TDL’s Sports, Wrestling, & Otherwise

OK, I understand that the 20 or so people who read this and the 5 or so who actively comment aren’t all in to vampire shows… but let’s do a quick comparison and you can tell me if I’m crazy.

First, here is the entire first episode of Buffy: The Vampire Slayer. Watch until the first break (about 2 minutes) via the awesome Hulu.com. At the very least, you’ll get Julie Benz in a schoolgirl outfit.

And compare it to this, this is the first scene of True Blood. The credits finish at about 1:40 which makes it about a 3 minute video. The first 20 seconds are kinda/sorta NSFW. No nudity but fully clothed simulated, uh, shenanigans. Being HBO, the language is more colorful.

I understand that True Blood isn’t going for the evil, killer vampire — but someone watched the first four minutes of this television show and said: “yeah… this is perfect” instead of “jeez, this looks fake and terrible.” I mean, these are the two scenes that are supposed to hook people in to thinking this show is worth watching, right?

I got caught up in the TrueBlood ad-campaign in New York City this summer. The posters for the show were actually posters for the central-to-the-plot Tru:Blood drink, goofing on energy-drink advertisements. The idea is that this synthetic blood serves all the vampire’s nutritional needs which means they no longer need to kill people.

Preceding the pilot, HBO ran two half-hour documentaries about the evolution of the vampire. The first half hour dealt with the evolution of the vampire in legend — going back through the origins of the creature throughout history and pointing how old the idea of a vampire actually is. The second deals with the evolution of the vampire in pop-culture and literature — pretty much starting with the original Dracula book and ending up through pretty current stuff. They made stops at Bela Lugosi’s civilized Dracula. The evolution to Dark Shadows’ Barnabas Collins who was the first vampire who was horrified by what he was and what he was doing. The evolution of the Dracula character to Christopher Lee’s horrifically evil version. They spent some time on Blade, The Lost Boys, Underworld, and the Anne Rice universe. Notable exception was any mention of the Whendonverse — which seems like a very strange call considering the fan base of the two shows is essentially the same. Non-notable exception was the lack of mention of Moonlight.

I was also happy to see HBO got the bat-shit crazy psychic vampire lady to appear and talk about how she has to eat other people’s energy to stay feeling well. Seriously. I’m not kidding. She wrote a book about it.

I presume they ignored the Whedon vampires for two reasons. First, the pilot episode is ridiculously close in plotline to the Buffy pilot. Blonde girl with special powers runs into a vampire and falls in love with him. He sets her life on a new course. Secondly, the Whedonverse ruins their idea that this show is a natural progression of how the vampires have kind of moved from evil to romantic to heroic over the course of the last few decades. Whedon’s vampires were unapologeticly evil. They killed without thought. In this incarnation, vampires are just like people. They no longer have to kill people because of Tru:Blood so they “come out of the coffin” and present themselves to society. The opening scene shows a “vampire rights advocate” on Politically Correct arguing for vampire rights.

The Good

• Best line: Would you be willing to give up all different flavors of food and only drink Slim-Fast the rest of your life?
• Anna Paquin as a blonde. I think I like it.

The Bad

• As a Buffy fan, the way vampires on this show “vamp out” is really lame — and the actor they used to show it off in the opening scene didn’t help. The first scene in Buffy was Julie Benz dressed up in a school-girl outfit flirting with a guy and bringing him on to the roof of Sunnydale High. When she turns, her whole face turns monstrous and she kills him rather violently. It’s a scene that sticks with you. On this show, the first image is a completely unintimidating redneck threatening two drunk high school kids and a store owner. With his not intimidating Louisiana accent, he has has two pretty fake looking fangs fall next two his front teeth and says “ah’ma eat ya”. It was not the greatest debut for the show’s vampires.
• As seems to be the problem occasionally with HBO shows, the debut episode was paced agonizingly slow. Nothing of interest really happened and it really felt like they were killing time in a lot of it — which seems like not a good idea for a pilot episode.
• If anyone else watched this, did anyone else notice that Sookie’s (yes, Anna Paquin’s name in the show is “Sookie Stackhouse”) bedroom was exactly Buffy’s bedroom — right down to the positioning of the bed, window, and wallpaper? As I watched this episode, I found the writer’s and director’s contentions that they “never watched that show” become increasingly hard to believe. Especially, as we previously mentioned, the plotline of the first episode being about a blonde with special powers falling in love with the vampire.

