“I don’t believe in much, but I do believe in duct tape.”

–Miles Straum, “Lost”

The wild hecticness of the past two weeks ought to end on Tuesday night: I will have finished the Last of the Big Projects at Harvard Business School, and Mr. Improbable will (ash willing) be home.

I’ve missed him, but Milo and I had gotten into a nice routine of walks and napping (Milo)/working (me), and then in the evenings snuggling and watching movies and TV together. (I did wind up watching “Caprica.”) It’s been okay.

And it gave Milo an excellent opportunity to practice his comic timing.

He has an uncanny knack for sighing, growling, grumbling at the perfect moment when we’re watching a video, and I swear he’s getting better at it. I’m not pretending to be one of those dog owners who insists her dog understands English (even if he did, he still wouldn’t know what’s going on on “Lost” any more than I do). But he likes the attention of being laughed at, and I can’t help but wonder if he’s figured out that growling when he hears the sound of a threatening voice, or sighing when the music swells dramatically, will get him laughs.

He comes from funny people.

Other people’s fat, that is.

It’s the only possible explanation for last night’s episode of “Lost.” Apparently, Hugo Reyes has one consistent character trait, and one only: he is fat. Or so the writers seem to think.

Spoilers below the break:

Ta-Nehisi Coates has a brilliant post up about weight loss, the American food industry, environmentalism, racism, and stuff. He’s one of my favorite bloggers anyway, and this post exemplifies why; in essence, he’s trying, as always, to get his readers to look at the bigger picture and not point fingers at individuals. This is a huge part of what I try to do with etiquette, and what part of my whole “epidemic of rudeness” post was about — looking at systemic causes for why people behave the way they do, instead of just running around shrieking “Narcissism! Internet! Mindlessness! Selfish bastards!”

You really have to read the whole thing to understand how he gets from low-fat Oreos to racism, but here’s two key paragraphs:

But more than that, I understand enough to be wary of inveighing against people who eat at McDonalds–or even McDonald’s itself–of harshly interrogating the morality of flesh-eaters (I am, of course, among them.) It’s not that any of this is wrong per se, so much as it’s limited. When you’re constantly naming people for their sins of consumption, it’s very hard to get them to act against a system of consumption. More than that, it often misses the point of how hard it is to pull oneself out of the Matrix, and thus underestimates the Matrix, in that it assumes we can win by yelling.

Likewise, I think in my best writing here, in the writing that really matters, I’ve worked to steer us away from the reductive parlor game of “Is this/he/she racist?” It’s useful to a point, but ultimately self-serving. It underestimates our demons and it underestimates how an entire system warped nearly every institution in this country, and continues to warp it to this day. What I’d rather we us understand is some sense of the big system, some sense of American white supremacy as mechanized racism.

You might disagree with some of his specific points, but the overall thrust of his argument is, I think, profound.

(Also, while we are on the topic of the U.S. food system, did anyone catch “Parks & Recreation” last night? Yes, it tripped some of my body-acceptance triggers, but I thought for a sitcom, it did a damn good job of showing some of the problems of our current food system and legitimate points of view from both the liberal and libertarian sides. And all that along with a B-plot featuring an iPod/Roomba hybrid called “DJ Roomba” and a C-plot of April becoming disenchanted with her two gay boyfriends. No small accomplishment, that.)

Hardcore fans have probably already seen this, but just in case — the past five seasons of “Lost” in eight minutes.

Amusing to watch if you’re planning to view the season premiere on your own. Vital to watch if you’re going to make a social evening out of it, so you’re not That Guy saying, “Wait, so it’s the 1970s?” “Dude, I thought that guy was dead” and so on.

Last week’s episode of “The Office” was, even more than usual, a virtual seminar in How Not to Do Things, from How Not to Play Office Politics to How Not to RSVP to a Wedding (“I’ll just text you for directions the day of. And put me down for whatever’s fanciest. Unless there’s ribs.”)

