Downton Abbey Valentine's Day cards

For the Anna to your Bates, the Matthew Crawley to your Lady Mary, or the cutting comeback to your Dowager Countess, a selection of Downton Abbey-themed Valentine's Day cards.

Where's the social networking on Star Trek?

Cat Valente remarks on the old-fashionedness on display in Star Trek DS9, particularly in regard to what the characters do and don't do with their free time, infinite bandwidth, extreme connectedness, and lack of scarcity.

Nobody sits around and plays Farmville. Nobody gets embroiled in a flame war concerning the portrayal of Klingons in human vids or just sits and watches vids with their feet up. Nope. The brave men and women of the future read (super old) books, talk to each other face to face, and even in their VR fantasies practice for things they will have to do in real life or, admittedly quite realistically, have space holosex. There is no WoW. There are no video games at all unless they are evil ones from Risa that will suck out your brains.

Because of this, and because of the lack of a social network, it is possible to be alone in the Star Trek world in a way which I would have to deliberately take action to achieve in my world. Even when we are alone, most of us check a number of communication vectors and leave them live--Twitter, email, text messages, Facebook, our blogs, Reddit, news feeds. We are a baby hivemind spinning our training wheels. To be alone as profoundly (to me) as Sisko, Kira, and the rest often are, I would have to make a decision to shut down all of those streams.

Mad Men season five fashion predictions

Over at Sew Weekly, Mena Trott predicts what some of the characters will be wearing in the coming season of Mad Men.

Oh, Betty. For years, she has been immaculately dressed and presented as the facade of the perfect 1950s/1960s wife. With her cinched waists and billowing skirts, she's held onto late 1950s and early 1960s fashion the longest. In season four, she's married to the anti-Don, the boring Henry Francis and is getting a little too familiar with the bottle. When you're married to Henry Francis, you just don't care any more. That should be embroidered on a pillow.

How a late night talk show works

Gavin Purcell produces Late Night with Jimmy Fallon and the other night on Twitter, he shared some info about how the show comes together.

Don't go changing

In a piece for Vanity Fair, Kurt Andersen argues that for the first time in recent history, American pop culture (fashion, art, music, design, entertainment) hasn't changed dramatically in the past 20 years.

Since 1992, as the technological miracles and wonders have propagated and the political economy has transformed, the world has become radically and profoundly new. (And then there's the miraculous drop in violent crime in the United States, by half.) Here is what's odd: during these same 20 years, the appearance of the world (computers, TVs, telephones, and music players aside) has changed hardly at all, less than it did during any 20-year period for at least a century. The past is a foreign country, but the recent past -- the 00s, the 90s, even a lot of the 80s -- looks almost identical to the present. This is the First Great Paradox of Contemporary Cultural History.

Think about it. Picture it. Rewind any other 20-year chunk of 20th-century time. There's no chance you would mistake a photograph or movie of Americans or an American city from 1972-giant sideburns, collars, and bell-bottoms, leisure suits and cigarettes, AMC Javelins and Matadors and Gremlins alongside Dodge Demons, Swingers, Plymouth Dusters, and Scamps-with images from 1992. Time-travel back another 20 years, before rock 'n' roll and the Pill and Vietnam, when both sexes wore hats and cars were big and bulbous with late-moderne fenders and fins-again, unmistakably different, 1952 from 1972. You can keep doing it and see that the characteristic surfaces and sounds of each historical moment are absolutely distinct from those of 20 years earlier or later: the clothes, the hair, the cars, the advertising -- all of it. It's even true of the 19th century: practically no respectable American man wore a beard before the 1850s, for instance, but beards were almost obligatory in the 1870s, and then disappeared again by 1900. The modern sensibility has been defined by brief stylistic shelf lives, our minds trained to register the recent past as old-fashioned.

Dubtrot: My Little Pony dubstep

You've probably seen the NY Times correction that everyone's talking about. Ok, not everyone, just everyone who works in media. Anyway, here it is:

An article on Monday about Jack Robison and Kirsten Lindsmith, two college students with Asperger syndrome who are navigating the perils of an intimate relationship, misidentified the character from the animated children's TV show "My Little Pony" that Ms. Lindsmith said she visualized to cheer herself up. It is Twilight Sparkle, the nerdy intellectual, not Fluttershy, the kind animal lover.

Here is said article. Jim Romenesko talked to Amy Harmon, the reporter who wrote the article, and uncovered this magical tidbit:

I was accompanying Kirsten to school, taking notes on my laptop as she drove. She was listening to music on her iPod known to Pony fans as "dubtrot," -- a take-off on "dubstep,'' get it? -- in which fans remix songs and dialogue from the show with electronic dance music.

Dubtrot! And leave it Urban Dictionary to gild the lily.

Dubstep music relating to My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. Often created by bronies, dubtrot can include dubstep remixes of songs from the show and original pieces created as homage or in reference to the show.

Bronies! Defined as:

The term used to describe the fan community(usually of the older group, males and females) of the show My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic.

Anyway, would you like to listen to some dubtrot? Of course you would: Rainbowstep, Rainbow Dubtrot, and fluttershymix.

Game of Thrones season two teaser

When this came on right before the season finale of Boardwalk Empire, I shushed my talking wife so hard I nearly threw out my back.

April! April is coming!

Sherlock returns in January

The second season of Sherlock returns to the BBC on January 1st with A Scandal In Belgravia:

In episode one of this new series, compromising photographs and a case of blackmail threaten the very heart of the British establishment but, for Sherlock and John, the game is on in more ways than one as they find themselves battling international terrorism, rogue CIA agents and a secret conspiracy involving the British government. But this case will cast a darker shadow over their lives than they could ever imagine, as the great detective begins a long duel of wits with an antagonist as cold and ruthless and brilliant as himself: to Sherlock Holmes, Irene Adler will always be THE woman.

The series will likely show in the US on TV at some point after that or via torrent quite a bit sooner.

Opening quotes from The Wire

The beginning of each episode of The Wire featured a short quote of dialogue from that episode...here are the characters saying all those quotes:

(via supercut.org)

Woody Allen: A Documentary

American Masters is airing a two-part documentary on Woody Allen this week on PBS.

Beginning with Allen's childhood and his first professional gigs as a teen -- furnishing jokes for comics and publicists -- American Masters -- Woody Allen: A Documentary chronicles the trajectory and longevity of Allen's career: from his work in the 1950s-60s as a TV scribe for Sid Caesar, standup comedian and frequent TV talk show guest, to a writer-director averaging one film-per-year for more than 40 years.

The first part aired last night (it's rerunning throughout the week so check listings, etc.) and the second part is tonight.

Don Draper, 1927-2011?

In a recent interview reported over at Grantland, Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner talked about how Man Men will end in its seventh season.

"I do know how the whole show ends," he told us. "It came to me in the middle of last season. I always felt like it would be the experience of human life. And human life has a destination. It doesn't mean Don's gonna die. What I'm looking for, and how I hope to end the show, is like ... It's 2011. Don Draper would be 84 right now. I want to leave the show in a place where you have an idea of what it meant and how it's related to you."

Monster 104-disc set of Law and Order: The Complete Series

For Law & Order superfans only: a 104-disc set of every episode of the show. 20 seasons, 456 episodes, weighs in at 10 pounds, and costs $450 from Amazon. (via nextdraft)

A billion years in the blink of an eye

When I was a kid, one of my favorite things on one of my favorite shows (3-2-1 Contact) was Al Jarnow's Cosmic Clock, a short video animation showing a billion years of time passing in fewer than two minutes. There's so much science in this little video.

This is one of those things I thought I'd just never see again. YouTube is truly a global treasure.

Franzen's The Corrections on HBO

HBO is doing a show (or is it a movie?) based on Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections.

With 2 Oscar winners, Chris Cooper and Diane Wiest, already cast as the leads, this was a no-brainer, but it's now official: HBO's drama pilot The Corrections is proceeding to production.

An oral history of MTV

Pitchfork has an excerpt of I Want My MTV, an oral history of the first decade of MTV.

I got word that Pepsi had bought the first spot in the 1984 Grammy telecast and they were gonna play a new Michael Jackson Pepsi ad. I'm like, "Michael Jackson belongs to MTV, not the Grammys." I wasn't gonna let it happen. So I called Roger Enrico, the head of Pepsi, and said, "Roger, I've got a major problem. This Pepsi Michael Jackson spot that's gonna run in three weeks on the Grammys? That should run on MTV first."

"Well, Garland, I've already made a deal with the Grammys." I go, "Wait a minute. You know how we do world premieres of videos. What if I world premiere the commercial? And what if I give you 24 promos a day for two weeks leading up to it? Would that interest you?"

He goes, "How much do you want for this?" I said, "Nothing." He goes, "What? You're telling me you would promote a commercial 24 times a day for two weeks before playing it? Garland, I like your style. Done." So it played for the first time on MTV.

(thx, jon)

It's just apps on apps on apps

Riffing off of a short observation I sent him, John Gruber speculates about what an Apple TV ecosystem might look like.

Why not the same thing [as Newsstand] for TV channels? We're seeing the beginnings of this, with iPhone and iPad apps like HBO Go, Watch ESPN, and the aforementioned Bloomberg TV+. Letting each TV network do their own app allows them the flexibility that writing software provides. News networks can combine their written and video news into an integrated layout. Networks with contractual obligations to cable operators, like HBO and ESPN, can write code that requires users to log in to verify their status as an eligible subscriber.

This smells right to me...it's a very Apple-y way of approaching the TV/movie problem. Rather than fight with the studios and networks over content sold through the iTunes Store (where the studios control the licensing rights), just provide a platform (iPhone + iPad + iTV + App Store) controlled by Apple and if the studios/networks want to reach those customers, they need to provide an app...with Apple taking a 30% cut of the App *and* content sales.

America in Primetime

Over the next four Sundays on PBS, a documentary series called America in Primetime will talk about the best shows created since the invention of television.

America in Primetime is structured around the most com-pelling shows on television today, unfolding over four hours and weaving between past and present. Each episode focuses on one character archetype that has remained a staple of primetime through the generations - the Independent Woman, the Man of the House, the Misfit, and the Crusader -- capturing both the continuity of the character, and the evolution. The finest television today has as its foundation the best television of yesterday.

The series has been getting great reviews...here's one from NPR:

And when these people talk about TV, they don't feel the need to play nice and agree. While most writer-producers in this show talk about television drama series as a novel, allowing an examination of characters over dozens of hours instead of just a movie-length drama, Sopranos creator David Chase asks what's so great about that? Who needs a Casablanca II, III or IV? And when it comes to the idea of having a serial killer as your central character in Showtime's Dexter, you'd be surprised who doesn't approve of that concept. At least I was surprised. Because right along with Michael C. Hall, the star of Dexter, talking about his vengeful character, you have Tom Fontana and then David Simon, creator of The Wire, talking about why they think Dexter goes too far.

Here's an eight-minute video introduction to the show:

(via nextdraft)

Arrested Development reunion

If you missed the cast reunion of Arrested Development at the New Yorker festival over the weekend, you can watch the whole thing on Facebook here (you must be logged in to see the video). This is the event at which they announced that the show will be coming back.

George Harrison: Living in the Material World

Premiering on HBO this week, a Martin Scorsese documentary on George Harrison, everyone's favorite Beatle who wasn't John or Paul.

Academy Award-winning director Martin Scorsese traces Harrison's live from his musical beginnings in Liverpool though his life as a musician, a seeker, a philanthropist and a filmmaker, weaving together interviews with Harrison and his closest friends, performances, home movies and photographs. Much of the material in the film has never been seen or heard before. The result is a rare glimpse into the mind and soul of one of the most talented artists of his generation and a profoundly intimate and affecting work of cinema.

New season of Arrested Development?

Today at the New Yorker Festival, the entire cast of Arrested Development gathered for the first time since the show wrapped in 2005 and the big news was:

If all goes according to plan, the series will return to television in a nine- or ten-episode limited-run television series, set to film next summer, with each episode focussing on a single member of the Bluth clan. And series creator Mitchell Hurwitz said that he is halfway through the screenplay for a reunion film and is "eighty per cent" sure it will happen.

!!!!

Don Draper pitches Facebook Timeline

This is just flat-out fantastic.

(via ★interesting)

Won't You Be My Neighbor?

Watch Fred Rogers sing the opening theme from Mister Rogers' Neighborhood from 1967 to 2000.

(via ★aaroncohen)

NFL TV maps for the 2011-2012 season

These maps are updated every week and they tell you which games are on TV in which parts of the country. Not an issue if you have DirectTV or whatever, but for the rest of us... (thx, joshua)

More Mister Rogers

1. Amazon has every single episode available on Instant Video. (thx, matthew)

2. PBS Kids has a bunch of episodes available with a kid-friendly video player. (thx, chris)

3. Episode guides and more at The Neighborhood Archive Blog. (thx, jeff)

Back to school with Mister Rogers

After reading the fantastic Tom Junod piece on Fred Rogers earlier in the week, I poked around on YouTube for some Mister Rogers clips and shows. There are only a few full episodes on there but two of them are particularly relevant as kids across the nation go back to school for the fall:

I watched the first episode with Ollie yesterday (he was a big fan of the trolley, which was always my favorite part of the show too) and then we watched how crayons are made and how people make trumpets.

