Disorderly Content

One of the funniest things I've ever heard was when Elmo and his support person Kevin Clash appeared on Wait Wait, Don't Tell Me, the NPR news quiz. As good as that was, and it was indeed good, it may just have been surpassed by this video interview with Elmo and Ricky Gervais. I'm not sure who has the upper hand, although it's clearly not the unseen interviewer.

Not safe for work, or much of anywhere else, this appears to be an example of what happens when a kid's show decides to have a little fun with the premise...

...and not, I hope, to bury it.

If you know me at all, you know my taste in television is eclectic. And during this long and dull summer, while I waited for Psych and Mythbusters and Pushing Daisies to release new episodes (check, check, and still waiting), I let myself get sucked into something totally cheesy on ABC Family of all things. It's called The Middleman, it's like a snarky takeoff on all those British spy shows from the 60s, plus Men in Black, plus a whole bunch of other stuff. Yes, it's cheesy, but only the finest cheese, classic imported fromage. And the cultural references fly by at an alarming rate, most of which escape even me, whose steel trap mind my brother once described as intellectual landfill!

Take this week's episode for example, which guest starred Kevin Sorbo as a Connery-as-Bond ex-spy who's been frozen for forty years (okay, the concept is Austin Powers, but the delivery is pure Bond). We eventually learn his name is Guy Goddard, which I just discovered was an homage to the two male leads from Lost in Space. I mean, how cool is that? And what other show would feature a martial arts master named Sensei Ping, who for obscure reasons wears a Mexican wrestler's mask?

I'm telling you, you have to check this show out. Quickly, before ABC Family replaces it with something smarmy like that new Brenda Hampton show. I wasn't wrong about Farscape, right? Or Corner Gas. You have been watching Corner Gas, haven't you?

I recently became addicted to Corner Gas, a Canadian comedy series about a combination gas station/coffee shop in a nowhere town in Saskatchewan. I'd caught most of the episodes on WGN, but finally ordered DVDs of all four seasons to make sure I hadn't missed any. While listening to the commentary on a season two ep, I heard mention of the town where the show is filmed, and where they built the titular gas station. That led me to Google, which got me to the town's home page. Where I learned virtually nothing, since way too many of the site's pages say the same thing:

Help... we need information for this page!

If you are a resident of Rouleau and would like to help out, please submit accurate and detailed information to:

info@townofrouleau.com

So I'm not a lot wiser about the "real" Dog River, although there's a pretty good virtual Dog River on the show's website. And isn't that what really matters?

Last night saw the return of CBS's Monday night block of comedy shows. I liked the first season of How I Met Your Mother (both the show and Canadian teen pop sensation Robin Sparkles are among my MySpace friends - yes, I have fictional characters as friends), thought season two was okay and am still not sure about season three. So I was curious to see how they'd do after their strike-enforced hiatus. The answer: good, bad, clever, funny, a little dull. But nothing that made me want to blog.

No, I owe the impulse to blog to Two And a Half Men, and a small subplot involving Charlie trying to wangle an introduction to a cute girl for his nephew, the ever less charming as he gets older Jake. The mother of said girl is hostile, Charlie is oblivious, she takes action and pepper sprays him in the eyes. And I'm pissed.

Yeah, I know it's a comedy. But I have to ask what's funny about an unprovoked assault? Not that Charlie wasn't being a jerk, which, by the way, was seriously out of character. It was obvious the woman was getting angry, and Charlie was always presented as aware of women's vibes, even if he chose to ignore them. But my bigger problem was with the woman, and with the lack of consequences. Since when is it permitted to attack someone because they won't go away? Does this mean that the next time somebody pisses me off in the supermarket I can borrow someone's cane and beat the miscreant over the head with it? In the world I live in, pepper spray is for defense; actions like Charlie's demand calling the manager, or even a cop.

What I think makes me even more incensed is that HIMYM had a somewhat similar scenario that played out completely differently. Ted somehow decided the Universe was rewarding him for doing bad things. At one point he sneaks a couple of bottles of champagne onto somebody else's bar tab; the owner of said tab punches his lights out. Puncher gets arrested; punchee manages to avoid arrest himself over the ill-gotten booze but realizes that he's been acting like a total prick. Not so funny, but at least it comes from a world I vaguely recognize. 2.5 Men, not so much.

