Now You Know

Wisconsin delivered an old fashioned asskicking to Nebraska tonight. Welcome to the Big Ten, Big Red! After the nonconference games I wasn't worried about the offense. Russell Wilson joined a pretty good unit that didn't ask much of its QB, and he brought a lot to the able (and made Nick Toon look good for once).

My main concern entering B1G play was the defense, which hadn't been tested by anyone to speak of. It looked bad in the first game of the season against UNLV's "pistol" offense. They did just fine against Nebraska today, neutralizing their running game and keeping mobile QB Taylor Martinez contained for most of the game. The line got plenty of pressure on him, and the secondary picked him off three times.

About the only complaint was what happened early in the first half, when Abbrederis fumbled a return and Nebraska punched it into the end zone. It anchored a stretch that saw Nebraska jump on three fumbles. Two of them were their own, so apparently they had lots of practice at is (laughing) (h/t cdw).

Wisconsin's schedule looks favorable, with Illinois as the lone ranked team on the schedule. It's always tough to count on a win in the Horseshoe though, no matter how unsettled the aOSU QB situation is, and I'm still worried about Sparty after last year.

vs Indiana
at Sparty
at aOSU
vs Purdue
at Goldy
at Illinois
vs Penn State

Should be a fun ride.

When you say Wisconsin, you've said it all.

Wisconsin Non-Con recap

Technically the non-conference portion of the season isn't over yet, but I feel safe in saying that anything I say about the first three games will apply to the last one and then some.

But really, what is there to say? Wisconsin's offense looks incredible. My only concern on the offensive side was whether Russell Wilson would have anyone worth a damn to throw to, but Jared Abbrederis and Nick Toon have risen to the occasion. The Badgers are still getting plenty of yards on the ground, though James White hasn't seemed quite as explosive as he was last season.

The only hiccups so far have been some rusty play by Borland and Taylor in the UNLV game (understandable) that seems to have cleared up, and some strange line play against OSU. Early in the game both of Wisconsin's lines were being pushed around, which is unusual to say the least. They won 35-0 so they must have figured it out I guess.

Bring on Nebraska!

NFL season predictions

AFC Playoff teams:

North: Steelers (12-4)
East: Pats (12-4)
South: Texans (9-7)
West: Chargers (12-4)
WC: Ravens (9-7)
WC: Jets (9-7)

NFC Playoff teams:

North: Packers (11-5)
East: Eagles (11-5)
South: Saints (10-6)
West: Rams (9-7)
WC: Cowboys (10-6)
WC: Lions (9-7)

NFC North:

Packers: 11-5
Lions: 9-7
Vikings: 7-9
Bears: 4-12

Super Bowl: Steelers over Saints

UNLV 17 - 51 Wisconsin

Like last year, I'm going to try to do some quick thoughts after each game this season. It might be tougher this year because I'm at a short term position in Rhode Island and did not bring my TV. It looks like I'll be spending some time in bars this fall (for the Packers too, of course).

I barely followed Wisconsin football this offseason. About all I knew was that Watt, Carimi, and Kendricks were all drafted (and should play major roles for their teams this year). If you asked me this summer who the QB was going to be I might have said Tolzein --- I couldn't remember if he graduated or not. After I finally emerged from the football-shaped rock I was hiding under I heard lots of great things about Russell Wilson, but my concern was that he wouldn't have anyone to throw to. Between this and the talent drain from the draft I was uneasy with the predictions being thrown around about UW winning its division, let alone winning the B1G and contending for a national title.

How Wisconsin won: Russell Wilson got plenty of praise for his performance, but it was Wisconsin Football that won the day - running, running, and yet more running. At one point they listed all of Wisconsin's drives and they were averaging fourteen yards per play . Ball and White look in midseason form. Wilson looked great in the pass attempts he did make, though he overthrew two passes early. However, there's little doubt that the run game set those throws up so it will be interesting to see how he does against a stouter defense. The Badgers didn't see many third downs and those they did see were mainly third and shorts. Wilson made some great plays with his legs, and the best compliment I could make was that he didn't remind me of Brooks Bollinger*. He made good decisions on when to tuck and run and ran one in for an easy touchdown with WRs blocking down field.

*Bollinger was notorious to me for giving up on plays and trying to run with it. I can't count how many times I heard "Bollinger on the keeper....gain of one yard on the play".

