Another post involving the TV show Private Practice that assumes you know nothing about it and are not worried about spoilers.

By far, the two characters I care least about the show are Pete and Violet. Sometimes, when writing characters, the traits they think are admirable end up being an albatross around their necks. So Pete the ER doctor is “passionate” and has a strong sense of right and wrong. Over time, this translates into the fact that he is always angry and yelling at everybody. Violet is sensitive and thoughtful, which ends up with her being a neurotic mess.

So over the course of the show, Pete and Violet end up together. And together, their intense and passionate feelings for one another (a good thing!) turns into episode after episode of them screaming at one another (him usually screaming at her) and wallowing in self-pity and personal turmoil (usually her). To the point that my response to this relationship that I am supposed to care for is that he needs to move to the other coast or San Salvador or something.

Then Pete died, which was probably for the best of all involved.

All of this is how dramas work. I pick on Private Practice, but it’s actually one of my favorites. In good part because Pete and Violet are the exception rather than the rule. But even there, we have it. Humans (at least of the affluent variety) aren’t meant to endure the things they go through. Sometimes the best thing to happen to a character is that they get to check out of the show (and thus, the drama).

As the Chinese proverb curse goes, “may you live in interesting times.” I think of the relationships that I have had in the past and while none of them reached the degree of “interesting” as Pete and Violet, they were… what they were, I guess. The relationship that lead to my marriage was comparatively boring. I got to check out into my own happy ending. Unlike Pete, I didn’t have to die to do it.

I have actually finished the series, which ended a couple years ago. I am happy to report that the final season of the show was probably the best final season of any show ever. But for the most part, they knew they had a half-season to wrap things up, and they did. Character by character, most of them getting their own episode. Some new storylines were started, but with the conclusion in mind. Amelia went and fell in love with a Republican. Sheldon fell in love with someone dying of cancer. Cooper and Charlotte had triplets. And Pete stayed dead.

This post neither expects you to know anything about “Private Practice” nor does it expect you to care about the characters.

In lieu of listening to audiobooks, I am using my smartphone to listen to television shows again. I used to do this pretty regularly, but it’s harder on Android phones than it is on old school Windows Mobile phones.

Right now I am listening to Private Practice, a now-defunct spin-off of Grey’s Anatomy. I’m early into the fifth season.

In it are two lovers, Adison and Sam. Adison is getting older, has fertility issues, and wants to have children. Sam doesn’t want them, so Adison is looking at IVF. While considering IVF, Adison is going off her birth control. Due to this, she requests that Sam wears a condom. Sam tries to get out of it. She says “No condom, no sex.”

Other than condom promotion, this whole storyline is bizarre. She wants children, and has given no indication that she wouldn’t be interested in having his children. (She’s not looking for an all-star donor – never mind that even if she were looking for the perfect specimen she could probably not do better than Sam himself.)

I fail to understand how getting pregnant by Sam wouldn’t be almost ideal. Her baby has a great biological father. The father is the guy she wants to spend the rest of her life with anyway, and who if he wanted to whose children she would like to have. The only loser here would be Sam. So the natural plotline here is that Sam takes his chances, and if she did turn up pregnant then it’s Tough Luck Sam.

I can’t figure out if there is something that I am missing here, if condom promotion trumps all, or if writers are so used to the typical contraception storyline (she says where a condom, he doesn’t want to, he eventually does) that they simply couldn’t see that in this storyline it just fit at all.

The following was supposed to be an introduction to a series of posts on Ordinary Times about the American version of House of Cards. It never came to fruition, so I thought I would share it here:

I want to start the discussion of House of Cards out by talking about the basic plot that spanned the first two seasons. It’s not exactly novel to say that it’s very unrealistic. The only question is whether or not it was made better or worse by its fantastical elements.

In the British version, the question is basically asked “What if you had a Whip who was extremely intelligent as well as a ruthless psychopath?” Accepting those premises, it’s not hard to imagine events unfolding as they do in the story. On the other hand, the original version took four episodes to get where the American series took 26. Due to the logistics of American government, a longer road to the White House was a necessity, though another way of looking at it is that the number of episodes necessitated the long plot twists and turns.

The criticism I have here is that there were so many twists and turns that it became too unwieldy to account for in a plan that Frank could announce to his wife in the first episode. Anything above and beyond “I’m going to unseat the Vice President and then hope I take his place and then take down the President. The assumption that he would, in fact, be Matthews’ successor in the Vice Presidency was not a controllable circumstance no matter how smart you are. The mechanism by which he was able to receive advocacy within the Walker Administration (helping the Chief of Staff’s daughter get into Stanford) was unknown to him at the time.

On the other hand, unlike in Britain, we do not have a clean path from legislator to chief executive unless there is a vice presidential appointment involved, or the president and vice president were incapacitated or removed without sufficient time for a new vice president to be appointed. It is curious that they went the former route instead of the more direct path from Whip to Speaker to President. While not controllable, it is nonetheless more controllable than counting on a vice presidential appointment.

