Lost on Me: One Man's Attempt to Survive the 'Lost' Finale

Originally published by PopMatters on May 24, 2010

Like millions of other television junkies, I bought the hype; I was reeled in by the ruthlessly compelling commercials and well-placed print ads, and on September 22, 2004, I tuned in for the premiere episode of Lost.

Lost, with its water-cooler plot-twists and world’s sexiest flight manifest quickly became a pop culture phenomenon, burning up internet chat rooms (when they were still around), blogs (they’re still around, right?) and even the print media (which at least the time of this writing is still around.)

I remember saying to myself as the pilot unfolded, “I think I’m hooked.” It happened right around the time the plane crashed, as terrifyingly visceral a scene as I’ve ever seen on the small screen, in spite of my already knowing it was coming. I wondered what would become of the survivors, how they’d turn coconuts into wine, how they’d get along or not get along. I wondered who might take off their shirt first.

And then, well before the final credits sped by, I changed the channel. Something inside me aggressively spurned the show like I’d rejected a baboon heart. It wasn’t snob’s natural aversion to the cultural zeitgeist, because even if I’d instinctively known that was coming, I’m okay with that sort of thing… most of the time, anyway. Yes, I’ve recoiled against hype before, turned my nose up at everything from No Country for Old Men to Radiohead to Pinkberry. But this was different, as I hadn’t yet been inundated with an avalanche of “OMG!!!” praise for Lost when I bailed. That would come later, of course. But when I decided to watch almost anything else, it was just me and my remote and a storyline and cast which failed to keep my attention. Not when there’s probably a cake battle on the Food Network, Lost. Not by a long shot.

So, I got my ass off the island much quicker, apparently, than anyone else who’d either starred in or watched Lost. Because like the pull that island seems to have had on those poor schmucks, so too did that show have a pull on pretty much everyone I know, pretty much everyone you know and pretty much everyone else with even the most tenuous connection to network television.

I stayed away, too, sinking my TV teeth into less befuddling fare likePsych and Flight of the Conchords and The Biggest Loser. But with the finale upon us this week, I thought I ought to give Lost one more shot.

My research such as it was consisted of years of ignoring Facebook status updates friends made about the show, loud commercials I’d managed to tune out and the last 45 minutes or so of ABC’s two hour pre-game celebration before last night’s final episode. I must also confess to having not entirely paid attention to the latter, as there was a Sex & the City II cake challenge on the Food Network, and while I have also managed to avoid that particular cultural phenomenon (with much more bile), a cake-off if a cake-off, and that means Kerry Vincent is gonna be bitchy from beneath her Ren-Faire headband.

I guess a bit of Lost sunk in over the years, in spite of my efforts to keep it out. I’d heard of Locke, for example. And also something happened to that guy who used to be a Hobbit, right? What I’ve heard most aboutLost since it premiered nearly six years ago was how good it was. And what I heard second-most was how goddamn confusing it was. Given I knew almost nothing about Lost, I figured I was in the right frame of mind to catch the finale. Boy, was I wrong.

Even if I hadn’t caught a bit about the alternate worlds stuff, I’d have probably worked it out pretty quickly. I might have assumed one of the two threads was some sort of dream, though once the touchy feely déjà vu flashes began happening, I’d have seen the light. (I just found out producer Damon Lindelof calls these plot devices “flash-sideways” – Thanks, Wikipedia!)

I don’t believe in a lot of things, but I do believe in duct tape

Because I haven’t actually watched the series unfold, the questions I have are fairly mundane, and for all I know they were answered ages ago. How come none of the dudes on the island have crazy hermit beards instead of seductive stubble? And while some of the castaways had sufficiently unkempt hair, most looked salon-friendly. And, at the risk of sounding indelicate, why didn’t the fat dude who says “Dude” all the time lose a little weight?

So, I watched the finale. Not all at once, of course, because like I did nearly six years ago with the pilot episode, I petered out before the finale did. I stuck it out, though, finishing it on Hulu this morning. And admittedly I’m probably a bit more confused than your average fan. Didn’t the guy from Party of Five (another show I never watched) open the series looking up from a jungle floor? Nice one!

Despite the soundtrack trying to force me into action, I didn’t feel the tension on the edge of the cliff the way a regular viewer might have. I also didn’t shed any tears when characters who’d hooked up on the island had flash-sideways walks of shame in hospitals, alleys or piano-heavy benefit concerts. But those of you who’d watched every second of every episode and are now wondering what the heck you’re gonna do with yourselves on whatever night the show regularly aired, maybe you bawled like babies. Maybe your couches are still moist with tears and sadness snot at this moment. And that is ultimately how I closed outLost; not by hoping for loose ends to be tied up in a satisfying way, but by wondering if that’s how the fans felt about it.
Some beloved TV shows end on a sour note (I’m looking at you, Seinfeld and The Sopranos). Others, like The Shield, manage to make the inevitable seem revelatory. Still more, such as Arrested Development, fall somewhere in between, unable to say goodbye because those involved in making the show are as bewildered as those who watched it.

How was Lost for you? If you loved the show, did that bit in the church seem less mawkish than it did to a cynic like me? Did you find the tying up of loose ends satisfying and natural or rushed and convenient? Are you bummed there’s no Drive Shaft tour on the cards?

Because of all the mythological hokum, the smoke monster poppycock and the supernatural rigmarole woven through the fabric of Lost, it was already likely bound to become a televised sci-fi tent pole for years to come. The romance and intrigue and – at least what I’ve been told – humanity of the characters helped it cross out of what is often perceived as the narrow scope of that genre and into the mainstream. Lost was hugely successful, and not in retrospect like the original Star Trek series, either. Lost was a phenomenon in its present, and that’s not likely to change. And I guess I can say I was there at the beginning and end of it all, even if the middle is something of a blur.

