I do love that about Netflix. The selection is kind of crap, but I don't care, I have low standards. But the process of picking something off a menu, watching it, and turning it off when it's over is so much less soul-sucking than channel surfing.
(In moderately related news, someone here mentioned Archer, and so Buck and I watched a couple of seasons of it. Reprehensible, but often funny. Then Buck mentioned thinking it was funny at Easter dinner, and our guests (including my father) scorned him, volubly. I blame the commentariat.)
He violated the first rule of Unfogged club! I have no sympathy.
Reprehensible, but often funny.
That is an excellent way to describe it.
When you find yourself watching shit get real on Parking Wars is when you know it's time for an intervention.
I have not particularly tried to get Blume to watch Archer, because I think maybe the reprehensibility would annoy her. I do however quote her lines from it, which annoys her in a subtly different way.
It looks like "Archer" is going to be a perennial hit, so I can only imagine how awful it's going to be in a few years. It took "South Park" like six seasons to get to the point where literally every joke consisted of some sort of smirking taboo violation.
My TV watching system requires a few affirmative, time-consuming steps, which makes it hard for new shoes to clear the barrier. It doesn't stop me from watching crap, but it's a very limited repertoire of crap which I will refrain from listing because (as it takes specific work on my part to watch these shows) you all would make fun of me.
6: huh, I would have said that it had dialled that back a little bit in favor of bigger-scale spy plots.
Of course, when I've occasionally seen recent South Park episodes I found them pretty damn funny, so maybe I'm just juvenile like that.
(Pooping)
For reasons that I don't really understand, my apartment this semester (temporary sublet) has super extra deluxe cable, but no internet. I've not had cable, ever. (well. my mom's house did, for like 2 years in high school. but not my own).
TV watching is weird when you have 500 things to choose from but half of them are Law & Order. I can't really tell if I like it or not. I mean, I do love Law & Order, but enough is enough.
One positive, compared with Netflix at least, is that almost everything is captioned. But I wouldn't pay money for the service, if it were my decision.
I pretty much don't watch TV anymore, because I find searching for stuff too difficult and no longer get TNT. Pickers is sometimes on in the background.
It's right on the line where I think the reprehensibility should annoy me, and sort of worry that I'm amused anyway. I think it's literally the pacing -- it moves fast enough that the godawful stuff doesn't just hang there.
hard for new shoes to clear the barrier.
Did you really mean to talk about proclivities like this in public? I mean, I don't think less of people when I learn stuff like this about them, necessarily....
I think I have shoes on the brain what with the searing, ongoing pain in my whole footal area.
I get blisters from the barefoot shoes too, but only once -- when the first batch heals, they're good from then on. But yeah, big gnarly blisters.
I have not particularly tried to get Blume to watch Archer, because I think maybe the reprehensibility would annoy her.
I'm already annoyed by the female characters, and that's just having glimpsed them on Tweety's computer while he's using headphones.
Law and Order can be deadly on Netflix. Watch Next Episode, Watch Next Episode, Watch Next Episode, Watch Next Episode fuck, it's 2 am.
Actually, people, recommend TV shows, preferably available on Netflix. Light, we're talking about. Funny, stupid SF (would you like to know how many hours of the various Stargate franchises Buck and I have watched? More than I'm comfortable calculating.), anything else fluffy. Low levels of violence, if possible (violent plots are fine, I just don't want to be looking at blood and body parts. No Dexter). I don't want to watch Downton Abbey.
17: This is exactly what I did for hours and hours and hours and hours on my iPad right after Baby O was born. Baby, me, iPad, Goren -- all in bed for days on end.
I generally turn on the TV between 9 and 9:30 every weeknight and watch random junk. It doesn't matter much, because I pass out on the couch, usually well before 10.
3: and 4: nail it for me. The fascination with having 440 channels of crap in HD wears off quickly enough.
IMX "Archer" and a few other half-hour shows are perfect for exercising on the treadmill tho' sometimes "Archer" has me laughing too hard to continue tho' I'm immune to reprehensibiliosis.
I've done that with Law and Order on cable with clients. I have also watched too much BET. I really can't recommend The Parkers..... Haaa--ay. Everybody hates Chris is not terrible.
Actually, people, recommend TV shows
I only watching things on DVD from netflix, so I haven't watched any of the current seasons of these shows, but the shows I'm excited about right now are (in order)
The Good Wife
Big Bang Theory
Leverage
I liked seasons 1 & 2 of Glee, but I'll probably skip season 3.
Come to think of it, I'm looking for recommendations as well.
LB -- if you haven't watched William and Mary (2003) I'd recommend it. Martin Clunes is fantastic (though I didn't like Doc Martin at all). The one problem is that there aren't that many episodes, you'll go through it pretty quickly.
Justified. If it's not on Netflix (I haven't checked), get a fucking cable subscription.
We dont have cable for this reason. Even without cable, it is easy to get sucked in to stupid stuff.
recommendations
My deep love for the Rockford Files has become a running joke in my family, who don't like it much. A lot of what I like about it is the cinematography and location filming. Maybe Torchwood if you haven't already seen it.
Arrested Development, the first couple seaASONns of Malcolm in the Middle, Blue Planet and Monarchy (UK) if you tolerate documentaries. For the latter (which really is interesting if you have any appetite for historical documentary), an additional game is to develop two phrases to yell at the TV when the narrator puts on one of his two facial expressions, raised eyebrows, or squinting hedgehog. We did "wooo!" and "Hoo-ah" respectively. Harold Lloyd's silent movies.
18 - Everyone says that Fringe totally ramped up its game starting in the second season, but I've only seen the first season, which was pretty pedestrian.
Big Bang Theory
I do not understand what is funny about this show.
Oh, hey, you know what I really liked? Slings and Arrows, a show that I found enjoyable despite the fact that it was about actors and is from Canada, a nation that has never won a Fields Medal.
30 -- seconded.
28.1 -- I love the Rockford Files so much. Fun fact: my Godfather was a recurring character actor on the show, usually as a villain, cementing my deep personal connection to 70s drifters and low lifes.
We've watched a couple of episodes of the Rockford Files lately. It's fun, but really interestingly dated: the pacing is bizarrely slow by current standards. Phone rings. Rockford looks up, has facial expression. Phone rings again. Rockford gets out of chair, walks across room. Phone rings again. Rockford answers it. Long pause while Rockford listens. Rockford says "This is me." Next long pause. Rockford finally says something that advances the plot. This doesn't make it annoying to watch, somehow, but man, things move slow.
I do not understand what is funny about this show. /i>
I suspect that people will either find Jim Parsons funny or not, and there isn't much to say beyond that.
I will note that the thing that impresses me about the show is that it's managed to improve over time (while still working in a very narrow range). I found the first season solidly good, not great, and I worried that it was just going to get worse from there, because it felt like the range of possible plots was so limited. But the writers have managed to continue to come up with new material (and to shift the focus of the show in minor ways to open up new possibilities) and the actors have all improved to the point that I was genuinely impressed with the quality of the acting in the most recent season.
Slings and Arrows is good and, if you like it, I would also highly recommend the documentary Every Little Step.
man, things move slow.
Absolutely. Part of what I love about the show.
Also, trailers in his trailer park now sell for at least $1,000,000. Fuck everything that's happened since 1980.
Hah -- bringing together Rockford Files and all those facial recognition threads we had a while ago, we were watching an episode of RF that had a tennis pro with about ten seconds on screen: a very very very tall young blond kid. Buck got a look on his face, puzzled for a bit, and said "That's the farmer from Babe." And so it was.
I cannot imagine making that sort of identification.
32.2 !!!!!! What was Juanita Bartlett like? I am dying to know.
Oh yeah, Everybody hates is Chris is mostly very good.
30. Aren't you married to a dweeb? Parts of my old physics department map over very nicely. Also, the skinny actor is good with physical comedy, for which I've got a soft spot; I think it was here that I learned that my appreciation of Jim Carrey is not widely shared.
Party Down was fantastic, no longer streaming.
The second Babe movie, Pig in the City is fantastic.
The Closer, although lightness varies. Added bonus - star Kyra Sedgwick is cousin of hubby Kevin Bacon.
Justified
Hell yes! I thought about recommending Justified, but it kinda fails the violence criterion.
I'd been watching Fraggle Rock with my kid on the Amazon live streaming jonx. He loved the show, but then was always talking to his friends about fraggles and wanting to play fraggles, and his friends were all "WTF are fraggles?"
So, not wanting have him be a social outcast, I've had to wean him off the show.
There is so much media fragmentation these days that I don't think kids are going to be growing up with the same shared canon of shows that everyone watched, like my generation did. There are just too many things to choose from.
The Closer, although lightness varies. Added bonus - star Kyra Sedgwick is cousin of hubby Kevin Bacon.
The problem with The Closer is that you have to listen to Sedgwick's death-by-strangling-in-molasses attempt at a southern accent.
Have I mentioned The Good Wife? No more than ten times, right?
Archer is good, if a little Adult Swimmy, but the main character being voiced by Coach McGurk is very distracting. Home Movies is way more awesome.
