The exact same newspaper has shown up in different TV shows — Six Feet Under, Married With Children, That 70s Show, etc. — for several years now. Does anyone have the backstory on this?
Update: Slate’s Brow Beat blog has the backstory:
Production companies use prop newspapers instead of real ones because getting clearance from an actual publication is usually more work than it’s worth in potential fees and bureaucracy. (There are exceptions. When Tony Soprano picked up his paper each morning, it was always the Newark Star Ledger.) Rather than battle the legal department at the New York Times for that perfunctory breakfast shot, prop masters buy a stack of Earl Hays fake papers, which cost just $15 each. Sometimes if they have some left over they’ll recycle them for another job.
I am glad that someone compiled a list of all of the unanswered questions that the Lost producers/writers left when the show ended.
[Dead Flash embed of http://www.collegehumor.com/moogaloop/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=1936291&fullscreen=1]
I don’t really care about the answers to most of these but watching it irritates me that they jerked us around with the Dharma/Others/Walt/4-toed statue crap when it didn’t matter at all. Oh, and the fucking numbers and the whole ARG thing. “All of this matters”, Jack? Uh, no.
I get giddy around big television events. The Lost finale this weekend certainly qualifies and a big question is, “Will fans of the show be satisfied with how it ends?” From Seinfeld to the Sopranos (for different reasons), series finales have a history of being disappointing. In this way, it’s almost easier when a show is canceled because then we get to blame the network as opposed to the writers. That said, I want to be satisfied Sunday. LOTS of other people are talking about Lost this week. Here’s what some of them are saying:
Doc Jensen
I’m ready for the final chapter, ready to see how it sums up the season and brings the series to a close. I’m ready to watch meaning (which, to be clear, is different than answers)… But will the meaning leave us in despair, or take us into happily ever after?
TV Guide Magazine
What makes Lost so special is that it never spelled things out for us the way a normal TV show does. It defies formula in a medium that regularly rewards it. Lost asked us to get lost within the show and to be satisfied with being lost for most of its run. TV almost never operates that way.
NYTimes.com:
The show had one good season, its first. It was very, very good …but none of the seasons since have approached that level, and the current sixth season, rushed, muddled and dull, has been the weakest.
NPR
To me, some of the trick of Lost has been that some things are important and some things aren’t…And that doesn’t bother me at all, because that’s part of constructing a convincing universe.
Newsweek.com
I’m not saying there aren’t major mysteries of Lost that I don’t want solved…But I’ve accepted at this point that the running tally of questions I’ve had about the show will likely never be answered…I don’t want them to be. Why? Because the answers would probably suck.
3 Lost Links: Lost Re-Enacted By Cats and I’ll Never Be Lost Again, a hip hop homage, and this from the National Post.
Slate Magazine
Or perhaps the message will be that we should all find meaning in one another, instead of in some mystical riddle. (A swipe at religion? An affirmation of personal agency? A meta-critique of fans who take the show waaaay too seriously?)
The Atlantic
It’s all going to come down to this: is this a story about fate or choice? All along, many clues left us thinking it was a matter of fate: the numbers, the crazy mainland connections, Jacob’s touch…
Jezebel
The show really had a lot of ground to cover this season in order to satisfy its loyal fans, but I think we all knew deep down that we’d never really know everything. Still, we were thrown several bones of juicy Island lure…
io9
If you think of Lost as being one big novel…then the stuff that happened in Chapter Five ought to be meaningful in the final chapter. There ought to be a sense that everything was leading towards this ending…
NYMag
Nothing that was key in the early seasons…is even in play. Even the ambiguities of “Across the Sea” now seem like attempts to shade the battle between mustache-twirling, murderous Smokey and his limp, Jesus-y antagonist.
Sepinwall
And now we see that the writers have saved the explanation of the sideways universe for the finale. Even with all that extra time to play with, that seems like an awful lot to squeeze into the finale…I still find myself oddly trusting that they know what they’re doing with this finale.
TIME
Inevitably, any answers we get from this point on will satisfy some people and not others.
The Watcher
Did their deaths have meaning or were they just more victims of the seemingly endless battle between the Man in Black/Smockey and Jacob? This episode started the process of claiming that their deaths did indeed have meaning…
The Boston Globe
For a drama that traffics in philosophy, religious allegory, physics, and literary references from Jane Austen to Kurt Vonnegut, “Lost” has a decidedly B-movie feel. After the remarkably cinematic 2004 pilot episode, set immediately after the Oceanic 815 plane crash, the adventure has been pretty schlocky.
Zap2it
With only two and a half hours to go, there’s simply no way for the show to answer every lingering mystery still up for discussion. I’m not entirely sure that’s a bug as a much as a feature.
WSJ.com
If we give the writers a little grace and extend some patience, the suspense leading up to the finale of this television show could teach us something about faith in general.
Defamer
We propped up the show with our eyeballs, our blog posts, our participation in those agonizing summertime internet Easter egg hunts. They created the whole thing, out of nothing…Let them end it their way.
LATimes.com
For years series were canceled and disappeared without ceremony, but nowadays…it is more usual to aim for some sort of closure. (Just as it’s become more common, in life, to think we need it.)
KansasCity.com
If we were to do a poll on which of the three retiring shows will have the longest and strongest afterlife, I’d bet the winner would be “Lost.” Of course, the poll would be conducted on the Internet, which is sagging under the load of commentary…
Best Week Ever
What They Died For Better Not Be That Stupid Light
PopMatters
Now I’m just holding on for whatever may come. As long as it isn’t a snow globe in an autistic child’s hand, I’ll be okay.
USATODAY.com
Fates will be decided, questions will be answered, and one of TV’s greatest series…will come to its conclusion. Not since The Fugitive, one suspects, has a series finale been greeted with such anticipation, and such dread.
