House Hunters

On Tuesday, I watched an episode of House Hunters.  I’ve actually watched several, and almost always enjoy them.  The show is weightless and without import, the television equivalent of diet soda or elevator music, but I watch it and I like it.  A lot, even.  This I confess to you.

I’m not exactly alone, either.  House Hunters, long the flagship series of the House and Garden Network, has been on for thirteen years and produced over 500 episodes and a small fleet of spin-offs.  The show is somewhat unique among reality television series in that it has no host- there’s no Ty Pennington or Gordon Ramsay to pull us from episode to episode, just the prospect of a new person or pair of persons on a quest to find the perfect home.  It’s simple and cheap and may not even be real, but I’ve watched it more than I care to admit, and if it’s on I’ll probably watch it again.  Why?

House Hunters works because it’s relatable.  Take last Tuesday’s episode, the series’ 1084th.  It follows Jonathan and Jenny, a newly married couple living in Atlanta, as they struggle to move out of Jenny’s parent’s basement and into a house of their own.  Jonathan and Jenny are not trying to be the last man standing on a desert island or belt their way to a recording contract.  They’re looking at real estate, comparing square footages and shelf space and roach populations to decide where they’ll hang out for the next few years.  Jonathan is kinda pudgy and Jenny is a brunette- they’re very nearly real people, and we can recognize ourselves in their situation.

House Hunters works because it isn’t relatable at all.   We don’t know what Jonathan and Jenny do for a living, but we know their budget caps out at 300k, and we know that they turn down delightful looking houses because, in one case, the hardwood floors aren’t dark enough, and in another because the toilet doesn’t have its own space apart from the rest of the bathroom.  They throw around words like ‘craftsman-style’ and ‘traditional’ as if they’re architectural terms of art with meanings understood only by them, and at one point bemoan the kitchen of house number three, which unlike my kitchen is not confined to one wall of a living room, as too small.   ‘Just who do these people think they are?’ we ask ourselves.  ‘Tools,’ we answer ourselves, and we feel good.

The show, in short, works for many of the same reasons so much of reality television works, by playing on the eternal tug of war between sympathy and schadenfreude.  We want Jonathan and Jenny to find their happiness, and then we want them to choke on it, just a little bit.  And then there’s the packaging.  Each episode of House Hunters is wrapped up into a discrete, unobtrusive, half-hour box.  You can miss one, two, thirty-eight episodes and pick right up with the nice couple from Delaware or the odd single girl from Nebraksa without missing a beat.  The lack of connective tissue between episodes provides it with a fungible kind of freedom- the structure can be, and has been, endlessly replicated with only small changes and still retain its basic allure.  This wouldn’t be true if the show made more demands of its audience, if it required them to do more than absentmindedly judge whether Jonathan and Jenny made the right choice to sacrifice, say, more square footage for a smaller mortgage, but it doesn’t.  It lets audiences make the fun, easy choices involved with house-hunting and spares them the hard ones, engaging the outer parts of the brains and allowing the rest to slip into a soft sweet torpor.

And that’s why House Hunters is a show I feel like I need to justify enjoying, but that’s also why I’ll watch it again.  And probably again.  And again.  I wonder if it’s on now.

The Venture Brothers- The Devil's Grip

Hank Venture and the Action Man, enjoying the hell out of life.

 The Venture Brothers is a show that is gleefully, unstoppably full- full of ideas, full of characters, full of plotlines that zig and zap between and around each other with little thought for whether they will ever meet.  The show’s fifth season finale, ‘The Devil’s Grip,’ is overstuffed.  It follows up on the cliffhanger from the end of the last episode, wherein Doctor Rusty Venture is crushed by a giant disco ball, it spends time with Hank and Dean as they adjust to their new lives with their godparents, it wraps up Gary’s Season-long search for meaning, and it continues to add elements to the show’s increasing complex mythology.  It can’t help but feel a bit bloated, but by now the show has learned to embrace its bloat.  It’s made a style of being overstuffed, and it’s learned how to use it to leave us wanting more.

                There are a lot of threads running through ‘The Devil’s Grip’ but the meatiest involves Hank and Dean.  After Doc’s brush with death, Sergeant Hatred ships the boys off to live with retired members of the old Venture team, Hank with Rodney the Action Man and Dean with jet-setting pederast Colonel Gentleman.  This season has seen the Venture twins grow further and further apart, and pairing them up with former members of their father’s team gives us a look into their possible futures.

