I'm working on it!

Sorry I've been MIA. (Holidays. You know.) I'll be back soon, however, with some SERIOUS writing on...

Chuck.

Stay tuned.

-T

RIP: Brittany Murphy

My thoughts and prayers are with Brittany's family and friends. Especially now that it's Christmas. What a terrible thing--I am sad, because she was so very young, and the movies that she made--they brought me tons of joy over the years. I won't forget you, Brittany. I know you're somewhere glimmering, now, ghetto fabulous sweet, rollin with the homies in that place where starlets go when they die too young.

Farewell, pretty lady.

Memory, Perception, and Point of View: The Merit of "How I Met Your Mother," Pt. 2 of 2

"How I met Your Mother" loves to play with time and temporal markers, meditating on how memory works, and how sometimes, memories can bleed into one another or get mixed up. For example, in episode 3.17 The Goat, we’re introduced, for the first time, to Missy. Missy is a goat brought into Lily’s kindergarten class as a visitor with Farmer Frank, who drunkenly explains to Lily’s students that right after this Missy is going to be slaughtered. Lily, “in a fit of mercy,” purchases Missy and brings her over to Ted’s apartment where she hopes to stash the goat until Monday when animal rescue will come to pick her up. That’s when we get our first shot of Missy the Goat in the bathroom. Future Ted tells us, “…What Missy the Goat would go on to do in that bathroom was so—” and then he stops himself and qualifies, “No, you know what? I’m getting ahead of myself. We’ll get there.” Future Ted is the one telling the story. This is first person POV, and so this kind of thing is okay. It’s credible, and we believe it. We’ll also keep watching to find out what the deal is with the goat in the bathroom.

Anyway, all of this, future Ted tells us, takes place the week of his thirtieth birthday, the week of his surprise thirtieth birthday party, the week Barney slept with Robin and then hires Marshall to find a loophole in the Bro Code (Another integral part of the “HIMYM” world) so that he can stop feeling so bad about it. All of this, future Ted’s voiceover says, “brings us to April 25, 2008, my thirtieth birthday, or as it would come to be referred to in later years, the Day of the Goat.” After a quick phone exchange between Lily and Barney, at which time Lily says, “You gotta see it! It’s so much fun having a goat at a party!” the voiceover continues, “In a few short hours, Lily would come to regret those words.” There is suspenseful music, and then we get a repeat shot of the goat in the bathroom, but we aren’t going to learn about the goat right now, and future Ted assures us, once again, that “we’ll get there.”

“The Goat” is a turning point episode, in that Ted experiences some serious emotional trauma after learning that Barney slept with Robin and, in turn, telling Barney that he doesn’t want to be friends anymore. At the end of the episode, Ted arrives at his surprise birthday party by himself, and then the episode does that thing that “HIMYM” does when it’s at its best: it reveals itself to be a narrative that is not only about how Ted Mosby meets the woman of his dreams, but about friendship, love, and loss during those strange transitional years that exist between college and adulthood. After Ted arrives at his party, there’s a shot of Barney, torn, sitting alone in a limousine, empty glass in his hand after having just been dumped by the person who, as we understand it, he values most in this world. We are distracted, because it is sad. We’ve forgotten about the goat.

Break. When we return, we get one last shot of the goat in the bathroom. It’s got a pink towel in its mouth, and future Ted is back with this closing bit of voiceover: “Oh, right, the goat! So funny. You’re gonna love this! So later that night, the goat locked herself in the bathroom and was eating one of Robin’s washcloths and—Wait, hold on. Robin wasn’t living here on my thirtieth birthday. When did this happen? Oh, wait. The goat was there on my thirty-first birthday. Sorry I totally got that wrong.” Cue credits. We’re left sort of speechless. Why?

Because future Ted has just redacted what we thought was going to be an integral part of the episode. Yes, it seemed integral at first, partly because, well, the episode is called “The Goat,” and also because that shot of the goat in the bathroom kept showing up, and future Ted kept assuring us that, eventually, we’d get there. We’d get to what happened with the goat. We never got there. This feels like a trick, like a gimmick only there for a laugh, but it is, in fact, an earned ending. While we’re waiting for the goat story, what we don’t necessarily realize right away, but what we begin to realize over time, is that this episode is not about the goat at all. This episode is about the the consequences Barney must face after having slept with Robin, and it’s about Ted’s friendship with Barney. Remember how Ted talks early on about his box of stuff that he doesn’t need anymore? Well, that turned out to be foreshadowing, as he later groups Barney in with the stuff in that box, and now, instead of thinking about the goat, we’re thinking about Barney and Ted, and their friendship, and what this means for next week’s episode. So we may be surprised in the end, but we’re not too disappointed, because the narrative has successfully distracted us from the goat. Future Ted has forgotten, too, about the goat, as he’s telling the story. We know this, because in the end we get an “Oh, right. The goat!” and that’s when we learn that it’s all been a big mistake, the goat is next year, and now we have to wait a long time to get the exciting conclusion. That’s alright, though, we’re not concerned with the goat. We’re concerned with Barney and Ted.

Here’s an instance of two memories that bleed together in future Ted’s retelling, but it’s not enough that they just bleed together. Again, this is is not a gimmick, and I think it might be safe to argue that the reason these memories bleed together is thematic in nature, and that they have much more in common than the simple fact that they both take place around Ted’s birthday. Both The Goat and the episode in which the goat narrative wraps up, season four’s finale The Leap, deal with Barney and Robin’s relationship—The Goat being the catalyst, and The Leap being, well, the leap, and the fruition. They get together. Sort of. That’s not the point. These two episodes deal with Ted at great milestones in his young adult life. Ted is our guy, but he’s obsessed with compartmentalizing, and he wants to plan everything, and he wants everything to go to plan. In fact, it makes total sense that, twenty years from now, Ted Mosby sits down with his two kids and proceeds to tell them the ENTIRE story of how he met their mother, because that’s how Ted works. He obsesses, and he is meticulous. He’s an architect. He plans things, and, well, he’s kind of a romantic, but he’s also naïve. Both The Goat and The Leap meditate on Ted’s inability to control the world around him.

