Advertisement
MAD MEN IN CRISIS
In their second season, AMC's cigarette-smoking, scotch-drinking admen confront personal demons during rapidly changing times
"I wanted to show what it was like to have the world change around you," says Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner. "You watch life pass, and you're the same person inside." For the second season of Weiner's acclaimed AMC show (July 27th, 10 p.m.), set at a New York advertising agency, the action leaps forward from 1960 to 1962, when Madison Avenue — and the rest of the country — would become riveted to the nuclear brinkmanship of the Cuban missile crisis. But the personal dilemmas that gripped Don Draper and his colleagues at the end of last season — secret identities and surprise pregnancies — lurk in the background. "If you were having problems in your marriage and 9/11 happened," Weiner says, by way of analogy, "you still had a problem with your marriage."
Indeed, Mad Men's first season ended with square-jawed Draper, played by Jon Hamm, confronting an unhappy secret: Before stealing the identity of another soldier in Korea and making a new life, he was Dick Whitman, the orphaned child of a prostitute. Now, Weiner says, "Don Draper is doing great and Dick Whitman is not doing great. In psychological terms, it's about the concept of the false self."
Weiner says he would love his series to span an entire decade: "Right now, I don't even know if Don is somebody who's going to end up with sideburns or look exactly like he looked in 1960."
Waiting to film a scene early on a Tuesday morning, Hamm flips through a vintage advertising annual and confesses he never thought he'd get the part — for which he won a Golden Globe earlier this year. "I started at the bottom of everybody's list," Hamm says. "I loved the writing, but I thought they'd give it to a movie star." Then Hamm stops short at an ad, reprinted in the annual, that reminds him the Sixties were a very different time.
"Spray-on barbecue sauce?" he asks.
GAVIN EDWARDS
Photo: AMC
Advertisement
WILL WEEDS GET US HIGH AGAIN?
If the last season of Showtime's "Weeds" was a skunky buzz kill, a puff of Season Four will probably make you paranoid. In the first two episodes, Nancy Botwin (Mary-Louise Parker) hits the road having burned down her house, moves in with her dead husband's father (a gambler played by the always brilliant Albert Brooks) and helps run drugs across the Mexican border. She also develops an obsession with birds. Meanwhile, middle-aged stoners Doug and Dean (Kevin Nealon and Andy Milder) continue to fry brain cells as Nancy's ex-pal Celia Hodes is busted for Nancy's crimes. Weeds (June 16th, 10 p.m.) is aging like an old pothead: Hanging out is still fun, but you wonder if its old self is ever coming back.
KEVIN O'DONNELL
Photo: Monty Brinton/Showtime
DINA LOHAN RULES
We always knew that Lohan girl was going to be a star. Wait: Did you think we meant Lindsay? Nah, we meant Mama-Lo, Dina, the brassy Long Island hell-on-wheels now entertaining the crap out of us on her scattershot E! channel series, Living Lohan (Sundays, 10:30 p.m.). "Oh, God, whatever!" Dina tells us of her reality-TV fame. "We did this just to defuse the rumors. . . . The tabloids have been so horrific to us over the past two years, so we're trying to fix it." While LL may not succeed in that effort — it appears only a U.N. resolution could stabilize the Lo clan — we're launching a Dina-for-an-Emmy campaign. We want to see that speech. And the afterparty.
JASON GAY
Photo: E! Networks
Advertisement
THE GONG SHOW
Comedy Central revives classic Chuck Barris game show with scruffy comic Dave Attell
Why do a new Gong Show?
I always wanted to do a variety show bringing out edgier, dirty
acts. The American Idol/Dancing With the Stars movement
— it's so tame. People come from other lands where you can
ride an elephant to behead something, and they see us dancing with
Marie Osmond. They're like, "That's what you guys call
entertainment?"
Seen anything good in the auditions so
far?
The hardest part of doing this show is YouTube. Everybody has a
video of themselves pushing a friend into a baby pool full of
cowshit. I'd like to get that in front of a live audience with some
cool judges.
Were you much of a fan of the original
series?
