TV Watch: Shows You Probably Should Be Watching

No Lost last night, so let's do a quick rundown on shows you really shouldn't be missing right now:

Fringe
I was luke warm to warm on the show last season, but Season Two has been particularly good and I'm already getting somewhat stoked for the next season. They're moving away from a disassociated monster-of-the-week style plots and getting more and more intwined with the rather interesting backstory. And if you missed the time-travelling episode with Petere "Buckaroo Banzai" Weller - well, you missed one of the best time travel stories ever put to screen.

Justified
I'll admit to a certain overzealousness about this show. But look: Timothy Olyphant was clearly engineered, possibly by aliens, to play a cowboy. It's co-produced by Elmore Leonard and based on one of his shorts. He spends most of his time battling either racist hicks or the Miami Mafia. It's not going to have the most complicated story arcs on television, but it is clever, fun and terribly fun to watch.

Doctor Who
OK, so kind of a lateral toss here since American viewers need to find sneaky ways to catch the latest of this BBC show. And if you haven't caught up on all the previous seasons, don't start this one. So, because I know several Cathode Readers are way behind on Who, I'll be mysteriously brief: it's actually more of the same than it might seem, but that is a good thing.

And I'm going to toss in a quick plug for .comEDY, which you can't see because it hasn't actually aired yet. Actually, still in production. But it's in production by long time Cathode Tan secret decoder ring wielder The Futon Critic and loosely based on some of our mutual history. Thankfully not about the time we broke into a secret government and released that zombie virus thing. Because woah. That would be embarrasing.

How Stargate Universe Fails

We tried, we really tried to like the latest installment of Stargate, but they just make it so darn hard.

And look, if you're going to respond to this post with "but its all about the characters" or "the show is people!" then - well, just don't bother. I get that. In fact - that's the problem with the show. SGU is more about people than it is about science fiction. Or, sadly, storytelling in general.

Problem number one - the people just aren't very interesting. There's a very slim line between two basic types - slightly angry military types who are deeply burdened with a sense of responsibility and slightly neurotic civilians deeply burdened with a sense that they are all going to die. Tack on singular traits (geeky, cute, nervous, gay) and you have a pretty smooth curve when it comes to making characters distinct.

Which might actually work, in a slasher film kind of way, if the show had any guts about putting characters at risk. As mentioned previously, for a show about the horrible risks of venturing off into deep space - the show has about the same body count as Voyager, and so for all of the handheld camera shots ... comes off as about as vanilla and safe.

I'm still an episode behind, but let's take 'Time' as a perfect example of how the show stumbles on itself.

Spoiler alert.

So, you have this really decent sci fi premise: a time loop allowing characters to see their possible future. OK, great. However, it takes way too long to set this up because the show can't resist melodrama when melodrama might be portrayed, so we watch Eli getting annoyed with people and people getting annoyed with Eli, and all sorts of moaning and groaning shot via handycam until we get to the good stuff. Then, armed with this knowledge - we .... watch a lot more moaning and groaning until we finally get to step B of this plan which, if you take the hypothesis that the show is unwilling to risk getting its hands dirty - ends with a very predictable conclusion.

Next week? More moaning and groaning. This isn't Stargate Universe so much as it is Stargate Bitching About Space. It's the The View with teleporters.

For the show to succeed, it needs a real sense of dread - something the show it really wants to be, Battlestar Galactica managed quite well (though arguably lost it off and on).

Fans will say it is a "more human" show, which it is and if you enjoy these particular humans than this is the show for you. We'll be waiting for a show with less cliche, more dimensional and less predictable humans though.

2010 - you can do better sci fi than this.

Roku adding a bunch of new channels (none being Hulu)

Roku is adding a slew of 10 new channels to their lineup, notably Pandora, Flickr, Facebook photos and blip.tv. It's this kind of value add that makes me thankful we went ahead with this route rather than wait for Sony to match Microsoft's Netflix offerings. We still use the Netflix channel pretty exclusively - but this new selection looks pretty interesting.

