Category: Television

An entry on the Sci Fi Wire blog says that David Eick, one of the creators of the new “Battlestar Galactica,” is planning a “complete reconceptualization” of the series “The Bionic Woman”.

I called some of my contacts in the industry and obtained a top-secret document detailing the proposed story arc for the first season:

Prologue
A series of 8 “webisodes” available exclusively on SciFi.com, detailing the work of the brilliant doctor who comes up with bionic technology. After her most important breakthrough, operatives from a rival technology firm kidnap the doctor in an action-packed sequence. They then rape her, steal her blueprints and her ovaries, bury her alive, make fraudulent charges on her credit cards, dig her up, rape her again, then murder her. Runs May through July with strong lead-in to August season pilot.

Episodes 1-2 (Pilot)
Career woman with promising career is told she’s infertile. Thrown into depression, she develops eating disorder then gradually more self-destructive behavior. Leaves fiance, takes up extreme sports. Final 30 minutes of episode 2 shows skydiving accident in prolonged, horrific detail.

Episode 3
Cut between flashbacks to skydiving accident and invasive medical procedures. Pronounced dead. Misogynist military biotech expert proposes bionic enhancement, has difficulties with his own marriage and deals with death of his mother.

Episode 4
More flashbacks of skydiving accident, invasive bionic medical procedures. Biotech expert develops drinking problem.

Episode 5
Physical therapy, frustration and suicide attempts, addiction to pain killers. Cliffhanger: military presents incalculable medical bills, only way to repay is to work as covert gov’t operative.

Episode 6
While in gov’t training, bionic woman fails to save little girl from oncoming train. Wracked with guilt. Shadowy figure pleased at success of gov’t’s new “omega weapon.”

Episodes 7-10
Black ops missions in Afghanistan and the Sudan. Supporting cast introduced, killed. Bionic woman deals with secret drug addiction, wracked with guilt over death of little girl.

Episodes 11-12
Two parter. Bionic woman forced to assassinate her ex-fiance (an upcoming presidential candidate) and his new wife.

Episode 13
Bionic woman teams with Sasquatch to fight evil Soviet fembots. (Sweeps)

Episodes 14-20
Cancer.

Episode 21
Remission.

Episode 22
More cancer.

Episode 23
Problems with aural implant lead to suspicions of schizophrenia. Suspected mole in agency, evil twin of her biotech expert primary contact. One is rigged with explosives to blow up the Pentagon. Who can she trust?

Episode 24
Bionic arm goes awry, killing Pope. Wracked with guilt.

Episodes 25-26
Meets rival agent, falls in love. Discovers he is also equipped with bionics. Make elaborate plans to leave their respective agencies and escape to obscure island in S. Pacific. Elopement. New husband is killed in horrific wedding night malfunction. She is charged with murder. Was it all a set-up? (Cliffhanger)

Tonight I watched hours and hours of two series that have a lot in common: 1) they’re both shown on the SciFi channel, 2) they’re both revamps of notoriously nerd-ridden franchises, and 3) they’re both awesome.

Battlestar Galactica
Nothing cheers up a Friday like suicide bombings, descriptions of eyes getting plucked out, nighttime death squad abductions, stolen ovaries, abandoned and unwanted babies, and mass execution by firing squad! TGIF!

If there’s any doubt left that this is a well-made show, I’ll tell you it has to be. Because I wouldn’t put up with something this grim and depressing if it weren’t. At one point, Adama says, “things are going to be okay,” which really puts his intelligence into question. Dude, look around you. In the past three years, when has anything been “okay?” The only bright spot I have to hold onto is that as miserable as they all are, they’re still anal-retentive enough to cut the corners off all their paper, and even the windows of their computer displays. Well, that and the promise of seeing Fat Apollo get chewed out.

But then they have scenes like the first ones with Starbuck and her new roommate, which are cool enough to make the whole thing worthwhile. I’m kind of skeptical that a magic squad of paratroopers descends on the firing squad and whisks everyone away to freedom, so things aren’t looking too good for Apollo v1.0.

