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Stunt casting!

Kind of a perfect episode last night on the HIMYM front, no? What worked so well with the Britney stunt-casting was how her roll was so easily replaceable. It worked because she didn’t need to be there and was utterly forgettable. Had things been reversed and she played the Sarah Chalke character it would have been an unmitigated disaster for reasons aside from the fact that she is clearly a horrible actor. Most sitcoms put the guest star front and center. I respect HIMYM for dropping her into the background (to and extent).

But that is not the most interesting thing about Monday’s episode. Clearly the noteworthy addition was the fact that we might have “met the mother.” There were certainly a few clues, the most significant being Stella’s declaration that she “went out on St. Patrick’s Day,” where we, the audience, know the mother happened to be. What is interesting about all of this is the fail-safe the series’ creators have build into the show. As of right now they don’t if they are coming back next season. If Moonves decides to pull the plug in a month or so, all of the groundwork is laid for an easy wrap-up. Now, if things get carried out for another season (or even another two) they are also in great shape because nothing is in stone, it can all just be written off as coincidence.

If you have the time I encourage you to check out Whitney Matheson’s Pop Candy Podcast from two weeks back where she talks with series co-creator Carter Bays about the show’s future and plans on how they hope to reveal “the mother” (with varying degrees of vague response).

Better to burn out or to fade away?

This thing is killing me. We all knew the writers’ strike was going to be a major inconvenience, but I never suspected it would have the effect it’s currently having on my psyche. Ever since the writers took to the picket line three weeks ago, television has kind of sucked, and not just because my beloved late-night shows immediately went into reruns. Despite the fact that we’ve still been getting new scripted episodes these past few weeks, the strike has, in a way, highlighted just how solidly mediocre this fall has been. The new series, while marked by very few cancellations (honestly, who would have thought Cavemen would still be airing new episodes three weeks into November?), have generated no significant hits (with the exception of Samantha Who?, but it’s hard to say if it is the show that is successful or its Dancing With the Stars lead-in) while our favorite returning series from years past have either been wildly inconsistent (How I Met Your Mother), shockingly awful (Weeds) or just kind of a mess (Friday Night Lights). To top it all off the two series that have been consistantly good and occasionally great in The Office and 30 Rock are the first to run out of episodes. The whole mess can put your average television viewer into something of an existential conundrum: if interesting stories can vanish as quickly as they appear, what’s the point of it all? More after the jump…

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Pic via Flickr

I’m going to forgo the usual episode recaps today as I 1) haven’t actually watched anything from last night and 2) feel like dedicating some space to the WGA strike as tomorrow night will mark the first significant casualty of the work-stoppage. Thursday’s episode of The Office entitle “The Deposition” will be the last new episode we can expect from the show until the strike ends. The Office was one of the first series to close up shop due in large part to the fact that a good chunk of the cast happens to also write for the show.

The Futon Critic has a really handy guide with the amount of episodes each show has left to air before going dark. Most of the networks biggest series will have trouble making it past the first week in December (which, luckily for them, is traditionally dark). We should expect little (if any) scripted programming come 2008.

In the meantime, treat yourself to the endless supply of strike blogs popping up on the internet, the most informative being the guild’s official blog United Hollywood. Here are some others:

Late Show Writers on Strike
Scribe Vibe (Variety)
Show Tracker (LA Times)

One last note: since the major sticking point for this strike is writer’s compensation for ad-supported material posted on the web, I would encourage everyone to avoid using the networks’ video services until a deal is made.

It sounds like you’re carrying gravel in a metal pail.

This one snuck up on me. The first act was very Friends ‘97, with the cast getting into some wacky and crazy situations, certain to be resolved in a cool twenty minutes. Marshall wanted to check if he passed the Bar exam, but lost his password. Ted was excited about a new girlfriend but couldn’t understand why his friends hated her. Typical sitcomy stuff, and not terribly funny. More after the jump…

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Nick Andopolis?

The moment I had been waiting for all season happened about two-thirds of the way through Monday’s episode as Ted, Barney and Robin sat on the kitchen floor debating who would get whom in a possible divorce of Marshall and Lily. Robin seemed to think she would end up with Lily and Ted and Barney would get Marshall. This lead to the following exchange:

TED: We used to be together and still hang out. It’s not weird.
ROBIN: It’s a little weird.
TED: Yeah, it is a little weird.

I loved that, and as far as I’m concerned the sentiment really corrected a lot of the problems I had been having with this season. More after the jump…

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I checked in this morning with what those crazy kids over at Bonanza City to see if they were still alive, kickin’ and speaking with adorable speech impediments. Having missed the past two episodes I was certain Wednesday’s episode would open with a series of cabins flames and thick black smoke pouring out of the windows. The streets would be riddled with corpses with one naked youngster beating another naked younger with a wooden plank off by the church. The rest of the town would be covered in mud, faces painted and attacking the film crew, who they have decided serve no purpose other than that of food. These images were quickly put to rest as the kids continued doing/not doing dishes, complaining about not getting paid enough, and looking generally chilly.

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I know a great burger joint!

