Mad(lib) Men

What's inherently dramatic about advertising? Because this is a field that I would not have guessed to be overrepresented on the TV. Melrose Place (Heather Locklear), Sex and the City (Kim Catrall), ...um... Seinfeld? (Julia Louis-Dreyfuss). Whatevs. Point is, Mad Men does is better than anyone else. How, you might ask? Easy. One of these things is going to be in any scene, which is either awesome on its own, or because of the whole meta, isn't-it-funny-that-it's-in-every-scene thing:

• Smoking
• Drinking
• Joan

Here's the thing - I've only been watching the second season, and I don't even care what I've missed. I'm sure there's a ton of backstory, but who cares! Don Draper clearly hates himself, and he's mean to January Jones. Self-loathing that manifests itself in sabotaging one's own marriage? You had me at "self-loathing".

A well-deserved Emmy in my book. Also, Zoe Bartlett is surprisingly, surprisingly good. Ehh what the hell, here it is again - "surprisingly". Not that I've been unimpressed before, but wow, she absolutely nails that character. She's like a ninja that's behind on the bills and has to work as a temp to pay the bills - "I could whump all yall punks, but I'm stuck here with a stapler, Microsoft Excel, and a crushing amount of personal crap. But for real, I will destroy you all."

Lastly, mad props to The Onion AV Club and their blogging of MM. I never went to film school, so I use the AVC to learn about things like "direction" and "subtlety" and "lighting". First rate work, guys.

Bringin' Messy Back

After an extended hiatus (let's not bicker and argue about how hiatused who), TayVay is back! Mostly because I love television, but mostly mostly because I need practice writing. So here goes with some quick thoughts:

• It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia is the best show - hands down - you're not watching. Better than Dexter, better than The Office, better than 30 Rock, better than Mad Men (barely). It's Seinfeld for the cursing generation. Danny Devito is a weak spot, but Caitlin Olsen is vastly underrated.
  
• My dad loves Two and a Half Men because, and I quote, "Charlie Sheen is really good at playing Charlie Sheen". This is like saying you like going to the dentist because "people who drill holes in my teeth are really good at drilling holes in my teeth".
• Pushing Daisies is overrated. Prove me wrong (and show your work).
• If you could resurrect any Star Trek series, which would it be? I was leaning toward TNG, but then I realized that Marina Sirtis' juggernaut of a career would probably keep it from happening.
• Mad Men is very, very handsome. More on this later.

Lastly, I've invited my pal Peter to join me here at tayvay. Partly because he's a fellow lover of television, but mostly because he's a much better writer. Viva el Pedro! Let's hope he accepts.

Pilots Gone Wild

It's not often one gets to say it, but VH1 stole my idea.

Kinda.

I won't get into the specifics of my idea (patent pending), but the premise of Acceptable.TV is pretty good: 5 shows crammed into a half hour show. There's some interactivity involved too, which is less interesting, but the idea of short shows that cycle every week is very appealing.

For one thing, it keeps things fresh. And sketches like "Operation Kitten Calendar" (The Apprentice, but instead of business, contestants compete in the art of kitten photography) are if not inspired, entertaining.

But it also allows for dead weight to drop away. How often have we seen shows stick around only because there's not enough reality shows waiting in the wings to take their place (I'm looking at you , Yes Dear)? This way, crap goes away and something else takes its place. Now more than likely, it's stunningly crappy. But them's the breaks--I'd rather have something that might be good than something I know is terrible.

So a tip of the hat to VH1: you've figured out that Americans have short attention spans and bad taste in television. You're way ahead of the game.

.5hr news hr

For good reason, I'm tough on FoxNews. I was especially hard on The Half Hour News Hour (HHNH) when it was on. I believe I referred to it as "a crime against comedy".

Now, generally when things are pitched as "Just like X, but for Y!", danger is ahead. HHNH was supposed to be "The Daily Show, but for conservatives". Instead, it was more like "A bludgeon to the head, but for idiots!". Look, I'm sure there are funny conservatives out there. South Park has some nice libertarian strands to it. Drew Carey is supposed to be a raging Republican. Dennis Miller's on Fox, and he was pretty dang funny in 1991. But if your punch line is "Vice President Ann Coulter", that's not funny. It's not even offensive. It's just offensively unfunny.

