The Quintessential Alabama and Mississippi films

The Quintessential Alabama film: To Kill a Mockingbird
If being Southern before the Civil War is a bad thing and holding onto that Southerness after the Civil War is considered a very bad thing, then Alabama (along with Mississippi) is widely considered one of the two worst states in the nation. Whereas Mississippi has other points of pride that don't specifically bring up its racist history (the blues, aquaculture, the Mississippi Delta, some of the South's more ornate plantations), there's not as much for Alabama to do except own up to being the epitome of the Deep South which would explain the nickname Heart of Dixie. After all, Alabama today is a center of industry and manufacturing which is something present-day Alabama has in common with Alabama in antebellum days.

Candidates for the quintessential Alabama film ranges from dark films like Color Purple while a film like Tuskegee (or what I imagine Red Tails would be like) tries to simply portray heroism without its contrast. Talladega Nights and My Cousin Vinny also come to mind as films with a specific location but I associate NASCAR as being more of a Carolinas thing and My Cousin Vinny lacks a strong regional flavor. I first assumed it was in the Midwest or Not-So-Deep South before looking it up.

The quintessential Alabaman film, therefore, should be a film that negotiates Alabama's racist past with its progress. It should be a film that's unapologetic about the attitudes of its people back in the day. To Kill a Mockingbird has the quintessential hero in a fight for justice that results in his client not being exonerated. It's a bittersweet film in which the main protagonist (the book's narrator) is a young girl who learns that right and wrong are complicated where they live.

It's a good portrait of small-town Alabaman life as told first-hand by an Alabaman.  Although it's primarily known as a book, the film version is iconic enough to appear in the iconic AFI list: 100 Years...100 Movies.

The Quintessential Mississippi film: O Brother Where Art Thou
Mississippi, like Alabama, is known for being the extreme Deep South so we could go for a film that uses the state as a hotbed for hatred such as "Mississippi Burning" or "Ghosts of Mississippi" but look closer (as I did last year on a very touristy trip through the state while staying in Memphis) and you'll see other traits such as their blues heritage, the riverboat culture of the Mississippi Delta, the ornate plantations, and even the fact that they farm fish (aquaculture). Mississippi also has a natural beauty with its swampy magnolia and oak forests that's almost mystical.

The Coen brothers create a strong sense of place in their films and capture that natural beauty out of which tall tales could be spun, the likes of which appear in the travels of Everett, Delmar and Pete. Mississippi is the proud birthplace of the blues in their purest form (as in acoustic, unpolished recordings) which ties into the trademark sound of the inadvertent band formed by the trio known as the  Soggy Bottom Boys. In its early form, Blues was almost indistinguishable from something heard in churches which is why it's also appropriate that there's such elaborate religious mythology.

Remember the talk of elaborate ornate plantations Mississippi was famous for? We see that in the elaborate divide between rich and poor and the class-conscious ex-wife of Everett (Holly Hunter).

Lastly, when I was in Mississippi, a lot of the tourism centered on roads and corridors such as the Blues Highway (running through Clarksdale) or the Natchez Trace and the film emphasizes this geography as well as all the mythical and legendary stuff they encountered was along the road. The character who sold his soul to the devil (Tommy) is even based on a piece of Mississippi folklore about a famous blues guitarist (Robert Johnson) who sold his soul to the devil at the confluence of two major highways in Cleveland, Mississippi.

The quintessential Florida film: Sunshine State

The Quintessential Florida film: Sunshine State

Since Ponce de Leon came to Florida looking for his fountain of youth, the state of Florida has historically been a land of opportunity with vastly different groups of dream seekers -- the tourist industry, Russian arms dealers, Cuban emigres, Latino power players, Northeastern snowbirds, adherents of the philosophy/religion of Jimmy Buffet -- intersecting to make a vast socio-economic web that includes the moderately dysfunctional government we often read about.

