Are the Dukes’ days numbered?

How you reckon them Duke boys are gonna get out of this one?

Well, them Duke boys have got themselves in a real heap o’trouble this time. How do you reckon they’re gonna get outta this one? They’re just spending their days the only way they know how, but that’s just a little bit more than Hollywood will allow.

“The Dukes of Hazzard,” long ago a staple of family television viewing, is now collateral damage in the culture war, and it’s all on account of that Confederate battle flag on the top of the series’ iconic 1969 Dodge Charger, the General Lee. After all, why react when you can overreact?

First, the consumer division of Warner Bros., which owns the series, said it would no longer license merchandise emblazoned with the Confederate flag, which means no more General Lee models and toys. Then TV Land abruptly dropped reruns of “The Dukes of Hazzard” from its schedule, drawing the ire of one of the show’s stars, John Schneider.

We should have seen it coming. Although it appears in a recent Autotrader.com commercial, the General Lee is shot entirely from low angles, so the spot where the flag should be is never visible.

This all comes as the Confederate flag in particular and reminders of the Confederacy in general are becoming as endangered as photos of Leon Trotsky in Stalinist Russia.

Even NASCAR, once a uniquely Southern sport, has turned on the battle flag, going so far as to ask spectators not to fly the Confederate flag at NASCAR races and offering to accept used Confederate flags in trade for the Stars and Stripes.

That went over about as well as you might expect. At Daytona, for the first race after NASCAR boss Brian France told fans to leave their Confederate flags at home, the infield was full of pickups and RVs decked out in Confederate colors. Tell some Southerners they can’t fly the battle flag and they might do it just to show you they darn well can — even if they might not do it otherwise.

Whenever the issue of the Confederate flag is raised, we go around in circles with the same old arguments about what the flag means. Is it a symbol of heritage, as its defenders say, or a symbol of hate, as just about everyone else says? If only it were that simple.

The problem with symbols is they don’t mean anything in and of themselves. They mean different things to different people at different times. The battle flag is no exception. If someone tells you the Confederate flag means heritage, he’s right. If someone else tells you it means hate, he’s right, too. And heritage and hate don’t even begin to exhaust all the possibilities.

That brings us back to “The Dukes of Hazzard.” Running for seven seasons from 1979 to 1985, the series came at the tail end of a period when the South embraced the romance of the outlaw. Movies such as “Smokey and the Bandit” and “White Lightning” turned bootleggers and moonshiners into heroes. A lesser-known entry in the cycle is 1975’s “Moonrunners.”

“Moonrunners” became the basis for “The Dukes of Hazzard,” which toned down the lawbreaking for family viewing, but just the same was an outgrowth of the outlaw South, which pitted honest outlaws just out to make an honest, if illegal, living against the same corrupt authority figures who in real life were the villains of the civil rights era.

Confederate flags atop Southern state capitols are a relic of 1960s Southern intransigence on civil rights. But the Confederate flag atop the General Lee is a symbol of something else — opposition to corrupt politicians who use the law to keep honest folks down, regardless of their race.

The Confederate flag is as complicated as the South itself. The South likes to think of itself as the Bandit, but it keeps voting for Sheriff Buford T. Justice. And while we Southerners love the backwoods glamour of bootleggers and moonshiners, Southern prisons — just as Northern ones — are filled with pot dealers, a disproportionate number of them black.

Maybe the period when the Confederate flag was an outlaw symbol was a brief window, one that has since closed. So, maybe we can’t do “The Dukes of Hazzard” today; even the movie version was 10 years ago. But that doesn’t seem like a good reason to consign the reruns to the memory hole.

Culture Shock 04.16.15: 'Daredevil' brings Marvel back down to Earth

One particular scene marks when Marvel's "Daredevil" goes from being merely good TV to being something special.

At the end of the second episode, Daredevil — although he isn't yet called that — fights his way through a gang of Russian mobsters in order to rescue a kidnapped boy. The entire fight plays out in one long take, no cuts and no trickery. With its bare-knuckle brutality and seemingly effortless cinematography, it immediately draws comparisons to the extraordinary hallway fight in Chan-wook Park's 2003 film "Oldboy." One rarely sees such compelling fight scenes in movies nowadays, and never on television. If anything, "Daredevil's" fight surpasses "Oldboy's."

If there's one thing "Daredevil" does well, it's fight scenes, but the show does a lot of other things well, too.

All 13 episodes of "Daredevil's" first season debuted on Netflix last Friday to near unanimous raves. Count this review among them. The first of Marvel's five planned Netflix series, "Daredevil" brings the far-flung Marvel Cinematic Universe, which took off into deepest space with "Guardians of the Galaxy," back down to street level, specifically New York City's Hell's Kitchen.

This is a New York still rebuilding following the events of "The Avengers," and one man wants to see the city rebuilt according to his own grand design, and heaven help anyone who stands in his way.

Wilson Fisk (a perfectly cast Vincent D'Onofrio) may lack the Red Skull's Cosmic Cube or Loki's godlike powers, but he more than makes up that deficit with sheer physical menace. He's Marvel's most fully realized villain to date, in large part thanks to D'Onofrio's mercurial performance.

A man-mountain barely concealing both volcanic rage and childlike insecurities, Fisk has never truly grown up. But he has grown powerful, and from Hell's Kitchen's shadows he runs the most fearsome criminal organization in the city. He owns the cops, the courts and even members of the media. And he's looking to expand.

That places Fisk on a collision course with Hell's Kitchen's self-appointed defender, a masked vigilante dressed in black who is chipping away at Fisk's empire.

When he was 9 years old, young Matthew Murdock (Skylar Gaertner) was blinded while saving a man from being run over by a truck carrying chemicals. The chemicals took Matt's sight, but they heightened his other senses to superhuman levels. He can hear cries for help across town, tell when you're lying by your heartbeat, and smell a hit man’s aftershave two floors down.

He's also an expert in martial arts, thanks to being recruited and trained by a blind martial arts master and all-around jerk named Stick, made likable by Scott Glenn's endearing portrayal.

Yes, that sounds a lot like the old TV show "Kung Fu," a fact the show acknowledges with a sly grin, proving you can do gritty street-level superheroics without losing your sense of humor.

Now an adult, Matt Murdock (Charlie Cox) fights for the innocent by day as a lawyer and by night as the "man in the mask." Like I said, he's not Daredevil yet, but he is on the path.

As not-quite-Daredevil, Matt has one ally, Rosario Dawson as the nurse who patches him back together. As Matt Murdock he has a few more: his law partner Foggy (Elden Henson), their client-turned-secretary Karen (Deborah Ann Woll) and investigative reporter Ben Urich (Vondie Curtis-Hall).

Cox's Matt Murdock makes us forget Ben Affleck was ever miscast in the same role. Cox brings humor and drive to the character, and endows him with charisma to spare.

Show runner Steven S. DeKnight, taking over for Drew Goddard, who dropped out early into production, ably treads the fine line between genres. By the time Matt finally puts on his red costume with the horns, it feels natural. The Marvel Cinematic Universe happily accommodates the spectacle of the movies, the family-friendly adventure of ABC's "Agents of SHIELD" and the adult crime drama of "Daredevil." But those of us who grew up reading the comics already knew that.

Culture Shock 04.02.15: 'iZombie' brings life to the undead

Rose McIver as Liv Moore in "iZombie." (Photo courtesy The CW.)

I believe it was the late philosopher of teenage angst Jason Dean, as played by Christian Slater in the 1988 movie "Heathers," who asked, "Now that you're dead, what are you gonna do with your life?"

Ah, that is the question — or at least it is for Liv Moore, who is not feeling quite herself these days.

Liv (Rose McIver, late of "Once Upon a Time" and "Masters of Sex") puts the lower-case "i" in The CW's latest comic-to-screen adaptation, "iZombie." The show is loosely based on writer Chris Roberson and artist Michael Allred's 28-issue series published by DC Comics' Vertigo imprint.

On paper, Liv seems to have it all. She has a loving and not-too-embarrassing family, a handsome and caring fiancé, and a promising career as a doctor in her future. Until, that is, against all her usual instincts, Liv accepts an invitation to a party, held at the wrong place at the wrong time. Or maybe it's the right place at the right time, if a zombie outbreak is your idea of a happening scene.

So, Liv Moore — the name is a pun; get it? — wakes up the next morning dead, or rather undead, and with an occasional craving for brains with hot sauce, but otherwise just a little worse for wear.

