Lost Is Back, Baby

I've been kind of standoffish about Lost this so far this season, partly because of The (Fictional) Prisoners' Dilemma I described earlier. Last night's episode, though, brought me back in. Locke is back in first season form, communing with the island, having visions, fighting polar bears. Good stuff, and a welcome return from the conflicted weakling he had become in the second season.

There was a lot of prophecy in this episode. Locke has a prophetic vision in a sweat lodge (using the same psychotropic stuff he used on Boone in season one), then later an unconscious Eko seems to come awake and deliver another prophecy to Locke, while Hurley (who last season listened to a radio broadcast of Glenn Miller and mused that the signal might be traveling through time) hears Desmond make a prophetic remark that makes Hurley think Desmond has traveled through time as well. By the end, Locke has returned to the beach settlement like Moses coming down from the mountain to give the other castaways their marching orders. Later this season, I see Locke and Eko traveling to the Others' camp to tell Ben Linus (aka Henry Gale), "Thus saith The Island, 'Let my people go!'"

So a good episode, although the flashbacks surprisingly didn't resolve, so I'm disappointed in that.

BTW, I haven't been blogging it, but Lost is followed by another surprisingly good show, titled The Nine. I'm not thrilled with the title. When I first heard it, I thought it was a show about the Supreme Court.

Basically, The Nine is another big puzzle show, with an intriguing premise. Two guys plan a simple bank robbery, in and out in five minutes. Things go wrong, and 52 hours later, the SWAT team rushes in to end a hostage stalemate. We see the customers go into the bank, and we see very different people come out, along with intriguing clues to what went on during those lost 52 hours. The series now proceeds along two tracks, telling the stories of how the nine hostages deal with the aftermath of the crisis while also flashing back to tell the events of the stand-off itself.

The premise is pretty gimmicky, but the character writing is good. But even before the show premiered, people were wondering how long it would last, being scheduled right on the heels of Lost, since both shows have large ensemble casts and complex storylines. Would viewers be willing to watch two intricately-plotted dramas in a row?

In fact, most, if not all, TV dramas follow that model, which makes it a lot more intimidating for a new viewer to drop in on an established show. Jonah Goldberg at NRO pointed to this passage in a New Yorker review by Malcolm Gladwell of the book, Everything Bad is Good For You:

As Johnson points out, television is very different now from what it was thirty years ago. It's harder. A typical episode of "Starsky and Hutch," in the nineteen-seventies, followed an essentially linear path: two characters, engaged in a single story line, moving toward a decisive conclusion. To watch an episode of "Dallas" today is to be stunned by its glacial pace--by the arduous attempts to establish social relationships, by the excruciating simplicity of the plotline, by how obvious it was. A single episode of "The Sopranos," by contrast, might follow five narrative threads, involving a dozen characters who weave in and out of the plot.

My feelings exactly. This is a double-edged sword, however. While it makes for a richer viewing experience, it can make people like me reluctant to try a show that we haven't been in on from the beginning. I keep hearing about how great Battlestar Galactica is, but the few episodes I've watched, while good, were so enmeshed in ongoing storylines and relationships that I felt kind of adrift. I occasionally catch an episode, but I don't care if I miss one. And although I hear great things about The Shield, there's no way I'm going to try to jump into it in the middle.

I've got enough on my plate with Lost and Smallville and Heroes and Supernatural and Prison Break and The Nine and Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip and Survivor, thank you very much.

Monday Morning Roundup

One of the best moments in Stephen King's Misery is when Annie goes into a long rant about movie serials and the way they would change stuff from last week's ending cliffhanger at the beginning of next week's episode.

That's what happened with Heroes this week. It wasn't an earthshaking change, of course, not a cheat to let the hero get out of the COCKADOODIE CAR! before it plunged off the cliff. They just had to dump a joke, because it works a lot better at the end of a scene than at the beginning.

It's a joke we've all seen before, most recently in the new Cox high-speed internet commercial. The final guests are leaving a party late at night, and the husband and wife look at this amazing pile of dishes in their kitchen. The husband says it'll take forever to clean up, and the wife jokingly suggests that they crack open the computer and siphon out a little of the "high-speed." Then they look at each other like, why not? Hubby drips a little CG mercury-looking stuff onto his palm, rubs his hands together, then does all the dishes in, like, one second, suds flying everywhere. Wife looks dumbstruck, then says, "Holy--"Smash cut to black.

It's a meta-joke, combining the raw reality of what someone probably would say in just such a situation with a wink at the audience. "I know what she said, you know what she said, we all know what she said, but TV won't allow us to actually say what she said, so we'll do a provocative cut that lets you fill in the blanks." You see it in movie trailers all the time.

At the end of Heroes last week, Claire woke up from her attempted rape and accidental murder to find herself on an autopsy table with her chest cut open in the classic Y-incision. Claire looked at herself, and at the line of shiny stainless-steel bowls awaiting her viscera, and said, "Holy--" Smash cut to black.

This week, of course, she just says "Oh my... ga..." before zipping herself back up and getting out of there. I understand why they did it, but it dropped me out of the episode a bit, right at the beginning.

The rest of the episode was pretty good, as the characters began to meet one another, finally. I'm even starting to warm up to characters I didn't like before. Heroin Boy, for instance, seems a lot cooler now that I've seen his powers in action (and hats off to the production staff, who somehow made painting look like a cool power). Likewise Sybil, the multiple-personality stripper (although if her alter is also super-strong or something, I may have to start calling her StripperHulk).

The only real problem is that, with so many parallel storylines, none of them advance very far by the end of the episode. It's like, "What if Robert Jordan wrote superheroes?"