After our YouTube supply is exhausted, we'll move on to DVDs (here's a music compilation and episodes from the first week of the show), Netflix, or Amazon Instant Video, which has a bunch of episodes available for free (!!) for Prime subscribers.

As Seen on TV hardships

This one is mostly for my wife, who gleefully mocks TV infomerical actors who have trouble flipping a simple pancake or operating a mop.

(via devour)

Watching 9/11

The Internet Archive has collected thousands of hours of TV news coverage from September 11, 2001 and the following days.

The 9/11 Television News Archive is a library of news coverage of the events of 9/11/2001 and their aftermath as presented by U.S. and international broadcasters. A resource for scholars, journalists, and the public, it presents one week of news broadcasts for study, research and analysis.

Television is our pre-eminent medium of information, entertainment and persuasion, but until now it has not been a medium of record. This Archive attempts to address this gap by making TV news coverage of this critical week in September 2001 available to those studying these events and their treatment in the media.

An amazing resource. But God, that's hard to watch.

Fake + logo = Fauxgo

Fauxgo is a site that collects fictional logos from movies and TV shows.

New Cosmos series

This is a bit of a head-scratcher...the guy behind the Family Guy (Seth MacFarlane) is teaming up with Carl Sagan's widow and Neil DeGrasse Tyson to do a sequel to the landmark science series, Cosmos. The series will air in primetime on Fox.

The producers of the show say the new series will tell "the story of how human beings began to comprehend the laws of nature and find our place in space and time." They go on to boast: "It will take viewers to other worlds and travel across the universe for a vision of the cosmos on the grandest scale. The most profound scientific concepts will be presented with stunning clarity, uniting skepticism and wonder, and weaving rigorous science with the emotional and spiritual into a transcendent experience."

I'll be tuning in but will be pleasantly surprised if it does well in the ratings or is any good.

Downton Abbey set to return in September

...but only in the UK (or to those elsewhere in the world who can use a BitTorrent client). The season will include eight episodes as well as a two-hour Christmas episode.

The first episode will open not with a witty but icy quip from the peerless Violet, Dowager Countess of Grantham, played by Maggie Smith, but with the massive explosion of a shell in the battle of the Somme, where the heir to Downton, Matthew Crawley (played by Dan Stevens), is fighting. The drama's producers hope that the darker wartime storylines, and the aristocratic ensemble dressing down in the "we're all in it together" clothing of wartime, will not deter the fans.

The US premiere is not until January 2012 (nice poster though). Oh, and Fellowes is already working on storylines for a third season. Yay! (thx meg)

Where are they now? A special Spencer and Heidi update.

Reality TV is not my beat, not even reality TV-bashing, but this story is too good and schadenfreudalicious to pass up. Heidi and Spencer from The Hills have fallen on hard times and find themselves in The Dumps.

They're broke and living at Spencer's parents' beach house in Santa Barbara because of the free rent; Heidi's body and face are forever changed from plastic surgeries she now wishes she had not gotten; their relationships with friends and family are severely damaged; and they have found themselves largely unemployable, both on camera and off.

Yeah, not sure how anyone could have envisioned all that would end badly. But at least it was fun for the viewers? Right? Watching people ruin their lives between Coors Light commercials? (via @sfj)

TV appearance of Lincoln assassination witness

In 1956, 96-year-old Samuel Seymour appeared on a game show called I've Got A Secret...his secret was that he saw Lincoln's assassination when he was five years old.

That blew my mind. (via devour)

Game of Thrones visual effects

BlueBolt did the special effects for the first season of Game of Thrones; here are some of them. (Minor spoilers...)

(via stellar)

What did Stringer Bell do wrong?

A great question over at Quora: What were the biggest tactical mistakes that Stringer made in Seasons 2 and 3? Why did he make these mistakes?

5. Not using a knowledgeable intermediary to deal with Sen. Clay Davis. He was clearly out of his league with Davis and had he used an attorney with the correct political connections, he could have likely gained all that he sought with fewer complications than he did.

Kids show references The Wire

This scene from iCarly, a Nickelodeon show for tweens and pre-tweens, references the scene in season five of The Wire where (highlight text to show spoilers!) Michael kills Snoop.

(via @aliotsy)

Arrested Development = The Godfather!

Basically, Arrested Development is a sitcom version of The Godfather. Michael = Michael, G.O.B. = Sonny, and Fredo = Buster.

Fredo Corleone is the second oldest son of Don Vito Corleone, but is unfit to run the family business. His stupidity, lack of confidence, and otherwise child-like behavior prevent him from being taken seriously by any member of the family. Despite his attempts at success, integration into the family usually comes to no avail. He is often humored by deciding family members (Michael), and given menial business tasks (i.e. casinos, whorehouses) for the family.

Buster Bluth is the youngest son of George, Sr., and is unfit to run the family business. His stupidity, lack of confidence, and otherwise child-like behavior prevent him from being taken seriously by any member of the family. Despite his attempts at success, integration into the family business usually comes to no avail. He is often humored by deciding family members (his mother), and given menial tasks (i.e. learning cartography) to distract him.

(via mlkshk, sorta)

Mad Men season five is a go

Everyone has shaken hands with everyone else, so Mad Men season five can finally happen. But here's the part you're not going to like...the new episodes won't air until March 2012.

Game of Thrones food blog

The Inn at the Crossroads is a blog dedicated to exploring the cuisine of George R.R. Martin's Fire and Ice book series, from which HBO's Game of Thrones is adapted.

The Queen took a flagon of sweet plum wine from a passing servant girl and filled Sansa's cup. "Drink," she commanded coldly. "Perhaps it will give you courage to deal with truth for a change."

Massive collection of TV channel logos

These are just a few of the 9000+ TV channel logos collected here.

(thx, tanner)

Doctor Who gonna bust a cap in yo ass

Sometimes the simple things in life are best...like a compilation of clips of The Doctor shooting guns with a gansta rap soundtrack.

(via ★interesting)

Seinfeld's sneakers, a complete guide

Jerry Seinfeld seemingly wore a different pair of sneakers (mostly Nikes) on his TV show each week...here are 50 pages of analysis of Jerry's shoe choices. For 90s athletic shoe and Seinfeld superfans only. (via @cory_arcangel)

Still a single-name star: Roseanne

Great Roseanne Barr piece in New York magazine last week about fame and her shitty network TV experiences.

During the recent and overly publicized breakdown of Charlie Sheen, I was repeatedly contacted by the media and asked to comment, as it was assumed that I know a thing or two about starring on a sitcom, fighting with producers, nasty divorces, public meltdowns, and bombing through a live comedytour. I have, however, never smoked crack or taken too many drugs, unless you count alcohol as a drug (I don't). But I do know what it's like to be seized by bipolar thoughts that make one spout wise about Tiger Blood and brag about winning when one is actually losing.

It's hard to tell whether one is winning or, in fact, losing once one starts to think of oneself as a commodity, or a product, or a character, or a voice for the downtrodden. It's called losing perspective. Fame's a bitch. It's hard to handle and drives you nuts. Yes, it's true that your sense of entitlement grows exponentially with every perk until it becomes too stupendous a weight to walk around under, but it's a cutthroat business, show, and without the perks, plain ol' fame and fortune just ain't worth the trouble.

You come at the Lion King, you best not miss

The Lion King movie recut into a five-minute summary of all five seasons of The Wire.

I almost didn't post this because it dogs on the underrated season 2. (via ★vuokko)

Revisiting 1984

After yesterday's post on Ghostbusters ("Don't cross the streams"), I got hit with a few follow-ups worth following up:

• When I said 1984 was arguably "the biggest/most important year in modern cinematic comedy," I meant mostly because of the ridiculous amount of money comedies made that year and how those surprise blockbusters affected how comedies were made afterwards.
• Still when you add This Is Spinal Tap, which also came out in 1984 but didn't make very much money, you really could make a case that it really could be the best/most influential year for movie comedies.
• I didn't know this, but Aaron Cohen tipped me off: Jason actually already preemptively backed me up: "1984, a fine year for movies." As Jason says, "My God, the pop culture references."
• Also via Aaron, his own "1984 Was a Good Year for a Lot of Things" and Bill Simmons's 2004 post "1984, it was a very good year." Both mine the same pop culture vein, adding books, TV, and sports into the mix too.

I particularly like Simmons's note about college basketball (maybe even more relevant today):

College hoops meant something in '84. You stayed home on Monday nights to watch the Big East. You knew the players because they had been around for years. And since guys stuck around, you could follow Ewing and Georgetown, Hakeem and Phi Slamma Jamma, Mullin and St. John's, Pearl and Syracuse, MJ at UNC . . . these were like pro teams on a smaller scale. I'm telling you, a Georgetown-St. John's game in the middle of February was an event. These moments aren't even possibilities anymore. They're gone.

My favorite document of 1984 (sports or otherwise) is undoubtedly Sparky Anderson's Bless You Boys, his running diary/memoir of the Detroit Tigers' amazing season that year. It's about baseball, but so many other things -- life, death, perspective. I wrote about it last year for The Idler when Sparky Anderson passed away.

One last "what if?" note from Simmons:

Rolling Stone was offered the chance to buy MTV, and Sports Illustrated was offered the chance to buy ESPN. Both magazines decided against it.

Talk about crossing the streams.

A/B testing comedy the Judd Apatow way

Freaks and Geeks creator and Bridesmaids director Paul Feig talks about his collaborator Judd Apatow's audience-driven approach to editing movies:

Judd actually has this whole thing they do with side-by-side screenings at two theaters right next door to each other and do a "P" version, which is a polished version, which is the one we think is close to what we want to have be our final cut. And then another one called the "E" version, the extended version, which is the dumping ground for everything we think might work, or we wanted to try, or we're just curious if it's gonna work. And out of all of those screenings, you'll always get about five or 10 new things that you didn't think were ever gonna work that go through the roof and you plug 'em into the polished one...

We'll always keep in a couple of jokes, just for ourselves. Then you go, "Okay, if it doesn't work, whatever. This is kinda for us." But none of us are brave enough to wait that long to see if it works because you want to have something that you know is clicking with an audience.

A lot of filmmakers will hate hearing that. To them, that feels very hacky, But the audience are the ones that are going to come and pay the money and they're the ones who are going tell their friends if it's good or not. I didn't get in the business, and Judd didn't get in the business, to make stuff that nobody sees. I've made a career making stuff that nobody sees, so anything that I can do to help make something that people are going to enjoy and want to see over and over again, then I'm there.

Feig also has an interesting take on the continued love for Freaks and Geeks: in 2000, when the show was cancelled, cancellation for a single show was pretty much total death. If there weren't enough episodes for syndication, it would only linger on through word of mouth and the occasional samizdat VHS tape.

[Feig:] The British model, which I've always thought was great, is that you do a TV show and then they sell it. Then you can buy it at the video stores forever, so it never went away. But American TV used to be if you had a show and it got cancelled, then it never existed.

DVDs changed the culture. It's not really a "cult hit" in the same way if you can just Netflix the entire run. Now, single-season shows like Freaks and Geeks can be sold and rewatched and lent out, and play out for their fans over and over again like long, favorite movies. And they don't need their A/V teacher to have a copy of the film reel to do it.

The original pitch for Doctor Who

The Between the Pages blog tracked down the original set of five pitch documents for Doctor Who. It wasn't until the fourth document, the Tom Baker of the group, that Doctor Who was explicitly mentioned by name.

The Secret of Dr. Who: In his own day, somewhere in our future, he decided to search for a time or for a society or for a physical condition which is ideal, and having found it, to stay there. He stole the machine and set forth on his quest. He is thus an extension of the scientist who has opted out, but he has opted farther than ours can do, at tne moment. And having opted out, he is disintegrating.

[Handwritten note from Sydney Newman: "Don't like this at all. Dr Who will become a kind of father figure -- I don't want him to be a reactionary."]

One symptom of this is his hatred of scientist, inventors, improvers. He can get into a rare paddy when faced witn a cave man trying to invent a wheel. He malignantly tries to stop progress (the future) wherever he finds it, while searching for his ideal (the past). This seems to me to involve slap up-to-date moral problems, and old ones too.

In story terms, our characters see the symptoms and guess at the nature of his trouble, without knowing details; and always try to help him find a home in time and space. wherever he goes he tends to make ad hoc enemies; but also there is a mysterious enemy pursuing him implacably every when: someone from his own original time, probably. So, even if the secret is out by the 52nd episode, it is not the whole truth. Shall we say:

The Second Secret of Dr. Who: The authorities of his own (or some other future) time are not concerned merely with the theft of an obsolete machine; they are seriously concerned to prevent his monkeying with time, because his secret intention, when he finds his ideal past, is to destroy or nullify the future.

[Handwritten note from Sydney Newman: "Nuts"]

Mad Men season four on Blu-ray/DVD

With the next new season of Mad Men delayed, you'll have to make do with the recently released season four Blu-ray and DVD to get your fix.

Hilarious fake TLC promo

Turns out there's not so much learning on The Learning Channel anymore.

Fake shows from the video: 12 Wives, 12 Problems; Dwarf Hoarders; Uterus Cannon; and Hasty Home Surgery.

Real TLC shows: 19 Kids and Counting; Strange Sex; Extreme Couponing; and I Didn't Know I Was Pregnant. (via ★dansays)

Television death portraits

Stephan Tillmans' Luminant Point Arrays project is a collection of photographs of tube television screens as they're switched off.

