2007: Ten Hours

First a desultory top 10 8 albums of the year, though with a nota bene: I don't think I've been this disinterested in putting together a year-end list in recent memory. That doesn't have anything to do with the quality of the year's releases; rather, my media priorities and critical attention have shifted unequivocally towards teevee, and I haven't felt the urge to keep up my indie cred as years past. This list makes no claims as to comprehensiveness:

1. Electrelane - No Shouts, No Calls ^*
   "Saturday"



2. The Angelic Process - Weighing Souls With Sand †
   "Million Year Summer"



3. Eluvium - Copia ^∞
   "After Nature"



4. Mira Calix - Eyes Set Against the Sun ^∫
   "Umbra/Penumbra"



5. Colleen - Les Ondes Silencieuses ^≈
   "Sun Against My Eyes"



6. Feist - The Reminder ¹²³⁴
   "My Moon My Man"



7. PJ Harvey - White Chalk ^℘
   "White Chalk"



8. Boris with Merzbow - Rock Dream
^∪
"Feedbacker"

---

^* The Electrelane ménage -- krautrock and gorgeous melodies -- hooks up with sweet, heartbroken lyrics. Much rejoicing. (Come back, Electrelane! -ed.)

^≈ An ambient record you have to listen to, spacious and intimate. The key is to disappear into the waves...

^† Never heard anything so loud.

^℘ Nothing wrong with Peej doing pretty, especially as a Civil War ghost.

^∞ Baltharian reveries on the Cylon baseships.

¹²³⁴ Geddit?

^∪ Cheating, sure (i.e. Pink live!), but I finally get Merzbow now, he just needs to play behind a hardcore punk-metal trio shredding out the best post-Motörhead long-player ever. (Nb. the linked video isn't with Merzbow -- you'll just have to imagine the track with more industrial noise.)

^∫ The most pummeling quiet record -- ever?

---

Enough of the music bollocks, here's the TV

If you're a regular reader, you probably have picked up my contrarian views which, I'll admit, are sometimes (oftentimes?) blatant provocations, playing the devil's advocate just for its own sake. And one of the unstated assumptions that underlies this blog (and explains the amount of energy I put into it) is that tv land always has quality, it's not the underachieving wasteland that various cultural sentinels would have you believe it is. Critics who complain about any given year's quality are these dour sentinels, or else they're deluged by the sheer volume of mediocrity that's unavoidable in any medium, and I have little time for their opinions.

That said, I compiled the 10 Best Hours of 2007 with difficulty, though to avoid historical revisionism, I had a hard time doing it last year, too. Part of the reason is that the new shows mostly disappointed (though I swear to God, Reaper delivered on its promise), while the old favorites either stumbled along during Fall 2007 (which piled additional detritus onto the sublimity of Spring 2007 that I had to mentally sort through) (also, the strike didn't help, but we'll probably never know just what could have been if things had been business as usual), or skipped this year altogether, whether by HBO's strategized scheduling practices (you guessed it, The Wire) or because their runs simply ended (Teen Titans, Justice League Unlimited).

And sometimes I'm just behind the curve. Just this year, I've caught up (and I'm still catching up) on no fewer than 5 shows of which I'm now an entrenched fan, and no doubt I'll still be discovering new shows. But for the moment, if I could propose an amended 10 hours from 2006, they'd look something like this (new entrants bolded):

10. Justice League Unlimited, "The Great Brain Robbery" (5x08)
9. Friday Night Lights, "Pilot" (1x01)
8. Survivor: Cook Islands, "People That You Like Want To See You Suffer" (13x10)
7. Heroes, "Fallout" (1x11)
6. Teen Titans, "Things Change" (5x13)
5. Lost, "Live Together, Die Alone" (2x23)
4. Veronica Mars, "Not Pictured" (2x22)
3. Battlestar Galactica, "Resurrection Ship, Part 2" (2x11)
2. America's Next Top Model Cycle 6, "The Girl Who is Going to the Moon" (6x09)
1. The Wire, "Final Grades" (4x13)

Given that almost half of my top 10 of 2006 got turned over, anything I put together for 2007 is destined to be no less temporary. (And let's not forget that we're talking about tv here, that gloriously ephemeral and intangible medium -- at least it was before the DVD, which, like the edenic serpent, introduced to it the death of permanence and respectability, but that's another matter).

