Some Things Don't Need To Be Discussed

I dreamt last night that I was Walter White. Walt is not a happy person to be at this point in Breaking Bad , and my unwaking self endured the full brunt of his fear. I was Walt, hat and beard and panicky, sinister cleverness and all, racing cross-country in hiding, dodging the police by just a few steps, wondering if I had enough bullets left to settle my problems or if I would have to figure out a way to buy more without being recognized. I mention this not just to brag about how exciting my dreams are—and they are fabulous—but to point out that Breaking Bad  has become embedded not just in our collective unconscious, but in my private one too. So why don't we just shut up about it?

This is the best moment in history to be making television, and the worst to talk about it. Each week, tens of thousands of words are churned out about the hot TV topic of the moment—whether it's Breaking Bad  or Mad Men  or last season's hit drama Complaining About Mad Men —in recaps, podcasts, think pieces, and commentary shows produced by the networks themselves. Each moment of the show is picked over, retold, argued about and pondered, again and again until, by the time "Last Week On Breaking Bad " rolls around, the previous show has grown stale in our mouths. It is the single greatest act of collective, instantaneous criticism that has ever happened, and I think it's too much for one TV show to bear.

Breaking Bad  is a crime drama. This is my literary turf. I think crime dramas have endless appeal, both for their comforting repetitiveness and for the art that comes from exploiting that repetition, but I've also found that writing seriously about them is not always a good idea. In college I wrote a paper about The Killer Inside Me , Jim Thompson's most literary novels, and one of his best. Despite that book's surprising amount of literary merit, though, I found it was a tough paper to get through. Stories of suspense do not demand much intellectual underpinning, which is why I like them. But when a novel's foundation is 90% plot, the critical structure you can build on it can only get so high before it collapses, and your teacher thinks you an idiot. 

So, the best way to appreciate crime is to read it, muse on it, and let it go. Suspense television is the same way.    The plotting in Breaking Bad  is intricate and brilliant, but great plotting is rarely more than a clever trick. Delving into it for hundreds or thousands of words at a time—something practiced by traffic-hungry publications who should know better—is the critical equivalent of explaining a joke. The trolls who haunt the comment sections of these godforsaken bits of writing are even more misguided. Take the top comment on this week's Vulture recap by Matt Zoller Seitz, the gold standard in overly literal recaps. From Jake_M:

I’d like to believe that the opening sequence for episode 5.09, skaters in empty pool, the opening for the final eight episodes, is important. There are 4 persons at the pool. Two skaters performing/playing, one person videotaping the performance, and one person sitting on the edge of the empty pool, watching the performance.  

What if this is a sketch of the defining moment in Walts tragedy as he sees it. That he was reduced to be a spectator in every way to the succes of Gretchen and Elliott. That they got the succes, happiness and attention he was cheated for and believed he deserved. That their wrongdoing, in Walts mind, propelled him into all these catastrofic events in life. Then it seems probable that the ricin he is collecting is intended for G and E.

 "I'd like to believe ___________ is important" is the watchword for all those who demand too much from their TV. Of course we want to believe it's important, because otherwise, why did we waste so many hours watching it, thinking about it, dreaming about it? But TV is better when it isn't weighed down with the importance of being the only healthy area of American mass culture. Suspense shows are mostly plot, and everything else—bits of great acting, characterization, and directing—are morsels to be savored, and savored quietly. 

A year or two ago, I quit reading anything anybody wrote about Mad Men . That includes recaps, obviously, but also more pieces to which more care was paid: interviews and historical nitpickings and deep unpackings of all the little symbols that Matthew Weiner shoves wherever they will fit. My enjoyment of the show skyrocketed. As we stumble towards the finale of Breaking Bad , I suggest doing the same thing. (Right after the end of this paragraph.) It's a beautifully constructed piece of television. Turn down the outside noise, and you might actually be able to hear it.

The Ipcress Bean, Ground As Fine As I Like

It's not cool to grind your own coffee. It's not uncool. It's just a thing lots of people do every morning, myself included. Having a strong opinion of whether or not a person should grind their own coffee is one of those things that marks a person as psychotic. If other people want to drink chock full o' nuts that they keep in their freezer, good for them. They're saving money, and they're as happy as I am. Probably happier, in fact, since they have slightly more money.

