What is Your Favorite TV Finale?

With LOST ending tomorrow night I pose this question on Roland's Extra Criticum website.. click here to read the post and add your own suggestions!

Death of Soaps article on Extra Criticum.com

Hey all, just a little forwarding action... wrote a piece last night about the Death of Soaps over at Extra Criticum that just went live.. if you enjoy your soaps as much as I do, go ahead and check it out! http://www.extracriticum.com/extra_criticum/2009/08/death_of_daytime_soaps.html

Law and Order poll now on Extra Criticum

My partner Roland is doing a little survey on his site http://www.extracriticum.com/extra_criticum/2009/06/its-all-about-the-ensemble-which-law-order-cast-worked-best.html .. which LAW AND ORDER cast is YOUR favorite? Go to the site now and vote!

I Dig This New Opening

Soup Operas

It's back again, the bad product placement on ABC soaps... cringeworthy references to V8 and Campbell's soup on One Life to Live and now Prego on All My Children. It was bad enough back in the mid 90s when, just at the time that Disney acquired ABC, that Luna's spa on OLTL would frequently sport Disney movie posters in the background (because I know many spas that advertise with full movie posters, don't you?) and it was barely tolerable that all the kids on both AMC and OLTL played with Disney plush toys and last year when all the women of Fusion on AMC would start chanting the virtues of Campbell soup, but really, the writing for this is not even remotely subtle. One of two things is happening here: either the writing staff thinks viewers are too stupid to notice OR they are making it so obvious on purpose in order to call attention to it as a way of saying "we have to do this but we aren't going to like it". I vote for the latter because I am an optimist. Really.

@ Yahoo! Video

Dr. Horrible's Sing Along Blog - The Most Fantastic Thing You Will Ever See. er, almost.

I heart Dr. Horrible. www.drhorrible.com

This past spring a bunch of Hollywood types got together and wrote and produced a little thing they called "Dr. Horrible's Sing Along Blog" featuring Neil Patrick Harris as the eeeeevil doc trying to rid himself of his nemesis The Hammer. There's a lot of singing and there's a lot of intentional hambone acting. And it was also the most entertaining thing I've seen all year with the possible exception of WALL-E and the season finale of LOST. There was more heroics in the first five minutes (and we're talking about a movie that focuses on the villain here) of Dr. Horrible than in the entire 13 hours of this season's HEROES (what a bag of crap that show is, who's writing this shit? I can only assume that they are drunk with the money that NBC must be feeding them and not spending enough time.. well, you know, actually writing).

Anyway, more and more people are spending less time watching the traditional gawk box (television just in case you weren't paying attention) and more time watching television shows and videos that other people create on the computer. This is a trend that will continue in earnest the more we hardcore tv addicts have to endure the piss poor quality of shows like HEROES and MY OWN WORST ENEMY (ugh, more on this as I write a fall season wrap up in the days to come) as well as a half dozen other shows that the network suits I'm sure are sitting there scratching their heads wondering 'gee, why aren't our shows doing well?"

Would someone please tell them (politely if you must but tell them nonetheless) "because your shows are terrible. There is nothing entertaining in watching people be beat up, shot at, cut open and die. There is nothing entertaining in watching good people kill other people in a cheap SAW rip-off as the HEROES season finale pretended to be. And if you want us to come back, you'd sure as hell know where you're going with the story because we can sniff out a writing team that doesn't have a clue a mile away" (LOST is for some reason excluded from this.. we all know and strangely accept that the writers have zero idea how to resolve all the balls they've thrown up in the air but I guess we'll just learn to accept that .. I'm not sure why but we do).

Anyway, I think we'll look back at Dr. Horrible as the thing that kick started web-only entertainment with professional name recognizable talent. And thus the death knell of television begins. Oh and thank you Jeff Zucker at NBC for making this happen just a wee bit faster. Oh, and in case you weren't paying attention to these things: NBC owns HULU.. and HULU plays what? oh yeah, internet videos. Have we found the smoking gun? Is NBC purposely trying to kill it's prime time lineup in order to bolster it's online profitability?? sniff.. smells like it. Only my opinion of course but that's what it looks like from here.

If you haven't seen it, you can download it off of iTunes and you can go to www.drhorrible.com/ to pre-order the DVD. Honestly, you'll be glad you did.

Mad, Sad and Just Plain Blahhhh

This morning we had an ‘all-staff’ meeting at work ..well, actually it was held at the 34th Street Loew’s Theatre since our usual meeting place – the studio - is being used by the set for WorldFocus the new news show being produced by Thirteen.

Our president Neal had some grim things to report about the economy (not a shocker of course but unnerving when it’s pointed out on the big screen reminding me of a slide show that Lucy once showed Charlie Brown depicting his faults) but also, thankfully, some good news about the exciting projects in the new year.

Not only is everyone eagering looking forward to the Make ‘Em Laugh six part series in January, the new studio space at Lincoln Center, some incredible music programs and the series about America’s infrastructure, Blueprint America but also the new hosts of SundayArts and some really great Masterpiece Classic programs including a spring series of adaptations of the works of Charles Dickens.

So today, I’m trying to focus on the good things. And that’s not been easy given a very depressing weekend where not one but all three days of plans that I made got changed/shortened or outright cancelled. At least I caught up on my tv viewing.

