All the quoted sections are from comments by Tom Coates.

Why are you paying HBO $240 a year to get to see True Blood and a couple of episodes of Game of Thrones. If you think that’s genuinely what it’s ‘worth’ to see those shows, I think that you are—bluntly—wrong.
[...]
Is your argument REALLY that people should be paying $240 a year for True Blood? Because that just doesn’t sound in any way plausible. Not one bit.

No, that’s not what I’m saying. That’s why I no longer subscribe to HBO.

My argument was that for at least a year, HBO was getting (at least) around $240 from me for watching True Blood. So I was a more valuable customer to them than the guy who says “I don’t want all that; I’ll give you $40 for it. Deal? No? Okay, then I’ll steal it.”

My argument was also that there are millions of people like me who do subscribe to HBO and pay for their service. So when MG Siegler says that if he doesn’t like the terms, he’ll just take it for free, he’s not just hurting some faceless corporation. He’s taking advantage of stuff that millions of other people are paying for. It takes some mighty big stones to expect any sympathy from the people who are paying companies for stuff that he gets for free.

Ratings

I’m guessing a lot of other people out there are NOT prepared to pay $240 a year to get to see True Blood, and that—frankly—many of those *would* be prepared to pay $40-60 to get to see the Season via iTunes when it’s broadcast. So you need (say) eight of those people to download for every one who buys HBO. That seems *entirely* plausible to me, frankly.

I’d be in that group of people who’d be prepared to pay $40-$60 to get the Season Pass on iTunes. The point of that blog post is that it’s unlikely that’d be enough.

I do think it’s being needlessly combative to dismiss all the actual numbers as being completely unknowable. It’s not that I agree with the claim that piracy numbers significantly equate to potential sales. I think it’s “needless” because even by doing the simplest, back-of-the-envelope calculations, the economics still don’t make sense.

Ignore the 8:1 ratio, and make it even simpler. Let’s say that Game of Thrones (instead of True Blood, just for the sake of keeping the conversation consistent) goes on iTunes the day after broadcast, for Siegler’s suggested figure of under $40 for an HD season pass. And HBO is actually $16/month on DirecTV, not $20. So one year’s HBO subscription is $192. $192 / $40 = 4.8, which means that you’d need a 5:1 ratio of iTunes season pass sales to HBO subscribers.

(Obviously, that ignores Apple’s cut, along with whatever deals it gets from DirecTV or Comcast. But it also ignores the fact that HBO doesn’t make all its money from selling one TV series through one source. So for simplicity’s sake, let’s call it even).

If a ratio of 8:1 is plausible, I’m assuming that you think 5:1 is plausible as well. But can you name any other TV series — or for that matter, any other product — that has seen a five-fold increase in ratings simply by lowering its price? I think that’s the part that’s completely implausible.

According to Entertainment Weekly, the finale of Game of Thrones (the highest-rated episode of the season) had 3.9 million viewers in the first night of broadcast. (The article goes on to say that the show averages 8.3 million viewers when you account for repeats, DVR, and on demand). This report puts it at 3.04 million viewers.

Are we supposed to believe that making the show available on iTunes would suddenly turn Game of Thrones ratings from 3 million to 15 million? Or even more unlikely, that you could convert 8.3 million viewers to 40 million? That assumes 15 million viewers would be interested in an epic fantasy series at all, much less that they’d be willing to pay $40 a head (no pun intended) for it.

A couple of obvious counter-arguments: this assumes that it’s either all subscriptions, or all iTunes season pass sales, and not a combination of both. It assumes that if HBO made its programming available same-day (or day after) on iTunes for $40 a season pass, that they’d lose all their subscribers. Obviously they wouldn’t lose all of them, but it’s clear to me that they’d lose a huge portion. There’d be very little incentive left to subscribe, unless you were one of the rare viewers who watched every series on the channel and you just couldn’t get enough of Kung Fu Panda 2.

Profits

And the even more obvious counter-argument: even by the generous, over-simplified example, they’d need 15 million viewers on iTunes + season passes to make the same revenue they get from 3 million viewers on subscriptions alone. But would they need all of those 15 million just to be profitable?

Obviously not, but it’s not as clear-cut even in the simplest calculation. Take that one estimate from The Hollywood Reporter that it cost $60 million to produce the series. Every discussion of Hollywood that I’ve ever seen says that a feature film has to make double its production cost in order to become profitable, because of marketing and distribution. For simplicity’s sake, let’s assume that it’s significantly less for TV series than it is for movies, and assume it’s 1.5 times the production cost. That would mean that GoT has a “break-even” point of $90 million.

I don’t know what Apple’s cut for TV shows over iTunes is, either, but just assume that it’s the same as for apps: 30%. That would mean that for every $40 season pass to GoT, HBO gets $28. By those numbers, a season pass of GoT would need 3.22 million season pass sales to break even.

That seems reasonable, right? They got 3 million viewers just in one night via subscriptions. But that’s the problem with directly equating ratings to sales: again according to Entertainment Weekly, the sales of GoT DVD sets are “through the roof” and broke all kinds of records. That record-breaking value: 350,000 units over 10 days.

That’s a much better indication of how many people are actually willing to pay for the whole season. I don’t know how to get the number of iTunes season pass sales for the same season 1 set of GoT, or if that information is even available to the public. No matter how much more convenient it is to buy stuff over iTunes than to pick up a physical DVD set, I’m pretty sure that that convenience doesn’t translate into ten times more sales. I would be stunned to learn if it’s even twice as many (700,000 units, still a good bit short of 3.2 million).