But the real reason a list of 10 was hard this year and probably will always be hard is that for all the tv I watch, I don't watch enough to compile awesome episodes from 10 different shows, which is sort of reflected in my year-end music list as well. I don't have enough time to watch that much tv, I don't have cable, I'm afraid of getting hooked on shameless trash (like, say, The OC), I don't believe in the concept of a canon -- whatever combination of these reasons is the case, I don't come close to comprehensiveness, and so if you ever read me saying "this year was a bad year in tv," feel free to launch a projectile of your choice (I suggest: a football) towards my groin.

Which is all to say that the following list is a project of simple vanity. Just because I include certain shows on an arbitrary list doesn't make them more legitimate or better than anything anyone else watches (even if I make claims to the contrary -- remember, I'm an admitted hypocrite). In addition to the vanity, a top 10 lets me reflect on some shows, to work through why I enjoyed them, with perhaps a dash of evangelism for the more ratings-challenged ones.

Finally, I should state that despite the anti-canon equivocations of the preceding paragraphs, the top five includes episodes that sent me into ecstasy -- whether of the unadulterated variety or the kind that involves endorphin-releasing schadenfreude -- enough so that 2007 was a great tv year, however you slice it.

(Nb. I realize that one of the entrants below is actually two hours, but for the sake of symmetry, shut up.)

10. So You Think You Can Dance, Week 1, Top 20 Dancers Perform (3x06; FOX, 6/13/07)
The overall talent level, if not the choreography, was exponentially better than years past, and all the promise offered by the dancers was nearly as exciting as anything they actually did. Also, this was kinda hot, and a certain host put the "cat" into "lolcat."


9. Project Runway Canada, "Opposites Attract" (1x06; Slice, 11/12/07)
Just as you'd expect, the Canuck version of Runway doesn't have the same bite as its southern cousin since, as we all know, Canadians are scientifically more polite than Yankees, which, when it comes to reality tv, is to sadly blander effect. (I can make this un-PC generalization because I watched an episode -- one whole episode! -- of Canada's Next Top Model.) For instance, Evan Biddell, the show's self-styled heavy, slimmed down from his pre-Runway weight of 300 pounds, then bit off the catchphrase of an infinitely more colorful American Runway contestant. Some heavy!

Yet, the most notable trump card that Runway Maple Leaf holds over Runway Crying Eagle is its host, Iman. While Runway Canada kicked off with as much empty space and personality as the Northwest Territories, Mrs. David Bowie single-handedly raised her version above any stereotypical and expected Canadian blandness. Iman owns the whole show in a way that Heidi -- bless her always-smiling Teutonic femmebotness -- never has. Iman informed the designers of their upcoming challenges and all eyes were of course on her. Her hosting style was uncompromising as she takes her sweet time with her line readings. Where Heidi bids farewell to eliminated contestants with the impersonal "auf Wiedersehen," Iman tells them what's up, "You just didn't measure up." But it was in the sixth episode of the season that she at last decided to utterly dominate the show, letting loose with charisma, humor, and an effortless strength of opinion that is captivating.



In fact, she almost single-handedly raised the show's game at the opening of the show when she reminded everyone that she can still bring the woah:



I haven't seen someone work the shadows like this since Sydney Bristow. It's safe to say that she'll always be an elegant lady.

Additionally, there was Marie Genevieve, whose French(-Canadian) accent drives me nuts.



She also combines my two favorite things: glasses, and white girls.


8. Bones, "Mummy in the Maze" (3x05; FOX, 10/30/07)
Even if I never remember the procedural bits, Temperance Brennan makes science and empiricism sexy.




7. John From Cincinnati, "His Visit: Day Five" (1x06; HBO, 7/15/07)
The most thrillingly weird moment on TV since the first season finale of Twin Peaks. Prepare yourselves.



Sure, this scene is pure spectacle that pointed to mythological depths at the time but instead opened up a can of worms that ultimately turned out bottomless -- but sometimes payoff is unnecessary. Some things just can't be expressed yet remain beautiful all the same. If you can let yourself be enticed by the unanswerable mystery, the unfettered unknowable, and unbounded possibility, then you'll have stumbled onto the allure of the ineffable. It's a vastness which, if I were the grandiloquent type, I'd call God. (Also if I were a blasphemer.)

