Procrastination Station
It turns out that one huge benefit of making your post a private one is that you get to see exactly who is reading it, because they have to contact you direct and ask you for a password. Which is nice. Thankfully quite a few of you did, and provided me with just the ego-massage that I required. What you didn’t do, by and large, was leave me any helpful comments. If you don’t know what I am talking about then by all mean feel free to email me, hit me up on Twitter or Facebook and I’ll send you the password. But despite the warming glow of people asking to read something of yours I shall resist the temptation to ask you to do so again, I suspect I’d get far less of a take up than before.
I’ve been feeling a bit more productive again of late, and having pretty much rounded up part one of Blood On The Motorway it’s time to turn back to my normal blogging. Before we go any further let me do a little bit of whoring and point you in the direction of a piece I wrote for Demon Pigeon about Axl Rose and a bit of a moratorium over at the Year of Health. As well as this I’ve taken my first steps into the wider world of trying to get paid for writing things. I’ve signed up to a company called Suite101, which is a site that gets you to write short articles for them and then they pay you a slice of the Google Advertising revenue that you get from the article. On the face of it this is not going to be a particularly lucrative deal, but from what I can tell (and the proof will come if this actually happens for me) but most articles wont pull in more than, say, $1 a month, unless they get really noticed. But that’s not actually that bad when you consider that will be for 12 months. If I can crank out three or four of these articles a week, then it wont be long before I build up enough of a head of steam that the money coming in will be quite nice. It’s never going to be enough to allow me to survive on it (unless I get really lucky on it and have a whopping hit of an article) but it’ll be a nice bit of extra cash.
That is, of course, if it works as advertised. I’m still pretty sceptical about the whole thing, but the way I see it is that if it doesn’t work then I’ve not really lost anything save for a little bit of time. As well as that, it’ll give me an excuse to write some copy that I can then use in a portfolio, and broaden the type of writing I can show around. As much as I love Demon Pigeon, it’s hardly the kind of content that is likely to lead to a job. I really do want to start building up a decent portfolio, and as much as I’ve kept writing in public ever since I left the Asian Express, very little of it is usable for a portfolio, and most of the stuff I can use is about 5 years old, and a lot of that is not really very good. So even if this doesn’t bring in the cash, I can write about whatever I want, so I can use it as an exercise in bulking out my portfolio. But I do hope it does bring in the cash.
But that’s enough shop talk. I know this blog has become a bit of a procrastination station recently, but I really do want to take the whole ‘writing’ thing seriously, and as a result it’s pretty much all I have to talk about. Boooooring.
So what else have I been doing? Not a lot. Yesterday I appear to have agree to another web project, although this one is not particularly labour intensive, should be fun too, and will probably become more popular than anything else. We shall see.
Other than that I have been largely watching the repeats of Mad Men on BBC2 on a Sunday night. It’s divine, even though nothing ever actually happens in it. One of the episodes this week had a plot that actually revolved around some people going for a drink after work, and nothing happened when they did. I am utterly transfixed. I think it’s the world’s most expensive and brilliant screensaver. The real hook in it is the characters, which are brilliantly drawn and very well acted, but have the added bonus that the writers make no effort to ascribe them a goal or obvious motivation. They’re just people, complex and trying to get through the day. Marvellous stuff and I am very happy knowing I still have three and a half series of it at the very least makes me happy. Oh, and talking about the show this much gives me justification to put pic of the lovely Christina Hendricks at the top of this post. Yum.
Other than that I’ve been watching a lot of the Hurricane Katrina docs that have been on to mark the five year anniversary. I’ve only watch the first half of the epic Spike Lee doc ‘When The Levees Broke’ but it’s magnificent, moving, and bewildering. Can’t quite see how it’s going to stretch to four hours though. Oh, and we’ve been watching the original Swedish Wallander, which is excellent but bloody hard work, so much so that watching one episode puts you off watching the next one a bit, even though it’s really enjoyable.
So yeah, it turns out that all I’ve been doing is watching telly. No change there then.
