A few months ago we subscribed to Netflix, so we could watch streaming shows and movies now that we had high-speed interweb. Netflix has been something of a mixed bag – more on that another time – but we found some shows to watch on Netflix that we’ve missed owing to our not being a cable teevee household. One such show is the History Network’s Pawn Stars.
This show, for those unfamiliar with it, takes place in Las Vegas, at a pawn shop owned by a guy named Rick Harrison. Working with him is his father (called “the Old Man”) and his son (called “Big Hoss”) and a guy who is mostly played for comic relief (called “Chum Lee”). And what happens on the show is pretty straightforward: people come in with stuff that they try to sell, leading to some work identifying the items, and then the price haggling (if Harrison and company are interested in buying it). Basically it’s Antiques Roadshow with some more personality to it, where money actually changes hands. Instead of someone being told that the gewgaw they’ve just brought in is really valuable and then they say, “Wow, I’m gonna keep it forever!”, here we have people saying, “Great! That guy said I could get $10,000 for it, so I want $10,000 for it.”
Pawn Stars is a lot of fun on several grounds – the guys on it are an entertaining bunch, the haggling is entertaining, and the items themselves are often fascinating. There are also “before-after” things, too, when Harrison and company buy something that’s a wreck and then get it restored. These segments are so fascinating, actually, that their preferred guy for restoration now has his own show. (We haven’t seen this yet, but it’s called American Restoration. When this shows up on Netflix, we’re there.) Where the focus in Antiques Roadshow is on the stuff, here the focus is more on the people and the connection they have with their stuff. Sometimes there are sad little vignettes, when people who are clearly down on their luck are trying to make a buck by hawking their stuff, and they get less than they clearly want; sometimes there are triumphs when someone discovers that an item they got someplace for very little is worth a whole lot. And then there are the people who don’t know that what they’ve got are fakes. (One guy, in an early episode, has promised his wife that he’ll make a lot of money selling his antique gun…which turns out to be fake and worth about fifty bucks. Ouch. Lots of curse-word beeping on that guy’s reaction!)
Firearms of all sorts seem to be the most common types of items brought in on the show, but this is all very interesting – you learn a lot about the history of firearms by watching this show, and they seemingly never buy an old gun without taking it out to the wilderness and firing it. Exploding stuff is cool! For me, the most amazing item was a guy who came in with a big hunk of gold coins all melded together – it was part of the treasure from a shipwreck off the coast of Sri Lanka, discovered by Arthur C. Clarke and a diving buddy of his years ago, that turned out to be one of the richest treasure ships ever found. Harrison did not end up buying the treasure lump, but this whole transaction was amazing. (Clarke wrote a wonderful book on the finding of the ship, The Treasure of the Great Reef.)
This particular transaction raised the standard question: is Pawn Stars for real, or is it staged? I suspect that it’s a mix of both; there’s no way it could be one hundred percent ‘real’ and look as professional a production as it does. There are times when the influence of producers shows a little too much (such as when the second season starts and suddenly every episode had to have at least one conspicuous reference to Subway restaurants). But really, I don’t care – the personalities are engaging (Harrison and company come off like a terribly fun bunch to hang out with), the show is fun, and the stuff is real. Well, usually, anyway.
Rick Harrison has a new book out about the whole pawn shop experience, called License to Pawn. The book is a fast, breezy, and extremely entertaining read. It’s worth noting that Harrison and his family have been in the pawn shop business for years, and that what’s seen on the show is just a small part of what really goes on in a pawn shop. The Harrison family has seen its share of seedy characters throughout the years, and there are a lot of wonderful anecdotes in the book that detail the colorful people who have come through on occasion. The show never depicts the dark underbelly of Las Vegas, but it’s clear that Harrison and company have seen a lot in their years. There are even some haunting tales, including one poor fellow, socially awkward, whose main hangout in life was the pawn shop until he finally had to be forbidden to return after he sexually harassed a female employee and died soon after. And there’s probably a fascinating show in itself to be made from the life of the person who has to staff the shop’s overnight window (bulletproof glass, of course).
The book has chapters by the Old Man, Big Hoss, and even one by Chumlee, which strongly implies that Chumlee’s not quite the big dumb lug the show makes him out to be. Each one is refreshingly up front about their own strengths and weaknesses; Harrison himself is proud of how smart he is, but he’s also willing to admit that he was an awful student in school and that he can’t resist some particularly crackpot schemes to make a quick profit. (One such scheme involves nickels. Lots of nickels. Believe it or not, Rick Harrison thought he’d make money by investing in nickels.) There’s something about Harrison that is inherently likable; he comes off as the kind of guy whom you could consider a great friend even if you disagree with everything that comes out of his mouth. (Could be the fact that at one point in the book, he admits to being completely uninterested in fashion and declares a preference for…overalls!) Big Hoss and Chumlee have had drug-related struggles in their past, which they write frankly about, and my personal favorite anecdote in the book comes from Big Hoss’s chapter. Here it is:
I’m sitting on the stool inside the shop at the night window and a woman walks up and asks me, “Do you buy gold teeth?”
“Yes, ma’am, we do,” I tell her.
She’s looking at me through the window, and she doesn’t look like a drug addict or a desperate person. She’s in her fifties. She’s dressed reasonably well, her hair is groomed, she’s not dirty. (Those three descriptions qualify as high class for the night window.)
She says, “OK, good. Do you have a pair of pliers I can borrow?”
Stupid me, I think the two questions are unrelated. I think she’s asking to borrow pliers for reasons that have nothing to do with the question of the gold teeth. I’m thinking maybe she needs to fix her car, or maybe give them to a guy she’s with so he can fix the car.
It was late. I probably wasn’t thinking straight.
I grabbed a pair of pliers from under the counter and told her I’d need a driver’s license to hold so I make sure I get my pliers back. She nods and hands her license through the slot. No big deal to either of us.
About a half an hour later, she’s still nowhere to be seen. I’m thinking it’s awfully strange that someone gave up their driver’s license for a pair of pliers at three in the morning in a pawn shop in Vegas. Then again, it is three in the morning in a pawn shop in Vegas, so maybe it’s not so strange.
Anyway, she finally shows up at the window with her mouth full of toilet paper. She drops a gold tooth and the pliers through the slot.
A gold tooth covered in blood.
For $40.
So now I’m wishing I hadn’t given her the pliers. If I had been thinking, I would have realized why she wanted the pliers. The idea wasn’t to refuse the pliers out of any moral judgment – she’s got to do what she’s got the do. I just shouldn’t have supplied her with the means to do that.
I’m looking at the tooth, thinking, “Well, Big Hoss – now you’ve got to buy it.” After all, she did go to the trouble to bring it to me.
Somehow this one vignette tells you so much about what happens at a pawn shop in the middle of the night in Vegas. You have it all – desperation, weariness, and a certain moral recognition that the desperate need to be afforded whatever dignity is in our power to spare.
Now I just wish Netflix would get some new Pawn Stars episodes available for streaming….
I tend to write teevee reports at regularly irregular intervals. What this means is that I generally wait until SamuraiFrog writes one, which then reminds me that I need to write one, too. Hooray for lemming-like blogging practices!
But anyway, most shows (minus a few FOX shows that were put behind due to baseball and lots and lots of X-Factor) are now anywhere from one-quarter to one-third of the way through their seasons, so it’s a good time to see what’s going on.
:: The gold standard for teevee at Casa Jaquandor continues to be Castle, which has lost exactly none of its touch. I was a bit afraid that after last season’s grim and intense (but great) finale, that this year the show would veer too strongly in the direction of that tone, but they’ve still been able to maintain their just-right mix of seriousness and goofball comedic cops-and-criminals that made the first three seasons so great. I just love this show to absolute pieces.
