Hey Glee

OK Glee, let's have a talk. You and I both know I didn't like you when you first started up but you grew on me and the way you took serious situations and managed to treat them in a humorous way while setting the whole thing to what is sometimes very good music made me a fan. The only conclusion I can draw from what's been happening with the show since season 2 began is that you are now trying to lose me as a viewer by making me hate it. Why? Is it something I said? What can I do to make things right. I'm willing to work with you, Glee, but you have to at least meet me halfway. Sure, you introduced Darren Kress's character, the kind of gay guy who, like Neil Patrick Harris, makes totally hetero guys like me say, "All right, I'll switch." (Is Darren Kress gay or is it just his character? My sexual confusion needs to know.) Also, you had that great Britney Spears episode (never thought I'd say that) but you also had that mind bogglingly stupid religion episode that made me truly start to doubt you. Basically, you have to stop doing what you did on Sunday. You have to cease your attacks on my intelligence. I submit the following examples. I warn you, these examples contain spoilers from Sunday's episode.

• Yes, it's so nice and life affirming that they let Artie join the football team even though he doesn't have the use of his legs but am I honestly supposed to believe that there's no rule against letting someone in a wheelchair play high school football? First, that "no rule against it" thing is what you say in lame kid movies when you're trying to get a goat or a chimp on a team and it's something that, if there actually was no rule against it, there would be within minutes of someone actually trying to do it. Come on, do you people really believe it's OK to bring Artie onto the field and have Finn use him like a battering ram against the opposing team's defensive line? You could put people in the hospital like that and if there really isn't anything in the rulebook, I'd be willing to bet there would be several laws against it.

• When there's a guy in the offensive line whose job it is to protect the quarterback and he's purposefully not doing that, someone who's supposed to be one of the best high school coaches in the state should notice something like that yet Coach Biest fails to ream him out and remove him from the lineup choosing to yell at everyone instead.

• Also, one of the plot points was that a faction of the team that bullies the Glee club is forced to perform with them as a team building exercise so they just walk out even though the coach says they're off the team if they do that which means McKinley High will most likely have to forfeit. Really? None of those guys really wants the championship ring and NONE of them has a college scholarship and his whole future riding on what happens in that game?

• Why did the football bullies refuse to perform? At first, they didn't until the hockey team stole their usual humiliation tactic of tossing Slushies in their faces because these tough guys are now considered Glee Club nerds. Having a bully do that or worse to a weak kid like Curt or Artie or one of the girls with the victim declining to fight back is a perfectly plausible scenario. A half dozen big, tough football players who normally don't take anyone's shit having Slushies thrown in their faces and doing nothing but complain about it is not. I was expecting a battle royal when that happened but all they did was take it then go whining to the Glee Club.

• The episode's climactic scene is when Finn launches a half-assed plan to get the other team's quarterback to fumble the snap by yelling "BRAINS" zombie style (they had zombie makeup on from their performance of Thriller during halftime) under the theory that the other team would be so disoriented by people in zombie makeup acting like zombies that they would pretty much forget how to play and basically hand them a victory and you know what? It worked. Personally, I think the only way it would have worked is if the other team was so busy laughing their asses off that they just dropped the ball but I guess now, having seen it with my own eyes, I know better.

Those of you who actually saw it are probably wondering why I didn't mention the initial plan of letting girls join the team so they could fill out their numbers requirement. It says a lot about the episode that this particular plot point was one of the most believable and least stupid parts of the episode.

Shape up, Glee. I still like Sue Sylvester and Curt and Rachel even though she's become more of a dick than she used to be so I'll watch for a little while longer. But I won't watch forever. Oh yes, there will come a time when even I will stop believing.

Closing My Eyes And Thinking Of England

This week, American audiences were treated to not one but two brand new versions of popular British shows. Since America is the country in which English was invented and Jesus was born, you would think this would be a good and natural thing and that God's favorite country would produce television superior to a nation known mainly for having an aging figurehead on all its money. Oddly, this wasn't the case.

But I kid the British. Yes, I kid because I love. Specifically, I love your television shows. Mind you, I am under no illusions about them. You all on the other side of the Atlantic are just as capable of churning out brain damaged crap and labeling it mass entertainment as we are. The difference is that, when you're television is good, it's really good. Doctor Who is a better science fiction show than anything that's ever been on in the US. Monty Python, even 40 years later, is still a better example of how to do sketch comedy than anything America has ever produced. For a more contemporary example, Peep Show is funnier than anything currently running in America (30 Rock being its only real American rival). And Skins is, with the exception of season 4's final two episodes, one of the best things ever.

And now we have Skins in America thanks to the good folks at MTV. Somehow, the good folks at Music Television found an hour in the week in which they weren't glorifying foul mouthed, promiscuous guidos or teen girls who've never heard of birth control to create and broadcast its own vision of Skins. If you're not familiar with it, it's a very well written show about teens. Unlike your normal show about teens in which the "teens" are actually mature, sophisticated 25 year olds who are ridiculously wealthy and spend most of their time living soap opera plots. Skins, on the other hand, insists on actually having kids under the age of 18 play kids under the age of 18. They're also from families whose income ranges from middle class to much lower (though one of them did come from money, not sure if they'll copy that yet or not). They also do things like take drugs and have sex without experiencing some sort of horrible punishment. In fact, they actually seem to find these experiences pleasurable. The show is also wildly funny in the way it deals with some very realistic situations in a dramatic and entertaining way. So how did it translate to American television? The first episode was, for the most part, a remake of the first episode from four years ago. It was too much to hope for that they would come up with original characters and scripts, I guess. Some of the names are different and the gay boy is now a lesbian girl but, ultimately, they're the same people. The show suffers in comparison. The acting isn't as good and I feel they've removed some of the gutsy spirit that drives the British show. I felt like I was watching a high school drama club trying to do their own production of the original script. Plus, as other people have pointed out, the language wasn't adapted. American kids don't speak in British slang. An even bigger mistake is that American kids don't go to the British school system which is what they're going to here. That's simply lazy and I expected better.

Also suffering in comparison to its original is Being Human, the story of a vampire and a werewolf who become friends and decide to move in together in an apartment haunted by a ghost. The British show isn't perfect but it does have a very real and natural feel to it. It has humor but the humor evolves from the situations and the established characters. The characters in the American show, on the other hand, all behave as if they're characters in the Scream movies. People behave in a post-modern style and seem to be winking at the audience. They don't speak in dialogue as much as they do in patter. The British werewolf, George, behaves like a socially awkward guy whereas the American werewolf, Josh, behaves like a standup comedian whose act revolves around why he can't get laid. I think people who never saw the British version will like it more than I did.

The good news is that both shows are about to start new seasons in the United Kingdom. It's a shame that there's no way for me to see it over here until 6-8 months pass and they finally decide to show it on BBC America. Yep, no way at all.

He-Woes

If NBC's new superhero show The Cape was an animal, it would be a zebra. Why? Because, like The Cape, I couldn't care less about zebras. I know we're supposed to be concerned about the extinction of any species but if every zebra on Earth succumbed tonight from some sort of horrible zebra plague, I would probably mumble, "That's horrible," and go back to making my homemade yogurt. Do you make your own yogurt? It's good. I like it way better than the stuff you buy in the store and I definitely like it better than The Cape.

As with zebras, I don't wish death on The Cape. It wasn't the worst show I ever saw. I even think it has the potential to become good. But it's not now. Good, I mean.

The actual Cape is a cop named Vince Faraday (David Lyons) whose employer, the police force, is about to be taken over by a private company called the Ark Corporation. Faraday should have known right away that something was wrong because the CEO, Peter Fleming, is played by James Frain, an actor best known for playing bad guys. Faraday must not watch much television though because he failed to recognize the evil Frain and thought he was a nice guy until he discovered all the crazy illegal activities that Peter Fleming was into, up to and including the fact that Fleming is really a masked villain named Chess who recently murdered the Chief of Police. Faraday's other mistake was not realizing that, in stories like this, the guy you think is your best friend is secretly working for your enemy and that allowed the best friend to betray him and help Chess capture him.