45: coincidentally, I can't watch Bob's Burgers due to the lead character being voiced by Archer.
42: Next thing you know you'll be shouting "Get off my lawn!". But yeah, fragmentation is everywhere increasing except on the net where one can always find someone else into the same whatever.
Watch Next Episode, Watch Next Episode, Watch Next Episode, Watch Next Episode
This is me with everything. Downtown Abbey Season 1: 1 day. Season 2: 1 dayish. The "Up" documentaries: 48 hours. It is a problem. Let's not even talk about The Hills I guess.
Kolchak if you want something less recent and mostly silly. I've only watched a few episodes, owing to having access to Netflix only when visiting family.
If documentaries are in the mix I recommend Small Town Gay Bar. There are a bunch of Frontline episodes available on Netflix, and more available for streaming at lousier quality from the Frontline website.
And it turns out Home Movies is on Netflix. So watch that.
Parts of my old physics department map over very nicely.
Parts of my middle school mapped over pretty well, what with the video gaming and comic book obsessions and Tolkien fetishizing. Can't imagine any group of actual adults resembling those characters at all. But sometimes the whiteboards in the background make fun of silly trends on the arxiv.
Essear, I started The Good Wife purely on the basis of you comparing it with Veronica Mars. I'm enjoying it, though maybe not on a Veronica Martian scale.
Blume, I have sat through a couple of episodes of Big Bang Theory and it really isn't funny. Once an episode they give that one actor a line that he delivers in a hilarious way and the rest is kind of trying.
No cable, no rabbit ears, just Netflix and Hulu. We watch a show over dinner, and are struggling to come up with something. We watched Lost over many months, finishing in mid-March, and are doing Community right now, but the older 2/3ds of the household isn't particularly impressed.
42 last: it's a tragedy that thing like this won't work for our grandkids (when we get some, and they grow up). Or this.
I think Daria is now available on Netflix.
Totally violates the non-violent criteria, but I found that if you come to Breaking Bad with a certain mindset it is basically just a cynical romp.
But sometimes the whiteboards in the background make fun of silly trends on the arxiv.
Hah. I've heard on good authority that the scripts have passages that say [INSERT SCIENCE HERE] which they then farm out to their physics consultant. Who presumably does the whiteboards.
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Hey, remember that 15 hour exam I had? Well, I passed, without having to do any rewrites. (Recall, if you get less than 8/10 on any section you are obliged to redo it.) One more to go in a couple weeks, and then hopefully I can reduce my entire exam budget for my remaining lifetime to something shy of thirty hours.
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57 has got to be a big part of the problem, right there.
Wow, I so fucking loathe those prison "documentary" shows like Hard Time and Lockdown; I've run across partial episodes of each and a few minutes' exposure makes me feel like I need to scour myself with Brillo. I mean for Christ's sake, at least the Soviet Union had the sense not to try to market its gulag archipelago as entertainment. (Or, possibly this is actually a brilliant bit of evil that the USSR missed out on. Whichever is the case: cannot stand it.) Even watching the penal system personnel acting like overcooked hams when a camera is turned on them is devoid of entertainment value.
Archer is great, though. "Karate, the Dane Cook of martial arts" still makes me chuckle.
Big Bang Theory got to be better than I thought it would be based on the first season, but then started to contract again into a very small number of plots/types of humor. At some point it became the highest rated show in Canada, I think. Don't know if that's still true.
I've already mentioned it elsewhere, but the show I'm a bit embarrassed to like is Psych which is completely light and silly, but entertaining enough to kill time. It's also a show that I thought got better for a while and more recently has mostly declined.
I cannot imagine making that sort of identification.
Based on voice, I recognized the guy who played the principal on Boy Meets World in a character role he played in an episode of, I think, the aforementioned Kolchak.
Re: Big Bang Theory, I've seen an episode or two here and there, and I think it's pretty good as sitcoms go. Witty dialogue, sometimes the situations actually are comedic, the characters aren't horrible, the humor is rarely cringe-inducing, the geek culture reference every 30 seconds is a nice touch. I don't watch much TV and no sitcoms at all these days (well, maybe Castle counts as a sitcom, I'm not sure), but if I did, BBT would be high on the list.
Re: Fringe, my girlfriend loves it and has urged me to watch it. We're borrowing the DVD of season one from a friend of hers, because apparently it's a continuity-heavy show, so I should start at the beginning. I've watched four to six episodes. It's OK so far, and I might eventually catch up-to-date on it, but I doubt I'll ever be as into it as she is. I have much less patience than I used to for the continuity-heavy kind of show that throws an "everything you know is wrong" at you five times a season.
As for things with season upon season on Netflix, I like Farscape. There was a request for "funny, stupid SF," so it seems right up LB's alley. I've only seen the first season so far, though, so if it gets bad later on, don't blame me.
6: huh, I would have said that it had dialled that back a little bit in favor of bigger-scale spy plots.
That's good to hear. I haven't seen any of the new season because, you know, I hated it so much earlier.
I like to think that paying attention to the internet leaves me with my thumb on the pulse of modern entertainment, but I've never even heard of Archer. Weird.
64: I didn't really like the first season the first time through (at least not until towards the end).
We cut cable down to basic in favor of Netflix. Our only real issue with be the sequel series to Avatar: the last air bender.
65: I hadn't either, but I consider myself out of touch.
50: We really enjoyed that one, all the more because the local hills seem to be populated by roaming herds of hounds who look like ours.
physics adults
Enormous basement cockroaches explode when dropped into liquid nitrogen. The dude who thinks he's smooth, and the tenor of his interactions with the foreign grad student seem closest, actually.
66: Why did you keep watching it if you didn't like it? I watched the first episode, concluded it was juvenile bollocks, and left it there.
71: because a number of people whose opinions I found plausible insisted it was funny.
The Tao of Rio Brave A Yakky Way of Knowledge ...not sure if this is Thompson or Bordwell trying to be funny, but the sun rising and setting in the same place made me laugh
Man, Avatar: The Last Airbender was outstanding. Who could have guessed that giving a cleverly-written action-and-F/X-laden property to M. Night Shyamalan would result in him destroying its film viability [interrobang]
But at least he got rid of all the Asian characters.
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Yglesias is on fire today. A real microcosm of all his topics both in the old style and the new Slate style.
Post 1: Parking lots are bad. People who like parking lots are irrational old fogeys.
Post 2: Everyone's going to have a smart phone soon. Literally everyone, because of market forces.
Post 3: Price fixing and collusion is not a problem because ... lengthy copyright protection is a bigger problem.
Post 4: Headline: "A Sarkozy Loss Could Plunge Europe Into Chaos--in a Good Way!" The post doesn't mention any way in which this could be good.
Post 5: Very rational and data-backed points on the structure of the job market and how Republicans are destructive liars.
Post 6: Everyone is going to have a smart phone soon and they won't have to pay any more than they do for their regular phone, because of market forces.
Post 7: Interesting point about the international natural gas market.
And a longer piece with two basic points:
1. Hopefully Obama is just lying about all this populist non-technocratic stuff like he was in the last election.
2. Factories are useless.
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Whew! Am I in time? If anyone's masturbating to Ben Bella, STOP IT THIS INSTANT!!!
Haven't had cable really ever. I fucking love that Roku box though. HD hulu plus and Netflix is great. Friday nights tend towards the family watching marathons of stuff like Hell's Kitchen, Storm Chasers, Deadliest Catch, etc. while the wife and I drink a ton of boxed wine.
72: That's what lead me to it in the first place. Maybe I'll try jumping in at season 2. LB's comments about reprehensible things have me intrigued.
75 -- the points on e-book antitrust are even lazier and stupider than usual. But whatever, I've written him off, the great blogospheric hope of 2004 is gone. At least Ezra Klein became a non-lazy working journalist.
79: He's right about extended copyright being evil.
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Why the hell isn't this a bigger story?
http://truth-out.org/news/item/8469-arizona-gunmen-wearing-camouflage-kill-two-immigrants-in-ambush
I mean, there are armed gangs of white supremacists carrying out midnight assassinations, and it's not front page news anywhere? I have to read about it from an annoying left-liberal spam blog? If this had happened in 1954, Cronkite and Murrow and them would have been all over it.
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If you'll pardon my replying to the OP:
Whenever I visit my dad with his full suite of cable, I pretty much just sit in front of the TV flipping through until it's time to go to bed. I didn't do this last time, but only because I wasn't there long enough to watch any TV at all. But yes, this is my typical response to cable.
I might add that this isn't a deprivation thing; I did the same thing back when I lived there. At our house we have, including digital channels (like 13-2, 13-3), maybe 10 viable channels. I'll get sucked in, but it's impossible to stick with it long if there's truly nothing on. With 30+ channels, no amount of vapid content can drive me away.
82: I actually heard something about that the other day (on FB maybe?). I was sort of assuming I'd be hearing more about it in the days to come.