​But I like grinding my own beans. It's fun, it makes a loud noise, and how often in your life do you get the opportunity to pulverize something into flakes? As someone with no  strong feelings about coffee—I'm a tea man—this seems odd, but it's not something I've ever pursued. Pursuing things is not something I like to do before I get my coffee.

While grinding beans this morning—beans that I could tell you nothing​ about, except that they are from across the street and turn into coffee if you dump hot water on them—I had a flash. A memory-thing. I grind beans because of The Ipcress File​.

I watched that Michael Caine spy thriller sometime in high school, in the depths of a Caine obsession that would lead to Zulu​ and Alfie​ and The Italian Job​ and whatever else my movie store had. The Ipcress File​ is a very odd movie, a psychedelic secret agent...something. It was a bit much for teenage me. But the opening sequence stuck with me.

Apparently, in the '60s, you could tell a lot about a person by how he prepared his coffee. Owning an electric grinder must have been very mod when Michael Caine became a star, because it's the first thing we see his secret agent doing. Not fiddling with a cocktail shaker, not checking the clip on his Walther—he's grinding coffee. This is a hip secret agent, we learn. A bachelor who knows how to take care of himself. A bachelor who knows how to take care of England.​

​I'm no secret agent. (If I were, I wouldn't tell you.) But in a teenage desire to become one, I seem to have internalized a simple axiom. Spies grind coffee, and I should too.

Huh.​

On Shakespeare Day, Eulogies From Hamlet & Marlena

It doesn't take much prodding for me to praise Orson Welles. The man was the original studio system martyr—a dynamo whose personality made him irresistible, and also made it impossible for him to get work. He was always fun to watch on screen—I mean, just look at that grin!—​but the man knew how to write, too. I've been thinking about Touch of Evil​ a lot lately. Not the famous opening tracking shot, nor the inexplicably less famous second tracking shot, but the ending, which never fails to give me chills.

​Orson's corrupt sheriff, a sinister fat man whose weight Welles was not more than a decade away from, lies face down, dead in a gully. Marlene Dietrich, the mealy-mouthed fortune teller who was the only person who liked him, watches on, stone faced, and delivers the finest movie eulogy of all time. "He was some kind of man. What does it matter what you say about people?"

The ending's ambivalence ​recalls that of The Third Man​. The monster, both played by Orson Welles, is dead—killed by the only man in the world who loved him. Just in case he's feeling a little bit too good about his crusade, though, the dead man's woman makes sure he knows that he hasn't done anything great. Yeah, you killed the bad guy. But the bad guy was Orson Welles, dammit, and he was the most fun part of this movie!

But it also recalls a couple of Shakespearean eulogies, one of which I was reminded of this morning by Super Theater Twitter Guy Jonathan Mandell.​

"He was a man. Take him for all in all. I shall not look upon his like again." (Hamlet) Shakespeare, born 439 years ago today.

— Jonathan Mandell (@NewYorkTheater) April 23, 2013

​There are a lot of ways to deliver that line, which Hamlet uses to remember the murdered father whom he is about to kinda-maybe-sorta-think about avenging. Taken with Dietrich's Central European ambivalence, it offers the same, "I don't know—what's the point of mourning the dead?" shrug. If Hamlet is that ambivalent to his father, well, I get why he's not racing to the armory in search of an uncle killing sword.

I saw Julius Caesar​ at BAM a couple of weeks ago. It's a lush production, fuzzy at the start, but furiously clear by the time the murderin' starts. At the end, when the stage is covered with the traditionally Shakespearean corpse-pile, we get this eulogy, over the corpse of Brutus: "His life was gentle, and the elements/So mix'd in him that Nature might stand up/And say to all the world 'This was a man!'"

​I love it. I don't know how these all connect, exactly, and I won't force it. But I do know that if the best you can say for the dead is, "Well...he was a man," perhaps the eulogy business is not for you. The press release for Julius Caesar​ touted it as something revolutionary, but an all-black Shakespearean tragedy set in tropical climate is hardly new. Orson Welles did that with Macbeth​ in 1936, a reminder that while he may have been a few hundred years behind Shakespeare, he was decades ahead of everyone else.

