Daniel's TV Blog

I rarely ever watch award shows. I didn't have much else on the TiVo last night so I tuned in to watch Doogie host. He was awesome and everyone told him so. He made a gay joke right in the opening song. I also counted three Kanye West jokes. Here are some of the highlights:

• 30 Rock won for Best Comedy. Yay, 30 Rock! Also Alec Baldwin won, but not Tina Fey. Boo!
• Mad Men won for Best Drama. It's a great show but I'm not sure if it's "Best Drama" material. I went to bed before this award was given out.
• Kristin Chenoweth won for Pushing Diasies. She started to cry and so did I. I love her.
• Grey Gardens won for best TV movie. I loved this movie. Is it available on DVD? If so, go watch it.
• Amazing Race won again for Best Reality show. Does this win every year? Yes it does.
• Kathy didn't win, instead it went to Intervention.
• South Park won for the episode about the economy. Stan's dad's blender was financed but they sold the debt and repackaged it, just like mortgage-backed security bonds. It was great.
• One of my favorite moments was the list of names for best variety show, especially Conan's Facebook gag.

Labels: Emmy

Earlier tonight one of my friends broke into the normal conversation of the night to tell us something one of his friends posted on Facebook. It was a super-slam against Kanye West. Among other things his Facebook friend said, "It's a good thing your mother is dead so she didn't have to see what you did tonight." I thought this was extremely harsh. Nothing could deserve such and awful statement!

Then I saw what he did. Here is the clip, although I think this will be disabled in a short time:


So here is what happened. Taylor Swift won a video award for Best Female Video. During her acceptance speech Kanye West rushes the stage and grabs the mic from her. He congratulates her for winning but says Beyonce had one the best video of videos of all time. effectively saying her win was worthless and it belong to Beyonce. Beyone did have a great video and she did go on to win the Video of The Year Award. But I love the You Belong with Me video. It's all about how the nice, unpopular girl should really be with the super hot neighbor guy. She has won several Country Music awards but this was her first big mainstream award and Kanye ruined it. It looks as if she is about to burst into tears...and who would blame her. Beyonce is laughing nervously. I wouldn't know what to do if I were her either. Afterward the crowd erupts in applause and I have no idea if it is in support of Kanye or Taylor. I'm still confused but I want to cry for Taylor.

Really Kanye, I too am happy your mother died before seeing this deplorable behavior. It's just not right.

Here is the video. Go buy the song right now.

Labels: MTV

Accidentally On Purpose. I find a show about a baby crazy women ruining the life of her frat boy baby-daddy so repulsive. Really, this show makes my skin crawl.

Labels: Fall 2009, Vampire Diaries

The new fall season started last night with the debut of Glee. Here are the new shows this season I plan on watching:

Glee, 9/9/2009 on FOX
This premiered back in May and I love this show. Love it. Love it!

Community, 9/17/2009 on NBC
Joel McHale from The Soup is the star of this new sitcom about a bunch of characters at a community college. It looks like the best new comedy of the season.

Parenthood, 9/23/2009 on NBC
The movie was great and like 20 years old but I look forward to the very few episodes I expect out of this.

Modern Family, 9/23/2009 on ABC
Why watch Parenthood, which was about family life in the late 80s, when you can watch a total new and original show about three different families. One of them is a gay couple with an adopted baby

Cougar Town, 9/23/2009 on ABC
I love Courtney Cox Arquette although I don't think this show will be success. Maybe 6 episodes I guess.

Eastwick, 9/23/2009 on ABC
This could be this year's Ugly Betty or Desperate Housewives. I think it will be a big success. It's my number three show this year after FlashForward and Glee.

FastForward, 9/24/2009 on ABC
I'm looking forward to this show more than anything. Everyone blacks out and has a vision of the future. The future vision is for April 2010 so we can expect the show to catch up with its future before the end of the season. I'm worried that Penelope is in this. She needs to be on Lost more for the finale season.

V, 11/3/2009 on ABC
We have to wait until November but we get: Inara/Adria, Agent Baldwin, and Juliet all in the same series! I'm happy they are remaking this classic show from my childhood. I just hope they don't do the whole stealing-the-water story. There's so much water in the galaxy, there's no need to pull it out of our gravity well. Go gerbils!

Labels: Fall 2009

The big news of the day is Ellen is joining the cast of Idol. I love Ellen and this is totally going to get her Giraffe money. Long ago on her talk show she said how Michael Jackson was so rich that he could afford a private zoo with a Giraffe. That's rich. She is totally on her way there. She also signed up for many more talk show years, to at least 2014.

Labels: American Idol, Ellen

Today is the official start of the new fall season with the debut of Glee on FOX. Fox seems to always be the first one to start the season. Glee did have a preview back in May and it was great. I missed it and had to watch it on Hulu. I really love the idea of a preview and I really hope each network decides to run a preview of one new fall series during the season finale season. It really gets people excited for a show. In addition to the preview, Glee has released short episode clips all summer to tease us with. I missed a few but I did see Gold Digger which was hilarious.

Way back in May, I was visiting Paramount Studios with my friend Jason and our mutual friend Gary gave us a personal tour of the studios. They had several active sets going on, some back Nickelodeon sit-com, Nip/Tuck, and Glee. Nip/Tuck was shooting that day so we couldn't get in to see most of the sets. Glee however was clear and we were able to wander through. Here I am sitting at the Principal's desk. This was before I had seen the preview so I wasn't to super excited about walking though the set. We also walked though the classrooms, halls, the teachers apartment and the locker room. They didn't have any showers on the set. They have to do those scenes on location since there was no plumbing built into the set.

Don't miss Glee tonight. I surely won't.

