As I’m one of those carping, bitter writers who’ve yet to make an actual living doing this, I’ve resigned myself to a day job. Not just any day job, but one as part of perhaps the most despised profession in the universe (Which? A virtual muffin basket and free copy of my as yet unpublished masterpiece for the most imaginative answers).  While I don’t see anyone rushing around creating shiny TV around my job (come on, cops? Surgeons? Serial killers? What’s so hot about them?) it seems TV-land loves the jobs you hate. Not least of which, lawyers, which populate drama series The Good Wife.

The wife of the title, Alicia Florrick (Julianna Margulies, ER) begins the series as the least interesting aspect of this sleek legal drama. First seen demure, devastated and in pearls by the glare of flashbulbs. Alicia’s doing a Hilary, choosing to stand by disgraced District Attorney Peter Florrick. No, that allusion isn’t one of mine; the writers directly reference Hilary Clinton as a role model for Alicia – make of that what you will.

As Peter (a sleazily magnetic Chris Noth being Big behind bars) fights allegations of corruption, Alicia returns to her previous career as a lawyer to make ends meet. While Alicia’s struggles at work and at home are the stuff of drama, they don’t make her a character to warm to, as the writers at first appear to assume. This being a long held bugbear of mine – that being a Mom gives a character instant access to the viewer’s, and indeed other characters’ sympathies, negating the need for further character development.

Alicia lands on her feet at a prestigious Chicago law firm, at which old flame Will Gardner is one of the partners. Will (Josh Charles, who played an angry, unhappy husband with painful realism as part of the excellent In Treatment) carries a torch for Alicia, making him the obvious choice for a will-they-won’t-they dance.

More interesting are the peripheral characters: Alicia’s younger rival Cary and the mysterious in-house investigator Kalinda (Archie Punjabi, White Teeth). She’s steely and sexy in her uniform of tiny skirts, knee-high boots and black eye-liner. Yet, Punjabi’s performance is such that I’m far more excited by what’s she’s thinking than what she’s wearing, unlike Alicia – so often the stylish blank.

Better played are Cary and Alicia’s battles, his struggle to reconcile his ambition with his scruples, and his hopeless attraction to the secretive Kalinda. Cary’s a handsome, well-connected WASP endowed with a certain obnoxious charm by Matt Czuchry. Cary’s a familiar character (imagine Czuchry’s poor little rich boy routine in The Gilmore Girls, plus a few years, a very few disappointments and a well tailored suit), until the second season, when he gains a little more vulnerability without resorting to a total personality bypass. Czuchry even gets to use some facial expressions beyond smug or faintly annoyed!

The strange chill at the heart of The Good Wife means the initial premise of Alicia breaking down the door to the boys’ club of the legal profession doesn’t quite fly. The Good Wife recalls series’ like The Closer and Medium, in which the protagonist relies on supposed feminine qualities like emotional intelligence and empathy to give her a leg-up in a brisk, factual, masculine world. But this distinction is made with all the subtlety of a falling gavel: note a scene during the pilot, where Alicia tries to track down evidence to exonerate a client; she makes vital progress by bonding during a vacuous, lazy oh-dear-aren’t-men-silly moment with a female clerk.

The series tries to cast the poised, tamped-down Alicia as the heart of the series, often expected to bring her time as Wronged Woman and Mom, rather than any political nous or legal skill, to bear on sensitive cases involving victimised women or families. This patronising characterisation aside, The Good Wife develops the glimmer of something special in its mix of female characters.

Ally McBeal this isn’t, the cases often dry, or sad, or self-consciously earnest rather than outrageous, with febrile twists and long-reaching consequences. Alicia and Kalinda develop a tentative, barbed, sardonic friendship lubricated by tequila, which doesn’t fall easily into the broad types of female relationships beloved of TV-land. It is neither the shrieking singletons who bond over the fecklessness of men, nor the catty on-off rivals over men, or work, or men. Did I mention men? All of which makes for perhaps the most genuine female friendship on US TV.

The Good Wife doesn’t break new ground in presentation or point of view; its stories are told in traditional Good vs. Evil fashion, the courtroom debates are pitched battles for the most part, exciting at the time, but not memorable. The second season introduces more moral ambiguity and twisty plotting that’s a marked improvement, as well as the sense of a wider, murkier network beyond Alicia’s firm. The Good Wife’s latter cases revolve around the meeting of commercial, legal and political interests, in a gratifying fashion that’s less tidy, but more believable.

Never mind if Alicia and the terminally boring Will continue to circle one another, or if Peter revives his political career. I want to know more about Cary and Kalinda, about the somewhat clichéd Dianne Lockhart (fabulous Christine Baranski) and her endless collection of shoulder-padded outfits, the deliciously amoral spin-doctor Eli Gold (an entertaining, if slightly overcooked guest turn from Alan Cumming). Look out, too for  a daring, cynical recurring role for Michael J. Fox  and for an appearance from America Ferrera post Ugly Betty – her guest role proves that she deserves a character that isn’t hemmed in by her ethnicity.