If it isn’t obvious by now, I found that the more fantastical elements of the plot hindered my enjoyment. I would have preferred a plot more specifically geared towards Underwood becoming Speaker of the House and based on some grudge involving the sitting Speaker. From that standpoint, you could have had a tigher plan and a tighter plot.

I have long since discovered that what I believe would be ideal and what the viewing public wants are two different things. We live in the age of the president, there is no doubt, and it might have been harder to garner interest if “all” that’s at stake is speakership. That might have flown when the speaker was a household name in the Gingrich years, but might be a harder sell today. On the other hand, it’s not hard to devise some sort of plot for taking the speakership in Season One and then working to eject the president and vice president (presumably in a unitary scandal in season two.

My own creative ruminations aside, however, I enjoyed the show in much the same guilty-pleasure sort of way that I enjoy Scandal. As ridiculous as it was at points, I did enjoy it from start to finish and will most assuredly watch Season Three.

On one last plot-related point, I was relieved that the president was not ejected by reason of the anti-depressant medications. I was afraid that’s where they were going to go with it and that might have been the final straw for me. We may have impeached a president for an extramarital affair, but that was only made possible by having him virtually dead to rights on having committed an underlying crime. Fundraising, though, is about the integrity of the office and while I don’t believe for a moment that events would have unfolded how they did in the program, it at least had an air of credibility. And a certain parallel with the Clinton impeachment as a focus on something frivolous turned into the revelation of something that (arguably) wasn’t.

Ordinarily, I wouldn’t spend an hour watching a TV show about Dukes of Hazzard, but things just kind of fell into place for it.

It really is interesting the relationship CBS had with ruralia. Shows in rural America were very, very successful for the network, and they always seemed unhappy about it.

It’s not too much unlike Fox’s relationship with Married With Children. Very successful show that Fox always seemed more embarrassed about than proud of.

Libby Watson finds American satire lacking:

That’s part of why British political discourse makes American politics look like tea at the cricket club. When Congressman Joe Wilson yelled, “you lie!” at President Obama, it was a national incident, but raucous shouting at the Prime Minister during Prime Minister’s Questions has been a weekly institution since the 19th Century. We throw eggs at our politicians; we nick their bikes; we certainly don’t stand when they enter the room.

This jeering hatred of politicians is integral to The Thick of It. Malcolm calls minister Nicola Murray a “psycho-fanny,” and violent threats that he’ll “sell off [her] fucking flayed skin” are standard. And these politicians are worthy of hatred. Nicola is a total “omnishambles;” her predecessor Hugh uses the story of his adviser Glen’s special-needs son to lie to Parliament. The advisers are as terrible. Malcolm is the “Malchiavellian” scumbag behind it all, but every single one is slimy, backstabbing, and horrible. Ollie is a “man worm,” who helps depose both Nicola and Malcolm. Others trade nicknames for a mentally ill man: “The fucker’s a nutbag.”

It’s certainly true that our style of politics – as acrimonious as it often is, can be compared as “gentle” compared to British politics. It also makes sense to me that The West Wing is a truly American type of program.

Having seen both, I also mostly with her comparisons of the American and British versions of House of Cards, though that’s more complicated than it initially appears. Our Underwood was, I’d argue, actually considerably more villainous than their Urquhart. The British version, though, had a very American over-the-top feel while British satire tends to be more… patient.

I think Watson really nails it here, though:

It’s not only hatred, though—Brits don’t have the forgiving impulse that America has for its politicians. The fall-and-redemption story is familiar in American politics. Last year, we got a Congressman Mark Sanford as proof. George W. Bush’s paintings of dogs hang on the national refrigerator, with him trotting them out in a fluffy Today Show interview with his daughter.

And I think the the politics discussed throughout is symptomatic of our interest in the redemption narrative rather than being about politics in particular.

To take it out of our statehouses and DC, I consider The Office to be indicative of this. On first blanch, their David Brent was two-parts creepy and one part annoying. Our Michael Scott was two-parts annoying and one-part creepy. As time progressed, the difference became more increasingly important. Early on in the series I wrote the following about Scott:

The most telling scene with Michael Scott was when he was showing a video of his younger self on a kiddie show of some sort. He is asked what he wants most from life and he says it’s to get married and have 100 kids so that none of them could decline to being his friend. One of the saddest scenes on television pretty much ever.

Frankenstein’s Monster said something along the lines of “I am a monster because I am in pain.” Whenever I run across someone either in real life or in entertainment that has an emptiness in their heart, it makes me very wary.

