davidklecha | Entries tagged with television

One of the other things that inspired my post on taking things a little slower was that I’ve taken to watching and rewatching streamed shows at a much slower pace than I’m used to, or most people do, altogether. Especially in my peer group and younger, there’s this almost unspoken understanding that when you rewatch something, or discover something several seasons in, you devour it in as short a time as possible. I remember doing that when I got the first three or four seasons of Stargate SG-1, years and years ago, sitting in my wife’s apartment, years before we were married, on Spring Break and just cycling through DVD after DVD.

And that was neat, and fun, because I had the time and I had an appetite for more of the story, more of the excitement.

Times being what they are, though, as a dad and husband and part-time writer and such, it’s a) nearly impossible to do that and b) by necessity, I’m discovering that I enjoy taking my time, even my first time through shows. Right now I’m working on watching Dr. Who (Nu Who, starting with Eccleston) and Farscape for the first time, and rewatching MacGyver, Stargate SG-1, and Burn Notice (though at some point all of those will turn into catch-ups as I lost the thread on all of them during their original runs). And I’m contemplating rolling on into Star Trek, X-Files, and a few others, eventually, at the same leisurely pace. (My one crushing disappointment, currently, is that I can’t seem to find Magnum PI streaming online, in its entirety anywhere.)

Obviously, this will take me a long time. Probably four years for Stargate SG-1 if I keep a steady once a week pace. But, honestly, that’s okay. I don’t get too torqued about spoilers (I know a TON about what happens in Who in the most recent seasons, so there’s not a lot of surprises there), and I don’t mind learning to savor some things again, giving me an opportunity to dwell on the episode I just watched for a while, without them all running together because I never watched them on their own. It will also, I hope, keep me from getting fatigued or exhausted with one show or another, which was a problem when I did watch a ton all at once, and I’ll be less likely to skip episodes that I have other-than-favorable memories of.

At any rate, this isn’t a manifesto or anything, but I would encourage you, gentle reader, to think about the way we interact with culture and consider whether a long-term thing might be ultimately more satisfying than a binge.

Mirrored from Bum Scoop.

I think we’re about halfway through the first season of Homeland, so it seems like a fine time to offer some impressions.

I was really excited about this show. It had Damien Lewis, an awesome actor who I think does not get nearly enough work, and he was playing a Marine and a veteran of Iraq, which certainly touches close to home, so to speak. It also had a premise that I felt held a lot of promise: you have this Marine who was a presumed-dead prisoner of Al Qaeda following his capture in the Iraq invasion. He’s found in Afghanistan, of all places, shortly after a CIA agent of dubious mental stability (played by Claire Danes) receives a warning that an American POW has been converted to the cause and made a terrorist. Naturally, she twigs to Brody, Damien Lewis’s character, after he’s rescued and starts a dangerous, quasi-official investigation into him starting from the moment he returns home.

I figured they could play this three ways, two of them being more interesting than the third. The first, was that Brody has not been turned at all. Yeah, he’s damaged. Sure, he’s rather angry at the Marine Corps and the government for seemingly giving him up for dead. But he’s no terrorist, and the real terrorists are using him as a pawn/stalking horse in their attempt to pull one over on the CIA and perpetrate a really nasty attack. All they intended to do was mess him up but good and plant the seed through Claire Danes and make the CIA chase their tails, distracting them from their real plans.

The second possibility is that Brody is sort of faking it as a turned terrorist. He can’t tell the truth to the CIA because they’ll only knock out a small part of the operation, and he thinks they could score a much bigger victory if he’s working as a sort of independent double agent–being a good mole/plant/whatever, but trying to work to undo the bad guys’ efforts from sorta-within. In there, there’s also the possibility that Damien Lewis suspects the CIA themselves of having a mole or a plant, so he can’t trust them with what he knows because the bad guys will just take him out and go on without him.

The third, and most boring possibility is that he really is a terrorist. The only way I think this could be redeemed is if they were setting him up to be a kind of Manchurian candidate, and there are powerful Americans behind the whole thing, using him through Al Qaeda, or whatever. Still, I think that’s still rather boring because it’s almost too straightforward. And the thing that makes me worry that they’re on this track is that they’ve portrayed certain moments which I think are ambiguous, but seem to be intended as shocking reveals of his true terroristic nature, such as an apparent conversion to Islam. I’m hoping it’s more nuanced than that, but for some reason I just don’t have that much faith in them.

