Poll Results - What Show Do You Think Should Win The Emmy For Outstanding Comedy Series?

I realise that in a year that features polling for both a US Presidential and a Canadian parliamentary election this isn't the most important poll that you're going to be confronted with, but still only four respondents is hardly what I was expecting. Still It's what I've got so I'll make the best of it.

As I said, I had four voters this time around and here are the results. With no votes, in a tie for fourth place, are The Office and Entourage. With one vote each (25%) are Two And A Half Men and Curb Your Enthusiasm. And the winner, with two votes (50%) is 30 Rock.

I don't really think that I can disagree with this result. As I've often said, I don't watch many sitcoms. In fact in the past year I know I haven't watched a complete episode of any of the nominated shows. So what you're going to get now is less a critique of the nominations and more a diatribe about a couple of aspects on the current state of the sitcom business.

Even thought I don't watch most of these shows I do know that Two And A Half Men is the top rated comedy on any North American network – and probably gets less respect than most of the comedies out there. Okay, it gets more respect than Carpoolers and Cavemen, and looks like Shakespeare when compared to Do Not Disturb (but something on the lines of Taming Of The Shrew rather than Twelfth Night). Certainly it gets far less respect than either The Office or 30 Rock, despite the fact that both – but 30 Rock in particular – get substantially lower ratings than it does, meaning that far fewer people are watching. All this despite being vilified by the Parents Television Council. And Two And A Half Men shows no signs of getting tired... though honestly who would know.

Okay, that was a gratuitous shot at a lot of things, like the poor quality of sitcoms in general, like the fact that when you do get top quality intelligent material it doesn't draw an audience, like 30 Rock and to a lesser extent The Office, and I suppose the fact that network executives seem not to be listening to their most important constituency namely the people who watch their networks. I mean let's face it, 30 Rock is a great show, one which deserves to win the Emmy that it's almost certainly going to collect later this month but the show averaged 6.4 million viewers last season and ranked 94^th in the season ratings. Compare that with Two And A Half Men which averaged 13.6 million viewers last year and finished 16^th in the ratings, or a show that wasn't nominated, How I Met Your Mother which averaged 8.2 million and finished 60^th in the ratings finishing ahead of The Office which had
8.1 million viewers and finished 77^th. Some people worried that How I Met Your Mother was at risk of being cancelled, while there seemed to have been little worry about 30 Rock, and The Office is touted as a huge hit by NBC. Either the networks are wrong, the public is wrong, or there is a different standard being applied (I think it's the latter – The Office in particular has a strong appeal to affluent audiences).

But yeah, I do think that 30 Rock will win the Emmy and deserves it. It is funny in an urbane, intellectual way and – probably more important to Emmy voters than ratings are – has a certain prestige factor going for it that a show like Two And A Half Men doesn't possess. In this field (to use the current political catchphrase – this is not meant as an insult to Governor Palin) Two And A Half Men is the pig in lipstick. Then again while I'm sure that everyone attached to the series would dearly love to win an Emmy, I'm sure they're content with laughing all the way to the bank.

New poll – the last in the Emmy series – will be up in a few minutes. At least the Drama category is one that I know a little something about.

Do Not Disturb - The Writers Should Have Been

I've got good news and bad news for the people behind the new FOX comedy Do Not Disturb (yeah right, like they pay attention to me). The good news is that the first episode wasn't as bad as I thought it was going to be. The bad news is that my expectations for this show were so low that the only direction it could possibly go was up. Well that's not entirely true; my expectations for The War At Home was lower than this and that show managed to be even worse than I expected. Do Not Disturb really wasn't as bad as I expected but make no mistake, it was bad.

The show is set in a small, high end hotel in New York and focuses on the misadventures and foibles of the places employees. I managed to miss the first couple of minutes of the episode but quickly picked up the essence of the plot. An article came out detailing the sexual "adventures" of an anonymous member of the hotel staff in various parts of the hotel. This leads Rhonda, the hotel's head of human resources, to hold a sexual harassment class specifically directed at the hotel's manager Neal. Neal is a natural born horn-dog with a variety of "smooth" moves. Neal claims that he can stop his behaviour at any time and sets out to prove it. There are a couple of subplots along the way. In one Nicole, finds that she's been dropped by her modelling agency. It's important to her that she keeps working as a model for reasons that seem logical to her at least. In another subplot Larry, who is gay, worries that he's not being seen as sexually attractive since he's been in a committed relationship for some time.

Now I broke the discussion of the plots at this point because it's hear that things fall into a trap. The plots that I've outlined to this point are hardly daisy fresh, but there are ways to spin them in an innovative way. Too bad that the writers take them exactly the way that you'd expect them too. Naturally, as soon as Neal pledges not to get involved with anyone at the hotel he encounters a gorgeous woman named Tasha who is almost as eager to do with him what he wants to do with her. And naturally, at almost the instant that her sexual harassment class ends Rhonda gets involved with a member of the staff who is one of her employees, Billy the security guard for the hotel. Of course Rhonda and Billy have to sneak around to find a place to have sex, and naturally enough they get caught by Neal who has succumbed to the charms of Tasha. She has an excuse for what she was doing in the hotel's electrical room with the security man. But of course Neal attempts to bluff Rhonda into revealing that she's as bad as he is in this particular case by claiming that he had security cameras installed and those cameras have caught Rhonda's various trysts with Billy.

The other subplots unravel in the same sort of ways. While Nicole looks like the current trend in models (skinny to the point of anorexia) it is Molly who tries offers to help by hooking Nicole up with her modelling agent. Nicole doesn't believe that Molly (who is a heavy woman) is a model until she comes across a magazine with Molly's picture on the front – Molly is one of the busiest plus sized models in Indiana. Naturally Nicole gets a modelling job... as the new face of crystal meth addiction. Similarly, in the plot with Larry, his straight slacker co-worker Gus tells him that to regain his sense of being sexually attractive he should go to a bar and flirt with a guy. And naturally, the guy that Larry chooses to flirt with just happens to go to the same yoga class as Larry's partner. And while Larry reports that he and his partner fought at first, they had great a great time making up. Even the denouement to the main plot is predictable. When he reads the article Neal immediately states that he hasn't done have the things that are listed in the article. We then cut to the front of the hotel where Molly is talking to a young guy, telling him that the article could have gotten her into trouble...but they sex they'd had in the hotel was going to keep on happening!

You may have noticed that I haven't mentioned what most of the people that I've mentioned do at the hotel. That's because, except for Rhonda, Neal and Billy (whose security uniform consists of a tight fitting black T-shirt with the word "Security" on it in big white letters) I don't know what any of them do. That would have presumably been included in the actual Pilot episode of this mess, but FOX decided to air a "stronger" episode first and hold the Pilot for a later date. If this is FOX's idea of a strong episode of this series I am truly frightened by how bad the "weak" Pilot must be.

