Tag: Teevee

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Something. On Television.

Some random notes on teevee I’ve been watching of late:

:: This is surely going to go down as American Idol‘s worst season. It’s been awful. Just awful. We’re down to the final 11 now, but even when they were in the final 24, it was clear that there were only two or three strong contestants and a whole bunch of singers ranging from “Meh” to “OMG please put down the microphone before you kill again”. And that was before one of the truly unique and impressive singers, Lilly Scott, was eliminated before she even got to the final 12.

If the job of those very highly paid judges is to pick the best singers before it gets to the “America votes” stage, how did they end up with such a bad crop? Were the asleep at the wheel? Is Simon Cowell trying to guarantee that Idol goes under in his last season?

:: Castle is now officially one of my favorite shows. I’m still not caught up on all episodes this season — I’m six or seven behind, but I’ll get there — but I just love this show. I love its sense of humor, the wonderful chemistry between Nathan Fillion and Stana Katic, the supporting players (both Richard Castle’s mother and daughter and the other cops at the precinct), the creative murders they solve, and so on. I also love the sly pop cultural references in the show, such as Castle dressing up as a “space cowboy” for Halloween (in the costume Fillion had worn on Firefly), and Castle’s comment when someone compares him to a teevee detective: “Well, the ones I’ve seen tend to be oddly obsessed with their sunglasses.”

Oh, and well — Nathan Fillion. And Stana Katic. Wow.

:: The Office still has lots of gonzo, funny moments, but I think the show’s definitely on the wane. It has strained credulity one too many times for me, and the character dynamics have shifted a bit too much for the show to go back to what it once was. The writers are giving it the old college try, however, by abandoning the “Jim and Michael as co-managers” thing and by giving Michael a new set of corporate foils to buck heads against.

I did like the episode in which Pam gave birth; it was a welcome return to Jim being the island of sanity in the midst of sheer craziness, and his exasperation as Pam enmeshed him in her own brand of insanity, when she is usually his sane partner in crime, was priceless. That episode also yielded what I consider to be one of the best lines in the entire run of the series, when, during a discussion of how Pam’s labor can be helped along, Kevin offers the sage advice, “Stick spicy food up her butt!”

:: Still liking The Mentalist, although not as much as Castle. I still would love to see Patrick Jane be wrong once or twice. But I could look at Robin Tunney all day!

:: As much as I loved the show in its original setting, I must admit that I have not been watching the “revamped” Scrubs. I caught a few episodes, early on, and…well, I don’t know. If they’d kept the show at Sacred Heart and rotated in new cast members every so often, as teaching-hospital shows tend to do, maybe it would have worked, but the episodes I watched struck me as a higher-quality AfterMASH.

:: Grey’s Anatomy is still all kinds of terrific. For one thing, the one character I loathed, Izzie Stevens, is gone. (I don’t like Kathering Heigl, the actress who played Stevens, either, but that’s neither here nor there.) The show’s predilection for having each character eventually sleep with each other character gets a bit odd at times, but what I really appreciate about Grey’s is the way the ensemble gets shaken up on occasion by the addition of a character here, a character there, kind of the way ER used to do things; but where ER would keep bad characters around for way too long, the Grey’s Anatomy producers seem to have a pretty good handle on getting rid of characters who just aren’t working as quickly as possible. I appreciate that. Grey’s is as strong as ever.

:: I’m almost hooked on The Big Bang Theory. Its timeslot is awful — it airs while I’m reading to the kid, so I miss a bunch of it. But what I’ve seen is awfully clever and hilarious.

:: The Amazing Race continues to entertain. The Celebrity Apprentice does too. What I’ve seen of Survivor does not. Somebody at CBS really wants to give that moron Rob from Boston a million dollars, huh? He’s been on The Amazing Race twice and Survivor three times now.

That’s about it. I’ve got some reruns to watch!