Not that I was expecting it - but Hulu would be such a perfect marriage for the Roku device. Hulu would instantly crank up their viewership and Roku would get a swath of decent material. It would be what The Office would refer to as a win-win-win. We won't get it, of course, because the TV industry doesn't want me watching Hulu on my TV and will go to absurd lengths to stop me from doing just that.

Even though, as previously mentioned, there is absolutely no way they can stop me from doing just that. It's like stupid was raised stupid, had a kid, and that kid was really stupid and then that kid married stupid and had a stupid child. Hulu is like stupid's grandfather.

Anyway, we'll be checking out the new channels when we get a chance.

Stargate Universe, We Really Need To Talk

So I thought "Darkness" was a slow but at least moderately interesting thanks largely to watching a couple of characters breakdown, especially Rush. The Eli Factor was less annoying, because at least Eli was as surprised as I was that everyone expects him to know everything or solve anything.

But "Light"? Painful. Just painful.

Spoilers abound, this is critique and not review ... so if you haven't watched it, well, you're warned.

A few of the finer points:

Don't expect a sensible viewer to really buy into "everyone is going to die" scenarios five episodes into a new show.

Especially when that scenario includes flying to a massive energy source, and everyone was originally going to die because the ship had no energy and your resident smarty smart keeps talking about how the ship came here "for a reason".

Also five episodes in - the whole "stranded on a hideously boring planet" scenario isn't really going to sell easily. The whole "this planet is full of sand" scenario was kinda dull enough.

So instead of plot or conflict, we're bombarded by video confessionals, in the form of one liners spoken into an alien handycam, a sex scene, a lot of moping around, some background music, and some really fairly nice views of the impending sun.

What we lack is any emotional connection to these characters. Eli gets the most airtime, and he's just annoying as hell. Rush is the most developed, but tuned to be unlikable. Our fearless commander is probably the closest thing to a character I might care about and we know he's destined for martyrdom.

Did any of the characters freak out and try to mutiny? Not really, not in any real way. I half expected Eli and Cute Chick to hook up in their supposed last few minutes - which might have made for some interesting dialogue later ... but no such luck. Maybe the shuttle could have gotten stranded? Oh no, we get an incredibly implausible landing instead.

Right now the show is centered around putting everyone into a horribly doomed scenario that everyone survives. Well, OK, Cute Chick's dad bit it - which is sadly the show's best moment to date, even though Cute Chick seems to have rebounded pretty well. The frame of the show is like a disaster movie, which is awesome, except that if you watched a disaster movie and five hours into the movie you only had one real tragedy - you would want your money back.

Finally, the ending of "Light" was just bizarre. Hey, I'm trying to give you a compliment here - but then I'm going to accuse you of being an evil son of a bitch with pretty much nothing to show for it. Felt to me like someone ran the tape and realized there was 40 minutes of essentially a slow ballad music video and decided to toss a bit of infighting for good measure.

Hopefully in the next couple of episodes, it will be less of the Rush and Eli show and we can finally get some real depth into the secondary characters other than lame quips that would barely pass on an actual reality show. Hopefully the conflict will get more complicated than the "big thing we can't solve, oh my we are all dead, oh wait there's the thing we need" style of arc. Because I'm not buying this show has the chops to kill any character off at the moment.

But if the next five episodes follow the same vein as the last five episodes, I'm going to wish the ship had flown into the sun ... and stayed there.

How Hulu Is Kinda Stupid

It recently hit the street that Hulu is considering charging for their content. I suppose I can appreciate that, Hulu offers a lot of material which is quite valuable - recent shows, especially, for this age of time shifting. There's a decent amount there I'd access to catch up on some TV.

Which is why, if ad revenue is down and the powers that control Hulu need more cash, I have a recommendation other than forcing people to pay.

Stop being so damned stupid.

See, back in July, Hulu blocked the PlayStation 3 browser from accessing content. At first this was just done without much explanation, but then a very corporate non-answer arrived which takes a bit of brain pulling to translate (they use "windowing" as a term if it explains everything) - but in between the lines it comes down to "our partners pay for specific rights concerning television viewing, and threatened to pull out."

