MagneticMediaFed

missy aggravation / some sacred questions

BENTHAM!! Wait. Who?.. Why? (Spoiler-riddled Lost thoughts after the jump…)

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Picture via NYTimes.com

I have to make this super-quick as I have to catch a flight in a few hours and could use a little sleep. Join me after the jump for some parting words for HBO and the BBC’s Extras…

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The daily routine.

And so another mostly successful season comes to a close for America’s favorite (?) serial killer, Dexter Morgan. Good times were had, capture was evaded, blood was spilled, and all with a catchy Latin beat! I’ll slice and dice the details after the jump…

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Pee-Wee’s other playhouse.

So we have Oscar Vibenius played with an odd subtlety by the awesome Paul Reubens as well as that creepy neighbor kid from Mad Men both having hair fetishes. In the series each character gets his dream to come true when the female lead snips off a small lock as a souvenir. All we need is one more character on one more program and I suppose it becomes a trend. C’mon, Hollywood, don’t let us down now. More after the jump…

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The second the Black child (not to be confused with “the black child”) said, “Where’d my gerbil go?” I think just about everyone watching Curb’s sixth season finale immediately said to themselves, I know where this is going. Luckily, by the time it got there (about halfway through the episode) we realized that it didn’t so much matter, other factors were all ready in play. While the episode (which ran about 40 minutes) couldn’t compete with season three’s sucker-punch of a finale (the restaurant opening) in terms of providing a perfectly themed exclamation point for the entire season, I still found it quite good. More after the jump…

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Before I go and get all speculative, I want to say for the record that the first three sketches and shockingly the entirety of Weekend Update this week was more or less SNL-perfect (meaning it certainly could be better, but not given the way the show is produced and what it tries to accomplish or not accomplidh). Brian Williams was hilarious in those three sketches right after the monologue and then kind of disappeared for thirty minutes before playing himself in the last few sketches of the evening. Still, I loved those first three because he did, in fact, play a character and in at least two of them spoke with an accent(!). Also Feist! Who knew? Certainly not I (on the Rick J. Pecoraro Hotness Meter playing a Gretsch guitar puts you very close to the top). But, what this their season finale? More after the jump…

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Sunday marked the season finale of Deadwood. It also happened to be the series finale, kind of. David Milch, the show’s creator desperately wanted a fourth season to finish telling his story, but HBO balked. They said he could only have six episodes. In what initially seems like a completely backwards decision, they reached a compromise where the show would instead come back as two, two-hour movies for the network. If you do the math you’re left thinking, “Wait a minute. That’s four hours instead of a promised six? WTF, Mr. Milch?” I thought the same thing, but in an interview with Brian Cox on NPR’s FreshAir Mr. Cox made the point that a “movie” would actually allow Mr. Milch to work outside of the perameters he had already constructed. There’s more by clicking below…

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HBO seems to be dropping the ball left and right. It is no longer the sole home of high quality televised drama (thanks for canceling Arlis, a-holes), and when it is given the advantage (i.e. when The Sopranos is airing), it completely destroys any sense of momentum in the season by skipping a week before the finale. Neither The Sopranos nor Big Love were on last week, probably so the network could get away from the added pressure of competing with everyone else airing their season finales. What happened to “It’s not TV, it’s HBO?” Are things really in such dire straights the big, bad HBO can’t stomach going up against Grey’s Anatomy, a series so popular it wasn’t even ON last week? This is a shame for both of their series. All the urgency was drained away exposing flaws that might have otherwise gone undetected. The Sopranos held up, as it always does. It’s flaws aren’t dramatic, but instead simply illuminate the direction of the show. Big Love is a different story altogether. Keep reading by clicking below…

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First of all, if have yet to watch the Lost finale, it’d probably be best to read this post later.

Second, if you don’t watch at all, let me take this moment to beg you to start– and not even in a “do yourself a favor and watch the 48 aired episodes on DVD over the summer” way. As the clock struck 11pm edt last night, people who have been watching the show for two years were left pondering a situation in which, basically, everything we thought we knew was ever so gently turned on its side (though not on its head, as no moment was exceptionally shocking, just momentum changing– which is almost better for a show like this). In other words, this is the absolute PERFECT time to just jump right in. Sure, the die-hards will say, “Rick, that’s &%$#’in crazy! Of course you need to watch the previous episodes. It’s a show about characters and we’ve had over 40 hours to learn about them,” but those people are total nerds are not to be believed! I go on after the jump below…

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Last night was the Lost and American Idol finales. You know this because every person in America was watching television last night (those who claim to have NOT watched television last night are not only un-American but deserve your public scorn). Because of this, Lost (and I guess American Idol) deserve posts that are much larger than what I’m able to deliver right now (I’m about to go to a baseball game… Yeah, that’s right, OUTDOOR entertainment. It can happen).

So in the meantime…

• The New York Times recaps the Lost finale. It’s a good article and has some interviews with the producers in regard to what they were shooting for.
• In my neverending ploy to get everyone in America to watch It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia, this news is coming out of Zap2It about how season one episodes will air on FOX starting Sunday, June 11th. WATCH.
• A great podcast, “Brill and Eric Watch TV” cover what makes a good season finale? Good commentary, and they have a great, kinda-hostile, on-air relationship.
• And finally… it appears that a group of Tom DeLay supporters have become confused by Stephen Colbert’s on-screen performance. [via TVSquad]

So there we go, obviously there will be more later. GO METS!

