What If Rupert Murdoch’s Empire Were Hacking All The Way Down?

Rupert Murdoch owns a lot. That sentence doesn’t even need an indirect object. He simply owns a lot. Of newspapers, of movie studios, of television networks, of television programs, of websites, of magazines, of record labels. He even owns fifty percent of Australia’s National Rugby League. Chances are that of the thousands of pieces of content you interact with everyday, a good third to one-half of them link back to him in some sort of gold-plated game of Six Degrees of Rupert Murdoch.

He now owns one hell of a scandal. Murdoch’s News Corporation is the parent company of News International, which published the British tabloid News of the World. It’s recently come to light that News of the World engaged in phone hacking to illegally obtain information. Earlier this month, British prime minister David Cameron called for a massive government inquiry into the affair, hoping to address claims of hacking and police bribery.

High-ranking British police officials are stepping down. Members of Murdoch’s empire are being arrested. The United States is now getting involved: the FBI just began investigating whether or not News Corp’s violated the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act with the alleged hacking and bribery. Oh yeah, and they might have accessed the voicemails of victims of the 9/11 attacks and the 7/7 London bombings.

Rather than wade into this quagmire and attempt to report on it (there’s plenty of that going on already), I’d like to speculate on what the world would be like if such underhanded behavior pervaded the furthest reaches of Murdoch’s empire. Cue the dream sequence music.

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The Uplifting Pessimism of Louie

We all have dark spots in our brains. Dimly lit corners out of which the nastiest, most unseemly, deplorable thoughts emerge. Like vermin, they scuttle back to darkness the second we shine light on them. We prefer them that way. Few of us have the courage to go in after them, even fewer have the courage to invite them into the light.

Louis C.K. has such courage.

At forty-three, Louis C.K. (née Szekely) has lived a more thorough life than most of us ever will. He’s written for The Late Show with David Letterman, Late Night with Conan O’Brien, The Dana Carvey Show, won an Emmy in 1999 for his work on The Chris Rock Show, written several screenplays, created a sitcom on HBO, starred in several comedy specials including the Emmy-nominated Chewed Up.

Why call C.K.’s life ‘thorough’? He’s also gotten married, gotten divorced, and shares custody of his two daughters with his ex-wife. He’s been through enough crap to know that every bright sun comes with its own dirty gray lining, and he’s unafraid to share that truth with his audience.

You’d know all this if you watched his FX show Louie, for which C.K. recently received Emmy nominations in acting and writing.

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Sunday Reading: A Sordid Cast Around Casey Anthony

I didn’t follow the Casey Anthony trial that closely. There was even a period of time where I thought Casey was the child’s name, and all the talk of nannies led me to believe for a short while that a nanny was the one on trial.

The information mess was cleared up for me in the last week as the country sat through the trial, listening to 911 calls, reliving the horrific details of a little girl’s disappearance. This story didn’t just dominate the news, it smashed through newsroom walls and grabbed microphones away from anchors, demanding it be discussed.

And it’s not surprising we listened, or that the trial itself whirled into town like a travelling circus. Harming children has for ages been represented in our culture as the ultimate crime. The Greeks had Medea. Shakespeare sprinkled his tragedies with scores of child-murderers. Films like Rabbit Hole weave narratives out of normal, twenty-first century people’s primal reactions to an incredible loss.

Writing for the New York Times, Frank Bruni elaborated on the Anthony trial’s dramatis personae. There are the defense lawyers: bird-flipping Cheney Mason and the boastful Jose Baez. There’s Casey Anthony herself, who will the burden of this nightmare long after the relief of a Not Guilty verdict fades. What I found so refreshing was Bruni’s indictment of HLN anchor Nancy Grace:

“No wonder he so thoroughly riled Nancy Grace, who doesn’t need any riling. While other commentators, responding fairly enough to what they were seeing and hearing, put their chips on Anthony’s guilt, Grace bet the whole house on it. Crusaded for it. Brooked no alternate outcome. Ever certain, ever merciless, she’d give 25-to-life to an alleged jaywalker based on the testimony of a 99-year-old with cataracts.

After the Anthony verdict, her wrath was biblical: “The devil is dancing.”

She doesn’t serve the cause of victims with such histrionics. She serves the cause of Nancy Grace.”

Bruni concedes that Grace is a bit of a chicken and the egg question. She wouldn’t be so successful if there weren’t 5.2 million people willing to watch the verdict on HLN. But her ascent is still unsettling, as it represents more people turning to “news” networks for affirmation rather than information.