Specifically:

Distribution availability across platforms — theaters vs. TV vs. recorded media like DVDs vs. online streaming vs. mobile phones — was always implicitly or explicitly controlled in that world. But a few factors have made the barriers between those platforms more permeable: the rise of the web, increased broadband availability, the ease of digitizing video, and the increase in the computing
power of devices like gaming consoles, set-top boxes, and mobile phones.

However, in the near-term, the windowing strategy is still dominant in the business. Billions of dollars flow in across these different windows, and entire companies are organized around them. Nothing productive comes from flouting that reality (except to law firms who work on the occasional lawsuit).

Yeah. So this is why that is kinda stupid. Television industry types, listen up - because I'm only going to rant about this once.

Technology has converged your precious windows. Sorry about that, but it is really time to move on. Thanks.

See, I can watch your little television programs on my television using a computer any time I want. Heck, with the right cables - I can probably watch it with my iPhone. With some mad Linux skills, I could still do it on my PS3. This concept that my television is somehow under your control is so archaic that you make my old TiVo laugh. As if VCR's and DVR's shouldn't have been enough of lesson - the fact that my television is essentially a massive computer monitor at this point is just not that difficult of a concept to grasp.

See I have this Mac Mini. And it hooks right into my television. And it has a web browser. Which can play Hulu. So that kinda fscks your stupid windows concept right up.

But I don't watch Hulu on the Mini, because it is an older PPC model and the performance sucks. It worked pretty good on my PS3 - but now that's blocked. So now I don't watch Hulu.

And someone at Hulu is wondering why ad revenues aren't what they'd like them to be - but instead of the networks realizing this is nearly the year 2010, the whole thing is considering going to a pay-to-view model ... which is quite possibly they only way the thinking around the whole thing could travel any more backwards in time.

Sigh.

So yeah, go ahead and charge for Hulu. Let's see how that works for you. Or wake up to the modern world and just increase your current viewership.

Sci Fi Review: Dollhouse and Stargate: Universe

Science fiction on television seems to go through waves ... you'll have a show which takes off, acts a bit like a tentpole for more sci fi - and then everything winds down and some of the actors from one show start shuffling around. Take the Battlestar reunion taking place on Dollhouse - if Tricia Helfer shows up, I'll be convinced that Echo is actually a Cylon.

Dollhouse peaked somewhat with last season's unaired Epitaph One (unaired, but watched by probably every Dollhouse fan by now), which was easily the best episode of the show so far and serves as guidepost for the direction of the plot. Season two starts not only a little flat, but even somewhat confusing as we jump right in with Ballard now on the side of the 'house and his strategy for bringing it down feeling about as muddled as an active's CAT scan. The third episode, "Belle Chose", actually felt more like a better start for the season as we see Ballard trying to fit into his new role as well as some wonderfully creepy foreshadowing into the events of Epitaph One. The show has an odd game to play now - making the original premise and plotline around Echo work while also building to a potentially dark future. If it has any problem, it's that the latter is proving a lot more interesting than the former. However, if "Belle Chose" is an indication, this season could prove that the show can finally perform to its potential.

The other "networks show sci fi on Fridays because they assume the demographic never goes out and then complains about the numbers" offering right now is Stargate: Universe. Apparently the demise of Atlantis called for something of a reboot on the frachise, which after a long running core show and relatively long running spin off isn't worst idea. Universe has a different cinematic feel and the overall concept is more serious - it's like someone got some Battlestar in my Atlantis.

Sounds great on paper, but the execution so far is a bit lacking. One issue is that the wide array of characters feel largely similar and the ensemble feels somewhat shallow due to it. The military crew feels almost like a band of dwarves - you have stern, youthful, angry, etc. Two of the characters stand out for me ... one being Doctor Rush, in part because Robert Carlyle's portrayal is particularly awesome and secondly he's such a great throwback to a near villain like Doctor Smith (Lost in Space) than another "brilliant scientist with a gun" cutout that the series could so easily offer up.