Just for grins, I looked up the Times'​ original review of Welles so-called "voodoo Macbeth.​" It is, how shall we say, really fucking racist. Critic Brooks Atkinson—he of the eponymous theater—tells us that the cast in this "darktown version" of Shakespeare's tragedy "have conjured [a] weird, vari-colored raree-show out of the fine stuffs of the theatre and the ferocity of Negro acting." The costumes are "an idealization of Negro extravagance," and the staging is done "with an eye to the animalism of the setting." But though the play offers "sensuous, black-blooded vitality," it "has missed the sweep and scope of a poetic tragedy." This is my favorite bit (emphasis mine)​:

As Macbeth, Jack Carter is a fine figure of a Negro in tight-fitting trousers that do justice to his anatomy. He has no command of poetry or character.

Oof.​ Just...oof.

There's been quite a lot of chatter lately—and probably for decades—about the death of theater criticism. Asked to eulogize the golden age of New York criticism, I can't give anything more than a Dietrichian shrug. What does it matter what you say about plays?

A Phrase To Throw Under Any Bus You Can Find

As far as I'm concerned, reality TV—Worst Cooks in America excepted—is part of the problem. What problem? Oh, I don't know. All of them? Off the top of my head, it's easy to blame bad reality programming for the dumbing down of entertainment, the decline in scripted television, the continued survival of checkout line tabloids, and anything else  that's bothering me at the moment. But one thing has been irking me in particular lately, and that's the abuse of a specific phrase.

A week or two ago, I seemed to spend the entire weekend washing the dishes. While I was consumed with this oddly monumental task, my girlfriend amused herself in the other room, indulging in a consciousness-destroying cocktail of The Sims and a variety of housewives, each more real than the last. The toilet paper I crammed into my ears did not create a tight enough seal, forcing me to listen over the roar of my sink to hours and hours of only on Bravo-style "drama."​

And every five or six minutes, it seemed, someone was accusing someone else of throwing them under the bus. Here is a typical exchange, from a drama-filled house party that the producers stretched out over two episodes:​

Housewife 1: "I don't want to throw anybody under the bus."

Housewife 2: "You don't want to throw anybody under the bus, but she's throwing all of us under the bus."

Housewife 3: "She's throwing all of us under the bus."

​There are a lot of words and phrases that have been abused by reality television—drama itself being one of them—but none sticks in your ear more than this particularly ugly bit of public-transit related metaphor. It's become popular despite its length, its awkwardness, and the fuzziness of its meaning. Actually, it's meaning shouldn't be fuzzy. In its purest form, I think the phrase means something like "to make a scapegoat of." But in its current diluted state, as used by every reality show contestant from Beverly Hills to Hells Kitchen and beyond, it seems to mean "betray," "work against," or "do something I didn't like." 

Reality TV feeds on petty people overreacting to minor disagreements. To get a sense of how asinine these storylines can get, just count how often this phrase is used. If you hear someone accuse someone else of throwing them under the bus, you know three things:

1. The speaker is stupid.
2. The disagreement is meaningless.​
3. You should check and see what else is on your DVR.​

The abuse of this particular phrase is a shame because, used sparingly, it evokes quite an effective image. If you saw one Beverly Hills shrew literally throw another underneath a Los Angeles Metro bus, you would have to think, "Boy! Those housewives are really angry at each other!" But instead, the phrase is meaningless—indicative of nothing beyond another hour wasted on the couch.​

Celebrity Diving Is No Joke. Well, It Is. But It's Also Real.

I've been having fun lately at the expense of NBC, reveling—as much of the TV-conscious Internet has—in the continually lower lows to which their scripted programming is sinking.​ But shows written by writers are not the only place that broadcast networks are clueless. Although they pioneered the Frankenstein that is reality programming, the Big Four have lost control of the monster. Vulture wrote yesterday, in a round-up of opinions from "unscripted insiders,"​ that network television hasn't produced a new hit reality show since The Voice​, in 2011.

​I'm more interested in trying to figure out why network scripted programming is so awful. But the fact that its lowest-common-denominator ratings-grab reality programming is not just terrible but unpopular is interesting as well. What's the problem? Let's ask the insiders!

"They rarely take chances,"

"There's a saturation factor going on. If you put a pawn show on cable, a year later, there's 25 of them."

"The genre has gotten mature. It means that less is going to work, just because there's a cynicism that's set in with the audience. You can't shock people with an idea that would have before."

"The division between broadcast and cable is arbitrary and artificial, a way to make excuses to higher-ups who lack vision and creativity."