Liv's new undead look — unruly white hair and a deathly pallor — even works for her. Put her in a hoodie, and she totally rocks shoegazer chic, which I read is making a comeback. It's a style that'll probably be all the rage among cosplayers on this year's sci-fi convention circuit.

Mind you, being a zombie entails some serious lifestyle changes. Liv abandons her hospital internship and gets a job as a medical examiner's assistant. Not counting state legislatures, morgues have the best stash of fresh brains just going to waste. Also, Liv dumps her boyfriend (Robert Buckley's equally punny Major Lilywhite) so as to avoid accidentally zombifying him.

With a regular diet of microwaved brains keeping her from going "full-on zombie" and frequent applications of bronzer, Liv passes for alive — emo, but alive. The only living person in on Liv's secret so far is Ravi the M.E. (Rahul Kohli), who thinks he might be able to cure her, but in the meantime, her condition makes for fascinating study.

Speaking of her condition, when Liv eats a person's brain, she also absorbs fragments of the person's memories and personality traits. Say Liv eats the brain of a kleptomaniac, she might find herself unconsciously stealing things. Say also the kelpto was murdered. Liv might have some insights into who done it.

In the comic book, Liv (named Gwen instead) works as a gravedigger so as to satisfy her hunger for gray matter. The TV's show's change of setting allows "iZombie" to double as a police procedural.

Enter newbie police detective Clive Babineaux (Malcolm Goodwin), who could use a little assist making his way past the department's old boys club. A zombie assistant M.E. could help with that, only better not let on she's a zombie. Just tell Clive she's psychic instead. Cops really go for that "psychic detective" stuff, just like USA's "Psych."

There you have it. The perfect setup for a story about a woman who comes to find out only after she's dead that she rushed through life so fast she never stopped to smell the roses. So she uses her second chance to have a life worth living. If it seems a bit trite, it is, but Liv and her supporting cast are endearing enough to make it work. McIver's Liv is a pleasant change from the tedious slow-walkers over on AMC's "The Walking Dead" (and I'm not talking about that show's zombies). She's adorably morbid, and her banter with Ravi makes the show.

The recurring baddie, David Anders' dealer-turned-zombie Blaine, is also a blast, with his fatalistic plan to make the most of his situation by turning more people into zombies and then acting as their hook-up for prime-cut brains. The first lobe is free, but then you've got to pay.

It's Blaine who, briefly speaking as the voice of the show's producers, wonders aloud if zombies are past their sell-by date. I wonder the same, but if shows like "iZombie" can think up new twists, there may be some life in this genre yet.

Culture Shock 03.26.15: Tommy Wiseau trades his 'Room' for 'Neighbors'

"Oh, hai neighbors!"

The enigmatic director of the cult-favorite bad movie "The Room" is back, and this time he's made a television show.

Everyone who has met Tommy Wiseau has a theory about him — where he's from, where he got his money, what's up with that unplaceable accent of his, and so on. My theory, not from having met Wiseau but from having conducted a cursory study, is he's an extraterrestrial, an alien wearing an off-the-rack human suit and trying — mostly failing — to pass as a native of the planet Sol 3, aka Earth.

My theory makes as much sense as any. How best can one describe the man — if indeed he is a man and not a Reptilian from Zeta Reticuli — responsible for what is widely considered the worst movie ever committed to film, "The Room"?

Wiseau wrote, directed, produced, financed and starred in "The Room," apparently imagining it as a serious drama about love, friendship and betrayal. You know, the usual things, only filtered through Wiseau's alien-from-another-planet understanding of them.

Unintentionally, Wiseau created a hilarious comedy of errors. "The Room" is less a film and more a stream of non sequiturs. Characters come and go. Plot threads disappear. And no one reacts to anything the way a normal human would.

One of Wiseau's co-stars, Greg Sestero, recounted the bizarre behind-the-scenes story of "The Room" in his funny, often jaw-dropping book "The Disaster Artist," itself now set to become a movie.

So, when you've made one of the worst movies ever and spawned a cult following around both it and yourself, what do you do for an encore? If you're Wiseau, you do what all of Hollywood's big-name talent is doing these days: You take your game to the small screen.

Thus Wiseau now gifts us with 12 episodes of a half-hour comedy series he calls "The Neighbors." Not that any TV channel — not even E! — would touch this. So, "The Neighbors" is debuting on the streaming site Hulu, which made the first four episodes available last week.

"Seinfeld" was billed as a show about nothing, but "The Neighbors" really is a show about nothing. It contains no real plots and no real characters, just people wandering aimlessly. Wiseau seems to grasp that audiences love "The Room" because of its badness, so he has set out to make a deliberately bad sitcom, peppered with callbacks to fan-favorite lines and scenes in "The Room."

Characters in "The Room" idly toss a football for no reason, so characters in "The Neighbors" idly toss a basketball for no reason. It's Wiseau's idea of a crowd-pleaser.

Wiseau, once again acting as writer, director and star, plays two characters, because one just isn't enough to showcase his talents. The main character is Charlie, the apartment manager. The other, Ricky Rick, is (I think) one of the tenants. We can tell them apart because one is obviously Wiseau in an ill-fitting black wig, while the other is clearly Wiseau in an ill-fitting blond wig.

Other tenants include Ricky Rick's psychic girlfriend, a guy who always has a basketball and loves ice cream, a woman named Philadelphia who never wears more than a bikini, several ethnic stereotypes (one of whom owns a pet chicken) and Troy, a high-strung pothead and part-time arms dealer.

I don't think Wiseau has ever met a real pothead. I mean, I know of some who are arms dealers, but none who are high strung.

There's also a visiting British royal named Princess Penelope, who shows up in episode 2 because that's something British royals do, I guess. Did I mention there are 12 episodes of this?

By trying to make a show that's deliberately bad, Wiseau has succeeded only in making a show that's painfully unwatchable. When the actors blow their lines, miss their marks and fumble their props, it isn't funny, merely tedious. The only laughs come from the cast, and even those are forced.

Yet I've no doubt this is exactly the show Wiseau wanted to make. So, maybe this is Wiseau's way of getting revenge on the audience that laughed at his supposed drama "The Room." If so, maybe he's human after all. And if that's the case, well played, Tommy. Well played.

Culture Shock 01.01.15: Mozart on your television

Gael García Bernal as Rodrigo in Amazon's "Mozart in the Jungle."

I blame public radio.

For most of us, our only exposure to classical music on the radio dial comes from public radio, where the hosts — no one calls them "disc jockeys" — speak of the music they serve up in the hushed, reverential tones that have become public radio's most identifiable and risible trait.

If classical music has a reputation in the English-speaking world for being stodgy and largely irrelevant to the culture at large, and believe me it does, then those whose job it is to promote the art haven't helped matters.

The name is a bad enough handicap to overcome: "classical music." That alone says, "old, moldy and not relevant to my interests."

Performers, composers and conductors feel the passion in what they do, but most of their potential audience does not. We're a long way from the 1913 Paris debut of Igor Stravinsky's sensuously scandalous "The Rite of Spring," which so inflamed its audience that the performance ended in a riot.

Imagine that: a ballet riot. Today, we reserve that sort of passion for sporting events.

All that is why it's such a pleasant surprise Amazon.com took a chance on "Mozart in the Jungle." The first, 10-episode season of the half-hour comedy series, set amid New York City's classical music scene, dropped on the Amazon Prime streaming service just before Christmas.

The series is produced by Roman Coppola ("Moonrise Kingdom"), Jason Schwartzman ("Rushmore") and Alex Timbers, and inspired by Blair Tindall's memoir "Mozart in the Jungle: Sex, Drugs and Classical Music." As the book's subtitle so desperately conveys, this isn't your typical, stuffy classical music. Tindall's memoir is about young prodigies living away from home for the first time and taking full advantage of their newfound freedom.

The Amazon series is more circumspect. It begins with our Tindallesque heroine, Hailey (Lola Kirke), pursuing an open tryout with the fictional New York Symphony and ending up instead as assistant to the symphony's young, brash and charismatic new conductor, Rodrigo (Gael García Bernal of "Y Tu Mamá También").