Overall, the rest of the series has been pretty well done, and Damien Lewis, Claire Danes, and Mandy Patinkin (who has been offering up about a dozen reasons per episode for him to bail out at the end of this season or the next) have knocked out their respective roles. And the various subplots revolving around Brody reintegrating with his family and dealing with all the things he missed during the 8 years he was gone have been pretty engaging and well done (if a little obvious).

Ah well. We’ll see what the rest of the season brings. Good things, I hope.

Mirrored from Bum Scoop.

Right now, I’m working on a collaboration with another author, which is both very cool, and tunes me in to some of the issues that come along with it. Not that this project is encountering any particular problems, but inside the process it’s easier to see where the problems might come in.

It was timely, then, that I ran across a couple of things that people don’t typically think of as collaboration, but which most certainly are. And yet, I think people often hold these sorts of things to the same standard of narrative coherence that we expect from more focused entertainments, like books. I mean, with books and stories, you have (generally) at most a handful of people actively involved, and at the end of the day it’s primarily the responsibility of the author(s) to do the actual writing.

But when you have something like the convoluted narrative structure of LOST, which has literally dozens of collaborators–writers, directors, producers, and cast–is it really any surprise that there’s no way the final episode could really have paid off the prior 6 seasons? Which shouldn’t be to say that it’s not worth watching, and enjoying, either in discrete chunks or as a whole Massively Multi-authored Oeuvre, but should anyone really try to hold Martin and Linelof to the same standard? If Martin botches the ending to The Song of Ice and Fire, it’s on him and his editor, full stop. That the LOST finale failed to satisfy… is that Lindelof’s fault? Or Carlton Cuse? J.J. Abrams? Or maybe Matthew Fox? Or…?

And I think that’s definitely one of the limits of the newfound enthusiasm for the Season-Long Television Story, as opposed to the episodic or hybrid formats. Maybe you can maintain some narrative cohesion for a season or two, but after that things will slowly start to get entropic. I think the same thing happens with modern comic books, and why Marvel and DC have to throw out these annual, reality-bending shake-ups that shave off digressive or lame story elements brought in by rushed deadlines and unfocused (or hobbyhorse-riding) creators. Whatever editorial controls are in place, especially with the big tentpole characters, it’s insufficient to maintain any kind of consistency even over a year or two, much less the 50+ years so many of these characters have been kicking around.

But, in both TV and comics, the narrative consistency and cohesion aren’t the main draw (as they can be in books), so I don’t think it’s an issue anyone’s likely to solve any time soon–short of dramatically cutting down the length of TV seasons (though cable is having some success with that) or permakilling a lot of characters in comics and promoting their replacements.

Mirrored from Bum Scoop.

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.

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.

( Read the rest of this entry » )

Mirrored from Bum Scoop.

Yeah, I’m aware that I’m outrageously off the mark in terms of doing these day after day. Oh well.

Day 22 – Favorite series finale

There’s only a few series finales I’ve even seen, and most series that I really like have been killed before their time. So that leaves out a lot of awesome shows, like Firefly and Brisco, since they vanished before they even knew they needed a series finale. Others, I haven’t seen yet, like LOST (I know, I’m going to be way outside the traditional spoiler limit by the time I get around to seeing it).

One show that ended before its time, but had a great series finale (I thought) was Life. In case you haven’t seen it, this was a cop drama starring Damien Lewis (of Band of Brothers) and Sarah Shahi as LAPD Detectives. Lewis played Charlie Crewes, a former beat cop who had been wrongly accused and convicted of killing his friend and the friend’s family, then exonerated, and enriched by a settlement with the LAPD. Part of the settlement included allowing him back on the force, which of course not everyone was on board with. And, of course, he was somewhat secretly investigating who had framed him.

The show was quirky and rather beautiful. Sarah Shahi played Dani Reese who came pretty close to being my favorite female character of all time. Lewis played Charlie as pretty deeply damaged ex-con, who masks a lot of his damage with Zen quirkiness. Adam Arkin played Ted, a friend of Charlie’s from prison who had been an Enron-type executive, now charged with keeping track of the newfound wealth.

It was just a beautiful show, full of abrupt changes of direction, surprises, good crunchy stuff. And then… Leno decided he wanted the 10pm time slot to himself, and the show died before it had a chance to live. And I think, if you’ve ever seen the series finale, you may know what I mean when I say that I think the last couple of shots were intended as the first few shots of the third season, resolving the cliffhanger.