How UNLV lost: I can criticize a few things about UNLV's game (mainly lousy red zone execution), but given expectations this was a win for them. Aside from the financial aspect (which was the main reason they set up this series), their "Pistol" offense gave the Badger defense fits, as well as the camera crew. I must have been misdirected five or six times with their option plays and had no idea who had the ball. They were consistently getting to the edge against a Wisconsin defense that looked very slow. The defensive line was definitely missing J.J. Watt, and Chris Borland (who I had completely forgotten about after he missed last year with an injury) did not seem like the impact player that he was when he won the B1G Freshman of the Year award after the 2009 season. Jesse Palmer or (ugh) Craig James mentioned that they could just be gaming Oregon State with their defenses this week, which is right about the level of analysis I expect from those two.

Game ball: Montee Ball

Next week: Oregon State (who just lost to a FCS team!) at Camp Randall. Wisconsin's non-conference schedule is nuts this year. Three games at home and one game at Soldier Field vs Nothern Illinois.

Summer TV Countdown: #2 Parks and Recreation and #5 Community

This summer, the Onion's AV Club published 4-part interviews with the showrunners of Community and Parks And Recreation (you can find the final installments, and links to the previous ones, here and here). In my brain Michael Schur will always be Ken Tremendous, so I refer to him simply as KT below.

(Obviously, spoilers if you haven't watched the most recent season of these shows).

These are both shows that I quite enjoy, but I had very different reactions to the interviews. KT's Parks and Rec interview reminded me of everything that I love about Parks and Rec, while Dan Harmon's Community walkthrough magnified everything I'm worried about on Community.

Let's start with the Community one, since it was first anyway. It's a show that is (intentionally) tough to define beyond the fact that it's a comedy. It has a large ensemble cast, pretty much all of whom work well together. It enjoys doing, for lack of a better word, spoof episodes, where they riff on some particular genre of movies or tv. Most importantly, unlike most tv shows (especially sitcoms) it takes risks by challenging and changing its characters and their dynamics, which is always nice to see. These risks the show takes, both with individual episodes and the characters themselves is why it can crank out such great episodes, but they don't always work out.

I thought the biggest character misstep they had this season was with Chang, who was the breakout star of the first season and was largely pathetic and used to little effect this year. What made his character great was how drunk with power he was in the first season. The change they made to his character was interesting in a "let's see what happens" sense and was an organic change with respect to the internal logic of the show, but despite adding the extra wrinkle with Shirley's baby this year it largely went nowhere, and the show suffered without him. Having more John Oliver was nice, but didn't fill in that gap. I don't know what else they could have done - it would have been interesting if he somehow became the new dean, but the current dean is so awesome that you can't write him off the show.

I wasn't a huge fan of what they did with Pierce in the second half of the season either, but I'll give them more of the benefit of the doubt there. He turned into a (even huger) huge asshole and it was hard to figure out why everyone was still friends with him. They did address this in the finale though, and it makes a little more sense if he's being set up as the villain in the next season, which could be interesting.

My biggest issue with the show, which was only magnified by this interview, is how much the show loves patting itself on the back for some of the sitcom-subverting things they do. I'm not sure why it bothers me so much - in some sense it's not too different from doing, say, the zombie episode or the war movie spoof that was the first paintball episode. In particular, I'm thinking of the Documentary Filmmaking episode, where they spoof the mockumentary format, Paradigms of Human Memory, where they spoof clip shows, and Critical Film Studies, where they base the entire episode on an elaborately framed joke related to a lesser-known 1980s movie.

People like what they like - I also am apparently the only one who doesn't enjoy the Troy freakouts they used in the second half of the season - but when the showrunner says things along the lines of "we don't have to reinvent television every week", and you take him seriously in context, it could lead to trouble. I recognize that it takes some careful planning to craft a good comedy show, but this kind of overthinking can spoil things. I don't have a problem with serious episodes - one of my favorites this season was Troy's birthday party. I thought it was just a factor of seeing how the sausage was made - I made these points in the comments to one of the interview parts and the interviewer said that all showrunners were like this.

Fast forward to the Parks and Rec interview with Ken Tremendous. He also goes into great detail about their strategy of crafting their show, but instead of making me nervous it just reminded me of everything I love about Pawnee and those characters in general. P&R isn't afraid of a little change either - it cut Mark from the show after the second season and more or less replaced him with Ben, Chris joined the cast, April and Andy got married, Tom quit his job. The show still had a few issues: they still generally have a tough time with Ann storylines, the Leslie and Ben stuff dragged a bit, and they could be in danger of leaning too much on Ron stories (though not too much, as every plot involving Ron has been absolutely hilarious so far).

