Blade: Trinity

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Let me tell you a story about a trilogy of movies that became a director’s franchise. The first movie was a cool little horror movie, the second jacked up the action quotient to roller coaster levels, and the third had all the right ingredients for a great movie, but never quite came together. I’m speaking, of course, of the Aliens Trilogy (sure, there were four in that series, but I expect there to be a fourth entry in the Blade series).

Blade: Trinity is a wildly uneven film that is meant to appeal to the inner juvenile male in all of us.

Here’s the rub: I wanted to like this movie. I thought the first movie (directed by Stephen Norrington) was a serviceable entry into the series, hitting all the key points of establishing the character and his mission. The second one (brilliantly directed by Guillermo Del Toro, who went on to direct Hellboy) raised my expectations, extending the mythology of the character and increasing the action quotient. Quite frankly, I went into this movie expecting something like Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend (the basis for the movie The Omega Man or The Last Man on Earth).

The “setup� (since using the word plot implies a cohesive narrative structure) sees vampire uber-hunter Blade being pursued by the Vampire Nation; a distraction, since they are really after Dracula. The movie has the feel of trying to be the closing chapter in the series, with both sides talking about finding a final solution to their enemies/problems. Blade is caught in a battle between earthly things, the law (specifically the police and federal agents) and spiritual forces, the vampires. As a hybrid of both realms, being both human and vampire, his dual nature is constantly in battle with each other. Vampirism becomes a metaphor for sin, especially in that for him, it is only the blood that keeps his “sin nature� from overtaking him. Despite his method-acting choice of keeping his face frozen as if he’s had one too many Botox injections, Wesley Snipes is having fun during this movie. So much fun that I wish he’d either do a movie based on the comic book character Black Panther or get back to doing movies that stretch his talent.

The “trinity� in question is made up of Blade (Wesley Snipes) and members of a group calling themselves the Night Stalkers: Abigail Whistler (Jessica Biel) Hannibal King (Ryan Reynolds). Metaphorically though, you kind of have to wonder how the spiritual (physical in Abigail’s case) father to all of them, Abraham Whistler (Kris Kristofferson), fits in. His parting observation is that when you are in a war, you can’t do it by yourself. As cool as the lone wolf routine may seem, we weren’t meant to be alone. This sets up the tricky concept of the trinity. There are three centers of consciousness, yet one being, one mission. Each person of the trinity is co-equal, yet serves different roles. The persons are at once independent and interdependent. And ultimately, the trinity is about relational unity and fellowship.

The movie gives lip service to wanting to separate the myths from the facts when it comes to vampires. It is a little known fact that every culture in the world has a variation on the idea of vampires, most predating their popularization with Bram Stoker’s “fable� Dracula. It should be noted that in Dracula, Stoker conceived the perfect “antichrist�: a creature who sought eternal life through blood, given resurrection in a new body after three days, defeated by a stake (a piece of the cross), the crucifix, baptism/holy water, or the sun’s (son’s) light. So while the movie on the one hand tries to run from the vampire’s Christian trappings, it turns around and gives their Dracula (Dominic Purcell) a more stereotypic demonic look (which draws upon the look of the strain of vampires seen in Blade II) --that is, when this incarnation of Dracula isn’t doing his Fabio impersonation. Yeah, you take him, and all the vampires, that seriously. This just added to the list of failings for the movie: to be a larger-than-life hero, you need a larger-than-life opponent. You never felt this from Dracula: it was as if the name alone was supposed to be threat enough.

For that matter, all the characters (say it with me) sucked, except for Hannibal King. He was charismatic and funny --the perfect counterbalance to Snipes’ Blade --and held the movie together. Then again, that’ll happen when you give a character history, depth, a reason for being, and good dialogue.

Put simply, this movie lacked style. The movie provided a showcase for scream queen performances as plenty of vulnerable women are given chances to shriek as Dracula bites them. It even seemed to strive to be a B-movie with some of the over-the-top performances, bad (or badly delivered) dialogue, and gratuitous shower scene. The movie tries to distract us from its lack of narrative voice with fight scenes that never build toward a final confrontation. Plus, someone decided that the movie ought to be loud instead of cool, since dance club music obviously sets a better mood than an actual musical score (do I need to point out the ridiculousness of Jessica Biel downloading music into her iPod so that she has theme music to kill by? Or a fighter using their ears to listen to music during a fight in the first place?) To add to the “been there� feeling of the movie, the ending plays out with an eerie familiarity if you’ve seen the first Blade. Sure, there were plenty of moments meant to be high-five moments, for instance, when Abigail stakes a vampire a little south of where my biology class taught me the heart was. Then again, all the vampires in the movie were fairly easy to dispatch. This might be the biggest “sin� of the movie: vampires that aren’t scary.

So we have characters that were underdeveloped and direction that lacked style. Sounds as if we can lay the blame for the failings of this movie at the feet of writer/director David S. Goyer.

Overall, the movie borders on being shrill and just this side of cheesy as it can’t quite escape the B-movie feel to it. With even the stand-and-cheer moments feeling forced, this movie may please some comic book fans, but lovers of vampire lore, or coherent storytelling, will be disappointed.

SpongeBob SquarePants -The Movie

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In a nutshell, if you like the cartoon show that this movie is based on, then you will be almost pleased with the movie. The movie touches on all the things you love about the show (or hate about the show, depending on where you fall on the topic of all things SpongeBob), but doesn’t quite deliver.

For those new to this universe created by Stephen Hillenburg (hard to believe anyone is, considering the millions that the Nickelodeon show brings in via merchandising) SpongeBob SquarePants is a sponge. “Absorbent and yellow and porous is he.� Along with his best friend Patrick, a starfish, they live in the underwater town of Bikini Bottom. SBSP works as a fry cook at the Krusty Krab, alongside his neighbor Squidward Tentacles, for their money grubbing boss, Eugene H. Krabs. Mr. Krabs’ long-time arch nemesis, Plankton, runs the rival restaurant, the Chum Bucket. The plot centers around Mr. Krabs opening up Krusty Krab II, next door to the first one, and making Squidward the manager instead of SpongeBob (“It’s not called kid-ager�). Plankton has framed Mr. Krabs for the theft of King Neptune’s crown, as part of his convoluted scheme to get the secret formula for Krabby Patties. And SBSP sets off with Patrick on the hero’s journey to the forbidden Shell City to retrieve the crown and prove himself man enough to be manager.

Still with me?