After watching tonight’s episode, I remembered a “Battlestar Galactica” comic book I had when I was younger and a huge fan of the original series. The cover had a drawing of people running away from Cylon Raiders as buildings fell and laser bolts hit all over the place. The title of it was “ANNIHILATION!” I remember thinking at the time how incredibly cool it was, and having to look up the word “annihilation” because I didn’t know what it meant.

Even armed with the definition, it never registered with me how the show I was watching was a goofy, happy-go-lucky take on the near-total obliteration of the human race. Or that Starbuck’s girlfriend Cassiopeia was a prostitute. So apparently, the story’s in the telling. There are a lot of really interesting aspects to the universe and the premise of the show that were there all along, just hidden under layers of cheesy 80s television.

Doctor Who
Much like “Doctor Who.” I’ve only seen a smattering of episodes from the original series — I’ve never seen an episode with the Daleks, even — and I was never a fan. I tried, I really did, because it just seemed like something I should like. A time-traveling alien, a robot dog, monsters, pretty-but-British-so-they’re-not-so-pretty-as-to-be-inaccessible women, and the second best theme song in TV history*. How could it go wrong?

A lot of ways, it turns out. Obviously, after Star Wars and “Battlestar Galactica” the special effects were going to be a disappointment. But there was still something about it that never grabbed me as a kid; it seemed too talky and distant, like it was aimed at very dour British children.

So the new revamp of the series has gotten a lot of hype, and it turns out it’s all deserved. I watched the first DVD of the first season, not the new ones that started airing tonight on SciFi.

It’s just great. The interviews with the exec producer and writers reveal that it was made by people who grew up with the show and dreamed of writing for it ever since they were little. But you don’t really need the interviews to see that; it comes through in everything. They captured everything that makes the premise so appealing, but with well-written stories from a post-Douglas Adams England.

It’s not just the special effects that have caught up with the concept, it’s the tone and quality of writing. The British have always cornered the market on clever, and here’s a great example of it all working. It’s funny without being campy or too ironic, clever without being condescending, fun without being inconsequential, serious without being too dark and heavy.

And the last bit is what baffles me. When I was younger, I never understood that in the UK, “Doctor Who” was targeted towards kids. It definitely wasn’t like children’s programming in the US; it seemed closer to “Star Trek” than anything I was supposed to be watching. With the new series, they’re clearly targeting a wider audience; in the DVD special features, the lead actor describes it as aimed at the whole family, which is the kind of thing you’re supposed to say on a press tour interview.

But just in the first three episodes, we’ve seen the destruction of the Earth, speeches about how time is fleeting and everything around us is going to die, two characters sacrificing themselves for the good of others, at least four violent deaths of speaking characters, and scores of reanimated Victorian-era zombies. I realize I had a very sheltered childhood, where I always got the Disney version of every story and still wasn’t even allowed to see Old Yeller, but it still seems a lot darker than what most American kids are used to seeing.

I’m not saying they shouldn’t, of course — the show is a hell of a lot of fun, and probably American kids need to get toughened up anyway. I’m just interested in how there can be that wide a cultural divide. We get Disney and Dr. Seuss, they get Roald Dahl.

Also, did I mention the scores of reanimated Victorian-era zombies? The show rocks so hard.

* Of course, “Space: 1999” had the best.

Entertainment Weekly just ran an article about Rosario Dawson in which Kevin Smith calls her a “hot geek.”.

Which to me is like saying “compassionate conservative;” it just doesn’t exist. The terms are mutually exclusive. For those of us who were nerds back when being a nerd meant something (mostly it meant rejection and shame), this whole new movement, what with your X-Men and Spider-man movies being big-ticket productions and movies about hobbits winning Oscars, is a disturbing trend.

Only the most naive of nerds would see this as welcome, fulfilling some life-long fantasy that someone who looks like Rosario Dawson would walk into his gaming session in the back of the comic book store and confess her love for him in perfect Klingon. The cold hard reality is that when someone who looks like Rosario Dawson can speak Klingon, then there’s even less need in the universe for someone who looks like you.

