Mad Men Report: Star Trek: Strange New TV with 'The Good Place,' 'This is Us,' 'Easy,' 'Pitch,' and 'Speechless.'

Captain's Log: We are one week into our mission of indefinite length.  There is a wealth of new Television shows arriving, many of which are quite promising as distractions from my renewed interest in Star Trek.  I look forward to reviewing the new prospects but dread the loss of time that I could spend watching the Shat enunciate.

The Good Place

Heaven is real and it's very exclusive.  That's the concept behind the new NBC comedy The Good Place.  Paradise meets trouble when Eleanor Shellstrop arrives by some divine bureaucratic mistake.  Eleanor, played by Kristen Bell of Veronica Mars and appliance advertisements fame, is a garbage person.  She is entirely selfish and narcissistic but lucky enough to have slipped through the cracks in the pearly gates.  In The Good Place's non-denominational Valhalla everyone is matched up with their "soul mate."  Eleanor enlists the help of her one and only, an ethics professor played by very promising unknown William Jackson Harper, to keep her secret while My Fair Lady-ing her into the kind of person who deserves to be there.  Meanwhile, the flaw in the system is creating headaches for Michael, an angelic branch manager of sorts played by the legendary Ted Danson.  The Good Place starts off slow, as is to be expected with the exposition required by the setting, but with Parks and Rec's Michael Schur behind the scenes and a strong cast things are looking up.

Star Trek threat level: 8/10

This Is Us

It's hard to know how to feel about NBC's new drama This Is Us.  On one hand, it is incredibly well written and beautifully acted.  On the other hand, an actor distressed with his crappy sitcom job seeks comfort from his sister who is 97% just Molly from Mike and Molly.  The show follows four people who share a birthday and much more.  Smallville's Justin Hartley plays the aforementioned actor and Chrissy Metz of American Horror Story plays his sister, who I honestly can't describe in any better way than to compare her to Molly from Mike and Molly.  Her story line is to the Mike and Molly pilot what the Anne Heche/Vince Vaughn Psycho is to the original Psycho.  Sterling K. Brown, who just received an Emmy for his work on American Crime Story, plays a well-to-do family man seeking out his biological father.  Finally, Milo Ventimiglia and Mandy Moore play a couple starting a family.  This Is Us is full of wonderful dramatic moments, several surprisingly smart and subtle funny moments, and one or two bizarre, possibly problematic moments; in other words, it has the makings of a very fine drama.  It also has Milo Ventimiglia's butt, if you're into that kind of thing.

Star Trek threat level: 7.5/10

There's no party in the pilot.  When is the party?

Easy

Netflix's new anthology series (eight episodes with eight different stories, not segmented by seasons like American Horror Story) set in Chicago is a comedy about love and sex and dating.  The creative force behind Easy is acclaimed indie film director Joe Swanberg, who specializes in such topics.  The first episode follows a married couple struggling with the diminishing certainty of gender roles.  Andi is a career woman and Kyle is a homemaker/actor.  There aren't a lot of surprises and personally, as a hip, young, single, wild and crazy guy I have no investment in a marriage, but the rest of the series seems worth watching.  The cast alone is certainly promising, with appearances from Malin Akerman, Orlando Bloom, Dave Franco, and even Marc Maron playing a character who isn't Marc Maron.

Star Trek threat level: 6/10

Marc Maron seen here playing Marc Maron on Maron.

Pitch

Like many others, I tend to believe that baseball is among the most boring of the major sports, but it makes for damn good film.  Bottom of the ninth, bases loaded, tied game, two outs, two strikes.  Alfred Hitchcock would call that "laying the suspense on a little too thick."  It's surprising there have been so few TV shows about the game, the NSFW Eastbound and Down being the best the subgenre has to offer.  Until Pitch.  The FOX drama imagines the experiences of the first woman to play in the major leagues.  Kylie Bunbury plays the fictional trailblazing pitcher for the San Diego Padres Ginny Baker, who her agent (played by the consistently ferocious Ali Larter) describes as "Hillary Clinton with sex appeal" and "a Kardashian with a skill set."  She is joined by Mark-Paul Gosselaar as the prerequisite wisecracking veteran star catcher who is begrudgingly won over.  The rest of the cast is solid but I'd be remiss if I didn't mention Bob Balaban as the calculating owner of the Padres.  It's a show with a lot of heart and drama that's impeccably well made.

