Monday, March 11, 2024
Movies, TV, & Books
Wednesday, February 14, 2024
La Brea (The TV Show)
Natalie Zea in La Brea |
Wednesday, February 08, 2023
Playing Catch-Up
Tuesday, September 27, 2022
Review: House of the Dragon
House of the Dragon, on HBO, is a spin-off from Game of Thrones.
I enjoyed Game of Thrones, even the somewhat messy ending.
House of the Dragon is no Game of Thrones.
Sunday night as I watched the latest episode, I thought about 40 minutes into that I really did not care if I watched any more of this show.
I do not care about the characters. There isn't a likeable one among them.
Nor do I care who keeps the throne, gets the throne, eats the throne, or does whatever on the throne. I already know who ends up on the throne in 172 years after this prequel, so what does it matter?
I have read reviews calling this masterful, etc., but I find it incredibly boring and boorish. I can find better things to do at 9 p.m. on Sundays.
For a show that premiered as the highest rated show on HBO ever, it has been the quite the letdown for me.
I like fantasy, but this isn't fantasy. This is just Dark Age overkill with a few dragons thrown in.
Entertainment Weekly has called it Epic Fantasy for Dummies, but I would go even further and call it Useless Fantasy for People with No Attention Span. It is so boring you can look away and miss five minutes of it and still know it will continue to be boring when you return your attention to it.
People riding dragons does not make good fantasy. It's just fantasy if the characters are insufferable and the world they're in is untenable.
We will likely tape the remaining episodes and watch them at some point, but this certainly is not must-see TV.
For that, check out Amazon's Rings of Power. Now that's decent fantasy. I'll review that when I've seen the whole season. I don't see myself giving up on that one half-way through.
Wednesday, March 23, 2022
TV and Movie Thoughts
Friday, November 12, 2021
Talkin' TV
Friday, March 05, 2021
Batwoman Review
Batwoman, Season 2, is playing on the CW. I'm recording it and am a few episodes behind. Season 1 was so bad I wasn't going to inflict more of it upon my husband.
Season 2 is slightly better than season 1, so far. That isn't saying much, because the writing in Season 1 was absolutely awful. The acting was fine but the writing was among the worst I have ever seen.
Season 2 had a rough start. The show had to replace character Kate Kane, who was Batwoman, with a new person, Ryan, as Batwoman. The actor who played Kate Kane bowed out after the first season (I could hardly blame her, as bad as the writing was).
The first few episodes have been establishing this new Batwoman. It goes beyond credibility more than once, and sometimes I feel like the show has simply leapt over significant plot holes, but it is an improvement over season 1, to a point.
The writing is still bad, but the introduction of a new villain shows promise. We'll see.
When this show was first announced, I had high hopes for it. I like Supergirl, which is in its final season this spring. I like shows with strong heroines.
But I also like shows with good writing, and Batwoman suffers from a serious lack of imagination.
Wednesday, September 09, 2020
Flu Shot Day
Today was flu shot day. It was also "husband is home and doesn't know what to do with himself day," which means I was a little out of sorts myself.
Tomorrow, hopefully, we will be both be back on our schedules.
I found out early this morning that my name is going to be in a book called Xena: Their Courage Changed the World, which is about the Xena fandom of the late 1990s and early 2000s. I am mentioned because of my involvement in WHOOSH.org, a website devoted to all things Xena: Warrior Princess. I wrote many show synopses for the show, a few articles for the website, and also did some editing for the website owner.
That was exciting news.
I meant to blog earlier but things were simply out of my hands today.
So here's a new song by Sheryl Crow that I really like.
Wednesday, August 14, 2019
Happy I Have Morals
I think this was the second episode. I missed the first one.
The premise is that Billionaire Man will go into some city and in 90 days create a $1 million company. This is to prove, I think, that people who are poor are poor because they aren't smart or can't figure out how to beat the system or something. It's obviously slanted in that direction.
It's propaganda.
To my absolute horror and dismay, in the first minutes of the episode last night, Mr. Billionaire went onto private property (some vacant industry), then drove around back and waded through a pile of tires until he found several good ones. He then STOLE those tires and sold them for $1500 to get his "seed" money for his business. (Actually it was to get him a room because he'd been sleeping in his truck.) I don't know what happened after that because I turned the TV off.
