Attack of the Insult Comics

Watching the kids watch shows like "America's Funniest Videos" with our newfound over the air broadcast TV; you realize how breathtakingly cruel and stupid people will be to each other to get a laugh. Parents will abuse their own children. Children their parents. And everybody turns on the animals. It's shocking. Disgusting. What does it say about us? Where are the light, naive days of "Candid Camera"? Certainly not in the opening of Sacha Baron Cohen's newest chien andalou. All the typical trots are trotted out against Cohen, but I take my own counsel. Most times I find him eerily repulsive. Except when he makes me laugh, which is more often than I'd care to admit, particularly with my teenage son present. The kids worship him without the reserve adults grit teeth over. And the grown ups, the people who should know better, just keep falling right down into his little nightmare hole, like flies to a Venus fly trap. They never emerge unscathed. It's funny as hell, if you can get past the fact that the anti-social behavior is neither real nor staged, but something grayer in between, the product of a very clever, but warped mind. So not surprising, that Ron Paul, and Boutros (Boutros) Boutros Ghali no particularly dim bulbs were stung by Mr. Cohen. In his Sixer's shirted Ali G guise, Cohen has nailed celebrities, newsmakers and world leaders of all stripes and subjected them to the most inarticulate outrageous bigoted abuse, disguised as interview journalism. When interviewed himself, as by Terry Gross a couple of years ago, he articulates a daring vision of comedy, a candid camera farce/assault for the digital age. As uncomfortable as his button pushing makes us, there are a couple of reasons at least to like this guy. He uses the media to tweak power and celebrity in ways we ourselves only wish to. He is this generation's Chaplin, a true subversive.

But you didn't hear me say that because I've been watching some of my must see TV away from the broadcast box. TG for Hulu. It enabled me after five years of delayed gratification, to fall hopelessly under the spell of a show I wasn’t even sure I’d like. I was fortunate enough to come well under Hulu’s June 14^th deadline and in a concerted three week marathon, went from Season 1 to Season 5 of FX's amazing "Rescue Me", starring Denis Leary, Callie Thorne and the luminous Andrea Roth. Never have a more compelling, ###'ed up group of characters inhabited the small screen. Mr. Leary and producer partner Peter Tolan have appropriated the tragedy of 9/11 and given it a human scale and trajectory through the lives and loves of the NYC firefighters of Truck 62, a group of, in the words of character Franco Riviera, “the brotherhood of dysfunctional action junkies.” The show is bracingly un-PC and with its "pinned to the edge" explicit depictions of all the darkest nooks and crannies of the human psyche, it must give even the liberal FX morality police agita. Janet Jackson got fined for a nipple slip. The FCC must be watching "Rescue Me" closer than I do. Hopefully, with a new administration, they have their own must see TV and will leave mine alone.

The leader of this pack of dogs is Tommy Gavin, as played by Mr. Leary. Turns out I had him all wrong. Leary and I are the same age. He’s the type of macho wiseass guy who picked on my type of guy as a kid. At the beginning of his career, it seemed he was just another insult comic, an indoor sunglasses wearing, sneer-faced, Dice-Clay cloned Mick comic more known for profanity- drenched humor than serious work. IMH. Oh, but in “Rescue Me” his ghosts and demons leap, dance and blaze all over the screen and it is absolutely gut-wrenching and mesmerizing. Like watching luxury cars crash in slow motion.

Wherever he goes, whether to the firehouse, his own uneasy bed, or the kitchen of his lover, Leary’s Gavin lugs his Marleyesque purgatory train, the visible, trash talking, punch throwing ghosts of Jesus, his dead cousin, brother and father as well as civilian others who've perished in flames Tommy has fought with so little regard for his own life. At first I thought the device a little obvious, but I soon realized that Tommy’s ghosts are Leary’s first clue that his asshole alpha stud puppy alter ego is human, sympathetic and far frailer than maybe even the talented Mr. Leary is willing to concede.

Tommy's on again, off again, on again affair with the bottle is one only an AA lifer could fully conceptualize. You feel the burning ache of his thirst in the back of your own throat as he contemplates a fifth of vodka, pours the tumbler, raises it, sets it down, raises it again, all the while screaming "Don't do it Tommy boy!" Still the guy is an asshole and his own worst enemy. He is a mysogynist. He burns all his bridges, buys his kids' love with money and undermines everybody who cares for him. What a paradox! I care so deeply for him and his whole band of merry misfits. ( I hope he never finds out!) I love when a character, through the integrity of the writing, rises from the table, like Frankenstein’s monster, a creature far greater than the sum of his parts. Denis, I hardly knew ye. But man, am I impressed!

