Wired

The Wire is the best TV I've seen for bloody ages. Apparently messy, novelistic, totally unflashy, and mind-bendingly good. At least the first three seasons are. I'm breaking my long radio silence on this blog to perform the service of recommending it. And you must watch it from the very beginning.

Praise (Phoe)be

I’d like to honour Lisa Kudrow. For three things, none of which is playing Phoebe on Friends.

1) Her brilliant turn in The Opposite Of Sex.
2) Her equally brilliant (though less funny) turn in Happy Endings.
3) Her spectacular performance in The Comeback which makes the whole (and only) season well worth seeing.

Fade in

Broadening out the topic a bit, as promised, here are some great first episodes:

Life on Mars – possibly the best first 20 minutes of any TV show ever. A masterclass in setting up a complicated story with economy, humour and incredible dramatic power. And John Simm’s brilliant in it. (Such a shame that he couldn’t act ‘happy’ when he was overlooked for a BAFTA at the recent TV awards. You’d think ten seconds of fake smiling wouldn’t be beyond him.)

The rest of that first episode is still really good, if not quite as perfect. Which is why, for a first episode that is pant-sweatingly exciting and positively compels you to watch the rest of the series, 24 is still the number one.

And, as for comedies, I still maintain that the best ever episode of the (until recently) phenomenally entertaining Curb Your Enthusiasm is the very first, called ‘The Pants Tent’.* It is the model for every subsequent episode (or at least for every good subsequent episode) and yet is hilarious even if it’s the only one you ever saw.

Funny then, that the first episode of Arrested Development is one of the weakest. Too much heavy-handed exposition, too much even heavier-handed kookiness, and a significant smattering of schmaltz. AD became one of the best ever sitcoms, but its beginnings were not particularly auspicious. Which I guess – despite the focus of my last two posts – is a lesson for us all.

* For pedants: I know there was an hour-long special before the series proper, but that’s so not the first episode. I can justify that position at length if required.

Bee afraid, bee very afraid (sorry)

I’m intrigued to see how this turns out.

Seinfeld (the sitcom) revolutionised the genre, pushing a uniquely cynical view of human behaviour into the enthusiastic embrace of a massive mainstream audience. Seinfeld (the writer) clearly had a lot to do with that, though I suspect Larry David’s personal neuroses provided much of the show’s funniest and most inventive comic content. And Seinfeld (the stand-up comic) – hmm, well, not so hot. So Bee Movie could go either way.

My biggest fear, though, is hands-on producer Jeffrey Katzenberg. One of the greatest achievements of Seinfeld (the sitcom – god, eponymously-titled shows are a pain) was the banishment of ‘hugging and learning’ from this traditionally schmaltzy genre. Katzenberg has produced some brilliant films, but in all of his animated epics – and also his comedies like Shrek – there’s that same heartwarming and morally instructive payoff. Here’s hoping Bee Movie has a more of a sting in its tail. (Sorry again.)

Comfortably dumb

High concept has long since moved on from its Hollywood home, and now seems poised to take over non-fiction publishing. Books that attempt to capture a key element of the zeitgeist, in business, politics, or culture – and in one easy phrase – are all over the place. If it’s not the ‘tipping point’, it’s the ‘long tail’. A recent addition to the ranks is Steven Johnson’s Everything Bad Is Good for You.

Johnson is on to something a bit more interesting – and counter-cultural – than many of his peers. While every newspaper screams about dumbing down (often next to in-depth articles about Kate Middleton’s mum), Johnson points out that popular culture is in fact much more complex and dense (in a good way) than it has ever been before. I’m not sure he’s right that such developments are making us more intelligent (how on earth would you prove that anyway?), but evidence against the charge of mass culture dumbing down is overwhelming.

Even – no, especially – in television, that much-derided chewing gum for the brain, we can see the results of this smartening up right before our eyes. From the arcane web of plot that is The Wire to possibly the most intricately inter-textual sitcom ever, Arrested Development, this trend is particularly prominent in America – the capital of dumb if you’d believe half of the commentariat. And it’s popular, both in terms of ratings and – crucially – DVD sales, which allow much-needed repeat viewings.

But why is classical music not benefiting (in terms of both audience numbers and cultural prominence) from this surge of interest in more challenging cultural fare? A large part of the problem, on the traditional side of things, is the stultifying atmosphere of most concert performances. I’m not arguing for the desperate ideas of some promoters (‘speed-date to the sultry sounds of Mozart’s Requiem!’). But the dress and rituals of orchestral performance – not least the interminable multi-part curtain-calls, far more than at any play or musical I’ve ever seen – are unnecessarily off-putting. And as for opera, in the past few years only Opera North’s ‘Eight Little Greats’ season has really shown innovation in both repertory and presentation. It is hard to encourage new audiences, inspired by the vitality of the best of popular culture, to attend productions that are decades old.

There are signs of hope though, particularly at performances of contemporary classical music, where even traditional bands seem more comfortable pushing the boat out a bit. The London Sinfonietta have been doing some great stuff with Warp records, exploring in performance the connections between the likes of Aphex Twin and Stockhausen. They have also been keen to play around with the performing environment, incorporating massive projections into their concerts (gigs?). Wagner of all opera composers has historically encouraged the largest revolutions in production – and now he seems to be inspiring fresh approaches to concert performances too. Bill Viola’s central involvement in the Tristan Project (currently touring the US) takes the multi-media nature of Wagner’s intentions into new areas with the help of stunning high-definition video art.

We can only hope that these challenges to the orthodoxies of performance practice reach their own irreversible ‘tipping point’ – and encourage more fans of HBO’s The Sopranos to become admirers of Covent Garden’s sopranos too.