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Rushfield Babylon

where it all went wrong
Writer, reporter, Idol chronicler, seer. Contact: rr at
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  • August 13, 2013 9:04 am
    TOWARDS A UNIFIED FIELD THEORY ON HOW THE INTERNET MAKES EVERYTHING TERRIBLE I have nothing bad to say about Breaking Bad.  I was completely gripped by Sunday night’s episode. I’ve watched it twice and enjoyed it more the second time.  I think when the show concludes it is certain to go down as one of the great dramas in TV history. What quibbles I have with the show I recognize as just that - quibbles. So why on Monday did the internet make me ashamed to have watched the show, much less to have liked it? Part of the revulsion is no doubt due to some vestigial adolescent need to feel myself ahead of the crowd and just getting cranky when I find my tastes are actually not particularly unique or special. But beyond that, I think there is something terrifying about the way the internet turns out for these events and cranks up the GIF, meme, Tweet and think piece machines like some sort of disembodied 4th of July parade. These moments carry a desperation with them; the logical conclusion of the Bowling Alone thing, where now living our lives glued to our individual screens cut off from actual human interaction, we are desperate to find ways to march together. I’ve noticed that these events- awards shows, series premieres, etc. are becoming bigger and bigger of group phenomenons.  Super Bowl ratings have never been higher. The Grammies for chrissake inch upwards.  We want to watch together. In our own homes, in front of our own multiple screens. All to some extent harmless enough. If the world (or the upscale, urban sub-sub-subset of the world) can find some comfort in cheering on an episode of gritty drama together, then good for it for finding some in this cold machine driven world. But the downsides, as I see them are: • In our desperation to make a community out of watching an episode of a TV show, we pour more of our hopes and desires into that show than any hour of entertainment can bear.  We meme the life out of whatever is original and striking about a work within minutes, overexposing it so much it becomes noxious.  In olden times, it took years for enough VHS copies of Scarface to trickle back to frat houses so that every brother could do a passably awful Tony Montana imitation and make you wince when you heard the real thing.  And in the mean time people could talk about the film, consider it, pass judgement and change their mind before the re-use of the film became this world devouring thing apart from the show itself. Today, “I’m the one who knocks” and “say my name” are reproduced in every form upside down and backwards literally before the show is even over and any hope of a quiet place to take it in is in vain. • The fancy media instead of calming the crowd, now only stokes the flames. Once they could have put things in perspective, but now they see their job as articulating the frenzy of the mob. What is the good of having a blog or a Twitter account if you’re going to be the only corner of this corner of the internet not enjoying the hooplah?  And if you’re a professional reviewer and get screeners in advance you can actually get ahead of the mob by declaring an episode the best thing since Euripedes before anyone else has even watched it, and hope that your words are printed on banners in the parade. • Frenzied mobs, history has shown us, are not always just about fun, games and watching TV together. Now and then, they can have a dark side. Once we say this is all about us just piling on together for some kind of group ecstatic transformation, that can lead to all kinds of places, and I have noted in the past, Twitter’s less attractive tendency to transform into a lynch mob at the drop of a hat. Its hunger for fresh blood has not in the least abated. • Of late, its hunger has actually become an industry. Sharknado represents the internet now creating material for itself to mock.  In olden times again, the camp fun of watching old disaster films was mocking the dead serious overacting and unintentionally hamfisted actions. Now at Twitter’s demand, networks are producing intentionally hamfisted and overacted pieces so the internet can tear them apart. They are even letting us - in a contest - pick the name that we find most mockable. So we pick the thing we most want to rip to shreds, like a school bully making a nerd dress up in the most ridiculous costume, so we can make fun of him for wearing it. What is the solution? Well, as America’s leading anti-First Amendment crusader I have advocated the power and dignity of shutting the hell up many times before. Short of that catching fire, we can pray the internet continues to be merely annoying and only sporadically dangerous.  And short of that, networks that want their shows to be appreciated by the peoples and not just the subject of a mass spectacle should stop sending screeners to critics.  That part of the conversation at least we can put a lid on.

