Bianca Steele

Kate Mosse’s Labyrinth

I’ve mentioned a few times that I was planning a blog post on women’s Templar novels.  I’ve never got around to it; I have too much material to boil it down, and my feelings about these books are complex.  But while poking around the Internet, trying to decide whether to start that post or not, I discovered first, that there’s a new one, available in the UK and Canada but not in a US edition as yet (Guardian review here), and second, that there’s a miniseries playing right now on the BBC’s Channel 4 of Kate Mosse’s novel, Labyrinth (Guardian review here, trailer here).  Mosse’s first two novels in what’s now a trilogy, Labyrinth and The Winter Ghosts, and her other novel (of the three currently available in the US), Sepulchre, were the “women’s Templar novels” I was planning to write about.

Labyrinth is a big book, and it will tell you a good deal about it to say that, though it appeared nearly simultaneously with The Da Vinci Code, it was accused of copying from it.  Mosse’s books are much less ridiculous than Dan Brown’s are, however (though if you’re used to reading this kind of silly, conspiracy-oriented pseudo-historical romance, quite possibly you might not have seen Brown’s books as all that far from the normal).  The historical plot concerns the Albigensian Crusade in the Languedoc region of France, in the Pyrenées, and the preservation of a mystical secret through the joint actions of two religious sects, a kind of enlightened fraternity stemming from the Near East, and the adherents of Catharism, a break-off Christian sect being persecuted by the Parisian authorities in alliance with the Roman Catholic church.  The present-day plot concerns an amateur archeologist who, after finding a secret and keeping it illicitly, in following it up discovers tremendous truths about herself and the world.

The Winter Ghosts is more concise and ordinarily literary, less of a genre blockbuster.  The protagonist is a young man who’s trying to find his way, a recent veteran of the First World War, who suddenly and mysteriously experiences the past history of a woman persecuted in a similar crusade, also in the Languedoc region.  Again, the experience of confronting the past allows him to move forward in the present.

The books are appealing and disconcerting at the same time.  In the miniseries, John Hurt plays a peculiar, mystical figure whom the present-day young woman consults to learn more about the artifact she’s found.  Hurt is just the right type for this character, but I have to assume something is going to be lost from the book.  His character, in the novel, was by far the most interesting of all of them, and there’s just no way all his dialogue is going to be transferred to the screen fully and accurately.

Why I’m glad I don’t subscribe to HBO (UPDATED)

Because I’d be tempted to watch the new Aaron Sorkin series, The Newsroom.  I kind of liked The West Wing, though towards the end I was watching in the hope they’d bring Mary-Louise Parker’s character back, and Josh post-Leo’s chastising/anointing of him as a successor was becoming slightly annoying.  I even enjoyed Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, though Emily Nussbaum has it about right when she calls that show “horrible and fascinating.”  And I enjoyed The Social Network, regardless of its mistakes.

But, on the other hand, the preview-reviews of Newsroom seem to be converging on the show as middlebrow and excessively self-important, and these adjectives seem all too likely to be accurate.  Are we really being treated to a rewriting of Broadcast News in which the Albert Brooks character—the real journalist—has disappeared, and we’re actually supposed to take William Hurt’s airhead of a pretty-boy anchorman seriously as a commentator on politics and world events?  I’m pretty sure that’s not how the flashforward at the end of that movie has things turning out.  On the other hand, I was talking with a friend about the movie, which I’d seen shortly after I’d graduated from college (in 1987).  When I asked him why he thought Holly Hunter’s character (Jane Craig, the newsroom producer) cried for no apparent reason, at several times throughout the show, he didn’t hesitate.  It was because she was on the wrong track and deep down she knew it.

I didn’t look up Sorkin’s Wikipedia page until after I’d finished my post on The Social Network.  That was when I found out that the people whom Eisenberg’s dialogue in that movie most reminded me of had not only gone to the same high school Sorkin did (Scarsdale), just a couple of years after he graduated, but like him, had participated in the school’s drama program.  So, for me, that dialogue didn’t register as “Asperger’s” or “computer geek” but—especially in the character’s willingness to say those things straight to a woman’s face—the kind of suedo-intellectual, pseudo-Sartrean self-described “brutal honesty” not uncommon among undergraduates of all varieties.

