Sad Alec

Has anyone read the profile of Alec Baldwin in the New Yorker? I know, I know, this is my second blog in a row in which I mention the New Yorker. That is because I am trying to be an intellectual (albeit one who loves television). I also recently ordered Civilization and its Discontents from Amazon. The goal is to make low-brow people feel insipid, and high-brow people feel pretentious. I'll let you know how it goes.

Anyway, the profile is 8,000 words of Alec Baldwin hating his life. One usually expects that lengthy a piece to deal with the history of Russian-Georgian relations or be an excerpt from the latest Junot Diaz overrated piece of crap, but no: it's the guy who starred in The Shadow.

It would be easy to dismiss the piece as a spoiled rich out-of-touch actor bitching about what most people would dream of having, but I don't see it that way. I'm one of the people who really believed Puffy when he sang about mo' money mo' problems. And besides, this man wanted to be President of the United States:

Alec Baldwin began at George Washington University in 1976, with the idea of going into law and becoming President of the United States. At the end of his junior year, he split up with a girlfriend and lost a student-body election. Feeling underappreciated, he transferred to N.Y.U. and began studying at the Lee Strasberg Theatre Institute.

And people expect him to just shut up and enjoy being billed second on an NBC sitcom. This is a man with a level of ambition and audacity that most of us can't imagine. He clearly feels he settled, and worse, only sort of settled: elsewhere in the piece Baldwin says he pursued both fatherhood and his acting career only halfway, hoping to create a healthy balance. Instead he has a half-assed family life and a half-assed IMDB page:

"My life, in some ways, has been a half-measure. I didn’t commit myself all the way to my marriage and family, because I would have given up more. And I didn’t go all the way with just being completely selfish. I always wonder where my career would be if I was more selfish..."

Baldwin goes on to fantasize about being a classical radio host and a retired dude bumming around the Long Island Sound in a motorboat. The truth is--and I suspect he knows this--that he will never be satisfied, and wouldn't be had he been more "selfish" with his career either.

He's basically an insatiable person--so too, I suspect, is everyone. You think you've reached the peak you always dreamed of reaching, only to find another looming overhead. So just remember that when you are laughing at yet another Jack Donaghy non-sequitir, you're laughing at a tormented soul whose desires will only be consummated upon his death.

Have a nice weekend!

Finales Disorient and Disappoint

Last night's House season finale was rather underwhelming, much like the majority of Season 3. By the end of the episode, all three of the House-ettes had either resigned or been fired for reasons that remain underdeveloped, and the Patient of the Week's illness was quickly resolved with little explanation or mystery. A heart defect? That's it? Remember when this show used to have House doing autopsies on living children and unearthing shocking affairs via diagnoses of African sleeping sickness?

There's little suspense surrounding the fate of Cameron, Chase, and Foreman, considering that the actors who play them have not quit the show. The only tension is around how the writers will contrive to bring them back to the Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital at the start of season 4. Let's hope that come Septemberish, House will return to form with shocking, provocative cases, a little more heat (House and Cuddy, anyone?), and fewer plot arcs featuring men as hell-bent on destroying Dr. Greg as cartoon villains.

Lost's finale already has been much-discussed across the blogscape (I prefer this term to blogosphere) so I will just say this: now that's how a show maintains fan interest during the off-season. I have no idea how showrunners Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof plan to continue the show, given the shocking nature of the finale's few minutes. Any commenters care to weigh in with their predictions?

Finally, take a gander at David Remnick's take on the end of The Sopranos. He says it better than I could, which is one of many reasons why I am not running The New Yorker.

ANTM/Lost Recap

I have decided that henceforth, when there are two shows to blog about on the same night, I will write a recap in the style of the old New Yorker film reviews: that is, attempt to link two very different shows in one piece, using a lot of B.S. about their respective themes, which I will make up.

Since the dawn of television, serial dramas have used the deaths of main characters to bolster ratings, generate discussion, and attract attention. This has become so common and familiar a practice that TV writers seem to believe that they have to kill off at least one protagonist a season, like a sacrifice to the Nielsen gods. Competitive reality television has adopted the same process, but to an even greater degree: each week, someone is ritualistically sent home, their exile from the competition a stand-in for death.

Last night was the finale of Cycle 8 of America's Next Top Model, and the penultimate episode of Lost's third season. Both episodes made promises to their audiences, and one was kept and one broken. Each ANTM guarantees a loss, often made predictable through clunky editing. On Lost, the spectre of Charlie's death has been growing with each week, as Desmond repeatedly sees flashes promising a grisly end for the former hobbit. Desmond saves him each time, but has said himself that eventually Charlie has to die, that he won't be able to prevent it.

Last night was a Charlie flashback, and that alone could be hazardous to one's health. When Desmond told Charlie that he envisioned him flipping a switch, then drowning, which somehow enabled the rescue of Claire and Aaron, it became clear that after much promise, Charlie would leave Craphole Island for good. However, a series of random flashbacks highligting Charlie's "greatest hits" - the best moments of his life - and some poignant moments with Claire and Hurley led to Charlie swimming down to the Looking Glass Station to discover the station was not flooded. "I'm alive!" he shouted, and summoned several attractive women with guns. Fin. Huh.

I will extrapolate that perhaps Charlie's death was not as simple as a flip and drown, and Desmond did not want to tell him the gruesome extent of it, because that would prevent Charlie from following through with his final heroic moment. But if the Lost writers really want to prolong Charlie's demise for another episode - and by now he HAS to die, according to Chekhov's rule - there better be a damn good reason for it.

Meanwhile, ANTM's finale featured two deaths, as two models were sent home for being - well, what exactly? Renee and Natasha are clearly not inferior to Jaslene, who, like Kate on Lost, seems capable of making only one facial expression. (And, not to be catty, but she looks like a performer at Lucky Cheng's.) I find comfort in the fact that the ANTM winner, like the sole survivor of a plane crash, is treated with suspicion by the real world. Typically, the runners-up find much greater modeling success once they've left TV Land. Hopefully, Dominic Monaghan, who plays Charlie, will do the same. While I've never liked his character, he is one of the stronger actors on the show. Maybe he can branch out from his magical creature / magical island oeuvre.