There are a lot of great examples of Florida films covering all those different views of Floridian life: Off the top of my head, there's the dysfunctional urban landscape of Miami in Barry Sonnenfeld's adaptation of the Dave Barry book "Big Trouble," the mob film "Scarface" (few know that Al Capone ran much of his Chicago mob operations from Florida), the portrait of Florida as an lavish 50's vacation spot for snowboards in "Some Like it Hot" and "Palm Beach Story," Miami as a happening singles scene in "Hitch," and the more backwater view of Florida as a small-town haven of eccentric characters in "Because of Winn Dixie."

Rather than pick and choose any one specific version of Florida for the quintessential Florida film, I've chosen "Sunshine State" because it includes the intersection of multiple Floridian versions in one Altmanesque whirlwind.

The underrated gem by John Sayles flew under the radar when it was released in 2002 but it's worth a second look. Starring an ensemble that includes Mary Steenburgen, Edie Falco, Angela Bassett, Timothy Hutton, Alan King, James McDaniel, and Jane Alexander, the film centers around seaside town whose tranquil existence is threatened by an enroaching real estate developer.

Florida is largely a state where real estate development is the rule of the land. The city of Miami, for example, is no longer home to the Miami Dolphins, Miami Beach, University of Miami, Key Biscayne, or even Miami airport. As seen below, all those places broke off from the main city proper as the municipalities became dominated by gated communities and developments that encouraged voters to need the city less. Miami, in fact, survived a vote to dissolve the city entirely in 1997.

Steenburgen stars as a chamber of commerce head and overanxious real estate developer who is trying so hard to sell her latest development she doesn't even notice that her husband (King) is suicidal. In my years of local reporting, I have come across these Chamber of Commerce types and these jobs typically require very perky people who speak about where they live like it's shangri-la.

The only reason there isn't enough sprawl to connect the East and West coasts of Florida is through the tireless work of wetland preservationists (what ultimately dooms this real estate venture). The Everglades saved through the championing of Majority Stoneman Douglas who now has a number of streets, statues, and parks named after her in South Florida.

Bassett stars as former town pariah Desiree Perry who got pregnant by the local football star (McDaniel) before he made it big and is now returning to her hometown. She's deciding on behalf of her family whether to sell the land or preserve the special piece of her town. The theme here is Florida being a dream for so many conflicting groups of people is represented here. For Bassett's character and her neighbors, the town represented the opportunity for blacks to have their little piece of the beach. The town also highlights the pockets of poverty found in many a Florida coastal town.

Lastly, we have Edie Falco as Marley Temple who represents the state's evolving tourist industry. Temple, a sixth generation Floridian, used to be a mermaid in one of the seaside attractions that lined the highways before the corporate megaliths of Sea World and Disney World took over. What Temple is referencing, when she talks about her past life as a mermaid, is a real tourist attraction: The mermaids at Weeki Wachi Springs.

 

This is also a Florida thing, as the mermaid shows or the alligator shows that still populate the land today pose all sorts of questions as to how to promote nature, myth, and how not to step on past or future waves of progress in the tourist industry.  

Falco is now an owner of the family motel who's sick of where she's living. Her tryst with a landscape architect hired (Timothy Hutton) by the prospective land developer. It's a metaphor for the past Florida going the way of the future.

As a tapestry of intersecting lives, Sunshine State works as a great scene piece that has aged well and will likely continue to be relevant.

Reexaming Titanic 16 Years Later

If there's one thing the 1997 James Cameron film and the 1912 steam liner both have in common is that they were unprecedented cultural juggernauts. Simply by setting sail out of Southhampton, England on April 10th, 1912, the Titanic set a world record for the largest moving object. Of course, it would go onto set more records later in the week for death and disaster, but it was a symbol of crowning achievement for the guilded age nonetheless

Similarly, no movie had captured the public attention in my lifetime like the film did. It's budget and attention to detail was unimaginable and clearly enhanced the film in an era when the American blockbuster was still evolving as an art form. It's 15-week run as America's number one film (very few films today last more than 2 weeks at the number one spot and I highly doubt any film has gone more than four weeks at #1 since 2000)  and subsequent shattering of a 20-year-old record for domestic gross was ample evidence that this is the film everyone saw if they were alive in 1998 and not living in a cave.

