Tag Archives: tv

Companies that seem intent on selling you stuff you know you don’t need…and RIGHT NOW

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A few weeks ago, I read the circular for Best Buy, and they were announcing they were selling “back to school” stuff. For some reason, a big screen tv seemed to be one of the important things they felt people would need as part of back to school. The ad on the back page advertised Best Buy as the “techfitter” (whatever that’s supposed to mean) and that this was important for back to school. All I kept thinking was “I have never been in a school where I needed a big screen tv for any rhyme or reason”.

Fast forward to the next few weeks, and the ads have been advertising nothing but the need for a big screen television for the “big game”. Two weeks in a row. And it shows football players on the screen doing whatever it is that football players do. And all I could think to myself was, “well, if I bought a big screen television because I needed it to go back to school” why the hell are you advertising one for me to watch the big game? Am I only allowed to watch the back to school big screen TV when I’m working on school stuff, but if I’m planning to watch “the big game”, I have to get a specially bought big screen TV from Best Buy that just lets me watch “the big game”? Next week, will there be a big screen television set for me to watch old episodes of Rosanne, and then the week after that a new set to watch the “new” season of television that will be airing for the new fall season? Do you kind of get my point here?

I’m a huge advocate of discontinuing the hype of advertisement that so many companies do. I used to love it when a company sent me a flyer advertising good prices. But that was before those companies started adding “buy this now before this price is gone” to the wording. I don’t know if you’ve noticed this but everything seems like it’s a crisis when it comes to sales and prices. You don’t have a discount sale any more. You have a “blow out sale!”. Offers are going to disappear if you don’t act now, and I mean FREAKING NOW!!!!!!! Because there’s no way in the world that that discounted television that they dropped ten dollars off the price will EVER POSSIBLY comes down ten dollars again, and you will completely missed out on the one chance of your freaking lifetime!

It’s to the point where every time I go to a store, I’m expecting to have a stroke because the pressure is on to make sure that I act right then and there, because if I don’t, Jack Bauer isn’t going to be there in time to diffuse the bomb from going off. I was playing an online game the other day, and an ad came over the interface, telling me that if I didn’t upgrade my account right then and there, I would lose the opportunity to play the great content that was obviously right there in front of me if I only acted fast enough. I signed out of the game, deleted it from my hard drive and will probably never take advantage of that game again. I mean, honestly, the pressure is too heavy on me to have to do the right thing at the right time, and if I don’t play it, and maybe read a book, that pressure seems to be a lot less pressing.

As I started to pay closer attention to this stuff, I started to realize that there were a lot of products I’ve bought over the years that I don’t need to buy again, or don’t need to upgrade. I’ll be honest. When the Best Buy ads started playing into my subconscious, I actually started thinking that my 32 inch television wasn’t big enough, that I might need to upgrade to a 55 or 60 inch television. And then it dawned on me. I never watch my television. Like ever. I’ll play a Blu-ray on it, and I might watch Netflix stuff on it every now and then, but mostly I tend to watch shows on my computer, which has a 27 inch screen, and I’ve never had a reason to complain that it was too small. I don’t ever watch “the game”, so I don’t care one iota for seeing “the game” when it comes across the screen. I don’t even know when it airs, other than a faint memory of Monday because of the old reference of Monday Night Football. I can’t even tell you if that’s still the night, or even what station that used to represent.

What I have started doing, and I wish more people would do it as well, is to stop buying things from companies that try to convince me there’s a hurry for me to purchase their junk. Purchasing should be a well thought out course where you’ve considered all of the alternatives and whether or not you need the item. We’ve come a long way from those days, and I feel that way too many of us do most of our shopping in the quick lane aisle, buying things placed in that aisle for us to foolishly think how convenient it might be to buy that.

 

Homeland Season One…not sure if I liked it or not

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Over the weekend, I finished watching the first season of Homeland, the series about an obsessive, medically (kind of insane) CIA analyst/operative who suspects a returning POW of being with Al Qaeda. The show itself is kind of ho hum, although it does have great performances from the main actress and the former Indigo Montoya of Princess Bride fame (much older and still a great actor). The show really goes off the rails with its attempts to be “accurate” in intelligence work, which to put it simply is MASSIVELY inaccurate. But having said that, one of the things it does REALLY well is to showcase a person who is medically compulsive to the point of insanity. And THAT it does really, really well.

