NetFlix-4 – Press Play Video Blog

KICKING TELEVISION: ‘Fuller House’ and the Stasis of Nostalgia

One of the most vivid memories I have of my adolescence is gorging on Doritos and Pepsi in my friend Tim’s basement and watching TV. There was no junk food in my home. I used to try and make my own Orange Crush from tonic water and orange juice. I was not a cool tween. I don’t know what the cool 12-year-olds were doing on their Friday nights in the late 80s, but they definitely weren’t in Tim’s basement laughing at the comedic stylings of the Olsen twins, cutting-it-out with Dave Coulier, digging on Jesse and the Rippers, crushing on Candace Cameron, and augmenting our sugar cravings with the sweet banality of Full House.

Full House has returned to the television landscape as Fuller House, part of a wave of reboots. The Netflix series essentially flips the premise of its forbearer; recently widowed DJ Tanner-Fuller (Cameron) welcomes her sister Stephanie (Jodie Sweetin) and best friend Kimmy Gibbler (Andrea Barber) into her home to help raise her three sons, as DJ’s recently widowed dad (Bob Saget) accepted help with his three girls in exchange for room and board for his brother-in-law Jesse (John Stamos) and best friend Joey (Dave Coulier). Sterile hilarity follows, as do occasional guest appearances from series originals Saget, Stamos, Coulier, and Lori Loughlin. Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen (Michelle Tanner)—Forbes Celebrity 100 listed, fashion icon paparazzi subjects—declined participation

Full House wasn’t a show that revolutionized the sitcom or embedded itself deeply in the cultural fabric of TV, but that didn’t matter then and it doesn’t matter now. It wasn’t offensive or malicious. It was benign—comfortable. It served its purpose as a family comedy, a staple of ABC’s TGIF lineup, and a sitcom that made 12 to 14 year-old me laugh bootlegged Crush out my nose. Tim did not live in a sugar-dry home. I remember very little about the show other than hanging out in that basement, ignorant of my absence of cool, and happier for it. Teendom came soon after, and being cool became infinitely more important, and so I didn’t watch much of the later seasons of Full House. The only time the show entered the zeitgeist was in conversation about the Olsen twins, the websites counting down to their 18th birthday, and the piracy of their youth by the infancy of the Internet’s intrusiveness.

I’m not sure how many Full House episodes we actually consumed in that basement. But that’s how my memory places the show, and that’s where Full House will remain, regardless of the truth, whatever that may be. Memory is static—it exists in our solipsism. Television is a mnemonic device as much as a form of entertainment. It gives personal associations cultural and temporal references points born of its archival inertness. It’s a literal record of a performance, but a figurative record of individual experiences. No one else, not even Tim, likely associates Full House with Pepsi and Cool Ranch, but for me the affiliation is so vivid, so real as to have the essence of fact.

Our televisions and streaming apparatuses have become inundated with reboots and revisions of beloved series, and Fuller House has chosen to rest in its past, much like The X-Files echoes its earlier seasons, as if Mulder and Scully had just been waiting in stasis for us to find them. Properties are given the choice to either contemporize their efforts or mine nostalgia for viewers. Fuller House attempts to revel in the nostalgia of Full House in order to build upon its audience, much as Star Wars did with The Force Awakens. Star Wars provides a new foundation for a narrative that will leave behind the past while Fuller House stays in the past. The mixed family of Fuller House lives in the same home as the extended Tanner family did on Full House; the set is nearly exactly the same, as is the comedy. Maybe they should’ve killed Danny, Jesse, and Joey off in the first episode, but that would’ve made for a different show—a darker, perhaps more interesting series—one that would ask that its original audience disregard nostalgia and indulge in a universe that has aged as its viewers and their universe has.

The show is keenly aware of itself as a cultural entity; often making reference to the absence of the Olsens and the fact it’s a reboot. In almost breaking the fourth wall, the show continues its participatory nostalgia in winking at the audience it indulges as we do. It dances the edge of satire, with grand canned oohs and aahs and reactions to the guest appearances of Saget, Coulier, Stamos, and Loughlin. In fact, a close watch of Fuller House finds a much more complex sitcom then what shows on the surface, discussing loss, the modern nuclear family, and puppy ownership. But the core of the show remains its fascination with an ever-static past, both theirs and ours.

Interestingly, the reboot’s three principles—Cameron-Bure, Sweetin, and Barber— have been mostly absent from show business since the original series. Removed from the cultural landscape, its almost as if they’re characters were off living the twenty-one years between episodes as we were. Perhaps this is why the original’s leads—Saget, Stamos, Coulier, Loughlin—who have remained part of the zeitgeist, have mere ancillary roles in Fuller House. (Okay, maybe not Coulier.) In this way, the show is honoring both universes, that of Full(er) House and our own, respectful of the associations of memory that exist in relation to the original.