I first saw the film in the theater a few months after its release in my early teens with my late grandfather (on a bittersweet note, this was the last film he saw) and was overtaken with sadness. To witness the senseless tragedy of those lives lost was a severely depressing experience that haunted me for a couple days. I wasn't a film enthusiast back then so rather than admire James Cameron for so effectively depressing the hell out of me, I just wished I hadn't seen the film in the first place.

About nine years later in college, I saw the film again with a more detached emotional perspective and found the film to be a brilliant film and used it as the topic for a term paper in one of my film courses. I no longer saw Titanic as a portrait senseless tragedy but a well-thought out expose on class tension. The tragedy wasn't that a lot of people died but that existing views on class (the fact that lifeboats for third class passengers weren't provided because they'd aesthetically clutter up the deck strolling experiences of the first class is the kind of thing you can go wild with in such an essay) prevented lives from being saved.

Fast-forward to the present where I've become much more educated on the Titanic. The 100th Anniversary of the sinking had an article in National Geographic that spurned my interest along with a recent Reddit question and answer session by a preservationist for the Titanic exhibit. The more I've diven into the research about the Titanic, the more I've realized that the mysteries of the Titanic are unknowable. We now have greater forensic technology to piece together what happened in the North Atlantic at 41'N, 48'W in the early morning hours of August 15th and research and new books have kept going on the disaster but those new books have the effect of disproving what the earlier books said and those new books are in doubt too.

For instance, the Californian and its captain Robert Lord took a lot of heat because they were apparently closer to the Titanic than the Carpathia (the ship that eventually picked up the survivors, making contact with the first lifeboat, approximately an hour and forty minutes after the Titanic sank and everyone not in a lifeboat died of hypothermia from being in 29 degree water) and did not respond to the disaster in time. However, new research by the British Department of Transport and another maritime historian David Gittins have supposedly cleared Lord's name by calculating that the Californian was likely too far away to be able to make a rescue in time. This pushed forward the theory that the ship that the people on board Titanic and the Californian saw over the horizon was a third unidentified ship (The Samson) that was sailing illegally in those waters. The problem with that theory is that another Titanic researcher, Leslie Reade, followed this revelation by consulting Icelandic port records (the Samson's destination) and did the math to discover that the Samson couldn't have been there in time. With that myth debunked, most Titanic researchers are pointing their fingers again at the Californian as the likely mystery ship on the horizon but how does that explain the fireworks seen on the bow of the ship?

These are still issues hotly debated today and whether the water was even 29 degrees or whether anyone lasted more than an hour in the water (see Charles Joughin) were up for debate.

Several of the survivors such as Colonel Archibald Gracie and Molly Brown made names for themselves as amateur historians after the incident and perhaps that's where James Cameron fits in: Cameron pieced together the most exacting details of history he could find while sifting through inexact historical speculation to create a powerful story and perhaps that's as good as one can hope for.

Saturday Night Live: The Ed Norton episode

Watching Ed Norton jump through the hoops required of an SNL guest host with such aplomb
led me to ponder the differences between a great host and a popular one.

In the great AND popular host category, Christopher Walken, Tom Hanks, Alec Baldwin and Jon Hamm have managed to kill it on stage and earn enthusiastic invitations to return simply by virtue of being great actors. In a second category of popular hosts are people like Justin Bieber, Lindsay Lohan (who, thanks to a three-year sting in the mid-aughts, is almost a five-timer), Miley Cyrus, and Justin Timberlake (I'm aware I'm in the minority in thinking he's not that special as an SNL host. I'm not saying he's bad, but can we agree he gets A LOT of praise) who often get glowing reviews if they don't mess up.

