I'd never even heard of the show, It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia. Judging from the dates, it looks like it's been on for a year or two. I don't know how I could have missed it. Anyway, I saw an ad or something and told the TiVo to record an episode. It was pretty good. I think I'll keep watching it.
Also, the episode I saw had Dennis Haskins, the guy who played Mr. Belding on Saved by the Bell. Man, that guy got huge.
Everybody else and their brother is linking to the Live Action Simpsons Intro, so I guess I may as well too.
The actors don't look enough like the cartoon characters for my tastes, but it's pretty clear that a lot of work went into this.
Well, it's official. Fox has Cancelled Arrested Development.
The bastards!
I don't get that station. They green light incredible shows like Serenity, Arrested Development, Family Guy and Gregg the Bunny, but then they cancel them before they can find an audience. I guess it's good that we at least have shows like that at all, but I sure wish some station would green light incredible shows and then keep them around for a while.
I wonder if some production company could do straight to DVD TV shows. I guess there'd be a lot of risk in something like that, but it would be pretty cool.
TiVo recorded a Seinfeld episode as one of its suggestions for me. So, I'm watching it, and it seems sort of different. I looked it up, and it turns out it was the pilot. It's really interesting seeing the characters before they were fully fleshed out. You can see shades of what the show would ultimately become, but everything is just slightly different.
Holy crap, new episodes of Greg the Bunny are airing on IFC! I absolutely loved Greg the Bunny when fox was running it. Unfortunately, this preview clip Greg the Bunny Video does Las Vegas is amazingly unfunny. I hope the rest of the shows are better than this.
I think so, Brain, but how will we get three pink flamingos into one pair of Capri pants?
OK, I thought it was kind of funny when the TV show Arrested Development referenced the Star Wars kid. But, that is nothing compared to the Robot Chicken I just watched. An all out brawl breaks out at a SciFi Convention, and they reference the Lightning Bolt, Lighting Bolt Video. That is one extremely obscure and esoteric reference. I literally fell off my couch I was laughing so hard. I don't know who wrote that into the thing, but I love that show just a little bit more now.
Some people on the web were raving about how funny Robot Chicken was, so I told TiVo to grab me a few episodes. It really is kind of good in a wring the funny out of the morass of pop culture kind of way. More than any show I think I've ever seen it seems to have been written by and for people with attention deficit disorder.
I just got done watching the pilot for the show, NUMB3RS. The always lovely Sabrina Lloyd was in it. I have a Tivo Wishlist set up for shows she's in, so Tivo was kind enough to record it for me.
OK, first things first, the name is just God awful. Seriously, that alone almost guarantees this thing won't make it past a half a dozen episodes. And, it is pretty clearly trying really hard to follow the CSI formula for TV. I can almost hear the pitch meetings now -- it's like CSI, but math instead of science. The premise feels pretty thin even for a single two hour movie, so I just can't see them stretching it out for an entire TV series.
All that said, I did sort of just barely like the pilot episode. There are a lot of known names involved with this thing including Rob Morrow (Northern Exposure), Peter MacNicol (Ally McBeal), Judd Hirsch (Taxi) and Ridley Scott (Blade Runner) to say nothing of the always lovely Sabrina Lloyd.
I doubt it will last very long, but there's never much good to watch on Fridays anyway, so I'll watch the next one and see if it gets better or worse. My money's firmly in the worse camp.
Man, NUMB3RS -- what a stupid name.
When Louis is giving the weather, he looks about as awkward and uncomfortable as I've ever seen somebody look. I mean, I love me some bad TV, but Wow! This moves past right past laughter and well into tears.
Wow! It looks like a new season of MI-5 has started. It had been so long, I just assumed it was cancelled. I'd almost removed it from my TiVo season pass. I never know when to safely remove things from my season pass. I assume I can get rid of The Agency, Boomtown, Dead Like Me, dr. vegas and The Office, but I haven't for fear that I might be wrong about them (despite what I'd heard). I'm even less sure about shows like Out of Order which I assume was just a one off kind of little mini-series, but sort of hope will one day come back. I wonder how many season passes TiVo can hold. Is there any problem with just leaving cancelled shows in there forever hopelessly searching for the next new show to record?
