Dispatches from The Vast Wasteland

The 2010-11 TV season winds down tomorrow. Over at The Vast Wasteland blog at ChicagoNow, I review the series finale of The Chicago Code, which comes to a satisfying if lamentable end; and I speak with Bill Lawrence, co-creator of Cougar Town and Scrubs, about the former show's second season finale Wednesday night. Check them out, shan't you?

Place your bets, Windy City

Illinois Governor Pat Quinn has gone on the record supporting a casino in Chicago, an idea which has also been previously endorsed by new Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel. Whether this long-discussed, often-thwarted plan ever becomes a reality remains to be seen. But any gambling enterprise that may set up shop in my hometown would be wise to tap into the parochial nature of Second Citizens. Might I suggest a few locally-flavored odds for future Chicago bookies to consider.

Ending On A High Note: A Few Great Season Finales

The 2010-2011 network TV season draws to a close this month, sending us out into invigorating, socially well-adjusted, outdoor summer evenings (okay, fine, sending us flipping over to repeats and catch-ups on Netflix). In honor of this bittersweet time, let’s talk favorite season finales.

By no means is this meant to be a best-of-all-time catalog, since I can’t pretend to have seen all sixty years worth of television (careful observers will note that all of these episodes aired in the last two decades). Nor is this even a comprehensive list of my personal favorites. I have no doubt that I’m omitting some wonderful specimens from shows I love - Cheers and Homicide: Life On The Street come to mind - but which I simply haven’t seen recently enough to recall sharply. I’m also excluding series finales, which aren’t fair to compare given their built-in emotional triggers.

So, feel free to jump into the comments and share your own favorite, and tell me exactly why I’m an irredeemable soulless idiot for leaving it off the list.

(Oh, do I even need to add that spoilers follow? Well, this is the Internet, so yes. Yes I do.)

Buffett Vs. Scott - The Tale of the Tape

 

The season finale of The Office, already stuffed to the gills with prayers for view-errr, I mean, guest stars, recently added investment mogul Warren Buffett to the roster of famous people who will jockey for the resume jewel of managing northeastern Pennsylvania's most famous branch office. The Sage of Omaha is as hallowed a name as there is in American business, but he's known primarily as a savvy investor rather than a leader of men and women. So how would he stack up against the man he'd be replacing, veteran manager Michael Scott? Let's go to the tale of the tape:

Anti-Superman screeds are moronic - but not because Superman's fictional

The hysterical kerfuffle over the latest issue of Action Comics, in which Superman renounces his American citizenship, has predictably inspired a huge amount of jingoistic blathering. And of course there have been plenty of calm, well-reasoned rebuttals from people who actually understand the point of the story and who aren't, y'know, morons.


But one counter-argument I've heard around the Twittersphere - partly in jest, partly not - basically amounts to, "Calm down, Superman's not real." There are many valid reasons to reject the anti-Superman screeds, but this isn't one of them. If you believe that fiction has a serious role to play in demonstrating and shaping societal values, then it's perfectly reasonable to be angered by a work of fiction that seems to spit in the face of the values you cherish - or worse, one you once regarded as sharing your values which suddenly seems to upend or reject them.

Words worth a thousand pictures

I’ve been reading Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere recently - fulfilling my duties as both a Sandman devotee and a literary Chicagoan, since the book is April’s selection in our Public Library’s “One Book, One Chicago” program. As any Gaiman reader would expect, the story is propulsive and chock-full of rich world-building and encyclopedic literary allusions. But at times, I feel like the strictures of prose lead to pitfalls that a comic book would skip over: some of the characterizations are a bit too on-the-nose, and descriptive passages occasionally lean on triteness.

And then I come across a passage like this one (which I quote here without context in order to prevent spoilage):

“The marquis felt, then, that much of what he had gone through in the previous week was made up for by the expression on Hunter’s face.”

Only pure prose can render that moment so perfectly. In a comic book, the expression on Hunter’s face would have to be drawn by an artist, who interprets the meaning of the sentence and the scene a certain way. The reader’s interpretation of that drawing may, in turn, diverge from the artist’s intent, but will nevertheless be restricted to the range of emotions conveyed by a particular physical image.

As it stands, that passage encapsulates the competitive advantage of a verbal medium. By relying on the limitless malleability of language, Gaiman allows every reader to process the meaning in her own way. In that sentence, Hunter’s expression might be one of anger, shock, bemusement, respect, relief, astonishment, joy, disbelief. It might contain any combination of those emotions. So it contains all of them, while stating none of them. It’s a Schrödinger paradox of a sentence. It forces the reader to do a bit of work, to invest himself in a way that a visual medium cannot.

ATTENTION STARZ: I have your next historical-but-not-really drama right here

Followers of my Twitter feed will not be surprised to learn that I've been brushing up on my mythology - specifically, Edith Hamilton's Mythology, a sort of greatest-hits compilation of the gods and heroes of Greek, Roman, and Norse legend. What remains striking about virtually every one isn't what they reveal about the values and mentalities of antiquity so much as what they reveal about timeless human nature. This isn't a terribly original observation, but it's true: the roots of all storytelling are here.


Anyway, the one I'm really loving, one of the preeminent stories of its time but lesser known today, is the saga of Theseus. He was Athens's greatest hero, and dude was a straight-up knight of the realm: brave, just, and wise. And his story would make for a pretty kick-ass graphic novel or 13-episode TV series.