widdershins

Hey, Mythbuster!

Thanks to Eric's recommendation I've been watching Mythbusters. It's of local interest to me; M5 Industries is on the lower slope of Potrero Hill, where I live, and there are occasional neighborhood sites or businesses in the show. The show is also of interest to nerdy/geeky types thanks to the inquisitive subject matter. Unfortunately, like all shows on Discovery, the show is produced with an annoying lowbrow style. In this case, the show has a moronic voiceover for small children and idiots who can't follow it otherwise, and there is a recap of what just transpired every 5 minutes or so for people with the really, really short attention spans.

The show has really caught on to something in the culture. The word "mythbuster" now denotes the archetypal nerdy engineer and is recognizably associated with the core visual images of the show's hosts, Jamie and Adam: one a beret-wearer with walrus mustache, and the other with thick black glasses and a t-shirt. I wish I could remember which recent movie I saw where someone fitting the latter description was referred to as "mythbuster" off-handedly.

What's on?

I know you've been sitting around asking yourselves, "what's mg watching on TV these days?"

Glad you asked!

The top tier of really good things on TV that are worth going out of your way to see, if you're me:

• Lost
• MI-5
• The Kumars at No. 42
• Two and a Half Men
• House
• Arrested Development
• Grounded for Life
• South Park

And then there's the tier of shows you watch because you're a silly person who happens to like them or just can't tear yourself away from them, if you're me:

• Stargate: Atlantis
• Stargate: SG-1
• Battlestar Galactica
• The West Wing
• Las Vegas
• Numb3rs (sic)
• Tilt
• Star Trek: Enterprise
• Queer Eye for the Straight Guy
• King of the Hill
• The Simpsons
• Malcolm in the Middle
• Monk

This time through I am resolved not to watch Survivor or The Apprentice, although I can't quite force myself not to watch American Idol so far. These three all suffer from being more of the same and quite frankly are totally played out. The thing about American Idol is that V and I just have so much fun pausing the TiVo every couple of minutes to make fun of the whole thing (contestants, judges, host, etc.) and laugh ourselves silly. Really, it takes us 90 minutes to watch an hour of it, and that includes fast-forwarding through the commercials.

So what are you watching? What's that super great show I don't know about yet you can clue me into?

American Idol

I'm ashamed to admit I am completely hooked on American Idol.

The first season I managed to completely ignore it. Star Search, after all, was boring in the 80s, why would this be any different?

When the second season rolled around, V got interested in it. She would watch the shows when I wasn't around mostly (thank you, Tivo!), but would occasionally show me bits of the show she thought were especially good. "That guy is a little flat," I'd say, or "she's off-tempo." What little I saw of the singers was unexceptional, but the feedback from the so-called "judges" (Randy Jackson, Paula Abdul, and especially Simon Cowell) was a little bit interesting. V watched it avidly at the end last year, and her enthusiasm extended even to buying Clay and Ruben's CDs. I'd say she was hooked at that point.

And then this year when the season started I happened to catch the beginning and I was hooked.

The truly compelling part of American Idol to me (and I suspect to a lot of people) is the auditions at the beginning. For weeks, they show outtakes from auditions by thousands of people. In these auditions, the judges are brutal as they weed out 99% of the contestants. The brutally frank feedback continues in the next round over several weeks as the 60 or so selected seminfinalists are winnowed down to the final dozen. I love the feedback. I love that someone stands up and pours out their heart into a song (or not) and then receives a frank, usually unadorned, evaluation. I think most viewers imagine themselves in the shoes of the aspiring young people, but not me. I see the judges listening, evaluating, cutting to the chase, as it were, and I think I Want That Job!

The rest of the season is all downhill from there. Once they get to the final 12, the judges no longer determine the outcome, as it is left up to phone and text message voting. But a lot of interest in these people was built up in the early stages, enough to keep me interested in what happens with them: do they continue to develop, do they overcome their personal flaws, do they become spoiled by success, can they keep it up? So, I'm hooked.

Which is not to say that the show isn't also really annoying. At every step, the show draws everything out twice as long as it needs to be in order to milk the ratings. It's on 2 or 3 times a week, for 30, 60, or even 120 minutes, and gets ratings that approach the Super Bowl's. Thanks to Tivo, we often fast-forward through the pointless parts, which helps. There are incessant, unavoidable product placements. And the show also has an annoying MC guy, one talentless, vapid "Ryan Seacrest" (I seriously doubt that's his birth name) who thinks that inventing a catch-phrase (in his case, "Seacrest -- out!" at the end) is equivalent to having an interesting personality.