I was really a fan of Chuck Barris. But I have to do it my own way.
There will be a gong, but it will be a solar-powered gong.
Are you, as Chuck claimed to be, a CIA
assassin?
I like to think that that's true. Though if Chuck doesn't like the
show, that's a bad thing, because he'd kill me. But if he likes it,
we'll have no problems.
JASON GAY
Photo: Comedy Central
COREYS À DEUX
A dark detour in the '80s heartthrob drama
Blind item of the summer: who molested Corey Haim? In the second season of The Two Coreys — the A&E reality series (June 22nd, 10 p.m.) starring former teen idols Coreys Haim and Feldman — Haim says during therapy that he was sexually assaulted. Who could it be? Feldman promises a shocker: "It'll be riveting and captivating."
KEVIN O'DONNELL
Photo: Andrew Eccles
Advertisement
GENERATION KILL
In a new HBO miniseries, the team behind The Wire deliver a harrowing account of the Iraq invasion. But they needed the help of an unusual soldier
"In the history of filmmaking, there is only one movie that Marines like, and that's the first 20 minutes of Full Metal Jacket," Sgt. Eric Kocher says, slicing into a medium-rare steak in a midtown New York restaurant. "After that, it all goes to shit."
A veteran of the Iraq invasion in 2003, Kocher is a muscular 28-year-old with an intense stare and the word psycho tattooed inside his lower lip. For the past year, he has served as the senior military adviser on Generation Kill, a seven-episode miniseries about the early days of the Iraq war that premieres on HBO July 13th at 9 p.m. Based on the book of the same name (which began as an award-winning series of articles by journalist Evan Wright in Rolling Stone), Kill follows the Marines of 1st Recon, who were at the vanguard of the American invasion in 2003, blitzing ahead of the U.S. forces in Humvees. A team leader on the real mission, Kocher was there to make sure the filmmakers stayed true to the story. "If Eric hadn't been there, it would have been Generation Lame," says Wright, who served as a co-writer and consulting producer on the show. "He forced an authentic point of view."
Kocher's own story sounds like something that could make a great sequel. Several months into his second Iraq tour, his Humvee suffered a direct hit from a rocket-propelled grenade in a massive ambush outside Fallujah. One of Kocher's best friends, who was sitting directly behind him, Cpl. Eddie Wright, lost both hands. Kocher's right arm was badly broken with much of its flesh burned off. One of his eardrums shattered, and his trigger finger dangled by a single strand of skin. Kocher's commanding officer was killed while fending off the attackers.
Though his injuries could have warranted a discharge, Kocher was desperate to return to battle. Recuperating back home in San Diego, he would sometimes go out on patrol as if he was in Iraq. Later, in an effort to speed up his rehab, he took pliers and removed the pins that doctors used to reattach his finger, allowing him to bend it so he could shoot again. A mere four months after the attack, he was back fighting in Fallujah, "hooking, jabbing and fucking dudes up."
"I had a mission," Kocher says at lunch. "All I wanted was to get back to Iraq and settle the score."
Photo: Paul Schiraldi/HBO
Advertisement
GENERATION KILL continued ...
After a couple more tours, Kocher was back home when he got a call from HBO asking if he'd like to join as an adviser to Generation Kill. Soon he was off to Namibia, where he and two other 1st Recon vets, Sgt. Rudy Reyes and Cpl. Jeff Carisalez, put the actors through an intense boot camp. "Little pussy Screen Actors Guild rules wouldn't let them do 18-hour days," Kocher says. The advisers berated the actors over details. "I made a two-page list of rules. Never take off your helmets, because that never happens. Never start shooting all over the place — cause it ain't fucking ever like that."
Fortuitously for Kocher, Kill was produced and co-written by David Simon and Ed Burns, the verisimilitude-obsessed masterminds behind The Wire. Like that series did with the Baltimore drug trade, Kill dismisses clichés and offers a brutal snapshot punctuated by outrageously crude dialogue. (In one scene, as a line of M1 tanks rumbles into battle, a Marine declares, "Hey, if you lay down with your cock on the ground, it feels good.")
