There is a Blog that Never Goes Out

2011-05-20T13:00:00.000-04:00

I have ranked the top 68 television shows of the '00s, and will be presenting them, one-by-one, starting with 68 and working down. The rankings are more or less based on the show's popularity, it's cult status, it's critical acclaim, and my personal liking of it, with a heavy dose of arbitrariness added in. If a show was a big enough phenomena, I'll keep it on the list - but if I don't like it, I may drop it some spots. One other caveat - these are primetime shows (I apologize if I put a cable show that wasn't, I thought they were all primetime shows - the main point of this is just that no talk shows, no Colbert and Daily Show that would be on otherwise).

7: Family Guy

Admitted, this show serves a limited demographic. I doubt most people over, I don't know, maybe 40 or 45 know much or anything about it. But nowadays, or really more, in the early 2000s, it reached classic Simpsons episode of devotion, of memorizing and repeating classic lines, and not just a few, but many, especially from the first couple of seasons. Some quotes have simply become part of my friends' speech patterns.

Family Guy is famous amongst other things for having a first run which was phenomenally popular amongst a certain crowd, being cancelled, and then a couple of years later, against all odds, coming back. I was one of those people saddened by its cancellation and excited by its return; I remember during freshman year signing and passing around a petition my friend was distributing requesting Family guy get back on the air and then senior year watching a bootlegged version of the first episode back before it actually aired which opened with Peter mentioned that Family Guy had a shot of coming back only if the legions of Fox shows which had aired and been cancelled in the meantime, each of which he named, were gone. The show was revived due to a combination of crazy good ratings as repeats aired on Adult Swim and crazy high DVD sales, parking it as the second best selling TV DVDs ever, right behind Chapelle's Show.

Family Show wasn't the first to use it, but it was certainly noteworthy for its over featuring pop culture references leading to random cutaway sequences, and using these so much that often even die-hard fans can't remember which particular sequence goes with what episode - plots in Family Guy episodes are often beside the point more than in any other show I can think of.

When it's at its best, these clips are as funny as anything on television. My friend invented a game we used to play called "Family Guy" game in which someone would call out a word, and we'd type "Family Guy" an then that word into youtube, click on what came up, and then keep following links until we dried them up and then called out another word. When Fox eventually decided to take everything off youtube, it kind of killed the game, but just enjoying those clips in and of themselves, was probably the best way to enjoy family guy - context isn't important, and while I wouldn't want that for all my shows, I'm fine with that for this - there's a place in television for this.

I've always thought there was a great animated show battle between Family Guy and South Park. Most people like both at least a little, but I feel like you're really a fan more of or the other at heart, and for me it will always be Family Guy. South Park viciously took on Family Guy in two episodes, Cartoon Wars part I and II where it basically bashed Family Guy left and right and then left again. Some of their points are valid - plots really are inconsequential to Family Guy, so sure, there's absolutely room to make fun of Family Guy. In my personal opinion, however, instead of teasing Family Guy lightly and funnily, South Park comes off as self-righteous, full of itself, and unable to deal with the idea that Family Guy could in any way be funny, and ham-handed, sour, and mean, in the worst way. I'm glad Family Guy took it in good humor, and I think if you work on a comedy show you can't take any kind of insult too seriously. That doesn't mean it's not stupid though. There's a lot of different kind of ways to be funny, and I'm not sure why South Park can't deal with that.

I could go on about Family Guy at length, but I'll note here that it resuscitated the career of former Billboard Hot 100 #1 artist Walter Murphy, best known for "A Fifth of Beethoven" which appeared on the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack. He also had minor hits with his take on "Flight of the Bumblebee" and a "Theme from E.T." medley. Murphy did the theme for Family Guy and some of the songs, and even won an Emmy for one of the worst - "You've Got a Lot to See."

Okay, these were a few random asides, but all said, Family Guy is huge. It's now been on for a ridiculous 9 seasons and 164 episodes, the vast majority after its revival. And though it remains as much of a fixture on fox as ever, along with two other Seth McFarlane projects, American Dad and The Cleveland Show, it feels in a way the same way current Simpsons does - just not as relevant as it once was (I don't even mean the quality, which I've heard various reports of, and is up and down when I watch - and with Family Guy, consistency isn't really as important - even in most bad episodes, you're guaranteed a great gag or two) in that I can't assume almost everybody I know has seen the past episode and can quote it verbatim.

2011-05-19T13:55:00.001-04:00

8: House

House has been Fox's scripted mainstay (and second only behind American Idol in importance to Fox) through the past decade, anchoring its lineup with a show that, for the most part of its run, has been both critically lauded and commercially successful.

I watched most of the second and third season of House, and while I enjoyed it very much, it being 85% procedural and 15% serial led me to feel less compelled to watch it weekly - this could instead be the stuff of Sunday afternoon marathons post-football season like Monk and Law & Order: SVU.

Of course, if Hugh Laurie didn't do such a good job, the show could have run out of legs a long time earlier. The formula really isn't all that wonderful - it's one of those situations where, if I described the show to you - a crack medical team led by a moody arrogant savant assisted by his three acolytes take on a strange medical case every week and figure out what's wrong with the patient, often some ridiculous disease you've never heard of - it doesn't sound all that great (to be fair, it actually sounds better than I thought it would sound before writing it out). However, the cast, mostly Laurie, but with a shout out for his only friend, fellow doctor Wilson, portrayed by Robert Sean Leonard, takes it to above average.

I'd like just a quick word about the CSI-like super up close shots of medical organs and other fairly disgusting parts of human insides, and that word(s) is(are), stop showing them, they add absolutely nothing to the show, and seem strange and out of place - the show is not really stylized like CSIs in any other way.

The show has certainly by now reached grand-old-man status - it's a legend in its time slot, but more for what it did, than for what it's doing now. And although most of what I know about the recent episodes comes from reading articles and other people's opinions, I don't find it hard to believe that the show, while perfectly acceptable I'm sure, has passed its prime (and believe me, I do hate those people who are so quick to jump on shows from being passed its prime - but of course, it does happen). As if to give new life to the show, a whole bunch of new characters were introduced in the fourth season. His three helpers all were either fired or quit, and through a gradual winnowing process House chose three new ones.

One of the three new doctors chosen in season 4 was portrayed by Kal Penn, who left House, and well, acting, to join the Obama administration after the election of 2008. The writers of House deigned to do something creative with his leaving the show, and instead of having him get fired, or some other way leaving open the door for later reappearances, decided to have him hang himself and pose this as something of a mystery, regarding why he did it. While I appreciate the going for the gold approach to story telling - there can be no doubting this is a bold manuever - it never made a whole lot of sense for me. Yes, I suppose there's some potential character-mining to be had here, and that was the idea - can House deal with there being no reason, no rationale, blah, blah, blah, I think that benefit is outweighed by the forced feeling the whole action generated.

The newest out of camp House is that Lisa Edelstein will not be returning next season as Cuddy, and if the wheels weren't already spinning, they are now, and although next season will probably be the last, it seems as if, if it could have been better planned this season should have been. While sometimes cast changes work, it's always unfortunate to have one of those last seasons that just seem one season too far, when some actors and actresses wanted to carry on and some didn't, and you end up with kind of a muddled mess and an end that doesn't do justice to a show's beginning and middle.

Still, House is the big medical drama of its day, bigger I think overall in impression than Grey's Anatomy (though with less impact on the pop charts) every decade needs at least one defining medical drama (90s - ER, 80s St Elsewhere to start), and House is the '00s.

2011-05-18T10:56:00.002-04:00

This is a relatively old commercial, I know, but recently I've become a little bit obsessed with it. And not because it's terrible, or so great, or so absurd, but for two main reasons. (Okay, changed me mind after watching it again - it is so great - just not particularly revolutionary or influential or anything)

(Quick sum up: Basically, for his father's 60th birthday, his son takes me on a trip to Norway, where presumably their ancestors had come from - they have a fucking amazing time, paying with their citi credit card all the way, only to find out at the end that they are actually Swedish, rather than Norwegian.)

1 - It makes Norway look like the coolest place on Earth (no pun intended there). How is Norway not paying some money for this, the best reason to visit Norway since the 1994 Winter Olympics? I would like to plan a vacation based solely around this commercial. I literally want to go to Norway, and in order, visit the places the father and son go - the museum or whatever it is with that giant boat, the pint at Ibsen's favorite pub (can that possibly still be around? I hope they're not shading the truth here), the sampling of local cuisine (that fish looks delicious), the fjords, the jumping in the water, the rowboating. Literally, I would sign up for a tour group whose reason for being was reenacting the trip from that commercial. It was the trip of a lifetime, the dad said! What else do you need?

2 - Probably more minor point, but that old guy looks awesome, and has an awesome beard. He's got great sunken eyes and sly smile. If I look half as cool when I am that age, I will be thankful. (Apparently he is portrayed by Norm Golden and I now need to see his SVU episode - it looks like the son may be a guy named Scott Organ but it's harder to definitively confirm this)

Humorously, in the youtube comments, there's a weird occasional back and forth between pro-Norway and Swedish forces - mentioning how terrible it would be to find out that you were Swedish.

Also, when looking up things about this commercial - I found this amazing article of a guy who seriously can't handle the possible inaccuracies of the commercial - such as the fact, that Ibsen would have been more likely to drink in restaurants. Yes, you apparently can't take a ferry to Stockholm, and yes, the music is clearly not Norwegian, but who cares?

2011-04-26T23:30:00.002-04:00

Cold Mountain

I watched Cold Mountain the other day. It's one of these films that kind of snuck up on my netflix queue. Once upon a time, in the early days of having netflix, I made a fairly long queue of random movies I was vaguely interested in seeing for one reason or another, and I hit "add" to just about any movie Netflix recommended that held any interest. As time went by, I found myself largely ignoring most of this list, and picking out movies I really wanted to see as I went; generally once I send a movie away, I find a movie on my list to move into the first position. A couple of weeks ago maybe, I sent a movie away, and fresh off the death of Elizabeth Taylor, I picked Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf to be my next film. Yet, the next day, I get an e-mail telling me Cold Mountain is coming - bullshit, I thought, naturally - sneakily enough Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf had a wait, pushing the second position movie into first. Anyway, so I had it, it won an Oscar, might as well watch it, I figured.

I told my friend that I had seen the movie, and he asked me, something along the lines of, "was it exactly what I expect it to be?" After which, I thought for a second, and replied affirmatively. After thinking about it some more, there isn't a much better way to describe the movie if you know anything about it - it's a big, long, romantic, star-studded Civil War epic (Jude Law and Nicole Kidman play the leads, with Renee Zellweger winning an Oscar for Supporting Role) about a guy trying to get back to his love in the South vaguely based on the Odyssey and all about terrible toll of war (not a lot of war movies endorsing war these days). Take a moment to think about that in film form, and I would wager that what you're thinking is just about what the movie is.

What I didn't realize is that the film is positively loaded with acting talent - four academy award winners - Nicole Kidman (The Hours), Natalie Portman (Black Swan), Phillip Seymour Hoffman (Capote) and Renee Zellweger (none other than Cold Mountain). After that, only one other nominee, Jude Law, nominated for Cold Mountain as well as for The Talented Mr. Ripley, appears, but plenty of other actors of note, who, because of the journey format of the story often come into the film for just a couple of minutes - Giovanni Ribisi pops up for about five minutes, Jena Malone and Cillian Murphy are in the movie for what has to be a couple of minutes at most and Emily Deschanel and James Rebhorn are on screen for a matter of seconds. It also contains Jack White's only real acting role (Elvis Presley in Walk Hard barely counts, I suppose).

Lastly, is it wrong, that as a northerner, I always route against the southern soldiers in these films even when they're supposed to be the good guys? I mean I'm not going so far as to root for the northern soldiers who (spoiler!) try to rape Natalie Portman, but still in the battle scenes, death to the South! Nice try of all these southern stories to try to make heroes who were southern but don't have slaves - as long as they wear that rebel grey, to hell with them.

2011-04-25T12:11:00.002-04:00

Most irritating sports radio trend #61 (not ranked in terms of irritation)

The "Straw man False Negative"

Let me explain to you what I mean. Sports talk radio host wants to make a BOLD statement, which often isn't really all that bold, so he tries to enhance the boldness of said statement by letting people know before saying it that either absolutely nobody out there listening agrees with what he is about to say (without naming names of course of anybody who actually has this opinion) or noting how crazy you, the listener may think he is after hearing this wild statement.

I find this happens more on single person radio shows rather than two or three person shows, as with multiple people there's always someone to comment on your BOLD statements and act as a sounding board and disagree or agree as needed. With single person shows, the hosts seem to feel as if there's a need to create a dialogue with the listeners, and thus these hosts foist opinions onto the listeners without asking and pat themselves on the back for disagreeing with the opinions they gave to the listeners.

Colin Cowherd is the king of this maneuver - I've heard it many times from him - specifically, today, he was talking about the Lakers and he talked about how Lamar Odom, as the third or so option for a multiple championship team a la James Worthy could garner serious Hall of Fame consideration. To get you ready for his percieved out-there-ness of that statement, Cowherd spent a couple of minutes before actually saying it letting the listeners know that "NOBODY is thinking this" and that they may disagree vociferously once they hear what he has to say (though I don't think he actually used the word vociferously.) Now whether you think that statement is actually a bold one or not is at least mostly beside the point.

Just say what you think, man. If it's actually bold, listeners will take it that way, and they can disagree with you when they call in, or guests can disagree with you on air. It's just unfair to set up a statement as one no one will believe, when you have no actual evidence that no one will believe it other than you saying so because it suits your purposes.

Michael Kay does this all the time as well - spend more time talking about how the next thing he says YOU will disagree with and YOU will think he's crazy than actually saying whatever he thinks.

Of course this all ends up to another good reason to simply not listen to sports radio, but then that would be no fun.

2011-04-20T15:58:00.001-04:00

NBA basketball is on TNT.

MLB baseball is on TBS.

TNT knows Drama.

TBS knows Comedy.

Does this mean basketball is drama and baseball is comedy?

Ponder on that.

2011-04-15T17:26:00.002-04:00

Today, I read of China's amazing decision to ban time travel on television - or in full - "Fantasy, time-travel, random compilations of mythical stories, bizarre plots, absurd techniques, even propagating feudal superstitions, fatalism and reincarnation, ambiguous moral lessons, and a lack of positive thinking" - which eliminates viewings of Back to the Future, or 12 Monkeys or Timecop, among others. (Of course, Chinese people everywhere should thank the government for preventing them from being embroiled in Lost - which basically contains every single element which the government wants to ban).

So, while plodding around the internet in the wake of this decision I found a Washington Post 2006 list of banned keywords on Chinese internet. Now, it's a super long list with tons of political figures and things like that, but here are a couple that I felt stood out as highlights (being aware that as a not-as-political-astute-as-I-should-be citizen, I may be missing some obvious political implications from one of these):

"Indonesia" - I'm honestly curious about what Indonesia did to raise ire in China so much more than every single other country on Earth

"Night talk of the Forbidden City" - Only at night? talking during the day is far less dangerous?

"News Blockade" - well this just starts some levels - the Chinese people can't even look up the fact that they can't get news

"Armageddon" - I'm not sure if this refers to the movie, or the place of the final conflict between divine good and divine evil, but I don't think the Chinese government can prevent the power of either just by banning it online.

"Hire a killer to murder one's wife" - well, I suppose if you're working on the premise that you're going to ban any combination of words, this is as good as any

"Bug" - this one I assume is the recording device and the not the member of the animal kingdom, but this could still cause a serious problem for Chinese entomologists

2011-04-13T15:39:00.002-04:00

The picture really speaks for itself, but I'll add the obvious comment. How the fuck is this real and not some terrible Saturday Night Live commercial skit? Who has ever eaten a pizza, and said to themselves, "you know the only thing that would make this better - if I also had some cookies"? (Admittedly, cookies are probably delicious at anytime, but you don't just see them attached to every frozen entrée for a reason.) I would say that it finally happened, except that exactly nobody has been anticipating this.

Of course the only thing more bizarre is Digiorno's new Pizza and Wyngz. It's not really stranger in that it's chicken - wings and pizza seem like a far more logical combination than pizza and cookies. It's that these are not Wings, but Wyngz, because they can not legally be called Wings, as they have no wing meat. Colbert has the definitive takedown.

2011-04-04T09:53:00.000-04:00

A (relatively) quick sum of why I picked who I picked in each division:

AL East:

The easiest pick for me - there's a reason everyone's picking the Red Sox - they replaced Victor Martinez and Adrian Beltre with Adrian Gonzalez and Carl Crawford, and it would be an incredible stroke of bad luck if they had anywhere near as many injury problems this year as they did last year. I picked the Rays to tie in second the Yankees (and forced to pick, I'll have them winning the one-game playoff), which was a bit of a gamble - the Yankees certainly have the better offense, and will probably trade to improve their starting rotation, but right now the Rays starters are superior 1-5, and, well, you have to go out on a limb sometimes. I'm not sure Vlad Guerrero and Derrek Lee were worth signing for the Orioles, but they should be worth a couple of wins, enough, along with their young rotation to list them above the Blue Jays, who lose key contributor Vernon Wells (for good reason, but still, he was decent last year) and are relying on what could also be a very good young rotation, but have less offense.

Player from this division who I most want a jersey or shirt of: My boy Brian Matusz who closed last year in sterling fashion and is primed to sooner rather than later become the leader of the Orioles young rotation once he gets back from the DL.

AL Central:

I'm not all that convinced that the Tigers are better than the Twins and the White Sox - this was probably the hardest call for me of all the divisions. The Tigers have the division's best pitcher and position player, and while in baseball that doesn't necessarily mean all that much, it was a tiebreaker for me, especially since both Justin Verlander and Miguel Cabrera have been extremely durable so far in their careers. The Twins, if Justin Morneau stays healthy are every bit as good, but their rotation outside of the outstanding Francisco Liriano doesn't thrill me - it may be deeper than the Tigers', but has no second starter to rival Max Scherzer. I don't really have a good reason the White Sox can't win it either, though I generally have a policy against picking teams starting Juan Pierre, and Paul Konerko would be hard pressed to repeat his 2010. Between the Indians and Royals, well, they each have a couple of parts to watch, and for Royals fans in particular, Mike Moustakas should be up sometime soon with any luck.

Player from this division who I most want a jersey or shirt of: I already have a Verlander, which I found for about three dollars, next, I think I'd like a Shin-Soo Choo jersey - already the best Korean position player ever (Sorry, Hee Seop Choi), and one of the most underrated players in the majors over the past couple of years.

AL West:

The Rangers don't have Cliff Lee, sure, but they were probably going to win the division without him last year anyway. I don't love them so much, and the possibility of half their best hitters getting hurt - the Kinslers, Cruzs, and Hamiltons, and not expecting much from tradition power position first base with Mitch Moreland. That said, I don't like any of the rest of the teams any more - the As have the potential for a great starting staff with Brett Anderson, Travor Cahill, Dallas Braden and Gio Gonzalez, but have absolutely no hitting behind it. In terms of the Angels, Dan Haren's great, Jerrod Weaver is good, but I'm not sure he can duplicate last season, and I don't have as much faith in the rest of the starting pitching as well as the potentially horrendous hitting infield until Kendry Morales gets back. The Mariners, well, they get to have King Felix Hernandez, and really, how much more can one team ask for.

Player from this division who I most want a jersey or shirt of: I have been searching for a reasonably priced Felix jersey for years, so that goes without saying, but otherwise a Brett Anderson Athletics jersey would be great, partly because he's a left-handed starter on the verge of being a really good pitcher if he can stay healthy, but also because I can then make all sorts of Suede references which almost no Americans will get (ie. He's "so young," he's one of the "beautiful ones," he's "animal nitrate"...).

NL East:

Second easiest division pick, though here, I actually think I'd take the Braves over the Phillies before I'd take the Yankees or Rays over the BoSox. We all know why the Phillies are first - their absolutely spectacular first four members of their starting rotation. However, Chase Utley's out until who knows when, and just about every other key member of their offense is on the decline. The Braves have a very good rotation, albeit not as good, but more potential for growth on offense, with a hopefully healthy all year Jason Heyward, Dan Uggla at 2nd, and a possible comeback season for Chipper Jones. The Marlins have a fierce young rotation of their own, but one that hasn't been able to consistently throw the amount of innings they'll need from it to compete, though the team will be aided by full seasons of Logan Morrison and Mike Stanton. Sports Illustrated had the Mets finishing behind the Nationals, which, biased Met fan that I am, I just don't see - while the Mets pitching has a chance to be wretched, their offense has a chance to be pretty good, and the fact that the Nationals are starting Rick Ankiel everyday certainly does not bode well for them.

Player from this division who I most want a jersey or shirt of: I have a Beltran shirt, and Santana and Beltran jerseys currently. If it were ever acceptable for a Mets fan to own a Braves jersey (though, compared to even five years ago, it's much closer - if you could go back in time to 2004 and tell a Mets fan that he or she would hate the Phillies ten times more than the Braves, he or she would never have believed you) I'd love a Tommy Hanson - I think he will be a bona fide ace sooner rather than later, and I wouldn't mind a Ryan Zimmerman either, another underrated star.

NL Central:

I admit I probably went with my heart a little bit, rooting for the Brewers over the Cards and Reds, but I think there's justification for it - the Brewers, at the expense of a real shortstop, which I'll admit is troubling, traded for two top notch starters who have plied their trades for their careers in the more difficult American League, and should find things easier in the National. That, along with hopefully another healthy Rickie Weeks season and the rest of the Brewers offense could certainly do the trick. I don't think the Reds were any fluke - I think they'll do just about the same as they did last year, but that the Brewers, with their massive starting pitching improvement will inch ahead - a big feat, I admit, but within the realm of possibility, considering just how bad the starters were last year. The Cardinals still have an excellent chance as well with Albert Pujols, Matt Holliday and the rapidly improving Colby Rasmus, but I'm not sold, and call me a fool, I know, on Dave Duncan getting the rotation to not miss Adam Wainwright. The Cubs could actually be decent, and it could be fun to watch if Carlos Zambrano can have follow his hot streak at the end of last year, and the Pirates and Astros can not be decent, but at least the Pirates have some fun hitters, while the Astros have...can Michael Bourne lead the league in steals?

Player from this division who I most want a jersey or shirt of: Rickie Weeks, for sure. I need to get one, or best of all an old school Brewers jersey of his.

NL West:

I picked the Giants to repeat because of their starting pitching along with improvements at shortstop, third base (Sandoval can't be that bad again) and a full season of Posey, but it all rests on the starters staying healthy. The Rockies have likely the division's best player in Troy Tulowitzki, and a very solid rotation, but will need some increased contributions from some of the guys in the lineup (Ian Stewart? Dexter Fowler?) to take the division. The Dodgers need a come back season from Matt Kemp, which I think they will get, but they also need some offense out of some other positions, which I'm not sure they will. The Padres were a great story last year, but pretty much traded their best player, Adrian Gonzalez, over the offseason, for good reason, but still, everything kind of went right for them, and I can't see that happening again. The Diamondbacks, well, they got, uh, Joe Saunders last year. I do think Ian Kennedy and Daniel Hudson could emerge as quite good pitchers though.

