The Decline and Fall of HBO: I suppose True Blood was OK. That is to say, it's not worth watching other than as a mild distraction. The concept of vampires as an oppressed minority with religious and quasi-right wing human supremacist forces out to get them is about as heavy-handed and conceptually confused as anything I have seen. It also appears to have no actual point. Beyond that, True Blood is a generic combo of soap opera and murder mystery, just add vampires. Attempts at humor are not particularly funny. Attempts at suspense are not particularly arresting. Attempts at romance descend into dull pseudo-porn. Producer Alan Ball's reputation now rests on American Beauty, an overwrought movie which gets exponentially worse with age; Six Feet Under, which had one great season, and one good one, and also has no staying power; and the shrug-inducing True Blood.
(By the way: I am already sick to death of frickin' vampires. Let's declare a moratorium on any more vampire crap. Let the undead rest in peace for a while, wouldja?)
A better pointless time waster is Entourage because it doesn't profess to be anything more than tissue-thin and therefore doesn't require the effort to be disappointed, and you only end up wasting 30 minutes instead of an hour. Plus, there is always The Piven to liven things up.
Upcoming for HBO is a sitcom called Hung and I refuse to describe the premise, but you can probably guess. I'll just say that if you are one of those people who believes TV is a lurid cesspool, you're about to get a reload of ammo, as if you needed it. All this is made more poignant because they have just re-run the final season of the finest TV show ever made, Deadwood.
I know some people claim The Wire to be best, but they are wrong. That show's source of brilliance was the treatment of the series as a contemporary Greek Tragedy, but it was marred by the very contemporary setting it so valued. In the end outside forces like David Simon's axe grinding weighed heavily on it, and I grew to sense an uncomfortable voyeurism, as if it a certain class of elitist progressives were gawking at the portrayal of some horrible primitives, while congratulating themselves on their broad-minded evaluations. The ambition for social relevance inevitably makes the living reaction to the show part of the experience; "contemporary" is a double-edged sword. I rank The Wire at #3.
The Sopranos also bears mentioning, but to be honest, it was 6+ seasons when it should have been about 4. There were stretches that were carried almost entirely by James Gandolfini. However, it benefitted supremely from Matt Weiner's subtle and honest insights into humanity (now obvious thanks to Mad Men). The characters were as deep and the relationships as complex as any ever created. The Sopranos comes in at #2.
Deadwood rises above the others simply by the scope of its ambition. The Wire was about impotence in the face of a cold-hearted, dehumanizing system. The Sopranos was about the lies we tell ourselves and how we work to preserve them. Excellent and timeless themes, no doubt; well-plumbed throughout the history of the arts. But Deadwood was about how civilization emerges from barbarism. Go find examples of that anywhere else in the arts or humanities. Forgive me if I don't wait. If it wasn't totally original, it was pretty rare. And I'll wager anything you do find in a similar vein is mawkishly simple in comparison. More likely you'll find high-minded expositions about how we are no different from savages.
But more than that is the language. As far as I know Deadwood is the only TV show, and one of the few recent works of drama in any form, to use the English language in something other than a utilitarian, realistic way. The dialogue had a rhythm and tone all its own -- it approached having a meter. People spoke in complete sentences and paragraphs. There were regularly soliloquies. All of this was intermixed with some of the most poetic profanity imaginable. I know the gangsters and gangstas in the other two shows had the lingo right for their idioms, but that was for the sake of genuineness. The dialogue in Deadwood wasn't aiming to be genuine; it was aiming to be beautiful. And it was. Just an amazing work of art.
Deadwood never got a chance to end, because it was more important to have time slots for something like Hung. Where once HBO had the balls to greenlight epic drama, they now only have the balls to greenlight epic genitals.