(via ★buzz)

Mad Men season five delayed

There's currently no deal in place for the show, which probably means we won't get to see the next season until late 2011 or early 2012 (instead of this summer).

People involved in the talks suggested this week that one or both deals may be imminent, but that may not be enough to ensure a summer start. Todd Gold, the editor in chief of XfinityTV.com, Comcast's television news site, said it was becoming clear that the show was "right on the cusp of going one way or the other."

"By now, the writing staff should be humming along, maybe about a month or more into work for a summer premiere," he said. "Unless Weiner is secretly manufacturing outlines in preparation of some crazy all-night writing sessions with his staff, it might be time for fans to grow concerned."

Watch Downton Abbey for free online

The first season of Downton Abbey, which I highly recommend, is available to watch online for free in two places: on Amazon (for Amazon Prime subscribers) and at Netflix Watch Instantly (for subscribers).

kottke.org on Jeopardy

On Jeopardy today, a contestant named Ethan responded incorrectly to a $1000 clue with "What is kottke.org?"

The best part is how disgusted the viewer is..."Are you freaking kidding me? Oh jeeezz..." Ethan, if you're out there and if there was actually such an item, I would totally send you a kottke.org tote bag for working in a reference to kottke.org on a show that has such a storied past on the site. What a lovely 13th birthday present. (thx, justin)

Hollywood career advice from Alec Baldwin

Apologies in advance for the Charlie Sheen mention, but Alec Baldwin's advice to Sheen (and, belatedly, Conan) is golden.

Conan has moved on and his great talent is undiminished by his difficult experiences. I had wanted to say to him back then what I will now offer to Charlie. You can't win. Really. You can't. When executives at studios and networks move up to the highest ranks, they are given a book. The book is called How to Handle Actors. And one principle held dear in that book is that no actor is greater than the show itself when the show is a hit. And, in that regard, they are often right. Add to that the fact that the actor who is torturing their diseased egos is a drug addled, porn star-squiring, near Joycean Internet ranter, and they really want you to go.

Reminds me of Frank Sinatra's letter to George Michael.

Come on George, Loosen up. Swing, man, Dust off those gossamer wings and fly yourself to the moon of your choice and be grateful to carry the baggage we've all had to carry since those lean nights of sleeping on buses and helping the driver unload the instruments.

(via stellar)

Al-Jazeera's coverage of the Japanese earthquake

If you haven't already heard, Al-Jazeera had (and continues to have) some of the best coverage of earthquake and tsunami in Japan. Here's a clip from earlier showing the tsunami rushing through a populated area.

Contrast with CNN, which was apparently home to giggles and Godzilla jokes as the quake was being reported. In the last three or four big events in the world, Al-Jazeera has had the best coverage...is this a changing of the guard?

Update: Mediaite investigates and finds no evidence that a Godzilla reference or giggling occurred on CNN last night.

We did find an example of an American in Japan that made a reference that it was like a "monster movie" (which is included below) but Church handles herself completely appropriately.

Update: Mediaite found a video of the CNN broadcast in question where the anchor chuckles at something her interviewee says. And her whole tone sounds a bit more chipper than it ought to. The sing-song anchor voice might suffice when reporting non-news filler but fails when watching video of dozens of homes (possibly with people in them!) being swept along by a massive wave of water. (via @somebadideas)

Snoop from The Wire arrested in drug raid

Felicia Pearson, who played Snoop on The Wire, was arrested today on drug charges.

Felicia "Snoop" Pearson had served a prison sentence for murder and returned to drug dealing on the streets of East Baltimore, before a visit to the set of "The Wire" led to a star turn on the show and offered a new chance to change her life.

But her past kept creeping back - she was a witness to a murder and was arrested after she refused to testify -- and subsequent film and television offers were hard to come by.

Now, Pearson, 30, has been accused of playing a part in a large-scale drug organization, whose members were arrested in raids Thursday throughout Baltimore and surrounding counties, as well as in three other states.

(via df)

The Qaddafis and the Bluths

The New Republic compared the Qaddafi family with Arrested Developments Bluth family and found some similarities.

Mohammed Qaddafi and Gob Bluth are both the oldest sons of tyrannical fathers, and both stand in the shadows of their younger, more favored brothers. The sibling rivalry can get intense -- Mohammed's feud with younger brother Mutassim over a Coca-Cola plant ended only after a worker had been injured and a cousin had been stuffed into a car trunk, while Michael and Gob's dueling banana stands ended with the fire department being called twice.

Brigadier Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart

Nicholas Courtney, who played the Brigadier on Doctor Who, died yesterday aged 81.

Ripped from the fake headlines

An episode of CSI:NY "borrowed" quite a few elements from a short story written by Teddy Wayne and they basically won't admit that they did so. Whenever stuff like this happens, I think about that interview where Vanilla Ice tried to argue that the bassline from Under Pressure and Ice Ice Baby were totally different.

Doctor Who cheat sheet

From illustrator Bob Canada, a one-page guide to Doctor Who for first-timers. Best viewed large. See also these illustrated portraits of all eleven Doctors.

Gene Roddenberry's original pitch for Star Trek

The 16-page first draft of Gene Roddenberry's pitch for Star Trek.

STAR TREK is a "Wagon Train" concept -- built arround characters who travel to worlds "similar" to our own, and meet the action-adventure-drama which becomes our stories. Their transportation is the cruiser "S.S. Yorktown", performing a well-defined and long-range Exploration-Science-Security mission which helps create our format.

The Yorktown! And the captain was to be named Robert April.

Human Planet

The Blue Planet, Planet Earth, Life. These BBC nature series have all neglected to showcase our planet's most amazing animal. Human Planet is an upcoming nature series about human beings.

No David Attenborough?! Still looks fantastic, though. (via @dunstan)

The shrinking political soundbite

The political soundbite has gotten progressively shorter over the past few decades.

A professor at the University of California had just published research showing that the length of the average TV sound bite had dropped dramatically, from 43 seconds in the 1968 presidential election to a mere nine seconds in the 1988 election. And this drop had led to lots of hand-wringing -- from professors, from journalists, and from politicians themselves. "If you couldn't say it in less than 10 seconds," Michael Dukakis complained about the previous campaign, "it wasn't heard because it wasn't aired."

It's currently just under eight seconds...which, perhaps not coincidentally, is about how long it would take someone to speak a text or tweet.

Boardwalk Empire visual effects

Brainstorm Digital showcases some of the visual effects that they did for HBO's Boardwalk Empire.

James Burke's Connections online

Every episode of the classic science/history series Connections (as well as Connections 2 and 3) is available online at YouTube.

Connections is a ten-episode documentary television series created, written and presented by science historian James Burke. The series was produced and directed by Mick Jackson of the BBC Science & Features Department and first aired in 1978 (UK) and 1979 (USA). It took an interdisciplinary approach to the history of science and invention and demonstrated how various discoveries, scientific achievements, and historical world events were built from one another successively in an interconnected way to bring about particular aspects of modern technology.

Connections explores an "Alternative View of Change" (the subtitle of the series) that rejects the conventional linear and teleological view of historical progress. Burke contends that one cannot consider the development of any particular piece of the modern world in isolation. Rather, the entire gestalt of the modern world is the result of a web of interconnected events, each one consisting of a person or group acting for reasons of their own motivations (e.g. profit, curiosity, religious) with no concept of the final, modern result of what either their or their contemporaries' actions finally led to. The interplay of the results of these isolated events is what drives history and innovation, and is also the main focus of the series and its sequels.

Here's the first episode to get you started.

Warning: you may not be able to stop. If you'd like to watch the series in a less irritating format, you can always purchase it on DVD.

Marlo Stanfield is chaotic evil

Here are a few characters from The Wire categorized by their Dungeons and Dragons alignment (good/neutral/evil and lawful/neutral/chaotic).

There are a few more alignment charts from the same source, including a Mad Men chart with Betty Draper as chaotic evil (justification). (via @juliandibbell)

Arrested Development entire series: $28

Amazon has the entire three-disc set of Arrested Development on sale for $28 (69% off). Here's a little taste of the magic:

Crazy bad 80s reunion videos

Somehow a Norwegian television station got a bunch of 80s celebrities -- people like Norm from Cheers, Tiffany, Malcolm Jamal Warner, Ricki Lake, Eddie the Eagle, Tanya Harding, Dolph Lundgren, Bananarama, Manuel from Fawlty Towers, etc. etc. -- to do promotional music videos for an 80s nostalgia show and the results are nothing less than a supertrainwreck. First they did "We Are the World":

And followed that up with "Let It Be":

Unbelievable. (via @sportsguy33)

Minimalist Doctor Who

Only for Doctors one through six.

Behind the scenes of The Simpsons

Here's Bill Oakley, a former writer and showrunner for The Simpsons, on how the show got made back in the show's golden years (seasons 4-8).

Twice a year, from at least season three 'til season eight, there'd be these story retreats where everybody would come and present their ideas for episodes. We'd get a big conference room in a hotel about a hundred yards from the office, and we'd go around and everybody would tell their ideas, one by one. It was sort of like opening Christmas presents on Christmas morning; we'd go around in a circle and everybody would have a turn or two.

It was always a huge treat to see. You had no idea what George Meyer (for instance) was going to say, and suddenly it was like this fantastic Simpsons episode pouring out of his mouth that you never dreamed of. And it was like, wow, this is where this stuff comes from.

Oakley also provided an example of a script as it went through all of its revisions on its way to the airwaves; it's the one where Principal Skinner gets fired and Bart tries to get him his job back.

Watch Star Trek online for free

As it isn't an official thing, I don't quite know how this works, but you can go to Watch Trek and watch any episode of any Star Trek series from the original series to Enterprise. The quality is pretty good too.

Cookie Monster wants to host SNL

Here's his audition video:

Fantastic idea...I would love to see a Saturday Night Live with Sesame Street characters. Hey, if 30 Rock is really The Muppet Show...

The Hour, Britain's Mad Men?

Dominic West, who starred as McNutty in The Wire, will play the lead character in a six-part BBC series called The Hour. The show is set in the 1950s and will air next year.

The Hour follows the launch of a topical news show in London set against the backdrop of a mysterious murder. West will play Hector Madden, the programme's upper-crust, charismatic front man.

The series is being called the UK version of Mad Men:

The only place with better retro fashion than New York in the 1960s is London in the 1950s.

(via unlikely words)

The economics of Seinfeld

Dozens of scenes from Seinfeld used to explain economic concepts. For instance, in an episode from season five:

George thinks he has been offered a job, but the man offering it to him got interrupted in the middle of the offer, and will be on vacation for the next week. George, unsure whether an offer has actually been extended, decides that his best strategy is to show up. If the job was indeed his, this is the right move. But even if the job is not, he believes that the benefits outweigh the costs.

Economic concepts touched on: cost-benefit analysis, dominant strategy, and game theory. (via what i learned today)

Sherlock!

The BBC aired a new adaptation of Sherlock Holmes this summer called, simply, Sherlock. The three 90-minute episodes are set in the present day (which could have been cheesy but isn't) and make for some really good television. American audiences can find all three episodes on Masterpiece Mystery on PBS starting this week:

Starring Benedict Cumberbatch (Atonement, The Last Enemy) in the title role, Martin Freeman (The Office, UK) as Dr. John Watson and Rupert Graves (God on Trial, The Forsyte Saga) as Inspector Lestrade, Sherlock premieres on Masterpiece mystery! on Sundays, October 24, 31, and November 7, 2010 at 9pm ET on PBS (check local listings).

In with three criminally clever whodunits, A Study in Pink (October 24), The Blind Banker (October 31) and The Great Game (November 7), consulting detective Sherlock Holmes teams up with former army doctor John Watson to solve a dizzying array of crimes with his signature deductive reasoning. From the writers of Doctor Who, Sherlock is co-created and written by Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat.

Worth seeking out, especially if you get PBS in HD (here's the opening title sequence). If you miss it, the series is also available on Blu-ray and DVD on Nov 9.

The Great Egg Race

The Great Egg Race was a late-70s/early-80s BBC TV show that was a kind of Junkyard Wars on a smaller and more nerdy scale. The first episode shows a number of people attempting to build small egg carrying cars powered by rubber band.

I love this stuff. I had a physics teacher in high school who presented us with a number of these challenges throughout the school year. There was the strong toothpick bridge (someone basically cheated and made a glue bridge with embedded toothpicks) and the rolling object (it had to go down a short ramp and stop on a mark about 10 feet away), but my favorites were the mouse trap-powered car and the egg drop.

The winning mouse trap car was made with a lot of assistance from the student's father, who owned a machine shop. It was light but solid with precisely machined plastic wheels and a precisely machined axle and travelled probably twice as far as any of the other cars, which were generally built with whatever crappy off-the-shelf components could be scrounged from the local five-and-dime. I spent three satisfying late nights building my car and came in pretty close to last.

