jmatonak | Entries tagged with tv

Avatar: The Last Airbender came to my attention because it has an entry on every. single. Tvtropes trope page, and because people were complaining about EPIC FAIL in the casting of the live action version. I resisted watching it for a long time because it was something that everybody liked, and everybody's tastes don't agree with mine most of the time.

But in this case? Everybody's right. This is a really good show.

( Live Action Casting FAIL )

So I'm off to watch the last two (sob!) episodes.

Iroh rules.

My magical teevee machine cut 30 Rock off before the credits.

Can anyone tell me who played the blind redhead in the 30 Rock episode "St. Valentine's Day?" I've checked all the usual internet places, and they don't know.

Because I posted to complain about it, Terminator: River Tam Beats Up Everybody went and got somewhat much better. For one thing, they don't make a point of killing off all the sympathetic characters anymore.

Oh, Tina Fey, why must you hurt me so?

(To be fair, I did gut-laugh.)

Apparently, part of me still thinks of me as a graduate student.

Dangit, other people have noticed real life is like the last season of The West Wing now.

It turns out Jimmy Smits/Matthew Santos really was based on Barack Obama.

( Spoilery Joke )

This show deserves to be cancelled.

If you're wondering why, it's because I just don't care if anyone lives or dies. The supposedly sympathetic characters are completely unpleasant, and every single character the audience is encouraged to get to know dies, usually within a scene or two. I hear this thing is going off the air, and I weep no tears for the producers. They take the axiom of "angst=art" and turn it up to about 14. It's cheap, it's bad writing, and in the age of DVRs we can fast forward to the Summer Glau fight scenes.

The producers of this piece of shit can't have a TV show until they learn to take proper care of one.

I just saw this week's Special Victims Unit. I found it disturbing, but probably not for the reason I was supposed to. For one thing, it was the monthly "Stabler snaps" episode. But, more importantly...

( Possibly triggery, definitely disturbing, spoilery )

I'm officially disappointed in Bionic Woman- someone let me know if it gets better, please.

I was so disappointed by the ending of Kim Possible I had to come out and admit I watch Kim Possible just so I could register this complaint about how disappointing the ending was. Or something.

Recent events here incline me to add this spoilery part.

( Read more... )

I seem to remember posting a lot on a site called Mighty Big TV, which changed its name to Television Without Pity not too long after I started posting there. I mostly posted about Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which was a really good show- and I specialized in getting into fights by defending characters who didn't seem to be popular. It turns out Spike was a lot more popular than I thought, and people got passionate all out of proportion- one of the ways I can tell Buffy was a really good show. So I got into a lot of Spike-related... discussions.

(Dawn was never popular. So I mostly remember taking abuse for defending her. Poor thing.)

Of course, there is a possibility that none of this ever happened and I was made to believe it did by creepy monks (see what I did there?), because a recent post in

swsa's journal sent me back there, and... I don't exist. There doesn't seem to be a single post by me. At least the fights I remember were kind of fun. So at minimum, I fabricated some memories of fun stuff.

So, to sum up:

Dawn Summers = 100% real
Me = not so real. Dawn's evidence that her memories actually happened is considerably more detailed.

Or maybe TWoP's search engine is broken. :)

I really don't know what to think of Battlestar Galactica anymore. It hasn't completely degenerated into soap opera. Some of the individual eps can be compelling. But it is definitely crossing over into the territory where I start to think, boy, this show could use more vampire slaying.

Claire's friend Zach, before his memory loss and subsequent makeover, reminded me of me in high school. I meant well, but I was terribly shy and repressed and confused. I would have had absolutely no idea how to handle a girl like Claire... but I really, really would have wanted to.

The producers had originally intended to leave the door open for the possibility of Zach being gay. They gave the kid a MySpace page in which his sexuality was listed as "questioning", and they "coded" Zach gay in all the ways that, in college, I was taught to associate with the films of Douglas Sirk. Then, because of actor rebellion or for some other reason, they apparently decided Zach was not so gay and stopped including those little hints.

Some viewers were up in arms. They were incensed that the producers had seemingly backed down from portraying a sympathetic gay character. I can sympathize. Honest. There need to be more sympathetic gay characters, of all ages and classes and backgrounds, on network TV. I do believe that. It is far more important to fight bigotry than it is to give me TV characters who mirror me. I believe that, too.

But I'm not gay. Gay is wonderful, but I'm not it. I can't have been the only kid that was like me, even if I was the only one I knew.

Zach reminded me, powerfully, of me. And, it was "obvious" Zach was gay. Apparently, there was no doubt of this in the minds of many viewers.

It makes for an odd and unsettling feeling.

(If I said this already and forgot, sorry for the spam.)

Current Mood: weird

I watch a lot of TV. Therefore, I see a lot of TV commercials.

Some commercials are very charming. (For example, I'm really enjoying Sophia Shorai's cover of "Hello Goodbye", which was apparently recorded for the Target ad that's airing now.) Some commercials are loathsome. (For example, I did not need to hear "I Melt With You" used to sell me Cheese-it's, or however you spell the name of that product.)

I have used the Internet to watch certain commercials over and over again. (I seem to remember a Lee Jeans ad with a giant woman in a little black dress. I mean, the dress was huge, but proportionately, it was a cute cocktail dress. You know.) It seems funny to me that I will occasionally seek out commercials and ignore the "entertainment" they are wrapped in. I'm not really bothered by that, because I feel everyone is being openhanded and above-board with me. Target got a girl with a pleasant voice to sing me a good song, and therefore can ask me to shop at their stores. I do not feel manipulated or lied to. I probably won't run out to Target, but I'll consider in the next time it's appropriate.

In contrast, there has only ever been one anti-drug ad that I thought was remotely fair. (I enjoyed seeing Rachael Leigh Cook rant and bust up a kitchen, but my brain is not an egg.)

The "fair" anti-drug ad was the one in which a young man explains that he went over to a friend's house, smoked pot, and stared vacantly into space for hours. He then enumerates all the more active things he could have been doing instead, and points out that he has better things to do than sit on a couch.

I'm from where I'm from. I know that a lot of the overblown rhetoric about drugs that I see in commercials is complete BS. But I felt that particular ad was being truthful. I liked that.

I have seen in a couple places the contention that Claire, on Heroes has been given a passive, weak, stereotypically girly power- the ability to take unlimited amounts of abuse with good humor and aplomb. With due respect to those who have espoused this view, I would like to dissent from it.

Claire is the second most powerful main character on the show, and the third most powerful overall. I would love to say Claire is the most powerful, but I can't- Hiro is an atrocity of power, and Sylar seems pretty excessive also. But, next to Hiro, Claire is the most powerful among the heroes of the show.

( There are spoilers (sort of) for episodes that have already aired behind this cut. )

Okay. I sat through what seemed like decades of Save the cheerleader, save the world... blipverts. And I like the show itself. But if I hear Are you on the list? enough times, I'm going to have to campaign hard for the cancellation of Heroes. And possibly burn down the sets. :P

***

Occasionally, I find myself asking the following question.

Are the rules of Monopoly true?

At first, and maybe for always, this question is just dumb. The adjective and the noun just don't match up. It's like asking if happiness is green. On the other hand, I know a lot of uses of the word true. Scientific truth, historical truth, and mathematical truth are all different. (One can interpret Wittgenstein's "The world is the totality of facts, not of things" as an effort to bridge these differences. If I were still in college, I would.)

I think that if I could come up with a way to answer the question instead of discarding it as ill-formed, I might really learn something.