But of course, that is remedied by the final scene, which is another awesome cliffhanger. This week, we see SuperHiro as he will appear in future, looking badass. The glasses and nerdy haircut and sarariman wardrobe are gone; now, he's got a soul patch and a katana slung across his back (it looked too long to be a ninjato) and he speaks perfect English. It's a dramatic moment that shows just how far Hiro will go.

Studio 60 was OK. I probably won't be talking much about it any more, unless something interesting happens. This week was all more of the same: Matt doesn't like Christians, except Hannah; the show isn't funny (with a really awful Nic Cage impression that seems to be a running bit on the show, since we also saw it last week), but everyone keeps telling us it is, we take time out from the "comedy" for a sermon on whatever subject Sorkin thinks we should be really angry about (this week, it's reality shows).

Before Heroes, I happened to click onto an episode of How I Met Your Mother, which I've gotta say was really funny. Or I should say, the A-plot featuring Doogie Howser and Willow was really funny, the B-plot not so much.

I Know We're All Getting Older, But...

Is it just me, or does Shatner look like a burn victim in his new DirecTV commercial? It looks like he's had some bad work done (of course, there is a limit to what plastic surgery can do, and I think Shatner has hit that limit).

Costumes

The one cardinal rule that the producers of Smallville decided to adhere to when they started the series was, "No capes; no flying." Well, it took them about 3 seasons to break the "no flying" part, and while it wasn't a cape, they dipped a toe into the costumed hero waters in Season 5's "Vengeance" episode. The usual convention on the show is to have characters wear normal clothes in colors that echo their comic book costumes. Clark wears a blue shirt with a red jacket, the Flash wore a red hoodie, Aquaman wore green swim trunks and an orange tank top. But at least once before, they've had an actual costumed hero prowling the streets of Metropolis.

And next week, they're going to do it again with Green Arrow. On tonight's episode, they gave us a teaser, with Oliver Queen at a costume party dressed as Robin Hood (a shout-out to the original Green Arrow costume, although the arm straps came from the awesome Neal Adams revision from the 70's). Next week, he's in full-on superhero mode, in a costume reminiscent of his newer look with a badass hood and some goofy looking wraparound sunglasses.

I'm not a fan of the guy they've got playing him, but I must admit, it was a cool moment last week when he stood on the balcony of his penthouse apartment, bow in hand, said something like, "How about Borneo?" then turned and fired. The camera goes whizzing off to track the arrow as it flies out over the city (and I'm thinking, "There's no way he's going to shoot an arrow from Metropolis to Borneo... is he?") and then the arrow drops and hits, thunk, right into the giant globe on top of the Daily Planet building. I'll take their word for it that he actually hit Borneo.

In other news, I mentioned a while back that I'd written a dud short story. I've gotten some feedback on it, and despite its slow start and trite ending and numerous typos, a few people actually seem to like it. So maybe it's not as bad as I thought. Maybe it's even worth fixing.

Next question is, do I go back to trying to fix Hero Go Home, or do I give NaNoWriMo another shot? I'm about halfway through the revision, but I haven't seriously touched it since writing the short story, which seemed to simultaneously break my rhythm and my spirit.

Writers group meeting tomorrow. Maybe I'll catch a little motivation from them.

The (Fictional) Prisoner's Dilemma

Lost is taking an interesting approach at the beginning of this season. Aware that viewers have been frustrated in the past by a lack of answers, and aware that one of the things that killed X-Files was drowning in its own convoluted mythology, they have resolved to clear up a lot of things this season. One of the first things they have done is to bring us into the Others' camp (which I really expected last season).

However, although it's good in the sense that it brings new characters into the mix, it's also risky, because right now, the show is moving very slowly. I've mentioned before about one of my pet peeves in a book, The Ivanhoe Problem. Related to that is the (Fictional) Prisoner's Dilemma.

The Prisoner's Dilemma is a classic problem of game theory which I won't go into here. The (Fictional) Prisoner's Dilemma is a completely unrelated thing, which is the idea of Protagonist as Prisoner. I can appreciate the cat-and-mouse games that go on between captor and captive, and what's happening on Lost is a very well-written and acted. Three of the main characters have been taken captive, and they are trying to figure out how to escape. Problem is, they've been taken captive by what seems to be the remnants of a group that was conducting experiments in psychology and conditioning. So while the prisoners are trying to outwit their captors, the captors are conditioning the behavior of the prisoners.

Problem is, (and here's the dilemma) there is something in me that does not want to identify with someone in captivity. I want that person to strike back, to escape, to not only escape but triumph somehow and bring down those who unjustly imprisoned him. Now, some would argue that this sense of frustration is what you need in a drama, that the more the audience is invested in the character. the greater the catharsis when he finally succeeds.

But there are two big traps in this. Number one, a prisoner is by definition confined, so the story becomes static, locked in one location, and can become boring. And number two, that sense of outrage can turn to frustration, and unlike the character, the audience is not trapped in the situation. The audience can escape. Push the frustration too far, and they'll do just that.

I'm not ready to quit yet, especially since it looks like they'll be going back to the Swan next week, where we'll finally learn what happened to Locke, Desmond and Eko.

Schrodinger's Nuke

I'm too lazy to look up how to do umlauts, so let's assume I know how to spell Schrodinger correctly and move on.

The North Koreans claim to have staged a nuclear test on Oct. 9, although experts now think it was a dud, (and some folks are saying it might even be a hoax). Democrats have predictably begun screaming that it was all Bush's fault (it would not surprise me if some nutjob conspiracy theorists on the left made the claim that the Bush administration was actually behind it, either by helping perpetrate a massive hoax with conventional explosives, or by providing the NorKs with a nuclear device), while Republicans are blaming Clinton and Carter.