So, TiVo recorded Gilmore Girls for me last night. And, that's good because I feel like Gilmore Girls is one of the few really good shows on right now (although I am sort of getting into Lost).
The thing is, I get it off of satellite, and there was a crazy amount of rain here in Southern California. Rain means rain fade. I lost signal, and I didn't get like 15 or 20 minutes of the show recorded.
Arghhhhhhh!!!!!!
So annoying! But, fortunately I live in the time of the internet where content is never more than five or six clicks away. OK, actually, it was a little more than that away. I was pretty sure somebody would have posted a torrent for the show, but first I had to find it. I tried a few Google searches with predictably bad results. I knew there was this one site out there that catalogs all that stuff *Cough*SuprNova.org*Cough*, but I couldn't remember the name of it. That meant even more searches to try to dredge it up.
Finally, I find a seed for the show, and I start downloading it, and it says it's going to take 100 hours. 100 hours? For 1 hour of TV? WTF internet?! I started, and then I found another seed that was only going to take 8 hours, so I started that one, and then I went to bed. I woke up and still didn't have the full show. I had to wait another hour+.
Really, we should be able to get these things a lot faster than this shouldn't we? I mean don't get me wrong. It's great that we can get them at all. Mother nature with her silly rain can't stop me, but I thought the whole idea of torrents was that it made downloading fast (I know the real idea was that it offloads the bandwidth for really popular files, but isn't it also supposed to make it fast?).
Anyway, I finally got the show, and I come to find out it only ran 43 minutes anyway. I'd only lost the final 2 minutes to rain fade. What the hell is that? Ten hours for two lousy minutes of programming.
Update: I just realized the reason the run time is so low is because they cut the ads. Duh! But, that means I didn't lose nearly as much of the show as I thought. They must load up a lot of ad breaks at the end of the show or something. I swear TiVo said I was missing a good 15 minutes.
Man, Jon Stewart went on Crossfire and took the whole show to task with both guns blazing.
Samples:
BEGALA: Well, it's because, see, we're a debate show.STEWART: No, no, no, no, that would be great. To do a debate would be great. But that's like saying pro wrestling is a show about athletic competition.
(LAUGHTER)
CARLSON: Jon, Jon, Jon, I'm sorry. I think you're a good comedian. I think your lectures are boring.
STEWART: Now, this is theater. It's obvious. How old are you?
CARLSON: Thirty-five.
STEWART: And you wear a bow tie.
(LAUGHTER)
(APPLAUSE)
CARLSON: Yes, I do. I do.
STEWART: So this is theater.
CARLSON: I do think you're more fun on your show. Just my opinion.
STEWART: You know what's interesting, though? You're as big a dick on your show as you are on any show.
[A] ground-breaking TV series with the enigmatic Professor Julius Sumner Miller - ran on the ABC from 1963 to 1986. Professor Miller's infectious enthusiasm for physics delighted, educated and entertained generations of Australians, most of whom have at some point asked each other 'Why is it so?' in the characteristic Julius Sumner Miller voice.I've watched 1 1/2 episodes. It's sort of a drag because of it keeps freezing as it tries to buffer. I should be on a quick enough pipe to handle it. I can't imagine what it would be like on dial-up.
The show rocks though. From the initial close-up on that freaky black & white eyeball to his Socratic grilling of the students, he's like a cooler, crazier Mr. Wizard.
So, a while ago, I heard about a failed TV pilot starring Jack Black called Heat Vision and Jack Well, it turns out Andy has a copy, and he's seeded a bittorrent of it.
I've been trying to download the 300+ MB file for over an hour now. I'm only 13% through. I hear it's funny though, so come on everybody. Fire up your favorite client. I need more users so we can get faster throughput on this thing. My PowerBook is so hot right now it's about to melt through my lap and down to the core of the earth. Nobody wants that. Help a guy out.
Why on earth did I ever like the show Electra Woman and Dyna Girl when I was a kid? I mean I know kids have something like zero taste in this kind of stuff, but WOW that show was bad. Seriously, seriously, seriously bad. TV Land was running episodes, so naturally I TiVo'd it in a fit of nostalgia.
It's obviously supposed to be a female version of the old Adam West Batman series. Batman was campy and self-effacing, so it actually holds up pretty well. I mean, I liked it as a kid a whole bunch too, and I liked it for very different qualities than what I might see in it now. Still, on either level it works pretty well.
