It was slightly weird when Emmitt Smith and other sports figures decided to start going on reality shows. But at least they were in the prism of “celebrities.” Several years ago, a former NFL quarterback (by no means a star) was on Survivor, and he was so concerned about people recognizing him that he lied about his job and most everything else. He apparently felt his celebrity would be a drawback.

What then are we to make of the chances of ex-NFL Coach Jimmy Johnson on Survivor? It’s not like he can pretend to be someone else. Heck, I would vote him off everytime because a) he’s insufferable b) I’m a Niners fan c) his hair. But, I have to admit, I am sort of fascinated to see what would happen if he were on the show. I think they might have got me to watch the show again, after not having watched for some time. Heck, his hair after a week without product should be fascinating television by itself.

One of my partners just walked in with a brand-new 64 Gig 3G iPad.

Because he likes to torture me, he handed it to me for 10 minutes.

Played with email. Noted speed of Safari. Looked at books. Then selected a video from his unlimited Netflix account and watched it stream.

Forgive me, Father, for I am lost in the sin of geek lust.

[Note for those who are my wife: yes, I know I don't need it.]

Been awhile since we did a Friday timewaster, but I thought I would toss out some major nostalgia. I am a trove of useless knowledge, and one of my strengths is TV show theme songs. So, imagine how happy I was to find a site dedicated to recordings of 80s shows theme songs. That’s right in my wheelhouse!

Sure, there are a few notable absences – She’s the Sheriff, Riptide (one of my favorite shows when I was young. Should I admit that?),  or Bring Them Back Alive (still Bruce Boxleitner’s finest work) but there is so much to love here. How about the theme to one of my all time favorites – Tales of the Gold Monkey! Or A.L.F.? Who knew the Facts of Life changed their theme song so much?

One of the neatest parts of the site is the old sports show music. Remember the old NBA on NBC theme? The even older CBS one was better. I also recommend the promos section, if just for the awesome clip of Letterman making fun of NBCs promos back in the day.

The site is sort of cluttered, and the audio is Realaudio (unfortunately) but it’s still a nice way to waste some Friday time. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go enjoy my favorite all time TV theme song – The Scarecrow & Mrs. King (seriously, it’s a great theme. And, Boxleitner again…)

This has the potential to be either awesome (like Peter Jackson’s adaptation of Lord of the Rings, for instance) or horrific (like the movie adaptation of Bonfire off the Vanities, for instance). The Pillars of the Earth is one of my favorite pulp reads — the apex of Ken Follet’s talents for plotting and vivid bad guys.

Clearly the producers recognize that a movie is a fundamentally different art form than a book, and have acted accordingly — the plotline described on the site differs substantially from that of the book, which is epic. We’ll see whether they manage to capture what makes the book great even after telescoping the story. They’ve certainly got the actors to make it work — Ian McShane and Donald Sutherland are exceptional.

I note that it’s being released on the Starz network, which gives the producers freedom they wouldn’t have on network television. If the Pillars of the Earth miniseries is a success, it will be a yet another example of networks that used to just replay old content producing their own top-notch entertainment — like TNT, AMC, and others before them.

The venerable Law and Order — a franchise that’s old enough to vote, and will soon be old enough to drink or to move back in with its parents — is spawning yet another spin-off, this time set in Los Angeles. This seems paradoxical — it’s a move unimaginative to such an extent that it clearly required imagination. It’s not even the most recent law enforcement spinoff to be set in my fair city — the lethargic NCIS Los Angeles (which puts me to sleep, and is tolerable only when Linda Hunt is onscreen mugging) holds that honor.

It will be interesting to see if Dick Wolf and his team break at all from their successful formula. For instance, not that I think NBC would ever air it, but I’d love to see a very dark Shield-style Law and Order featuring cops like Nino, David, and Rafael. But such stuff is probably better off on cable.

