February 2007 Archives
By Nathan Alderman – February 27, 2007
You can measure NBC’s desperation to escape the stink of pure crazy rising off the once-promising Studio 60 by the frequency with which they’ve promoted the show that’s stepping into its time slot, The Black Donnellys. If you spent even a single half hour of the past few months watching NBC in primetime, chances are you caught one of the network’s ads for the series, begging you with all the subtle delicacy of a sledgehammer blow to watch “the next great NBC drama.” (The NBC Promotions Department: There’s Nothing We Can’t Oversell!) Or, more accurately, the next next great NBC drama, seeing how the last next great NBC drama is busy imploding under the weight of Aaron Sorkin’s ego.
Paul Haggis was responsible for two of my all-time favorite TV shows, Due South and the criminally underseen EZ Streets, both of which combined offbeat humor and stark drama with deceptively complex characters. If the pilot’s any judge, Donnellys, from Haggis and his Crash cohort Bobby Moresco, is at best half as good as either of those series, and just promising enough to disappoint.
It’s got a brief, brash, lovely title sequence with a stylishness too rarely seen on TV, and at times, the same haunted, lonely middle-of-the-night feeling that distinguished South and especially Streets. And the pilot makes mostly amusing use of its unreliable narrator, pausing, altering, or even rewinding the events onscreen — even if the gimmickry involved feels at odds with the grimmer subject matter. Lead Jonathan Tucker’s got the charisma to carry a series — maybe not this series, but a series — and designated love interest Olivia Wilde gives a surprisingly strong performance, even if her preternatural good looks seem completely out of place in the show’s working-class world.
Alas, these advantages are utterly wasted by a pilot that suggests Haggis and Moresco got a 12-pack of Guinness and a couple of Pogues albums, put on a DVD of Goodfellas, and started taking notes. Especially in EZ Streets, Haggis demonstrated a knack for pitting two characters of equal sympathy against one another, and wringing nail-biting suspense out of the moral choices each faced. (See for yourself, courtesy of BrilliantButCancelled.com.) Here, alas, we get nothing so nuanced. The Black Donnellys, at least in its pilot, is a show about hateful idiots doing stupid, destructive things for absolutely no reason we can fathom.
Even at the hour’s end, I could barely tell the four leading brothers apart, except maybe that one was the good one, one was the inexplicable chick magnet, one was the compulsive gambler, and one was the crippled, short-tempered, violence-prone criminal heroin addict. (Overdoing it much?) These character traits, by the way, are all helpfully dictated to us by the narrator, in case we might happen to be blind, deaf, mentally incapacitated, or watching an entirely different series at the time. All of these knuckleheads do dumb, illegal things on a fairly constant basis, with their only apparent motivation being that they’re Irish, they live in New York City, and they’ve probably been drinking. When your main characters’ defining — heck, only — characteristics could fill a Post-it note with room left over for an entire grocery list, you’re already in trouble.
But wait! The stereotypes don’t stop there! We’ve got the grizzled old Italian mob boss! His sleek, sharkish enforcer, eager to fit the old ways with cement shoes and make with the bloodshed! The weaselly snitch who wishes he were one of the guys! And while Haggis’s previous shows reveled in turning such TV stereotypes on their heads, all of these guys behave exactly like you expect them to, which pretty much kills any suspense from the get-go.
When the ostensibly likeable lead character commits a repugnant and frankly stupid act at episode’s end, it doesn’t feel so much tragic as inevitable, and we don’t feel an ounce of sympathy for him before, during, or after. And when the lovely girl-next-door tells our hero “I love you” and “I’m a married woman, so nothing can ever happen between us” in the same breath, we’re left insulted by the unlikelihood of that statement and baffled as to why she’d say so in the first place.
