Has "Walking Dead" jumped the zombie shark?

(877 words)

The show had been gut-wrenching — and I don’t mean that as a dramatic critique.

No, in “Walking Dead” you can see people use things like wrenches to remove guts. It’s a weekly disgust.

My wife, a devoted fan, was eager to talk about it. She wanted to pick my brain.

“Are you done with it?” she asked.

I told her, no. I still feel invested in the characters and the prepper in me is still compiling survival tips on what to do in the event zombie apocalypse becomes a reality and I’ll need to be alert for a more literal kind of brain picking.

But last night’s season 7 premier crossed a line with me.

I won’t say the show jumped the shark. “Walking Dead” producers would never let that happen, opting, I’m sure, to work a zombie shark plot line into the series.

The wanton gruesomeness of last night’s de rigeur violence left me feeling diminished. Is this really how I want to spend an hour? Does this qualify as entertainment?

The presidential debates are more uplifting.

At least with those — and they’re every bit as gruesome as “Walking Dead” — I know I’ll get to see Alec Baldwin ridiculing Trump.

Anytime televised violence becomes stomach turning because characters are getting their stomachs turned (or chewed), it’s time to re-think how I’m spending my time. So I’ll, for now, continue watching “Walking Dead,” but all the while my mind will be drifting to what I’d rather be watching. The list includes:

• Porn — I’ve never been a big porn guy, but something raunchy would be a nice palette cleanser after watching Michonne lop the heads off 30 zombies intent on dining on more than finger sandwiches. If you’re looking for Christmas stocking stuffers, I like ones involving things like the saucy divorcee and her cheerleader roommate surprising the pizza delivery boy with the kind of tip he can’t claim on his tax forms.

• “Cheers” — It’s on one of the retro channels and we DVR about 20 of them at a time. I hadn’t seen the show in about 15 years and I wondered if it still held up. Boy, does it. It remains uproarious with each character deftly acted and right on the money. I love to laugh so, ergo, I’ll always love “Cheers.” It sounds heretical, but it’s right up there with “Seinfeld” and “Seinfeld” is right at the top.

• “The Fugitive” — It was about 20 years ago, before kids, and I was seeking a good show to watch with lunch. Val at the time had a full-time job in Pittsburgh. I vaguely remember my father telling me to check out David Janssen and “The Fugitive” reruns. I watched one and was blown away. Each episode was a dramatic gem. I remember Val coming home and me saying, “We’re going to have to start taping these shows to watch with dinner. They’re that good.” She responded with some version of, yeah, right, we’re going to tape shows that first appeared in 1963. Today, it remains one of our all-time favorite shows. We even have an episode guide!

• “Breaking Bad” — The show went off the air three years ago last month and I’ve ever since been itching to start it all over. It’s that good, in my opinion the best show ever. I’d watch “Mad Men” and “Sopranos” from the start again, too.

• The World Series — Now’s the time of year when every pitch becomes so precious because I know baseball’s about to be cruelly ripped from my life. In the summer, baseball is my televised security blanket. Personal calm is elusive when it isn’t near. Barring a zombie apocalypse, I’ll be writing about the World Series tomorrow in advance of Game 1.

• “The Larry Sanders Show” — Brilliant Garry Shandling comedy with equally brilliant cast led by Jeffrey Tambor and Rip Torn. Again, I just love to laugh and this one makes me very happy. HBO ran 89 episodes from 1992-98. I have a compilation disc with about 20 of them on there. Each is golden. You know what else is still really, really funny? “Third Rock from the Sun,” starring the peerless John Lithgow. Sitcom trivia: The career-making Frasier Crane “Cheers” role that went to Kelsey Grammar was offered first to Lithgow. 

• A roaring fire — Hallelujah! The weather has finally turned. I welcome the fall chill. I love fall days cooking soups and warming the house with a nice fire. And if I’m in front of a fire, naturally, I’ll have a good book with me. I’m right now in the middle of Tom Wolfe’s excellent “Bonfire of the Vanities” from 1986. It’s particularly timely with so many egos and ambitions dominating our news.

• “Walking Dead” — It’ll never be one of my all-time favorite shows — I doubt I’ll ever re-watch more than an episodic scene or two — but this show was once great.

I think it’s too infatuated with devastating its audience with increasingly graphic violence. Last night’s brutal killings of two main and beloved characters couldn’t have been more disgusting.

Plus, I don’t foresee a “Walking Dead” happy ending and that turns me off.

See, I love happy endings.

Like the kind awaiting that lucky pizza delivery boy!

