This post contains spoilers through the February 5 episode of Luck.

While I essentially agree with Tim Goodman that difficult television isn’t inherently a bad thing, I’m still having trouble finding my big emotional hook into Luck. Fortunately, my political hook’s presented itself in the stocky, short-fused person of one Chester “Ace” Bernstein, also known as Dustin Hoffman, or a man currently living out the kind of cushy parole of which Bernie Madoff can only dream. He is—or would like to be—the man who holds all the other characters’ fortunes in his hands even if they don’t know his name. And at the moment, he’s reading like a dour Al Swearengen (fitting, given Geri Jewell popping up on the track next to Marcus this week)—a visionary without the sense of humor or personal charm.

Or perhaps he’s Rhett Butler, who before he married her told Scarlett O’Hara “There’s good money in empire building. But, there’s more in empire wrecking.” Ace has come out of prison at the perfect time to capitalize on a wreck. “The U.S. economy’s in the fucking toilet. The New York bankers with their three-card monte bond swaps brought the whole fucking walls down. Tremendous structural damage to tax base, unemployment, plus my impression, tremendous, tremendous compression of the leisure gaming dollar,” he explains to his potential fronts. “In California, established and passed by the legislature, horse racing is legal and casino gaming isn’t. Leaving aside for a second the fucking rain dancers. And like the whole state economy, the race track is desperate for new streams of revenue. Perfect fucking Trojan horse.”

There’s a grandiosity to his schemes, a grand sense of what Ace thinks he’s owed. And while he’s almost meek with the parole officer who has Malcolm X on his wall, who asks him, with what sounds like genuine concern “How are you settling in?” Ace can be button-poppingly angry when asked about his prison experience, snapping at the investor who remarks that his company name will be on the new venture that it’s “Because I’m a fucking felon. Anything else you want to explain to me?” But it sounds like he’s angry less that people don’t understand what he’s been through and more that they don’t understand the code that got him there, founded on an overdeveloped sense of responsibility that led him to take the rap for his partner’s cocaine stash when the drugs were mistakenly pinned on his nephew, a New York University student. “All I remember from that time is a little boy who was running around with his shoes untied,” Gus recalls. “The question is, Ace, what if it was all turned around?” “Mike would have given me up in a heartbeat,” Ace says with certainty. Self-righteousness may not keep you warm at night, but the fire it provides will fuel you during the day.

Interestingly, it seems like the biggest threats from Ace’s plans may come not from Mike and the other higher-ups, but from below, from Escalante, bitter already at losing his horse in a claiming race. “Ace Bernstein that they calling him coming with his beard to see what his $2 million bought him,” he grumbles. “Ace Chester Bernstein gonna look to running my business?” And it remains to be seen what their history is. “There’s a picture for your, Escalante behind a pushcart full of fruits and vegetables,” Gus muses at the end of their day. “Doesn’t know to this day it was you who got him through the gate?” “It was him made himself into something,” Ace tells him. Escalante may be living by the code, just on a different scale.

Undercover Boss, the CBS show based on a British program of the same name that began airing in the United States in 2010, may have been the programming decision that was most responsive to the recession. By disguising the CEOs and other top executives of major American corporations and sending them out to the front lines of their organizations, Undercover Boss played to the fantasy of showing your employer what your life is really like and how hard your work really is. At a time when executives can seem impossibly distant from the average worker and from viewers at home, Undercover Boss makes CEOs seem accessible—and sometimes, the boss’s experiences end up translating into company-wide changes in policy. Such was the case at Kendall-Jackson Vineyard Estates, where president Rick Tigner went undercover and into the company’s fields and processing facilities in an episode of the show that aired last weekend. I talked to Mr. Tigner at the Television Critics Association press tour about what he learned about immigration reform, sustainable wine production, and being the face of a major company at a time when America doesn’t love CEOs—and why he decided to start a language program for his workers and give them more vacation time. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

How did you decide to go on the show in the first place?

