The first sign of trouble this season: One of these things is not like the other. San Francisco. Los Angeles. Chicago. Miami. New York City. Las Vegas. Washington D.C. Texas.

Did you spot it? Let me give you a hint, it’s the one that’s NOT A CITY. It’s that massive 2nd tier state with a soon to be failing economy that leaps out at you. Did you think we wouldn’t notice that  names like “Dallas” or “Houston” or “San Antonio” seem to be conspicuously missing?

Do you know why they’re missing?  Because nobody associates any part of Texas with food. The state dish is admittedly delicious BBQ, but it’s best served behind a gas station on a plastic tray, with half a loaf of Wonder Bread as a chaser. The unofficial motto is “everything’s bigger in Texas.” Note carefully that it’s not “everything’s BETTER in Texas”, just bigger. When it comes to culture, Texas makes Donald Trump look classy. Nobody moves to Texas looking for any kind of cutting-edge cultural experience unless you’re in Austin, the city who’s mantra is “Please ignore the map because we’re really not a part of Texas.” On the national stage, Texas is mostly known for choking – whether it’s Tony Romo under pressure or George W. Bush eating a pretzel. This is the food culture you want to tap into?

OK, I get it. You’re looking to spread your wings and explore, but let’s be serious. Top Chef should be like the Super Bowl. All you have to do is rotate through the same three or four base cities (NY, LA, SF, and because they have Grant Achatz, Chicago) and call it a day. If you want to put Padma in chaps, then import a cowboy. If you want a change-up, try New Orleans. You can’t justify San Antonio as a point of culinary interest any more than you could justify Denver, Detroit, or Dallas.

Second: The two opening “audition” episodes might be the lowest point in series history. It’s clear that the 150 chefs you’ve featured to date have pretty much exhausted the talent pool of undiscovered A-list, TV friendly chefs. You don’t need to advertise that by exposing us to 100 more C-list chefs who don’t stand a chance of making the casting cut. Your job – your very raison d’etre as producers – is to find, recruit, and choose 15 interesting chefs and test their endurance for my amusement. Staging a repetitive, American Idol style auditioning cook-off is the antithesis of what makes your show interesting.

Beyond that, the judging panel methodology of American Idol does not work for you. On Idol, for better or worse, I can hear what is reasonably close to what the judges are hearing. It’s a little interesting because I’m working with the same information that they have. On Top Chef, I have nothing to work with. I can’t smell or taste the plates, I’m experiencing it vicariously through your judges. This is not a show that invites “play along at home”. This is a show about pressure, personality and imagination. Forcing Tom, Padma, and some random schmuck to play Simon, Paula, and some random schmuck is embarrassing and dramatically uninteresting.

Either a chef is good enough for Top Chef, or they’re not. If you want to show me some cocky young buck or tear-jerking sob story, then cast them. I know that if you’re focusing on some interesting story in those opening episodes that they’re just going to get cut. If they’re interesting and make it, you’ll save their story for when the bullets go live. If they’re interesting but don’t make it, you’re going to squeeze that out while you can. (And if they’re uninteresting, as many of them are, why are you showing me at all?)

Just do your job, Top Chef. Cast the best you can, put them under pressure in the kitchen somewhere and see who rises to the challenge.

Production values are slipping, too. The green screen for the interviews have hit a nadir at many points so far this season. For the uninitiated, those beautifully composed interview shots that comprise the bulk of the show are usually shot in a cramped room behind the set with the chef sitting in front of a green sheet like they’re posing for a portrait at Sears. Post-production magic swaps out the green screen and replaces it with a gorgeous wall ripped from the pages of Architectural Digest. There’s no smooth way to say this, but this is Hollywood 101 at this point, and Top Chef has done a technically poor job of it. The process is called “keying”, and if you look at the Heavy Girl With Disheveled Hair, you can see that all the detail has been keyed out of that lesbian rat’s nest on her head. That’s kind of forgivable because fine threads of hair are tough to key out, but pulling a bad key on Old Bald And Bitter Chef is inexcusable on a technical level.

And tell the people who shoot the food inserts to lay off the rack focus. Yes, the crew must be very excited by the new tilt-shift lens, but the same rack focus on 16 consecutive plates of food is tiresome. While you’re at it, smack the editor who cut those in, too. There must be something on a slider you could alternate with.

You know how I can tell this season is off? Tom Colicchio can’t be bothered to hide it. He’s never suffered bad chefs lightly, but making him send one contestant home in the middle of the first challenge was embarrassing – both to him, the show, and the chef. Watching the quinceanera episode, until the eating started he couldn’t be bothered to wipe that condescending look off his face.  There were at least five shots of him in the episode last night where he was clearly thinking: ”Who thought this was a good idea? What the hell is this idiotic party I’m stuck at? Where the hell is the nearest decent restaurant? When can I go back to see my kids? Why the fuck am I here?”