This is good I suppose since One Life to Live continues to really be spectacularly well done and I had three eppys of “Pushing Daisies” to watch. The sad note is that of course “Daisies” is cancelled and we’ll never get to see how everything gets wrapped up – unless creator Bryan Fuller gets it out there in a comic book. It’s bad enough when comic books are made into terrible movies, but a tv show made into a comic book? Did they not learn their lesson from “Welcome Back, Kotter” the comic book?

So this week has started with a thud, but the holidays are nearly here and that is a good thing too.

Finally, today is Facebook Blackout Day when people who don’t like the “new” Facebook will be silently protesting by not logging on. Or logging on but suspending poking each other. Or something like that. Me, I prefer the old design as well but wasn’t quite sure how not using some free service would really make an impact other than make it cheaper for them to run for a day.

Cost Cutting Your Nose To Spite Your Face

This caught my eye today in the Washington Post (online version, naturally): “Under a new agreement reached this week with its labor unions, WUSA, Channel 9, will become the first station in Washington to replace its crews with one-person "multimedia journalists" who will shoot and edit news stories single-handedly.” http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/12/11/AR2008121103976.html

It’s the latest in a long series of cost-cutting measures that have hit the entertainment industry in recent times and more specifically, this week. What with Viacom laying off folks, newspapers on the verge of going belly up, and NBC essentially pulling a bunch of jobs away from writers, producers, agents, etc by removing five hours of scripted programming hours a week from their schedule and replacing it with a prime time Jay Leno ‘Not Tonight Show” Tonight Show.

But that wasn’t really what caught my eye. No, what caught my eye was the station’s call letters: WUSA. I worked as an intern at WUSA when Gannett (their parent company) assigned the patriotic moniker to their Minneapolis NBC station. It has since been reassigned to a Washington DC station.

It was an exciting time, to be 22 and spending three days a week in a newsroom as well as riding around with reporters as they went out on stories.

I won the cheers of everyone on crew when, one day, I was returning from the airport in one of the station cars with film for a story, a car broadsided me and I careened into the middle lane guardrail. By the grace of God I walked away unscathed but the car was beyond repair. I thought I would be fired, fined, jailed but instead the camera crew guys patted me on the back – they’d been wanting to get rid of that junker for years. Whew. Dodged a bullet there!

Anyway, I'm not sure how I feel about one person 'mulitmedia journalists'. I'm sure most of the people I knew back 22 years ago at that Minneapolis station have long since moved on to other places or retired and it's not as though these guys wouldn't have been capable of doing it on their own if it came to that.

But I can't help but wonder - how can tv survive all these cost-cutting measures? If they're not creating a product worth watching, why, then watch? If you watch tv for scripted shows and they're not there. Why watch? If you watch tv for professional news coverage and it's not there, why watch? And if people aren't watching, advertisers don't advertise with you and you go out of business. It doesn't seem like a very smart business model to me......

more on this again because it warrants more discussion than I have today..

Micro Brew-ha-ha

There are some days when I think I’ve been working in an office for too long.

This is because today the article about Thirteen’s new studio space at Lincoln Center was announced in the New York Times and fantastic actress Laura Linney (Oscar nominated for her role in “The Savages”) was announced as the new host of Masterpiece Classic starting with the January 4th, 2009 episode (a new adaptation of Tess of the D’Ubervilles) but the thing that got me most excited was discovering that a new microwave had been installed in our company kitchen.

I guess it really is the small things that make a difference sometimes. Either that or I need to get a life. :)

Strangers on a Plane or Airport: 88

Last night I had an early evening committment and so I ran late for the second Debate.

I think I turned it on at about the moment when they were tusseling about the economy. It didn't take me long to get disgusted by both sides' verbal wrangling although when McCain pulled out his 'nailing Jello to the wall' comment I had a choice: throw the tv out the window or turn the channel. I love my tv so I simply turned on one of the many things that I've DVRed recently.

In the last election the GOP railroaded Kerry with their Swift Boat lies and before that they attacked Gore by slamming him with Clinton's infidelities (which, sadly, were not lies at all although it had nothing to do with Gore).

When some people don't get their way, rather than accepting it, their answer is simply punch the other person out. Those people are called bullys .. and I know very well how they operate because I grew up related to a master bully. They rule through fear of being punched or teased and one's only way of dealing with it is to run and hide, stand up and be knocked down, or, as I did, destroy yourself from within believing that what the bully says is true and that you deserve to be beaten on a daily basis.

So, I know bullys.

If McCain/Palin thought they could win on their own merits, there would be no need to put Obama/Biden down. Simple as that. Bullys know their own inadequacy makes them inferior to the one they're bullying and they seek to goad the other person into being as 'little' as they are.

It's sad enough when children do it to each other, sadder still when adults do it.

Thankfully, this morning I tripped over this story that gave me the simple lift that I needed:

http://leishacamden.blogspot.com/2008/10/not-that-it-matters.html

You can call it sappy or ridiculous but I don't care, it resonated with me and some of that verbal vomit that spewed forth from my tv is now washed away. At least a little bit.

