proximoception | (no subject)

For those caught up: wha'd you make of the Mad Men? Not great, I thought. The Don strand of the next to last one sure was. I think overall it was a weirdly mixed series. Very high highs, but of uncertain duration, even in those peak middle seasons. Which I guess is the story of almost every series ever and not weird at all, but it's weird for one that could get as good as that to not stay better. Twin Peaks was swiss-cheesy, but that was explainable by network pressures and a long Lynch absence. The Wire 2 and 5 were slight miscalculations rather than lapses, and work more than fine once you adjust.

Did the ultra-short scenes come in fairly late in the run? Like season 5 or so? I think they both helped and hurt - they pulled it away from what wasn't working or was merely connective tissue, but could create the impression of mere stuff happening, seeming to suggest we weren't to take much note of what went down when we were. Do other series even use those? Live action, anyway. They must be a bitch to film.

Threaded | Top-Level Comments Only

The season wasn't my favorite. I hated a bunch of the finale. It's actually retroactively ruining my trust in the writers and making me bitter. So many of the resolutions felt undeserved. Still processing.

Yeah, don't jar me unless you're telling me something. The final thing at least had a meaning, it just wasn't a very interesting one. Consumerism will coopt even anti-consumerism. This is a note to end on? Eesh.

What was the Christmas Story line? "A CRUMMY AD?"

Had so much time passed that we forgot what a piece of crap Pete Campbell is? Why did they turn Ken Cosgrove into a cartoon?

Jon Hamn's NY Times interview saved me on Don but his arc in the final episode was so rushed.

I watched a bit of season one and there's something to the idea of the lie being more real, or more important, than the truth. Consumerism being just a vehicle for a necessary, life-affirming unreality that has to be fought for. But Don never struck me as empty enough to be in a show about emptiness, or rather, the things he has done to combat emptiness proved long ago that he isn't empty. And so the existential crisis Harmon was trying to epiphanize to me was solved a long time ago.

But, what I wanted to say was: Community's ending: Best ending ever?

I think my medication issues may have affected how the latter half of Community season 6 hit me. A lot felt somehow both brilliant and irrelevant, finale included, as though beamed in from some alternate universe's version of the show.

In also reminded me a bit of Trader Joes versions of common junk food staples, like Lays and Oreos. They simultaneously taste more like real food, hence in many senses a bot better, than what they're mocking, but have also left out whatever chemicals require you scarf more. Such that they sit around in your cupboard for like a year till you remember to throw them out. 6 seemed maybe even better than 5, at times, but it wasn't a better that actually needed watching. And 5 had a bit of that Trader Joes issue itself, just much less.

I wonder what I'm dancing around. Maybe the creators were losing interest in their puppets exactly when they were achieving full mastery as puppeteers? One reason to doubt all of this is that I feel pretty much the same about the latest five Adventure Time episodes. Might just signify insufficient processing by me of some necessary and fruitful but very new direction. Maybe rewatching will help retrain me.