But that’s for a TV series that’s already a year old, and has had its big events long since spoiled all across the internet. Of course there’s going to be a drop in sales. How much do the sales increase if you reduce the time between broadcast and season pass/DVD set availability? I don’t know how to estimate that, other than to say “less than 2.5 million people.”

On the one hand, you’ve got a known market of 29 million subscribers, paying you $192 a year. On the other, you’ve got a demonstrated market of 350,000 customers, paying you around $30 a year. Somewhere in the middle, you’ve got the iTunes market.

We do know at least that MG Siegler and the guy from The Oatmeal have pledged to chip in $80 towards our $90 million estimate. Counting the actual bankable value of that, that leaves: $90 million.

If it’s silly for the RIAA and MPAA to directly equate piracy numbers to lost sales — and it is silly — then it’s every bit as silly to claim that those numbers significantly equate to potential sales. A company simply can’t make projections by treating torrent download figures as actual sales. A company can only make projections based on what people actually buy. I can’t imagine a TV exec would last very long if he could promise ratings would double or more, simply by opening the show up for download.

What I can imagine is that execs would be eager to do it if they had ample evidence it would actually work. When even a rough estimate fails to hold up — even though it’s based on numbers completely pulled out of my ass and still altered to make them more generous — I don’t see how the actual numbers could work.

A Word from Our Sponsor

Moreover, frankly, the world changes, and people’s business models have to change too. If all the other broadcasters think that they can make money by selling on iTunes the day after broadcast for a certain amount of money, then of COURSE expectations will be set for shows on HBO to be similar. And people will justifiably start asking ‘why am I paying so much for this’ or ‘why can’t I get it at the same time as I get all my other shows’.

And to those people, you point out: “all your other shows are subsidized by advertising.”

If anyone is paying $40 per season to watch Mad Men, which is broadcast with commercials on AMC, and is still confused as to why he can’t pay $40 per season to watch HBO shows immediately after they’re broadcast, then I’d suggest he’s not paying enough attention to Mad Men.

And anyone who underestimates the impact of advertising should consider this: an episode of True Blood a while back had two male vampires having sex with each other followed by one ripping the other’s heart out. The series regularly combines the “nudity,” “graphic violence,” and “adult language” warnings not just in a single episode, but in a single scene. HBO does have a standards and practices department, I’m assuming, but a significant part of the reason producers go to HBO is to be able to make content that’s not beholden to advertisers.

There’s Right, and then There’s What’s Right

And one way or another, whether it’s moral or reasonable or not, people are going to start moving to either other shows or they’re going to torrent it. Because it’s easy and it works.

Is that right? No. Is it basically inevitable? Yes. Does that mean that their existing business model might be under threat? Yes. Is that fair? Bluntly, that’s an irrelevant question.

If the question is irrelevant as to whether it’s unfair to HBO, then why is it relevant whether it’s unfair to customers? Why should HBO — or any of us — care whether or not Siegler is stamping his feet and complaining that he doesn’t get to watch Game of Thrones exactly when and how and for how much he wants to? He’s already demonstrated that he’s not a guaranteed source of income to HBO, and he’s already demonstrated that he’s willing to take advantage of those of us who do pay for what we get. If fair is irrelevant, then why should I care what he says?

Saying “fair is irrelevant, this is business” is always the position that’s presented as if it were the most pragmatic one. But in fact, it’s so short-sighted as to be completely unrealistic. An economy where one party in every business transaction is treated unfairly is unsustainable. If someone can’t even speculate on a business model that doesn’t end up with HBO losing money, then that’s not saying “I want HBO to make its content more widely available.” That’s saying “I want HBO to go out of business.”

I don’t want HBO to go out of business. Not for HBO’s sake, but my own, so that I can continue to watch vampires having gay sex and ripping each other’s hearts out.

Sermons vs. Stupidity

And meanwhile, a whole bunch of people actually are moving away from cable completely, because it’s an expensive standing cost each month that they don’t need to pay and they don’t want to pay. They want to own the shows and be able to watch them when they want to. Again, if HBO’s business model doesn’t stand up under those circumstances, and other people’s models do, and if HBO isn’t prepared to find some way to change, then — and surely this is obvious — HBO will fail.

Again, there’s a difference between what is fair and reasonable and what is going to happen. We’re in a transitional period here. Obviously the possible viewers buying things from iTunes is likely to grow massively over the next ten years. And the desire to be able to buy bespoke, just the things you want, to watch when and how you want, is not going to evaporate. So, I’m afraid, one way or another, HBO are going to have to find some way to adjust to it.

HBO has been adjusting to “transitional periods” quite profitably for most of my lifetime. Before the rise of VHS and DVD, they distinguished themselves by being the most convenient way to watch movies at home. Then they distinguished themselves by being the only way to get sex & violence on TV. Then they distinguished themselves by being the channel that produces highly desirable series and shows them without commercial interruption. It’d be an enormous mistake to talk as if HBO is run by idiots who can’t tell which way the wind is blowing.

And the “whole bunch of people” who are moving away from cable aren’t yet enough to replace a subscription model. If the market were there, they’d be milking it for all it’s worth. But the market just isn’t there.

