teachers

'this life' was brilliant - people with hangups and shitty social lives shagging, fighting, taking drugs, swearing - ok so no katie holmes but bloody hell it was great - the love triangles, the BEST willtheywontthey storyline ever, the best series ending since blakes 7', primetime hetro/bi/gaysex - much better than the sopranos or oz could ever be. - god, how i loved it, even though my brief said it was technically flawed as far as the law stuff.

teachers and that new comedy with the brigstock guy with a big head are rubbish though.dawsons creek - eva diminishing returns for me sadly.

I really really really like Teachers (and As If) (and obviously Queer as Folk) (and Dawson's Creek, actually) (tho Dawson himself = DUD DUD DUD, DUDE) — I think they're deft and smart and just very very funny. I somewhat pointedly didn't watch This Life first time round, then cracked because everyone in the office was talking abt it, inc. one in the office that I was hopelessly sweet on. Second time round, the rerun, I watched it all in one go, avidly, a bit obsessively (difft. office, and hopelessly-sweet-on long out of my life): I think the seams showed somewhat — someone pointed out (here? no, it was Ben Thompson) that Yuppie Lawyers of this Ilk would (statistically) be listening to the Eurythmics. But it was still well and wittily written, even abt people who I'd probably quite dislike in life.

I like the way they use music, because it shows they actually listen kinda the way we ("we") do: I think some of what they're using it for is a TV programme-maker's answer to the questions Tom and Sterling and Ned and many others have been discussing over at Pop Epiph/whjat does it mean, how does it mean it (to this character, to this scriptwriter/producer/director), but as Show and Tell, not words-on-a-page. Don't think 'exploitation' — a crappy crit concept which puts you (well, someone) much too much on the defensive to be clear — think (yay!) Answer Record. In this case, a clutch of available BritPop (or whatever) is being "answered" by a swift, sly, throwaway bit of moral drama, y'know, about growing up and not growing up, and what an adult is, and who isn't adult yet. (I likje the unimportant throwawayness, also: QaF didn't quite exhibit this enuff, by having to be "groundbreaking" snore blah)

Important caveat: I don't KNOW half the records used. Maybe if I knew more, I'd perhaps notice dullardry in the use, and resent it. But I'm not CERTAIN that I would. I think — as I said elsewhere — that I'd far rather hear music in this context (context = a reasoned argument, a review, but slipped sideways into dramatic/serial form) than in Grown-Up failed formats like Jools or Jo Whiley or [shudder] the South Bank.

I don't really like Ally McBeal, incidentally, which kinda debuted some of the techniques at issue: pop as Greek chorus/inner soundtrack/etc/etc/etc/don't get me started you'll regret it. But of course it was mostly very obvious choices of pop, there: in fact, unlike This Life, it picked pop tha characters probably would like and know. And the bar-band girlie was godawful.

(Callista Flockhart is good btw in the very very overlooked pre-AMcB Joe Eszterhasz movie 'Telling Lies in America'... )

This is me from a very old bit of the site, talking about Lucy Sullivan Is Getting Married. Wonder how true gripes below (though I'd probably modify them now) are re. Teachers etc. which I wouldn't watch for personal reasons anyway.

"Semi-hyped new com-dram from ITV (British terrestrial commercial TV channel, for non-UK readers) finds leggy Lucy agonising over flatsharing, useless boyfriends, getting drunk at parties etc. Notable - or rather typical - for two things. Firstly the very New Britain way in which the comic foils are the weirdoes (strange hippie chick passed over as flatsharee in favour of bland Lucy), the old (Lucy's caricature Anglo-Irish mum) and the sad (Lucy's loser boyfriend): the show gives us the surefire 90s formula of aggressive normalcy marketed as attitude. Which leads on to thing #2: the reason people want to watch this kind of programme or read this kind of book. At some point the public taste in fiction shifted from escapism, wanting to read about or watch the extraordinary, to wanting to consume only refections of ourselves. If I wanted to focus all my incoherent griping about the decade's pop culture, it would be against the way that said culture has turned from a playground of wonders into a soothing Snow White mirror, concerned only with confirming and validating our collective lifestyle choices, and devil take the rest."

"aggressive normalcy marketed as attitude": not true of any of above, I don't think (no: true of McBeal). In As If, critique of AgressNorm is the Central Plot Fuel... Teachers is a sly critique [UOWP] of laddism. TL was sometimes somewhat schematic-tokenist (but good on inter-generational).

Mind you, I believe Buffy has declared Revolutionary War on Amerikkka.

" surefire 90s formula of aggressive normalcy marketed as attitude"

I think, coming back to what I was saying in the Simon Reynolds thread, that this is very close to the problem I have in taking large sections of modern R&B/chart pop to my heart. So it seems odd that what you hate in TV you like in music. But I may be way off mark.

Beyoncé? "Normalcy"? Don't THINK so...

My liking pop is part of the reason I'd now tone that down, actually (written 18 months ago).