They are into the Second Season now, which makes me sort of wonder as the end of Season One kind of put the main actress in a position that shouldn’t EVER give her an opportunity to be doing what she was doing in the first season. But knowing Hollywood, they’ll write themselves around that one in a really corny way, kind of like 24 used to do over and over again.

So, I’d advise watching it for the drama, the surprise turns and for one of the best performances of someone acting crazier than me.

“See Price in Cart” is a crappy business strategy that needs to go away very fast

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I received an advertisement from Sam’s Club today that listed a television on sale, but in order to see the price, you had to click it (as it listed “see price in cart”). One click later, I was now on a screen that told me to “add item to cart” AND NO PRICE. That took me to another screen with the wording along the lines of “complete transaction” and a button, AGAIN WITH NO PRICE. The next screen was a couple of listings of what the price used to be, and yet another button to make the sale (without the price yet). Look, I get the idea that you’re trying to get people to want to buy the product and are doing all sorts of psychological games along the lines of “well, if they click this many times to get to the price of the tv, they’ll eventually just decide they have to have it.” This is fine if we’re all multi-millionaires shopping in some boutique where “price is not a concern” but this is freaking Sam’s Club, not some posh place in Beverly Hills.

If you want me to buy your crap, tell me how much it is. If it’s cheap enough that I find it to be a bargain, I’ll buy it. If it’s not, then no amount of “keep clicking until you’re so worn down that you’ll buy it JUST TO GET OUT OF THIS NIGHTMARE” is going to make me pay more money for an item that I’m just curious about.

Companies really need to stop this crap because it so annoying. Customers aren’t lemmings, nor are they people who want to be herded towards your sales. Customers are people you should be trying to attract with good prices, good service and excellent products. Otherwise, your company and its business practices suck. Simple as that.

The Second Season of V Disproves My Theory That V Couldn’t Get Any Worse

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I discovered the other day that the television show V actually came out with a second season. Somehow, I missed it when it aired, but as I had seen the first season and was really interested in seeing how it played out in the second season, I went out and bought the season of DVDs. You see, I should probably explain that my fascination with V is not because I think it’s a great show, but because I watched the first season and kept saying to myself: “How can a show have such great acting talent, an obviously decent budget and still manage to suck so badly?” I mean, the star of the show is one of the main characters from the GREAT television series LOST. And then there are people in the show that come from some of the greatest that science fiction has ever offered. There was a guy from Firefly (the pilot on the show), the star of Earth: Final Conflict (a strange show that is oddly A LOT like V’s premise of an alien race showing up, promising great things but having a hidden agenda), an actress who was one of the recurring characters on The Office, the secondary female star being also from Firefly and Stargate SG1 (she played the prostitute on Firefly and the Ori human leader in Stargate SG1), the hot girl who played Supergirl on Smallville, and so many other actors that I was constantly saying, “hey, I recognize that guy/woman!” Yet, with all of that talent, they still managed to produce one of the most ho hum shows I’d ever seen.

So, I thought that the second season really couldn’t get much worse. Well, I was wrong. What started out as a “oh no, the aliens are really evil but only one FBI agent knows about it” has now turned into a show where I find myself going, “who cares?” almost every time a big event occurs in an episode. The aliens are diabolical, yet the rag tag team of rebels is at some times brilliant (beyond belief), the greatest Spetznaz operatives the world has ever known, completely stupid and clueless, overly obvious to the point of where I keep thinking, Okay, we have the stupidest aliens in history because they can’t figure out that the guys working against them are always present whenever things go bad, and filled with so many dorky coincidences that I’m sometimes embarrassed to be watching.

Spoiler alert: The end of this season got even worse than I ever imagined it would be. The aliens became so powerful, and so evil that it actually hit a point where I thought, wow, there’s no way the humans are going to win this one. Everyone is paranoid, and the good guys are losing their way and their battles, and I thought, okay, wow, this is going to finally start getting really good to where the main characters are really going to have to doing some serious crap to win this battle. And THEN: a secret organization of military organizations made up of every nation in the world comes to the rescue of the main hero, telling her that she’s no longer alone in her battle, that this organization of super army has been tracking the evil aliens, JUST IN CASE they might be evil, and now they’re ready to work with her, because they now realize she’s actually on their side.