On Doctors, Housewives, Bad Cops, Atticus Finch and Damn Statistics
You may have noticed that things look all shiny and new around here, as promised I have a new theme until the site gets a full overhaul for the launch of BOTM. One downside, however, is that the change seems to have borked my analytics right up, so I can't see if anyone is actually reading any of this. Any other bloggers will know that there's little worse than not being able to obsess over your stats, but hopefully this will all resolve itself in the next few days. Today I've managed to get a bit more writing done for Blood as well, so I'm now six issues in. For those of you who are interested, I will be aiming for two posts of 1000 (or so) words a week, so this will take care of the first three weeks while I'm getting set up. Ideally though I want more of a cushion, something around the 10 issue mark, so I can make sure I'm not putting anything out without adequate revision. One of the real threats with doing online fiction is that I'll end up putting up stuff that's not quite good enough, so I want to try and keep a buffer as much as I can so that things are getting a few revisions before they go up, unlike this blog, which tends to fall out of my head via my hands, and get whacked straight up.
But anyway, I promised you some thoughts on the good and bad of what I've been watching of late, so here goes:
1. Doctor Who. I mentioned before how much I thoroughly loved this whole season of the Doctor. I can't claim to have been the biggest fan in the past, I never really watched it as a kid and while I liked the Ecclestone series and parts of the Tennant stuff (although I never really liked Tennant himself) I now feel as though I have 'my' Doctor in matt Smith, and together with Karen Gillan (be still my heart) and Stephen Moffat they have finally created something that stands up as well as anything produced by the Godlike genius of Sci-Fi, Joss Whedon. Smartly scripted, emotionally engaging, brilliantly performed, this was children's TV that remembered that kids are smart, and they are people. Wonderful stuff, and the double-finale was about the best I've seen a series wrapped up, and the episode Vincent and the Doctor (Richard Curtis, where the bloody hell did that come from?) is easily the best thing I've seen so far this year. The scene in the Museum had tears streaming down my face, and Ellen's too.
2. Desperate Housewives. Ellen managed to hook me into this a few years back, and I have been a fan ever since. Again, taking what is essentially whimsical melodrama and marrying it to taut storytelling, good performances and wry humour all combine to make this a show I look forward to more than most, and this season has been excellent, right up until the last episode, which aired on Channel 4 last night. How on earth did they misjudge it so badly. All the various strands and interweaving plotlines were left vaguely resolved, but without any emotional payoff. I mean, there was a serial killer arrested, and a car blew up in the middle of the suburbs with a wanted terrorist inside, but by the very next scene these individual plots were completely ignored. It was lazy storytelling, plain and simple, with the writers too eager to shoehorn clues about next year's plots to bother resolving this years. Disappointing to say the least, and it makes me wonder if the show's days are numbered when the writing staff have clearly disengaged.
3. Southland. Ellen and I managed to sit through about twenty minutes of this distincly average Shield clone, before I realised that it was actually nicking the plot from the pilot of the Shield wholesale. Terrible, and the acting was pretty substandard, and the characters should have been walking around wearing their cliches on a billboard rather than cop uniforms. Woeful. Although still not as bad as the Idris Elba vehicle on BBC1, Luther, which was so bad that I've tried my utmost to forget it even exists.
4. The IT Crowd. OK so we're only a couple of episodes in but once again Graham Linehan's sticom is better than everything. Fact. And I want most of Roy's T-Shirts, and the pictures he has in his new flat. Hell, I'd even take the bicycle off his hands.
5. Films. Not all of them, obviously, but one of the big pluses to having a V+ box is that I no longer have to miss those cool films that they inevitably stick on at one o clock on a Wednesday morning because I have to go to work the next day. Last night we watched To Kill A Mockingbird, which I was sure I'd seen before but I'm now not sure I had. Needless to say it was brilliant and moving and I now want to use Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch as a template for how to be a good dad. Oh, and I finally got round to watching both Zombieland and An Education, both of which I highly recommend, although obviously for completely different reasons.
Anyway, that'll do for now, back to the apocalypse, goodbye.
When is an office not an office?
Firstly, a quick note to say that those of you who have come to the site directly and not just looked at the shiny RSS feed will notice that the site looks awful. Turns out updates are not such a good idea, and I shall be looking at a new theme soon, but in the meantime, please do stay.* Now that's out of the way, I'd like to talk to you about my office. No, please do stay.