Sadly the other character is Eli, who is such a horribly transparent viewer advocate that I fear the array of geek apparel and references to arrive. If his "Last Starfighter" premise of even being in the show wasn't bad enough, the fact that every other character willingly accepts his presence so blindly is even worse. Eli's character is a blow to the kneecaps to the show. Take the second episode, for instance, where one has to continually ask - why are they insisting on keeping the slacker civilian in the desert??

The show's pacing seems slow at the moment, so the jury is still out while we see if that's part of a method or just plodding along.

For Sunday: IT Crowd Bloopers and Brutal Legend

Two links today:

First up: The Girl found this awesome blooper reel for the great Britcom The IT Crowd, which is now available in its entirety on Netflix Instant, should that be accessible to you.

Second: Tim Schafer vs. Ormagoden - look out for October 1st, peeps - I hear it is going to rock with a chance of some roll.

TV Reminder: Dollhouse Season Two Tonight

Dollhouse gets a second run starting tonight (9/25). It's been left alone on Fridays with the cancellation of The Sarah Connor Chronicles, but at least that frees up Summer Glau for a guest appearance, right? C'mon - it would be awesome. Especially if the guest appearance was as Cameron. Whedon, call my people.

Wait, I have no people.

Anyway, whether Dollhouse can hit the ground running or will find a kind of narrative apex remains to be seen - but seeing it when it airs is probably the best thing for the show at this point (not sure how doing things like buying it off PSN or iTunes factors into the livelihood of a show versus good old Neilsen right now). We're actually going to miss it, hitting the road and going to a fish fry it would seem - but I do have high hopes for this season.

Update: Yeah, OK - as Sterno points out, if you don't have a Neilsen box - might as well buy it online. We'll probably grab it off PSN, if it's there, when we get back.

TV Watch: Virtuality

Virtuality began life as a TV pilot from some of the same crew as Battlestar but ended up as merely a movie, a show that wasn't picked up and something of a tease.

The show follows the crew of the Phaeton, mankind's first interstellar ship, on a mission to find intelligent life around Epsilon Eridani. The show's title refers to the dual nature of the crew also taking part in a reality TV show as well as having access to "virt mods" for virtual reality. Without moving into the realm of spoilers, nothing is quite right on either side of that fence.

There's a lot going on, even for a television pilot gone movie. You have the backdrop of ecological disaster, making the 10 year voyage to the stars critical for the planet. There's a lot of infighting surround the reality show itself, the bizarre problems in virtual reality and the interactions between the twelve person crew.

With so much at work here, and so much of it working quite well - it baffles me how this show didn't at least get a shot. If you look back about a year, you see Fox sticking with the more generic shows (I reallly like both Fringe and Dollhouse, don't ge me wrong) - and ditching the more unique ones ... namely this show and Boldly Going Nowhere. From those I've talked to who have seen the Boldly pilot, it's completely hilarious. And nearly impossible to see.

If anything, Virtuality reminds me a lot of Odyssey Five, a character driven show with some unique sci fi twists and mysteries to it.

At least you can still watch Virtuality on Hulu, which I highly recommend. Still, I would imagine someone could possibly find a copy somehow...

Cancel that order. The video was pulled off Hulu. Now that is a tease.

Good Question - How Would You Fix Heroes?

Topless Robot points out that Heroes has gotten to the state where commercials for the show point out it's been sagging - and I have to admit that I haven't watched the show since Sylar put on a suit and started acting like a bad Men in Black impersonation.

So I don't even know if I could answer my own question, but I know one thing - at this point it would be painful. Just a few personal notes:

- Some of the ensemble has to go. Take an existing character and revamping them just to fit the plot better is plain stupid and gets rather insulting to the viewers after a while. Kill some people, bring in fresh blood.

- Along with that ... remaining characters need to become internally consistent. Hiro should use his powers in one episode similar to how he does in an another, and not conveniently forgetting he can control time simply because he has a inconvenient power.

- On the inconvenient note, it should be added that in general ubercharacters are pretty dull (and generally inconvenient to your plot). The entire "power sucking" concept got out of hand quickly in the show and only got worse. Characters who can't be killed and can kill everything are just problematic.