The acting in this show is about as good as what they're given to work with. I've never been a big fan of Jerry O'Connell who plays Neal. The only thing I've really liked him in is as Detective Woody Hoyt in Crossing Jordan, however I've found most of his other work going back to his Canadian series My Secret Identity to be quite annoying. Casting him as an arrogant, egotistical, womanizer doesn't exactly endear him, or really play to his strengths as an actor. I wasn't too aware of Niecy Nash before – I've never watched Reno 911 – but she does what she can with the material here. Too bad it's such pedestrian material. The other characters, with the possible exception of Jolene Purdy aren't given much more than basic "types" to work with – the airheaded skinny model (Molly Stanton), the slacker (Dave Franco), the insecure gay guy (Jesse Tyler Ferguson) – and they don't lift things above those "types." However it is the writing rather than the performances that is at fault here. The writers have set up a definite "good guy-bad guy" relationship between the attractive but superficial "upstairs" people, led by Neal, and the less attractive but smarter downstairs people who do the real work, led by Rhonda. It's just about as pat a solution as you are likely to find. They've also made the choice to go with the standard sitcom responses to the problems that the characters had. They took the path of least resistance as far as writing this thing and as a result haven't delivered anything special. But even then the writers are at least partially absolved by being forced to work within the constraints of the concept for the series. The producers are giving us yet another workplace comedy and not coming up with a way to set it apart from the mainstream beyond the theory that it's about an internal conflict between the "upstairs people" – the ones attractive enough to work with the public – and the "downstairs people" who aren't attractive but are at least as essential for the hotel to run properly. It's been done before and it's been done better. There are directions that the series could have taken that would have lifted it out of the realm of the cliche. One need only look to the British series Hotel Babylon to see what can be done can be done with the idea of a high end hotel and the staff who work in it that doesn't involve adversarial relationships or the same bog-standard stories and scenarios that were mined out years ago.

I mentioned in my review of Fringe that it is easy to write about shows that you feel are good and shows that are bad but that it was hard to talk about mediocrity. Nothing in this show rises to the level of mediocrity. Mediocrity implies that there are directions that exist that could improve a show if the producers were brave enough or innovative enough to take them. In the case of Do Not Disturb you might be able to improve the show, but that would take a new cast, writers who were willing to take different directions on standard plotlines, and a new concept might not hurt either. This isn't the worst sitcom that I've seen but the truth is that I have seen better sitcoms than this cancelled and even I will admit that those shows deserved to be cancelled. While this show doesn't suck as badly as I thought it would it also doesn't come at me with any reason why it should survive. If this show is still on at the end of the year I won't be surprised, but I won't be happy either, particularly if better comedies have been cancelled.

The Science Of The Impossible – Fringe

There are times when I think that it is easiest to write about things that you really, really like or really, really hate. It is only mediocrity that is difficult to quantify. Which may explain why I still haven't come up with a review of 90210 while dashing off a review of Hole In The Wall the night it aired. I am going to do it again for Fringe but this time it's because I really, really, really like it. To be sure there are flaws in logic and execution but despite flaws in some of the parts the thing holds together quite well. For me the proof is that despite the 95 minute running time – with limited commercial interruptions no less – the episode felt quickly paced and not like something that was padded with excess material. Indeed one of the faults was that, at times, it felt like it was rushed; as if they could have used a bit more time to develop an idea. That's unusual in most pilots that are longer than an hour and feel like they were stuffed with fluff to make them fit the time slot.

We get a pretty quick impression of what we're dealing with in the first scene aboard a German airliner flying to Boston. Encountering extreme turbulence the passengers fasten their seat belts. One of the passengers is feeling unwell. He uses an auto-injector which we later discover is supposed to contain Insulin (the device looks like an EpiPen, so my first reaction was that he was using Epinephrine for an allergic reaction). Almost immediately he gets up and runs for the front of the plane, a flight attendant running after her. When she finally catches up with him and sees his face she recoils in horror. His face is melting. We see the other people on the plane; their faces are melting. When the plane's co-pilot opens the cabin door to see what the panic is about he quickly closes it. The last image we have from the inside of the plane before it lands is of the co-pilot's face melting away, allowing his jaw bone to drop off.

FBI agents Olivia Dunham and John Scott are called to the airport to participate in the investigation. They're called separately but they're in bed together, conducting a secret love affair in a cheap motel. The FBI isn't in control of the operation though. That job goes to curt and abrasive Homeland Security agent Philip Broyles. Broyles takes charge of things in the sort of pre-emptive manner that most local law enforcement agencies on TV accuse the FBI of adopting, and when Dunham protests using her position as "interagency liaison officer" she not only earns a new nickname, "Liaison" but also a position as one of the people going on board the plane. The plane is absolute carnage; bones, clothes, blood and sticky slime. We learn (after one of the episode's commercials) that the plane has been ordered burned by the Centers for Disease Control, a cover story of course. Acting on an anonymous tip John and Olivia go to a storage facility. There they share "a moment" where they talk about the fact that John said that he loved Olivia for the first time at the motel. Naturally this means that something very bad is going to happen to John. Sure enough, after what must have been hours spent looking in storage lockers – since it has gone from daylight to night (all the better to see the explosions of course) John opens a locker filled with experimental animals and chemicals. He has also flushed his quarry, the man running the experiments. The guy runs, with John in pursuit, then, using his cell phone triggers a booby trap. The subsequent explosion not only badly injures John but also catches Olivia. Then as they say, things get weird.

When Olivia regains consciousness we learn that John isn't dead ... yet. His skin has basically turned transparent to the point where we can see through his skin to his muscle structure. The doctors have managed to slow the process of degradation but not totally arrest it. Investigating the circumstances of the deaths on the plane, Olivia finds a link to an incident at Harvard many years before. This leads her to Dr. Walter Bishop. The only problem is that Bishop is a patient at a mental hospital, and the only way to get to his is with the permission of his sole surviving relative – his estranged son, Peter. Peter Bishop is a high school dropout who is on the run from a gambling debt. He's currently in Iraq trying to make money by conning some Iraqi oil men with a plan to build a pipeline. Olivia travels to Iraq and bluffs Peter into coming back to the States with her. She uses him to gain access to Walter. It's apparent that Walter is both brilliant and totally detached from reality – as if his mind is travelling on two tracks at the same time. Seventeen years in an asylum that is little better than a snake pit will do that to you. Bishop lets Olivia know that the only other person has any idea about the compound that caused the deaths on the plane and John's condition is his old lab assistant "Belly" – Dr. Bell. Bell is the founder of Maximum Dynamic, a company that states that what they make is everything. Olivia wants to talk to Bell, but without any proof of his connection to the deaths on the plane it isn't even something to be considered. The only person who can provide the information that can cure John is the man who caused the explosion and the only person who saw him is John.