Related …

TV-holics prepare for bender

It was a very zombie Thanksgiving

Oscars & “Walking Dead:” an Odd Couple post

A “Breaking Bad” intervention

“Breaking Bad” vs. “Sopranos:” the winner is …

I wake up and smell something, but it's not coffee

(688 words)

I think I’ve found the culprit as to why career stability’s been so elusive for me and  you’re probably holding a cup of it right now.

It’s coffee.

You have it and I don’t.

It’s likely you’re one of the more than 140 million Americans who starts the day with a cup of Joe. If someone tells you to wake up and smell the coffee then, by God, you can do it.

I don’t drink coffee. Never have.

It’s surprising to even me because I drink lots and lots of everything else. Hot, cold, pasteurized or distilled.

I’ve drunk oceans of ouzo, rivers of red wine and enough sudsy beer to buoy a fleet of battleships. I revere bourbon and dabble in vodka, gin, Scotch, Irish and Canadian whisky, etc. It’s safe to assume I’ve tried just about every distilled spirit available in every bar, often with predictably detrimental results.

Suggest you and I do shot from any old bottle and -- Cheers! -- I’ll drink to that.

And it’s not just hootch. I drink milk and enjoy orange, apple, cranberry, grapefruit and all the other juices.

When was the last time you had a swig of Hawaiian Punch? Me, I had one about a month ago.

And I drink Coke, Root Beer, Mountain Dew and all the other carbonated poisons they say are full of flame retardants. They say they’re bad for me, but I see many advantages for a modern man going through life more flame retardant.

I guzzle water all day long and try for digestive reasons to slam a pot of scalding tea -- hot water even -- after every meal believing it helps better disperse congealing belly contents.

So you have on this side me and the whole wide world of things that are mostly safe to drink and then on the other side you have coffee and vast multitudes of people way more productive than me.

So it’s been decades since I’ve woken up and smelled the coffee. My darling wife doesn’t drink coffee either.

She wakes up and being married to me can only dream of what it’s like to smell the coffee. Poor kid.

I can’t help it. A good, long, loud morning fart is sort of my way of clearing my throat and therefore an occupational necessity for any man who spends the day talking out his ass.

One study says 78 percent of coffee drinkers say it’s the first thing they think about upon waking up; 67 percent say they can’t function without it.

The only thing I’ve felt remotely like that about anything in the last 20 years is, I guess, “Breaking Bad.”

Would my life be different if I drank a little coffee?

I know on one hand I’d be even more impoverished. The average coffee drinker spends about $335.75 a year on coffee. But that seems low. Starbucks earned almost $15 billion in 2013.

Plus, there’s all that time making coffee, waiting in line for coffee, etc., and goofing off on coffee breaks.

That last point is likely moot with me. It’s felt like I’ve been on one long coffee break since 1992.

But would the caffein boost make me more efficient? Would I be super-charged? More stimulated?

I guess that’s one of the reasons I don’t want to engage in the coffee craze. If the world’s wired on coffee, then I guess I’m wifi.

I enjoy going through life under-stimulated.

It’s a safe bet that unlike me, not many coffee drinkers enjoy catnaps during long red lights. And I like to nap -- I’ve taken two quick naps during the time it’s taken me to write this far! It’s very refreshing.

Understand, I’m not trying to change any minds here. Enjoying coffee is an international endeavor that bridges races, religions and helps bring together people from around the world. 

I’m just wondering if my life would be better if I indulged in a little daily java.

So if it works for you then by all means, continue consuming.

Keep on waking up and smelling that coffee.

It’s bound to beat what Val’s always stuck smelling. 

Related . . .

Free wireless and costly coffee

My history of drinking at/near work

A “Breaking Bad” intervention

Read this and go straight to sleep

Let Woody be Woody: Harrelson flicks & others

Didn’t see HBO’s “Game Change” because we don’t have HBO. Would have rushed to order it if any of the show promos had hinted it included Woody Harrelson playing a character based on Woody Harrelson.

He’s becoming that entertaining.

I’ve read enough profiles of him recently to understand shows depicting Woody being Woody would be better than most of the movies starring alleged A-list actors who command far more respect than the B-list actor who got his start on “Cheers” playing a guy named Woody.

Better is any role that has Woody playing an exaggerated version of himself.

That’s what happens in “Zombieland,” and “The Messenger,” two of the finest movies we’ve seen in the past two years.

In both, Woody plays over-the-top, more hick and cartoonish versions of himself with out-of-control rage issues.

And when I say a cartoonish version of himself, I’m talking Yosemite Sam.

That’s exactly who he acts like in the peerless zomcom “Zombieland” from 2009. In it Harrelson plays a dim, but ultimately sweet redneck who slays hordes of blood slobbering zombies for fun and survival.

We recently rented the outstanding Harrelson drama “The Messenger,” also from 2009, about the U.S. Army details obliged to inform parents and spouses of the death of loved ones fighting overseas. In it Harrelson plays a dim, but ultimately sweet redneck who wrestles with the morality of war and getting drunk.

