Pictures and Images
"I'm caught in a crossfire between pride and fear
and my heart isn't bullet-proof...
I'm in pieces
think of something clever"
--Ginny Owens, "Pieces"
First off, Sharon promised a picture of Asher as Larry the Cucumber:
Many more recent Asher pictures can be found in the Asher in Grove City Album on our Picasa page.
And, before I ramble on about things that don't matter, something fun for musicians this holiday:
I'm headed back to Chicago for a whole week this time. I obviously don't want to be away from family for so long, but at the same time this promises to be the end of version 1.0 of the Jump archive, so I may be wrapping up an important milestone.
I've also gotten several emails about SAD, thank you to everybody who's taken the time to write.
Now, on to something truly important: TV. It appears NBC is pretty upset at the way "Heroes" has been going this season. I'm not truly surprised; when Sharon and I got sucked into "Heroes" its first season it benefited from snagging a huge portion of a Sorkin audience. The show wasn't as tight or fun as a Sorkin show, but it wasn't preachy or self-important like "Studio 60" and all the show's best qualities were on display against something that was struggling and failing. Now it's obvious the writers are comic book writers with all the good and bad that goes along with that, and with the sloppy plots and big jumps from what viewers were expecting (not just continuity breaks, but deliberate changes in intent of characters) the show has clearly lost its focus. Sharon and I are still watching it, but I at least feel like each episode is letting me down a little more.
"Chuck", on the other hand, has been wonderful this season. Faced with what is typically a show's death knell (the guy-girl relationship is made sorta possible) the show hasn't just thrown in the towel or turned into a rerun of itself. Instead, the writers seem to have grasped something that makes for really good television: theme and parody. The most recent episode was full of completely unbelievable points (really, Japan has a nuclear missle satellite in orbit that is controlled using a code available only if you beat the last level of Missile Command?) but the show manages theme and variation so well (especially as they tap geek subculture) that I just didn't care. It is caricature, but it's fun caricature, and even characters that seemed to exist only to be cardboard cutouts for the Chuck/Sarah story have been given room to breathe.
"Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles", despite having already been picked up for the whole season, seems to also be losing its footing. My fear (and the fear of many on Television Without Pity) when the show began was "how are they gonna make this interesting without turning it in to 'Terminator of the Week'"? The answer: they aren't. Basically, this season has been a different Terminator every week. It's a shame, because there are tons and tons of ways to take the show that don't involve massive time travel, but I guess since they don't capitalize on the Terminator part of the francise they're out. Also, they (like every other SciFi show ever) are having problems not regressing their android characters. Summer Glau is doing great, but their bad guy Terminators seem to be having problems finding where to draw the line between "human behavior I can emulate" and "human behavor I can't understand", tending to side on whichever involves the least impact on the scene.
(There's a whole different discussion here on the use of Christian imagery and the Bible in that show, but let's just say I'm mostly buying it and Sharon mostly isn't. The line is where the use seems forced versus an interesting theme and variation model. Sharon's mostly annoyed and I'm mostly interested. They can definitely ruin it if they start trying to use the Christian imagery as more than theme/texture and start trying to actually tie in story to foretold events. If they stay away from that I'm okay, and most of Sharon's concern is, I think, that they'll head that direction, at least with the former FBI character.)
I watched the second episode of "Fringe" and dropped it. Too weird, not enough for me to care about. I watched "Alias": people seem to forget that before "Lost" people watched Abrams's shows because he knew how to do characters, not just weird stuff with online hints. I wanted to know stuff about Alias too, but only after I was watching it for Sydney Bristow and (more, honestly) SpyDaddy Bristow.
"House" is turning into a completely different show (less about medicine, more about characters) but with the exception of 13 I'm pretty into the characters, so this is an okay change for me. It had to happen eventually, since you just can't have that many crazy medical things that aren't completely absurd (and, basically, they'd gotten to the completely absurd point during most episodes last season, and I'm not even a doctor.)
The election is over so it's likely that SNL will soon not be worth watching again (I mean, there will be highlights, but that's what NBC.com is for) and that pretty much brings us up to the present. (We could talk about "The Amazing Race" but this post is too long already.)
