Episode 2 (July 7th)

When Masters of Sex was originally announced, I knew I was onboard from the jump. Not only was the idea of a show dedicated to scientific research right up my alley, but the prospect of a cable drama not dealing with crime, terrorism, murder, the apocalypse, or just misery in general, felt like a bloody revelation. Add to that a period setting based on actual researchers, and Lizzie Caplan and Michael Sheen as the stars, and you pretty much couldn’t have come up with a more appealing show.

I watched the pilot when it premiered last year, liked what I saw, and….only just watched the second episode, due in part to the show’s quickly approaching second season. The pilot didn’t put me off when I first watched it -that I can remember much of it clearly a year later means they were doing something right. But committing to a new TV relationship requires a certain amount of effort I wasn’t ready to put in at this time last year, what with all the other shows that summer 2013 had to offer. 2014 has been a merciful reprieve in that regard (though it’s been offset by a really strong selection of films), so with the help of an informative “previously on,” there was nothing to hold me back from finally getting into Masters of Sex.

The lead paragraph maybe oversells the show’s uniqueness just a bit, as it has the early makings of an Anti-Hero drama, just in the Mad Men vein, instead of something more plot-heavy like Breaking Bad. Sheen’s Bill Masters is every bit the prickly hard-ass striving towards some Greater Good that Don Draper and Walter White always were, but thanks to historical precedent and a less directly self-interested goal, Masters sabotaging his life, and the ones of those around him, in the name of advancing human understanding of sexuality, actually has some weight to it.

The show is still very much in its infancy, such that I was hardly surprised to see episode two double down on the pilot’s double-entendre streak. That the opening credits for the show are nothing but Freudian imagery establishes the difficult approach the show has to maintain when dealing with its chosen subject matter. Sex is silly and spiritual, universal but also deeply personal, and depending on the person, the most important thing in your life, or the least. It would be just as inappropriate for Masters of Sex to treat sex like a snickering twelve year-old as it would to treat it purely clinically. Masters attempting to codify the rules and systems behind a concept of limitless definitions and variations creates an interesting juxtaposition for the show to play with out the gate.

Of course, the show can’t be all about sex all the time (though, one could easily argue that’s the whole point: everything eventually circles back around to sex), so the show does a pretty solid job of setting up a number of engaging characters and relationships over its first two hours. Most belong to the women, in particular Caplan’s Virginia Johnson, along with the salty working girl Betty, who ends the hour with a completely different identity than when she started. A significant improvement from the pilot is Masters’ current wife, Libby, who’s perhaps the most outright sympathetic Anti-Hero wife of any recent examples of the trope. She would most certainly need to be written as a cold-shrew in a two-hour film that looks to follow Masters’ personal history accurately, but using a serial format, the show can explore the complications of their relationship for all they are worth.

Whereas the sexual symbolism can get a pass, the show’s thematic stop signs are more than a wee bit on the nose still, but it’s early hours. There’s a lot of potential for this show to break new ground for TV, and I look forward to seeing what’s in store for the rest of the first season.

Midseason (July 15)

Halfway through its first season, Masters of Sex hasn’t taken the leap forward in quality I hoped to have seen by now, but that’s mainly because I have no idea what a vastly superior version of the show would look like. Thanks to its historical roots, the lengthy period of time Masters and Johnson spent on their research has allowed the show to take a lax and telescoped approach to the sex study, and instead has spent most of its time and energy getting to know the side characters over the course of its first six hours.

This has worked largely to the shows benefit. The writers are trying something risky with Ethan, who was pretty irredeemably awful in the first handful of episodes, but is now starting to come around to being more watchable the more he realizes what a piece of human garbage he can be. More surprising is how invested I am in Libby Masters, who is basically the antithesis to every cable anti-hero wife that isn’t Carmela Soprano. Her frustration with Bill Masters and desperation to connect to him through a child only gets more heartbreaking the deeper the show dives into Bill’s own childhood trauma, and Masters of Sex doesn’t force you to take a side in the issue. These are two people who want fundamentally different things out of life, but try to make it work; her because she loves Bill, and him, because he needs a cover story. Add on top of all that some great work from Beau Bridges, and the always great Alison Janney arriving late to the party, and there’s a already plenty in Masters of Sex that’s ripe with potential.

