I'm Back

Well at least for a while. The old computer is toast. It might be the power supply or it might be the motherboard but either way I don't think it's cost effective to go to the trouble I'd have to go to in order to get it up and running again. I'd made the conscious decision to get a new computer as soon as Vista is released as things started failing on the old machine. I'm sticking with that idea, so what I'm doing now is actually using an older computer that my brother had - it's so old that it's running Windows 98 though it could run XP and probably will be by the end of the week. I've been spoiled by XP and how many of you thought you'd ever hear anyone say that! I still have slight hope of being able to get my hard drive from the dead machine up and running but this machine is set up in a very strange manner. It should work though if the drive isn't fried, which I fear is entirely possible. Anyway, that's an update on my current status. I'll probably have a real post in a day or two.

Short Takes - October 21, 2006

Show updates: To no ones surprise Shark got a full season order this week. This means that half of CBS’s new shows have full season orders. Of course when Smith was cancelled it meant that a quarter of the new shows had been cancelled - CBS only introduced four new series this year. No word yet on The Class but I wouldn’t be surprised if it got a full year too.

On the other hand The CW cancelled half of their new series and gave a full year to the other half. The Kelsey Grammer produced comedy The Game got a full season order, while the network cancelled Runaway. I haven’t seen either but in the case of Runaway, I have to confess that I like the adult leads, Don Wahlberg and Leslie Hope. Wahlberg is a far better actor than his brother Mark – and showed it in Band of Brothers and the late lamented Boomtown – while I find Leslie Hope kind of sexy and a good actress. I first noticed her in 24 but she really had me in the short run series Line of Fire by smoking. She smoked like a woman who needed a freakin’ cigarette rather than as someone who was using a cigarette as a prop to look sexy.

Also, NBC (which is simultaneously complaining about the cost of production of new programming in the first hour of primetime – see below) has announced that they will be ordering more episodes of Friday Night Lights, a show which at least currently airs the first hour of primetime, but would probably benefit from a move away from Dancing With The Stars and NCIS.

CBS getting creative; NBC, not so much: Apparently next season on CBS won’t feature as any new “procedural” series like CSI or Criminal Minds. TV Squad reports that the network is looking at series about wife swapping and the sexual revolution of the 1970s, the women’s movement, a comedy from one of the writers of Borat, and an American version of Viva Blackpool. The latter is a BBC production that mixed the criminal investigation of a murder at a casino (though they called it an arcade, a word that has a different meaning in North America) with fantasy sequences and people bursting into song. And it worked.

NBC on the other hand has announced that it will no longer be programming either comedies or dramas in the first hour of primetime. According the NBC president Jeff (two ‘F’s, one ‘Z’) Zucker, “advertisers just won't pay enough money during the 8 pm time slot to cover the costs of comedies and dramas.” Instead the network will be offering reality programs and game shows. In fact what Zucker really means is that advertisers won’t pay enough money for the comedies and dramas that NBC is putting on the air during the “8 pm time slot”. That’s fairly obvious since none of the other four networks has had much problem finding sponsors. Currently NBC runs the drama Friday Night Lights and the comedies The Office and My Name Is Earl in the first hour of prime time.

What does the PTC hate this week?: NewsCorp, the parent company of Fox and the FX cable network. In a statement at the NewsCorp shareholders meeting, PTC Chairman of the Board Lee Weil made this statement: “Mr. Murdoch, I believe that you are a good man with solid values, and yet NewsCorp has clearly carved out a niche for itself by specializing in smutty, vulgar, and violent entertainment, all in pursuit of profit. You should be ashamed - but it’s clear that you aren’t, and neither are the executives that work for you.” Well right there he got it wrong. Rupert Murdoch is a man whose newspapers ouside of the United States regularly feature pictures of topless women, graphic details of the latest in gossip and whatever titillating crime has oozed out from whatever rock. Murdoch is all about the profit. Always has been from the time he took over the Adelaide News after the death of his father. Profit is why he founded Fox News Channel.

The PTC Chairman then goes on to list some of the “smutty, vulgar, and violent entertainment” Murdoch should be ashamed of:

• Nip/Tuck which has featured themes of misogyny, sexual violence, incest, bestiality, pedophilia, and necrophilia. The producer of the series has publicly stated that his goal is to pave the way for broadcast television to feature a “rear-entry” sex-scene in the next three years.
• The Shield which has featured an officer of the law acting out rape fantasies with prostitutes and being forced to fellate a gang member at gunpoint.
• Rescue Me which recently included a scene of a man raping his estranged wife.
• The War at Home which one TV critic described as “unconscionably smutty.”

The PTC Chairman then went on to decry “NewsCorp’s flagrant disregard for families as demonstrated by its abuse of the publicly owned airwaves through its refusal to abide by federal decency laws and community standards and NewsCorp’s complicity in forcing families to subsidize the pornographic content on its cable properties as part of their cable package.” At this point Weil informs us that he\e “cherishes the First Amendment” but then quotes Theodore Roosevelt: “I believe in the first amendment, and I cherish the freedoms our forefathers fought and died for, but I also know that with freedom must come responsibility. Theodore Roosevelt said, ‘Men can never escape being governed. Either they must govern themselves or they must submit to being governed by others.’” Weil offers a warning: “Until NewsCorp does a better job of keeping sexually explicit and violent content off of television during hours when children are in the viewing audience; until NewsCorp stops forcing cable subscribers to help pay for the disgusting and depraved content of Nip/Tuck you will be under the constant scrutiny of the FCC, of Congress, and of millions of outraged American families.” Families represented, of course, by the PTC and its more religiously based counterpart the American Family Association.

They actually changed the Worst of the Week show from what I thought I had seen earlier this week – back when my own computer actually worked. This time around their Worst of the Week is the episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit which featured Jerry Lewis. They started out by pointing out Jerry’s presence on the show: “One of America’s most beloved Television icons, Jerry Lewis, guest stared on Law & Order: SVU this week. Hopefully viewers didn’t tune in to see “The Nutty Professor” solve a crime, because there was nothing funny about this episode.” And except for a brief mention at the end of the article that is the last we’ll hear of Mr. Lewis. The bulk of the article talks about one scene in the show: “They find a woman and her young daughter lying in bed murdered, bloody, bound, and naked. Both have been stabbed 40 times, raped, and then suffocated with packing tape. Melinda (the coroner) explains, “The vaginal trauma was more severe on the child…due to her pre-pubescence.” Later she elaborates on the cuts saying that each of the 40 cuts was inflicted before death and that the victims felt every one of them. Detectives pry the little girl’s hand open to retrieve a crucifix she tore from her mother’s neck. The entire scene is too much for Dani to handle and she is noticeably shaken not only by the gruesome sight, but at the idea that a child could suffer in such a way.” The PTC expresses its moral outrage at this scene by saying “It is puzzling how the writers of SVU could conceive of Dani being disturbed by the sight of the murder scene and yet present the scene as entertainment for Americans. Are we heartless, desensitized monsters who feel nothing at the sight of a murdered child who was raped and murdered? Is the intention of the show to disturb us?” As a matter of fact, yes it is. Sex crimes are among the most horrendous in any nation. Most of the information about the crime is given in the form of description rather than depiction. The viewer is meant to feel moral outrage particularly at the murder of the child so that when the murder suspect is later himself killed by Jerry Lewis’s character we not only excuse the murder but actually support his actions. And remember this is not an actual murdered child, this is an actress who once the scene was shot got up, washed whatever Hollywood-in-New York is using for realistic blood and went off to school or her next audition.

Why the PTC and similar groups must be stopped: I found this statement came from Sumner Redstone, Executive Chairman of CBS-Viacom and whatever else they own on the Center for Creative Voices blog, or at least part of it. The bulk of the text comes from a Hollywood Reporter article. Redstone was speaking to The Media Institute which is describes as a “First Amendment Think Tank”.

Unfortunately, we find ourselves in a world where, increasingly and alarmingly, a couple thousand form complaints from people condemning shows that they have never watched can result in an indecency fine 10 times higher than an year ago. In a world where these same form complaints can lead regulators to dictate business models that ultimately do more harm than good. And yes, in a world where entertainment and news executives, musicians and artists are living in a great deal of fear.

If the public is not happy with a particular program, then they won't watch it, and it will go off air. Government censorship - and by this I mean imposing any kind of burden or penalty on those who publish protected speech - circumvents this process. This is particularly pernicious not only because it is prohibited by the Constitution but also because it can be abused by the government.

Give the government the tools to punish those it doesn't like or silence what it doesn't want to hear, and you undermine democracy. Give people the tools to choose what they see and hear, and you enhance democracy.

Momentarily, Temporary, And Please Stand By

When I was a kid, watching television wasn't always a simple as turning on the TV and watching a show. There were "Technical Difficulties". What the "Technical Difficulties" were was never absolutely clear but in many cases the local station - in my case CFQC-TV in Saskatoon would be able to put up a slide or have one of their announcers do his thing. It was usually something like "We are currently experiencing Technical Difficulties." There was then a vague indication of how long it would take to resolve the "Technical Difficulties." There was then usually an indication of the amount of time, not in minutes but in the use of words. It always seemed to the eight year old me that when the announcer said "Momentarily" it meant at most a couple of minutes. "Temporarily" meant longer, maybe four or five or ten minutes tops. The killer was "Please Stand By". That meant that the people down at the station had absolutely no idea of when this was going to be fixed and you might just as well turn off the TV and go read a book play outside for a while. I hated "Please Stand By."