He was acclaimed, too, for his role in 2007’s “No Country for Old Men,” in which he plays a dim, but ultimately sweet redneck bounty hunter who fails to persuade a more lethal bounty hunter with a Moe Howard haircut to, please, not shoot him.

It’s been a marvelous career trajectory for an actor from Hanover, Indiana, who played a dim, but sweet redneck bartender from Hanover, Indiana, who wrestles with how to keep guys like Norm and Cliff from getting too drunk for network standards aiming to keep must-see TV family friendly.

He has what seems to be a non-Woody role in the ballyhooed new movie, “The Hunger Games,” so we’ll probably skip that and look forward to the rumored sequel to “Zombieland,” in which he reprises, well, you can figure it out.

We’ve done our share of enriching Hollywood the last couple of months. Here’s my jiffy little critique of what we’ve seen in theaters and at home. I’m ranking them on a scale of how many Woodys they’d need to make them perfect (zero Woodys, perfect; five Woodys unwatchable).

• “Safe House,” starring Denzel Washington -- Another fine performance by the great Denzel, but the movie suffers from obnoxious camera technique favored by directors too lazy to set up real action shots. Yes, it was the Drunken Camera Man School of Filmmaking. Too many of the too many action films are slapped together this haphazardly. Three Woodys.

• “The Lorax” -- We are in the Golden Age of kiddie movies, but the Seuss movies, to me, don’t work. The art is lavish, the stories slim. The perfect Seuss template remains the 24-minute version of “The Grinch that Stole Christmas.” Four Woodys.

• “Arrietty” -- Another one with the kiddos, this one very sweet and tender. It was unhurried, the artwork sumptuous. I thought it might be too slow for my girls, but they loved it. Not a classic, but we’ll watch it again. It’s nice to see movies made that show kids not all stories are spastic. One Woody.

• “Rise of the Planet of the Apes,” -- This was fantastic. Great campy fun. And the computer-generated action-sequences of the monkeys run amok is mesmerizing. One Woody.

• “Bridesmaids” -- This was a critically acclaimed box office smash that both Val and I hated, me more than her. It’s from the Judd Apatow school of gross-out comedy. Its success means we’re going to be inundated with more of it in watered down forms. Five Woodys.

• “Breaking Bad” -- Not a movie, per se, but we’ve spent more than 45 hours the past three months catching up on seasons 1-3 of this AMC drama about a high school chemistry teacher who turns to meth cooking to provide for his family after he’s diagnosed with terminal cancer. Better than “The Sopranos,” this is the most entertaining show we’ve ever watched. 1/2 Woody.

“Breaking Bad” is near perfect, but there’s nothing in the whole wide world that couldn’t be improved with a little Woody.

Reunited: TV and me

In the name of sound parenting, I’ve for 11 years espoused the conventional wisdom that watching too much TV is bad and will turn your mind to mush.

At least half that’s a lie. I think it’s the part about TV being bad.

I can’t be certain because I spent about 12 hours watching TV yesterday and I’m feeling really mush-minded.

Restricting my TV viewing while raising kids might be my greatest sacrifice. I certainly haven’t cut back on bar time or ever once during their existence applied for a real job so that must be it.

It is not insignificant.

I’ve loved TV, even bad TV, ever since “Speed Racer.”

I was raised on “Fantasy Island,” “Love Boat,” “Gilligan’s Island,” and can argue for hours about cast chemistry on “Three’s Company.” I can quote verbatim entire episodes of “Cheers,” “Coach,” and know precisely the moment to switch channels on a very special “Family Ties” episodes if I want to avoid tear shed.

I love “The Simpsons,” “The Twilight Zone,” “The Odd Couple,” and anything that includes “Newhart” in the title. I, of course, love the adult shows with profanity and gore galore. That means “True Blood,” “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” and the holy grail of it all, “The Sopranos.”

And I love sports. I grew up watching hours and hours of golf, football, baseball and hockey marathons. Heck, I’ve even watched hours and hours of actual marathons.

But with kids I watch TV the way other men look at porn. I feel shame if they bust me in the basement staring at “Seinfeld.”

That’s wrong. I was especially cranky at Christmas after surrendering the remote for four weeks of girly sweetness and holiday purity.

The only time I heard a really good profanity was when I said one outloud to the stupid dog.

I needed therapy.

It came courtesy of the NFL.

Because of schedule creep, the regular season concluded New Year’s Day, the traditional day for college bowl game extravaganzas and the NHL Winter Classic.

That meant those games were held Monday when the kids were in school.

Hallelujah! A Christmas miracle only 358 shopping days until Christmas!