In The Goat, he decides not to be friends with Barney anymore after Barney sleeps with his ex-girlfriend, breaking the bro code, and defying Ted’s expectations—all of this, regardless of the fact that he’s moved on from Robin, and that Barney actually has feelings for Robin. She was not just a one night stand to him. In fact, Barney’s feelings for Robin are what complicate and pressurize much of season four. Of course, we know that Ted’s decision to dump Barney in The Goat will not be easy, but he makes the decision, like that, and it’s not until later, when Ted gets into a car accident, and Barney is injured trying to get to him, that Ted realizes Barney’s importance as a friend, and that, sometimes, actually being a friend is a little bit more complicated than the list one might make on a piece of paper of the things friends should and should not do.

In The Leap, Ted, unemployed and looking for work, is asked by a couple of potential clients to design for them a tourist restaurant in the shape of a cowboy hat. He designs the building after three very hard days, and they reject him. Then, after Ted’s party (which he didn’t attend), his rejection, and the run-in with Missy the goat (goat pay-off…finally!), the group sits down with Ted to console him, and Lily begins to talk about how things change, and how nobody’s life turns out the way they’d always imagined when they were younger. “I have to be an architect,” Ted says. “That’s the plan.” “Screw the plan,” says Lily. “You can’t design your life like a building. It doesn’t work that way...Listen to what the world is telling you to do and take the leap.” Then, there is the actual, proverbial leap, when everybody literally jumps from Ted’s roof over to the better-furnished roof nextdoor. Hey, this is a great show!

Essentially, these memories bleed together in the retelling, because they both deal with similar plot and thematic milestones for Ted, and since this is future Ted’s story, we’re sort of at his mercy. Also, this type of overlapping of memories and events (which actually happens a lot in “HIMYM”) simply goes on to create an ever larger, more credible, three-dimensional world for these characters to run around in. What’s so great about all of this, is that Ted Mosby, our protagonist, is an architect who, at every pass, attempts to design his own life (like Lily said), but the structure of the show "How I Met Your Mother" is entirely based on memory, and it is often told in a way that is, in fact, non-linear. Future Ted is always sort of getting lost, mixing things up, exagerrating, and outright changing things. It’s like the structure of “HIMYM,” or the outcome in the retelling, is a a manifestation of its character’s goals, and of the show’s central theme, which I think Lily lays out rather plainly for us in The Leap: “You can’t design your life like a building. It doesn’t work that way. You just have to live it and let it design itself.” And that’s what memory is. Memory is not what really happened. It is, in fact, quite different than reality. It’s a perception of what happened, dependent on us and how observant we are, what we do and don’t remember, how we remember, why we remember certain details over others, and memory sort of redesigns and reimagines itself as we get older and farther away from the thing we’re trying to recall. “HIMYM” is doing the same thing: constantly reinventing itself, changing its story, creating elaborate schemes in which memories are intertwined and updated in new and challenging ways. It’s why we keep watching. It’s why we love it so damn much. 

Memory, Perception, and Point of View: The Merit of "How I Met Your Mother," Pt. 1 of 2

I've written a somewhat longish essay about the use of POV and memory in CBS's "How I Met Your Mother," a show that, I think, is television's greatest sitcom since (and in the vein of) "Arrested Development." By longish, I mean that this essay is too long to be published entirely in one post. Therefore, I've decided to split it up into two posts, one to be published today and one tomorrow. Alas, Part 1 shall commence...NOW. Enjoy!

“How I Met Your Mother” is all about memory. The point of telling is twenty years in the future, and it’s the only real instance of voiceover that I love on television, because “HIMYM” is not just using voiceover as a trick or as a way for the audience to cheat themselves into the mind of the protagonist. That’s lazy writing (like in "Dexter," which I love, but that voiceover is SO unnecessary). Instead, Bob Saget’s perfectly pitched dad-tone voiceover does a lot of work, and it’s a serious part of the show’s infrastructure as a thematic building block and an experiment with memory. In fiction, first person point of view is based on perception, what the narrator remembers, how he or she remembers it, and what he or she forgets or skips over. In television (and in film), this type of POV is difficult to pull off. Most of the time, the POV in film and TV is third person omniscient, moving in and out of certain situations, and it may follow one person more closely than others, or, more often, two people, sometimes (like in "Friday Night Lights" or "Mad Men") many more. For example, in Sleepless in Seattle, we get two very solid third limited POVs, one with Annie and one with Sam, and it’s when they collide that the tension really sizzles. There’s one or two moments of limited third on Jonah, too, like when he and Jessica are purchasing the airplane ticket, or when he’s on the plane, or when he’s waiting on the top of the Empire State Building by himself. That third person, then, really zooms out and becomes totally omniscient when we see the map of the United States and the dotted lines that represent Annie’s plane rides across the country. This is a sort of basic example of what I’m talking about, how POV works in film and TV.

The first person POV is usually attempted via voiceover, like in American Beauty, or in "Dexter," but usually, this fails, because even with the suspense of disbelief created right away in American Beauty when Lester tells us that he’s narrating from beyond the grave, are we supposed to believe that this is still Lester’s POV when we’re in Ricky’s house and Ricky’s father comes in and asks for a urine sample? Or that it’s still Lester’s POV when Ricky and Jane are making that video in Jane’s bedroom? Are we supposed to believe that, just because Lester is dead, he knows all this now? Doesn’t that then cause all sorts of problems for the physics of the world in American Beauty? There are serious issues here, but these issues don’t seem to matter as much in film and on television as they do in, say, a novel or a short story, because film and television have the luxury of visual distraction. American Beauty is a fantastic narrative, and without the voiceover, a perfect narrative. So why the voiceover? Because it’s a sort of trick, and it lets the audience feel like they’ve been let in on a secret that the rest of the characters don’t have access to. That’s how "Dexter" operates. We know what Rita doesn’t know, and so we will usually sympathize with Dexter over Rita, even after he’s just finished lying to her and she’s angry. In "Dexter," the voiceover gets us to sympathize with a character who might otherwise seem unsympathetic. "House, M.D." on the other hand, gets along fine without a voiceover, even though its main character is a douche bag, because unlike Dexter Morgan, who is a serial killer (and a blood spatter analyst), Gregory House is a doctor, and we want to trust doctors. We don’t need that extra boost. So in “Dexter,” maybe the voiceover helps, but it’s certainly not necessary. In fact, it might be much more interesting if we weren’t always in Dexter’s head.