We here at I Am A Child Of Television are currently experiencing Technical Difficulties. To be more specific, it appears as though my computer has given up the ghost. It won't boot or show the manufacturer's flash screen. The hard drive and both optical drives are operating but even attempting to boot from an Ubuntu Linux live disk did nothing. I suspect that the CPU is fried. The machine has been acting up for a little while - it started reporting hardware conflicts and refused to recognise that there was paper in my printer amongst other things, then on Thursday I turned it off and when I turned it on again nothing happened on the monitor.

I am writing this on my brother's computer - I'm house sitting for him again - and I have a couple of ideas to try to replace my computer that might work. I should be able to do another post on this computer but after that I don't know is Momentarily, Temporarily, or Please Stand By applies to my current situation.

There's Always A Gimmick

It used to be that the best game shows in the world came from the United States of American and were exported to the world. Family Feud, Wheel of Fortune and a bevy of others started out in America and migrated elsewhere in the world. There was even a Maori version of Password in New Zealand. But as time went by fewer and fewer game shows were being made in the USA. There's only one daily network game show left - The Price Is Right - and only a handful of syndicated game shows on broadcast TV plus another handful on cable networks including GSN. Instead of buying syndicated game shows, local stations started buying syndicated talk shows like Oprah and Jerry Springer or court shows like Judge Judy or Judge Joe Brown.

At the same time that the game show seemed to be dying out as an American form new shows were appearing in Europe, some of which took a wildly different approach to the form. Part of this was the rise of the "reality competition show" - things like Belgium's The Mole, Sweden's Expedition Robinson, Now Or Neverland and Big Brotherfrom Holland. All of these shows migrated to North America, with Expedition Robinson becoming Survivor and Now Or Neverland turning into Fear Factor. As is obvious from this list American television saw the success that these show had and when producers like Endemol and Mark Burnett brought those shows to American networks they were quite willing to pick the shows up. The popularity of these shows encouraged American networks to look at other types of European shows including game shows. ABC had a hit with an American version of the British hit Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?, hosted by daytime talk show host Regis Philbin, a show which continues today in syndication, hosted by Meredith Viera. NBC brought the BBC series The Weakest Link to the United States, featuring the original British host, journalist and television presenter Anne Robinson. More recently the network brought the Endemol series Deal Or No Deal to America, a show which has versions in 26 other countries. And on Friday NBC introduced another Endemol series, 1 vs. 100.

Known in the Netherlands as Eén Tegen Honderd, 1 vs. 100 bears a strong resemblance to Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? There is a single player and "The Mob" - 100 people with varying degrees of education. The show's host, Bob Saget, asks both The Player and The Mob a multiple choice question with three answers. There are twelve levels of questions with values between $100 and $10,000. The Mob answers the question in secret after which the Player answers the question publicly. If the Player answers the question correctly, an amount of money equal to the number of members of The Mob who got the answer wrong times the value of the question at that level is placed into a pool. The Player can either take the money or again face The Mob. If The Player answers the a question incorrectly the money in the pool is split between the surviving members of The Mob. The Player has two "Helps" that can be used at any point during the game. The first time The Player uses a Help he/she selects one of the three answers to the question and may ask one of the people in The Mob who gave that answer for an explanation of why that answer was given. This would seem to be a combination of Millionaire's "Phone-a-Friend" and "Ask The Audience" life lines. The second time The Player uses a Help the "game" (which of course means the producers) selects two members of The Mob. One has entered the correct answer while the other has entered an incorrect answer. The Player can then ask why the two people have chosen their answer. This Help most closely resembles Millionaire's "50/50" life line, since one incorrect answer is always eliminated. If The Player successfully eliminates all 100 members of The Mob, the top prize of $1 million will be awarded. To make it worthwhile for members of The Mob to give correct answers, those who haven't been eliminated before The Player is either defeated or walks away with the cash stay to compete against subsequent players while those who are eliminated are replaced in The Mob.

The show reveals its similarities to Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? early on. The first question asked to the first contestant was "The 2003 movie Seabiscuit featured what kind of animal in the title role? A) one with fins, B) one with paws, C) one with hooves?" Both The Player - a bouncer who wanted to win enough money to buy an engagement ring and hold a really good wedding for his fiancee - and The Mob which included nine teachers, three Deal Or No Deal models, and Jeopardy's biggest winner ever Ken Jennings, all got it right. It was a simple question but as Regis Philbin once revealed the producers of Millionaire would offer very easy questions in the first couple of levels so that kids playing along at home wouldn't feel frustrated. Of course there were some players on that show who didn't know the right answer to those "simple" questions. The Player won his first money at the $500 level when eight members of The Mob didn't know that a "pupu platter" was a type of Polynesian dish frequently served at Chinese restaurants. He picked up over $22,000 at the $1,000 level when the question asked what the name of the (then) current Secretary General of the United Nations would be if it were rendered in the style of the song "The Name Game" (if you're interested it is Kofi, Kofi bo Bofi). In the end the player walked away after completing the $5,000 question, using both of his Helps and winning $135,000. He also eliminated 58 members of The Mob.

I confess that I was intrigued about this show. To say that it is far more complicated than Deal Or No Deal is probably an insult; Candyland is more complicated than Deal Or No Deal. The format gives both The Player and The Mob an incentive for getting the answer right. At the same time both The Player and The Mob have a rooting interest in the player eliminating members of The Mob but eliminating them late in the game. If the player eliminates 30 members of The Mob at the $500 level and goes out at the $1,000 level, the 70 remaining members of The Mob split $15,000, getting $214.28 each. If on the other hand 30 members of The Mob are eliminated at the $5,000 level that adds $150,000 to the pot. Assuming that these were the first eliminations (highly unlikely) that would give the remaining 70 members of The Mob $2,142.85. In other words keeping as many members of The Mob in the game until the higher levels benefits whoever wins the money. While the show doesn't have the mathematical complexities of the seemingly simple Deal Or No Deal - there have been analyses of optimal strategies in that game - it is certainly more of a challenge.

Bob Saget is a perfectly adequate host, nowhere near as manic or eccentric as Howie Mandel can be or as excitable as Regis Philbin. Saget's years hosting America's Funniest Home Videos and his time on Full House make him a comfortable presence as host. He moves around a certain amount and seems relaxed as he eases information out of the players and talks to members of The Mob when The Player uses one of his Helps. The set design is interesting. The set is constructed so that the members of The Mob are seated "stadium style" in front of individual panels of lights which are normally blue but change colour when a member of The Mob gets the answer wrong before their lights go out and they effectively disappear into darkness. The studio audience is seated behind The Player in more conventional TV studio seating so that their perspective is similar to The Player's.

I found myself enjoying the first episode of this series when I eventually watched it. I'd like to see more challenging questions but then that's a common gripe of mine when it comes to this sort of program - I want Jeopardy style questions on the grounds that both players and the audience aren't stupid and that they want to see the players pushed a bit. Barring the sort of overexposure and reliance on gimmicks such as frequent "celebrity" editions that became a problem for shows like Millionaire and Weakest Link I feel that this show could do quite well. In that respect I would say that it is at best a one or two night a week thing. You could easily replace one of the three editions of Deal Or No Deal with 1 vs. 100 which might not be that bad an idea. On the other hand, given the state of the current NBC line up - which is showing more than a small amount of weakness - it is entirely possible that the show will find a spot of its own. I'd offer a qualified recommendation for this even though it is delaying the return of Crossing Jordan.

Short Takes - October 14, 2006

I'm not sure how good this one is going to be. For one thing the PTC doesn't have a new Worst of the week - they're still fixated on Heroes. Then again there are a couple of news items and a tasty little sex scandal involving a Republican - no not that Republican - so maybe we've got something to go to press with.

