4B — Thursday, February 25, 2016 the b-side The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com By ALEX INTNER Daily Arts Writer The musical TV genre has experienced a massive creative growth recently. The relaunch of the genre started out with “Glee” in 2009, which used pop songs to tell its story. The show was a massive success for FOX in its first season, but it never really found an ability to tell its story through song. Then “Smash” arrived onto the scene, bringing in a mix of contemporary pop and original content. The show was touted as the next big hit by NBC when it premiered, but it never connected with the public, not lasting past its second season. Then along came “Galavant” and “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend,” which have tiny viewerships, but are two of the best out there right now. This leads to the question: is there something inherently limiting, from an audience per- spective, about musical television shows? If so, that’s really disap- pointing, because both “Gala- vant” and “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” are brilliantly inventive, using their songs to tell their story in new ways. Something astonishing hap- pened during the second season of “Galavant.” The show elevated itself from a cheap musical I’d watch out of respect for the format to something fun and unique. Most of that change came from the music itself. In the first season, the songs told jokes, but they didn’t lead anywhere for the stories or the characters. Composer Alan Menken (who wrote the music for many of Disney’s ’90s musicals) expanded the scope of the songs, using them to address both humor and character growth. In the second season, the show lost its fear of advancing its characters through song. A moment in the show’s finale comes to mind. King Richard (Timothy Omundson, “Psych”) meets his “inner-child” in a song addressing his hopes and fears. He sings: “Will my star ever rise? / Will my life ever change? / Am I destined to be achievement-free forever?” This type of self-reflection through song is something the show would never have attempted in its first season, and shows a lot of growth on the show’s part. Some of the songs end up in full-fledged parody. A song where Galavant (Joshua Sasse, “The Neighbors”) tries to set the mood for a date between Richard and Roberta (Clare Foster, “The Bill”) reminds me of a classic “Little Mermaid” tune, though its refrain of “Maybe you won’t die alone” is slightly different from “Kiss the Girl.” And one scene involving Richard and Roberta sharing the story of first sexual encounter to their zombie army features a similar tune to “Grease” ’s “Summer Nights,” complete with zombie grunts filling for in for the greasers’ responses. “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” is also pushing the musical-comedy boundary, using music to deal with some of the show’s deeper themes surrounding mental ill- ness. During the series, there are a few moments where Rebecca (Rachel Bloom, “Fuck Me Ray Bradbury”), the show’s main character who moves to West Covina, CA to follow her former summer-camp boyfriend Josh Chan (Vincent Rodriguez III, “Hostages”), is upset because of something Josh did, and each of these moments features a song. The first, “Sexy French Depres- sion,” puts Rebecca’s feelings front and center with a scene that uses berets and a black and white aesthetic. The second, from the latest episode, when Rebecca’s lies catch up to her and push Josh away, features Rebecca singing “You ruined everything, you stupid bitch / You’re just a lying little bitch who ruins things and wants the world to burn.” It’s heartbreaking to watch her bash herself like this, but it’s a beauti- ful way to illustrate the impact of the moment. “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” also does something the best musi- cals do: use its music to address character relationships. In a scene from earlier in the season, Josh addresses Rebecca after a moment of contention between her and the rest of the group, and the two share a reprise of “West Covina” where the two affirm their friendship. It’s a moment that only a musical could do, put- ting two voices in tight harmony. But I don’t want to discount the success of live musical broadcasts from NBC and FOX, which have been big fat hits for the networks, and pretty damn good as well. Those events are better able to draw an audience because the networks can push them as happening live. They also utilize big industry names who probably wouldn’t commit to a full series. Still, despite all the warm critical reception of these new musicals, neither of the continu- ing series is likely to see another year. “Galavant” ’s big supporter, Paul Lee, was just fired from his position as ABC’s President of Entertainment, and the rat- ings for its recent run were just abysmal. And less than a million people watched the premiere of “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend,” with little growth in DVR views. That signifies one of two things: either viewers didn’t find the show or just outright rejected it. That’s such a sad thing for me. People will watch the live broad- casts of known musicals, but they either can’t find or won’t watch the weekly series. This is an unfortunate situation, because both the shows are using songs to tell stories in ways that other series just can’t. They’re explor- ing new ways of advancing story and character through their orig- inal music, and it’s a shame that they probably won’t be able to tell these stories for much longer. TV NOTEBOOK EPISODE REVIEW This season of “Shameless” launches the Gallagher family into new territory. The family’s dynamic has always been at the core of the show, but it approaches a turning point now that the kids are grown up (with the exception of Liam). Fiona (Emmy Rossum, “The Day After Tomorrow”) must cope with her siblings’ resistance to being told what to do, and she seems to lose her