Player from this division who I most want a jersey or shirt of: Clayton Kershaw. He's a lefty, and he's incredibly fun to watch pitch.

2011-03-31T13:34:00.003-04:00

I admit, some of these picks are a little chalk. But come on, whose aren't these days?

AL MVP:

Adrian Gonzalez, Boston Red Sox

Gonzalez is of course the new acquisition of the Red Sox, the team favored by everyone and their mothers to win the AL East. Although the Padres were certainly competitive last year, and came very close to a playoff spot, they still got a fraction of the media coverage the Red Sox will receive. Gonzalez is in the prime of his career and has had back to back outstanding years, finishing fourth and second in the NL in 2009 and 2010 respectively in baseball reference WAR, and his counting statistics should improve dramatically with a much more offensively potent lineup and a much more offensively potent ballpark. I would place Adrian Gonzalez as the co-favorite in the MVP race along with Miguel Cabrera, with Robinson Cano, Evan Longoria and other new Red Sox acquistion Carl Crawford not that far behind.

AL Cy Young:

Felix Hernandez, Seattle Mariners

Yes, this is the first of two back-to-back Cy Young award winners I'll be predicting this year, though I think the AL pick is going out far more on a limb than the NL pick. The one aspect of this pick I do like a lot is that by giving Felix the Cy last year with so few wins, if he wins just one or two more and otherwise puts up similar statistics, it would be hard not to award it to him again. He has more or less gotten better year-to-year each of the past five years (Fangraphs' WAR has him better in '09 than '10, but he had a better FIP, xFIP, and tERA last year and pitched more innings, so I'm not exactly sure why), and he's shown no injury history up to now, at least. No reason not to expect a near duplicate of last season. The other key contenders here I would have to think would be Justin Verlander, CC Sabathia and Jon Lester, with me nearly arbitrarily putting them in reverse order or likelihood of victory.

AL Rookie of the Year

Jeremy Hellickson, Tampa Bay Rays

He's a top three prospect in the majors according to just about everyone (and top prospect to be in the majors to begin the season and not on the DL). Hellickson will get a chance to get lots of innings and lots of wins. As I talk about in the NL ROY section, it's all about playing time. Hellickson, though not supposed to be an eventual ace, is mature and has very good stuff, or so I read. Other horses in the race would be Mariners starter Michael Pineda and Toronto Blue Jays starter Kyle Drabek.

NL MVP:

Albert Pujols, St. Louis Cardinals

The #1 overall seed of award picks, I kind of hate myself for picking Pujols (though of course, based on this year's NCAA Tourney, a #1 overall pick wouldn't be such a great bet). Here's the problem. We know as much as we can possibly know about anyone that Pujols is going to be fantastic. He's getting older, but he's still more or less in his prime years, albeit towards the end of those for a normal player, and the man has led the NL in baseball reference WAR for the past six years. I'd love to take a chance, I really would, but the other players I want to pick are super dark horses, and I just don't have the balls to actually pick them, but rather to mention them one sentence from now and give myself credit in case they crazily go on and win it even though I didn't pick them. After Pujols, the most likely I think are Joey Votto, Ryan Braun, Troy Tulowitzki and maybe Prince Fielder (at this point there are about eight names that I think have about even chance - including Hanley Ramirez and even Jason Heyward and Buster Posey - why not?). My super aforementioned dark horses, for the record I'll refer back to if they come out of nowhere, are Rickie Weeks and Matt Kemp.

NL Cy Young:

Roy Halladay, Philadelphia Phillies

Easiest pick I made all day - more than Pujols even, I think, even though there are a score of great pitchers in the NL. Roy Halladay is basically the best pitcher on planet Earth right now, and even though he's older, he has been extremely durable, is on a contending team and has both the old-school finishing games mentality gut-voters love, and the wonderful strikeout to walk ratios that stats-voters love. Maybe his biggest obstacle (besides every pitcher's number one obstacle - getting hurt) is Cliff Lee or Cole Hamels also having an amazing year, and somehow splitting the vote. Amongst the other outstanding NL pitchers I'd pick in order of likelihood to win would be Chris Carpenter, Cliff Lee, Tim Lincecum, Ubaldo Jimenez and Clayton Kershaw as my up and comer.

NL Rookie of the Year:

Freddie Freeman, Atlanta Braves

Rookie of the Year is first and foremost about opportunity (well, that at playing at least okay with that opportunity). Rookie of the Year, from year to year, is like the Tony awards - some years have extraordinary talent, like last year with Jason Heyward and Buster Posey, but other years have Bob Hamelin (or the musical Titanic) and just about anyone can sneak in there. When predicting it's always a smart bet to guess someone you know will get at bats, and the two best bets in that regard would be Freeman and Giants first baseman Brandon Belt.

2011-03-31T13:23:00.002-04:00

Predicted Baseball Standings Time:

Let me get the standings out before the season starts and then thoughts and MVP/Cy Young picks can come later.

AL:

AL East:

Red Sox 94-68

Rays 90-72

Yankees 90-72

Orioles 78-84

Blue Jays 77-85

AL Central:

Tigers 87-75

Twins 86-76

White Sox 83-79

Indians 69-93

Royals 67-95

AL West:

Rangers 87-75

Athletics 83-79

Angels 83-79

Mariners 70-92

NL:

NL East:

Phillies 91-71

Braves 88-74

Marlins 83-79

Mets 77-85

Nationals 72-90

NL Central:

Brewers 88-74

Reds 87-75

Cardinals 86-76

Cubs 78-84

Astros 68-94

Pirates 68-94

NL West:

Giants 89-73

Rockies 85-77

Dodgers 83-79

Padres 75-87

Diamondbacks 68-94

Prior years' predictions can be found here and here and here.

2011-03-28T12:25:00.000-04:00

9. Veronica Mars

Okay, so here's the last show on the list that absolutely nobody watched (well, there's a second one that most people didn't watch as it aired, but I think far more people have watched it since), though it developed a significant cult and is probably one of my, I don't know, five favorite shows of all time (it's incredibly high ranking on my personal list make up for any commercial drawbacks).

I like doing analysis of television as much as the next person, but sometimes more than exactly what you can put your finger on is the feeling you get when you watch a show, when you talk about a show, after you watch it, and when you think about watching it (I spend a lot of time thinking about TV). For Lost, the feeling as the show moved forward changed from excitement right after an episode to frustration, to not really wanting to see more episodes, to at least, for now, not really wanting to see any episodes again(maaaaybe the Desmond-centric time travel one is an exception). For Veronica Mars, my feelings are the opposite. Recently it was mentioned when I was in the car with my friend who had not seen it, and my other friend and I got really excited, telling him to watch it and then later watching the first couple of episodes with him, which were just as good as they were the first time I saw them (or the second). Just writing about it makes me want to watch.

Veronica is a teenage sleuth in a California high school divided between sons and daughters of the rich and the sons and daughters of those who serve them. She is an exception from either of these two groups in that her dad was the sheriff - poor but with power. This all changed after the biggest murder in town history, when he accused the wrong suspect, a multi-millionaire software developer whose son dated Veronica and whose daughter, the dead victim, was her best friend. After that, he was recalled from office and started up a private detective agency, while Veronica became a target at school, since her dad became so unpopular in the wake of accusing the richest man in town. She was asked to choose her friends, or her dad, and stuck with her dad, making her a social pariah. Oh, and her mom walked out on her and her dad somewhere around this time. Got all that?

The way the show works is that every episode contains a small scale mystery - who stole something from the school, who is terrorizing another student - random classmates will come to Veronica for help sometimes, knowing her reputation as a bit of a crime-solver. She then uses some of her dad's cool P.I. equipment along with her natural guile and solves the cases. There's also a big season-long mystery (in the first season, it's who killed her old best friend portrayed by the now much more famous Amanda Seyfried) which works itself out over time, until becoming the focus of the last couple of episodes.

There are many reasons I love this show. For one, the writing is fantastic. Joss Whedon is one of my television heroes and I think it's undeniable Veronica Mars creator Rob Thomas (sadly not the same Thomas lead singer of Matchbox 20) is influenced by him. The dialogue is sharp, witty and banter-y, all around, but I particularly enjoy the conversations between Veronica and her dad. Her dad is a great character - it would be so easy to make a show like this and make her dad a bumbling fool, or at the least a naive father on whom she is always pulling one over, or some strict disciplinarian who you are always rooting for her to disobey. This isn't the case at all however - as a viewer, you love her dad - he's smart, he's good at his job, and while he doesn't always know everything she's up to (he does have a job and other commitments, after all) several times in the course of the show, Veronica thinks she's gotten away with something but he knows about it, or knew about it all along. Another character, Logan, who is pretty despicable in the first couple of episodes of the show, became a favorite by the latter half of the first season. The power to transform a character from hated to loved and not have it feel forced (reminiscent of what Whedon does with Cordelia in Buffy) is impressive.

It's tempting to go far more in depth, but it would be difficult without way more words so another subject for another day. All I'll say is that, while I could say this about a whole bunch of series on the list (and I may again before it's over), if you have not watched this show, WATCH IT NOW.

2011-03-23T17:25:00.000-04:00

Another commercial I don't understand.

Okay, so somehow there are two employees, one for Pepsi Max, and one for Coke Zero, presumably blue collar, probably truck drivers (white collar workers would probably not be wearing shirts with patches on them and baseball caps) who both end up sitting near each other at the counter at a diner. The Coke Zero guy, who was already sitting down when the Pepsi Max employee walked in, is drinking a Coke Zero, but sees Pepsi Max guy start drinking a Pepsi Max. The Coke Zero guy stares at the Pepsi Max longingly. They chat, the Pepsi Max guy moves up next to Coke Zero guy, and he confirms Coke Zero guy's question, which is whether Pepsi Max had zero calories (it does). Pepsi Max character offers up the can of Pepsi Max to Coke Zero guy, who takes it, has a long pull, and then confirms, skeptically that the drink has zero calories. He then takes another gulp, which Pepsi Max guy captures on his phone, and when Coke Zero guy asks him why he's taking that, Pepsi Max guy responds that he's putting it on youtube. The camera then takes us outside of the diner, and all of a sudden Pepsi Max guy and Coke Zero guy come crashing through the window, fighting, presumably because Coke Zero guy was concerned that being seen drinking Pepsi Max would get him in trouble with his employer.

The fact that this commercial is terrible comes out simply from a single viewing. But possibly my main problem is that I don't understand the underlying reason for why we should believe this commercial. And, of course, I get that lots of commercials kind of (or entirely) have nothing to do with selling their product - it's a different type of approach, and that's fine. Let's restrict ourselves to commercials that talk about one product being good by demonstration, or one product better than another comparable one. Usually they either show people, who we're at least meant to believe are real people, talking about the product, or they show the two products at work. In the former, in theory, if they're real people, that gives some sort of credit - real people think this product is good. In the latter, two, say, cleaning products are used side by side, presumably the results of one are much better than the other, and if we are to believe this is honest, it could persuade us. In this commercial however, the characters are clearly actors. There's no reason we would believe otherwise, from the way the commercial is filmed, to the dialogue, to the comical fight scene at the end. Soda isn't a product we can see in action - there's no way for us to judge the effect of taste from watching, like we could with a cleaning product. So basically what's happening is a paid actor who is clearly a paid actor acting as a Coke trucker is claiming how great Pepsi max is. Why on earth would anybody believe this? It's not just that the commercial doesn't work to me; the concept doesn't work. I don't get it.

2011-03-14T16:52:00.002-04:00

This is a commercial I've seen a lot recently that has drawn my ire.

Basically, the premise is a bunch of people are having a blast at Buffalo Wild Wings at lunch, but sadly, they need to return to work. Not to worry! The waitress signals the bartender, who hits a button, which transmits a message to the weatherman who is now on the TV, talking about what a beautiful day it is. After he gets the message, though, he changes his tune - his producers set up the scene to look as if there is a storm, massive rain, terrible conditions and what not, and he reports that with such weather, it's best to stay inside and have a beer.

This is all well and good enough, except what's going to happen when they go back to work hours later? Their bosses will ask them where they were. Their excuse will be "I was at the restaurant when a weather report came on telling us about a huge storm outside and advising that we remain indoors. Only later did I find out that the storm was a fabrication concocted by the restaurant to keep us there buying drinks and wings." Who is going to believe that? Unless, alternately, that weather broadcast that was altered was also broadcast somehow into televisions everywhere, so the bosses either thought the same thing or at least understand their predicament.

2011-03-05T11:14:00.002-05:00

10: Lost

Well, unlike the last post, I have the opposite problem. Rather than having nothing to say, I could write a book about Lost (well, at least a novella) and I need to restrain myself a little and will try to avoid getting too specific, but I will probably make some specific examples of things, so if you haven't seen it (and there might be spoilers of something because you can't talk about the show without it, but they also probably won't make any sense to anyone who hasn't watched, and thus quickly forgotten) just trust me on the general points.

For me, and this may be entirely too harsh, and I understand if you think that - Lost, ultimately, represents disappointment. I reserve my harshest judgments not for the worst shows - there's just not enough to say - they're so obviously not good - the Big Bang Theories, or the relentlessly mediocre Mentalist type shows, or the Ghost Whisperers, or so forth and so on. Rather, I'm toughest and most frustrated with the shows that could be good, that have a lot of really good elements, and yet just screw it all up. Lost, along with Battlestar Galactica are pretty much the textbook examples for me of two shows like this - shows that have all this wonderful potential and do a whole bunch of things really well, just to kind of fritter it away in the end (Heroes would be a sub-standard example of this, but it was almost all potential undelivered - it kind of fell apart after the first half-season).

Sometime early in the airing of the second season, I got swept up in Lost fever, watching the first season in a couple of weeks, and then catching up. I pretty much watched regularly weekly until the fifth season, where I kept falling behind but eventually caught up, until the sixth and final season, which I mostly didn't watch, and read wikipedia summaries, and then just watched the final episode, which I feel bad for, because I knew most likely I was going to dislike it, and I feel like I was biased, but yeah, I did hate it.

I was swept up in my initial Lost viewing, as so many others were - the show had a creative, genuinely interesting and new premise, and created a world of mystery with the story and with the look of the show.

This article is a bit disjointed, but I'm kind of taking a quick chronological (or biographical, I guess) journey through my affair with Lost.

Of course, here's the one thing I never liked straight from almost the beginning, and more and more as the show went on: the flashbacks. They're terrible. Well, first, before I tear them to pieces, let's list the exceptions. First, the flashbacks were okay with me, generally, when they moved the plot, and not the characterization. This refers mostly to flashbacks of other events on the island when someone was away from the group - such as when Claire was taken by the Others, and we see what happened to her. I would also however make an exception if there were flashbacks that yielded really important information to the plot off the island, though I can't think of an example offhand (there are a lot of peripherally relevant things - Hurley winning the lottery with the numbers, Locke's dad coming back later on - but these were mostly unnecessary I felt (subjective analysis, I know) and could have easily been worked around).

Now the problem - they stink. Well, first, the soft problem - personally, I think any benefit of characterization given by the flashbacks was more than made up for by the time they took from on-island activities, and the disjointedness they added to the show, in addition to being a kind of lazy way of avoiding having to create more subtle characterization on the island itself. We want to show that Jack has to be needed? Let's just make up some random off the island story showing that, that's not restrained by what is going on on the island - same thing for whatever else they wanted to show for other characters. The hard way, but the better way, would have been to find situations on the island and craft their personas rather than show this blatant hit-you-over-the-head example off the island and then a subtler example in the same episode on the island so you can say to yourself "oh, I get it - the flashback and the island plot are related!". That's actually not the worst thing about the flashbacks. That's mostly commenting on their laziness and unnecessary-ness. Some of them were, taken in and of themselves, not bad pieces of television, even if I wished they weren't there. But, more and more as the seasons moved forward, a lot of them were just plain bad and served to show the same character flaw again and again. The absolute worst one of all was the flashback in which Jack is on some tropical island, meets a woman, hangs out with her a whole bunch, and then against her wishes insists on getting a tattoo, and then gets asked to leave. This was the worst (I think I remember even reading an interview with Damon Lindelof or Carlton Cuse where they described this as a low moment for them) - it had absolutely no relevance to anything else in the series and just battered home a point about Jack that if you hadn't gotten from the last eight flashbacks, you're not going to get now, and also, even taken out of context, just as a bit of story-telling it was utterly terrible. There were other bad ones, and to be fair, this is the worst, but you get the point.

The last thing is that by starting this flashback format, they locked themselves in. Even when the flashbacks no longer became helpful (if they were ever helpful), they felt they had to use them in every single episode, instead of just using them when they were needed.

Okay, I think I just spent most of the space I was planning to use writing just about the flashback device, so I'll speed through things rather than have a 4000-word entry.

So let's move quickly through the seasons. First was best - mystery about the island, good characters, for the most part, a lot of different ways they could go. (Cuse and Lindelof say that it should have been obvious they were going the super-duper natural (that's even more super than supernatural) route from always day one with the smoke monster, but I think that's just hindsight talking - they could have gone sci-fi, or they could have kept their limited supernatural in a box, rather than going time travel and so forth). The second season featured some incredibly slow-moving repeated tales of different members of the tail section of the plane (no pun intended, really), and then possibly my favorite episodes of the series (possibly, though not my favorite episode, more on that in a minute), when they had who would turn out to be the super-villain of the show Ben Linus locked in the cage and he tried to convince them of all sorts of things. Of course, this was probably the performance that got Ben Linus promoted to amongst the most important characters of the remainder of the series, a move that was disastrous in my opinion - he became one of these characters (like Syler in heroes, or Baltar in Battlestar Galactica) who lies so often but people keep for some reason believing him over and over again, until it just gets frustrating, tiresome and unbelievable (yeah, he's charismatic, but no one is that charismatic).

All right, skipping forward some more, my favorite character on the show was Desmond, and the best episode was probably his crazy time traveling episode "The Constant" where he has to go back and convince Penny to keep the same phone number so he can call her. Anyway, in terms of how the supernatural elements have anything else to do with the show, yeah, not so much. In terms of just an individual piece of television making though, it's great.

Skipping forward some more (maybe I really should write a series just on Lost), I realized by the last season I really didn't have the desire to watch the show, but I at least tried to keep up with what was going on. The flash-sideways were possibly the worst thing the show ever did even just by themselves, and in addition with the way the Lost creators completely used it as misdirection as what could have been an alternate universe after Juliet blew up the bomb in the '70s (if you're reading this and haven't seen the show, it makes no sense, I know, but for those who have seen the show, it doesn't make that much more sense). Anyway, I'm tired of trying to describe exactly what was bad about things. That whole concept sucked. Just saying.

Yeah, so Lost. It was kind of a big deal. It inspired this Weezer album, after all.

2011-03-04T13:00:00.000-05:00

11: Sex and the City

I really shouldn't be the one writing about Sex and the City. I've seen a few episodes, and a decent chunk of the first movie. It's a big show for a certain demographic over the last ten years (women) and was a giant success for HBO, pretty much the co-biggest the commercial success of the decade along with The Sopranos and I would be remiss not to mention it for its combination of commercial appeal, critical success and cultural phenomenal-ness.

The show was big enough to inspire products like Manolo Blahnik shoes and places like Magnolia bakery to become household terms, just from the show itself. It was a big platform for women in the mid-to-late thirties to be, I don't know, real, and party and be professionals and meet guys and have sex and talk about it and not just get married and have kids and just deal with their mother-in-law.

Of course, my friend who was a fan has always said, rather than about the girls, as one would think, for her it was about the dudes. It's a rich collection of actors who have portrayed the guys of Sex and the City, the diverse (well diverse between white guys) likes of Chris Noth as Mr. Big (who as a die-hard Law & Order fan I always have had serious trouble taking seriously as a romantic lead), Ron Livingston, John Corbett, Mikhail Barishnikov (I remember thinking "what the fuck?" when I read that casting call somewhere), James Remar, Kyle McLachlin and the always great Evan Handler.

I don't have any strong feelings about the show (I don't want it much, the ones I've watched are okay, not great but watchable, but more or less, it's not written for me, for what that's worth).

I wish I had more to say, particularly because I'm sure there is a lot to say about this show, it broke all sorts of ground in a way, and a lot of people love it the way I love other show. I don't have any easy way to make fun of it or deliver some random trivia the way I would about some of the other shows on the list. I'm just going to move on and resolve to write more about the new few on the list. Apologies to all. At least I know far more about the plot of the show than I did before writing this.

(I do realize I want to make a quick note - the wikipedia season summaries are clearly written by a fan in an non-objective style of writing - referring to "our resident bad girl samantha," having us all watch with him as "we start the season," and writing on sentence "Life after Big." (also I realize I did want to mention Big as one of the great partially named characters in TV, up there with the Columbos and the McGuyvers and the Kramers - someone should make a list sometime))

2011-03-03T15:57:00.000-05:00

12: Everybody Loves Raymond

Yes, I know, this one seems like it's from forever ago, as it ended in 2005, but it didn't really peak, popularity wise, until 2000, and I still submit it's the biggest mainstream comedy of the 2000s (Two and a Half Men may be surpassing it, but give me some leeway).

This is one show I was actually there for the beginning for, and I really mean before the beginning (pre-beginning?). When I went to Las Vegas in, well, I guess it must have been 1996, in August, we, at MGM Grand (I think?) went to a couple of free screenings of upcoming CBS television shows, where we would share our opinions. One of them, as I've implied was Everybody Loves Raymond, and the other was the short-lived Moloney, starring Peter Strauss as a Los Angeles cop/psychiatrist (we were on the vacation with family friends, and my friend was so taken with Moloney that he watched every episode - I wouldn't be surprised if he was the only person in the US to do so). It took place on Long Island, where I grew up, so we immediately took to representing the show and it is the kind of show we all liked enough for us to watch it as family for its first couple of seasons. I've basically seen every episode of the show for the first few seasons, and not a single episode from the last one where I'm sure some weird stuff happens (like did at the weird last few seasons of Home Improvement) and the kids get older (Madylin Sweeten, who played daughter Ally, is weirdly 19 now, her brothers who played her brothers in the show are now 15).

The formula's pretty simple. Professionally successful, but common sense stupid, Raymond is always pissing off his smart housewife who is always doing everything around the house and for the kids (she's the deuteragonist - so says wikipedia - second character to the protagonist - I didn't even know this word existed). Oh, and of course, his overbearing parents, along with is older brother resentful of all the attention he gets (prompting the distinct Brad Garrett low-voice grown "Eeeeverybody loves Raymond" (Why I can't just find a youtube of him saying this, like that, is beyond me)), live across the street.

These weren't the salad days for CBS like they are now. CBS was struggling and NBC ruled the roost (really really hard to believe, I know). Raymond was one of the most important shows (along with Survivor and all the procedurals led by CSI) in changing that. The show was Emmy gold as well, winning the best comedy award twice, and all of its main cast members winning acting Emmys, except for Peter Boyle, who was nominated seven times.

