MagneticMediaFed

Chances are no one is watching this show. Chances are the damage is already done. When there is the option of watching a group of rich, petty, semi-alcoholic non-actors bounce throughout the “hottest” clubs in southern California or seeing a collection of future Darwin Award winners vie for the love and admiration of a bisexual, anorexic* stripper, it’s probably pretty hard to care much about a collection of wholly average white kids attempting to put out a school paper. And that’s too bad, because MTV’s The Paper is not just solidly entertaining but paints one of the most realistic portraits of suburban high school ambition this side of Tracy Flick.

It’s the type of show MTV should have been making all along. Like the first incarnations of The Real World, The Paper doesn’t seem particularly interested in “producing-up” the action, and instead does what the reality genre was suppose to always be: documentaries with a hyper-kinetic visual style. That being said, this shouldn’t be mistaken for the early 90s alterna-rock-pesimsm from days of yore. The series is Gen-Y to the max, and perhaps that is also what makes it so relentlessly watchable. The tone of the show is super-upbeat, but the characters are just vicious. It’s packed with eye-rolls and secret-laughs and plotting and back-stabbing and ad sales and layout and editorials and sports coverage. I guess in other words, it’s just like a high school.

Check out the show while you can (there are still two episodes left and the first six are available online). Future seasons will suffer from the kids having seen the previous slowly morphing the drama from reality to “Reality.”

*speculative

Picture via MTV.com

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Pic via MTV.com

Remember back when The Hills was just a whimsical digression? Somewhere along the way things got murky. They seemed to be trying a lot harder. It probably had a lot to do with the fact that the series has turned into two completely different shows, “Engaged and Enraged with Heidi and Spencer” and “The Fabulously Boring Life of Lauren Conrad.” Attempts were made for inner-series crossovers, but those never work out. Now we’re left with a product that isn’t even attempting to keep up the guise of “reality” and because of this we start noticing things like “acting ability” or “dialogue” and like Mayor Royce after attempting to put a positive spin on legalized drugs, I’ve found myself taking a step back, throwing my hands up and saying, “What was I thinking?” More after the jump…

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What’s more awkward than a first date? How about watching someone else’s first date? This week Whitney, who is quickly becoming my favorite of The Hills clan, went out with Jarett, her personal trainer. Watching their date was kind of like watching a fever dream of every first date went on in the history of modern romance over a span of three minutes. Jarett, who seemed to be trying to hard wouldn’t let her finish a thought before asking a new questions, even dipping into the “What’s you sign… I actually don’t know what that means” back of post-modern date-lines. More after the jump…

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It isn’t, not, funny!

The Hills can be one of the biggest teases on television. Each week we think we’re going to witness the ultimate smack-down and nine times out of ten we’re left wondering how the producers managed to create a show where so little can consistently happen week in and week out and somehow make it suspenseful. Of course every now and then we’re given the claws and hissing and knives-in-backs we have been craving all along — that said emotional explosions rarely live up to the hype is besides the point, but what good is a show about catty twenty-one-year-olds living it up in Hollywood without the occasional throw down? This week our two anti-heroes squared off. More after the jump…

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Just a big Ruse

I’m always amazed after taking in an episode of The Hills at how little actually happens in a given 22-minute episode. It’s a show built almost exclusively around reaction shots — almost to the point where all one is seeing is reactions to other people’s reaction. It’s kind of awesome. More after the jump…

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I think, um, they go against the wall… or the floor… or… um…

Remember last week when the preview for this week made it look like we were going to be treated to a Spencer/Brody smackdown, the likes of which mortal man has not encountered since Leonidas at Thermopylae? Well that didn’t so much pan out. What we did get was Lauren and Whitney on a business trip to New York City, home of the MagneticMediaFed offices (and Teen Vogue). More after the jump…

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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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I watched most of tonight’s Video Music Awards on MTV. Was it just me, or did MTV somehow pack a room with every significant pop-culture celebrity of the current generation and yet completely fail to create any genuine moments of entertainment?

Such a weird presentation. There couldn’t be more stuff going on at any given moment on the screen and yet nothing stuck. It was like watching a multimillion-dollar theatre production as assembled by an ADHD thirteen-year-old girl and her cool-guy uncle. No matter how far the pendulum would swing toward complete pop-madness we’d suddenly snap back the other way and see Lou Reed perfoming “White Light White Heat” with The Raconteurs (who served as the event’s house band, and who may or may not have been playing with Jim Jarmusch toward the end). Whatever happened to just having two chicks make out? Remember when that was a surefire way to get a positive write up?

The one moment of inspired madness was when some dude from the audience grabs the mike and introduces himself as “Six” and rambles something about MTV not making his show. Jack Black had a good line about how “Six is the new Soy Bomb.”

But that’s about it.