A lot of the show’s cracked sensibility is still here -the animation mixed with the jarring live-action digressions- but it doesn’t always come together. For example, you want the theme song to be there, expecting a grand audience sing-a-long. Instead it is delivered hilariously by live-action pirates. This is typical of the almost-perfect frustration of the movie. There is still plenty of the crass humor and frantic animation that makes the show great. The copious amount of Patrick nudity prompted this exchange between my son and me:
“I see his butt.�
“What did daddy tell you?�
“Butts are funny.�

Sure, there’s an early scene of SpongeBob in the shower with Squidward, but the topper for disturbing imagery can be expressed in four words: David Hasselhoff’s flexing pectorals.

There are two problems with the movie. One, I never thought that as a writer I would say this, but this movie suffers from too much plot. Most cartoon-to-movie leaps suffer from not having enough plot, after all, we’re talking about stretching an 11 minutes per episode cartoon into an hour-and-a-half affair. But plot is not quintessential to the SpongeBob experience: non sequitur dialogue combined with gratuitous looniness is.

The other problem is one that strikes far too many cartoon movies: THE CELEBRITY VOICE. This movie should have been a road movie with SpongeBob, Patrick, and Sandy Cheeks, a “Fellowship of the Crown.� Instead we get a tale -without Sandy, except by cameo- distracted by the introduction of a new character (and not character so much as merely celebrity voice) Mindy (Scarlett Johansson). King Neptune, a character introduced on the show, is now bald and voiced by (and modeled after) Jeffrey Tambor. Though, admittedly, Dennis (Alec Baldwin) worked, but this was because his character was more in tune with the pop-culturally-aware-yet-random spirit of the show.

The show has always been about the power of friendship and community. Sure, SBSP and Patrick get blitzed on Goofy Goober Sundaes after SpongeBob is overlooked for promotion, but they are there for each other. It is SpongeBob’s eternally optimistic, innocent obliviousness, that is not only the secret to his charm, but that also gets him through life. In short, his is the faith of a child. Though the plot is supposedly about the duo’s desire to prove themselves to be men, since men have facial hair and are “invincible� what we learn is that it is important to be who you are. And it is their child-like faith that sees them through.

“If nautical nonsense be something you wish� . . . then this movie doesn’t quite hit the mark. The closer it sticks to the television show the better it is. But despite its flaws, it does prove to be a highly entertaining venture.

Saw

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“How can you walk through life pretending that you’re happy?� That is the question that apparently only a serial killer can help you answer. Such is the premise of the movie Saw. Saw is either a cynical look at a moral(less) universe or a cynical look at a moral(less) God. The movie sets itself up as Seven meets Phone Booth, being about judgment, atonement, and redemption.

The Jigsaw Killer, as the serial killer is known, sets himself up as God in this universe, and people are expected to play by his rules. He is the ultimate judge. The motivation given to the serial killer is that he is dying, which has given him a unique perspective and appreciation for life. The ultimate sin, in his universe, is to squander the gift of your life. He goes about, sitting in judgment of others, until he finds subjects guilty of wasting their lives. He then puts them in elaborate scenarios, forcing them to reflect on their lives and the gift they’ve been given, and then he makes them pay for their sin. The one victim to have escaped goes as far as to say “He helped me.�

The atonement takes the form of the victim being punished for his sin by, in one way or another, mirroring that sin. Free will is reduced to two choices, a series of either-ors: do something horrible to someone else or let something horrible happen to you. There is no morally good option (unless you count self-mutilation) only the lesser of two evils. I won’t be more specific with the choices --believe me, you don’t want to hear their grisly choices-- other than to say that Dr. Gordon has to do something drastic or else his wife and child will be killed. And that the movie is titled Saw for a reason. If you don’t play by the “rules,� you are punished, then forced back into the game. In this mad display of twisted morality, the victims have to make atonement -to cover over, often with the blood of a sacrifice- their sin. The sin, or role to play in order to escape, isn’t as clear for Adam (the other man in the scenario), though he seems to be guilty of smoking.

“How did I get here? I had everything in perfect order,� Dr. Gordon says, echoing the sentiment we have when we find ourselves at the end of our downward spiral into sin. His series of compromises started with innocent flirtation and ended with him in a seedy hotel with a woman other than his wife. In a lot of ways, the movie both wants to be the movie Seven but also throw you off by not being the movie Seven. The Jigsaw killer seems to be preaching a message of being grateful for the life that you have, and his schemes play out like an extreme version of scared straight. Only in the realization of gratitude does one find redemption.

The movie doesn’t quite work. First off, you don’t really come to care about the characters; in fact, the more they try to characterize them, the less you like them. Second, the movie suffers from what I call “the curse of the red herring,� by which I mean that it doesn’t play fair. There are point-of-view tricks (who’s doing the watching?) that make for holes in logic. The director’s decision to employ speeded up and shaken camera sequences distracted rather than added to the atmosphere, and especially didn’t work during the climax. And because we live in the age of the trick ending, writers and directors go for ever more implausible endings in order to attain the twist. The movie is a series of narrative tricks --over plot and characterization-- that leaves you feeling toyed with and cheated.

Like a flawed version of Seven, this movie is an examination of using immoral means to a moral end. Those drawn in by the advertising poster may be a little disappointed, but it does have some effectively creepy moments to it.

Third Watch

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I had often thought that Third Watch had been a show in search of an identity. It just seemed that way because every season John Wells, in his desperate bids to save the show, tinkered with it to the point of recreating it. The premise of the show was to examine the life of those often-unsung heroes: the patrol cops, paramedics, and fire fighters, the people who do the actual work between the homicide cop shows like NYPD Blue and the hospital shows like ER. In season one, as often is the case, the characters were likable, but bland. "Bland" may seem harsh, but the show seemed populated with uninteresting, or at least ill-defined, characters. In season two we saw more soap opera-esque elements as it became the paramedic/fire fighter/patrol cop version of ER. By season three, it decided to try and distinguish itself from the borders of TV land by more creative storytelling: using dramatic voice overs of that episode’s featured character, symbolic imagery, solid character development -- less of the outright soap opera. That's when the show started to gel and really grow on me. By season four, they stumbled on a ratings formula: insert more action shoot-outs, explosions, and major characters dying. They seemed to be pursuing a course that eschewed small-character driven episodes in lieu of the big bang.

Don’t get me wrong, I liked the bang.

This season it has flourished on Friday nights in what was heretofore the "NBC, 10 p.m. cop show death slot" (see Homicide: Life on the Streets). This is especially ironic considering that it is replacing the much better, and recently canceled cop show, Boomtown). The show alternates between a return to its more character-driven roots and the occasional bout of bombast, which threatened to overpower anything approaching character development, but the writing remains strong.

Third Watch, in typical John Wells tradition, is a good show. ER is a good show. The West Wing, under his sole direction, is a good show (but not the “art� that it often came close to being under the brilliant, if erratic, voice of Aaron Sorkin). It has shifted its focus mostly to the cops, occasionally the paramedics, with the fire fighters, at best, making guest appearances. But meanwhile, the show has become a solid, second-tier cop show, not great like The Shield or Boomtown, but easily as good as any Law & Order.

