Film: Movie Review: The Central Park Five

Ken Burns’ documentary The Central Park Five departs from his usual style, perhaps because it’s a collaboration with his daughter Sarah (who previously wrote a book about the subject of this film) and her husband David McMahon; or perhaps because it’s not a look back at America’s distantly painful past, but rather about a fresher wound. The movie begins with a montage of New York in the 1980s, establishing the context of a city dealing with the early days of the AIDS epidemic, the rise of crack cocaine, a decade of fiscal crises, and—above all—escalating racial tension, exacerbated by gang violence, police brutality, and vigilantism. Then, in 1989, a white, female investment banker was raped and beaten in Central Park, on a night when there were reports of mobs of black youths rampaging through the park. The police rounded up a group of Harlem teenagers, and after grueling interrogations, got confessions out of five of them. Almost as soon as they’d been charged, the teens withdrew their confessions, saying they’d been coerced; but with enraged citizens demanding justice, “The Central Park Five” were tried a little over a year after the crime and quickly imprisoned. They served out their terms, after which the emergence of a new suspect led New York to exonerate them, belatedly.

The Central Park Five tells this story largely via interviews with the Five themselves, supplemented with archival news footage and atmospheric shots of the locations where these events took place. Missing from the film—because they declined to participate—are the rape victim, her actual attacker, or anyone from the police or the prosecution. And though there’s explanatory on-screen text throughout, the movie has no narrator. So unlike the comprehensive, authoritative voice of most of Burns’ documentaries, The Central Park Five is more subjective, bordering on claustrophobic as it walks viewers step by step through how five kids became the most reviled people in New York City, even though the contradictions in their statements and the lack of DNA evidence should’ve provoked more skepticism. 

That closed-off quality costs The Central Park Five some drama. This is a movie about a rush to judgment in a city on edge, and it never expands its scope or meaning over the course of its two-hour running time. But the specifics make the story powerful regardless. The accused explain what being interrogated was like, and how they eventually agreed to the police’s theory of the case because they were exhausted and because each one individually was told he’d get off easy if he just admitted he was there. Similarly, the one juror who was a holdout during the first trial says that he finally voted guilty because he was tired of the other jurors yelling at him. Meanwhile, the police and prosecution followed protocol, and the press and public took what the authorities said at face value, because the facts of the case mattered less than what it represented: a city fighting back against the thugs, whether they were guilty of anything or not.

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Film: Movie Review: Rust And Bone

After lighting up Cannes with A Prophet, his sober yet gripping thriller about an Algerian immigrant who works his way up the prison hierarchy, director Jacques Audiard invited (and received) ridicule with Rust And Bone, a silly-sounding love story between a street fighter and a whale trainer who loses both legs to an orca. But the two films are not as far removed as they seem, in both spirit and quality: Both continue Audiard’s practice of filtering American genre fare through a more overtly poetic sensibility; both are about broken men coming to terms with their masculinity; and both are bold, supremely confident pieces of filmmaking, unafraid to court a little embarrassment in service of the big gesture. It says something that Audiard’s “killer whale movie” stages its most emotional moment to a Katy Perry song and still deserves to be taken seriously. 

Many of the torments facing Matthias Schoenaerts in Rust And Bone are strikingly similar to those in Schoenaerts’ breakthrough role in Bullhead as a ’roided-up henchman in the black-market cattle-hormone trade. Schoenaerts and his 5-year-old son have hitchhiked their way to live with his working-class sister (Celine Sallette) while he gets his act together. He picks up a few odd jobs, but he’s a brawler by build and by nature, and it eventually lands him a position as a nightclub bouncer. One night he saves Marion Cotillard, a Marineworld trainer, from a melee at the club and drives her home, where he’s again called upon to protect her, this time from a jealous, violent boyfriend. The two part amicably, but Cotillard comes back into Schoenaerts’ life after the accident robs her of both legs and wounds her in less visible ways, too. 

Based on Craig Davidson’s short-story collection, Rust And Bone is a deft, sidewinding drama about two people overcoming disabilities in body and soul. There’s something deeply romantic about the ways each of them try, consciously or not, to rehabilitate the other, and great complexity, too, in the schism that develops when one comes closer to being whole than the other. Cotillard and Schoenaerts have a raw chemistry that’s unquantifiable yet totally convincing, even though her character seems like the last person to accompany a Neanderthal like him to an underground street-fighting match. The film stumbles a little with a deus ex machina ending that hastily attempts to glue the fractured bits of narrative back together, but Audiard’s conviction strengthens the seal. In his hands, something as simple as a dip in the ocean becomes a vivid, sunkissed, restorative paradise.

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Comedy: Newswire: Patton Oswalt, Red Dawn, and more this week on The A.V. Club

New this week:
We eased into our end-of-the-year coverage by catching up with some of the albums that fell through the cracks this year. This week, we reviewed Woods and Menomena, which were both respectable. We also reviewed Alt-J, which somehow wasn’t as good. 

Don’t miss:

We celebrated Thanksgiving in many ways, although being slobs in front of the TV seems to be a common thread.We did, however, have our turkey day more together than these 20 impromptu TV Thanksgivings.Kyle Kinane kicked off the holiday season with a joyous account of how much he hates “Little Drummer Boy.”  Intrepid gamer John Teti tested out the Wii U for all of us, and he had some not-great things to say about it. Specifically, he noted “Not even a key party in The Castro would force its guests to dick around with so many weird-looking toys.”Reasonable Discussions tackled the age-old question of burning out vs. fading away, thanks to a reader question about the new Soundgarden and Green Day albums.Mos Def’s ex-wife has a poorly written, hanger-on’s tell-all that’s positively full of breathless tales of handsome men. How could we not read it for Silly Little Show-Biz Book Club?Breckin Meyer plays a liberal blogger who threatens to move to Canada after John Kerry loses the 2004 election. Rather than the setup to a really crappy joke, that’s the plot of a really crappy movie that made its way straight to Commentary Tracks Of The Damned.Julia Child tried to teach us how to cook with these 10 episodes of The French Chef, but we still plopped our cranberry sauce out of a can.Annie Zaleski talked about the record that brought sexy back to indie rock.Patton Oswalt had some advice for Dane Cook, and was willing to share it with you, along with stories from pretty much his entire film and television career.We passed out somewhere around the ninth slice of turkey, but if we hadn’t, this article on 30 Rock’s unlikely longevity would have inspired us to do a marathon.Avanti! reminded us how falling for a movie can be like falling in love.Guy Fieri and Saturday Night Live reminded us that laughing at your desk like an idiot can be a really nice break in the day.Jason Heller grappled with hardcore’s aging problem as new releases from Green Day and Bad Brains make him question whether the genre was ever supposed to grow old.Meanwhile, Kathleen Hanna still sees reasons to keep the riot grrrl movement alive with a new label and new Bikini Kill reissues. She also said some pretty great things about feminism.We made you a mixlist of 15 songs about VD. It is the inevitable follow-up to last week’s songs about porn.

What are we arguing about this week?
A New York Times trend piece about hipsters and irony did everything that combination of words was meant to do by lighting the Internet up in defense. Josh Modell saw it as an opportunity to say some nice, heartfelt things. 

This weekend:
See: Life Of Pi offers gorgeous visuals from director Ang Lee. Or there’s Red Dawn, if you’re trying really hard to avoid greatness.
Read: Marvel Comics: The Untold Story by Sean Howe tells the exhaustive history of the publishing house, including the rift between Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, and Marvel’s early ’00s renaissance. 
Listen to: Massive Attack’s excellent Blue Lines, which gets the reissue treatment 20-plus years later. Or listen to Rihanna’s new record if you want to feel really uncomfortable about celebrity and society.
Laugh at: Kyle Kinane’s second comedy album, Whiskey Icarus, gets an A from Genevieve Koski.
Watch: Ben And Kate has its best episode yet, and Parenthood gets an A, while New Girl, Happy Endings, and Don’t Trust the B---- In Apartment 23 turn in solid Thanksgiving episodes.

The A.V. Club in your town:
Prepare yourselves, Chicago. Our New Cult Canon tour is bringing Bad Santa to the Lincoln Hall Wednesday, November 28. We’ll pretty much all be there, and we’re bringing director Terry Zwigoff along for a post-show Q&A. Then we’re sending Zwigoff and Nathan Rabin straight to Seattle for a second screening and Q&A on Thursday, November 29 at Central Cinema. Both screenings will have free samples of Mike’s Hard Lemonade. To buy tickets and see whether the tour is coming to your town, check out our website for the schedule. 

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Film: Movie Review: Hitchcock

There’s a pretty clear line separating the good scenes from the bad scenes in Hitchcock, a biopic about the battle to make 1960’s Psycho, the shocker that ushered in the modern era of horror films. The good scenes find Hitchcock on set or in studio offices, asserting his creative vision in the face of executive resistance, despite having just ended his peak decade with North By Northwest, one of his biggest hits. The bad scenes are the ones that have nothing to do with making movies, or are so tangential to the process that they don’t have any relevance. This is the fatal mistake made by so many artist biopics: Assuming that the banal details of an artist’s personal life can illuminate his work or make it seem more compelling than it was already. In the case of Alfred Hitchcock, here was a man staking his reputation on a project of unprecedented audacity. What does it matter that it put a mild strain on his marriage? 

Based on Stephen Rebello’s Alfred Hitchcock And The Making Of Psycho—a book widely acclaimed for a meticulousness that’s lacking here—Hitchcock stars a bejowled Anthony Hopkins as the Master of Suspense, whom he plays as a caustic wit whose confidence reads to others as bullying and arrogance. Nearly as much attention is given to Hitchcock’s devoted but long-suffering wife Alma Reville (Helen Mirren), who gets little credit or reward for her stabilizing presence at home and on set. With imitators nipping at his heels, Hitchcock feels pressure to take a bold creative leap, but he drums up little enthusiasm for Psycho, a grisly tale in which the star dies at the end of Act One. After failing to secure studio financing, Hitchcock opts to produce the film independently and stakes his own personal fortune on it, over Reville’s objections. 

Making his feature debut, director Sacha Gervasi follows up his fine documentary Anvil: The Story Of Anvil with another story about the perils of uncompromising creative endeavor, but his Hitchcock goes only a step beyond caricature. While it’s great fun to see Hitchcock terrorizing Janet Leigh (Scarlett Johansson) and his collaborators or anticipating the precise response of the audience he’s playing like a fiddle, his domestic crises are substantially less compelling. Hitchcock asserts Reville as the unsung hero of the Master’s oeuvre, a meticulous planner, gifted writer, and important sounding board who neither received proper acknowledgement nor worked outside her husband’s sphere. But their marital scrapes look absurdly petty in relation to a watershed moment like Psycho, an irreducible achievement that’s cheapened every time Gervasi wanders away from it. History is history; the rest is trivia.

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Eat/Drink: AVQ&A: The worst foods we love

by The A.V. Club Staff November 23, 2012

Welcome back to AVQ&A, where we throw out a question for discussion among the staff and readers. Consider this a prompt to compare notes on your interface with pop culture, to reveal your embarrassing tastes and experiences, and to ponder how our diverse lives all led us to convene here together. Got a question you’d like us and the readers to answer? E-mail us at avcqa@theonion.com.

