kottke.org posts about TV
Perplexed and irritated that I couldn’t find any Barcelona FC matches on TV for the past few weeks, I finally did some research and it turns out that’s because Qatar-based Al Jazeera bought up the TV rights to several European leagues but doesn’t actually have a channel to show the games to most American viewers.
Lionel Messi’s and Cristiano Ronaldo’s league matches will disappear from the television sets of many American soccer fans, starting this weekend.
That’s because the U.S. television rights to Spain’s La Liga have switched from GolTV to the new beIN Sport USA network, launched this week by the Al-Jazeera Sport Media Network and available in only about 8 million homes to viewers of DirecTV and DISH Network.
And it’s not just Spain’s soccer that is affected.
Italy’s Serie A, France’s Ligue 1, England’s second-tier League Championship and England’s League Cup also have moved to high-spending beIN Sport, which is taking over all of them from News Corp.’s Fox Soccer.
“The ratings are going to be so low that they will be almost unmeasurable,” said Marc Ganis of the Chicago-based Sports Corp. Ltd., consulting firm. “Considering the push that European soccer is making in the United States, taking additional money and losing exposure becomes fools’ gold. They need to have a long-term strategy, not short-term.”
What. In. The. Actual. Fuck!?
The upcoming season of The Office will be the show’s last, but we will finally get to see who is behind the camera filming. From the executive producer of the show:
All questions will be answered this year. We are going to see who’s behind the documentary and we’re going to meet some of them. (Also) a big Jim and Pam year.
This is apparently taped off of someone’s television so the picture is blurry and the sound is not so good, but you get the gist.
[Dead Flash embed of http://www.springboardplatform.com/mediaplayer/springboard/video/sotv036/677/532735/]
Season three of Downton is set to start airing in the UK in September and in the US in January (for those who don’t know what BitTorrent is).
David Simon remembers his friend DeAndre McCullough, who died last week. You might remember him as Lamar (Brother Mouzone’s assistant) from The Wire and was also profiled by Simon and Edward Burns in The Corner.
At fifteen, he was selling drugs on the corners of Fayette Street, but that doesn’t begin to explain who he was. For the boys of Franklin Square — too many of them at any rate — slinging was little more than an adolescent adventure, an inevitable right of passage. And whatever sinister vision you might conjure of a street corner drug trafficker, try to remember that a fifteen-year-old slinger is, well, fifteen years old.
He was funny. He could step back from himself and mock his own stances — “hard work,” he would say when I would catch him on a drug corner, “hard work being a black man in America.” And then he would catch my eye and laugh knowingly at his presumption. His imitations of white-authority voices — social workers, police officers, juvenile masters, teachers, reporters — were never less than pinpoint, playful savagery. The price of being a white man on Fayette Street and getting to know DeAndre McCullough was to have your from-the-other-America pontifications pulled and scalpeled apart by a manchild with an uncanny ear for hypocrisy and cant.
(via @mrgan)
If you’re anything like me, you take things like 34 People You Probably Didn’t Know Were On Seinfeld as a challenge. It’s been awhile, but I’ve seen every episode of that show (most of them at least twice) so I thought this would be easy but I totally had forgotten or didn’t realize that Jon Favreau, Catherine Keener, Amanda Peet, Denise Richards, and James Spader were on the show. Guess I’m not the Seinfeld fan I thought I was.
Writing for The Awl, Heather Havrilesky (who you may remember from Suck) highlights three stereotypical TV characters (The Hapless Dad, The Friend, and The Wise Old Professional) and characters on three current shows (Louie, Girls, and Mad Men) that cut right through that bullshit.
Because on “Girls,” not only is The Friend (Hannah, played by Dunham) not all that insecure (relatively speaking), but she also has more swagger and courage and heart than The Hot One (Marnie) and The Other Hot One (Jessa) and The Sort of Hot One (Shoshanna) put together. Instead of whining and weeping snottily into her hands the way The Friend would do on any other television show, Hannah gets naked and refuses to exercise but realizes that she is exactly 13 pounds overweight (this isn’t some fantasyland, after all, except for the trust funds and bad Fu Manchus). Hannah has lots of not-very-great sex. She’s sometimes timid and confused, sure, but she’s brave enough to state her feelings to people directly. She’s self-possessed. But most importantly, she is not preoccupied with not being The Hot One. She wears clothing that doesn’t compliment her body. She doesn’t appear to brush her hair regularly. She doesn’t have to, because she doesn’t believe that there is some center of the universe located somewhere other than where she is, and she’ll only get there if her hair is brushed. No. She can simply exist and do what regular people do: Eat, worry, sleep late, roll her eyes, fall on her face.
I’m gonna come out and say that I really liked Girls, due in large part (I’m realizing now) to Hannah’s (and Adam’s and Ray’s) directness and self-possession.