Now, having said that, I am still concerned about the ongoing storyline about Detective Beckett’s pursuit of her mother’s killer(s). I continue to believe that for best effect, the Castle producers really need to put that storyline to bed this season. They’ve gone to the well infrequently enough that it hasn’t become old hat yet, but in my view, they are getting ever closer to the point where it just won’t be believable to keep having Castle and Beckett pull back the curtain only to find another curtain. There is now no possible way that Castle and Beckett themselves don’t end up together in a romantic capacity, and I don’t think that can really feel right as long as there’s this very dark and tragic loose end dangling out there.
Still, Castle continues to be just fantastic. The Halloween episode was incredibly well-done, and I loved the episode that had Castle and his mother as hostages in a bank robbery, a very nicely-done break from the show’s usual routine.
:: Sticking with the “police procedural” thing, The Mentalist has been a slog this year. Last season ended with Patrick Jane shooting Red John to death right in the middle of a shopping mall, which promised for some possibilities for really interesting storytelling. How would a guy like Jane react to having achieved his revenge? How would he find it at all satisfying? How would he react to now being a killer himself (no matter how justified)? How would his cop friends react to him? How would that affect his investigative skills? And as for Red John, how is this serial killer able to inspire so many disparate followers who are literally willing to die for him with nearly religious intensity of belief?
Alas, The Mentalist explored none of these possibilities. They instead took the lazy path that I had feared all along: that the guy Jane gunned down wasn’t Red John at all. Which means that we’ll get more Red John murders (which involve very bloody killings and a red smiley face drawn on the wall in the victim’s blood), more Red John followers, and more lathering, rinsing, and repeating.
Even worse, The Mentalist has now, in the space of eight episodes or so, managed to completely waste two wonderful guest stars in Bradley Whitford and David Paymer. Whitford played the guy that Jane gunned down. It was a terrific scene, but what if Whitford had lived to stand trial as Red John? They could have really used that…but instead it was ten minutes or so of neat character interaction, and then, BANG! As for Paymer, he played a blogger whom Jane came to believe was a serial killer, and again, there was some potential for some great cat-and-mouse stuff with a recurring character. Instead, Jane taunts Paymer’s character into badmouthing Red John (whom everyone believes to be dead) on live television, an act which leads to Paymer getting to be the victim Red John uses to announce to the world that he’s very much alive. (Now, I must admit, this last was a twist that I genuinely didn’t see coming and it was really quite well done.)
So, the Mentalist writers are in a similar position to the Castle writers: they need to wrap Red John up this year, or else it’s just going to get boring. Their problem, though, is that they simply aren’t as good a bunch of writers as the Castle bunch, so I have a lot less confidence that they can pull it off. We’ll see.
:: I recently decided that The Wife and I needed a new show to watch, so I downloaded a few episodes of Person of Interest, the James Caviezel show that has him playing an Iraq War vet who is recruited by a mysterious guy who has developed a computer program that can crank so many numbers that it can predict when crimes are about to take place…but it can’t predict how or when. All it can do is spit out the social security number of someone who is somehow involved in something bad, whether they know it or not, whether they’re the criminal or not. We’ve watched two episodes and we’re intrigued enough to keep watching.
And I, for one, would love to see Caviezel one day try to star in some kind of goofy, dopey sitcom. That would be hilarious.
:: I’m still watching New Girl, but subsequent episodes have not lived up to the promise of the pilot. It’s almost like the producers put all of their effort into the pilot, and now, having been picked up, are now saying, “Oh geez, now what?!” It didn’t help that they had to recast one character right out of the gate (an actor from the pilot had to bow out of the show when his old show got a surprise renewal, so his contract was still in effect). The show is still good for a few laughs each week, but…well, it’s just slightly above “Meh” right now. (Of course, from my perspective, New Girl could restore some goodwill by having Zooey Deschanel don the overalls from the pilot episode again. Seriously, she may be the single cutest woman to ever wear overalls in history.)
:: The Big Bang Theory continues to be fantastic, although their (apparent) conclusion of Leonard’s fling with Priya was pretty ham-handed. I have a hypothesis about that…but for now, the show’s strength continues to be the simplest of all models: they’ve created an entire group of interesting and memorable and whacky characters, and they just stick them into interesting and memorable and whacky situations. Big Bang Theory is the most character-driven show I know of right now, and I still love it. The gentle implications that Amy Farrah Fowler is actually quite a bit more interested in sex than Sheldon generate tons of hilarity, and the slow morphing of Bernadette into Howard’s mother is a masterstroke, as Howard clearly loves his mother but also clearly can’t figure out how to get away from her.
As for Leonard’s breakup with Priya: it really wasn’t handled well at all (assuming that it’s a done deal and Priya’s gone), and in watching some reruns, I note that his earlier breakup with Penny wasn’t handled all that well either. I really think that the Big Bang Theory writers have a high level of distaste for writing “bummer news” stories like breakups, and when they find they have to write one, they do the minimum amount of work required and surround the breakup with all manner of other farce (which is why the Leonard-Penny breakup happened during an “Evil Wil Wheaton” episode). Plus, Priya never came off…well, I’m not even sure how she was supposed to come off. They obviously couldn’t write her super-nice, but they weren’t able to really pull off writing her as a bitch, either.
:: I really want to like How I Met Your Mother more than I do. It’s funny, it makes me laugh, and I like all of its characters but one. The one I don’t like, though, is the main character. I just have zero interest in Ted Moseby and I don’t give a crap if he ever meets those kids’ mother.
:: Two Broke Girls, however, amuses me greatly. It’s just a basic “odd couple” kind of sitcom, and those always hinge on the characters and their actors. Here it works pretty well.
:: For dumb fun, I still turn to CSI: Miami and Hawaii Five-0. They’re really pretty much the same show – they even look the same, with the same styles of photography. The CSI: Miami premiere, which had Horatio Caine staggering through an entire crime investigation despite a bullet wound in his stomach (sustained in the last moments of last year’s finale), was over-the-top fun, as was the “Miami hit by a tornado” episode. I love these shows, even though neither is to be taken the slightest bit seriously.
:: Reality shows? I’m pretty much down to The Amazing Race, which is the same as always. I was annoyed that they brought in two Survivor winners as a team, but those folks got eliminated very early on, so it didn’t bother me much at all. They’ve also thrown in some bizarre twists to mess with the racers, like the one where at the roadblock (the second of each episode’s two challenges), they had to earn some money and then donate it to an orphanage. At the donation table, there’s this little sign off to the left – incredibly easy to miss – that reads, “You MUST donate ALL of the money in your possession.” Team after team missed the sign, donated just the money they’d earned in the roadblock, and then walked a mile or so to check in at the Pit Stop…only to have Phil tell them, “Go back and give them ALL of your money.” Oops.
:: X-Factor is American Idol with a different black guy in Randy’s chair, a different fourth person in Kara/Ellen’s chair, a less-drugged Paula in Paula’s chair, Simon in Simon’s chair, Pepsi cups instead of Coke ones in front of the lot, and some British guy instead of Ryan Seacrest presiding over the whole thing, as we judge acts of wider age ranges and including groups. That’s it. I watched two episodes or so and then said, “Yeah, I’ve seen enough of this.” If these kinds of singing competitions are your thing, then rock out, but I’ve had my fill by now. I’m still undecided as to whether or not I’m even watching the upcoming season of Idol.
:: Still enjoying this go-round of The Office; I think that being freed of Michael Scott has in some ways reinvigorated the writing. James Spader’s corporate boss guy is really weird, though.
:: As for the various highly-touted shows that run on cable networks, I watch exactly none of them. Frankly, they all sound really grim and dour and I just don’t want that all that often, which is why I’m unlikely to ever bother with stuff like Breaking Bad or The Wire or Sons of Anarchy. I just don’t much feel like watching that sort of thing.
OK, that’s about it. I’ll report back later in the season….
Now that we’re a little ways into the new teevee season, here are some thoughts on some shows.