Back to "How I Met Your Mother." Future Ted’s voiceover in “HIMYM” is not a trick or a ploy to illicit sympathy when there are moral or other ambiguities going on the narrative. “HIMYM” is the only show on television (that I can think of, at least) that has an unreliable narrator, and it’s the best show to really mess with memory and to meditate on how we remember things. "Scrubs" is the next best thing, I think, but "Scrubs" isn’t what it used to be, and J.D.’s voiceover is in the present tense, and so it is more about interiority, fantasy, and self-reflection. J.D. is not really telling the story. He’s thinking about the story, and we’re let in on his thoughts. For example, the opening of the "Scrubs" pilot: J.D. sits up in his bed. His voiceover says, “Since I was a kid I’ve been able to sleep through anything. Storms, sirens, you name it. Last night I didn’t sleep.” J.D. goes to the bathroom, sprays a dollop of shaving cream into his hand. “I guess I get a little goofy when I’m nervous,” says the voiceover. Then, we get a couple shots of J.D. with a shaving cream bra and shaving cream muscle lines. Funny. J.D.’s voiceover says, “See, today isn’t just any other day. It’s the first day.” Then, J.D. says to the mirror (outer story J.D., this is a line of dialogue, the first real line of dialogue), “I’m the man.”

Okay, so we’re given J.D.’s actions. He gets up, goes to the bathroom, plays with some shaving cream. These things are funny because of J.D.’s voiceover, his interiority (or interior monologue) in the moment. There’s a small tension when J.D. tells us in voiceover that it’s his first day and that he’s nervous, and then he says outloud to the mirror, “I’m the man.” We’ve already got a little inner turmoil here. There’s already some conflict, because WE know that J.D.’s nervous, because of his interior voiceover, but his actions reflect confidence, and we’ll keep watching, because we want to see how things play out. The voiceover in "Scrubs" creates a different kind of tension than it does in “HIMYM”, but it’s still doing a lot of work and is, in its own way, necessary. It’s a self-reflective voiceover, and it allows for quite a bit of silly stuff to happen (because this is J.D.’s head, right?) without us wondering what is and isn’t real. The exagerration is in the moment. "Scrubs" is about perception and escape, whereas “HIMYM” is about memory, and what it means to have a memory, and how memory works.

Memories change. There’s tension when, in “HIMYM,” memory is altered, like when the terms “bagpipes” or “eating a sandwich” are used instead of the actual terms for what future Ted’s talking about: loud sex and smoking pot. This type of tension is what creates much of the humor in the show. At first, future Ted is using these phrases supposedly to save himself from having to divulge sordid details to his children, to whom he’s telling this very long story (in the outer story of the show—realize that almost all of “HIMYM” is exposition), but in the meantime, a running joke has just been created, and then when it’s repeated, builds itself into the structure of the world. This is sort of a basic tactic in writing. Writer and fabulous teacher Ron Carlson always says, “If you want to make something real, tap it twice.” Once we hear two references to “eating a sandwich,” the joke becomes not just a joke, but a credible part of the world, and we believe it without even flinching, so that in a later episode, when we hear a reference to Marshall and Lily “eating a sandwich,” we know exactly what that means, and there’s comedic pay-off. It’s funny, because it’s an inside joke between future Ted and the audience. Marshall and Lily aren’t actually in on the joke. In fact, the characters in “HIMYM” aren’t actually in on a lot of the things we, the audience, find funny in the show, because the humor exists not so much in what they’re doing, but in how Ted remembers, and how Ted relays the story to his children and, by extension, us. (...)

Check in tomorrow for Part II: Temporal markers and The Goat; Memory and The Leap

Authority Rules: The Merit of "Glee"

"Glee" brings to television something that I thought we'd lost a long time ago--something seemingly gone with the days of "Freaks and Geeks" and "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," "Dawson's Creek" and "Gilmore Girls." "Glee" is about a merry band of misfits, teenagers who don't rule the school or ride around in limousines or subscribe to the pitiful, contemporary stereotypes engrained in our psyches by blond (wealthy) idiots like Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie. "Glee"is a show about acceptance, about friendship and leadership and staying true to oneself. It's about having conviction. That said, "Glee" might seem to embrace cultural stereotypes of teenagers (ie: pregnant cheerleader, Tracy Flick type, dumb jock, fashion-conscious gay kid), but it, in fact, does not. It does the opposite.

I've learned a lot here at UCI, and one of the things I've learned is that everything's been done. Everything in the whole wide world has been written already--every kind of teenager and every kind of person in the whole entire world. That said, stereotypes are not real. They do not exist in the real world. They exist only as a way for us to mentally categorize information. For example: Even the most stereotypical Orange County housewife (in the real world) will wear a funny hat every once in a while, read Charlotte Bronte, and smoke cigarettes on the porch while humming old Sex Pistols tracks. These things go against stereotype. She's still considered a stereotype, however, because she's tan with expensive highlights and breast implants, and she drives a Range Rover and wears a big, diamond watch and neglects her poor, stereotypical Orange County children who do stereotypical drugs like cocaine while she flirts shamelessly with the stereotypical pool boy. You see, stereotypes don't exist in the real world, and they only really exist in fiction, movies, or television when a writer (or writers) choose to write idea at the expense of characterization. This is usually a consequence of laziness, inexperience, or a simple lack of talent. We see this on a lot of shows, namely (and since we're talking teenagers), "Gossip Girl."

