Sesame Street is insane, BTW. They aired 130 60-minute episodes over six months for that first season and over its 43 seasons, the show has averaged 100 episodes per season. A truly amazing combination of quantity and quality.
1 The Sopranos
2 Seinfeld
3 The Twilight Zone
4 All in the Family
5 M*A*S*H
6 The Mary Tyler Moore Show
7 Mad Men
8 Cheers
9 The Wire
10 The West Wing
11 The Simpsons
12 I Love Lucy
13 Breaking Bad
14 The Dick Van Dyke Show
15 Hill Street Blues
16 Arrested Development
17 The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
18 Six Feet Under
19 Taxi
20 The Larry Sanders Show
The full list is here in PDF form. Lost above Deadwood? And Homicide? And several other more? Maybe they ignored everything after the first couple seasons?
[SORTA MAD MEN SPOILERS! but not really] I don't know if Ken Crosgrove dancing on the latest episode of Mad Men is the best thing that's ever been on the show, but it's definitely in the top 10. And it might be even better with a little Daft Punk.
And it might be best with the Crazy in Love cover from Gatsby...just load up that this YT video while watching the animated GIF and you're all set. (This is how Millennials watch TV, BTW...it's all animated GIFs with YouTube video soundtracks. Civilization is gonna be juuuuuuust fine.)
Update: Max points out I may have misread the article and these 57 girlfriends are not necessarily Jerry's only. Supporting this is Sarah Silverman's inclusion in the composite even though she's was a love interest of Kramer's.
4. "The Rye" (Season 7, Episode 11)
This episode's titular breadstuff-which Jerry steals from an old lady who refuses to sell it to him, even for 50 bucks-supposedly comes from Schnitzer's, a great New York bakery name if we've ever heard one. The real place was called Royale Kosher Bake Shop. Unfortunately, it's now closed. A Jenny Craig branch stands in its place at 237 W. 72nd St. Also in this episode: Kramer leads Beef-a-Reno-fueled hansom cab rides through Central Park. His skills as a tour guide are questionable, though, as his historical "facts" are impressively inaccurate. For example, Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux-not former New York Yankee Joe Pepitone-designed the park.
Already good, Seinfeld got 100 times better when I moved to NYC and got 10 more of the jokes per episode.
Netflix has announced that the 15 episodes of the new season of Arrested Development will be released, all at once, on May 26th. Netflix did not announce that later that day, all 15 episodes will be available on BitTorrent.
A nascent trend on YouTube is to take contemporary dramas and imagine what their 1995-style opening credits sequences might look like. The first one appears to be this Walking Dead one, followed by Breaking Bad, which is the best of the bunch:
Andy Marx shares the story of how a lunch with his grandfather, Groucho, and a few of his grandfather's guests ended up helping save every episode of the seminal 50s TV show You Bet Your Life.
No longer out of the limelight, my grandfather was enjoying his status as a cultural icon now that such classic Marx Brothers films as "Duck Soup" and "A Night at the Opera" had been discovered by a whole new generation eager for something to go with the free-wheeling attitudes and politics of the late '60s and early '70s. Groucho and his brothers fit the bill perfectly and my grandfather was more than happy to oblige his new-found fans, many of them Hollywood celebrities. Among my favorite celebrity sightings at my grandfather's house in those days were Alice Cooper and Rolling Stones guitarist Ronnie Wood.
This particular day, my grandfather asked me to be ready to accompany him on the piano, since he planned to sing for the invited guests: Jack Nicholson, Elliot Gould and the great French mime, Marcel Marceau. As I said, you never knew who would arrive for lunch with Groucho.
In case you missed it a few months ago on PBS, the excellent The Mind of a Chef is out in downloadable form on iTunes and at Amazon. The first episode is available for free on the PBS site for try-before-you-buy purposes.
The third episode of the first season of Charlie Brooker's Black Mirror was called The Entire History of You, in which many people have their entire lives recorded by implants. Brooker's take on the self-recorded future and Google's rosier view meet in this video:
Black Mirror is currently in its second season in the UK, with no US release on the horizon. Here's what one of the season two episodes is about:
A CG character from a TV show is jokingly put forward to become a member of Parliament. The actor behind the character is uneasy about this new political world he's found himself in, and as the character's popularity among voters increases things begin to take a turn for the worse.
Squee! I still miss Sean Bean though. I wouldn't mind a little Six Feet Under Late Ned action. Maybe bring him back as a White Walker or something. They're headless zombies, right? Hello?