Instead, those are the ending of the series, as Charlie does the unexpected, giving himself up to a master criminal that has been plaguing them from early on and had captured Dani… then killing him, brutally, swiftly, and without remorse. For a show that had a lot of those sudden, unexpected moments, the series finale capped it all with a good one. Loved that show, and I’ll miss it very very nearly as much as I miss Brisco.

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Mirrored from Bum Scoop.

Day 21 – Favorite Ship

So, I’m guessing that the originator of the list means favorite relationship, canonical or otherwise, and not favorite spaceship. (Because that would be Serenity, duh.)

This was another easy one, actually. My favorite “I want them to be together forever” has always been JD & Elliot from Scrubs. I don’t quite know what it is about them–probably the sheer goofiness of the characters, especially as written in later seasons made them kind of perfect for no one other than each other. As much as supporting love interests would play to their goofiness, or tolerate it (looking at you, Keith!), it seemed like they were the only ones who could really play off one another in a constructive, hilarious way.

I was also amused that for a long time, I mis-remembered that their initial relationship lasted a really long time. When in fact it went all of one? two? episodes at most.

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Mirrored from Bum Scoop.

Day 20 – Favorite kiss

So, this is another of those very-TV-fan type categories, because, really… I just don’t know. But I’ll answer this in the spirit, rather than trying to pinpoint a specific scene. And this dips back to X-Files, because I can’t really think of many other TV relationships that I have been excited about, which is going to make tomorrow’s topic interesting.

Anyway, for years I think I’ve been mis-remembering the end of the eighth season of The X-Files, after Scully’s baby is born and they do that goofy three wisemen thing with the Lone Gunmen, there’s an embrace between Mulder and Scully. And I keep remembering it as a kiss, but I guess it’s not. I can’t find it in any videos or anything (and there’s LOTS of videos of Mulder and Scully set to schmoopy music), but there is one from the series finale.

What made it interesting, anyway, is that was the one “will they or won’t they” relationship that I really got invested in on television. I watched most of the shows in the latter seasons in their timeslot (since we lacked Hulu or even Netflix back then), and it was a very exciting thing for them to acknowledge the relationship, though in part I think that ultimately doomed the show. So, in lieu of my mis-remembered kiss, here’s the one that ends the entire series.

Day 01 – The Adventures of Brisco County Jr. (should never have been canceled)
Day 02 – The IT Crowd (show that you wish more people were watching)
Day 03 – Detroit 1-8-7 (favorite new show)
Day 04 – Stargate SG-1 (favorite show ever)
Day 05 – The Office (show you hate)
Day 06 – “Window of Opportunity” (favorite episode)
Day 07 – “Demons” (least favorite episode)
Day 08 – Mythbusters (everyone should watch)
Day 09 – Mulder sings “Shaft” (Best scene ever)
Day 10 – NCIS (show you thought you wouldn’t like)
Day 11 – Stargate: Atlantis (show that disappointed)
Day 12 – “The Chronicles of Meap” (episode you’ve watched more than 5 times)
Day 13 – Danger Mouse (childhood show)
Day 14 – Alexander Scott from I Spy (male character)
Day 15 – Samantha Carter (female character)
Day 16 – 1980s Detective Shows (guilty pleasure)
Day 17 – Band of Brothers (mini series)
Day 18 – Dr. Who (title sequence)
Day 19 – Firefly (TV show cast)
Day 20 – Mulder & Scully (Favorite kiss)
Day 21 – Favorite ship
Day 22 – Favorite series finale
Day 23 – Most annoying character
Day 24 – Best quote
Day 25 – A show you plan on watching (old or new)
Day 26 – OMG WTF? Season finale
Day 27 – Best pilot episode
Day 28 – First TV show obsession
Day 29 – Current TV show obsession
Day 30 – Saddest character death

Mirrored from Bum Scoop.

Day 18 – Favorite title sequence

Again with the “not sure if I have a favorite here” kind of thing. Because, yeah. Not so much a fan of TV that I fall in love with a title sequence. However, I did see something neat a couple weeks ago, and this seems like as good a place to share it as any. Every Dr. Who intro, since 1963:

Sadly, I don’t have much else to add, other than: this is pretty neat. And as soon as I post this, I will think of the show opening that I really really loved, but right now, it just ain’t coming to me.