In the midst of all this, I was thinking about how even though Ed Norton did a great job unlikely he'll ever get the attention for a great hosting job that someone like Justin Timberlake does even when he does a mediocre job. It's a shame because I think it's more impressive and fun watching a primarily dramatic actor do a redneck accent or an overexcited virgin than watching a popular teen idol marginally succeed at his quest to be liked by a youthful demographic who already likes him or her.

Outside of Norton, this week was notable for me in that it gave the opportunity for the three underused repertory cast members to shine: Aidy Bryant successfully avoided her go-to valley girl character for a whopping three sketches. Maybe she does have some range after all.
Similarly Jay Pharoah carried a sketch without resorting to doing an impression, and Pedrad (who did shine a lot in her first 4 seasons but hasn't had a lot to do this season) got the lead role in a character-based sketch. Pedrad excels at off-beat original characters similar to Kristen Wiig but thanks to the writing staff's restraint, Pedrad hasn't gotten the chance to run any of them into the ground.

In my opinion, the best sketch of the night was the "12 Days a Slave" parody. It was pointed, sharp, and full of odd moments of humor throughout. Hardly fifteen seconds went by without a solid joke.

I think sometimes SNL can be overly comfortable with regional stereotypes which is why the  exterminators sketch left a sour taste in my mouth. The sketch also failed because it didn't develop any of its three comedic concepts (1 People having a meeting  rudely interrupted, 2 Eccentric exterminators, and 3 Diabolically smart possums) well enough for any of the three angles to be
memorable.

I thought the sketch about warning about the dangers of strangers was another big hit for me and had a good kernel of truth as I always felt like elementary school health and safety classes taught information that could be easily challenged (i.e. say no to weed, etc). The props department must have been lazy to not come up with any large desks.

I don't understand why the sketch about the virgin waiters was called "Ruth's Chris." Is that a reference to "Ruth's Crisp Steak House"?  Why do they need a brand name of a restaurant (who might or might not be comfortable with being used in a sketch) for the audience to associate that type of waiter with. I had a similar complaint about Target Lady (as in: Does Target, in particular, have crazy cashiers? If Target isn't specifically being satirized, why use the name?). Although it got humor from a couple crude places, I appreciated the enthusiasm of the quartet of virgin waiters. With over half (3/5 to be exact) of SNL's cast having been there for less than two years, it seems like the writers are trying to mix and match their 15 sketch actors as much as possible so that they might find some chemistry in the group.


Taran Killam's quasi-digital short took too long to get to its first joke although it seemed kind of sad which isn't a good thing if there's not a comic level to that sadness.


The Wes Anderson film, although very culturally specific, was wonderfully constructed. It was the kind of sketch you can watch multiple times and pick up something on new each repeated viewing.

The Rain Man parody looked good in concept but, unfortunately, didn't escalate anywhere. It's an example of a sketch that probably could have been improved if it went through another pass.

On the whole though, this was the kind of episode that was worthwhile thanks to Norton and cast members stepping it up.

Some Notes on the Great Gatsby

My original entry on the Great Gatsby was complete with visuals, videos and a full multi-paragraph review but unfortunately the Blogger software mysteriously deleted it. The moral of the story? Wordpress is the answer.

In any case, here is an early draft of that review:

• A product from Baz Luhrmann, the film was certainly guilty of what TV Tropes (www.tvtropes.org) calls anachronism stew. The clearest examples of this are that much of the diagetic sound track would not have rap music and the costumes would not have been as revealing. This is an unusual case of anachronism stew, however, because it's how the film is marketed:"Come see Great Gatsby with Baz Luhrmann! Watch what happens when Baz Luhrmann mixes up a 1920's story with 21st century sensibilities and various trappings of all historic eras in between." Thus, every historic inaccuracy isn't so much a gaff but an artistic choice which makes the critical viewing experience a lot different. If you're not intimately familiar with the 1920's, it's an instinctual trust that what you're watching is inaccurate.
• In reality, the soundtrack isn't as obnoxious as the trailer made it out to be with a screeching rendition of "Happy Together" combined with out-of-place rap music turned up to eleven. There's maybe two or three rap songs, a nicely reworked "Crazy in Love" (music director Jay-Z felt the need to plug his wife), and a U2 song but also a full orchestration of Rhapsody in Blue and an appropriately placed jazz trumpet. If anything the fast-paced editing was the main culprit for distraction. 
• This film also narrowly beats out the Da Vinci Code for laziest use of stock footage I've ever seen in a film. It was fortunately used in such small doses that anyone hardly remembers
• I imagine the audience score (80% of moviegoers in exit polls liked it as opposed to 50% of critics) was so high because the trailer and Baz Luhrmann's reputation were sufficient enough to steer anyone away who might give the film a thumbs down. In other words, Great Gatsby should be measured more on box office receipts because it already narrowed its audience with a polarizing preview. Previews are not supposed to be polarizing as they are generally created by film studios and not the director and those studios tend to like the widest audience possible. I imagine it was an inadvertent effect. 
• Leo DiCaprio has had some of the best film performances of the last decade and deserves any role he wants, every one of the 51 times he said "Old Sport," I felt he just lacked the presence and gravity to carry it. While he is in his mid-to-late-30s, he plays around 30 which is a bit young for the part. I'm not suggesting Robert Redford is a better actor than Leo DiCaprio, but he looked exactly how Gatsby should as spelled out in the novel: A little older, broad-shouldered, aristocratic, distinguished. 
• The hypervisual style of Baz Luhrmann can be wonderful at times and not work at others. The use of color in certain sequences (like Nick's first party) was especially wonderful in that your eye was drawn to the different colors on every flapper's dress. The tea party seemed like a slightly sunnier version of a Tim Burton film. The junkyard where Isla Fisher's garage was located was depicted as a bleak landscape that evoked more questions than answers and there was probably some symbolic reason as to why some post-apocalyptic landscape would exist between Great Neck, Long Island and Manhattan (if I'm not mistaken Flushing Meadows exists between those two cities, it's a very nice park). I don't suspect anyone thinks there's some consistent visual motif to the whole movie but rather just a lot of nifty things to look at..

• I don't understand why Gatsby drove at super sonic speeds. I suppose at a certain point, the only explanation is that it's a Baz Luhrmann film but I imagine a car in the 1920's was probably going 30 miles per hour at best. 
• On a somewhat related note: I have some cousins who live in Great Neck, New York which is what West and East End are a stand-in for. If you look on Google Earth you can see why the towns have those names. My cousins even showed me a house off in the woods that was supposedly the inspiration for Gatsby's mansion
• Speaking of the mansion, I thought it was a plot hole that Gatsby would have a whole army of manservants. Maybe, he just contracted them for the parties. Wasn't he a humongous recluse?
• Hello, Elizabeth Debicki! I will keep my eye out for your future filmography as you stole the show here

Why is American Horror Story's bizarreness acceptable guilty pleasure watching?

American Horror Story came out of the gate this fall as one of the most anticipated programs. Especially in a weak fall pilot season like this, I knew AHS would be either godawful or massively engaging and that executive producers Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk would leave little middle ground.

The first season of American Horror Story had a certain set of complex rules regarding ghostdom in an extremely unlucky house where nearly everyone who lived on the premises gets murdered and then some. As someone who's not ordinarily a horror fan, the show took me to some dark and freaky places with a certain melodramatic aura characteristic of Murphy's style and that lent ambiance.