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I heart Miranda Bailey

I’ve been watching Grey’s Anatomy ever since somewhere around the midway point in its first season, and in all that time, Dr. Miranda Bailey has been one of my favorite characters. The show’s focus tends to remain on Meredith Grey and the original surgical interns who worked under Bailey, but Bailey often steals the show and often provides the show’s grounding during its odder flights of fancy.

So, Bailey was originally one of my favorite characters on the show. And then, after several seasons, this moment took place, involving a teenage kid who had tried to impress a girl by jumping into a pool of cement, not realizing that he’d jumped into quick-drying cement:

The wisdom of Star Wars!

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Lowering the bar a bit, are we?

Here’s part of the AOL welcome screen that greeted me this morning:

Eight is Enough. “Classic” episode.

Sometimes the world scares me. Eight is Enough? Classic episode?! Are we now defining “classic” teevee as “that which was originally televised more than thirty years ago”? Because, if we are, the whole notion of shark-jumping is in for some unfortunate revision….

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Why HDTV was invented

Back when we first got our flatscreen HD television, a bit less than a year ago, everybody told me that two things justified the purchase: movies, and televised sports. Now, with movies, this is clearly the case. Sports, I suppose; the only sport I watch much at all anymore is football, and it certainly does look better in HD, especially in a widescreen format so when the players are lining up, I can even see what the safeties are up to. (With the Bills, they’re usually gesturing back and forth to see if the other knows where he should be, and then falling back as deeply as possible so as to allow opposing receivers to get ten yards of forward progress before they’re even touched.)

Well, there’s another reason. As is our New Year’s tradition here at Casa Jaquandor, we watched the Great Performances PBS telecast of the annual New Year’s From Vienna concert on New Year’s night, as we’ve done for years. (I actually started watching this concert while I was in high school.) The concert — performed by the Vienna Philharmonic under a different guest conductor each year — is always accompanied by wonderful photography and dance in and around various locations in Vienna, relating to the history of that great city and of Austria during the time of the Strauss family. It’s always been a gorgeous thing to watch, but this year was the first time we got to watch the concert in HD, and it was more than gorgeous: it was revelatory. Details from the Musikverein and the other locales just burst from the screen. The telecast was just amazingly beautiful, in a way I’d never appreciated before in the more than twenty years I’ve been watching this concert every year.

The musical part of the performance, by the way, was first rate in every way. The conductor was Frenchman Georges Pretre, and he made the effervescent elegance of the Strauss music shine forth so amazingly that the notes themselves seemed to sparkle. How I wish I could attend this concert in person, just one time! Here are two of the numbers from that concert, the most famous final two encores. I was unable to find a video of the first that includes the wonderful tradition in which the first notes are interrupted by applause, prompting the conductor to address the audience with a brief New Year’s message, but the music itself is the thing. Here is On the Beautiful Blue Danube, accompanied this year not by ballet dancers but with a photographic journey along the Danube from its source to its mouth at the Black Sea:

And here’s the final encore, by tradition the final piece played every year. Also traditional is the rhythmic clapping, directed to loudness or softness by the conductor. The Radetzky March:

Just wonderful music making.

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Scrubbing back in….

Scrubs returns to the air tonight, but it will look significantly different than it did in its previous eight seasons: only three of the old cast regulars will be regulars on the new season (Turk, Dr. Cox, and the new intern last year dubbed ‘Jo’ by JD). Joining them will be a new cast, but other old regulars will apparently turn up in guest shots throughout the season. In addition, the show’s setting is changed, from Sacred Heart Hospital to a medical school where Turk and Cox are, I presume, teaching.

Has there ever been a show that returned but with a shell of its original cast and in a completely new setting? I don’t remember one…and the closest analog I can come up with is the M*A*S*H follow-up spinoff, AfterM*A*S*H. I’ll give the revamped Scrubs a shot, but…I don’t know. We’ll see how this goes….

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Shouldn’t some developer have built a strip mall there by now?