While "Mozart in the Jungle" is structured around Hailey's attempts to balance working for Rodrigo, mastering the oboe and having a boyfriend (Peter Vack), it's the other members of the orchestra family who most command our interest. Over the course of 10 episodes, what could be just a one-note collection of sitcom supporting players grows on us, both as characters and people. Well, except for Dee Dee (John Miller), who starts out as the old hippie percussionist and pretty much stays the old hippie percussionist. But that's old hippies for you.

Saffron Burrows is Cynthia, a star cellist who is having an affair with Malcolm McDowell's Thomas, the outgoing conductor who has been relegated to a ceremonial "emeritus" position. And Broadway mainstay Bernadette Peters plays the symphony's president, whose main job is to keep the financially beleaguered institution's donations flowing in.

In trying to bring life back to the New York Symphony, Rodrigo faces the same problems that face the real world of classical music. When he gives Hailey a shot at trying out, it's because he values passion ("the blood," he calls it) over technical proficiency. Rodrigo's struggle to revive classical music, which Bernal makes our struggle, too, propels the series. The backstage shenanigans are secondary. Rodrigo sexes up classical music more than the sex does, as he confronts the ridiculous union rules and donor galas that become the comedic obstacles in the way of his creating something special, something that might connect with a larger audience.

Funny, sometimes quirky and glamorously shot, especially when Coppola is in the director's chair, "Mozart in the Jungle" is more than an entertaining comedy, although it is that. It's the best publicity classical music has had possibly since the Parisians rioted over Stravinsky.

Culture Shock 11.27.14: 'The Flash' hits the ground running

This is the fall TV season when the superheroes took over.

Superheroes already rule the box office, but now they're making a play for your television. Four of the five broadcast networks already air at least one series based on a comic book. The fifth, CBS, has one in development based on Superman's cousin, Supergirl.

Fox's Batman prequel "Gotham" and NBC's "Constantine" join The CW's "Arrow" and ABC's "Marvel's Agents of SHIELD" on the increasingly crowded airwaves, with ABC's "Agent Carter" and The CW's "iZombie" yet to come.

But the breakaway star of this year's pack is The CW's "The Flash." The series based on DC Comics' "fastest man alive" hit the ground running and quickly earned a full-season pickup after scoring the also-ran network's best ratings ever. (Sorry, folks, but there will be more "running" jokes.)

The most surprising thing about "The Flash," though, is how good it is. Coming up on its mid-season break, "The Flash" easily outdistances most of its competition, with the exception of "Agents of SHIELD," which, now in its second season, has upped its game to the point of becoming one of the best things on TV, regardless of genre.

What sets "The Flash" apart, not only from other DC Comics-inspired TV shows but also from DC's movies, is it's actually fun. It feels a lot more like a Marvel/Disney production than it does a typical, ponderous DC/Warner Bros. production.

A lot of that comes down to star Grant Gustin. His dorky-but-likable Barry Allen is closer to Spider-Man's alter ego Peter Parker than he is to the square-jawed stiff Barry Allen who first appeared in "Showcase" No. 4 back in 1956.

Unlike "Gotham," which has struggled to settle on a tone, or "Arrow," which after three seasons still can't bring itself to call its main character Green Arrow, "The Flash" never takes itself too seriously and eagerly embraces its comic book origins.

Sure there's a lot of science jargon and hand-waving exposition, but "The Flash" doesn't back away from being about a guy who became super-fast after he was struck by lightning and doused with chemicals during a particle accelerator malfunction. I mean, how else is a guy supposed to get super powers? Space aliens don't hand magic rings to just anyone, you know.

You get the feeling watching "The Flash" that this is a show that just might have the Flash face off against a talking, super-intelligent, telepathic gorilla. Then the show rewards you by teasing just that.

Am I the only one who nearly fell out of his chair when the show gave us a glimpse of a caged gorilla named Grodd just a few episodes back?

Like Marvel's movies, "The Flash," itself a spin-off of "Arrow," is seeding a larger superhero universe. Casual viewers won't get all the references, but for longtime readers of DC Comics, every episode of "The Flash" brings a new Easter egg.

The show has so far slipped in the alter ego (one of them, anyway) of the superhero Firestorm, and it built an entire story around two Captain Atom antagonists, Plastique and Gen. Wade Eiling. The same story even name-dropped one of Captain Atom's civilian identities, Cameron Scott.

All these nods to other superheroes, as well as to decades of comic book stories, come across a lot more naturally than they do in "Gotham," with its winking references to future Batman villains. (OK, we get it already. Edward Nygma is going to become the Riddler one day. Did you really have to give him a coffee mug with a question mark on it?)

Yet one thing all these superhero shows have in common is standout supporting players. "The Flash" has two of the best: ex-"Law & Order" star Jesse L. Martin as Barry's childhood guardian and Tom Cavanagh as the mysterious Dr. Wells.

If it can keep up the pace, "The Flash" looks to be in for a long and entertaining run.

Culture Shock 11.13.14: 'Twin Peaks' is happening again

True to her word, it looks like Laura Palmer will indeed see FBI Agent Dale Cooper again in 25 years. Whether that's exactly what "Twin Peaks" creators David Lynch and Mark Frost had in mind back in 1990 is another matter.

Laura's prediction, in Agent Cooper's dream at the end of the first season's third episode, was just one of the many cryptic clues dropped during the show's brief, yet groundbreaking run.

When Lynch and Frost announced last month that "Twin Peaks" would return in 2016 for nine new episodes to air on Showtime, the news lit up the Internet like nothing short of announcing a new pope or a new "Star Wars" trilogy. As the giant told Agent Cooper, "It is happening again."

"Twin Peaks" returns to a television landscape radically changed from the one it shook up back in 1990 and '91. Back then, "Twin Peaks" was unique. Now, quirky shows with oddball characters and serialized storytelling that once was reserved for soap operas are virtually the norm.

"Twin Peaks" is in large part responsible for that.

When Lynch brought "Twin Peaks" to ABC in 1990, it was almost unheard of for respected filmmakers to slum in the television ghetto. Now that's common, too, and no one but the most obnoxious art-film snobs looks down on TV.

Yet that's not all that's changed about television in the intervening quarter century.
"Twin Peaks" is many things. It mixes comedy, melodrama, horror, science fiction, urban legends, bleeding-edge physics and Buddhist philosophy into the most compelling murder mystery since Jack the Ripper. "Who killed Laura Palmer" was the second coming of "Who shot J.R.?"

Yet structurally, "Twin Peaks" is deceptively simple. It's a parody of soap operas, and not the nighttime variety such as "Dallas" and "Dynasty," which reigned over the 1980s, but the daytime kind.

Like virtually every daytime soap ever aired, "Twin Peaks" is set in a fictional town with a sordid underbelly. A logging/resort community near the Canadian border, Twin Peaks falls into the long tradition of made-up burghs, from Salem to Genoa City, that attract more than their share of drama.

The show's mood music, courtesy of composer Angelo Badalamenti, swells with overwrought intensity at every romantic interlude. And the multi-generational cast reflects the storytelling necessities of daytime soaps, which traditionally shift their plots toward younger cast members in the summer to take advantage of teens being out of school.

"It is happening again. It is happening again."

Beyond that, "Twin Peaks" trades in all of the familiar tropes of daytime drama.

Infidelity? Aplenty. Convenient cases of amnesia? Nadine coming out of a coma thinking she's a teenager and back in high school qualifies. Characters presumed dead who turn out to have faked their deaths? That runs in the Packard family. A shady businessman who owns most of the town and schemes to gobble up or destroy everything he doesn't? Well, of course. "Twin Peaks" even has that most soapy of soap opera tropes, the identical twin who appears out of the blue.

James, a lovesick teen with resting pout face, seems to have just arrived from daytime TV. He goes through soul mates faster than most men do TV channels. He starts as Laura's "secret boyfriend" and moves on to her best friend Donna before the corpse is cold. Next he's on to Laura's identical cousin, then back to Donna and finally into the arms of an older woman, who so obviously plans to Double Indemnity him that we realize it faster than James can say Barbara Stanwyck.

In case all that doesn't clue us in, almost everyone in Twin Peaks is hooked on a soap opera within the soap opera, the amusingly overwrought "Invitation to Love": a parody within a parody.

But can "Twin Peaks" return as the same soap parody it was? In 1990 ABC, CBS and NBC each aired between three and four hours of soap opera programming each weekday. Today they air 3½ hours total between them. The daytime soap is a dead format, wrapped in plastic.

How the soap opera's demise will play into what Lynch and Frost have planned is, for now, just another of their unsolved mysteries. It could even involve a long lost twin.