On Thanksgiving, it’s a tradition to focus on food—and to eat certain hearty, relatively healthy foods, like turkey, potatoes, vegetables, and breads. But the other 364 days a year, we’re surrounded by fast foods, snack foods, and non-foods, packed with empty calories and emptier food-substitute chemicals. Which often doesn’t stop us. What’s the unhealthiest food you love and eat more often than you should?

Tasha Robinson
The Pringles Taste Test reminded me that Pringles exist, so I promptly went and got some and ate them. And with every chip, I thought, “What is the appeal of these things? They’re so clearly potato paste, spice dust, and salt.” It’s probably just as well I forget about them for years on end, because in spite of the complete lack of apparent food content, they’re awfully addictive once you get started. Still, they don’t hold a candle to crunchy Cheetos, which are composed entirely of Styrofoam and cheeze-flavor powder, as far as I can tell. I can only justify buying them for occasional parties, but they’re the most useless foodstuff I’m likely to gravitate toward. Mmmmm, faux-cheeze-flavoring.

Sarah Collins
I don’t know why you say “faux-cheeze-flavoring” with that slight hint of shame, Tasha, because I will eat just about any foodstuff covered in tasty, oddly colored powder. I pretty much only have parties as an excuse to buy barbecue potato chips and Cool Ranch Doritos, two foods that completely zap the little self-control I do have. Cool Ranch in particular is an imaginary flavor I’ve been trying to harness for years. I still think it would make a good rub for relatively flavorless tilapia filets, and now that this exists, I probably will begin seasoning all my foods with the crunchy, salty, tangy flakes. At least I won’t have to ask why when my untimely death comes around. 

Claire Zulkey
In college, I discovered Kraft macaroni and cheese. I was always aware of mac and cheese, but my fancy-ass mom never made the boxed variety. (I believe we were a Stouffer’s family.) But sophomore year, a roommate of mine used to make a box, eat half of it, leave the rest in the kitchen, and wander off. I, like a desperate hyena, would scavenge, and it was there that I developed a taste for the salty, carby treat, the base of which consisted of my very favorite vice (pasta), mixed with one of my other favorite vices (cheese, or at least in the Kraft version, something that resembles it). Other food obsessions have come and gone (Nutri-Grain bars, Quaker chewy granola bars, Pop Tarts) but I still love me some mac and cheese. Most of the time now I eat something quasi-healthy like Amy’s frozen version of the meal, or make my own, but now and then I reach for the blue box, make it, and unlike my old roommate, eat the whole damn thing.

Marah Eakin
I unabashedly love two things made almost entirely out of chemicals. I blame my mom for letting me eat them constantly as a child. One is Hostess Cupcakes—the chocolate ones, not the not-chocolate ones. Those are made of pure animal fat and some kind of grain that humans shouldn’t eat, but I love them all the same. I’ve had to limit myself to only eating them on very long road trips that I take by myself, meaning I eat them maybe once a year, if that. I’m also “allowed” to eat them if I’m very sick, because then I deserve them. The other chemically processed food I just love is SpaghettiOs. I only like the ones with meatballs (if you can call them that), and I consciously think, every bite I take, about how unabashedly fake they taste and smell, and I love them all the same. Those, I basically have to just not ever buy, because if I own them, I will eat them, and while they’re not incredibly bad for you, they’re certainly not good. 

Marcus Gilmer
I know it’s not that popular across the rest of the country, but I’m obsessed with anything and everything from Popeye’s, particularly the fried chicken. It dates back to when I lived in New Orleans and the chain was everywhere. But one of my fondest post-Katrina memories is waiting in line for two hours with friends to get Popeye’s when the first location opened after the storm. Of all the lines I waited in, that was the best. And when I moved to Chicago in 2006, the first thing I did was locate my nearest Popeye’s. This year, I’m even ordering their cajun turkey special for our Thanksgiving dinner. That’s how much I love it.

John Semley
Without a doubt, the No. 1 offender is pepperettes. Maybe pepperoni more generally, but especially as neat little prepackaged pepperette salt sticks. When I was a kid, never much for sweets, I used to put ’em down in pack-a-day doses, driven by Macho Man Randy Savage’s demand that I “SNAP INTO A SLIM JIM, HO YEAAAAAUUUGH!” As an adult, tastes (barely) refined, I buy salted, cured, nitrate-injected meat sticks of all sizes and compositions: pork, turkey, beef, as long as they’re crammed with paprika. Besides being actually the most delicious thing that exists in the world, pepperettes are also insanely addictive. Every time I open my fridge, and they’re there, I’m helpless. And like an actual, defenseless compulsive, I’ve even bothered to develop my own slang around pepperette consumption (“Snappin’ sticks,” “Rockin’ rods,” etc.).

Noel Murray
I completely overhauled my diet two years ago, and now eat mainly simply prepared meats, fruits, nuts and vegetables, with little to no grains (meaning rice, corn, oats, and wheat), just a little bit of dairy, and not much sugar beyond what’s naturally occurring in those fruits and vegetables. I’ll still eat a bit of fresh pastry or a handful of tortilla chips every now and then, but I’m more or less out of the junk-food/fast-food business: I avoid fried foods, potato chips, packaged baked goods, and candy (aside from dark chocolate squares, which are allowed). But I cannot stop myself from consuming ice cream. On the scale of bad things I could eat, ice cream isn’t so terrible, I realize. It’s possible to get ice cream made with all-natural ingredients that tastes delicious and is relatively healthful. But it’s also possible to go through a drive-through and get a cup of processed chemicals topped with peanut butter and Oreos, which is what I tend to go for. I’ve finally gotten some measure of control over my ice-cream habit by admitting I’m never going to get over it, and giving myself permission to get one big ice-treat (or two smaller ones) each weekend. It’s my one planned “cheat.”

Phil Dyess-Nugent
My favorite food is Kentucky Fried Chicken, or KFC, as the corporate lawyers beg us to call it now, though anything that chain sells that isn’t fried is clearly the work of the devil. (I love that the characters in Killer Joe refer to it as “K-fried-C.” Does anyone know if that’s a Tracy Letts invention, or is it really a snotty colloquialism used by subversive KFC purists? I grew up on this shit, and I can be irrational about it; I remember reading (in Big Mac, Max Boas’ unauthorized biography of Ray Kroc and McDonald’s) the story of how Harland Sanders, one of the great home cooks turned entrepreneurs of his day, developed and perfected his recipe and drove around the country selling his pressure-cooker system; I remember it the way you’re supposed to remember the first time you read about the pilgrims landing at Plymouth Rock. Of course, the Colonel got screwed when he sold his likeness and recipe to the big-money bastards, and they’ve watered down his perfect formula: They don’t even cut the breasts right anymore, the sons of bitches. But whenever I look at that red-and-white logo, I feel like I’ve just come home.

Kyle Ryan
I’ve considered tailoring my exercise regimen to whatever would allow me to drink about 20 ounces of Coca-Cola every day without becoming a fat-ass. Yes, I know it’s bad for my teeth, supposedly leeches nutrients from my bones, and doesn’t agree with me on an empty stomach, but I adore it all the same. My friends, family, and co-workers know my devotion to Coke borders on fanatical, as they’ve witnessed me trying not to go Joe Pesci on a waiter who says “Pepsi okay?” after I ask for a Coke. NO, IT’S NOT OKAY, PAL. (If they have Dr Pepper, I’m mollified, as I love that too, but it isn’t common in Chicago.) But I generally avoid those situations, because a restaurant’s beverage setup heavily informs my decision to eat there. A fountain that has a good mix—very important—with free refills occasionally trumps the quality of the food in my mind, which helps explain my patronage of the Subway by the A.V. Club office. Pepsi, off-brand cola, some bullshit “artisan” house-made cola? Please. Give me Coke, or GTFO.

Jason Heller
A couple years ago, I got in shape and started eating healthy, so I’ve actually been pretty successful so far (knock on wood) of counteracting a life’s worth of negligent, indiscriminate eating habits. Potato chips and pretzels are still a huge temptation, but even then, I might indulge in a bag of Lay’s maybe once a month. Harder to avoid, though: donuts and pastries—particularly the variety that can be found at coffee shops. As a freelance writer who can’t properly concentrate at home, I wander from café to café here in Denver most days, guzzling black coffee and working on my laptop. Of course, there’s always a mouth-watering array of goodies in the pastry cases of these places, including a couple of coffee shops in town that stock donuts. (Statistically speaking, Denver is one of the healthiest cities in the nation, and one where donuts are not popular or prevalent at all compared to the rest of the country.) But it isn’t just donuts. Fruit danishes? Almond croissants? Scones? At least once a week, I have to indulge—which isn’t that bad a lapse, all things considered. And at least these treats are usually locally made, rather than crapped out of a factory. Not that my conscience really figures into this; the fact that I have a sugar crash and feel like utter shit a few minutes after I eat these things is enough of a deterrent. 

Keith Phipps
I’ve tried to phase the most egregiously unhealthy items out of my diet in recent years, because as I get older, it’s become apparent that dietary choices have consequences. But since rules don’t apply when you’re out of town, or at least dietary rules don’t seem to, I tend to indulge on the (now rare) occasions when I’m on the road. This past weekend, I took my first road trip that didn’t involve chasing many handfuls of Combos with a 20 oz. bottle of Coke, and I’m kind of proud of that. True, the trip began with a trip to Dunkin’ Donuts, but hey, it’s still progress.

Erik Adams
I haven’t done the due diligence on this, but it’s probably a good thing I don’t drink Slurpees (or their non-union, non-7-Eleven equivalents) as often as I did during my days as a bored suburban teenager with little more than a driver’s license and a 52-ounce refillable X-Treme Gulp to my name. It can be said without certainty that I dodged a type-2 diabetes bullet by retiring the big red mug—especially after I followed the lead of my college roommate and cut the insulation out of the thing, making certain I could get twice the icy corn syrup for the same low refill charge. When summer temperatures heat up, I’ll still dip into the frozen Coke once or twice, but these days, I opt for a more reasonable serving size—one that can fit in a standard-size cup holder, for starters.

Genevieve Koski
I’m appalled when I think of how much McDonald’s I used to eat during my adolescence and early adulthood, when my metabolism ran at roughly the same capacity as a blast furnace and I thought little of mowing down Value Meals several times a week. With age, I’ve gained some better judgment and a more refined palate (and a couple of inches here and there), but I still haven’t found anything to fill the McDonald’s french fry-shaped hole in my life, so I still allow myself to indulge from time to time. Sure, they may not be the best-quality fries, prone to the whims of whatever bored teenager is manning the fryer and salt-duster that day, and they may only be palatable during the three-minute window between “blisteringly hot and crispy” and “room-temperature wads of salty wet cotton,” but I just can’t shake whatever strange power they have over me. It’s not just the fries’ fatty, carby goodness at play—all french fries have that—but rather the indescribable, un-reproducible flavor afforded to them by the beef-flavored oil they’re cooked in and the secret “natural flavoring” McDonald’s adds. The almost certainly illicit secrecy surrounding McDonald’s fries only adds to the nutritional and societal guilt they induce, but at least I can take comfort in knowing I’m not alone in my vice: French fries are more profitable for McDonald’s than hamburgers, and James Beard and Julia Child purportedly loved the damn things.

