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.

The future of sports television?

The NFL is showing their Sunday night game on NBC (traditional play-by-play broadcast) and online (traditional broadcast plus four other camera angles). Slate declares that the experiment may be the future of sports television.

The "Star" cam isolates on one player from each team-or, in the case of the Tampa-Seattle game, five different players. Other "stars" have included Pittsburgh wide receiver Hines Ward and safety Troy Polamalu, Jacksonville QB David Gerrard, and Cleveland wideout Braylon Edwards. For quarterbacks, this feature is a bit redundant-the camera's always on the guy with the ball-but it's fantastic for the other positions. Watching Polamalu fly around the field at full speed on every play is fantastic, and not just because his jouncing hair is hypnotic. Few athletes play with Polamalu's reckless abandon, and it's thrilling to try to forecast collisions by watching him bounce around the iso cam.

The Star cam works even better for receivers. After watching Ward and Edwards for three straight hours, I now understand why so many wide receivers are narcissistic-their job is to run one wind sprint after another with only the occasional ball thrown their way to break up the track workout.

TBS did this for the baseball playoffs too, except that they omitted the actual broadcast online and provided only extra footage/angles. Adding to Slate's complaints of no replays (it's streaming video only, no pausing, etc.) and no stats info on the other angles, I'd add that based on my experience watching the game online last night, they need something other than a test pattern and piercing tone to indicate that the video player is lagging and buffering. Perhaps a silent "please wait, buffering..." message instead?

Simpsons spoof Mad Men

Video of the Simpsons Halloween episode opening that spoofs the Mad Men intro.

The Olsen twins

I don't know if you'll enjoy reading a NY Times profile of the Olsen Twins, but I was oddly fascinated.

Mary-Kate's contribution to the enterprise is a collector's knowledge. She has been buying vintage Lanvin and Givenchy, among other classic labels of the mid-20th century, for a number of years. (Unlike Ashley, Mary-Kate continues to act, having played, with a perfect semblance of haze and obfuscation, a born-again Christian drug dealer on the third season of "Weeds." This year she appeared opposite Ben Kingsley in the film "The Wackness.") Ashley is the more entrepreneurial, the one who will tell you how much she admires Steve Jobs and Bill Gates.

Andrew Johnston, RIP

The season's final Mad Men recap is up at The House Next Door, but it was not written by its usual writer, Andrew Johnston. Johnston passed away yesterday at age 40 after a lengthy battle with cancer. RIP.

Interview with Mad Men's creator

Great interview with Matthew Weiner, the creator of Mad Men. Gender roles are a big focus of the show, something that wasn't necessarily apparent in the first two shows when I thought it was going to be some sort of lopsided misogyny-fest.

And the big intellectual skirmish going on was "Is it great that we're so different, men and women, or is there no difference at all?" No difference at all is where is started. Let's have equality and legistlate it like that. And then it became so much more complicated when you added sex to it and biologically the relationship is always sexist in some way. What's sexist in the office is fuel in the bedroom. We're wired that way to some extent. Women become more aggressive and it becomes strange for men.

(via fimoculous)

Tweet, tweet, free tacos

Fun evening activity: type whatever crazy shit is happening on TV into Twitter Search and watch the wittisicms and not-so-witticisms roll by. Example: in game one of the World Series tonight, someone stole a base and every single person in the United States won a free taco from Taco Bell. Instant tweetalanche.

The television of your dreams

The picture color on your television as a kid may influence the color of you dreams.

Do you dream in black and white? If so, the chances are you are over 55 and were brought up watching a monochrome television set.

Interestingly, studies indicate that dreams were in color before black and white TV came along.

Truthful TV title cards

Truthful TV title cards. Heroes becomes No One Dies Ever, Mad Men is Drink Smoke Fuck, and Lost is Winging It.

No season 3 for Mad Men?

The NY Post reports that Mad Men has not been renewed for another season. Yet. Eep.

Around the TV business, the news that no plans were in place yet for a new season was greeted with surprise. "I can't believe they haven't renewed it yet," said an executive at HBO, which now sheepishly regrets it did not sign the series about Madison Avenue in the 1950s and '60s when it was offered several years ago.

(via fimoculous)

Update: Variety reports that the show will return.

AMC has formally exercised its option for a third season of the period drama.

However, the show's creator is looking for more money and may not return. (thx, fladam)

Megamovies, TV shows as days-long movies

In a 1999 essay about The Sopranos written after its first season, Vincent Canby suggested that the show was an example of a relatively new form of television, the megamovie.

"Berlin Alexanderplatz," "The Singing Detective" and "The Sopranos" are something more than mini-series. Packed with characters and events of Dickensian dimension and color, their time and place observed with satiric exactitude, each has the kind of cohesive dramatic arc that defines a work complete unto itself. No matter what they are labeled or what they become, they are not open-ended series, or even mini-series.

They are megamovies.

That is, they are films on a scale imagined by the big-thinking, obsessive, fatally unrealistic Erich von Stroheim when, in 1924, he shot "Greed," virtually a page-by-page adaptation of Frank Norris's Zola-esque novel, "McTeague." Stroheim intended it to be an exemplar of cinematic realism.

Megamovies take television seriously as a medium. They have dramatic arcs that last longer than single episodes or seasons. Megamovies often explore themes and ideas relevant to contemporary society -- there's more going on than just the plot -- without resorting to very special episodes. Repeat viewing and close scrutiny is rewarded with a deeper understanding of the material and its themes. They're shot cinematically and utilize good actors. Plot details sprawl out over multiple episodes, with viewers sometimes having to wait weeks to fit what might have seemed a throwaway line into the larger narrative puzzle.

Episodes of these megamovies, Canby argued presciently, are best watched in bunches, so that the parts more easily make the whole in the viewer's mind. For many, bingeing on entire seasons on DVD or downloaded via iTunes has become the preferred way to watch these shows. If stamina and non-televisual responsibilities weren't an issue, it would be preferable to watch these shows in one sitting, as one does with a movie.

Since The Sopranos kick-started things in 1999, the megamovie has become a far more common occurrence on TV. Virginia Heffernan recently stated that the creators of nearly all hour-long dramatic series are aiming to make megamovies. I've collected a few examples of megamovies accompanied by their total running times below. The list is incomplete but represents several of the best-known and -appreciated megamovies out there.

The Sopranos, 81 hours 46 minutes
Lost*, 61 hours 59 minutes
Mad Men*, 18 hours 6 minutes
Six Feet Under 57 hours 45 minutes
Deadwood*, 36 hours
The Wire, 60 hours 45 minutes
The West Wing, 111 hours 56 minutes

For The West Wing, that's 4 days and 16 hours of continous watching. An asterisk marks megamovies that are as-yet incomplete. In the case of Deadwood, it's as if the film projector broke about halfway through the movie, only no one got their money back and eveyone left the theater pissed.

Update: In his review of the third episode of Mad Men this season, Andrew Johnston talks about the two dominant forms of TV drama and how The Sopranos and Mad Men fits in. (thx, stephen)

Can helium balloons carry off a child?

In the opening credits of the 80s TV show Webster, the title character is shown lifted into the sky by a dozen helium balloons. Mena Trott recently enlisted her young daughter in an attempt to prove, a la Mythbusters, that a few balloons won't actually lift anyone anywhere.

Update: Mythbusters actually tackled this question in 2004. (thx, javier)

Mad Men typography

Mark Simonson takes an extensive look at the typography of Mad Men and concludes that a surprising amount of the type is set in fonts that either weren't around in the early 60s or weren't yet popular in the US.

Then there is the Gill Sans (c. 1930) problem. Gill is used quite a lot in the series, mainly for Sterling Cooper Advertising's logo and signage. Technically, this is not anachronistic. And the way the type is used -- metal dimensional letters, generously spaced -- looks right. The problem is that Gill was a British typeface not widely available or popular in the U.S. until the 1970s. It's a decade ahead of its time in American type fashions.

There's also the Arial problem in the ending credits.

What are you doing here?

A supercut of every utterance of the phrase "what are you doing here?" on Doctor Who, including dozens of variations. Wow.

Migrating Americans in new HBO show

HBO is developing a series set 25-40 years in the future when Americans are fleeing the country en masse and settling elsewhere in the world.

In his research for "Americatown," Winters had explored possible nightmare scenarios that could bring the U.S. to a collapse decades down the road, like the price of oil skyrocketing and natural disasters reaching catastrophic proportions. Then suddenly oil hovered near $150 a barrel this summer, floods hit the Midwest and the South and Wall Street crashed under the weight of the mortgage crisis.