Really? That’s the October surprise you have for your viewers? When things get really bad, SHIELD is going to appear out of nowhere and help the Avengers now that they’ve lost all of their powers, even though we never hinted SHIELD existed in the first place? How about a superduper weapon that they’ve been building in the Antarctic wastes, just in case something like this should ever happen? Or perhaps a Death Star? Or should we just find a hot shot pilot who has never flown a battle before to fly a sortie against the alien horde and shoot his blaster at a two meter hole that will somehow blow up all of the alien ships together? I mean, we’re doing stupid crap. Why not?

Anyway, I’m looking forward to Season 3, so we can see what “great” entertainment they have to offer next time around. I’m hoping the hero finds an alien motorcycle and jumps over the alien space shark that is threatening humanity.

The Struggles of Science Fiction on Modern Day Television

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I was watching another one of those obscure BBC television shows this last weekend called Outcasts. It’s a science fiction 8 part series that takes place in the future when a series of catastrophic events force colonists from Earth to take up residence on some far-away planet. Immediately, they run into political problems amongst the survivors, and then they start to discover really odd things, like the possibility that humans may have colonized this planet a long time ago (which makes absolutely no sense to anyone). It’s an interesting story arc, and as I was watching it, I immediately started thinking, “I’ll bet they didn’t renew this show, which means I’m probably watching the first season of yet another science fiction television show that didn’t make it past its freshman year.” And it turns out, I was right. The first season ends on a cliffhanger, and the viewers are left hanging yet again.

Maybe it’s me, but why don’t television networks understand that science fiction takes time to grab ahold of its audience? I don’t think there’s a science fiction show out there that didn’t take a number of seasons of trodding through really difficult character building before it finally got the to meat of its show. Look at the recent success of Battlestar Galactica. It started off a bit stale, and then it built into a brilliant final couple of seasons. Look at practically every Star Trek that came out after the original series. The Next Generation took a few seasons to catch on, people constantly comparing Picard to Kirk before realizing they weren’t the same person, but different, and that wasn’t so bad a thing. Deep Space Nine took about three or four seasons to kick off before it became possibly the most beloved of all of the Star Trek universe offerings. Voyager, well, I argue it was a lot better four seasons in and to the end, although there are some who can’t stand it at all, but it still made that same arc I’m talking about. And Enterprise was a pretty decent last season show that took a lot of “hey, we’re exploring space for the first time” episodes to get to its point.

I look at some of the greatest science fiction around, and it took a long time to get around to being great. The 4400 was a great show once you finally got beyond the beginning parts of what it was trying to do. The X-Files took some time to find its footing, as well as Fringe took about two seasons to finally reveal that it wasn’t a rip-off of the X-Files, but great science fiction all on its own. It’s still going strong.

The thing is: Science fiction takes time to tell its story. It’s not like a cop show where you throw a bunch of people into a scene after a murder, have the star do his quirky mannerisms and then jump to a chase scene/shoot out, and then cue the last insider joke before going to commercial. Some of these shows are dealing with some pretty heavy subjects, and it takes time to get an audience to buy into the characters, and sometimes even the universe we’re talking about. Stargate was an interesting piece of science fiction in that it started off strong, and then became even stronger once it played out its initial arc and had to reinvent exactly what it was doing to come to a whole new kind of show. Stargate Atlantis did practically the same thing, once its writers realized they weren’t just recreating Stargate SG1, but had a brand new animal on their hands. Stargate Universe could have evolved into something great as it was starting to get better in the second season, but like most executive decisions it never had enough time to build its audience and appeal to do what it needed to do. It was cut off way too early to finish its growth.

Outcasts is an interesting example for me because I’ve been reading the message boards concerning this show since it was shut down after its first season. People are really upset because a show they really started to get into was cut off way too early to allow itself a chance to breathe. And I don’t blame them. For all of the crappy shows that are out there, it is rare to find a show that really tries to take chances and pushes itself as it does it. It was fascinating that they were doing what they were doing with the cast they had, considering I don’t think I’ve ever really seen any of the actors before, aside from a cameo in the very first episode by Jamie Bamber, better known for playing Captain Apollo on the remake of Battlestar Galactica (I kept looking at him, thinking, “is that who I think it is?”).