There's a blizzard bearing down on the northeastern United States and here's some essential information you need to know if you live in an affected area:
But seriously, you should follow @EricHolthaus for the latest storm info. (Ok, so we have our first celebrity Twitter weatherman. Weather and climate are going to become a lot more important in American pop culture...at what point do Gawker or Buzzfeed launch their climate verticals?)
Help Lord Grantham find his cigars, puff up pillows for Anna, and spy on other staff for Lady Mary in this "tastefully exciting" SNES version of Downton Abbey.
Prop Joe was one of the few characters to appear regularly in all five seasons of David Simon's urban drama. Chew was a mountain of a man with a world-class deadpan, always underselling the character's juiciest lines. "Gotta say I'm proud of y'all for putting aside petty grievances and putting this thing together," Joe intones during a meeting of the New Day Co-op, a democratic association of drug dealers whose meetings are run via Robert's Rules of Order. "For a cold-assed crew of gangsters, y'all carried it like Republicans and shit."
"Implied win" refers to episodes in which you don't see a plea bargain or Guilty verdict, but it's pretty clear that's the way things are headed. For instance, if the killer's wife tearfully agrees to testify against him and then the episode ends, it's an "implied win." We don't know the outcome, but we are led to believe it's going to be some flavor of Justice. (The rare cases where the result was completely unclear went into the Other category.)
Over the entire run of the show, more than a third of all the episodes ended in Guilty verdicts, while another third ended in plea bargains. 80% of episodes ended in solid wins: either Guilty verdicts, plea bargains, or implied victories. That's not too shabby, considering that the actual NYPD has a homicide clearance rate of about 50%. (Although you have to figure Law & Order isn't meant to represent every case these detectives investigated; in 20 seasons, I don't think there was a single murder that didn't result in an arrest.)
You need predictable and changing seasons to grow grapes and the Game of Thrones world features long unpredictable seasons...so where does all that wine come from?
The seasons in George RR Martin's medieval fantasy are a random, unpredictable mess. They could last anywhere from a few months to a decade and there's no way to forecast them. As the story opens, the characters are near the end of a long, ten-year summer. They also worry about the coming winter, which will cause mass starvation if it also lasts years on end. This wonky climate is an irreplaceable part of Game of Thrones. Westeros would not be remotely the same without it.
But grapevines have a life cycle that depends on regular seasons. In winter, grapevines are dormant. Come spring they sprout leaves. As summer begins, they flower and tiny little grapes appear. Throughout the summer the grapes fill up with water, sugar and acid. The grapes are finally ready for picking in early autumn, then go back to sleep in winter. This cycle is why wineries can rely on a yearly grape yield. Obviously, in Westeros, something must be different about how grapes work.
Illustrator Dennis Culver is offering for sale a poster of 50+ characters from The Wire.
You've obviously got your Omar and String, but you've also got Butchie and Lamarr and Horseface. $25 for the poster...that's about 50 cents a character!
My wife and I have been watching Boardwalk Empire for the past three seasons and it's seemed at times like we were the only ones. Writing for Grantland, Carles argues that the show got great this season and I totally agree. (Warning: tons of spoilers.)
Basically, I spent the first two seasons of Boardwalk Empire trying to figure out whether or not I even enjoyed the show. It featured premium producers, directors, writers, and actors, but it never felt like you were watching the show of the moment. Boardwalk Empire has been popular enough to get renewed regularly (it will be back for a fourth season next year), but it's been difficult to come to a consensus on whether or not it has been a fulfilling experience. There's a gap between high-end critical acclaim and casual fans. The uninitiated never get it. 'It's boring,' they say. 'It's trying to be something it isn't.' And maybe they were right. Fortunately, Season 3 has changed everything.
The show's tough to recommend to people because it's such a slow starter (compared to something like Breaking Bad or Homeland or whatever), but I'm happy we stuck with it.
For those unfamiliar with the book, it's a sweeping fantasy novel set during the Napoleonic Wars where two magicians have emerged in Britain. As well as telling the story of their rivalry, it also details an amazing alternate history where the North of England was the dominion of a magical overlord known as the Raven King, and pulls in many notable historical characters.
I am not ashamed to admit that, to my total surprise, I am looking forward to the second season of Girls more than The Hobbit or the next season of Mad Men. (But perhaps not season three of Game of Thrones. Perhaps.)