Diversionary Tactics

So I’ll admit that the Friday night debate wasn’t as riveting as I’d hoped it would be. To be frank, neither candidate came off particularly well although I now hold moderator Jim Lehrer in an even higher regard than I did before as he tried (somewhat in vain) to keep both men on topic and get them to talk to… each other rather than to mommy, I mean to him.


I have a funny feeling that Jim has already made up his mind and it’s the viewers that should have been the ones that needed convincing (although I doubt that there’s much that either of them could have said that would have made anyone change their mind and certainly, neither of them made that great of an impression on me. Obama’s stop/start speech pattern made me like him a little less than I did before although he’s a whole lot more preferable to McSame who is so hungry to get into the White House that he’s playing the Wilford Brimley role of the kindly grandfather to the hilt. I almost expected him to offer Lehrer a bowl of Quaker Oats.)


And then over the weekend I got one of those internet pass along things, you know the kind; where the little girl is dying and if you just send one dollar she’ll make an amazing recovery or those emails where you have to forward it on to everyone from your kindergarten class or else everyone in Topeka will simultaneously implode.


But this one was different, it was a suggestion that instead of bailing out a bunch of people that made a bunch of big bad mistakes, that the government give the 700 billion to us the citizens of America to pay off our own debt, mortgages, student loans and such. By the emails’ reckoning, 700 billion spread out over approximately 200 million adults after taxes comes out to about $250k. I tell you, any candidate that managed to get that through would have my vote hands down. It’ll never happen of course but over the weekend I had pleasant thoughts of getting caught up in my bills and having way more than I would need to buy a little home out in the country or simply take some time off and write. Ah well back to the lotto.


So with all these things tying my stomach in knots I spent part of the weekend escaping the world by rearranging the furniture in my apartment and throwing out clothes that don’t fit any longer. I realize this isn’t a real exciting way to spend a weekend but sometimes in the midst of chaos, I for one, feel the need to straighten out my own home. It is at the moment immaculate.


I also took Saturday afternoon and went off to the upper east side to get a really great massage by a friend of mine who directed a show I was in last year. It was really relaxing and afterwards I took my time getting back home. I wandered through shops and stopped and read a magazine over cheap Chinese food, walked through the Park at dusk. SNL's parody of Palin and the debate was spot on and hilarious. It's amazing to me that I've been watching SNL since I was 12. That's a really long time.


Sunday I spent the evening watching General Hospital from last week and the new episodes of Desperate Housewives and Brothers and Sisters. Both were pretty good although maybe it's because I'm so embroiled in real world politics, both seemed even more shallow and out of touch with reality than they usually do. I mean, most tv shows exist in another universe but specifically for Brothers and Sisters which has always prided itself on being political, for them to be so nutered is a little sad. It's kind of devolving into Dynasty bit by bit rather than be a 21st century 30-something which is what it started out to be.


But it was a pretty good bit of diversion at a time when I sure needed it.

Heroic

Here's the thing: I love television but believe it or not, there are others that love it more. OK so maybe they obsess about it more. For these people, nothing is ever right, everything is deriviative of something better (even things that they didn't like in the first place) and to complain and declare that they will 'never watch the show again' is common (sometimes week after week this declaration is made). Such is the plight of Heroes.

When Heroes began a couple years ago I was into several serialized shows, Desperate Housewives, Ugly Betty, Lost, etc and I didn't want to add another one to the list. Moreover, it didn't look, despite my comic book loving background, like something that I'd be interested in spending time on. I ended up watching a couple episodes when there was a big fuss over the show but I felt that the stories were overly complicated and the characters not so compelling so I didn't return. I saw the fervor that overcame the masses about the show and even got a shiver up my back at the tag line, "save the cheerleader, save the world", but still, just couldn't get into the show.

Last season I tried again only with even less success as the masses complained that the stories moved too slowly. I didn't really see any difference between the one or two episodes that I saw in the second season with the three or four that I saw first season and everything was sort of as incomprehensible as ever (and this is coming from someone who can pretty much run down the entire 70 year history of the characters of DC Comics, most of the history of Pine Valley, Llanview and Port Charles and knows where to find the best burger and the best pizza among hundreds of choices in New York City - Roccos or Fat Sal's for the former, Nicks for the latter btw).

So last night I was home relaxing after an intense day at work and a very grumbly subway ride. My roommate and I have finally decided to have tvs in our own room and simplify the living room which is at the moment clogged with a large couch, a large table, two large bookcases, a trunk and a large entertainment center. Something has got to go and so the entertainment center is being dismantled as I write this and the traffic jam that is our living room is about to feel a lot calmer. This means that my tv, workspace and bed are all in the same room but that's not much different than it was when I was growing up (although the room is about half the size) and so I flipped on the set to whatever was on and what was on was.. the season premiere of Heroes, the third season.

First though the countdown show was a little ridiculous. Although it claimed to be live it obviously wasn't because uhm it's not pitch dark in LA at 5pm PST (8pm EST)... anyway, it was a 60 minute promotion for the season and a wee bit of back story of the characters. As a promo piece it was fairly good and knowing extremely little about the show, I have no idea what they left out.