Sadly, one of the few places where science fiction is welcome doesn’t seem to have a lot of science fiction anymore. I’m talking about the SyFy Channel, which used to be the SciFi Channel. Nowadays, the channel is known more for WWF wresting and ridiculous movies of the week about killer land sharks and other nutso ideas. They have a bad habit of killing any strong science fiction shows, including the cancellation of Caprica, Stargate Universe and the recent announcement of the discontinuation of Eureka. Checking through the TV Guide, I don’t find too many original programs showing up on the SyFy Channel any longer, which means my original necessity of always making sure my cable company had that channel is no longer a given.

Part of the problem of this dilemma is probably necessary to address as well, and that’s the fact that because science fiction involves special effects and unique, alien environments, the budgets for these shows can sometimes be astronomical. During the Star Trek run on UPN, there was some serious money being invested per episode to keep the quality up on that show, and every other show was trying to do the same sort of thing. Nowadays, a network isn’t really all that interested in paying that kind of money for entertainment, especially when they can get even higher ratings from crappy reality tv programming that costs a fraction of money to produce.

The other part of the problem is the perception people have for science fiction as well. For some reason, science fiction is seen as “geek” culture, which can often lead to a group of adults shunning someone who watches science fiction, while they may be gluttons of reality television and Gossip Girl-like programming instead, somehow seeing these alternatives as more “acceptable”. Science fiction gets equated with the kind of entertainment that should be enjoyed by little boys and men who never grew up.

But quite often, science fiction practically masters the concepts of the human condition by forcing us to look at social and societal issues that cannot be explored within the confines of our normal, everyday lives. Science fiction can put someone back into the shoes of someone who had to make decisions during the Trials of Nuremburg, or force a discussion on the ramifications of the ethics of genocide that are not just theories but might be happening at a particular time and place. It can allow questions of the nuances of same sex relationships by changing the species as the focus, yet still unravel a group of people on the cusp of making a life-changing decision. While it’s not impossible to do that in other genres, rarely is it done there, which leaves science fiction one of the few places where such ideas and thinkers can completely be at ease with each other.

Unfortunately, I just finished watching a great show that will never see another episode or any of its brilliant ideas examined further by the writers who presented the dilemmas in the first place. Until then, we have to search for another venue, and hopes that someone else manages to fill the void that doesn’t often get filled by those with the vision to ignite the ideas in the mind’s canvas of possibilities.

Why Television is Failing So Much These Days

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Networks really don’t want to admit this, but they’re losing big time in the ratings wars. Oh, they’ll acknowledge it by saying really stupid things like, “we have to compete with so many other sources, like computer games, Xboxes and cable” but what they’re really not admitting is that they’ve so lost the pulse of America that they may never gain it back. The reason they don’t want to admit that they’re failing big time is that everyone who works for the networks realizes that his or her job is on the line if someone higher up realizes how incompetent they really are. So, instead of admitting it and fixing it, they’ll go on pretending that the emperor has no clothes and hope no one notices either.

Well, I’m going to put forth a couple of problems and solutions, and then we can kind of figure out if the networks are ever going to get any better.

1. The Hiatus. One of the biggest mistakes the networks could ever make is to start up a new show that starts to gain the attention of the public and then SUDDENLY yank it off the air for three or four months, and then let it reappear again. If there was a number one stupid thing to do so you could derail any chance at succeeding in ratings THIS  it is.

The origins of this stupid idea quite possibly came as a result of the infamous writer’s strike that halted all production for a period of time right in the middle of a brand new season. As a result, some really promising shows got canceled prematurely because they didn’t even get a first half of a season to gain popularity. They were pulled off the air during the strike and then never brought back.

Now, I could see this as one of those once in a lifetime situations, but somehow the networks thought this was a really good idea to subject viewers to a gap in time right in the middle of a show, as if this would cause them to come rushing back to that show, because they’ve been waiting and anticipating its return. This is supposedly what happened with LOST. But because it worked for LOST, they tried it with every other stupid show they aired. They did it with Heroes, and then Heroes went completely downhill. Then they did it with every other shows as well. SyFy became famous for doing this (even though it’s not a major network), and it is quite possibly the reason for the destruction of Caprica. Caprica was a somewhat decent show, but they cut it right in the middle of its first season so that people just stopped caring about the show. Then the second half came, and well, no one cared. So it got canceled.

That’s the problem right there. If you give us a new show and then halt it in the middle of the very first season, don’t expect us to come back. Sorry, but you lose.