Chess saw this as an opportunity and made the world think that Faraday was Chess. Faraday then stumbled underneath a train car full of fuel before it blew up and that should have been the end of that except for the improbable stroke of luck that allowed Faraday to survive that explosion. You all with me so far? Because this is where it gets weird.

Faraday is rescued by Max Malini (Keith David) and his Carnival of Crime. They're part of an actual carnival plus they rob banks dressed as clowns/sideshow freaks/etc. The reason it never occurs to law enforcement to actually check the local carnival to see if anyone there matches the description of the bank robbers? Shut up, that's why. Anyway, Malini and his band of hardened criminals are actually a swell bunch who take pity of poor Faraday and make him a supersuit, the centerpiece of which is an old trick cape. It's made of spider silk which, Malini assures us, is stronger than kevlar. I guess it's also how it stretches out so it can do things like grab guns out of peoples' hands and grab unsuspecting criminals from behind and jerk them away. Oh boy, does Faraday love to jerk people away. I have no idea where they end up but I guess it doesn't matter. The makers of The Cape feel that jerking people away is so great that there's no reason not to do it numerous times. Anyway, armed with the cape, a series of nifty carnival tricks and a sexy know-it-all blogger named Orwell (Summer Glau), Faraday is now able to try to take down Chess and keep his family safe because Chess thinks Faraday is dead.

Now, if I ever became a vigilante superhero who had no actual super powers, instead of the Cape, I would probably call myself the Gun and do battle with Chess and his operatives by shooting them in the face but Faraday wants to do it the hard way so he uses that stupid cape that always fails when he tries to use it at the beginning of a fight but usually comes through for him by the end of it. But that's just me. The real observation here is that, if I was making a television show about a vigilante superhero, I would watch movies like Iron Man and The Dark Knight as well as the first season of Heroes and try to figure out what made them hits. The Cape lacks the humor, pathos, interesting characters and serious storytelling that those three examples had. What's left is a typical revenge story in which two dimensional heroes battle very dull villains.

As I said, though, it has potential and I may even watch it again to see if that potential is fulfilled. Or I might try to find a zebra documentary. Are they white animals with black stripes or black animals with white stripes? Never mind, I don't care.

Three Is A Magic Number

Today I have to play a bit of catch up so instead of one big review of one big thing I'm going to post three little reviews of, well, three big things. Just go with it.

True Grit -- The new Coen Brothers production of True Grit is, simply, one of the reasons movies were invented. It's not a "great" movie in the sense that it will change or influence the world in any significant way or that it shines a light on the human condition. It's just a very entertaining film about some very interesting characters. I recommend you read the book as it is a masterpiece of simple, straightforward storytelling and this new cinematic adaptation of the book can be described the same way. Jeff Bridges gets all the attention for the role of Rooster Cogburn, the harsh and pitiless U.S. Marshal, but the main character is actually a 14 year old girl named Mattie Ross and the Coen Brothers should be commended for having enough confidence in an inexperienced newcomer like Hallee Steinfeld to play this crucial role. They turn out to have made the correct decision and she turns out to be someone who can hold her own with the likes of Jeff Bridges, Matt Damon and Josh Brolin. True Grit is a movie I'm going to see again on the big screen, something I rarely do anymore, and I guess that's the best recommendation I can give it.

Toy Story 3 -- Much as I wanted to last May, I was just never able to get around to seeing Toy Story 3 in theaters. It's a shame there isn't some method for viewing movies in your home after they leave theaters BUT WAIT there is. The DVD of Toy Story 3 was a pleasurable way to spend the morning after Christmas. I remember everyone talking about how sad the ending was and I thought I was prepared because the other two Toy Story movies. I thought two things as the movie was playing. First, I considered what a shame it is that too often in life something wonderful has to end in order for something else that's wonderful to begin. We have to leave behind the pleasures of our childhood imaginations in order to partake of the wonders of adulthood. If we're lucky, of course, we manage to keep a little of that childlike sense of wonder as we grow older and I always have pity for people who weren't able to accomplish that. The second thing I thought of was, "Oh my God, can you imagine how horrible it would be if toys really were sentient beings and we just kept abandoning them like that?" I'm surprised these characters from Toy Story haven't founded their own version of Skynet by now and just taken us all out.

Doctor Who: A Christmas Carol -- My favorite show had a new episode on Christmas day which, of course, officially made Doctor Who the new Reason For The Season. Still, I keep going back to the fact that this episode took some of the rules that govern the Doctor Who universe and tossed them out the window. Michael Gambon played Kasran Sardick, a horrible, wealthy and powerful old man who's refusing to help a spaceship that's about to crash even though he could easily prevent it from doing so. The Doctor then decides to go back in time to when Sardick was a child and see if he could make him a nicer person. Thing is, this really isn't supposed to be possible. One of the major plot points of Doctor Who is that once he becomes part of events, he can't alter them. From a storytelling point of view, it's a necessary weakness or else he could just go back in time every week and prevent stuff from happening instead of dealing with it in the present. So why was he able to do it this time? And why not just go back and tell the ship not to take off in the first place? It's all good, though. If you read yesterday's post, I went on about how I could excuse certain plot holes if a story is done skillfully enough. This is one of those times. It was an enjoyable episode written by Steven Moffat, one of my favorite writers, and at least now Doctor Who fans will have something to complain about on forums for the next several months while they're waiting for the new season to premiere. By the way, I have a theory about what the Silence is. Maybe someday I'll tell you about it.

Dead Men Walking And Doing A Bunch Of Other Stuff

The Walking Dead is, simply, one of the best new shows I've seen in a long time. Usually, the worst episode of any television series is the very first episode. If that holds true for The Walking Dead, we're in for a treat because it's first episode was excellent.

The Walking Dead takes all the cliches of the zombie movie and makes them work one more time. It's set firmly in a copy of George Romero's universe in which, for some unknown reason, the recently deceased have come back to life to eat the flesh of the living and can only be put down for good by destruction of their brains, either quickly with a bullet or slowly by watching Two and a Half Men. Unlike more recent "zombie" pictures in which the monsters are actually people driven mad by a disease, these creatures have literally died and risen up. Why did this happen? No idea. Why do they eat the living and not each other? Seriously, stop asking questions like that and enjoy it. As in George Romero's "Living Dead" series of films, the zombies are slow and weak creatures made deadly by their numbers and their unending determination to kill us all.

When the show starts, we know all this but the characters don't. This is good because we require very little in the way of general exposition and explanation of why and how society has collapsed. In the opening scene, we know right off the bat why all the cars are crashed and overturned and why we only see one guy walking down what should be a busy highway and gas station. This guy is Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln), a sheriff's deputy in what I think is rural Kentucky whose patrol car is low on gas. He can't just pull the cruiser into the gas station though because it's already crammed with idle cars, cars that are either empty or whose drivers are dead. The only other person walking around is a little girl who is anything but a harmless child.

In flashbacks, we see that Rick was shot in a firefight with meth dealers and, in a move skillfully appropriated from 28 Days Later, woke up in the hospital to find that society had collapsed under the weight of a zombie invasion. He was shaky and weak after spending a couple of weeks in a coma and luckily encountered no zombies who could hurt him until he met a man named Morgan and his 10 year old son Duane. Morgan and his family were on their way to a refugee camp in Atlanta run by the military but they holed up in a house near Rick's home when Morgan's wife becomes a zombie. He didn't have the heart to kill her completely but that means he and Duane now watch through cracks in the boarded up windows as she shambles along with other zombies outside the house.