See, I stopped watching "Gossip Girl," because every time its writers come close to true characterization, like with Chuck Bass, they slack off and rely on our generic understandings of youth and money, sex and revenge, rather than excavate an understanding of these things that is unique to Chuck. Of course Chuck Bass acts out the way he does. He's a rich heir from the Upper Eastside of Manhattan, and he's got daddy issues. We can understand that, because we've read Fitzgerald's "This Side of Paradise" and because we've seen "Dead Poets Society." That's not characterization. That's laziness. It's not intelligent TV, so I don't waste my time with it anymore. "Glee," on the other hand, makes quite a bit of commentary on stereotypes, because it reinvents its stereotypes and develops its characters by giving each of them a unique perception of the world. Quinn is a pregnant cheerleader...whose parents kick her out of the house, who lies about the identity of the father of her child, who allows herself to be manipulated by a desperate woman, who, despite her sweet looks and social status, still feels like a misfit every single day. Puck is a big, dumb jock (AND a pool boy)...who eats dinner at home in front of the television with his mother, who is Jewish, who plays the guitar, who must struggle with the fact that the girl carrying his child doesn't want him around, who steals money from the bake sale to pay for sonograms, who quits football to join, well, Glee. 

Anybody who watches "Glee" knows that it is not simply some throw-off teen romp full of bubble gum and stereotypes (as it may seem, I think, to some people). Quite to the contrary--"Glee" is, at times, deeply serious, deeply heartbreaking in its examination of teenage life. In this way, it is like "Freaks and Geeks," but it is better than "Freaks and Geeks." I think of that scene in Wheels, that gloriously orchestrated scene that juxtaposes Kurt practicing scales on the piano and his father receiving a hateful phone call pertaining to his son's sexuality. This scene sort of chewed me up, spit me out weak. It is almost unreal. It's a product of perfect editing, perfect pacing, writers with knowledge of not only juxtaposition of visual and aural queues, but also of cultural tensions, familial tensions, and tension in general. This scene is pretty much a how-to on writing suspense, and it's an example of suspense that works and feels very real while existing outside the moronic realm of an action flick. It's scenes like this one that, the moment "Glee" gets too silly or goes to town with our suspense of disbelief, pretty much throw our heads through a window, place our feet firmly on the ground and remind us that silly and music are not all this show has to offer. It becomes a very adult show in these moments, a show that discusses homosexuality, teen pregnancy, people with disabilities, financial stress, marital tension, issues of self-worth, and more. Wheels, I think, is this season's best episode, with Mattress at a close second for its emotional excavation of Will in moments of unspeakable revelation. I have to say that I didn't know Matt Morrison could act like that. He had me at hello with those curls and that voice, but that's not all. Dude's got chops, and I'm looking forward to much more of Will Schuester.

One last thing on "Glee"--I'm really digging the new Naturalistic camera work. By that, I mean, the shaky cam, that sort of documentary-style camera work that "Friday Night Lights" has been working for four years. I think some critics get on "Glee"'s case for its supposed inconsistent tone, but I think they're missing the greater significance here. The story is this: "Glee" can get away with pretty much anything it wants. It can use Naturalistic camera work in one shot, and take a more traditional approach in the next, and it can use Surrealism in its musical numbers, and it can use voiceover whenever it damn well pleases. "Glee" is so well-paced, and it has such fabulous authority that it can get away with anything. Seriously, when have you ever watched "Glee" and thought, Wow, these writers really don't know what they're doing, do they? No! They always know exactly what's going on. It's not "Lost." We're never caught wondering, watching as the writers so obviously try to shake loose from their own shit-tastic, labyrinthine handy work (note: I love "Lost"). It's not "Mad Men." It never feels sort of slow or cyclical. It never makes me want to gouge my eyes out with frustration (note: I love "Mad Men.") It's "Glee." This is the merit of "Glee." The Magical Realism and all that suspense of disbelief that we feel: It's all earned. The writers, the performers, the directors, the producers--they own each and every episode they put out. They make it their own, and it's this authority, this commitment to pacing, to plot, and to character that allows them to get away with pretty much anything they want. Like I said, "Glee" is about conviction, and this show's got plenty of it. Plus, and I don't think anyone can disagree with me here, it's entertaining as hell. So where's the love? I love "Glee." It's quickly becoming one of my favorite shows and, I think, one of the best shows on television.

(Watch "Glee" at hulu.com.)

Christmas TV Episode #1: "Smallville"

1.) "Smallville" 5.9 Lexmas (Watch it now here, or for more choices, try here.)

This list has has been dedicated to counting down what I believe to be ten of the most unexpected and fantastic Christmas Episodes on semi-contemporary television. There are a lot of great shows on this list, a lot of shows ten thousand times better than "Smallville," (I mean, "Six Feet Under" is ten thousand times better than most shows) but Lexmas is a rare and singular example of a true Christmas episode, an episode of television that uses Christmas as, not only an active setting for its characters to run around in, but also as a catalyst for specific events, themes, and tensions that end up playing a large role in the continuity of the series.

Lexmas is easily the best episode of "Smallville," and uncontested as the greatest Christmas episode I have ever scene. It's affecting and incredibly sad, the story of a Lex Luthor that could have been, a story of difficult decisions, love and loss, and heartbreak. Lex Luthor's life has been an accumulation of broken promises and myriad casualties, and he's frail because of it, broken down and shredded, with pieces missing, and he is haunted by the cold, immovable fear that he will always be alone, and that this, in the end, is what will drive him to destruction, to evil, to the Lex Luthor we have come to know as, not morally ambivalent or vulnerable or young, but Superman's arch nemesis, the man who cannot control his own fate and so seeks to control the world's.

