Tag: Teevee

Posted on

Dollhouse

So I watched the premiere episode of Joss Whedon’s new show Dollhouse. I’m pretty much resigned to the fact that the Friday night 9:00 pm timeslot, forever known as the Timeslot That Ate Firefly And Spit Its Bones Back Out To The Consternation of Geeks Everywhere, will soon claim Dollhouse as another victim. I hope the show gets at least enough of its episodes aired to make the investment of time worthwhile.

I liked the pilot episode, in that I saw more than enough to keep me coming back for more (at least for a few episodes), but it was still a problematic show. I’ve read that the FOX suits didn’t care for Whedon’s original pilot and made him come up with something new, somewhat on the fly, hence this episode, which was a bit of a mess. I think they attempt to establish a little too much going on with this episode, and the main storyline, involving a kidnapped little girl, ends up having a lot less impact than it could have.

For those who didn’t see it, Eliza Dushku stars as “Echo”, a young woman who is an “Active” for a shadowy organization called the “Dollhouse”. Actives are people whose personalities are erased and reprogrammed for various missions — called “engagements” — that come via very wealthy people who have need of such things. In this pilot episode, Echo is programmed as a hostage negotiator when a very wealthy man’s young daughter is kidnapped. Dushku plays this part fairly well, although frankly this storyline isn’t anything anyone who has watched a lot of teevee hasn’t seen before.

That’s not all that is going on, of course; every show these days must have a continuing “mythology”, and some of this is established here as well. Questions are raised about the nature of the Dollhouse organization, but obviously not answered: who owns it? Who funds it? What is its purpose? Where do they get their recruits? What exactly did Echo do to get recruited? What’s with the doctor with the scarred face? Who is her “handler”, anyway? Also, there is an FBI agent who is investigating the Dollhouse but who hasn’t yet even been able to verify its existence. What is his emotional stake in the Dollhouse? Why is he pursuing it? And who is the guy we see at the end of the episode, but only from behind, watching old DVD footage of Echo in her former, pre-Active life, while two bodies bleed out on the carpet behind him?

This pilot episode felt overstuffed, as a lot of such pilots do these days. Plus, the show lacked that typical Whedon punch in the dialogue; there’s not a lot of humor to be found in this episode. I hope that changes in the future. Plus, I’m not sure if following Echo’s adventures is going to be as involving as it should be, given that she will literally be displaying a new personality each week. We’ll see.

Share This Post

Posted on

Just testin’ out my hammer.

In the “Credit where due” department, I just have to give major props to the creative geniuses behind Scrubs. Apparently this is to be the show’s final season, and man, is it ever going out on a strong note. This season has been one terrific episode after another, each one filled with laughs and poignant insight that have been the show’s hallmark since it first aired. I love that they’ve found ways to keep Dr. Kelso relevant even though he’s retired, that they’re doing the logical things with Dr. Cox, that the new interns are turning out to be interesting characters in their own right, that JD and Turk still engage in all manner of craziness, that the Janitor continues his unique brand of lunacy, and that they’ve managed to come up with a convincing way to give Ted a girlfriend.

I am so going to miss this show when it ends, and ABC’s picking it up for one final glorious run almost gets that network off my hook for canceling Once and Again back in 2002.

And Sarah Chalke and Judy Reyes are just getting more and more beautiful! Wow, am I going to miss this show.

Share This Post

Posted on

The Trouble with Izzey

Anybody watch Grey’s Anatomy?

Anyway: I suspect that Izzey’s romance with Denny’s ghost is actually due to a tumor or some other kind of brain ailment in Izzey’s head. This will culminate in the season’s final episodes; Dr. Shepard (McDreamy) will have to operate on her to save her life. There will be a final scene, then, before the surgery, when Izzey will say her final goodbye to Denny. That’s what I think happens here.

(Although one possible hole in my theory is that the last episode specifically showed Denny sitting beside Alex, with Izzey out of the room. Now, Alex didn’t see Denny, but if Denny’s “existence” is dependent on Izzey’s brain ailment, how could he be sitting there addressing Alex?)

OK, I’m done. Carry on.

(Actually, I’m not done. I think Sara Ramirez, who plays Dr. Callie Torres, is really a very pretty woman, and I think that Chandra Wilson, who plays Dr. Miranda Bailey, consistently turns in the show’s best performances.)

OK, now I’m done.

Share This Post

Posted on

Some Thoughts on Contemporary Popular Culture

That’s actually a pretentious title for a post in which I’m going to geek out a bit. Huzzah! Back to the geekiness!

:: It did excite me that another attempt to bring everyone’s favorite Cimmerian, Conan the Barbarian, back to the big screen was in the offing. That excitement became past tense, however, when the big name most likely on board to direct turned out to be Brett Ratner, who has made a nice living out of making dull movies.

:: I’m actually enjoying Grey’s Anatomy this season, although I still think the show desperately needs another character or two. They’ve already added one — the new emergency medicine chief, who’s also an Iraq war vet with a penchant for maverick thinking — but another, cardiologist Dr. Erica Hahn, is about to depart, so that’s a wash. But the show’s generally been more interesting this year, what with backing off the constant fluctuations of the Meredith-and-Derek romance a bit, in favor of other characters. And Izzy Stevens hasn’t even gotten on my nerves yet, strangely enough, even after Katherine Heigl’s classless “Boy, did our writers suck last year!” rant last offseason.