(via bygone bureau)

Michael Kors' Mad Men influence

Fashion designer Michael Kors based his 2008 fall collection in part on Mad Men. The maturity of dress on the show is part of what attracted him:

Aren't we ready for that again? For some maturity? I have to tell you, I am sick and tired of hair down to there and crotch-high hemlines. It's so obvious. For Fall I was really trying to bring back buttoned-up sexy -- think Grace Kelly. So cool, so poised. She never reveals a thing and you can't take your eyes off of her. I mean, watch "Rear Window." That's smart sexy; it's interesting sexy. And it's grown-up sexy. You want a tip on looking hot? Wear reading glasses and a fitted dress. Simple.

He's right about Grace Kelly. I watched Rear Window recently and she's something else in it.

Mad Men recaps

Andrew Johnston has been posting great meaty Mad Men reviews over at The House Next Door after each episode. Here's a two-fer that covers the last couple of installments. You can find the rest of the season 2 recaps here.

John Hodgman on his unique celebrity

In an excerpt from the soon-to-be-released More Information Than You Require, John Hodgman shares how he became a famous minor television personality and how he deals with all that fame.

As a matter of fact, sometimes now, if I'm feeling tired or a little sad, I'll go put on my UPS-man outfit and hit the subway. I'll hope that maybe someone will recognize me. It's very embarrassing, isn't it? But most of the time, it doesn't happen. No matter how crowded it is, no one says anything. They are reading, talking, thinking about where the train is taking them next. They don't say anything to me at all. And that's when I sit back, and look at them all, and think to myself: Don't any of you have a television? What THE FUCK is wrong with you people? I'M SITTING RIGHT HERE!

Some of this is from a bit Hodgman did for an episode of This American Life earlier this year.

Mad Men places

The Washington Post takes a stroll through Manhattan, circa the Mad Men era.

Sterling Cooper, as every fan with a pause button knows, is at 405 Madison Ave., an address that...does not exist. If it did exist, it would be where a bank of Chase ATMs is now, not the ideal spot to spend the morning, but don't worry, soon it will be 11:30 and time for your first cocktail.

One place the article doesn't mention is Lutèce, the fancy French place frequented by the bigwigs in the show. It closed in 2004. (thx, jake)

How crayons are made

Video of how crayons are made.

This is probably my all-time favorite childhood TV moment. I loved watching the smiling workers and relentless machinery turn all that formless wax into something that I USED EVERY DAY. My favorite part is the crayons popping up out of their molds. Still gives me chills, it does! BTW, the YouTube page says the video originated from Sesame Street but it was actually from Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood. (thx, janelle)

Update: I stand corrected...the above clip is from Sesame Street. But Mr. Rogers did show a similar clip on his show (stills here). I know I've seen the one on Mr. Rogers but I don't know about the Sesame Street one. (thx, everyone)

Best show poll results

Almost 4000 people have taken the best show on TV poll so now is a good time to take a look at the results. Here are the top five:

The Wire: 16%
The Simpsons: 8%
Seinfeld: 7%
Arrested Development: 7%
The West Wing: 6%

No other show got more than 4% of the total vote. As expected, The Wire topped the list¹. Some notes:

• Arrested Development ranked 4th overall, way higher than I would have thought. People love this show more than the ratings and its duration (it was cancelled after 3 seasons) would indicate.
• The Sopranos was not in the top five. My feeling is that if this poll were conducted five years from now, it would rate higher...the influence this show has had on TV is only starting to be felt.
• Beavis and Butt-head beat out The Honeymooners for second-to-last place. Ralph and Alice deserve better.
• Shows I would have liked to see higher in the list: Deadwood, Sesame Street, The Sopranos.
• I love Seinfeld, but it was ranked too high. At 2%, Buffy got 2% more of the vote than I would have given it.
• Shows that some thought should be on the list: Law & Order (love the show but it defines formulaic TV), The Twilight Zone (perhaps), Doctor Who (again, love it, but nothing this cheesy can be the best show on TV), Sex and the City, Rome, Carnivale, Heroes, and The Mary Tyler Moore Show.

Thanks to everyone who voted.

[1] I got some emails saying that The Wire ranked first only because I talk about the show so much on the site. That was probably a factor, but it's not like this is a Wire fan site or something. The poll wasn't that scientific anyway. Run a similar poll on Perez Hilton and American Idol might have won. Or on a site that appeals to 50-somethings and some of the older shows on the list might have done better. All this poll really shows is what people who like the kinds of things I post about on kottke.org also like to watch on television. (This was also not, as someone suggested, an attempt to gather information about viewing habits for advertisers. Duh.) ↩

Mad Men wallpaper

These Mad Men illustrations done by Nobody's Sweetheart are fantastic.

Oh, Joan! And wallpaper-sized to boot! The full-sized Sally Draper's Cocktail Cheat Sheet is awesome. (via merlin)

Best show on TV ever?

Just for fun, I whipped up a little poll based on the best show(s) on TV post the other day:

What's the best show that's ever been on television?

There are around 30 shows on the list; please consider all the options before choosing.

Production notes: My methodology can be described as "half-assed". I consulted a number of "best of" lists in choosing the shows -- not just the ones listed in yesterday's post -- and excluded some currently airing shows on which the jury is still out (e.g. 30 Rock, Mad Men) for lack of sufficient evidence. No miniseries allowed, episodic only. My feeling is that there are still too many show on the list (there are four or maybe five real choices) but I wanted to give people options. Also, unless the list is missing something *very* obvious, I'm not looking for additions so don't even think about Cmd-N'ing that mail message.

True Blood titles

I don't know if I'm interested in watching the show or not, but we might have a new leader in the best TV show main title sequence: True Blood. By the same folks who did the Six Feet Under titles. Perhaps NSFW. (via quips)

Update: Maybe Digital Kitchen was influenced by a documentary called Searching for the Wrong Eyed Jesus in making the True Blood titles?

The best show on television, all of them

According to several TV writers, bloggers, and cultural critics, each of these is the best show on television.

The Wire
Lost
Friday Night Lights
Deadwood
30 Rock
The Daily Show
Battlestar Galactica
The Sopranos
Arrested Development
Studio 60
South Park
Veronica Mars
Six Feet Under
Hard Knocks: Training Camp with the Dallas Cowboys
The Colbert Report
Mad Men
The West Wing

Mad Men is getting the most buzz lately but The Wire is still the high-water mark (in my opinion as well as the web's collective opinion according to Google). The Sopranos gets surprisingly little love as the top show, although its relatively weak competition back in the early 2000s perhaps means it didn't need to be said. The quality of television for the past 3-5 years is impressive...most of the shows listed above were all on at the same time.

Road runner rules

The simple but strict rules for Road Runner cartoons.

1. Road Runner cannot harm the Coyote except by going "beep, beep".
2. No outside force can harm the Coyote -- only his own ineptitude or the failure of Acme products.
3. The Coyote could stop anytime -- IF he was not a fanatic. (Repeat: "A fanatic is one who redoubles his effort when he has forgotten his aim." -- George Santayana).
4. No dialogue ever, except "beep, beep".
5. Road Runner must stay on the road -- for no other reason than that he's a roadrunner.
6. All action must be confined to the natural environment of the two characters -- the southwest American desert.
7. All tools, weapons, or mechanical conveniences must be obtained from the Acme Corporation.
8. Whenever possible, make gravity the Coyote's greatest enemy.
9. The Coyote is always more humiliated than harmed by his failures.
10. The audience's sympathy must remain with the Coyote.

Charles Miller argues that John Hodgman's PC character in the Mac vs. PC commercials is like Wile E. Coyote...likable but inept. (via df)

Daydreaming is important business

Jonah Lerher on daydreaming and the human brain's default network. Creativity, especially with regard to children, might be stifled by too little daydreaming and too much television.

After monitoring the daily schedule of the children for several months, Belton came to the conclusion that their lack of imagination was, at least in part, caused by the absence of "empty time," or periods without any activity or sensory stimulation. She noticed that as soon as these children got even a little bit bored, they simply turned on the television: the moving images kept their minds occupied. "It was a very automatic reaction," she says. "Television was what they did when they didn't know what else to do."

The problem with this habit, Belton says, is that it kept the kids from daydreaming. Because the children were rarely bored -- at least, when a television was nearby -- they never learned how to use their own imagination as a form of entertainment. "The capacity to daydream enables a person to fill empty time with an enjoyable activity that can be carried on anywhere," Belton says. "But that's a skill that requires real practice. Too many kids never get the practice."

But television isn't the default network that Lehrer is referring to:

Every time we slip effortlessly into a daydream, a distinct pattern of brain areas is activated, which is known as the default network. Studies show that this network is most engaged when people are performing tasks that require little conscious attention, such as routine driving on the highway or reading a tedious text. Although such mental trances are often seen as a sign of lethargy -- we are staring haplessly into space -- the cortex is actually very active during this default state, as numerous brain regions interact. Instead of responding to the outside world, the brain starts to contemplate its internal landscape. This is when new and creative connections are made between seemingly unrelated ideas.

