7 posts tagged “more tv”

Let's talk about MyNetworkTV. The idea is so overdue that it almost seems quaint; thirteen-week stripped serials that tell arced dramatic stories, and then are over, poof, and another one starts up.

Because of the "gap" left by the merger of UPN and the WB into the CW, lots of local affiliates all of a sudden had hours without programming, and a whole network was left with empty prime time. So now, from 8 to 10 (Pacific, I don't know how many feeds there are) we're getting Desire and The Fashion House, based on classic telenovelas that have enthralled millions of our neighbors down south. These are full American remakes, of course, drawing talent like Bo Derek, Morgan Fairchild, and Tippi Hedrin (Tippi Hedrin, people!) in Fashion House, which, according to its website, "delves deep into the glamorous, yet unscrupulous, world of the fashion industry and how greed, lust and blind ambition make or break careers, and hearts, in the business." Desire, a serial about mobstery restaraunteur brothers, stars Sofia Milos, near and dear to us from CSI: Miami's many adventures.

Every weekday for thirteen weeks we'll get another episode of the unfolding mystery, and as a bonus, the ADD-ridden among us will get special "catch-up" episodes on the weekends, where the week's events are condensed into an easy-to-swallow hour. And then! When the story's over, the shows go away. And whole new shows start, with whole new stories. Revolutionary!

The shift from the rigid network format (half-hour or hour, twenty-two week episodic structure that builds its story in time for sweeps and hiatuses) to a story-based one is the natural evolution of the medium. With DVD boxed sets and bittorrent downloads, we're eating TV series by the season, not the month. Me, I've only watched "24" on DVD. I just wait till the season's over and go to Amoeba so I can consume Jack Bauer's entire day in one go, and I have been known to do just that -- though, unlike Jack, I pause to eat and pee and get from place to place, so it usually takes me longer than twenty-four hours to get through a season.

And let's all look at Doctor Who, the classic version, for a change: here's a show that's been producing story-based arcs for something like twenty-six seasons. And the BBC still remains a rich proving ground for short-form serials; six-episode, thirteen-episode, three-episode stories come and go, year in and out.

Now, we've had our share of excellent miniseries, don't get me wrong, and from Roots to Band of Brothers to that one where William H. Macy had really big ears, I love me a good miniseries. I sat through Taken! I mean, mostly for Matt Frewer and Dakota Fanning, but still. Ten hours! I love a story that takes ten hours!

MyNetworkTV has all the hallmarks of failure, from a cheap-ass logo to programming that looks like it was shot on a sound stage behind the Border Patrol station in Tijuana, but it's got nothing to lose, and it can afford to be shameless, and that just might propel it to that weird sort of hypnotic success. Soap operas run for twenty seasons, not because they retain viewership from start to finish but because everyone dips in, once in a while, enjoys a season or two of Luke and Laura and then goes back to college or whatever and leaves the series for the next generation to enjoy. This leads me to believe that we will eat this kind of storytelling up.

Thanks to the nice folks at Laurel's TV Picks, namely Laurel, I've got our fall TiVo/download schedule mapped out to the hour:

Mondays

8:30-9 How I Met Your Mother CBS (9/18)
9-10 Heroes NBC (9/25)
10-11 Studio 60 NBC (9/18)

Tuesdays

8-9 House FOX (fall, 9/5)
8-9 NCIS CBS (winter, 9/19)
9-10 House FOX (winter)

Wednesdays

8-9 Bones FOX (8/30)
8-8:30 Twenty Good Years NBC (10/4)
8:30-9 30 Rock NBC (10/11)

Thursdays

8-9 Survivor CBS (9/14)

Fridays

8-9 Bones FOX (winter)

Battlestar Galactica
Stargate: Atlantis

Sat

-nothing-

Sundays

8-9 The Amazing Race CBS (9/17)
9-9:30 Family Guy FOX (9/10)

+ nonspecific FX/TNT shows, like probably "Rescue Me"
+ HBO shows ("Big Love")
+ BBC/ITV shows (Aftersun, Torchwood, GW X-mas special, DW, Little Britain, 2 Pints, Catherine Tate, etc)
+ misc procedurals that conflict with the above (or midseason) and will therefore be downloaded and saved for dry spells and special occasions (Jericho, Kidnapped, Vanished, Traveler)

Or, How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Beeb

I finally had to take "anglophilia" off my disinterests list. Not that, up until now, I wasn't interested in England, the way I'm interested in Norway and Fiji and the Falklands, but I never felt the need to fangirl the UK, the way some misplaced Americans do, reaching out for some beautiful, centuries-old, Stonehenge-crumbling historic past with kings and dragons and Shakespeare. I always identified more as a straight-up pomo American, too thick with irony to appreciate any of that very genuine, very poncy history that draped itself all over the Queen's England. England was a modernist icon, I thought, trapped in endearing -- but all the while very earnest -- echoes of the past.

Let's not forget I'm talking about television. And though it's 2006 it took me this long to get past my own stereotyping -- up till now England had been that place with four TV channels and nothing on but Masterpiece Theatre and Fawlty Towers, and all of that was adorably quaint but had very little to do with me, over here, slamming Rocky Mountain's finest ale and mainlining Family Guy, here on the brink of the second revolution in three hundred years, here in this country that's hasn't even reached her two hundred and fiftieth birthday yet. I was busily being the young punk runaway, and I'd very decidedly cast off the shackles of the Mother Country, 'cause fat lotta good they'd do me over here.

