Matt Yglesias

Dark Blue: The Madness Continues

I watched episode three of TNT’s Dark Blue last night and the show continues to be driven by the absurd and reprehensible notion that the world would be a better place if there were more rogue unaccountable police units. In this episode, our heros first try to entrap an innocent man. Then when that fails, as a fallback plan they just frame him instead. And, weirdly, they refer to this framing as “entrapment” and acknowledge that it kinda sorta might involve crossing a line, as if to obscure the fact that their initial plan was also illegal. Then, using the innocent man as a confederate, they successfully infiltrate some drug organization where a dude gets arrested but the innocent man is killed.

This is all acknowledged as a harrowing weekend at the office, but nobody seems to notice that effect police work is supposed to reduce, not increase, the quantity of people killed.

Specifics of the show aside, what’s totally missing from this conception of police work is any sense that there’s an actual purpose to the enterprise. Instead, you have a certain number of criminals and you have some cops so the cops are supposed to catch criminals. But nobody says at the end of the episode “now that we’ve arrested this guy there will be no more cocaine in Los Angeles.” Because that would be stupid. But then what are they trying to accomplish? Note that it’s not impossible for drug enforcement to accomplish something worthwhile. Open air drug markets are a huge nuisance for people who live in the neighborhood, and it’s possible to shut them down for good and make everyone’s life better. Or you can target enforcement on gangs that are being violent, or employing kids. But you need some kind of coherent theory about what the problem is in your community and how it is that law enforcement activity is going to make the problem better.

SoCal High School Noir?

Ezra Klein justly praises the excellent 2005 film Brick. But he also describes it as “the best hard-boiled noir ever set in a Southern California high school.”

I remember thinking when I saw Brick how strange it was that this film came out at the very same time when Veronica Mars was on television. Suddenly the world was full of Southern California high school noir. And then just like that, the genre vanished. At any rate, I think I liked VM slightly better than Brick, although arguably the TV show doesn’t qualify as “hard-boiled” so we could draw the distinction there.

Only on the Internet

A comprehensive (?) list of times characters have used the word “penny” on the various Star Trek shows. Apparently such “old Earth” adages as “a penny for your thoughts” and “in for a penny, in for a pound” will persist into the distant future.

Farley: Human-Cylon Alliance is Impractical and Irresponsible

Robert Farley makes the case against the Cylon-Human alliance, arguing “that Vice President Zarek and Lieutenant Gaeta were correct to resist the Adama-Roslin military-political clique.”

I tend to agree on the policy merits. However, I think Farley is too quick to leap from policy agreement to endorsement of the Zarek/Gaeta coup. One could argue that, yes, since the very survival of the human race is called into question by this policy decision that one shouldn’t be bound by the law. However, the circumstances of post-genocide humanity are such that one could make that case regarding essentially every policy dispute. Nor am I by any means convinced that the anti-cylon faction had seriously exhausted the legal means available to them to try to fight this policy.

Second, I think Farley is too optimistic about the possibility of humans and cylons going their separate ways. The level of distrust and past bad acts is simply too high. If humanity rejects alliance with the rebel cylons, it seems likely to me that the cylon will conclude that humanity intends to destroy them. If so, they’ll try to destroy humanity. Meaning that humanity really may have no choice but to destroy the cylons. Nobody likes the security dilemma, but there it is, and it has been ever since the initial signing of the Armistice.

BSG Prediction Blogging

There be spoilers at this link so don’t click here if you haven’t seen Friday’s new episode of Battlestar Galactica. Suffice it to say that I endorse Julian’s predictions.

Bonus policy angle: Tricia Helfer’s off the grid sustainable house.

Deadweight Loss

You hear a lot of bogus statistics thrown around about economic losses due to piracy, but you hear very little about the economic cost associated with pricing digital media so far above the marginal cost of production.

For example, I was in Target last week and saw this box set of The OC DVDs on sale for $116.99:

Now for my part, I was never a huge OC devoté but I watched most of the first season and some of the second season before losing interest. And I have some money, I like pop culture, and I like impulse buys, etc. If this box set were orders of magnitude cheaper—say $10.00 instead of $116.99—I might have bought it. Now presumably the people running these businesses know what they’re doing, and overall profits really would be lower. But still, owning all those episodes would have given me $10.00 of utility and it would be possible, though not legal, for me to acquire them at no cost whatsoever to their owner. And it seems that The OC lost over five million viewers between its popular first season and its unpopular forth season. Maybe all five million of us would be moderately interested in the box set worth of DVDs were it cheap. That’s maybe $50 million—maybe more—in deadweight losses related to just one show.

Now obviously that’s a lousy estimate. Don’t take it seriously. Maybe some clever economist somewhere will come up with a reasonable way of calculating it. I’m just illustrating the point that the costs are real. And that for this reason, the optimal amount of copying is not zero. It’s just common sense that there are lots of people for whom owning the complete run of a TV show would be worth more than $0 but more than the $100+ prices these things carry in stores. It’s a good thing, from a social point of view, that some of those people are able to acquire “pirated” copies of the things they want to watch.

