kottke.org posts about TV
HBO is licensing some of their shows exclusively to Amazon for streaming on their Prime Instant Video service. Here’s the scoop:
Beginning May 21, Amazon Prime members will have unlimited streaming access to:
- All seasons of revered classics such as The Sopranos, The Wire, Deadwood, Rome and Six Feet Under, and of recent favorites such as Eastbound & Down, Enlightened and Flight of the Conchords
- Epic miniseries, including Angels in America, Band of Brothers, John Adams, The Pacific and Parade’s End
- Select seasons of current series such as Boardwalk Empire, Treme and True Blood
Game of Thrones and True Detective are notably absent from the deal. But Amazon Prime subscribers will be able to stream all of the shows above for free. (via deadline)
Kristian Nairn is the actor who plays Hodor on HBO’s Game of Thrones. When he’s not acting, the 6’10” Belfast resident DJs and makes music. His Soundcloud page contains a bunch of his house mixes; here’s the latest mix from three months ago:
Hodor!
[Warning: season 4 spoilers ahoy!] So, in the second episode of this season of Game of Thrones, something wonderfully unpleasant happens. If you’ve seen it, you know what I’m talking about and if you haven’t, you should really stop reading right now. I’ve been thinking about why it happened and who did it. This series of images over at Imgur presents a compelling explanation.
Lady Olenna gives sympathies to Sansa for the murder of her family. Watch carefully. Yoink! Olenna rubs Sansa’s neck, plays with her hair and finally snatches the right-most jewel on Ser Dontos’s necklace.
Interesting, right? (I mean, maybe not if you’ve read the books, but I haven’t so I have no idea who killed Joffrey in the books or if you ever even find out.) But there are two puzzling things about the Tyrell plot:
1. Why the hell was it so convoluted? Couldn’t Lady Olenna have brought the poison to the reception herself? Why use Sansa’s necklace? There’s no CSI: Westeros so no one would have ever suspected Sansa’s necklace being part of it. Unless the Tyrells tipped someone off about it after the fact. Also, for the love of the old gods and the new, Grandma, hasn’t Sansa been through enough without being framed for that little turd’s murder?
2. Why do it? Why then? Does Margaery stay Queen? She has no heir by Joffrey. Or is one of Joffrey’s little brothers in now? I suspect these questions will be answered in the next episode, but unless Margaery stays Queen, the Baratheon reign ends, and the Lannisters get bupkiss, I don’t see a compelling reason for the Tyrells to do this.
Bonus tidbit: this is the last we’ll see of Joffrey and also the last we’ll see of the actor who plays him, Jack Gleeson. Gleeson is retiring from acting, saying he “stopped enjoying it as much as I used to”. I bet the guy who played Malfoy in the Potter movies is breathing easier.
Years of Living Dangerously is a 9-part documentary series on climate change which features celebrity correspondents like Harrison Ford, Oliva Munn, Jessica Alba, and Matt Damon reporting from around the world on different aspects of our changing climate.
The series combines the blockbuster storytelling styles of Hollywood’s top movie makers, including James Cameron and Jerry Weintraub, with the investigative skills of 60 Minutes veterans Joel Bach and David Gelber and a team of leading national news journalists and scientists.
Each YEARS correspondent — including top Hollywood stars recognized for their commitment to spotlighting and acting on the biggest issues of our time — delves into a different impact of climate change. From the damage wrought by Hurricane Sandy in the tri-state area to political upheaval caused by droughts in the Middle East to the dangerous level of carbon emissions resulting from deforestation, the series takes the viewer on a journey to understand the current and intensifying effects of climate change through vivid stories of heartbreak, hope and heroism.
The show starts airing on Showtime on April 13, but the entire first episode is available on YouTube right now:
The show is getting great reviews so far; I hope it helps move the needle. (thx, tobin)
HBO put the entire first episode of Mike Judge’s new show Silicon Valley up on YouTube:
Slow television is the uninterrupted broadcast of an ordinary event from start to finish. Early efforts included burning Yule logs on TV around Christmas and driver’s views of complete British rail journeys (not to mention Andy Warhol and the pitch drop experiment), but Norwegian public television has revived the format in recent years. The first broadcast was of a 7-hour train trip from Bergen to Oslo, which was watched at some point by ~20% of Norway’s population. You can watch the entire thing on YouTube:
Not content with that, in 2011 an entire ship voyage was broadcast for 134 continuous hours. The entire voyage is available for viewing, but you can watch a 37-minute time lapse of the whole thing if you can’t spare the 5½ days:
As the show progressed and the ratings climbed (half of the Norwegian population tuned in at some point), the show became an interactive event, with people meeting the ship along to coast in order to appear as extras in the cast. Some even followed in smaller boats, filming as they went along in the ship’s wake.
Other shows included 12 hours about firewood (including 8 uninterrupted hours of a burning fireplace), 18 hours of salmon swimming upstream (which some felt was too short), 100 hours of Magnus Carlsen playing chess, a 30-hour interview with a noted author, and several continuous hours of sweater production, from shearing to knitting.
Shows currently in the planning stages include A Day in the Life of a Snail and “a 24-hour-long program following construction workers building a digital-style clock out of wood, shuffling planks to match each passing minute”. The slow TV concept might soon be coming to American TV as well.