SamuraiFrog points out that today is the 40th anniversary of Sesame Street. Wow. That means that the show was only a few years old when I was a part of its core audience. My memory of that period of my life is admittedly vague, but I recall being distinctly upset when it seemed like most of the day was gone and Sesame Street was still a few hours away from being on teevee. (I think it was on at 4:00 or something like that.) My era was, of course, pre-Elmo. I had no idea who Elmo even was until The Daughter came of the age to watch the show, and I remember thinking, “What the hell is ‘Elmo’s World’ all about? Did somebody drop some bad acid or something when they came up with this character?” There’s a lot in Sesame Street for adults to find enjoyable while the kids eat it up, but really, Elmo ain’t one of them.

But anyway, here are some clips from the show over the years. Here’s Nathan Lane, singing what may be the show’s signature song, called “Sing”:

Lots of other celebrities have shown up on the show to do musical numbers with the various Muppets in attendance. Here’s Gloria Estefan doing the same song, partly in Spanish (and looking very cute in overalls!):

REM came on to do this take on one of their own signature tunes:

One of the coolest guys in history came on the show, Johnny Cash:

I suppose it’s typical that all of my favorite Sesame Street moments involve music. Here’s the earliest appearance on the show of “Mahna Mahna”:

Of course, the definitive rendition of “Mahna Mahna” would later be done by The Muppet Show, but this is pretty cool too.

Here’s classic Kermit the Frog:

And hey, what is the name of that song, anyway?

Sesame Street‘s sense of humor was a lot stranger back in the day, when they’d use trippy animations to teach lessons about sneezing:

Or when they’d demonstrate subtraction using cream pies:

And, of course, one of the most famous clips in the show’s history, when the producers had to figure out how to address death:

Happy anniversary, Sesame Street, and thanks for the memories.

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Everyone here is highly gruntled.

SamuraiFrog on The Office so far this season:

Last week’s episode of The Office was the best this season. I liked the wedding episode, but the “mafia” episode was a real dud. There were a lot of people out there screaming about shark-jumping, which I thought was premature. Besides, you can’t even claim a show jumped the shark at a certain point until at least a half-season has gone by: the phrase is about the overall effect, not immediate bitching about something that pissed you off. There’s a new phrase for that: “nuking the fridge.” That’s when you idiotically whine about how a series that features Nazis being melted by the power of God, a man surviving a fall from a plane in a raft, a guy having his heart ripped out of his chest and continuing to live, and a man simply walking off a gunshot wound after drinking from the Holy Grail is suddenly unrealistic because a guy survives a nuclear blast inside of a lead-lined refrigerator.

OK, them’s fightin’ words! Well, not really, but I do disagree with some of this, so here are my points of contention with My Right Honorable Friend.

While I haven’t opined that The Office has engaged in shark-jumping, I’ve wondered if it might be getting close to doing so, because for me, the show’s best moments — and there have been so, so many — have all been grounded in a strong sense of believability. We’ve all known bosses who are like Michael Scott: amiable, and even good at their original position, but utterly inept at management and who only succeed by virtue of the good people they have under them. We’ve all known managers who stay employed almost inexplicably: “How can the higher-ups not see this stuff going on?!” Michael is that boss, and The Office has followed the tried-and-true comedy strategy of taking something very familiar and simply dialing up the intensity just enough to allow for absurdity.

The problem, for me, is that the absurdity has usually been still believable on some level. The least successful episodes have all involved incidents in which Michael, or someone else, did something that I’m pretty confident would get them fired in nearly any real-life workplace. I remember a few seasons back when the Scranton office got flooded with the just-relocated members of the now-closed Stanford branch, and Michael outed one of the new people as a felon and humiliated another who was extremely fat. Or the episode where Michael “outed” Oscar as gay. Those episodes left bad tastes in my mouth, because things just wouldn’t return to normal after incidents like that, unless we’re talking about a very poorly run company indeed.