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Stephen Colbert Granted a Super PAC by the FEC, Satire Abounds

There’s more than one Stephen Colbert. One is a real human being. The other is a caricature of other real human beings (Bill O’Reilly, etc.) played by the actual human being on Comedy Central’s The Colbert Report.

It’s easy to lose track of which one’s which.

Both were born in South Carolina. Both spent their teenage years playing Dungeons & Dragons. Both hold honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts degrees from Knox College (though it may be more accurate to say they both hold the same honorary degree). Both prefer the faux-French version of their last name (/koʊlˈbɛər/) to the actual Irish pronunciation (/koʊlbərt/).

One is a comedian, political satirist, and aspiring musical theatre star. The other is a pundit, journalist, and fearer of bears. One performed extensively with Chicago’s improv troupe Second City. The other performed at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, where he cracked wise about the Bush administration while standing amidst – who else? – the Bush administration.

That wasn’t the only time the caricature Stephen Colbert poked his nose into (or jammed his foot up the rear of) reality. Just yesterday, the Federal Election Commission granted the latter permission to form a Super PAC capable of raising unlimited campaign funds for whatever/whomever Colbert sees fit.

And this is just the latest episode in Colbert’s quest to satirize politics and bureaucracy with his mere parodical presence.

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Saturday Morning TV: SpiderMonster, the Musical

This has been making the rounds, I realize. But it’s still good. By the way, when did Sesame Street turn into Saturday Night Live?

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"Game of Thrones": A Look Back at the First Season

(Only minor spoilers until the last paragraph)

Last Sunday, HBO's Game of Thrones wrapped up its first season. True to the tradition set by its spiritual predecessor, The Sopranos, the penultimate episode was filled with twists and turns, while the finale adopted a slightly more relaxed pace, spending more time setting up the pieces for the game's inevitable second season. But the finale garnered the show's highest Nielsen ratings of the season and, while not quite approaching a True Blood level of popularity, it does demonstrate a slow but steady rise in viewership, and the water-cooler talk about the show seems to have only grown as the season progressed. (It's been fun to watch my friends' reactions on Facebook). 

It still strikes me as strange that the series seems poised to be a success. George R.R. Martin, the author of the original books, worked in Hollywood as a TV screenwriter in the nineties. Because of frustrations over budget restraints, finite casts and specific script requirements, Martin left the industry to write books that were the complete opposite of his television career. His books are gargantuan, feature thousands of characters, and Martin shoved in all the subplots, tertiary characters, graphic violence, and local color that he had been forced to leave on the cutting room floor with so many of his television scripts. The books were a reaction to the world of screenwriting, and were meant to be literally unfilmable. 

I've been reading the books for a good ten years, so when I heard the plans to create an HBO series, I was more than a little anxious. On the one hand, I knew that Martin's sizable list of dramatis personæ and seemingly endless array of subplots couldn't make it to the screen without shedding some weight. On the other hand, when you take away the convoluted plots and the colorful cast of secondary characters, was there anything left of the books worth translating onto screen? The books work in part because of their excess.

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A Few Questions for AMC’s The Killing

Five days later, I’m still not sure how I feel about the season finale of AMC’s The Killing. And the more I ponder the finale, the less sure I am of how I feel about The Killing’s entire first season.

AMC’s most recent foray into original programming billed itself as a cut above your average police procedural, similar to how last fall’s The Walking Dead was billed as a horror serial that you cared about for more than just the gore. This would be more than just an episode of Law & Order stretched out over thirteen episodes. This wouldn’t just be half a season with 24 with less than half the action.

The Killing promised to set itself apart from the Law & Orders and CSIs of the world by marrying the influence of its Swedish predecessor Forbrydelsen with the small-town mystique of Twin Peaks. The deliberate, meticulous pace of the early episodes felt so…European. Each frame bears the weight of a particular Mood. And the oppressive rainy skies and lakefuls of red herrings harkened back to Twin Peaks, the seminal serial drama of the early 90s. If you set a murder mystery in the Pacific Northwest, chances are you’ll warrant Twin Peaks comparisons.

To cut through all of the context and expectations, The Killing pressed ahead on the strength of a single question: “Who killed Rosie Larsen?”

After thirteen episodes, I have a few more.

[I’ve tried to keep it relatively spoiler free after the jump. I discuss the season-ending cliffhanger without revealing any specifics.]