( Read the rest of this entry » )

Mirrored from Bum Scoop.

Day 17 – Favorite mini series

Okay, hands-down no brainer on this one. The only mini-series I’ve ever watched as it happened, the only one I own, and the only one (obviously) I’ll rewatch at the drop of a hat:

Lonesome Dove.

Ha! Just kidding. What I meant to say was Band of Brothers. The series aired on HBO in late 2001, which was a very interesting time for anything war-related to be airing. But there you have it. Even outside of that context, I’d consider it one of the most brilliant things ever filmed, ever. I happened to be living with some fans of the Sopranos when it aired, and HBO put it on right after that show. I usually skipped the lead-in, but came in for the show itself, and I don’t think I missed an episode. And as the end of the final episode came up, a room full of maybe five or six guys sat around, staring at the ceiling, wondering how to sniffle without making a sound.

I still cry watching the last episode.

If you’ve never seen it, it’s a mini-series produced by Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg, based on Stephen Ambrose’s account of the men of Easy Company, 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division, who jumped on Normandy on D-Day and fought through the entire northern European campaign, ending the war finally in Austria. The series focuses on Maj. Richard Winters (played brilliantly by Damien Lewis), Capt. Lewis Nixon (played unexpectedly by Ron Livingston), Lt. Carwood Lipton (Donnie Wahlberg), and a core of the other men who were with the unit since its inception in training. Odd appearances are made by David Schwimmer as their first CO, Capt. Sobel, Simon Pegg as 1Sgt. Evans, and Jimmy Fallon as a 1st Lieutenant supplying them in the lead-up to Bastogne. Oh, and Tom Hanks as a dead body.

Basically, the show is brilliant. Every actor chosen, down to David Schwimmer was perfectly chosen for the role. The only minor exception is Simon Pegg being wasted in what is essentially a background role that disappears after the first episode (though, to be fair, at the time he was a small-time British TV actor). The locations are perfect, the action is breathless, and the stories are masterfully told. Although it only happened to me in a very tiny way, my heart absolutely goes out to Pvt. David Webster in the episode “The Last Patrol” where he is treated almost as an outsider for having missed the Battle of Bastogne due to being wounded shortly before. The episode “Bastogne” itself is at devastating look at the life of Eugene Roe, company medic, as he tries to deal with the daily grind of dealing with the wounded and ill during that harsh winter in and around the beseiged city. And “Points” is just incredible, wrapping up the whole series.

Aaaaaaaand now I want to go watch it again. Sigh.

( Read the rest of this entry » )

Mirrored from Bum Scoop.

Day 16 – Your guilty pleasure show

So, I struggled with this one until about a minute ago, because I just couldn’t really think of anything that I was in any way ashamed of or anything like that. I mean, again, I just don’t watch enough TV that I either worry about what other people think of my viewing habits, or to waste time trying to acquire the taste for things that people might think out of my wheelhouse, so to speak.

But then, I started thinking of classes of shows. The first one that popped to mind was 1990s TV sci-fi, most of which was produced in Vancouver. Stargate SG-1, Hercules/Xena, X-Files, Farscape, Space: Above & Beyond, and so on. Most of it seems to have the same production values, so the same vague “look,” and it kind of screams to me of a sort of homey Saturday afternoon watching syndicated science fiction on Fox or something. But then, most of my friends tend to love that kind of stuff like I do, so it’s not really a guilty pleasure.

What I came up with, instead was: 1980s detective shows. There’s probably a strong nostalgia element here, because I remember watching Magnum PI as a kid and loving that show, not to mention MacGyver which I tend to think of in the same vein. And later on I discovered stuff that I would consider of the same class: Simon & Simon, Riptide, and so on. (Simon & Simon even had a Magnum PI crossover.) I remember enjoying those so much, being so entertained by the blend of action, mystery, and humor.

And looking around now, it seems like one of those things that’s almost completely gone, which might really make it a guilty pleasure. The only shows I can think of that come close, right now, are Psych and Burn Notice. Nothing on broadcast TV, except maybe Chuck?, really comes close. Instead, the neverending stream of CSI clones and police procedurals. Nothing wrong with those, as such, but that they’ve kind of elbowed out the kind of detective shows I really like. Well, maybe they’ll cycle around.

And as a bonus…

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Mirrored from Bum Scoop.