That’s the only real saving grace so far this season – Tom’s expertise and intolerance of poor cooking gives Top Chef enough gravity to hold together when the show threatens to go Real Housewives. His judgments are the reason to keep watching, and when he looks like he’s checked out, the show is in deep trouble.

Look, Top Chef, it’s first-world problems to keep a successful and beloved show running. But learn from those who have failed before you, and accept your place in the world. Nobody wants to see a 100 yard dash determine who runs The Amazing Race. Stick to what you do best – finding interesting chefs, put them under extreme pressure, and let us watch them rise or fall.

The original is some of the best television you’ll never get to see. It’s the story of Sam Tyler, a tightly wound police detective who gets hit by a car and wakes up in 1973. There he comes face to face with  markedly different attitudes toward policework, feminism, popular culture, and civil rights. His primary foil in 1973 is DCI Gene Hunt, a leonine blowhard who doesn’t care for DI Tyler’s fancy modern methods at all. After all, “Gene Hunt smashes doors down. He does not pick girly locks.”

The BBC iteration felt bold and new. Sly cultural jokes deftly danced with moral dilemmas, manly camraderie, and engrossing mysteries. The American iteration feels like nothing at all. It suffers from a complete lack of distinction; the copy is  featureless Xerox, where all the engaging nuances are wiped out in the imperfect act of copying. It looks like television, it sounds like television, and at its best, it merely resembles routine television.

The good news about the American iteration is that it’s not the absymal failure the David E. Kelly version was rumored to be. The bad news is that it’s plodding and generic, unable to walk and chew gum at the same time. Jason O’Mara’s Detective Tyler is a loose-limbed vacancy. He doesn’t seem focussed enough to be a sitcom character, much less a brilliant police detective. Harvey Keitel  does a lounge-act Harvey Keitel impersonation as Chief Hunt. He comes across like a leprechaun with a mullet, or an incarnation of the Fighting Irish logo, all fists and sweat. The only actor to escape reasonably unscathed is Michael Imperioli, who appears to have entered the witness protection plan where he was promptly given the world’s most horrible mustache.

In 2008, Sam was hot on the tail of a serial killer who had just kidnapped his girlfriend Maya. In 1973, he immediately stumbles across a victim identical to the bodies the modern killer was leaving behind. One step at a time, Sam realizes how backward that 1973 is. A cell phone is unheard of. Fingerprints will take two weeks to get a match. And the World Trade Towers are still standing. Hey, weren’t those the days!

It’s unfair to compare this version to the original, but unfortunately on its own merits, it fails. The storytelling is flat and telegraphed. A wisecrack, a line of exposition, a beat of wondering at the wacky 1970′s; each moment follows another as a discrete packet, like a quantum of narrative, disassociated with the preceding beat. It’s thuddingly insistent on remaining a step behind the audience at all times.

At the end of the pilot, a killer is caught, and yet Sam remains mysteriously stuck in the past. The pilot episode follows the British pilot episode almost beat-for-beat, and yet never comes into a focus of its own. Every moment feels like a Xerox copy of something we’ve seen before – people who’ve never seen the original would feel a passing twinge of famliarity, as well, struggling to remember which generic cop show that they’ve stumbled across in late nights of channel surfing. The most successful British import, The Office, succeeded because the American producers took the broad strokes and re-tooled the show to fill in their own fine details.

If the American Life On Mars is going to succeed, it needs to find a unique identity, and fast. Until then, let’s console ourselves with some favorite Gene Hunt-isms:

Dora Keens: I want a lawyer.

Gene Hunt: I wanna hump Britt Eklund, what are we gonna do?

 

[Bursting in on Stephen Warren, who is performing an act of oral sex on another man]

Gene Hunt: I’m not a Catholic me’self Mr Warren, but isn’t there something in the Bible about “Thou shalt not suck off rent boys”?

Warren: How dare you come in here!

Gene Hunt: You could have said that to the boy.

 

Gene Hunt: There will never be a woman prime minister as long as I have a hole in my arse.

 

Gene Hunt: I think you’ve forgotten who you’re talking to.

Sam Tyler: An overweight, over-the-hill, nicotine-stained, borderline-alcoholic homophobe with a superiority complex and an unhealthy obsession with male bonding?

Gene Hunt: You make that sound like a bad thing.

 

Gene Hunt: Don’t move, you are surrounded by armed bastards!

 

 Chris Skelton: I wonder what killed him?.

Gene Hunt: That would be the bloody enormous hole in his chest where the bullet went in.