Honestly, though, things have gotten bad enough that it's more or less impossible for every outrageous occurrence to result in outrage, even among those who pay attention.*
* true story: before my sister came out, she was visiting home from college wearing a leather jacket with, among other things, a pink triangle sticker and a "if you're not outraged..." sticker. This would have been the late '80s. I had to ask the significance of the triangle**, which she explained in historical, not personal, terms, but the other sticker somehow really hit home. Honest to god, it actually made me think, "Maybe I'm not paying attention." And, smothered in privilege, I wasn't, even though I paid attention to politics. Score one for bumper sticker sloganeering.
** was I unusually dense? I don't actually think so
LB - if web shows might fit the bill check out The Guild. It's very geeky and low budget but it's entertaining.
I've been enjoying the new BBC version of Sherlock Holmes, but Netflix has only three episodes.
The other three episodes aired a couple months ago.
It's fun, but really interestingly dated: the pacing is bizarrely slow by current standards
I know! Somehow that's almost the best part. I loved the episode (possibly pilot) where the phone rings while the owner is out lying by the pool. She gets up, walks inside (slowly), and finally reaches the phone. Must be 8 rings. Such a throwback.
Did I mention here my Starsky & Hutch phase? I watched all of iirc the first 2 seasons (maybe more?). Shockingly enjoyable. I should add here that I have little to no interest in ironic/retro entertainment - I wasn't watching it to laugh at them, nor to relive my childhood memories (which were vague at best, barely enough to make me want to watch in the first place). Certainly some of the pleasure is the shock of the semi-old, but mostly it just hit my sweet spot.
But whatever, I've written him off, the great blogospheric hope of 2004 is gone. At least Ezra Klein became a non-lazy working journalist.
As I discussed here, I gave him up when he went to Slate, and I haven't missed him at all. As it happens, I read a few of his pieces today because Atrios linked the parking one, but I haven't regretted dropping him one bit. I've been reading Drum in his place, but with little enthusiasm.
There are only six in all?
Forget it, Moby. It's Britain.
Someone told me there were two seasons and didn't explain how short the seasons were. I know British TV has short seasons, but I thought they usually ran into the double digits.
LB, why don't you want to watch Downton Abbey? It's totally great and light and undemanding. Justify yourself before the tribunal.
95: They call them "series," not "seasons". Which doesn't explain the shortness.
Yes, it's an unusual situation. I view it as a series of made-for-TV movies filmed with mostly the same actors on mostly the same sets.
Like the original Sherlock Holmes movies, the last 12 of which came out in a 5-year period. Or other film series of that time, like Doctor Kildare and Torchy Blane.
I mean, there are armed gangs of white supremacists carrying out midnight assassinations, and it's not front page news anywhere?
An ambush like that is also consistent with the cartel conflicts. Might not be a white supremacist thing.
I should probably think about doing my taxes soon.
You don't have to file taxes, because the tax forms fail to include an OMB number as required by the Paperwork Reduction Act of 1944. Also, you can claim that the federal income tax is unconstitutional under the 13th amendment. Don't waive your rights.
I strongly second Cyrus's recommendation in 63 of Farscape. Don't be put off in season one by the muppet character: it/he works. One of the lead actors went on after Farscape to appear in one of the Stargates -- as Lt. Colonel Cameron Mitchell, apparently -- though I could never stand get into Stargate, so I can't tell if that speaks in his favor or not.
75:
Post 2: Everyone's going to have a smart phone soon. Literally everyone, because of market forces.
Post 6: Everyone is going to have a smart phone soon and they won't have to pay any more than they do for their regular phone, because of market forces.
You know, this just drives me nuts. I'm not going to read the damn posts, but I hope he addresses the fact that not everyone has access to wireless service. Entire swathes of the country are effectively dead zones -- no service.
The earlier seasons of Farscape were good, anyway. As the series progressed it seemed to meander into incoherence.
I strongly disagree with 105. The whole Talyn arc, the Scarrans, more great characters (Sikozu). Great stuff till the very bitter and unjustly cancelled end.
Never seen Farscape, never seen Archer, never seen etc. Now that Justified is done, all I got is Mad Men, and however cinematic, MM still feels like fan service for Lipp Sisters, and I grow bored with an ethnography of Basket of Kisses.
So I have TCM and the recorder and wish I could talk her into dropping cable entirely.
102. Huh? On a USG contract a few years ago I argued that even the 1040 had the OMB number so our unique data collection should too. (I was trying to get a client component to comply with the PRA.) I pulled a copy of the form and it was there.
108 -- I was reiterating a super stupid, frivolous tax protester argument that you see sometimes.
105: The earlier seasons of [insert series name here] were good, anyway. As the series progressed it seemed to meander into incoherence.
Are you sure this isn't just a line??
It's possible you had to be a fan. I can't clearly distinguish, years later, between one season and another, but the whole Scorpius business, lasting several seasons, was pretty cool; once that more or less resolved, slightly less interesting, but enough additional conflicts were developed and explored (D'Argo and Chiana, Pilot), that I found it absorbing.
Each character was quite distinctive, and was treated relatively equally, which is not something you can say for the typical ensemble cast. Toward the very end they did revert to focusing on the white guy lead, which was too bad, but I can forgive a final season of pretty much any show.
106: Could be it just got more continuity-intensive as it went along. It seemed incoherent to me because earlier episodes were relatively self-contained within a larger story arc, while later ones seemed largely impossible to make sense of.
OK, I just checked and the 1040EZ has "OMB No. 1545-0074". So does the 1040. Reginfo.gov shows that this control number is used for Individual Income Tax Returns.
How could people make this argument?! (I don't mean you Halford. I mean the loonies who can't see what is in front of their faces.)
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Second degree murder charge for Zimmerman. (Just in case someone just woke up from a coma and needs a quick news fix here)
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Watch Terriers. Inexplicably canceled after one season, but what a season! An utterly non-cloying SoCal noir P.I. bromance.
Archer and Bob's Burgers, as noted, are hilarious. I like watching both, but I can understand the confusion. "Jon Benjamin" has a van, which features the common voice to both in live action, is not nearly as good as either.
Justified is fantastic -- if it was all like season 2 it would be Wire-level. I buy it from Amazon.
The Hour on BBC, about a TV news hour on the 1950's BBC, is really good -- we just watched the first series, also a la carte on Amazon. Stylish period version of Broadcast News with a little bit of Tinker Tailor thrown in for good measure.
I watch Parenthood, which is good but not exactly cool. Friday Night Lights, showrunner Jason Katim's previous show, is wonderful all the way through (excepting one of the Season 2 plotlines, widely agreed as a misstep, which didn't bother me all that much because I'll forgive any plotline for bringing me more Landry.)
Parks and Recreation is top of the single-camera sitcom right now. I've enjoyed individual eps of Raising Hope and Up All Night, and I'm more hopeful for the former.
Very excited for Girls on HBO. I loved Tiny Furniture.
OP and 83: Exactly this. Every time I visit my parents or a particular friend in the country, I HAVE to go through this insane thing where I sit down in front of the teevee and change the channel almost constantly for hours and hours, dazzled by all the choices without every settling on anything. Always, eventually, some little part of my brain says "this may actually be the stupidest behavior I'm capable of," self-loathing overcomes me, I put the remote down, and I'm done for that trip. But the next time, I have to do it all over again.
I mighta should have gone presidential for this.
Either I'm really bad at arithmetic, or I'm getting a much bigger refund than usual. I think it has something to do with changing jobs and states partway through the year confusing the withholding?
Shorter The Hour squib: Mad Men with things happening and pleats.
Any show that uses the word "zword" will deeply suck.
The argument (I'd just vaguely remembered it, but if you go to the IRS website you can find the full list of frivolous tax protester arguments) is that the instructions and booklets associated with the form 1040 don't contain an OMB control number. Therefore no tax liability!!!!
I also like "I am not a citizen of the United States, because I do not live in the District of Columbia -- I am a citizen of a particular state" and "I have no "income" because I was paid solely in compensation for my labor, and therefore received no net compensation." I
110 IIRC the whole Scorpius - one of the greatest TV and Science Fiction villains ever- and Scorpius/Harvey business really doesn't get resolved until the very end.
I saw someone say about Archer above that it was a bit too Adult Swimmy but I do so love The Venture Bros.
117: Maybe you had a child and forgot about it.
92: I may have already admitted this here, but I hung on to reading Yglesias for a very long time, registering the objections but still finding his stripped-down style and range of issues appealing enough to keep reading, if only in a narcotic blog-addict way. Then he wrote a post being breezily skeptical of a study claiming that most people wouldn't put down their pets for $1 million dollars of U.S. currency, and I unsubscribed and haven't looked back.
110.1: A line as in "Hey, baby, wanna talk about how Farscape's later seasons meandered into incoherence"? No, not really. But who knows, maybe it should be.
Justified is fantastic -- if it was all like season 2 it would be Wire-level.
Well said. I started this show assuming it would be a guilty pleasure along with the dumber of the other cop shows I watch, and it turns out to be an entirely guilt-free pleasure. If you don't like violence, you could watch it with your eyes closed and it would still be pretty damn good just for the dialogue.
