Orange Is The New Black Has A Flashback Problem

Flashbacks are essential and integral to Orange Is The New Black. They are part of the make-up and fiber of the show. They’re useful to not only provide three dimensional shading to a character, but they help prop up the show’s themes and point of view. Orange is about showing us the inequalities of race and class within our country, and about how prison is the great equalizer. The prisoners are a purposeful melting pot, and by bringing to light the backstories of multiple individuals, the show is able to bring taste and color and richness into the dish. Outside of the Piper and Vause backstories- which the story has rightfully steered away from as it chugs along- getting to know where different characters and where they came from and how they existed outside of the Litchfield prison walls helped shape them when you saw them inside the walls. Unfortunately, as the cast of Orange gets bigger and bigger, and the need for side detours gets smaller and smaller, the flashbacks have become a distraction. Further, the writing for the flashbacks have become weaker as the show has progressed.

Within the show’s first two seasons, we got flashbacks of prisoners like Watson, the runner who just wanted to fit in, Red, the would be crime boss trying to rise through the ranks, and Morello, the woman who wants to be loved by Christopher. These flashbacks were well fleshed out which in turn gave the audience a deeper understanding of who they were watching. For the most part, these flashbacks were also mini-vignettes with their own arc and storylines that just happened to be spread out over the course of a single episode. Therefore, when the flashbacks ended, they provided their own emotional weight and punch. Unfortunately, that’s just not the case anymore.

Rest In Peace Buddy Ryan

In 1981, Buddy Ryan almost lost his job as the defensive coordinator of the Chicago Bears. The team was atrocious, and the team’s owner, George Halas, was cleaning house. Head coach Neill Armstrong was let go and Ryan was soon to be next. However, Buddy Ryan was so beloved and the team cared for him so much, that they wrote a letter to Mr. Halas pleading with him to keep Ryan on. It’s a move you don’t see too often in professional sports, yet it worked. What’s even stranger is that Halas brought in former Bears tight end Mike Ditka to become the team’s head coach, sticking Ditka with Ryan and not allowing him to hire his own defensive coordinator. Even though Ditka and Ryan were not the best of friends, Ryan’s players loved him and would go to the end of the world and back again for him. That’s the type of man that Buddy Ryan was. He was a smart man, and a well-respected one. He truly was one of the titans of the game of football, and he will be sorely missed.

Ultimately, keeping Buddy Ryan on as defensive coordinator was a smart move. Even though Ryan notoriously butted heads with Ditka, the two respected each other. Ryan had his defense and Ditka had his offense. Buddy Ryan installed what came to be known at The 46 defense. Commonly misconstrued as the four – six defense (and based upon the number of defenders who would rush the passer or drop into coverage at all times), Ryan’s 46 defense was based upon strong safety Doug Plank, who wore number 46. The basis of the defense is a constant barrage of men attacking the line of scrimmage; eight men would crowd the box with 6 men at all times on the line. And the defense worked.

Disney Almost Erases Decades of Misogyny with Zootopia. Almost.

Early on in Disney's newest animated feature Zootopia, our hero, a bunny named Judy Hopps, voiced by Gennifer Goodwin, enters the police station in which she'll be working for the first time. She's greeted by a huge (pun intended) cheetah named Clawhauser, voiced by Nate Torrence, who comments on how cute Judy is. Judy responds by saying that only other bunnies can call each other cute, but not other animals. Clawhauser sheepishly apologizes for his ignorance and helps direct Judy to her first ever police briefing.

In a way, Zootopia is an apology for the decades of both overt and latent misogyny its released in the world over the past decades. Whether it's one of their earlier films like Sleeping Beauty or Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs which taught girls to sit quietly while you wait for a man to save you, or one of their later films like The Little Mermaid which teaches young girls to actively be quiet while you attempt to lure your crush with only your looks, Disney studios does not have a good track record of helping to mold the minds and attitudes of young females. Which is unfortunate considering how instrumental they are in their development.

A Retrospective on How I Met Your Mother

Binging on Friends and watching the series for the first time earlier this year whet my appetite for one of my all-time favorite sitcoms: How I Met Your Mother. After finishing Friends, I dove head first into HIMYM. Re-watching the first five seasons re-affirmed my love of the show and just how smart and funny it was, and dredging through seasons 6 and 7 (I just started 8 as of the writing of this post) made me realize how much Carter Bays and Craig Thomas, the creators and showrunners of the show, ruined their own legacy. There is an obvious dichotomy of How I Met Your Mother, between its excellent first half and its subpar second half a la Full Metal Jacket. A lot of the problems of the show’s second half seemingly stemmed from the fact that Bays and Thomas took the title of their show way too seriously, and dragged out its lead character Ted Mosby’s (played by Josh Radnor) relationship and journey to meet the mother of his children far past its natural creative endpoint.

A common critique of the show as its latter seasons were airing was that Ted just needed to meet The Mother already and get it over with; have the show be a modern version of Friends with The Mother becoming the sixth member of the gang. However, time has given me some perspective, and I can understand why Bays and Thomas waited so long to introduce The Mother. Todd VanDerWerff wrote an excellent piece forGrantland after the series finale about how the show itself was all about failure and disappointment and the realities of living in your late 20’s in the mid-to-late 2000’s and transitioning into your 30’s. That was the whole point of the show from the getgo ever since we learned from the pilot that Robin was not The Mother. So how can the audience demand a happy ending where we meet The Mother already when the whole purpose of the show is where we never actually get what we want? It’s easy to say the show should end up like Friends because on the surface HIMYM looks like Friends, but the two shows are fundamentally contrasted from each other.

