Television Update: Dexter, The Good Wife, and Elementary

(Pneumonia update: still coughin’ :P)

You may recall that earlier this year, I posted a blog entry on three season premieres. Here’s the follow-up as we hit the holiday break.

Slight spoilers, but everything is really vague.

Dexter (season 7)
Status: stopped watching at 7×06
Thoughts:

Oh, Dex! You had me so excited at the beginning of this season. I stocked up on popcorn to get ready to watch you tangle with Deb and Laguerta. But then what happened? After a few rip-roaring episodes of moral dilemmas and cops hot on the Bay Harbour Butcher’s tail, you devolved into angry mob bosses (decently entertaining, I’ll admit) and utterly boring sexy times. (So. Utterly. Boring.)

I hear tell that some of the later episodes have been awesome, and maybe I’ll pick them up again once rave critical reviews start piling up. But I wish you’d get back to the sibling and family and friends relationships I care about and not get into this mess of romantic/sexual feelings that feels like it was shoehorned in. I mean, if there’s a deity of fiction, he or she knows that I’m more than down with plot-related romantic relationships. But when everything interesting about the characters goes out the window to make them happen (see also: House and Cuddy, Mulder and Scully), sorry, a few seconds of onscreen kissy-face ain’t worth it.

Elementary (season 1)
Status: still watching lackadaisically
Thoughts:

+ It’s fun to watch this show establish the relationships between its main characters, especially when we have a clue as to how it’ll all go down (hint: Holmes and Watson turn out to be friends). I also love observing how the show is slowly developing the relationship between Gregson and his stable of detectives and Holmes and Watson.

– The TV-Guide-style tag lines tend to follow this pattern: Holmes solves a COOL AWESOME MYSTERY!!! Meanwhile, Watson has feelings. C’mon now!

+ Ya gotta hand it to the mysteries for sheer creativity. I love the premises of a years-old bomb going off in someone’s office; a killer who leaves a smiley-face balloon in the place of abducted children; a guy in plane crash wreckage who was already dead…

– … although the solutions to those mysteries were kind of underwhelming. It’s pretty easy to spot the villains early on. Why else would that secretary/barista/kid/individual get so much screen time in the first act? Unless they’re recognizable performers, which usually, they’re not.

– Speaking of which, Lisa Edelstein seems to be appearing on every show I like, which is great because I love what I’ve seen of her acting, but it’s annoying when the show, like this one, kind of gives her a boring stereotypical POWERFUL BUSINESSWOMAN WHO ALSO LIKES TEH SEX to play. The Good Wife subverted this well, I think, by giving her a SEX-LOVING POWERFUL BUSINESSWOMAN who also defied our expectations: the scene in the bar with Alicia showed a new and awesome side to the character without negating her established personality. Backslash Good Wife diversion. Oh, please, it’s just a taste of what you’ll get in the next section.

+/- What interests me most about the Holmes character archetype is the (perhaps postmodern?) question of how you can be like Holmes and still be a good person. Sometimes this show glosses over how much of a jerk he with Watson’s Obligatory Complaint (TM) and then no mention of the offending remark/action/jerkface antic ever again. Or it skims over the issue with Gregson’s “I am a cop, and all I care about is whether the case is solved blah blah tenth time I’ve said something like this.” Other times, admittedly more rarely, Watson is a true intellectual equal for Holmes and forces him to reconsider his stance. Or Gregson really has a point that what Holmes is about to do will cause more harm than if he did nothing. That’s what I like.

The Good Wife (season 4)
Status: like you thought there was even a chance I wasn’t watching this religiously with my fellow Good Wife cultists
Thoughts:

+ I know some fans feel like the grabbed-the-theme-from-the-headlines stuff is overdone, and I can see how you might want them to just use real software names instead of made-up, libel-avoiding services like ChumHum. But I really like how topical this show gets, and how its online world feels like the one I use. I like it because their episodes don’t “deal with” issues but instead explore variations on them. I like seeing how someone took the news and said, “What if you look at it this way?”

+ Aaaah, the guest stars! So awesome! Christina Ricci! Nathan Lane! Stockard Channing!

+/- I’m ambivalent about the Kalinda-Nick thing. I know a lot of fans hate it, and there were aspects of the plot that disappointed me (like Cary coming out of a violent dust-up with just a black eye that people believe he got playing basketball). But I could also believe that despite Kalinda’s awesomeness, this little sh*thead is the one obstacle she can’t overcome, because if there’s one thing Kalinda is bad at, it’s dealing with relationships where actual feelings are involved even when without them, the situation would be simple. But I agree with many that Nick just wasn’t dangerous enough to ever feel like a real threat. But but I also like the idea that he’s just a threat to Kalinda, because you don’t always tolerate someone wrong because they’re stronger than you objectively; sometimes it’s because you really do like/love them despite the fact that they’re an abusive tool with criminal tendencies — I liked how the storyline opened the possibility of subverting the “confused and/or weak” stereotype of fictional women in abusive relationships.

Of course, all that said, I loved the way it ended (unless Kalinda did something stupid. But I hope that’s not the case, because that would be a cliffhanger that depends on narration, not on plot events, which annoys me). Like there was ever the possibility of something different.

(Although… we’ve already seen how much Kalinda will give up for Alicia. They could have used this to show us how much Alicia will give up for Kalinda, made something exciting out of that, like: does it make her a bad mom that she’d risk herself for her friend? How do you balance your responsibilities to different people when they conflict? Or, what do you do if you know you’re willing to give everything to someone, and she’s not willing to give everything for you? Does it change your friendship? Should it? What is the most important way to give someone else everything — being willing to risk your physical well-being or being willing to bare your emotions?)

+ Family stuff: the show has introduced a few parents-of-characters this season, and, wow, I think they really shed light on how our fan favourites got to be the way they are. You might even argue that there’s an overall theme of how selfish parents affect children — and what it means, exactly, to be a selfish parent, since Peter’s mother isn’t selfish in the same way as Alicia’s mom or Cary’s dad but her need to control her son’s life isn’t exactly self-sacrificing either. Then, of course, there’s the selfish parent question from Alicia’s side: is ignoring ridiculous allegations about her husband’s, um, yes, the episode went there, selfish? Is putting her career first sometimes selfish? How much energy should she spend on running her children’s lives?

+ Can’t wait to watch Peter or Maddie battle Chandler — I mean, Mike Kresteva. You know that’s gonna be good.

– I do wish there were more Diane and/or Cary, though. Diane was awesome with those two crazy love interests and going to bat for Alicia when we least expected it. I want Cary and Alicia to have more interesting stuff together.