MagneticMediaFed

One year ago I spent the entire upfronts week feverishly clicking my refresh button looking for the latest information on the coming fall television season. What a difference a year makes. After the 100-day writer’s strike left most of the network’s schedules flopping on the dock like a hooked but forgotten flounder, no one (not the advertisers, not the networks, and certainly not the audience) seems particularly thrilled about the network announcements (or lack of announcements) for their future plans. This week is, after all, FOR the advertisers, and since network television is no longer viewed as being all that lucrative those advertising dollars are looking for something more than the typical slate of potential prime-time disasters. Take ABC, for example. The network plans on adding a whopping TWO new programs to its fall prime-time line-up, choosing instead to bring back almost all of it’s fall ‘08 slate (minus, Carpoolers, Cavemen and October Road). But who cares, especially this early in the process? More after the jump…

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Am I the only person who isn’t particularly offended by the news Jimmy Fallon will be taking over Late Night next summer? This isn’t to say I’ll be watching, but as a strategic move in chess game of late night programming, it makes perfect sense. Let us not forget the genre is clearly in its waning years. Really, network television, like newspapers, aren’t a particularly sound investment right now. That being said, the transition from where we are now to where we will eventually be isn’t going to be immediate, and frankly, we probably won’t see it happening. One day we’ll just wake up, go to work, stumble over to the water cooler and say to whomever is standing there, “Hey, did you watch Letterman last night?” To which they will undoubtedly respond, “What’s a letterman?” And then you will realize that they don’t even have televisions at the nursing home and that you haven’t gone to work in 23 years. More after the jump…

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So funny.

Look, I have nothing profound to say about Thursday’s episode of The Office aside from the fact that I think it is safe to say at this point that Mindy Kaling writes the best laugh-out-loud (that’s LOL for the kids) episodes of their whole staff. Here are things that I loved from “Night Out”:

• Ryan on drugs with his “half-beard”
• Jim screwing things up
• Pam throwing a football in Meridith’s face
• Dwight’s ability to attract hot women and then reject them
• Michael’s explanation of what to do if a friend tells you he has a drug problem, and then saying “I’ve been watching The Wire. I don’t understand a word of it!”
• The poor security guard
• AND PERHAPS the single funniest thing I have seen in 2008: Toby saying that he is going to move to Costa Rica and that he is now going to leave and jump the fence, followed by him running out the door and jumping the fence. This made me laugh so hard I had to pause the video — God, I hope he doesn’t really leave the show.
• And the little guy… I’m sorry, I feel bad… but seriously, goofiest looking guy ever? Perhaps.
• This isn’t a funny thing per se, but since I’m from Omaha I enjoyed that the club in New York was playing “Worked Up So Sexual” by The Faint.

What did I forget?

See, this is what I’m talking about! Tonight’s 30 Rock was hilarious, as it always is, and even featured the real-life mayor of the great city of New York Michael R. Bloomberg but seriously, what the hell was Tim Conway doing there? His story had absolutely nothing to do with anything! Why even have it? Blarg, indeed!

Um. That was excruciating. I almost had to turn it off. But does that make it good? Thoughts? I’m kind of at a loss.

Really?

30 Rock might be the smartest and funniest comedy currently on television. It’s certainly in the top three. That being said, can we really heap upon it praise after praise when it consistently delivers the most uninspired B-stories this side of Full House. For as sharp as this show’s writing can be, I simply don’t understand why every episode tends to have a secondary arc (usually involving Pete) rife with cliché. I mean, really? Pete get’s his hand stuck in a vending machine?

This has made me realize that 30 Rock is perhaps too tight for its own good. Take away these completely idiotic and disjointed B-stories and do you know what you’re left with? A fifteen minute show. They might as well cut it down and just put it on after Aqua Teen on Adult Swim (making it without a doubt the most expensive 15 minutes on television).

Though perhaps the lameness of these stories is the joke. Maybe they’re a parody of the type of sitcom fare that usually gets an audience to respond. That has to be the case, right? A show this funny wouldn’t produce material so tepid otherwise, right?

Whomever or whoever? Enjoy this awesome clip from perhaps my favorite episode of The Office ever, “Money,” courtesy of Hulu.

Living in something of a television black-hole with almost obscene amounts of free-time, I’ve frequently found myself over at the NBC/FOX video-joint Hulu, which just went public a few weeks back. As far as sanctioned video is concerned, there might not be a better destination online (though I will also add that the revamped Daily Show website is wholly usable). So far I’ve re-watched the first half of this season’s episodes of The Office, more than a few 30 Rocks, The Jerk, The Three Amigos and (strangely?) Dude, Where’s My Car. The experience, which is where any video-based website lives and dies, is so good I almost want to classify it as “feel-good.” There’s something almost novel about the notion of getting content that for so long has been on the fringes of legality now packaged in a super-slick wrapper sanctioned by all of the powers that be (including our once-short-shrifted writers). More after the jump…

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