(no subject)
This is an accurate visual representation of me trying to slog through the last few months of this release:
My two consolations are that it will all be over soon and that I'm going to Dragon*Con in a week and a half--not, alas, before it's all over, but close enough.
I've been keeping up with the usual summer caper shows (Burn Notice, Leverage, White Collar--I think three of this particular genre is my limit), and rewatching Slings & Arrows with the Thursday night group ("Everybody cries when they're stabbed!"--never not funny), and chipping away at the Netflix queue. At some point, I need to think about new fall shows, but so far none of the new show promos I've seen have grabbed me. Tell me, o flist, what are you looking forward to watching this fall?
Speaking of the Netflix queue...
* * * * *
I saw Felicia Day speak on the Whedonverse panel at Dragon*Con last year, and she had a lot of very interesting things to say about media distribution in the Internet age. For those of you who don't recognize the name, she was Penny in Dr. Horrible's Sing Along Blog and has written, produced, and acted in a successful web series called The Guild that is now in its fourth season. The series revolves around a guild of players in a World of Warcraft-like MMORPG, and I put it in my queue after seeing her because I was curious, but hadn't made it a priority because I'm not a gamer. Then, recently, I was looking for a show that wasn't much of a time commitment (the first season is less than an hour in total, and the rest of the series averages around 1:20 - 1:30; the episodes are between 5 and 8 minutes long).
You guys, it's GOOD. Amazingly so, given the production constraints. The writing is sharp and funny; every scene is dense with telling little character details; and there are some rough edges to some of the acting at first, but iti's a lot of fun to see each of the actors totally inhabiting each of these characters. And it's as much about the bleed between online communities and real life as it is about gaming, which is why I found myself identifying with it very strongly despite not having played much besides Atari 64. It's sharp and funny and full of surprising moments of pathos.
The characters are all in some ways gaming archetypes, but they have immediate and three-dimensional hopes and dreams and challenges; they all need something from the others that they're not getting anywhere else, and that something goes far beyond distraction from real life problems. (And Day has quite obviously gone out of her way to portray a gaming world that is inhabited by all kinds of people, not just white male geeks.) I love all of them, especially Codex (Day's character), but I've found to my surprise that Vork is probably my favorite. He's so intense and reasonable and utterly rule-bound; his spiritual/wifi quest in his van in Season 3 is one of my favorite little character arcs ever. (And Jeff Lewis is amazing in that role; his deadpan is so dead that it's turned to dust.)
Seasons 1 and 2 are fun, but Season 3--when the Knights of Good, the eponymous guild, encounter a rival guild headed by Wil Wheaton (who is wearing a utilikilt) really kicks the stakes up a notch. Good stuff.
sdwolfpup, I feel like you in particular would really love this show.
* * * * *
The first season of Jeremiah is some seriously unusual television. The premise of the show is that some fifteen years before present day, a disease that everyone refers to as the Big Death killed everyone over the age of adolescence; the survivors grew up with no adult guidance and very little access to technology, amidst the rapidly-crumbling remnants of their former world. So far, so good! This is a tremendously interesting premise, and for various reasons (I'm guessing that being based on an existing property--a comic book--rather than written from scratch, and J Michael Straczynski's involvement were big factors) the worldbuilding is excellent. The main characters, Jeremiah and Kurdy, spend the first season tooling around a post-apocalyptic landscape, encountering various little isolated communities that have managed to organize themselves around their local resources and put together a way of life. These encounters range from the oddly sublime to the horrifying, because all of the communities are different, rebuilding barely-remembered institutions in new ways, organizing themselves according to the specifics of local power structures and resources and limitations. The one thing they all have in common is that everyone is ineradicably marked by the losses of the Big Death--the distinct before and after phases of their lives--and those losses have both a practical aspect (knowledge and technology lost) and an emotional one (strong opinions about the value of life one way or the other; a persistent lack of maturity that comes from having no adults to model themselves on). And with a few exceptions, the show really follows through on the scarcity of goods in that kind of environment. There's a rough arc around a mysterious military site from the time before the Big Death and signs that it might still be around.