However, there is one thing that Pam Beesley-soon-to-be-Halpert got right, and that she’s gotten right before: how to call someone out on bad behavior.

In this episode, Michael warns Pam that if she lies to him, her baby will be born a liar, because he will imbibe dishonesty through her breast milk. To which Pam replies, “Please don’t talk about my breast milk.”

That’s how you do it. You don’t interpret the behavior, you describe it, as neutrally and objectively as possible, in a calm voice. If Pam had said, “Please respect my privacy,” or “Please don’t say things that are work-inappropriate,” that would be an invitation — as she knows all too well — for a long digression on Michael Scott’s part as to why talking about his employee’s breast milk is not an invasion of privacy or inappropriate at work. Because anyone who will talk about his employee’s breast milk, pretty well by definition, does not understand the concepts of privacy and appropriateness. But he could hardly argue that he was, as a matter of empirical fact, talking about her breast milk.

She has done this before with Michael, most notably when she said, “Please don’t throw garbage at me.” And here’s the thing: it works. It works about as well as anything will work with the Michael Scotts in our lives. He never did throw garbage at her again after that, nor, at least for the rest of the episode, did he talk about her breast milk.

Of course, he continues to violate all norms of social conduct in every other way, because he is Michael Scott, and has the emotional development and social skills of a not particularly cool kindergartner.* This is what’s frustrating about people like that — and we all have them, in some version or another, in our lives — they never generalize to an overarching principle. Tell them not to throw garbage at you, and they’ll just put butter on your desk.

But hey, at least they’re not throwing garbage at you anymore. Sometimes that’s as good as it gets.

*I know at least one kindergartner whose empathy, humor, and sense of occasion far outstrips that of Michael Scott, so if you are the parent of a similar one, please don’t take what I said personally. That’s why I added that “not particularly cool” clause.

If you, too, are a fellow “Mad Men” addict who finds it hard to get from Sunday to Sunday (or Monday to Monday, if like us you download from iTunes), here’s a midweek fix for you, courtesy of Hulu: the half-hour “Alfred Hitchcock Presents.” These were done in the late 1950s … you can imagine Don and Betty, pre-kids, kicking back in the evening with a drink and a smoke and enjoying these little tales of deception and intrigue.

They really are quite good, and Mr. Hitchcock’s mini-monologues before the commercial breaks are wonderful. The man had presence. He had issues, but he had presence. I can just imagine Don squirming in his seat and muttering to Betty, “Don’t they understand that without advertising, they wouldn’t get their programs on the air?” (A point that’s frequently made about “Mad Men” is that Sterling Cooper is an unusually behind-the-times ad firm. Even in the early 1960s, there were firms that were hiring and promoting women and Jews, and appealing to youth culture, and using irony. Mr. Hitchcock’s delightfully insulting intros to the commercials were clearly beloved by his advertisers, but I can’t imagine Sterling Cooper allowing this for one of their clients.)

I’ve always been more of a book than a movie person, and my first introduction to Alfred Hitchcock wasn’t as a director, but as an editor of a mystery magazine and subsequent anthologies with titles like “Stories to Stay Awake By” and “Slay Ride.” Nedra Tyre, Henry Slesar, Robert Bloch, Lawrence Block … ah, the names bring back happy times. I had a whole stack of those paperback anthologies as a kid. I bought a “Best Of” anthology about a year ago, to take on the train when I was going to New York to meet my publishers, which is probably what led me to start watching his show on Hulu.

One thing that hit me when I was reading the anthology last year, and that is incredibly noticeable in the show: there didn’t used to be no-fault divorce. Which meant that, if your marriage wasn’t working out, you either had to find cause, or if the divorce was agreed upon by both parties, one partner had to take the fall (I think “mental cruelty” was a common out), or else … you got creative. Which of course is where the murder mystery tends to start. It’s really astonishing how many of his stories (magazine and television) are about husbands and wives killing each other. Now, I’m hardly politically correct enough to maintain that a murder-mystery show ought to be providing us with good role models, but is it completely out of the question that, at least once in a while, the husband and wife might not be adversaries but co-conspirators? It is in the world of the Hitch, apparently.