Frank Darabont, director of the wonderful Shawshank Redemption and the horrible The Mist*, helped adapt this from Robert Kirkman's graphic novels and even wrote and directed this first episode. What he created looked more like a movie than a television show. It's often quiet. There isn't much in the way of background music. The quiet often lends low key dread to scenes in which the characters are as safe as they can be. There are very few moments in which you're truly at ease and not in fear that a zombie could drag itself out of nowhere and start killing characters you've come to like. This may be the most frightening television series ever produced yet there's also hope for the future. Not much, mind you, but you do watch as Rick Grimes manages to recover and adapt to this new world.

The Walking Dead is, in a word, brilliant. I can't wait for it to complete its six episode run even though I'm sure I'll want way more than six episodes.

*It was a decent movie until the ending but oh Lord, what an unforgettably horrible ending.

Swift and Merciless Judgment

Doing a bit of a twist on my somewhat-regular liveblog feature today. Instead of watching something on Netflix Instant, today I'm doing real time comments on a recently premiered television show currently available on Hulu.com. My main rule on these is that it has to be something I haven't seen before but I did see this. I watched the first five minutes anyway. That's how I know it will be a great vehicle for my sarcastic commentary. With that, sit back and watch me while I watch the pilot episode of the new Jimmy Smits drama Outlaw.

00:00 -- Oh cool, a commercial for Suave hair care products telling me to rethink salon hair. Hulu really gets me.

02:00 -- After the ad, we see some lawyer walking furiously through a prison in Pennsylvania. I'm not sure if he's doing something important or if he just had chili for lunch and is trying to find a bathroom. Ah, he has a client on Death Row who's facing imminent execution and whose final hope is a stay of execution from the U.S. Supreme Court. Usually, the problem with that is making a convincing Constitutional argument. In this case, the problem is that the Justice who has to break a 4-4 tie is Cyrus Garza (Jimmy Smits). Most Justices, when they're not Justicing, are giving speeches to law students or writing books about Marbury vs. Madison but now Garza. No, he's one of those flashy Justices who breaks the blackjack tables of Vegas and is a common paparazzi target. I see this going well.

03:20 -- Garza is something of a rock star/strict constructionist Justice who packs auditoriums surrounded by his screaming fans. He calls the young, female ACLU attorney pleading the inmate's case a flag burner before coming on to her in a somewhat creepy way so yeah, he's a jerk. Gee, I hope there will be some sort of process or series of events through which Garza can redeem himself.

06:00 -- Garza has a tightass clerk named Eddie who has just met a woman whose ass is tight in an entirely different way named Lucinda. Lucinda is some sort of miniskirt wearing researcher/hacker who introduces herself to people by saying she doesn't want to sleep with them so she fits right in with a guy who's described as the most conservative justice on the Supreme Court.

11:00 -- An evil Senator threatened Garza with impeachment if he stayed the execution. A quick Google search showed that only one Supreme Court Justice has ever been impeached. That would be Samuel Chase in 1798 and he won his impeachment trial. This means that there's never been a Supreme Court Justice who's been forcibly removed from office. Still, the execution, the Senator's threat and the recent death of his liberal father have come together and made Garza to decide that it would be much better to resign his position and become a trial attorney. Let me say that again. The makers of this show have created a character so fucking stupid that he actually thinks he can do more good as an attorney than he can as a god damn SUPREME COURT JUSTICE. My God, television can be stupid. The ad for LG refrigerators in which a woman pulls a fully laid out dining room table from her fridge was actually a relief.

19:22 -- Garza has joined a high powered corporate law firm that has agreed to pay him an outrageous salary and let him do whatever he wants even if it makes zero dollars for the firm. I don't mind unrealistic plots. Hell, I like the new revamp of Nikita and unicorns are more realistic than that. What I don't like is when something is both unrealistic and stupid, especially when I get one stupidly unrealistic event piled on top of another such as, oh, let's say a Supreme Court Justice being threatened with something that hasn't happened in 200 years so he quits in order to do more good off the Court than on so he joins a law firm run by money grubbing bastards who give him a huge budget to do whatever he wants. And the first thing he wants to do? That would be to represent Greg Beals, the inmate to whom he just granted a new trial. Not only do his clerks and sexy hacker/whatever the hell she is go along for the ride but he also scoops up Beals' lawyer, Al Druzinsky, to be part of his legal team. In about five minutes, they discover that the eyewitness who placed Beals at the scene of the crime recanted before he died. For some reason, this makes everyone think they shouldn't go forward with the new trial but should accept a plea agreement instead. Everyone, that is, except Garza. Cause that's how Garza rolls. Also, they needed something dramatic for Garza to do before they cut to commercial. My ad this time was for one of those icky KY sex gels. Thanks Hulu.

25:40 -- Beals was granted a new trial but, for some reason, he's have an appeals hearing. Can't Garza say something like, "Um, I kind of gave this guy a new trial." The important distinction here is that the defense has severe limitations when it comes to introducing new evidence in an appeal and boy oh boy, have they ever come up with new evidence. Seriously, I think I'm more likely to have committed the murder than Beals. Should be smooth sailing from here on but, unfortunately, we have around 15 minutes of broadcast time left which means some sort of godawful conflict is about to happen to set up the episode's third act. Let's watch.

28:30 -- Shockingly, the judge threw out their new evidence but there's something even more important. Due to a Three's Company level of misunderstood eavesdropping, Garza's very young law clerk, Moreta, thought he was dying and professed her love for him. she did this despite the fact that he sexually harasses her pretty much non-stop though this is probably why she hasn't filed numerous lawsuits against him by now.

33:30 -- I am watching this while logged into my Hulu account. This means they know it's me. I also click every one of those damn "Is this ad relevant to you?" boxes so they have some idea of what I like. So why the hell does Hulu think I am interested in ads for women's hair care products, Axe body spray and sex gels? Anyway, through actions both quasi-legal and highly unlikely, Garza and his team have tracked down some lab tech who hadn't testified in the first trial so instead of a devastating plot point setting up the final act, we have a hopeful one. This means all will appear to be lost before Garza pulls this witness out of his ass and saves the day. I wonder if I'm right.

37:30 -- Garza's witness knew all along that it was the deceased's husband, a police officer, who had committed the murder but never told anyone because, if she had, this whole story would have been denied its dramatic ending. This leads to a Jimmy Smits monologue about fairness and justice in the middle of the hearing. The judge, a man who until this point was a strict adherent of rules and process, tosses all that out the window and lets him. I may as well get comfortable as this could go on for the show's final four minutes.

42:00 -- Beals was set free so Garza and his team celebrated in the only truly proper way. They ate large amounts of nitrate laden barbecued meat while everyone tells lame jokes and half baked sexual innuendos. Garza spots an intimidating looking man following him but we never find out who he is. This sets up a mystery to be solved in future episodes, a mystery whose answer will never be known to me because I am never watching this definition of televised mediocrity again.

Look At My Briefs -- 9/23/10

I've officially lost 40 pounds this week so I don't want to write anything big. What a perfect time for another round of brief comments on various subjects I like to call Look At My Briefs.

I was looking at gossip sites to see what the current whereabouts of Lindsay Lohan were (can't be too careful with that girl) when I saw this story about the possibility of Glee star Lea Michele posing topless for Playboy. The final two paragraph shows why this story defines the term "burying the lede."

Sacha Baron Cohen as Freddie Mercury? I'm in. Oh, I hope Cohen isn't the kind of actor who will hold back on screen and not give a completely fearless performance.

Variety blogger Michael Schneider says Fox isn't giving up on its new drama Lone Star just yet. My response: Really? Why not? For those of you who missed Lone Star, which is most of you if the ratings are true, it's the story of a con artist who married into a wealthy family who starts developing a conscience and tries to turn his life around. At the end of the first episode, one of the ways he does this is by taking on a second wife. I was expecting a fun, interesting look into the world of con artists and instead received a slow, depressing tale of a bigamist anti-hero. It's "critically acclaimed" which makes me think the critics who are going around and acclaiming it never saw the whole thing. The question isn't if Fox should give it another week but how it got on the air at all.