Meanwhile, if you’re really jonesing for a top-notch cop show set in Los Angeles, Southland is exceptionally good, and may even (I hope) survive another season.

Well, if you can Jon Stewart did last night. His show started with an epic segment where he proceeded to destroy Beck, switching between a mocking impersonation and shots of Beck’s actual ramblings. It’s delightful. Check it out.

After watching that, I realized that I had never actually seen an episode of Beck’s show. So, I’m tivoing tonights episode, and will keep a running diary when I watch it this weekend.

I have high hopes for Becks utter insanity.

The wife and I began watching Whedon’s short-lived, but masterful, television series Firefly again last night.  For me it was the second time on dvd (after watching it on Fox during its original run), and for the wife it was the first.

The show holds up as well or better than it did when originally broadcast in 2002.  Though Whedon has a great sense of humor, Firefly is his most tragic work, following the crew of the spaceship Serenity about the planets as they run from the demons of their past, principal of which is that many of them were on the losing side of a stellar civil war in which the central-planet “Alliance” (forces of progressivism, nationalism, multi-planet corporations, state security, big government, or if you want to summarize it as a whole, “the East”) crushed the outer-system Browncoats (so named because they couldn’t afford uniforms) or “Independents” (anarcho-syndicalism, libertarianism, mom-and-pop commerce,  minarchism, “the West”).

Plus a subplot about government mind control that can’t be revealed because it would spoil the conclusion of the series, the somehow-produced, and somehow-profitable, science fiction film Serenity.

And of course Fox, where good television goes to be born only to suffer infanticide at the hands of executives, ruined the show, broadcasting a tragic space-opera serial out of order because some of the episodes they front-loaded were funnier than the intended earlier episodes.  So normal people watching the show had no idea what was going on.  It was cancelled before its full run was complete, due to low ratings.  Today Firefly lives only on dvd.

And it did occur to me, if HBO or Showtime, networks which aren’t afraid to challenge audiences and which take the long view, had access to the show, it might have had its second or third or fourth season.  Hell, Big Love is now on its fifth season.

And which comes back round to my other point.  Firefly, as cool a piece of anti-authoritarian agitprop as was ever made, is more relevant today than ever.  In 2002 only freaks on the left or the libertarian fringe feared their government and their banks.  Today, everyone fears the Man.

If you’ve never seen Firefly, I strongly urge you to watch the show in the original order. And wear your brown coat with pride.

If there’s anyone I can’t stand, it’s people who wander up to a conversational group talking about a TV show and intone “Oh, I don’t even own a television,” then recline upon their own insufferable smugness. Look, just go read Recherche du Temps Perdu as translated into Navajo or something, will you? We get it. You’re our intellectual superiors. Let us go back to talking about the B-plot on Friday Night Lights.

I agree with the recent cliche that we’re in another golden age of television — particularly with the addition of cable as a dominant player, the last decade has seen a flood of high-quality, sophisticated, literate, well-written, and gripping and/or hilarious shows.

But there’s no denying that television, to swipe and modify E.B. White’s famous comparison, is like humor or frogs — it does not benefit from being picked apart. In fact, nearly everything on television suffers badly from close analysis. A good show is a windswept romance, not a stable long-term relationship. I’m not saying that you can only enjoy TV if you are dumb — though it certainly helps in many cases. I’m simply saying that examining its premises too closely will spoil your enjoyment. That doesn’t mean its a uniquely crass or stupidity-inducing form of entertainment. Have you closely analyzed the lyrics to your favorite song recently? No, it simply means that if you’re going to watch TV with a skeptic’s eye, you’re going to wind up disappointed or, possibly, freaked out by the hidden premises.

One of the best places to observe this phenomenon is the blog Overthinking It. Today, they take on Cartoon Network’s Star Wars: The Clone Wars, illuminating a level of dramatic irony that borders on the grotesque. My eight-year-old LOVES this show, but I don’t think I can watch it again without shuddering now. Enjoy!