One of the strangest things about our move into the new and shiny new house has been the realisation that getting what you want isn't always the best of ideas. The main reason for deciding on a three bedroom house (aside from the obvious fact that a three bedroom house is always going to be bigger than a two bedroom) was that finally, I could have an office to do all my writing in. In the old house we had the computer set up in the mockery that was the dining room, but in reality was more of a big space that connected the lounge to the kitchen. As such, it was bloody hard to concentrate sometimes, with Rosie back and forth all the time, and the general cooking time ruled out for actual work. In the new house, however, we now have a spacious office room, with a proper computer desk, a filing cabinet (well, of sorts) and even a nice plush leather sofa bed that enables us to use the room as a guest bedroom. It's perfect, and should now enable your dear author here to get some serious work done. All except for one thing.
It's upstairs. Now, what with me not being a Dalek, you wouldn't imagine that this would be a huge issue for me. But Rosie is a bit young for me to leave her downstairs on her own during the day, so writing when on my own is out. Also, the office is right next to her room, and the hot weather and new room have meant that Rosie rarely settles when we put her to bed as it is, so the notion of sitting and tapping out an opus once she's gone to bed is also out of the window. And Ellen and I see each other so infrequently that when we do get an evening in together, I rarely want to remove myself from the lounge. So we now have a nice office that never really gets used for any great period of time. Which renders it essentially useless.
All of which is really just excuses. What I need to do is either bite the bullet and admit my mistake and move the computer downstairs, or stop spending my evenings sat in front of the telly, and instead get writing. But as well as the logistical difficulty of using my own computer, I have to admit that the V+ box, which I believe I may have already mentioned once or twice, is making it very hard to get anything done at all. By freeing me of the constraints of having to sit down at a specific time to watch a show, it now allows me to record anything that I think may be of interest to me. Which is a hell of a lot of stuff, it turns out. So now, as unshackled as I am to regular programming, I am having to spend all my time watching telly just to stay on top of it all.
So in other words, I need to stop being a lazy arse. In that spirit, I have once again started working on Blood On The Motorway, which for those of you who don't know, is the mythical online novel whose existence I have been threatening for a year now. I actually registered this domain a year ago, and the blog was moved to a sub domain, but this whole year it's been nothing more than a holding page, and I have been putting off its launch for some time. But today I talked to the mighty Jonic about getting the site itself designed and took another pass at the first four episodes/issues so that they will be ready to launch with the site. I'm not going to promise that it will be tomorrow, but it should be soon. I am actually quite excited about it, but I need to get a bit further ahead than I am at the moment before I launch, as if launching Demon Pigeon has taught me anything, it's that it's generally a good idea to keep your updates regular. Something we have become a bit shameful at lately, which I shall add to my list of 'stuff that I need to sort out once I summon the courage to use my computer more.
But enough introspection. Tomorrow I shall return with some thoughts on some of the many TV shows I have been watching, including the terrible end to the otherwise excellent recent series of Desperate Housewives. Yeah, that's right, I'm in touch with my feminine side, and my feminine side gets pissed off when shows are wrapped up in a ham fisted and illogical way.
*Facelift achieved, shiny new theme installed. I hope that once Blood On The Motorway is done properly that I'll get the theme for the blog to match it, but this will do in the meantime.
A Cunning Plan
Today I attempt the impossible. No, not trying to balance an egg on it's end at the equinox. Not sitting through an episode of Big Brother without curling my fists into a ball while a rage sweeps through my body. Not even trying to explain to George Osbourne that poor people are still people too. Today, I will attempt to avoid all mention of the England game for its entire duration, and watch it on V+ when I get home. Yes, I know I said yesterday that I wouldn't mention the football, but hey, it's my blog, and this is going to take up my day.
In order for this miraculous feat to occur, several things will have to work in my favour. Firstly, since I came into work early today, I can leave at four o clock, meaning I have to get through the first half and the half time coverage without anyone in my office alerting me to the score. Sadly, since I work on a huge open plan floor, this is unlikely. In order to minimise the risk I have asked everyone in my immediate vicinity not to mention the score, and I am going to stick some brutal metal in my ears and avoid the internet. Of course this does nothing for the other people I don't know well enough to approach, nor does it rule out the fact that there are probably a few people I work with who would see it as hilariously funny to destroy my day. I am however slightly aided in this by the fact that most of the die hard fans have already taken the afternoon off. The only reason I haven't is that I am a dumbshit who only thought to do it when it was too late.
