Dan Schindel | Vox

An ode to Adventure Time, one of TV’s most ambitious — and, yes, most adventurous — shows

2018-09-03T08:25:17-04:00

After more than eight years of shenanigans involving candy people, alternate universes, vampires, nearly 3,000 wiki pages’ worth of lore, some highly unusual exclamations (“Mathematical!”), and bacon pancakes, Cartoon Network’s beloved Adventure Time is coming to a close.

Since its debut in 2010, the series has evolved into one of the most popular and influential programs in the channel’s history. Despite being first and foremost a kids’ show, it built a sizable fan base among older audiences and gained mounting psychological and even philosophical weight over its 10-season run. The September 3 series finale marks the end of an era in imagining new storytelling possibilities, not just for cartoons but for TV in general.

Adventure Time spans nearly 300 11-minute episodes involving hundreds of distinct characters — so it’s no easy feat to describe. But in brief, it takes place 1,000 years after a nuclear apocalypse known as the “Mushroom War” warps the Earth into a fantasy landscape; its main setting, the Land of Ooo, is populated by offbeat creatures and people made of candy, fire, or “lumpy space,” among other things.

A young boy named Finn (Jeremy Shada) is apparently the last human being on the planet, and he and his foster brother/best friend — a shape-shifting dog named Jake (John DiMaggio) — have taken it upon themselves to be as helpful around Ooo as possible. They lend their treasure-hunting, monster-fighting, errand-running prowess to their many friends and neighbors, and along the way, the complex backstory of Adventure Time’s characters and their world is unspooled.

That supremely odd summary belies the fact that Adventure Time has sneakily persisted as one of the most critically acclaimed shows of the 2010s. When considering the recent “Golden Age” of TV, few would rank it alongside the likes of Breaking Bad, Mad Men, or Game of Thrones. And yet it has received high praise from sources as wide-ranging as the A.V. Club, the New Yorker, NPR, and this very site.

In addition to being aimed at kids, Adventure Time lies at the intersection of multiple artistic categories that often struggle to attract serious critical consideration — namely, animation, fantasy, and short-form episodic TV (which for a long time was mainly the playground of experimental Adult Swim shows like Aqua Teen Hunger Force). Still, it has won over many critics. And though its erratic airing schedule has led to a decline in viewership and prestige in its later years, it has maintained a consistent standard of quality nonetheless.

With its series finale now on the horizon, let’s take a look back at the brilliance of Adventure Time, both as a singular achievement and as a show that has left a lasting impact on the TV landscape.

Throughout its run, Adventure Time was one of the most artistically adventurous shows on television

Adventure Time began as a short film made for Nicktoons. After the short leaked online and subsequently went viral, creator Pendleton Ward was able to successfully pitch it to Cartoon Network as a series. Produced in 2006, it exemplifies the “random” style of internet humor of that time, pioneered by the likes of Homestar Runner, eBaum’s World, and Newgrounds.

In just under seven minutes, a boy and his dog fight an ice-powered, princess-abducting king, with a brief dream excursion to Mars for a pep talk from Abraham Lincoln, before ultimately running off to confront some ninjas who have stolen an old man’s diamonds (ninjas were to internet comedy in the mid-2000s what bacon would be to it in the early 2010s). Millions of people loved it when it hit (the then-young) YouTube, and the short was eventually nominated for an Annie Award.

Once Adventure Time the show made its Cartoon Network debut, it found instant success and regularly drew millions of viewers per episode for many years. Examining the phenomenon, critics have often cited the show’s broad appeal for both kids and adults as a big reason for its popularity.

Cartoons have long embraced an anything-goes sensibility, but Adventure Time took the approach to a new level. Every single episode would pack its brief running time with strange new characters, places, and ideas: A vampire who drinks the color red. A pack of sentient balloons eager to die. An imaginative robot that “switches places” with its reflection. And to fit within the 11-minute runtime of each episode, it all came at the audience at a breathless pace.

Animated shorts are as old as television itself, but Adventure Time spurred a revival of the format, especially on Cartoon Network. The show also led the way in turning “random” humor and world-building from a niche interest into what is now practically an industry standard, not just for animated series aimed at kids but for adult-oriented ones as well. Shows like BoJack Horseman and Rick and Morty demonstrate a common willingness to indulge the strange, an instinct that Adventure Time arguably introduced to the mainstream.

It didn’t stop there. Even as Adventure Time told bizarre tales of trickster gods from Mars and penguins that turned out to be world-threatening alien abominations, it worked hard to incorporate them into its complicated backstory and world, maintaining dense continuity through multiple long-running story arcs. In the grand tradition of prestige TV, it featured overarching plots about Finn’s search for his birth parents, or the recurring threat of the fearsome undead sorcerer the Lich. And yet it also made time for many standalone episodes, sometimes ultimately folding them into the larger picture, with major characters like Marceline the Vampire Queen being introduced in apparent one-off installments.

Adventure Time’s penchant for experimentation was both admirable and skillfully executed. The show didn’t hesitate to hand over multiple episodes to guest directors simply to riff on a different animation style. It occasionally adopted an idiosyncratic airing schedule, where several new episodes would drop over the course of a single week and then months would go by with nothing new. While the inconsistency sometimes hurt Adventure Time’s ratings, the show’s creative team used the “episode bomb” approach to produce several miniseries that featured some of its most ambitious ideas and set pieces.