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Television Review: BBC's "Sherlock"

Sherlock Holmes is one of those subjects where the concept has long outgrown the original source material. People who have never read one of Doyle's short stories still can pull up a detailed image of Holmes and Watson in the mind's eye. The fog-laden streets of Victorian London, the cool demeanor of the pipe-smoking detective, the flustered, bumbling, easily befuddled sidekick that is Watson, the magnifying glass used to hunt down those elusive clues, and the cries of "Elementary!"

Except that, well, most of these traits, considered the bedrock of Sherlockiana, really stem from the Bruce/Rathbone films of the 1940s. Doyle's original stories, on the other hand, featured a womanizing ladies man of a Watson, a cocaine-addicted Holmes who was ignorant of heliocentric theory, and a good deal of shoot-outs, boat chases, and fistfights to accompany the ever-important science of deduction. 

As a kid, I loved reading the Doyle stories, and in turn I became something of a Sherlock Holmes hipster, criticizing any Holmes adaptation that was not akin to the original books, and bitching about Watson used to be cool until Nigel Bruce came along and ruined everything. I flat out avoided the 2009 Robert Downey, Jr. film, even though it looked like fun, because of my dislike of turning my beloved Sherlock Holmes into some sort of farcical romp through a whitewashed London. The original Holmes fought against Germans, bigots and Mormons, among others, and if the film wasn't based on Doyle's stories, I wanted none of it. 

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Watching Cable TV Attempt to Broaden Its Appeal

Cable television is often seen as the hyper-specific counterpoint to the broad, all-demographic-encompassing programming of the broadcast networks. A quick scroll through the TV Guide channel shows a myriad of narrowly focused stations, promising shows that appeal to a specific group of people, or dedicated to a specific genre. Hell, the fact that there's a "TV Guide Channel" at all is one of the oft-overlooked miracles of cable TV. 

Yet the concept of the narrow focus of cable is more myth than reality. The initial cable channels that sprung to life in the late seventies weren't remarkable in that they provided something specific, but in that they catered to everybody. Channels like TBS and USA mainly played reruns of old dramas and game shows, with maybe a few movies and Atlanta sports events thrown in. There was very little original programming, and the appeal was deliberately broad. 

In the years that followed, however, cable television began to concentrate on certain niches, and many of these channels make up the bedrock of modern cable television. ESPN did sports. CNN was news. MTV was music. Nickelodeon was for kids programming. By the time that Food Network, the History Channel, and the Sci-Fi Channel premiered in the nineties, the tale of cable appeared to be a journey from broad generalities to a narrower focus. 

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Side Project Shot!!!: An Interview with Mark Stegemann of "Men of a Certain Age"

I've been fortunate enough over the last few months to have the chance to write about a truly excellent show called Men of a Certain Age on behalf of the Good Men Project. Despite what you may think, Charge Shot!!! is not the only love of my blogging life. Don't fret: CS is still my wifey, my own personal queen of the blogosphere. You could call GMP my side chick. If you know anything about the content of the site, you'll appreciate the irony of that metaphor.

Men is a substantial enough show that it's actually a pleasure to recap the episodes (unlike some other shows). Each 40-minute slice gives the thinking watcher a lot to chew over, and GMP readers have happily responded to  my posts with their own responses and questions. I didn't expect, though, to hear the actual writers for the show wanting to get involved in the conversation.

The week after GMP ran my first episode recap, Gmail told me that I had a new Twitter follower, a guy whose icon was a little fat white kid in a red parka. I paid it no mind. When I checked my account a few hours later, I noticed a message from red parka guy: "Loved first blog, boy you really get the show! If it's good for the GoodMen, I'd be happy to do an interview."

I checked the sender again. "Oh crap, that's Mike Royce, the creator of the show," I thought. "Probably should have noticed when he started following me. Egg on my face!"

Little did he know I was concurrently in the process of securing an interview with another writer for the show, this one a guy named Mark Stegemann who'd cut his teeth on Scrubs, a really excellent show that often doesn't get enough credit for its depth and the inventiveness of its style.

GMP ran the interview with Mike Royce earlier this year, and I'd recommend it heartily, and not just because it will mean a slight uptick in my page views: Royce is an incredibly articulate guy who has a lot to say about comedy writing and life both at the age chronicled in the show and in general.

This week, though, GMP published my interview with Mark Stegemann, and it's an equally interesting trip through Stegemann's rap sheet and his thoughts about what it's like to be a younger man writing about guys who could be his parents. At the risk of seeming rude, I'd say you're a fucking idiot if you don't read it.

