Nathan for You - "Dumb Starbucks"

For anyone who has never watched the show Nathan For You on Comedy Central, you are missing out on one of TV's strangest, smartest, and all-around funniest shows right now. It's a show that's so unique that it's kind of hard to even explain what it is. It can be explained as a sort of reality/comedy hybrid - a reality show that's making fun of all of the other reality shows. Combined with shows like Review and Broad City, Nathan For You is a show that's helping Comedy Central shed its image of "that channel that plays South Park and airs too much Tosh.0" into one of the most reliably consistent cable networks, offering a slew of strong-voiced comedies that are toying with television formula and creating something that feels wholly unique. (The more I write this paragraph, the more I realize how much fucking greatness there really is on Comedy Central right now and how I need to write a post about this topic sometime soon).

But anyway, let's talk about "Dumb Starbucks", and about how it means this entire blog post is pointless.

Nathan for You is a rather silly show and on the surface it might appear that it's simply a shallow skewering of the artificiality of reality television. But it's a show that, through its hijinks, manages to make some surprisingly poignant statements about natural human reactions. By creating an environment that seems real to everyone involved but that the audience knows is all fabricated, it allows the show to sort of twist the usual reality formula and produce material that is not only hilarious but also kind of...psychologically interesting? Or maybe it doesn't! Maybe it's just a television show, created to make money and maybe to generate some laughs along the way. Maybe the meaning I'm subscribing to it is entirely based on my own perceptions of media and has nothing to do with what Nathan Fielder was attempting to do. Maybe all of this is just total bullshit! Maybe I'm just ranting right now because I feel like I have to because I need to maintain this blog to have some online writing presence so I have the chance of getting a paying job after I graduate college! Maybe none of this is real at all!

This is sort of the point that "Dumb Starbucks" makes. Nathan's Dumb Starbucks restaurant was genuinely not an artistic statement. It was a parody only because the law said it had to be. And yet, so many people saw it and tacked their own meanings on to it, assuming it was an expression against corporate America or a Banksy-esque piece of modern art, and through those tacked on meanings, it became that, at least for those people. "Dumb Starbucks" is not exactly a nihilistic "nothing means anything" lesson. Instead, it's a lesson that anything can have meaning, and that meaning is defined by what other people interpret it as. That's some pretty amazing depth for a show that included a parody of "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction" called "(I Can't Get No) Erection". 

Or maybe nothing means anything.

Summer TV Roundup

Hey guys! We're in the middle of summer right now, and although the summer TV season is more active than it used to be, it's still kind of...not all that active. But! There's a few interesting new shows that I thought I would write a quick word about. So here they are!

The Leftovers on HBO is an intriguing new drama from Lost creator Damon Lindenolf. Much like Lost, it's a show filled with ambiguity and unanswered questions, filled with an addicting sense of mystery and a whole lot of misery. The show is a little bit of a mess - its portrayal of teenagers is often embarrassing and its lack of clear direction can be frustrating - but there's enough good in it that it's worth seeking out.

Married and You're the Worst are FX's newest comedies, both of which are centered around seemingly toxic relationships and the struggle to make them work. Married boasts a hell of a cast, from Nat Faxon to Jenny Slate to fuckin' Judy Greer. That cast alone makes it worth a watch, and although the writing isn't quite all there yet, there's enough potential in its cast and in its premise to keep me interested in where it's going next. You're the Worst, on the other hand, boasts a handful of unknowns, including its leads Chris Geere and Aya Cash, both of whom are immensely talented and seem poised to break out even if this show doesn't pan out. But hopefully it does, because You're the Worst is a sardonically charming little show that could turn out to be something special if given the time.

There is also Masters of Sex over on Showtime, which I've yet to watch but I hear amazing things about. Watch it and tell me how wrong I am for not watching it!

And finally, there's The Strain on FX, which I don't know much about but boasts plenty of disturbing billboards, so there's that.

Season Review: Orange is the New Black - Season 2

Okay, so I was going to do weekly reviews for this show, but then I didn't. So here's a season review!

There was no way for Orange is the New Black to match its first season. It was a season constructed around the idea that people aren't always what they seem to be, and that first impressions and stereotypes often prevent us from seeing the person inside of all of the people in our lives. But the show is now in its second season, which means we already know most of these characters fairly well. Granted, Orange is a show with such a sprawling cast that it would probably take like nine seasons before each character was fully developed and given their own story, but the trick that Season 1 pulled off, the trick where our impression of each character was deliberately challenged and transformed over the course of the season, was only going to be met with diminishing returns in Season 2.

