television

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I read an interesting piece in last week’s (February 1st 2010) New Yorker on The Tonight Show debacle.  But I thought the author of the piece,  Nancy Franklin, touched on but did not expand upon one part of this equation that in the future is going to be a very big deal.

First let’s start with the “facts” (as we know them).

1.  I suspect very few people who are fans of Conan are also fans of Leno and vice versa.  I’m sure there’s a crossover but I’m willing to bet it’s small.

2.  Conan’s audience skews young and Leno’s audience skews much older.

So here’s the thing, Leno going back to The Tonight Show is going to work fine for a while…maybe even for 10 years…because his fans will come back and the show will default back to the way it was before…fine.  But what happens in 10 years?  Maybe I’m overestimating the grudge holding ability of the Conan fans (my grudge holding abilities are practically infamous in my land) but I don’t think those young fans are coming back…EVER.

I think they’re sufficiently pissed at the way Conan has been treated (there has been picketing, ad campaigns, facebook groups, you name it in support of Conan and horror at NBC’s behavior), that in 10 years when Leno is ready to be replaced (because he’s even older than he freaking is now) there will be nobody that NBC can put in that Tonight Show chair (short of Jon Stewart perhaps) that we would come back to watch, just based on principle.

Now, I’m not the best fan of late night talk shows anyway.  I’m not a consistent viewer, watching only when the mood strikes, or when I remember to.  And I generally feel about late night talk shows the way I feel about SNL – that there are always brilliant little bits and moments – but that I’m not willing to sit through an hour of average (and sometimes below average) entertainment for those small gems – especially when I can pick them up on the news websites the following day if they were good anyway.  I just am not willing to invest in them consistently.  I also have the problem of being both a Conan fan and a Letterman fan, which worked fine until Conan took over The Tonight Show, because I didn’t have to pick.  I tried to watch more Conan once I had the option (and misfortune to have to choose between them) because I felt he needed the support since he was new to the timeslot.  However I never watched Leno.  The dude is just not funny to me.  And because of that it hurts NBC not a whit for me to vow not to watch Leno, because I never did and never would have.

However, I CAN vow to never watch The Tonight Show again**

So in the end I think this is more short-sighted BS on the part of NBC.  Sure, this might work now and they’ll get their “safe” Leno hosted Tonight Show back, but in the long run, they’ve shot themselves in the foot.  Good riddance I say.  Perhaps we should have just let Johnny Carson take the show with him when he left…it’d certainly be more respectful of his legacy than where we ended up.

As for you specifically Leno, while I don’t think that you are specifically to blame for all of this, your handling of it has been proof that I was right all along to dislike you.  I had barely any respect for you left after your writer’s strike behavior in 2007, but that little I had left has been killed dead dead dead.  You now seem like a ridiculous comic book villain to me.  Congratulations idiot.

* Credits:  Jack Ziegler cartoon taken from The New Yorker 2/8/10 edition

** Again, with the exception of a Jon Stewart Tonight Show host – which I don’t even want because I prefer him where he is – but I think Conan would understand and forgive me for going back on my proclamations in that one scenario.

So I started writing this post back in August of 2009 when it was announced that AMC was going to be the home of Robert Kirkman’s The Walking Dead,  but there’s been a lot going on (despite the lack of gainful employment) and it took me a while to circle back and get to this. I was reminded that this post was sitting here waiting to be finished by the announcement last week that Frank Darabont’s pilot script had been greenlit by AMC …so here we are.

Plenty of other people, websites, and blogs have already taken a swing at casting The Walking Dead, but I’ve tried to avoid those posts so that I don’t corrupt my own instincts (and cheat off of those people).  So take a look at what I’ve come up with – and get your own recommendations on the board in the comments section.

A couple of guidelines I used:

1.  I tried to keep the casting fairly realistic, picking actors that I thought would be willing to be a part of an ensemble cast of the next (hopefully) highly acclaimed AMC television drama (i.e. you won’t see Angelina Jolie or Will Smith in here anywhere).