Btw, if there are any other cop show devotees, is it just me, or is the decently-intelligent police procedural suddenly an endangered form? There seems to be plenty of NCIS/CSI crap available, but nearly every other good cop show from the last few years has been shitcanned after one or two seasons.
Yeah, I started watching Prime Suspect and was really getting into it when the axe fell. I haven't started watching Awake yet--I read the pilot and found it really moving and was baffled as how they would make it last--but I've heard that there's a twist in episode 3 or 4 that gives it pretty good legs.
124 I should have tried that one at I-CON but I don't think I could have delivered it with the necessary conviction.
Shorter The Hour squib: Mad Men with things happening and pleats.
Also right on. I think I'm just going to outsource my teevee related comments to you from now on. Tell me what to say.
121: I had forgotten about the Scorpius/Harvey business! That was a little ... odd, but fine, a series can mess with my head if it wants to. Fucking Harvey! Again with Harvey?! Why is Harvey here?!
I did love that show.
129: Yeah, you and me both. I even signed that silly petition.
124: A line as in "Hey, baby, wanna talk about how Farscape's later seasons meandered into incoherence"?
That could work as a pick-up line among certain parties, but it was not my meaning. No, just that judging that some series 'was great in the first couple seasons, then increasingly wandered' can be a standard sort of remark for virtually any series. I doubted that you -- you -- would take refuge in such a tactic -- but you have to admit what it sounds like.
For 111, yes, it became more continuity-intensive as time went on.
I was going to try Archer but then I noticed Dirty Harry was available.
131: Oh I see. Well, I suppose it could almost be used as a reflexive one-size-fits-all criticism, but that's not what I meant. In fact where shows attempt larger narrative arcs, it does seem common for the accrued continuity to get more and more opaque as time progresses, but Farscape seemed to me like an extreme example.
It's true that it may also be that I just wasn't enough of a fan to persevere. The Scorpius / Harvey business was lost on me, for instance, despite its apparently being pretty neato.
This movie holds the record for most shots fired by a man in a sweater vest.
134: thanks! Sounds like I was in the minority in not having to do rewrites.
133: but Farscape seemed to me like an extreme example
Oh. It didn't seem extreme in that respect to me. Recent shows that demanded a fair amount of continuity-following: Lost. Battlestar Galactica. Obviously The X-Files, which is a bit older, and really did become incoherent. (As did Lost.)
I think you just weren't following Farscape much, babe.
Current shows that are probably really good but demand continuous following: Fringe. I catch maybe one episode every 3 weeks, and I can barely follow it, yet I think I discern that there's something worthwhile there. I'm sort of sorry I didn't follow from the start.
Lost and the X-Files are also excellent examples, yep. Slightly different in that Lost actually was never coherent (after I watched the first season, I knew for a fact that the writers hadn't the slightest idea where it was going or what all the mysteries they were madly gesturing at were about), while X-Files actually became both incoherent and obviously lazy. I'll at least say for Farscape that while their later efforts didn't compel me, they at least started out with an interesting framework and always seemed to be earnest. I guess had I managed to keep following it closely, maybe I'd feel differently.
Do you all watch Breaking Bad? It seems like it's been around forever, and then in the last two months everyone's become all JESUS CHRIST THIS SHOW IS A MUST-WATCH!
But I have a vivid memory, shortly after I met a (strange) colleague, of a conversation where she went on and on about what a great show it was. And then she said that she no longer watched it. Because it wasn't a good idea to be watching a show about illegal drugs.
Breaking Bad is awesome.
(Also a good example of the blended story-arc / episodic format done right. There's a large arc happening and backstories for everything that's going on, but it's never confusing. You could pop in at the third season and still be able to find your bearings as a viewer, or at any rate, I was able to.)
But isn't it perplexing that people out there won't let themselves watch a show they otherwise enjoy, because it's about illegal drugs?
143: Quite bizarre. You should check if they also avoided Band of Brothers because it was about killing people.
Lost actually was never coherent (after I watched the first season, I knew for a fact that the writers hadn't the slightest idea where it was going or what all the mysteries they were madly gesturing at were about)
True that. I think it traded on everyone knowing perfectly well that it didn't make any sense. But there was some good acting in parts, in a melodramatic way, and it formed a puzzle.
Breaking Bad I saw only a few early episodes of, and then lost sight of completely. (We also lost some cable channels, maybe whichever one it's on.) It seemed ... tortured in a way that I found discomfiting, so I didn't think about it much.
Also, 138: they [Farscape] at least started out with an interesting framework and always seemed to be earnest.
Earnest is good.
I never watched Star Trek because I'm opposed to trekking.
I'm probably wrong about this, but I can't help thinking that the quality of TV shows is more polarized than it used to be. There's not as much mediocre material in the mushy middle, is what I mean. The poor quality shows are unbelievably bad, just absolute crap, whereas the really good shows are truly excellent (much better than TV shows used to be, and on a par with very good movies).
Breaking Bad is seriously awesome.
Disagree with 147. I don't follow sit-coms, so I can't speak to those, but for dramas, there's something like Blue Bloods, a cop show, about a family all involved in the criminal justice system in one way or another: it is truly in the mushy middle. It doesn't actively suck. I admit that that's the only one I can think of at the moment, but I don't watch TV very often.
The analysis in 147 is correct. I'll leave figuring out the commercial calculation that explains why (it's simple!) as an exercise for the reader.
Does it start and end with D, by some weird chance?
This seems like a good spot to mention that I really don't get the hate people have for the last episode of BSG. I mean, I get where it would bug people, but the hate is so extravagant, and I find it rather satisfying. It reminds me how people started claiming that The Simpsons started sucking in 1993.
It's possible that I had a different response because I watched it on Netflix a few years after the fact, and so A. wasn't part of any ongoing discussion that might lead to inflated/misguided expectations, and B. had vaguely heard that the conclusion was bad, thus lowering expectations. But as I say, the hate is extravagant - it's not like I think the finale was a 6 where other people think it's a 4. It's more, I think it was a 6 or 7 (more, maybe), and other people think it was a 1. Or worse.
Example: SEK just listed the show among the top 10 of all time, excluding the finale. That's just extreme.
145.last: It certainly is.
I think it traded on everyone knowing perfectly well that it didn't make any sense.
Oh no, not so much. There was a significant cadre of Lost fans who were utterly convinced of the existence of a Master Plan and who kept copious wikis tracking every Easter egg and weighing the tiniest of details. They were a bit like an apocalyptic Christian congregation preparing for a Rapture that was never coming; I felt really bad for them.
Boy, I thought that show got stupid in a hurry.
Does it start and end with D, by some weird chance?
DsquareD?
Dad?
Doinkied?
Yes, I felt like BSG started great and at some point well before the end just went off a cliff. I stopped watching well before the finale. But I'm not a scifi guy and basically view things like Stargate and Farscape and whatever as bafflingly stupid and unfun.
If I look across my lifetime (or at least the media-aware portion of it), I must say that a very, very surprising thing is now having a goodly number of top line TV shows overtaking the vast, vast majority of movies in terms of quality. Just not what I would have predicted at all in, say, 1968 or 1972. In retrospect one might be able to discern the bare beginnings of the trend; and I don't know, maybe someone predicted it.
In retrospect one might be able to discern the bare beginnings of the trend;
The trend began when movies thought they should be as long as possible. It's the visual equivalent of an all-you-can-eat buffet. Good TV shows are well-edited and well-planned. Also the writers are fucking brilliant and the actors are great.
159: Yeah, they also didn't fully get that when you're doing an episode / story-arc show, you have to at least loosely plan the story arc. So, for example, if you're going to make "the Cylons have a plan" your show's byline, your writers should have at least a rough idea of what that means.
There is a very clear commercial explanation for 160, as well, which is related to the first answer. Tweety basically has it, though that particular format isn't driving things anymore.
Donkey puncheD?
Dodo'd?
Dood?
Dillweed?
154: The finale was really lame, JRoth. It really was. I wasn't *disgusted*, mind, because there was no way in hell they were going to tie things up quickly enough, but they went for teh sob, and another sob, and everyone wandered off by him/herself to start a new colony (by him/herself? how?), and yeah, a person just had to grimace in mild embarrassment.
So, no hate, just kind of funny/too bad. I'd have to think pretty hard about whether BSG is among the top 10 of all time, but that has nothing to do with the finale.
I'm probably the only person who thinks this, but I thought Lost did a surprisingly good job of wrapping up plot points both weekly and at the finale. I may have been helped by expecting X-Files levels of incoherence.
160: It's quite amazing how many top-notch actors you see on the small screen these days. There's probably a story to be told about how the costs of feature film-making led to greater and greater reliance by studios on "safe" rehashed material that would have easier merchandise and video game tie-ins (reboots, remakes, comic book movies, etc.) meant to reduce reliance on box office as such to turn a profit.
This seems like a good spot to mention that I really don't get the hate people have for the last episode of BSG.