 

Gene Hunt: Now. Yesterday’s shooting. The dealers are all so scared we’re more likely to get Helen Keller to talk. The Paki in a coma’s about as lively as Liberace’s dick when he’s looking at a naked woman, all in all this investigation’s going at the speed of a spastic in a magnet factory.

 

Sam Tyler: I still think we need to entertain the possibility that this could be a racial killing..

Gene Hunt: Oh, well let’s entertain it, let’s take it out for a prawn cocktail, a steak and a bottle of Liebfraumilch, then let’s kick it into the gutter where it belongs!

 

Gene Hunt: You great… soft… sissy… girlie… nancy… French… bender… Man United supporting POOF!

 

Gene Hunt: Drugs, eh? What’s the point. They make you forget, make you talk funny, make you see things that aren’t there. My old grandma got all of that for free when she had a stroke.

 

Gene Hunt: He’s got fingers in more pies than a leper on a cookery course.

 

Gene Hunt: She’s as nervous as a very small nun at a penguin shoot.

 

 

The HBO special is assembled from live performances on three continents – Johannesburg, South Africa; London, England; and New York, New York. Rock’s production company has thrown tradition and continuity out the window by attempting to seamlessly splice together performances from all three locations into one cohesive whole. Sentences that start in Johannesburg finish in London. Punchlines that start in London are delivered in South Africa with a repetitive echo in New York to drive the point home.

It’s impossible to say why the production company chose this approach. Were they unable to get a full, satisfactory perfomance in any single location? Did unforseen technical issues destroy some tapes?  Could it be an avant-garde stylistic decision? Whatever the reason, the execution is startlingly poor and fatally undercuts Rock’s shrill performance.

The first time the show jumps mid-sentence from one continent to another, the timing of the dialogue edit is flawless; unfortunately that only makes the sudden jump of wardrobe, lighting, and audio presence even more jarring. One of the cardinal rules of editing for performance is to never make an edit that calls attention to itself. A corollary to that rule would be that if you’re going to make an edit noticeable, you swing for the fences. Anything less than total commitment is going to feel like a mistake. It’s common practice to assemble a concert film from multiple performances across multiple nights. This feeble multi-city approach is the worst kind of aesthetic decision because it a) calls undue attention to itself, and b) measurably detracts from the subject.

The audio in all three concert halls has a jarringly different ambience, and the video from the New York City performance has the high-shine, poor contrast look of old video cameras. It’s almost painfully apparent that this production wasn’t originally designed as a 3-location montage, which makes the awkwardness even more evident.

Worst of all, the jumping locations undercuts Rock’s strength as a performer. Marquee comedy like this isn’t a weekend comedy club performance, in many ways, it’s live theater at its finest. Rock is a dedicated comedian, who could have spent a year or two honing the material for Kill The Messenger. This is a performance as polished as anything on Broadway. Needlessly leaping through time and space, changing inconsequential elements like audio reverb and wardrobe, fractures any kind of performance continuity.

Rock is a strong presence, constantly prowling the stage, contorting his face into a shrill rictus, and controlling the audience’s focus, but the inconsistent mix-and-mash performances become unsettling as the show progresses. His discipline and skill as a performer becomes evident, as the leaps across location show us how polished and rehearsed his performance is. However, the translocating robs us from seeing one continuous performance. Part of the intense, peculiar magic of stand-up comedy is that it’s dangerous. It’s one man on a stage without a safety net. Puncturing that illusion fatally wounds the comic energy, and it’s unforgiveable that every time the show jumps across the globe, you’re left asking “why?”

It’s a small blessing, then, that the material of Kill The Messenger is his weakest stand-up outing  yet. Rock is becoming a voice without a message. The ferocity of his breakthrough special Bring The Pain is still present, but the relevance has faded. Much of the race- and gender- based humor here feels like leftover material from Bring The Pain and much of the topical McPalin/O’Biden humor is too perfunctory. Rock is a funnier and harder-working comedian than almost anyone else headlining today, but he’s like a fire running out of fuel. Does Rock feel trapped by his prior success? Or does he have nothing else to say?

A lot of his material this time out settles for easy punchlines instead of pushing into new ground. His opening bit about being tracked like a wild animal starts like a Borscht belt routine, then leaves a lot of ground unturned. The punchline involves Rock on a safari, being photographed by white people also on safari. There’s a moment of ambiguity, an implication that the bush-guides are tracking Rock himself like a jungle papparazzi, before the joke collapses onto the old black people vs. white people stereotypes. It’s lazy humor, not only because finding black people in South Africa isn’t so hard as to require a safari guide, but because Rock pulls himself out of the line of fire. How much more interesting could the material have been, had Rock turned on the savage nature of papparazzi photographers, or the disparities of his own fame?

