Out With a Whimper: The Death Knell of Community

It seems as if I have been writing about television a lot lately. Perhaps I need to work on my reading/television balance. Anyway. . . 

Community, like Arrested Development and Freaks and Geeks before it, is going the way of Janice Joplin and James Dean--untimely, youthful deaths that lead to beatific devotion by a committed group of fans who will forever wonder, what if? Granted, they are still making episodes of Community, but the show will never be the same without show creator and showrunner Dan Harmon and that has been fully evident in the first several episodes of the new season.

When news of Harmon's release from the show came out last year I let out an audible gasp, not unlike when I found out Bill Snyder retired for the first time as Kansas State's football coach or that Rage Against the Machine was breaking up (in retrospect I am a bit ashamed of being so moved by the latter). Why do the perfect things always end? (I am not talking about Rage Against the Machine anymore.)

Community is/was, as far as it goes for me, the most fascinating show on television. It was witty, parodic, meta. It basically took every convention of the sitcom and inverted it. There was a claymation Christmas episode, a clip show with clips never featured in an prior episode, two Glee sendups, a mockumentary of Ken Burns's Civil War series, an entire episode about Dungeons and Dragons, a bottle episode about a lost pen, two paintball wars, a zombie episode, John Goodman in a ponytail, and the dean (oh, the dean!). The Sam and Diane couple, Jeff and Britta, are revealed to having been sleeping with each other without the group's knowledge for an entire year. This was not a typical sitcom by any standard.

And now it is dying. Not because Season Three wasn't awesome. It was. It was totally awesome. But because America would rather watch eight incarnations of CSI and Two and a Half Men. And everything on television is subject to the tastes of a culture for whom Honey Boo Boo is an icon. It is hard for works of art, on network television at least, to survive in that environment. 

But part of me also thinks that Community will in the long run benefit enormously from its short run. Harmon will almost certainly benefit from this long term. He gets to be the genius who was kicked off his brainchild only to watch it founder without his guiding hand, only adding to the aura of his genius. Maybe it is because I am so naturally uncreative, but it is hard for me to imagine a show as different as Community sustaining itself for seven or eight seasons without descending into an unfunny caricature of itself. This is, in fact, what we have seen this season as the show is helmed by different talent. Perhaps Harmon could have kept up the brilliance for another season, but there are only so many other places a show like that can go.

I think of how terrible The Office has been without Steve Carrell, and let's be honest here, it was headed downhill before he left, and I can't help but be grateful that Community has been (likely) spared the same fate. It will die after this season and its first three seasons will sit on my shelf as artifacts of untarnished brilliance. And I will remembers its death kindly. It is not Janis Joplin's Cheap Thrills or James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause and the eternal "what if?", but Mickey Mantle retiring, not because he wasn't still good, but because he wasn't Mickey Mantle anymore. In that sense, and in those situations, you are glad that people called it quits, even if their death is somewhat forced. We remember Barry Sanders with more affection than Brett Favre for a reason. Quitting with grace is better than not knowing when to stop. So for your own sake, Community, just quit and die already and let us eulogize you properly. "Goodnight, sweet prince. And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest."

Why the Church Loses Its Kids

I am linking hereto an article that has been making the rounds in the Christian corner of the interwebs. I recommend that you read it or at least browse it in order to have my comments make sense.

Articles like this have really started to bother me. I don't want to impute bad motives to the author or anything like that. At one time in my life I would have really enjoyed an article like this. I enjoy many things I get to nod along knowingly to, as if I am the bearer of some profound insight somehow shared by the author. But now they feel too out of touch and too simple, much like the arguments of many Republicans in the wake of the last election: it is not our policies that are turning people away, but our packaging! Maybe if Marco Rubio says the same old stuff Latinos will vote for us in droves. Christians fall into this same trap. We can think: maybe it is not that Christian doctrine is really, really hard to swallow and follow in our instant gratification, intensely individualistic, insanely privileged world, but that we are doing some easily correctable thing wrong that once we correct will lead to massive revival. But Christian doctrine is divisive and unsettling. It requires us to believe things absolutely unpalatable to our culture. And once kids raised in the church get out and fully immersed in that culture, this reality can become too much to bear.

