MagneticMediaFed

Let me describe my current situation: I have just moved from New York City to Nashville, Tennessee. To make the move as streamlined and economical as possible I opted to leave behind several things. One of those things was my trusty 20″ Panasonic tube standard-definition television. Televisions are (or rather, were) quite the bulky piece of equipment. Because of this decision I have been keeping myself up-to-date in the world of televised media by watching whatever I can on my computer. Because we now live in a world where there are myriad legal (and perhaps a few legally dubious) options for television content on computers I have to assume that this is not a method of consumption unique to me and my current situation. I have to assume many thousands (millions?) of viewers watch video on their computers or, frankly, it probably wouldn’t exist.

This leads me to a very interesting development that I believe to be unique to the process of watching video on a computer monitor. Tonight I was catching the most recent episode of FX’s stellar drama The Riches when the screen dipped to black where the commercial would have been had I been watching on legit cable (let’s just gloss over the fact that it wasn’t). Well, because one sits so much closer to the screen while watching video on a computer, when that video dips to black it is not unlikely for the viewer to catch a rather revealing glimpse of themselves in the reflection of the suddenly black monitor. It is one of those rare moments when one sees themselves as they actually are, completely unencumbered by pretense. For me, during this episode of The Riches I two-times caught myself grinning like an idiot as the drama of the episode escalated to the point of cliffhanger just before cutting away to commercial. It is rare in life to see oneself with this degree of utter realism. In the morning, while looking into the mirror while brushing our teeth we know what to expect. It’s an image we’ve seen millions of times before. In the presence of cameras we may believe the image being captured is reality, but more often than not what we see is the adoptive presence of someone who knows they are about to be seen and recorded.

But those unexpected flashes of black, where we suddenly see ourself as an active participant, that’s where the truth lies. Smiles, grins, looks of horror, boredom, curiosity, these are the most accurate reviews for any program on the air. Next time you start streaming something to your computer, don’t be surprised if what you see if yourself.

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).

EVIL!

Cartoon Network banned the last two episodes of the brilliantly sharp The Boondocks second season because the episodes took square aim at BET. It seems in the current age of mega-media conglomerates what is off-limits is taking shots at the boys club. BET and Cartoon Network are not owned by the same companies (Viacom owns BET and Time Warner owns Cartoon Network) though it is apparent that these companies want absolutely no ill between them, as you never know when one will try to join forces (or buy) the other. (A less speculative report of the story via the Canadian Press.)

It’s our loss, as those two episodes, entitled “The Hunger Strike” and “The Uncle Ruckus Reality Show,” are brutal in their pointedness and hilariously funny. The first episode follows Huey as he stages a hunger strike until BET is taken off the air, its office’s shut down and “all of its top executives commit Japanese ritualistic suicide.” In the second episode BET gives Uncle Ruckus a reality show (Uncle Ruckus being a recurring older, black character who hates black people). The framework for both of these episodes is a super-villain-like boardroom at the BET headquarters where they attempt to execute their master plan: the destruction of all black people.

The episodes did air in Canada, because… well, what the hell do they care? This means they are readily available on the torrent sites (look for episode numbers 214 and 215). Unfortunately for our law-abiding friends, The Boondocks is not readily available for consumption online. Adultswim.com seems to have clips, but not whole episodes and the show isn’t on iTunes. The best we can do is dig through YouTube looking for soon-to-be deleted episodes.

I was able to find the completely unedited opening to “The Hunger Strike” on HipHopDX.com. NSFW (especially if you work for BET)

Uh… daddy issues?

Last November when the WGA strike kicked off, word was that the as-of-that-moment eight completed LOST episodes were going to end on a cliffhanger that — if the strike ended up putting a premature end to the season — would drive the audience crazy. Show-runners Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof suspected that if episode #408 were to air with no follow-up for six to eight months there would be riots, a mass exodus of viewers from the show, the streets would run red with the blood of infidels — you get the idea, people would be pissed.

It turns out they were more or less right. Thursday’s episode, another solid entry into the season 4 canon, ended with not just one possibly-infuriating cliffhangers, but two. Sayid gives up Michael/Kevin Johnson to the Widmore crew, an act that may or may not be the right thing to do depending on whose team on which you think everyone is playing. Then back on the island Ben tells Alex, Rousseau and Carl to head for “the sanctuary” where two of the three ultimately get gunned down. Then the episode ends. Knowing that this will be resolved in a couple week (there are five more episodes slated for this spring) makes this ending OK. If this were it, however, frankly, I’d be rather annoyed. So annoyed, that I probably would have stormed the AMPTP headquarters with a large mallet and wrecked havoc until the strike ended. Luckily for all of us, that will not have to be done.