This morning one of the ESPN morning shows had Cowboys receiver Miles Austin, who is from New Jersey (even gave the Garden State a shout out…) This led to the awkward moment of the interviewer asking Austin “You’re from New Jersey, have you seen the show Jersey Shore on MTV?” Happily, the player hadn’t (or at least wouldn’t admit it).

What was the rationale behind that question? Would this then lead to a long discussion of just why that guy calls himself “The Situation”? Or perhaps we could finally hear the word Guidette on ESPN airwaves? Were they really that starved for interview material with the new star of the team that beat an undefeated team? Sheesh.

The web tells me that I am not the only person out there disappointed by AMC’s remake of the classic 1960s British spy / sci-fi / conspiracy theory television show The Prisoner.  I’m a fan of AMC nonetheless.  In addition to Mad Men, which with the possible exceptions of HBO’s Bored To Death and NBC’s Thirty Rock is the best thing currently on the tube, AMC has generously made each and every episode of the original Prisoner available for viewing on the web.

At one time I’d planned to blog my way through all of the original Prisoner programs, but of course life and work got in the way of that overambitious project.  My thoughts about the original show, and why you should watch it, were blogged and can be found here.

Shorter version:  The Prisoner may not be the best television show ever made, but it is the best anyone’s done on the universal human emotions of fear, self-doubt, and paranoia.  You need only read the news to understand the extent to which these emotions dominate our world today.

Many don’t understand it or turn away from it in disgust despite its garish colors, friendly surf music soundtrack, charming setting, and humor, because television giant Patrick McGoohan’s masterpiece is as close as anyone’s ever gotten to putting Franz Kafka on the tube:  Franz Kafka mixed with Ian Fleming.  That’s the show’s premise: what if James Bond went off the reservation?  What would They do to get him back?  How would he resist?  And in fact, aren’t They doing the same thing to us all.  Like Kafka, the show is best viewed as an allegory for the world.

You can watch the entire original series by clicking here. It won’t just take your Friday afternoon.  It will imprison many afternoons and evenings to come.

We expect to find odd things on the internet. It’s a given. It is, arguably, the entire point of the internet.

But we expect to find it in less familiar precincts. We don’t expect to from zero to surreal just by visiting the familiar or the banal — the CNN, the weather.com, your personal home page.

Or Google.

Yet Google is, increasingly, bizarre, even before you clink on any of the freaky links it spits out for you. Case in point: Google’s auto-complete feature, which offers you popular searches based on the letters you have typed into the search bar so far, increasingly suggests that the internet is made up exclusively of dadaists and deviants. (As if you didn’t know).

Have no idea what I mean? Visit Autocomplete Me, where they offer some of the best examples.

You are Number Six.

Who are you?

Not the new Number Two.  Nor for that matter, the new Number Six.

The producers of AMC/ITV’s renewal of The Prisoner had a tall order to fill: to reimagine and remake a television show so perfect in its strange mix of whimsy, paranoia, conspiracy, and adventure that over forty years after its debut, it is still ahead not just ahead of its time, but of our time.

Even shows like Twin Peaks, Lost, and Life On Mars, the programs that most nearly approach The Prisoner as ongoing mysteries meant to keep the audience guessing, didn’t quite hit the mark of Patrick McGoohan’s masterpiece.  As for the producers of this “remake,” well, they tried.  And on the evidence of one episode, they’ve failed.

Utterly.

This is a Prisoner written by committee, full of pretty people and long stretches of … futility.  Oh they’ve taken the cosmetics, the plot, and the ideas behind the original.  They’ve sounded the notes, but they’re not getting the music.  Where the original show featured a parade of memorable character actors such as the wonderful Leo McKern, and a star who could have worked for Hitchcock, this version gives us a cast that could have come straight out of a toothpaste commercial, and a star memorable only for his ordinariness.  James Caviezel, while certainly good looking enough, just isn’t a big enough man to play the part of someone so extraordinary that a separate world would be set up to extract information from him, and to drive him insane.