The second season, Asylum, was rife with grand potential. On top of being a period piece set in a really intriguing place (a 1950's sanitarium is the kind of thing you'd drop everything to see a History Channel documentary of), the show offered some highly intriguing castings: Jessica Lange as a sadist nun, Sarah Paulson as a steel-willed reporter (anything but her insufferable Studio 60 "comedienne" was a nice turn for her) , Joseph Fiennes as a monsignor, Chloe Sevigny being on TV at all, Zach Quinto as a court-appointed psychiatrist - and pretty much every actor delivered.

The show had a good villain in Jessica Lange's nun who would institute her reign of terror unchecked and a decent wild card in James Cromwell's Nazi doctor, but soon pretty much everyone started turning evil to the point where the show had about seven too many villains and to say that the balance between antagonists and protagonists was off would be a massive understatement. Suddenly, Lily Rabe was possessed by the devil, Zach Quinto (who, for the first time in recent memory, stood a chance of playing a good guy on TV) got possessed by his Sylar character from Heroes, there were aliens and mutant bears (I really wish either lions or tigers were included into the plot so that I could add an "oh my" at the end), and Joseph Fiennes' monsignor became guilty by association because he supported Cromwell's Nazi experiments. At least I think he did. After a while, I stopped keeping track. Was I really supposed to?

At some point the plot became secondary to the proverbial song and dance of the horror genre (hopefully that wasn't too lazy of a Glee reference) and Falchuk and Murphy were clearly having too much fun playing around to pay attention to the important details.


A message board commenter (thsholiver) I came across today wrote:
"I don't know about everyone else, but I at least watch the show for the batshit insanity, and any plot they can work in that doesn't get in the way of that is just a bonus."

The problem is that as the plot drifts down the list of priorities in AHS's storytelling kit, the show gets more and more forgettable. I remember last season for a few strong performances, and a random hodgepodge of standout scenes. Surely, the show benefits from Jessica Lange's "Name Game" Youtube clip but it would be nice if the actual plot was one of its strong points.

 
What's worse is that the show has such great potential with plots and characters. This season, the show takes place in New Orleans at a school for the witches. I'm not into True Blood, Vampire Diaries, Twilight (I don't even know if witches are in those shows so this could be an awful analogy, sorry) or whatever the hot show about supernatural teenagers is these days, but I AM interested to see a story about hormonal-crazed supernatural witches in the hands of Murphy, Falchuk and a stellar cast of Tessa Farminga, Sara Paulson, Jessica Lange, Gabourey Sidibe, Lily Rabe, and Kathy Bates.

And the show got off to a great start. But then there was a ridiculous plot in which Evan Peters's dead body parts are sewn together with that of other bodies in the morgue by a Tessa Farminga's Zoe who only knew him 15 minutes. The romantic notion of Zoe wanting to bring a guy you briefly fell in love with to life wasn't the problem so much that she thought it would be a good idea to sneak into a morgue and bring her quasi-boyfriend back to life by sewing his head and other dead body parts together.

If that wasn't enough, this week Gabourey Sidibe's character had sex with a minotaur this week. Trust me, if you didn't see the episode or don't know what I'm talking about here, it's as weird as you would have imagined.

The show is rougly 80% solid story plotting and 20% some errant writer just throwing weird shit into the script to see how much he can get away. In other words, the plot is starting to get derailed by that 20% batshit insanity and, even worse,  I'm starting to get the feeling that batshit insanity is going to start winning the day over a solid plot from here on out. How is that going to be memorable?

Notes on the SNL Miley Cyrus episode

Despite the fact that Miley Cyrus has always been a weak actress and is now a walking punchline on top of that, the show found a way to work around her. SNL is most impressive when it shows it can be host-proof.

Still, the episode had three sketches that were so seriously misguided, one has to question if the head writing staff has really got it together. Forty sketches are written every week and it's the job of the head writers (there are two sharing the position this year) to select the 10-12 best among that lot. Many disgruntled cast members (Janeane Garofalo, Chris Elliott, and Norm McDonald) have all said in interviews that a lot of the best sketches don't get picked.

