MagneticMediaFed

I don’t want to get too political here, but I just finished watching this week’s Meet The Press (my favorite of the Sunday morning Yack-shows) and Tim Russert had on President Clinton as a guest. During the conversation the issue of torture came up. On a previous appearance Clinton had said he supported sanctioned exceptions to the country’s current anti-torture policy. Here, he said he had changed his mind on the issue — and this is where the connection to television starts to take place.

Clinton spoke of the “Jack Bauer” scenario. On 24, he pointed out, whenever the President gives the OK for Jack to torture a suspect, the result is always negative for the President and for the country, but when Jack acts alone, knowing the consequences of his actions, things tend to work out for the best (or whatever definition of “best” you want to go with when nuclear annihilation tends to be the consequence). In short, Clinton thinks that a country shouldn’t sanction torture, but if the agent actually involved with a situation chooses to take action for the greater good, knowing the legal repercussions of those actions, it might not be a bad thing.

Policy aside, it’s always interesting to hear someone in politics so directly references the actions of a fictional television character. The question I wish Russert had followed up with would be whether President Clinton thought last season of 24 was as lame as most of the rest of us. I’m also curious if he thinks the relocation of the series to Washington D.C. in the upcoming seventh season is a good move. (It is.)

While I evenually puked my guts out, I never puked my heart out.

Did anyone else while watching Thursday’s season premiere of The Office feel a pervasive though unfounded sense of imminent dread? Luckily the episode was an hour long and thus that fear had plenty of time to dissipate before things became too wrapped up. When all was said and done I had had a good time and was glad the show was back on the air. Still, I have this feeling that the aforementioned dread will continue to haunt this series. In a way, it has to. How long can the creators possibly keep things going, especially after the bar was set so high last season? More after the break…

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The total number of Earl episodes I’ve seen in my life can be counted on the right hand of a magical seven-fingered fairy (or dwarf). I’ve always found the show to seem funnier than it actually ever was. That being said, I also like the idea of comedy on television that isn’t shot in front of a studio audience, so I’m in – at least for a while. More after the jump…

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I don’t have a lot to say about Life. I watched it late last night when I probably should have been watching Top Chef, but I was in a groove and had heard that the pilot was pretty good. The pilot was pretty good, but this isn’t a show for me. I can’t do procedural cop dramas — even the good ones. Life is just like Raines, NBC’s previous quirky know-it-all cop drama set in L.A. Our hero is a bit of an outcast detective who takes to the streets solving murders while catching curious looks for co-workers. In this iteration Charles Crews is a detective who served twelve years in prison for a crime he didn’t commit. Now he’s out with a mysterious settlement by LAPD, independently wealthy, and for some reason still working cases.

He also likes fruit, I guess.

Again, this isn’t a bad show. There’s a pretty interested device they use going in and out of a lot of the commercial breaks where we see 16mm interview footage of people from Crews’ life talking about his time in prison. It’s an interesting way to tell a story that in and of itself isn’t particularly interesting. For a police procedural, the actual crime of the week takes a back seat to the story of our main character (as it should), and his lack of freedom for the past dozen years (as well as a good amount of Zen reading) has given him a personality not unlike a crazy person making him fairly interesting to just watch. In a fictional universe where I get home from work on an average Wednesday and have nothing to watch, I could see giving Life an hour of mine, but right now it simply isn’t in the cards.

Domo arigato, Mrs. Roboto

The episode’s single greatest moment comes from the crippling car crash that sends our heroine to the robo-surgeon. It’s unexpected (even on the second viewing), loud, violent, and incredibly quick. There’s no slow-mo, no prolonging the damage. It just happens. It’s brutal and kind of cool. It also comes nine minutes into the series, leaving a lot of room to go down hill, which the series does. Much more after the jump…

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My dear, you look absolutely perplexed.

It just doesn’t seem to end, does it? Tonight three new shows are premiering, along with new episodes from a couple gems from last week… and Top Chef. It’s OK. Sleep is overrated.

Bionic Woman — NBC 9:00pm
A so-so remake of a cheesy show about a robot-woman not called Small Wonder, though I haven’t seen the reworked pilot. I can guarantee lots of robot-woman fighting, if that’s your thing.

Life — NBC 10:00pm
Honestly, I know very little of this show. I know it’s about a guy who was wrongly imprisoned and then joins the police force. I’ve also heard the pilot is quite good.

Private Practice — ABC 9:00pm
It’s the Grey’s Anatomy spinoff. I won’t be watching (thank god!), though I assume many will. Let me know how it is.

Dirty Sexy Money — ABC 10:00pm
I really liked this show. It’s funny, has the always awesome Peter Krause, is briskly paced and kind of reminds me of a dramatic version of Arrested Development. That being said most the hour is dedicated to exposition, so who knows where it goes. Still, it’s the most interesting hour of the night.

Let’s also not forget we have new episodes of the awesome Kid Nation (8:00pm CBS) and Gossip Girl (9:00pm CW) as well as the (pen?)ultimate Top Chef.

Good luck!

For as weak and unfulfilling as last year’s finale was, this episode was everything a season premiere should be. It took nearly all of the incredibly good-looking characters from last year (seriously, are there any average-looking people besides Parkman and Hiro in this world?) and put them into new and intriguing storylines, with mostly success, and it introduced a bunch of new faces into the mix as well. It effectively created plenty of new mysteries and raised lots of questions, but as we’ve learned in the past, how well they pay off is anyone’s guess. More after the jump…

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NBC

I’m going to keep this quick. I’ve only seen one episode of Quantum Leap, but I know a copy-cat when I see one. That being said, Quantum Leap was hugely popular (it seems) and maybe those people that absolutely must have a weekly fix of random time-travel based entertainment won’t mind the similarities.