I judged Heroes too harshly, based on its awful pilot, so I’m willing to stick around and give Donnellys a few weeks to change my mind. I like the overall stylishness of the series, and the small, human details it slips in around the edges of its paint-by-numbers storyline. (Plus? Wilde is admittedly easy on the eyes.) But right now, I’m not seeing “the next great NBC drama” so much as “Oscar winners half-assedly slumming for easy paychecks.” If I wanted to see a weekly hour of thoroughly unlikeable people making incredibly dumb decisions, I’d watch reality TV. Or, you know, Studio 60.
By The Vidiots – February 26, 2007
Dissecting the Oscars with Philip Michaels, Lisa Schmeiser, and Jason Snell. Our podcast doesn’t run as long as the Oscarcast, but it’ll feel like it!
TeeVee Podcast #6, 35-minute 8.4MB AAC file.
You can play back the AAC file with iTunes or even VLC. MP3 diehards like Rywalt can find a file to satisfy you behind this link. You can subscribe via iTunes — and write a scathing review, even! — or via conventional RSS feed.
By Jason Snell – February 4, 2007
A personal take on the best commercials of the Super Bowl:
GM’s Robot, where a forlorn car-assembly robot dreams of the terrible life that would await it if it were to lose its job. Funny, cute, and more than a little bit dark.
CBS’ house ad for Late Show With David Letterman, the perfect reunion of Dave (Indianapolis) and Oprah (Chicago).
Coke’s Grand Theft Auto parody, in which the protagonist of the would-be violent video game instead does good deeds and brings flowers and puppies to all.
Garmin’s Ultraman spot, which takes me back to my childhood days as a viewer of Captain Cosmic, in which a GPS-equipped Ultraman defeats the evil Map Monster.
Emerald Nuts’ brilliant Robert Goulet ad, in which Goulet is apparently a stand-in for low blood sugar.
The rare funny beer ad, Budweiser’s Crabs were funny even though it was sort of a riff on “Toy Story’s” little rubber aliens.
And finally, my vote for the lamest ad of the Super Bowl: Revlon’s Sheryl Crow ad, which made me feel what it would be like to watch a documentary about a singer being convinced to color her hair in exchange for a commercial endorsement. The answer? It feels like death.
By Philip Michaels – February 3, 2007
According to rough estimates by AC Nielsen and Company, roughly 7 billion Americans will be watching Super Bowl XLI on CBS this Sunday. (Editor’s Note: That 7 billion figure was selected at random, as we are too lazy to look things up.) So what better use of energy than to chronicle all the things those people won’t be watching while their eyes are affixed on the Colts-Bears throwdown?
The Broadcast Channels
After the obligatory Simpsons rerun at 7 p.m. — really, Fox could never air another original episode of The Simpsons again, and it might take us years to find out — Fox treats us to X2: X-Men United, the casually-paced, overly loud middle installment of the X-Men trilogy.
After trotting out Extreme Makeover and America’s Funniest Home Videos repeats — the Mouse Ear’s moral equivalent of Simpsons’ reruns — it’s time for a 9 p.m. showing of Old School — the sort of movie aimed squarely at the kind of people who will be watching Peyton Manning and Brian Urlacher over on CBS.
NBC figures you’ll want to watch four solid hours of Grease: You’re the One That I Want repeats beginning at 7 p.m. NBC figures wrong. But not nearly so wrong as the CW which turns to a three-hour Beauty and the Geek marathon to make that dull, stabbing pain in your right temple just a little bit more acute.
The Cable Networks
As always, the sports channels are giving up the ghost on Super Bowl Sunday. After a 12:30 p.m. PT Dog Show, ESPN features five hours of figure skating. (ESPN Classic offers “classic” figure skating — in which “classic” is defined as “post-2004 footage we happen to have on hand” — from 10 a.m PT through 5 p.m.) ESPN2 may be dropping the numeral from its name — that’s going to cause some confusion — but it remains your one-stop shop for World’s Strongest Man coverage, beginning at 1:30 p.m. PT and wrapping up long after celebratory riots have consumed the cities of Chicago and/or Indianapolis. Versus, the channel formerly known as Outdoor Life offers alternating showings of the 2007 Dakar Rally and Bull Riding, presumably for an audience who finds football a trifle too mainstream for its tastes.