Walter suggests a method to allow Olivia to find out what John knows. It's called coordinated dreaming and required Olivia to enter a sensory deprivation tank, take LSD and have her brain connected to John's with electrodes. Peter is appalled by the idea, but Walter claims that he has used it in the past to interrogate a dead man. The technique works in allowing Olivia's mind to contact John's and she persuades him to remember the events leading to the explosion. She sees the man and is able to create a computerized drawing of him, which in turn allows him to be identified. The picture matches one of the passengers on the German airplane. They also discover that the man has a twin brother, and the twin brother works for Maximum Dynamic. It's enough to all them to try to contact Bell. However Bell is out of the country, and Olivia and her FBI partner Charlie Francis to one of Bell's leading executives, Nina Sharp. Sharp is all charm and cooperation, giving them information on the man they're looking for, Richard Steig. Nina also lets slip the information that the event they're investigating is part of a pattern. It's a pattern that Olivia and Charlie have no knowledge – according to Nina, their security clearance isn't as high as her company's. Once they have the information from Maximum Dynamic, Olivia and the FBI, with Walter and Peter in tow track him down to his home. Peter sees Steig escaping from house and lets Olivia and the FBI know the direction he's taken off in and give chase. They eventually catch him and get the information they need to cure John with, after Peter threatens him.

Steig has one other piece of information to make a deal with. The events on the airliner were in the way of a demonstration. However Steig had already set up a deal with someone else. When the plane landed Steig had received a call from one of their representatives, an FBI agent. Steig recorded the call and was willing to release the tape to Olivia in return for a plea deal. The voice on the tape was John's. Hurrying back to the hospital where John is recuperating and where Steig is recovering from Peter's interrogation techniques, Olivia finds Steig smothered with a pillow and John missing. Olivia chases him but his car crashes. He dies as Olivia tries to get the name of who John is working for. Broyles has explained the pattern of mysterious events to Olivia by now and offers her a job working with him on trying to discover the cause of the events. She is reluctant to take on the job but the events with John have forced her to change her mind. She wants to enlist Peter and Walter Bishop into her team. Peter is reluctant but eventually they agree to work with her.

The acting, at least from the people who have an opportunity to say more than a handful of lines, is first rate. Australian actress Anna Torv, who plays Olivia has a vaguely exotic quality that is difficult to describe, however she delivers a strong performance playing a woman who is determined to do anything necessary to save the man that she loves. She expresses her pain when she realizes that John was involved with Steig as much with her expression as with anything that she says. Joshua Jackson as Peter Bishop progresses from a sort of outraged disbelief that anyone could take his father's rantings and pseudo-scientific mumbo jumbo seriously (as far as Peter's concerned his old man could rot away in that asylum forever and it wouldn't bother him one little bit) to someone who, if he still doesn't believe everything that he's seen, is at least committed to helping Olivia. The implication is not so much that he has romantic feelings for her but rather is impressed with her determination to save John if only as a way to escape from this scary world. Even as he seems to reconnect with his father he rejects his father's work. Blair Brown is perfect in the small role (in the pilot at least) of Nina Sharp. From the moment we see her – even before she actually says a word, just based on the way she carries herself – we sense that there is something sinister about this woman. And when she does speak, even though she says nothing that seems particularly threatening, our suspicions are aroused even further. She is too calm, too smooth, too prepared, as if she already knows what is going to happen and how she is going to react to every question posed to her in her interview with the FBI (because of course that's exactly how she treats it, as if she is being interviewed by a reporter who feels well briefed but actually has far less information than Nina does). And as we find out in the last scene, where Nina talks to an orderly about John's corpse, we are exactly right about her.

Still there are two really standout performances. The first comes from Lance Reddick as Philip Broyles. Reddick imbues Broyles with a sense of arrogance. This seems particularly directed at Olivia that turns to something like bemused tolerance as she goes off on what probably seems like a foolish tangent, to something that's not quite respect but may be acceptance. All the while, even as he reveals some of the details of "The Pattern" to Olivia, you get the sense that he's holding stuff back. It's not malevolent (although it could be) simply that there are things that she doesn't need to know and won't find out about them until she does. And it's all done with a calm even serene demeanour. The other bravura acting performance comes from Australian actor John Noble as Walter Bishop. They say that playing someone who is insane can be amongst the hardest challenges for an actor. Noble, who is probably best known in North America for playing Denethor in Lord Of The Rings: Return Of The King does what seems to my untutored eye to take a magnificent stab at it. By turns his Walter Bishop is all business and childlike. At one point he takes a skin sample from John's arm while asking for some ginger ale because it's been so long since he's had any. At another point, while waiting for some result from Olivia's attempts to contact John in the dreaming state, we see Walter watching Spongebob Squarepants, with a joy and amazement that surpasses anything that you'd see from a child. It's ana amazing performance.

The writing may, in some respects be a weak point for the show. I don't mean the actual dialogue, which conveys the emotion of Olivia's desperation to save John quite well. Rather I guess it's a vague sense of being rushed. There's no real sense of the passage of time unless the characters specifically comment on it. We move from Olivia telling Broyles about needing to get to Peter Bishop to Olivia in Baghdad confronting him. To be sure there's an indication that we're in Baghdad (one of the "cute" visual tricks of the episode which I'll mention in the next paragraph) but there's no sense of how long it took her to get there. For all we know (and in this series it's just possible) that she was teleported where she needed to go. Everything about the pacing of the episode seemed to have been rushed. In a show like Mad Men or Battlestar Galactica (two dramas that never fails to impress me with their quality) one is never without a sense of the passage of time, even though it's normally not overtly stated. I suppose that that contributed to the sense that the pacing of the episode seem fast – as if they were trying to fit everything into the 95 minute running time – and why it sometimes didn't seem like the episode took as long as it did.

I wanted to mention a couple of the visual effects. The setting for John and Olivia's shared dream was suitably other worldly. It probably should have provided us with a clue as to the turmoil within John that the place where she met him was not a "happy place" but at the time I supposed we were meant to see it as an effect of his injuries. The other effect, which I like though others seemed to have been annoyed by, was the use of captions to indicate location. Other shows use these but none do it with the "flair" (or perhaps "chutzpah" is the better term) that J.J. Abrams displays here. The captions are big and done in a three-dimensional type face. Moreover at times they seem to exist in the physical universe. In the establishing shot at the FBI office in Boston, the camera pulls through one of the "Os" in Boston to get into the office. But perhaps one of the most brazen/brilliant uses of the effect comes soon after when Olivia travels to Baghdad. We start with an establishing aerial shot of the city with the words "Baghdad Iraq" superimposed over the city. We then switch to a ground level establishing shot looking up towards helicopters flying over the city...and the "B" from Baghdad. Like I said, "flair" (or perhaps "chutzpah").

