(Editor’s Note’s Note:  It has come to my attention the Editor’s Note was almost as long as the “article.”  Please accept my sincere apology.)

(Editor’s Note:  A few people have made more than passing mention to the fact that I’ve been even lazier than usual lately.  The reasons are threefold: 1) I have been focusing more on the trading part of trogging, 2) I apparently need some kind of pharmaceutical product to spark my creative loins, and 3) I am pretty lazy.

Couple cases in point: three weekends ago I went to Comic Con in NYC.  Am I a nerd?  No.  Were there 84,999 other people there that day?  Yes.  Was there ample fodder for a blog post?  No question.  (We set the over/under on girls dressed as Slave Leia at six and that number got demolished.  Interestingly, the correlation between “dresses as Slave Leia at comic conventions” and “has a Chinese script tattoo on her ribcage” is very close to 1.0)  Rarely are you in a public arena where 100 people are playing a highly competitive D&D tournament.  There were lots of dudes walking around proudly wearing some bizarre anime cat outfit.  There were even dorky middle aged guys buying $20 reproductions of Micronauts comic books and having them signed by their favorite childhood artist, Michael Golden – who (presumably) was not very chatty and didn’t seem to be in a great mood.

Anyway, I was formulating some stuff in my mind, laying it all out mentally, and then realized it was six days later.  Too late to capture the Comic Con zeitgeist.  Astonishingly enough, the very next weekend I found myself in the very same convention center, seeing the super-cool-but-surprisingly-Slave-Leia-free Meet The Breeds exhibit.  6500 breeds of dogs, many of them larger than a Chevy Volt.  I’d never seen a Cane Corso or the many breeds of Mastiff (apparently you can customize them like you’d order a computer from Dell); we got to see a show quality Vizla, the breed we like to pretend we’ll eventually get, assuming we exit cat-only hell.  What, you might ask, was the name of the Vizla?  Chilly.  His name was Chilly.  I sh-t you not.  Meet The Breeds could’ve been a post, right?  When I got around to thinking about it, it was nine days later.

Chilly Jr. says hello

This past weekend I went and watched Navy kick the sh-t out of Notre Dame, which would have made a nice counter to my I F-cking Hate Sports post.  But it’s now basically Wednesday – old news.  So, you see, I’m continually running a little behind, and a little light on creative inspiration beyond ranking the top ten brands of plastic food storage containers or finishing casting for my Daft Punk parody video “One More Mime.”  I’ll try to step up the motherf-cking pace.

And, if you’d like to kick yourself, anyone reading this could have won the iPad simply by emailing The Big Lead and saying “hey, it’s almost halloween, this dude wrote about candy, maybe throw it in your daily links?”  I finally decided to (not completely unashamedly) do it myself last week, they kindly obliged and I got an extra couple thousand hits.  One email could’ve equaled one iPad.  Such is life.)

Ideas-That-I’m-Certain-Other-People-Have-Had-But-That-I-Can’t-Check-For-Fear-That-Those-Previous-Ideas-Might-Be-So-Similar-They’d-Completely-Eliminate-The-Need-For-This-Post:  How I’d Fix SNL

A few weeks ago, I did a post where I talked about the new fall shows.  I had a bit in there about Saturday Night Live, as well, where I threw out an outline of every episode of the show:

I can pretty much predict every show in advance: Saturday Night Live Okay, let’s have a sketch where it’s a talk show hosted by an oddball celebrity, with other oddball celebrities as guests (or if we want to get butt-crazy, let’s make it a gameshow hosted by a celebrity), a commercial parody, a sketch where there’s a cocktail party and then a super-weird guest shows up and acts super-weird, a musical guest who’s likely to be a complete unknown or a hasbeen, then a sketch with a running character – how about Gilly?  everybody needs a little more Kristen Wiig, right?, weekend update, a sketch that’s sports-related, another sh*tty song, a digital short that will surprise you with its special guests acting contrary to their public image, and finally a skit that satirizes local television commercials.  See you next week.  (Katy Perry was good, though.)

I watched the Jane Lynch show last week and was actually flummoxed by my accuracy:

• Talk show?  Check (The New Boyfriend Talk Show)
• Gameshow with oddball celebrities?  Check (Secret Word skit)
• Commercial parody?  Check (Moms on Facebook)
• Digital short with Jane Lynch acting contrary to her public image?  Check
• Gilly?  Check (just kill me…)
• Local commercial parody?  Check (lawyer with two heads)

You get the picture – that sh-t is way too predictable.  I’m just an unpaid internet hack and I could’ve outlined 80% of the damn show in ten minutes.  Younger folks might shrug at the notion that SNL is important (much as they’d shrug at the thought of Notre Dame as a football powerhouse – it’s been awhile for both) but as an old-assed man, I beg to differ.  It used to be something of an institution, an early introduction to up-and-coming talents and a sounding board for important social and political issues.  (I just added that last part for the heck of it, I really don’t ascribe much social value to the political humor or other socially-aware skits.  Richard Pryor excepted, perhaps.)

There are really only four components that one could potentially address when attempting to right the (previously) good ship SNL.  You’ve really only got:

1.  The Host

2.  The Cast

3.  The Writing

4.  The Format

1.  The Host – Actually, I have very little problem with the hosts.  Often – especially with sports stars (Michael Phelps might be funnier after a few bong rips) – the hosts are painfully unfunny, which is itself somewhat funny.  But the casting team has recently done a pretty solid job of identifying people who are actually pretty funny – Jon Hamm, Justin Timberlake, January Jones (haha, just checking to see if you are awake, she was somewhere between “horrendous” and “god-awful”).  Aside: five or six years ago, I never thought I’d utter the words “needs more Justin Timberlake.”  But here we are in 2010.  Making strides.

