Firewall & Iceberg Podcast, episode 81: 'Weeds,' 'The Big C,' 'Necessary Roughness' & more
Dan and Alan also review 'State of Georgia' and the next 'Twin Peaks'
We began recording this week's Firewall & Iceberg Podcast with me outdoors. Then a plane flew overhead, so I moved indoors, to what turned out to be a noisy day at the office. In other words, no matter where we go and what we do, there is background noise. But in the foreground, lots to talk about, with a bunch of new and returning shows premiering this week, the next "Twin Peaks" episode, plus our first dip into the mailbag in a couple of weeks. The run-down:
"Weeds" -- 01:00 - 10:25
"The Big C" -- 10:30 - 21:00
"The Voice" -- 21:00 - 28:10
"State of Georgia" -- 28:20 - 34:00
"Necessary Roughness" -- 34:00 - 44:20
Listener Mail: Peter Falk -- 44:30 - 50:40
Listener Mail: TV Directors -- 50:45 - 56:40
"Twin Peaks" -- 56:45 - 01:11:10
As always, you can subscribe to The Firewall & Iceberg Podcast over at the iTunes Store, where you can also rate us and comment on us. Or you can always follow our RSS Feed, download the MP3 file or stream it on Dan's blog.
Alan Sepinwall has been reviewing television since the mid-'90s, first for Tony Soprano's hometown paper, The Star-Ledger, and now for HitFix. His new book, "The Revolution Was Televised," about the last 15 years of TV drama, is for sale at Amazon. He can be reached at sepinwall@hitfix.com
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Login or create a HitFix account Login SignupJamie
June 27, 2011 at 6:59PM EST Reply to CommentSinbad is on a new tv show called "Sinbad: It's Just Family" on WE tv, which is even less your demographic than ABC Family, so I'll accept that you haven't seen it advertised.
Saulo
June 27, 2011 at 7:00PM EST Reply to CommentThe end of the first season of The Big C has better episodes than the beginning. It's funny that you guys are talking about season 2 but havent actually watched season 1!
Thank God there is Breaking Bad, who has a piece of every show on television! When you talk about NBC's Smash you can remember Skyler singing "Happy Birthday, Mr. President..."
Very entertainment podcast though.
Saulo *entertaining
June 27, 2011 at 7:02PM ESTJamesTown
June 27, 2011 at 7:43PM EST Reply to CommentSinbad had a funny guest spot on It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia a couple of seasons ago. Yes, the comment section is going turn into Sinbad career discussion forum.
I'll remember Peter Falk more for the Princess Bride than Columbo.
odessasteps
June 27, 2011 at 9:12PM EST Reply to CommentSince this has now become a semi-running joke on the podcast, it leads me to ask in a quasi-serious (and not critical) question:
Just what is the target demographic for the podcast? 18-34? 18-54? I ask because the podcast has a lot of reviews for ABC Family shows. Are those shows meant for an adult audience? Are there lots of young people listening to the podcast (like Alan's daughter before they go to see SAW XII at the theater)? I don't recall a lot of those Nick and Disney comedies mentioned this week being reviewed.
Not a complaint. I don't watch those ABC Family shows, but I enjoy hearing Alan and Dan talk about them in the same way the talk about Pay Cable Dramas or USA/TNT shows I don't watch either.
Is the purview of the podcast any scripted (or reality) prime-time TV show, anywhere from Game of Thrones to that Cash Cab show?
Just wondering, because there have been showed it would have been interesting to see discussed on the podcast, but don't fall in the window.
thanks.
dan OdessaSteps - There will always be gaps, but I think we try to review as much new product as there is out there, especially in the summer when our regular network favorites aren't around. It just happens that ABC Family has a TON of new shows premiering this summer (at least two more still to come) and so we've been reviewing it (somewhat at my urging), though there's also been a lot of USA and TNT lately. We revisit things when it seems relevant -- i.e. "The Big C" this week -- and we occasionally do other things when we've got screeners and it seems like it might be interesting.
June 27, 2011 at 9:20PM ESTBut obviously it's somewhat restricted by what Alan and I watch, hence the absence of reviews for most new TLC shows or our total obliviousness that Sinbad has a WEtv show.