Already opinion of this series seems to be all over the place. People either love it (like me) or they loathe it. Many people comment on the similarity between this series and The X-Files and usually find it lacking. I do acknowledge a similarity to The X-Files but I also see similarities to a show from a couple of seasons back called Threshold, starring Carla Gugino, that I actually think is closer to this series than The X-Files is. I liked that show a lot – felt in fact that it was the best of the three "alien invasion series" from that season (the others were Invasion and Surface). Despite a handful of things about Fringe that I found annoying – the pacing problem that I mentioned being the biggest, and that may be have a lot to do with getting the show up and running – I really like this show as well. What I'm really interested in is how they'll follow up on this. After all, as is often the case the pilot is not reflective of the show that we'll see in subsequent weeks. In the pilot for Fringe the focus was on Olivia's relationship with John, her desperate attempts to save him, and her sense of betrayal when she finds out that he had been dealing with Steig. All of this is what draws her into the area of fringe science and introduces her to Broyles and to the Bishops. What the rest of the series has to do is to hold on to us as she and her team investigate the various threats that they'll be investigating. That could be a difficult thing to pull off. Threshold wasn't able to – it was one of the first shows cancelled that season. FOX, which is notorious for cancelling series quickly needs to take its time with this one, but given that it comes from producer J.J. Abrams, that seems likely to happen, even if the ratings for the pilot may not have been stellar (it finished second to America's Got Talent, though to be fair it held its audience solidly in each half hour). This could still turn out like Threshold, but I'm hoping that things go more like The X-Files, which started slowly and built an audience. I think this show is intriguing enough for that to happen.

Series Premieres And Season Debuts– Week of September 8-15, 2008

Here we go with week two of the new season. Or is it pre season week two? I don't really care. What I do know is that there are new shows debuting and other shows starting off for the season. All of these are on FOX and The CW of course – the other networks are still winding up their summer schedule. All in all a relatively light week .

Monday

FOX has the season debut of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles and the aftermath of the explosion. John has to face the reality of his future alone.

Tuesday

FOX has the debut of the highly anticipated science fiction series Fringe. The episode will be 95 minutes long and have limited commercial interruptions. The arrival of a flight from Germany at Logan International with no one alive on board sets in motion a deeper mystery. I`m really looking forward to this one, particularly since people whose opinion I respect and who have actually seen the episode are raving about it.

Overlooked in all of the hype about 90210 is the CW`s other new major show, Privileged. The series stars Joanna Garcia, formerly of Reba, as a journalist who takes on the job of tutor for a pair of spoiled rich teens who I suspect could be modelled on the Hilton sisters. I've always liked Garcia, and from the sounds of things this could be a fun "dramedy" with the emphasis on the "-medy."

Wednesday

FOX has the third season debut of the Brad Garrett-Joely Fisher series 'Til Death. Mostly harmless.

FOX also has the series premiere of Do Not Disturb starring Jerry O'Connell and Niecy Nash. Based on nothing more than the previews that FOX has provided, this workplace comedy featuring people yelling at each other, is high on my list of shows that should be cancelled quickly. Then again, it is a sitcom on FOX, the network that kept The War At Home on the air for two excruciating seasons.

Friday

FOX has the season debut of Wayne Brady and Don't Forget The Lyrics. Why? I don't know (third base!).

Hole In The Wall Was A Hole In My Night.

I wasted half an hour on Sunday night watching FOX's new game show Hole In The Wall. It gave me a headache. When the show stopped so did the headache. Draw your own conclusions.

Or better yet, I'll draw one for you, and use just two words and an exclamation point to do so – It sucked!

Of course you knew it would. Marc Berman talked about this show in his Programming Insider podcast and stated that it seemed like "summer fare" with respect to Marc, he's undervaluing summer shows. I'd rather watch most of them than Hole In The Wall.

Ah, you may ask, but what makes this show so awful? After all you've probably watch the YouTube clips from Japan and other places of "Human Tetris" and laughed yourself silly. This is the same thing, so why doesn't it work? There are a lot of parts to the answer but what it really comes down to is this; a ten minute clip on YouTube in a language that you don't understand showing an event that you don't know the rules of is far different than a half hour show in a language that you understand and rules that you get. And there are plenty of annoying things in addition to that.

The show is hosted by Mark Thompson who is the local weather and lifestyles reporter at FOX's LA affiliate KTTV and has worked for the network in a number of other network reality shows as well as some acting work. The floor reporter is actress Brooke Burns who may be best known for appearing on Baywatch but was also the host of the NBC series Dog Eat Dog a few years ago. There's not much for either one of them to do. Brooke gets to talk to the contestants for a few moments who are in two three person teams. Not that the contestants on the first episode had much to say – mostly they stood around posing taunting the other team. And really she had more to do than Thompson whose principal role was to explain the number of holes (and therefore the number of people who would be participating). There's not much more to the roles of either host.

As I mentioned the game involves two teams of three. The members of each team are linked by common occupations or interests. In the first episode there was one team of body builders called "The Six Packs" and one team of overweight radio station employees called "The Beer Bellies." There are four rounds to the game before a final grand prize round for the team that earned the most points in the preliminary rounds. In the first round one person had to fit through a hole cut in a moving Styrofoam wall. If he (the first episode had two teams of men although supposedly subsequent episodes will pit men against women) made it through he got one point for his team; if he didn't he got dunked in a pool. Then a player from the other team faced a different opening. In the "Double Wall Round" the other two players on each team had to try to fit through one or two holes. Of both players did it they earned two points for their team, although it wasn't made clear in the introduction to the round what would happen if only one made it through (apparently the team wouldn't get any points). In the Triple Wall Round" all three team members had to pass through one or three holes. Finally, in the "Speed Round" all three members of each team participate, trying to pass through holes in the wall which is moving towards the team members at twice the normal speed. In this round, if some members of the team pass through a hole while the others fail, the team gets points equal to the number of players who get through. If all three players pass through the "Speed Wall" they win an extra $5,000. The team with the most points after the four rounds wins $25,000 (plus the $5,000 if they passed through the Speed Wall) and the chance to play in the grand prize round.

The grand prize round is known as the "Blind Wall." One member of the winning team is blindfolded (actually give a set of goggles to wear that don't admit light) and has to pass through a hole guided only by instructions from the other members of his team. If he manages to accomplish this, his team will add an extra $100,000 to their prize fund. Needless to say this seems close to impossible and "The Six Packs," who won the first show, failed miserably at it.

There were several things that I find annoying about this show. The sound seemed to be set up so that everything that the announcers and even the contestants said seemed to have a slight echo, like an announcer at a sporting event. The mugging, posing, and taunting by the various contestants was way over the top, particularly the supposedly "amusing" antics of the "Beer Bellies" who, given a chance to wear Spandex for the first – and hopefully last – time in their lives proceeded to give us shows of them wiggling their flab. And there was the audience who seemingly cheered and applauded this mess as though it were every play in a tight Super Bowl game. Presumably they were exhorted to do this by the producers because for the life of me I couldn't see anything that exciting in this mess.