Ooof. The weekend did a number on me, I tell you what.

Day 15 – Favorite female character

So, I’m going to take an easy out on this one, although there are all kinds of GREAT female characters out there. Scully, Kate Beckett, Dani Reese, Janet Frasier, Vala Mal Doran, Aeryn Sun, Dixie Cousins, Caitlin Todd, and on and on.

But, my all-time, hands down, no shit favorite is and may always be Samantha Carter. And one of the reasons I’m going back to the SG-1 well for this is, apparently, there is a faction of SG-1 fandom that thinks she is pure evil and, literally, should be killed by the other characters in the show. I have no idea why, and I can’t fathom the hate for the character. I really can’t.

Anyway, in the story she’s a somewhat improbable Air Force officer (though, aren’t they all?) astrophysicist who had been one of the anonymous worker bees in the background of the original movie. She joins the lead exploration team and is often the source of the technical know-how (and technobabble) for the team. And she kicks butt. But she’s not an unrealistic non-stop ass-kicker. And she’s gorgeous.

The only real disappointment is that, with the departure of O’Neill from the team, that she didn’t get a chance to lead it entirely on her own. She get her own command, of course, in Stargate: Atlantis, but I would have preferred to see her in charge, taking charge of the team.

( Read the rest of this entry » )

Mirrored from Bum Scoop.

Day 14 – Favorite male character

This is a pretty tough one, since I don’t get into favorite characters, even more than I don’t get into heavy show fanaticism. Which might make a few of these questions a little boring, but what the hell. And there’s a lot of candidates from shows I’ve already mentioned: Brisco County Jr., Jack O’Neill, Daniel Jackson, Teal’c, Mulder, Jethro Gibbs, Danger Mouse…

But I think I’ll go with Alexander Scott, as played by Bill Cosby, in the old TV series I Spy. He was a very cool character, especially for his times, when I’m not sure there was such a thing as a black spy in that genre, much less one of many languages and Harvard educated and such. I always thought that was a rather nice touch to a character that, from my perspective, didn’t seem all that groundbreaking, but for 1965 must have been.

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Mirrored from Bum Scoop.

Boy, am I talking a lot about TV or what?

Anyway. This past weekend, the Detroit Free Press had interviews with Michael Imperioli and Erin Cummings, two stars of the upcoming cop drama series. I realize that the kind of things they’re saying in the interview are the kinds of things they would be saying about just about any town at the launch of a new location-produced show, but it is such a big deal for Detroit, that I think it’s cool that ABC is obviously making an effort to appeal to the people of Metro Detroit. The city has gone through so much, it’s kind of neat to see a couple of actors say that they want to keep the show alive and keep working in the area through the long haul.

Mirrored from Bum Scoop.

Day 11 – A show that disappointed you

I don’t often get excited about TV shows. See all the business in the previous entries about not being a huge fan of TV in general, but there are a few that I have anticipated eagerly. Star Trek: The Next Generation, for instance. Firefly. Deep Space Nine. I’m trying to think of something not science fiction and pretty much failing. Anyway, the point is, if I don’t get that excited, it’s hard to be disappointed. I just shrug and move on.

But there are a couple. I wish Heroes had been better after the first season. My personal theory is that they shot themselves in the foot at the end of the first season by not doing something definitive with Sylar and opening the playing field up a bit more for new antagonists. I felt pretty early in the second season that he would just sort of hang over the whole enterprise, and I didn’t like that, so I stopped watching. Apparently, for my reasons and others, I wasn’t wrong to do so.

The biggest, I think, though had to be Stargate: Atlantis. I really… really wanted that to be better. And mostly it just sucked. Starting with a character who was created to be the opposite of Samantha Carter (who is rightly beloved by many if, strangely, not all) in Rodney McKay, and making his whiny, egotistical, cowardly self part of the focus of the show. Move on through the decision to give most of the characters those dumbass, quasi-Star Trek uniforms (which I notice are nowhere to be seen on Stargate: Universe, hooray), and carry on through a host of seriously questionable choices by the characters that are, at times, meant to be heroic.

And seriously? What is it with this franchise and black Marines? First there’s Lt. Johnson in the fourth episode of the first season of SG1, where he’s the first one to succumb to the evolutionary-regression silliness, then there’s Lt. Ford in Atlantis, who has to get abducted by the bad guys at the end of the first season and turned into some mega asshole drug addict barely-a-guest-star, and then there’s MSgt. Greer on SGU, who is introduced to the audience in lock-up. Seriously? What the fuck?