:: Hell’s Kitchen ended a few weeks ago, somewhat mercifully, as it turns out. This last season was awful. I wrote before about the obvious fact that the producers were keeping Elise around for the sake of drama, but as the finale unwound, it became clear that keeping Elise around for the sake of drama was the only thing keeping the show remotely interesting to watch. Hell’s Kitchen has become nothing more than formula, with nothing ever different, right down to the formats of specific episodes. I found myself predicting each episode’s challenge, before they happened. “Oh, eight chefs left? Time for the Blind Taste Test!” “Final four — time for a visit from the family members, followed by Taste It and Create It!” “Oh, it’s the final two? This means they’ll cook their five dishes for five judges, and whoever wins more gets to pick their team for the final service first.”
There is absolutely nothing ever new about Hell’s Kitchen anymore. Nothing ever happens that we haven’t seen happen to a different batch of chefs in previous seasons. The challenges are always the same; the only thing that changes are the ingredients. Each episode follows a rigid pattern: Reaction to last week; new day and new challenge; losers do crappy punishment while winners have fun; dinner service; upstairs drama over elimination nominations; elimination. It’s all just boring now. And the worst thing is, they don’t have to completely re-invent the show to reinvigorate things. Here are a couple ideas, just kicked off the top of my head randomly:
– No more “men versus women”. During the “signature dishes” challenge, each head-to-head winner goes on one team, each loser to the other. This way you get a whole team of people with a chip on their shoulder from the get-go.
– Have a challenge early on whose reward for winning is the right to trade one chef to the other team, of their choice, for a chef from the other team, of their choice.
– Leave Hell’s Kitchen. Take the chefs to actual, existing restaurants and have them cook one night for actual, paying customers. See what happens.
Just a couple of thoughts…but Hell’s Kitchen really needs to mix things up, and stop being the same thing every year with nothing changed but the faces.
:: The Big Bang Theory continues to please. I would like the show to return a bit to its ‘geek humor’ roots; the focus has been on ‘geek romance’ a bit too much. I like the ‘geek romance’ stuff just fine; the show does it well. But there’s been just a bit too much of it.
:: CSI: Miami and Hawaii Five-0 are my go-to shows for goofy, over-produced, brainless, cops-and-robbers, overactors galore, gonzo fun. Ken Levine writes about why H-5-0 is bad, but while I concede some of his points, I don’t care. On Monday nights at 10:00 when I’m tired and winding down my day, a stupid cop show is just what the doctor ordered.
:: The Office isn’t outright painful to watch, like it was last year, but it’s still not that great. It’s basically “watching someone flounder about a management job” with the same group of office cohorts. It’s not a show I look forward to much anymore; it’s something that is non-crap in a timeslot between shows I like watching.
Ohhh….wait a minute. We’re watching The Office right now as I write this, and Darryl just had one of the best lines in the show’s history. He was upset about not winning the lottery, but then he realizes he’s being an ass and says:
“You know what? My future’s not gonna be determined by seven little white balls. It’s gonna be determined by two big black balls.”
Credit where due, that was a terrific line.
:: I watched two episodes of The X-Factor. And then I stopped, because it’s the same damn thing as American Idol. I don’t care. Really and truly, I don’t care.
:: The Amazing Race is off to a typical start. It’s hard to figure out who to root for early on, so the show’s mainly about the travelogues and laughing at the annoying ones. What I do not like is the presence of two racers who are former winners of Survivor. This is irritating. They got eliminated really early on, but it’s just annoying that apparently CBS is going to be bringing former contestants back on both TAR and Survivor each time out now. I’ve stopped watching Survivor entirely because of this. If they want to bring back old contestants, then just have an “All-Stars” edition. Bringing back two contestants at a time is just stupid. (And even dumber is the apparent fact that the new contestants apparently aren’t even bothered by this — why isn’t the automatic reaction never, “Hey, these guys have played before! Screw them, let’s vote ’em out first time we’re at Tribal and then play the game our way!”)
:: The Mentalist has returned, in kind-of annoying fashion. Last season ended with Patrick Jane coming face to face, in a shopping mall, with Red John, the serial killer who murdered his wife and daughter. They even cast Bradley Whitford as Red John, giving the part some gravitas. Then, as Red John was walking away, Jane shot and killed him. That was how the season ended. With this season, Jane has to answer for killing the guy…but after that’s wrapped up, Jane drops the bombshell that I feared was coming: The guy he shot wasn’t Red John. And the second episode seemed to confirm this, so now…the Red John subplot marches on.
This, quite frankly, sucks.
I still enjoy The Mentalist, because it has a good sense of humor for a show. But the Red John thing just needs to end. It’s getting unbelievable at this point. Red John isn’t just a brilliant serial killer; he’s been established as being able to establish a large enough grip on other people that he inspires them to kill themselves on his behalf. It’s just getting flat-out unreal, and worse, continually playing the “Jane is closing in…but now he’s not!” card is lazy writing. How much more interesting to use Jane’s victory over Red John to explore what happens to a single-mindedly driven person like Patrick Jane when he finally achieves his grim goal…but instead, the search for Red John continues.
:: In a similar vein, the search for the killer of Detective Beckett’s mothercontinues on Castle. I’m more forgiving, since Castle wasn’t so brazen as to suggest that the storyline is over before resurrecting it next season, and because Castle is, in general, much better written than The Mentalist. But here, too, I’m starting to tire of the storyline, because it can be a crutch for the writers. It gives them something to do every time sweeps rolls around, and it gives them a way to keep stringing Castle and Beckett along, when it’s obvious they really should be together at some point.
I end up wishing that writers would have enough courage, or confidence, to finish a story and then, if the show goes on, honestly explore the implications of that story and the ramifications when it ends. It would be a lot more compelling than these types of years-long mysteries that aren’t really mysteries but rather onions with endless layers to be peeled back.
:: Everybody hates on Mondays, but for my money, Tuesdays are far more likely to offer up a Giant Bowl of Suck. Tuesdays are just irritating. Everybody gears up for Mondays, because they’re depressing by definition, but Tuesdays? They just sit there in the tall grass, waiting to ambush you. Tuesdays are the nadir of the week. You’re still close enough to the previous weekend to remember whatever good times you had to see end to go back to work, and you’re too far from the next weekend to take solace. Tuesdays are just nothing but grind.
:: I don’t know if I’m going to bother watching the finale of Hell’s Kitchen. The show is just awful, what with the continuing, and increasingly inexplicable, presence of Elise.
:: In the “Hey, that’s never happened before!” department, I got blocked by someone on Flickr! This was really odd. I’ve never been blocked before, ever. I only noticed because I added her as a contact just the other day, and today I noticed she wasn’t showing up on my Contacts page. Weird! I’ve been defriended on Facebook and I’m sure I’ve been unfollowed on Blogger, Twitter, and Tumblr, but I tend to not notice these things…I have no idea what my numbers are, in terms of followers, on any of the services that have followers in the first place. I’m kind of intrigued as to what it was about me that turned this person off; I can only assume she took a cursory look at my photostream and concluded that I’m some kind of creepy fetishist. Oh well!
:: I have zero idea of what I want for my birthday this year. And I feel like I should be taking advantage, because I’m hitting one of the Nice Round Numbers.
Specifically, now, some food thoughts:
:: I’ve been consuming fruit smoothies in a big way of late. My method is this: I throw in a cup or so of ice cubes, followed by a scoop of protein powder (if I’ve just returned from working out, otherwise I omit the protein powder), then roughly half a cup of milk and half-to-two-thirds a cup of vanilla yogurt. Then I add fruit: usually I throw in a banana, followed either by a peach or two or a blend of berries, mostly strawberry or blueberry. Then I let the blender work its magic, and drink.
My problem, of course, is that the stuff I’ve been making my smoothies with will very shortly be out of season, and thus either unavailable or too expensive to keep on hand. We’re heading into apple season…so, do apples make decent smoothies? I will report back once I’ve found out, but an apple cinnamon smoothie sounds awesome, doesn’t it?