Third Watch aired episode 100, “A Call for Help,� on Friday, January 9. It was a stand-alone episode, and if you watch closely, you sense the effort of straining for an Emmy nomination. This episode was reminiscent of the late, great, much-lamented Homicide: Life on the Streets. It was stylized, filmed in ten-minute segments (as opposed to the usual one) without cuts, a feat of direction and acting since a screwed-up line would mean filming the whole ten-minute sequence all over from the beginning.

It may be my favorite episode to date.

Spiritual Connections

There are numerous spiritual connections in the show. In season four, after a near-fatal heart attack, Fred Yokas, the husband of police officer Faith Yokas, abruptly discovers Jesus Christ as his Lord and Savior. Suddenly the family had to cope with its anchor doing an about-face and becoming a religious zealot while he struggled to incorporate spirituality into their lives. But since this element of his character has been ignored of late (particularly curious in light of Faith’s struggle to regain the use of her legs after one of the aforementioned “big bang� episodes), there is another recurring theme that I want to examine: the show’s fascination with theodicies.

An Aside About Theodicies

A theodicy, simply put, is man's attempt to justify God or explain suffering. Commonly, it addresses an issue often called “the problem of evil.� The problem came about in response to our changing view of God. “Consider the goodness and severity of God� Romans 11:22 states, and that thought ruled the day. Then, in the last couple hundred years, the image of God as both good and severe was gradually replaced with a God who is only good. He became a loving father, then a nice, kind father-figure, then just a granter of good gifts . . . a Santa God. There is nothing wrong with seeing God as good, as long as you realize that is not all He is. We have many sides to us, so we can only imagine how complex He is. Anyway, this was a subtle shift that proved inherently problematic, because it didn’t take long for someone to realize “wait a minute: if there is a good, loving God, why does He let bad things happen?�

The basic argument, in its four-pronged form, goes something like this:

a) If God is good, He would destroy evil

b) If God is all-powerful, He could destroy evil

c) But evil exists

d) Therefore, there is no God

Obviously Christian apologists got tired of hearing this “ah-ha, what do you have to say about that?� argument all the time, so they developed their counterarguments, usually getting by with weakening each of the propositions. Maybe God is arbitrary or capricious; His definition/standard of good being different from ours. Maybe God can’t destroy evil; He’s limited by our free will. Maybe evil isn’t real, we only perceive things as evil. But there is a God. You’ll note however, God never justifies His actions. The closest He came was in the book of Job, though He never answers Job’s questions and basically tells Job “I’m God, you’re not. Shut up.�

But I digress.

So What Does Third Watch Say?

Third Watch tends to apply a reverse perspective to theodicies, one that I can’t say that I’ve heard anywhere else. Let me give you an example from season one (an example that obviously has stuck with me), from an episode titled “Ohio.� The paramedics are stationed in a hotel garage, during a Clinton-Giuliani debate, discussing their worst cases, religion, and relationships. At one point, I believe it was Bobby turns to Doc and asks “after all the stuff we’ve seen, how can you still believe in God?� Then Doc gives an answer that pushed me over the edge and made me want to give the show a chance: “You’re asking the wrong question. After all the things we’ve seen, how can you still believe in man?�

That’s one way to answer the problem of evil: Holding man accountable for the evil he creates and perpetrates on himself.

This brings me to “A Call for Help.�

A series of little annoyances and incongruities result in the apprehension of a man who, as it turns out, has gruesomely killed his friend. Throat cut, face hacked up, stabbed some fifty odd times -- a random and wholly unnecessary act of violence. This left the cops wondering if the arrest was the result of dumb luck, good police work, or the work of a "higher power."

Sasha: Maybe “someone� wanted him caught . . .

Bosco: You ever ask yourself how “someone� could let something like this happen in the first place?

Sasha: It’s free will. We all have a choice in what we do with our time here. Some of us choose to be cops. Some of us choose to be killers. It’s all up to us. It’s our choice.

Again, the show points to man’s free will being responsible for a lot of the evil that the police, paramedics, fire fighters, and doctors see. There was a similar theodicy on the ABC show 10-8. The concluding voice over of the 1/11/04 episode said the following:

“The thing about the Garden of Eden is that paradise was doomed from the start. Yeah, sure, Eve could’ve said ‘no’ to the serpent. And Adam could’ve said ‘no’ to Eve, but trouble set in before then. Before the knowledge of good and evil. When all-knowing God decided on the sixth day to add humans to the mix, made in His image. At first just one, but God saw Adam was alone and needed someone to help him, knowing the likely outcome of putting more than one of us on the planet. But He took His chances. Why? Who knows? Maybe because He knows that our imperfections and need to help one another are more important than His perfect Eden. Ask me what’s worse: to go solo in paradise without the chance to screw it up or together in a whacked out world to help each other get by. I’ll take the world and take my chances any day of the week.�

A Few Last Words About Theodicies

If you’re anything like me, you’re left wondering “what do we say about the problem of evil?� Well, there are a lot of books written on the subject, so it’s not like I’m going to come up with some great revelation in a couple of paragraphs. But here I go anyway, keeping in mind the lessons learned from Third Watch.

We could argue the philosophy of “the problem of evil�, but in the end, where does that get us? Job had bad things happen to him because he was so righteous. And while the Third Watch argument scores a lot of points by putting the burden on us, it doesn’t address natural evils, such as earthquakes, floods, or tornadoes. There are a few things we just have to learn to live with:

-learn to accept that there is a mystery to creation; a complexity to reality. Some things simply can’t be explained from a human perspective.

-learn to shut up. Arguing philosophy, even if you present good theology, doesn’t help if some tragedy has occurred in a person's life. Often our advice, whether we intend it or not, is cruel and insensitive. We can’t provide answers because, when all is said and done, we have none to offer. All suffering is not meant to teach us a lesson. The only things that can be said about all suffering are that
1) it is meant to refine our faith;
2) it is to make us more like Christ; and
3) it is to be endured.

-learn to care. Be a part of people’s lives. Be that helping hand. Be that shoulder to lean on. Few things console better than a sympathetic presence, especially by a fellow sufferer.

-learn to trust God in the dark. Again, some things are beyond human explanation and the best we can do is know that God is good and worthy to be trusted.

-and if you absolutely, positively, have to have some example to thwart the “problem of evil� consider this: the presence of evil is not in conflict with the goodness or power of God. Man, if only I could think of an example of when His goodness, His omnipotence, and the reality of evil could be found in one place, yet not be in conflict. Oh yeah, at the cross of Jesus Christ.