Despite the show’s overall comedic tone, it handled its biggest ideas with gravitas and sincere emotion. And for all the manic energy it could indulge, Adventure Time never hesitated to slow down for a scene or two, or even a whole episode. American animation sometimes has trouble simply putting breathing space into shows and movies — superfluous gestures, brief pauses, and other moments that aren’t necessarily propelling the plot forward. Hayao Miyazaki once explained this to Roger Ebert as ma, the soundless beats between claps of the hand. Adventure Time had lots of ma.

Look at this scene from the “Stakes” miniseries, in the episode “Everything Stays.” In less than a minute, the episode creates an extraordinary evocation of intimacy between a parent and child. The animators inject dozens of little gestures to establish this feeling — note the brief shot in which young Marceline strokes her mother’s arm. And then the scene is over, and it’s on to the next beat.

This kind of formal economy, doing a lot in precious little time, is rare in television. Today, many prestige shows are running longer with each installment yet still struggle to carve out time for characters to simply be. They could learn something from Adventure Time, a show that used its 11-minute episodes to explore myriad genre ideas and flights of fancy, and to demonstrate the endless potential of simply being artistically open and flexible.

Adventure Time boasts more thoughtful character development and writing than most live-action shows

Every single character on Adventure Time, from the regulars to the one-episode guests, had a distinct voice. And I don’t mean in terms of acting (though the show’s voice acting was excellent), but in how each person spoke. The writers gave everyone a unique slang, or attitude, or cadence to work with.

Finn and Jake had their own adolescence-inflected goofy rapport and strange swears (“Aw, dingle!” “Algebraic!”). Marceline was a laid-back slacker punk rocker. Princess Bubblegum was officious and scientifically minded. Finn and Jake’s parents, who only appeared in a few episodes, had ’30s-style trans-Atlantic accents (“Make like there’s egg in your shoe and beat it!”). One episode set in an alternate universe introduced an entirely different future lingo. No character was too minor to be considered as a distinct individual.

Adventure Time frequently devoted entire episodes to fleshing out secondary characters, sometimes shining a spotlight on someone who had only existed in the background for the entire show up to that point. It drew up complex inner lives for the likes of characters with names like “Root Beer Guy” — a sentient, walking mug of soda — and “Cinnamon Bun.”

And what it could do for its main characters was even more impressive. Some of them were hundreds of years old, with a few of them predating the Mushroom War, and as we got to know them better, we came to understand a long history of regrets, which stemmed first from the act of survival and then from trying to build a new society out of the ruins. Their arcs were contrasted with the subtle but definable trajectories of Finn and Jake, who slowly matured over the course of the show from goofballs to responsible figures.

Many episodes of Adventure Time took detours to toss out different philosophical challenges, aiming them at both the characters and the audience. In one, Finn got trapped in another world and lived an entire lifetime there before returning to his own as a child again. In another, Finn and Jake confronted a population of people willingly submitting to a Matrix-like virtual reality existence. In a sequence emblematic of the series’ simultaneous whimsical tone and intellectual seriousness, one character mused: “What’s real? Your eyes think the sky is blue, but that’s just sun rays farting apart in the barf of our atmosphere. The sky is black.”

Adventure Time dared to be anything and everything, often at the same time. It was a silly, plotless kids’ show. It was an epic fantasy adventure. It was a long-term coming-of-age story. It was an experimental exercise. It was a stoner’s dream. It was a relationship drama. It was a heartbreaker.

Episodic television offers a canvas unique among the arts: time. The best shows make use of this canvas to tell their stories as creatively and ambitiously as they can; Adventure Time used it to become one of the best television series of its day.

Adventure Time’s four-part finale, “Come Along With Me,” airs Monday, September 3, on Cartoon Network.

Deadpool 2 casually subverts some of superhero movies’ most toxic clichés

2018-05-21T17:28:30-04:00

Though Deadpool is most celebrated for breaking box office records and paving the way for R-rated superhero movies, when it was released in 2016, some commenters noted that Deadpool had surprisingly forward-thinking attitudes about sex and gender roles. Ryan Reynolds’s fourth-wall-breaking, foul-mouthed, extremely violent superpowered mercenary might seem an unlikely vector for progressive messages, yet under the smirking immaturity, Deadpool possesses a surprising inner sincerity, something that’s far more apparent in the new sequel Deadpool 2.

Despite the films’ marketing, which emphasizes the title character’s outrageousness, the series leans far more heavily on pop culture references, superhero genre in-jokes, and Looney-Tunes-with-gore slapstick for humor, rather than anything overtly “edgy” or “un-PC” — uncomfortably mean-spirited jokes are relatively rare. (Granted, this interpretation relies on the viewer being fine with Deadpool and others getting subjected to truly ridiculous levels of bodily harm, but again, that cartoonish effect leavens the brutality.) In Deadpool 2, this element combines with a story about trying to reach a troubled youth, creating an overall effect that’s legitimately empathetic.

That’s not to say that the film is standing on rock-solid moral ground. While offensive humor might not be its main mission, there are still jokes about, for instance, sexually abusive scoutmasters, or at the expense of Deadpool’s roommate Blind Al, played by Leslie Uggams. (The film has nothing but love for her, but again, “Blind Al.”) And then there’s the fact that the production chose to keep on T.J. Miller’s character despite the sexual harassment and assault allegations against the actor. This is less an indictment of this movie specifically than it is yet another example of a systemic problem in Hollywood, but it’s an issue nonetheless.