Star Wars influence chart

A chart from Wired in 2005 shows how Star Wars influenced the later development of movies, games, TV programs, and the like.

The Star Wars empire has grown into one of the most fertile incubators of talent in the worlds of movies (Lucasfilm), visual effects (Industrial Light & Magic), sound (Skywalker Sound), and video games (LucasArts). Along the way, some of the original Lucas crew has gone on to become his biggest competitors.

The Flash interface is really annoying and not useful...the whole image is a better way to look at it. Very Mark Lombardi. (via vc)

2008 NFL TV maps

New for the 2008 NFL season: the NFL TV distribution maps that tell you which football games are going to be broadcast is which parts of the country. They're using zoomable Google Maps this year...here's what a typical coverage map looks like:

During football season in a TV market like NYC, which is dominated by coverage of two local teams (Giants and Jets), this is an essential tool for determining if you're actually gonna get to watch the game you want to on Sunday.

Update: There's an interview on Yahoo with the guy that runs the site, J.P. Kirby.

Mad Men's Arial gaffe

Mad Men gets a C- for using Arial in the closing credits instead of original-and-still-champion Helvetica. Time for Sterling to have a chat with the art department.

Best TV commercials by movie directors

Ten cool TV commercials done by movie directors. Ridley Scott's 1984 Apple ad makes the list along with spots by Messrs. Jonze and (Wes) Anderson. BTW, Jonze's Ikea commercial is superior to his Gap ad. (via self-employedsandwich)

List of problems solved by MacGyver

More from the bounty of Wikipedia: a list of all of the problems solved by MacGyver.

MacGyver creates a bomb to open a door using a gelatin cold capsule containing sodium metal, which he then places in a glass container filled with water. When the gelatin dissolves in the water, the sodium reacts violently with the water and causes an explosion which blows a hole in the wall. ("MythBusters" questioned the size of the explosion but verified that pure sodium does cause an exothermic reaction when mixed with water, just not enough to destroy a concrete wall.) The amount of sodium required to destroy a concrete wall would greatly exceed the size of a cold pill.

Despite the length of the page, the text warns that "this list is not yet comprehensive". (via gongblog)

MP3 of The Wire discussion

An mp3 of the entirety of last month's discussion of The Wire presented by the Museum of the Moving Picture is online. Participants included David Simon, Richard Price, Wendell Pierce (The Bunk), and Clark Johnson.

Olympics TV schedule calendar (in GCal)

NBC has an extensive calendar of events on their fancy Olympics web site but it doesn't look like they have the option of simply subscribing to a TV schedule calendar in iCal or on Google Calendar. I found a Google Calendar of the Olympic TV listings that looks to be accurate. I couldn't find an iCal calendar; the closest I got was this schedule of competition calendar, which looks like it may or may not jibe with the broadcast schedule here in the US (many of the main sports will be broadcast on a tape delay). Has anyone found a Olympic TV sched iCal calendar?

The Genius of Charles Darwin

The Genius of Charles Darwin is a three-part series about Darwin presented by his rottweiler, Richard Dawkins. A short video taste of the show is here and the entire first part is on Google Video. (via smashing telly)

How Buildings Learn TV series

In 1997, the BBC aired a three-hour documentary based on Stewart Brand's book, How Buildings Learn. Brand has posted the whole program on Google Video in six 30-minute parts: part one, part two, part three, part four, part five, part six.

If you're hesitant about whether to watch the series or not, check out this two-minute appetizer of perhaps the meatiest tidbit in the book: the oak beam replacement plan for the dining hall of New College, Oxford. (via smashing telly)

Update: An old version of the New College web site says that the oaks were not planted specifically for the replacement of the ceiling beams even though they were used for that purpose. (thx, emily, david, and phil)

What Would Don Draper Do?

Answers to frequently asked questions and questions that need not be asked: What Would Don Draper Do? (via fimoculous)

Update: What Would Joan Holloway Do? Never mind that, where are the pinup posters?

A Wire event tonight in NYC

This is late notice and who knows if there are even tickets left, but David Simon and several cast members of The Wire (Carver, Daniels, Gus, Lester, and the Bunk) will be discussing the show in NYC tonight in a Museum of the Moving Image program.

Variety's slanguage

"Words" used in this article about the season premiere of Mad Men:

skein
aud
preem
competish
skeds
spec
cabler

Here's a list of the other "words" used by Variety in their "articles".

The balcony is closed

Nice remembrance from Roger Ebert on the end of the long-running At the Movies show.

One thing we never did, apart from an occasional special show, was depart from the format: Two critics debating the week's new movies. No "advance looks" at trailers for movies we hadn't even seen. No celebrity interviews. No red carpet sound bites. Just two guys talking about the movies. At one point, our show and two clones were on the air simultaneously. Then we were left alone again: The only show on TV that would actually tell you if we thought a movie was bad.

Too Weird for The Wire

Too Weird for The Wire, a story of a number of Baltimore drug dealers and their unusual "flesh-and-blood" defense in federal court. It's a tactic used by white supremacists and other US isolationists groups in tax evasion cases and the like.

"I am not a defendant," Mitchell declared. "I do not have attorneys." The court "lacks territorial jurisdiction over me," he argued, to the amazement of his lawyers. To support these contentions, he cited decades-old acts of Congress involving the abandonment of the gold standard and the creation of the Federal Reserve. Judge Davis, a Baltimore-born African American in his late fifties, tried to interrupt. "I object," Mitchell repeated robotically. Shelly Martin and Shelton Harris followed Mitchell to the microphone, giving the same speech verbatim. Their attorneys tried to intervene, but when Harris's lawyer leaned over to speak to him, Harris shoved him away.

David Simon, I believe you've got enough here for a sixth season of The Wire. Hop to.

Seinfeld fictional films

A list of the fictional films referred to in Seinfeld. (thx, nicholas)

I Was A Mad Man

On the heels of Michael Bierut's rave for Mad Men comes William Drenttel's admission: I Was A Mad Man.

Then the CEO [of Krystal Restaurants] turns to me, ignoring everyone else, and asks me to take out my wallet. He asks me how much money I have. I count about $150, and tell him so. He smiles, looks me squarely in the eye, and asks: "Would you spend your last $150 on this shit?"

The rest of the story involves me telling him to take out his own wallet and me swearing I'd spend not only my money but all of his. And we did. We spent all of Krystal's money, millions of dollars. We made second-rate advertising, and they had second-rate stores with really second-rate hamburgers. We deserved each other.

Michael Bierut on Mad Men

An appreciation of Mad Men by designer Michael Bierut.

Jesus God in heaven! Not until I know I'm not wasting my time! From the minute Don launched his this-meeting-is-over bluff, I was on the edge of my seat, and my lovely wife Dorothy will tell you that I literally clapped my hands at that line. For me, this sequence is as close to pornography as I ever get to see on basic cable.

Alright, uncle, I give, I give. I will try and find some time in my schedule to watch this show.

Real-life Family Guy

Video of actors doing the voices for The Family Guy. High levels of dissonance may occur while watching Mike Henry doing the Cleveland voice at the end.

Bunk and McNulty go skiing

We interrupt this vacation for an important message: there's a new episode of The Wire where Bunk and McNulty go skiing. Here's a screenshot.

TiVo remote control design

The history of the design and manufacture of the TiVo remote control.

Like any remote, the designers were adamant about keeping the remote's button layout as simple as possible. But with the DVR's numerous features, the designers needed to create lots of extra buttons. To keep things straight, each button needed to have a distinctive feel, giving the ability to control the remote without even looking at it, which Newby described as a "key Braille-ability" surprisingly helped by the "blank finger parking spots between keys" that were equally important.

(via waxy)

Explanation of the end of The Sopranos

In case you're still hung up on the ambiguous ending of The Sopranos, there's this long self-proclaimed definitive explanation of "The End".

"If you look at the final episode really carefully, it's all there." These are David Chase's words regarding the finale of the Sopranos. He is right, it is "all there". This is the definitive explanation of why Tony died in Holsten's in the final scene of The Sopranos. The following is based on a thorough analysis of the final season of the show and will clear up one of the most misunderstood endings in film or television history. Chase took almost 2 years to construct the final season of the show after the fifth season ended in June of 2004. Part 1 will show how Chase directed, edited and scored the final scene of the Sopranos to lead to the interpretation that Tony was shot in the head in Holsten's and how this ties into the "never hear it happen" concept that Chase hammered into the viewer before the show's final scene.