"Would you like to play with fire? Would you like to play with Bob?"

Culture Shock 10.09.14: It's the end of Saturday morning as we knew it

Print advertisement for NBC's 1983 Saturday morning cartoon lineup. It was the
debut season for "Mr. T" and "Alvin and the Chipmunks," while "Thundarr the
Barbarian" moved to NBC from ABC, where it had aired the previous two seasons.

For as long as I can remember, "children's advocates" have hated children's television.

They always said the same thing: Children's television was too violent, too dumb and too commercial. And because kids watched "too much" of it, it was, by implication, too entertaining.

Not anymore. Mark your calendar, for this is a date that shall live in infamy: Saturday, Oct. 4, 2014, was the first Saturday since the 1960s when there were no Saturday morning cartoons on broadcast network television. For those of us who were kids during the Golden Age of Saturday morning cartoons, in the 1970s and '80s, it's Saturday mourning in America.

At last, the self-appointed children's advocates have slain their dragon.

In place of the animated cartoons that Generation X and the millennials grew up with are a bunch of live-action "educational and informational" programs. They're designated by the little "E/I" logo on the screen, which means the broadcaster is counting every second of them toward its government-mandated quota of E/I programming. It doesn't matter if anyone watches; it just matters that it's there and that it's "quality," as defined by the children's advocates.

Kids, meanwhile, have responded just as you'd expect. Those who can have flocked to cable TV and the children's section of Netflix, both of which operate blessedly free of the dictates of the Federal Communications Commission, for the most part. For now, anyway.

How did this happen? How did children wake up in a world with no Saturday morning cartoons?

It started 24 years ago when Congress passed the Children's Television Act of 1990. The act was the culmination of 20 years of agitation by activist groups such as Action for Children's Television, founded by Peggy Charren, who became the go-to talking head whenever the national news media needed someone to pontificate about kiddie TV, because why would you ever ask a kid?

The Children's Television Act limited advertising during both cable and broadcast children's programming and mandated that broadcasters devote a set amount of airtime each week to E/I shows.

The act's first victims were the cartoons that aired after school each weekday. The ad restrictions made them less profitable, which was the kiss of death in the highly competitive broadcast syndication market. Stations quickly dropped cartoons and added more talk shows and TV judges. Indirectly, we have the CTA to blame for Judge Judy and her ilk.

The CTA's full impact didn't hit Saturday mornings until later, as the FCC "clarified" the act and spelled out exactly what "educational and informational" meant, always tightening the screws.

NBC was the first to fall. The proud peacock that once had aired "The Smurfs" and "Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends" farmed out its Saturday morning airtime to corporate sibling NatGeo.

Print advertisement for CBS's 1982 Saturday morning cartoon lineup.

CBS and ABC were next, followed by Fox. When the end came, only The CW was still airing cartoons, all of them Japanese imports. It was a painful, lingering death. Saturdays deserved better.

The image of children getting out of bed at the crack of dawn to watch Saturday morning cartoons along with a sugary cereal chaser has become a cliché. But it's no less true. My generation looked ahead to Saturday mornings — filled with Superfriends and Snorks — as if each were a mini Christmas. The networks trumpeted their new Saturday morning lineups each fall with preview specials in prime time. It was a big freaking deal.

Sure, kids still have Cartoon Network, Nickelodeon and the Disney channels, but Saturday morning's passing matters. Maybe those old cartoons weren't "educational" in the approved sense, but they were a springboard for our imaginations. More than that sugary cereal, those cartoons fueled us, not just for the rest of the day but for life.

"Scooby-Doo," for one, taught us real-life lessons. We learned not to worry about scary-looking ghosts, because the odds were those ghosts were just con men trying to pull a fast one.

With cartoons teaching lessons like that, it's no wonder Congress was so eager to replace them with FCC-approved boredom.

Culture Shock 10.02.14: Elvira buries herself in her 'Coffin Collection'

Trigger warning: Some of the puns and alliterations in this column are particularly pungent and may produce prolonged paralysis. The author regrets nothing.

Elvira, Mistress of the Dark, on the sofa of her 2010-11 series.

This time every year, the historic Knott's Berry Farm theme park in Buena Park, California, undergoes a transformation, becoming Knott's Scary Farm. It's one of the nation's most storied haunted attractions.

Returning to Knott's Scary Farm's 1,800-seat Charles M. Schultz Theatre this year "by overwhelming demand," is that horror hostess with the mostess, Elvira, Mistress of the Dark. It turns out you can't keep a good ghoul down. So, Elvira is dying on stage twice nightly in a Vegas-style variety show. That's about the only way nowadays you can catch her live — or even dead.

Elvira's alter ego, Cassandra Peterson, retired a while back from doing the convention circuit in character. And who can blame her? She's been donning her black, bouffant wig and pouring herself into that low-cut Morticia Addams dress for more than 30 years.

Who could have guessed Elvira would become a long-term gig or that the character, which Peterson created for local Los Angeles television, would go national, even international, like pancakes?

Elvira's original "Movie Macabre" show aired from 1981 to 1986 and featured Peterson's undead Valley girl persona hosting horrible horror flicks ranging from "Attack of the Killer Tomatoes" to "Night of the Zombies." From there, Elvira branched out into merchandising, comic books, two feature films (1988's "Elvira, Mistress of the Dark" and 2001's "Elvira's Haunted Hills") and a seasonal Coors Light ad campaign. You know you've hit the big time when you're shilling for the Silver Bullet.

More than almost any other horror host, Elvira has endured. But it was still a pleasant surprise when she returned to television for the 2010-11 season with a resurrected "Elvira's Movie Macabre."

Now all 26 episodes of Elvira's latest spell (including several never aired) are in one box set, "Elvira's Movie Macabre: The Coffin Collection," from Entertainment One.

At the height of her notoriety, Elvira became the
four-color hostess of DC Comics' "House of Mystery."

At a suggested retail price of $99.98, the 13-disc set isn't cheap, but the movies are. (If you're cheap, a few episodes are available at Hulu.com.) Elvira sticks with films that have fallen into the public domain. That used to happen when a production company went bankrupt and nobody renewed the copyright, or nobody bothered in the first place. Thus, Elvira serves up a bewitching buffet that includes classics such as "The Satanic Rites of Dracula" and "Night of the Living Dead," and not-so-classics such as "Attack of the Giant Leeches" and director William "One Shot" Beaudine's "Jesse James Meets Frankenstein's Daughter." (Note: "Frankenstein's Daughter" is not to be confused with "Lady Frankenstein," which is also included in this set. #TheMoreYouKnow)

But don't think there's no star power here. The Coffin Collection conjures up a lot of name actors with bills to pay, including Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing, Joanna Lumley, Dean Stockwell, Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi, Jack Nicholson and Joseph Cotton.

Still, let's not kid ourselves here. The real star attraction is Elvira, draped across her red velvet sofa and letting it all hang out. Well, not all. This is a show that ran in broadcast syndication. This isn't HBO's "Same Old Gnomes," or whatever. For that matter, some of the movies are censored, too, to meet broadcast standards. (I'll pause while we all laugh at the idea of broadcast TV having standards.)

Under normal circumstances, I don't approve of watching movies that have been chopped up for TV, but in this case some of the alterations, such as the fogged-out "naughty bits" in "Lady Frankenstein," are entertaining on their own merits. And so is Elvira.

With skills honed as part of LA's Groundlings comedy troupe, Peterson makes even the lamest jokes get up and walk. Sure, it's kind of a slow, shambling, zombie-like walk, but fast zombies are an abomination, and don't you forget it!

Inviting a horror host into your living room is like serving comfort food to your brain, and Elvira is the chocolate-covered cheesecake of horror hosts.

Culture Shock 08.28.14: Something borrowed, something 'Who'

Peter Capaldi, left, is the Doctor and Jenna Coleman is Clara in the 2014
season of the BBC's "Doctor Who," airing on BBC America.

"Don't look in that mirror," the Doctor barks while still in the throes of post-regeneration delirium. "It's absolutely furious!"

The only constant in the universe is change, and "Doctor Who" (Saturday nights, BBC America) has seen plenty of that in its 50-plus years. This time, it's a biggie. Matt Smith's manic, absentminded professor is gone, but not forgotten. In his place is a more mature and cantankerous Time Lord portrayed with gusto by 56-year-old Scottish actor Peter Capaldi.