:: I’m also really enjoying The Office, which has turned up the whole “office romance” thing about three notches, supplementing to the eternal sweetness of the Jim-and-Pam romance with Michael and the new HR woman, and the hilarious Dwight-Andy-Angela “triangle” (with Andy blissfully unaware that he’s even in a “triangle” to begin with).

There was a wonderful scene a few episodes ago that had Jim and Pam call each other on their cell phones at the exact same time, so each got the other’s voicemail, and they proceeded to leave each other messages that reflected the other, almost as if they were actually conversing. I love that show again.

:: My Name is Earl is still funny, but not side-splitting and not nearly as clever as it once was. I don’t think it’s done, but it’s definitely losing steam.

:: That Kath and Kim thing is awful. It reminds me of all those crappy sitcoms that NBC would trot out, one after the other every year, to take the timeslot between Friends and Seinfeld.

:: For campy fun, CSI: Miami is still your best bet. There’s not a thing to take seriously in that show. I love it.

:: On The Amazing Race, I picked out two teams to root for in the first minutes of the season premiere. So wouldn’t you know it: one of those teams got eliminated in that first show, and the other fell two weeks later. Oh well. There’s only one team that bugs me, and I don’t even hate them all that much. As far as who I’m rooting for, I’m not really sure. Maybe the Mom and her son. There’s certainly nothing like the Hippies to root for, or the Barbies to hate. And there’s certainly no Mirna, alas. This year’s edition did take us to New Zealand, home of host and gamerunner Phil, who introduced his dad to the contestants at that leg’s pit stop. Phil’s dad turns out to be a bit of a dirty old man, because when the team of pretty blonds arrived (eliminated later on), he gave them each a nice, lllooonnnggg hug. That’s how it’s done!

:: Wow, that covers just about all the regular teevee viewing I do anymore. Another few years, and unless I pick up some shows, I might be done with network stuff altogether. What else is there to look forward to? More boring lawyer shows from David E. Kelley?

:: Some photos arrived online from the set of the new Star Trek movie. I’m still not excited about this at all, given how tired Trek became in its last years as a going concern and also given my general lack of enthusiasm for JJ Abrams. And this isn’t helping: the new bridge of the Enterprise.

That looks to me like what I imagine Steve Jobs’s bedroom to look like, not the bridge for the Federation’s greatest starship. That’s not a place where you lock phasers on target, it’s where you go to upgrade your iPod. Ugh.

:: Apparently a fourth Pirates of the Caribbean movie is in the works, with Russell Brand said to be joining the cast as Captain Jack Sparrow’s brother. Who’s Russell Brand? Well, I dunno, but I’m game for more Pirates stuff, since I greatly dug the first three (even At World’s End, which a lot of people thought wasn’t so good). I do hope that the new film moves into a new story or set of stories for Captain Sparrow and the rest of the Black Pearl gang, since it seems to me the tale of Will Turner and Elizabeth Swann is wrapped up nicely.

:: Michael Crichton died last week. I never read any of his books, but I did see a number of movies made from them (I liked the first Jurassic Park, and not so much the second), and I was a big fan for many years of ER (which Crichton created) until it managed the impressive feat of jumping the shark twice in one year. Crichton’s global warming skepticism was disappointing, but nobody’s perfect.

That about covers it for right now.

Share This Post

Posted on

A bag of rocks?

So we watched It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown last week, as is our annual holiday tradition; I think I’ve watched that show every time it’s aired since college, and a lot of times before that, as a kid. But some things in it kind of bothered me this time – stuff I’ve noticed before but always made peace with.

Mainly, Charlie Brown is really treated like crap by his schoolmates, isn’t he? I mean, this kid gets the shit end of the stick in just about every scene in which he appears, so much so that it’s amazing he has any friends at all. After the brilliance that is A Charlie Brown Christmas, here poor Charlie is merely the butt of the joke every time he’s on the screen. In the Christmas show, Charlie Brown is ridiculed for his selection of a tree and he’s referred to as a blockhead, but he also manages to have a number of civil conversations with his classmates and they ultimately treat him well, in keeping with the spirit of the season.

In Great Pumpkin, though, most of the humor derives from a kind of meanness, doesn’t it? Even the first big laugh, Linus’s horror when Lucy stabs the pumpkin with the carving knife, is funny because Linus is so traumatized. But back to Charlie Brown: there’s the kicking-the-football bit; there’s the “Your name got put on the wrong list” bit when he gets a party invitation he wasn’t supposed to get; there’s the humiliating way the kids sketch their jack o’lantern pattern on the back of his head.

Now, all of that’s still funny, and I still laughed at a bit of it. (Well, not the invitation list joke; that’s always struck me as unfunny in a mean way.) But the trick-or-treating results this time really gave me pause. The joke is, of course, that at every house, while all the other kids get candy, each time Charlie Brown gets a rock. It occurred to me, watching the show this year, that where every other mean joke at Charlie Brown’s expense is perpetrated by kids, the giving-of-rocks is done by the adults of the neighborhood.

