TV
Sarah: “as anyone else observed the phenomenon of non-TV watchers who will spend hours watching shows on DVD and think that it's somehow morally superior, since you avoid the commercials?”
After searching through Jason Kottke's site for links about The Wire, and remembering his strong recommendation of season 3, it feels a little strange to say that after watching both the first and second seasons, it's time for a break. Season 4 is currently in progress, so I don't feel like there's too much left to get caught up, meaning I can wait until the holidays and use the hour or two gained from not watching Baltimore homicide and narcotics cops catch the bad guys to catch up on the first season of space pilots battling their robotic creations.
Thoughts so far on the first two seasons: lots of parallels between it and Homicide: Life on the Streets. Both are set in Baltimore, Maryland. Both have homicide detectives joining police raids while wearing bullet-proof vests. Both have black ink on the whiteboard for solved cases ("clearances" in The Wire, meaning they passed it on to the district attorneys), and red for unsolved cases, like the 14 Jane Does in Season 2. Both had the district attorney's office as a largely tangential player, but from what I remember, The Wire has more politics. (A running theme is that if you follow the drugs, all you find are drug users and drug dealers, but if you follow the money, you don't know what you'll find.) Homicide was a little edgier, especially with the editing, and dark, and maybe a little better. But then again, it didn't have Method Man acting as one of the gangsters.
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.
Conan O'Brien has seen the future of TV: “the trend toward larger and larger televisions will continue as screens double in size every 18 months. Televisions will eventually grow so large that families will be forced to watch TV from outside their homes, peering in through the window. Random wolf attacks will make viewing more dangerous. And, just as televisions grow larger and more complicated, so will remote controls. In fact, changing channels will soon require people to literally jump from button to button. Trying to change the channel while simultaneously lowering the volume will require two people and will frequently lead to kinky sex.”
Todd, after quoting my quip about FOX has a tendency to cancel its best shows, on the TV show Arrested Development: “For a while I've had this thought that watching AD is like surfing the web. The show has an overt narrator, wonderfully voiced over by Ron "Speilberg-Lite" Howard, and that narrator provides us with numerous cut-away example and sample clips that support, explain or contradict things the characters in the show say and do. The clips, like hyperlinks used for the same reasons on web page, come from all over: surveillance video, home movies, still shots of print publications. They hit you like you might hit a linked page - quickly, somewhat disjointedly, yet somehow appropriate, before returning to the flow of the show. It's a different kind of tv, and it's part of what makes this show so enjoyable.”
Dave Pollard on House MD, another FOX show, which I haven't seen an episode of: “The attempt by the hacks to damage House is clearly evident (the hospital administrators are predictably corrupt and ludicrously manipulative and out to 'get' our hero -- they force him in the latest episode to choose between firing one of his brilliant interns or shilling for a new overpriced drug; and the way-too-pretty young people on the staff are being given more close-ups and featured in vapid, simple subplots) but what is remarkable is that the show seems to have found a way to accommodate this interference without losing its edge. A particularly fine episode, Fidelity, has a convoluted, stunning plot and a merciless, horrifyingly human ending. It would make a wonderful stage play. And House's spare and savage come-backs and asides are still original, lovingly crafted and totally believable. House is tailor-made to be the stereotypical rude and short-tempered medical specialist, yet Laurie and the writers refuse to allow him to be caricaturized -- with each episode he grows deeper and more engaging and complex.”
Jon Gertner wrote an article—as yet unread by yours truly—that suggests that TV ratings are so hard to measure that any data they provide is useless. (This is also an idea that comes out of The Wisdom of Crowds as well.) The point is twofold: the major broadcasters are probably going to have to start listening to the conversations around their shows rather than find out raw numbers of how many people are "watching" them, but now that they release TV shows on DVD as quick as they do, they might be able to use the raw data—DVD's sold, amount of money that the DVD's brought in, etc.—to figure out whether they should keep producing the show, or in Family Guy's case, bring the show back.
All the shows listed above are FOX shows, probably because they are shown on one of the three—the number fluctuates to as high as five—TV channels I get. I'm actually considering getting cable again, if only to 'watch' baseball games, or rather have them as background noise and watch the plays when I hear the crack of the bat. I do know that TV, before not having cable, was a time-sink, and there are multiple episodes of The Simpsons repeats that I know I'd end up watching.
Chris Anderson: “Both the channel-centric reality of TV and its ephemeral nature are artifacts of the distribution bottleneck of cable broadcast. TV is still in the era of limited shelf space, while the lesson of the Long Tail is that more is always better. The growth of cable capacity over the past decade pales next to the growth in video creation over the same period and the size of the potential microaudiences for anything and everything. TiVo may have helped by at least taking the tyranny of time out of the equation, but we are nowhere near the iTunes model of being able to download everything ever made, anytime.”
Makiko: “suddenly, I've realized that I was feeding my mind the equivalent of junk food, and my mind wasn't appreciating it. And it really did hit me during the Oscars, of all things, during the brief retrospective of the movie people who had passed away during the last year, starting with Gregory Peck. Gregory Peck is one of my favorite old-time actors. Yet, I realized with horror that I have never actually seen his two most famous movies, To Kill A Mockingbird and Gentleman's Agreement.”
While millions of people were watching the Oscars, I was watching shows that had some comedic value (two episodes of King of the Hill, a really funny show that is hitting its prime, and The Simpsons) and Solstrom. After watching a documentary series on Cirque, I've been wowed by the majesty of the performers, who effortlessly—with mistakes in the live shows, but "flawlessly" due to the advantage of takes on the TV series—and fluidly do things that I don't even have the ability to dream about, much less imagine in my waking hours. The TV series shows a world that is very sensual, in that human touching, between men and women, children and adults is a prerequisite not only essential for the stunts they pull off but, it seems, to the world's inhabitents' peace of mine. Since reading it, I've been thinking a lot about James W. Prescot's article on the inverse relationship between pleasure and violence [commentary/summary], and the key argument of the article is that human touching is absolutely necessary, and the people of Solstrom understand this perfectly. While many millions of people were watching millionaire overactors competing for award statuettes but $32,000 gift bags just for being nominated (!) I was watching something that made me laugh and then something that amazed and continues to amaze me.
Makiko says that reality TV is the junk food of the medium, and she's right. It's the one genre of TV I never cared for. I still think that TV is drugs and that less is better. Because TV is drugs though, I haven't fully kicked the habit (not having cable has helped tremendously), and sometimes—rarely, but sometimes—the drugs work.