Matt Yglesias

After The Wire

Via Radley Balko, a compilation of great moments from The Wire, the best television show of all time:

What’s really depressing to me about the current TV landscape isn’t so much that we haven’t seen another Wire-quality show as it is that we haven’t even seen a serious effort to produce another show that’d be as good. The aesthetic message of the The Wire is that it’s possible to create TV shows with much higher aspirations than what you typically see—long, densely structured plot arcs with sprawling casts of characters that allow you to go beyond what’s possible in movies. But the business message is that being near-universally celebrated as the best TV show doesn’t bring with it any particular financial rewards.

Consequently, if you watch Dexter or True Blood you don’t say to yourself “this is every bit is ambitious as The Wire but doesn’t quite hit the mark.” Instead, you’re looking at shows that have constrained their ambitions. It’s sad. Consequently, even though I’ve seen each season at least twice, in recognition of the fact that I don’t own any of the DVD’s I’m going to go buy the complete series box set in hopes of creating better financial incentives for better television in the future.

The Popularity of the Civil Rights Movement

Race moved closer to the forefront of the most recent episode of Mad Men and it struck me that one thing the show doesn’t necessarily do a great job of making clear is that in the early 1960s the basic civil rights agenda was pretty broadly popular among white northerners. Getting the Civil Rights Act of 1964 into law was a big struggle largely because the procedural rules and traditions of the senate gave southern members a lot of ability to block broadly supported legislation. What’s more, Democratic leaders were reluctant to push hard on an issue that tended to split their coalition. But when it finally did come up for a vote only six northern senators voted against it—Byrd of West Virginia, Hickenlooper of Iowa, Goldwater of Arizona, Mechem of New Mexico, Simpson of Wyoming, and Cotton of New Hampshire. During Mad Men times, both of New York’s senators were pro-civil rights Republicans.

And similarly, the Civil Rights Act of 1957 and the Civil Rights Act of 1960 were both supported by a majority of northern Democrats and a majority of Republicans. Civil disobedience and mass marches were controversial, the civil rights movement was very unpopular among white southerners, northern whites obviously weren’t free of racist sentiments, and something of a backlash against the civil rights movement would come in the near future, but as of 1963 the civil rights cause was broadly popular in the north.

And specifically it’s been indicated repeatedly in the past that Sterling-Cooper is tied in with the northeastern establishment wing of the GOP, which at the time was definitely supportive of civil rights legislation.

Dark Blue

TNT’s constant advertising for Dark Blue during the NBA playoffs and the fact that I used to love The Practice back in the day has been enough to suck me in to watching the first couple of episodes of the show. I suppose it’s well-executed enough to be watchable, but the basic thesis of the show—that it would be really awesome if the LAPD had more unaccountable rogue police units—is both absurd and reprehensible.

Meanwhile, last night I finally got around to watching a few episodes of Season 2 of The Shield on Netflix. It’s not the best thing I’ve ever seen, but as an alternate treatment of the very same “unaccountable rogue LAPD unit on basic cable” concept it sure is a lot better. Also manages to work in the fact that in some ways an unaccountable rogue policy unit might be problematic. A little corruption maybe!

The Ontology of Transformers

There’s no denying that this is a pretty amusing poster. Still, it reminds me that I think the film engaged in a bit of revisionism when it portrayed the Autobots as humanoid-shaped robots capable of change into cars and trucks and so forth. My understanding from my childhood is that we should think of them as car-shaped robots capable of changing into humanoid-shaped ones. After all, they’re called autobots, like automobiles. Their essential property is their car-ishness.

On the other hand, they’re also called transformers which indicates that it’s the transforming itself that the essential fact. They’re neither humanoid nor car-shaped, but transformative. Or something.

This Whole Blog Thing Has Gone Too Far

There seems to be a TV show called Blog Cabin. Obviously blogging jumped the shark long before this (and reality television long before that) but still this seems to be a new level of egregious.