Other channels respond to the prospect of a Super Bowl by trotting out a marathon of programs and then heading over to a local bar to watch the game themselves. Such is the case at E!; at 2 p.m., the network offers five straight installments of 101 Even Bigger Celebrity Oops!, which I am almost sure is just a random combination of words jammed together to mask the creative desperation.
TNT hands things over to The Closer starting at 11 a.m. — it apparently takes The Closer 12 hours to wrap things up. USA also devotes half the day to Monk reruns, though Adrian Monk gets a one-hour jump on The Closer with a 10 a.m. start time.
On the Sci-Fi Channel, Ghost Hunters begin looking for spooks and specters at 9 a.m. on Sunday; those phantoms must be hard to find, as the Ghost Hunters plan to keep at it until back-to-back episodes of The Dresden Files start at 9 p.m. Meanwhile, CourtTV features eight episodes of Forensic Files starting at 6 p.m.
The Hallmark Channel has six episodes of Little House on the Prairie beginning at noon. It would take me until 8 p.m. that evening just to contemplate the majesty of Michael Landon’s hair. On the other hand, 12 hours of What Not to Wear (The Learning Channel) feels like 11 hours and 59 minutes too much if you ask me; then again, I’m not the target audience for this block of programming beginning at 2 p.m. I was also not aware that there was enough information on knitting to fill one half-hour program, let alone 10-and-a-half hours; nevertheless, DIY has a Knitty Gritty marathon starting at 1:30 p.m.
After hastening the decline of Western Civilization from 2 p.m. to 6 p.m. with Surreal Life Fame Games, VH-1 goes for the kill shot with four episodes of the execrable I Love New York at 6:30 p.m. SpikeTV would rather we focus our hatred on our four-legged friends with back-to-back episodes of When Animals Attack (4 p.m.) followed by a doubleheader of When Good Pets Go Bad (6 p.m.).
You know who everyone wants to spend the Super Bowl with? Paula Deen. What — you don’t want to? Well, then better not tell the Food Network, which is airing seven hours of Paula’s Party (starting at 2 p.m.) featuring the down-home gourmand. Speaking of food, if you’re serving any at your Super Bowl Party, you are advised to avoid surfing past the Discovery Channel between 4 p.m. and 3 a.m. when sure-to-be-stomach-churning episodes of Surgery Saved My Life are airing.
After a spate of comedies aimed at chicks and people who hate laughter — Father of the Bride at 11 a.m., its piteous sequel at 1 p.m., and Legally Blonde at 3 p.m. — TBS offers six-and-a-half hours of My Boys, an actually sitcom about a woman who enjoys hanging out with guys and watching sports. (“But won’t women who enjoy hanging out with guys and watching sports be watching the Super Bowl instead of this virtually unheard of show?” you ask. Shut up, TBS responds.)
Also unclear on the concept of effective counter-programming is ABC’s Family Channel which stares down the biggest sporting event of the year with movies about… sports. Granted, one’s a film about ice skating (The Cutting Edge 2: Going for the Gold at 4 p.m.) and the other asks you to believe that Freddie Prinze Jr. can throw an effective split-fingered fastball (Summer Catch at 6 p.m.), but still, who are you trying to get to tune in here? People who hate sports so much that they want to watch Freddie Prinze Jr. play sports in a not-very-convincing fashion? I would like to read your internal memos defending this decision, please.
BBCAmerica knows who will be channel-surfing on Sunday, however. It starts showing Footballers Wives at 10 a.m. and does not let up until the whistle sounds in Miami.
BET offers two marathons on one day — you can watch four episodes The Wayans Brothers starting at 3 p.m. followed by four episodes of The Jamie Foxx Show at 5 p.m. That’s probably four more episodes of each show than you watched when both were on network TV. A&E — no arts, very little entertainment — follows suit with four episodes of King of Cars at noon, followed by six hours of Cold Case Files at 2 p.m. TVLand goes with a one-two punch of westerns: three hours of Bonanza at 1 p.m. and four hours of Gunsmoke at 4 p.m.
