Okay, comic book fans. Here’s a spoiler image from the January 15 episode of Smallville that, if you’re a long-time DC Geek like I am, will get your heart aflutter.
I can’t even tell you the title of the episode, since that’s as much a spoiler as the picture, but if you drag over the blank between the quotes, you’ll see that it’s “Legion“.
This morning, in blogging the new version of Cupid, I observed that the show probably wouldn’t last, since it’s hard to keep such shows on tv for long. (The video is now working in that post, btw).
This afternoon bore out my pessimism in general; two of the more original and distinctive shows to debut in the 2007/2008 strike-shortened season, Pushing Daisies and Eli Stone, were cancelled today, along with Dirty Sexy Money. All three will finish out their original 13-episode orders for this season, but won’t make any additional episodes. Hopefully, the networks will air all of those episodes, and not wait to feature them on DVD collections.
Daisies, while visually stimulating and wittily written, was easily predictable as having a short life expectancy; it lived and died on its frenetic pace, something that wasn’t really sustainable long term. The creators have said that the storyline will finish up in comic book form (probably from corporate siblings DC Comics or Wildstorm), which is actually somewhat fitting, since the show was previewed in comic book form at the 2007 San Diego Comic Book Convention.
I’m more disappointed by the demise of Eli Stone, a quirky, fun series which was more-or-less a conventional legal comedy/drama (think LA Law), with a weekly musical number and an aneuryism-induced vision or two thrown in to keep it interesting. With good, sometimes subtle performances by Jonny Lee Miller (the first Mr. Angelina Jolie), Victor Garber, Natasha Henstridge, and Julie Gonzalo, this one had a good chance of staying around for quite some time. Too bad it won’t get the chance.
I also watch Dirty Sexy Money, but it’s more of a guilty pleasure. I’ll miss it, but not in the same way as the other two, and not for as long.
If you’re holed up in a hotel room riding out Gustav, or just want to celebrate Labor Day with no labor, the link below will take you to a list of television marathons that will be taking place this weekend.
Enjoy.
Interesting Pile: Labor Day Weekend 2008 TV Marathons
The 300 Project: 13/129
I’ve had this sitting in my Google Notebook for a couple weeks. This video, courtesy of YouTube user lostuncut takes the opening theme music and style of Battlestar Galactica and plugs in video and credits for Lost.
Probably only amusing for fans of both shows, but funny for those of us in that category.
And, for those who are still trying to figure out how all the flash-forwards on Lost fit together, here’s a video that puts them in chronological order:
The 300 Project: 31/106
While I’m sitting here waiting for the latest installment of what’s turning out to be a really, really good season of Lost, I figured I’d pass on a couple of links to two of the best (and not mutually exclusive) theories as to what’s really going on in the series. And, following them, is a link to a recap site which uses screencaps from the episode being summarized, and combines them with funny captions to tell the story.
http://theoriesonlost.blogspot.com/2007/05/great-gedanken-experiment-tale-of-time.html (click on the “Read Theory” button)
http://community.livejournal.com/lost_tv/1631599.html?thread=35257199
http://ack-attack.livejournal.com/tag/recap
The 300 Project: 7/48
The major television networks, and many of the minor ones, are offering full episodes of their shows online, but it can sometimes be difficult finding them. There are almost as many viewers as there are sites, and it seems that finding a given show can be a clickapalooza, as you try to navigate the sites.
No more.
Prime Time Rewind offers a spiffy cube interface which links to pretty much all of the networks and programs that are available across the ‘net. Clicking on a show launches a page which has the network’s own layout in a frame, with a handy Prime Time Rewind nav bar on the left side. I’ve grabbed a couple of shows, and it seems to work pretty smoothly. So if you miss an episode, or want to get caught up on a show, check out Prime Time Rewind.
