Sancho Panza At The Wedding Feast

If Deadwood is HBO’s vision of the rapid civilization of America and the creation of institutions to raise order from chaos, then the same network’s The Wire complements it as a chronicle of the eventual failure of those institutions and America’s entropic return to disorder. There is little difference between the nascent gold rush town of Deadwood and The Wire ’s decaying Baltimore. Both are marked by lawlessness in the absence of an empowered and moral government, both populated with essentially good-natured people whose compromises with society have stripped them of any aspirations but survival. But whereas hindsight allows us to view Deadwood as the temporary and messy beginnings of the American empire—and therefore imbued with hope—there is little redemption found in the looking-glass America of The Wire . Together, the series document the beginning and end of twentieth century America, and capitalism’s raising and ultimate abandonment of its cities. The Wire is some kind of mi...

Until a man is twenty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that under the right circumstances he could be the baddest motherfucker in the world. If I moved to a martial-arts monastery in China and studied real hard for ten years. If my family was wiped out by Colombian drug dealers and I swore myself to revenge. If I got a fatal disease, had one year to live, and devoted it to wiping out street crime. If I just dropped out and devoted my life to being bad. From Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson A reverie is not the same thing as a dream, for the reason that it does not allow the possibility of nightmare. We fantasize about our other happier selves, succeeding at everything we fail at, living the full lives we deserve and would have if only we weren’t born so unlucky. Or comfortable. We do not imagine the dark sides of our fantasies, even when they are founded on unpleasant thoughts, such as a traumatic event that pushes us to finally appreciate life. The first time I was tested for HIV,...

There are fifty-three episodes of the late sitcom Arrested Development . This is a longer run than many failed shows are able to achieve, and three or four times the amount of episodes of nearly all British comedy series. This includes Fawlty Towers (12 episodes), The Office (14 episodes), and Monty Python’s Flying Circus (45 episodes). By these standards, it had a good run, and, like those timeless shows, its wealth has been secured for posterity. Why, then, the indignation? Why the great sense of loss? Why can’t we let go of the fact that Arrested Development is dead dead dead, no matter what we heard of Showtime wanting to pick it up or a possible feature film? It debuted in November 2003 to critical acclaim. It was an instant classic, something unlike nearly everything else on television: a single-camera farce, irreverent as Python , fast as Fawlty , and more brilliantly cast and timed than anything since Seinfeld , or beyond. In short, it was the very best comedy anywhere on t...

Most striking about Deadwood , creator David Milch’s revisionist western series, is its sense of place. The show is exquisitely photographed, staged grandly and with an obsessive eye for detail, and cast perfectly. It is less a narrative than an evocation of a lost place and an elegy for a lost time. I recall Deadwood the way I recall real towns; it has the ability to ignite all of my senses. The muddy streets, the glowing lamplight, the never-ending din of the bustling crowds, the stink of manure and human filth, and the sweet tickle of a lady’s perfume are all impressed upon me as truly and permanently as the heat-stroke sewer-stench of Manhattan and the baker-blessed stoniness of Paris. Deadwood is the new paradigm of the west, the way Saving Private Ryan became the template for cinematic combat. Everything before was whitewashed kid’s stuff, typical Hollywood misguided refinement, or ignorance. Deadwood is early America as rough and Darwinian, survival of the meanest, and all i...

This month marks the tenth anniversary of the premiere episode of Buffy The Vampire Slayer , and I am celebrating the event by watching the entire series from first to last, a feat I have never accomplished. It is not that I never had the motivation: Buffy caught my attention in its second season with a series of episodes that succeeded at doing things that no other show had even attempted. I had settled easily into Buffy’s universe, a funny, scary, sincere take on the horrors of high school that played like the best satire: so strange and implausible, its truth hits like a mirror on the forehead. But it wasn’t enough that each episode concentrated the monstrosity of growing up into actual monsters (the girl so unpopular—so invisible—that she actually became invisible; the roving band of bullies whose malevolence was supplemented by their being possessed by hyena spirits), the makers of Buffy gave their characters such depth and authenticity, and then put them through such terrors, ...

Tonight: TV Wasteland, or: In Between Episodes . On last week’s broadcast of the radio show This American Life , host Ira Glass confessed his love for The O.C. He actually listed all of his favorite modern TV shows, but most striking was his passion for that prime-time teen soap opera. You see, Ira Glass is your classic smart guy, the host of an NPR radio show and certified horn-rimmed glasses-wearing hipster nerd. (If you are not fond of either hipsters or nerds, don’t be put off—the positive qualities of each cancel out the negative qualities of the other. Think John Cusack in High Fidelity .) I missed The O.C. , so I cannot speak for it, but Mr. Glass made a good case for why he loved it—or how he loved it. It was a regular highlight of his week, a time when he and his wife could sit together (on the couch, I presume, under a comforter and behind an array of fabulous comfort foods) and follow a serial drama, presumptively played out smartly and honestly, but not without its share o...

We are in the midst of a presidential election here in France. I have not followed it except in the international section of the British newspaper The Guardian, where I also read the news of the American election a full year-and-a-half before it will take place. I will write with as little hint of ignorance as I can. The candidates here are M. Sarkozy, who currently holds some kind of office and is the chosen successor to the retiring President Chirac. He has been in a tight race with the Socialist candidate Mme. Royal, who has caught flak recently for undervaluing her expensive vacation home on her tax documents. It turns out this socialist candidate is quite a wealthy person; she is one of those people who would lose out in the socialist equalization of wealth. M. le Pen represents the far right. I know little about him, except that some raw graffiti on a wall we passed on our country hike declared him the Nike Hitler and that he belongs in his tomb. France is a country in turmoil, b...