Electra Woman and Dyna Girl though feels like really bad fan fiction of Batman, like the star wars kid who was making the internet rounds last year only not as funny/good. It's like what you might get if you taped a bunch of kids on the playground acting out super hero rolls -- except here the writing is worse.
I do dig the secret door though. I always wanted my own secret door that led to my own secret lair.
Why did nobody tell me that TV Land was running episodes of Shazam!? I mean I told you all about my interest back in April of 2002. I tell you sometimes I think nobody but comment spammers really reads these pages.
Truthfully, I didn't remember mentioning it myself. I knew I'd done an entry about yesterdayland, but I didn't remember what the yesterdayland URL was, and I wanted to link to their entry for Shazam!. Unfortunately, it seems that yesterdayland has folded up shop. I find that very sad. That web site was awesome. I guess the good ones never last.
I've had Brian Green's book, The Elegant Universe for about a year now. So far, I have not found time to read it. I very much want to read it, but I am lame. Enter TV, with a 3 Part Nova Special:
This would-be revolution goes by the name of string theory, the most musical explanation of creation ever invented. It describes the elementary particles that make up nature not as little points but as vibrating strings of energy, a different "note" for each different kind of particle. How it developed and what it might mean is the subject of "The Elegant Universe," starring the Columbia University physicist Brian Greene, author of the best-selling book of the same name. The three-part rags-to-riches story, which starts on Tuesday night, is billed as the biggest project "Nova" has ever done, with a $3.5 million budget, gobs of animation and special effects, and appearances by many of the leading lights of modern physics and string theory.Sounds really interesting. I have to remember to record this.
Is there anything worse than a show that used to be a shining beacon of light now reduced to a phlegm stain? I used to love the West Wing. From time to time, there would be moments that would give me chills, and every week, there was something that made the weeks wait worth while.
No more. I understand that Sorkin left this season. His loss is sorely felt. It was almost unwatchable tonight. I keep looking at it and expecting to see a glimmer of its former glory. You almost can. It's like looking at somebody who was once beautiful now scarred by the worst kind of plastic surgery mistake imaginable.
Pretty much this entire season of TV sucks harder than it ever has. Is there a writers strike I didn't hear about or something?
Wow! The US version of Coupling is horrible.
H.O.R.R.I.B.L.E.!!!!!
I knew it would suck, but I had no idea it could possibly be so stilted and unfunny. The weird thing is, most of the script seems to be taken straight from the UK version. Same jokes, but really just way less funny than the original. I don't understand how they did it. They sucked the funny right out of it.
There's a crispness in the air (more or less) and new shows on TV (more or less). Yea!
I watched the series premier of Jake 2.0 tonight. Maybe it's just that I'm a sucker for Nano Tech, but I have to say it didn't suck. It wasn't the greatest thing ever. The whole he loves the blonde who sees him as a sexless neuter while the brunette scientist (whose beauty is hidden behind a pair of glasses) secretly loves him is a theme that's just beyond played out. And, let's be honest it's just an updated six million dollar man. Still, I think I'll watch it again.
Why is MTV running a Spider-man cartoon? I know they stopped playing music videos a long time ago, but I thought their programming was at least about a particular life style. Spider-man doesn't make any sense at all.
But then Five gay guys for a straight guy or whatever it's called doesn't seem like a good fit for Bravo either. I guess now that all the stations are owned by the same company they've decided to stop pretending that stations have any kind of distinction or cohesive programming any more.
It's sad in a way.
Oh, and PS - as Spider-man cartoons go, this one kind of sucks. Bring back the ice dude and the girl who was on fire. I'm sure they were at least as sucky, but it's hard to argue with nostalgia. Or, bring back the end of the Electric Company. Those spider-man skits where the only reason I ever sat through the Electric Company. Yeah, Spider-man and the Bloodhound Gang. Let's have show that is nothing but the entertaining last few minutes of children's programming. That would rock. Somebody should start a station or something.
So, do you have Showtime? If you do, you should definitely set your TiVo to grab "Free for All." It's animated, sort of in the style of "Family Guy" and funny as hell. Seriously, there are like two to twenty massive belly laughs an episode. Absolutely a show to watch out for.