Deadwood

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Have you ever wondered why we seem to have so many television shows revolving around law enforcement? Look at some of our top shows: CSI (Las Vegas, Miami), Law & Order (the original, crime and punishment, criminal intent, special victims unit), The Shield, The Wire, NYPD Blue . . . the list goes on and on. One reason is the seemingly endless supply of stories that come from or can be spun from the lives and encounters of police officers. It also betrays our fascination with law and how it works.

Both reasons haunt David Milch. He went from story editor to Executive Producer of Hill Street Blues, was the co-creator of NYPD Blue, created the two short-lived series Brooklyn South and Big Apple, and now finds himself on the opposite side of the law with Deadwood. Don’t get me wrong, Deadwood continues Milch’s fascination with looking at the nature of law and law enforcement, he just does it from a new perspective. The theme that he focuses this show around is “how does society organize itself in the absence of law?�

This show is loosely based on actual events in the Sioux Indian land of Deadwood, South Dakota, during the 1870s -- just after Custer’s ill-fated stand at Little Big Horn and as gold is discovered in the Black Hills. The former camp of Deadwood becomes a boomtown. Those people who grew up on a diet of 1950s and 60s era Westerns will be shocked by this show. David Milch said that he thinks of the show as a “story as set in the West rather than a Western.� And the casual viewer will be assaulted by some harsh language. Often. We’re talking Good Will Hunting plus Menace II Society levels of profanity. Horror writer Gary Braunbeck calls profanity “violence without action,� and never is that more true than on Deadwood. David Milch spent months (some reports say well over a year) doing research for the show, including the level of foul language. Apparently people who visited the real Deadwood left stunned by the language used there.

While mixing in real-life figures such as Wild Bill Hickok (Keith Carradine) and Calamity Jane (Robin Weigert) into the story, the action centers around two main characters: the former law man trying to start his own business, Seth Bullock (Timothy Olyphant), and the corrupt, murderous, scene stealing, saloon owning pimp Al Swearengen (Ian McShane). Think of Al as the Kingpin (from the Daredevil movie) or Falstaff (from Shakespeare’s Henry IV) or Tony Soprano (from The Sopranos) of the Old West. Hypnotic, charismatic, and brutal, he disposes of the bodies of his victims via hungry pigs. A patron of his said it best, “I don’t trust you as far as I could throw you, but I enjoy the way you lie.� Their stories are set to a backdrop of rampant sex, alcoholism, drug use (laudanum--pure opium in alcohol--being the drug of choice for ladies), greed, and racism/fear (because of the omnipresent Indian threat).

All in a state of lawlessness.

The nature of the literal lawlessness of Deadwood came to light during the “trial� of Cock-Eyed Jack McCall after he shot Wild Bill Hickok in the back. It occurred to several prominent citizens, chief among them Al, that no one could appeal to the law in order to settle on a verdict. To do so would invite the Federal government looking at them, annexing the area as a state, which it was not at the time, and possibly seizing property. So instead, the judge ordered the jurors to deliberate according to common custom, in this case, common custom would have been to do a revenge killing.

But we don’t live in a state of lawlessness.

C.S. Lewis, author of The Chronicles of Narnia, makes an argument for a Law of Human Nature, those laws of right and wrong written onto men’s hearts. After all, ethical disputes presuppose some common standard of human decency. But as we look at the people around us, we’re disturbed by how men actually behave versus how they ought to behave. Something in us tells us that there is a standard of behavior that we ought to adhere or at least aspire to. And if there is some kind of code written into each of us, there has to be an Author of that code.

HBO continues its trend of highlighting our fascination with the brooding criminal side of humanity--The Sopranos, The Wire, Oz--perhaps forcing us to face the ugly truth about our natures. Yet, it is in the sewers of mankind’s heart, without the civilized dress that we like to put on to deceive ourselves about who and what we are, that it’s easiest to find God. The seeming absence of Law in Deadwood still points to a Lawgiver. The preacher on the show, at Wild Bill Hickok’s funeral, summed it up this way: “I believe in God’s purpose, not knowing it. I ask Him, moving in Him, to see His will. I ask Him, moving in others, to allow them to see.�

This is a moody, brilliant show, a gritty look at the Old West, that is defined by the depth of its characters.

Desperate Housewives

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“‘Most men lead lives of quiet desperation’ ... Really, and what do women lead? Lives of noisy fulfillment?� Susan Mayer (Teri Hatcher) asks. Such desperation takes many forms and leads down many paths, all of which are intriguing and riveting.

Desperate Housewives is like nothing currently on the air right now, so how do I offer another show for comparison? Part (murder?) mystery, part soap opera, and part dark comedy, I imagine that the pitch meeting for it went something like “think Twin Peaks meets The Stepford Wives meets Melrose Place, with the dark humor of Heathers.� That may be a little too much, but you get the idea. ABC, network television, is taking a chance with a different type of show that’s both smart and deals with adult themes.

The show basically asks “how much do you really want to know about your neighbors?� The problem is that, as Susan Mayer says, “Sometimes people pretend to be one way on the outside when they are totally different on the inside.� That’s something true of everyone on the show. The denizens of Wisteria Lane are an interesting and varied (though not all that varied) lot.

Mary Alice Young (Brenda Strong), our narrator, spent her day as she did every day, “quietly polishing the routine of my life until it gleamed to perfection.� That is, until she killed herself before the first commercial break. Don’t worry, though. She leaves behind a husband, a son, and a family secret. Plus, she continues as the narrator for the show. Susan Mayer, recent divorcee, enjoys a Gilmore Girls-type relationship with the daughter she has custody of while pursuing romantic possibilities. Lynette Scavo (the long-underappreciated Felicity Huffman) plays an uber-mom who sacrifices her fast track career for the sake of being a stay-at-home mom. The cheating Gabrielle Solis (Eva Longoria) is a model who “enjoys� more of a business relationship with her husband than a marriage. Bree Van De Kamp (Macia Cross), a “plastic suburban housewife� does everything that people think a perfect wife and mother should do, except connect with her husband and kids.

Everyone has things going on beneath their perfect surfaces. In a lot of ways, in all the ways we’ve come to identify success, these women have everything anyone could ever want. And yet, there is still something missing, so every day is a (desperate) search to connect, to find something meaningful in their lives. When asked “Don’t you just love being a mom?� Lynette Scavo reminds herself, and us, that “for the person who asked it, only one answer was acceptable.� So she lies. Life is full of such encounters. We struggle with our longing to be genuine versus our need to present ourselves as having things together. In other words, we often sacrifice the realness of our relationships in order to cultivate the surface ones we’ve come to depend on. There is a constant longing to share, but the need to maintain their image usually wins out.