The Final Frontier

Before posting any additional inflammatory remarks about Gaza, I thought I would address the other controversy likely to provoke lengthy internet feuds — which of the “Star Trek” series is the worst? Yesterday afternoon while awaiting the beginning of the Texas-OSU game, I opined on my public Twitter feed that “truly ‘Voyager’ is the worst of the Star Treks.”

This provoked some dispute from my Twitter followers. The most popular contrary view was that “Enterprise” is worse. But a substantial number of people took the line that “Deep Space Nine” was the worst. That’s just crazy. It’s true that DS9 starts weak, but it actually becomes quite awesome once the Dominion plotline gets rolling. And beyond that, it’s actually a pretty innovative show — it was one of the pioneers in moving the hour-long television drama away from the pure serial mode and toward longer-running narrative arcs.

As for “Enterprise,” I dunno. The Temporal Cold War is stupid. But I think the explorations of the origins of the Federation and the Prime Directive are interesting. Not interesting to normal people, of course, but interesting to fans of the franchise. Whereas “Voyager” just gives me nothing. I appreciate the desire to set a show far, far away from the rest of the action in order to avoid being weighed down by too much existing canon, but an inability to rely on basic familiar pillars (Klingons, Romulans, the occasional emergency sub-space transmission from admiral so-and-so) winds up doing a lot of reinventing the wheel. Except it’s a kind of second-rate wheel.

The BSG Era

Newsweek “asked its cultural critics to pick the one work in their field that they believe exemplifies what it was like to be alive in the age of George W. Bush.” Unfortunately, the very first one to answer is the television critic and he makes the right choice — Battlestar Galactica. I found this via Scott McLemee who also concurs in that judgment.

There have been better television shows than BSG, which I’ve tended to find uneven. But the show’s had some brilliant runs, and really nothing else has done nearly so much to capture the dystopian nature of the Bush years.

If It’s Sunday, It’s Conservative

Look, this discrepancy is easy to explain. When conservatives dominated the government, it was necessary for conservatives to dominate the Sunday show guest lists in order that the views of big-time newsmakers be reflected. Conversely, with progressives coming into power, we need conservatives to dominate the Sunday show guest lists in order to counterbalance the views of those holding high political office.

Rewatching

David Thompson says “The Godfather plays every year; The Sopranos in reruns will bore you.” Ross Douthat responds:

Well! The Godfather does play every year, but it’s also only three hours long, and thus a completely different artistic animal than The Sopranos, which clocks in roughly eighty hours when all is said and done. There’s no perfect analogy here, obviously, but on length alone it’s a little like comparing James Joyce’s “The Dead” to David Copperfield. Yes, Coppola’s masterpiece has a self-contained perfection to which a long-running television show simply can’t hope to aspire – and yes, as a result, there are episodes and even long swathes of David Chase’s show that bore upon reacquaintance, just as there are sections of Copperfield or War and Peace that I wouldn’t care to read and re-read every year. But trust me: I’m watching The Sopranos in re-runs right now, and as a cumulative experience – allowing for bumps and blind alleys and boredom along the way – it’s no less impressive than the first time or two I watched it.

Let me start off with the quick note that I took Fred Kaplan’s advice and recently rewatched the Godfather movies as re-released on Blu-Ray and was not disappointed. Ross is both right about this and also being somewhat too easy on The Sopranos. The relevant comparison here is to The Wire which, though not quite equal in length to The Sopranos, is comparable in scale. And the Wire, though I think it does flag a bit in seasons four and five, absolutely never stops feeling like a single coherent work that deserves to be watched uninterrupted from end to end. The Sopranos is extremely well-made television, but especially after season two it begins to get very “televisiony” — full of occasional digressions and sub-plots that feel like filler or stalling or efforts to spread screen time around rather than being crucial to the development of the story. If The Wire had never existed, one might be inclined to say that this is just intrinsic to the medium, but we while it is endemic to the medium we also know now that it’s avoidable.

Good Ratings

Lots of people watched Barack Obama:

Day four of the Democratic National Convention featured the acceptance speech by nominee Sen. Barack Obama. The convention was carried live during prime time on ten networks – ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, FOX News Channel, MSNBC, BET, TV One, Univision and Telemundo. Coverage varied by network, all ten aired live coverage from approximately 10-11PM (ET). The final night drew the largest audience so far for the Democrats (24.5% of all American homes), eclipsing the audience reach the three previous evenings.

I wonder about the viewership counts for events like this one that people tend to watch in groups. I think there were a dozen people at my house last night to watch Obama. Needless to say, the fact that tens of millions of people want to watch Obama speaking is sure to be an even bigger liability for his campaign than the fact that 80,000 people turned out to watch it live.

Ratings Update

Looks like when you include all the networks, the 2008 convention is drawing more viewers than the 2004 edition did.