The one major element to the show that’s not got me hooked yet is the suggestion of a (inevitable) romantic pairing between Masters and Johnson. I like seeing Virginia having to struggle with her (bratty as all hell) kids and commitment to the study, and I like seeing Bill’s prickliness cracking further and further to expose the mushy goo and rage curdling away underneath. Together as professionals, they’re a lot of fun to watch, but whenever the show makes overtures to a non-platonic relationship between the two, I don’t buy it. The show devotes an entire monologue at the end of episode three to how enraptured men are by Virginia, which is an oversell equal to the undersell of what possible interest Virginia might have in Bill that isn’t purely professional. Seeing as their partnership is key to the history the show is following, I have to hope we start seeing some real sexual chemistry between the two before season’s end.

Masters of Sex at its very best probably won’t look all that different from the 80% efficiency it’s running at right now, I imagine. It’ll probably involve fewer of the more obvious, rimshot-worthy sex jokes, and will also indulge less in moments where the viewer is invited to feel superior to the outdated sexual attitudes of the time that Johnson and Masters are one day meant to revolutionize. Both these elements are crucial to the identity of Masters of Sex though, they just involve the much tougher task of writing plot that’s emotionally true, instead of plot that makes a bunch of crazy, exciting stuff happen. All the pieces Masters of Sex needs are present, they just need a little more tweaking to reach optimal output. 

Season 1 Finale (August 11th)

The final stretch of episodes in Masters of Sex’s first season really got me thinking about the last Showtime series that I really got into, which was Homeland. I loved the spy thriller series for the season and a half when it was great, and still thank its creators for ending the third season with an offramp I gladly took to leave behind the middling-to-poor show it had become. Showtime has a bad track record of running one-to-two season wonders into the dirt (Dexter and Weeds, to name a couple), but we can get worried about that particular menace once Masters of Sex starts kicking around longer than it should.

Both Homeland and Masters of Sex close out their first seasons on a downbeat note following pyrrhic victories for their protagonists, who have lost the jobs that consumed their lives (also, there’s some electroshock therapy that shows up in both, but that’s more of a coincidence). Ending on a moment of darkness is what cable dramas are all about these days, so it was just as typical of the form for Bill Masters to end the season at rock bottom, as it would have an 11th hour miracle save the status quo. What concerns me though, is the season’s final moment, which is where the Homeland comparison really solidified in my mind.

It was right around mid-Season 2 of Homeland that viewers finally copped to the show Howard Gordan and Alex Gansa were actually making; this wasn’t a post-9/11 espionage drama, it was a post-9/11 romantic espionage drama. The show, in the creators’ eyes, was ultimately about whether or not the two crazy spies at its center could keep it together, even though one was a CIA analyst, and the other a terrorist. Considering all the good the show had done up unto that point as both a thrilling spy story and a look at the modern security state, this was an unwelcome surprise to most viewers. Sure enough, once the Carrie-Brody relationship started to dominate the show, the wheels came off.

For Masters of Sex to end its first season on Bill professing his love for Virginia (in the pounding rain, no less) shouldn’t come as a surprise. It’s literally history textbook that these two end up together. My concern is that Masters of Sex currently has a large engagement vacuum at the centre of its story. Everywhere you look but head-on, there’s great stuff on this show. Thinking back on it, my favorite moments from the finale all involved secondary characters, whether it was Lillian piping up for Virginia at Bill’s presentation, Libby giving birth, or Margaret confronting her husband about his hidden homosexuality. The show has created a rich, well-populated world of characters that can bend the tone and writing show to whatever combination they’re in (sassy Jane alone, and her “you yelled, Sir?” pluck adds a dry sense of humor the show needs more of).

But at the center of Masters of Sex are Bill and Virginia, and with the final two episodes of the season showing how good for the show they are apart, I find it worrying how much the show wants to keep them together. The disconnect between author and audience is a matter of both writing and chemistry. Bill Masters occupies an interesting place in the pantheon of White Male Antiheroes, in that he’s boring and unlikeable by design. The show does very little to make him cool or sympathetic; we root for him because his zealous devotion to advancing science happens to be taking a lot of different causes in the right direction.

