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Sunday, February 04, 2001
"The Lone Gunmen" is the second "X-Files" spinoff, I decided. What was the first? "The X-Files." This latest season, it seems the show has become a spinoff of itself. The most recent episode was Doggett and Skinner doing a case. No Mulder (well, not really) and no Scully. It's like the new Guns 'N' Roses.
Tuesday, May 08, 2001
I have a theory. The last few episodes of "The West Wing" have dealt with the process of revealing secret of the President's multiple sclerosis. There's talk of lawyers, conspiracies, and coverups. They throwing around phrases like "perpetrated a fraud against the American public." It's all very sad, because we know that President Bartlett is a good man and had only the best intentions at heart, that his condition never caused any real danger, et cetera et cetera. It seemed like just another May sweeps climactic story arc. Then it hit me. Aaron Sorkin (the writer of the show) is using his fantasyland White House as a bully pulpit. This is his way of joining the ranks of Clinton apologists. There are many similarities. In this case, though, the integrity of the President is (ha ha) inimpeachable. So we take his side. We make excuses for him. We rationalize. And then the next time we think about Clinton, we're a little softer on the guy, because at some level, we've realized that the other side of things is a little harder and more complex than we thought. What did you expect? It's called jaded.
¶ 125 Posted at 07.50 PM ⇒ No Comments ( politics | theorizing | tv ) Wednesday, September 24, 2003
I swear, if you prohibited interior designers (well, the ones on TV at least) from using the words "simply," "easily," "beautiful," and "elegant," they wouldn't be able to form a sentence. Maybe get a buzzer and have a game of "Interior Design Taboo."
¶ 609 Posted at 12.22 PM ⇒ No Comments ( tv | house ) Saturday, November 08, 2003
I've been watching Fox News lately. Not really intentionally, but because the YMCA seems to always have it on. Today one of their stories was advocating going easy on crooked CEOs because all the damage has been done already and the remaining corporate officers have all learned their lessons. I don't even get mad at Fox or Bill O'Reilly anymore; I just sort of shake my head. I've realized that's just the way they are. It's like the parable of the frog and the scorpion. I just remind myself that their job isn't what we assumed it was. They're not there to report the news. They're there to advance an agenda. Once I got over that hump, I just stopped getting mad at them.
Sunday, June 20, 2004
We have been watching this guy on "Jeopardy" who is something amazing. Usually, I'll at best have grudging admiration of the players, but this Ken Jennings character has blown us away every time. New on "Jeopardy" is the elimination of the 5-game limit; as long as the champion keeps winning, (s)he keeps coming back. So far, Ken has won 13 times in a row for about $440K. It's not just the money, though; the guy's breadth and depth of knowledge is simply astounding. You should watch "Jeopardy" this week if you can, although there's no guarantee how long he'll be on.
Sunday, October 17, 2004
There needs to be a single site where I can get a customizable feed of upcoming guests on TV talk shows. I should be able to filter on which guests I'm interested and which shows and get it all in one place. I mention this because I keep wanting to see Jon Stewart on news programs, where I gather he does an excellent job. I have seen the "Crossfire" clip that is making the rounds, and will get to that shortly.
You may have heard the brouhaha about Jon Stewart's recent appearance on CNN's "debate show" "Crossfire." He showed up with an axe to grind, that the news media aren't challenging politicians on meaningful issues. The politicians and their minions would rather trick people into coming to their side than persuade them. The media let them get away with it by focusing on irrelevant and superficial issues; instead of real debate, they just present competing liars. They may ask "hard questions," but they don't follow through with them. Jon Stewart stated his point several times in several ways, but didn't seem to be getting through to either Paul Begala or Tucker Carlson, the hosts of the show. The irony is that, in their attempt to deny and distract from his point, they validated his concerns and justified his criticisms. Therre is a transcript of the show, but you should watch it instead. You can get the video from IFilm (but you have to watch a commercial first) or use BitTorrent.
Sunday, March 27, 2005
I've been watching the new "Battlestar Galactica" on Sci Fi. I never saw the original series, so I don't know how true it is. Frankly, I don't care. It's good on its own merits. If you enjoy the science fiction-y type thing, you should make a point of watching the show. The season finale is next Friday, so they'll probably start the series over again the Friday after that (April 8).
Friday, April 29, 2005
An article in the NY Times Magazine makes a persuasive argument that television programs are intelligent and getting more so.
Tuesday, December 06, 2005
Apple has added (the new) Battlestar Galactica to the iTunes Music [sic] Store. According to Ars Technica, they are offering the entirety of the show's run thus far, including the mini-series (in 4 parts), the first season, and all of the second season that has been broadcast thus far. I think ad-supported media is a bad idea, so I'm happy to see the apparent success of a simpler, fairer business model for television programs.