There is nothing revolutionary in Fuller House, other than that it is fearless in living in the past. Complete with groan-worthy catchphrases—old (Oh Mylanta!, How rude!, Have mercy!) and new (Holy chalupas!)—the show remains committed to the bygone era of TGIF and the big, fluorescent family sitcom. Watching the series will probably not attach a marker of memory to this moment, to my now. I’m able to procure my own sugar these days. But the show is successful in recapturing its own youth, and perhaps a bit of mine.

Mike Spry is a writer, editor, and columnist who has written for The Toronto Star, Maisonneuve, and The Smoking Jacket, among others, and contributes to MTV’s PLAY with AJ. He is the author of the poetry collection JACK (Snare Books, 2008) and Bourbon & Eventide (Invisible Publishing, 2014), the short story collection Distillery Songs (Insomniac Press, 2011), and the co-author of Cheap Throat: The Diary of a Locked-Out Hockey Player (Found Press, 2013). Follow him on Twitter @mdspry.

KICKING TELEVISION: Bingeing on Judd Apatow’s ‘Love’

In love, I’m Paul Rudd eating cupcakes out of the garbage. My failings are not malicious. I was single for a long time. And I’m a writer. And I used to live in the woods. Loneliness and solitude are—were—my jam. I wouldn’t say I’m good at marriage. It’s a process, I keep telling my wife and my therapist, which makes her furious and makes him nod. The love part I’m good at. I think.

I’ve never been very good at moderation, so the advent of streaming media was made for people like me. I am Netflix. My predisposal to binging is indicative of what makes me a less than ideal husband. I’m incapable of diffusing any manner of consumption. I crave excess at the expense of reason or commitment or even Friday night. Let’s watch six hundred and thirty-one minutes of ‘House of Cards’! is not a loving proposition, but to me it’s the very definition of happiness.

In an attempt to bridge the gap between my gluttonous leanings and my marital duty I binged on ‘Love,’ Judd Apatow’s new Netflix series. I was initially apprehensive because—though I like many of the productions that Apatow has been involved in—I was worried Love would be a TV adaption of his bromantic comedies. But ‘Love’’s Gillian Jacobs’ effortless wit and against-type female leads in ‘Community’ and ‘Life Partners’ were outstanding performances, and the supporting cast—Brett Gelman (excellent in the gone too soon ‘Go On’), Kerri Kenney-Silver (reboot ‘Reno 911’ please)—provided hope. I worried about Paul Rust, though I knew very little about him except a faint recollection of hating ‘I Love You, Beth Cooper.’

A show that is about love is an ambitious undertaking. Of course, most shows are about love on some level, except for Chuck Lorre productions. But to be so forward about the intentions of your series’ discussion creates almost impossible expectations. In discussing love, ‘Love’ asks that the audience consider their own experiences with the state. Gourmandizing the series inflates the scope and breadth of that experience, or it did for me anyway. Binging on ‘Love’, whether by accident or by design, was a cathartic and introspective three hundred minutes, which asked me to reevaluate how I have loved or been loved..

‘Love’ is the story of Mickey (Jacobs), a program manager at a satellite radio station, and Gus (Rust), an onset tutor, navigating the peripheries of modern day LA. I didn’t love Rust early on—he seemed too out of place as a lead, my issue not his— but as I ate through the first few episodes, he grew on me. He’s not a typical male lead, but perhaps that’s why he eventually appealed to me. I can identify with someone who’s not the archetype of masculinity, who errs on the side of idiosyncratic, who isn’t the most beautiful of God’s creatures, who dances like a drunken Muppet, who crushes up. But early on he and Jacobs develop a chemistry that seems organic and true, which is absent from most film and TV. And I like that they’re in their 30s, and close in age. I’m sick of leading men who get older while their love interests remain the same age. It’s masturbatory and false and, frankly, tired.

At some point in binging on ‘Love,’ I fell in love with Jacobs. Or maybe I fell in love with Mickey, I’m not sure. Jacobs is brilliant, and she embodies the hesitancy of love. She’s the type of flawed character I adore, the kind I like to write and am drawn to in literature. Mickey wants to be loved, but her manner suggests either she doesn’t believe she deserves it or she’s afraid of it. I think I love Jacobs/Mickey because I’ve lived in that realm myself; I’ve occupied that self-destructive fear of the possibility of happiness.