In the end however I can't see much that's entertaining about this show. As I said, the YouTube clips were funny, almost certainly because we got them in small doses, and we didn't have a set of rules or anything that we understood about what was going on. The clips were just another example of one of those crazy Japanese game shows. Viewed with an understanding of what is going on it stops being funny and turns into something really stupid. Brooke Burns old series, Dog Eat Dog was far more engaging than this mess. About the only thing worse than a half hour of this show would be a whole hour of it. And before you laugh at that prospect, be aware that when FOX ordered this series they ordered thirteen hour long shows although it was done with the understanding that they could be split into twenty-six half-hour shows. For once I'm hoping that this mess will turn out to be a ratings disaster of the highest magnitude and that FOX will pull the trigger on it quickly. For all of our sakes.

A Tale Of Three Series

This isn't exactly how I planned to return to Blogging after an unplanned hiatus for most of the summer. I was working on a post that at least partially dealt with my "discovery" of a fifty year old TV series and how it underlines something that's missing in modern TV. But real world events have overtaken my own aims and the result is just too good not to blog about. (Before I start on this one I should mention that as a Canadian I don't have a dog in this fight, although like all but the most right wing Canadians my sympathies lean toward the Democratic party, primarily because the policies advocated by the Democrats are closer to the policies that Canadians hold dear, like Medicare.)

John McCain's decision to select Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as his Vice-Presidential nominee completed the real world electoral picture for the 2008 season. It is an electoral picture that has similarities to three different TV series of the last few years. The three series are 24, Commander In Chief, and The West Wing.

Let's start off with Barack Obama and 24. This is a pretty obvious one. The first season of the series featured Dennis Haysbert as David Palmer, the presumptive Democratic nominee for President, and the first African-American to be nominated for the post. There has been some suggestion, at least partially from Dennis Haysbert, that the character of David Palmer might have had some sort of impact one making Obama's candidacy "acceptable" to the American public. According to a TVSquad article, which quotes an AP wire service report, Haysbert said, "My portrayal of David Palmer may have helped open the eyes of the American people. I mean the American people across the board – from the poorest to the richest, every color and creed, every religious base – to prove the possibility there could be an African-American president, a female president, any type of president that puts the people first." Yeah, I know, it sounds like a reach to me – and to a lot of the people who commented on the story at the time – too. Still, setting aside any possible influence that Haysbert's portrayal of David Palmer may have had on the sensibilities of the American public, there is no doubt that 24 at least suggested the potential of a qualified and charismatic African-American candidate winning the nomination for a major political party by, not to mention winning the presidency. (And before anyone mentions Jesse Jackson, while he was certainly a viable candidate for the nomination in 1984 and 1988, it is questionable how viable he would have been considered in the general election or how broadly based his support was.) In fact there are aspects of the David Palmer character, particularly his reliance on his younger brother Wayne as a political advisor (revealed in later seasons) that would really make the character seem closer to the real world Kennedys than any current politician.

The nomination of the little known Sarah Palin as the Republican Vice-Presidential candidate brings another show into the mix. Commander In Chief brought Geena Davis back to TV starring as Mackenzie Allen, a former member of the House of Representatives who is a Republican who was so at odds with her party that she ran as an Independent. After two terms in Congress she left to become Chancellor of the University of Richmond. She's a specialist in Middle East Affairs as well as a lawyer. From there she is selected by the Republican nominee for President to be his running mate, even though her principal attributes for the job are the fact that she can bring women's votes to his campaign and can balance the ticket because of her moderate, even independent stance on the issues. Of course everything changes after she's elected when President Teddy Bridges dies of a stroke. She is the Vice President that no one wants to see elevated to the big job and suddenly there she is. To compare, Sarah Palin is the one term governor of Alaska, who before becoming Governor was the mayor of Wassilla, a city of 9,000 people. She ran for Governor on a platform of cleaning up government in spite of the fact that the state had previously been governed by a Republican administration.

Of course the big comparison is to The West Wing. It has been stated by series writer and producer Eli Attie that the character of Matt Santos was directly based on the then new Senator from Illinois Barack Obama. There is also a suggestion that based on their perceived maverick stance within the Republican Party that Arnold Vinnick was at least partially based upon John McCain. The latter assertion is far more tenuous than the link between Obama and Santos, to the degree that I don't think that it has ever truly been articulated by anyone associated with the series, and there are a lot of people (mostly those holding a liberal perspective it must be mentioned) writing since McCain's involvement in the current Republican nomination process who have state that McCain is no Vinnick. It doesn't really matter that much of course; it is sufficient to note that both Vinnick and McCain have been perceived as outsiders within their own political party.

The Santos campaign nominated former Labor Secretary and White House Chief of Staff Leo McGarry as Vice President. Viewers may have thought that this was a case of Josh Lyman pushing his former boss (and long time family friend who Josh had come to see as a substitute father as well as a mentor) into one final bit of public service – he had after all suggested Leo as a possible replacement for John Hoynes during the second Bartlett campaign. However it is made clear that Leo's primary role in the Santos campaign and a coming Santos administration has a lot to do with McGarry's knowledge of the working of power and his strengths in foreign affairs and other areas where even a three term Congressman would be deficient. On the Republican side, Arnold Vinnick chose the two term Governor of West Virginia, Ray Sullivan to be his running mate. Sullivan is chosen by Vinnick largely to balance the ticket ideologically with Sullivan appealing to the conservative, religious, pro-life base of the Republican Party, a constituency that Vinnick's moderate Republicanism had alienated.

So where does that put us with regard to the current real-life political campaign? Well the selection of Joe Biden to be Barack Obama's running mate is fairly obvious. As was the case with Leo McGarry and Matt Santos, Biden brings a wealth of experience, particularly in the area of foreign relations, to compliment Obama's inexperience in those areas. Similarly, Sarah Palin's great strength is with the Republican base – she's an evangelical, life time member of the NRA, who espouses an extremely strong pro-life position and strong family values. Even if McCain's weakness with the Republican base is overestimated – which I suspect it probably is – Sarah Palin probably helps in this area.

Of course the real world complexities of selecting a running mate go far beyond what a TV series like The West Wing is able to portray. Joe Biden not only helps the Obama campaign with his perceived lack of experience, he also strengthens the ticket in Pennsylvania and some of the other battlegrounds states and is seen as helping with the perception that Obama is something of an elitist, a perception that can hurt the party's support with blue collar voters. As for Palin, she doesn't add any states to the Republican side of the tally – both Alaska where she was Governor and Idaho, where she was born, are solidly Republican – but supposedly she is meant to attract disaffected women who supported Hillary Clinton, and has strength with blue collar workers because her husband is a commercial fisherman and a member of the United Steelworkers. (For the record, I think this is a crock; Palin is about as likely to attract disaffected Hillary voters with her pro-life, anti-sex education needed, pro-gun rhetoric as a big plate of moose burgers is likely to attract a pack of roving vegans. Personally I think the selection is a disaster for the Republicans which is fine with me. But that's me being political, and after all this isn't my fight.)