But then there's the weirdness of the show that exists entirely outside of its world. First of all, Jeremiah and Kurdy are played by Luke Perry and Malcolm-Jamal Warner. This is not de facto bad casting, but you must admit that you're kind of scratching your head and trying to picture it as you read this, right? Then there's the fact that the show was made for Showtime, but does not stray that far from conventional safe narratives--the heroes are not perfect, but they're good enough, and there's not a ton of question that they won't triumph in the long run--so it's jarring in some ways to see the boobs and curse words pasted awkwardly into this fairly recognizable narrative. (I do want to qualify that statement a little. Jeremiah's storytelling is definitely riskier and more unpredictable than, say SG-1; there are aspects of the worldbuilding that are fairly dark and not something you see a lot of on TV. But the boobs and curse words are not a seamless part of the universe's fabric in the way they are in, say, Deadwood.) Also, the constant Canadian Actor Bingo is a little distracting. Seriously, EVERYONE had a part on this show. Let us not even get into the Jason Priestly guest spot, which is likely to make the head of anyone who watched TV in the early 90s explode from cognitive dissonance.
Anyway, while it is by no means perfect, I really enjoyed Season 1 for its quirky sensibilities and the sense of a new world out there, putting itself together in pockets and clearings and valleys. I've stalled about 4 episodes into Season 2 because it seems to have switched gears and become something of a military drama, with the small scrappy rebel army moving against larger forces. So far, Jeremiah and Kurdy haven't done any more tooling around the post-apocalyptic landscape, and that's what I was there for. It's not an overwhelmingly jarring shark jump like season 2 of Dark Angel, but it's not the show I was watching. I will probably finish it, but I'm not that enthusiastic about it right now.
* * * * *
I have been planning to watch The Wire for a while. I first got interested in The Wire when someone told me that David Simon co-wrote The Corner, a book I had read well before The Wire came out because I am a freak with eclectic taste in nonfiction, and which had made a huge impression on me. Then I found out that Homicide came first, so I decided to go in order, because I am a freak who likes to go in order.
I was really impressed by Season 1. It's remarkable how not-dated it is; the homicide squad doesn't have cell phones or computers or video surveillance, but the dialogue snaps and the technology would seem out of place in the workmanlike, grungy-in-the-corners squad room. It employs my favorite kind of storytelling, which is to let the events unfold in measured and sometimes pedestrian detail, while the characters reveal themselves in glimpses, by their reactions. I see now why Andre Braugher is so deeply admired; Frank Pembleton is immediately striking in his inflexible commitment to doing what he thinks is best (and I love how the scene where he refuses to go back to get the car number for the keys he's holding, instead of trying every car in the garage, reveals that that inflexibility is not as much a choice as a compulsion). I also like treatment of Baltimore as a setting: it's the landscape in which these detectives operate, and as much a part of their investigation as the people they interview. It's a very distinct setting, very not-suburban and not-Manhattan and not-middle-America. Adena's likely killer isn't a FedEx guy; he's a fruit and vegetable vendor from a very specific local tradition.
As a long-time SVU watcher, though, it's fairly strange to see Munch as a three-dimensional character with actual, like, development.
Now I'm totally going to have to read the book.
* * * * *
TV meme: Day 7 - Least favorite episode of your favorite TV show
Hoo boy. There are several episodes of Farscape that are objectively bad, like "Jeremiah Crichton" and "Mental as Anything". I would have a hard time finding much to like about "Lava's a Many Splendored Thing" if I didn't feel like the whole thing was an elaborate, in-jokey reference to ST:TOS, at least visually. And I find Maldis basically unwatchable, so "That Old Black Magic" and "Picture If You Will" are right up there too. But all of those episodes have redeeming features on either a plot or character level: Rygel stepping up to his heritage; D'Argo confronting his past; the whole crew sinking to a low point before they find Moya again, and finding the shields; the first real indications of Zhaan's dark side; Chiana and Aeryn's odd partnership.
No, my least favorite episode of Farscape is "The Locket," which I pretty much can't stand. Anything new we find about how John and Aeryn feel about each other here is reiterated in a much more meaningful way in 'Liars, Guns and Money" and "Die Me Dichotomy." It doesn't advance the ongoing plot arc, since it's basically a magical do-over. The plot doesn't make any sense in light of Aeryn's later geometric pregnancy. And for the love of all that is holy, WHY DOES GETTING OLD MAKE JOHN TALK WITH A SOUTHERN ACCENT????? That drives me INSANE. I could probably deal with all of those things except for the aging = Southern accent thing in any other show, but it's a piece of cheap emotional manipulation on a show that is capable of doing so much more, and that even in failing, usually fails in more interesting ways. Feh, I say!
Previous entries here.
* * * * *
I have been complaining about how cold and miserable our summer has been so far, so I probably shouldn't complain that tonight will be my second night in a row of lying on the wood floor in my cotton jammies with a bag of frozen peas pressed to my face and neck until the temperature in my living room drops below 80. Be careful what you wish for.
This entry was originally posted at http://danceswithwords.dreamwidth.org/149606.html (
comments). Comment at either site.