The moral here I guess is that if you're willing to (a) trespass and (b) steal, then you can move forward in life. (Can you see my eyes rolling?)
He is nothing but a crook. If he thinks this is ok, then I doubt he's a billionaire because he did something legal to earn his millions.
This morning I am happy that I am not a crook. I am happy that I know right from wrong, and that I do not believe that just because your bicycle is out next to your house, I have the right to take it. Basically that is what Mr. Billionaire did. Even if the property had been reposed by the city, that land and its contents belongs to the taxpayers and the stuff wasn't Mr. Billionaire's to take.
So I am content to be mediocre and not of great wealth, because at least I have my principles.
I am happy that I have good morals.
Each day in August you are to post about something that makes *you* happy. Pretty simple. And, it doesn't even have to be every day if you don't want it to be. It's a great way to remind ourselves that there are positive things going on in our lives, our communities, and the world. Check out the gal that initiated this here.
Monday, April 29, 2019
Game of Thrones Fatigue
Don't worry, I won't give away anything in case you've yet to see it.
I stayed up until 10:30 p.m. to watch the show, and then stayed up another half-hour waiting on my sweetie. So I went to bed a little later than normal.
Us older folks need our shut-eye time, you know. Can't be out prowlin' around like them young kids. Or the young kids we used to be.
I am enjoy Game of Thrones but I do not rewatch the episodes all the time. I find them gruesome and they have many bad things happen to women. But I like the story line and some of the characters, although everyone knows by now not to like characters in this show because they generally die.
I was thinking back though to my very first "fandom," which wasn't Star Trek or anything like that. No, it was Xena: Warrior Princess, which started in 1995 and came along about the time the Internet was becoming a thing. We were tied into our desktops then and half of us could only access through dial-up with America Online, but it was the first place and first time I ever found myself involved with other people who liked the same TV show to an extreme that others found, well, nerdy or weird, I suppose.
The fandom gave me many friends, a number of whom I am still friends with today, mostly on Facebook. But these are some of the people that I have known the longest now, people who have been on my radar for almost 25 years.
That's a very long time.
Fandoms are interesting. I found myself with trading cards, dolls, comic books - anything Xena-related suddenly became a prized possession. I think most of my collection is now rotting away in the storage shed, with the exception perhaps of the trading cards and one Xena doll that sits on a bookcase.
Now I have a few Wonder Woman dolls on my shelves, but nothing like with Xena. It can be exciting to throw yourself into a TV or movie show, into its world, to visit with other folks who enjoy the nuances and weird eccentrics of a show.
But not to the point of fatigue.
Part of that fatigue comes from GoT not being on for a year and a half. I'm straining my brain trying to remember the characters and why they matter. Or if they matter. Or what they did to bring them to where they are now. But after seven years, those fine details have fled my brain.
Like I said, I didn't rewatch GoT because of the gore and nudity. I can see it once but I have no desire to revisit it. I've not read the books, either, and have no plan to do so. The TV show is all the gore and gruesome I care to deal with.
That said, if you like fantasy, then Game of Thrones is an interesting watch. If you like intrigue and character assassination, it's interesting to watch. There are many elements to it. People who automatically dismiss it because it's fantasy are missing the point.
Fantasy is dream come to life. It also harbors a lot of truth buried beneath the dragon hordes. Fantasy makes you think, makes you feel, makes you empathize with others. Besides, mysteries are fantasies, really. There's no Dick Tracy wandering around out there. Most fiction is fantasy of a sort. I'd argue that the Bible is the most fantastical of all books, really. The Lord of the Rings has nothing on that piece of work.
I suspect people who say they dislike fantasy have never seen a good fantasy. Their loss.
Friday, September 04, 2015
It Was 20 Years Ago Today
This was the day that Xena: Warrior Princess, debuted. I was already a Hercules fan and had fallen for the character of the Warrior Princess on the three episodes featured in the fantasy series about the legendary Greek God.
Xena was no goddess. She was a sometimes deranged and damaged woman who decided she had to "do good" to circumvent her dubious and dreadful past. It took viewers six seasons to learn what that past was, and it wasn't pretty.