So, respectably, Season 2 of Orange is the New Black decided not to attempt to recreate the magic of Season 1 and instead did what a great second season should do - it took the characters and dynamics established in the first season and expanded on them, dug into them, challenged them, analyzed them, and tried to figure out just what exactly they mean. The second season is a tough hurdle for a television show to overcome, particularly one with a first season that made as much of a splash as Orange's did. In many ways, the second season is the true test for a television show's legacy. There are countless amounts of shows that had big, well-loved debut seasons that fell off in their second years and ultimately became known as shows that never lived up to their promise, even if they would run for several more years (think Glee and, of course, the poster child for this example, Heroes). And while there are a few shows that were able to rebound from messy second seasons (such as Friday Night Lights) most of the best television shows rise to the task in their second years, showing that what they did right in the first season wasn't just a fluke. Think of the second season of Breaking Bad, which took the intriguing premise that the first season laid out and skyrocketed it to full force. Or, the second season of Mad Men, which rubbed its characters' noses in the shortcomings, flaws, and desires that they were lingering under the surface in Season 1. Or look at countless great comedies over the past few years - Community, 30 Rock, New Girl - which took the solid foundations the shows had built for themselves in their first seasons and tore them apart, experimented with them, and used them to become bolder, braver shows. So it's a great relief to see Orange is the New Black put together a daring, ambitious second season that made the show's universe feel more alive than ever.

The strongest competent of Orange is the New Black's second season - and the key to making it work - was empathy. Granted, empathy has always been one of the shows' key elements, but what made the shows' second season so bold was how it forced the idea of empathy to expand to everyone. This was most evident in the way the show handled Pennsatucky and Healy, who had become the central villains of the show by the end of the first season. But rather than doubling down on their awfulness, the show paired the two in a story arc together and asked us to look into them in the same way we looked into people like Red and Suzanne in Season 1. This empathy was also extended to the guards - the Litchfield newsletter includes a section entitled "Guards Are People Too", and that concept ran strongly through-out the season. People like Fig and Caputo were given shades of humanity that weren't granted to them last season, and while we're not supposed to forget that they can do pretty loathsome things sometimes (such as Caputo accepting oral sex from Fig after ratting her out, or the large majority of Fig's persona), we're also forced to remember that they, too, are human. Everyone is. Even the most despicable person, be it Vee or Pornstache, is a human being with feelings and emotions.

That idea sort of creates a warm and fuzzy feeling, but it also contributed to the season being a rather dark season of television - much darker at the core than the shows' generally optimistic first season. The idea that even the worst of us are human also uncovers the worst in ourselves, or in the people we previously perceived as "good" - we look at Pornstache and know he's a vile human being. He raped Daya! He trafficked drugs into the prison and directly lead to Tricia's death! But then we look at someone like Bennett, and what did he do? He...well, technically raped Daya, too. Sure, Daya says she loves him, but who knows if she really does or if she's just responding that way because he's a man in power and she's powerless? He...trafficked contraband into the prison, contraband that could potentially be harmful. We want to believe that Pornstache is the "bad guy" in the store, but is a "good guy" like Bennett really all that much better? That point leads to Vee, perhaps the most terrifying antagonist that Orange is the New Black has introduced in its run thus far. Vee is, most likely, a genuine sociopath, but also an incredibly smart genuine sociopath. She takes the inmates and immediately spots their weaknesses, then uses those weaknesses to manipulate them and take them down to depths that even they probably didn't realize they were capable of sinking to. We watched as people like Suzanne, Taystee, and Red, people we had grown to love, were transformed from the lovable characters we had come to know them as into the hardened criminals we first perceived them as. I've seen some criticisms that Vee was too cartoony of a villain and totally devoid of the shows' signature empathy, and I can't necessarily disagree, but I also don't really care. Vee was such an effecient way for the show to demonstrate how thin the line can be between "good" and "bad", and how uncomfortable of a feeling that is to sit with.

And yet, Orange is the New Black remains a pretty hopeful show. The season ends, once again, with most of the characters redeeming themselves in some way or another, and ultimately favoring the "good" side of the line over the "bad" side. But there's always the feeling lingering around the surface that "good" and "bad" are simply illusions, and that all of us are collections of various emotions and components that can easily be turned into something we never thought we could be. And as long as Orange remembers that, it's going to continue to be one of the most fascinating shows on TV, a co-existence of warmly comforting and deeply unsettling.

Final Grade: A