Reign [Premiered 10/17/2013]

In this CW-ification of the story of Mary, Queen of Scots, a teenaged Mary (Adelaide Kane) arrives at the French court and upends the dynamics between Prince Francis (Toby Regbo), his parents, his bastard brother Sebastian (Torrance Combs), and a surprisingly youthful—some would say hunky—Nostradamus (Rossif Sutherland) who predicts Mary will bring the family to its ruin.

Maria Suzanne Boyd [Georgia State University]

Close your eyes and imagine you are watching Mumford and Sons or The Lumineers perform at a renaissance festival. Got it? If so, then you have a good feel for the overall tone of the CW’s new historical drama Reign. The pilot offers a nicely blended mix of fun, intrigue, danger and sex, and in keeping with the CW’s stable of regular programming there is also a hint of the paranormal. Adelaide Kane helms the overtly beautiful cast in her role as the young Mary, Queen of Scots, and it is nice to see her exercise her acting chops beyond her stoic portrayal of Cora on MTV’s Teen Wolf.

If gross historical inaccuracies do not bother you, Reign has the potential to be a delightful, guilty pleasure. The pilot exceeded my expectations both in relation to the production value of the program and the narrative setup.  The sets and costumes were dazzling, the large cast of characters was efficiently introduced, and the season’s main conflict was clearly established.

Put simply, Reign can best be described as Scandal meets Game of Thrones. This show has easily earned a spot on my DVR.

Alyx Vesey [University of Wisconsin-Madison]

This melodrama about Mary, Queen of Scots, as the teenage bride-to-be of Dauphin Francis wants to be many things, but “period appropriate” isn’t one of them. Following Marie Antoinette, the soundtrack utilizes marketable contemporary indie folk and validates such pop anachronism by securing artists like The Lumineers and music supervisor Liza Richardson.

Foremost, Reign wants to put the “rip” in “bodice ripper,” serving its demographics’ hormonal impulses with scenes of voyeurism, masturbation, infidelity, and post-adolescent erotic intrigue. It also wants to capitalize on ABC Family’s success with Pretty Little Liars by foregrounding Mary’s fragile bond with her handmaidens as they encounter regal treachery (prediction: the whole French court is “A”). Finally, it wants to legitimate itself by shading the margins with political machinations and grisly violence.

But for all its demands, Reign is timid. The young cast lacks distinction. They all have excellent cheekbones and offer tepid line readings. Kane is no match for Catherine de Medici (Megan Follows, forever Anne Shirley), who will call upon the supernatural (Nostradamus is her confidant) to prevent her son’s impending marriage. If Mary wants the crown, she’ll have to take on her mother-in-law first.

The Tomorrow People [Premiered 10/09/2013]

Robbie Amell stars as Stephen, a high schooler hearing voices who discovers he’s not crazy; he’s simply one of the Tomorrow People, a superhuman species with powers— Telekinesis, Teleporting, and Telepathy—threatened by a government containment program, Ultra, and its leader Jedekiah (Mark Pellegrino).

Myles McNutt [University of Wisconsin-Madison]

Having been responsible for writing the summaries for each and every new fall series, I’ll say this for The Tomorrow People: there’s enough going on that there isn’t enough room for it in the above. We didn’t get to the sentient supercomputer, or Cara (Peyton List) and John (Luke Mitchell) as Stephen’s guardians in this new world, or the daddy issues underpinning the whole shebang.

However, we also didn’t get to the ideas of The Tomorrow People, which are pleasingly evident in this pilot. While far from new, the questions of humanity percolating through the pilot are effective, and the duel for Stephen’s allegiance offers a setup—Stephen working undercover with Ultra—that feels both sustainable and dynamic. Nothing in the show’s mythology is new—the daddy issues are particularly unoriginal—but the math in the pilot feels well calibrated.

Yes, Robbie Amell clearly looks his twenty-five years and has no business playing a high schooler. Yes, the sentient supercomputer is a bit on the nose. Yes, Sarah Clarke is woefully underused as a generic, overworked mother. However, there’s a bit of a wink to The Tomorrow People that keeps it from drowning in self-seriousness; while far from brilliant, there’s enough here to suggest a show capable of evolving into a solid piece of genre television with the right guidance.

Melanie Kohnen [New York University]

I probably wouldn’t have watched The Tomorrow People’s pilot if I hadn’t seen it by chance at San Diego Comic-Con. While I watch a number of CW programs, nothing about the premise stood out to me, and the pilot confirms this at first glance. The Tomorrow People is a cookie cutter CW show featuring a mostly white ensemble cast of attractive young actors who portray outcast characters bound together by a shared supernatural fate stemming from genetic difference (think X-Men). If it hadn’t been for the last scene, I would have had no interest in watching the show again.

But Stephen’s decision to work for Ultra surprised me and makes me curious about what is ahead on the show. Perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised by this twist because Stephen’s decision embodies the ambiguity of so much millennial-oriented television, in which questions of belonging are not easily settled. Ultimately, the pilot suggests that biological family and a family of friends, good and evil, social outcasts and corporations are not extreme opposites, but co-exist. If The Tomorrow People builds on this ambiguity, it has a chance to exceed its too-familiar premise.

Bärbel Göbel Stolz [Indiana University]

This US remake of a 1970s UK teen sci-fi show did deliver. It is a teen drama that provides love triangles, high school bullies, a societal system that has to be rebelled against and displays at its center teen angst, all wrapped up in a coming of age story. In millennial fashion, the coming of age as Stephen comes to terms with his outsider status and powers develops at lightning speed, crystallizing within just 42 minutes.

The Tomorrow People also throws in Abel and Cain, a little bit of The Matrix’s Neo, X-Men mythology, and gender norms we have grown accustomed to in much of teen male melodrama (physically strong, non sexually-threatening males who’ve been partially orphaned; smart females, emotionally torn; bad-boy side-kicks). Given these elements, you may think “seen it, been there, I don’t care.” Yet, this show does provide a few interesting alterations from the norm that could be intriguing down the line, the most interesting one being the lead character’s choice—after just finding out some important truths about himself—to work for the enemy, most likely as an infiltrator.

All in all: If you expected a CW show, you got exactly what you expected.

The Originals [Premiered 10/03/2013]

In this spin-off from The Vampire Diaries, the Original family of Klaus (Joseph Morgan), Elijah (Daniel Gillies), and Rebekah (Claire Holt) arrive in New Orleans to play a part in an ongoing struggle for power between vampires, werewolves, and witches in the Big Easy.

Karen Petruska [University of California – Santa Barbara]

I’m a fan of The Vampire Diaries, but I am NOT a fan of Klaus, the character whose rabid fan base prompted the CW to create a spin-off based on his petulant, whiny, egomaniacal, and—oh yeah—completely immortal hybrid werewolf-vampire character. I am giving The Originals a chance, though, since it has finally removed Klaus from TVD. The pilot suffers from too much exposition and a lack of focus. Nevertheless, I was pleasantly surprised.

