August 2005 Archives

Caught Prison Break this week -- the first premiere of the fall season, no less! My short review: I liked it enough to be willing to watch another episode, but I'm not sold yet.

It certainly doesn't have the weight of a Lost, but Prison Break may have the chance to pull off the same ridiculous, credulity-stretching thrill ride that 24 excels at.

My major complaint: I want more of the guy who's breaking out of prison, and less of the shadowy conspiracy people outside the prison's walls. Oh, and a lot less of Condemned John Doe's lawyer ex-girlfriend.

It's fun to see a show with such a high concept make it on the air, though. If they can pull it off, and keep moving the story along from week to week as if we're just watching a really long movie, it'll be a beauty to behold.

But I'm not making it a Season Pass on my TiVo just yet.

Since it’s the top-rated TV show in America, I guess I’m not making much of a confession when I say that I watch American Idol. And I enjoy Idol a lot, despite being annoyed by a few of the flaws in its premise. Last season’s rejiggering of the show’s middle weeks was a big improvement.

These past few years, American Idol has spawned several uninspired knock-offs, including the nobody-asked-for-it resurrection of Star Search. The only reality show in the ballpark with Idol in terms of both quality and ratings is the show that started it all, Survivor.

Leave it to Mark Burnett, the man behind Survivor (and a few Survivor clones), to beat American Idol at its own game. Rock Star: INXS has many faults — some of them pretty serious — and it’s hardly setting the ratings on fire. But as pure entertainment, Rock Star blows away American Idol on almost every level.

Part of the show’s success has to do with its method of choosing contestants. Burnett, a master of reality-show casting, filled Rock Star with a collection of talented singers, many of whom have previously fronted rock bands with actual recording contracts, actual records, and even actual hit songs. In contrast, American Idol is populated with undiscovered amateurs. The result: Rock Star’s top six singers would be competitive with the six best American Idol singers collected over four seasons.

Rock Star’s also more lively than Idol, which has always been fashioned as a family show. Rock Star has more of an edge — we seen the contestants living a bit of the rock-star life in the show’s L.A. mansion, drinking, smoking, fighting, and generally living it up. Sure, Rock Star seems to believe in a vision of the rock scene as it was in the ’60s and ’70s — the sort of “let’s rock!” attitude that you’ve seen taken to extremes by Spinal Tap and Jack Black. It’s mildly ridiculous, but it’s still got a life that you don’t see from fresh-faced youngsters doing wacky skits about how much they love their Ford Focus.

The result of the show’s rock focus and its better cast of performers seems to be that the show has been able to put together a much better collection of songs than those performed on Idol. The Rolling Stones, the Beatles, Pink Floyd, Queen, Nirvana — the set lists of the weekly Rock Star performance shows are consistently good. Compare that to some of the embarrassing song choices you hear every week on Idol.

Sure, it’s funny to hear the band at the center of Rock Star: INXS referred to as an “international supergroup,” when in fact INXS is more likely to be languishing in the “Where Are They Now?” file. But Burnett was smart when he chose INXS: the band’s surviving members are personable — I particularly enjoy that the drummer can’t help but play air-drums as songs are performed — and INXS really does have a better catalog than those of us who only remember “What You Need” might realize.

And having INXS present in every episode gives the show a razor-sharp focus that Idol also lacks: the winner of Idol gets… what exactly? A record contract? But some of those winners haven’t really done anything, and several runners-up seem to have even better shots at stardom than the singers who beat them. Rock Star, meanwhile, is searching for a very specific person: the person who will front INXS on a world tour and sing on its forthcoming album. So in that way (much like Burnett’s own The Apprentice), Rock Star is an extended job interview— er, audition. And contestants can’t just get ahead by sucking up to the voters — they’ve got to impress their prospective bandmates as well.

