#the dynamic between two and four is really weird and incomprehensible to outsiders

[brown-little-robin]

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[beatriceeagle]

Where do you think teen wolf jumped the shark? Also, non-specific, but do you have a favourite (and least favourite) TV finale? Thanks!

I heard a TV writer once discuss shark-jumping in terms of suspension of disbelief. “You get one buy,” is how he put it. On Psych, we’ll buy into the idea that Shawn does wacky hijinks in pursuit of convincing the police that he’s a psychic, because that is the show’s central premise. But if you try to add one more unbelievable thing on top of that (say, werewolves) the high-wire act fails. You’ve asked the audience to believe too many things, and now their faith in the show has collapsed.

But as even that writer acknowledged, it doesn’t usually work that cleanly. Shows rarely jump the shark all at once. Even seemingly obvious cases like, I don’t know, Bones, usually show some cracks in their foundations before they do whatever massive thing it is that completely fucks over their show. And often, it’s not a case of so much doing something that breaks the suspension of disbelief as it is breaking your contract with the audience. We agreed, implicitly, that we were going to be this kind of show—but now we’re this kind of show, instead.

The weird thing about that is that, in theory, that doesn’t have to be a bad thing. The Good Place broke its contract with its audience at the end of season one in a pretty major way: A lot of the twist of the first season of that show only works if you assume that it’s the kind of show that doesn’t have twists. (And despite it being one of the best first seasons of a comedy in years and years, I know people who felt betrayed by that twist!) Agents of SHIELD, as I wrote about earlier today, broke its contract with its audience massively at the end of its first season—it spent 18 episodes establishing a world, and character dynamics, and operating procedures, and then not gradually, but all at once, said, “Okay, none of that is what we’re doing anymore”—and became a much better show for it. Sometimes, you just have to say, “Screw the old world order,” and let people come along or not.

So anyway, when I ask, “When did Teen Wolf jump the shark?” I’m asking both, “When did it stop being the show it agreed to be at the outset?” and also, a little bit, “When did it get bad?” And there are two assumptions built into those questions: 1) That Teen Wolf at some point stopped being the show that viewers first signed on for, and 2) That Teen Wolf was ever good.

And, okay, I don’t think that Teen Wolf was a bad show, clearly, because I have watched seasons one through three… a lot. There is something compulsively watchable and fitfully well-observed, about that show. The scenes between Scott and his mom, or Stiles and his dad, or of just Allison, alone, are often shockingly well-observed on a human level. There is some great, almost melodic dialogue, performed by really good actors.

But also, I mean, it’s really silly. The first season is paced atrociously. There are all of these over-the-top cinematic sequences of lacrosse. The mythology is incoherent, even before they start piling stuff onto it. And it doesn’t seem to have a central theme until well into its third season, at which point its central theme is extremely ethically questionable.

But I think the thing is, that’s the show that viewers signed on for! They signed on for this silly, heartfelt, overly cinematic, occasionally weirdly insightful, sometimes very funny werewolf show, that couldn’t pace a 12-episode story arc to save its life. And there was no one moment where that show transitioned into being a different thing. It would be really easy to point to Allison’s death, but honestly, I think her death was fairly in keeping with the kind of show Teen Wolf had been up to that point; one thing that the show had always handled pretty well was teenage heartbreak, and although the ramifications of Allison’s death were handled weirdly, when they did pop up, they tended to be some of the better bits of late-season Teen Wolf.

I will say that season 3B was a huge tonal shift from previous seasons. It’s significantly darker than anything that came before it—not just at the end, but all the way through. It’s not really goofy the way that previous seasons were. On the other hand, 3B is a really good season of Teen Wolf. In many ways it’s the show firing at all cylinders. They’ve got their formula down. (Teen Wolf at its best is a villain + a secondary villain who’s hunting the main villain and making trouble for the good guys in the process + a handful of emotional throughlines.) They’ve got a genuine atmosphere going. They’ve got a tremendous central performance from Dylan O’Brien. And the plot completely tracks!