2. Remake Hell. There’s a reason some shows were canceled the first time around. They failed. Remaking a failed show from yesterday may sound like a daring idea, but all it does is show that your network has no creativity whatsoever. Hawaii 5-0 might sound like a great idea, and I’m kind of liking the idea of seeing Grace Park in a bikini once a week, but to be honest, Hawaii 5-00 wasn’t all that great a show back then. I’m not all that excited about it now. So, I don’t watch it. And when others get over the fresh car smell, they probably won’t either. And that’s the most popular of the remake shows to have been done. Imagine what happens to the ones that aren’t as popular. The show V sounds like a neat idea, but it’s been done before. Even though some of the actors on the show are all from a Best of Sci Fi of all time (watching the cast is like watching a recap of who was once great in sci fi), it’s very hard to get past the fact that almost nothing in this show is original. And then they put it into half season hiatus (see complaint Number 1), which means they’re going to be seriously struggling to maintain an audience. And when they cancel it on us, they’ll blame us for not wanting to watch it.

3. No Faith in a Network. This is one of my biggest pet peeves with the networks. I generally don’t watch a new television show any more until it reaches the third season because I’m so tired of a show being canceled in the first or second season, right after I’ve gotten drawn into it. They did it to me with Harsh Realms (remember that one?), Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, Jericho, Jeremiah, Firefly, and Dollhouse. Why would I trust a network to actually continue a television show that I started to watch? It’s really not worth the effort until they’ve decided to reward us by actually continuing the show. But they won’t continue a show because none of us are watching it (maybe because we don’t believe you’ll continue it).

4. Rehashes of Overdone Formulas. How many Law & Order or CSI franchises can we create? As a matter of fact, do we really need another cop show of any sorts? At one point, I was getting paranoid while living in San Francisco because there were more cops on television from San Francisco than there were actual cops on the streets. I was scared to walk to the corner because on TV there was a crime happening every fifteen seconds in San Francisco. And I knew not to call a cop because they were all basket cases who were having problems dealing with their sanity (or ex-cops who were scared of their own shadows…thanks, Monk). Recently, there was a show with a guy who played a drugged out mafioso in New Jersey who was now a cop in Detroit. I was starting to wonder who I could trust anymore. I mean, I’m kind of scared just now writing about it. But stop giving us more stupid cop shows. There’s not as much crime in the world as there is on television. Stop scaring the crap out of us.

5. Bad writing. This is probably my biggest complaint these days. The Event stopped being an event for me because the writing was straight out atrocious. And then they backed it up with some of the worst acting since Pauly Shore decided to make serious movies. Or maybe he didn’t. I don’t know. Maybe it’s just a recurring fear I have. But either way, the writing is awful on some of these shows. I remember watching an episode of The Chase (or is it just Chase?), and three times in a row I was able to blurt out the next line of dialogue word for word before the actor could say it. And these were the “gotcha” moments that cop shows have where the hero gets to say the cool thing to the guy who is setting him or her up for a big dramatic moment. The writing was so bad that it was badly predictable.

That, in short, is why I find network television these days to be suffering. If they want to really compete with the competition that’s up against them, they have to raise their game. But they can’t raise their game if they’re going to keep doing the stupid things they keep on doing.

Stargate Universe is Back–Intervention

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Well, the second season of Stargate Universe has premiered. For those who may have been following my blog, or had conversations with me about this show, you know that I haven’t been the greatest fan of the first season. First off, I love Stargate, and by that I mean both of the previous series Stargate SG1 and Stargate Atlantis. So I had a lot of hope for this show because I loved all things Stargate. But the first season was so flawed in so many different ways. The acting was all right, probably the only positive they had, but the writing was atrocious, and it was like they were just phoning in the whole thing. I never saw so many “let’s solve a huge conflict by going to a commercial and then coming back as if everything was solved off screen” moments in a show before. It was becoming a joke of what it could actually be.

So, when they left us with a cliffhanger for the end of Season One, I half expected them to come back and resolve the whole thing by some act of the gods that wouldn’t make any more sense than the rest of the episodes. But fortunately, they didn’t. Surprisingly, the first episode was not bad. But then, true to form, they went back to stupid resolution processes that keep causing me to pull out the few hairs I have left on my head.