Unlike Leary, Callie Thorne is an actress whose career I have followed for decades, before she played long-suffering Elena McNulty, wife to serial destructo boy detective Jimmy McNulty on HBO’s critically heralded “The Wire” and before that, Det. Laura Ballard on NBC’s amazing six year, ‘90’s-era “Homicide, Life on the Streets.” With her trademark sexy vulnerability and toughness, she stole scenes, shone in these relatively minor roles, playing second fiddle to bigger names and storylines. In every role she plays, you feel her absences from the screen like gravity and wait impatiently for her return.

Mr. Leary, to his eminent credit, understands this. He trained the spotlight and let slip the leash that other directors and writers have restrained the incredibly talented Ms. Thorne with and she leaps to deliver, oh God does she deliver as Sheila, the predatory, over-the-top, head-case, pill-popping, sex-starved, Tommy-loving widow of Gavin clan cousin, Jimmy Keefe, the firefighter who died in the second WTC tower’s collapse. In bed, in a chair, on a table, on the floor, she is every bit Leary’s femme foil and like him, displays no fear in her exploration of desire and fallibility. I can’t take my eyes off her. I would give body parts to watch Thorne and Leary rehearse. I think I'd finally truly get the writer/actor connection.

They are as unlikable a group of characters as you’d ever want to meet.

They are as lovable a group of characters as you’d ever want to meet.

I now wait with bated breath, hook and ladder, for Wednesday early, early mornings, when the previous week’s show is posted by FX after an agonizing eight day delay.

Another Hulu offering I didn’t think I’d warm to is Showtime’s “Dead Like Me” which I assumed would be yet another death-trip rip-off of HBO’s wildly popular “Six Feet Under.” Again, I got it wrong and I happily report I’m in love with 28 year Ellen Muth, who plays, no carries the show, as pug-faced, saucer-eyed 19 year old Georgia, a college drop-out office drone who is freakishly and summarily dispatched by a Russian space station toilet seat turned fiery reentry debris. For reasons that aren’t entirely clear, instead of meeting her eternal reward, the unfinished George, aka "Toilet Seat Girl" is pressed reluctantly into yet another dead end job as an undead case worker, a grim reaper who harvests the souls of the living, seconds before their often gory denouements. The reaper squad receives daily assignments from the bureaucracy of death, but no pay or expense account for their grim but merciful tasks. So they must resort to some sordid and hilarious scavenging to keep it going 9-5 in the land of the living. Clever, though the writing isn't yet near as crisp or insightful as "6 Feet," yet it has its moments and the camera loves Muth. With her rolling eyes, deadpan voiceovers and fixed scowl turned smile; she outshines even thespier thesps Mandy Patinkin and Jasmine Guy, episode after episode. Watch this dead little lady rise like a phoenix.

It’s shows like these that make the last two decades the true golden era of the little screen. As long as talented writers and actors are allowed to parade and exorcise their demons on the little box, I will keep watching, far into the night, cheating sleep and drawing inspiration as I seek out the clues and tools for mining the veins buried deep in my own dark writer's heart. Television drama, written by writers, acted by actors, like reality, only better.

I want my DTV?

For those of us who have neither cable or satellite TV, a transformation has come that the rest of you might have missed. On June 12, the old NTSC (never twice the same color) signal disappeared, though not completely and the new digital signal, DTV, (http://www.dtv.gov/) took its place. A handful of networks (NBC and CBS among others) jumped on the bandwagon early, but for the most part, the full force of change wasn't apparent until I rescanned the tuner of the Pioneer DVD-RW-VHS machine I'd bought six months ago and to its glory it added nearly all the new channels. 3-1, 6-1,6-2,6-3, 7 (low power signal), 10 1-3, 12 1-7, 17-1,2, 29-1, my new favorite Mind TV 35 1-3 and on and on ... at least twelve more channels.

I put it to you, does anybody really need more TV than that?

And it's a high def signal that looks great on my $127 Sanyo 27" TV. It sounds great on my home audio system. This is in the same bandwidth that the old signal occupied and is incredible compared to what we used to get before cable came. Which was nada, zilch, crappo. Down the hill in the city, with poor line of sight to the Roxboro transmission towers, our reception historically sucked. We pulled in ghosted, fuzzy 10 and 12 on good days and a few of the UHF channels. When cable came on the horizon, I was an advocate. Literally. Back in the early 90's I sat on a City Council public access advisory sub-committee that worked to bring cable to Philadelphia and true public access to cable. Well, it half worked, considering that 15 years later, the house that Comcast built is the tallest building in Philadelphia and the largest cable provider in the country, while a new public access movement is still struggling to democratize the media. Good luck.