Caroline here, who works for the company, she was actually researching how to, you know, give an award to one of our employees. And so she was going on the CBS site, they have some sort of employee-recognition program, and with that she saw the Undercover Boss program and then connected the two. And really, I think as a company, you know, our culture of helping employees and understanding their story just connected.

You came on the show after going through a rough period, you mentioned through ’08 and ’09. Was there a sense that this was sort of a positive way to show that you were coming back or to show that you were reaching out?

It’s interesting. When you go through a difficult time and you have, you know, lay-offs, or we call right-sizing or downsizing…The reality was is that, you know, we still want to do the right things for our employees…When the show was offered to us, you know, it would have been a great thing for us to help the morale of the company.

Now you said when you went on the show that you found that some of your directives hadn’t made it all the way down the chain of command.

When I did the show, there’s always these concepts of “Do people understand that it’s quality first?” You know, it’s one of our visions and values…But on that one division—our distribution and trucking division— you know, that part had not gotten through. You know, so there was a management issue, I think, or communication issue there…the management is not necessarily overwhelmed, but just they were so busy trying to drive that business, so that some of the level of service at the driver level, they kind of lost sight of it…I worked with an employee who actually, you know, I would argue—maybe not the most stellar employee on that particular day. He also just had a bad day, you know. Didn’t mean he was a bad guy, and doesn’t mean he can’t be a great employee.

One thing I thought was interesting that you mentioned was finding you had some communications issues with your Spanish-speaking workers. You said that wasn’t something that had occurred to you before. How much did you know about the actual sort of ethnic composition of your workforce?

I have a very good understanding of the composition, but I really probably had not enough knowledge that our frontline managers didn’t have the ability to communicate with them. Now, the person I worked with was one, a new employee, and a young employee, so she hasn’t had enough time or experience necessary to learn Spanish. She might have over time. Don’t get me wrong. We have a lot of other people who are frontline managers in production who speak Spanish. But the reality is we have some that don’t…Being someone who I think—I always think I’m a pretty good communicator, who had the inability to communicate on my very first day I did the show. I was like, “Wow, this is a problem.” But it’s a problem that’s addressable…

I can’t make you learn another language. It’s difficult. I can’t force you to do it. You have to want to do it…It’s been six months since the show. And right now we’re just in the process of implementing the whole project because it took time to hire the training manager, to get all of the Rosetta Stone licenses, to work on the tuition payments because we’re doing more than just one type of training… And then also for the Spanish-speaking employees, who actually get paid, you know, throughout the day, we’re doing it during the work hours versus making them stay after work to do it. But the English-speaking management employees, they do their day jobs, and then they stay later because it’s sort of optional for them.
Read more

This post contains spoilers through the January 29 episode of Luck.

Because Luck is so big and sprawling, I’m going to focus these recaps on a different character every week. And because this is the premiere, and I’m new to horseracing, I want to start with Gus. I’ve always liked Dennis Farina, who I think can be a wonderfully sensitive and underrated actor, and I particularly appreciate him here as Gus, a role I found to be even more sensitive and nuanced on a second pass.

I think it makes sense to look for structure and the larger idea in David Milch’s work. We’re not far enough into Luck for me to see the show as clearly as I do the themes in Deadwood, of course, but Ace is clearly the power broker here, the man who thinks he can see the future and manipulate it, who can turn the recession and the financial desperation of the area into a revitalization and expansion of gaming at Santa Anita. That life is made possible in part by Gus, who handles the great details and the small of Ace’s post-prison existence, whether he’s adjusting Ace’s thermostat to “67 degrees. 67 degrees is perfect,” or acting as “the first front in history” so Ace can own a horse again. But does that make him a butler? A political factotum? Or the citizen to Ace’s great man?