:: I’m also giving more and more thought to vegetarianism. Not as an entire lifestyle, but I’m liking the idea of going meatless one or two times a week. I am already eating several vegetarian meals each week, so doing this won’t be a problem. I imagine that beans will have a major presence. I need to start reading some recipes!
:: But no, I won’t be giving up meat entirely. Never! And by way of evidence, here’s a recent meal I had: a pancetta, Romaine, and tomato sandwich on a sub roll:
Oh, this was heavenly.
:: I have officially come around on fresh tomatoes. I love ’em now. I hated them when I was a kid, but I gradually learned to accept them on sandwiches and burgers and tomato slices on pizza. I’m not sure I’ll ever sit and eat tomato slices all by themselves, but otherwise, I’m becoming tomato-obsessed. It’s too bad our balcony gets so little sunlight during the summer; we can’t grow any tomatoes!
:: Oh, and I discovered hummus last week. I had a hummus, tomato, and leaf lettuce sandwich for lunch one day that was amazing.
Spoilers for Hell’s Kitchen and Master Chef, under Inviso-text — highlight to read.
Good lord, both of these shows irritated the hell out of me tonight. If anyone has ever questioned the clear fact that for all the onscreen stuff involving Gordon Ramsay and the other two guys on Master Chef are deciding who stays and who leaves, it’s really the producers who are calling the shots, there can be no doubt now. Each show had a person or two who really deserved to leave on the basis of what they did in the episode, and in both cases, those people were spared.
On HK, either Elise or Carrie should have been booted. It was painfully obvious, from the way both cooked terribly, and from the way that as soon as both of them were booted out of dinner service, the Red Team found its groove and completed dinner service with few hitches. And on Master Chef, it was clear that Christian attempted to weasel out of responsibility for his and Suzy’s loss in the challenge, and that his lemon meringue pie was not as good as Suzy’s. But on HK, both Elise and Carrie were spared and Ramsay pulled a surprise eviction of Jamie (who had been part of the red team’s recovery after the Drama Queens were sent upstairs), and on Master Chef, Suzy was given the boot.
I really can’t see any rationale for this other than the producers of each show basically telling Gordon Ramsay and company that he had to keep around the people who produced the most conflict, which in reality teevee terms translates to “the best teevee”. This is the problem with these shows where eliminations are supposedly decided by the show’s star/host: it’s clear that the producers have input.
I remember the second or third season of The Apprentice, when in a “shocking” boardroom sequence, Donald Trump fired four people at once. This was billed as a stunning development, but if one considered that the show’s numbers of both contestants and episodes were known well in advance, it became clear that that season was specifically set up so that Trump would have to do a mass firing at some point or other. It’s the same thing here. There’s no doubt in my mind that the producers told Ramsay, “No way are you getting rid of Elise or Carrie just yet.” And that sucks, because watching the two of them is just annoying now.
And what exactly makes a ‘sexy’ dessert, anyway? OK, end of rant!
Spoilerific musings on Hell’s Kitchen and MasterChef!
:: Elise is freakishly annoying. She’s not a bad cook, but she’s lazy in the challenge loser punishments and just a generic loudmouth. And I frankly don’t understand why people don’t learn that taking the “I’m not here to make friends!” approach to a reality teevee competition never works.
:: If a favorite is emerging — and it’s not a strong favorite — it’s probably Will, from the Men’s (Blue) team. He doesn’t get a whole lot of screen time during services, which is a good thing, because screen time during services tends to go to the people who blunder. Will’s main screen time comes during challenges, when he does well. I don’t think he’s had a dish criticized yet, and he did a 4-for-4 performance in the “cook four cuts of beef to specific doneness” challenge.
:: They made a big deal out of the ‘balcony tables’ overlooking the kitchen, but nothing’s happened up there that I know of. Odd.
On MasterChef:
:: I like Jennifer a lot. She definitely has cooking skill, and…well, she’s pretty. I’m shallow.
:: I wonder if the producers worked on Joe Bastianich’s personal skills or something, but he is not nearly as obnoxiously arrogant as he was last season. He’s still an occasional hard-ass, but he actually looks like he’s enjoying doing the show this time out. There’s a lot less of the “I shall now descend from Mt. Olympus to mingle with you groveling monkeys” air about him this season.
:: But then, it could just be that Bastianich is simply the second most insufferable prick in this year’s edition of MasterChef. This guy Christian is just a complete douche. He’s also a very good cook, obviously, but really — douche. He’s so convinced that he is carrying around giant bags filled with Awesome that it’s been noticed by the chef judges, who are starting to take shots at him for it. Which he is ignoring. He reminds me of the awful Benjamin from two seasons back on Hell’s Kitchen, a bullying toad who doubled down on his own screw-ups when one of the world’s greatest chefs told him he was full of it.
:: I’d love to see a Mystery Box Challenge where contestants are not given a bunch of “the most amazing” ingredients, but rather, a whole bunch of crap. I’d like to see a challenge where they’re told to make something decent out of beef kidneys, regular old American white bread, Velveeta, and stuff like that. Now there would be a serious Challenge!
I could swear that I’ve linked this already, but for the life of me, I can’t find where, so maybe it’s just been on my “Link this!” radar for a while, without actually getting linked. Anyway, over at Musings of a Sci-Fi Fanatic there is a truly wonderful post about the pilot episode of The Incredible Hulk (the Bill Bixby-Lou Ferrigno show).
The credits roll to the theme of Joe Harnell’s The Lonely Man and Banner’s lonely journey begins. The theme highlights the tragic reality of the figure that is David Banner always walking away alone. This version of the Hulk has been called an “American classic.” I think that is a great assessment of what the folks involved with this series, aimed for adapting from a comic book. It’s the perfect American tragedy.
This was a strong start to the possibilties ahead. As a character study Johnson gets the dark tone, but I can imagine there were suits in the room that were uncomfortable with a story centered on a tragic figure. The Incredible Hulk was clearly intended to be a big green doozy of a series. It’s one of the first comic book characters to move beyond conventions and present something much bigger and do so successfully.
Some final thoughts on the teevee season just completed:
:: The only new show I ended up liking enough to mostly watch all season (I missed a couple of episodes) was Mike and Molly. There’s not a thing about it that’s original; it’s just a typical sitcom about two people who meet and fall in love and meet each other’s circle of lunatic friends and family. The “spin” of the show is that our leads are obese. The first few episodes were heavy on the fat-jokes, but they backed off a bit on that, and mostly kept the “fat” humor aimed at Mike and not Molly. It’s not a great show, by any means, but it’s a pleasant sitcom with likeable people in it. Which makes it a marked contrast to its lead-in show, the ongoingly awful Two and a Half Men.
:: I finally became a committed fan of How I Met Your Mother this season, although my impression remains the same as when the show debuted: the lead character, Ted, who is narrating the events of the show to his kids, is the show’s least interesting character. He really doesn’t need to be there at all.
:: The Office probably should have ended entirely on Michael Scott’s departure. This show has lost a significant amount of steam. The biggest mistake, I think, was in allowing Dwight to get the upper hand on occasion. I consider that a colossal blunder on the part of the writing staff.
:: We didn’t watch Grey’s Anatomy at all this year. We’ll likely watch this season over the summer.
:: I’ve already bitched about Survivor, which I didn’t watch. Rob should never have been there, period. I don’t care how much Kool-Aid he managed to get his competitors to drink; he should never have been brought back at all. I’m probably done with Survivor.
:: The Amazing Race was kind of unexciting this last time. I do wish that they would come up with a way around the fact that each year it seems like one of the final three teams ends up out of the running because they get a cab driver who can’t find the McDonald’s that’s closest to the airport, much less the destinations they have to reach.
:: I watched the first episode of two of Celebrity Apprentice, but then Donald Trump decided that he really wanted him some Teabagger Love, so the hell with him and his show.