The highlights of the material are the truest bits. Rock talking about the differences between having a job and a career, his early job washing dishes at a Red Lobster, and the racial makeup of his neighborhood are hilarious. Unfortunately, he pulls himself out of the spotlight too quickly, in order to fall back into jokes of racial stereotypes and gender differences.

Artists cannot succeed if they keep repeating themselves, and Rock is going to have to break new ground if he’s going to stay relevant. His success as an outspoken black man has had to change his life in unmeasurable ways. Much like Metallica can’t keep manufacturing outrage now that they’re multi-millionaires, Rock can’t stay relevant by wallowing in the indignities of racism. Kill The Messenger isn’t a career-ender. It’s a testament to Rock’s gifts as a stand-up performer that it won’t damage his headlining status, nor the impression that he’s the current champion of comic outrage.

Audiences first flocked to him for his vision; like all great stand up comics, he rose to fame showing us a world that’s right in front of us that nobody else could see. Rock’s success has lifted him to a new vantage point now, and if he can’t start showing us what he’s seeing from up there, we’ll shortly start to tire of him telling us what he saw five years ago.

Whether this re-make disappeared off the radar because of changing audience tastes, or because it was supremely witless and inept, we’ll never know. Either way, audiences are lucky that this dreadful mis-fire will soon be buried in DVD remainder bins. Summarizing the plot holes and Knight Rider-level cliches would be tiresome. The only point of interest in this dreadfully tedious affair is as a measuring stick, a point of reference for how far science fiction has regressed.

Originally a novel by Michael Crichton, and filmed for the first time in 1971, the story is about a team of scientists who race to find a cure for a mysterious pathogen that crashed to Earth. The original film is a worthwhile piece of work. On the surface, it’s awkward and dated. The main laboratory set is a late 60’s version of cutting-edge modernity. It’s bright and clean, Kubrick-influenced sterility. The scientists are square-jawed and non-descript, blank cogs with little more than dot-matrix printers at their disposal.

Now, in the post-Matrix world, science has to be dimly lit with green fluorescent bulbs. Labs are built like submarines, and scientists stare at automated beakers controlled by hyperintelligent computers. The scientists are all attractive automatons, differentiated only by a daytime television cliche.

The re-make re-invents almost nothing from the original novel. Since the scientists actually do very little science, the script pads out the running time with plenty of pseudo-science, giving every actor a chance to graft on some ludicrous exposition without actually explaining a thing. One of the most curious deletions in the re-make is the entry procedure into the high tech lab.

In the book, and in the 1971 version, entering the lab was a lengthy, multi-day process of decontamination. The scientists were symbolically purified from the outside in, stripping away layer after layer of contaminants until they reached the most medically pure state Crichton’s science could conceive of at the time.

It’s a fascinating sequence, especially in the novel, where the reader is confronted with a long inventory of potentially hazardous organisms that cover your body from hair to toenails. “We’ve faced up to quite a planning problem here. How to disinfect the human body — one of the dirtiest things in the known universe — without killing the person at the same time,” Crichton writes.

The 2008 version dispenses with such poetry – preferring instead a hybrid montage of showering shots that fetishize water droplets, feet, and shampoo suds. And that, in a nutshell, is a metaphor for the complete failure of the modernized re-make.

The 1971 version of The Andromeda Strain still holds together. It’s a tight, claustrophobic story that draws tension from paranoia and a fear of the unknown. The 2008 re-make drowns out tension in an avalanche of memes, desperately reaching out for relevance and ironically, finding relevance only as a yardstick of failure.

Forty years from now we’ll be laughing at the current design concepts that ‘high-tech’ means inefficient lighting and space station architecture. And hopefully the next people who remake The Andromeda Strain understand that story is more than just randomly running your mouth, and that newer does not mean better when it comes to science.

Television shows returning from cancellation can be lumped into the same two groups. Family Guy, also cancelled by Fox, returned from extinction without missing a beat. The brush with death has made the creators of Family Guy a little more fearless – they’ve already been cancelled once, so what’s left to fear? Whether you love the show’s humor or hate it, the post-cancellation episodes have been just as strong as the pre-cancellation episodes.

Like Family Guy, Futurama was also cancelled, and was brought back to life on the strength of DVD sales and re-run ratings. Unfortunately, death was not as kind. Grave-rot seems to have set in and lobotomized the nimble sense of humor that made the first four seasons of Futurama so wonderful.

In its first-run incarnation, Futurama was the far smarter and funnier show. Witty and cerebral, it easily blended low-brow slapstick with post-doctorate quantum physics, as when the doddering professor invoked Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle to complain about a photo finish of a race. “You changed the outcome by measuring it!”

The returning Futurama feels disoriented and off-balance. Part of the problem is that instead of returning as a string of 16 stand-alone episodes, the new season is divided into 4 four-part mini-movies. The first, “Bender’s Big Score,” is a muddled letdown.