Tony Kushner, in the early 90s, back before 9/11, before air attacks on our home soil, let Louis say this, in Angels in America: Millennium Approaches.

LOUIS: [...]In spite of all this the thing about America, I think, is that ultimately we're different from every nation on Earth, in that, with people here of every race we can't...Ultimately what defines us isn't race, but politics. Not like any European country where there's an insurmountable fact of a kind of racial, or ethnic, monopoly, or monolith, like all Dutchmen, I mean, Dutch people, are, well, Dutch, and the Jews of Europe were never Europenans, just a small problem. Facing the monolith. But here there are so many small problems, it's really just a collection of small problems, the monolith is missing. Oh, I mean, of course I suppose there's the monolith of White America. White Straight Male America.

BELIZE: Which is not unimpressive, even among monoliths.

LOUIS: Well, no, but when the race thing gets taken care of, and I don't mean to minimalize how major it is, I mean I know it is, this is a really, really incredibly racist country but it's like, well, the British. I mean, all those blue-eyed pink people. And it's just weird, you know, I mean, I'm not all that Jewish-looking, or...well, maybe I am, but, you know, in New York, everyone is...well, not everyone, but so many are but so but in England, in London I walk into bars and I feel like Sid the Yid, you know I mean like Woody Allen in Annie Hall, with the payess and the gabardine coat, like, never, never anywhere so much -- [...] in London, there's just...and at one point I met this black gay guy from Jamaica who talked with a lilt but said his family'd been living in London since before the Civil War -- the American one -- and how the English never let him forget for a minute that he wasn't blue-eyed and pink and I said yeah, me too, these people are anti-Semites and he said yeah but the British Jews have the clothing business all sewed up and blacks there can't get a foothold. And it was an incredibly awkward moment of just...I mean, here we were in this bar that was gay but it was a pub, you know, the beams and the plaster and those horrible little, like, two-day-old fish and egg sandwiches -- and just so British, and so old, and I felt, well, there's no way out of this because both of us are, right now, too much immersed in this history, hope is dissolved in the sheer age of this place, where race is what counts and there's no real hope of change -- it's the racial destiny of the Brits that matters to them, not their political destiny, whereas in America... [...] Racists just try to use race here as a tool in a political struggle. It's not really about race. Like the spiritualists try to use that stuff, are you enlightened, are you centered, channeled, whatever, this reaching out for a spiritual past in a country where no indigenous spirits exist -- only the Indians, I mean Native American spirits and we killed them off so now, there are no gods here, no ghosts and spirits in America, there are no angels in America, no spiritual past, no racial past, there's only the political.

And I was eager to fight for our political future, because America felt like the future, even though "future" might simply be what fills the vacuum in a world without a past. And because of that, I was threatened by all that past, all those beams and fish-and-egg sandwiches, all that deep racial history and tradition that paralyzed England and enabled us to open a can of whup-ass on y'all at Yorktown.

Then the Millennium was Approaching, and since then, the millennium came, and brought with it our first attacks on civilian soil; the first serious foreign attack on America since Pearl Harbor, and we all recoiled a little bit and realized how our parents must have felt, wondering what we'd been up to with all our tongue-in-cheek irony and sweeping entitled sense of security, like we really were the Brave New World and nothing could touch us.

Point is, we're not as cutting-edge as I'd thought we were, and England's not so backwards modernist as all that. Where we're actually quite paranoid, stuffy and neurotic and afraid of jinxing ourselves, England's let loose over the last decade, and all of a sudden those four channels are pushing at the parameters of what we've come to expect in television, and over here, the WB and UPN collapse in on one another, folding under the weight of trying to support all that teenaged, contrived sarcasm.

Our new hit shows, "My Name is Earl," "Supernatural," "Battlestar Galactica," "Grey's Anatomy," are so much more earnest than anyone would have dared pitch in '99, in 2000, back when it was all edges and irony. Now we find ourselves craving some security in the familiar, the old tropes of love and loss, heroes and monsters. 2006's television's just 50's television grown up, where the men are men and the doctors are doctors and the heroes kill the monsters and the girls are witty, and clever, and behind every good man.

I watched Coupling and some Eddie Izzard specials in '03 and '04, watched The Office and Little Britain in '05, Green Wing and Doctor Who in '06. (I also watched AbFab in the late 90s and early 00s, but French and Saunders didn't do much better than Fry and Laurie to subvert my BBC stereotypes, still the same sort of classic combination of slapstick and vulgarity, no?)

In the optimistic economic eighties, we had yuppie TV like "thirtysomething," like "The Wonder Years" (yuppie nostalgia) and "Murphy Brown," like "Family Ties" and "The Cosby Show."

In the counterculture 90s we had "Ally McBeal" and her dancing babies. We had "The Simpsons" and "Seinfeld" and we reinvented the evening soap with "Melrose Place" and "90210."

We got confused in the 00s, the decade we came under attack and went to war for reasons no one could really identify. For the first couple years we played it safe, we returned to Family Values, we carefully filed down anything that might mean fear. Aaron Sorkin left "The West Wing" just like Clinton left the White House, and both the fictionalized and real versions of the West Wing became treacleized and stopped having anything to say.

And we crawled out of the post-9/11 safety cushion with our wallets out in front of us; we bought what came next with our checkbooks. We got "Family Guy" back on TV because we bought the DVDs, because producers of media were too scared to take a gamble on what we might want, and instead gave us what they already knew we did. "Lost" came and reminded mainstream America of the escapist power of science fiction and the paranormal, and in a move that hasn't been seen since the Formica-plated 1960s, we brought back sci-fi with a vengeance. Sixteen paranormal themed shows premiered, and were as quickly cancelled.

