Daniel's TV Blog

This week I was watching Tosh.O and was surprised to see my friends Joe and Evan in the audience. I did a screen grab. Tosh.0 is an Internet clip show. Daniel Tosh was showing a particularly disgusting video and filming the audience reaction. There is the second row are my friends. The video was about a massive puss flow. I don't recommend it, but here it is. Evan and Joe are in three shots.

Labels: Tosh.0

Yay, it's Tennis Night!

Labels: 30 Rock

There is a common new device used this year on two shows, it's the I-saw-something-important-at-season-ending-cliffhanger-but-now-I-forgot-it thing. It happened with Olivia on Fringe and also with Lois Lane on Smallville. Yes I still watch Smallville, deal with it. Olivia went to Spock's universe and didn't remember her conversation until the fourth episode. Lois went into the future and saw some shocking important but she is only now starting to remember flashes of it. Whatever she saw the future seems to be bright yellow like it is on fire or something.

I've been trying to think of other cliffhanger amnesia. With two this season there have to be other instances. In the first season of Babylon 5, the security guy figured out the plot to kill the president but was shot and in a coma for the first few episodes of the next season. It's not quite the same but it did take a few episodes for the information to disseminate. Daniel Jackson died and ascended at the end of Season 5 of Stargate: SG1. He returned in Season 7 with no memory or the place he had gone in the intervening season or the advanced information he learned while there. It's sort of the same thing but not really since we weren't given the expectation of new information at the end of the previous season.

But this is such an easy device for drawing out a cliffhanger over several episodes I'm sure it has been used before.

Labels: Fringe, Smallville

The new Stargate premiered last week and I really love it. The premise is similar to the other Stargate shows, teams of military and civilians go through the stargate to different planets to get things and battle evil. While Atlantis had a similar premise to to SG1 with a big common evil group to battle with. But there doesn't seem to be a specific evil alien group yet and even if there were it would be had to fight them and rather easy to avoid them. It also seems to be also a lot darker than the other shows. Here are some other bullets points why I love the show and you should watch it.

• They are lost in space with a hotline to Earth. Even though they are several if not dozens of galaxies away, the ancient communication stones allow for real time communication with Stargate command on Earth and the primary contact Colonel Lou Diamond Phillips.
• They have the classic SciFi device of the outside man. The guy who played Mark's boyfriend on Ugly Betty is the new guy on the team who only got through one of the orientation videos before the incident sent them across the universe. He asks the questions the audience may not know.
• The driving force at least in this season is the struggle to survive. It kind of has the urgency of the first season of Battlestar Galactica where they are making due with what they escaped with. But the ancient ship holds lots of promise if they can fix the broken parts. First they needed air. Now they have to figure out the water, food, and power issues. I like struggling to survive shows like elements of LOST and BSG.
• I think one of the characters is a lesbian. A first for this franchise.
• The characters are great. As I always say the characters make the show. The lead scientist is kinda crazy and most people don't trust him. The outsider is a slacker who makes pop culture jokes. The three military people all have very distinct personality and their own issues. The Senator's daughter has great potential.
  
• There are still some mysteries. What was the dust devil? Who took the shuttle? Why are some planets locked out of the dialing device? What happened to the other team members who went to the other planet? What wonders does the Destiny hold? Are there other aliens in these other galaxies?
• You don't had to have watched the first 15 seasons to enjoy it. It's really good SciFi.
  

You can watch the first episodes on Hulu and the first two are free on iTunes.

Labels: Stargate: Universe

Before the new season started there were two shows I was most looking forward to. Those were/are Glee on Fox Wednesdays and Flashforward on ABC Thursdays.

Glee has kept its promise of being the funniest new show of the season. The characters are wonderful, from the main kids, to the background kids, to the teachers, and even the crazy wife. The story is moving along very fast. They could easy drag things out but they are really pushing the story on with the Invitationals, the upcoming Sectionals, and the Regionals off at some point in the season. I'm super excited that Cindi Lightballoon is now directly involved Glee. I really hope she sings sometime. And I can never get enough of the mohawk guy. He is delicious. This show exceeded expections and kept its promise of being awesome.

Then there is Flashforward. This promised to be am engaging mystery show that the whole world wound experience together. After three episodes I'm ready to drop this. I'll give it another chance since Charlie is joining the cast in the next episode or the one after. So before I get to the whole causality problem, the show is just boring. As I always say, it's the characters that make a show interesting. None of the FBI characters are interesting. Dr. Penny isn't interesting. The alcoholic utility guy looking for his daughter isn't interesting. All boring. What happened to the babysitter and the suicidal doctor? They had potential. The black fiance seemed interesting but she's only been in one episode. The next topic is the disaster cleanup and recovery. First up I don't think every building would be slightly damaged. I think some buildings would be undamaged, some would have some damage, and some would have burned down. With the streets impassable and dozens of fires going, at least one high-rise would have a big fire that would have burned all day to the point of structural failure. Twenty years ago the tallest building in L.A. at the time had a fire that lasted four hours and nearly took down the building. It was in real danger or shearing off the upper floor. It took 64 fire companies to battle this fire. In the chaos in the day of the blackouts it's far more likely that dozens of fires would have destroyed a lot of buildings around the world, not just L.A. And the cleanup seemed to happen very quick. The alcoholic utility guy would be working 16 hours shifts to fix all the problems. He wouldn't have time to get fill out exhumation paperwork much less hang around a bar in the middle of the day. I lived in Northridge during the 1994 quake and there was debris (mostly from fallen cement fences) on the streets for months. The time it would take to clear up every single freeway and major streets in L.A. would take weeks. It's not just a big accident, it's every mile of every freeway and every block in every direction. There's no plan in place for that kind of cleanup. It would take a few days to just come up with a plan. On to the investigation. It seems like the only people in the government investigating the incident is a same team in Los Angeles. There should be every government and military agency working on it. They should be a small team, not the leaders in the investigation.

But the causality issue is the biggest problem. If I had a vision of the future I would be very interested in seeing if it came true or not. And as the date and time became more known from the mosaic experiences, I would be very interested in that date/time. I wouldn't go about as business as usual. I'd be hanging out at a party celebrating a flash forward party. I wouldn't be in the bathroom. I wouldn't be having an ultrasound (who has those at 10pm?). I wouldn't be in a morning staff meeting in London. I wouldn't be at my own wedding. So either the future is what it is because I knew it was coming or the future is a possibility that could change. I know I would try to change it just because I could.

If I was running the show I would have kept at least the first few episodes heartpounding exciting. I'd start each episode with different disaster scenes from the blackout. I'd have characters that were interesting. I'd make the causality more of an issue. I'd spend more time to the clean-up effort instead of the far to slow moving investigation. And then I make the investigation more interesting. I'll give the show one more episode before I drop it.

Labels: Flashforward, Glee