Which leads to perhaps the best example of why Rock Star is a better show than Idol: the “results show.” American Idol follows up its entertaining performance show one day later with a program that is quite possibly the biggest waste of time to hit American television screens since Geraldo Rivera opened Al Capone’s empty vault on live TV. It’s 29 minutes of goofy skits, up-with-people group performances, and painful stalling for time, and then one minute that reveals which contestant will be sent home. If you have a TiVo, the Idol results show is a watchable couple of minutes. If you don’t, then watching the results show has a similar effect to several noxious plants once used by Native Americans in ritual ceremonies. Kids, don’t try this at home.

The Rock Star results show, in contrast, is a purely entertaining half-hour. (In the past couple of weeks, the show’s been expanded to a full hour, with the addition of some padding, but not as much as you’d think.) Unlike Idol, which inexplicably forces the audience to listen to the lowest vote-getter reprise the song that got them voted out of the tribe, Rock Star rewards the previous night’s best performance with an encore.

Then there’s the matter of the voting. In Idol, the three lowest vote-getters are revealed as a stalling tactic, manufacturing some drama until the final loser is revealed. In Rock Star, the public’s votes only have the effect of choosing the three contestants who must sing to survive. Then the three low vote-getters perform a song from the INXS catalog, allowing the band to judge which one of them is the worst fit and most deserving of elimination. Then the singer’s eliminated, a la The Apprentice, right down to an eye-rolling catch phrase. (“You’re just not right for our band, INXS.” Talk about product placement.)

As a result, the Rock Star results show features a good encore performance and three taut, emotion-charged new performances by people who are singing to stay on the show. And by moving the final choice for which performer to cut from the hands of the public to the hands of the show’s judges, it gives the judges a valuable job. (Cowell, Abdul and Jackson, as entertaining as they are, are basically as integral to Idol’s endgame as a vestigal third nipple.)

I mentioned that Rock Star had many faults, and it’s worth pointing them out in the hopes that the show will return next year. Top of the list is the show’s host, Brooke Burke. Burke may look pretty in some of the skanky outfits the show dresses her in, but her robotic readings of the text on her teleprompter are painful to behold. As annoying as Ryan Seacrest — out! — can be, he is a capable host who comes across as a real person with legitimate reactions to what’s going on around him. Burke, in contrast, seems like one of those omnipotent computer-beings Captain Kirk always used to encounter (and destroy through diabolical fits of illogic): unplug her script and all she’d be able to say would be, “Error! Error! Error!”

The show’s co-host, guitarist Dave Navarro, is pretty creepy, but he’s grown on me. Navarro’s place in the show is to identify with the singers and serve almost as their emissary to the rest of the show. He’s a bit too effusive with his post-performance praise, but he’s not the half of the hosting team that worries me.

Finally, there’s INXS themselves. The show treats them like rock royalty, when in reality they’re a step down from Duran Duran and only a couple steps up from Cutting Crew and Mr. Mister. The performances on Rock Star’s results shows have convinced me that INXS really does have some good pop-rock songs in its catalog, and I’m sure the band’s already made a fortune in record sales based on that exposure. But it’s a bit ridiculous to treat them as if they were the Beatles, or Pink Floyd, or even Journey.

But that’s a minor quibble. Even with the animatronic form of Brooke Burke sucking all the oxygen out of the room, Rock Star: INXS is the best new reality show in ages, and exposes many of American Idol’s faults. Idol is still fun to watch, but it’ll truly be a disappointment if Rock Star doesn’t return next summer to give the nation’s #1 TV show another kick in the premise.

I've been called out in the past for my entirely irrational enthusiasm for UPN's Veronica Mars.

In my own defense, it seems I'm not alone.

I finally got a chance the other night to watch last Friday’s episode of SciFi’s Stargate SG-1 — and experienced a pretty weird moment of geek dissonance.

