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 Ransack Minnesota For The Murderer

Dark Boy

by ETHAN PETERSON

I Am Not A Serial Killer
dir. Billy O'Brien
104 minutes

John Wayne Cleaver (Max Records) lives above a mortuary with his mother (Laura Fraser). His father was a gregarious nincompoop who beat his mother and bailed on the family structure. He and his mother are awakened at all times of night to service the various dead of the small Minnesota town they call home. They pump bright pink embalming fluid into the bodies in order to prepare the corpses for viewing. It is a virtual certainty that after the first twenty minutes of I Am Not A Serial Killer, opting for cremation will be the first thing on your mind.

Records has a natural affability that on the surface makes him a strange choice for a role as sociopath. Whenever he gets a violent urge — like wanting to tear someone's head from their body, or torch a cat — John has a simple rule that gets him back on the golden path: he pays the person who is angering him a compliment.

His therapist Dr. Neblin (Karl Geary) loves birdwatching, the kind of eerie pastime that suggests perhaps he is the man making all the bodies turn up dead in the mortuary. Whoever is doing the killing is removing particular organs from the deceased, and Cleaver wants to put together the pieces of the puzzle. What is the killer doing that he doesn't have to do? he wonders to his soon-to-be ex-friend Max.

The answer is quite a lot. Max quickly begins to suspect his neighbor Mr. Crowley (Christopher Lloyd) of the crimes. He plants a GPS in Crowley's car and discovers him impaling a drifter with a strange weapon on a frozen-over lake. Yes, it is self-defense, but why doesn't Crowley report the situation?

In high school, Cleaver is mostly ostracized except for the attentions of Brooke (the promising young actress Lucy Lawton). He is not much of a target for bullies whoever, who he threatens and frightens with dismemberment. They become the bullied ones, and report his language to the school. His mother tries to discipline him, but she can't think of any punishment he would either not enjoy or isn't already meting out on himself.

It is actually hard to believe that Cleaver is a sociopath, since he is aware that he does not have the feelings he should, which means on some level he is actually experiencing the correct response to events. He is utterly baffled at Brooke's attentions and can think only of what her head would look like on a stick.

Dan Wells wrote the novel series that the film of I Am Not A Serial Killer is based on. He couldn't wait to get his central character out of high school, since even he seems uncomfortable with the idea of a cold-blooded murderer around all these helpless children. I Am Not A Serial Killer is surprisingly uncontroversial for being a story which could push so many buttons in the contemporary climate. It almost feels like John Wayne Cleaver is the guy who went up the beanstock.

The novels themselves are sadly pretty terrible; without spoiling what Christopher Lloyd is revealed as being, it is a revelation that works a lot better in this adaptation than it ever did in the books. I Am Not A Serial Killer never becomes the slightest bit scary or threatening; it is the most feel good story about a sociopath hunting another serial killer ever conceived.

Maybe that's all for the best, as this lack of tension allows second-time director Billy O'Brien to focus on the more subtle moments. How Cleaver approachs and feeds a fire, talks to his mother, sister and aunt are all given far more time than they would in the Hollywood version of this. O'Brien does a fantastic job making I Am Not A Serial Killer look like a first class production despite working with the equivalent of the catering budget on a Dwayne Johnson movie.

Christopher Lloyd himself makes a big difference. His casting in the Back to the Future series was in some sense a shame, since he was just 47 when he played Doc Brown and he was only cast as an old man for decades afterwards. As Crowley, Lloyd is clearly having great fun lurching around, making his movements just unnatural enough to where he becomes entirely alien and yet nowhere near as threatening as the protagonist himself.

For his birthday Cleaver's father sends an mp3 player but forgets to fill it with all the songs of John's childhood. He is really upset by this, and tries to think of what personal rule against violence he can break. He never goes through with it, never scares us by doing anything a sociopath actually would. He's the dark boy who cried wolf.

Ethan Peterson is the senior contributor to This Recording. He is a writer living in New York.

In Which We Put Our Hands On An Executive

Prodigy, CompuServe and AOL

by ETHAN PETERSON

Halt and Catch Fire
creators Christopher Cantwell & Christopher C. Rogers
AMC

A monkey's paw is all this third season of Halt and Catch Fire is. Coined by the terrible English writer W.W. Jacobs, the little paw of a monkey is a concept that refers to when you wish for something but the thing you end up getting, while ostensibly identical to what you asked for, is substantially worse that your desire. 

Halt and Catch Fire did everything right for two wonderful seasons, and all I wanted was a third. Now it looks like it is being made in some guy's barn. This is supposed to be Silicon Valley?

I understand that it makes sense that the coders of Cameron Howe's social tech company would bring their clothes from their previous home of Texas to their new California environs. It seriously looks like they are just reusing the costumes from last season to save more money. "Why make more costumes," AMC probably opined in a memo, "no one watches this show enough to notice."

I watch this show, AMC. This third season reads like they only had the money to get the show's signature star, Lee Pace as sinister web security mastermind Joe MacMillan, for a couple of hours each day. The focus here is all on the relationship between Donna Clark (Kerry Bishe) and Gordon Clark (Scoot McNairy), which was exactly the wrong choice, since like most couples, the Clarks are only interesting when they are fighting.

I blame AMC for this entirely. There is one new actor in the season premiere of Halt and Catch Fire. Drink that in. I understand that later in the season Matthew Lillard and Annabeth Gish will be coming onto the show, but that would cost all of $10. What about maybe casting a star onto this project and giving it a budget to look as good as the other shows on the network. Fear the Walking Dead probably spends more on catering.

Despite the obvious lack of network support for this project — this show could have been Stranger Things — I have full faith that this season will eventually turn it around.

The early days of online interaction as a metaphor for our current view of technology leads to a lot of bracing critical moments. The soul of Halt and Catch Fire was really in the relationship between Cameron Howe (the brilliant and sexy Mackenzie Davis) and Joe MacMillan. The show's run began when they had sex, and the two barely share the screen together at all. Howe now gets along really well with the Clarks and in fact all of her employees, even though she misses the boyfriend she left in Texas.

The premiere was the perfect time to introduce her to a new love interest, someone who was also powerful in Silicon Valley who could become a major character on the show and a rival to MacMillan. This can still happen, but just think of how much that would cost in additional sets.

Instead we meet Ryan (Manish Dayal), who is meant to take the new role as the enterprising technical genius. Cameron struggles to believe in what Ryan is selling her, even though only months ago she was in his exact same situation and her bosses didn't listen. This is slightly implausible, but not as difficult as it is to identify with a character whose only trait is that he likes to work a lot.

Here's the problem: when you are good at one thing, you have a great situation. You are only good at that one thing, so you go and do it as well as you can. But what if you're good at more than one thing? How do you know which thing you are best at? You can't really know, since it depends on how good other people are at the thing you do. If you are the best at it, great and it's lonely at the top. If you are not, maybe you go back and revisit that other thing you do well.

At the end of the day (shut up), a show like Mad Men had two key characters and anything that took the focus off of Peggy or Don was a flat-out distraction from what made the show successful. Halt and Catch Fire created other characters that we love and respect. But there is such thing as being too respectful of what you make. For example, the executive played by Toby Huss should have died a long time ago, preferably in a fire.

Ethan Peterson is the senior contributor to This Recording.