The best part of the interview is just that you have a bigger sense of what KT wants to do with the show. Both Community and P&R have established a greater universe (Greendale, Pawnee) to interact with, but I have a better sense of what kinds of stories P&R wants to tell with its characters. Much more so than Community, what keeps bringing me back to P&R is that you get to spend time essentially hanging out with characters you like. The same is somewhat true in Community, especially with regards to Abed and Troy, Annie, and to a greater extent (for me at least) with Britta. But Community thrives more in intra-group conflict than P&R, which has much more to do with the inherent conflicts of governing. One thing KT mentioned about his vision for the show is that he doesn't like that most sitcoms are basically driven by jokes where the characters are all mean to one another. This is definitely something that's bothered me about a lot of the big sitcoms of the last 10-15 years or so, especially shows like Seinfeld (which I like less and less as time goes on) and Everybody Loves Raymond, which we used to love but just got tired of eventually due to all the hate flying around. The same is also somewhat true of The Office, though that show has some heart behind all of it.

Some of my love for the show also stems from the fact that I can connect with Leslie's (and clearly from the interview KT's) view of government, especially the parks. I grew up going on vacation to dozens of National Parks (as my mother worked for NPS for 30+ years), and my wife and I both worked at Harpers Ferry National Park when we were in high school/early college, where we met and worked with many more people who loved their jobs and were very good at them. Leslie is a proxy for everyone we knew who are good at their jobs and enjoy public service. There are certainly plenty of other people on the show who aren't such great examples but they all work anyway because they all respect Leslie.

I could probably say a lot more about Parks and Rec, but the appeal of the show is nicely summed up with what I said above about hanging out with characters you like. I'm really glad to see the show and Amy Poehler getting some Emmy love this year. Apparently Community didn't win any friends by essentially basing their Emmy ad campaign in Hollywood by telling people who haven't seen the show that they're idiots, so it's not that surprising that they got zero Emmy nominations.

Top three episodes for each show this season:
P&R:
1. Flu Season
2. Fancy Party
3. Jerry's Painting

Community:
1. Abed's Uncontrollable Christmas
2. Collaborative Calligraphy
3. Consipiracy Theories and Interior Design

Summer TV Countdown #14: Dexter

I probably have Dexter rated too low - blame it on how long it has been since I watched it. I got into the show a year or so ago thanks to all the Dexter fans over at Obstructed View. I enjoyed season five but have a reservation or two about the show. If I had to rank the Dexter seasons right now, I would probably go

2
4
1
5
(gap)
3

Spoilers below, obviously.

The good things about this season:

Anything involving Dexter's main storyline. The I remember liking the first episode or two after Rita's death, and I love pretty much any interaction between Dexter and Astor. They eventually leave to live with their grandparents (while Harrison stays with Dexter), and there's a great episode later in the season when Astor returns. Michael C. Hall really carries the weight on this show.

On a similar note, Lumen was great. Julia Stiles really nailed her guest role - John Lithgow was probably the only major guest star that has been better over the course of the show. Despite how relatively formulaic the show has become in the past three seasons (Major Guest Star is introduced, gets Too Close To Dexter, leaves one way or another at the end of the season), one thing that speaks for the quality of the show and its guest stars is that they're compelling enough to share the load with Michael C. Hall in carrying the show. Jimmy Smits was not so good (hence the rankings above), but Lithgow and Stiles brought a lot to the table in their stints on the show.
At first when I looked back on the season I thought that it would have been better if the Lumen story arc occurred in season three, since this season did a far better job with the "Dexter teams up with someone" plot, but it works better this season in the context of Dexter getting over Rita's death.

The not so good things about this season:

While Lumen was a great character and I enjoyed the broader arc of her story, there was one weak link - Johnny Lee Miller (of Hackers fame!) as Jordan Chase, this season's big bad. What he and his crew did to Lumen and their other victims was terrible and I quite enjoyed seeing Lumen and Dexter hunt them down, Jordan himself was kind of meh. I mean, he was evil and deserved to die, but he didn't feel EVIL the way that the likes of Arthur Miller or even the ruthless Miguel Prado. Jordan was just more of an asshole. It feels weird to say that, since I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that sexual assault is bad and I have no sympathy for abusers like Jordan's group anymore than I do with criminals like Miguel or Arthur. But it was a different kind of season - killing him felt much more about closure for Lumen (and indirectly, Dexter) than about some epic confrontation to remove Evil from the world as we've seen in other seasons. Overall I liked the idea of her arc (and Stiles and Dexter did a great job), but it didn't feel executed well on the side of the villains. I'm not sure if it was acting, or writing, or both.

Everything not involving Dexter or Lumen. I'm generally pretty meh on all the sideplots on this show in general. I quite enjoy Deb, but any b-plot that involves anyone else in Miami Metro Homicide that does not involve Dexter is extremely blah. I like Batista's character but I'm not a fan with what the writers have given him to work with, especially his marriage to LaGuerta and all of the internal police department wrangling that those two deal with. Quinn had more to do this season and we got the bonus wrinkle that he knows Dexter is up to something, but every time I look at him I wonder if he's going to die in the next episode from anorexia and/or heroin addiction. I swear you can see his ribs through his back. The other big plot line this season was the hunt for the so-called Santa Muerte killer, which weirdly fizzled out midway through. I don't even remember if they caught the perps. I think there was a shootout at a public location at some point and LaGuerta rightly got in a lot of hot water over it. Overall my memory of it was that it felt poorly tacked on.