My proposal: Nothing really, the hosts aren’t the problem, even the bad ones are sometimes unintentionally funny.

2.  The Cast – This is where I’m going to have to hold myself back, before this thing becomes a manifesto that would cause Ted Kaczynski to throw out a “TL,DR”.  The casts are way too large for the amount of time people are allowed to hang around.  The opening credits take like fifteen minutes now.  No one knows who half of the f-ckers are (which actually isn’t a bad thing, I’ll get to that).  People stay on the show for several years beyond their shelf life.  It’s a mess.

My proposal: Cast members can’t stay on the show longer than three years.  Period.  It would be set up like business school.  Your first year on the show, you are involved in about 30% of the sketches, but have to bust your ass writing, etc.  This is analogous to the first semester of B-school, where one works hard to secure a summer job.  Season two is like that summer job – chance to shine, 50% of the air-time to second year players.  Movie deals, comedy tours, all the glory will hinge on killing it your second year.  Third year, you are fading out, in 20-30% of the skits, like a grandparent (or second year B-school student who doesn’t give a fuuuuuuuuuck), working on your longer-term career stuff but hanging around to help the newbies figure out what’s what.

Instant solution for the good of mankind: Get rid of Fred Armisen and reduce Kristen Wiig’s screen presence by 90% – they are in every f-cking skit.  See what the newbs can do.  Armisen is pretty terrible, the new Chris Kattan – looks vaguely ethnic in a variety of ways, spare part being forced to play a leading role.  Now that they have an actual impressionist on the show in Jay Pharaoh, why is Armisen still playing Obama?  (Although, Fred – nice upgrade going from Peggy to Abby Elliot!  And you got to get rid of the Scientology bizness to boot!  Good work – now go do something else for a bit.)  And I used to be one of Wiig’s greatest supporters, but good golly have they gone to that well about 700x too often.  We get it, Kristen, you like playing odd characters as an interesting juxtaposition to the fact that you are actually pretty hot.  (Editor’s Additional Note: All you English majors who have a problem with this possibly inaccurate use of the word “juxtaposition” may really have a problem with the next paragraph.)

3.  The Writing – The writing manages to be distinctly lazy, repetitive and unoriginal, with an extreme reliance on juxtaposition for (attempted) cheap shock value laughs.  All comedy, to a certain extent, relies on juxtaposition (“hey, haha that character’s acting/speaking in a manner contrary to what i’d normally expect?  Wrecked em?  It damn near killed him!”) but these writers insist on overusing the “over-the-top-bizarre”character card.  Not every sketch needs to include people with (allegedly) humorous physical deformities attempting to get by in the real world.  Think of the best sketches you can remember on SNL – “More Cowbell” had its absurb elements, but they were much more subtle, and practically imperceptible to ungulate percussion enthusiasts.  Schwetty Balls certainly had it’s juxta-moment, but what sold the sketch was the actors’ commitment to the gag.

My solution:  There needs to be a moratorium on talk and game show sketches for a couple of seasons.  Those things are rarely funny (beyond “Celebrity Jeopardy”) and are just easy ways to shoehorn a host into a sketch.  And, they must significantly reduce the number of recurring characters.  NO MORE THAN ONE VISIT FROM A RECURRING CHARACTER PER SEASON.  And in my version, people are only on the show for three seasons, so the max number of times you’d have to see some garbage like Gilly is three times.

4.  The Format – The format is largely okay, with one glaring problem.

My solution:  THE SKITS ARE TOO F*CKING LONG!  ISN’T THE AXIOM “ALWAYS LEAVE THEM WANTING MORE”?  OR IS IT “TURN OFF YOUR F*(KING CAPS LOCK, BITCH!”?  Seriously, even the occasional decent skit runs a minimum of 25% too long.  Difficulties with handling commercial breaks?  Simple, have some kind of MacGruber-like filler skit that airs 2-3 times in an episode.  (Note: For the love of God, I am not suggestings we want more MacGruber, we absolutely want zero more MacGruber.  But you could figure out other single-episode mini-skits that would presumably plug timing gaps.  Or just cut the length of all skits in half and have two per commercial break.  Look, I didn’t pull out the protractor or anything here, I’m just spitballing it.  This is free advice.

Let's have a lot less (preferably 100% less) of this...

...and more of this type of bizness

I’m at 1700 words and am contractually obligated to stop the madness.

Later,

Chilly17

Back in the motherf-cking saddle…and here to talk about some television.  Despite what the title of the post says, I see no reason to limit my critique to debuting (or re-starting) shows or even shows that I’ve actually seen.  Don’t expect a lot of pictures – I’ve concluded that pictures are super-f0ocking-annoying and the reason I’ve been inactive for like six weeks.  (Interestingly, traffic is not down in that time frame.  Seems to correlate well with my MBA recruiting lesson: the less firms had seen me, the more they wanted to hire me.  Here, it’s “the less you write, the better.”)

(If you want a certified opinion on any televised nonsense, I highly recommend Alan Sepinwall’s site – he’s the Joe Montana of television critics.  Except he doesn’t like Glee, which seems weird.  His all-consuming love of The Wire more than compensates for his lack of appreciation of non-treacly teenage satire, though.)

Might be some spoilers, so if you’re behind, be careful.