Friendly reminder: ten episodes of Anthony Bourdain and David Chang's Mind of a Chef are available to view for free on the PBS website. I am through two episodes so far and it's my favorite cooking/food show since The Naked Chef.1 Here's the first episode, all about ramen:
TVs are designed to do one thing above all: sell. To do so, they must fight for attention on brightly-lit showroom floors. Manufacturers accomplish this in much the same way that transvestite hookers in San Francisco's Tenderloin district do--by showing you everything they've got, turned up to eleven. You want brightness? We'll scald your retinas. You want sharpness? We'll draw a black outline around everything for you. [...]
These days, any TV you are likely to buy, will, by default, have technology enabled that completely changes the emotional quality of the movies you watch. This is a cinematic disaster.
Last week, the hosts of NFL Kick Off on ESPN, Trey Wingo, Mark Sclereth, and Tedy Bruschi, jammed as many Princess Bride references as they could into their half hour show. Jack Moore collected them. Genuine guffaw at "There will be no survivors" from around :45.
The Dust Bowl is a four-hour documentary by Ken Burns airing on PBS starting this weekend.
The Dust Bowl chronicles the worst man-made ecological disaster in American history, in which the frenzied wheat boom of the "Great Plow-Up," followed by a decade-long drought during the 1930s nearly swept away the breadbasket of the nation. Vivid interviews with twenty-six survivors of those hard times, combined with dramatic photographs and seldom seen movie footage, bring to life stories of incredible human suffering and equally incredible human perseverance. It is also a morality tale about our relationship to the land that sustains us -- a lesson we ignore at our peril.
You can watch the first five minutes of the film on the PBS site.
How had I not heard about this before now? The Mind of a Chef is a PBS consisting of sixteen half-hour shows that follows David Chang through his world of food. As far as I can tell, this series is basically the TV version of Lucky Peach. Episode one is about ramen:
In the series premiere, David dissects the roots of his passion for ramen dishes and tsukemen on a trip to Japan. Learn the history of this famous noodle as David visits a ramen factory, has a bowl of the original tsukemen, and examines how alkalinity makes noodles chewier and less prone to dissolving in broth.
Check out an excerpt here, in which Chang reveals how he used to eat instant ramen noodles right out of the bag with the pork flavor powder sprinkled on top. The series starts this weekend...check your local listings, as they say. (via ny times)
Emeril Lagasse made an appearance on Treme on Sunday. I watched a clip of his scene a few days ago and have been thinking about it on and off ever since. In the scene written by Anthony Bourdain, Emeril takes a fellow chef to the building that used to house Uglesich's, a small-but-beloved New Orleans restaurant that closed back in 2005. The chef is having misgivings about expanding her business, particularly about all the non-cooking things you have to do, and Emeril explains that the way the owners of Uglesich's did it was one way forward:
You see, they kept it small, just one spot, just a few tables. There'd be a line around the corner by 10 am. You see, they made a choice. Anthony and Gail made a choice to stay on Baronne Street and keep their hands on what they were serving. They cooked, everyday they cooked, until they could cook no more.
But there's also another way to approach your business:
The other choice is that you can build something big but keep it the way that you wanna keep it. Take those ideas and try to execute them to the highest level. You got a lotta people around you, right? You're the captain of the ship. Or what I should say is that you're the ship. And all these people that look up to you and wanna be around you, they're living in the ship. And they're saying, "Oh, the ship is doing good. Oh, the ship is going to some interesting places. Oh, this ship isn't going down just like all the other fucking ships I've been on." [...] You've got a chance to do your restaurant and to take care of these people. Just do it.
kottke.org has always been a one-person thing. Sure, Aaron posts here regularly now and I have guest editors on occasion, but for the most part, I keep my ass in the chair and my hands on what I am serving. I've always resisted attempts at expanding the site because, I have reasoned, that would mean that the site wouldn't be exactly what I wanted it to be. And people come here for exactly what I want it to be. Doing the site with other people involved has always seemed unnatural. It would be selling out...that's how I've thought about it, as opposed to blowing up.
But Emeril's "until they could cook no more" and "you're the ship"...that got to me. I am a ship. I don't have employees but I have a family that relies on the income from my business and someday, when I am unable to do this work or people stop reading blogs or all online advertising moves to Facebook or Twitter, what happens then? Don't I owe it to myself and to them to build something that's going to last beyond my interest and ability to sit in a chair finding interesting things for people to look at? Or is it enough to just work by yourself and produce the best work you can?
