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Best of TV

First, because I’m expecting a lot of outrage from obsessive TV watchers, let me explain the methodology for my choices. In ranking a show, I am comparing it not only to all the other series out there, but also to previous seasons of the show. This would explain, for example, the relatively low ranking of The Wire, whose fifth and final season, while better than anything else on TV, was weaker than the four seasons that preceded it. And let me apologize for not including Mad Men. I just don’t get all the fuss about it.


The Best Shows



1) Lost

Let’s start by taking a moment to laugh at all of those who gave up on Lost during the admittedly weak first six episodes of the third season. Then, let’s take another moment to laugh at those who suggested Heroes was a better show than Lost. The thing is, Lost never really lost (yes, that’s an obvious pun) its mojo. Even the supposedly slow second season is awesome when watched continuously on DVD. But the shortened fourth season is easily the best and most audacious season yet. The sci-fi elements came to the fore, the pace quickened and the few flashbacks there were (Locke being continuously visited by Richard Alpert being the most prominent) gave answers about questions that mattered rather than explaining where Jack got his tattoos. The more prominent role played by Ben Linus (Michael Emerson), who along with Terry O’Quinn is the best actor on the show, also helped with the quality of the season, Think back to the best moments of the season, and chances are they will involve Ben. The desperation in Ben’s voice as, in an unsuccessful gambit, he frantically tells Keamy that he really doesn’t care about his daughter and the shattered look on his face after she is killed. And who can ever forget the chilling moment in the finale when Ben takes his revenge by frantically stabbing Keamy? As Locke asks him what he’s done, Ben chillingly replies, “So.” It was the frequency of these little moments that keep the mythology of the show believable. Jin asking Sun, “Is the baby mine?”, Sawyer whispering in Kate’s ear before taking a plunge from the helicopter and, of course, The Constant, which would surely top every list for best episode of the year. I must admit I was close to tears when Desmond met Penny in the past (or did that count as the present?) and begged her to give him his phone number. The 2004 phone call at the end of the episode was similarly heartbreaking and handled with extreme sensitivity.



2) The Office




For the purposes of this list, I am only including those episodes which aired in 2008, which would include the tail end of season four and the first nine episodes of season five. For a more detailed dissection of what makes The Office the most consistently funny comedy on television (sorry, 30 Rock fans), check out this New Yorker piece comparing the US and British versions of the show. I’m going to mainly concentrate on Amy Ryan. Her character Holly, who replaced Toby in Human Resources in the season four finale, was the perfect foil for Michael. She can be as naïve as Michael (the way she believed that Kevin is mentally challenged, whose behavior hilariously did nothing to challenge that notion) and as dorky (the Lazy Scranton rap in the first episode of this season and the Physical parody in the second). Ryan’s send-off was also perfectly appropriate, as she and Michael sing Life is a Highway multiple times. Ultimately, Holly was a smarter version of Michael. Unlike him, she realized that a long-distance relationship wouldn’t work. Oh, and major props to the writers for the way they handled the Jim-Pam engagement. Getting two of your main characters together has destroyed lesser shows like Moonlighting and Cheers, but has only improved The Office.



3) Friday Night Lights




I really shouldn’t like this show. I hate teen soap operas and don’t understand American football. But none of that really matters when you have such a top notch ensemble. The second season, with its murder plot and general melodrama, was mediocre, but what should be the final season of this ratings-challenged is a return to form. The interaction between Mr and Mrs Coach may be the best thing about the show, but this season also brought out the best in Matt Saracen, Smash Williams and Jason Street. Plot is really of no consequence in FNL; the only reason to watch this show is its minute observations of small-town Texas and the fantastic acting.


4) The Wire



A journalist friend of mine once mis-defined penultimate in a story as more ultimate than ultimate rather than next to last. Both definitions would be appropriate for The Wire. While it would be a mistake to concentrate too much on individual episodes as The Wire is meant to be digested as a season-length arc, the penultimate episode always brings together the various storylines in immensely satisfying and uncontrived ways. In Late Edition, the second last episode of the final season, we learn the fate of the four children of the fourth season as Michael kills Snoop without any hint of violence or malice and is forced to say a tender goodbye to his beloved brother Bug. My only quibble with this season was the portrayal of the Baltimore Sun. Probably because I am a journalist myself, the depiction of the newspaper just didn’t ring true. Then again, if I was a dock worker, my least favorite season would probably be the second one.


5) Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles



Yes, I know how ridiculous this show is. It’s plot has as many holes as Heroes (which is surely the worst show on television) and Thomas Dekker and Shirley Manson are terribly wooden actors. But if you don’t think too much about it, this is actually a really fun show. Most of the credit for that goes to Summer Glau, who should be familiar to fans of Firefly. As the good terminator, she has shown some subtle signs of independence and human feeling, which should come to the fore if the show is renewed for another season. I’m hoping the upcoming Terminator movie with Christian Bale as John Connor will incorporate some elements of this show. Overall, each episode has enough thrills and twists to keep me watching. It is also the most improved show on TV after a boring first season.


Other random stuff from the year in television:



The funniest scene of the year: Alec Baldwin of 30 Rock channels Redd Fox and many others in increasingly hilarious impersonations. How does this guy not win every award out there while Jeremy Piven wins an Emmy every fucking year?



Best ever Devil: Ray Wise (a television legend for his role as Leland Palmer in Twin Peaks) plays the devil as a cross between a horny teenager and a used car salesman in Reaper.



A great performance in an otherwise mediocre show: John Noble as the mentally challenged genius in Fringe. His non-sequiters always have me laughing but he also manages to bring out some pathos.

The Mumbai Blasts

Alright, so writer/editor/analyst Nitin Pai of The Acorn and myself agreed to have a sort of public conversation on the Mumbai attacks and their aftermath. Below are the first two emails; I will follow with a third soon and hopefully Nitin will find the time to reply. Without further ado...
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Hi Nitin,

In some ways, it feels like the dust has settled on the Mumbai attacks - at least on the discourse front - but in many other ways, it feels like the party's just getting started. The atmosphere on both sides of the border is unbearably tense. There was a report in Dawn about how a prank call from someone purporting to be Pranab Mukherjee put Pakistan's military on alert. I guess this is what it would feel like if Brad Pitt went over to Jennifer Aniston's parents' house during Thanksgiving, only if Pitt and Aniston both had nuclear weapons.

There are three sets of "things" about the attacks and the aftermath: the set of things which I know for sure, the set of things I'm not sure of, and the set of things that I'm completely lost on.

Things I know for sure

1. Having Asif Zardari in charge during a crisis is a bad thing

I bet even the lawyers are missing Musharraf right now. That guy was smooth, knew how to play the media game, and could talk up a storm. Zardari, on the other hand, is a bumbling idiot. He clearly learned nothing from his wife, who was even better at playing the rhetoric game than Musharraf (she was able to convince the entire establishment in DC and London that the chosen one from a feudal-aristocratic family was most attuned to democratic and liberal principles, for crying out loud). Zardari is liable to say or do something immensely stupid, which would be harmful at the best of times but can be near-apocalyptic during a crisis between two nuclear-armed states. Having a guy who confused the causes of World War I for the causes of World War II, or who went on Indian television and talked about instituting a no-first-use policy on nukes without running it by the people who actually decide nuclear policy in Pakistan in charge is a bad thing.

2. India's options are severely limited

India cannot launch an invasion or anything of the sort, because Pakistan has nuclear weapons. It cannot expect the U.S. to do its bidding to the extent that it would like because, as Negeen mentioned, Pakistan actually has leverage over the U.S. in the form of 100,000 troops on its western border (though this is not to say the U.S. won't do its bidding at all, quite the contrary). Even "low-level" responses, such as precision military strikes in Pakistani Kashmir are fraught with danger. Finally, doing nothing is perhaps the most unpalatable option of all: the Indian people, if my reading of various Indian newspapers and blogs is correct, want to throw a punch, for cathartic purposes if nothing else. But at this point, they cannot take anything other than extremely lame measures like calling off India's cricket tour to Pakistan or not allowing the release of some Shah Rukh Khan movie across the border.

I was leading my weekly discussion section this past Wednesday for a introductory course in international relations. It was all undergrads, but they're smart undergrads. So I asked them a simple question: "What would you do?" If you were an adviser to Manmohan Singh right now, I asked, what do you tell him? I was met with silence. I waited. Nothing. "No, seriously. What do you say to him?" Nothing. I waited a couple of seconds, before I moved on to discuss this week's readings, but it was telling that there wasn't even a suggestion.

3. This was not India's 9/11

The reason 9/11 was America's 9/11 was that the U.S, as a state, was not used to political violence. Of any kind. Even its civil rights movement was abnormally non-violent. The idea of civilians being targeted for political aims was not just anathema to them, but simply new.

This is the main reason that Mumbai is not India's 9/11. India is a violent country, by most standards. From secessionist movements to ethnic riots to religious violence, India has seen it all.