I wanted to come away from the finale having realized the folly of having had such an itchy remote finger all those years ago. I thought I might feel inclined to start Lost from the beginning, something I could do for free on Hulu, apparently. I thought I’d want to dissect the pilot and see if there were any clues more than 100 episodes ago to point to what happened last night. Instead, I think I’m as finished with Lost as it is with the rest of us. What happened on that fictional island is no more my concern than what led those four wretched Sex & the City shrews to Morocco for their new flick. I’m free of Lost, a show which never really had me to begin with.

Hey, Hey, etc... Why I Love the Monkees

Originally published by PopMatters on March 9, 2010

I’m used to catching grief from friends for some of the quirky stuff I listen to, so whenever the Monkees come up in conversation, I’m always prepared for a lively debate. I’m not naive enough to pretend they were one of rock’s great bands, though I do feel as though their music has been a bit shortchanged by history.

Their groundbreaking series lasted just two seasons, and was followed by a delicious stream-of-consciousness feature film (Head) and an even more bizarre TV special (33 1/3 Revolutions Per Monkee), which had the lousy fortune of airing opposite the Academy Awards. By this point, of course, the Monkees were hellbent on blowing themselves up from within. Scornful of the ridicule they faced from much of the “serious” rock cognoscenti, the pre-Fab Four made every attempt to shed their bubblegum image and strike out on their own.
 
It began somewhere around the time they recorded their third album. After playing sparingly on tunes for the first two Monkees’ records, the band took over for themselves. With the assistance of Chip Douglas on bass, the Monkees turned into a semi-actual band on Headquarters. It wasn’t a virtuoso collection by any means, especially when compared to many of other rock albums released in 1967. Never mind the Beatles’Sgt. Pepper; that year also saw seminal works drop from Love (Forever Changes), Captain Beefheart (Safe As Milk), the Velvet Underground (The Velvet Underground & Nico), Pink Floyd (Piper at the Gates of Dawn), 13th Floor Elevators (Easter Everywhere), the Doors (The Doors) and the Jimi Hendrix Experience (Are You Experienced?).

Still, Headquarters is the work of a pretty alright garage rock band, one with a keen interest in experimentation. That thread would follow on the band’s second album of the year, Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn & Jones Ltd., which featured forays into country rock, vaudeville pop and psychedelia, the latter including what has often been regarded as among the first uses of the Moog synthesizer on a rock song (both on “Daily Nightly” and “Star Collector”).

1968’s Head may be the Monkees’ creative zenith, both on film and vinyl. The script, such as it was, was written over a drug-fuelled weekend in a cabin in the woods with Jack Nicholson. Yes, THAT Jack Nicholson. Nicholson makes a brief cameo in the film as does Dennis Hopper (the two worked together on Easy Rider the following year, a film financed, in part, on Monkee money), Frank Zappa, a very young Teri Garr, a very puffy Sonny Liston, Annette Funicello, Victor Mature, Carol Doda, Toni Basil and American football great Ray Nitschke.

Opening with Micky Dolenz jumping from a bridge to certain doom, the movie sunk like a stone in limited theatrical release, but went on to become something of a cult classic.

The soundtrack features just a handful of original Monkees’ material, but what’s there is among the very best music they ever recorded. “Porpoise Song” is a swirling epic, and “As We Go Along” (with guitar by Neil Young), is a love song of fragile beauty. The oft-marginalized Peter Tork has two songs on the album, including the Indian-influenced “Can You Dig It?” (with vocals by Dolenz) and the sprawling stomp of “Long Title: Do I Have to Do This All Over Again?” Even the sometimes schmaltzy Davy Jones is in fine form, on the Harry Nillson-penned “Daddy’s Song”. Nicholson compiled the album, gluing the songs together with dialogue and sound effects from the film. The only misstep—replacing the incendiary live version of Mike Nesmith’s “Circle Sky” shown in the film with a flaccid studio recording—was undone when Rhino Records remasted the album for CD release over a decade ago.

Following the disastrous results for 33 1/3…,Tork wriggled his way out of his contract and split. As a trio, the Monkees released two more albums in 1969, much of which included songs recorded as early as 1966 that had just been sitting in a Colgems vault collecting dust. Nesmith’s “Listen to the Band” (originally given a psychedelic freak-out paint job with Tork still on board for 33 1/3…) was the last great Monkees song. The last “musician” in the band, Nesmith left to form his own country rock pioneering outfit, the First National Band. Dolenz and Jones put out one last album under the Monkees’ name before finally pulling the plug.

There’s no question the Monkees were fabricated. But so was the cast of your favorite film, and they made great art together. And when the Byrds or the Beach Boys used studio musicians on some of their now-classic tracks, no one blinked an eye.

While stuffy critics like Rolling Stone‘s Jann Wenner have always pooh-poohed the musical relevance of the Monkees, perhaps their greatest detractors of all have been themselves. Both Nesmith and Dolenz have frequently said in inteviews they didn’t think much of their music, with the former especially dismissive.

However, because they actually sorta gave a crap at the time, it’s impossible to objectively lump the Monkees in with other teenybopper acts of the day. Even if one doesn’t think much of them, they’ve got to at least fall somewhere in the chasm between the era’s rock and pop rather than at one end or the other.

I love the Monkees. Not just because I enjoy watching them on DVD with my eight-year old daughter (her fave rave is Nesmith, though she’s got bobblehead dolls of the whole group), but because I actually do enjoy their music. Some of it is simple to the point of hardly being there at all. And a few of their attempts to create art flamed out when they tried to fly too close to the sun, like Dolenz’ “Shorty Blackwell” (which is a total mess) and Nesmith’s “Writing Wrongs” (which is also a mess, but a curiously satisfying one). Yet there are gems to be unearthed far beyond the confines of a hits compilation. You may even find it’s worth doing a bit of exploring.