Who does the PTC hate this Week? I hadn't thought that there'd be much, what with there being no new Worst of the week (really, they are slipping since I don't think they're being more tolerant). But then I spotted a press release on their site: PTC Condemns Prime Time Obscenities. I knew I had struck gold. Apparently there was an incident of using the "s-word" on MyNetwork TV's new telenovella Desire. According to the PTC "The incident occurred during the 8:00 pm hour on the East and West coasts and during the 7:00 pm hour in the Central and Mountain Time Zones, and, even worse, the word in question aired during the opening sequences of the program." Of course who would know, since according to the ratings nobody - except possibly the PTC membership - is actually watching the MyNetwork's programming. The other "incident" occurred on ER: "just last week, NBC scripted the word ‘t*ts’ into the October 5th broadcast of ER, which airs at 9:00 pm in the Central and Mountain Time Zones." They mean of course tits. (On the intellectual side this leads to the question of whether the PTC would object to the word "teats" which Pete Postlethwaite used to describe a woman's breasts in one of the Sharpe films that were done for Britain's ITV But I digress.) The PTC goes on to castigate both networks for not using the Language descriptor 'L' in their ratings for the program: “No doubt the networks will lean on a technology crutch to absolve themselves of any responsibility. But the v-chip would not have prevented a child from hearing either of these obscenities. Desire was rated TV-14, with no ‘L’ descriptor to warn viewers of the offensive language. ER was rated TV-14 also with no ‘L’ descriptor. Even if used properly in every home in America, the v-chip would not have prevented the transmission of these programs into the living rooms of millions of unsuspecting families." But then they go and destroy their argument with this little gem: “Language descriptors aside, how many families in America would deem words like ‘sh*t’ and ‘t*t’ to be appropriate for their 14-year old children?" If the PTC can find me a 14 year old who doesn't know (and probably use) the word "shit" I would be so shocked that I would probably wind up in a cardiac care ward (and the percentage of them who have heard their parents say that word is probably quite high). Granted, I find the MyNetwork situation offensive simply because of the time that the show aired and because they didn't use the language descriptor in their ratings. If you are going to have the V-Chip as an important part of the process for making TV "safe" for younger viewers, and produce ads to that effect as MyNetwork's sister operation Fox has done, then you'd better err on the side of caution in using the proper descriptors. On the other hand I think that the PTC is playing their usual absurd games with the ER situation, the same game that resulted in a fine for the episode of Without A Trace with the implied teen orgy - the word is only obscene (if in fact it is and obscenity) between Chicago and Phoenix. And when exactly was the last time that the FCC has ruled that the word "tit" was a restricted obscenity?

Show reports: Nothing was cancelled this past week. Ugly Betty, Heroes and Jericho have been given full season orders. CBS will be replacing Smith with the medical drama 3 Lbs. starring Stanley Tucci and Mark Feuerstein, while NBC will be returning Medium with Patricia Arquette to the line up on Wednesday nights. 3 Lbs. starts November 14 while Medium returns on November 15.

To the person who commented on the Smith cancellation: You wanted me to complain to CBS about the way they mistreated the show. In fact you commented on it twice in exactly the same words. Can you say comment spam? I knew you could. But now to your main position. I will not be complaining about the cancellation of Smith for two reasons. First, I'm a Canadian and the American networks don't give a Tinker's Dam for anyone outside the United States because we don't count in their ratings. Second, and more importantly, I didn't think the show was all that good. I didn't think the writing was all that good, particularly after the first episode, and I have heard that Ray Liotta in particular wasn't happy with the whole TV experience. CBS cancelled the show because it was a ratings black hole. Mark Berman, who tracks the overnight ratings from Media Week tracked Smith's decline in the Overnight Ratings: Sept. 19 - Overnights: 7.8/12; Viewers: 11.00 million; A18-49: 3.6/10; Sept. 26 - Overnights: 6.7/11; Viewers: 9.67 million; A18-49: 3.3/ 9; Oct. 3 - Overnights: 5.8/ 9; Viewers: 8.43 million; A18-49: 2.8/ 8. To quote Berman "In two weeks, Smith has declined by 26 percent in the overnights, 2.57 million viewers and 22 percent among adults 18-49." And this doesn't mention the fact that in the second week the audience dropped appreciably between the first half hour and the second - 7.1/11 to 6.4/11 in ratings (10%), 10.03 to 9.10 million in total viewers, and 3.3/ 9 to 3.0/ 8 in the 18-49 age group (9%). And remember that decline took place in the middle of an episode. That doesn't say lack of promotion to me, instead it suggests total disinterest in the show.

Sara Evans quits Dancing With The Stars: Our little Republican sex scandal. Sara was almost literally the official Republican candidate for Dancing With The Stars. Former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay sent a mass email to his supporters calling on them to support Sara Evans in Dancing With The Stars against other contestants including "ultra liberal talk show host Jerry Springer". The blog Think Progress has a scan of the email. In it DeLay states that Evans "has been a strong supporter of the Republican Party and represents good American values in media. From singing at the 2004 Republican Convention to appearing with candidates in the last several election cycles, we have always been able to count on Sara for her support of the things we believe in. One of her opponents on the show is ultra liberal talk show host Jerry Springer. We need to send a message to Hollywood and the media that smut has no place in television by supporting good people like Sara Evans." It must have worked somehow because let's face it she was scarcely the best dancer on the show and at least to pairs who performed better than she did were eliminated. DeLay even gave a plug to the website that Sara had set up for her fans to support her on the show. It's an odd site which won't let you even read comments or her blog about the show without registering, and includes such instructions as "10/17/2006 08:00 PM Watch Sara on DWTS; 10/17/2006 08:30 PM VOTE NOW FOR SARA."

The only problem is that Sara won't be on Dancing With The Stars on October 17. On Thursday October 12 - the day after the results show which eliminate Willa Ford and Maksim Chmerkovskiy - Evans announced that she had filed for divorce from her husband Craig Schelske, who is a prominent Republican fundraiser and a one time candidate for the House of Representatives from Oregon. As a result she will be withdrawing from Dancing With The Stars. Through her lawyers Evans accused Schelske of drinking to excess, watching pornography both on his computer and on television (at one point of being the couple's 7 year-old son came into the room while his father was watching porn), having at least 100 nude photos of himself in states of arousal on the family computer as well as a number of photos of himself having sex with other women, and advertising on Craig's List for "three party and anal sex." The latter is particularly interesting since according to the Washington Post Evans also states that Schelske refused to allow a costume designer for Dancing With The Stars come to their rented Los Angeles home because the man was "a sodomite" and that he claimed that upon seeing the costume designer one of the couple's three children "break out in hives." The Post reports that a Washington based spokesman for Schelske issued the following response on his behalf: "I have made the decision to forgive Sara for the unfortunate campaign that she and her publicity advisors are currently waging. . . . Sara has unfortunately become a dramatically different person over the last year and it is something we have struggled to deal with. Sadly, it appears we have failed. The best I can do at this difficult time is ask that people of faith would pray for her and for my family."

No decision has been made by the producers of Dancing With The Stars as to how they will deal with Evans's withdrawal from the show beyond allowing her to make a taped statement to her fans on the Tuesday show. One unconfirmed report suggests that producers will make this coming week a "non-voting" week while there is a groundswell of fan support to bring back Willa and Maks as the "last eliminated couple." Still, much as I dislike Sara Evans as a dancer, she seems like a basically nice person and I hate to see anything like this happen to just about anyone.

This Is The One

We look for it every year, we TV fans and don't deny it. We look for the worst new show on TV. As a group we search high and low for the successor to According to Jim or The War At Home; the show that we would be too embarrassed to call a guilty pleasure because it would reveal that our taste wasn't in our mouths it was was somewhere nearer to our gluteus maximus. In other words the show that makes us cry (with real tears mind you): Oh God, oh God, make it stop, make it sto-o-o-o-p!!!!

Like many of you I expected that the show this year that would make me writhe with despair would be Fox's Happy Hour but then a funny (well not so funny really but you get my drift) thing happened - I watched the pilot. There, amidst the bad writing and the characters drawn with what seemed like a broken crayon was a redeeming quality. Her name is Beth Lacke and and any time she is on the screen in that show you suddenly forget that there is anyone else on the screen. She dominates like a colossus among pygmies. Oh don't get me wrong, the show is terrible and there's only so much she can do to save it by force of personality, but at that it's better than 'Til Death and light years ahead of the abomination that is Twenty Good Years.

This isn't just because I don't like John Lithgow. Actually I loathe him, particularly when he's doing comedy - or in this case allegedly doing comedy. Lithgow is the inveterate scenery chewer and while someone like James Woods will from time have softer moments - in Shark these are usually the times with the character's daughter - for Lithgow there is no off switch. In Twenty Good Years he plays Dr. John Mason. Mason is a surgeon's surgeon with an ego that thinks that not only do surgeons think they're God, the most over achieving surgeons think that they're John Mason. Mason is an arrogant Lothario (he makes a suggestive comment to his scrub nurse after a surgery despite having several ex-wives) who imagines himself to be the indispensable man at the hospital where he works. It's a delusion shattered at his sixtieth birthday party at the hospital when the hospital administrator (played by Tim Russ from Star Trek: Voyager, who I only recognizes by his voice) presents him with a putter and tells him that he's going to have plenty of time to use it because he's being forced to retire. For two years he'll be working part-time before the hospital no longer needs his services.

John's best friend, Judge Jeffrey Pyne (played by Jeffrey Tambor), has his own problems. He's an exceptionally timid and indecisive man. This plays into the hands of his overbearing girlfriend Gina (played by Judith Light). She has told him - nay, ordered him - to propose to her that night at the party that Jeffrey is throwing for John's birthday and Jeffrey is more than cowed enough by her to do it. At the party we meet the other two regular characters in this show; John's daughter Stella (Heather Burns) who is extremely late in a pregnancy, and Jeffrey's son Hugh (Jake Sandvig) an improbably scrawny male model who is in a full page ad. Jeffrey scurries around his apartment worrying about what he should tell people who are asking about the father of Stella's impending child - she went to a sperm bank because she got tired of waiting for the "right" man - and about his son's chosen career - he wants Hugh to go back to college and tells him "I used to look like you!" as a warning. When John shows up at his party he is drunk on a bottle of vodka and having had a revelation. He has realized that he has never done any of the things that he wanted to do when he was a young man except be a surgeon. He tells Jeffrey that they have just twenty good years left and they should live them to the fullest. It isn't entirely clear that Jeffrey wants to be included in they but what John is saying is enough in the emotion of the moment for him to tell Gina - in front of all their friends - that he was dumping her. Gina reacts by slapping Jeffrey and then, for good measure, slapping John.