Joel Keller
This is something that pretty much only people from New Jersey can understand, but if I could eat a Taylor ham, egg, and cheese sandwich on a hard roll for breakfast every day for the rest of my life, I’d be a happy man. For those of you in the other 49 states, let me give you a primer on Taylor ham, or pork roll as it’s known in its more generic form: It’s composed and pressed, cured and salted. Then it’s usually sliced and slapped on a griddle by your friendly neighborhood diner or deli (or by you… it’s available in every supermarket in the state) until it has some nice sear marks on it. Then it’s put on the roll with a fried or scrambled egg and melted American cheese. Salt, pepper, and ketchup are added if you wish. (I usually eat it unadorned.) What does it taste like? Think Spam, but with a sharper, smokier flavor, which increases the longer the slices spend on the flattop. As far as I’m concerned, if the slices are thin and almost crispy, that’s the sweet spot for me. The sandwich is a cardiologist’s nightmare—it’s full of bad fat, loaded with salt, and jammed with cholesterol. It’s all usually made worse by diners and delis that butter the rolls and cook the ham on a flattop that carries the oils of every pork product that came before it that day. But holy shit, is it good eatin’.

Steve Heisler
When I was a camp counselor in the Northwoods of Wisconsin, Culver’s abounded. It’s a big Midwest thing, so I’d understand if you’d never heard of it (the place mat at Culver’s has all their locations on it, and a good 85 percent are in Wisconsin alone). Basically, it’s a fast-food chain that I consider a cut above the rest. They serve these things called “butter burgers,” which are one part burger, eight parts butter. The buns are fried, and they are delicious. Culver’s also has frozen custard and cheese curds, and lemon ice coolers mixed with fruit. It’s everything a guilty-pleasure summer night was made for. When I used to drive to college from Chicago to St. Louis, there was one Culver’s in the Bloomington-Normal area that was exactly halfway between the two cities. I stopped there every time, and to this day, I insist we stop at one any time I’m within a few dozen miles. Because in New York, they have things like “trans fat laws” and “decency,” and it’s disgusting. Give me Culver’s, or give me death! Sometimes and death from heart failure!

Nathan Rabin
This is a tough one for me, because I almost exclusively eat total crap. For much of the past year I have enjoyed Qdoba’s Mexican Gumbo, which is essentially a mildly classed-up version of the KFC “bowl of sadness” Patton Oswalt reviewed so memorably for us back in the day. It’s a thick, gooey mass of rice and beans and cheese and sour cream and meats. Christ, my arteries are congealing just writing those words, but oh dear, is the Mexican Gumbo ever tasty. I don’t eat it with the frequency I once did, but I’m not ready to quit it any time soon, and yes, Qdoba, I would happily accept all manner of free meals in exchange for this free plug. Thank you for offering. 

Will Harris
Having managed to successfully maintain a low-carb lifestyle since April and lose 50-plus pounds in the process, I’ve come to realize a) how many incredibly unhealthy foods were staples of my diet, and b) that losing 50-plus pounds is absolutely no substitute for the brief, transient joy these foods brought into my life. Sure, I’ll probably live longer, but at what cost? Fortunately, I’ve been on this diet long enough and successfully enough that I’m feeling more comfortable about making the occasional questionable choices in my diet, which means that I’ve gone back to eating Chinese food on a more regular basis than I really should. It’s not that I can’t find semi-low-carb items on a buffet or takeout menu, but that pretty much defeats the purpose of eating Chinese. I need the greasy spring rolls, the hot and sour soup, the fried rice, and the sauce-enveloped General Tso’s Chicken, or whatever my meal of choice may be. I know it’s bad for me, but that’s just the way it’s gonna be.

Cory Casciato
My wife has done a pretty good job of banishing most of the crap from my diet (thanks, honey!) but I still have a weak spot for convenience-store nachos. I can’t even begin to guess why I find the combination of the lowest-quality corn chips available to the public, toxic orange goo, and a heap of pickled jalapenos so appealing, but it is simply irresistible. To make it worse, I always have to buy a Coke to wash the whole mess down, so my I get a nice double gut-bomb. At least I finally broke myself of the habit of eating them for breakfast…

Zack Handlen
I’ve managed to change my eating habits enough in the past five years that I don’t indulge as regularly as I used to, but every so often, I figure what the hell, and get a pint of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream. I have a few flavors I especially like; Stephen Colbert’s AmeriCone Dream is excellent, as is the Strawberry Cheesecake, or the Heath Bar Crunch, and while I can’t think of the name straight off, there was something with marshmallow and chocolate and graham crackers—oh right, S’Mores. I jog regularly, and I try not to eat terrible food every day of the week, but when it comes to B&J, the only real option is to not look at the ingredients, and down the whole thing in a sitting. As a comedian I once saw points out, that makes it basically a heroic act; I’m not a gluttonous sloth, I’m a man with a mission, and that mission is eating too much delicious, delicious ice cream.

Josh Modell
I had a tough time trying to think of an answer for this, because I love to eat and I don’t ever really feel ashamed about it. (This is not good for me, I realize.) Thanks to longtime Onion staffer Jun, our office is constantly stocked with candy and nuts, and I go in sprees where I don’t eat any for a few weeks and then eat it all. But I don’t feel bad. I crave—and generally track down and eat—a huge steak every couple of months. Like some of my co-workers, I will indulge in Culver’s burgers and frozen custard on occasion—sometimes, but rarely, on the same trip. (Plus, if you’re in the Milwaukee area already, there’s Kopp’s.) I also love to eat at fancy restaurants, and I won’t turn down the foie gras lollipop at Graham Elliot or candied sweetbreads at Schwa. So I guess my answer to this question is “anything and everything.” P.S.: I just died.

Marc Hawthorne
Thanks to Morrissey (via my high-school girlfriend), I’ve been a vegetarian for a very long time, but if I ever fall off the wagon, I already know exactly where I’m headed: Carl’s Jr., for their Western Bacon Cheeseburger. But in the meantime, I have an extremely soft spot for cheesecake, particularly New York style. I was first introduced to this magical dessert at a Jack In The Box in California, but I’ve since moved on to slices that aren’t served in plastic pouches. And it was only two weeks ago, while visiting Brooklyn, that I came into contact with the version that has stolen my sweet tooth: the plain at Junior’s, a place that is apparently insanely famous for its cheesecake but took a while to show up on my radar. My mom just asked me what I want for Thanksgiving dessert, and I’m about to spend 45 bucks to have one shipped out West.

Todd VanDerWerff
Let’s cook Franco-American (now Campbell’s) spaghetti in a can:

First, it’s 11:45 p.m., right? It’s not 11:45 p.m.? You have to wait. It’s gotta be 15 minutes before the store closes, so you can go there in a feverish haze and get lectured by security guards because you only need one thing, but not every store carries it anymore.Purchase one can of Campbell’s spaghetti in a can. Not Chef Boyardee. Don’t fuck this one up, okay?Head back home and assemble your ingredients: spaghetti can, pound of hamburger, diced onions that come in one of those spice-rack canisters, assorted spices, but mostly salt.Fry up that meat in your biggest skillet or frying pan. You want it nice and brown. Spatula it up, so it’s in little pieces. Somewhere in the middle of this, dump a bunch of onions in there. Probably season it, too. You’ll be able to see what you’re doing through your tears at some point, so just… do it then.You’ll want to open that can with a can opener. Probably now is good.Dump that can into the giant, frying pile of meat. Don’t worry about how it’s disgusting to look at, or how the little noodles stick together in a can shape, or how the sauce is properly described as “sauce-flavored.” Just don’t.Now fry everything together. Pour more onions in. Pour more seasoning in. Do you have some other stuff lying around? That probably needs to be in there, too.Serve it up on two plates: one for yourself, and one for your sweetie. (Helpful hint: When cooking spaghetti in a can (not Chef Boyardee), your sweetie is always yourself.)Enjoy! (Both plates!)

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Film: Great Job, Internet!: Caption Contest: What's in the minds of the Red Dawn cast?

In the interest of science, creativity, and the science of creativity, we're going to begin posting a film or TV still every week, and we're going to ask you to come up with a clever caption. Whoever's caption gets the most likes will win some kind of nonsense prize from The A.V. Club office, most likely a Simpsons toy of some sort. Last week's winner is brulio2415, who captioned the Twilight photo with "How about in dog years?" Nice job, brulio, but I think it would've been slightly funnier if you'd said, "How old is that in dog years?" Still, you win something. We'll be in touch.

Make sure you post your caption as a new comment, not as a reply, so we can sort out the winner. And though we know you'll be tempted to go for the easy, gross joke, remember that our commenting policy isn't out the window here. This week's still comes from the remake of Red Dawn, which opens today. My caption, to get you started:

"Okay, can you just scooch in a little bit? And if the bride could just give me a little bigger smile..."

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Books: Newswire: Happy Thanksgiving! (We’re going to lay low for a few days)

Hey, Happy Thanksgiving, everyone. (For non-U.S. readers, it’s a holiday we celebrate here.) The A.V. Club staff (pictured above) is going to take a few days off to celebrate, relax, and dream up exciting new content for everyone. That means no new content on Thursday—unless something alarmingly massive happens in the world of entertainment news—and a few items on Friday you'll want to read as soon as they post at midnight. (Or over the weekend. Or on Monday. Just read them.) 

In all seriousness, we are truly grateful for our readers, whose presence on this site allows us to make a living writing about pop culture. We think movies, television, music, books, etc., are all worth taking seriously, but we realize not everyone gets to make a profession out of our obsessions, and we appreciate you making that possible, just as we appreciate what each and every one of you (well, most of you) bring to the discussion in the comments. We want to make The A.V. Club a go-to destination for commentary, reviews, interviews, news, and other pop-culture related items, but also for a smart, fun community of likeminded people who enjoy each others’ company. You've helped turn it into that. Thanks.

View the original article here

Comedy: MusicalWork Review: Kyle Kinane: Whiskey Icarus

Kyle Kinane's Whiskey Icarus special airs on Comedy Central this Saturday, November 24, at 11 p.m. ET; the uncut and uncensored audio version will be available digitally on Tuesday, November 28.

Kyle Kinane is an exceptionally smart comedian who’s made a career out of acting stupid. He perpetuates and revels in his hobo-clown persona, characterizing himself on Whiskey Icarus as “Uncle Barbecue [telling] his dum-dum stories,” or perhaps “the wise high-school janitor,” the type of genial burnout who would name the tracks on his second stand-up album after the songs on Kiss’ Destroyer, just because. (He did the same thing with 2010’s Death Of The Party, only with Cheap Trick’s Dream Police.) But the mind behind that character is as sharp as they come, capable of sussing out the unexpected angles in an anecdote, as in a tour-de-force bit where he breaks down the multitude of questions raised by his airplane seatmate deciding to bring a Foot Locker shopping bag full of pancakes on board. (“Pancakes got X-rayed that day!”)

The other great contradiction of Kinane’s comedy is his ability to render ostensibly depressing material playful, and even heartening, via silly details and sly wordplay. He turns a lonely, drunken Wendy’s run into a late-night heist with an unamused cabbie in the role of getaway driver. He sees his sad life reflected back at him on the face of an unsliced pizza, and soldiers on anyway, marveling, “This giant taco tastes like Italy!” And finally, he proposes using his own headstone as an opportunity to elicit laughs from cemetery passers-by, perhaps the finest distillation of his ability to fuse the bleak with the uplifting. Kinane’s material is frequently self-deprecating, sardonic, and debased, but the underlying joy informing his approach gives it life, even when he’s talking about death. 