The Rest

I don’t quite know the rules for this world yet — which I don’t like. Silver appears to burn and paralyze them. The documentary let us know that vampires who hate God and garlic are just a stereotype. They appear to move with super speed. They may or may not be able to hypnotize people. Apparently, humans ingest vampire blood as an XTC-like drug which increases vitality and sex drive. This drug is harvested by paralyzing a vampire and draining their blood out of them — which indicates that vampires have blood in them — which is weird. Looking around the web a bit, this show is based on the “Southern Vampire Series” by Charlaine Harris. So, I guess if I cared to look for her rules I could find them… but I’m of the opinion that a vampire show needs to lay out their rules and mythology early on. I also call shenanigans on the vampire’s contention that “we don’t like our weaknesses to be made public.” Bull. We live in the Internet age. Two YEARS after the vampires were made public knowledge, the government and regular people would DEMAND to know how to kill them. As I’ve mentioned before — give me the mythology early. I want to know the rules early on.

On top of ALL that, I don’t really get it. I don’t see where they’re going yet. It doesn’t seem to be a drama, it’s not very funny, and it doesn’t seem to be going anywhere. If I’m grading the series on the pilot alone, it gets pretty low marks. It’s unsurprising that they sent the first two episodes out for review. So, at the moment, I’m undecided. Fellow upstate boy and guy with contacts SMS told me that the 2nd episode is much better than the first. That being the case, it gets at least next week.

I got the Entourage bandwagon pretty late. It kind of lost me last season, though, and I had big hopes for the season premiere. Unfortunately, it was another installment of “Vince doesn’t want to do something, E and Ari give him a pep talk, Vince reluctantly does it.” On the plus side — hot naked chicks.

Here’s to hoping next week is better.

JJ Abrams has become quite the sci-fi sweetheart. Following the glorious success of LOST, Abrams has been given the reigns of the Star Trek franchise and was handpicked by Stephen King to bring The Dark Tower to the big screen for the low licensing fee of $1. Abrams’s latest television product is Fringe, a sci-fi drama on Fox starring Dawson’s Creek alum Joshua Jackson. Just in case we need to be reminded that it’s an Abrams’ show, the opening shot is of an airplane in turbulence. Sadly, it’s NOT an Oceanic Flight, which would have been an excellent callback.

The Good

• It’s definitely sci-fi. I like sci-fi. It looks like it’s going to broadly explore some of the things the X-Files only touched on in early season (telekinesis, mind powers, etc) and then eschewed entirely for their broad, overreaching government and alien conspiracy storylines.
• It looks like it will be an episodic show that has some season-long storylines. I like this format.
• Once you get over the moderate absurdity of the Dr. Bishop character, he’s pretty interesting and likable. Thus far, the most likable one on the show. He doesn’t care about what’s going on around him. See problem. Solve problem. I can appreciate that.

The Bad

• Let’s be clear… this is definitely NOT the X-Files. I mean, it’s Homeland Security instead of the FBI, the woman instead of the man is the lead, one of the two isn’t an agent, and it’s about Fringe science — NOT extraterrestrials.
• It’s a bit TOO Abrams-y. I understand that comparisons to LOST are unavoidable, but the music types, how they cut, the way things are shot — everything screams LOST. When they’re about to cut to commercial, they use the same panicky violin music. There was one particular shot going to commercial with the cutaway shot on Lance Reddick (Matthew Abbadon on LOST) with the shrieky violin music and it literally could have been a shot from LOST.
• I find it eminently amusing that Dr. Bishop has been institutionalized for 17 years, but is able to come out of the asylum and, not only is lab at Harvard still intact (they’ve been using it for storage), but they happily allow him to use it.
• Did Joshua Jackson always have a weirdly stilted delivery or is this new for this show?