Or can you do both? John Gruber's Daring Fireball remains a one-man operation...as far as I know, he's never even had an intern. I don't have any inside knowledge of DF's finances, but from the RSS sponsorship rate and the rate for sponsoring Gruber's podcast, my conservative estimate is that DF grosses around $650,000 per year. And with a single employee/owner and relatively low expenses, a large amount of that is profit. So maybe that route is possible?
I don't have any answers to these questions, but man, it's got me thinking. Emeril got me thinking...who saw that coming? Bam!
The format of the American sitcom held steady for almost 40 years. The most noteworthy innovation was a negation; in the early nineties, HBO comedies like the short-lived Dream On ditched the pervasive canned laugh track, paving the way for the so-called cringe comedy of shows like Curb Your Enthusiasm. On Curb, the absence of a laugh track makes it difficult for viewers to know when to laugh. We cringe because we're holding in laughter, waiting for a cue that it's okay to release. But there is always a breaking point, an explosion into an absurdity so deep -- Larry rushing into the water to "save" a baptismal candidate from drowning, for example -- that the tension is relieved, and the laughter is released.
Louie both reacts to the failure of Lucky Louie and advances on Curb's cringe comedy by creating something tenser, more tonally ambiguous. Louie's singularity lies in its ability to further confound viewers by setting up jokes, and then providing pathos instead of punch lines. Not only does Louie's audience not know when to laugh, they don't even know if what they're watching is supposed to be funny. For the Laptop Loner, this ambiguity is made all the more palpable by the absence of viewing partners; we use other people's reactions to gauge the correctness of our own. But it also makes the ambiguity less assaulting. Alone, we can be comfortable in our discomfort.
The secret of Jeopardy, what defuses the reality-show aspect, is that we all universally wanted each other to win even though we knew that only one person took home the big money and would return to fight again.
Here's Glenn's Final Jeopardy from that night:
I wouldn't have gotten that question in a millions years. Maybe in high school...
In production for the past twenty-four years, it looks as though the documentary about Arrested Development might be nearing its release. Here's the final trailer:
In 2003, 24-year-old machinist Juan Catalan faced the death penalty for allegedly shooting a key witness in a murder case. Catalan told police that he couldn't have committed the crime -- he was at a Los Angeles Dodgers game at the time. He had the ticket stubs and everything!
When police didn't buy his alibi, Catalan contacted the Dodgers, who pointed him to an unlikely hero: misanthropic comedian Larry David. On the day in question, David had been filming an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm in Dodger Stadium. It was a long shot, but maybe Catalan could be seen in the background. When his attorney watched the outtakes, it took just 20 minutes to find shots of Catalan and his daughter chowing down on ballpark dogs while watching from the stands.
Thanks to the footage, Catalan walked free after five months behind bars. And Larry David found one more thing to be self-deprecating about. "I tell people that I've done one decent thing in my life, albeit inadvertently," joked David.
There was a time when American Movie Classics used to show classic American movies, when The Learning Channel could teach you something, and when ABC Family broadcast family programming. Wired's Ruth Suehle has a look at six TV networks that have significantly changed their programming since their founding. The story of ABC Family, which used to be known as The Family Channel, is especially interesting:
Plan A was to use it for ABC re-runs. Too bad [ABC] didn't own the syndication rights to the stuff they wanted to show.
Plan B was an image makeover. They'd rename it XYZ (as in the opposite of ABC) and sell it to a younger, edgier audience. Too bad nobody read the contract that said the word "family" had to stay in the name forever.
Why? For that, we rewind to its beginning as Pat Robertson's Christian Broadcasting Network Satellite Service in 1979. That religious beginning followed the network through multiple sales, each of which has been required to continue broadcasting Robertson's The 700 Club, hence the reason that show is now bookended by the disclaimer, "The following/preceding CBN telecast does not reflect the views of ABC Family"as well as the network's slogan of the last few years, "A New Kind of Family."
On The Jeffersons, you would give your notes to the director, and he'd go, "Right, right," and then turn around and go to the actors and say, "Oh, those fucking writers. They want to change this." And then the director would come back [to the writers] and go, "Oh, those actors. They won't do a thing I ask them." You get this weird us-against-them [mentality].
And when we got to Cheers, everybody could talk to everybody. Now, granted, if you were smart you had a sense of where you were on the totem pole, you watched your comments and obviously deferred to the bosses. But if I saw something that Shelley had done that I thought was particularly good, or if a writer had a suggestion for a way she might be able to do it better, you got to tell her that. The only rule was you had to do it so everybody could hear; there were no private conversations. It had to be open with everybody. It really fostered this feeling that we were all in it together.