- Plotwise, the show has always been hackneyed for me. It has decent themes, but relies way to much on nascent subplots that never really go anywhere and character development which seems like it can turn on a dime. I haven't watched lately so I don't know where the whole "creating superpowers conspiracy" core plot went, but the show needs to find themes which can work season to season, and not feel like it is picking up the pieces each time.

So basically: Kill some people off. Add some new ones. Be consistent. Get a trailer which convinces me you have a story worth saving.

Is 3D the next HD?

I think in some ways, Microsoft's Xbox 360 heralded the modern HD era of entertainment, being the first consumer device which both insisted upon itself on being part of the high def generation, but also one that was massively adopted by consumers.

Course, much of HD adoption wasn't the rosy path either Microsoft, Sony, or the other players, wanted it to be - which to bring it back to gaming aided a certain company rhyming with Mintendo by being cheap and easy to use on existing standard def sets. However, by May 2009, nearly half of homeowners have a high def set, a 12% increase from the previous year. The dust has settled on the format war, players are getting quickly cheaper and there are more and more viewing options are becoming available.

So, just as the smoke begins to clear - the industry is trying to carve the next, um, next-generation. HD is old. 3D is new:

We saw 3-D footage shot at the Beijing Olympics, including that larger-than-life opening ceremony in the Bird's Nest stadium and a soccer game that was more vivid and lifelike than anything I've ever seen on a screen. It felt as if we were standing at the edge of the pitch. I'm not a big sports fan, but the first thing I thought was that the "killer app" for this technology will be sports. Monday Night Football will never be the same again. ESPN, which embraced HD and boomed because of it, is going to have a field day.

-- TV’s Next Dimension [Newsweek]

In part, we have James Cameron to blame. He has been spearheading a movement in cinema for a while now, trying to prove that 3D has evolved past the gimmick stage and deserves to become the forefront of movie making technology. It doesn't hurt, of course, that the movie industry has been getting kicked in the shins with piracy and low ticket sales - both things that moviemakers hope 3D can help address. See, you can't simply sneak a camcorder into a theater, burn it and sell it if that theater is playing a 3D version. Add in the additional draw (and potentially the jacked up price) and you have a very happy theater owner.

The game industry has been making similar noises, although probably with a slightly different set of motives. With Moore's Law no longer being the prime mover for selling new games, or to put it another way - you can't be sure of a bestseller by trying to outperform yesterday's graphics anymore - game producers would love to have a technical solution to spike some sales. Long term gamers will realize, of course, that they have been here before, and honestly we'll need to see some better demonstrations to decide if goofy looking glasses are worth playing the game.

All of this, of course, translates into apparently an entirely new set of hardware:

We'll have to wait and see on that one. To get into the 3-D game, you'll need a new TV, obviously, as well as a new Blu-ray player that can play 3-D discs, and a new HDMI cable that can handle the extra data associated with 3-D content. The first stuff you'll see will be on discs, but Panasonic expects 3-D content will be delivered on cable and satellite, and even, eventually, on broadcast TV. It took eight or nine years for HD sets to reach widespread adoption, and 3-D will likely follow a similar curve.

-- TV’s Next Dimension [Newsweek]

Ahem. Firstly - a new HDMI cable? Wasn't HDMI supposed to be something of the end all, be all, for media cables?

But that's being nitpicky. I think the holes in the 3D theory are a bit more expansive than just the cables.

First - I find it doubtful that piracy will be so quickly subdued. It's been a circular technological war since the onset, and will continue to do so. Second, it seems unlikely that 3D is going to be a massive hit outside certain genres. I could be wrong, of course - perhaps seeing a lame romantic comedy with an additional dimension will make it slightly less lame - but I certainly don't see dishing any extra dollars to see it that.

Finally, HD was a far harder sell than the industry assumed it would be - partially due to high prices and partially due to a needless format war. There's nothing to say that a 3D generation wouldn't face similar, or worse, issues - especially considering we don't have any ready to market sets to examine at this point. Especially since I would challenge that "nearly half" equates to "widespread adoption", and adding in consumer fatigue from the fact that half them would have sets less than ten years old (my last TV I got from my first corporate job out after college, not that I'll admit here how long that was) - I think anything less than a decade is pretty optimistic.

