Miles's blog

I escaped to the library the other day in an effort to avoid having my air conditioner running constantly.  I was poking around the basement which has books about sports, arts, and movies (you didn’t think I would be in the history, science or philosophy section did you?).  The basement is also where they have the DVDs.  I wasn’t really looking for movies to watch as, all my loyal readers (both of you) know, I have promised myself to read more.  But I stumbled across DVDs of tv shows.  Curious, I went over to examine.

They have dozens of shows, from the sophisticated to the ridiculous.  They have Masterpiece Theater and I Love Lucy.  You can watch comedies like 30 Rock, or dramas like Dallas, or science programs from National Geographic.  For a tv junkie like me, this is a treasure trove of endless hours of not reading, not writing, not even breathing fresh air.

Not wanting to waste this opportunity, I quickly combed the shelves for attractive candidates.  After a good deal of perusing, reading the back of the cases, and general indecision, I finally settled on two very contrasting series.

The first was the HBO show Eastbound and Down about a former major league baseball player who falls on hard times.  The other was a British import, Danger UXB, a 1980s vintage production about life in wartime Britain.  I could not have picked two more different productions.

Eastbound and Down is a comedy. It was produced in part by Will Farrell, who appears in the show.  I think they are still making episodes, having completed season 3 this year.  I rented season 1.  I heard about this show a while ago and have always been intrigued with its premise.  What happens to major leaguers when their arms give out?  In this show they hit rock bottom.  The protagonist, played by Danny McBride, is a former star pitcher named Kenny Powers. Inspired by the racist, sexist, gay-bashing fireballer John Rocker, Powers is portrayed as perhaps the most unlikable character in the history of television.  He is crude, stupid, insensitive, condescending, arrogant, mean, selfish in the extreme, and possessed of a vocabulary that uses the “f” word as a prefix for basically every thought he wants to express.  Is it word a noun, verb, adjective, adverb, exclamation, or expression?  Yes.  I realize people sometimes talk this way (distressingly more often than ever and more publicly) but geez, do they have to use such profanity as the basis of every line in every script?  I know I sound like some sort of provincial prude, but when every single character, except for the stereotypical goody-goody principal of the school Powers teaches at, throws “f” bombs like candy canes at a Christmas parade, the effect is somewhat jarring.

I could excuse this lame misuse of the mother tongue if show was funny.  However, my tastes do not run to what I like to call “drunken frat boy humor.”  Alcoholic, drug-using boors are not my idea of heroes, anti or otherwise.  That is not to say that I never laughed while watching it, some things actually were kind of humorous, but all in all, I found Eastbound and Down a show best watched during fraternity initiations and in the background at a poker party.  (The amount of female pulchritude makes it attractive entertainment for situations where guys can be guys without the uncomfortable presence of women who might take offense at the way women are portrayed.)  I think I will pass on the rest of the episodes.  I guess I will miss seeing Powers’s old girlfriend, for reasons acceptable only to drunken, obnoxious frat boys, succumb to his well-hidden charms and engage in a liaison in the front seat of his pickup, because, of course educated, intelligent women will always want an uncomfortable romp with a Neanderthal at the risk of losing their smart, educated, caring fiancées.

To top it all off, on the rare times they have McBride actually try to throw a baseball he looks as much like a major league pitcher as John Goodman did as Babe Ruth, or basically not much.  If you are a fan of Eastbound and Down please do not post a comment telling me so because I want to still like you, and that might just make it impossible.

On a more intellectual note, I watched several episodes of Danger UXB.  It revolves around a young officer who is assigned to a unit of the British Army in World War II which was responsible for finding loose, unexploded ordinance dropped by the Germans on England and making sure it didn’t go off and kill people.  (The “UXB” in the title stands for “UneXploded Bomb.”)

I had seen this show years before on PBS, and once on VHS, but it is a rare pleasure to see it on DVD.  It is typically British.  The drama is paramount, but underplayed.  The characters are stressed, I mean after all their job is to find unexploded bombs in Blitz-era London and defuse them, but maintain a stiff upper lip.  Even when they suffer losses of friends and family, their grief is shown more by fadeout than exposition.  There are illicit affairs, but the star, Judy Geeson from To Sir with Love, is never shown taking off her layers of wool clothes in order to seduce her soldier paramour.  Mostly they talk in clipped sentences about how much they love each other and how unfortunate it is that she is married and that his life expectancy is not much greater than a fruit fly.  Even when these bomb defusers make a mistake leading to detonation, good reason for swearing, there are no “f” words.  Heck, they rarely even utter a “God damn.”  I doubt Kenny Powers would like it.

I do sometime wish there were subtitles, as the enlisted men’s cockney accents are challenging to discern with clarity, but all in all, the drama played out on the streets of war-torn London seems more intriguing to me than the comedy of drunken men chasing half-clad women in the South of today.  Maybe I am just old-fashioned.