To a lot of people I think, it was the last in a great line of classic old-school family sitcoms. It was generally well-received, and I think whatever critical value it had has been all but lost to its CBS successors, instead moving off to the new generation of sitcoms, without laugh tracks and over-sentimentality, like the NBC Thursday night shows (well, not Outsourced, but the rest) and It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia (the one particularly notable exception to this is How I Met Your Mother, which is very much in an old school format, yet has a critical following). But for the most part, there really isn't another Everybody Loves Raymond.

2011-02-25T15:00:00.000-05:00

13: American Idol

Perhaps it's unfair to stow the best rated program of the last decade here at number thirteen. Call it a bit of discretion for a show I genuinely extremely dislike. I admit I've had trouble exactly explaining very well what it is I so dislike about the show, and I'm not always sure I can to myself. In addition, I hold no animus towards contestants post-Idol, I've liked plenty of their music that has come afterwards (well, mostly Kelly Clarkson and a couple of other songs by people here and there). I just really don't like it. Oh, sure, there are a couple of reasons I can pinpoint, and they explain maybe why I don't watch it, but not really why I don't like it so much - two hours of show a week means they contain a ton of absolute fluff and the songs that got released at the end of every year as Idol songs tended to be lousy as a general course -A Moment Like This or Inside Your Heaven, for example. And part of it, certainly is because it's so popular, if nobody watched it, I probably would feel the same way about it as I feel about, I don't know, According to Jim. But it is that popular, so it stares me in the face every time a great controversy is there about which David to vote for, Cook or Archuleta (okay, that only happened once, but you get the idea).

I don't watch it, but that doesn't mean I haven't seen it, for better or worse. It's hard to avoid it ever, with it being so big and talked about. I know all the winners, and just about all of the runners up (I don't want to say for sure that I might not forget about a Diana deGarmo) because they're usually worth knowing, most of them have had at least some semblance of at least one hit (Taylor Hicks really pushing it with just the American Idol done "Do You Make Me Proud?"

It's everywhere. So many things about it have been cultural touchstones over the last decade - Simon Cowell raving, From Justin to Kelly, Clay Aiken claiming he's not gay and then finally coming out, Paula Abdul's scandal and alleged affair with a contestant, the great run of Sanjaya, Adam Lambert not winning probably because he's just gay or because he's flamboyantly gay - there are almost too many to count (there's so many that after writing this I just remembered William Hung - with almost any other show, that would be the biggest random sensation to happen to it). Although it has still been the #1 and #2 programs for the past five years (and no, I'm not giving separate entries to the performance show and the results show), I feel like while tons of people still watch, it's been less talked about everywhere the past couple of seasons (could just be wishful thinking).

Two of the winners have become unqualified stars - Kelly Clarkson and Carrie Underwood, and Jordin Starks has had her share of success. Two non winners have also become stars - Chris Daughtry, and oscar-winning Jennifer Hudson (there's a section of the American Idol wikipedia page devoted to award winners - hilariously there's an "Academy Awards" column - which looks like a binary column - it's basically a whole bunch of zeros and a one by Hudson's name).

Someday, someone's going to write a book about American Idol. As we move into a new generation of Idoldom, we have two new judges - really important decisions for the producers, who were worried that Simon Cowell leaving might cause droves of viewers to leave as well - and allegedly Steven Tyler has a knack for it (possibly making other new judge Jennifer Lopez jealous?). Still, we may well be reaching a point where American Idol is relevant in television, but not so much in music anymore.

I'll continue to follow it in as much as I need to know - acts that might actually become popular outside of Idol, and any major scandal news story, but no more. Thankfully, at least the days are gone where any American Idol songs released at the end would instantly shoot super high in the charts (the weirdest for me is going through my old year end top 100s realizing how high a version of God Bless the USA by "American Idol finalists" went - thankfully quickly forgotten - another distasteful byproduct of post-9/11super patriotic fever).

2011-02-22T15:44:00.000-05:00

14: Entourage

You know, a while ago, whenever I wrote this list up, this seemed to make sense here, and now it kind of looks like a strange outlier. And maybe that's just right. Maybe Entourage is a perfect type of program which had its little moment in the sun but was forgotten about quickly, even before it really officially ended (which it will this summer - and then maybe movie?). It was supposed to be HBO's next big breakout half hour hit, it's next Sex and the City, and it pulled off kind of a Vinny Testaverde type of career - never quite did become a star but was a very productive player for years and years.

And while I admit this is high, these type of careers are deserving of notice and Entourage was an important player on a big time team (HBO?) for many years. At its heart it's a male fantasy show, and I've often tried to put it off as the male equivalent of Sex and the City, though some women have said they enjoy Entourage and claim that my analogy is forced for that reason - women enjoy Entourage in general more than men enjoy Sex and the City (not that men can't, or shouldn't, of course). But it's like the bubblegum pop of shows, it's short, it bounces up and down but generally up at the end, and part of the reason you enjoy the ride is because, overall, you like to see them do well, and make money and sleep with hot chicks.

Vinny Chase has the rare fortune to play one of those characters who is more famous in the fictional universe than the actor Adrian Grenier in our universe, something that, even with Entourage ending soon will be relatively difficult to change (Vinny Chase did star in Aquaman, and The Great Gatsby after all). Entourage has wonderful fictional movies, particularly my favorite which is the scene of the Vinny Chase in the black-and-white art film Queens Boulevard saying "I Am Queens Boulevard" (I know it doesn't sound funny, but it just kind of is great). Entourage also does a good job in generally using celebrities well - it's a platform for celebrities to mock themselves by playing ridiculous exaggerated versions of themselves, and show viewers at the same time that they have a sense of humor.

What's unfortunate in a way as well, is that now, when many of its fans have written it off - probably more of fatigue than any particular jumping-the-shark arc or moment, Entourage had its best season in years actually delving into something Entourage had never really done - a seriously dark plot for Vinny Chase that wasn't simply solved over the course of an episode. I was a little bit conflicted in that I watch Entourage to see the boys having fun, facing little problems, coming out ahead and having a huge party, but this season the focus was on some actual serious shit, and they almost played into what you expected, but throwing a couple of moments, where you though Vinny would snap out of the funk, but he just fell further. If you described it to me before hand I'm not sure I would have been thrilled about it but I actually really liked it (the same way I felt about watching recent How I Met Your Mother episodes dealing with Marshall's dad's death - I watch the show to laugh, so I don't want to be sad, but all things considered, they've handled the death plot very well).

In the days of hilarious but sometimes hard-to-watch comedies, Entourage is a different breed. It's popcorn. It's not funny, but it's really easy to watch, and enjoyable and that sounds like a backhanded compliment, but it's really not.

2011-02-19T12:05:00.000-05:00

15: NCIS

The sneaky biggest show on this list, perhaps the most remarkable thing about NCIS is that there's nothing really remarkable at all about it. The little procedural that could, NCIS chugged its way from a 26th place and 11.84 million viewers in its rookie season all the way to the 4th spot and 19.33 million viewers in its most recent 7th season, growing in viewers every single year as it progressed. It can not be emphasized enough just how unusual this is. Sure, every once in a blue moon shows take a couple of years to find their feet but usually they peak out after a few years and begin a decline, either steep, or just gentle because their show is still extremely popular, but fewer people generally watch any one show as years go on, with fewer people watching broadcast TV as a whole. The two most closest examples I could find were Everybody Loves Raymond, which peaked in its 6th season, and dipped a slight bit but not by much afterwards, and Seinfeld which started with absolutely no one watching it, getting an extreme amount of leeway from NBC, and then by the 7th season reached its peak, which it more or less maintained for the couple of seasons after it. While season 8 ratings for NCIS aren't out yet, the single episode record was already set by a season 8 episode. Not to mention all this for a show that had the audacity to schedule itself next to the clear #1 show of the era (which will prevent it from ever notching a #1 slot, for better or worse) American Idol.

Okay, enough about ratings, but man, what else is there to talk about. I've seen quite a big of NCIS - when I was out in California visiting my brother, my usual Law & Order watching schedule was three hours off and NCIS was in its place. It's you know, okay. Kind of a middle of the road procedural, better than some of the real drek of the genre, but inferior to, say, Law & Order. I can understand why people watch it and why it stays on tv; I can not understand why it's the most popular scripted show in America. CSI, which was the most popular procedural before being replaced by NCIS at least has its crazy zoom in shots, and it's super sensationalized crimes. NCIS, while being no authority on realism, is nowhere as out there as CSI. Mark Harmon, who had bounced around after Chicago Hope ended, to end up as the lead, is minorly charismatic and his team is about average, including former Man from U.N.C.L.E. co-star David McCallum as the wacky old and morbid trivia filled medical examiner and Pauley Parette as the she's-over-forty-what-is-she-still-doing-with-the-goth-and-pigtails-thing forensics specialist, who is probably the second most well-known character after Harmon - the creepy NCIS:LA commercials had Chris O'Donnell and LL Cool J following her, as NCIS:LA follows NCIS on Tuesday nights.

I guess Michael Weatherly's the third most notable character? I don't even know. NCIS was a spin off of JAG which is notable for the fact that I just learned that JAG lasted TEN seasons, a fact which I find absolutely mindblowing, if only vaguely relevant here. That's it, really. This is going to be one of those weird shows that no one probably remembers even though it was huge at the time (Think: The Jets - 80s pop band with five top ten hits who no one has ever heard of - well, that's probably too obscure, but time will tell).

2011-02-18T13:00:00.000-05:00

16: Grey's Anatomy

Well, we're two in a row now, and two of three in getting through the pivotal ABC shows of the past decade. Debuting a year after Lost and Desperate Housewives in 2005, Grey's started in 2005, and was an instant hit. Ratings have declined since (teaser: there's only two shows offhand I can think of that drastically did the opposite of decline and the strangest one to me is next) but it's still getting enough viewers to at least assure it of an eighth season next fall. And unlike the other two, it's even produced its own successful-enough spin-off Private Practice (I do really want to know what a spin-off from Lost would be). Unlike the other two, I've never quite gotten what was the big deal. Not that Lost or Desperate Housewives ever were necessarily so great but at least they were fairly different from anything else on TV. Grey's Anatomy is pretty much a medical soap. Not that there isn't room for a big one (especially in the face of end of ER) and I suppose there really aren't too many hospital shows around in this age of police procedurals (House is a hospital more or less procedural - there have been a few unsuccessful - Mercy anybody? Along with some newer nurse shows - Nurse Jackie, Hawthorne) but it all seems pretty rote.

I've seen a small amount of Grey's Anatomy, and probably more remarkably when I was bored a couple of summers ago at a job (really bored) I read the wikipedia episode summaries for the first couple of seasons (I was really bored)(pretty much just like watching the show). For some reason the main wikipedia page makes absolutely no mention of what has to be the most insane episode (I think? There's no way there could be a newer, crazier one) and the most watched episode as it appeared right after the Super Bowl (to be fair, it was the fairly lousy Steelers-Seahawks Super Bowl). This is "It's the End of the World" (all the episodes are song titles - it's the gimmick - the next episode is even (And We Know it) (technically not a song title by itself, but I'll give some leeway)). In this episode, without going into the unimportant details, a man comes into the hospital with the bomb in his chest ("unexploded ammunition" - I'm just saying bomb - same point). Over the course of this and the next episode, the doctors try to remove it (I would be remiss to not point out that apparently in Seattle Grace Hospital, this situation is known as a Code Black - you haven't been a doctor long enough until you've had one, I guess) while a bomb squad expert played by Kyle Chandler waits to diffuse it. In the end, the doctors do their job, but soon after the bomb explodes anyway, killing the expendable Chandler and his partner but no doctors. Tragedy.

Of course, the other most well-known incident regarding the show, especially for non-viewers of the show, was the brouhaha that erupted when Isaiah Washington made insulting comments about the sexual orientation of fellow cast member TR Knight, who then came out officially after the incident. Washington tried to take it back, and emphasize to the public how comfortable he was with the gays, but it was too late. Soon, his contract was cancelled and he was bounced from the show, off to appear in uh, well a couple of episodes of the short lived remake of the Bionic Woman. A couple of wrong words can drop you far in this business.

Oh, yeah and it had that weird thing where Patrick Dempsey's character was "McDreamy" and Eric Dane's character was "McSteamy." That was highly relevant for a year or two there.

2011-02-11T14:00:00.000-05:00

17: Desperate Housewives

I remember the first year of Desperate Housewives. It was huge - and a sensation - something people were talking about it. Who Wants to Be A Millionaire was bigger in its time in that more people watched it, but it's not like if you were at work the next day there would be much to talk about it. But if I had been around a water cooler back in the fall of 2004, this is what people would have been talking about. Well, essentially this and Lost (particularly comparable as the biggest ABC scripted successes of the decade). And we all know what happened - one of them went on to be hugely buzzworthy for a couple of years, fell out of favor, and then after announcing when its finale would be, became a cause celebre in its final season, and the other one was Desperate Housewives.

Or so the narrative seems, and that's what I thought I'd find, in terms of ratings. But the story is totally untrue. While it seems like everyone I know and read was talking about Lost, Desperate Housewives was still cranking out better ratings, and it honestly wasn't even that close. Lost, which I would have thought, would have climbed in the ratings during the last season when everyone was buzzing after every single episode, had its lowest rated season yet, while Desperate Housewives, whose ratings were still down relatively (what non-American Idol shows aren't, these days) finished in the top 15.

It was an interesting idea when it came out - the classic trashy primetime soup but this time with a dark comedy satiric spin. Sure, lots of primetime soaps before had not necessary taken themselves super seriously, but not usually with this type of angle. The narrator was the recently dead Mary Alice Young, who killed herself under mysterious circumstances which are the first season mystery (each season seems to have some sort of overarching plot, while there are many smaller plots within). The Desperate Housewives I have seen pretty much came during the first and maybe beginning of second seasons with my parents, who watched it at the time. Anyway, there was all sorts of little of these little dark mysteries - people trying to kill each other and such, lightened by the sense of satire.

Everyone knew Wisteria Lane and the ladies of Desperate Housewives became kind of a famous individually and as a group, though some more than others - it was kind of a comeback for Teri Hatcher, and Eva Longoria probably became the most famous, in addition to her tabloid-drawing romance with basketball point guard Tony Parker, but Marcia Cross and Felicity Huffman also (and to a lesser extent, Nicolette Sheridan - as sports fans by remember from this incredibly strange and ill-advised ABC syngeristic pre-Monday Night Football promo - I was just going to link but after watching it again -if you haven't seen it this is such a must-watch that I'm just embedding it below this:

)

Honestly, I can't top that. I really want to end on that note, and I don't have much else to say (bunch of characters die? crazy mysteries?), so I'm going to.

2011-02-08T13:00:00.001-05:00

18: Mad Men

Mad Men is one of the best two dramas on TV right now (along with Breaking Bad, though I'm not always certain on the order) and one of the buzziest shows around, at least in the Eastern seaboard Megalopolis (probably not so much in the flyover states).

Going into the fourth season this year I had talked myself a little bit down on the show. I had talked to some people who weren't in love with it, or kind of liked it but thought it was overhyped. The show hadn't been on for a few months and it wasn't fresh in my mind; by the time it came back I wasn't all that excited about it. But then, as I started watching season 4, my feelings changed, and after just a couple of episodes I remembered why I liked the show so much, and after the season was done, I got to thinking this was probably the best season yet. And unlike Friday Night Lights - a show which as I watch it seems amazing, but which quickly seems significantly worse after I'm a few weeks away from watching, the feeling of how good Mad Men was has stayed with me this time.

The acting is supurb and the characters are rich. The plots are great, but the show ultimately isn't about the plots at heart - it's about the interactions between the characters. Don Draper is the heart of the show, and without him being a great character, the show would certainly go nowhere, but it's about more than just him. In addition, it would be easy in some ways to have Draper's character become a little bit at least of a cartoon at various points - ambitious ad man who cheats on his wife constantly is easy to get tired of (as much of a crazy person as Betty later becomes, doesn't excuse the constant cheating - it was good to see the marriage end all around) - but a combination of really good acting and really good writing make him much more interesting than he had to be. This season, the episode "The Suitcase" had that kind of instant cache that pretty much everyone knew they were watching a classic when they saw it - when I read things online and talked to other people, they agreed, and when I talked to people after the season and started with something like "great episode" they knew exactly what I meant. The relationships are interesting, and the Peggy-Don relationship may be the deepest and most important one in the show.

If I do have to make my one nitpicky current issue, and it's a relatively small one (spoilers coming), it's that Betty, Don's by now ex-wife has sort of become cartoonishly insane. She has not been in the show nearly so much once she left Don (she's not quite as important to the show as say Carmela was in Sopranos, but still), but she has become a real monster. Deciding to move to spite Sally, firing Carla ridiculously, and in general just acting like an 8 year old. Yes, we get the idea that she's supposed to be immature and a child, but come on - all the other characterization is far more subtle and nuanced, in particular, say Pete Campbell who was super villainous in the first season and has become much more tolerable, or Roger, but Betty has become one dimensional.

Anyway, it's a minor complaint, seriously. Great show.

2011-02-01T20:08:00.000-05:00

2010 Number Ones Ranking continued:

11. "Only Girl (in the World)" - Rihanna

This song to me sounds kind of like it was created by a computer with the inputs "upbeat Rihanna dance song." The computer made some sounds, did some crunching and spit out "Only Girl in the World" - a song that seems like it should work, but it just doesn't. I like Rihanna's other big songs that seem to be to be a relatively similar vain - "S.O.S" and "Please Don't Stop the Music" are both solid, but this one feels like it's missing something. I definitely like it more than "What's My Name" but that might just be because I like this type of song a little bit better overall. I want to like and I can listen to it occasionally - it's by no means a bad song, but sometimes it's hard to listen to songs when you know there are other songs out there that are similar but just better in just about every way. Listening to it again I think that hits it on the head best for me - in a vacuum I'd like this song quite fine - and I was thinking to myself, yeah, you know, this really isn't bad. Then I put on S.O.S., and damn, this really is much better. Maybe it's unfair to compare an artist to their previous work sometimes, but sometimes it isn't.

10. "Rude Boy" - Rihanna

The run of three straight Rihanna songs comes to an end, as well as the fourth number one of the year to be produced by Stargate - eight of the seventeen were written by Stargate or Dr. Luke.

If it makes any sense, Rude Boy is the type of song which I am willing to acknowledge might be better than I like the song. I honestly don't know exactly why I don't like it, but in the same way, you don't know you like a song until you find yourself leaving it on when you hear it on the radio, even if you've heard it ten minutes ago, I found myself, when the song was big, turning it off, and switching stations, even when I hadn't heard it in a while. I like it the best of the Rihanna songs of this year, and even listening to it again now, I want to like it more - I just don't. Some of it is probably the repetitiveness, but again, if it was a song I loved, the repetitiveness generally wouldn't be a problem. I like the style (and I kind of like the video as well). Well, maybe with time it will grow, or maybe not. It's the flip side of the unexpectedly liked song - sometimes you just don't like one you think you should.

9. Teenage Dream - Katy Perry

Part 1 in a series of 2 of songs I really wish were done by anybody except Katy Perry. Not much really separate the music in the two Katy Perry songs here or the two Kesha songs yet to come all with winning synth lines from producer of the year Dr. Luke. I don't really like Firework, but with these two its different. In fact, Tik Tok and California Gurls are more or less the same song as evidenced by a tons of youtube attempts at mashing them up (and really, the same song as "Who Dat Girl" by Flo Rida featuring Akon - another mashup waiting to happen). The difference as far as I can tell, is that Kesha's is great and Katy Perry's isn't. And great, yeah, is probably a stretch, but compared to Katy Perry, she is. And this is nothing at all to do with my sometimes personal contempt for Perry or my dislike of "I Kissed a Girl," which would not have been a good song no matter who was singing it. I absolutely honestly just do not like either her voice or the way she uses her voice, or maybe the best way to say it is her sound. I just don't - if anyone else did these songs, well, almost anyone I could really like them. But there's just something about them, and that's all the more frustrating. It's much easier to deal with a song that just all together is terrible than one that could be really good, and just isn't.

8. California Gurls - Katy Perry

This is mostly already encompassed in the previous entry, but speaking of predispositions, as a born and bred east coast guy, I feel a natural objection to songs so blatantly representing the west coast (and more than the west coast, really - southern california - this isn't about San Francisco or Portland or Seattle). Los Angeles is kind of New Yorkers' natural enemy - first, they start stealing our native tv shows (Law & Order: Los Angeles) and then they come after our number ones ("Empire State of Mind" - in my head - "California Gurls" has always been kind of a response to that, though I know of absolutely no evidence that that is true). So, yeah, I do kind of have a visceral reaction to the touting of SoCal so highly.

Also, random credit should be given for whoever suggested that the "gurls" be spelled with a "u" in tribute to "September Gurls" by Big Star (this, I have read somewhere to be true).

I've also always though that Katy Perry's short response lines during Snoop Dogg's rap could be right out of a porno ("yeah", "Uh huh" - just typing them really misses the point though, just listen to them during the song." As well, I can reluctantly give credit for love it or hate it, making a full-fledged ridiculous video - ambitious videos should at least get credit for trying (I actually don't even have a strong opinion about the video, other than it being ridiculous.)

7. Just the Way You Are - Bruno Mars

This fits under the category of songs, when I first saw them on the charts, I hoped they were incredibly random cover songs and were disappointed to find out otherwise. For example, when I first saw Katy Perry's "I Kissed a Girl" (merely two and a half years ago, but how long ago it seems in pop years) some hope harbored it was a cover of Jill Sobule's minor hit, or when more recently Mike Posner's second hit "Please Don't Go" moved up, I thought maybe it was a strangely random cover of the KC and the Sunshine Band song. I thought when I saw "Just the Way You Are" on the charts that maybe, just maybe it was a Billy Joel cover. Alas.

Anyway, I at first didn't like the song much at all - thinking it was a pretty boring ballad, but the more I heard it, I was turned on to some innate sweetness and changed my opinion a little bit. I think I've now gone back past the point where I don't need to hear it again for a while, and I don't think it's great but yeah at least I can see some of the appeal here. It's a nice little ballad, that is bound to be a super generic wedding song for some couples and I'm okay with it being a hit but I have a hard time really championing its cause.

Also, I just wanted to make note that going from not having a wikipedia page at all as "Nothin' On You" climbed the charts, to having two number ones in the year, a third in the first week of 2011, and a top five hit with Travie McCoy and "Billionaire" is pretty fucking impressive.

6. OMG - Usher

This song has one of the stupidest lines in a pop song (I know, I know - there are too many to count, but this ranks somewhere) with "Honey got a booty like pow, pow, pow/ Honey got some boobies like wow, oh, wow." A twelve year old could not have said it better.

Will I Am's production, featuring a whole bunch of crowd noise makes this another anthemic-feeling song on our list, and that's probably it's best quality. Honestly, even without the extra piped in crowd noise in the background, it gets you kind of pumped up, and with all due respect to Usher, the production is really the star here.

2011-01-24T10:39:00.000-05:00

I have not had a proper chance to express my outrage at just how terrible the latest serious of Miller Lite commercials, the "Man Up" series, which have aired for a couple of months now are.

