Terriers

I heard this called (detrimentally) The Last Boy Scout: The Series, and that's about right. If someone had made a TV show about Joe Hallenback and Jimmy Dix fighting crime and making money, but with the dude from Blade and the dude from True Blood instead of Bruce Willis and a Wayans brother (one of those is a marked improvement) (not Willis), it would be this show. And that's a good thing. It's something like its FX sister show, Justified, only it never really caught on--really attributable to the name and the surrealistic ad campaign. I wouldn't have thought it'd be that hard to advertise "private detectives who make dick jokes," but apparently the people who came up with "Timothy Olyphant threatening people with gunplay" were out to lunch that day.

Anyway, the first and final more or less wraps up, so you don't have to worry that there's going to be a big cliffhanger that never gets resolved. The story revolves around recovering alcoholic/recovering ex-husband Hank Dolworth (Donal Logue!) and reformed thief Brit Raymond (Michael Raymond-James! The killer from True Blood? The first season? When there was slightly more to the show than gratuitous nudity?) running a detective agency. When one of Hank's old friends is killed, Team Justice goes after the killers and finds a plot that goes all the way to the top, yadda yadda. You really have to watch it to get the full effect.

All in all, there's an impressive amount of plot stuffed into the shortened FX season. The mystery-of-the-week tends to reflect what the protagonists are going through in their lives, something like what Fringe has been on lately, but because Terriers is dealing with big themes like partnership, loyalty, and infidelity, it doesn't come off as gimmicky as "oh, we've just run into the only other person in two universes who has also forgotten their soulmate. Compare notes!"

By the way, in researching the show, I found a nice quote which sums up both why the FX network has such consistently quality shows and why this show in particular is so good.

Q: Now, with Katie (Britt's girflriend, played by Laura Allen), that character in most shows like this would be complaining all the time about what these guys are doing. But she, for the most part, goes with it. She accepts that he was a thief. She even sort of gets turned on by some of the things he does. How did you come up with the idea for her?

Griffin: I think there was bit of evolution there. All the notes that came from FX - I’m not just saying this - but especially from Landgraf, there was never one that made me really wince. This one might have been the most effective which was, "Make sure that Katie isn’t complaining or like these guys are no fun to be around. She’s drawn to that. There’s a reason why this girl is with this guy who’s not got the greatest prospects and that’s because he’s fun and she enjoys that."

Ryan: There was some concern after the pilot that it could go in that direction and so there was some conversations with John and the creative team over at FX about really looking for ways to move away from that and that was a great note on their part, and I think we embraced it.

Griffin: Also, the nice difference between film character and a TV character is in a film character that character can be a nag because you’re trying to get the story point across with all their failures. But you only have to live with that film character for an hour and a half or two hours. TV character, you want to be around a little longer and so it’s not just in service of that main character.

Ryan: And also it makes her character so much more attractive in the season as the series goes on and you wonder where Britt’s future is going to go with her. She becomes this perfect girlfriend that he risks losing. Whereas if she turns into some nag you sort of want to see him go away from her. I think the goal here is for the audience to hope that he has his act together enough not to blow it with her.

It's not just a nicely subversive feminist move, but it goes for empathy and character over cheap drama. Moreover, ( Spoiler territory. )

Anyway, good show, not much of a timesink, on Netflix Instant, check it out.

Donna Noble rewatch

Rewatching Doctor Who to work on my Donna voice, I've noticed some odd nerd elitism. It's a bit obvious when you think about it--the Doctor, at least as interpreted by RTD, is a male fantasy figure. He's young and attractive (say what you will about Tennant and Eccleston, but in-universe they were treated as desirable), he's socially awkward (but that's part of his charm), he's rude (but to people who are assholes, so everyone loves him for it), he doesn't know how to dress himself (but still ends up wearing awesome stuff like leather jackets and trenchcoats--really, you gotta give Moffett points for making the Doctor look like an idiot again), he's smart (in fact, so brilliant that all the jocks just have to gape in awe as he shows them how to solve their problems), he has just enough to brood about without a legitimate reason to be sad (oh, my homeworld of assholes is gone! Oh, my latest moon-eyed twentysomething is gone!), and of course he has a bevy of attractive young women who want him without him ever having to engage with them or enter a real sort of relationship.

Of course, you can argue the companions and their status as female fantasy figures all night, but they are primed as fangirl identification points. The Doctor shows up, whisks you off, have fun! Martha Jones is even a Harry Potter nerd. Donna Noble is the first person who really wasn't meant for fandom to empathize with. She's like a check-list of anti-nerd. Celebrity gossip, reality TV, un-clever, pushy, etc. The scene where her evil fiance emotionally eviscerates her is shockingly dark for a family show. And only after that do you get (to the show's credit) acknowledgment that Donna's learned and grown through her encounter with the Doctor, and later her return in season four.

She's a character in a nerd show who says that even if you don't have stereotypically nerdy interests or qualities, you can still be a good person. Until she gets lobotomized, OH WELL.

Watching the season four premiere, it actually occurs to me that this elitism is pretty damn textual. As Donna becomes a protagonist, we learn about her awful home life and bitchy mother, which makes her sympathetic, if not a true-blue nerd. But we're also presented with a female reporter who is successful (invited to Adipose Industries' press conference) and skilled (able to see through their bullshit and investigate, putting her on par with the Doctor and Donna). And she ends up as a running gag about getting captured and finally as proof that some people (who are not the Doctor and Donna) "just can't take it."

Was that present in the original series? Because it seems to me that "I only take the best" came about in the RTD era, like before it was "Anyone can learn magic if they just work hard enough" and afterward it was "You have to be born with magic." Which are two very different fantasies, and one is a lot more egalitarian than the other. It kind of makes me wonder--even in the case of companions who weren't young quasi-nerds, how many were put-upon anti-authoritarian types? Playing to a kind of "you'll all be sorry one day" nerd thought process. Or is that reading too much into things?