If Capaldi's visage is anything, it's furious. Showrunner Steven Moffat, now in his fourth year at the helm, turns that into an asset. Even Capaldi's eyebrows, which "Doctor Who" fans glimpsed to near universal delight in last year's 50th anniversary special, are potentially lethal weapons.

"They're attack eyebrows," the Doctor says after studying his new face. "You could take bottle tops off with these!"

One thing we know about the new Doctor: He has a gift for dialogue. His one-liners can kill.

The Doctor is always dangerous, but he usually plays the fool, lulling unwary opponents into a false sense of security. "My dear, no one could be as stupid as he seems," a villain once said of Tom Baker's Doctor, the iconic one with the endearingly ridiculous scarf. But Capaldi's Doctor seems ready to dispense with the pretense, and the scarf.

"I've moved on from that," he says. "It'd look stupid."

He's dangerous, and you should bloody well be terrified, especially if you're an old foe such as the Daleks or the Cybermen or, as in the season opener, "rubbish robots from the dawn of time."

But no one is more frightened than the Doctor's current traveling companion, Clara (Jenna Coleman), who is finally coming into her own as a character, even as the Doctor undergoes his most jarring regeneration since the show's classic era. Going from personable to prickly isn't an easy transition, as poor Colin Baker (the Sixth Doctor) learned. Although, in all fairness, poor scripts and tacky production during Six's tenure were the far bigger issues.

If anyone can make such a character compelling, it's Capaldi, whose Doctor has already displayed little flourishes reminiscent of Capaldi's wickedly brilliant Malcolm Tucker, the foul-mouthed political enforcer of "In the Loop" and "The Thick of It," only without the swearing.

The combination is something like another TV doctor: Hugh Laurie's Dr. Gregory House. In a preview for Capaldi's second episode, the Doctor even finds himself playing doctor to "a Dalek so damaged it's turned good. Morality as malfunction. How do I resist?"

But back to Capaldi's first outing, "Deep Breath." Moffat slows the pace and allows the story and characters to — forgive the pun — breathe. "Deep Breath" is a character study, a meditation on the nature of identity. That's a deep subject for a character who's had a dozen of them.

"Deep Breath" is structured around an ancient Greek thought experiment. Say your name is Theseus, and say you have a ship. Over time, the ship's planks become worn, and you replace them one by one until one day, finally, you've replaced them all. Is it the same ship you started with? Now say you saved all the worn planks and reassembled them. Now you have two ships. So, which is the true ship of Theseus?

The Greeks came up with many possible answers, and so does "Deep Breath." The Doctor's cyborg foes have rebuilt themselves so many times there's nothing of the originals left. For Clara, the question is whether the new Doctor is still the man she knew.

To ease the transition, Moffat brings back the Doctor's Victorian gang of Madame Vastra, Jenny Flint and Strax. The Doctor changes, but some things remain the same.

And sometimes one of those old, worn planks washes up ready to set sail again. An older, more temperamental Doctor gallivanting around time and space in a blue box with a schoolteacher who feels out of her depth? That seems familiar.

Culture Shock 05.08.14: WGN's 'Salem' is a Salem you've never seen

George Sibley knows a secret. There are witches in Salem, and his wife Mary is one of them.

But George will never tell. You see, he has a frog in his throat — literally. Mary put it there so she can control him, because she's a witch and that's apparently something witches do. And since Sibley is the most powerful man in Salem, that makes Mary the real power in Salem.

If WGN America's first scripted series weren't trying so hard to convince us it's a serious drama, one would swear at times it's a comedy. To say the least, it's a strange retelling of the witch trials. It even has you almost rooting for the infamous Puritan minister and pamphleteer Cotton Mather, author of the best-selling anti-dancing manifesto "A Cloud of Witness Against Balls and Dances."

The Salem witch trials of 1692 and 1693, during which 20 people were executed, have never been portrayed quite like this. In this telling, the witches are real, meaning they have supernatural abilities straight out of the Brothers Grimm. They're also the force behind Salem's witch-hunting hysteria, throwing suspicion on unsuspecting citizens so as to divert attention from their own schemes. The Puritans are just pawns, unwittingly bringing about their own destruction.

The big brain behind "Salem" is Brannon Braga, who does here to American history what he did to the laws of physics back when he was writing "Star Trek." Among other transgressions, Braga wrote the episode of "Star Trek: Voyager" in which Capt. Janeway and Lt. Paris travel faster than warp 10, turn into salamanders and have salamander babies together.

"Salem" isn't the first time Braga has gotten all weird with amphibians.

The story starts with John Alden (Shane West, "Nikita") going off to fight in King William's War. John is the son of one of Salem's founders, but he's so fed up with the Puritans he'd just as soon go off to fight the French. That also means leaving behind the woman he loves, the not-yet Mary Sibley (Janet Montgomery), who is secretly pregnant with his child.

So John goes off, gets captured by the Indians, spends years missing and presumed dead, and returns only to learn Mary is married to wealthy invalid George Sibley (Michael Mulheren).

Oh, and while he was away, Mary underwent a ritual that rid her of her unborn child in exchange for membership in Salem's witch coven, which sounds like Pat Robertson's worst nightmare.

Mary wants revenge on Salem's Puritan ruling class, whom she blames for taking away everything she ever loved. By the time John comes strolling back into the village, alive and bitter, her plans are too far along to abandon.

The coven's plan is to tear Salem apart by fomenting hysteria and framing innocent people for witchcraft. And their No. 1 pawn is Mather, played by Seth Gabel ("Fringe").

This is not a portrayal the historical Cotton Mather would recognize. While Gabel's Mather shares the original's religious fervor and daddy issues, he retreats from his burdens by drinking heavily and having relations with women of the night.

Both activities were big no-nos in Puritan circles — although drinking and legal bordellos were common in the other colonies. The real Mather would be aghast.

For that matter, he'd find everything about "Salem" objectionable. This is a sexed-up Salem that pushes the boundaries of basic cable. Expect regular helpings of bare backsides and sideboobs, to go along with the gruesome executions and brandings.

Gabel's Mather, with all his doubts, is more compelling and sympathetic than either West's bland Alden or Montgomery's Mary. Mary's willingness to sacrifice the innocent in her quest for power loses her our sympathy almost from the start. At least when Mather executes someone it's because he's been duped and manipulated. Mary knows exactly what she's doing.

"Salem" plays like an alternate history of America's founding. If the witches turn out to be the Illuminati, secretly manipulating America since it's founding days, I won't be the least surprised.

"Salem" airs Sunday nights at 9 CT on WGN America. New episodes appear Mondays on Hulu Plus.

Culture Shock 05.01.14: Syfy looks to shake up its 'Sharknado' image

In television, as in any business, branding matters. You can have the greatest product on Earth, and it won't matter a bit if your brand sends customers fleeing.

TNT knows drama. USA is where characters are welcome. AMC is all about advertising executives and zombies, which has a kind of synergy if you think about it.

And Syfy is the "Sharknado" channel, although that may be about to change.

There are worse fates. Never mind the lack of music, MTV is more like VTM nowadays, as in "Vacuous Teenage Moms." "Sharknado," on the other hand, was the surprise hit of 2013 on social media and gained viewers with repeat airings. The third broadcast attracted 2.1 million viewers, a record for a Syfy original movie repeat, according to Entertainment Weekly.

There's a lot to be said for cheesy movies. If I had my way, there would be a channel that aired nothing but reruns of "USA Up All Night." I'll take USA Network's early 1990s late-night schedule of "Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-O-Rama," "Chopping Mall" and "Hell Comes to Frogtown" over yet another "NCIS" marathon any day.

Come to think about it, 2014 Syfy is a lot like 1990s USA. Back them, USA Network was known for cheesy movies, WWF wrestling and originals such as "Silk Stalkings" and "La Femme Nikita" (a Canadian co-production). Today, Syfy is known for cheesy movies, WWE wrestling and originals such as "Warehouse 13" and "Continuum" (a Canadian co-production). All entertaining, but apart from the rare "Sharknado" fluke, nothing that gets viewers talking the next morning.

Syfy used to air a show that did have its audience talking: "Battlestar Galactica." Then, for reasons that make sense only to television executives, Syfy declared a moratorium on shows set in space. An odd decision for a channel originally called The Sci-Fi Channel, I know.