Another thing to pay attention to if you watch the show is how, if the criminal gets away at the end, Mr. Hitchcock’s final monologue always includes the fact that they were ultimately convicted offscreen. He says this with a Severus Snape-like contemptuousness, and although Mr. Hitchcock’s default vocal setting appeared to be “contempt,” it does seem rather special in this case. I think the network, or the advertisers, were pushing him to maintain a certain morality to the show that he didn’t agree with. “But of course, they were cot and brot to jus-tisssssssss,” he spits.

At any rate, do check them out. They’re quite fun. You can start with this one, if your populist rage against bankers hasn’t been assuaged by Ben Bernanke’s assertion that the recession is over. What revenge against bankers looked like in a simpler time …

And, did anyone get to see the series finale of “King of the Hill”? Just as pilots are difficult to do well, because of the narrative demands of exposition, finales can be tricky, too. Life doesn’t tie up in neat knots, so how do the writers balance art and naturalism, providing a sense of an “ending” without making the hospital corners too neat? And the nature of KOTH, I think, made writing a finale particularly difficult.

If a show is a series of one-off episodes, you don’t need a series finale. When — or perhaps if — “The Simpsons” ever goes off the air, they can do an ordinary episode, or get a bunch of guest celebs in to make it special. But there’s no ongoing story that needs to be wrapped up.

When there is an ongoing narrative … well, you can do that well or badly. I liked the ending of “The Shield,” although I know some people felt Vic didn’t get punished quite enough. “Deadwood” got cut down prematurely, having been promised four seasons and only given three, so that show’s finale was an exercise in trying to achieve a kind of emotional closure when the narrative arc had been interrupted. (I think they did a good job, but that’s because, for me, the most significant throughline of the show was the long, brutal, complicated love story of Al and Trixie. What he does for her in the final episode showed so clearly the extent to which love could redeem him — and the extent to which it couldn’t.)

“The Sopranos” … mmm, yeah. Not such a great job on that one. And do not even get me started on “Battle-frackin’-star Galactica,” the ending of which not only failed to satisfy any narrative logic, but was deeply offensive on every possible level: it was scientifically illiterate, ableist, pretty well erased the role of black people in human history –

Oh. Sorry. “King of the Hill.” I told you not to let me get started on “Battlestar Galactica”!

Anyway, KOTH was always a weird grey area between shows that are one-offs and serialized shows. There were ongoing plot arcs (Hank’s relationship with Cotton, the Dale/Nancy/John Redcorn triangle), but the characters never fundamentally developed. So what do you do with a show where people can die, but not age, or even change clothes?

You do it subtle, that’s what you do. It’s very possible to watch the finale of KOTH and not even realize it was the finale. The moments of grace that end it are small ones. Hank and Bobby grilling together, of course. But also Dale massaging Nancy’s headaches away. And, most touchingly, Kahn Souphanousinphone telling his daughter to “Take the night off [from homework], you three grades ahead already.” If there was an underlying theme to the show, it is about what it means to live up to a parent’s expectations — or what it means to have to modify those expectations for the child you actually have. Both Kahn and Hank wanted a son, and neither of them got one. (There’s a dissertation to be written on gender roles in that show, there is.) In the final episode, you get the sense that maybe both men have decided that their children are, in fact, good enough.

And that was very sweet.

I think “Seinfeld” should have gone out a bit more like KOTH did. It had a similar structure: events happen and their aftereffects continue from episode to episode, but no one ever really changes. Obviously, “Seinfeld” couldn’t go for the tart sentimentality of KOTH, it wasn’t that kind of show. But it was a mistake for them to do a big blow-out wrap-up, when nothing had ever happened that needed to be wrapped up in the first place.

Did anyone happen to catch NBC’s new comedy “Community” last week? If not, you can watch it on Hulu (or probably on the NBC site, but that’s way overbusy to navigate). If so, what did you think?

