Tag Archives: television

Trek…

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Since I was old enough to start making my own decisions about what television to watch, I’ve been a fan of Star Trek. There was a time in the late 80s and early 90s when I could have probably quoted every line of the 3 seasons of the original series, watched in syndication and taped to re-watch countless times on a score of clunky VHS tapes. Six movies and The Next Generation followed, adding to the franchise. I largely fell away during the era of Deep Space 9 and Voyager and Enterprise, though.

I wasn’t overly thrilled about the prospect of bringing the old girl out of mothballs with J.J. Abrams at the helm. I don’t generally like the current Hollywood approach of reanimating every old TV show and movie in an effort to pump more cash from an already tapped well – as if having an original idea or story to tell is some kind of crime against humanity.

With that being said, I’m pleased to report that Beyond manages to hit most of the right notes for this old Trek fan. As troubled as I was originally about these new movies breaking off onto a new timeline, I think this installment comes just about as close to the tone and feel of an original series episode as a fan could hope without putting everyone back on a low-budget set with a bunch of flashing lights and toggle switches. Although I’d never threaten to call this new incarnation of the Start Trek universe “campy,” it finds the proverbial sweet spot somewhere between keeping most of the old timers happy without alienating a new generation of fans. It was nicely done.

A show well run…

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There are thousands of websites you can visit today and read every detail of last night’s episode of Game of Thrones. I’m not going to call for a spoiler alert here because I don’t intend to provide that level of detail.

It’s not often that I find myself caught off guard, even by a show like Thrones. It’s simply understood that in the world created by George R.R. Martin anyone can drop dead at any moment. On any given Sunday you expect the high lords of Westeros to grapple in a fight to the death. There a whole hose of characters who have become part of the series’ background hum. Those secondary and tertiary characters may not get off any easier than their high born overlords, but their deaths are generally less noted.

In a season where the series seems to have discovered itself again – or perhaps noted that an end really is coming – last night’s blood offering was all the more notable. It spoke to sacrifice, friendship, and consequences. It reminds us that even in a world full of fairy tails, evil trumps good every bit as often as the other way around.

Maybe most surprising of all, though, is that it was a clear that even six seasons on, the fandom can still count on being caught off their guard. In an often formulaic world of 22 minute sitcoms and 43 minute dramas,  it’s nice to know that great stories are still being told. Boy did those writers earn their money this week. Their ending was among the most powerful I’ve seen on the small screen in quite some time.

I don’t usually give this space over to singing praises, but Martin, Benioff, Weiss, and the rest have created something absolutely magnificent. Show well run, gentlemen.

The golden age…

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Those who are in charge of deciding such things have proclaimed the 1950s and 60s the Golden Age of Television. I’ll gamely admit that in a 3-channel world ruled by the censor’s iron fists, those old timers managed to put together some truly amazing stuff. If you’re expecting story telling without a lot of special effects some of those shows still hold up. I’m happy to burn half an hour watching Andy Taylor patrol Mayberry or Marshal Dillon bring justice to the streets of Dodge City.

Since that golden age, though, we’ve seen the rise of hundreds of cable channels and shows like Breaking Bad, The Sopranos, Orange is the New Black, House of Cards, The Wire, Downton Abbey, and Game of Thrones. They’re reset the bar for the kind of entertainment that people expect on their small screen. Of course we’ve also seen Jerry Springer and Teen Mom II, but I suppose not every bit of writing deserves an Emmy. Still, with everything in the balance, I’d be hard pressed to think those old timers could do anything better.

Pixel envy…

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Unlike with some other electronics, I’m not a slavish devotee to having that latest and greatest television set on the market. I bought a highly rated Pioneer 42-inch plasma back in November of 2007 (read about the hilarity that ensued) and have been lugging its heavy carcass around with me ever since. It was state of the art eight years ago and still does a reasonable job, but if I’m honest, it’s getting a little finicky about what peripherals it plays nicely with and the picture quality is suffering. The old girl has seen better days, but considering how often she’s been crated, toted, and banged about, I’m a little impressed she still works at all.

I was willing to keep going along with it until last month when I bumped up the sizes of the set in the bedroom and discovered just how much better the viewing experience was on that new unit. If you’ll forgive the pun, the difference between a new smart LCD and its old, dumb predecessor was quite the eye opener. Sadly, it also means I’m just starting to peck around to decide what features a new “primary” screen should have… which means that sometime in the next three months I’ll have settled in on my actual requirement.

Now that 42-inchs feels like something fit for the bedroom, there’s little doubt that the replacement will be bigger – and I’m sure better in every single way. Still, I hate this part of the process – and wish just a little bit that I wasn’t wired quite as tightly into the compulsion for researching everything nearly to death. It tends to take the fun out of those “spur of the moment” purchase decisions. Still, it will be awfully nice to be able to sit down to watch something and not need to fiddle with every single setting under the picture menu to dial in a decent picture.

I’m afraid I’m about to succumb to a serious case of pixel envy. And you damned well can’t fix that with more cowbell.

Missing the big picture…

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I like to have background noise in the house while I’m going about my daily chores. Usually that means the TV is parked on a news station, the Food Network, or HGTV – basically something that I’m most likely not to get overly distracted by, but might accidentally hear something vaguely interesting. I made the mistake, during a lull in the day’s activities, of getting sucked into part of an episode of HGTV’s “House Hunters.”

Over the span of about ten minutes I heard the wife wine three times that whatever house they were looking at didn’t have chair rails and the husband pout that the lot wasn’t large enough for him to buy a “big tractor.” By this point I was actively yelling at the television and rooting for the porch roof to collapse on both of these individuals so they wouldn’t have the chance to further corrupt an already questionable gene pool.