The morning after the party Jeffrey is full of regrets (to the point where he wants to reconcile with Gina) while John has decided that their first great adventure will be a polar bear swim and he has the Speedo "banana hammock" on under his coat that he intends to wear - after he moves into John's apartment of course. Jeffrey throws him out but essentially relents when Stella tells him that now that John is only working half time he can't afford his alimony payments to the several ex-wives and his apartment. She persuades Jeffrey to let John live with him; just before her water breaks. For once Jeffrey is decisive enough to keep Stella calm and ask his bailiff to get the emergency services. Stella gives birth to a baby girl who of course enchants John. The experience and bonding seems to be enough to get Jeffrey to go along on John's lifestyle change, and the next day they are seen charging into the frigid Atlantic.

Where to begin on what's wrong with Twenty Good Years? Oddly enough I won't start with the writing or the acting. Instead I will come down on whoever decided to add the laugh track for the episode. You do not add laughs when someone says something. Note that I didn't say something funny, I just said something. Whoever was adding laughter to this show apparently decided that any statement at all was worthy of at least a little laughter. Of course that might be because it was a little hard to tell when there was something to laugh at. There were a couple of moments that were genuinely funny, like after Gina slapped John and he said "Well that was just rude," or the moment when Jeffrey told his son "I used to look like you." Unfortunately those moments were far too few and far to far in between. Most of the time my reaction to the supposed jokes (the ones where the laugh track guy gave us the really bigger laughs than he did with ordinary lines) was "uh huh" with the occasional "that was supposed to be funny?" thrown in for good measure. As for the cast, setting aside Lithgow and Tambor for a moment, it's clear that Burns is the more experienced member of the two person regular supporting cast but I have to think that her job is going to be the most thankless one on the entire show, since I think we'll be seeing a lot more of her than we will of Jake Sandvig.

Which brings us to Lithgow and Tambor, and the basic concept of this show. I've watched Jeffrey Tambor off and on since he was on The Ropers and Hill Street Blues, and while I was one of the many who never watched arrested Development I know that Tambor is a very good straight man and can be quite funny. In this show though I think the producers have chosen the wrong path by making his character indecisive and at times almost timid. As for Lithgow, well he'd probably be better served if he used his indoor voice a bit more. The man seemed to be shouting through most of the episode. Maybe it's Lithgow's interpretation of his character's overwhelming - or overbearing - personality. Together the two men do seem to have a sort of chemistry together - they reminded me most of Tony Randall and Jack Klugman, or Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau. Of course that's only appropriate since deep down at the heart of the matter this series is nothing more than The Odd Couple with some cosmetic adjustments. Instead of everyday lives as fortyish divorced men, this show is about guys in their sixties living out some rather stupid adventures of the type that people usually get out of their way in their twenties. At its heart though this show is about two guys who are polar opposites forced by circumstances to live together. We've already seen Jeffrey cleaning up his apartment (after the party); if John turns out to be a slob the comparison will be complete.

The concept of this show could work if the writers and producers brought something sufficiently new to it but the notion of living life to the fullest while you can, just isn't enough for me. When you balance the small number of "pros" for this series with the very large number of "cons", I have to say that of the new sit-coms that I've seen (I confess to not seeing them all) this has to be the worst, which I'm sure is not a distinction the people involved were hoping for.

Dang That's Some Good TV

In his 1985 novel Texas James Michener devoted parts of a two of chapters to the phenomenon of Texas High School Football. According to one of the character, there are three significant characteristics of the modern Texas legend - the ranch, the oil well, and Friday night high school football. Of the three, the ranch and the oil well have been idealized countless times in books, movies and television, but there has been nothing about football. According to the character "That's because outsiders were defining how we should look at ourselves. But there's never been a really first-rate book or play or dramatic presentation of Friday night football. And why not? Because people outside of Texas don't appreciate the total grandeur of that tradition." Since Michener wrote his book that has changed ever so slightly. In 1990 a writer named Buzz Bissinger published a book called Friday Night Lights about the 1988 Odessa Permian High School Panthers, a team that looked as if it would become the Texas State Champions except for an injury to one of the team's star players (Permian would become State Champions and the National Championship in the 1989 season). Bissinger was an outsider and sometimes took a cynical view of Texas high school football. The book did open a lot of people's eyes to the tradition however and in 1993 a TV series called Against The Grain was part of NBC's Friday night line up. It ran for eight episodes, in part because NBC's line up was relatively weak that year and in part because the producers didn't seem to fully understand Texas football. About the only significant thing it contributed was some kid named Ben Affleck as the team's star quarterback. In 2004 Friday Night Lights was made into a movie starring Billy Bob Thornton as Permian coach Gary Gaines and Derek Luke as ill-fated star player Boobie Miles. The film was made by actor and director Peter Berg (who played Dr. Billy Kronk in Chicago Hope) who happens to be Buzz Bissinger's cousin. And now NBC is ready to make another attempt at telling the story of Texas high school football with its own adaptation of Friday Night Lights.

Set in the fictional town of Dillon Texas the primary focus of the series is on head football coach Eric Taylor and his players. Taylor (played by Kyle Chandler from Early Edition) is a man under a lot of pressure. The town lives and dies by the high school football team and Taylor has ascended to the job of head coach because he has worked with highly talented quarterback Jason Street (Scott Porter) literally since Street was a child playing Pee Wee football. In some ways Jason is like the son he and his wife Tami (Connie Britton best known for playing Nikki on Spin City) never had. The first episode tries to give viewers a sense of the pressures that everyone connected with the football team; the coaches, the players, their families, their girlfriends. The pressure is intense. The team is covered by the local television station - NBC of course - and in snippets from the local radio station the sole topic of conversation is the team. The players all have signs on the lawn of their homes telling the world - or at least Dillon Texas - the name of the High School football player who lives in that house. That includes the teams sophomore second string quarterback, a kid named Matt Saracen (Zach Gilford) who is just happy to be on the team. They're almost like election signs but one gets the feeling that here elections are less important. We also get to know two other players, "Smash" Williams (Gaius Charles) the flamboyantly egotistical black running back who sees himself in the NFL making the big money, and the frequently drunk and possibly racist Fullback Tim Riggins who is Jason's best friend and knows that playing high school football is the high point of his life. For him there is no college or NFL career waiting just a dead-end job in Dillon. Jason's girlfriend is the cheerleader Lyla Garrity (Minka Kelly), while Tim is having sex with Tyra Collette (Adrianne Palicki) although she doesn't seem that particular about who she's with.. Everyone in town has an opinion and feels free to tell the coach and the players and the coach's wife exactly what the team needs to do and how he should run the team. In one scene Taylor meets with one of his coaches who has been scouting the opposing team. After reviewing the strengths and weaknesses of the other team Taylor says with sort of resigned tone "What the heck. It's only football." The other coach responds "It's only football" and Taylor replies with the same attitude: "It's only football" and then they laugh the sort of laugh that lets you know that there's no "only" about football. In the way they say the words you know without doubt that there's no "only" about football in this place. In a scene at the opening of a new car dealership the town's female mayor tell Street that he's a nice young man but on the football field he has to destroy the other team and even suggests listening to Black Sabbath to "make him mean." It is made perfectly clear that these people will not accept failure.

The whole pilot episode leads up to the first football game of the season and Peter Berg does everything short of sending every potential viewer a telegram telling them that Jason Street will be injured and that Matt will have to step up to take over the team and bring them a stunning victory. And that's pretty much what happened, with Jason forced to tackle a defensive player to keep him from scoring a touchdown which will put the Panthers out of contention for the game. The stadium falls silent as Jason lies on the turf, not moving. Eventually he is strapped to a backboard and taken to hospital by ambulance. We see scenes of Jason being treated at hospital cut into scenes of the football game where after some initial problems (hitting one of his own players in the back of the helmet with a pass) Matt airs out a long pass to an open receiver on the last play of the game to score the winning touchdown. Then as the stadium falls silent all of the players on both teams gather on the 50 yard line to pray for Jason.