One of those people was the man who told me he had Jane Craig down cold.  I never actually, as it turned out, spent much time around entertainment-industry people (which might explain his uniqueness), but of all the people I’ve ever known with some pretention to know a little bit about film, theater, or television (which he’d studied in university), he had absolutely the worst taste.  Middlebrow?  That’s probably a good word for it.  He gushed over the moral sophistication of Enemy Mine.  He gushed, similarly, over The Company of Wolves.  His hero was Stephen Spielberg, who made money because he made movies people like.  I don’t know how much more middlebrow you can get than that.  Like Sorkin, apparently (see the piece by David Haglund in Slate), he thought of himself as high-minded without being high-brow—unless you can be highbrow and at the same time mouth the moral pieties that will make the majority feel good about themselves.

Anyway, now everything Sorkin touches will remind me of him, and that’s not what anyone wants.

Writing in the Atlantic, on the other hand, Alyssa Rosenberg seems to complain that Sorkin is not middlebrow enough.  (Nussbaum makes a similar complaint.)  She goes beyond my friend’s worship of the market with its razzle-dazzle valuelessness to a kind of deep populism that redefines “what will make money” as “what is really good.”  Sorkin makes fun of cable news, with its partisan polarization, but according to Rosenberg this is what most people like, and they have good reasons to do so.  Sorkin, therefore, is explicitly making fun of his own audience, insulting them to their faces.  I tend to think Rosenberg is tying herself up in knots to make her argument here, because Sorkin most likely not only isn’t making fun of the vision of the world she alludes to, but in fact has probably never actually heard of it.  If she’s right, however, then maybe Sorkin isn’t so middlebrow after all—or maybe Rosenberg has touched on the possibility of a kind of art that eludes all our categorizations so far.

In her review, Nussbaum complains, in part, that the female characters, and their interactions with the men, are stereotyped and vaguely offensive.  She has a point; the same thing over and over again would quickly become tiresome.  If the stories are good, though, it sometimes is actually possible to ignore what gender the characters are, and how they treat their significant others in the mandatory romantic subplots needed to make sure the show has enough “adult” content, and pay attention to something different for a change.

UPDATE:  HBO has decided to do an end-run around my cancellation of their service by making the first episode of the series available online for free.  Oh, well.  Anyway, this article by NPR blogger Linda Holmes is also very good (she says the first episode is easily the best of the four that have been distributed to critics).  So, shall I download the episode to my iPod Classic?

Season 5 of Mad Men

I haven’t been sure about this season of Mad Men, so far.  I don’t like the ten PM timeslot, which puts it past my bedtime, not to mention the fact that it actually ends not at eleven but five minutes past the hour.  I personally enjoy the storylines about the women characters, and though I don’t begrudge the men having their chance, too, as it seems they have in at least two of the first few episodes, to me those episodes felt slow and single-stranded, focusing too much on one aspect of plot for almost the entire hour.  The characters’ personalities are shifting around a little, but that’s par for the course with this show.  I’m also not that crazy about Megan: at least, her scenes seem a little too frequently cringeworthy.

We may be seeing a little more autobiography this season.  Last week we saw what it might be like to be Sally Draper’s little brother: getting blamed for her misbehavior, and putting up with what looks like her increasing snottiness.  She was just a little girl up to now, but last week she might have been shaping up to be one of those suburban girls whose sense of superiority manifests as making sure everyone knows she thinks sex is “dirty,” and who’s too good to take the train to the city where she’ll see people who are “dirty,” too.

And now Megan has left advertising, and the office, as far as Don is concerned, has largely gone back to where it was before.  That she even tried to be a copywriter was a surprise.  We thought Don wanted a wife, not an Eliza Doolittle.  We thought he was auditioning replacement wives, with all those secretaries and short-term girlfriends—not replacement Dons.  It turns out, maybe, he isn’t sure what the difference is supposed to be.

After the episode ended, my husband and I spent some time discussing the significance of the empty elevator shaft.  He thinks the elevator is obviously seriously broken, and eventually someone is going to fall down it.  His candidate is Pete Campbell, who did talk an awful lot about suicide and depression in last night’s episode.  That might be so.  I thought it was a symbol, for Don, of the abyss.  Why was he going downstairs?  He couldn’t hope to catch Megan before she walked out of the lobby.  Was he going to visit the ex-lover he dreamed about earlier in the season?  He caught a glimpse of his own mortality, instead, and he turned around and went straight back to work (and there he poured himself a drink, and then was reminded of his advancing age once again, as he failed for the umpteenth time to “get” the latest music).