Speaking of unimpressive new shows, Hawaii Five-O also left a lot to be desired. I only watched it because my mother asked me to record it for her and it was pretty much what I expected. I am no longer a fan of old fashioned, conventional shows that could just have easily been on the air in the 1970s which doesn't leave much hope for shows like Hawaii Five-O that actually were on in the 1970s. This includes sitcoms with laugh tracks and standard fare cop shows. Oddly, this should have made me a huge fan of Lone Star but that's another story. Hawaii Five-O has generic characters, villains who are impossible to capture until suddenly they're easy to capture and lame jokes. It also had Grace Park in both her bikini and underwear so I do appreciate their effort on that front.

Big Hollywood's S.T. Karnick is well known to me as the guy who's always wrong. In the past, he has wholeheartedly endorsed shows like the quickly canceled Eleventh Hour and the sucky Kelsey Grammer vehicle Hank, embraced the Will Farrel version of Land of the Lost for a perceived anti-evolution message and tried to convince us the low brown Jack Black/Michael Cera comedy Year One was actually a deeply spiritual film. Given that track record, NBC should be thrilled that he didn't like The Event.

Sunday Night Bites

For some reason, ABC thought it would be a good idea to put its mediocre vampire show on the same night that HBO premiers new episodes of its excellent vampire show. This invites comparisons and I am never one to turn down an invitation which isn't at all true but let's move on anyway.

The Gates isn't actually a vampire show. Oh sure, there are vampires but there are also werewolves and witches. Maybe they thought, "True Blood is about vampires. If we toss in werewolves and witches, that means we'll be three times as good as they are." Even if I wasn't being facetious and they'd actually said that, True Blood had a witch last season and werewolves this season and their werewolves are already far more interesting than the boy band wolf pack in The Gates.

The pilot episode opens in a large gated community called, of course, the Gates. Rhona Mitra (the only actor in this show I recognize) plays Claire Radcliff, a housewife who sees her daughter almost get mowed down when she runs out in front of a contractor's pickup truck. The driver has the poor judgment to allow Claire to nurse the cuts he received in the accident as it turns out she's a vampire who kills the guy in a fit of bloodlust. We find out later that Claire is a stereotypical suburban housewife who is bored with her life but she deals with that by brutally murdering people instead of seducing 18 year old pool boys named Arturo. Oddly, she seems to have a conscience and contempt for her unnatural existence whereas her vampire husband, who murders no one, does not.

We also meet the Monohan family, people who pulled up stakes and moved to the Gates without ever visiting it when Daddy Monohan, a guy named Nick, took a job as police chief. Mom gets to know their new neighbor Claire when she brings over a lasagna. Nick gets to know Claire when he investigates her for the disappearance of the contractor. Nick shows us all he's completely unqualified for the job when, after his request for a search warrant is rejected, he breaks into the Radcliff home anyway and manages to get caught.

Meanwhile, the Monahan's eldest child, Charlie, enters the local high school and immediately shows us that he's one of those guys who is good looking enough to get any girl he wants but also sensitive and intelligent enough to immediately join in his literature class's discussion on the works of Flannery O'Connor. In a show about vampires and werewolves, Charlie is the least likely of any of these characters to actually exist.

Speaking of werewolves, it turns out every jocky douchenozzle boy in school is part of a werewolf pack. The Gates also has not one but two witches living in it, one of whom sells tea...BUT IT'S EVIL TEA and no, I didn't make that up. It seems that the philosophy behind establishing the Gates was, "Let's get all the dangerous supernatural creatures together in one spot. What could possibly go wrong?"

The Gates, sadly, was as dull in real life as its characters perceived it to be in the show. It wasn't all that bad but why would I watch this when I can watch True Blood? "But Mike," you say, "you have DVR now. You can watch both." Okay then, why would I watch The Gates when I could stare at a wall and be more entertained? No snappy comeback for that, eh Mr. Strawman?

Smart Stuff On The Idiot Box

It used to be that summer on American television was a vast wasteland consisting almost solely of crap reruns of the crap shows we watched on the only three television networks that existed. Yes, children, there was a time when you literally has only three national commercial broadcasting networks. Those, along with PBS and maybe an independent station that ran I Love Lucy reruns over and over constituted my viewing choices, at least when I was very young. You kids are lucky. You have 1000 digital HD channels that can be DVRed two at a time and it takes much longer to look through all those before you're able to say, "Geez, there's nothing good on."

Ah, but that is where you are wrong, fictional young people. There's a wide selection of shows even in summer time now that range from "AAAAHHHHHHHH" to "Aaaahhhh?" to "Pretty good." Today, I will discuss a few of those.

True Blood -- Not only is this decent non-reality-show content, it's one of my favorite shows. It's worth getting HBO just to watch this. This show centering on a male vampire who falls in love with a human girl serves as an excellent counterpoint to the horrible Twilight series. First, vampire Bill and human Sookie Stackhouse have sex and actually seem to enjoy it as opposed to Edward and Bella who try to teach the world the premarital sex causes vampires to sparkle less brightly. Though they have problems, for the most part Bill and Sookie's relationship is one of mutual love and respect. Edward and Bella, on the other hand, both know that Edward is in charge and that Bella should take it as a compliment that Edward wants to kill her. Anyway, True Blood has plenty of action, humor and interesting characters who actually have some complexity to them and that's why you should watch it. The fact that you can drink shots and scream, "THIS IS HOW YOU SHOULD HAVE DONE IT, STEPHANIE MEYER! SCREW YOU!" is an added bonus.

Leverage / Burn Notice -- I always think of these two as one show for some reason. They're very different in tone, style and content and only have the fact that they both engage in con artistry in common. Still, they're linked in my mind. One possible reason is that each of them has one of the sexiest actresses on TV today (Gina Bellman on Leverage and Gabrielle Anwar on Burn Notice). Another is that they're both well-made action shows about people who are extremely competent at what they do. Another is that they're both basically modern day takes on old fashioned pulp novels. Finally, even though they're on different networks, there's always the possibility that a crossover could occur and Gina and Gabrielle could make out. That reminds me, I have to finish up my short story, "Gina and Gabrielle Have A Threesome With Mike."

The Good Guys -- The pilot episode showed last month and I thought it was, appropriately, good. Not great, not pretty good, just good. Good enough to watch again anyway. As of this writing, the second episode has not premiered yet so all I can say is that the show at least has potential. Bradley Whitford and Colin Hanks star as an Odd Couple-pairing of cops whose investigations of petty crimes somehow put them on the trail of major crimes. The first episode started off slowly but really picked up in the last half hour when we met the World's Second Greatest Assassin (that's how he was always described). Anyway, I'm looking forward to this summer's season of The Good Guys unless it sucks in which case I'll completely rewrite this and act like I hated it the whole time.

Twos-day

Two-day on this Twos-day I'm going two talk about 2 different sub-two-jects. I hope the rampant hilarity of this first line didn't cause anyone to pass out from laughter.

First, Lost. I'm assuming you've seen it, by the way. Don't go bitching about how you were saving the last episode for the 4th of July and now I've ruined it for you. Judging from Twitter/Facebook/message board reactions, it went over fairly well with the show's fanbase. Even people who thought the show started going downhill after that awesome first 15 minutes seemed to gain a measure of satisfaction and completion from Sunday's final episode. I can say I liked it a lot and was impressed at how much sense everything made in the end.

One of the biggest conclusions I reached is that Jacob did a lousy job in his role as island protector. It was obvious from the episode that showed us his origin that his mother didn't even intend for him to end up with the job. Hell, the first thing he did in that role was something his adoptive mother had told him not to do. As an act of revenge, he tossed his brother down the light cave and ended up creating a very powerful and pissed off enemy that was just as immortal as he was. Then Jacob decides to spend the next 2000 years trying to convince him of the sheer awesome swellness of humanity. You'd think around year 1200 he'd figure it to be a lost cause but no, he soldiers on. To me, the biggest unsolved mystery is whether the people who ended up on the island, including Desmond, were brought together as part of an intricate plan that Jacob concocted to put an end to the threat of the Man in Black once and for all or if he threw darts at names to choose his candidates and got lucky that everything worked out.

