Walter White may be cut-throat, he may be a murdering, lying, cheating asshole, but he is the show, and we very much care what happens to him. Personally, I’d love to see him beat cancer, ditch that wife of his and unearth the millions in the desert to retire peacefully in Belize, or Russia, leaving Hank to fume and foment. Walter set out on a course that was rooted in good intentions. He wanted to care for his family. The road to hell, as they say… so in the process he lost his soul.
Take it all the way, Walt. You are the devil now. Live like it. We’ll have sympathy for the devil.
Another reader agrees that the antihero market is overcrowded but that the good finds are worth it:
Your post reminded me of how good and sick I got of movies featuring anti-heroes when I was young. Butch Cassidy, Bonnie and Clyde, Easy Rider – you could go on and on. But then came the ultimate anti-hero film: The Godfather.
That one I loved! I can still remember how delightfully shocked I was to find myself admiring Don Corleone, and, even more astonishing, rooting for Michael to follow in his father’s footsteps, instead of becoming the “good” Corleone that his father wanted him to be. The last scene, where we see the various capi kissing Michael’s hand through the horrified eyes of Michael’s wife, and were pleased for Michael, was glorious. I have never even bothered to watch The Sopranos – from what I hear, it is a latter-day attempt to equal the Godfather, and that is impossible.
Todd VanDerWerff put it well when he wrote “where The Godfather succeeds in (relative) succinctness, The Sopranos succeeds in accumulation.” There’s an argument that the serialized format of TV is better geared toward winning our sympathy for the bad guys. I wonder if the first reader above would be so supportive of Walter White if we only got to know him over two hours. (Incidentally, Sopranos showrunner David Chase actually wanted his pilot to be spun into film, now an odd and unappealing thought.)
Nikki Usher wonders whether Al-Jazeera America — which debuts today — will be “must-watch-TV or not watched at all”:
AJAM’s promise boils down to more hard news: 14 hours of daily live news, news updates at the top of every hour, documentaries, investigative reports, eight to twelve-minute news pieces, and fewer commercials. But is this what Americans want? Some defenses of AJAM forget that PBS (and the BBC) already exists and is not thrillingly popular among American TV households. NPR has its own oligopoly on serious radio news. If this new channel is basically Al Jazeera English tailored for the PBS/NPR audience, we can expect a left wing approach on foreign affairs, where the U.S. Syrian rebels are activists and the Arab Spring is an unalloyed good.
What makes AJAM truly odd and unpredictable, though, is that nobody knows what its metrics of success will be, because its success is not riding on market viability. It’s riding on Qatar’s approval. The financial well for coverage of uncovered issues, the money to hire talent, the desire to keep open bureaus – all of this depends on the good will of a benefactor whose intentions are still inchoate.
Despite the expected hyperbole regarding the network’s foreign owners, Jeff Jarvis worries the network won’t stand out enough:
Here’s what concerns me about Al Jazeera America: They hired people straight out of traditional TV news; they tried hard not to hire foreigners. But what I was hoping for was a new form with new perspectives. Instead, on On the Media, the producer of the evening news, Kim Bondy, said: “It has some of the sensibility of CBS Sunday Morning. It should also look a little bit probably like Rock Center. And we’re stealing a couple of pages out of Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel.” NO! This is your chance to reinvent TV news, not copy it! I’d rather they listed lots of shows and then said, “Ours will look and sound nothing like them!”
Meanwhile, Debra Kamin profiles Israel’s first international channel, i24news, which is looking to push back against AJ in English, French and Arabic:
It’s a mix that, by leaving out Hebrew, immediately signals i24’s ambition to speak to viewers beyond Israel’s borders. While English and French were obvious choices, the network’s founders say the decision to broadcast in Arabic was taken consciously to build an audience in parts of the world most hostile to Israel. “People will watch us because they hate us, and they will watch us through curiosity,” said Frank Melloul, the network’s Swiss-born 39-year-old CEO, who says he believes he can eventually compete with CNN, the BBC and Al Jazeera for viewers. “They will see how we cover the 70 percent of international news, and if they can trust that, then they will also trust how we cover Israeli news.”