Which isn't to say some people didn't get it right. After all, the 00s gave us "Arrested Development" and "Scrubs," and saw the practical death of the four-camera sitcom. And in our nostalgia we did some things right, like the reimagined, sexy "Battlestar Galactica" and the completely user-friendly and female-viewer friendly "Supernatural" and "Stargate: Atlantis."

But the UK beat us to it, lapped us, paced us, set the standard for television in the millennium. While we were busy nursing our wounds and looking for anything unthreatening, the UK went wild with some of the most threatening, raunchiest television ever. Queer as Folk in 1999 came like a big fuck-you to the United States, for all our new-world mentality, we weren't the first to launch a big gay drama, and then, like we were afraid anything new we dreamed up would look pale in comparison, we just went ahead and took QAF and adapted it for the US. Like there are no other gay stories to tell; like the Beeb had Jossed us good. We took "The Office" for the same reason; we tried to take "Coupling" as if we didn't really understand that, minus the no-holds-barred penis jokes, minus the really human awkward unflushable insights, NBC-clean, "Coupling" wasn't really any better than any four-camera sitcom we could have created ourselves, stock, stock and barrel.

So the UK reinvents "Doctor Who" and, across the pond, we reinvent "Battlestar Galactica." DW adds a canonically gay character in Captain Jack; we heteronormalize a queer relationship (Apollo/Starbuck) but also manage to get a lesbian icon out of the deal. BSG's poised like an epic space adventure, but what it privileges is the domestic -- maternal and paternal leaders, with Conservative military and religious ideals, lead their flock home to the bosom of the promised land, and we hear what we've heard in the United States since that September day in 2001, namely, "wouldn't it be nice to feel safe again?"

Russell Davies' "Doctor Who," while reimagined in much the same way, inventing comedy and irony in place of bad special effects and totally unscary robot villains, has the opposite moral, and that's where the UK's lapped us. "Doctor Who" doesn't say, "there's no place like home" -- in fact, it posits that we're living in a world of infinite possibility, where almost anywhere is an adventure and everyplace beats home. BBC used the same old tin trashcan Daleks and spent its focus on reinventing the characters, and letting them tell (in "The Christmas Invasion," and others) contemporary political stories, and a timeless love story, with humor and ambition and hope. Maybe the money David Eick and SCI FI used to make the Cylons look so good would have been better spent trying to inject some wit, and some sense of adventure, into Galactica's sprawling and humorless morality play.

And that's where the Beeb has dared to revolutionize television for the new millennium. Comedies like "Green Wing" play with taboos I wouldn't have known the world was ready for, stuck in backwards America in 2006. UK television's got nothing left that's sacred, and that in and of itself's an example of how far they've left us behind. In "Little Britain," Dafydd's "the only gay in the village," and for the first time we've got not only a canonically gay regular on a TV series, but we've got several, which allows us to mock Dafydd's one gay stereotype by holding it up against lots and lots of others. Because America still hasn't learned that there's more than one gay story to tell, more than one gay in the village after all.

Watching British TV now is like seeing ourselves in our parents. I can totally see where we got our wit, our sense of irony, our stubbornness and underdogsmanship. And I can see where we went wrong, where we got too big for our britches and where we didn't live up to their expectations. In "Green Wing," Guy challenges Mac to name five famous lesbians. Mac immediately goes to the Brontes, which Guy blows off as too easy, off limits. When was the last time anyone on American TV offered up the name of a nineteenth century author as part of casual banter? Next time Turk asks JD to name five famous lesbians, furrow your brow and look for it.

I still stand by the idea of America, and I love that this country's all future and no past, all potential and no shackles, because somehow even our most embarassing moments, our lapses in judgement, our slavery days, all feel very recent and natural, the growing pains of a country too big and faced with more freedom than it knew how to handle. But we got attacked, in this decade, and it changed us, despite feeling like we were all grown up in big-boy pants and way past changing, past being sensitive or scared.

"Doctor Who" 2005, "The Empty Child." The Anschluss has come to London and the kids are hiding from the air raids and Rose tells the girl not to worry, she's from London, fifty years from now. They win this one.

I was in Brooklyn on September 11th of '01, and Rose in the air raids reminded me that that's my experience, the closest we've come to being in a country that's been attacked on our own soil. Seeing a city like London under siege in my dad's lifetime gave me chills. Like it was impossible to believe this city of Panzers and exploding artillery's the same as the city where I went to the theatre in Picadilly Circus. And Nancy can't believe it either, even when Rose tells her they win.

Fifty years of recovering from that does something to a country, I imagine. Fifty years of rebuilding with the same stubborn manifest destiny that's going into rethinking the new World Trade Towers, nationwide, over generations. And so it is like seeing ourselves in our parents, and more, watching them watch us. And we were on the cutting edge for a while there but in this millennium we're behind the curve, backwards and stodgy and without any real sense of how to play well with others. From across the pond they mock us and watch us stumble, and in their television and movies and rhyming slang we get a peek into how we could have been, how our parents grew, in a different world, in a different time.

Talk back to me about British TV of the last decade, or American TV of the last decade, or strange books about war. I'm about to start the first series of "Black Books;" I'll keep you apprised.