And you're even more fuckingly idiotic if you don't watch the premiere of Men of a Certain Age, which airs tonight at 10 PM eastern on TNT. Continue...

Is The Office Lost Without Michael Scott?

These final episodes of the seventh season of The Office gave us a long goodbye to Steve Carell's character Michael Scott. If you still keep up with the show regularly you may have felt as if you were being "let down easy." If you're a bit lost on why Steve Carell's character left the offices of Dunder Mifflin then stay with me, it will only take a second to catch you up. Then we'll talk about what this all means for the show.

Basically, Scott still loved his ex-girlfriend Holly. After some classic The Office emotional ping-pong (she's engaged, she's not engaged, he likes her, he's scared) he finally proposes to her and she says yes, so he's off to Colorado to live with her and take care of her elderly parents. It's a nice, realistic reason for him to leave and it shows growth of character while still implementing a bit of tension. He didn't just resign for no reason, but it's not as exciting as Michael Scott dying. So what does this mean for the future of The Office? Will the show be able to survive without its hapless leader?

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Saturday Afternoon TV: 25 Years of Oprah Yelling

Oprah just taped her final episode. Good thing we have videos like this to remember her by.

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Funny Twitter Accounts Worth Preserving

Twitter is so strange. I think we can all agree on that.

It’s a bizarre hybrid of text messaging, instant messaging, Facebook status updates, and self/commercial advertising. Its character constraints encourage both tiresome Internet lingo (“c u l8r”, “lets go to 5 guys b4 the movie”, &c) and creative sentence structure (a good vocabulary helps you express complex ideas in 140 characters). Twitter’s infrastructure is so simple it’s wormed its way onto every web-connected device as well as “ordinary” SMS-enabled cell phones.

Perhaps it is deceptively simple – at least when it comes to entertainment. CBS’s recent cancellation of $#*! My Dad Says (discussed on this week’s podcast) is a reminder that Twitter functions best on its own terms.  It may be funny to read aloud Sarah Palin’s serpentine mangling of the English language to your friends, but her tweets would swiftly fall flat if propped up as anything other than one woman’s (or her publicist’s) inane chatter.

Hollywood and the various TV networks are blind to this. Chasing their audiences like deranged teenage exes, they bottle up any intellectual property the public might possibly like even a tiny bit in hopes of catching lightning.

Today, I’d like to speak up for the humorous Twitter accounts that should be left alone by TV.

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Saturday Morning TV: Social Security…in SPACE

I can’t believe our government spent money on this.

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Workaholics: Capturing the Post-College Malaise

Earlier this month I stumbled upon a new show on Comedy Central called Workaholics. It's not the type of show I would normally watch more than once. Full of bong hits, practical jokes and frat boy antics, Workaholics seemed at first glance a bit "young" for me. The show follows three friends (term used loosely) Blake, Anders, and Adam, recent college graduates and roommates, who work in cubicles in a big telemarketing conglomeration. Much of the humor rests on their debauchery, drug use, and misfortune in love and friendship.

No matter how I felt at the premise of this show by the end of the first episode I realized: I'm hooked. This show isn't just about throwing parties and taking shrooms, it hints at something deeper and speaks to the current situation of the twenty something. Workaholics isn't just getting a laugh from its target audience. It's also eviscerating us.

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Netflix To Offer Original Programming

Raise your hand if you have a Netflix subscription. Given this site's target audience, I'm willing to bet that the vast majority of you are sitting at your desks or on your couches right now, hands upraised, suddenly aware that every eye in the room is on you.

Not content to kill the dated Blockbuster Video model by sending DVDs straight to your house, Netflix is now hoping to succeed in creating original, Internet-only content that it can stream directly to subscribers. The company is perhaps the first with the infrastructure, business model, and subscriber base to make this feasible - in its most recent earnings call, Netflix claimed to have 22.8 million subscribers in the US and an additonal 800,000 in Canada, for a combined total of 23.6 million. As some sites have noted, this makes it larger than any US cable provider (Comcast, the largest of those, claims 22.8 million subscribers).

I can't really say anything about the show itself (a David Fincher-Kevin Spacey drama called House of Cards, based on a BBC miniseries and book of the same name), but I can talk a bit about the implications, both good and bad, of this move. Put your hand down, and I'll meet you after the jump.

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Casting for Political Correctness – Game of Thrones and Fantasy Racism

The first episode of HBO’s Game of Thrones aired just this past Sunday and already there’s controversy brewing: racism.