Finding its stride: Mad Men Draper still hasn’t found his mojo (and he pukes on himself a lot for such a hardcore alcoholic), but Peggy’s birthday episode was epic.  Kudos to the writers for building characters so vivid that even a minor encounter such as Betty bumping into Don at a restaurant is fraught with tension.  Still surprised that Peggy’s real life marriage to Fred Armisen (perhaps best known as the horrible Obama on SNL) ended in like three weeks.  Was the cause her Scientoligisicm or his desire to bang his hottie costar Abbie Elliott (who looks as far from Chris Elliott’s DNA as Gracie Belle is from Coach and Tammy’s.)  I’ll also say this again: Sally Draper is the best child actor I’ve ever seen.  Her trip to Don’s office was pretty heartbreaking.

Causing me anger: Friday Night Lights I know the season ended during the summer, but I still wish there was an iPad/iPhone/Android app that would punch you in the throat if you have never watched the show.

A show I’m not watching but that’s supposed to actually be good, despite circumstantial (cast, concept) evidence to the contrary: Hawaii Five-O F#ck Scott Caan – that guy contributed to the demise of Entourage.  (And – sorry, Major – Entourage was almost unwatchable this season.  I would do a post on “The Ten Dumbest Storylines on This Season of Entourage” but I don’t think I could go less than 14,000 words.  And, The League is horrendous – unfunny and overly-amused with its ability to push the censors harder than on a network show.  (I’ll still watch it in a pinch, though.  I watch a lot of tv.  We record three King of Queens reruns per day.)

Meet the friggin mother already: How I Met Your Mother I don’t think the show necessarily needs to end the instant the mother is identified, so can we move on to that stage?  And can we move away from the “trying to have a baby” stage?  (Rachel Bilson would’ve been a fine choice for the mother, and there was a nice symmetry with Barney’s boss name being “Bilson.”)  When the mother is identified, I’m hoping they’ll have Glenn Danzig guest star as well.

Our prayers have finally been answered – more David Spade!: Rules of Engagement CBS cancelled New Christine and kept this sh(t?  What is the opposite of a national treasure?  That’s David Spade – who looks like he’s on the same hygiene regimen as Ke$ha.  In an effort to make sure everything about this show sucks, Puddy and his wife are trying to have a baby.  Mix in the least-funny Indian actor working on a sitcom, and you’ve got yourself a sh&tty show.  (I’ll probably still be watching, but it’ll make me hate myself.)

The only dancing show I don’t watch: Dancing With The “Stars” I can’t support any show that gives more airtime/publicity to the likes of Kate Gosselin and Bristol Palin.  Please go away, everyone associated with this show.

Is Blair Underwood the new Ted Mcginley?: The Event Anything that bills itself as the new Lost is definitely going to suck.  They should just say “we are trying to make a show with a deeply layered mythology that will likely be cancelled before anything is resolved, and, on the one in 6,000 chance we do make it for five or six seasons, we will undoubtedly leave you with a less-than-satisfying conclusion, so only watch this if you can resign yourself to disappointment, either sooner or later.”  And what’s the deal with Blair Underwood?  His arrival on a show signals the beginning of the end.  And, he sucks.

The return of the modest one-piece

Already Cancelled: Lone Star That means SO watched the full run of this series.

Commercials for this show run 24/7 in Aruba, leading to modest homicidal urges: Parenthood Does every show now have to have a kid with Asperger’s in it?  This, The Middle, Big Bang Theory…also, Billy Baldwin?  He’s like the white Blair Underwood….

Like Gordon Gekko said, it’s good: Glee I must be a little gheyer than I thought, because I like Glee.  It’s not like I have showtunes on my Zune, either – I didn’t see any of those successful musicals other than Chicago, which I thought sucked.  (I’m especially doubting myself because the nytimes said (something like) the show “can’t figure out whether it’s a treacly coming of age drama or a satire.”  Treacly?  The same show that had Jane Lynch grimly eyeing the ass-sweat residue of the jewfro kid after he was consumed by a Britney-fueled masturbatory fervor?  (I apologize for the previous sentence, I re-read that like five times and then said” f*ck it.”)  Glee producers, one request: less jewfro kid.

(To me, the question is not so much the philosophical direction of the show, but whether it will fold under the weight of its meta observations.  A self-referential wink here and there is fine, but ultimately the show needs to exist in its own atmosphere.  That sounds a lot like something someone would write while under the influence.  I am not under the influence.  Yet.)

Show that I thought would be great but sucks so far: Running Wilde Nobody does insecure man-child better than Will Arnett, but this ain’t workin so far.  And how did Keri Russell not become a movie star?  No chemistry here, they need to make some changes, pronto.

I can pretty much predict every show in advance: Saturday Night Live Okay, let’s have a sketch where it’s a talk show hosted by an oddball celebrity, with other oddball celebrities as guests (or if we want to get butt-crazy, let’s make it a gameshow hosted by a celebrity), a commercial parody, a sketch where there’s a cocktail party and then a super-weird guest shows up and acts super-weird, a musical guest who’s likely to be a complete unknown or a hasbeen, then a sketch with a running character – how about Gilly?  everybody needs a little more Kristen Wiig, right?, weekend update, a sketch that’s sports-related, another sh*tty song, a digital short that will surprise you with its special guests acting contrary to their public image, and finally a skit that satirizes local television commercials.  See you next week.  (Katy Perry was good, though.)

As if this hasn't been emailed to you 300x already...

If I want to watch a show about spies, I’d rather watch the 80th iteration of Nikita than this crap: Undercovers Seems like this should’ve been the Blair Underwood vehicle this fall.  And, yes, every media outlet ever – the leading woman’s name is hard to spell.  I’m betting this get’s cancelled in like 4 weeks, so not sweating it.

The funniest show on tv: Community Nice start to the season, a bold hitting of the reset button.  Like Glee, dangerously close to over-meta, but the cast and writers are so filled with zing.  Last year was Community neck and neck with Modern Family; this year, I doubt that MF will be able to keep up.