:: CSI: Miami is as goofy fun as ever. I haven’t watched either of the other two CSIs in several years, but Miami still entertains me with its gonzo Shatner-on-quaaludes acting by David Caruso.
:: Hawaii Five-0 was OK. I wasn’t wild about it, but I did like it enough to catch most episodes. The cast developed chemistry as the season went on, and the finale episode was a hell of a cliffhanger. In fact, the cliffhanger was so good that it might be one of those cliffhangers with no satisfying resolution. I wouldn’t be surprised if next season starts off with some hand-wavey BS. But that finale was a pretty riveting hour of teevee.
:: The Mentalist was mostly entertaining, and it turned in a fantastic season finale, in which Patrick Jane came face-to-face with Red John. If it was Red John. We’ll see. Even if it was Red John, there are still lots of questions out there — such as, how did this serial killer inspire so many people to assist him in his crimes with such loyalty that they would all kill themselves rather than betray him? Next year will go into some interesting places, I think.
:: American Idol was boring, boring, boring. I can count on one hand the number of times the judges actually provided any real criticism of the contestants, so what happened was that each contestant settled into a particular comfort-area and stayed right there. There was Pia Toscano, who only sang nothing but big-voiced love ballads, Celine Dion style; there was a guy named James who, aside from one song, did everything as an arena-rock anthem; there was another woman who was very proud of her Latina heritage and therefore sang one verse of every song in Spanish; there was eventual winner, Scotty McCreery, who aside from one or two songs, did nothing but slow country tunes in his freakishly low voice. It was a dull, dull, dull year. Blech.
:: I hate Glee. Hate it. Absolutely hate it. But I’ll say this: Glee sure is a fun show to hate. It’s total crap. What do I hate about it? Well, the characters, for one. This is one of those shows that makes me constantly say to myself, “Nobody would ever act this way in real life!” In one episode, the Jane Lynch character played a sex-tape or something like that made by the glee-club director over the school’s PA system. I don’t know if that was supposed to be funny, but someone does that in real life, and they’re almost certainly suspended from their job by the end of the day. Ugh. I also hate how the show’s musical numbers are all the same: person starts singing while everyone else sits around, staring at them in rapt amazement. I hate how the show constantly implies that only singers are musicians of any worth — no lip service at all is paid to the incredibly talented instrumentalists who are never seen rehearsing or practicing, and yet who provide perfect — and anonymous — accompaniments each week. I hate the show’s reliance on cliche, from the flamboyant gay character to the way the season finale, set in New York City, opened with glittering shots of Times Square while the opening bars of Rhapsody in Blue played. Glee is ghastly garbage! (Why do we watch it? The Kid likes it.)
:: And then there’s the best damn thing on teevee, by far: Castle, which just continues to get better and better. This year featured some amazing episodes, and they managed to advance the relationship between Castle and Beckett without bogging it down. (Admittedly, though, I don’t think they have much more room to stretch things out without having them either wind up together or…not.) The ongoing tale of Beckett’s search for her mother’s murderer took some interesting twists and turns, none more so than what unfolded in the show’s brilliantly-written and acted season finale. Castle is the one show that has me wishing that late September was closer than it is.
And now we have summer teevee — Master Chef (never my favorite Gordon Ramsay vehicle), the eventual return of Hell’s Kitchen, America’s Got Talent (which is really only interesting in the first weeks, during the auditions, and before it ends up being a de facto singing competition). And, of course, movies!
I had a great time putting together my list of 100 Movie Memories last week, so doing the same thing with teevee seems an obvious follow-up. As before, this is a collection of memories about teevee watching, memories of teevee shows, thoughts on the teevee experience, and so on. Yay, teevee!
(I’m watching teevee in the photo, I swear. It’s not meant to force my readers to stare up at my nose.)
This post is pretty long, so it’s after the fold.
100. I’m old enough to remember when if you wanted to watch The Wizard of Oz, what you did was this: you waited until sometime in March when CBS would air it one time. If you missed it, well, there was always next year.
99. Ditto the holiday specials like Rudolph and It’s the Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown.
98. My family owned just one color teevee until 1984 or 1985. That color teevee was a tiny thing, a nine-inch screen that was very curved at the corners. It didn’t show the entire picture, either; if you were watching something with subtitles, the words spilled off the sides of the screen. We had a few other teevees, but they were all black-and-white.
97. The next color teevee that we got was actually a gift my parents bought for me so I could use it with my VIC-20. This one was nineteen inches. They got a deal on it at a local store because it had been a display model, used for the store’s display-model VIC-20! Apparently their default program to have running on their VIC was the slot-machine game, because its image was burned into the screen. This wasn’t a big deal when watching, though.
That teevee would be in our family — later my family — until just a few years ago when The Wife and I finally ditched it. Its main quirk was that at some point it developed this odd habit of ticking when plugged in and turned off. So, we had to keep it unplugged when not in use. We affectionately referred to that teevee as “the clicking wonder”. This was also my college teevee, providing many hours of entertainment to my roommates, my friends, and I in various degrees of sobriety.
96. We got cable in 1985. Prior to that, we used antennae. This wasn’t a problem in Portland, OR, where we lived well-within the broadcast area of the area’s TV stations. But Allegany, NY is not well-within the broadcast area of Buffalo’s TV stations, so we had to use one of those giant roof-mounted antennae. Even so, we only got channels 2, 4, and 7; and our reception on 7 was terrible.
[OK, an aside here. It’s a long-standing quirk of this blog that I write the kinda-word “teevee” when referring to TV. But I’m going to be referring to television a lot in this post, so here on out, I’m going with ‘TV’. OK? Don’t like it, your money back.]
95. When we finally got cable, my main desires were to watch MTV and Dr. Who, which was on WNED at the time. Dr. Who eventually went away, sadly.
94. I nearly died with glee when I looked at TVGuide and saw that WNED was going to have a Dr. Who marathon one Saturday afternoon. Huzzah! This, sadly, was when I discovered the annoyance of pledge breaks. Betrayer most foul!
93. I liked The Love Boat and Fantasy Island, which I thought made a killer back-to-back combo on Saturday nights. Sue me.
92. My very, very, very earliest TV memory is a kid’s show called Bumpity. My memories are so vague about this show that I decided to Google it before I wrote this entry on this list. Voila: Bumpity!
Bumpity was created in 1971 when the FCC (Federal Communications Commission) asked local station affiliates around the country to air children’s educational programming. The ABC affiliate in Portland, Oregon answered them by producing Bumpity, a talking bump in the lawn. It all started when an employee of the station, Bob Griggs, came up with an idea to design a puppet, which he made with less than three dollars.
A talking bump on the lawn? That’s some high-concept shit right there, folks! Given the time period, I have to assume that there were some hallucinogenic factors behind the creation of Bumpity.
91. I remember my parents watching this show on Friday nights on PBS.
(Starts at the 1:00 mark, roughly.)
90. In Portland there was an “independent” TV station that wasn’t network affiliated. I don’t recall which channel it was. This channel had good stuff on after school: The Flintstones, followed by The Brady Bunch, followed by Kung Fu, followed by Star Trek. This is where my love of Star Trek really began (although those seeds had already been sown, as my sister had loved Star Trek as long as I can remember).
89. Some part of me will likely be thrilled by this until the day I die at the age of 108:
88. Before the revealing episode aired, I guessed correctly who shot JR. It was a pure guess, based on very little knowledge of what the show was even about, but still. I was right.
87. I don’t want to pretend that my liking of Star Trek and Kung Fu were indicative of keen taste and high standards on the part of my eight and nine-year-old self. My favorite show at the time was Buck Rogers.
Ummm…yeah.
86. My other favorite show at the time? This one:
(BTW, check out the Diff’rent Strokes credits when done with horror movie music. Also, in the course of searching YouTube, I’m seeing lots of clips from an episode involving a child molester? I have no memory of this, thank God.)