The Sklar Brothers: The Hardest-Working Twins in Showbiz

Published by PopMatters on April 27, 2012

If it’s true comedians are narcissists, imagine what it’s like to be Randy and Jason Sklar. It’s not just because they’re identical twins, though they most certainly are that. It’s because they’re brothers who work – and travel, and perform, and hang out—together, and the banter is so innate in their live performances that it’s only natural it spills over into their post-show conversations. Perhaps a funk over how a recent performance went might have lasted half as long if there weren’t two of them volleying it back and forth. 
Last spring, the Sklar Brothers came to New York for a handful of shows as they prepped material for their latest album, Hendersons and Daughters. On a Friday night, they performed a pair of shows at Gotham Comedy Club, a wide room set up like a carpet-covered coliseum, with overly intimate tables and overpriced drinks.

The Sklars’ journey to becoming standup comics began in St. Louis, Missouri, where they grew up as fans of local teams like the Cardinals. 
The first show was dynamic, with the brothers hitting a rhythm early and riding it to the end. The second show, by their own account in its immediate aftermath, was a mess. It was late and the crowd was a combination of drunk and disconnected.

“It kind of bummed me out, I hate to say it,” Jason admitted. “Sometimes certain jokes go over better, but I felt like it was fucking work. It was so brutal. We were battling up there and it was not fun.”

“The mics were way too low,” added Randy. “Your mic should be powerful so you can make it hard for people to have a conversation, period. That’s the way it should be, to the point where if they’re rude enough to want to talk to each other, they’ll have to talk as loud, and then they get spotted and they’re fucking gone. Why did you come to a comedy show if you wanted to have a conversation? There’s a great bar downstairs.”

Later, in a sorta-okay-but-not-great bar next door, the Sklars held court with a few friends and a few fans. They’re really nice guys, Randy and Jason. I met their former accountant, maybe. Also a nice guy. The Sklars surround themselves with impenetrable niceness, perhaps, because it shields them from lunatics and assholes, from people shoving a business card in their hands, or giving them the vague celebrity recognition patter.

“I know you, don’t I?”

This was more slur than statement, and it came from a woman who leaned over a bar stool putting her frosted hair between Jason and I. She was in a group of two couples, the dudes growing increasingly hostile as she struggled in vain to put a name to the face.

“I know you … you’re from ...”

“That happens all the time,” Jason said later, and I’m sure he’s right. Earlier I’d told him a story about visiting my father’s apartment in Chelsea in the brief months-long window when the Sklars starred in their short-lived MTV series Apartment 2F. On our way to a since-shuttered Cuban diner, I spotted the brothers coming out of a building and realized I’d seen them before. Unlike our new friend in the bar, I hadn’t bugged them at the time. I did later, though.

The Sklar Brothers as they’re collectively known on comedy albums and in comedy clubs recognize the value of being cool to their fans. I crossed that threshold during the first season of Cheap Seats, a sports comedy show on ESPN Classic. The show, which ran for four seasons between 2004-06, starred Randy and Jason as network tape archivists commenting on clips from old sports broadcasts (with a very loose interpretation of “sports,” as evidenced by episodes on spelling bees and poker tournaments. If it sounds a bit like Mystery Science Theater 3000, the Sklars acknowledged that, and the stars of that show appeared in an episode of Cheap Seats, evoking some sort of comedic M.C, Escher painting (a reference point familiar to fans of the Sklars as well.)

In the third season of Cheap Seats, the show held a contest with the winner having an episode of the show shot in their home. I entered, but didn’t win. I did receive a signed photo and a t-shirt, both of which I still have somewhere.

Right around that same time, I sent them an e-mail asking them if they’d wish my then-wife a happy birthday. She’d become a fan through Cheap Seats, and I figured maybe there was an outside chance they’d hit her up with a MySpace comment, which should at least tell you how long ago that was. Instead, the Sklars sent her an e-mail, two or three paragraphs of the most hilarious shit I’d ever seen. That’s how cool these dudes are.

Randy and Jason talk about their fans a lot on their podcast. They read letters they receive in a segment which used to open the show but has since been moved; the advice came from a fan. They talk about the fans who come to their standup performances and shout out “Henderson!” and “Osbaldiston!”, both of which have their origins in hyper-enthusiastic sports play-by-play calls.

With Sklarbro Country, the brothers’ weekly podcast devoted to sports, comedy, and indie rock, Randy and Jason are fulfilling a destiny hinted at by the Beastie Boys, circa Check Your Head/Ill Communication, when the hip-hop/punk collective rocked vintage Knicks tees, built a basketball court in their recording studio and sporadically published a magazine devoted to music, comedy, sports and popular culture called Grand Royal.

“This is the dichotomy that lives inside of us and has always lived inside of us,” said Randy. “We are at once kids who grew up playing catch in the front yard for hours and hours and hours and hours and hours. And we are also perfectly at home watching Mel Brooks on TV and learning every line to Airplane! and loving standup comedy, and loving musicals and Broadway shows. That’s who we are.”

Jason said he sees that dichotomy as part of their bigger picture goal of dealing with perceptions and misperceptions.

“Our career has been spent deconstructing what people’s assumptions are of twins,” he said. “We have spent a career trying to mold a different perspective on twin-ness and a more nuanced, real perspective on twins that isn’t just for show, joke and what we all sort of know. And I feel like we’ve applied that to everything we do. Why does a sports show have to have Joe Satriani as the opening guitar riff for it? It doesn’t at all. In fact, it could start with a Belle and Sebastian song that makes you sad. Or a Best Coast song, or a Mazzy Star song, or something that makes you sit down and go, ‘Huh, that’s really thoughtful. That’s really neat.’”