Come four, I will leave work without talking to anyone, and I will cycle home. This part shouldn't be too bad, given that most people will be off the roads, although I will have to be pretty lucky to avoid honking horns and pubs, and laughing or crying children. The last obstacle will be that I will arrive at home at roughly the same time as the match finishes, and given that my whole estate is currently decorated in thick blankets of red and white (seriously, there's even bunting), there is a good chance that any celebrations or desolation will spill out into the street. Once home, should I make it, I can settle in, ignore my phone, and watch the match on a two hour time delay.
What's the chances that all of this will come off? Slim to none, obviously, but it's worth a shot.
Oh, and today I stole Ellen's snazzy new bike and cycled to work, which took only 30 minutes and was thoroughly pleasant, if a little nerve-wracking in places. But at least I wasn't stuck on a bus of doom, reading a really shit book. When I was a lot younger I used to love reading John Grisham, since I was only about 13 and didn't know any better. I haven't read any for years, but last time my parents visited they brought a new one up, The Associate, which they said was his best in years, so I thought I'd take nostalgia out for a bit of a spin and give it a whirl while I wait for Ellen to finish Cloud Atlas. I really wish I hadn't. The book itself hinges on a ridiculous premise, whereby the main character is supposedly trapped in a complex tale or blackmail, but I have so far thought of about 10 different ways he could avoid being ensnared, and the fact that he is supposed to be a world class top-shot lawyer and he can't think of any is staggering. And the whole thing is draped in a thick veil of misogyny that is quite shockingly forthright. The blackmail revolves around a rape, but any sympathy for the victim is utterly absent, while any other female characters are treated with nothing but contempt. One female associate, when faced with the same gruelling lifestyle as the men around her, actually faints! Those poor feeble women, eh? Nonetheless, although the book makes me have to temper the rising of bile, I still really want to know what happens at the end, so I guess it's been pretty effective at that at least.
So wish me luck, and if you are one of my friends, please resist the need to text or call me this afternoon. Cheers.
Service please
As I mentioned before, I am really suffering with writers block at the moment. I have managed to write one thing though, a bit of a missive to Virgin Media for the terminally awful piece of shit they call 'service.' I thought I might post it here, just on the off-chance that I can later try and persude them that you dear readers are numbered in the tens of thousands, and that I am what they call in marketing terms 'an arbiter of taste.' This also means I don't have to try and go through it all again, as typing anything seems to fill me with a certain amount of unspecified dread, roughly akin to when you have a hangover and have that guilty feeling that you just can't shake all day. But anyway, what follows is my letter to Virgin. It's not one of the comedy letters you see so often and that can be rather wonderful, mainly because they are easily dismissable, and I want a resolution.
"I am writing to complain about being mis-sold a package on Virgin by one of your sales staff. I initially was looking at a range of options for my new home, amongst which was Virgin. Having entered a few details onto your website I got a follow up call from one of your agents, and discussed the matter further. I had looked at getting the bundle which included Broadband L (which included the wireless router), TV M+, and phone M, as well as the V+ box with associated costs. I ran through the details with him over the phone, and he said that if I could call him back he would be able to get a better deal for me. I looked into it further and decided to call him back.
At this stage he offered me various discounts, including dropping the one off charge for the V+ box. We discussed this in specifics as I explained to him that I was not all that bothered about the HD aspect, as I don't have a HD TV, but I really wanted the V+ aspect. He informed me that the HD box was the V+ box, and so I agreed.
We moved into the house and managed to get everything set up, although was a bit annoyed to find that my router had been downgraded to a non-wireless kind, this was never mentioned. But when I came to try the V+ box I was very upset to find that it actually was just an HD box, without the V+. I immediately phoned your customer services centre and spoke to someone called *******, who was extremely rude, told me there was nothing he could do and that he also couldn't get me a manager to speak to, but that he would get one to call me back within an hour.
That call never came, so I phoned back, and this time spoke to someone whose name I didn't catch, but they told me that there was no problem, and that you could send me out the V+ box, but not until my account had finished setting up on the system, and that I should phone back the next day.
I called back the next day, and was told that it still wasn't set up, but that I would get a call the next day to confirm sending out my V+box.
Two days later I still had not received a call back, so again I called your centre, only to be told I could not get the V+ box that was promised to me, as I had not paid for it. Eventually I was told that I could purchase one for £100, or by upgrading to the XL TV package.