Otherwise I’m giving the first two acts of season four Lost 4 out of 5 Flaming MagneticMediaFed Television Icons.

LOST returns on April 24th

I don’t have a lot to say about the current season of Top Chef as we’re still in that awkward stage when there are far too many contestants to get attached to any one in particular (unless we’re talking about Andrew, who I see as a *slightly* more profane version of myself, except that he can apparently, y’know, cook), but I absolutely had to use this screen-grab of the preposterously hot Padma Lakshmi.

As for the show itself I do feel like we’re in for a potentially great season as the cast has a hellova lot going for it (and Chicago just strikes me as a better food city than Miami). For starters the producers seem to have cast not just one token asshole, but several. I guess I shouldn’t say “asshole” but instead “super-competitive.” My favorite characters to root against are the ones who get overly into the whole “I’m better than you so get the frak out of my way” game show mentality. Let’s think about this. If the show is essentially a series about picking the head of a new restaurant its really much more about finding someone who you’d actually want to work for than just whoever can cook the best tartare. So yeah, there are a lot of them. As we start burning through contestants I suspect that things will really amp up in the drama department (which I felt was missing from much of last season).

And of course there’s Padma, and the increasingly likelihood of Chef Tom wearing a beret.

Don’t buy it, but love it.

Yesterday afternoon, while watching the second season premiere of The Riches I began to think about the general improbability of the action on the show — how the set-up is so inherently ridiculous I’m astonished that they’ve already gotten an entire season under their belts and can hardly fathom the creators putting out at least another half-dozen this spring. I mean, how have these characters not been caught yet? But the thing is, the show works. I mean really works, like way better than a lot of those series that actually have believable plot lines. I started to think about which method makes for a better television experience. The short answer is its all about execution. The longer answer is after the jump…

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The Wire comes to a brilliant conclusion.

Series finales are always cursed with high expectations. Fans of any show luckily enough to meet its natural conclusion can attest to this. Sure, there have been some great ones, but for every Newhart there are dozens of Seinfelds (unless you subscribe to the theory that the Seinfeld conclusions was more of a post-modernist joke, but for the sake of this discussion let’s say it wasn’t). The Wire, the greatest dramatic series in television history, whose finale aired Sunday night, was note perfect from the first frame to the last. More after the jump…

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I wasn’t going to blog anymore until my relocation to Nashville was complete but after rewatching last night’s penultimate episode of The Wire, I’ve got to say something. First and foremost, for a show whose bread and butter is unavoidable despair, I found this episode particularly sad. Well, maybe that isn’t entirely true. One of the times when I almost broke down in tears was a positive reaction to Bubbles’ sobriety. (Honestly, I never thought he’d make it out of this series alive. I’m happy to be proven wrong.) But Michael and Snoop and then Michael and Dukie? That is some bleak, dreadful shit, and so it goes that as Bubbles is freed Dukie is enslaved, now on a trajectory to fill that role.

The rest of the episode — the nuts and bolts that will eventually reveal who the leak is in the DA’s office (Is it Rhonda? Is it the judge who started this whole thing off back at the beginning of season 1?), how McNulty does or doesn’t make it out of this intact, how Levy again skirts the law and how Marlo and co. will inevitably go free — was just as brilliant. Crime writer supreme, George Pelecanos filled the episode with so many hard-boiled detective scenes (Lester and Clay Davis at the bar, Gus and the vet at Walter Reed) the story moved with a breakneck pace and was loaded with dialogue so rich all I could do was think about rolling in it. And of course there was the prison scene where for the first time ever we see why Marlo is Marlo. Terrifying.

One week to go.

NOTE: I just called Comcast in Nashville and found out that I won’t be getting my cable until March 11th. So my series wrap-up won’t be published until at least the 12th. Sorry.

88 MPH

First, a bit of housekeeping: as you may or may not have noticed, I haven’t been blogging much these days. This is almost exclusively due to the fact that I am in the process of moving from New York City to Nashville, Tennessee, and frankly haven’t had time to watch much television (aside from Lost and The Wire), let alone formulate thoughts on said television and then actually type those thoughts out and click “publish.” This pattern of non-activity will likely continue for the next two or three weeks as I get situated in my new city. Feel free to track my progress on my personal site, as I set-up shop.

OK. With that out of the way, how great has Lost been these past five weeks? SPOILERS: It’s been really great. More on the “why” after the jump…

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Picture via Doug Mills/New York Times

First: sorry for the untimeliness in this post, but I’ve been busy working on the site’s redesign which you may or may not have noticed. Moving on.