The plot involves e-mail scamming aliens who use Bender to travel through time and rob history of all its treasures. What ensues is a tilt-a-whirl jag across what feels like an endless number of non-sequiturs and disconnected story threads. Limbo-stick decapitations, endless time travel loops, whale hunting, the North Pole, powdered television executives, evil Santa Claus, surgical mishaps, Leela’s romance with a mysterious stranger, a wild intergalactic space battle, three musical numbers, and more. It’s scattered, overwhelming, and disappointing.

Writers Ken Keeling and David X. Cohen spin in circles, trying to generate an epic story and wind up tripping over their own feet. The number of ‘Easter eggs’, old show in-jokes that are subtly or explicitly referenced, are sky high. For hardcore fans of the show, there are plenty of rewards in the details and none in the story itself. Non-fans of the show would be irretrievably lost in the relentlessly shifting plot. You’d be hard pressed to explain to non-fans how the future Harlem Globetrotters are actually post-post-doctorate physicists who specialize in time traveling mathematics, before having to explain the lineage of Leela’s Niblonian super-cute, super-genius pet, or the significance of Fry’s sadly patient abandoned pet, all of which blurs past in a few minutes.

Gone is the cleverness, and the love of the old science fiction tropes that Futurama could turn upside down. The best of the individual episodes would simultaneously embrace and invert old and new science-fiction clichés. Bender becoming a robot-god as he drifts through space. Fry gaining super-human powers from intestinal parasites. One of the secrets of Futurama is a quiet acknowledgement that we (the show’s fans) all love hearing those stories. We love (or love to hate) the Star Wars, Star Trek, Twilight Zones, and Outer Limits that we rabidly consumed as children.

And perhaps that’s why the new Futurama stumbles and the undead Family Guy succeeds. Family Guy has allegiance to nothing but irreverence. Character and continuity can be manipulated at will, as long as something is being mocked. Futurama doesn’t have that latitude because it has respect for its characters. Series creators Matt Groenig and David X. Cohen let them develop and evolve over the course of the series.

The series was laced with poignant moments, over the seasons, these animated characters developed the layers and depth that you would find in a good traditional sitcom. The re-animated version seems to have lost touch with that. The brush with death seems to have rattled the creators, shaking their faith in the warmth of consistency, and replacing it with the cold desperation of relentless gags and a flop-sweat fear of re-cancellation.

After the mis-fire of last week’s episode, “Britney’s New Look” was a welcome return to form for Trey Parker and Matt Stone. The episode takes our gossip-obsessed culture to the edges of horror, equating our tabloid-television fixations with the ancient historical practices of human sacrifice. That absurd perversion of logic is what the South Park creators do so well.

It wasn’t a great episode, but it easily had one of the most indelible images of the season. Chasing the big payday that compromising photos of Britney Spears can provide, the South Park boys unwittingly trigger her suicide. Or so it appears. Britney survives her self-inflicted shotgun wound to the head, and the results are a new level of disturbing.

Parker and Stone are nimble directors, able to mimick just about every film and television genre out there. The timing on the reveal of headless Britney was superb, and the sequence of ever expanding wide shots of the gathering mob are note perfect. And somewhere out there, a bunch of geeks are analyzing the pseudo-Latin chanting during the climactic scenes, parsing it for obscure or scatological references.

At its best, South Park finds comedy at the far ends of any emotional spectrum. What’s ironic is that their satire is largely a plea for reason and common sense. To fully appreciate their humor, you have to be educated, politically moderate, and a self-appointed member of the cultural elite. Parker and Stone are the best satirists working in television today, though they own that title mostly through a near-complete lack of competition. Nobody on television tackles the topics they go after, and few can hold a candle to their ability to skewer the absurdities in our culture.

In the end, though, “Britney’s New Look” is a mixed bag. The human sacrifice metaphor is apt, but much of the comedy falls flat. Mostly, Parker and Stone run afoul of their previous high water marks. After the brilliant reveal of headless Britney, the rest of the humor pales in comparison. Still, I sat in shock for that whole sequence, and it’s that blend of horror and absurdity that South Park does so well. Welcome back.

The best thing you can say for “Tonsil Trouble” is that it would have played better in season 7 or 8. Cartman gets AIDS from a blood transfusion, and then he infects an unsympathetic Kyle. The jokes are half-hearted — “I’m not just sure, I’m HIV-Positive” — and don’t cut deeply on any given issue. The humor suffers from A.D.D., alluding to AIDS losing status as a cause-celebre, unfair adults, dimwitted scientists, Magic Johnson, and the expensive price of a cure, without digging deeply into any of them.