At the core of any good romcom, or relationship, is a meet cute. To dismiss this trope as simply a tired device of the genre is folly. Mickey and Gus meet cute in a convenience store when Mickey has forgotten her wallet and the chivalric Gus covers her cigarettes and coffee. Meeting cute isn’t an easy plot device but rather a truthful one. Most of us meet our partners cute and it provides a narrative foundation for our lives together, just as it provides narrative foundation for romcoms.

In the meet cute at the end of ‘Love”s pilot, Mickey and Gus are enduring hangovers, one spiritual and the other of spirits. We tend to under-quantify how much alcohol has to do with love. Some would argue it’s more effective than match.com or Tinder. It’s surprising that every beer, bourbon, and hard soda commercial doesn’t promise romantic bliss more explicitly—like: Drink Bulleit Tonight and You’ll Get Married Next June!—because they’re certainly employed as vehicles for love. Love discusses alcohol in these terms, as a facilitator, but also finds Mickey in AA, though she’s less than committed to the process. AA has become a convenient trope of television; ‘Mom,’ ‘Nashville,’ ‘House of Cards,’ ‘Nashville,’ ‘Flaked,’ and ‘Grey’s Anatomy’ are among the series that use the mutual aid fellowship as a plot device. It’s a convenient exploitation; it provides a forum for characters to share, to be vulnerable, to provide drama. But here it becomes evidence of Mickey’s deeper failings, and not of the simplicity of what her addictions reveal about her character.

In their relationship’s infancy, Mickey and Gus get to know each other through conversation on an afternoon trip around LA, reminiscent of ‘Before Sunrise.’ We don’t see the early moments of love revealed so simply—so artfully—very often on television. What ‘Love’ captures with near perfection is the nervous furor of the virginity of companionship hopeful of affection. Mickey and Gus are not in love yet, but you can see the roots of something. We’re nervous with them—for them—as we indulge in the vicariousness of their burgeoning ardor. To witness its slow growth is something special on TV, where series race to establish love and then leave viewers with one hundred episodes of monotonous consummation.

In love and television there’s nothing more tired than the date. I’m not sure I’ve been on a date since I took a girl to see ‘Singles’ in 1992. My wife and I eat dinner together in restaurants, is that a date? But ‘Love’ uses “the date” in a unique and creative way, as a confused Mickey, wary of love, sets Gus up on a date with her roommate Bertie (the beyond excellent Claudia O’Doherty). Mickey participates in the date from hell by texting both Gus and Bertie, manipulating the evening, but ultimately endearing all three to each other. O’Doherty’s Bertie could’ve been a stock character, a wacky roommate, the Aussie sidekick. But instead there’s a truth to her, consistent with the series conceit, a sincerity that comes out as she Skype bakes with her mother or makes lame, nervous jokes. If season two of ‘Love’ gets bored of Mickey and Gus, I’d follow Bertie wherever life, or love, took her.

By episode seven of ‘Love’, Mickey and Gus have consummated their relationship. But they do so before their first date, and then fall awkwardly into a relationship of sorts, but one that’s difficult to watch and disappointing for the lovers. Soon after they become what many of us become in relationships: bored and self-destructive. Mickey’s fatigue and despondency manifest themselves in alcohol; she gets drunk and more awkward. Gus’ manifests in sexual greed; he has an affair with an actress on the TV show he works on.

While at this point in their narrative they’re not quite together, their egos, flaws, and fears convince them to implode. They’re suffering from the realities of post-infatuation. As I watched this I couldn’t help but recall the many, many, many, many times I’ve done this in relationships. It also made me realize how many people I’ve hurt in my self-destructive laziness. Watching it in ‘Love’ is cringe-inducing, in a positive way, in that it is genuine, true, that I understand it because I’ve behaved that way, and in seeing ‘Love’ I feel the shame and guilt I somehow avoided when I committed those crimes of dispassion. Ultimately, Mickey and Gus commit to each other, but in a way that seems perilous and unstable, but isn’t that how we all enter into love? Unsure, unprepared, but hopeful?

‘Love,’ in many ways, is about secondary and tertiary characters. And so is love. Those around us inform our relationships. They filter our emotions, our eccentricities, our fears. ‘Love’ fills around its leads with representations of elements of love. Iris Apatow plays life without sexual love, the wonderment of adolescence, before love confuses and drains. She’s confident, honest, and I trust her performance as a kind of younger version of Mickey from an alternate universe, a child actor who Gus tutors. Her character is a revelation, and may be the best thing about the show, but it is her mother’s (Leslie Mann) comedic timing and wit that shines here. Gelman is Mickey’s boss, with whom she indulges in an affair that confronts the act of love without love, of love as a weapon, and in doing so illuminates many of Mickey’s disturbing fears, fears about love and acceptance and sexuality that we all have. Kenney-Silver plays a future version of Mickey, her neighbor Syd, a woman who has endured love and settled in it. Gus’ apartment is often filled with a ragtag collection of his friends who get together to sing non-existent theme songs to films without theme songs. It’s a representation of the silliness of love, of the kinds of strangeness in us all that a prospective partner needs to accept, or at least tolerate, in order for love to be completely realized.