And as long as I'm shilling for Showtime tonight:
If you get a chance, you should check out the show "Out of Order." It stars Eric Stoltz and a bunch of other people you've probably heard of. It's a pretty solid show. I think it's a series. The premier felt way more cinematic than that though.
Somehow, I managed to get through more than 33 years of my life without ever seeing the play, Our Town. I haven't seen a lot of plays, so it's probably not too surprising. Except that, Our Town seems to be part of pop culture. In TV shows or movies, if the high school is putting on a play, it's almost certainly going to be Our Town or Romeo and Juliet. So, I sort of already knew the play without ever having seen it.
Showtime was showing a filmed version, so I finally had a chance to see it. Man, that play is recursive as hell. Recursion is something that seems to be really popular with computer geeks. For instance GNU is a computer operating system, and it stands for GNU's Not Unix. Do you see how that "G" would keep looping back onto itself into infinity? That's recursion.
I have to say, I'm geeky enough that I feel I should find that fascinating, but I'm not geeky enough to understand why it's fascinating. I think maybe it's a programming thing. Never the programmer I.
Our Town keeps looping back on itself, and the Stage Manager (narrator) is operating on several meta-levels. Now, I do understand the appeal of all things meta. For instance, the show Sports Night -- loved it. I also loved The Larry Sanders show. All those shows that are showing you stuff behind the scenes or abstracting themselves back to another level really speak to me. Our Town does that a bunch. It also deals with a lot of themes that I've been thinking about lately. So, all in all I'd say it was certainly worth seeing. I had the impression that it was a very simple play about life and death. And, I guess it is that, but it's a lot more interesting as well. Although I doubt that the play would concede that there could be anything more interesting than life or death. And, maybe it's right.
Children of Dune starts on the SciFi channel on Sunday. I've always been just the hugest Dune fan. I liked the Lynch film (even though you really need to have read the books to get it, and if you read the books, then you'll also get how very, very wrong it was). I LOVED the SciFi Dune mini-series. I know a lot of the fan boys were complaining to no end about the glowing TV like blue eyes, but I'm willing to let that slide because I thought that one was actually pretty near perfect. I bought it as soon as it came out on DVD, and when they released an extended version, well I bought that too.
So, I'm all over this upcoming mini-series of the next two books.
SNL was typically unfunny last night, but Queen Latifah was just all kinds of laugh. Who knew? Maybe for next season, SNL should lose all the Groundlings and Second City refugees and send its casting agents down to death row records or something.
Well OK, The X Presidents was funny too. Smigel continues to be the best part of that show.
The Bravo channel has been running a Boomtown marathon, so I've caught a few episodes. I'd never seen this show before. It seems like a pretty good show. They do a lot of playing around with narrative structure. Telling the story out of order from the perspective of various characters, or running the opening few minutes in reverse.
I would have expected that I would find that very innovative and intriguing, but I'm just barely, passively watching these shows, and I find that it's losing me pretty fast as a result. It comes across as gimmicky.
Still, it's amazing that there is a network TV show with the freedom to experiment with that kind of thing. I may have to watch a few shows again when I can give them more attention.
How did a show like She Spies slip under my radar? It sounds wonderfully horrible:
"Alias" meets "Austin Powers" by way of "VIP." Three female ex-cons (all beautiful, of course) work for the government to bring in criminals.Oh, yes. You have to know that I WILL be watching this show tonight.
Holy crap -- MC Hammer looks exactly like Jimmie JJ Walker. When did that happen?
Yes, it's true, I'm watching The Surreal Life A show with 7 minor celbrities living together reality TV style. It's pretty lame. I can't see myself watching this again.
If you're in Southern California (or probably anywhere in California), the local PBS stations carry this show California's Gold. It's a little goofy, and the host, Huell Howser, just falls all over himself to fawn over the most mundane kinds of things like interestingly colored rocks or poison ivy or whatever.
Still, there is something about this show that I can't seem to get enough of. It's not the kind of thing I'd actively watch, but just to have it on in the background on a lazy weekend day before I get ready, it's really fantastic. I was watching it this morning and they went to visit the Roy and Dale Evans museum.
This museum is filled with just all kinds of crap, and then they cut to one of the kids who is standing next to these mannequins that had been created by taking latex castings of Roy and Dale. It was supremely creepy because I was thinking you know the guy had his horse stuffed, and here is the family stuffing the mom and dad and making a few bucks taking gawkers through to look at it.
