Tag Southland

True Blood: Trouble

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It’s true: this week’s episode of True Blood was the best yet in the show’s three seasons. Why? Because Alan Ball and his writers are perhaps the finest team in the business right now (with Southland, Californication, Glee, Fringe,  Modern Family and Nurse Jackie).

With ‘Trouble’, they  took everything great about the series, and punched it the f**k up.

The show has fully grown into its core strengths: utter insanity, and a visceral, joyous sense of combustibility. True Blood now deeply revels in the possibility that any given moment on the show could violently explode into beautiful, raw, sexy chaos. The show thrives on this constant state of danger, handling it with an intense stare and crazed, high-velocity humor. The dialogue snarls, rips and tears through every scene like one of the wolves amped-up on Vampire blood. The writers throw lines like Jason Bourne throws punches: this is writing like Krav Maga – the  brilliance reveals itself with dizzying speed, line after line after line.

All this has been richly surrounded in this season by the growing depth and complexity of the vampire political and power structures, which has proved to be fascinating source of menace, conflict and fascination, and a chance for the actors to play some great scenes.

The energy from the actors in this particular episode was fantastic, and they had awesome writing to work with, to play with. Watching James Frain access pitch-perfect, utterly unhinged madness as the crazy vampire Franklin Mott (interesting in itself as the show hadn’t shown us vampires who were truly insane), or Stephen Moyer and Denis O’Hare as Bill and Russell playing their diabolically subtle power games, or Anna Paquin continuing her raw, edgy emotional makeover. In many ways, it was Franklin and Tara that propelled this episode with the show’s signature blend, its seamless, unholy and explosive mix of “what the f**k?!”, genuine danger, and sick, literally twisted humor. When Bill and Lorena had their vampire hate sex at the end of episode three, this writing team delivered their TV game-changer: as Lorena’s head slowly turned around, so did the television landscape.

That’s what Alan Ball and his writers (and the stellar cast and crew), have done with this season: changed the landscape, with each episode, with each scene, with each line sometimes. They are charging the show with plummeting rollercoaster velocity into completely unpredictable territory: we have no idea which insane left turn it’s going to take next, and that’s an extraordinary feat of story-breaking. Not only that, these writers deliver some truly nuanced emotional and psychological arcs, accessing the existential sadness of the vampire’s existence, and the many kinds of desire, the endless different ways we can lust after each other.

If there’s anything to criticize, it’s that Jason’s arc seems to be far away from the rest of the converging stories, Sam’s story is unfolding at a slower pace than the other arcs, and for now, Jessica appears to have been abandoned in Merlotte’s. This last is particularly upsetting since, as one character put it, Jessica is a “smokin’ hot vampire, in the majors.” Yes, she is. Therefore it would be great to see her brought into the monumental clusterf**k that is undoubtedly awaiting the rest of the characters by season’s end.

However, if there’s one thing we’ve learned from watching this show, it’s this: trust the writers.

Firstly, they know how to amp shit up: they salvaged the relative smallness of Jason’s story (compared to the high drama of the others) by pulling out a “classic Jason” moment, giving Ryan Kwanten an actor’s dream entrance to a scene: they were duly rewarded with ‘Jason Stackhouse’ being the number one trending topic on Twitter the next day.

Secondly, simply, they always weave their complex plot strands together in the end, as amply demonstrated by the previous two seasons.

Each episode so far this season has roared through the TV stratosphere, and the deep, dark power of the wars to come is looming. This is one of TV’s most purely thrilling experiences, and this episode took it further still.

Why TNT must renew Southland

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Only days before the season, and possibly series, finale of Southland, the visually hyper-articulate and brutally kinetic LAPD drama that TNT rescued from NBC in the wake of the Jay Leno prime-time experiment, the future of this show remains uncertain. It should not be this way: Southland is in the highest tier of cop shows, of dramas, of any kind of show, on any kind of channel. With its perfect clarity of presentation, its visceral, dynamic, adrenaline-rush aesthetic purity, its ruthless psychological and emotional precision – its violent catharsis – this show stands above all others. It takes nothing for granted, including its viewers. Nothing is extraneous in Southland: it is the definition of spare, minimalist truth. You have to run to keep up, and this is just as it should be. The writers, directors, actors, crew, all of them strip back the unnecessary flesh of typical dramas to reveal the bare bones of reality, of people in unforgiving, challenging situations, whether those situations last a few moments, or for years. Behind it all, Los Angeles rises; the city has rarely been so thrillingly and excitingly used as a milieu. The simple matter-of-factness of the downtown skyscrapers or the Capitol Records building appearing in the shot as the camera whips and plunges and sometimes, sometimes, holds still  for a moment, gives the images a heft and punch they do not normally have. When you think about how many books, TV shows and movies have used the city, this is a remarkable achievement. The show is on its way to other places, in a hurry, so it does not have time to stop and check out the sights; we see them anyway, and they have a greater impact this way. The compelling dedication of everyone involved in this enterprise, from its creator and writer Ann Biderman through the crew, the other writers, to the leads including Michael Cudlitz and Ben McKenzie as the patrol cops, is palpable. Somehow, amidst the fury and the pace, the entire team manage to find oddly moving, quiet codas that expand emotionally inside you like devastating, slow-motion, hollow point mood bullets. You don’t even realize it’s happened as you stare at a pair of sneakers hanging from a phone wire, or a poster of Where The Wild Things Are, the shot held, and held, and you wonder why you are crying. That the Southland team can conspire to pull off such moments along with the wild kinesis of the action is a testament to the creativity of all involved. There are precious few shows that deserve the investment and time of their TV channel: Southland is obviously one of these few. It has an effortless quality and authenticity. These are only some of the reasons why TNT should do what NBC could not, and give Southland the time and space to truly become the show it is meant to be. Because, astonishingly, even though it is already in the top echelon of TV shows, there is more that Southland could give us, if it was given a full season to truly spread its wings and take full, uncompromising flight; to fully explore its interweaving storylines and its large cast of psychologically detailed characters. TNT – don’t you want to be the network that took Southland all the way?

"…tiptoe through our shiny city, with our diamond slippers on…"

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The National, singing in Fake Empire, a song which recently achieved exposure during the closing moments of Southland, a new cop show set in LA, directed in the unforgiving glare of the sun and the submerged, deep shadows of the LA night, with pin-sharp, brutal clarity. The track contains a multitude of emotions tightly wrapped in the beaten cadences of Tom Waits’ poetry and the loneliness of Jack Kerouac’s American nights. The moment when despair and hope collide and it could go either way. This constant wonder of being alive. Everything is bright, everything is in shadow, and you go quietly through the shades in the valley of the sun, because to go any other way might make it all real, and you don’t know yet if you want darkness or wonder. Tiptoe, then, for now. Just like falling for someone, just like writing a novel; you plunge in with abandon and yet you tread carefully, because you don’t know yet what this thing may be, what it could become. You sense its power but don’t know it, although you want it more than you can say. You can only will it into existence. You want it, you want him, you want her. It’s all so close in your mind, so faraway from where you are. The chorus of the song tells us: “we’re half-awake, in a fake empire.” Maybe that’s the state we’re all in. Maybe that’s what it means to be conscious, to be human. To feel, to be in love. It’s our job as writers to find this out; it’s something only we can do.