And yet the reaction to this episode easily outflanks the reaction to other forms of violence, even if they were more brutal in terms of lives cost. By way of illustration, not only was Narendra Modi not punished for aiding and abetting riots that killed more than 2000 people - ten times the casualties of the Mumbai attacks - but he and his party were in fact rewarded by being reelected.

There is, of course, a very simple reason for this dichotomy: notions of Self and Other. Identities, as Alex Wendt might say, constitute interests. Put differently, who we think we are - and, by extension, who we think we are not - will impact what we consider to be impacting our values and beliefs. It's clear to me from the mobilization of civil society in India in the last ten days that violence perpetrated by groups originating from Pakistan simply means something different than violence perpetrated by one's own, even if the latter costs more in terms of lives lost. We in Pakistan are no strangers to this phenomenon. Innocent civilians lost due to American drone attacks elicit a very different reaction than the Taliban bombing girls' schools does.

Things I don't know for sure

1. What the motives of the attacks were

Assuming we can abandon the language of evil-doers and killing for killing's sake, I am unsure of the precise motivations for the attacks. I suppose how one conceives of the motivations of the attackers is in part determined by how one conceives of the attackers themselves.

If, for instance, one considers the attackers to be operating as an extension of the arm of the Pakistani state, then there are two possibilities. First, the attackers wanted to widen the low-level war fought in Kashmir for two decades to the Indian "mainland". Second, and more convolutely, the attackers were sent to escalate tensions on the eastern border, thus affording the military and the ISI the opportunity to take forces away from the western border where they are fighting an unpopular and difficult war.

On the other hand, if the attackers are a relatively autonomous entity, the possibilities change. One idea could be to sow discord between Pakistan and India, retard the five-year peace process which would marginalize them if it actually came to fruition, and create operational and political space for them to operate. If this is the case, they have already succeeded. Another possibility could be that this was a replica of Bali, i.e., a targeting of westerners in an eastern country. If that is the case, it is merely another step in these groups' war against the west.

I really don't know.

2. Is there anything the Congress Party can do to stop the BJP winning elections next year?

Crises are usually good for political parties in power, if they handle them correctly. The Republicans in the U.S., for example, used the rally-round-the-flag effect for a good six years to stay in power, despite being terrible at leading and governing. The Indian case seems different to me, because as a distant observer, I sense a fair degree of pent-up frustration with Congress' ability to protect Indians, and this Mumbai attack seems to be the straw that broke the camel's back. Do you think Congress has a snowball's chance in hell next year? If yes, why?

Things I am completely lost on

1. How the Pakistani security establishment is going to change priorities, if at all

It's no secret that post-9/11, the military and the ISI have targeted militant groups that operate against domestic targets - such as Shias - and targets to the west - such as in Afghanistan - a lot more than they've targeted groups that operate against targets to the east. I wouldn't go so far as saying the latter have been left alone, but they've definitely been given more leeway.

I wonder if that will change. On the one hand, this crisis has shown that these groups can mean a lot of trouble for Pakistan, because bringing the state to the brink of war with a militarily and economically stronger rival is a seriously suboptimal outcome. On the other hand, the preceding reason could well be used to justify their continued existence. In other words, the severe imbalance of power between Pakistan and India could be interpreted as a reason to keep these groups hanging around, just in case.

2. What Barry-O is thinking right now

You know how I feel really sorry for? The guy who idealistically claimed throughout his campaign that we - whomever "we" may be - "will change America and change the world." As I said in another class I TA, Obama is barely going to be able to change the carpeting in the White House, forget the entire bloody world (and I say this as an Obama supporter).

One issue is simply the course of events, which are invariably more complicated once you're in power than when you talk about them as a dispassionate observer. If Obama was faced with this crisis as President, what would he have done? Nothing too different than George W. Bush, I would imagine.

A more important issue is what the underlying intellectual philosophy is that guides Obama's thoughts. He seems to come from a tradition of realism, especially when he says things like "I have enormous sympathy for the foreign policy of George H. W. Bush." Indeed, this is the exact reason he picked Robert Gates as Defense Secretary - not all that team of rivals nonsense. On the other hand, he's spoken about supporting democracies and interventions in places like Darfur that make him closer to the liberal hawk/interventionist camp in the U.S. (think Madeline Albright). So when he picks the liberal-hawk-to-end-all-
liberal-hawks (Hillary) to be Secretary of State, I don't know what to think about his philosphy on international relations. And not knowing his general intellectual persuasions makes it harder to guess what he would think or do in specific crises like this one.