And of course, when they can pause to take a breath, everybody's simply baffled. Because whether test or hoax, the North's action simply makes no sense.

The North Koreans have always been sort of the nation-state equivalent of the Gambino Family. Which is to say, North Korea has no economy to speak of, and makes its money through essentially criminal means: gunrunning, gambling and extortion. The 1994 Agreed Framework was one example of that extortion. Essentially, the North Koreans said they would develop nukes unless we made it worth their while not to. We did, and then they did it anyway.

Criticize Bush for inaction if you will, but you have to understand that our range of options with the DPRK has been limited for some time now. Hell, even when Bush came into office (before the North Koreans admitted that they'd basically never paid attentoin to the deal they made with Clinton), it was generally assumed that, even with the 1994 agreement in place, the North Koreans had at least one (untested) nuke, and maybe as many as six. We knew they had the fissile materials, and we could assume they had access to the knowledge.

But without a successful test, we could not confirm the weapons' existence or publicly acknowledge it. So we had to adopt this Schrodinger's Cat approach to North Korea policy. We had to assume that they both did and did not have nuclear weapons, taking their existence into account in military planning while publicly continuing our attempts to stop them from obtaining what they (probably) already had. Our public posture would be that, without incontrovertible evidence that such nukes existed, we would act as if they did not, threatening sanctions if the North did not cooperate, offering rewards if they did.

Which makes this test so baffling. Because if the North confirms that it has nukes, we have no reason to keep bribing them to not develop them. Perhaps they think they can get us to pay them not to sell the weapons to anybody else. But a confirmed nuclear North Korea changes the balance of power in the region, and basically gives us an excuse to let our own Asian allies off the leash. What will the NorKs think when Japan rearms and nukes start popping up in Japan and South Korea and Taiwan? Do they seriously think they have a prayer of keeping up a serious arms race with such countries?

I'm not panicking here. As others have said, if genuine, all this test and the recent missile tests prove is that the North Koreans have warheads that won't fire and missiles that won't fly straight. Their nuclear threat is serious, but not yet imminent. But somebody damn well better get serious about these guys, right now.

Monday TV Recap

Prison Break is on hiatus, and I just couldn't bring myself to watch Fashion House, so this is all Heroes and Studio 60.

Three episodes in, Heroes continues to be half-interesting and half-boring as hell. TelepathiCop, Super-Hiro and the Crash Test Cheerleader continue to be the most interesting characters on the show, while Heroin Boy and Sybil and the Flying Politician continue to be meh. And the Indian geneticist searching for clues to the mystery of his dad's death is just y-a-a-a-w-n-n.

Where was I? Good things about tonight's episode: Super-Hiro stops time to rescue a little girl, the supervillain Sylar makes his first appearance, there's this awesome meta-thing going on, where Hiro has brought back a comic book from the future which he uses to guide him on his journey to America (and incidentally also makes him do this week's product placement duties - he didn't want to, but the comic book made him, y'all!), and the totally awesome ending with Claire, the indestructible cheerleader.

Studio 60 hit a milestone tonight. The bits of the show-within-a-show that we saw this week were actually kind of funny. Good and bad news about that. It's good in that maybe it won't all feel so fake, now. The recapper on Television Without Pity thinks that it's best for them to keep the fictional show off the real show so we won't be disappointed. But I don't think you can do that forever. It's like watching a show about a pianist where you never see hands on the keyboard, just the head and shoulders moving, like on Reefer Madness. If they can actually get some funny bits on the show, it helps us buy the rest of it.

The bad news is that the funny bits don't come from Comedy Jedi Matt. One comes from the roomful o' hack writers, and the other is entirely due to Sarah Paulson's performance (she's doing Juliette Lewis this week - it's not as good as the dead-perfect Holly Hunter she did on last week's episode but it's still pretty funny).

Sorkin is still pushing the whole Christianity thing as a wedge between her character and Matthew Perry's. It's the thing that's supposed to make her character distinctive, but since Sorkin can't write a halfway believable Christian character (not surprising, since he hates them), the show always falls flat when it forces her to go in that direction. When they just let her be funny, she's charming and awesome. So as pessimistic as I've been about the show for the first three weeks, I'm thinking there might be hope for it now.

Still, it doesn't help that the funniest bit we've seen on the show so far came not from the supposedly brilliant main characters, but from "Beavis and Hackboy."

I'm mulling over the North Korea situation and may comment on it tomorrow.

Going to Throw Up Now

So Dallas is fighting and scrapping and struggling, and somehow manages to stay only a touchdown behind Philadelphia. And with 30-ish seconds left in the game, they finally get a huge call to go their way, and end up with the ball on the 7-yard line, first-and-goal with four shots at a chance to tie.

Now their passing game has been hit-and-miss all day. Bledsoe has only hit exactly half his passes and been intercepted twice, while the running game has been pretty solid. Julius Jones has run for 100 yards on the day, and both of Dallas's offensive touchdowns have come on running plays. So do they give it to Jones or to Marion Barber?

No, they pass twice, and the second one is intercepted and run back for a touchdown. Dallas loses big.

First OU disintegrates in the second half, and now Dallas does the same thing. I'm not happy this weekend.

ETA: It occurs to me on further reflection that the pass plays may have been an attempt at clock control. With no timeouts left, Dallas did not have enough time left on the clock to take more than maybe two shots at the endzone on the ground. However, my main point still stands. Which is better: take two high-percentage, low-risk shots at a score, or four low-percentage, high-risk attempts?

Hindsight also tells me that what seemed like a mindlessly stupid play (the defender's pass interference foul that got Dallas to the seven-yard line in the first place) was actually a smart move. Without that penalty, Terry Glenn would almost certainly have scored. By fouling Glenn, the defender (don't remember his name) put Dallas in scoring position, but averted a sure score. And as it turned out, the Eagles' defense was certainly up to making the stop.