Anyway, for those reasons, and really so many more, I think SGA is and maybe always will be my biggest disappointment.

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Mirrored from Bum Scoop.

Day 08 – A show everyone should watch

This is really simple and really easy. Everyone should watch Mythbusters. It’s gotten a little more sensational in recent seasons, a little less science-y maybe, but really. Everyone. Should. Watch. Mythbusters.

And then they can stop sending me e-mail forwards about the hilarious true story of the guy who strapped a JATO rocket to his car and smeared himself across a mountainside. Or whatever. But mostly they should watch for the science. Look kids, it’s two guys who aren’t scientists, doing science! It applies to their lives as special effects guys! How amazing is that?

And since I have nothing else to say than that, have my favorite Mythbusters explosion of all time. Of all time!

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Mirrored from Bum Scoop.

Day 07 – Least favorite episode of your favorite show

So, again, there are a few worthy candidates here. Some would say that most of the first season is a good one, but I have a soft spot for the first season. They really tried to make every episode stand alone, and yet there’s only a couple of episodes that don’t have any bearing on future installments and story arcs. As bad as “The Broca Divide” was, for instance, they pretty much ignored the bullshit science later on, but used the notion of a people grateful for SG-1′s help, offering to house refugees and such in later episodes. For that alone, I’ll give that episode a pass. (Still in the bottom ten, especially for the bit where the black Marine is the first to succumb to the planet’s crazy-making evolutionary-regression illness, but hey.)

Anyway, also a good candidate are episodes like “Frozen” and “Nightwalkers” from Season 6 which seemed to have been lifted whole from the reject pile in the X-Files writers’ room.

I think the worst, though, in terms of just plain annoying, is “Demons” from the third season. It posits–contrary to the show’s premise–that some folks were plucked from medieval Europe and settled as slaves on another planet, and hung on to the medieval culture, marking all travelers through the gate as “demons.” This might have been handled well with another director, but unfortunately it was directed by Peter DeLuise who, while I’m sure he did many great things for the show, also seems to be the guy who took it the least seriously. (If you’re so inclined, listen to just one of his director’s commentaries on the DVDs. Half his comments are along the line of “And that’s Christmas lights in some black velvet! Is this whacky sci-fi or what!?”) And so you get episodes like this, completely forgettable and basically annoying. I mean, at least “The Broca Divide” and “Spirits,” for instance, had stuff in them you could argue about, and left some kind of impression. “Demons” is the episode I have to keep reminding myself even exists.

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Mirrored from Bum Scoop.

Day 06 – Favorite episode of your favorite TV show

So, there’s a few contenders for favorite episode. “Wormhole X-Treme!” and “200″ are almost a single, awesome episode, marking the 100th and 200th installments in the series. “Threads” is a great pseudo-series-finale, and “Moebius Pt. 1 & 2,” is a great follow-up movie to the series finale. The series really should have stopped there, but “Bad Guys” is a pretty hilarious 10th season episode, and “Unending” is a fantastic actual series finale. All of them deserving, as are a dozen others, but I’m going to go with the episode that sucked me in to the show when I first saw it, muted, years and years ago.

Window of Opportunity, as I mentioned the other day, is the series’ “Groundhog Day” episode. In it, the team goes to a planet and meets with an alien archaeologist another team met on a previous trip. Interestingly only to me, this is one of the earlier indications that there is human gate travel outside of the SG teams and their enemy the Goa’uld. That gets explored more later in the series, but it was kind of an odd, yet uplifting note, to this episode.

Anyway, it turns out the archaeologist is really working some shenanigans, trying to make an Ancient time travel device work, and in the process he starts up a loop that everyone but he, Jack, and Teal’c get caught up in. The show takes some predictable turns, in terms of the inevitable realization that nothing they do will have consequences, along with some hilarious bits of them learning to juggle, or the usually somewhat dim and uninterested Jack correcting Daniel’s translation of the Ancient language. Of course, they manage to convince the rest of the team that they’re stuck in a loop (each and every time), and finally do break out of it. But this episode tends to show off a lot of the things it does well, like the team dynamic, mixing light and heavy, and being able to consciously engage with genre tropes. More than once, in the episode, someone references or otherwise points out what usually happens in these kinds of movies/TV episodes, usually for comedic effect.

