In Which We Look Nothing Like Her

Coming from America

by ETHAN PETERSON

The Collection
creator Oliver Goldstick

Berlin Station
creator Olen Steinhauer

It is time for America to begin explaining Europe to itself. The island nation of England has been properly sedated and isolated. David Cameron has resigned and the next leader of Britain will begin preaching austerity in time. This means America has the European Union all to itself, and now it can begin making the proper, condescending form of media that conveys what it is like for disparate peoples and places to be grouped together purely for economic reasons.

In this vein is the wretched new Amazon series, The Collection. Richard Coyle (Coupling) plays Paul Sabine, a fashion executive who steals all his ideas from his profligate gay brother Claude (Tom Riley). France commissions Sabine's company to develop a new style (?) after the Second World War. Paul is married to an American woman named Helen (Mamie Gummer), who admires him because of, not in spite of, his flaws.

It is not overly clear whether the Sabines are French or English or some disturbed amalgamation of the two. Much of the excitement comes from Paul Sabine's willingness to do various disgusting things to get ahead in the world of fashion. Showrunner Oliver Goldstick (Ugly Betty) seems to think this turns him into a Don Draper-esque bad boy, but it actually identifies him as a terrible human being.

Although it seems definite that Amazon spent a great deal of money on The Collection, the fashion industry in the 1940s wasn't exactly blowing anyone away. Tons of costume dramas come from more exciting aesthetic eras. British audiences get a steady diet of this genre on a weekly basis; you would honestly be forgiven for thinking there wasn't a present moment in England at all. Even though The Collection is ostensibly set in Paris, certainly no one speaks French and most people have British accents.

For some reason Goldstick focuses a great deal of the story on an American photographer named of all things Billy (Max Deacon). He is naturally a misogynist, but he is that rare breed you see – he pities women, and considers himself a cro magnon with a heart of gold. He tells a French girl that she needs to smile more and goes around taking terrible photographs of the Seine for like ten minutes. Understand that not a single moment of this dreadful production is meant to be tongue-in-cheek.

Even more painful is the forthcoming debut of Epix' new series about a CIA operative played by Richard Armitrage (Thorin Oakenshield in The Hobbit trilogy) operating in Germany, Berlin Station. Oh boy is this a dreadful mess. Armitrage plays Daniel Miller, whose shaky accent is accounted for by the explanation that he grew up as an Army brat in Berlin.

The worst plot device ever opens Berlin Station, a flash forward where Daniel is shot. A short time earlier, Daniel spends most of the show following around an attractive woman who he seems destined to eventually meet, clutching a USB drive as in the worst John Le Carré novels. She is the contact for a Julian Assange-type character named Thomas Shaw.

Since this story could not possibly hold less of our interest, the focus in Berlin Station is more on the other officers working abroad. Their lives are given Grey's Anatomy style complications – one (Rhys Ifans) is fucking his informant, another (Richard Jenkins) his secretary. Only the token woman (Michelle Forbes) is given very little of interest to do, which probably means she is a mole of some kind.

Berlin and Paris, in these imaginings, look nothing like foreign places. They have been completely Americanized to our expectations of them. (The Collection could be a live-action version of Ratatouille.) The real thrill of drama in a foreign setting should not be to show how the entire world is not that much different than our own country.

This is a more difficult task than it seems at first glance, since it requires an intimate knowledge of France and Germany that most lack. Even the brilliant and authentic Deutschland 83 by Anna and Joerg Winger, which was focused on East Germany's conflict with the West, had the most perplexing American soundtrack. It was meant to convey the entrance of certain global ideas to the country, but there are only so many David Bowie songs one can tolerate being deployed over montage sequences of characters sobbing in empty rooms.

In order for this sort of thing to be accepted by American audiences, it has to be divested of all intrinsic difference, making the end result — in the case of The Collection and Berlin Station — this inescapably bland combination of both and neither. In its own disturbed way, this is the deranged lesson America has for Europe. Melting your differences away ultimately makes things so much less entertaining.

Ethan Peterson is the senior contributor to This Recording.

In Which We Name Our Detective After The Painter

David Simon's Afterbirth

by ALEX CARNEVALE

Bosch
creators Eric Overmyer & Michael Connelly

Were you potentially interested in a show that is a lot like The Wire, but you know, not? Amazon Studios' ten episode series Bosch, based on the character from Michael Connelly's mediocre novels, gruffly enters the scene. A white man made us and shall save us.