The premise of the show is about Dan Vassar a reporter in San Francisco who finds he is inexplicably traveling back and forth through time. He is able to change some peoples lives but not always for the better. He also is able to see his old girlfriend who had died in a plane crash. You know, your typical space-time-continuum mumbo jumbo.

It was a fine pilot, but after an hour I felt like I had seen all I needed to see. Mark this as the first show that will not make my cut for a second episode. It was one of those hours of television where you can’t say what you saw was particularly bad, but maybe bad in a completely different and unexpected way: leaving absolutely no impression on you one way or the other.

NBC

Tonight at 8:00pm Chuck premieres on NBC. Of all the new shows debuting over the next couple weeks, this is one of my three favorites. From Josh Schwartz, creator of The OC (don’t call it that), comes this tale of a big-box electronics store employee who unknowingly downloads the entire archive of the NSA and CSI into his brain when a former college roommate and current spy sends him the information in an email. LET THE HILARITY ENSUE! Needless to say, Chuck is pretty relaxed about the whole plausibility angle, and rightly so. The series is quick, funny and if not action-packed, then certainly action-subsidized. More after the jump…

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The short of it is NBC wanted to jack up its cost-per-show price to something like $4.99, which is asinine. In response, Apple says, “Thanks for the fish.”

Read the full story over at Engadget.

Ever blow through $20 and think, “Man, that was stupid”? You’re sitting there, holding your new copy of Shooter starring Mark Walberg and suddenly you realize, “I’m never going to watch this.” Or you walk into a Barnes and Nobel and pick up that new best-seller that everyone is talking about only to have it sit on your shelf for eight months before you finally opt to sell it on Half.com. It’s frustrating because it was a poor decision, but it was also just twenty bucks and is hard to get worked up over it’s loss. What’s $20? Twenty dollars is what you spend on a random Tuesday out with your friends. Twenty dollars is what you might find on the street. Twenty dollars is enough money to look like it can solve problems, but not enough money to actually do anything.

I present to you: Friday Night Lights on DVD. It came out yesterday. This week both Best Buy, Circuit City and Amazon.com all had the box set available for the NICE PRICE of $19.99. Huh, twenty bucks. Who knew?

Again, this is the best show on network television. If you didn’t watch last season NOW IS YOUR CHANCE TO CATCH UP. The series returns to NBC on Friday October 5th. That gives you more than a month to watch the first season’s twenty-two episodes, and if by some crazy alignment of the stars you didn’t happen to enjoy it, NBC is willing to give you your money back.

Enough dilly-dally. Just click the link. You’ve certainly spent way more money on stupider things (college, anyone?).

After last season’s horribly uninteresting Heroes finale, I was fully prepared to cut my losses and walk away from the show altogether. Unfortunately, Kristin Bell’s loveliness has thwarted my plans once again with its beautiful blonde locks and snappy come-backs by joining the cast (for a few episodes anyway) in its second season (so says TV Guide.com). Not nearly as exciting as the almost-news a few weeks back that she would be spending time on the Lost island, it is nonetheless good to know that we won’t have to wait until her movie with Jason Segel to catch a glimpse of Ms. Veronica Mars acting all sassy.

Her character on Heroes is described as a “sexy, myserious young lady” which sounds like a role she could play while in a coma. I for one can’t wait until next week when we find out this news was bogus and that she’ll actually be joining the cast of Jericho.

Thanks Andrea for the tip!

Dillon Football is coming back in a month!

One of the best pieces of information to come out of Press-Tour this year was that NBC is going to be releasing the Friday Night Lights DVD box set on August 28th (probably a month before the second season starts) and that it will be priced in a way to get even the cheapest television watchers on board and caught up by the fall (MSRP: $29.99).

Some light detective work shows you can pre-order the DVDs through Amazon for the low-low price of $19.99 (I’m not paid to say this, but I should be, right?). That works out to be 2¢ a minute, which is probably cheaper than most long-distance plans.

Look, if you have any interest whatsoever in watching really great television, this is a purchase you can’t afford not to make (remember, coffee is for closers only).

“If I hear ’save the cheerleader’ one more time I’m gonna execute every last one of you m@therf#ckers.”

What the hell was that?

A few months ago Wired magazine did a profile of Heroes creator Tim Kring, and it kind of confirmed what I had long suspected: Kring is the weakest link in the Heroes food chain. He seems uninterested in the material he produced and instead hands off most of the heavy lifting to a staff of incredibly talented comic book writers. When I saw that last night’s season finale was written by Kring, I new we were screwed. More on that after the break…

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“So I’m back, and I’m never, ever, going to leave. I’m going nowhere. This place is like the hospital where I was born, my house, my old-age home and my graveyard for my bones.” - Michael Scott

For the past two years The Office has done what none of us thought it could successfully do: separate itself from its British counterpart. The problem is it may have run its course last night. I’ll probably continue to watch the show (because, really, where else can you find decent comedy on television these days?) but I don’t really want to.

Thursday’s hour-long episode felt much more like a series finale than a season finale. More on this after the break…

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