The character at the center of the action in this pilot was not Klaus but rather his brother, Elijah. This is a smart choice because I suspect a little bit of Klaus goes a long way, even with his biggest fans. Elijah, on the other hand, not only has a code of honor but also tends to get stabbed on a regular basis by his brother with a magical stake (that renders him pseudo-dead); as a result, Elijah is a character for whom you can root, while Klaus is an irredeemable “dick,” as program co-creator Julie Plec called him on Twitter last night.

The fact that Klaus remains irredeemable, though, now has me intrigued. His greatest crime on TVD was his immortality, which rendered all actions against him inevitably futile: inaction is the death of a plot-based program. If The Originals chooses to focus less on Klaus to consider more the stakes of Klaus’ redemption for his long-suffering siblings, I may be able to get behind that. Beyond the Original family, other characters—particularly those of color—will likely suffer as pawns of Klaus, an unfortunate perpetuation of discomfiting racial politics that weakened TVD, as well. My determination that The Originals is not as bad as I expected is not high praise, but coming from a Klaus hater, it is pretty dang impressive.

Kyra Hunting [University of Wisconsin-Madison]

While the pilot form is always a fraught one, The Originals walks a particularly high tightrope as a spin-off of a very serial show, The Vampire Diaries. In this respect, it was quite successful; providing a logical motivation for introducing non-viewers or sporadic viewers of TVD to the history of the Originals while providing enough new material to engage fans. While it felt weighed down at times, the narrative conceit of a supernatural turf war, with the pregnant woman’s body as pawn, was interesting. The Originals narrative and dark aesthetic, which often felt like a mafia movie, also could appeal to male viewers who are underrepresented in TVD audience. While it seems improbable, in practice, that the series will gain a large number of non-Vampire Diaries viewers, its move away from this show’s valorization of romantic love to a focus on, and problematization of, familial love provides a nice bookend for Vampire Diaries fans. While there was a little characterization regression, and a “you send one of mine to the hospital I’ll send one of yours to the morgue” machismo that put me off balance at times; I found the first episode’s engagement with questions of power, loyalty, and love, as alternatively revelatory and weakness, a compelling direction for The Vampire Diary’s storyworld.

The Millers [Premiered 10/03/2013]

In this multi-camera sitcom from Greg Garcia, Will Arnett stars as a man who his his divorce from his bickering parents (Margo Martindale, Beau Bridges), who subsequently move back into his life and plan a divorce of their own.

Myles McNutt [University of Wisconsin-Madison]

It is oft said that one must not judge a sitcom by its pilot, and that is true of The Millers: the version I saw earlier this year had two different actors in the roles played by Jayma Mays and Nelson Franklin, for example, making it difficult to definitively say the series’ lack of subtlety couldn’t be corrected over time.

And yet at the same time it’s hard to trust someone who so willfully indulges in fart jokes in the way Greg Garcia does in this pilot. The dynamic of parents forcing their way into your personal life works as a comic setup, and both Margo Martindale and Beau Bridges are up for the rhythms of a multi-camera sitcom. The series’ biggest problem isn’t that its various parts don’t make sense, but rather that the script doesn’t trust those parts enough to let the rhythms work without the assistance of recurring flatulence designed to appeal to the Las Vegas test audiences that would determine the series’ fate.

Garcia has promised there are no fart jokes in subsequent episodes, and Mays and Franklin are a bit better calibrated than the actors they replaced, so it’s possible optimism is the best course. At the same time, though, whether I’m willing to commit twenty-one minutes a week based on my trust of Garcia’s judgment is an open question.

Eleanor Patterson [University of Wisconsin-Madison]

What are the people on the laugh track laughing at? Seriously? This contrived recombinant of Everybody Loves Raymond and insert-any-crude-CBS-sitcom-here is just not funny at all. Overbearing parents come to visit their kids and seem inappropriately shocked that their son has gotten a divorce, but then decide that this gives them the right to get divorced themselves. The logic is absolutely ridiculous and the disbelief is difficult to suspend. Be prepared for jokes about farts and the humdrum mundanity of white, middle class, heterosexual married life. Okay, we get it, gender difference is inherent, and marriage is horrible (but somehow still desirable), and middle class normality is unequivocally articulated as a white space. Which is why Will Arnett’s character must be coached on how to get laid from his African American co-worker, played by the funny comedian J.B Smoove, who was very good on Curb Your Enthusiasm, but whose talent is wasted here.

This show is so boring, and it’s not just the retrograde morality (divorce, for shame!). The narrative structure and comic timing is interchangeable with any milquetoast sitcom in the history of milquetoast sitcoms. Watching Will Arnett play a snarky, smug local news reporter on the lifestyle beat makes me long for the days of Running Wilde, whose premise was at least somewhat unique. And after Margo Martindale’s fabulous turn in FX’s The Americans, its painful to watch her talent languish in this uninspired tripe. I expect it will be picked up: its ratings were strong and it fits the CBS brand of comedy. The good news is that these shows are only 22 minutes long, and won’t be showing up on competitor-owned Hulu, where I do much of my own cord-cutting viewing.

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We Are Men [Premiered 09/30/2013]

Based on creator Rob Greenberg’s post-divorce sexual escapades, the series highlights a young bachelor left at the altar (Chris Smith) who bonds with three other jilted singles (Tony Shalhoub, Jerry O’Connell, Kal Penn, and Chris Smith) over their shared bad experiences with the opposite sex.

Evan Elkins [University of Wisconsin-Madison]

We Are Men raises a number of questions: Can a beer commercial be stretched into a half-hour sitcom? Just how easy is it to waste the comedic skills of Tony Shalhoub, Jerry O’Connell, Kal Penn, and The Other Guy (in descending order of formidability)? How many different ways to disdain women can a show fit into its first three minutes? Regarding the last question, does the theme song, a masculine version of Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive,” count? (the Cake version, maybe? I’m honestly not sure, and I’m not going to subject myself to it again to find out.)

But We Are Men wants to have its Cake and eat it too. It wants to be a straightforward celebration of masculinity and a winking critique of it. The title gives this away—it’s both a rallying cry for men and an ironic suggestion that we’re essentially dealing with children here. But this sort of faux-ambivalence is old hat at this point.

It’s ultimately hard to see how this has any kind of shelf life. It’s not that it’s impossible for television comedies with shallow characters to be great. In fact, many of the best are flush with them: Seinfeld, Arrested Development, The Simpsons, Party Down. But all of those shows offer exemplars of shallowness with somewhat different perspectives (like at least one woman, for instance). This just offers us four slight, unfunny variations on garden-variety arrested-development manhood.

