Work ate me. I'm back now.
Hey everyone. This last news cycle was very rough. (Wrote nine stories this week and most of them involved going out on assignments AAAARGH ...) And then I went home to New Jersey this weekend because I'm worried about money because bitch doesn't get paid too often. But oh well.
But the last thing I want to do on my LJ is talk about work, so here's the TV (or downloaded episodes on the Internet) I've been watching.
Charlie Brooker's Screenwipe I saw about four seasons of this on the recommendation of scarlet_carsons before it got pulled from YouTube, and now I can't see it (at least until I get off my ass and go for torrenting. I love this show. It's pretty much like The Soup in the U.S. in that it makes fun of the detrius of TV, but it's more of an explanatory/wrap up thing, with comedian Brooker explaining the plots of different series, as well as how television is filmed, which is what you want if you're a foreigner watching a show about British television. I don't know anything about, say, Have I Been Here Before? but Brooker's talented enough that his explanations can keep you afloat, and he talks enough about American TV anyway:
Silverhaired Captain Serious will never not be funny.
And it's fun to hear what British people have on television. As well as how Americans react to it. Brooker had one show where they went to America and had Americans watch British TV. The only thing they liked was Eastenders because they thought the idea of watching ugly people in a soap opera was novel. I'm sort of strangely proud of my fellow countrymen and women.
Yet the show that really interested me after Brooker described it was Dragons' Den, a show based on a Japanese program called Tigers of Money in which entrepreneurs ask five insanely rich people to invest money in their business in exchange for equity in their companies. Why didn't we have that here? I wondered. Scrappy people in a recession who want a Cinderella story with just the right hint of do-it-yourself-ness? That is like, our jam.
I wondered about this for like, a day, and then actually looked on wikipedia and saw that, oh, whoops, we actually do have Dragons' Den over here, and have had it for a year. Except we re-named it Shark Tank.
Shark Tank
So of course I started watching it, strangely. Even though I thought this would be America's thing I was not sure it was MY thing because I am all artsy and stuff and not so much about business and kind of tend to think corporations are festering piles of incompetence, criminality, evil and suck. But yet I like this show, go figure.
Part of the reason why I like it so much is the Sharks themselves. Well, I like some of the entrepreneurs too, especially the small business people who remind me of the folks I would interview for a new business story. I respect the show for not doing that thing American Idol does (and Brooker pointed out in Simon Cowell's X Factor) where they'll go into a person's sad backstory but then they'll always get into the championship. Shark Tank just doesn't fucking care, which can be incredibly depressing when a guy presents the Sharks with his terrible idea to sell these iPads full of ads to doctors' offices and he's taken out a second mortgage on his house to do this.
But the Sharks themselves are the most fun. I'll describe them all briefly:
Kevin Harrington - The Infomercial Guy. Has one of those creepy Jersey Shore tans. Kind of the boring one, but will occasionally invest in something like a pee receptacle disguised as a golf club, so you can't totally get rid of him.
Daymond John - Creator of Fubu and the one PoC on the panel. I want to like the guy a little more than I do, but he's basically okay. I tend to find he and Barbara will invest in the underdogs more often than not, which endears me to him. And also that he will get offended if another Shark invests in something before he gets to.
Barbara Corcoran - Ex-Real Estate Mogul and the one female on the panel, so she gets called things like "Lipstick Shark" and the "FIREY REAL ESTATE MOGUL" and it makes me want to punch through the wall. Yet I like Barbara a lot, partly because women represent and partly because she sits between Kevin O'Leary and Robert Herjavec, who fight all the time, and she just sits there looking slightly uncomfortable yet amused at the same time. She also has the bizarre sweet moment where she'll hug an enterprising entrepreneur and say, "We're going to make a lot of money together!" and it's kind of heartwarming but kind of like "Um, okay ..." as well.
Robert Herjavec - One of the people America stole from the Canadian Dragon's Den and of them, he's the good cop. He usually sums up what the audience should be feeling at any given moment, but he's entertaining enough to watch, especially when he snarks at O'Leary. They would be the type to make a good slash couple if the thought of them naked weren't really creepy.
Kevin O'Leary - The other Canadian, he's the bastard cop, although when he likes something he's sincere about it. He's also fun to watch even if you aren't the type to like angry men crushing dreams, because he has these ridiculous axioms like "That's what I love about money: it has no soul. It doesn't care" and "I think of my money like soldiers, I send them out to do battle and they capture more soldiers for me." So that is fun.
Alas, I haven't been able to see too much of this. Hulu started deleting episodes, but they're planning another season with celebrity judges (ew) so I'll see how that goes.
Avatar: The Last Airbender
I'm enjoying this immensely, even if I don't have too much to say about it now as I'm only half-way through the first season. I think both this and Scott Pilgrim are the two instances in which western media have actually been able to learn from manga/anime and apply what makes the mediums so much fun, rather than just replicate a generic version of the art style and put out something that's neither creative nor fun at all. Its influences are present but it's more than its influences, and that's awesome.
I will say, though, I think all the hullabaloo about how "THIS IS A SHOW THAT CAN BE JOINED BY ADULTS! ADULTS!" may have worked against it for me. Whenever they mention the genocide plot points I'm like, "Oh, yeah, whatever. It's cool, man. ADULTS!!!!" Yet whenever one of the characters takes a humorous pratfall or makes a goofy teenage joke I'm like, "... wait, what? Oh, yeah ... the show is still for kids."