The Rest
One of the characters early on makes reference to “The Pattern” without fleshing it out. At first, I thought it was going to be typical Abrams “make reference to something and then define it 10 episodes later” — but it wasn’t. Turns out, “The Pattern” is the point of the show. I kind of want to like this show, but I’m not sure whether or not I really want to get into another giant, cloying conspiracy show where someone’s going to be chasing after a mysterious pattern for N seasons.

That said, the last fifteen minutes of the pilot sold me. They drew closed the story for the current show and dropped hints of ongoing story lines. I’m OK with this, I think. If the gigantic, cloying conspiracy is a background issue to the week-to-week episode, I think I’ll enjoy it.

To recap for those reading along at home, in Season 1 was a 22-episode heist movie about 8 guys escaping prison. Season 2 gave us the US Marshal’s manhunt of the Fox River Eight across the United States. As I guess more people are like me and enjoyed the 22-episode heist move, the end of Season 2 saw Billick, Scoffield, T-Bag, and Mahone thrown in to a Panamanian prison with the assumption that they would, you know, escape.

The season was halved last year because of the writer’s strike, so instead of getting a 22-episode heist movie I instead got a 13-episode heist movie. It worked for me, I guess, but it was much like any other sequel. Not quite up to the bar set by the first movie but with moments all it’s own. It’s at about this point in the series that I realized how much the plot line is exactly similar to 24. They do something… and something goes wrong, which makes them do something else, which also goes wrong, which makes them do something else, which inexplicably goes wrong by some kind of wrath of God bad luck. This is not to be confused with 24’s plot of finding a witness, who gets shot but who gives a clue to another witness who gets shot. However, they do both share the wrestling ideal that everyone’s looking to turn on everyone else.

In the sequel, Scoffield is dropped in to a Panamanian prison and discovers that there’s a guy in there who he has to help break out. This guy, Whistler, is in Sona Prison for some undefined reason. Sona is much tougher than Fox River. It is simply prisoners kept inside a set of walls, surrounded by no-man’s land, surrounded by an electrified fence. There are no guards inside the walls. After a particularly bad riot the guards decided to leave the prisoners to themselves, only entering to do an occasional head-count. The prisoners have set up a dictatorship underneath the 4-life-sentenced Lechero, played by Robert Wisdom.

This is about the point at which this all-powerful, mysterious Company starts to get a little old. For three seasons now, they’ve created this far-reaching conglomerate. This Company, it’s revealed, managed to set-up Scoffield to have him placed in this prison so he could come up with a plan to break out Whistler. Meanwhile, let’s keep in mind that this Company, as it was revealed previously, is powerful enough to assassinate the president, fake the death of the Vice President’s brother for some inexplicable reason, have the Vice President placed in office, and fast-track some guy’s death sentence… but doesn’t have the resources to break a guy out of a Panamanian prison? Somehow, it’s easier or better to have Scoffield placed in the same prison, travel to the states to kidnap LJ (Lincoln’s son) and Sarah (Scoffield’s girlfriend), BRING them to Panama as hostages, and demand Scoffield break them out? This company is willing to kill anyone and everyone that gets in their way, yet they’re not willing to run a smash and grab at the prison and kill all the guards out of a helicopter? Really? Like… what’s the limit of what this company can do? They can assassinate the president but they can’t break a guy out of prison? It’s very confusing.

Oddly, I think the half-season arc actually HELPED this season. Maybe it’s because I don’t have much time off between watching these shows and I start to find the clinical bad luck somewhat annoying but you’d think just the law of averages would make the occasional thing go right, wouldn’t you?

Regardless, I enjoy the show. It just requires one of the highest “suspensions of disbelief” levels this side of 24 and Raw. And, for the first time, I can start watching it weekly. I don’t yet know what the storyline of season four is going to be. I hope it’s something beyond “Panamanian Manhunt”. I also hope they, like 24, realized that their plot has become kind of predictable and shake something up this season.

I knew I was going to watch Wipeout as soon as I started seeing promos for two reasons: 1) I really like watching mXc on Spike TV and 2) John Anderson is one of Sportscenter anchors that I really like. Teaming him up with John Henson to just goof on people hurting themselves seemed like an incredibly awesome hour of summer television. A few weeks after that I started to catch promos for I Survived A Japanese Gameshow. Since I rarely pay attention to what channel anything’s on (and since I watch 99% of my television now on DVR) I had no idea that both shows were on the same channel (I assumed one of them was one of Fox’s patented shameless rip-offs). Once I found out that ABC had them both, I was happy to see the glorious two-hour block of ridiculousness.

