Saturday Night Live this week is a rerun, and that’s a disappoinment.
Oh, I fully expect lots of reruns from that series. But you see, Mrs. Nat’s TV, the wee one, and myself are taking a trip to the east coast next weekend, and it would’ve been nice to actually see Saturday Night Live for the first time in a long while.
The “next week on The West Wing” trailer pushed the next episode as the big reunion episode, with Rob Lowe showing up. And that doesn’t impress me so much; sure, Lowe was the big name on what was supposed to be the regular cast for the show at the beginning (Sheen was supposed to be a rare gest star.) But at this point… the folks on the West Wing are The West Wing Folks. Lowe hasn’t gone on to big things; he had two series which were quick flops. So it’ll be nice to see him on the show, where he really was quite good, but in terms of being impressed with what an episode has to offer – tonight’s episode had both Stockard Channing and Emily Proctor, both of whom have moved on from West Wing to actual ongoing series, and managed to work this episode into their schedule. (Okay, okay, Out Of Practice isn’t exactly guaranteed to go on much longer, but I think it probably has already lasted more episodes than The Lyon’s Den and Dr. Vegas combined.)
The Bedford Diaries comes from some folks with great TV drama creds. And it has a great setting for a drama, a university. And it has an aggressive premise…
No, scratch that, it has a formula.
The premise is that there’s this sex-themed seminar where the students have all pledged confidentiality, and thus can chat about their real sex lives. So it’s got that high tawdry content, ‘cuz the kids like the sex. And the students keep video diaries, like the guys on The Real World, ‘cuz the kids like The Real World. And each week, the class has a theme, and surprise surprise, the episode is built around that theme, ‘cuz the kids don’t like subtlety. This is meant to be a teen show, but it reeks of desperate earnestness.
If there was a moment that made me suspect I would not enjoy the one episode I’ve caught of this show, it was the moment Milo Ventimiglia appeared on screen. Milo is the guy you may better know (and perhaps loathe) as aggrevating Jesse on The Gilmore Girls, who was never convincing in having the sweet young lead fall for him. And he was basically the same bad boy with a different name on American Dreams. Now I can’t see him without falling into a default irritation, and there’s nothing in his abrasive school newspaper editor character that makes me like him any more. I dunno, maybe the teen girls swoon for him. But I am neither teen nor a girl, and swoon I do not.
This one is not for me, and with its awkward mix, I suspect it’s not much for anybody.
Once again, I’ve been nominated for an Eisner Award, the biggest award in the English language comics market. This time, it is for my editing 24 Hour Comics Day Highlights 2005, nominated in the category of “Best Anthology”.
The odds of actually winning the award are pretty slim. But I’ll gladly take the nomination!
The widow and daughter of Jerry Siegel, the co-creator of Superman, have legally recaptured the copyright to Superboy, the version of Superman as a boy living in Smallville. Now, let’s set aside the somewhat odd thought that Superboy is a separate copyright, not merely a derivative of Superman; strange as that may sound, that’s settled law, as the judge just reaffirmed an early court decision on the matter some six decades old.
Now, the folks at Time-Warner are faced with a charge of violating that copyright via their TV show Smallville, which they continued producing and airing since the Siegels’ now-validated recapture of the rights in November 2004. Their argument is going to hinge on Smallville not being a derivative of Superboy, apparently claiming that this is the story of someone who is becoming Superman, rather than the already-powered younger character that was Siegel’s Superboy. There will be some major roadblocks in that argument, I reckon, not the least of which is that the series relies on supporting cast from the Superboy comic book series (such as Lana Lang, who first appeared in Superboy issue 10.)
But what I’m being amused by is the thought of “what would a TV series derived from the Siegel copyright look like?” After all, the Siegel estate merely recaptured the copyright. They did not get the trademarks, which would cover such valuable things as the name “Superboy” and the distinctive Superman costume and chest logo. So they would need to do a TV series bereft of the common superhero name and the costume.
In other words, they’d have to do a series that sounds a lot like Smallville.
Writing these reviews, there are two kinds of reviews that are both easy and fun to write. One is the review of a great new show, like, say, My Name is Earl. It’s easy because you really don’t have to explain why a good show works, because it works because it works. It’s fun because, if anyone is actually reading these things who isn’t automatically sampling things anyway (and that’s really an open question, I admit), you get to turn them on to something good.