In any event, I seem to be along for the ride, curious and fascinated by the competition, but mostly envious of the judges.

Holy ---

Just in case you run out of ironic nostalgic television references, this list of "Holy ---, Batman!" utterances by Robin on the Batman TV show should do the trick.

[via LinkMachineGo]

The Apprentice

Evan Kirchhoff at 101-280 endorses the new reality show The Apprentice, and I have to agree. In The Apprentice, 16 already very accomplished people compete in assigned business tasks and they are evaluated by Donald Trump, who each week fires one of them. The winner at the end of the series will become president of one of the Trump companies for one year. The show has got real people doing real things that really matter, and the fact that it's a competition is all the more appropriate to the (sometimes admittedly contrived) white-collar business environment, which the show is exploiting for entertainment value at the same time that it is wallowing in it and celebrating it. As Evan says:

The male team lost on the first day, and were asked to assign blame among themselves -- what followed was a macho exchange of fatuous management truisms; it was an accidental parody of every business meeting ever. This may be the key to the show: it is simultaneously an indictment and a celebration of American business culture.

Festivus

Happy Festivus, everyone!

FRANK: And at the Festivus dinner, you gather your family around, and you tell them all the ways they have disappointed you over the past year.

KRAMER: Is there a tree?

FRANK: No. Instead, there's a pole. It requires not decoration. I find tinsel distracting.

KRAMER: Frank, this new holiday of yours is scratching me right where I itch.

FRANK: Let's do it then! Festivus is back! I'll get the pole out of the crawl space.

Lord of the Rings

In honor of Return of the King, which opened this week, I'm recommending two fun LotR parodies: Once More, With Hobbits, a musical (lyrics only so far) to the tunes of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer musical episode Once More, With Feeling; also, the very naughty, hilarious Secret Diaries. [via MetaFilter]

And speaking of RotK, which clocks in at a zaftig 3.5 hours, it was no Matrix Revolutions-style third episode disappointment. It's great fun, and the battle of the Pelennor Fields is particularly moving. Even so, I liked the first two movies more. I suspect the eventual "extended edition" DVD with a few key scenes reinserted will play much better (especially the Saruman bits). I was, however, mildly disappointed that my favorite moment in the trilogy ("I am the Mouth of Sauron") was left out of the film version, although I suspect that was a victim of the screenplay adaptation, not the cutting room, so I am not holding my breath on its DVD restoration....

MI-5

The latest season pass we've added to the Tivo is the outstanding British drama MI-5 on A&E. It's an A&E co-production with the BBC, who air the show as Spooks in the UK. Unlike the slick but vapid Threat Matrix on ABC, MI-5 intelligently and compellingly depicts counterintelligence operations, as well as how these jobs affect the private lives of the operatives. These are real people who agonize over their duplicity and morality. A&E's apt tagline for the series is "They search for the truth. Their lives are a lie."

MI-5 is the UK's domestic security/counterespionage service, sort of like parts of the FBI and Homeland Security in the US. MI-6 is the super-secret foreign espionage service -- James Bond-type stuff. One of the subplots in the series is about the tensions between the two organizations.

Two seasons have been shown in the UK; the second season is now showing on A&E, who are also currently replaying the first season. The episodes I've seen so far (two from the first season) have been very exciting. This is simply one of the best shows on television right now, and we are really enjoying it. As a procedural, as a thriller, as a drama -- it rocks. "How did we not know about this?" V asked. I don't know, but now I'm telling you. Enjoy.

Seinfeld scripts

The complete scripts to every episode of Seinfeld, searchable. Serenity Now! [via J-Walk and Pop Culture Junk Mail]

Losing the translation

Bill Murray's character in Lost in Translation is shilling for a whiskey company in Japan. American stars do this all the time. While they wouldn't dare to cheapen their image by doing TV ads for consumer products in the US, they do love the money from doing Japanese advertising and they figure no one in the US will see the ads anyway. In the global high-speed Internet, that last assumption turns out to be terribly wrong. Take a look at Japander, a site that exposes many of these ads to widespread public visibility. [via 2blowhards]