Also, how hard of a sell will it be to convince consumers they need new hardware to make use of a feature which has been around since the 50's?

In general, I think the industry may be getting a little ahead of itself here.

Futurama Voice Actors Being Recasted

Fail.

Twentieth Century Fox, which is still producing the series even though new episodes will air on Comedy Central, is recasting the major voice roles for the show. That means no more Billy West (Fry, Professor, and Ziodberg), Katey Sagal (Leela), John DiMaggio (Bender), Maurice LaMarche (Kif Kroker, among others), or Tress MacNeil (Mom, and several others). Worst!

Fox released a statement saying "We love the Futurama voice performers and absolutely wanted to use them, but unfortunately, we could not meet their salary demands. While replacing these talented actors will be difficult, the show must go on. We are confident that we will find terrific new performers to give voice to Matt and David's brilliantly subversive characters."

-- 'Futurama' getting new voices for Fry, Leela, Bender, and others

I just don't quite see that working. Willing to give it a chance, but a lot of those voice actors were those characters.

Dollhouse begins Friday the 13th

Fans of the Joss man got a mixed blessing. His new show Dollhouse will be airing on Fox, it's set to air Feb. 13th, Friday the 13th to be exact.

Superstition aside, Friday isn't really a great time slot for television. It hasn't been uncommon to dump genre shows there from time to time (X-Files, for instance), and I'm sure there's a large subsection of Joss followers with Tivo on their side.

Still, this is Fox and their track record isn't always the greatest with handling new shows (*cough* Firefly( *cough*), so we'll see...

TV Watch: Robin Hood, Season One

Being sick really kinda sucks. Sure, you get to do all of the things you normally would love to have an excuse to do - eat ice cream for dinner, shuffle around in pajamas, laze around on the couch and generally moan when someone asks you to do something responsible (this, unfortunately, turned into a kind of moaning recursive loop since The Girl was at least equally sick at the same time). You get to catch up on all sorts of video games and movies - but at the same time you feel like you're just waiting to feel better.

Basically trying to relax and have fun actually turns into a chore. It's evil.

So let me preface that my view of Robin Hood, BBC's recent television show about the classic, might be a bit colored by the above facts. That's not to say we didn't enjoy the show - and in fact devouring the entire 13 episode first season was a pretty decent chore while we shuffled about moaning like zombies.

Basically the show boils down to a very British version of Xena. The plots aren't terribly complicated, there's a bit of touch and go when it comes to history, and most of the plot points involve fight scenes involve fight scenes. It's not nearly as cheesy as the old Raimi shows, mind you, at least not usually - and by the end of the first season you see the some shadow of depth forming. The show tries admirably to flesh out Robin as a war veteran, hero of the people and lovesick puppy. When it works, it works well and when it doesn't - well, he's generally doing something tricky with a bow so you don't really care.

If anything sells the show, though, it's the Sheriff. The basic theme of the character is "someone evil who really enjoys his job" and it is played out for every ounce. Most of the other characters are moderately two dimensional, but still enjoyable and the while the show doesn't fall into the "he's good with knives" formula of story telling too much - we certainly hope the second season finds more plot motifs than "break into Nottingham Castle and get something out".

Recommended in that beach read kind of way.

DVD Watch: OK, That Was Gay

This is just kind of a non-sequitur. I don't mean gay as in I'm some kind of closeted forumfeeder who thinks that "gay" should be a slur or that we just watched a lot of follies - I mean we happened to rent a couple of things with very strong lesbian undertones.

First up was Hex, which is a BBC TV show about the supernatural going-ons at a private university built on some hallowed witching ground or something. The occasional comparison to Buffy has been made here, but I really got to say that's something of a stretch. Buffy was brilliant, don't get me wrong, but it was still pretty formulaic in general and fell often to the "monster of the week" pattern. Hex builds up more like a drama as it digs up aspects of the main character's life and how it pertains to her creepy gothic surroundings.