But Syfy is also the channel that didn't know what to do with "Doctor Who," and Syfy's loss is  BBC America's highest-rated program and a reliable buzz generator. Meanwhile, Syfy has "Sharknado," "Ghost Shark," "Sharktopus," "Dinoshark" and the TV movie that kickstarted Syfy's love affair with monster-hybrid insanity, "Mansquito," which is oddly shark-free.

You have to figure Syfy's execs are just a little jealous of the science fiction and fantasy programming generating buzz for their competition, whether it's "Doctor Who" or "The Walking Dead"  on AMC or "Game of Thrones" on HBO. Syfy is an also-ran in the genre it used to own.

So, it's big news that Syfy is showing interest in its reason for being. The channel is heading back into space, embracing tech-heavy science fiction and, like all those other channels, looking to adapt best-selling novels.

One project already has a 10-episode order, and it will likely be the most ambitious series Syfy has aired to date, to say nothing of having the hardest science of any Syfy series. Maybe the success of "Gravity" has changed the mindset around the Syfy offices.

If Syfy is looking for its own "Game of Thrones," it may have found it in "The Expanse," based on "Leviathan Wakes" and its sequels by James S.A. Corey (the pseudonym for Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck). And wouldn't you know it, the cover of "Leviathan Wakes" has a nice blurb from "Game of Thrones" author George R.R. Martin.

"Leviathan Wakes" has warring factions, pitched battles and lots of unexpected death. So it is a bit like "Game of Thrones," only in space and without all the sex. So maybe it's not like "Game of Thrones" at all. Never mind. But it can air on basic cable without upsetting the usual suspects.

But even if "The Expanse" is good, will anyone tune in? Syfy has an established brand, one it spent years cultivating. And that brand doesn't scream intelligent, sophisticated, science-literate entertainment.

It's a brand that screams we're gonna need a bigger boat — and probably a bigger flyswatter, too.

Culture Shock 04.24.14: The king is dead, and I feel fine

He's dead, Jim.

I hope you're up to speed on "Game of Thrones." Spoilers are coming.

While the TV series deviates from the novels in many respects, HBO's "Game of Thrones" doesn't shy away from the one thing for which author George R.R. Martin has become best known: killing off your favorite characters in the most shocking, gruesome and heartbreaking ways possible.

It can be devastating. And since most "Game of Thrones" viewers evidently haven't read the books, Twitter explodes every time a major character dies. (Twitter is so much better than a water cooler.)

First it was poor Ned Stark. We'd been led to believe he was the star of the show, then boom. At the end of season 1, his head's on a pike.

We should have suspected as much. Dying is what Sean Bean's characters do best.

Then came the "Red Wedding." You can Google it. Some viewers are still in therapy for that one.

So, occasionally, as if in some half-hearted attempt to make it up to us, Martin kills off someone we  want to see dead. Two episodes into season 4, the TV show caught up to the most satisfying "Game of Thrones" death of them all.

Here lies Joffrey Baratheon, the most hated character on television. Indeed, possibly the most hated character in all of fiction. Hated by readers. Hated by viewers. Hated by small, inoffensive woodland creatures. And hated, most of all, by his fellow "Game of Thrones" characters, one of whom decided to do him in.

King Joffrey died as he lived, as a royal pain to all around him. He played second fiddle to no one. He may have been stupid, arrogant, petty, murderous, selfish, ignorant and, above all, a whiner, but no one came close to stoking the white hot burning hatred he did. He generated enough seething hatred to keep winter at bay.

And now he's gone — poisoned at his own royal wedding. He choked, he gagged, he turned an amusing shade of purple and then he died, crying in his mother's arms like the pathetic little loser brat he always was. The Red Wedding was tragic, but the "Purple Wedding," as fans call it, was a party.

Did I remember to mention Joffrey's mother is also his aunt, making him the slow-witted, inbred spawn of an incestuous relationship between sister and brother? I don't know how that could have slipped my mind.

Joffrey's mother/aunt Cersei (Lena Headey) is the only character who didn't hate Joffrey, and her lack of hatred is why everyone hates her. She knew full well the sort of monster she was raising. It brings to mind the Roman Emperor Tiberius, who said, "I am nursing a viper in Rome's bosom."

That viper was the mad Emperor Caligula, who, coincidentally, had a fondness for incest.

The only problem with Joffrey's death is it didn't take long enough. I think most of us would have happily watched an entire hour of Joffrey retching his liquefied guts out while crying for Mommy.

Joffrey's demise is probably the most satisfying screen death since Anne Archer unloaded a handgun into Glenn Close.

Yes, Martin deserves credit for creating such a despicable character in the first place, for dredging up such a hateful beast from the dark recesses of his sick, twisted mind. But most of the credit goes to Jack Gleeson, who brought the towheaded twerp to life — and death.

If anyone in the "Game of Thrones" cast deserves an Emmy, it's Gleeson, who had the thankless task of giving us someone to hate, and he excelled beyond all our hopes. In a show full of characters deserving of painful, lingering deaths, he outdid them all.

And Gleeson did it without much of a character to work with, really. Other screen villains at least get to be witty or smart. Not Joffrey. He was pure awfulness, with no redeeming or even faintly humanizing qualities. He was nothing but id.

In terms of the story, King Joffrey's death means little. Westeros is still a brutal land besieged by bloodthirsty tyrants and soft-hearted fools. But for a brief moment, it brought America together.

Culture Shock 03.27.14: Lack of facts keeps Flight 370 compelling

Planes similar to Flight 19, which disappeared in 1945 in the Bermuda
Triangle.

It is Sunday. It has been 17 days since Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 disappeared en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, and CNN's Martin Savidge is still inside the flight simulator.

He always seems to be there. Night or day, CNN anchors throw to him so he can explain what might have happened to Flight 370, based on the latest theories and conjectures, fragments and wild guesses.

"It's official. I am now known on the street as 'The cockpit guy'," he tweets.

This is how reporters become minor celebrities. It's not exactly Bernard Shaw reporting by phone from beneath a table in his hotel room as the missiles rain down on Baghdad during the first Iraq War, but at least there's little risk of becoming collateral damage. That's a plus.

The fate of Flight 370 and its 239 passengers and crew is morbidly fascinating all out of proportion to its intrinsic newsworthiness. Is the coverage too much? Maybe. But it's not exactly as if a steady stream of cable news pundits war-gaming the Crimean War 2.0 on live TV is particularly enlightening either. If you want to know what's up with Crimea, you're better off reading a history book and drawing your own conclusions.

But if you want to know what's up with that missing airplane in the Indian Ocean, your guess is as good as anyone's, and almost everyone has a guess.

Terrorism experts suspect terrorism. Engineers suspect mechanical failure.

Before the plane's debris was found in the ocean, a retired general known for his off-the-wall views was sure the plane was hijacked and taken to Pakistan because something something al-Qaida.

Did you know UFO sightings in and around Malaysia surged right before Flight 370 disappeared? I read that on the Internet, which is great if you believe everything you read on the Internet.

Is it possible Flight 370 went through a wormhole caused by the Large Hadron Collider? I just made that up, but does that make it not true? You can't prove it isn't.

The Flight 370 story is ill-suited to continuous, 24/7 news coverage. We know almost nothing. Facts we think we know one day end up disproved the next. And as far as American viewers are concerned, it's all taking place a world away. When it's daytime here, it's nighttime there. Most of our speculation occurs during the dead period when the search has been scaled back for the night.

When it comes to Flight 370, most of our "breaking news" is neither.

But CNN's ratings spike doesn't lie. A lot of us are addicted to Flight 370 news, even when it isn't news. Maybe especially when it isn't news.

It's the mystery that captivates because it's so unlikely. A large passenger jet vanishes for 17 days with barely a trace? In 2014? The government has spy satellites that can read your mail from orbit. So, how does a Boeing 777 just disappear?

Mundane explanations, the sort that invoke the science of how things like satellites and GPS and cellphones really work, don't satisfy. Never mind if they're true. Psychologically speaking, big mysteries demand big answers. Missing airplanes are by definition big mysteries. That's how we get six seasons of "Lost" on TV and Stephen King's "The Langoliers."

That's how we get the Bermuda Triangle. In 1945, Flight 19, composed of five TBM Avenger torpedo bombers, disappeared in the triangle. The most likely explanation is the pilots, mostly trainees, got lost and ditched their plans in rough waters as they ran out of fuel. The pilots and their planes were never found, but they were last seen in Steven Spielberg's "Close Encounters of the Third Kind."

