...once we Americans have ushered a writer into the contemporary pantheon, we will lie to ourselves to keep him there. Brutal review of Denis Johnson's latest in the Atlantic.
This made me think of nothing so much as the second season of Heroes, actually, and this truth-to-power comment I saw on the SF Signal review of the mid-season finale:
Watching you guys come to realize how awful this show is, but still refuse to admit that it was awful from the beginning, is like watching the Bush administration talk about Iraq. Even when they finally could admit that things weren't going well, they still insisted that it was news, that "we all fell for the same faulty intelligence", as if Hans Blix never told the UN that there were no WMD and as if there weren't massive protests all across the country before the war even started. They refuse to accept that they were lying to themselves from the start by lying to themselves now and convincing themselves that "no one could have predicted" that anything would go wrong. You guys are never going to admit that this has been a godawful show since day one. It's always going to be about how "season two sucks". You're so afraid to face that fact that you've been watching this worthless piece of shit for this long that you're going to keep pretending it's just seasons two to make yourself feel better about having ever watched season one. Because if you actually faced the truth, that you could have watched even one season of a show this bad, you would have no choice left but to kill yourselves.I'm not quite ready to kill myself, but he's surely right: the second season of Heroes has accomplished nothing so much as pointing out that the first season wasn't actually good, either, despite seeming like it was kind-of sort-of good at the time. There's just no "there" there, and there never was—like Lost before it, the creators seemed to have no idea what they actually wanted to do with the show after it accidentally caught on.
Memo to creators: Plan out your shows.
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