However, due to studios’ desire to appeal to as broad an audience as possible in order to rake in the largest possible returns, big-budget filmmaking isn’t generally conducive to overt messaging beyond universally agreed-upon things like “Friendship is good” or “Mass murder is bad.” Filmmakers within the Marvel brand have had to work around these strictures to introduce more complex ideas, as Ryan Coogler did with this year’s Black Panther. But most wouldn’t expect Deadpool to do anything beyond making with the funny.

And they’d be wrong! Here are three things about the film that suggest Deadpool 2’s ostensibly black heart might in fact be made of gold.

It has the first out queer couple in a mainstream superhero film

In the comics, Deadpool is pansexual, and Shatterstar, who shows up in Deadpool 2 in a minor role, is bisexual. These qualities are either absent or unmentioned in the film, but it does nonetheless feature a breakthrough in queer superhero representation.

Early on, we’re reintroduced to young X-Men member Negasonic Teenage Warhead (Brianna Hildebrand), a breakout star of the original who has a smaller but still fairly substantial role in the sequel. We’re then introduced to the new character Yukio (Shioli Kutsuna), her girlfriend.

The movie doesn’t make a big deal of it; there aren’t any leering jokes about lesbians, only delight on Deadpool’s part at Yukio’s appearance. Alas, there also isn’t much in the way of a dramatic arc for the pair, who mostly just pop in around the story’s edges. Yet the mere inclusion of this relationship is a landmark itself: It’s been a decade since Iron Man kicked off a major glut of superhero films, and nearly two since X-Men reinvigorated the genre in the first place, and these are the first named queer characters in a superhero film — canonical, confirmed within the material itself, and unambiguous.

Last year’s Power Rangers technically broke this ground by including a character questioning her sexuality, but that film’s handling of the subject was rather downplayed. Wonder Woman and the Amazons of Themyscira are canonically queer in the comics, but that’s left as subtext in the 2016 film. Thor: Ragnarok’s Valkyrie, played by Tessa Thompson, is canonically bisexual (according to the comics and Thompson herself), but footage confirming that was cut from the final film. Same goes for this year’s Black Panther, which reportedly cut a flirtatious moment between two women of the Dora Milaje.

In contrast, Deadpool 2’s matter-of-factness surrounding Negasonic Teenage Warhead and Yukio’s relationship is refreshing. This shouldn’t be a big deal in 2018, and that this is a major first for superhero films is less an accolade of this movie than a poor reflection on the genre’s (non)treatment of LGBTQ characters in general.

Most damning of all, it’s fully possible that Deadpool 2 could only “get away” with this because of its R rating: Until very recently (in fact, until just a few months ago with Love, Simon), including LGBTQ characters was all but an automatic ticket to an R from the MPAA. A hypothetical PG-13 version of Deadpool (and as hard as that may be to imagine now, it was a possibility for a while) might not have even been allowed the very simple level of representation the film has. But as much as this highlights how far Hollywood still has to go in this area, it’s still a positive step forward.

The story makes better use of mutants as a metaphor for oppressed groups than any of the “serious” X-Men films

The X-Men were explicitly conceived as a way to explore prejudice and oppression within the realm of superhero comics, and the various X-men films have followed this conceit; their depictions of mutant struggles have alluded to real-life discrimination faced by Jews, people of color, queer people, and more.

But the parable has always been … shaky, to say the least. Hatred of racial or sexual minorities is irrational; fear of people who can melt steel with their eyes or shape-shift is kind of understandable. Further muddling the metaphor, the X-Men more often fight other mutants than the humans who oppress them, and the threats facing them are on a massive science fiction scale rather than anything more based in reality. Aside from a few broad beats like, “Have you tried not being a mutant?” the films can only imagine this subject in terms of genocide — a hypothetical they’ve diluted through umpteen repetitions.

The first Deadpool only touched on this with a throwaway bit in which a guy mutters, “Fucking mutants,” after dealing with some of them. Deadpool 2 incorporates the theme to a much greater extent (and, in one joke, directly acknowledges the wonky way it’s been used in past iterations) but still doesn’t play it up too strongly. Yet this broad comedy approaches the idea of mutant oppression more intelligently and with more nuance than any of the straight-faced entries in the main X-Men film series.

The film’s plot revolves around Deadpool trying to protect teenage mutant Russell (Julian Dennison) from time traveler Cable (Josh Brolin), who wants to kill the boy before he grows up to become a feared criminal. In the present, Russell is merely a troubled kid who’s fallen prey to a repressive foster home, the Essex House, a dark mirror of Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters. The headmaster tortures the students while muttering, “Blessed are the wicked who are healed by my hands,” seeking to force them to suppress their abilities.

There’s an obvious parallel here to gay and transgender conversion therapy, but it more broadly evokes myriad real-life problems within the American foster care system, as well as institutional mistreatment of “criminal” youth. We also see Deadpool and Russell sent to an all-mutant prison, and the movie directly links its squalid conditions to those of Essex House.

Deadpool 2 thus reshapes the overarching X-Men metaphor to a broader definition than we’ve seen before. Rather than mutants being alternately analogues of queer people, black people, etc., they can be seen as every oppressed group at once, a representation of the underclass. It embraces the fluidity of the parable rather than haphazardly applying it.

The film pulls this off because it roots this in concrete experiences with direct referents in reality. Take away the superpowers, and it’s the story of two men arguing over whether a “bad” kid is fated to grow into a monster, and how believing in his future means battling multiple institutions that have already shoved him down the darker path. Russell, a young nonwhite boy (New Zealand actor Dennison is Māori), is essentially facing the self-fulfilling prophecy of criminalizing youths of color, in the form of a literal prophecy.