In summary, I am very disappointed by this service. The box that I do have is completely useless to me (it also has a nice habit of crashing just as I am in the middle of watching something, if only I had V+!) and the V+ box was one of the main reasons I took your service, and was explicitly promised to me as being within the package I was signing up for. I would like you to look back over my account and listen to the various calls to me and from me on ******** , and once you have confirmed this, I would like to be sent both the V+ box, and a wireless router.
If this is not resolved, I will be cancelling my contract immediately and going to one of your competitors.
I look forward to hearing from you.
Paul"
Interestingly, I was promised over the phone that if I sent a letter of complaint I would get a definite response within 48 hours. It turns out that what I would get is an immediate automated response which say's, and I quote:
"Hi Paul,
Thanks for the email you sent to us on *********. We're on the case and a member of our team will get back to you as quickly as possible, usually within 5 days. Don't forget - if there's anything else you'd like to know, just log on to our website. It's at www.virginmedia.com"
How utterly helpful. What's the betting that I don't get a response within 5 days?*
So there you go. The world's most blatant attempt to circumvent writers block. Hopefully it will have worked, and I can write something somebody may actually want to read.
*I actually wrote this two days ago now, so by reckoning, Virgin will get back in contact with in exactly 'when hell freezes over' days time.
Choices
*Note. Firstly I'm glad to say I've got the blogging buzz back at the moment, so expect to see a bit more activity around here. However, for the next few weeks it's very likely I will be talking about Politics a lot, seeing as it's all I can think or talk about at the moment. So if that's not your thing, then apologies. I know at least one American reader who will doubtless be utterly uninterested in the minutiae of British politics, so sorry Kerri. That said, on with the show.
Come next Thursday I am going to have to make a very hard decision. As millions of people put their ballots in the box and the nation waits expectantly for the result of the most closely fought election my generation has ever seen, I am personally being forced to choose. A choice, between tried, tested and reliable, or the shiny, the new, the unknown. A choice between cold hard truths, and the promise of a new way of doing things.
I am not talking, of course, about the choice between parties. No, for me that ship set sail long ago. No, I am talking about the choice of coverage come election night. I have already booked the next day off work, so that no matter how long the result takes I can stay up without fear of falling asleep at my desk the next day. I do this for every election (and the American ones too) because I am a geek, and I love watching the pundits clamouring to fill the time before the results come in, to see them desperately trying to spin results as they happen, to get reaction, and for the little moments that really shape your understanding of our political system. Or simply those moments that make you laugh, or punch the air (watching Michael Portillo's face as he lost his seat ticked both of those boxes for me) can easily keep me sustained for an entire evening, and often right up until the morning as well.
For my money, there is nobody better at this sort of thing than the BBC. With the trusty old Beeb you get the highest grade of punditry as well as the most knowledgeable presenters. But you also get a sense that they understand that this should be entertainment, that it's live, and that whatever happens will happen. Until recently it was a given that I was going to spend next Thursday in the company of the Beeb. The good old trusty Beeb. But now we have a new choice. A usurper, if you will, in the battle for my attention come election night. Channel 4's 'alternative election night.'
This promises to be a slightly more irreverent take on the unfolding election results, hosted by a mix of the good (Charlie Brooker, David Mitchell), the bad (Jimmy Carr) and the ugly (Jimmy Carr). Oh, and the lovely Lauren Laverne. Several of these ingredients give me hope, especially the presence of Brooker, who has long been my favourite person on telly. Certainly there is potential there for it to be a funny but still intelligent enough look at the night, but on the other hand, these are presenters who by and large don't have a lot of experience with live telly, so there is the very real possibility that it will all go immensely tits up. The description on the Channel 4's website bills it as 'a night full of satire and sass, minus the staid political swing-o-meters.' But I like the swing-o-meter. I am torn between wanting to be entertained, and wanting to be informed.
The Channel 4 show runs from 9pm until one in the morning. The BBC's coverage doesn't start on BBC1 proper until 9.55 (although BBC News will obviously be running with the election throughout the day) so I imagine that I will give the challenger 55 minutes to sell itself to me, at which point I think that the BBC may well win out. The truth is that as much as I have enjoyed the satire and humour that has permeated this election more than any other in my lifetime, I also take it very seriously, and I think come the night itself, I want to watch coverage that takes it seriously as well.