2.  I tried to pick actors and actresses that fit the roles visually AND that had acting skills I admired.  If I had to pick between skills and visuals, I usually went with skills.

RICK:


This one is honestly the easiest pick of the bunch, because I think Nathan Fillion is a just an obvious and yet inspired choice to play our hero Rick.  Fillion has a great fan following already (and one that overlaps nicely with comics thanks to his Firefly/Serenity, and Buffy roles) and he’s a proven actor that can hold his own on the film screen, but isn’t opposed to doing television.  Also, though his show Castle is very much “his” show, I feel like Fillion would recognize the great opportunity in The Walking Dead, like the opportunity of Mad Men, despite it being an ensemble cast.  The fact that Castle is still on is a bit of a problem, but I see the ratings aren’t great…I don’t want it to fail, as I like Fillion and wish him the best…but man I’d like to see him playing Rick.

As an interesting side note, my mother used to watch One Life To Live (and General Hospital) when I was younger, and I got addicted to both shows, and never more so with One Life To Live than when Nathan Fillion was playing a GORGEOUS version of the character Joey Buchanan.  I was so sad when he left the show (and I left watching it not long after) but MAN did the boy do well for himself.  It’s one of the only things that makes me proud about having watched soaps at one point in my life.  I’m all “I saw him and loved him first!”…and I’m almost never that far ahead of the crowd.

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There’s cause for celebration in my house (alright, fine…apartment) tonight and now that Variety has picked it up, I can talk about it.

CBS has ordered a second season of The Good Wife.

The Good Wife, which is not only a great show (a show that has become my most looked forward to hour of television) is also the show my boyfriend works on.  So, double good news.  Yay!  After a horrific week last week, and now getting sick, I’m ready for all good news all the time!  Bring it on!*

*In case I was at all unclear, bad news need not apply, we have no openings for bad news.

The article is up on Best Shows You’re Not Watching.  Enjoy!

My article giving out midterm grades to all the shows I planned to watch this fall is up at Best Shows You’re Not Watching.

Modern Family

My post about Modern Family went up today at Best Show’s You’re Not Watching.  Check it out.

Highlander Adrian Brody

And don’t laugh.  I’m dead serious.  Well I am serious…but you can laugh.

I caught an episode of this on late night Sci-Fi (no, I’m not writing Syfy) recently and all I could think is ‘why the hell am I getting a shitty V remake?  Why can’t I have a shitty Highlander remake instead?’

I had such a super sized crush on Duncan McCloud (and Adrian Brody ACK! Paul, ADRIAN PAUL…officially no more posts at 2am…thanks to reader David for the catch)*.  Plus, the Highlander concept was so awesome I totally didn’t want to be an organ donor for (well, an embarassingly long time) because “WHAT IF I WAKE UP A HIGHLANDER AND SOMEONE HAS ALREADY HARVESTED MY DAMN EYES!?!?!?”

Anyway, let this serve as my official plea for a hot Highlander remake.  I’m sure I’m not the first…the internet is vast and filled with fools like me.  Also, the less said about Highlander: The Raven, the better.  Amanda was always so annoyingly blech when she should have been made of 100% win.

*And don’t get on me about how the movies are better, or how dare I leave them out.  Some embarrassed part of me loves the Highlander movies too (it lives just to the left and down of the part of me that loves the TV Series) but pound for pound Adrian was just way more sexy and interesting to me as Duncan than Christopher Lambert ever was as Connor .

Project Runway Season 6

I’m kind of loathe to write another negative post today as I generally prefer to talk about things I love rather than things I hate.  Honestly – I know you don’t believe me given all the rants about comics and feminism – but I swear – I really do prefer to talk about things being awesome than things being crap – unfortunately the world does not always provide me with awesome material.  And thus, here we are today.