Reading through vintage Peanuts strips as I’ve done off-and-on over the last few years, I’ve been struck by the fairly bleak undertone to the humor. Charles Schulz knew that kids were often mean, and it wasn’t that they were mean because they didn’t know how to be nice, but it’s often because they just like being mean. But in the trick-or-treat scene, we get meanness not just from kids but from the grownups too; Charlie Brown’s basically being told, “The whole world has decided that you’re worthless, kid. Go play with your bag of rocks.” Of course, there’s a moral message of some sort in the fact that Charlie Brown is a fundamentally good kid; else he would have started putting those rocks through the living room windows of all the jerks who gave them to the kid in the crappy ghost costume in the first place.

And that’s not even bringing up poor Linus’s fruitless, doomed conviction that there’s a Great Pumpkin who will reward his pumpkin patch for its sincerity. If Great Pumpkin has a moral lesson, as A Charlie Brown Christmas does, that moral is much grimmer and darker.

My favorite parts of the show are always the surreal “World War I flying ace” sequences. Is that the moral of this show, somehow? That a life of imagination is somehow more satisfying than that of everyday life in a neighborhood where the Halloween tradition is for all the homes to give out rocks to the kid with the worst costume?

Share This Post

Posted on

FOOB-ar

It’s been a while since I bitched about For Better or For Worse, and since the strip is apparently “ending” sometime soon (next month, I believe), I won’t have too many more opportunities.

So! One of the annoying tics of this strip (one of oh so many) is the way Lynn Johnston so often seems to find it funny to close out a strip with a really lame pun, like so:

And when these lame puns take place, everyone involved in that strip ends up standing there, grinning like idiots at the lame wordplay. It took me a while to figure out what this reminded me of, but it finally hit me a few hours ago: these are the comic strip version of the final scene of an episode of CHiPS! Skip to the three-minute mark and you’ll see what I mean.

Of course, this kind of thing was done definitively on Police Squad!:

I should figure out a way to end my posts with lame freeze-frames!

Share This Post

Posted on

Ewwwwww! (teevee edition)

I was going to do a lot of comment on the various EW lists that they’ve got circulating, but I think I’ll do this one last post and call it a day on that subject. (Unless anyone’s really dying to hear what I think of, say, the “New Classic Death Scenes” or something similar.) I’m just doing the teevee list now; I won’t be doing the music list because I own exactly five of the albums on that list. (For fun and kicks, try and guess which ones!)

Anyhow, here are my thoughts on the teevee list. (For comparison, check out SamuraiFrog. His teevee tastes diverge sharply from mine on a number of instances, but on others we’re in total sync. Which is what you’d expect, I guess.) I won’t be bolding anything; just the list plus comment.

1. The Simpsons

Yeah, it’s a great show. That’s granted. No, I’m not going to state what everybody already knows – that its greatest years are now far in the past (imagine, this show is going to reach a point next year where two full Presidencies will have elapsed since its strongest episodes aired), but it’s still pretty funny and of generally high enough quality to warrant continued watching.

2 The Sopranos

I never saw a single episode. I’ve long noted that my interest in mob stories is practically non-existent. Whenever I say this to people, the invariable response is “But it’s so good!” Well, I’m sure it is. I’m still not interested.

3 Seinfeld

I’m a huge fan of Seinfeld. I even liked the much-maligned ninth season, and I didn’t think the finale sucked that badly (although it wasn’t nearly as funny as it should have been, with that premise). One great moment after another, and lines that I still quote and have recognized when I do so.

4 The X-Files

I loved this show too. Did it go on too long? Certainly, but I don’t think its fall from grace happened nearly as early as everybody else seems to think. I loved the show’s production values, the character chemistry between Mulder and Scully, and all the little touches therein. I loved the impenetrable mytharc too, and the Monsters-of-the-week.

5 Sex and the City

(Never saw a single episode, not once. Although for obvious reasons there’s one episode I might have liked, had I seen it.

6 Survivor

I hate this show. I’ve only watched two seasons of it all the way through, because a couple of years back The Daughter decided that she liked watching the games on the beach, so we ended up watching it. (That was when Rupert was on, and then a season or two later when a guy named Terry went on this big streak of winning every challenge for weeks on end, only to fall short of the million bucks in the finale, losing to some dopey little jerkoff named Aras. I haven’t watched the show since.) I didn’t like how the show basically rewards people who are complete jerks for being able to be the biggest, sneakiest of jerks. The skill set that makes people contenders to win Survivor also makes them complete asses in real life; why root for an ass to win a million bucks?

7 The Cosby Show

I watched a handful of episodes, found it amusing enough, but was never a big fan. Although, I do recall one hilarious bit that had Cosby describing the most horrifyingly inept Little League game in history, “a game which was broken open on a grand-slam bunt”.

8 Lost

Meh. Lots of people wandering around a mysterious island, acting all mysterious and stuff. I’m not a big fan of JJ Abrams.

9 Friends

One of my favorite shows of all time, and I’m not apologizing for that, either. It should have ended a year or two earlier, but I think it’s actually become underrated. At its best it was as funny as anything I can remember on teevee.

10 Buffy the Vampire Slayer

This is continually high on my “get the DVDs and watch it one of these days” list. I saw a few episodes here and there and I was always impressed, but by the time the show came on my radar screen it had already been around for a few years and I just didn’t want to invest the time to get up to speed on a show that had a dense mythology behind it. But I really do want to watch the thing.