The two shows were surprisingly different. Wipeout is, literally, just people hurting themselves with Anderson and Henson goofing on them. Gameshow, on the other hand, is a standard reality show format. People do stupid things and one person gets eliminated every week. Gameshow also again forces me to question whether or not people who are on reality TV shows have ever actually watched a reality TV show. Everything that happened on Gameshowwas clicheed reality show stuff. See if you can place any of these things from other shows:

1) The manipulative hot girl that makes guys do stuff that she wants.
2) Some person huffily saying: “I can’t believe he stabbed me in the back like that.” I can. In fact, I’d be shocked if he didn’t.
3) The shock and surprise when they bring a previously eliminated person back to be an injury sub.
4) Some person getting inappropriately angry when someone does, indeed, stab them in the back.
5) Some person saying: “I need to do what’s best for me. I’m here for the money.”

I continually fail to see why people stay interested in these shows. They’re all the same. At the very least, Wipeout doesn’t pretend it’s anything other than people doing stupid things for money. They don’t even particularly care that nearly all of their obstacles are impossible for the vast majority of people. They want people to look stupid for the amusement of the audience… that’s why they have people who have no business running an obstacle course run an obstacle course. Even the people competing treat like a joke. On the other hand, Gameshow has the ridiculous confessional thing where people stare into the camera and honestly tell us about their strategy for velcroing themselves on to walls.

I give the nod to Wipeout for just stupid summer amusement. Unfortunately, I waited so long to get this out of the queue that both shows are over… but NEXT summer I give the nod to Wipeout for stupid summer amusement.

I’m not a fan of reality TV. This is one of the few I watch. The judges have been telegraphing for nearly a month who they were planning on giving the victory too so it was of little surprise when they named Aaron the winner. Between a few times he was inexplicably not eliminated and the uncomfortable moments where three white people were doing their best to tell him to be more black without actually saying “be more black” (featuring such sage advice as “I don’t believe you’re showing us your real personality”, “tell me more about your family”, and “I felt like you weren’t being yourself there”) it was hardly surprising when they gave him the victory even though he was the worst of the three. The fix was in by the time Aaron went to pitch his pilot where the following exchange occurred:

Aaron: *starts pitching ideas*
Gordon Eliot: Didn’t I hear you had a nickname?
Aaron: People call me Big Daddy.
Gordon: Why don’t we call it Big Daddy’s Kitchen? [later changed to Big Daddy's House].

Big Daddy’s House? Really? Maybe we should just call it The Stereotype Hour with Aaron McCargo Jr.

They pretty much should have ended the show there — it would have been less of a joke. Adam’s pitch and pilot was superior to the other two in every way. He was consistently the best guy in front of the camera and consistently had more charisma. On his pilot he was better in front of the camera, the food he made was way more accessible to normal people, he was funnier, and his show was different than anything else on the network.

Susie Fogelson’s reasoning was that Aaron would “reach a whole new audience for the Food Network.” Perfectly understandable, perfectly acceptable, and it makes total sense. But: if that’s what they were looking for then don’t frame the show as a fair competition. Just give the dude a show. Aaron performed worst for two consecutive weeks and still won. The judges continually tried to make the audience believe he was better than he was. After Vegas buffet, the three judges made a “shocking decision” and pushed all three contestants through to the final week. All Aaron brought to the table was a good promo and I’m pretty sure anyone, given a few hours and editors, could create a good 20-second spot. So, after carrying all three in to the finals, taping promos, taping a pilot, they didn’t even open it up to fan voting. The three judges just picked a winner because Adam likely would have won in a landslide.

Adam got jobbed in the name of diversity. You can’t take people with no charisma and shove them in front of the camera because it looks good. If you want to carry more African-American shows, just friggin carry them. Conveniently, you guys have your own network and everything. Don’t run a 12-week commercial and pretend someone won a show to do it. Viewers aren’t stupid. Aaron is Dan & Steve II… someone pushed through the competition so Food Network can say to… someone… “we had to put them on!!” I don’t understand 1) why they do this and 2) why I continue watching. So far they’ve gotten it right exactly one out of four tries and, surprise, Guy’s the only that’s lasted.

