It's Super Bowl week, and Vidiots Jason Snell and Philip Michaels are here to talk about NFL Network, NFL Films, Super Bowl commercials, and the question of what show best fits in the post-Super Bowl time slot. Oh, and the autumn wind is a raider, pillaging just for fun.
TeeVee Podcast #5, 25-minute 8.6MB MP3
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As television fuses with the Internet and some TV shows become as profitable on DVD as they ever were being broadcast, things are getting really weird in the entertainment business.
Consider The Office, NBC's excellent comedy series. This season NBC has broadcast two episodes -- "Branch Closing" and "The Return" -- that were not the definitive versions of the episodes in question, but versions cut down in order to fit in today's standard "half-hour" time slot -- namely, just over 21 minutes.
This is not new, of course. Every TV show in America goes through a process where the have to cut (or even worse, pad) scenes until they can fit exactly in their time slots. And deleted scenes have been turning up on DVD sets for a while now.
What's different here is that the two Office episodes in question were instantly, immediately relegated to truncated status. By the next day, NBC.com was streaming and iTunes was selling a version of "Branch Closing" that ran nine minutes longer than the one shown on NBC, featuring whole other (funny!) subplots that never showed up on the Peacock proper. Likewise, "The Return" popped up online at seven minutes longer than the version shown the night before.
In syndication till the end of time, we'll no doubt see the truncated versions of these episodes, further truncated by the need to cram in even more ads. But on DVD, the extended versions will live forever as the true version of the episodes.
It's a weird situation. Despite having a high-definition version of "Branch Closing" on my TiVo, I chose instead to pay $2 for the full-length version on iTunes and watch that instead. It makes you wonder if this is just an isolated incident, or the beginning of a shearing process that will end up making what's broadcast on television just a teaser for much deeper material that will be offered to harder-core fans on the Internet or on DVD.
(Just a hypothetical here, but if you were a real fan of The Office and you knew that most of a season's episodes were going to be available in expanded form on iTunes, would you avoid the NBC version entirely and just buy a $35 Season Pass to the show? And maybe even watch it on a shiny new Apple TV?)
Here's another, weirder example. This week's Battlestar Galactica episode, "Taking a Break from All Your Worries," concluded (after the credits) with what Sci Fi referred to as a "bonus scene" from the episode. It was a cut-down version of a nearly three-minute long scene that the channel made available on the Web.
The "bonus scene" wasn't integrated into the episode, and doesn't appear in the iTunes download of the show. So it's probably more of a DVD bonus scene than part of an official, expanded episode.
Except for this: Galactica's so-called "bonus scene" is a scene I kept waiting for within the episode, one that I felt was a natural outgrowth of the other events in the episode. More than that, if it had been included it would've been one of the most powerful things in the entire episode -- much better than the lame jealousy/infidelity subplot that gave the episode its Cheers-referencing name.
And yet, it was instead tacked on as a marketing bonus to drive people to the Sci Fi web site. Was it a creative decision? A marketing one? Is that scene integral to the understanding of the series, or a complete apocryphal waste of time? I have no idea.
At least with The Office, I know that the version airing on NBC isn't necessarily the one I want to see. With Battlestar Galactica, I'm a little worried that some of the best stuff is getting shuffled off to the Web for marketing purposes instead of being put in the show where it belongs.
[Hat tips: tvtattle and Alan Sepinwall]
I don't know if you've been following the story about a Grey's Anatomy cast member who is in hot water after calling one of his castmastes a "faggot" not once but twice. I haven't been following it closely because Grey's Anatomy is only watched by one member of my home and she's not me.
Walking back home after dropping our son off at pre-school this morning, my wife and I were talking about Isaiah Washington's predicament. She wondered if it was reasonable to fire Washington for his offenses.
But here's my take, as someone who manages a staff of more than a dozen people. This is a guy who called a co-worker a "faggot" at their workplace. He got in trouble. And then, a few months later, he denied doing it and used the word again.