11 The Wire Never seen it; not a lot of interest, really.

12 South Park

I was a big fan for a while but then I just fell away from it. I didn’t stop liking it, I just gravitated away. I’m a little surprised it’s still around, though.

13 Freaks and Geeks

I really need to see this.

14 The Daily Show

I love it when I see it, which isn’t often.

15 The Oprah Winfrey Show

Meh. I’ve never understood how Oprah’s become the 800-lb gorilla of, well, everything.

16 Arrested Development

I always missed it during its brief stay on the networks because its time slot always coincided with either something else or The Daughter’s bed time. I’d like to see what the fuss was about.

17 The Office (U.K. Version)

I’ve seen a few episodes and liked it.

18 American Idol

OK, I’m still a fan. And I liked Taylor Hicks. And that clicking sound you hear is my readers now clicking the “Back” button on their browsers. (This season of AI was pretty disappointing, though.)

19 ER

When it was good, it was great. It had seven or so really terrific seasons, then a few years where it fell on hard times, and then it just started to downright stink. Two major events on the show made me start to lean away from it: the death of Dr. Romano (as horrifyingly bad a moment as I’ve ever seen on a scripted teevee show, from a writing standpoint), and the resolution of the Reese Benton custody battle. But I hung in there a few more seasons anyway before I finally admitted that the show was a shell of its former self, with old interesting characters replaced by boring new ones; increasing reliance on the stunt-casting of older notable actors as “terminally ill geezers of the month” (always in time to provide epiphanies to whichever cast regular was in most need of an epiphany at that moment); lazy shit like the “Let’s send some other character for a life-changing stint in Africa!”; and so on. Ensemble shows are hard to keep going over the course of many years, even if, as in the case of ER, they’re designed to allow for the rotation in of new ensemble members to replace old ones. New characters have proven interesting (Dr. Pratt, for example), but at times the cast has become so bloated that newer characters simply blended together, and in any case, no ER cast has ever had the same mix of chemistry that the original group did. ER is apparently ending this coming season, but it should have ended five or six years ago.

20 Beverly Hills, 90210

Never watched it.

21 Roseanne

I hated this show. I never once found it funny, and to this day, when I catch it in reruns, I still fail to laugh.

22 The Real World

I watched three seasons: LA (season two), San Francisco (season three, the one with Pedro and Puck), and London. Then I pretty much stopped. I liked the show well enough, but I finally got irritated with that little doofus from the London cast, the playwright kid, who spent all of his five months in London sleeping. Dude, you’re in London. WTF?! (The other American guy, the one who was befuddled because he couldn’t find Ranch dressing in London, was pretty amusing for a while.)

23 The West Wing

It was my favorite show for a while. The first two seasons and a chunk of the third were brilliant, but then Aaron Sorkin started to peter out. Season Five had a couple of strong episodes and a lot of “Meh” episodes, but the last two years seemed to figure things out again.

24 Star Trek: The Next Generation

Ahhh, I loved me some TNG! We always watched it in college, with the new episodes on Sunday nights and re-runs the rest of the time. Quite a bit of it doesn’t hold up quite as well nowadays, but quite a lot of it holds up damn well indeed.

25 Miami Vice

I watched an episode or two. I didn’t get it.

26 Chappelle’s Show

Huh? Don’t know it.

27 Law & Order

Not a big fan. I tend to see an episode a year, and I’m good.

28 The Larry Sanders Show

Heard good things, but never saw it.

29 The Shield

Ditto.

30 Late Show With David Letterman

I love Letterman, although I don’t watch him often anymore at all because it’s hard for me to stay up that late. I’ve always liked his off-kilter sense of humor. True, he was probably funnier ten years ago than he is now, but so’s anybody.

31 The Civil War

I never watched this, mainly because I’ve never been terribly interested in the Civil War. I know that it’s a period of history that commands immense fascination for many people in America, but it leaves me cold. (Civil War enthusiasm also seems to run hand-in-hand with Confederacy fetishism, which is always something that confuses me since the Confederacy was, by definition, treasonous.)

32 Gilmore Girls

I never watched it, but I’ve been told repeatedly that it’s very well written, so I want to check it out one of these years.

33 My So-Called Life

I adored this show, even as ambivalent as I was about my own high school experience. MSCL was brilliant work, but even though it’s better remembered now for its single, nineteen-episode season, I tend to view it as a dry-run for the deeply brilliant Once and Again that would come along six years later.

34 24

I saw seasons Two and Three, and I haven’t much bothered since then. I admire the show’s production values, but from what I hear the last couple of years the writing has suffered. I also find the Jack Bauer fetishization that you see in the commentary of the political Right in this country astonishingly creepy. “Jack Bauer has to torture people!” goes the refrain. But I’d like to see a show that details what everyday life in Jack Bauer’s America would be like after the country has witnessed nuclear terrorism, a President declining to run for a second term after a scandal, his successor dying aboard Air Force One, his successor being removed from office after criminal activity, the assassination of that first President after he’s left office, and the rise to power of that first President’s own brother. I think the country would be really messed up if that stuff all happened.

