Isaac Hayes

Signs of the times

You know you're watching a sweeps-period episode of a sitcom when it guest-stars a professional sports team and an actor playing himself in one scene at the end of the episode.

You know you're watching an sweeps-period episode of a sitcom from 1982 when the sports team is the Boston Celtics and the actor is Daniel J. Travanti.

Twin Peaks

I was expecting to enjoy watching Twin Peaks on DVD; I haven't really seen the show since it was canceled in 1991 and remember it fondly. But I wasn't expecting to be hit with an almost overwhelming sense of remembrance. It was as if I was both watching the show and watching myself watch the show as a 15 year old, and remembering just how stunningly weird and strange the show was.

I might go so far as to say that you can divide the history of American television into pre- and post-Twin Peaks. The pilot is an audacious piece of storytelling that drops us into the middle of a town full of the sorts of secrets and lies you'd find in a typical primetime drama or soap opera and then blows it wide open with the murder of Laura Palmer. I'd never seen anything like it before -- while townsfolk were running around double-crossing each other's business deals or hiding their illicit relationships there was this strange, unknowable world happening just behind it.

This sense of weirdness, just out of sight, is reflected several times in the pilot. Watch the backgrounds of each scene carefully -- there are a number of scenes in which something important is happening behind whichever character is the focus of the scene: The sheriff's truck pulling up far in the distance while Leland Palmer tries to calm his wife, or deputies walking toward the principal's office while teenagers talk to and ignore each other in the halls of the high school. It's a signal that this show is going to be different from anything else you'd ever seen before.

And it was.

And it paved the way for serialized shows where weirdness unapologetically happens. Twin Peaks paved the way for The X-Files and Buffy and Angel and Lost and Battlestar Galactica and dozens of other shows that have made TV infinitely more interesting than it was before 1990 -- and instead of being the goofy shows that made it on the air because everything else fell through, they're the tentpoles of their networks. Twin Peaks got canceled but made TV safe for smart, weird shows, and TV's much the better for it.

Another thing I remembered was that FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper was, hands down, the coolest man on the planet, and I wanted to be him when I grew up, except that my hair cannot do that.

And there was one more thing that made the show irresistible to my restless teenage brain. Well, three things:

Accent accident?

Am I the only one who thinks it's funny that Paul Giamatti's Colonial New England accent on John Adams sounds pretty much identical to Eddie Izzard's American accent on The Riches?

MSNBC thought

MSNBC would be ever so much better if they got rid of all their on-air talent not named Chuck Todd, Rachel Maddow, and Keith Olbermann. And maybe brought Chris Matthews down from the attic for election nights.

Redeemed!

I'm always vaguely embarrassed by the fact that I watch Hell's Kitchen; it's not very good, it's so overblown you can cut about ten minutes from each episode just by forwarding through the recaps and credits; and the whole thing is so forgettable that I forget what's happened in each episode about two minutes after it ends. Last summer, She Who Must Be Obeyed and I agreed that the show would probably drop off our schedules once the baby arrived. But when it popped up on our scheduled recordings list last week we decided we'd watch the first episode at least.

And we were rewarded in our faith, for Chef Ramsey hath delivered unto us the kind of thing that keeps me watching stupid reality shows. For one of the contestants, when charged with whipping up his signature dish, created something he calls "Hen in a Pumpkin."

Hen.

In.

A.

Pumpkin.

I imagine it would go well with bacon on a cat.

Wallpaper

I'm addicted to home improvement shows, even ones that deal with projects I can't imagine ever undertaking myself. Still, whenever one of these shows involves someone using wallpaper, I can't help but think it would be simpler and cheaper to just run a card with the words "DON'T USE WALLPAPER" on screen for the length of the show.

Separated at birth?

Battlestar Galactica producer Ron Moore...





...and Doctor Lucien Sanchez?

This is not a caucus post.

This is a Fox News post. I rarely watch Fox, but tuned in a few times last night when CNN and MSNBC were both on commercials. And I couldn't help being struck by how shabby the whole enterprise looked -- badly lit sets for their panels of talking heads, ugly graphics, and, well, everyone looked like they'd had lots of bad plastic surgery, except for Shepard Smith, who is what I imagine you'd get if you beat John Barrowman up very badly and didn't let things heal quite properly.

PSA: Amazon's Veronica Mars sale

Longtime readers of this blog will remember how much I loved the too-short-lived Veronica Mars. So I'd like to let you know that Amazon is currently selling the first two seasons of the show for fifteen bucks each. Enjoy!

Things like this make me miss THE BRAVE & THE BOLD

Batman meets Tim Gunn.

It's not that I didn't enjoy "Ed"

...at least for the season and a half or so before he turned into a deranged stalker, and I'm always glad to see Tom Cavanaugh guest-star on Scrubs, but when exactly did he become made entirely out of David Gest?

Becoming Dexter

Jim Emerson takes a look at the tour-de-force that is the opening credits of Dexter, one of our favorite shows:

Creating, assembling, integrating, asserting, and maintaining a personality is routine for most of us, but there's no denying it's hard work. Some of us have to do it from scratch every day. That's what so chillingly magnificent about the opening credits sequence for Showtime's "Dexter." It shows a man putting himself together (piece by piece, close-up by close-up) in the course of enacting his morning rituals. Yes, there are plenty of playful groaners about knives, flesh, and blood. Dexter is a serial killer -- albeit one who's trying to use his control-freak instincts to keep his habit manageable, within certain ethical boundaries, even as he daylights in forensics for Miami homicide. (He's a blood-spatter expert, naturally.)