The three sketches that left me scratching my head:
-I love Vanessa Bayer but the poetry sketch didn't have a strong lead character or any clearly-delineated punchline.
-The Kyle Mooney sketch operated under the weird assumption that someone would want to have sex with Miley Cyrus. Does the show not understand that people kind of see her as hideous with her new

haircut, tattoos, and general demeanor? They should have saved that skit for another guest star. It was also odd that there were very few jokes in that sketch. The "she's like 100 years old" line was just kind of bizarre. It seemed like a kind of humorous bit Andy Samberg would do in a digital shorts sketch but he would tip it more towards the bizarre jokey side so people would get that it was an oddball character. I think Kyle Mooney will have trouble finding his place on SNL.
-The cheer squad sketch lacked any actual hard jokes. Was the biggest reveal supposed to be that the alien was dancing to the beat? It was kind of funny in a low-key kind of way and the more talented actresses in the bunch-Vanessa Bayer and Kate McKinnon-did what they could to turn their bit parts into something kind of funny. Bayer's enthusiasm in delivering the line "I got held back" and McKinnon imbuing that bit of physicality in her introduction as Dakota Flanning both were smile-worthy though not entirely laugh worthy

The definite highlights to me were the casting session sketch and the Piers Morgan talk show sketch. Simple winning ideas. I also loved the Good Morning Miami with the hosts who hate each other. It had a nice rhythm to it and there was much humor to be mined from the brief promos. The racist Foley artist is someone they could develop a character around.

Some other notes:

-What was up with Miley Cyrus's dress in the opening montage. It rivaled her VMA attire for classlessness. I was too distracted by her midriff showing lawyerish pants suit to pay attention to the monologue, sorry.

-Vanessa Bayer still kills as Miley Cyrus and Jacob the Bar Mitzvah boy even though those sketches are probably soon approaching expiration.

-Nasim Pedrad plays Ariana Huffington well but isn't it kind of a weakness that she's becoming best known for an impression that another cast member (short-lived Michaela Watkins) already made famous?

-I think of the five new white guys, Beck Bennett is still the hardest to pick out. I really marvel at mother nature for creating a man with a face so indistinct. Was he Clinton? I think they need to put name tags for all the new cast members. Or insert a nice CGI arrow in post-production that follows the newbies around with their names overhead

-On another note, people point him out Beck Bennett as the guy from the AT&T commercials, but why don't people refer to Kyle Mooney as the Xfinity Comcast commercials and those pop up more often.

-Noel Wells played three characters in the first ten minutes of the show and she's ranked behind five other women in seniority. Who's she sleeping with and/or blackmailing among the exec producers? No just kidding, I love her so far, but it's a pretty alarming ascendency.

-Taran Killam is in so many sketches, it's fairly obvious he's basically the only guy writers trust to deliver at this point. It likely sets up a very lofty expectation at this point. Can he compare with Will Ferrell, Phil Hartman, Fred Armisen, Jon Lovitz, Will Forte, Jimmy Fallon, Dana Carvey, Amy Poehler, Kristen Wiig, and Bill Hader who were all MVPs (which I'll loosely define as someone who got the majority of the screen time) at various seasons of the show? Is he deserving of a supporting nomination at the Emmys like Kristen Wiig, Amy Poehler, and Bill Hader have gotten in recent years? Discussions very much worth having.

-Aidy Bryant is basically playing the same "Valley Girl" character in most of her sketches. In the poetry sketch, she basically was the same character as the "Girlfriends" talk show in mannerism and accent. I thought she had the opportunity to break out with a spot-on impression of Rebel Wilson but she didn't have any lines except for "yeah" in agreement with Kenan Thompson's Steve Harvey.

The Bridge Episde 4 Review: Maria of the Desert

Because this episode had a clearly delineated storyline with a beginning, middle, and highly cathartic end, “Maria of the Desert” felt very much like a procedural. Someone could have tuned in and, without being clued in on the back story, enjoyed the plot as a stand-alone episode. A girl’s slow death from heat exhaustion being broadcast out over the internet while a team of cops tries to save her is good enough fodder for anyone to enjoy.