35 CSI

I used to be a big fan, but kind of fell by the wayside the last couple of years. The original show’s the best, but the one I watch faithfully now is CSI: Miami, mainly because I like looking at Emily Procter and Eva LaRue, and because I derive enormous entertainment pleasure from David Caruso’s overacting and posing. It also featured my single favorite “Oh, bulls***!” moment in CSI crime investigations: in one episode, the killer had taken a photo with his finger partially covering the lens; they were able to resolve that smudge into a readable fingerprint. Yeah, right. This last season ended beautifully, though: since the iconic image of the show is Horatio Caine putting on his sunglasses, they did a cliffhanger where Horatio is shot on an airport runway, and as he’s lying on the ground bleeding profusely, the camera pulls back away from him…and through the broken lens of his sunglasses!

36 thirtysomething

Never saw it, but want to, seeing as how it’s by the same creative team as My So-Called Life and Once and Again.

38 Beavis and Butt-head

I loved it and found it terribly funny. Thing is, there really are kids like this in our schools. Kids who aren’t really dangerous, who don’t pose much of a threat to anyone, but who also just aren’t ever going to amount to anything much at all and who don’t really care about that either. Their antics can be hilarious, as this show demonstrated. My favorite episode had the boys participating in their school’s fundraising candy sale; they have to sell candy bars for two bucks each, but they don’t want to do the legwork to sell these things, so their elegant solution is to sell candy bars back and forth to one another for the same two dollars. That cracks me up just to think about it.

39 Six Feet Under
40 Mr. Show

I don’t know either of these.

41 Frasier

I loved this show for a long time, too. I think it went on too long, but I don’t think it slid into badness the way so many shows that outlive themselves do; it just kind of settled into a bit of routine for its last two or three seasons where it was dependably amusing but never as good as in its earlier years. Still, it provided many, many wonderful moments in the time it had, and I do think it went out on a very strong note, with Frasier’s romance with Laura Linney and one of the best series finales I’ve ever seen.

42 L.A. Law

It was a really good show for a few years, and then it started to bog down, much in the same way that ER did: cast bloat, interesting characters swapped for not-interesting ones, increasingly bizarre storylines, and one of the most staggeringly awful moments in teevee history (the death of Rosalind Shays, of course). I hung with it until the end, but man, was that last season bad.

43 Late Night With Conan O’Brien

I see it so rarely that it doesn’t even make sense to discuss it. I have a DVD of highlights from it around somewhere; I should watch that one of these days.

44 Jeopardy!

Yeah. Ken Jennings? I coulda taken him. I know this because on at least twenty of the seventy-eight nights (or however many there were), from the non-studio lit and no-audience and no-cameras friendly confines of my living room, I whipped his ass!

45 Curb Your Enthusiasm

Never saw it.

46 Homicide: Life on the Street

I watched a couple of episodes and was uniformly underwhelmed. It felt like BaltimorePDBlue to me.

47 30 Rock

I’m not sure if it’s been around enough to be a “new classic”, but it’s one of my favorites of shows on now. Not only do I think Tina Fey is one of the cutest women on the planet, but I think it speaks greatly of her that this, her big moment on teevee as a creative force, cheerfully makes her the butt of many, if not most, of the jokes. (Contrast with the same season’s Studio 60, in which Aaron Sorkin created a monument to Aaron Sorkin.) I actually wrote a bit of rant here first, having misread the title as 3rd Rock from the Sun, which I didn’t like very much.

48 Ally McBeal

Bleeccchhhh! I hated this show, as I tend to seriously dislike anything David E. Kelley does. I don’t like his writing.

49 Twin Peaks
50 Baywatch
51. Melrose Place

Didn’t watch any of these.

52. Felicity

More “Meh” from the pen of JJ Abrams.

53. Will & Grace

Funny for a season or two. After that, just shrill and repetitive.

54. Moonlighting

I never understood the fuss over this show.

55. Pee-wee’s Playhouse

Or this one.

56. Desperate Housewives

I actually liked the first season. Everything since was dull, and I stopped watching entirely last year.

57. The Amazing Race

My current favorite reality show! My only wish is that they’d put in a new rule that when you get to a locale, you are forbidden to get locals to either drive you to your destination, ride with you to show you the way, or drive ahead of you so you can follow them. Had this been the case, there’s no way the loathsome Dustin-Kandace duo would have ever been near-winners twice on the show.

58. The Tonight Show With Jay Leno

I like Letterman better. I also found it appalling that The Tonight Show was Arnold Schwarzenegger’s forum of choice for announcing his gubernatorial run.

59. Battlestar Galactica

I’ve got to see this. I was highly impressed with the pilot TV movie.

60. Xena: Warrior Princess

Snore.

61. The Office

Also not sure if it’s a classic already, but I sure like it. But how much of that is Jenna Fischer’s presence? Hmmmm.

62. House

Like it. New classic? Dunno, but I like it.

63. Mystery Science Theater 3000

Loved it, once I figured out what the concept was. Like everybody, I spent a year channel-surfing past MST3K and wondering why these crappy movies were always on with these shadows in front.

64. The Osbournes

Never watched it.

65. Family Guy

I hate this show. The only times it’s made me laugh were in moments involving the evil-plotting baby; everything else is stupid Simpsons retread crap.