Our own Jordan Pedersen said nothing about this in his review, but it appears that more than a few TV critics are a little unnerved by the Dothraki, GoT’s barbarian horde. Adam Serwer, writing for the Atlantic, expressed disappointment at the casting department’s choice of “miscellaneous brown people.” TIME’s James Poniewozik wondered if “if it's possible to be racist toward a race that does not actually exist” while calling the Dothraki a “grabbag of exotic/dark/savage signifiers.”

Caveat: I have not read any George R.R. Martin, and I have yet to see Game of Thrones. But this issue is larger than one HBO series (no matter how huge the hype). Racism and other forms of prejudice crop up in fiction because it remains an unfortunate part of society, however veiled it may be.

And while the public seems generally okay with capital-l Literature, etc. exploring such topics (with a few capital-n Notable exceptions), we get nervous when they appear in our pulpier entertainments like fantasy or science-fiction.

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TV Review: Game of Thrones Premiere

Oh damnable hype. The lead-up to HBO's extravagant fantasy serial Game of Thrones has been feverish, with reviews ranging from adulatory (most of the reviews) to glibly dismissive (the ones everyone talks about). It is, consequently, difficult to review the product itself, which premiered last Sunday on the Home Box Office, rather than just run down the hype (which is precisely what I'm doing right now). There's also been a steady stream of behind-the-scenes clips, concept art, and, most bizarrely, stories of environmental atrocities coming from the general direction of the production.

Couple that with the fact that the series is based on an as-yet-unfinished series of novels (collectively referred to as A Song of Ice and Fire) by former Twilight Zone writer and current Psychlo George R.R. Martin, and things get even trickier. After all, I've read a couple of the books myself, which makes it far easier for me to figure out what was going on in the pilot, which was most likely bewildering to anyone who hasn't read the book.

What's a reviewer to do?

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AMC’s The Killing is a Master Manipulator

Murder mysteries are tricky business. The stakes are always clear and incredibly high, but the tried-and-true machinations of the genre can wear out their welcome fast. Shows trying to escape cliché sometimes stretch too far, sabotaging the believability of their creation just to keep the viewer guessing.

Police procedurals like CSI avoid this problem by wrapping up each case within the hour and occasionally tossing in a meme for good measure. David Lynch’s oft-compared to Twin Peaks got by on sheer weirdness. Scores of others adhere to the predictable routine of Crime-Clue-Clue-Solution.

AMC’s new drama The Killing walks and talks like standard procedural fare, but after only four episodes it’s already showing that sometimes mysteries aren’t so simple. (Minor spoilers, I guess.)

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Sunday Reading: Is Game of Thrones Fantasy Crap?

Matt Zoller Seitz has some words for his fellow television critics: cool your jets.

Seitz, television critic for Salon, recently took umbrage at some of his critic colleagues’ thoughts on the much-anticipated HBO fantasy series Game of Thrones. He specifically calls out Slate’s Troy Patterson and Ginia Bellafante of the New York Times for dismissing not only the show too readily but the entire genre of fantasy.

Patterson’s review, “Quasi-Medieval, Dragon-Ridden Fantasy Crap: Art Thou Prepared to Watch Game of Thrones?” channels a faux-fantasy voice that Seitz argues is less a parody of Game of Thrones scribe George R.R. Martin and “more like a goof on what Patterson imagines fantasy fiction to be.” It’s hard not to see Seitz’s point when Patterson begins paragraphs with fluff like: “Thus does the reviewer feel daunted to face an old nemesis at a late hour.”

Seitz then derides Bellafante for pigeon-holing Game of Thrones as “boy fiction patronizingly turned out to reach the population’s other half.” Female audiences are less easily plied, argues Seitz; simply tossing in graphic sex scenes willy-nilly (which Seitz feels Thrones isn’t, anyway) is a way into a teenage boy’s heart, not a woman’s.

That Game of Thrones has elicited such tepid and generalized responses from Patterson and Bellafante is intriguing. That their responses have so incensed Seitz is no less intriguing. It may, in fact, boil down to genre. I know people who can’t get into fantasy because they’re put off by all the funny-sounding names. Seitz believes that such an excuse is just that, an excuse:

“Imagine if a review of Deadwood had mocked the very idea of a Western series telling morally complex adult stories, or if a review of The Sopranos proceeded from the assumption that gangster tales are inherently worthless as popular art. You can't. It's unthinkable.”

We’ll surely have some Game of Thrones coverage over the next few weeks. Be sure to sound off in the comments if you think it’s just fantasy fluff or riveting drama that meets the bar built, set, and raised by HBO.

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