For Great Drama, Comedy is Key: Why the best television dramas rely on humor to tell their stories

tv_drama

Mel Brooks once said something to the effect that comedy is harder than tragedy, because while it’s easy to make one person cry at something, it’s a lot harder to make them laugh. Whether or not that’s true, some of the greatest television dramas of the past couple decades have risen to this challenge by blurring the lines between genres. By incorporating comedic elements into their episodes, they’ve provided audiences with hilarious scenes that stay with viewers for years. But why? What advantage is there in inserting these moments of levity into otherwise bleak proceedings? The one thing that some of the most successful and beloved shows of recent years – like “Breaking Bad,” “Game of Thrones,” “Mad Men,” “The Sopranos” and “The Wire” – have in common is a surprisingly deft comic touch.

First, it’s a necessary tension breaker. After scenes and entire episodes dealing with the various intricacies of betrayals and murders, an audience needs something to relieve that pressure, breaking up the funeral dirge of favorite characters and grim moments. The deftest writers, those of the shows previously mentioned, are usually very good at incorporating these moments of laughter into plot-driven parts, making it natural rather than a transparent attempt at easing the tension and angst inherent in life, death and tragedy. For example, in “Game of Thrones,” while the wedding between Tyrion and Sansa is a veritable downer moment that finds two beloved characters in a situation neither enjoys but are forced to undergo, the writers find time for a drunken Tyrion to make merry and therefore mock the seriousness of the occasion.

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R.I.P. James Gandolfini

James Gandolfini passed away in Rome, Italy due to an apparent heart attack. He was only 51 years old.

Gandolfini became famous with his portrayal of Tony Soprano. “The Sopranos” is one of the best and most influential dramas in TV history, and the success of the show hinged on Gandolfini’s role as Tony. In many ways the Tony Soprano character lived up to the stereotypes of a New Jersey mob boss, but the brilliance and appeal of “The Sopranos” derived from showing every aspect of Tony’s life, including the small challenges and joys of everyday life. The hook was the idea that this mob boss was seeing a psychiatrist to deal with his panic attacks, but that was just the device to help David Chase flush out this complex and fascinating character.

The writing on the show was brilliant, but it would have gone nowhere without Gandolfini in the lead role. The Tony he created was real, so all the tough guy mob scenes seemed authentic and believable, just like his interactions with his family and friends. Of course, he and the show benefited from an amazing cast, with Edie Falco as Carmela in an equally compelling role. With the two of them, we saw all of the conflicts and contradictions of the lives they lived.

“The Sopranos” helped bring about the revolution in television that saw an explosion of creativity on cable TV, a process that is now broadening even further to streaming original shows on Netflix. Forget about broadcast TV and even most movies – the best stuff is all happening on cable, and that’s been the case for years. In a world where we can access all of these shows on multiple formats and on multiple devices, viewers are much better off watching series like “The Sopranos,” “Breaking Bad,” “The Wire,” etc. over the latest movies. You can’t underestimate the influence of “The Sopranos” and James Gandolfini as Tony Soprano.

  

The Light from the TV Shows: A Chat with Brian Cox (“The Straits”)

The watching of one’s favorite programs has increasingly stretched beyond the TV set and onto the internet, with various online viewing outlets providing exclusive programming for its subscribers. In the case of Hulu, Stateside viewers suffering from Anglophilia have been particularly excited about seeing a flurry of programming from the UK turning up, but now they’re starting to bring us a few treats from down under as well.

The crime-family drama “The Straits,” starring Brian Cox, who you probably know from “Manhunter” or “Braveheart” or possibly even “Super Troopers,” premiered on Hulu a few days back and will be doling out a new episode every week, but once you’ve started watching, between the dialogue, the action, the humor, and, sure, the sex and violence, too, you’ll find that a week will seem like a bloody lifetime

Bullz-Eye was fortunate enough to chat with Cox about his new endeavor, not to mention a few other highlights from his none-too-shabby back catalog, but be forewarned: he’s been talking about “The Straits” in the past tense for awhile now – it premiered in Australia back in February – so you’ll see that he has a tendency to slip up and offer spoilers on occasion. Not that they’ll stop your overall enjoyment of the series, but just don’t say we didn’t warn you.

Bullz-Eye: Well, I didn’t have enough lead time to absorb all 10 episodes of “The Straits,” but I’ve knocked out three of them thus far, and I’m really enjoying it.

Brian Cox: Well, good! Good, good, good. [Laughs.] It’s a good show!

BE: It is. A nice blend of drama, a bit of humor here and there, and certainly some darkness.

BC: Yeah, it’s got a black-comedy effect about it.

BE: So how did “The Straits” fall into your lap? Did they approach you directly?