The interplay between Kyle Kinane the character and Kyle Kinane the writer is what makes Whiskey Icarus such a compelling listen. It’s full of surprising moments that feel natural, the ramblings of an eccentric who has far more control over the situation than he lets on. Kinane’s lack of self-control is the centerpiece of many of his stories, whether he’s getting drunk on an airplane, making a sad meal of 7-Eleven cheeseburger dogs, or pondering whether a Twizzler would fit in his butthole; but he’s extremely savvy in how he portrays these moments, manipulating and stacking them for maximum impact when the punchline falls, turning what could be a one-note character into a power chord.

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Comedy: Great Job, Internet!: In honor of Thanksgiving, here are some deep-fried-turkey disasters

Perhaps you've heard horror stories of people trying and failing to deep fry turkeys. Eater has collected eight such videos for your enjoyment, so go check those all out. Here's my favorite. Keep your ears open for the line, "Back up the car!"

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Comedy: Newswire: Patton Oswalt, Red Dawn, and more this week on The A.V. Club

New this week:
We eased into our end-of-the-year coverage by catching up with some of the albums that fell through the cracks this year. This week, we reviewed Woods and Menomena, which were both respectable. We also reviewed Alt-J, which somehow wasn’t as good. 

Don’t miss:

We celebrated Thanksgiving in many ways, although being slobs in front of the TV seems to be a common thread.We did, however, have our turkey day more together than these 20 impromptu TV Thanksgivings.Kyle Kinane kicked off the holiday season with a joyous account of how much he hates “Little Drummer Boy.”  Intrepid gamer John Teti tested out the Wii U for all of us, and he had some not-great things to say about it. Specifically, he noted “Not even a key party in The Castro would force its guests to dick around with so many weird-looking toys.”Reasonable Discussions tackled the age-old question of burning out vs. fading away, thanks to a reader question about the new Soundgarden and Green Day albums.Mos Def’s ex-wife has a poorly written, hanger-on’s tell-all that’s positively full of breathless tales of handsome men. How could we not read it for Silly Little Show-Biz Book Club?Breckin Meyer plays a liberal blogger who threatens to move to Canada after John Kerry loses the 2004 election. Rather than the setup to a really crappy joke, that’s the plot of a really crappy movie that made its way straight to Commentary Tracks Of The Damned.Julia Child tried to teach us how to cook with these 10 episodes of The French Chef, but we still plopped our cranberry sauce out of a can.Annie Zaleski talked about the record that brought sexy back to indie rock.Patton Oswalt had some advice for Dane Cook, and was willing to share it with you, along with stories from pretty much his entire film and television career.We passed out somewhere around the ninth slice of turkey, but if we hadn’t, this article on 30 Rock’s unlikely longevity would have inspired us to do a marathon.Avanti! reminded us how falling for a movie can be like falling in love.Guy Fieri and Saturday Night Live reminded us that laughing at your desk like an idiot can be a really nice break in the day.Jason Heller grappled with hardcore’s aging problem as new releases from Green Day and Bad Brains make him question whether the genre was ever supposed to grow old.Meanwhile, Kathleen Hanna still sees reasons to keep the riot grrrl movement alive with a new label and new Bikini Kill reissues. She also said some pretty great things about feminism.We made you a mixlist of 15 songs about VD. It is the inevitable follow-up to last week’s songs about porn.

What are we arguing about this week?
A New York Times trend piece about hipsters and irony did everything that combination of words was meant to do by lighting the Internet up in defense. Josh Modell saw it as an opportunity to say some nice, heartfelt things. 

This weekend:
See: Life Of Pi offers gorgeous visuals from director Ang Lee. Or there’s Red Dawn, if you’re trying really hard to avoid greatness.
Read: Marvel Comics: The Untold Story by Sean Howe tells the exhaustive history of the publishing house, including the rift between Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, and Marvel’s early ’00s renaissance. 
Listen to: Massive Attack’s excellent Blue Lines, which gets the reissue treatment 20-plus years later. Or listen to Rihanna’s new record if you want to feel really uncomfortable about celebrity and society.
Laugh at: Kyle Kinane’s second comedy album, Whiskey Icarus, gets an A from Genevieve Koski.
Watch: Ben And Kate has its best episode yet, and Parenthood gets an A, while New Girl, Happy Endings, and Don’t Trust the B---- In Apartment 23 turn in solid Thanksgiving episodes.

The A.V. Club in your town:
Prepare yourselves, Chicago. Our New Cult Canon tour is bringing Bad Santa to the Lincoln Hall Wednesday, November 28. We’ll pretty much all be there, and we’re bringing director Terry Zwigoff along for a post-show Q&A. Then we’re sending Zwigoff and Nathan Rabin straight to Seattle for a second screening and Q&A on Thursday, November 29 at Central Cinema. Both screenings will have free samples of Mike’s Hard Lemonade. To buy tickets and see whether the tour is coming to your town, check out our website for the schedule. 

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Books: Newswire: Happy Thanksgiving! (We’re going to lay low for a few days)

Hey, Happy Thanksgiving, everyone. (For non-U.S. readers, it’s a holiday we celebrate here.) The A.V. Club staff (pictured above) is going to take a few days off to celebrate, relax, and dream up exciting new content for everyone. That means no new content on Thursday—unless something alarmingly massive happens in the world of entertainment news—and a few items on Friday you'll want to read as soon as they post at midnight. (Or over the weekend. Or on Monday. Just read them.) 

In all seriousness, we are truly grateful for our readers, whose presence on this site allows us to make a living writing about pop culture. We think movies, television, music, books, etc., are all worth taking seriously, but we realize not everyone gets to make a profession out of our obsessions, and we appreciate you making that possible, just as we appreciate what each and every one of you (well, most of you) bring to the discussion in the comments. We want to make The A.V. Club a go-to destination for commentary, reviews, interviews, news, and other pop-culture related items, but also for a smart, fun community of likeminded people who enjoy each others’ company. You've helped turn it into that. Thanks.

View the original article here

Key & Peele, “Season Two, Episode Nine”

Well, pressure’s off. Key & Peele is a legitimate ratings hit, and has the full backing of its network behind it. So might as well take some risks and have a hell of a lot of fun with its viewers. Tonight’s episode is one of the loosest they’ve ever done, mostly for the duo’s willingness to speak directly to the audience—both in the room and those at home.

It goes both ways. The stars admit during one of the interstitials that Jordan Peele had a weird idea for a tweet a while back: “What if names were farts?” What if people identified each other with a fart sound, rather than a string of letters pronounced as a word? They then decided to use Comedy Central’s money to shoot a scene that takes place at a party, where there are lots of introductions happening. Hence, lots of farting. Rob Delaney makes an appearance, and his name is the filthiest-sounding fart. Frank Caeti pops into the background to actually say someone’s name out loud, and is shunned for it. And this whole thing is probably the longest sketch in the entire episode. It’s an okay sketch—I mean, to their credit, Keegan Michael Key and Peele stick with the premise and see it all the way through. But they let the audience into their process, freely admitting beforehand that they did the sketch as a test to themselves to see if they could actually do it.

There are also moments where they let the content dictate the form, which is always a smart thing to do in comedy. Before a prison scene, Key is talking to the audience when he notices a woman laughing harder than usual. The camera finds her, and her friends gamely point her out. The duo takes a moment to let things sink in. “Ma’am,” Key says, “take a deep breath.”

We cut directly to the next scene, but the show’s willingness to acknowledge what happens in the room makes the entire episode feel footloose and fancy-free. In one scene, Key straps a bunch of babies to himself as if they’re body armor and starts a fight with Peele, who’s actively trying to back down. In another, two gang members find each other in a dark alley, realize they have an affinity for Twilight, and strike up a lifelong friendship that involves pointing guns at each other for the entirety of their lives. The moment with the audience member hasn’t yet happened, but the playfulness is already there, with something as simple as the act of pointing a gun at someone while splashing them in a pool.

My favorite scene, though, requires a lot of backlogged knowledge and isn’t overtly set up. It’s a spoof of the Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers wherein Rob Huebel and co. refer to Jordan Peele’s Green Ranger as the Black Ranger, repeatedly. That show was insanely racist. The Yellow Ranger was Asian and the Black Ranger was actually black. But not knowing this doesn’t hinder the experience of watching this particular sketch, which includes Key as the Yellow Ranger, who’s a blatant stereotype of a Native American. It’s just a little inside joke that makes things all the funnier. And it’s even better that they didn’t have to explicitly call that out.

The guys are having some fun out there. When a policeman is an amateur magician, they make him so bad that Peele would rather have a ticket than a 2-for-1 coupon to the guy’s show. They crack each other up onstage talking about how the two of them need each other to make one entire black person. There’s a lot more laughing in the moment when they’re not trying to make us laugh, and it’s infectious.

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Glee, “Dynamic Duets”

Holy motors, Batman! “Dynamic Duets” is the most fun I’ve had watching Glee since Sam took his shirt off last. How did the writers never think of this before? Every year they tear the glee club apart so that they can come together as a team before they take on the bad guys. It’s a stock superhero-team origin story. Only this year it’s like The Avengers without all the lead-up films. There’s no Ryder Lynn movie to introduce everyone’s favorite most recent cast member. There’s no independent Unique franchise to establish her as more than her gender identity. But never fear, ordinary citizen. “Dynamic Duets” is here to save Glee and then some.

Glee episodes always seem to start from a track list and work backwards, but this one, written and directed by Ian Brennan, seems to derive from (strive toward) that final-act shot of the New New Directions: everyone in a huddle, their hands in the middle, the music swelling as our heroes unite to take on sectionals. If we’re not rooting for them by then, then who cares if they lose to Dalton? But like a skipping student cramming for a test, Glee spends this last hour wisely. Kitty helps the team reach the magic membership number, and Murphy-brand mixed messaging or not, she seems to enjoy glee club for more than just the chance to sabotage Marley. Marley is still experimenting with bulimia, which if you ask me says a lot about the persuasive force of Ryder’s lips. Also how dumb everyone involved is, considering this ripe body-image storyline rests on the rotten evidence of a couple costumes—but not her other clothes!—feeling too tight. Again, maybe it’s just fuzzy plotting, but I find the Kitty-Marley relationship genuinely complicated. It’s probably just a long con, but Kitty spends more time cheering Marley up than tearing her down this week. She succeeds in making Marley feel bad about an innocuous blow-off from Ryder, but her insult backfires when it pushes Marley to ask out Jake. Kitty isn’t just a bitch, Marley isn’t just a doormat, and suddenly I’m interested in them making good decisions and getting into good colleges and finding good work/life balances.

