The only reality TV show I watch, generally, is The Amazing Race. It's been the only one that's felt, well, real to me. This week, Lisa's mom Meki has been visiting, and we're just off some of our usual routine.
That's how we came to be channel surfing last Wednesday and ended up watch Fox's dance contest. And guess what? I ended up not only intrigued, but hooked.
This show is vastly different than Dancing With The Stars, which is mildly entertaining celebrity fluff. SYTYCD is actually an intense, highly compressed, and competitive apprenticeship. I watch the dances and react emotionally to the showmanship. The judges are critiquing the dances and dancers on their technical merits, and they are teaching aspiring professionals.
Like every other reality competition on TV, the public votes, with the dancers getting the lowest totals in danger of being eliminated. Unlike every other reality TV competition, the judges decide who goes.
No, the judges are not unbiased, and that factors into the eliminations.
It's extremely entertaining TV, and it's refreshing that there are no product placements.
Showing posts with label TV. Show all posts
Showing posts with label TV. Show all posts
Saturday, July 10, 2010
Saturday, March 21, 2009
Further Reflections On The Battlestar Galactica Finale
Can't help myself, it's not often that a television show engages the mind as well as the emotions.
Here be spoilers.
Here be spoilers.
- I was not surprised that the resolution of the series would bring the survivors of the Twelve Colonies here. That's a common trope in both science fiction and New Age pseudo-science (remember von Daniken's "Chariots of the Gods" from the 1970s). The unexpected part was that the BSG survivors got here so far back in our past: 150,000 years!
- The time capsule approach to time travel was pretty cool. No deus ex machina here, as long as you discount the FTL jump technology.
- It felt like an appropriate and proportionate response that Boomer and Tory received rough justice at the hands of Athena and Tyrol, respectively.
- It comes as no surprise that a show that demands you take faith seriously would demand you do the same with angels. The identity of the angels, though? That, my friends, requires a bit more pondering.
- For a show with such an Old Testament feel, the redemption of Gaius Baltar was a nice touch.
- Lee Adama, Luddite! It's rare to see a story deal with a society that uses high technology to survive long enough to reach a point that they can recognize how their use of that technology is damaging them spiritually, that decides to discard their technology so that they can start anew, and that actually follows through on the decision. That's moral courage, people.
- If my count is correct, the role of Moses in this drama took four parts: Adama, Roslin, Starbuck, and "Galactica" herself. And they all got to see the Promised Land, even though none of them got to dwell there.
- Our last image before the fade to the ending credits was of Six and Baltar, arm-in-arm walking away from us, becoming lost in the Manhattan crowd. With the strong notion of cycles throughout not only this episode but the entire series, I'm trying to remember if the miniseries began with them arm-in-arm walking toward us? I'm thinking no, that it began with Six alone, in her sexy red dress, on her way to meet Baltar. If that's not a false memory, then I'll leave BSG taking away the message that cycles of destruction can be broken, and that we certainly, no matter who we are and what we've done, do not have to end up alone.
Friday, March 20, 2009
They Have A Plan...
The series finale of BSG had its share, and more, of holy frak moments tonight. I found it very satisfying, from the frantic moments of combat to the awe inspiring sight of ships deliberately flying into the sun to the Return of the King-like multiple goodbyes at the end. I'm a sucker for a good redemption story, and there were several redemptive threads here.
It's refreshing to see a very SFnal story that not only doesn't ridicule faith, but embraces it as essential to life.
It's also fitting that the Sci Fi channel is bidding farewell to its most critically and popularly lauded show in the same week that it has announced that it is changing its name to "SyFy". The network's press release said that the new name is more of an "extensible brand", one that will be free of connotations of -- and I paraphrase here -- video game loving geeks who live in their parents' basements, and will appeal more to females. Talk about dissing your core audience...
Given the pure dreck that "SyFy" usually broadcasts, it's also fitting that some marketing genius missed, as has been pointed out widely on the Net this week, that "syfy" idiomatically translates as a venereal disease in Polish, and as excrement in at least one Nordic language.
It's rather fascinating to watch a whole cable network jump the shark.
Tuesday, March 3, 2009
24 and the Shark
How, in this post-modern metaworld where everything is a reference to and a comment upon itself, does a television show jump the shark twice? I ask because, last night, 24 did it again.
There's never been another show to compare to 24. Each season, one day, 24 episodes, each occurring in real-time, a massive conspiracy, and America survives because of one man. Jack Bauer. It shouldn't have worked the first time, not when the big event in the debut episode was a terrorist blowing an airliner with several hundred passengers aboard out of the sky. And she escaped. Not when that episode was delayed in the aftermath of 9/11.
As a reader primarily of science fiction, fantasy, and suspense thrillers, I long ago learned to bring a willing suspension of disbelief to my reading. It's a required tool, more so in these genres than in fiction at large, and it transfers to the medium of television quite well. Without it, I could never be a fan of such a show as 24, as I was for its first five seasons.
You see, 24 has always had large credibility gaps in its story lines. It also had the uncanny ability to take its lead character, put him in the most outrageously stressed situations, lead him up to the very edge of a gaping hole in credibility, and have him successfully cross it on a tightrope made from the tautest razor's edge of suspense. It worked, not only because of the always unbearably heightening tension, but because of the character of Jack Bauer.
Take a fundamentally decent man, one with a seemingly endless ability to love (especially something larger than himself), with a driving need to protect that which he loves, and with self-discipline to shame a centurion. Train him in the myriad uses of deadly force. You then have a warrior, whose one and only priority is his mission.
You have Jack Bauer.