The first episode was called Sins of the Past and it set up the premise of redemption that ran throughout the entire show. It also introduced us to Gabrielle, Xena's sidekick. Gabrielle was a feisty non-warrior who saw something in our heroine that intrigued her enough to cause her to leave her home to travel with her. The relationship between these two became something of a tease - were they or weren't they lovers? - at a time when such things still weren't overly accepted on television. (It was the late 1990s, remember.)
The show was a campy fantasy, and while Greek gods and goddesses popped in and out, XWP was irreverent with history. The writers didn't care if the Trojan Horse took place when Caesar was alive or not. It had a weird timelessness about it, as if Xena and Gabrielle were constantly popping through some dimensional porthole that the viewers never saw.
I loved it. I loved the characters, the dialogue, the fanciful play with the notion of redemption, the idea of gods and goddesses interfering with lives. I loved the fact that these two women were roaming about ancient Greece all by themselves. I loved that Xena was strong, powerful and quick to fight while Gabrielle was a writer and poet who preferred peace to the sword.
The show had a different tone from Hercules, which grew darker as the seasons progressed. Xena had some dark moments and a few story lines that were, well, horrifying, but the show eventually always came back around to finding itself (except for the last two episodes, which set up a hue and cry from every Xenite on the planet).
XWP gave me something to look forward to, and it was also the first big fandom to develop courtesy of the Internet. Star Trek fandoms were already in place, but Xena fans took things to a different level. Xena fans had online arguments over shows. They developed the term "shipper" with regards to fandoms.
By its second season, Xena was the top-rated syndicated show in the United States, and it remained in the top five throughout its run. The show ended in June 2001. It's always had a cult following, which continues to this day.
Okay, yes, I am among those followers. I became a weekly contributor to Whoosh!, an online magazine devoted to all things Xena.
Around the Xenaverse, I was Bluesong: Spoiler Princess. I had a C-Band satellite back then, and on Sundays the show would "feed" to the various shows that would then play the episode at some point during the week. I watched the feeds, making me among the first folks in the U.S. to see the episodes, and I wrote a synopsis for nearly each and every show. At first they appeared in a newsgroup, and then after Whoosh! became established, they showed up there beginning with episode 19 in the first season. After that, I did most of the synopsis updates. Folks waited anxiously for those things to go up.
Eventually I was given the title of Associate Editor at Whoosh!. You can find me listed on the "Staff Emeritus" page.
More importantly, I made friends. I can't believe I have known some of these folks online now for 20 years. They're on my Facebook feed. One of those Xenites is my email pal, writing to me nearly every day for 15 years. We've talked about everything from the show to the state of the world. We even exchange Christmas and birthday presents.
No TV show has captured my imagination as much as this one. There are others I've enjoyed (Buffy, the Vampire Slayer), but this is the show I would watch multiple times. It's been about six years, though, since I last pulled out the DVDs. Maybe its time for a reunion of me and Xena?
"You are what you do. You can recreate yourself every second of your life." - Xena in Forgiven.
Opening lines of the show:
"In a time of ancient gods, warlords and kings, a land in turmoil cried out for a hero. She was Xena, a mighty princess forged in the heat of battle.
The power.
The passion.
The danger.
Her courage would change the world."
Friday, February 20, 2015
Where Did Mayberry Go?
For those who may not know, The Andy Griffith Show starred Andy Griffith as Andy Taylor, a sheriff in a small town in North Carolina. The town was based on Mount Airy, NC, Griffith's hometown. The town was populated with interesting, homey characters. Andy played a widower with a small son and his Aunt Bee lived with them to help raise the boy. He went through a few girlfriends before settling on one around the third season.
The show ran for eight seasons, from 1960 to 1968. The shows I am most familiar with are the early seasons in black and white (seasons 1-5), which our local TV stations has rerun at 5:30 p.m. for about 30 years. They seldom run the later episodes. I understand it is the highest rated show in that time slot in our area. Still.
The episodes have names but I don't know them. Last night's episode involved the choir. Barney, Andy's bumbling deputy, was singing in the choir and well, Barney can't sing. He thinks he can, but he can't.