People keep acting as if my posts and comments are “moralizing” about piracy. But piracy doesn’t offend me nearly as much as stupidity does. When Siegler and others say that HBO can provide the same thing that ad-supported channels do, and that HBO’s resistance to do so is purely out of greed or artificial scarcity, that is a gross display of willful ignorance. The facts simply don’t support it.

When Siegler and others say that piracy is their only option, and that it effectively sends a message to the production companies, that’s just insultingly disingenuous.

It’s entirely plausible that yes, “over the next ten years,” the market will be such so that people will be able to buy their programming a la carte. Assuming it happens, that’ll be great! But that doesn’t change the fact that Siegler is saying willfully stupid and disingenuous things right now.

Fortunately for me and millions of stupid people like me, M.G. Siegler’s got it all figured out. There are these things called “torrents” that let you download television programming from the internet for free, sometimes even before it’s broadcast in your area! All you have to do is:

1. Download a BitTorrent client for your system.
2. Find the torrent file for the show you want to watch.
3. Tell yourself that you’d be perfectly willing to pay for the show if those damn media companies would only let you.
4. Download and enjoy.
5. Don’t put any additional thought into it, apart from rationalizing it on the internet.

Siegler’s devoted a lot of deep thought to this moral quandary:

The problem is that I’m not an HBO subscriber. Believe me, given the quality of their programming, I would love to be. Unfortunately […] You cannot give HBO your money directly. They will not accept it. They are fully in bed with the cable companies and are not going to get out of that bed anytime soon, because of what they get paid to perform their unnatural acts in that bed. A lot of money.
[…]
Because of the aforementioned naughty cuddling deal HBO has with the cable companies, they also cannot (or will not) offer up their content via a legal means, such as iTunes, in a timely manner.

Clearly, it’s HBO’s fault. They’re wallowing in cash from their dark dealings with the cable and satellite monopolies, and they’ll be damned if they’re going to give up any of that profit just for the sake of Doing the Right Thing.

It’s a tough decision, and Siegler is being extremely bold by being the first person on the internet to admit that he’s pirated media.

It brings me no great pleasure to do it, and I’m not technically sure that I’m allowed to say this, but I’m going to because HBO has left me no choice: I’m going to be pirating season 2 of “Game of Thrones.”

I’m going to be forced to scour the shady underbelly of the Web to find the show.

[…]

Again, I’d gladly pay for it. But I have no way to do so, outside of forking over an obscene amount of money on a monthly basis to a cable company, and/or waiting a year. I’m just not willing to do that. My hand is being forced.

And when someone posts a link to the webcomic The Oatmeal that said exactly the same thing as his blog post does, and which was forwarded to the Facebook and Twitter feeds of every single person on the internet a few weeks earlier, Siegler makes it clear why he’s writing: it’s “worth putting it into words again and again and again and again, until something changes.”

It’s clear: there is no other option.

Except, well, being patient and waiting for it to come to iTunes. Like adults without an over-inflated sense of entitlement do. That’s basically the approach that Andy Ihnatko suggested, in his post “Heavy Hangs the Bandwidth That Torrents the Crown”. That was one of the most perfect articles ever written about the topic. At least, it was before Ihantko felt the need to qualify it with an addendum about how media companies force people into piracy. Apparently the notions of personal responsibility and “two wrongs don’t make a right” are too nuanced for the internet to be able to process.

Oh right, I forgot that there is one other option: paying for it with cable or satellite service and a subscription to HBO, like millions of other people do. But Siegler thinks that’s outrageous:

Why would I pay upwards of $100 a month for something I have no interest in? I just want HBO.
[…]
When I watched the first season of “Game of Thrones” this past week, I watched it through iTunes, where I happily purchased the entire season for $38.99 (in HD).

So as he repeatedly makes clear, Siegler is perfectly happy to pay for his television programming. Well… up to a point, anyway.

Let me see if I can piece together the terms of this transaction: it has to be less than $40 for the entire season. He has to be able to download it to his computer and watch it anywhere. And he shouldn’t have to wait any longer than HBO subscribers in any time zone in the world in order to watch it. If profit-hungry HBO doesn’t agree to those terms, the only recourse for the consumer is to download a torrented version.

Why is HBO being so damn unreasonable?

At The Onion’s AV Club, Todd VanDerWerff posted an article called “Patience and piracy: Why helping yourself hurts good TV.” It’s got more rational thinking and insight than a hundred Oatmeal strips stacked end-to-end. But, because of all those troublesome words and ideas, it didn’t go viral. (And because it didn’t have “Piracy” and “Game of Thrones” in the title, like Siegler’s post, it didn’t do as good a job of link-baiting. “I’m being forced to pirate Game of Thrones against my will!” is a much more internet-friendly title than “A Winter of Piracy is Coming.”)

Here’s where things get a little tricky. And speaking as someone who watches a lot of television, I have special insider knowledge of how media corporations do business that Siegler, a partner in a venture capital firm, couldn’t possibly be privy to. So excuse me for getting technical here, but bear with me: an epic fantasy series consisting of dozens of hours of footage filmed in various locations with several prominent Hollywood film stars is not an inexpensive production.