Oh, there's one other political-television link which I actually hesitate to mention, but I'm not the first to note this and I probably won't be the last. Take a look at this

Sarah Palin and Tina Fey – separated at birth?

Series Premieres And Season Debuts– Week of September 1-7, 2008

And so it begins.

While people in the business like Media Week's Marc Berman will tell you that the new TV Season doesn't officially start for another three or four weeks, the truth is that at least two of the networks are getting a jump on the game by running their shows out early. This week we'll see the return of three (or is it four) series on FOX with two hour season openers, the return of three series, and the highly anticipated series premier of 90210 on The CW. Here's what the week looks like in terms of shows starting up for the year:

Monday

FOX has the two hour season debut of Prison Break, which is back for its fourth season, with Lincoln and Michael out to avenge the death of Sarah Tancredi. Boy Is he in for a widely reported spoiler.

The CW has the one hour season premiere of Gossip Girl. With the high end students back from summer vacation there's the usual teen angst and rebellion design to aggravate the crap out of the PTC. This time around it includes Nate having an affair with a married older woman (played by Madchen Ammick who did much the same thing in Twin Peaks about 20 years ago), while Serena is mourning her relationship with Dan and Dan is wondering where his relationship with Serena stands after the break-up. And I bet you can tell that I don't watch this show.

Also on The CW is the one hour season premiere of One Tree Hill another show that I don't watch. Lucas's dream girl shows up at the airport; Nathan's comeback is halted by potentially career-changing news and Brooke and Victoria's struggle over "Clothes Not Bros" comes to a head. Whatever the hell that all means.

Tuesday

The CW has the highly anticipated debut of 90210 – not highly anticipated by me mind you but that's beside the point – in a two hour season opener. Harry Mills returns to Beverly Hills to take care of his mother, former TV star and Betty Ford Clinic graduate Tabitha Mills. He's the new principal at West Beverly Hills High, where his daughter Annie and adopted son Dixon will be navigating their new clique-heavy surroundings. The CW is hoping that their target youth demographic will tune in for the teen angst elements, and that fans of the original TV show will tune in to see what's new at West Beverly High and maybe reconnect with Kelly Taylor and Brenda Walsh (and maybe, just maybe, Donna Martin if Tori Spelling can get a deal equal to what Jennie Garth and Shannen Doherty got) from the original series. Reportedly The CW has a lot riding on this show – like its very existence. If it means anything, the Parents Television Council has already notified advertisers that they shouldn't even consider buying time on the series because the network has refused to allow advertisers to prescreen the series. According to the PTC, "CW's Gossip Girl has recently solidified the network's reputation for turning out reprehensible content targeted directly at teen and pre-teen viewers. Advertisers must bear in mind CW's track record when considering whether they trust the network enough to blindly sponsor another program targeted at teens. If Gossip Girl is any indication of what 90210 will look like, advertisers have plenty of reason to steer clear of the show. 'Gossip Girl' storylines have glamorized drug and alcohol use along with casual teen sex, including threesomes. Apparently, CW believes this type of content is appropriate to include in the most-watched show among girls ages 12-17, and advertisers shouldn't expect any restraint with 90210." Well if thumbing our noses at the PTC isn't a good enough reason to watch I don't know what is.

Wednesday

FOX has the two hour season premiere of Bones, which has Booth and Brennan in London. Brennan is lecturing at Oxford and Booth is consulting at Scotland Yard. Naturally enough they get drawn into the murder of a young heiress.

The CW has the debut of the new rotation of America's Next Top Model. Thirty young women seeking to become models are reduced down to the "Notorious Fierce Fourteen" (that's the episode title) but one of them has a secret. Isis is a trans-gendered individual.

Thursday

FOX has the two hour season opener of Kitchen Nightmares with Gordon Ramsay. Actually this episode looks at six of the twelve restaurants that Ramsay helped – or tried to help – in the first season. Actually two of the restaurants from the first season have closed since the episodes they were on aired while a third was sold.

Friday

FOX has the two hour season premiere of Are You Smarter Than A Fifth Grader? The episode features special guest contestants model Kathy Ireland and the State Superintendent of Georgia (I assume this is the State Superintendent of Schools) as well as the introduction of the new class of Fifth Graders

New Poll – What Show Do You Think Should Win The Emmy For Outstanding Comedy Series?

The Nominees:

• 30 Rock
  
• The Office
  
• Entourage
  
• Two and a Half Men
  
• Curb Your Enthusiasm
  

A mixed bag here. A couple of well respected but not necessarily well rated comedies from NBC; an extremely highly rated show from CBS that gets no respect even though it probably deserves at least a little; two cable series that get tons of respect but can quite rightly be described as "inside baseball." Is it a huge surprise that three of the five nominees deal in some way shape or form with the Television industry?

As usual, vote for who you want to win not who you think will win. This poll will run two weeks.

Poll Results - What Show Do You Think Should Win The Emmy For Outstanding Reality Competition Series?

This category showed a big drop-off form the Outstanding Actor in a Drama category in terms of number of votes cast. I suppose I should probably blame that on my singular lack of posting during the polling period. There are reasons for that – I wasn't feeling that great and I have been dealing with a serious bit of Writer's Block – but it's also the case that this category rarely draws a lot of voters.

So let's get down to the nitty gritty. There were four votes cast. With no votes we have Dancing With The Stars and Project Runway. Tied for second place, with one vote each (25%) are The Amazing Race, and Top Chef. And the winner with two votes (50%) is American Idol.

Now let's state for the record that this is not how it's going to go down in reality. The most likely winner in this category – as it has been since the category started is The Amazing Race although I will grant you that it may face a bit of a challenge this year from Dancing With The Stars. It was always my contention that The Amazing Race is the one reality-competition series that members of ATAS could vote for without feeling guilty because it was the one that was least insular. It seems classy, showing Americans the world. If Dancing With The Stars stands any sort of chance it is because it is a show that a lot of the actor members of the Academy would really like to participate in if only they had the time to do it. The show is sometimes criticized for getting "Z-List" celebrities, but the fact is that what they get are the people who are able to take weeks off their schedule to train to dance. That's more likely to be Marie Osmond than it is Marg Helgenberger. As for the rest of the shows, I find it odd that the same show was nominated twice. Because that's what Top Chef and Project Runway (and the other Bravo reality competition shows) are. They follow exactly the same format – a quick challenge to give someone immunity or some other advantage – followed by a major creative competition judges by a panel of judges including one guest judge, after which one participant is judged "the winner" and three others are selected for possible elimination. Strip away the details – replace food with fashion or hair or whatever – and they're all the same show. And what's more that show is Survivor except without the day to day struggle for food and fire. In truth I'd rather the Chinese edition of Survivor had been nominated than one of these shows. Finally we're left with American Idol, a show which still dominates the competition on the nights that it's on in terms of ratings. The problem for the show at least is that those ratings are declining to the point where they're doing some revamping for the coming season by adding a fourth judge. And if past performance at the Emmys is any indication it doesn't do well with Emmy voters. It certainly doesn't do well with me as a viewer.