And my personal favorite:​

"This whole business puts you in a scaredy-cat place. It's hard to try to stay fearless."

So essentially, network reality shows are bad for the same reasons everything else they do is so bad: bloat. Shows are too big, too long and too expensive, and all that money makes it impossible to take risks. But as Vulture​ does point out, the networks do have something up their sleeve that cable would never dare attempt: celebrity diving. It's real, and it's...terrible.

Splash​ premiered last night on ABC, following hot on the heels of Fox's one-off special Stars In Danger: The High Dive​. How bad does it look? Well, sample a promo.

On Tuesday March 18th, the stars will fall. Splash marks the first time 10 celebrities will train and compete in regulation platform and springboard diving at dizzying heights in front of a weekly poolside audience. Leading up to the competition, the world's most decorated and medaled diving legend, Greg Louganis, will give each celebrity weeks of training.

This show is stupid. There's no point in my rubbing it in. But I want to point out a few questions that have to be answered before a show is greenlit. 

• ​Are Americans interested in professional diving?
• Are Americans so interested in professional diving that, when promised "celebrity diving," they won't mind being offered a former Girl Next Door​ instead?
• Are Americans so amused by the idea of fat men and little people hurting themselves that they will tune in to a show built around that concept?​
• Are Americans hungry for more Louie Anderson?​ Like, tearing at their chest, screaming in agony hungry?

Based on the promo for Splash​, ABC thinks the answer to all three of those questions is a resounding "Hell yes!" 

What shocks me about shows like this isn't that they're stupid.​ Obviously, network TV thinks Americans are dumb. (They aren't.) But broadcast television is big money. It's high stakes. There are fortunes riding on it. So why does everything they do seem so lazy? Why does everything they do seem so cheap?

An Incredibly Well-Reasoned Argument Against 'Girls'

Since the end of its first season, I've tried to figure what it is about Girls that irks me. I've never watched a television show that fights its viewership quite as hard as this one. While that sounds good on paper—really, I'm all for difficult TV—there's something about Girls​ that I find impossible to watch, or even explain. I wonder sometimes if I would like the show better if shown it in a vacuum, if I knew nothing about its origin and had read no commentary of it on the Internet. But as it is, everything I read about Girls​ makes me want to watch it less. So all of this week's ballyhoo about the terrible-sounding Season 2 finale got me thinking again. Because it's apparently impossible for me to speak coherently about this show, I decided on a very easy, very fun way out:

I missed last night’s Girls finale. Missed the whole season, in fact. This wasn’t due to any particular choice, it just so happened that after the first episode of the second round premiered, I had no urge to torrent it, convert it for use on my DVD player, and watch it on my incredibly fancy $40 TV. (That’s right—it’s a Trinitron.) The fact is, I just don’t like that show, and I’ve spent the last seven or eight months trying to puzzle out why.

There’s no good reason for me to dislike Girls. The show is funny, well-made, and occasionally features Chris O’Dowd. It’s about a place where I live and characters that are like people that I know. And Lena Dunham is ungodly talented—as a writer, but as an actor too. The show is sickening in a way that I like my television—sickening like Curb, like the British Office, like Peep Show—and yet it leaves me cold. The best answer I can come up with is a cop out, but a beautiful cop out, a cop out so elegant and wonderful that you will thank me for sharing it with you. Why did I lose interest in Girls?

Because I hate its stupid face.

For better or worse, it goes on from there.​ I thought I'd made a funny point. The commenters didn't agree, calling me "completely irrelevant," "an airhead," "embarrassing" and "really, really dumb." Well, you can't please everyone. Or, apparently, anyone. No matter. Because people hated it, that post got more pageviews than anything I've written for Bullett, which says more about the Internet than I ever could.

Oh My Stars, How Sorry I Am For Neglecting You!

I was absent last week, and I do apologize. I was distracted by a nifty new gig I just got—more on that in a week or two—and the continuing amazingness of the World Baseball Classic. (Which I'm writing about, not just watching obsessively, I swear.) But though I was too lazy—I mean busy!—to update the blog, I did do a bit of jabbering over at Bullett​. Take a look:

First, I wondered whether or not a Trainspotting​ sequel would happen. If it does, would it be a terrible idea?