Instead of pitching Barney out on his ear, the choir members first tried to convince Barney he was sick, so he wouldn't show up at a concert. Then they tried to change the work-up of the songs so that Barney would do a recitation in each piece, but he wanted no part of that because he wanted to sing.
Andy then came up with the idea of using a microphone, and having Barney whisper his singing solo, while in reality another voice was coming over the real microphone in the back. All of the choir members were in on the idea.
This was not a joke. This was an effort to keep someone that everyone genuinely liked from having hurt feelings. As we were watching, I turned to my husband.
"I would like to think people thought enough of me to try to keep me from being embarrassed and hurting my feelings like that," I said.
We both agreed that would be a fine thing. However, given the current state of hatred and lack of empathy that seems to be the normal attitude of most folks these days, neither of us felt that such a thing would even be possible. Somebody's always ready to point out when you hit the wrong note, even if a majority keep quiet.
Part of my dismay at this state of the world comes from watching people gang up on one another on the Internet, seeing anyone who slips up in the least come under such intense scrutiny that I am amazed that we don't have half of a nation out slashing its wrists in despair at any given time. We have become a bitter, brutal, backstabbing society, full of hate and spitefulness. Like gathers with like and we attack, striking like hungry alligators who fear there will never be another meal.
I know that love is still out there, that people still care for one another. I have good friends that I would swim through a flood to help, if I had to. But I think those days of perpetual niceness, that time when manners mattered and people didn't feel so free to speak opinions that would be better left unsaid, are over and long gone, if they ever existed at all.
One thing about old TV and its fictional worlds. They can surely make you wonder what has happened in the intervening years.
Friday, December 06, 2013
TV: Masters of Sex
The story is about Masters and Johnson, the team that studied sex back in the 1950s.
The show is very well acted with Michael Sheen playing the role of William Masters and Lizzy Caplan portraying Virginia Johnson. The storyline does a terrific job of depicting gender disparity prevalent at the time (women are inferior) and portrays these attitudes in a most believable way.
There is nudity in the series but not enough to be distracting. The show is really about the two main characters and the lives of those around them. The viewer is invited to learn about people who participated in the study, the wife of William Masters, the provost of the college and his family, and others who were involved with Masters and Johnson in some fashion.
It presents a very nicely rounded view of the whole process of the study as well as what life was like back then.
The most recent episode presented a Civil Defense drill and how the entire country was being urged to hide under desks in the event of a nuclear attack. It was very well done.
There are few shows that I actually want to own on DVD, but this is one of them. I would watch this whole series again. I do not know if this will be a continuing series or if these 10 episodes are all of the show, but if you have missed it I suggest watching it when you can.
It has also given me an interest in Masters and Johnson, particularly Virginia Johnson, who is portrayed as a very strong and capable woman who knows her own mind (and body) in an admirable way. I wouldn't mind finding a biography of her if there is one.
Friday, July 19, 2013
All Hail Liz
Swamp People is about alligator hunting. But as with all of these reality shows, it is the personalities that give the show any semblance of interest.
One of the characters is Liz Cavalier. She turned up in the second season to help King-of-the-Swamp Troy Landry when his other hired hand had something else to do. Landry's "Choot 'em Elitabeth" became one of those lines that you say around the house sometimes, just for a laugh.
In Season 3, Liz went out on her own, and she's the Queen of the Swamp. Last year she took on a young woman named Kristi as a helper, but this year when the show started, Liz, who is in her early 40s, was working with her daughter, Jessica. This was because Kristi was busy taking care of her farm and daughter Jessica didn't want her mom out on the bayou alone.
The reason Mom shouldn't have been alone? Liz had just had her gallbladder removed but she was out there wrestling 800-pound alligators even though the doctor said she shouldn't do that.
Since I just had my gallbladder removed, I know how Liz might have been feeling, and I simply have to salute a woman who could have her belly cut open and then go out and wrestle an alligator.
I'm much too wimpy to do something like that. Heck, I haven't even picked up a full bag of groceries yet.
There were a few times on the show when Liz grabbed her side and howled in pain. I have to wonder if she ripped a stitch or two. I mean, damn, woman.
So anyway, 50-year-old me is no alligator queen. I ain't even a queen of the grocery.