The egg drop challenge involved constructing a landing pad no taller than 12 inches for an unboiled egg. Competitors dropped their eggs from successively greater heights until the egg broke. The two winning landing pads were successful at the greatest height that our small school could muster...out a window at the top of the football field stands, probably about 35 or 40 feet tall. One was a huge box full of wool and other soft materials that could have successfully cushioned an egg dropped from the top of the Sears Tower. The other winner was a tupperware bowl full of stale popcorn that your humble blogger grabbed off the counter the morning of the challenge after completely forgetting about it over the weekend. No one was more surprised than I to discover that popcorn is an ideal egg cushioning material...not that I let on. :)

Four things about Mr. Snuffleupagus

1. His full name is Aloysius Snuffleupagus.

2. For more than 14 years, Big Bird was the only character on Seasame Street who could see Snuffy...he was BB's imaginary friend.

3. Some of the grownups on the show came to believe Big Bird about the existence of Mr. Snuffleupagus and he was revealed to them in November 1985:

4. Snuffy's reveal came about because of some high-profile sexual abuse cases:

In an interview on a Canadian telethon that was hosted by Bob McGrath, Snuffy's performer, Martin P. Robinson, revealed that Snuffy was finally introduced to the main human cast mainly due to a string of high profile and sometimes graphic stories of pedophilia and sexual abuse of children that had been aired on shows such as 60 Minutes and 20/20. The writers felt that by having the adults refuse to believe Big Bird despite the fact that he was telling the truth, they were scaring children into thinking that their parents would not believe them if they had been sexually abused and that they would just be better off remaining silent.

(via @h_fj)

He-Man on Hulu

A bunch of old episodes of He-Man on Hulu! Wow, were these episodes this bad and slow when I was a kid?

NFL TV maps for 2010 season

I'm a little late this year, but the 2010 NFL maps site has been up and humming for four weeks now. The site displays what games are going to be on TV in different parts of the country.

The Wire Monopoly

A version of Monopoly based on The Wire.

(via @tcarmody)

David Simon's original pitch for The Wire

David Simon was just awarded one of the MacArthur Foundation's $500,000 genius grants, so I thought it would be interesting to revisit Simon's original pitch of The Wire to HBO (PDF).

But more than an exercise is realism for its own sake, the verisimilitude of The Wire exists to serve something larger. In the first story-arc, the episodes begin what would seem to be the straight-forward, albeit protracted, pursuit of a violent drug crew that controls a high-rise housing project. But within a brief span of time, the officers who undertake the pursuit are forced to acknowledge truths about their department, their role, the drug war and the city as a whole. In the end, the cost to all sides begins to suggest not so much the dogged police pursuit of the bad guys, but rather a Greek tragedy. At the end of thirteen episodes, the reward for the viewer -- who has been lured all this way by a well-constructed police show -- is not the simple gratification of hearing handcuffs click. Instead, the conclusion is something that Euripides or O'Neill might recognize: an America, at every level at war with itself.

From my original post on this in April 2009 (which also contains links to three episode scripts):

The list of main characters contains a few surprises. McNulty was originally going to be named McCardle, Aaron Barksdale became Avon Barksdale, and the Stringer Bell character changed quite a bit.

Stringy Bell just doesn't have the same ring to it, does it?

Mad Men reading list

The NYPL blog has compiled a list of books ripped from the scenes of Mad Men.

Some of the titles are featured prominently in the series and others are mentioned in passing. Remember the book Sally read with her grandfather at bedtime? The book on Japanese culture the agency was told to read? The scandalous book the ladies passed between each other in secret? You can find all these and more!

(via mad men unbuttoned)

Liz Lemon flashback collection

I wonder if they'll ever do a flashback where Liz is heavier (as Fey once was).

Fallon and Timberlake give rap history lesson

This is the best thing you'll see all day. Please just watch:

The Beastie Boys and Eminem stuff killed me. Who knew Fallon could sing? (via @hodgman)

Jon Stewart in profile

From New York magazine a couple of weeks ago, a profile of serious funnyman Jon Stewart.

Stewart made himself into the leading critic and satirist of the media-political complex, starting with "Indecision 2000," The Daily Show's parody of that year's presidential campaign. His comedy is counterprogramming-postmodern entertainment but with a political purpose. As truth has been overrun by truthiness and facts trampled by lies, he and The Daily Show have become an invaluable corrective-he's Cronkite, the most trusted man in America, although in keeping with the fragmented culture, he's trusted by many fewer people, about 1.8 million viewers each night. Years ago, Stewart lost out to Conan O'Brien and Jimmy Kimmel for late-night network jobs, but the shifting media fortunes have made him the long-run winner, with vastly more job security and cultural influence than his conventional talk-show competitors-and most conventional journalists.

The end of recaps

Over at The Awl, Robert Lanham recaps a Three's Company episode from season 7 called Chrissy's Cousin.

Next week, we have a very tough decision to make since two Richard Chamberlain miniseries, "Shogun" and "The Thorn Birds," will be premiering opposite "Three's Company" on the two other channels. Decisions, decisions.

Repeat, on the two other channels. (This just in: get off my lawn!)

Thermos to the Moon

Have you ever thought about a rocket as a giant flying Thermos bottle? You will now:

Lovely bit of production there as well. (via russell davies)

Your TV might contain even more John Hodgman soon

John Hodgman is filming a pilot for an HBO show called Good Evening, My Name is John Hodgman. Jonathan Coulton and Spike Jonze are involved.

THE THEME OF THIS PARTICULAR PROGRAM is "JOCKS vs. NERDS," the culture war of our time, and a subject that you know I have been thinking about for some time now, and also talking about with the PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES.

IN THIS CASE, the "NERD" shall be played by me, John Hodgman, and the "JOCK" shall be played by the New York Jet, NICK MANGOLD, as I confront all of my deepest fears (humiliation/being punched/Nick Mangold) and attempted to learn from him the virtues of jock culture and the rules of football.

And YOU are invited: September 28th in NYC. Tickets are free and they have an unlimited supply because they are filming it in some sort of massive rocket ship hanger. All you Little Hobos (that's what Hodgman calls all his fans) click through for details on how to get your tickets.

Ebert relaunches At the Movies

The new show will appear on PBS and feature Elvis Mitchell & Christy Lemire as the main hosts.

"I believe that by returning to its public roots, our new show will win better and more consistent time slots in more markets," added Ebert. "American television is swamped by mindless gossip about celebrities, and I'm happy this show will continue to tell viewers honestly if the critics think a new movie is worth seeing."

Stars January 2011.

Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce Campbell?

Ladies and gentlemen, a friendly reminder: Pete Campbell's happy dance.

Gag me with a spoon

Video of a Valley Girl contest that took place in Encino, CA in 1982.

The footage is from a show called Real People, which was a big hit with adolescent Jason (although I loved That's Incredible more). If you want to learn more about Valley Girls -- sure you do! -- Wikipedia has almost too much info. (via lowindustrial)

Mad Men preview

Over at Unlikely Words, Aaron Cohen has a roundup of the many previews written about tonight's Mad Men season 4 premiere.

How Conan's Tonight Show ended

Todd Levin wrote for Conan O'Brien's Tonight Show; here's Levin in GQ describing the job and those final few weeks of the "I'm with Coco" business.

So it wasn't until my third day of work that I finally decided to slip past Conan -- hunched over his desk, busily doodling on that day's script -- and join the other writers behind the couch. As I settled into my spot among three veteran writers and prayed for invisibility, Conan glanced over, sized us up, and mock sneered, "Look at you four, standing there. You're like a Mount Rushmore of incompetence." Then he chuckled and returned to his cartooning. It was a quality put-down, and I was honestly overjoyed to be included in it.

Original Apollo 11 CBS News broadcast

I had so much fun with this last year, I'm doing it again: watch the original CBS News coverage of the Apollo 11 Moon landing and first Moon walk, reported live by Walter Cronkite exactly 41 years after it happened.

Just leave this page open in your browser and at the appointed times (schedule is below), the broadcast will begin (no manual page refresh necessary).

Schedule:
Moon landing broacast start: 4:10:30 pm EDT on July 20
Moon landing shown: 4:17:40 pm EDT
Moon landing broadcast end: 4:20:15 pm EDT
...
Moon walk broadcast start: 10:51:27 pm EDT
First step on Moon: 10:56:15 pm EDT
Nixon speaks to the Eagle crew: approx 11:51:30 pm EDT
Moon walk broadcast end: 12:00:30 am EDT on July 21

If you've never seen this coverage, I urge you to watch at least the landing segment (~10 min.) and the first 10-20 minutes of the Moon walk. I hope that with the old time TV display and poor YouTube quality, you get a small sense of how someone 40 years ago might have experienced it.

Please note that schedule times are approximate, based on your computer's clock, and that the syncing of the videos might not be perfect. You need to have JS and Flash 8+ to view. This is just like real TV...if you miss the appointed time, there's no rewind or anything...the video is playing "live". I have not done extensive browser testing so it may not work perfectly in your browser. If you run into any problems, just reload the page. Thanks for tuning in.

Simple Mad Men posters

I love these minimalist Mad Men posters by Christina Perry.

Prints are available. (via footnotes of mad men)

Your Mad Men homework

It's two weeks until season four of Mad Men starts but in the meantime, you can pre-order Mad Men Unbuttoned, the book that sprang from the loins of the excellent and well-reviewed The Footnotes of Mad Men blog. I've only skimmed bits of it here and there, but it looks good so far.

Hacking The Price is Right

Terry Kniess, a former weatherman with a knack for numbers and seeing patterns, went on The Price is Right and won more than $50,000 in prizes because of an exact bid on his Showcase. His secret? He watched hundreds of hours of the show and discovered its secrets and weaknesses.

Before they stepped foot in the Bob Barker Studio, they were going to be prepared; "Good TV is rehearsed TV," Terry likes to say. For four months during the summer of 2008, they recorded The Price Is Right every morning and watched it together in bed every night, Terry hunting for patterns and Linda doing the math. It didn't take long for them to find their edge. In The Price Is Right's greatest strength, he and Linda also found its greatest weakness: It had survived all those years because it seemed never to change. Even when Drew Carey replaced Bob Barker -- the show's own version of Vatican II -- he rocked a similar skinny microphone. Behind all the screaming and seeming chaos, there was a precise and nostalgic order. Terry says he first sat upright in bed when a distinctive grill called the Big Green Egg came up for bid again and again. It was always $1,175.

(via @longreads)

Steve Carell leaving The Office

Unless the producers pull a Darrin Stephens, Michael Scott will no longer appear on The Office following the next season.

"I just think it's time," Steve told our Kristina Guerrero. "I want to fulfill my contract. When I first signed on I had a contract for seven seasons, and this coming year is my seventh. I just thought it was time for my character to go."

But according to Steve, The Office could go on without him. "It doesn't certainly mean the end of the show. I think it's just a dynamic change to the show, which could be a good thing, actually. Add some new life and some new energy...I see it as a positive in general for the show."

Carell added:

I didn't see it as a huge thing and I certainly didn't anticipate any sort of hubbub over it.

All together now: that's what she said.

P.S. Tad Friend has a profile of Carell in the New Yorker this week...sadly offline without a subscription.

The case of the recurring TV newspaper

The exact same newspaper has shown up in different TV shows -- Six Feet Under, Married With Children, That 70s Show, etc. -- for several years now. Does anyone have the backstory on this?

Update: Slate's Brow Beat blog has the backstory:

Production companies use prop newspapers instead of real ones because getting clearance from an actual publication is usually more work than it's worth in potential fees and bureaucracy. (There are exceptions. When Tony Soprano picked up his paper each morning, it was always the Newark Star Ledger.) Rather than battle the legal department at the New York Times for that perfunctory breakfast shot, prop masters buy a stack of Earl Hays fake papers, which cost just $15 each. Sometimes if they have some left over they'll recycle them for another job.

Unanswered Lost questions

I am glad that someone compiled a list of all of the unanswered questions that the Lost producers/writers left when the show ended.

I don't really care about the answers to most of these but watching it irritates me that they jerked us around with the Dharma/Others/Walt/4-toed statue crap when it didn't matter at all. Oh, and the fucking numbers and the whole ARG thing. "All of this matters", Jack? Uh, no.

TV as social media

Although you might think otherwise, people tend to watch TV live, even when recording shows for later viewing on DVRs is an option. The pull of communal activity for the human social animal is strong.

Like all social activities, television-watching demands compromise. People may have strong ideas about what they want to watch, but what they really want to do is watch together. So the great majority of them first see "what is on" -- that is, what is being broadcast at that moment. Restricted choice makes it easier to agree on what to watch. If nothing appeals, they move on to the programmes stored in a DVR. On the very rare occasions when they find nothing there, they will look for an on-demand video.

Horse names from The Wire

Some of my favorites are Prezbo, My Name is My Name, Hamsterdam, Always Boris, Fuzzy Dunlop, and Sheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeit. Glaring omissions? Hit Me on My Burner, Snot Boogie, and Pack o' Newports. The full list. (thx, tash & nathan)

The best TV commercial ever

Or so says Errol Morris. It's certainly the most honest advertising I've ever seen.

A bouncer in Birmingham hit me in the face with a crescent wrench five times and my wife's boyfriend broke my jaw with a fence post. So if you don't buy a trailer from me, it ain't gonna hurt my feelings. So come on down to Cullman Liquidation and get yourself a home. Or don't. I don't care.

(via fimoculous)

The fake problems in infomercials

We love these in our household. My wife was howling with laughter at the Shoe Dini commercial just last night...the "problem" was that if you bent over to put on your shoes, your shirt would get wrinkled. Oh, the humanity. (thx, mark)

The Beauty of Maps

The Beauty of Maps is a BBC series that "[looks] at maps in incredible detail to highlight their artistic attributions and reveal the stories that they tell". The site also links to another maps blog: Amazing Maps. (via junk_deluxe)

Mad Men done after season six

Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner says that Mad Men will end after six seasons. Which is good news and completely unsurprising.