The shooter didn’t do nearly as much damage as I’d hoped: Grey’s Anatomy She’s gone, but have you ever had a stronger sense – without ever having met that person – that a person was a complete bitch than with Katherine Heigl?

Really, really bad idea spurred by some dumbass “say, the kids really seem to like the Twitter” executive: Sh*t My Dad Says Pretty, pretty bad.

On that note, I’m out of here.  I’m pretty exhausted from yesterday completing one of my few manly accomplishments ever: putting up a rod in the closet.  Since SO refused to heed my warnings that her Hoarders-esque habit of keeping every piece of clothing she’s ever owned was dangerously overloading her closet, the whole thing eventually came crashing down (bolts ripped out of the wall and sh*t).  Our first effort to replace it was unsuccessful, as my presence apparently caused the studfinder to misfire (har-de-har-har).  Twelve hours later, I’m pounding in drywall anchors with a pencil behind my ear, carpenter-style.  So far, it be holdin.

I’m going on a little vacation to hang with people who are, like, accomplishing stuff.  Should be fun – later,

Chilly17

It ain’t South Park.  Or Californication.  Or any other ironic cartoon program that I’m not cool enough to have seen.  It’s way down there on your guide, on BBC America.  It’s a British high school comedy called The Inbetweeners.  And if it was a motion picture in the US, even with the bleeping, I’m certain the MPAA would saddle it with an NC-17 rating for language and content.

The rare cringe comedy not shot in “mockumentary” style, The Inbetweeners involves four friends’ quest to get laid and raise their collective social standing.  The characters are stock: briefcase-carrying nerd, lovestruck nerd, stupid nerd, incomprehensibly offensive nerd, mean schoolmaster.  The insults are pretty raw, but accurate in the area of how youngsters (at least in my day) spoke of their desire to have intercourse with their friends moms.  Of course, usually that was just rhetoric, but here the kids are often speaking about specific parts of the main character’s mom.  She’s not Sophia Vergara, but still, we are talking about Britain here, let’s be realistic.

Surprisingly, there are not a lot of good pics of Belinda available, but, trust me, she's much better than the average mom.

The show is pretty humorous, but also educational: I’ve learned tons of new slang for female anatomy (most of them seem to end in “-ge”, I’m thinking of creating my own.  Maybe, “slunge”?).  I’ve also learned that being “fit” is a high compliment.  And, when casting a teen series in the US, casting directors seem to seek out actresses who will inspire debate about “are our teens too thin?”  In the UK, the casting directors are apparently going more for the “our teens: do we have bras big enough to contain them?” debate.   Check it out, it’s available on BBCA On Demand, too – you may not love it, but you will probably be offended by something.

90210 producers, take note: this is what you should be striving for.

In other news, I have been quite busy of late, so postings have been on the sparse side.  I’m trying to unravel my tax records, which should be pretty easy.  Except for the fact that in mid-2008 I inexplicably said “fuck it” and stopped keeping my own records.  That had worked fine in the past; my old broker, despite being less technologically advanced than Suretrade in 1999, provided extremely detailed info on option trades in the 1099 package.  (Option trade information doesn’t go in the 1099 that goes to the IRS, so it’s up to the trader to keep the records and make sure his taxes aren’t fucked up.)  But then I switched to a 1,000,000,000,000,000,000x better trading platform in early 2009 – that’s where the problems begin.  They list every trade in their year end info pack, including ones that weren’t taxable events.  So I’ve had to go and back those trades out and try to get it all to sync up with my own records.  And I don’t have a fucking printout of the 2009 trades because it’s 116 pages long.  Fuck me.

In other² news, I went to SO’s friend’s birthday party in Brooklyn on Saturday.  The usual, drank too much, got wine spilled over 80% of my body, ate a lot of cheese.  When we got back to NYC, we were out of water, so stopped at the corner store to get some.  (For the record, this corner store is the anti-Gristedes: the listed price of a 20 oz Diet Coke with Lime is $1.50, but they let Chilly have them for $1.25.)  When there, I realized that I didn’t have my phone at the same time SO realized she didn’t have her purse.  Chaos ensued.  I started yelling about leaving shit in the cab and how SO needs to pay more attention, SO had the corner store guy call her friend in Brooklyn (at 4:00 AM) to ask if our stuff was there.  Full on debacle.  Still bitching and yelling when we got back home, I was startled to see my phone on the counter – a fucking miracle!  I was using it to check the Final Four score in Brooklyn (those fucking hipsters never have TVs) and somehow it teleported back!  Starting to rethink my position on religion and the supernatural…when SO realizes her purse is there, too.  Apparently we BOTH forgot that we stopped at home and then went to the store.  Morons.  Alcohol, while tasty and delightful, makes you stupider.  The funny part is, the corner store guy could not tolerate that our friends in Brooklyn weren’t answering their phone – he called them 300x until she picked up.  It’s good to have a solid corner store guy.

Later,

Chilly17

Other titles considered: “I Forked Myself”, “Robert Frost Was Not A Capitalist”, “I Am Not A Practiced User Of Paint.net Or Really Any Free Version Of Photoshop.  (It’s Pretty Complicated.  Seriously.)”  So I said “fuck that noise” to that potential banking gig.  They were looking for me to “take a year back” – which essentially means to pretend I did not work 10.7 months at a better firm (actually a much worse firm, but a better group in terms of participating in and executing deals in the space) in 2008.  I also didn’t really think jumping on something imperfect just because it fell into my lap was prudent, have fallen for that before.  Also, I’m pretty lazy.