At 9 the two hour premiere got underway. Now, so often I too am just crabby about my television but I have to admit that I found the show to be charming, fast paced, filled with good looking people even if some of them aren't the brightest bulbs on the planet - for example, one guy opens a safe when his dead father has told him it would bring about the end of the world and another guy injects himself with a drug that will give him super powers even though he whipped it up in oh about ten minutes. On the other hand, this is the type of thing that actually goes on in comic books so if the show is following the comic book tradition, hubris and arrogance are common and are usually followed up eventually by all sorts of conflicts which is, after all, what propels the story.

I'm sure that there are lapses in logic and dropped stories as the fans on Television Without Pity.com are having a field day whining about.. but I say, geez, just enjoy the show. For what it is, it's pretty good and while I couldn't care less about the comic books, the online tie-in stuff and the Sprint sponsorship, for a show with people who have 'abilities beyond mortal Men', well, it's pretty decent. I know I've complained about Reaper and Gossip Girl being vapid and shallow so how can I give Heroes a pass? I don't know. It's like Art or Porn.. you can't define it but you know quality when you see it and I think Heroes has it. Will it be a show that I'll race home to watch every Monday night? Unlikely. But I'll probably DVR it and watch a bunch of episodes all at once.


Ok the one caveat I have is the gore.. knifings and injections and lobotomies and so forth. Bleck. I had to stop watching ER because NBC insisted on showing closeups of every bloody operation and frankly I just don't want (or need) to see it. Yes, yes it's very lovely that your special effects department is top notch, but enough already.


Finally, the ads. It stands to reason that the biggest action flicks (James Bond) and sci fi flicks (Eagle Eye) would be promoted during the show but I had to laugh at AXA Equitable churning out their "800 pound gorilla in the room" campaign several times throughout the show. Isn't the 800 pound gorilla in the room the fact that this is basically gambling (as evidenced by the "your money 'could' set you up for retirement" tag line they deliver).

Anyway, that's enough tv talk for today.

Annual Fall Preview part 1 of .. oh I don't know

It's Monday, I lost two and a half hours of my life last night that I'll never get back watching the 60th Emmys which were awful other than a singular moment that made watching it almost worth the effort. Naturally being appreciative of anything intelligent and slightly subversive, I'm talking about Tommy Smothers' comment something about 'truth is what we get you to believe". Fantastic. Anyway, you can read my commentary about the night at Roland's Extra Criticum where I am a columnist. http://www.extracriticum.com/ I'll probably post more reviews/views now that the TV season is returning after the disasterous 2007/8 season.



Like global warming, the writer's strike seems to take the blame for every problem that network television is having - from an anemic fall lineup to lost viewership to even more game and reality shows. In a business that relies on viewers to supply advertising dollars, why you'd program things that people don't want to watch is beyond me. I guess they feel that viewership is going to be down no matter what they do, so why not save some money and do everything on the cheap. The problem is: doing it on the cheap with junky game shows and junky reality shows is one of the reasons why viewers are flocking to the internet in the first place: because there's stuff to watch there/here. I wish I knew some network/advertising types whom I could nudge and say "if you fill up my screen with more advertising than actual show, I'm going to turn the tv on even less than I already do". but sadly, I do not.



What's also sad is that after thumbing through the Entertainment Weekly fall preview guide, I can't believe that there's very little I'm looking forward to seeing. There have been years when I genuinely fretted over nights where I would have to choose to watch this show or that show. Granted, that is why DVR's were invented but as of yet I don't see anything that I want to add.



The other day I went through my DVR and erased Jericho from the list. Goodbye you sad yet fun little show. I will miss you and you're very hot cast members. I will miss the strange pacing and yet oddly well written show. I will look forward no more to wondering if Skeet Ulrich is ill, just doesn't eat a lot or the studio pestered him to have that gaunt "I'm a homeless meth addict" look.



I will also miss Moonlight, the vampire show, Journeyman, the time traveler show and Reaper, the show about the guy who is the devils bounty hunter. OK so I know that Reaper is still on but I've given up, my patience with the dimwit characters came to an end as I struggled to watch the last handful of episodes (I ended up skipping a couple of them and it turned out that I missed nothing).



I'm fascinated by Pushing Daisies if only to see how long they can sustain such a charming show before it falls into itself with too many gimmicks and oversaturates itself with cuteness. I wish that American tv could take a cue from British television and figure out how many hours it takes to tell a story rather than assigning 21 hours for several seasons on end to a concept that would barely make a good movie. PD has a lot of potential (more than just a two hour movie) but I don't know that I can see it reaching 100 episodes much less 50 or even 25. Nine hours of it last season was perfect and the writers strike (see? that again) was a blessing for this show. I wish the networks had the courage to say "ok only ten hours this season". Leave your audience wanting more. It's the first rule in showmanship. Ah well. No one has ever accused the suits at the networks of knowing how to put on a good show.



Well, this is more than I intended to write this afternoon but more on the upcoming season as it unravels...

7 Thoughts on a Thursday

1. It was a strange summer filled with learning new technology (my roommates flat screen, this new blog, my new phone) and frustrated by dealing with the old (various computer problems, Time Warner internet failures at home, losing my iPod Shuffle and having to buy a new one.. grr) ... wasn't technology supposed to make our lives easier, not harder?