Articles like this are indicative of what Kenneth Stewart of Covenant Seminary recently called evangelicalism's "liturgical inferiority complex." We don't have all of the fancy ritual of other, older denominations and now that we are in a brief zeitgeist where older and liturgical is hipper than newer and free-flowing we are scrambling to keep up and reconsidering traditions jettisoned recently by the seeker sensitive movement.

Stewart's example was the recent move by many lower church evangelicals to embrace Lent. I like the tradition of Lent, and generally practice some form of mild observance, but it is not the ancient practice its advocates make it out to be and uneducated laity believe it to be. Neither is it based on anything strictly Biblical. This doesn't mean it is wrong to celebrate Lent, merely wrong to act as if the majority of evangelicals who do not observe the season are somehow deficient for refraining from an extrabiblical tradition. We may wish for the return of liturgy to the church, but there is nothing inherently Biblical about liturgy. One can appreciate Cranmer's Book of Common Prayer or the Westminster Catechism, but if one actually takes seriously the prayers and claims in the liturgical works, the last thing it ought to make one is proud. 

Furthermore, this author sort of blithely accepts that Christian youth who leave the church when they march off into the gaping maw of the university do so because they were unprepared by their parents and their church. "Train a child in the way that he shall go and when he is old he will not depart from it," is a proverb, not doctrine. Want proof? How did the kids of the guy who wrote this proverb turn out? Some kids will fall away. Most will not fall away because they read Nietzsche and now harbor deep theological reservations about Biblical Christianity, but because they want to have sex and get drunk without feeling guilty. There are exceptions, but that is the rule.

Also, #10 and #9 on this list are directly the result of a previous movement to make church more attractive to kids, by the previous generation of evangelical parents that were freaked out when their kids started leaving the church. In other words, stuff gets complicated when your goal becomes not to lose the kids. One generation tends toward severer discipline, the other towards entertainment, both with the same goal in mind. Raising kids on a diet of grace, as this author recommends, is great as long as you understand (and teach them) that grace binds as well as frees. God does care how we act, even though we are saved through his favor alone. I hate how carelessly character and good works are dismissed by these purveyors of grace as if conduct no longer matters. Of course a tally sheet shouldn't be kept at youth group to keep track of how good each individual is doing in arbitrary categories, but there ought to be accountability, especially with high schoolers. I am not yet far enough removed from high school to forget that high school aged people are very stupid. Even the smart ones.

I think it is hard to know why people leave or why they have dark times of doubt. I was beset by a severe dark night of the soul my senior year of college. I still don't know what caused it or why it happened when it did. I have theorized multiple things, all possible, but even eight years later I can't say fully why it happened. It just did. My guess is these kids who gave these answers about why they left the church actually have little idea why they left. Or they know, but it is better to complain about Noah's ark themed playrooms and the ignorance of their former leaders. Anything but turning the gaze inward. In any event, the severely anecdotal observations related in this article probably should not be made too much of. The reason for most church loss is in many senses far easier than all of this handwringing leads us to believe. Our grandparent's generation had a word for it. It was sin.

Reading for Reading's Sake

I found this quote on Alan Jacobs' tumblr and found it prescient for me:

“Again, while it is a great blessing that a man no longer has to be rich in order to enjoy the masterpieces of the past, for paperbacks, first-rate color reproductions, and stereo-phonograph records have made them available to all but the very poor, this ease of access, if misused — and we do misuse it — can become a curse. We are all of us tempted to read more books, look at more pictures, listen to more music than we can possibly absorb, and the result of such gluttony is not a cultured mind but a consuming one; what it reads, looks at, listens to is immediately forgotten, leaving no more traces behind than yesterday’s newspaper,” – W.H. Auden, Secondary Worlds (1967)

I know that I often fall prey to this tendency Auden astutely points out. On the top of this page is a list of books that I have read during the current year. Frequently I consider deleting this page. Why is it there? I started it as a way to keep track and for people to have a link to things they might find interesting, but I wonder if it doesn't subtly influence both what I read and they way I read it. There is always a pressure to read a book more quickly than I ought to merely in order to mark it off the list. Now with the page up there that pressure is amplified.