I watched Cheers all the time when I was a kid...I've seen each episode at least twice. For me, it was the best show until Seinfeld came along. Haven't seen an episode for probably 15 years though. I wonder if it holds up as well as Poehler claims.
Joel and Ethan Coen are bringing one of their signatures movies to television. FX has closed a deal to develop Fargo, an hourlong project loosely based on the Coen brothers' 1996 comedic crime drama. The Coens will serve as executive producers on the project, which will be written/executive produced by The Unusuals and My Generation creator Noah Hawley.
Other potential headlines about the Mindy Kaling profile in NY Magazine: 'I hope Mindy Kaling's new show is as awesome as Mindy Kaling' and 'I wish television executives would take chances like this more often.'
Her character on the show also seems to represent a version of singledom not being explored on TV, one that is very different from Zooey Deschanel's Jess on New Girl, who is so presexual in her girlishness that she spends an entire episode getting over her discomfort with saying the word penis. And unlike Girls' Hannah, played by Lena Dunham, she's found her life path, and she has had sex with more than a couple of people. "I just wanted to do a show that is kind of about dating, about someone who thinks about love all the time," Kaling says. "One thing that is different than other shows is that my character is weirdly, extremely confident. She feels like she should be dating Chris Evans. That's something I learned from writing for Michael Scott. He thought he was going to marry Teri Hatcher, even though he was constantly being told that was not the case."
Perplexed and irritated that I couldn't find any Barcelona FC matches on TV for the past few weeks, I finally did some research and it turns out that's because Qatar-based Al Jazeera bought up the TV rights to several European leagues but doesn't actually have a channel to show the games to most American viewers.
Lionel Messi's and Cristiano Ronaldo's league matches will disappear from the television sets of many American soccer fans, starting this weekend.
That's because the U.S. television rights to Spain's La Liga have switched from GolTV to the new beIN Sport USA network, launched this week by the Al-Jazeera Sport Media Network and available in only about 8 million homes to viewers of DirecTV and DISH Network.
And it's not just Spain's soccer that is affected.
Italy's Serie A, France's Ligue 1, England's second-tier League Championship and England's League Cup also have moved to high-spending beIN Sport, which is taking over all of them from News Corp.'s Fox Soccer.
"The ratings are going to be so low that they will be almost unmeasurable," said Marc Ganis of the Chicago-based Sports Corp. Ltd., consulting firm. "Considering the push that European soccer is making in the United States, taking additional money and losing exposure becomes fools' gold. They need to have a long-term strategy, not short-term."
The upcoming season of The Office will be the show's last, but we will finally get to see who is behind the camera filming. From the executive producer of the show:
All questions will be answered this year. We are going to see who's behind the documentary and we're going to meet some of them. (Also) a big Jim and Pam year.
David Simon remembers his friend DeAndre McCullough, who died last week. You might remember him as Lamar (Brother Mouzone's assistant) from The Wire and was also profiled by Simon and Edward Burns in The Corner.
At fifteen, he was selling drugs on the corners of Fayette Street, but that doesn't begin to explain who he was. For the boys of Franklin Square -- too many of them at any rate -- slinging was little more than an adolescent adventure, an inevitable right of passage. And whatever sinister vision you might conjure of a street corner drug trafficker, try to remember that a fifteen-year-old slinger is, well, fifteen years old.
He was funny. He could step back from himself and mock his own stances -- "hard work," he would say when I would catch him on a drug corner, "hard work being a black man in America." And then he would catch my eye and laugh knowingly at his presumption. His imitations of white-authority voices -- social workers, police officers, juvenile masters, teachers, reporters -- were never less than pinpoint, playful savagery. The price of being a white man on Fayette Street and getting to know DeAndre McCullough was to have your from-the-other-America pontifications pulled and scalpeled apart by a manchild with an uncanny ear for hypocrisy and cant.
If you're anything like me, you take things like 34 People You Probably Didn't Know Were On Seinfeld as a challenge. It's been awhile, but I've seen every episode of that show (most of them at least twice) so I thought this would be easy but I totally had forgotten or didn't realize that Jon Favreau, Catherine Keener, Amanda Peet, Denise Richards, and James Spader were on the show. Guess I'm not the Seinfeld fan I thought I was.
Writing for The Awl, Heather Havrilesky (who you may remember from Suck) highlights three stereotypical TV characters (The Hapless Dad, The Friend, and The Wise Old Professional) and characters on three current shows (Louie, Girls, and Mad Men) that cut right through that bullshit.