“We all have moments of desperation,� Mary Alice Young narrates. Desperation points to a hole within us, a hole we want to fill by any means necessary. Stephen King once wrote a book titled Desperation whose main theme was that if you weren’t in a state of faith, you were in a state of desperation. It all boils down to the conversation that Gabrielle has with her gardener-turned-lover (who, as she says, is “far too young to smoke�). When asked why she married her husband, she answers “Because he promised to give me everything I ever wanted.� Since the husband, in fact, gave her all of those things, yet this gardner still finds himself in bed with her, he logically asks “Then why aren’t you happy?� She tells him that it "turns out that I wanted all the wrong things."

The drama shows remarkable promise, and like its characters, there is a lot going on. So much that it may be difficult to sustain (and they may wish to learn from the mistake that Twin Peaks made and not try to keep the show going once the mysteries have been solved). Deliciously funny and engaging, this is definitely one of the bright spots of the new television season.

Lost -The TV Show

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Once again, Wednesday night is one of the best television nights of the week, with several great shows going head to head. The latest hit is the show Lost from creator J.J. Abrams, who also created the shows Felicity and Alias, and who’s due to helm Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible 3. The premise of Lost: a plane crashes on an island, stranding 48 survivors. Oh, and there’s a mysterious creature running around terrorizing them. Gilligan’s Island this ain’t. Survivor the scripted show, this ain’t.

There are several things that characterize J.J. Abrams writing. He has a love op pop culture, but doesn’t mistake pop culture references for good writing (very few shows can mix pop references naturally into the rhythm of the show and still produce interesting characters and dialogue and not give into in-joke winking at the audience. An example of the former would be Gilmore Girls; the latter, the movie Shark Tale). He loves witty, romantic banter. He loves strong women. He loves thrillers with constant twists and surprises, and he's not afraid to veer into science fiction territory, which means he writes above the expectations of the audience, never condescending to them.

No matter how intriguing the premise, if you don't care about the characters, no one’s going to watch. Abrams focuses on just three folks, making us care about them while whetting our appetite to learn about the others. Based on his previous shows, I expect a love triangle of some sort to develop before too long. The other thing to expect is that no one is as they seem. Jack (Matthew Fox), the doctor, helps the injured and maintains order and civility. Kate (Evangeline Lilly) was a prisoner being transported on the flight. There is a member of the Iraqi Republican Guard; a junkie, British rock ‘n roll bassist (The Lord of the Rings’ Dominic Monaghan); a black father (Harold Perrinneau, from Oz) and his young son; and a squabbling, supposedly adult, brother and sister among the cast of characters. As a testament to how well the characters are developed, there is an Asian couple who don’t speak English. Yet, despite the language barrier, we know that he is a domineering husband (who at one point orders her to button the top button of her blouse when she is talking to a man) and that she is submissive, but yearns for more (as she unbuttons that same button when he turns his back). Identity and motives all come into question as Abrams layers intrigue with the jockeying of alliances and constant deception.

The whole concept of man on an island reminds us of who we truly are. "Three days ago we all died. We should all be able to start over," Jack says. Who they were before the crash was their old nature. This time on the island represents their chance at redemption -- if they want it. When stripped of the conventions of society, without the veneer of civilization, are we the cast of Lord of the Flies waiting to happen or can we rise above our basic nature? Terry O’Quinn’s character, when talking about backgammon, explains, "there are two players: one is light and one is dark," echoing the sentiment that there are ultimately two sides, good and evil. The mysterious creature on the island reminds me of the Bible passage "Be self-controlled and alert. Your enemy the devil prowls around like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour" (I Peter 5:8).

If you like popcorn thrillers with an air of wit and intelligence, this show is easily one of the best new shows of the year.

Boston Legal

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“I’ve always prided myself on being nuts, but in this firm, I find myself falling into the sane category.� Such is Alan Shore’s (Emmy award winning James Spader) dilemma now that he’s joined the new show, Boston Legal. To play catch up, the last season of the show The Practice saw most of its cast fired and the show centering on James Spader’s character. Capitalizing on the momentum generated by Spader, ABC moved to cancel The Practice and spin it off as Boston Legal.

David E. Kelley created The Practice, Ally McBeal, Boston Public, (among others) and now, Boston Legal. He is a gifted writer when 1) he’s focused (meaning that he has only one, maybe two, shows on the air at a time), and 2) he has characters or actors that he enjoys writing for. Boston Legal has the same precarious balance, and the same inherent dangers, of Ally McBeal. It has wildly eccentric characters and situations at its core, so we’re left wondering how long can he keep this up. The show borders on being without focus. As much as I love James Spader’s performance and clever dialogue, David E. Kelley has a tendency to have his characters saying outrageous things for the sake of outrageousness, leaving other characters little to do other than stare blankly in bewilderment.

No one plays smug, supercilious, charming pervs like James Spader, and a sprawling cast revolves around him. Brad Chase (Mark Valley of the too-soon-canceled show Keene Eddie) sets himself up as Shore’s principal rival, both ethically and in pursuing the affections of their female colleagues. Tara Wilson (Rhona Mitra, the only other holdover from The Practice) serves as Shore’s erstwhile moral compass. Sally Heep (Lake Bell) plays his presumed love interest. And most importantly, Denny Crane (Emmy award winning William Shatner) is his mentor. There isn’t enough scene to chew when the two of them are together. No one plays pompous, egotists who love to hear themselves speak like William Shatner.

“We’re all desperate to be relevant.� Denny Crane.

Alan Shore is a complex anti-hero who wears his weaknesses on his sleeve. His disarming honesty also doubles as another emotional wall. He longs for intimacy even as he does as much as he can to destroy any chance of it. He plays coy games with Tara, both wanting her and keeping her at bay, then abruptly switches (probably due to David E. Kelley finding someone new to write for) to pursuing Sally. Sexual politics rears its head repeatedly throughout the show -- women using their sexuality to handle clients, co-workers, or judges or men doing their best to sleep with their co-workers. The office politics of attraction, sexual tension, and relationships. In the real world, this law firm is a sexual harassment powder keg waiting to blow. But it is this pursuit of relationships, this longing to for intimacy, that the cast uses to fill the void in their lives.

“ ‘What’s the point?’ . . . Questions like that’ll kill you. You don’t ask. That’s the point.� Denny Crane.

We have a love/hate relationship with the law. We are fascinated by its machinations. The practice of law rarely makes sense, yet we are slaves to it. This show perfectly illustrates the idea of how our legal system circumvents the spirit of the law by sticking to, and finding loopholes through interpretations in, the word of the law.