I know most people could not care less how many books I read per year or what books I read, but everything in our culture points us toward a crafting of our identities. For a reader, part of how we craft that identity is by what we read. We keep lists, lists which are constantly updated and amended, of things we want to read. We sometimes feel bad if an unworthy book from off the list is suddenly read.

The solution, I think, is twofold. First, don't worry about any lists. This doesn't mean necessarily to not keep them, but to not be bound by them. As Mr. Jacobs recommended in his excellent book on the art of reading, don't so structure your reading to not be open to serendipity and whim, both excellent guiding principles in their own right. Second, slow down. St Augustine, a quite good reader himself, once wrote "I write as I learn and I learn as a write." Simply put, if you take the time to slow down and write as you read--take notes, ask questions--you gain far more than by simply plowing through tome after tome.

It might mean reading less, fewer notches on the bedpost, but the reading will almost certainly be better and what is learned in the books will last.

House of Cards and the Narrow Imagination of Dramatic Television

Over the course of the past few months, since whenever it showed up in Netflix on instant watch, I have been slogging my way through Aaron Sorkin's early aughts drama The West Wing. I really have enjoyed the show. It is a liberal fantasy land, in many ways, (one scene where my smug meter nearly exploded was when the president dressed down a conservative radio host in a room full of radio hosts for her use of Leviticus to object to homosexuality) but an entertaining one. There is something thrilling about getting a look behind the scenes--however skewed that look might be--in the halls of power for our country. I am only a couple of seasons in so far, so I really don't know where it goes from here. I can safely assume, given its seven season run, that President Bartlet is reelected. I don't imagine they spend the final four seasons following the gang as they fan out to various lobbying agencies and sit on the boards for big campaign contributors to finally cash in on their years of overwork on Pennsylvania Avenue. But one thing about the show, something that strikes me as nearly entirely different from the great shows currently on television, is that it is positive. There is an occasional shady deal and sometimes bad stuff happens, but in the end it is hopeful. The people who staff the west wing believe in this country and believe in the policies they will spend their time in office fighting for. 

By contrast, during my recovery from surgery a couple of weeks ago I used part of my time to watch David Fincher and Beau Willimon's very different Washington drama, the freshly released House of Cards. Cards is the first full-fledged production sponsored, owned, and produced by Netflix. It stars Kevin Spacey as a completely immoral Machiavellian politician. The majority whip for the Democratic Party in the House of Representatives, the series begins by Spacey's character, Frank Underwood, being denied the cabinet post in the new administration he was promised. His pride hurt, he kicks in to revenge mode, seeking to run over everyone who has spited him, anyone else who might hinder him, and one unfortunate junior member of Congress with a substance abuse problem.

I don't really want to delve too deeply into Cards. I finished it Sunday night and am still forming thoughts--at this point it seems like another extremely well done show with a main character who I hope dies sometime soon. But I think the prominence of shows like Cards, and here I would lump in Breaking Bad, Mad Men, and The Walking Dead, says quite a lot about how we think of heroes today. In short, we don't really think they exist anymore. We are no longer believers. Our heroes are antiheroes. 

It has been instructive to watch these shows side by side. I don't know what Washington is really like, but I imagine it is neither The West Wing nor House of Cards. But it seems to me as if people these days take the more negative interpretation of something as the truth of the situation. I have had people tell me, for instance, that Mad Men is an accurate reflection of the early 60s. But this is ridiculous. Mad Men is just as much of a caricature of that period as Leave it to Beaver. We just like the darker spin these days. It is somehow gratifying to think that all of those family men we at one point in collective history were encouraged to admire were really just cheating assholes. Sorry, well-dressed cheating assholes.