My problem this year is that so far it feels like the air of plausibility around The Office is feeling strained. Michael and Jim as co-managers? I’ve never seen any kind of co-manager scenario, except in a couple of cases where one manager was being transferred out but his “effective” date at the new place wasn’t for a week or two. Long-term co-managers? I don’t see how any workplace would try this.

Likewise, Jim and Pam in the same office. I have never heard of a workplace where this is allowed: a person allowed to work in an office where their spouse is their direct superior. This has already reared its ugly head on the show, in an episode where Michael and Jim had to decide which employees got raises and which didn’t. That kind of thing is a giant can of worms, and each week it goes on, I find it hurts the believability of the show.

My biggest problem with the show’s direction right now, though, isn’t about plausibility but about character. Dwight Schrute is one of the show’s signature creations, but so far this year, especially with the promotion of Jim, I fear that the writers are going too far with Dwight. They’re perilously close to making him not a very odd and paranoid character, but an outright malevolent one. I found the sadistic glee Dwight showed in bugging Jim’s office almost out-of-character.

However, I could still be wrong. It could be that the writers are setting up some storylines here. I hope so.

(On SamuraiFrog’s “nuking the fridge” comment, I do object there on the grounds that with the exception of the liferaft-from-the-airplane thing, the Indiana Jones moments he cites are all instances of something literally magical happening in the movies. Sure, I can accept the power of God melting the Nazis, because that’s the power of God. Sure, I can accept a sacrificial victim still living after his heart’s been plucked out, because that’s the power of the evil sorcerer-priest. Ditto the Hole Grail. There is no magic at work in the fridge-nuking, which is why that scene doesn’t work. It’s the same with the airplane jump: there’s nothing magical going on there, so all we have to go on in terms of plausibility is our own experience. Suspension of disbelief is a hard thing to get a handle on, sometimes.)

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A few random teevee thoughts….

Just a few quick thoughts from some recent teevee viewing:

:: I understand why FOX had to do it, but geez, going from final three to the winner of Hell’s Kitchen in a single two-hour episode really seems rushed to me. In the past, the final two have had a two-hour show (or a two-parter) to themselves. (FOX’s scheduling bit the show in the arse — FOX runs the Major League Baseball playoffs, which are going on now, so it was either wrap HK up faster than usual, or have it go away for three weeks and then have the finale later on. They opted for the former, and I don’t blame them.)

:: The most recent episode of The Amazing Race had what had to be the most crushing defeat for a team in the show’s history. A team (a guy and his friend or brother, can’t recall which, who has Asperger’s) reaches the Pit Stop first — only to discover, minutes later, that they’ve lost one of their passports. This means they are no longer officially checked in, and have to go back onto the race course (which for this episode is in Cambodia) and look for the passport, find it, and then return to the Pit Stop. If they fail to get back before all other teams check in, they’re eliminated. They didn’t find the passport. Exit the team. Ouch.

(Oh, and so far, the show’s roadblocks and detours haven’t been as much fun as the more gonzo previous season, which had my two favorite tasks to date — the hauling of giant cheeses and the Austrian beer-hall pie throwing.

:: I’m enjoying Grey’s Anatomy as much as ever, although I do hope they introduce some new blood soon. The show’s ratings appear to be sliding, though. I’m not sure why.

:: I loved Jim and Pam’s wedding on The Office, but I wonder if the show isn’t reaching something of a tipping point. One of the show’s great strengths to me has been its believability, for the most part; it takes normal office dynamics and seemingly amps them up just a little, often for hilarious effect. Still, there have been moments in the show’s history that stood out as too unbelievable to swallow, and I’m seeing a trend of more of that kind of thing going on. Specifically, I hope the writers address the problem inherent in having Jim being an office manager where his wife works as a subordinate. Every company I’ve ever worked for had rules against this type of situation. We’ll see.

:: Thank God 30 Rock is back on, because that means there are two funny shows on NBC on Thursdays. Community and Parks and Recreation just don’t amuse me in the slightest, I’m sorry to say.