"Smallville" might, to the casual observer, seem to be all about Clark Kent, the mere identity crises, confusions, and tribulations of a strapping, young Superman. It is, in fact, much more complicated than that, or, much simpler, depending on your perception, as "Smallville" is really about choices. It's about the choices we make every day, to leave someone behind, to reveal a secret, to betray a friend, to get married, to have children, to leave home, to come home, to kill, to forsake our families, to trust, to run away, to love with our whole hearts, to give up, to keep going, to disobey, to do the right thing--It's about all these choices and more, and the people that we become because of them. In Lexmas, which is a sort of modern-day adaptation of It's a Wonderful Life, only in reverse, Lex is faced with a choice. The choice he makes in this episode decides much of the man he is to become.

Up until now, we've seen Lex do terrible things, seen him make terrible choices, but there's always been hope for him. He and Clark have tried to be friends, and sometimes it seems they really are. We know he values Clark's friendship, but he's also insatiable and suspicious, and he cannot trust. We know he's terrified of becoming his father, of becoming the very embodiment of the greed and the bitterness that he's been surrounded with his entire life, and we know he's afraid, or unable to love. In episode 4.10 Scare, a deadly neurotoxin is leaked from a lab in LuthorCorp, a toxin which causes its victims to enter a perpetual state of their worst nightmare. When Lex is infected, his nightmare, we learn, is particularly terrifying: We see him standing in the middle of a stark, post-apocalyptic world, surrounded by death, and smiling. Lex's worst nightmare is to find joy in the act of causing pain to others. Of causing death. Scare, I think, imbues Lexmas with a very interesting and complicated resonance. We know Lex's worst nightmare, and now, we must sit and watch as he allows it to become him.

Lex stands so close to the darkness, to real evil, and yet he's always staring back through some window into the life he's always wished he could have, at the seemingly lost possibility of righteousness, wondering what happened and how he can scratch his way back in. Lexmas allows for a real manifestation of that window, and now, the window is open. After getting shot by a couple of bad characters in an alley in Granville, Lex nearly dies, and in his state of near-death, he is ushered into an alternate reality by an apparition of Lily, his dead mother. This reality, she promises, can be his should he make the right choice in the end. We then navigate this reality with Lex, who's baffled but quickly adapts to its inherent happiness. This is a reality wherein Lex has forsaken the Luthor family and fortune, seven years in the future. He is married to Lana, and they have one son and a baby on the way. They're living the middle-class American Dream in a country home in Smallville, and it's Christmas Eve. He is good friends with Clark (which, we're reminded, is very important to him), and Clark's father, Jonathan Kent, has been elected Senator. Lex and his son Alex buy a Christmas tree together. It's learned that Chloe's book, an expose on LuthorCorp, (pioneered by an "anonymous tell-all source"--obviously Lex) is being published in January, and Clark is a reporter at the Daily Planet. Later that night, at the Kents' Christmas Party, Jonathan reveals that the governor has chosen Lex to be the recipient of the Kansas Humanitarian Award. Jonathan even gives a toast to Lex. "Ladies and gentlemen," he says. "I give you Lex Luthor, the finest man I know."

After the toast, Lex goes out to the porch and his mother appears to him. "I can't remember ever being this happy," he says. "This has been the best day of my life." She tells him that he can have everything, all of this, if only he'd "follow [his] heart, not [his] ambition." So much hope and saturated golds and Christmas reds and greens imbue each shot in Lex's alternate reality, that we can't help but wonder if, somehow, he will make the right choice, and he'll come out of this thing, not only alive, but better, a better man, "the kind of man," Clark tells him out there on the porch, that "[Lana] could love." He doesn't make the right choice, however, and the reason for that is not something I'll reveal to you here. If you've seen the episode, then you know what I'm talking about. If you haven't, you should watch it, because Lexmas is an episode that tries to make us understand the plight and descent of not just an icon or a character from popular culture, but a man. "Smallville" has done such an interesting job humanizing its characters, turning the idea of Lex Luthor and his many appropriations and all-too farcical contrivances into a man. The best characters are the ones that we can recognize from all angles, the ones that exist in our memories, as not just notions, but as walking, talking human beings.

Lexmas is a landmark in the downward spiral of Lex Luthor, his deterioration as a man, and his final true pitch into corruption and evil. The choice that he makes at the end of Lexmas is not sudden. It is the culmination of countless tensions and events orchestrated perfectly up to this moment. This choice has been swimming beneath the surface for five seasons, and now the writers have chosen this moment, Christmas, for it to rear its tragic head. This development is devastating in a lot of ways, as it diffuses any hope we may have had for Lex Luthor, hope we hold on to even though we know that the path he must take is inevitable. We all know how it ends. "Much like Ebeneezer Scrooge," Lex says at the end of Lexmas, "I realized that what I want more than anything is to live happily ever after. And do you know what the secret to living happily ever after is? Power. Money and power. See, once you have those two things, you can secure everything else...and keep it that way." Michael Rosenbaum's Lex Luthor is stoic but uncertain, right on the edge of vulnerable. The range of emotion that he uses with Lex is what, I think, makes his Lex Luthor the best and most dynamic Lex Luthor of all. Oh, this is a Christmas episode for the ages.

Here ends the Best Christmas TV Episode Countdown. Maybe, someday soon, when you're feeling merry and yule-happy, or maybe when you just need a forty-five minute break between shopping and baking, you'll find some use for this list. So happy watching. Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night. Of television.

Christmas TV Episode #2: "Party of Five"

2.) "Party of Five" 3.13 Christmas (Watch it now on hulu.com.)