Whew, sorry to blow your mind with all that jibber-jabber. Let me dumb it down a shade:

We all know how TV works — you watch it for free or download a season pass for around 40 bucks on iTunes or Amazon. But then, this isn’t TV. It’s HBO. And over a decade ago, HBO responded to the decreased demand for their feature-length movie schedule by putting the spotlight on well-produced, innovative, quality original programming, and also Hung. And it’s not just the case that they produce “tentpole” series like Game of Thrones, Boardwalk Empire, and Rome — television series with feature film budgets. They also produce stuff that probably wouldn’t be feasible elsewhere, like Deadwood, Bored to Death, and even True Blood. (Which isn’t an epic production like the others, but still straddles the line between lowbrow enough for broadcast TV but still too raunchy and too niche for broadcast TV).

That model isn’t cheap. And I’m sure that HBO appreciates the thought, Mr. Siegler, but your generous contribution of 40 bucks before Apple’s cut isn’t quite enough to cover it. For that matter, your $15 a la carte subscription to HBO wouldn’t cover it, either. What covers it is that “naughty” relationship HBO has with the cable companies. It’s kind of like that $600 smart phone you bought for $300 plus a cellular contract.

Except there’s even more to it than that. HBO can afford to produce shows like Game of Thrones because HBO has established itself as a company that can produce shows like The Sopranos (and Rome, Deadwood, etc). People will pay for HBO because of the programming that they can only get on HBO. That exclusivity is baked into the value of the company, and therefore into the cost of its programming. They’ve sneakily hidden this fact into their shady deals with unscrupulous cable providers and by making it the tag line of an entire marketing campaign: “Only on HBO.”

If you can spend $2.99 for an HD copy of the latest episode of Game of Thrones at the same time as a cable subscriber who’s paying over $95 a month for his cable and HBO subscription, then there’s no incentive for him to keep subscribing. And then there’s nothing to separate the digital release of Game of Thrones from that of Mad Men and Breaking Bad, even though two of those series are subsidized by advertising and one isn’t. And there’s no incentive for HBO to keep funding weird, original, expensive, commercial-free television series.

None of this is really all that complicated.

But in this case it’s different, because Siegler and others like him really want to watch Game of Thrones and nothing else that HBO offers. Well, a couple of years ago I really wanted to watch True Blood and nothing else that HBO offers. What I did was I torrented an episode, and I felt like an asshole about it. Then I paid $20 a month for an HBO subscription. So please don’t anybody try to present a confession of “I didn’t feel like an asshole about it” as a battle cry of “I’m taking a stand against Big Media!”

Would I prefer to pay $40 or less to get a season pass of just the series I want to watch? Of course I would. But I was cursed with a conscience and the nagging tendency to think about things for more than a half second. And I quickly realized that paying for the stuff I don’t want to watch helps pay for the stuff that I do want to watch. And that the stuff I watch for “free” has been paid for with advertising.

(Incidentally, the next time I read anyone suggesting that digital versions of print media like books, comics, and magazines should of course be cheaper than the print versions, because the cost of printing has been removed, I’m going to devote all my energy to perfecting my slap-someone-over-the-internet technology. Don’t say you weren’t warned).

And am I suggesting that DirecTV and HBO are just barely scraping by with subscription fees and DVD sales? Of course I’m not. Both NewsCorp and Time Warner are doing quite well for themselves, last I checked. But I missed the day of ethics class where they told us that it’s okay to take stuff without paying for it as long as I was taking it from rich people. And unfortunately for me, their financial success doesn’t obviate my personal responsibility.

Personal responsibility is what it all comes down to, because that’s the part we actually have control over. Marco Arment, someone I usually agree with about everything except coffee, wrote a post (with diagrams!) called “Right vs. Pragmatic” in response to the Oatmeal cartoon and Ihantko’s blog post. And for most of that post, he’s right. The response to piracy from “big media” has just been bone-headed. All the litigation and legislation against piracy on behalf of the RIAA has been a failure both financially and in terms of PR, and now the MPAA is making all the exact same mistakes. The DMCA sucks. And it’s stupid to hold onto an outdated business model when there is still plenty of money to be made providing content through more accessible channels like iTunes, Netflix, Hulu, etc.

But in that entire post, there’s one very important point that Arment fails to emphasize: Responsible, grown men should not be throwing their fucking trash on the floor in the first place.

If you want to really make a stand, instead of just talking about it to make yourself feel better, then actually take a stand. Don’t buy TV from HBO if you don’t like the way they do business. Don’t help advertise it, either, by posting big pictures from the series on your blog and using the title in your post title and talking about how the show is so great that you’re willing to steal it. And if you like the show and would like it to be available on iTunes, then buy it on iTunes. If you want the show to be available on iTunes sooner, then buy a show you like that’s already available, and make it clear that there’s a demand for television through that channel that’s greater than what they’re seeing from cable or satellite subscriptions.

HBO execs have about a 0.0000% chance of reading a post on your website. They have a slightly higher chance of seeing your download of the torrent file in the logs of a pirate website years from now when the site gets threatened for shutdown. They’re guaranteed to read the income statements from Apple.

All that said: everyone should check out that Oatmeal comic one last time, and give him the final say. Scroll to the bottom of the page, after the big chunk of ads that help pay for his bandwidth, and read the last three words.

“Please don’t steal.”

Watching it felt like I was being unfaithful.

But now that I’ve got Bill Willingham’s approval, I can admit it’s a pretty good series. And it’s really not all that much like Fables.