The 300 Project: 6/47
NBC Television announced a few weeks ago, around the time the writers’ strike ended, that they were switching away from the traditional model of the television season, to a 12-month schedule. This is, in a way, something I’ve been advocating for years, and something that viewers have been able to take advantage of thanks to the original programming being offered on cable networks, for a number of years, but it’s the first time that a network has fully embraced the concept. Assuming, of course, that they actually do fully embrace the concept, which remains to be seen.
When I was a kid, the television season ran from roughly Memorial Day to roughly Opening Day of the baseball season. A television show would have about 24 episodes in a season, and would sometimes take a week off around Christmas or New Year’s, but other than that, new episodes reliably aired weekly. Summers were filled with variety shows, filler programming, and reruns.
Fast forward a bit, and you found production costs going up and more networks and such, and eventually we found ourselves with the current September to May season, with each program running between 20 and 23 episodes, with new episodes often a rarity between Thanksgiving and New Year’s. Summers have been given over to reality programs and “burn offs”, episodes of canceled series that were completed before the program was pulled from the network schedule. If the NBC brass is to be believed, however, that might be at an end.
NBC has been looking at the success of summer drama series on basic cable networks (The Closer, Mad Men, and Greek are recent examples), and asked themselves, “Why can’t we do that?” And the answer was, they can. They haven’t revealed exactly what their plans are, but have indicated that they won’t necessarily be waiting for Fall or Spring to debut new shows. When the show is ready, and when there’s an opening on the schedule, they’ll plug the new show in.
For quite some time, I’ve been advocating spreading the season out more. My theory is that it would be possible to divide the year into three segments: September through November; January through May, and June through August. They’ve almost been doing this already, with shows like Heroes going on break during the holiday season, and others, like 24, not starting their season until January. What I’m thinking, though, is that some series would run fewer than 22 episodes, maybe as few as 6-10, as their storylines dictate, as they do in Britain. Stories which require more time to develop can run in the January-May “season”, with the summer series representing more “boutique”-style shows, which the networks wouldn’t expect to generate the same rating level as the other seasons’ shows.
I’m anxiously awaiting what NBC decides to actually do with this, and I’ll keep you posted.
The 300 Project: 1/42
Fox’s new television show The Moment of Truth has been a mixed bag to date, but the episode that aired this past Monday was an amazing bit of television, a veritable trainwreck, but an intriguing one.
For those who haven’t been following it, Moment takes a contestant and asks them more than 50 questions of varying intensity and intrusiveness while they’re hooked up to a polygraph machine. The producers then cull the questions and ask the contestant 21 of them in front of a studio audience, and their friends and family members. If the contestant tells the truth in front of the live audience (based on the results of the polygraph session), they continue on, winning increasing amounts of money as they reach certain numbers of correct answers, with an ultimate prize of $500,000 for 21 correct answers.
The program implicitly asks how much a person is willing to humiliate himself on national television, and where is the line, when saving oneself from the humiliation outweighs the potential winnings. Of course, other shows have asked similar questions, although not in quite so intimate a way; an additional element that Moment adds is the fact that the contestant doesn’t know what the results of the polygraph test were, so they could answer a question in the game the same way they answered it in the screening, and still be out the money, if the polygraph said they were lying. It’s an interesting show, and while some of the contestants and/or questions have been fairly dull (“Have you ever called in sick when you really weren’t?”), some of them have been more interesting (“Have you ever checked out another guy in the locker room”, asked to a former pro football player).
But all of that paled before this past Monday night, in an episode which I’m surprised they didn’t save for their season finale. (The full episode can be viewed on Fox On Demand.) The host, Mark Walberg (not to be confused with Mark Wahlberg) came on a couple of times to warn the viewers that the episode crossed certain lines, and that had he been allowed to make the decision, they would not be airing it. But air it they did.
The contestant was Lauren Cleri, an attractive blonde who took the stage with her parents, siblings, and husband Frank looking on. The questions started painting a less than attractive portrait of Cleri almost right from the beginning, when she admitted to having been fired from a job for stealing, that she’d rather give food to a dog than a homeless person, and that she’d kept secrets about her father from her mother. And then things got bad.