The Greatest TV Show in the World

Prison Break's on hiatus during the hated baseball playoffs (seriously, you guys may love them, but they are a major pain in the ass for me), just in time for me to catch the Greatest TV Show in the World!

See, what happened was, UPN and the WB merged into the CW, leaving lots of markets with two stations, but just one network between them. Rupert Murdoch, always good at spotting opportunities and capitalizing on them, immediately ginned up a new network, called My Network TV. Only instead of trying to roll out a slate of weekly shows like normal, what MyNet did was to launch two telenovelas, basically prime time soap operas. The same two shows air five nights a week, with recap shows on Saturday.

The shows play like low-budget Dynasty, and use the anime trick of keeping costs down by constantly having characters flashback to earlier episodes, so they can reuse footage. But on Monday, all will be forgiven.

For on Monday night, My Network TV will air a two-hour special of Fashion House, in which Morgan Fairchild shows up and kicks Bo Derek's ass. That's right: Morgan Fairchild and Bo Derek in a catfight. Put 'em Star Trek miniskirts or X-Men spandex, and all of my teenage fantasies will converge in one giant orgasm of '70's cheese.

I've been very depressed about my writing lately. I've basically been writing total crap lately, and not enjoying it anymore. It's gotten so bad that I was seriously questioning last night whether I should just hang the whole thing up. I'm not there yet, but I'm just tired and depressed and seriously need to do something fun.

Lost Again

The Lost season opener was last night. I liked many aspects of it, although I was not thrilled that I will apparently have to wait until episode 3 or later to find out what's been going on back at camp.

Lost is a very difficult show to write, because it has so many main characters (14 in the first season - I haven't really tried to count what it'll be this season ), but each episode focuses on one or two in particular. A typical episode = A-plot (character on island deals with problem), flashbacks (same character goes through crisis in his past that somehow relates to present problem) and B-plot (meanwhile other characters do something silly like play golf or eat imaginary peanut butter).

So that keeps four or five of the characters busy. What do you do with all those other cast members? You either a: find an excuse for them to have a walk-on or b: isolate them and bring them back when they're needed. The situation at the end of Season 2 had the characters split up into basically four groups: Prisoners of the Others (Jack, Kate, Sawyer), the Elizabeth group (Sayid, Jin, Sun), the Swan gang (Locke, Eko, Desmond), and the main camp (everybody else). Five, if you count Hurley hiking all by his lonesome.

The opener was all Prisoners. Next week's episode brings in the Elizabeth group. The third week might go to the Swan, or they may continue with the Prisoners storyline for a while.

Man, what I really wanted was a two hour opener that gave a little of everything. It's only right, since that's the way they left us at the end of last season.

On the good news side, Lost is at least a show that commits to its changes. Season 2 was completely different from Season 1, and it looks as if Season 3 will be even more different. Unlike, say, Smallville, which seems to bring on major changes at the end of every season, only to retcon stuff by the end of one or episodes in the new season.

Monday: Prison Break, Vanished, Heroes 2, Studio 60 3

So I took a few days off (or was it a week? More? Losing track of time here) from the book, which I am beginning to hate, to write a short story. And quite frankly, it's a dud. I was on a tight deadline, and I had to work from a "story seed" which forced me to do some things with structure I didn't necessarily want to do, but in the end, those things don't really matter. I wrote a dud, a dud that thuds, and returning to the book yesterday did not have me all revved up and ready to go. My good stuff isn't selling, and I haven't produced any other good stuff in six months or more because I've been concentrating on this damn book, and even when I get a good short story idea lately, I either biff it in the attempt and write a dud or I just.... stall.

And I think I'm feeling kind of irritable because Monday is turning into my favorite night of television, even though half of the shows I watch (and maybe three-fourths, if Prison Break ever gets back into the conspiracy side of its plot) are actively trying to get me to stop watching. Prison Break's big villainous conspiracy is a plot between the President and Big Oil (sound familiar?) Vanished features a huge Masonic conspiracy of shadowy figures who are plotting to get a right-wing judge appointed to the Supreme Court, a judge who happens to be a big supporter of curtailing freedoms in the name of law and order (how DO they come up with these ideas?) The big conflict on the first two episodes of Studio 60 was standing up to right-wing Christians. This week, Danny gimmicks up a focus group question to prod Matt into taking more shots at Bush, cause God knows, there aren't enough of those on TV (which points up a bigger problem that I alluded to earlier and will discuss at greater length in a bit).

So tonight was the second episode of Heroes, and I really hope this show turns cool pretty soon. There are lots of hints at cool stuff. For instance, we discover that Heroin Boy, the addict who paints visions of his future, has been writing a comic book called 9th Wonders, of which at least one issue features the real-life adventures of Hiro (my favorite character in the pilot, who does not get nearly enough screen time this episode). That concept is decent, but here's what I'm looking for, though I don't see it happening: in the pilot, we see Genius Kid reading an issue of 9th Wonders. The cover of the issue (which is also Super Hiro's screensaver) is this gigantic blue monster, a big Godzilla-type deal. The heroes we've been introduced to so far are pretty blah, and their powers are boring (Super Hiro, Heroin Boy, the Flying Politician and his brother, Delusions-of-Grandeur Kid, The Indestructible Cheerleader and Split-Personality Stripper). But I'd love to see them try to take on a a giant Blue Godzilla. That would be cool.

Unfortunately, I think they're going to spend most of the first few episodes at least fleeing some big shadowy conspiracy, because there sure aren't enough of those on television.