I never watched SG1, even when all my Farscape fannish friends hopped over into SG and even when the artist formerly known as Maayan started writing fic. And EVEN when the artist formerly known as Maayan and I drove out to the desert just to lie down beneath this bowl of stars, and, over the course of eight or ten big-sky hours, M. told me the entire tale of Daniel Jackson, from Sha'uri and that, wossname, wise Ancient caretaker, to Daniel ascending and then getting the boot and coming back with big biceps to play with Ben Browder. And I've seen the movie and I'm comfortable with the rule that any new Stargate starts with a hot alien babe showing some scruffy antihero her, erm, cave paintings, but my fannishness about SG1 extends to how hot Jaye Davison was as Ra the sun god in the movie, and, pressed, I couldn't pick a Goa'uld out of a lineup, despite the fact that I think Peter Stebbings played one once.

This is our first Star Trek free television year since 1987. And I'm not complaining, I can't very well complain considering the preponderance of genre TV this year, but when a gal who grew up watching Picard seek out new lives and new civilizations needs a sci-fi fix, she needs a FIX, yo. And thus we have Stargate: Atlantis.

SGA is not a profound show, by any means, nor groundbreaking in any way, let's just get that straight right off the bat. BSG is undoubtedly smarter and more elegant, more dangerous and unique. And BSG is a damned good show; we'll get that out of the way straight off too, despite the fact that it's really not very funny at all. But it's not our space show, not any more than Threshold or Invasion or the new Dr. Who; it didn't pick up the Star Trek spill. That, there, is for SGA.

Because, okay.

So what SGA does for us is give us everything that was ever delicious about Star Trek (and Star-Trek-related space shows, see also Babylon 5) without any of the hamhanded morality or unwieldy world-building. Every season on every Star Trek has a handful of yummy plots (the bodyswap plot, the trapped-in-an-elevator plot, the killer bugs plot, the power-outage plot) that lend themselves to thoroughly, relentlessly enjoyable television, and then a handful of useless boring plots (the requisite Klingon episode, the requisite alien one-off love affair episode) that never really hold up upon the fortieth or fiftieth rewatch. And so SGA, cleverly, has saved us that trouble by ONLY recycling tried and true FUN space plots. Yes, every arc and every decision and every character or alien race on SGA has its ancestry among the Star Treks, but oh! how wonderful to see them strung together like this, like a greatest hits album recorded by ONLY the good characters, the clever, snarky, slashy characters, with the tongue-in-cheek humor that gets to come from being set in the present, as opposed to in a nebulous future where we don't have money or racism anymore.

Every character on SGA also has his or her ancestry among the Star Treks, which is kind of a handy shorthand for us because it doesn't matter if the characters themselves actually live up to their obligations because we BELIEVE they do, since we've grown up simmering in these paradigms. To wit -- play the drinking game "What Does Weir Do?" sometime and see how sober you end up. Weir, darling Weir, has never once done ANYTHING, not a THING to demonstrate that she's the ass-kicking chick leader we want her to be. BUT, I'm willing to BELIEVE she is, even if she doesn't show me, because Janeway was, and that's where her ancestry springs from. Here, observe a chart, where Star Trek: Voyager is (almost) arbitrarily selected from any of a set of space show paradigms:

Which brings me to why it doesn't matter if McKay's science is pseudoscience, because he's been TAILORED as a genius, we BELIEVE he's a genius, and so we can use that for our fannish pursuit of tasty slash. And it doesn't matter if Sheppard's got nothing but his pointy ears and his belt to set him apart from John Crichton or Tom Paris or anyone else who likes to take a little space ship for a joyride and come home cracking jokes about pop culture, because we BELIEVE he's a kickass soldier and pilot and commander.

So those of us who wanted so badly to slash our space boys now get a better slash pairing than Paris/Kim (or Crichton/D'Argo!) ever offered us. Those of us who want hot girlslash can take Weir and Teyla to places Janeway and B'Elanna have absolutely gone before. Those of us who want smalltime bottle eps can hang out in Atlantis (which I always accidentally refer to as "the station" when I want "the city," see also, DS9, B5) while those of us who want mytharc with gravitas have the Wraith a more serious and satisfying threat to Earth than the Borg or the Scarrans ever were. It's like space shows for DUMMIES over here, with all the lines drawn for us, but FUCK ME the lines are good.

Which is to say: there is nothing unsatisfying about SGA. It is comfort food, it is a legacy, it is in the dictionary next to SPACE SHOW. Mm!

All of this leads me to suspect -- and this is where my complete ignorance of SG1 could get me in trouble, so feel free to take this with a grain of <s>stupidity</s> salt -- that the creators of SGA were Trek fans themselves, and that they SEE the opportunity SGA has to be the neo-Trek for this generation. Which leads me to "Aurora."

The Ancients, at least in Aurora, resemble Star Trek so much that I can't imagine it's unintentional. Which is partially upsetting, because I want the Ancients to be omnipotent, or at least paranormal, and Star Trek-ifying them makes them almost too underdeveloped for my taste, but let's table that for now.

John shows up in the virtual environment only to get faced with a phaser and thrown in the brig behind a forcefield. He travels down brightly lit corridors that could be on Voyager, the Defiant, or the Enterprise, and faces off with the Captain in an all-white version of Picard's bridge.

And perhaps we're spoiled, those of us who marinated in space shows most of our lives, because we don't see Star Trek's universe as tremendously radical; we've seen it all before. But with SGA we get an opportunity to see the technology and civilization created by Star Trek in a new light, through the prism of folks who stepped right out of 2005 just like we do. And, like John Crichton faced with little yellow bolts of light, it IS pretty damned amazing what the Ancients came up with, what with transporters and force fields and phased-energy weapons and traveling faster than light. And considering they were defeated by the Wraith, or at least overwhelmed, it makes sense they shouldn't totally outstrip the Borg, right? I mean, if the Wraith race of bee people was too tremendously advanced from the Borg race of bee people, we'd expect the Ancients to be similarly advanced, and unstoppable opponents don't make good TV.