Alyx Vesey [University of Wisconsin-Madison]

This program bears the distinction of being the only sitcom in recent memory to take Kirk Van Houten’s storyline in “A Milhouse Divided” as its premise (I bet Tony Shalhoub’s Frank Russo sleeps in a racecar bed). The pilot’s journey from failed wedding to singles complex—How do we filter out the teases? We don’t let them in!—introduces a Van Houten-esque collection of characters: perennial divorcé Frank, cheater Gil (Kal Penn, who deserves better), and Stuart (Jerry O’Connell, who doesn’t), a man so saddled with alimony that he literally can’t keep the shirt on his back.

The quartet’s chemistry is serviceable, though the male lead has a bland congeniality that recalls Justin Barta’s unremarkable turn in The Hangover series. More remarkable is the comedic talent just out of frame. Alan Ruck officiates Carter’s wedding. Dave Foley briefly appears as his dad. The show claims HIMYM alum Rob Greenberg as its creator and credits Adam Arkin with directing its second episode.  But if Men’s “charm” is in downing beers and ogling bikini-clad neighbors with the fellas, I’d rather break my lease.

~ ~ ~

The Crazy Ones [Premiered 09/26/2013]

Robin Williams returns to TV as an ad man who works alongside his daughter (Sarah Michelle Gellar) to make companies happy—starting with McDonald’s, Kelly Clarkson, and James Wolk free-styling about drive-thru loving—and make audiences laugh in this move into single-camera comedy for David E. Kelley and CBS.

Anne Gilbert [Rutgers University]

There’s a lot going on in The Crazy Ones’ pilot, not necessarily to its benefit. Simon (Robin Williams) is insane, but also a mad genius of advertising (or was, in some previous glory days). His daughter Sydney (Sarah Michelle Gellar) is uptight, but also sort of charming, and usually right. Their associate Zach (James Wolk) is kind of slutty, but also good at everything and totally likable. Kelly Clarkson is enthralled by her own unironically sultry rendition of “It’s Not the Meat It’s the Motion” in reference to…hamburgers, that we are supposed to eat…but also is just bitchy enough to make it funny. Oh, and because they clearly greenlit their role as “big client” in the pilot, McDonald’s is about family and togetherness, but not at all obesity epidemics or minimum wage battles.

The Crazy Ones is packed tight and manically paced, making it impossible to get to know the characters, much less care when – thank goodness! – they are able to help McDonald’s sell more (non-sexual) hamburgers. There is a slickness to the show that, combined with the David E. Kelley pedigree, the stellar cast, and the high-profile guests, means it takes a while to notice that it’s more polish than substance.

Jennifer Smith [Independent Scholar]

The Crazy Ones is about a man who used to be among the greatest stars of his chosen profession, now older and troubled and trying to prove he hasn’t become repetitive and irrelevant, and it stars Robin Williams, who… well, you get the picture. From the giant painting of young Williams in the ad office to the reference to the character’s addictions and divorces, the show isn’t subtle about the connection. This exploration of Williams’ star text is matched by Sarah Michelle Gellar’s attempts to both live down and live up to her Buffy past — she punches a robot within the first five minutes, but her character’s main arc is her struggle to prove she’s a successful adult professional. The show plays on our nostalgia even as it strives for freshness, which is also, not coincidentally, the point of the pilot’s McDonald’s/Kelly Clarkson plot. I don’t know if this is a good show or not, and it probably depends on your tolerance for Williams’ manic comedy (of which I’m admittedly a fan). But as a textbook study in negotiating star texts and intertextuality (it’s a modern comedic Mad Men, right down to the title), The Crazy Ones is a gift to teachers of media studies.

Karen Petruska [University of California – Santa Barbara]

I have taught Advertising and Promotional Culture too often to glean from CBS’ The Crazy Ones the sincerity it and its promos seem to want to inspire. Despite the program’s focus upon a loving relationship between father and daughter, it also features characters that mark the complexity of advertising as a business, particularly through characters such as the pandering, exploited female assistant and the charming, corrupt character portrayed by James Wolk. Advertising is called out as manipulation repeatedly. For example, despite assurances that “icons don’t like to sing about meat” and that Kelly Clarkson “[w]on’t do jingles,” Clarkson is nevertheless driven to do just that in order to reinvent her celebrity brand. A relationship of mutual dependence is therefore set up between all the central players, each using each other to advance individual ends, just as the many mentions of McDonald’s throughout the episode serve the ends of producer 20^th Century Fox, distributor CBS, and the larger ecosystem of television economics.

The Crazy Ones repeatedly exposes consumer culture anxieties—whether the agency can “pivot” (read: manipulate) Clarkson, whether a practiced pitch can read as “authentic,” and in my favorite moment, Gellar’s character replies to a question about whether icons like John Lennon were paid when employed to sell an idea (not a product) in an ad with “that’s besides the point.” Ultimately, the show is sorta funny and can sell a new brand every week (cha-ching). But if I tune in, it will be to see how long the show can sustain an awareness of the central dilemma of television and advertising: they seek not to entertain but to exchange viewers as currency. That balancing act is actually pretty entertaining.

~ ~ ~

Mom [Premiered 09/23/2013]

Anna Faris and Allison Janney play daughter and mother, respectively, in this Chuck Lorre-produced comedy about a recovering alcoholic and working mother of two who must adapt to her mother’s return to her life at an already complicated time for her romantic relationships and her relationships with her two children.

Jennifer Smith [University of Wisconsin – Madison]

While the overbearing laugh track and Jon Cryer cameo make Mom unmistakable as a Chuck Lorre-produced CBS sitcom, this pilot surprised me with its genuine, layered approach to the exploration of the familial relationships between three generations of imperfect women.  Elevated by the ample comedic talents of stars Anna Faris and Allison Janney, Mom lets its women take center stage, making their flaws and challenges the driving force of the plot. When they’re the butt of jokes, it’s because of choices <em>they</em> make, and their relationships with each other, a relative rarity in current domestic/familial sitcoms.  Sure, the women are emotionally-stunted addicts who make poor life choices, but the men are philanderers, deadbeats, and narcissists – there’s no question of where viewers’ sympathies should lie. And refreshingly, the show treats characters with back stories grounded in addiction and teen pregnancy as subjects of gentle comedy rather than as freak shows or tragedies. This episode suffers from Clunky Sitcom Pilot Syndrome; the beginning, especially, is abrupt and disorienting, and the exposition feels shoehorned-in. But the comedic timing and slapstick are well-executed, and the characters are compelling. It’s not quite Roseanne or The Golden Girls, but it has potential.

Alyxandra Vesey [University of Wisconsin – Madison]

It makes sense that the promos for this series highlight the pilot’s diner scene between mother-daughter duo Bonnie (Allison Janney) and Christy (Anna Faris), following an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. Janney and Faris lock into the itchy rhythms of their dialogue, relishing the “k” sounds in phrases like “licking cocaine crumbs out of shag carpet” in harrowing recollections of each other’s substance abuse problems.