    TOWARDS A UNIFIED FIELD THEORY ON HOW THE INTERNET MAKES EVERYTHING TERRIBLE

    I have nothing bad to say about Breaking Bad.  I was completely gripped by Sunday night’s episode. I’ve watched it twice and enjoyed it more the second time.  I think when the show concludes it is certain to go down as one of the great dramas in TV history. What quibbles I have with the show I recognize as just that - quibbles.

    So why on Monday did the internet make me ashamed to have watched the show, much less to have liked it?

    Part of the revulsion is no doubt due to some vestigial adolescent need to feel myself ahead of the crowd and just getting cranky when I find my tastes are actually not particularly unique or special.

    But beyond that, I think there is something terrifying about the way the internet turns out for these events and cranks up the GIF, meme, Tweet and think piece machines like some sort of disembodied 4th of July parade. These moments carry a desperation with them; the logical conclusion of the Bowling Alone thing, where now living our lives glued to our individual screens cut off from actual human interaction, we are desperate to find ways to march together. I’ve noticed that these events- awards shows, series premieres, etc. are becoming bigger and bigger of group phenomenons.  Super Bowl ratings have never been higher. The Grammies for chrissake inch upwards.  We want to watch together. In our own homes, in front of our own multiple screens.

    All to some extent harmless enough. If the world (or the upscale, urban sub-sub-subset of the world) can find some comfort in cheering on an episode of gritty drama together, then good for it for finding some in this cold machine driven world. But the downsides, as I see them are:

    • In our desperation to make a community out of watching an episode of a TV show, we pour more of our hopes and desires into that show than any hour of entertainment can bear.  We meme the life out of whatever is original and striking about a work within minutes, overexposing it so much it becomes noxious.  In olden times, it took years for enough VHS copies of Scarface to trickle back to frat houses so that every brother could do a passably awful Tony Montana imitation and make you wince when you heard the real thing.  And in the mean time people could talk about the film, consider it, pass judgement and change their mind before the re-use of the film became this world devouring thing apart from the show itself. Today, “I’m the one who knocks” and “say my name” are reproduced in every form upside down and backwards literally before the show is even over and any hope of a quiet place to take it in is in vain.
    • The fancy media instead of calming the crowd, now only stokes the flames. Once they could have put things in perspective, but now they see their job as articulating the frenzy of the mob. What is the good of having a blog or a Twitter account if you’re going to be the only corner of this corner of the internet not enjoying the hooplah?  And if you’re a professional reviewer and get screeners in advance you can actually get ahead of the mob by declaring an episode the best thing since Euripedes before anyone else has even watched it, and hope that your words are printed on banners in the parade.
    • Frenzied mobs, history has shown us, are not always just about fun, games and watching TV together. Now and then, they can have a dark side. Once we say this is all about us just piling on together for some kind of group ecstatic transformation, that can lead to all kinds of places, , Twitter’s less attractive tendency to transform into a lynch mob at the drop of a hat. Its hunger for fresh blood has not in the least abated.
    • Of late, its hunger has actually become an industry. Sharknado represents the internet now creating material for itself to mock.  In olden times again, the camp fun of watching old disaster films was mocking the dead serious overacting and unintentionally hamfisted actions. Now at Twitter’s demand, networks are producing intentionally hamfisted and overacted pieces so the internet can tear them apart. They are even letting us - in a contest - pick the name that we find most mockable. So we pick the thing we most want to rip to shreds, like a school bully making a nerd dress up in the most ridiculous costume, so we can make fun of him for wearing it.
    What is the solution? Well, as America’s leading anti-First Amendment crusader I have advocated the power and dignity of shutting the hell up many times before. Short of that catching fire, we can pray the internet continues to be merely annoying and only sporadically dangerous.  And short of that, networks that want their shows to be appreciated by the peoples and not just the subject of a mass spectacle should stop sending screeners to critics.  That part of the conversation at least we can put a lid on.

