Over the past week, I’ve been contacted about three new (or at least newish) web series. Vancouverites will recognize a bunch of locations in these first two. The first is a comedy called The Jim–here’s a teaser (rated PG for strong language):
The second is The Vetala, and seems to be a bit X-Files-esque. Aesthetically, this feels heavily influenced by Battlestar Galactica. Here’s the first episode:
The third is the slickest of the three, kind of a sci-fi show featuring a girl and her wolf entitled Riese. Again, the first episode–note the great costuming:
“Hung” is a new TV series from HBO starring Thomas Jane and Jane Adams. Thomas Jane stars as Ray Drecker, a down-on-his-luck, divorced Phys Ed teacher. As his ex-wife (played capably by Anne Heche) points out in a flashback scene, his one admirable attribute is that he’s well-endowed.
In an attempt to raise some money (to fix his house, to reclaim his children from his ex), he becomes a gigolo. Jane Adams plays Tanya, a sweaty, poor poet who becomes his pimp.
Fans of “Weeds” will recognize this premise: “Single parent in dire financial straits turns to socially unacceptable work and hilarity ensues”. Except that, in the case of “Hung”, hilarity definitely does not ensue. Its fatal flaw is that it’s simply not very funny. I watched the first episode of the newest season of “Weeds” last night, and there were more laughs in that show than four episodes of “Hung”. The writing isn’t particularly witty, and Thomas Jane doesn’t seem to be much of a comic actor.
The writing, I think, is at the core of the show’s problems. The characters are all caricatures: Jane plays a buffoon, Adams plays a hippy artist, Heche is the neurotic soccer man. “Weeds”, on the other hand, is populated with these nuanced, complex characters, and that’s often where the comedy stems from.
The writers also ask us to sympathize with Drecker, Jane’s character. This is tricky, because the protagonist is a jerk. Also, on a minor technical note, he’s depicted as pretty dimwitted. Yet in the second episode he uses the term ‘emasculated’ without missing a beat. This rang false to me.
There seems to be a fundamental law of television, that 80% of all potential greatness is locked inside 20% of the shows. That makes choosing what to watch easier, I suppose.
The other day, I watched two-part finale to season eight of Scrubs, cleverly entitled “My Finale, Part 1 and 2″. I assumed–and the episodes did nothing to dissuade me–that these were also the series finale. The final show was packed with the usual goodbyes and sentimentality that you expect from such last episodes. You can watch the last few minutes on YouTube.
As it turns out, there will apparently be another season of the quirky medical show. Wikipedia offers this explanation:
On June 19, 2009, it was announced that the reformatted ninth season of Scrubs would “shift from the hospital to the classroom and make med-school professors of John C. McGinley’s Dr. Cox and Donald Faison’s Turk.” According to Lawrence, the ninth season will “be a lot like Paper Chase as a comedy,” with Cox’s and Turk’s students occasionally rotating through the halls of Sacred Heart and encountering former series regulars.
The other leads, Zack Braff and Sarah Chalke, have apparently signed on for guest appearances in six episodes each.
Regardless, Scrubs got me thinking about other final episodes that I remember. There actually aren’t that many:
I remember the final episode of M*A*S*H as a particular sobfest. “Goodbye, Farewell and Amen”, as it happens, is still the most watched American television broadcast in history.
Cheers had a really classy ending, with Sam adjusting a photo of Geronimo near the piano, which has been on the set since Coach’s (Nicholas Colasanto) death.
I only vaguely recall the final episode of Buffy, which, in truth, felt a little rushed and (typically, I’d say) quite unsentimental.
In talking about TV finales with others, I remembered that the cast of Family Tiestook a curtain call at the end of their final episode, which was a nice touch.
Last night we were watching an episode of “Scrubs”. It featured an anime-eyed, ukelele playing actress who I vaguely recognized. Here she is in a romantic duet with the hapless, sweaty lawyer Ted:
Apart from being an actress, I remembered that she was in a musical comedy duo. I couldn’t remember their name, but I did recall the title of one of their songs: “Pregnant Women Are Smug”. Depending upon your state of mind, that video may either anger or amuse you. Proceed at your own risk.
So I started to google “pregnant women are”, and was amused by the possible results that Google suggested:
What an odd set of suggestions, eh? The results raised a related question in my mind: why would somebody phrase their search as “pregnant women are hot” or “pregnant women are moody”? It seems way more natural to search for “hot pregnant women” or “why are pregnant women moody?”
It’s not often I feature cat fights from Spanish (or maybe Latin American?) soap operas on this site, but Richard sent this along and I couldn’t resist. You have to watch until about the 1:10 mark, when there’s a rather unexpected turn of events.
I think all that hair helps to cover up the lousy fight choreography. Hey, Spanish speakers, what are they fighting about? A man, no doubt.
Julie and I recently finished watching season four of “How I Met Your Mother”. It’s obviously just “Friends” 2.0, but I’ve grown to enjoy it. I like how the show gets very post-modern with plots and time lines. Plus, of course, Neil Patrick Harris is kind of a revelation.
This season both of the female leads, Alyson Hannigan and Cobie Smulders, were pregnant. In the second half of the season, I enjoyed watching the meta-show of “Conceal the Pregnancies”. The show’s producers devised all sorts of creative strategies to hide the actresses’ growing bumps.
You’ve got the clothing options, which the show deployed early on. There’s the big flowy scarf, the loose-fitting shirt and the big dressing gown:
Several variations of the big bag:
The rather unconvincing newspaper:
The cereal box:
Finally, if you’re looking for something really formidable, just have the actor stand behind something solid, like a cooler:
Or, she can carry something and stand behind something:
In what I’d imagine to be a nod to this issue, both actress’s characters make a joke about being pregnant in the final episodes of this season. I’m not sure what the thesis would be, but there’s surely a Women’s Studies essay in the metaphor of hiding these women’s pregnancies. What’s the opposite of ‘emasculated’?