I thought it was pretty awful, largely for indulging in the mysticoreligious stuff that made the series bad in other ways. Starbuck was an angel? What? It's been too long for me to remember exactly, but I think it was the second-to-last season that I thought was pretty miserable all around, and then parts of the last season gave me some hope they would resolve things in a satisfying way, and then they didn't. But yeah, I think the difference between that show and Lost is that at least at some point one could have believed the writers of BSG knew precisely where they were going, and then they manifestly didn't.
But isn't it perplexing that people out there won't let themselves watch a show they otherwise enjoy, because it's about illegal drugs?
I'll bet a fair number of them enjoyed the Sopranos.
This seems like a good spot to mention that I really don't get the hate people have for the last episode of BSG. I mean, I get where it would bug people, but the hate is so extravagant, and I find it rather satisfying
Because it betrayed so much of what went before. And the mystical mumbo-jumbo wasn't even some interesting pay-off of the intriguing Cylon monotheism. It was out of left field. And it just sucked. And "All Along the Watchtower" what the hell? And everyone just going off into their own exile? Just disconnect, I guess.
I loved the early Battlestar Galactica episodes, but eventually stopped watching. I lose interest in shows with utterly joyless characters. Mad Men, I'm looking at you.
Starbuck was an angel?
They guy who went on to appear in The A-Team?
It's great that the production values of tv have gone way up, but I find shows like the CSIs, NCIS, Numbers, etc. basically too glossy to be watchable.
Slight digression: It's kind of weird watching action movies from the 80s and early 90s and seeing car chases without particularly fancy cars involved.
Max Headroom.
BSG was great political commentary, but really needed a sense of humor IMO. I stopped watching with the onscreen torture.
What are the economics for the program makers of rented DVDs? Why aren't the financial details of this publicly discussed (at least when two publicly traded companies are involved?)
Thanks to 167 for spelling that out. I find it hard to remember sometimes that feature filmmaking has increasingly killed acting quality.
Are we sure this isn't just nostalgia? Just checking. We do still have Meryl Streep, for example, though I don't know who's taking her place.
Certainly one hears of many sometime film actors turning to Broadway, and they sometimes say that it's for a kind of relief and exploration they weren't finding in Hollywood.
I tend to think a lot of the appeal of TV over movies is that a TV series has room to tell an extended story and to really delve into characterization in a way that a 2-hour movie just can't. But I think most of these long-arc TV shows need to have a cutoff planned from the very beginning. Season one of Veronica Mars is a thing of beauty because it's self-contained and not so long that it meanders way off the path. One of the things that's impressing me about The Good Wife is that it's still holding my attention three seasons in, and I'm still finding the characters consistent; most shows have a lot of "wait, did they totally forget the way they were writing that character two years ago?" moments.
. But I think most of these long-arc TV shows need to have a cutoff planned from the very beginning.
What is the reason why this might not be the case? You don't even have to think that hard. Exercise for the reader!
I keep meaning to re-watch The West Wing. I have season one sitting here. I should start that soon.
Max Headroom yes indeed. I saw it again recently when the DVD set was released and it really holds up well I thought.
177 I think that's exactly why TV these days (the post-Buffy era) is so strong.
178: Well, yes, obviously the artistic considerations and the commercial ones aren't aligned very well. I don't see that that makes it less interesting to discuss the artistic considerations.
Max Headroom is pretty uneven. Lots of it is great conceptually, but a couple episodes really are terrible. I watched it again recently and, aside from wondering if I ever understood most of it as a kid, it was pretty easy to see why it was canceled.
180.1: Yes, for me (not a particularly close observer) it was Max Headroom* and Twin Peaks that illustrated the promise.
*And some of the other Brit stuff around that time.
Max Headroom.
Oh hell yes. God that was a great show.
How would those who doubt the existence of a mushy middle explain Sons of Anarchy? Or How I Met Your Mother or Sherlock?
181 seems right to me.
Also note that the commercial considerations aren't in themselves necessarily an excuse; there have been shows that have shown the ability to take those factors into account and still roughly plan and deliver a story arc. (Cf. Breaking Bad above. Or in the pulpy SF tradition, Babylon 5; you'd of course need to keep planning loose and adaptable as Straczynski did.) What explains a complete lack of planning is more likely people who are used to working in purely episodic format trying to pretend they're working in a different format, but not really adapting.
I would like to second the recommendation to watch Home Movies.
Exercise for the reader!
Would you cut that out, Halford? If you have something to say, say it.
I'm still watching Mad Men but I think it's also suffering from the "too many seasons" problem. As it moves later in time it's kind of feeling increasingly unmoored to me. We're getting lots of episodes in the lives of these characters, but there's no overarching narrative holding it together that I really care about. And a lot of the issues that were driving the plot for a while, like Don's double life and sense of guilt, are basically resolved now. It's no longer "here's a man climbing the ladder who has a secret that can bring him crashing down," it's just a successful guy who's kind of a douche sometimes. And I don't see other characters filling that vacuum, either.
The recent US feature film Up in the Air was well acted, so were True Grit and Gran Torino.
Max Headroom was the TV equivalent of Too Drunk to Fuck, what's wrong with you all?
Jeanie and Samantha: precursors of the Betty Draper pigeon shooting. Discuss earnestly.
188. He's not saying DVD, but I'd be curious both about 175 and about Rockford's screenwriter Juanita Bartlett.
Totally agree with 186.2. Commerce constrains the art, but there's lots of room to create better or worse art within those constraints. Still, if you're looking to make big structural claims about movies or TV, following and understanding the $$ gives you the best first-order understanding.
Now that I know that the magic safeword is "DVD", why does that operate differently to make a quality gap between movies and TV shows? DVD sales as opposed to rental costs?
194: Totally, and it also provides the best explanation for why the production cultures of some shows ultimately fail to adapt. This continuity stuff might be all the rage and sound kinda sexy, but deep in their viscera there are probably still a lot of people working in television who cannot bring themselves to part from the proven model of the Old Ways.
Oh, I can defend movies over long form tv if I want to, maybe by alluding to Flaubert and an economy of expression. Or Chekhov, or Maupassant, or Fitzgerald's stories vs novels.
Or imagine Casablanca with oh two hours on the resistance in Paris, two hours on the early romance, two hours Rick getting set up in the new town...blah blah
Or imagining Weiner with 1 year pre-production, two months to shoot, and 1 year post-production per hour on screen. And ten times the budget per hour.
Or GRRM and the modern genre doorstopper. Are we really getting "depth" or are we getting flab, indecision, and excess.
Film is about editing and visual communication. Words are extraneous. Actors love stage, i.e., love to hear their own voice on and on and on...
I was just thinking, "I wonder what bob thinks?"
I always wonder with a question mark at the end, because I have a very inquisitive sense of wonder.
175: two things basically drove the boom in good TV; the DVD boom and the ability of HBO to sell itself to rich subscribers. The DVD boom is now over but the quality shows make money mostly through subscription sales for their networks (eg output deals with Netflix) or, in the case of the FX and AMC shows, that plus being niche shows for rich people (more than 50% of Mad Men viewing households make more than 100k a year. More than 50%!). The model is totally different from when you were trying to attract mass eyeballs to a network show (or a basic cable network) to sell broad-based ads, and when cable could make money showing movies. Even network shows are largely niche driven for good demographics (eg Parks and Rec). The only TV that's going for mass eyeball nowadays are sports or event shows like AI.
194. I would like to do this. Is there anywhere to read about revenues from various sources of some particular show broadcast + a few years, say BSG or Garry Shandling?
And long form tv usually requires multiple characters all getting paid, so Peggy has to be given something, and Joan, and Roger, and Betty....
I never much liked Dickens and Trollope and...the soap opera.
Well back to my movie, where I just spent ten minutes watching a thirty year old woman silently at hardwork making paper and then rest. Cut to beautiful rural landscapes (3 minutes) to contrast her condition with the place she lives.
This established character, tone, style, mood, place, economic circumstances...and empathy.
51, 187, 200: Coach McGuirk appealing to US rich subscribers.
I never need to wonder why I don't watch many foreign films.
||
WHY IS THE WASHING MACHINE TAKING SO FUCKING LONG TO FINISH?! I just want to go to BED.
|>
205: Because it needs to establish empathy.
Some of the recent tv miniseries adaptations of Dickens and Trollope have been good.
205: It self-agitated a lot when it was younger.
This seems like a good spot to mention that I really don't get the hate people have for the last episode of BSG.
Last episode was fine, as I remember it. Last season was kind of all over the place, full of loose ends and mystical bullshit.
201-- not at that level of detail in a centralized place, but you can get a lot from reading the trades.
Ok, multiply pwned about BSG.
I lose interest in shows with utterly joyless characters. Mad Men, I'm looking at you.
This is one of my problems with Mad Men. It also just feels terribly stilted at times, and there's something about January Jones that sets my teeth on edge. I'm not sure if I think she's a terrible actor or I just find her character that repellent.
200: I'm suffering from a failure of imagination as to why/how that explains why (per 160 upthread, if we accept its thesis) TV show quality might outpace or replace movie quality. Wouldn't the TV shows just become, you know, better, while movies remain pretty much just as good, rather than becoming worse?