It undermines one of the most toxic clichés in comics

This part of the movie can’t be discussed without revealing a big spoiler, so proceed with caution.

There’s a dismayingly common storytelling trope in comics wherein a male superhero’s girlfriend, wife, or other female relation will be tortured, de-powered, raped, and/or murdered solely to affect him as a character, with no regard for the woman. In 1999, a group of feminists created a website to catalog every instance of this phenomenon, naming it Women in Refrigerators after an example from Green Lantern No. 54, in which a supervillain kills Green Lantern’s girlfriend and leaves her body in a refrigerator for him to find.

Naming and drawing attention to “fridging” has sadly not cut down on its use over the years. It’s hardly limited to comics, but it’s prevalent within the superhero genre — and it’s filtered into the films in recent years as well, most prominently 2014’s The Amazing Spider-Man 2.

Despite this cultural prevalence, Deadpool 2 screenwriters Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick claim they’d never even heard of fridging before writing the film, and offer an explanation for their treatment of Vanessa that hews remarkably close to the textbook definition of the trope. (“Deadpool kind of works best when he’s had everything taken away from him, when he suffers.”) But in spite of their ignorance, Deadpool 2’s fridging is carried out in a manner that helps undermine some of the the trope’s more toxic implications.

After an action montage, the beginning of Deadpool 2 sees Deadpool and his girlfriend Vanessa (Morena Baccarin) celebrate their anniversary while planning to have a baby — a blazing warning sign for any woman in an action movie. Sure enough, some criminals Deadpool neglected to kill earlier break into their apartment, ultimately killing Vanessa. The movie itself acts surprised, with the opening credits consisting of nothing but stunned exclamations over what viewers just witnessed. Deadpool then spends the rest of the film struggling to muster the will to live, sometimes seeing heavenly afterlife glimpses of Vanessa that dispense ethereal advice to him. In the end, after some character development, Deadpool accepts her death. A woman must die so a man can grow as a person.

Except during the obligatory mid-credits sequence, Deadpool acquires Cable’s time travel device and then promptly uses it to kill Vanessa’s attackers and erase her death from the timeline. And thus does the entire story arc around her murder and Deadpool’s reaction to it become an elaborate piss-take of fridging.

While comic book characters often come back to life, this grace is extended far less often to fridged women. (For example, Alexandra DeWitt, Green Lantern’s girlfriend, has stayed dead, whereas Major Force, the villain who killed her, has died and come back multiple times.) This is likely a side effect of wishing to preserve whatever “lessons” are imparted to their men by their deaths, as well as a general feeling that comic book girlfriends are disposable. Deadpool 2 isn’t having any of that. It gleefully has its cake and eats it too.

Of course, Vanessa’s resurrection doesn’t change the fact that her death leaves her offscreen for most of the movie, to say nothing of the off-putting nature of her death in the first place. (Her role as the female lead is filled in by Zazie Beetz’s Domino, who is a capable and likable character in her own right, but Vanessa’s presence and especially her sweet relationship with Deadpool are still sorely missed.) And given Reese and Wernick’s statements on fridging, it’s safe to say this wasn’t intentional commentary on their part, but they’ve nonetheless stumbled unwittingly into an affirming statement on the worth of superhero girlfriends.

But that’s just another example of the contradictions that characterize Deadpool 2. It’s both sadistic and caring, thematically considerate and textually crass. Plenty of superhero movies have their hearts in the right place without necessarily delivering a coherent message. (Remember Captain America: The Winter Soldier and its incomprehensible exploration of the surveillance state?) Deadpool 2 holds no pretension of intellectual depth, and yet it manages to say and do more positive things than many of its contemporaries.

TV is brimming with great action-adventure series. Here are 5 standouts.

2017-04-25T01:51:23-04:00

Emily Beecham on AMC’s Into the Badlands. | AMC

As a medium, TV has rarely been held up as a go-to destination for excellent action sequences and sprawling adventure plots filmed on location across the globe. For a long time, particularly inventive fight scenes and large-scale epics were somewhat restricted to the big screen, where budgets are higher and production schedules are more relaxed.

But in the past several years, a new vanguard of action- and adventure-heavy series has advanced the threshold of what was once considered possible to achieve on TV. And the action and adventure genres are now experiencing something of a renaissance, led by the success of shows like Game of Thrones, the hit HBO fantasy series that overlaps with both.

While Game of Thrones draws by far the most viewers and cultural buzz, there are many other worthwhile series out there that offer exciting action and an epic scope. Here are five underappreciated options that run the gamut from fun diversions to essential viewing.

The Last Kingdom is basically Game of Thrones, but with much faster pacing and twice as many battles

Set in ninth- and 10th-century Britain, The Last Kingdom — which aired its first season on BBC America in 2015 and has a second season coming out on Netflix in May — feels like a cousin of HBO’s Game of Thrones, thanks to its heavy medieval warfare and power struggles in the halls of nobility. But where Game of Thrones is much more measured in its pacing, The Last Kingdom moves at a positively breakneck speed.

The series is an adaptation of Bernard Cornwell’s 10-book Saxon Stories, about how wars against invading Vikings led to the various Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of Britain uniting as England. And while other shows of its ilk might have spent a solid chunk of time introducing characters and building out a world, The Last Kingdom’s eight-episode first season manages to cover two whole books’ worth of material. The first episode alone fits in the entirety of a young boy’s coming of age before undergoing a huge time jump and then setting up conflicts for the season to come.