I'm not going to worry about the unsolved mysteries. If I ever meet any of the main creative forces behind Lost, I won't ask about polar bears or what was so great about Walt or if that Dharma peanut butter was smooth or crunchy. My question would be, "How close to your original vision of the ending did the actual ending turn out to be?" I'm curious about how much of the plot was planned from episode one and how much was just winging it.

Topic #2: I haven't given much space to Big Hollywood recently but this post today by Jeffrey Jena caught my eye. he claims comedian Elayne Boosler defriended him on Facebook for the crime of being a conservative.

I got “unfriended” on Facebook a few months ago by comedienne Elayne Boosler. Out here in the real world I wasn’t really “friends” with Ms. Boosler. We had met a few times and I think we may have shared a stage or two somewhere along the way but that was it. Our Facebook friendship was almost as brief. When I disagreed with one of her political postings I was soon scratched from her “friend” roster. It seems that Ms. Boosler does not like to have her opinions challenged. She is one of many “progressives” who believe in diversity of appearance but not of thought. Fair enough. You want to be narrow minded and intellectually lazy so you don’t have to defend your opinions, that is your right as an American. Second in my mind only to the right to be as stupid as you want to be is the right to put your fingers in your ear when someone who disagrees with you is so rude as to start throwing facts at you.

He then goes on to claim that another progressive friend also dumped him from Facebook and from these two incidents draws the conclusion that liberals are vicious and intolerant. What caught my attention, though, is that, in both cases, Jena doesn't show us the comments that were so offensive to liberal sensibilities. As you can see from the quote above, all he says is that he disagreed with a political post without a hint of whether he said, "I think tax cuts increase revenues," or if it was more along the lines of, "Why does Der Führer Obama think he can change our health care system when he won't even release his birth certificate?" He goes into a bit more detail in the second example in which he paints himself as a calm debater going up against an emotionally immature and out-of-control liberal but, again, he fails to show us the actual Facebook posts that set this person off. We only have his word that he is the sad victim of liberal intolerance.

On the other hand, we have Elayne Boosler saying he's full of shit. She pays Jena the courtesy of linking to what he actually said instead of providing us with her own vague characterizations of Jena's words. I also looked at some of her older Facebook posts and found this thread in which she criticizes Starbucks for allowing armed customers into their stores. In the comments, some guy states that we must allow this because a crackhead might someday find a gun while rooting through trash. According to Jena, Boosler should have lost her shit and defriended him. Instead, she disagreed and calmly stated that, if she encountered an armed customer in Starbucks, she would leave after registering her complaint to the management.

One more thing. I loved this statement Jena makes about the poor, persecuted Hollywood conservatives.

I look at folks like Dennis Miller, a guy who I have admired for years, and Drew Carey, and wonder what their brash conservatism has cost them.

Well, let's see. Dennis Miller now has a radio show because of his conservative beliefs as well as numerous tour dates. Drew Carey is an even sadder story. Because of his conservative beliefs, he was only allowed to make 200 episodes of his sitcom The Drew Carey Show. He now, tragically, makes an excellent living as host of The Price Is Right so yeah, let's all weep for Dennis Miller and Drew Carey.

A Distinct Lack Of Glee

I didn't care for Glee when it first premiered. I think the reason I didn't like it is because I was comparing it to a British show called Skins. With the exception of the last two episodes of season 4, Skins is, simply, one of the best things ever. I'm not exaggerating when I say it's one of the best written television shows in the history of the medium. It can be warm, harsh, funny and tragic, usually in the same episode. It's the story of teenage who actually seem like real people. Real people aren't usually as interesting as they are, of course. Real people aren't as clever or witty or lead lives packed with that much drama. One of the challenges of fiction is to make the unlikely events these characters live through seem natural and they pull it off.

And then there's Glee. When I first watched Glee, I kept thinking of Skins and Glee just didn't measure up. I've now come to accept Glee for what it is and I usually end up liking it. The kids are funny but not in that stupid sitcom way where 15 year old teenagers somehow have the world view and sensibilities of 30 year old standup comedians. They also do some pretty good musical numbers. Still, as I was reminded by Glee's most recent episode, it's not Skins.

One of the main plot points of last Tuesday's episode was when three of the main characters decided to lose their virginity. One thing I like about Skins is that they show's creators and, by extension, its characters, don't tie themselves up in knots about sex. It actually recognizes that a) lots of teens have sex and b) most of them, to varying degrees, seem to like it. Glee, unfortunately, is on American television and the biology of American teens is significantly different from that of their counterparts on British telly or, for that matter, their counterparts in real life. TV teens in America don't seem to particularly like sex and the only reason they bother with it at all is peer pressure from other teens. Why these other teens pressure their peers to do something that they, themselves, don't seem to like is a mystery.

Three couples this week decided to have sex and each couple had one virgin and one experienced partner. One couple was glee club teacher Will Shuster and guidance counselor Emma Pillsbury. Emma's OCD has kept her from having sex even though she's almost thirty so she, at least, has an excuse. They're adults though and I want to concentrate on the kids.

Series regulars Rachel and Finn, though their personalities are different, are crazy about each other and pretty much meant to be together. Unfortunately for them, they're in a TV series that gets a lot of story mileage from keeping them apart so now they've decided to lose their virginity to other people. Oddly, of the four people involved, only one really wants to have sex because he thinks sex is awesome and that guy is Jesse, Rachel's insensitive new boyfriend. Rachel doesn't want to but Jesse is pressuring her and she may as well get it out of the way. The fact that she likes Jesse and that Jesse is the kind of guy most girls would want to have sex with has little to do with it. Finn is an entirely different case. A cheerleader named Santana has offered to relieve Finn of his virginity for what are mainly political and status reasons. Finn decides to take her up on it. Why? You may think it's because she's hot enough to be in Maxim which, in fact, she was (Not Safe For Work link here) and that sex with a hot girl is an awesome idea. No no no, Finn decides to do it to make Rachel jealous or some stupid shit like that.

Predictably, Rachel backs out because this is American television and teenage girls don't really want to have sex. If they do, it's because they are sluts who have no respect for themselves like Santana. Speaking of her, Finn goes ahead with it and nails her in a sleazy looking motel. What does he do after? Maybe you're thinking he says, at least to himself, "Woo hoo, I had sex." You'd be wrong about that because this is American television and sex is wrong. Instead, Finn bitches about having done it while Santana looks bored and says she wants a cheeseburger. Again, Finn just had sex with this girl (again, for God's sake, don't click this link if you are at work or using your church's WiFi or anything like that) and all he can think of to do is complain. The reason he's whining about having had the greatest night of his life is because he's on American TV and the fact that he just had sex means that a puppy just died because SEX IS BAD and no one really wants to do it until they get married or move to England where kids can bang away in peace.

All The New In Whoville

One of the advantages to living in England, in addition to the cheap healthcare and boiled food, is that you get to watch new episodes of Doctor Who before the rabble here in the United States can get their filthy paws all over them. For example, the U.K. premiere of series 5 was last Saturday but it won't show in the U.S. until April 17. We Americans can do nothing except howl in the wind and shake our fists at an uncaring God over this horrific plight. I suppose we can be thankful that they don't have a six month gap anymore but I really can't figure out why they have a gap at all. Hey, remember back in the long long ago when I said we Americans have to blithely accept our fate and wait till the 17th? That's true unless you use one of many methods, some legal, others not, to watch it earlier. I used one of the legal methods which is why I was able to watch it the same time it was being broadcast on BBC One so SCREW YOU GREAT BRITAIN! I believe this is where I remind you that we saved your ass in World War II and allowed you to join us in our glorious adventure in Iraq.