2. I've let go of a few things in my life and by no small miracle, my back pain decreased significantly. Going to a chiropractor 9 times in three weeks helped also. As did learning to sit differently while on the computer. And stretching. And bike riding.


3. Saturday August 30th was one of the best days in my life.

I spent five hours riding the bike from W. 102nd down along the river to South Ferry, boarding a boat to Governor's Island, riding a lap there, and then resuming the ride along the southern edge of Manhattan and up along the lower east side until I got to E. 34th St when the bike path ended. Oh sure I could have ridden through city streets but I was a little over it.


Then, after getting home via subway, and two chicken empanadas later followed by a long hot shower, I spent the evening with my two best friends: the BF and Matt who was in for the weekend from San Francisco. Best. Day. In a long time!! (I was just sorry that the BF was ill all weekend..... :( :( :( :( )


4. I am in love with my bike. In addition to the bike ride I took initially in mid August, I also rode last Saturday the equivalent of about 15 miles and then on Labor Day rode up from where I live on W. 102nd Street up to 190th where the Cloisters are located (to have a picnic lunch with Jim, his boyfriend Bill and some of their friends).

The short term goal of riding the bike: to ride the entire perimeter of Manhattan (30 miles)... the long term goal: to ride the 100 miles from Jamaica Queens to Montauk (at the very end of Long Island). The ten miles from the town of Montauk to the lighthouse (which I've been to and is gorgeous) is pretty hilly... I don't know that I have the kind of bike to make those hills but I do want to do the 100 miles ... don't know if it'll be this autumn or next summer..... but I'll do it!


5. Both the DNC and RNC have worn me out on politics. Yeah she's got a nice rack. Yeah, he speaks eloquently. Yup he's a wonderful family man and sure, he's got military experience up the wazoo. But they're all liars, thieves and corrupt. Worst of all, none of 'em is worth a dime if all they can do is bitch about each other. Unfortunately we're stuck listening to them for the next 60 days and worse, we have to listen to all the crybaby reporters and commentators from all sides of the political spectrum whine and lie and bitch and moan about how this and that person isn't being fair. Honestly, it's like listening to four year old cry about graham crackers. At least you can put a four year old down for a nap. What are we supposed to do with grown men and women who express with relish the defeat and humiliation of another human being when they are supposed to be journalists who are reporting the news?

I wish they'd all just shut up and find another job. Thank God for the 'off' button on the television set.



6. On a brighter note, Laura Spencer is back on General Hospital and the scenes are watchable. Imagine. Material on GH that's actually interesting, plays to history, isn't focused on the mob and compels me to tune in every day... shocking!! Naturally the whole question of "is Lulu imagining that Laura is well or is Laura really recovering?" is a really great way to play with her return. Bravo!




7. I caught a few shows that I normally would not watch... and found some truly bizarre (and funny) stuff: The Girls Next Door (about three Playboy bunnies in Hef's mansion), Chelsea Lately (a smart talk show run by a female comic addressing issues of the day... a female Jon Stewart.. wish she filmed in NYC), and .. yes, I admit it, I watched the return of 90210 the other night.. yes it was somewhat watchable.

The Big Picture

I’ll admit it. I’m a channel-changer. While I’m not the type that has to constantly scroll through all the channels in order to find a thirty second bit that he likes before moving on to the next channel, when it comes to big news events like this weeks Democratic National Convention, I channel change a lot in order to try to get a variety of viewpoints (usually the motivation for a new channel is when my blood starts boiling at some inept analysis).


So it happened that last night I ended up toggling between Thirteen’s (where I work during the day) coverage and MSNBC. On my cable system, they’re right next to each other and so it made it easy. I was enjoying watching and listening to Keith Olberman and Chris Matthews and the adjacent commentary by a panel of people that included an newly easy going Pat Buchanen who got admonished by his colleagues when he attempted to turn the discussion decidedly anti Obama. It was then, though, that I noticed that they were talking so much that they were talking over a pre-taped segment covering Michelle Obama’s history. Toggling back to Thirteen I got the whole video (and through the magic of DVR, I was able to ‘rewind’ to the beginning).. and that’s when I noticed it.


The screen looked less cluttered on PBS and I could see a full picture.


It’s funny how we get used to something. On the other stations (not just MSNBC) the news crawl at the bottom of the screen has become a part of the television news landscape since 9/11’s scattered news stories demanded a Wall Street ticker-like bombardment of updates to a chaotic swarm of concurrent events. But over the past few years it’s become ubiquitous and used unecessarily out of crisis.


Do Angelina Jolie’s children really need a news crawl? I swear I saw that on one a couple weeks ago.


Worse, though is how over the past few years the intrusion of too many graphics (most of the time they’re ads for products and other in-network shows) has gotten to be so bad that at times it’s hard to see the actual show behind all those dazzling, moving, colorful ads. They fly in and twirl and people now move about along the bottom of my television set, but I just want to see the actual show I’m watching. I get enough commercials. Yes, I’m aware of your show, but bombarding me with more ads while I’m trying to watch something else won’t get me to watch.. it’ll get me to turn the set off (which is ironically what people are doing .. and then the network guys sit in an office in Hollywood and scratch their heads wondering why people aren’t watching.. well, DUH!).