But most of all it reminded us both of the notorious scene in L.A. Law when Rosalind Shays, played by Diana Muldaur, stepped into an open elevator shaft and fell to her death.  She had been talking with Leland McKenzie, whose role on L.A. Law was similar to that of Bert Cooper in Mad Men, and with whom she was romantically involved.  She stepped into the elevator without looking, but the elevator wasn’t there.  Muldaur’s character was the Wicked Witch of the law firm, a senior partner fairly recently hired.  Her subordinates hated her and so did the audience.  When she stepped into the elevator shaft, watchers (mostly male) laughed hysterically.  (This was the comic juxtaposition of the absurd with the ultra-serious that marked David E. Kelley out, at first, as clever, but eventually snowballed into an annoying tic.) 

Maybe someday Peggy will be a Rosalind Shays to the workers at her firm, or maybe Joan will be.  It’s pretty certain that Megan will not.  For one thing, she finds the whole idea of working in the commercial world to be revolting.  In fact, this is something she has in common with her new husband.  Don has had, as subordinates, secretaries, who are all female, and copywriters, who with one exception are male.  Even though he’s a copywriter himself—he started out as one, although we, the audience, haven’t seen a lot from that part of his career—he despises most of them.  He can’t rely on them the way he does the secretaries, and he thinks of them almost as if they were children.  He thinks that he is—and he may actually be—so much better than the other copywriters that he is practically not even a copywriter at all.  It’s been difficult to see this because there’s been so much emphasis from the beginning on Don’s creative skills (though almost as much on his brand of salesmanship), but maybe he is happier as a manager: not one of the boys.

But in the show, Don Draper remains the copywriter par excellence.   And in any event, it seems that Don can’t really see Peggy as an epigone.  Maybe he can only really respect someone who is, as Peggy says in regard to Megan, “good at everything”—or, at least, who looks and behaves the way he thinks a woman ought, and despises the commercial world the same way he does, whether or not he shows it.  So it wouldn’t have been surprising if Megan had moved into the same kind of life he made for Betty.  But it turns out that he wanted a woman who could be both.  At least, when Megan said she wanted him to teach her how to do his job, he jumped at the opportunity.  He wanted Joan, Peggy, and Betty combined; but there was only Megan, and she went down the first elevator, leaving the other empty.

Just as Don leaves his mod, freshly decorated apartment empty, uninterested in the new Beatles album his young wife picked out especially for him to hear.  He’s revealed as the old fogy he was all along.  Will he be able to leave his position to anybody, if he can’t leave it to his “perfect” new wife?

Roger Sterling, full of the insights he acquired by dropping acid with a younger woman who unlike him is in therapy, is trying, finally, to leave his position to Pete.  But Pete still sees Roger as he was before his transformation, and Pete is miserable.  As is Peggy: they do more and more of the work, but don’t seem able to step into their aging mentors’ shoes.  Why not?

Good for Peggy!

At the risk of this becoming a Mad Men blog:

I can’t say I liked this episode.  It feels like a transitional hour, a warning that what we see next week may not follow what was happening on the show up to last week.  This device may be appropriate in a novel of a certain kind, but an episode of a television show ought to stand alone, and the characters and setting ought to stay the same throughout.

We see Don swimming, and I felt like I was watching Prince of Tides.  He overhears the Rolling Stones in the locker room, and the song continues playing as he stands outside the famed New York Athletic Club, watching the girls in their summer dresses go by (literary allusion here!).  We can almost smell the warm breeze blowing in from the New Jersey Palisades.  Don has been talking about cutting back on his drinking.  He is ready to turn over a new leaf in his life, but is he also going to get with the Zeitgeist and learn to love the way the younger generation lives?  Ida Blankenship is recovering from cataract surgery and does almost nothing really wrong this hour, so maybe that joke is something we’ve now seen the last of.  Roger and Bert are nowhere to be seen, and Pete Campbell appears once for a second, as does Ken Cosgrove.  There is a new vending machine in the thin-walled office.  Joan now apparently hates her life, and her doctor husband is finally off to basic training.  Office stuff focused on the creative staff, who, we’re reminded, are unmarried men in their twenties and eligible for the draft.

Joey, who has been around the longest of that group, is a freelancer, and particularly hostile to Joan (and not only to her).  I wondered whether he was an instigator, stirring up the rest of the group to make trouble, but we haven’t seen them together enough for this to be more than speculation—in “reality,” his feelings may be the same as theirs.  Peggy, after trying to advise him on how he can keep his job, ends up firing him.  This led to her first disagreement with Joan over how the office should be run and how women should behave there.