66. Grey’s Anatomy

Now here we have the opposite problem with ensemble shows: the ensemble isn’t big enough, which led this past season to some real dramatic constipation on the show. They added two new characters of consequence, but that wasn’t enough since they only replaced another character who’d already left for spin-off heaven. I still think that Grey’s beats the pants off ER right now, but I can see it seriously falling from grace if it doesn’t add some spice next year. They’ve been playing the same storylines for too long now.

67. Planet Earth
68. Jackass
69. The Colbert Report

I’ve never seen these. Colbert’s on too late.

70. Everybody Loves Raymond

Now, it was often a very funny show. It really was. Its characters were quirky and played off each other in fun ways, and the cast had real chemistry which helped. But the show was just a well-done sitcom. Maybe it stands out because it was just about the only traditional sitcom that was being done well (aside from Friends) in the time it was around. When it went off the air (it too had a well-done finale episode), someone on a message board I wrote described it was “the show that changed the sitcom forever”. That could only be uttered by someone who’d never seen any other sitcoms before.

71. Friday Night Lights

Never watched it.

72. NewsRadio

Obviously it wasn’t as good after Phil Hartman’s death. But then, my favorite character was always Stephen Root as the owner of the station. Maura Tierney was also a standout.

73. Oz
74. Wiseguy
75. Project Runway
76. In Living Color

Never watched these.

77. The Golden Girls

Ick. Never liked it.

78. I’ll Fly Away

Saw it occasionally in college. Nice, but forgettable. The cute blonde girl would later do a couple of seasons of ER, which ended when a crazy patient stabbed her to death.

79. The Comeback

Never even heard of this.

80. King of the Hill

I think this show is underrated, or was in its prime. I haven’t seen a new episode in several years.

81. Murphy Brown

Funny for a while, then became boring.

82. The Hills
83. Absolutely Fabulous

Never saw them.

84. Northern Exposure

It took me a while to figure this show out. The Girlfriend (later The Wife) loved it, so I watched it by proxy, but it really took me a season or two to get into it. Then I loved it.

85. The Kids in the Hall
86. Prime Suspect
87. Deadwood

More in the “never watched” category.

88. Malcolm in the Middle

Now this was a funny, funny show in its first few seasons. I fell away from it after a while, but it was a favorite for a while. It had this habit of being mildly amusing for most of an episode, with one truly inspired moment that would make the entire show.

89. SpongeBob SquarePants

Weirdly amusing, in my opinion. I can totally understand why some people hate it.

90. Dawson’s Creek

Crap. Total crap. Kevin Williamson’s writing annoys the hell out of me.

91. Mad Men
92. The Ben Stiller Show
93. Queer Eye for the Straight Guy

Yet more that I never watched.

94. Married…With Children

Meh. Amusing, but not great.

95. Designing Women

Didn’t like it.

96. The Arsenio Hall Show

This was very popular in college; it was always on at that timeslot in the dorm lounges. I don’t remember why.

97. Party of Five

Aside from letting me look at Neve Campbell, I don’t remember much about this show.

98. MacGyver

This was silly, silly fun. Years ago The Girlfriend (later The Wife) and I visited The Future In-Laws at their home, and I discovered that The Future Sister-In-Law was so big a fan of MacGyver that she could, using the satellite dish, watch the show for four consecutive hours on weekday afternoons, on teevee stations from all over the country, and she often did. (BTW: xkcd from the other day. Heh!)

99. The Bachelor

Stupid, stupid, stupid crap, this is. Remember when everybody was in vapors over FOX’s one-off Who Wants to Marry a Multi-millionaire? Well, now The Bachelor is in its eighth year or something like that. WTF?

100. Saved by the Bell

Oh, come on. Just because we all watched it because TBS had it on for two hours solid each day during the mid-1990s, when we were all being slackers because it was cool to be slackers and all, and thus because of that we all know who Zack Morris and Kelly Kapowsky are, doesn’t make it a great show. Watch it now, and try telling me it’s not complete crap. I dare you. I double dare you!

So Saved By the Bell is on the list. But not Once and Again or Firefly? NYPD Blue? Scrubs? Millennium? What about cooking shows? Like him or hate him, Emeril Lagasse’s shows put Food Network on the map in large part, and Alton Brown’s show is really good. This list stinks.

Share This Post

Posted on

Blubbering….

I’m not sure how I missed this, but Jason has a list of movies that make men cry. I’ve bolded the ones that do, in fact, make me cry like a little girl who’s just had her lollipop stolen by the creepy old guy who owns the local nuclear power plant.

It’s a Wonderful Life

No, not really. I’ve never liked this movie all that much.

Schindler’s List

Last time I watched it, I didn’t cry at the right scene, but the film still moved me terribly. I know that the “I could have done more” scene didn’t happen in real life, but it’s still a terribly emotional scene. For me, even more emotional is the cast members accompanying their people they’re playing in laying rocks on Oskar Schindler’s grave. That always gets me.

Frequency

I haven’t seen this.

Dead Poets Society

What phony tripe this movie is. It’s the desk-standing, “O Captain my Captain” scene that’s supposed to be the tear-jerker, but as I’ve noted previously, this comes after these kids have already signed the paper getting Keating fired. It would have been more fitting if Keating had said, “Yeah, day late and a dollar short, fellas.”