There are no rules, though. It's whatever amuses us. Though obviously we sometimes take requests... But I'd like to think we cover enough random stuff that we aren't aiming at any one restricted demographic...
Anything goes!
-Daniel
robbns
June 27, 2011 at 11:49PM EST Reply to CommentI don't know what this says about my impression of Mr. Fienberg but I expected him to mention Wings of Desire for Peter Falk.
dan Robbins - I went Cassavetes instead! I can only be *so* pretentious...
June 27, 2011 at 11:53PM EST-Daniel
veena sud The less said about Cassavetes the better. The man's films were meandering and pointless, and offered little in the way of resolution.
June 28, 2011 at 5:29AM ESTJeff kelly
June 28, 2011 at 7:13AM EST Reply to CommentDoes anybody else have a problem with this week's podcast? The version I downloaded and which is on directory ends at the 56 minute mark.
RU Serious
June 28, 2011 at 8:45AM EST Reply to CommentDan was EXTRA insufferable today, maybe he was in a bad mood? Maye I'M in a bad mood? This was a big week for the upwards inflection at the end of sentences that aren't questions, the use of one of his favorite grad-school-sounding phrases "vocational irony narrative," AND my latest pet peeve, the word 'uhb-ZURD.' And I only got through like the first half hour! Who knows what else is in store for the ride home. Hopefully some more irrationally impassioned defending of some mediocre cable shows. How DARE you assail The Secret Life of the American Teenager!
dan RU Serious - "Vocational Irony Narrative" has nothing to do with grad school.
June 28, 2011 at 11:29AM ESTAnyway, I'll work on fixing me, just for you.
-Daniel
RU Serious Thanks buddy!
June 28, 2011 at 2:11PM ESTJoseph Dan did seem extra pissy. I like pissy Dan though.
June 28, 2011 at 2:39PM ESTdan lol! Sigh.
June 28, 2011 at 3:26PM ESTDonBoy
June 28, 2011 at 10:22AM EST Reply to CommentTwo points from the Twin Peaks section:
1. I don't remember if it was you or Dan who said "if the blogosphere existed back then", but how could you of all people not mention that Usenet did exist, as did alt.tv.twin-peaks, which I used to print out and bring to family gatherings (seriously)? And that group was exactly like blog commenting today. My take on blogging has always been "Look, Usenet went mainstream!"
[SPOILERS FOR TWO RATHER OLD MOVIES BELOW]
2. It's not just that doppelgangers are a Lynch trope; there are also references to at least two famous films around Madeline's appearance. One is "Laura", which the audience should have in mind from the beginning of the series, since it deals with a Laura who is killed at the outset and whose picture is a recurring motif -- but it turns out she's not dead. The other is Hitchcock's Vertigo, in which Kim Novak is "Madeline", and also somebody else, sort of. Put these together and Lynch is practically demanding that we at least speculate that it's Madeline wrapped in plastic, and that Laura has arrived under Madeline's name.
sepinwall Ah, Usenet. I was on Usenet a few years after Twin Peaks aired, but my recollection is that newsgroup posters weren't quite as impatient and demanding as we are today. And even if they were, it was a relatively small/obscure arena compared to the prominence of the blogosphere. So even if everyone on alt.tv-twin-peaks was screaming bloody murder about "I know who killed Laura Palmer. Yes, it can wait until morning," that reaction was far less likely to trickle back to Lynch, Frost, ABC, etc. than how the AMC executives have responded to "The Killing" uproar.
June 28, 2011 at 10:29AM ESTdan DonBoy - Sadly, the Internet didn't exist for me until 1995 when I started college, so I can barely even conceive of usenet groups existing before then (though obviously they did). And for Alan, Usenet posters were every bit as impatient and demanding as we are today. I remember endless TRULY obnoxious threads about the briefcase in "Pulp Fiction" on alt.fan.tarantino.
June 28, 2011 at 11:27AM ESTSIGH...
And I'm disappointed in myself that I didn't bring up "Vertigo"/"Laura." Bad Dan!