That is why the first five seasons of 24 worked, because Jack Bauer was always a soldier, fighting to protect something worthy of his devotion. It helped that for the first four seasons, as well as his country and her people, he had a leader, in first Senator and then President David Palmer, who was worthy of the mission. And, of course, season five was about avenging the death of David Palmer, among other fallen comrades.
In season six, there was no tighter focus than the amorphous threat to the country. And, lacking that tighter focus, there was no way to anchor that tightrope of suspense, no way to make it over the widening craters of the plot holes. After five seasons in which missing an episode of 24 was a reason for a week-long depressive funk, I quit watching the show with a half dozen episodes left. I still don't know what happened in the season six finale, and I really don't care.
I had no intention of watching season seven, but a week before the season premier, Fox rebroadcast 24: Redemption, the movie from last November that set up a reboot of the series. It was a dead night for television otherwise, and it piqued my interest. So, I started season seven the next week. And was caught up in the old 24 fashion.
Until last night.
An attack on the White House by commandos under the personal leadership of an African warlord? A Secret Service force that doesn't at the first sign of a threat move the President to a completely secure location? A Secret Service force, where every man is a deadly marksman, that knows it's facing armed men, manages to set up a somewhat protected position, and doesn't take down at least as many men from the opposing force as it loses? The evil warlord finds a White House staffer alone in an office on the phone, tells her to hang up, she complies, he guns her down, and then takes as a hostage the first armed man his force compels to put down his pistol? The commandos have complete electronic control of the White House, including the combination to the armored door of the panic room? The commandos manage to capture the President's daughter, who refused to listen to the advice of a seasoned and trusted security agent, which might have kept her safe? The President, upon seeing her daughter in the warlord's power, telling the one person in the panic room with her -- Jack Bauer!!! -- to open the door so she can keep her daughter from being killed? Jack Bauer complying, without reminding the President of how many men have already died this night to keep her safe?
It doesn't work, not for me. 24 requires a complicated balancing act, dancing as it always does on the edge of a precipice. It's a tribute to a large number of creative people that it pulled it off for most of five seasons and that it succeeded in a series reboot after jumping the shark in season six. Last night, however, was a profound disappointment that has, once again, shattered my willingness to suspend disbelief.
There's never been another show to compare to 24. Each season, one day, 24 episodes, each occurring in real-time, a massive conspiracy, and America survives because of one man. Jack Bauer. It shouldn't have worked the first time, not when the big event in the debut episode was a terrorist blowing an airliner with several hundred passengers aboard out of the sky. And she escaped. Not when that episode was delayed in the aftermath of 9/11.
As a reader primarily of science fiction, fantasy, and suspense thrillers, I long ago learned to bring a willing suspension of disbelief to my reading. It's a required tool, more so in these genres than in fiction at large, and it transfers to the medium of television quite well. Without it, I could never be a fan of such a show as 24, as I was for its first five seasons.
You see, 24 has always had large credibility gaps in its story lines. It also had the uncanny ability to take its lead character, put him in the most outrageously stressed situations, lead him up to the very edge of a gaping hole in credibility, and have him successfully cross it on a tightrope made from the tautest razor's edge of suspense. It worked, not only because of the always unbearably heightening tension, but because of the character of Jack Bauer.
Take a fundamentally decent man, one with a seemingly endless ability to love (especially something larger than himself), with a driving need to protect that which he loves, and with self-discipline to shame a centurion. Train him in the myriad uses of deadly force. You then have a warrior, whose one and only priority is his mission.
You have Jack Bauer.
That is why the first five seasons of 24 worked, because Jack Bauer was always a soldier, fighting to protect something worthy of his devotion. It helped that for the first four seasons, as well as his country and her people, he had a leader, in first Senator and then President David Palmer, who was worthy of the mission. And, of course, season five was about avenging the death of David Palmer, among other fallen comrades.
In season six, there was no tighter focus than the amorphous threat to the country. And, lacking that tighter focus, there was no way to anchor that tightrope of suspense, no way to make it over the widening craters of the plot holes. After five seasons in which missing an episode of 24 was a reason for a week-long depressive funk, I quit watching the show with a half dozen episodes left. I still don't know what happened in the season six finale, and I really don't care.
I had no intention of watching season seven, but a week before the season premier, Fox rebroadcast 24: Redemption, the movie from last November that set up a reboot of the series. It was a dead night for television otherwise, and it piqued my interest. So, I started season seven the next week. And was caught up in the old 24 fashion.
Until last night.
An attack on the White House by commandos under the personal leadership of an African warlord? A Secret Service force that doesn't at the first sign of a threat move the President to a completely secure location? A Secret Service force, where every man is a deadly marksman, that knows it's facing armed men, manages to set up a somewhat protected position, and doesn't take down at least as many men from the opposing force as it loses? The evil warlord finds a White House staffer alone in an office on the phone, tells her to hang up, she complies, he guns her down, and then takes as a hostage the first armed man his force compels to put down his pistol? The commandos have complete electronic control of the White House, including the combination to the armored door of the panic room? The commandos manage to capture the President's daughter, who refused to listen to the advice of a seasoned and trusted security agent, which might have kept her safe? The President, upon seeing her daughter in the warlord's power, telling the one person in the panic room with her -- Jack Bauer!!! -- to open the door so she can keep her daughter from being killed? Jack Bauer complying, without reminding the President of how many men have already died this night to keep her safe?
It doesn't work, not for me. 24 requires a complicated balancing act, dancing as it always does on the edge of a precipice. It's a tribute to a large number of creative people that it pulled it off for most of five seasons and that it succeeded in a series reboot after jumping the shark in season six. Last night, however, was a profound disappointment that has, once again, shattered my willingness to suspend disbelief.
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