Essentially, The Last Kingdom follows the Game of Thrones model of alternating between political maneuvering and battles, but with an emphasis on the fighting rather than conversations about strategy. This laser focus on action often sacrifices the potential for more in-depth character work, but the show generally isn’t trying to be too deep. It’s a ride, and a well-executed one.

The first season of The Last Kingdom is streaming on Netflix. Season two debuts on Netflix on Friday, May 5.

Into the Badlands is a fun salad bowl of Kung Fu tropes

AMC’s martial arts drama about warring feudal barons in a post-apocalyptic America couldn’t be accused of striving for prestige status; the show’s over-the-top sensibility of elaborate costuming, souped-up Mad Max-esque vehicles, and an inability to slow down for longer than a single scene wouldn’t allow it. The show is intended more as a corrective, pursuing the tradition of the 1970s drama Kung Fu, but with a lead (Daniel Wu) who’s actually Asian.

Most episodes of Into the Badlands follow Wu as his character fights rival soldiers, bandits, assassins, slavers, or whoever else happens to be dumb enough to get in the way of his attempts to secure a future for himself and the woman he loves. Even when the show pauses so characters can plot against one another or indulge in some romance or introspection, there’s always the sense that it is impatient to simply get to the next fight scene. Which is perfectly forgivable, since its fight scenes are a blast.

Behind the scenes, Into the Badlands is run by a host of action veterans — most notably including Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon choreographer Ku Huen-Chiu, who masterminded the fights in the first season. That well of experience comes through, as the series’ martial arts mayhem exhibits a level of professional polish you’d expect more from a feature film than a TV show. The ever-game actors (and their seamlessly integrated stunt doubles) pull off some truly wild acrobatics. For pure “someone actually did that” excitement, Into the Badlands can’t be beat.

The first season of Into the Badlands is streaming on Netflix. Season two is currently airing on AMC, with new episodes debuting Sundays at 10 pm. Previous episodes of season two are available to stream on the network’s website.

Black Sails boasts superlative large-scale battles

This action drama set in the golden age of piracy pulls double duty as something of a prequel to Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic adventure novel Treasure Island (yes, really). The series — which wrapped its fourth season on Starz earlier this year — was criminally underappreciated during its tenure on the air. But as a tale of feuding pirates and royal sailors, one of its strongest elements is that it features at least two or three major confrontations per season, and it always makes the most of the resultant spectacle.

And no two battles on Black Sails are alike. One scenario may see the show’s main characters and their crews using two ships to capture a third; another might see them staging a major assault on a seaside town. But what’s key about all of the show’s battle scenes is that it takes pains to establish the situations and strategies employed by all the various players before each sortie begins. And more importantly, it understands that the best way to present a battle is as a standalone story of sorts.

This means avoiding the trap of simply piling adversity against whichever side we’re meant to root for before ultimately relieving it — and instead indulging in the back-and-forth of changing fortunes and the reveals of hidden plans. The climactic battle of season three offers an excellent example of this approach, with Royalist forces striking at pirates entrenched on a beach, forcing them to retreat into a jungle; only then do the pirates reveal their true strategy. It’s rousing stuff, and often involves ship-to-ship combat that was filmed on real ships instead of green screen-heavy soundstages.

What’s more, Black Sails also excels at a different type of, er, action: The show features nearly half a dozen bisexual characters in its main cast, and treats sexuality in general with a refreshing matter-of-factness. Not only do the characters usually enjoy the sex they’re eagerly having — often a rarity on shows where violence is prevalent — but their constantly shifting relationships nicely tie into overall changes in the show’s plot. Many serialized genre dramas restrict romance to subplots and view it as subordinate to the overall concerns of the story, but on Black Sails, romantic relationships are part and parcel of both who the characters are and their roles in the wars at hand.

All four seasons of Black Sails are available to stream through Starz’s streaming service.

Spartacus is a (sometimes literal) orgy of blood, sex, and style

Another Starz show that was sadly underwatched in its day, Spartacus remains one of the finest action series to ever air. Highly reminiscent of the 2006 film 300, shot as it was against green screens and with a commensurately hyper-stylized aesthetic, this swords and sandals epic is 39 episodes’ worth of absolute excess. No spray of blood is too powerful; no sex scene too gratuitous.

What sets Spartacus apart from so many other action shows is that its violence is handled with an especially bravura eye, so that it amounts to far more than gory juvenilia. (Creator Steven S. DeKnight went on to be showrunner for the first season of Netflix and Marvel’s Daredevil.) Meanwhile, just like on Black Sails, the horniness is absolutely equal opportunity — but there’s a lot more of it. You’ve got straight sex, gay sex, orgies … take your pick. There are male characters around for the show’s entire run who never wear shirts. It’s like Magic Mike with decapitations.

Intriguingly, the intense physicality of Spartacus also has a thematic point. The series’ overall story arc sees its title character and his gladiator comrades rebelling against their Roman overlords, and makes a valiant effort to show how the ruling class sees slaves not as humans but as tools. Two forms of objectification — the kind we usually think of with the ogling of bodies, and the more literal, “one human owns another” kind — are contrasted with one another. On a meta level, the show might even inspire the viewer interrogate how those two forms interrelate.

What keeps Spartacus from being pointlessly exploitative is that it also emphasizes the humanity of even the most minor characters. That’s something far too many genre shows can forget in their pursuit of thrills.

