The richest, most expressive element of the BBC detective series Wallander might be the Scandinavian-modern style sets, which were designed by Anders Olin.  They set the scene with precision, and offer deep sensual pleasure.  The centerpiece is the police station in Ystad, the small city in southern Sweden where the drama unfolds, which was constructed in its entirety in a studio there.  The floor where the homicide detectives work is spacious, with low ceilings and limited views to the outside.  The open central space, where they gather, is lined with wood planks and furnished with gently-worn, generic (that is, non-iconic) pieces of Scandinavian modern furniture.  Lit dimly, and propped with flurries of paper, stuffed birds, rusting metal desk lamps, and dying potted plants, the room evokes the strangeness and sadness of the work the detectives carry out, and that seeps into their personal lives.

The Wallander sets are a terrific contrast to the Mad Men sets, which fetishize mid-century modern design by recreating pristine, museum-like environments, including Rogers Sterling’s office and Don Draper’s apartment.  In those sets every object is gleaming, unused, and bathed in brilliant white light.  Compare them to the dark hardwood walls, bare concrete floor, and austere tables and chairs that furnish the Wallander police station, which suggest that these rooms have been around for a while, and that the detectives who work here have been around for a while too.  Everything inside it them has a lyrical battered feeling.  While open office spaces have become a design cliche, particularly for companies that want to project a socially progressive image, the set for Wallander is not about that at all.  These detectives work to unearth secrets, purposefully and painfully.  The common room, where everyone’s mutterings and moods spill over into everyone else’s, shows us the tumult.

Image courtesty of Ouno Design

What’s your favorite New York City-centric Sandy meme: the Fallen Tree, the Flooded Platform, or the Dangling Crane?  (I’m going with the Dangling Crane.)  I rode through the storm unscathed, without even losing power, and watched it unfold on television and online.  In general, still images of the storm are more powerful and communicative than video footage, maybe because the gravity of the situation isn’t undermined by the self-serving narration and heroics of local newscasters.  The damage in coastal Queens and New Jersey is devastating, and images of ruined homes there remind me of press photos coming out of war-torn regions in Libya.  There’s incredible violence in them.  But this is nature perpetuating the violence, and we can probably expect more, and more frequent, anomalous “weather events” like this.  As I heard one caller on a local radio show last week plead, we can’t continue to occupy “land that nature wants back.”

The storm brought back scenes from Beasts of the Southern Wild, which I saw several months ago, on a gentle summer afternoon.  I liked the way the movie used light and sound to shape a particular physical world (damp, overstuffed, aphasic) in a way that regular movies don’t.  And I liked the way the movie examined the unadorned, expressive faces of its actors, many of them black, which regular movies don’t.  Beasts takes us to the Bathtub in New Orleans, a low-lying land that became an island after Hurricane Katrina.  As another major storm approaches, a band of Bathtub residents defy a forced evacuation and return to their homes.  It’s a highly romantic position and, as narrated by Hushpuppie, the gritty five-year-old at the center of the story, understandable.  What this movie shows clearly, and the Sandy media coverage does not, is that nature has the awesome power to rewrite geography and obliterate culture.  Maybe it’s something we can’t think straight about right now, as we aid the displaced and evaluate the damage.  It’s much simpler to think about the Dangling Crane.

I watched the first seasons of Mad Men fitfully; I was definitely not on board.  The characters and their settings, though allegedly historical accurate, were chilling.  And I couldn’t understand the popular fascination with this time period, the early 1960’s, when men were men and women were there for their delectation.  But I watched the latest season (the fifth) breathlessly, caught up in every story line.  The characters were stirring, and their unnaturally stiff composure and surroundings underscored the explosive distance between their inner and outer lives.  People that had been grotesque caricatures to me (Roger Sterling, Joan Harris) were suddenly sympathetic, and I fell especially hard for Peter Campbell, the upstart ad agent and Connecticut family man, as he fell, swiftly and simply, in love with a neighbor.  Their romance, played out in daytime trysts at the Roosevelt Hotel, was tremendously moving. 