But anyway, back to the DNC coverage. As the graphics on MSNBC were covering up nearly a half of the screen, all I could think about was


1. how some poor camera guy and producer are sitting in the control booth trying to make sure that the framing is right so that what’s actually important gets seen, in this case, Michelle Obama


2. and. that I see now why there’s been a push towards larger TVs – not for that movie theatre ambience, but more importantly, so that there’s more screen to see the picture of, you know, the actual thing they’re showing.


I didn’t even realize how much of my screen was taken up by the logos and the ads of MSNCBC until I went to Thirteen and suddenly the picture area was huge. It’s like the 8 foot guy who’s sitting in front of me in the movie theatre finally got up to go to the bathroom and I can at last see what I want to see without having to look around someone’s head. That’s frustrating enough in a movie theatre but intolerable at home.


Anyway, I ended up staying put on Thirteen for the rest of the evening even though the sound quality was a little less than the other stations and even though a couple of the commentators on the post convention talk about really should have no future in news reporting or politics. One in particular I was aghast had little to no grasp of either how to speak on camera or solid political opinions. How do these people get these jobs anyway?


Tonight, Hillary Clinton speaks in what is sure to be the most talked about evening of television tomorrow and possible for some time to come. I’m pretty sure that I’ll just turn to Thirteen to begin with but you never know. The allure of that remote is sometimes too good to pass up.


This piece was originally posted on the Thirteen Facebook page, re-written slightly and then posted on www.ExtraCriticum.com in this, it's final form.

The Summer So Far, The Sequel

Here are a few more things that I know I know:


13. My apartment smells of 'guy'.. not bad but not good either. When I say 'guy', I mean like the way a male teenager's room smells or a locker room smells or feet, well, you get the point. Is the answer candles? Sprays? My roommate and I both shower regularly, wear clean clothes and there are no dishes in the sink. And yet it smells like 'guy'. What is up with that?


14. Just the mere mention of the documentary "Man on Wire" (about a man who walked a cable strung between the Twin Towers in 1974) gives me vertigo and makes my legs all swimmy. Just reading the commentaries on http://www.extracriticum.com leave me feeling as though I'm in free-fall 110 stories above the Earth. My fear of heights seems to have sharpened as I've gotten older despite my attempts to "cure" myself - going up to the oberservation deck - the 80th floor or so- of the Towers in 1986 and looking down between the two buildings was a start, going to the top of St. Paul's Cathedral in London, the top of the Eifel Tower in Paris and other such monuments, I thought would cure me but alas it has not. Frankly, 911 just confirmed my worst fears of what could happen when one is in a tall building. Thank God the BF lives on the 5th floor of his building!


15. I need a weekend out of the city. I think I've written this before but it bears repeating. Maybe I'll just get on the first train some weekend out of Penn Station and take it to whereever and then get out and get on the first train heading back. I need to get off this island even if only for a few hours (I know I know, there's always Brooklyn and Queens.. but those boroughs used to be their own distinct place, but now they are really just extensions of Manhattan). Maybe over Labor Day weekend.


16. Swing Vote still sucks. And worse, I remembered this morning that I had remarked at the time that one scene uses virtually bar for bar the music from Costner's Field of Dreams all in a cynical attempt to evoke the good will of the earlier, much better, movie. As I'm a HUGE fan of FOD and have seen it a dozen times and listened to the soundtrack perhaps a hundred times, I know of what I speak.


17. I watched General Hospital on Soap Net Tuesday night because there was nothing else on and it's virtually unwatchable. It's still mob-centric, the Quartermaines are nearly extinct. The Q's were picked off one by one over the past five years and now are bearly recognizable.
Plus the show stupidly killed off the son of a legacy character rather than mine him for decades of history. The newcomers are decent though but it's not a show I know anymore.


My wish is that someone on the show would go back in time to 1998 when all my favorite characters were still alive and change history and then over a year the show would rewrite and revisit the storylines of the last decade so that by the time they got current, we'd have all of our favorites living again, a real development of what's been going on with them over the past ten years and the basis for a show that I personally would love to watch again. Naturally that'll never happen.


But I do have a question: why must a character be killed off if the writers need to write them out? Does no one get a job or go to school or have a relative to take care of out of town? To me, it's creative bankruptcy to kill as many characters as GH has done and is detrimental to the long survival of the show and by some rights, the genre. Sigh. But no one asked me.


18. "Night Shift" - the GH nighttime spin off isn't so bad though. Focusing on the hospital the way, you know, a show named "General Hospital" should. I'm just sayin.


19. I am having tremendous fun noodling around with the Thirteen Facebook page creating graphics and writing a daily blog. It's keeping me off the streets and sometimes that's the most one can ask out of life.


And those are the things that I know I know today.

Here's what I know I know:

1. It's been hotter and more humid for longer than any other summer that I remember being or living in New York. The really bad hot/humid weather usually lasts for a couple weeks in mid August but the rest of it is bearable. This year it started in early June and just lingered. It hung around like a bad relative, unwilling or unable to leave. I measure this by how many times I have to turn on the air conditioning in my apartment because at the current Con Ed rates, if I turn it on, it'd better be because parts of me are melting off my body.