Recently, Mat Williams hand wrote 288 of the lines Bart Simpson writes on the blackboard to open every episode. He used 20 white markers over 2 days to complete the work on the 22m long blackboard at Work Club, a London based ad agency. Clicking here will allow you to zoom in on any part of the blackboard, while clicking here will allow you to watch a video of Mat skateboarding through London and writing on the blackboard in a Bart Simpson mask.
Incidentally, there have been 463 episodes, and Bart doesn’t write on the chalk board in the opening to all of them. To read a list of all the openings, go here. To SEE a list of all the openings, go here. There’s an electrical outlet in front of Bart’s knee in every season except season 1 and season 21. This might only be interesting to me.
(via nerdcore + thedailywh.at)
NBC announced on Friday that Law and Order would be canceled after 20 years.* As the New York Times ably put it, “the wheels of TV justice will soon grind to a halt.” City officials estimate that the show pumped about $1 billion into the New York City economy. And won’t someone think of the actors.
Several casting directors for theater, film and television estimated on Friday that the majority of actors’ resumes that came across their desks included “Law & Order” credits. Some actors who worked chiefly in New York theater, drawing weekly salaries of $500 to $1,500 for their stage roles, supplemented those paychecks by playing judges, jurors and police officers on “Law & Order.” Pay for those jobs ranged from a few hundred dollars to $1,000 or so a week for only a few moments of screen time.
*They also announced that Heroes would be canceled, but I didn’t know that was still on.
Although you might think otherwise, people tend to watch TV live, even when recording shows for later viewing on DVRs is an option. The pull of communal activity for the human social animal is strong.
Like all social activities, television-watching demands compromise. People may have strong ideas about what they want to watch, but what they really want to do is watch together. So the great majority of them first see “what is on” — that is, what is being broadcast at that moment. Restricted choice makes it easier to agree on what to watch. If nothing appeals, they move on to the programmes stored in a DVR. On the very rare occasions when they find nothing there, they will look for an on-demand video.
Some of my favorites are Prezbo, My Name is My Name, Hamsterdam, Always Boris, Fuzzy Dunlop, and Sheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeit. Glaring omissions? Hit Me on My Burner, Snot Boogie, and Pack o’ Newports. The full list. (thx, tash & nathan)
Or so says Errol Morris. It’s certainly the most honest advertising I’ve ever seen.
A bouncer in Birmingham hit me in the face with a crescent wrench five times and my wife’s boyfriend broke my jaw with a fence post. So if you don’t buy a trailer from me, it ain’t gonna hurt my feelings. So come on down to Cullman Liquidation and get yourself a home. Or don’t. I don’t care.
(via fimoculous)
We love these in our household. My wife was howling with laughter at the Shoe Dini commercial just last night…the “problem” was that if you bent over to put on your shoes, your shirt would get wrinkled. Oh, the humanity. (thx, mark)
The Beauty of Maps is a BBC series that “[looks] at maps in incredible detail to highlight their artistic attributions and reveal the stories that they tell”. The site also links to another maps blog: Amazing Maps. (via junk_deluxe)
Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner says that Mad Men will end after six seasons. Which is good news and completely unsurprising.
For fans who were holding out hope that we might see the show drag on into the ’70s or even ’80s — giving Don Draper a chance to try out key parties, double-knit polyester, muttonchops, and eventually cocaine and yuppie amorality in Reagan’s America — it’s probably a little disappointing. But for everyone else, it’s reassuring to know that Weiner is working with a specific endpoint in mind.
Television drama is known as a writer’s medium but directors wield increasing influence over the visual language of a show.
[Jack] Bender didn’t direct the Lost pilot — that was J.J. Abrams — but he helmed the second episode, “Walkabout,” and set some ground rules that have largely endured. Handheld cameras shouldn’t be used unless they serve a real dramatic purpose. (“I said, ‘OK, let’s not become the handheld show,’” Bender says.) Blues and greens, the main colors on the island, should largely be kept out of the flashback scenes. During the filming of “Walkabout,” Bender also made subtle changes to the script in order to heighten the drama. One scene, set on the beach amid the ruins of a crashed airplane, called for a knife to fly through the air and land in the trunk of a tree. Bender decided to send the knife into a seat cushion lodged in the sand, while a character sat in the adjacent seat.
Every episode of Shelley Duvall’s Faerie Tale Theatre can be found on Hulu. I had no idea this show existed until the other day, but it sounds like it was quite a program:
Faerie Tale Theatre brings to life twenty-six of the most magical fairy tales of all time. Directed by such masters of cinema as Tim Burton, Francis Ford Coppola and more, and star-powered by Robin Williams, Billy Crystal, Mick Jaggar, James Earl Jones, Howie Mandel, Christopher Reeve, Susan Sarandon and more, this collection is an unparalleled treasury of the best-loved tales of enchantment, adventure and wonder.
Here’s the Tim Burton-directed Aladdin and His Wonderful Lamp and Rip Van Winkle directed by Francis Ford Coppola. (via andrea inspired)
One of the many places reviewed on TripAdvisor is a small Pennsylvania B&B called Schrute Farms…which you might recall is from The Office. From the NY Times:
Carla Harrington of Fredricksburg, Va., was surprised to find 82 percent of reviews recommended Schrute Farms. “I thought about what it would feel like not to know them as TV characters but to really go to this B & B,” she said in an interview. Her one-star slam called Dwight “an overbearing survivalist who appears to have escaped from the local mental asylum.”
(via mrod)
For your Lost party tonight: dozens and dozens of Dharma Initiative food labels that you can print out and affix to bottles and jars.
Includes steak sauce, cake mix, tuna, sake, and guacamole dip.
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