Enjoy Aaron’s show for the whole six episodes it’ll be on. Good job, guys.

My friend Doug has been hounding me for a good six months to start watching Battlestar Galactica. He and I are usually pretty much on the same wavelength when it comes to movies and TV shows so I dropped it in the Netflix Queue for after The 4400.

The set-up to the series is pretty simple. Humans create robots. Robots become self-aware. Robots attack humans. War ensues. War ends in a draw. Robots go away for 50 years. Robots figure out how to create create robots that look human. Robots find God. Robots infiltrate human civilization and nuke them. We pick up the series as the Battlestar Galactica, a warship created in the first conflict, is to be decommissioned. The decommissioning ceremony is interrupted by total war.

Another one in the win column for Doug.

Finding a good sci-fi series is really, really hard. Either the acting horrible (anything on the Sci-Fi network), the storylines have very little respect for the abject geekdom of the fan base or the source material (Enterprise), or it’s really good and gets killed before its time (Firefly). With BSG none of those things happened (except maybe the killed before its time thing… I’ll get back to you on that after I see all four seasons).

Having never seen the original series (or ever having known it existed) I had no expectations going in to this show. This is probably a good thing; it seems like most people who went in expecting a Star Trek to Star Trek: The Next Generation progression were sorely disappointed. Instead they were treated to an almost complete re-imagining of the universe. I can’t really speak to those differences as I never watched the original series, but suffice it to say that the Wikipedia pages on the original series don’t share too many plot-points. This leads me to believe that there is an intense geek-war on which of the two series is better. I don’t have any of that to deal with.

The first season is pretty much split in to two main plot arcs. The first deals with the Cylons’ (those are the robots) new ability to look human. They have implanted sleeper agents in to the human world who they themselves don’t even know they’re robots. The second deals with how the human race (population after the extermination: 48,000) survives and reconstructs the government. For most of the season there is a gentle power struggle between Commander Adama (the highest ranking remaining military official and the captain of Battlestar Galactica) and President Laura Roslin (the Secretary of Education who becomes president because the rest of the cabinet is killed). For the most part, those two stories are more than enough to carry the first 13-episode order.

One issue: can I get one male on the show that isn’t evil, stupid, or so weak-willed as to compromise the survival of the race to get a little tail? Here is a list: The Cylons are able to bring down the humans’ defenses because Number Six (Tricia Helfer) is able to seduce Dr. Baltar (James Callis), the smartest man on the planet, into giving her defense codes. The chief of engineering hides his suspicions that one of the pilots is a may be a sleeper agent. The evil, male-run military vs. the peaceful female-run presidency. Cigar-smokin, order-betraying, bad-ass Kara “Starbuck” Thrace who knows better than her male superior officer. Again, not to say that there’s anything wrong with any of the above, but a little variety would be nice.

All told: I can’t wait until season two gets here.

I was a big fan of Reaper throughout the entire 2007 season and, as it turned out, it was the only show I was really pulling for to get a second season. My prayers to Satan (no contract) were answered as The CW did pick up the show for a 2nd season… which makes it pretty much the only freshman show I like other than Terminator that got picked up. It was probably a borderline call for the CW… it was the #2 most popular new CW show after Gossip Girl but consistently came in low in its time slot. Relief for me.

I can’t say enough good things about Reaper. I had a few complaints about it at the mid-season point:

What I Say Now: This show is kind of fading on me. Each episode has been very formulaic. It’s the same show week after week. The few interesting pieces of plot they’ve started (like Sam’s dad burning certain pages of the contract) were never mentioned again.