Doctor Who is now under the benevolent protection of one Mr. Steven Moffat. If that name means nothing to you, please accept my solemn promise that he's one of the best writers on the planet. I don't mean just in television either. I'd place him as one of the best living writers in any medium so you can imagine my excitement when I heard my favorite writer had been handed the reins of my favorite show.

When we last saw the Doctor, he had sustained fatal injuries in yet another of his many battles to save the world. Never fear, though. The Doctor is a Timelord and they have this cool thing they do where, when faced with death, they simply regenerate and all is well. The downside of this particular evolutionary mechanism is that they're not the same afterward. They keep all their memories but, in many important ways, they're now different people. This was really brought home during the final episode of the tenth Doctor played by David Tennant. That was very sad indeed because we knew that, in a way, this tenth Doctor was going to die. We didn't have much time to mourn though because the energy given off by the regeneration had trashed the Doctor's time machine, the TARDIS, and it started plummeting to Earth.

Now that we're all caught up, we see the new Doctor, Matt Smith, crashing the TARDIS into a sleepy English town where he meets an eight year old (I think, somewhere around there) girl named Amelia Pond. Amelia was giving a special Easter prayer to Santa Claus to send someone to fix the crack in her wall. An especially scary crack. She sees the blue box crash in her backyard and sees a soaking wet crazy man pop out asking for an apple. He claims he loves apples but spits it out when he bites into it. It turns out the Doctor no longer knows what the hell he likes to eat and has the wonderfully unflustered little girl prepare him various dishes before he decides that his favorite food is fish dipped in custard. Seriously.

Matt Smith, with the help of Moffat's writing, instantly endeared himself to me. He plays the Doctor as a slightly crazy and hyperactive fellow who, judging by ratings and fan reactions, will bring back the people (I wasn't one of them) who vowed to stop watching the show when Tennant left. After all, without spoiling too much, he manages to solve a life threatening crisis without the TARDIS or his sonic screwdriver. Personally, I think Tom Baker could have wrapped the whole thing up even faster and had time to run to the shop for jelly babies, but I'll cut Smith some slack. This was his first episode, after all.

Look At My Briefs -- 3/11/10

It's been two fun filled days since I lasted posted anything of substance. I can't think of a better way to come back than with my brief comments on various subjects I like to call Look At My Briefs.

Variety fired Todd McCarthy, it's chief film critic of over 30 years. If they think this act will push their profit margin back in the black, why not just fire all their reporters and make their paper a giant book of ads while also doubling the cover price? They'd make a fortune then. Other people do what you guys do, Variety. If you don't offer the public something unique such as, let's say, distinct and well known talent, why on Earth would anyone bother to go to your publication? I, personally, don't see myself ever even looking at Variety again.

Okay, um, just ignore that last sentence. According to Variety, Corey Haim has passed away at the age of 38. Drug addiction is a horrible thing, folks. I'm hoping I won't have to read a similar article about people like Lindsay Lohan in a few years. Little known fact: back in the 80s Corey Haim, Corey Feldman and I were known as the Three Coreys. They stopped hanging out with me when they found out my name wasn't Corey. It was fun while it lasted though. Farewell, Corey Haim. Thou shalt not fall...crryyyy little sister...

I usually like the MTV Movies Blog though I can't say that about this particular post. They have a 10 second advance clip of the new Twilight film but you have to watch a one minute commercial to access it. Classy, MTV. I'll save you the time. Edward and Jacob both mope around expressing their love for Bella in a way indistinguishable from the way a sufferer of clinical depression would do so. Bella, meanwhile, stares stone faced at both of them with her mouth open making one wonder when exactly drool will start dribbling out and...that's it. I'm happy to have saved you the time.

I've never been a huge fan of Tron. Thus, it's a mystery as to why I'm looking forward to the upcoming Tron Legacy coming out in December. This trailer may have something to do with it. We see that things haven't changed that much in the Tron world since we last saw it. We also see that the Dude abides.

The Hollywood Reporter, also known as one of those publications that does exactly what Variety does but still employs film critics, reports that CBS has renewed Undercover Boss for a second season. I've no idea how that will work. I suspect people will now be suspicious when a 50 year old guy has a film crew tagging along behind him when he shows up to report for his low wage entry level job at a major corporation. I don't watch that show so I don't care all that much.

She's Out Of My League comes tomorrow. I wrote about this under a little subsection called Movies I Haven't Seen though I was really reviewing the trailer. The producers need not worry though. I have no problem putting preconceived notions behind me. I've hated movies I expected to love and vice versa many times. I will enter the theater this weekend as a fair and impartial critic after which I will write a review so scathing it will melt your hard drive. Maybe.

Some Guy Trying To Figure Out "Lost"

When it first started I figured this was some Gilligan's Island type deal where the plane survivors would start building shit out of coconuts and have sex with monkeys (come on, you know they were doing that) while the radio would talk about nothing but them for years. After a while, though, it seemed so obvious they were in Hell or Purgatory or something but the producers insisted that they were all very much alive and not in Hell. I figured the producers were just total douchenozzles and that the last episode would show them in Hell and they'd come on and say, "Ha ha, you just wasted years trying to figure this out but they were in Hell the whole time like you thought."

Some time went by and I thought, "Nah, they're not in Hell, that's just stupid." This was when they started finding the polar bears and the sharks with that weird logo tattooed on them and THAT was what made me think that they're being manipulated by a group of super intelligent bears and sharks working together to conquer the world. I dismissed that when I realized bears and sharks would more likely try to eat each other before they would ever work together so I was back at square one.

After I got past the bear/shark conspiracy, the Others showed up. This is where I said, "Oh come on!" and almost stopped watching cause I figured they were just pulling things out of their butts at this point. That and the way they're on the island and then they're doing flashbacks to some time when they went out to buy bananas or some shit like that made me think, "Why bother? I can't keep up." Still, I stuck it out.

When six of the island's inhabitants got off the island, I figured the damn show would be ending then but the damn thing is still on so I have to keep thinking about it. I thought maybe the Oceanic Six would get an apartment together and the whole thing would turn into a sitcom with wacky situations like the Smoke Monster almost getting them evicted by setting off the smoke alarms but no, instead we see them wandering around looking all mopey even though they got off that stupid island where people were always shooting at them.

Speaking of that Smoke Monster, what's the deal with that? Is it some animal that's on fire? Now they're saying the Monster is also Locke who's dead but is alive back home because a bomb went off that never went off so the plane that crashed never did so everyone on the island is also back in Los Angeles eating In And Out Burgers instead of the wild boar that they're eating cause they're stuck on the island Norman Coordinate!

What was I talking about? Oh yeah. I think they're in Hell.

*Come on, you know they were doing that.

Who's Last

Doctor Who is currently the best show on television. It is also one of the best shows ever made. Harlan Ellison wrote an introduction in 1977 to a novelization of the Doctor Who story Genesis of the Daleks in which he declared it to be the best science fiction series ever, beating out even Star Trek or The Twilight Zone. And he was right, in my opinion anyway. It premiered in 1963 and ran until 1989 to be revived in its current incarnation in 2005.

Jumping ahead to January 1, 2010, we have now seen the final episode of David Tennant as the 10th Doctor and, frankly, I don't think it could have gone any better. While I disagree with a recent survey naming him as the best Doctor, he's had a hell of a run and will be missed. If not for the fact that Steven Moffat, one of my favorite writers in any medium, was taking over as showrunner I'd probably be one of those people vowing to never again watch Doctor Who. I'm wondering now if, somehow, a threat like that from me would have somehow kept Tennant in the show. That would have been cool even though I then would have gone mad with power and forced them to do something really crazy like give the Doctor breasts.