But, we can kill a Wraith with only moderately more difficulty than we can kill a Borg, and we are similiary outnumbered, out-hiveminded and out-expendable; the Borg don't care if they lose a million drones if they take Earth in the process and neither do the Wraith. Which makes sense, and makes the Wraith, like the Borg, a compelling foe. If we could kill them too easily they'd be boring, but if it were impossible to kill them at all, they'd be unwieldy. And thus, we give them bug-minds and greater numbers and we let them rape and pillage the galaxy destroying worlds, while somehow being the only four people in the universe who can conceivably stand up to 'em.

Point being, SGA's taking a whole team, a whole planet worth of people and doing to them what Farscape did to Crichton; plopping them in the middle of space technology WE (the audience) are not unaccustomed to, and watching the cast members flounder around learning as they go, dwarfed by this impossible futuristic tech and this battle of giants in the playground (watch as I mix my space show metaphors!). And thus, we get everything fun that Farscape did, along with everything fun that Star Trek did, along with everything fun that B5 ever did, stuck between order and chaos, between the Shadows and the Vorlons, between the Ancients and the Wraith, between the Federation and the Borg.

*

Caught another gasp of apparent downtime at work; this only happens on weekends, usually Sundays, slow news days, when the bosses are away and the campaigns are par for the course till Monday's news cycle begins.

Let's talk about TV!

I am all over this <i>Lost</i>-itis surge of genre-lite shows hitting mainstream network television. It's positively a FEAST for those of us who hunger for genre television in the post-Star Trek world. I'm watching them all (except, oddly, <i>Lost</i>, which I lost control of somewhere mid last season when the flashbacks started to bore me. If they're done with the backstory flashbacks I might tune in again; how's this season?) except the one on the WB about the teen ghostbusters, but that's more of a WB/teen-show bias than anything else, and I'd probably watch it if someone pointed me the way. Anyway, here's the 2005 shows I'm watching this year. Add to it the old standards of Atlantis and Galactica (go SciFi!), Scrubs and House (go docs!), Survivor and The Amazing Race (go reality!) and this is my Fall '05 lineup. Don't forget that the _underscore's the new bullet point; use it three times and it's yours:

_bones: Apparently I'm the only one who's liking this show. I think that'll change. It turns out it's PURE GENIUS, and that Emily Wossname is ADORABLE and she and David Boreanz promise to be the Mulder and Scully of the Oughts, except far more frank and shooting from the hip and FUNNY. I love the ensemble, love the marvelously clueless nerd (see also: every other show this year; viva los nerds!), and love the wry humor socially inept geniuses brought together for no other reason than they love a mystery. Sheer quality; this is the best new show this season. The writing crackles, the ensemble has genuine chemistry, the characters are new and different and the mysteries, so far, have been, you know, TV-solid.

Thumbnail: Bones is a brilliant yet completely socially inept forensic anthropologist who really really likes solving crimes; David Boreanz is a federal agent who could use the help of a good forensic doc, badda-bing, now they're partners, and they have a crack team of nerds and hackers at their disposal.

_surface: Holy production values, Batman! If nothign else, this show watches like a Hollywood blockbuster, and with cliffhanger endings at the end of every episode, it's a lot like watching a massive-length feature in the line of "Lake Placid" or "Deep Blue Sea" cut arbitrarily into forty-four minute chunks. So, you know, it's exactly as enjoyable as "Deep Blue Sea" or "Anaconda" or anything else with scientists and seamonsters, and that Lake Bell is adorable (and about as believable a PhD as Denise Richards).

Thumbnail: There's something big under the sea, some sort of super mammal that lays eggs, and one got beached, and the government found it, and meanwhile Lake Bell is a surfer-chick marine biologist single mom trying to solve the mystery of the undersea beast. Elsewhere, a kid in suburbia hatched one of the eggs and grew a teeny little amphibian that he named "Nimrod." Elsewhere, a guy in an annoying marriage is obsessed with finding the sea monster that dragged his best friend away.

_threshold: I don't care what you say, there is nothign that will make me stop watching a show where Brent Spiner and a midget protect us from invading aliens. This is probably a dumb show, but I don't care much, because, like Surface, it has its roots in adventure/pseudo-genre films like "Sphere" and apocalypse films like "The Day After Tomorrow" and "Independence Day," thus makign it a classic textbook what-to-do-when-the-aliens-come series. Carla Guigino is a good tough lead, but the high points of this show are unquestionably Brent Spiner as the neo-60's hippie doc, and the midget lingust mathematician. MIDGET LINGUIST! The possibilities are limitless!

Thumbnail: A la "Sphere," Carla Guigino is a federal agent who dedicated her life to making plans for Worst Case Scenarios, and building teams to call to duty in said scenarios. When an alien signal designed to reprogram human DNA appears over a Navy ship at sea, Guigino is called to Washington to implement plan Threshold; the plan she wrote for the event of an alien invasion. She comes with her very own clueless nerd (this one's a curly haired hacker conspiracy theorist, to offset "Bones"'s curly haired hacker PhD student or "Numb3rs" Krumholtz's curly haired math teacher), a tough-jawed marine, and the aforementioned Brent Spiner and a midget that make the show oh so worth watching. Seriously, the midget (Peter Dinklage) linguist is the best bitter brilliant not-a-team-player scientist to hit media since those guys who worked with Bruce Willis in "Armageddon."