Meanwhile, I'm feeling better for having griped to you nice people. And wondering what next week's episodes will bring. Oh, and hoping any women I meet either missed last night's episode or know that pepper spray is not a proper way to say go away. Just in case it should come up.

I'm sitting here and watching last night's Daily Show, now New and Improved With 100% Less Writers! And as shaky as the show may be in its "we're making this stuff up as fast as we can" improvizational style, it still feels like a weight has been lifted from my chest. I want the writers to win, and I'm willing to put up with a certain amount of pain to show my solidarity. But a steady diet of reality programs? That's just cruel.

I have no interest in reality TV. None. Well, Mythbusters, but I think of that more as educational (as in "We take all these insane risks so you won't have to") than reality. No, I've never watched more than a small piece of an episode of reality TV. And here's an excellent demonstration of why not.

What follows is a video of James Franco and Mila Kunis reenacting a scene from The Hills, a show I know about only because of the discussion on the TV Guide podcast. Yes, I do listen to people talk about reality TV, but only because they're entertaining about it (more entertaining than the shows themselves, I suspect), and because they also talk about scripted shows and movies.

Anyway, here it is, courtesy of Television Without Pity's Telefile, the latest blog to join my already overloaded collection:

In honor of my South Bay Blogger friends (who are the only ones on the planet who might find the title of this post funny), I have to share the strangest bit of video I've seen in a long time. Safe for work, but not if you're Golden Girls intolerant:

A Golden Girls credits makeover

It's like two gifts in one. The first is that for some unknown reason, at least to me, the wonderful folks at Television Without Pity have done one of their inimitable recaps of an episode of How I Met Your Mother, the only comedy worthy of my Replay. (Well, the only one not on Comedy Central or Cartoon Network, anyway.) And not just any episode: the amazing Slap Bet episode. Which recap gave me the second gift: a link to CBS's Slap Bet Countdown clock. So now we know what Barney does not: the exact moment when we may experience The Slap Heard Round The World. (Number three.) I mean, isn't that legen... wait for it... dary?

Is there nothing the man can't do? Judging by this Veronica Mars season two gag reel, I'm thinking blend into the scene may just be that one thing. Joss had a walk-on (really more of a stand-on) as a car rental agent in one episode. But there was a lot more than we saw on the show. His, ummm, performance begins at the 3:26 mark. Enjoy:

Spotted on TV Squad, who say they discovered it on Whedoneqeue.

So I've been watching this World Series of Pop Culture thing on VH1, because I love trivia and because I used to be good at it. But I've been feeling even more old and out of it than usual, as category after category shows how little I know about what this generation (or is it these generations -- how many are there between me and them?) enjoys. Which is why I was shocked when a category came by where I knew the answer to every single question. That category? Cross-dressers. Yeah, I'm shocked. Granted, the questions were pretty easy. And I guess it's an advantage to be old enough to remember Bosom Buddies in its original run. (Buffy and Hildy, I knew you when.) But when a game was lost when a contestant couldn't name a single Abba song? I don't know who I was more embarrassed for. Him because he couldn't? Or me, because I had no trouble at all...

Case in point, the original and unaired pilot to Buffy The Vampire Slayer, which I'd heard about but had never seen until TV Squad announced the existence of a copy on YouTube. It's not good. Not nearly as awful as the Buffy movie, but not good. Still, it's worth watching to see how young everyone is, as well as the poor actress who got to play Willow for a few minutes:

A couple of years ago a friend let me see a copy of the American pilot for Red Dwarf. By comparison, this is Shakespeare. Good Shakespeare.

And another favorite show bites the dust. Last night's finale for Everwood wasn't the ragefest I felt while watching the last episode of Farscape (the male and female lead getting turned into Folger's Crystals, followed by a To Be Continued that we all knew was a lie -- although it turned out not to be), and it wasn't the emotional roller coaster of the end of Angel. It was sappy and tearstained, in all sorts of good ways. And even as a double episode it was way too short. I realize that it's Everwood the place I'll miss, even more than Everwood the show. The creators managed to give us the kind of small town we all want to live in, even people like me who'd go insane within weeks in a place like that. Not a Mayberry, where the weirdness and the smallmindedness would have me wanting to off every third resident. (Oh, let's be honest: every second resident. At least.) But a place with warmth and openness, where somehow people keep surprising you.