Wednesday, February 27, 2013
Watching "Makers"
This is particularly true if you believe in women's rights, as I do, and think that women are people, too. It is good to be reminded that it had only been 40 years since things were really, really bad for women.
The documentary outlined the women's movement, from the inception of NOW to radical feminists (they are not one and the same), to what the film called "the conservative push-back" and resulting decimation of the women's movement and the stalling of the female climb to her rights as a person.
While the women you might expect were in the documentary - Friedan, Steinem, Clinton - the thing was loaded with women you may not have heard of. It was empowering to hear these stories, from the first woman to run in the Boston Marathon to the Southern Bell switchboard clerk who took the phone company all the way to the Supreme Court.
I really admire women who can stand up for what they know is right, who can see that laws and attitudes in place are wrong. They made a powerful stand against injustice and inequality and fought not just for themselves but their daughters and granddaughters. They fought for me!
The patriarchy and the glass ceiling have always been very real to me, and I have experienced harassment in many forms, both in the workplace and outside of it. Some of it - most of it - has been simply because I am a woman. In the early 1980s Oprah Winfrey was told she didn't deserve the same pay as a man - because she was a woman. That was just 30 years ago for her - but I heard the same line only 10 years ago!
It is easy to be harassed because you're a little different - a woman in a man's workplace. It's easy to become the target when you're a little more ambitious or a little more conscious of what is going on (it doesn't take much to be different). As a woman, I have been harassed for having an opinion, (because women aren't supposed to have them), for having different ideas (because women aren't supposed to have those, either), and for wanting to do things that were not considered "womanly" (like the time I worked in a machine shop). It certainly makes you feel like you are less than human when you are treated as such.
I have hoped for the last several years that we are on the cusp of a new women's movement. Eventually there will be one too many transvaginal ultrasounds legislated, and things will erupt, I think. Or maybe I am just foolishly hoping that legislated rape with a probe will eventually outrage enough women that it takes them to the street. Perhaps it will have to go a little further, to the point of The Handmaid's Tale, before complacency is no longer a viable alternative to what is happening.
Homemaking certainly is a valid career or life path. But I am opposed to having that forced on every woman, and that is where certain political paths and ideas lead. It was the lack of choice and the lack of opportunity that drove the women's movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s. I certainly don't want to go back to that era. I like to work and I like being able to own property and have credit in my name. These things have only been allotted to women in the last 40 years. Just 40! No wonder it remains tenuous and slippery.
So I applaud these trailblazing women who have broken the glass ceiling, who have changed laws, who have taken their lives and made them their own, and not remained trapped in a life someone else molded for them. Thank you to the filmmakers for this marvelous film.
Tuesday, August 28, 2012
In Love with The Newsroom
Today, "There but for the grace of God go I" is a statement of hubris, a phrase of arrogance. It is used to make poor people feel bad, to indicate that they have done something wrong - that they are inherently "less than" because they do not have that grace of God.
Poor people do not glitter when they walk. But rich people do, and in today's world of emotional, gut-wrenching vileness, that glitter is all that matters.
This difference in thinking is but one of the many themes of The Newsroom, a show on HBO.
This is a show that has left me crying at the end of 9 out of the 10 episodes in its first season.
My husband says I cry because I am, after all, a news woman at heart. The show depicts that adrenaline that occurs when a story hits, the heat of the chase for information, the action that takes place behind the scenes as news unfolds. I miss that and it is worthy of tears.
But he is not entirely right. That is not the only reason this show makes me cry. The truths of this show, even though these truths are set in a fictional narrative, are what make me cry.
A friend on Facebook noted that she liked the show, and one of her friends called it "a commie show." That is, of course, the worst insult one can hurl in the United States, to call something "communist" or "socialist."
It is telling that truth is now labeled communist in the United States - lies, I guess, are the American way. Truth has become a bad thing, something to eschew, something bad. But this show is pointing out the true evils that have assailed this nation.
The Newsroom takes aim at the Tea Party, and rightly so, but there are also jabs at the other parties (Republicans and Democrats),the political process in general, and corporate rule. The show points out that this is a nation that is so self-involved and gorged on its own emotional bloat that intelligence has shoved itself into high gear and maneuvered clear off of this planet.