Now if someone could explain to me why Phil Keoghan wasn't nominated for Outstanding Reality Host I'd be most grateful. I mean Tome Bergeron doesn't dance, and as for Jeff Probst, he kicks back at the crew camp drinking beer and watching satellite TV while those people on the show are getting bitten by malarial mosquitoes and gashing open parts of their bodies I don't even want to think about. Meanwhile Keoghan is racing around the world with the competitors on the show and he has to finish first every damned time.

New poll up shortly.

New Poll – What Show Do You Think Should Win The Emmy For Outstanding Reality Competition Series?

The Nominees:

• Amazing Race
  
• American Idol
  
• Dancing with the Stars
  
• Top Chef
  
• Project Runway
  

I think it's pretty much well known that I have a particular favourite in this category, but I won't mention it lest it influence you.

Remember, I'd like you to vote for who should win, not who you think will win, and don't be influenced by my opinions. I'm giving you two weeks to vote on this one.

Poll Results – Who Do You Think Should Win The Emmy For Outstanding Actor In A Drama?

The most votes cast yet in this Emmy cycle and a very interesting result. No one ran away with the title but there were definite front runners. One of them was not the actor considered by much of mainstream media to be most likely winner.

Okay, enough teasing of the result, here are the actual tallies. In sixth place, with no votes, is Jon Hamm from Mad Men. In a tie for fourth place with one vote (6%) each are Bryan Cranston from Breaking Bad and James Spader from Boston Legal. In a tie for second place with five votes (28%) are Michael C. Hall for the lead role in Dexter and Hugh Laurie for the title role in House. But the winner, with six votes (33%) is Gabriel Byrne for In Treatment.

When I wrote the introduction to the original solicitation of votes I wrote "In my mind there are five great performances here (I'll give you three guesses which one I think doesn't belong; first two don't count)." The one was James Spader. I honestly don't think that his part on Boston Legal is anywhere near as strong as any of the other parts. Bryan Cranston has a truly meaty role as the dying high school teacher who turns to making Crystal Meth as a way of providing a nest egg for his family. Hugh Laurie is masterful as House. He is not, as my brother describes the character, "a doctor with a God complex," but rather a character whose brash exterior masks his internal self-doubts. I'm not sure what can be said about Michael C. Hall's performance as Dexter except to describe it as riveting. I don't kno what to say about Gabriel Byrne in In Treatment simply because I've never seen it, however Byrne has a long standing reputation as one of the best actors around. In fact, for me the only surprise in this one is that Jon Hamm, who plays the repressed ad agency executive Don Draper in Mad Men didn't get a vote. His portrayal of someone seeking a way to ameliorate the quiet desperation of his life is riveting.

New poll up in a few minutes.

Who Does The PTC Hate This Week – August 15, 2008

I have been neglecting my self-appointed duty to tell you what the Parents Television Council finds objectionable. Perhaps that's partly because the PTC hasn't exactly been overly active of late. However a few things have cropped up over the past few days that I thought were worth mentioning. And unfortunately, to tell part of this story with full accuracy I am going to have to use a fleeting obscenity; a word that has appeared in this blog before, usually in connection with the PTC.

The first of these is a PTC press release expressing their outrage about something that happened on the August 5^th episode of Big Brother. According to the PTC, "During last night's broadcast, a woman named Libra was arguing with a man and said: 'Memphis was in the f***ing room!'" I'm shocked to have to say that on this one, the PTC was right – Libra did say "fucking" when she was arguing with Jesse. But here's the other thing though, I watch Big Brother including that particular episode and I don't remember her saying it. And I'm not the only one. In his August 6^th Programming Insider podcast Mark Berman's guest mentions that the PTC was protesting the use of "the word" and Berman was amazed, because he didn't hear it either. So, in an effort to discover whether she did or she didn't I asked the question at Jackie Schnoop's The (TV) Show Must Go On blog (the place to stop for Big Brother discussion). I got a reply from "Clementine" who pointed me to the appropriate clip of the show on YouTube (unfortunately the clip can't be embedded). The incident took place at around the ten minute mark of the clip. And sure enough, Libra does say "fucking." Just one thing though; I had to listen to the clip six or seven times before I could actually tell what she was saying. Now admittedly, I've been having some temporary hearing problems over the past little while, but even so it normally doesn't take me that long to pick out that word (and believe me I hear it often enough). What I think happened is that whoever was handling the editing at CBS simply missed the word – believed it was unintelligable. Why do I think so? Simply because the Big Brother Houseguests use the word "fucking" often and it has always been censored in the past. Indeed it was censored on numerous other occasions, so why let this one through unless the editor in question simply didn't hear the word. In other words, it wasn't even a simple case of human error but rather a case where someone was genuinely unable to determine what was being said.

Of course, that's not the way the PTC sees it. In their press release, which includes a link to a prepared form email that's all ready to be sent to the FCC, PTC President Tim Winter writes the following: "There is absolutely no justification for allowing an 'F-word' like this to air unedited on prime time broadcast television. There can be no question that this was an intentional act on the part of the network; someone actually had to edit the scene with the word into the show. Just this past November, CBS hypocritically entered into yet another consent decree with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) promising not to air indecent material. But apparently, CBS will break its own formal promise – again. Last time it was to air a teen orgy; this time it is for the opportunity to air the 'F-word.' CBS' behavior is a direct result of the 2^nd Circuit Court of Appeals ruling on so-called fleeting profanity – a case that will be heard by the Supreme Court this fall. But let me be clear: Unlike the facts of that legal challenge, this was no live broadcast. It was an intentional airing of pre-packaged program that contained obscene language. The network's reprehensible decision to air it cannot go without consequence."

Well let's look at this in a couple of different ways. First, let's look at why the word aired. As I've said, there is a plausible explanation of how the how the word might have slipped by, namely that the person editing the episode either did not hear the word or misheard the word either as something else or couldn't be sure of the word that Libra said; in other words the word was unintelligible to him. The other aspect to consider though is Mr. Winter's interpretation of the 2^nd Circuit's ruling on fleeting profanity – not "so-called fleeting profanity" but actual fleeting profanity as defined by the FCC itself before the current administration. His interpretation of the ruling was that it only applies to live events. In his majority opinion on the Pacifica case (which the PTC is so fond of quoting), Justice Stevens wrote, "This case does not involve a two-way radio conversation between a cab driver and a dispatcher, or a telecast of an Elizabethan comedy. We have not decided that an occasional expletive in either setting would justify any sanction or, indeed, that this broadcast would justify a criminal prosecution." In the case of an Elizabethan comedy of course one would be dealing with scripted, and one would presume previously recorded, material. Even in 1978, Stevens recognised that not all uses of expletives in pre-recorded programming would be actionable.