    90 notes Filed under:  Breaking Bad, television,.
  • July 15, 2012 3:36 am
    BREAKING BAD: YES, BUT… Okay, to start off, before I get banned from the internet, this is not an anti-Breaking Bad post.  I like Breaking Bad. I am very pro it.   This is an I like it, but with qualifications post.  I know that in this era everything has to be either The Best Show in History (TBSIH) or a Total Disaster, but I’d like to pretend there are some grades between A++++ and F minus. In the case of Breaking Bad, I’d like to pretend that the grade A -/B+ still exists, because that’s what I’d give it. For those of you who can remember the days when teachers didn’t give everyone  A++++’s just for showing up so they didn’t have to leave school feeling like you weren’t as good as anyone, the purpose of less than perfect grades wasn’t to say that if you got an A -  you deserved to die.  It was, optimistically, to tell you, there’s room for improvement.  And here are things you have to look out for.  A -/B + does not equal F, as painful as it might be for some to picture something you love being less than perfect.We’re not doing Breaking Bad any favors by saying that every second of every episode is the best thing that’s ever been on television.  Some episodes have been incredibly great.  And others have been, frankly, uneven.  If you don’t point out where it’s had missteps, you can’t appreciate where it get things really right.  You cease to be an active viewer and just become a hysterical fanboy jumping up and down and clapping your hands with glee at the sight of the Chicken Brothers sign.  I won’t going into all the things that I think are good about Breaking Bad because frankly, you have the entire rest of the internet to do that.  I’ll just say that it is a totally unique show in TV history and for that alone it has my support and respect. BUT…. There are reasons why I look to tomorrow night with guarded enthusiasm and concern about where the show could be headed and those reasons are: • For me, the show hit its apotheosis at the end of  Season Three with the plane crash.  In that final arc, everything happened.  Walt was enveloped by the consequences of what he’d become, he embraced the darkness and that darkness exploded upon the world.  • If this is a deep dramatic show about Walt’s character, since then frankly, it has been spinning its wheels.  That S3 finale was so apocalyptic on such a personal level, that it’s never been able to recapture that inner darkness.  The ending of last season may have been a more elaborate scenario but  what Walt did with the plant and the kid wasn’t really a development over the place he was at two seasons ago, but a return to it. • There has been this arc: Walt or Jesse gets freaked out by what they’ve become, tries to step back from gangster life, but realize they’re no longer any good for normal life so come around and embrace being gangsters. This arc has now been passed back and forth several times.  At some point, it crosses over from realistic conflicted emotions to what we call, characters fighting the premise of the show.  And at some point, the moping about having to be drug kingpins, while certainly understandable, gets a little tiresome.  If they had limited themselves to just one bum out each, they could’ve taken over the Southwestern drug trade three seasons ago. • In the place of character growth, the cartoonish elements of the show have grown and now, just about swallowed it.  You had from the beginning these gothic, unreal elements, but they set off the intense, sunbaked, bitter realism of Walt’s life. Now, what with the Chicken Brothers and Saul and the Mexican hitmen twins, the whole show is in gothic cartoon land. Or at least it was at the end of last season.  Walt can’t continue to be an intensely real character in an entirely cartoon world.  Eventually, that tension can’t hold up. • Maybe it would be more anchored if there were more supporting characters that had any weight to them, but there’s really not a single really fleshed out compelling character on this thing.  Hank, Skylar, Walt Jr…all of them feel like dramatic foils just to keep things complicated for Hank.  There’s not a one of them that I’d be willing to spend a full episode with. I know you need a mix of flat characters and round characters supposedly, but the whole point of this novelic approach to television is to be able to make characters infinitely richer and more complex.  And I just don’t see the real complexity or shadows with the supporting characters on this.  No fault of the actors, but none of them have taken me to any place that has surprised me yet.  Gus did, in a Gothic way, but he’s dead. • Unless I’m missing something, Walt just put a bomb on the bottom of the chair in the room that Gus was going to go into.  So he didn’t need to poison the kid to get Jesse to get him into the hospital to get close.  That whole thing didn’t pan out. The plant that they showed in the final show was beside the point, not the key to the whole plan. Some scientific criminal mastermind.   Other than that, happy Season Five Breaking Bad! 