The new Finn and Puck are also in a gender-stereotypical fight, but the old Finn gives them an assignment: to tell each other about their deepest fears. “Dynamic Duets” doesn’t offer much reason to expect either kid would actually complete his homework, but they’re invested enough in winning that they do. Biracial (and half-Jewish) Jake doesn’t feel like he fits in anywhere, and Ryder can’t read. A quick round of dissolve-heavy superhero-movie testing reveals that he’s dyslexic. Needless to say, they’re best friends now. Less out of shared victimhood—these are two guys who think they’re alphas, after all—than team bonding. Meanwhile Sam persuades Blaine not to return to Dalton and to stop beating himself up about his poke-buddy. Throw on some feisty Tina, some classic peanut gallery, and a bonding montage, and the New Directions are a full-fledged team ready to be tested.

It’s not that I feel sorry for the new mutants and all their pamphlet-ready issues. It’s that I have a sense of who they are now, and they’re all winning me over to some degree or another. Marley and Ryder are taking steps to improve their lives. Kitty’s getting nothing out of revenge, and is really good at pretending to enjoy singing with Marley. Sam and Blaine’s bro-hood ascends to some level of continuity, and so does Sam’s nerdy side: “Dalton was like Death Star meets Mordor meets Temple of Doom. I might be exaggerating but probably not.” Most of all, they’re funny. Even Finn! Sporting a Clark Kent/Will Schuester sweater-vest, he complains to Beiste, “The glee club doesn’t see me as an adult. Uh, God, is that what coffee tastes like? How do people drink that?” For a normal Glee episode (one with a class assignment and no major life changes), “Dynamic Duets” is the perfect tonal template: heavy on the funny, even when it’s serious.

The playfulness of the superhero story takes the episode to an even higher level when it bleeds into the style. “Dynamic Duets” has a unity of form and content like nothing this side of the heartiest shipper fan-vids. The adventure serial transitions, the Fleischer cartoon music, the Bat-Signal title card, the action shots of the superhero club running through the halls of McKinley. The episode is full of comic panels, not only the Photoshop newsprint transitions but the canted power portraits. Tarantula Head (Joe)’s dreds crack like a bullwhip, and Femme Fatale (Kitty)’s whip spins fast enough to blow Woman Fierce (Marley)’s hair and cape. Marley soaring through the air on the piano is quite the symbol. The camera rumbles for Sam’s Bane impression, and he isn’t phased when someone makes fun of the jock-strap on his face. “Let the games begin!” There’s even a villain with his very own X-Mansion, and he spins around in a chair stroking a cat. “I’m Hunter Clarington. I’m the new captain of the Warblers. And I’m not even remotely bi-curious.” At the end, we see Sam and Blaine rescuing the trophy in a classic superhero sequence: the broken-into case, the curtains blowing in the open window, and the Warblers looking out the window. It resolves a short-term superhero plot, a long-term teen-drama plot (Blaine forgives himself), and codes a shout-out to some vocal shippers by way of Batman knockouts: “Blam!” and “Slaine!”

In short, “Dynamic Duets” makes a virtue of Glee’s malleability. Just as I could see this show entering a two-act Red Shoes interlude or stumbling into a haunted-house story, this is a show where the fireplace can magically roar when Blaine takes a step toward the dark side and it doesn’t mean there is literal magic. It means Glee isn’t strict with realism. What musicals, teen melodramas, and superhero stories have in common is an initial embarrassment. It’s lightly embarrassing to see well-behaved members of society dressing up in tights or breaking out into song or flipping out about not-very-big deals, because it violates our expectations, like talking to someone on an elevator. In that respect, superheroes fit right into Glee, a show that couldn’t be normal if it tried. Right now, I couldn’t be more thankful for that.

Stray observations:

For those counting, Blaine is in a club for superheroes and a club for superhero sidekicks. That is going to look pretty sweet on a college application.Puck, or should I say The PuckerMan, is spending his time soliciting on the Walk of Fame. Good to see him again, and he reinforces his advice to Jake: “Don’t be a dick, and don’t give up.”Not showing Blaine’s poke-buddy is a great choice. This ain’t about him.So is not trivializing Unique. She isn’t in this episode at all, which is a shame considering the whole “team coming together” angle, but it’s a relief that Unique was never compared to any of the kids’ superhero personae.Sam and Blaine’s cover of “Heroes” is the musical showcase, taking place on a dark stage backlit with golden superhero spotlights and spanning a do-gooder montage. Confessionalism isn’t the only thing bringing the glee club together. An anti-graffiti task force and a Thanksgiving charity help, too.Artie, upon being told he can’t be Professor X due to copyright violations, says, “Uh, I’m Dr. Y, and my superpower is wheelies?”Discussing the glee club membership situation, Brittany asks her phone what it thinks: “I think I am alive, and you are the machine.”Classic superhero plot: Hunter preys on Blaine’s good-guy-ness. The deal is for Blaine to sacrifice himself for McKinley’s trophy.“Dynamic Duets” has made Finn more likeable than ever. On top of the coffee bit, he has this great scene opposite a bunch of wooden models of the cast posed in fluid dance positions. I love the way he rolls with the punches from Ryder and Jake: “Ignoring you.” One says he sounds like Yoda, and he shoots back, “Deal do we have?”Finn admits his idea to sing Foreigner songs in foreign languages wearing foreign flags is pretty bad. Tina says, “Worse than ‘Funk?’” Artie says, “Worse than ‘Night Of Neglect?’” Finn wants Blaine to stay with the slowly gelling New Directions. “We need a team with a lot of gel and you’re like the biggest part of that.”

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TV: Interview: Dan Schneider on Head Of The Class and creating some of Nickelodeon’s most memorable shows

Casual television viewers—especially young ones—might not know the name Dan Schneider, but they’ve probably seen one of his shows. After launching a career as a young actor in films like Better Off Dead and shows like Head Of The Class, Schneider stumbled into creating some of Nickelodeon’s most popular shows ever, from All That to iCarly and Victorious. He’s launched the careers of countless child stars including Kenan Thompson, Amanda Bynes, and Miranda Cosgrove, and spearheaded hundreds, if not thousands of hours of smart, funny entertainment for an entire generation of kids. On the eve of the iCarly series finale, The A.V. Club spoke to Schneider about how he got into the business, being a showrunner, and whether he keeps up with the kids from Drake & Josh. 

The A.V. Club: You grew up in Tennessee and that’s where you started acting, but it seems like you sort of just fell into it. How did that happen? 

Dan Schneider: I grew up as the funny guy in class, and that was pretty consistent through my childhood. I was never a great student. The thing I excelled at most in high school was that I would do plays. I moved to a new high school in Memphis my junior year. In my senior year, I won senior-class president. I basically did that by getting onstage and giving a speech that got a lot of laughs. Because of that, I was onstage a lot. I would get onstage in front of people and do little skits and do funny stuff. I realized I really loved performing. 

After high school, I kind of floundered a bit. At that time they were shooting a movie in Memphis. It was a big deal because it was the first time Hollywood had ever come to Memphis. My teacher in an acting class at Memphis State—now University of Memphis—said, “There’s a role you might be able to get. There’s a couple of speaking roles.” I went to this big casting call for the movie [Making The Grade]. There was a sea of teenagers. They were doing extra casting as well. It was this huge mob scene. I almost left, and this guy comes up to me and just sort of saw me and said, “Hey, are you here to audition for the film?” I said, “Yeah.” He said, “Come with me.” I went and read with him, and he turned out to be the producer. He didn’t even know I had an appointment. He liked my face, I guess. He hired me for that movie, and I was supposed to work for four days on it. It ended up being four weeks. Then he hooked me up with another film that was shooting in the Caribbean [Hot Resort]. At the time, I was kind of blowing off school. I had a job. I worked at a store that sold Apple computers. I was fixing Apple computers. After the two movies, I was like, “Wow. I’ve never even left Memphis, and I got two movies. Maybe I should go to L.A. and see what I can do.” So I got a manager and an agent, and that led to another movie or two and that led to a TV show called Head Of The Class. By the mid-’80s, I was an actor. I was never super-famous, but I was definitely on the map.

AVC: On your IMDB page, which is surely very accurate, it says that people still stop you on the streets and say, “Ricky from Better Off Dead!” Is that true?

DS: It is true. Here’s what’s true about it: I did Head Of The Class for five years. It was a pretty big hit on ABC. That’s what most people know me from. But people are like, “Oh yeah, he was Dennis on Head Of The Class. Who cares? Big deal.” [Laughs.] 

There’s an age group of people out there, though… I guess right now they’re probably 35 to 45. When they find out I was Ricky in Better Off Dead, they look at me like I’m The Beatles. It’s so funny. It was just this little movie I did in 1985. To this day, I hear about Better Off Dead at least every month. People freak out. Nobody gives a damn that I was in Head Of The Class, but when they know I was Ricky in Better Off Dead, they’re like “Holy crap, man! You were Ricky.” They go crazy.

AVC: You sort of fell into creating All That after you hosted the Kids’ Choice Awards, right?

DS: Yeah, the second Kids’ Choice Awards, which were in ’88, I think. I was a co-host. 

AVC: Who was your co-host?

DS: Tony Danza. He was the far more important host. I met this guy, Albie Hecht, an independent producer at the time who was producing the Kids’ Choice Awards. I had a relationship with him, and he landed at Nickelodeon as the head of development. So I ended up writing this pilot called All That, which was a kids sketch-comedy show. I thought it was just going to be a part-time job between acting jobs, because after Head Of The Class I did another series called Home Free, which you probably don’t remember. It was only on for one season. I played Matthew Perry’s best friend. That was right before he got Friends. That show went away. I was just kind of filling the time until the next pilot season when I wanted to get another TV show. Then they put All That on television, and suddenly I was writing and producing a TV show. And that led to Kenan & Kel. Then somewhere in there, I got to be a very busy guy writing and producing two TV shows at once. 

AVC: Did you always want to write or produce?

DS: Absolutely. I actually wrote an episode of Head Of The Class. As a kid—I say as a kid, but I mean 21 or 22—I knew that actors on TV shows come and go. Some of them last. Most of them don’t. Most of them just sort of fade off into the sunset after the show’s over. I was 21 and thinking, “When this Head Of The Class boat ride ends, I don’t want to fade off into the sunset. I want to keep working. I want to be involved in the entertainment business.” I felt like, “Don’t just be a passenger on the ship. Learn how to captain the ship. Learn how to drive. Learn how to write. Learn how to produce.” I paid attention to the directors on Head Of The Class and how things worked, and I wrote an episode. I just sort of wrote it on spec, but the producers liked it, and they bought it. That was my first taste of selling something that I wrote. 

It’s funny. Right when I moved to L.A., I started writing. I wrote some screenplay. I’m sure it’s terrible. But I wrote a screenplay by myself. When I first moved to L.A., I had no friends. I didn’t know anybody. I just sat in a little studio apartment, and I wrote a screenplay. 

I used to write sketches. I loved David Letterman in the ’80s. I used to write Top 10 lists for him, and I faxed them in anonymously. I’m sure they threw them away. 

So yeah, I’ve always wanted to write, and after I was doing All That and Kenan & Kel, I got the opportunity to do another TV show—I was still going on auditions. I realized that if I took that show, I was going to have to give up All That and Kenan & Kel. I really didn’t want to do [that]. I was just having too much fun, and I was really enjoying the action of being a writer and producer. I passed on the acting role, and that was really the turning point, I guess, in 1996, when I was like, “You know what? I’m going to put my acting career on the back burner, and I’m going to be a writer-producer.” Then I wrote the movie Good Burger.