Oh, and who can forget this sparkling performance? Camp (albeit unintentional) and weirdness -- John From Cincinnati really is the Twin Peaks for the '00s.


6. Reaper, "The Cop" (1x08; The CW, 11/13/07)
Remember how I'm never wrong? Still the best new show of the season. Yes, a lot of Reaper's own viewers have cited the show's uneven tone or its meandering master narrative, but I could barely care less and I'm still not wrong. Look, if I acknowledge every one of my mistakes, that'd make for exceedingly dull reading. Like our own beloved president, never admit to error! So here's how I reason my way out of this quandary: for me, nearly any narrative deficiency can be compensated for by hilarious wit, especially the sophomoric variety, which Reaper has no problem with. As a for instance, peep this. (Start at about 8:30.)


5. Survivor: Fiji, "It's a Turtle!" (14x10; CBS, 4/19/07)
In Fiji, the lines drawn in the sand split the would-be survivors into two principle camps: the players I adored -- Yau-Man and Earl -- and the players I hated -- Alex and Mookie, who liked to figuratively flex their muscles and kick sand in the face of slight professor Yau-Man. (There was a third camp, the people I couldn't care less about, but that describes exactly how much energy I want to spend on them.) Alex was a piece of work inside and outside the game, but I loathed Mookie, whose defining moment came two episodes earlier, during a projectiles-throwing challenge, when he ridiculed Yau-Man's unorthodox technique which, of course, had the weight of science behind it as he pwned Mookie (start at about 2:30 for the goods -- don't miss his shock and dismay that a skinny old dude could manage to outperform him). That instant crystallized the jockish presumption that typified Alex and Mookie, and when they thuggishly tried to strategize against Yau-Man and Earl and dubbed themselves (along with Dreamz and Edgardo) something as junior-high pimply as "the Four Horsemen" (of what? Delusionally Inflated Ego and Pathetic Macho Dick-Swinging?), their plans obviously and completely unraveled with the frothiest layer of schadenfreude ever on Survivor. The bad guys don't always get their comeuppance in reality tv -- much less reality qua reality -- but when it does, there's nothing sweeter.

Also, Boo's FLOZ hat is destined to be the enduring mystery of our times.


4. Friday Night Lights, "Mud Bowl" (1x20; NBC, 3/28/07)
Season two has made me reconsider the fabled first season's naturalism, which is more accurately Naturalism since the situations so often were larger than life and their consequent outcomes concluded neatly by preternatural maturity (which season two tried to complicate by rolling back and/or conveniently forgetting a lot of character growth). But scratch the substance and you reach the show's real meat, its style. Don't let the vérité influences and flourishes fool you, because they're precisely the point, and did "Mud Bowl" ever bring the ruckus: Of course Dillon was going to win its regular season finale to go on to the State Championship, which would've been predictable and lifeless if the moment was anything less than heart-stopping and epic. A neutral site built days before the game. A torrential storm torn straight from YHWH's Old Testament wrath. Motherfucking Isis. Boys entering the crucible of flooded ash and the annihilation of all ego, and emerging men of character. And a television show transcending the shackles of substance and into the realm of pure aesthetics.


3. Heroes, ".07%" (1x19; NBC, 4/23/07)
Wherein Nate loses out on Linderman's pot pie, and the show's nerd quotient goes through the roof. I never plotzed so much.


2. 30 Rock, "Greenzo"/"Somebody to Love" (2x05, 2x06; NBC, 11/8/07, 11/15/07)
See what I did there? Together, not only were these two episodes the most riotous consecutive weeks in sitcom history (not even God, if She were a divine comedy Supercomputer with all eternity to write half-hour laff-fests, could come close to the hilarity), but they also add up to one hour! I'm smart, like Al Gore.


1. Veronica Mars, "The Bitch is Back" (3x20; The CW, 5/22/07)
Loathe as I am to admit it, the fans were partly right, the third season was the least of the three. Yet for all the foul cries and spurned oaths, Veronica Mars was never a categorically bad show. Season three shifted its method; instead of one grand mystery, the season was split into three abbreviated mystery arcs (though in the end, that last arc got chopped even further into mostly standalone episodes so the CW could look for Pussycat Dolls), and as a result, the show's scope and focus consequently suffered. Not much, mind, but enough to throw fan nation into a frothy spaz.