Whatever it turns out to be, there’s a real tenderness in Gus’s service to Ace. “I got a pencil right here, and I got an old ad from Sears I can write on the back of,” he tells Ace when Ace asks him to get a tape recorder, eager to be helpful as quickly as possible even though he misses the larger picture in the process. We learn that he’s answered every letter Ace got while he was in prison, a touchingly old-fashioned gesture. And though he ventures into the world of horse racing out of duty (Gus has trees to tend), telling Ace nervously “What do I know? All four of his legs reached the ground,” Gus finds genuine joy there. The look on his face when Mon Gateau eats a carrot off his hand for the first time is utterly charming in a world that’s already revealed itself to be brutal in the break of a horse’s leg, desperate in the form of Jerry’s gambling.

“All I’m worried about is you relying on me when I’m out past my depth,” Gus confesses to Ace after the latter’s tiring first day out of jail. “You don’t know your own depths,” Ace tells him. It’s an interesting, paternalistic moment, and it remains to be seen what it means. Is this the powerful issuing a vote of confidence in the common people, or a powerful man seeing in his factotum a man who could rise above his station?

One of the nice thing about being at Sundance is that the festival is a break from watching movies about people who are ostensibly like me: young, white, urban professionals. That said, when I did see a movie about those kinds of people, specifically, Save the Date, it was a pleasure to spend time with a romantic comedy that, with one significant exception, felt vastly more emotionally true and specific than the kinds of relationship stories Hollywood seems convinced women like me want to spend the money we’re not already laying down for shoes to go see.

In Save the Date, Sarah (Lizzy Caplan) runs a bookstore but hopes to make a living from her illustrations (drawn by graphic novelist Jeffrey Brown, who wrote the script with Egan Reich and director Michael Mohan). As the movie opens, she’s moving in with long-term boyfriend Kevin (Geoffrey Arend), who’s half of a band with Andrew (Martin Starr, the man in movies who does the most to hide his sexiness), who is engaged to Sarah’s sister Beth (Alison Brie, playing a grown-up Annie from Community). Commitment-shy and career-insecure, Sarah breaks up with and moves out on Kevin when he impulsively proposes to her, then jumps into a new relationship with lovelorn bookstore customer Jonathan (Mark Webber) while trying to deal with helping an increasingly anxious Beth plan her wedding.

None of this is incredibly new territory, but all of the relationships have a specificity that works. Beth and Sarah are clearly playing out long-established scripts as they move through a series of swiftly-unfolding big events. “I’m waiting for marriage,” Sarah jokes to Beth as they drive her stuff to Kevin’s place. “I thought you didn’t believe in marriage,” Beth ventures, torn between being excited about the prospect of her sister joining her on the road to marriage and nerves about whether Sarah can handle the commitment. “I don’t,” Sarah deadpans, “So I’m going to die a virg.” After her breakup with Kevin, Sarah tells Beth, “All I want is to get food that’s really bad for us and for you to give me a lot of sympathy.” But Beth, who disapproves of Sarah’s flightiness, is hesitant. “I’ll get really bad food,” she compromises. “But I’m not giving you sympathy.” Similarly, Andrew and Kevin are friends of long-enough standing that Andrew can muse to Kevin, “Do you think she and Beth are the same at sex?”

And as Sarah gets to know Jonathan, their conversations have a nice tinge of nerves and wonder. “I stalk your friend quietly. Because it’s a bookstore,” Jonathan jokes to Beth as he works up the courage to talk to her at the concert where Kevin proposes. Later, as they get to know each other, Jonathan explains to Sarah that he wants to be marine biologist that “I know there isn’t an ocean in Kansas City. And that’s why I became totally obsessed with it. And waves are amazing.” “It’s just so cool that you care so much about something,” Sarah tells him, recognizing in Jonathan the shared risk of having a dream that could disappoint you if it doesn’t come true. It’s a nice movement that feels of the recession and the generation without being bogged down by it.

Similarly, the movie isn’t afraid to make drama out of human decency and indecency without going over the top. When Kevin confronts Jonathan over his relationship with Sarah, Jonathan says mildly, “If I were you, I wouldn’t have done this, but I’d have been really upset…I want you to know I’m entirely sympathetic to your situation.” “Dude,” Kevin tells him. “I’m just pissed you don’t suck.” Those emotions are big enough.