Star Trek threat level: 8/10

Speechless

Comedies about disabled people are tricky.  If Michael J. Fox can't make it work, who can?  The answer appears to be Minnie Driver.  Driver is magnificent as a hyperactive mama bear who goes to the mat and lives there for her son with cerebral palsy, Micah Fowler as J.J.  The pilot reveals and corrects the oversight Driver's Maya has shown her daughter and other son, The Walking Dead's Kyla Kenedy and Spy Kids' Mason Cook.  Maya's much more chill husband is played by John Ross Bowie, a great character actor stepping out of his recurring role on The Big Bang Theory.  The cast is rounded out by the velvet voiced Cedric Yarbrough as J.J.'s new vocal aide.  The show is funny and has heart without coming anywhere near sap territory.  It pains me to say this, as it's currently in The Middle's timeslot, but Speechless will make an excellent addition to ABC's Wednesday night lineup of family sitcoms.

Star Trek threat level:8/10

Mad Men Report: TOS: 'Atlanta,' 'Better Things,' 'One Mississippi' and 'Queen Sugar' are All New TV Shows

♫I'd like to buy the world a coke♫

Guess who just finished Mad Men?  I'll give you a hint.  He's got a dumb blog and now he has to explain the concept of a dumb feature on it for the eighth time, a duty that has just become even more complicated than it was before.

I think the only way to tell this story is with a sparse use of flashback.  The time is spring, 1992.  The world is enthralled by the latest moving picture, White Men Can't Jump.  Now we skip forward, but still not to the present.  The time is late summer, 2015.  Cinema is dying and in its place Television is growing in both popularity and artistic merit.  Our hero has just begun to enjoy one of the most acclaimed Television series of the era, Mad Men.  He partakes in this endeavor even though he is just weeks from a brand new batch of series arriving, many of which will call for the time he has just devoted to Mad Men.  He decides to rate these series based on their capacity to distract him from the beloved period piece.  Now we arrive in the present, roughly a year later.  Our hero finishes watching Mad Men just as a new fall TV season is about to begin, but has committed to this feature on his blog so he must find a new measuring stick.

That stick shall be the legendary science fiction franchise known as Star Trek.  Our handsome and debonair protagonist has seen about five sixths of the late 60's original series that started it all and one season of the reboot Next Generation that premiered in the 1980's.  In honor of the recently celebrated fiftieth anniversary of The Original Series he has decided to finally commit and make Star Trek his number one Netflix priority.  First, he will finish the last half of the last season of Kirk and Bones and Spock's 3/5 year mission, then watch The Animated Series in its short entirety, then the remaining six seasons of The Next Generation, and so on, as well as any motion pictures in between.  This seems like a good time to remind the audience that our hero has been calling himself a hero this whole time.  And now, he begins this many, many, many years mission to watch strange new TV shows and offer brief opinions on them and rate them based on whether or not he'd rather watch them over Star Trek.

Better Things

Since 2011 Pamela Adlon has helped Louis C.K. make his show one of the best things on TV and now he is returning the favor as producer and co-writer for Adlon's starring vehicle.  Adlon's character is named Sam instead of Pam, but aside from that the show is mostly based on her own life.  Sam is an actress of both face and voice (you probably know Adlon's voice as Bobby from King of the Hill or any number of other cartoons), and she is raising three daughters alone.  Better Things is funny and sweet and full of fun cameos from people like Julie Bowen and Constance Zimmer.  Better Things is more accessible than Louie and every bit as funny.