Yet all that was erased when Veronica Mars and her father Keith became mired in a sex tape and election scandal in the Veronica Mars episode ever. Their fates were never so much in doubt, and the show was never so uncompromisingly urgent, its status quo never so ruthlessly overturned -- all of which would have still applied even if the season finale hadn't officially become the de facto series finale. Leaving the Marses -- heretofore the most self-sufficient and self-composed father-daughter duo ever to grace network tv, I'd gather -- dangling over this network show's most dangerous and uncompromising knife-edge (a show which, on a regular basis, dealt frankly with teen sex, teen drug use, and teen angst) to no resolution was as cruel of a kick in the teeth as the agony that Keith and Veronica suffered.


Just a warning: Next year, if you're still reading and I'm still blogging, expect to see an all-Wire top 10.

Indie rating: Electrelane - "Saturday"

America's Next Top Model (Cycle 8) - 8x01 "The Girl Who Won't Stop Talking"

Last season, as I've said several times before, was disastrous because the girls weren't inspiring models and because, after CariDee and Melrose, they had zero personality. This being ANTM, the girls of Cycle 8 probably don't know how to model either, but at least we're not lacking for personality. (Especially since, you know, Cycle 8 has two plus-size girls, hurr hurr!)

More seriously, ANTM already has a passel of severe self-esteem issues that promise to make Cycle 8 infinitely more rewarding than Cycle 7. Sarah who has the knowledge, experience, and albino street urchin/waif/elf look going for her...



... yet her insecurity compels her to constantly boast about her accomplishments to so that others can validate her. Also:



Then there's Jael who seems to dread success so much because she's afraid that she won't be a lovable loser anymore. Another thing that irked me about Jael -- and really, it's about Jael, as it has little to do directly with her -- is her race. Jael looks like a slutty, punked out Gwyneth Paltrow...



... her father is a German Jew, and her mother is black ("African-American" were Jael's exact words).



(Which prompts Ms. J to say, "That is some strong DNA on your daddy's side," though we'll ignore the eugenic undertones of his statement.) Accordingly, Tyra identifies Jael as "half-black," an identification which brings up really bothersome ideas about
racial purity. Simply looking at the above picture, the complexion of Jael's mom is rather light, which suggests that -- if we're go by archaic notions of "blood" vis-a-vis race -- mom has a fair amount of white "blood" in her ancestry. And Jael is still half-black? Is white blood that weak that a drop of black and you don't go back?

Anyway, you get the picture with the insecure girls, which also includes Renee.

Since this post is so late, I'll just say that Kathleen is the Mirror Universe Bre (minus the Mirror Universe goatee): they're both black girls from Noo Yawk with big hair, but Kathleen was preoccupied with being everyone's best friend.

Also, Gia from Veronica Mars season 2 was at the Goodwill fashion show.



Indie rating: Smoosh - "About the Picture"

Ten Hours from 2006

I'm a bit surprised that I've taken so long coming up with a Top 10 TV shows, especially because 2006 was a fairly strong year in terms of reality TV plus Veronica Mars (haters can shut it), and that I'm as obsessed with TV as ever. Compare TV to my music geekness, which has abated considerably, though nonetheless I've decided on a moderately stable list of 10 albums:

1. Boris, Pink


2. The Pipettes, We are the Pipettes


3. Joanna Newsom, Ys


4. Bardo Pond, Ticket Crystals


5. Espers, II


6. Isis, In the Absence of Truth


7. OOIOO, Taiga


8. Saint Etienne, Tales From Turnpike House


9. Camera Obscura, Let's Get Out of This Country


10. Eluvium, When I Live in the Garden and the Sea

Special mention goes out to Electrelane's Singles, B-Sides & Live collection.

Anyway, back on the TV front. To cut some suspense, stuff that is totally up my alley -- Justice League Unlimited, Teen Titans, and Battlestar Galactica -- aren't on the list because like a failed nerd, I only started watching their first seasons this year -- I have a feeling that once I get completely caught up, a lot of reality tv would get bumped off this list.