Olga Khazan puzzles over how Russians enjoy and support flamboyant pop stars despite their society’s widespread homophobia:
One theory holds that the success of such performers in Russia today is an extension of a type of dandyism that’s been prevalent in Russian theater and music for centuries. Popular variety shows feature men (and women) who act out zany, satirical sketches, often with the help of puppets, miming, dancing, and the occasional use of drag for comedic effect. The historic appreciation of these types of colorful displays, combined with Russians’ love of ballet and opera, means effeminate or even drag performances aren’t generally associated with homosexuality, explained Boris Dralyuk, a lecturer in Russian literature at UCLA.
Stephen Amico, who is writing a book about homosexuality and Russian pop, said Russians in smaller cities have told him that they like the pizazz of gender-bending acts, which seem to brighten an otherwise dreary provincial existence. Older women in particular seem to love Moiseev for his emphasis on beauty and tenderness — two aspects that were lacking in Soviet life. Amico’s personal theory, though, is that Russians simply need an outlet to escape the binary heterosexuality that’s been imposed on them. The law says you can’t promote gay rights, but you sure as heck can rock out to a indefatigable drag queen.
A reader takes issue with the idea of starting restaurant reviews on opening night:
Luke O’Neil’s argument that restaurants should be reviewed as soon as they open shows a complete lack of understanding of how a restaurant gets put together and underplays the complexity of the process. His analogy to theatre previews is apt. I’m a Broadway theatre professional and can attest that the preview process is not a mere courtesy to work out the kinks – it’s an essential part of the creative process. Indeed, I have never seen a musical that is remotely the same on opening night as it is at first preview. There are fundamental things that can only be learned by performing the show in real-time, in front of a real audience. I am certain the same is true for restaurants.
Preview theatre audiences know that they are buying an early sneak-peek at a show. As a foodie myself, I know that hitting a restaurant in the first week or two will mean sacrificing perfected operations for a priority view. There’s no attempt to hide the story by the operator.
A first preview review of “Wicked” would not review the show that tens of thousands have since seen. A first night review of Momofuku Ssäm Bar would also not be a review of the restaurant you can now go visit. Early reviews serve neither the reader nor the broader goal of establishing a written history for the industry at large.
Laura Bennett declares her antihero fatigue, arguing the word has lost all meaning in the recent surge of bad boy TV dramas:
Somehow “antihero” has come to represent an impossibly broad characterological range: from psychopathic drug lords to well-meaning serial killers to wayward Dominican kids who sometimes mistreat women because of culturally-ingrained misogyny. …
In Hollywood, the concept has been around at least since films of the ’40s and ’50s began exploring the new post-war cynicism, and an action film actually titled “Anti-hero” appeared in 1999. [Encyclopedia] Britannica cites as some early antiheroes Satan in Paradise Lost, Heathcliffe in Wuthering Heights, and Don Quijote, none of whom are particularly useful analogues for the wretched, morally bankrupt leading men of cable drama. And the men of HBO and AMC are not as similar in their sinfulness as they have been made out to be. Walter White is by now less an antihero than a straightforward villain, a macho foil for Hank. “Antihero” implies that a character encourages a conflicted sympathy; Walt forfeited our sympathy long ago.
Walter White can only claim antihero status for a precious few seasons until the series becomes the confessions of a thug. The show’s genius, as Heather Havrilesky recently pointed out, is how effectively it alienates the audience from its protagonist without losing any dramatic momentum. Conscious of how cheap the American bad boy trope has become, the show’s writers keep pushing their main character further into villainy until we’re all forced to drop concern for Walter and redirect our sympathy and compassion toward basically everybody else. That’s when you know it’s no longer an antihero’s story, but a subversion of the trend.