As a former college teacher, of course, I’m predisposed to like any show in an academic setting, but that personal prejudice aside, I thought it was fairly good. Pilot episodes are always difficult, because it’s tricky to get all the exposition across and set up the lines of character development and conflict in a way that doesn’t seem horribly forced and unnatural. (The only show I’ve ever seen that didn’t do this, that had a remarkably naturalistic pilot and yet still left the viewer with a really strong sense of who was who and what was going on, was “Friday Night Lights.” Of which I watched exactly one episode. So maybe it wasn’t such a great pilot after all.)

“Community” handled that fairly well by creating a first-day-of-school setting in which the getting-to-know-you scenes seemed more or less appropriate. The fact that they did the entire first episode as a riff on, and ultimately, you discover, a tribute to John Hughes’s “The Breakfast Club” didn’t exactly hurt as far as I was concerned, either.

I’m delighted to see John Oliver from “The Daily Show” as a psychology professor, because he is hilarious and adorable. I was less thrilled with Chevy Chase as a retired businessman doing continuing-ed to keep sharp. Mr. Chase did a fine job, but I simply couldn’t turn off the fact that he was Chevy Chase. Mr. Oliver, despite the fact that his character is not unlike his TDS persona, still seemed like a professor to me; Mr. Chase seemed like Chevy Chase doing an SNL skit. He’s just too big. He’s been around too long.

Abed, a Palestinian-American student with … interesting social skills, will probably be the breakout character. Because everyone on the show talks incredibly fast, I’m not sure if the main character (an unethical lawyer played by Joel McHale from “The Soup”) is really calling him “Op-ed” or not. If so, I have to admit — the “white person can’t get brown person’s name right” is a tired and offensive joke. But dang, if you’re going to go to there, calling a Palestinian “Op-ed” is pretty funny, given the amount of newspaper ink that gets spilled over the Israel/Palestine conflict.

Again, though, I’m not even sure if this was a joke that was being made, or one I was just hearing. Maybe they were trying to get as high a joke-per-minute rate as they could for the pilot, but these people talk fast. I bet a transcript of the pilot episode would be at least two pages longer than a transcript for any other half-hour sitcom. If you’re hard of hearing or if English isn’t your native language, put closed-caption on for this one.

A final criticism is that the entire premise of the show is flawed. Jeff Winger, the lawyer, never got an undergraduate degree, and has to get one in order to avoid being disbarred, which is why he is at a community college with all the “losers.” But you can’t get a bachelor’s degree at a community college. They give two-year associate’s degrees.

Am I a big academic geek for being bothered by that? It’s okay if the answer is “yes.” (You know the rule: don’t ask questions you don’t want the answers to.) I’m very willing to suspend disbelief to a certain degree (no pun intended, and why we make unintended puns is a topic for another post) but the invention of an institution that doesn’t exist, outside of actual science fiction, bugs me. Okay, sure, a doofus of the magnitude of Michael Scott would probably not run the best branch in all of Dunder Mifflin. But there are medium-sized paper companies. Dunder Mifflin itself could exist, even though it doesn’t. But a community college from which one can earn a bachelor’s doesn’t.

Bugs me.

What did you think of the show? If you’d like to opine on the season premiere of “The Office,” I’d like to hear your thoughts on that, as well. (My favorite bit of dialogue from that one: “I’m so glad you’re eating again.” “Me too!” So much of it is in Mindy Kaling’s delivery.)

“Mad Men” starts this weekend, and I can’t wait. I may have to, of course, at least until it shows up on iTunes, because Mr. Improbable and I don’t have cable. But I think you can get it on iTunes 24 hours after it airs. In the meantime, here‘s a good article in Vanity Fair to whet your appetite–and a “Which Mad Man Are You?” quiz. Look who I got!