"Party of Five" is a type of drama that doesn't really exist anymore. It's about family, and I can't really name any shows on right now that deal with and try to understand the same types of messages and situations that "Party of Five" excavates each and every episode. Off the top of my head, I come up with "Supernatural," which does sort of deal in some heavy familial issues, but the Winchesters are only two brothers, and they don't keep a home, and they don't have to deal with paying the bills or taking care of younger siblings. They don't live in the sort of mundane reality that resembles our own. They're almost like superheroes, so it's not the same. There's "Friday Night Lights," which does give us a sort of close examination of the Taylors and their home life. We get a lot of their dynamics as a family and their situation in Dillon, TX, but "FNL" is still one of those multi-POV shows, like "Mad Men" and "The Wire," and whole episodes will pass without addressing real familial conflict at all. That doesn't make it any less of a show, it just makes it a different type of show than "Party of Five," which is a show about family in the most unrefined sense of what that word, family, and what family really means. And what family really means is not something I'll attempt to list for you here on my TV blog. It's a million things, big and small, and this episode, I think, is one of the most nuanced examples of what this show can really do as a drama about family, and the emotional gravity it can achieve without feeling entirely sentimental and overwrought.

"Party of Five," in case you don't know, premiered in 1994 and was actually supposed to be cancelled during its second season due to low ratings. Fox kept it around, however, after it won the Golden Globe for Best Drama in 1996, and the show then aired for six seasons until 2000. It never really did do well in the ratings, but then again, most compelling dramas don't. Again, I refer to "Friday Night Lights," which is, I think, the best show on television right now, and nobody watches it. Don't ask me why. Anyway, "Party of Five" is about the Salinger family, five brothers and sisters whose parents were killed in a drunk driving accident about nine months before the time period of the pilot. Charlie (Matthew Fox), Bailey (Scott Wolf), Julia (Neve Campbell), Claudia (Lacey Chabert), and Owen (he's the baby--so multiple actors) live together in their parents' house, and the show is about them dealing with the tribulations of, not only growing up, but of growing up without their parents. They learn to depend on each other in ways they didn't know they could, and they also learn that they can hurt each other. I think "Party of Five" is particularly deft in how it captures sibling rivalry without ever forgetting its characters or letting things come to cliche. I always say that sibling dynamics are the hardest to write. The writers on this show, however, really get it.

"Party of Five" deals in quite a few heavy-handed themes (alcohol abuse, depression, cancer, teen pregnancy), but unlike a lot of other family-geared shows of the era, "Party of Five" never really gives off that "Tonight, on a very special episode" vibe. Instead of relying on the audience to sort of insert their generic understanding of these larger issues, or other smaller, family-related issues, "Party of Five" localizes them to the Salinger family, and instead of sort of talking to us, the audience, or into some void that I like to call the Danny Tanner Void (You know, when he sits the girls down and gives them this generic, all-encompassing lecture that could really apply to anyone, and so it is lost?), the characters talk to each other. They lecture and listen to each other. They argue, and there's always agenda going on--no character is ever lost at the expense of message. Plus, the acting is impressive. Some of the greatest moments, and the greatest performances in this show belong to a young Lacey Chabert, whose monologues often have the ability shake me loose and bring me to tears. She doesn't have one in Christmas, but she does share a couple poignant scenes with Charlie, one particularly poignant interaction toward the end, and it really is one of those things. She goes outside to the porch, looking for "somewhere where no one else is," which is such a lovely notion, really, when you think about what it must be like to live in a house so full of people. On the porch, she finds Charlie. "It doesn't really feel like Christmas in there," she says to him, and then there's a certain honesty in her voice and on her face as she's talking to her much older brother about things like happiness and what it means to have something of your own in this world, and there's such sadness, such wisdom for such a young girl to possess. You can't help but believe her.

This episode, unlike some of the others on this list, really feels Christmassy. It's not without its conflicts, though, as a major discovery about Grandpa Jake leaves us weak with worry, and Charlie's inherent optimism, his constant search for a life and goals of his own, are thwarted, once again, by things beyond his control, and Bailey's apathy is beginning more and more to resemble alcoholism, and Julia and Claudia, the women of the house, feel that their family, torn in so many ways, is sort of hanging by a thread and that there's nothing they can do to save it, and there's a real hopelessness here that you can feel, but it's Christmas. Grandpa comes over, and these conflicts are not defused, but they're sort of laid down one by one, tucked away just for the night, and the episode ends with Julia and Claudia, cleaning up after dinner, singing "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas" in a perfect, perfect scene that, in any other show would go completely unearned.

I really miss "Party of Five," because like I said before, there's really nothing like it, and I wish Sony would just release seasons 4-6 on DVD already. I'd buy it all in a heartbeat.

UP NEXT: #1! Wait for it...

Christmas TV Episode #3: "The West Wing"

3.) "The West Wing" 2.10 Noël (Watch it now.)

"The West Wing," epic and magnificent as it is, this foray into American politics and the nuts and bolts of democracy, is really, at its core, a treatise on personal histories, friendship, and (excuse my language) the politics of the heart. Noël is a study in this hypothesis, an episode of "The West Wing" that deals primarily with the personal dilemmas of its characters and secondarily with the political, press-related, and national security dilemmas of the White House. Like "Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip," "The West Wing" is a show about a workplace, but also like "Studio 60," on "The West Wing," workplace-related ordeals are not separate from the ordeals and agendas of its characters. Often, the two are directly related, either literally or symbolically. The affairs of the White House affect and are affected by the characters that handle them, and no character is ever lost at the expense of political wonk or consternations of national security. There is a fair bit of shop talk in "The West Wing," but it's well-written, and you don't necessarily have to understand it all to know what's going on, or to have a good concept of the gravity of the circumstances. Sorkin is a genius in writing mood and frustration. He gives his characters things to talk and rant about, and then they run around and talk and rant in their own fabulously unique ways. It's all about the characters. They're credible and dynamic, and we'll follow them pretty much wherever they want to go, regardless of whether we know what they're talking about while they get there.

