketable?"

I've spent too much time wondering about the timber used in Carmela Soprano's construction project and not enough contemplating the organizing principles of society and individuals through the lens of Lost -- or even, say, what the underground market forces behind the 19th Century slave trade have to do with all of this.

The show deservedly evokes observations like this:

How I loved this scene for presenting without judgment some very complicated ideas about justice, personal responsibility, and how people become the people they become. Yes, the morality of all this is troubling and disturbing. So is our world. Which brings this full circle.

These people:

• Ben Linus: He is a villain as persuasive as Hannibal Lecter. (Michael Emerson owes much to Anthony Hopkins.)
• Jack Shephard: I never, ever would have thought that I would be transfixed by a Matthew Fox performance, let alone feel a kind of rooting interest last seen in second grade when Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom hit theaters.
• Hugo Reyes: Every time he's on screen I feel happiness and trepidation all at once.
• Claire Littleton: I care about her so much that it hurts.
• John Locke: Whatever bad acts he commits, I am convinced that he will be the show's ultimate hero.
  

If The Sopranos was born as a child of the '90s -- a self-aware parable about personal hedonism, the emptiness of prosperity, a little self-help therapy and illusions of sensitive mannishness -- Lost is all '00s: people coming to grips with tragedy that they never expected and never deserved, negotiating random acts of violence and manipulations by leaders they trusted, never able to reckon with the extreme relocation forced by external events.

I feel, like, pained that I didn't pay closer attention when I watched earlier episodes.

The Sopranos is (almost) dead. Long live Lost.

Personal notes

Dear Wilco: I didn't understand you until A Ghost Is Born, which reminded me of Neil Young in his Arc and Weld stage. So how the hell did Sky Blue Sky turn out so boring? Whenever I try to listen to it, I fall asleep. Watching Chinatown does the same thing to me, so maybe you're in good company. Please try harder next time.

Dear Hold Steady: Thank you for the EP that you just released on iTunes. It was a nice surprise, even if the only new track is a cover of Bob Seger's "Against the Wind." I recently stumbled across an mp3 of "For Boston," and feel lucky that I did. True, almost everything you do is crazy fun, but how did the horrible "Chillout Tent" make Boys and Girls in America while "Girls Like Status" and "For Boston" couldn't cut it?

Dear Besnard Lakes: You and I shouldn't like each other at all, but for some reason it's a match.

Dear Amy Winehouse: Occasionally good albums get to be popular, and I'm glad that you've pulled it off. I saw you on Letterman just before the album came out, was instantly smitten, and hunted down every song I could find. You're still keeping me happy and interested. Thanks for that.

Dear Arcade Fire: I find your albums boring and overwrought, but God damn, your reputation as live performers is well earned. The show at Radio City last week, it felt like a privilege to be in that room. I was in a good mood for the next few days just because of you. You may become my next U2: even when they annoy me, their lives shows are indispensable. It was an extraordinary night.

To The Band: The box set for The Last Waltz was worth the price. You're a band that I always turn back to, and I'm glad that we found each other when I was in college.

To The Sopranos: I don't predict you or overanalyze you. I let the experience wash over me. However, it occurred to me that the animating force of this show is that Tony was raised by a woman who tried to murder him, and the pity and horror of seeing Tony kill a man who he thought of as a son brought the series full circle. He is no better than Livia. Also, while I'm writing, I'd like to note that the Slate guys who write about you are first-rate fucktards.

Dear Gary Shteyngart: I avoided reading Absurdistan because its title (wacky!) sounded like a Jimmy Fallon skit and the premise sounded Boratian. Yeah, I'm an idiot sometimes. I haven't had so much fun with a book since A Confederacy of Dunces, and in its first half, it kept occurring to me that you're the John Kennedy Toole who lived. Thanks for being so fun, dude.

Dear Richard Yates: I know you're dead so you might not be reading this, but Revolutionary Road has its great moments, even if it lost me at the end. Very glad to have read it, but it will just make me angry when the movie comes out.

Dear Michael Chabon: True, I'm just 120 pages into The Yiddish Policemen's Union, and true, it's just started to pick up, and true, it's not fair for me to say something mean before I finish the book. But the first 100 pages are rough. Real rough. In the past you could be annoying, but never so boring, and I'm worried about what's going on with you.

Dear Ian McEwan: I hated Saturday, and I hated it oh so very much, but it might be the kind of hatred that only a genius inspires. You know Atonement is my favorite book this century so far, but it took me awhile to forgive you for Saturday. I got around to reading Amsterdam and was happy to see it pull off a great little puzzle and get the tragicomic tone just right. Let's forget Saturday. It's all good now, even if the New Yorker excerpt made me nervous about On Chesil Beach.

Dear Amsterdam: Looking forward to seeing you again this weekend.

Best to all,

CN