Still, I'm enjoying it a lot. Yay for Netflix and all that. :)
But the last thing I want to do on my LJ is talk about work, so here's the TV (or downloaded episodes on the Internet) I've been watching.
Charlie Brooker's Screenwipe I saw about four seasons of this on the recommendation of scarlet_carsons before it got pulled from YouTube, and now I can't see it (at least until I get off my ass and go for torrenting. I love this show. It's pretty much like The Soup in the U.S. in that it makes fun of the detrius of TV, but it's more of an explanatory/wrap up thing, with comedian Brooker explaining the plots of different series, as well as how television is filmed, which is what you want if you're a foreigner watching a show about British television. I don't know anything about, say, Have I Been Here Before? but Brooker's talented enough that his explanations can keep you afloat, and he talks enough about American TV anyway:
Click to viewSilverhaired Captain Serious will never not be funny.
And it's fun to hear what British people have on television. As well as how Americans react to it. Brooker had one show where they went to America and had Americans watch British TV. The only thing they liked was Eastenders because they thought the idea of watching ugly people in a soap opera was novel. I'm sort of strangely proud of my fellow countrymen and women.
Yet the show that really interested me after Brooker described it was Dragons' Den, a show based on a Japanese program called Tigers of Money in which entrepreneurs ask five insanely rich people to invest money in their business in exchange for equity in their companies. Why didn't we have that here? I wondered. Scrappy people in a recession who want a Cinderella story with just the right hint of do-it-yourself-ness? That is like, our jam.
I wondered about this for like, a day, and then actually looked on wikipedia and saw that, oh, whoops, we actually do have Dragons' Den over here, and have had it for a year. Except we re-named it Shark Tank.
Shark Tank
So of course I started watching it, strangely. Even though I thought this would be America's thing I was not sure it was MY thing because I am all artsy and stuff and not so much about business and kind of tend to think corporations are festering piles of incompetence, criminality, evil and suck. But yet I like this show, go figure.
Part of the reason why I like it so much is the Sharks themselves. Well, I like some of the entrepreneurs too, especially the small business people who remind me of the folks I would interview for a new business story. I respect the show for not doing that thing American Idol does (and Brooker pointed out in Simon Cowell's X Factor) where they'll go into a person's sad backstory but then they'll always get into the championship. Shark Tank just doesn't fucking care, which can be incredibly depressing when a guy presents the Sharks with his terrible idea to sell these iPads full of ads to doctors' offices and he's taken out a second mortgage on his house to do this.
But the Sharks themselves are the most fun. I'll describe them all briefly:
Kevin Harrington - The Infomercial Guy. Has one of those creepy Jersey Shore tans. Kind of the boring one, but will occasionally invest in something like a pee receptacle disguised as a golf club, so you can't totally get rid of him.
Daymond John - Creator of Fubu and the one PoC on the panel. I want to like the guy a little more than I do, but he's basically okay. I tend to find he and Barbara will invest in the underdogs more often than not, which endears me to him. And also that he will get offended if another Shark invests in something before he gets to.
Barbara Corcoran - Ex-Real Estate Mogul and the one female on the panel, so she gets called things like "Lipstick Shark" and the "FIREY REAL ESTATE MOGUL" and it makes me want to punch through the wall. Yet I like Barbara a lot, partly because women represent and partly because she sits between Kevin O'Leary and Robert Herjavec, who fight all the time, and she just sits there looking slightly uncomfortable yet amused at the same time. She also has the bizarre sweet moment where she'll hug an enterprising entrepreneur and say, "We're going to make a lot of money together!" and it's kind of heartwarming but kind of like "Um, okay ..." as well.
Robert Herjavec - One of the people America stole from the Canadian Dragon's Den and of them, he's the good cop. He usually sums up what the audience should be feeling at any given moment, but he's entertaining enough to watch, especially when he snarks at O'Leary. They would be the type to make a good slash couple if the thought of them naked weren't really creepy.
Kevin O'Leary - The other Canadian, he's the bastard cop, although when he likes something he's sincere about it. He's also fun to watch even if you aren't the type to like angry men crushing dreams, because he has these ridiculous axioms like "That's what I love about money: it has no soul. It doesn't care" and "I think of my money like soldiers, I send them out to do battle and they capture more soldiers for me." So that is fun.
Alas, I haven't been able to see too much of this. Hulu started deleting episodes, but they're planning another season with celebrity judges (ew) so I'll see how that goes.
Avatar: The Last Airbender
I'm enjoying this immensely, even if I don't have too much to say about it now as I'm only half-way through the first season. I think both this and Scott Pilgrim are the two instances in which western media have actually been able to learn from manga/anime and apply what makes the mediums so much fun, rather than just replicate a generic version of the art style and put out something that's neither creative nor fun at all. Its influences are present but it's more than its influences, and that's awesome.
I will say, though, I think all the hullabaloo about how "THIS IS A SHOW THAT CAN BE JOINED BY ADULTS! ADULTS!" may have worked against it for me. Whenever they mention the genocide plot points I'm like, "Oh, yeah, whatever. It's cool, man. ADULTS!!!!" Yet whenever one of the characters takes a humorous pratfall or makes a goofy teenage joke I'm like, "... wait, what? Oh, yeah ... the show is still for kids."
Still, I'm enjoying it a lot. Yay for Netflix and all that. :)