I’m unconvinced that Mom, co-created by Chuck Lorre, Eddie Gorodetsky, and Gemma Baker, deserves the pair’s comedy master class. This critique hovers over Faris’ career, as she frequently delivers Goldie Hawn-level zaniness in lesser efforts (though I stand behind Gregg Araki’s Smiley Face). For example, the writers need to develop Christy’s work life without relying on winking cameos from Two and Half Men’s Jon Cryer. But some of Mom could work. I’m interested in Christy’s working class family and easy rapport with shaggy ex-partner Baxter (Matt Jones, of Breaking Bad fame). I liked Faris’ brittle candor in the AA scene. I’m leery of Bonnie intervening on behalf of granddaughter Violet (Sadie Calvano), who mirrors her mother’s teenage hedonism. But I’d like to see Janney and Faris trade barbs in a program worthy of their talents.

~ ~ ~

Hostages [Premiered 09/23/2013]

Toni Collette stars as a surgeon scheduled to perform an operation on the President, only to have her home invaded by a rogue FBI Agent (Dylan McDermott) who holds her family hostage in the interest of determining the outcome of that operation; this fifteen-episode “limited series”—that means it will be capped at fifteen per season—tells the story of how the family and their captors’ secrets unravel in captivity.

Bärbel Göbel-Stolz [Indiana University]

CBS’ Hostages trailer looked not too promising. There is a promising cast, but the premise is problematic. Where can this plot possibly go?

Breaking with CBS’ procedural line-up the series sets up characters, narrative arcs, and subplots. Possible storylines that extend this to a season run, however, seem illogical. Being illogical is something that a good thriller is not. The FBI agent would not compromise the control needed to handle the situation; he does not make mistakes. It seems unlikely that his kidnapper alter ego would. Opportunities are laid out before us, but are too few to push past a heavy-handed pilot. There are so many possible complications; I almost do not care when they will come into play. The sole question is not if or how, but when. It makes me think I am waiting for a bus.

Exception: The evil kidnappers kill yellow labs, America’s favorite furry family member. But then, the pet is revealed alive. This is the series’ promise: you won’t know who is good or bad. It still feels predictable. The sub-plots will extend this series’ run, likely at the cost of narrative cohesion, pace, and my interest in watching. I hope my pessimism will be exchanged for excitement. I am not holding my breath to find out.

Jonathan Gray [University of Wisconsin – Madison]

Someone needs to sit down with the Hostages writers and explain how thrillers work. They seem to have misheard the notion that thrillers can’t be all action, and require some build up, as “make sure there are lots of boring scenes in between the exciting ones.” The first fifteen minutes in particular are profoundly boring, even in spite of the music’s heavy-handed attempts to create suspense or to try and convince me that Dylan McDermott’s Duncan Carlisle is Totally Badass. McDermott and Toni Collette both find ways to make the show slightly more interesting as it goes along, but much of the show felt so trite, so paint-by-numbers. The only scene in which something seemed legitimately at stake was one in which Collette’s Dr. Ellen Sanders almost cuts off a finger. Good serial programs nearly always need a few episodes that are there simply to set things up, and that aren’t all that enjoyable, but it’s bad strategy to make the pilot one of them. I’m left expecting a show that will continually spin its wheels. The pilot ends with Sanders seemingly buying herself two weeks, but unless the writers do something, I can’t see it lasting too much longer than that.

Alyxandra Vesey [University of Wisconsin – Madison]

I watched the Hostages pilot for Toni Collette’s face. As a longtime fan (the popsicle scene in Little Miss Sunshine!), I delight in her visage’s affective athleticism, which always reveals—and, often, quickly buries—characters’ subjectivities.  Even when the material fails to meet her, watching Collette build a character for a primetime political thriller is an event to me.

Adapted from an Israeli series, Hostages models itself after Homeland, with remnants of 24 crowding the margins. Collette plays Dr. Ellen Sanders, a surgeon with a seemingly perfect family life. She inherits President Paul Kincaid (James Naughton) as a patient. But the episode devotes much of its packed, at-times incoherent hour to her family’s kidnapping by an FBI team led by special agent Duncan Carlisle (Dylan McDermott). His unclear motive is tenuously connected to an assassination plot and his ailing wife. For me, the hook is in its final scene when Sanders, who injected blood thinner in the President’s bloodstream to buy time against Carlisle, stares into the camera during a press conference and dares him to make a move. It’s a heightened conclusion. But Hostages might set itself apart if it prioritized its formidable lead actress and her face’s storytelling capabilities.

The Emmys began late due to a mess of a football game, where the New York Jets managed to sneak out a victory after setting team records for penalties and penalty yards. It was an omen for the night to come, where any objective referee would have penalized Ken Ehrlich and his production team on countless occasions. From the moment the ceremony began with an aimless sequence where the Emmy production team proved their ability to edit footage from various television shows together into fake conversations between television characters, it was clear that this was an evening set to celebrate television in the most misguided of ways.

It was unfortunate for the show’s producers there was no clear narrative that emerged out of the night’s winners: the Netflix ascension never materialized, Breaking Bad expanded its trophy case with wins for the show and Anna Gunn but didn’t dominate as it could have, and Modern Family went unrepresented in acting categories for the first time but nonetheless won the one that matters, Outstanding Comedy Series. It means the telecast itself becomes the narrative, and a rather unpleasant one at that.

There were the special eulogies for individuals who had passed on, which drew controversy for selective criteria in advance of the ceremony and criticism from viewers and winners—Modern Family’s Steven Levitan—for giving the evening a somber tone. There was the choice to maintain the audio feed in the theater for the In Memoriam segment itself, enabling the always tacky “Applause Meter” to judge the level of celebrity on display. There was the nonsensical appearance of Elton John to perform a new song that “reminds him” of Liberace only to attempt to justify his appearance given his nonexistent relationship to television. There was the excruciating opening segment that transitioned from the aforementioned pre-taped sequence to a lazy Saturday Night Live monologue where a parade of previous Emmy hosts were wasted right up until the point Tina Fey and Amy Poehler momentarily wrestled the show from its imminent doom.

And yet it was the look back in television history to the year 1963 that best encapsulates the broadcast’s problems. Combining a superfluous performance of The Beatles’ “Yesterday” from Carrie Underwood with a Don Cheadle-delivered retelling of a tumultuous year in our history, it sought to position television at the forefront of culture. It was television that helped the nation heal about JFK’s death, gave Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” resonance, made The Beatles the phenomenon they would become, and—in an awful segue—continues to serve as the launching pad for musical acts like Underwood. Anyone with an understanding of history—yet alone media scholars—would have scrawled all over their script, which fails to cite sources to support any of these overly simplistic claims.