AVC: How does your experience as a teen actor affect how you deal with the kids on your shows now? 

DS: It puts me in a very unique position, because I’ve seen it from both sides. It helps me because I know how actors think. I know what’s important to them. And I have a very clear perspective because I starred in two TV shows, and I guested on several. I know the emotions and the thoughts that actors have about what they’re doing. I understand them very, very clearly. The kids I work with—and not just the kids, all the actors, because I hire adults, too—all the actors I work with know I was an actor. To them, I’m in their club. They accept me as one of them because they know it’s been my face in front of the camera, and I’ve had to do exactly what they’re doing now. There’s a level of trust and respect that I think a producer that hasn’t done that wouldn’t get. They trust me. 

I often play the role of an acting coach. The actors will come to me and say, “Dan, I don’t feel like I’m making this funny. How can I make this funny? How should I say this?” They don’t do that with your average producer because your average producer may not know how to say it; they’ve never been a comedic actor before. 

It’s helpful to me because I can anticipate. I’ll be in the writers’ room, and I’ll say, “Yeah, we’re long. Our script is long, but I don’t want to cut this joke because we cut another joke from this scene for him yesterday. If we cut this one, we’re leaving him with no good jokes, and he’s going to be bummed.” I never want an actor to feel bad; I think like an actor. 

When I’m with the guys and girls in the writers’ room and we’re writing a scene, when we finish it, very often I’ll go, “Let’s read it out loud. Let’s perform it.” It’s up on the screen already, so we scroll back, and we perform it. I think I do that because I’m an actor. Yes, I’m a writer, but I’m writing words for someone to speak, not for someone to read. I’d write very differently if I was writing a book than if I’m writing dialogue. I know that because I’m an actor. I’ve had lines that were difficult to say, and I’ve had lines that were great and easy to say. I’m familiar with those rhythms. I want to write dialogue that if it were for me, if I were getting it, I’d want that material. 

AVC: One thing that Nickelodeon has done is given kids a lot of credit, both as viewers and as actors. Their programming, for the most part, isn’t just dumb shows where kids make fart sounds. 

DS: I love that you get that. It sounds like you get the difference between my shows and other shows in my genre. I can’t go around saying that because I don’t want to sound like an egomaniac, patting myself on the back, but I do think that within my genre, which I guess is kids/family TV, my shows stand in their own little niche. 

I’m never going to write fart jokes, because I feel like I have a responsibility to the audience to give them good stuff. I should be able to come up with something funnier than any third-grade boy could think of. I’ll say that in the writers’ room. I’ll say, “Would that get a laugh? Yes. Is it okay? Yes, but we’re not going to win a clever award for it. Let’s try to be cleverer. Let’s try to be more original. Let’s try do something that your average writers’ room wouldn’t come up with. Let’s be more creative.” 

Also, I never woke up one day and said, “I want to write TV for kids.” That was never a goal of mine. I sort of fell into it through my relationship with Albie. I grew up watching reruns of old shows. My dad would have me watch the shows that he liked. I watched I Love Lucy. I watched The Dick Van Dyke Show. I watched M*A*S*H and Mary Tyler Moore and Bob Newhart and Taxi and Cheers. In fact, I credit the Charles brothers [Glen and Les], who were the main forces behind Taxi and Cheers and a little bit of the original The Bob Newhart Show. To me, those guys were my heroes. And also Larry Gelbart, who did M*A*S*H, and Larry David, who did Seinfeld. Those are my heroes. That’s the kind of sitcom writing that I like. I like Friends. I like Seinfeld. I’m a student of sitcoms, of comedy television. I love it. The original Saturday Night Live is another big influence. I was watching that when I was 7, 8 years old. That’s the comedy I like. When I got into kids TV, I never was like, “I want to write a kids show.” I was like, “I want to write a show like M*A*S*H or Cheers or Friends. That’s what I love, but I have to make it suitable for kids.” 

AVC: Do you think about the success of your show in the long run, whether it will stand up to scrutiny 10 or 20 years down the road? 

DS: That’s exactly how I feel. Often I will say when we’re writing or producing something, and I want to do one more take, make it a little better, and people are looking at me like, “Wow, it’s late, Dan. We’ve already done six takes. Do we really need another one?” I’ll always say, “Guys. Our name is on this forever.” I take a lot of pride in it. 

Television audiences have fragmented so much because there’s so much product and there are so many channels and so many shows. No shows get the big audiences like they got 20 years ago, 30 years ago, 40 years ago. All the audiences are small. It used to be, for an episode of Cheers or M*A*S*H, practically the whole country was watching. Now, you’re a big hit show if 13 million people watch, which is a relatively small audience compared to what audiences used to be. 

What I love about kids TV is it’s really the last bastion of television where everybody watches. You can’t find a teenager who doesn’t know Drake & Josh. You can’t find someone in their 20s who hasn’t heard of All That and Kenan & Kel. And you certainly can’t find a kid today who hasn't heard of iCarly and Victorious. They all watch. I know when those kids grow up, in seven, eight, nine, 10 years when they’re in college, that’s going to be a common thing that they remember together. 

I try to make my shows smart. God knows I do a lot of goofy, physical, broad comedy, but so did Kramer on Seinfeld. On Friends, Joey and Chandler had a duck and chicken. Broad comedy works at all levels of television. Saturday Night Live has very broad comedy. So I do my share of broad, goofy comedy, but I also try to make it smart. 

And I do think about that. I think to myself, “I want iCarly to live on, and people who watch it when they’re 20 and 30 to still like it.” Sometimes I will look back at a show I liked as a little kid, and I’ll go, “Oh my God, that show was so stupid. What did I see in it?” I don’t want anybody to say that about one of my shows.

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TV: Newswire: RIP Larry Hagman

Larry Hagman, most famous for playing J.R. Ewing on the hugely influential primetime soap Dallas, has died from complications from throat cancer, according to the Dallas Morning News. He was 81. He is survived by his wife and two children. “Larry was back in his beloved Dallas re-enacting the iconic role he loved most. Larry’s family and close friends had joined him in Dallas for the Thanksgiving holiday. When he passed, he was surrounded by loved ones. It was a peaceful passing, just as he had wished for,” said his family in a written statement.

Hagman was in Dallas because he was in the process of filming the second season of TNT’s reboot of Dallas. There was no word yet on how the series would proceed without Hagman’s presence. His portrayal of the villainous J.R. is one of the great TV bad guy performances, and both the original series and the reboot hinged on his ability to play a man willing to do completely despicable things yet make the audience simultaneously want him to succeed and want him to fail spectacularly. Dallas was never so good as when J.R. was scheming, or when he was having to live through the aftermath of one of those schemes, and Hagman played every side of the man with a gusto that gobbled up the screen presence of lesser actors. Fortunately, he was surrounded by a solid ensemble cast, and many became his lifelong friends.

Hagman, who fought in the Korean War after being drafted into the Air Force, got his start in the acting world via the stage. He was active in both the Off Broadway and Broadway scenes in the late ‘50s, making his Broadway debut in the play Comes A Day in 1958. His presence in the New York theatre world also marked him as someone who would appear frequently on the live TV anthology dramas of the period, and he was a frequent presence on the young medium, making him one of the few actors to have worked in all seven decades of the medium’s existence. Hagman would take a role in the soap Edge Of Night in the early ‘60s, but it was his first regular TV sitcom role that would make his name.

TV fans who don’t know Hagman for Dallas—and there must be one or two of them—surely know him for the lead male role in I Dream Of Jeannie. As Tony Nelson, the military man who happens to find a bottle containing Barbara Eden’s genie, Jeannie, Hagman imbued the silly series with conviction. The show was one of the less successful of the gimmick fantasy sitcoms popular in the ‘60s, but Hagman and Eden’s chemistry was strong enough to carry the weak scripts and misogynistic premise. The series offered NBC a hit in the popular genre (to go with ABC’s Bewitched and CBS’ My Favorite Martian), running for five seasons. (Hagman said that the show died because Tony and Jeannie got married, which gave the audience no reason to care about the characters anymore.) Eden’s work was flirtatious and sexy, and Hagman’s solid, rock-ribbed Americanism kept things from getting too threatening for middle America. He balanced out the titillation, making it safe for consumption. Hagman and Eden would remain friends, and the two would do two reunion specials in 1985 and 1991.

Hagman kept active in the post-Jeannie world, popping up in made-for-TV movies like Sarah T.: Portrait Of A Teenage Alcoholic and big-screen films like Harry And Tonto. (Hagman made his film debut in 1964’s Ensign Pulver and also starred in the big-screen version of Fail-Safe that year. His film work was never as high profile as his TV work, but he had several memorable, smaller roles in such films as Superman, Primary Colors, and Nixon.) He also bounced between other prospective TV projects and failed series before his wife, Maj, whom he was married to for nearly 60 years, suggested that he cast his lot in with Dallas. J.R. was a supporting player in the show’s first season, which was originally intended only as a miniseries, but Hagman’s ability to be charming while doing horrible things quickly made him the star of the show.

J.R. was at the center of the show’s most famous story arc as well, when the United States was gripped by “Who Shot J.R.?” fever. The episode in which the answer—J.R.’s sister-in-law Kristen—was revealed is still the second most-watched scripted program in TV history. (Only the M*A*S*H finale was higher.) The arc gained its power from the fact that seemingly everyone on Dallas would want J.R. dead, even if the audience wanted him to keep scheming, that Hagman twinkle in his eye. It was a genuine attempted murder mystery, and when J.R. recovered and recovered his memory of the fateful night, Hagman got to be an indelible part of TV history. (He also got to be part of the story on the show’s business end, as contract negotiations to pay him more money played a big part in J.R. almost dying after being shot, though the network and production company blinked when forced to contemplate the series without its biggest star and selling point.)

Dallas ran for 14 seasons and over 350 episodes, growing long-in-the-tooth, as all series that run that long do. Yet it kicked off the primetime soap boom of the ‘80s and remains the best example of the form. The sorts of storytelling pioneered by the show would evolve into the more sophisticated serialization employed by primetime dramas today, and J.R. made a reasonably early version of the TV antihero, if you squint hard enough. Hagman stayed with the show for its entire run, and the series finale, an It’s A Wonderful Life riff centered on J.R., ended with one final cliffhanger, in which it seemed the old bastard had committed suicide. He hadn’t, of course, and when the series returned for reunion movies and the TNT reboot, Hagman was there, flashing his pearly whites as he screwed over his enemies.

It was that big, bold smile that made Hagman the TV star he was. TV rewards people with magnetic personalities that come across to the viewers at home, the sorts of actors who can transcend the smallness of the screen to project charisma into someone’s living room. By that standard, Hagman was one of the very best the box ever had, the kind of actor who could stab his fictional best friend in the back, then waggle his eyebrows at the camera, as if to ask viewers at home to pass the popcorn.

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Music: HateSong: Kyle Kinane pa-rum-pum-pum-pum’s his way through hating “Little Drummer Boy”

In HateSong, we ask our favorite musicians, writers, comedians, actors, and so forth to expound on the one song they hate most in the world. 

The hater: Kyle Kinane hates a lot of things: unsliced pizza, boasting about voting, and those Subway ads where adults talk in child voices. Thus, on the eve of Kinane’s Comedy Central special Whiskey Icarus, The A.V. Club thought it only fitting—and in keeping with the season—to ask the comedian about his least favorite Christmas song. 