So, without thematizing the entire year (which, if you ask me, is an exercise in futility and arrogance), an ascending list of my favorite hours from 2006 with brief-to-briefish commentary:

10. So You Think You Can Dance, Top 10 Dancers (2x16)
The judges were witless annoyances, the reality wasn't narrative-based, and I still don't know a quickstep from a jive, but SYTYCD is the younger, snottier, snappier, and sometimes "edgier" (i.e. including krumping as a style) version of Dancing with the Stars. Clearly, all of the hip-hop styles are on the show to appeal to younger viewers, who would be more familiar with popping-and-locking than fan kicks, but amazingly, the most impressive, sublime moments of the second season of SYTYCD were lyrical, paso doble, and the Cuban rumba, and this episode featured two of these styles. As shallow eye-candy goes, SYTYCD is fluffier (even if the final prize is actual employment for the winner), but as camp as a high-energy disco number, fluffy goes a long way.

9. The Amazing Race, "5 Continents...10 Countries...And More than 59 Thousand Miles!" (9x12)
Wherein smelly hippies flex their brains to beat almost heterosexual fratties!

8. Scrubs, "My Transition" (5x18)
OK, so Scrubs makes the list 9.5 hours. Add "My Urologist" (5x17) if you're into Dr. Acula. Vampires and absurdist high-comedy -- how could I not love this?

7. Friday Night Lights, "Pilot" (1x01)
Friday Night Light perfectly blends the football action with searing melodrama in its first episode. Also: QB1 vs. QB1.

6. Survivor: Cook Islands, "People That You Like Want To See You Suffer" (13x10)
Many reviews point to the preceding "Mutiny" episode (where Candice, and then Jonathan, abandoned the Aitu (Survivorese for "hero") Tribe) as the turning point of Cook Islands, since it turned the most likeable contestants Ozzy and Yul, who to that point were among the likeliest contenders to win the game, into underdogs. At the same time, the other tribe, composed of young white kids (& Nate), dared to treat the solemnity of the Survivor as no more than The Real World: Cook Islands, thus earning the contempt of most viewers. (Insert boring tangent about how the white kids, AKA the face of homogenous America, rejected the Protestant Work Ethic, which the two Koreans, a Mexican, a black woman, and a middle-aged Jew were left to pick up.) In other words, "Mutiny" completely deserves its place in Cook Islands lore, but in all of 2006, I don't think that my schadenfreude got as much of a work out as it did when I saw Candice blub because she was surprised that the tribe she betrayed to make out with her show-boyfriend was angry at her.

5. Project Runway, "Designer's Best Friend" (3x03)
Just about any episode could've made this list (like Kayne's Marilyn Monroe riff), but seeing how Laura interacted with her dog was just too priceless. (Not to mention the first of Angela's many disasters.)

4. Heroes, "Fallout" (1x11)
Lost-lite, but a very candy-coated version that, thus far, doesn't take itself quite as seriously as its progenitor, as summed up by Matt and FBI Girlfriend's telepathic flirting (better known as the awesomest exchange between shippy characters ever).

3. Lost, "Live Together, Die Alone" (2x23)
Even though Lost consistently disappoints and frustrates me, the finale to season 2 rates this high almost because it stands out so much from the rest of that tease of a season, much of which was satisfied with maintaining its insular little world as the series became preoccupied with drawing out its status quo. Without answering existing questions, the show introduced new mysteries that were entirely within the parameters of the status quo, and as a result, many viewers felt like they were strung along. But by the finale, Lindelof, Cuse, et al seized the chance to blow up the insular little world they'd created and show us that, yes, another world existed beyond the Island, a world much larger with a whole different vocabulary to describe its own questions. (Unsurprisingly, this outside world has been a non-factor in season 3.)

2. Veronica Mars, "Not Pictured" (2x22)
Maybe my taste is questionable (obviously it is with all these reality tv shows), but Veronica Mars was no less enjoyable in its second season than it was in its first. (Caveat: I only saw the mythological episodes that UPN reran during the summer hiatus.) The season finale typified everything I love about the show and even added a cherry on top: snappy and "epic" dialogue that culminated with Logan's impassioned and equally epic speech to V, a reveal that was unexpected but not out of leftfield, and a serious and genuine sense of danger during the climax (which is the cherry, if you're still keeping track).