If THEY wanted to get information from James Caviezel, they’d just have him mugged in some dark alley.

Even Ian McKellen, gamely trying his best to carry our interest as Number Two, can’t carry the show on his back.

I feel like I’m watiching The Truman Show rather than The Prisoner.  I suppose this cast and these writers might have made a … decent program given the freedom to make something their own, but the problem with reimagining perfection is that you’ve got to do it perfectly.

Not recommended.

Update: For our friends Eddie and Ella:

I get more from the first minute of the first episode of the original than I got from last night’s slogging abomination.

Via Flatlander over at OO, I learned that HBO has confirmed most of the cast of the “Game of Thrones” series. This blog has pictures.

Expect a fair amount of out-of-proportion fanboi rage over this series. But as I’ve argued before, a movie or TV show is an entirely different art form than a book, and it’s silly to expect to get from one everything you got from the other. I hear good things about the producers of this HBO miniseries from a friend who knows them, and I think the cast looks good. I suspect the series will be awesome in a way that is completely distinct from the way the books are awesome, probably preserving only outlines of character, plot, theme, and tone — just as both the book and the movie L.A. Confidential are great, but in utterly different ways.

I still think Patrick Stewart would make a great Stannis, and that Brian Blessed would be perfect as Robert if he weren’t getting a bit too old for the part.

Stuffed shirt leftwing elitist Harry Connick Jr. evidently has no sense of humor.  Watch as he imposes his cheerless political correctness on this wholesome Australian television audience.

You may view Connick’s overreaction to this innocent bit of fun at about the four minute mark.  Cheers to the host for standing up to Connick and explaining the humor. And cheers to the brave Australian commenters at Youtube, like “uaapd”, who points out:

Clearly, it was a PARODY, not an attack on the Jacksons personally, or anyone else, black, white or green. How’s your economy going – no recession here. In case the yanks hadn’t noticed, you aren’t the centre of the universe, but we have sufficient self esteem to ignore aspects of your culture that offends us. Please do the same.

and “doingitlive1″ for this:

I was going to write a whole lot of crap but it comes down to one thing really….”get f**ked Harry, I am sick of uptight, politically correct w&nkers” I was offended by the fact that the yanks elected BUSH as president…now that is offensive world wide. …..If your too uptight to get it please stay on your side of the hemisphere and please please please stop starting all the wars

And anyway, it’s not as though there are black people in Australia.  At least none who can afford a television.

Via.

I’ve seen a lot of criticism of the Double Down Chicken Sandwich at KFC, which uses the chicken as bread, and is currently being test-marketed in Nebraska. I guess KFC assumes that nobody in Omaha cares if they get fryer grease all over their hands while eating. It is pretty heinous looking when you see the actual sandwich instead of the glossy advertising photo but I’m at a loss as to what the big story is.

It isn’t that I don’t get the problem. I’ve written about fast-food monstrosities before, and continue to think that there is a special circle of hell for Colonel Sanders, Ray Kroc and the King of Burgistan for what they have wrought. It just doesn’t strike me as anything new under the sun.

The chicken-as-bread is a gimmick. A gross gimmick, but a gimmick all the same. If the KFC PR guy is to be believed, it is a 590 calorie sandwich – high, but not out of line for fast food. If the combo meal were simply called the Two Patty Platter – or even if they surrounded the double-chicken with bread, increasing the calorie count – I don’t think anyone would have mentioned it at all.

In the end, under the guise of being horrified by the fattening of society by the evil fast food companies and their ever-more-devious ways of packing more calories into a meal, all of the critics have instead served as a gigantic, free marketing campaign for a fairly ordinary sandwich.

It isn’t that the fast food companies aren’t evil and ever-more-devious; they are. I only wish that people would do a better job of picking their battles.

Via a lot of places but mostly Chris