Basically each commercial proceeds as so: Man walks up to bar, asks for a lite beer. Attractive female bartender asks him whether he wants more taste, or less. Man responds that he doesn't care. Bartender gives him the beer with less taste, makings an insulting comment about something involving his appearance, and tells him that when he fixes that flaw he should come back and get his Miller Lite. Man walks back, flabbergasted, in denial and his friends make fun of him.

There are so many problems here, naming them all is simply overkill.

First, why would the man respond that he doesn't care? Actually, even before that. Why would the bartender even ask? From the waitress's description, there's nothing distinguishing the beers other than quality in which one is better than another. Why would anyone ever want to take the less flavorful choice? Would a waiter at a restaurant ask whether someone wanted the good item, or the less good item? Would anyone in any circumstance ask this? Is she worried about supertasters with sensitive tongues? Is there really a market for less flavor that I'm not familiar with? (This is a lot of questions in a row, I know).

Her having asked that, for all the same reasons why would the man possibly say he doesn't care, and not say more. In fact, if there was even a possible reason supertaster or otherwise, he'd specifically say less. There would absolutely be no conceivable circumstance in which he said he didn't care unless he literally doesn't have a sense of taste and it's actually all the same, which maybe is possible, I don't know.

Why would anyone go back to this bar? The bartenders insult you. Sure, I get that they're hot, but it can't be all that difficult to find another bar with hot bartenders. Every time you walk up to the bar, they purposely hand you the beer with less taste every single time, and then they make an insulting comment.

Also - even aside from the insult, how bad is the service here? Until they change something about their attire, the bartender won't give them the apparently better tasting miller lite?

Not to mention the things they are making fun of these guys for are the most played out, easiest things to make fun of in the book. A guy wearing a speedo? Hilarious. A guy wearing way-too-tight skinny jeans? That's novel. Creativity is completely absent. To call the assembler of these ads simply lazy is not harsh enough.

I thought about linking all of them, but a couple really give you the general idea. If you really want more you can just type "Miller Lite Man Up" into Youtube.

I don't know if there's any other genre of commercials more than beer commercials that tends to produce such great ads (Miller High Life guy, Most Interesting Man in the World) and such equally terrible commercials (the Miller Lite triple hops brewed commercials, most Bud Light commercials).

2011-01-20T09:37:00.003-05:00

So, I've been sick the last couple of days, and not super serious sick, but for me, more sick than I've been in quite a long time. Anyway, I feel like my immune system has the talent to defend me from illness, but they've gotten lazy and stagnant with few imminent threats, and have forgotten to work as a team.

I wish I could round up my white blood cells or whatever and give them some sort of motivational speech - throw them a Dennis Byrd jersey (by the way if I have to hear one more story about how it was this speech that actually inspired the Jets to victory - yes, at first it was a very cool story, but how about emphasizing the actually, um, plays in the game - I'm sure the players would have put in their best efforts either way) or tell them what the virus said about their ability to fight it - that they had no chance, that the virus would cruise to an easy win. Maybe I just need a better coach. Maybe my voice has lost resonance with the team. I hear Larry Brown's now available; if I don't get better soon, I'll put myself on the hot seat.

2011-01-15T12:52:00.003-05:00

I just saw Sugar, a film about a young dominican playing in the low minor leagues. I highly recommend the film, it's an interesting sports film about something sports films aren't usually about and without the arc sports films usually have, leading to a grand triumph at whatever sport they are featuring - it's instead all about dealing with the isolation of someone away from his own home, and the frustrations of not always being successful.

I write not to talk about that however, but rather a small part of the movie. At one point, main character Miguel "Sugar" Santos strikes up a minor friendship with big time prospect Brad Johnson when they are both in single A ball in Iowa. Santos barely speaks any english. On the bus, they manage through the language barrier to ask each other their favorite players. Santos says his is Robinson Cano, and Johnson says that his is Roberto Clemente. Johnson is stunned when Santos has no idea who Roberto Clemente is. (Johnson then asks Santos is he knows who Babe Ruth is - Santos responds something like, "the chocolate" and I honestly have no idea if he's supposed to be joking or just doesn't know who Babe Ruth is). Johnson then asks Santos if he listens to TV on the Radio. Miguel Santos has barely been in America a month or two, doesn't speak english, doesn't know who Roberto Clemente is and possibly who Babe Ruth is. What on earth could possibly give Johnson the slightest idea that Santos might know who TV on the Radio are? A vast majority of Americans would not know who TV on the Radio is. What were the chances Santos would? Anyway, I'm pretty sure it was just a weird way to make a logical transition into using a TV on the Radio Song (Blues From Down Here) into a montage sequence of Santos' early baseball life in Iowa.

2011-01-14T17:05:00.000-05:00

There were 17 different #1 singles on the Billboard Hot 100 chart last year, a fair number, though the quality was quite variable. Time to rank 'em.

17. "Raise Your Glass" - Pink - There doesn't strike me as there being an incredibly obvious will-be-instantly-forgotten number one single as a lot of years have, but if I had to pick I'd take a stab at this (with relatively little confidence, but got to pick something).

If your going to be a fan of pop music, or really music general one thing you need to do, or should try to do, I think is separate the song from the artist. What I mean is that, try your best to not let the fact that you hate an artist's first ten singles influence your listening to the artist's eleventh single. Will you like it? Probably not - but you should judge it on its own mertis and not bring in your preconceptions. Normally I'm good at this, and over time I've come to enjoy many a song by artists I haven't liked in the past, and certainly wouldn't have in my early college most pretentious phase. But everyone has their exceptions to rules, and mine I admit it, is Pink. There's just something about her and her songs that pisses me off, and I certainly don't dislike them all equally, but I can't shake that predisposition to dislike them.

My relationship with Pink is like that with an annoying friend - the most you hear them, certain things start to get on your nerves that wouldn't if anybody else did them - the way they say certain words, or make some gestures - when you step back they seem like they should be innocuous, but they drive you crazy. It's a Max Martin production and I don't hate the music but some parts of the song just irrationally irritate me, such as the line when she says "What's the dealio?". I can't explain why it pisses me off so much, but it does.

16. Love the Way You Lie - Eminem featuring Rihanna - In a year of repeat artists at the number 1 spot (12 of the year's 17 number ones were recorded by the same five artists), it's about time to hit on a collaboration of two repeaters.

Why so serious, Enimem? Gone any semblance of playful or wit lyrics and in are superserious messages about spousal abuse. Heavy shit.

In addition is the strange coupling in the music video of Maxim Hot 100 head Megan Fox (of toe thumbs and all) with former hobbit/drug-addled one hit wonder bassist Dominic Monaghan, though I suppose Fox's boyfriend in the video is no less likely than her real life squeeze relevant-fifteen-years-ago Brian Austin Green (unfair much probably - he did play Metallo in Smallville and was in the Sarah Connor Chronicles). Maybe Fox in a video would help resurrect Green's rap career.

15. Firework - Katy Perry - Perry's third number of the year capped off a year in which she firmly established herself as one of the biggest women in pop today clearly "making" on the make-or-break second album. The first many times I heard Firework, it suffered from a case of "All I Need is a Miracle" syndrome. The Mike and the Mechanics song is the prevailing example of a song which, upon listening to it, it takes until the chorus to recognize. You maybe kind of think you recognize the song and you spend the whole first minute trying to peg what it is until you get to the chorus at which point you smack yourself in the head for how you could not have realized what such an obvious song was until that point. With Firework, I suppose it might be at the end of the pre-chorus - once it gets to that "Fourth of July" part, the mental light turns on identifying it, making me sigh and say to myself, next time I'll remember it.

Anyway, Katy Perry suffers from a mini-Pink problem - but I realized later that it is actually her sound and not just her (though the more I see her talk, the dumber she sounds - this classic proactiv commercial is prime example - skip to 55 seconds if you don't want to watch the whole thing - the line "I'm talking about zits here people" has entered my vernacular and the scene in which she uses a shoe as a fake phone is not to be missed), so I feel less bad. Anyway, there's two later Katy Perry entries to discuss that.

Also, fireworks are clearly coming from her breasts in the video. I don't really get it. I get that she has big breasts, but the California Gurls video seems like a more typical way to show them off.

Moving on.

14. "Not Afraid" - Eminem - Okay, if I someone cut this list into tiers, the next cut would be either her or after the next one. Basically, half of the people I know think this song is better than "Love the Way You Lie" and half think that is better, and I'm a member of the former. It's still a disappointing effort for Eminem but it has going for it over "Love the Way You Lie" a distinct anthemic quality -the whole everybody chorus and all that and it's a little catchier. I do also appreciate his ability to knock on his last album, rapping, "let's be honest/ That last Relapse CD was 'ehh'." It's more super serious shit. To be clear, I have nothing against serious rapping. If it was from, say, Nas, I wouldn't expect any less. I just have something against Emienm serious rapping, and not for any other reason except that it is far inferior to his earlier songs. I mean, it's cool that he's off drugs and if it actually inspired others I guess it doesn't matter the quality of the song anyway. That's all.

13. Imma Be - Black Eyed Peas - Say what you will about the quality of Black Eyed Peas songs, I think it needs to be admired that their singles really all do sound significantly different, especially in the days of uber-similar Dr Luke synth riffs. I've liked probably the majority of their singles, and I like the other four top ten singles off of The END (Boom Boom Pow, I Gotta Feeling, Meet Me Halfway, Rock That Body), I just don't particularly like this one. The constantly repeated "Imma Be" like gets a little grating. Okay, kind of a lot grating. I just watched the video and considered counting how many instances there were of it, but quickly gave up. Well, you can't win them all.

12. "What's My Name" - Rihanna featuring Drake - The way I feel about Pink and Katy Perry, I think I feel the opposite about Rihanna songs. Before this year, I've generally liked almost all of them, and because of that I probably came into the new ones expecting to like them. However, after this year it didn't end up that way. I didn't particularly care for just about all of her songs this year (well, I liked "Hard" and that peaked in 2010, and she, uncredited, sings the hook in Kanye's great "All of the Lights"). Honestly, I'm hard pressed to say anything too bad about "What's my Name," it's more that I really don't have much good to see either. For all the super steamy lyrics, I find it to be kind of a boring song. The Drake part is okay, and yeah the Rihanna part is, um, okay. It's a song that if done right should be caught in my head, especially with the amount of times I've heard it, and it really hasn't. That's about it.

2010-12-25T18:55:00.000-05:00

19: Survivor

Another absolutely first year sensation, but one that lasted pretty well to this day, albeit in a less popular form, but still - longevity counts for a lot.

Besides being a sensation, Survivor gets bonus for pretty much creating the reality show as we know it today - the forbearer of The Apprentice, The Amazing Race and countless other second tier shows (anyone remember the other Lost?). By now, they've faded back into the second tier behind a couple of other styles of reality shows - talent contests like American Idol or Top Chef, and watching-people-live like Jon and Kate Plus Eight and Keeping up with the Kardashians. Still, Survivor's brand of reality television dominated much of the '00s.

For a show that was this big, there'a s surprising lack of famous contestants - about all there is, and it's minor at best, is first season winner Richard Hatch, known for being a pudgy guy who was later arrested for tax evasion, and shares the same name as an actor who appeared on both editions of Battlestar Galactica. More famous, but one of those things that everyone who knew it at the time remembers, but anyone who doesn't would say "What the fuck are you talking about?" is the "rat and snake" speech which Susan gave to Kelly towards the end of the first season. Just watch it. The most lasting contribution to pop culture is probably the notion of being voted "off the island" which is in reference to the fact that that first season actually took place on an island, and of course, people were voted off one-by-one - even though later seasons took place on non-islands, the catchphrase stuck.

I have a particular personal connection to the beginning of this phenomenon (a word I feel like I'm using a lot on this list, but so it goes) as my dad got thoroughly caught up in the season. Even when we were on vacation in West Virginia (if I remember correctly) we all gathered around the TV in our room when it came time for Survivor - we held out breaths through each immunity challenge, each vote at the end of an episode. I remember Rudy, the elderly former navy seal and Kelly (subject of the rat and snake speech), the whitewater rafting guide who won four straight challenges to make it to the final two and eventual winner Richard Hatch admitting premature defeat on the final immunity challenge - holding your hand on a statute for as long as possible - hoping that the winner would think they would fare better against him in the finale and thus not vote him off.

My dad has continued to follow the show through its constant rule changes in attempts to keep it fresh - different forms of challenges, immunities, ways of splitting tribes, but I haven't seen much since (Though of course I couldn't manage to totally avoid Boston Rob and Amber who appeared on Survivor, got married and then appeared on the Amazing Race (and yes, you can just type "Boston Rob" into wikipedia and it will lead to him)).

As the granddaddy of its form of reality TV, Survivor will not be forgotten like so many other shows of its genre will be (and already have).

2010-12-21T15:50:00.000-05:00

20: South Park

I've seen tons of episodes of South Park and still have seen fewer than almost anyone else I know and I've never truly watched it religiously (and seriously, there are two hundred fucking episodes).

The bit I remembered most about the early seasons of South Park (as someone who didn't actually see the show, due to not having cable before the glorious summer of 1999) is the fact that Kenny died every episode leading to the statement, "Oh my God, they killed Kenny" - a bit that thankfully creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone realized eventually was getting tired, and that now that the show was a bona fide success, was unneeded anymore.

It's absolutely a good show, and a funny show overall, but there are a couple things about it that prevent it from being in my absolute upper echelon of comedies (I often say it's shows like this that come in for the most criticism from me - not the Two and a Half Mens of the world, whose reasons for my dislike are fairly obvious, and which could not be easily fixed - they'd have to be entirely different shows - rather shows that are oh so close to being great but come a little bit short for specific reasons - like Battlestar Galactica).

Here's my issue with South Park - at it's best it's uproarious but I think these happen the most when it's been silly and absurd rather than trying to make some sort of serious point and coming off as self-righteous and pretentious. So many episodes are pretty much written as - saw news story or major trend, must make immediate comment on how stupid it is or outlandish people are being, and for me, those just don't work. It's obviously not as if this type of humor can't work - political or critical humor can be hilarious - I think Daily Show and Colbert Report do a great job of it, I just don't think South Park does. For example, I watched the episode "Whale Whores" which was basically a half hour episode on how stupid the TV show Whale Wars is (I didn't know anything about the show, but I'll chalk it up to my lack of knowledge of non-scripted television, rather than it necessarily not being noteworthy) and I wanted to scream, as I often do at South Park, "I get it! You hate fucking [whatever they're bashing - in this case Whale Wars!]" But smack in the middle of the episode is a montage with a rendition of Poker Face sung by Cartman. And it's absolutely hilarious. You know they just put it in because they thought it would be funny to have Cartman sing Poker Face, and you know what, they were right - it was silly and it was wonderful.

Scott Tenorman must die, generally regarded as one of, if not the best episode of the series has no ax to grind with any political topic - it's basically a giant revenge scheme from Cartman who has been wronged by Scott Tenorman, who sold pubes to Cartman amongst other things, ending with Cartman feeding Tenorman his parents in a chili, and having Radiohead, his favorite band, call him a crybaby. The episode is vulgor and ludicrous but never serious and full of itself.

Everybody who is anybody knows essentially the two best characters are Cartman and Randy Marsh. I really don't have much else to say about that, but it has to be said.

South Park is a pretty essential show to my generation - if you had asked me without thinking I probably would have ascribed it more to the '90s than the '00s, but it's not at all - it started in 1997, and while it was an absolute sensation that first year, which counts for something it's been going strong all decade, one of not many shows to do so.

2010-12-17T00:29:00.000-05:00

21. Curb Your Enthusiasm

HBO shows are popping up all over this list, and HBO's signature comedy (well one of two - this and Sex and the City - but this is more of a comedy with a capital C - it's about the laughs and nothing but) is one of those shows that is all about the laughs (see earlier parenthesis) - like It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, it's not interested in you really investing in the characters, or feeling any pathos in the story or plot. It's essentially Seinfeld in Los Angeles, but without the straight man to point out how absolutely insane either Larry is being, saying what the viewer is thinking (Larry's wife, Sheryl, sort of gets that role to an extent, surely but her role is so thoroughly dominated by Larry, where Jerry's is at the least equal to the rest of the Seinfeld characters). It's slightly inferior to Seinfeld because of this, but it's mostly more of the same, and gets the laughs that a show like that needs to succeed (Entourage, ostensibly a comedy isn't very funny but makes up for it with a serial more or less interesting plot).

An interesting game (if one can call it that) I play when watching episodes is trying to pick in each situation that comes up whether Larry is right and everyone else is insane (example: the rule of the dry cleaners - in one episode, Larry loses his jersey in the dry cleaner's - another customer gets it by accident - and everyone (including guest star Senator Barbara Boxer) claims it's part of the great rule of the dry cleaner's - sometimes you win, sometimes you lose) or Larry is wrong (example: Larry gets into a fight with a bunch of children when he pays them for some lemonade and then tries to demand his money back when the lemonade stinks). It's honestly about half and half.

Praise should certainly be generously given to the supporting characters - Jeff Garland as Larry's agent is great, as well as numerous recurring guests such as Richard Lewis and Ted Dansen (part of the great Ted Dansen revival along with Damages and Bored to Death, a topic for another day), but the show is really about Larry himself (some people absolutely love Susie Essman as Jeff's wife who curses constantly and kicks Larry out of her house almost every other episode for some reason, but she, for the most part, doesn't do it for me - it's just too much, even by Curb standards). Larry has his share of catchphrases - "prett-ay good" (you really have to hear it to understand how he says it, "Let me ask you something" generally preceding a particularly inane question, and his long-form stare (go to 42 seconds for the stare, and keep watching to hear the "prett-ay good.").

The guest stars are too numerous to name and each season has a loose plotline, the best of which may be the seventh season in which Larry arranges a Seinfeld reunion, all as a ploy to get his ex-wife back, which allows the possibility of having a Seinfeld reunion, without ever having to have one officially (George struck it rich with the iToilet - a mobile phone application letting you know where the nearest free toilet was, but lost all his money to Bernie Madoff).

I would be remiss to mention the strangest random fact about Curb Your Enthusiasm which is incidental to the show itself, but fascinating - a man was cleared of a murder charge because he was caught in the outtakes for a Curb Your Enthusiasm episode (the one where Larry picks up a prostitute to take the HOV lane to the game) at Dodger Stadium. So Curb has contributed to society.

It took me way to long to watch this show for someone who loves Seinfeld, and yes, it's not going to blow your mind - it's exactly what you expect, but it's funny, and you can't ask that much more from something.

2010-12-16T11:56:00.000-05:00

22: The OC

Here's one of the great Moment shows. We've had a few so far - Heroes comes to mind - and I know there's at least another if not more coming - but this is one of those shows that had the equivalent of music's first album syndrome (I'm looking at you, Strokes) - it came out and set the world on fire - it was the absolute hottest show for a short period of time but just found it impossible to maintain its level of success and petered out way faster than you would guess by the way the show came out of the gate (this is in parallel to say the Everybody Loves Raymond, White Stripes strategy - no one watches you first season, listens to your first album, but the right people have faith, and you have room to build).

The O.C. came out in 2003 as one of those soaps that are smart and cool, trend-setters like (unsurprisingly, Josh Schwartz, the creator later went on to create Gossip Girl - which fits pretty much the exact same description). The show performed the rare feat of gaining viewers week to week at the beginning of its run - a sure sign of a hit - and was the highest rated network drama its first year among viewers 18-24, and although that sounds needlessly specific and thus less impressive, it's kind of a big deal. It did a couple of things that are peripheral signs of a hit in the making - it made at least relative stars of some of its cast members - Misha Barton probably most of all, but also somewhat of Adam Brody and Rachel Bilson. Seth Cohen, Adam Brody's character - the lovable nerd and bringer of all things pop culture to the show's universe - (Death Cab for Cutie, his favorite band is featured prominently) came up with with the buzzwordy holiday of Chrismukkah (yes it has its own wikipedia page, albeit it's only the second most popular fake Christmas holiday after Seinfeld's Festivus). It featured music prominently and sent sales by artists appearing on the show skyrocketing - Rooney's sales doubled immediately after their appearance, and most impressively, Imogen Heap's Hide and Seek became an instant classic after appearing in the Season 2 finale.

The show absolutely fell apart by the fourth season, and some people I know who watch it religiously have said, more or less by the third, and maybe was on an inevitable path down from the beginning of the second. Generally, the third season is regarded as the worst, and the fourth a bit of a step up, but it was too little too late by that part - bad ratings coupled perhaps with the shocking death of Marisa Cooper (Barton) had the show all but over somewhere through the middle of the fourth season (One of the only episodes I've seen is that death episode - I was so confused if she was really dead as it seemed like a big fucking deal to kill off a main character). It would be also unfair to leave out that the show falls into the classic graduating from high school trap - very few shows can make the leap from high school to college or whatever else successfully.

It's the sad reality in a way - it's just hard to keep up with that first burst, and what a burst it was - in college, the OC was everywhere.

2010-12-13T14:26:00.000-05:00

23: Two and a Half Men

Oh, Two and a Half Men. TV's biggest comedy has been running now for an unbelievable 8 years and shows no signs of slowing down (Yes - shouldn't it now be called 3 men? Phew, needed to get that joke out of the way). Charlie Sheen might be regarded as something of a genius and an argument for TV over movies - who needs film when he makes 1.78 million an episode - about 40 million a year, and pretty much a guarantee of not flopping.

My friends and I have a minor inside joke that went on for a while where we were going to start a blog called the 2.5ers and dissect every Two and a Half Men episode joke by joke explaining how each one is funny and consequently why the show is so great. It could have been a thing.

You probably know the premise, they're not all that much to it. Recently divorced fairly pathetic man (Emmy award winner Jon Cryer) moves in, along with his son, to his ladies' man brother's (Sheen, of course) swank Malibu house. Honestly, there's a whole lot more characters than I realized - I've seen a couple of episodes, but there's eight seasons worth - and I'm sure loads of backstory and loves gained and lost, but really what it is, love it or hate it, is the standard bearer for Classic American Sitcom on TV right now (Big Bang Theory might be making a push sadly but it's still a ways away).

What I didn't know is that apparently there was a CSI/Two and a Half Men crossover which sounds absolutely insane - in the Two and a Half Men part of the crossover apparently a man is found dead, assumed to be murdered, but actually was a con artists and died of a heart attack (sure that's a super incomplete description of the episode - but be honest - do you really care? And if you do, and you haven't seen it, I'm sorry I ruined it for you.)

I feel like I may be out of touch with a certain demographic - Two and a Half Men has long been my go to for a stupid, but super popular show (amazingly - the "Critical Reception" section on wikipedia is two lines - the daily news calls it "solid, well-acted and occasionally funny" and some Australian calls it a "sometimes creepy, misogynistic comedy" - pretty much all one needs to say about the show I guess - metacritic does't have any reviews in its database either). Now, I had long assumed the show's audience to be limited to people twenty years older than me and in the fly-over states, but I ended up engaged in a conversation with two people around my own age, one of whom began a sentence, "you know what show actually has really good writing?" and answered her own question with Two and a Half Men, with which the other person wholeheartedly agreed. I couldn't keep silent, but I was outnumbered.