85. Like most young kids, I loved Sesame Street, The Electric Company, and Mr. Rogers.
And Sesame Street yielded my earliest memory of a pie in the face.
84. “We can rebuild him. We have the technology.” (The Six Million Dollar Man, which I loved. I never figured out, though, why it was that when he used his bionic leg to run at super-speed, the show depicted this by showing him running in slow motion.)
83. “Mr. McGee, don’t make me angry. You wouldn’t like me when I’m angry.” (The Incredible Hulk. I see this occasionally in reruns to this day, and I don’t think it’s bad!)
82. Things I learned from The Dukes of Hazzard: welding the doors shut on your car is a good idea; some cars survive being jumped over stuff just fine while others (invariably topped by flashing lights) do not; you can get in a world of trouble for driving around with something called “moonshine” in your car; dealing with your county police is a lot easier if you know exactly where the county boundary lines are at all times, so you can duck outside the Sheriff’s jurisdiction; short shorts are attractive. (I really only watched the show for a year or two. It really lost its magic when Bo and Luke went off someplace else and were replaced for a season by two dipshit cousins for some reason.)
81. I loved game shows as a kid. Loved ’em. My favorite was The Price is Right, but I also greatly enjoyed Cark Sharks, Family Feud, The Jokers Wild, Tic Tac Dough, and others. Game shows were fun, I tell you what. I started losing my fascination with game shows once Press Your Luck came along.
80. Pretty much until I graduated high school, a new James Bond movie would show up in theaters every odd year. The only other way to see them was to watch them when they were televised on ABC, which happened once every three or four months. It was in this way that I gradually saw the entire series…except that since they were on ABC, and our ABC station was the afore-mentioned Channel 7 with its crap-tastic reception, it would be years before I saw the Bond films in anything remotely resembling the way they were supposed to look.
79. Sunday nights on CBS had a line-up we watched pretty faithfully: All in the Family and its sequel series Archie Bunker’s Place, One Day at a Time, Alice, and The Jeffersons. For the most part, we watched the middle two shows because they were between the others, which we wanted to watch more. (I may be mistaken, but I remember that my mother didn’t care for Bonnie Franklin on One Day. I didn’t care, because by this point — I was now ten or eleven — I’d come to the realization that girls are nifty beings, and that I could happily look at Valerie Bertinelli for as long as she was on the screen.)
78. I miss extended theme songs to TV shows. Lots of times I just liked the themes without being terribly interested in the shows themselves. (One TV theme that I always thought was underrated was Cagney and Lacey‘s theme. Not that great a show, but a terrific theme.)
77. I still think The A-Team is pretty entertaining. I always loved how the bad guys always got the drop on the team, but before dispatching them, decided to lock them in a warehouse full of engine parts and tools.
76. I never really got into MacGyver. I don’t know — it just seemed to roll all of The A-Team into one guy, and he never even needed the warehouse full of engine parts and tools. Some of those things he did were pretty eye-rolling, like one episode where he and some woman are trapped in a chemical factory or something, and MacGyver stops to grab a bunch of candy bars from a busted vending machine. Later on, when they discover that a chemical reactor is leaking, MacGyver uses the candy bars to plug the leak because they’re made of sugar which will react with the leaking chemicals to plug the leak. Yeah…and then there was an episode that had MacGyver squaring off against a marching horde of army ants.
75. “Our loyalties are to the species, and to the planet. Our obligation to survive is owed, not just to ourselves, but to that Cosmos, ancient and vast, from which we spring.” –Carl Sagan, Cosmos — first the TV show, and then the book, which continue to be one of the most important shaping factors in how I view our Universe.
74. “Once you give up integrity, the rest is a piece of cake.” –JR Ewing, Dallas. I became a big fan of Dallas during the 80s. I wasn’t even bothered all that much by the “Pam dreamed all of last season!” dodge to bring a dead Bobby Ewing back to life. Dallas was fun stuff.
73. Dynasty, however, was more of a mixed bag. It was a lot trashier, for one thing, with constantly over-the-top dialog and scheming by the characters. Everyone was always vowing to “destroy” someone else. “I’ll destroy you, Blake!” “No, Alexis, I will destroy you.” This use of “destroy” became a running joke in my family: “Go clean the litterboxes.” “What if I don’t, Mom?” “Then I’ll destroy you.”
72. The other big prime-time soaps were Knot’s Landing and Falcon Crest, neither of which I particularly got into, although I liked Falcon Crest‘s theme. There was a staggeringly silly Dynasty spin-off called The Colbys, which featured Charlton Heston and Barbara Stanwyck, if you can believe that. One season of The Colbys ended with Emma Samms’s character being abducted by aliens. I shit you not. They showed the ship and everything.
71. What about daytime soaps? Well, General Hospital was always a blast, what with spy-adventure summer storylines. I was schooled in As the World Turns, thanks to my mother and sister. Once in college some friends and I were watching some movie, when an actress who had played Margo on ATWT showed up, and one girl and I said at the same time, “Margo?!” Anyway….
70. I was never a big fan of The Cosby Show, to be honest. I didn’t hate it, by any means; it just didn’t light my fire.
69. I hated Roseanne, though. Ugh.
68. During college, TV dropped off my radar in a big way. The only shows I actively pursued were Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.
67. “Let us make sure that history never forgets the name Enterprise!” –Jean-Luc Picard, “Yesterday’s Enterprise”
66. “Time has little to do with infinity and jelly donuts.” –Thomas Sullivan Magnum, Magnum, PI. I loved this show. Still do, actually — it was so often just plain entertaining, with a wonderfully written cast of characters and a lot of intriguing mystery stories and occasional forays into espionage thrillers. At times the show could actually become very dark — there was an episode that had Magnum being called on the phone by a serial killer who would taunt him with nursery rhymes, another that had Frank Sinatra guest-starring as a mainland cop with an agenda. And then there’s the episode that had Magnum going underground to go after his daughter’s killer — that’s an episode that’s going to stay with me forever.
65. I liked both of the fall-1981 shows that sprang from the earlier-that-year success of Raiders of the Lost Ark: ABC’s Tales of the Gold Monkey and CBS’s Bring ‘Em Back Alive. Gold Monkey was probably the more successful of the two, in terms of quality, but Bring ‘Em had its charms too.
64. Maverick and Hee-haw were common when I was very young. I suspect that Hee-haw may have been an early source of my fascination with overalls.
63. I didn’t develop an interest in sports until my late teens, aside from figure skating, which I liked because my mother likes it. I also enjoyed it back when Wide World of Sports actually covered the wide world of sports.
62. As noted above, entire shows came and went during my college years without penetrating my consciousness. I was only vaguely aware of a sitcom starring a guy named Will Smith, and likewise only vaguely aware of some cartoon show that was on the still-fledgling FOX network. This show followed a family of yellow-skinned buffoon, the oldest child of which was a mischievous boy with spiky hair who apparently liked telling people not to have a cow.
61. The Girlfriend (now The Wife) and I have always had a show or two that we mutually liked a whole lot. The first one was LA Law, which was really good for its first three or four seasons. It got kind of embarrassing pretty quickly, though, after they killed off one character by dropping her down an elevator shaft.
60. Cheers was also a mainstay of college. What a great, great show that was. I remember that we ordered a pizza on the night of the finale, and the delivery guy was jealous that we were watching the show. That finale was one of the first, if not the first, “event” series finale shows, with retrospective before and late-night stuff after. I remember hissing the screen when Bob Costas, ever the clever one, said, “This is the Super Bowl of comedy, with one difference: they’ll be laughing in Buffalo.” Yeah. F*** you, Bob.
59. Sticking with Cheers for a moment: I will cheerfully admit that I liked Rebecca Howe a lot more than Diane Chambers.
58. Coach: (answers phone) Hey, is there an Ernie Pantuso here? Sam: That’s you, Coach. Coach: (into phone) Speaking!
57. The Cheers gang gets its final victory over Gary’s Old Towne Tavern — but not really, since they have to beg conman Harry the Hat to do it for them.