The one place the movie steps wrong, and that I think male writers and directors tend to get wrong frequently, is in a surprise pregnancy plotline. I understand that continuing pregnancies is a way of keeping a plot going, and of upping the emotional impact of a relationship. But there’s something kind of odd about when male writers think women will be less than careful about birth control. Being uncertain about the state of your career or indecisive about committing to a relationship doesn’t automatically being careless about birth control, be it the Pill, an IUD, or simply regular condom use. And I’m not sure why those two things seem to go together, whether here or in Knocked Up. If anything, if you’re worried about your future, that seems like a time that the well-educated, upper-middle class heroines in these movies would be particularly careful about getting pregnant. At least Save the Date, unlike Knocked Up, has the courage to at least utter the word abortion. But a movie that’s realistic and tender and smart about sex and pleasure seems like it could have been more thoughtful and internally consistent when it comes to sex and reproduction.

It says a lot about Work It that the way the show dealt with cross-dressing was so misguided that I didn’t even get around to writing an extremely angry post about the show’s poisonous sexism before it was cancelled due to faith-in-humanity reaffirming low ratings. But every silver lining has its cloud, which in this case were the strong initial ratings for Rob. Whether the latter continues to hold those numbers is a very interesting question, but I think the fate of each of these critically-savaged shows says something about the stories Americans want to here, and what compromises they’re willing to make to them.

I think there’s no question that the impact of the recession on gender and economic power has been important and thought-provoking for a lot of people. If you’ve been a provider, and see that role tied up with your gender, and then lose that role, I imagine you have some thoughts about manhood, womanhood, etc. But I don’t necessarily think the recession set off a gender war. And the wildly aggrieved nature of Work It was sour beyond being interesting or resonant. On the show, Lee, the main character, complains bitterly about how much better his friend Angel is at selling pharmaceuticals in drag, calling her a whore, not that the experience leads him into clarity or sympathy for women who can’t or won’t let a man get a leg over to get a leg up in business. Lee’s toxic brother in law rants endlessly about how women are emasculating men. All three men appear to meet at the bar where they hang out because they want to escape whatever women in their lives, and those women are set up in a way to make that escape possible. They’re wretched people to spend time with, and even worse tools to get at the painful truths of the American economy through humor.

Rob, on the other hand, is not a good show either. The “shucks-I’m-sodomizing-Grandma” scene in the pilot will justly go down in infamy. But there is a real need for a show about American Latinos, and for a show that satirizes the efforts of white Americans to understand their changing society that opens up more space for conversation and shutting it down. Is Rob that? It’s not particularly clear yet. But the design of Cheech Marin as a conservative immigrant small businessman who wants to defend the border with cannons and employs undocumented immigrants himself is intelligent in intention if not in execution: not all non-white people think alike, and not all of them hold positions that we think of as progressive. His interactions with Rob, who tries to ingratiate himself by supporting immigration reform and talking about how much he likes guacamole, are probably the parts of the show that work best: the target is Rob’s desire to be accepted even though he hasn’t tried hard to be knowledgeable, and the jokes don’t suggest that he should try less hard, just try better.

Where Work It was hostile in its proud ignorance, Rob is amiable in its attempts to get at something true. Neither of them are good shows, but Rob could become a decent one with the right intentions and some heavy lifting. Work It never would have been. It’s too bad ABC didn’t realize that before airing it.