But in pop the mockery of the odd/old/sad/different etc. is generally not overt (I don't even think it's there). When it is - i.e. "No Scrubs" - I like it less.

Also in pop the situations are generally ultradramatic moments and crises - at which point even the most aggressively normal people tend to react in extreme ways. We simply can't tell anything about 'Britney's personality' from "...Baby One More Time" or "Oops I Did It Again", for instance. The situations in TV comedy-dramas though - or at least in that one - often arise out of people stepping over social norms.

I think the difference is that while pop fits into a fairly rigid social framework, it's bitty enough that you can lift it out and use it for yourself. Whereas chick-lit and lad-lit and comedy-dramas depend on that social framework for their very existence.

I watched "teachers" for the first time just the other day (whenever the most recent episode was on) I just thought it was boring, I'm afraid. Not bad enough to be irritating. "This Life" on the other hand. That I REALLY hated. Vile characters (not vile in an interesting way either). Can I say unconvincing dialogue? Crap script. Some of the acting wasn't too hot either, despite reviews stating otherwise. Did money change hands or something? I mean, the sub-cinema-verite shaky camerawork was actually praised as "innovative" in the guardian, would you believe! Maaan, it wasn't even innovative in nypd blue, or whatever us cop prog they filched it off. Does this shaky camerawork irritate anyone else? Last night I saw it being used in a cookery prog. Is that cutting edge or what?! Get a steadicam U laym0rz!!

Oh, "The Cops" sux as well.

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I usually watch Teachers with headphones on...so last night I watched it while listening to Cub, then a bit of Teenage Fanclub and then the Manics. The programme is crappy for sure!! Dawson's is great!

Oh and if Dawson *ever* does have sex, I think there should be a whole spin-off mini-series about his post-intercourse analysis/ confusion.

Oh, "The Cops" sux as well.

My mouth is opening and closing but no noise is coming out..

Also in pop the situations are generally ultradramatic moments and crises - at which point even the most aggressively normal people tend to react in extreme ways. We simply can't tell anything about 'Britney's personality' from "...Baby One More Time" or "Oops I Did It Again", for instance. That's not the point. You can't tell anything about the personality of the actress who plays Lucy Sullivan, either. I'm talking about the character of the song/show and their protagonists. In ABBA or the Ronettes, they were loveable, vulnerable, romantic; not so bloody streetwise. That's what I mean by not normal. I don't get that from modern chart pop, even the stuff I like (eg. Britney). Its not so much the songs themselves. It's the vibe you get off the singer and the production that surrounds them. When something like Lauryn Hill's 'Ex Factor' or Wu Tang Clan's 'I Can't Go To Sleep' comes along and floors me I know what I'm missing. They are both sad tracks, but it needn't be so.

The fanatically pro-pop factions on ILM might put this down to an intrinsic inability of mine to relate to what's modern, and assert that if I was my age in the 60s I'd be moaning about the the ruthless efficiency of Spector or the Motown hits factory. Maybe they'd be right, I've no way of knowing, but I tell you it feels for all the world like there really is a difference that comes as close to objectively true as these things can be. I should be posting this to the 'epiphany of pop' thread, but I didn't like its name.

But who in the hell would want to have sex with Dawson? That is the 10,000,000 dollar question. You should tell your James Van Der Beek story, fred.

Buffy (or even Angel!) wipes the floor with Dawson any day of the week.

nicole's right. dawson's is good, but buffy wipes the floor with any programme.

The music in Buffy is always rubbish: but this is part of its glad-I'm-alive-to-witness-it genius. Alt.garbage demons are presumably in charge of booking for the Bronze — not so urgently evil that they require dusting here-and-now, but, y'know, come the day...

for some reason i like the music in buffy, even though i've no idea what it sounds like (can never remember), and would probably be unlikely to buy it.

that said, i realised the other day that i really like the theme music for dawson's creek (and have since found out its by, shudder, ...paula cole)

but this is all getting away from the rubbishness of teachers and this life.

The themetune for Buffy is one of the greatest bits of music ever recorded (checks sanity; yes, still functioning). It's the incidental bands who play the Bronze I'm whining about (tho the Bronze doesn't feature anything like as much these days).

It's a v. lame thing to say, but if you only started Teachers this week, then it's bound not to work as well as if you were one of the bold and beautiful in from the start (= me).

Think of it like the Smashing Pumpkins live series: you have to buy and hear EVERY SINGLE ONE before you understand the brilliance of ANY SINGLE NOTE. (Checks sanity again; shakes it, hard, perhaps a little worried now... )

Yeah, Buffy's music is generally pretty poor (as if I'd watch it for that), although the use of The Sundays' cover of "Wild Horses" in the Prom episode was brilliant.

This Life was the show I obsessed over prior to Buffy, funnily enough. Anna (and indeed any character played by Daniela Nardini) was and is the woman I would consider converting for. The aggressive normalcy Tom notes of shows like it was never a problem for me, partly because I don't live in Britain and partly because its normalness was so fucked up and unbelievable, like a piece of magic realism or something.

I would be worried, if I were you.

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