¶ 1190 Posted at 11.41 AM ⇒ No Comments ( tv | cool ) Monday, February 13, 2006
This past Friday, Fox showed the last 4 episodes of "Arrested Development." AD was one of the funniest shows on television, packing the jokes in so densely that I'd have to rewind a dozen times per episode. I'm sure that's part of why it failed to pull a large audience; you had to pay attention and learn the characters to fully get it. You couldn't just pick it up partway through an episode and instantly figure it out; it wasn't that kind of generic, lowest common denominator show. There were layers of intricate plotting, callbacks, richly bizarre characters, and just plain stupid humor. I'm sad to see it go, but they went out well. The final episodes pulled together many of the loose ends, piled on the funny, and wrapped it all up with a clever self-referential joke. Everything worked. There's still a glimmer of hope that Showtime will pick it up, though. Regardless, I highly recommend you obtain the show (perhaps on DVD) and watch it for yourself.
Tuesday, June 06, 2006
With surprisingly few misgivings, yesterday I cancelled our Tivo Season Pass for "The Daily Show" and "The Colbert Report." "The Daily Show" has been there from the moment I got my first Tivo 6 years ago (!), and I watched the show regularly in college for years before then. It was a pretty simple decision: 4 hours of weeknight is a lot of time. Those aren't shows that you can really watch a week or two after they've been recorded; you have to watch them in a couple of days or not at all. We chose not at all. It's just TV, after all. I realized that in any given week, I have time to read, watch TV, and get work done, but not all three. Now that I have "The Economist" coming to my door every week, I have a lot of reading to do. The stack of flooring in the dining room isn't going to install itself, either. TV was the natural thing to cut. Whether this is a precursor to getting rid of DirecTV completely remains to be seen; we certainly won't do it for a few years, and we'll keep the TV for DVDs and such.
Thursday, November 09, 2006
I just finished watching "Firefly" last night. Only 14 episodes were ever produced, so it was pretty easy. I liked it. It's not the best show in the world, but it's pretty good, easily in the top 10%. They did some interesting things, things that were new to me. It was a well-balanced show, which is a hard thing to explain. It's too bad Fox fumbled it, because it's way better than what's on television most of the time.
Tuesday, November 21, 2006
I've been watching the new NBC show "Heroes." It's pretty good. I didn't see the pilot, but I have seen all the remaining 8 episodes. It's in some ways too early to judge, though, since it's a serial, and the first major story arc has yet to crest. It's not enough to start out well, though they've certainly done that. Assuming NBC runs the first n episodes again during the inter-sweeps doldrums, I suggest you give it a try. Or you could watch it online. Note: link contains episode descriptions which will be spoilers for previous episodes.
Monday, April 02, 2007
There's no money in the "Star Trek" universe. We never learn what they do instead of money, though. They clearly still have scarcity of resources, at minimum time, energy, people, and interest in dull jobs. How do they allocate these limited resources to satisfy their needs? They never tell us, they just say there's no money and leave it at that.
¶ 1415 Posted at 11.47 AM ⇒ No Comments ( deep thoughts | tv )
I have subscribed to HBO and Starz/Encore. That costs $25/month, which is wikkid expensive, unless you're only doing it for a month. See, I have 140 hours of capacity on my Tivo now, and those two channels are showing at least 30 movies that we want to see. I can fill up my Tivo with movies to watch later. Less than a buck a movie is pretty good.
¶ 1416 Posted at 12.38 PM ⇒ No Comments ( movies | tv ) Monday, April 30, 2007
Sitcoms are notorious for all having the same basic characters. There's the funny one, the neurotic one, the vain one, the ditzy one, the weird one, etc. I'm starting to think that it's not so much a lack of imagination as it is being true to reality. The key concept here is "adaptive radiation," taken from evolutionary biology. Basically, in adaptive radiation, what happens is that a single species will fracture to fill available ecological niches over time, no matter what the starting point. Darwin's Galapagos finches are the prototypical example. I've noticed something similar in people. You'd think that the student population of Rice is all nerds. You'd be mostly right, if you were comparing against the general population, and yet Rice had the same groups as any other university or even high school. There were the jocks, the stoners, the goths, the earnest thespians, etc. Even though Rice had higher admissions standards, there were still variations along the axes secondary to selection for entry. These became more pronounced over time once the academic attributes were more normalized. You may have distinguished yourself as the smart guy in high school, but in a place where most everyone was smart, you branched out (possibly by being extra smart). I figure the same thing happens in social groups. Once you factor out the common ingredient that brought you together, "the other stuff" becomes more significant. Furthermore, there's an inevitable conflict that will usually keep two people from occupying the same niche. The loser either finds a different niche or leaves the group entirely. These roles are not fixed to the person, but rather to the group; a single person could be the funny one in one group and the smart one in a different one. This subtle jockeying tends to shake out similarly across social groups, no matter their nucleus. Thus, you inevitably end up with the funny one, the neurotic one, the vain one, the ditzy one, and the weird one in every group.