The Good Wife seeks to make a point about women’s place in American society and politics. I don’t even mind if it’s not quite sure what that point is. As a comment on the status quo The Good Wife doesn’t reveal anything earth-shattering: gender and race remain factors in American politics, but the attempt is intriguing. Even Alicia becomes slightly more human as the series progresses, though improbably made up and coiffed round the clock.

Strange, too, are the viral video and YouTube skits created by various characters as part of their politicking – neither as funny, nor shocking as they should be.  Rather like the often painful efforts of countless rom-com writers trying to convince us that their fictional novelist/songwriter/screenwriter character can really write (see Music and Lyrics, Alex and Emma, Never Been Kissed, etc)! American TV has long been accomplished at high concept,  topical dramas ripped from the headlines, and  The Good Wife continues the theme. It also consistently manages to be a little odd and suprising while mired in gloss, and for that, worth watching.

Among the joys of possessing a modicum of education is some entitlement to the occasional smug glow.

By long and devoted watching of ER and House, and paying a little attention in lectures along the way, I came to some grasp of what ‘v-tach!’ and ‘asystole!’ actually mean. Where I come from, terms seldom including an implied exclamation mark, as those may soon become defunct on the NHS.

Still, valuable lessons all, much like the hospital morgue etiquette and astoundingly lax security illustrated by Pathology. This 2008 medical chiller comprises a thoughtful, considered meditation on the nature of life and death, the human condition, and our primal nature…

Actually, bollocks it does.

Pathology rattles through its brisk ninety-odd minutes and flimsy, vaguely familiar premise (Flatliners had attractive young medics being too clever for their own good twenty years earlier) with all the flash and dash of a high-concept music video, and about the same consideration for plot, character development and dialogue. Or even consistency. Courtesy of director Marc Schölermann, a slick, if ludicrous Hollywood debut.

As per tradition on small and silver screen, Pathology’s gloomy hospital seems unusually populous with the beautiful and arrogant. Newbie Dr. Ted Grey (Milo Ventimiglia, Heroes, Gilmore Girls, Rocky Balboa, a music video or two) finds himself anxious to get in with the cool kids against his better judgement – a pack of amoral interns whose extracurricular activities include plotting the perfect murder, detectable by nary a scalpel, test-tube or microscope.

While under the tutelage of Dr. Morris (a lugubrious, heroically deadpan John de Lancie, Star Trek: The Next Generation), young Teddy leaves behind a pining, sweet natured intended (Alyssa Milano, Charmed). As per another set of well-worn movie traditions, her very gooey-eyed comeliness dooms her to something nasty. But, I’m getting ahead of the story.

She’s no idea when he falls in with shifty-eyed Sparknotes-Nihilist Jake and chums. Proof of how shocking this lot are? There’s bemusing knife play and bacchanalian revelry around toe-tagged corpses in the small hours. There’s flinging bits of liver at the nerds. More shocking, Jake’s girlfriend, Juliette and her wont to inappropriate toe fondling, make out sessions with a female friend in front of a crowd at any opportune moment. Oh, and Ted’s presence leads to a daft, sneering alpha-male stand off, which galvanises The Game.

The body count rockets until Teddy suffers an attack of conscience when Jake’s worrying tendencies culminate in a frenzied rampage. With a climactic explosion, Pathology completes the classic triad of celluloid teen-boy fantasy: blood, boobs, and boom!

But, don’t worry girls (and indeed, some of the boys). There’s sufficient expanse of Ventimiglia’s milky skin on show to divert you – not a stand in, not that I checked. Not at all. But, I digress.

The star’s lovely bottom aside, he can’t make Teddy real enough for the viewer to care what happens to him. The point, rammed home with a big, shiny cleaver, is of course that the fight for civilisation and morality is pointless, as we are all animals with the evolutionary imperative to kill, and only a thin veneer separates Ted from the monstrous Jake.

Because that’s, like, so deep, dude.

The screenplay doesn’t have the give required to convey Ted’s wrestle with his scruples, or even have him show a little vulnerability. We’re meant to believe he’s a good but ambitious man corrupted, but next to Jake the maniac, he comes across as wooden. Heroes, self-important tosh though it is, at least allowed Ventimiglia to play to his strengths as pale-and-interesting dreamer Peter Petrelli. The other cast members of Pathology get scarcely a look-in, little more than eye candy and bags of meat by turns, sometimes both at once.

Taken for the forgettable popcorn-fodder it is, Pathology isn’t the worst way to while away an evening – there’s skill in its sleek, moody glamour, and wheeling, nightmarish visions of the city by night. There’s the odd bit of grinding angry-white-boy music, if you like that sort of thing, but in all, sadly insufficient material to sustain the film’s pretensions.

   Welcome to Xenith’s latest; an overheated mess of scurrilous, unfounded speculation and scathing opinion, perhaps the occasional review, skewering old or new screen offerings to virtual cork and pasteboard for the scrutiny of the collective cruel and grubby little boy with a magnifying glass.                    