HHNH is so historically pungent, it's probably worth about 6 posts (heck, it managed to get me back to the blog). But it makes its appearance in TayVay for coming back with new episodes. Yes, after two epic stinkers, FNC picked it up for a 13 episode run, the first of which was last night (a Saturday).

The scheduling alone is genius. Really. Think about it, this is a show with no audience AT ALL. Liberals and apolitcal people aren't going to watch because all it does is make jokes written by 4th graders. Conservatives aren't going to watch because they have other, more "Foxy" shows (i.e. Hannity & Idiot) to watch. So it pretty much has to go on a weekend night.

BUT if you put it on when no one is watching, it can just soak up the ratings from people who have FNC on in the background. So while the audience will only be a few hundred thousand, it'll have a like 6 share because there's nothing else on. I call this the Crossing Jordan effect. So it's fantastic for people like Rush Limbaugh who want to talk up how funny and great conservatives are ("Just look at the ratings!") while avoiding the reality that the show is putrid.

But alas, I am too harsh. For the first time, HHNH had a decent joke, so kudos. I'm not saying I laughed, but lines like "The queen was in town this week with a net worth of about 800 million. Upon hearing this, she was immediately hit on by John Kerry" show a lot more thought than the rest of the show.

In other news, the female anchor Jennifer Robertson seems like she could be really, really good. Like if you were a director and you needed someone to look constipated for a solid 22 minutes, but still deliver stale jokes. Or if you had a character who had a colostomy, and whose bag was full but had a leak in it, so the character knows she needs to take care of her crap, but she has a job to do, dammit. Jenn would be awesome for that.

War Crimes

I'm not sure how I feel about Michael Rapaport. On the one hand, he's behind one of the worst comedies on Fox this year, but on the other hand...well, I guess there is no other hand. He's a tool.

TWAH has been on for 3 years, so evidently someone, somewhere is watching it. I could call these people names, or point out that just because a show makes offensive jokes doesn't mean it's funny, or I could point out the insulting nature of laugh tracks, but I won't. Instead, I want to remind everyone that there is a market for everything and that somebody out there likes the crap you can't stand.

And there's nothing you can do about it.

No matter how bad TWAH is, it'll stick around because there is an audience for unfunny comedies. Every season there's about 10% decent shows and 90% schlock. Sometimes, the schlock gets cancelled immediately. But more often, it festers as the network struggles to find Replacement Schlock. But when it finally goes, someone gets pissed. I suppose this is the motivating factor in keeping shows like King of the Hill on the air (sidenote: HOW IS THIS STILL ON THE AIR!?!?!).

But seriously Fox, what are you thinking? Normally, every show has a fan club or a following. TWAH has a myspace page and 1350 friends. Let me break this down for you check writing style: Thirteen hundred fifty and n0/100 friends. To put that in perspective, Til Death has about 9500 friends. The market has spoken. Kill it.

TayVay Jumps The Shark

I don't believe in jumping the shark. That's not to say I don't think series decline - oh how they decline - but that there's not a single moment or episode where you can say "from here on out, suckage". Television doesn't go bad in the sense that, say, a ham would go bad. With TV, there's usually some change (lose a showrunner, a producer gets distracted, Ted McGinley gets hired) that causes things to go downhill. Ham don't work that way.

Alas, BSG has let me down. Despite its strong run as "the best show on television", Sunday's season finale was a clear message that it's all downhill from here. The acting will still be great, the actual dialogue will continue it's impressive run of awesome, but the story is going to wind down.

The revelation that "The Resistance" - the 3 people most responsible for antagonizing Cylons on New Caprica - were actually Cylons was so hackneyed, so poorly planned and executed, it's hard to see how they could go anywhere interesting with "The Plan". Just making someone a Cylon for shock value isn't witty, it's mean.