What else is there to say though - you know what it is, there's nothing particularly interesting about it - you either enjoy watching it, or you don't, and against my preference, more of America is in the former than the latter. Oh well, there are worse things.

2010-12-09T02:34:00.003-05:00

This minor story happened a couple of weeks ago, but as a Bills fan in particular and someone who once had a AIM profile (yeah, remember those?) feature about athletes thanking god for their feats, I wanted to take a moment to comment on it.

After dropping a perfect touchdown pass by Ryan Fitzpatrick, which would have beaten the Steelers in overtime, Bills receiver Steve Johnson did the impossible - he - more or less - blamed God for his drop in his twitter feed:

I PRAISE YOU 24/7!!!!!! AND THIS HOW YOU DO ME!!!!! YOU EXPECT ME TO LEARN FROM THIS??? HOW???!!! ILL NEVER FORGET THIS!! EVER!!! THX THO...

This is amazing. Steve Johnson, though he may not appreciate this, should be commended. It's about time if God's getting credit for athlete's success, he also accepts blame. Previously, I've said that it's silly at best, insulting at worst to credit God with success on the playing field/court/ice/whatever - and I don't even mean thanking him for just being here or getting you through, or whatever, but really particularly victories or particular plays - as if God has a rooting interest, or that sports is what he has time to focus on, or some such, but I have a new rule. You can thank God all you want for whatever you want as long as you're willing to blame him when things go wrong. Take it or leave it.

2010-12-09T02:29:00.002-05:00

Time to return the Luke Scott jersey I bought.

I've not spoken of politics in my few posts on this blog, but if you don't think Obama was born in this country, you're a complete and total moron. There, stand taken.

PS. I lied about having ever bought the Luke Scott jersey.

2010-11-23T23:01:00.000-05:00

Some particularly egregious nerd face can be found in the fourth season of Six Feet Under, episode nine "Grinding the Corn."

My friend created the idea of nerd face when referring to Big Bang Theory - the current time's foremost purveyor of the phenomenon - basically treating television (or film, I suppose) nerds with the most stereotypical brush possible - they don't know how to dress themselves, they have glasses, they're socially awkward and can't function in society, they collect action figures, they love Star Wars and Lord of the Rings.

In this episode, the death of the week is a comic book store employee, who dies while trying to reach on top of a series of shelves for a rare comic, only to have the shelves fall on him, crushing him to death. His friends who set up his funeral are shown as total outcasts - weirdly explaining the origin story of superhero Blue Tornado when it comes out to Nate and David, and later ineptly breaking in to steal the issue the deceased wants buried with him, folding immediately when the more masculine Nate and Rico threaten them. At the funeral itself, it's a room full of carbon copies of the two characters, glasses, t-shirt with strange reference on them, who are subject to mockery by David for their alleged inability to fit into society.

Anyway - you get the idea - sure, all of these things exist, but isn't it time we got some actually well developed nerd characters who might like Lord of the Rings and or superheros but aren't total freaks

It's just one episode, but someone needs to call it out when it appears, on behalf of the Anti-Nerd Defamation League, or somesuch.

2010-11-21T17:48:00.000-05:00

24: Deal or No Deal

Of all the absolute crazes over a show, the craze that emerged at the beginning of the run of Deal or No Deal is possibly (probably?) the stupidest. Not so much because it's the worst show, so to speak, but because, and I honestly mean this in the least pejorative way possible, it's really stupid. Just about never before has so little happened over the course of an hour of TV programming (maybe some of those super stretched out American Idol elimination hours, but you get the point). The premise was relatively simple - there are women holding 26 suitcases, each worth an amount of money, between one cent and one million dollars. The contestant slowly eliminates cases, with the idea that if he or she went all the way, there would be one box remaining, and the contestant would walk away with that amount of money. However, to hedge his or her bets, a mysterious banker offers the contestant a deal after every few cases are eliminated, depending on the values of the cases which were eliminated - for example, if the eliminated cases had relatively low values - it's most likely the offer will be higher than if the eliminated cases had relatively high values. There's absolutely no skill whatsoever - the choice of cases is random - the only thought process is calculation the expected value of the remaining cases and comparing it to the banker's offer along with one's personal risk aversion.

Deal or No Deal truly did create one of the great villains in game show history - the banker (doesn't it just sound evil? If only it had been popular a little longer it might have picked up on the investment banker and banks in general hatred wave of the bailouts) (at least second in outright villainy to the insane Inquizitor). The banker was shrouded in mystery - a silhouette who we only knew through the offers he placed via Howie Mandel. Was he a capitalist big wig trying to make a buck off the working man with sinisterly lowall offers, or merely trying to help take away some risk so a contestant could at least bring back something to show for their efforts? Who can say - you decide.

The eponymous catch phase is mentioned by Mandel each time the contestant must choose - whether to accept the banker's offer (Deal) or not (No Deal.) This decision is replete with a button - pressed when the contestant wants to make the deal. The unsung heros - the models - Wikipedia has an insanely (yes, I think it's insane) comprehensive list of the models used along with which case they held (imagine what an opening that would be at parties: "I held 17 originally, but was moved later to 21.") There was even a model search in which viewers could vote for models who tried out in various episodes. Of course, as well, this was a total resurrection of Howie Mandel's career (making him the second big-time OCD game show host) even leading to his starring in an insane Candid Camera-style show called Howie Do It (let's all groan at once.)

I want to say it's oddly compelling, but it's really not. It almost is - I mean it has the ingredients to be the show that you shouldn't want to watch but you actually can't turn away from, but it just never quite did it.

Somehow, this was big (and internationally - it started out in the Netherlands and spread to over 20 countries - among them Tunisia, Malta and Bulgaria) - and when I explain this to people in forty years, they're going to laugh and say why was this so popular, this is ridiculous, but it was true, and we were there.

2010-11-17T11:57:00.004-05:00

25: Chappelle's Show

Hard as I might try, it's impossible to exaggerate the absolute sensation Chappelle's Show was during the relatively short airing of its two seasons in 2003 and 2004 and just after when the DVDs came out. In 2005, soon after it came out the first season DVD sales were the best of ALL TIME for a TV series. Now, I understand DVD was still a relatively recent medium and there were only so many shows on DVD, but still compared to all the other shows which had drawn far bigger ratings, it's an extraordinary accomplishment.

There were some all time great sketches - the racial draft - where each race was allowed to draft to take people who were of mixed race and assign them to one race for once and all -

There were phrases that became part of the language on places like college campuses (at least mine) - the Charlie Murphy True Hollywood Stories Prince and Rick James sketches in particular - "I'm Rick James, Bitch", "Cocaine is a Hall of a Drug," "Game, Blouses" among them.

His Lil Jon sketch in particular was huge, and perhaps a product that could only come out of exactly that time - Lil Jon's brief reign in american pop music came at the same time Chappelle's Show lasted - my friend wondered if college students today would even know enough about Lil Jon to have the sketch make any sense.

The Samuel Jackson beer ads (based on a Sam Adams that was iconic enough that anyone at the time would recognize it but not iconic enough that too many people would probably remember it now), in which Chappelle appears as Jackson, looking like his Pulp Fiction character, aggressively and with foul languages attempts to persuade the viewers to try his beer ("It'll get you drunk!).

Oh, and I couldn't finish the entry without mentioning the Wayne Brady sketch - after being insulted by a bit in which character Negordamus claimed that white people liked Wayne Brady because he made Bryant Gumbel look like Malcolm X - Brady was asked to come on and do a sketch - basically the idea was a parody of his squeaky clean images, in which Brady does drugs, terrorizes Chappelle and recites memorable quotable lines such as "I'm Wayne Brady, bitch," and the immortal, "Is Wayne Brady gonna have to choke a bitch?"

As I'm writing, I just think about more notable sketches, but these were more or less the absolute biggest, and I'm honestly just reminiscing and recapping to anyone who has seen the show. But really it was because as I remember them now to myself, they were both good, and they were big, and if you haven't seen them, you should see them, if not for their quality than for the massive pop culture phenomenon they represented. Like every sketch show, it had its share of flops, but for just two seasons there was a remarkable number of successes, especially consider the number of total sketches was cut by the appearance of musical acts and the seemingly interminable amount of commercials.

With a success like this, the show should have gone on forever, or at least until popularity gradually faded away. It was not to be though, as Chappelle, and I don't know a better way to explain this, and I apologize if it's technically incorrect - freaked out over some combination of the stress of making the show and its impact on his stand up career and his life and who knows what else and that was it, the show was over - but maybe it's better off anyway, that what existed of the show remains, as a moment in time.

2010-11-17T11:27:00.003-05:00

26: King of Queens

If aliens come down and want to know what television comedy was like in the 00s, King of Queens might be the sitcom to show them. No one, I don't think, claims it's the funniest show or the best show, but it might be the most representative (and part of the proof of de-evolution CBS Monday night sitcom progression from Everybody Loves Raymond to King of Queens to Two and a Half Men).

It's a show that as a sophisticated east coast (well I know the show is based on the east coast also, but that's not the point) TV viewer and fan of Mad Men and Bored to Death I wanted to hate, but I just can't (Two and a Half Men, though, another story.) I don't watch it very often, nor do I flip to it generally when it's on, but I've seen episodes and it's hard not appreciate it's relative mastery of the traditional sitcom genre. Now, when I say relative mastery, I don't mean like Seinfeld (not a traditional sitcom in a lot of ways, but still multi-camera and laugh track and all that) or even Cheers - I mean more in a way that it is has the pure essences of sitcom - man (Doug) , husband, is selfish, immature, and not the smartest, wants to play cards and watch sports with his friends but has a good heart and really loves his wife deep down - woman (Carrie) is smarter, sarcastic, and really keeps their lives together while working at a legal secretary (at least the woman have jobs now.

The offbeat, strange character humor, which would often come from kids in a show like this instead comes from Carrie's father, Arthur who is craaaaaaazy, doing also sorts of eccentric things and not getting along with Doug in the process, although of course, somehow over time they grow warmer and learn to respect and live with one another.

Not to mention the achievement as being the definitive go-to example of fat-husband with hot wife - perpetuating the classic double standard that fat guys (well, TV fat - Kevin James is is large by any standard, but could get a lot real life fatter) can get attractive thin wives, but pretty much it never works the other (I suppose I have to give the new CBS Monday show Mike and Molly (and yes, this is just about the only credit I'm giving it) credit for having both protagonists being actually, and not TV, large and equally so).

Probably the strangest, biggest attempt at quirkiness (aside from Patton Oswalt, of course) is the recurring bit of having Lou Ferrigno as their neighbor (part of the Hulk's 00s revival, along with his appearance in I Love You, Man). Patton Osawlt as friend of Doug's Spence is the highlight of the show the few times I see it, playing a character pretty much based on himself, the stereotypical nerd character, but hey, Patton Oswalt's funny (also random aside - does anyone else hate it when a character has a link on wikipedia (Spence, Oswalt's character in this case) which just links back to the show page (King of Queens, here) - why would there be a link then? WHY!?).

Random fact I learned in that King of Queens has one of the great classic sitcom tropes - character written out of show with absolutely no explanation - Carrie had a sister who also lived with her and Doug, Sarah who magically disappears after the first season.

Anyway, yeah, King of Queens - the type of the thing CBS does (I was going to write best, but I think that might be giving too much credit to CBS.)

2010-11-10T17:28:00.004-05:00

27: John and Kate Plus Eight

The world of family-with-lots-of-children-television doesn't end with Jon and Kate - 19 Kids and Counting and Table for 12 were inspired by Jon and Kate (as we speak there's a new one - Sextuplets Take New York, and Quints by Surprise debuted earlier this year - I swear I wish I was making these up) (and all on TLC, it's true - it's essentially become your one-stop shopping home for family-with-lots-of-children reality shows). However, none of them have exploded onto the national consciousness like Jon and Kate Plus Eight.

I got most of my first hand experience with Jon and Kate through my friend Leslie who was obsessed with it, and in particular with the way Kate constantly nagged Jon, and what Jon had to put up with (though she was quick to label Jon as something of a scumbag for his behavior after their separation), in particular one notable clip in which Kate yelled "Jon" with a particularly indolent naggy tone, which soon entered our vernacular.

The merging of crew with family was apparently so thorough that permanent light fixtures were installed in their house to make filming easier and the crew was treated as family - further blurring the continuing line between how "real" reality tv ever is.

Jon and Kate made for fantastic tabloid fodder - the almost inevitable breakup-over-tv (their separation was announced on a June 2009 episode) celebrity tragedy and maybe a general lesson on why-not-to-get-married-and-have-lots-of-kids-when-you're-fairly-young. People were into it - this was an US magazine story, on TV, and you knew it was going to air on an episode of the show after it happened. The episode in which they announced their separation was the most-watched on the season. When it came down to it, that's what people really wanted - not that they wanted to see the divorce necessarily, but at least to some extent what fed the show was the train wreck/car crash at NASCAR element - with all these pressure, and these people, something has got to go wrong. Certainly, it was in part a chicken and egg situation - only because people were interested at all from day one was there enough fodder to feed the machine - but once it started going, that was it. Jon and Kate post separation are probably as popular (well not personally, but in a selling magazine sense) than they ever were before.

Jon and Kate Plus Eight (now simply Kate Plus 8, sadly - Jon's name wiped from existence in the title) was a definitive pop culture phenomenon and defined a segment of reality television.

2010-11-10T14:31:00.002-05:00

28: Jackass

Jackass

I had maybe for a second questioned the staying power of Jackass before the last couple of months, but if I had, I had made a huge mistake - it had been four years since the last Jackass movie, but Jackass 3-D went off without a hitch - grossing 130 million so far with a boffo opening weekend win.

The show itself, it's hard to believe (it was hard for me to believe when I saw it) only lasted two seasons - from 2000-2002. The series' stars - most notably Johnny Knoxville, but also Steve-O and Bam Margera became household names (at least in households having people under the age of 30) and even got their own spinoffs - Viva La Bam about Margera and co. (which I knew about) and four (four! - Dr. Steve-O - who turns "wussies into men" for all of 7 episodes,Blastazoid, which beat that with only 2 episodes aired, Homewrecker, with 8 episodes, kind of a Jackass-meets-Extreme Home Makeover take off, and the actually successful Wildboyz, which was kind of more Jackass, post-Jackass, except with wild animals, with Steve-O and Chris Pontius). There were only 25 half hour episodes of Jackass! To have the kind of impact it had with so few episodes is incredible (though to be fair it's with the help of now three movies, each of which has grossed more than its predecessor).

Jackass has a what in some ways has always struck me as strange so-stupid-it's-brilliant-art type stigma (or I guess stigma has a negative implication (though some might thing arty is negative too) we'll presume some sort of positive stigma can exist for these purposes) - Jackass 3D debuted oddly enough at the Museum of Modern Art and counts Spike Jonze among its producers.

The premise is simple - the show is a bunch of people performing stunts on themselves, leading to injuries, and hopefully, hilarity. Some stunts from just the third film include - playing tetherball with a beehive, launching Steve-O in the air while he is inside a portable toilet, pulling a tooth out with a Lamborghini, and using super clue to take off chest hair.

These things were of course not acceptable to stodgy politicians - who deemed them poor moral examples for today's youth - unsurprisingly, video game lovers most hated politician Joe Lieberman was at the forefront. It was rather insubstantial in the long run though.

I admit, I don't really get it. I feel like an old person saying this, but yeah, it just seems pretty dumb. I'm not going to go so far as to claim it could never be entertaining in short spurts, or that some of the pranks couldn't be amusing, but more or less I did miss the boat here. It's bound to happen though, that you don't get on board with cult pop culture items (obviously Jackass is more than a cult, but the point remains) - god knows I never could figure out what's so great about Rocky Horror Picture Show.

Alas, it's a thing, and a big one, and I at least appreciate their pushing the boundaries of what can be shown on TV, anyone who does that gets some extra credit in my book.

2010-11-08T12:13:00.000-05:00

29: Six Feet Under

This show has been on my mind particularly of late, as I've been watching through it currently - I'm midway through the third season. So I'm not going to look up anything in the last two seasons, because there's no point in ruining them for myself, but there's plenty to say about the first two and a half.

I knew the concept of Six Feet Under - it's about an family (the Fishers) who run a funeral home and their various lives, and the gimmick that at the beginning of each episode, we see a person die, and that person later has a service at the funeral home (Fisher and Sons.). In the first episode, I also knew, in the first five minutes more or less, the patriarch of the family dies in a car, crash thus setting up the return of the eldest son Nate from Seattle to run the funeral home with his brother David. As silly as it sounds, I was worried that the show would be simply so depressing I wouldn't want to keep wanting to watch many episodes in a short period of time.

That's not really the vibe though you get from the show. By no means is it an upbeat show - I would say on the whole there's a lot of depressing little moments - but the feel too the show is not wholly dark - the characters have happy times, and even some of the terrible bad times are not portrayed as utterly grey as they could be. And, honestly often the characters get on your nerves - they're crazy, irritating, immature, self-pitying - but maybe that's going too far, because they're really not all that bad. They have their good moments too, particularly in regard to each other. The relationships between members of the family Fisher

Though, sometimes it becomes a race between which character is driving you most crazy at the time - right now it's Ruth, the matriarch.

You get desensitized in a weird way from watching all the deaths at the beginning of the episodes. Instead of a downer, sometimes it becomes a game of figuring out how the person's going to do, or who's going to die (one episode betweens with a pair of construction workers sitting on a beam high up, eating their lunch - I figured one would fall or be pushed off, but instead his lunch box fell and killed a passer-by). It is interesting to me (though probably easy to guess when thought about for longer) to figure out which of the rare deaths actually affect me - not usually the gimmicky deaths or the accidents as much as the deaths from disease - one in particular where a husband died from cancer and was having morphine hallucinations.

Anyway, it sits pretty much where I thought - it's good, quite enjoyable, but not quite as good as some of my absolute favorite HBO shows.

2010-11-03T14:23:00.003-04:00

I hate myself for this, and but humor is the best thing in the face of depression right...

It looks like after Tuesday's elections, he's no longer still the one...groan.

2010-11-03T14:22:00.002-04:00

2010 was a banner year for New York Times television reporter Bill Carter - master of the most niche of specialties - late night battles. Sure, while most people were focusing on the sometimes outlandish, sometimes riveting, and sometimes both battle between Conan O'Brien and Jay Leno for the storied Tonight Show, which had its share of winners and losers, one man was winning no matter what happened, and winning more the longer it took and the more heated it got - Bill Carter - the definitive expert in late night television battles. He benefited on two friends - one, the battle between over the Tonight Show brought to mind the battle in the early '90s, particularly as Jay Leno was a key combatant in both, and Carter was asked tons of questions about that battle, and how it compared to the current one, and secondly, he was given plenty of material for a second late night book, bound to generate buzz, based on the fact that he is the reigning expert on all issues late night television. The War for Late Night, his new book comes out this week, and if it's lucky, will even inspire a made-for-tv movie of its own.

So, kudos to you Bill Carter - you deserve to have your expertise tested and rewarded every 18 years or so. Just one question - where's my Craig Ferguson book?

2010-10-27T12:20:00.003-04:00

Okay, I admit this is really dumb, but this is actually what I thought Droid Does meant when I first read it (yes, I know how stupid that sounds, and how it doesn't make any sense, but that's somehow what I thought - it just read that way). Whatever you want to say, I find it hilarious and will continue to do so.

2010-10-21T12:34:00.001-04:00

At the Tomb of the Inflatable Pig by John Gimlette

How much do you know about Paraguay? How much do most people in the US know about Paraguay? How much do I know? Let's see. I watched them in the World Cup, and I know that Roque Santa Cruz hails from there, and that's about it. I couldn't have even told you it was landlocked. Embarrassing, maybe, but best to be honest with myself.

In the Head of the Inflatable Pig is a combination travelogue and basic history guide to Paraguay - the author intersperses his experiences visiting historical places in Paraguay, his experiences with the people he comes across while visiting those places, and bits of history - both important political moments and interesting tidbits of history he comes across that may not be important in the largest sense but provide insight into the Paraguayan way of life, which is really what runs through all the sections of the book.

I get a taste of the history of Paraguay which is absolutely fascinating (which is helped by Gimlette's writing style and the general organization of the book) - a series of dictators each with their own eccentricities - one who drove the country into an unbelievably debilitating war in the late 19th century (the War of the Triple Alliance (which I knew the name of, but just about nothing else) killing over 80% of the population and leaving a 10-1 female to male ratio which is hard to digest even as I type it now), a period of instability, and a 35-year long brutal dictatorship which lasted up until almost the end of the 20th century. In addition, I get a flavor of the culture and the Paraguayans attitude towards their series of dictators. It left me, while reading it, thinking about how inconceivable it is, as an American, even with all my frustrations with our political process, to imagine what it would be like to be living under constant dictatorship and the weight of such a brutal history and to appreciate how the Paraguayans carry on.

More than just straight history, though (not that straight history is not enough for an excellent book) Gimlette lends some insight into Paraguayan culture. I don't mean culture so much in the particular art, or music, or literature, but more in the sense of the general attitudes and

Recently, I read another book about South America, The Lost City of Z, and it made me read more about South American, and in that case the Amazon. This book is very different but makes me feel the same way, not just about South America but about any country. Every country has its own story - its own unique history - before reading this book, Paraguay was just a country next to and with a similar name than Uruguay, who probably had some dictatorial issues, sure, but that's about it.

And yes, sure, that sounds obvious, as if it's coming from an ignorant person who should have known more about the country in the first place, and yes, that's at least partly true. But even so it speaks to a broader point (yes I'm not I'm going a bit far here) about the simplicity with which people view the world all too often (and why history is so valuable even today) - people are quick to group people and make snap judgments, to look no deeper than the surface, because they don't have enough information and because they don't care enough but there's almost always a nuanced reason for everything that you'll miss if you don't look a little harder. To give the most broad example, many people within Paraguay kept voting for people who were related to their old brutal dictatorship, which seems crazy, until you realize that in a country with so much instability economically and politically, that time represented the only stability they ever knew.

Anyway, even if you don't get that much, it's a good book for the anecdotes alone, so read it.

2010-10-20T13:25:00.002-04:00

I just discovered something for which I desperately am seeking physical proof.

It turns out that one of a very young Brad Garrett's first, uh, roles, was as a the model for the back cover of Electric Light Orchestra's album Discovery, in which he is, according to wikipedia, "dressed in middle eastern clothes, turban and holding a big sword." I have been conducting some google searching and have yet to locate this back cover. As it is, I'm going to have to search for this every time I go to a record store (the few that are left these days) and at the very least hope to find it and get a photograph it. I have a hard time believing it's not on the internet somewhere, but so far at least it's eluded me.

2010-10-15T10:05:00.000-04:00

As a longtime participant in College Bowl during college, I learned to think of trivia in threes, as many questions were three part questions ("bonuses")about something similar (ie. three different bands recorded songs called "Learning to Fly"), so whenever I see two of something unusual, I automatically think, with one more it could be a bonus.

Last night, I watched the Sam Peckinpah film Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia and it contained the second driver-of-car-talking-to-disembodied-head-sitting-on-passenger-seat scene I've ever seen (the first is the Quentin Tarantino guest directed sequence in Sin City in which Clive Owen has Benecio Del Toro's head on his passenger seat). One more and there'd be a bonus...