_invasion: SNK likes this show because it's really secretly a show about the vicissitudes of blended families, masquerading as a pseudo-genre show about aliens. Really, the crazy Everglades stepfamiles that make up the ensemble are absolutely the reason to watch, from the scruffy conspiracy theorist brother-in-law ("It's an EBE! It's an EBE!") to Kari-Matchett-of-Cube-2 as the wild-eyed blonde doctor who just might be under her husband's weird alien spell. The kids act like kids, the stepparents act like stepparents, and the politics of Homestead, FL, are secondary to the politics of a family with stepdads and stepmoms and stepkids all struggling to feel safe after the scary (and all-too-real-looking) hurricane.

Thumbnail: There's a hurricane in Florida, after which mysterious bolts of light fall from the sky, land in the Everglades and swim away. Two families, joined by divorce and including (usefully) a doctor, a newscaster, a park ranger and a sheriff, survived the hurricane and had their share of strange encounters with the alien lights, which they will likely spend most of this season coming to understand. Like <i>Lost</i>, and unlike most of the other new-genre shows, Invasion is careful not to tell too much; the story of the alien (?) is vague at best, and used only to add color to the more important story of the family and social dynamics in this sleepy Everglades town.

*

As for comedies, I'm watching "How I Met Your Mother" and "Kitchen Confidential" and so far they're both very worthy heirs to excellent sitcoms lost and gone. "Kitchen" could be the next Sports Night, if it smarts up a little, and "How I Met" is already the best heir to "Friends," but even better because it's got Neil Patrick Harris and Alyson Hannigan in. Neil Patrick Harris is the best thing to hit sitcoms since Zach Braff, I tell you whut.

I gotta go back to work now.

Medical Investigation

This week we had Ice Station wossname, you know, where they fly up because the researchers taking core samples Are Not Who They Are, and then the crazy comes, and the murders, and the storm comes, and they're trapped. MI's what you'd get if you took the early cast of ER and sent them on Mulder and Scully's adventures: renegade NIH docs flyin' from town to town identifying mysterious pathogens in the nick of time and saving the world without fanfare. The cast is sort of yer just-add-water ensemble with the exception of my girl Eva Rossi, more on her later. Neal "Buck Compton" McDonough is Dr. Stephen...something, who lopes around brooding and taking everything *really* seriously, and Kellie Williams is his emotionally stable sidekick, following him around, diagnosing things and telling Dr. Stephen that he should get more sleep. Chris "Jake 2.0" Gorham is DANGEROUSLY cute and plays the same role he played in Odyssey 5, where "young prodigal astronaut" is replaced with "young prodigal doctor." The token black guy is pretty interesting for a token black guy, if only because his job description remains sort of indiscriminate: he seems to be the resident CSI, which mostly means that while Buck and Kellie are talking to patients and diagnosing things, Token Black Guy prowls around the victims' homes with rubber gloves on, taking samples of things and putting them in jars. The internet tells me that critics don't like Eva Rossi, but I think she's awesome if for no other reason than it's been a long time since a TV show had a resident LIAR. Eva is the NIH crew's "press liaison," which, okay, I have no idea what that means, but in the very first episode, to keep a journalist off their scent, Eva seduced said journalist, led him into the hospital's basement, cold-cocked him and locked him down there for the duration. This is probably not ethical, but I find it deeply cool. Aside from that, she mostly has Deanna Troi's job, which is to say, she stands next to Buck a lot when he's interviewing patients, and then mutters "he's lying" under her breath and goes off to unravel the patient's lies. Plus she's really VERY hot.

MI is basically TV comfort food, likeable, interesting enough and easy enough to follow. They did the "poisoned pants" plotline WEEKS before House did it, equally satisfying if lacking any real existential commentary or depth. But I ain't missed an episode yet and I'm still finding it good solid square-meal TV which could end up being NBC's answer to CSI.

House

House is better. I am so over the whole lead-character-is-a-cipher school of ensemble casting, and House neatly sidesteps that by making the lead character a sociopath whose opinion of humanity starts with "all patients lie" and goes down from there. And fuck me gently with a chainsaw, Hugh Laurie is hot. The grumblyness! The scruffyness! The Vicodin addiction! "I don't have a pain management problem; I have a PAIN problem." House answers the same questions as MI, but doesn't really pretend to be an ensemble because all the non-Hugh Laurie members of the cast are only relevant in as far as their relationship with House. Essentially he's a genius diagnostician put to the task of solving medical mysteries, and he's got a fleet of groupie docs who work for him and revel in his brilliance while being perplexed by his dry, utterly unloveable personality. And plus since he's such a genius he gets to stay still at a pleasant ivy-covered hospital in Princeton, NJ where the mysteries come to him and all he has to do is prod his groupies into doing the legwork while he tromps around on his crutch popping pain pills and working one day a week in the free clinic so Bobbi Bernstein doesn't fire him. The groupies are pretty awesome themselves, if indistinguishable from one another, though over the course of the eight or nine episodes Omar Epps has begun to distinguish himself as the workaholic doomed to follow in House's footsteps, and Jennifer wossname, the girl doc, has begun to distinguish HERself as the one who sometimes cries. Also there's Robert Sean Leonard, whose role in the cast is completely indeterminate except for showing up occasionally to flirt with House and give House the opportunity to do guy things like play piano and stare at boobies.