Going forward:

One of the biggest complaints about this show from the critics is that it hits the reset button too often and that the broad arc of the season is fairly predictable (as mentioned above, Major Guest Star is introduced, gets Too Close To Dexter, leaves one way or another at the end of the season). Except for season 5, for obvious reasons, pretty much every season has started with promos along the lines of "The old Dexter is back!!!!11!". But, given the premise of the show, I don't see how many ways there are for them to not hit the reset button without destroying the premise of the show, since once someone finds out about Dexter's secret he either has to kill them or get caught, and then it's show over. One way they could have changed things would have been to keep Lumen around past the season break. They might have even been able to keep her around even if she decided to stop with the killing. Maybe I'm just too optimistic about how that would work though.

I don't remember the guest stars that have been cast for season six, except for the always awesome Edward James Olmos. I don't really have the vibe that anyone is supposed to be the big bad that gets Too Close To Dexter. I expect we'll be getting a lot more of Dexter worrying if Harrison is evil, which is kind of meh. Dexter does have a sword hanging over him in Quinn, though Quinn does owe him one for fudging the blood work that fingered him for Liddy's murder. Still, just a few hints to Deb can ruin everything for Dexter. I don't know/remember if Dexter kept an insurance policy against Quinn.

One thing I am hoping for next season is that the plot action will be a little more spread out. The past few seasons have had a dud episode or two in the middle of the season that felt like filler to push us to the big plot points in the last few episodes. Dexter loves to set up all the pieces in the first 7 episodes or so before knocking them all down in spectacular fashion. Those last few episodes are great, but it pulls a lot out of energy out of the earlier episodes. Contrast it with Breaking Bad, where shit can Go Down at pretty much any moment, which does a better job of keeping its viewers on their toes.

Summer TV Countdown #17: Castle

I'm a huge fan of Nathan Fillion. We're both big fans of Firefly (of course), and we also loved Dr. Horrible. So the prospect of Fillion as a wise-cracking mystery writer hanging out with some homicide police sounded like it would be fun. And it is an enjoyable show, generally.

Here's a basic rundown of the show. Castle is a best-selling mystery writer who uses his clout with the mayor's office to attach himself to Kate Beckett, a hot shot (and also hot) ace homicide detective who is to be the inspiration for a new series of mystery novels. There are a few other supporting characters on the show, who are generally pretty good. Most notable are Ryan and Esposito, two other homocide detectives who generally serve as the comic relief in the series, though thankfully not through the "incompetent cops" trope - they're both good at their jobs. Even better are Castle's family. He lives in a big apartment with his hilarious former Broadway star mother Martha and his teenage daughter Alexis, from one of his previous marriages. All three of them have fantastic chemistry - especially Castle and Alexis, who is smart and does a great job grounding him.

Most of the time it's a fun show - there's some case of the week, they solve it, Castle cracks some jokes, and a good time is had by all. The show also does a decent job with the UST between Castle and Beckett, though it's not nearly as thick as it was between Mal and Inara on Firefly. They have some good capers - my favorite might be the one where they go through secret tunnels in the sewers while investigating some Prohibition era related crime.

However, the show does have a few problems. Whenever it verges into Serious Territory (especially in any of the episodes that focus on the hunt for Beckett's mother's killer) the show is not as good - I often find myself rolling my eyes at some of the cliched Hard Boiled Cops lines in their interrogations etc. I was also extremely annoyed by the season finale (SPOILERS COMING, IF YOU CARE). It gave some resolution to the Beckett's mother storyline...by revealing that Beckett's police captain, who is a regular on the show and is a great guy and great police, has been involved in the coverup for years and is blackmailed in to protect his co-conspirators. He eventually betrays his conspirators and is killed in a firefight protecting Beckett. It pissed me off because it felt completely manufactured by the showrunners who needed to ratchet up the tension for ratings, rather than for any particular plan or character arc on their part. Even more annoyingly, they gave us a "cliffhanger" where Beckett was shot while speaking at his funeral, but where's the suspense there? They're not going to kill off the co-main character and main love interest - this show just doesn't have the kind of balls to do that.

That pretty much sums up my main problem with the show - it's a fun show from week to week when they all run around and solve mysteries. Everyone has great chemistry with everyone else (it's Nathan Fillion's gift), but whenever they try to move away from their basic formula it generally falls on its face.