The problem is that 3B leads into season 4, which maintains the tonal shift—it is literally, physically darker, as all of the ensuing seasons are—but is also bad. There are moments of season 4 that I like, but it’s also the point in time when Teen Wolf gives up on the “two villains” model in favor of the “five hundred villains” model, and also introduces a bunch of new characters, which it is absolutely not capable of dealing with. Also, at around this point, Teen Wolf stopped plotting logically and started plotting thematically. What I mean is that, for instance, in season four, suddenly Lydia, Stiles, and Scott all have massive, encroaching financial issues. Of these, Stiles’ are the only ones that are connected to any previous plot point on the show itself. Lydia’s are, if I’m remembering correctly, introduced mid-season for like two episodes. But more to the point: These financial issues don’t go anywhere. There’s like a running bit with a duffel bag of money from the Hale vault, or whatever, but it’s ultimately meaningless, because the financial issues are not there to either move the plot forward or elucidate character. They’re supposed to be a thematic counterpoint to the hired assassins who have shown up in Beacon Hills.

That kind of theme-based plotting is a) not Teen Wolf, and b) completely outside of Teen Wolf’s skill set, and as soon as the show started working that way, it immediately became an incomprehensible mess. I reviewed every episode of season 5A, and I still could not tell you what the fuck was happening in that season.

But that can all be walked back. I’ve watched shows that got bad—sometimes in ways that made them feel completely unfamiliar to themselves—and then got good again. (For example, Community‘s season four finale is a shark-jumping moment if I’ve ever seen one, and season five, though it had Harmon back at the helm, still didn’t feel like Community in some vital way—but season six is my second-favorite season of the show, and keeps trying to sneak its way into being my favorite.) The moment that I think of as being the point of no return, for Teen Wolf, is when they wrote Kira off. When Allison died, at least it felt meaningful, and like it was part of the natural progression of the show saying something. When Derek and Isaac left, it was due to the actors understandably moving on, and came about in ways that felt like natural exit points for the characters. But Kira’s exit was just Teen Wolf flailing, getting rid of characters who felt like likeable, old-style Teen Wolf (and who the show had put three seasons of development into) while filling up the cast with a bunch of mostly bland next-generation people. After a season with no Danny and no Coach, writing Kira out was really Teen Wolf just intentionally burning its bridges.

And actually, if you go back, it all starts even earlier than 3B. I think the cracks in Teen Wolf’s foundation start in 3A (a season I’m generally fond of!) with the introduction of the capital-M Mythology: the True Alpha stuff, which ended up really fucking with its ethics and the way that Scott functioned on the show long-term; and also Lydia’s banshee stuff and the Nemeton stuff, which ended up just being incredibly confusing. Season 3B is remarkable, in hindsight, for how comparably well it deals with those elements, when they all ended up being a huge drag on the show, in the long run.

So my short answer is that Teen Wolf jumped the shark in season 4, but my longer answer is that it was a process, starting in season 3A, and not really ending until season 5.

My favorite TV finale is, I think, the Lost finale, although the Community finale is certainly high up there. (Controversial, I know, but I will stand by this opinion til the end of time.) My least favorite, though I know it’s practically a cliche, is the How I Met Your Mother finale. When my sister was helping me brainstorm to figure out my answer to this question, she noted that a unifying factor among many terrible series finales is that they undo major aspects of the show that preceded them, and she is completely correct. This is the same reason that, even though it’s unusual for people to stay with their high school sweethearts, Harry/Ginny and Ron/Hermione had to be together in the Harry Potter epilogue; if you want to make that point, you had a whole series to make it. Trying to be clever and pull a fast one with the ending is just irritating.

Send me meta prompts to distract me from my migraine! 

[tinymixtapes]