I guess that's a lot for one email. I'll shut up now, and look forward to your thoughts.

Best regards,

Ahsan
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Ahsan,

Using the 9/11 analogy or anticipating President Obama's stance on these attacks look at the situation from an America-centric perspective. While this may allow a greater degree of debate among scholars and laymen alike, it is best we set aside these distorting prisms if we want to examine the situation with clarity.

I have previously characterised contemporary India-Pakistan relations as a game where India faces three players on the Pakistani side. India would like to engage and give the benefit of the doubt to one player (now Zardari & Co, for the want of a better name), but contain or suppress the second (Gul & Co, again for the want of a better name). The third Pakistani player, Kayani & Co, stood in between the Zardari & Gul companies, with evolving relationships with either. The relationship between Zardari & Co and Gul & Co appears to India as antagonistic, but not beyond all doubt. The dynamics of this four-cornered relationship was evolving, and was perhaps headed for some stability, until the Mumbai terrorist attacks were executed by the Lashkar-e-Taiba, likely with the ISI's connivance.


The fact that the attacks were carried out, and allowed to be carried out suggests:


a) That whatever might be the long-term benefits of having a civilian dispensation in Pakistan, it is not a credible interlocutor in the short-term.


b) That, in the post-Musharraf dispensation, the quarters that control Pakistan's nuclear weapons and the quarters that control its jihadis are operating increasingly independently.


c) That unless India acts forcefully, it may have to live with an escalating level of terrorist attacks. The Mumbai blasts of 1993 set off the trend of serial blasts. The Mumbai blasts of 2006 set off a new series of synchronised bombings. The Mumbai attack of 2008 might indicate a new wave of urban guerilla warfare.

This suggests that India must match its long-term commitment to a Pakistan's internal reconciliation and democracy with a short-term disregard for the unwilling or impotent de jure rulers. India's response must not be constrained by the need to keep Zardari & Co in power.


Second, far from having no options, it must be noted that India has a few options: not conducting a punitive strike is an option; sending troops to Afghanistan is an option; working towards an international coalition (of the kind proposed by Robert Kagan recently) is an option; bridging the United States and Iran to make use of the land corridor from Bandar Abbas to Kabul via the Zaranj-Delaram highway is an option; lobbying the international community to tie economic aid to Pakistan to Islamabad's meeting concrete milestones is also an option. In fact, if it is established that Gul & Co conducted the Mumbai attacks independent of Kayani & Co, the nuclear dimension becomes more manageable.


Third, the Mumbai attackers might well have failed in a broad strategic sense: by uniting the fissiparous Indian polity on the need to defeat jihadi terrorism. True, the post-Mumbai spirit might fizzle out, but already, politicians and policymakers have come around to tackling terrorism in the right earnest.


As I write this, Zardari & Co have arrested a top-rung Lashkar-e-Taiba leader and raided its Muzzafarabad camps. Symbolic as it is, it is still a welcome move. But will the other players on the Pakistani side accept this quietly?

regards,

Nitin

Speaking of Prank Phone Calls

Sometimes you can be a bit too careful:

Florida Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen received a phone call from Obama yesterday to wish her congratulations on her re-election and to convey other political-type niceties — like the importance of working together.

Problem was, she didn’t believe it was him. She thought it was one of those wacky radio station stunts wherein a DJ gets you to believe he is someone famous. You know, like when Sarah Palin was spoofed into thinking she was talking to French President Nicolas Sarkozy.

Determined not to be “Palin-ized,” Ros-Lehtinen hung up on him.

So Obama’s head honcho Rahm Emanuel got involved and called her back. She promptly hung up on him too.

”I thought it was one of the radio stations in South Florida playing an incredible, elaborate, terrific prank on me,” Ros-Lehtinen told the Miami Herald. “They got Fidel Castro to go along. They’ve gotten Hugo Chavez and others to fall for their tricks. I said, ‘Oh, no, I won’t be punked’.”

It finally took Representative Howard Berman to get involved before she would believe Obama wanted to talk to her. Berman called his colleague, but she was wary of him too.

In fact, she demanded that Berman share a private joke they share to convince her that Berman was actually Berman.

No details of the private joke has emerged but that top-secret intelligence was enough for Ros-Lehtinen to believe that this was all for real.

She then told Berman to tell Obama to try again.

“I know this sounds very presumptuous, but please tell President-elect Obama he can call me now and I will take his call,” she said.