*Second note. I'm going to try and post this using my phone, as I have learnt my lesson about blogging from a work computer, and I am not going to be able to get it up until tomorrow otherwise. If this works, it will make me a happy man. If it doesn't, well then I guess I will remove this note and post it tomorrow instead. So if you are reading the note then it worked. If you are not, well then you will never know about it.
*Third note. The phone thing didn't work. I hate the world.
Um, anyone still there?
So it's official, I am utterly shit.
Having promised not to let my extracurricular activities preclude me from updating this place, the truth is that Year of Health and Demon Pigeon (not to mention the fallout of that business at the tail end of last year) have been keeping me pretty busy of late. Incidentally, both sites are now live, and I have to say I'm pretty pleased with the results, both in terms of the lifestyle change that Year Of Health has enacted within me, and in how Demon Pigeon has turned out, given it's my first foray into the wider world of 'doing the internet' properly. If you haven't done so yet, do go check them out.
But enough of the digital pimping, what else is new with me? Well, I'm in a new job, so that's nice. Things are going pretty well at the moment, although I'm bloody knackered by the end of the day. Ellen got me the complete Buffy box set for Christmas, and to my pleasant surprise she's really enjoying watching it with me at the minute, and we're not even up to the bit in season two when it all gets really bloody good. You know the one, where the person does the thing? Yeah, you know. Don't pretend you don’t.
I saw Avatar twice at the cinema, both times in 3d. The first time I was staggered by the sheer beauty of it, and the second time I realised that under all that brightly coloured 3d fauna there lay at the heart of it a distinctly average film. I'm going to be interviewing one of my all time favourite bands, and even if it is going to be via email that's pretty bloody cool. Oh, and I've become a Gleek.
So I just wanted to pop by and let you all know that I'm still here, which I am, and that I fully intend to update this more often, well aware as I am that I owe you good people a lot of Cross Blogination posts. The fact that it's my turn as well should spur me on a bit.
So how are all of you?
A whole lot of nothing
So again I have to say that my brain is currently totally tapped out, due to having to think about too many things, all the time. My normally docile brain has been suddenly expected to leap into action on a number of different fronts, and so as I sit down to write this blog I can think of absolutely no topic to ramble on about. So instead I shall ramble on about nothing.
Yesterday something happened which made me a little nervous about the series of tasks which I have chosen to undertake. I was writing some stuff for BOTM, trying to get a good amount of stuff down in advance of launching, when I found that nothing good was coming to me. I had written 500 words of badly written Dan Brown nonsense, all short sentences with no joy in them whatsoever.
Normally once I have sat down to write I am fine. My version of writer's block is closer to writer's avoidance. Once I actually sit down, it all comes tumbling out of me faster than I can type, but yesterday what wrote was so utterly terrible that I deleted the whole lot without thinking. I hope that my brain has not atrophied from neglect. That would be awful. No need to panic just yet though.
Yesterday was the finale of Generation Kill, and I've written about it often enough that I don't feel I can let its end go unmentioned. It was predictably brilliant. Subtle and complex, with no easy resolutions, but with excellent insight into our recent misadventures in that region. Highly recommended. I am definitely going to search the book out.
I spent a small section of my day yesterday waiting in a waiting room, surrounded by sick people. It's as though the medical establishment thought to themselves that the best way to get people out of waiting rooms would be to make them dens of interminable despair, where you are cocooned in with lots of people who are ill of a variety of different ailments while unadorned walls of grey seem to close in on you. Since the Swine Flu panic started they have become even worse, with no leaflets or magazines available to pass them time, so you spend the whole time glowering at those people who have the temerity to cough or sneeze in your presence. I coughed at one point, and nearly found myself reassuring everyone that it was simply a smoker's cough.
So that's about it really. I shall continue to trundle through the day with zero enthusiasm, and hope that tomorrow I feel like skipping through fields of daisies. Metaphorically speaking of course, since Daisies are thin on the ground in winter, and it's cold out, and besides I'm not really the skipping kind of person.
The Shield
This weekend I finally finished the seven season odyssey that is The Shield, with its emotionally destroying finale meaning that once again I am talking TV. I started watching the Shield when I first moved to York and found the first season on special offer in HMV. Often unfairly this show has been compared to the genius of The Wire, but while this shares a gritty and uncompromising feel with David Simon's epic, it is more of an unhinged and deranged cousin, utterly insane in its premise and execution.