The other is the review of blatant garbage like Teachers, both because there’s a lot of fun verbiage you can use in explaining how a thing is bad, and because there’s nothing like a destructive review to serve as revenge for a bad work having taken precious TV watching minutes away.
But then there are shows like Pepper Dennis, shows that neither make you giddy nor make you say “how on earth was this put on the air”? It’s a reasonably made example of a show that isn’t quite aimed at me.
The show is set in the world of TV news, a realm which has given us good shows in the past, whether the comedic take of Mary Tyler Moore or the dramatic edge of WIOU. Pepper is an intrepid girl reporter, in a world in which those shiny pretty local news reporters are more likely to be uncovering corruption and talking people down from building ledges than to be covering press conferences, visiting the local demonstration, and otherwise doing the lets-cover-the-things-presented-to-us-as-news and the hey-we-listened-to-the-police-band coverage that local TV reporters spend their time doing. No, she’s the TV daughter of Lois Lane and His Girl Friday. Pepper is a have-it-all kind of gal who actaully has it all except a man and the anchor position she wants. When she gives in to her lusts and has a one-night stand, anyone who follows the modern TV cliches knows that the one-night-stand guy will show up the next day as the new guy brought in to fill the position she was aiming for.
But despite that sort of triteness and the over-the-topness, the show has its charm, most of which comes from Rebecca Romijn, playing the title character. Chipper, driven, but emotionally clumsy may be a stock character, but played well, it’s an endearing one. It’s a comedic drama, more Ally McBeal than anything serious, but the situations (the romantic conflict with the new anchor, and the differences with her meeker, milder, yet personally clumsy sister) just aren’t that enthralling to me. All in all, smoothly made, but a little too silly without quite being funny enough for me. But if I’m sitting there and it’s on, hey, no problem.
Not that that’s likely to happen, since it’s up against House, Scrubs, and most importantly, Veronica Mars. And that last points to a rather large dilemma that Pepper Dennis faces. It’s tough enough for a midseason show to make it to the fall schedule… but when your network is about to merge its schedule with another network, so that at least half of the existing shows have to die, squeezing your way in becomes that much harder.
NEW GOVERNMENT INITIATIVE: NIGHTLIGHT SAVINGS TIME
As part of a new electricity conservation drive, President Bush today signed into law the Nightlight Savings Time initiative. “Just as Daylight Savings Time is designed to stop wasting the daylight during hours when its not useful, so is Nightlight Savings Time meant to save electricity at times when the nightlights are not used. Our studies found that while people leave their nightlights plugged in and on all through the night, it is very rare for anyone to be up and stirring, and thus needing a nighlight, between the hours of 2 and 3 AM.
“As such, starting tonight and going every night through fall, every American will have to get up at 2 AM and unplug their nightlight. Then at 3 AM, they get up again and plug them back in.”
Mark Evanier thinks that the fact that “Grandpa” Al Lewis was born in 1923 makes his claims that he was involved in the Sacco and Vanzetti defense in 1927 a “fib”. Me, I think it makes it a particularly impressive achievement!
Andre Braugher is a great actor. He does smart well. He does focused well. He does clever well.
Since his award-winning run on Homicide, I’ve seen him repeatedly in projects that are earnest, but never clever, and that is a shame. We get one of them again in Thief, his new series on FX. Andre leads a team of high-end thieves. This isn’t one of those unnatural heist shows; his thievery is fairly straight-forward. But living in New Orleans, which last year switched from having culturally-interesting decay to having devestation, and working on the wrong side of the moral life, bad things are happening around him and to him.
The show is shot dark and grungy, and it feels dark and grungy. There is no hope. If he manages to pull through his immediate problems, then he is still a thief. And there is no fun, because this is not the loony fun usual Hollwood version of the leading man thief. No hope and no fun make this a hard show to watch.
Andre plays the part well, and for you (well, us) Arrested Development fans, we get to see Mae Whitman, who played George Michael’s girlfriend Ann. But those looking for entertaiment aren’t likely to find it here.
Between this and the short-lived Iraq-based Over There, FX may well be diving into physical areas of drama before the viewers are ready for them.
Evanier posts this bit of bunkum that is apparently traversing the interweb:
On Wednesday of this week, at two minutes and three seconds after 1:00 in the morning, the time and date will be 01:02:03 04/05/06. This won’t ever happen again.
Of course it will — at 01:02:03 04/05/2106, 01:02:03 04/05/2206, 01:02:03 04/05/2306, and so on.
Better still, if you’re not on military time, it happens again 12 hours later.
