Watch Star Trek online for free
As it isn’t an official thing, I don’t quite know how this works, but you can go to Watch Trek and watch any episode of any Star Trek series from the original series to Enterprise. The quality is pretty good too.
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kottke.org posts about TV
Cookie Monster wants to host SNL
Here’s his audition video:
Fantastic idea…I would love to see a Saturday Night Live with Sesame Street characters. Hey, if 30 Rock is really The Muppet Show…
The Hour, Britain’s Mad Men?
Dominic West, who starred as McNutty in The Wire, will play the lead character in a six-part BBC series called The Hour. The show is set in the 1950s and will air next year.
The Hour follows the launch of a topical news show in London set against the backdrop of a mysterious murder. West will play Hector Madden, the programme’s upper-crust, charismatic front man.
The series is being called the UK version of Mad Men:
The only place with better retro fashion than New York in the 1960s is London in the 1950s.
(via unlikely words)
The economics of Seinfeld
Dozens of scenes from Seinfeld used to explain economic concepts. For instance, in an episode from season five:
George thinks he has been offered a job, but the man offering it to him got interrupted in the middle of the offer, and will be on vacation for the next week. George, unsure whether an offer has actually been extended, decides that his best strategy is to show up. If the job was indeed his, this is the right move. But even if the job is not, he believes that the benefits outweigh the costs.
Economic concepts touched on: cost-benefit analysis, dominant strategy, and game theory. (via what i learned today)
Sherlock!
The BBC aired a new adaptation of Sherlock Holmes this summer called, simply, Sherlock. The three 90-minute episodes are set in the present day (which could have been cheesy but isn’t) and make for some really good television. American audiences can find all three episodes on Masterpiece Mystery on PBS starting this week:
Starring Benedict Cumberbatch (Atonement, The Last Enemy) in the title role, Martin Freeman (The Office, UK) as Dr. John Watson and Rupert Graves (God on Trial, The Forsyte Saga) as Inspector Lestrade, Sherlock premieres on Masterpiece mystery! on Sundays, October 24, 31, and November 7, 2010 at 9pm ET on PBS (check local listings).
In with three criminally clever whodunits, A Study in Pink (October 24), The Blind Banker (October 31) and The Great Game (November 7), consulting detective Sherlock Holmes teams up with former army doctor John Watson to solve a dizzying array of crimes with his signature deductive reasoning. From the writers of Doctor Who, Sherlock is co-created and written by Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat.
Worth seeking out, especially if you get PBS in HD (here’s the opening title sequence). If you miss it, the series is also available on Blu-ray and DVD on Nov 9.
The Great Egg Race
The Great Egg Race was a late-70s/early-80s BBC TV show that was a kind of Junkyard Wars on a smaller and more nerdy scale. The first episode shows a number of people attempting to build small egg carrying cars powered by rubber band.
I love this stuff. I had a physics teacher in high school who presented us with a number of these challenges throughout the school year. There was the strong toothpick bridge (someone basically cheated and made a glue bridge with embedded toothpicks) and the rolling object (it had to go down a short ramp and stop on a mark about 10 feet away), but my favorites were the mouse trap-powered car and the egg drop.
The winning mouse trap car was made with a lot of assistance from the student’s father, who owned a machine shop. It was light but solid with precisely machined plastic wheels and a precisely machined axle and travelled probably twice as far as any of the other cars, which were generally built with whatever crappy off-the-shelf components could be scrounged from the local five-and-dime. I spent three satisfying late nights building my car and came in pretty close to last.
The egg drop challenge involved constructing a landing pad no taller than 12 inches for an unboiled egg. Competitors dropped their eggs from successively greater heights until the egg broke. The two winning landing pads were successful at the greatest height that our small school could muster…out a window at the top of the football field stands, probably about 35 or 40 feet tall. One was a huge box full of wool and other soft materials that could have successfully cushioned an egg dropped from the top of the Sears Tower. The other winner was a tupperware bowl full of stale popcorn that your humble blogger grabbed off the counter the morning of the challenge after completely forgetting about it over the weekend. No one was more surprised than I to discover that popcorn is an ideal egg cushioning material…not that I let on. :)
Four Things About Mr. Snuffleupagus
1. His full name is Aloysius Snuffleupagus.
2. For more than 14 years, Big Bird was the only character on Seasame Street who could see Snuffy…he was BB’s imaginary friend.
3. Some of the grownups on the show came to believe Big Bird about the existence of Mr. Snuffleupagus and he was revealed to them in November 1985 (full episode here):
4. Snuffy’s reveal came about because of some high-profile sexual abuse cases:
In an interview on a Canadian telethon that was hosted by Bob McGrath, Snuffy’s performer, Martin P. Robinson, revealed that Snuffy was finally introduced to the main human cast mainly due to a string of high profile and sometimes graphic stories of pedophilia and sexual abuse of children that had been aired on shows such as 60 Minutes and 20/20. The writers felt that by having the adults refuse to believe Big Bird despite the fact that he was telling the truth, they were scaring children into thinking that their parents would not believe them if they had been sexually abused and that they would just be better off remaining silent.
(via @h_fj)
He-Man on Hulu
A bunch of old episodes of He-Man on Hulu! Wow, were these episodes this bad and slow when I was a kid?
NFL TV maps for 2010 season
I’m a little late this year, but the 2010 NFL maps site has been up and humming for four weeks now. The site displays what games are going to be on TV in different parts of the country.
David Simon’s original pitch for The Wire
David Simon was just awarded one of the MacArthur Foundation’s $500,000 genius grants, so I thought it would be interesting to revisit Simon’s original pitch of The Wire to HBO (PDF).
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.
From my original post on this in April 2009 (which also contains links to three episode scripts):
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 just doesn’t have the same ring to it, does it?
Mad Men reading list
The NYPL blog has compiled a list of books ripped from the scenes of Mad Men.
Some of the titles are featured prominently in the series and others are mentioned in passing. Remember the book Sally read with her grandfather at bedtime? The book on Japanese culture the agency was told to read? The scandalous book the ladies passed between each other in secret? You can find all these and more!
(via mad men unbuttoned)
Liz Lemon flashback collection
I wonder if they’ll ever do a flashback where Liz is heavier (as Fey once was).
Fallon and Timberlake give rap history lesson
This is the best thing you’ll see all day. Please just watch:
[Dead Flash embed of http://widget.nbc.com/videos/nbcshort_at.swf?CXNID=1000004.10045NXC&widID=4727a250e66f9723&clipID=1252017&showID=243]
The Beastie Boys and Eminem stuff killed me. Who knew Fallon could sing? (via @hodgman)
Jon Stewart in profile
From New York magazine a couple of weeks ago, a profile of serious funnyman Jon Stewart.
Stewart made himself into the leading critic and satirist of the media-political complex, starting with “Indecision 2000,” The Daily Show’s parody of that year’s presidential campaign. His comedy is counterprogramming-postmodern entertainment but with a political purpose. As truth has been overrun by truthiness and facts trampled by lies, he and The Daily Show have become an invaluable corrective-he’s Cronkite, the most trusted man in America, although in keeping with the fragmented culture, he’s trusted by many fewer people, about 1.8 million viewers each night. Years ago, Stewart lost out to Conan O’Brien and Jimmy Kimmel for late-night network jobs, but the shifting media fortunes have made him the long-run winner, with vastly more job security and cultural influence than his conventional talk-show competitors-and most conventional journalists.
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