They both start with a bunch of disparate fairy tale characters living together in the same town in the modern world. After that, though, Once Upon a Time feels like it owes less to Fables than it does to Lost.

That’s fair enough, since all the marketing material reminds us that two of Lost‘s executive producers are behind the show. So you can excuse all the appearances of Apollo bars, and the fact that the entire format of the series is taken directly from Lost: TV-pretty people trapped in a secluded location trying to figure out a series-long conundrum; each episode featuring two parallel stories in two different timelines, with each timeline giving context to the other.

And that’s okay, because that format is just as clever and flexible now as it was during the Dharma Initiative days. Even better, it actually makes sense here. In Lost, the flashbacks were used to stretch out the intrigue: we’d learn details about the characters based on past events. In Once Upon a Time, the situation is flipped: we in the audience know more about the characters’ stories than the characters themselves do. The premise is that they’ve all been placed under a curse that’s made them forget they’re storybook characters, to guarantee that none of them will have a happy ending.

That’s the most intriguing part to me, because it means that we have a better chance of getting a happy ending from Once Upon a Time than Lost was ever able to deliver. Everything in Lost depended on stretching the mystery out for as long as possible. Fables is in the same position, more or less: it’s an indefinitely ongoing story that has to keep building on itself. But with Once Upon a Time, we already know how the story’s going to end: they’re going to live happily ever after. The intrigue comes from the telling, and the re-telling.

Are Mary Margaret/Snow White and David/Prince Charming going to get together? Of course. Who are the bad guys? The Evil Queen and Rumplestiltskin. How did they all end up trapped here? It was a curse from the Evil Queen. We know what’s going to happen, the appeal of the stories is seeing how they happen. No “Are they in Purgatory?” style blue-balling here.

Of course, they get to take advantage of their series-long intrigue as well. It’s all in the details, filling in the stuff that wasn’t covered in the original stories. What exactly was it about Snow White that made the Evil Queen so angry? Plus there’s all the secret origin stories — they’ve already done Prince Charming, Jiminy Cricket, Rumplestiltskin and the Huntsman, and made them more interesting than I would’ve thought possible.

And for those of us who watched Lost looking for occurrences of the numbers, the Dharma logo, cross-overs of familiar characters, and implausible coincidences, there’s plenty of material here. Familiar and not-so-familiar characters pop up, and we can speculate on who they are and how their stories intersect. In this week’s episode, we saw how Snow White first met the dwarves. Before the Christmas break, the sheriff that everyone assumed to be the Big Bad Wolf turned out to be a different character.

On top of that, there’s the recurring appeal of Fables, which is seeing how fairy tale characters get translated to the modern day. And they’re usually clever and subtle. A bearded pharmacy owner reveals his fairy tale identity as soon as he sneezes. Red Riding Hood works for her grandmother and delivers food. A cleaning woman named Ashley turns out to be Cinderella. (That one was my favorite). I’m still hoping that they do an episode with a young blonde girl breaking into the home of three big, hairy gay men.

Another thing that I really like about the series is that it’s completely driven by female characters. The two heroes and the main villain are all women. And it’s done seamlessly, by virtue of the source material. Most of the fairy tales focused on female main characters, and yet still managed to make them all passive. When you update those characters to the modern day — or when you retell the original stories with a modern sensibility — you end up with stories centered on strong, intelligent, and independent women.

The casting (and stunt casting) helps, too. Jennifer Morrison is cool as hell and had me hoping for an entire season that she’d be Ted Mosby’s kids’ mother. It’s nice to see Ginnifer Goodwin not in insipid romantic comedies that try to pretend she’s not astoundingly beautiful. I have to admit to having a voice-crush on Raphael Sbarge since he played a Han Solo rip-off character in Knights of the Old Republic. Lana Parrilla has one note she has to keep hitting over and over again, and she’s still managing to change it up slightly between episodes (but they really need to give her something more to work with instead of just saying “You’re not welcome here, Miss Swan” repeatedly). And Robert Carlyle does fey, creepy, and menacing better than most.

Plus they’ve done plenty of guest appearances from actors from just about every nerd fantasy series I like: Pam from True Blood as Maleficient. Krycek from The X-Files as Hansel & Gretel’s dad. Anya from Buffy the Vampire Slayer as Hansel & Gretel’s witch. Charles Widmore from Lost as Prince Charming’s father.

I don’t think Once Upon a Time is as ground-breaking a series as Lost was. I can’t see it ever doing anything as stunning as the season two reveal of what was inside the Hatch. It’s not quite as hip or self-aware. (Which is partly a good thing, since going too self-aware with fairy tale stories would be insufferable; remaining a little bit square is exactly the right tone to hit). It relies a little too much on green screens and CGI (although it makes up for it with great costumes). And I do have to wonder how they’re going to get a series’ worth of material out of the premise.

It didn’t grab me instantly, like the Lost pilot did. But it’s had a great slow build-up so far, plenty of clever moments, great pacing, and just enough intrigue to carry it through the first season finale. And it’s really nice to see a series that doesn’t rely on dragging out mysteries, but recognizes the value of a familiar story told well.

It also borrows the concurrent-timelines gimmick from Lost and the police procedural plot-of-the-week/series-long conspiracy combo from The X-Files and virtually every TV series after The X-Files. It almost seems as if Fox wanted its own version of Lost but forgot that it’s already got its own version of Lost and it’s called Fringe.