But what really grinds my gears is this interview with show creator Ron Moore after the finale. I really, truly held out hope that the 3 weren't actually cylons but had been manipulated somehow, like maybe Max Headroom was there all along. Anything but Cylons. But no, they're the real deal. Only they're not, because they're the part of the Final Five, so they "play by different rules". Ooooo, like what? No backsies? They've all had their cootie shots? Funk that.

They spend all this time creating a mythology, making you think there's something more than just than the old Humans v. Cylon paradigm (for instance, the temple of Jupiter that was built millennia before Cylons existed.) And then they screw it up by picking three random characters and turning them into the most powerful of all the Cylons.

And check the interview - this is something they "came up with" in the middle of the season. Look bub, the beginning of the show says in big white letters "They have a plan." That means you're supposed to have plan for their plan. You don't get to make it all up as you go along - that's like taking the mythology of the X-files and letting The Lone Gunmen run the show.

And yes, Starbuck is back. We don't yet know if she's a figment of Lee's imagination (think Six/Baltar), but odds are she isn't. God, if she's the final Cylon I'm going to crap myself. Can't you bring in someone? Or make it someone silly, like Lt. Gaeta (whom I've always suspected, btw). There needs to be some bind between the humans and Cylons other than "skinjobs" and betrayal and living amongst us, etc. For godssake, it's too much of a tease to construct all the amazing characters and have the series devolve into "well, they're cylons. How unexpected and deep."

Maybe I'll feel better when the show comes back in 2008, but I wouldn't count on it. BSG, congrats on actually jumping the shark. I didn't think it was possible.

Good vs Evil

Wednesday (shut up, I'm busy) the stars aligned - both the Mavs and the Stars were on TV in Houston. Better yet, the games didn't overlap - Mavs at 7 on ESPN and Stars at 9:30 and Fox SW. Why is this in a TV blog? One word: commentators.

Sports commentating is probably one the two jobs 90% of men would take in a second and be fairly qualified for, right there with "Burrito Tester". You know how little kids want to be astronauts or firemen? Sports commentating is basically the Dream Job of 18-25 year old males across the nation. Sure, we all know it's a little harder than it looks and requires a ton of prep work to be good. But deep down, we know we can do it and that we'd love it.

And Wednesday night provided the perfect point-counterpoint to commentator skill. Up first, in the red corner, weighing in at 220 pounds and zero complete sentences in 2006, it's Bill Walton. Last week, Bill Simmons had a great column about how one sportscaster can ruin a broadcast singlehandedly on a night-in-and-night-out basis. That's how I feel about BW - I'm sure he's a great guy and was a super center, but that man has no business with a headset other than to say "would you like that burger animal style?" He has this rambling, detached from reality style about him, where everything is either the greatest that ever was or the worst that God ever cursed upon this earth. And it changes. Every. Time. He. Talks. First, Lebron James is the greatest player to play the game, he puts the team on his back, you can't stop him, etc. He misses a shot and "Cleveland is not going to win with Lebron playing this poorly". I defy you to find someone who listens to BW and thinks "now that's a great broadcaster". He was the first national voice I learned to recognize, and now I cringe everytime I do.

But up next in the blue corner, weighing a combined 1.3 Oprahs and somehow making hockey popular in Texas, its Ralph & Razor. If you don't live in Dallas (or don't watch hockey, which I think covers everybody), you don't know R&R, but I assure you, they are the greatest pair to ever call an NHL game. Since they do both the radio and TV call, they have to be descriptive and entertaining enough for the radio audience while not being completely overbearing and talking over the action for the TV. Of course, it doesn't hurt that Razor is a kooky ex-goalie who talks like a Canadian trying to sound like a Canadian. And Ralph, what can you say about a guy who beat alcoholism and cocaine addiction to keep his dream job. They play off each other brilliantly, and they have this tremendous backstory - it's like Wayne and Garth shaped up and got a job calling hockey games in Texas. You couldn't ask for more entertainment.

So the message, as always, is for producers: if you want to succeed, hire good people. And if you don't, I hear Bill Walton is available.