Days 23-30 of 30 Days of TV Shows

Gah. So yeah, some time got away from me, and I think I’m just going to wrap this up quickly.

Day 23 – Most annoying character

Rodney McKay from Stargate Atlantis. Seriously? The guy was created as a foil for the supremely awesome Samantha Carter in the SG-1 series and they gave his whiny, egotistical, cowardly, assholish self a series of his own? WTF. So annoyed by him.

Day 24 – Best quote

“I love it when a plan comes together.” – Hannibal Smith on The A-Team.

Day 25 – A show you plan on watching (old or new)

LOST. I’ve watched in fits and starts, and I’ve decided to rewatch from the beginning. Some people think it’s not worth it, but… I enjoyed the show, even at its most opaque, so I don’t think the finale is going to be a letdown. There’s more to a show than just resolving the central plot questions.

Day 26 – OMG WTF? Season finale

“I am Locutus of Borg.” Star Trek The Next Generation. Enough said? I dunno. But that was a long damn summer.

Day 27 – Best pilot episode

I feel like I should pick one of those “never picked up” pilots and so I’ll go with the extremely forgettable, and yet somehow memorable to me, “Journey to the Center of the Earth” (1993). I actually remember being a bit disappointed that it wasn’t picked up for a series, since it set itself up so well for one, but then, in those days I was positively starved for ANY kind of TV science fiction.

Day 28 – First TV show obsession

Probably the original Star Trek. The only TV show I really ever tried to write fanfic for, waaaaaaaaay back in the day, and the show that cemented the Saturday late afternoon syndicated sci-fi nostalgia thing for me.

Day 29 – Current TV show obsession

Currently, it’s rewatching the old Jeremy Brett-era Sherlock Holmes shows. I like Robert Downey Jr in the big-screen Holmes, but Jeremy Brett as Holmes and Edward Hardwicke as Watson are probably my first exposure to them on TV, and thus laser-burned into my consciousness.

Day 30 – Saddest character death

Daniel Jackson. All 132 times.

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Mirrored from Bum Scoop.

News and Infotainment

This week, I found myself loosely following (as much as I could, work being what it is) a couple of stories as they developed–which is odd for me lately as I’ve been acquainting myself with the news on a fairly casual basis. And, of course, it got me to thinking about news, “the good old days,” and so on, and I came to a few conclusions. Or, at least, mid-clusions.

One of the things I realized was that, before the internet and 24 hour news channels, there seemed to be two basic categories of the thing we call news. One was news, mostly reported after the fact, unless in truly extreme circumstances. The other was infotainment–People magazine, tabloids, and later shows like Access Hollywood. Fluffy pseudo-news that was, nonetheless, entertaining.

And these days it seems like the lines are quite blurred. In order to fill those 24 hours of programming, news channels have had to resort to either repeating the same stories ad infinitum, giving over their air-time to pundits and other Glennbeckian dickheads, and breaking in for wall-to-wall coverage of anything dramatic or interesting where they can get cameras. Balloon boy, for gratuitous instance, or most recently the Discovery Channel hostage taking. It seemed both of those were covered with the same breathless, unblinking saturation as 9/11.

So, I’m thinking I would like to see things break out into four categories: news, which would be a sort of prelude to history–stuff that’s been investigated and reported on, facts gathered and collated and verified before being published. Then there would be a sort of acknowledged “current events” that would leverage all the modern media and such, the 24 hour news stations, blogs and twitter and all that, to give people a live feed onto what’s going on right now, all the dramatic moments that they crave. Then you’d have the old opinion and editorials, complete with the Becks and O’Reillys and Maddows and Olbermanns of the world, hashing it out amongst themselves. And then the celebrity fluff and infotainment.

If we could get everything shuffled off into those four channels, I would love it. But I don’t think the industry is going to do it on their own, since there’s money to be made blurring the lines, and I’d hate for the government to have any role categorizing the news.

But it’s a nice dream.

Mirrored from Bum Scoop.