So there’s Stargate regular Michael Shanks as Dr. Daniel Jackson … alongside Ben Browder and Claudia Black of the late, lamented Farscape (the only reason I’m watching in the first place) … and for some reason, Shanks and Browder are done up in so-similar-they’ve-gotta-be-a-homage replicas of Malcolm Reynolds’ space cowboy gear from Joss Whedon’s Firefly. (This may have been an excuse to get Browder back in the sort of tight pants his female fans apparently have strong positive feelings about.)

And then Wallace Shawn shows up. Yes, Vizzini from “The Princess Bride.” Talk about inconceivable. I felt like I tuned in for a TV show and got fan fiction instead.

As for the show in general… eh, it could be worse. Browder’s one of those actors you can’t go wrong with. Even if he’s basically playing a more superficial version of Farscape’s John Crichton, he seems to be having a grand time of it, which makes the show’s carbon-copy plots and aren’t-we-cute attempts at humor a lot more palatable.

Black has been valiantly playing against type as a flirty thief named Vala, and she’s just as fun to watch as Browder. But there’s little more to her character than a few straps of leather and an endless string of really bad sex jokes. Her work on Farscape proved her a hugely classy and talented actress, even in the most bizarre situations. Having her done up as shameless nerd bait seems somewhat beneath her dignity.

Shanks and Christopher Judge — who seems to be playing Mr. Spock’s NFL-linebacker cousin, Teal’c — are pleasant enough. Shanks has good comic timing and admittedly sharp chemistry with Black, while Judge seems to have mastered the Vulcan art of the dry one-liner. Former star Richard Dean Anderson, in his few brief appearances before exiting the series for good, has seemed bored to the point of stupefaction, delivering emotionless lines while scanning the horizon for his paycheck. For shame, MacGyver! Apparently there’s also someone named Amanda Tapping in the cast, but she seems to be on pregnancy leave for the nonce. Or perhaps her character’s invisible?

On the whole, I’ve got to roll my eyes at the show’s loving emphasis on bureaucracy. The galaxy is threatened! I’ll start the paperwork — you form an exploratory committee! And don’t forget, we’ve got a funding hearing coming up, so if you could push back the alien invasion until the 25th, that’d be great.

Then there’s the vague sense that while girls may be pretty to look at, they’re kind of weird and icky if you actually have to talk to them about something other than science. (Daniel Jackson spurns Vala’s not-unreasonable advances with an almost pathological fervor — which kinda makes one wonder about those long glances he and Teal’c share.) Who knows? Perhaps this sort of thing satisfies the legions of regional managers and software engineers who’ve made this show such a ratings success. It just makes me feel slightly ashamed for tuning in, Browder or no Browder.

Then again, I’ve also been enjoying the new Battlestar Galactica, with its refreshing balance of theology, politics, characterization and GIGANTIC KILLER ROBOTS. Considering the shaggy-haired awfulness of its source material — and the riveting excellence of the new series — perhaps my shame threshhold needs an adjustment.

I am a geek. Also, arguably, a nerd. If you take a look at the articles I’ve written for this fine website, you will probably notice a preponderance of reviews of terrible science fiction shows. And I stand by my praise of The Secret Adventures of Jules Verne, too: that show was nothing but fun. Fun with an airship! What I’m saying is that I like science fiction shows, and I traditionally don’t mind if the special effects budget is a little thin. Or, indeed, completely nonexistent.

And yet, I’ve never been into Doctor Who. I’ve even poked gentle fun (or, depending on your definition, “viciously mocked”) those who revere the venerable BBC series. I think the main reason is that I never got to see it during my vulnerable childhood years, when my standards were even lower than they are now. So I’d hear about this legendary show called Doctor Who, but my local PBS station (note to youngsters: this was when “cable television” meant you had access to an amazing twenty or so stations) had a fairly limited BBC lineup: just Monty Python, Fawlty Towers, and perhaps a bit of Blake’s Seven and Are You Being Served?