In addition to this problem, however, it was also a sequence that implicitly argued the Emmys exist not simply to acknowledge the best in television, but also to reaffirm to us that television is an important part of society, and that—according to Television Academy chairman Bruce Rosenblum during his annual spiel—the Academy is there 365 days a year to help make this “golden age of television” a reality. This rhetoric was also evident in the sequence where Diahann Carroll read a prepared statement about her impact as the first African American actress nominated for an Emmy, turning over the microphone to Scandal’s Kerry Washington; it was the Emmys touting their progressivism, a noble gesture that does not change the dramatic underrepresentation of men and women of color both at the Emmys and on TV in general, and does not magically transform the Television Academy into the Peabody Awards overnight.

The Emmys are at their worst when they feel as though they are about the Emmys. As someone who has over time accumulated a wealth of knowledge about the Emmy Awards as an institution, I reveled in Ellen Burstyn joking about the screen time for her previous nomination and often found Ken Ehrlich’s broadcast fascinating in its tone deafness, but its ultimate failure is both undeniable and unfortunate when I consider the worthy—if, yes, also wealthy—winners whose personal and professional triumphs were overshadowed by the spectacle or lack thereof around them.

The most frustrating detail was in the special choreography segment featured in the broadcast’s final hour. For most viewers, the routine inspired by nominated series was representative of the hokey, misguided production numbers elsewhere in the broadcast. However, for me it was a rare case of one of the Creative Arts categories—consigned to a previous ceremony, which this year aired as a tape-delayed, edited two hours on FXX—being elevated to the main stage, with the choreographers—many of whom I respect based on their work on reality stalwart So You Think You Can Dance—nominated for their work in television being given an expansive platform for their work and an acknowledgment of their labor.

Whereas FXX’s broadcast only acknowledged nominees for guest acting awards, and aired only small portions of winners’ already short speeches, for a brief moment the Academy recognized the work of choreographers at the Emmys itself; it was unfortunate that what surrounded it so diminished the meaning of the performance. It was a broadcast that prioritized promotable musical acts at the expense of time for television professionals to accept their awards, so busy performing the “importance of television” that it forgot what—or who—actually makes television, if that was something the Academy even knew in the first place.

Almost Human [Premiered 11/17/2013]

Karl Urban stars as John Kennex, a no-nonsense cop in a future where every cop is paired with an android partner. Re-entering the force after a personal tragedy, he’s paired with Dorian (Michael Ealy), a rejected android model whose emotional capacities are heightened. They form an uneasy partnership to confront a corrupt world, one case at a time.

Kit Hughes [University of Wisconsin-Madison]

This is a show that wants its viewers to ask, “ah, but which one of them is ‘almost human’?”

I have other questions.

1. Why should we care about anything in this future, which seems to be populated only by abusive cops, robots with weird cheekbones, and crime/“the syndicate”?
   1. Is it because there are allegedly some good noodles places and that one pale, creepy science guy who’s in every procedural (you know, to shore up the masculinity of the protagonist) still listens to Depeche Mode?
   2. How do we distinguish allusion from cliché writing?
      1. Fake epithets (“synthetics”) and underground medicine (“Recollectionists”); seriously?
      2. Is AH’s characterization of its villains lazier for ripping off the masks in V for Vendetta or for simply calling them “the syndicate”?
      3. Why can’t people leave Blade Runner alone?
      4. Could this show actually have something interesting to say about the monstrosity of bureaucratic records-keeping systems, data collection, and the politics of access?
         1. Could it move past its gleeful focus on surveillance?
         2. Why was their evidence locker so bright? Doesn’t the future care about preservation storage conditions?
         3. Will any show ever recapture the delightful chemistry of Perfect Strangers?

Jenna Stoeber [University of Wisconsin-Madison]

A set up so classic it seems like something from a satire; technology/crime/drugs are out of control. John (Karl Urban), a renegade human police officer with a mysteriously disappeared ex-girlfriend, memory problems, a pill addiction, and a synthetic leg, loses his partner in a tragic-heroic accident. The majority of the episode takes place post-recovery, when he is partnered up with Dorian (Michael Ealy), an emotional, buggy android. The set-up is a classic buddy-cop odd-couple formula.

Like much cyberpunk media, it features a vaguely pan-Asian design-skin that looks like it was ripped from Blade Runner. The morality and characters are pure I, Robot, and there’s even a dash of the Saw franchise mixed in for flavor; The whole episode has a cinematic feel to it, perhaps due to the high production value and well executed design. And yet, there’s something distinctly uncomfortable with watching Urban rampage through the episode, alternatively harassing and assaulting people, and being generally unbearably unpleasant. I suppose his aggressive interactions with Ealy are meant to be read as social commentary, but lack the follow through to be anything other than bizarrely offensive. Luckily, after roughly 20 minutes of being partners, they bond over synthetic body parts, and, gee, discrimination is solved!

Brooklyn Nine-Nine [Premiere 09/17/2013]

A workplace comedy that happens to be set at a police station, Andy Samberg stars as a typically immature—for Samberg—detective, Jake Peralta, whose ecosystem is threatened by the presence of new chief Ray Holt, played by Andre Braugher. Surrounded by supporting players not dissimilar to those found on co-creator Mike Schur’s Parks and Recreation, including Melissa Fumero’s eager detective who looks to Holt as a mentor figure, the two cops must balance their respective career goals with the new comic situation in front of them.

Alyx Vesey [University of Wisconsin-Madison]

Brooklyn Nine-Nine brings law enforcement back to the workplace sitcom. But it’s also a comment on the buddy cop genre. Molly Eichel signposted the Beastie Boys’ “Sabotage” video. I’d add The Heat, which referenced Lethal Weapon to foreground women’s professional friendships. This parallels Andy Samberg’s roast of James Franco, which mocked the “tradition” of capitulating to racist, sexist, and homophobic insult humor. Jake Peralta riffs on an archetype, trading Martin Riggs’ self-destruction for arrested development.

What is most promising about the pilot’s commentary on heteromasculinity is its pervasiveness. Take Andre Braugher’s authoritative performance as Ray Holt, precinct 99’s new no-nonsense commanding officer. Toward the end of the pilot, Holt reveals that it took so long to become captain because the NYPD was uncomfortable with his homosexuality. I like Melissa Fumero as Detective Amy Santiago, a focused, unsentimental woman who won’t back down from a challenge, even if she’s dousing sandwiches in hot sauce. I appreciated the wink to Cagney and Lacey, after whom Sergeant Terry Jeffords (Terry Crews) named his daughters. I’m also intrigued by the tentative connection between detective Rose Diaz (Stephanie Beatriz), detective Charles Boyle (Joe Lo Truglio) and administrator Gina Linetti (Chelsea Peretti), as I’d like to see gifted physical comedian Lo Truglio (the muffin scene!) play romance.

Some jokes rubbed me the wrong way. Peralta and Santiago compete to see who can arrest more people because filtering citizens through the prison industrial complex is hilarious? The Disco Strangler brandished a yo-yo, ha? But the runner of older women going about their day while the team nabs criminals tickled me. I’ll take another coffee break with this crew.