Labels: Fall 2009, Glee

I recently saw the new G.I. Joe film. It was really cool. Lots of great special effects and cool gadgets and weapons. It got me thinking about the original cartoon from the 80s which I watched, and the comic book which I read for about 5 years.

The TV show started with a mini-series. GI Joe and Cobra went on a global hunt for three special ingredients to a special doomsday machine. It eventually went into a daily series where each week Cobra was foiled by Joe is they quest to take over the world. It was never really clear where Cobra got all they funding and how they could afford to buy all the choppers that the Joes shot down each episode or pay the mercenaries who bailed out of the choppers that the Joes shot down every episode. The comic book went into a lot more detail about their organization but the back story was never really explored that well. They also had to cool Cobra Island story where the Joes were tricked into detonating a ton of underwater explosives triggered a tectonic event which created a new island. At which point the secret Cobra organization became a nation recognized by the U.N. That was pretty cool.

The movie had the predicable one-liner references to the show, "He's a real American hero" and "Knowing is half the battle." But it also had a completely plausible origin story for the well funded terrorist organization Cobra. An super smart scientist stumbles across some groundbreaking nono-technology and he is able to adapt it to use for mind control and facial reconstruction. This guy goes on to become Cobra Commander. The mind control technology explains the source of the power, both money and man-power. It is very powerful technology for whoever first masters it and could easily turn someone into a very powerful threat. I'm not sure if I like the change of the Baroness from just evil villainess to the unwilling mind controlled sister of the Cobra Commander and ex-fiance of Duke, the newest member of the G. I. Joe team. Woman can be beautiful and evil. It made for a good love story though. Pretty much all of the characters Destro, Zartan, Snake Eyes, Storm Shadow had their origin stories presented in the film. Something I never got in the show. Even if the movie had been a flop (it wasn't so expect more) it would have been great for me to know the back stories of the characters I've known for so long. And knowing is half the battle.

Labels: G.I. Joe, I Remember

This is a new recurring kind of post for me, the "I Remember" post. I'm going to talk about shows I used to watch long ago without doing any research. It's just the show as I remember. So there will be some missing and incorrect information.

When I was a child I used to watch Days of Our Lives and Another World. The latter was since canceled but DOOL is still limping along as NBC's only remaining soap. I have a vague memory of another NBC soap called The Doctors. Then in high school there was Generations, the first soap with a significant African American cast, instead of the two token characters who have no choice but to get married, until a third black person moves into town. Finally NBC had Passions which I watched a few times at the gym and was thoroughly confused why anyone would watch it, and I love bad television. But my favorite soap opera was called Santa Barbara. And a few weeks ago when driving through Santa Barbara, I started to remember a lot of this show.

The show started with the return of some guy who used to be engaged to The Princess Bride. He was in prison for killing her brother. Upon parole he was released and returned. I don't remember much of this story line other than the not really dead Capwell mom was the real killer, but it was an accident. The two main families were the Capwells and someone else. They were modelled after the Capulets and Montegues from Romeo and Juliet. So the guy coming back from prison was probably a member of the other family. I didn't watch it for a while and then they had a big earthquake and stuff. I watched it regularly in high school. It was the time of two super couples, Mason Capwell and the character played by Nancy Lee Grahn and Cruz and Eden Capwell. Cruz was the successful Latino police detective and Eden was the daughter of the wealthiest family in town so this was a problem. But eventually everyone was happy with their relationship. And they were happy until the rape. Eden was violently and realistically raped in a very emotional storyline. She was smashed into her glass coffee table by a man dresses all in black, one of the many reasons never to have a glass coffee table. She recovered and they found out it was gynecologist. Gross. That character fell of a cliff or something. Apparently they liked the actor because they recast him as the new D.A. with the crazy wife. Mason and Nancy's character (I can't remember her name) had an on-again-off-again relationship. They were both lawyers and much of the time they were dealing with Mason's alcoholism. Often they were the comic relief with one mad capped adventure about a missing body they put in their garage freezer. I don't remember why they had a body, but it was funny.

I stopped watching when I went off to college and the show was eventually cancelled. It ended well though. Someone got married and all the couples got back together to celebrate at the wedding. There was some gunfire, but in the end all the couples danced happily off the air. I wonder if they are showing old episodes on the Soap Opera Network. I'll have to take a look.

Labels: I Remember, Santa Barabara

I've only been keeping up with three shows this summer:

• True Blood, which is having its season finale next week
• Defying Gravity, which has a brilliant way of concurrent time-line story telling
• and Warehouse 13 on SyFy network

I wasn't sure what to expect from Warehouse 13. The object-hunter type shows never seem to be successful. The concept of collecting magical objects seems to familiar and yet and can't think of other shows like it, other than Pandamonium. That's right, I just referenced an obscure Saturday morning cartoon from the early 80's. But this show is the perfect balance of comedy, sci-fi/fantasy, pop-culture references, and romantic tension. But this show has the main success elements: interesting characters. Pete and Myka are a great team who quickly got over the we-hate-each-other to we-are-friends-and-colleagues mode. Artie (a long time SciFi actor) has an interesting a mysterious past but is completely dedicated to the Warehouse and the safety of everyone. The addition of teen-genius Claudia was the best. She improves better than Artie, sometimes with disastrous results.

So each week Pete and Myka venture out to some part of the country to collect a dangerous object. Mostly it has something to do with electromagnetism. Sometime it is technology created way before it's time, like a holographic generator. When something strange happens they try to find a common source and then bag it, tag it, and stick it in the warehouse.

The show has three episodes left in this season, but all the current season are on Hulu. It has already been renewed for a second season. Yay!

Labels: Warehouse 13