It’s a not a marathon per se, but anytime you read an episode description of Beverly Hills 90210 (5 p.m., Soap Opera Channel) that begins, “Dylan has a jet-ski accident,” attention must be paid.
Bravo is all over the map on Sunday, starting with five hours of The Real Housewives of Orange County at noon, a repeat broadcast of its latest Project Runway-knockoff Top Design at 5 p.m., and eight hours of Law & Order: Criminal Intent at 6 p.m. Know what all those shows have in common? They’re all on Bravo.
The Biography Channel starts showing Poirot movies at 7 a.m. Sunday morning and doesn’t stop until the wee small hours of Monday. The Cartoon Network goes for a more animated mystery-solver with a series of Scooby Doo specials airing from 1 p.m. to 10 p.m. (Don’t try any funny stuff promoting these Scooby Doo specials, Cartoon Network. We’ve got our eye on you.)
In lieu of compelling counter-programming, just trot out whatever movies you happen to have in your tape library. That seems to be the operating theory over at FX, where The Stepford Wives (4:30 p.m.) gives way at 6:30 p.m. to all three-and-a-half-hours of The Green Mile. Things are much more dire at Comedy Central where the edited-to-ribbons edition of Fast Times at Ridgemont High (3:30 p.m) leads into the can’t-be-truncated-enough airing of My Boss’s Daughter (5:30 p.m.), followed by the I-must-have-been-sick-the-one-day-this-was-in-theaters broadcast of The Sweetest Thing (7:30 p.m.)
AMC — the “C” no longer stands for “Classic” — offers Romancing the Stone at 4:15 p.m. (sort of a classic), Lake Placid at 6:15 p.m. (not at all a classic), and Ladder 49 at 8 p.m (what — are you kidding me?).
On IFC, enjoy The Cooler — the single worst movie I have watched in the last five years — at 6 p.m. That’s followed at 7:50 p.m. by Jerry and Tom — if you tune in expecting to see the antics of a cat and mouse, you will be bitterly disappointed.
Nothing delights me more than seeing what women-in-peril counter-programming the folks at Lifetime trot out opposite the Super Bowl. I’m a little disappointed with this year’s offerings…
Dawn Anna: A woman (Debra Winger) who recently survived a near-fatal illness must contend with her child’s death in the Columbine shootings. (3 p.m.)
The Good Girl: A small-town Texas Wife (Jennifer Aniston) who wants more out of life becomes infatuated with a new co-worker. (5 p.m.)
Bastard Out of Carolina: An illegitimate child endures increasing sadistic beating from her mother’s (Jennifer Jason Leigh) second husband in the ’50s south. (7 p.m.)
Enough with the quality flicks starring respected actresses, Lifetime — where are the movies about women standing strong after undergoing the heartbreak of bigamy? Where are the made-for-TV offerings featuring Markie Post or Marg Helgenberger or Mel Harris? Where are the Mother, May I Sleep with Dangers? For shame, Lifetime — this is your counter-programming lollapalooza and you blew it. Take a cue from your sister channel, Lifetime Movie Network, which is showing tripe like The Only Witness (“A girl’s life is in danger after she witnesses a murder that may be part of a conspiracy.”), and A Matter of Justice (“The mother of a slain Marine tries to find her son’s killer and gain custody of her only grandchild.”) That’s women in peril, baby.
Oxygen gets the counter-programming concept. They’re showing Beaches, once at 5 p.m. and again at 7:30 p.m. Now there’s a movie no one with an XY chromosome sequence would want to watch.
Ah, but the grand prize for Super Bowl counter-programming genius goes once again to Animal Planet. For the third year in a row, the cable channel is airing Puppy Bowl, three hours of footage of adorable doggies frolicking with chew toys aired on a continuous loop from 3 p.m. to 3 a.m. It’s the Super Bowl Sunday equivalent of the televised yule log.