All of this would actually get kinda boring as it takes a few episodes just to start rolling into anything resembling conflict - so the writers tossed in a smartass lesbian roomie subplot to spice things up. This was a good idea, because honestly one disc into the show and it's still the most interesting part of the whole thing. Hex shows promise in a slow and mildly suspenseful kind of way - and the twist in the first few episodes (won't spoil it here) really helps keep the attention.

Next was Tipping The Velvet - which honestly must stand as about the only lesbian epic I can think of off the top of my head. It's a three part BBC mini-series (so clocks in at around 180 minutes I think) based on the novel of the same name and follows the life and times of one Nancy Astley and her coming out in Victorian England. And by coming out - I don't mean as a debutante or anything, I mean even the title is a reference to a lesbian act and the BBC don't hold much back in their portayal of the book. The movie feels a little lopsided - there's some really strong performances but that's occasionally offset by overt symbolism which feels a little too film school for me.

All of this brings me to a point though - this is all BBC material. I can't imagine an American network handling either of these shows (except on cable). I'm not familiar with how they aired, but I think Hex aired pretty much like Buffy did and the show goes way beyond the simplistic handling of Willow's relationships in the first few episodes.

It's just another example of American puritanism. Because everything this month has to be brought back to GTA - it occurs to me as I write this that the most often noted act in the franchise deals with hookers. Mind you this is a game in which you can burn old ladies alive in glee - but think of the prostitutes seems to be the watchphrase.

Course the outrage seems a bit less this time. Maybe as games push these little moral envelopes, we'll get some better television eventually...

TV Watch: Lost, Confirmed Dead

I am definately becoming a fan of this year. It feels tighter and more tense than the last season already and, dare I say it, finally starts to remind me of the first season. The first season was full of danger and mystery, not just weird plot twists and mysticism.

Confirmed Dead gave us four quick flashbacks which tied directly into the action as opposed to any kind of fluff. This last season won't have much time for fluff, so let's hope this is a trend. And these flashbacks were pretty juicy. Why would Dan have such a reaction to Flight 815? All the other characters had some kind of connection to the flight except Miles, so who exactly was that in all those pictures? (Like candidate is someone associated with Eko). How is it that Charlotte didn't seem too surprised to see a polar bear skeleton in Tunisia (and how the hell did it get there? Is it the "real" location of the island and the island is just ... what ... removed from time?). Did Frank get the job as a pilot just because he called about the footage?

Course, there's still this problem that the writers insist on layering new questions even when old ones are getting to the point where they feel stale. Locke badgering Ben for information about "The Monster" felt forced and false to me - as did Ben's answer. That and the whole silly wrangling over why the Freighties were really there ... it's like the Island's main power is remove a person's power of explanation. It was passable in the first season, but now is just feeling annoying.

I was glad to see Naomi and Abaddon, however, as I think we're going to get the net drawn closer on the global view of the Island as the truth about the Freighties unfolds. Also, if Miles can't give us some insight in the the Jungle Whispers, Jack's dad and maybe even the cabin, I'm not sure who can.

All in all, I'm in thumb's up mode.

TV Watch: Lost, The Beginning of the End

Television shows often remind me of large scale allegories of real life hardships. Sports Night, for instance, is surviving adversity often despite oneself. Buffy is about overcoming problems with the help of your friends. Star Trek is about how one should never, ever, ever build a holodeck.

Lost is about gross project mismanagement. In this sense, it shares an interesting narrative space with 24 ... a show who's entire premise is that our whole government is weak were it not for one action hero.

Lost is kinda the same without the action hero.

Before I make it sound like I didn't enjoy the Season 4 opener - let me say I did. Enjoyed it quite a lot and am rather looking forward to this season. If this is the tone the show is taking, I think it will a good finish with a lot of focus on the mystery elements of the plot without losing track of the characters. The flashfowards are being used brilliantly and I think the producers are proving that they can use last season's twist to very good effect.