“When we look at [Phoenix Suns point guard and raconteur] Steve Nash, I bet there are friends in Steve Nash’s life who don’t even know he plays basketball,” said Randy. “I like that. I like when guys say, ‘This sport is not my entire life.’ And that’s what we’re trying to get people to do.”

“It was high school,” said Jason, before citing an early inspiration. “Richard Lewis; loved that special with the piano and the brick wall. It was at the Improv I think. He was so good that special, and showed what comedy could be.”

“[Jerry] Seinfeld, [Garry] Shandling,” Randy added. “We loved Shandling. We just were into that stuff, so we would do people’s bits not knowing that’s not what you’re supposed to do. We would just do it for our friends in high school and whatnot and get huge laughs because these are phenomenal bits that people came up with. And then there was a talent show in the school. A lot of it was material which we just stole, which is just terrible. We didn’t know that wasn’t what you were supposed to do. But some of it was stuff that we wrote and we were encouraged by it.”

Soon, the Sklars were comfortable enough with their act to put it on videotape, a recording which they sent to the Disney Channel in the hopes of making it on to a young comedians’ special.

“I remember Skippy from Family Ties was going to be the host of the show, Marc Price,” said Jason. “The production company called us back and I’ll never forget talking on the phone with them. They didn’t talk to our parents, they talked to us. And they were like, ‘We’ve looked at thousands of tapes and you guys were in the top ten of tapes we saw.’ I think that stands to reason. How many kids are doing standup?”

The show was never produced, but it was enough to get Randy and Jason interested in taking it further. Though on course to become attorneys, the brothers continued honing their act during their time as undergraduates at the University of Michigan. After graduation, they were accepted to law schools but instead moved to New York to pursue standup. Which, in a very roundabout way, brings us to the present.

The Sklars are the hardest working twins in showbiz. They regularly travel the country performing standup and have three albums to their credit, the most recent—Hendersons and Daughters— released in 2011. In addition to their own forays into television (Apt. 2F, Cheap Seats), they’ve appeared on Law & Order, CSI, Grey’s Anatomy, Entourage, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia and plenty of other scripted TV shows. They’ve been regulars on Chelsea Lately and on radio on the Jim Rome Show. They’ve done a handful of films, though the less said about most of them the better. They’ve done internet series (Back on Topps, Held Up), been on cartoons (The Oblongs) and guested on podcasts.

An upcoming History Channel series, The United Stats of America, will see Randy and Jason using statistics (and, presumably, comedy) to figure out where the country has been and how it got to where it is today. Six episodes have been produced, though there’s no indication on the network’s website as to when they might air.

Outside of semaphore and puppetry, there are few avenues they haven’t traveled down as performers. And, I don’t know: Maybe they actually have done puppetry.

Sklarbro Country, the weekly podcast, is perhaps the twins’ greatest labor of creative love. It shows in the comfortable rhythm they have, not only with one another but also their guests, often a fellow comedian, sometimes one from their close circle of friends. But there’s also a lot of hard work that goes into producing an episode of Sklarbro Country, and perhaps larger ambitions than one might realize.

“What we’re trying to do as well is extrapolating the human story, and what is it saying in a larger theme, and how can we attack a larger theme so it’s not totally based in the story,” Randy said. “Like where does all the championship memorabilia go for the team that loses? That’s an interesting concept for us, and how is that deceiving for the people who live in villages around the world?”

They also understand that it wouldn’t be an easy transition, melding the material in the podcast with their standup performances.

“
I think we’re even kind of afraid to do some of the stuff we do in the podcast on stage with a regular crowd, but I would love to,” said Jason. “We would love to figure that out.”

What you hear when you download an episode of Sklarbro Country—which is free, by the way—is the result of a lot of hard work behind-the-scenes.

“The first 20 minutes of that show, we write,” said Randy. “That’s super rare. It’s written based off of us improvising. First we’ll start talking about the story and say, ‘What’s the angle?’ And we start talking and coming up with jokes and write them down. And then we’ll tighten it and make it a little clearer. We write a very detailed outline, which a lot of times has fully written out jokes. But we also go off it.”

No matter how hard they work, though, they still have to deal with what every performer faces: Negative feedback.

“I’ve heard criticism where people say like, ‘These guys don’t disagree with each other,’ but I don’t know that we have to,” said Randy. “There’s enough of that shit on the air right now. There’s Around the Horn if you want disagreement, and sometimes PTI. But that’s not necessarily what we do. Maybe there is some merit to what people are saying. We take every little criticism as though there’s some truth behind it and we’ve got to figure it all out. I think it’s who we are.”

The criticism may have directly yielded another sport-comedy endeavor with Point/Point, a series of video shorts on Jockular.com where Randy and Jason spoof the standard charged patter of sports shows by vehemently agreeing with one another.

In an effort to bring their many worlds together, Randy and Jason have dipped their toe in the water with the odd live performance of Sklarbro Country, including an appearance at this year’s SXSW. Festivals, they explained are a lot of fun. But for responsible family men, they’re also tough to justify.

“What’s hard for us is that we have families, and it’s hard for us to be like, ‘We’re going away this weekend. We are going to make a total combined $50. They’re paying all our expenses, though,’” Randy said. “That doesn’t mean anything in a marriage. ‘You take care of the kids. What I’m going to do is hang out, listen to music, smoke some pot, hang out with all my really fun comedy friends. You deal with the kids and I’ll talk to you periodically, but it’ll probably be too loud because bands will be playing and you’ll feel completely alone.’ You can’t do that unless you have the most understanding spouse ever or unless … unless nothing. It’s just too much to heap on somebody, and we have to ask ourselves what does it do, to what end. Yes, it’s super fucking fun. There is no more fun than performing at a festival in front of a thousand people who are psyched.”