For fans who were holding out hope that we might see the show drag on into the '70s or even '80s -- giving Don Draper a chance to try out key parties, double-knit polyester, muttonchops, and eventually cocaine and yuppie amorality in Reagan's America -- it's probably a little disappointing. But for everyone else, it's reassuring to know that Weiner is working with a specific endpoint in mind.

What do TV directors do?

Television drama is known as a writer's medium but directors wield increasing influence over the visual language of a show.

[Jack] Bender didn't direct the Lost pilot -- that was J.J. Abrams -- but he helmed the second episode, "Walkabout," and set some ground rules that have largely endured. Handheld cameras shouldn't be used unless they serve a real dramatic purpose. ("I said, 'OK, let's not become the handheld show,'" Bender says.) Blues and greens, the main colors on the island, should largely be kept out of the flashback scenes. During the filming of "Walkabout," Bender also made subtle changes to the script in order to heighten the drama. One scene, set on the beach amid the ruins of a crashed airplane, called for a knife to fly through the air and land in the trunk of a tree. Bender decided to send the knife into a seat cushion lodged in the sand, while a character sat in the adjacent seat.

Shelley Duvall's Faerie Tale Theatre

Every episode of Shelley Duvall's Faerie Tale Theatre can be found on Hulu. I had no idea this show existed until the other day, but it sounds like it was quite a program:

Faerie Tale Theatre brings to life twenty-six of the most magical fairy tales of all time. Directed by such masters of cinema as Tim Burton, Francis Ford Coppola and more, and star-powered by Robin Williams, Billy Crystal, Mick Jaggar, James Earl Jones, Howie Mandel, Christopher Reeve, Susan Sarandon and more, this collection is an unparalleled treasury of the best-loved tales of enchantment, adventure and wonder.

Here's the Tim Burton-directed Aladdin and His Wonderful Lamp and Rip Van Winkle directed by Francis Ford Coppola. (via andrea inspired)

Schrute Farms on TripAdvisor

One of the many places reviewed on TripAdvisor is a small Pennsylvania B&B called Schrute Farms...which you might recall is from The Office. From the NY Times:

Carla Harrington of Fredricksburg, Va., was surprised to find 82 percent of reviews recommended Schrute Farms. "I thought about what it would feel like not to know them as TV characters but to really go to this B & B," she said in an interview. Her one-star slam called Dwight "an overbearing survivalist who appears to have escaped from the local mental asylum."

(via mrod)

Dharma Initiative food labels

For your Lost party tonight: dozens and dozens of Dharma Initiative food labels that you can print out and affix to bottles and jars.

Includes steak sauce, cake mix, tuna, sake, and guacamole dip.

SpongeBob SquarePants and the seven deadly sins

The seven main characters on SpongeBob SquarePants were supposedly based on the seven deadly sins:

Sloth: Patrick
Wrath: Squidward
Greed: Mr. Krabs
Envy: Plankton
Gluttony: Gary
Pride: Sandy
Lust: SpongeBob

That's right, a talking sponge that wears pants represents lust.

David Mamet's guidelines for screenwriting

In a memo to the writers of The Unit, David Mamet (the show's executive producer) provides a short but master class in writing for television.

THINK LIKE A FILMMAKER RATHER THAN A FUNCTIONARY, BECAUSE, IN TRUTH, YOU ARE MAKING THE FILM. WHAT YOU WRITE, THEY WILL SHOOT.

HERE ARE THE DANGER SIGNALS. ANY TIME TWO CHARACTERS ARE TALKING ABOUT A THIRD, THE SCENE IS A CROCK OF SHIT.

ANY TIME ANY CHARACTER IS SAYING TO ANOTHER "AS YOU KNOW", THAT IS, TELLING ANOTHER CHARACTER WHAT YOU, THE WRITER, NEED THE AUDIENCE TO KNOW, THE SCENE IS A CROCK OF SHIT.

(thx, mark)

Life

I'd really like to watch Life, the newest multi-part nature documentary from the BBC, but the version showing on Discovery in the US is narrated by Oprah Winfrey and not David Attenborough. Guess I'll wait for the Blu-ray version for the full English experience. Or maybe they'll release a German version narrated by Herzog? Pretty please? In English?

Green screened

I had no idea how many outdoor scenes on TV shows are shot on a green screen. Here's a reel with several before and after examples.

(via that's how it happened)

Google's Super Bowl ad

It didn't feature an athletic woman with a flimsy bra throwing a hammer through a screen, but I thought Google's Super Bowl ad was pretty well done:

First two minutes of Lost season six

I couldn't find the entire first hour of the season six premiere of Lost that was supposed to have leaked online, but this contains the first two minutes (plus two minutes from last season):

Update: I've gotten some angry emails saying that I have spoiled the Lost season premiere for people by embedding this video showing the still frame of Jack on an airplane. To rebut:

1. Lost is unspoilable. What you think is happening either didn't happen, won't happen, will happen again, and has nothing to do with with happened previously or afterwards.

2. Seeing the first two minutes of a TV show doesn't spoil the TV show...that's just watching the show.

3. At the end of last season, if you picked the most obvious scenario for season six to open with, it would have been that the bomb reset the timeline and then seeing everyone on Flight 815 headed safely for Los Angeles, oblivious of all that we've witnessed in the past five years. You can't spoil the obvious.

Update: Ok, here's the first hour of the season premiere (starts at around 1:35:20). It's a poor recording with even worse sound, but it's watchable if you have to know RIGHT NOW. (thx, jeffrey)

Entire Lost canon on Hulu

All 101 episodes of Lost are available on Hulu right now (US only). The season premiere is in 5 days...plenty of time to catch up on all ~73 hours of plane-crashing, hippie-communing, smoke-monstering, eye makeup-wearing, nicknaming, time-jumping weirdness.

The crash of Flight 815 in realtime

We're about a week away so this synchronized view of the crash of Flight 815 in realtime is a good amuse bouche for the season six premiere of Lost.

Gridiron time

Actual football played in a 60-min NFL game: about 11 minutes.

So what do the networks do with the other 174 minutes in a typical broadcast? Not surprisingly, commercials take up about an hour. As many as 75 minutes, or about 60% of the total air time, excluding commercials, is spent on shots of players huddling, standing at the line of scrimmage or just generally milling about between snaps.

Andy Warhol's MTV show

Of course Andy Warhol made a TV show for MTV called Andy Warhol's Fifteen Minutes.

The whole thing is a perfect snapshot of everything to love and hate about the 1980s: the art bull market, Manhattan, fashion's hardworking LGBT backbone, and the nature of celebrity in the dawn of the fractured and streaming media world we live in now.

The link above has pointers to downloads of footage from three shows. (via fimoculous)

The Office intern's photo blog

Ryan (the intern) from The Office has a photo blog.

Yes, acceptance is a theme of this photo, as well as all my photos; even the photos I take that capture isolationism have a theme of acceptance, a lack of acceptance. It is the ultimate compliment that this photo not only captured my soul, but yours as well.

The Avon Barksdale Story

Here's the trailer for The Avon Barksdale Story, a documentary about the real-life Baltimore gangster than inspired the Avon Barksdale character on The Wire.

Barksdale's real name, Nathan Avon Barksdale, and his nickname, "Bodie," were both used in the series as composite characters. Avon Barksdale was The Wire's first season's central character. The storyline focused on the Barksdale clan and their ruthless hold on Baltimore's underworld and the intense efforts of law enforcement to stop them. Barksdale was a real crime figure in Baltimore.

(thx, mark)

Enhance your hyperspace

A bunch of clips from movies and TV that show people enhancing things on computer screens:

And a more artful collection of hyperspace scenes from movies:

Both are via Andy, Mr. Supercuts himself.

The People Speak

Loosely based on Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States, The People Speak is a show that features well-known actors reading famous speeches and letters from American history.

Using dramatic and musical performances of the letters, diaries and speeches of everyday Americans, The People Speak gives voice to those who spoke up for social change throughout U.S. history, forging a nation from the bottom up with their insistence on equality and justice.

The show starts airing this Sunday but many of the performances are already available online.

Arrested Development, the entire series for $29

74% off at Amazon today only. US only, sorry.

Management theory and The Office

In The Gervais Principle, Or The Office According to "The Office" and the followup The Gervais Principle II: Posturetalk, Powertalk, Babytalk and Gametalk, Venkatesh Rao dissects and analyzes the American version of The Office to a degree I hadn't thought was possible.

After four years, I've finally figured the show out. The Office is not a random series of cynical gags aimed at momentarily alleviating the existential despair of low-level grunts. It is a fully-realized theory of management that falsifies 83.8% of the business section of the bookstore.

Even if you're only an occasional viewer of the show, this is worth reading through, especially if you work in an office environment. (thx, zach)

The 100 best quotes from The Wire

This is really well done. (thx, joris)

Update: The next 100 greatest quotes from The Wire. (thx, charlie)

Spoilers

In the opening scene of the season finale of Mad Men last night, Betty Draper goes to visit Roger Sterling in a freshly mowed hay field wearing a huge white wedding dress and gets shot in the head with a rifle by an off-screen Jane. She was aiming for Roger, but the first bullet missed and he hit the deck like a good soldier. As the second bullet entered the back of Betty's head, the camera swung around 180-degrees in a Matrix-like way and we see the bullet exit her neck about two inches below the ear. A ray of light shines through the hole as the bullet exits, as if Betty is made of pure light.

And then I woke up. I haven't seen the actual episode yet. (Friends, don't let friends eat late Vietnamese dinners.)

Sesame Street, a disappointment?

From 1971, a critique of Sesame Street from The Atlantic.

Nonetheless, and in spite of all its successes, I feel very strongly that Sesame Street has aimed too low, has misunderstood the problem it is trying to cure, and will be a disappointment in the long run. I also feel that it has misunderstood the nature and underestimated the opportunities of its chief subject, the three R's, and its medium, television; and therefore, that even what it sets out to do in the short run it does not do nearly as well as it might.

My So-Called Life on Hulu

All 19 episodes of My So-Called Life are available on Hulu for free. (US only.) My huge crush on Claire Danes persists into the present. I've seen this Soul Asylum video about 5 kajillion times and even liked her in Terminator 3. (I know, I know.) (via andrea inspired)

Mad Men, the megamovie of the moment

Writing for The Atlantic, Benjamin Schwarz says we've got it all backwards regarding Mad Men: January Jones is a bad actress and the show's appeal lies not in the accuracy of the production details but in the emotional intelligence.

Then there is the miraculous Hamm, playing the lead character, Don Draper. Here is an actor who at once projects sexual mastery and ironic intelligence, poise and vulnerability. That alchemy has created the greatest male stars, from Gable to Grant to Bogart to McQueen to Clooney, because it wins for them both the desire of women and the fondness of men.

For my money, Jones is just as good at Hamm in portraying her character's multitudes.

Drinking like Mad Men

Some folks from the web magazine Double X wondered what it would be like to drink as much in the workplace as the characters do on Mad Men. So they spent the day getting hammered and tried to do some work. The results are somewhat different than on the show.

The Botany of Desire documentary

PBS will be airing a two-hour-long documentary based on Michael Pollan's excellent The Botany of Desire (previously recommended here).

The tulip, by gratifying our desire for a certain kind of beauty, has gotten us to take it from its origins in Central Asia and disperse it around the world. Marijuana, by gratifying our desire to change consciousness, has gotten people to risk their lives, their freedom, in order to grow more of it and plant more of it. The potato, by gratifying our desire for control, control over nature so that we can feed ourselves has gotten itself out of South America and expanded its range far beyond where it was 500 years ago. And the apple, by gratifying our desire for sweetness begins in the forests of Kazakhstan and is now the universal fruit. These are great winners in the dance of domestication.

A five minute preview of the show is available on YouTube:

I've watched the whole program and it's a worthy companion to the book.

Update: PBS has put the whole thing online for free. (via unlikely words)

The Footnotes of Mad Men book

The Footnotes of Mad Men blog will be a book. Nice!

2009 NFL TV maps

If you want to know what football games are going to be on TV in your part of the country on Sunday, check out these maps every week.

Salting ice cream

In last Sunday's episode of Mad Men, Grandpa Gene ate ice cream right out of the container and salted each spoonful before putting it in his mouth.

It was an odd sight...salt isn't normally the first thing you think of as an ice cream topping. After the episode, Rex Sorgatz tweeted:

WHO THE FUCK SALTS THEIR ICE CREAM?

Salt has its own flavor when it's concentrated (if you salt foods too much or eat some all by itself) but used judiciously, salt takes the natural flavor of food and enhances the intensity. To use another dairy product as an example, fresh mozzarella tastes pretty good on its own but throw a little salt on top and it's mozzarella++. Salt makes ok food taste good and good food taste great. Along with butter, salt is the restaurant world's secret weapon; chefs likely use way more salt than you do when you cook at home. It's one of the reasons why restaurant food is so good.

But back to the ice cream. As food scientist Harold McGee writes, salt probably won't make ice cream taste sweeter but will make it taste ice creamier, particularly if the ice cream is of low quality, as the store-bought variety might have been in 1963.