The second episode of the show spends most of its time dealing with character development - the character of the people and the character of the town. The episode starts the Sunday after the game in which Jason Street is injured. In the ramshackle Black church and the beautifully appointed White church, prayers are being said for Jason Street, but even in church the focus is on football and almost as important, the repercussions of Jason's injury. The only person not in church is Riggins who is working out his anger by shooting up road signs with a rifle. The story flies through the town that Matt had his eyes closed when he threw the winning touchdown. Things aren't improved any when, during practice Matt can't execute any of the plays. There's pressure from supporters, including former team members who flash their championship rings to remind anyone around that they were somebody. It is made absolutely clear to Taylor that this team needs to win championships - the town is nothing without a winning team - and Eric reveals his despair to his wife. He got the head coaching job because he was Jason's coach - in a very real sense Jason was Eric's meal ticket - and not only is Jason out for the season it, he is told that he probably will never walk again. In a scene in Jason's hotel room we see the depth of feeling that Eric feels for Jason, expressed in just two words, "Damn, son." There are other effects. Smash, having declared in the local diner the need for someone to step up to lead the team names himself as the logical leader, which angers Tim, who has never liked Smash and only partially because he's an egotist. Smash's declaration intrigues Tyra to the point where she lets Smash take her to his family's apartment where his mother and sisters walk in on him. However the person we find out the most about is Matt. Jason tells the coach that Matt is a different sort of kid from him - he draws and listens to Bob Dylan - and Tami convinces him that he can mould Matt in the same way that he has moulded Jason and other young players. With that he goes to the boy's home. Matt lives with his grandmother while his father is serving in the Army in Iraq. He seems a bit ashamed about living with her, to the point where he asks her to go into her room while the coach is at the house, but once she finds out who is at the door she's more excited than he is. In talking to Matt he admits that he's impressed with the way the boy is stepping up, working at a job in a fast food place to contribute, working hard at his studies, and trying to learn the football plays. He takes Matt to the football stadium and works on building his confidence before the next game. The episode ends just as the players are leaving the locker room for that game.

Based on the first two episodes of Friday Night Lights I have to say that it may be one of the gems of the new season. The show could easily have been done as a teen angst series of the type that was prevalent on the old WB - a One Tree Hill with football instead of Basketball. There's some of that but it is most assuredly not the dominant feature of the series. The adult characters are well presented with Kyle Chandler standing out in the equivalent of the part that Billy Bob Thornton played in the movie version of Friday Night Lights. Still what stands out more than anything else is the writing and the way the show is presented visually. The writing has a believable quality about it and for the most part refuses to ignore the realities of this sort of town. Berg, who is currently the only writer credited for the series, uses the Sorkin like trick of people talking over each other, and when circumstances warrant quickly cuts between conversations. The scene at the car dealership in the first episode cuts between alumni talking and asking questions of the coach, to the Mayor telling Jason about needing to get mean, to a woman of about 40 talking to Riggins about how the word "Blitz" sounds sexual, and how he could "blitz" and older woman (clearly implying herself). The outage that Smash's mother feels when he finds her son with a white girl like Tyra is palpable and her comment to Tyra - "I work in a family planning clinic, someplace you've probably never visited" - shows the disdain she feels for this piece of trash who could ruin her son's life. The presence of religion in this series is also palpable. Prayer is an accepted part of the way these people live their lives and no Supreme Court ruling is going to interfere with them praying for a win or for a fallen athlete. It isn't presented with any motive other than an acknowledgement that this is an important part of what holds this community together and in another way keeps it apart.

I also think that you have to take note of the way that the show is shot. Peter Berg directed the Pilot and his directing style seems to have been retained for the second episode. There are a lot of quick cuts and he uses the "shaky cam" to good effect. At times the episode feels as though someone is shooting a documentary about this town and their team. There are other times when he doesn't use the shaky cam technique, to give the feeling that this is a moment where a documentary crew wouldn't be shooting. The football sequences in the first episode are done nicely both in terms of how they're shot and how they're presented aurally. While we're seeing action on the field virtually all of the words we're hearing are coming from the radio announcers who are calling the game. The voices are actually those of University of Southern California football announcers Peter Arbogast and Paul McDonald. Occasionally the voice of the quarterback or the referee is heard, but there's no description of the plays from the coach. In fact the coach is almost never heard during the game until he Jason's injury and the need to get Matt into the game.

I want Friday Night Lights to be successful. I'm not a football fan. Like most people in Saskatchewan I bleed Green & White when the Roughriders play in the CFL, but I never been to one of their games or to a University of Saskatchewan Huskies game. As for high school I attended my first - and last - game in Grade 9 when it was pretty much required for "freshies" at Mount Royal Collegiate to walk to Gordie Howe Bowl and see the game. I'm one of those outsiders that Michener's character in Texas describes who doesn't "appreciate the total grandeur of that tradition." I'm not sure I have anything that I can really compare it to. I suppose the closest thing in my experience might be the way that small prairie town like Kindersley or Rosetown feel about their Junior Hockey players; kids who are one or two steps away from the NHL, steps most of them won't make. In watching Friday Night Lights the thing that kept repeating in my mind was the first verse of Bruce Springsteen's song "Glory Days". What this series has done so far is evoke a sense that for most of these young men these are their Glory Days; that while they may go to college, get good jobs, get married and have kids the best time of their lives will be the two or three years that they spent playing football for their town. Being able to convey that sense of excitement and undiscovered futility is something that most TV can't do. I love this series and hope that NBC will give it the time that it needs to find its audience. Just don't watch it expecting your average TV show about sports. This is more about the culture of a place and its people - football is just the catalyst.

Short Takes: The Return (again) - October 7, 2006

Fall.

You've got to love it. The crunch of dry leaves under foot. That little nip in the air - somewhere (it was a comfortable 22 Celsius here today). Baseball playoffs have started - I remember a time when "started" also meant "almost finished" but that just shows how old a codger I'm getting to be. People in Toronto still think the Maple Leafs might win the Stanley Cup - oh wait they stopped believing that yesterday didn't they.

And of course Evil Network Weasels have stopped talking about how fabulous all of their shows are and how great their line up is, and have actually started cancelling shows, putting them on hiatus, and moving them - or combinations of all three. It used to be (another sign of my codgerdom) that networks would be civilized and wait until November to cancel a show and allow it to run its 13 weeks. These days shows get cancelled before the season's whole line up finishes debuting, and sometimes the shows that haven't debuted yet are the shows that are being cancelled. And of course the worst thing - well in a way - is that the Weasels who are cancelling the shows are the same ones who less than two months ago were telling us just how fabulous their coming fall season was.

Of course not everything in this batch of Short Takes. We also have the ever popular "Who does the PTC hate this week?" And there are a few other things I've managed to dredge up.

Farrah Fawcett: Farrah Fawcett has Colo-Rectal Cancer. This was posted on TVSquad.com on Thursday - the same day that it hit the mainstream media - but interestingly The Cancer Blog, which is a sister site of TVSquad.com posted the story the day before most of the media were aware of it. Farrah, who is 59, lost her older sister Dianne to Lung Cancer eight years ago. Fawcett has been an advocate for Cancer charities and research since then. She is currently undergoing radiation treatments preparatory to surgery and chemotherapy. I was never a huge fan of Farrah Fawcett's - during her time on Charlie's Angels I always preferred Jacklyn Smith to either Fawcett or Kate Jackson - however in the past year my family went through as scare when my mother was misdiagnosed with Colo-Rectal Cancer so I know a bit about the fear that this disease can provoke in both patients and family. Naturally our hopes and prayers are with Farrah as she prepares to confront this disease.

NBC Cancels Kidnapped: But they're waiting for ten more episodes to nail the coffin shut. The network will be moving the show, which had been dying a very public ratings death in the third hour of Wednesday, to Saturday nights for the remainder of the show's run, starting October 21. The network is allowing the show to wind up the kidnapping arc about the abduction of Leopold Cain, so that the few fans of the show will be able to see it through to a conclusion unlike what happened to the Fox series Reunion last year. The show will be replaced in its Wednesday time slot - which had been the long time home of Law & Order - by Dateline NBC. It's worth noting that this series was one of the shows moved in the massive shakeup that NBC made in their Fall Schedule in order to move Studio 60 On The Sunset Strip from Thursday's second hour to Monday's third hour. Kidnapped was originally scheduled to air on Tuesday nights in the third hour opposite ABC's Boston Legal and CBS's Smith. NBC Entertainment President Kevin Reilly said at the time "We've enjoyed an extremely successful development season and are going to do what it takes to give each new series the strongest launch we can. Now that we've assessed the competitive landscape, we've scheduled our new shows in time periods where we believe they'll succeed and will be supporting them with robust marketing campaigns and the full resources of the network." That worked out real good. Too bad - I like this show and it had a great cast.

Speaking of Smith: That show has been pulled from the CBS line up effective immediately. Seven episodes out of the initial order of thirteen have been shot. The Smith website isn't accessible through the main CBS site anymore - the show has been pulled from both drop down menus on the site - and CFTR Radio in Toronto reports that the show has been cancelled and describes it as the first cancellation of the season. The show lost 26% of its audience between the first and third shows: first episode overnight ratings 7.8/12, 11 million viewers; third episode ratings 5.8/ 9, 8.43 million. It also dropped in the crucial Adult 18-49 demographic from 3.6/10 for the premiere to 2.8/8 for the third episode, a decline of 22%. Worst of all it was not retaining viewers from the preceding shows,NCIS (10.8/16; Viewers: 15.52 million; A18-49: 4.0/11 on October 3) and The Unit (8.5/13; Viewers: 13.17 million; A18-49:4.1/11). Those shows were in second and third place on the night respectively.