Star Trek threat level: 7/10

Atlanta

I can't tell you how relieved I am to discover that Donald Glover is still funny.  Once one of our generation's most promising comics and star of the hilarious cult classic NBC sitcom Community, Glover has spent the last few years focusing on his career as sensitive guy hip-hop guru Childish Gambino.  As the creator and star of Atlanta, Glover brings humor and heart to an exploration of his hometown, the epicenter of Southern hip-hop.  Glover plays Earnest "Earn" Marks, a smart, enterprising guy with a crappy job and a baby daughter, who involves himself in his cousin's rising rap career.  Alfred "Paper Boi" Miles, Earnest's cousin played by Brian Tyree Henry, has more street cred than Earn but isn't sure he wants it.  Keith Stanfield, Straight Outta Compton's Snoop Dogg, plays the goofy stoner philosopher Darius at the head of Paper Boi's entourage, of which he might be the only member.  Also, the city of Atlanta is another character but let's just pretend I didn't say that weird pretentious thing even though it's kind of true, I hate myself.

Star Trek threat level: 9/10

One Mississippi

Tig Notaro has become one of the greatest comedians of our time by telling deeply personal stories.  She's the living embodiment of "tragedy + time = comedy."  In her new Amazon series One Mississippi she's using that equation to create a hilarious and beautifully heart-wrenching narrative.  The show follows Notaro as herself, recovering from cancer and a mastectomy, returning to her hometown so she, her brother and her step-father can take her mother off of life support.  That's one hell of a first episode.  Few stand-up comics take to acting with any grace but Notaro is like a fish in the water.  Tig's characteristic deadpan is complimented by John Rothman as her cartoonishly stoic step-father and balanced by Casey Wilson as her very L.A. girlfriend Brooke.  All of this is based on Notaro's actual experiences, allowing her to create the latest in her long line of profoundly honest comedy.

Star Trek threat level: 6.5/10

Queen Sugar

For a while it seemed like OWN would be the closest Oprah would ever come to failure but Big O's TV network seems to be turning around thanks to director Ava DuVernay.  Oprah appeared in DuVernay's incredible film debut Selma, which likely led the way to Harpo Productions' Queen Sugar.  The series follows a family based in Louisiana that is brought together in the wake of tragedy.  The premise seems familiar and the first episode is a little rocky but it also contains several moments of absolute brilliance.  The whole cast is great but True Blood's Rutina Wesley especially shines with a grace and subtlety unimaginable on the campy vampire funstercluck.  All in all, Queen Sugar has the makings to be the greatest Southern drama of our time.

Star Trek threat level: 7/10

How to Tell if You're From a Small Town

J. Cole is a fairly famous rapper from Fayetteville, North Carolina.  I'm from a small town about 25 miles from Fayetteville.  It has recently come to my attention that J. Cole also thinks he is from a small town and it's kind of breaking my brain.  Earlier this week I listened to the live album Forest Hills Drive, recorded in Fayetteville.  After performing the song "St. Tropez" Mr. Cole explains that it's about coming from a small town and dreaming of more.  This is perplexing me because Fayetteville already has so much more than my town does, like twenty times the population for starters.  I love movies and comic books but there are no movie theaters or comic book stores in my town.  Fayetteville has more than one of both, which is why I drive for 45 minutes every other weekend or so to watch movies and buy comics.  Actually, my town does have two closed down movie theaters, neither of which has shown a movie to the public in over a decade or ever had more than two screens.  Fayetteville has a half dozen fully operational multiplexes, and a mall, and a good sized airport, and the single largest military base on the planet.  This is not a small town, it is a medium sized city.  In his defense, J. Cole is not alone in this delusion.  Taylor Swift also seems to think that she came from a small town, as evidenced by her 2010 song "Mean," in which she declares her intentions to move to a big city.  It could be from the point of view of a much younger Swift who lived in a small town in Pennsylvania, but it is more likely from the perspective of 2010 Swift who had lived in Nashville, one of America's most famous cities and headquarters to the massive country music industry, for the better part of a decade.  I worry that an epidemic is on its way that causes celebrities to be confused about the size of their hometowns so I've come up with a few guidelines to help keep things straight.

You have to leave the town on a regular basis to get the things you want

As previously mentioned, I drive 25 miles to Fayetteville a couple of times a month to enjoy the big city amenities denied to me in my actual small town.  I also work in another city smaller than Fayetteville.  Actually, most people I know have jobs outside of the town they live in.  Small town life is defined by a relative scarcity of resources.  On TV every hamlet has one of everything, but in my experience everything is a little more spread out.  You can get what you want but it's going to eat up some your precious time and gas money.  You can go to a city like Fayetteville that is lacking very little, or you can go to the movie theater in one town or the bowling alley in another or the shopping center in another.  In modern day America living in a small town means leaving it.