Because on "Girls," not only is The Friend (Hannah, played by Dunham) not all that insecure (relatively speaking), but she also has more swagger and courage and heart than The Hot One (Marnie) and The Other Hot One (Jessa) and The Sort of Hot One (Shoshanna) put together. Instead of whining and weeping snottily into her hands the way The Friend would do on any other television show, Hannah gets naked and refuses to exercise but realizes that she is exactly 13 pounds overweight (this isn't some fantasyland, after all, except for the trust funds and bad Fu Manchus). Hannah has lots of not-very-great sex. She's sometimes timid and confused, sure, but she's brave enough to state her feelings to people directly. She's self-possessed. But most importantly, she is not preoccupied with not being The Hot One. She wears clothing that doesn't compliment her body. She doesn't appear to brush her hair regularly. She doesn't have to, because she doesn't believe that there is some center of the universe located somewhere other than where she is, and she'll only get there if her hair is brushed. No. She can simply exist and do what regular people do: Eat, worry, sleep late, roll her eyes, fall on her face.
I'm gonna come out and say that I really liked Girls, due in large part (I'm realizing now) to Hannah's (and Adam's and Ray's) directness and self-possession.
The Apollo 11 Lunar Module landed on the surface of the Moon 43 years ago today. For the 40th anniversary of the landing in 2009, I put together a page where you can watch the original CBS News coverage of Walter Cronkite reporting on the Moon landing and the first Moon walk, synced to the present-day time. I've updated the page to work again this year: just open this page in your browser and the coverage will start playing at the proper time. Here's the 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 {break}
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.
Marissa Mayer has only been CEO at Yahoo! for a day and she's already creating viral content like a stop motion Lego version of The Wire. Imagine what we'll get when she's been there a week.
Audible guffaws at, "What's up his ass?" "No one likes our season, that's what." (via @jonahkeri)
He said: 'British drama seems particularly obsessed with murder and the past, often together. Black Mirror is a rare modern look at where society and individuals could be headed, given the all-pervasive deluge of social media and technology.'
The first series prompted 322 complaints over a story in which a Prime Minister was blackmailed into having sex with a pig live on TV.
Brooker said: 'Half of the things in the first run of Black Mirror seem to be on the verge of coming true. They've got prisoners in Brazilian prisons pedalling on exercise bikes to reduce their sentences (not entirely dissimilar to the episode 15 Million Merits) and Google Glass looks like copyright infringement as far as The Entire History of You is concerned.
Here's the entire first episode of Aaron Sorkin's The Newsroom. You can also watch it on HBO.com but you have to register first. I doubt non-US residents can watch it in either place. Why isn't this embeddable? I don't understand...they don't want more people to watch it? Does the internet girl know?
This is amazing...a trailer for a musical version of The Wire done by Funny or Die. Featuring real cast members from the show like Michael K. Williams as Omar, Felicia Pearson as Snoop, and Andre Royo as Bubbles.
The Wire premiered on HBO 10 years ago tomorrow so Maxim (what really?) is out with a long oral history. It's all worth reading (and finally proof for the 'I read it for the articles' argument), but the more interesting bits to me were towards the end, and I wish there were a few more comments from superfans. Marc Spitz did an amazing job wrangling interviews from the majority of the cast.
New to me was the cop actors and crook actors not hanging out together, and Prop Joe mentoring the kids from Season 4.
Tristan Wilds (Michael Lee, student, Stanfield gang enforcer): Every time we'd get a script all four of us would sit down with Robert Chew go over the script and make sure we had it down.
Robert F. Chew (Joseph "Proposition Joe" Stewart, drug kingpin): A couple of them were not from Baltimore so they did not have the lingo and the dialect, so I'd give them hints on that and just understanding the emotion of the scene.
I also liked this bit about Snoop.
Tristan Wilds: I remember when I first read the script, I was like "Noooo! Why do I gotta do it?" Snoop became like my big sister to me; she was everything. I was actually with my niece a couple months ago and she was watching iCarly -and there was a scene where Sam takes paint ball gun and shoots Gib, but he looks at her before she does and says, 'How's my hair look?' And she says, "You look good, Gib."
Method Man: I always went online to see the reactions that people would have after someone got killed. Snoop, when she got killed, oh you should've seen it. You would've thought somebody really died. Like it was a funeral happening: "RIP Snoop, we gon' miss you," and all this craziness. They were just two lines short of making "In Memory Of" T-Shirts. Same thing with Omar. Stringer, same thing. Then when I die, it's like "good for him. They should've killed his ass sooner."
