P. J. Harvey – "Rid of Me" (1993)

You’re not rid of me

I’ll make you lick my injuries

I’m gonna twist your head off, see?

The narrative arc of the final season of the Showtime TV series Billions culminated in a horribly wrongheaded ending.  (More on that later.)

The show had another fundamental flaw – namely, terrible scriptwriting.

For me, naturalistic dialogue is the sine qua non of a compelling television series.  But the Billions writers seemed to be much more interested in demonstrating how clever they were rather than in writing dialogue that sounded believable when it came of the character’s mouths..

In particular, the scripts rely far too heavily on pop culture references.  All the characters were constantly saying things like “I am not taking that particular boat trip up the Mekong to find Kurtz,” or “Yeah, it’s all more perplexing than the betrayal of Johnny Caspar,” or “And yet a slight Russell Ziskey smile dances around your face, Karl.” 

There are literally dozens of such references to movies, TV shows, novels, recording artists, and athletes in the final Billions season.  

I’m sure that the writers had a lot of fun coming up with those lines.  I can just imagine sitting in the writers room, having a gay old time stumping my fellow wordsmiths with references to obscure sixties cartoon characters or Beatles songs or Coen Brother movies.  

But I’m sorry – that’s not the way real people talk to each other.

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As I watched the final season of Billions, I was constantly hitting the pause button and going to Google because I didn’t know what the characters were talking about. 

I’ll save you the trouble of Googling the references quoted above.  The first one refers to the 1979 movie, Apocalypse Now – Colonel Kurtz was the Marlon Brando character.  Johnny Caspar is one of the gangsters in the 1990 film, Miller’s Crossing.  And Russell Ziskey is the character portrayed by the late Harold Ramis in the 1981 comedy, Stripes.

Bill Murray and Harold Ramis
 (as Russell Ziskey) in Stripes

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The Billions writers seemed to have a particular affinity for The Sopranos.

Here are three references to that show from the final season of Billions:

If you were a Sopranos fan, you should understand what those references mean.

If you weren’t, get out that smartphone and start Googling!

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Rid of Me, which was P. J. Harvey’s second album, was described by SPIN magazine as “an expression of pure, unadulterated id” – which isn’t a bad description of Billions. 

Here’s Polly Jean’s account of the writing of the title track from that album, which was featured on the soundtrack of episode six of the final season of Billions:

At that time, I very much wanted to write songs that shocked.  When I was at art college, all I wanted to do was shock with my artwork. When I wrote “Rid of Me,” I shocked myself.  I thought, “Well, if I’m shocked, other people might be shocked.”  The sound of the words was powerful, and the rhythm felt clean and simple to roll off the tongue.  I knew that this was the type of song I was trying to write.

Click here to listen to “Rid of Me.”

Click here to buy it from Amazon.

Dollyrots – "Because I'm Awesome" (2007)

I’m on your speed dial

The one everyone wants to meet

’Cause I’m awesome!

When I came of age a half-century ago, the best movies were infinitely better than the best television shows.

If you don’t believe me, all you have to do is take a look at Easy Riders, Raging Bulls – Peter Biskind’s book about the many great movies that were released in the 1970s.

We’re talking The Godfather (parts I and II), The Last Picture Show, Five Easy Pieces, The French Connection, The Wild Bunch, Mean Streets, Shampoo, Clockwork Orange, The Conversation, Badlands, Days of Heaven, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, The Long Goodbye, Nashville, Star Wars, American Graffiti, Chinatown, Carrie, Slap Shot, Vanishing Point, Bad News Bears, Breaking Away, Manhattan, and Rock ’n’ Roll High School – to name just a few.  

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The hour-long episodic dramas that dominated network schedules in the 1970s couldn’t hold a candle to movies like those.  But the long-form cable-network series that began to appear around the turn of the century – such as HBO’s The Sopranos, which first aired in 1999 – have an inherent advantage over the typical movie. 