If you are not familiar with The Shield, it centres around one Police district in run down Los Angeles, and in particular the exploits of Detective Vic Mackey and his Strike Team, a gang of ruthless police officers hell bent on their own destruction. Mackey, played with earnest violence throughout by Michael Chiklis, is a one man armageddon, capable of just about anything, from murder to facilitating drug deals, to sacrificing anyone close to him.
But the true beauty of this show is that within the first episode you realise that this is not the cop show cliche of 'one man who will bend the rules to get things done.' No, this is a stone cold psychopath who is utterly devoid of morals who is willing to do anything to fulfil his agenda. And that agenda is to make as much dirty money as he can, and to make sure he doesn't get caught doing it. And we the viewer are forced to watch, to identify with this monster and by the end of the first season, pray he doesn't get caught.
Over the course of seven seasons we have slowly seen every member of the cast infected by Vic and his dirty morals. Nobody gets off lightly, and the supporting cast (particularly Jay Karnes as talented but socially inept Homicide detective Dutch Wagenbach and CCH Pounder as his hard nosed partner Claudette) each excel in portraying their own personal demons, reflecting the cold hell of the streets and what it means to deal with them on a day to day basis.
Whereas the Wire is relentlessly real, with all the flawed personalities that entails, The Shield is reality turned up to a thousand. Whenever there is a perp who will not break, VIc is there to beat the life out of them while everyone turns their backs on their morals in order to get a win. Nobody gets off clean.
The finale itself was possibly the tensest hour and a half of television I have ever seen, as seven years of twists and turns finally come to a head and it becomes clear that there is no way to finish the story with a happy ending. When it had finished I sat dumbfounded for a good five minutes, utterly unable to move, so emotionally draining it was that I couldn't bring myself to change to another channel. And I am not ashamed to admit that there were times when there were tears, big fat man tears. Anyone who has seen it will probably know to what I am refering, an event so shocking that I'm not sure how it was allowed to be broadcast.
Unflinching, brilliant, disturbed. One of the most original shows on TV, and unlike so many shows that have a long overreaching story arc, it concluded so intensely, so maddeningly that it has reached the pantheon of those TV shows that can genuinely be called brilliant.
Misfits
Apologies if this is becoming TV central these days, but this is in large part due to being the parent of a small child who can't get out very often, and of course being a big geek,as was pointed out to me on Twitter yesterday when I started talking randomly and enthusiastically about Babylon 5 before I realised nobody was paying any attention.
Last night saw the debut of E4's new sci-fi/horror/comedy/drama Misfits. Centred around a bunch of asbo-collecting teens doing community service who become endowed with a collection of rather naff superhero powers, this was a very strong start, full of dark Dead Set horror and Skins-esque humour.
The episode kicks off with the aforementioned idiot children tormenting their affable probation worker as they studiously avoid work at all costs, until giant car-sized hailstones start to slam down all around them. The group are hit by lightning and hey presto - wackiness ensues.
What makes this stand out from the other X-men lite superhero shows (I'm looking at you here Heroes) is the sense of darkness that is present throughout. For instance, one of the kids is imbued with a power that sees her become instantly and violently attractive to any man who touches her, which as superpowers go is pretty rubbish unless you want to become raped on a continual basis.
The cast, largely unknowns (I recognised one from an excellent drama earlier this year about the foster case system but I can't remember the name of it) are tremendous, and the writing is razor sharp and witty, and offensive enough to propel the average Daily Mail reader to headbutt the television in despair.
Taking its cues from low budget horror (almost the whole pilot is set in one abandoned looking warehouse) this knows how to utilise its strengths and play down its weaknesses. When the violence comes, it's in short brutal and kinetic scenes which are genuinely shocking.
But what really makes the whole thing work is the fact that this is a group of very real teenagers, rather than, for instance, the hyper-attractive cast of Skins. You would walk past them on the street without ever paying attention (you might grab your bag a little tighter at the sight of Nikki, pictured above) to them, and it is this grounding in reality that sells the admittedly silly premise.
The only problem with this show is that it now means one more night of the week where I can't make any plans, at least not until its run ends in 5 weeks time. Cheers E4.
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