Evan Elkins [University of Wisconsin-Madison]

Newsradio remains the gold standard against which I judge all ensemble television comedies. This is patently unfair, but it’s how my brain works. To my mind, the flawless cast (yes, even Joe Rogan. But seriously, take another look at that Newsradio cast) and ingenious, multi-cam-meets-Jacques-Tati staging still haven’t been matched. There are other contenders, some of which can be traced back through the lineage of Brooklyn Nine-Nine co-creator Michael Schur, but it’s Newsradio that, above all others, shows me the heights that the ensemble comedy genre can reach.

One episode in, Brooklyn Nine-Nine doesn’t wither under my harsh, Newsradio-comparing gaze as much as most programs do. In fact, it might be the funniest cop-comedy pilot since Poochinski. While it’s nothing special formally—it sticks to a now-familiar, unremarkable single-cam format, in part to half-heartedly invoke the look of a cop drama when it needs to—the cast is pretty terrific. In particular, I’m always happy to encounter Jo Lo Truglio, who can play a middle-aged sad sack better than anyone at this point (though I imagine his character’s quirks will be significantly less weird than they wound up being in the second season of Burning Love.)

Anyway, once it finds its footing—and it’s already quite a bit further along than most comedy pilots—it could contribute to a pretty solid Fox Tuesday night lineup. Just pretend Dads doesn’t exist.

Jennifer Smith [Independent Scholar]

“The only puzzle he hasn’t solved is how to grow up.” This description of protagonist Jake Peralta (at the conclusion of an awkwardly expository list of character summaries delivered by the squad’s captain early in the pilot) perfectly summarizes the central problem with Brooklyn Nine-Nine: Andy Samberg’s man-child persona. In a cast as diverse as this one, the central focus on one of the only straight white men – and a petulant, obnoxious one at that – is disappointing, if sadly unsurprising.

Creator Michael Schur’s Parks and Recreation works so well because Leslie Knope, overwhelming as she may sometimes be, is both inherently likable and unique in the current television landscape. But here, in a world (a police precinct) where the stakes are high and the supporting cast is full of complex, interesting individuals, the focus rests on the same irritating, immature, sexually-harassing schlub found at the center of any Chuck Lorre sitcom.

I’d love to keep watching for the sake of the other characters, especially the brilliant Andre Braugher’s older, gay, black police captain (the polar opposite of a stock character). But unless Peralta quickly solves the aforementioned puzzle, I’m not sure how long I can stick around.

Anne Gilbert [Rutgers University]

Brooklyn Nine-Nine has a lot going for it from the start – the writers crib effectively from police procedurals to shorthand all the crime solving, the cast has an easy sense of camaraderie, and Andre Braugher’s knowing, poker-faced delivery is comedy gold. But before I can get on board, the show needs to get to know its tone; the pilot is balancing in a no man’s land between “quirky” and “downright absurd.”

There will be inevitable comparisons to Scrubs, which juggled a similar serious content/wacky delivery approach, but Brooklyn Nine-Nine hasn’t yet made the commitment to a similar level of weird. Instead, it has a pervasive wry and offbeat tone that genuinely works, but gets thrown off-kilter with, for instance, the flashback of the Disco Strangler going after a victim with a blinking yo-yo, or Samberg’s Detective Peralta sporting a garish Speedo swimsuit in an attempt to prove a point – or, honestly, every attempt to tell me, again and again, that Peralta is actually meant to be a good detective.

As of now, it’s a fun show that, if it is able to find its feet and develop its characters, could eventually be really funny.

~ ~ ~

Sleepy Hollow [Premiered 09/16/2013]

A time-traveling Ichabod Crane (Tom Mison) wakes up in modern day Sleepy Hollow to discover his nemesis the Headless Horseman is still wreaking havoc; he also informs the Sheriff’s deputy who discovers him (Nicole Beharie) that the Headless Horseman is actually one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, Death. Death also has a machine gun. And he wants his head back. Thus begins a journey into a mythology rife with presidential bibles, witches, and fated connections between an odd-couple male/female pairing from the minds of Phillip Iscove and producers Alex Kurtzman, Roberto Orci, and director Len Wiseman.

William Proctor [University of Sunderland]

The synopsis of Sleepy Hollow sounds deliciously absurd: take the principle character of the Washington Irving novel, Ichabod Crane, and his nemesis, the Headless Horseman, throw in a dose of temporal mayhem and, like other contemporary myth translations, bring it kicking and screaming – and slicing – into the 21^st century. The pilot episode begins to develop the show’s mythos and world-building with economy and panache. There is plenty of potential here and, despite the derivative nature of the narrative – it could be a season-long arc of Supernatural, for instance – the chemistry between protagonists Ichabod and his cop side-kick is satisfying enough to warrant interest. One gets the feeling that the writers have their tongue firmly rooted in their cheek and set out to have fun. Clancy Brown, who played the Kurgan in 1980s cult classic Highlander with demonic delight, provides a cameo and is summarily decapitated early in the episode – the irony of which will not be lost on avid connoisseurs of pop culture and fans of Highlander (remember the tag-line and accompanying Queen song? ‘Don’t lose your head’). Some of the humour is in bad taste (asking a black police officer if she is ‘emancipated from slavery’ misses the mark somewhat), but the overall tone of the show is breezy and full of joie de vivre, a palliative to the sombre atmosphere of this post-Dark Knight world.

Taylor Cole Miller [University of Wisconsin-Madison]

Last week before class, I showed my students some trailers for fall premieres, among them FOX’s Sleepy Hollow. While I introduced the title, a few scooted up in their seats, excitedly anticipating what might’ve been Downton Abbey meets American Horror Story–a period scare-piece to relish in the ever-earlier, ever-colder Wisconsin darkness. After a few scenes, though, most lost interest, preferring instead to relish their last few minutes of cellular freedom. If a 1790s Sleepy Hollow was too boring for Hollywood, a 2013 “modern-day retelling” with guns was too boring for them–and for me, too.

I hesitate to be so cynical, especially because Sleepy Hollow is really more like the homely lovechild of two very capable parents: The X Files and Hocus Pocus. Perhaps I’d be quick to forgive, then, because I really want to love it. But the pilot is burdened by the weight of a new mythology that it data-dumps on us while confronting its ancient protagonist with his “enlightened” racism (“Nay, I do not support slavery!”), baffling technology, a gun-wielding redcoat, and a George-Washington Jesus.

But ultimately, I AM pessimistic. The pilot isn’t even fully invested in itself–the humor is as tentative as the horror. I’ll be unlikely to follow Sleepy Hollow as it stomps around searching for purpose–sometimes for humor, sometimes for pity–not all together unlike its infamous headless horseman himself.