The problem is that the show’s commitment to making Bill a prickly crank makes Virginia’s relationship to him hard to buy. Initially, she was exploiting his feelings towards her for a job, and then to become a part of the work he believed in. But the spark of connection that’s required to make us believe a real emotional connection between the two could develop isn’t there. Perhaps the show is choosing a clinical approach to the romance to match the circumstances of its courtship. But that would only explain why the Virginia-Masters relationship is so lifeless -it doesn’t excuse it.

Masters of Sex is that rare program that grows into a fully formed show in only one season. It’s managed to examine sex and gender dynamics better than any show in recent memory because it knows and proves these are topics you can write a whole show about. What’s still up in the air is whether it can make the core relationship of that show as meaningful and entertaining as all the great material swirling around it. 

After reading review, after analysis, after hatchet job on this thing, it seemed about time to finally watch Mark Webb’s corporate-mandated follow-up to 2012’s rather poor Spider-Man reboot. This might be another case, like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles earlier this week, where rock-bottom expectations braced me for a pummeling that turned out to be less disastrous than I had prepared for.

Going into TAS:2 fully aware of its many, many flaws (including: a bloated, nonsensical and stitched together plot; a protagonist without an actual arc; questionable performance choices by Dane DeHaan and Jamie Fox as the villains), the viewing experience became much more about looking for those places Webb, and vilified writers Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman, went right, instead of pointing out the very obvious ways the whole thing is a giant mess.

In many scenes of TAS:2 you can tell there was a nugget of an interesting idea that’s been buried by the shaky structure of the project. There are these fleeting instances of things I’ve never seen in a superhero movie, ones that actually seem progressive by the standards of the genre, regardless of studio. But they stand out for their novelty by also being anomalies, as TAS:2 still has to be the clanking mass of CG spectacle and setpieces that is the modern superhero movie.

Example: there’s a lot to Jamie Foxx’s Electro that’s really half-assed (2014: the year we proved evil German scientists are still a thing), but his first action scene with Spider-Man is a minor-revolution for resisting being an action scene for so long. When he and Spidey first meet in Times Square, a lengthy amount of time is spent with Spider-Man acting as a negotiator, trying to talk down Electro before he goes ballistic. Of course, he inevitably will, but before they square off, the film does take the time to show how Spider-Man’s power lies in being a mediator and a friend, not just an ass-kicker.

Peter Parker is a non-entity in his own movie, as he does nothing but try to fight the changes in his life. For a blockbuster, a hero without a well-paced story is usually a killer. Yet, a smaller Spider-Man movie in this vein could be a revelation. There’s never been a superhero movie focusing on day-to-day life of superheroics; the latest threat to the world and all existence is always waiting right around the corner. TAS:2 is narratively spineless, which accounts for why so many scenes have no idea what tone or visual style to maintain, but a picture about Peter Parker’s sacrifices to be Spider-Man that’s 75% character study, 25% superhero film, could bring a set of fresh eyes to the genre.

And the last big thing that TAS:2 does right, against all odds, is maybe the most depressing thing about it. There’s finally an interesting female lead role in one of these things, and its overwhelming incompetence in other places overshadows that fact. With Gwen Stacey, we’ve finally got a superhero love interest that isn’t just the love interest. Her entire conflict with Peter through the film is about her having an internal life and existence outside of her boyfriend; yes, it would be pretty life-changing to be dating a superhero, but just like Peter, life itself doesn’t get put on hold. Gwen spends most of the movie making independent decisions for herself, even when it comes time for the action-packed finale. When Spider-Man is fighting goons by himself, the film is mostly generic, but by having Gwen as treated as an equal participant and partner, there’s a dynamic and a character type at play in TAS:2’s finale that elevates it substantially.