                Hank, ever the good sport, seems like he’s going to be okay no matter what happens to him.  The Action Man leads a fairly boring life- he mostly just putters around his Boca Raton retirement home.  But Hank throws himself into the thick of it, gladly helping the Action Man seduce a fellow resident who Action Man’s been “trying to drill for, like, 40 years” and gamely participating in a fairly disgusting Team Venture burial tradition.  Hank and the Action Man seem to be the kinds of people who can make themselves happy no matter what their situation, even if their situation is dire at best.

                Things are less rosy for Dean, who’s been slipping into a sullen torpor ever since the end of the previous Season.  It’s hard to blame the guy- living with his sad-sack father and enduring the endless parade of costumed freaks who show up to fail all over his front lawn week after week would be enough to make any teenager a little morose- but this episode makes the case for Hank’s rose-colored outlook on life over Dean’s justifiable funk.  After all, no one wants to end up like Colonel Gentlemen, sitting alone with his memories and passing the time by watching Sabrina the Teenage Witch and cataloguing which appearances of Salem the cat featured an actual cat and which only had “that crappy puppet.”

                Matters between the brothers come to a head at the end of the episode, after they’ve returned to the Venture compound to have a proper burial for bite-sized former Team Venture member Paul Entmann, who the Action Man accidentally crushed under the base of his rocking chair.  Dean finally lets Hank on the dreadful secret he’s been carrying since the Halloween special- the two of them are clones.  Clones, Hank.  Dead several times over.  Hank considers this atomic bomb of information for a moment before responding with characteristic good cheer.  “That.  Is awesome.”  And he means it.  The Venture-verse can be a humiliating, soul-crushing place to live, but Hank has chosen to enjoy it.  Of late the writers have allowed Dean to have a human reaction to the insanity that surrounds him, but I wonder if he won’t find a way to integrate his earlier unfounded optimism back into his personality next year.  In a world this maddening, it may be the only way he can enjoy himself.

                That’s something that Rusty Venture, after over forty years in the business, has never quite learned how to do.  He begins the episode in a dungeon in the Monarch’s home.  Dr. Mrs. The Monarch tells him that she and her husband are going to torture him, and Rusty is prepared to again go through the motions.  Fake a little pain, maybe make an escape attempt, beg for a bit of mercy, and he’ll be home before dinner.  Only this torture session is a disappointment even by Rusty’s standards.  The Monarch is enthusiastic as ever to break his arch-enemy down piece by piece, but Rusty’s apathy and the Monarch’s incompetence prevent either party from getting what they want.  Eventually, the Monarch becomes so disheartened that he just lets his hostage go, and Rusty shuffles home despondent in the knowledge that even the Monarch can’t spare the energy to get that excited about him anymore.

                Of all the characters on the show, Rusty is the one most often stuck in a loop, failing to break out time and again and never learning from his mistakes, so it’s hard to believe that this new blow will inspire him to change, but kudos to the writers for finding new ways to reinforce just how low he has sunk.  The Monarch has a different, more interesting reaction.  After sitting forlornly in his room for a while, he makes an about-face and begins to revel in the limp torture session, cackling to his wife that it was all designed to break Rust’s spirit.  It’s hard to know whether this is actually the case or if the Monarch is just covering for his despair, but it doesn’t matter.  Like Hank and the Action Man, the Monarch has found a way to love the loop he’s trapped in, turning what might be a pitiful failure into an imagined triumph.  It’s odd to think of the Monarch as a healthy individual, but at he's embraced his situation and found a way to be happy.

                So maybe the message of Season 5 is to make the most with what you have where and when you have it, even if you don’t have much.  It’s a compromising, even depressing message for a show full of compromised, often depressed characters.  The producers have shown a remarkable ability to turn the compromises of life into television gold season after season, and let’s hope that we don’t have to wait two more years for them to keep doing it.  Bloated or not, The Venture Brothers clearly has material to be by turns depressing and hilarious for years to come.