This is what makes me cry, this acknowledgement that as a nation we are now running on fetid emotions and not using the rational, logical selves that once gave us hope of a great country.
It is hard to watch what you love be destroyed, to see evil take over. Evil has usurped the airwaves in the form of 24-hour disingenuous Meet the Press set-ups, corrupted our political process, eaten our discourse and turned us all into partisan ninnies who can barely think our way past tomorrow's breakfast. God forbid we actually set up and solve problems.
The Newsroom works for me because it shows me what could be. It shows what could happen if the media once again became The Fourth Estate, the watchdog of the nation, instead of its lapdog. In a recent episode, The Newroom explains what a real presidential debate should look like, and it cuts deeply because it acknowledges that what we see today is not news.
What we see today is not news. I'm repeating that because it is important. What we see today is entertainment. And there is a huge difference. News tells us what a presidential candidate actually believes and points out stupid when it sees it. Entertainment makes light of real concerns and turns our attention to that kitty cat over at the side of the political forum.
Today we see nothing but kitty cats on all of the news channels.
The fictional show about real news points out that we are seeing kitty cats, and then turns its attention to the real news. You know, the stories of voter disenfranchisement and oil spills. Stuff that really matters.
The Newsroom is also human, and it shows the dichotomy that exists for all journalists - we are human and part of the story even as we try to sift facts and tell it right. That the latter part of the job has been lost (the telling it right) is the tragedy.
Will McAvoy is the news anchor for a show produced by Atlantis Cable News (ACN). His executive producer is MacKinzie McHale. She is also his former girlfriend.
The female characters on the show have been bashed by critics as being hysterical and flat, among other things, but I like them. I consider myself a feminist but I do not see these female characters as derisive or downplaying women or their roles in either the lives of the men or in the media.
Romance is a big thing on this show, too. We have the Will/Mac (and will they or won't they get back together) and we have a Jim/Maggie/Don/Lisa story, along with a new one with Sloan tossed in there for good measure.
The romance is important because it humanizes these people. News people are not little automatons who run around reporting the news. They have lives, feelings, and concerns.
There is a lot in this show to watch. I know some will find it partisan, that it is attacking one side over the other, but I think it it attacking a process, not a side. It is attacking a process that has taken over and destroyed this country. I'm afraid we're too far gone to be saved.
I have watched many of the episodes more than once, and it is quite nuanced. There is much to think about.
Since it is a show that makes you think, I suppose that is why the ratings are not as high as they should be. God forbid we actually think about something here.
And it is *not* a commie show.
Here are some articles about the show:
From The Christian Science Monitor: The Newsroom: Looking Back on Season One
From The Daily Kos: The Newsroom Airs the News Program We've Been Waiting For
A last show discussion: The Newroom finale sets up Season 2 with new stakes and all the greatest fools
The Newsroom Concludes Season with More Tea Party Bashing: Calls Them ‘American Taliban’
The Newsroom finale, Will rises from the ashes
If you're interested, do a search. There are many others. Here's the Wikipedia link if you want that kind of information.
Thanks for reading.
Tuesday, October 11, 2011
Let's Learn Something
Her new show is called Oprah's Lifeclass. Essentially she has set out to teach the world how to be better. How to be a better you, a better friend, a better everything. And I don't mean better in a bad way, as in, there is something wrong now, but better in the way that everyone has faults and issues. We can all stand a little self-exploration every now and again.
I really admire her efforts to bring light and focus to television. She is attempting something very positive here. She is trying to turn the idiot box into a teaching tool.
She's doing this by going back into the vast archives of her TV show and bringing forth things that could assist someone with personal growth.
Last night's show focused on ego. Where does your ego get in the way?
In the example I saw, she said her ego focused on her weight issue. She wanted to lose weight for her ego, not for the right reasons.
In conjunction with the TV show, she has set up a life classroom of sorts at her website, oprah.com. Over 1.1 million people have signed up for it, including me. She gave the first one million a free journal. I did not sign up quickly enough to qualify for that, but oh well.