I'm getting tired. Perhaps the claim wasn't that movies are becoming worse at all, just that TV is becoming better.
Boy do we never wait for our washing machine or our dryer to finish before we go to bed. We are all about the crumpled rumpled chic over here.
214: I don't trust washing machines. I've dealt with too many floods from stuck valves & blown hoses to go to sleep with the main valves still open.
99: Oh great, so it's just the Drug War after all. That is very comforting. For awhile there I thought I might have to be concerned.
People sleep soundly in their beds so that rough men may do violence.
Thanks for 200, 211. Does that mean Variety, or something else?
213. I go to fewer than 10 movies a year out for myself now, since TV is often better. I think that the different media compete for the limited free time of the harried rich, who are too busy twittering or commenting to watch anything anyway. The special case of the washing machine is left as an exercise for the reader and Mark Zuckerberg, who could make actual money from a status updates like 205 and especially like 215.
Is there a way to extract per-year dumps of comment text here (I was thinking wordclouds, but ad revenue to fund a party house...)?
I don't even own a watching machine.
197: Or imagine Casablanca with oh two hours on the resistance in Paris,
Film is about editing and visual communication. Words are extraneous.
Arntchya being a little bit inconsistent there, Norma Desmond? Casablanca is all about words. All the actors spit out their dialogue rapid-fire staccato style like they were being paid by the word. Most of the memorable scenes have little or nothing to do with what's happening on screen, and everything to do with what's being said or not said. It's based on a fucking play, ferchrissakes. There's not even a car chase!
Film is about editing and visual communication. Words are extraneous.
It is quite different with serious opera. All of its masters try to keep the audience from under standing the characters. Occasionally catching a word might help the inattentive listener, but on the whole the situation must explain itself—the speeches don't matter! This is how they all think and have pulled their pranks with words. Maybe they only lacked the courage to express fully their ultimate disregard for words: with just a little more impudence, Rossini would have had everyone sing nothing but la-Ia-Ia-Ia—and that would have made good sense. One shouldn't believe the words of characters in opera, but rather their sound!
I'm shocked, shocked to find that bob is bullshitting in here!
Y'all are not encouraging me to finish watching BSG, which would be unfortunate, since I've enjoyed the 3/4 of it I've seen so far.
I am the very model of the modern harried rich, and yet there is relatively little that entertains me. What is wrong, O temple of media?
And I am shocked the twitter generation thinks movies are too slow, words are all important, as long as they come fast and there are lots and lots of them, and think an opera is incomprehensible to someone who doesn't speak the language of the libretto, and cannot imagine enjoying watching a fine craftsperson at work for even ten minutes.
Casablanca is completely understandable without understanding the language, and I'll bet most of us remember the visuals and not the words.
221:Naw, projection. It is other generations and social groups that think they are their words, their bullshit, are texts they create and share.
Waiting at the newstand for the latest on Lil' Dora, we aren't even bourgeois anymore. Neither are we proles.
Just babelfish.
Rory has a new baby sister. Boy is it ever awkward that UNG told everyone he was hoping for a boy.
People try to put us d-down (twitterin' 'bout my generation)
Just because we do expound (twitterin' 'bout my generation)
Things they do look awful c-c-cold (twitterin' 'bout my generation)
I hope they die before I get old (twitterin' 'bout my generation)
224: Hooray for new baby sitter though, right?
For the record, I remain amazed that all you people with kids juggle that responsibility along with all the other life bullshit that gets tossed one's way. I should beketchup myself daily in your honor.
I read 224 as sitter. And then was puzzling over the second part.
227: You're not the only one. Oopstain.
Saw a movie tonight in a theater. There were 4 other patrons, which is pretty usual for the downtown place.
Salmon Fishing in the Yemen.
222: You should watch up until the last 15 minutes of the very last episode. Then swiftly rip your television's power cord out of the wall, and pretend they ripped off the Sopranos.
Disagree with 147 -- I think there's a high end where there wasn't before, and everything else has gotten better. The crap is better and the mushy middle is better. Extremely little TV from before 2000 holds up. (I was impressed with how much I enjoyed going back to Twin Peaks, though I only rewatched the pilot.)
231 gets it right. In terms of scripted TV anyway. "According To Jim" may be stupid, but it's better than "Mama's Family".
Although the dozen cable channels of detritus of reality shows about boring narcissists and vaguely glamorous retail establishments are probably worse.
154 is wrong on all counts. I also watched on DVD long after it came out, and I also had low expectations of the finale since I heard that everyone hated it. But God is it awful. There's a point about an hour from the end where I thought "This isn't as bad as I thought. It's not completely satisfying, but it provides some closure." And then the actual ending started.
NickS, there's a point in the finale where if you stop, you might just be mildly disappointed, but you won't feel utterly betrayed. I'm not quite sure how to say what it is without spoilers, though.
As NickS and Nathan Williams near the end, one of us is just going to have to go back into the episode and dig up the exact right stopping point. Maybe edit together an improved ending where it goes into a scene from the very special cocaine episode of "Growing Pains" followed by "Never Gonna Give You Up."
75: Yglesias' post 4 is true, though. The current people running the ECB, etc. are wackos who are crippling the European economy for a generation. They have to be stopped. Hollande is in a position to do it, and is hinting that he will.
Though any post in which he says "from an economic point of view" I can stop reading right there because it means we've entered the part where he has no idea what he's talking about.
Catch up comment:
Archer is one of the best shows on US telly. I think that despite initially dismissing it as trying to hard to be reprehensible. And I certainly wouldn't claim as some have above that it has toned down the reprehensibiltiy recently. Far from it. What it has done, however, tightened up the writing so that it has the best call-backs and running gags since Arrested Development, and some awesome, almost Thick Of It quality swearing. All this makes the over-the-top gratuitousness strangely charming, not least because it's still PG-13 level gratuitousness by British/HBO standards.
Justified is also great, but I'd argue that it is in fact at least partly a guilty pleasure. The plotting is very silly indeed, if you think about it for half a second. It's not trtying to be The Wire of Appalachia. That said, the dialogue is superb, and many of the characters are compelling (if not realistic) and well acted.
BSG's finale was bad, but mainly because the showrunners had painted themselves into a corner by that point. I thought it was about as satisfying an ending as they could produce, given where they had got to. Which admittedly wasn't very satisfying.
The typical British series/season is 6 episodes. Sherlock is two seasons of three longer episodes.
There clearly is a huge mushy middle in US TV. It may be a well produced mushy middle, but it's still more or less interchangeable. How many police procedurals are there on air at the moment and what are their audiences?
Mark Kermode's recent book is very persuasive on why films have become worse while TV has become better. The basic argument is that as film development costs have risen studios have become extremely risk averse, and they've learned through repeated experiment that it's an awful lot less risky to throw lots of money at something like Transformers than it is to throw even a little money at, say, a comedy, and more importantly that spending money improving the quality of the writing does on average nothing to improve the financial return.
Don't trust yourself or your tribe to make an accurate, objective judgement that your local current culture/civilization/fashion/fad production is the bestest evah was. Especially at the centre of fucking Empire, especially if you see so much else that is contemptible or inferior.
Don't trust anybody who says some distant or previous C/C is better.
Don't fucking trust progress, especially cultural progress.
Don't even think you have a clue about what you are swimming through. You can't even see it.
Don't trust anybody who says a given cultural product is better because it is popular, or better because it isn't popular, either a refined taste or an undiscovered treasure or the accumulated wisdom of the twenty people you hang out with. Don't trust the test of time. Don't assume that in an empire more fast and vast, the cream rises to the top. Assume the opposite. Weiner and Simon and the sit-com people are making burgers that sell. Look at who's buying. Do that first.
Understand how badly you want to appreciate or be appreciated, approve or be approved.
Having taken all these cautions and considerations into account, odds are very very high that what you esteem is still shite, because as the dude said, 99% of everything and everybody is garbage.
236:Fuck me if my scales have to have Deadwood on one side, and Transformers on the other. In that case, I would have to watch Michael Bay, for one thing. That's madness.
Deadwood versus Dekalogue, or The Wire versus Chabrol or Clair Denis and you are approaching fair judgment. Barely.
I'll bet most of us remember the visuals and not the words.
This is a curious claim to make about a film with a several of the most quotable movie lines ever.
Look, you know exactly what is going on here. Community and Party Down are products designed for you (and me), some self-chosen subset and you think you are the bestest smartest most moral most civilized fairest most educated people evah, so of course your culture is superior to all others , in all time and space.
And you are the first sub-culture to ever think this.
224: Unless they are in Florida, he can't behead the mother for that anymore.
What in God's name are you going on about Bob? There's not a single post in this thread claiming that, say, Community, is the best thing ever? Indeed, the only post even mentioning Community says they're not particularly impressed. And I've no idea how 238 is supposed to be responsive to 236.
Mon: How I Met Your Mother, The Lying Game
Tues: Raising Hope, Parenthood
Wed: Modern Family
Thurs: Community
Fri: DeGrassi
And I guess Saturday is going to be Legend of Korra.