1. America's Next Top Model Cycle 6, "The Girl Who is Going to the Moon" (6x09)
Before this year, I wouldn't have listed a recap episode at all, much less rank it this high, mostly because it's simply a summary of what's happened so far in a show's season. However, I picked a recap episode is because if it would stand in for the whole season, and I otherwise would've listed multiple episodes of Cycle 6. But "The Girl Who is Going to the Moon" also helped me realize two benefits of recap episodes. The first: "deleted" scenes that offered hilarity -- Joanie doing her Furonda impression, Danielle and Joanie rapping in the kitchen, etc. The second: it allows viewers like me, who originally couldn't stand Jade's mentalism, to revisit such classics as, "This is not America's Next Top Best Friend." The difference between the first time I heard her inanity and the second time were was Joanie and Danielle had both been built up into protagonists who could face (or play) off against Jade. As long as Jade was a credible threat to win, and without any frontrunning girls to keep her winning, I couldn't enjoy her Sister Soldier antics; but when Joanie and Danielle became the prohibitive favorites to reach the top two, I could safely dwelve into Jade's analystic mind.

Indie rating: Joanna Newsom - "Emily"

(Don't) Watch Veronica Mars!

Not that the paltry number of hits that T!YBE receives is enough to prop up its sagging viewership (I'm up to 20 a day!), but watch Veronica Mars. Actually, don't, because the show is currently in the middle of a big reveal of its season-long mystery, and it's also complicating the resolution of season 1's mystery. So, unless you want to be spoiled out of the most compelling serial storytelling on TV anywhere, don't watch this show right now.

Instead, queue the season 1 DVD on your Netflix. What I can tell you is that the show is set in the fictional town of Neptune (look on a fictional map and you'll find it next to San Diego) and focuses on Veronica Mars, the sharp high school junior whose best friend Lilly Kane was murdered. Meanwhile, Veronica and her father Keith live on the wrong side of tracks (mother Mars skipped out under mysterious circumstances), and to make ends meet, Veronica takes side jobs out of her father's PI office.

If all that sounds like a dysfunctional Nancy Drew for the new millennium, you'll happily discover that Veronica Mars rises above such a facile comparison. The show mixes snappy screwball dialogue with fully realized characters, noirishly labyrinthine plots with unflinching stories about date rape, class stratification and family drama. While such a melange of genres sounds fatally incompatible, Veronica Mars never veers off too far in a single direction: the heady topics the show grapples with toughens the show against comparisons to Nancy Drew, while the snappy dialogue never permits the atmosphere to slide into the oppressive abyss of self-importance. And before you write off the show for possibly being sentimental, know that sometimes the rich kids are justifiably vindicated, and sometimes the poor kids are no better than street-level thugs; so rather than a show that redistributed sympathy inverse to his/her wealth purely out of liberal guilt, Veronica Mars complicates its characters into something deep, and despite the mannered and stylized acting, despite the noirishly outlandish high-school-on-steroids melodrama, the Veronica Mars approaches the reality in a way more real than real life.

Indie rating: The Dandy Warhols - "We Used to be Friends"

Wednesday Night Showdown: LOST vs. VERONICA MARS

At least ratings-wise, the head-to-head competition between these two shows is over before it really starts. Lost routinely clobbers any and all competition. However, both Lost and Veronica Mars head the primetime charge towards the continuing, serialized narrative, though each program approaches serialism with a significantly different philosophy.

Although both shows center around a dominant mystery, Lost, on an episode-by-episode basis, typically offers a mystery that has a direct consequence on the show's mythology (i.e. what is the island, why are survivors there, etc.), but more often than not in season 2, the episode fails to resolve the mystery so that a later episode to grapple with. An episode of Veronica Mars on the other hand introduces a small plot that may or may not be related to the larger mythology (in season one, who killed Lilly Kane; in season two, who sabotaged the school bus), and unlike Lost, the episode resolves that mystery before its 42 minutes are up. And just as importantly, that episode of Veronica Mars will also sneak in a new mystery right at the end. These two different serial approaches have profoundly different effects on the viewer (though I must warn that I'm once again generalizing from my individual experience).

In order to talk about Lost's approach to mystery and cliffhangers, it's best if I first talk about cliffhangers in Veronica Mars. When an episode opens with a new, minor mystery, the viewer feels incomplete in a very basic sense: she doesn't know Who Did It or What Happened, and she wants to know. So of course, when the mystery is solved, the viewer feels completed with the knowledge. But when the episode, in typical Veronica Mars fashion, introduces another mystery or a new clue in the mythological mystery, Veronica Mars displays a thorough understanding of both an ongoing television show and the capacious and bottomless appetite of human desire.