From Peggy’s first day at work, Joan has been the one who taught her the ropes, and Joan has always turned out to be right.  Now, however, Joan seems angry about Peggy beginning to learn to cope without flirting to get what she wants.  She says as much: by firing Joey, she made Joan “look like a meaningless secretary” (because Joan could have had a drink with the client and gotten Joey fired herself, if she’d really thought it was that important).  In fact, this is the opposite of what Peggy intended.  She wanted to show that Joan was not so “meaningless” that she could be treated like dirt, and it never occurred to her that by exercising some power in her own department, she would be treading on the office manager’s toes.  Joan still sees herself as the mother hen who’s responsible for all the female workers in the firm, and Peggy made herself look like Joan’s protector.  Possibly worse, Peggy acted in a way Joan would never act, and would never advise the other secretaries to act.  If you are going to tell men not to draw pornographic drawings of their female coworkers, you are going to limit your ability to cope using flirtation, and more generally, your ability to act in the office in the same way you would act in a social setting.  Therefore, in Joan’s eyes (as in those of the men), you must be “a humorless bitch.”  It’s true that it’s not obvious whether Peggy did the right thing (she seems to have fired Joey more because she lost her temper at how he treated her than because of what he’d done).  In a different kind of show, we might know whether she did or not, because we would see more of what went before and after the crisis events, and we might see the characters talking them over and arguing about them more.

We also get a little slip-slide back into the world of The Sopranos when Faye describes her father as a two-bit gangster: a candy-store owner who is just a little mobbed up, because where she grew up, owning that kind of store involved “certain responsibilities.”  We can’t know whether she really used to live in the kind of place where this was expected, or whether her father was more of a criminal than the other men in the neighborhood.  Letting viewers know which is something that can’t be done when you allow so much to happen off-screen.  For just this reason, most television shows limit themselves to what pretty much all viewers can be expected to already know about, but Mad Men instead permits viewers to make up their own minds.  That seems like a good thing in theory, but sometimes it ends up feeling about as intimate as Don's and Bethany's few-and-far-between dates.

Mad Men Six Weeks Later

If you haven't seen the first three seasons of Mad Men, the following contains major SPOILERS.  If you haven't seen episode 7 of the fourth season yet, there are minor spoilers.

For my purposes, the important scene here was the dialogue about getting credit.  Peggy complains that she got a bad reaction to an idea that wasn’t even hers—it was Danny’s idea, and the only reason they had to hire Danny is that Don stole Danny’s idea when he was drunk.  (He was drunk when he decided to hire Danny too, incidentally: when Peggy came to his apartment and told him he had to hire Danny because of what he, Don, had done.)  Don takes exception to the fact that she is naming the person whose idea it is, and jumps to the conclusion that the person whose ideas she’s really concerned about is herself—which is unfair, given that she’s said nothing of the sort.  But Peggy takes the bait, and launches into a complaint about the floor wax account that she’s obviously been rehearsing for quite a while.  And Don’s response is to give her his theory of intra-firm economics.  Don Draper—whose vaguely underhanded way of getting a foot in the door we saw last week, and whose first personal contact with middle-class life was the widow of the man whose death he inadvertently caused and whose life he subsequently stole—believes so strongly that all the copywriters’ product belongs to the agency that he is uninterested even in publicizing their achievements internally, or in thanking them to their face.  You don’t need a reward in the form of recognition—“[t]hat’s what the money is for”—is what he says.

Clearly, I was wrong to say, as I did after the first episode of this season, that “They are all Don’s, and Peggy knows that more than anyone.”  Where did I go wrong?

It isn’t true to say that we’ve seen nothing of the process by which ideas were turned into ads at Sterling, Cooper in the first two or three seasons.  We saw Don’s subordinates presenting him with ideas, and we saw Don presenting ideas to the clients.  It was not entirely clear at first even that they were his subordinates, rather than fellow copywriters who envied his talent and his prominence within the firm.  It was entirely possible that his prominence was as the first among equals, and that although he may have presented his colleagues’ ideas, as the best among them for meeting with clients, he didn't take credit for them.  We did see the other men complaining about Don among themselves, but most of the time they didn’t obviously have any good reason to do that, other than not liking him.

Peggy doesn’t get to do that.  She was brought on as the only copywriter in the new firm, only twenty-six years old and with only two years of experience.  She now has new coworkers (who are younger and didn’t know her before), and they invite her to go to lunch with them, but she is now more or less their boss and the buffer between Don and them.  The only one she can complain to about Don Draper is Don Draper himself.  In this episode, Don showed she could do that with little risk of lasting damage to the trust between them, but it might have been otherwise.