The typical movie is about two hours long.  But the typical TV series has eight to twelve hour-long episodes per season – and the best series continue for four, five or even more seasons.

That additional time allows for more complicated and intriguing plot lines.  More importantly, it allows for more interesting and multidimensional characters.

Comparing a movie to a great TV series is like comparing a short story to War and Peace or any other great novel.  Less may be more when it comes to modern architecture – but less is definitely not more when it comes to books and TV series.

A few of the series that prove the truth of that statement beyond the shadow of a doubt include The Sopranos, The Wire, Homeland, Line of Duty, Orange Is the New Black, Happy Valley, The Night Of, Godless, the Danish/Swedish edition of The Bridge, the first three seasons of Fargo, and – last but certainly not least – Succession.

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Of course, length alone does not guarantee that a television series will be great.  For example, consider the Showtime series Billions – which I just finished watching.  

The producers of Billions spared no expense when it came to production values.   And its cast of performers was second to none in terms of either quality or quantity.  But the scripts for the show’s final season were a mess – both on a micro and a macro level.         

The next several installments of 2 or 3 lines will explain just how the final season of Billions jumped the shark.  

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It didn’t take me long to identify the official 2 or 3 lines record of the year for 2025 – ’cause I’m awesome!

I first heard “Because I’m Awesome” on the soundtrack of the initial episode of the seventh and final season of the Showtime series, Billions.

“Because I’m Awesome” was released on the Dollyrots’ second studio album – Because I’m Awesome – in 2007.  It’s been featured on the soundtrack of a number of movies and television shows in addition to Billions.

Click here to listen to “Because I’m Awesome.”

Click here to buy it from Amazon.

Vagle Brothers – "When We All Get to Heaven" (2008)

Soon the pearly gates will open

We shall tread the streets of gold

When the late Jimmy Carter ran for president in 1976, he was asked if he was a born-again Christian.  “Yes,” he answered.

When reporters asked him about his faith, he told them that he prayed “about 25 times a day, maybe more” and read the Bible every day.  After leaving Washington, the former president not only regularly attended a Baptist church in his hometown, but also taught Sunday school there.

Jimmy Carter teaching Sunday school in 2010 

President Biden touched on Carter’s devoutness when he eulogized him yesterday:

Jimmy held a deep Christian faith in God.  [H]is candidacy spoke and wrote about faith as a substance of things hoped for, and evidence of the things not seen.  Faith founded on commandments of scripture.  Love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and all thy mind and all thy soul.

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Given that, it seemed odd when Garth Brooks and Trisha Yearwood sang John Lennon’s “Imagine” at Carter’s funeral.   After all, that song has been described as “purposely and powerfully irreligious.”  

Here’s how one writer described “Imagine”:

“Imagine” is unabashedly utopian and deeply moral, calling on people to live, as one humanity, in peace.  It is also purposely and powerfully irreligious.  From its opening lyric, “Imagine there’s no heaven,” to the refrain, “And no religion too,” Lennon sets out what is, to many, a clear atheistic message. . . . “Imagine” is explicitly secularist. In Lennon’s telling, religion is an impediment to human flourishing – something to be overcome, transcended.

Despite that, it’s been widely reported that “Imagine” was Carter’s favorite song – which is why it was performed at his funeral. 

“Imagine” famously begins with this line: “Imagine there’s no heaven.”  But this is what the late president’s grandson said when he spoke about his grandfather and his grandmother Rosalynn – who died last year – at the service: “Rest assured that in these last weeks, he told us that he was ready to see her again.”

Does that sound like someone who would prefer a world where there’s no heaven?

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It turns out that Carter never said that “Imagine” was his favorite song.  But he was quoted as saying in 2007 that it was his favorite Beatles song:

I hate to nitpick, but “Imagine” is not a Beatles song, of course – it was a John Lennon song that was written and recorded after the Beatles had broken up.