Okay, so, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip.

If you asked me to name the single greatest book about show business that I've ever read, I couldn't do it, but if you asked me the top ten, or even the top five, William Goldman's Adventures in the Screen Trade would definitely be on the list. You should go read it now, or as soon as you finish reading this post. It's non-fiction, so I don't think I can spoil anything.

Anyway, one thing Goldman is known for is adapting novels into screenplays (including his own), and he spends a major portion of the book giving a little instructional lab on how to do it. He starts with a short story he wrote, titled "Da Vinci, " about a kid whose dad is a barber, and how the kid breaks his dad's heart by having his hair cut by a better barber. This other barber, see, he's like an artist with scissors, a true Da Vinci of cosmetology (or is it barberism?).

So he presents the story, and then he adapts it into a script, and then he hands that script out to several movie professionals in different fields (a production designer, a cinematographer, an editor, a composer), gets comments from them about what they would have to do to bring this script to life on screen, and finally, he gives it to George Roy Hill, Oscar-winning director of The Sting. And here is a bit of what George Roy Hill has to say about the script:

The first thing to say, the artist as a barber is a very tough visual thing to do. You have, in some of your more purple prose, described the effects of these haircuts...
In the story, you accept this, because you don't have to deal with the visuals, but in the screenplay, you run smack into them, and there's your director saying, "What the hell can I do?"...
Look at your opening page--"Pull back to reveal a schoolyard on an agonizingly beautiful spring day." Well, the studio executive reads that and says, "Oh, an agonizingly beautiful spring day, that's great." The director says, "When have I ever agonized over a spring day?" Then he says to his cameraman, "Get me an agonizingly beautiful spring day."
It's all hype--you write it, the executive reads it, and after I've shot it, everybody looks at it and says, "Wait a minute, that isn't agonizingly beautiful, why isn't it?"

Studio 60 is up against the same problem. The script keeps hyping Matt and Danny, as well as Harriet and Simon and Tom (the Big Three stars of the show-within-a-show) as these awesome talents. Matt is the author of "Crazy Christians," a sketch so incredibly controversial yet funny that Wes, the previous producer, has kept it in his desk drawer for four years, working up the courage to put it on the air. Matt spends all of episode two agonizing over his cold open while dispensing comedy advice like some Stand-Up Jedi (seventeen is funnier than twelve, don't ask for the laugh, ask for the butter). In episode three, we see them developing jokes for the fake newscast as well as a game show parody, and they keep telling us how incredibly smart and talented they are, and how incredibly funny the show is, and the amazing ratings they're pulling in.

Unfortunately, at some point, they've got to actually show the haircut, as it were, and in the bits we see, the show is thuddingly un-funny. We keep hearing the legend of "Crazy Christians," but never see a bit of it. The Gilbert & Sullivan parody is limp. The game show parody is "funny," in that smug, conceptual way of a bunch of college students sitting around getting high and making fun of all the folks they think they are better than ("Religious people are dumb!", "Tom Cruise is crazy!", "Rumsfeld is a dick!"), but it lacks any actual punch lines or laughs (although I must admit, the snippet of the performance is a little better than the rehearsal). There's a montage of the actual performance where we see little bits of skits we've been hearing about all episode, and there's not a big laugh in any of them.

There's a subplot about a particular joke they write for the newscast that offends Harriet, so she comes up with an alternate joke. Neither joke is funny when it's first presented. We're told, though, that the first one "killed" at dress rehearsal, and that Harriet will really be able to sell the second one with a vigorously funny performance, but we never see either one pay off. It's sort of a cowardly out, but it's also a smart one, because based on the evidence so far, the show is never going to be as funny as the characters keep telling us it is.

Which makes me sad.

A Look Back

Got bored last night while The Wife was on the computer, so on a whim, I pulled out an old book I had on the shelf, titled The Best of Science Fiction TV. This is one of those throwaway compilation books thta publishers seems to shovel out by the thousands every year, lots of small snippets alternating with a ton of pictures. "Lavishly illustrated," as they say, with screen captures of cheapo television shows.

The book was published in 1987, almost 20 years ago, and it sort of amazed me to page through it. A couple of months ago, see, I attended a panel at Conestoga about "The Year in Television," and the consensus seemed to be that it had been a slow year. Other than Battlestar Galactica and Lost, nothing else had really seemed to take hold and thrive. Even Star Trek, long the most durable and dependable of franchises, no longer had a show in production.

But looking at this book, you realize just how far we've come. The list of the top twenty-five science fiction in shows of all time, voted on by a group of respondents including prominent TV critics, SFWA writers, and SF fan groups, was this:

1. Star Trek (and at that time, there was only the one)
2. The Twilight Zone (the original)
   
3. The Outer Limits (still only the one)
4. The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy (BBC series)
5. Dr. Who
6. Amazing Stories
7. Mork and Mindy
8. The Wild, Wild West
9. V ("the miniseries," the book qualifies, not the follow-on series)
10. The Prisoner
11. The Invaders
12. Quark
13. The Jetsons
14. Captain Video
15. The Adventures of Superman
16. Space Patrol
17. Tom Corbett, Space Cadet
18. The Twilight Zone (80's revival)
19. Lost in Space
20. Way Out
21. The Avengers
22. Battlestar Galactica
23. Science Fiction Theater
24. My Favorite Martian
25. Blake's 7

This was the state of science-fiction TV in 1987. Of the twenty-five shows on the list, only three were products of the decade in which the book was written (Amazing Stories, Blake's 7, and the 80's revival of The Twilight Zone), other than Dr. Who, which had been running constantly for over two decades. The most recent of the rest had gone off the air five years previously (Mork and Mindy, which started in 1978 and lasted till 1982). Several of the shows had lasted only one season, or had been cancelled before their first season had ended (Quark, which aired only eight episodes). Two of the shows in the top 25 also placed in the top 10 Worst Shows (Lost in Space, Battlestar Galactica).