    BREAKING BAD: YES, BUT…

    Okay, to start off, before I get banned from the internet, this is not an anti-Breaking Bad post.  I like Breaking Bad. I am very pro it.   This is an I like it, but with qualifications post.  I know that in this era everything has to be either The Best Show in History (TBSIH) or a Total Disaster, but I’d like to pretend there are some grades between A++++ and F minus. In the case of Breaking Bad, I’d like to pretend that the grade A -/B+ still exists, because that’s what I’d give it.

    For those of you who can remember the days when teachers didn’t give everyone  A++++’s just for showing up so they didn’t have to leave school feeling like you weren’t as good as anyone, the purpose of less than perfect grades wasn’t to say that if you got an A -  you deserved to die.  It was, optimistically, to tell you, there’s room for improvement.  And here are things you have to look out for.  A -/B + does not equal F, as painful as it might be for some to picture something you love being less than perfect.

    We’re not doing Breaking Bad any favors by saying that every second of every episode is the best thing that’s ever been on television.  Some episodes have been incredibly great.  And others have been, frankly, uneven.  If you don’t point out where it’s had missteps, you can’t appreciate where it get things really right.  You cease to be an active viewer and just become a hysterical fanboy jumping up and down and clapping your hands with glee at the sight of the Chicken Brothers sign. 

    I won’t going into all the things that I think are good about Breaking Bad because frankly, you have the entire rest of the internet to do that.  I’ll just say that it is a totally unique show in TV history and for that alone it has my support and respect.

    BUT….

    There are reasons why I look to tomorrow night with guarded enthusiasm and concern about where the show could be headed and those reasons are:

    • For me, the show hit its apotheosis at the end of  Season Three with the plane crash.  In that final arc, everything happened.  Walt was enveloped by the consequences of what he’d become, he embraced the darkness and that darkness exploded upon the world. 

    • If this is a deep dramatic show about Walt’s character, since then frankly, it has been spinning its wheels.  That S3 finale was so apocalyptic on such a personal level, that it’s never been able to recapture that inner darkness.  The ending of last season may have been a more elaborate scenario but  what Walt did with the plant and the kid wasn’t really a development over the place he was at two seasons ago, but a return to it.

    • There has been this arc: Walt or Jesse gets freaked out by what they’ve become, tries to step back from gangster life, but realize they’re no longer any good for normal life so come around and embrace being gangsters. This arc has now been passed back and forth several times.  At some point, it crosses over from realistic conflicted emotions to what we call, characters fighting the premise of the show.  And at some point, the moping about having to be drug kingpins, while certainly understandable, gets a little tiresome.  If they had limited themselves to just one bum out each, they could’ve taken over the Southwestern drug trade three seasons ago.

    • In the place of character growth, the cartoonish elements of the show have grown and now, just about swallowed it.  You had from the beginning these gothic, unreal elements, but they set off the intense, sunbaked, bitter realism of Walt’s life. Now, what with the Chicken Brothers and Saul and the Mexican hitmen twins, the whole show is in gothic cartoon land. Or at least it was at the end of last season.  Walt can’t continue to be an intensely real character in an entirely cartoon world.  Eventually, that tension can’t hold up.

    • Maybe it would be more anchored if there were more supporting characters that had any weight to them, but there’s really not a single really fleshed out compelling character on this thing.  Hank, Skylar, Walt Jr…all of them feel like dramatic foils just to keep things complicated for Hank.  There’s not a one of them that I’d be willing to spend a full episode with. I know you need a mix of flat characters and round characters supposedly, but the whole point of this novelic approach to television is to be able to make characters infinitely richer and more complex.  And I just don’t see the real complexity or shadows with the supporting characters on this.  No fault of the actors, but none of them have taken me to any place that has surprised me yet.  Gus did, in a Gothic way, but he’s dead.

    • Unless I’m missing something, Walt just put a bomb on the bottom of the chair in the room that Gus was going to go into.  So he didn’t need to poison the kid to get Jesse to get him into the hospital to get close.  That whole thing didn’t pan out. The plant that they showed in the final show was beside the point, not the key to the whole plan. Some scientific criminal mastermind.  

    Other than that, happy Season Five Breaking Bad! 

    20 notes Filed under:  tv, breaking bad,.
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