Good stuff. And how ironic that it had to die to give 7th Heaven yet another season. It's been said that the good is the enemy of the great, that merely good enough is easy and cheap enough to make it harder and more risky to produce real quality. Then how to explain the decisions at the new CW, where the best is pushed out by the truly craptacular?

This weekend I caught an episode of Mythbusters in which Adam and Kari took on cell phones, or more specifically if driving while holding a cell phone to your ear is more or less dangerous than driving drunk. Their conclusion is that both are equally dangerous, which is hardly a surprise to anybody who's spent time on a California freeway. (Whenever I see somebody suddenly veer across several lanes, I'm only surprised if I don't see a phone clapped to one ear.) I was disappointed that they didn't try a less obvious question, like how much worse your driving is with a hands-free setup than when you aren't on a phone at all. Still, watching the two of them (and especially Kari, let's be honest) just on the legal side of drunk was highly entertaining.

But it all reminds me of a classic episode of WKRP in Cincinnati, where the local Sheriff's Department or whatever did an on-air demonstration of the effects of alcohol on reflexes. Except they made the mistake of using Dr. Johnny Fever as the test subject. And to the police official's growing consternation, the Doctor's response times only improved with each drink. Must be all those drugs he took in the Sixies...

Which reminds me of that wonderful line about how if you remember the Sixties, you weren't there. Which is quite a distance from my original point, whatever it might have been.

I've mentioned Television Without Pity before. And I've mentioned their Tubey's Kids auctions as well, where devotees compete to win a recap of a favorite episode of a favorite show, with all the proceeds going to a worthy cause. This last auction (which we Scapers lost) was followed by a second chance auction (which we won). And this morning I'm enjoying the recap of A Human Reaction, a pivotal episode of Farscape. Part of the fun of winning one of these things is the debate over which of TWoP's recappers we should ask to do the job. Should we pick among the already converted? Or someone discovering the madness for the first time? We chose the latter for the recap of the Premiere episode. But this time we went for a seasoned Scaper, the kind of guy who bemoans the loss of our show whenever he can sneak it into his recaps of other, sometimes worthy programming.

Anyway, he done us proud. And if you think this recap is entertaining, how much better is the real thing? That's one thing about us Scapers: we can't resist the chance for a conversion.

Television Without Pity may be without pity, but it is not without a social conscience. For a year or so, they've been holding quarterly auctions for some worthy charity, where devotees to one show or another (also known as fans or, more accurately, nuts) pool their resources to outbid each other. The prize is a recap of an episode of said show, done in the inimitable TWoP style. We Scapers have won two such auctions, which got us recaps of Crackers Don't Matter (well, they don't) and the series premiere. But try as we might, we were outbid in the latest auction by the Days Of Our Lives crew. And now their recap is up, demonstrating that even I am insufficiently ironic to appreciate soap operas daytime dramas. But not to worry; a second auction was held immediately, which we Scapers won. And although I know the Full House crowd is furious (and who can blame them), their hostility is more than compensated by the joy of an upcoming recap of A Human Reaction. Personally, I was pushing for Won't Get Fooled Again, if only for the higher degree of difficulty in having to explain all those back references. Ah, well; maybe next time.

What with all those theater tickets, I spent a lot of time last week going in and out of the Times Square subway station. And right by the shuttle that runs to Grand Central, all the support posts were decorated with ads for Heather Graham's new series, Emily's Reasons Why Not. But as the title of this post says, I guess we'll never know what her reasons are. Because word is ABC cancelled the show after one episode. Which isn't a record; I've heard Turn On was cancelled during its first commercial break. But it's still pretty shocking. Makes you wonder what the next few episodes look like. Unlike Heather, they must not be very pretty.