Then, they actually cut to Roy and Dale themselves who were, at least at the time of taping (and maybe even currently) surprisingly still alive and kicking. At least they were alive. I'm not 100% sure about the kicking part. They either had on a lot of make up or they'd had a lot of work done because they looked even more artificial and creepy than the rubber mannequins. Naturally they took Huell back to look at the stuffed horses and talk about what a great horse trigger had been. I'm not sure why, but the whole thing just left me with an indescribably icky feeling. I think I need to go take a shower now.
So, I thought that Fox's show, Firefly, started out pretty crappy. Still, I kept watching it because there isn't much else to watch on Fridays. The past two weeks have been pretty solid. I think it could be a good show -- except I'm almost certain it's going to be canceled.
Isn't that always the way? Still, if you're not watching it because of the first two episodes and the ridiculous western/sci fi hybrid style, you might want to give it another shot.
I've been spending the whole evening watching a Dinner for Five marathon on the independent film channel. If you haven't seen it, Jon Favreau (writer and star of Swingers and Made, etc.) is a host leading a dinner party with 4 other celebrities. It's surprisingly engaging.
Part of that is that they're entertainers, so they know how to be interesting, and part of it is that Favreau (or his pre-interviewers) has done his homework, so he is able to direct the conversation towards interesting stories. While I'm sure it's very artificial, it doesn't feel as artificial as some of the late-night talk shows.
It has me wanting to go to my own micro-dinner party with smart, interesting people. There should be a company that does that. Sort of like a dating service, but more oriented towards bringing small, diverse groups of people together. Seed the thing with a moderator who can draw everybody out and make everybody as interesting as they can be. I think something like that could fly.
I think I may finally have to delete my season pass to Inside The Actors Studio.
I mean, when they had Billy Joel on, I raised my eyebrow. When they had Ben Afflek on, I had serious questions. When they had Antonio Banderas on, I was pretty sure they had finally been reduced to blatantly whoring themselves.
But, tonight, I come home from dinner, and find James Lipton interviewing Pierce Brosnan. I haven't watched it yet, but I can't wait to hear about all the intense sense memory work he had to do to get in touch with his brilliant portrayal of Remington Freaking Steele.
Have they done Keanu yet, because you have to know he's next. Seriously, WTF!?
Domo Kun is (as near as I can tell), an animated character promoting some Japanese TV station. There is a 100 Meg movie linked off of this page. Now, if somebody's going to put a 100 meg video up on the web, you have to think it must be spectacular. Otherwise, who's going to put up with the download times on something like that? Working on this assumption, I downloaded it. I have to say the magic was lost on me -- that is, until I got to the dance sequence at the end. The dance sequence features somebody in a big Domo Kun suit, bouncing around with like 100 cheerleaders to the song Xanadu. Now that was so bizarre to see it completely justified the download time.
So, Kevin Mitnick and Steve Wozniak hosting The Screensavers - this sounds in theory as though it would be the dream show of all time. Woz is such a cool guy, and Kevin is interesting and seems articulate whenever I've seen him interviewed. The reality though was so stilted that even I, the king of train-wreck television, could barely bring myself to continue watching it. Really, really painful to see.
I have to admit to never having read or seen anything by Samuel Beckett. That is, I hadn't seen anything until tonight. I've been watching Beckett on Film . I'm unsure of what to make of it.
Many of the characters seem to be traits or aspects of a person more than fully formed individuals, and there doesn't seem to be a lot of plot or drama. Everything is fractured and ambiguous. It's interesting in a way, I suppose. Normally, I like ambiguity in my art. Normally, I would expect that I would like this type of thing a lot. I do in a way, but it's more because I feel like I should than because I feel like I've really come away with anything. I find I just don't have the attention span for it tonight. It reminds me of Kafka. I like Kafka a bunch. I've read everything we still have from him -- some pieces several times (except his journal. I tried, but let's be real here). But, I'm always a little uneasy about it. It's like looking into somebody's working notes and finding half-formed experiments. It's like they aren't really meant to be seen. I find it hard to believe Beckett's shorter plays actually get staged, but clearly they must.