Foxy Moves: We already knew that Fox was putting The Happy Hour and Justice on early "pre-World Series month" hiatus but we now know what they're going to do with at least some of the shows that are in trouble. The Happy Hour is scheduled to return on November 2 along with 'Til Death. The shows will serve as lead ins for The O.C. which will have its debut on that night. As of October 23, Justice will now move to the second hour of Monday night following Prison Break and replacing Vanished which will move to the first hour of Friday nights starting on October 27. Last Friday a rerun of the pilot episode of Justice aired in the first hour and lost to Ghost Whisperer, Deal or No Deal, a repeat of the previous night's Grey's Anatomy and the CW's Friday Night Smackdown! - Friday is not a good night for Fox series! Also, Standoff will be swapping with House, moving to the first hour of Tuesday night (opposite NCIS and Friday Night Lights) while House moves to the second hour (opposite The Unit and Biggest Loser). This latter move had been pre-planned by the network and of the moves announced is probably the best of the lot.

The CW opts for migration: In a surprise move The CW network announced that it would be transferring its Monday night line up of Seventh Heaven and Runaway to Sunday night beginning October 15, and its Sunday comedy line up of Everybody Hates Chris, All Of Us, Girlfriends and The Game to Monday night starting October 9, where the shows come up against the CBS comedy line up. This move actually makes some sense if you think about it hard enough. In the past The WB did reasonably well with dramas on Sunday nights (UPN didn't program Sundays) and the two family oriented dramas would seem to be a good fit for that night. Seventh Heaven - previously the highest rated WB series will be going up against reality shows The Amazing Race, Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, NBC's Sunday Night Football, and starting in November Fox's line up of The Simpsons and American Dad. Runaway which stars Donny Wahlberg and Leslie Hope will be up against Cold Case, Desperate Housewives, Family Guy and The War At Home as well as Football. Potentially this gives the CW a bit more of a chance in the second hour of Sunday.

PTC gets one right: Admittedly it's for all of the wrong reasons, but still.... In a statement before the FCC's Quadrennial Broadcast Media Ownership Review, held in Los Angeles PTC executive director (and soon to be President) Tim Winters linked "Indecent programming with media consolidation" according to a headline on the group's webpage. According to Mr. Winter's statement before the Commission "And since the Commission last dealt with the issue of media ownership three years ago, millions of Americans have filed formal complaints about broadcast indecency violations. All but a handful of those complaints reflect national network television broadcasts. With very few exceptions, network-owned television stations do not consider community decency standards." He added later in his statement, " When local programming decisions are prohibited by a remote corporate parent, the public interest is not served." (my emphasis) Interestingly this is a similar position to a group which could scarcely be more different from the PTC in what they want to see; the Centre For Creative Voices in Media, a group which often opposes the complaints filed by the "millions of Americans" who fill out the PTC's pre-made complaint letters. On September 13, the Centre's blog reported on a two year study supressed by the FCC that claimed that "locally owned stations produce more local news than those owned by media giants." According to the study "locally owned stations produced five-and-a-half minutes more local news in a half-hour newscast than their consolidated competitors - meaning 33 more hours of local news per year." In other words, "when local programming decisions are prohibited by a remote corporate parent, the public interest is not served." Speaking from a place where the majority of private English language stations are owned by two corporate entities - CTV and Canwest Global - I can't help but agree. News coverage, particularly in the smaller Saskatchewan cities has decreased as media ownership has become centralized in the two private networks.

Who does the PTC hate this week?: Besides media conglomeration the PTC is also mad at FedEx for sponsoring Medium, where "the lead character Allison, dreams about a man who has kidnapped and raped several teenage girls" and CSI where scenes " included a man with a biting fetish, men receiving S&M beatings from a dominatrix in a sex club, a grown man with a sexual desire to dress like and be treated as an infant and a woman making a sex video for her 15-year-old stepson." This was the message brought to the FedEx stockholders meeting by the head of the Memphis Tennessee chapter of the PTC, Kelli Turner on behalf of the Council.

This week's "Worst" show was NBC's Heroes. The PTC states that "Due to its violent and sexual content Heroes is not suited for children of any age. And as far as adults are concerned, if you are disturbed by graphic gory horror film, Heroes is probably not for you either." Their major objection was to the character of Niki Sanders: "When not performing as a webcam stripper, one of the show’s “heroes” uses her special powers to violently bludgeon her enemies to death." They then describe the scene in which Niki "begins to take off her clothes while the second hitman video tapes them. Suddenly, she changes her mind and says to the man “Screw you!” The hitman strikes Niki in the face and knocks her out. When Niki awakens she finds both men dead, one with a sharp object protruding from his neck and the other sprawled out the floor. Torture devices are shown hanging from the walls and blood is literally splattered everywhere." In an aside the PTC also objects to the scene where "Claire, the invincible high school cheerleader, experiments with her super power by putting her hand in a garbage disposal without experiencing any pain. When she removes her mangled extremity the camera zooms-in on the bloody injury which suddenly and inexplicably heals." Just for the record, NBC has announced that Heroes will be renewed for the whole year after only the second episode of the show.

I Haven't Forgotten You - I've Just Forgotten How To Manage My Time

It seems like every so often I feel the need to apologize. It must be the Canadian in me but, hey some of my ancestors have been here since before Little Jimmy Wolfe climbed to the top of the Plains of Abraham with a bunch of his Anglais pals and beat up on Montcalm. In fact, if some of the stories are true there were other relatives of mine who weren't exactly pleased when Samuel de Champlain decided to overstay his welcome by a few hundred years. So I AM Canadian. But that doesn't really matter.

No what I'm apologizing for this time is not exactly being timely in writing my reviews. I've been more than a bit exhausted lately which takes away from some of my writing time, and then there have been a couple of computer problems this week which meant that some other projects that I was working on "ceased to proceed" as the saying goes - usually after I'd written most of what I had to say but had saved little or nothing of it. I'm getting a handle on most of this stuff although the program that I use to do my bowling statistics is behaving in a maddening manner (it refuses to calculate handicaps for teams) but I'll tame it. Plus, in a rare occasion I will have this Monday to work on a review or two (it's Canadian Thanksgiving and the state of the bus system on a holiday in this city means I won't be bowling - I'll roll off instead). I've got an idea of what I want to do this weekend and beyond - whether I can do it or not is a whole other question.

Wish me luck!

One Irritating Thing About TCM in Canada

This post serves a bit of a dual purpose. First of course is to register my irritation about something that Turner Classic Movies does with their Canadian feed, and that is to sometimes show different films in Canada than they do in the United States.The other purpose is to thoroughly lord the fact that I get TCM (and AMC now, though it really isn't worth the effort anymore) because I have Shaw Cable while my friend and fellow habitue of the alt.movies.silent newsgroup Stephen Cooke does not. I'm tempted to add a "Nelson Muntz" like HA HA here, so I will

HA HA

Most of the time I confess that the substitutions aren't really a problem for me. TCM has to substitute for films where they don't own the Canadian broadcast rights and can usually find a movie in their library that's just as a good and sometimes better - or at least something that I have a greater desire to see - than the movie that they're not going to show. But this Sunday they're showing the recreation of the classic (and lost) silent horror film London After Midnight to Americans. Canadians get The Boob with George Arthur and Joan Crawford. Which is fine I guess, except that it's October and TCM usually loads up on horror films and I've been hearing about this film for years, and this recreation for almost as long. Still it's not as bad as on October 29 when TCM in the USA is showing the 1925 Phantom of the Opera while TCM in Canada is showing Cabin In The Sky, which isn't even a silent. I ask you, is that fair?

Jericho Is Not Lost

Every so often there's a show which has a fascinating premise and a good to great cast but when the show finally emerges somehow doesn't deliver on the promise. Jericho is a show like that. After watching the second episode I'd say that this show could be more than just an adequate bit of entertainment, and still might develop into something more. After two episodes though I have to say that it isn't there yet.

Think the end of the world is scary? That's nothing compared with the end of civilization. At the end of the world everyone dies, but at the end of civilization people revert to the state of nature. And it's not just any state of nature either, it's a very Hobbesian state of nature where, as old Thomas put it, life is "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short." The science fiction writer Jerry Pournelle wrote a book about that called Lucifer's Hammer and while it didn't deal with a nuclear bombing, it did involve an event which basically left the world without the trappings of civilized man and featured what amounted to a determined group in one location trying to pull things together despite the best efforts of the uncivilized hordes to overwhelm them. There's dramatic tension in that sort of story line. Unfortunately I don't think that Jericho is delving anywhere near that deep into the subject.

In the pilot episode we're introduced to the primary cast, and they seem to fit "types". There's Gerald McRaney as the town patriarch, Mayor Johnston Green, and his two sons. Eric (Kenneth Mitchell) is the good son who stayed in town and helps dad run the place, while Jake (Skeet Ulrich) is the mysterious prodigal son who is a disappointment to his father but his mother Gail's (Pamela Reed) favourite. There's Grey Anderson (Michael Gaston), the man who wants to run the town - not an outright bad guy but someone who wants to disturb the natural order of things. There's Dale Turner (Erik Knudsen), the kid from the wrong side of the tracks whose trailer trash mom was off in Atlanta doing what trailer trash moms do. Of course he has a crush on one of the richest girls in town. There's Jake's old girlfriend Emily Sullivan (a blonde Ashley Scott) whose fiancee was flying into Wichita, and the young and extremely skilled school teacher - Heather Lisinski (Sprague Graydon) - who is clearly going to be the third leg of this love triangle. To round things off are Stanley and Bonnie Richmond (Brad Beyr and Shoshannah Stern), two siblings who own a farm in the area despite the fact that she's deaf. Finally there's British actor Lennie James as Robert Hawkins, the mysterious newcomer in town who claims to have been a cop in St. Louis but seems to know about a lot of things than an ordinary cop wouldn't know. Plus there's the usual assortment of people who don't stand out as important, at least not yet.