    As my sole qualifications for this gig  are the acquisition of more useless trivia and credits of actors and directors than is healthy and thankless love of the ones that make and perpetuate the myths as much as cliché busting masterpieces, I don’t promise to be regular, scholarly or even to have any idea what I’m talking about.  Rather, this column thrusts to the thump of my tub, for the flawed, the contradictory, the downright populist, and whatever I’ve been watching this week. Fusing all that with the hubris of competing directly against the millions of entertainment blogs out there brings us to the fumbling conception.  

    I begin with absolutely no discussion of the current Oscar contenders, one of those might-have-beens; the well-intentioned ‘issue’ movie that almost gets it right while bordering on the offensive, and wins a clutch of hideous gilded objects.

     Oddly sidelined for a win by the Oscar committee, In and Out (1997) manages both to skirt the bear-maw of sentimentality that inevitably swallows many a promising idea (Forrest Gump, anyone?), and topple into it. Predating the current trend for the industry to prove how self aware and ironic it is, this film features one film’s laziest stock characters, the egg-cup shallow megastar (a monosyllabic Matt Dillon) who ticks award season boxes by playing a character with some type of physical or mental impairment, or one who belongs to a trendy persecuted minority. The opening fake-Oscar ceremony a joyous marshmallow spoof of backslapping star cameos and snippy in-jokes (Stephen Segal’s Best Actor nomination for ‘Snowball in Hell’ being my particular favourite), the winner a sledgehammer-subtle but all-too relevant indictment of Hollywood’s squeamishness when it comes to gay characters, and straight actors who play gay for accolades.

    Ooh, cutting and cynical, no? Timely, even. On to the plot, then: 

    Popular high school English teacher and track coach Howard Brackett (Kevin Kline) enjoys a neat, chaste, self-contained life in Greenleaf, Indiana, engaged for the past three years to fellow teacher and recovering binge eater Emily Montgomery (Joan Cusack), and one time English teacher of Cameron Drake, C-student done good.

     The town congregates around their TV screens to cheer on one of their own, when Cameron, in an acceptance speech of supreme, good-natured stupidity, outs Howard to the town, and the nation. What follows is a breezy farce in which Howard has to contend with his family and fiancee’s confusion, a media invasion, and the barrage of limp-wristed stereotypes posited by his students.

    While the film does very little to counter any of those, glibly equates sexuality with gender identity, and relies rather too heavily on Freudian slips and malapropisms, as in the ‘intersection’ scene, for laughs, I find I can’t bring myself to judge too harshly.

     I want to hate In and Out, but can’t, with the slightly clumsy message of tolerance, and the tiniest of sly hints at a gay wedding, well before the present toxic US Proposition 8 debacle, while still treating Howard with disappointing squeamishness, so as not to alienate conservative filmgoers. Aside from the noted ten-second smacker forcibly planted on him, Howard’s sexual awakening isn’t exactly believable, and leaves him as much of a eunuch as before – strange for a film centred on this man’s sexuality, he gets the least action, or even romance, out of all the characters. All it takes for Howard to reluctantly come to terms with himself is the spurious, if very funny realisation that he can’t contain the urge to get down to that disco stomper on his ‘Be a Man’ self-help tape.

    Bar the occasional painful moments when I felt like I’d stumbled into a sub-par Dead Poets Society, or indeed any film with the word wedding in the title by mistake, In and Out is a slice of enjoyable, if hardly groundbreaking entertainment. The film does indirectly raise a bugbear of mine: lack of equal visibility for female sexualities compared to the proliferation of dramas, films and dismal, tear-stained reality shows that feature gay/bi men. Barring sitcom innuendo and the occasional, terribly earnest storyline on ER, Casualty and the like, or as a device on Torchwood since a good proportion of the alien villainesses get their kicks kissing girls; I was suitably intrigued this week by the introduction of a clever, hard-as-nails maybe lesbian in the latest series of Skins. More on Skins, and on the perils of being a TV teen soon.

     Still, Kline is warm, likeable, and adept at the physical comedy required by the title role. Tom Selleck, bit player and moustached-man’s icon, proves sprightly and fun, while never quite relinquishing his defining characteristic (being a sleazy hack, doing his utmost to hide the big, beating heart beneath that hairy chest). Joan Cusack continues her repertoire of shrieking neurotics, alongside tons more of my favourite recurring movie clichés. The wedding has more frills and awful dancing than you can shake a stick at, a stiff-shirted power-hungry high school principal, small town oddballs, and teenage meatheads with infinitely more sensible girlfriends. Best of all is Debbie Reynolds, and her genteel Arsenic and Old Lace caricature of a sweet, slightly dotty old dear with a barely concealed core of steel. This from an actress who I’ll adore forever for Singin’ in the Rain, now spending her dotage playing the kind of twinkly Marple-esque woman who wouldn’t dream of setting foot outside the house without hat and gloves, never raises her voice and probably packs a shiv in her knitting bag.

    Uncomfortable assumptions and theoretical shiv included, In and Out isn’t a great film, somewhat dated and rather muddled in its aims, and may even have done more harm than good in some quarters, but it remains a necessary step while films like Brokeback Mountain and the actors therein attract praise and censure for reasons other than the quality of filmmaking.