Did anybody watch? Does anybody care?

Look, this is the last time I’ll write about The Hills. I promise. After all, its season ended this past Wednesday, and it probably won’t get picked up for a second (probably). Since it started, I’ve found the show hit-and-miss. Certain moments will have some great drama but the storytelling has always been suspect. Most of the problems, it seems, have come from the faux-reality moniker that the series clings to.

Watching the finale, a lot of these problems went out the window. As an episode, it was the series best. The main character, Lauren, who had spent this season interning at Teen Vogue had a simple decision to make (simple decisions work great on mainstream television and especially on MTV). She had to decide if she’d be spending the summer living with her boyfriend (who may or may not be an asshole) or if she’d be living in Paris interning at Paris Vogue. It was good drama, but as the episode went on I began to feel more and more unsettled. Why? Keep reading by clicking below…

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When 30 Days premiered on FX last summer, I tuned in and loved it. And yet for some reason, I only watched three of the series six episodes. This wasn’t because it became worse over time (if anything, the opposite was true), but more due to the fact that the show aired its “hook” episode right off the bat leaving the casual viewer little reason to remember to tune back in– which is exactly what happened, I just forgot to tune in. Morgan Spurlock, creator of the series (based not so far from his highly entertaining documentary Super Size Me) takes part in one of the episodes each season. Last year he and his girlfriend lived on minimum wage, this season he goes to prison. The big difference (aside from the possible anal rape) is that his episode is airing last this season. This slight programming adjustment has no impact on how good or bad this series is, but it does do a better job of holding the viewers– especially since the other five episodes may not be as entertaining as Spurlock’s but they’re certainly more important socially. But wait, there’s more (click below)…

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First of all, I feel I’m not going to be able to write nearly as much in this post as I should given the amount of notes that I’ve been jotting down over the past three days. I suppose that’s the problem with not posting everyday. Ideas build up and then the getting them out begins to seem overly daunting for something that’s suppose to be fun.

But anyway.

Tonight, MTV will be airing a documentary called Iraq Uploaded at 8:00pm EDT. The subject of the doc is about the videos that have been uploaded to sites like YouTube by soldiers who were or are currently in Iraq. More so, its a doc about unfiltered news video (I haven’t seen it yet, but this article does a good job of setting things up).

Thanks to the ease of both uploading and watching web-video, it has suddenly become possible for people all over the world (specifically in war zones) to shoot and distribute first-hand accounts of these wars– sometimes (oftentimes) in a way that is exponentially more raw than anything the nightly news would dare broadcast. Keep reading by clicking below…

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About six months ago I wrote about the new reality series Rollergirls that was showing on A&E. My initial reaction was that the show was a breath of fresh air, if not entirely revolutionary. Brought to us by the same team that gave us the super-slick Laguna Beach, Rollegirls presented the lives of several members of the TXRD Lonestar Rollergirls in Austin, Texas. The DVDs of the series were released late last month, giving me a chance to catch up on episodes I had missed during its initial run. Simultaneously, MTV has started to air episodes of its Laguna Beach spinoff, The Hills. Watching both shows in close proximity brought out some interesting contrasts. Read more by clicking below…

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A little about the past couple night’s worth of TV:

Dog Bites Man
(Comedy Central, Wednesday’s 10:30pm)

The second new mockumentary to hit the cable spectrum this week is about a fake news team. Comedy Central probably has some sort of graph with fake news running down one side and mockumentary running down the other. Statistically, Dog Bites Man is a can’t miss, and based on the first episode, the math seems to be correct. What’s impressive about the show is the unexpected bit of gravity it seems to be carrying (exactly whats missing from Lovespring International. It never gets heavy like The Office, but it suggests that there might be a little more to these characters than simple quips. And really, that’s just it: characters. The speedy 22 minutes of the premiere didn’t give a lot of room to get much out of the four primaries, but Matt Walsh’s character, Kevin, proves that Walsh isn’t just the better improviser than most of the people on shows like this, but he’s also a better actor.

Rescue Me (#302)
(FX, Tuesday’s 10:00pm)

First and foremost, this episode might have been the funniest one they’ve ever aired, peaking with what has to be the greatest sound cue on television in years (ever?). In addition to having the second sugar-induced-vomiting from a child I’ve seen on TV this week, the episode also managed a teriffic rug-pull, where all the laughs and all the fun just stopped, suddenly and violently. GREAT episode (rrrrrrrrriiiiiiiip).

The Late Show with David Letterman
(CBS, weeknights 11:35pm)

They’re doing this new runner involving Sue Hum, the costume designer walking up behind Dave’s desk holding some sort of food and then just standing there. Hillarious.

The Hills
(MTV, Tuesdays 9:00pm)

My DVR screwed me and this didn’t record. I wonder if MTV will rerun it this week?