:: I’m noticing that, in watching reruns of The Family Guy, which The Daughter enjoys for some reason, the only times I really laugh invariably involve either Stewie or the talking dog. That’s it. Peter? Lois? The two older kids? They could vanish from the show. But Stewie and the talking dog really do amuse me with some of their antics and banter.

:: I still have yet to watch the first few episodes of House, Dollhouse, or Castle, which I hadn’t even realized had started already. Oops. I also want to look forward to 24 this year, but the way last season got started so strongly and then petered out in the last quarter of the season gives me pause. But then I’ll look into the eyes of FBI Agent Renee Walker again, and that’ll be that.

:: I renew my wish that Patrick Jane, on The Mentalist, would be completely wrong some time. I’m starting to get a bit bored by the show’s formula of unmasking the killer in Act IV, and then having Jane indicate that he figured it out way back in Act I. I also wish they’d quit having Jane be right at the expense of the wondrous-to-gaze-upon Agent Lisbon.

:: At The Store, some wonderfully benevolent soul has changed the teevees in our cafe from FOX News to the Food Network. That’s always a fine development.

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Some TeeVee Notes

Some stuff on teevee of late:

:: I make no apologies at all for my continuing love for Grey’s Anatomy, which is now entering its sixth season. The show’s ensemble continues to be strong, although I still seriously dislike Izzie Stevens (and I disliked her character even before it turned out that actress Katherine Heigl is a complete self-absorbed flake). I like how the show has modified its ensemble a little at a time, adding a character here and subtracting a character there; this maintains chemistry a lot more effectively than the approach taken by ER, which would introduce new characters in bunches, many times with less than stellar success. Sure, Grey’s is pure soap opera, but sue me. I like it.

One thing about the recently-concluded “Death of George O’Malley” storyline bugged me, though. George was one of the original cast of surgery interns at Seattle Grace Hospital, all the way back from the show’s start, but the actor who played him decided to leave, so George was killed off (in pretty grisly fashion, I might add). But before his horrific fatal accident, George had spent much of last season discovering that his major surgical skill was for trauma: his ability to think quickly and maintain his composure, and so on. George found his calling to such an extent that, an episode or two before the season finale, he joined the Army.

And with the exceptions of two characters, everybody on the show reacted as though this was the most horrible decision George could have possibly made. Everyone acted as though it was foregone conclusion that George would be killed in Iraq, everyone acted as though joining the Army was an automatic death sentence. I could see some of his friends reacting that way, but it bothered me that only one person actually said that they thought it was admirable and heroic.

Oh well. I’m still watching.

:: I really need to get off my arse and watch Season One of Dollhouse.

:: I suppose I should give Flash Forward a try, although I was kind of prejudiced against it by the fact that it seemed like every website I frequent other than my own had an annoying Flash ad for the show that would swoop across the screen and obscure the content. I hate that!

:: I really enjoyed the first two episode of last season of Castle, and I look forward to watching more of this show. I need to get back up to speed.

:: I don’t like Parks and Recreation. It just isn’t that funny to me.

:: Wow…I haven’t watched any one of the CSIs this year, not even Miami. I guess I’m done with it.

:: I’m still enjoying The Mentalist, although I maintain that it would help things if Jane turned out to be wrong once in a while. But then, the show is probably able to slip all manner of plotholes past me whilst I gaze longingly at actress Robin Tunney.

:: Another year, another Amazing Race. This one had a pretty diabolical twist at the very beginning: the start line featured a challenge for the teams, and the last team to complete the challenge was eliminated from the Race on the spot. Wow. After that, it was the typical kind of thing; the teams were sent first to Japan where they appeared on one of those sadistic Japanese game shows and were required to eat something like a half-cup of wasabi in less than two minutes. The show’s still fun, but I do kind of wish they’d find a way to change up the format a bit.

That’s about it for the stuff I watch or don’t watch, thus far in the new season.

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