MagneticMediaFed

Yikes. Crazy eyes!

What I’ve grown to love about Ugly Betty is that even a weaker episode (like last night’s) can still be jam packed with secret rooms, hidden diaries, foot fetishes, nosy reporters, lonely/crazy immigration case workers, secret deals, sexy blackmail, Marc, Amanda and Justin all inside the New York technicolor publishing industry. Oh, and there’s lots of cleavage.

Not every episode of Ugly Betty is a home run (or even a sac fly), but they’re certainly packed with plot. The show stays true to its telenovela roots by giving us two twists for every turn, an yet never feels like appointment television — which in this case almost seems refreshing.

I like knowing that it’s possible to make a show you can just jump into without having to fall back on the trapping of the “network procedural.” As long as you can understand the motivations of the characters (which any six year old could easily do), Ugly Betty is an easy show to pick up. Good drama doesn’t have to be as dense as Lost or as flat as Law & Order.

As for “Punch Out,” it was solidly OK. I’m partial to having more Marc and Amanda than less — especially when they’re plotting. Still it was good to have the show back after its EPIC hiatus.

The winners of the 2006 Peabody Awards have been anounced, highlighting the best of television and radio from the previous year. As the Emmy voters continues to prove how out of touch they are with what is actually great on television, the Peabodys have established themselves as the true symbol of greatness (though it should be noted that The Wire did not win this year, but has in the past [2003]).

Here are some of the highlights:

When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts — Spike Lee’s remarkable poem of rage about Hurricane Katrina and the governement’s negligence in protecting its citizens. I can’t think of piece of television I watched last year that was more powerful and elicited such an emotional reaction. This one was a no-brainer for the Peabody committee.

Boondocks: Return of the King — One of the biggest surprises on the list, Boondocks is one of those absolutely fantastic series that you completely forget about once the season ends. Perhaps that statement is more damning to the viewers than the series itself. “Return of the King” is an episode that imagines Martin Luther King Jr. waking up from a 30 year coma and seeing what his American Dream had actually accomplished. It’s a pretty bold half-hour of television, especially for a time-slot that often houses a talking piece of meat. Bully for you Aaron McGruder.

Friday Night Lights — In what I hope to be the first of many awards (and the first in a series of justifications for bringing the show back in the fall), Friday Night Lights was recognized for accurately portraying a reality shared by most people in America. Sadly, most people in America still don’t know this is even a television show. Hopefully this award can convince a few more people to tune in (its a shame advertisers aren’t particularly interested in the 25-42 year old television critic demographic. If they were Friday Night Lights would easily be a top-ten show).

Other highlights in the entertainment category include the category defyinging Ugly Betty, The Office for a season in which it really came into its own and separated itself from its British counterpart (which was also a Peabody winner), Showtime’s Brotherhood, a series I have never seen, but now would like to, and Scrubs, for what I have to assume is a recognition of their last good season.

Read about some of the other honorees over at Aaron Barnhart’s TV Barn

It took almost four months, but this afternoon I finally got caught up with Ugly Betty. The irony of this endeavor being the next new episode isn’t scheduled to air on ABC until April 19th. Still, it’s nice to not be lagging so far behind (three weeks ago I had amassed eight episodes on my DVR dating back to early December).

The first dozen or so episodes of Ugly Betty were obviously strong enough for it to attract and hold an audience. Perhaps a lot of that attraction came from the desire of the larger television audience to see a show that feels legitimately ethnic, not simply looking like a cross-section of America as seen by Hollywood casting agents. Though part of what frustrated me about those first episodes was show’s tendency to dip into the “helpful Mexican” well. Every episode involved some rich white people getting into trouble and having an ugly Mexican girl remind them of their own glory. It’s the same type of “non-risk” you get when your screenplay involves a “magical black man.”

But then something changed. Shortly after the winter hiatus the show suddenly got a whole lot wackier, helped significantly from the revelation that Rebecca Romijn is the recently sex-changed brother to the current editor-in-chief Daniel Meade. It was the type of momentum changing turn of events that can turn a passive viewer into an active viewer. Suddenly the madness of the show started to replicate the telenovela of which it was based (accented, as always by the frequent realization that the exceptionally hot Ms. Romijn was suppose to have once been a guy) – though no moment this season has been funnier than scene from the telenovela within-the-show where a pregnant woman stands next to a priest, has a beach ball fall out from under her dress, slaps the priest and then proceeds to make out with him. That’s comedy.

The show has also benefited from the decentralization of Betty from the stories. Sure, the show is still ostensibly about her and her crazy exploits in the fashion world, but the secondary and even tertiary characters have developed exceptionally strong B and C storylines within the episodes. The highlight for me being the office-hijinx raised by Marc and Amanda, easy the most underappreciated comedy-duo on television (though their own self-appreciation probably makes up for the gap in widespread acclaim).

If you, like me, hadn’t been paying very close attention you have a month to catch up.

