BEYOND THE VALLEY OF THE POLS: Reviews of this and that.

Christopher Bram, Gossip. A New Yorker and a Washingtonian meet in a gay chatroom. (We call them “Washingtonians” when they’re not from ’round here.) Their sex life flourishes even though one is a left-leaning ex-activist and one is a rising-star Young Republican type. But how long can you sleep with an enemy who doesn’t even know he’s the enemy?

This is nearly perfect summer reading: just intelligent enough to give savor to its lurid, trashy elements. (Bram’s narrator bashes the New York Post, but this book reminded me more of that tabloid than of any other literary production.) I enjoyed it until the very end, when its suspense turned into melodrama via a too-neat (though well-foreshadowed) resolution.

Here I reviewed Bram’s Exiles in America, a much better book. Gossip did hit on one of the major themes of that book: the stark, sociologically-inflected differences between how a couple looks from the inside and how it looks from the outside. Exiles takes as its epigraph Robert Frost’s line (from memory, too lazy to look up, sorry) that marriage is “a type of friendship recognized by the police.” Gossip shares that sensibility, though the nature of marriage itself isn’t at issue in this book the way it is in Exiles.

I’ll note that while the leftists in Gossip were recognizable human types, the right-wingers resembled exactly zero right-wingers I’ve ever met. But I’m willing to posit that I have not met a representative sample. It didn’t keep me from enjoying the novel until it was over, at which point I did start to feel a bit curdled.

Kings, episodes 6 – 10: I reviewed previous episodes of this “It’s about King David only alternate-universe only we’re not going to tell you any of that because we don’t want you to watch this show, apparently” NBC drama here. The first ten episodes are up at IMDB.com.

In the later episodes, some things are better: The David actor is growing on me. “Chapter One” is tense and intriguingly meta-narrative-y; the final twists of “Javelin” left me wanting to know what happens next. They’ve continued to pepper the show with lines and speeches which come from within a monarchist worldview, which fascinates me! This is one reason I like the Saul-figure’s ruthless action at the end of “Brotherhood.” It feels alien, old, simultaneously human and eldritch: personal.

The romance between the king’s aide and the guardsman is both endearing comic relief and poignant character shading.

Other things, though… not so much. All the other younger actors still bother me, especially the Jonathan one. It would kill you to move your face? Express an unspoken emotion or an internal conflict, now and then?

During “Pilgrimage,” in which various nonmarital sex scandals threaten, I found myself saying out loud, “Why is it so easy to make liberalism sound saccharine?” Whenever the series touches the intersection of sex and publicity it tends to sound contemporary-bien-pensant rather than alien-monarchist.

I still really, really hate what they’re doing with the David/Jonathan relationship. They’ve chosen to prettify David (in “Chapter One,” the Saul-figure does to show-David what the Biblical David did to Bathsheba’s husband, so the show’s David remains an overperfect farmboy with no need for penitence) and make Jonathan a conflictedly-gay conflictedly-villainous waffler with an obvious redemption arc in sight. I hate every one of these changes! …There’s also still little sense of God as a moral force rather than merely a source of power, although I admit we’re getting subtle outlines of God’s commandments as the series progresses. I wish David, rather than Silas (=Saul), had become the focus of God’s moral attention earlier on–I get why they’re doing it this way, but again, it makes David look cute rather than astonishing.

I should maybe note that I can’t be rational about the “Sabbath Queen” episode because it depicts a family dealing with a critically-ill daughter. I have no idea if that episode is good or not, and I don’t plan to watch it again.

Batman: The Animated Series, all seasons. I hate Batman comics; I loved this series!

Batman as a genre tends toward sickly child-abuse storylines and exploitive portrayals of mental illness. (I know why you’d mine mental illness for metaphors, and that can really work; I just want it to be completely cartoony, or much more realistic, or unruly genius… not the Uncanny Valley into which a lot of Batman stuff falls for me.) In comics which purport to be Serious Business, I really cannot handle that stuff. For the most part, this show didn’t hit those buttons for me, although there were occasional moments when the bottom dropped out and I couldn’t help but remember that Arkham Asylum is scary because we’re supposed to fear “the weak and the wounded.”

But the thing I loved about this series–the reason I Netflix’d it, and the thing on which it completely delivered–was its look. This is a hot, gorgeous show. It’s all angular and expressionist and deco and… basically honey for the bears, where I’m concerned. It’s dark and spooky-fun and stupidly beautiful.

I loved basically any show with Harley Quinn. I was expecting to like her and ended up adoring her. She’s having so much fun! “Harley’s Holiday” might be my favorite of those, although the one with the Joker Fish, which I think is her first or second appearance, is also adorable, as is “Harley and Ivy.” I liked Poison Ivy’s eps generally as well. I love that they paired the clown and the femme fatale, and kept both of them recognizably noir-girl types!

I think you’ll know immediately whether this show is for you, since as I said, its look is its main appeal. (At least for me.) Most of the special features are commentary tracks, which I love!–the most fun for me were the ones for the first episode, where they laughed at how dark the coloring is (it’s really startling), and for “Critters,” which is apparently one of the most reviled episodes of the series. I liked it! And I liked it even more after the commentary track. I think they actually avoided the problems of making a dark deco Batman fight a giant chicken, you know? It’s an incredibly creepy chicken! On the other hand, it’s part of a weird run of episodes where Batman fights dumb stuff–there’s a dinosaur in the previous episode, and later we get gorilla-villains. …Speaking of villains who don’t work for me, I hated all things Ras al-Ghul except for the one which is really a Jonah Hex episode.

The later discs are a “revamped” version. Og like: I think they use a lot more red in the revamp? Not sure. If I’m right, it made the show even hotter; if I’m wrong, something else made it look extra spectacular. Og no like: People’s faces mostly became more masklike, whiter and more acutely-angled, and I missed the curves.