The highest art made from the lowest original source material is a ticklish subject. I guess the right answer would be Wes Anderson's The Fantastic Mr. Fox? This rarely comes up; truly bad books are rarely made into magnificent anything. Bosch is nowhere near magnificent, but simply through Eric Overmyer's involvement, it becomes a major improvement on the novels about the too often fictionalized Los Angeles area.

Hieronymous Bosch (Lost's Titus Welliver) is one hell of a homicide detective. I mean, he allows a serial killer to nearly escape from his clutches, spends two months trying to solve a decades old cold case for no reason, causes a suicide and two other deaths, shoots an unarmed man who he says is a killer, and consumates a relationship with a junior officer in his department (Annie Wershing). Besides that, the man is a damn genius.

Bosch is also a terrible father. His ex-wife is a retired FBI profiler who lives in Las Vegas and competes against whales in high stakes poker. Her new husband is every bit the father Bosch does not want to be, because our detective has "cases." He actually only has one case for most of Bosch, and it takes him forever to solve it. Vegas is only a few hours away, but he never goes there.

Bosch's superior is Deputy Chief Irvin Irving (Lance Reddick), who is basically reprising his exact role from Overmyer's The Wire for no reason I can discern. Reddick's low voice is his signature. Emoting and bringing vibracy to an underwritten scene is not really his signature. There is one moment where Reddick talks to a prosecutor while both sit in cars that happens on all of Overmyer's shows, because it is the kind of thing that occurs in real life, and Overmyer loves stuff like that. But here the tête-à-auto accomplishes the opposite effect — it makes everything seem fake.

The thing that was actually good about The Wire was not the writing or the performances — both varied greatly in quality. What made the show different was that every scene had consequences, unfolding the butterfly effect through bleak streets and inside quiet homes.

Bosch's house, which he supposedly bought from the proceeds of a movie adapted from one of his cases, is completely open to the world. Massive windows look out on the metropolis below. (Bosch's daughter has never even been there.) His girlfriend is not invited to this inner sanctum at any time, but she shows up unexpectedly and Bosch begrudgingly invites her in. What would she want to do with this monster?

In order to make someone so devastatingly banal sympathetic, Connelly has created a detailed backstory that involves Bosch's mother being a prostitute who was murdered, and him being raised in an abusive Catholic orphanage. It turns out the serial murderer (Jason Gedrick) came through that same orphanage, where a dark room with a soiled mattress isolated the most disrespectful boys.

Because we see no actual evidence of how this impacts who Bosch is, the context feels fake. Everything around Bosch is actually more fascinating and vibrant than he is: a lesbian police captain (Amy Aquino) with a child, a repressed homosexual serial killer, Bosch's divorced African-American partner (The Wire's brilliant Jamie Hector), his rookie love interest who has her growing pains, his sympathetic but hard-nosed ex-wife (24's Sarah Clarke). All these characters get plenty of screen time, as Overmyer smartly emphasizes the ensemble.

But the focus is too often on Bosch himself. Welliver tries his best to imbue the thankless role with a brusque charm, but he fails partly because he is never given anything to do. He has one costume change in the entire run of the show. (He takes his shirt off once to have sex.) He never moves quickly or decides something at once — from all appearances the only thing he is any good at is drinking and smoking.

Nobody watched Treme, even though it was the best musical by far that has ever been created. It was also hard to follow without detailed notes. Overmyer takes Bosch in a much simpler direction: instead of a thousand storylines, we get one procedural stretched over an entire season of episodes. The plotline of Bosch would have been wrapped up in mere minutes by any other detective. I understand the idea of following a single character over the expense of a large group makes television easier to follow and understand, but airing as it is on Amazon Prime, Bosch did not need to appeal to that audience.

As long as Bosch waited to become a show, and as much as it cost Connelly personally to buy the rights back from Paramount, did we really need another white cop who doesn't follow the rules, unless he is portrayed by Jake Gyllenhaal?

Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording.

"Lovit" - Marian Hill (mp3)

"Wasted" - Marian Hill (mp3)

The new album from Marian Hill is entitled Sway and it was released on February 17th.