Also-s:

• Another thing that happens in this episode: Gary and Sargent Hatred storm the Monarch’s cocoon in an attempt to rescue Rusty, Gary indicts the Moppets for killing Henchman 21, and the cocoon explodes.  Again.  It’s a good indication of how stuffed this episode is that these bits happen mainly in the background. 
• When Hatred approaches Gary about storming the cocoon, Gary cocks a stick he’s holding like it’s a gun.  Even when they’re about to change into costumes and assault a super-villain’s flying fortress, these characters still love to play make-believe. 
• The Monarch does vocal warm-ups before torturing Rusty.  Can't risk tripping over the tongue during one of those villainous monologues. 
• It looks like Colonel Gentleman and the Action Man will be moving to Rusty’s neck of the woods next Season.  With the cast continuing to grow, it really makes you wish they could switch to a one-hour format.
  
  

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The Rains of Castamere

    Warning: If you have not seen the show, or read the books, and yet somehow are still reading this review, know that there will be spoilers.

 

    From its very first frames, The Rains of Castamere announces itself as an event episode.  As it starts, a moody cello blooms onto the soundtrack.  The camera slides across tight close-ups of elaborately carved figurines arrayed on a map of Westeros- lions, wolves, a flayed man- and we know this will be an important hour for Game of Thrones.

    Even casual fans of the show probably already know this.  The Rains of Castemere is the ninth episode of the show’s third season.  The ninth episode of the first season ended with the moral center of the show getting his head chopped off and the ninth episode of the second centered around the biggest action set piece the show, not to mention the books, has yet to give us.  Readers of the books have even more reason to be nervous, but neophyte and expert alike are aware that shit is to go down.  Game of Thrones is a show with a ton of moving parts.  It follows a large number of characters separated by motive, allegiance, and vast amounts of physical space.  Episodes can sometimes be so concerned with moving figurines across the map that they lack cohesion, but here the writers can tie up strings, pay off plots, and show us that what may have looked like meandering was in fact a pre-planned march to a specific point in TV space-time.  We arrive at such a point here, and the careful build-up makes The Rains of Castemere the most memorable, effective episode the show has yet produced.

    And the ending where many of our favorite characters are brutally murdered probably has something to do with this, too.

    It’s pointless to talk about this episode for too long without mentioning that little incident- the Red Wedding is the point to which this season has been marching all along- but that it hits as hard as it does owes a lot to the episode that precedes it.  The most obvious way the episode lets us know what’s coming is by spending so much time with Robb and company.  Robb’s story has moved in fits and starts this season- Catelyn gave a few moving monologues here, Robb made some stupid tactical decisions there- mostly pacing from one spot to another within a holding pattern.  But here, we spend the first fifth of the episode discussing Robb’s plan to storm Casterly Rock and getting reacquainted with Walder Frey, the grand Lord Asshole of the Twins.  David Bradley plays Walder Frey as a lecherous, sniveling weasel of a man, but in his first scene, wherein he publicly drools over Robb’s wife Talisa like he’s hired her for his latest bachelor’s party, director David Nutter is content to let us think that Frey is merely a huge jackass rather than a huge jackass planning mass murder.

    It’s still possible to believe that Frey is content just to shame Robb the second time the episode returns to the Twins, this time to witness the wedding between Edmure Tully and one of Frey’s prettier daughters.  Frey gives Robb a nod as if to say ‘Look what you missed,’ killing good taste but keeping hope alive.  Also converging on the Twins: Arya and the Hound, the most charming odd couple to hit Westeros since Jaime and Brienne.  Like Robb, Arya’s story has felt stalled for some time.  She hung out with Beric Dondarrian and his merry band of thieves for a while.  That didn’t work out, and she’s spent the last couple of shows staring daggers at the Hound.  But now she’s close to seeing her family again, something she hasn’t done since the first season, and the episode takes the time to highlight how much this means to her.  Arya stares across the river to the castle where she will be reunited with her mother and brother, and the weight of her two-season journey is felt suddenly and fully.

    Even when not dealing directly with the lead-up to the Red Wedding, The Rains of Castemere wisely focuses on the scattered Starks, giving it a sense of uniformity that would be diluted were the Lannisters or Stannis or Brienne to make an appearance.  Jon Snow finally blows his cover when he and his wildling raiding party steal some horses from an old Northman.  The man is a witness and has to die, and the ever-mistrustful Orell suggests Jon do the deed.  That Jon is too damned honorable to kill for the sake of his mission is not shocking- he is Ned Stark’s son, after all- but Ygritte remaining by his side even as the wildlings turn on him is commendable and not completely expected.  Rose Leslie has done a terrific job of breathing a lusty, full life into her character, and while I knew Jon was going to ditch her it was still hard to watch her watch him leave.