P.S. Does this 10-hour video of Tyrion Lannister slapping Joffrey count as slow TV? Either way, it’s great.
My friend Aaron has compiled an Rdio playlist of every song ever played on MTV’s Amp, a show from the mid-90s that featured electronic music. Lots of Underworld, Prodigy, Aphex Twin, and Orbital on here.
Some songs weren’t available on Rdio, but there’s more than 18 hours of music here.
Now that I’ve caught up on True Detective, I have to agree with Emily Nussbaum’s take on the show and finale: a stylish well-acted show with a “hollow center”.
To state the obvious: while the male detectives of “True Detective” are avenging women and children, and bro-bonding over “crazy pussy,” every live woman they meet is paper-thin. Wives and sluts and daughters — none with any interior life. Instead of an ensemble, “True Detective” has just two characters, the family-man adulterer Marty, who seems like a real and flawed person (and a reasonably interesting asshole, in Harrelson’s strong performance), and Rust, who is a macho fantasy straight out of Carlos Castaneda. A sinewy weirdo with a tragic past, Rust delivers arias of philosophy, a mash-up of Nietzsche, Lovecraft, and the nihilist horror writer Thomas Ligotti. At first, this buddy pairing seems like a funky dialectic: when Rust rants, Marty rolls his eyes. But, six episodes in, I’ve come to suspect that the show is dead serious about this dude. Rust is a heretic with a heart of gold. He’s our fetish object — the cop who keeps digging when everyone ignores the truth, the action hero who rescues children in the midst of violent chaos, the outsider with painful secrets and harsh truths and nice arms. McConaughey gives an exciting performance (in Grantland, Andy Greenwald aptly called him “a rubber band wrapped tight around a razor blade”), but his rap is premium baloney. And everyone around these cops, male or female, is a dark-drama cliche, from the coked-up dealers and the sinister preachers to that curvy corpse in her antlers. “True Detective” has some tangy dialogue (“You are the Michael Jordan of being a son of a bitch”) and it can whip up an ominous atmosphere, rippling with hints of psychedelia, but these strengths finally dissipate, because it’s so solipsistically focussed on the phony duet.
I enjoyed the show and am seated in the McConaissance cheering section, but True Detective is far from TV’s best thing evar. And Nussbaum hits the nail right on the head: the lack of good women characters is to blame.
Something I’ve noticed about my favorite TV shows: they are mostly testosterone fests where the women are more interesting than the men. Mad Men is the perfect example. Game of Thrones is another. And Six Feet Under. Even in Deadwood, which I am rewatching now and is loads better than True Detective, women more than hold their own against the men. It’s fun to watch the men on these series generate bullshit, but it’s much more interesting to watch the great actresses who play these women navigate and elevate through the predictable male privilege.
It’s Saturday Sunday Night Live! Here’s Louis C.K.’s monologue from last night’s SNL; it’s 8 minutes of his trademark stand-up.
Joe Sabia has built The Office Time Machine, which is a collection of video clips of every single cultural reference ever made in The Office, organized by year. For example, here is 1994:
Sabia built it to highlight how much artists and creators borrow from culture:
The Office is relatable (and hilarious) because it borrows so much from culture, and people get the references. Culture is society’s collected knowledge, art, and customs. It’s what surrounds us and unites us, and it allows us to collectively laugh at a joke in The Office about Ben Franklin or M. Night Shyamalan. Culture, simply put, is the seasoning in a meal.
(via waxy)
The reboot of Cosmos has been solid but not spectacular so far, but the second episode contains as solid and clear an explanation of evolution as I’ve ever seen.
Even if evolution clashes with your world view, this is worth watching if only to understand what you’re aligned against (per Bret Victor’s advice). The third episode airs on Fox tonight and is about the creation of the scientific method.
For the show’s 10th anniversary, a video essay about Deadwood, perhaps the best three-season show that’ll ever be. Written and produced by Matt Zoller Seitz for RogerEbert.com.
Deadwood the series is a whole heck of a lot of things, in no particular order. And it’s that “in no particular order” part that makes it so rich.
(via @djacobs)
I had forgotten the Coens were turning Fargo into a FX TV series. But time has ground onward steadily and lo, the series is set to premiere in April. Here are a whole set of teaser trailers:
Billy Bob Thornton, Martin Freeman, Colin Hanks, Bob Odenkirk, Oliver Platt? Could be good. (via devour)
If you missed it last night as I did, the new version of Cosmos is now available on Hulu (probably US-only unless you’re clever).
The reviews are good so far.
If you’re having Downton Abbey withdrawals, may I suggest Robert Altman’s Gosford Park? Written by Downton creator Julian Fellowes, it’s a proto-Downton of sorts: lots of upstairs/downstairs with a dash of mystery. And the cast! Clive Owen, Emily Watson, Stephen Fry, Kristin Scott Thomas, Michael Gambon, Derek Jacobi, Kelly Macdonald, Helen Mirren, Ryan Phillippe…and Maggie Smith plays a witty countess.
Watch it on Netflix Instant, at Amazon, or on iTunes.
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