After leaving the gym last night, was visiting a different Gristedes grocery (stunningly, the one closest to me no longer carries Arriba Hot Salsa, just Medium and Mild.  Despite all my consumer activism specific to this product and store.  Dammit.) and while walking between 8th and 9th Avenues happened upon the movie premiere for Brothers.  It’s an upcoming wife-cheating-on-soldier-husband-with-soldier-husband’s-brother movie or something.  So anyway, covered in sweat and looking forward to the four pound quesadilla to come, I’m suddenly about 12 yards from Tobey Maguire.  Between us there was about 6,000 people all snapping 18 megawatt flashes right in his grill nonstop while he walked twenty feet to his left.  It didn’t look like that much fun – thank goodness for the anonymity of the internet.  Would hate to have to go through that every time I posted something.

This was after they ran the flash gauntlet

Official Kudos to Two Television Programs That Just Concluded Their (Too Short) 2009 Seasons

Mad Men –  Extra rough patch for the Draper.  Took him some time to start getting his Draper on and even then received some pretty consistent bitch slaps from the various ladies in his life.  Some of the story arcs were slow developing, but the payoff in the last three episodes was excellent.  Mostly season three was about the maturation of the female characters: Joan finally coming out swinging, Betty plotting, Peggy standing up for herself (when not laying down for herself and a former colleague).

Mad Men is the only program I can recall depicting someone getting his foot cut off by a runaway lawn mower at an office party.   Love Sally, love Joan, love Roger, love the bizarre look Draper has whenever something horrible is happening to him.  Exquisite work by the cast and the writers, as usual, and further demonstration that “unknown ensemble” is the way to put together a strong dramatic cast (see Wire, The).

Curb Your Enthusiasm –  We’ve seen the formula for what, seven seasons now?  Larry gets agitated by something/someone, it escalates into an altercation and the whole thing later comes back to bite him.  (This was pretty much the Seinfeld formula as well).  Each season also has a broader backdrop – donating an organ, separating from his wife, conducting a Seinfeld reunion to get his wife back, etc.  Wait, what?  Seinfeld reunion?

I’m actually pretty surprised how little hype this got, as there was effectively a half hour Seinfeld imbedded in the season of Curb.  Fucking spot on, the premise for the reunion was funny and tied in with the meta storyline perfectly.  I’m convinced they could crank out another ten seasons of the Sein if they wanted to, without sacrificing much quality.  Not really much need to, though, as CYE has assumed the mantle for no-hugs, curmudgeonly humor.  Eager to see what season eight has in store (although given the long wait between seasons on HBO, it will probably be 2014 or so).

The Exact Opposite of Kudos (2 Thumbs Jammed Straight Down Into My Eye Sockets) To FlashForward

Ten Things That I Hate About FlashForward

1. The constant “I just found out my mom’s dabbling in internet pron” look on Joseph Fiennes’ face.  Dude, just go ahead and start crying if you need to.  Let it all out.
2. Joseph Fiennes’ “I will now channel Christian Bale’s Dark Knight” voice
3. The complete and utter lack of any chemistry on the part of any two characters, on either a romantic or platonic level
4. The inane focus on the main character’s potential future relapse into alcoholism, when he’s also going to be sought out by masked men with laser-scoped assault weapons in the future.  The latter seems a bigger problem to me, not to mention the fact that his fucking partner is going to get fucking murdered
5. The ABCentric lesbian subplot.  Seriously?  In every one of your dramas?  At least the ones in FF are pretty hot, unlike the dogfest that apparently wasn’t a fan favorite on Grey’s Anatomy.  (Disclaimer: I do not watch Grey’s Anatomy, but have been exposed to it and therefore suffer some longterm effects)
6. The nonsensical prioritizations/decisions – “I’m trying to extradite this Nazi to the US, but let me take this 15 minute phone call from my AA sponsor, could be important.”  ”I realize you are the director of the LA office of the FBI, but please allow me to make you Director of Homeland Security.  I am the President.  Or you could not take the job and senselessly blackmail me for a small favor instead. Seemingly i would grant that favor sans blackmail since i just offered you a preposterous promotion, but go ahead with the blackmail if you feel that’s the right thing to do.”
7. No one is actively trying to bone Nicole.  (Since the first episode, at least).  She thinks she’s gonna die, she’s probably down with just about anything.  Morons.
8. The writing is god awful.  Terrible dialogue and a lot of convenient coincidences that allow the heroes to immediately decipher needle-in-haystackesque clues.  Speaking of heroes, Heroes season one was roughly 38x better than this.
9. The protagonist’s wife is super-duper annoying, generally bitchy to everyone and vacillating on whether the visions are to be believed or not.  (Apparently she was on Lost or something, am not eager to dig into another ABC science fantasy program after this trainwreck.)
10. Myself, for continuing to watch.  Why?  I’m certain that a two minute recap on Television Without Pity would be just as satisfying without wasting so much time.

Three Things I Can Tolerate About FlashForward

Peyton is apparently not just a boy's name

1. Nicole.  If your Venn diagram with Mad Men is only going to contain one person, Peyton List is not a bad way to go.
2. John Cho and Jack Davenport, better known as Harold and Steve (Coupling) are the only ones not mailing it in, actingwise.
3. The general premise is pretty cool, and I guess what keeps my dumb ass going back.  The show itself acts somewhat as a time travel device, because after drudging through twenty minutes worth of an episode, I invariably feel that I’ve put in about 57 minutes.

Chilly17

Monday

Robarney - get it? I put them together like Bennifer. Awesome.

How I Met Your Mother – Maintains the hilarity even while introducing Robarney as a couple.  As pointed out somewhere else, Ted is devolving a little bit into a straight-up Ross impersonation, which is lame.  Or ghey.  I predict that he pulls out of it.  The other members of the ensemble continue to bring it.  Rating: Strong Buy.