That was a bit of a disappointment, no? John Cho aside, this episode felt especially flat despite having plenty of material to work with. Ted Mosby the porn star? That’s kind of funny, right? Marshall having to decide between working for a major corporation versus working for a non-profit? Surely there are some comedic situations to be mined. Lily with credit card debt? That’s relatable. And yet, so rarely did it make me laugh. Perhaps the best way to sum up how “I’m Not That Guy” played out was “sitcomian.” Aside from a few clever cutaways, what separated this episode from your typical late-season Friends? Not much.

I think this week’s episode, compared to last week’s hilarious entry in the HIMYM canon, really illustrated why the show works when it works and why it doesn’t when it doesn’t. The classic sitcom form no longer elicits laughs. This is not because the writing is any worse than it once was or that everyone forgot the lessons taught to us by the classics like Cheers and Taxi and Mary Tyler Moore, but the fact that audiences have spent so much time watching sitcoms over the past sixty years there is very little room left for the form to provide genuine surprise (which in turn provides genuine laughter). The best episodes of How I Met Your Mother have been as much about turning the form on its head as writing a witty comeback to be spoken by a character. Where the two come together is where the shear pleasure of the series is able to shine through.

This? This was low-stakes comedy.

It’s been a month since new shows started popping up and my god has it been a rough ride. I was able to keep for the better part of two weeks, but lately I’ve had to throw my hands up and declare that once again, the television has won. Part of the problem, for me at least, is this fall seems to have more decent shows than season’s past. There are always one or two really good new programs, but typically the rest of it is just dreck. This year there have only been a small handful of shows I would consider abdominal, but with an unusually large amount resting somewhere in the middle. But how does one justify sticking with a series that is at its very best just OK. I think now would be as good a time as any to look at where we are and decide how to move forward.

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The Vicky Mendoza Diagonal

I’ve been complaining that the show this season has kind of lost its feel (actually I seem to be complaining about that for every show these days). Well, if there were ever an episode that felt like vintage HIMYM, it would have to have been this one. You got your flashbacks, you got your Barneyisms, you got your light romantic drama between characters, you have your sandwiches — all in all a perfect storm of awesomeness. More after the jump…

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The good thing about Survivor is that just when you begin to get bored with how the season is playing out, they change it up on you. Now this episodes turnabout was no surprise, they gave it all away in the previews. But it’s still nice to know that even a season that was turning out to be semi-predictable could still become exciting again. More after the jump…

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UPDATE: In news that is surprising to absolutely no one, Viva Laughlin has been cancelled making it the first true victim of the 2007-2008 television season (Nashville was pulled and Online Nation was cancelled, but those shows weren’t scripted). I’m going to walk out into the newsroom and start singing about this. READ MORE

Tonight at 10:00pm CBS is previewing Viva Laughlin their new casino, musical train wreck which will be moved to Sundays before its ultimate cancellation. Here’s the deal: there has not been a show this bad in years. No, not even Cavemen. Cavemen fails because it’s completely uninspired. Viva Laughlin fails because the inspiration was completely misappropriated. It’s such a bizarre concoction of genres and nonsense it is absolutely worth checking out (at least once). Let’s just put it this way, at one point in the pilot Melanie Griffith breaks out into the worst rendition of Blondie’s “One Way Or Another” ever captured on a motion-based medium. It’s astoundingly awful, and funny… really funny. Watch it, at least for a while. You have to know what you’re missing.

I guess I’d call this an improvement over last week, though the problems are more or less the same. The show is going to have a real problem if it can’t find a way for Ted and Robin to inhabit more of the same storylines. Unlike the previous episode, this week I felt Robin’s story was the stronger of the two — though a lot of that could be from my never ending appreciation of adults saying inappropriate things to children. More after the jump…

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Ding Dong, The Dick is Dead!

Alright, so I’m writing this a little late, so I’m going to keep the recap part out (if you don’t know by now . . . you don’t really care).

After last week’s episode, I had a horrible vision. I could imagine very clearly, all done up in too much makeup, Dave sitting in the top 3 at the final tribal council. I don’t know what it was, but the image was all too easy to conjur up. Well, now I don’t have to worry about that any more! More after the jump…

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The gang finds god.

I think Homer Simpson said it best this summer as he frantically flipped through the Bible saying, “This book doesn’t have any answers!” Perhaps the Bible should have been written more like the Bonanza City Journal, as that book seems chalk full of suggestions kids are more than willing to go along with. In short, they were told that the kids needed to find god and that perhaps they should hold a service — because in the history of modern civilizations, religion has never complicated things. More after the jump…

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Cooper, Mosby, Kelly

I was out having dinner tonight when I received a series of panicked phone calls from a good friend. The first of which has no baring on this conversation, but for those interested apparently Blade Runner is showing Tuesday night at the Ziegfeld here in Manhattan. The second call, however, told me — rather, screamed at me — that Winnie Cooper was on How I Met Your Mother and that she was still, in fact, hot (she’s also, apparently, a math genius). The last of the calls, which were all made in a period of about 7 minutes, said the following:

Dude! Now f–king Kim Kelly is on How I Met Your Mother! Winnie Cooper and Kim Kelly both on the same episode looking incredibly attractive. This is truly a moment for the ages. I’m only five minutes in but it’s totally blowing my mind. You need to get home as soon as you can and watch this, then I can comment on your blog about it. It’ll be awesome!

Well, sir, the ball is in your court (more after the jump…).

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