Those few minutes have stuck with me most of the afternoon and into the evening. I wonder if maybe it isn’t just the perfect reminder that so many people have a tendency to focus on the truly insignificant details at the expense of seeing the big picture.

Not a sermon, just a thought…

The nine o’clock hour…

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HBO has provided the valedictory hour for my weekends since a guy named Tony ran north Jersey and the Barksdale crew controlled the corners in west Baltimore. With tonight’s season ender for Game of Thrones I guess I’m back to casting around for something at the nine o’clock hour to punctuate the end of the weekend.

I should probably be a responsible adult and use that extra hour to get something closer to eight hours of sleep, but somehow I know that’s not going to happen. I haven’t really looked at what HBO is rolling our for the summer or fall seasons – and the Walking Dead are still to far away to contemplate.

Worst case scenario I find myself a good book to fill the extra time. As much as I like reading, allocating one hour a week to get lost in the flickering glow of a really good drama feels like something I’m actually going to miss.

Explaining the Game…

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Sunday I had the singular experience of trying to simultaneously watch the new episode and explain the back story of Game of Thrones. I don’t feel like I did either activity the kind of justice it deserves, summing up the nature of what is modern television’s greatest fantasy epic as 1500s Europe meets Harry Potter meets Dallas… with dragons.

While trying to fill in character elements and key overall plot points, I missed big swaths of story arcs moving forward – so much to the point of reading the recaps on Monday and wondering if I’d even watched the right episode. Turn your eyes away for a few seconds and you find yourself hopelessly lost in the progression. It’s even worse now that the show has started outpacing or diverging wildly from the source material. Even the things I knew to be “true” about the world of GoT aren’t necessarily so. Questions of “why did he do that,” are met with only a perplexed “I have no idea.”

I’m going to have to go back and rewatch last week’s episode before settling in Sunday night for the next installment. I should go back and rewatch the whole damned season at this point since you could probably fill another book with the details I missed while watching some other part of the screen. If I struggled to explain the Game after being a faithful viewer and being well versed in the books, I’m not sure I have a prayer of keeping things in order now that we’re heading off script.

The only thing for sure now is that when someone wants a primer on Game of Thrones I’ll just point them at A Wiki of Ice and Fire and wish them a good day. I no longer feel at all qualified to speak with even limited authority about what’s going on and why.

Blood pressure…

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The president will deliver the State of the Union address tomorrow night. Thanks to the 24-hour news cycle, we mostly know the broad strokes of what’s going to be in it – I’m sure it’s not nearly as suspenseful as waiting for a president to send his hand written evaluation up the Hill once a year, but asking the cable news channels to adhere to an endearing 18th century standard of practice is surely too much to ask.

That means tomorrow evening I have two choices. First, I could watch the speech live and make myself crazy ranting and raving at the television in real time and ensure I’m too aggravated to get anything close to a good night’s sleep. Option two involves ignoring the live broadcast and catching the meat of it in dribs and drabs over the next few days, which would lengthen the duration of annoyance but likely reduce the intensity of my expected opposition to nearly everything I expect to hear.

In any case, it’s a safe bet that my blood pressure will be off the rails for the next couple of days. Under the current circumstances it seems the best I can hope for is avoiding a heart attack, ulcer, or throwing the remote through the screen. That doesn’t say much for my evaluation of the current state of our Union.

There anyway…

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I’ve seen a commercial on television for the US Postal Service over the last few days. I’m going to set aside the fact that there has been a postal service in this country since the revolution and you’d be hard pressed to find someone who hasn’t at least bought a stamp or received a letter at some point in their lives and focus on what I really find odd about seeing the post office on TV.

The ad is clearly trying to drum up package handling business for the USPS; trying to remind their customers that they do more than “mail.” That’s well and good. The real issue of the thing is how they go about it. Whatever ad agency they paid millions to for this campaign didn’t focus on things like accuracy, on time delivery, or even cost. Instead they went an entirely different direction, literally having one of the people in the spot say the line “We’re going to be there anyway” while urging us to use them as our parcel deliverer of choice.

We’re going to be there anyway. It doesn’t exactly fill me with lofty visions or assurances of my package getting where it’s supposed to go. It feels like the barest step up from “Give us your stuff and hope for the best.” If they’re trying to swing my business away from UPS or FedEx, I’m afraid the post office is going to need to try something a little more confidence inspiring in their approach.

The truly disturbing part is that somewhere deep in the bowels of Post Office Headquarters, a committee of thoughtful and well compensated people thought that ad was right on point – the very best their money could buy. Maybe it was the least bad of several options, but still I think I’d have gone in a different direction. Then again, they got me to spend a whole 30 minutes thinking about the Post Office. Even if I’m not going to use them, that’s something.

Mmmmm… leftovers.

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The LeftoversI’ve been watching The Leftovers on HBO. For those not following along at home, it’s a series based on what would happen after 2% of the population, men, women, and children simply disappeared. There’s plenty of self-loathing, searching for inner peace, questioning authority, and general social stress, you know, a basic dystopian adventure.

Without giving away any key plot elements, it seems to me that all of the characters are slowly descending into their own personal version of madness. Maybe that’s why I take exception with the show’s premise, especially since the great disappearance included the evil as well as the righteous. It was an equal opportunity vanishing.

I tend to think that if I woke up tomorrow to find 2% of the population had disappeared, I’d largely shrug and think of it as a good first step. When the other 97.999% bugger off, then we’d be in business.