On The Seventh Day Of Christmas

On the seventh day of Christmas, my true love – Television – gave to me...seven year end lists (or at least year end lists from seven favourites of mine).

This was the supposed to be the one that got me caught up; an easy one, because all I'd be doing is inserting links. Yeah, right. Schedule still way out of whack thanks to shovelling snow and feeding little brother, not to mention watching the Rose Parade and the Rose Bowl game. I'll share a secret – the Rose Parade was more exciting than the football game.

But let's get started with this. These are end of the year lists put out by various people, most of whom I have a certain amount of respect for, although there are some that are included for reasons like the fact that they're Canadians.

• Alex Strachan, who writes for the Canwest newspapers has his "Naughty and Nice" list – five things he considered Naughty, and five that he considered nice. #1 on the Naughty list Farmer Takes A Wife: "This pig-in-a-poke, roll-in-the-mud dragged reality TV to a new low, and that's saying a lot. Is this really our reality?" #1 on the nice side was Canadian comedian and social and political satirist Rick Mercer: "Rick Mercer had himself a merry old year. An unnecessary fall election, and the nonsense that followed it, gave him a lifetime's worth of material to run with. And run with it he did."
  
• Long time friend of the blog Jaime Weinman, in his Macleans Magazine blog has his Best on TV list. He has five categories including "Best non-romantic relationship," "Best appearance by a ghost," "Best use of a TV show for political purposes," Best speech," and "Best-looking Canadian on TV." In the latter category he writes, "This is almost as difficult as choosing the most depressing news story of 2008; there are so many beautiful Canadians on television that many U.S. message-board posters have become convinced that Canadians are all beautiful. Which we are." Setting that obvious truth aside he's really talking about Colbie Smulders of How I Met Your Mother, and while I have other choices I can't entirely disagree.
  
• Alan Sepinwall of the Newark Star-Ledger has two lists here. One looks back at the best shows of 2008, while the other looks forward to the best episodes of 2008. His Best Series list is the traditional 10 best series of the year – although naturally there are eleven entries in his top ten list. Naturally most of his shows were on cable. #1 was of course The Shield: "It's been two months since I first saw the cop drama's final two episodes, and I still shiver at the memory of how uncompromising, how disturbing, how powerful and how devastating they were -- the best finale I've ever seen for an American TV drama. Unlike "The Sopranos" -- the show to which it was so often compared -- "The Shield" seemed determined to provide as much closure as possible, and yet there's a delicious ambiguity to the final fate of Vic Mackey (the brilliant Michael Chiklis) and what it means." In his Best Episodes list has fifteen entries with no apparent order. I particularly like his assessment of the CSI episode "19 Down": "The first half of William Petersen's farewell offered up Bill Irwin as a disturbing new villain, Laurence Fishburne as an intriguing new hero, and a reminder of just how much more potent the original "CSI" is than its various spin-offs and imitators."
  
• Aaron Barnhart at TVBarn.com and the Kansas City Star focussed his attention on what he called at one point, "TV's most thrilling reality show," the 2008 presidential election. In one concession to looking at entertainment he talks about the late night shows and in particular Tina Fey's version of Sarah Palin: "Her close encounter with Palin on one "SNL" episode was much commented-upon, but it was the QVC sketch -- with the fey-Sarah hawking "Palin in 2012" T-shirts while Real McCain, standing just off-camera, asked, "What are you doing over there?" -- that historians 100 years from now will write dissertations about."
  
• Ed Bark in his Blog also made a point of discussing the election, with four or five of his ten entries focussing on either politics or TV as a venue for politics, making reference to the death of Tim Russert, and MSNBC embracing its status as a left-wing response to Fox News. For him Obama was the TV story of the year: "From the hard-fought, ice-encrusted primaries of January to December's still operative after-glow, Obama is by far the year's biggest TV story. Making history helps, too. And in the end, yes he did."
  
• Tim Goodman of SFGate.com came up with a list of the twenty-five best shows of the year, although his number one was Mad Men: "This is a series that is brain candy as well as eye candy. Visually stunning and smartly nuanced, the full Don Draper character study is a thing of beauty. But this season, "Mad Men" fleshed out the surrounding characters as well (particularly Don's wife, Betty) while simultaneously ramping up the duality of Don, nailing cultural change and alluding to the onrush of chaos."
  
• Maureen Ryan has a list of the Top Shows on TV in 2008 that is chock full of stuff besides her Ton Ten list (with twelve entries) that reminds me why she's one of my favourite professional critics. I really like her assessment of the second season of Mad Men: "Even when it confounded me, this rich, complicated drama about yearning, unpredictable men and women left me hungry for more. This year, the "Mad" men frequently yielded center stage to the show's frustrated, fascinating women, who turned in stunning performances, and to supporting characters such as the lovable but heartbreaking Freddy Rumsen (Joel Murray)." And her writing on The Shield – "Few shows in the history of television have worked as hard to keep their fans' attention; only high-quality Swiss timepieces are more beautifully complex." – ain't bad either.

My Perfect Women!?