It started at noon. Val wisely DVRs “The Price is Right,” essential viewing in any day of great TV.

It’s the “Gone With The Wind” of game shows. And Drew Carey surpasses Bob Barker as host. He’s added humorous flourishes that Barker, as great as he was, just couldn’t pull off.

For instance, this week is celebrity guest week. So in addition to the regular features and those gorgeous models viewers were treated to . . . Snoop Dogg!

It was such uproarious fun watching him advise contestants on the price of things like Rice-a-Roni that Val and I were chagrined we didn’t have a big bag of pot handy to get high, something I’m sure millions of other underemployed loafers instinctively did.

Then Val graciously handed me the remote and for the next eight hours (the last four spent solo in the comfortable basement), I watched sports. The NHL Winter Classic is becoming one of the year’s great events and I didn’t miss a minute.

Then I began a round-robin flip fest between bowl games and an NBC sports special about the 1972 hockey Summit Series between Canada and the old Soviet Union.

It was like I completely checked out on my parenting duties. And it was good.

It started to dawn on me that yesterday was maybe one of the best days of my life when both kids zonked out by 9 p.m. without either of us administering any narcotics. They just fell asleep.

And Val and I settled in for three hours of what seems destined to become one of the best shows we’ve ever seen.

It is “Breaking Bad.”

She’d checked out the first season from the library with neither of us having much hope we’d have a chance to dive in.

Within ten minutes we were as engrossed as if we’d been watching for three seasons. We watched till midnight.

We have 43 episodes to catch up on and I can’t wait.

I’m too mush-minded a man to predict what this year will bring, but I know this much:

It’s going to be good.

I’m turning the TV on and it’s returning the favor.

Bacon, our sinful staple

I am trying to think of the one naughty, illicit and dangerous thing I could do morning, noon and night and I keep coming back to bacon.

It wouldn’t work with drugs, which I guess is the long-story-short of shows like “Breaking Bad.”

I remember having some wonderful times trying it with booze and buddies back during my wild heydays some 20 years ago. Oh, the fun we had! We could make it work for as long as we didn’t have to, which back then was about 10 days at a stretch.

I’m confident I’d enjoy sex three times a day, but that’s difficult to achieve within the family dynamic. It’d be a burden on my already over-extended and sleep-deprived wife who’d have to do all the work while I watched TV.

That means I’d need to get a bunch of volunteers -- could we call them “staffers?” -- to do the job or jobs. And I’d be in way over my head with that.

Essentially, I’d be trying to assemble a harem, and I doubt I could keep a harem happy, not when I struggle daily to keep Val happy -- and by happy I mean borderline tolerant.

That leaves bacon, the only vittle that appears on each and every menu around the clock, a dietary ubiquity even salad can’t surpass.

You can have bacon and eggs for breakfast, B w/ LT for lunch, and renown chefs reach for bacon when they want to add an incarcerating flavor to things like scallops and steak.

I’ve never seen it offered as such but in this, the land of the deep-fried Twinkie, I have to imagine someone’s including bacon-based dessert.

It’s already the rectangular staple included in any well-rounded diet for someone eager to eat three square meals a day.

Eat enough of it in that geometric triumvirate and the doctors warn us our torsos will all become rhombus shaped (tapered tops, expansive mid-sections).

Really?

I’d like to give it a shot. I work above a restaurant/tavern and on the days when bacon steakburgers are the lunch special, the heady aroma invades my office and makes it impossible to concentrate. On those days I often stroll zombie-like downstairs to get a bacon fix.

Of course I do that most days with beer. Like bacon, the health scolds all say that’s bad for me, too.

I wonder what would happen if instead of three or four beers, we all substituted three or four thick slices of Happy Hour bacon.

I doubt much would change. We’d all still stay for about two hours. We’d still talk about sports, politics and how our lives would be different if even just a few young, single women ever stumbled into the bar.

That’s the allure of sin binging on bacon.

It still has all the rebel appeal of smoking with none of the expense or stink. And you wouldn’t have to stand pariah-like out in the bitter elements to enjoy bacon.

On the contrary, you’re welcome to eat bacon in all the finest restaurants. The trim waiter will even unfurl a fancy napkin on your lap prior to ordering some smoked Applewood.

So I’m intent on eating bacon three meals a day.

And if I ever do, this will be the very last you hear of it -- unless the stunt earns inclusion in my pending obituary.

Because I don’t want people who restrict their urge to eat bacon to resent me for indulging mine.

We’re a nation of secret sinners. We all get away with as much as we can and don’t like it when we see anyone enjoying more of it than the rest of us.

So bragging about my bacon diet would be unseemly. People would resent me for my excesses.

And being a pig is a poor career move for a guy who’s determined to really bring home the bacon.