As the episode wound down, I found myself hoping for a “to be continued”, or that they would leave Cartman and Kyle infected with AIDS for a good chunk of the season. For a show that routinely kills off one main character and sex-changed another, a running theme of infectious disease is not beyond the bounds. Also, given the contentious nature of Cartman and Kyle’s relationship, there might be some interesting comic potential to have them tied together so intimately. Unfortunately, the show copped out and cured them with a half-hearted deus ex machina.

Like Kubrick’s satire, the best South Parks fearlessly push their central gag to an illogical extreme, bending the world we know until it reaches the breaking point. Last season’s scatological laceration of Bono savaged his self-serving and condescending “save the Africans” stance in an unforgettably surreal manner. And the “24″ parody was sublime – mocking current television cliches and politics in one brilliant package. “Tonsil Trouble”, by comparison, is a weak attempt to be offensive that would have been funnier four or five years ago.

Still, even when it misfires, South Park is still funnier than most shows on television. New episodes run on Comedy Central every Wednesday for the next seven weeks, and it’s safe to expect better as the season unfolds.

Also worth noting – for the first time in memory, I finally have a three-way TiVo conflict. “Law And Order”, “Top Chef” and “South Park” all run on Wednesday at 10:00 PM. All three are worthy shows (more on this later), and thankfully Comedy Central re-runs “South Park” ad nauseum, making it easy to catch up on a missed episode.

Unfortunately, the bar has been raised for both television action and science-fiction shows. And ironically enough, NBC/Universal’s Battlestar Galactica is the current high water mark for science-fiction (a series also re-constructed from the ashes of a twenty year old series created by Glen A. Larson). Even if you only count Knight Rider as half science-fiction, it now is unquestionably the worst piece of sci-fi American television has seen in a long, long time, replacing the old title holder of last fall’s Bionic Woman.

It takes less than sixty seconds to parse the lack of subtlety, imagination, or creative inspiration behind Knight Rider 2008. It start with an old man, living in a house chock full of the most sophisticated artificial intelligence algorhythms in the world, casually lets a menacing pair of strangers walk into his house after a sudden power outage. This isn’t just a failure of logic, the suspension of disbelief required to make this work would require your central nervous system to shut down completely. But it gets worse… the camerawork – all medium shots and unrevealing pans – suddenly goes hand-held and leers into the face of a bad guy, using a dutch angle framing that went out of fashion when the first Knight Rider aired.

In short order, we meet a random lesbian/FBI agent; a brilliant scientist with hypnotically shiny lip gloss; and a tousle-haired ex-Army Ranger/race car driver who seems to spend his time having threesomes. When the most well-rounded, believable, and engaging character is a solar-powered morphing Ford Mustang voiced by Val Kilmer, you’re watching a show that is running on fumes.

What’s worse is that the clichés haven’t really started piling up yet. The brilliant scientist in the opening turns out to gasp be a body double! Which gets revealed in a monochromatic, jumpy-camera flashback! The ex-Army Ranger (vaguely played by Justin Bruening) has a shocking family secret! And he’s a big-stakes poker player! And he just happens to have harbored romantic feelings for the scientist’s ultra-foxy daughter (Deanna Russo)! Who was heartbroken he left her years ago! And the local sheriff is in league with the villains! Who are a near omnipotent, Halliburton inspired “private security company”!

Most pilots are exposition heavy and lumbering, but this whole venture is senseless and wholly devoid of fun. Way back in 1982, the idea of a super-intelligent talking car was balanced right on the edge of ‘way-out fantasy’ and ‘airbrushed van painting cool’. Now cars are coming equipped with talking GPS systems, and the outer edge of cool is somewhere beyond Facebook. Good television can’t be any more than a half step behind the mainstream. Good science fiction needs to be a couple of steps ahead of the mainstream. None of the factory-spec elements of Knight Rider have any current relevance – the bluetooth headsets, hipster lesbianism, and cheesy poker games already feel like dated cultural relics. Completely missing is that sense of cool, that ‘gee whiz, wouldn’t it be awesome if…’ sensibility that fuelled your imagination when you were young.

In a show this dismal, you can’t entirely blame the actors, but Bruening lacks the porn-star-lite charm that Hasselhoff exudes with ease. The other actors are so devoid of character that it’s hard to tell if they’re even performing. There isn’t a compelling image or coherent thought to be found. Shadowy conspiracies that seem to have only four employees, body-doubles, mommy issues, absentee fathers, and hack cliffhangers all feel like something a twelve year old J.J. Abrams would come up with. Cheap digital effects work compound the problems, with green screen spill very visible in a number of shots. There isn’t even the thrill of sweet cars driving fast… a feat even The Fast And The Furious: Tokyo Drift managed to achieve in spades.