2. Summer movies blow if you're an adult. I enjoyed Mamma Mia and that had no real weight whatsoever. It was over the top splendor, ridiculous camp and a solo by Meryl Streep that took a mediocre song like "The Winner Takes it All" and actually made it about something real. Poor Pierce Brosnan though; cringe-worthy singing and mind numbing exposition "I have been trying for two days to tell you that I'm divorced but I can't seem to find you while staying in your own hotel on this tiny Greek island" Sheesh. Whatever they paid him, it wasn't enough. But everyone had a good time and people were singing in the audience and it's been one of the highlights movie-going wise.


3. Remakes of old creations are good if they stay true to their material. Sex and the City used their 2 and a half hours wisely by simply giving us where Carrie and Company would be at this point of their lives. Still fabulous and still sexy. OK and over-dramatic (although the bit about the plot hinging on Charlottes daughter swiping Carrie's cell phone when Big is trying to call her is abit convenient but I'm willing to let it slide because everything that comes from it was so good).


4.However, Indiana Jones... sigh. I wanted to like the movie so much and I thought it did an admirable job... but it stayed with me afterwards and not in a good way. I kept trying to be excited by the movie but I realized I wasn't and worse, if/when the next one comes out, we have to live with a character named Mutt Williams rather than Indiana Jones? Ugh.


5.I had hopes about the X Files movie but then I heard that creator Chris Carter not only never had a "bible" of the shows mythology but none of it was going to be used in the movie. Uh oh Number One. Then when I saw a trailer and I was utterly unmoved, not a ripple or tingle anywhere, well, it was uh oh Number Two. But then I heard that the plot hinges on (spoiler alert) a gay man that wants his head put on a woman's body. Or some such nonsense. The blogs gave me the low down and while I avoid most gay blogs as over hysterical about this type of thing (my people can really be over sensitive and this coming from the King of Sensitivity), I couldn't avoid it and furthermore, was really turned off and disappointed. So uh a sort of anti gay movie. Well, uh oh number three and strike out. Maybe I'll rent it when it comes out on DVD...


6. Note to X Files creator Chris Carter: alienating your fan base (by telling them all those hours trying to connect the dots of the alien mythology were meaningless, because there wasn't anything to connect) won't bring in the mainstream, it'll just piss off the ones who would have made your movie the big success it should have been. How Hollywood can't seem to learn this lesson is beyond me. Producers of LOST, this should be a wake up call for you. As the heir apparent to the mythology driven show, please for God's sake make sure the series makes sense by the end of the run and for no reason whatsoever NEVER tell us that you were making it up as you went along. We suspect as much, try to prove us wrong. Please.


7. Which reminds me, six more months til the next season of LOST starts. Sigh.


8. Which reminds me, whatever happened to summer reruns? (OK I know that they phased out years ago but I never missed them more until last night I was flipping around the channel during prime time and never have I seen such a collection of out and out crap on the tube before!)


9. Wall-E was brilliant. Nothing more to add other than to reiterate that Pixar generated a more complex character in the first five minutes of the cockroach character in Wall E than Kevin Costner did with his character in the entirety of Swing Vote. The cockroach was infinitely more believable too.


10. I doubt I'll see The Dark Knight but it's grossed $400 million in 18 days and columnists are chuckling at the fan boys who are looking to topple the $600 million domestic gross of Titanic a decade ago. Hmm. Nothing encourages a bunch of fan boys more than Hollywood telling them that something can't be done. I think the gauntlet has been thrown down in what seems like a well orchestrated maneuver to make sure the flick spins to 600 mil in record time. And by the way, writer Martin Pasko makes a point on his Facebook page saying that he's worried about what the PR flaks have in store for Michael Caine and Aaron Eckert now that a number of Batcast have made headlines (and none in particularly good shape... Morgan Freeman, get well!!)


11. I need a vacation and badly but I cannot afford it and even if I could, the price of fuel would cripple me and the add ons of air travel would break me. That leaves rail travel. I'm glad I live on the east coast where rail travel is actually realistically possible. I can actually get somewhere without needing a sleeper car. So I'll continue to do 'staycations' in the city on the weekends although that's not really the same thing as, you know, leaving the island once in awhile.


12. My back pains of the last week were a result of a. general lack of exercise, b. stress, c. sitting slumped over a computer too long and too frequently and d. lifting a heavy box that aggrevated the 'bad place' on my back. I'm doing things to alleviate it including going to a chiropractor who has already worked wonders in just two sessions. However since my copay is $30 I'll have to curtail how many sessions I can afford and hope that I am completely well by the time my coverage peters out. But again, universal health care is for Communists. Whatever.


And that's some things that I know today.

Obsessive, Compulsive or Complete?

So last night I was mentioning to some friends how I've managed to watch nearly ten seasons of FRIENDS since June 16th. Once one gets past the question of why anyone would watch all 260some episodes, the bigger observation of the group was that I am obsessive compulsive. I guess just that I'm posing this question and not letting go proves their point but nonetheless I got a little offended.