I don't know what to make of all of this, if anything. The only reason I bring it up is because I imagine that the audience that would have watched The West Wing in the early 2000s is roughly the same crowd who is watching the much different brand of TV today. The West Wing functioned as a sort of liberal escapism from the Bush years, though I don't imagine Jed Bartlet has anything in common with Al Gore. As easy as that is to mock, at least the escapism was tied to what people viewed as noble causes. What are these new shows helping us escape from? The boring world where most people are nice and nondescript? Does Walter White or Don Draper or Rick Grimes or Frank Underwood have any nobility, any quality which is worthy of emulation?

Maybe that is not the point, but to me Draper and Underwood especially are so bad they are no longer even interesting. The best character on Cards is/was (spoiler alert) the now deceased congressman Peter Russo. Russo wasn't a great man, but a good one undone by demons and played upon by a disgusting mastermind. There is nothing interesting about Underwood, he is one-dimensionally bad. And, as Grantland's TV writer Andy Greenwald pointedout, his wife Claire, a thinly-veiled Lady Macbeth, is the result of a character emerging fully formed from a "fire in a metaphor plant."

These bad male leads are all intended to shock, but shock can only be sustained for so long. How surprising is it to see Don Draper womanizing? It might have been somewhat shocking in Season One (I think of that great carousel scene in the final episode of the season), but by now it is beyond tired. Cards started with Underwood choking a dog to death: how can we be shocked by anything else he would do? Walter White went from mild-mannered chemistry teacher to murderer in two shakes of a lamb’s tail. While it was horrifying to see him complicit in the death of a child in the first half season of Season Five, it was not shocking or outside of his character. He has no character left. His descent from pushover teacher to criminal mastermind to sociopath wasn't the slow burn fans of the show, including me, liked to believe. It all happened rather quickly. The past few seasons have just been the aftershocks. Walter hasn't changed. He has been presented with new, sometimes increasingly harrowing situations, but his response has always been the same: calculated self-preservation. That the stakes are higher doesn't reflect a change in character; Walter is simply all-in at this point and will do what needs to be done to try and avoid the ignominious death he deserves.

Reading back through what I have written, it strikes me how disparate the comments are. I think my larger point, and what bothers me most about the current state of TV (and, really, there is a ton of great television out there; I hardly ever watch a movie anymore), of which these bad boy lead men are only an indicator, is that the two main traction points for drama on the avant garde television shows are infidelity and murder. Both are dramatic, yes, but only in a limited way. There are things in life that are dramatic that don't involve cheating or killing. I think this is why I loved the small screen version of Friday Night Lights so much, despite its myriad flaws. The most absurd moment of FNL was when they tried to interject a bit of good old-fashioned killing into the show. It is also why, at the end of a long day when Owen is in bed and Clara and I are tired, we fire up an episode of Parenthood, perhaps my favorite show these days, on Netflix and trust that, money problems aside, Adam Braverman will never resort to manufacturing drugs to make ends meet. Crosby, on the other hand. . . 

The Walking Dead

The Walking Dead is a cable television phenomenon, in many ways the king of cable (though last night's episode was dethroned by The History Channel's miniseries The Bible; to show where my twisted loyalties lie, I recorded The Bible and watched The Walking Dead). People can put whatever spin they want to on the brilliance of the show, or this or that, but really most people watch to see zombies get splattered and an occasional unlucky human get bit in a grotesque manner. I like to believe I am one of the former, watching for the psychology of seeing a group of people live through the end of the world, but I must admit that seeing a katana go through a zombie skull can be gratifying in its own way. 

I am writing about the show because last night's episode, Clear, was perhaps the most disturbing I have seen. This is a claim that cannot be taken lightly by watchers of the show--there are many, many disturbing moments--but there was something about last night that gave me the willies. It kept me awake in bed. I couldn't get over one image: that of an orange backpack laying on the side of the road.