The ending of Trainspotting always seemed to be a bit of a cheat—a happy ending to a story that had no business ending well. But the sight of Ewan McGregor’s Rent Boy scurrying off into the dawn, his friends hard-fought drug money clutched in his fist, was so feverishly delightful that I didn’t mind. After all, what’s a heroin comedy with a cheery ending? I’d always wondered where Rent Boy ended up, but also not wanted to know—a recovering heroin addict with a sack full of stolen money is not a man you expect to live very long.

​Next, I pondered the wildly successful Veronica Mars​ kickstarter. The kickstarter was definitely a good idea. Reviving the series, I think may prove a mistake. But hey, what do I know?

Which producer will be the next to cash in on his fanbase? Will Judd Apatow try to crowdsource Freaks & Geeks: The Movie? How about a kickstarter to revive My So Called Life, Crime Story, or Police Squad, starring a computer generated version of Leslie Nielson? Using digital technology to revive a beloved, cancelled-too-soon TV show is a tempting thing. When the new episodes of Arrested Development are released in May, we’ll see for the first time whether or not it’s a good idea. When the richest, dumbest man on Kickstarter gets a chance to say, “Your check, sir,” we’ll see it on the big screen. But my gut tells me that cancelled TV shows are like dead bodies. They shouldn’t be brought back to life.

​And then, on Friday, I delved into Marilyn Monroe's reading collection.

Like a rather lovelier Rodney Dangerfield, Marilyn Monroe never got no respect. For one thing, she was funny, she knew it, and she hardly ever got a chance to show it off. We all know she could sing, but come on—she could really sing. And yet, she remains thought of as not much more than what Truman Capote called “a platinum sex-explosion.” (Of course, she was that too.) Capote thought a lot of Marilyn—there’s a beautiful scene with her in Music For Chameleons—but apparently Marilyn didn’t think much of him, because she didn’t own a thing he wrote.

Really, she didn't! There's this whole list of her books, and not an ounce of Capote among them.​​ Consider that article my last word on Smash​, which last week was officially moved to the TV graveyard that is Saturday nights. Smash​ and Marilyn...sad, sad, sad.

Oh, "Smash." Poor, Poor, "Smash."

I was right. Not only is Smash ​worse now that it's average instead of catastrophic, it's also much less popular. Because I can't stop thinking about how bad Smash​ is, I thought some more about how bad Smash​ is.

Ironically, the only compelling storyline in this season is the meta-commentary on the showrunner’s departure. In season one, Debra Messing’s character, Julia, served as Rebeck’s stand-in—a relationship between character and creator that hamstrung the show. As Kate Arthur reported in Buzzfeed, “Rebeck based the character on herself, and yet wouldn’t allow Julia to have a good arc that would satisfy or endear her to the audience.”

If the writers wanted to give Julia something to do that was hard and that she would eventually get through, “Theresa would say, ‘It’s not a struggle! She doesn’t have a problem! She’s the hero! She saves everything!’” said someone who witnessed this oft-repeated discussion.

Another source added: “The writer had such a strong identification with that character that she couldn’t actually write well for her, or allow interesting stories to develop. The writers were trying to push into more interesting territory for that character, and Theresa blocked that creatively. Even if she might think, Well, I wanted Debra Messing to be the star, she didn’t allow that to happen.”

Without Rebeck there to keep an eye on her, Julia has been rewritten as a writer who is crippled by arrogance. Blind to Bombshell’s problems, she is so unwilling to rewrite her own work that she threatens to destroy the show. Dedicating a storyline to shaming a fired employee is twisted, infuriating and quite possibly insane—in short, everything we hate/loved about Smash in the first place. As the network flails, perhaps a desperate attempt to save the show will lead to more of this weirdness. Smash may get awful again, but I don’t think it could ever get bad enough to make a comeback.

​There's much more at Bullett​. Check it out, whydontcha?

Stevie Spielberg To Revive "The Best Movie Ever Made"

Oh-ho-ho. Madman Stephen Spielberg announced this morning that he has decided to do the impossible. Picking up where Stanley Kubrick left off four decades ago, Spielberg is going to film a sprawling mini-series biopic of Napoleon​. Spielberg is a genius at bringing impossible films to life—he made Tintin​, for god's sake!—but so was Kubrick, and the little Corsican beat him. I just wonder if maybe Spielberg shouldn't have started with something easier—like bringing Kubrick back to life. 