In Noël, we see Josh Lyman (the role that Bradley Whitford was born to play), Deputy White House Chief of Staff, meeting with an ATVA psychologist Dr. Stanley Keyworth (guest star Adam Arkin) to discuss and come to terms with his recent symptoms of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Josh's PTSD is a result of the Rosslyn, VA shooting at the end of the first season, during which two gunmen fired shots into a crowd of Bartlett Administration players on their way out of a town hall meeting. Josh and President Bartlett were shot, and Josh's injury was critical.

Noël is masterful in its examination of sound: music, especially. The introduction of the brass quintet, and then the bagpipes, and finally the cello, played in a special appearance by Yo-Yo Ma, build and evolve throughout the episode, and are eventually transposed over the sound of sirens. The transposition illustrates Josh's constant reliving of the shooting at Rosslyn, and how, in his perception, the music equals sirens, a perception that is triggered by the PTSD and causing him to have a meltdown. This meltdown culminates about five days prior to the outer story, when, after the Congressional Christmas Party and the performance by Yo-Yo Ma, Josh goes home and injures his hand by cutting it on some glass. 

The hand injury, and how Josh received the injury, is sort of the crux of this episode, so I won't give away too much information here. Josh claims to have hurt it by setting down a high ball glass too hard on an end table, but it's clear from the get-go that this is a fabrication of his broken mind. It's also clear that getting Josh to recount what really happened to his hand is Stanley's goal in getting Josh to acknowledge his PTSD. The hand injury and Stanley's frequent repetition of the question "How did you hurt your hand?" is, essentially, the driving catalyst behind all the in-scene exposition of Noël. 

The outer story of this episode is simple: Josh sits and talks with Dr. Stanley Keyworth, ATVA psychologist, for several hours on Christmas Eve. The majority of this episode is conducted through exposition, flashbacks that begin about three weeks before the outer story and end with Josh injuring his hand after the Congressional Christmas Party five days ago. This episode uses flashback in various ways, particularly snap flashbacks full of aural and visual parallels to the outer story, and repetition of these snap flashbacks to create a visual tension for Josh's fractured memory. (Note: I'm using the term "snap flashback" because I don't know what else to call it. What I mean is a very quick flashback, almost impressionistic.) In particular, the repetition of a snap flashback in which Josh does set down a high ball glass too hard on the table (while it's clear that this is not what actually happened) really nails the idea of repression, and how capable the human mind is of altering memories that are painful. Here's that Sorkin social consciousness again. In Noël, he acknowledges the true nature of PTSD, that it is not simply a stigma applied to Vietnam and other war Veterans, but a serious psychological condition that can affect anyone who's been involved in a traumatic situation--even the Deputy White House Chief of Staff. 

Whitford's performance in Noël will shake and startle you. It's so controlled, yet unexpected, because the Josh Lyman character is very much about confidence, snark, and arrogant charm (not to mention intellectual superiority). To see him stripped of his composure, of his control and then shucked down to sheer fear and frustration, a pulp of his former self, is unnerving. His fragility is so intimate that, at times, it's almost uncomfortable to watch. But then again, this type of intimacy seems to be Sorkin's best and most unacknowledged specialty. So it works, and we watch.

I think the best part of this episode is in the above clip, when, after Stanley finally dispenses Josh into the world, diagnosis in hand, and Leo McGarry is waiting for him in the White House lobby. Josh is surprised, and then Leo tells him a story about a man who falls into a hole, and here, in this scene, is what I'm talking about when I talk about politics of the heart. "As long as I got a job," Leo tells Josh, "You got a job." Like I said in my post about "Studio 60," Aaron Sorkin has this uncanny ability to encapsulate moments and themes that, in the hands of a lesser writer, would almost always reveal as sentimental and schmultzy, and to master them into these moments of pure understatement while still imbuing them with quite a bit of emotional gravity. This moment at the end with Leo is a perfect example of what I'm talking about. I think it really is just a matter of remembering the agenda of each character and not allowing message or sentimentality or formula to get in the way of credible characters and character interactions. I mean, it's not easy, but Sorkin does it anyway.

This idea of character agenda is, I think, a huge part of what's making TV so good these days. You see, television that sticks to formula, like "CSI" or "Bones," must often use its characters as pawns to sort of serve the story, to push the plot forward, mouth pieces for expository information. This doesn't leave much room for credible characterization and agenda. Great TV is really only characters and agenda. Like "Friday Night Lights" and "Mad Men" and, yeah, "The West Wing." What's the "plot" of a show like "The West Wing?" Well, there's a premise. There's always premise, but the "plot," or whatever you want to call it, is really, then, just the result of several different characters sort of bumping into and reacting to each other in a certain setting at a certain time. Sorkin is, I think, the true master of the television character. That's why he's on this list (and lots of other much more important lists) more than once.

UP NEXT: Getting down to the final two! For this next one, think the 90s and a young Matthew Fox.

Christmas TV Episode #4: "Supernatural"

4.) "Supernatural" 3.8 A Very Supernatural Christmas (Watch it now at Youtube.com)

(LIGHT SPOILERS AHEAD) A Very Supernatural Christmas is terrifying. It's one of the show's scarier episodes (RE: Evil Santa), with lots of blood and some seriously creepy ironic old people. That said, lots of "Supernatural" episodes are scary. Lots of them are hilarious, too. I think the true significance of this show, however, lies in its exposition, and how deeply imbued with sadness and loss these boys' lives really are. "Supernatural" is a fairly serious show. I don't just mean Angels vs. Demons or Lucifer and the end of the world. I mean this: Here are two brothers that have lost everything. They're bereft in so many ways. They've watched everyone around them die, and now they only have each other. This history, this dynamic is written so well into the infrastructure of "Supernatural," that when death threatens to take one of the Winchester boys away, and the other reacts so intensely, so extremely, that he would die, that he would sell his soul to save his brother, our reaction is equally extreme. It's heartbreak. Extreme, terrible heartbreak, and if you truly watch and understand this show, you understand that it's about just that: heartbreak, sacrifice, desperation. Demons, Angels, Tricksters, Vampires--these things are the secondary tension in "Supernatural." The primary tension lies in the tragic history of Sam and Dean Winchester, and that's why this episode, A Very Supernatural Christmas, is so goddam good.