I'm not sure that salt makes sugar taste sweeter, but it fills out the flavor of foods, sweets included. It's an important component of taste in our foods, so if it's missing in a given dish, the dish will taste less complete or balanced. Salt also increase the volatility of some aromatic substances in food, and it enhances our perception of some aromas, so it can make the overall flavor of a food seem more intense.

So that's why the fuck someone might want to salt their ice cream.

Anthony Bourdain's Disappearing Manhattan

A Continuous Lean recommends Anthony Bourdain's Disappearing Manhattan episode of No Reservations...with the pertinent YouTube embeds.

Fuck, it's worth a watch even if you have seen it ten times. Eisenberg's, Manganaro Foods, Keens, Le Veau d'Or, this show is like my NYC gastro-playbook. Watch it, love it, live it.

Grub Street has some textual CliffsNotes if you're not into the video. If I had one of them life lists, sharing a meal with Bourdain would probably be on it.

Miles Fisher

The fellow who played Kinsey's Mary Jane hookup in the latest episode of Mad Men¹, Miles Fisher, does mean impressions of both Tom Cruise & Christian Bale and keeps a non-typical blog.

And that Princeton Tigertones thing? Fisher attended Harvard and was a member of the Krokodiloes a cappella group, aka he had the perfect pipes for the role.

[1] We don't really need to put a spoilers disclaimer on the appearance of marijuana in a TV show set in the latter part of the early 60s, do we? A: no. ↩

There will be a fourth season of Mad Men

AMC renewed Mad Men for a fourth season.

Farewell, Reading Rainbow

Reading Rainbow is going off the air today after 26 years, making it the third longest running show on PBS (after Sesame Street and Mister Rogers' Neighborhood). Nothing about this on Levar Burton's blog or Twitter acct. as of yet.

Dance, Pete Campbell, dance!

I could watch Pete Campbell dance all the day long. Pitch perfect acting by Vincent Kartheiser. (via this recording)

The footnotes of Mad Men

This may be my favorite new blog of the year: The Footnotes of Mad Men. Sample footnote: The Dream of the Fisherman's Wife, the tentacle porn hanging in Bert Cooper's office. (via sandwich)

Chopping widescreen movies

Steven Soderbergh on the new pan-and-scan: the cropping of 2.40:1 films to fit the HD TV screen.

Television operators, the people who buy and produce things for people to watch on TV, are taking the position that films photographed in the 2.40:1 ratio should be blown up or chopped up to fit a 16:9 (1.78:1) ratio. They are taking the position that the viewers of television do not like watching 2.40 films letterboxed to fit their 16:9 screens, and that a film insisting on this is worth significantly less -- or even nothing -- to them.

He has particular contempt for AMC and HBO:

[HBO wants] everything pan/scanned. On the Ocean's films I had to get somebody VERY HIGH UP WITH WAY BETTER SHIT TO DO to call them and make an exception. Their influence means they could make this problem go away single-handedly, but since they won't, they get to be the poster child for stupidity. Not that they're uninterested in hypocrisy too; while their PR caters to the most adventurous TV watchers, their actions indicate they think their viewers are very, very afraid of anything actually different.

I watched The Darjeeling Limited on Starz a few months ago. This is a movie where the wider aspect ratio is almost another character and the knuckleheads at Starz chopped the hell out of it. Blech.

The cinematography of Mad Men

In a video at the end of this post, Film Freak explores the cinematography of Mad Men. (via house next door)

Arrested Development DVD on sale

Amazon has all three seasons of Arrested Development on DVD for 60% off...only $44.

Vanity Fair on Mad Men

Vanity Fair goes long in a profile of Mad Men and series creator Matthew Weiner. Great stuff if you're a fan.

The dialogue is almost invariably witty, but the silences, of which there are many, speak loudest: Mad Men is a series in which an episode's most memorable scene can be a single shot of a woman at the end of her day, rubbing the sore shoulder where a bra strap has been digging in. There's really nothing else like it on television.

The article mentions that the show's core group of writers are all women. The show's portrayal of women is what really drew me into the show. The first 2-3 episodes were nothing but men behaving badly and I was ready to give up on it but then came episode 4 and it was like, oh, the women are sticking it to the men now...this could be interesting.

Update: From the WSJ, a piece about the women on the show and behind the scenes.

Behind the smooth-talking, chain-smoking, misogynist advertising executives on "Mad Men" is a group of women writers, a rarity in Hollywood television. Seven of the nine members of the writing team are women. Women directed five of the 13 episodes in the third season. The writers, led by the show's creator Matthew Weiner, are drawing on their experiences and perspectives to create the show's heady mix: a world where the men are in control and the women are more complex than they seem, or than the male characters realize.

(thx, lopati)

Mad Men Yourself

Pick out a suit, light a cigarette, slick back your hair, and download the result as a Twitter icon or desktop wallpaper: Mad Men Yourself. Here's what I would look like as a Sterling Cooper junior account executive.

Illustrations by Dyna Moe, who worked her way into the hearts and minds of the Mad Men folks with her wonderful illustrations.

And PS to AMC: What, no season three press kit to send along to kottke.org? Almost 20 posts in the past year not enough for you?

Update: The Bygone Bureau has a short interview with Dyna Moe about her involvement with the show.

You Are There

First broadcast on the radio in 1947, You Are There presented historic events as they would have been reported by modern news broadcasters. In 1953, the program jumped to television with Walter Cronkite as the host, who also hosted a brief revival of the show in the 70s.

The series also featured various key events in American and world history, portrayed in dramatic recreations, with one addition -- CBS News reporters, in modern-day suits, would report on the action and interview the characters. Each episode would begin with the characters setting the scene. Cronkite, from his anchor desk in New York, would give a few words on what was about to happen. An announcer would then give the date and the event, followed by a bold, "You Are There!"

Cronkite would then return to describe the event and its characters more in detail, before throwing it to the event, saying, "All things are as they were then, except... You Are There."

At the end of the program, after Cronkite summarizes what happened in the preceding event, he reminded viewers, "What sort of day was it? A day like all days, filled with those events that alter and illuminate our times... and you were there."

Here's a clip from an episode from the 70s version of the show about the siege of the Alamo. Cronkite reports and Fred Gwynne (Herman Munster) plays Davy Crockett.

What a fantastic idea for a show...I'd love to see a contemporary version of this. Well, not too contemporary; watching a CNBC-style presentation of the 1929 stock market crash wouldn't really be that fun.

What's On Earth Tonight?

Strange Maps has a map of What's On Earth Tonight, basically a TV Guide for the Milky Way. The map is not that big yet because TV signals have only been sent out from Earth since the late 1920s.

The first tv images of World War II are about to hit Aldebaran star system, 65 light years [ly] away. If there's anybody out there alive and with eyes to see it, the barrage of actual and dramatised footage of WW2 will keep them shocked and/or entertained for decades to come. Which is just as well, for they'll have to wait quite a few years to catch the first episodes of such seminal series as The Twilight Zone and Bonanza (both 1959), just about now hitting the (putative) extraterrestrial biological entities of the Mu Arae area (appr. 50 ly). The Cosby Show, Miami Vice and Night Court (all 1984) should be all the rage on Fomalhaut (25 ly). Meanwhile, the sentient, tv-watching creatures near Alpha Centauri (4.4 ly), our closest extrasolar star, are just recovering from the infamous "wardrobe malfunction" during Janet Jackson and Justin Timberlake's halftime show during the 2004 Superbowl.

See also the opening scene from Contact.

CBS News Coverage of Apollo 11

For those of you who missed the show last night or if you just want a replay, the CBS News footage of the Apollo 11 Moon landing and Moon walk, presented by Walter Cronkite, is available on YouTube. The Moon landing video is here and the first of 7 videos of the Moon walk is here.

Apollo 11 landing on TV as it aired 40 years ago

Inspired by the ApolloPlus40 Twitter account and We Choose the Moon, both of which are tracking the Apollo 11 mission as it happened 40 years ago, I've built a page where you can watch the CBS News coverage of Walter Cronkite reporting on the Moon landing and the first moon walk, 40 years to the second after it originally happened.

Just leave this page open in your browser and at the appointed times (schedule is below), the broadcast will begin (no manual page refresh necessary).

Schedule:
Moon landing broacast start: 4:10:30 pm EDT on July 20
Moon landing shown: 4:17:40 pm EDT
Moon landing broadcast end: 4:20:15 pm EDT
Moon walk broadcast start: 10:51:27 pm EDT
First step on Moon: 10:56:15 pm EDT
Nixon speaks to the Eagle crew: approx 11:51:30 pm EDT
Moon walk broadcast end: 12:00:30 pm EDT on July 21

If you've never seen this coverage, I urge you to watch at least the landing segment (~10 min.) and the first 10-20 minutes of the Moon walk. I hope that with the old time TV display and poor YouTube quality, you get a small sense of how someone 40 years ago might have experienced it. I've watched the whole thing a couple of times while putting this together and I'm struck by two things: 1) how it's almost more amazing that hundreds of millions of people watched the first Moon walk *live* on TV than it is that they got to the Moon in the first place, and 2) that pretty much the sole purpose of the Apollo 11 Moon walk was to photograph it and broadcast it live back to Earth.

Thanks to Meg for her JS help...any errors or sloppy code are mine. Please note that schedule times are approximate, based on your computer's clock, and that the syncing of the videos might not be perfect. You need to have JS and Flash 8+ to view. This is just like real TV...if you miss the appointed time, there's no rewind or anything...the video is playing "live". I have not done extensive browser testing so it may not work perfectly in your browser. Bug reports are welcome and I will try to fix things as they crop up. If you run into any problems, just reload the page. To ensure that you have the latest (hopefully bug-free) version before the broadcast begins, reload the page. Other than that, if you leave it open, the broadcast will happen automatically.

If you like this, tell your pals on Twitter.

Update: If you missed the "live" show, you can watch all of the clips on YouTube.

30 Rock = The Muppet Show rebooted

I've never seen 30 Rock (I KNOW, I KNOW) so I can't attest to the correctness of this, but supposedly the show is a rip-off of The Muppet Show.

EXHIBIT B: LIZ LEMON VS. KERMIT THE FROG
Both are the most normal characters on their respective shows. Both are unlucky at love. Both are neurotic worrywarts and type-a personalities who slow burn into a crazy breakdown once per episode. AND both have some kind of flirtation with the guest stars that ultimately goes nowhere. There is absolutely no difference between Liz Lemon and Kermit the Frog save for genitalia (Liz is a lady, Kermit has none).

Make up your mind, internet. Is Kermit Liz Lemon or Christian Bale?

Update: Sesame Street did a 30 Rock bit. Liz Lemon was played not by Kermit but by a lemon. (thx, elisabeth)

Best TV of the decade

Variety polled members of the Television Critics Association for their picks for the best TV of the past decade. Here are their choices for drama series and comedy series:

Drama: Friday Night Lights, Lost, Mad Men, The Sopranos, The West Wing, The Wire.

Comedy: 30 Rock, Arrested Development, Curb Your Enthusiasm, The Daily Show, Everybody Loves Raymond, The Office.

Summer of The Wire

Alan Sepinwall is watching season two of The Wire this summer and posting reviews. Here are his episode one reviews: one for newbies and another for veteran viewers. At the risk of sounding like a broken record, season two is underrated and if you didn't care for it the first time through, I'd give it another shot. (thx, david)

Mad Men season three

Season three of Mad Men is set to premiere in August. Oh Joannie! Plenty of time to stock up on your rye and Lucky Strikes. (thx, meg)

Update: The season three premiere has an official date/time: August 16 at 10pm. Because of the expense of the show, AMC wanted to add two more minutes of advertising but series creator Matthew Weiner balked at cutting that time out of each show. So season three episodes will run slightly past 11pm to accommodate both parties' desires. (thx, david)

Also, if you've never seen Mad Men and wonder what all the fuss is about, AMC has the entire first episode of the series online for free.

Hurley has a blog

Sweet Marvin Candle! How come no one told me that Hurley from Lost has a blog?

Supertrain!

Supertrain was a massively promoted and extremely expensive 1979 NBC adventure drama that lasted only a few episodes before being cancelled. Along with the US boycott of the 1980 Summer Olympics, the superflop nearly bankrupted the network.

The show featured an "atom powered steam turbine" train that could travel from NYC to LA in 36 hours. Infrastructurist has posted links to the awful and campy pilot episode of the show. Here's part one to get you started. I love that the train's crew is right out of a 1970s disco and the board of directors are bona fide 1890s railroad magnates. This thing is a train wreck. (Layered narrative again! Bam! (Again!))

The food of Star Trek

In celebration of Star Trek opening today, Adam Kuban goes long on a piece about food in Star Trek movies and TV shows.

Science fiction often holds a mirror up to contemporary culture, critiquing its practices, politics, and mores. So, too, with Romulan ale. Because of the United Federation of Planets' standoff with the Romulan Empire, the drink is illegal within the Federation -- much like Cuban cigars are in the U.S. But like the captains of industry of today, captains of starships indulge in this vice.

Oddly, my only complaint is that (somehow) his piece isn't long enough. Adam, you didn't even get in to "Tea. Earl Grey. Hot." (thx, alaina)

Hating The Wire

During a discussion with friends the other day, someone wondered, "Who doesn't like The Wire?" The show is easily one of a handful of shows considered the best ever and even those who feel that The Wire is overrated still don't dislike it. But someone's gotta hate it, right?

