Thursday, December 22, 2011

Terriers and The Arbor

Sorry for the silence on here the past couple of days. I've been working long hours and not really having the urge to write in my time off. I do have some time before I go in today and some stuff to write about, so here's something.


I watched Terriers, the canceled FX buddy cop drama (they're PIs, not cops, but come on, it's in the genre) over the course of about a week, and I absolutely loved it. I hate myself for not watching it when it was on the air and helping to delay its demise. It's not exactly groundbreaking, but it's effortless fun, and when the stakes get high, they get just as high as they do on, say, Breaking Bad. Donal Logue is great as a highly competent, ex-alcoholic Dude-like slacker – although the fact that he looks just like a 1998 Jeff Bridges may be helping me see the similarities in the characters. Michael Raymond James is equally impressive as ex-con Britt Pollack, the partner to Logue's Hank Dolworth. The supporting cast is all excellent, too, with my personal favorite performance coming from Rockmond Dunbar as Detective Mark Gustafson, Hank's partner from when he was still on the force.

Whereas Breaking Bad has intensified so much from season to season that the funny moments have all but disappeared, Terriers is essentially a comedy in which dramatic things happen, or at the very least a truly hilarious drama. Logue and James' chemistry as they exchange one-liners –albeit sometimes painfully Sorkin-y ones – is natural and endlessly entertaining. To keep bringing Breaking Bad into it (and only because I consider it the gold standard for dramatic television, mind you, not necessarily because there's any deep similarities between it and Terriers), Aaron Paul and Bryan Cranston are a great leading duo, but riding around with them is never fun. The tension is too real.

What sucks most about Terriers' cancellation is how long it could have continued to be good. When Arrested Development was canceled, it was starting to recycle too many jokes and needed the impetus of cancellation to make its last few episodes as great as they were. The Netflix deal threatens this nearly perfect comedy series. Community's shelving earlier this year was a blessing in disguise. It's a mostly great show, but it was going to run out of cute episode ideas by halfway through S4 and realize that it hadn't developed its characters enough to build the remainder of the series around them. I, for one, hope it doesn't come back, at least not unless Dan Harmon radically reimagines the show. But Terriers could have kept being Terriers for four, five, six seasons without losing steam. They must have felt the network's breath on their necks, considering how neatly the overarching plot of the first season is tied up by the end of the last episode, but that moment as the credits roll and we don't know whether Britt and Hank are going to prison or Mexico, while a beautiful exercise in open-endedness, left me wanting to hit "next episode" on Netflix. Alas, I'll never be able to. R.I.P., Terriers. You could have been the best show on TV.



I also recently watched The Arbor, which may be the strangest film I've ever seen in terms of its approach to storytelling. It's a documentary. Sort of. Director Clio Bernard tells the story of British playwright Andrea Dunbar, her relationships with men, and the lives of the three children she left behind by conducting interviews with Dunbar's family and people who know her work and then having actors lip-synch their answers while aimlessly wandering locations relevant to the material. This is cut with a small amount of archive footage of Dunbar herself and snippets of a public performance of The Arbor, her first play, staged by Bernard himself. Once you get used to the film's conceit, it's just a harrowing narrative film that happens to be entirely true. Relative newcomer Manjinder Virk gives a performance as Dunbar's daughter Lorraine that, if the Academy had any idea what to do with such a strange film, would be garnering awards buzz. She's haunting as a mixed-race outcast who was 10 when her mother died and fell into a life of prostitution and drug abuse. The central discussions about The Arbor all center on Bernard's technique, and I feel like there's almost nothing I can say that hasn't been said, but know that beneath the veneer of a very cleverly told story, the story itself is strong enough to survive a more traditional approach to documentary filmmaking.

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