sense of purpose in the transition. The episode “Pimp’s Paradise” shows the calm before the storm. After getting evicted when their house is foreclosed, the Gallaghers navigate a series of hurdles to regain ownership of their home. They hope to return to a sense of normalcy, when their lives aren’t getting torn apart by drugs, jail or romantic strife. This is normalcy for the Gallaghers: Liam getting lice, Debbie (Emma Kenney, “Epic”) seducing her employer recovering from cancer, Lip (Jeremy Allen White, “Afterschool”) getting his professor fired after nude pictures of her are leaked from his phone and Carl (Ethan Cutosky, “The Unborn”) using his (likely) drug money to pimp out their house with a slide and DJ booth. As the family’s individual subplots drift further apart from one another, the episode struggles to reincorporate the driving element of the show’s drama: Frank (William H. Macy, “Fargo”), the only character who never changes. His attempt to reclaim his status as head of the household prompts Fiona to throw in the towel and move in with Sean (Dermot Mulroney, “The Grey”). With Fiona’s history of doomed relationships and Frank’s pattern of flighty opportunism, another upheaval is bound to hit soon. - SHIR AVINADAV SHOWTIME B- Shameless Season 6, Episode 7 Sundays at 9 p.m. Showtime TV musicals and you D ear Gillian, Sometimes it feels like I’m constantly ‘looking for love.’ However, I have lost sight of what that truly means. In this day filled with Tinder, hookup culture and increased sexuality, how can I look for love with all this sex in the way? Don’t get me wrong, I wouldn’t turn down the opportunity for sex but I often feels like it gets in the way of finding a relationship. I’ve never been good at finding the love part, and the sex part just seems to complicate it for me. I desire both but one seems like an immediate gratification and the other seems like exit out of a long complicated maze. Please send me advice on how to navigate between desire for sex and longing for love. Are they mutually exclusive? Is it possible to be on the hunt for sex and find love along the way? Or do I have this whole thing upside down? Please help. — Lovelorn and Lonely Dear Lovelorn and Lonely, People have been sitting around musing on the topic of what love and sex do to and for each other since Eryximachus proposed that for the post- feast entertainment in Plato’s “Symposium,” everyone should belt out a little oration in praise of Eros, the god of love. This wine-fueled series of exegeses on the subject yielded some thought-provoking opinions that have stood the test of time. But they were so wide-ranging that the only conclusion from them is that there is no coherent consensus on the topic, one which is destined to dominate everyone’s little black book of eternal mysteries of human existence. Plato — well, the words of the prophetess Diotima through Socrates’ speech — posits that the erotic desire of romantic love cannot be satisfied by sex and is really an existential yearning to transcend our own beings and mortality. Exactly what you have in mind every time you bring someone home, right? Then there’s Aristophanes’ creation myth of primordial beings with two bodies in one before they were split in half by the gods, leaving a world of “individuals” trying to fuse back together with their other halves. This stands now, 2500 years later, as not only one of the most striking metaphors on the topic, but also as a bountiful source of pickup lines at Rick’s. The mystery was not solved by Xenophon’s response to Plato (also titled “Symposium”), nor in the many Symposia since. Heaven knows that in the Symposium held at my house last year featuring History Prof. David Halperin’s students in togas, the love/sex mystery was hopelessly compounded and shrouded in a dense enigmatic fog that, for many of us, has yet to lift. A little later, Aristotle maintains in his “Prior Analytics” that erotic desire is actually more a desire for love than it is a desire for sexual intercourse. If Aristotle’s on to something and love is actually the aim of sex, why is it often so detached and void of emotion or commitment? And if it’s not for love, what is it for? That’s the question Halperin will take up in a forthcoming article “What is Sex For?” in which he will attempt to tie this Aristotelian paradox into the no-less-mysterious topics of gay bathhouses and Adele. Since figuring out what sex is for seems doomed, do we have a better chance with love? We turn to essayist Susan Sontag, who managed to demystify the art of photography and then took on the question what is love for. “We ask everything of love. We ask it to be anarchic. We ask it to be the glue that holds the family together, that allows society to be orderly and allows all kinds of material processes to be transmitted from one generation to another. But I think that the connection between love and sex is very mysterious.” Thanks a lot. Sontag continues: “Part of the modern ideology of love is to assume that love and sex always go together. They can, I suppose, but I think rather to the detriment of either one or the other. And probably the greatest problem for human beings is that they just don’t.” Well, Lovelorn, at least you’re in good company. But let’s move up from philosophy and intellectualism to the arts, which, I believe, are better at eternal mysteries. There’s a film from 1971 called “Carnal Knowledge,” from the Jules Feiffer novel, in which Jack Nicholson and Art Garfunkel meet as freshmen roommates at Amherst. In terms of your letter, LL, Nicholson’s character can be said to be sex and Garfunkel’s, love. The film follows them through their lives, and although there are many lovely insights and some great lines, by the end, the question of which one fared better is … you guessed it, a mystery. Some have weighed in on the relative merits of love and sex, elevating one above the other. Plato and Aristotle saw love as the higher