C. Lee Harrington [Miami University]

Me likey! With “Sympathy for the Devil” and two beheadings in the first ten minutes, count me in. I don’t remember enough about the original story to be bothered by inconsistencies so this was pure fun: respectable acting, nice atmospheric touches, acceptable evocation of the supernatural (excepting the horse’s eyes, whaaat?), packed full of backstory, a bit of humor, and pretty much what a premiere should be.

I didn’t much go for the romantic subtext between Abby and Ichabod given everything the characters had gone through but I understand the point from a production perspective. And I didn’t much go for Ichabod’s ease with finding himself in the 21^st century: he never asks what year it is, is more bemused over a car’s power windows than freaked out that something like cars even exist, and finds the trappings of mass commercial culture only mildly interesting.

The premiere sets up interesting questions for the series as a whole: What does Andy know and how does he know it? For that matter, what did George Washington know and how did he know it? Who all is part of the coven? What’s with that bird?  I’ll definitely watch next week.

Jenna Stoeber (University of Wisconsin – Madison)

The series premiere of Sleepy Hollow starts out with a rough recounting of Washington Irving’s famous story; it has to start this way, otherwise the audience would spend the rest of the episode struggling to connect the premise of the show with the legend. The plot seems to be taking a something-for-everyone approach, offering up magic, historical fantasy, biblical prophecy, hints of an Illuminati conspiracy theory, and a guest appearance by George Washington. However, this is a minor complaint. Aside from the scattershot of plot threads and the heaps of exposition, very little about the episode feels like a premiere – in a good way. The story doesn’t dwell on the mundane aspects of the urban fantasy genre, namely the laborious magic-is-real coping that often drags down such shows. The writing is clever and entertaining, and the plot moves along at a brisk pace. Nicole Beharie, playing lieutenant Abbie Mills, performs her role like she’s been doing it for years, and the interactions between her and Tom Mison, playing Ichabod Crane, are captivating. The episode wasn’t without cheesiness – the image of the headless horseman with a bandolier and a shotgun is certainly a wake-up call – but the absurdity is grounded in Beharie’s exceptional performance. I look forward to seeing which plot threads they pick up in next week’s episode.

MasterChef Junior [Premiered 09/27/2013]

In this spinoff, Chef Gordon Ramsay invites us to remember American Juniors with a pint-size take on his successful MasterChef series, toning down the vindictive to walk talented young chefs through the competition.

R. Colin Tait [Texas Christian University]

With Friday’s release of his sixth show for the FOX network, super-chef Gordon Ramsay scores a homerun with the junior version of MasterChef. By tweaking the formula so that restaurateur Joe Bastianich and celebrity chef Gordon Eliot can praise, rather than cut down, the contestants, the creative team has created a rarity on TV – a reality show that concentrates on celebrating and supporting its competitors, rather than berating them for their lack of talent. Of course, it helps that these contestants are adorable and precocious children.

By focusing on children rather than adults, the show stacks the equation for audiences too, making it nearly impossible not to root for them, especially when they collapse into tears of joy or sadness, as they often do. These would-be chefs also bring out the soft side in the normally abrasive hosts, who are not only on their best behavior here, but whose personas actually seem charming in comparison to the adult version of the show. This is especially true of Ramsay and co-host Bastianich, whose sunny dispositions are a welcome change.

My only complaint is that these would-be-amateurs seem to come exclusively from society’s upper crust and come complete with refined palettes of the cultural elite. But, otherwise, this show is guaranteed to please parents and their children alike.

Karen Petruska [University of California – Santa Barbara]

The main reasons to watch MasterChef—both the grown-up version and the new tiny human spinoff featuring kids 8-13 years old—are the charming and charismatic chef judges (fathers all), from Gordon Ramsay of Hell’s Kitchen fame, Graham Elliot as the “nice” judge, and my personal favorite culinary crush, Joe Bastianich, know for his steely stare and for smelling food before tasting it. While this version of the program sticks closely to the tested formula established by the adult version, the series nevertheless continues to find success in mining for food-oriented tension. It also features some pretty cute kids who reveal a remarkable level of self-possession and self-confidence.

They prepare dishes from French macaroons to homemade pasta, and the judges agree that every single dish is very good, even though a few kids receive gentle critiques about dry shortcake or overcooked pasta. Ramsay is best known for his cursing, but what he really does well (especially on Hell’s Kitchen) is teach. So far it seems we won’t get contestant cattiness, always an element of the adult version, but I will be interested to see if the kids form friendships and if the program lets us see them suffer inevitable disappointment (their parents, off on the sidelines, never speak but are there to offer a hug for those who do not advance). If the program maintains its current tone of constant, consistent inspiration for the love of food, it is something I’d encourage my own nieces to watch. Maybe they’ll be inspired, too.

However, while it would be ill advised to overemphasize the importance of the Emmy Awards, this year’s nominations have been identified as a bellwether moment for Netflix’s original content and “Internet television” in general. The New York Times headlined its Emmys report with the innocuous “Netflix Does Well in 2013 Primetime Emmy Nominations.” Variety went with “Emmys Recognize Digital Age as Netflix Crashes The Party.” They’re both headlines that read as though they were written in advance, a clear narrative for journalists to latch onto to sell this year’s Emmy nominations as “important,” knowing Netflix was likely to compete with House of Cards and Arrested Development—House of Cards proved the big winner, earning nominations for Outstanding Drama Series, Lead Actor in a Drama Series, and Lead Actress in a Drama Series. Before the nominations were even announced, Academy chair Bruce Rosenblum acknowledged this narrative, citing the usual boilerplate about television changing into a multi-platform experience in his introduction to the live nominations announcement.

While acknowledging that Netflix’s rise is noteworthy, I reject its ties to the narrative of online television for two reasons. First and foremost, it is meaningful that the series Netflix submitted for consideration—which also included Hemlock Grove, and which earned a total of 14 nominations—are in no significant way a departure from traditional forms of television content. House of Cards is a premium cable drama series being distributed by Netflix; Arrested Development is a broadcast comedy turned premium cable comedy being distributed by Netflix. While there is clear innovation in terms of how these shows are reaching audiences, and I’ll acknowledge that Arrested Development’s puzzle-like structure is uniquely suited to that distribution model, we’re still considering series that would be strikingly familiar to Emmy voters.

These are not nominations for webseries like The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, competing in categories specifically designed for web-based content. Julia Stiles was not nominated as Lead Actress in a Drama Series for Blue, a webseries distributed through the FOX-owned WIGS YouTube channel. There was actually a “webseries” nominated in a non-special class category: Machinima’s Halo 4: Forward Unto Dawn earned a nomination for Outstanding Main Title Sequence, a nomination that oddly enough isn’t mentioned by Variety or The New York Times. Although I understand why Netflix is garnering the attention, to suggest that the Emmys are recognizing the digital age based on a showy drama series starring Kevin Spacey and produced by David Fincher, or a comedy series that was nominated for three-consecutive years in its previous life on broadcast, is to suggest that the Emmys simply acknowledging you can access the medium of television online outside of special class categories is itself remarkable. This seems like a low bar, and one that obscures the range of diverse and innovative forms being developed in an online space, and being mostly ignored by the Academy.