At the same time, this episode is a great case study for how serialized TV in this Golden Age has evolved past the procedural. In an episode of “Monk”, “Murder She Wrote”, “Columbo”, or ten million other shows of that ilk. We know the killer will be caught by the end of the episode using the hero’s super-abilities.

In contrast, we had no idea in this episode if Sonia’s super-Asperger crime fighting skills will beat the clock and save the girl because we have no pre-established conventions to lean on. A serialized show like “The Bridge” establishes a universe whose rules we uncover as we go and that makes the suspense truly genuine. Add a couple moderately eye-popping twists on top of that and you’ve got the kind of kinetic episode that moves this show closer to must-see territory (although for the record, I don’t think any show is must see in this Golden Age).

A pretty pervasive complaint is that the killer is omniscient and, therefore, kind of boring. I’m in agreement there, but the show is about Sonia, Marco, and their respective universes. The killer doesn’t need any characterization for the show to feel rich, or even for the murder mystery to feel daunting enough. Far more interesting are the two baddies south of the border that we’re introduced to in this episode and I thought it was very notable that neither one looks particularly menacing. Fausto Galvan, the big drug lord, looks like a tourist or retiree with his polo shirt and golf hat. The other unholy influence on Juarez, Graciela, looks like a sweet old church lady.

This speaks to the show’s larger strength of developing its characters at an optimal pace. Marco, in particular, has a lot of solid character moments here. We knew about his marital indiscretion and some of us might be quick to judge him but the show aims to narrow the differences between a “good family man” verses a man who made an error in judgment. Scene by scene, little moments are sprinkled in that ask us to consider Ruiz as a man of good character: He treats Sonia with sensitivity, he’s determined to cut through the red tape if it means helping someone, he bought the underappreciated secretary flowers, and he clearly resists bad influences.

In contrast, peripheral characters like Charlotte’s ranch hand Cesar or her stepdaughter are fine with minimal development. They’re only important in how they relate to Charlotte and while her connection to the main plot (outside of sexing up Ruiz) is still somewhat distant, it’s narrowing and where these storylines intersect is something I'll stay tuned for.

Some other notes:

• I kind of enjoyed the scene of Galvan spraying nail polish remover into that guy’s face, but there were so many things logistically wrong with that scene: If I may nitpick a little. 1. How did he know that guy wasn’t just getting up to go to the bathroom? 2. Why would that guy attack Galvan? Even if he had a motive, he had to be aware of the repercussion. 3. Why was Galvan unscrewing the bottle before the guy got up? 4. It was an unlabeled bottle so how did he know it wasn’t just water? Can you imagine how dumb it would have looked for him to splash water on a guy while trying to be menacing? He might as well have bought a super soaker.
• Linder seems a bit cartoonish with his mutton chips and overdone accent, but I can see the point in making him weird-looking to illustrate the notion that this is a weird world we’re being taken into.
• The interference conflict with the FBI wasn’t particularly interesting. Delving into inter-bureau politics is something procedurals often think we find interesting and that’s usually not the case.
• Why didn’t the philanthropists give the money to save the girl? I think the episode would have been better served with a scene or two of the philanthropists deciding whether or not to give the ransom. Especially considering the Millwood widow is one of the show’s main characters. All she does is wander into the station and give Marco’s wallet.
• The big “tunnel” is extremely underwhelming on screen. It looks like a tunnel borrowed from a cheap-B movie set in a mine. Would it be too big a production cost to show where the tunnel opens up on the Millwood property? -Anyone mildly familiar with religious cults would find the god ranch Linder sends Eva too seems equally as scary as the world she came from.
• I kind of like that Frye is unapologetically a jerk. If he were just a little less of a jerk (or rather less self-aware of what he is) or more of one, he’d be a dislikeable character.