The first episode also set the premise - the townspeople of Jericho Kansas become aware of a nuclear blast in the vicinity of Denver. Most of them see the mushroom cloud rising in the west behind an intervening mountain range (in Kansas... or even eastern Colorado) just as the President of the United States is about to make a speech to Congress on increasing global violence. Setting aside how unlikely it is that you could see a mushroom cloud rising over Denver from even the Kansas state line, the image of the boy standing on the roof of a building watching the mushroom cloud after his little sister counted "5...4...3...2...1" is a strong visual, and a reminder of the famous "Daisy" ad from the 1964 presidential campaign. Equally affecting is the way that the town first learns that Denver isn't the only place that has been hit by a nuclear blast. Dale Turner's mother called their home just as the Atlanta bomb exploded and the way that he plays the answering machine tape over and over to hear her voice is certainly effective. The trouble is that this seems to be as far as they go. The lights go out - I'm surprised they lasted as long as they did - and people start to panic. There's a run at the gas pumps since these folks need gas to run their generators, and things almost get violent before the mayor gives an inspirational little variant on his campaign speech that calms everyone down by reminding them to be proud of their town. There's a bus full of school kids who go off the road and hit a deer. They're rescued by Jake, despite the fact that his leg is injured. In fact, the mysterious prodigal son even has the time and skills to do an emergency tracheotomy on a little girl using juice box straws (none of the kids is old enough to have a pen).

I have to confess that the second episode was better than the first, although it didn't really live up to my hopes for this series either. The second episode featured two major plot points. The first concerned an approaching rain storm which would drive the radioactive dust from the Denver explosion to the ground right over Jericho. The townspeople needed to take shelter from the "fallout rain" but the the town's two fallout shelters can only house a fraction of them - those who can find shelter in basements or storm cellars at home are advised to do so. In one Eric details exactly how you die from radiation poisoning to a group of guys who refuse to go to the shelters and are planning on dying with their buddies playing pool. This scene seems to redeem Eric but in a later scene he acts like a tough bastard when he turns away busses filled with people from the town's other, uninhabitable shelter. It is Jake who comes up with a solution to the problem by suggesting that the people take shelter in the local salt mine, and it is Jake who mysteriously knows enough about demolition to know how to collapse the entrance to the mine without bringing the whole place down on the people's heads.

The episode's other major plot resolved a pair of cliffhangers from the premier. One concerned Emily, who was blissfully unaware of the bombs and had been driving to Wichita to pick up her fiance. The other was related to the search for the school bus. The county sheriff and one of his deputies found a wrecked bus, but it turned out to be a bus carrying convicts. In the second episode Emily was picked up by a sheriff's car carrying two mend dressed as deputies, but bit by bit she became aware that they weren't what they seemed, a belief that was confirmed when she heard an actual police broadcast that mentioned that the sheriff was missing. They ended up at the Richmond farm, where only Bonnie was at home. The "deputies" needed gas for their car but Stanley had the only key and he was in town. Tension grew as Emily sought a way to protect herself and Bonnie and to get help from town. Eventually she was able to get a gun and three bullets from a display that the Richmonds had on a table, and was able to escape to the car and its radio to call for help. The call was heard by Jake, who raced from the mine (after detonating the explosive to close the entrance from the outside) to the Richmond farm, just in time to gun down the two fake deputies and get Emily, Bonnie, and the two real sheriffs deputies (who were still alive in the trunk of the car) into the relative safety of the Richmonds' storm cellar.

The problem I have with Jericho isn't that it's a bad show. It is perfectly adequate and if anything seems to have improved over the first episode. The problem I guess is that I was expecting and hoping for something more than a "perfectly adequate" show. The show is being compared in some circles to Lost, but by that comparison they are falling short. We are barely aware of relationships outside of the Green Family and their friends and colleagues, like the Richmonds and Grey Anderson. In fact the only character who is really outside this circle is the mysterious Robert Hawkins who knows more than he's telling. He has far more knowledge than a guy who was a cop in St. Louis and had some anti-terrorism training after 9/11 would have. He's keeping information from his neighbours - like the fact that Philadelphia, San Diego, Chicago and at least three other cities were also hit - and seems to have bought a house with its own extensive bomb shelter. One of the strengths of Lost is that while there are central figures in the cast it is a large ensemble and attention can shift between the characters. In the first two episodes of Jericho the focus has clearly been on Skeet Ulrich's Jake as the "man of action." In the first two episodes, and in the previews for the third, Jake has played a central role while the other characters haven't had nearly the development. Moreover there seems to be little of the character development that is so much a part of Lost. We know very little about most of the characters, and in the case of Jake and Robert Hawkins the truth is actively being kept from us. tantalising tidbits are being revealed - Eric is married to the town doctor but seems to be carrying on some sort of an affair with the owner of the local tavern - but just how important this information will be is hard to determine at the moment.

Jericho is a show with. Gerald McRaney was an outstanding presence in the third season of Deadwood. Sadly the part of Mayor Johnston Green doesn't have nearly the depth of George Hearst on Deadwood. Similarly Pamela Reed seems to be relegated into yet another supporting role as Gail Green. So far she doesn't really seem to have much to do beyond being - well supportive of her husband and her two sons. Skeet Ulrich's character of Jake. He seems to be a good fit for the role, although I think that the focus on his character tends to detract from the potential of other actors. The two younger female leads, played by Ashley Scott and Heather Lisinski seem likely to be relegated into a romantic triangle with Jake. The characters are both capable in their own ways but they seem somehow to be relegated to lesser positions within the scripts.

I don't want to seem too negative about Jericho. I still think the premise has considerable potential and it could realize that potential. Still, this season seems to be giving us an abundance of good shows - dare I say it superior quality shows as compared with previous seasons. I'm not sure that Jericho falls into that category, at least not yet. I confess that there are shows that were cancelled last season that I would prefer to watch instead of Jericho. The show is doing well in the ratings, so far finishing second in it's time slot to Dancing With The Stars, and is building an audience, but for my part I just feel that this is not a strong offering. Certainly it isn't comparable to Lost. If the two shows went head to head I'm inclined to believe that Lost would easily emerge as the winner. From my point of view Jericho needs more of a sense of impending menace not from radiation but from other people, the ones in the Hobbesian state of nature who are determined to take what they need from those who have it. I also think that it needs to focus more on the larger ensemble and less on the character of Jake. If the writers can work on these aspects, and the viewers are willing to accept this sort of thing, I think the series could become more than "just" adequate.

Poll Results And A Bit Of News - What new Drama will be cancelled first?

First the results. We had fourteen voters this time around, which sounds good until you realize that there were sixteen shows listed, so we averaged under one vote per show. Not that it matters though because there's a relatively clear winner.

In a tie for eighth place with no votes are Heroes, Standoff, Ugly Betty, Shark, Runaway, Friday Night Lights, Six Degrees, The Nine and Studio 60 On The Sunset Strip with no votes. In a tie for fifth place with one vote each (7% of those cast) are Smith, Vanished, and Justice. In a tie for second place, with two votes (14%) are Kidnapped, Jericho, and Brothers and Sisters. The clear winner in this poll however is Men In Trees with five votes (35%).

There are a couple of interesting things in these results. Of the shows not getting any votes, only one - Standoff - had debuted before the poll began. Of the shows that got votes, only Brothers and Sisters has not yet debuted (it appears tonight). Make of that what you will, but I can't help but wonder what the results would have looked like if my technological difficulties hadn't occurred and I'd been able to run the poll before most of the series had debuted.

I can't help but wonder what the sizable vote for Men In Trees to be the first drama cancelled means. I know that I haven't reviewed the show yet largely because I have so far found myself unable to sit and watch a complete episode without missing big chunks of it. This is despite the fact that I basically like several members of the cast including Abraham Benrubi (Jerry from ER but also Olaf The Troll from and episode of Buffy The Vampire Slayer) and John Amos (Admiral Fitzwallace on The West Wing, but also Gordie on the 1970s Mary Tyler Moore Show). Setting aside my personal dislike of Anne Heche - when she was a lesbian and with Ellen DeGeneres I kept thinking that Ellen could do much better, which of course she has - I don't really find the parts of the episodes that I've seen that appealing. The interesting thing is that I read people raving about just how good the show is in terms of writing and characters. I'll keep trying with it though.