Did anyone else have an uncontrollable need to make words of the theme song on BSG? The problem is there's one point where it sounds for all the world like she's singing "heard it on the radio" so then my brain would try to squoosh the rest of it into English morphemes as well, but it didn't really work.
(I actually assumed they made up an exotic space language, but IMDB has tugged on my sleeve and informed me the words are a mantra from the Rig Veda: "OM bhûr bhuvah svah tat savitur varçnyam bhargô dçvasya dhîmahi dhiyô yô nah pracôdayât.")
What in God's name are you going on about Bob?
Hey you kids, get off my turf!
Speaking of which, who but an old dude would land on "twitterin'" rather than "tweetin'" in 225?
120 et al.: I knew a professor of tax law whose Dad was a tax protestor. He said that the IRS agent who was after his Dad was quite nice and really just wanted to make a deal with this old guy. He and his sister just could not make headway. At one point he worried that by going with his Dad it might look like he was acting as his lawyer. Totally insane.
246: It's more authoritative when you say it.
My conference call over. I hate having to wake up early.
I don't know about authoritative, but truer.
250: I had a 6:30 to 8 one that just ended. Blowing off an 8-9 one at this very moment. And on tap for this afternoon, department-wide Meyers-Briggs group hug! I'm pumped!
252: At the unnamed government agency where I have an office, the real employees are required to take civility training. It took all my willpower to not respond to the emails about it with, "You can't make me go, fuckers."
Things read and connected this week. Find them yourselves
Clay Shirky on social readings
Richard Seymour on ideology, Althusser, Butler, ideology and the struggle to define a resistant interiority that is not a mere opposition
Kundera (Scruton ain't bad) on kitsch. The first tear for Treyvon Martin is my own. It is the second tear, demanded/resisted by myself as I am watching myself being watched, the seductiveness of subjectivity as public performance that makes withdrawal attractive.
Yeah yeah, old one rejected by the pack howling at the moon. It ain't about pleasing an audience.
236 last is basically right. A simple way of putting it is that TV marketed for sophisticated adults has become more profitable while mass-marketed TV has become less profitable, while in the current environment for teenagers and kids are profitable, and films for sophisticated adults generally aren't, at least right now. Basically, sophisticated adults don't go to theatres (in large enough numbers), the financing you get from rich sophisticates for HBO subscriptions or AMC advertising isn't there, and for a variety of reasons it has proven very difficult to keep quality movies
for adults cheap enough in production or distribution costs to make very risky, low returns worth it. OTOH if you can create a franchise that teenagers love, you can get very rich indeed.
It's worth noting that the current state of affairs is probably only about 5 years old. While it's long been clear that the big money is in tentpoles, people go through recurring bouts of trying to make money in higher quality movies; most recently there was a big push for "indie" (not really) financing in around 2005-2006. I personally think that there's real room for a market for adult sophisticate films, but you need to be obsessive about keeping costs low.
Back to TV, I've been talking about the high end but I'm surprised that there are folks contesting that it's dropped off on the low end. The low end (really, the bulk) of TV is now not scripted at all but reality shows, which are cheap to make and mostly terrible. These are basically like crack -- cheap to make, people get addicted, you can write them off nonproblem. There's certainly a mid-range of OK scripted shows that are still trying for the mass market (say, NCIS) but these skew older and there's a distinct whiff of the past about them.
recently, there was financing for "indies" around 2005.
Basically, sophisticated adults don't go to theatres (in large enough numbers)
I'm not going to pay for baby sitting just to watch a movie when I can wait a few months and see it for nearly free once it hits Redbox.
257
... . The low end (really, the bulk) of TV is now not scripted at all but reality shows, which are cheap to make and mostly terrible. These are basically like crack -- cheap to make, people get addicted, you can write them off nonproblem. ...
I found "Pawn Stars" strangely addictive. Although I wonder how "real" it actually is and whether it is totally unscripted.
the IRS agent who was after his Dad was quite nice and really just wanted to make a deal with this old guy
I don't know about IRS agents in general, but this certainly describes my dad (IRS agent for 40 years). Sure, he could seize your property if it came to that, but he was a lot more interested in working out a payment plan with you.
Sorry to start a subject and then go to bed.
So, for example, if you're going to make "the Cylons have a plan" your show's byline, your writers should have at least a rough idea of what that means.
This I completely agree with. I get that they never had enough certainty about length of run to have a clear outline from pilot to finale, but the number of random lurches seemed excessive.
That said, while I would have been happy with non-supernatural explanations for some of the early inexplicable/mysterious things, I think it's weird to treat them as somehow exogenous. I mean, Baltar's imaginary Six shows up in the pilot, and she's talking about God in the second. It's fair enough to say that was never your favorite part of the show, but it was baked in from the beginning, not a crutch added to cover for bad plotting mid-run.
Oh, and I think that the non-arc episodes (worst of all, Apollo as crime investigator) are so clearly worse than the woo-heavy ones that I think it's a misdiagnosis to blame the woo for the show's failings.
I'm not sure if I think she's a terrible actor or I just find her character that repellent.
Must you choose? Why not a terrible actor, superbly cast as a repellent character?
236.1,2: Based on all the comments about Archer, I watched a couple of episodes last night. I'm not quite convinced of its brilliance, but I'm still open minded. The obscure pop-culture references were pretty varsity level (Lidsville! Whoa.).
And you're right, I might have gotten a hair carried away about Justified.
I mean, Baltar's imaginary Six shows up in the pilot, and she's talking about God in the second. It's fair enough to say that was never your favorite part of the show, but it was baked in from the beginning, not a crutch added to cover for bad plotting mid-run.
Well, yeah, but the point is that at least early on it's entirely ambiguous as to whether Head Six is just a figment of Baltar's imagination/psychosis, something Cylony like a chip or programmed memory, or something supernatural. And that ambiguity is creatively productive. Whereas the overtly spiritual stuff is not, for the most part.
Based on all the comments about Archer, I watched a couple of episodes last night. I'm not quite convinced of its brilliance, but I'm still open minded. The obscure pop-culture references were pretty varsity level (Lidsville! Whoa.).
I suppose your reaction will depend on your enjoyment of creative swearing and snappy call-backs. Personally I love that shit. I'm not claiming it's high-brow.
260: I think I've mentioned here that the best "customer" service experience I've had in recent times has been with the IRS despite my being generally careless, negligent and rather unheedful of deadlines. And a relative who lives in a state of perpetual borderline tax scofflawness seems to have worked out an acceptable state of affairs in which he semi-regularly contributes something substantive towards his ongoing account deficit and in turn is left relatively alone. There does seem to be an agent who is sort of the equivalent of his social worker/parole officer.
260: State tax people are certainly like that. Although they deal with people in a bimodal way: if you're a confused/financially straitened regular person or businessman, they're helpful and unaggressive, they just want to figure out a payment plan that gets everything paid without hurting you too badly. If they begin to believe you're a crook, they get dogged and hostile.
263: I'm not claiming it's high-brow.
Sure, as long as you understand how badly you want to appreciate or be appreciated, approve or be approved.
233, 234: If I get a vote, I'm going to say that the resolution for Admiral Adama was fine (and better than what came after). But I have a feeling that the Starbuck resolution everyone hates comes in the midst of that.
Actually, I'll readily agree that what comes after the last line of dialogue is 100% stupid and worthless, but that's just like a minute or two.
BSG's finale was bad, but mainly because the showrunners had painted themselves into a corner by that point. I thought it was about as satisfying an ending as they could produce, given where they had got to.
I think this is a fine criticism.
I personally think that there's real room for a market for adult sophisticate films, but you need to be obsessive about keeping costs low.
Isn't this basically what Woody Allen does? ISTR that he's very good at policing production costs, and so, even though his movies aren't that popular anymore, he gets to keep making them and nobody on the business side really minds.
258 gets it exactly right.
So does 262.1.
268: Yes, but he has stopped making his movies in New York, apparently because he can't afford to.
Also, I wonder whether the rich people that fund Woody Allen movies are making money or hoping to make money, or if they mostly are doing it because it isn't that costly and they like the idea of being Woody Allen's patrons.
And that ambiguity is creatively productive. Whereas the overtly spiritual stuff is not, for the most part.
Fair enough, but I think that the true ambiguity goes away pretty quickly; I mean, Season 1, Episode 10 is called "Hand of God", and pretty clearly shows Baltar getting guidance from above. I guess you could argue that an extremely elaborate scheme would also explain it, but, very early in the series, Occam's razor says that there is a god who's playing a hand in all this.
I guess what I'd say is that I totally buy finding the woo stuff a turnoff by the middle of season 2, but blaming it for the finale, or even the final season, seems like blaming the wrong flaw.
All that said, what would be kind of awesome would be seeing the original creative team basically recreate the entire show, beginning to end, knowing what they know now. Fewer inconsistencies, fewer missteps, fewer fruitless diversions (it's played very heavy when Baltar's cult get guns, but then nothing - at all - comes of it. And that happened when the end was within sight!). I think that there would still be dissatisfaction at the finale (clearly a lot of people simply hate the very idea, no matter how it's played or led up to), but I also think the journey there would be much more satisfying.