Of course, adherence to comic book lore means that TAS:2 is probably the last we’ll be seeing of Gwen, and that’s a real shame. There are blatant structural and exposition purposes for why she plays as big a role as she does, and some might argue that the time invested in Gwen is what prevents the film’s protagonist from having his own arc. But the reason the Peter-Gwen scenes have always worked best in these Webb films is because they get to the heart of the Spider-Man character better than any action scene can. Responsibility, compassion, and foolish youth are what define this character, not spandex and a spidey sense. You can tell that Webb, and maybe even Orci and Kurtzman, know this too. It’s just a shame that making a film dedicated to those qualities scares studios, who instead trade on cloying sentiment to cover up plot holes, all so that you can shove popcorn in your mouth while New York gets blown up for the 10,000th time. 

The Dissolve is doing their Movie of the Week on MacGruber, a 2010 SNL movie that I watched maybe half of a year ago before turning it off. It’s got a reputation for being divisive, but many people I follow in the comedy world hold it in high regard. The movie is less revered in the film community, but has always seemed ripe for cult status, as all SNL movies can be. Finding out where you land on such a film is fun in and of itself, so after finally watching the whole thing, I can say the appeal of MacGruber makes a lot more sense to me.

Sad as it sounds, something like Sharknado is the closest thing we have to a classic ZAZ parody like Airplane! or The Naked Gun. Not in terms of quality, mind you, but because it’s an effects-driven parody for an effects-driven market. Flight disaster films and cop movies were prime targets for parody in the ‘80s because they were genres that had many different entries to draw material from, and could be easily mimicked. With superhero movies and city-scale destruction now being the norm for action movies, the dominant public entertainment in film in desperate need of a good pantsing has become too big to mock.

Where the Meet the Spartans and Epic Movies of the world are just bad pop culture sketches strung together, the best parody films satirize a genre’s form, as well as its content. Blazing Saddles and Spaceballs are as much homage as they are funhouse mirror to their source material. The truest parody asks that you look the part before you open your mouth. But how do you silly walk the walk of a colossal blockbuster, when so much of their content is pretty visual effects, and the story is often secondary to setpiece placement?

Anyway, MacGruber is pretty hit and miss as a comedy, par for the course for any SNL film, but as a parody of shows like its TV namesake, as well as ‘80s action films, it’s a terrific success. The SNL digital shorts became properly, in part, because their production values allowed them to recall the formal qualities of whatever they mocked, be it music video, or action scene. MacGruber successfully trades on the camera intensity and high key lighting of post Tony Scott-Hollywood, while also having a cheapness that makes it look like an episode of TV.

The movie, structurally, is also a mutt. Most individual scenes are little more than sketches, the premise being “how badly can MacGruber screw things up?” But the punchline often determines where it is the plot will head next. Like MacGruber himself, the film rushes headlong at a joke, and through dumb luck and persistence, somehow makes it work. The movie employs its titular hero like a rubber band, stretching his actions from goofy, to careless, to disgusting or despicable, but once it hits the vein of laugh it’s been working toward, MacGruber contracts back to being a movie again, ready to repeat the whole process at whichever next plot point has been established.  

MacGruber and MacGruber are the product of guys raised on ‘80s action heroes; they can effectively satirize the horrible one-liners, violence, and hair of guys from Rambo, to Maverick, to Riggs, but they love the blissful stupidity of these guys all the same. The nostalgia that lets director Jorma Taccone and company know their targets so well is also what lets their more immature instincts get the better of them a lot of the time. These are comedians working in the 21st century, so MacGruber was inevitably going to be more scatological and filthy than any of its ‘80s, or TV inspirations.

But that also means MacGruber’s creators are old enough to appreciate the storytelling tropes worth goofing on in action movies, and use those to give their parody a form. This is ultimately what allows MacGruber to have its lasting appeal. The Seltzer-Friedberg era of parody may be as much a product of choosing structurally weak source material as it is S & F’s awful writing. Guardians of the Galaxy and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles are going to be the two biggest movies this weekend, but how would you satirize a film that’s all about having a good time while chasing a McGuffin, or one that already plays like an imitation of Transformers? I guess my real question after watching MacGruber is: are we making anything worth celebrating through satire anymore?