Despite its silly name, Don’t Trust the B- In Apartment 23 was one of my favorite pilots that I saw this fall. I like Krysten Ritter a whole bunch, and her odd-couple roommate schtick with Dreema Walker felt plausible and funny. Ritter plays Chloe, a manipulative New Yorker who takes roommates only to drive them nuts and keep their deposits, who ends up with more than she bargained for in June, a wholesome Midwesterner who came to New York only to find the job she planned to take wiped out by Bernie Madoff’s fraud. Chloe also maintains a nicely platonic friendship with James Van Der Beek, playing a slightly-altered version of himself a la Larry David, something that, as Ritter said today, is all too rare on television in particular and pop culture in general. I was intrigued by the Madoff references, and other riffs on things like June and Chloe walking out without paying a bar tab and blaming it on times being tough, so I asked creator Nahnatchka Khan what role the recession plays in the show.

“I think we’re trying to make it feel like it exists in the world. I know a lot of my friends are feeling the recession and it’s a real thing that exists,” she said. “Dreema’s going to continue to try to get a job. She’s trying to get hired by a Wall Street firm and people aren’t hiring, so she’s working at the coffee shop with Mark. But not giving up, and that’s the hopeful message. Times are tough but people aren’t giving up.”

I sort of like that perspective. 2 Broke Girls tends to tell specific stories about why the characters don’t have any money. Max grew up poor and has financed her attempts at self-improvement with debt, which haven’t yet paid off for her. Caroline lost her family’s money when it turns out her fortune was built on a foundation of lies. But the people around them seem relatively unaffected by the recession. Han’s trying to make the diner take off, but it’s not like there are very specific problems he has because of the recession. Hipsters continue to spend ridiculous amounts of money. Peach’s friends are only affected by Ponzi schemes, not by their tanking investments.

Other shows are doing one-offs. I think we’ll see a lot of things like Raising Hope‘s planned Occupy Natesville episode, that weave in the symbols of the recession in the same way most people will have glancing contact with the bleeding edge of the conversation without being permanently on the vanguard. But getting that persistent environment right is a tricky thing that involves thinking out your characters’ motivations in a really complete way. People are affected by recessions in ways that they don’t necessarily name, and figuring out how to articulate that and keep their motivations consistent is important.

Thank goodness ABC’s humiliating Work It premiered to ratings worse than the now-canceled show it replaced. It still doesn’t restore my faith in humanity that the so-called comedy beat Parenthood, but I’m narrowly relieved that it’s not an instant hit. Work It made me sadder than anything I’ve watched in a long time, sad enough that it’s proved difficult for me to muster up the same level of outrage as some of my colleagues.

It makes me sad that anyone would feel so vulnerable that they’d start darkly speculating bars, as a friend of main characters Lee and Angel, that “It’s not a recession, it’s a mancession. Women are taking over the workforce. Soon, they’ll start getting rid of men. They’ll just keep a few of us around as sex slaves…Not the kind of sex you like, Angel. Just kissing, and cuddling, and listening.” It’s not just that the mancession has been manifestly debunked, and men are doing better in the recovery of women. It’s the idea that people feel that lost and angry, that the idea that for women to succeed men have to lose, and lose badly, still has currency. It makes me sad to think that there are women anywhere who are waiting for men to buy them things but are doing for self because “none of them have any money.” It makes me sad to think that men and women know so little about each other that women find car maintenance mysterious and men think that the essence of femininity is nibbling on lettuce. And while I don’t normally like to complain about television networks being out of touch, because it’s not like market research doesn’t exist, it makes me profoundly sad that anyone, anywhere, would look at this show and think that audiences would see themselves in it.

Work It‘s approach to revelation via gender-switching is particularly grating given that Up All Night is doing the same thing, with vastly more tenderness and perceptiveness. It’s particularly ugly to see Lee pretend to have been sexually harassed at his old job, telling his new potential boss at the pharmaceutical sales company where he goes to work that “The guys were always sassing me, or patting my fanny, or ogling my teats.” In pretending to understand female experience, he’s demonstrating his ignorance of it in a way that minimizes sexual harassment, making it cutesy and adorable. The same thing happens when he goes to the taco shop where Angel works to try to convince him to join the masquerade. His complaint that “My eyes are up here” is glib, rather than revealing new understanding of how uncomfortable it can be to be ogled.
Read more