I’m not liveblogging the thing, but as for the finale of American Idol: David Cook has just opened the show with a scorching performance of U2’s “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For”.
And just like that, I think Cook wins. Game, set, match. That Archuleta kid can’t come close to anything like what Cook just did.
OK, that’s out of my system.
(Oh all right, since they went right into Arculeta’s first song as I was typing this, he’s doing the only thing he knows how to do: a soulful ballad – “Don’t Let the Sun Go Down On Me” – and not terribly convincingly. He’s a cross between Clay Aiken and Snoopy. Ick, ick, ick, ick. And of course, Randy Jackson can’t possibly criticize this kid. Ye Gods. Now I’m done.)
Becca points out that it’s Lance Henriksen’s birthday. Happy birthday, Frank Black! It really is too bad that Chris Carter never really figured out what he wanted to do with Millennium, but wow, those first two seasons are some brilliant teevee.
At her post, Becca provides five fascinating factoids about Henriksen. Here’s a sixth: he’s a master potter. He used to actually have a site where you could buy his pottery, but that seems to be gone for now. I’d love to sip tea from a Lance Henriksen mug, though!
:: Last night’s Deal or No Deal was a Star Wars themed show, with two contestants who are big Star Wars fans. One was a woman whose hero as a kid was Princess Leia, and she nearly burst into tears when Carrie Fisher turned up. The other contestant was a guy who went to see Star Wars in 1977 with his father, when he was just a kid. What was nice about the show wasn’t just all the fun Star Wars stuff (for the woman, the briefcase toting models were replaced by stormtroopers, while for the guy, the models were there and all were dressed in the famous gold bikini), but that they didn’t make fun of these people for being Star Wars fans. They allowed the two contestants to be what they are: two normal people with jobs and families who happen to love Star Wars. I appreciate that.
:: American Idol‘s theme night tonight is Neil Diamond. That’s pretty cool — I love me some Neil Diamond — but the remaining Idol contestants are my least favorite of any grouping at this point in the show since I’ve been watching it. David Cook’s the best one remaining, but he doesn’t really “Wow” me at all; I think the whole “rocker dude doing brooding arrangements” thing was done better by Chris Daughtry a few years back, and his “Music of the Night” from Phantom of the Opera last week just didn’t impress me. I seem to be alone in this view, but I remember when that show came out, and I remember how every school choir, amateur community chorus, college chorus, all-state or all-county chorus, or vocal ensemble of any kind was doing Phantom, and I remember how “Music of the Night” became so ubiquitous a selection by amateur baritones that the song just started to sound clicheed within a year or two of the show’s debut. That’s what Cook sounded like, to me: he didn’t make me think of Phantom, but of all those kids and amateur adult singers I heard back in the day doing Phantom.
Then there’s David Archuleta, who I suspect will make the final two with David Cook. I can’t imagine why he gets wild praise every week, because there is nothing convincing about him at all. He’s Kevin Covais with a better voice; he’s the male Diana DiGarmo. (GAHHHH!!! This kid’s doing my two favorite Neil Diamond songs, “Sweet Caroline” and “America”! NOOOOOO!!!) I get no sense at all that this kid connects with the songs on any emotional level whatsoever. Maybe in ten years when he’s been drunk a bunch of times and vomited in public places and been dumped by better looking girls than he deserves to date and failed a class or two in school and been bluntly told that he has no future, his singing will be convincing.
(Oh God, he just murdered “Sweet Caroline”. It made me want to throw three bricks through my teevee, in time with the “Bum Bum Bum”s. Ack.)
Syesha has bored me each week, except for last week, when she was awesome singing an Andrew Lloyd Webber tune I don’t know. Maybe she’s this year’s Kimberly Locke, who flew under the radar in Season Two to nearly steal the spotlight from Clay and Ruben.
Brooke? She’s immensely likable, and she’s toast. She should be singing soulful songs in coffee bars somewhere. Oh my God, it just hit me: Brooke is Phoebe Buffay, with a decent voice and without material like “Smelly Cat”!
And the dreadlocked Jason? Meh. Meh, meh, meh. Meh.
It’s weird: the Idol people clearly wanted to avoid the embarrassment of having another Sanjaya on the show, but in succeeding there, they’ve also avoided having another Jordin Sparks or Melinda Doolittle. My favorite singers this year were Michael Johns (gone three weeks ago), and Carly Smithson (gone last week). David Cook is the favorite to win, but I’m not excited at all. He’s the best of a weak bunch. In football terms, he’s the 9-7 team that wins the NFC South.