Jason picked up the thread.

“You go to a festival, and they’re like, ‘The car is ready for you,’ and you hop in the car with Tig Notaro and Kyle Dunnigan and Rich Fulcher and we sit there and we fucking gag around and we just honestly do Carson impressions and joke around and just are so silly and laugh our asses off,” he said. “It’s so much fun, it’s what we love. There’s something about that that I miss. So we’ve got to do one every once in a while.”

Connecting with other comics is important to the Sklars. On the night of their appearance at Gotham Comedy Club, Jay Mohr—in town to film an episode of Law & Order: Criminal Intent—turned up between sets and staying for much of the second performance. It meant a lot to Randy and Jason.

“Richard Lewis is up at Caroline’s tonight, and he could have easily gone up there and hung out,” Jason said. “He could have done nothing, he could have just hung out with people from the set, from his crew. He came here and hung out and gagged around with us and made fun of us while we were selling t-shirts from the table. And it was fucking great. That’s part of this business that we truly love. We feel like we’ve worked hard in this business to achieve a certain level of respect from our peers. And I think we’ve got it for the most part. I mean, there are always going to be people who don’t like what we do or think we’re funny.”

“I think that’s diminished a lot, because we’ve hung around and kept making stuff,” Randy said, and to prove a point, the Sklars talked about a work-in-progress idea, the practice of constant consideration of material that could both make them laugh and move their careers forward.

“The Jersey Shore people went in and negotiated their contracts for a lot more money, and I would have just loved to have been a fly on the wall for that negotiation,” Jason said. “They’re saying like, ‘Snooki wants $50,000-per-episode, she wants a percentage of international sales and back end DVD stuff.’ And the business affairs person from MTV is like, ‘Alright, well there’s got to be conditions.’ And the lawyer is like, ‘Fine, what are the conditions?’ and she’s like, ‘Seven drunken hookups.’

‘Obviously, fine. She’ll do that in one night.’

‘One condom-rip pregnancy scare.’

‘Who rips the condom?’

‘Producer. Pre-ripped.’

‘Fine. What else?’

‘She’s got to take a shit in the bed.’

‘No, she’s not going to shit in the bed.’

‘Fart in the minifridge?’

‘On camera?’

‘Off mic.’

“We’re just beginning to work that out,” said Randy. “I think there’s something funny in that, but we don’t know what the answer is yet.”

The Life of an Alien Lizard Queen: An Interview with Monica Baccarin

Originally published by PopMatters on April 13, 2011

Though she’s since become known to fans of the contemporary remake of the sci-fi television classic V, in a former TV life Morena Baccarin was known to fans the world over as an interplanetary prostitute on Joss Whedon’s heralded but short-lived series Firefly.

Inara Serra was really more than just a mere hooker in Firefly (and its follow-up feature film, Serenity). In the late 25th century world concocted by Whedon, Companions like those played by Baccarin are really high-society courtesans and part of the social fabric. Naturally, Inara Serra is something of a tormented soul. Coming as Baccarin’s first steady Hollywood gig, it was also an unforgettable experience.
 
“It was a blast,” Baccarin said, in part because of her work with Whedon.

“Joss was great,” she explained. “He’s really specific about his work; he knows exactly what he wants.” 

Baccarin said of Whedon, “I feel like he is the kind of person that allows for so much creativity,” she said. She added a tongue-in-cheek caveat: “Generally speaking, he is always right.”

Firefly and Serenity also gave Baccarin a taste of what it’s like to become a key figure in sci-fi fandom, especially after the experience entered her rear view mirror.

“It was humbling to see how many fans there are of Serenity,” she said. “It’s like an underground fan base.”

It’s something she’s likely experiencing all over again now that V has just wrapped its second season. On the show, Baccarin plays Anna, the Visitor Queen and High Commander of the sinister alien invasion.

“Reaction has been good,” Baccarin said of the ongoing series. “This (was) a much more action-packed season…Lisa doubts if she wants to be a queen.”

Though it might seem as though it would be a piece of cake to play an emotionless alien, Baccarin said she actually finds it to be a tricky proposition.

“Having no emotions is the most difficult, to tone it down,” she said.

One way of ensuring she can keep emotions out of the character as much as possible is to not let them get in the way of her private life. One way to ensure this is to avoid looking herself up on Google because she’s wary of seeing what people might be saying about her.

“I don’t want to believe the bad stuff,” she said.

As for what comes next, Baccarin said she might like to try her hand at something outside the realm of sci-fi, perhaps dabbling a bit in comedy.

“For me, it really is about the story and characters,” she said. “Inspiration is key for me in choosing characters.”

Fans of the Brazilian-born actress would likely contend she’s already done a pretty good job of that already.

Additional reporting by Charles Wallace

An Original Mad Man Reflects on the Real 'Mad Men' and the Show

Originally published by PopMatters on October 15, 2010

Maybe this says more about who I spend my time with than anything else, but I don’t know anyone who doesn’t watch Mad Men. There are times I have to step away, like when my Facebook news feed is filled with post-viewing chatter by friends who’ve changed their profile pictures to cartoon versions of themselves as characters from the show. When the hype becomes too much, or when I realize I don’t want to know what kind of trouble a little girl is getting into in the world of episodic television when I’ve got an actual little girl of my own in the actual world. I’ll tune it all out and let a few days go by, but such is the allure of Mad Men that I’m back in front of the television again, feeling like no matter how much I groom myself I’m still comparatively slovenly. Everyone I know watches Mad Men. Well, not everyone. Not my father.