You disappear into history, and you reappear as mythology.

Before there were airplanes, there were ships. The Mary Celeste was discovered adrift at sea, its crew missing. Books and movies followed, but few hard facts.

Hard facts would only get in the way. When there are facts, everyone gets to call it a day.

If only there were more facts, Martin Savidge might get to go home.

Culture Shock 03.20.14: New 'Cosmos' gets A for science, D- for history

Neil deGrasse Tyson takes the conn.

Astrophysicist and science populizer Neil deGrasse Tyson begins our tour of the cosmos — and his new Fox TV series "Cosmos: A SpaceTime Odyssey" — with a trip through the solar system.

Past Mars we go, then on to the outer planets: the gas giants Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and finally Neptune, discovered only in 1846, which should tell you something about the reliability of the 4,000-year-old practice of astrology.

Next, on to the icy bodies beyond the planets. One of those icy bodies is Pluto, cast out of the planetary pantheon in part because of Tyson's tireless anti-Pluto campaign. The murderer has returned to the scene of his crime.

My personal grudge aside, Tyson is the natural successor to Carl Sagan, who brought the wonders of the universe, from faraway stars to the atoms in our bodies, into our living rooms in his 1980 PBS series "Cosmos."

To an 8-year-old, even one watching on a snowy, rabbit-eared, black-and-white TV, Sagan's "Cosmos" was enthralling and illuminating. It was even a little bit haunting, thanks to liberal use of music by ambient composer Vangelis ("Chariots of Fire") and Sagan's reminders of just how small we are compared to the immensity of the cosmos.

Sagan's "Cosmos" was filled with spiritual awe. Like Albert Einstein before him, Sagan flirted with the pantheism of Benedict de Spinoza, the heretical, 17th century Jewish philosopher.

Spinoza defined the cosmos and God as one and the same. That view doesn't put humanity at the center of the universe, but it does give us a crucial role.

"We're made of star-stuff," Sagan said. "We are a way for the cosmos to know itself."

We are still getting to know the cosmos, and Tyson gives us a refresher course.

If Sagan was a spiritualist, Tyson is a kid in a candy store, a wide-eyed 8-year-old with an adult astrophysicist's knowledge and a natural storyteller's gifts. He's no less in awe of the universe, but he is equally in awe of following in Sagan's footsteps on what Sagan called the "shore of the cosmic ocean."

Tyson starts where Sagan did. We tour the universe in a "spaceship of the imagination," only with better special effects. We see what all of cosmic history would look like compressed into a single year.

Hint: All of our written history takes place in the last minute of the last hour of the last day.

Science moves on. New discoveries happen all the time, and we've learned a lot since 1980. Back then Pluto was still a planet.

The new "Cosmos" also adds animated history lessons. They dramatize the lives of scientists who have expanded our knowledge. This is where we most see the influence of executive producer Seth MacFarlane (yes, the creator of "Family Guy").

Unfortunately, this is also where the new "Cosmos" trips up.

The first episode focuses on 16th century Italian friar Giordano Bruno, who believed, contrary to prevailing views of the time, that the universe was infinite. The Roman Inquisition burned Bruno at the stake, and "Cosmos" holds him up as a martyr for free inquiry.

Actually, Bruno's theological — not scientific — speculation about the universe's size played little role in his ending up on the Inquisition’s naughty list. The church was more put off by his heretical views on the divinity of Christ. Anyone can Google it, so there is no excuse for "Cosmos" getting it wrong.

The second episode is on more solid ground, in more ways than one. The action shifts from outer space to inner space, to the molecular processes that drive evolution. What humans did over thousands of years, turning wolves into every breed of dog we see, natural selection did over hundreds of millions of years, turning single cells into every plant, every animal and every slime mold.

The story of the cosmos remains as vibrant now as when Sagan was our guide, and not just because today's 8-year-olds get to watch on better TVs.

Culture Shock 12.05.13: TV embraces your inner psychopath

James Spader in "The Blacklist."

The breakout series of this fall's TV season is NBC's "The Blacklist."

As a drama, it's a bit far-fetched, relying on coincidences, improbable twists and characters stubbornly keeping to themselves information that would resolve the plot. In other words, it's indistinguishable from most other TV dramas. But none of that matters, because what makes "The Blacklist" so addictive is James Spader's performance as globetrotting super-criminal and, when it suits him, FBI informant Raymond "Red" Reddington.

Spader has made a career of playing characters who earn the overused label "quirky," and he won three Emmys portraying windmill-tilting attorney Alan Shore. Now he has the role every actor dreams of. He has his own psychopath.

Well, maybe Red isn't quite a psychopath, but he's close enough. He has most of the same traits as the other antisocial protagonists who have become some of television's most popular characters. It's a pantheon so shady some of its members don't even qualify as anti-heroes, yet few of them are entirely villains, either. They go up to the line, cross the line, erase the line, and pick up the line and skip rope with it. They operate outside the system, live by their own moral codes and get things done when no one else can.

They're throwbacks to Clint Eastwood's "Dirty Harry" Callahan and Charles Bronson's Paul Kersey, who embodied 1970s outrage at runaway crime and a justice system seen as coddling criminals. Liberals recoiled, seeing "Dirty Harry" and "Death Wish" as fascist wish fulfillment. Conservatives looked at Callahan and Kersey and saw the last sane men in a world gone mad.

Since then, violent crime has declined to near-historic lows, but you couldn't tell from the way people still worry about it. Yet on top of that, now there is the perception white-collar crime is out of control, that Wall Street can wreck an economy, leave taxpayers to clean up and get away with barely a public shaming.

The political system is in thrall to the powerful and well-connected, government spy agencies spend most of their time spying on their own citizens, and now you can't even keep your health care no matter how much you like it. Every institution in America seems broken or corrupt or both.

No wonder we turn to characters like Red, who exist outside the system. The Miami police are so incompetent and politically compromised, they miss the serial killer in their ranks. Good thing Dexter Morgan goes after only other serial killers, armed with his own moral code, "The Code of Harry."

Hannibal Lecter isn't quite as nice, but he still rationalizes his actions by claiming to eat only the rude. Who hasn't wanted to deal out just desserts to a cad or 200?

Now NBC has turned Dracula, usually a villain and sometimes a tragic hero, into an anti-establishment crusader, pretending to be an American industrialist whose anachronistic, steampunk, green technology will bring down his hated enemies, who happen to be Victorian oil barons.

Yet Dracula is still Dracula. He acts without remorse, sacrifices pawns and leaves a trail of blood-drained corpses in his wake. He's no hero. He just has an agenda people nowadays kinda like.

The stakes today are much higher than they were in the 1970s, and our vigilantes have grown larger to match. No doubt, as liberals fretted, they are a kind of wish fulfillment, but liberals make wishes just as conservatives do. As H.L. Mencken wrote, "Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit upon his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats."

We still turn to rule-breaking heroes: Dr. Gregory House, the two modern-day Sherlocks of CBS and the BBC, even Robert Downey Jr.'s Iron Man. They all break the rules to get their way.

But sometimes the threats are so bad, we want heroes who aren't heroes at all, really. Guys who will get their hands dirty and not lose a wink of sleep over it. In a world gone mad, it's the ultimate wish fulfillment.

Culture Shock 10.17.13: Gillian Anderson rises to the challenge of 'The Fall'

Americans may be forgiven for thinking Gillian Anderson has kept a low profile since "The X-Files." Actually, she's kept busy, living and working in the United Kingdom, and picking up, through osmosis, a British accent that at least is more convincing than Madonna's.

Her gripping new five-episode BBC television drama, however, should have audiences on both sides of the pond taking notice.

In series 1 of "The Fall" (Netflix instant, DVD), Anderson stars as Detective Superintendent Stella Gibson, a member of the London Metropolitan Police sent to Belfast, Northern Ireland, to get a result in a murder case the locals can't close. As both an outsider and a woman of authority in a male-dominated field, Gibson arrives to a situation primed for tension.

The tension only ratchets up when she begins to suspect there is more to the unsolved murder than just one unsolved murder. There is a serial killer at large, honing his skills, developing his technique and preparing to strike again.

Unfortunately, she's right, and the audience knows who the killer is even if Gibson doesn't.

Paul Spector (an unnerving Jamie Dornan of "Once Upon a Time") is a family man and a grief counselor. He works with couples who have lost children. He also stalks and kills woman, and he's getting better at it.