Music Review: Blondes - Warmth

Blondes Warmth [R&S; 2017] Rating: 4/5 The smell of a vintage paperback doused in coffee and camembert. The sound of an old man called something like “Gus” softly whistling his favorite ditty. The feeling a vole probably has upon tucking itself under a cozy fold of dirt. The final scene in Home Alone. That’s warmth: a blissful thing, an elusive thing, an almost kitschy thing typically found in fine wines and kind faces and home interiors. Say it out loud — /wɔːmθ/ — the word itself is a quick cuddle of consonants ending with a pleasing fricative that sizzles like a cigarette being dropped into a puddle. Yeah, pretty fucking weird name for a techno record, tbh. And yet somehow an appropriate one in the case of Blondes’ latest effort, which takes a musical language characterized by cold-blooded futurism and punctuates it with something that resembles “warmth.” It’s nothing like the sickly warmth of indie aesthetics, nor the analog warmth sought out by cassette tape purists, nor the nostalgic warmth sent tingling down your spine by a Fender Rhodes Mk 1. Rather, there are these faint touches of humanity behind each layer of piston-perfect repetition: the music not only throbs, but breathes as blood courses through every modulation and fingertips tinker behind every nuance. Take the opening track “OP Actual,” which is both rhythmically strict and texturally free, stirring up classic elements of ambient play — room noise, electrical whirring, mechanical humming, gentle static — and fixing them to a power grid of kick drums. There is no “musical object” here, only the relived experience of two quiet blokes multi-tracking live jams in a Brooklyn apartment block at four in the morning while high on quinoa and mint tea. By engaging with techno forms through this praxis of spontaneity, Warmth captures the organic and the mechanical in a single sweeping gestalt. (And, suddenly, the cover artwork makes more sense: tangled fragments of natural and artificial substances, vibrant poppies shrouded in the lifeless color of negative film, ambiguous gray things that could be… rocks? …mushrooms? …tumors? …beads of liquid gallium? Is that a swan?) Sure, you have the metronomic pulse, the restrained synth loops, the staccato bass lines — these fixed elements in the musical structure, or “states of being” as Zach Steinman has it, are meticulously arranged and calibrated with machine-like accuracy and then left to forge their own timeless substrate. But it is the duo’s myriad free-flowing responses to these elements, the dynamic becoming associated with human process, that adds flesh to the bones. Although each track plays into these repetitive structures to an extent, it’s clear that Blondes aren’t afraid to color outside of the lines. Like children with their crayons, they grind down with fist-grip spaghetti hands, head tilted 90°, wild concentration in their eyes, a purposeful dash of red here, a mindless scribble of green there, and a thick stroke of black on the kitchen counter because FUCK YOU DAD. A track like “MRO” feels imbalanced, agitated, capricious, with the kicks desperately trying to pin down scrappy fogs of dissociated sound as they swell up into fits of rage. And on “Clipse,” a flurry of silvery bells and squelchy synths develops a shadow of reverb so dark that it actually swallows the percussion section whole. Still, we can rely on these loops and thumps and cycles and grooves to guide us through surroundings that are otherwise alien to us, ones that often venture too far into the abstract to be explored in their own right. That is until our hearts develop a serious case of arrhythmia on “Cleo,” a track that rejects four-to-the-floor altogether. Instead, it clicks and clacks like a woodpecker chewing on mahjong tiles while aimlessly fluttering between soaring pads and huge elastic bass slaps. It goes to show what Blondes sound like when they aren’t operating within any self-imposed limitations: proper weird. Parallel to these diverse soundworlds is a listening experience in equal parts somatic and meditative. You could certainly shut your eyes and “disconnect” with a track as euphoric as “KDM,” but it keeps you firmly grounded in the corporeal with skitty arpeggios that tickle your earlobes, solemn vocals that sink deep into your chest, and scattershot claps that bounce around in your skull like puzzled flies trying to escape. That is, even when your mind is stuck to the ceiling like a discarded helium balloon, your stomach keeps on churning and your skin keeps on shivering. Such is the paradox that haunts Your Brain On Dance Music: you clench your teeth and feel distinctly “here,” only to be continually swept up and taken elsewhere. “This makes me feel alive!” – you “This makes me lose my mind!” – you, also By releasing Warmth on R&S Records, it’s clear that Blondes are aiming to orient themselves more firmly on the dance floor, it’s just not a dance floor that any of us are familiar with. So where are we? It’s a question that the record refuses to answer: “Stringer” is situated at the bottom of a storm drain filled with pissed-off snakes; “Tens” is somewhere halfway between an opium den and a construction site; “Quality of Life” rides an industrial freight train through the desert as it gets torn apart by a sandstorm. But while the term “post-club” gets thrown around a lot, it doesn’t really apply here. That is, listening to a track like “All You” might be like splashing around in the 9th circle of a dirty K-hole, but the party still creeps into earshot for seconds at a time, hey, before creeping off to feed endorphins elsewhere. So there is a club, somewhere, and it’s definitely not behind us — often it’s more, like, on top of us? “Sub-club” would make a bit more sense, as if hearing the music from the perspective of a cockroach living among a jungle of dirty Reebok Classics. Or perhaps: “drunk driving at 5 AM and crashing your Nissan Micra into the side of a Berlin night-club.” Everything is concussed, a bit hazy and distant, with all the activity taking place elsewhere — but without a doubt it’s club music, of sorts. If anything, the joy of Warmth is that its sound manages to inhabit all of these different spaces at once without being utterly incomprehensible, much like the multi-spatial, almost noumenal experience of the dance floor itself. And with that, dance music gets one step closer to an honest depiction of euphoria; yes, yes, you’re drooling quite heavily, but at least you’re drooling through an earnest smile. http://j.mp/2yQ1hTW