Project Runway sucks.  I cannot believe you can go from the peaks a mere year ago (and five seasons of quite frankly ground breakingly great reality television) to the valleys we are experiencing now.  So why does it suck?  Let me count the ways.

1. The contestants are flat out not as talented.  I doubt a single designer in the top three this year could have made it to the top three in any other season.  Even Carol Hannah, who I like.

2. The challenges were not only boring and dull, but um…not actually CHALLENGING.  They were phone it in easy, and almost never were the designers given more than one day to finish a challenge, which I think sometimes limited their potential ambition.  Where were the challenges to make things out of food, or flowers and lawn shavings?  Where were the intensely specific and brutally creative challenges?  Totally absent.

3.  Nina Garcia and Michael Kors were almost entirely absent from judging.  This makes, Heidi, who I love, but who I can also freely admit is the least qualified and least gifted judge, as the only mainstay judge getting to know the designers.  More talented designers (Ra’mon and possibly Epperson and Malvin) got cut arbitrarily, while others (Johnny and especially Mitchell) were allowed to stay on without doing anything of note for far too long.  It threw the entire competition into a strange kind of flux, where the bar never officially got raised on the challenges because the level of competition was so low.

4.  It’s on Lifetime now instead of Bravo.  Bravo is on the cutting edge (if there is one on television), they have forward thinking aggressive programming, and they have proven that they know what to do with reality television…in fact, they’re the masters.  Lifetime is a rookie in this area and while I applaud their interest in changing the face of Lifetime, I hate for a brilliant show to suffer as they get over their freshman errors. And I suppose this largely includes the new production company (which I understand is no longer Magic Elves).

4a. I can’t help but think that part of the designer casting had to do with Lifetime’s “targeted demographic”.  There was a disproportionately high number of attractive thin young women on the show this year (and in fact the final three are all thin attractive women).  So when suddenly the talent level has dropped considerably and there are all these attractive young women…I don’t know…I have no proof…but it felt a little convenient all of a sudden.

4b.  Another frustrating aspect of PR being on Lifetime is that unless you’ve recorded it – it is BRUTAL to sit through the commercials for other Lifetime programming.  The ad content is so in opposition to the show you’re watching that it’s jarring and, well, horrible.  I used to hate watching the Bravo ads because there was so much repetition but at least those ads were for shows I might conceivably watch.

Those are the big ones for me.  Others might argue that moving the venue to Los Angeles also hurt the show.  It wasn’t that big a deal to me.  If you took away the other problems I listed, I think I barely would have noticed the LA change.

I’ll be finishing out this season, and my longtime love for the show will probably compel me to come back for the first few episodes of Season 7, in the hopes that they’ve learned from their freshman mistakes.  But probably this show is over for me (for everyone? I’ve heard nothing but bad things from other fans as well).

It will be hard to recover from such a terrible misfire of a season.  It went from must see TV for both Adam and I, to Adam dropping it and me begrudgingly watching it days later on the TIVO.  Not good.

the v logo, which is more interesting than the cast shot

Awesome idea, as it was in 1984, but the execution here is seriously flawed.

Stilted writing, over-the-top hammy performances (with a few notable exceptions), incredibly out of touch and dated stereotypical characters, and effects that are completely hit and miss.

It’s easy to see where the money went on certain effects shots that look good to great by TV standards, but others look hokey and almost like they could have come from the original 1984 series.  Basic shoddy green screens with actors awkwardly in front of them; a “New York riot” that looks like an average day on any New York street, rather than the chaos that would ensue were aliens floating above us, etc.

I could forgive the effects though, I really could.  What I cannot forgive is ridiculous heavy handed plotting and completely unoriginal characters.  The single mother and rebellious teenage son?  CHECK!  Attractive blonde overly earnest priest questioning his place now that aliens have showed up?  CHECK!  Hot blonde (might as well be from Cali) alien to tempt the rebellious teen son?  CHECK!  “Perfect” guy with a mysterious past that is super in love with his “perfect girlfriend”?  CHECK!  Convenient traitorous partner/best friend?  CHECK!  “Tough as nails” newly divorced mother?  CHECK!  All the tropes are there – and there’s not a single interesting or new thing about these stereotypes that get trotted out for roll call.  These were tired character types ten years ago (at least!) and I saw nothing new to keep me tuned in now.