“We know that the law is spiritual; but I am unspiritual, sold as a slave to sin.� (Romans 7:14). The cast of The Practice agonized over their win-at- any-cost mentality, and the toll it took on their souls. At the heart of The Practice was the torment of staying true to the law, even if it meant freeing rapists, murderers, and drug dealers on technicalities in its name. Alan Shore exposes the hypocrisy of the law as practiced. His amorality is the spirit of the law taken to extremes. He’s not one to easily abide authority, or as he sarcastically puts it, he’s “a slut for authority.�

“I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do.� (Romans 7:15) This was Alan Shore’s lament during the last season of The Practice. Tara served to help him understand his “proclivity for exotic women and illicit behavior.� As written, Alan Shore is supposed to be 75% quintessential cad and 25% striving for good, or at least making the law work even if it means breaking the law. For example, once his firm realizes that it is about to lose a custody battle in which a no-account father wishes solely to be a jerk to his wife and kids, Shore blackmails him to acquiescence. Such is the moral quagmire in which he often finds himself. Shore is at once endearing, compelling, and appalling, which is supposed to be good, though not quite -- but it makes for interesting television.

“And if I do what I do not want to do, I agree that the law is good.� (Romans 7:16) Trapped in a spiral of legal angst, even Alan Shore realizes, at some base level, that he can’t keep flouting the law then turning to it for guidance. He hates rules, ironic since somewhere in his soul he loves the ideal of the law. He also hates himself. Most times he demonstrates an ambivalence toward the ethical side of the law. But he also realizes that there are eventual consequences to the path that he has chosen. He realizes the kind of man that he is, and more critically, the kind of man he isn’t, and part of the drama is seeing whether or not he keeps treading water where he is or if he decides to grow.

Boston Legal doesn’t have the inherent gravitas of The Practice, but neither does it have the over-the-top antics of Ally McBeal. Along with Lost and Desperate Housewives, Boston Legal just may help ABC reestablish itself as a network after faltering for several seasons.

Shark Tale

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The easiest way for me to sum up A Shark Tale, since it will invariably be compared to Finding Nemo, is to recall when the movies A Bug’s Life and Antz came out. They came out within a year of each other, both seemed to cover the same territory, yet they were completely different movies. A Shark Tale is the Antz. The movies pales in comparison to Finding Nemo mostly because it replaces heart, or anything approaching real emotion, with rapid fire jokes. This makes for a fine and entertaining, though ultimately forgettable, movie. There were plenty of times when the adults were laughing, but the kids stared wide-eyed at the screen since whatever everyone was laughing at was at least animated. The movie clearly suffers from a case of being too hip for its audience. The jokes and allusions come at a fast and furious pace, and either you are in on the jokes, or you are bored by the self-referential "wit" of it. References don’t entertain kids. Nor can, or should, they relate to a plot that revolves around a mafia spoof. Oscar (voiced by Will Smith) and Lenny (Jack Black) are essentially two sides of the same coin. Neither of them are living the life they were created or expected to live. Oscar is filled with get rich quick schemes and dreams of being somebody. Lenny is set to inherit the family business but dreams of being a "nobody". He is also a vegetarian, thus risking alienation from his family, especially his father Don Lino (Robert DeNiro) should he decide to come out of the closet with it.

I kept waiting for the movie to be "about" something. At one point, Oscar is bought with a pearl of great price, as the woman who pines for him offers a family heirloom to help him pay off a loan shark. She offers the wisdom, in reference to the large pearl, that "dreams can begin small, too." At another point, Lenny’s brother, Frankie, dies. This also again points to how the movie veers from heart for the joke. Unlike animated movies such as Bambi, The Lion King, or Finding Nemo, this death in the family is played for laughs. One might expect that this element of tragedy would be the transforming event in our two protagonists lives. And it is, if you count embracing a lie as the life-changing event. Oscar is transformed into his new life as a shark killer. Ultimately, this movie is about a call to authenticity or, as the cover to Cheryl Lynn’s song proclaims, they’ve "Got to be Real". Both Oscar and Lenny are called from their old lives into their new ones. Once they’ve shed the lies, they embrace the call of who they are and who they were meant to be in the fuller sense. However, in eschewing sentiment for the sake of humor, I felt cheated by the movie, much in the same way as a person who keeps you from getting close to them by throwing jokes at you. So I left wondering how great it might have been if only the movie could have been real with the audience.

The Shield

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The Shield is the best cop show on television and one of the most engrossing and provocative dramas, period. In season three, it has lost none of its brand of in your face brutality and moral ambiguity as it examines the life of street level police investigation. Imagine Training Day and A Simple Plan combined as a television series and you get The Shield.

There is a war on the streets with citizens on one side, drug dealers on the other, and the police somewhere in the middle. The things that the police have to see and deal with on a daily basis lead one character to proclaim that “You see something like that, makes you wonder if we all wouldn’t be better off at home reading the Bible.� The moral guidelines that the police draw for themselves get blurred as they are faced with the harsh reality of investigating and fighting street crime. They have to re-calibrate the lines they have drawn for themselves as they face certain intense daily temptations.

Sex: from vulnerable crime victims, confidential informants or other players, or prostitutes.

Money: think of how many millions of dollars pass through the hands of mostly clean cops during the course of their duties. How easy would it be to just skim from the top of it? Just a little. It wouldn’t hurt anyone. And, after all, cops are dreadfully underpaid for what they are asked to do.

Violence: thug life respects only the strong, the necessarily brutal. Violence is the universal language of the criminally minded. Hardened gang members vs. hardened street cops. The temptation to abuse their authority. The rationalization to do bad things to bad people for good reasons.

What price are we willing to pay for safe streets and what does it cost those we ask to deal with society’s garbage? As they deal daily with the worst humanity has to offer, what does it do to their psyches, their consciences, their marriages and families? And let’s not forget their souls, as right and wrong no longer seem so cut and dried, and they become lost in the quagmire of their reality.

This is the world of Vic Mackey (Michael Chiklis, yeah, The Commish, except now bald and buff), fiercely charismatic leader of his own private “cult�: the Strike Team task force charged with gang investigation. He earns loyalty through a combination of doling out rewards, his (seeming) to do anything for his men, and for generally being a cop’s cop. Those who cross him face cruel taunting (Dutch), political outmaneuvering (Det. Wyms), or outright death (a fellow detective in the series pilot). It is interesting to note that the word “vic� is also police shorthand for victim. And in a lot of ways, Vic is a victim, of life and his own decisions.