The point here is that, before Star Trek: The Next Generation ushered in a new wave of serious science fiction shows, the bench was really thin. Some of the shows that are fondly remembered now were not watched because they were good, but because they were the only even vaguely SF-nal thing on at the time. In those days, fans took what they could get. Nowadays, we get more than we can take.

So before you jump on the Aaron Sorkin bandwagon, dercying the degeneration of television into a horrible wasteland compared with some golden past, take another look at the titles on this list, and compare them to what's on today. We have it pretty damn good right about now.

Smallville Season Opener

Watched the season openers of Smallville and Supernatural. There are two kinds of season opener: the flashy beginning of a big new story arc (Smallville, and pretty definitely Lost as well) and the quiet coda (Supernatural).

Both Smallville and Supernatural ended on cliffhangers last season. But Smallville played big and bombasticin their opener, wrapping up the big story arc of last season (Brainiac/Zod) with frighteningly quick efficiency while setting up new villains for this season (the escapees from the Phantom Zone). I had thought, after all the build-up of Zod last season, that they would make him the big bad for at least several episodes, if not the entire season. But no, wham-bam-boom, he was gone and the new guys were in place. At the same time, they put just about the final period on the Clark/Lana relationship, and the Chloe/Clark crush, introducing a love interest for Chloe and finally showing a real spark between Lois and Clark. All in an hour, so there was very little time to linger on tender moments.

Supernatural, on the other hand, while it ended on a cliffhanger, had basically wrapped up the immediate storyline, sort of putting everybody back to the status quo of episode one, until the final shocking moments (and BTW, is it just me, or is the whole "view from inside the car as it is unexpectedly hit on the passenger side" thing getting a little played out?*). But instead of launching immediately into a big new arc, the season opener focused instead on the characters' reactions to the events of the finale and disposd of most of the dangling threads. They set up the new arc in only the vaguest way. It was a much quieter approach than Smallville, but it worked pretty well. I'm still not sure I'm going to be a regular viewer, but I'm willing to keep tuning in, at least for another couple of weeks.

*I remember it happening in Reunion, and Smallville, and in at least one other movie or series, and in a seat belt PSA, and now Supernatural.

ETA: When I listed the seat belt PSA above, I thought at the time it might be an insurance company commercial, then somebody reminded me that Volkswagen had done the same thing. I remember one of the commercials, but couldn't find a video to link. however, they did a sequel.

Falling Up the Slippery Slope

mtreiten mentioned torture in a comment to a previous post of mine. I didn't reply then, because the whole subject depresses me, but then I read Jonah Goldberg's article in National Review Online, which expresses at least a part of my view. I'll try to express a little more of it here, although it's fairly large and amorphous, so I'll probably state it poorly.

What I see Goldberg saying here is that we need to have a serious discussion on just what is and is not torture, and I agree. However, I'm not sure that such a discussion is possible anymore, because the two sides in this debate are literally speaking two different languages. We've known for years about the political power of framing the debate in terms favorable to your side, which is why opponents of abortion call themselves "pro-life" (rather than "anti-abortion") and proponents call themselves "pro-choice" (rather than "pro-abortion").

The problem is that this tendency, along with an exaggerated fear of the "slippery slope," have resulted in people (and I'm going to characterize this as being mainly people on the left with nothing but my own anecdotal evidence to go on - skewer me if you must) defining terms downward until they become almost meaningless.

In a society where simple insults are redefined into hate speech, where normal behaviors can be redefined by the mental health industry as new diseases, where an actor on a Public Service Announcement can say without irony that "tolerance means celebrating our differences," where an insurance company may raise your premium if you have one cigarette a year and where some folks argue that having even one beer constitutes "drunk driving," where moronic celebrities will bleat "First Amendment" when their record sales drop because they said something offensive to their audience, where eating cockroaches is protested as animal abuse (I had more, including at least one on the right, but my brain is going numb), it is not surprising that people will regard hoods as torture.

We are so in horror of falling to the bottom of the slippery slope that we keep pushing things the other way, just to make sure we don't slip. People who live in horror of the Christian Right and Bush's theocracy have no problem pushing their own style of Puritanism on society for our own good.

But torture has a long and rich history, with some weirdly beautiful terms (strappado and bastinado come immediately to mind). Read the Malleus Maleficarum sometime to get a sense of what real torture is, and then try to square that with what we've been debating recently - loud music, cold rooms, hoods. Where is the line between discomfort and torture? My gut says somewhere around waterboarding, but then I think, if we do it to our own troops as training, how bad can it be? Is inducing momentary panic equal to torture? Should we expand the arsenal of allowable techniques based on the extent of the immediate threat (the "ticking time bomb" scenario)?

Oh wait. I forgot. There is no real threat. So we can all just go back to whatever we were doing before. How could I have ever doubted that serious discussion was possible?

Studio 60 Revisited

Thinking back on Monday's episode, I'm reminded of something else that bothered me about it. The show's A-plot is all about needing to come up with a cold open, the skit they do before the opening credits. Matthew Perry's character (conveniently named Matt) agonizes over this, because he knows that it will set the tone for the entire show, and for their entire run of the show. He needs something splashy, an attention-grabber that will both acknowledge and downplay the circumstances that led to the regime change, and he needs something hilariously funny that will signal the shows return to the kind of quality and cutting-edge social satire the show was once known for.

To accomplaish this, he pins all his hopes on... a Gilbert & Sullivan parody.