By Nathan Alderman – February 2, 2007
That’s the best way I can describe Comedy Central’s darkly whimsical The Sarah Silverman Program. Bright and cheery on the surface, deeply sick and wrong underneath, it’s thankfully more than a mere showcase for the irrepressibly potty-mouthed Silverman; it’s a half-hour trip into the comedienne’s own private land of Oz — the magical-kingdom Oz, not the sordid penitentiary Oz, although there are abundant hints of that, too.
For the most part, I find the things Silverman says — basically, just a list of all the words you would have snickered uncontrollably at in third grade, on an endless loop — not nearly as funny as the way she says them. She’s just too damn adorable, and she knows it, delivering the most blisteringly filthy and insensitive gags with a sweet-faced and unwavering facade. (Mr. Show, the surreal HBO sketch comedy series on which Silverman occasionally appeared, had a similarly gee-golly approach to vulgarity, with equal success.) The disconnect between her winsome looks and six-year-old-hooker-on-meth sensibilities is her greatest comedic weapon, and it’s showcased well here.
The Sarah Silverman Program has the star playing an unemployed, chronically selfish, lunatic version of herself, living with her marginally more normal sister Laura (played by, well, her sister Laura), across the hall from two geeky gay neighbors (Mr. Show vet Brian Posehn and Steve Agee, heterosexuals both). In the pilot, a case of the sniffles leads Sarah to an alluring bottle of orange cough syrup; it not only transports her to a magical stop-motion-animated wonderland, but kicks off her one-woman rampage of jealous destruction when Laura falls for her arresting officer (Jay Johnson, continuing a string of superb straight-man work from Mr. Show and Arrested Development).
Silverman’s funny on her own, but her acidic and sometimes grating comedy is best in small doses. Thankfully, her show’s got two secret weapons: Rob Schrab and Dan Harmon. Longtime writing partners, Harmon and Schrab got their first taste of the big time by penning the script for last summer’s Monster House, but away from the Hollywood spotlight, they’ve been honing their comedy talents as the co-founders of Channel 101, an L.A.-based showcase for five-minute, zero-budget homebrewed TV shows.
Saturday Night Live’s Andy Samberg and his Lonely Island cohorts got their big break through The ‘Bu, their merciless Channel 101 skewering of The O.C. Schrab most notably created the Peanuts-on-LSD saga Twigger’s Holiday, while Harmon’s been the driving force behind a number of clever and hilarious series, from Computerman (starring an underpants-clad Jack Black) to Laser Fart, the epic saga of a superhero who, well, guess.
Their Channel 101 experience pays off big time here. Schrab’s direction gives the pilot the childish energy and colorful, confident visual style it needs, and his and Harmon’s contributions to the writing populate Silverman’s off-kilter world with memorably bizarre throwaway lines and funny, charming characters. Posehn and Agee (another Channel 101 vet, among several to appear) are particularly delightful as the manliest TV homosexuals this side of The Wire’s Omar Little, and their episode-closing declaration of their total gayness for one another is no less sweet for being completely hilarious.
As half-hour comedies go, The Sarah Silverman Program is a welcome breath of fresh, filthy air. It doesn’t just avoid the typical sitcom cliches; it beats them senseless with a golf club, sets them on fire, and then proceeds to make up a silly, catchy little song about the whole endeavor while dancing around their smoldering remains. Silverman’s mugging sometimes threatens to wear thin, but it’s considerably leavened by her place as the unrepenetant jackass of the series — the crazed, overgrown toddler around whose gravitational pull this entire universe warps.
If you watch this show, you’ll likely laugh loudly, and often, which is about all you can ask of a sitcom. If you don’t watch, you’ll probably make Sarah Silverman cry. And do you really want that? I mean, come on — just look at that face.