As season 3 begins, they have to deal with the consequences of their simple plan: they have robbed the Armenian mob for millions. They just wanted enough to retire on comfortably. They saw how the bad guys lived, why couldn’t they earn, especially if they only stole from the bad guys? The sum of their antics have caused them to now lay low, to reform after a fashion, but a far cry from seeking redemption. Jealousy and mistrust create fissures in the Strike Team as the plan slowly unravels, straining and testing loyalties even between Vic and Shane, as Shane marries his personal Yoko Ono, dividing his loyalties between Vic and his new bride. Fear and greed drive them as they keep the cash but can’t spend any of it until it’s safe, and as they wait out their enemies: their fellow detectives investigate a string of related murders; the FBI had marked some of the money; and the Armenian mob wants their money back.

Despite the occasional bombast, this is truly a character-driven show. There is Julian (Michael Jace), a self-loathing black Christian who simply wants to find his place while he struggles with his homosexuality; and Dutch Wagenbach (Jay Karnes), who appears weak, but it’s his streak of Sherlock Holmes (seeing patterns where no one else does), goodness, and honesty that keep him “safe,� though he struggles to figure out the “why� of evil, spending his days staring into the abyss of man’s depravity and not realizing its slow pull on him; Shane Vendrell (Waton Goggins), Vic’s racist right hand man; Captain David Aceveda (Benito Martinez), the politically ambitious boss who decides to clean up his legacy before moving on to the city council; and finally, Claudette Wyms (CCH Pounder), the politically naive, though often smug, moral compass of the station.

But it all comes back to Vic.

He’s desperately trying to keep all his plates spinning, always teetering on the verge of self-destruction. He manages to cover his butt on the job, even while bending rules for his own selfish reasons (trying to not get caught by Aceveda, Wyms, or Dutch). He keeps his eye on the greater good, again while bending rules for his own selfish reasons (protecting his partners, family, and crime victims). We can’t easily paint Vic as a dirty cop, because we see the good of which he’s capable, his tortured conscience as he tries to do what he believes is right. He has become cold and calculating, a slave to his ambition and greed, as he tries to turn the corner to not have to live the way he’s been living. The way he sees it, salvation lies outside of himself with his family (or what’s left of it).

Terror, cruelty, and savagery are par for course in a fallen world. If the worst of that world is all that you traffic in, it’s easy to see how your moral compass can get broken. In a lot of ways, his struggle is our struggle. The battle of good vs. evil is within one’s soul, where the good is not always so good and the evil often appears good. He is a deeply flawed person trying to do the best he can in a fallen world, hoping that it’s not too late for him. That’s what makes The Shield great viewing.

Angel: the Search for Redemption

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Changing one’s life around is not easy. To take stock of yourself -- who you are and where you’ve been -- to see your life for what it is and then do a complete 180 degree turn is a challenge not many are willing to undertake. This show follows the journey of a “man� (and by man, I mean 200-year-old vampire with a soul) who seeks to answer the question: can you ever do enough good to balance the scales for all the evil you've done in your past? Have you ever done things so wrong that you are beyond the hope of redemption? When you’ve wasted, or rather, misused your life, what can you do to win it back?

Angel, the spin off of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, no longer struggles with its own identity. Though I feared for that identity when Spike (played by James Marsters, who doesn’t get enough credit for his acting) brought his act over from Buffy and joined the cast as a regular, the show has successfully created its own universe with its own mythology. If Buffy the Vampire Slayer was the television equivalent of Wonder Woman and the celebration of girl power, then Angel is Batman, with a brooding dark knight who helps the helpless rather than preying on them. The triumph of the antihero. While the show had found its perfect stride in season three, in this its fifth and final season, it has shifted and become, in a lot of ways, a different show. When it recently celebrated episode 100, I thought a backward look over the seasons was justified.

Joss Whedon, creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, and Firefly is a self-professed atheist, and yet he can’t help but explore spiritual themes in all of his works. Partly this is because horror lends itself to the spiritual. It almost forces the hand of both the writer and the reader to deal with spiritual matters: life after death, matters of the soul, the unseen world of angels and demons, the possibility of heaven and of hell, and the concept of God.

The basic premise of the show is that according to prophecies, a vampire with a soul was destined to become a champion, to play a vital role in the coming apocalypse. You could say that he was one of the elect, one of the chosen, called for a new path, a new way of living. As in all cases of those that are chosen, he was chosen for a purpose: to partner with The Powers That Be, to be their vessel to save the world. He has to walk the path of the champion, the hero, which requires him to be selfless and to sacrifice. In other words, his life is no longer his own. And the character Angel (David Boreanz) does all this, primarily because it is the right thing to do. He, unlike the rest of his vampiric ilk has a soul and thus has moral obligations. (The only other exception is Spike, a vampire created by Angel and a former protege, but he fought to reclaim his soul rather than have one thrust upon him as a curse. Too long a story to cover here.) Angel is also motivated by a promise, a hope, a reward: finite life. He gets a regenerated body to live the finite life of a renewed man.

I hope you noted the inversion: being a vampire, Angel had already possessed eternal life.

I know that I’m going to upset some people (those who hate horror and those who are vampire purists), but if you look at the book Dracula, which popularized the legend of vampires, you will see that it is deliberately steeped in Christian ideology. It was as if Bram Stoker, the author, set out to create a villain that was, in essence, the ultimate anti-Christ. To give just a few examples: Dracula had his “John the Baptist� forerunner, the madman Renfield; it is through the power of blood that one has eternal life; and, in order to become like him, one must die and three days later, rise. And look at some of the things that stop him: the cross, the sun’s light, and holy water. Which is why you see a lot of modern-day writers of vampire lore go out of their way to distance themselves from its Christian trappings.

In his past, Angel went by another name: Angelus. That was the name he used when he had only a demon inside him, before he had a soul. As Angelus, he was a legend of terror, wreaking new acts of horror, inflicting pain in grandiose and creative ways, until he was “cursed� with a soul and became "Angel," who had to face and to live with the evil that he had done. As Angel, he has fought the good fight -- first alongside Buffy, then on his own -- principally against the law firm Wolfram & Hart, whose senior partners are powerful elder demons.

The entire cast deals with issues of loss and proving their self-worth. All of them are trying to make up for the past while not slipping from the path they have chosen. Difficult, when they find themselves running the company they have been fighting against for four seasons.

In episode 100, we saw the return of Cordelia Chase (Charisma Carpenter), one of the members of “Team Angel,� who had fallen during last season. Her role on the show was often that of the conscience of the group in general, and as a mirror specifically for Angel. She was one of his all-too-few ties to humanity and often had to remind him that his actions affected others. She showed him the good parts of himself, counterbalancing the brooding self-loathing and self-flagellation that he was so often caught up in.