Watch Ugly Betty at ABC.com

Since it premiered this past fall, Ugly Betty has become that one show that I religiously record every week only to have to force myself to actually watch (despite enjoying it when I do). Maybe it’s because Thursday night is all ready a busy night of the week for television, or maybe because the last thing I’m thinking about come Friday morning is watching an hour-long dramedy that seems to have Frank DeCaro as an art director. Still, when I do get around to pressing play, I tend to find the show regularly funny, occasionally hilarious, and constantly pleasant. Perhaps it’s a little too pleasant. Ugly Betty’s biggest fault is perhaps its strongest selling point: optimism. Maybe it’s these cynical times, but the “idea” of a show as rosy as this one kind of turns me off — a sad commentary on the state of affairs. It’s the bleak, depressing halogen bulbs of The Office that make me laugh the hardest each week. It’s the blood soaked and impoverished streets of West Baltimore in The Wire that elicits the deepest emotional reactions from me. Where, exactly does “cheer” fit into that equation?

Right now I have a month’s worth of Betty saved to my DVR, waiting for this almost fictional future where I’ll say to myself, “Hey, whatever happened to that style-impaired ethnic friend of ours, and her zany adventures in a cartoonish New York fashion industry?” I want that day to come, but I mostly doubt it ever will. I enjoy the fact that this show is a success and I want it to succeed. My friends who watch it say the past few weeks have been quite good — I’m sure they have been — though when I cycle through my saved programs its name reads as an annoyance more than a thrill.

Sorry Betty for being and Ugly American.

It seems like last week there there was so much television being watching by yours truly I barely had an opportunity to report back with my thoughts (and without thoughts, we really don’t have much of a website). So here are, more or less, my notes on a week’s worth of programming:

Friday Night Lights (Tuesdays 8pm NBC) - Inexplicably placed on a Tuesday, Friday Night Lights is being put into my regular rotation because its one of the few shows I’ve seen on network television that doesn’t shy away from the racial and economical issues affecting small cities in America. The pilot was a by-the-numbers local-boy-makes-good football story and yet the emphasis was never put on the game itself, but on the characters and how football is really the towns only shared experience. The shows realism seemed startling.

Help Me Help You (Tuesdays 9:30 ABC) - I liked seeing Tim Meadows as the rival therapist. Tim Meadows is the type of SNL alum who was so poorly used on the show it might have tainted an otherwise brilliant career. Otherwise, if it weren’t for the complete lack of comedies on television, I probably would quit watching this show. In classic Hollywood fashion, the series takes place in a New York City that reeks of Los Angeles (the LA subway may on one of the sets didn’t help).

The Nine (Wednesdays 10:00 ABC) - First and foremost, “Egan Foote” might be the greatest character name of the season. As for the character, well, we’ll just have to wait and see. As a whole, The Nine was both good and interesting, but like Studio 60… we won’t be able to get a real look at the show until the second or third week. What is interesting about the setup for The Nine (a group of people are held hostage in a bank for 52 hours, and throughout the shows run we’ll get to see what happened in there) is seeing if audiences will use the hostage-taking as a canvas in which to project their own personal tragedies. Perhaps the bigger question is wondering if people do happen to project themselves into the series, will they like what they see? The Nine asks viewers to dig a little deeper into their own psyche in order to start relating to the characters on screen. I’m curious to see if viewers will be willing to do that.

Freak Show (Wednesdays 10:30 Comedy Central) - The voice-talent alone is a force to be reckoned with. Frankly, I could listen to Jon Benjamin read XML manuals and find it hilarious, though the show still pales in comparison to The Venture Brothers, which might be the pinnacle of six years worth of Adult Swim programming. Aside from South Park, Comedy Central has never really had much authority in animation.

Peep Show (BBC, DVD) - I put down the TV remote for the DVD remote and checkout out the british series, Peep Show, which was recommended to me by a friend. It’s a fairly high concept show about two roommates who are a bit of an odd-couple (one’s a button down office worker, there other is a carefree musician). The twist is that the entire show is shot from the point-of-view of one of the characters. As in we, the audience, are constantly looking through someone’s eyes and are able to hear their thoughts. Its a cool-enough idea, and could certainly propel a series, but it also doesn’t hurt that the characters frequently make the worst decisions you could imagine. I’d basically equate the style of comedy to something of a British It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. Definitely worth checking out.

Ugly Betty (Thursdays 8:00 ABC) - Nice to see “Dawn” from the British office show up here as the host of “Fashion TV.” That makes two network shows where she’s been spotted in a small role this season. LET’S MAKE IT THREE!

SNL (Saturdays 11:30 NBC) - The only redeeming parts of this episode were the “New York City Stories” shorts that were done with Fred Armisen and Amy Poehler. Specifically the first one where Armisen played Scorsese. That made me laugh.

South Park (Wednesdays 10:00 Comedy Central) - I don’t play “Worlds of Warcraft” but enjoyed this episode nonetheless. I’m curious how much support they had from Blizzard, as their logo was all over the episode.

Extras (Thursdays 9:00 BBC-2) - It’s not out in America yet (January), but let me be the first to tell you that the second season of Ricky Gervais’ Extras is leaps and bounds above the first (which is saying something since the first season was hardly shabby). This week’s episode featured Chris Martin from Coldplay pimping his new record “Coldplay’s Greatest Hits.” I know that doesn’t sound all that funny (”You’re gay because you like Coldplay”), but trust me… it is. There’s video available via the BBC.