[SPOILERS]

Scott Wolf’s tempted opportunistic reporter was vaguely interesting and well executed, though certainly not ground breaking.  Alan Tudyk’s traitor FBI agent/V terrorist cell operative was not unexpected, but at least in Tudyk’s hands it didn’t incur eye rolling.  Although proof that the writing/plotting/pacing is seriously off, is that we as an audience cannot remotely begin to care about Tudyk’s character and/or his relationship with Elizabeth Mitchell’s character before he turns on her – so the reveal is totally powerless.  We can’t feel anything about it because we don’t care about these characters yet (if ever)…it’s no real surprise he turns on her, because we don’t actually know or care for him.  Morris Chestnut’s “perfect guy with a past” in love with his “perfect girlfriend” was boring me to tears as well (despite my general like of Morris Chestnut) but the reveal of him as a V traitor aligning himself with the human resistance was a welcome surprise.  The V leader Anna, played capably by Morena Baccarin is enjoyable to watch, but that won’t take me far.  And in an interesting side note, IMDB says that Famke Janssen turned down the role of Anna…which if she read the script, I don’t have to wonder why.

There was also a kind of pitifully unhip aspect about this show, that I can’t quite put my finger on.  I suppose it was primarily noticeable in the writing…it felt like someone’s grandpa was writing it and was trying SOOOO hard to connect “with teh kids!”…which as anyone who’s still remotely young-ish will tell you is a freaking death knell.  In my experience, kids (especially badass awesome ones) can sense someone trying too hard from about a thousand miles away and will run in the exact opposite direction.

Also, if this was supposed to be geared towards the young hip sci-fi crowd then why are there no good young characters?  There’s only one young adult/teenager (that’d be the rebellious teenage son – oh, and his token friend that got about six lines) and they’re probably the most annoying characters thus far.  So if it’s not geared towards “teh kids”…who is it geared towards?  The entire cast looks to be in their mid-30’s…but I’m in my early 30’s and the cast still felt old and tragically unhip to me.

And it can’t possibly be geared towards the die hard sci-fi crowd because even my barely sci-fi credentialed ass found plot holes the size of…well…I don’t know…but they were big.  Like, why do the the V’s need to engage in any kung fu fighting with us lame humans, when their technology outstrips us by miles?  And how have the V’s actually managed to stay hidden, when all it takes is a two by four to the head (or arm, or whatever) to reveal their interior reptilian selves?  And is the entire human race really so dumb that when an alien guest storms into all of our major cities across the globe and essentially says it will be taking some of our “abundant natural resources” nobody stands up and goes – “Hey…you know what is abundant here on Earth and isn’t anywhere else in our known universe?  Human FLESH!”  Lame.

All in all I’d give the first half of the episode a solid and resounding F, and the second half a wavering C- (wavering towards D that is), putting us somewhere in the D range overall.  I’ll probably tune in next week to see if they can save any of it (though if the previews are any indication – they can’t).  But if they don’t manage some better writing, better acting, less heavy handed hammy one liners, more consistent effects, and perhaps most critically – losing the dated and unhip feeling of the whole thing – I’ll be permanently pulling the plug.

Ironically, the somewhat similar Flash Forward (FBI lead characters, major global event, etc.) is already on my critical list – a mere pseudo-weak episode away from being pulled from my weekly viewing – and compared to V, Flash Forward looks like a world famous, A-list cast Shakespearean production.  And if you’ve seen Flash Forward…that’s saying a lot.

The Good Wife

My review of The Good Wife is up at The Best Shows You’re Not Watching.  Check it out.  As always, comments appreciated!  ~ Kelly

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