Daniel's TV Blog

I found a new show this week. It’s called Three Sheets and it’s about drinking around the world. The host Zane travels to different cities and drinks at various local bars, meeting the locals, playing their drinking games, and trying their more exotic drinks. The later usually ends up with someone puking. Although I’m not a huge drinking, I do love travel shows and this is a fun alternative to the never ending repeat network called The Travel Channel. The drawback is this show is on a networked called MOJO HD, which is only available on HD cable. It’s not available on DISH yet. I’ve been watching episodes on HULU. They have entire full episodes of this and many other shows. It's travel, drinking, and fun, what's not to love?

Strangely enough this week I also started watching the new season of Addiction. The first episode I watched was about a 24 year old Iraqi yet who drinks up to a liter of vodka every single night. He’s had several car accidents while driving drunk. He’s totally messed up from the war after killing fisherman he though were insurgents and watching his sergeant bleed to death on their last day. He’s living with his parents and working as a clerk in a liquor store with no long term prospects. I thought it was going to be a happy ending when he agreed to go a 90 day rehab facility run and staffed by ex-military vets. But the captions at the end told he left the facility after 3 weeks and is now living with friends. It’s amazing to watch the next generation of homeless being created right before our eyes. Kudos George Bush.

Labels: Intervention, Three Sheets

Samantha Brown is back! This summer she’s got TWO new shows, Samantha Brown’s Passport to Great Weekends, which premiers tonight, and Samantha Brown’s Passport to China, which starts later this summer just in time for the Beijing Olympics. But her new show tonight brings her back to the US after two seasons in Europe and one in Latin America. Great Weekends is all about awesome 48 hours adventures one can have. Tonight’s episodes take Sam to Vegas and to Austin, Texas, two of my favorite US cities. I’m heading to Vegas next month. Sam has a wonderful way of walking into a room she has almost certainly already toured and looking at it with such joy and wonder. It’s just wonderful. Sam visited Vegas on many occasions on Great Hotels. I think it was the Luxor episode were she just looked so comfortable in Vegas after all the previous episodes. She was driving down the strip in a convertible humming her show’s theme song. I can’t to see her back in Vegas tonight! Set your TiVos. If you miss it tonight, don't worry it's on constantly all weekend.

Labels: Samantha Brown

I really like the FX show, 30 Days. It’s far more to the documentary side of the spectrum, not the reality show side. No one wins anything at the end of the show. People just learn a lot about themselves and others. The episodes without any growth, however, are the gay ones. In the first season they took a religious extremist and had him move to San Francisco with a gay roommate and work in a gay bar. He left the experience as anti-gay as when he started. Last night on the latest episode, they took a Mormon women and moved her into a family with two gay dads and their four adopted kids. At the end she was just as anti-gay as when she started. The gay couple were all very nice and non-confrontational with her. Her worst conversation was with the straight family members who would not accept her intolerance. She stormed out of there crying.

The problem is of course, you can’t change people’s religion. Changing someone opinion on animal rights or gun rights is not as core to their perceived being as their religion. And even though I could go on and on about how religion is wrong on homosexuality, they are brainwashed a certain way and they aren’t going to change. The good thing is more of them are dying each year than are converted so eventually we will have marriage equality, adoption equality, job safety, etc. Very soon their opinion will be a small minority.

Labels: 30 Days

Over ten years ago, The Onion ran an article entitled, “U.S. Dept. Of Retro Warns: 'We May Be Running Out Of Past'”

While it was funny then, it’s true now. This week VH1 is airing, iLove the New Millennium. The obvious follow-up to I Love the 70’s, 80’s, and 90’s is a few years too early. They can only run eight episodes instead of ten. Tonight is 2004 and 2005 while tomorrow finishes up with 2006 and 2007, just under six months after the actual year ended. But I’ve been watching because it is always funny. Hopefully they will wait until 2010 for iLove the New Millennium, Service Pack 2 or whatever they will call the sequel.

Labels: iLove the New Millennium

Kathy Griffin is blowing up my TiVo. Repeats of season 3 of Life on the D List were on all morning. I watched some before work. My TV is also my alarm clock so I woke up during Kathy’s date with Ron Jeremy. It was unusual. But tonight is the start of season 4 of Life on the D List. Yay for Kathy. The half hour before her show is the red carpet special for the special Bravo A List awards, which comes on after the season premier. It’s just Kathy Kathy Kathy, all night long. Yay!

In more Kathy news, her next Seattle show goes on sale on Saturday. The show is on 11/20/08. I took a look at the ticket price and Holy Fuck Balls! Tickets that were $42 last year are now $72! With the insane ticket master fees it’s going to be like $90 per ticket. I’m still going. Plus I just found out that Kathy is performing in Las Vegas while I’m there this summer. Yay for me!

My final Kathy news is my super famous YouTube clip from Kathy’s penultimate appearance on The View last year. It’s the third highest most viewed Kathy Griffin video, after her Today show rant on Ann Coulter and the Eminem video she appeared in. View count has been up recently and so has the comments. Most are favorable but there’s this one odd fish who keeps claiming Kathy is Jewish and immoral. I wish people would stop imposing their beliefs on Kathy. She's a free spirit. Yay for Kathy!