(via house next door)

Soap opera birth control

In Brazil, soap operas, and specifically the small families they depicted, might have been a form of birth control, lowering the fertility of the audience:

In 1960, the average Brazilian woman had 6.3 children. By 2000, the fertility rate was down to 2.3. The decline was comparable to China's, but Brazil didn't have a one-child policy. In fact, for a while it was even illegal to advertise contraceptives.

Many factors account for the drop in Brazilian fertility, but one recent study identified a factor most people probably wouldn't consider: soap operas (novelas). Novelas are huge in Brazil, and the network Rede Globo effectively has a monopoly on their production...

Using census data from 1970 to 1991 and data on the entry of Rede Globo into different markets, the researchers found that women living in areas that received Globo's broadcast signal had significantly lower fertility. (And yes, the study did control for all sorts of factors and addressed the concern that the entry of Globo might have been driven by trends that also contribute to fertility decline. I'll spare you the gory econometric details.) Additionally, people in areas with Globo's signal were more likely to name their children after novela characters, suggesting that it was the novelas specifically, and not TV in general, that influenced childbearing.

Update (by jkottke): The Sabido Method:

Named after the pioneer in application of this entertainment-education strategy, Miguel Sabido, the Sabido Method is based on character development and plot lines that provide the audience with a range of characters that they can engage with -- some good, some not so good -- and follow as they evolve and change. Sabido developed this methodology when we was Vice President for Research at Televisa in Mexico in the 1970s.

According to the Mexican government's national population council, a soap opera called Acompaname was responsible for large increases in people requesting family planning information, contraceptive sales, and enrollment in family planning clinics. From 1977 to 1986, when these soap operas were on, Mexico's population growth rate fell by 34%. The Sabido Method was also recently covered in the New Yorker. (thx, omegar)

David "The Wire" Simon's new show, Generation

David "The Wire" Simon's new show, Generation Kill, starts on HBO on July 13 and will continue for six Sundays after that.

Line Rider McDonald's commercial

Whoa, a TV commercial for McDonald's that features Line Rider. (via waxy)

TBS and their annoying interstitial commericials

Last night I was watching a rerun of Family Guy on TBS and right before the show went to commercial, this happened:

See what they did there? They paused the TV show, ran a little mini-commercial for some show that no one cares about, and then returned to the last two seconds of the segment before going to commercial. Jesus Christ. I realize that Time Warner doesn't actually care about the people who watch their shows and that television programs are just the networks' way of getting people to watch advertising, but this is too much. Do these things actually work or just piss people off in droves? Is there some marketing hot dog at Time Warner who thinks that Family Guy viewers want to watch the blue collar comedy stylings of Bill Engvall? I'm sorry that the DVR is ruining your business model, but can you kick the bucket a little more gracefully? (Digg this?)

Photos of TV

Mike Sacks takes funny photos of his TV viewing. (via buzzfeed)

HBO on iTunes

As rumored yesterday, the iTunes Store has added some HBO shows to their lineup. The initial offerings are the first seasons of The Wire, Flight of the Conchords, Rome, and Deadwood, as well as seasons 1 and 6 of the Sopranos and all of Sex in the City. Prices are between $2-3 per episode. (thx, dhrumil)

Final Jeopardy blog

The Final Jeopardy blog posts a video each day's Final Jeopardy question. (thx, daniel)

Fifty greatest TV shows of all time

There's much to argue with on this list of the 50 greatest TV shows of all time. Too many 1 or 2 season shows and recent shows. And Buffy at #2? Christ, whatever.

The Wire, Simpsons style

A few drawings of characters from The Wire drawn in the style of The Simpsons. Here's a scene from season one; D'Angelo tries to teach chess to Wallace and Bodie:

This might be my new favorite thing on the web. (thx, andy)

At the Web 2.0 conference, Clay Shirky gave

At the Web 2.0 conference, Clay Shirky gave a talk called Gin, Television, and Social Surplus. In it, he argues that the "social surplus" soaked up in the latter half of the 20th century by television is now being put to better use on the internet.

For the first time, society forced onto an enormous number of its citizens the requirement to manage something they had never had to manage before--free time. And what did we do with that free time? Well, mostly we spent it watching TV. We did that for decades. We watched I Love Lucy. We watched Gilligan's Island. We watch Malcolm in the Middle. We watch Desperate Housewives. Desperate Housewives essentially functioned as a kind of cognitive heat sink, dissipating thinking that might otherwise have built up and caused society to overheat.

But maybe it's possible that the internet is a slightly more sophisticated (or slightly more cognitive) cognitive heat sink?

Starcade was an 80s TV game show

Starcade was an 80s TV game show where contestants competed against each other on various arcade games like Joust, Burgertime, Dragon's Lair, and Mr. Do. I watched it whenever I could and now they've put 15 full episodes online for your viewing pleasure. I found this on the Secret Fun Blog, written by the Vice-President of the official Starcade Fan Club.

On a Spring morning Brad showed up to homeroom with the crazed look of inspiration on his face. He erupted into babble and I sensed that he'd been waiting many hours to unload his revelation upon me. It was something about Starcade, and a club, and titles and duties, and other foreign concepts. I patronizingly agreed to his wishes and I even signed something. It was a letter...

Beginning May 5, the original Iron Chef is

Beginning May 5, the original Iron Chef is back on TV in the US. Set your DVRs for 11pm every weeknight on the Fine Living channel. (via eater)

Stephen Fry and The Machine That Made Us

All six parts of a BBC documentary called The Machine That Made Us are on YouTube: part one, part two, part three, part four, part five, part six (60 minutes total). (BTW, if you're in the UK, you can watch it on the BBC's iPlayer.) The film stars Stephen Fry and tells the history of the Gutenberg Press.

Stephen's investigation combines historical detective work and a hands-on challenge. He travels to France and Germany on the trail of Johannes Gutenberg, the inventor of the printing press and early media entrepreneur. Along the way he discovers the lengths Gutenberg went to keep his project secret, explores the role of avaricious investors and unscrupulous competitors, and discovers why printing mattered so much in medieval Europe.

But to really understand the man and his machine, Stephen gets his hands dirty - assembling a team of craftsmen and helping them build a working replica of Gutenberg's original press. He learns how to make paper the 15th-century way and works as an apprentice in a metal foundry in preparation for the experiment to put the replica press through its paces. Can Stephen's modern-day team match the achievement of Gutenberg's medieval craftsmen?

Here's part one to get you started:

I haven't had a chance to watch it yet, but it's supposed to be really good. Oh, and if you're thinking "who does this Fry bloke think he is going on about technology like he knows something about it", you should check out his blog...he's a top-notch tech blogger. (thx, dean)

Star Trek statistics: just how likely are

Star Trek statistics: just how likely are you to die if you beam down to the planet's surface wearing a red shirt?

You don't know about the Red Shirt Phenomenon? Well, as any die-hard Trekkie knows, if you are wearing a red shirt and beam to the planet with Captain Kirk, you're gonna die. That's the common thinking, but I decided to put this to the test. After all, I hadn't seen any definitive proof; it's just what people said.

Slowing down the playback of a 1999 Apple

Slowing down the playback of a 1999 Apple commercial = drunk Jeff Goldblum. "Internet? I'd say Internet." Great stuff, indeed. (via cynical-c)

Long long but good good roundbrowser** discussion

Long long but good good roundbrowser** discussion about which is the best TV drama ever: The Wire, Deadwood, or The Sopranos.

MZS: And I would be, frankly, stunned if, as great an actor as Ian McShane is, he ever did anything that was as demanding and as complex as what he did on Deadwood. Same thing for Gandolfini. And there are even smaller players I think that's true of as well. Molly Parker, you know, my God, look at all the things she got to do. When is she going to be able to do all those things again?

AS: A lot of that comes from the fact that these people were doing series, and now they're trying to move on to movies, and no movie part will ever be as complex as Tony Soprano or Al Swearengen or Bubbles.

MZS: Is that an inherent strength of the medium, then, as opposed to movies?

AS: Yeah.

Obviously, there are spoilers here if you haven't seen all three shows in their entirety.

** A roundbrowser discussion is a roundtable discussion that takes place online. Ok, yeah, I didn't think it was all that clever either. Oh well.

We started watching HBO's John Adams miniseries

We started watching HBO's John Adams miniseries last night. Going in, I thought Paul Giamatti was going to be too familiar to play Adams; I'm happily wrong. He and Laura Linney are nearly perfect as America's first power couple. Guess we're going to hold off canceling that cable for a few weeks, at least until -- SPOILERS!!! -- the Americans win the Revolutionary War.

Tyler Cowen has a short review of

Tyler Cowen has a short review of Peter Moskos' book, Cop in the Hood: My Year Policing Baltimore's Eastern District.