Apparently, Ken Jennings is in Seattle, where it’s snowing a lot. Not to leave his commentary at that, however, Ken goes on to make a pretty obscure pop cultural reference:
Maybe we’re victims of that crazy weather machine that Elizabeth Taylor was using to freeze Port Charles back on General Hospital in the early ’80s. Yeah, there’s a reference that exactly nobody will get.
Au contraire, Ken! Not only do I get the reference, but I get to point out your error: it wasn’t Liz Taylor’s character (yes, she was on GH), Helena Cassadine, who was tormenting Port Charles with the weather machine, but rather her husband Mikkos, who was played by John Colicos. Helena Cassadine didn’t come along until Luke and Laura’s wedding, which was well after Luke’s thwarting of Mikkos’s plot.
Colicos is an actor well-known to geekdom of that period, having played Commander Kor, one of the more memorable Klingons on Star Trek (TOS) and then reprised the role on a couple of episodes of Deep Space Nine (by which time Kor had gone from looking like a TOS Klingon to looking like a regular old ridged-forehead Klingon), and the villainous Baltar on the original incarnation of Battlestar Galactica.
But anyway, Ken’s got the right nefarious plot to destroy Port Charles, but the wrong villain. Good thing that was never the “Final Jeopardy!” answer while he was on the show!
(And here’s a trivia question: when Luke Spencer was trying to access the control panel that would deactivate the weather machine, he had to type in the password that Mikkos Cassadine had chosen. What was that password?)
This post is suggested by a recent post by Jason, wherein he reports that in the inevitable movie version of this old teevee show from the 1980s (because if it was on teevee in the 1980s, it’ll be on a movie screen soon enough, so bring on that Riptide movie! And Simon and Simon!), the role of Thomas Sullivan Magnum will be played by Matthew McConnaughey. Personally, I don’t have much of a problem with McConnaughey as an actor, but he’s got his own thing going on, and I don’t see him recreating the air that Tom Selleck brought to Magnum. Jason has the goods on Magnum as a character: at first glance, he’s a ne’er-do-well beach bum slacker, but underneath the exterior of shorts, floral shirts and a Detroit Tigers baseball cap is a fiercely intelligent, piercingly observant, and forceful man who can even descend into some pretty dark places. Can Matthew McConnaughey capture this? I don’t know. He’s been the doofus in a lot of doofus comedies, but he was also pretty good dramatically in Contact and Amistad, so, who knows.
Anyway, back to the show. Magnum, PI was a staple of Thursday night teevee in our home for pretty much the entirety of its run, although in its last couple of seasons it tended to be a little darker than my parents found to their liking. At its best, though, Magnum was always a terribly entertaining show. It had nifty detective stuff, nice action sequences here and there, some terrific cast chemistry, and a lot of wonderful character-driven conflict and humor. The continual battle of wills between Thomas Magnum and Jonathan Quayle Higgins was often played for laughs, but underneath it all was the fact that as different as these two men were and as crazy as they could drive one another, in the end, each would walk through fire for the other if they needed to.
So yeah, I was a big fan of Magnum, PI. Here’s a list of my favorite ten episodes. My summaries below are spoilerish, so if you’re watching the show on DVD for the first time, skip this post.
1. Memories Are Forever, parts one and two
Magnum established fairly early on that Magnum was married while in Vietnam to a French nurse, who was later killed in a hospital explosion. In this two-part episode, she turns up alive, and married to a Vietnamese general. It’s a thrilling episode, filled with intrigue and the tragedy of two lovers who cannot be together. (Hmmm…they should make a movie like that. Maybe get someone Bogart-esque to play the lead….)
2. Unfinished Business
The flip-side to the episode above, years later it turns out that Magnum has fathered a little girl with his former wife, Michelle. Both are murdered by yet another Vietnamese general (there were lots of these throughout the show’s run), and Magnum sets out for revenge. This is a gritty and intense episode, made especially memorable by Magnum’s standard voiceovers, which here take the form of letters he can no longer send to his daughter. (Of course, the series finale would establish that Lily, Magnum’s daughter, wasn’t killed after all.) Also notable is the performance by Lance LeGault as Colonel Buck Greene, a Navy Intelligence officer who recurs a number of times throught the series’s run to clash heads with Magnum.
