kottke.org posts about TV
Robert Chew, who played Proposition Joe on The Wire, died yesterday aged 52.
Prop Joe was one of the few characters to appear regularly in all five seasons of David Simon’s urban drama. Chew was a mountain of a man with a world-class deadpan, always underselling the character’s juiciest lines. “Gotta say I’m proud of y’all for putting aside petty grievances and putting this thing together,” Joe intones during a meeting of the New Day Co-op, a democratic association of drug dealers whose meetings are run via Robert’s Rules of Order. “For a cold-assed crew of gangsters, y’all carried it like Republicans and shit.”
An entire Tumblr full of images of Downton Abbey’s Lady Edith Crawley with googly eyes.
God, this makes me unbelievably happy.
These are all so perfect but I’m having a hard time deciding which is the most perfect….the Mrs Patmore tabby or the Dowager Countess Sphynx?
Prints are $22 a pop on Etsy and likely to go quickly. (via @mathowie)
BBC Research & Development have created a site using the Web Audio API that lets you recreate the sounds of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, stuff you may have heard on a Jon Pertwee-era episode of Dr Who. The Wobbulator is my favorite.
The gang at Overthinking It have analyzed the endings of all 456 episodes of Law & Order (guilty, not guilty, plea bargain, etc.).
“Implied win” refers to episodes in which you don’t see a plea bargain or Guilty verdict, but it’s pretty clear that’s the way things are headed. For instance, if the killer’s wife tearfully agrees to testify against him and then the episode ends, it’s an “implied win.” We don’t know the outcome, but we are led to believe it’s going to be some flavor of Justice. (The rare cases where the result was completely unclear went into the Other category.)
Over the entire run of the show, more than a third of all the episodes ended in Guilty verdicts, while another third ended in plea bargains. 80% of episodes ended in solid wins: either Guilty verdicts, plea bargains, or implied victories. That’s not too shabby, considering that the actual NYPD has a homicide clearance rate of about 50%. (Although you have to figure Law & Order isn’t meant to represent every case these detectives investigated; in 20 seasons, I don’t think there was a single murder that didn’t result in an arrest.)
They also looked at all of the red and yellow alerts on Star Trek:TNG.
You need predictable and changing seasons to grow grapes and the Game of Thrones world features long unpredictable seasons…so where does all that wine come from?
The seasons in George RR Martin’s medieval fantasy are a random, unpredictable mess. They could last anywhere from a few months to a decade and there’s no way to forecast them. As the story opens, the characters are near the end of a long, ten-year summer. They also worry about the coming winter, which will cause mass starvation if it also lasts years on end. This wonky climate is an irreplaceable part of Game of Thrones. Westeros would not be remotely the same without it.
But grapevines have a life cycle that depends on regular seasons. In winter, grapevines are dormant. Come spring they sprout leaves. As summer begins, they flower and tiny little grapes appear. Throughout the summer the grapes fill up with water, sugar and acid. The grapes are finally ready for picking in early autumn, then go back to sleep in winter. This cycle is why wineries can rely on a yearly grape yield. Obviously, in Westeros, something must be different about how grapes work.
(via bb)
Illustrator Dennis Culver is offering for sale a poster of 50+ characters from The Wire.
You’ve obviously got your Omar and String, but you’ve also got Butchie and Lamarr and Horseface. $25 for the poster…that’s about 50 cents a character!
My wife and I have been watching Boardwalk Empire for the past three seasons and it’s seemed at times like we were the only ones. Writing for Grantland, Carles argues that the show got great this season and I totally agree. (Warning: tons of spoilers.)
Basically, I spent the first two seasons of Boardwalk Empire trying to figure out whether or not I even enjoyed the show. It featured premium producers, directors, writers, and actors, but it never felt like you were watching the show of the moment. Boardwalk Empire has been popular enough to get renewed regularly (it will be back for a fourth season next year), but it’s been difficult to come to a consensus on whether or not it has been a fulfilling experience. There’s a gap between high-end critical acclaim and casual fans. The uninitiated never get it. ‘It’s boring,’ they say. ‘It’s trying to be something it isn’t.’ And maybe they were right. Fortunately, Season 3 has changed everything.
The show’s tough to recommend to people because it’s such a slow starter (compared to something like Breaking Bad or Homeland or whatever), but I’m happy we stuck with it.
The BBC is making a 6-part miniseries out of Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell.
For those unfamiliar with the book, it’s a sweeping fantasy novel set during the Napoleonic Wars where two magicians have emerged in Britain. As well as telling the story of their rivalry, it also details an amazing alternate history where the North of England was the dominion of a magical overlord known as the Raven King, and pulls in many notable historical characters.
Can’t wait…I loved JS&MN.
I am not ashamed to admit that, to my total surprise, I am looking forward to the second season of Girls more than The Hobbit or the next season of Mad Men. (But perhaps not season three of Game of Thrones. Perhaps.)
Friendly reminder: ten episodes of Anthony Bourdain and David Chang’s Mind of a Chef are available to view for free on the PBS website. I am through two episodes so far and it’s my favorite cooking/food show since The Naked Chef.1 Here’s the first episode, all about ramen:
[I removed the embed because it was autoplaying for some unlucky people. You can watch the first episode here.]
The first four episodes will be taken down after Friday so act now.
[1] No joke, those first couple seasons of Oliver’s show were really good. It’s not the original Iron Chef or anything, but still. ↩
A spoof episode of American Experience on hobos, narrated by John Hodgman.
I posted this a few years ago but ran across it randomly the other day and had to feature it again. See also the Human Planet episode about The Douche.
In a rant as informative as it is funny, filmmaker Stu Maschwitz explains why your TV ruins movies & tells you what presets to use, what settings to disable, and why you shouldn’t buy a TV in a store.
TVs are designed to do one thing above all: sell. To do so, they must fight for attention on brightly-lit showroom floors. Manufacturers accomplish this in much the same way that transvestite hookers in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district do—by showing you everything they’ve got, turned up to eleven. You want brightness? We’ll scald your retinas. You want sharpness? We’ll draw a black outline around everything for you. […]
These days, any TV you are likely to buy, will, by default, have technology enabled that completely changes the emotional quality of the movies you watch. This is a cinematic disaster.
(via @rcjohnso)
Last week, the hosts of NFL Kick Off on ESPN, Trey Wingo, Mark Sclereth, and Tedy Bruschi, jammed as many Princess Bride references as they could into their half hour show. Jack Moore collected them. Genuine guffaw at “There will be no survivors” from around :45.
(thx, Alex)
The Dust Bowl is a four-hour documentary by Ken Burns airing on PBS starting this weekend.
The Dust Bowl chronicles the worst man-made ecological disaster in American history, in which the frenzied wheat boom of the “Great Plow-Up,” followed by a decade-long drought during the 1930s nearly swept away the breadbasket of the nation. Vivid interviews with twenty-six survivors of those hard times, combined with dramatic photographs and seldom seen movie footage, bring to life stories of incredible human suffering and equally incredible human perseverance. It is also a morality tale about our relationship to the land that sustains us — a lesson we ignore at our peril.
You can watch the first five minutes of the film on the PBS site.
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