This is one of the two or three best conceptual analyses of "cops and robbers" I have read. It is mandatory reading for all fans of The Wire and recommended for everyone else.

Sheeeeeeeeeeit.

The final episode of St. Elsewhere revealed

The final episode of St. Elsewhere revealed that all of the action of the show took place in the mind of an autistic child. Two detectives from Homicide: Life on the Street investigate a doctor from St. Elsewhere. Thus Homicide is a fiction. And so are 280 other shows that are connected to those two shows through crossovers and references. This page contains a map of all the crossovers, encompassing such disparate shows as Doctor Who, The King of Queens, and Leave It to Beaver. Wonderful.

The end of The Wire

WARNING, **EXTENSIVE SPOILERS** ABOUT SEASONS 1-5. So, The Wire is over. The 60th and final episode of the show aired on Sunday night. I watched it last night and felt very sad afterwards. Sad that it's over and that doing a sixth season could not and would not work. A good chunk of my morning was spent clinging to the show's final moments; I must have read close to 50 or 60 pages of interviews and analysis concerning the end of the show. Here are a few of those articles worth reading:

Heaven and Here is providing their usual excellent coverage of the end of the show.

I don't know if Cheese's speech about the game was one of the more definitive the show's ever put forth, or the ultimate in dime store Wire-isms. I also don't know which way it was supposed to be perceived by the characters. But that it was immediately followed by a murder that contradicted everything it contained -- one that went against a lot of what's been both depressing and demoralizing about the show -- was kind of awesome.

Alan Sepinwall has the definitive end-of-the-show interview with David Simon. It's long but oh so good.

We knew that if we got a long enough run, all three of the chess players would be out of the game, so to speak. Prison or dead. We did not chart all of their fates to a specific outcome, but we knew that the Pit crew would be subject to an exacting attrition.

We knew, for example, that when Carcetti declares that he wants no more stat games in his new administration that the arc would end with his subordinates going into Daniels' office and demanding yet another stat game. Or that McNulty would end up on the pool table felt like Cole, albeit quitting rather than dead. Or that Carver's long arc toward maturity and leadership would begin with him making rank under ugly pretenses and then being lectured by Daniels about what you can and can't live with. (It's at that point that Carver slowly begins to change, not merely when he encounters Colvin's integrity.) We knew that the FBI file that Burrell would not be put into play in season one would eventually be used to deny Daniels the prize.

Sepinwall also wrote an extensive recap of the final episode.

Heather Havrilesky's interview with David Simon on Salon covers some of the same ground as Sepinwall's interview but is still quite fine. Here's David Simon explaining what the whole season five newspaper thread was all about:

[The season] begins with a very good act of adversarial journalism -- they catch a quid pro quo between a drug dealer and a council president -- which actually happened in Baltimore. Not necessarily the council president, but between a drug dealer and the city government. That whole thing with the strip club? That really happened in real life. It was news. The Baltimore Sun did catch that, it was good journalism, so I was honoring good journalism. It ends with an honorable piece of narrative journalism, about Bubbles. And the Baltimore Sun has, on occasion, done very good narrative journalism.

In between those bookends, which I thought were important, because in our minds we weren't writing a piece that was abusive to the Sun or any other newspaper ... the paper misses every story. They miss that the mayor wants to be governor, so ultimately the guy who was the reformer ends up telling people to cook the stats as bad as Royce ever did. Well, in Baltimore that happened. And they missed the fact that the third-grade test scores are cooked to make it look like the schools are improving, when in fact it doesn't extend to the fifth grade, and that No Child Left Behind is an unmitigated disaster. They set out to do a story on the school system, but they abandoned it for homelessness because they're sort of reed thin. Prosecutions collapse because of backroom maneuvering and ambition by various political figures, speaking of Clay Davis ... And when a guy like Prop Joe dies, he's a brief on page B5.

That was the theme, and we were taking long-odd bets that very few journalists would even sense it. That would be the critique of journalism that really mattered to me, because we've shown you the city as it is, and as it is intricately, for four years. It was all rooted in real stuff.

The last of Andrew Johnston's recaps for The House Next Door. He remains skeptical about the newspaper part of season five's main plot:

In my decade-plus as a professional journalist, I've seen a lot of people compromise their principles in order to stay employed, but never have I seen so many people compromise so much. At the risk of seeming terminally naive, I have to ask if things are really that much worse in the newspaper world than they are in the magazine biz (and now that I've raised the question, I'm sure more than one person will provide evidence in the comments below that yes, things are that bad).

Yanksfan vs. Soxfan views The Wire through the lens of Baltimore sports.

From the air, the picture isn't quite so romantic. The satelite image above shows the site that was once home to Memorial Stadium. An entire neighborhood is oriented in a horsehoe around it. But there's practically nothing on the site now. It's a void. The last remnant of Memorial Stadium came down in 2002. That was a concrete wall dedicated to the soldiers who gave their lives in the First and Second World Wars. It read, "Time will not dim the glory of their deeds."

The Orioles moved into Camden Yards in 1994. You'd think that, when the city agreed to build a new home for the team, there would have been a plan for the old site. But that's not how the development game works. A rising tide doesn't necessarily lift all boats. The money was downtown, and that's where it stayed.

Assorted other articles that I'll leave unexcerpted: AV Club interview with Simon, final episode recap from Thoughts on Stuff, and a letter on HBO's site from David Simon to the fans of the show.

And finally, a few other tidbits.

• According to Simon in his interview with Sepinwall, the superhero-like jump taken by Omar in season five from an apartment balcony was based on a real-life experience by the real-life Omar.
• Did you catch Simon's cameo in the newsroom at The Sun? Did Ed Burns have a cameo of his own at McNulty's wake?
• Aside from Ziggy Sobotka, Brother Mouzone, and maybe Horseface, season five featured every surviving main character in the show's five season run. Mr. Prezbo was the last to turn up as the subject of Dukie's transparent short con.
• At the beginning of season four, I wished that season five would be a Godfather II-style prequel showing how the main characters (Avon, Stringer, McNutty, Daniels, Omar, etc.) got to where they did. Turns out that Simon and company had that in mind all along; in seasons four and five, we simultaneously see the beginnings and ends of several characters. Michael and Dukie are explicitly set up as the new Omar and Bubbles, respectively. Carver is the new Daniels. Sydnor is the new McNulty (with some Freamon sprinkled in). I'm also guess that, more or less, Kima is the new Bunk, Kenard is the new Avon/Marlo, and Randy is the new Cheese (Simon has confirmed that Cheese is Randy's dad). Namond is the only season four kid that doesn't really morph into one of the other characters...maybe Bunny.
• Slim Charles shooting Cheese in the head was the most satisfying moment I've ever witnessed on TV.

Now that it's done, I think we're going to cancel HBO and everything but basic cable. I doubt it'll be missed much...aside from sports and movies, The Wire was only thing we watched on TV.

No spoilers, no spoilers. It appears that

No spoilers, no spoilers. It appears that the very last episode of The Wire will not air a week early on HBO OnDemand like all the previous episodes have this season. Air date is Sunday, March 9...the show appears OnDemand the next day. The series finale will clock in at 93 minutes, longer by 15 minutes than last season's finale.

Liveblogging the Oscars

Just a heads up to let you know that a liveblog of the Oscars is going to be starting here in a little bit. Follow along as I follow along, if you know what I mean (and I think you do).

7:44a, Feb 25th: The Oscars are over. 20% of the nominees won. The cat threw up on the rug and Ollie's a bit fussy this morning. We'll see you back here next year.

11:42p: Bedtime. Last update until tomorrow morning, when I assume the Oscar ceremony will finally be over.

11:06p: None of the stories on the front page of Digg refer to the Oscars. Unsurprising that they have their heads in the sand on such an important issue.

10:47p: BREAKING NEWS: The program on ESPN2 right now is not Fisting; it's Fishing. Fishing. Also, 1363 unread items in my RSS reader.

10:28p: Fashion update. Just took off my shirt. It's hot in here, it's not just me.

10:08p: Battery life at 31% and dropping.

10:00p: Just checked the movie times at the theater two blocks from my apartment. Juno at 10:50, There Will Be Blood at 10:20, Atonement at 10:30, and No Country for Old Men at 10:15 & 10:55. Michael Clayton is on Movies OnDemand for $4.99 at any time.

9:32p: Is this a good time to go to the movies? Lots of empty seats at There Will Be Blood maybe?

9:07p: My liveblogging outfit this evening: jeans by Banana Republic, long sleeve tshirt by American Apparel, socks by Wal-Mart, boxer shorts by Muji.