… well, I do have ideas. They got that part right. (Actually, unlike a lot of viewers, I don’t hate Peter Campbell. I think there is a possibility of redemption in him–and he is a hard worker, with good ideas. My prediction is that whatever happens to his character this season, his realization that he fell in love with a plain-looking, working-class Catholic girl on the basis of her brains, wit, and ambition will fundamentally change him as a person. Also, my ex-boyfriend is distantly related to Vincent Kartheiser. Is that a weird #lameclaimtofame or what?)

I never did enter the contest to win a walk-on role. I saw some of the entries and mine was nowhere near as well done, and I didn’t have time to do another photo shoot. Kind of a shame, as I have several good vintage or vintage-look dresses, including one Little Black Dress that is cut exactly like the one I chose for my avatar. (It seems that about half my Facebook friends have “Mad Men” avatars as their profile pictures. It is to spring ’09 what Shepard Fairey-izing yourself was to fall ’08.)

For your amusement, here’s the photo I did take:

Not bad, but it’s not great. The book is bigger than my face, and my hands, which are 1) not my best feature and 2) not manicured in a 60s style, are too prominent. (Also, I just noticed, it looks as though my left breast is about six inches higher than my right one, which–peeking down shirt to check–no, it isn’t.) All in all, if that was the best I could do, there didn’t seem to be much point to entering.

But you remember yesterday, how I said Milo had the total early-60′s look? Seriously, check out little Doggie Draper:

Exact same facial expression. Exact. Although that is not the expression Milo would have on his face if his chair were slowly filling with water, I tell you what.

Comments open for all “Mad Men” fans! Don’t worry about spoilers–if I don’t want to see them, I won’t look.

Those of you who aren’t “Mad Men” fans, or at least fans of the cool sleek lines of early-60s design, are going to have to be a bit patient with me for a while, I’m afraid. I’m fully in the grip of “Mad”ness! I’ll be doing the photo shoot to enter the contest for a walk-on role this weekend. You can only submit one picture, I think, so I’ll post a few up here and ask you to vote.

In the meantime, I went to madmenyourself.com again and did one of Mr. Improbable. Here he is, at his first day at Sterling Cooper. They hired him because they thought his quirky sense of humor might help them land more high-tech accounts … of course it’s ridiculous to think that people will ever have computers in their homes, but the secretaries sure love that new copier, so maybe these “business machines” are the wave of the future.

This is nowhere near as good as the Simpsons version of Mr. Improbable, but it still works. I like how it looks like Mr. Improbable is thinking, “Um, I should have worn a suit? And shaved?” which is an expression I’ve seen on his face all too often.

Everyone else is thinking, “Who hired the Jew?” Except for Joan, who is checking out his butt and thinking that he might clean up nice. Hands off, Ms. Holloway!

“Mad Men” is ramping up publicity before season 3 debuts on August 13, and I’m loving it. I definitely plan to enter their contest for a walk-on role, and I will let you know when pictures of me are up on the site! (I hope to do the photo shoot this weekend with the assistance of History Girl–who better to bring out my inner Rachel Mencken than a theater-loving history teacher turned vintage boutique owner turned history teacher again?)

If you’re not interested in the contest, but still like to envision yourself rocking that great early-60s style, check out their terrific “Mad Men Yourself” site, where you can choose the physical features and clothing to make a Mad Men-ized version of yourself. Here’s me (you’ll notice I chose a backdrop to go with the cover of my book):

Not bad, eh? Although the coffee should be iced.

… the one-eyed man is “Kings.”

In other words, the show’s not perfect, but it’s a remarkable effort for network TV. Let’s talk about what works and doesn’t work in “Kings.”

What works, surprisingly enough, is the show’s theology, which is probably the main reason that it got cancelled. We like our religion in this country, but nobody, and I mean nobody, wants to deal with the God of the Hebrew Bible. The moody, sacrifice-loving God of “Kings” acts in on human events, but obliquely, conveying his wishes through double-yolked eggs, extinguished candles, and the like. He seems to have very particular notions about border control, and few thoughts at all for the soldiers and civilians who die defending those borders. He is a God far more concerned with building a nation than with constructing a moral code. He is infinitely involved in the minutia of the lives of the elite–the king and his family, the priests, the arms merchants–and utterly indifferent the vast population of “Gilboa,” who, presumably, worship and offer sacrifices just as their leaders do.

