and though he pays me minimum wage
Jun. 18th, 2012 03:02 pmI seem to be wanting to rewatch Profit.
I am definitely okay with this.
It's one of my favorite little television oddities, really; one of those things that next to no one saw when it was aired, but has refused to quite go away. According to various DVD featurettes, iirc, it's never been out of favor with people who write for TV, which I entirely believe. (I would very much like to know if Matt Weiner was ever a fan, because if Don Draper and Peggy Olsen don't share a few narrative DNA codons with Jim Profit and Gail Koner, it's a very big coincidence. Although Mad Men is actually far more optimistic about human nature.)
I mean, on the surface level, Profit is obviously the product of a televisual culture than which we are a little more advanced these days (I'm sorry, that's an awful sentence). The pacing runs a bit sluggish by 2012 standards; the plot contrivances are occasionally -- uh -- well, nothing we're watching these days is going to look any more plausible in sixteen years; and, with the exception of the titular character (and I might be biased, because Adrian Pasdar could look both sexass and dignified in a potato sack), everyone looks like they got dressed in a bad second-hand shop in the dark.
We'll say nothing about the computer graphics. I find them charming, anyway.
But at the same time it's probably one of the smarter pieces of television I've ever seen, and the single most pitch-black satire I've ever encountered in any media. I do not think anyone has ever been more vicious about ripping shreds off the concept of the American Family (The Manchurian Candidate wants to be -- and I mean the book; the first movie waters it down and the second is going after different targets -- but it bogs down in 1950s gender ideals) and as for the American Corporation, and Profit's glorious skewering of the tendency of the two to be conflated...
So yes, I think I'm going to watch it again. I have thoughts. And it'll be a nice warm-up for reducing the Upstairs Downstairs reboot to lawn mulch*.
* Lawn mulch, furthermore, which I have sworn will not contain a single instance of "this isn't how I would have done this" thinking; it won't need to. There's material for a dissertation in the way that no one, possibly excepting the cast, had a damned clue about how they were doing it; I'm going to be mulching it primarily for the purpose of giving myself a way to articulate my thoughts about knowing what goddamned story you're telling. Because it's a textbook example of what happens when you don't; also, it's obscure in this country and not sf/f/h, so no one reading this is likely to have any serious emotional attachment to it. But I digress.
I am definitely okay with this.
It's one of my favorite little television oddities, really; one of those things that next to no one saw when it was aired, but has refused to quite go away. According to various DVD featurettes, iirc, it's never been out of favor with people who write for TV, which I entirely believe. (I would very much like to know if Matt Weiner was ever a fan, because if Don Draper and Peggy Olsen don't share a few narrative DNA codons with Jim Profit and Gail Koner, it's a very big coincidence. Although Mad Men is actually far more optimistic about human nature.)
I mean, on the surface level, Profit is obviously the product of a televisual culture than which we are a little more advanced these days (I'm sorry, that's an awful sentence). The pacing runs a bit sluggish by 2012 standards; the plot contrivances are occasionally -- uh -- well, nothing we're watching these days is going to look any more plausible in sixteen years; and, with the exception of the titular character (and I might be biased, because Adrian Pasdar could look both sexass and dignified in a potato sack), everyone looks like they got dressed in a bad second-hand shop in the dark.
We'll say nothing about the computer graphics. I find them charming, anyway.
But at the same time it's probably one of the smarter pieces of television I've ever seen, and the single most pitch-black satire I've ever encountered in any media. I do not think anyone has ever been more vicious about ripping shreds off the concept of the American Family (The Manchurian Candidate wants to be -- and I mean the book; the first movie waters it down and the second is going after different targets -- but it bogs down in 1950s gender ideals) and as for the American Corporation, and Profit's glorious skewering of the tendency of the two to be conflated...
So yes, I think I'm going to watch it again. I have thoughts. And it'll be a nice warm-up for reducing the Upstairs Downstairs reboot to lawn mulch*.
* Lawn mulch, furthermore, which I have sworn will not contain a single instance of "this isn't how I would have done this" thinking; it won't need to. There's material for a dissertation in the way that no one, possibly excepting the cast, had a damned clue about how they were doing it; I'm going to be mulching it primarily for the purpose of giving myself a way to articulate my thoughts about knowing what goddamned story you're telling. Because it's a textbook example of what happens when you don't; also, it's obscure in this country and not sf/f/h, so no one reading this is likely to have any serious emotional attachment to it. But I digress.