8:55p: What else is on right now: The Mummy on Encore, Buffy the Vampire Slayer on Fox Movie Channel, Miller's Crossing on Encore Action, The Departed on Cinemax, episode #8 of The Wire on HBO, the Masterpiece version of Pride and Prejudice on PBS, Bulls vs. Rockets on ESPN, Godfather II on AMC, and Born Into Brothels is just ending on IFC but Spanking the Monkey starts in 20 minutes.

8:43p: Non-ceremonial bulletin: I've turned on the comments.

8:34p: I'm told that the ceremony has started.

7:58p: The Oscars have not started yet.

Some thoughts on The Wire, season 5

NOTE: don't read any further if you haven't watched episode 6 of The Wire's 5th season. SPOILERS.

I've been meaning to write a post on my thoughts about season 5 of The Wire but luckily Heaven and Here beat me to much of what I was thinking. The highlights:

Too many characters, too many stories, too much telling and not enough time for showing, which is why it feels more like a conventional TV show than in years past.

Unnecessary cameos. What is this, a reunion tour? Hi Nicky, hi Randy! (Although I think the Randy thing is interesting in relation to his dad...did Cheese get the way he is through a similar trajectory? And I suspect that Randy will come back into play...the season 4 kids are the only ones, besides the drug dealers themselves, who have any evidence of wrongdoing by Marlo, et. al.)

How are they going to wrap this up? I don't care what happens to Carcetti or McNulty or Freamon or Daniels and we're obviously going to get some sort of closure on either Omar or Marlo, but if they leave the Dukie, Bubs, and Michael threads significantly hanging, I'm gonna be pissed. (Prediction: if Marlo gets got, it will come from within...either Chris or Michael or both.)

The whole McNulty/Freamon thing: blah. Same thing with the newspaper angle...not as interesting as I thought it was going to be.

But all the rest of the seasons started slow and built into something...they coalesced. Maybe this one will as well?

The only thing I really like about McNulty's manufactured investigation is how it affects so many different things in the system. Carcetti running for governor on the homeless issue. The newspaper switching their focus from the schools to the homeless. All the little things that pull resources and energy away from the Marlo Stanfield case. Pulling Kima off her triple. Motivating Bunk to reopen the case files on the bodies in the vacants. Everything is connected, unexpectedly.

Oh, and I love the "Dickensian" stuff in the newsroom...it's Simon's little shoutout/fuck you to the real media's coverage of the show, frequently called Dickensian. Heaven and Here on the term's misuse:

Something that has been bothering me about the deluge of stories on the show lately (which is , as Shoals said to me earlier today, "split now between nay-sayers and people drowning in their own adulation,") is the loose use of the term "Dickensian." Some stories are simply grabbing onto the upcoming plotline of the Sun editor assigning a story on "Dickensian" kids, but more often than I like, I see lazy writers using Dickens as a sort of shorthand for intricacy, urban despair, and nightmarish institutional breakdown, as if he owned the patent on all that.

Maybe much of the media criticism we were promised in season 5 is meta?

Cynical-C shares some of the more interesting

Cynical-C shares some of the more interesting complaints received by the FCC about television programming. One viewer complains about The Family Guy:

The show has no redeeming/moral value what so ever. The show actually had the gall to show GOD in bed with a young woman ready to have sexual intercourse and the dialogue to go with that event, including the use of condoms. They also had Jesus and his earthly father Joseph having an argument. Along with portraying the total disrespect of family values Stewie hitting his mother, the father and son ganging up on the wife/mother, there was also a male sexual predator in this episode as well.; The whole show was quite revolting. It should be taken off the air.

Mythbusters, airplane on a conveyor belt

Starting in about 40 minutes, I'll be liveblogging the Mythbusters episode where they take on the infamous airplane on a conveyor belt problem. Updates will be reverse chronological (newest at the top) so don't scroll down if you're DVRing the episode for later viewing or otherwise don't want anything spoiled.

Fair warning? Ok here we go.

10:32p I've turned comments on. Why not!!

10:04p
The plane took off so easily. The laws of physics are proven correct once again. But I'm not sure this is going to settle anything. I'm getting email as we speak that the test was unfair. Plane was too light. Tarp was pulled too slowly. Etc. But the thing is, it doesn't matter how large the plane is...given enough runway and a strong enough conveyor belt, it will still take off. Ditto for the speed of the treadmill...it doesn't matter how fast the treadmill is moving. It could be going 300 mph in the opposite direction and as long as the bearings in the plane's wheels don't melt, it's gonna take off. (For an explanation, try this one by my friend Mouser, who has a MIT Ph.D in Physics Sc.D. in Nuclear Science and Engineering.)

9:58p

Update: Due to popular demand, the above graphic is available on a t-shirt at CafePress. Prices start at $18 and they're available in men's and women's sizes.

9:58p
Heeeeeeeere we go.

9:56p
The pilot flying the ultralight is predicting that he won't be able to take off.

9:55p
Orville Wright died 60 years ago today.

9:50p
Cockroach mini-myth: cockroaches would survive a nuclear blast longer than humans but there were other kinds of bugs that fared better. Another commercial.

9:47p
Back to the shaving cream in the car prank. Now they're going to use A-B foam...they're trying to fill all the space in the car and perhaps explode it. Totally worked.

9:44p
Expedia commercial. Nice synergistic placement. Good work, Discovery Channel's ad sales team.

9:43p
Ok, to do the large-scale plane test, they're using a 2000 foot tarp and a 400 pound ultralight. Tarp is pulled in one direction and the plane tries to take off in the other direction. The wind is picking up and blowing the tarp runway all over the place. They're also having problems with punching holes in the tarp. They're going to try again after we hear some more about radioactive cockroaches. Aaaand, another commercial.

9:36p
Second mini-myth: if you freeze a can of shaving cream, cut it open, and then put the foam in a car, it will heat and expand to fill the car. One can did almost nothing. 50 cans didn't do too much either.

9:32p
Off to commercial again. Macbook Air ad. I don't understand all the whining about how expensive and underpowered it is. You can't get by with an 80 GB hard drive? Come on.

9:30p
Now a bit of explanation from the boys. (Things are moving faster now, which is welcome.) The thrust from the airplane acts upon the air so it doesn't matter too much what the runway is doing to the plane's wheels. And then back to the roach thing. They irradiated them (and some other bugs) and most of the roaches died. Still pending...

9:25p
Ok, they're dragging paper behind a Segway and trying to take off with the model airplane in the opposite direction. IT JUST TOOK OFF.

9:19p
Back to the roach thing. More recapping and a little bit more setup. I don't see how people can watch this show...it's sooooo slooooow. And now another commercial break. Hello picture-in-picture.

9:18p
As expected, the model airplane "flew" off the end of the exercise treadmill. It didn't have enough room to take off, but if it stayed straight, it probably would have.

9:14p
First recap...they took a solid minute to explain what they've already done. Ugh.

9:13p
Going into the first commercial, we've caught a glimpse of how they're going to test the main myth. They're going to drag a huge plastic sheet long the ground and have the plane sit on the plastic and being going the other way attempting to take off. A reasonable substitute for the treadmill.

9:08p
They're starting off small with a model airplane on an exercise treadmill. They're showing the two hosts learning how to fly the tiny airplane. One of them is riding around on a Segway. Oh, and they're also doing two other mini-myths during the episode. They just switched gears to the first mini-myth: can a cockroach survive a nuclear blast?

9:04p
And we're off. They're calling it "the moment we've all been waiting for". My guess: the plane will take off.

8:58p
I've only watched one other episode of Mythbusters before today. I found the show to be a little slow and very repetitive; 8 minutes of material stretched into 45 minutes of show. Unfortunately, this practice seems to be common among science programs on television.

8:40p
Watching Family Guy as a warmup. The one with the nudist family. Good stuff.

8:22p
Preemptive answer for the inevitable "Do you realize how boring/stupid/goofy it is to liveblog this?" Most definitely.

For real this time: Mythbusters will air

For real this time: Mythbusters will air their challenge of the airplane on a conveyor belt puzzle this Wednesday at 9pm ET. (thx, darin)

Two-hour special on the History Channel called

Two-hour special on the History Channel called Life After People, 9pm tonight and rerunning throughout the week.

What would happen to planet earth if the human race were to suddenly disappear forever? Would ecosystems thrive? What remnants of our industrialized world would survive? What would crumble fastest? From the ruins of ancient civilizations to present day cities devastated by natural disasters, history gives us clues to these questions and many more.

This appears to be unrelated to Alan Weisman's well-reviewed The World Without Us. If it comes down to watching this or Killer of Sheep, watch Sheep.