Michael Scott’s younger years are never spelled out and though he likes to talk about himself he doesn’t really do so in honest or accurate terms, so we’re left to speculate. Nonetheless, it seems relatively apparent to me that Michael hasn’t just been hurt by what social rejection almost certainly took place in his past, but rather that he’s been scarred by it. I see within him a certain darkness in his soul where the part of him that is loved and accepted should reside. That’s not to say that he is completely unloved and unaccepted as his mother seems to love him (if not respect him) and Dwight functionally (if not earnestly) respects him, but it’s clearly not enough.

The dangerous Scott painted in this portrait is beyond redemption. And yet, however, he was redeemed. It’s not just that Scott had over seven seasons to find his redemption while Brent had only two. Brent could have had ten and it wouldn’t have mattered. Not only because of the two-part-one-part difference, but because Scott’s happiness and Brent’s being forced out were both natural extensions of how each side likes our stories told.

Whether about politics or a guy running an office.

Intellectually and artistically, I have a preference for the British model. Our House of Cards and The Office are more entertaining, but theirs are stories better told. But I have the heart of an American, I suppose. The British version of the Office was simply hard for me to watch. House of Cards was easier, but I am still disinclined to ever go back and watch it. I seem to appreciate their approach from a mild distance.

Cross Canadian Ragweed – Look At Me from Hartmut Braeunlich on Myspace.

It’s frustrating has heck that this video isn’t available on YouTube or anywhere else but MySpace, but here it is. It’s one of my favorites. Better done than a lot of their more professional videos. A great song, to boot.

I don’t understand a word in this song, but it’s a pretty awesome music video.

I actually saw it without hearing it. We were eating at a Mediterranean restaurant and it was playing as part of a loop on the TV. Along with what appeared to be random videos of southern Europe (maybe narrated, no audio). The music is okay, and in French. But it definitely caught my attention and is now on the master playlist at home. (The master playlist being about 300 or so music videos I play when I need to keep Lain occupied.

During the move from Arapaho to West Q, I listened to the audiobook of Atlas Shrugged. Well, in the 20-30 hours of driving I got through half of it, anyway, and the rest was heard after I arrived.

It exceeded my expectations, though my expectations were pretty low to begin with. A lot of people who are sympathetic to the themes of the book admit pretty freely that it’s not a great book. So I was expecting thing characters, wooden dialogue, and so on. That’s what I got.

I did actually like the story, though, including a lot of the parts of the story that a lot of people don’t care for. Specifically, I refer to the parts of the book about the running of the railroad and the conquering of various logistical challenges and legal/regulatory restrictions. I apparently have an affinity for books, as one of the few college books I have subsequently re-read more than once was Eliyahu Goldratt’s The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement. The story of which is about a plant manager trying to improve the production of widgets of some sort. Basically, a novelization to convey certain theories about business.

And so it was with Atlas Shrugged, and some of the parts of it I found most interesting.

The biggest weakness was, as I expected, the characters. Ordinary Times’s Jaybird describes the heroes as being ridiculous but the villains as being ripped from the headlines. That strikes me as about right. My interest in e-cigarettes has reinforced this point, as the FDA and CDC compete with one another to sound the most like Atlas Shrugged’s State Science Institute.

But the heroes were stale. They were supposed to be archetypes of all that is good and true and virtuous in the world, and there’s not much you can do with that. However, giving them just a little bit of a sense of humor (of the exasperated variety, if nothing else) would have gone a long way. Humor has a great leavening effect that this novel sorely could have used.

The best characters were actually the female characters. Which is remarkable because there are very, very few of them. The lead is a woman, Dagney Taggart, of course, but she wasn’t the interesting one. Rather, the ones I was fascinated by were wife characters, Lillian Rearden and Cherryl Brooks Taggart.

Lillian was the wife of Hank Rearden, the secondary protagonist. She was obviously a villainesque character, but had an interesting mysterious quality about where she was going from and what was going through her mind (in a book where you find out, at great length, what is going through most characters’ minds). Cherryl Brooks Taggart was a grocery clerk who married Dagney Taggart’s brother (a villain, of sorts) who sort of played the up-by-the-bootstraps mindset in a world with little use for such things (and who, by virtue of her marriage, was actually on the wrong side of the book’s primary struggle).

As far as the ideology of the book goes, I agree with some of it and disagree with a lot of it. But I knew that going in. Nonetheless, I actually enjoyed the perspective presented a great deal. In part because of its relative novelty.

When the movie came out, somebody accidentally or not-so-accidentally referred to it in marketing as “a story of self-sacrifice” when it is, in fact, a story very much against such things. A part of me wonders if basically it was an act of subversion on the part of someone who was hired to to market a product they detested. But a part of me wonders if it was actually an honest mistake, that signals got crossed, and that pretty much any book that involves self-sacrifice is going to be in favor of it to some extent. Which is actually a reasonable expectation when it comes to fiction. One of the things I did really like about the book is that it did turn it on its head.

I enjoy the different, and whatever else I might say about it, this book was.