In the spirit of Cynical-C's excellent You Can't Please Everyone series, I went to Amazon and looked for bad reviews of The Wire season one DVD. There were six one-star reviews and four two-star reviews (versus 190 five-star reviews). Three of those were customer service complaints and one read like a five-star review that was accidentially mis-rated; here are parts of the remaining reviews:

I have watched 6 episodes of Season 1 and have desperately tried to get into The Wire. Despite the hype, and all the trendies saying what a mahhvellous show it is, actually it is pretty dull. Boring characters, little conflict, confusing scripts, same stuff repeated ad nauseam. Frankly, the lives of petty drug dealers in Baltimore don't do it for me, and not do the cops who are a pretty unattractive bunch with few dramatic qualities. I know that Prison Break was appallingly acted but at least it had a story line. The Wire is like an improvisation at one of those let it all hang out stage schools which never produces particularly great actors.

I had 1000's of hours of viewing movies, television series, and television programming behind me before I sat down to watch this series on DVD, season one, the box in my hand. I was very dissapointed. This series stinks. I watched only episode 1, and have the experience and perception to know that it won't get any better. [...] If watching cheap white trash and cheap black trash destroy themselves and probably each other interests you, this is for you. I have a better way to spend my evenings. I experience enough negativity in the world on a daily basis, that I don't have to put it in my dvd player after dinner for it to "entertain" me.

I really disliked this show, i watched the entire first season in two days, i only did so because i was waiting for it to become interesting. After so many glowing reviews, i could not belive how just plain awful this show turned out to be. I would rather watch reruns of Barney Miller, you get the same effect of watching the Wire except with slightly more enjoyment. I know it's not The Shield and it's not supposed to be but i implore you to purchase that series if you want to enjoy a television experience.

I got the Wire because I thought I was missing the boat on 'the best show on TV'. Well...I must be missing something because after watching 5 episodes I don't get it. I kept thinking it was going to get better..not that it was bad...it just wasn't that interesting. The only reason I kept watching was to see Idris Elba who plays Stringer Bell cause he is a cutie!

Perhaps it is in the office where the show falters the most, sometimes having camera shots zoom in on a person for three seconds at a time while they are thinking about nothing. Then there is the whole thing with the detective using a typewriter. Okay, did I miss something? Is this 2008 or 1978 people?? High Profile crime unit using typewriters, sure I buy it and a bag of that counterfeit money they had in the first episode.

I tried it sober; perhaps I should have tried it drunk. Ham acting, cliched backdrops (pole-dancing was an idea already on its last legs before The Sopranos ran it into the ground) and dialogue which may possibly be realistic but certainly is dull. I labored manfully through the whole first episode. I shall not torment myself with a second.

If Barney Miller is more your speed, season one of that show is also available on Amazon with reviews almost as good as The Wire's.

Update: I had totally forgotten about Andy Baio's Amazon.com Knee-Jerk Contrarian Game.

Madison Avenue Cookware

Madison Avenue Cookware. The only thing that cooks better is a woman.

The site, which seems to be down right now, is actually a promotional site for Mad Men.

Conservative Colbert viewers not in on the joke

According to an article published in The International Journal of Press/Politics, both liberals and conservatives find The Colbert Report funny, but the two groups differ in their perception of Stephen Colbert's actual ideological allegiances.

Additionally, there was no significant difference between the groups in thinking Colbert was funny, but conservatives were more likely to report that Colbert only pretends to be joking and genuinely meant what he said while liberals were more likely to report that Colbert used satire and was not serious when offering political statements. Conservatism also significantly predicted perceptions that Colbert disliked liberalism.

(via cyn-c)

Lost vs. Victorian literature

Plot-wise, Little Dorrit is just as ridiculous as Lost, frozen donkey wheel and all. Discuss.

Disturbin' Strokes

The intro to Diff'rent Strokes set to some disturbing music is "far more creepy than I thought it would [be]". (via cyn-c)

John Madden retires

I was up waaay too early this morning watching some trending topics on Twitter Search and John Madden's name suddenly appeared. When you see a boldface name pop up on Twitter Search like that, it usually means they've died. I'm glad Madden's not dead but I'm sad that he's retiring from calling football games. I know he wasn't everyone's cup of tea, but I loved listening to him.

The Wire Bible

This is quite a treat. Someone got ahold of some scripts from The Wire and posted them online. [Update: I've mirrored the files for convenience.]

Season 1, episode 1, "The Target"
Season 1, episode 9, "Game Day"
Season 5, episode 10, "-30-"

But the real gem is a document dated September 6, 2000 that appears to be David Simon's pitch to HBO for the show. The document starts with a description of the show.

Simon had the show nailed from the beginning. Near the end of the overview, he says:

But more than an exercise is realism for its own sake, the verisimilitude of The Wire exists to serve something larger. In the first story-arc, the episodes begin what would seem to be the straight-forward, albeit protracted, pursuit of a violent drug crew that controls a high-rise housing project. But within a brief span of time, the officers who undertake the pursuit are forced to acknowledge truths about their department, their role, the drug war and the city as a whole. In the end, the cost to all sides begins to suggest not so much the dogged police pursuit of the bad guys, but rather a Greek tragedy. At the end of thirteen episodes, the reward for the viewer -- who has been lured all this way by a well-constructed police show -- is not the simple gratification of hearing handcuffs click. Instead, the conclusion is something that Euripides or O'Neill might recognize: an America, at every level at war with itself.

The list of main characters contains a few surprises. McNulty was originally going to be named McCardle, Aaron Barksdale became Avon Barksdale, and the Stringer Bell character changed quite a bit.

STRINGY BELL - black, early forties, he is BARKSDALE's most trusted lieutenant, supervising virtually every aspect of the organization. He is older than BARKSDALE, and much more direct in his way, but nonetheless he is the No. 2. He has BARKSDALE's brutal sense of the world but not his polish. BELL is bright, but clearly a child of the projects he now controls.

The final section is entitled "BIBLE" and contains draft outlines of a nine-episode season. I didn't read it all, but the main story line is there, as are many plot details that made it into the actual first season. (thx, greg)

Namaste

Someone scanned and uploaded some old Dharma Initiative ads from 70s magazines like National Geographic. Wow, that's a long-running ARG.

BTW, the island on Lost has to be the largest MacGuffin in the history of moving pictures, right?

Cosmos on Hulu

The entire Cosmos series is available for free on Hulu, in 480p no less (US only). From the Wikipedia:

[Cosmos] covered a wide range of scientific subjects including the origin of life and a perspective of our place in the universe. The series was first broadcast by the Public Broadcasting Service in 1980, and was the most widely watched series in the history of American public television until 1990's The Civil War. It is still the most widely watched PBS series in the world. It won an Emmy and a Peabody Award and has since been broadcast in more than 60 countries and seen by over 600 million people, according to the Science Channel.

(thx, sam)

Planet Earth on Discovery now

Tonight on Discovery HD: Planet Earth marathon until 3am ET. If you haven't seen it, now's your chance.

Jimmy Fallon mines the web

Being that Jimmy Fallon is a big nerd and his show's producer is Gavin Purcell (formerly of TechTV, G4, and Attack of the Show), I knew it was only a matter of time before The Late Show started featuring more online stuff than its predecessor. But I didn't know it would happen so soon. So far Jimmy has welcomed Kevin Rose & Alex Albrecht (of Diggnation) and Josh Topolsky (of Engadget). On last night's show, they turned a Twitter user with 7 followers into an instant Twitter celeb. The show's web site is mainly a blog staffed by full-time editors.

Reality TV cliches

We get it, you're not here to make friends.

The time loop theory of Lost

Your Lost prep for the evening: The Time Loop Theory. Spoilers.

All of the "werid" things that we see happen in seasons 1 & 2 of LOST are a result of the Losties now existing in the year 1996 on the island. This is why Locke can walk, and why Rose is Healed -- their bodies are now existing in a time prior to them contracting their illnesses. This is also why some characters, such as Walt, have extraordinary perception -- because they're technically from the future.

This is Lost as Primer (note the Primer timeline map).

David Simon, back on the beat

David Simon, formerly of The Wire and The Baltimore Sun, noticed an underreported Baltimore shooting involving a police officer and decided to investigate it himself. What he found is not good news for the citizenry.

Well, sorry, but I didn't trip over any blogger trying to find out McKissick's identity and performance history. Nor were any citizen journalists at the City Council hearing in January when police officials inflated the nature and severity of the threats against officers. And there wasn't anyone working sources in the police department to counterbalance all of the spin or omission.

I didn't trip over a herd of hungry Sun reporters either, but that's the point. In an American city, a police officer with the authority to take human life can now do so in the shadows, while his higher-ups can claim that this is necessary not to avoid public accountability, but to mitigate against a nonexistent wave of threats. And the last remaining daily newspaper in town no longer has the manpower, the expertise or the institutional memory to challenge any of it.

In other Simon news, apparently he's doing a pilot for HBO for a show called Treme, "post-Katrina-themed drama that chronicles the rebuilding of the city through the eyes of local musicians". The cast will include Clarke Peters and Wendell Pierce, who played Lester and Bunk on The Wire.

And speaking of The Wire, the latest issue of Film Quarterly has several articles devoted to the show. Only one article is online so you best send Lamar out to the newsstand for a paper copy. (thx, david & walter)

Nature's Great Events

If you liked Planet Earth, you should probably check out Nature's Great Events. Narrated by David Attenborough and currently airing in the UK on BBC1 and BBC HD, the series consists of six 50-minute shows, each of which features a large-scale annual event, like the spring thaw in the Arctic Circle and the sardine run along the coast of South Africa. The series was shot in HD using many of the techniques seen in Planet Earth.

If you're in the UK, you can check out the first three episodes on the BBC site. In the US, Discovery will be airing the show sometime in the spring under the title Seasons of Survival (apparently Nature's Great Events isn't dramatic enough for the American audience). No word on whether Attenborough's expert narration will also be replaced as it was in Planet Earth.

In the meantime, some HD clips of the show are available on YouTube. This slo-mo video of a grizzly bear shaking the water off its fur is fun to watch but this too-short clip of an extraordinary coordinated attack of dolphins, seals, sharks, and birds on a massive school of sardines is the gem.

(via we made this, who call the series "mind-blowingly good")

Asymmetric television

I love this TV by Studio FRST; it's shaped to do both full-size widescreen and 4x3. A picture is worth a thousand words in this case:

That chunk out of the corner is really nice. (via monoscope)

New Simpsons intro

After 429 episodes, The Simpsons finally get a new intro sequence...in HD and Dolby Digital 5.1 no less. (via fimoculous)

Previously on Drunk

Lost is five episodes into the new season and I've just now discovered the Lost drinking game. Dammit!

Take a sip whenever: Juliet makes her default wide-eyed, perma-smirk face.

The Ascent of Money

The Ascent of Money is a two-hour documentary about the evolution of money and finance. The whole thing is available for viewing on PBS's web site for free.

"Everyone needs to understand the complex history of money and our relationship to it," he says. "By learning how societies have continually created and survived financial crises, we can find solid solutions to today's worldwide economic emergency." As he traverses historic financial hot spots around the world, Ferguson illuminates fundamental economic concepts and speaks with leading experts in the financial world.

The series is based on Niall Ferguson's book of the same name (an Amazon and NY Times bestseller) and will air in an expanded 4-hour version later this year. (via lined & unlined)

The NFL on TV

Football season is over but if you still want your fix, Mark Bowden wrote an interesting piece for The Atlantic about how NFL games are presented on TV. The camera operators and directors seem as talented and under pressure as the players on the field.

The television crews don't just broadcast games, they inhabit them. They know the players, the teams, the stats, and the strategies. They interview players and coaches the day before the game. They brainstorm, anticipate, plot likely story lines, prepare graphic packages of important stats, and bundle replays from previous contests to bring a sense of history and context to the event. They are not just pointing cameras and broadcasting the feed, they are telling the story of the game as it happens.

Just this morning I was thinking about how successful the instant replay rule has been for NFL broadcasts. TV instant replay predated its use by the referees, but now the review process has some weight behind it and provides extra drama, particularly in exciting moments of the game. The Santonio Holmes touchdown catch in the final moments of the Super Bowl is the perfect example. From the perspective of "telling the story of the game", the catch was amazing. But what the review process does is delay the release of tension for a minute or two...it's a mini-cliffhanger inserted into a sport that doesn't have any natural cliffhanging moments. Showing the replays over and over while the ref makes his decision also brings the viewer into the story itself, as though he is playing the part of the reviewing referee. (thx, john)

Another class on The Wire

Regarding Berkeley's class on McNulty & Co., Jason Mittell is teaching a class on The Wire at Middlebury College this spring. More information is available on the class blog, including the course schedule. This class *will* include the underrated season two.

A class on The Wire

UC Berkeley is offering a class called What's so great about The Wire?