Doctor Who fans have known for over a year that this was coming. The Doctor received no less than three different prophecies in the past year that implied his life would soon end but that didn't make it any easier when it happened. If you're familiar with the show you know that Timelords like The Doctor don't really die, of course. Since 1963 when the actor playing the Doctor decides to leave the show all they have to do is fatally injure the character and Regeneration kicks in. All wounds are healed but the Doctor looks completely different. One thing that was really driven home this time around is that this isn't just a cosmetic change. The new person has all of the Doctor's memories but, as has been witnessed over the years, the personality is different. The one who was there before, in a sense, no longer exists and it is like death. This point was driven home and made Tennant's exit more emotional when he Regenerated.

The two part finale was exciting overall as the Doctor's arch enemy, the Master, returned from the dead...again...to wreak havoc in the Doctor's life with yet another insane scheme (that works, for a while anyway) to dominate the world but that story is just an extended introduction to the long, emotional goodbye to David Tennant at the end. When he begins to change, you start getting choked up and then he turns into the new Doctor, actor Matt Smith, and BAM it gets fast paced and exciting. There's no more time for tears as the Doctor checks to see if he still has fingers, fingers he'll need because HIS SHIP IS ABOUT TO CRASH.

So yes, Doctor Who will go on and it will almost certainly be good with new people both in front of and behind the camera. I'll miss David Tennant and producer/showrunner Russell T. Davies but I missed Christopher Eccleston when he left and it all worked out. If fact, here's how all that went.

"Wow, Christopher Eccleston is great."

When he first got replaced by David Tennant: "Who's this douchebag?"

After a few episodes. "Wow, David Tennant is great."

When he first got replaced by Matt Smith. "Who's this douchebag?"

We'll find out this spring when the new series starts how long it will take for Matt Smith to stop being a douchebag and start being the Doctor. I do wish I could go back in time and somehow convince David Tennant to stick with the show. I won't be doing that, of course, because it's impossible. Seriously, if I ever tell you I did that, do me a favor and lock me up.

The Good, The Bad and the Silly

Today I focus on two struggling science fiction shows that either face cancellation or have already received their death sentences.

Flash Forward, the show in which everyone in the world were given visions of their future, deserves to go but is currently slated to get at least one more chance. I try to like this show, I really do, but every time it makes me think it's going to be something special they do something supremely silly. I mean silly on an epic scale. The previous episode in which an American doctor searches for a Japanese girl he met in his flash forward was pretty good and had a genuine surprise at the end. This made me look forward to the next episode or, as I now refer to it, the episode that kicked me in the crotch.

The latest episode, titled "A561984", showed us FBI agents Mark Benford and Demetri Noh heading to Hong Kong to track down a woman who told Demetri he was destined to die next March. They did this even though their superior, Stanford Wedeck, told them not to and they ignore him when he tells them to come home. Thus, Wedeck gets to join the large pantheon of high ranking law enforcement officers who have to deal with loners who sometimes have to break the rules to get the job done. Anyway, Benford and Noh track down the Persian woman at a Hong Kong restaurant and manage to get some information out of her, specifically that Noh will die because Benford shoots him. After that she says, "I can't tell you any more." Why was she able to tell them that but not any more? Shut up, that's why. Benford then does what any of us would do. He pulls his gun while she's surrounded by armed guards and tries to take her...well, who knows where the fuck he was going to take her in a city run by the Chinese. Oh, I bet you didn't know American FBI agents were allowed to carry guns in Communist China. I didn't either but if Flash Forward says they can I guess it must be true. As Benford put very little thought into this major felony, he didn't figure that one of the advantages of being an authoritarian police state is that the police show up very quickly when a maniac is holding someone at gun point in the middle of the street. But hey, it's not the Chinese who show up but rather a CIA tactical squad. Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that the Chinese allow the CIA free reign in the streets of Hong Kong, another thing I now know thanks to Flash Forward. After this, Wedeck gets to do another thing that many high ranking law enforcement officers in movies and television have done. He orders Benford to turn in his badge and his gun.

To sum up: an experienced FBI agent thought it was a good idea to defy his boss, kidnap someone in public in the middle of China only to have the whole plan thwarted by American agents IN CHINA. When Flash Forward first came on, I mentioned how worried I was that this brainchild of Brannon Braga would be stupid and I was right. I hear that Flash Forward is being retooled and won't be back until March. I can't see it getting any better unless they bring Graham Chapman back from the dead so he can put on his colonel's uniform and loudly announce whenever things get too silly.

Moving on to show number two: Dollhouse. I was not a fan of Dollhouse's first season. It was amazing to me that I didn't like a show made by Joss Whedon but I just couldn't be entertained by the idea of these people being used as slaves and prostitutes. I only watched season two because of the season one finale with Alan Tudyk as a rogue Doll called Alpha and an unaired episode on the season one DVD showed some promise. Season two did have some improvements but not enough to draw in new viewers and Fox has already announced its cancellation. I wouldn't have cared too much except that this week's episode was good. I mean really, really good. One of the things that always made Joss Whedon's shows entertaining was the quality of the villains. People (or possibly creatures) like Spike, Darla, the Mayor and the First were worthy protagonists to Buffy and were fully fleshed out characters who kept us coming back. Dollhouse had a little of this with Alpha which is why I watched season two. It wasn't until this week, though, that Dollhouse really came into its own thanks to a new villain.

Summer Glau was introduced this week as Bennett Halverson. After the corporation that runs the Dollhouse captured Eliza Dushku's Echo, they brought her to see Bennett Halverson, a brilliant programmer who apparently has a history with Echo's original personality, enough of a history that she starts torturing Echo. She is interrupted by Echo's main programmer, Topher Brink, and that's where it gets interesting. Topher and Bennett are instantly attracted to each other and we see Bennett and Topher nervously and genuinely flirt with each other while simultaneously working against each other. Bennett is revealed as funny and nerdy as she is malevolent and sadistic and is the kind of character who would make me watch this show every week. That is, if Fox hadn't already canceled it. They did say they were going to make sure the storyline was wrapped up so at least we'll have that. I'm not sure whose fault it is that it took the better part of a year for this show to find its legs though I'm betting the guilty party's name rhymes with Cox Cetwork.

So, the show I like goes down the tubes while the dumb show gets to go on and on. The good news is that Joss Whedon will now have time to make more Doctor Horrible films while Brannon Braga will now be too busy to attempt the same thing. That's something, I suppose.

Stupid With A Capital V

Dear makers of the show V: FUCK YOU!

You're all total dicks. You're also huge douchebags. The only reason you're not bigger douchebags is because you're total dicks and it's been scientifically proven that a large, quantifiable amount of dickishness has the unintended benefit of limiting the level of douchebaggery so they lucked out there. When your dumb little show premiered, I was apathetic about it. It wasn't the worst thing on television. I could take or leave it. It didn't matter to me if it got canceled or managed to hang on for a second season. In fact, I didn't even see last week's episode and didn't care. I did, however, see this week's episode. Now I care. Now I'm passionate. Now I wholeheartedly root for its cancellation. Why? It's really more my fault than it is yours. See, the makers of V are shitheads and I hate shitheads. It's my problem.

I've never been one to be outraged by fiction. It happens from time to time. Movies like Bride Wars or the finale of Battlestar Galactica have been known to invoke a reaction that can be described as apocalyptic. Even then, I can pretty much let go any sort of political or social messages contained in fiction that either actually exist or, as is more often the case, people imagine are there. I've written many times about how annoyed I get when people who can't tell fantasy from reality hold up a work of fiction as proof and vindication of their worldviews. This has been the case with V. The fact that the show's producer is an openly gay liberal Obama supporter hasn't stopped people from seeing it as a strident criticism of the Obama administration. Ordinarily, I'd have commented on such stupidity but as I said, I simply didn't care enough to do so. Until now.