Not every show needs to be as heady and grim as Battlestar Galactica. Sometimes bad television can be at least enjoyable to watch, and everyone has an over-eager twelve year old tucked away somewhere deep inside who deserves to come out and play occasionally. Damn the nostalgia, though, because your inner twelve year old boy, is going to have to hold on to the slim hope that an inevitable A-Team re-make is much better.

In my previous piece on The Sopranos, I made the point that it was one of the most ambitious shows on television, and that the sixth and final season was coming to a conclusion with a blistering ferocity. Happily, the series finale lives up to all the expectations that one could have for the show. The ambiguity and unconventional delivery that were the hallmark of the series found new heights in the finale, where the long-standing themes of the show were resolved and yet nothing ended at all.

Spot polls are showing immediate reaction is split nearly 60/40 with people hating or loving the finale. The people who are disappointed have missed the point. The show was never about bloody shootouts, or the gruesome closure of Phil Leotardo’s death. It isn’t about plot threads that have to be perfectly resolved; it’s more about the ongoing moments in the lives of these characters. Paulie’s revelation of seeing the virgin Mary inside the Bada Bing strip club is a perfect example of this. It’s symbolism and a punch line all at the same time. The lingering close-ups on Paulie Walnuts face don’t erase a lingering suspicion that he’s also turned against Tony, but a definitive answer to that question would just rob the show of its hypnotic power.

In the opening of the episode, Tony tries to barter his FBI contact for information about the location of Phil Leotardo. The agent is virtually a mirror of Tony. Pudgy, balding, angry at his home life, having an affair, and sitting in frozen parking lots at midnight, just like Tony. The good guys are just like the bad guys in North Jersey.

Throughout, the visual detail is as rich in this episode as in any episode from the series. Tony appears almost entirely in black. He appears in the shadows, wearing black and white shirts, wearing black leather jackets against a bright white brick wall. Blackness might be consuming him, or maybe the light is on the verge of overwhelming him. He spends the bulk of the episode in sepia-tinted shadows, in the shadows of history, perhaps? Red is the only prominent color, in Janice’s scarf, the Chinatown lamps, the paint on Tony’s incognito can, the gas station accents, a stuck ketchup bottle, the tablecloths at Satriales, Carmela’s jacket in the diner. Just like in Goodfellas, it’s a warning color, an alarm of impending death.

The remainder of the episode is mostly concerned with Tony’s family, and resolving matters with his son A.J. He’s still a screw-up, and he enters therapy just like his dad, and there’s evidence that young A.J. has picked up some of Tony’s sociopathic tricks. He closes out the episode not far off from where he began, a young, slick New Jersey operator just like his dad. At the other end of the spectrum, Uncle Junior is incoherent in a state-run mental facility. Tony tries to remind him that he once ran north New Jersey, and the fleeting “oh, that must be nice” shows Tony how little the power and the struggle ultimately amounts to. The son is the beginning, Tony is over the middle, and Uncle Junior is the end of the cycle.

The music that suffuses the episode is just as pointed. Bob Dylan’s “It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)”. Simon & Garfunkel show up as ringtone with “Cecilia”, with the “You’re breaking my heart, I’m begging you please to come home” lyrical implications. “You Keep Me Hanging On” while Phil Leotardo gets gunned down is bleakly ironic. The Noisettes “Scratch Your Name Into The Fabric Of This World.”

The final scene, which was instantly, classically divisive, is driven home with another loaded music choice. Tony waits in a booth in a diner, idly exploring the jukebox. He plays Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believing” while his family gathers, one by one. He keeps looking over his shoulder as random, vaguely menacing extras enter. First Carmela arrives. There’s mundane talk. A.J. enters, with more mundane talk.

Outside, Meadow has problems parking her car. Inside, pedestrians enter. It’s innocuous, but the rhythm of the editing and the increasing tempo of the music suggest impending danger. This is it, isn’t it? Tony’s supposed to go out in a hail of bullets? In the penultimate episode, the scene where Bobby Bacala is gunned down in a toy train store was filmed much in the same way. Quick cuts, images that are both innocuous and fraught with peril. It’s the same in the diner. Meadow’s increasingly frustrated attempts to park. Tony’s head swiveling. Pedestrians entering. They could be hired guns. They could just be regular Jersey mooks. Bullets could start flying at any second.

The moment Meadow enters the diner, Tony looks up, and on the lyrics “Don’t stop”, the show abruptly cuts to black. Flash back to the season premiere, where Bobby Bacala tells Tony that you probably never see the ending coming, it just all goes black. So did Tony get gunned down? Or does Meadow hug Tony, sit down, and dinner goes on as planned?