Female avengers pitted against male serial killers are nothing new. The metaphor of men who literally objectify women is too easy to pass up. "The Silence of the Lambs" perfected the genre, which is feminist while also a target of criticism from feminists. It just goes to show, you can tell a feminist story yet get zero credit if you don't tell the "right kind" of feminist story.

In "The Fall," the heroine isn't a rookie like Clarice Starling of "Silence," but a veteran who has dealt with serial killers before. The power dynamic is different. Gibson, whom Anderson plays with world-weary confidence, has power, and the men around her don't, or they don't have as much.

As a pattern emerges among the killer's victims — young, attractive, up-and-coming professionals — Gibson deduces a motive. The killer is targeting women who have some measure of power and success, or at least more of it than he does. It's garden variety misogyny.

So far, little of that strays beyond the standard feminist critique of society's gender roles, but what makes "The Fall" interesting is where its sexual politics do diverge from the politically correct.

Gibson is completely comfortable with her sexuality and with using it, on occasion, to get what she wants. She has what British sociologist Catherine Hakim calls "erotic capital," and she knows how to spend it.

The day she arrives in Belfast, she picks up a fellow officer for a one night stand. Later, when the secret gets out, she confronts another officer about the double standard. No one thinks twice about a one night stand when the man is the instigator, she says. Then when told her fling is married, she responds she didn't know that and, in any case, that's his business, not hers.

For Gibson, embracing her own sexuality gives her a "male" outlook on sexual relations. Men are subject to her female gaze, and all is fair game. So, is that feminism or not?

All of this, however, is subtext for Gibson's pursuit of Spector, who at heart is an arrested adolescent who fancies himself beyond good and evil. It's a delusion that stands in stark contrast to the bleak landscape of Belfast, a working-class wasteland still not far removed from decades of sectarian religious conflict. Everyone there has seen too much, and everyone there, newcomer Gibson included, is compromised.

This is no paradise of Eden. This is the world after the Fall.

Culture Shock 09.19.13: 'Dirk Gently' brings Douglas Adams' holistic detective to life

Darren Boyd, left, Stephen Mangan, and Helen Baxendale.

In screenwriting, you have what are called the "A story" and the "B story."

The A story is the main narrative. The B story is secondary, often dealing with supporting characters. While the two parallel stories may be linked thematically, they otherwise don't usually have a lot to do with one another.

For instance, an episode of "Star Trek: The Next Generation" might focus on Capt. Picard averting a diplomatic crisis between water-breathing fish people and a race of sentient sea sponges. Meanwhile, the B plot involves Data humorously failing to stop his cat Spot from marking territory in the transporter room.

Yet, in other instances, the A and B stories collide. There is that occasional "CSI" episode in which the primary case and the secondary case intersect, and the lead CSIs have that eureka moment where they realize they're working the same case.

Enter Dirk Gently. Dirk is a holistic detective. For him, every case is the same case because everything — and he means everything — is fundamentally connected. That's why he has no problem billing a client for a new refrigerator; everything is relevant to the case, so everything is a business expense. Also, Dirk is a bit of a jerk.

"Dirk Gently" is one of those shows that was just too good for television. It was too good even for British television. So, it ran only for four brilliant episodes, but now all four are on DVD.

The show is loosely based on two novels by "Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy" author Douglas Adams, "Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency" and "The Long, Dark Tea-Time of the Soul." It doesn't adapt either of them so much as mine them for ideas.

Dirk (Stephen Mangan of Showtime's "Episodes") is slovenly, insolvent and abrasive. He refuses to pay his secretary on the theory that if he does, she'll stop showing up for work in hopes of getting paid.

He also is locked in a battle of wills with his cleaning lady.

While working on a case involving an old lady's lost cat, Dirk chances upon university acquaintance Richard MacDuff (Darren Boyd of "Spy"). Except Dirk doesn't believe in chance because everything is interconnected, just as the beating wings of a butterfly in the Amazon can influence the path of a hurricane in the Atlantic. Convinced it could be the key to the missing cat, Dirk takes on the case of MacDuff's girlfriend (Lisa Jackson), who may or may not be having an affair.

Needless to say, the cases are related, in improbable if not impossible ways, and by the first episode's conclusion, MacDuff has signed on as Dirk's partner/assistant/human ATM.

With cases that involve time travel, conspiracies, robots and computers with artificial intelligence, "Dirk Gently" treads ground between sci-fi and detective series, and it plays cleverly with the cliches and conventions of both. Series creator Howard Overman ("Misfits") does an excellent job of turning Adams' novels into a TV show that stands on its own.

Mangan brings manic intensity to the role of Dirk, who is at his most likable when he's being his most horrid. Conning people comes second nature to him, but as MacDuff grudgingly admits, Dirk is a brilliant detective.

Boyd's MacDuff is the perfect straight man for Dirk. Exasperated, resigned and abused, MacDuff sticks with Dirk only because he thinks, somehow, in ways that aren't entirely obvious, that he and Dirk are doing good.

Yet ironically, because everything is connected, the cases Dirk solves are usually his fault somehow in the first place. That's the show's ultimate commentary on the detective genre: Cases exist solely for detectives to solve. That's Dirk's greatest con of all, and it's on us, but it's fun to watch.

Culture Shock 08.08.13: TV and movies experience reversal of fortunes

Two new books, taken together, perfectly illustrate the divergent fortunes of television and the movies.

The first is "Difficult Men" by GQ correspondent Brett Martin. In this case, the (overly long) subtitle — "Behind the Scenes of a Creative Revolution: From 'The Sopranos' and 'The Wire' to 'Mad Men' and 'Breaking Bad' " — says it all. Television is no longer mostly just sitcoms and episodic police procedurals, although both are still around and doing fine. Now there are complex shows with ongoing stories that attract some of the best actors in the business, the sort of actors who used to do only movies and looked down on TV work.

Driven by writer-creators rather than by directors, television has become the go-to platform for long-form, narrative storytelling.

At the other, seedier end of the street is Lynda Obst's "Sleepless in Hollywood: Tales from the New Abnormal in the Movie Business." Obst is a producer who has a hard time producing movies nowadays, even though her credits include hits like "Adventures in Babysitting" and "Sleepless in Seattle."

The reason is Hollywood doesn't make the kind of modestly budgeted films she makes anymore, unless they're horror films or star-driven comedies. Everything is either low-budget indie films, on the one hand, or grotesquely budgeted effects-driven extravaganzas based on brands with built-in audience appeal. That's why everything Hollywood produces seems to be a remake, a sequel or based on a book, comic book or old TV show.

They're not all bad, but for every "Iron Man" there are a dozen "Man of Steels," crowding out other types of movies. Once, these big-budget would-be blockbusters were tentpoles around which studios built their release schedules. Now, Obst complains, just about every studio movie is a tentpole.

Even a big-name director like Steven Spielberg has to scrape together funding when he wants to make a non-tentpole like his Oscar-bait biopic "Lincoln."

That prompted Spielberg and George Lucas, jointly credited/blamed with creating the "summer blockbuster," to warn that Hollywood's big tent is on the verge of collapsing.

The common denominator behind both TV's and films' fortunes is DVD sales.

The rise of DVDs (and video on demand) in the past 15 or so years made movies more available, a development that was one thing driving pay-TV channels like HBO into original programming as a way to differentiate themselves. The subsequent decline in DVD sales, however, broke all of the Hollywood studios' financial models, leading to the tentpole-dominated model that prevails now.

The decline of DVDs is in part the work of Netflix, which is also credited with helping change TV for the better by encouraging "binge viewing" and producing its own shows like the Emmy-nominated "House of Cards," a fourth season of "Arrested Development" and the latest critical darling, "Orange is the New Black." It's not too much of an exaggeration to say Netflix changed everything.

So, is everything roses for TV and curtains for the movies? Not necessarily.

Television still falls prey to formula. For all the talk of a "creative revolution," how many of these daring new shows can be summed up as "family man (or woman) with a secret criminal life"?

And Hollywood has been here before, when big-budget disasters like 1963's "Cleopatra" nearly sank studios and cleared the way for a new generation of filmmakers who made smaller, more personal films. After a decade of bloated epics, we got the generation of Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese and, yes, George Lucas.

Lest we forget, the original "Star Wars" was also a modestly budgeted film, by today's standards.