Why was the project snakebit?​

Rare among visionaries for actually making his epic dreams come true—consider 2001, Spartacusand Barry Lyndon—with Napoleon, Kubrick reached higher than ever before. Over two years of intensive research, he employed dozens of assistants, eventually producing thousands of pages of notes and tens of thousand location stills—a treasure trove that was recently assembled in a very expensive, very pretty book. In a typically modest letter to his producers, he made the famous claimthat, “It’s impossible to tell you what I’m going to do except to say that I expect to make the best movie ever made.”

To defray the cost of his cast of thousands, Kubrick planned to film his interiors in France and his battle sequences in Romania, breaking production up into thirds to allow for added planning time. His plan was to “shoot with available light” and “exploit the fully dressed interiors of the period which are readily available in France,” suggesting the movie might have had the dreamy look he later used to bring Barry Lyndon’s eighteenth century alive. His proposed budget was $4 million—impossibly low, considering that the comparatively simple 2001 cost over $10 million. Sensing madness, Hollywood finally pulled the plug.

​More at Bullett​. 

Although I haven't read any of that very expensive, very beautiful book, I've been curious about this movie for a long time. I'm not sure if I'd rather Spielberg fail to finish the movie by attempting to do justice to Kubrick's vision, or succeed by ignoring all of the dead man's hard work. Thankfully, it's not my problem.

Stop The Brooding! A Plea For Happy TV Cops

I'm a budding Miami Vice​ fan, and in 2013 that means that, eventually, your father will give you the complete Crime Story​ on DVD. A short-lived Michael Mann joint that premiered in 1986, Crime Story​ was stylish, ambitious and—as soon as it was pitted head-to-head against Moonlighting​—doomed to fail. Two things struck me about the show's movie-length pilot. First, "Runaway" is an awesome theme song. Seriously. Take a look:​

Features Del Shannon - Runaway

But I was even more pleasantly surprised by the relationship between Lt. Mike Torello—played by the expertly mustachioed Dennis Farina—and his wife. ​Namely, they had one. In the first few episodes, they fight about, the screw a bit, and they decide to have a kid. It's honest, everyday stuff—and a nice contrast from the nihilistic battle against crime that occupies the rest of Torello's waking life. Of course, it doesn't last.

Because the TV gods demand sacrifices, the Torello's happy partnership goes on the rocks quickly, and they're broken up by episode ten. This is a shame not just because Dennis Farina has the kind of sad-guy face that makes you want to give him a hug, but because there are nearly no good cop marriages on TV, and I think that's a shame. Let's consider some candidates for happiness:

• Vic Mackey, The Shield​. What starts as a surprisingly durable marriage—able to survive the pressures caused by two autistic children and Mackey's incredibly bald head—eventually cracks under the weight of his sadism. I'm surprised it lasted that long.
• Kima Greggs, The Wire​. When we meet Kima, she and her longtime girlfriend Cheryl are happy in a very realistic way. Because it's The Wire​, that can't last. Over the next five season, they have ups and downs—mostly downs. It's an honest depiction of a relationship dying, but that's not what I want. I want one that's thriving.
• Hank Schrader, Breaking Bad​. Hank's marriage has been held together by the strongest adhesive imaginable: a fiendish duct tape of denial and borderline behavior. The marriage endures, but it's certainly not happy.

I realize that being a cop's husband or wife is famously difficult. The irregular hours, constant danger, and likelihood that your loved one will turn into this guy​ make it difficult to keep a marriage going. But not impossible. I don't know cops, but the law of probability states that somewhere in the United States, there is a cop with a good marriage. Somewhere. One of them.

Put that guy on TV. ​

I want just one show where the cop's home life is not a major source of conflict. Where difficulties arise and are dealt with like adults. Where nobody goes to bed angry. Basically, I want Tami & Coach, but they solve murders. Only one TV detective that I can think of—and I've been thinking of this for fifteen or twenty minutes!—comes close. Who may it be? Let's play a little guessing game.

He and his wife bicker, but he only rarely gets kicked out of the house. He rides his kids hard, but they respect him—even though they seem to get raped, abducted and (nearly) murdered all the time. ​He's bald, burly and angry, and he really, really doesn't like men who don't respect women. Ladies and gents, I give you Elliott Stabler:

If that's the happiest cop on TV, I think we can do a little better. ​