2010-10-13T10:43:00.001-04:00

31: Aqua Teen Hunger Force

Aqua Teen Hunger Force will always hold a special place in my heart even though I honestly haven't watched much of it in the last. Still, even through to this day, a picture of Master Shake is my facebook icon.

Cartoon Network's Adult Swim programming block in general was a phenomenon in the first decade of the 21st century amongst a certain segment of the population - boys in particular aged from about high school to about 30. There were a whole host of shows that played a part in this - Harvey Birdman, Sealab 2021 along with repeated programming of shows on other network - such as Futurama andFamily Guy, but indisputably the biggest of the original programming was Aqua Teen Hunger Force. ATHF (for short) was based around the absurd premise of a trio of human-sized fast food items - a shake (Master Shake), fries (Frylock), and a, uh, meatball (Meatwad) who could talk and had powers (shooting lasers for Frylock, changing shapes for Meatwad and, well, nothing really for Master Shake) solving mysteries in suburban New Jersey, all while bothering their Jersey slob neighbor Carl. Of course the premise was even this coherent just to get them on the air - their creators and no actual intent for them to be solving mysteries all the time (they do in about the first three episodes) - that was merely the only way to convince Cartoon Network to put the show on (The show is kind of a spinoff of Space Ghost Coast to Coast, where a twisted version of the characters appeared (though Meatwad looks pretty much the same)).

ATHF became a minor sensation. During the first couple years of college, watching Adult Swim was a weekly ritual. Every week I'd get together with my friends and put it on, every Sunday night when the new comedies aired. I was so obsessed with these episodes that I can even now recite some of the episodes nearly line for line, particularly what may have been our favorite episode, Revenge of the Mooninites, which featured a belt which gave Foreigner powers - my friends and I loved the episode so much we actually started listening to Foreigner more because of it.

ATHF became the type of quick barometer of what people I could get along with that certain pop culture phenomena become to individuals (not that I'm endorsing super quick judgment, but hey, everybody does it, and sometimes it's right) - I remember talking to a coworker in the first or second summer after it's existence and finding out first she didn't know what it was, and then that she more than just didn't like it, she didn't get it - I tried to be polite but inside, I scoffed. The show was never bound to appeal to more than a niche population - it was far too ridiculous - but it had a cult among those who did.

ATHF got a national airing to many who had absolutely no idea what it was for a brief moment when, in 2007, a viral marketing campaign went wrong (or right, considering the amount of publicity in generated) when commuters reported LED set ups of the Mooninites by a T station in Boston unlit and replete with a power source and some exposed wiring, which was essentially a giant sized Lite Brite. Before you could say Ignignokt and Err, there was a huge freak out and the site was surrounded by fire, police and ambulances, none of whom clearly was a stoner or under 30 because one look at it for anyone who had seen the show would clearly recognize the character, who appeared in many episodes. A second sign was spotted, and the full blown panic was repeated. It's hard to tell whether this speaks more to the incompetence of the Boston police department or the generation gap. The two people responsible for the marketing campaign was even arrested, citing an incredibly far-fetched idea that they were trying to start a panic.

The episodes got even more ridiculous as time went on, and I haven't seen a lot of the later ones - it's the last of the old Williams Street Adult Swim series still airing - and I don't watch Adult Swim with the insistent regularity that I used to (that's not to say I don't tune in occasionally, especially for Venture Bros.). But that should take nothing away from those classic early episodes.

2010-10-12T13:38:00.004-04:00

31: Breaking Bad

Breaking Bad is probably my favorite drama on TV right now (though Mad Men is closing in with it's currently very strong season). The show improves over each of the first three seasons, with the third getting into the darkest, but the most interesting territory, not to mention the most exciting as well. The show also manages to trade off suspense and introspectivity (yeah it's probably not a word - I'm still using it) very well - late in the third season, there is a bottle episode which could easily have fallen flat but was very entertaining and seemed to fit within the context of the season.

The ending of the third season did something that's relatively rare for me in shows - got me excited enough about the possibilities that it makes me want to go online and read everything about what people thought about the episode, and the season - blog entries, comments, interviews with the creator (Oh, to think when I liked Lost, at the beginning this happened a bit). Even better, reading this stuff actually made me like the show more, rather than less. When I would go on to read about Lost opinions and theories, a little thought would make a lot of the initial excitement about the show lessen - it make a lot less sense after thinking about it. With Breaking Bad, reading about it pointed me in new directions and illuminated things I hadn't noticed - not just plot related, but ideas about the characters and the way the show is shot. I read one particular interview with the show's creator Vince Gilligan, and what he said about the way the show is written rang true - he said that they didn't, for the most part, plan out entire season arcs from the beginning - rather that they often wrote themselves into corners and then tried to write their way out of them. While that sounds like a recipe for disaster, it actually succeeds time and again over the course of the show - so many times I wondered how exactly they'd get out of a tricky situation without making it so the show couldn't continue anymore and they've cleverly, and plausibly within the boundaries of the show managed to work their way out.

Bryan Cranston's Walter White is a moving and nuanced protagonist up there with the best in TV - the Tony Sorpanos, the Don Drapers, though opposite of Draper, whose work life is honest (more or less), but family life is not, White does not mess around on his family, but his dishonest career comes up and screws with his family life anyway, no matter how much he tries to prevent it. Cranston and Aaron Paul as Jesse, the second principal character (Cranston's Christopher Moltisanti? Maybe a stretch...) both give excellent performances and create a really interesting relationship between the two characters - often it's portrayed that although Jesse is the career criminal, he's the one with the true heart of gold, while the socially awkward middle aged father career science teacher is the cold and inhuman one. Maybe that sounds cliche, and to put it in one sentence it is, but as it's shown over the course of three seasons, it a lot more subtle and complicated.

The one flaw the show has is the occasional unnecessary gimmick - the show is so strong already that sometimes it resorts to cheap tricks that it doesn't need to succeed. A couple of the gimmicky conceits really work well - I particularly loved Tuco's uncle who appeared in season 2 when Walt and Jesse were kidnapped, and could see them plotting, but could only hit his bell, rather than speak. Ones that don't work though include particularly the gimmick in which the end of the episode, or season (in the case of the second season) is shown at the beginning and we're left to wonder how it gets there. This doesn't add a whole lot to the show, and particularly in the case of the second season the whole airplane-crashed-by-Jane's-grieving-dad plot didn't do it for me (thought it wasn't so overwhelming as to ruin the show or anything) - it seemed out of place - but I'll chalk it up to not quite being able to paint out of one of those corners as well as they do it every other time (though the crash itself was fine - leading to the great scene of Walter explaining why there's no need to fret to his school's student body).

2010-10-11T17:05:00.002-04:00

Book Review: The Lost City of Z by David Grann

My grandma and I were reading buddies. Whenever I visited her, we'd talk about what the other was reading, or had read recently, and how was it, and so forth, even though we just about never read the same things. She always said that reading was one of the things that kept her going into old age - one of her favorite parts about reading was that you could immerse yourself in another place, or another culture, or another time and feel what it was like even without leaving your house. Personally, that had generally not been a major factor in my motivation for reading, but reading something like this makes you understand why that rationale can be so powerful.

That's only one of the reasons this book is so fascinating - the adventure in the Amazon aspect. Everything described about the amazon area was so interesting I found myself looking up more online later, and wanting to find another book that talks about the area - my imagination was piqued by all the unique dangers and experiences of the amazon - I felt like a little boy reading an adventure novel (I guess it's not that far away from truth) - undiscovered tribes, with thousands of unique languages who could befriend explorers, take them prisoner and eat them (yes, it sounds like an old-fashioned belief, but apparently a couple of the tribes actually practiced cannibalistic behavior) along with untold ways leading to an untimely death - several different insects alone, many poisonous animals, starvation, and of course sheer mental insanity.

Another reason to read the book is the mystery - there's a degree of suspense to unraveling what actually happened to Percy Fawcett, the protagonist of the non-fiction work - an incredibly riveting figure - unrelentingly loyal to a few, showing no fear in the face of these dangers, but also impossible to get along with for anyone who didn't share his one-dimensional keep-going never-stop mentality. There are even various little clues - journal entries, some of them possibly coded, rumors and stories from local tribes, and little bits, possibly true, or possibly not from the different explorers who have followed him in - at least those who survived.

A third (I'd say last, but that implies a more limited list than I'd like - maybe I'll think of more later?) is the reason I end up most often end up reading non-fiction books - the history. The shift in anthropological ideas, and how Fawcett was both ahead of time in his treatment of the natives, and still a member of his time with his generally noble savage beliefs. The notion of exploration, of how to deal with something completely new is compelling, and the amazon in the early 20th century (and probably to a lesser extent today) is particularly interesting because of how it was the last truly unexplored place on the planet, and that even as technology outside kept improving, explorers struggled to make use of that technology within the jungle. There's some strange romance to the notion that a small group of explorers could succeed where a giant battalion could not, and to the idea that even to this day there's some unexplored piece left.

And it kind of teases you - because in the end, there wasn't realy an answer, even though reading the whole way you kind of knew there wouldn't be - and to some extent, that's probably the point - all these people looking for definitive, certain, iron-clad proof that just is never going to exist as hard as it is to except, and it is hard, but it's a little less hard because of how enjoyable for us (not for them surely - with the malaria, and the yellow fever, and bugs, and the pirhanas and whatnot) the journey is getting there.

2010-10-09T01:59:00.000-04:00

32: Who Wants to Be a Millionaire

Oh, to remember again what it was like to be alive during the great Game Show Revival on the turn of the 21st century. Sure, reality television was just a baby, and would go on to dominate the television landscape for much of the decade. But there was a trend, harking back on an older tradition, that burned first, and burned faster. The resurgence of the game show. And sure, game shows had been running during the day for years - Wheel of Fortune, Jeopardy and The Price is Right among others. But this was the Game Show's big return to prime time, and the king of and inspiration for the revival was Who Wants to Be A Millionaire.

Ten contestants would begin each show with what was called a "Fastest Finger" - they would need to put four things in order, and the fastest to do so, was chosen to compete on the "hot seat." They would then answer multiple choice questions which went up in value, fifteen of increasing difficulty, the last one worth a million. One wrong sent the contestant home, but to to help each contestant were three "lifelines," which could each be used once - the 50/50 which eliminated two of the choices, Ask the Audience, which let the studio audience weigh in with their thoughts on a question, and Phone-a-Friend which let the contestant call someone they knew and get their opinion on a question.

Millionaire started in the UK, first airing in 1998, and spread to the US a year later, hosted by Regis Philbin, where it quickly became a sensation. Actually, sensation is underselling it. Because of its success, ABC began airing in three times a week. It's hard to describe just how big Millionaire was at that time. Looking at the Nielsen ratings for the year of 1999-2000 forces me to do a double take no matter how many times I see it - the top three spots were all taken by the three weekly editions of Millionaire. Phrases came into the lexicon from the show, like lifeline, but most of all "Final Answer" - before accepting any choice from the contestant, Philbin would ask - "Is this your final answer?," and the contestant would have to respond in kind for the answer to count. The phrase was ubiquitous - most hilariously winding up in the Simpsons rom-com "Love is Nice."

Part of the beauty was that anyone could try out for the game show by calling up from their house and answering questions - if they got them right, they'd be entered into the pool for the show. It was so big that when the first person came along and won the million, he became a household name - John Carpenter (and directed Vampires, no less! (he didn't), not to mention the fact that he was so confident on the million dollar question ( "Which of these U.S. Presidents appeared on the television series Laugh-In?") that he used his last lifeline - his phone-a-friend to call his father and let him know he was about to win a million dollars (to be fair, it was a really easy million dollar question.)

Of course, with that kind of overexposure it was due to burnout. It got a little less popular the next year, a lot less popular the year after that, and it was done, mercifully put to bed by ABC. One does wonder if the show could have lasted a little longer if ABC had put it on a little more judiciously - though that brings up the great question, like with a young pitcher on a potentially world series winning team - is it worth hurting the pitcher's arm, or overexposing the show, for that one year of absolutely glory. Who can say.

A character from the dead-too-soon Party Down said in an episode that the key to a long relationship is to be a crockpot - burn too bright and you're likely to kill the relationship early - maybe the same is true for game shows. The daytime version of Millionaire, hosted by former View and current Today Show anchor Meredith Viera, has been running strong since 2002 - never the same type of national water-cooler-buzzing presence its predecessor was but still going, and there's something to be said for that too. Oh, and that the show inspired Best Picture winner Slumdog Millionaire's creation. Not a bad legacy.

2010-10-08T10:43:00.002-04:00

33: It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia

One of my personal favorite comedies currently on TV, I got on board sometime during the third season, when a friend in Philadelphia gave me the heads up (relatively soon after the airing of the It's Always Sunny commercials which were parodies of the Mac and PC ads - Mac would say "I'm Mac", and then one of the other characters would say "I'm PC" and then what it stood for - the only one I remember is that Danny DeVito said "Perverted Clown" - not sure why that stood out - I had absolutely no idea what was going on in the commercials). Since then, I've been a devoted viewer and have been surprised at just how big the show has gotten - the cast went on a tour doing renditions of "The Nightman Cometh" - the musical performed within the show, and people dressed as Green Man - Charlie's characters which involves him wearing a full body green lyrca suit - pop out at any Philadelphia sporting event.

The party line on Sunny is that it's something like Seinfeld on crack - or in my way of saying it, while sometimes the Seinfeld characters are insensitive to others - you can imagine wanting to be friends with them - you'd never want to be friends with the Sunny characters - they're - and this is one of the things that separates from just about everything else on TV - jackasses, dicks, all together despicable people - and there's pretty much no reason ever given for you to feel any other way about them (well, except maybe Charlie - he's pretty lovable).

Each episode generally has a familiar set up - someone in the Gang - the shorthand for the characters Dennis, Mac, Charlie, Dee and Frank - gets an idea - and the Gang generally splits up into two groups taking on something to do with the idea, getting themselves into all sorts of trouble, and constantly backstabbing and betraying one another, which has absolutely no consequences by the time the next episode rolls around.

It's super low budget, it's theme song is some old timey instrumental music and every time I think the writers have absolutely exhausted things to make fun of and socially acceptable lines to cross (the gang takes on abortion, the gang deals with racism, the gang deals with drugs), they find something new, and it's more or less been consistently funny (obviously there are better and worse episodes, but generally even the worse episodes have a few great laugh lines - even the weird flashback-gang-are-characters-in-revolutionary-times episode which was the worst of the series).

It may not be the best crafted show out there, or having the most meaningful or engaging story - there's almost no serial element - but it does what comedy shows in theory should do best - its' funny - more than funny - it's hilarious - I probably laugh more while watching Sunny than almost any show on during the same time - and it passes the test for longer term appreciation - it's full of repeatable lines that last - watching repeats are just as funny as watching for the first time. It's one of the few shows that I have more or less unrestrained praise - sure, it puts up a ceiling by not being a show with many layers or meanings or story or feeling but it sets out to do one thing and it does it very well.

2010-10-07T11:09:00.000-04:00

34: The West Wing

Even though I watched this show regularly for the first three seasons, it blows me mind to think of it as a 2000s show and realize it went on til 2006 - I always associate it with the late '90s and high school, which I graduated in 2001. Of course, it's biggest impact was certainly in those first three seasons, before Aaron Sorkin left. I've heard relatively decent things about the post-Sorkin years, particularly about the last season, where the new election seemed to capture a little bit of buzz, albeit not generating much in the way of ratings, as Jimmy Smits ran versus Alan Alda for the presidency (And poor John Spencer died right before he was to be Vice President - RIP John Spencer).

In the beginning though, the West Wing was really a sensation - both commercially and critically - in its first four years it won the Emmy for the Best Drama, with eleven different actors and actresses being nominated over the course of the series, and six of them winning at least one. The show was known for it's Aaron Sorkin patented - walk-and-talk style - witty, fast-talking conversations between staff members that happened as they moved from one oh-so-important meeting to another.

In my civics-minded, trying-to-get-into-college, days of junior and senior year of high school, I would go to model congress every Wednesday (kind of an informal debate club) and come back in time to watch the vast majority of West Wing followed by Law & Order. Watching it, for one hour goverment just seemed, well, good. You hear that expression "good government" - and I think there the implication, in my mind, anyway, is just that in the minimalist sense - the government is not corrupt, not actively cheating the taxpayer. And sure, the Bartlett administration in the West Wing had that. But the term could be used more broadly in the magical fictional world of the West Wing - it was good - the people were generally wise, the President in particular, and while they made mistakes, the mistakes were so good natured and accidentally misguided that who could blame them - these were people you saw running a government and wanted to vote them back in in perpetuity (Of course I say this as a liberal - I'm sure there are some conservative viewers who felt different, but as much as it can be, they were even good - well-meaning, above their partisan slant).

Now I don't want to sound too simply jaundiced about the modern political system - sure, I admit to being not thrilled about the way politics works sometimes, but I don't think there's anything modern about that - these problems have existed for years and years - just not as much in the West Wing. As someone who is inclined towards the cynical, maybe there was something I particularly appreciated about watching the workings of the staffers on the West Wing and seeing them do things that more often than not made you want to believe in the power of government, and particularly in American Democracy. Once in a while it's nice to be hopeful, even if it's based on something fictional.

2010-10-06T00:37:00.004-04:00

Burned Out Mets Fandom

I don't want to speak for all (or even most) Mets fans, but by the last couple months of this year, I've been feeling more burnt out as Mets fan than I can remember feeling in years. I've only watched occasional games over the last month, and even when watching I'll turn away early in the game, or pay half attention. I can't remember the last year I've attended as few games as I did this year (3). Part of this is certainly due to the general quality of product on the field - it's rough to watch a bad team for one (though the Mets aren't a truly awful team - 4 games under .500 with a Pythagorean winning percentage of .500 - just an awfully underachieving team) and it's even less inspiring when you're being forced to watch a lineup full of not-really-prospects like Lucas Duda, Quad-Aers like Jesus Feliciano, and way-too-young-all-field-no-hit players like Ruben Tejada.

It all starts with 17 games left in 2007, when the now fabled collapse began - the Mets blew a 7 game lead, a lead which they had had for four months, culminated by losing on the last day of the season in blowout fashion to the Marlins, in a game started by one time arch-rival Tom Glavine, his last as a Met, which was over before it even began - he allowed seven runs in the first while only managing to get one out. Of course, like a financial down or up cycle, we could only know for sure when tides changed in hindsight - at the time, it was bad, absolutely brutal, certainly - perhaps worse than the seven game loss to the Cardinals in the NLCS the year before - but there was hope all the same - the Mets were just removed from their fantastic 2006, and it was a serious of freak bad luck in the bullpen that had caused some of those losses, and with solid performances from 2006 acquisitions Oliver Perez and John Maine, it seemed like 2008 would be closer to 2006 than 2007.

It turned out to be wrong of course - 2008 ended up being a poor man's 2007 - the lead was never quite as big, and the team never quite seemed as good (though it finished with one more win than the year before) - and while it was just as tough to swallow, the eventual collapse was more expected if nothing else - it's as if we were back at home with the feeling that mets fans need to expect everything to go wrong, and that for some reason that was just on a strange hiatus for 2006. I was at the last game at Shea Stadium, where the Mets played a meaningful last game of the season for the second straight year, losing again to end any playoff hopes. Compared to the year before of course, 2009 was simply an unmitigated disaster - every important player not named David Wright was injured for a significant part of the season, and Wright had a power outage leading to no Met having more than 12 home runs, and that being by the mostly-no-hit, no-field Daniel Murphy. 2010 was a much more successful year record-wise than 2009, but it was still below .500, and it came at a point where I honestly didn't expect anything more than a third place finish from the Mets.

Now, it didn't help at all that while the Mets were going from blowing leads to never having them in the first place, the Mets biggest rivals were succeeding, well, about as much as baseball teams can succeed - the Phillies have made the playoffs every year from 2007 to 2010, won the World Series in 2008 and won the pennant in 2009, while the Yankees won the World Series in 2009. It's serious insult added to terrible performances by the Mets.

By the end, no, middle, no, mostly beginning at the latest of this year, Mets fans had lost confidence in their manager and general manager to put together a team capable of winning anything, not to mention the ownership, which sadly isn't going anywhere. It became a matter of riding out the year to wait for changes after the year. And by the end of the year, watching the Mets was no longer an act of enjoyment - it was a reminder of failure.

I just want to make it known that I do not blame the players, and particularly am not one of those people who thinks that not making the playoffs is on the shoulders of David Wright and Jose Reyes and we should trade them - they - for the most part - have done their part - it's been the pieces around them that have been insufficient.

My friend Rich made a point which I think resonates a lot - Mets fans are back in a mode in which anyone in charge of the Mets should be considered guilty until proven innocent. I desperately want to give new management a chance, but I have absolutely no faith in the current ownership group to pick new management I would support.

I hope, I really do, that next year begins with a management team that is capable to making the Mets a team that can compete for the playoffs every year, but I can't get back that excited feeling until I see something in action.

2010-10-05T23:58:00.002-04:00

Red Bull Fandom

I've just started, over the past few months to be a serious New York Red Bulls fan. Now, before, if you had asked me, I would have said I was a Red Bulls fan - and I wasn't entirely just pulling it out of thin air - I occasionally followed the stories and I watched playoff games, but I couldn't tell you who they were playing next week, or who their regular center backs were. Suffice to say, I was a very casual fan. For years, I had wanted to make a more concerted effort to follow the Red Bulls - a few years ago, I became a fan of the Blackburn Rovers in the English Premier League which is great, but games are not on often because they're kind of a second tier time, and after all, I'm from the US, I should have a US team to root for, dammit.

I had chosen the Red Bulls as the local team (either reason 1 or 1A on how to chose a team, along with team your parents rooted for) which comes with the benefits that all the games will be shown on local TV. Before I watched my first few games, I looked up the players and history on wikipedia - but you can't really learn them that way (well, you can - you can just force yourself to memorize them, but that's kind of cheating and absolutely no fun). Each game, I would remember one or two more players - just by osmosis, and sooner or later, you get to know the players, where they play and more and more about their style, and hopefully start remembering at least the better players on opposing teams.

There's a great getting-to-know you feeling about the early stages of following a new team. You can even note that fantastic first moment when the team scores and you actually feel an authentic, unforced moment of joy - one that you can only earn from commitment to a team - learning the players as they kick corners or crosses or tackle opposing attackers (As soccer goes, it's a lot easier to learn the more offensively minded players usually, as they're the ones scoring the goals). And, of course with that, the actual feeling of irrational anger and disappointment that follows a loss (failing to get a win when the other side has ten men for most of the match? Come on!).

It feels a little bit like cheating to be really getting into it when the Red Bulls are just starting to coalesce as one of the favorites for the MLS Cup (Yes, that's what it's called) or the Supporters Shield (best regular season record, and this is a much cooler name than MLS Cup (and possibly as important - winning a regular season is a regularly underrated feat in American sports where playoffs are such a big deal). That said, I don't feel too bad considering it's hardly like jumping on the Yankees' bandwagon - MLS could use all the fans they could get, and most people in New York still don't give a shit about the Red Bulls.

