Alex Reid

This is one of my new favourite TV shows of the year.

Portlandia is a collection of sketches about various absurd and flaky characters living in Portland, starring SNL’s Fred Armisen and former Sleater-Kinney star Carrie Brownstein.

If you’ve ever met a lot of people from Vancouver, Seattle, Portland and/or San Francisco, or you have a lot of experience dealing with hipsters in general, you’ll really understand the parodies. Portland – according to my friends on the West Coast – is the hip place to be; it’s LCD Soundsystem and granola in the 1990s.

One of my favourite sketches from Season One:

Another favourite here too of the same character we have all seen downtown.

The second season airs on IFC tomorrow night.

Great opening song too!

I love AMC’s Breaking Bad and I love the gag reels.

During it’s 60-episode and five year run, HBO’s The Wire naturally was criticized by the Baltimore Police Department as it analyzed the dysfunctions of an entire city. But it was two days ago when Police Commissioner Frederick H. Bealefeld III that the HBO show was a “smear that will take decades to overcome“.

“I heard all this stuff about, ‘Well there’s crime shows about L.A., about New York, about Miami,’” Bealefeld said. “You know what Miami gets in their crime show? They get detectives that look like models, and they drive around in sports cars. And you know what New York gets, they get these incredibly tough prosecutors, competant cops that solve the most crazy, complicated cases.”

“What Baltimore gets is this reinforced notion that it’s a city full of hopelessness, despair and dysfunction. There was very little effort – beyond self-serving – to highlight the great and wonderful things happening here, and to indict the whole population, the criminal justice system, the school system.”

Actually what Baltimore got was the best show on television. I’m sure most police officers will attest that CSI Miami is so removed from the truth that it is indeed more about models and fast cars than the profession. Perhaps Bealefeld would rather have models and fast cars himself. But I can do not defend the show that I love more than the creator himself.

David Simon, the creator of The Wire, Treme and Generation Kill and a police reporter at The Baltimore Sun for twelve years, penned a scathing public reply to the police commissioner that I think echoes similar problems in Winnipeg.

Others might reasonably argue, however that it is not sixty hours of The Wire that will require decades for our city to overcome, as the commissioner claims. A more lingering problem might be two decades of bad performance by a police agency more obsessed with statistics than substance, with appeasing political leadership rather than seriously addressing the roots of city violence, with shifting blame rather than taking responsibility.