Mad Men seems to be faster paced than a similar kind of hour-long drama normally would be.  A lot happens each week, and a lot happens between the episodes.  Compare it with, for example, something like L.A. Law The Practice or Boston Legal: both of those shows follow a strict, consistent four-act structure, going over every development again and again.  In those shows, you know exactly what is going on.  Every event that is relevant to the present episode is outlined and retraced (particularly in dialogue) so that it is clear, and so is every important relationship.  In Mad Men, by contrast, there is a lot we viewers don’t know.  We know it’s important that Paul Kinsey didn’t move to the new firm, but we don’t know exactly why—yet.  And the dialogue sometimes addresses what’s going on emotionally without describing what the characters are actually thinking.

At Sterling, Cooper Don Draper was a genius.  At Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce, he hasn’t done anything right that we’ve been allowed to see, except the Glo-Coat ad.  In the first few seasons, his greatest asset was his ability to charm the clients.  Now he would appear to disgust them, and his greatest asset is said to be his artistic work behind the scenes and his knowledge of what makes an idea a finished ad.  There’s no real way of knowing how to reconcile these.  Is this what Don Draper would be without the big-firm support that the first seasons supplied him with?  Or is this what Don Draper would have been seen to be, by his secretary Peggy, if she had worked with him as a copywriter instead?  Or, is he simply getting tired of trying to please people, now that his façade has finally fallen totally apart?

Don's relationships to just about everybody in the firm have changed dramatically, several times, over the past three or four years, and the changes were not always overtly motivated.  It seemed that one minute Roger Sterling was Draper’s closest ally; the next minute, he was extracting a promise from Cooper that he’d have no contact with Sterling ever again; and the next, he was inviting Roger to form a new firm with him.  The characters’ attitudes to the world outside of their own office walls are barely telegraphed, in a way would be natural if they were gossiping among themselves, but that gives most viewers little help in knowing what is going on.  Don has a lot of opinions, but we only sort of kind of know what they are.

Presumably, the reason people like any television show is that it reflects back to them something in their own lives, something about themselves or people they know, something about the world they live in, or about the companies they work for.  What is reflected back about Don Draper, however, is ambiguous.  He is both an everyman and a superhero.  He is outrageously handsome, supremely confident, and (for the most part) incredibly lucky.  He possesses every good quality that a man in his career might wish for: a creative genius with terrific charm and a pretty decent business sense.  Even his unhappiness is super-sized—he isn’t just poor, he’s the son of a prostitute who died in childbirth, raised by people who hated him, and the proximate cause of his divorce is the one good thing he ever did in his life.  What makes him an everyman, I think, is that he isn’t all of these things, all the time, he isn’t any of them consistently.  If there is a real pattern to the changes in his personality, I haven’t found it yet. 

UPDATE: Fascinating: If you search Bing for the line, “that’s what the money is for,” you find that it appeared on the Watergate tapes.

Forster, Trilling, Kazin, and Draper

In the course of reviewing a new biography of E.M. Forster, Colm Toibin answers a question I’d wondered about: Did Lionel Trilling know Forster was gay?  As Toibin points out, it doesn’t matter:

"Trilling had enough to write about, including the drama in Forster’s work between freedom and restriction, between the spiritual and the material, between England and its empire, and between one class and another in Forster’s own world. These conflicts were substantial enough for Trilling not to need to know that they also operated as metaphors and systems of disguise, that their power in Forster’s fiction was nourished by his secret sexuality.”

But he says the answer is no.

Trilling is one of a triumvirate of mid-century American critics recommended, in Walking Out in the Evening, by the Frank Langella character.  He assumes that the graduate student writing a dissertation on his novels has never heard of either Trilling, or Edmund Wilson, or Alfred Kazin.  This sounded implausible to me.  Maybe not, since my local library has only two books by Kazin, one of them a collection of Edgar Allan Poe stories that he edited (and the other on religion).  Anyway, Andrew Seal has a brief review of Kazin’s On Native Grounds here.