There’s a true awkwardness to the interactions between characters in ‘Love’ that is absent from these types of romantic narratives. The absence of the time constraints of traditional television promotes the natural, organic feel of the show. And in that manner, the show becomes a living treatise on love itself, and examination of an emotion that is attached to nearly everything on television but rarely with the subtlety and deft touch that Apatow et al. have used in creating the universe of ‘Love’.

There’s a quiet, beautiful moment in Love’s second episode when Bertie and Gus carry a chest-of-drawers into Mickey’s house. The two agree—having just met her—that Mickey is the best. She’s cool, right? So cool. But a little scary, right? She is a bit scary. But so cool. At its best, this is the very essence of love; fear infused with the divine. The same can be said of the series; it excels in moments of simple truth, allowing subtlety to carry the exploration of emotion.

KICKING TELEVISION: Mindy Kaling, Me, and The Death of Network TV

I have an awkward attraction to Mindy Kaling. Awkward, because I have a complicated relationship with the characters she has played on The Office and Mindy. They seem obsessed with pop culture, their glossy public aesthetic, and the material. So I shouldn’t be attracted to her, because those obsessions annoy me. And yet, I want to have a dysfunctional relationship with her characters. I want to fight about Taylor Swift songs playing in our Mercedes. I want to go through a painful divorce with them, and reconcile one day in the romcom style of the art they find heroic. So, when Fox predictably cancelled The Mindy Project last year because it was a funny, well-written show that didn’t attempt to solve naval crimes, I was somewhat heartbroken. But then Hulu came along. The online network picked up the show, and Mindy and I were reconciled, just like in the movies!

What’s above is analogous to the current state of television in that the Internet and streaming services are the future of TV. Earlier this month, the National Football League broadcast a London game between the Jacksonville Jaguars and Buffalo Bills on the Internet. Yahoo served as the tilt’s exclusive venue (with the exception of the Jacksonville and Buffalo markets), the first such broadcast in league history. The NFL, always at the forefront of broadcasting and profit, was ostensibly using the game as a precursor to telecasts in markets beyond North America. And though the viewership numbers are under some discussion, one can imagine that this is the future of sports television. And as go sports, so does the rest of TV. Sport is the last bastion of live viewing, and has always been a leader in evolving to suit consumption habits. Sports were on cable long before The Sopranos gave life to HBO. Monday Night Football moved to ESPN a few years ago.

As the technology and the audience change while the networks don’t, TV is being consumed and celebrated beyond its once seemingly indestructible monopoly. HBO, Amazon, and AMC were feted at the Emmys; Hulu and Netflix are creating interesting, popular, and successful programming; and NetFlix’s CEO declared that their shows aren’t just better, but that all TV will be on the Internet by 2030. Is there any hope left for the network model?

Network television has been trying to fend off the rise of alternative broadcasters for over a decade. NBC, CBS, ABC, and Fox were besieged by the onslaught of cable. But while HBO et al. were expanding the breadth and ambition of the medium through innovative and original programming, the networks had the sanctuary of convenience and tradition, not to mention brand authority. Plug a TV into a wall and you can watch Big Bang Theory. And even if a Chuck Lorre laugh fest isn’t on, the viewer recognizes that eventually something they like will probably come on CBS soon enou… oh hey, it’s Mark Harmon! Network TV was safe and comfortable.

But out of nowhere, at least to the anachronistic and ignorant rule of the networks, came the Internet. The constraints of traditional television were gone, like twenty-two minute sitcoms and seven-day schedules to shoehorn CSIs into. Programming is released on any schedule, viewers vote on pilots to promote to series, and the audience can consume products at their leisure. And the Internet doesn’t have to bow to censorship. But, instead of embracing the technology and adapting to inevitability, the networks have fought back with inferior efforts and multiple incarnations of established dreck. And now their end is nigh. Advertising revenues for broadcast television have plateaued, and advertisers are “predicted to spend more on digital platforms than television in two years.”

My own viewing habits are indicative of the evolution of the way we consume TV. I haven’t had a TV in nearly a decade; only recently has that changed. All of my viewing was online, mostly through less than legal means. It allowed me to pick and choose what I wanted to watch, on my schedule, without commercials or Dick Wolf productions. The picture quality, the sound quality, and the technology were at times less than ideal. But the price was right: nothing. And I never had to sit through an episode of something I loathed.