Evidently, Mrs. Cleri has feigned sleep or sickness to avoid sex with her husband. Okay, that seems to be fairly common. Less common, however, but still not unheard of, is taking off her wedding ring during a night out with friends, or marital infidelity. And then things got really bad.
Lauren admitted to being in love with a former boyfriend on her wedding day. Evidently that boyfriend was a guy named Frank (yes, he and the husband had the same name), because he came out to ask the next question: if Frank (the boyfriend) would take her back, would she leave Frank (the husband) for him? At that point, Lauren’s sister pressed a sort of panic button on the stage, which can be used only once by a family member or friend who doesn’t want the contestant to answer a question. The question (per the rules) was replaced by another question which the contestant must answer, which in this case sounded suspiciously similar to the unanswered one: Did Lauren think that Frank (the boyfriend) is the man she really should be married to.
Through all of this, Lauren’s answers were incredibly, searingly honest. Sex outside of marriage? Yep. Secrets about Dad that Mom doesn’t know? Sure. In love with a boyfriend on your wedding day, and still thinkin’ he’s the guy for you? You betcha.
Lauren Cleri left the show with no money, and, presumably, no husband as well (the New York Post reports that Lauren and Frank Cleri are now separated). The question that caught her up?
“Do you think you’re a good person?”
Lauren said yes. The polygraph said no. And I’m thinking the viewing audience largely agreed.
Note: I relied on this article to refresh my memory on some details of the episode, and got the New York Post reference from it.
The 300 Project: 18/41
A few quick lunchtime tv notes, since I’m going directly from work to a meeting this evening:
Both Big Brother and Jericho return to CBS tonight, at 8 and 9 p.m., respectively.
The BB 9 contestants are even more buff and beautiful than usual, and the producers have promised to turn up the heat in the house (literally), to encourage the wearing of less clothing. Each contestant will be paired up with their “soul mate” (the producer’s determination, not the contestant’s, though in at least one case it appears that two of the contestants have been dating prior to entering the house), and will have to do everything together. This should make for some tension, and allow the producers to cut the contest short (two evictions per week), since the scripted shows that the first-ever winter season of Big Brother was designed to replace will be coming back in a month or so, now that the writers’ strike is over.
Jericho picks up in the town-against-town battle that it ended its first season on, but quickly jumps forward in time a few weeks to the rebuilding process following the end of the conflict. Viewers who didn’t watch the first season should be accommodated with catch-up updates, and the existing fan, who reversed a cancellation decision by the network with an outpouring of salted nuts (when asked to surrender in the aforementioned battle, one of the characters replied with Anthony McAuliffe’s famous retort), should be happy to see at least a resolution to some of the dangling plotlines.
Also tonight, American Idol (7 p.m., Fox) starts the always-traumatic Hollywood week. For those who don’t mind spoilers, the top 12 male and female contestants have been leaked online, and TV Squad has an analysis of the boys and the girls, along with an analysis of how the show has gotten away from the “undiscovered” talent dipping their feet into the recording industry, and is featuring some contestants who have done some pretty significant (if unsuccessful) wading.
The 300 Project: 6/29
Lost returns to television this week, shifting days from Wednesday to Thursday. For those who haven’t been following the show, last season’s two-hour finale will be re-shown on Wednesday night, in “pop-up video” style, with factoids and things displayed on the lower third of the screen.
The show then takes its new timeslot on Thursday at 8 p.m., following a one-hour “catch up” show designed to bring new viewers up to speed. If you don’t want the Reader’s Digest version, ABC is streaming all three seasons of Lost to-date, in High Def, on their web site, at http://dynamic.abc.go.com/streaming/landing.
Lost is somewhat unique among current tv series, in that while it still has a rabid following, it has announced exactly how many episodes it has left in the story they intend to tell; there will be 46 episodes over 3 seasons before the series come to an end. But the beginning of the end starts this week. (Or, more appropriately, the beginning of the end is rebroadcast this week, with the repeat of the game-changing Season 3 finale.)
The 300 Project: 21/21
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