The episode started out with a stand-off between the bad guys of the Lucian Alliance and the crew of the Destiny, the ship that has been the headquarters of this third installment of the Stargate enterprise (no, not that Enterprise). Anyway, the bad guy Varro ends up being a not so bad guy and saves the crew from being slaughtered but marooned on some desolute planet instead (geez, what a pal, eh?), and then he gets marooned, too, for going against the new crazy leader who takes over after Kiva dies from a gunshot during a gunfight with Colonel Telford, who also was shot in the stomach during the exchange. Anyway, the upshot is that the Lucian Alliance guys become all bad ass like and threaten to kill everyone, but Rush does a double cross, like he always does, and manages to play chicken with the Lucian guys by threatening to let some pulsar kill most of the people on board, except for where Rush and a few stragglers are holding up.

Meanwhile, TJ, who was pregnant last time we checked, and shot when Varro went nuts trying to, well, I really still don’t understand what he was trying to do when he started fighting his own people and grabbing for a machine gun that managed to kill everyone, including Elmo who was innocently recording his show at a nearby soundstage next door to the Stargate set, ended up on some planet they had been to before where they left half the civilian crew. Some aliens brought her there and it ends up being one of those situations where she’s kind of there and not there, but she’s going to be sent back, but her baby has to stay. That’s the deal. Or agreement. Or whatever. So TJ comes back, realizes that she lost her baby, because everyone on the ship thinks that she actually lost it on the ship, but in reality it’s living happily on some strange planet out in the Gamma Quadrant, or wherever it is they were.

So, here’s my thoughts. The show had some interesting action and character dilemmas. The Sergeant Grier character is becoming one of the most fascinating characters of all. He’s twisted, an asshole, but he’s so freaking loyal to Colonel Young that you have to just admire the man in his own violent way. Plus, the actor plays this character so well. I mean, I hate the character big time, but at the same time he grows on you in a pretty fascinating way.

The baby thing with TJ is completely understandable, although cowardly writing, in my opinion. They felt they had to get rid of the pregnancy, and I really think the decision was made to avoid having a baby they had to keep working with on the series each and every episode, because you know it would be that important if she had to keep it. It would be a constant set of episodes where her one defining line would be: “I have to protect my baby!” And honestly, I want to see her character grow without having to fall into such an old Hollywood, phoned in sort of characterization.

The Lucian Alliance guys bring an interesting dynamic because now we have a whole bunch of new characters who are now on the ship. Sure, they’re in lock-up right now, but you know they can’t stay there. They’re either going to be integrated into the crew, a la “the Maquis” from Star Trek Voyager, or they’re going to become further adversaries. Plus, one or two new actors might get pulled from them to become regulars, and some of them were actually pretty good, including the woman who takes over as their leader at the end. Unfortunately, they’re previous female leader died, and she could have been a fascinating character to build upon for the show.

They introduced the alien race (the one that saves TJ and keeps her baby) again, which means that they may have a much larger focus in the series. If not, they’re a bad plot save device. I’m hoping there’s something more going on because they hint that they’ve been paying attention to the Destiny crew and only jumped in when they had to do something to save TJ from death (she was dying from the gunshot would in the crazy machine gun spray by Varro’s bizarre heroics).

Rush is becoming a very conflicted character now. Before, he was trying to take the Destiny. Now, he’s sort of on the side of the good guys, so who knows where his loyalities and his motivations will lie for the future. I don’t think they ever really played out the end of the conflict between Rush and Young. Saying they’ll work together “for the sake of the crew” is okay, but logic dictates that there should have to be more to it than that.

Complaints: They’re still doing the last minute saves by Deus Ex Machima, and that’s getting on my nerves. Grier and Lt Scott were in one of those no win situations where they were stuck outside the ship, unable to get to a hatch to get back in before the pulsar hit. Even the annoying kid Eli couldn’t save them, so they were presumed dead. Then out of the blue they are safe, and they state that they were lucky enough to be shielded from the pulsar by where they were located. OH GREAT! No, that’s stupid. Don’t set up an imminent death moment and then say, oh we were saved because the pulsar just barely missed us, letting all of this happen off camera. This is continuously bad writing, and I was hoping they had fired all of those bad writers from the first season.

Unfortunately, those types of writing moments are what continue to bring down what can be a good show, because the season premiere was not bad. I enjoyed it. I just need them to be a bit more consistent and realize that the audience is not a bunch of teenagers who are constantly fooled by coin tricks.