"You have to show the humor, because that's how humans cope," says Burns. "If you showed this to some Roman legionnaires 2,000 years ago, they would recognize the humor and the distress of people in combat."
Though Kill takes place during the first two months of the now five-year-old war, Simon believes the story remains relevant. "The events that followed are all presaged here," he says. "The rise of the insurgency, the fundamental misunderstanding of the society. Evan's book is one of the most important and introspective stories about the warrior culture of the military ever written."
No one breathes and loves that culture more than Kocher. To listen to him talk is to hear the Marine mind-set on display throughout Generation Kill — that mixture of bravado and disturbingly cold realism. "We do the most taboo thing you can: killing a motherfucker," Kocher says matter-of-factly. "Everything is to the next level. Am I haunted by the faces of the men I have killed, like Achilles says he was? Fuck no." He sketches an arc on the paper tablecloth. "The evolution of the warrior is a curve: You're 18 and you kill your first guy. You're young and don't know shit, then a few years later, you've killed more guys than Commando and you're now what every Marine wants to be: a warrior. But then you reach a crossroads and down here it gets a lot deeper."
Kocher has one standard for Kill's success. "It's easy to sell to the public, but if we could convince the Marines then we succeeded," he says. Reaction so far has been positive. "The only negatives were nit-picking things, because Marines are anal-retentive. If they are picking on the small things, that means we did our job. I don't give a shit what kind of underlying statement this makes — I just wanted to tell the truth."
SEAN WOODS
• Read the stories behind Generation Kill
Advertisement
FOUR REASONS WE LOVE
THE
G4 NETWORK
The first channel to bridgee the intersection of video games and TV may be cable's most addictive fix. If that's not enough, there's Olivia Munn in a bikini
1 For years, we've been hearing about how video games and the Internet will rise up and destroy television as we know it. Six-year-old G4 is the only network that realizes the Axis of ADD has already won — and it bows down before its pixelated overlords with pride, serving up wall-to-basement-wall coverage of gadgets, gaming and anything else that's ever derailed a once-promising sex life. It's like Spike for nerds; instead of serving up Ultimate Fighting Championship marathons and late-period Van Damme flicks, G4 wants to be your offline source for Grand Theft Auto cheat codes and rumors about the new iPhone. Or maybe G4 is the CNN of geek America. Forget the war, screw the election — G4 floods the zone on news events like the gaming-industry convention E3 and the San Diego Comic-Con.
2 Attack of the Show! — an hour-long download of entertainment news, gadget reviews and videos of foolish young men hurting themselves very badly. It's got the cheap, cheerful, throw-it-at-the-wall feel of early MTV, and co-host Olivia Munn reads bullshit off a teleprompter with the flippant allure of a young Kurt Loder. There are two kinds of people in the G4 world: fans of Munn's self-satisfied sass and iconoclasts who prefer the crazy-eyed sultriness of X-Play's Morgan Webb; it's a Betty-or-Veronica, Xbox vs. PS3 kind of debate. (G4's on-camera talent also includes some dudes, but chances are you won't care.)
3 Dubbed Japanese game shows are the finest form of televised sport ever devised by man, and sometimes G4 seems to show nothing but. On Ninja Warrior and Unbeatable Banzuke , unfailingly optimistic athletes — sometimes Olympians, sometimes guys with claims to fame like "overall winner in the 1985 Nagano police bike-safety competition" — tackle zany obstacle courses. Most of the other syndicated offerings on G4's lineup — Arrested Development, COPS — have even less to do with technology, but who cares? They're still great shows.
4 Right now you're probably thinking, "Sure, but it's not like they've come up with a show that combines competitive eating and vomit-inducing gyroscopes." Hurl! premieres July 15th. Lick it up, Bravo!