I'll talk about more weighty stuff another day, but the quote probably gives a pretty good idea how I'm feeling this days.
and my heart isn't bullet-proof...
I'm in pieces
think of something clever"
--Ginny Owens, "Pieces"
First off, Sharon promised a picture of Asher as Larry the Cucumber:
Many more recent Asher pictures can be found in the Asher in Grove City Album on our Picasa page.
And, before I ramble on about things that don't matter, something fun for musicians this holiday:
I'm headed back to Chicago for a whole week this time. I obviously don't want to be away from family for so long, but at the same time this promises to be the end of version 1.0 of the Jump archive, so I may be wrapping up an important milestone.
I've also gotten several emails about SAD, thank you to everybody who's taken the time to write.
Now, on to something truly important: TV. It appears NBC is pretty upset at the way "Heroes" has been going this season. I'm not truly surprised; when Sharon and I got sucked into "Heroes" its first season it benefited from snagging a huge portion of a Sorkin audience. The show wasn't as tight or fun as a Sorkin show, but it wasn't preachy or self-important like "Studio 60" and all the show's best qualities were on display against something that was struggling and failing. Now it's obvious the writers are comic book writers with all the good and bad that goes along with that, and with the sloppy plots and big jumps from what viewers were expecting (not just continuity breaks, but deliberate changes in intent of characters) the show has clearly lost its focus. Sharon and I are still watching it, but I at least feel like each episode is letting me down a little more.
"Chuck", on the other hand, has been wonderful this season. Faced with what is typically a show's death knell (the guy-girl relationship is made sorta possible) the show hasn't just thrown in the towel or turned into a rerun of itself. Instead, the writers seem to have grasped something that makes for really good television: theme and parody. The most recent episode was full of completely unbelievable points (really, Japan has a nuclear missle satellite in orbit that is controlled using a code available only if you beat the last level of Missile Command?) but the show manages theme and variation so well (especially as they tap geek subculture) that I just didn't care. It is caricature, but it's fun caricature, and even characters that seemed to exist only to be cardboard cutouts for the Chuck/Sarah story have been given room to breathe.
"Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles", despite having already been picked up for the whole season, seems to also be losing its footing. My fear (and the fear of many on Television Without Pity) when the show began was "how are they gonna make this interesting without turning it in to 'Terminator of the Week'"? The answer: they aren't. Basically, this season has been a different Terminator every week. It's a shame, because there are tons and tons of ways to take the show that don't involve massive time travel, but I guess since they don't capitalize on the Terminator part of the francise they're out. Also, they (like every other SciFi show ever) are having problems not regressing their android characters. Summer Glau is doing great, but their bad guy Terminators seem to be having problems finding where to draw the line between "human behavior I can emulate" and "human behavor I can't understand", tending to side on whichever involves the least impact on the scene.
(There's a whole different discussion here on the use of Christian imagery and the Bible in that show, but let's just say I'm mostly buying it and Sharon mostly isn't. The line is where the use seems forced versus an interesting theme and variation model. Sharon's mostly annoyed and I'm mostly interested. They can definitely ruin it if they start trying to use the Christian imagery as more than theme/texture and start trying to actually tie in story to foretold events. If they stay away from that I'm okay, and most of Sharon's concern is, I think, that they'll head that direction, at least with the former FBI character.)
I watched the second episode of "Fringe" and dropped it. Too weird, not enough for me to care about. I watched "Alias": people seem to forget that before "Lost" people watched Abrams's shows because he knew how to do characters, not just weird stuff with online hints. I wanted to know stuff about Alias too, but only after I was watching it for Sydney Bristow and (more, honestly) SpyDaddy Bristow.
"House" is turning into a completely different show (less about medicine, more about characters) but with the exception of 13 I'm pretty into the characters, so this is an okay change for me. It had to happen eventually, since you just can't have that many crazy medical things that aren't completely absurd (and, basically, they'd gotten to the completely absurd point during most episodes last season, and I'm not even a doctor.)
The election is over so it's likely that SNL will soon not be worth watching again (I mean, there will be highlights, but that's what NBC.com is for) and that pretty much brings us up to the present. (We could talk about "The Amazing Race" but this post is too long already.)
I'll talk about more weighty stuff another day, but the quote probably gives a pretty good idea how I'm feeling this days.
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