You can say "It's a small town you've probably never heard of" and be right

Small towns typically don't have much name recognition.  If a stranger from a distant part of the country is aware of your city and knows what state it's in you are not from a small town.  Nashville is a world famous city and bears a name synonymous with an entire genre of music.  Fayetteville is part of a triangle with North Carolina's capital Raleigh and another major city, Durham.  If someone knows Raleigh and Durham, there's a decent chance they know Fayetteville.  When TV personalities do local promos they say "What's up Raleigh-Durham-Fayetteville."  If Seth Meyers has frequently said the name of your city it is definitely a city.

It takes less than a minute to read the Wikipedia page

An extensive Wikipedia page means two things: there's a lot to know about the topic and someone(s) cared enough about it to put all that information in one place.  The bigger the city the bigger the Wikipedia page.  The page for Fayetteville is about five times the size of some nearby actual small towns.  Small towns are boring.  They don't have identities and there's nothing interesting about them.  Their only claim to fame is the two or three people who made it out and made it big, but usually not big enough for anyone to care about them, including the people in the town.  Fayetteville's "Notable People" section alone takes up almost as much space as my town's entire Wikipedia page.  That is not a small town.

Three Movies with 'Stranger Things'-like Movie Buff Cred

As you may have heard, Stranger Things is Netflix's latest mega-hit series and it is pulsing with 80's nostalgia.  Stranger Things is what would happen if 80's Steven Spielberg invented a teleportation machine and tested it on himself but 80's Stephen King got mixed up in it at the last second and their atoms got scrambled together.  The cast features 80's movie stars Winona Ryder (Heathers, Beatlejuice) and Matthew Modine (Vision Quest, Full Metal Jacket), as well as some kids living the E.T. life and a few teenagers surviving a horror movie.

Mostly.

Stranger Things comes from a long line of homage art.  A good film buff can pinpoint all the ways Star Wars owes a debt to the likes of Flash Gordon and The Searchers.  Stranger Things certainly isn't the first show or movie to build itself around an established genre from an earlier time.  Here are a few films to check out if you like the way Stranger Things likes cool things.

Super 8

The second Super 8 shows up on Netflix again expect to see it in the category "Because you liked Stranger Things."  The 2011 film has all the same influences as Stranger Things but one of them had a hand in creating it.  Steven Spielberg served as producer alongside writer and director J.J. Abrams.  Super 8 is full of nostalgia although it takes place a few years earlier than Stranger Things, in the late 70's rather than the early 80's.  The Goonies/E.T. kids of this movie include excellent performances by Elle Fanning and Joel Courtney along with the prerequisite cool adult Kyle Chandler.  Together they hunt down a mysterious creature, the reveal of which is really quite impressive.  Super 8 takes the film love to a meta degree because the kids' favorite hobby isn't Dungeons and Dragons but amateur movie making, hence the title, a kind of film commonly used for home movies of the time.

Pacific Rim

If there's one thing director Guillermo del Toro is good at it's making monsters.  In 2013 he made his monsters huge.  Pacific Rim tells the story of a battle between giant monsters (Kaiju) who want to invade Earth from an alternate dimension and the humans in giant robots (Jaegers) tasked with defending the world.  Obviously it's an homage to the giant monster movies of old like Godzilla and Gamera, yet still feels like one of the freshest and most original sci-fi blockbusters of the decade.  For the most part, the robots and monsters are the real stars of Pacific Rim but it also features some thoroughly captivating performances from Charlie Day as a frantic, tattooed mad scientist, Ron Perlman as a black marketeer and Idris Elba as an Idris Elba character.  An Idris Elba character named Stacker Pentecost.

Captain America: The First Avenger

I've made no secret about my love for Captain America: Winter Soldier but I'm also a staunch defender of its criminally underappreciated predecessor The First Avenger.  Winter Soldier is strongly influenced by 70's political thrillers but as a World War II period piece First Avenger draws from a very different pool of inspiration.  It has elements of 40's sci-fi but mostly First Avenger is the best Indiana Jones movie since 1989's The Last Crusade; the Indiana Jones series itself being an homage to the action serials of the 1940's.  Director Joe Johnston excels at period pieces and is perfect for an Indy inspired film.  The First Avenger  also introduced the world to Hayley Atwell's Peggy Carter, who more than earned an excellent spin-off TV series with a similar tone but more espionage.