House is as dry and clever as House himself, smart smart smart and therefore doomed to cancellation. They're better than the poisoned pants plotline they RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES!, but the medical mysteries themselves aren't as important to the show as the "differential diagnoses" over the course of the episode, where the groupies try to impress House while saving patients' lives, and House further alienates his docs and shoots down all their suggestions.

Medium

This Arquette is sort of off-putting and I can't figure out why. There's something deeply annoying about her, but yet, every time I think she's an untalented hack she turns around and does something subtle and powerful and all of a sudden I like her again.

Medium is, well. So this Arquette discovers she's psychic, or, rather, has prophetic dreams, mostly about violent crimes, and so she scurries over to the DA's office and volunteers her service helping to track down killers et al. It's got the episodic casefiles you'd expect, but it's really a family drama masquerading as a paranormal mystery show, because the best parts of it are the scenes at home between the Arquette (Allison...something) and her husband (who ROCKS) and her kids. First off, she's a psychic and her husband BELIEVES her, which is already revolutionary and cuts right past all the things that are usually annoying about the set of shows built on this concept (see also: Invisible Man, First Wave, Pretender, anything where the lead's got some paranormal skillz and nobody believes him). Also, she doesn't try to hide it, cutting right past the OTHER usual annoyance of these types of shows. For example, when she goes to quit her job as a paralegal and her boss asks why, Allison shrugs and says "apparently I'm psychic, isn't that weird?" But the BEST best un-annoyance of Medium is that sometimes Allison's visions are WRONG. I have so much respect for a show that doesn't mind having its lead characters visions be WRONG that I'd keep watching this show for that reason alone.

The casefiles are dumb. The show's got a vague Touched by an Angel vibe to it, but because of the details above I think I don't care. Mostly, Allison's husband is sexy and funny and supportive and interested in her visions and good to the kids, and the kids sound like real kids and the Arquette acts like a real mom and wife and woman who recently discovered she's psychic, and all that is absolutely worth watching.

At the Melrose Ave. piercing-supply-slash-head-shop where they sell Om and Yin Yang and dragon's head pendants in pewter for eight bucks, I picked me up an amulet of dubious imagined origin -- some sort of fake spiritual symbol, I assume -- which purported to represent The Summoning of Power!

So anyway, I now have the ability to summon power, on a cheap silver chain around my neck. Mostly I bought it because I like saying it aloud in a booming voice while my sister got fitted for a new earring for her tragus pierce (and it all comes 'round again,Punk), but, you know. Fear me! I can summon power now. I'll admit, I'm afraid to use it.

But here I go, summoning power that this Macintosh will not foil me while I get out all this business about Londo Mollari.

I've been thinking about Londo for weeks now. The DVDs came so I'm rewatching B5 seasons 3 and 4, and the A stories are so familiar to me I find myself scanning past them, emotionally, looking for things hiding in the fabric I hadn't seen before. And while I've always loved Londo -- as far as individual alien-centric eps go, you know, the requisite seasonal Ep About Narns or Ep About Minbari, the Centauri ones were always my favorite -- this time I took notes because there's something about him I've never been able to put into words. Not sure if I can now either, beyond the fact that he's tragic, heartbreaking, more complex, I think, than any other character in any of my fandoms. But I wanna try.

Normally when I obsess about a character I want to write him into a fic, but I find Londo un-fic-able and I wanted to figure out why. It's not for lack of chemistry (Londo/G'Kar just *cries out* and Londo/Vir's not a bad fallback position) or for an inability to find his voice; I swear, sometimes I talk to myself in that Franco-Russian accent of his.

But Londo, it turns out, is a victim of circumstance. Is most interesting when the world is thrust upon him, when each decision he makes is to cover for or try and repair all the decisions prior. When the results of his actions spiral out of control and he's trapped -- as he is for most of his life -- by the world he's built around myself.

Since JMS and Peter Jurasik did a damned good job of creating a world on Londo's shoulders, there's no room for me to do it and I wouldn't want to. And excising him from that world -- giving him an adventure, a romantic interlude or even some inextricable angry sex with G'Kar -- takes away what it is I like the most about Londo to begin with. I don't want to see him making new decisions, good or bad, separate from the fate he's got in the series. And because he's buried there so deep I can hardly imagine space in his brain to get him there anyway.

Londo's the epitome of old-school, conservative, reactionary, a member of a regime that's seen its best days. The Centauri Republic and its Emperor are old models of a dying paradigm and Londo's stuck there like somebody's dad, shaking his head and wondering what happened to the good old days.

G'Kar tells Londo his heart is empty, but I don't agree. I think Londo has the heart of a boy who grew up in the shadows of the royal court in its heyday, with -- probably in keeping with the timeless and prophetic nature of Centauri as a race -- ancestral memories of honor, valor, order and respect. Everything Londo does he does for the Centauri, he does as a Centauri, as a member of this dying breed that even the other members of the royal court no longer aspire to be part of.

He's given his title of Ambassador to Babylon 5 as a joke, almost. It's a write-off assignment that no one else wanted, but for Londo it's the first step toward the royal court, it's a title, responsibility, the mantle of the Empire that he grew up honoring above all else. He's hungry for power, reckless for it but not out of greed, exactly -- more out of an understanding that That's What Centauri Do.