It's an amazing opening sequence that's unsettling enough that we to fast-forward through it most weeks.

The Office gets a convention

It's nice to see that my hometown has embraced The Office so completely that they're throwing a convention this weekend. If you're attending, though, just make sure you don't put pink highlights in your hair or curse at an overflowing toilet.

RIP Viva Laughlin

Viva Laughlin has been canceled after just two episodes, which should surprise precisely no one. The show was a muddled mess from the word go. It was an adaptation of the BBC musical murder mystery Blackpool, aired on BBC America as Viva Blackpool, and seemed determined to act out every single cliche of bad Americanizations of British TV.

Taking a limited-run show that works because it's got a limited run and turning into an aimless, open-ended mess? Check.

Taking the high-concept that's the point of the show in the first place and shunting it to the corner like that weird relative no one likes in a holiday picture? Check. The musical numbers barely showed the actors singing, or doing much of anything but walking or driving while singing.

Taking characters played by interesting-looking British people and replacing them with generically pretty American actors grown in pods? Pretty much check -- sure, Laughlin lead actor Lloyd Owen is himself a Brit, but he's much more normal looking than Blackpool's David Morrissey and his hair and wardrobe were toned down to the point of nondescriptness -- Morrissey's thinning would-be pompadour, Elvis sideburns, and bolo ties are gone, and in their place is nothing that would ever warrant a second glance on the street. Worse still is the replacement of David Tennant with some perfectly boring guy with a perfectly rhinoplastied nose.

The bottom line is that there was no point at all to making this remake; it richly deserves its cancellation and I hope it will stop any thoughts of Americanizing Stephen Moffat's amazing Jekyll series.

Tales of the Gold Monkey. On DVD.

I had forgotten this show -- which I recall quite enjoying as a kid -- even existed until I read the story about a possible release next year. I suppose it's fitting that a show that probably made it on the air to capitalize on Raiders of the Lost Ark will now make it onto DVD thanks to the fourth Indiana Jones movie. It's nice to see those wisecracking 1930s adventure heroes sticking together.

Bionic

So there's a new Bionic Woman series on NBC, and since it's got many of the folks who run Battlestar Galactica on staff we've watched the first two episodes. The presence of the lovely Michelle Ryan doesn't hurt, nor does that of Katee Sackhoff, who proves once again that women named "Katee" should not be messed with.

The show's not awful, but there are some really dumb tropes whose presence annoys me, most of which center around the mysterious, possibly sinister group who bionicized (is that a word? It is now.) Jamie Sommers, the new bionic woman. The group, personified by Miguel Ferrer, acts dumb when it comes to handling and recruiting Jamie.

For instance: She complains to Ferrer that they've turned her into a freak. He says the dumb thing: Something along the lines of, we built you and we own you. Wouldn't the smart thing to say be something closer to, "You were in a car accident that cost you three limbs, an eye, and an ear, and thanks to our technology you're all superhuman and fully functional. Would you rather be hobbling around on normal prosthetics?"

Ferrer also takes a hard line in his initial attempts to recruit her. Wouldn't the smart thing to do be to offer her a job with a large salary, health coverage, and the promise of a desk job if and when she retires from field work?

Problem is, none of those things read "sinister" really quickly. And writing dumb is easier than writing smart.

An open letter to a just and benevolent God

Dear God,

Thank you for adding Alicia Witt to the cast of Law & Order: Criminal Intent.

Yours,

Matter-Eater Lad

Couldn't they find any Americans in Cardiff?

I winced, hard, when Friday's episode of Doctor Who featured its fictional American president referring to himself as "the President-elect of the United States." I suspect the line was intended to sound like the president was using his full and baroque title, along the lines of "Elizabeth the Second, by the Grace of God, of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and of Her other Realms and Territories Queen, Head of the Commonwealth, Defender of the Faith," but it doesn't work that way. "President-elect" is a precise title that refers only to someone who has won a presidential election but not yet been inaugurated. And if the guy we saw in this episode was "just" president-elect, he'd have had no actual authority to do any of the things he did in this episode -- that would have all been handled by the outgoing, incumbent president.

Anyway, Russell T. Davies should feel free to call me next time he needs a consult on American politics.

Dialogue I would have liked to hear

In last night's episode of Heroes, the interminable Mohinder snaps at a man (Stephen Tobolowsky, AKA Ned Ryerson, AKA a !@#$er from Yankton) who, Mohinder says, has been following him -- because Mohinder has seen this man at three presentations he's given! Of course, Ned Ryerson explains something that has to do with one of the show's lurking uber-conspiracies. Which is fine, for dramatic purposes, but I wish he'd said, "Yes, I have! When I attend academic conferences I go to presentations by researchers whose work interests me and overlaps with my own research! I was going to suggest we collaborate on a paper together, but since you've just pushed me down a flight of stairs, never mind."