By Chris Rywalt – February 1, 2007
A wonderful confluence of streams in my life poured into my lap last night while watching the news. I haven’t written for TeeVee in a while because nothing much has been interesting to me in the world of TV lately. And of course I’ve been concentrating on my art crticism and commentary. But last night, I saw on the news that the great city of Boston was nearly paralyzed by a marketing attempt which was mistaken for a terrorist threat — and the marketing attempt was for a TV show, Cartoon Network’s Aqua Teen Hunger Force.
You can read in more detail about it on CNN’s site or in probably a thousand other places on the Web. The short story is this: To promote Aqua Teen Hunger Force, an advertising firm hired some artists to create these little electronic blinking-light objects and stash them around Boston and other cities “as part of a guerrilla marketing campaign”. Someone in Boston spotted one and thought it was a bomb and all hell broke loose as the police and various armed forces became convinced Boston was about to be blown to bits by a circuit board full of LEDs. Finally, someone at Cartoon Network noticed what was going on, told the police, and everyone switched from fear to anger. The anger so far has come down almost entirely on the heads of Peter Berdovsky and Sean Stevens, two of the artists responsible, who were arrested and charged with “placing a hoax device in a way that results in panic”.
What really shocked me was that the artists were arrested. Because I did something similar — albeit not involving any electronics — and, coincidentally — or not — my sign was removed almost while the panic in Boston was going on.
I am also amazed that America has turned into a nation of jingoist paranoiacs. We wave our flags, we support our troops, we slap yellow ribbons on anything that moves, and the minute an artist — even a commercial artist — twitches in the direction of doing something out of the ordinary, we go totally insane.
What the hell is wrong with us? The parade of self-righteous suits berating the Cartoon Network and its hirelings for its callous behavior was longer and more bloviatious than anything I’ve seen on TV in a long time. If the artists had planted actual bombs they might have been better received.
I remember reading once — I forget the author — that the leaders of the Soviet Union had become so paranoid they were afraid of poets and painters. Now that the Soviet Union has dissolved, is America turning into it? Is northern Alaska going to become our Siberia? Or maybe we can just rent part of the real Siberia. I’m sure they’ve got plenty of gulags we can re-open.
Our law enforcement agencies are guilty of hearing zebras when they should be hearing horses. Chances are any odd little blinking-light device is going to be someone’s art project, not a terrorist attack. Does this mean terrorists might disguise their bombs as art installations? Sure. But then the terrorists could be communicating using coded transmissions in Artforum, too. Hell, they could be embedding subliminal messages in the photos on the cover of Time magazine! And have you tried circling every twenty-third word on the front page of the New York Times? There are messages there….
This insanity isn’t getting us anywhere. You might think there’s an intelligent art installation here — and there is. Someone did it already, in fact: Clinton Boisvert, back in 2003, put some black boxes with the word FEAR painted on them in the Union Square subway station. And guess what? The police got afraid. Are they poststructuralists that they should react towards the symbol (the word FEAR) the way they would towards and actual object that should be feared (a bomb)? Maybe the NYPD has read too much Foucault.
People are going to say the Cartoon Network and their contractors had it coming, that they should have thought ahead more. That what they did was reckless. Even people who are defending them are probably going to say what they did was not very smart, not careful enough. Just as people were very angry with Clinton for his art prank.
I call bullshit. What these artists did was not reckless, it was playful. It was not stupid, it was a goof. And if this whole country is going to opt for fear instead of fun, for pain instead of play, for bombs instead of art — if our default stance is going to be a fearful crouch from here on out — I won’t stand by and accept it.
No. We cannot spend our lives suspicious of everyone, peering out at the world through slitted, piggy little eyes. We can’t assume everyone guilty until proven innocent. We can’t start in a place of fear and hate. When you start with fear and hate, you can’t get anywhere anyone wants to go. You can only get to the gulag. And no one wants to be at the gulag — not the inmates, not the guards, not the warden. No one.
We have to stop this now. We have to stop this within ourselves. We have to stop.