Tuesday's episode was a smorgasbord of dumb. I wonder why the aliens refer to themselves by their human names when they're alone since, for the most part, they seem to have at least a mild contempt (in some cases not so mild) for our species. I find it preposterous that humans are so incurious about where the V's came from and what their world and culture are like. We as a race seem perfectly content to allow powerful aliens to set up embassies, healing centers, soft serve yogurt stands etc. while knowing so little about them. Another storyline involves the human resistance led by Elizabeth Mitchell thinking it would be a good idea to let a dangerously unstable man take the lead in a plot to kidnap a V. There's also a story about a V impregnating a human woman without the aid of genetic engineering, something that Carl Sagan once said he found to be the least believable thing about Star Trek. This shows the scientific ignorance of the show's staff from the producers on down who probably think Africa is crawling with human/chimp hybrids. Anyway, all this was just run of the mill TV stupidity on par with generations of science fiction shows that have called a solar system a galaxy. What pissed me off? I guess I've buried the lede long enough.

The V's were attempting to infect humanity with something called R6. I'll be damned if I can remember what the hell R6 is supposed to do but I doubt it's good. Anyway, supposedly the V's were mixing this R6 in with some sort of super vitamin supplement when they were actually mixing it in with flu vaccine. Yeah, that's right, the makers of V decided to reinforce the fears of Jenny McCarthy acolytes who believe that vaccines are evil based mainly on evidence they found up their asses. It's very rare that you hear me groan at a television show's plot. The last time I did that was during the one and only episode of the now canceled Eli Stone I ever saw in which a lawyer receives visions telling him that vaccines cause autism.

I have no idea if the producers meant to send the message that people shouldn't take flu vaccine. In fact, knowing them, I'd say they put as much thought into it as they did the idea of human/alien hybrids. Still, we currently are in the middle of a global flu pandemic that is literally killing people and V comes along to tell the more ignorant members of our population who were on the fence as to whether they should take the vaccine that yes, the crazy paranoid cousin who said that the government is hiding the fact that vaccines make your belly button close up and cause your urine to catch fire just might have had a point.

So, I will now join the majority of the nation and stop watching V altogether. Until it's canceled, I will practice the dance I'm going to do on its grave.

V-ry Interesting

The first sentence of today's offering was going to be, "New media is a wonderful thing," but then I realized that's not true. A more accurate statement is, "New media can be a wonderful thing." It's a blunt instrument that can be used for both decent and horrific purposes. A good example of this is the common practice of showing extended previews of new television shows online. When Flash Forward and Torchwood: Children of Earth did this, it worked very well because their previews were interesting, action packed and made you want to see more. More importantly, they weren't stupid.

Which brings us to Hulu's preview of V.



If you are outside the United States you probably couldn't see that so you might want to take this as a sign from God to move here now. You God fearing Americans, on the other hand, just got your first look at the new television show V, a remake of a mediocre television show of the same name that was on back in the 80s. (You can keep reading, non-Americans. I'll describe the video.)Remaking lame decades old science fiction actually has had a decent track record in recent years so there's no reason to judge it harshly for that reason. No, the reason to judge it harshly is its actual content.

The premise of the show is that technologically advanced alien visitors come to Earth and take us over not by bombing the shit out of us but rather by being our saviors. Their truly nefarious purposes will only become apparent after they have become a fixture in our lives. That's what the show's publicity says, anyway. According to the show's first nine minutes, the visitors think the best way to make a good first impression with us is to have ships the size of several city blocks show up unannounced over our major cities, an act that immediately causes world wide panic. The first indication the ships are there is the earthquake-level devastation caused by the turbulence created by their ships. This makes a large crucifix fall down and nearly kill a wheelchair-bound man before it shatters. They also cause military aircraft sent up to investigate these ships to crash in the middle of crowded urban areas. Surely all this makes the world's population say, "What shouldn't we love about these aliens?"

My favorite part of this clip, though, is the military barricade. The Army or National Guard or whatever has set up a barricade around the part of Los Angeles over which the alien spaceship is hovering. Lost actress Elizabeth Mitchell plays an FBI agent whose son is on the other side of the barricade and she's trying to get to him but the soldier manning the barricade tells her that no way, no how is she ever in a bazillion years going to be allowed into that part of the city. Luckily for her the soldier has the attention span of a fruit fly and she manages to slip past him after he is easily distracted by a nearby scuffle. Now comes the part that really gets me. It turns out there are just as many civilians wandering around on the restricted side of the barricade as there were on the other side. The barricade really served no purpose other than to briefly provide Elizabeth Mitchell's concerned FBI mom with something to do for about 90 seconds.

Anyway, FBI mom finds her son and together they witness the aliens once again trying to endear themselves to us by recreating that scene from Independence Day where hovering spaceships suddenly open up. The clip ends there but, if you've seen the ads for V, you know that, instead of burning the cities with FIRE FROM SPACE you instead see Morena Baccarin's pretty, soothing face telling everyone that everything is cool and that they've brought intergalactic chicken wings for the entire planet to munch on. It's something along those lines.

It's possible that the producers of V said to themselves, "Let's get all the stupid shit we're ever going to do out of the way in the first nine minutes of the first episode and construct a smart, exciting television show from then on." It's possible, but I doubt it. Instead, I think that the makers of V, much like the alien characters they have created, either aren't capable of making a good first impression or didn't think it was important.

Big Saturday

The first paragraph of this is possibly the shittiest endorsement of a television show I've ever seen. Please note that the guy actually wants you to watch the show. A "different comedic approach" seems to mean, "Let's not actually be funny."

Always Watching

Television. What a powerful word. Just saying it makes you think of television. It touches all of our lives in a particularly telvisionish way. Today I'm going to talk about this thing we call "television" or "TV" or "that thing the Tivo and XBox are connected to that lets me see naked vampires on HBO."

Fringe -- This has improved somewhat since its debut last year but it's problems are still there. It's still needlessly gross and its plots still cross the line that divides "Far Out Science Fiction" from "Insane Stupidity." Recent examples include a scientist whose wife couldn't bring a child to term because of her lupus so his solution was to combine human, scorpion and molerat DNA. Had someone actually managed to create a living creature like this, it would have been one of the most amazing scientific achievements in history and would have gotten the fellow who literally whipped this up in his basement several Nobel Prizes. Instead, it was used as a plot point in which the child becomes a creature who can poison people so he can drag them to his underground lair and eat them. Grade: C+

Glee -- This has also improved since I saw its pilot episode last May but it's still not very good. I seem to be in the minority on this one as reviews and other randomly given opinions on I read on message boards and Twitter indicate that most people really love this show. To me, it just looks fake. Everyone seems to be trying way too hard. Only Jane Lynch's psychopathic cheer coach makes what she's doing look effortless and natural. Combine that with the fact that the glee club students look older than their teacher and you have a show about teensagers that just can't hold a candle to Skins. Speaking of which...

Skins -- This just wrapped up its third series run on BBC America and remains one of my favorite shows ever. It's certainly the best show about teens out there right now. It manages to remain riotously funny while taking the problems its characters face very seriously. It also takes a realistic view of teenagers doing drugs and having sex and actually acknowledges that kids, you know, do that and, for many, it's a matter-of-fact course of action that doesn't necessarily ruin their lives or inspire self righteous monologues about respecting yourself. There's one more show about teenagers I should mention...

The Vampire Diaries -- I've watched two full episodes and part of a third. I didn't finish the third one since, 20 minutes in, I knew exactly what was going to happen. There will not be a fourth.

Flash Forward -- So far, this isn't bad though there are signs that the Brannon Braga Stupidity Curse could kick in at any time. For instance, last week the FBI team investigating the world event that caused people to see the future got a lead on a possible suspect and brought a full assault team to take him down. Two of the regular characters and some poor, doomed day player then leave their lovely team behind and storm the suspect's dark, spooky lair. This results in the suspect's escape and the death of the one who wasn't a regular (another sign that this was made by a former Star Trek writer).