Watch More TV

From Patton Oswalt's MySpace page:

Television, these last few years, has moved light years beyond movies in terms of characterization, narrative, and audacity. Maybe it's the rise of iTunes and the DVD boxed set, where you can experience the creator's complete vision in terms of a story arc. Maybe it's cable television allowing writers and directors to experiment and take risks. But television, since THE SOPRANOS, has become the Hollywood of the early 70's.

Here's what you might want to check out:

It's pointless of me to push shows like BATTLESTAR GALACTICA and BURN NOTICE 'cause, if you're reading this, you're probably watching them already.

But this past season of BURN NOTICE was amazing, and not on a weekly, hot babes and action kind of way. The show has become an ongoing pulp epic, with new, stinging layers peeled back at the end of every season, and the darkness deepening around a hero who's determined to use the darkness to preserve the light. Plus, every episode you can learn, through Jeffrey Donavan's laconic, winking voice-over (and some pretty nifty montages) how you can use non-dairy creamer and Christmas lights to destroy a city block. There's even a growing YouTube cult of weirdos who test out every homemade death-device...and so far, they've all worked! And there's new episodes coming in June! And Bruce Campbell! BRUCE Campbell! That's all you need to know. Again, television shows have turned into bombastic cinema, doled out in hour-long doses every week.

BATTLESTAR, which is winding down to a how-do-they-write themselves-out-the-bleakness finale, is social commentary smuggled inside the most elegant sci fi/noir vessel since ALPHAVILLE. If you've never seen a single episode of the show you need to break your femur, get laid up in a hospital for eight weeks, and watch the entire run on either iTunes or DVD. I'd love to see creator Ronald D. Moore take on Gene Wolf's BOOKS OF THE NEW SUN, Warren Ellis' PLANETARY, or Bester's THE STARS MY DESTINATION. Wow!

And that's just cable. On network TV, the best hour-long drama, hands down, is FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS. Rehearsed but not blocked. That's how they do the camerawork on the show, and it's like watching a weekly documentary about a small town facing compromise and obsolescence. And the two leads -- Kyle Chandler and Connie Britton (who's a MILF the way Jimi Hendrix is a guitarist) -- are the new Gandolfini and Falco, as far as I'm concerned. If they're not nominated for Emmys, for this last season, I quit. PLEASE watch this show -- NBC had to go halfsies with DIRECT TV to finance these latest episodes. It's hanging on by its fingernails, and NBC honcho Ben Silverman has been very public and very vocal about his indifference to the show's fate. When you see how this third season ends, you'll want a fourth. And I DON'T want it to end the way it does. Clear eyes, full hearts, can't lose!

Speaking of the Nerd Mafia, where the fuck were you when Joss Whedon's terrific new series DOLLHOUSE premiered on, of course, Friday, February 13th? It's the THIRD time he's come up with a brilliant, kick-ass concept, broke his back bringing it to light, and then had a network a) put it in the death slot and b) shuffle the episode order. GET HIS BACK, people. Besides, I'm on it in two weeks. Do you really want to let the show get canceled, and miss Tahmoh Penikett kick the living crap out of me? The fuck else are you doing on a Friday night?

Or Sunday night, for that matter? This Sunday is the Season 2 premiere of BREAKING BAD, the best show you weren't watching last year. Bryan Cranston won a much-deserved Emmy, and that was for a truncated, 7-episode first season. How did you guys miss a show about a trampled, neglected genius, who turns his skill at chemistry into a fledgling meth empire, all the while battling cancer -- a cancer which, when undergoing chemotherapy, turns Cranston into a bald, black-clad arch-villain? And, of course, he's forced into an alliance with (as his dopey, meth-head partner puts it) "a psychotic clown" drug dealer named Tuco. Lex Luthor and The Joker, roaming the New Mexico desert, with no World's FInest in sight. The 6th episode of Season One -- "Crazy Handful of Nothin'", is one of the best hours of TV I've ever seen -- up there with "Every Mother's Son" and "The Subway" from HOMICIDE, "Old Cases" from THE WIRE, and "The Pine Barrens" from The Sopranos. BREAKING BAD is compromised villains who create their own false good, played out in a forest of food clubs, strip malls and bland, sinister architecture. A must-see.

And you MUST see DELOCATED, every Thursday night on Adult Swim. I was reluctant to recommend this, because I think its creator and star, Jon Glaser, is the funniest man on television right now. Everything he's ever done has cracked me up, so much so that he's entered that category of people like Brian Stack, Maria Bamford, James Adomian and Eddie Pepitone -- people who I can't offer an honest opinion of, since they're so purely talented and funny that it doesn't matter to me what they do.

But I've seen the entire season of DELOCATED and holy shit, it's brilliant. Jon Glaser, who's got one of the warmest, most expressive faces and voices in comedy, makes the bold move of playing a character in a black ski mask with his vocal cords permanently altered. The conceit of the show -- a family in the witness protection program who sign on to be in their own reality show -- seems so limited that it's amazing, in the later episodes, when you realize how rich and subversive the world they inhabit is. And, like BATTLESTAR, it uses its far-out concept to make some pretty harsh points about the world -- in DELOCATED's case, how "reality" TV is warping, consuming and, ultimately, destroying reality. Only it's NOT harsh -- you'll be laughing your ass off. Trust me. Ska-mitzvah!

Finally, you've got to start watching EASTBOUND AND DOWN on HBO. I know the early episodes were dark and brutal, but that's the point. Jody Hill, Danny McBride and Ben Best -- the brains behind THE FOOTFIST WAY, have created a comedic, low-rent version of NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN. Stay with me on this.

Remember how, in NO COUNTRY, you've got the Anton Chigurh character, a force of pure, un-compromised evil, plowing through the world, and we see how every other character stands or falls before him? Some saved by fate and luck, others destroyed by integrity and conviction?

Well, Danny McBride's washed-up ballplayer, Kenny Powers ("a bullet-proof tiger") is a force of pure, unapologetic delusion and narcissism. How will his sister-in-law's Christian faith, his ex-girlfriend's love for her fiancee, or a high school music teacher's man-crush stand up against the poisonous stink of Kenny's essence? This has got to be the first 1/2 hour weekly comedy which is unabashedly going to be a 3 hour movie, with each episode's opening scene being THE EXACT NEXT SCENE from the previous episode's last shot. Plus, you've got David Gordon Green directing episodes, Andrew Daly as a clueless romantic rival, and the blitzkrieg comedic assault of a mulleted Danny McBride. You do nothing but win when you watch EASTBOUND AND DOWN.

Okay, enough reading. It's time to switch off your computer, embrace life, sit down, and watch a lot of TV.