(There will be spoilers beyond this point, though none that will have any long-term implications for the show.)

The premise of the show was a road trip episode. Rick, his creepy son Carl, and the enigmatic Michonne wisely leave the rednecks and the infirm at the prison to fight it out in case the Governor and his people show up while they are out looking for more guns. Why not just leave the prison? you ask. I have no freaking idea. 

The episode opens with a sign erected on the side of the road telling a girl named Erin that whoever left the sign was trying to make it to Stone Mountain (isn't that where Kenneth from 30 Rock is from?). It is a haunting image. Parents (?), extended family (?), friends (?), leaving this hopeless/hopeful message that Erin would see this sign and somehow be able to find them. It helps to remind us that there are people out there other than Rick's fascist prison gang and the Governor's fascist hamlet dwellers. 

Moments later we see our heroes in their sponsored automobile burning down the highway in search of heat. Up ahead in the road is a backpacker, a real live human backpacker, who is pleading for them to stop and help. He is alone and desperate.  Michonne doesn't slow down as she drives. They hardly look back. Frantic he starts running after them. Moments later they find themselves stuck in the mud and are attacked by a cohort of nearby zombies. This is one of the more interesting zombie scenes in the show. There are several zombies pounding on the windows of the car, but the group seems entirely nonplussed. Rick casually cracks the window, tells the other passengers to plug their ears, sticks his revolver into the head of the first zombie and the brains get splattered. That is the only kill we see. The next shot is of a neat pile of zombies stacked on the side of the road. In many ways this season isn't really about the threat from the undead. They are all such experienced zombie killers that they hardly constitute a threat anymore. They are more of an inconvenience than anything. A side note in the battle between the survivors.

Rick and Carl help get the car free and as they are getting in the backpacker comes running down the road, again pleading for help. Once again, the group hardly casts him a second look and they take off. You knew what was going to happen at this point. You knew this guy was dead and they were going to find him on their way back. And this is what happened, though it happens offscreen. 

I am leaving out the bulk of the episode: the gang encounters Morgan, the man who helped Rick in the pilot episode of the show, saving his life and explaining the nature of the devastation to him. The conversation between the two was fascinating stuff, and to me further damns Rick for his refusal to help the unnamed backpacker. Here is a guy, Morgan, who had no reason to take a chance on Rick, yet did and saved his life and allowed him to find his family again. But Rick seems to resolutely refuse the same kindness towards others. And who, really, has Rick been burned by? Shane was apologetic in the moments before Rick stabbed him in the heart. The only other traitors were prisoners who had been trapped in a supply room for a year. 

After leaving Morgan to his grim future of living by himself in a Home Alone style booby-trapped attic, the gang takes off back to the prison (what is with the geography of this show? Somehow the prison is a hop and a jump away from Rick's hometown. Why, then, was it difficult for them to find? They spent the winter going SWAT-style through South Georgia. Wouldn't you know about the prison right down the road from your house?). They pass the familiar mess of wrecked cars where they encountered the zombies in the first scene. Shortly up the road is a mutilated corpse and on the side of the road an orange backpack.

I had hoped that there would be a moment of great regret on the faces of the characters at this point. A realization that they had abandoned a man to a cruel death. Instead, after passing the backpack they back up and the 12 year-old boy reached down silently to put the pack in the car. There might after all be something useful in the pack. The wearer of the pack would only have been a nuisance. I about cried. Seriously. I teared up. It was awful to watch. 

This was one of those rare moments where the show slows down enough to let you contemplate the terror that has befallen the world since the advent of the apocalypse. And when you do that it makes for great TV, but it also allows the human tragedy to soak in and confronts you with just how awful this new world really is. With people like this as survivors, maybe it is better for the world to go ahead and just end. Honestly, at this point I have a hard time rooting for Rick. What makes him better than the Governor? How different is it to actively kill someone or to abandon them to fate in this zombified world? I can see those who argue that he made a pragmatic decision, a cold calculation. I can see that point, but whatever he did it certainly wasn't human.