BC: They did! They got in touch. I was doing “That Championship Season” on Broadway, and I just got this call from my English agent…because I have agents here and I’ve got agents in England…and they said, “How do you feel about going to Australia?” And the irony was that I’d been trying to get Australia for about the last four or five years, and I’m thinking, “Well, it’s only ever gonna be a job that gets me out there.” So when I got this call, I said, “I’ll do it! I don’t care what it is. I’m desperate to go to Australia!” [Laughs.] Then they said, “Well, hang on, read the script!” And I read the script, and I said, “Well, this is even better: a great job, a great role, and I get to go to Australia! This is a must!” So my wife came and my kids came, and it was a fantastic opportunity, one which I cherish. And I’m very sad that we’re not going to do some more of it, because I do think we were just…you know, the potential of it is enormous. But they’re a little nervous about it, because it’s about a crime family.  But what I love about this show and what I love about Australia…

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The Light from the TV Shows: Magic City is a Must-Buy

I really don’t have much of a clue who reads what around here—I mean, I’m just sayin’, but…we do have a comments section, you know—but if you happened to have caught my column from April 25, then you already know a little bit about how I felt about Starz’s “Magic City” when it first hit the airwaves. At the time I wrote about it, however, I’d only seen the first three episodes, so I couldn’t really offer much in the way on incisive commentary. Indeed, to save you from clicking on the above link, the bullet points of my brief discussion of the series were…

1. It looks great.

2. The second episode rehashed too much of the pilot, but the third episode was much better.

3. As far as the cast goes, Danny Huston makes a great bad-ass, Jeffrey Dean Morgan is in fine form as well, and although Alex Rocco’s storyline was a bit schmaltzy for my tastes, he’s still Alex Rocco, which means his scenes are worth seeing simply because he’s in them.

All things considered, it’s probably best that I hadn’t yet seen the fourth episode when I wrote about the series, since not only did it prove to be the most disappointing installment of the entire season, but it left such a bad taste in my mouth—I believe the precise phrase I used to describe the series at the time was “infuriatingly inconsistent”—that, if I’m to be honest, I could’ve flipped a coin to decide my thoughts on whether it was going to get better or worse in the coming weeks. Pretty much all of the good will it had built up in the preceding three weeks had been shot all to hell in the span of a single hour.

Thank God it got better. In fact, it got so much better that, now that Magic City: The Complete First Season has been released on DVD and Blu-ray, I have absolutely no hesitation about recommending it as a must-buy. I really can’t speak to what happened behind the scenes to turn the series around in such a dramatic fashion, but it was one of the most impressive TV turnarounds I’ve ever seen.

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Weekly Web Series Review: Blue

Julia Stiles in Blue

Julia Stiles stars as the title character in “Blue,” a new web series produced by the YouTube channel Wigs, which is described as “a digital channel producing high-end, original, scripted dramatic series and short films about the lives of women.” “Blue” certainly fits this bill, as it has high, network-standard production values and explores the life of Francine, aka Blue (Stiles), a single mother who works in an office and moonlights as a prostitute. We are introduced to her in the middle of serving a client, Cooper (David Harbour), who turns out to be an old acquaintance from high school. Cooper has more than a simple professional interest in her, and there is speculation that he might be the father of her 13-year-old son, Josh (Uriah Shelton).

Josh is a precocious, A-student who is beginning to be curious about sex and who is too smart not to know that his mother is hiding something about herself from him, though he is not yet sure what. He befriends Cooper, seeming to need a father figure in his life to complement the good relationships he has with his mother and his grandmother, Jessica (Kathleen Quinlan), a sexy older woman prone to over-sharing about her love life. Meanwhile, beginning in the third episode, Blue has an oddly mentor-like relationship with her office co-worker, Lavinia (Sarah Paulson), who looks up to her, thinking Blue really has her life together. Lavinia seeks Blue’s advice about her relationship with her ex-husband, Walter (so far unseen), who seems to be using her for financial support due to his ailing health.

The series is created, written and directed by Rodrigo Garcia, who is known for his work on feature films like “Mother and Child” and last year’s “Albert Nobbs,” as well as television series such as HBO’s “The Sopranos” and “Six Feet Under,” the latter of which has a similarly soap opera feel to it. The first season runs 12 episodes, each around eight minutes long, which means the entire first season is roughly the length of a relatively short feature film, and each episode is basically a single long scene, or two shorter, connected ones. Some of these work better than others; while Blue and Josh have great chemistry and really good dialogue in the second episode, and a subplot involving Josh’s troubles at school in the tenth and eleventh episodes is especially interesting, I have to admit I have very little interest in the relationship between Blue and Lavinia. Paulson is a very good actor, but her character is sort of weak and whiny, and it remains to be seen if her subplot will garner more interest. On the other hand, the first season ends with an intriguing development involving an older man from Blue’s past, and fans of soapy drama will definitely want to tune in for new episodes once they become available.

Julia Stiles in Blue backside view