What are the classics of the 21st century thus far?

nice point!

i thought the great feat of the sopranos was making an audience love every mob cliche again and again even though they were old hat for decades. but, again, those cliches just make for good drama/t.v. they are comforting to people. like zombies and brains! they always want to eat them and people will watch them eat them forever.

i agree with this, but to a larger extent i think the mafia is like high school or the aristocracies of the past--it's a fertile setting for creating heightened stakes, a kind of funhouse mirror for ordinary life.

like, the Godfather could be boiled down to "shall i take over dad's business or be my own man?"

Ugh but still a man

you guys still haven't told me if you agree that one episode of a t.v. show can be a considered a single work of art like a poem. and be divorced from the series as a whole. there are louie episodes that are better than a lot of recent movies i've seen.

http://www.geekosystem.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/SMBC_Title.png

scott: i think it's a great point and one too often passed over. it's hard to make those judgments with stuff that has these long multi-season narrative arcs perhaps. but i think there's an interesting tension to doing an episodic narrative--something that mad men, in particular, seems to push to its limits.

oh is this sopranos vs. breaking bad now?

Sopranos is faust, basically. Tony is the devil. Melfi is a standin for the audience. Everyone else is consumed or destroyed by Tony's monstrosity.

Breaking Bad is much thinner thematically imho - as I said at the end of Season 4: Feel like this show is about one thing and one thing only, really: being addicted to the tension that comes from high risk behavior. The rest is just mechanics, action movie shit.

you guys still haven't told me if you agree that one episode of a t.v. show can be a considered a single work of art like a poem

absolutely agree with this

Faust! I like it. Tony sorta seems like Faust and Mephistopheles.

agree that BB is thinner. which is why, as much as I love it, im not sure it's something i'll ever return to when it's over. but of course who knows.

like that episode of breaking bad where jesse parties for days with hobos in his house. that was a better drug movie in 44 minutes than any drug movie i can think of in recent memory. not saying it was a deathless epic masterpiece but you didn't really have to watch every episode to get that episode. it stands on its own.

you guys still haven't told me if you agree that one episode of a t.v. show can be a considered a single work of art like a poem. and be divorced from the series as a whole. there are louie episodes that are better than a lot of recent movies i've seen.

― scott seward, Monday, January 28, 2013 10:42 AM (10 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I think you are otm here, especially about Pine Barrens, which I am rewatching right now since you mentioned it

In the case of The Wire, I'd say that the basic units are the individual seasons. That's the level on which you see the most formal unity. Focusing on episodes makes a lot of sense in Community, where episodes can vary a lot stylistically and in terms of quality. Same with Seinfeld.

Pine Barrens is an obvious one. University. College. maybe a few others.

An old, but valid, definition of a classic is a work of art that is still sought out and appreciated, one that still has a wide audience or readership, a century after it first appeared. This gives the work five or more generations to settle into the culture, and lets the tatses of the original audience to be erased by several new waves of enthusiasm and the reactions aginst them.

Easily 99.5% of art and lit gets washed away in those tides. What's left after all that time has to compete with whatever is new and vital in the current culture and hold its own. Under the circumstances, it's a pretty safe bet that most of what has been touted here is wrong, but I endorse the general sense of the thread that films will outperform books by a wide margin. I would add to that my hunch that a majority of the classic books written since 2000 will be non-fiction.

Just catching up, the ones I like are:

• animation
• big telly box sets
• grand theft auto

• r&b
• skyscrapers

more important question: after the global warming holocaust, what will extraterrestrials want to watch when they retrieve our artifacts and take them back to their space museums?

girls gone wild

that reminds me, im pretty confident about A.I. fitting the bill. (not to rehash that debate yet again...)

Aliens might start with Planet Earth.

i'm more of a bicentennial man myself.

than an A.I. man.

same movie really.

Re: treating TV episodes as discrete works of art, I think it's totally valid but I seem to have more trouble with doing so myself the less an individual episode stands on its own as an independent work. Long-form narrative just sorta becomes a single, blurred single unit in my head, and there are moments that stand out but rarely single episodes. I personally tend to revere single episodes of, like, sitcoms and more procedural-y shows (like choice ST:TNG eps, or that first season Homicide ep with the araber). But I would by no means balk if someone with a brain capable of remembering single episodes were to champion a small piece of the larger pie.

This is probably because, since the advent of the season-long DVD box set, watching six straight episodes of a show has become my preferred method of watching TV by a country mile. Similar, I guess, to how I prefer to not just dip into a novel for an hour here and there.

i hope the aliens like party down. any one episode of that show is a treat. any single episode better than the hangover or a zillion other recent comedy movies too.

I often wonder if there is some distant planet that is home to some technologically superior aliens that have been watching us for years and they love our movies but think Drive Angry 2>>>>Citizen Kane.

i'm glad that after much disgreement with scott seward itt the two of us can bro up over our love for party down

i still think about the sopranos all the time. one big difference between the sopranos and shows like breaking bad and sons of anarchy is that i think david chase hated the soprano family from the beginning.

p sure that in the future major film studios will each only release one multibillion dollar budgeted film a year and that everything else will be on-demand or w/e for the various smaller screens, making the delineation between tv and movies really fuzzy/irrelevant, esp as things like commercial breaks get phased out.

does danny mcbride hate kenny powers?

killer ryan posts itt fwiw

doubt it, especially given the way the character was softened/redeemed in the last season (xp)

did they really do that? i disapprove! stricken from the halls of classics now!

yeah i wasn't happy about it either

this is a good other thread to mention deus ex in

wolf hall trilogy is obvs a major masterpiece

Oasis 2006 compilation album 'stop the clocks'