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

In his op-ed on Monday, David Brooks revisited the father of our country and paid wistful attention to the mythic figure’s concern for dignity.

When George Washington was a young man, he copied out a list of 110 “Rules of Civility and Decent Behavior….”   They were designed to improve inner morals by shaping the outward man. Washington took them very seriously….  In so doing, he turned himself into a new kind of hero. He wasn’t primarily a military hero or a political hero.

What kind of hero was Washington?  Brooks adopts the words of a historian:

[Washington] “was acclaimed as a classical hero because of the way he conducted himself during times of temptation. It was his moral character that set him off from other men.”

To be a political or military hero, one need only win; to be a moral hero, one must seem worthy of the victory.  By 1796, largely thanks to the efforts of Thomas Jefferson, the French neo-classical sculptor Jean-Antoine Houdon had captured this dignity in stone:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/wolflawlibrary/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Houdon, George Washington, Virginia State Capitol, 1796

Here the gentleman farmer and surveyor, the commander and citizen, stands erect with chin up and rests his left arm on a fasces, a symbol of the Roman republic.  Washington’s sword-bearing hand now guides a cane.  His weapon, the sheathed sword of state, hangs opposite on the symbolic post.  One can well envision this Washington declining to become emperor, as the story goes, and choosing instead to step down after his second term for the sake of this nascent democracy.

The conventional wisdom about George Washington is that he was all three: a great general, a beloved statesman, and a prudent, self-governing man.  Nowadays, we still have victorious generals and accomplished politicians.  But dignity, the quality that demonstrates wise self-regulation, has vanished from the scene:

…the dignity code itself has been completely obliterated. The rules that guided Washington and generations of people after him are simply gone.

Brooks mentions a few politicians who have become all too familiar to us in ways George Washington never was.  He has a point; it is difficult to think of any figure in the public square who maintains that sort of dignity and commands that sort of respect.  To find a suitable analog, we have to turn to contemporary fiction.  Science fiction.  Interlarded with heavy doses of science fantasy.

We have to turn to Admiral Adama from Battlestar Galactica.  As the BattlestarWiki explains:

Adama has the rare combination of qualities that make up a good leader: insight, the ability to naturally command respect, a common touch that enables him to relate to the enlisted personnel under his command as well as his officers, intuition, intelligence, a strong belief in his own abilities, and the ability to take the advice of others. These qualities are reflected in the fact that personnel of all ranks aboard Galactica hold him in high regard….

Sure, Adama has his issues.  However, he keeps them in his quarters and always presents a dignified face to his people.  He believes that they deserve nothing less than a steady hand at the helm.  And sure, there are those in his fictional world who question Adama.  There are even some who rebel against him.  But most are fiercely loyal to him.  Even some sleeper agents planted in his crew by the enemy find his character so compelling that they choose to stand with him, come what may.  This loyalty attaches neither to Adama’s military victories nor his political maneuvers, but to his virtue.  One close colleague explains the allegiance of Adama’s people this way: “They’re doing it for the old man!”

When it comes time to stir up dissent, Adama’s insidious adversary, the community organizer Tom Zarek, compares Adama’s return to that of a Greek god: “Zeus has returned to Olympus.”  The comparison is cynical.  The gods are capricious, mad with power, and all too human; their dignity is a sham.  Of course, in the world of Battlestar Galactica, most humans believe in these gods.  The humans are hellenistic polytheists, while the robots and cyborgs are monotheists– an intriguing domain for thematic development in the series.  So when Zarek compares Adama to Zeus, neither man believes in Zeus but both understand that most of Adama’s followers do.  Aiming to offend, Zarek implies that Adama is imperial rather than democratic, the de facto god of his people.

Here, the comparison between perceptions of the real George Washington and projections of the fictional William Adama becomes strained.  For it was quite reasonable to present the founding fathers of the United States by way of Roman republican iconography that reinforces our most cherished political values, representative government and the rule of law.  Right?  But no crackpot would ever, ever compare Washington to Zeus.  Certainly not in earnest.  Certainly not in the form of a gigantic, fantastically expensive, state-commissioned sculpture intended for display in the nation’s most hallowed halls.  Right?  RIGHT?!

Not so:

The plot thickens, but I need a drink.  Let’s continue in a separate post.

Following up on an earlier post by Ken, we present more notes on the strange creatures we call “humans.”