Gossip Girl – I really love what they are doing with the Chuck/Blair storyli – I do not watch GG.  Rating: Not covered.

Heroes – Season 2 sits on our DVR, unwatched, perilously close to being deleted.  I need to hear proof that they’ve unfucked themselves before I get back into it.  Rating: Hold (Speculative).

Tuesday

Crunches should do the trick. Couple dozen sets.

The Biggest Loser – Haven’t really watched it yet, but the contestants don’t look as fat at a glance, so might not be that great.  Rating: Hold.

(Not a lot of tv watching on Tuesday, just wait til you see Thursday though.  And this isn’t all inclusive)

Wednesday

Consider your point made, ABC.

Cougar Town – Would have been a much better vehicle if they just had Courtney Cox walk around in her underwear for thirty minutes.  The weaker than weak sauce storyline doesn’t provide the appropriate framework for her walking around in her underwear for only 12 minutes.  (We get it, CC is still hot.  I’m pretty certain that, even devoid of fame and riches, she could still score plenty of dudes of whatever age group).  Rating: Strong Sell.

Modern Family – My favorite new show so far.  I’m a sucker for people being randomly shot with BB guns though, it was funny in A Christmas Story and it’s funny now.  Plot in a nutshell: Arrested Development-esque look at a family consisting of a dad with a majorly hot and much younger new wife and (sensitive) step kid, and his two kids: a daughter with a husband and several kids and a gay son with a newly adopted Vietnamese kid.  Hilarity ensues.  Rating: Strong Buy.

The New Adventures of Old Christine – JLD continues to bring the funny and I love the supporting cast.  It’s fascinating to me that JLD’s dad is a French billionaire – he must be pretty cool to tolerate the humiliation JLD certainly suffered climbing the comedic ladder.  Rating: Buy.

Thursday

I predict a little misty-eyedness, even though th is fiction and in real life Jenna recently got a divorce

The Office – The writers have done a good job so far integrating the Jam relationship, hopefully this week’s wedding won’t signify a shift in this trend.  Continues to be a bright spot and somewhat reflective (if through a funhouse mirror) of what office life is like.  Rating: Strong Buy.

Parks & Recreation – Jury is still out on this one for me.  I like Amy Poehler but not sold on the Leslie Nope character.  I do think the Indian guy is pretty funny, and Rashida Jones is always a plus.  Storylines have been pretty weak.  Doesn’t capture the essence of small town beaurocracy the way The Office captures the feeling of working way-too-closely with some oddballs.  Rating: Hold (Speculative).

Community – It’s well documented on this site that I am a huge Joel McHale fan.  I love The Soup and think the dude is funny as shit.  However, I’m not digging this show as much as I’d originally hoped.  JM can bring the smarm/jerkiness just fine, but I’m yet to buy the whole concept: JM, a successful attorney, has to go to a community college to get his degree since he lied about having one.  His study group, consisting of the normal mix of hot chicks, nerdy chicks, eccentric old dudes, and hilarious Indian dudes (what is up with all the hilarious Indian dudes this year?) will help him graduate and also, in a very special episode, learn something about himself.  I think it will come together, but hasn’t so far.  It is pretty funny though seeing McHale channel a young Chevy Chase, alongside tha actual old Chevy Chase.  Rating: Buy (Speculative).

Grey’s Anatomy – Hork-hork-hork-hork.  (Sound of cat vomiting)  Rating: Retardedly Strong Sell.

Flash Forward – My first ever viewing of an ABC drama.  It might get there, but I wasn’t overwhelmed off the bat.  The pilot wasn’t nearly as compelling as (this is now hard to say) the Heroes pilot two years ago.  I’m a little concerned that the main character is so concerned about his wife potentially cheating when it appears the apocalypse is right around the corner.  And why is John Cho’s character named Demetri?  Isn’t he Korean?  Rating: Hold.

Friday

I don’t fucking watch TV on Friday – I’m 40 not 83.

Saturday

See above, it’s fucking Saturday.

Sunday

Birds of a feather

Curb Your Enthusiasm – LD remains a genius.  Leon Black might be the funniest character on television.  I’m sure the Seinfeld reunion will be well done, but just the average episode of this show is better than 99% of other programs.  Rating: Strong Buy.  HBO does a great job, except for…

Entourage – WTF happened to this show?  This season has been painful to watch.  I know that the shooting schedule forces some dated references, but I’ve seen Wings re-runs that are more current than some of the stuff here.  Drama, once the best character, has become too much of a caricature.  I realize the show is about the entourage, not Vince, but E’s storylines are boring unless he’s dealing with Ari.  Ari’s shtick is wearing thin.  I like the evolution of Lloyd and Turtle, but those are tertiary storylines that can’t sustain the show.  Rating: Sell.

On a non-related note, there’s a great read on the Marc Dreier saga in Vanity Fair.  If you haven’t read it or any of the many Madoff pieces in VF, I highly recommend them.  Some chilling stuff in there re: BM.  Carve out some time though, a couple of hours of good reading material there.

Chilly17

Weeds was once a pretty interesting, if far-fetched, Showtime dramedy about a suburban widow keeping her family afloat by dealing marijuana.  The cast and performances were strong – Mary-Louise Parker, Elizabeth Perkins, Romany Malco, Kevin Nealon, Justin Kirk each brought something unique to the table, be it comedic perspective, empathetic longing or whatnot.  The storylines were interesting and there were some pretty staggering plot twists to keep things lively in the first two seasons.  The third and fourth seasons starting veering out of control to unrestrained silliness.