Cable. Sure, we enjoyed it for awhile, though it never had the range of programming choices and signal quality it claimed it would and I expected it to. And cable companies have never been known for their service ethic. Ancient history. To pinch pennies, I took back the $90/month box back over two years ago and never looked back. The financial savings were only part of the picture. Son 1 started a new comic strip. Son 2 took up piano. Mrs. W devours novels and I read to my sons and ... I write. More and better than ever before. I did it for the money. I did it for the family and our lifestyle. I did it for dinner conversation and the young minds. I did it for myself.

I go to dinner parties, tell friends this story, thinking I'm very out there and instead run into others, yes, even media types, who say yeah, me too; I gave up cable and never looked back. My solo back to basic protest is more like an underground movement. But don't feel sorry for us. We're not exactly sewing our own clothes and working by candlelight here. More like we're burning up the DSL line. Today, I'm ordering a Roku box and we'll be watching 500 films in my queue on Netflix "watch now" films. There are 49,500 more videos that I haven't found yet. I found Hulu and Amazon Videos on demand. I had a short dalliance with Graboid. Again, how much more do you need than that?

But back to basics. With the goofy antenna we have that looks like a Star Wars radar device we get strong, clear HD station signals, though positioning is important and sometimes we see digital lag and dropout especially during storms. But the most important thing is that we get it all free. We went from weak to no signals to clean, snow/noise-free terrestrial transmission. Yee haw. By the way. We are watching more TV since the switchover. The young people particularly, with summer upon us, must be poked and prodded to turn off the computer and TV and read or go play in the street. I too am not immune to the 'lure of the box.

I'm witnessing traditional terrestrial TV reinvented. For somebody who makes his living writing video, who has studied television from the days of Vladimir Zworkin, it's beyond cool, but it's not the only game in town. FIOS will probably obsolesce my current setup when we can get it. Which we will eventually, but can't yet.

True story.

For some inexplicable reason our leafy upscale little urban neighborhood 15 or so blocks from the old Bell of PA headquarters, can't get FIOS on some blocks. The guy up the street got so pissed because they kept him on a phone a half hour waiting to hear the news I could've told him. Nope, no fiberoptic cable here. Not yet. After waiting so long, since 1996 in fact, when Bell of PA first promised what they then unglamorously called "fiber to the curb," I'm in no hurry anymore. Funny, but 500 channels of nothing, which my parents in Pittsburgh have, is mind numbing. 50 channels of nothing is something. Something better. Something more manageable. A leap from far too much to more than enough. True innovation.

Can't forget the net. Which we all know changed everything. Lots of television to watch out there, including my current favorite. More on that later. Television has decided to grow up. In some ways it's too late. We’ve moved on. Sort of. But we're still grateful and still watching. Maybe with a little more selectivity. But we're watching. And that's the way it is.

Ribbon Schmibbon

"Microsoft today released a "technical preview" release of Microsoft Office 2010, the next version of the world's most widely used application suite. The beta is available to anyone who preregistered with Microsoft for a chance to download and test it. After running it for a few days of intense testing, I'm impatient for the final release." This according to PC Mag.

The author of this article might be an eager beaver--he's paid to be. As a user in the trenches, I have a different take.

I've been using MS Word since 1983, (that's right, Word for DOS) and by version 2 it was a robust program that I'd written macros for to automate many functions. I'm a scriptwriter and 2 column was not something Word did easily back then. Early in it's upgrade path, all the macro's I'd written became incompatible, hours/days/weeks wasted. I learned. So when Office 2003 came bundled with my most recent hardware upgrade, I dug in. I'm a whiz at it, I have to be. But when I try to help colleagues with 2007 and its ridiculous ribbon interface, I feel like a moron. It's not nice to make your power users feel like morons. So I stick with O'03 because I see no benefit, no enhanced functionality that makes sense to my business. This from the guy who only upgraded from DOS to Windows when it became apparent that Windows allowed functions like faxing from applications that DOS required extra software and lots of difficulty to do. People and businesses who rush to upgrade should seriously examine how and if the pretty, new upgrade enhances their own productivity. You need to look past slick interfaces, pop open the hood and be able to tick off 2-3 "must have" innovations. Even if you find real productivity enhancers, you have to balance them against what you'll lose in orphaned functions and time wasted in a new learning curve. It bites the big one-it always has bitten the big one, that MS and other developers make you completely relearn the applications you need for your daily work every two to three years. If there are no compelling reasons to upgrade, then don't. Just say no. Dig in. Join the growing ranks of software skeptics. If everybody used the same "enhanced functionality yardstick" eventually even the big software makers would catch on.

Curmudgeonly yours,