The other caveat necessary when considering the impact of Netflix’s nominations is that its distinct mode of distribution would have been erased for many Emmy voters. Netflix sent out screener DVDs of both House of Cards and Arrested Development to Emmy voters, meaning they never had to confront their status as “internet television” as they sampled series submitted for consideration. Additionally, online screening options have been available from networks like FOX or NBC for a number of years, which means that more technologically savvy Emmy voters are already used to streaming television (thereby erasing the only significant sense of difference tied to the Netflix series). While we can read the narrative of the Emmys embracing online television based on the basic fact of their nominations, the actual process through which Netflix earned those nominations did not necessarily carry the same narrative.

Comparisons have been drawn between Netflix’s breakthrough and that of premium and basic cable channels, which are still establishing “firsts”: Louie, for instance, is the first basic cable comedy to earn a nomination for Outstanding Comedy Series. However, as the difference between forms of distribution continues to collapse—especially for Emmy voters who receive DVDs or online streams stripped of commercials—we are no longer in an era where distribution is in and of itself a stigma facing television programs that otherwise tick off the Emmy boxes. Rather, the Emmys are a battle between brands as individual networks and channels seek to associate themselves with the prestige necessary to earn an Emmy nomination. Netflix didn’t earn Emmy nominations by stressing its sense of difference, but rather by erasing that difference, developing series that matched contemporary, popular conceptions of what qualifies as television prestige.

It is hard for me to accept this as a bellwether moment for online television when Netflix’s success is based on their ability to disassociate themselves with the notion of online television. Their success was not in breaking down barriers for new forms of distribution, but in finding a way to successfully convince Emmy voters those barriers did not apply to them. For evidence of this, one need look no further than the official “Facts and Figures” document released by the TV Academy: despite all this discussion about online television, Netflix is categorized alongside AMC and HBO as a cable channel despite the existence of a broadband category, which is exactly what Netflix intended and the narrative we should be taking away from these nominations.

The problems and possibilities of defining cinema geographically have long bedeviled scholars of national cinemas, and have become all the more complicated as the contemporary cinematic universe has become increasingly diasporic in nature. As it turns out, many of the questions germane to conceptualizing modern-day film’s regional character (or lack thereof) can be found in microcosmic form in this year’s festival line-up. For every film that comfortably fits into a traditional idea of a cinema defined by local landmarks and culture, there is another that escapes easy classification, pushing us to consider what it is we mean when we claim a film as “Wisconsin’s Own.”

Take perhaps the most basic of regional-cinema boundaries: geography. Certainly, several of this year’s offerings use local spaces and institutions to vivid effect. In Flog Therapy and University of Wisconsin-Madison: Zoological Research Collections, filmmakers (and UW-Madison students) Ayla Larson and Billy Johnson sketch the interiors of the Inferno Nightclub and the university’s zoological research labs, respectively, in playful and unexpected fashion. Towns like Lodi, Sauk Prairie, and Baraboo form the bucolic backdrop against which director Jonathon Quam tells a quietly devastating story of childhood abuse and fraternal bonds in Blood Brothers.

But what to do with a film like Delphine Lanson’s Father’s Birth, a heartfelt love letter to the complexity of modern families that splits its time evenly between Waukesha and Paris? Or The Librarian and the Banjo, in which director Jim Carrier hopscotches from Madison to New Jersey to Tennessee as he tells the story of Dena Epstein, a music librarian who wrote the definitive book placing the origins of the titular instrument in African and African American culture? Their ties to Wisconsin are essential, but their stories cannot be told without leaving the confines of the state.

And what of those films whose “locales” barely reside in the physical world at all? Using stop-motion techniques to animate Lego characters, Eric J. Nelson’s Siszilla pays gloriously low-fi homage to both the Toho classic and the glories of childhood play. On the other end of the tonal spectrum, Meghan Allynn Johnson’s The Howdy House presents a meeting at a restaurant (in St. Louis, natch) through stop-motion as well, though the results swerve between the beguilingly surreal and inexplicably unsettling.

What of works that explicitly enmesh themselves with the issues, mores, and culture of the state? Marc Kornblatt’s Street Pulse (pictured) refracts the experience of Madison’s homeless population through the stories of several individuals, most memorably a married couple whose large difference in age and experience do not deter them from forging a life together, on and off the street. The capitol’s annual summer solstice festival gets captured via a playful pastiche style in Meghan Monday and Brijetta Hall Waller’s Solstice. Such films take a powerful look at the state of Wisconsin today, offering insights and observations that only a ground-level view can provide. Yet might a “Wisconsin” film capture more intangible feelings, moods, thoughts—ones experienced in a given place and time but not bound to it exclusively? An audience in a university town like Madison will laugh knowingly (and perhaps sigh wistfully) at the gentle skewering of fratty men aging semi-gracefully in Mark Kerins’ Drunken Phone Calls, but so will anyone who knows the gentle ache of growing up and apart from one’s college pals. The haze of familial memory and emotion explored so sensitively by Kellie Bronikowski in Somewhere in Between has a reach that knows no geographic boundaries.

And let’s not even get started on the matter of defining a “Wisconsin film” by directorial biography. Nathan Punwar—the director of the dizzying, dazzling Loves of a Cyclops—spent almost his entire youth in Madison, but lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Joel Allen Schroeder grew up in Madison and attended UW-Madison for two years…before transferring to USC and residing in Los Angeles—his heartfelt documentary, Dear Mr. Watterson, explores the lasting legacy of the Calvin and Hobbes comic-strip. Are they any less “Wisconsin filmmakers” than, say, Steve Miosku, a UW-Milwuakee student whose Gears—a masterfully ambiguous tale of a father, daughter, and the mysterious forces threatening to separate them—was made entirely in the state with an all-Wisconsin crew? (Never mind that he grew up in New York City.)

The examples could go on and on, but the message is clear: in an age of ever-increasing mobility and cross-continental communication, filmmakers and films are rarely products of a single environment. Far from suggesting a dilution of regional identity in the face of hyper-connected postmodern culture, though, such imbrication of influence showcased in this year’s “Wisconsin’s Own” selections speaks to the exciting way in which films tied to a particular place nevertheless negotiate multiple influences in surprising and original ways. They suggest that Wisconsin identity itself is not a static bundle of characteristics, but a dynamic way-station where ideas and identities from various times and places overlap, intersect, and fuse together. It should come as no surprise, then, that such a locale would produce such a vivid, unpredictable, and invigorating selection of films.

Madisonians and others will be able to see these films for themselves starting tomorrow and continuing on through April 18^th. Whether lifelong Wisconsinites, globe-hopping transplants, or somewhere in between, we can with pleasure claim these films as “our own”—an identification as multifaceted in theory as it is invigorating in practice.