FOX’s broadcast of Super Bowl XLII (that’s “42″ for those that don’t read Roman) was the second highest rated television program of all time coming in behind the finale for M*A*S*H. The game was seen by an estimated 97.5 million people (M*A*S*H reached 106 million people, though at a time when most people only had access to a handful of channels). I find this to be more or less astounding. Much of what contemporary culture is based on is the notion that there are very few things rallied around by everyone, and the steady decline in network television ratings is perhaps biggest example of this (followed closely by the lack of America’s appetite to consume large quantities of popular music). To see a singular event grab such a large percentage of our collective attention spans speaks highly about the event itself as well as providing a bit of reassurance to the networks that people will turn out en mass if there’s something actually worth checking out. But what is the subtext of these numbers? Do they suggest that the solution to the network’s audience migration problem lies solely in their ability to deliver something worth seeing (because there is a lot of television worth seeing that most audiences could care less about)? Or should we read into this that the magic lies in the very scarcity of the event itself? After all, what are the odds of getting a Super Bowl where the actual game was that good? More after the jump…

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I wanna go back!

I suppose in about eight weeks I could proven severely wrong. I suppose this could be true. For as a season that was designed to tell a very specific story over a very specific number of episodes (16), it is quite likely that I and all the rest of the beach-based sci-fi nerdalati could riot in the streets for leaving us hanging with the inevitable faux-finale. Yes, we will gather together with torches and SPF 60 and mobile devices that allow us to maintain contact with our favorite gadget blogs and will whine and complain about the writers, the AMTPT, ABC, Cuse and Lindelof and the rest of the cast and why they couldn’t just cross the damn line and maybe squeeze out a nineth episode — something, anything to prolong the misery that is being denied what is rightfully ours.

But right now, today, as American’s quickly find worthy substitutes for televised entertainments in the face of a strike that has rendered much of the entire medium culturally irrelevant, LOST is the big winner. I’ll tell you why after the jump…

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“You weasel!”

Oh television, we barely knew you. Once a bastion of entertainments both important and trivial, this year you were reduced to rubble after the writer’s strike sucked out your very essence — original, scripted programming. And now, you’re dead. But! Could there be a resurrection? Perhaps. It appears the strike could be coming to a close. I fear it is too late. After the jump, please enjoy MagneticMediaFed’s first foray into this whole “web video” sensation everyone has been talking about, as we throw a funeral for television…

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Clark Johnson as Gus Haynes and Michael K. Williams as Omar Little

For those playing the home game, allow me to pass along the following:

• Tuesday Terry Gross interviewed Clark Johnson on Fresh Air. Mr. Johnson plays city editor Gus Haynes of the Baltimore Sun this season. He also directed the pilot episode and will direct the finale in a few weeks.
• This was followed Wednesday by her interview with Michaek K. Williams who plays the exponentially awesome Omar Little.
• A couple weeks ago HBO put out The Wire: All the Pieces Matter, a collection of music from the series as well as Beyond Hamsterdam: Baltimore Tracks From The Wire, a stripped down disc that focuses exclusively on the hip-hop that has come out of the city. The cool kids seem to think the two are a mostly worthy effort.

Yesterday afternoon I enjoyed my day off by watching the fourth episode of The Wire season five on HBO On-Demand. As I was sitting in my living room watching it there seemed to this perfect storm of politics swirling around me as the episode played out. I was home from work for the MLK holiday, which obviously has its own political implications, especially as I enjoyed the comfort of my gentrified New York neighborhood watching a series ostensibly about the progress (or lack thereof) of the African American community in our country’s cities. The best parts of the episode (and I might argue the best parts of the this season as a whole) dealt with the complex maneuvering of political capital by Baltimore’s fictional mayor in order to further his own political ambitions. While watching this and thinking about why I was staying home form work I couldn’t help but also think about the current presidential race that is now going full bore and the disconnect between what I was currently seeing on screen and what the candidates have been screaming about on the stump. More (with very minor spoilers) after the jump…

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Just when you thought the writer’s strike had sucked out the very last drop of interesting scripted television this year, AMC goes ahead and delivers to us Breaking Bad, a new hour-long drama starring Malcolm in the Middle’s Bryan Cranston as a science teacher who starts cooking meth to supliment his income. The network, which was previously known for categorizing “Cat Woman” as an American Movie Classic, now has a lot to live up to after delivering Mad Men to us last summer — one of the best new shows of the decade.

Frankly I don’t know what to expect from Breaking Bad (foolishly, I missed my opportunity to catch a press-preview of the episode earlier this week), but I have to say I’m optimistic. Cranston was great recently in guest spots on How I Met Your Mother and I look forward to seeing him do drama. I’m also hoping the show proves to be a more down-to-earth, less self-destructive version of Weeds. We’ll find out on Sunday.

Breaking Bad starts this Sunday (January 20th) at 10:00pm EST on AMC.