Forrest Gump

I refuse to hate this movie, even though it feels like I should, or something. First time I saw it I cried when Jenny died; for Forrest to wait for her his entire life only to lose her when he finally got her struck me as terribly sad.

The Natural

I haven’t seen it, despite its being filmed in Buffalo. I stink.

The Shawshank Redemption

One of my favorite films, but it doesn’t make me cry. It fills me with a deep sense of fulfillment, as if some rightness in the cosmic order has been restored when it ends. I can think of few films that give that sense of satisfaction that this one does. (Although I do think it should have rolled the credits with Red’s bus heading down the road. We just don’t need to see him meeting Andy on the beach; it simply isn’t necessary and the whole point is that at long last Red has learned to hope again.)

Big Fish

I’ve had the DVD for two years and still haven’t watched it. Gotta get to it; I’ve heard naught but good about it.

Seabiscuit

I haven’t seen this.

The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King

This whole trilogy is full of weepy moments for me. Just a few: when Frodo and Bilbo are reunited in Rivendell; when Frodo tries to leave Sam behind at the end but Sam just marches into the water after him; Eomer’s arrival at Helm’s Deep; Sam’s “It’s like the old stories” speech; Pippin’s terror at being taken by Gandalf away from Merry; the lighting of the beacons; Gandalf’s meditation with Pippin over the nature of death (“And then you see it: white shores….”); the charge of the Rohirrim at Pellenor; Theoden’s fall and Eowyn’s victory over the Witch King; “I can’t carry it for you, but I can carry you!; when Aragorn leads all of Gondor in bowing to the four hobbits.

The Passion of the Christ

Nope. I ended up fast-forwarding through some of it; Christ’s forced march to Golgotha with the Cross takes forever, and by the time they’re nailing him to the thing, the entire movie has for me become a bit desensitizing. I also noted something else when I watched the movie: during the more violent parts, like when the Roman soldiers flog Jesus, I actually found myself admiring the make-up effects of the movie. It’s supposed to be a horrifying moment, but I found myself wondering, “Wow, how did Gibson manage to simulate the whip actually biting into Jesus’s skin and ripping giant chunks out of it?” (I seem to recall another blogger mentioning this, but I can’t remember who that was.) I just didn’t find this film all that emotional; it was quite the opposite for me. Cold and distant.

(And there was one moment that stood out like the proverbial sore thumb. When Pilate has the Jews choose between freeing harmless Jesus and murderer Barrabas and they choose Barrabas, a shocked Pilate glances at Jesus, who gives him this stare back that seemed to me to be Jesus basically saying, “You got any other bright ideas?” It kind of pulled me out of the movie.)

ET: The Extra-Terrestrial

When I first saw this at the age of ten, I cried long and hard during the death scene. After that, I never cried during that scene again, knowing that ET wasn’t actually dead. (He was only mostly dead, har har!) But to this day, I cry immensely during the final farewell. In fact, I can actually work up tears if I just listen to that entire, magnificent “Adventure on Earth” cue that John Williams wrote for the film’s last fifteen minutes. I always lose it at the exact same moment: after Gertie and Michael have said their goodbyes to ET, and then the mother and the “Keys” guy arrive just in time to look on as Elliot approaches for his farewell. Without fail, I start sobbing right then.

And I’ve noticed a couple of other moments that make me cry, earlier, before Elliot’s “talking to dead ET” monologue. When ET is crashing, the first time they put the defibrillators on him and shock him, we cut to Gertie, who visibly jumps with surprise at the violence of the electricity being blasted through ET, and then she immediately starts to cry as only a little girl can. And so do I. And then, a minute or two later, as Elliot is looking on in total helplessness, having been shoved aside by all the doctors and officials, his mother comes up behind him, unsure of the reaction she’s going to get – and he just throws his arms around her. I lose it there, too.

8. The Green Mile

No crying here.

7. Saving Private Ryan

I’ve beaten this movie up a couple times in the last week, so I’ll have done; but it didn’t make me cry. The Normandy stuff was incredibly visceral, of course, in the way that I think Mel Gibson wanted The Passion to be but didn’t quite pull off.

6. The Pride of the Yankees

I haven’t seen this.

5. Rudy

Ugh. Especially Jerry Goldsmith’s bore of score, relentlessly pounding that one tune into our heads, over and over and over and over again….

4. Braveheart

I didn’t cry at this. I love the movie, but it didn’t make me cry.

3. Brian’s Song

I haven’t seen this.

2. Old Yeller

This movie, along with The Yearling, only made me cry tears of anger if any tears at all. “Boy becomes man by learning how to kill his beloved pet” is vomitous, nonsensical crap. I hate this movie, as you can tell. (There’s a really funny episode of Friends where Phoebe walks in as the others are watching this movie and sobbing away, and Phoebe doesn’t get it because it turns out her grandmother who raised her would invariably turn off sad movies before they got to the sad part so Phoebe’s always thought that infamously sad movies actually have happy endings. In her attempt to re-educate herself she watches Pride of the Yankees and is horrified when the baseball player gets Lou Gehrig’s Disease; someone else says, “Er, Phoebe, that actually was Lou Gehrig. Didn’t you see it coming?”)