-Daniel
DonBoy I have some old crit-stuff at home about TP and Usenet -- it was definitely a jump up from normal Usenet in its depth of analysis via crowdsourcing (although I presume a lot of it was tripe, too). It did eventually come to the attention of Lynch/Frost, although as Alan says, not overnight as such things happen now.
June 28, 2011 at 11:41AM ESTDonBoy To be specific: an essay by Henry Jenkins, who founded the field of study of the relationship between genre fans and their shows. It's called "Do You Enjoy Making the Rest of Us Feel Stupid?": alt.tv.twinpeaks, the Trickster Author, and Viewer Mastery. And it's available in full, via Google Books! (I have this in an earlier book -- this one seems to be a reprint of various earlier articles of his -- and that one contains a charming footnote with an explanation of what :) means.)
June 28, 2011 at 8:46PM ESThttp://books.google.com/books?id=jj2eKl3NcBEC&lpg=PA128&ots=n89l5wQTDT&dq=henry%20jenkins%20trickster%20author&pg=PA115#v=onepage&q=henry%20jenkins%20trickster%20author&f=false
dan DonBoy - As soon as you mentioned it, I went to my shelf and took down my copy of Henry Jenkins' "Textual Poachers: Television Fans & Participatory Culture," which has a long section on "Twin Peaks" newsgroup response...
June 28, 2011 at 8:59PM ESTI read it... back in the day. But I'm not sure I want to re-read it now due to my "Watch the show as fresh as possible" policy...
-Daniel
odessasteps As someone as an undergrad in the late 80s/90s, there was popc discussion not only on Usenet but also on paid services like AOL and Prodigy and CompuServe. I don't believe the WWW and blogs even starting popping up until the mid 90s. (I remember having to learn Mosaic to write HTML in grad school in 93 or 94).
June 28, 2011 at 9:16PM ESTUsenet had some great groups for discussing shows, perhaps most notably the MST3K boards, both for discussion and 'circulating the tapes.'
DonBoy Dan: yes, sorry, the full essay (and probably the earlier stuff in Textual Poachers) contains spoilers for Twin Peaks.
June 28, 2011 at 9:27PM ESTdan DonBoy - I'll re-read after the podcast re-watch is over. It's one of my favorite books of critical... stuff.
June 29, 2011 at 12:46AM ESTSide note: One of my regular fantasy baseball/football teams has been named The Textual Poachers for years. Yup. Geek.
-Daniel
WaltEagle
June 28, 2011 at 12:59PM EST Reply to CommentSounds like a good lineup of topics next week, and I can hardly wait for Curb, but what are the odds you'll fit in your thoughts on the Treme finale/season 2?
dan WaltEagle - I would say odds are good. Alan didn't mention it specifically because he knows I'm racing to catch up in time for the finale and he didn't want to promise anything my time may not allow us to deliver on...
June 28, 2011 at 1:08PM EST-Daniel
Frank C.
June 28, 2011 at 2:46PM EST Reply to CommentGreat episode! I hope to hear a Treme finale review next week. I reall think this season has been a big improvement over the first season. A lot less lecturing than the first season.
ed w
June 29, 2011 at 4:30PM EST Reply to CommentDan seemed unusually grumpy during the Weeds segment. :)
lztouchthedream
June 29, 2011 at 8:05PM EST Reply to CommentI guess I'm one of the few who both a) think Weeds has gone way downhill and b) has watched every season. I feel like a crazy man when I hear people say last season (and the premiere of this season) are an improvement over the dismal 5th. Sure, they took a good step in eliminating the most problematic element (trying not to be too spoilery) but they did it in the same way the show has worked for the last two seasons at least, just dismiss a huge plot thread with a few lines of dialogue, or maybe a quick scene.
Not to mention it's still completely tone deaf, like a Frankenstein of super broad comedy and completely preposterous drama stapled together. The first two seasons (and some of the third) were much better at that balancing act, and I don't really know why they lost it. Probably just the bloat of a series with a restrictring premise being stretched far too long. But i'm still watching and talking about it, so I think Showtime wins in the end.