3. Did You See the Sunrise, parts one and two
Another two-parter (or maybe it was a two-hour episode later split into two parts for syndication; remember when teevee shows had actual episodes of double length, as opposed to being regular-length episodes with extra commercials, or just two episodes run together end-on-end?) dealing with the Vietnam exploits of Magnum and friends (he, helicopter pilot TC, and club operator Rick all served there together). Here, a brutal Russian prison guard named Ivan they had the misfortune of meeting in Nam comes to Hawaii, having run up the ranks and become a diplomat. TC is brainwashed into attempting to kill Ivan, but the plot is more nefarious than that, and in the course of things, Magnum’s friend from the Navy, Lt. MacReynolds (“Mac”), whom Thomas is always bribing with food to get him classified information, is killed when the bad guys bomb Magnum’s Ferrari (without him inside, of course). The final scene, where Magnum finally confronts Ivan directly, presents the series’s most surprising ending.
4. Home From the Sea
This episode has no case for Magnum to solve. Instead, on the Fourth of July, Magnum is out at sea, paddling his surf-ski as part of his personal tradition of spending Independence Day alone. A speedboat knocks him off his surf-ski, and Magnum is alone in the ocean, during which he flashes back to his father’s last days. Meanwhile, his friends all have premonitions that Magnum is in serious danger. It’s a very effective episode.
5. I Witness
Magnum wasn’t always a serious show, however; often it put its tongue-in-cheek sense of humor on display. This episode is a good case in point: the King Kamehameha Club is the scene of an armed robbery, and Magnum has to figure out who did it, based on the clues buried in the varying accounts of the robbery he is given by his friends, whose clothes were stolen in the course of the robbery. The whole Rashomon thing may be something of a cliché these days, but here, as each person tells his story in a way that makes him look the best, the result is hilarious.
6. Luther Gillis: File 521
This episode pairs Magnum’s 1980s Hawaiian gumshoe with Luther Gillis, a St. Louis gumshoe who talks like he’s right out of a Dashiell Hammet novel. Gillis is working a missing persons case, and he ends up working with Magnum, much to Magnum’s chagrin. It’s pretty much the old “Two guys who can’t stand each other forced to work together” buddy story, but it’s done infectiously well. Gillis was a fan favorite, so he returned a few more times over the show’s run, but this first appearance was his best.
7. Laura
Like any popular teevee series, Magnum PI would occasionally feature big-name guest stars. Carol Burnett appeared a couple of times, for instance, but this grim episode brought in Frank Sinatra. The climactic sequence takes place without dialogue; just the sounds of the Honolulu streetscape backed by the throbbing chords of “Tonight Tonight Tonight” by Genesis (a stylistic riff, perhaps, on Miami Vice‘s use of “In the Air Tonight”). I only saw this episode a couple of times, but it is a standout.
8. Paper War
During the last season or two, there was a running gag involving Magnum’s hypothesis that Jonathan Higgins, the Major Domo of writer Robin Masters’s Hawaii estate (called “Robin’s Nest”), actually is Robin Masters. This is the episode where Magnum first draws that conjecture, as the occasionally combative relationship between the two men escalates into a fairly nasty prank war, culminating in one of the most hilarious bits in the show’s history: Magnum blowing up Higgins’s matchstick model of the Bridge on the River Kwai, while he’s whistling “Colonel Bogey” to Higgins over the phone. Later, in a standard bit of plot handling, when the two have decided that they can no longer coexist in any way, they’re locked together inside an elevator in an abandoned building, which is where Magnum starts suggesting that Higgins is Robin Masters. (The show would never officially clear up this point; it’s a pleasant notion, but it was clearly cooked up after the fact, when a number of earlier episodes establish people from Robin Masters’s past speaking to Robin as if he actually is Robin. But Higgins-as-Robin is a lot more satisfying, so…I dunno.)
9. Holmes Is Where the Heart Is
Another Special Guest Star episode here: Patrick Macnee, as an old friend of Higgins’s. Higgins has locked himself in the study at Robin’s Nest and is typing away on his old typewriter, while Magnum is desperately trying to figure out what it is that has Higgins behaving so obsessively. The story he’s writing is told in flashback: when his friend, played by Macnee, came to visit him some years earlier (before Higgins met Magnum), and turned out to be mentally ill, believing himself to be Sherlock Holmes. It’s a fun episode that has a very touching ending, and the framing story works because of the show’s great chemistry between Magnum and Higgins as adversarial friends.