Overall, I’m hoping this is a sign of better things to come this season, and even with reservations, I’m going to continue watching…for now.

Some of the Best Writing on TV May Never Be Seen

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It’s kind of funny, actually, but there is this bias against certain types of programming on television, specifically that of the science fiction and fantasy variety. But surprisingly, some of the best dramatic writing I’ve ever viewed has been from this genre, and unfortunately no one really seems to be watching it.

An example is the one that everyone talks about when it comes to science fiction, and that’s the rehash of Battlestar Galactica, which had to be one of the best dramas I’ve seen on television in ages. It was intense, well acted, and with plot twists that were so well constructed that it was shocking at how well it was carried out. Some other examples would be some pretty obscure titles, including one I was watching last night that was unbelievable for how well it was written, and that show is Doctor Who. Over the last few years I’ve kind of paid attention to this show, but always thought it was a bit too campy for me. I was watching the middle of the fourth season of the latest variation of this show, and out of nowhere the writing was just overwhelming. Some of the plots were just genius, and then the way they pulled the stories off was beyond anything I’ve seen in modern television. There was one episode that took place on a futuristic airliner (done to be much like the cabin of any airplane, but in space), and the character interaction was just off the charts. The plot seemed somewhat simple, but the story quickly went from a “what’s out there” to a Lord of the Flies segment of anarchy that I kept thinking they were going to somehow blow this great moment of television, but they never did. They did a really good job of maintaining the type of power they were going for, and it was like a seasoned director took a great screenplay and made it just right. You don’t see that very often.

Lately, we’ve seen some brilliant character-driven storylines on recent television shows like LOST, which has shocked so many people at how it did exactly what it set out to do. Yet, we’re still left with this sense that science fiction and fantasy is trash that really shouldn’t be paid attention to.

I had a conversation the other day with someone who told me that she only watches dramas, like Gossip Girl, because she likes shows that are a lot more realistic. I’ll not even comment further on that one, but I’m sure you get the idea. People are so convinced that it has to be a drama to be considered real, yet I can’t tell you how many of our dramas are some of the worst writing that has come along in ages. Sure, there are exceptions, but way too often we’re given trash and get so used to it that we give accolades to medium level stuff, as if it is brilliant. A couple of examples come to mind because I’ve been watching these shows and still can’t believe that people think these are the best we have to offer.

Breaking Bad. An okay show, but for some reason every review of this show acts as if it is the greatest television show ever. I’m deep into the second season of it, and it’s okay. It’s not great, but it’s okay. What I would like to comment about this show is something no one wants to admit: It’s basically Weeds with a much more serious story line. And Weeds does it so much better. Let’s look at that for a second.

Weeds has a woman who needs to make a lot of money because she lost her husband, so she goes into the marijuana dealing business. She has a bunch of wacky friends who hang around, and the show does everything possible to justify that this woman is doing a very bad thing but for the right reasons.

Breaking Bad has  a guy who needs to make a lot of money because he’s got cancer, so he goes into the meth dealing business. There are a bunch of somewhat wacky people who are part of his world (including a klepto sister in law and a DEA agent husband of the klepto who has all sorts of his own wacky drug-related adventures), and the show does everything possible to justify that this guy is doing a very bad thing but for the right reasons.

Both shows are essentially about the same thing, except unlike Weeds, people don’t generally consider meth to be as innocent as they do marijuana. So it has some problems there. All along, I watch Breaking Bad, waiting for the great moments everyone talks about, but I find myself thinking, “why should I care for this guy who is creating a product that is destroying the lives of so many so he can take care of his family?” It’s like the show Dexter, another “great” that people talk about. I watched all of three episodes before I thought, “I can’t root for this guy” and never watched it again. There’s a point where rooting for the underdog just doesn’t justify rooting for the criminally insane guy who considers himself above the law.

Other “great” shows: Rescue Me. I bought the first season and had a hard time getting through the first episode. Trite writing that tries too hard to play the 9/11 angle of brave firefighters. Let’s make them somewhat crazy, and everyone will root for them. Hasn’t worked so well for me so far.

Sadly enough, there aren’t enough ground-breaking shows out there, and the few that are just don’t seem to be that great themselves. Which is pretty sad because the really, really good shows don’t last very long.

Anyway, just a gripe that is slowly going off track now, so I’ll end there.