56. The only time we saw Vera’s face, it was covered with pie.
55. “Hi, I’m Larry, this is my brother Darryl, and this is my other brother Darryl.” –Larry, Newhart
54. Oooh, I can’t forget about Saturday morning TV! I was a big fan of Captain Marvel (my mother even made me a Captain Marvel suit for Halloween one year — and no, I’m not posting pictures) and the companion show to Shazam!, The Mighty Isis. Other cartoons came and went, but my favorite was always The Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Hour.
53. And don’t forget Schoolhouse Rock and In the News, narrated by Christopher Glenn!
52. If this preceded a show, you were in for something good:
51. Scooby Doo never really did it for me. I could never understand why, after however many times the monster turned out to be a guy in a suit and mask, the kids didn’t just try to rip the monster’s mask off the first time they ran into him. Didn’t make sense.
50. I didn’t discover The Simpsons until it had been around five or six years, long enough to be in syndicated reruns and have new episodes on. The Girlfriend (now The Wife) introduced me to the show. It’s waxed and waned, but I’ve been a fan all these years.
49. News events I watched unfold on TV: President Reagan’s inauguration (our teacher brought a TV in for this), which was immediately followed by news that the American hostages in Iran had been released; the 1981 eruption of Mt. St. Helens; the first launch of the space shuttle Columbia; the assassination of Anwar Sadat; the explosion of the Challenger; the inauguration of President Clinton; the final court ruling in Bush v. Gore; the election of Barack Obama as 43rd President of the United States; the killing of Osama bin Laden. (I didn’t see 9-11-01 footage until I got home from work, eight hours after the attacks.)
48. I’ve never been a big fan of talk shows. Merv Griffin was kind of cool, though.
47. “Sis-boom-bah. What is the sound a sheep makes before it explodes?” –Johnny Carson as Carnak the Magnificent, The Tonight Show. I’ve been a Johnny Carson fan ever since I was in second grade or so. The guy was terrific.
46. We got our first VCR in 1985 or thereabouts. The first show we taped — because it was on when we got the thing set up — was an old NBC mystery series called Riptide. The show was crap, but I watched that taped episode five or six times, because hey, we taped it!
45. Renting movies sure had an interesting evolution. First there were “video clubs”, not “video stores”. You had to join a club to be able to rent, and joining cost money. I remember that when we rented a movie for the first time, the place required a $50 deposit in case we ruined the tape. (The movie was Raiders of the Lost Ark, by the way.) I remember the first store in our town that wasn’t a “club” where you had to pay dues, but you just gave them some info to keep on file and then you paid your four bucks or whatever to take home a movie. This joint was called “Choice Video”, and their odd habit was that they didn’t organize their movies at all. In any way. No alphabetizing, no categorizing, no nothing. If you wanted a specific title, you had to search the store for it. You could ask the guy at the counter, but he’d just look it up and say, “Yeah, we own it.”
44. Since I’ve already done a 100 things about The Simpsons, I’ll just pick one thing from The Simpsons: Leonard Nimoy on “The Springfield Files”.
Hello. I’m Leonard Nimoy. The following tale of alien encounters is true. And by true, I mean false. It’s all lies. But they’re entertaining lies. And in the end, isn’t that the real truth? The answer is: No.
43. Say what you will, there is no TV show better for the brain when one has just completed a closing Friday night shift at a pizza place and it’s 2:00 in the morning than Beavis and Butthead. That show could be downright clever in its satire of high school idiots, such as in one episode where the boys are participating in the school’s fundraising candy bar sale, selling candy bars for $2 each. The guys sell them back and forth to each other, for the same $2. Loved that.
42. I only watched seasons two, three, and four of The Real World. I liked the San Francisco cast the best (excepting Puck, who was a douche).
41. “Harris, where’s the sex?” –Captain Miller on Barney Miller. I loved this show and watched it after school when it was in reruns for a time. This quote comes from an episode where, for some reason, the police department had Detective Harris make a porn movie, which he screened for the squad. But he’d made a film, not a skinflick, leaving Captain Miller to intone, “Harris, where’s the sex?!”
40. Little House on the Prairie was fun in its earlier episodes, but like a lot of shows that get popular and last a while, it started to take itself too seriously, and some of the later episodes are so overwrought with depressing crap that the show almost felt like self-parody. Alice Garvey’s death was impossible to take seriously, and the whole series ended with the denizens of Walnut Grove dynamiting the town to keep some evil capitalists from getting their hands on it! Wow.
But damned if I don’t tear up when I see the “Ernest Borgnine as an angel” episode. Boy Howdy, that one gets me every time.
38. “It’s my gift. It’s my curse.” -Frank Black, Millennium
37. I should probably say something about MTV. I grew up with MTV; I was only nine or ten when it first started up, and I saw it the first time only a year or two later, when I started visiting a particular friend after school and for sleepovers. MTV was cool at that point: just wall-to-wall music videos, which I thought were the coolest thing on Earth. My favorite of the original VJ’s was Nina Blackwood.
I’m old enough to be one of those who can whine about the gradual shift on MTV from videos to original programming, but at the time that I still had MTV as a viewing option, I enjoyed stuff like The Real World. I have zero idea what MTV is like right now, though.
True story: early in the school year in 1986, my paternal grandmother passed away. She was the first death in the family that really hit me. It was on a Friday morning. That night, the MTV Music Video Awards were on. Out of habit, even though I wasn’t much in the mood, I turned them on and watched a bit — long enough for them to cut to live footage from a Van Halen concert. Watching Sammy and the boys doing “Best of Both Worlds” really helped my mood that night.
36. I liked Caroline in the City a lot more than I would have had it starred anyone other than Lea Thompson.
35. We loved ER so much. That show’s first five or six seasons were as good as anything I’ve ever seen. We eventually fell away from the show (here’s why) but while it was good, The Girlfriend (later The Wife) and I moved heaven and earth to not miss an episode.
34. I will forever believe that NYPDBlue is one of the great underrated TV series of all time. It was so good, and so rock-solid consistent. And it had one of the finer finales I’ve seen in a series.
This isn’t the final scene, but it’s close. Andy Sipowicz’s journey from the show’s beginning to its end is a great TV achievement (and acting achievement, by Dennis Franz) that I wish got more credit than it seems to have.
33. Why Mad About You didn’t end with the wonderful birth of Paul and Jamie’s kid is something I’ll never understand. It was such a perfect moment to end on, as the show transitioned from being about a marriage to being about a family. (And, frankly, the show just wasn’t that good at being about a family.) Mad About You‘s second, third, and fourth seasons are all kinds of terrific.
32. We didn’t start watching Friends until midway through its first season. We never stopped watching it. Friends is one of my favorite shows of all time. Yes, it probably went on one season too long. I don’t care.
31. Wow, there were a slew of crappy shows that tried airing in the post-Friends or post-Seinfeld timeslots. The Single Guy? Jesse? (That one was really bad, especially since it was supposedly set in Buffalo.) Madman of the People? Good Morning Miami? All crap. Only one of those post-Friends shows stands out…
30. …my beloved Scrubs. This show is one of the things that keeps me from writing off the 2000s as a complete waste of a decade for all of humanity. Scrubs made me laugh and brought me in, emotionally, as no other sitcom has ever done.
29. Scully: Fox? Mulder: I even made my parents call me ‘Mulder’.
28. Starting with Super Bowl XXV (the Bills’ first appearance), I’ve never missed a Super Bowl game. Yay, me!
27. My favorite cooking shows were Emeril Live and Good Eats. Iron Chef was variably interesting, mainly depending upon the secret ingredient. I remember an oddly compelling little game show on FoodTV called Ready, Set, Cook!, which would pair a regular person with a chef, and in twenty minutes they had to come up with a dish using ten bucks’ worth of ingredients provided by the contestants.