Based on the pilot and first episode, though, it seems to be doing everything it can to discourage interest. Part of it’s built into the premise — right before Alcatraz shut down, hundreds of prisoners and guards just went missing. They’re showing up in the present day, un-aged and on the loose, still looking to pay back whatever was bugging them enough to get sent to a maximum security prison in the 60s. And, apparently, they may or may not have been given subliminal/post-hypnotic suggestions to kill folks on behalf of some yet-to-be-revealed shadow organization.

The problem is that murderers coming back from the past just isn’t all that compelling. They kind of used up every possible twist on that in the first two episodes, and there’s still an entire series and hundreds of bad guys left to bring back, over and over again. If all the episodes were done from the criminal’s perspective, as the first part of the pilot was structured, there might be some interesting future-shock material. But they got rid of that as quickly as possible, to focus on a police detective and Jorge Garcia playing basically Smart Hurley.

(Jorge Garcia is one of the best aspects of the show, incidentally, which is kind of a problem, since he’s a character actor who works best when he’s making observations from the sidelines).

As it is, you’ve got the super-secret high tech agency led by Sam Neill plus a cop using 2012 technology and an author who knows every detail about the prison and its residents, against… a bunch of guys from the 60s. Even murderers from the 60s seem relatively quaint compared to the post-Hannibal Lecter serial killers on every other crime show. I foresee lots of ominous scenes of the killer slowly approaching his victim, and then freaking out at the sound of a cell phone ringtone or the sight of an HDTV. “Now I’m going to gut you to appease my dark master and… my God! The screen is so thin! What sorcery is this, a portrait of the cast of Glee and yet it moves?!”

And let me get back to “super-secret high tech agency led by Sam Neill.” For some reason, I’ve had the idea stuck in my head for years that Neill lends an aura of integrity to whatever project he’s working on. But thinking back on everything I’ve seen him in, I have no idea where I got that idea. (Maybe The Hunt for Red October?) The man agreed to do everything asked of him in Event Horizon, for Pete’s sake. If that’s not reason enough to question his judgement, then his performance in Alcatraz might be. I’m sure it doesn’t help that he doesn’t have a lot to work with; his lines all seem to be taken directly from the master handbook of “Things Ball-Busting Heads of Secret Conspiracies Say.” But his delivery seems tone-deaf throughout, as if he’s playing everything a little camp while everyone else is trying to be straightforward.

My biggest problem with the show, again at least from the first two episodes, is that it doesn’t seem very smart. To be clear, I don’t mean real-world smart, but TV smart. Lost was, we all have to admit, a soap opera with pretty people in pretty scenery and lots and lots of crap science and implausible plot twists. And Alias was even goofier. But they both had a kind of swagger to them. Like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, they were fully aware of how silly their core premise was, but they presented everything with the confidence of being in on the joke. They knew when to just drop something matter-of-factly, and when they were getting into weirder territory, and make it all sound like they knew exactly what they were doing.

Alcatraz takes an already somewhat dull premise and tries to milk intrigue out of it. How are these people coming back looking exactly the same as they did 50 years ago?! Well, time travel or some kind of stasis, obviously. And what does it have to do with this mysterious medical experiment?! It could be any one of a hundred different medical experiments we’ve seen on TV before, from cloning to alien-human hybrids to just run-of-the-mill tachyon injections. Showing a doctor taking a few vials of blood from a guy does nothing to pique my interest. Making an incision and it shoots out a jet of toxic gas which incapacitates an ambulance and gives everyone black ink running out of their eyes: that’s got my attention.

It’s disappointing, because I was kind of looking forward to getting wrapped up in and ultimately disappointed by another big-mystery series. But this one just strikes me as another show like the Sci Fi channel’s Haven: the main cast is competent but not charming enough to keep me coming back, the premise is inherently repetitive, and the events aren’t weird enough (in TV terms) to make for must-watch television.

This post is bitching about the first 10 or 15 minutes that I saw. The premise of the show is basically X-Men done as a police procedural: a team of people with “special abilities” get together and solve crimes with David Strathairn as a hairier Professor Xavier. Fair enough.

At the beginning of the episode, we get an introductory scene for each of mutants alphas heading towards this week’s big case. Each scene explains exactly what each character’s power is: the woman with super-persuasion powers talks her way out of a traffic ticket, the man with super-strength pushes an SUV out of the way, the girl with super-senses overhears a whispered conversation out of a sea of noise, and the over-protected autistic kid who can sense TV and radio transmissions watches TV signals no one can watch while his mom tries to talk to him.

After each one, there’s a zoom in on the agent’s personnel file that lists his or her name and power. It’s completely, insultingly superfluous.

Due to my super-human ability to perceive what I’m being shown in a television program, I’d already figured out each character’s name and super-power from the scene showing their name and super-power. But somebody on the production decided to completely underestimate the audience’s intelligence and insist on treating us like easily confused simpletons. Whether it was an executive somewhere, or one of the show creators pre-censoring himself, I don’t know. Either way, it’s infuriating.

Each one is around 10 seconds long, so in the grand scheme of things, it’s not that big a deal. What makes it so obnoxious is that it was so unnecessary — the set-up scenes were so well done, comparatively. They conveyed every single thing they needed to. It just reeks of that “what if people don’t get it?” attitude.