10. Deja Vu, parts one and two
In lieu of the Special Guest Star, Magnum PI would indulge that other great stunt of hit teevee shows everywhere: the Special Location! Here, Magnum and friends travel to Great Britain, ostensibly to help set up the newest of Robin Masters’s estates, an English castle he’s calling “Robin’s Keep”. Here, while Higgins tries to train the ineffectual British guy who’s to do the same job here that Higgins does in Hawaii (this fellow played by Peter Davison, who is most famous as the Fifth Doctor on Doctor Who), Magnum becomes involved in some intrigue involving an old buddy of his from the Vietnam days who did assassination work in that war, and who turns out to have stayed in that line of work after it. There’s also a subplot involving Higgins’s reticence to drop in and visit his father, since the two haven’t spoken in years.
So there they are: ten episodes of Magnum PI. Funny thing is, I left out a bunch of episodes that I like a lot as well, so if I were to re-write this post tomorrow, I’d probably include nine completely new episodes (my Number One is pretty much a constant; that’s a truly great episode). Maybe the one, originally intended for the series finale until the show got picked up for another year, where Magnum is critically wounded in a gun battle and spends the episode as a ghost, hovering on the edge of death; or the one where a psychologically fragile Magnum thinks he’s seen his old friend Mac, dead for several years, very much alive on the streets of Honolulu; or the one where Magnum is paired with a modern day Samurai warrior (played by Mako). What a great show that was.
As a wrap-up, here are the show’s opening credits. It feels like Thursday nights on CBS again!
(Trivia question: Everyone knows that Magnum’s favorite baseball team was the Detroit Tigers. But what was his favorite beer?)
:: Looking at NBC’s announced schedule for next season, I see that ER‘s next season will be its last. Longtime readers will know that I think this should have happened four or five years ago, when the show wasn’t a complete shell of its former self. The show started losing me with the awful killing of Dr. Romano, and then it came close to permanently losing me with the even more awful resolution of the Reece Benton custody battle, and then it finally lost me for good when it had its own Moldavian Wedding Massacre (see this post of mine for the reference there) and had a bunch of criminals shoot up the ER. Back in the day, though, wow, was that show good.
:: The film version of The Hobbit officially has a composer: Howard Shore, who is the only choice, really. The idea of a Middle Earth film without music by Shore is just plain wrong.
And to think, I thought for a fleeting moment back in 2005 that, with the conclusion of the Star Wars saga, geek culture would enter a Dark Age….
I think I’ll start doing random “Top Ten” lists of favorite things of mine, on whatever odd topics I can think of. (And feel free to suggest more topics, folks!) Those crazy kids at Tosy and Cosh have been doing this for a while, and as always, there’s no idea I’m not too crass to steal outright. So here we go with my first random “Top Ten” list: my favorite supporting characters from Seinfeld. (For the purposes of this post, I will define “supporting characters” as none of the four leads, no one who appeared in only one episode prior to the series finale, and none of Jerry’s revolving-door girlfriends. Oh, and no Newman or the Seinfeld or Costanza parents, because those characters are so recurring as to almost be regulars.)
10. Mr. Krueger.
The last of a long line of colorful bosses George Costanza had in the course of the series, this guy was probably overshadowed by the ultimate colorful boss, New York Yankees owner George Steinbrenner (famously shown only from behind). Krueger presided over his own fun bit of insanity in the workplace, though, most memorably thwarting George’s plan to adopt the nickname T-Bone and instead dubbing him “Gammy”. Krueger was played by Daniel von Bargen, who is one of my favorite character actors.
9. Bob “The Maestro” Cobb
The orchestra conductor who, despite the fact that he conducts third-rate amateur orchestras, insists that everyone call him “Maestro”, even during sex. (When Elaine lets out a squeal of “Oh, Bob!”, he stops and glares at her until she corrects herself.) He only appeared a couple of times, but they’re both hilarious appearances.
(By the way, in one of these episodes, Elaine starts ripping off some lyrics from a Verdi opera, and nobody bats an eye. When’s the last time a teevee show depicted a knowledge of opera as something perfectly normal?)
8. Susan Ross
Alas, poor Susan, to be engaged to George Costanza and then to die from the effects of licking toxic envelope glue. I think that Susan’s demise marked the emergence of a stronger meanness in the show’s comedic stance, although it remained mostly funny up until the end (I’ve never held with the general derision that the show’s last season has attracted). But as for Susan, she gets a mention because she so often was the straight-woman to the antics of our four leads, and the season in which she was George’s fiancee produced many of the show’s funniest episodes.