And not even a good Gilbert & Sullivan parody. The song he parodies, the Major-General's Song from The Pirates of Penzance, is perhaps the most famous song from their most famous operetta. The problem is, the original song is a rapid-fire catalog with tricky diction and rhyming. The Studio 60 parody is rather flat and wooden, nothing tricky or rapid-fire about it, killing even its couple of tepid punch lines by having a chorus repeat them ad nauseum and stomp them into the ground.

If you want to see rapid-fire musical parody done right, watch Animaniacs.

Why am I spending so much time writing about a show I don't seem to like that much? Because when he's good, Aaron Sorkin writes awesome TV. And like I said, I'm a sucker for backstage drama. And I like the cast. If Sorkin could just get off his soapbox, stop preaching at us about the evils of the Christian Right and bloggers and filming in Vancouver, and concentrate on the characters and the (fictional) show, this could be a home run.

But it's not there yet.

More New Shows

First episode of Heroes was on tonight, NBC's new series about modern day superheroes appearing in the "real world." I actually watched it online over the weekend, though, which was pretty awesome in itself. I have a friend who basically never watches TV anymore. He either downloads Torrents or rents DVD sets off of Netflix or buys them outright if it's a show he really likes. Don't know what this does to the economics of TV long-term, but I got a little thrill of coolness being able to watch a show being streamed on-demand instead of broadcast. Of course, thanks to the protections on the streaming, I couldn't rewind and watch scenes again, so it wasn't totally cool.

Show-wise, it was OK. There's an awesome money shot right up front (and by money shot, I don't mean ejaculation but the equivalent on a show like this - a cool effects sequence of someone using their powers). It's really early in the show, and it was in the trailer, so no spoiler warning. Basically, this cheerleader (played by Hayden Panettiere) takes a 30-40 foot fall onto the ground. The shot is set up to look like it's being filmed by a friend with a videocam, so we see in one continuous take the girl climbing the stairs, jumping off and falling to strike the dirt face-first, the POV jumping as the cameraman runs over to see if she's okay as she climbs to her feet and yanks her dislocated shoulder back into place. All one seamless shot.

That pretty much kept my ass in the seat for the rest of the episode. It's not a great show, not as breathtaking as Lost was when it debuted, or as zingy as Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, but I like a couple of the characters pretty well. When the cheerleader's mom asks her what she did today, the girl answers, "I walked through fire and didn't get burned" (which is literally true). Mom, who's busy playing with her annoying little lapdog, gets all teary-eyed at her daughter's poetic summation of the human spirit, saying something like, "Haven't we all?" So the cheerleader and the teleporting Japanese sarariman I liked. The stripper on the run from the mob with her super-genius son (played by that annoying kid from My Wife and Kids, who's getting typecast as the precocious genius), I didn't like so much.

In the meantime, I also watched Vanished, which is apparently getting killed in the ratings. It's too bad, because I kind of like the show, although having a Masonic conspiracy at the heart of it all*? Sort of done. It feels a little like a cheap attempt to cash in on The Da Vinci Code. Plus, there was a real howler tonight. Pardon me while I digress into my former military area of expertise.

Last week, the FBI agents found this laptop that was set up to receive a wireless broadcast of a video feed that showed the kidnapped senator's wife (the 'vanished' of the title). So they try to track the signal.

Now, radio-direction finding is really simple in concept. In the old days, you would set up with a directional antenna and physically turn it around until you found the direction in which the signal was strongest; nowadays, they make special direction-finding antenna arrays that can calculate the same thing within seconds. So with one reading, you can basically draw a line from where you are to where the signal is originating from, and the signal could originate from anywhere along that line, up to the range of the transmitter. We call this a Line-of-Bearing, or LOB.

To pinpoint the transmitter's location, you want at least three receivers in different locations giving you those LOBs; where the lines intersect is the transmitter's true location. We call this triangulation.

On Vanished, they started out okay, with three direction-finding trucks moving out to take readings. However, the signal was cut off before they could get more than one reading. So the agent asks the tech what he can do with one reading, and the guy says the one reading has yielded not a LOB, but a "ten square mile area." Puh-leeze.

Okay, over it now. Studio 60 ep. 2 aired tonight. Man, this show frustrates me. I love backstage stories. I've done enough performing that I can really relate to them. But the show keeps wobbling back and forth between some fairly sharp character and dialogue and some really lazy potshots at Bush and the Christian right. Sorkin knows from experience that Christian outrage is great publicity, so he manufactures some by having his fictional show-within-a-show thumb its nose at its Christian viewers. I'm not a Christian anymore, but it's just so strident and tiresome, and I just hope he's gotten it out of his system, and that the show has more interesting places to go than this. Because I really like Amanda Peet and Matthew Perry and Bradley Whitford.

*once again, not really a spoiler, since they've been hinting broadly at this for at least three episodes

More Synchronicity

So I'm in the middle of a long weekend, and my main goal has been to write the first draft of a new short story I agreed to write as part of a contest. Part of the research I've done for the story over the last two days has been refresher reading on the Lesser Key of Solomon, a rather famous (or perhaps infamous) text on magic and demon summoning.

Now on Thursday, I wasn't sure if the new season of Smallville was starting or not, so I recorded it, and while I was at it, I also recorded another show I've been hearing good things about, but never watched. That show is Supernatural. Turns out, the shows I recorded weren't the new season openers, but the season finales from May.

So I spent much of this afternoon and evening writing the story, with frequent references to the Lesser Key of Solomon. Then I came home and watched the shows I recorded on Thursday. Guess which magical text plays a major role in the finale of Supernatural?

The show itself was okay, although the grim and gritty got a little over-the-top after a while. Plus, the dialogue could use some work. The characters say each other's names way too much.