Discerning critics and avid fans have agreed that the five-season run of Ed Burns and David Simon's The Wire was "the best TV show ever broadcast in America"--not the most popular but the best. The 60 hours that comprise this episodic series have been aptly been compared to Dickens, Balzac, Dreiser and Greek Tragedy. These comparisons attempt to get at the richly textured complexity of the work, its depth, its bleak tapestry of an American city and its diverse social stratifications. Yet none of these comparisons quite nails what it is that made this the most compelling "show" on TV and better than many of the best movies. This class will explore these comparisons, analyze episodes from the first, third, fourth and fifth seasons and try to discover what was and is so great about The Wire. We will screen as much of the series as we can during our mandatory screening sessions and approach it through the following lenses: the other writing of David Simon, including his journalism, an exemplary Greek Tragedy, Dickens' Bleak House and/or parts of Balzac's Human Comedy. We will also consider the formal tradition of episodic television.

They're skipping season two? Shameful. (via unlikely words)

The yellow line

A video explaining how the yellow first-down line is drawn on the football field during games. (thx, david)

Eye On Springfield

Eye On Springfield celebrates Simpsons moments from seasons 1-9, when the show was "still funny". If you're around me for more than a few minutes, it's likely you'll hear "freshen ya drink, govenah?" at some point.

Leadership

Irate gentleman: "Are you in charge here?"
The Doctor: "No, but I have a lot of ideas."

That's the Fourth Doctor in The Horror of Fang Rock. However, it should be noted that aside from The Doctor and Leela, everyone else featured in the episode died.

Brother Mouzone implicated in Notorious B.I.G.'s killing?

When The Notorious B.I.G. was shot dead in Los Angeles, a composite sketch of the shooter done shortly after the killing depicts a clean-cut black man in a suit and bow tie. Was Biggie's killer the partial basis for Brother Mouzone, the bow-tied hitman from The Wire?

At least until I hear from Mr. Mouzone's lawyer, I say: case closed! (thx, alex)

Liveblogging the Lost season five premiere

After catching up with seasons 1-4 of the series over the past few months, this is the first episode of Lost that I will be seeing live. Exciting! To commemorate, I'll be liveblogging the first episode of season five, set to begin here in about 10 minutes. Don't worry, spoilers will be minimal. Check back frequently for updates.

11:55 pm Ah, there we go. Just under an hour.

11:06 pm Come on Wikipedia...it's six minutes after the show ended and you haven't updated the pages for the new episodes yet.

10:56 pm Yes, by all means, don't show her face. Christ.

10:55 pm Wait, was that the Tardis?

10:54 pm Hurley can always eat.

10:53 pm Sayid is a vampire. Didn't see that one coming. Cheap attempt to capitalize on Twilight, True Blood, and Let the Right One In vampire maina.

10:50 pm "You've got more issues that Life magazine." TV is so bad.

10:47 pm I made a mistake earlier. Locke is not a Cylon, he's a replicant.

10:44 pm Well, Hurley, when you put it like that, it all just seems really absurd.

10:43 pm "If the news thinks you've done something, then everyone does."

10:40 pm Dharma, Dharma, Dharma, Dharma, Dharma, Dharma, Dharma.

10:32 pm Ooh, Time Elves! They were riding the Smoke Monster!

10:28 pm I was just thinking...someone needs to kill Neil. Then someone did! And that fire to fire thing just after the water to water transition? Nice. Now do earth and wind.

10:23 pm Wait, was that Lt. Daniels?

10:22 pm Get your own I Love My Shih Tzu t-shirt. It *is* all about shirts. (Here's another one!)

10:15 pm Caviar sandwich!

10:13 pm Hurley is in the background of every shot. Spot him if you can.

10:10 pm Water to water cut scene? Brilliance reminiscent of 2001: A Space Odyssey. And now it's Weekend At Sayid's!

10:08 pm Wait, who the hell is Neil?! (No, seriously.)

10:06 pm Intense shampoo? Fuck you.

10:02 pm Boooo! Not her. Boo. No more advice from dead people.

10:00 pm I'm really tired of these initial shots of headless people. Pan up, for God's sake.

9:58 pm SFJ: "9:54 PM: This is impossible to spoil. We are going in circles." You got that right. (For those of you unfamiliar with TV lingo, that's called a crossover, folks.)

9:50 pm She's dead, right?

9:49 pm Why is Sawyer so angry all the time?

9:45 pm Weird Capital One commercial totally rips off Nintendo. Lawsuit.

9:44 pm I liked this series the first time I saw it...when it was called Star Trek: The Next Generation.

9:43 pm Oh right, it's not supposed to make sense. Look, there's someone who we know is dead! (Or do we? (Yes, we do. (Or do we? (Etc.))))

9:42 pm How does he still have the compass? Why doesn't he just give Richard a big hug and drag him along?

9:40 pm Compasses point north.

9:38 pm Tune in next week for "Name! That! Time!" (I can name that time in 2 scenes, Bob.)

9:31 pm Watch out for the knives!!! Oops, too late.

9:26 pm God, I hope this means we get to see Nikki and Paolo again!

9:24 pm Wait, I have to do this for *two hours*?

9:21 pm SFJ is also liveblogging. He says, "IT IS ON."

9:19 pm Locke is a Cylon.

9:12 pm First commercial is 12 minutes in (Frost/Nixon trailer). Only 12 minutes? Also, I love the Lost titles...short and to the point.

9:09 pm "I guess we'll never know." You got that right, pal. You never even explained about the polar bear!

9:07 pm Jack and Ben in a hotel room together? Is Lost doing its own slash fiction now?

8:53 pm This clip show is a bummer. The show's producers are way too conscious of how the audience perceives the show.

Two more seasons of Mad Men

The creator of Mad Men, Matthew Weiner, has signed a deal with his distribution company to do the show for at least two more years.

Pact will keep Weiner at the helm of "Mad Men" for the next two seasons. It also covers TV development and includes a component for Weiner to develop a feature project for Lionsgate. There's no specific idea on the table for the feature, but it won't be "Mad Men" on the bigscreen, Weiner and Lionsgate execs said.

Praise be. (via fimoculous)

If the cast of The Wire was a football team

The Ravens are looking good in the playoffs but Mark Lamster imagines a football team made up of characters from The Wire. The most inspired choices:

Offensive Coordinator: Lester Freamon
FB: Thomas Hauk
MLB: Wee-Bey Brice
MLB: Cheese Wagstaff
Kicker: Ziggy Sobotka
Fan club president: Roland Pryzbylewski

2008's television reviewed

I didn't watch a lot of TV last year but Todd VanDerWerff's review of 2008's television season makes me feel like I did.

I mean, not ALL television was bleak -- Mad Men ignored the industry-wide memo and gave us one of the best seasons of television ever, while Lost and Battlestar Galactica each hit new creative highs -- but the fact that The Wire and The Shield both wrapped up, with BSG and Lost soon to follow, made things SEEM that much bleaker.

I especially liked his definition of "socks folding TV":

A good socks-folding show is one that you can sort of pay attention to and enjoy. It's generally well-crafted, but not especially ambitious.

My all-time fave socks folding show is Star Trek: TNG. Even if you fold only when Troi is chattering away pointlessly, you can get a whole basket of clothes done before the second commercial.

The Wire, rapped up

A five-minute rap video that summarizes all five seasons of The Wire.

Police chief, yeah, his rank is proper
'Cause of the window, he starts a war with Frank Sobotka.

MIA's Paper Planes is still my favorite Wire-inspired song, but this is pretty sweet. (thx, about 2000 people)

3-2-1 Contact!

Opening theme to 3-2-1 Contact. This was the soundtrack to my tween and early teen years.

Photos of The Wire soundstage

Photos of the abandoned soundstage for The Wire.

So I found out yesterday that the soundstage for "The Wire" still existed. I wasted no time in visiting it and was there almost less than 24 hours. It's one of my favorite TV shows ever and I had to see this before everyone ruined it. The building is also scheduled for demolition and they are going to build a super market on it.

(thx, hurty)

Island TV

Have you noticed that people like watching TV programs which take place on islands? It's true! Some of the most popular shows in history are set on islands. Perhaps it's the warm weather, laid-back island living, the friendly people, the azure seas, and palm trees that attract viewers. Who can really say? Here are some popular TV programs that take place or are filmed on islands.

Survivor
Lost
The Cosby Show
Friends
Mad Men
Law & Order
I Love Lucy
30 Rock
Seinfeld
All in the Family
The Daily Show
The Colbert Report
Countdown with Keith Olbermann
NBC Nightly News
Good Morning America

Update: Oh, man, I forgot Fawlty Towers, The Office, and Monty Python's Flying Circus! (thx, martin)

Star Wars on The Muppet Show in 1980

Four months before the opening of The Empire Strikes Back, Luke Skywalker, C-3PO, R2-D2, and Chewbacca appeared as the special guest stars on The Muppet Show. Mark Hamill's first line as Skywalker is:

It seems we've landed on some sort of comedy variety show planet.

...and it goes downhill from there. The whole show is available on YouTube in three parts:

The appearance was probably orchestrated as a promotional crossover. Frank Oz voiced Yoda in Empire and was a lead puppeteer for The Muppet Show, performing Missy Piggy and Fozzie, among others.

Dubbing The Wire into German

An interview with a translator about the difficulty of dubbing The Wire into German.

To bring over the style of the speech out of the slums or ghettos, we haven't used very exact, grammatically correct German. Nobody says "Wegen des Fahrrads" (because of the bikes), rather "wegen dem Fahrrads" ('cause of them bikes), for example there we use wrong German. Here and there we've used other phrases, sometimes with an English or American sentence structure.

The interview itself was translated from German to English. (via panopticist)

The prolific John Munch

According to IMDB and Wikipedia (here too), Richard Belzer has appeared as Detective John Munch on ten different television shows, more than any other character on television. An exhaustive John Munch viewing would include shows from the following programs:

Homicide: Life on the Street
Law & Order
X-Files
Law & Order: Special Victims Unit
The Beat
Law & Order: Trial By Jury
Arrested Development
Paris enquêtes criminelles (aka Law & Order: Paris)**
The Wire
Sesame Street

Belzer surpassed John Ratzenberger and George Wendt, who played barflies Cliff Clavin and Norm Peterson in six different series: Cheers, St. Elsewhere, The Tortellie, Wings, The Simpsons, and Frasier. (Ratzenberger apparently enjoys continuity; he's done a voice in every single Pixar movie, nine in all.) Munch/Belzer have been prolific in the matrimonial arena as well. Between the two, they've been married seven times (Munch:4 and Belzer: 3).

** It's unclear from the sources that I read if Munch has appeared on this show or will appear in the future.

Update: Two more things. The Munch character was inspired by real-life Baltimore homicide detective Jay Landsman...who both inspired another character on The Wire (named Jay Landsman) and appears in The Wire as a police lieutenant. All three -- Munch, the fake Landsman, and the real Landsman -- appeared in a fifth season episode called Took. Oh, and Munch, like many other television characters, is a figment of an autistic kid's fertile imagination. (thx, scott & logan)

A tour of New New York

Locations of interest in New New York (with photos), the setting for the events of Futurama in the year 3000. Includes Citihall, Taco Bellevue Hospital, Little Bitaly, the Metropolitan House of Opera, Original Cosmic Ray's Pizza, and Commander Riker's Island Jail. (thx, anthony)

Milch talks Deadwood season four

In a segment for the upcoming Deadwood DVD box set, series creator David Milch talks about the abrupt end of the show and some of the plans he'd had for season four:

Milch does say that he had hoped to introduce a couple of new characters in the never-made fourth season, one of which was based on the sojourning father of John D. Rockefeller who passed himself off as a medicine man who was both a fraud (dispensing mostly alcohol as medicine) and bigamist. He'd be accompanied by a native medicine man whose tactictics were about the same. As it was it could only introduce a bit of their stories in season three.

Milch also says that he's currently working on another show for HBO about New York City police in the 70s called Last of the Ninth. (via house next door)

Futurama's Planet Express in Hell's Kitchen

According to Bender's Game (good title!), a direct-to-DVD Futurama movie, the Planet Express HQ is located in Hell's Kitchen right on the Hudson.

Snoop Dogg on Martha Stewart

If you can stomach more than 30 seconds of it, here's Snoop Dogg on Martha Stewart making cognac mashed potatoes. Here's part 2, in which Snoop and Martha compare posses -- bodyguards in Snoop's case and personal assistants for Martha. One of commenters on YouTube correctly notes that Stewart has spent more time in jail than Snoop.

A Matter of Loaf and Death

A Matter of Loaf and Death, the Wallace and Gromit short formerly known as Trouble At' Mill, will be shown on the Beeb in the UK at the end of December.

In this new masterpiece viewers will catch up with Wallace and Gromit who have opened a new bakery -- Top Bun -- and business is booming, not least because a deadly Cereal Killer is targeting all the bakers in town so competition is drying up. Gromit is worried that they may be the next victims but Wallace couldn't care -- he's fallen head over heels in love with Piella Bakewell, former star of the Bake-O-Lite bread commercials. So Gromit is left to run things on his own when he'd much rather be getting better acquainted with Piella's lovely pet poodle Fluffles.

Rumor is that a US showing will soon follow.

Arrested Development

I'm seeing Lost on the side right now (sssh, don't tell Meg) but for the most part, we're a one-at-a-time family with respect to TV shows. With Mad Men on hiatus for who knows how long and spurred by a current lack of cable TV, we finally settled in to watch a few episodes of Arrested Development on Hulu (the whole show is on there) and promptly hopped on the bandwagon for this now-cancelled masterpiece. Great stuff.