It's not like I've not done this before. Last summer I vascillated about reading the Harry Potter books and so procrastinated fulfilling my long time plan of waiting to read all the books until the seventh one came out. This was a good plan until the promotional noise became so deafening that I briefly decided that I didn't care if I knew whether Harry lived or not, I was prepared to care less. Except that I had read the first book a few years earlier and had enjoyed it and had liked the movies. My mom had even given me the fourth book in hardcover and although I attempted to simply start there, it wasn't really a good idea to start in the middle of a series (Star Wars notwithstanding).


So I decided to systematically read all the books in the series but I'd have to do so quickly before news of the ending reached my pop culture saturated ears. I have to admit that I enjoyed the experience. Having the entire series at my fingertips and one volume as my constant companion for weeks was pretty cool. Once I'd bought the 7th volume I was practically speed reading though (although admittedly there are sections in the seventh book that deserve to be sped read) until the last day when I was 50 pages from the end, I actually was so excited that I took a cab home from work so that I could finish that much quicker. OK, some compulsion going on.


I ended up reading all seven volumes in 29 days which just goes to show me that I can do anything that I put my mind to, if putting my mind to something means merely accomplishing it by walking into a bookstore.


Anyway, I've always had a fondness for FRIENDS and over the years have bought all the seasons up and, alternately, gotten some seasons as presents. Not sure which ones anymore but it doesn't really matter. I vowed that 'someday' I would start watching the entire series in chron order. But like many people, my library is filled with many movies that have never been opened. I'm not sure I understand this. It seems like hoarding to some I suppose but it's also cool to have a collection. Granted, I think it should be a collection one actually watches but that's for rainy weekends. Or retirement. In New York there are always things to do and so we accummulate and actually watching our collection gets put off until.. 'someday'.


But after marathoning Sex and the City and LOST earlier this year, I decided to tackle Friends this summer. I was in a bad mood and Friends makes me laugh. So sue me.


Once I started though I couldn't and didnt' want to stop. I would lay for six hours or more on my bed watching disc after disc. At some point it became kind of obsessive - to see if I could get through the entire series.. and then at some point I wanted to be complete and see if the entire series actually hangs together narritively (it does.. there are a few lapses and leaps that the show makes but so much of it is so good that their mistakes are forgivable). After obsession and completion, then a sort of competition kicks in and sprinter-like I wanted to get to the finish line.



Currently I am about a dozen episodes away from the end of the tenth and final season. I will miss the shows when I finish sometime in the next week (if I wasn't hung up with work and other committments this weekend, I could finish tonight dammit! LOL) and the experience is a kind of rush. And I suppose that it's akin to the kind of intensity that one feels when one decides to read all the works of Jane Austen or Stephen King or Shakespeare. OK I'm not comparing the Friends creators with these creators but I do feel, like them, Friends is one of those pieces of art that will endure as a portrait of life in the end years of the 20th century and the start of the 21st.


For me I guess the appeal of the show has always been the wish fulfillment of having a group of people that you're close to, a family that you go through things with. I guess that's not really reflective of reality but it sure is a nice thought. That not just one but five people will be there for you is a pretty appealing feeling and in my book that's neither obsessive or competitive, but a component for me to feel complete.

Simpsonic

For the past twenty years The Simpsons has been one of my favorite shows not only because of its razor sharp satire and ever evolving animation but also because it's not above making fun of Fox and they get away with it... which especially in today's political climate is pretty amazing. Although I was disappointed when, recently, they worked a reference to Universal Studios (where the Simpsons ride has just opened) into the script... anyway, the show has just been renewed for it's 20th season which ties it with Gunsmoke as televisions longest running show. That's pretty damn amazing. Not always perfect but fairly consistently funny and that's quite a feat to achieve for 19 consecutive years.


Anyway, someone with even more time on their hands than I put together a five minute high speed montage of all the Simpsons' opening credit 'couch gag' (where all five family members gather to watch tv) and it's pretty dizzying but hilarious and a not so subtle reminder that the Simpsons don't get older, they get yellower. No, wait, that's not right.. they get betterer drawn.


No, wait. D'oh!


http://www.tapespace.com/view/every_simpsons_couch_gag

Bill Moyers hands out beat downs and lollipops, but whoops all out of lollipops!!

"Bill Moyers gave the keynote address at the National Conference for Media Reform this past weekend in Minneapolis, where more than 3500 participants gathered to discuss ways to bring more democracy to American media. "Democracy without honest information creates the illusion of popular consent while enhancing the power of the state and the privileged interests protected by it. Democracy without accountability creates the illusion of popular control while offering ordinary Americans only cheap tickets to the balcony, too far away to see that the public stage has become just a reality TV set," Moyers said. "Nothing more characterizes corporate media today, mainstream and partisan, than disdain toward the fragile nature of modern life and indifference toward the complex social debate required of a free and self-governing people." Among other speakers at the conference were Dan Rather and Arianna Huffington. At the conference, Moyers was confronted by a producer from the Fox News program, The O'Reilly Factor with Bill O’Reilly, who has long been antagonistic to both Moyers and public broadcasting. In a widely circulated video clip, Moyers is seen handling the ambush with humor and class."


See the original clip at http://www.thirteen.org/newsandpublicaffairs/moyers-on-the-media and then commentary at http://www.crooksandliars.com/2008/06/08/fox-news-producer-ambushes-bill-moyers-gets-taste-of-his-own-medicine/