At the end of season two, Sam is stabbed and killed, and to bring him back, Dean makes a deal with the crossroads demon, who gives him one year to live, and then his soul goes straight to Hell. Sam has been searching, but there seems to be no way to break Dean's contract. Dean is doomed. Dean sort of accepts his fate, but Sam will not. This episode does a really great job of capturing Sam's frustration, his unwillingness to cope with the inevitability of Dean's demise, as opposed to Dean's resignation of the matter, and then translating all of this over to the template of Christmas. Because Dean wants to celebrate Christmas this year, for the first time ever, and Sam rejects him on the grounds of unhappy childhood memories. This is not the real reason, of course, but it is, however, what catalyzes this episode's massive forays into in-scene exposition.

In this episode, we're given three long, very involved flashbacks, in which mini-Sam and mini-Dean (maybe eight and twelve years old) are spending Christmas alone in a hotel room. The hotel room is brown and gray, and there are fast food wrappers everywhere. The boys seem to have been alone for a long time, because dad is out on "business," and their dialogue implies that this sort of thing happens often. The boys and their dad move around a lot, and while Dean knows the real reason, Sam is still sort of left in the dark.

This scene is incredibly charged with resonance and history (Dean storms out after Sam mentions their mother), and yet the writing is fully conscious of, not only what's happened to them in the past, but also what's happening to them now, or in the future. Sam, in this scene, is inquisitive, resourceful, naive, and maybe a little pessimistic. He talks big, but he's vengeful and impulsive, and he's already showing us hints of moral ambiguity (in stealing his dad's journal and snooping around Dean's gun). Sam's moral qualms, as well as his tendency toward impulsive behavior, really explode in season four, after he loses Dean and consorts with Ruby for four months. By the time Dean returns, Sam is too far gone, too broken and entrenched in the notion of revenge, and there's really no possibility of repair, only forgiveness, and then "Supernatural," like "Buffy," becomes a show about redemption. Dean, in this flashback, is obedient, headstrong, and brave, and he seems to have some greater, darker understanding of the world and their situation that imbues him with a kind of death wish, or desperation, or sacrificial nature. He sleeps with a gun under his pillow, is evasive and condescending, and from this and previous flashbacks, we know that his first priority, as established by dad, is to protect Sam. Mini-Dean's development into the Dean we know today is based in his extreme observation of sacrifice. Not only would he die for Sam, but he's ready to die. He's willing, and that makes Dean, I think, the more sympathetic Winchester.

Even though Dean is characterized as a womanizer, a soldier, the do-now-think-later type, and he can sometimes come off as radical or vicious, he is, essentially, a true selfless character, in that he rarely seeks revenge or power, relief or happiness for the sake of himself. Usually, when Dean seeks these things, he's seeking them for Sam. Sam, on the other hand, is not selfless. Sam is, in fact, quite selfish, and we can see that a little bit in A Very Supernatural Christmas, when Dean tries to convince Sam that they should have a real Christmas this year, and Sam snubs him.

Sam: Look, Dean, if you wanna have Christmas, knock yourself out. Just don't involve me.

Dean: Oh yeah, that'd be great. Me and myself making cranberry molds.

Dean doesn't actually want Christmas for himself, even though he's about be sent into the pit. He wants to celebrate Christmas as a family. Sam thinks about himself. "Don't involve me," he says. Dean resigns. Later in the episode, Dean brings up a memory of a wreath made of empty beer cans that their dad brought home one Christmas. Sam attacks him, because Dean hasn't "talked about Christmas in years." Dean responds, "Well, yeah. This is my last year." Sam says, "I know. That's why I can't...I can't just sit around drinking egg nog pretending everything's okay when I know next Christmas you'll be dead. I just can't." I! I! I! Sam won't sacrifice his own hang-ups to accommodate Dean, who's just sacrificed his soul to save Sam. Then, we move into another flashback in which mini-Dean comes back with dinner and ends up telling mini-Sam all about their dad's true identity as a Hunter. He also tells Sam that it was monsters who killed their mom. Sam responds, "If monsters are real, then they can get us. They can get me...If they got mom then they can get dad, and if they can get dad, they can get us." Dean says, "It's not like that, okay. Dad's fine. We're fine. Trust me." Dean then promises Sam that it will be all better when he wakes up. "I promise," he says. Sam is worried about himself. He's young, sure, but Dean is young, too. Dean is worried about dad. He's worried about them. "We're fine," he tells Sam. Sam doesn't believe him. I'm not sure he believes him now.

A Very Supernatural Christmas is about Sam coming to terms with his own selfishness in dealing with Dean's sacrifice. After they almost die several times before killing a couple of pagan gods, Sam sends Dean out to buy beer and sets up a little Christmas celebration while he's gone. The two drink very strong egg nog (an acknowledgement, I think, of Sam's lingering inability to cope, and a bit of foreshadowing, as Sam does have some minor struggles with alcohol in coming episodes, as with other, more unsavory addictions) and exchange gas station gifts next to a make-shift Christmas tree decorated with car air fresheners. They share a moment in the end, of silence, and it seems like Sam might say something, but I'm so glad that he doesn't, because that silence alone is fraught with more emotional history, sacrifice, and baggage than any words that any writer could ever write. "Supernatural" really is one massive, televised demonstration of resonance. It's a show occupied by silence and sidelong glances, conversations and singular moments that are wrought and heavy with the past. Christmas episodes are always good opportunities for any show to excavate the ever-present emotional underbelly that lingers in the space between two characters. "Supernatural" doesn't really need a Christmas episode to excavate its characters' emotional fixations, but it's got one anyway, and it's a good one. It's a really, really good one.

UP NEXT: "I've been down here before, and I know the way out." Yo-Yo Ma and Christmas meltdowns in the White House.