All four seasons of Spartacus are streaming on Netflix.

The animated Samurai Jack is the best action show currently on the air

More than 12 years after the cult favorite cartoon’s original run was cut short, Samurai Jack has returned for a new season to finally wrap up its story. And it hasn’t missed a single beat, effortlessly recapturing everything that has always made the series great. Following the namesake lead as he travels a dystopian future while trying to find a way back to the past, Samurai Jack combines unparalleled action visuals with a singular tone and an offbeat sense of humor. (In the premiere of the new season, for example, Jack fights a music-themed bounty hunter who commands a flying sword by scatting.)

The show displays a consistent and utterly unique ability to tip between the rush of fight scenes and long stretches that exist solely to explore how a community works, or to study someone working some mundane task, or to simply revel at scenery. Samurai Jack is unafraid to go long stretches without any dialogue — sometimes entire 30-minute episodes. That’s nearly unheard of for television in general and animated shows in particular. Series creator Genndy Tartakovsky is as much a master of the calm as the storm.

And when the storm hits, nothing on TV (and a good chunk of film, really) can touch Samurai Jack. Tartakovsky has a kinetic sense informed by multiple strands of Southeast-Asian action cinema, as well as anime, American Westerns, and comic books. Across 50-some episodes and counting, no fight is the same, with Jack facing off against a dizzying array of robots, monsters, demons, and assassins wielding all sorts of weapons and powers. Every move and cut has dramatic weight, with the animators having meticulously plotted out each beat of each duel. It’s intoxicatingly perfect action cinema.

The first four seasons of Samurai Jack are streaming on Hulu. Season five is currently airing on Adult Swim, with new episodes debuting on Saturdays at 8 pm. Previous episodes of season five are available to stream on the network’s website.

5 Drunk History stories that succeeded where Hollywood stumbled

2017-01-11T14:16:06-05:00

Bob Odenkirk as President Richard Nixon and Jack Black as Elvis Presley on Drunk History. | Ron Batzdorff/Comedy Central

We’re at the time of year when history-based movies start hitting theaters in hopes of garnering attention from various awards bodies. Many words have been written about the problems that are seemingly endemic to biopics, and even more about the myriad inaccuracies in “based on a true story” movies. But where big-budget Hollywood often stumbles, there’s one source for historical edutainment that consistently delivers on both halves of that portmanteau: Comedy Central’s Drunk History.

Yes, a TV show centered on drunk comedians telling stories of the past — with actors reenacting the events in question, lip-syncing to the storyteller’s every slurred syllable — frequently puts the movie industry to shame when it comes to evoking history. And when Drunk History and a film both tackle the same historical event, the advantages of Drunk History’s irreverent approach to material that’s so often treated with extreme reverence become very apparent.

To see what makes Drunk History great, compare how it handled these stories with how they were handled by filmmakers with a lot more money at their disposal.

When Elvis met Nixon

The story: In December 1970, Elvis Presley showed up at the White House demanding to meet President Richard Nixon. Elvis wanted to become an undercover agent for the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs. The result was an infamously awkward photo op.

The movie: This year’s Elvis & Nixon, which got generally agreeable reviews and achieved about as much cultural penetration as a stone skipping over a pond, failing even to recoup its $4 million budget. Building on a narratively thin premise, it can’t offer much more than the surreal novelty of Michael Shannon playing Elvis and Kevin Spacey playing Nixon.

The Drunk History segment: One great thing about working with roughly seven minutes means that no segment of Drunk History gets a chance to wear out its welcome. Even the most footnote-like of events become substantial, or even expansive, when there’s no space for fat in the storytelling. Relating history as one of the wild and crazy stories a friend tells you when you get blitzed together works perfectly for this kind of “Would you believe this happened?” incident.

The Battle of the Alamo

The story: At the height of the Texas Revolution, a garrison of Texan troops held out for several weeks against a much larger Mexican army at the Alamo Mission. The Texans, which included now-legends Jim Bowie and Davy Crockett, were eventually slaughtered nearly to a man.

The movie: 2004’s The Alamo, starring Dennis Quaid, Billy Bob Thornton, and Patrick Wilson. It was an extraordinarily expensive flop and reviled by critics, who didn’t cotton to its attempt to Braveheart up the story of the Alamo.

The Drunk History segment: One fun thing about the series is that it subtly, gently, but surely takes the air out of the legends that have accrued around certain historical figures over the ages. The defenders of the Alamo have been heavily romanticized (something The Alamo indulges fully), but Drunk History storyteller Matt Gourley feels free to mock the many mistakes that led to their obliteration.

The visuals back up this irreverence, even in little moments, such as when William Travis’s slave attempts to join in on a celebration, only to be shooed off by frosty glares. Gourley relates the glorious tale of Crockett’s last stand, only to reveal that in truth, he was bayoneted to death while lying sick in bed. Reverence for heroes can often obfuscate the telling of true stories, but it’s hard to be reverent when you’re bashed.

The election of 1800

The story: Fellow Founding Fathers of America and onetime bosom buddies Thomas Jefferson and John Adams were set at odds when Jefferson ran against Adams in the presidential election of 1800. The campaign slander from both sides drove a wedge between them that lasted years, and was eventually mended via letter correspondences.