Charles Burnett's Killer of Sheep, a 1977 film

Charles Burnett's Killer of Sheep, a 1977 film that was selected as one of the 100 essential films of all time by the National Society of Film Critics but was just recently released in theaters, will be shown on TCM today at 8pm and early tomorrow morning at 12:30am. Set your DVRs for this one. (big thx, max)

Short teaser for Generation Kill, David Simon

Short teaser for Generation Kill, David Simon and Ed Burns' next project for HBO about the Iraq War. It's from October but I hadn't seen it until now so maybe you hadn't either? The 7-hour miniseries is based on Evan Wright's book of the same name. This video discusses the book and its subject matter. (thx, david)

The T.V. Might As Well Be An Answering Machine At This Point

I've turned my T.V. on just one time in 2008. I rarely miss it at all, except for a very few moments when it's like missing heroin. (Some relief coming: eight episodes of "Lost," beginning January 31; ten episodes of "Battlestar Galactica" coming in March.) Yesterday for a job I was talking with two bigwigs, an actor and an actor-director; they said they were both in a weird state of both crunch and inactivity because of both the Writer's Guild strike and the maybe-upcoming Screen Actor's Guild strike, which I had totally forgotten about. (That 120,000+ member union may strike in June, over the same issues—profit from new media—that sent the Writers Guild out more than two months ago.) That's when I realized: I can't take a world without actors! Sure, they're not as useful as deli owners or baristas to my life. But I like looking at them! Maybe it'll be averted: The Directors Guild is close-ish to a settlement, which might be a template for the writers, which might be sort of a template for the actors. In any event, I asked the nice Oscar-winning lady what sort of things she liked about working: "I have health insurance, that's enough," she said. Mm, I should get a union then! Some health insurance sounds good right about now.

The Sound of Young America's Jesse Thorn

The Sound of Young America's Jesse Thorn interviews Wendell Pierce and Andre Royo, who play The Bunk and Bubbles on The Wire. (thx, jesse)

Sudhir Venkatesh recently sat down with some

Sudhir Venkatesh recently sat down with some real gang members to watch some episodes of the The Wire.

The greatest uproar occurred when the upstart Marlo challenged the veteran Prop Joe in the co-op meeting. "If Prop Joe had balls, he'd be dead in 24 hours!" Orlando shouted. "But white folks [who write the series] always love to keep these uppity [characters] alive. No way he'd survive in East New York more than a minute!" A series of bets then took place. All told, roughly $8,000 was wagered on the timing of Marlo's death. The bettors asked me -- as the neutral party -- to hold the money. I delicately replied that my piggy bank was filled up already.

(thx, matt)

With The Wire final season premiere approaching

With The Wire final season premiere approaching rapidly (the episode is already on HBO OnDemand and the first two are on BitTorrent), news outlets everywhere are covering and reviewing the show. My favorite article -- because it's something different and critical for a change -- is a profile of David Simon by Mark Bowden in the Atlantic Monthly. He starts out slow with a comparison of fiction and nonfiction in telling stories:

Fiction can explain things that journalism cannot. It allows you to enter the lives and motivations of characters with far more intimacy than is typically possible in nonfiction. In the case of The Wire, fiction allows you to wander around inside a violent, criminal subculture, and inside an entrenched official bureaucracy, in a way that most reporters can only dream about. And it frees you from concerns about libel and cruelty. It frees you to be unfair.

But then you get to the part describing Simon's vindictiveness and how it has shaped him, which adds some depth to the earlier fiction/nonfiction comparison. Worth a read.

Also of note is that the full text of The Believer conversation between Simon and Nick Hornby has been put online.

Absolute Zero looks like an interesting show

Absolute Zero looks like an interesting show on cold temperatures, airing on PBS in mid-January. For the Long Zoom fans out there, don't miss the Sense of Scale widget.

The new literacy of television

Late last week, Marc Andreessen pulled a quote from a New Yorker article written in 1951 about television:

The most encouraging word we have so far had about television came from a grade-school principal we encountered the other afternoon.

"They say it's going to bring back vaudeville," he said, "but I think it's going to bring back the book."

Before television, he told us, his pupils never read; that is, they knew how to read and could do it in school, but their reading ended there. Their entertainment was predominantly pictorial and auditory -- movies, comic books, radio.

Now, the principal said, news summaries are typed out and displayed on the television screen to the accompaniment of soothing music, the opening pages of dramatized novels are shown, words are written on blackboards in quiz and panel programs, commercials are spelled out in letters made up of dancing cigarettes, and even the packages of cleansers and breakfast foods and the announcers exhibit for identification bear printed messages.

It's only a question of time, our principal felt, before the new literacy of the television audience reaches the point where whole books can be held up to the screen and all their pages slowly turned.

This sounds far fetched and Andreessen belittles the prediction, but is it really that outlandish? Literacy rates in the US have risen since the advent of television (I am not suggesting a correlation) and Steven Johnson suggests in Everything Bad Is Good For You that TV is making us smarter.

If you stop thinking of TV in the specific sense as a box on which ABC, CBS, and NBC are shown and instead imagine it in the general sense as a service that pipes content into the home to be shown on a screen, the prediction hits pretty close to the mark. The experience of using the web is not so different than reading pages of words that are "held up to the screen" while we scroll slowly through them. If we can imagine that what Paul Otlet and Vannevar Bush described as the "televised book" and the "memex" corresponds to today's web, why not give our high school principal here the same benefit of the doubt?

With the new season right around the

With the new season right around the corner, Heaven and Here, an excellent group blog about The Wire, is starting back up again. The latest two posts are about season two, the most underrated season IMO.

The NFL has caved and is going

The NFL has caved and is going to simulcast the Patriots/Giants game on NBC and CBS instead of just showing it on NFL Network, a channel available to fewer than 40% of US households.

Radio interview with Felicia Pearson, who plays

Radio interview with Felicia Pearson, who plays Snoop on The Wire. It's apparent from the interview that she doesn't so much act in The Wire as play herself. "I have patience." (thx, adam)

The last episode of Ricky Gervais' Extras

The last episode of Ricky Gervais' Extras has a message concerning celebrity and television:

"The Victorian freak show never went away," Millman rails in a soliloquy that serves as a climax of the "Extras" final episode and a moment of redemption for the character, whose life and friendships have been corrupted by fame. "Now it's called 'Big Brother' or 'American Idol,' where in the preliminary rounds we wheel out the bewildered to be sniggered at by multimillionaires."

To the networks, he says: "You can't wash your hands of this. You can't keep going, 'Oh, it's exploitation, but it's what the public wants.' No."

To the audience watching at home, he says: "Shame on you. And shame on me. I'm the worst of all. Cause I'm one of these people that goes, 'I'm an entertainer, it's in my blood.' Yeah, it's in my blood because a real job's too hard."

Wow, The Simpsons did a parody of

Wow, The Simpsons did a parody of Noah Kalina's Everyday video. Noah, you just graduated summa cum laude from Pop Culture University.

Update: But apparently the background music was used without permission.

A few months back a producer from the Simpsons contacted Carly about using her song 'everyday' for an upcoming episode in which they were going to parody my video. She was negotiating a rate for the song, until they never got back to her. No fee was agreed on, no contracts signed.

Maybe they decided since it was parody they didn't need permission? I don't find that likely since what little I know about Hollywood/TV is that they're really concerned about clearing rights. (thx, slava)

Update: The song rights mixup was an accidental oversight and is currently being corrected.

Internet pissed at Mythbusters for not showing airplane on a treadmill

According to their web site and TV Guide, last night's episode of Mythbusters was supposed to address the airplane on a treadmill question. They didn't and nerds everywhere are upset. According to an email from the executive producer of the show, the segment got rescheduled:

First up, for those concerned that this story has been cancelled, don't worry, planes on a conveyer belt has been filmed, is spectacular, and will be part of what us Mythbusters refer to as 'episode 97'. Currently that is due to air on January 30th.

Secondly, for those very aggrieved fans feeling "duped" into watching tonight's show, I can only apologise. I'm not sure why the listings / internet advertised that tonight's show contained POCB. I will endeavour to find out an answer but for those conspiracy theorists amongst you, I can assure you that it will have just been an honest mistake.

Not sure that's going to quench the nerdfury, but I'm glad the piece will air in January.

Seeking Patriots game in NYC

The NFL, in their infinitesimal wisdom and utilizing their stupid scheduling/blackout policy, has ensured that the best game of the weekend (Steelers vs. Patriots) will not be shown on TV in the New York City area. We get the hapless Jets instead...a team that not even Jets fans care about at this point in their 3-9 season. Our cable provider doesn't carry any NFL stations and we don't really want to trek out to a sports bar with the kiddo. Are there any other options? An illicit online broadcast? Anything?