A selection of good Ralph Wiggum moments from The Simpsons.
Pretty good, except that they missed “I’m Idaho”, “This tastes like burning”, and “Oh boy, sleep! That’s where I’m a viking!” (via @erikmal)
The Apollo 11 Lunar Module landed on the surface of the Moon 43 years ago today. For the 40th anniversary of the landing in 2009, I put together a page where you can watch the original CBS News coverage of Walter Cronkite reporting on the Moon landing and the first Moon walk, synced to the present-day time. I’ve updated the page to work again this year: just open this page in your browser and the coverage will start playing at the proper time. Here’s the schedule:
Moon landing broacast start: 4:10:30 pm EDT on July 20
Moon landing shown: 4:17:40 pm EDT
Moon landing broadcast end: 4:20:15 pm EDT
{break}
Moon walk broadcast start: 10:51:27 pm EDT
First step on Moon: 10:56:15 pm EDT
Nixon speaks to the Eagle crew: approx 11:51:30 pm EDT
Moon walk broadcast end: 12:00:30 pm EDT on July 21
Here’s a post I wrote when I launched the project.
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 Dave Schumaker for the reminder.
Marissa Mayer has only been CEO at Yahoo! for a day and she’s already creating viral content like a stop motion Lego version of The Wire. Imagine what we’ll get when she’s been there a week.
Audible guffaws at, “What’s up his ass?” “No one likes our season, that’s what.” (via @jonahkeri)
The UK’s Channel 4 is bringing back Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror for a second season of three episodes.
He said: ‘British drama seems particularly obsessed with murder and the past, often together. Black Mirror is a rare modern look at where society and individuals could be headed, given the all-pervasive deluge of social media and technology.’
The first series prompted 322 complaints over a story in which a Prime Minister was blackmailed into having sex with a pig live on TV.
Brooker said: ‘Half of the things in the first run of Black Mirror seem to be on the verge of coming true. They’ve got prisoners in Brazilian prisons pedalling on exercise bikes to reduce their sentences (not entirely dissimilar to the episode 15 Million Merits) and Google Glass looks like copyright infringement as far as The Entire History of You is concerned.
Well, everyone knows Clinton played sax on the Arsenio Hall Show. What this video presupposes is… maybe he played M83?
Watch at :30 to see the hand claps sync. (★Interesting)
Here’s the entire first episode of Aaron Sorkin’s The Newsroom. You can also watch it on HBO.com but you have to register first. I doubt non-US residents can watch it in either place. Why isn’t this embeddable? I don’t understand…they don’t want more people to watch it? Does the internet girl know?
PBS teamed up with Symphony of Science’s John Boswell for this remix, “the first in a series of PBS icons remixed.” I’ve listened to this 5 times.
You can grow ideas in the garden of your mind. (via sly oyster)
This is amazing…a trailer for a musical version of The Wire done by Funny or Die. Featuring real cast members from the show like Michael K. Williams as Omar, Felicia Pearson as Snoop, and Andre Royo as Bubbles.
(via @monstro)
The Wire premiered on HBO 10 years ago tomorrow so Maxim (what really?) is out with a long oral history. It’s all worth reading (and finally proof for the ‘I read it for the articles’ argument), but the more interesting bits to me were towards the end, and I wish there were a few more comments from superfans. Marc Spitz did an amazing job wrangling interviews from the majority of the cast.
New to me was the cop actors and crook actors not hanging out together, and Prop Joe mentoring the kids from Season 4.
Tristan Wilds (Michael Lee, student, Stanfield gang enforcer): Every time we’d get a script all four of us would sit down with Robert Chew go over the script and make sure we had it down.
Robert F. Chew (Joseph “Proposition Joe” Stewart, drug kingpin): A couple of them were not from Baltimore so they did not have the lingo and the dialect, so I’d give them hints on that and just understanding the emotion of the scene.
I also liked this bit about Snoop.
Tristan Wilds: I remember when I first read the script, I was like “Noooo! Why do I gotta do it?” Snoop became like my big sister to me; she was everything. I was actually with my niece a couple months ago and she was watching iCarly -and there was a scene where Sam takes paint ball gun and shoots Gib, but he looks at her before she does and says, ‘How’s my hair look?’ And she says, “You look good, Gib.”
Method Man: I always went online to see the reactions that people would have after someone got killed. Snoop, when she got killed, oh you should’ve seen it. You would’ve thought somebody really died. Like it was a funeral happening: “RIP Snoop, we gon’ miss you,” and all this craziness. They were just two lines short of making “In Memory Of” T-Shirts. Same thing with Omar. Stringer, same thing. Then when I die, it’s like “good for him. They should’ve killed his ass sooner.”
Also on the 10th Anniversary tip, here’s Details on 10 Ways the Wire changed TV and The Atlantic says The Wire feels dated. (via @groveatlantic)
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