So sorry, Mr. Smith. You’ll still be welcomed into the Dragon Con with open, sweaty arms, but your friend will have to stay outside. We have a cosmic order to maintain. Open the gates too wide, and you get stuff like “Heroes”.

For all I know, “Heroes” was a true labor of love by a dedicated, hard-core comic book fan who’s wanted to do a story like this ever since he was a teenager. It sure doesn’t come across like it, though. Watching it, you don’t get an image of a dedicated artist passionate about telling a story, but a group of NBC execs passionate about cashing in on the success of the X-Men movies and “Lost” and too unoriginal to do anything other than copy the format of every other “disparate people brought together by supernatural circumstances” package series.

The whole thing has a junior-varsity, C-list vibe to it. Even starting with the opening text crawl, a completely unnecessary prologue that threatens this is just the “first volume” in an “epic story.” Then the pompous, overblown, and completely unoriginal title credit: “Chapter One: Genesis.” They’re getting the comic book feel down, but unfortunately it’s an Image comic book.

And it just goes on like that. It’s not horribly inept or offensive, just completely unoriginal, unsubtle, and ham-handed. You’ve got two-dimensional characters in stock situations doing uninteresting things. Everybody talks in exposition. The mysterious, intriguing villain is neither mysterious nor intriguing. The performances are mostly competent but completely unremarkable (which is a feat, considering all the awful, clumsy exposition-heavy dialogue the actors have to deliver). It’s all Generic Television Superhero Product.

For me it was all summed up by one scene: our Japanese character, who’s named Hiro, because you see that’s clever, is having a conversation about being a loser with his salaryman friend in a karaoke bar, because you see they’re in Japan, and on stage are two guys doing the “I Want it That Way” bit. It was a dull, pointless conversation between stereotypical characters in a totally stereotypical situation, with an obvious and clumsy and already-outdated and not very clever topical pop culture reference.

There was one moment at the very end of the pilot that had a halfway-intriguing twist and almost made me curious as to what happens next. I read on that NBC site, in an interview with the creator of the series, that the idea for that came from his friend Damon Lindelof, one of the creators of “Lost.” Reading that just made me kind of sad for the guy, that his one original idea he has to admit came from somebody else.

I don’t think I have enough pity to keep watching the show past a second episode, though. If I want to watch a series about people with strange new powers in a real-life setting, I’ll watch “The 4400” or “Smallville.” If I want to watch a series about a bunch of disparate people brought together by unnatural circumstances, I’ll keep watching “Lost.” Or maybe I’ll just read a real comic book.

I was thinking more about those Hummer ads, and something just occurred to me:

For decades, we’ve had hundreds of ads for dozens of products where the underlying message has been the same: Buy this product and you’ll get a huge boner.

In the past few years, advertisers have been able to run commercials for products whose purpose is exactly that. And the ads always show guys fishing or gardening or sitting at the kitchen table with their wives. In other words, they finally have the chance to come right out and say “buy this to get a boner,” and they say everything except that.

Marketing types live in some bizarre alternate universe.

Car commercials are getting a lot more aggressive lately. Used to be the worst was that Mistubishi ad with the creepy woman in the beret pop-locking in somebody’s passenger seat like she was having an event. Now it’s hard to watch commercial TV for too long without feeling like you’ve been assaulted.

VW has been all up in everybody’s business, either trying to charm you into buying a Rabbit, scare you into buying a Jetta, or shame you into buying a Passat. The ads for the Rabbit, like the car, would be completely unremarkable and forgettable except for that damn song which grabs on like one of those Wrath of Khan worms. VOOOOOOOOOLLLLLLKSWAAAAAAGEN!

Then those Jetta ads, which don’t seem to be working as hard to sell you cars as they are to freak your shit out. People driving along having some dull conversation so you think it’s an ad for wine coolers or something then BAM! they get T-boned. The ads always end with two people saying “Holy Shit!” — the one in the ad, and me.