Season premiere of Mad Men was last night, and Matthew Weiner, the show’s creator, is on today’s Fresh Air.  He confirmed that Don Draper is, in a sense, pretending to be someone he's not: to be the kind of executive Dick Whitman thinks Draper would be.  We’ll see how that plays out in the fourth season.  Draper has gone from being a rising star, but a protégé, of a second-rate firm, to being a principal at a firm that right now is still just struggling to get out of the basement.  He’s losing the false uprightness of the white-shoe executive he probably could never have succeeded in appearing to be, and letting his inner maverick out.  From now on, if the first episode of the season is any guide, his campaigns will be honest about what the companies he represents really are selling, even if the results are crude.  And he intends to be recognized as the genius he is.  He is breaking the barriers that constricted what was permitted to be said.

It’s always difficult for me to avoid seeing Don through Peggy’s eyes, and to ask what it would be like to work for him.  He gave her a break, but now she seems to have come into her own.  It isn’t obvious that anyone will allude to her origins as a secretary from Queens, and her lack of a college degree, ever again.  And she may be beginning to become annoyed with Don.  The saying, “no man is a hero to his valet,” may apply here.  We, the audience, know that Don Draper really is the real thing: his campaigns are groundbreaking, and Peggy of all people knows that they are his.  In previous seasons, Don has been teased for being a “gray flannel suit man”: a managerial, executive type, not really creative.  His willingness to stick with Sterling, Cooper, rather than moving on to a more high-powered, business-oriented firm, suggested that he really identified with that old-fashioned idea of the firm, and so did the way he kept his copywriting staff in line.  Maybe now that his name is on the door he’s willing to show his true colors.

Big Love

Stanley Fish, surprisingly, has praise for the television drama, Big Love, in particular for the first episode. He thinks viewers like it because it values family life and has likeable characters. He likes the resilience of the “modern” polygamists (as opposed to the ultrareactionary cultists who live on the “compound”), whose life he sees as approaching a democratic ideal if not achieving it. He also praises the series for its aesthetic qualities, comparing it to highly regarded shows including The Sopranos, Mad Men, and Deadwood.

Really?  The series is entertaining but in my opinion it is not much more than that.

Here is a sample scene from the episode Fish discusses. The characters speaking are married women in their twenties.

-- I can’t carry boxes and watch over the little boys at the same time.

-- Yes you can. OH YES YOU CAN. Father, do you see what she’s doing? She’s sassing me!

It is silly, even preposterous. It approaches the level of absurdity that David E. Kelley has sunk to. But maybe the premise itself is so bizarre -- in spite of its basic plausibility -- that implausible plotting and dialogue seem almost normal. Fish is right to notice that the same was true of The Sopranos and is now true -- to a lesser extent -- of Mad Men.

Fish compares the plotting to those series (and, oddly, to Deadwood -- the third season, maybe, but not in my own opinion the first and second), saying “you have to think about it afterward and figure it out yourself.” But that’s not it, exactly. What the plotting is, is episodic. One thing happens, and then another. A crisis is introduced, we move on to another, a crisis is resolved, there’s another crisis. Chloe Sevigny says she will do anything -- even move away -- so as not to hurt Bill. She announces, “They took my ladder.” Scene change: A Chloe Sevigny lookalike foreigner with no previous interest in Mormonism appears and says she wants to join the family. Cut to black. This is the transition that so took Stanley Fish?!

The plot lines are connected by virtue of their contiguity, not by any logic. There is currently a subplot involving a house occupied by teenage throwaways from the ultrareligious “compound”: the boys wrestle, live in squalor, do meth and heroin -- while the girls living among them continue to wear their colonial-style long dresses and bonnets, dream of returning home when they turn eighteen and can do as they wish, and spit at the girl who lives with her father (a onetime throwaway himself), calling her a whore. Interesting -- but interesting in a way that intersects with all the other interesting aspects of these people’s ways of life? To me it all feels thrown together: anything that seems like it might fit is simply included wholesale.

Potentially more original: the workplace scenes, which at times are given nearly equal prominence, since Bill also considers his prosperity to be a part of his eternal legacy. But as businesspeople, they are the same as businesspeople elsewhere. They have problems at work. Just like they have problems at home. The only thing that makes them different is who they sleep with. And the fact that they have extra wives around to do the scutwork.

UPDATE: My husband disagrees (though he doesn’t agree with Fish either). (1) Big Love is nothing like David E. Kelley (who, actually, I liked and made excuses for, up to the second season of Boston Legal). (2) The sister-wives in the scene I quote were teenagers, not twenty-something women, and my quotation doesn’t prove my point. (3) The plotting with multiple storylines makes perfect sense and does not just skip randomly from crisis to crisis, and she does not look like Chloe Sevigny.  (4) The whole point of the show is that the way they live doesn’t matter, and I didn’t emphasize this fact enough.