We’ve been involved with some interesting client projects lately, and I’ve been meaning to share them:
ActiveState recently announced a public beta for Workspace (not to be confused with the excellent, local co-working space), something we’re calling ‘instant infrastructure for managing software development projects’. It’s a set of hosted, customized tools–source control, project management, issue tracking, wikis, blogs, and so forth–aimed at small teams and individual developers. In addition to the collective wisdom and experience that ActiveState brings to the project, Workspace promises to spare developers the pain of manual setup, integration and the apparent endless tweaking associated with managing tools of this sort.
Our longtime client Nitobi announced a couple of exciting bits of news this week: they sold their session recording tool RobotReplay and became shareholders in BookRiff. Nitobi built BookRiff (we’ve done some work with them as well), and it looks pretty sweet. They haven’t gone public with their tool yet, but we’re psyched about it.
In other Capulet news, our first social media marketing bootcamps in Victoria and Vancouver sold out. So we’ve added second sessions for both Vancouver (June 23 - just one spot left) and Victoria (June 4).
While reading about the new History Channel series Life Without People (brief review: fun, highly derivative of the excellent World Without Us, but the movie-guy narration is ridiculously overblown), I happened upon a reference to the seventies BBC TV post-apocalyptic TV series Survivors. It turns out that they’re in the midst of remaking the series–they’re currently shooting season (which, in BBC terms, probably means six episodes) two.
I really dig post-apocalyptic works of art, so I immediately went looking to watch the remade series. I read on this (Official? Unofficial? Hard to tell) blog that season one was available on iTunes. Great, I thought, I’ve got some travel later in the week, I’ll plunk down my 20 bucks or whatever and download them.
Alas, “Survivors” is not available on iTunes Canada. Nor, as far as I can tell, is it available on the American or Canadian Amazon sites. I’d gladly pay for the show, even with iTunes’s imperfect system, but I can’t. What’s left? Illegally downloading the show using BitTorrent.
The Excellent Yet Distant Online Content Distribution Model
This is, of course, a very common complaint. Over the last decade, as Cory Doctorow likes to say, content producers must be ““dragged kicking and screaming to the money tree”. Farhad Manjoo reflects this ethos, and describes some of the reasons behind it, in his latest Slate article:
In my dreams, here’s what it would look like: a site that offers a huge selection—50,000 or more titles to choose from, with lots of Hollywood new releases, indies, and a smorgasbord of old films and TV shows. (By comparison, Netflix says it offers more than 100,000 titles.)
Things, of course, are even worse up here in the Canadian digital ghetto.
Last night I finally got a chance to watch the Battlestar Galactica finale. Early on in the show, at about the 2:00 mark, the camera pans across a futuristic cityscape. At one point it passes over an inlet or river. There’s a bridge in the foreground and a geodesic dome further back. Here’s a screen capture:
Does that remind anybody else of False Creek, the Cambie Street Bridge and Science World? I couldn’t find a perfectly analogous photo (I suppose I could install Google Earth and see how it looks), but this one gives a lower perspective:
Obviously the show is shot in Vancouver, and I’d imagine that the special effects are done locally, so it’s only natural that we might recognize bits of the city in the finished product. This is the first time, though, that I’ve noticed renderings of Vancouver in a CG-only shot.
Warning, Spoilers Ahead
As for the finale itself, I give it a ‘B’. Some random notes: the final battle was reasonably satisfying, in an SDF-1 Macross sort of way. In retrospect, I’m still unclear on why Hera was so important to everybody, practically speaking.
I’m glad they found Earth, but it was a bit silly when they’d already found an ‘Earth’. It seems highly implausible that, after four years of a brutal struggle for survival, that the humans would send all their remaining assets into the sun. But what do I know?
The bit with Gaius and Caprica 6 each having a kind of Swayze-esque ghost was charming the first time I saw it, but they pushed their luck. That whole present-day New York denouement to the denouement was incredibly cheesy, and really should have been cut.
My unanswered questions:
What was Starbuck in the fourth season? A corporeal angel? I noticed that nobody called her “Starbuck”, which I suppose meant something.
How many cylons are left? Aren’t there a bunch of baseships out there still, roaming the galaxy?
What will future generations of humans do when they find the lyrics to Dylan’s “All Along the Watchtower” written on some cave wall?
UPDATE: I spoke to a member of the visual effects team who said that since the Caprica City scenes are shot on location in Vancouver, it made sense to base the look of the CG city on Vancouver, but with a few extra “futuristic” buildings thrown in.
Last night I was watching an episode of “True Blood” on my laptop. In one scene, a character puts a CD on, and we hear the familiar strains of the Cowboy Junkies’ moody cover of the Velvet Underground’s “Sweet Jane”. Directors seem to love this song–I’ve heard it in movies and on TV almost as often as that darn cover of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow”.
Being a big geek, I wanted a closer look at the CD cover the character was holding. I took a screenshot–click for the large size:
It doesn’t look like any Junkies cover that I’ve ever seen. Of course, the CD’s owner is the kind of guy who would put the CD back in the wrong case. However, he’s also not the kind of guy who would own “The Trinity Sessions”, where this song originally appears. As you can see, I was troubled. Maybe the director wasn’t sure what song they’d use when they shot the scene?
As for “True Blood”, I’d give it a cautious thumbs up. It’s not brilliant television, but it’s got an offbeat, amusing story set against the creepy backdrop of rural Louisiana, a part of the world we rarely see on television.