The show itself is fine, from what I’ve seen; the Onion review’s description of a less pretentious Heroes is pretty on target. It’s a lot like what you’d expect a USA Network show about people with super powers to be. And I just don’t think people on the USA Network have any business assuming they’re smarter than the people watching.

Nobody does, actually, but those guys in particular.

The New Scooby Doo: Mystery Incorporated series
Except for maybe “The Powerpuff Girls,” any animated series aimed at kids has failed the second they make it smart enough for adults to like, too. I really like that the new series is for fans of the old series — they’ve got all kinds of callbacks to the original monsters, cameos from “New Scooby Doo Mysteries” celebrities like Don Knotts, and clever bits like casting Casey Kasem as Shaggy’s dad. And they have a season-wide story arc hinting at the original bunch of crime-solving teens in the same city, with their talking parrot. I hope it lasts.

Aquaman on the new “Brave and the Bold” series
The series isn’t quite as charming as it used to be, but Aquaman (voiced by John DiMaggio, who does Bender from Futurama and Jake from Adventure Time) is still the best character. Nice to see the guy finally getting a little respect, since he’s had a hard few decades.

Man vs Food
Everything about this show is just wrong. It’s a testament to gross American excess and waste, the host is plenty likeable but he talks through his nose, and they referred to Walnut Creek as “just outside of San Francisco.” But still, if it comes on, my ass is fixed to the couch and my eyes to the TV for hours, or until creepy Anthony Bourdain comes on, whichever comes first. I’m not proud of it, but it happens.

The Daily Puppy
is my favorite blog, hands down. Don’t tell my cat.

The “Walt Disney World Ephemera” group on Flickr
and the “Disney Printed Matter” group
There are billions and billions of groups for Disney fans on Flickr, but these two are specifically for maps, magazine ads, FastPasses, ride tickets, parking tickets, and old shopping bags. When I was younger, I used to sneak into my brother’s room and rummage through the bottom drawer of his dresser, because that’s where he kept the bags full of souvenirs from our previous trip to Disney World. (Other families hid porn, my family hid Disney souvenirs). To this day, the EPCOT Future World icons and original Walt Disney World logo and even this photo still trigger a glee response at the base of my spine. Also this.

More evidence that no matter what you’re into, there are at least fifty other people somewhere on the internet who are even more into it than you are. And yes, I mean the naughty stuff too.

And unrelated, but just because I love it a lot: “Whiners Can Be Losers” from the Cartoon Network’s golden days.

Turns out that some of the rarer episodes are out there on something that’s like YouTube but isn’t but is also owned by Google and like YouTube, it also shows videos. You can search for “Time of the Apes,” which is one I haven’t seen for over a decade and will likely never be released in one of the official sets because of rights issues. Other semi-rare classics to search for: “Daddy-O,” “Master Ninja I,” and “Fugitive Alien.”

I’m excited because I love MST3k and hate copyright.

Season one took a while to get up to speed — it wasn’t exactly clear whether or not they were actually in on the joke. Season two had some amazing moments, but you had to slog through lots of pointless subplots and tedious month-long orgies to get to them. But season three has been firing on all cylinders. It’s got the big mystery (what is Sookie Stackhouse?), a fantastic villain, a ton of interesting side characters, and finally, they’ve completely embraced being on HBO.

Before, it’s always felt like they’re kind of holding back or saving themselves for big moments. This season, the HBO-ness never quite stops. I think every episode has had the Nudity Violence Adult Language warning, but this year they really hit their stride at combining all of those at the same time. This episode started with a blood-covered shower sex scene that would’ve been the climax of any other HBO series, but that was tame compared to everything else and in retrospect actually kind of sweet, in True Blood terms. (Incidentally, with as much fluid exchange as goes on in this series, I’ve got to wonder why they haven’t spent more time talking about STDs). You’d think that you can only go over the top once or twice, but now they just keep stacking more top. And going from really, genuinely dark, to laugh-out-loud funny over the course of one scene.

The end of the most recent episode (“Everything is Broken”) sums up everything that’s great about this season — a creepy-sexy scene in a limo followed immediately by a tour de force performance that’s both hilarious and horrifying. And I never say “tour de force” so you know he knocked it out of the park. And they didn’t even need to ramp it up that much, considering they already had the scene with him narrating his evil plan of revenge to a crystal goblet filled with vampire remains.

I’m not saying it’s all been great. I like the subplots with Sam and Jason in theory — if you spent too much time focused on vampire royalty and Nazi werewolves, it could get too fruity. Even if the werewolves are mostly biker trash. True Blood does need to have a steady supply of straight-up white trash. And this season’s definitely delivered, but there’s the problem: even if your dog fighting rednecks are shapeshifters and your meth dealers are some yet-to-be-determined supernaturals (probably shapeshifters), it’s still hard for that to compete with vampire royalty and Nazi werewolves. You can’t really bash a guy’s head in with a mace and then cut to the dog fight and expect it to be horrific. I’m a little curious to see what the meth dealers turn out to be, but I’ll definitely be happy when Sam’s brother and the rest of his family go the way of Eggs.

I already said that Denis O’Hare is amazing as Russell Edgington, and I also want to go on record as saying I’m on Team Alcide all the way. And Alfre Woodard is pretty fantastic with just a few lines here and there as Lafayette’s mostly-crazy mother, but she’s Alfre Woodard so that’s more or less to be expected.

