really great show on television

I wish there were a really great 
show on television. It would be 
in black and white, set in the days
where tough men wore sharp hats
and women knew how. So instead 
of curses, there would be all that 
great and colorful old-timey lingo, 
but obviously used in place of a curse,
so you'd laugh and know exactly. 

The hero would have a jaw you 
could found a bank branch on. 
He'd have the look of later men
cranked out of the Carey Grant
stamp press, but with his own
stamp too: kind of fuzzy, like
an off-print counterfeit that can
still pass on the streets, on tv.
Dapper not suave, large 
but not musclebound: 
a good guy, but with a wrong
side you don't want to get on
(several people every week
look right at him and apparently,
didn't get the memo) in short:

straight dangerous, with a 
chaser of hard morality 
and one of those "own 
solitary code" of honor 
deals. Keeps getting 
in fights he didn't start, 
chases he kicked off 
by showing up, or 
saying something 
- with a meaning look. 

It'd be racist, because 

that was the time, but 
every time somebody 
was racist, the hero 
would launch in from 
the side with a haymaker 
suckerpunch crack! across 
the jib, and down they go
- even if he wasn't in that scene! 

You see, in those days they filmed 
on soundstages, so the hero was 
probably watching from the wings. 
Probably how those cases got solved, 
if you think about it. Canny. 

Anyway, the dialogue and character 
touches would be a joy, the plots 
well-laid and knit, the twists and turns 
believably implausible, the score 
would be brassy, halfway-atonal
raucous jazz with an animal rhythm, 
only composed to within an inch 
of its life so the effect is a sort of 
deadly, trained timid raucuity - 

a classic. An all-around ironshod 
brass-fitted pipe-hitting classic 
with a heart of gold, where every
week's show wrapped up tidy
and neat, and satisfying, and
you came to love seeing each
character come back, even if
they're not main-cast, because
it's all been drawn so well
into a taut net of bursting
televisual virtues and merits. Only 

you couldn't recommend it anybody 

because of all the dramatically 
necessary heavily explicit nudity 
and hard core sex - with full-on 
zoomed-in biologically lurid 
obsessive camerawork, too! From 
startling, unexpected angles 
borrowed from avant-garde 
German Expressionism, and 
- the skin tones. How these
scenes were lit to bring out 
luster and throw deep shade, 
with shadows and angles 
turning a vigorous animal 
brute force tenderness coupling 
into an orgy of phantoms panting 
and thrusting, giving and receiving 
around the main pair! How many 
different lights are supposed to be 
on in this "room"? 

But really, this is the only small 
touch of the show's production that yanks 
you out of suspension of disbelief, and 
it's worth it for the sheer art. Truth 
and beauty, kids. The human form, 

whether wandering the dark streets 
sprayed with rain so the light picks up 
darkling gleams, and shadows cut 
deeply across paths, or getting into 
dive bars for a purpose: YOU! YOU 
in the corner! CHASE SCENE. WHY? 

Or when the guns come out. Or the knives, 
but - let it be fists, please. The hero does not 
come up short there. A knife he can handle
- or always does. A gun makes him stop,  
hold up his hands and get cocky. It's 

a plot device. Like how he always gets 
hit on the head from behind and blacks out. 
If the writers can't figure out how to stop 
this guy sometimes, these shows would take 
ten minutes tops! Where were we, though? 

The human form, in the midst and muddling through 
all of that, sometimes we lose its beauty in the doings. 
Yet sex somehow, that doesn't happen. It's as if it's 

the one act 

in which beauty itself is the act. Human beauty, 
and that's why this show gets it so right. Because 

well. 

It's also why you can't recommend it.