Now it’s the fifth season, and essentially none of the above plaudits still hold true.  Call it The Curse of Jeffrey Dean Morgan’s Ghost – Weeds is now as fucking stupid as Grey’s Anatomy, maybe (shudder) even worse.  Parker’s “eyes wandering to the far left or right of the screen as she silently slurps the last of her Diet Coke/iced coffee” scenes were heralded as a nuanced take on a widow’s disociation in the first couple of seasons.  Now it just seems like she’s got undiagnosed Asperger’s.  Kevin Nealon’s character is beyond cartoonish and 100% unfunny – you are better off fastforwarding once you see his face, only pressing play when there is no trace off him left.  Perkins’ Celia, initially the meddling bitch that made dicey situation dicier, is now a zero dimensional character that is just a hair beyond Nealon’s in prompting suicidal/homicidal urges.  All that He Said, She Said potential sadly wasted…wait, what?  Wasted potential?  Elizabeth, perhaps you’ve found a home.  Call us.

The writers seem far more interested in having an interesting opening credit sequence.  Hey, Jenji Kohan, we fucking get it – you created Weeds!  Ha – you carved that in a bar of soap!  You are clever, great.  Now make the show stop sucking.  Bring back Conrad, Heylia, and Sanjay.  Kill off Doug, Celia and all Mexican gangsters (except maybe Ignacio).  Thanks, much appreciated.

(500) Days of Summer

Hey, what do you know, two good movies in a row!  What a streak, particularly in this barren summer.  Most of you probably assume I will love any movie with parentheses in the title, but that isn’t true.  (Although parentheses are awesome, allowing you to “break the fourth wall” even though you are already speaking directly to your audience)  Is (500) Days as good as The Hurt Locker?  No, too precious in spots and also featuring a couple of (unneccessary) standard romantic comedy staples – the bumbling friends with no advice to offer and the wise (and profane) beyond-their-years sibling with way too much (good) advice to offer.  Other than those quibbles, though, (500) Days was pretty fresh – I loved the fact that they tell you up front (and in the trailers) that it isn’t a love story and doesn’t really work out for the couple.

It’s a pretty typical story: straight-laced boy Tom (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) meets quirky, not-that-conventionally-beautiful-yet-uniformly-desired girl Summer (Zooey Deschanel).  The story is not told in chronological order, so you don’t get the straightforward “does she like me? she likes me!  she doesn’t like me…” routine.  I think every guy has probably encountered some loopy chick like Summer (and does Zooey Deschanel play any other type role?  And is she the same exact person as Maggie Gyllenhaal or what?) at some point, leading to much consternation.  Gordon-Levitt is a great actor, although this is the first time I’ve seen him in something this light since his seminal work in Third Rock From the Sun.  He works just fine here, maybe a tad too earnest at times, but he was able to bridge the gap from breezy to (literally) cartoonish well.  As a bonus, there’s a big dose of Hall & Oates in here, too.  If you are going to go to a romantic comedy, I highly recommend this over that garbage with Katherine Heigl and that 300 dude.  (Side note: Doesn’t that Gerard Butler look a bit too Quagmirey to be starring in romantic comedies?)

Giggety?

One other thing, Geoffrey Arend, who I saw in the liquor store the other day, is one of the goofy friends in this movie.  As you may recall, he is engaged to Christina Hendricks of Mad Men fame.  Geoffrey may be a great guy, but we still couldn’t figure out how this all adds up.

Maybe they just hope "Arendricks" will catch on?

About to go on safari, yall,

Chilly17

I have more free time.  And, apparently the policy in our apartment is that anything that somehow gets onto the DVR must be watched.  And the frickin DVR has a mind of its own – I turned off Tool Academy after 5 minutes and took it off record.  But there it was, every week.  It would not go away.  And so we watched.  And I’m certain that it shaved a good 15-20 points off of my already regressing IQ.  

I’m here to save everyone else from such a fate.  I will take a look at some retarded shows and save you some gray matter.  Since tomorrow is Wednesday it probably makes sense to start with…

Real World: Brooklyn  (MTV, Wednesdays at 10:00 PM EST)

This is the most action that this show has seen

Two-word Cast Description:  Black girl.  Token gay. Tat girl.  Gender reassigner.  Bodybuilder/model.  Dancer/dancing disliker.  Really-seems-ghey mormon.  Ex-army guy.

Summary:  By now, everyone is pretty much familiar with the Real World formula: mix together combustible (yet attractive) people from all walks of life, and watch them fight and fornicate.  Sometimes at the same time.  Each cast member will have some lame story line: “I always wanted to live in Omaha because I have longed to pursue a career in agriculture, and there aren’t many ag opportunities in Compton.”  There’s always some contrived “work” that the cast members have to do, but it’s all essentialy staged for the inevitable fighting and fornicating.