But the actor who doesn’t get nearly enough credit is Carrie Preston as Arlene. It’s kind of a thankless part, but I think the show would be a lot worse without her stabilizing everything. She’s not the only actress on the show who’s much better-looking in real life (Rutina Wesley really needs a scene where she’s not tied up or crying) but she is the only one who’s really having to walk the line between comic relief and drama. In less competent hands, she could’ve ended up just a caricature. But she manages to make an over-dramatic and a little racist stereotypical character and make her really sympathetic. On a show like True Blood, that can go from sad to horrifying to hilarious at a moment’s notice, you need somebody who gets it.

So that’s all I’ve got about True Blood, and it only took up a little less than an hour. I’ve still got to wait a week until the next episode.

You are the very first person ever to get the meaning of the show. Yes. It is a love story. Always has been…always will be.

Yeah.

I’m all for artists coming up with a different interpretation of their work than may be obvious to the fans. I’m even all for the more cynical version, artists putting a spin on their work for the press. But I’ve gotta call BS on that one. The show about survivors of a plane crash on a tropical island haunted by a smoke monster has not always been a love story.

If the guy who made the show doesn’t know what it’s about, I guess you can’t expect anybody else to, either. “Everybody Loves Hugo” just felt like a writer’s meeting where everybody said “oh crap we’ve only got five episodes left?!”

Spoilers for this week’s episode “Everybody Loves Hugo…”

I’ve got no idea what that whole business with Gaia was supposed to be about. (That’s her name on Rome, anyway, I can’t remember her name on Lost). For starters, any time they pick the Black Rock dynamite, you know what’s coming, and I mean come on, guys: you’ve already done that one. They’ve spent all this time developing the character, only to have her accomplish nothing and go out like a chump. That’s not a shocking twist; it’s a waste. Especially when they had her complaining about how she had no purpose now that Jacob was dead. You can’t try to build up sympathy for a character and then just kill her off.

I was all excited at the potential that Libby was going to be coming back, but that was back when I thought they were going to do something with her. Who was her husband? What was the boat race for? Why was she in a mental institution? Again, it was build-up with no pay-off; instead they spent all this time following an imaginary story they just made up.

When they showed Sun writing a note to Jeff Fahey’s character, I realized I’d totally forgotten the whole bit about her sudden treebonk-induced aphasia. The reason I forgot about that: it’s yet another new little plot thing they’re introducing without any context, instead of tying up loose ends.

I guess that may not be fair; they did explain the whispers in the jungle with grace and subtlety. “OH HEY NEVER MIND I think I know what these whispers are after all. They’re dead people right, Michael?” “Yes. See ya.”

And also the smoke monster knocked Desmond down a well for no reason.

Now I’m on the edge of my seat wondering what are going to be the implications of alternate-reality Desmond running over Locke with his car, because they’ve spent a lot of time and energy setting that whole idea.

I already explained why I like “Castle” so much, and if you’ve been unfortunate enough to follow me on the Twitters, you’ve seen that turn into a full-blown new-favorite-TV-show infatuation. And there’s one bit from the first part of the recent “Major TV Event” that sums up everything I like about the series:

A serial killer is at work in New York, obsessed with Detective Beckett’s “alter-ego” Nikki Heat, calling her and taunting her to catch him before he kills again. The FBI arrives on the crime scene, with a tough expert profiler (played by Dana Delaney) claiming jurisdiction over the case and being dismissive of Castle and Beckett’s casework. She brings a ton of high-tech equipment and a cadre of FBI agents into the precinct and takes over the situation room…

…and then, they all cooperate and work together to try and solve the case. Everybody is friendly and supportive of each other. On a crime show! All it takes is one commercial break before they’re all making wisecracks at each other and gossiping.

Which proves that there’s no cliche they can’t deflate. I don’t know if it’s because I’ve been getting older or what, but over the past few years, I’ve developed a lot more respect for creators who aren’t just obsessed with novelty, but can spin and rework formulas and genre tropes into something new. And this is exactly how you do genre fiction: be confident enough to acknowledge cliches and recognize why they’re useful, and then use them as tools instead of just crutches.

Take for instance the “Bones”- and “CSI”-like super-futuristic VR holo-screens they toted in for this episode, causing me to emit a pained groan. They brought them in, set them up, had Castle make a joke about them to make it clear they weren’t taking this stuff too seriously, and then took advantage of exactly what they’re good for: cramming a ton of pseudo-detective work into a limited amount of screen time. Basing a code on Castle’s books is a neat idea; having to crack the code could’ve been clumsy and tedious without an injection of TV-universe technology.

Another great touch was having Susan Sullivan reminiscing with an old episode of “The Incredible Hulk” she’d appeared in. It’s tough to hit just the right level of “meta” enough to acknowledge you’re in on the joke, but not so much that it makes the whole thing pointless (e.g. the Firefly reference earlier in the season that didn’t quite work as well).

The beauty of it is that if you’d described just the plot of this episode to me, I would’ve dismissed it as just another police procedural, and probably a hopelessly cliched one at that. But the plot is usually secondary on this show — why else would they put a “surprise” exploding apartment cliffhanger in an episode titled “Tick tick tick…” — because everything is driven by chemistry.

(And Beckett was totally in a different apartment, of course. That’s the one TV gimmick that’s been enabled by cell phones, instead of being ruined by them.)