¶ 1432 Posted at 12.17 PM ⇒ No Comments ( tv | deep thoughts ) Friday, June 22, 2007
Shepard Smith, Fox News anchor, went to a Chicago Fox affiliate to help them improve their local news operation: His tips for improving the show included adding more music, bigger graphics and a faster pace... "I'm not here to talk to you about journalism," one witness recalled him saying. "I'm here to talk to you about good TV."From the Chicago Sun Times.
Friday, June 29, 2007
I like seeing pictures of famous people when they were a lot younger than now. Matthew Perry and Christina Applegate in 1988, for instance. He looks kind of Kyle MacLachlan to me in that shot.
Friday, September 28, 2007
Calling a show "Dirty Sexy Money" is a sure-fire way to turn people off and make them embarassed to talk about your show. That's too bad, because the pilot was pretty good. "The Bionic Woman" was decent, "K-Ville" was good (second episode; missed the pilot), and "Chuck" was mediocre. I'm motivated to watch a few pilots for some reason this time around.
Friday, October 12, 2007
"The Bionic Woman" is a show that does female role models right. Over the last decade or so we've seen a trend in "girls kicking ass." Initially, it seemed like a good thing, such as with Sarah Michelle Gellar in "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" 1. However, the trend was very quickly hijacked by exploitation. "Charlie's Angels" may have physically kicked ass, but the way they kicked as was so comically over-the-top as to be insulting. They were also too thin in skin-tight, revealing clothing2, and were written (and played by?) silly, emotionally fragile airheads. No thanks. That seemed to be the norm, too, with shows like "Dark Angel" and "Alias." At least "Xena" knew she was a joke. Even the non-ass-kicking roles too often degenerated into neurotic, hen-pecking harridans. That's what's refreshing about "The Bionic Woman." To be sure, Michelle Ryan is beautiful. C'mon, it's TV. What's notable is that she's more normally-sized, and she dresses like a real person. She is capable of kicking ass, but she's also capable of losing, and badly so. The action is unrealistic 3, but not exploitative. She has cried on the show, but only once (thus far), and that after her boyfriend dies. She's assertive and confident, but not inflexible and definitely not bitchy. She has really serious issues to deal with in her life that are sometimes overwhelming, but she's an adult, and she behaves like one. It's not just about our fearless heroine, either. Of the seven (thus far) recurring characters, four are women, and I'd say the top three in terms of screen time are all women. There are a lot of shows that do that, of course, but "The Bionic Woman" isn't an estrogen party like "Desperate Housewives" or "Sisters;" it's not aimed at the "for women only" demographic (ghetto?). Katee Sackhoff's villainess is also a positive role in some ways. I mean, ok, sure, she's a wack job, but that's not all she is. She's also more normal physically, and she's never shown any more skin than her face and arms 4. In spite of desperate circumstances, she also doesn't collapse into tears, and while she's kind bitchy, she's really funny while doing it. I wouldn't call "The Bionic Woman" a great show, but it's certainly a good show. It's good to see a show aimed at both men and women with strong 5 female characters. Hollywood too often pays lip service to that while sneaking in the standard, inaccurate gender stereotypes. What's nice about it is that so much about the characters on the show is normal. Women are police officers and soldiers and scientists. They're smart and dumb, strong and weak, and generally unskanky. Hollywood doesn't usually reflect the real world, but this show does. Though the women are bionic, the rest of it is real.
1 Admittedly, a show I never watched.
2 I am not a Puritan, I just don't like it when they try to pander to me and miss by a mile.
3 She is bionic.
4 Which are muscular, but not scarily so.
5 Physically, emotionally, and psychologically.
Thursday, February 21, 2008
Wikipedia has a category called Television articles that need to differentiate between fact and fiction.
¶ 1685 Posted at 09.53 PM ⇒ No Comments ( funny | tv ) Thursday, April 03, 2008
I like it when writers sneak hidden obscure jokes into movies and TV shows. By "hidden" I mean the sort of thing that doesn't even register for someone who doesn't get it, as opposed to making them feel left out. "The Simpsons" are consistently good at that. "Shaun of the Dead" had at least two. Early in the movie, the background music was the late 90s trance hit "Zombie Nation." Nobody who didn't recognize the song would have noticed anything beyond background music, but it added a little bit if you did recognize it. There was also a passing reference to a character named "Ash," which was also the name of the Bruce Campbell character in the "Evil Dead" movies (that one I only barely caught, since I never got into those movies). It makes me wonder how many I missed, in that movie and in other works. Seems like there's a web niche that needs filling.
¶ 1710 Posted at 09.32 PM ⇒ No Comments ( movies | tv ) Sunday, April 06, 2008
It's way past topical, but I never got around to posting about it... I can't believe this show got cancelled. I heard his Ackman is HUGE.
It's not easy to find the whole episode, sadly, because that clip just leaves me hungry for more.
¶ 1714 Posted at 08.27 AM ⇒ No Comments ( tv | funny ) |
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