My father and I get along incredibly well. Sure, it hasn’t always been that way. I was a gigantic pain in the ass when I was a teenager, and we’ve had the odd disagreement here and there in the intervening years. For the most part we really get along, but when it comes to television, well…. Last Thanksgiving, during a visit to the home he shares with my stepmother in Palm Springs, my father made it through about five minutes of the pilot of Arrested Development, a show I’d tried in vain to convince him was a comedic work of art. The ensuing conversation didn’t go well, and it wasn’t the first time that sort of thing has happened, either.

And so after nearly four full seasons of not even mentioning Mad Men to my father, I finally had to ask. It’s not because I’m a fan of the show, or at least that’s not the only reason. I wanted to get the opinion of my father, not as the opinionated curmudgeon who’d burned me up over Arrested Development, but as an expert. My father was a Mad Man.

Gary Kott was a writer and Supervising Producer on The Cosby Show from the second-through-sixth seasons, the ones where the show was #1 in the ratings. I was a high school kid at the time, and it held a certain cache with some of the girls in my class to be able to say that some stupid thing I’d done had become some stupid thing Theo Huxtable did on television, even when that was mostly untrue.

My father wrote scripts for Remington Steele, Fame, The White Shadow and Hotel. He’s won a Peabody Award, a Writer’s Guild of America Award, a People’s Choice Award, an NAACP Image Award and was once nominated for an Emmy and twice for the Humanitas Prize. But even today, he still feels like some of his best work was done on Madison Avenue.

In some ways, my father’s story in advertising is not unlike Don Draper’s, beginning by writing catalog copy for department stores and ending in offices high above the grit and grime of midtown Manhattan. My father became Vice President and Creative Director at the legendary Ogilvy & Mather, worked on huge campaigns for Young & Rubicam (on whose carpeted floor a much younger version of myself threw up) and had a hand in doing in real life the kinds of things Don Draper and his creative team try to do on television. My father was there in the ‘70s, so while some of these guys were still around, the world outside was very different. And with his long hair, leather jackets and blue jeans, my father made sure it looked a lot different inside the offices as well. Even so, I thought I’d ask.

He hadn’t seen the show, of course. He’d heard about it—how could he not?—but hadn’t actually watched any episodes. So, with my father in his home in Palm Springs and me in mine in Brooklyn, we set up Skype and watched the pilot together. Every few minutes, we’d pause the episode and chat, and nearly two and a half hours later we were through.

Set in 1960, the Mad Men pilot—“When Smoke Gets in Your Eyes”—brings us back to a world that almost seems quaint by comparison, where everyone smokes and drinks and cavorts with sexism and sexuality in equal measures. Much has been made of Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner’s attention to detail, and it was after seeing Draper sorting through an ad pitch on a bar napkin while ordering another drink that my father first paused the episode.

“That’s what we used to do, write campaigns on napkins,” said Dad. “I worked on so many campaigns, I’d come up with them on the subway on the way in to the meeting so many times. One of the skills good advertising people have is amazing quickness. Just the quickest, brightest human beings on the planet, and they all know how to pull stuff out of their hat. And good stuff.”

The bar itself had a certain familiarity to it as well.

“Across the street from Ogilvy & Mather was a bar called Ratazzi’s, and it’s where all the advertising people hung out. They served these huge martinis and it was packed every night. They finally closed it and there’s a plaque, a permanent plaque there, I think it’s on 48th between 5th and Madison, and it’s actually an historical site now.”

As the action followed Draper to the crash pad apartment of his beatnik fling Midge, my father wondered about whether the show was going to turn into a soap opera, a question I’ve often found myself asking.

“So, now they’re making the show like Desperate Housewives goes to Madison Avenue, all affairs and flings,” he said. “If you worked for a big ad agency, you weren’t worried about who you were schtupping. No one cared, no one gave a shit.”

As Don and Midge discussed the government’s crackdown on cigarette advertising—a storyline that runs through the entire episode—my father recalled the first time he came in contact with the product as a copywriter.

“The only advertising campaign that I ever turned down is when I was at Young & Rubicam,” he said. “They were pitching Liggett Meyer, and they asked me. I went, ‘Well, okay. I’ll give it a try.’ This was probably sometime in the early ‘70s. And they handed me a report, a top secret report from the government: The Health Findings of Cigarettes. I read it, and I smoked at the time. And not only did I quit smoking, but it was the only time in my life when I went in and said, ‘I cannot work on this product.’ I was so horrified by that report.”

Restrictions were nothing new to the advertising world by the time my father became part of the scene, but there were always ways around them.

“The Food and Drug Administration had already started to clamp down, so we had a lot of restrictions we had to work around,” he said. “But there were guys at the agency that had worked during the days of no restrictions, and it was really quite amazing what they got away with. The stories were unbelievable. They’d show you the historical reel, and what they used to do with toys, kids walking in, they’d get a plastic submachine gun and they’d show them sneaking into the room while their parents were sleeping and they’d machine gun their parents to death. These commercials went on and on.”

Later, when Joan Holloway shows new secretary Peggy Olson the ropes, my father stopped the show again.

“I started in ’69 and was at Ogilvy in ’72,” he said. “These days were already long gone. These secretaries were thinking, ‘I’m gonna be creative director.’ That attitude had changed. They weren’t coaching each other on how to screw their way to an apartment in New York.”

When I explained that Olson actually did work her way up the chauvinistic ladder to become a copywriter, my father said that it seemed realistic.

