(no subject)

[proximoception]

Deadwood's up with Parks and Recreation when it comes to absurd second season improvement - in both cases one should really just read a brief plot summary of season one. No clue where the show's going but everyone and everything's suddenly interesting. Most interesting thing about the Shakespearean trappings is that they're being gotten away with - don't feel annoying, derivative or desperate. Reminds me of some of the better Romantic attempts to imitate him, e.g. Danton's Death and some of Musset's efforts, where you're surprised to find selected mannerisms of his successfully acting as genre. Bloom insists Shakespeare wrote no genre. Perhaps he got away with this by becoming one? Makes one wonder just how this works - a sort of digression, where traditional genres and character types are suggested and then overloaded with individualizing details such that we join the characters' resistance to further invasions of narrative staleness because we feel they don't deserve it? A separation of person and role we tolerate because of how closely it fits our own recurrent splittings. Webster imitated everything but this, and interestingly comes across as imitating nothing; Buchner pretty much this only, and feels like the only play he's ever heard of is Hamlet.

Hannibal's improved too, though it started well enough, or anyway very prettily. It's getting into oddly Bloomian waters itself with some of the shifting relationships among the tiny number of leads. And is odd in general - most startling relaunch of a mainstream franchise I can think of, about on par with letting David Cronenberg remake Star Wars, or Wed Anderson Harry Potter. Presumably they'll cancel it any second now.