This long four-part interview of 30 Rock show runner Robert Carlock at the AV Club is, as mentioned, long but worth reading if you're into TV or 30 Rock. Part one covers season one & and part of two, and part two walks us through part of season two & season three.
[Jerry Seinfeld's] people and NBC were talking at a very high level about promoting Bee Movie, and they were encouraging us to use him. We were really eager to do anything we could to continue our life writing the show, in part, at that point, because we'd really fallen in love with writing it. I will never have another opportunity to write for those people again. Writing a half-hour for Alec Baldwin is insane. And to work with Tina. A lot of the things this show has done, like product integration and guest stars, is partly to give NBC the fewest number of excuses possible to get rid of us. If they're saying, "We'll promote you. Have Seinfeld on," and we all love Seinfeld, we'll sit down and try to find a way to do it on our terms-much like product integration, where every time we've done it, we've had the luxury of being able to call it out or mock it or integrate it. This past live show had a couple of P.I. things in it, because that was so much about television that you're able to do it. We were happy to have Jerry come on the show, and he shot 10 pages in a very long day. We usually shoot six or seven pages, so it was a real burden.
Prochronism analyzes word usage in shows like Mad Men and Downton Abbey to hunt down anachronisms...like "a callback for" and "pay phone" from a recent episode of Mad Men.
The big one from the charts: Megan gets "a callback for" an audition. This is, the data says, a candidate for the worst anachronism of the season. The word "callback" is about 100x more common by the 1990s, and "callback for" is even worse. The OED doesn't have any examples of a theater-oriented use of "callback" until the 1970s; although I bet one could find some examples somewhere earlier in the New York theater scene, that may not save it. It wouldn't really suite Megan's generally dilettantish attitude towards the theater, or the office staff's lack of knowledge of it, for them to be so au courant. "call-back" and "call back" don't seem much more likely.
In the episode "The Kingsroad," we learn that Westeros has at least one moon. It's very possible, therefore, that they have a very small or distant moon, that is causing a variable tilt in their planet's rotational axis.
It's interesting to note that, according to legend, Westeros used to have two moons, but "one wandered too close to the sun and it cracked from the heat" pouring out a thousand thousand dragons. Well, dragons aside, it's conceivable that some kind of cataclysmic celestial event could have wiped out their second moon, which would have thrown their planet's rotational axis out of whack.
But we only finished paying off our student loans -- check this out, all right, I'm the President of the United States -- we only finished paying off our student loans about eight years ago.
The first episode of Girls, an eagerly awaited HBO series by executive producer Judd Apatow and writer/director Lena Dunham, is available for free on YouTube (HBO disabled embedding for some dumb reason). HBO plans to do this with Veep next week as well.
Is Tom Junod's long piece in Esquire a takedown of Jon Stewart? Or just a thorough examination of the messiness of being an ambitious public figure these days? I couldn't tell. But if you're a Stewart fan or Daily Show viewer, Junod's piece is well worth a read.
Now look at him. It's seven years later, and he's aged like a president. He's been graying for years, but now he's gone gray, and a transformation seems to have taken place. He's forty-eight years old. He has a wife and two young kids whose lives he worries about missing because he stays so late and works so hard. Last year, when he did that thing, that Jon Stewart thing, that rally in Washington, D. C., he looked like he was starting to, like, fill out -- his suit looked a little small on him as he made his big valedictory speech -- but now he's gaunt, and his face is sort of bladelike, collecting itself around the charcoal axis of his eyes, nose, and mouth. Still, he's jacked. The whole studio is. You don't have any choice at The Daily Show. For one thing, the music gets louder and louder as you wait before finally reminding you where Stewart's from with a climactic rendition of Born to Run. For another, there's a tummler, a warm-up guy who bounds around telling you that you might laugh to yourself while watching Jon Stewart at home, you might smile and chuckle at the apercus, you might silently congratulate yourself for getting the jokes, but you're not at home anymore, and here you have a responsibility -- you're the laugh track. "Do you want to be on TV! Do you want to meet Jon Stewart! Then you better get loud..."