So my blogging buddy Tim Gueguen had this link in his blog to a site called Celebmatch which uses "the scientific method of biorhythms to calculate the compatibilities" between you and various celebrities. Tim holds that biorhythms are bunk, and I basically agree. What this site does seems less like Biorhythms, and more like cheap astrology to me though. Enter your birthdate and they will tell you which five celebrities (you can choose male or female) you match up with best, and if you click on their names you will see who you are most compatible with physically, emotionally and intellectually. All from your birth date. You can also see how you match with other celebrities. So here's who they said I was best suited for:

1. Ellen DeGeneres 98%
2. Anita Baker 98%
3. Crystal Gayle 98%
4. Star Jones 98%
5. Beth Broderick 97%

Apparently part of the matching process is to find someone close to my own age, which is silly. I'm a man - I want younger.

(BTW: This post is also an experiment with Blogger's new image feature. So far not bad.

10 TV Cliches

Spent yesterday mowing the lawn and cleaning out the rain gutters, just in time given how clogged they were. You know you're in trouble when small trees start growing in your gutters - and yes I have seen that. Mine weren't quite that bad but there were one or two things that looked like they had germinated, but they won't get a chance to grow to maturity. Anyway, I was really too tired and unmotivated to write anything last night even though I haven't reviewed - or even seen - Hit Me Baby One More Time. Maybe next week ... or maybe not at all.

Something that did come to my attention was an article on MSN about 10 TV Cliches which MTV reporter Larry Carroll wishes to see banished forever. Some of his conclusions I agree with and some I don't but as usual I have an opinion on just about all of them.

1. Wonder Twin Powers, Activate! Let's face it, this is a classic. In TV it goes back to at least The Patty Duke Show, but even Shakespeare used it a couple of times. When carried out well it's great. Some of my favourite episodes of Bewitched were the ones where Pandora Spocks portrayed Samantha's cousin Serena, and while the episodes of I Dream Of Jeannie with Jeannie's sister Jeannie weren't as well crafted, I liked her too. In his article Carroll mentions Phoebe and Ursula Buffay but of course Ursula had originally been created for Mad About You and the idea of twins was used to explain how Lisa Kudrow could be on both series. It just sort of carried on from there.
   
   
2. Thinking a Sentence is Two Words Long Well yes it may be overdone, but the partially heard conversation is another classic which again probably goes back to Old Bill. Misunderstandings like this are the bedrock of comedy and they probably go back to Bedrock.
   
   
3. Sir, Would You Like a Tongue-Lashing With Your Beverage? The old "abusive servant" bit (and it's subset the abusive waitress). It can get old but let's admit that it is less often used than the "My Mother-in-Law is a wicked witch" cliche which just about every sitcom has run with. When it was done in Soap Benson was the sanest character on the show, plus he did have, or at least was allowed to develop, a genuine affection and loyalty to Jessica and Billy. Mostly though the characters these people work for tend to develop a dependence on them if only as a sparring partner.
   
   
4. Double Date, Double Trouble Now this one has been overdone.
   
   
5. You're Not My Kid! This one is more a question of logistics than an actual cliche. I mean once you get over the initial cuteness and dealing with a baby phase what do you do with a toddler. Most two year-olds aren't good about learning their lines so you either contrive to keep the kid out of sight or you age the kid to a point where you can use them. I Love Lucy did both - Little Ricky was out of sight for most of the fourth (Lucy in Hollywood) and fifth (Lucy in Europe) seasons before introducing a new Little Ricky (Keith Thibodeaux) aged 5 or 6. In other cases the actor wants to go to college or do other projects. You can either write them out, like Jonathon Taylor Thomas in Home Improvement or keep the character and change the actor as they did with Becky in Roseanne. And it's not like adult actors don't change occasionally either - see Lionel in The Jeffersons.
   
   
6. An Unexpected Delivery Well let's face it, if you can't have fun with birthin' a baby what can you have fun with. Even Gone With The Wind did a little humour with that although it was mostly a serious moment. And as usual Lucy led the way. The birth of Little Ricky, even if it wasn't in an elevator, was a funny show.
   
   
7. We're Trapped - Let's Reminisce! Agreed. The usual springboard to a clips show and who really likes them.
   
   
8. I'm (Cough, Cough) Not Feeling Well Yeah that's a bad one. On the other hand it's not one that we see all that often anymore, maybe because it's hard to get the superstars on TV.
   
   
9. Now You Don't See Me, Now You ... Still Don't See Me It's another standard but what would Waiting For Godot be without it? The real explanation is that the show is creating an character that no actor could live up to. Who could play Niles Crane's wife Maris as described in all of those episodes and would we have been better off if she'd been more than an off-screen presence. The same goes for dead characters. Could we really believe that Martin Crane was married to Nancy Marchand (who played Fraser's mother on an episode of Cheers). And it's not just comedies either - see (or rather don't see) J. Beresford Tipton in The Millionaire (voice by Paul Frees) and Charlie in Charlie's Angels (voice by John Forsythe).
   
   
10. Look, I'm in a Dress! Isn't This Funny? Hey some men look funny in dresses - Dave Foley did some of his best work in Kids in the Hall in fashionable frocks. Even Fred Flintstone wore dresses from time to time. Again, I'm sure there's an example from Shakespeare, and if not, just remember that Bonnie Prince Charlie was smuggled from Scotland to the Isle of Skye dressed as a woman.