In Defense Of: The 22 Minute Episode

On January 22, 2016, The Ringer’s Andy Greenwald had an excellent interview with Michael Schur. Mr. Schur was a former writer on The Office, he’s the creator of Parks and Recreation, and the co-creator of Brooklyn Nine-Nine. You can listen to the podcast in full here. In the discussion, Mr. Greenwald brings up Mr. Schur’s upcoming NBC show The Good Place, and why Mr. Schur decided to go back to a broadcast network as opposed to a premium channel or streaming service. Below is an excerpt from that discussion:

“MICHAEL SCHUR: I believe that there are many, many, many, many advantages to doing a show on a premium cable or streaming service like, for example, there’s no commercials, you can curse, you can do whatever you want, you can make the episodes whatever length you want-

ANDY GREENWALD: I like that “doing whatever you want” was the third thing after “cursing”.

MS: Cursing, I, I wholeheartedly support cursing on TV. I think there should be more cursing in general- and more bleeping

AG: But bleeping is funnier than cursing.

MS: I kind of agree, um, but you can also, like there’s on network you run, you have to run the credits over the show which interrupts the show, there’s snipes for other shows that interrupt your show… so I, there obviously, there are many obvious advantages of going somewhere besides a network, but I think there are also advantages that are maybe less obvious of staying on network, besides just a sense of loyalty that the NBC Peacock means something to me, it does. I think comedy works really well when there are a lot of obstacles to it, um, I think obstacles breads creativity and breeds good problem solving and I think that comedy works best when it’s very crisp and lean, and I think that if you say to someone like, “You can have as much time as you want, and you can- there’s no commercials, and you can mill around, and just get in that pool and swim around”, I think a lot of- my opinion, some comedies, many comedies, or at least half hour shows that are on other networks, premium  networks we’ll call them, can get a little “meander-y” and a little kinda soft. And that’s not to say that’s bad, or maybe that’s exactly what they’re going for, but there’s a way in which having to write in a crisp, three-act structure, or now it’s like a four-act structure- which is a whole other problem, but having  to write to, a certain, when you’re breaking stories it forces you to be really lean and mean, it forces you to edit yourself, it forces you to think about the classic storytelling structure of Act One, Act Two, Act Three, and I, and I, it’s not that you don’t remember those things, you don’t suddenly forget them if you go somewhere else, but I think it becomes less vital to your process, and I kind of believe that it’s good for writing to be, to be presented with those specific obstacles- for comedy at least.

…

MS: The show should be as long as the story demands, not as long as you can take with it. And part of what I like about being on a network is- it’s a little annoying that every episode has to be exactly twenty-one minutes and thirty seconds, I think it’s extremely unlikely, that the optimal length for every single episode of every single show is exactly that long… but it is a sort of, like, this is the deal man, that you have to write, and edit, and act a story that is length, and it’s not very long, and there’s something that’s kind of perversely appealing about that to me.”

The Red Hot Chili Peppers Are Doing Just Fine Without John Frusciante: My Review of The Getaway

The world was ready for a great Red Hot Chili Peppers album, and the band, now in their fourth decade of making music, finally gave one to us. The band has a steady stream of popular, good, and enjoyable hits, but their albums have been up and down. For every Blood, Sugar, Sex, Magik and Californication is an I’m With You and One Hot Minute. The Getaway sturdily falls into the former category and is a must listen for even the casual Chili Peppers fans. It’s easily the band’s best albums since Stadium Arcadium- which was released a decade ago.

For the vast majority of the band’s run, the core has been lead singer and lyricist Anthony Kiedis, bassist Flea, and drummer Chad Smith- who just happens to be a doppelganger for Will Ferrell. For most of their albums, the band’s guitarist was John Frusciante, one of rock and roll’s greatest guitarist and the only one who could rival Jack White as the greatest guitarist of the era for latter Millennials. Without realizing it, Frusciante was the band’s soul. Kiedis and Flea brought the energy and the funk to the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and it’s their band, but John Frusciante built the foundation that allowed Kiedis and Flea to play on.

My Review of Finding Dory

Generally speaking, all movies from Pixar studios are the same two movies. It’s either an adventure film where characters have to get from Point A to Point B (Toy Story, Toy Story 2, Finding Nemo, The Good Dinosaur, Inside Out, Monsters Inc.) or it’s a coming of age film where the main characters stay in one place and fight (Cars, Ratatouille, Monsters University, Toy Story 3, A Bug’s Life). Sometimes the film is a combination of the two (Wall-E, The Incredibles), but more often than not, the plot and the story of a Pixar film is something you’ve seen many times before, often times from a previous Pixar film. However, Pixar remains the top of the animation mountain- both in terms of box office success as well as quality of work. Pixar has been able to consistently churn out great film after great film for over two decades. Even a decent film like Finding Dory is lightyears ahead of most of the animation crop.

Yet there are clear tiers within each individual Pixar films. The tiers used to be “Holy cow, that’s friggin one of the best movies of all time” and “That’s very good, but it’s not one of Pixar’s best”. Films like the Toy Story franchise, Wall-E, Finding Nemo, and The Incredibles fall into the former while other films like Cars, Ratatouille, and A Bug’s Life fall into the later. Unfortunately, ever since Cars 2 came out in 2011, we have unfortunately needed to create a third category for Pixar: “wow, that surprisingly was not a good movie”. Films like Cars 2, Monsters University, and Brave has unfortunately taken their place among the Pixar lore and semi-hurting the legacy. Since 2011, Pixar has made some Friggin Best Films of All Time movies like Inside Out and Toy Story 3, but for the most part, the films are either Surprisingly Not Good, or just bordering it. Pixar’s last two films, The Good Dinosaur and Finding Dory are good films and films that I would give a positive rating on Rotten Tomatoes if I had a vote, but clearly rank among of the worst films the studio has ever produced.