Update: We ended up watching the game online -- poor quality, dropped frames, and all. Better than braving the rain and sports bar. (thx to everyone who wrote in, especially kunal)

How Alec Baldwin channels his rage

Alec Baldwin must relish the opportunity to channel his rage through Jack Donaghy, the beloved heartless media executive he plays on 30 Rock, a rage in evidence at The Huffington Post in his open-skewering of the suits who own and run his show's network.

On the problem of the studios in the ongoing WGA negotiations:

They are owned by huge, creativity-deadening corporations and operated by lawyers and marketing executives who lord over the worst creative decline I have witnessed in a long time, particularly in films. In television, companies like GE view properties like NBC the way realtors view square footage. GE does not care what is on NBC. So long as the programming is relatively inoffensive, they want to earn as much per square foot as they can.

I missed this at the time, but 30 Rock snuck in a last-minute subversive writers' strike joke for its last pre-strike show.

For some defictionalized 30 Rock goods, t-shirts for the parent company of 30 Rock's NBC, Sheinhardt Wig Company, can be had here.

(via glass shallot)

American Gladiators around the globe

You may have heard that NBC has revived the American Gladiators franchise for primetime. I had tickets reserved for tonight's taping that definitely would have been used if if I'd been able to reconcile my preteen nostalgia with the potentially many hours of sitting in a studio and cheering on cue.

Instead, I set out to learn the Gladiator names of other American Gladiators around the world.

• Sweden's American Gladiators battle it out on Gladiatorerna. In this clip, Phoenix and Raptor manhandle the Attackboll. With cheerleaders and minimalist on-screen graphics.
• American Gladiators in South Africa are known as MTN Gladiators. Watch Gazelle live up to her name on the Pendulum. With pleasant accents and everyone smiles and is very cordial to one another.
• American Gladiators in 1991 go by the name American Gladiators, featuring Malibu, Zap, Lace, and all the rest. I could not find a third international American Gladiator clip.

If you were to pit Gladiator teams from around the world against each other in one arena, make it part of the penal system and introduce a fat, homicidal tenor named Dynamo to the fray, now that's a taping I would go to.

New episodes of The Wire, available now!

New episodes of The Wire, available now! Well, sort of. The Amazon page for the season 4 DVDs contains three mini prequels to the series: one with a grade school-aged Prop Joe, a teenaged Omar, and McNulty's first day with the homicide unit.

Found while browsing HBO OnDemand last night:

Found while browsing HBO OnDemand last night: the first 4 episodes of The Sopranos and the entire season 3 of The Wire. Go nuts.

Don't know how I missed this, but

Don't know how I missed this, but there's a TiVo that records in HD that doesn't cost four bazillion dollars. TiVo HD records 20 hours of HD programming, you can view/record two shows at once, and differs very little from the more expensive Series 3 TiVo. Amazon's got it for $262 (retail is $299). But whoa, the Series 3, which can record 32 hours of HD programming and retails for $599, is only $399 at Amazon after rebate (note: "usually ships within 3 to 5 weeks").

Big Screen Little Screen has some info

Big Screen Little Screen has some info of the upcoming season of The Wire. It begins Jan 6th and the episodes will appear OnDemand a week early (they did this last year, yes?). The post also contains 5 promos for season 5. Almost here!

The BBC is planning to produce Shakespeare's

The BBC is planning to produce Shakespeare's entire canon for TV...all 37 plays.

(via crazymonk)

Video of Twitter on CSI. They even

Video of Twitter on CSI. They even stayed within the 140 character limit. (via waxy)

An Apple Lisa commercial featuring Kevin Costner.

An Apple Lisa commercial featuring Kevin Costner. While you digest the awesomeness of that, it's interesting to note how consistent Apple has been under Steve Jobs in their message and approach...the emphasis on non-traditional business uses of computers in the Lisa ad and the whole iLife philosophy go together quite well. (via the house next door)

Mailer, Cavett, Vidal, and Flanner

On his NYTimes blog, Dick Cavett remembers having Norman Mailer on his show along with Gore Vidal and Janet Flanner. It was a notorious episode; a perhaps more than slightly drunk Mailer lashed out first at Vidal and then everyone else in the room but couldn't keep up with the jeers and witticisms flying at him from all angles.

Mailer: I said that the need of the magazine reader for a remark he could repeat at dinner was best satisfied by writers with names like Gore Vidal.

Flanner: All those writers called Gore Vidal.

Vidal: I know. There are thousands of them, yeah.

Mailer: There are two or three.

Cavett: Who are some of the others?

Mailer [with a dark look]: I don't know.

Cavett: Who wants to host the rest of this show?

Mailer, years later, told me that it was at this point that "in the face of the Cavett wit and Flanner's deft interruption" -- adored by the audience -- and in consideration of his alcohol content, he realized that he was not being skillful at mounting a sustained argument.

In an interview a number of years ago with Cavett, Charlie Rose showed a clip of the incident:

The video should cue up at the clip in question, but if not, skip to 29:00 in. Highly entertaining reading and viewing.

Title sequences from Doctor Who, 1963-2006. Unfortunately

Title sequences from Doctor Who, 1963-2006. Unfortunately all the videos are in Real format, which in the age of YouTube is just silly. Not unfortunately, most of the opening titles videos are available on YT: first Doctor, second Doctor, third Doctor, fourth Doctor, fifth Doctor, sixth Doctor, and seventh Doctor, as well as other variants. (via quipsologies)

Opening credits for Down to Earth, a

Opening credits for Down to Earth, a show on TBS in the early 80s (it was their first original series). The opening jingle was so catchy that I can still sing most of it even though I haven't heard it in 20 years.

Season 1 of The Wire is currently showing

Season 1 of The Wire is currently showing on HBO OnDemand. I presume seasons 2-4 will follow as the January premiere of season 5 approaches. (thx, michael)

Speaking of, here's a short teaser promo for season 5. (thx, gary)

Update: The post originally said that season 2 was OnDemand...I corrected it to read "season 1".

Nick Park and Aardman Animations are doing

Nick Park and Aardman Animations are doing a new Wallace & Gromit film called Trouble At' Mill (pronounced Trouble At The Mill). Unlike Chicken Run or Were-Rabbit, it'll be a 30-minute film made for TV, like A Close Shave or The Wrong Trousers.

Wallace and Gromit have a brand new business. The conversion of 62 West Wallaby Street is complete and impressive, the whole house is now a granary with ovens and robotic kneading arms. Huge mixing bowls are all over the place and everything is covered with a layer of flour. On the roof is a 'Wallace patent-pending' old-fashioned windmill.

No place for children

We're running a bit behind in watching The War; we stopped the other night right before D-Day. The series is quite good so far, even with all its flaws. The last section we watched dealt with the Battle of Monte Cassino and the related Battle of Anzio in Italy. With the Germans holding the high ground, these battles were some of toughest of the war for the Allies. During one particularly difficult moment, an American soldier yelled out a prayer (I'm paraphrasing slightly): "Oh God, where are you? We really could use your help down here. And don't send Jesus, come down here yourself. This ain't no place for children."

Bad news, Deadwood fans. Ian McShane says

Bad news, Deadwood fans. Ian McShane says that the two Deadwood movies are not going to happen. Cocksucker! (via david)

Update: Here's a letter from HBO dated 9/27/07 that outlines their decision to not go forward with Deadwood and John From Cincinnati. (thx, marshall)

Dozens of stills from The Simpsons that

Dozens of stills from The Simpsons that make references to famous scenes in movies.

Amazon just sent me an email about

Amazon just sent me an email about my preorder of The Wire season 4 DVD. They say the shipping date has slipped a little, but the page still says it'll be out on Dec 4. Anyway, they made me verify the "change"; if I hadn't, they would have canceled the order, which seems a less-than-optimal solution to the problem. If you preordered, you might want to watch your inbox.

An incredible archive of all the televised

An incredible archive of all the televised reviews of Siskel and Ebert (and Roeper) after 1986. Here, for example, is Siskel and Ebert's review of Die Hard from 1988. (thx, martin)

Goldenfiddle's got the new Wes Anderson-directed AT&T commercials.

Goldenfiddle's got the new Wes Anderson-directed AT&T commercials.

The New Yorker's Nancy Franklin pans Ken

The New Yorker's Nancy Franklin pans Ken Burns' The War.

They’ve taken a subject that is inexhaustible and made it merely exhausting. Scene by scene, interview by interview, the series doesn’t bore, if you are of the school that believes that everyone’s experiences are at least somewhat interesting, and that the experiences of those who went through the Second World War are more interesting than most.

Video of a bunch of TV production

Video of a bunch of TV production company logos...you know, the ones that usually follow the shows, "sit Ubu sit, good dog" and the like.

Japanese treadmill game show

Video of a Japanese game show where contestants have to clear hurdles while running on treadmills. There's something Sisyphean about their task. No word on whether any of the contestants were able to take off.