The hated: “The Little Drummer Boy,” originally written in 1941

Kyle Kinane: Musically, there’s nothing wrong with the song. It’s the lyrics. First off, the song is about not having anything to give to baby Jesus, so you play the drum. You don’t play a drum at a baby. That’s never been a good idea in the history of the world, playing a drum at a newborn baby. That’s stupid.

And then it says, “Mary nodded.” Meaning the new mom is like, “You know what? I just gave birth, I got a newborn, go ahead and play a drum at my kid’s face. That’s what I want right now.” This is a stupid, stupid premise. And half the lyrics are singing drum sounds. You sing, “Pa-rum-pum-pum.” It’s singing drum sounds when there’s a drum in the song. And that’s stupid. You’re singing the sound of an instrument that’s also playing in the song—dumbest song in the world. It’s an entirely unnecessary song.

The A.V. Club: Are there any versions of it you like? There have been a million covers.

KK: Well, yeah, because it’s a Christmas song. Everybody just covers a Christmas song automatically because it’s a cash-grab. It’s just the worst.

AVC: This song also isn’t short. It clocks in at about three and a half minutes.

KK: Because as long as you keep saying “Pa-rum-pum-pum-pum,” as long as you keep singing the stupid sound of the instruments—it’s just… ugh.

AVC: It’s supposedly based on a 12th-century legend about a juggler who juggles before the statue of the Virgin Mary, and then the Virgin Mary statue smiles or throws him a rose.

KK: It’s based on a guy that juggled in front of a statue? Mary got excited about a juggler? Live human beings don’t get that excited about jugglers, let alone statues coming to life.

AVC: This is obviously a religious song, but it’s almost pious to the point of ridiculousness. Mary, the most virtuous woman in the world, and baby Jesus, they’re totally fine with drumming as a gift.

KK: At best, she was being polite, because she knew what she was involved in. It’s like she’s the First Lady or something, and someone said, “Oh, I want to play a drum for your kid.” You’d have to be like, “Ugh, I’ve got to let this happen.”

AVC: Are there any Christmas songs you do like?

KK: For some reason, I like “Winter Wonderland.” I will just randomly sing it year-round. It’s a catchy one. Normally, Christmas songs, I’m put off by, but yeah, “Winter Wonderland” sung in the middle of the summer—not just for irony, but for the fact that it’s a change of the pace of the big summer hits—I enjoy it.

AVC: Did you ever work in retail around Christmas?

KK: No. I think one of the driving factors is that I can’t handle the torture of that repetitive music. [Laughs.] Even just having to walk into retail places and hear all of it, and just see the faces of people that have had to deal with it.

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Games: Great Job, Internet!: Remember the Lovecraftian horror that was Windows 95 with a new Tumblr

If you’re old enough—and Lord, does it make us sad that this is now something you can remember if you’re “old enough,” like there are now, “You know you’re a child of the ‘90s if…” e-mail forwards—then you remember that great, shimmering bastard of an operating system, Windows 95. You remember the way it worked but also had severe limitations. You remember the way it really tried to make PCs more like Macs but missed much of the Mac’s functionality. You remember the way that Microsoft paid out of its nose to get the rights to The Rolling Stones’ “Start Me Up” for the advertising campaign. You remember when Microsoft was a thing people shook their fists at, instead of just another tech company. And surely you remember the way it was a gateway to Lovecraftian horror. What? You don’t? Well, it’s a good thing the Tumblr Windows ’95 Tips is around to keep you appraised of this fact. Go there and remember all the terrifying things the OS used to make you do just to keep running, then be thankful we’re all much more civilized nowadays, and using Ubuntu, or whatever it is the kids are up to. (We’re too cranky to learn anything new, so we’re still using Windows 95. Help us. Please.)

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Glee, “Dynamic Duets”

Holy motors, Batman! “Dynamic Duets” is the most fun I’ve had watching Glee since Sam took his shirt off last. How did the writers never think of this before? Every year they tear the glee club apart so that they can come together as a team before they take on the bad guys. It’s a stock superhero-team origin story. Only this year it’s like The Avengers without all the lead-up films. There’s no Ryder Lynn movie to introduce everyone’s favorite most recent cast member. There’s no independent Unique franchise to establish her as more than her gender identity. But never fear, ordinary citizen. “Dynamic Duets” is here to save Glee and then some.

Glee episodes always seem to start from a track list and work backwards, but this one, written and directed by Ian Brennan, seems to derive from (strive toward) that final-act shot of the New New Directions: everyone in a huddle, their hands in the middle, the music swelling as our heroes unite to take on sectionals. If we’re not rooting for them by then, then who cares if they lose to Dalton? But like a skipping student cramming for a test, Glee spends this last hour wisely. Kitty helps the team reach the magic membership number, and Murphy-brand mixed messaging or not, she seems to enjoy glee club for more than just the chance to sabotage Marley. Marley is still experimenting with bulimia, which if you ask me says a lot about the persuasive force of Ryder’s lips. Also how dumb everyone involved is, considering this ripe body-image storyline rests on the rotten evidence of a couple costumes—but not her other clothes!—feeling too tight. Again, maybe it’s just fuzzy plotting, but I find the Kitty-Marley relationship genuinely complicated. It’s probably just a long con, but Kitty spends more time cheering Marley up than tearing her down this week. She succeeds in making Marley feel bad about an innocuous blow-off from Ryder, but her insult backfires when it pushes Marley to ask out Jake. Kitty isn’t just a bitch, Marley isn’t just a doormat, and suddenly I’m interested in them making good decisions and getting into good colleges and finding good work/life balances.

The new Finn and Puck are also in a gender-stereotypical fight, but the old Finn gives them an assignment: to tell each other about their deepest fears. “Dynamic Duets” doesn’t offer much reason to expect either kid would actually complete his homework, but they’re invested enough in winning that they do. Biracial (and half-Jewish) Jake doesn’t feel like he fits in anywhere, and Ryder can’t read. A quick round of dissolve-heavy superhero-movie testing reveals that he’s dyslexic. Needless to say, they’re best friends now. Less out of shared victimhood—these are two guys who think they’re alphas, after all—than team bonding. Meanwhile Sam persuades Blaine not to return to Dalton and to stop beating himself up about his poke-buddy. Throw on some feisty Tina, some classic peanut gallery, and a bonding montage, and the New Directions are a full-fledged team ready to be tested.

It’s not that I feel sorry for the new mutants and all their pamphlet-ready issues. It’s that I have a sense of who they are now, and they’re all winning me over to some degree or another. Marley and Ryder are taking steps to improve their lives. Kitty’s getting nothing out of revenge, and is really good at pretending to enjoy singing with Marley. Sam and Blaine’s bro-hood ascends to some level of continuity, and so does Sam’s nerdy side: “Dalton was like Death Star meets Mordor meets Temple of Doom. I might be exaggerating but probably not.” Most of all, they’re funny. Even Finn! Sporting a Clark Kent/Will Schuester sweater-vest, he complains to Beiste, “The glee club doesn’t see me as an adult. Uh, God, is that what coffee tastes like? How do people drink that?” For a normal Glee episode (one with a class assignment and no major life changes), “Dynamic Duets” is the perfect tonal template: heavy on the funny, even when it’s serious.

The playfulness of the superhero story takes the episode to an even higher level when it bleeds into the style. “Dynamic Duets” has a unity of form and content like nothing this side of the heartiest shipper fan-vids. The adventure serial transitions, the Fleischer cartoon music, the Bat-Signal title card, the action shots of the superhero club running through the halls of McKinley. The episode is full of comic panels, not only the Photoshop newsprint transitions but the canted power portraits. Tarantula Head (Joe)’s dreds crack like a bullwhip, and Femme Fatale (Kitty)’s whip spins fast enough to blow Woman Fierce (Marley)’s hair and cape. Marley soaring through the air on the piano is quite the symbol. The camera rumbles for Sam’s Bane impression, and he isn’t phased when someone makes fun of the jock-strap on his face. “Let the games begin!” There’s even a villain with his very own X-Mansion, and he spins around in a chair stroking a cat. “I’m Hunter Clarington. I’m the new captain of the Warblers. And I’m not even remotely bi-curious.” At the end, we see Sam and Blaine rescuing the trophy in a classic superhero sequence: the broken-into case, the curtains blowing in the open window, and the Warblers looking out the window. It resolves a short-term superhero plot, a long-term teen-drama plot (Blaine forgives himself), and codes a shout-out to some vocal shippers by way of Batman knockouts: “Blam!” and “Slaine!”

In short, “Dynamic Duets” makes a virtue of Glee’s malleability. Just as I could see this show entering a two-act Red Shoes interlude or stumbling into a haunted-house story, this is a show where the fireplace can magically roar when Blaine takes a step toward the dark side and it doesn’t mean there is literal magic. It means Glee isn’t strict with realism. What musicals, teen melodramas, and superhero stories have in common is an initial embarrassment. It’s lightly embarrassing to see well-behaved members of society dressing up in tights or breaking out into song or flipping out about not-very-big deals, because it violates our expectations, like talking to someone on an elevator. In that respect, superheroes fit right into Glee, a show that couldn’t be normal if it tried. Right now, I couldn’t be more thankful for that.

Stray observations:

For those counting, Blaine is in a club for superheroes and a club for superhero sidekicks. That is going to look pretty sweet on a college application.Puck, or should I say The PuckerMan, is spending his time soliciting on the Walk of Fame. Good to see him again, and he reinforces his advice to Jake: “Don’t be a dick, and don’t give up.”Not showing Blaine’s poke-buddy is a great choice. This ain’t about him.So is not trivializing Unique. She isn’t in this episode at all, which is a shame considering the whole “team coming together” angle, but it’s a relief that Unique was never compared to any of the kids’ superhero personae.Sam and Blaine’s cover of “Heroes” is the musical showcase, taking place on a dark stage backlit with golden superhero spotlights and spanning a do-gooder montage. Confessionalism isn’t the only thing bringing the glee club together. An anti-graffiti task force and a Thanksgiving charity help, too.Artie, upon being told he can’t be Professor X due to copyright violations, says, “Uh, I’m Dr. Y, and my superpower is wheelies?”Discussing the glee club membership situation, Brittany asks her phone what it thinks: “I think I am alive, and you are the machine.”Classic superhero plot: Hunter preys on Blaine’s good-guy-ness. The deal is for Blaine to sacrifice himself for McKinley’s trophy.“Dynamic Duets” has made Finn more likeable than ever. On top of the coffee bit, he has this great scene opposite a bunch of wooden models of the cast posed in fluid dance positions. I love the way he rolls with the punches from Ryder and Jake: “Ignoring you.” One says he sounds like Yoda, and he shoots back, “Deal do we have?”Finn admits his idea to sing Foreigner songs in foreign languages wearing foreign flags is pretty bad. Tina says, “Worse than ‘Funk?’” Artie says, “Worse than ‘Night Of Neglect?’” Finn wants Blaine to stay with the slowly gelling New Directions. “We need a team with a lot of gel and you’re like the biggest part of that.”