I've only added one new show to my ReplayTV this season: a comedy called How I Met Your Mother. It's on CBS. *shudder* It has Bob Saget *shudder*, although thankfully only in small doses and only as a disembodied voice *small sigh of relief*. It has Alyson Hannigan, a small point in its favor. And Neil Patrick Harris of Doogie Howser and Harold and Kumar fame. (We shall not speak of his involvement in Stark Raving Mad. Ever.)

NPH plays Barney, shallow best friend to Ted, the show's putative lead and without a doubt the dullest character in the cast. But Barney's not just shallow; he's also a blogger. And in a fit of creativity and with-it-ness one doesn't expect from CBS (ever!), Barney's blog has moved from the purely conceptual to the real, or at least as real as anything in cyberspace. Yes, somewhere some anonymous CBS employee is channeling Barney and blogging about it.

I know I let my subscription lapse a couple of years back, the onscreen schedule on my ReplayTV providing more than adequate warning of anything worth watching. And I guess I wasn't the only one, as declining subscriptions have led its publisher to abandon the (big) pocket sized edition we all grew up with in favor of a more magazine-like magazine.

Anyway, this week is the last for the classic Guide. And they're celebrating or mourning its passing with a series of nine different covers. Each one recreates a classic cover, in some cases using an old show's modern decendent. M*A*S*H begetting Scrubs I can see. Good Times leading to Bernie Mac, okay. And The Flintstones begetting The Simpsons, sure. I'll even accept Reba MacEntire as a modern Lucille Ball, although truth to tell I mostly found Lucy grating. But Jennifer Love Hewitt as The Flying Nun? Conan O'Brien as Buffalo Bob Smith? Everybody knows he has more in common with Howdy Doody...

I'm a big fan of Richard Sharpe, British infantryman turned officer during the Napoleonic Wars. The creation of novelist Bernard Cornwell, Sharpe was brought to life by Sean Bean in a series of TV movies I discovered on PBS and collected on tape (remember tape?) and then DVD. Sean Bean's one of those actors who gets work but not necessarily respect; aside from his anti-Bond role in Goldeneye, he's almost always portrayed as a weakling, a coward or an outright villain. None of which is true of his portrayal of Sharpe, although as The Movie Blog argues, aspects of that role may be responsible for his typecasting.

Anyway, The Movie Blog also mentions that Bean's about to embark on a Sharpe sequel, to be filmed and set in India. I for one can't wait!

I just read on TV Squad that Don Adams has died. I was a huge fan of Get Smart, even sitting through the execrable movie version that didn't even have Barbara Feldon. Gonna miss you, Max.

One of the blogs in my RSS reader (NetNewsWire, in case you haven't been paying attention) is called Charles on... anything that comes along. Charles is a Brit and a Mac fan, although neither is relevant to this particular post. What is relevant is a link he included on his blog. The link is to a story I'd heard years ago, about a guy who figured out the pattern in a game show called Press Your Luck, got on the show and took the producers for a bundle. But this version of the story tells about what happened after the show. And it isn't pretty. Rod Serling would have enjoyed this one, I think.

Thanks to TV Squad for a pointer to an article at US News & World Report on the passing of Bob Denver. Yeah, I know Denver's passing is already old news. But the article includes some bits from an interview they did a few years ago (how few, they don't say) that answers the age old question: Mary Ann? Or Ginger? Like the rest of us (well, me anyway), Denver thought there was no contest: Mary Ann all the way.

Another conundrum for the ages put to rest.

I'm not sure how, but a while back I ended up on some NBC mailing list. Every now and again I'd get a request to participate in a survey. And if I'm sufficiently bored, I might actually fill it out.

Which is what happened today. Survey arrived in my email. I clicked over to the site. It asked my gender and gave me a selection of age ranges. I answered honestly and clicked the Continue button. Whereupon I was thanked for my participation and offered the opportunity to invite others to participate.

Guess they already have enough old white men in their survey. Or should I say old men; they didn't ask about the white part.

I've been having a wonderful time ODing on British series lately. First it was the first two seasons of Danger Mouse, a wonderfully quirky cartoon I discovered on Nickelodeon back in the 80s, and which is every bit as goofily amusing now as it was then. Maybe even more so; my sense of humor is getting less sophisticated in my declining years. Or maybe these are my reclining years, my posture being what it is.