First and foremost, I want to tell everyone this this post will be typed in “real time.”

As for last night’s 2 hour season finale, it was about what was expected. Hour one was all about stopping the terrorists from launching the missiles (again). Hour two was dedicated to bringing the President to justice (again?). I wouldn’t say there were any real surprises aside from Jack not killing Logan himself, but truthfully a season finale is really only as good as its cliffhanger. Writers usually have 13-24 shows to tell their story. The last episode obviousy needs to tie up the loose ends, but we all know its going to happen. What were they going to do, let the bag guy get away? (Might have been cool.) Really though, those last 10 minutes make the finale, and I guess, in that case, 24 ended really well.

Jack was kidnapped by the Chinese (who you may remember from season 4) and appeared to be on an oil tanker in the middle of the ocean heading for… Shanghai(?)– it should also be noted that the time that passed between Jack getting kidnapped, being beaten to a bloody pulp (off camera) and being plopped down at the feet of the Chinese (a Chinese?) on said tanker in the middle of the ocean: 7 minutes.

Perhaps the bigger questions is this: will Day 6, which starts January 2007, take place in Los Angeles again, or will they be in a different city altogether? Hopefully the latter. There’s no reason that show shouldn’t be filmed in New York City. The two are a perfect match.

Remember Kevin Spacey? Remember how awesome he was? Usual Suspects, L.A. Confidential, Midnight and the Garden of Good and Evil were all good if not great movies. In the mid-90s people LOVED Kevin Spacey, but as soon as the American Beauty thing died down something happened. I’m not going to say it was Pay It Forward, but it was. I saw that movie in the theater on a double-bill with Space Cowboys, which is completely irrelevant to my point about Kevin Spacey, but is quite funny nonetheless.
In short, Kevin Spacey has become a bit of a punchline. All that being said, I think he will make an AMAZING Lex Luthor.  But that’s not all, click below for more…

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Scrubs season five came to an end Tuesday night with the last two episodes of the season. As a finale, the shows were good, but nothing that stood above or beyond the other episodes that had been airing since January. This sounds like a slam on the season, but it’s actually a positive. Season five of Scrubs was incredibly solid. There were few episodes (if any) that ever had me laugh as hard as I would laugh at, say, an Arrested Development or as hard as I would have laughed at Andy Richter Controls the Universe (a show that I will always compare to Scrubs because both came out in 2001 and both got a majority of their humor from crazy dream sequences. Though as I’ve said in the past, Andy Richter… was exponentially funnier because the characters never had to learn a lessson, unlike on Scrubs), but what the series does succeed at, and especially this past season, was keeping the level of funny consistent episode to episode. They may never have had you wet your pants, but you knew you were going to walk away in a positive state of mind– it also didn’t hurt that the wackiness this season was amped up a bit (my favorite running gag being JD’s purchase of a quarter-acre and building a porch on it. No house. Just a porch).

And not to be outdone, they threw in a juicy little cliffhanger for us to hold onto until next January (Scrubs runs nonstop over the latter half of the year, a trend we’ll be seeing much more of in ‘06-’07). It’s a damn good thing they got the green-light for a season six.

Jim and Pam, sitting in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G.  SPOILER! Jim kissed Pam at the end of the season 2 finale which aired last Thursday.  I hope I didn’t ruin it for anyone.  If I did, I’m sorry, but you should be more on the ball with your DVR watching.  Seriously.  It’s your own damn fault.  You don’t deserve surprises.  I’m sorry.

So, it’s mid-May and sweeps in full bloom.  A handful of shows have aired the last episode of their respective seasons, giving TV addicts some necessary time off (or at least giving them extra time to, say, watch the first two seasons of Battlestar Galactica). It’s an important part of the television calendar not only for the networks who need the ratings points to drive up their ad-dollars, but for the viewer as well, who needs some sort of validation in spending the past 30 weeks following a story that’s suppose to go somewhere.  Season finale season is the literal (and figurative) payoff for both sides.

So far, The Office has delivered the best episode.  It had the perfect balance of soapy-cliffhanger and genuine hilarity.  This speaks volumes about a show that one year ago I thought would do nothing but stain the image of the original BBC The Office (my favorite televison comedy of all time).  But that wasn’t the case.  The American version retooled over the summer and came back strong.  The fact that it’s actually built an audience is even more impressive as the retooling was in no way a watering down.  Now, The Office is in the unenviable position of being THE comedy that could resurrect the entire genre (the irony that it could also save NBC, the network who more or less killed television comedy over the past seven years by beating a dead horse with a dead panda is priceless).  Next season will be key as the series needs to maintain the level of writing it’s currently putting on the air as well as adding viewers. Here’s hoping The Office cracks the top 20 and unseats Two and a Half Men as the number one comedy in America (it has been for over a year!!!).

What’s interesting about the growing audience for The Office is the show represents exactly what network suits say will not work on television: single-camera comedy with no laugh track (and in the case of The Office no music track either… just silence). And yet people don’t seemed to be frightened off and running back into the wilderness.

The Office, NBC Thursdays 9:30et