His first fatal mistake -- the one that would inform all the other fatal mistakes to come -- is his grudging alliance with Mr. Morden. The one good thing in Londo's life -- the Lady Adira -- has been taken from him by Lord Refa, and, enraged, Londo needs to show the Centarum that he's better than Refa, needs to hurt Refa in the only way that makes sense, stripping him of respect and power.

Londo cuts his Faustian bargain with Morden and his relationship with the Shadows -- the one that will, over the next twenty years, destroy him -- begins.

Morden and the Shadows align with Londo for their own purposes, and intellectually he knows it, knows Vir's right when Vir tells him not to take the deal. I think even then he sees his own fate (again with the Centauri and their prophetic dreams), but as far as Londo's concerned he has no other choice. No other choice -- with this decision, or any of the decisions to follow.

For Londo, the Shadows attack the Narn. Londo wants it to be over then but he knows it can't be. Londo could have killed one Narn, gotten a medal for it and gone on with his life but that's not the way of the Great Centauri -- they live big, they do big, they conquer. It's the way he was raised -- the way things Are. So the Shadows destroy one Narn base and then another, and Londo watches it spin out of control, hoping against hope (and he doesn't really hope, I think, he never really thought he'd get his life back after that) that it would end after just one more. But Morden's ruthless and the Shadows have their own plans ("Why don't you destroy the entire Narn homeworld, while you're at it?") and it's too late.

Every decision Londo makes -- every single personal, emotional, or professional decision for the duration of the series and the rest of his life -- comes from trying to untangle what he'd done when he aligned with the Shadows and started the war against Narn.

And he doesn't -- he doesn't feel evil. He doesn't think he's evil, just a victim of impulse and circumstance. He never wanted the Narns killed. Never wanted G'Kar to hate him and doesn't quite understand why G'Kar does -- why G'Kar can't see that Londo had only the best intentions and only ever wanted to do right by his people, for the good of that dying Centauri republic.

But as G'Kar said, he shook Londo's hand, and 24 hours later they were at war.

Still, I don't think Londo ever considers G'Kar his enemy. He has the opportunity to kill G'Kar ("And the Rock Cried Out, No Hiding Place") and he has Lord Refa killed instead.

When the Centauri telepath comes to the station Londo asks her to tell him his fate -- rather, to confirm that the fate he knows is spooling out for him is unavoidable. "You will be Emperor," she tells him, and with that he knows he's doomed.

He closes his eyes and everything about his life ahead of him is awful -- he gets the vision of the Shadows landing on Centauri Prime (see: icon) long before he's even heard of the creatures, gets the vision of himself as an aging Emperor infected by his Drahk keeper, gets the vision of dying at G'Kar's hands. And even knowing his horrible, awful fate he does nothing to avoid it, because he does what he does for the Centauri, and he knows he's doomed to suffer but god damn it he won't let his people down.

You think about it -- Sheridan does much the same thing and he's cheered as a hero. Londo goes down unpitied and unmourned, having lived every single moment in service of an Empire that doesn't really exist anymore.

Even when the crazed Cartagia was Emperor, making a mockery of the court and all it stands for, Londo still makes sure his dress jacket is clean and pressed before entering Cartagia's throne room. Even when the crazed Cartagia sells out Centauri Prime to the Shadows and nearly gets the entire world destroyed, Londo stands on ceremony and respects the office. That respect, that tradition of service to the throne and the people, is all Londo has. Which is why if you try to tell him the Centauri regime is outmoded and dying he can't hear you, he won't hear you because without it he is absolutely nothing.

Kosh shows himself in the garden saving Sheridan, and to all the other races, the Vorlon appears as an angelic being of light, something straight out of their bibles and myths. Londo, with no mythology other than that of the Republic, doesn't see anything.

Peter Jurasik is just a phenomenally brilliant actor, I think. Because here's a character primarily defined by conquest, by getting in bed with the dark side and emerging heartless, but somehow Londo is more than just pathetic or piteous -- he's a hero, a nobleman, an old-school martyr. Beyond the hair and the makeup it's all in that face -- he's gonna take a deep breath and go down for his people because that's what's been asked of him. And it hurts like hell but he might as well be waiting there at Gethsemane (Brother Thomas would agree). And while he might in a moment of weakness ask that this cup pass from him, he knows it can't, and he doesn't run, and to the moment where he dies at G'Kar's hands he takes it like a man. Like a Centauri.

I fucking love this guy. I've got pages of notes here, all the little moments that make Londo what he is: he's trapped in the elevator with G'Kar and he just doesn't understand why G'Kar won't help him try to escape, why G'Kar can't see that in this, like in so much else, they're in this together, they're both whipping boys, they're both doomed.

When he's given his keeper and crowned Emperor, both to protect his people from the explosive devices the Drakh have planted all over Centauri Prime, he sends Sheridan and the others home rather than inviting them to his coronation. Not because he doesn't wish beyond hope that he could shrug it all off and side with them, but because he doesn't want them to be part of this, doesn't want them entangled in what he has to do. He keeps both Vir and G'Kar at arm's length for the same reason, and so he's considered arrogant, hostile. And really, he's just an instrument.

I wish I could write Londo, and maybe now that I've gotten all this out of my system I can. But I swear, in all my fannish pursuits (including a tendency to be drawn to the villains, Dukat, Scorpius, CSM, to try and see their stories, their points of view), I really don't think there's a character out there as complicated -- while being somehow also incredibly simple in his priorities and his purpose -- as Londo.

What a great fucking show.




How many Centauri does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
Just one. But in the great old days of the Republic, hundreds of servants would change thousands of bulbs at our slightest whim.
-- Londo, "Convictions"