What’s New This Year:  Since being gay doesn’t pack much shock value anymore, this season MTV has raised the bar with Katelynn, a post-op dude-turned-chick.  There’s also a regular gay dude who seems to be straight given his anger issues and a virgin mormon widely assumed to be gay.  I’m pretty sure that he’s just ultra naive (think Will Ferrell in Elf) but some of his quotes strain credulity.  The others are basically the same cookie cutter types you see every season, with the exception of Ryan, the Army vet.  Thankfully, he is by far the most normal person on this show and comes across as a likable regular guy who’s looking forward to starting over after getting back from Iraq.  (Spoiler alert: Never look forward to anything when the military is prominently involved in any possible disappointment)

What Interesting Things Happen on the Show:  Nothing.  This season is hurting.  There’s zero chance of anyone hooking up on this show.  The producers have been reduced to having the guys play silly pranks on the girls.  Not pranks with the panache of Jim Halpert, either – more Dwight’s style.  The bodybuilder dude and dancer girl were barely on the first 5-6 episodes.  No one really gets drunk (except sometimes the token gay guy, which seems odd), no one has sex (although Devyn is certainly juggling a lot of guys) and the fights are always of the “please-do-the-dishes” variety.  (Although there was potential for the extremely rare do-not-steal-my-artificial-vagina-growing-tools-as-a-prank argument.  Unfortunately tensions eased before they got to this point)

Having Katelynn traipse around in panties was bothersome on many levels.  Not so much for the whole transgender thing, but more for “everyone else here is pretty modest; i guess to make a great impression  I should walk around in my panties constantly” reasons.  From the get go those savvy guys knew something was amiss with her and they correctly guessed that it was a dong.  When the big secret came out, there were dribs and drabs of humor as the guys asked questions about the process (although Chet (might-be-gay-mormon) predictably asked some creepy ones).  But even this supposedly inflammatory cast addition is really just kind of boring (as well as really messy).  

Conclusion:  Don’t waste your time.  JD’s (token gay guy) meltdown was the only mildly interesting thing that’s happened so far, and they all pretended it didn’t happen the next day.  So read a book or something, but don’t waste your time on this.  But for heaven’s sake if you are hurting for TV to watch on Wednesday, don’t even consider directing your dial to…   

High School Reunion  (TVLand, Wednesdays at 10:00 PM EST)

Small photo used to prevent retinal damage (plus was all I could find)

Two-word Cast Description:  Ugly Dude. Ugly Chick.  Ugly Dude. Ugly Chick.  Ugly Dude. Ugly Chick.  Ugly Dude. Ugly Chick.  Ugly Dude. Ugly Chick.  Non-ugly Chick.  Ugly Dude.  Ugly Chick.  Ugly Dude.  Ugly Chick.  Ugly Dude. Ugly Chick.  Ugly Chick.

Summary:  I didn’t see the first season of HSR (a relief that this no longer has anything to do with Hart, Scott or the other guy) but the setup seemed enticing: take a handful of people from a random high school class set to have its twentieth reunion and have them cohabitate in a resort house in Hawaii.  This is right in my wheelhouse since I graduated at roughly the same time (from high school; college took me seven total years as, uh, the NCAA granted me three redshirt seasons).  They try to populate the “reunion” with key stock characters: the Jock, the Class Clown, the Snob, the Beauty Queen, the Dickwad, the Stalker – all your favorites are here.  

Plotlines:  The producers attempt to make it interesting with various subplots: a woman has held a 20 year grudge against another woman because of a slumber party snub (gasp!); two of the reunionites were formerly married (and the wife is inexplicably in high demand) leading to some awkwardness; two frat boy types from a different graduating class at the same school are air-dropped in to stir things up.

The mechanisms for personal interactions are Hall Passes (you get to pick someone to go do an activity with) and Detention (the producers pick someone for you to be stuck with on some random activity).  This being TVLand, there won’t be much adult-oriented action.  Although one of the girls was allegedly in Playboy (must have been the “Insecure Girls of Botched Plastic Surgery” issue).

What Interesting Things Happen on the Show:  Nothing.  It’s super-duper boring.  The staged fights/rivalries generally fizzle out.

One of the interlopers (the two guy from a different graduating class) got pretty drunk the first night and made some inflammatory comments.  The rest of the cast spent approximately four consecutive episodes deciding whether to kick him out, culminating in a Jedi council meeting where they nearly-unanimously decided to do so.  He walked in on this meeting and apologized.  Instant forgiveness was granted (except for one tool who could not abide this forgiveness and sent his own message by leaving Hawaii).  In his defense Shalonda’s high school picture does bear more than a passing resemblence to that of Buckwheat.  There’s nothing wrong with that – most of the children of the 80′s have at least one regrettable look in their past.  If I could go back in time, along with preventing myself from watching Real World: Brooklyn and HSR, I would skip over my “parachute pants and sleeveless white tee shirts” phase.

The “wannabe” girl who was snubbed by the other girl (who herself carried some (literal/fun) baggage – she had apparently suffered brutal teasing for having large breasts) used this hatred to fuel a Keyser Söze-esque quest for revenge.  It was all resolved as a silly childhood misunderstanding after ten minutes.  They spent like eighty hours of screen buildup for this quick and easy resolution.  Sweet.  Glad I invested some time in this.  Awesome how they repeat stuff 7-9 times to make sure you get how major the issue is and then it just disappears.

Another radically unattractive guy was dropped in a few episodes later as the long-time “crush” of the one girl on the show who is not hideously ugly.  This gentleman had had a rough go of it lately – his roommate had stolen all of his shit (or something like that, too lazy to track down the details).  So the producers hooked him up with multiple Hall Passes with his crush.  It was excruciating to watch his fumbling advances (even though the two interlopers tried to give him some ladykilling advice).  She was at least nice about it, belying her “snob” past.  Ultimately, her rejection led this sad fellow to nude up and jump in the pool, probably one of the least-desired images in television history.  

Conclusion:  Again, don’t bother.  But one question for the producers: where the fuck did you get this homely menagerie??  They are from Arizona, for Christ’s sake – couldn’t you at least have found a graduating class with 1-2 average looking people?  The “hot” guy in this group has skin that would have Tommy Lee Jones seeking out the nearest laser skin resurfacing center.  Even if you hypothetically wanted to watch this program, you would have to spend much of your time averting your eyes (one of the girls either has Type 10 skin cancer, 7th degree sun burn or leprosy).  Spare yourself.