    The episode continues the Stark-fest by having Jon’s wildling melee happen in sight of Bran and his companions, who are holed up in a nearby tower waiting out a rainstorm.  The characters in Game of Thrones have become so wrapped up in their own plotlines that any meeting, or near-meeting, between them is default event television, even without the added bonus of learning that Bran can control Hodor and his direwolf with his mind, which it ends up he totally can.  The episode also checks in with Sam and Gilly, who are approaching the wall from the north, and Deanerys, who conquers Yunkai by sending her lieutenants into the city to convince the slaves to rise in revolt against their masters.  These scenes aren’t worthless- the sight of Jorah, Grey Worm, and Daario taking on fifty-some-odd Yunkish guards is particularly fun- but they feel lifted from a less momentous episode.

    Because everything else in The Rains of Castemere is devoted to preparing us for the Red Wedding, which takes up the last fourth of the episode.  The writers take their time setting the table- we’re given snippets of conversation between Robb and Talisa, Catelyn and Roose Bolton- before Edmure and his new wife are carried off to bed, the doors close, and the minstrels at the wedding feast start playing ‘The Rains of Castemere.’  Nutter makes excellent use of Michelle Fairley’s face here, giving us several slow, lingering shots of Catelyn’s expression as it dawns on her that something is very, very wrong.  Of the characters collected here, she’s the one we’ve known the best and the longest, and we see the carnage mostly through her eyes.

    The violence hits hard and fast.  It begins with Talisa getting stabbed in her stomach, unquestionably the most brutal moment, and keeps the momentum going as Robb, then the Stark soldiers, and then Catelyn are hit with arrows or knifed at the throat and go down, one after the other after the other, while Walder Frey cackles.  It’s a horrifying sequence made all the more effective because of the production’s total commitment.  The very idea of killing off one’s core cast of good guys en masse is shocking, but the production team seems determined to raise the level of visceral brutality to levels not yet seen as if determined that this scene is one for which the series is remembered.

    Indeed, the scene is so effective that it’s hard to imagine how the show is going to top it in the seasons to come.  Game of Thrones is a show with a ton of moving parts, and it’s always adding more.  In the first season, most characters were confined to two or three locations and concerned with different parts of the same plot threads.  Now they’re zipping all over the map, going about their own business on errands of ever-increasing complexity that do not necessarily have any narrative connection to each other.  The Red Wedding is a watershed moment for the series because it’s connective.  It represents a clear journey’s end for several important characters and ties up threads for several more, like the Lannisters, who have doubtlessly been working toward this outcome for some time.  The books following A Storm of Swords have their share of shocking moments, but they’re disparate, important for the characters involved but not so much for the fate of Westeros as a whole.  They don’t tie the show together like the Red Wedding does, and that means the producers will have to rethink how they stage the their event episodes going forward.

    But those producers have proved themselves competent enough for me to be excited about whatever they do in the future.  Episodes like The Rains of Castemere don’t just provide great reasons to tune in on broadcast night- they give fans a reason to stick around for the long haul, to see what seeds planted here will sprout into their own event episodes two, three, four years down the line.  When this series has wrapped, I imagine that the Red Wedding will indeed be one of the scenes for which it’s remembered, but the audacity of its existence makes me sure there will be plenty of others.

Also-s:

•     After the Hound brings up Ned’s death, Arya looks him dead the eye and vows to someday put a sword through said eye and out of the back his skull.  I probably shouldn’t be afraid of a fifteen-year-old, but Maisie Williams is just that good.
• Bran, now convinced by his newfound powers that he must go north of the wall to find the three-eyed raven, bids goodbye to Osha, who ain’t about to go back to the stank-hole, and Rickon, who, we are reminded, exists.
• Jorah comes back from his battle with the Yunkish guards battered and bloody and bearing good news, but all Deanerys can do is ask after Daario Naharis.  If Jorah’s face were a wall, that’s the moment it cracks from the inside-out and crashes into a pile of rubble.

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