The movie: In this case, it’s a TV miniseries from 2008: HBO’s John Adams, a seven-part biography of the second president, starring Paul Giamatti as Adams and Stephen Dillane as Jefferson. Their relationship is just one of many subplots as the series tracks the course of Adams’s life through the Revolutionary War, his presidency, and his retirement, but it takes center stage in the final episodes. Unlike other examples in this article, the prestige version of the story is fairly well-liked and successful.

The Drunk History segment: However, I honestly prefer this take on the story, and not just because it’s around a hundredth the length of the HBO version. There’s something refreshing about how Drunk History takes unglamorous comics who are game to look ridiculous and lets them playact as our most sacred cows. HBO’s John Adams is the definition of Hollywood respectability, refined but stodgy; Patrick Walsh’s drunken account of Jefferson publicly accusing Adams of being a secret “hermaphrodite” requires no such solemnity.

The New York City newsboy strike of 1899

The story: Already living lives of deprivation on the streets of New York, the city’s young newspaper sellers felt an even greater financial squeeze due to the unsavory business practices of the print industry’s titans. A strike ensued, which eventually resulted in better compensation for the newsboys.

The movie: Disney correctly believed this was good material for a movie. For some reason, Disney believed said movie should be a musical. The result, 1992’s Newsies, was widely dismissed, and it’s best known today for the curiosity of getting to watch a young Christian Bale sing and dance. The movie was later adapted as a stage play that was much more successful, even though it also isn’t very good.

The Drunk History segment: In the film, Bale plays a fictional newsboy who leads the strike, while the actual leader of the strike, Kid Blink, is relegated to a minor role. Drunk History never feels the need to make such changes for the sake of marketability or focus group appeal. In what other context can you imagine Haley Joel Osment getting to tackle the morally complex role of a union leader turned scab? Nowhere.

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The Stonewall riots

The story: The modern LGBTQ rights movement in the US started on June 28, 1969, when a police raid against the queer patrons of the Stonewall Inn in New York City kicked off a massive protest. Within days afterward, activist groups were mobilizing. The first gay pride parades were held on the one-year anniversary of the riots.

The movie: Hollywood’s go-to disaster artist, Roland Emmerich, brought us 2015’s Stonewall, which was reviled from its first trailer for reducing the Stonewall protestors from a multiracial, multigender mass to a bunch of pretty young white, cisgender men. It was hated by critics and seen by few.

The Drunk History segment: Once again, Drunk History deigns to give proper credit for historical actions to the people who carried them out, rather than bland fictional stand-ins. Its version of Stonewall focuses on Marsha P. Johnson, a beloved black trans activist who was among the first to fight back against the police that night. And she’s even played by an actual trans actor, which shouldn’t be as maddeningly sporadic in film and TV as it is.

In general, Drunk History takes time to tell stories that, had they featured straight white men, would have been no-brainers for biopics long ago. And even if it is about a bunch of soused comedians, that gives the show real educational value.

Drunk History airs Tuesdays at 10:30 pm Eastern on Comedy Central.

Cinemax’s Banshee has the best fight scenes on TV. Here are 5 reasons why.

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In an article from last year, Willa Paskin of Slate ably diagnoses everything wrong with typical television action scenes:

These are a very specific kind of fight scene. Monster punches are thrown, but are only ever filmed from behind the person being hit, so the punches never have to land. Furniture is broken and guns are brandished but dropped. The protagonist either wins (if the fight takes place at the end of the episode), or loses in some inconsequential way (if it takes place in the middle). The outcome is never in doubt. You can fast-forward, go the bathroom, text or read the Internet while these fights are taking place and miss nothing.

As with many issues in TV, these problematic patterns can be traced to shortages of both production time and funding. Fight scenes are hard work; it takes a lot of time to storyboard them, longer to choreograph each individual punch, and even longer still to then carry out the process of blocking characters, cameras, and props within a location. They’re usually grueling for actors and stunt doubles to film, as the normal process of shooting multiple takes is amplified by the daunting physical exertion that’s required in addition to “just” acting.

That’s before you get to the makeup and/or visual effects work required to create the wounds that fighters sustain, to say nothing of ensuring that continuity is preserved from one shot to another. It can take multiple days to shoot what usually amounts to just a few minutes in an entire episode.

All told, fight scenes are very expensive, from both a time standpoint and a monetary one.

So, considering the fast-tracked production schedule most television adheres to, it makes perfect sense that series creators can only devote so much schedule space and budget to the battlin’ bits. Lackluster action is just one example how a good deal of TV often neglects its camerawork (because television is a so-called “writer’s medium” and so forth). But there’s a glorious flip side to this problem.

The same way that poor fight scenes are a symptom of TV’s general prioritization of writing and acting over visuals, the growing trend of “cinematic television” brings with it a precious few series that can put together kick-ass fight sequences. Paskin cites Daredevil and The Americans as examples of TV series that avoid the pitfalls she describes, but the unmatched, blood-drenched king of TV fisticuffs, chases, gunfights, and more is, indisputably, Cinemax’s Banshee.

Where most TV shows misstep, Banshee effortlessly pirouettes

Currently in its fourth (and final) season, Banshee has enjoyed supportive critical attention and a devoted fan base since it debuted in early 2013, but it’s remained sadly bereft of mainstream attention. The series is a pure pulp amalgam of They Live, the films of John Woo, half the Vertigo comics library, and every direct-to-home-video action flick ever.

Its setting — the rural hamlet of Banshee, Pennsylvania — is likewise a melting pot of idiosyncratic elements that somehow come together beautifully. Ex-Amish crime bosses, a pitiless gang based on a Native American reservation, a whole military base’s worth of corrupt soldiers, a cross-dressing hacker, and 7-foot-tall giants are somehow all crammed into the tiny town. Oh, and everyone is a martial arts expert. Everyone.

