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The Julie Taylor Test: How to tell if a TV actor is bad

Sun, 05 May 2013 21:00:00 +0000

Julie Taylor appeared on all five seasons of the late, great “Friday Night Lights.” The teenage daughter of the show’s main characters, the indelibly decent and charismatic Mr. and Mrs. Coach (or, fine, Eric and Tami Taylor), Julie (Aimee Teegarden) had more screen than almost any of “FNL’s” players except her parents. She wasn’t, at first glance, obviously, abjectly terrible, but she was tremendously opaque and flat: the lackluster nature of her performance was quietly mediocre. Whereas everyone else on that show seemed, almost effortlessly, to embody a real, identifiable, understandable and believable person, Julie never even fully registered, except in rare, fleeting moments.

TV is very kind to bad actors. In a movie, when someone is bland or dull or hammy that’s all they have time to be. On TV, as a bad actor appears again and again, you begin to rationalize the badness, their under-, over-, or just plain wretched acting. Maybe this performance is inexpressive and uncharismatic because the character is inexpressive and uncharismatic. Some people are! Maybe it’s not January Jones who can’t put over emotion of any kind, it’s Betty Draper who is so flat!

Poll: 3 in 10 voters say “armed revolution might be necessary”

Wed, 01 May 2013 21:26:00 +0000

A new survey of voters by Fairleigh Dickinson University’s PublicMind finds that 29 percent agree with the statement, “In the next few years, an armed revolution might be necessary in order to protect our liberties" - including 18 percent of Democrats, 27 percent of Independents and 44 percent of Republicans.

From the survey:

Only 38 percent of Americans who believe a revolution might be necessary support additional gun control legislation, compared with 62 percent of those who don’t think an armed revolt will be needed. “The differences in views of gun legislation are really a function of differences in what people believe guns are for,” said Cassino. “If you truly believe an armed revolution is possible in the near future, you need weapons and you’re going to be wary about government efforts to take them away.”

The poll also found that 25 percent of those surveyed "think that facts about the shootings at Sandy Hook elementary last year are being hidden." 11 percent are unsure.

h/t TPM.

Rise of the conservative revolutionaries

Wed, 01 May 2013 15:45:00 +0000

There's plenty of proof of an authoritarian streak and animus toward democratic ideals in today's conservative movement. There was the movement's use of its judicial power to halt a vote recount and instead install a president who had lost the popular vote. There is the ongoing GOP effort to make it more difficult for people to cast a vote in an election. There is the GOP's record use of the Senate filibuster to kill legislation that the vast majority of the country supports. There is a GOP leader's declaration that what the American people want from their government simply "doesn't matter."

Up until today, you might have been able to write all that anti-democratic pathology off as one infecting only the Republican Party's politicians and institutional leadership, but not its rank-and-file voters. But then this morning Fairleigh Dickinson University released this gun control-related pollshowing that authoritarianism runs throughout the the entire party.

My colleague died for peace

Tue, 02 Apr 2013 16:46:00 +0000

Two years ago Ahmed Shihadeh enjoyed a peaceful, if routine, life as a married young man living and working in the suburbs of Damascus. A master’s student in economics at Damascus University, he, like everyone else around him, never accounted for a popular revolution or subsequent government crackdown to abruptly upend his world.

Only one of the millions of ordinary Syrians whose day-to-day existence has been dramatically altered by the conflict in the country, Ahmed was suddenly compelled by the extraordinary circumstances around him to change from an ordinary student working at a local bank into an activist fighting to undermine a violently repressive government. Amid the increasing chaos, Ahmed left his studies to join a group of peaceful activists to found a citizens’ newspaper named Enab Baladi, created to disseminate local news on the revolution.

Ahmed found himself thrust into a world where he lived under constant threat and had to operate in secret, printing and distributing physical newspapers with the knowledge that he would be tortured and killed were his work discovered. The contrast with the normal life he enjoyed two years ago could not be starker, but as much as the situation deteriorated and the world he inhabited slowly ceased to exist, he refused to leave his home or his aspirations for a democratic Syria. Ahmed would write of the revolution he fought for:

“Revolution” returns, lazy as ever

Tue, 26 Mar 2013 12:21:00 +0000

“Revolution,” NBC’s hit drama about what happens when all the electricity in the world goes out, returned from a four-month hiatus last night. “Revolution” took its break after airing just 10 episodes. NBC said it didn’t want to string very few episodes out over a four-month gap — and four months would give the show some time to up its quality level. “Revolution” had an audience and an interesting premise, but as I lamented when it first premiered, it put that premise to boring, anodyne ends, making one dull blond girl do stupid things while hunting for her dull blond brother while everyone wore a clean, muted-color Henley shirt in an environment not as specific or strange or scary as a post-apocalyptic, electricity-less world would really be. (And don’t get me started about how QVC the mechanisms that can turn the electricity back on look.)