And yeah, getting players who are big names, and who as someone who followed soccer even just a little bit knows, is pretty exciting - Thierry Henry was the leading goal scorer for Arsenal for years, and Rafael Marquez was a key cog in Barcelona's defense, and is still captain of the Mexican national team. Adding to that is young guns like Tim Ream, who could be on the US team in a couple of years.

It's exciting - it's easy enough - watching just two hours a week - and you get on board with both a franchise and a new league. I know some people are content with just one or two sports, and going all out with those but I like a more broad approach (not every sport of course, no NASCAR - everyone's got to have limits). Plus, it's good to diversify the things you care about - when your other teams are in down years (Mets, Bills - and we'll see on Knicks), it's nice to have enough that one of them is bound to be successful.

So yeah, go Red Bulls!

2010-10-01T15:06:00.002-04:00

True Blood Finale

Warning: Spoilers

I was quite dissappointed in the True Blood finale, and most of the second half of the season, after I watched the last three in a row, especially compared to last season. Last season featured two big plots that slowly built up, gaining momentum - more and more happening - and then one plot reached its cliamx, the Fellowship of the Sun plot, leaving the last couple episodes up for wrapping up the Maryann the maenad plot.

This season, the most exciting episodes seemed to happen about halfway through the season. The season started slow, sure, but all True Blood seasons (or all three of them, anyway) start slow. Generally they've started to seriously speed up later on. Some of the plots that I was waiting to be folding into one of the more important plots never really coalesced. For example, the Jason plot - him with the warepanther Crystal and trying to defend her from her incestuous family while saving her compound - where was that going? What does that have to do with anything? Who cares? I thought for sure her people would somehow be relevant to the season's end game, but nope. (This doesn't mean I expect there to be no smaller subplots - just fewer and more focus on the bigger plots, especially by the end - smaller plots like the Hoyt-Jessica one are fine, or even the Lafayette plot with his new guy - that never really seemed like it had much to do with anything and that was fine aside from the too much screen time it got at the end where main plots should be taking over). Also, towards the end of the season, certain plots seemed to come out of absolutely nowhere. Sam and his murderous backstory burglarizing and then being backstabbed? Where the fuck did that come from? Why is that coming up for the first time in a season's last episode, where things are being concluded? And the Sam plotline never went anywhere in terms of the main plotlines - I thought for sure Sam's brother would end up being one of the main villains of the season, but that never kind of really developed, it just kept repeating the part about him being a bad kid and Sam trying to straighten him out over and over again until the last half hour or so.

Finally, there's the main plotline itself. Russell Edgington is made out to be the oldest, most powerful vampire any of the characters on the show has ever known or heard about (at least until next season). He is the King of Mississippi, and now Louisiana as well, and commands an army of werevolves that have been around for centuries. He ends the ninth episode of this season by killing a news reporter on TV and telling everyone he is prepared to take over humanity. And that's about the most climactic his story gets. Considering how much Russell has been built up, it's remarkably easy for Eric and Bill to trick him, and it takes about 10 minutes. There's no fanfare. Shouldn't there be some vampires or wolves protecting him? Why the countless mentions of his wolf armies and flashbacks of Eric fighting them and then absolutely no mention of that again? I really don't get it. Maybe they're building up something especially epic for next season, but I don't have much faith in that. I just feel kind of disappointed.

2010-09-01T02:00:00.000-04:00

Inception

Just saw it, finally, nearly two months after it came out. Also, please read no further if you want to avoid SPOILERS.

That said, if you're still reading there's no major particular spoiler - this is no Sixth Sense or Crying Game - there's no absolutely major how-did-you-not-realize-this-the-entire-movie twist that hearing would ruin the movie - which I might have thought there would be based on the hush-hush attitude I got from people mentioning the movie when they learned I hadn't seen it.

For a movie that I had absolutely no idea what the plot really was before seeing it, other than it involved going into people's dreams, it's actually pretty simple to summarize - In a world where (cue Don Lafontaine voice over) people can enter other people's dreams and extract information from deep within the person's subconscious, a wealthy japanese businessman wants to hire someone to do the opposite - plant an idea within a person's dreams - a very difficult but not impossible proposition. He hires Leonardo DiCaprio, an expert in the art of extraction whose only dream is to go back to his kids in the US, which he had to flea due to his alleged murder of his wife, in exchange for making the charges against him go away, as only a shady powerful businessman can. Leo, whose own dreams are haunted by guilt that he caused his wife to commit suicide, assembles a crack team of dream-invasion experts with different skills (sort of an A-team of planting ideas into one's subconscious) and they get to work planning on creating an idea in the head of Cillian Murphy, a dying energy leader's son, to get him to break up the company that will soon be his. To do this, they'll have to dig deeper within dreams than ever before - going recursive - a dream, within a dream, within a dream - and find off a number of militarized projections within Murphy's brain - he's been taught by other dream invaders how to protect his brain in case of attack. To be able to know when they're in a dream or reality, which can get quite confusing with all these recursive dreams, each dream invader is taught to carry around a totem - an item which lets them know if they're in a dream or not - Leo's is a top which continues spinning forever in a dream, but falls down in reality.

It's an innovative idea - the theme of what's dream and what's reality that pervades the movie is a rare combination of thought-provoking an action packed - a combination that Christopher Nolan has become maybe the undisputed king of after churning them out (both Batman movies, Prestige, Memento). The unquestionably long film (a solid two and a half hours) moves briskly - it didn't drag, which was certainly appreciated. The notion of the totems were one of my favorite points in the film - a solid connotation of an otherwise tricky difference between dream and reality - and I found myself by the end of the film trying to figure out when Leo spun his top, and when it fell down to make sure what was real.

There was a kind of throwaway scene when Leo was off collecting members of his team and found his chemist - the man responsible for putting everyone into such a sedate state that they could safely

There was a lot of technical dream talk - what was possible in a dream and what wasn't, what each member needed to do to ensure the dream invasion went smoothly, and some bits about some magically dream limbo - that didn't seem to necessarily make a whole lot of sense even relative to each other when given some thought - but I honestly had no problem with that - it was a case of necessarily acceptance of crazy ideas to let the movie take you where it wanted to go, and most of the specific rules in terms of dream invasion weren't particularly what the movie was about, except in terms of generating action scenes - it would have been a lot more boring if there was no resistance in Murphy's brain to the planting of the idea.

The worst part of the movie was by far the obvious and contrived ending - the team has just about pulled off the impossible mission, except for the loss of their wealthy businessman employer who has died within the dream sending him into some sort of dream limbo (normally dying wakes you up - but not when you're so sedated as they need to be to enter third order dreams - sure,whatever). Leo doesn't go back to the real world with the others in order to save the businessman - without him alive, he won't be able to get back to his kids - the only real point of doing this all, to him. Leo then appears to save the businessman's life in the dream - and kicks them back to reality - unnecessarily repeating a scene which was also the first scene in the movie in the process - only to discover that after he gets home to Michael Caine (either his father, or more likely his father-in-law who gets about three minutes of screen time) and his kid, his top keeps spinning after all - he never did make it out of that dream (Dreams more real than reality? What? Mirroring his wife's being convinced that the dream they were both stuck in was also real? Impossible!). I basically spent the last half hour hoping that, please, it wasn't just his dream after all. I would have been fine if that top had fallen and he made it home, or even if he died, or was in limbo, or, honestly whatever the fuck - anything but that - it was a serious cop out and minor M. Night Shyamalan move to an otherwise interesting and sensible film.

Overall, it was a very solid movie, and for the most part, worthy of the hype - a fine summer blockbuster, without necessarily being a seriously great movie. As mentioned before, it was unexpectedly straightforward - not necessarily a bad thing - but I actually might not have minded if there was a little more layering and mystery. Still, that's not really to complain, behind the asinine it was very solid.

2010-08-06T14:29:00.002-04:00

Time for a fun sports rant.

In the wake of "The Decision" and Lebron bringing his much-desired talents to South Beach, there has been a slew of interviews with old athletes along with talk by sports radio blowhards about how rivalries today are not like rivalries in the old days - when players would never consider being friendly with their counterparts on a rival team, let alone joining up with some of their players on a team in the future. In regards to baseball, I recently heard a radio personality complain about how years ago, in the 1970s, the Yankees and Red Sox legitimately hated one another, but today even those fiercest of rivals are now friendly, chatting before and after games, and on the basepaths, and not displaying hate through their every facial tic and expression.

Sure, it's fine for fans to hate players - we're detached. We don't actually know any of these people. We don't hang out with them. And, yes, one of the great things about sports is that you can hate someone for absolutely no good reason, and within this sphere, it's totally okay, and even encouraged.

But players deal with each other every day, on the court (or field, or ice, or whatever) and off, and they actually hang out with each other - they're real people to each other - not just symbols or characters in a narrative. Why should they hate people they know just for your satisfaction as a fan? Should people not be friends with other people who work at rival companies? Because, really, that's what it is. Sure, they play against one another, but they work for two different companies, and they compete, and then afterwards, they're done.

It's absurd. Hang out. Be friends. It's their lives.

Maybe if we didn't have free agency, and the reserve clause, and owners could still keep players forever while paying them pennies, we wouldn't have players switching teams so often, so maybe we should go back to that too.

If I have to hear from some old-time athlete or some curmudgeonly fan again about how things were better in their days, when players on any opposing teams, let alone bitter rivals, bitterly and truly despised each other merely for the act of being on the other team, I'll, I don't know, punch them. Well, I probably won't. But I'll imagine it.

2010-07-09T10:39:00.002-04:00

I've developed a current obsession with this Heineken Light series of commercials (of which there are two currently I believe), which seem to rely on the premise that a couple of younger men have struck it rich and moved to some sort of retirement community and developed a friendship with a couple of older men, in particular, the star of the commercials (or breakout character, if that can exist in commercials) is Maurice portrayed by Bill Cobb, a veteran character actor, recognized best (by me) for his role as Moses, the janitor in The Hudsucker Proxy. In the first ad (well first in that I put it first since I believe they came out at the same time), the young dudes (Jamie and Gavin are apparently their names, according to Heineken) are hanging out at Maurice's house, and notes that Maurice has led an "active social life" (he repeats this - emphasizing the fact - a "very active social life," based on the pictures of women covering his wall. He then digs through Maurice's record collection and discovers, to his surprise, a Peter Cetera record. Not supposing this would be the type of music Maurice would like, the young dude questions Maurice - "you like Cetera?." Maurice answers with a pronounced and elongated "No" (possibly the best individual line in the episode by itself, combined with his expression) and then goes on to teach a lesson - he doesn't like Cetera, but the ladies love Cetera, and if you love the ladies, by default, QED, you love Cetera - logic 101 (well he doesn't say QED, but you get the point.) Gavin (after watching both commercials again and reading some descriptions I think I've concluded that this young dude is Gavin) says, in part disbelief, "so I love Peter Cetera?"as Restless Heart by Peter Cetera comes on. I'm not sure how this makes me want a Heineken Light, but it's genius. Most Interesting Man in the World, you have a new rival for best beer commercial.

The second commercial is slightly inferior, but still clearly worth watching. The best Maurice line is the lack of a line - when the young dude points out that Maurice had dated a Pointer sister - Maurice merely holds up two fingers, correcting him, to which the young dude now correctly announces, "two pointer sisters." Maurice's only other line comes when he tells the other young dude ("Jamie") to mow his lawn. Brilliance.

2010-07-01T20:07:00.002-04:00

I was watching the Met game today, as I often do, and play-by-play man Gary Cohen, commented that the Nationals, who the Mets were playing against, make no mention of their progenitors, the Montreal Expos, anywhere in their ballpark, instead playing homage to the previous teams in their city, the two American League versions of the Washington Senators. Cohen complained about this, siding with me on a rant I have often gone on about with friends. Namely, that when a franchise moves, its history is that of the franchise that it became, rather than a franchise that was in its city before but moved somewhere else.

The prime example of this in my mind is when the old Cleveland Browns moved to Baltimore and became the Ravens, and a couple years later the new Browns were formed. There was such outrage in the Cleveland area that somehow (and I'm not sure what the legal basis was for this (this ridiculous settlement which I will not acknowledge since it's pretty much changing history) the Ravens were forced to use old Baltimore Colts statistics (referencing the last move which created a cartoonishly villainous owner universally hated by the city from which the team was moving) in all of their media guide. This was, of course, patently ridiculous. Ignoring the fact that this left a gap between 1983 and 1996 where the team didn't exist, there was already another team with this history. And honestly, neither of these is the true point - this team was not the Colts - it was the damn Browns - they kept all the players, the coaches, the front office personnel, the owner - change of name and all, they were the Browns, and they have the Browns history.

When the Browns started up again in 1999, they laid claim, by legal settlement and popular sentiment, to the legacy of the old Browns which was AN ENTIRELY DIFFERENT TEAM. Jim Brown did not play for the new Cleveland Browns - he played for the team that is now the Baltimore Ravens. Same with Bernie Koser and Ozzie Newsome and Otto Graham. They're not part of the new Cleveland Browns legacy. It would be like if the Nationals started claiming Walter Johnson was part of their history, or if the Mets claimed Pee Wee Reese or Christy Mathewson (the Mets already come too close with their Jackie Robinson shrine, but I'm willing to cut them some slack because of his off-the-field importance (I also know the Mets took their colors from the old teams but that's a far cry from stealing their history), or is the Kansas City Royals claimed...well there weren't really any good Kansas City Athletics (and if they were, they were traded to the Yankees anyway). History follows the franchise, not the city - when a team moves the players and personnel stay the same - it's only logical.

Now, I'm not saying if you're a Browns fan you have to follow the team to Baltimore - you have full rights to both have rooted for the old Browns, take pride in their history that you rooted for, and then switch to the new Browns if you'd like - that's entirely reasonable. But just recognize - it's not the same team.

2010-06-16T15:26:00.000-04:00

Yesterday, I nailed down the three games that aired - New Zealand-Slovakia, Ivory Coast-Portugal, and Brazil-North Korea.

The day was highlighted by the last minute goal by New Zealand to secure the draw and the intrigue and excitement of the Brazil-North Korea match - the second Brazil goal, by Elano was the best goal of the day, and the general mysteriousness of the North Koreans plus their surprisingly (to me) good play. Also by how relatively boring the Ivory Coast-Portugal was. Even when (albeit still injured) Didier Drogba entered the pitch, did the excitement level barely improve.

Alas, more matches.

Backlog: 5 matches

As of after June 15, 2010: 9/63 total matches watched.

2010-06-15T00:46:00.002-04:00

I was out of the US for some time, but now I'm back and it's World Cup season. I'm going to attempt (I'm not yet sure if I will actually be able to do it yet) to watch every match of the World Cup. This doesn't mean I have to watch them live - that would be impossible - I can DV-R them, and I don't have to watch them in order. If I am actually going to do it, I'm going to say that I need to finish all the games before the final. That sets an actual end date, but gives me some leeway if I fall behind in these opening rounds, since, seriously, there's three matches a day, it's a lot of football (soccer, whatever, either way). Also, since I'm watching out of order, yes, I'm going to find out some scores before I see the matches, but honestly it's just impossible to not - I've managed to hold off for a few more important games to me, and ones I'm going to watch very soon after they aired.

I was unable to watch anything on Friday or Saturday so those matches are all logged on the DV-R.

On Sunday, I woke up early and watched my recorded US-England manage, which I miraculously managed to not have ruined for me.

I then went to Loreley on the Lower East Side and watched Serbia-Ghana and Germany Australia there.

After Sunday June 13 - 3/63 total matches

Monday June 14:

Woke up and watched Netherlands-Denmark

Watched Japan-Cameroon in the afternoon and Italy-Paraguay at night

After Monday June 14 - 6/63 total matches watched.

More thoughts tomorrow after matches and sleep.

2010-04-02T18:22:00.003-04:00

Even from abroad, it's time for my annual horrific attempt to predict the year's MLB standings. Let's have at it, shall we:

American League
AL East
Yankees 98 64
Red Sox 94 68
Rays 91 73
Orioles 75 87
Blue Jays 73 91

AL Central
Twins 84 78
White Sox 83 79
Tigers 78 84
Indians 77 85
Royals 72 90

AL West
Rangers 83 79
Mariners 81 81
Angels 80 82
Athletics 77 85

National League

NL East
Phillies 89 73
Braves 87 75
Mets 80 82
Marlins 79 83
Nationals 72 90

NL Central
Cardinals 89 73
Cubs 82 80
Brewers 80 82
Reds 79 83
Pirates 74 88
Astros 67 95

NL West
Dodgers 88 74
Rockies 87 75
Diamondbacks 84 78
Giants 81 81
Padres 66 96

Hopefully the math is right - it should be, but sometimes I realize I don't know how to add or use a calculator - let's see if this works out better than previous years - I feel like I've gone less out on a limb for the most part, with the exception of maybe picking the Angels to not win the AL West again, which seems like always happens anyway. But maybe this is the year...

2010-03-26T11:50:00.000-04:00

Actually not the only spinoff on this list (Law & Order SVU and Boston Legal), it's so similar to its to its progenitor that I dread writing about it, but I felt it would be unfair to not include a show that has just about (maybe just a little short) equaled the popularity of the original CSI domestically an possibly eclipsed it internationally - having made the top 10 viewing charts in more countries than any other show some arbitrary survey named it the most popular show in the world.

I've seen a handful of CSI Miami episodes, and frankly there's not all that much to talk about, and almost anything I would has to be saved for the original CSI article, so we'll talk about the people involved in the most successful spin-off of a show to date (that I can think of quickly).

This discussion starts and ends (well, not really ends because I want to talk about other people) with David Caruso. Caruso's career has an arc just like so many classic movies, many of which Caruso wishes he could have been in, or a great sports tale (Zach Grienke anyone?). After plugging away in supporting roles throughout the '80s and early '90s, he got his big break with NYPD Blue and earned rave reviews. It all went to his head, however, as he got cocky, and left after just one season to pursue a career in film. The epic failures of his two big starring roles in Jade and Kiss of Death derailed his leading man career before he could really get started - Jade apparently is so forgettable that one of the few facts mentioned above the contents on the wikipedia page is that the movie is known for killing Caruso's career. He returned to TV in the one-season classic Michael Hayes where he played a New York prosecutor - the series' best distinction may be that it was the first show on the three major networks to have a first run episode finish 6th in the nightly Nielsen ratings (Somehow both leads landed on their feet - Caruso's co-star Ruben Santiago-Hudson is now appearing as the boss in Castle).

Caruso's film career didn't improve much from here - he appeared in Proof of Life and a movie called Body Count which doesn't even have a wikipedia entry (trumped by the Ice T band, an independent movie made with Ice-T, and an early '90s video game Operation: Body Count), and those are seriously the highlights. Yet, somehow, all-knowing Jerry Bruckheimer (or more likely someone else) saw his former talent and decided to rescue him from the scrap heap, installing him as Lt. Horatio Kane on CSI: Miami, and a legend was born.

Caruso is the heart and soul of the show - him and Emily Proctor are just about the only two to remain the whole time. Caruso's character has become best known for his one-liners, often strategically timed with putting on his sunglasses and the subject of many an amusing youtube clip (They're really just getting funnier and funnier as I watch - my favorite being "The verdict is in, Frank...but the jury is out" - I don't have a clue what the context of that could be).

The rest of the cast is stocked with regulars of the tube. Kim Delaney, from NYPD Blue and the short lived Philly, stuck around just for a season. Emily Proctor was best known for her role as Republican white house counsel for the Bartlett administration. Medical Examiner Khandi Alexander was on Newsradio, ER and the The Corner.

(just a brief interlude here to make it known just I just watched that "Verdict is in" clip another three times - it's really that good.)

Honestly, I could keep going on with cast members - it has Rory Cochrane of Dazed and Confused fame who after barely drawing a regular paycheck for years somehow decided to leave the show after two seasons - but really, you should just spend what extra 30 seconds you might have spent browsing the rest of the article just watching some of those clips again. And that's why CSI Miami is on the list if for no other reason.

O

2010-03-25T10:00:00.000-04:00

36: Battlestar Galactica

Another show that I've seen, has a huge cult following, and that I feel very strongly about. I like, but I don't love it nearly as much as Flight of the Conchords (which makes me wonder why I would put it on spot above it?). Battlestar Galactica (or BSG and everybody calls it and I will be) does some things right but also does a lot of things wrong which prevent it from being a truly great show.

Now, I'll warn ahead of time that when I make this quick list of bad things about it's going to make it seem like I hate the show - but honestly, this is different - like with say, Scrubs or How I Met Your Mother, my most specific criticisms of shows are saved for shows that I generally like but have some problems that keep them from being great shows - there is just no point in nitpicking about everything wrong with Two and a Half Men - everything is wrong about, so why go into detail - but with these shows that are pretty good but have some serious pitfalls, these are the shows that frustrate the heck out of me.

Oh, and on to the list.

The dialogue is terrible - lazy at some times, just plain bad at others. There are a couple of cute things - I love the little bits of its own language - the fracks, and the "So Say We Alls." and every once in a while Admiral Adama gives a nice little speech. But in comparison to other sci-fi shows I invested in - mainly of the Joss Whedon variety - it's so lacking - it's often generic, melodramatic, cliche and repetitive.

The characters are terrible. Basically, there are a handful of characters who are superheroes - both Adamas, Starbuck, Roslin, Baltar - they're basically the critically characters in every important event that happens on the ship and they come to the rescue in every single crisis, surrounded by a couple of the next tier of characters. Some of the worst episodes, which will be discussed shortly are about the back stories of these characters - and highlight the flaw of the poor characterization but overexposing them to dramatic situations that either the existing characterizing can't handle, that seem ridiculous and out of context, and that are just uninteresting because we don't really care about the characters enough. Sure, I root for them, and yes the Admiral is awesome - and just about always right, Jack Bauer style - but some of them really grate on the viewer, and the constant reinvention of characters like Baltar to kind of redeem them while keeping them as antiheroes is stretched beyond belief.

Some episodes are absolute duds. It's hard to be a great show when you have a handful of episodes that don't simply not move the story forward, or focus on a weaker character, but are just plain awful. There's a handful of them particularly in the second half of the second season, included possible the worst episode of them all Black Market - about some personal demons of Lee Adama who takes up with a prostitute and has to shut down an illegal black market run by (the only redeeming part of the episode) Bill Duke. Scar, the episode with the entirely unwanted Kat backstory is another true stinker.

The ending is terrible. Yeah, I won't ruin it for if you haven't seen it, though you can more or less guess part of it, and the part of it you can't guess really doesn't make any sense.

Okay, so, as I warned it sounds like I hate the show. I really don't though - it does a couple things well - mainly it's interesting plot and the dynamic between the cylons and the humans and the questions of what's really human, and whatnot, that inevitably occur. It does a relatively good job of keeping suspense and slowly revealing the remaining Cylons and for the most part I was not incredibly angered by any revelation (except for the ending). The main-plot centric episodes are by far the best - the ones dealing directly with Cylons - and those tend to heat up towards the end of the show, and towards the end of each season, or half season. Another quick issue with the plot (not to get back into complaining I swear) is BSG's utter reluctance to change the status quo - basically to get away from their main set up as Roslin as president and Adama as Admiral on the ship - when something happens to change that you can feel the tension as they try to return to normalcy - particularly when they were held captive by the Cylons on New Caprica you could feel how badly they wanted to get back to the existing set up - a plotline that could have been half a season on another show was only a couple of episodes on BSG.