7. Mr. Wilhelm
George’s supervisor while working for the Yankees was hilarious, whether joining an office-cleaning cult or speaking to George in some kind of weird code using the Petula Clark song “Downtown”.
6. Kenny Banya
Jerry’s hyper-annoying fellow comedian, who enjoys success despite an apparent complete lack of comedic talent. Known for arguing over whether soup at a nice restaurant constitutes a “meal”.
5. Mr. Pitt
My favorite of Elaine’s bosses, the staggeringly eccentric Mr. Pitt launched from one obsession to the next with wild abandon: one week he hates ink pens, the next he’s obsessed with his socks, the next he loses hours staring at one of those 3D poster things, the next he’s unwittingly evoking Adolf Hitler. I was always disappointed that he didn’t stick around longer.
4. Bob Sakimano
OK, this is a bit of cheating, since (to my knowledge) we never actually see Bob Sakimano in any episode of Seinfeld. But his presence is always felt, as Kramer is constantly citing “my friend, Bob Sakimano” as justification that any of his hare-brained schemes will work perfectly.
3. Jackie Chiles
Chiles is an interesting character these days. He’s still hilarious in re-runs, many years after Johnny Cochrane rose to prominence in the OJ Simpson trial. Most times topical humor like the Chiles character becomes stale, but Jackie isn’t just a riff on a specific lawyer, but a riff on the whole notion of ambulance-chasing shyster lawyers.
2. Mr. Thomassoulo
George’s boss from a short-lived stint with a sporting-goods company. He only appeared in a couple of episodes, but he engages George in a nasty battle of wills, and at one point he demonstrates a surprisingly astute understanding of George’s character when he allows all employees access to George’s personal bathroom. Played memorably by Gordon Jump, who turns in a nice contrast to his soft boss from WKRP In Cincinnati.
1. David Puddy.
Elaine’s oafish, lugheaded New Jersey Devils fan boyfriend with whom she keeps breaking up and returning to, over and over again, sometimes several times in the same episode. Elaine’s intelligence and Puddy’s dense nature make for a hilarious couple.
I’ve just watched about twenty minutes of FOX’s new reality show The Moment of Truth, and wow, what an appalling show. I can’t believe this is on teevee. I’m astonished…and all I can think of is how eerily prescient, once again, Monty Python turns out to have been:
(The relevant sketch comes at about the 1:10 mark.)
UPDATE: OK, just to put Roger at ease in comments, I didn’t sit down with the desire to watch this show. It happened to be on after American Idol, so when I sent The Daughter to the bathroom at 9:00 to do her “get ready for bed thing”, I had ten minutes to watch whatever was on next, and Moment of Truth was it. Rest assured, I won’t be watching this crap again!
I’ve seen almost none of the movies nominated for anything tonight (Pirates: At World’s End and Ratatouille are it, I think), but I’m enjoying Jon Stewart’s hosting, and those faux-montages (“Oscar Salutes Binoculars and Periscopes”) were totally hilarious. That is all.
The ABC television network is facing a fine of $1.4 million dollars because they aired a show that included several glimpses of a woman’s buttocks. When did this happen, you ask? When did ABC so brazenly endanger the morality of our nation’s children and general people with sticks in their butts? Why, back in 2003! Thank God George Bush’s FCC is on the case, because I’ve barely been able to function for the last five years, so scandalized was I when I saw those buttocks. Thanks, FCC! You guys have your fingers on the pulse!
But I’m gonna need a bit of clarification here, because there were a lot of buttocks shown on NYPDBlue (the show in question, which went off the air in 2005 after a twelve-year run). That show had lots of buttocks. I’d even hazard a guess that the percentage of NYPDBlue episodes that showed buttocks exceeds fifty percent, although I can’t be sure. How did this one episode draw the FCC’s ire? The article indicates that “a boy surprises a woman in the shower”, so maybe it’s that the kid saw the buttocks. Oh noes!
But I can’t get beyond the fact that the episode being fined aired five years ago. What the heck happened here? Was some FCC guy watching some DVDs of NYPDBlue and suddenly noticed buttocks for the first time? Anyway, I’m glad that the FCC is in the business of retroactive moral policing. Maybe they can finally start punishing CBS for all the shenanigans that used to take place on that filth-fest Smothers Brothers show.