But don’t take my word for it. Take consulting firm Deloitte’s:

Streaming video services, now used by more than 42 percent of American households, are heavily changing media consumption habits across generations, according to the ninth edition of the Deloitte "Digital Democracy Survey" released today. The study reveals that streaming content has overtaken live programming as the viewing method-of-choice, with 56 percent of consumers now streaming movies and 53 percent streaming television on a monthly basis, as compared to 45 percent of consumers preferring to watch television programs live. Moreover, younger viewers have moved to watching TV shows on mobile devices rather than on television. Among Trailing Millennials (age 14-25), nearly 60 percent of time spent watching movies occurs on computers, tablets and smartphones, making movie viewing habits decidedly age-dependent.

In August I purchased a cable package, in part because I write about TV and I can deduct it from my taxes, and in part because I gotta have my Shondaland Thursdays without delay. And what I’ve found in the decade between cable subscriptions is that they look a lot like the Internet. Albeit an overpriced and less user friendly Internet. There’s on-demand viewing, but it takes some getting used to and there are still commercials. The picture quality is without peer, but I feel like I’m always being sold something. My package inexplicably doesn’t include HBO, but I can watch Modern Family at any time of the day.

The reason I keep the cable, other than the advice of my accountant and my affection for Ellen Pompeo: sports. I can watch nearly any event live, in perfect HD, with pause and playback features. Sports had always been the one drawback to my online viewing decade. Either options available to me were too expensive, the illegal streams lagged or were non-existent, or simply watching on a 13” screen didn’t do the spectacles justice. But as the Jags-Bills experiment predicts: sport is not long for extreme online convenience at a reasonable expense. And when that day comes, and it is coming soon, my subscription will be stricken from my monthly bills.

So, with the rapid change in technology suggesting that networks adapt a new model, one would think that the quality of their programming would evolve to counter their dissipating audiences. But that has not been the case. The fall pilot season has been awful, and television events like a live broadcast of H.M.S. Pinafore can only hold the fort for so long. Network programming is analog in every sense of the word. It is tired and dated and enjoyed mostly by your parents. Programming still aspires to mediocrity and adheres to antiquated formats. How many hospital serials that run forty-two minutes plus commercials from 10 to 11 can a generation handle? The networks are trying to offer audiences online options, but their streaming services are designed for your parents, as is the programming. Despite their efforts to offer on demand viewing on multiple platforms, they’re still selling a product that was designed for a platform (traditional TV) that has evolved beyond six channels and a set of rabbit ears. Networks are large companies with near infinite resources and a keen understanding of technology, and yet they seem to still believe that a century old model will continue to be successful. CBS, NBC, ABC, and Fox seem to be trying to bleed the last few dollars out of a generation that will soon be watching NCIS in their retirement homes on iPads programmed by their grandchildren.

I missed last night’s episode of The Mindy Project. According to Hulu, in “Mindy and Nanny” Mindy has to “fire the world’s most difficult nanny: her mother-in-law. Jody tries to save Jeremy from his manipulative girlfriend.” It sounds delightful. I’m going to watch it as soon as I send this to my editor. I’m going to watch it in my pajamas, eating watermelon and Halloween candy using my parents’ Hulu login while drinking a pumpkin beer on my couch at 1:11 in the afternoon. Just the way TV is meant to be consumed.

Mike Spry is a writer, editor, and columnist who has written for The Toronto Star, Maisonneuve, and The Smoking Jacket, among others, and contributes to MTV’s PLAY with AJ. He is the author of the poetry collection JACK (Snare Books, 2008) and Bourbon & Eventide (Invisible Publishing, 2014), the short story collection Distillery Songs (Insomniac Press, 2011), and the co-author of Cheap Throat: The Diary of a Locked-Out Hockey Player (Found Press, 2013).Follow him on Twitter @mdspry.

Watch: What Does ‘Daredevil’ Owe to ‘Oldboy’? A Video Essay

This finely attuned video essay from Cineflect on the similarities between the fight scenes in Neflix’s ‘Daredevil’ and the 2003 film ‘Oldboy‘ would be what they call "insider baseball" these days if it were not for the fact that the Netflix Marvel series is rapidly becoming a favorite on the strengths of its acting, its cinematography, and its fight scenes, and ‘Oldboy’ has long been a cult favorite on the strengths of at least two of those qualities. As you watch J.S. Lewis’s well-narrated and well-organized examination of these two films, you can see the beauty of well-honed influence–influence without anxiety, that is.