Yeah, so honestly again, I do like the show, but don't make it your first choice to watch either. But yeah, it's got quite the cult following, so here it is.

2010-03-11T10:40:00.000-05:00

37: Flight of the Conchords

Finally, we again get to a show that I genuinely love. A cult show it certainly is - there's no chance more people watch it than Dancing with the Stars - but it would be silly to underestimate it's popularity - from firsthand experience I can tell how hard it is to get tickets to a Flight on the Conchords show - I got completely shut out the first time they came around New York before being able to land some while constantly hitting "refresh" on ticketmaster the next time a year later.

Flight of the Conchords is, of course, about two New Zealanders just come to America, New York in particular (I admit I have a bias towards shows that take place in New York) to succeed as a novelty folk duo. The show stars the duo - Brett and Jemaine as well as their manager Murray, who also works at the New Zealand consulate and their one fan, Mel who is creepily obsessed with them.

Flight achieves something very difficult with its songs - the rare ability to make songs that are both funny and that you actually want to listen to them over and over again. Songs like "If You're Into It" and "Business Time" actually make me laugh out loud multiple times, even when I hear the song again, but I want to listen to them because they're actually good songs, not just because they're humorous. (The funniest song might be one of the few in their repertoire not actually in the show, "Jenny." I can grant I suppose that the overall total quality of the songs maybe slipped a slight, slight bit from first to second season – but there remained some absolute classics - “Hurt Feelings” and “Too Many Dicks on the Dance Floor” included.

Brett and Jemaine play a very strange role of not being truly stupid characters but rather being absurdly naive, which makes the whole show in some kind of surreal universe. In Flight of the Conchords – there is no straight man – all five main characters who appear in just about every episode, and all of them are suitably wacky – Murray, the manager is not entirely unreasonably compared to Ricky Gervais's David Brent from the Office – truly incompetent – though with his own mannerisms – the best may be the chart he made to show the progress of his friendship with Brett and Jemaine. Mel, Flight's one fan, makes bizarre comments about wanting to sleep with the two of them, although she is married to former professor Doug, who apparently she seduced as a student (fun fact: Doug's bizarre series of credits in addition to Doug include a recurring role on Damages and a fairly important role in the journalism plot of the fifth season of the Wire along with several commercials). The duo make a show of always both trying to be nice to her and carefully avoiding her - one major plot line involves her being jealous when two new people joint the fan club. Dave, the pair's best friend and a pawn shop owner, is a bit off himself and often has trouble comprehending where they are from – on Brett's budding romance with an Australian woman – he remarks “You're from Austria and you're from somewhere no one's ever heard of.”

Of course, making fun of New Zealand and the rivalry between New Zealand and Australia are ongoing themes throughout episodes. Ultimately it's bone dry humor that gains steam upon repeated viewings - many of the laugh lines almost take a second or two of silence to really pick up on.

Flight of the Conchords is one of my favorite comedies of the decade, and that alone should earn it its spot.

2010-03-03T00:17:00.003-05:00

Minor complaint:

There is nothing more irritating when watching How I Met Your Mother than when they do the type of jokes where Ted says something on screen and then future Ted/narrator Bob Saget pauses the scene makes a comment saying the opposite - example - in yesterday's episode Ted said something like "I have a feeling things are going to work out," to which future Ted after pausing commented, "No they won't."

These jokes are incredibly unfunny and an entire waste of time. Please stop doing them.

-Andrew

2010-02-25T11:01:00.000-05:00

38: Dancing with the Stars

Celebreality was certainly one of the biggest genres to emerge out of the 2000s (or subgenres - out of the more encompassing reality genre). Starting with shows like The Surreal Life, which laughed at them, and reveled in their outright weirdness, these shows generally employed the Dist of D celebrities - maybe even F celebrities sometimes if that were a real term - is Shifty Shellshock, the lead singer of Crazy Town, and participant in Celebrity Rehab's first season -really a D celebrity? (really?)

Now I don't mean to suggest that Dancing with the Stars had A list celebrities - far from it (people are really clamoring to see more Rocco diSpirito on TV after the failure of The Restaurant (along with the failure of the actual restaurant featured on that show)) - but it changed two things - one, the show wasn't geared along the premise of simply laughing at celebs and thinking about how their life is pretty pathetic - sure it could be funny to see some of these people dancing ridiculous moves that their body types did not support, but in a far more innocuous way than laughing at someone on celebrity rehab. Second, there was one area where it really did get more or less A-list celebrities - the sports world - sure Mel B isn't exactly out there tearing up the music charts (though some of their music celebrities were legit - Mario has had hits through most of the decade) but Floyd Mayweather Jr. is generally considered one of the best fighters of the last decade - Emmitt Smith and Jerry Rice are the all-time leaders in rushing yards and receiving yards respectively and Jason Taylor and Warren Sapp are defensive stars in their own right. The Olympians they've used aren't random shot putters or equestrian stars (oxymoron?) that no one knows - they're gold medal winners from the big events that people actually care about - Kristi Yamaguchi, Maurine Greene, Shawn Johnson.

Now, I've been wrong before many, many times about shows. So maybe it's not a surprise that I was completely shocked by the success of Dancing with the Stars. Still, I don't think I was the only one - when Survivor came out - whether I liked it or not, I recognized it as something kind of new - and even when Apprentice came out I could understand what was buzzworthy - but with Dancing with the Stars - it seemed like a tiny twist on a similar theme - getting together retread celebrities for some random competition - something that could maybe hold its own on Saturday nights during summers but nothing groundbreaking. And yet the show was a giant, stupendous hit, and has more or less continued being a fairly big hit for almost five years now. I have total faith that its run is slowing now, but we're already far past being really impressive territory.

This show is the reason that networks continue to take those concepts that make you say "who greenlighted this?" and actually put them together ("Here's the pitch: We take the two things Americans love most - celebrities and dancing) . Sure, nine out of ten of them may bomb completely, but if one out of ten gets you a Dancing with the Stars, it's something you'd be foolish to ignore.

2010-02-24T09:28:00.000-05:00

39: The Shield

I honestly know very little about The Shield as well, though a fairly different show from Will and Grace. It always seemed like it had some things common with 24 - not so much that the shows were similar but that as there are certain things that give 24 its essential, uh, 24ness - things that you can count on watching any given episode or any given season, I felt like, based solely on commercials and what I read, there was a certain Shieldness, a style and specific things I could count on in any given episode of the Shield. That starts and ends with Michael Chiklis and Vic Mackey. From my made up assumptions about the show, though I think this one is true - he is the show - of course there are other characters, but like Jack Bauer, it's really about him, more than it is a true ensemble - he is the one character, without which it wouldn't be the same show.

Before The Shield, all I knew about Michael Chiklis was that he had starred as The Commish, though I had absolutely no clue what the hell The Commish was (and when I found out it was totally nothing like what I imagined it to be (which was kind of a Shield Jr.) - a comedy-drama about a small town police chief in upstate New York which lasted an amazing five seasons) (this is not to mention his work on the thankfully brief sitcom Daddio where he played a stay-at-home Dad.) The one thing about the Shield - it all seems so hard boiled - I don't think I ever saw Chikless speaking in any other tone between different grades of yelling. I've thought about watching it, the reviews I've seen have been mostly favorable. I don't want to read too specific into the plot details because I might potentially watch it, but basically it seems like it's pretty much about cops who do whatever it takes to put criminals away - even if that means resorting to illegal methods (you don't say!) and in turn conduction other illegal activities such as selling drugs or operating with organized crime.

The Shield more or less put FX on the map in terms of original shows. FX is up there with the USAs and the TNTs in terms of quantity and success of original series but it all started with The Shield. I'm honestly hesitant to read too much because I might want to watch it one day, but we'll just assume that Vic Mackey does a lot of bad things, some of which are in the ultimate goal of good things, and that a whole bunch of criminals and other cops try to take him down and possibly succeed by the end of the series.

It was definitely kind of a big deal though - it wasn't necessarily ground-breaking in its idea, but it was consisted lauded for its real-life portrayal of LA street gangs. Seems like good enough to make the list.

2010-02-23T09:03:00.000-05:00

Someone needs to tell Train that they have no business with a hit single.

2010-02-07T10:53:00.000-05:00

40: Will and Grace

To be honest, and probably not all that surprisingly, I didn't see that much Will and Grace on TV. I saw it as more or less an ally of Friends in the war between Friends and Seinfeld to control NBC's Must See Thursday night TV, and with Will and Grace coming on the year Seinfeld was gone, it was clear who had won - the newer, younger Kobe (Friends) would stay and be the king of Thursday night, while the older, veteran Shaq (Seinfeld) would be traded (well, it finished, and of its own accord really - could have gone on for as long as it wanted). Friends was assembling allies now that Thursday night was its own and saw a potential strong ally in Will and Grace, and indeed Will and Grace held onto a Must See TV Thursday spot longer than anyone would besides Friends and Seinfeld (until maybe the Office beats it out eventually, maybe (and also is it as amazing to anyone else how long Thursday night has managed to last as the premier comedy programming night for NBC - wikipedia even has an entry about it - in almost thirty years, even as the shows changed, the night has lived on - and we all know about the legendary trouble NBC had during the 90s and early '00s NBC had trying to fill the night out around Seinfeld, Friends, and yes, later Will and Grace - sure we remember Jesse and Veronica's Closet - but what about Leah Remini in "Fired Up" with a winning tagline like "First she got fired, then she got fired up." or "Battery Park" starring Elizabeth Perkins of minor Weeds fame, about which all wiki has to say is that it's about a police department and that "Seven episodes are registered with the United States Copyright Office." and Leap of Faith, the midseason replacement for Inside Schwartz, which apparently stars a bunch of kind of famous people - Sarah Paulson, Tim Meadows, House's Lisa Edelstein, Veronica Mars/Party Down's Ken Marino, and Regina King and yet the best info IMDB has about the show is the User Comment tagline, "Finding this show funny would be a HUGE Leap of Faith!!!" along with lines from that comment such as - " I tried to be as open-minded and receptive as possible, but I think Schindler's List had more humor than this piece of schlock.")

So, back onto Will and Grace. Way back in my entry on Queer Eye I mentioned that Queer Eye and another show paved the way for gays into the television mainstream, and Will and Grace is indeed, that show. I honestly don't have all that much to say about it - like Queer Eye, it got mixed reception from the gay community - yay for putting gay characters at the center of a show on network TV, nay be still containing many of the same stereotypes, blah, blah, blah. When it started I didn't think there was any chance of it becoming the monster it became,
further devaluing the Emmys by not only winning one for best series, but also becoming one of three shows (impress your friends: Golden Girls and All in the Family are the others) where all the principals of the show - in this case, Debra Messing, Eric McCormack, Sean Hayes and Megan Mullaly all won at least one Emmy for acting.

Other than that, was is there really - it was a sitcom, it did especially well amongst the 18-49 crowd, it was the first TV success for Debra Messing after the failure of Ned and Stacey and the even more short-lived Prey (I think I'm the only one who even saw an episode of that show.) It also had to survive the incredibly annoying voice of Megan Mullaly (who has now been cast on my beloved Party Down, but I have faith that Rob Thomas will redeem her).

Also, apparently it has, what I find a really strange, and kind of depressing final episode. Apparently Will and Grace stop living together and don't talk for a period of about fifteen years while their respective kids grow up. Now, at the end of course, their kids somehow meet and marry, leading to a reconciliation, but still, that's fifteen years best friends and roommate didn't talk to each other. That qualifies as depressing in my book.

That's about all, #40.

2010-01-18T12:31:00.000-05:00

41: Firefly

Gone too soon - that can be said about many, many shows, but on this list, this is the probably the show I feel second or third strongest about it (yes, I can't decide whether I would have preferred this or another show on the list to continue more), and the other shows at least lasted more than one season. As I seem to have counted Buffy as more of a 90s show and Dollhouse is not making any list (I haven't seen it yet, so I can't comment on its quality, but certainly hasn't been all that successful or acclaimed), I can talk about my love for all things Joss Whedon in this entry.

Firefly is a member of an underused genre, the space western (probably joining Cowboy Bebop in the elite ranks). A crew of outlaws, the leaders of whom fought for the wrong side in a few years old civil war, traveling around the world fulfilling missions for hire, but not without helping out a few down and out people along the way. It's got all the Whedon staples - there's two ongoing on and off love interests (Captain Mal Reynolds and Inara, the companion and engineer Kaylee and doctor Simon Tam), strong female characters, twisting traditional things on their head - companion Inara, essentially a high class prostitute, is treated as in a position great respect, and the show is fulled with very distinctive dialogue, including some chinese because I think somewhere in the back story China was supposed to have played an important role in getting into space.

Although most episodes contained a single main plot, as in Buffy, the world of Firefly was rife with possibilities - exploring the background laid out within the universe - the civil war that had made Mal an outlaw, further the back stories of each of the characters, making Shepherd Book interesting by actually revealing whatever it was that was so mysterious about him.

To be honest, it took me a couple of episodes to really get into Firefly - I had to get a feel for the different characters and just the way the show goes - which I think is the way I felt about the beginning of Buffy as well, but when I got into it, I was hooked. The second half just flew by - even though the show was not particularly serial, each time one ended I wanted to see another one, and of course, as happens with a one season show, just when you're right in it, it's over.

I liked Serenity, I know some people who didn't. Basically, my view was that I'd take anything that was more Firefly, and it was, so I liked it, but it certainly does things that probably would not have happened had the show been renewed.

So there will always be a dream of what could have been. Alas, all I can do is wear a browncoats T-shirt and award it a place on the list for the cult value it generated and wonder if Fox gave Dollhouse a second year, why not Firefly?

2009-12-20T09:11:00.000-05:00

42: 30 Rock

I amazingly made my feelings on 30 Rock to some extent clear on this blog before - it's a stellar, good overall, show, but for some reason there has developed around it this bizarre critical consensus that it is the best comedy on television (certainly as far as Emmy has to say about it). Like Steve Nash a few years back in the NBA, 30 Rock is good, sure, but the praise has become overwhelming that you can't help but think of something you like without also thinking of it being overrated (though I do think it's gotten to the point where Steve Nash is so overrated, he's underrated, but 30 Rock hasn't reached that point yet). 30 Rock was well-liked from the outset but it cemented its status and Tina Fey's as a critical darling with her extremely well-received take on Sarah Palin for Saturday Night Live, which may have revived any commercial fortunes for the show as well (probably Fey has more to thank Sarah Palin for, after maybe Barack Obama, maybe).

30 Rock took its time finding its way - for the first half dozen episodes or so, I thought it was pretty lacking, and it was not helped by my preconceived notions of it being overrated, before I even saw it, and none of this was helped by the multiple appearances of Rachel Dratch, who was originally cast to play Jenna, which would have been an absolute disaster. It found its sea legs though, helped by the likability of Tina Fey and Alec Baldwin's performance as Jack Donaghy, one of the only people in the show who can actually act, and whose role really is almost equal to Fey's. What I originally thought would be a true ensemble show is really tiered - Baldwin and Fey, then Jane Krakowski's Jenna Maroney and Tracy Morgan's Tracy Jordan, and then everyone else - there's always some Kenneth (Jack McBreyer) and sometimes some Pete (Scott Adsit) and Frank (Judah Friedlander) and maybe others.

There's sometimes a little too much Kenneth for my taste - he's a one-dimensional character who shouldn't really get plots, but rather have just a couple of lines an episode, but overall it's a solid show, and has been successful enough on occasion to get me to say a couple of its phrases repeatedly ("shut it down," "I want to go to there"). Unlike How I Met Your Mother, which I think is strongest with its gimmicks sometimes, I think 30 Rock is often weakest with its gimmicks - I was not a big fan for example, of the Jon Hamm episode in which the premise was that he was so handsome that he lived in a bubble, in which everyone would bend over backwards for him (my bigger problem with this episode, and I'd be fine if women told me that I was wrong, is that Jon Hamm didn't seem quite handsome enough to carry out that premise in a believable way for me).

I know this is the cliche answer for the highlight of 30 Rock, but for me, it probably is still the episode in which Alec Baldwin portrays Tracy Jordan's mother and father as well as several other people from his childhood. I couldn't stop cracking up watching it the first time, and though I certainly laugh bit watching 30 Rock, I don't crack up like that very often.

Also, 30 Rock are complete guest star whores - barely an episode goes by it seems without guest stars. I don't necessarily say this as either a good or bad thing but they really take advantage of their connections, and surprisingly, considering it would be so easy to fit the guest stars in as playing exaggerated versions of themselves as in Entourage or Extras, usually playing characters.

So, watch 30 Rock. It's good, it's funny - it's just not the best comedy on TV.

2009-12-19T17:11:00.001-05:00

43: The Apprentice

Towards the beginning of this list, I covered the Weakest Link, and I noted that there was a short while where the phrase "You are the weakest link" was used and universally recognized. Well, cube that, and just maybe you have some approximation of what The Apprentice's signature catch phrase, "You're Fired" shouted by Donald Trump replete with a finger point for emphasis. There is nothing more Donald Trump seeks than fame, and he certainly had had his share over the years for his real estate, but more for his outsized personality and his divorces. By the early 2000s he was definitely still well known, but amplified his celebrity several fold, especially amongst younger viewers, with The Apprentice.

We all know how it works by now - the "ultimate job interview," as its advertisements proclaimed, starts when a group of contestants is split into two teams, and both assigned a task. The winning team goes through to the next week, while the losing team must go to the board room for a chat with Trump and his two associates, after which the project manager of the losing team - each team has a leader each week responsible for making sure their team completes the task - chooses up to the three people to go to the board with him or her and after more evaluation Trump fires one. Repeat next week, until all the contestants are eliminated except for one.

Oh, of course there are twists and turns along the way - sometimes multiple people are fired, or the winning team can help choose who to eliminate, but more or less it's the same thing. Unlike some other reality shows, the host, Trump was really the star of this one (that and the rampant product placement to be found throughout the show). No contestant generated all that much fame - Bill Rancic ring a bell? I doubt it - I only knew because my dad watched at the time, and maybe season 1 contestant Omarosa has some minority notoriety amongst seasoned celebreality fans.

Apprentice waned in popularity over the years - how much of Trump's schtick can America take? - and in its attempt to stay relevant, or even just on the air, hit upon two dependable reality TV tricks of last resort - a move in location, to LA, and the inevitable celebrity edition, which showcased the business acumen of such luminaries as Baldwin brother-turned conservative Christian Stephen Baldwin, country music star Trace Atkins, and the Sopranos' Big Pussy, Vincent Pastore. It clearly was on its last legs, but manages to continue ticking, at least for now - another celebrity apprentice is on its way in the spring of 2010.

2009-12-09T13:57:00.006-05:00

I'll admit it. I really haven't seen very much Smallville, and I'm constantly surprised every year when I find out that, yes, it is still on - it's covered almost every year of the decade, starting in 2001, and entering its 9th season in 2009. And to be honest, the only way I usually find it is because I figure out that the reason some hot chick is famous is because she was on the show - Laura Vandervoort (currently of ABC's '80s sci-fi remake V "fame") was Supergirl on Smallville, apparently.

I'd also be lying if I didn't say I really wanted to cheat and use the Smallville entry to talk about a major 00's phenomena of which Smallville is a part (and really the only live action television entry) - the revivial of the comic book on film and screen.

This was such a big deal in the decade that I felt it has to be mentioned just for a couple words at least - starting with the first X-Men movie in 2000 and the first Spider-man movie in 2002, that basically spent film executives everywhere scurrying off to find comic movies to make - be they revival of huge classic heroes, Superman and Batman style, or nonclassic heroes at all in Sin City, or 300, or perhaps most ambitiously, with Watchman, the race was off. The sheer number of comic book films that have been produced is astounding, and with often decades of character biography, they're ready made for sequels if they do well, which most have - Daredevil, The Punisher and multiple Hulk movies are the exception (not a surprise - the Hulk sucks).

And unlike some of the other trends - this one's not ending any time soon - the existing successful franchises are likely continuing - more Spider-mans, Batmans, Ironmans - and more are on their way - Green Lantern and the Avengers seem on the horizon.

I suppose I should go back to the show for at least a brief moment, but I don't have much to say about it - it's always been kind of popular enough to keep it on for this long which is certainly an impressive achievement but it's really never rose to any mainstream or big time cult status, at least any that I've seen. I don't have any strong feelings about it - I find it minorly interesting - I might consider reading the wikipedia character pages in the future, but I highly doubt I will end up watching many episodes. But yeah, they picked no better time to come out with the show, and whether they were a cause or a symptom of the comic book revival, credit to them, it's a good thing.

2009-12-08T22:59:00.000-05:00

45: Mythbusters

I gradually became aware of the minor Mythbusters phenomena amongst a certain demographic, notably my demographic - 15-35 year old guys who like to watch people blow stuff up, but feel classy about it, because it's in the name of science - science turned cool, like the Bill Nye of the 00s.

It's a great idea - test popular myths to see if they can really happen - and there's something pleasingly definitive result - Busted, Comfirmed, or the always disappointingly undefinitive Plausible. It started out testing pretty well-known myths - early episodes inlcluded solving "Can Pop Rocks & Soda, when eaten simultaneously, cause the eater's stomach to rupture? "(Busted) and "Will using a cell phone near a gas pump cause an explosion?" (Busted). Of course, most of them are busted - but there's just enough confirmed and plausible to make you hold out hope at every opportunity, just like every once in a while, there will be a not guilty verdict in Law & Order to let you know it could happen, and enjoy the guilty verdicts each even more.

It stars Adam Savage, also known as the cool one with glasses, and Jamie Hyneman, also known as the walrus, the dude with the beret, or simply, the lame one. Adam Savage, it should be noted had a brief acting career before Mythbusters - most not remembered for his appearance as drowning man in Billy Joel's video to You're Only Human (Second Wind). Along to help them out, later on in the show, was their B team who matured and were eventually empowered to work on mythbusting themselves (I assume mythbusting is a verb). They were in - Jamie and Adam were even big enough for a guest appearance on CSI.

The best parts of course, were when they had competitions between the two, such as when they had a hovercraft racing contest.

By now - that they're stretching for myths is clear - 2009 episodes test such "myths" as "Can a person swim faster in syrup than in water?" (Plausible) and "Can popcorn be cooked with lasers or explosions? ," (Busted) myths, that at least in my part of the country I had never heard of - and such clearly non-literal expressions as "Can someone really be knocked out of their socks? "

Mythbusters is one of those shows that gets the benefit of the doubt because it's on a high cable channel, that has maybe four show as flagship programming (Discovery Channel - Deadliest Catch? Dirty Jobs? Man vs. Wild? Maybe Cash Cab?) and can show episodes over and over again to fill up its air time. But, that being said, I have to worry if its fifteen minutes as a minor phenomena is just about up.