The American model of a TV program and the mechanism of human desire run parallel to each other. Television programs always want their viewers to come back for more because as money-making enterprises, they need to maintain their number of viewers from one episode to the next to remain attractive to advertising dollars; meanwhile, viewes are happy to oblige the programs because people will always desire that one object that will make them whole and complete. But of course, even if they get the object of desire, they'll soon find something else that they're missing and will want once again. So, when Veronica Mars ends an episode with a new mystery or a new wrinkle in an existing mystery, the show enacts both the American TV model and viewers' psychological inclinations.

With its method of introducing new mysteries, Veronica Mars also treats viewers with a pang of pleasure. After an episode resolves its mystery, the viewer feels satisfied and complete, but this sense of wholeness is quickly shattered by the new mystery. Yet, instead of feeling distressed by the new mystery (and the lack of knowledge that comes with it), our unconscious mechanism of desire is stimulated. People want to want, and Veronica Mars taps such an impulse by persuading the viewer to want to know Who Did It or What Happens Next.

Lost, in contrast to Veronica Mars, is much stingier with its mysteries, which resultsin fewer mystery plots. And with fewer mysteries (which usually are stretched out across multiple episodes), resolutions are likewise harder to come by. Ultimately, the entire mechanism of desire is frustrated. Although people want to want, they want to want new things, and Lost often doesn't deliver new mysteries because it's fully intent on milking the Island mystery. Take "The Whole Truth" (2x16), for example. It centers around the Henry Gale mystery (initiated two episodes ago with "One of Them" (2x14)): is Gale an Other or not? This episode begins with this question in the air (I won't usually count flashbacks as new mystery plots because they're not very interesting most of the time) and ends with it still unanswered. Consequently, the viewer is unfulfilled and incomplete, which is a regular feeling since Lost stopped offering new twists and turns and instead focused on stringing its viewers along with old mysteries.

That Veronica Mars seems to wield an innate understanding of Lacanian psychoanalysis (i.e. the mechanism of desire, for those of you keeping track) doesn't mean that its method is perfect. As season two has shown, the show's directive of one new mystery per week seems to be straining its internal logic and credibility. After all, it's only a matter of time when such a proliferation of ideas caves in on itself, leaving viewers with "One Angry Veronica" and "Ain't No Magic Mountain High Enough."

Still, it's notable that Veronica Mars dares to incorporate so many mysteries, especially since most other serial shows adhere to the Lost-style -- Alias and 24 spring to mind most readily.

Indie rating: Drive Like Jehu - "Human Interest"

Veronica Mars - 1x16 "Betty and Veronica"

Hey, this show is pretty good! I think I said sometime ago that the writing was probably unlikely that of any other show that I've seen (granted, I watch a lot of reality tv and 24 -- not exactly shows that feature great dialogue), but the story itself really didn't grab me until that one about the poker game.

However, it's too smart for me! Developments sometimes rush right past me, and like I said, I watch a lot of reality tv and 24, i.e. shows that will slowly repeat a point so that their mass (or plain stupid (Hi!)) audiences can follow, and Veronica just doesn't pander to me like I'm used to! Though I did think of this smart thing: Abel Koontz! And the Kanes! If I'm just getting this connection now, I really am slow!!

One actual point in the midst of this overflow of exclamation marks: in this episode the dialogue, especially Veronica's one-liners, seemed markedly weaker and at times more forced than in the previous couple episodes.

Indie rating: Kronos Quartet - "Spem in Alium"

Veronica Mars - 1x01 "Pilot"

Review: Not bad, not great so far, the quality of the dialogue and its bruntness in portraying certain issues (date rape, entitled psychopaths) show that it has promise.

Analysis: A conceit running through the episode was trash -- Veronica dumps the music box in the trash, her dad throws the photo of Jake Kane's tryst away, and would you look at that, both of them return near the end of the episode. On that same token, Veronica and her dad have become social refuse, cast aside after their respective downfalls (Keith when the town recalled him, which indirectly leads to Veronica's, i.e. her rape). Add in new kid Wallace, social reprobate Weevil and we've got a dump of a group so far, which carries over, although probably inadvertently, to the UPN-drama aesthetic of washed out colors, which gives the impression of low production values.