Side note: Three guys looking for their friend who mysteriously disappeared?  I liked it better when it was called The Hangover.

"Sausage Party" is great but is Seth Rogen ok?

For a long time my feelings about the new film Sausage Party were a lot like everyone else's.  I thought "it seems pretty dumb, even for Seth Rogen, but I'm intrigued."  That must be a fairly common reaction to the Pixar-style comedy about talking foodstuffs that is absolutely not intended for Pixar's usual audience.  My interest was increased tenfold when an ad for Sausage Party was shown during a commercial break for Preacher, the TV series also created by Seth Rogen and his production partner Evan Goldberg.  Preacher is part intense drama, part black comedy, and part religious satire.  When I first saw Sausage Party being advertised during Preacher I laughed at the idea of one being promoted on the back of the other as if to say "if you like 'Breaking Bad with more sacrilege' you'll love 'Toy Story with 1000% more dick jokes.'"  I quickly realized that Preacher and Sausage Party are more alike than it seems at first glance, and now that I've seen Sausage Party I can confirm that the two are scarily similar in a way that makes me enjoy both even more, but also makes me a little worried about Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg.

Preacher's recently concluded first season follows a clergyman named Jesse Custer with a dark past who struggles with doubt while trying to lead a Texas church filled with S&M hillbillies, deformed arsefaced teenagers, and star-crossed lovers in mascot costumes.  By the season finale Jesse gets the answers he wants but even more questions and a lot more rage, most of it directed at God.  Sausage Party is about a god-fearing sausage named Frank, with the "gods" being the patrons of a grocery store.  Frank discovers that the shoppers aren't ferrying the food to paradise but to their doom.  They're both comedies with as much existential horror as humor.  They're both about the faithful discovering that the object of their worship is far from perfect.

Rogen and Goldberg (Rogberg) have been working on Sausage Party for nearly a decade but the fact that it was released so close to Preacher is interesting and a little worrying.  I can't help but think that one or both of these gentlemen is experiencing a major mid-life existential crisis and their recent releases are just a part of a pattern.  In the last three years every movie Rogberg has made has either been about growing up, a religious crisis, or the ongoing threat of violent dictator.  In 2013 there was This is The End, in which Rogen and several of his actor friends played themselves as apocalypse survivors who wind up in heaven after a couple of close encounters with demonic forces.  Next was Neighbors, about Rogen and Rose Byrne's married couple who go to war with a fraternity; a literal conflict between domesticity and untethered youth.  That same year saw the digital release of The Interview, easily the most controversial film in recent memory, maybe ever.  The Interview is about entertainment journalists assassinating the very real, very alive, and very dangerous tyrant Kim Jong-un, but the human center is about Rogen's character trying to grow up and take on more serious subject matter against the resistance of James Franco's man-child Ryan Seacrest-type character.  2015 saw The Night Before, a Christmas movie about childhood friends growing up and growing apart.  Finally, that brings us to 2016's Neighbors sequel, Preacher, and Sausage Party.

The stakes just keep getting higher and higher for Rogberg and they're trying harder and harder to grow up while holding on to the goofy blue humor that made them famous.  I'm just not sure they're handling the pressure very well.  They seem to have developed a dim, almost nihilistic worldview.  Maybe they're still a little shaken up after poking the bear by jokingly murdering the bear in The Interview but that doesn't explain the fucked up stuff in This is The End.  Maybe they're just experiencing normal growing pains, or whatever normal is for thirty-somethings who have been among the most influential people in Hollywood since their late twenties.  Maybe they're crying out for help or maybe their films are a perfectly healthy output for a couple of artists struggling with complex thoughts and emotions.  Maybe I end too many blog posts by saying "maybe" a lot but fuck it.  If Seth Rogen can make a movie about a talking weiner why does anything matter?  Maybe life is fucking meaningless.



Side note: Sausage Party is just Preacher with a happy ending, to put it mildly.