The point of The Sopranos has never been to answer those questions. The point is that ambiguity. Grand climaxes are comparatively easy, but closing out your thematic concerns without a hail of bullets and letting your characters live on, much as the first time audiences saw them, is a narrative trick of the highest order. The three generations of Soprano men etch out a circle of life. The good guys aren’t much different than the bad guys. And even in a world of stark black and white, Tony Soprano exists in a perfect state of ambiguity.

Bravo, David Chase.

Gallons of ink have been spilled hailing The Sopranos as the greatest television show ever. That’s a difficult title to hand out in a medium as populist and as varied as television; indeed that simple act of coronation will inspire the dissidents in droves. Best at what? Better than M*A*S*H? Gunsmoke? 24?

“Best” isn’t the most accurate title to award it. “Most ambitious” works much better. The Sopranos is to television what Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow is to the modern novel. A towering achievement in precision – dense, hyper-literate, and laden with symbolism. In many places, it’s as frustrating as it is rewarding, and like Pynchon, Sopranos creator David Chase seems to take a sadistic pleasure in toying with audience expectations.

The final season of The Sopranos is currently airing on HBO, and perhaps after the final fade out, the debate about greatness can properly begin. Instead of waving farewell with an emotional victory lap, Chase is driving his points home with a blistering ferocity. Watching it is like being pushed out of an airplane blindfolded. The impact could happen at any moment, and every scene that buffets past without one isn’t a reprieve but another dreadful moment waiting for the inevitable.

Last season of The Sopranos was all wind-up and no delivery. Reportedly, HBO begged David Chase to extend his final season, and last season’s extended (and fruitless, pardon the pun) plot about the gay Vito Spatafore felt like distracting filler. The final episodes of last season were static letdowns. The new season is off to a roaring start, and is showing very little interest in a prolonged, sentimental farewell.

Life hasn’t gotten any easier for Tony Soprano and his crew during the series hiatus. The feds continue to ramp up their investigations, and Tony has been on edge, perpetually “waiting for the other shoe to drop.” His near-death experience did nothing to stem his growing sense of despair, or slow his growing realizations that his whole life has been a pale imitation without substance. Like the Roman Empire in its final decline, nothing can be done to stop the collapse. These final hours of the show portray a haunted Tony Soprano, cursed with the knowledge of impending doom and powerless to stand against it.

If you’re late to the game, it’s still not too late to appreciate the final episodes. The opening tag of “previously on The Sopranos” does a fairly thorough job of filling in the broad strokes background of each episode, and the powerhouse acting is engaging enough to fill in any holes.

The first episode begins with the police knocking on the door of his house, armed with search warrants. “Is this it,” a worried Carmella asks. Is this it, indeed… the only predictable thing about The Sopranos is its stubborn unpredictability. Every moment of the final season so far has been bathed in the acrid sweat of impending doom. In the first three episodes, it has felt increasingly probable that Tony Soprano would whack his brother- in-law, his favorite nephew, or Paulie Walnuts, one of his most trusted capos.

Some of the show’s considerable power comes from this unpredictability. In most television shows, A will always lead to B. David Chase has essentially invented a new language for the small screen, and the narrative rhythm of The Sopranos is what makes it one of the most distinctive shows on television. When Tony spontaneously takes Paulie Walnuts out to sea, conventional television would have those characters unflinchingly executed in the next scene. Chase and company are instead content to let the opposite happen – nothing.

But even nothing is something in The Sopranos’ universe. Paulie Walnuts might walk off that boat alive, but Tony’s toothy half-smile is a tour de force of ambiguity that keeps it compelling on a second viewing. It’s the hunter toying with his prey, deciding life or death on a whim. The ambiguity is powerful because both outcomes are equally plausible. Chase isn’t showing you nothing with Tony’s stasis; he’s forcing you to see all the possible outcomes with equal clarity. A more pedestrian show would fumble about with some forced mis-direction and throw in a pseudo-shocking choice to punch the scene closed. In lesser hands, Paulie Walnuts would have been either unceremoniously dumped into the ocean, or deposited back on the dock with a warm pat on the cheek.

This can get frustrating to watch because audiences generally like closure and The Sopranos has never been much for providing it. Like much of David Lynch’s hypnotic film work, the power of The Sopranos comes from the threat that it will never make any pat narrative sense. Instead the show is sharp enough to create a fantastic set of possibilities, but deliver you to a completely unseen conclusion. In some sly ways, much of the series is about that disillusionment. Life never seems to work out the way you think it should, and if anyone can testify to that, it’s Tony Soprano.

The Sopranos might have originated on television, but at this point it has transcended it. Perhaps the only sure bet is that Tony won’t go out in a hail of bullets like the typical Hollywood gangster. His fate is likely to be much grimmer, one of collapsed potential. I half expect the final image to be of a once proud Tony, caged like a circus lion. Once a symbol of power, now defanged and caged, brought low by the insurmountable march of time.