At the center of this maelstrom is a so-far nameless former thief (played by Antony Starr) who’s spent the duration of the show posing as Lucas Hood, Banshee’s new sheriff. Fresh out of jail, “Hood” soon has any thought of keeping his head down dashed, as he gets wrapped up the myriad criminal threats plaguing the town, tries to win back his former partner in crime and lover (Ivana Milicevic), and finds he can’t resist the call of his old ways.

Banshee is extraordinarily over the top, yet there’s nary a joking wink to the audience anywhere in the mix.

That commitment extends to the fight scenes, each and every one of which is an exquisitely crafted labor of love. Veteran stuntman Marcus Young serves as Banshee’s fight choreographer, and the show’s various directors, camera operators, and editors have done their best to bring his and the writers’ many gonzo visions to fruition. There are a scant few episodes that don’t contain at least one action scene that’s superior to 99 percent of what Hollywood’s blockbusters have to offer.

Where most TV shows misstep, Banshee effortlessly pirouettes. There are many, many examples of how, but here are five of the best.

1) Fight sequences that would qualify as complete on lesser shows are just a jumping-off point for Banshee

As seen in: Carrie (Hood’s old flame) versus Olek (her crime lord father’s henchman) in “We Shall Live Forever” (season one, episode six)

The series’ biggest set pieces all carry the same signature: Namely, the moment that would be the coup de grace for any traditional fight scene is instead merely where things really get started. Perhaps no confrontation illustrates Banshee‘s ability to surpass viewers’ expectations better than this one, which spans nearly an entire episode (you can watch a portion of it on YouTube).

Multiple times throughout the hour, a seemingly definitive blow is struck, but then both combatants rise for another round, the plot cuts away to something else, and then we come back to these two to find them still going at it. One hallmark of a good fight scene is that the audience is sufficiently convinced the fight is taking a toll on its participants, and the brawls in Banshee are immersively exhausting. Every victory, regardless of whether it’s claimed by a good guy, bad guy, or someone in between, feels well and truly earned.

2) The show ups the ante of its fight scenes by adding difficult, unexpected complications

As seen in: The high-speed armored truck heist in “Little Fish” (season two, episode one)

You might think the quiescent pastures of Banshee‘s rural Pennsylvania setting would rapidly grow boring as a backdrop for action sequences. Not so. The show continually seeks to one-up itself, and it uses its first major action scene of the second season to make a potent statement that it won’t settle for any sort of rut.

High-speed car chases are already something television generally avoids due to the headaches of blocking off roads, the dangerous stunts involved, and the high price tags that both of those elements entail, but then Banshee tosses driving backward while shooting, a motorcyclist, and other harrowing factors into the mix. Now’s probably as good a time as any to note that the show’s cast members do as much of their own stunt work as they can.

3) Banshee's fights aim for a level of visual grandeur that we usually associate with film

As seen in: The gunfight in a church in the season two finale, “Bullets and Tears” (season two, episode 10)

Season two climaxes with a hefty dose of heroic bloodshed. The scene represents an already heightened series at its most heightened, as the physical finesse of the two “heroes” (heroes relative to the murderous gangsters they’re fighting, at least) is almost supernatural (which is fitting, considering the church setting).

The frantic kineticism of the gunplay is punctuated by moments of grace, like when someone dives to the floor and strikes a pose as he slides across it. Pews are blasted into a storm of splinters by gunfire, and the chaos mounts to demonstrate how ultimately overwhelmed the two leads are by the enemy. The scene is so elemental that it could stand on its own, apart from any understanding of the show itself.

4) The show consistently one-ups itself with creative fight choreography, blocking, and camerawork

As seen in: Clay Burton (an ex-Amish gangster’s right-hand man) versus Nola Longshadow (who’s out for revenge against said gangster) in “A Fixer of Sorts” (season three, episode three)

This is quite possibly Banshee‘s best fight to date, combining everything discussed above. It is astonishingly, biblically brutal. (You can see the full scene on YouTube.)

But the blocking and camerawork are the true superstars here. Much of the scene feels like it was shot in one take, even though it doesn’t quite claim as much; rather, it skillfully uses actions to mask its cuts without changing the shots’ point of view too much.

The camera bobs and weaves around and through the car, just like the characters do, introducing surprisingly complex geography to a battlefield that’s perhaps 10 square feet. It’s blissfully relentless, crescendoing in a stunning act of creative viciousness. Before watching this scene (or glimpsing the GIF above), had you ever seen anyone strangled from the inside of their throat? Now you have.

5) Banshee is always looking for some new visual conceit to explore

As seen in: The heist seen entirely through various in-universe cameras, in “You Can’t Hide From the Dead” (season three, episode seven)

Once again seeking to shake things up, Banshee decides to crib from not only heist films but found footage films as well.

Applying the immediacy of found footage to a robbery significantly ramps up the suspense. Each fighter must play their part in concert with everyone else or the whole thing will fall apart, and the split-screen, real-time presentation lets the scene juggle all of them at once.

The sequence also lets “You Can’t Hide From the Dead” indulge in multiple fights experienced mainly in first-person point of view, beating recent first-person shooter film Hardcore Henry to the punch by more than a year. This scene neatly encapsulates Banshee itself, as many volatile ingredients come together and react to create beautifully messy explosions (literally).