Covert Horse

My latest guilty-pleasure TV show is Covert Affairs, on USA Network. It's like the defunct, geek-appeal series Numbers, without the math. Only this time, the clueless brother is in the field while the smarter brother is behind the scenes at headquarters. Only they're not brothers at all; rather, the field agent is a sexy, newly trained gal-agent recruit who can drive like Mario Andretti, throw an elbow like Gordie Howe, and hold a bewildered but meaningful facial expression for an extra beat whenever she processes new information like Judge Amy on Judging Amy; and the smart guy is a blind techie ops guy who gets her out of two types of trouble every three minutes, between commercials. And they're all in the CIA, not the FBI. Except that Charlie, the smarter brother in Numbers, was never actually in the FBI; he was a math professor who consulted for the FBI. And his colleague was an astronaut. And his father was Judd Hirsch, who used to be the guy in Taxi and Ordinary People; only this time the mentor is not Judd Hirsch but an ice-blond covert ops lady boss who is married to her boss, a politically connected CIA Deputy Director who is leaking information to a pretty reporter, whom the blind guy is sleeping with, while he deputy-directs a thorough shakedown of his division to stem the leak; which is why the blind guy can never answer the phone when Judge Amy needs him.

Perhaps I should have started by comparing the series to Bonanza.

Anyway, the horse comes through the wall in Covert Affairs at least twice per action sequence, which, while putting it on a par with Leverage, the statistical leader in the Implausible Moments category, is of little consequence in the realm of guilty-pleasure viewing. Piper Perabo is no Gina Bellman or Leslie Ann Warren; then again, Gina merely bowls you over with her classic beauty and Pan-European accent, assumes stock-character identities, and arranges helicopter pick-ups, whereas Piper as Annie Walker has to keep the very identity of her employer secret from her Georgetown Hausfrau sister, Amber from House, with whom she lives, only Amber isn't Amber in this series and hasn't appeared as anyone's spooky ambulatory hallucination as if she were one of John Nash's imaginary friends helping him develop the mathematics of Game Theory -- which Charlie, the smarter brother, calls upon weekly to illustrate a plot point in Numbers -- in A Beautiful Mind. At least, she hasn't yet.

Will she? Will the Deputy Director blame the leak on the blind guy, kick him to the curb, and start fooling around with the reporter himself? Will Annie Walker find love while successfully ingratiating herself with her Ice Queen boss -- who also appears in Leverage as Nate Ford's ex-wife who bailed Nate out of trouble while Gina Bellman was off having her baby, despite her lack of covert ops training and not being blind? Will Amber from House turn out to be a fellow CIA agent whose own ambulatory hallucinations involve Judd Hirsch? Most crucially, is Leslie Ann Warren -- who also played Juanita in Baja Oklahoma and Cinderella in Cinderella (A Very, Very Special Television Event), and whose star-turn in Mission Impossible set the bar for future spy-gals very, very high -- still smokin' hot?

The answers to these questions, and many more, are only a DVR box away.

When the Horse Comes Through the Wall

"Slumdog Millionaire" deserves its popular acclaim. I wish the reviews had given some hint of the human cruelty depicted, not to ward off moviegoers but to prepare them to brace themselves on the way to the feel-good, Bollywood payoff; it's not only a game show fairy tale involving a plucky kid from the Mumbai slums but a full-on, Dickensian exploration of the harshness of poverty, including the often brutal, other-than-heroic actions of people facing that circumstance.

That's a different topic. Today I would like to perform humanity a service, one far greater than the entertaining, yet gritty depiction of authentic life in the slums of India for worldly, media-saturated Western audiences that somehow have remained staggeringly unaware of the world's inequities.

Namely, I would like to retire the tired cliche, "jumping the shark" and offer the world a replacement.

As we all know, "jumping the shark" is what happens when Hollywood writers, rewriters, script doctors, directors, producers, studio executives, and interns have run out of new ideas and say the hell with it, let's just stitch up the plot with a spectacle and move on.

Only Dickens' Mr. Scrooge would deny the orphans of "Slumdog" every possible small triumph in their two decade adventure of youthful survival. But when these vagabond train riders on a random journey are forced to jump, and they JUST HAPPEN to land within a kilometer of the Taj Mahal, they are jumping an entire school of SeaWorld sharks at the same time.

This won't do. Rather than tagging the screenwriter's picaresque plot points with an overused metaphor derived from Fonzie's motorcycle stunt jump in a "Happy Days" episode, I would like to propose a fresh, new cliche.

In Terry Gilliam's "The Adventures of Baron Munchausen", we begin from the opposite end of the credulity spectrum. We expect from the outset to be led on, lied to, and stretched beyond recognition by the Baron's tall tales. That's the story, after all. In context, riding a cannonball over the siege to conduct reconnaissance is plausible. Nobody bats an eye when Eric Idle's character Berthold revs his feet in Flintstones fashion and zooms across the landscape at cartoon speed. We cheerfully suspend disbelief when Vulcan crushes a lump of coal into a diamond for his true love, Aphrodite, who tosses it in a pile with all the others.

However, near the end, when our heroes have not so much jumped the shark as been swallowed by one, and are hanging around in the sea creature's belly digesting the circumstances, as it were -- and then, the Baron confidently whistles for his gallant white horse who comes riding through the wall into the belly chamber to rescue them; well, excuse me, Mr. Gilliam. Even compared to your inferno of intentional implausibility, you've tossed one too many logs on the fire.

Which brings us to our New Metaphor Opportunity.

We're willing to believe Jamal, Salim, and Latika could survive the urban slums by the force of their wits, willingness to accommodate, and eternal hope; millions do. We're even willing to suspend disbelief that Jamal has found his way onto "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?" and answered each question, because that's the story. But when our youthful unfortunates jump from the train and JUST HAPPEN to land in the shadow of the Taj Mahal, I propose that we henceforth characterize such a deus ex machina as "The Horse Coming Through the Wall" instead of "Jumping the Shark".

Rest in peace, fish tank hurdlers everywhere.