Click to viewMy two consolations are that it will all be over soon and that I'm going to Dragon*Con in a week and a half--not, alas, before it's all over, but close enough.
I've been keeping up with the usual summer caper shows (Burn Notice, Leverage, White Collar--I think three of this particular genre is my limit), and rewatching Slings & Arrows with the Thursday night group ("Everybody cries when they're stabbed!"--never not funny), and chipping away at the Netflix queue. At some point, I need to think about new fall shows, but so far none of the new show promos I've seen have grabbed me. Tell me, o flist, what are you looking forward to watching this fall?
Speaking of the Netflix queue...
* * * * *
I saw Felicia Day speak on the Whedonverse panel at Dragon*Con last year, and she had a lot of very interesting things to say about media distribution in the Internet age. For those of you who don't recognize the name, she was Penny in Dr. Horrible's Sing Along Blog and has written, produced, and acted in a successful web series called The Guild that is now in its fourth season. The series revolves around a guild of players in a World of Warcraft-like MMORPG, and I put it in my queue after seeing her because I was curious, but hadn't made it a priority because I'm not a gamer. Then, recently, I was looking for a show that wasn't much of a time commitment (the first season is less than an hour in total, and the rest of the series averages around 1:20 - 1:30; the episodes are between 5 and 8 minutes long).
You guys, it's GOOD. Amazingly so, given the production constraints. The writing is sharp and funny; every scene is dense with telling little character details; and there are some rough edges to some of the acting at first, but iti's a lot of fun to see each of the actors totally inhabiting each of these characters. And it's as much about the bleed between online communities and real life as it is about gaming, which is why I found myself identifying with it very strongly despite not having played much besides Atari 64. It's sharp and funny and full of surprising moments of pathos.
The characters are all in some ways gaming archetypes, but they have immediate and three-dimensional hopes and dreams and challenges; they all need something from the others that they're not getting anywhere else, and that something goes far beyond distraction from real life problems. (And Day has quite obviously gone out of her way to portray a gaming world that is inhabited by all kinds of people, not just white male geeks.) I love all of them, especially Codex (Day's character), but I've found to my surprise that Vork is probably my favorite. He's so intense and reasonable and utterly rule-bound; his spiritual/wifi quest in his van in Season 3 is one of my favorite little character arcs ever. (And Jeff Lewis is amazing in that role; his deadpan is so dead that it's turned to dust.)
Seasons 1 and 2 are fun, but Season 3--when the Knights of Good, the eponymous guild, encounter a rival guild headed by Wil Wheaton (who is wearing a utilikilt) really kicks the stakes up a notch. Good stuff.
sdwolfpup, I feel like you in particular would really love this show.
* * * * *
The first season of Jeremiah is some seriously unusual television. The premise of the show is that some fifteen years before present day, a disease that everyone refers to as the Big Death killed everyone over the age of adolescence; the survivors grew up with no adult guidance and very little access to technology, amidst the rapidly-crumbling remnants of their former world. So far, so good! This is a tremendously interesting premise, and for various reasons (I'm guessing that being based on an existing property--a comic book--rather than written from scratch, and J Michael Straczynski's involvement were big factors) the worldbuilding is excellent. The main characters, Jeremiah and Kurdy, spend the first season tooling around a post-apocalyptic landscape, encountering various little isolated communities that have managed to organize themselves around their local resources and put together a way of life. These encounters range from the oddly sublime to the horrifying, because all of the communities are different, rebuilding barely-remembered institutions in new ways, organizing themselves according to the specifics of local power structures and resources and limitations. The one thing they all have in common is that everyone is ineradicably marked by the losses of the Big Death--the distinct before and after phases of their lives--and those losses have both a practical aspect (knowledge and technology lost) and an emotional one (strong opinions about the value of life one way or the other; a persistent lack of maturity that comes from having no adults to model themselves on). And with a few exceptions, the show really follows through on the scarcity of goods in that kind of environment. There's a rough arc around a mysterious military site from the time before the Big Death and signs that it might still be around.
