Klondike and preliminary notes on "True Detective"

For all I know, the last two hours of the Discovery channel's mini-series, "Klondike" is enthralling, inspiring, and brilliantly written. I abandoned this gargantuan absurdity after suffering through the first two parts of the six-hour show. "Klondike" represents an interesting, if perhaps, unfortunate development in television: hitherto, reality TV shows have amped-up conflict to create phony melodrama approximating the Sturm und Drang that you might expect in a rather florid fictional mini-series; now, however, reality shows are so popular that fictional melodrama seems anxious to imitate them. Periodically, the frenzied and improbable action in "Klondike" pauses for digressive conversations about geology and mining techniques. This seemed peculiar to me since the lurid subject matter of the show really has little or nothing to do with mining -- the drama is just an excuse for lots of violence and sex. But, from the ads interspersed in the proceedings, I see that "Klondike" is thematically liked with, at least, two other shows on the Discovery channel, both of them reality programs -- something called "Gold Rush" and another show called "Bering Sea Gold". These shows presumably feature low-grade morons belching insults at one another as they search in vain for the proverbial "glory-hole". (A friend of mine who has seen these shows tells me that nuggets and veins of gold are as scarce on these programs as ghosts on "TAPS" or the other paranormal programs haunting the Networks.) Furthermore, there have been a number of reality shows recently broadcast involving logging operations. "Klondike" seems 'tied-in' to these enterprises as well -- the fetching heroine of the show runs a saw-mill and, frequently, boasts that her "timber" is more valuable than the gold the other characters are trying to pluck out of the ubiquitous Klondike muck. Generally speaking, mini-series languish because they have too many characters and too few incidents -- in the middle of these programs, the producers of such shows often neglect even fundamental editing techniques: if someone says they are going to the bakery, the show kills time by filming the hero walking to his car, opening his car door, driving to the bakery, getting out of his car, walking to the shop, and, then, enjoying some light, and pointless repartee with the shop proprietor: the craft of editing is used only to jerk responses out of the viewers in various poorly conceived and implausible action sequences. Otherwise everything proceeds more or less in real-time with lots of shots of people walking across rooms and opening doors to fill out the lengthy running time of the show. "Klondike" has the same poorly conceived and implausible action scenes, many of them edited into a mismatched hash of quick cuts, but it doesn't slip into longuers -- to the contrary, "Klondike" packs so much action into its narrative that the viewer starts to look forward to the relative respite of the TV commercials. In the first forty minutes, the two feckless heros are beset by homicidal knife-wielding Chinamen in a gambling den, survive a spectacular avalanche, crash through deadly rapids and are attacked by wolves. Around the one-hour mark, one of the heros, a whiny, irritating Jewish kid, is inexplicably gunned-down and spends the next forty minutes lying on a block of ice while flies buzz around his nose and his buddy ineffectually seeks "justice" for the dead man. The best part of the show -- and I concede I don't know how it ends -- was this second hour of episode one and, on the strength of those scenes, I tuned in for a second night. Alas, part two is just more of the same and, in fact, the show's plot becomes increasingly hysterical: everyone is dying from typhus, an evil gunslinging businessman, played effectively if extremely negligently by Tim Roth (the role is clearly derived, like most of the show, from the bad guy in "McCabe and Mrs. Miller"), humiliates a sublimely beautiful prostitute by making her strip in a mud-storm; this mistreatment causes the prostitute to minister to the ill who are being treated by a kindly (but wolf-slaughtering) Catholic priest played by Sam Shepherd in a part so annoying and overwritten that you long for one of the bad guys to put a bullet through his brain. Wicked bureaucrats scheme to slaughter innocent Native Americans; the mounties are pressured to hang two poor Indians whose tribe plots to attack Dawson City and everyone schemes to steal everyone else's claim. Just as the hero's mortgage is about to be foreclosed -- on a one-week redemption period! -- he and his new friend, the pale guy from "O Brother Where Art Thou" who isn't George Clooney or John Turturro, find lots of big fat nuggets which saves the day except for the fact that a crook has trapped them in their own mine where they almost suffocate before someone else digs them out. And so and so on. Every possible hot-button is touched: women give proto-feminist speeches and bad guys are variously anti-semitic or anti-American-Indian and the show's diction involves lots of cussing, people saying that "they don't give a shit" or are "pissed-off", probably idioms not much in use in the Klondike. Jack London watches the proceedings with a jaundiced eye. The show has fantastic location photography and the depiction of Dawson City as a muddy boomtown is extremely authentic as are the images of gold mining fields, muck and water wastelands with weird scaffiolding all over the place and a matte mountain range, as improbable and blue and beautiful as the hazy background of a Brueghel allegory, painted across the top of the image. But it's meretricious garbage and ultimately unwatchable. There is an unpleasant aspect of commercial TV that involves pandering to the audience's lowest and most base instincts. "Klondike" represents that tendency in the extreme, but, even, very high-quality and brilliant TV shows seem to be made by directors who feel that they must, periodically, interrupt their narrative to provide some cheap thrills that producers perceive to be necessary to maintaining market-share. In "True Detective", the astounding series on HBO (starring and jointly produced by Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConnaughey), the second show predictably installed a rote, by-the-numbers sex scene in the program's first fifteen minutes. Woody Harrelson, a middle-aged and blunt-spoken cop, goes to see his nubile girlfriend. She handcuffs him to a conveniently located bracket, straddles him, and proceeds to have sex with him after taunting the lucky copper with her exceptionally large and perfectly formed breasts. (She also obligingly wiggles her perfectly formed, if a little scrawny for my taste, ass in his face -- and the camera's lens.) The woman is a typical HBO starlet, hired primarily for her figure (miraculously slender with huge breasts) and willingness to engage in kinky sex on camera and the scene, although titillating enough, completely stalls the show and distracts the viewers from the real subject matter of the series. Furthermore, the woman is so improbably beautiful that her appearance in this degraded and debased rural parish of west Louisiana makes no sense at all -- what is this miraculous sex-angel doing in these benighted boondocks surrounded by a cast entirely chosen for their ugliness, blubber, and realistically slumped shoulders and blotched, pimply faces? It's a lack of confidence, a sense that audiences are so ridiculously stupid and depraved that you have to show them hard R, strip-tease, action every ninety minutes or they will bolt the room. Critics of "True Detective" also demonstrate part of the problem with commercial (is there any other kind now that PBS is also all laced-up with ads?) TV. "True Detective" features many impressive and nightmarish soliloquies spoken by McConnaughey's character. In these speeches, the half-mad cop -- he has been driven to the brink of insanity by the death of his little girl -- expresses a profound and utterly black pessimism. He argues that human consciousness is a mistake and intones variants on the ancient Greek dictim that "not be be born is best." All of this makes perfect sense in the death-haunted milieu that the film shows. Several critics writing about the show have characterized this cop's philosophical attitude as "existentialism." But, of course, the character's musings have almost nothing to do with existentialism -- these speeches are essentially variants on Schopenhauer's pessimism, a precursor idea to existentialism but, ultimately, thought of entirely different tenor. I assume most TV critics are graduates of expensive Ivy League schools. Have we really reached such a nadir in our education that these legions of smart-phone surfing pundits don't know what existentialism is? And, if so, does this explain, to some degree, the pervasive stupidity of something like "Klondike"?