I followed up the World's Greatest Secret Agent with the highland charms of Monarch of the Glen, a series I discovered on one of my local public broadcasting stations. (Sadly, I can no longer get that station. Damn cable company!) Monarch of the Glen is quirky and Scottish, or is that redundant? It has amazing scenery, fine performances and a combination of comedy and pathos that we Murrkuns don't do nearly so well. Can't wait for season four...

From Boing Boing comes the thrilling and surprising news that the broadcast flag is dead. The US Court of Appeals declared that the FCC exceeded its authority by ordering that digital televisions implement the flag, which would have prevented us from doing anything with broadcast programs not explicitly permitted by the content creators.

Read the Boing Boing report for more detail. But in short it means that the guys who tried to sue the VCR out of existence the first time (and failed) and then tried to order it out of existence via the FCC (and failed) now have to talk their Congresscritters into legislating it out of existence. And any Congresscritter that goes along better hope we voters don't know who they are, right?

Update 05/06: Professor Lessig points out that it was the American Library Association who challenged the FCC on the broadcast flag, with PublicKnowledge paying for the legal talent. We owe a big debt to both.

I'm a huge fan of the television show Farscape, which is hardly a surprise to anyone who's spent any time around here. I'm also a devoted fan of Television Without Pity, a website that does for teevee what a dog does to a bone. So when TWoP announced a charity auction for a recap of a favorite show not already covered, Scapers were there. And now, so is the recap. The episode is Crackers Don't Matter. Good choice, although I suspect non-fans (aka the uninitiated) will think it's not just Moya's crew whose sanity is in question. Trust me, it gets better. And weirder. And better.

I don't see a lot of TV commercials. Between DVDs and my ReplayTV, I rarely watch anything broadcast in real-time. But this afternoon was an exception. And I was surprised and impressed with the honesty of this ad. The station: our local UPN affiliate. The product: tomorrow afternoon's broadcast of Mariah Carey's less than stellar performance in Glitter, a film the on-air announcer describes as so bad, it makes Gigli look like Gone With The Wind. He then compounds this fouling of our airwaves by announcing that Glitter will be shown without commercial interruption, as if that's a good thing. And then the piece de resistance: the broadcast is sponsored by something called Options Made Easy, which I assume is one of those seminar series for the terminally gullible.

Then again, who else would waste a perfectly good Sunday afternoon watching this crap?

When I was very young¹, television had its first crude brush with interactive entertainment. The show was called Winky-Dink and You, and it involved a plastic cover for the TV screen and a set of special markers. On command, you were supposed to draw in some missing object to help Winky-Dink on his adventures. One can only imagine all the crayon marks and permanent marker scrawls parents had to clean from the family set in households without the official kit.

I mention this because of a posting on Boing Boing about a new experiment in interactive television. The program: Battlestar Galactica. The technology: podcasting. The idea is that you download an MP3 of executive producer Ron Moore doing commentary on the latest episode and then play the file while watching the show. There will be a visual cue to tell you when to start the commentary and audio signals to pause for commercials.

Like Winky-Dink, it's kind of a cool idea with a cumbersome implementation. Somewhere, Rube Goldberg must be smiling.

1. Actually, I was so young I was in negative numbers. According to IMDB, Winky-Dink went on the air a year before I was born.

While the music and motion picture business fight a vicious battle against people who copy their content, The Sci Fi Channel sees an opportunity in all that bandwidth. They've made the first episode of Battlestar Galactica available on their site. There's some bad news, like the fact that there's no download option; you have to watch it on their site. And it uses Real Player, which is unappealing both for technical and business policy reasons. But the quality of the video is surprisingly good, whatever I may think of Real. And for those of us who don't get Sci Fi or who have avoided the show for other reasons, it's a chance to see what we're missing.

Sci Fi has received a lot of grief over their programming decisions, particularly among Farscape fans who blame them for the show's early demise. (Well, we have to blame someone.) But isn't it nice that the folks who program for a future-oriented audience are making their own tentative steps to embrace the future?