MATT MORALES
Photo: G4 Network
Advertisement
ION: COMFORT TV
You ever just want to curl up and watch Mama's Family? These guys understand
Cable used to be littered with channels showing dusty reruns of shows like Gilligan's Island and Maude. They've all since gone the way of rabbit ears — even Nick at Nite has morphed into one endless Full House marathon. ION, which rose from the ashes of PAX, is now the only player in town. When it's not showing infomercials (about 60 percent of its programming), ION serves up Quantum Leap, Mama's Family and The Steve Harvey Show. Periodically, its slate of reruns changes. Sometimes it's The Wonder Years, sometimes Perfect Strangers, which has aged remarkably well. Even the infomercials are entertaining, particularly the one for the Time Life Classic Soft Rock collection, hosted by Air Supply and full of homoerotic overtones. ION may look like a UHF station from 1990, but it's a modern-day national cable channel — and the last bastion of irony-free entertainment on TV.
ANDY GREENE
BASEBALL ON TV THAT ISN'T BORING
DirecTV launches a channel for ADD diamond freaks. Or compulsive gamblers
Man, people love to bitch about baseball on TV. It's too long, too meandering, too full of Joe Morgan rambling on about what he ate for dinner in 1978. Well, we've got a solution, whiners. It's DirecTV's Strike Zone Channel. It's baseball TV for crackheads. You don't watch one game. You watch every game. At once. DirecTV flips from stadium to stadium, bringing you clutch moments as they happen. One minute you're watching Manny Ramirez with the bases loaded, the next you're checking to see if Brandon Webb can shut out the Dodgers. "We keep it movin'," says DirecTV executive VP Eric Shanks. "For the first time, baseball and TV might wear you out."
JASON GAY
Photo: DirectTV
Advertisement
ONLINE EXCLUSIVE:
THE
SECRET DIARY OF A CALL GIRL
High-class hookers are having the best year ever! Showtime's new Monday night steam bath Secret Diary of a Call Girl is like Bridget Jones Dupre and the City, a witty British import about a legal secretary who moonlights as an upscale escort and struggles to keep her two lives (and wardrobes) separate. The sharply penned dramedy starring Billie Piper is based on the writings of an anonymous Englishwoman who published her journals in 2005. "I love sex and I love money ... plus, I'm fundamentally lazy," Piper's character explains. What's not to like?
Clip courtesy of Showtime
ONLINE EXCLUSIVE:
EXILED
If you love to loathe the bratty teens of My Super Sweet 16, sit down: In a Simple Life-esque twist, MTV is shipping those new-BMW-receiving, private-jet-flying divas out of the country! Eight Sweet 16 stars will be deployed to far-flung locations like the Arctic Circle and the Amazon and asked to live like the locals do — with cameras tracking their every move, of course. Will it be offensive? Most certainly. Will we watch it religiously? Of course.
Clip courtesy of MTV
Advertisement
From Season Three, Episode 10: Namibia
ONLINE EXCLUSIVE:
MAN
VS. WILD
A nature show hosted by a man named Bear: it doesn't get much better than this. Man Vs. Wild poses a series of poignant questions: can one dude stave off death in extreme conditions? Should anyone drink his own urine? Is this actually a reality show? Once you've seen Bear Grylls curl up inside a camel carcass for the night, you won't really care. The third season of the Discovery Channel show featured our intrepid survivor tackling Zambia, Namibia, Siberia and someplace called Ring of Fire, so one can only imagine what's on tap for Season Four. Bring it on.
From Season Three, Episode 4: Panama
Clips courtesy of Discovery Channel
ONLINE EXCLUSIVE:
IN
PLAIN SIGHT
Mary McCormick is Mary Shannon, a U.S. deputy marshal charged with keeping folks in the Witness Protection Program safe. USA's new heroine also has a weird mom, a drug-addict sister and an independent streak that certainly spells cable magic. In the Law & Order model, each week of In Plain Sight brings a new witness and new circumstances (some hilarious, some tragic), which means there's plenty of room for Shannon's character to grow into something deep and worth watching.
Advertisement
• Mad Men in Crisis
• Will Weeds Get Us High Again?
• Four Reasons We Love the G$ Network
• Baseball on TV That Isn't Boring
• Online Exclusive: The Secret Diary of a Call Girl