I signed up even though I knew I wouldn't do the exercises or be able to watch all of the TV show, because of my class schedule. I expect most people are not able to devote an hour every night to this, but perhaps the online initiative will make it work. But I thought it might be an interesting and worthwhile exercise when I had a spare moment. I am always trying to do better and be a better person.
The series runs for five weeks, five nights a week.
Friday, September 30, 2011
Why I Don't Watch TV
I am not up on popular culture.
Movies are not something I go to, except maybe once a year. I don't sit around and watch them on TV, either. I don't watch very many TV shows. At the moment, the only thing I am making a point of watching is Survivor and the new Charlie's Angels, and neither are overly great. We also watch a lot of shows on History and Discovery Channel, but if I miss them, I don't worry about them.
I stopped watching a lot of TV in 1995. The other day I was trying to figure out what happened in 1995 to make me stop sitting in front of the 'tube, and it hit me. That was when we suddenly had more than three channels.
You see, up until that point, my TV viewing was limited by accessibility. When I was growing up, I could only get one channel - ABC. If a show came on ABC, I watched it. I loved going to my grandmother's because they could get all three channels - and PBS.
When I married, I moved up in the world. We could get CBS and ABC. After we moved to our current home in 1987, we could get all three channels. But not PBS.
The big C-Band satellite came to our house in 1995. You might remember those honkin' big dishes that folks had outside their homes. The thing was huge, about 10 feet across, covered with mesh, with a big pointy nose sticking up into space. It moved about in search of the satellite feeds.
So we suddenly had 250 channels. My husband picked up the remote.
Flip.
Flip.
Flip.
Flip.
And that was the end of my TV watching. I cannot stand to sit there and watch pieces of shows. I'm rather anal in that when I watch a movie, I watch it from beginning to end. Same with a series. If I don't see the pilot, I generally don't watch the show.
But it is not all his fault. That was also the year I began freelancing for a newspaper in another county. I covered all the government meetings over there, and that meant that I was out at least one night a week, if not more, and not generally the same night. That meant I missed shows. Which meant I just stopped watching, because if I couldn't see them all as they were shown, I just wouldn't watch.
These days, I read while he flips through the TV channels. Sometimes he stops on something and watches it. Sometimes I might look up if it is interesting.
I started watching Survivor from the very first episode. My mother had just passed away and I needed a distraction. It came on the one night I did not have something else to do, and it was on CBS, a channel I could easily find on the satellite. It has remained a show I watch just out of, I don't know, some kind of weird icky voyeurism. I know it's stupid and a waste of my time but I watch it anyway. I don't know why.
Since 1995, the series I have watched in their entirety are few. Here are some: JAG, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Xena: Warrior Princess. Also Six Feet Under, The Band of Brothers and John Adams on HBO.
I wanted to watch Lost but I missed the first episode so I never picked it up. I never watched X-Files. I never saw any of the offshoots of Star Trek, except for Voyager, and I only saw that up to season 3, and then it moved to a channel that the C-Band satellite didn't get so I didn't see the rest of it. Actually, I didn't see all of Buffy until I watched it a few years ago on DVD while I was huffing and puffing on the treadmill for the same reason. Something happened with the channel.
I have not seen a single episode of American Idol, So You Can Dance, or 24. I don't know what Mad Men or Modern Parents are about. I have not watched any version of CSI, NCIS, or anything like that.
These days we have one of those small satellite dish and 300 channels.
Flip
Flip
Flip
It's the same thing. Lots of channels. Nothing to watch.
I have missed out on a lot of TV viewing. But I have also read a lot of books, met a lot of people, spent way too much time on the computer, returned to school several times over the last 20 years, and lived what I consider a full life.
If that means I don't have a clue what they're talking about in class, it's something I can live with.
Friday, September 23, 2011
TV: Charlie's Angels
Starring:
Annie Ilonzeh
Minka Kelly
Rachael Taylor
Ramón Rodríguez
Victor Garbe
I know my regular readers are puzzled. What am I doing watching TV - and actually writing about it?
Well, I do watch some TV, but not a lot. And I cannot remember the last time I made a point of sitting down and watching a pilot of a show.
However, I am a big Charlie's Angels fan from way back. When I was 13 and the original show came on, I never missed an episode. And I liked the first Charlie's Angels movie with Drew Barrymore, Cameron Diaz, and Lucy Liu. The second one, Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle, is okay but it went a little over the top, moving from detective to superhero in one gigantic leap.