So I didn’t get to see Doctor Who until relatively late in life. It was just something that resulted in a lot of books at the end of the local bookstore’s Science Fiction section, plus maybe somebody at the San Diego Comic Con would show up in a weird costume. Except the Comic Con is in the middle of summer, so it was pretty rare for anyone to actually commit to the great big scarf. The point is that it only existed as a rumor. Somewhere out there was something called Doctor Who, and it was supposed to be absolutely essential.

Then I saw a few minutes of it. That’s a Dalek? This is classic science fiction television? You’re kidding, right? Look at the sets! Look at the “amazing” way things disappear because they stopped the camera for a second. This is terrible! I didn’t understand how even people raised on the original Star Trek — hell, people raised on Tom Corbett, Space Cadet — could buy this show, let alone consider it a classic.

And that brings us up to the present, or at least a month or two ago, when I started watching the new Doctor Who episodes. It hasn’t officially aired in the United States yet, but it turns out that Seattle cable television includes CBC, which originates in Canada. So I got to see it well after it aired in the UK, but still probably before it shows up in the US proper. And I like it. I like it a lot!

The good news is that while they’ve upgraded the special effects, they don’t seem to have monkeyed with the basic concepts: The Doctor (incidentally, one of the things that still bugs me is that it’s a show called Doctor Who with a main character called “The Doctor” — and I’m not supposed to call him “Doctor Who”. Is this one of things that fans use to keep outsiders out?) has a police box that’s bigger on the inside than the outside, he travels through time a bit, and so on. I wouldn’t have been surprised if they were just looting the concept for a whole new “reimagined” show, but they’ve even brought in Daleks. And made them scary! That’s practically impossible!

I also enjoy the performance of Christopher Eccleston as the Doctor. He’s a jerk! And I mean a real jerk. I approve of shows where the lead character is actively unpleasant to people (like in House except that I keep imagining Hugh Laurie as Bertie Wooster, which makes it harder to take him seriously as a genius). And I think it’s interesting that the Doctor has been played by nine different people. And that they really are extremely different.

Because I’m not entirely familiar with the Doctor Who mythos, I’ve never really understood the whole multiple-Doctor thing. I know that occasionally the actor is replaced (like how Eccleston is leaving and David Tennant is taking over next season), but to what degree is it the same character? In order to answer this question, I got one of my friends (who’s really into Doctor Who) to loan me a few DVDs. The only one I’ve watched so far is “The Three Doctors”, in which the first three men to play the Doctor interact. I approve of complicated time travel tricks.

Unfortunately, for a guy with a time machine, the Doctor doesn’t do near as much time traveling as I’d hoped. He seems to mostly use the Tardis to show up at the plot and to leave at the end of the story. But that’s somewhat off the subject of “The Three Doctors”, I guess. Tell you what: pretend this paragraph is a visitor from a different time, where it fits in much better.

“The Three Doctors” is formally from the era of the Third Doctor — it seems like in all the shows where a Doctor meets his other selves, he meets previous incarnations; it’s probably too much work to have him meet somebody who’s going to play the Doctor a few years later — and when the Second Doctor shows up, it looks like they don’t recognize or like each other at all. So I guess when the Doctor dies, he regenerates a new body who’s the same person, except that he doesn’t have continuity of memory, personality, or body. This is weird, complicated, and almost impossible to either understand or justify, and I therefore strongly approve of it. It ain’t science fiction if it all makes sense.

I enjoyed “The Three Doctors”, although apparently the gentleman who played the First Doctor was too sick to show up on the same set as the other two, which was disappointing. Also disappointing: the terrible, terrible special effects. Yes, I know it was a million years ago (1973) but… man. However, since I enjoyed the parts of the show that weren’t monsters or special effects, I think I’ll probably at least watch a few shows from the Tom Baker era.

Yes, I’m basically doing homework on thirty-year-old sci-fi shows so that I can better understand a new sci-fi show that’s not even being aired in this country. I told you I was a geek.