One of the subplots of this season was that Angel was on the verge of giving up. Plagued by doubts about his purpose, his mission, and his methods; doubts about the prophecy and his role in things to come; doubts about his reward -- he was at a spiritual low, wondering if he had in fact become complacent and enamored with the trappings provided by Wolfram & Hart. Whereas once he had battled them and all that they stood for, this season found him and his team in charge of the law firm that represented only evil (as in, demonic) clients. And the hypocrisy of using evil to thwart evil had been slowly eating at him because, as he puts it, “evil wins, ‘cause instead of just wiping it out, we negotiate with it. Or worse, for it.�

This was the second time he has made this mistake in the course of the series. The first was in season two, when he decided that in order to battle Wolfram & Hart, he had to descend to their level and methods. In that case, he chose to be evil himself, he couldn't blame it on a reversion to Angelus. Along the way, he alienated his friends, the Powers That Be, and himself. This time his choices were a series of moral compromises, starting very small at first, as he deluded himself that he could remain good while using the tools and profits of evil.

Enter Cordelia.

One of the sacrifices that heroes, especially anti-heroes, often make is that of a personal life. Angel’s personal life is a series of missed moments. The love of his life had been Buffy, with whom he could not have a moment of perfect happiness for fear of reverting to Angelus (long story). Then there was Cordelia, who was taken by The Powers That Be the night the two were going to confess their mutual love for each other. She had been in a coma from the end of last season (another long story), and was back because The Powers That Be owed her a favor that she was calling in. She arrived in time to thwart the plan of Lindsey, the villain for the episode and former golden-boy lawyer for the firm Angel now ran. Lindsey’s grand plan revolved around making Angel doubt himself. He even mocked him by saying “There’s always time for redemption. Isn’t that your whole thing?� Cordelia’s job was to get her guy back on track, back on the road to redemption. “You know how you’re always trying to save, oh, every single person in the world? Did it ever occur to you, you were one of them?� Cordelia asked.

Redemption is what we all hope for. It is difficult to do a show that has as its heart the theme of redemption without slipping into moralizing or treacly simple-minded pabulum. In the real world, stories aren’t often clearly black and white with well-defined heroes and villains. High themes indeed, but the show works.

Plus it has lots of monsters and kung fu fighting. What more can you ask?

All in all, while not its best season (again, that would be season three which just came out on DVD), this season of Angel has been a very good one: lighter in tone than most of the series, but still marked by all the things that has made it great: great writing with wit and humor, great direction and well-rounded characters. This episode, characteristic of the best episodes of the show, had a way of making you laugh one minute, scaring you the next, thrilling you the next, then pulling your heart strings. And while I am saddened at its abrupt cancellation, I know that the series will have quite the second life on DVD.

Nip/Tuck - Vanity of Vanities

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“Do what thou wilt.�
-- Aleister Crowley, occultist

“To thine own self be true.�
-- Hamlet, Shakespeare

“Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like mortal man ...Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another ... Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts.�
-- Romans 1:22-26a

What do these three ideas have in common? They are the underlying philosophies of the show Nip/Tuck. Riding the post-Sopranos wave of shows, acting as if they’ve just discovered profanity and nudity in order to be seen as relevant and edgy, FX has just finished airing the first season of Nip/Tuck. Debuting to the fifth largest ratings for a basic cable show, FX continues to make a name for itself with another show in the same mold as The Shield (arguably the best show on television, one that also explores the moral ambiguities of a fundamentally corrupt cast). While it may aim to be only a bawdy, nighttime soap opera -- a poor man’s Six Feet Under on Viagra -- it puts a mirror to American culture and its unnatural predilection for physical beauty.

Dr. Christian Troy, played with cardboard charm, oozes smugness and unbridled egotism. His downward spiral to ever more degrading depths provides the spark of the show. Not since Ted Danson on Cheers has sex addiction been given so much play. He routinely seduces his patients, trading sex for free surgery. He’s willing to do anything for profit, including get in bed (this time, metaphorically speaking) with drug lords. His idea of being a role model for his friend’s children: taking Matt McNamara to a strip club to give him confidence with women. And in a later episode, he takes him to a porn party where Matt contracts an STD. Only after taking a strong look at the trail of shattered lives and trashed feelings in his wake does he even wake up and face the type of person he is.

Dr. Sean McNamara is the opposite side of the same coin. Neurotic and judgmental, he’s just as smug and self-centered as his partner, whether he realizes it or not. He tries to hold his disintegrating (because of absenteeism due to his practice) marriage together through tepid displays of communication and affection -- a "too little, too late" policy undermined by 1) his assumption that his wife is having an affair (which she was tempted to do) and 2) his using that assumption to rationalize his own affair.

But they love the children.

While the youngest child, his daughter, has no role other than to look cute on occasion, the older one, his teenage son, can’t escape the over-the-top plotlines. He becomes convinced that he’d lose his virginity if he were circumcised. Of course his second sex act involves the dilemma of a threesome with his oh-by-the-way-did-I-mention-I-was-also-a-lesbian-girlfriend.

The show explores the values of physical perfection, and takes special delight with its (can we spell “misogynistic�?) cruelty. One scene in particular stands out: when Christian takes a permanent marker to draw on a (nude) woman to illustrate her areas of imperfection. The show has a lot of shock for shock’s sake: explicit sex, pushing the boundaries first mapped by NYPD Blue; explicit gore, found mostly in their graphic surgery depictions; and explicit language, though even ER has had the reins loosened on language. The unwritten rule is that quality justifies the excesses. But even through the muck heap of excesses, light can shine through.

The Consequences of Living in a Moral Vacuum

I have had this ongoing debate, albeit, mostly with myself, about whether the show itself has no moral center, or if the point of the show is to illustrate what happens when someone has no moral center. The problem for our protagonists is that everything they have -- the trappings of wealth, beauty, unlimited sex, peer respect -- leaves nothing but ashes in their mouth.

Near the end of the season, a three-episode story arc ran that encapsulated not only the problem with the characters in the show but the answer to their various dilemmas, if it had been pursued. At this point in the show, Sean McNamara was elbow deep in an affair, pursuing what he was missing in his marriage. Julia McNamara was being tempted by her own possible affair. This left Matt McNamara with his only other adult role model being Christian Troy, who at the time was negotiating a trade of his current girlfriend for a colleague’s Lamborgini.

The episode arc opens with Matt and his Jewish friend, Henry, getting high while discussing God. Henry can’t light his bong because it is the Shabbat, the Jewish Sabbath, and the Law says that he cannot do any work, in this case, lighting the match. Matt wonders whether obeying these rules of conduct matter, to which Henry says that “God doesn’t give a sh-t� about lighting a match, but he believes that if he obeys he will lead a “happy life and survive.�

Then on their way home, they perpetrate a hit and run.

Their victim turns out to be Cara Fitzgerald, a Christian Scientist and the founder of their scho