Prison Break
Remember when I said I don't watch TV? Come on, you remember. Well, that's over now: BitTorrent and DVD rentals are my new TV. Here's what I'm watching (contains spoilers if you haven't yet seen them).
Prison Break: I initially downloaded episodes to catch up with the first season, but now I do it because they show it on Mondays at 8 o'clock, which is about the time my girlfriend and I are on the phone. (Aww.) The show is utterly preposterous: in one recent episode we see escaped convicts Michael Scofield and Fernando Sucré falling into a river only to see them in the next scene high and dry, the former wearing different clothes giving the latter a note from his pocket. That's on top of all everything else in the second season: now that they've escaped from prison, the FBI and "The Company" and the prisoners' former guards are on their tail, each prisoner with their own story line, involving revenge, marriage, clearing their name, and so on. At least they killed off the annoying characters (Veronica Donnavan, "Tweener") but shit's ridiculous. And yet I watch.
Battlestar Galactica: I finally watched the miniseries on DVD as well as a few episodes I had already seen and can see what people like about it. Almost everything about it—the story and the morals in the story, acting, soundtrack, the effects—are great. Almost? It tends to gloss over a few things, like how Boomer landed her ship after leaving Caprica. But something tells me they explain that later on.
The Wire: Jason Kottke wouldn't shut up about it, so I watched the entire first season over a span of a couple weeks. Set in Baltimore, the first season takes us inside the low-rises of the projects, with the police trying to break down a drug operation. The second season takes us to the docks and inside the dock workers' union. (The title refers to wiretaps placed on pay-phones and pagers in the drug dealer network.) Unlike Prison Break, The Wire seems intent on killing off the most interesting characters, like Wallace in the first season (unfairly, he just wanted out of the game) and almost Kima, the black lesbian. In season two, they kill of D'Angelo and make it look like a suicide, also for wanting out of the game (but also because they were afraid he'd snitch or already had). The series introduces me to slang like "mope", "the bug", and "suction". Also interesting is how they namedrop neighbourhoods, like some kind of geographic secret handshake. (I wonder if that's how Vancouverites felt about Da Vinci's Inquest.) Other things I learned about Baltimorians: they swear every third word and are all alcoholics, especially Baltimore cops. Oh, and don't fuck with Omar.
My favourite show on TV, the only show besides Prison Break that I schedule time to watch, is getting canceled according to various media reports. There's video of David Cross calling out FOX's marketing department for failing to promote an award-winning show. A MetaFilter thread goes through the usual "FOX executives are idiots"/"the show isn't funny anymore anyway"/"I saw this coming" reactions. I think there's a better way to complain, but it involves spending money.
The latest episode was really great, and the jokes were okay until the very end, when I laughed the hardest in a long while for a situation comedy. The episode consisted of Michael Bluth telling his new girlfriend that his company's property had a mole problem. Simultaneously, we see Tobias getting asked to "perform" as a mole for the CIA (Tobias thinks it's a casting agent asking him to try out for an acting role). When Michael invites Japanese investors to view the property, property the investors think already has homes built on it, his brother creates the illusion of housing with miniatures. A mixup earlier in the episode has Michael's son, George Michael, trying on a jetpack. The episode culminates with a absolutely unintentional—by the characters—re-enactment of an old Godzilla movie, with George Michael flying in to run into and fight with what looks to like an oversized mole, which was busily crushing the miniature houses, much to the horror of the Japanese investors. Michael is relieved, since that means that the investors wouldn't be giving his company any money, saving the company from defrauding them.
The episode is a great example of the lengths to which the writers go to setup a big joke (the Godzilla reference), and even the small ones where Charlize Theron's character, a British schoolteacher, complains about "Yanks" playing Brits in the movies. The show would remind me of the short-lived Get a Life starring Chris Eliot if I could remember any details from the show. (But when the band Handsome Boy Modeling School came about, I immediately knew where they got the samples from on their first album.) The shows' wierd humour are comparable, but I see a potential parallel with Family Guy, which is vulgar but hilarious. Family Guy got cancelled by FOX too, and the network re-instated it once they realized that DVD sales and re-run ratings were through the roof. So here's my theory: with actual sales data, FOX executives will consider re-instating Arrested Development as well.
There's a slight chance that this is a cynical way to market the show, by making it look like they're cancelling it—they have not outright said they are cancelling the show, just that they've purchased less shows than originally promised for this season—they're getting people to talk about it and gauge how people feel about the show. Maybe they're even watching a PubSub feed for 'arrested development' or using some other tracking tool to see what people are writing about the show on their weblogs. Most of the reaction seems to be following one of the three templates in the MetaFilter post.