Bennett goes on to strip Tony Soprano and Carrie Bradshaw of their antihero credentials as well:
Even Emily Nussbaum—who it should be said, is singularly skilled at inventing her own critical archetypes, a la the “Hummingbird theory”—wrote a piece on “Sex and the City” that identified Carrie as the “first female antihero,” the one frustrating bit of an otherwise lovely essay. Carrie could be irksome as a character, but “Sex and the City” was defensive of its protagonist in a way that “Breaking Bad” and “The Sopranos” never were, permitting Carrie to be abrasive and vain only to rein her in at the last minute with a pat, chastened ending; the other shows pushed us to see just what it would take to sever our emotional attachment to their protagonists, while Carrie’s reprehensibility was always a learning experience.
This might be overkill. If Carrie was too innocent, and Tony too depraved, one wonders what recent drama got it just right.
To me, the above scene from The Sopranos is a great example of the genuine antihero Bennett is after: disgusted with his (usually maniacal) sister’s progress in anger management, Tony methodically dismantles her gains from therapy and drags her back down to his level of misery and self-loathing. With a grin. Like Walter, Tony’s infection of everyone around him becomes a horrible spectacle, be it through physical brutality or sick emotional manipulation. He knows he’s a “toxic person,” as he laments later on in the series, and his attempt to correct himself forms the tragic arc of the show’s final season.
Still, contra Bennett, we never abandon him like we do Walter – in fact, we follow Tony into therapy, into purgatory, into death (that’s right) and, in the above clip, out of his sister’s house and into the street. Because there’s no way we’re staying behind with Janice. He’s not simply an antihero because he cares for his family or wields personal charm, but because in the moral universe he inhabits, Tony is capable of more insight and growth than the rest of his family, friends and enemies. And unlike Walter’s evolution into Dark Lord in Breaking Bad, Tony never replaces the true villain of the piece – his mother Livia, who carries on poisoning everyone’s lives long after her own has sputtered out.
So while it’s true The Sopranos spawned a wave of second-rate libertine heroes, of all shapes and sizes, if it gave us the perfect modern antihero in Tony and paved the way for the anti-antihero in Walter, that seems like a price worth paying.
Luke O’Neil insists that restaurants should be subject to critics’ reviews as soon as they open, rather than enjoy the customary grace period:
Perhaps the best parallel to the restaurant industry for our purposes is the world of theater. Most plays and musicals offer previews to paying audiences to give the cast and crew a chance to work out the kinks of a production. There has been pushback against critics’ self-imposed prohibition on writing about theater previews for a while now, because previews, like delayed restaurant reviews, don’t make sense. Why shouldn’t an early performance, or meal, be subject to judgment? People are paying full price for it. Is the money of the first few hundreds or thousands of people to buy a ticket or make a reservation worth less than the people who see a play or visit a restaurant after it’s hit its stride?
There are two functions of criticism: to inform the public, and to write for writing’s sake. The latter is great—who doesn’t appreciate reading a beautiful essay about an old film or book?—but it should take a back seat to the former. A struggling new restaurant may turn into the city’s most beloved establishment after a few years, but the fact that it opened poorly is news that diners have a pressing interest in knowing today. And a place that opens immediately running on all cylinders is newsworthy as well. Withholding either piece of information out of a sense of critical noblesse oblige seems like a dereliction of duty.
Ryan Jacobs describes them, which are in accordance with the state’s brand of Islamic law:
The Saudi government’s obsession with the criminalization of the dark arts reached a new level in 2009, when it created and formalized a special “Anti-Witchcraft Unit” to educate the public about the evils of sorcery, investigate alleged witches, neutralize their cursed paraphernalia, and disarm their spells. Saudi citizens are also urged to use a hotline on the CPVPV website to report any magical misdeeds to local officials, according to the Jerusalem Post.
If you’re accused, good luck defending yourself in court:
In the 2006 case of Fawza Falih, who was sentenced to death on charges of “‘witchcraft, recourse to jinn, and slaughter’ of animals,” she was provided no opportunity to question the testimonies of her witnesses, was barred from the room when “evidence” was presented, and her legal representation was not permitted to enter court. After appeals by Human Rights Watch, her execution was delayed, but she died in prison as a result of poor health.