And now here he is. The man did stand-up for years, and in the studio you can actually see it on him, because whereas on television he clings to his desk like it's an iron lung (former writers say that you know a bit is doomed if it requires him to get up from behind it), here he actually stands up and goes out to the audience to answer questions. And he's a kibitzer -- it's not Plato's Symposium, folks. The first question is "What's your daily routine?" and Stewart answers as he's been answering since Destiny's Child was together: "Jazzercise." The second question is "Which one of the animals on my T-shirt would you like to be?" and Stewart responds with a question of his own: "Is there a correct answer to that?" And even when a young woman with short hair and glasses and a faded cause on her T-shirt asks if "our greatest media critic" has actually had an impact on the way the media does business, he instantaneously cocks his chin, sucks in his cheeks, and narrows his eyes until he looks like a wizened version of the man whose image is emblazoned on the wall outside; then he deepens his voice confidentially and says, "Well, look who's carrying the NPR tote bag." Of course, he denies having an impact -- "the satirist depends on shame, and everyone knows that our culture has become shameless" -- but when somebody calls out, "But you killed Crossfire!" he says, "No, I didn't. Crossfire was already dead..."
And there it is again, that denial of power upon which his power depends. It's strange, isn't it: One of the fastest and most instinctive wits in America feeling it necessary to go on explaining himself again and again; a man who lives to clarify resorting to loophole; the irrepressible truth-teller insisting on something that not one person of the two hundred watching his show in the studio -- never mind the millions who will watch on television -- can possibly believe.
Since Google released the video for their augmented reality glasses the other day, people have been busy making videos that show a more realistic (or cynical) portrayal of how the glasses might work. Here are a couple of the better ones. First a version of the glasses with Google ads:
And this one gives new meaning to the phrase "banner blindness":
While not specifically about Google Glasses, this concept video by Keiichi Matsuda is also worth a look:
A satire on entertainment shows and our insatiable thirst for distraction set in a sarcastic version of a future reality. In this world, everyone must cycle on exercise bikes, arranged in cells, in order to power their surroundings and generate currency for themselves called Merits. Everyone is dressed in a grey tracksuit and has a "doppel", a virtual avatar inspired by Miis and Xbox 360 Avatars that people can customise with clothes, for a fee of merits. Everyday activities are constantly interrupted by advertisements that cannot be skipped or ignored without financial penalty.
Since 2008, Wall Street and Washington have fought against the tide of the fiercest financial crisis since the Great Depression. What have they wrought? In a special four-hour investigation, FRONTLINE tells the inside story of the struggles to rescue and repair a shattered economy, exploring key decisions, missed opportunities, and the unprecedented and uneasy partnership between government leaders and titans of finance that affects the fortunes of millions of people around the world.
If you've never seen the early seasons of The Simpsons, a good way to catch up might be to watch this:
Just a quick hack to experiment what happens if you watch a lot of The Simpsons episodes at the same time. It just took 10 lines of code and a few hours of processing.
About the video:
-Top to bottom: each row shows a season (from season 1 to season 10)
-Left to right: each column shows an episode (from episode 1 to episode 13)
A total of 130 episodes is displayed, framerate is 25fps, thumbnails have been captured at 80x60px
By the time we were finished with Rabbit of Seville, Ollie had literally peed his pants from laughing so hard. I think I'm gonna get the Looney Tunes collection on Blu-ray so we can watch more but I'm a bit afraid of what the hijinks of Wile E. Coyote and The Road Runner might do to my boy's pants.
Did we mention that our esteemed editor-in-chief hung out with President Obama last week? Because that totally happened. Just two regular guys, discussing Linsanity, Blake Griffin's jump shot, what it's like to pitch a baseball while wearing a bulletproof vest, and -- as the conversation wound down -- The Wire. Asked to name the greatest Wire character of all time (let it never be said that Grantland does not ask the tough questions!), the Commander in Chief didn't hesitate: "It's gotta be Omar, right? I mean, that guy is unbelievable, right?"
With respect to the President, Omar is the most overrated character on The Wire. I mean, I love Omar. I do. He is everyone's favorite character and easy to love because he's one of the show's most manufactured characters. Gay, doesn't swear, strong sense of morals, robs drug dealers, respected/feared by all...come on, all that doesn't just get rolled up into one person like that. The Wire aspires to be more than just mere television, but when Omar is on the screen, it's difficult for me to take the show as seriously as it wants me to.
Downton Abbey fans will note the striking parallels between Almina's life and that of her fictional counterpart, Lady Cora Crawley. This is hardly an accident: Lady Carnarvon and her husband, the eighth Earl of Carnarvon, affectionately known as Geordie, have been friends with Downton Abbey creator Julian Fellowes for more than a decade. Though Lady Carnarvon calls Fellowes a "genius," she's too involved with the show to call herself a fan. "It's too much of a bloody muddle," she says.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
...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)
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
