This site is made possible by member support. 💞
Big thanks to Arcustech for hosting the site and offering amazing tech support.
When you buy through links on kottke.org, I may earn an affiliate commission. Thanks for supporting the site!
kottke.org. home of fine hypertext products since 1998.
Beloved by 86.47% of the web.
When I was a kid, one of my favorite things on one of my favorite shows (3-2-1 Contact) was Al Jarnow’s Cosmic Clock, a short video animation showing a billion years of time passing in fewer than two minutes. There’s so much science in this little video.
This is one of those things I thought I’d just never see again. YouTube is truly a global treasure.
HBO is doing a show (or is it a movie?) based on Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections.
With 2 Oscar winners, Chris Cooper and Diane Wiest, already cast as the leads, this was a no-brainer, but it’s now official: HBO’s drama pilot The Corrections is proceeding to production.
Pitchfork has an excerpt of I Want My MTV, an oral history of the first decade of MTV.
I got word that Pepsi had bought the first spot in the 1984 Grammy telecast and they were gonna play a new Michael Jackson Pepsi ad. I’m like, “Michael Jackson belongs to MTV, not the Grammys.” I wasn’t gonna let it happen. So I called Roger Enrico, the head of Pepsi, and said, “Roger, I’ve got a major problem. This Pepsi Michael Jackson spot that’s gonna run in three weeks on the Grammys? That should run on MTV first.”
“Well, Garland, I’ve already made a deal with the Grammys.” I go, “Wait a minute. You know how we do world premieres of videos. What if I world premiere the commercial? And what if I give you 24 promos a day for two weeks leading up to it? Would that interest you?”
He goes, “How much do you want for this?” I said, “Nothing.” He goes, “What? You’re telling me you would promote a commercial 24 times a day for two weeks before playing it? Garland, I like your style. Done.” So it played for the first time on MTV.
(thx, jon)
Riffing off of a short observation I sent him, John Gruber speculates about what an Apple TV ecosystem might look like.
Why not the same thing [as Newsstand] for TV channels? We’re seeing the beginnings of this, with iPhone and iPad apps like HBO Go, Watch ESPN, and the aforementioned Bloomberg TV+. Letting each TV network do their own app allows them the flexibility that writing software provides. News networks can combine their written and video news into an integrated layout. Networks with contractual obligations to cable operators, like HBO and ESPN, can write code that requires users to log in to verify their status as an eligible subscriber.
This smells right to me…it’s a very Apple-y way of approaching the TV/movie problem. Rather than fight with the studios and networks over content sold through the iTunes Store (where the studios control the licensing rights), just provide a platform (iPhone + iPad + iTV + App Store) controlled by Apple and if the studios/networks want to reach those customers, they need to provide an app…with Apple taking a 30% cut of the App *and* content sales.
Over the next four Sundays on PBS, a documentary series called America in Primetime will talk about the best shows created since the invention of television.
America in Primetime is structured around the most com-pelling shows on television today, unfolding over four hours and weaving between past and present. Each episode focuses on one character archetype that has remained a staple of primetime through the generations - the Independent Woman, the Man of the House, the Misfit, and the Crusader — capturing both the continuity of the character, and the evolution. The finest television today has as its foundation the best television of yesterday.
The series has been getting great reviews…here’s one from NPR:
And when these people talk about TV, they don’t feel the need to play nice and agree. While most writer-producers in this show talk about television drama series as a novel, allowing an examination of characters over dozens of hours instead of just a movie-length drama, Sopranos creator David Chase asks what’s so great about that? Who needs a Casablanca II, III or IV? And when it comes to the idea of having a serial killer as your central character in Showtime’s Dexter, you’d be surprised who doesn’t approve of that concept. At least I was surprised. Because right along with Michael C. Hall, the star of Dexter, talking about his vengeful character, you have Tom Fontana and then David Simon, creator of The Wire, talking about why they think Dexter goes too far.
Here’s an eight-minute video introduction to the show:
(via nextdraft)
If you missed the cast reunion of Arrested Development at the New Yorker festival over the weekend, you can watch the whole thing on Facebook here (you must be logged in to see the video). This is the event at which they announced that the show will be coming back.
Premiering on HBO this week, a Martin Scorsese documentary on George Harrison, everyone’s favorite Beatle who wasn’t John or Paul.
Academy Award-winning director Martin Scorsese traces Harrison’s live from his musical beginnings in Liverpool though his life as a musician, a seeker, a philanthropist and a filmmaker, weaving together interviews with Harrison and his closest friends, performances, home movies and photographs. Much of the material in the film has never been seen or heard before. The result is a rare glimpse into the mind and soul of one of the most talented artists of his generation and a profoundly intimate and affecting work of cinema.
Today at the New Yorker Festival, the entire cast of Arrested Development gathered for the first time since the show wrapped in 2005 and the big news was:
If all goes according to plan, the series will return to television in a nine- or ten-episode limited-run television series, set to film next summer, with each episode focussing on a single member of the Bluth clan. And series creator Mitchell Hurwitz said that he is halfway through the screenplay for a reunion film and is “eighty per cent” sure it will happen.
!!!!
This is just flat-out fantastic.
[Dead Flash embed of http://www.viddler.com/simple/4306fd74/]
(via ★interesting)
Watch Fred Rogers sing the opening theme from Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood from 1967 to 2000.
(via ★aaroncohen)
These maps are updated every week and they tell you which games are on TV in which parts of the country. Not an issue if you have DirectTV or whatever, but for the rest of us… (thx, joshua)
1. Amazon has every single episode available on Instant Video. (thx, matthew)
2. PBS Kids has a bunch of episodes available with a kid-friendly video player. (thx, chris)
3. Episode guides and more at The Neighborhood Archive Blog. (thx, jeff)
After reading the fantastic Tom Junod piece on Fred Rogers earlier in the week, I poked around on YouTube for some Mister Rogers clips and shows. There are only a few full episodes on there but two of them are particularly relevant as kids across the nation go back to school for the fall:
I watched the first episode with Ollie yesterday (he was a big fan of the trolley, which was always my favorite part of the show too) and then we watched how crayons are made and how people make trumpets.
After our YouTube supply is exhausted, we’ll move on to DVDs (here’s a music compilation and episodes from the first week of the show), Netflix, or Amazon Instant Video, which has a bunch of episodes available for free (!!) for Prime subscribers.
This one is mostly for my wife, who gleefully mocks TV infomerical actors who have trouble flipping a simple pancake or operating a mop.
(via devour)
The Internet Archive has collected thousands of hours of TV news coverage from September 11, 2001 and the following days.
The 9/11 Television News Archive is a library of news coverage of the events of 9/11/2001 and their aftermath as presented by U.S. and international broadcasters. A resource for scholars, journalists, and the public, it presents one week of news broadcasts for study, research and analysis.
Television is our pre-eminent medium of information, entertainment and persuasion, but until now it has not been a medium of record. This Archive attempts to address this gap by making TV news coverage of this critical week in September 2001 available to those studying these events and their treatment in the media.
An amazing resource. But God, that’s hard to watch.
Socials & More