“Touched by an Angel” it’s not. There’s a reason that nobody, with the possible exception of a few fringe elements in the Israeli settlements, worships this idea of God anymore.* This is the God of national honor and glory, not universal peace and justice. So kudos to “Kings” for actually trying to grapple with a vision of God that is deeply disturbing and unappealing to modern sentiments–and that’s right there in your Bible in black and white. It’s a bold choice. “Kings” does a much better job than “Lost” or “Battlestar Galactica” ever did of setting out the rules of engagement with the supernatural from the beginning. You know starting off that God is real, that he has a plan, and that he communicates with certain people but that it is possible to misinterpret his wishes. Both “Lost” and, most egregiously, “Battlestar Galactica,” tend to pull in the supernatural elements whenever they can’t explain a plot point logically, a narrative gap-mending role less appropriate to God than to grout.

Perhaps the producers are still relying too much on the show’s Biblical conceit, however, because the alternative-universe elements of the show are a great disappointment. God dropping hints to his favored ruler like so many mints on a hotel-room pillow? Fine, I can believe that. An absolute monarchy in a nation with a free press? Now that strains my credulity. Although “Kings” works well as a family drama, the show fails to flesh out the kind of nation that Gilboa is. How much power does King Silas really hold? Do all Gilboans believe in God, and do they all agree on what God wants from them? Why was Gilboa at war with Gath? What does God think about Gath? Is he their God too? Why was the king’s son allowed into direct combat? (I seem to recall this being a controversy overseas when Prince Harry signed on for Afghanistan.) What was the form of government in Gilboa before the monarchy? How did Shiloh become so technologically advanced? Was Queen Rose being literal when she said that Silas took Gilboa from virtual hunter-gatherer existence to the 21st century? How the hell did that happen if so, and why aren’t more people walking around looking like Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer?

It’s good theology. It’s really, really bad science fiction. It’s bad television writing overall, really. One of the themes of modern high-quality television is going beyond the character or small social group to look at the larger world in which the dramas play out. “Deadwood” and “The Wire” are more about the founding of civilization and the nature of institutions, respectively, than they are about any given character. “The Sopranos” invites viewers to compare and contrast the ethics and etiquette of the Mafia with that of affluent middle-class America. “Battlestar Galactica” painted a nuanced picture of a society in which women’s rights were a given but social class left scars so deep they almost functioned as caste markers. “Kings” only focuses on … the king, and his God, and his family, and his rival. It would have been a better show if they had named it “The Kingdom.”

*Modern Jews do not worship the God of the Hebrew Bible (aka the “Old Testament.”) A common misconception among non-Jews is the idea that Judaism kind of stopped after Christianity began. This is like thinking that English history ended in 1776, because we have America now. Judaism continued to evolve, write a whole ‘nother holy book, and developed a concept of God that goes well beyond the violent tribalism of the first five books of the Bible.

It’s grim times in TVlandia for those who don’t have cable. If you’re hankering for some quality drama, check out “Kings.” The show has, unfortunately, been cancelled, but the final six or so episodes will be running starting this Sunday on NBC. You can catch up on the earlier ones online (and you should watch it from the beginning).

“Kings” is a show that is so perfectly to my taste it is almost a parody of my taste: an alternate-universe drama, heavy on the politics, based on the Hebrew Bible, done in Shakespearean style, starring the incomparable Ian McShane. Mr. Improbable didn’t even believe me when I told him about it.

If you’ve seen it, I’d be curious to hear what you think, so leave me a comment. I’ll blog more about the show later. I think some aspects of it work and some don’t, but it’s one of those artistic endeavors in which the failed elements are as intriguing as the successes.