1. One might think that the memoirs of highly educated strippers, discussing their careers, methods, and insights into the psychology of the aroused men who throw money at them would be informative, or at least sexy and titillating.  One might be wrong.
2. We’ve written previously about Television Tropes, but for some reason it is still not the most popular site on the web among people between the ages of 25 and 45 who watch television, meaning the entire internet.  It should be.  If you’ve ever wanted to know why it is entirely logical that time travelers can defeat the star-spanning Dalek Empire to avert a cataclysmic future, but cannot kill an infant boy named Adolf who is defended only by an old Austrian drunk and a woman who suffers tuberculosis, TV Tropes explains.
3. From high to low, the Police Blotter of the Flathead Beacon, Flathead County Montana, dissects the annals of crime in a place so sparsely populated that criminals have to walk ten miles, uphill in the snow, to find others against whom to commit their offenses.  Dry, humorous, and recommended.
4. Is nuclear beer in our future?  One might think so from watching this ad for Taedonggang, North Korea’s flagship premium lager, so expensive that only foreigners and people named “Kim” can afford it.  A North Korean news story on the beer (Taedonggang is the only product advertised on North Korean television) is striking as it depicts the beautiful freeways surrounding Pyongyang, the most peaceful highways in the world, unsullied by traffic because no one owns a car.
5. Packratt (not his real name) in Seattle had a very bad experience with the police.  Fortunately the web provides a novel form of revenge.  He compiles and disseminates data about crimes and misconduct committed by police officers.  In meticulous, exhausting detail.  Visit the news feed at Injustice Everywhere, and be horrified.
6. The Vatican Library has made its secret archives available online.  As any seeker of hidden knowledge would expect, there is a catch.
7. Eye of the beholder?  Russian artists Vitaly Komar and Alex Melamid took a worldwide poll as to what people find appealing in art, and created the results.  The answer?  Everyone, except for the Dutch, likes studies of solitary trees standing on a lonely northern beach. Everyone, except for the Dutch, hates abstraction.

What’s wrong with the Dutch?

Ever wondered what ET is watching now? Assuming he doesn’t have cable, you can figure it out through Gizmodo’s cool graphic showing how far into the stars various broadcasts have reached.

Via Billy Ockham.

Do you consider yourself to be a good-looking man?

Do you have an extroverted personality?

Do you want to make love to one of the world’s most beautiful actresses?

Perhaps marry her?

Become famous on national television?

And get paid to do it all?

Have we got an opportunity for you!

For years, I wondered — was it a dream? Had I imagined it? Was it a rose-colored delusion, the result of some high fever or overdose of cold medication in my early adolescence, some result of late seventies/early eighties bad nutrition?

For years I searched. Surely there must be some record of it. There’s a record of everything. I just haven’t drafted my search properly. Or . . . didn’t I? Am I wrong?

Did Mr. Pow really exist?

Finally, today, joy from a properly constructed Google search: someone else who acknowledges that Mr. Pow existed.

TV Pow was a contest that would be hosted live during commercial breaks. I remember prizes from board games to trips to Cedar Point (an amusement park) on the deluxe Cedar Point Express bus! Woo!.

You might ask, how do you win these fabulous prizes? Just send in a postcard with your name, age, address and phone number. Heck, for a trip on the Cedar Point Express, they could’ve asked for my Social Security number, a pap smear and a blood sample.

Wait — I forgot the most important part. You send in the postcard, they call you on the phone, and you use the phone –your voice, man — to blow up alien spacecraft. A highly advanced shooting game, similar to Space Invaders is displayed live on TV, and you would shout into the phone, “POW” to activate your laser (the thin white block) and kill the aliens (the thick white blocks). If you kill enough aliens, you win.

Of course, that’s not really how it played out. Kids would be taken aback by their sudden fame of being on TV live during little house, and would whisper “pow” too softly to activate the voice technology. Or, things would swing the other way, and you’d have thirty seconds of a kid shouting “POWPOWPOWPOW” at the top of his little lungs. This was frickin’ genius in the post-pong/pre-atari world.

In the Los Angeles market, this was branded as “Mr. Pow” and hosted by a guy who, in retrospect, looked like the biggest stoner on the planet. I would sit, rapt, as blocky dots would lumber across the screen, more or less in time with some voice-cracking kid shrieking “POW!” That kid, at that moment, was FAMOUS.

I remember many moments very vividly: holding my son the first time, learning my mother had died, my first closing argument to a jury.

But there is very little I remember as vividly as the time in roughly 1980 when Mr. Pow broke down. The poor kid on the line shouted, with increasing desperation and speed, POWPOWPOWPOWPOW, but no dots emerged, and his thirty seconds ended fruitlessly. I can remember with cinematic perfection the broken and hopeless tone with with the kid wailed “IT DIDN’T GO POOOOOOOOWWWWWW!”