So, it’s got a warm and fluffy place in my heart for a couple of reasons, and it’s not surprising that it has consistently been among fans’ absolute favorite episodes.

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Day 05 – A show you hate

There’s a couple classes of show I hate, almost universally, and will simply never watch no matter how awesome people tell me it is.. One is the half-hour sitcom, which I just don’t have any time for. Part of it is that the shows so often rely on the device of a character’s abject humiliation for its humorous punch, and that, as they say, is one of my squicks. I don’t know what it is, but I hate to see people humiliated for humor, especially when the situation is contrived, Rube-Goldberg-esque, to humiliate them. Probably the number one reason why I could not stand Meet the Parents. Drove me up the wall. Too many sitcoms of my youth were built around that, and I just don’t have the time or spare mental energy to waste on it. I’d rather just watch Old Spice Guy Isaiah Mustafa answer questions than sit through an episode of Two and a Half Men.

The other is reality shows. Do I need to say more? Do I? Hate ‘em all. Unholy mix of mockumentary and game show.

So… I guess if you had to pin me down, I would say probably The Office. To me, painfully unfunny and not worth watching for any genuine bits that might be mixed in there somewhere. There’s a lot more that I don’t like at all, and Seinfeld is probably the close runner-up, with Law & Order: SVU, Battlestar Galactica, Stargate Atlantis, and several others vying for the top 10 of shows I loathe. But The Office tops them all.

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Day 04 – Your favorite show ever

So, I’m not typically a very fannish sort, especially when it comes to TV. I just don’t get deeply invested in shows, even shows that one might say I really, really enjoy. Just not part of my matrix or something.

Stargate SG-1, for whatever reason, blew that sensibility out of the water. I still didn’t start writing fanfic or making homemade music videos or anything, but through the first 8 seasons, it’s the sort of show that I could just pop in a DVD and sit down for a day and watch them. Which is, in fact, how I watched the first five seasons or so, on consecutive days, for quite a while.

I don’t remember when I first became aware of the show–I remember seeing the movie in the theater and enjoying it quite a bit–but one night my girlfriend (now wife) and I went to hang with some people at a bar in downtown Grand Rapids. And Stargate SG-1, for some reason, was on one of the bar TVs. I couldn’t hear what was going on, but I could tell that it was the Groundhog Day episode of the series, “Window of Opportunity,” just from the visual cues.

And I was in love.

I don’t know what it was that struck such a chord with me. It might have been Richard Dean Anderson playing against type as a wise-cracking, kinda dumb, let’s-blow-shit-up military officer. Or it might have been the “team” aspect of the show, or something like that. I think the things I point to the most, however, are the kinda hybrid nature of baddie-of-the-week and overarching mythology, and the blend of action and drama and humor. I liked, especially, how it was obvious that the show seemed to operate in an environment where things did carry over, but not every episode had to focus on the big questions and big story.

Until the 9th & 10th seasons, for the most part, which is why this isn’t on my list as a show that should never have been canceled. In fact, I would have loved if they had directly spun off the series into an idea that some had floated, called “Stargate Command” which would feature the same characters to begin with, but would give them the opportunity to transition in other actors, transition out the mainstays if they wanted, and keep things fresh. But, apparently, Sci-Fi Channel wanted its 10 season behemoth, so… we got those seasons, which seem like kind of a mistake to me. Except for the 200th episode, which is freaking hilarious, and a handful of others, here and there.

Anyway, back to why I love it so much. So, another aspect I loved about it is that it seemed like the perfect Saturday afternoon syndicated science fiction show. Probably it and Farscape really fill that role well, and there’s stuff for everyone (it seems), or at least every mood, in SG-1. I never watch it that way, one episode a week, though I’ve toyed with that idea as a weird sort of rewatch. Would take me years to get through all of them, but… it seems like a nice, slow way to go through it.

The only problem is, whenever I rewatch the series, I tend to stall out right before some of the show’s more embarrassing episodes, especially in the second season. But, I should remember, there is stuff to appreciate about the show, even in the worst episodes. Which is probably also why I love it so much.

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Mirrored from Bum Scoop.

Bum Scoop

The Klecha Undeground

TV Rewatches the Old Fashioned Way

Homeland

An Ideal Number of Authors

News and Infotainment

Days 23-30 of 30 Days of TV Shows

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More Detroit 1-8-7

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