Czeslaw Milosz has passed on. He was 93. Sam has links o’plenty.

Superfriend butting in here to say: Let’s have a Tom Shales kind of morning, shall we? He’s in rare form — and believe you me, I don’t say that lightly, still not having forgiven him for not understanding why Jon Stewart is funny.

He takes on last night’s NBC coverage of the opening ceremonies of the Athens Olympics. And he is dead on. Mostly.

He isn’t quite as impressed as I was by the pageantry of it, which is truly some of the most amazing theater I’ve ever seen on that scale. Theater managers all over the world have to be dreaming of replicating effects like the human statues and the costumed people that seemed animated through the effect of exquisite make-up and wardrobe that moved like drawings. One of the best things about it was its complete disregard for any sensibilities other than the aesthetic — you would never see anything that interesting in an American-created Olympic opening, because we would be too afraid at pissing people off by showing a glimpse of a human breast, or having a couple roll around lustily in a giant lake, or the Greek god Eros flying around in naught but a drapey loincloth. The switchboards would light up, the hands would cover the mouths and we’d be reading about it for three months. It would disintegrate our moral fabric. Right?

But incorporate some athletes at the end and some stupid commentary so people don’t feel threatened by the intellect behind it all, the symbolism (which is surely rated I for inappropriate on television), and people can deal. As long it’s happening in Greece.

Bob Costas and Katie Couric should be ashamed at their running idiocy during the entirety of the show’s majestic portion. They only seemed to get their sea-legs when the parade of athletes started. I actually turned to Mr. BondGirl at one point and said, “This is what it’s come to?”

This comment was provoked by Katie Couric’s reading off an index card that the foustanela skirts several men on one of the floats were wearing consist of 400 pleats symbolizing the years during which Greece was under Ottoman rule. To which Costas replies, “I wouldn’t want to have to press that!”

I. Wouldn’t. Want. To. Have. To. Press. That.

Bon mots singled out by Tom Shales in his column included:

The very quotable Archimedes . . . was an excitable guy,” Costas said as if talking about another of his chumpy sports chums. “But we must make allowances for genius, I guess.”

…Costas to recite the plot of “Oedipus Rex” — how he murdered his father and married his mother, with Costas adding that this was “a sequence of events that seldom turns out well.”

Once Couric and Costas shut up and put aside all the notes about Greece that NBC Sports researchers had assembled for them, the pageant had other inspired touches besides Cube Man. The huge stadium seemingly turned into a large man-made lake for costumed performers to skate on. A 9-year-old boy had the thrill of gliding around on the pond in what looked like a giant paper hat. It eventually broke into several pieces that were suspended by wires and dangled up into the stratosphere, or near it. Ever-ready with the concise acerbic remark, Couric looked at the kid and declared, “He’s so cute!”*

* Note to Shales, the kid in the paper hat actually came BEFORE Cube guy. What happened was the giant face representing early sculpture broke apart into all those more natural representations of the human form, and which then settled into the lake to represent the Greek islands. Quite awesome actually. But unfortunately, B & K still had plenty of notes and yammering to do.

I suggest you check out the Washington Post’s photo gallery, which has the only photos that come close to getting the cool stuff, such as the amazing Centaur and the columnistas. It’s here. (You’ll have to click to photo 4 or 5 to get to the good stuff.) The BBC has some decent pics here.

Perhaps if we combined a plot from Six Feet Under, where David gets carjacked and hijacks the entire rest of the episode with melodrama, with Bob and Katie, we’d have a winner. Bob and Katie carjacked outside the Olympics, the cast of Six Feet Under must narrate the opening ceremonies.

Tom Shales has an interesting column on character assassination, when television shows, often fueled by desperation (and in HBO’s case, the imprimatur of the edge), beat up on their characters. Specifically, he points to Six Feet Under and its recent carjacking episode (which I also ranted about). Shales suggests that the edge is as much of a blessing as a curse. On one hand, it can give us genuine moments into subcultures that Standards & Practices would fly into a ridiculous uproar over. But Shales also implies that the edge gives the writers too much breathing room to resort to their worst impulses.

What Shales fails to point out (along with Joy Press in the Voice last week) is that when we are given recurring characters and they fail to live up to the character traits that they have been established with, this is the part that kills. Because an audience, particularly an audience that cares, does pay attention. They are attuned to the little moments, even if it’s only an instinctive meshing between audience and creators. One egregious example that comes almost immediately to mind is the disappointing ending of Birdy. Beyond the anticlimactic letdown (which I won’t give away), there’s the implication that the character is too intriguingly complex to do something that puerile. Or the final act of Cymbeline (famously rewritten by George Bernard Shaw) in which all of the characters are supposed to stand about on stage, interjecting when a subplot needs to end, after exhibiting so much life.

To offer a personal example, in an early draft of my play, Wrestling an Alligator, I had a character commit a horrible action. I wanted to illustrate this character’s brutality and how this sort of thing is encouraged in the business world. I made every effort to make the moment as horrible as possible — to not hold back from my own personal feelings and convictions, to operate on the edge that the good people at the Fringe were so healthily advocating. When this draft was circulated and received comments from some very helpful souls, I was then forced to justify this action and reassess why it was there. These conversations were very beneficial and resulted in rethinking the moment, rewriting, and finding the right tone. It was not really a question of how far I could go, although I did want to ensure that the moment was lively and different. But, above all, my concern was to find the right moment for the character. As it turned out, when we staged the scene last week, the tailored moment hit close to the emotions without really compromising the giddy intent.

I’m pleased to report that Six Feet Under has begun to rebound from its slump, although, in my view, it’s trying a bit to hard to recapture its momentum. And I would argue that, had the show trusted its audience a little more, it wouldn’t have to try nearly as hard to discard or modify the wishy-washy arcs. In the case of the carjacking episode, I don’t believe the writers seriously asked themselves whether the moments were all justified. This, more than anything else, is why the ratings have dropped.

Forget Wiseltier’s bombast. Mark’s got a sizable and thoughtful review up (to the point where he’s blown his limit by 1,500 words).