26. I watched a fair amount of the first season of Survivor, and I decided that I didn’t like the show, because it seemed to me set up to reward a person with a particular skill set that would make that person not all that much fun to be around. I eventually came around, only to be turned off again by the show’s fetishistic worship of that nitwit Rob Mariano. I have no idea if I’ll bother watching the show when it returns (and I certainly won’t when Rob returns).
25. I really miss Whose Line Is It Anyway. Both the British and American versions.
24. Back in the mid 90s, NBC had an idea of doing three action/adventure/thriller shows on Saturday nights. They called it the “Saturday Thrillogy”, and two of those shows — The Pretender and Profiler — were favorites of ours. (The first show wasn’t, and I don’t even remember what it was. It was canceled, though, and replaced by something else that we still didn’t like all that much.) Both The Pretender and Profiler lasted for several years, and we watched them faithfully, often over Chinese takeout. Both shows were canceled despite respectable (but not great) ratings, because NBC wanted to free up Saturday nights for their next BIG THING. This was the XFL. F*** you, NBC.
23. I never really got thirtysomething, because I was probably too young to get it. But the next show by creators Marshall Herskovitz and Edward Zwick, My So-Called Life, absolutely rocked my world. I actually got partially obsessive over that show.
22. MSCL only lasted one season — f*** you, ABC — and receded into memory. Five years later, Herskovitz and Zwick would get another drama on ABC: a show about two divorced people who fall in love while trying to deal with the emotional fallout of their splintered families. That show was Once and Again, which would last three wonderful, brilliant seasons, until ABC pulled the plug. Yeah. F*** you, ABC!
21. I mentioned Millennium some entries before. After Millennium ended each Friday night during its run, I’d switch over to CBS and watch the entertainingly silly Don Johnson show Nash Bridges. That show was a lot of fun.
20. The West Wing served up a lot of brilliance over its seven seasons. I recently watched seasons two and three, and I think that Aaron Sorkin started losing steam about halfway through the third season. A lot of those episodes just sit there, never really generating any dramatic heat; characters make speeches to one another as opposed to interacting, and there’s precious little drama. I haven’t watched the fourth season in a long time; ditto the subsequent years. Season Five struggled to figure out how to exist after Sorkin, but I remember thinking that the show succeeded on occasion. It got really good again in Seasons Six and Seven. Loved the finale.
John Spencer’s best moment:
And my favorite West Wing scene ever:
19. I was puzzled by the sudden resurgence of game shows in the early part of the last decade. Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? was fun, mainly because Regis Philbin knew what he was doing. But it was followed by a lot of crap, like The Weakest Link, 1 versus 100, and the like. I did enjoy Identity, which was kind of an updating of the To Tell the Truth concept.
18. 24 wasn’t on my radar until its second season. I watched seasons two and three religiously. Seasons 4, 5, and 6 went by, mainly because FOX aired the first four episodes of each of those seasons over two nights, which put me behind right from the start. I got back to the show with season 7, which was really good until the last few episodes, when it started to sink. The show was mostly fun, even if it was awfully fascistic and cheerleading for a terrorized police state of a country.
17. King of the Hill was overshadowed by The Simpsons, but it had a warm genius of its own.
16. Futurama was/is brilliant. Love it.
15. I’m not a big fan of Family Guy, but I do love the Star Wars parody episodes and pretty much any episode that focuses on the odd relationship between Stewie and Brian. However, my grudging enjoyment of Family Guy does not extend to Seth McFarlane’s other shows; American Dad and The Cleveland Show are both crap.
14. Jumping back a bit…I watched every episode of Police Squad when it originally aired. What a great show!
13. I’ve never liked David E. Kelley. Never ever ever. I didn’t like Picket Fences. I didn’t like Chicago Hope. I didn’t like The Practice or Boston Legal. I consider it a great deed by the TV Gods that his Wonder Woman pilot got scorched.
12. I really need to start doing a Buffy the Vampire Slayer watch one of these days. I only watched two or three episodes during the show’s initial run, and I didn’t stick with it because by that point it was season three or so and I didn’t really want to try to catch up on a show with a dense mythology.
11. I tried watching Babylon 5 several times. Didn’t care for it, though.
9. I never watched The Sopranos. I had zero interest in it. Someone once described it as a “soap opera for men”. I’m just not that big on mob stories, and shows with lots of “whacking”.
8. Ditto The Wire. Way I see it, I don’t care how lovingly the meal is prepared, if I don’t like the featured ingredient.
7. I’m a Seinfeld fan to this day. What’s so great about it is how, with relatively few exceptions, the show simply does not date itself. There are very few topical references in it, and I love its cast of quirky characters and the even stranger universe they inhabit. And I love being able to speak in that special code to other Seinfeld fans, such as saying, “Why don’t you just TELL me the name of the movie you want to see?”
6. Huh. I almost got to the end of this post without really mentioning The Brady Bunch. Consider that rectified. Love me some Brady Bunch. Especially that episode where Cindy asks Santa to give her laryngital mother her voice back so she can sing at church.
5. My fandom may have been strangled by the awfulness of this season, but I sure did enjoy American Idol for a few years there!
4. I like NCIS as a fun action show, but I find it hard to take seriously a program that had a bad George W. Bush impersonator playing the actual President in the first episode.
3. “There are two kinds of folks who sit around thinking about how to kill people: psychopaths and mystery writers.” Castle is my favorite thing on TV right now.
2. If there’s ever another TV incarnation of Star Trek, there must be a role — even a one-shot as a Starfleet Captain would be fine — for David Caruso. That guy was born to lock phasers on target!
1. We probably watch as much TV on a computer now as we do on an actual TV. I don’t think I’ll ever be watching TV on a phone, though. I have standards for screen size. But TV in bed, on my computer? That’s just awesome! I can’t believe how far things have come since that nine-inch color TV whose main nifty feature was its ability to display an image instantly, without that “warm up” period that old TVs used to have. I’m not terribly interested in 3D TV, either…but we’ll see where TV goes!
So, apparently “Boston Rob” Mariano won Survivor. Well, hell, he should have. It was, after all, his fourth appearance on the show. Coupled with his two losing appearances on The Amazing Race, Rob was 0-5 in million-dollar-prize CBS reality shows going into this one. Now he’s 1-5, which is actually a worse winning percentage than the Atlanta Braves posted in World Series appearances in the 1990s (they were 1-4 at winning the Series).
I was actually excited for this season of Survivor, because I thought that the twist they had come up with — “Redemption Island” — was a fascinating one that could very well do interesting things with the psychology of the game. But then, CBS turned around and played down the “Redemption Island” aspect by insisting that what the world really needed to see was Rob versus Russell again. I, already filled with dislike for both guys, decided that I had no interest in watching this season until both were gone.
Now, Russell was gone very quickly, and I figured that if the castaways were smart, they’d eliminate both of them on general principle. Seriously: if I went through the audition process, got picked for the show, and then showed up for the first day of competition only to then find out that two of the other castaways had been on the show a combined five previous times, with each one never winning, I would have made getting rid of them both Job Number One. Apparently these folks didn’t think like that, but then, I have zero idea as to what they were thinking, as I stuck to my guns and didn’t watch the show at all.
Hey, if Rob “played the game” and everybody loves that, great. My opinion isn’t based on his game play this time around. I’m not saying he shouldn’t have won because he’d had his shot before; I’m saying that he shouldn’t have been there at all because he’d had his shot before. And even though I hate Rob and think he’s a colossal douchebag, it’s not just about Rob. I liked Rupert a lot each time he was on, but he’s had three shots and should never show up again. In fact, I’d pretty much cap everyone off at two possible appearances, period. But then, it’s not my show.
I’ll say this: I’ll be extremely surprised if Rob isn’t on Survivor or The Amazing Race yet again at some point in the next three years. I don’t think that CBS or Mark Burnett can quit this guy. Winner or no this time, Rob is not going into the sunset. He’ll be back. So, I strongly suspect, will Russell.