Was I right? Six new TV series reassessed

Wed, 14 Nov 2012 18:39:00 +0000

It's hard to judge a TV show by its first episode. But every fall, when the networks march out their new fall shows, that's exactly what critics have to do. Inevitably, some promising shows fall off, and some not-at-all-promising shows get surprisingly good. Two months into the new season, I checked in on six of the more high-profile new series to see how they're faring. (Sorry, "New Normal" — I was wrong about you!)

“Revolution”: The apocalyptic zeitgeist

Mon, 12 Nov 2012 21:11:00 +0000

Even before Sandy took out a chunk of power on the East Coast, the top-rated new network series of the season was a show whose central concern was the total loss of electricity. For “Revolution,” society doesn’t operate without electricity — and not just those delivered in wires, but the sparks in automobiles and generators as well. Society breaks down, militias spring up and the rest of your life is roaming round in bands looking for family, redemption or both. Fifteen years later, when we pick up the story, the world’s monuments are engulfed in advanced greenery, as people have for some reasons neglected their gardening hand tools, but they have advanced skills in bows and arrows and swashbuckling swordfighting.

What in “Revolution” was speaking to TV viewers even before the hurricane hit? It can’t be just because it follows the biggest overall hit of the season, “The Voice,” whose fans are just too exhausted after the two-hour episodes to change the channel. More likely, it builds on the irrational fear of total global meltdown that feeds the success of everything from “The Hunger Games” and “The Walking Dead” to “Doomsday Preppers.”

NBC’s surprisingly good September

Tue, 02 Oct 2012 14:28:00 +0000

Last night, word leaked out that NBC will not be going ahead with “Mockingbird Lane,” its high-profile reboot of “The Munsters.” Despite detailed explanations of how the new project would be edgy and different from the 1960s sitcom, and the promise of a big, strong cast that included Eddie Izzard and Portia de Rossi, it always sounded like a pretty bad idea, or at least one that would be very difficult to execute well. The restraint shown by NBC in not ordering the series, one NBC has been talking about and up almost since the arrival of Bob Greenblatt, its still relatively new president, is another good sign for the network, which is having a surprisingly good autumn. Aside from airing “Guys With Kids” this fall, NBC is having the best pilot season of all the networks.

Eric Hobsbawm in quotes

Mon, 01 Oct 2012 16:24:00 +0000

In the early hours of Monday morning, celebrated British historian, staunch Marxist and public intellectual Eric Hobsbawm died at age 95.

Hobsbawm's ideas will long survive him, especially through his major works, "The Age of Revolution," "The Age of Capital," "The Age of Empire," "History of the 20th Century," "The Age of Extremes," which has been translated into 40 languages since its 1994 publication. Despite shifting trends in the academy, Hobsbawm stuck by his Marxist guns throughout. Here are a few of his thoughts on war, capital and nationhood:

On war and capitalism:

"War has been the most convenient pseudo-solution for the problems of twentieth-century capitalism. It provides the incentives to modernization and technological revolution which the market and the pursuit of profit do only fitfully and by accident, it makes the unthinkable (such as votes for women and the abolition of unemployment) not merely thinkable but practicable. What is equally important, it can re-create communities of men and give a temporary sense to their lives by uniting them against foreigners and outsiders. This is an achievement beyond the power of the private enterprise economy when left to itself." (The Observer Review, 1968.)

The end of the world has never been so dull

Mon, 17 Sep 2012 13:30:00 +0000

There is an eerie moment near the beginning of “Revolution,” NBC’s new post-apocalyptic drama about a world without electricity, when we first see all the lights go out. Two soldiers, on leave, are driving down the highway when their cellphones die. Their headlights start to flicker and their cars sputter to a stop. The camera pulls back as the cars behind them turn out in succession, the highway going dark. Above, glints in the sky fall to earth: airplanes.

This scene, and especially the monstrous, elegant airplanes, are the only grace notes in the entire pilot of “Revolution,” which takes a high-stakes, specific premise — the end of the world through a total collapse of technology — and makes it as dull and generic as possible. It is a show about technology that doesn't find technology the least bit interesting.

“Revolution” picks up in earnest 15 years after Armageddon. The United States government has fallen, America has been taken over by militias, and no one has any idea why the laws of physics just broke. (It’s not just that the grid doesn’t work — batteries, backup generators, cars, they’re all out.) The show’s heroine, Charlie, a teenage girl, who like all teenage girls in these “Hunger Games” days, uses a crossbow, lives in a sleepy farming community and longs to go out into the big bad world.