The Tivo keeps grabbing this show, So Graham Norton. I hate the fact that I just can't get enough of this thing. It is just the basest, most crass, tee hee hee he's talking about sex kind of program. But, there are times when I find it unbelievably funny.
Take for instance tonight when his guests were Dolph Lungren, Loretta Swit and Matthew Modine. This was the funniest hour of television I've seen in about a year. There were like 10 I can't believe how funny that is moments. Granted, some of them were just because I so enjoy watching a train wreck, and this show has train wrecks like you would not believe. The interview with Modine was so stilted, and he was trying so hard to figure out what the deal was you can actually see time stop as the horror of it washes over his face. Brilliant! Just, Brilliant. Totally rivals the night when they had some belly dancer or something on shooting darts out of her ... well, I said it was crass right?
Plus the girl who brought him the wax statue was just smokin' hot. Who would have thought all the hot young ladies would be over whooping it up in England?
So, The Gilmore Girls. If you've not seen this show, but you are familiar with the premise, you may be tempted to dismiss it as trite crap. I can see how it might look that way from the outside looking in. But, it's really much better than it sounds. If you've seen the show, then you can probably understand why I actually like it quite a bit.
So, I'm watching it tonight, and as an extreme sub-plot, there is a story line where one of the wacky townspeople has made a short film. I'd totally forgotten how spectacular that film was. It is without question one of the greatest things ever to grace celluloid, or video tape, or whatever. It is so perfectly surreal, that Dali would look at this thing and think WTF?!
And remember, I can edit out two of the "hells", but I need to keep all of the "damns". It's a street cred thing.
I have been watching a disturbing amount of Trading Spaces (link is to an interesting behind the scenes accounting of the show), and Mad About You. Given that all appearances to the contrary I'm actually not a woman, any viewing time greater than zero is probably disturbing, and I'm well past disturbing into problematic. Thing is I've been watching a lot more TV in general for the past few weeks and frequently there is just nothing else on. I should just turn the thing off and read more, but I'm in the middle of a book that I don't really enjoy, and for some reason I just can't bring myself to not finish it. Clearly I need to work on my time management skills, or at least become more discerning in my media choices.
Let me tell you tonight's episode of The Screensavers was outstanding. You know usually it's chock full of geeky goodness - well not full, but sometimes there is a chewy geeky center. Tonight though they really came through with the funny. Like 3 major belly laughs, not least of which is this pointless shockwave presentation Cow Aerobics. Worth the shockwave download if you don't already have it.
The Discovery Channel Documentary, The Unfolding Universe sounds really interesting. I only home my new lemon of a Direct Tivo box stays alive long enough to record it tonight.
Growing up as a kid, there wasn't much better than Saturday morning TV. As the seasons past, shows tended to come and go - sometimes so fast they almost seemed a dream. Take for instance Monster Squad - which it turns out was not a dream. I don't remember anything about it except that I missed it when it wasn't on any more. And speaking of not really remembering a show but still being effected by it, was it Shazam that had the jet pack? Man, I always wanted one of those jet packs.
So the TV show Wednesday 9:30 (8:30 Central) starts off with one strike against it. Clever names never bode well - particularly when they are promoting the show based on the name. I probably wouldn't have even seen it since Wednesdays are powerhouse nights for TV what with the West Wing and all. Still, they have some serious talent in the thing, and one of my VCR's was free. You'd think with a roster of stars like that it would be good. You'd be wrong. This show blows in a major way. Too bad.
*singing*
Snowball you are my best friend...Snowball your love never ends...Whether you are white or yellow...You are sure my favorite fellow.
*/singing*
Wow, Fox is really doing some edgy programming these days. I was concerned when I saw some of the previews for Andy Richter Controls the Universe. I always liked Richter, and I wanted to like the show, but the promos made it seem pretty bad. The show is actually pretty good though, and Greg the Bunny is great. I love meta-programs like Larry Sanders or Sports Night, and this is meta in a surreal way that has to be experienced.
*singing*
Snowball You Make Me Rock My World
*/singing*
So I'm watching The West Wing tonight. It's new (yeah!). Anyway, the Josh character gets caught up in some internet message board and he's going on about the posting police and the control freaks. It was a perfect MetaTalk moment. Give him time - soon he'll understand the control freaks may be right.