Since it turns out that Hollywood is listening to what TDL has to say, pretty much all my complaints were addressed when the show came back from WGA Strike hiatus. The fact that Sam’s dad removed pages of the contract turned out to be pretty important. They added Ken Marino and (sorta) Michael Ian Black to the show as a gay demon couple who lived next door to Sam and his group. They created a faction of demons who were trying to overthrow the devil. It turns out that there’s something strange going on with Sam’s parents. They moved a bit away from the “Monster of the Week” format they’d been using and went toward a more long storyline approach. They added Kandyse McClure’s disturbingly gorgeous eyes (and presumably the rest of her) as Ben’s girlfriend; ending the horrific and pointless “Ben marries someone out of guilt so she could get a green card” storyline.

(Aside: the next show up on the Netflix list is Battlestar Galactica… there are 4 discs sitting on my entertainment center waiting for this stupid west coast swing for the Mets to be over. I can’t put into words how happy I was thirty seconds ago to find out that McClure’s on that show, too.)

It probably didn’t hurt Reaper that Smallville is ending its thousand-year run after next year. I presume they will heavily promote Reaper as the heir-apparent for the network’s sci-fi/comic geek junkies. It’s got Kevin Smith cred, after all. Right place, right time.

Also, I’m not sure what this says about the CW, but 5 of the top 10 DVRed shows are on this network. I guess this says something about the viewing patterns of the younger audience.

Grade: A, and you should be watching this if you’re not.

Kingdom Hospital was the short-lived, Stephen King penned television series that aired back in 2004 (or rather, Stephen King American adaptation of Danish miniseries “The Kingdom” penned by Lars von Trier). This is another case where I missed the first episode. I tried to watch the second episode but there were so many seemingly random things going on that it just wasn’t worth it. I figured that I missed way too much set-up in the first episode and if I saw it from the beginning things would make more sense.

I figured wrong.

As it turned out, Stephen King’s adaptation could have simply been titled “f*cked up fever dreams Stephen King had when he was in the hospital following his accident with as many inside references to his own works as he could fit in to a 13-episode series.” Surprisingly enough, this doesn’t work as well as you’d think.

The premise gives us a hospital, named Kingdom Hospital, in Lewiston, Maine. As it turns out, the hospital was built on top of an old, burned down hospital which which itself was built on top of an old, burned down textile factory. A group of children were caught in textile factory’s basement in the fire and died. As we all know, when children die on a site in a King novel, the site is poisoned forever.

As a fan of King’s works for a very long time, I have a feeling the series was written with people like me in mind… the problem is that a lot of the standard King archetypes work better in print because when you see them in reality they really seem kind of dumb. The crazy psychic old lady that no one listens to, the psychic people with Down’s syndrome, the creepy little ghost kid, the poisoned site: all of these things can be seen in various King works. They certainly don’t seem to work as well on the screen. I think there’s a reason for that: the picture that your mind paints when you’re reading about these supernatural things is invariably more realistic than what you can reproduce on the screen with a television budget. Think about King’s best “to screen” translations. Carrie, Cujo, and Pet Sematary were all very simple psychological thrillers. The Shawshank Redemption, The Green Mile, and Misery didn’t really involve special effects. Think about some of the worst. It did not translate. Neither version of Salem’s Lot really translated. Maybe on the drawing board a scary monster anteater named Anubis sounded like a good idea but it really didn’t work for me.

Of course, maybe a lot of that could have been saved with a solid storyline that covered all the episodes. We’ll never know as this one really didn’t. At one point the people in the ER break in to song and no one really mentions why. Later a lawyer is admitted and either he is having a dream about people forcing him to sign waivers during a heart attack or the people are actually doing it. In another scene, the anteater rips the lawyer’s heart out of his chest and we never see him again. I’m assuming he died but we don’t really know.

And, if nothing else proves that it was an extending chance for King to just do what he felt like: there was an entire episode based around the hospital “setting right” the Buckner play from the 1986 World Series. In the episode, “Buckner” was brought in to the hospital and given the chance to travel back in time and fix his mistake. If that wasn’t enough, the fact that the hospital gave him the chance to travel back in time was never really addressed.

All said, the entire series was a mess. Nothing led to anything else. Character’s jump in between the real world and the in-between with no real explanation. King fans used a lot of explanations for why this show didn’t catch on. People didn’t “get it”. They broke it up and aired the episode after long breaks. It was none of that. It just wasn’t that logical or good a show.

Recommendation to avoid. Up next: Battlestar!