pursuit. Freud saw sex is primary, driving virtually everything we do, and love as just one of many constructs we use to get more sex. In her novel “Love,” Toni Morrison explored infatuation, a kind of half-sex- half-love minotaur: “Do they still call it infatuation? That magic ax that chops away the world in one blow, leaving only the couple standing there trembling? Whatever they call it, it leaps over anything, takes the biggest chair, the largest slice, rules the ground wherever it walks, from a mansion to a swamp, and its selfishness is its beauty ... People with no imagination feed it with sex — the clown of love. They don’t know the real kinds, the better kinds, where losses are cut and everybody benefits. It takes a certain intelligence to love like that — softly, without props.” Looking at history, I don’t think our world of dating sites, apps and i-things has yielded an era of more sex and less love. But I do think they have made finding and losing sex and love more impersonal and reduced our accountability for how we carry ourselves in doing so. This may be pushing sex and romantic love further from each other and I think this is what you are sensing, Lovelorn. Yet there’s no correct recipe for finding genuine love, as Stendahl illustrates in his novel “The Red and the Black,” which locates love in the spontaneity of the moment and not the strategic love games of jealousy, drama and roles. So with no formula or equation for solving for love with the variable of sex, I hope I’ve been able to prove you are not alone in feeling your way through the complicated maze of yours. No, the two pursuits are not mutually exclusive, but no one’s been able to calculate a correlation coefficient. Send an email to deargillian@ michigandaily.com or anonymously here describing a quandary about love, relationships, existence or their opposites. Gillian will attempt to summon the wisdom of the arts (literary, visual, performing) to soothe your troubled soul. We may publish your letter in the biweekly column with your first name (or penname). Submissions should be 250 words or fewer and may be edited prior to publication. CULTURAL CURES COLUMN I’m looking for love, but just finding sex GILLIAN JAKAB By RACHEL RICHARDSON Daily Arts Writer During the classical film era, theorists grappled over the importance of shooting on location. Those who encouraged it claimed that it evoked a layer of depth unmatched by the sentiments the actors produced when recording on a sound stage. This was extremely critical for “Rome, Open City,” where the suffering emitted by the people lining the decimated streets of Italy constantly reminded the actors of the brokenness their characters felt and enhanced the emotional authenticity. Others argued that it didn’t matter where the film was shot as long as the director could convince his audience that the story took place in the exact location that he told them it did. Nowadays, few directors prioritize filming on-site, as audiences willingly accept the idea of feigned locations. To disguise one city as another, directors carefully select indistinguishable areas to shoot their films in addition to employing other creative techniques. For example, “The 5th Wave” is set in Cincinnati, Ohio, yet it was shot in Macon, Georgia though it’s almost impossible to tell since the tall trees and dirt covered ground make the woodland setting appear like the forest you’d expect to see in Ohio. There’s also a clever shot of a sign indicating how many miles the heroine must travel until she reaches the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, which is located in Dayton, Ohio. So, although the movie itself was far from believable, I was thoroughly convinced that the action happened in the exact location that I was informed it did. However, for Ohio residents, this effect may not have been achieved. To locals, it doesn’t matter how average the forest, or how many cutaways to city limit signs the director uses, they will always be able to discern that it’s their city. My familiarity with Grand Rapids unfortunately led to a state of temporarily disillusionment. I vividly remember the morning I learned that Jessie Eisenberg and Jason Segel were downtown shooting “The End of the Tour.” In that moment, I felt a sense of pride knowing that my hometown was going to be featured on the big screen. Sadly, this exhilaration subsided once I actually watched the film. Initially, it was exciting to hear the little voice in my head exclaim “I’ve walked past that” (the office building at 50 Monroe Avenue), “I’ve seen that restaurant,” “I’ve driven on that stretch of I-196” and “I think I’ve actually been inside that building.” But, this also emphasized that the story isn’t actually unfolding in Bloomington, Illinois. Now this is not to say that I didn’t thoroughly enjoy “The End of the Tour,” just that I became frustrated with its lack of genuineness. With a much bigger production, “Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice,” having been shot in Detroit, it will be interesting to see if Michiganders will notice any familiar buildings or streets. Typically, the background tends to lose its significance in films dominated by special effects, computer graphics and fight scenes whereas in calmer, narrative-driven features such as “Tour,” the characters’ interaction with their environment is salient. While in the early days of cinema, all elements equally determined a film’s success, contemporary Hollywood heavily depends on acting and post production work. Audiences have come to rely on movies for a complete manipulation of reality, not a beautiful recreation of it. Thus, the importance of on-location shooting has sadly diminished. But this strategy cannot be completely neglected, especially when its absence can prevent the viewer from completely engrossing themselves in the film. FILM NOTEBOOK Location, location ... WARNER BROS. “The People Mover is even worse than I thought.”