Then of course there’s the Passat ads, about “Low Ego Emissions.” I’ve gotta admit I kind of like the concept behind those. And you’ve got to like any series of ads that has a Nemesis. Not long after the Passat ads started, Hummer launched these:

This one also got a “Holy Shit!” out of me. The version posted there on YouTube is the one that’s running now, the one after somebody must have complained. The version I saw ended not with “Restore the Balance” but the real message of the campaign: “Restore Your Manhood.” The other ad in the series is a woman who gets pissed off when a rude woman cuts in front of her son on the playground, and her only recourse is to go out and buy a gas-guzzling Hummer. (She doesn’t even head back to drive the Hummer over the woman’s child, which would’ve at least made some sense).

Before I get lumped in with the “ecofeminist” who posted the YouTube video, and the other tofu defenders complaining about the ad, let me make one thing clear: it’s not the whole “you got to stop being such a damn pussy and start eating steak and drivin’ a big-ass truck and GIT-R-DONE!” that bugs me.

I mean, it’s stupid as hell, but nothing to get all upset on the internets about. Advertisers have been pulling this kind of nonsense for years, trying to grab guys by the short hairs and point and laugh at their flaccidity until they spend money on their whatever. There were a few months at EA where every morning on my way into work I had to walk under a ginormous screen showing an ad mocking guys for being impotent pussies until they bought a copy of Madden or Fight Night or whatever.

But that’s marketing; that’s what they do. There’s some parable that keeps getting trotted out about a scorpion giving a ride to a field mouse or a racoon or something. I forget the details, but it ends with the scorpion killing its passenger and when the passenger asks why he just says “I’m a scorpion” and the moral is that it’s pointless to get angry at a person for being true to his nature. Same goes for ad people: humilating you or flattering you into buying something is their purpose in life. There’s no point in getting all indignant about it.

And that’s why the Hummer ads have me baffled. Being honest is antithetical to what these people do — and if we are going to start seeing truth in advertising from anyone, it’s going to be Hummer?

But with these ads, they’re calling out their core market exactly for what they are — impotent turds with more financial worth than self-worth. They’re coming right out and saying, “You are so hopelessly insecure that even the most mundane of life’s setbacks send you reeling into an impotent rage for which the only solution is to immediately buy a ridiculously oversized, impractical, environment-destroying vehicle that should never have been released to the mass market.” In other words, the exact same message as this parody ad, but for reals.

If other advertisers decide to follow Hummer’s lead and start telling it like it is, I just have one urgent request: please, please, please, stay true to advertising convention and keep urine and menstrual fluid a bright royal blue.

It’s counter-intuitive, but having a TiVo encourages a healthier relationship with the television box. You’re always hearing from TiVotees who go on about how they watch less TV than they did before they got one, but now I’ve got proof. Over the past month I’ve been subjected to more TV at my parents’ house and on airplanes and in hotel rooms than I’ve watched in the past four years.

The first thing that becomes obvious is that so much of TV is absolute crap. There’s a whole section of my TiVo subscription list that I always thought of as guilty pleasures, but now I can watch completely guilt-free. Because now I’ve seen what’s out there, and it’s worse. And what’s worse, I’ve been having to see it Clockwork Orange-style, unable to turn the channel but still instinctively reaching for the rewind, fast-forward and skip buttons like some kind of a phantom limb.

Or worse, stuck on a plane with a huge projection of Jeremy Piven all up in my face for an hour during turbulence.

Jeremy Piven’s Journey of a Lifetime
Also known as Jeremy Piven is an Enormous Douche. I’ve got no idea how something this loathsome made it to the normally-innocuous Travel Channel; I’m guessing there weren’t enough sexxxy spring break girls in it to make the cut for E! The premise is that inexplicably well-known supporting actor Piven makes a spiritual pilgrimage to India with a camera crew and a book about yoga he picked up while in LA.

One of the remarkable things about this show is that it manages to make egomaniac Anthony Bourdain seem low-key and selfless. Hell, he makes Richard Gere seem well-adjusted. We get shot after shot of Mr. Piven doing yoga here, talking to a swami there, feeling visibly moved by the plight of a child over there before being driven back to his luxury spa here. The key theme isn’t so much “India” or “East Asia” but “get this guy on-screen as much as possible.” It’s not filmed like a travel documentary but a campaign ad. Although I’m not sure what office he could be running for other than Arch-Douche of Doucheland.