"Don't do this, Dean!"
"I have to, Sam!"
"No you don't, Dean!"
"Yes I do, Sam! Our lives depend on it!"
"No they don't, Dean!"*

As for the story I'm writing, I'm about two-thirds of the way through it. I'm sort of happy with it as far as it goes, although I think the plot plays out a little too conventionally. I recently read an essay about fantasy relying too much on quest plots, because so many fantasy writers are stuck in Tolkien imitation mode. I think the same is true of horror stories, where so many of them are about a guy encountering forces beyond his control and trying to beat them, only to discover at the end that his efforts were at best futile, at worst playing right into the malevolent creature's designs. Between this and the poetic justice story, you've got well over half the horror field covered, I think.

I don't want to play to cliche, and yet that's exactly where I'm headed right now, unless some brilliant inspiration strikes me in the next 2000 words.

*not real dialogue from the show, but you get the idea

Apple Sux

I had Quicktime on my computer, but I ran into playback problems, so I updated the player. Quicktime was now totally incompatible with Firefox, apparently, so I deleted it from my system completely, and everything else ran pretty much fine. So my wife is looking for something on-line the other day, it requires Quicktime. She reinstalls it, and now not only does it not work with Firefox, not only does it pop up fucking error messages every other page, but it's also killed Flash!

Fucking useless crap.

ETA: Fixed it. Ended up having to delete a bunch of .dll files. What a pain.

2nd UPDATE: mtreiten asked how I fixed it. I searched through Mozilla's FAQs and found this page, which recommends editing Quicktime's preferences under the Browser tab and unchecking Flash content, then hunting down and deleting npqt*.dll from your Mozilla plug-in folder. I tried to get away without deleting the dll files, but it turns out I had to. I still get error messages popping up constantly asking me to install Quicktime, but the Flash works again. I've tried unchecking the boxes that make Quicktime the default player of all but Quicktime and TIFF files, but I still get the error messages and I don't know how to stop them. Ironically enough, I've only been getting the error messages asking me to install Quicktime since installing Quicktime.

Temeraire and Hedwig

I've been on a frantic reading binge, finishing On Basilisk Station by David Weber and then leaping headlong into His Majesty's Dragon by Naomi Novik. The Weber book was the first in the Honor Harrington series, and it was generally okay, although as a first novel, it had some pretty clunky prose and wooden characters. Also, being a science fictional retelling of the Horatio Hornblower story, Weber has to jump through some expositional hoops to set up his spaceships so that they have to battle like 17th century warships, maneuvering in two dimensions to fire broadsides at each other. But for all that, by the time I finished, I wanted to read the second book in the series.

But since I'd had the Novik book for a month, and had put off buying it for months before that, I decided to go ahead and read it next. I finished it last night, and it was really good. It' a fantasy about the English using a dragon-based air force against the French during the Napoleonic wars. Excellent work, with a really appealing character in Temeraire, the dragon. I must say, I got a little choked up a couple of times, and I plan to buy the next book in the series very soon.

However, while I was reading it, I couldn't help but be struck by the similarities to Harry Potter.

Captain William Laurence, the main character, is an Englishman who is drawn into what amounts to a separate culture existing alongside his own (the Air Corps, devoted to the care and training of dragons, like the wizarding world of the Potter books). He is an outsider who has to learn his way among strangers, who all seem to know about him, because he is famous (for having retrieved a rare dragon's egg from a French warship). Although he is a newcomer to this society, he progresses very quickly, thanks to grit and loyalty and the fact that, though inexperienced, he's badass powerful. His strength makes him the target of a powerful enemy, who is both the source of his power and jealous of it. But his goodness and loyalty bring him allies, foremost among them two fellow trainees, male and female, one each. His adjustment to his new position is made easier by the fact that he is suddenly and unexpectedly wealthy. Over the course of his training, several seemingly unrelated clues come together to reveal a secret plot that only he can foil in the end, by discovering the true nature of his own power.

Some of these things are common tropes, of course, but others, like his newfound wealth (which also featured in the Honor Harrington book, strangely enough - that may have been what made it stand out so strongly) aren't so much.

I'm going to spend the weekend not going to FenCon and trying to bang out a couple of short stories that have impending deadlines. Depending on my success with those endeavors, I may then reward myself with the second Temeraire book, Throne of Jade.

TV, TV, TV

The fall season is in almost full swing, so all that free time I had over the summer is getting sucked up again. I spent the weekend watching Lost Season 2 in anticipation of season 3 starting in a couple of weeks. I watched an episode of the remastered Star Trek. It was "Balance of Terror," Das Boot in space. The effects are subtly better, but they did not take my suggestion and depicted phasers as photon torpedoes, just like the original episode. There is a funny bit where Nimoy has to run down a corridor and turn a corner; between the slick floor and the (as near as I can remember) painfully ill-fitting boots of the first season and the probably-flimsy set walls that he must avoid bumping, the run looks pretty silly.

Watched the debut of Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip last night. Very funny in places, but like The West Wing, it alternates between being very funny and almost unbearably preachy. A character has an on-camera meltdown at the beginning of the show, in which he goes off on television for being dumb and offensive, but not offensive in the right ways. And given Sorkin's previous highly-publicised drug problems, it seems almost too much like a roman a clef for his main characters to be a TV writer and director, both of whom also have a history of drug problems (one of them played by Matthew Perry, who also has his own real-life history of drug problems). Maybe the drug thing will fade into the background once the show gets rolling.

I have to mention, though, that the biggest laugh I got during the episode was from the Rozerem commercial. Rozerem is a sleep aid drug, and get this: one of the side effects may be drowsiness. Alert CBS News, I think there's a scandal a brewin'.