“Ogilvy was very strange back then,” he said. “There was a no nepotism rule. You couldn’t be a relative of anybody, and you certainly couldn’t be a wife of somebody, or you couldn’t be the girlfriend. They were really on the lookout for that. If you were a copywriter, you really had to earn your way in. There were a couple of secretaries that got promoted to advertising, but we all saw the process that they had to go through, and it wasn’t easy. They had to do spec portfolios like we all did and present them. And it was actually better for them once they got their first copywriting jobs to leave the agency so they didn’t have that hanging over them.”

With a pitch to Menken’s Department Store looming, firm partner Roger Sterling asks Draper, “Have we ever hired any Jews?” My father, a Jew, had already asked if the topic would come up during the show.

“There were no Jews in ad agencies,” said Dad. “Ogilvy & Mather was very British, very Harvard, very preppy. I don’t know if there was ever a Jewish guy in the creative department, and then one that looked like me.”

Later, when Sterling introduces David Cohen – who he found in the mailroom – to Rachel Menken as a member of the art department, my father laughed.

“That’s very funny,” he said. “That just happens to be good TV. It was an exaggeration, but it’s good writing. That’s good TV. Their whole handling of the Jewish situation was good. It’s funny that I brought it up, and it was a subplot of the first episode. It really was rare.”

The topic led him on a tangent about other firms, including one that produced some work that not only showed up in later episodes of Mad Men, but which convinced my father that advertising was where he saw himself.

“Advertising was pretty bland through the ‘50s,” he said. “It was all things to all people, big, luxury convenience, girls in crinolines, jingles, taglines. There were two giants of advertising thought, and I worked for one of them, David Ogilvy. And then there was this new agency called Doyle, Dane, and Bernbach. That’s probably who they were talking about as catering to the Jews. David Ogilvy landed the Rolls-Royce account and wrote these stunning ads, they were poetry. Later, they got the Mercedes account. But Doyle was a small agency, and they got this account called Volkswagen. You’ve got to remember in the ‘50s and ‘60s, the idea was big luxury American cars. And here was this frickin’ car from Germany, of all places, called a Beetle that looked like something you’d put in your pocket. And on top of it, it was the dream child of Adolf Hitler. How can you sell that in America after the war? Giant luxury cars, beautiful women driving down the street, handsome men, ‘See the USA,’ Dinah Shore, blah, blah, blah. Doyle, Dane and Bernbach said, ‘Let’s go the opposite.’ And they came out with an ad, and the headline said: Think Small. Think Small to Americans, and this little teeny picture of this little Bug, and that one ad revolutionized advertising. When I saw ads like that, I said, ‘That’s what I want to do.’ That started the new school of advertising, this minimalist, sharp, clever thoughtful campaign.”

Other campaigns by the firm were just as revolutionary.

“The idea was to boast that you were number one. So Doyle, Dane, Bernbach gets Avis. Hertz was the number one car rental of all time, and if you were not number one, you sure didn’t want to advertise it. So, Doyle comes out with this headline that says: Avis – We’re Number Two, But We Try Harder. So bizarre, and Americans loved that.

“And then they got the Alka Seltzer account, and how do you do anything with such a cruddy product. And they started this campaign: Plop Plop, Fizz Fizz, Oh What a Relief it Is. And that led to commercials like, ‘I can’t believe I ate the whole thing.’

“When I saw ads like that, I thought forget about the old school of advertising, that’s what I want to do. So here, not only was I with the long hair, the leather jacket, but I wanted to do advertising that these agencies had never done before. And they sort of let me do it. They fought me all the way, though.”

The show wasn’t a total hit with my father, especially when it came to the quality of the advertising.

“This is the problem, probably, with the show so far,” he said. “The idea is great, but the advertising sucks. If this guy is a creative genius and that’s the kind of advertising he’s approving, this guy would be out by 1973. If this is the best he could do, and these are his advertising instincts in 1960, my guess is he’d own a bed & breakfast in Vermont by 1973. I saw a lot of these guys go down quick. To me, it’s like saying, you’ve set up a show about the greatest football player that ever lived, and then you see him throw the ball and he can’t even grip it.”

The episode featured art director Sal Romano showing a print sketch of a man in a hammock with the word ‘Relax’ as the headline, and later Draper enthralling the board of Lucky Strike by pulling “It’s toasted” out of thin air. Neither of these impressed my father.

“When you think of, ‘It’s toasted’ saving the day, compare that to ‘Just Do It’ for Nike,” he said. “Enough said. That’s saving the day. It’s the weak part of the show, the actual advertising, because it’s hard.”

He acknowledged that because if his professional experience, that sort of thing might bother him more than the average viewer.

“I wrote a doctor show (The Cosby Show), and I just threw in some medical jargon,” he said. “I’m sure some doctors watching were like, ‘Hey, the patient’s gonna frickin’ die!’ Cliff Huxtable was a doctor, and Clair was a lawyer, and I’m sure lawyers were going, ‘What the hell are they talking about?’ But that is a really bad ad agency. And I’m sure America doesn’t care, just as if I was watching a show about Nascar, whatever they tell me is fine, I’m not going to know the difference. But right now, that ad agency is going to have to get better because I’d have a hard time watching it. A show about advertising, you would hope that they got sharper, because none of these people would survive so far. It’s the worst ad agency I’ve ever seen, and they’ve got to get to work.”

That last point was also something of an issue for my father, a man who worked absurdly long hours in advertising, and then continued the practice while writing and producing television. As the younger staff members of Sterling Cooper begin to file out just after 5:00 in the afternoon, my father was stunned.