Note that I don't actually think, IRL, that this would be a good idea.
270.2: I don't think it's one or the other. I think that they see a nice little return on each film that lets them continue to invest in the idea of being Woody Allen's patrons. I suspect that, if every movie of his lost a few million, the warm glow of patronage would wear off pretty fast.
Plus they probably get tax breaks. For some reason, Germany has a massive tax break for Hollywood movie financing - it's how Uwe Boll gets to keep making crappy loss-making movies.
Fair enough, but I think that the true ambiguity goes away pretty quickly; I mean, Season 1, Episode 10 is called "Hand of God", and pretty clearly shows Baltar getting guidance from above.
See, that's precisely what I was thinking about when suggesting creative ambiguity. At the end of the day, all he does is point randomly at a spot on a photograph. It turns out to be a good guess. Yes, it could be the Cylon God, or he could just be incredibly lucky, as he often is (and indeed a lot of the rest of the Colonials often are). He takes it as proof of the Cylon God, setting him on a new path. As far as the show is concerned at that point, it doesn't matter which is right. All that matters is what Baltar thinks, because it drives his actions.
Woody Allen certainly makes money from his movies. I don't know specifically about his films, but it's likely the case that the studio that distributes his films make a small profit and that most of his outside investors take a loss.
256 made me laugh.
I think I'm going to have to give Archer another shot.
Doesn't anyone watch the Venture Bros.?
My impression was that "Midnight In Paris" and "Vicky Cristina" both made a major profit, and the others from the last 15 years or so have not. Isn't that what you expect from funding a musical or a movie (or a band, if you're a record label)? Mostly misses, but the hits are hits.
Doesn't anyone watch the Venture Bros.
Yes. It's great, but I'm not sure how many other Unfoggeders would like it. Archer probably has a broader appeal, subject to the reprehensibility caveat, which I figure most Unfoggeders can cope with.
Anyway, for those unfamiliar with Venture Bros, it's basically a spoof of Johnny Quest specifically and hero/nemesis kids cartoons in general. If you liked Harvey Birdman - Attorney At Law, you'll probably love it.
how Uwe Boll gets to keep making crappy loss-making movies for sophisticated, grown-up audiences.
I thought he was a basketball player.
NickS, there's a point in the finale where if you stop, you might just be mildly disappointed, but you won't feel utterly betrayed.
As NickS and Nathan Williams near the end, one of us is just going to have to go back into the episode and dig up the exact right stopping point.
How odd. I did, in fact, watch the first 2 1/2 seasons of BSG, like them a lot, and stop partially because I'd read such negative things about the final season. But I don't think I said anything about that on this thread.
I haven't gone back to see who I was being confused with, because my immediate reaction was, "wait, how do you know?"
I thought [Uwe Boll] was a basketball player./i>
Sort of a cross between Uwe Blab and Manute Bol?
</StandPipe>
271
I guess what I'd say is that I totally buy finding the woo stuff a turnoff by the middle of season 2, but blaming it for the finale, or even the final season, seems like blaming the wrong flaw.
I think the problem with the finale of BSG wasn't the fact the supernatural appeared or even how important it was but what it was there for. I mean, from the start to the second-to-last episode, the supernatural was ambiguous but seemed to indicate big ideas and deep meanings, or at least, because this is just TV after all, big-looking ideas and deep-feeling meanings. But then in the last episode, not only did they remove the ambiguity, but they unambiguously made it clear that God's plan was just anthropomorphic, modern-human-centered, pedestrian stuff.
Not enlightenment, not some destiny that's inevitable on its own terms, just keeping the course of history on schedule. In the BSG-verse God does exist, angels aren't just hallucinations, but apparently the game they're playing with the universe isn't dice or solitaire, it's Rock Em Sock Em Robots.
All that being said, I'd recommend BSG overall to anyone who hasn't seen it yet. For most of its run it was an epic story of both survival and being worthy of survival. Enjoy the ride, just make sure to get off at the second-to-last stop.
285: OK, but my only caveat is that we see vast parts of the BSG-verse, and there isn't anyone but people - no slimy green monsters, no super intelligent shades of the color blue, nothing. In that world, an anthropocentric God isn't so nonsensical.
But yeah, I take your point, as I do that of 276. I'd just argue that the ambiguity wasn't as deep or significant as it seemed.
Anyone watching/been watching Homeland ? That's been entertaining us and kid A on Sunday nights for the last few weeks, though it is pretty ridiculous. Apart from that, I've been watching ER.
I mixed up NickS and Nathan Williams. Nick, did you mention it before, and it just stuck in my head? The only alternative is that I'm psychic. I promise to only use my powers for good.
I thought by Season 2 is was clear that the supernatural was real, and that to think anything else was wishful thinking. The ending didn't suck because it was mystical. It sucked because for the final hour of the show, every character acted in a way completely unrelated to their character over the course of the show. All of the characters unanimously agree to a final resolution that nothing in their previous behavior suggests they would agree to. Basically, they throw away everything they spent 4 years trying to preserve. And rather than explain, or dramatize, they just have a Lee Adama voiceover explaining "We all agreed unamimously to the most implausible plan ever." Would you agree to the plan? Would anyone?
Would you agree to the plan? Would anyone?
I think that a back to the land movement would be extremely appealing to a lot of people after 4 years stuck in windowless spaceships with only an 18 month hiatus on hell for a break. I think that recreating the sort of settlement that was built on New Caprica would be extremely unappealing to people.
That said, it's incredibly rushed and glossed over. I don't think that it would necessarily make interesting TV, nor would it necessarily put your complaint to rest, but I do think that another 5 minutes spent on the topic could have greatly increased the plausibility of the outcome. I can imagine them actually starting to lay out an urban settlement, and a main (or maybe secondary) character saying, "Don't you remember how bad things were on New Caprica even before the occupation?", while random people from the fleet just take off into the country to claim land.
I am incredibly glad that they didn't attempt to show interaction with the local hominids. That would have been awful.
But I didn't pick up this deadish thread to talk BSG. I came to talk about Archer, 4 episodes of which I watched last night. Very uneven, with some very funny moments and long stretches that barely made me half-smile. I'd watch it on broadcast (that is, if I were already sitting down in front of the TV, ready to be entertained by whatever the clicker provided), but I doubt that I'll Netflix it again. Does it get consistently better the deeper it goes?
First, it's a terrible, terrible, terrible show and no one should watch it. But it does get better, because what it does well is accumulate loony details -- from the first episode, Archer's relationship with his mother is obviously a horror, and the general category of horror is clear. But the steady drip of bits about it gets funnier and funnier.
I'm intrigued by exactly what it is that makes it a terrible, terrible, terrible show. I've only watched the first one and came away thinking that a whole bunch of people whose taste I otherwise respect have gone off their meds. But then here you are being all mysterious and stuff about how it's appalling but you still watch it. I'm going to give it a try starting at the beginning of season 2 just to see if I can find the whateverness of it.
Why would you respect my taste? I don't respect my taste. The show is vulgar and juvenile in a way that I do honestly disapprove of, it just strikes me funny.
But the steady drip of bits about it gets funnier and funnier.
Totally. It's really like AD in that respect, and not just because of Jessica Walter. Though it doesn't hurt that she's in it.
The sequel to the Avatar has cars. That is all.
The sequel to the Avatar has cars.
!!
How is it, so far?
Too steampunk meets buffy to be as good as the original, but not bad.
Katara got really old but kept her hair the same.
There's a sequel to Avatar?!? Wait, what? How can it be that Moby's seeing it when I haven't even heard about it? Why is Moby calling it "the Avatar"?
Kobe would like to tell you that it's the anime-influenced Nickelodeon cartoon, not the Cameron movie, Parsi.
299.1: The Legend of Korra is the real name. It doesn't air for real until tomorrow.
299.2: Moby has parents with extensive cable and a five-year-old boy. It was heavily teased over Easter. The first two episodes are free on iTunes, which was something my wife found after my son talked about it and we had a brief panic because we canceled all but the basic part of cable months ago.
299.3: Moby was on his phone and didn't want to type "Avatar: the Last Airbender" as it was too long. He thought "the Avatar" was enough to make people think of Aang and not blue, tall things.
Oh heavens. Thanks, snarkout. I thought we might not be talking about the same thing, and I should have googled to resolve my confusion. I became totally distracted by a fight between Balloon Juice and Radley Balko, topic, Cato: Good or Bad? !
FWIW, I watched the 5th episode while I was waiting for a pizza, and it was very, very funny (it's the one with the gay Cuban hitmen).
What I'd say I like best is that it takes the kind of rapid-fire stream of tasteless jokes that is Seth McFarland's MO and narrows the focus to being actually relevant to the characters. IOW, Family Guy just throws shit against the wall, but Archer actually mostly makes jokes that have some place in the (ridiculous, convoluted) plot.