Ambinder envisions a bleak future for the traditional spy:
This next generation of spies, the men and women who are in high school now, are going to find that it will be virtually impossible to live a life undercover. The CIA knows this, and it is gradually changing the way it integrates intelligence officers into their assignments. Malevolent and friendly entities are gobbling up data from U.S social networks to try and identify current and future spies; a big source of intelligence is the Facebook and LinkedIn profiles that former CIA officers establish once they’ve retired. Just like the NSA, foreign intelligence services can use Google, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook to track the activities of current and former American intelligence operatives. And who, at the age of 12, thinks about the record he or she is leaving online at that age as a barrier to future employment as a spy?
Sarah Carr worries about the Egyptian state controlling the press:
It looks like we are heading towards media oppression that will be worse than under 2011. There is a public appetite for it, and the security bodies have apparently been given a green light to do as they please. Wars on terrorism rely on crude binaries: You are either with us or against us, and this is the constant message being relayed to us ([presidential advisor Mostafa] Hegazy even said during the presser yesterday that Egypt is “taking note of who is with it and who is against it”).
Laura Dean connects Egypt’s polarized media to the country’s deepening divisions:
When the army took power they shut down several Islamist channels, and since then the state and independent outlets have shown unwavering support for the army and the military-backed government. When 51 Morsi supporters were killed by security forces outside the Republican Guard, the army said they were provoked and did little toattempt to justify what was, at the very least, a disproportionate use of force. Despite the overwhelming number of dead Morsi supporters, no one in the mainstream media questioned the military’s line. …
Meanwhile, the Muslim Brotherhood is not innocent of biased and faulty coverage. Following the Republican Guard killings, they used images of dead Syrian children, claiming they were Egyptians that had been killed in the shooting.
David Kenner takes note of the military’s intimidation of foreign journalists:
The official criticism of the foreign press corps has coincided with an increase in attacks on journalists as they cover events in Cairo. The Guardian’s Patrick Kingsley, the Washington Post‘s Abigail Hauslohner, the Independent‘s Alastair Beach, the Wall Street Journal‘s Matt Bradley, and McClatchy‘s Nancy Youssef were all threatened by Egyptian security forces or civilians in the past several days. Brazilian journalist Hugo Bachega was also detained while covering the protests on Friday, as was Canadian filmmaker John Greyson and physician Tarek Loubani, whose current location remains unknown.
Dylan Matthews fact-checks the show’s portrayal of the meth game:
One of the most convincing critiques of the show I’ve read came from The New Inquiry’s Malcolm Harris, who argued that the show’s obsession with highly pure method — supposedly Walt’s calling card, and the thing that got Gus interested in buying his wares — doesn’t square with the real world, in which meth is almost always “stepped on,” or diluted. There isn’t a market for pure meth, not because it’s not better, but because of who’s buying meth. “It’s a textbook case of what freshman economics students call inelastic demand,” Harris writes. “As Stringer Bell told D’Angelo Barksdale in another show about drugs, in direct contrast to what Walter claims, ‘When it’s good, they buy. When it’s bad, they buy twice as much. The worse we do, the more money we make.’”
Even if that logic holds, there may still be reasons for Walt to make his meth as pure as possible. “When Walt measures the purity in the lab, he’s figuring out how much of the expensive and tightly controlled precursor chemicals became saleable product and how much went to waste,” Lindsay Beyerstein at In These Times has argued. “The purer Walt’s product, the more [distributors] can dilute it.” But that doesn’t explain why Walt’s meth on the street, when found by his DEA agent brother-in-law Hank and analyzed by the agency’s experts, is so much purer than other meth out there. Walt’s product would only make it to the street like that if there really was demand for purer meth.
Update from a reader:
Wasn’t this addressed in last night’s episode, albeit indirectly?
Local scrub dealer Declan is fine with substandard product, as he’s much closer to the end-user, both geographically and in terms of where he falls on the supply chain. International meth empire mastermind Lydia, on the other hand, needs a purer product. If you’re moving tons of meth halfway across the globe, you’re going to want the purest product you can have, as it allows for easier transport and lower risk. I figured that Lydia’s issues with Declan’s substandard product stemmed directly from the fact that the product was meant to be cut upon arrival in Europe, not because Czech junkies are any more discerning than those of Albuquerque.
The Dish 