“Time to go at 5:15? You saw the way I worked. 5:15, you’d say half day,” he said. “At Y&R, we all worked weekends. The saying was ‘If you don’t show up Saturday, don’t bother to show up Sunday.’ We’d be there hour after hour after hour hammering out ideas locked in our offices. So years later, Ogilvy takes me back, and they were going to make me a Vice President and Creative Director out in L.A. So the first day they introduced me to my group, the art directors and the copywriters. And at about ten after five, a couple of them knocked on my door, stuck their heads in and said, ‘We’re really glad you’re here, can’t wait to work for you, see you tomorrow.’ And they got on the elevator. And I started laughing and laughing. Someone came in and said, ‘What’s so funny?’ I said, ‘These guys have such a great sense of humor,’ and I kept looking at the elevator doors waiting for them to open. And they never opened up. Five minutes later, three more people from the group walked in and said, ‘Gotta go, I’ve got a volleyball game today.’ And the whole group was gone by twenty after five. I sat there stunned. It was at that moment where I knew it wasn’t going to work out for me. Going home at five o’clock at night? I’d never heard of that. Five o’clock was when it got quiet and you could do good work. That’s the way it was, and I said, ‘I’m going to get out of here. I can’t work with people like this.’”

As a television show, my father found Mad Men more hit than miss, though the repetition began to wear on him a bit.

“The writing is so inconsistent,” he said. “They just keep hitting the same beat and the same beat and the same beat. This guy is good, I’m not knocking him. It’s really impressive that a guy would tackle an era he had nothing to do with. But I’m 30 minutes into the show, and they’ve articulated the same problems five times. In 30 minutes, you’ve covered cigarettes five times and talked about this girl’s legs seven times.”

While Account Services Executive Pete Campbell is presented as a threat to Draper, my father didn’t buy it, especially after the former’s disastrous “death wish” pitch to Lucky Strike.

“The evil character, the Darth Vader kid would just get blown out of the water,” he said. “The great thing about Steven Spielberg, when he did Jaws, he didn’t say, ‘Oh my god, there’s a shark and it’s eating all the people.’ He showed the fucking shark. And he just showed it for about 30 seconds, and it just fucked everybody up for the rest of their lives. You can’t say in a corporate office that there’s guy nipping at my heels, you’ve got to show they’re formidable. You can’t have a guy get up and give a speech saying we’re all going to die anyway. You’ve got to have this guy coming in with amazing shit, because that’s the fear. Advertising is like baseball. You’re having a bad season, and they bring in a rookie, and he starts hitting line drives off the fucking wall, your job is really in jeopardy. So you’d better start taking steroids. This guy has no competition yet in that agency. In the ad agencies, the competition is grand. There’s always people nipping at your heels, and I’d be nipping at his heels. And he’d feel it. I nipped at all these guys. I always had guys coming after my jobs constantly. And I’d say, ‘Okay, try to get it. You’re better than me, you deserve it.’ And you know what, they couldn’t find that person.”

My father said he understood that if the show was four seasons into its lifespan, the characters probably developed much further than the “stick figures” he saw in the pilot, and the advertising might even have improved. But after 45-plus minutes, it was all about Don Draper.

“What makes a TV show ultimately is the characters, and so far it’s just the pilot, but you’ve got one good character, Don Draper,” he said. “Otherwise, it’s very one-dimensional and repetitive.”

But that was only part of the picture, and my father said that when the writing was good, it was very good. He liked the premise, how careful Weiner and the producers were with conveying a period in time and with setting it in what was effectively the Wild West in the Big Apple.

“It’s very clever what this guy has done in setting it back in the early ‘60s when there were no rules to life. I mean, everybody smoked. They smoked in the office, they smoked on airplanes. And they drank.”

Though he said the drinking wasn’t nearly as over the top as it might have been in 1960, my father remembered the offices as being a bit more lenient in his era than they might be today. He remembered a fellow copywriter from his early days at Ogilvy & Mather.

“She got hired two weeks after me, and she would come in still drunk from the night before,” he said. “She would slam her door shut and say, ‘No calls!’ She’d black out on the couch, wake up at about 11 and I had to take her down for coffee. She was very funny.”

My father also enjoyed the show because it gave him an opportunity to talk about his past, both in advertising and in the eventual move to writing for television.

“These people all wanted to be vice presidents, but that was a sad day for me,” he said. “I was 30 years old, Vice President, and it depressed me. But what it also did was it gave me permission to leave the business. I was way younger than any of the other creative directors. I didn’t really want to supervise other people, and I didn’t care about corporate pie charts. I was not motivated to have the corner office, and there were guys in there who wanted that dream.”

Instead, his relocation to Los Angeles with Ogilvy & Mather gave him the opportunity to break into Hollywood.

“It was The White Shadow and Bruce Paltrow” he said. “Hollywood did not care about advertising people, and Marc Rubin had gotten the head writer job through Paltrow. They had a pickup for five shows, and Paltrow wrote one, Rubin wrote one, I think Paltrow wrote another and Paltrow’s friend Steven Bochco came in and wrote number four. They only had one script assignment left, and Paltrow said, ‘Who do you want to write it?’ And Mark said, ‘Gary Kott?’ Paltrow said, ‘Who’s Gary Kott?’ ‘He works in an ad agency,’ and Bruce Paltrow hits the roof. ‘I have my choice of any writer in Hollywood? What do I care about an ad guy?’”

We continued to talk about my father’s career long after “When Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” fell into the credits, digging through my own hazy memories of visits to ad agency offices and commercial shoots along the way. We also covered some of what happened over the next few seasons ofMad Men, with my father guessing more often than not how certain events in and out of the world of advertising might have been handled on the show. It made me wonder how other people in advertising both past and present see Mad Men, or how doctors see shows like ER or Grey’s Anatomy or even The Cosby Show. And then I got back into Mad Men itself, watching the season’s penultimate episode like pretty much everyone else I know. Everyone else but my father.