First time you use a homophobic slur against one of your co-workers, it's time for Human Resources to swoop in and give counseling. You give the employee a warning that this sort of behavior is unacceptable.
And if they deny it and do it again, you fire their ass on the spot.
It's an easy decision. It should've been made the moment this happened. Instead, ABC has continued to dither about the matter while Washington scrambles to apologize to everyone he can. And Grey's producer Shonda Rhimes has unforgivably been silent on the matter, not condemning Washington's behavior. Is it okay for anyone to use that word to describe a member of your cast, Shonda? What would you have done if a cast member had used a racial slur against Washington on the set?
Washington should apologize. And he should attempt to make amends so that he can repair his life and perhaps save his career.
But for this job? In this workplace? Forget it. As far as I'm concerned, he had his chance. He blew it. If I were his boss he'd be looking for a new job.
I was already interested in Drive, Fox's upcoming Lost-meets-Cannonball Run series, on the strength of creator Tim Minear. He's the sharp, imaginative writer who's had a hand in Angel, Firefly, Wonderfalls, and The Inside, fine shows all. And the premise -- a gaggle of strangers in a mysterious cross-country road race, each with their own motives -- sounds clever enough.
I got more interested when I heard that Minear would be reteaming for the series with Nathan Fillion, the lanky, charisma-intensive star of Firefly. The erstwhile Captain Mal Reynolds has proven himself adept at comedy and drama alike; it's hard enough for an actor to be either hilarious or terrifying, much less both within the confines of the same role, but Fillion did it time and again on Firefly, and he deserves better than the box-office ignominy in which he's been toiling since Serenity, the big-screen version of Firefly went lamentably belly-up. Any chance to see him back on TV on a weekly basis is definitely a good thing.
And I was probably far happier than I ought to be to learn today that Amy Acker, who did amazing work in a dual role on Angel, and was pretty much the single best thing about Alias's fifth season not named "Jack Bristow," will be recurring on Drive as well, as the missing wife of Fillion's character. To put it simply, "too much Amy Acker" is not a phrase I recognize as part of the English language.
And then, of course, I remembered that Drive is a show from Tim Minear, on Fox. Which, given Fox's habit of ruthlessly disposing of all three of Minear's previous shows before they had any chance to gain anything even remotely resembling an audience, means that the network has pretty much already decided to cancel it.
Ah, well -- take heart, Tim. I'll be watching. For all four episodes before Fox yanks Drive for, oh, Family Guy reruns, or Yet Another Inexpensive Hour Of: Let's Make Fun of People Who Can't Sing, And Also, Paula Abdul Is Totally Drunk.
Heck, go ahead and put me down for a DVD box set, would you? Just make sure it contains numerous, Acker-centric deleted scenes.
Apparently Muslim groups are mad about being villains on 24 again:
"The overwhelming impression you get is fear and hatred for Muslims," said Rabiah Ahmed, a spokeswoman for the Washington-based Council on American-Islamic Relations. She said Thursday she was distressed by this season's premiere. "After watching that show, I was afraid to go to the grocery store because I wasn't sure the person next to me would be able to differentiate between fiction and reality."
If there's someone at a local grocery store who can't differentiate between reality and TV, I think all of us are in danger. What if he sees me and thinks I'm one of The Others? Or is convinced that I'm actually a Cylon? Or -- it chills me blood just to think of it -- that I'm a cast member on Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip?
Also, this message to Muslim activist groups: I understand your point. You are afraid of being stereotyped and racially profiled as terrorists, when we all know that a very, very, indescribably tiny percentage of all the world's Muslims are terrorists.
But let's also not forget that most of the terrorist attacks in the world today are performed by Islamist terrorists. What's 24 supposed to do, pretend the terrorists are Pastafarians from Planet Zeta 3?
I'm pretty sure 24 isn't going to do an alien invasion until Day 10.
But the good news is, he's also honest.
And... we're back.