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The Sopranos, “Walk Like a Man”

“Walk Like A Man” (season 6, episode 17; originally aired 5/6/2007)

In which Tony has problems with all of his sons

The final nine episodes of The Sopranos focus heavily on fathers and sons—both biological sons and surrogate ones. Tony steadily realizes that every father figure he’s had in his life has been shit, but seems also capable of keeping this information from his conscious mind, while both his real son and his “work” son slowly collapse under the strain of their lives. Ideas of masculinity, of living up to some impossible male code, hang lowly over the bulk of the series, but they never seem so prominent as they do now, when the characters try like hell to find a way out of the traps set for them by generations past, only to stumble blearily right back into them. “Walk Like A Man” can be a bit too neat, in that Sopranos way where the show occasionally becomes too enamored of its thematic parallelism, but when it comes to the ways that A.J., Christopher, and, yes, Tony can never escape the quicksand they’re mired in, it’s a powerful hour of television indeed.

Perhaps the most consistent throughline of the entire series has been the relationship between Tony and Christopher. Really, only the Soprano marriage even comes close to the level of detail and shading that’s devoted to Tony’s connection with his “nephew,” the man who was supposed to succeed him someday but has only managed to piss Tony off and strain the two’s relationship to the point of breaking. What’s doubly sad about this is that a major contributing factor is that every time Chris tries to better himself, or tries to prove his loyalty to Tony, he gets mired more deeply in the situation, unable to escape from the man who increasingly views everybody in his circle as his subject. Chris can’t drop by the Bing anymore, because he needs to stay away from places where people are drinking. Yet Tony conducts so much of his business at the Bing that he considers it Chris’ fault that their relationship is deteriorating. If he were being honest with himself, Tony would find somewhere else to talk to Chris. Instead, he insists on luring him into his lair. (Fittingly, in a late-episode moment, Chris sees Tony laughing in slow-motion, wreathed by cigar smoke. He looks like the devil.)

But, of course, the real rift between the men has nothing whatsoever to do with Chris’ inability to be around alcohol. No, the real rift between the men stems from the fact that Adriana told Chris she was an informant for the FBI, and when the chips were down, he chose Tony over Ade. He figures that would have bought him some loyalty, or at least the benefit of the doubt. Instead, it seems to have made things worse, created an open wound that bleeds too profusely to ever heal. In their own ways, both men loved Adriana, and she was able to create a kind of bridge between them, even if that bridge was threatened by Tony’s lustful desires. Without her there—and with both men knowing they’re responsible for her death—there’s no common ground, no demilitarized zone anymore. The water that should have gone under the bridge has gotten dammed up, even if the only way either of the men can talk about what happened is through the most extreme of allusions to the situation.

Meanwhile, Tony’s also trying to solve the problems of his biological son, who’s reeling from his breakup with Blanca. A.J. spends his days sacked out on the couch or lying in bed. He quits his job at the pizzeria, and when he says things to Meadow that remind her of a girl she knew who committed suicide, she sends up the alarm. A.J.’s never had to deal with something like this. His whole life, he’s had things handed to him, and he doesn’t know what real loss is like. (Perhaps he’s remembering those times his grandmother told him we all die alone, in our own arms.) In his own fumbling way, he was trying to break with the toxic past of his family by being in a relationship with Blanca. But now that he’s back in the lap of luxury, everything feels wrong. He can’t move past what happened with Blanca, and it’s not just because he was in love with her. He also can’t move past what she represented, the life he might have had where he was a free man. (Live free or die, as the episode title goes…)

At the backyard barbecue Christopher holds for his family and friends, he tells Tony that because of his therapy, Tony understands “the human condition.” And maybe that’s true. Maybe some part of Tony is better equipped to deal with this stuff than he would have been before the series began, before he met Dr. Melfi. Yet he sure seems as baffled by all of this as he ever was, tentative and uncertain around his son and angry and vituperative around Chris. His prescription for A.J.’s depression involves having Carmela find him a psychiatrist via his pediatrician (in a great laugh line), as well as going out to strip clubs to party with kids his own age. If pressed, his prescription for Chris’ faults would probably involve wiping the man from the face of the Earth. If he’s not going to stay in the fold and reverential of his father figure, better to have no Chris at all, perhaps. Tony might understand the “human condition” better than, say, Paulie, but he’s still a terrible student of it, unable to see beyond his myopia.

The final episodes of the series seem resolute on proving that Tony’s a sociopath at times, trying to reveal all of the ways he’s slowly eroded every relationship he’s had and turned them into purely functionary exercises in power imbalances. Yet these episodes also return us to the Tony who cries at times, who worries about the future, who, in particular, has hopes for his kids that might never be met. Meadow and A.J. have always been Tony’s best shot at escaping the life that’s dragged his soul into the muck. There’s no way he can get out of the mob at this point, but there’s a chance his kids can find a way to have nothing to do with it. Yet he’s so unused to anything but the life he leads—and perhaps not consciously aware this is what he wants—that he can’t comprehend A.J.’s depression. In a moment that’s at once incredibly touching and incredibly narcissistic, Tony brings everything back to himself. It’s his fault, he tells Melfi, that A.J. is so sad. It’s his rotten, messed-up genetic code that causes the boy to feel so bad.

Who knows? Maybe it is Tony’s genetic code that dooms A.J. On The Sopranos, people get trapped in endless cycles that spiral ever downward, and their best hope to change in the future is to change via their children. (David Chase has singled out this idea of generational evolution as a way that the series disproves the popular thesis that it’s all about how people can’t change.) Yet the flipside of that is that once a child knows a certain way of life, it becomes much harder to leave that behind. A.J.’s best shot might have been Blanca. By the end of this episode, after he’s gone out partying with his friends and helped them hurt someone who’s welching on a gambling debt by pouring sulfuric acid on his foot, it’s not hard to look at the boy and see someone who will follow in the footsteps of his father, as surely as Tony was eventually unable to avoid the magnetic tug of his own father’s way of life.

Is it possible to escape? Of course it is. There’s a good reason that Barbara—the Soprano daughter who made it out—makes one of her extremely rare appearances in this episode. But cycles become self-perpetuating, and sometimes, the only way out of them is straight down, into the maw of whatever it is that’s sucking you under. This seems to apply to Chris, who ends the hour in a pitiful place. Throughout the episode, it’s become evident that Tony simply doesn’t care anymore about Chris, especially in the scenes where Chris tries to get Tony to do something about how Paulie’s masterminding a scheme to rip off Chris’ father-in-law. Instead, Tony issues some platitudes about how he’ll have a talk with Paulie, but Chris really just needs to let go of this, even as Paulie keeps escalating things. The cage Chris is in here has never been more apparent, and there are numerous shots of him staring wild-eyed into the distance, as if realizing that the last exit off this particular highway was long, long ago. He should have taken Adriana’s deal. He should have informed. (Notice how he brings up all the stuff he knows to J.T.) But now he’s trapped, and he’ll forever be haunted by what might have been.

So what then? If he’s trapped, why not stop self-improvement altogether? Chris falls off the wagon again, and while this could feel repetitive, there’s a weight and tragedy to it that his benders in the first part of the season were missing. What’s most impressive about this is that he’s just having a drink with his old friend Paulie, but it feels like he’s signing his own death certificate. There’s an inevitability to this, a kind of surrender that has a certain horrific touch to it. Everything Chris has done throughout the series has been about keeping one eye on his exit strategy, but now, after all this time, he’s got nowhere else to go and nothing else to do. He has a drink. He gets drunk. And when he starts rambling about babies, about how they represent something new, something better, something perfect, everybody just laughs at Paulie’s jokes at Chris’ expense. The camera slowly drifts around Chris, suggesting he’s unmoored, lost. And he looks out at the laughing hyenas, sees how they’ll never respect him, and he heads out into the night.

This was always where he was going to end up. There was no way to escape it. The best he can hope for now is that his daughter might be so lucky as to have something better. But he’s seen the way the mafia takes hold of people even tangentially connected to it and squeezes them for everything they’re worth. As if proving this point to himself, he goes to see J.T. Dolan, one of those people who thought they could get involved with the mafia only slightly and found himself dragged under. The conversation with J.T. is a touchstone for this whole season and maybe this whole series. It dances around things that Chris can never talk about, and finally, J.T. tries honest. “You are in the mafia,” he tells Chris, the sort of brutal thing you can only say to someone you think you’re close to when they’re drunk and you just need to cut through the bullshit. Chris, of course, shoots him in the head.

Because it’s honesty that’s the true villain here, right? If any of these people sat down and were honest with themselves about their lives and what they’ve wrought, the only response would be death, either their own or others. They sow destruction everywhere they go, and when it comes time to try to put things right, they don’t know how. Tony can’t help his son get better, because he, himself, isn’t interested in getting better. So he comes up with bullshit solutions that will patch over the pain for a while but will never fill the void at the center of A.J.’s soul. It’s that void none of these characters will ever know how to fill, the same void their fathers and father figures filled by constantly feeding their own appetites, until that, too, lost its luster. The episode ends with Chris pulling up outside his house, drunkenly staggering toward a tree that Paulie destroyed when he made his angry ride around Chris’ lawn. He sets it right again. He pats the soil down. It looks good enough for now, but there’s no fixing what’s wrong. The roots no longer have hold, and everything’s adrift.

Stray observations:

Paulie’s grim expression when he drives over to Chris’ house to tear up his lawn with his car is absolutely hilarious. Some excellent, wordless acting from Tony Sirico.Why the minus? Well, A.J.’s moping wore a little less well with me this time around. I understand just why it’s necessary, and I like where it’s all headed, but to a degree, it’s hard not to want the kid to just get up off his ass and realize there are other fish in the sea. (My God. I’m as bad as Tony!)When Little Paulie cons his way past Mike, the employee at Al’s store, there’s a casual malevolence to it that I really like. He’s not all that great at this, but he’s confident enough to pull it off.Meadow pops up mostly to worry about A.J. and to have a mystery date. And I love that final scene with the family at the kitchen table, when it really does seem as if everything is getting back to normal.If it didn’t have a naked breast in it, I would have made the expression on Robert Iler’s face when the stripper is grinding against him the screencap for this episode. It so perfectly expresses the ennui roiling inside of this hour.Some great malapropisms in this hour, but I think my favorite is when Chris says something about getting your teeth wet.Tony reports the Arab guys to the FBI, complete with cell phone number and names garnered from a quick call to Chris. He also tells Carmela that, hey, it could be worse. A.J. could be in Iraq. I love how mid-00s foreign policy hangs so heavily over this season.“Last time, you started crying and had to leave the Starbucks!” Blanca feels bad for A.J., but not that bad.“That’s a huge plus nowadays!” Tony Soprano, on being white.“Babies. They’re the future.” The continued philosophical musings of Christopher Moltisanti.

Speaking with the Fishes (spoilers):

Knowing that the next episode contains Chris’ death, it’s impressive to me just how thoroughly this episode sets his character arc for that to happen without actually suggesting he’s about to die in any way.Meadow’s mystery date is with Patsy Parisi’s son, Patrick, who will become her paramour as the show ends, signifying how she’s gotten roped into her father’s orbit all over again. (This is probably why we hear about Finn for the first time in ages as well.)The show’s also laying the groundwork for Tony and Melfi’s ultimate split in this episode.

Next week: Tony and Christopher have a run-in with “Kennedy And Heidi.”

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