Labels: Kathy Griffin

This season saw lots of newly dead. Some where sad, some were celebrated, some were shocking, and some were unnecessary.

Danielle Rouseau. She was crazy but she was also Deleen. I was happy everything she showed up. Sadly she was killed by the mercenary team. I’ll miss her. She probably won’t be back in a flashback.
Karl. We never really got to know what his deal was. How did he get to the island? Were his parents there? Why was Ben brainwashing him in Room 23? He’s dead now so we will probably never know.
Alex. “Where is Alex?”, the first words spoken by that crazy French women was the first evidence that there were Others on the island. Over the years we met Alex and know her full story. I was completely shocked when Keamy executed her in front of Ben. This set Ben off on him quest to find and kill Penny. I hope he never succeeds.
Captain Gault. He wasn’t in many episodes but he was the hottest guest star this season. Though some would disagree and say it was:
Keamy. The mercenary character who goal it is to kill everyone isn’t likely to survive the season. He did survive the smoke monster and getting shot by Richard before getting killed in the Orchid. I was wondering if he left radio contact would the bomb explode or did his device send a signal once he was dead. If they were deep underground, how did the signal get broadcast?
Michael. While he needed to die to atone for the killing of Ana Lucia and Libby, I would have liked to see him and Walt be reunited. Although with the presence of Jack’s Dad, perhaps he is joining the ranks of the Undead. Walt and Michael may yet be reunited if he returns to the Island.
Jin. This I found this death to be unnecessary. I hate it when characters are killed for no reason. It is my hope that he survived the explosion and made it back to the island radius to be moved with it. This seems unlikely since the helicopter flew from the wreck to the island and missed the movement. However that could have been because they were in midair. Jin still could have survived, but probably not. Maybe he could be undead too. I just hope that whatever Sun is doing is super important and something she wouldn’t have done had Jin survived.
Claire. Is she dead? She was hanging out with the Undead Christian so she might be. But non-dead characters can see Christian so perhaps the Island is just protecting her from the Battle with the Freighter. Either way, she is currently Lost.
Daniel. He was on the zodiac when the island moved. Was he close enough? Most likely since the helicopter raft never encountered them during their time before Penny’s boat showed up.
Locke. He’s dead in the future. His official death is suicide. Was he killed or did he really kill himself? Why does he have to go back to the island with the Oceanic Six? Will the island bring him back to life?
The Rest of the Freighter People. The Doctor, Minkowsi, the chick with the chain, and all the mercenaries. Widmore is going to go recruiting.

Labels: LOST

Since I was neglectful about the usual individual episode postings I like to do, I'm going to do a series of Season 4 wrap-up post. This one is mostly about the LOST timeline but also a bit about the finale.

I was very satisfied with the way LOST ended this year, more so than any previous season. This is the way shows should end the season. In all the past seasons of LOST, the next season began at almost the exact moment from the season finale. This is how most cliffhangers work. It’s useful but it’s not my favorite way of doing things. This season LOST had what I call a Buffy Ending, and it was great. A Buffy Ending is when the season ends and the large season arc gets resolved in the finale. In Buffy this meant the destruction of the “Big Bad” of the season. This is usually coupled with some additional smaller cliffhanger for us to ponder over the summer, like Buffy running away, or Buffy dying, or (surprise!) Buffy has a sister. The fourth season of LOST essentially wrapped up the large story arc set down in the pilot, “will the get off the island?”, left some mysteries unresolved, and completely set up for season five’s main arc: getting back to the island.

This goes along with the biggest shift in the show that results from this episode: breaking with the timeline. From the beginning there has been one narrative coupled with flashbacks and flash-forwards. But the main timeline from the Pilot to “There’s No Place Like Home, Part 3” played out day by day for 108 days. BTW, 108 was the number of minutes between pushing the button at The Swan and it’s the sum of Hurley’s lotto numbers. So as excited as I am to find out how they get back to the island and how/why/if Locke really died, I’m interested to see where they will start the timeline for season five. I think they will start from or shortly after the coffin meeting. Flashbacks and possibly flash-forwards will branch off from this timeline. We will uncover what happened on the island and what else the Oceanic Six have done from arriving on the beach in Indonesia to the coffin meeting. It’s going to be a very exciting season, too bad we have to wait until January.

Labels: LOST

Bridget is my favorite Girl Next Door. I was watching a bunch of episodes over the weekend and I noticed that her part of the opening credits changed over the seasons. Observe:

Season 1














Season 2














Season 3














And I put them all together on YouTube.

Labels: Girls Next Door

Labels: Venture Brothers

Well it finally happened, there is absolutely nothing on my TiVo. I’ve watched everything that I recorded. I copied shows to DVD that I want to keep. And now the TiVo is completely blank. I’m thinking of running the “delete everything” feature and rebuild my season passes. This is the first time I’ve hit the bottom since I got the TiVo in March 2003 so I’m not expecting this to happen again for a while. Not only is the TiVo blank, the eight year old DishPlayer died a third and I think final time so I don’t have any shows on that DVR either. To compete the emptiness of content, all my NetFlix disks are either coming or going today, nothing at home. I feel weirdly empty today, like when you take a really, really big poop.

Labels: DishPlayer, TiVo