Category Archives: Television

How the West Was Dead

DeadwoodWith the help of my new television, on Sunday I parked myself on the couch and watched the last two first-season episodes of HBO’s western drama series “Deadwood.” I’m a bigger fan of westerns now than I ever was, thanks in part to the wealth of symbolic artistry that great directors have woven into the genre and which escaped me somehow when I was a kid. So I’ve been watching “Deadwood” with curious interest. If I can liken it to anything I’ve seen before, it would be an incredibly profane version of Robert Altman’s venerable “McCabe & Mrs. Miller,” which also explored the brutal, unpleasant and dirty living inside of a frontier town.

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A New Vast Wasteland

TelevisionFor a year, our television’s picture has grown gradually more distorted at the top edge, such that the head of anyone who appears on it seems elongated and unnaturally tall — my friends call it the ‘conehead effect.’ I would’ve liked to have replaced it sooner, especially given that it’s often difficult to make out who’s winning a ball game if a network — like say Fox Sports — chooses to display the score horizontally, at the top of the screen; our aging, fake-wood paneled idiot box would cut off most of the runs, outs and innings at the top.

The final straw came on Friday evening, when the picture moved even further north, and left behind fully two-inches of unused black space along the bottom. I fiddled with it a little bit, then left it alone for the evening as we went to dinner. Saturday morning it showed the same result, and I finally felt justified in buying a new set.

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Stop Trek

EnterpriseI’ll admit a fondness for “Star Trek,” having enjoyed the original show in reruns as a generally geeky youth and its many successors as an only moderately less geeky adult. But after having caught five minutes of an episode this season wherein the crew of the latest show, “Star Trek: Enterprise” were shooting it out with aliens on a world that resembled America’s old West (crazy!), even I will admit that the whole franchise is just begging for a bit of television euthanasia.

For about five minutes at the launch of the series, “Enterprise” seemed to promise a new, fresher take on the tried and true Trek formula, in which a cadre of futuristic office co-workers spreads free market principles around the galaxy. But it too has succumbed to retreading the same old territory as its predecessors, and just a glimpse of the show reveals it to be hackneyed to distraction. Now word comes that, apparently, UPN has acquiesced to fan pressure and renewed “Enterprise” for another season. Please, someone make it stop.

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In Studio Visit

The Daily ShowAs one of my gifts to my girlfriend for her upcoming birthday, I went the extra mile to obtain tickets to today’s taping of “The Daily Show with John Stewart,” of which she is a big fan. In-studio seats are booked solid through the end of this coming summer, but I was lucky enough to grab a pair of canceled reservations last Friday by calling the show’s booking line. Having a reservation still doesn’t guarantee you a seat though, and I had to show up at the theater about ninety minutes ahead of time to wait in line, and even then, we barely made it into the studio made the cut-off at a hundred audience members. It was worth it, though; I saw nothing in the studio that would contest the idea that this is the most consistently funny and certainly the politically sharpest show on television. Still, I was surprised by how small their stage set is.

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News Flashes

These Just InThe most consistently funny program on television is “The Daily Show with John Stewart.” For some proof, have a look at “Hail the Armies of Rove” on this page. It’s a gut-busting bit of reportage from Stephen Colbert and serves as just one example of this cast member’s remarkable comedic genius. So I was eagerly anticipating tonight’s showing of “These Just In,” which features a series of four short films from a few of the show’s staff writers. To be honest, I was mildly disappointed, as their overall hilarity was noticeably milder than just about any episode of the show they produce at their day jobs.

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Burn Baby Burn

DVD BurningThe so-called “SuperDrive” in my new 12″ PowerBook G4, while not the first DVD-RW I’ve ever had access to, is the first one I’ve personally owned. So, with a little bit of free time this past weekend, I decided to sit down and see if it was possible to burn myself a copy of one of the movies that I own in DVD format — for fair use, back-up purposes only, of course.

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Don’t Spam the Messenger

iChatI’ve had to remove my iChat/AOL Instant Messenger screen name from my already fairly outdated About page because in the past month or two, I’ve become the victim of some pretty frequent IM spamming. There’s nothing interesting or clever about this junk advertising, aside from the fact that it gets delivered over a previously spam-free communications channel; in fact, it’s probably among the more banal and least innovative ways of capitalizing on a new medium that I’ve seen.

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Fake Realpolitik

The West WingAfter complaints and criticisms last season that it had lost touch with the times, the new creative team of NBC’s highly decorated series “The West Wing” seems prepared to play catch-up — and furiously — in its first outings without creator and former executive producer Aaron Sorkin at the helm. For those who don’t watch the show or who can’t be bothered by the dramatic meanderings of network television, it’s not worth recapping the details of tonight’s plot, but suffice it to say that a show that was once engineered specifically as a liberal fantasia has been rudely awoken to the new conservative reality; the president that sits in this fictitious Oval Office is now a member of the Grand Old Party.

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