John Lennon and Muhammad Ali
at Jimmy Carter’s inauguration

Actually, it may not be accurate to characterize it as a John Lennon song either.  Lennon later acknowledged that the lyrics for “Imagine” were largely inspired by Yoko Ono’s poetry.  

In 1980, he told the BBC that the composition should be credited as a Lennon/Ono song:  

A lot of it – the lyric and the concept – came from Yoko, but in those days I was a bit more selfish, a bit more macho, and I sort of omitted her contribution, but it was right out of Grapefruit.  

(Grapefruit was the title of a poetry collection that Yoko published in 1964.)

In 2017, the songwriting credit for “Imagine” was officially changed to recognize both John Lennon and Yoko Ono. 

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I know many of you feel differently, but I am not a fan of “Imagine.” 

So today 2 or 3 lines is featuring “When We All Get to Heaven,” which was written in 1898 by Eliza Edmunds Hewitt, a Philadelphia schoolteacher.  According to the pianist at the church where Jimmy Carter taught Sunday school, that hymn – not “Imagine” – was Carter’s favorite song.

Click here to listen to a 2008 recording of “When We All Get to Heaven” by the four Vagle Brothers, who grew up in Karlstad, Minnesota – a town of 710 souls in extreme northwestern Minnesota that’s just a few miles south of the Canadian border.  (All four attended Evangel University in Springfield, Missouri, which is affiliated with the Assembly of God denomination.)

Click here to buy the Vagle Brothers album In the Spirit of the Lord, which includes “When We All Get to Heaven.”  (That song is titled “When We All Get Together” on that album, but it’s the same hymn.) 

Lady Gaga – "Paparazzi" (2009)

I’m your biggest fan

I’ll follow you

Until you love me

When my sister and sister-in-law were here for the holidays, I took them to the National Gallery of Art in downtown Washington, DC.

We first visited the NGA’s East Building, which houses the museum’s collection of modern and contemporary art.  It opened in 1978 – the year after I moved to Washington:

One of my East Building favorites is Katharina Fritsch’s “Hahn/Cock,” a 14-foot-tall sculpture of a blue rooster that was installed on the roof terrace of the East Building in 2016.  An NGA press release announcing the work’s acquisition describes it as “a cheeky feminist retort to the 19th-century commemorations of male warriors”: 

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The NGA’s more traditional West Building – which opened in 1941 – houses art from the 11th through the 19th centuries:

When we visited the West Building, it was mobbed by people who came to see “Paris 1874: The Impressionist Moments,” an exhibition featuring 130 paintings by Cézanne, Monet, Pissarro, and other French impressionists.  

The day we were there, the wait to get into that exhibition was 70 minutes.  (No thank you!) 

So we spent most of our time looking at 19th-century American art, including James McNeill Whistler’s larger-than-life-sized “Symphony in White, No.1: The White Girl,” which depicts Joanna Hiffernan, who was Whistler’s live-in mistress for years:

We also saw a number of monumental landscape paintings, including Frederic Edwin Church’s “Niagara,” which most critics agree is the greatest of the hundreds of paintings of Niagara Falls:

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My daughters and two of their friends visited Paris last fall.  One of the highlights of their trip was a visit to Claude Monet’s house and gardens in Giverney, which draws over half a million visitors each year.

The NGA’s collection included Monet’s painting of the garden at his residence in Vétheuil, a village near Paris where he lived before moving to Giverny:

Perhaps the best thing about “The Artist’s Garden at Vétheuil” was that we didn’t have to wait in line for 70 minutes to see it.

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Daniel Kreps of Rolling Stone described the music video for Lady Gaga’s 2009 hit single, “Paparazzi” as “brimming with cinematic style” but also “a little self-indulgent.”

A little self-indulgent?  That may be the understatement of the year.

Click here to watch the “Paparazzi” music video.

Click here to buy the “Paparazzi” recording from Amazon.