And now the news I promised. TVSquad.com reports and Futon Critic confirms that Fox will be placing both The Happy Hour and Justice on "early hiatus" before the start of the Baseball playoffs which dominate the Fox lineup for most of October. The episodes of The Happy Hour scheduled for September 28 and October 5 will be replaced by reruns of episodes of 'Til Death. The Justice episode schedule for September 27 will air, but the episode set for October 4 will be replaced by a House rerun. In addition the pilot episode of Justice will be repeated on Friday September 29, reducing the length of the Celebrity Duets finale to one hour from two (hurray!). The Happy Houris supposed to return to the Fox lineup on November 2, but no date has been reported for a return of Justice. Each of the series, which started earlier than most network shows, suffered a major audience loss against "premiere week" competition. Ratings for Justice were down 37.29% from its premiere episode (and down 36.67% in the 18-49 demographic), while ratings for The Happy Hour dropped by 34.78% (and 32% in the 18-49 age group) from its debut. In last week's ratings, The Happy Hour finished fourth in its time slot against My Name Is Earl, Survivor, and special recap episode of Grey's Anatomy which aired before the season premiere. Justice was fifth in its time slot, being beaten by the second hour of The CW's America's Next Top Model, as well as CBS's Criminal Minds a rerun of last season's finale of Grey's Anatomy and the second hour of NBC's Biggest Loser. I suspect that airing the Justice pilot on Friday night might be an attempt to see if the show could be moved permanently to a time when all Fox has is a couple of reality shows, but that's purely a guess on my part.

A Late Review Of Kidnapped

I managed to screw up the taping of several shows that I wanted to see this week. Yeah, I use a VCR not a DVR (around here DVRs are only available if you pay for a high def cable box or use satellite, but that's a whole other story) so there's no high tech "season pass" for me. Anyway, I am really grateful that NBC decided to show the pilot episode of Kidnapped on Saturday night, because if they hadn't I might have missed one of the best shows that I've seen so far this season.

There are basically three ways to approach the first episode of a new series. You can dump the viewer into the story with virtually no preparation at all. That's what Aaron Sorkin did with The West Wing. You can spend the bulk of an episode setting up the premise of the series, although the result is a pilot episode that bears little or no resemblance to what people will see every week. That's what Sorkin did this year with Studio 60 On The Sunset Strip. Finally you can find a middle ground where a significant portion of the episode is given over to setting up the basic premise of the show with the remainder given over to settling into the regular flow of events. This seems to be the approach taken by the producers of Jericho. I don't have any problem waiting until the second episode to review a show like Studio 60, or even one like Jericho because of the way their pilots are structured, but when it comes to show that dump you right into the action, the pilot episode is often essential for grasping the events of the show, particularly one that is essentially a serial. Kidnapped is one of those shows.

Kidnapped opens almost as if it was an episode of Law & Order. In a few minutes we meet the Cain Family - the teenaged son Leopold, the younger daughter Alice, mother Ellie, and father Conrad. We meet the Cains in the morning as the present a happy appearance to a reporter from the New York Times. There seems to be a sort of undercurrent suggesting that perhaps things aren't as happy as they might seem to be. Also present is Virgil, who we have seen entering the building in what seems to be a daily occurrence. When Alice tries to introduce Virgil to the "girl from the Times" (as Conrad calls the reporter) her mother tells her in French "We don't talk about Virgil with guests." As we quickly discover, Virgil is Leopold's bodyguard. We soon learn that Leopold needs a bodyguard. The car in which Virgil, Leopold and another boy are being driven to the boys' exclusive private school they are stopped and the driver killed. Virgil shoots a man posing as a cop and then shoots up a garbage truck blocking their retreat before he himself is shot by a sniper on another building. The other boy is sent back to the Cain home with a note - "Don't call the police." All of this occurs in the first six minutes of the show and yet it can't be described as rushed. We get the information we need to know in order to set up the premise of the series and to give us a hint of how we should feel about these people.

We are soon introduced to the major characters of this show. As it happens, the Conrad Cain's lawyer, Roger, knows someone - or rather knows of someone - who can help. This is our introduction to Knapp who we see rescuing another kidnapping victim and killing the kidnappers to get to her. Knapp, and his associate Turner, have as their goal the return of the victim "intact" otherwise they don't get paid. That's part of why Knapp advises his clients not to contact the FBI; in his view the FBI's objectives are too diverse - the return of the victim, the identification and capture of the kidnappers and the recovery of the ransom. Unfortunately the Cains may not have a choice about bringing in the FBI. Agent Latimer King, who is on the verge of retiring, is contacted by Virgil's wife. She tells King that her husband is missing. After first asking Conrad Cain about Virgil's whereabouts, King eventually finds him in a hospital in Queens. It is from Virgil that King learns about Leopold's abduction. He surmises that Knapp is also involved, and in a nicely choreographed scene, talks to Knapp on the phone. Both men are lying about their locations until King and his FBI colleagues enter the Cain home and are standing face to face with Knapp.

It becomes clear almost immediately that King and Knapp both know and respect each other, and seemingly don't respect the lead FBI agent on the case. They're soon dealing with a ransom demand. The kidnappers call Conrad Cain and demand that he deliver $20 million in Bearer Bonds to a subway station in Brooklyn. This allows the FBI to "determine" the location that the call came from, an apartment in Brooklyn. While Knapp, Conrad Cain and King go to the drop point, the FBI's SWAT team prepares to take down the apartment as soon as the ransom is delivered. Told to proceed into the "local" tunnel to Coney island, Cain encounters a man to whom he is supposed to deliver the ransom - or at least so he thinks. When Knapp captures the man it turns out that he's a homeless man who has been given a hundred dollars to deliver a note. But it's too late. The FBI agent with the SWAT team sends his men in, not listening to King's claims that this was not the drop. It turns out badly - the apartment was rigged with explosives and when the SWAT team enters, the place blows up. At that moment Ellie Cain gets a call from the kidnapper: "You've just killed your son."

This recap of the first episode doesn't do it justice. There are several scenes involving the kidnappers including their apparent leader "Mr. Schroeder". Once the kidnapping takes place, Schroeder's associate ruthlessly goes about eliminating loose ends - specifically the fake cop and "Mr. Greene" the sniper who shot Virgil. But there are so many other great touches, like Ellie's line to Conrad when he says that the note tells them not to call the police: "I imagine the note always says not to call the police." It's said in such a matter of fact manner that it conveys Ellie's certainty that her husband is doing the wrong thing but that she'll let it go ... for now. There are all sorts of hints that there's something deeper going on, and not just in the kidnapping.

Inevitably there are going to be comparisons between this show and the Fox show Vanished. If the criteria for comparison is that the show is a serial about kidnapping (the Fall Preview edition of the Canadian TV Guide contains the following: Is the world really ready for two season-long kidnapping serials on the same network? - Vanished and Kidnapped both air on Global in Canada) then I don't think the comparison is valid. Vanished is heavily modeled on films like The DaVinci Code and National Treasure. The kidnapping of the Senator's wife in Vanished seems mainly intended to lead the FBI agents and the reporter into the depths of a massive conspiracy and the shadowy "super-organization" responsible for it. And while the Cain family and others in Kidnapped have more than their share of secrets and shadowy areas in their lives, the show's focus is on the kidnapping rather than on the as yet unknown motives for it. By any other criteria, Kidnapped comes out far ahead of Vanished.

The acting in Kidnapped is first rate, which shouldn't really surprise anyone given the talent that has been assembled for this series. Oscar winner Timothy Hutton plays Conrad Cain while Dana Delaney plays his wife Ellie. They have some scenes that portray the intermingled rage confusion and hopelessness of parents who have had a child kidnapped, and they pull them off in a manner that is letter perfect. Jeremy Sisto plays Knapp, and from the moment you first see him, you realize that he is a both a dangerous man and someone of greater depth than he might initially appear to have. There's an exchange that he has with Turner (Carmen Ejogo) that shows this beautifully. Knapp asks "So what kind of fifteen-year-old reads Buddhist Epistemology?" to which Turner replies "A lonely one." And then she asks "Don't tell me you've read it" to which he replies "Hnm-mm. Not this translation." Finally, there's Delroy Lindo as the marvellously named Latimer King. His physical presence marks him as a man who is in charge, and the way that the other agents react to him at his retirement ceremony and then after he takes on the case confirms that he's very good at what he does. It's an impression confirmed by the way that Knapp reacts to him on the phone call. There's a deep mutual respect there; one has the feeling that there aren't too many people that Knapp has respect for and few of them work for the FBI. Comparing the cast of this with the cast of Vanished is like comparing the latest high performance supercar with an inexpensive product of one of the big three auto makers. The American car does the job but the supercar makes you enjoy what it's doing. Of course the strength of the cast is only part of it. The writers of Kidnapped give this superb cast speeches that fit the situation they are in and which come across as believable. As for the direction, the pace is absolutely perfect. Where the pilot of Vanished seemed to be in a rush to get us between action scenes and to not give us time to recognize how weak either the cast or the writing were, the first episode of Kidnapped managed to pack a great deal into its hour but in a manner that still let us enjoy the quiet, personal moments like Conrad Cain making a peanut butter and Jelly sandwich for his daughter but being so distracted that he doesn't realize that he's using mayonnaise instead of peanut butter. Not only is it a perfect symbol for the grief he's feeling that his son has been abducted but it's the sort of personal moment that can easily be so easily ignored if the focus is too much on the investigation, as it almost has to be in most episodic cop shows. It's an example of using the serial form to good advantage, something that I don't really feel that Vanished does.

I think you can guess that I really like this show. It may very well be one of the best things that I've seen so far this season, and it is definitely on my list of shows to go out of the way to see. I'll make sure the VCR is set properly this week because this is one show that I want to make sure I don't miss. I highly recommend it.