But it's been three seasons in now and I can't help but be reminded as to how we got there. Seriously, Ben, at some point being vague and mysterious ... I mean, clearly as a strategy this has really sucked. People have died. Your people, their people, apparently putting the entire planet at risk in some mysterious and vague way people might actually help work against if you weren't so vague and mysterious.

Locke - that goes for you too. The reason why Hurley is my favorite on the island is that he's the only one I trust would actually tell everyone to stop, shut the hell up and listen when he knows something important.

Anyway, that's just a burden the new season will have to deal with. I can say I'm probably not nearly as interested as I was into trying to figure pretty much anything out. I mean in the first season when it was weird polar bears and noises, I could liken it to a game where you might be able to put clues together. Now we know the writers are willing to throw just any old wrench at you to keep you from doing just that.

Oh, did we forget to mention that time and space might jump around? Did we? Oh, sorry. Thought we had.

Anyway - I am looking forward to the final episodes, which hopefully we'll actually get on time (pending the WGA strike).

Oh - my favorite moment? Abaddon. Great to see the actor getting a sweet cameo, hopefully we'll see some more of him. Wonder what side he's allied with.

Writer's Strike Closes The Office

I honestly haven't written anything on the WGA strike because it kicked up right as NaNo did and I haven't had time to actually figure out what the nuances are.

So here are the writers and actors of The Office doing it for me.



From DailyKos, thanks Jason.

Lucas Aims For Robot Star Wars Television

George Lucas, the Star Wars creator is looking for writers to help pen a live-action series about the lives of robots, according to a story published Wednesday in Los Angeles Times.

Does this mean C-3PO and R2-D2?

-- Report: New Star Wars show about robots

Adult Swim just did the Robot Chicken and Family Guy Star Wars parodies back to back - pure gold. If this comes to light, I just hope Lucas keeps to a benevolent dictator role and not, you know, writing and directing or anything.

Quo Vadimus

Yes, I know there was a PS3 price drop. But let's talk television for a while anyway.

Sports Night, I believe, is Aaron Sorkin's greatest work ... although to be honest I've never dived much into West Wing because it always felt like Sports Night without the funny. Studio 60 mirrored the show in many ways, even more than the typical Sorkin dialogue and "walk and talk" directing ... but in that it was a show centered around a fictional show essentially lead by two male leads and a female boss.

While I enjoyed Studio 60 as reminiscent of Sports Night - it still pales somewhat in comparison. While it might have had higher production values, it never had ... well, what Sports Night would call an economy of language. Not in dialogue so much as that Sports Night manages to create a complex environment in a very short space. A half hour of Sports Night is almost always more entertaining than its hour long sibling.

I've watched the box set at least a half dozen times. I go back to this show when real life approaches this level of density. If that sounds like some kind of rabid fan obsession ... it is. Honestly the show spooks me out with its ability to create completely fictional events which actually relate not to some abstract global issue (as was more often the case with Studio) but stuff that actually happens to, you know, me.

For instance, I know a few people who should probably watch the episode where Dana realizes her big project has gone off the rails. Or even better, the scene where Sam informs upper executives that their notes "exhibit an almost total lack of understanding of how to get the best from talented people". Sports Night isn't just a show about a workplace which might be more colorful and funnier than yours ... it's a show about a workplace which is constantly under fire from forces both of its own creation and external.

Sadly there are times when I think the show wouldn't be so good if itself hadn't come under so much fire. Sam's quote comes from Cliff Gardner - an episode which may well have derived from Sorkin's own conflict with ABC keeping Sports Night on the air.

And it should be said that while the series finale, Quo Vadimus, is hardly the best episode - it is one of the best series finales in the history of television. It manages to end the series with a crescendo and a bit of hope that once you've watched the show from beginning to end for the sixth time ... you somewhat need.

With that said, I've got to sign off the blog for a while. Cathode Tan will be back in about a month, but in that time I've got to get married and leave the country (don't fret - on honeymoon). That and a handful of issues I can't really write about publically just yet - and I gotta say that in light of all that I can barely remember what Sony is doing with their pricing, much less actually care.

So don't worry - the blog's not going anywhere. When I get back, I'll have a new ring and possibly a tan.