And all the while he keeps bowing and saying “Namaste” in that insufferably pompous nasal whine. I like to think that the typical shooting schedule for the “documentary” consisted of 10 minutes getting footage of him shouting “look at me” during some deeply significant ceremony, followed by 20 minutes of the camera crew just beating him repeatedly.

Bones
I’m sure she’s a fine actress and all, but Emily Deschanel has that weird Cro-Magnon thing going on. I’m just sayin’. It was surprising, is all, because Zooey’s hot.

But the show is stone dumb, even for Fox. Read the character names and descriptions on that Wikipedia site, for starters: “Temperance Brennan” and “Seeley Booth” are your heroes. Take that petri dish of stupidity and add the desire to one-up CSI at every level, and you end up with forensic pathologists at the Smithsonian who have holographic technology straight out of Aeon Flux.

Plus it has a message: the one I saw was about a murdered prostitute addicted to plastic surgery and Dr. Temperance Brennan lamenting about people so convinced they’re ugly that they willingly give up their individuality. Which is a good, albeit preachy, point, although the whole time she was talking I couldn’t stop staring at her protruding brow ridge.

The Closer
This one isn’t so bad, actually; it’s your typical old-school hour-long crime show. I just wish somebody would give Emmy Award Nominee Kyra Sedgwick a dialect coach. One of the things about her character (who’s pretty much completely unlikable and annoying) is that she’s supposed to be from Atlanta. Nobody from Atlanta talks like that, not even on “Designing Women.”

Grey’s Anatomy
I only caught a few minutes of this one, and I don’t get it. I keep hearing about what a huge hit it is, and I guess I assumed it was a show about a hospital. From what I could tell it’s a show about self-obsessed average-looking women who wanted to have sex with equally average-looking guys. Maybe it’s got some subtleties I just didn’t pick up on.

Kenneth Copeland’s Believer’s Voice of Victory
I’ve seen three sermons/infomercials by this guy, and the recurring theme of each wasn’t so much faith and belief or even Christianity, but “Praise Jesus I’ve got so much money.” He talks about his boats and his planes and his big houses and his big cars and how all of us could have as much money as he does if we just have faith. And tax-exempt status, I’m assuming.

There are plenty of televangelists out there a lot more toxic — as far as I’m aware, Kenneth Copeland hasn’t blamed 9/11 on the liberals or said “nyah, nyah” to a stroke victim. I was just surprised by the rhetoric of the Copelands, having grown up watching Jim & Tammy Faye Bakker (yes, really) reveling in their wealth and excess and seeing how that whole thing played out.

The rest of this post is a spoiler for the season 2 premier of The Venture Brothers:
Continue reading “R.I.P. Hank and Dean”

“The Venture Brothers” is definitely the best show on [adult swim], and if it weren’t for “Lost,” it’d be the best show on TV right now. I got the Season One DVDs when I was down in Georgia, and I’ve finally gotten around to watching the extra features.

The extra features aren’t enough to buy the DVD on their own, but it’s a great touch they went out of their way to include them. (Besides, the episodes are so good I’d’ve bought the set without any extras). There are interviews with the cast of the “live action movie,” and a special making-of segment. I haven’t listened to the commentary tracks yet. The best special feature is the totally bad-ass slipcase art by Bill Sienkiewicz.

The new season starts Sunday, June 25th, and adultswim.com has been running teasers for a sneak preview available online tomorrow (Friday). If you want to get as excited as I am, you can check out Jackson Publick’s blog and this fansite for the show.

It was from one of those blogs I heard about J.G. Thirlwell, who does the music for the show and records under the name “Foetus.” His album Ectopia (recorded as “Steroid Maximus”) is pretty damn cool. A few years ago I got Music for Imaginary Films by Arling & Cameron, and while I liked the concept, the music itself was predictable and dull. Ectopia delivers on the concept and is better in every conceivable way.