The show’s designers did a splendid job recreating a room from the Roosevelt.  (Ironically, the real Roosevelt Hotel boasts that they’ve just remodeled all their rooms.)  There’s something about this generic, tasteful midtown hotel room that’s especially forgiving.  Because it’s not-home and not-work, it gives the characters a space where they can suspend their official identities and unfold their real selves.  The room is simple, spacious and squarish, furnished with neo-colonial pieces that look downright dowdy compared with the ones in Don Draper’s Scandinavian-modern living room and Roger’s white-and-chrome office.  There’s an arched upholstered headboard, a high full-size bed, a butler, and a desk.  The space is flooded with the kind of soft white daylight found in Dutch paintings.  It makes the scenes feel, at the same moment they’re unfolding, as if they’re being remembered.  And we know that they’ll be remembered, just this way, forever, by Pete.

My taste in television is lamentably lowbrow.  So I favored comedian Louis CK’s older show, Lucky Louie, over his new one, Louie, that’s been so highly acclaimed.  The older show is a dimmer, grittier version of a standard network sitcom, like Good Times with a white family.  I found the new series pretentious formally, filled with too many artfully composed frames, meaningful silences, and dramatic close-ups.  Each time I watched I wanted to say to Louis CK, actor/writer/director/editor, You’re a comedian, so just concentrate on being funny.  Nonetheless I kept watching, encouraged by the occasionally outright hilarious bits like Blueberries.

And then, this season, came the gorgeous surprise of David Lynch guest starring as a network television executive who guides Louie through an important audition.  Lynch is playing an exaggerated version of himself, a show business old-timer with a quivering bouffant, flat western accent, and off-kilter timing, and he looks like he’s simply reading (and shouting) his lines off cue cards.  But his presence is both indelible and satirical; you can’t turn away.  This titanic character (as well as the three-episode story arc it’s part of) tips the tone of the goings-on from comedy to something a little bit deeper.  And, in the director’s presence, the show’s visual design becomes charged with Lynchian meaning.  It is, finally, believable that the entire series unfolds from Louie’s specific, sometimes strange, point of view.  The face of his boy-manager looks like that of a carnival freak.  Three hooks on the back of his dressing room door shimmer with menace.  The doorbell in his apartment sounds like it’s ringing from outer space.  It all makes Louie’s dithering, ordinary-guy cluelessness enormously touching.  It’s hard for sitcoms that are trying to do something fresh strike the right visual and emotional tone.  (Watch how The Mindy Project is struggling right now.)  Louie nailed it.

I swoon for Mr. Bates, I swoon for Lady Mary’s drop waist gowns, and I swoon for the house itself, Downton Abbey.  The show is filmed at Highclere Castle, the real-life home of the Earl and Countess of Carnarvon, a young couple who look alarmingly non-royal.  The current structure was built between 1838 to 1878 on an historic site that has been continuously occupied since the 800’s.  Like Downton, Highclere served as a hospital during WWI and, in the happier times before and after, as a venue for highly glamorous parties.  The house has neo-Gothic facades with a storm of crockets and finials disguising its hearty stone walls.  But its interiors, cavernous halls furnished with dark orientals and spindly tables and chairs, embody a restrained, anglophilic glamor.

An American equivalent might be the Henry Clay Frick mansion on Fifth Avenue in New York, which houses the Frick Collection.  This grand limestone house and its gardens fill and entire block above East 70th Street, yet still feel intimate, like a family’s home.  The rooms are finely scaled and spin off a skylit courtyard that’s a bit like Downton’s entry hall, although much smaller.  Just the room names themselves — Garden Court, West Gallery, Oval Room — conjure a finer life.  On a weekend afternoon the museum is filled with visitors plugged into their audio guides, focused so hard on the docent’s recorded voice that they’re inattentive to the stupendous artwork in front of them, including several iconic Vermeers and Rembrandts.  As I made my way through the galleries, rediscovering a Whistler here and an El Greco there, I felt an incredible sense of ease.  It could imagine that this place was still a house, and that it was entirely open to me.