So I was curious to see what the new incarnation of Charlie's Angels would look like. Plus I am taking this class on detectives in film and literature, so I could plausibly call this homework.
This will be a spoiler, so if you are not keen on knowing what happens, please walk away now.
The three angels, Abby (Rachael Taylor), Kate (Annie Ilonzeh), and Gloria (Nadine Velesquez), are more or less criminals. Abby is from a wealthy family, but she is also a good cat burglar. Kate is a former police officer who went bad. Gloria was in the military but received a court martial. Charlie has given them a second chance.
Bosley (Ramón Rodríguez) is a very handsome young fellow who got caught hacking the IRS's computers.
In this first show, called Angel With a Broken Wing, the three girls go off to save a young girl who is being sold as a sex slave. They accomplish their mission quickly and meet back at headquarters for a pat on the back. Abby and Kate decide to go party, but Gloria says she has something else to do. They all go outside, and Abby and Kate stop to have a chat about some unopened letters from Abby's father that Kate found in the trash. Gloria goes to her car, gets in, and the car explodes. She is dead.
Exterior cameras caught a woman on a motorbike leaving the scene of the crime. Kate and Abby go after her and find her on a boat. The woman in question, Eve, turns out to be a tough catch. As they have a stand-off, a helicopter comes roaring over the water and bullets fly. They all dive in the ocean, and Kate and Abby decide Eve is not the bad guy.
They join forces to find Gloria's killer. Eve is a childhood friend of Gloria's, and she relays a horrible tale of a time when she and Gloria lived together in an orphanage and some men came to take them away to sell as sex slaves. However, they escaped but they could not forget the looks of terror on the faces of their fellow orphans. Of course, the fellow that the Angels were after originally is the very same guy.
The evil sex trader is now a wealthy millionaire, so they infiltrate a ritzy party and capture his woman. Eve gets caught, though, and the evil fellow recognizes her as the little girl who got away. He takes her away for torture.
His woman soon tells them where Eve and other enslaved young girls are, and the Angels go save her.
Charlie asks Eve to join the team as the third angel, and she agrees.
That's the basic story. Not bad, really. This episode reminded me a lot of the Charlie's Angels movie with Drew Barrymore, which is no surprise since Barrymore is an executive producer of this new show.
The show is set in Miami, and I think it was a good idea to move it to the east coast. I thought the girls were pretty, the acting okay. I like the young, sexy fellow as Bosley, though I personally think he should be gay. Just because.
The show offered up a few homages to the original show. First, Kate's name obviously is a nod to Kate Jackson, who played Sabrina Duncan in the original. For those who may not know, the original Charlie's Angels was created as a vehicle specifically for Jackson, who at the time was on her way to becoming a major TV star. She was my favorite Angel and I remember reading that she was Barrymore's, too.
The address of the Townsend Agency was 1976 Ocean Blvd. and that address is obviously a nod to the year the original series began. The original ran from 1976 to 1981.
When Bosley is introduced, Abby says his name and the camera cuts to a fellow who looked very much like David Doyle, who played the original Bosley. I was actually relieved when Bosley turned out to be a hunky Latino with two beautiful women adoring him in a swimming pool.
The idea of killing off the lead angel and bringing in the second sister is what happened with the original show. In the original, Jill Monroe (Farrah Fawcett Majors) left (though she didn't die) and her young sister, Kris Monroe (Cheryl Ladd) took her place.
There were probably more nods to the original that I would see on a second viewing.
The only thing I did not care for was the voice of Charlie. It is far too soft and sexy.
I don't know if this is a show that will stand the test of time - even a few months - because I certainly have no idea what the pulse of the viewing public is these days. I think the show would be a solid medium viewing experience, but these days that is not good enough.
The camera action was interesting and different, very reminiscent of the movies. The show had a lot of fast action and if you like to see girls doing martial arts then this is the show for you.
I did not dislike it. I will watch it again next week to see how it progresses.
You can read a review of it here. This writer calls the show mediocre, neither good nor bad. Below you can see the trailer for the 2011 TV show.