But then there's the weirdness of the show that exists entirely outside of its world. First of all, Jeremiah and Kurdy are played by Luke Perry and Malcolm-Jamal Warner. This is not de facto bad casting, but you must admit that you're kind of scratching your head and trying to picture it as you read this, right? Then there's the fact that the show was made for Showtime, but does not stray that far from conventional safe narratives--the heroes are not perfect, but they're good enough, and there's not a ton of question that they won't triumph in the long run--so it's jarring in some ways to see the boobs and curse words pasted awkwardly into this fairly recognizable narrative. (I do want to qualify that statement a little. Jeremiah's storytelling is definitely riskier and more unpredictable than, say SG-1; there are aspects of the worldbuilding that are fairly dark and not something you see a lot of on TV. But the boobs and curse words are not a seamless part of the universe's fabric in the way they are in, say, Deadwood.) Also, the constant Canadian Actor Bingo is a little distracting. Seriously, EVERYONE had a part on this show. Let us not even get into the Jason Priestly guest spot, which is likely to make the head of anyone who watched TV in the early 90s explode from cognitive dissonance.
Anyway, while it is by no means perfect, I really enjoyed Season 1 for its quirky sensibilities and the sense of a new world out there, putting itself together in pockets and clearings and valleys. I've stalled about 4 episodes into Season 2 because it seems to have switched gears and become something of a military drama, with the small scrappy rebel army moving against larger forces. So far, Jeremiah and Kurdy haven't done any more tooling around the post-apocalyptic landscape, and that's what I was there for. It's not an overwhelmingly jarring shark jump like season 2 of Dark Angel, but it's not the show I was watching. I will probably finish it, but I'm not that enthusiastic about it right now.
* * * * *
I have been planning to watch The Wire for a while. I first got interested in The Wire when someone told me that David Simon co-wrote The Corner, a book I had read well before The Wire came out because I am a freak with eclectic taste in nonfiction, and which had made a huge impression on me. Then I found out that Homicide came first, so I decided to go in order, because I am a freak who likes to go in order.
I was really impressed by Season 1. It's remarkable how not-dated it is; the homicide squad doesn't have cell phones or computers or video surveillance, but the dialogue snaps and the technology would seem out of place in the workmanlike, grungy-in-the-corners squad room. It employs my favorite kind of storytelling, which is to let the events unfold in measured and sometimes pedestrian detail, while the characters reveal themselves in glimpses, by their reactions. I see now why Andre Braugher is so deeply admired; Frank Pembleton is immediately striking in his inflexible commitment to doing what he thinks is best (and I love how the scene where he refuses to go back to get the car number for the keys he's holding, instead of trying every car in the garage, reveals that that inflexibility is not as much a choice as a compulsion). I also like treatment of Baltimore as a setting: it's the landscape in which these detectives operate, and as much a part of their investigation as the people they interview. It's a very distinct setting, very not-suburban and not-Manhattan and not-middle-America. Adena's likely killer isn't a FedEx guy; he's a fruit and vegetable vendor from a very specific local tradition.
As a long-time SVU watcher, though, it's fairly strange to see Munch as a three-dimensional character with actual, like, development.
Now I'm totally going to have to read the book.
* * * * *
TV meme: Day 7 - Least favorite episode of your favorite TV show
Hoo boy. There are several episodes of Farscape that are objectively bad, like "Jeremiah Crichton" and "Mental as Anything". I would have a hard time finding much to like about "Lava's a Many Splendored Thing" if I didn't feel like the whole thing was an elaborate, in-jokey reference to ST:TOS, at least visually. And I find Maldis basically unwatchable, so "That Old Black Magic" and "Picture If You Will" are right up there too. But all of those episodes have redeeming features on either a plot or character level: Rygel stepping up to his heritage; D'Argo confronting his past; the whole crew sinking to a low point before they find Moya again, and finding the shields; the first real indications of Zhaan's dark side; Chiana and Aeryn's odd partnership.
No, my least favorite episode of Farscape is "The Locket," which I pretty much can't stand. Anything new we find about how John and Aeryn feel about each other here is reiterated in a much more meaningful way in 'Liars, Guns and Money" and "Die Me Dichotomy." It doesn't advance the ongoing plot arc, since it's basically a magical do-over. The plot doesn't make any sense in light of Aeryn's later geometric pregnancy. And for the love of all that is holy, WHY DOES GETTING OLD MAKE JOHN TALK WITH A SOUTHERN ACCENT????? That drives me INSANE. I could probably deal with all of those things except for the aging = Southern accent thing in any other show, but it's a piece of cheap emotional manipulation on a show that is capable of doing so much more, and that even in failing, usually fails in more interesting ways. Feh, I say!
Previous entries here.
* * * * *
I have been complaining about how cold and miserable our summer has been so far, so I probably shouldn't complain that tonight will be my second night in a row of lying on the wood floor in my cotton jammies with a bag of frozen peas pressed to my face and neck until the temperature in my living room drops below 80. Be careful what you wish for.
This entry was originally posted at http://danceswithwords.dreamwidth.org/149606.html (
comments). Comment at either site.