Brotherhood is a Showtime series about life in Providence, Rhode Island. It turns out to be somewhere between The Sopranos and The Wire, with perhaps a little bit of Breaking Bad thrown in. If you enjoyed any or all of those three series, you might also like this one. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brotherhood_(American_TV_series) By the way, for those of you who make have notices that I didn't have a blog post on the Super Bowl this year: you're right. I decided there is no way I can add value to any casual TV viewer's existing understanding of the event this year. Glad you got by without me.
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I mentioned the series "Fat Actress" here yesterday. I want to say something else about it now. I won't say anything of substance, but my excuse is that today is my birthday (61), so I'm being frivolous in the spirit thereof. Consider my party hat on. Mayim Bialik does some very good work playing, like Kirstie, a fictionalized version of herself. Bialik is best known nowadays for the part of Amy, in The Big Bang Theory. But that show didn't get its start until 2007, and the character of Amy makes her first appearance only in the third season (it may have been later -- I'm too lazy to look that up). In 2005, when "Fat Actress" appeared, Mayim Bialik was best known as the former child star who had done "Blossom" from 1990 to 1995. Ten years is a long time since one's last Big Thing, so Bialik had a reputation somewhat like Alley's, as someone who "used to be famous." I know nothing about Blossom , but I'm very...
Nurse Jackie is the weekly TV program Edie Falco did after The Sopranos wrapped. I was thinking while I watched an episode via Netflix recently that my mother, who was a nurse 'back in the day,' would love the show. But then I considered the drug-addicted character Falco plays and I thought ... oh, maybe not. Mom has a sense of humor about nursing but she has old-fashioned ideas about what kind of stories ought to be told. Jackie as portrayed in the series is such a mess of a human being that it is hard to imagine the series having been a hit without the genius of Ms Falco. She had made Carmela Soprano sympathetic, she could do so with Jackie Peyton. I was fascinated by a subplot of episode 4, season 1, in which Jackie's daughter Grace is diagnosed with having an "anxiety disorder" on the basis of such facts as that, when encouraged to draw something with crayons, she created a picture with grays and blacks, i.e. with no proper colors. Jackie's react...
I was binge-watching THE WIRE recently, but the theme song "Way Down in the Hole," kept causing my mind to wander to theological questions. The lyrics end as follows, "Don't pay heed to temptation, for his hands are so cold, "You gotta help me keep the devil, Way down in the hole." Within post-biblical Christian theology, the role of the devil in cosmology is very ambiguous. Is he a servant of God, or is he an adversary? Is he sort of a frenemy? If, with Dante, you see Satan chiefly as a prison warden of hell, then Satan would seem to be a servant of God. He rules over a "kingdom" only in the sense that a warden does. He superintends the punishment that the higher authority has decided should be meted out. God is the Governor and the legislature, the judges and juries, all in one Being. Satan is the humble obedient prison warden. Yet Satan's presence there too is a punishment. The "warden" analogy falters here. You can ...
I begin this year, as I seem to begin each year, with three calendars. I have a new desktop/appointment calendar from American Express; a month-by-month wall calendar advertising the Boston Red Sox baseball team, and a day-to-day calendar atop my dresser filled with trivia regarding a television program, The Big Bang Theory. The AMEX calendar, as is its year-by-year custom, tells me to travel to various exotic places where I can use my blue card to go into debt. Among the locales highlighted this year: Cancun, Mexico; Oslo, Norway; Cusco, Peru. In connection with the latter, we're told amidst space for mid-September 2015 appointments that visitors to high-altitude Cuzco should keep well hydrated and avoid heavy meals and alcohol. Got it. The Red Sox calendar gives the stats for different players each month, starting in January with Jon Lester, Pitcher, #31. Lester also gets a very dramatic photo portraying him in full stretch, mid-pitch. If you're curious, he was born...