I’ve always wondered if George RR Martin was making fun of Old Yeller in A Storm of Swords, when Daenerys hires an army of soldiers who have been methodically desensitized to just about everything through their lives. The guy in charge tells her how each soldier is given a puppy when he reaches manhood, and as his final test before being allowed to become a soldier in this army, he is required to kill his dog.

1. Field of Dreams

You’d better believe it! At three points, even: when Ray realizes that Doc Brown can’t return to being a ballplayer; when he realizes that the catcher is his father; and, of course, “Dad, you wanna have a catch?”

Jason also gives some movies that make him cry, so I should do the same. I used to be really bad about crying at movies when I was a kid; The Wizard of Oz did it, and Snoopy Come Home was positively traumatic. Dances With Wolves used to have me in a waterworks as soon as Cisco’s death, but in more recent viewings, I hold it together until the very end (but Wind In His Hair’s cries of friendship from the clifftop still get me, to this day). I admit I got seriously choked up during the slaughter of the Jedi in Revenge of the Sith, and while I haven’t cried at that sequence watching the film at home, I still find it a terribly emotional scene.

Let’s see, what else? Oh yeah, An Affair to Remember, the obvious last scene, when Cary Grant is about to leave when he suddenly says something that makes him put two and two together and realize why it was that Deborah Kerr wasn’t at the Empire State Building like she’d said she’d be. Beauty and the Beast does it now and then. I haven’t seen it in a very long time, but I remember Shadowlands being quite the tearjerker.

As long as we’re talking tearjerking stuff, a lot of episodes of teevee shows have had me all weepy. A bunch of Once and Again episodes do it (the big catalyst here being “There Be Dragons”). ER, in its hey-day, could uncork a good weeper about once a season; there was Dr. Greene’s baby-delivery-gone-awry in season one, the EMT guy who suffered third degree burns over ninety percent of his body in the season two, Carter-and-Lucy-get-stabbed, and the episode when we learn that Dr. Greene has died. That was a masterful episode that I thought a wonderful send-off for Dr. Greene, so much so that the next episode, which backtracked a bit to show Dr. Greene’s last days, felt superfluous to me. In the episode in question, at the beginning, Carter reads a letter Dr. Greene has written from Hawaii, where he’s gone to live out his last days [brain cancer]. It’s a warm and funny letter, but then at the end Carter grabs one final sheet and says, “Oh, Elizabeth [Dr. Greene’s second wife] wrote something here too…” And he’s silent for a moment, and we know what’s coming: “Mark died this morning at sunrise.” The rest of the episode shows the rest of the ER staff struggling with the news that Mark is gone; Carter posts the entire letter on the main bulletin board, and at the end of the episode, we briefly flash forward a year to see that the letter is still there. That was a great episode, back when ER was actually good.

Let’s see, what else? The West Wing had some teary moments too. “In the Shadow of Two Gunmen” opens with the aftermath of the assassination attempt, and the way Toby catches himself when he finds Josh and, after telling him to get up, realizes that Josh is bleeding profusely from his gunshot wounds, always gets me; so does Mrs. Landingham’s death later that season. And yeah, on Friends, I usually tear up a bit for Chandler’s proposal to Monica.

Star Trek? A few times, but not that often. I find that the climax of “The City on the Edge of Forever” unfolds too quickly for tears (not a fault with the episode, just a fact about the way it’s done). The DS9 episode “The Visitor”, though, is extremely moving, despite the technobabble that pads out its running time.

And then there’s that old family chestnut, Little House on the Prairie, which always had a lot of attempted tear-jerking moments. I think they tended to try too hard, though; sometimes it almost became laughable. (Poor Alice Garvey’s fate was so over-the-top that I found myself wondering if I was supposed to take it seriously, and the final episode where the people of Walnut Grove dynamited their own buildings while singing “Onward Christian Soldiers” in order to thwart some kind of evil capitalists very nearly had me on the floor in stitches.) But there was a very fine episode guest-starring Patricia Neal that was quite the weeper, and the all-time champ for this show was an early two-parter when Laura is jealous of her new-born baby brother’s attention so she prays for him to die, and when he does, she runs away to climb a mountain where she meets an angel played by Ernest Borgnine. Yes, it’s exactly as cheesy as it sounds, but wow, does that one lock my personal floodgates in the “open” position.

Well, that’s about it. I’m basically an emotional basket case. What can I say?

Share This Post

Posted on

Sign me up! Sign me up!!!

Here at Casa Jaquandor we have not had cable teevee for almost eight years; “rabbit ears” have been sufficient for our needs. Aside from the occasional Food Network show, I’ve really not missed cable all that much.

But then I read this xkcd installment, and, finding it amusing but wondering what it means, follow the link at the top of the page, I find what is surely the greatest commercial in teevee history.

I don’t remember a single commercial that filled me with more desire to buy what’s being sold than this one. I’m serious, I’ve got a MONSTER hankering to sign up for cable right now. Here’s a commercial that has two astronauts doing the “terrorist fist bump” and Stephen Hawking saying “boom de yada”.

Yeah, I love the whole world too. Boom de yada!

(Of course, my lack of cable means that likely every one of my readers has already seen this ad and is now thinking, “Wow, doesn’t our boy Jaquandor need to get out more often.” Guilty as charged, I suppose.)

Share This Post