Worth noting at this point is a recent Amicus Brief submitted in the FCC appeal of the 2^nd Circuit Court of Appeals ruling to Supreme Court. The brief, was submitted by a number of former officials of the FCC including former chairmen Newton Minnow, Mark Fowler, and former acting chairman and longest serving appointee to the Commission James Quello. Quello was a commissioner at the time of the Pacifica case. In the Amicus Brief, the former FCC officials stated that "... we have been dismayed by a series of recent [FCC] decisions that have transformed a hitherto moderate policy of policing only the most extreme cases of indecent broadcast programming into a campaign of regulatory surveillance that will chill the production of all but the blandest of broadcast programming." Likening the current FCC's enforcement program to "a Victorian crusade" they stated that "To effectuate its new clean-up-the-airwaves policy, the Commission has radically expanded the definition of indecency beyond its original conception; magnified the penalties for even minor, ephemeral images or objectionable language; and targeted respected television programs, movies, and even noncommercial documentaries." While one would hardly describe Big Brother as a "respected television program" there could hardly be a better definition of "minor, ephemeral...objectionable language" than the incident in the episode of Big Brother.

(Actually the former commissioners went further than just calling on the Supreme Court to uphold the 2^nd Circuit Court ruling. According to Broadcast & Cable the Brief calls on the Court to remove the FCC from the business of regulating content. According to the article, "They said the court's work would be incomplete if it simply struck down the 'fleeting expletives' policy, arguing that the FCC's indecency calls in cases of nudity and nonfleeting profanity were inconsistent and that the commission was using 'context' as a 'talisman to ward off serious questions about the extreme subjectivity of the agency's determinations.'" They also argued that the basis of the original Pacifica decision – the uniquely pervasive nature of the broadcast medium – had ceased to exist in the era of the Internet and multi-channel video (by which I assume they mean cable TV). "It is time for the Court to bring its views of the electronic media into alignment with contemporary technological and social reality. As former regulators, we appreciate that the FCC is in an uncomfortable position, buffeted by the turbulent passions of anxious parents and threats from excited congressmen. But that is precisely why the matter must be taken out of the agency's hands entirely." Needless to say, the PTC is not pleased by the Brief.)

Of course you don't actually have to say or be seen to say bad words to arouse the ire of the PTC – not if you're Big Brother anyway. The series was described as "Misrated." This was before the August 5^th incident although that incident (which I still contend was an accident – they do happen you know no matter what the PTC thinks) although it did rate a mention – in boldface type no less – in the article. No, what the PTC objected to was words that you couldn't hear uttered by lips that you couldn't see. They claimed that the episode of July 31^st should have been rated TV-14L and state that there was no rating applied to the episode at all, something that I find extremely hard to believe. Anyway, here's what they have to say: "The episode's opening recap featured a shouting match between Jerry and Memphis. The latter was upset over Jerry attacking his character. 'You calling me a ______ (bleeped, blurred f***ing) womanizer?' Memphis asks. 'You wanna see me get ______ (bleeped, blurred f***ing) real? I'll get really real, old man!' Memphis' outburst was shown several times, each with another f-bomb. 'Are you out of your mind, old man?' Memphis shouts, 'Are you _____ (bleeped, blurred f***ing) out of your mind?' Later in the episode, Jerry strikes back at the four contestants who have ganged up on him. 'You think I'm going to kiss your ass? You guys _____ (bleeped, blurred f***) me, I'm gonna kiss your ass?...You come and jump on me with your friends. Four of you. Four of you on my ass. You want? All four, come on! Let's go and get it on. ____ (bleeped, blurred F***) ya!'" Now remember, you can't hear the word "fuck" and its variants, and a lip-reader couldn't pick up on it either because you can't see the people's lips (and they did a really good job of completely obliterating the lips). And yet here's what the PTC has to say: "Given the frequency and severity of the swearing, the show should have been rated TV-14 L." By the PTC "standards", the show clearly wasn't censored enough even though – as even they state you couldn't hear or see the words in question – so one has to ask, where exactly does it stop?

Swingtown yet again earns the "accolade" of worst show of the week. I won't go into detail on what the PTC states – since I don't watch the show I'm really not in a position to judge or to entirely contradict what the PTC position – however based entirely on what the PTC says and what the series producer has claimed about the show, the episode that the PTC is complaining about is concerned with the consequences of the protagonists' actions. The consequences of these actions include jealousy and the weakening of the familial bonds. And these are consequences that the characters are aware of. The PTC summarizes a scene between a father and his teenage daughter by saying: "Bruce attempts to scold Laurie for being involved with her older teacher, but when Laurie shoots back with 'What about what you two were doing?' Bruce realizes he and Susan have no moral ground to stand on. Bruce muses, 'No wonder our kids are off the rails. The buck stops here. We are taking back control of this family.'" The PTC ignores this business of consequences of course. Instead, in their conclusion they write, "By airing content intended for premium cable channels on network television, CBS has subjected families to topics that only adult couples should be discussing. And like so much of TV today, by suggesting that monogamy is stifling and, therefore, unhealthy, the show fails to promote positive exploration of sexuality within the confines of marriage." And yet surely scenes like the one they themselves quote are indicative that even the characters of the show are coming to realize that the lifestyle they've adopted is the unhealthy one rather than monogamy. But surely the most absurd thing is the assertion that, "by airing content intended for premium cable channels on network television, CBS has subjected families to topics that only adult couples should be discussing." They seem to be taking the truly absurd position that premium channels like Showtime and HBO are only subscribed to by families without children. Premium channels are available to all who are willing to pay for them... including families with children.

The PTC has been running their TV Trends column dutifully each week while I haven't been writing about them, but quite frankly their weekly Jeremiads have been the typical reactionary stuff we've come to expect from the author of these "think pieces." In the July 17^th column, for example, he expressed the opinion that supposedly child-friendly shows were dens of filth and inappropriate language. Proof? Hugh Hefner and his three Girl Next Door girlfriends were on Celebrity Family Feud against some actors from The Sopranos including Vincent Pastore ("Big Pussy" Bonpensiero.) and Hefner said "I think [the girls] are going to do very well against Big Pussy." Smutty double entendre of course – at least in the PTC's view. And there was "Busty Heart" crushing beer cans with her boobs on America's Got Talent (I'd be more upset that kids would try to imitate the sword swallower myself), and a singer supposedly singing "I Kissed A Girl" which supposedly were an "explicit endorsement of drunkenness and promiscuity." You can tell it was bad because they underlined it and put it in italics. If they could have bold-faced it without being to obvious you can bet they'd have done it. In the July 25^th column the writer goes on and on about TV's fixation with breasts. The writer states, "It is pathetic that a medium with the tremendous power which television possesses is willing to objectify one-half of the human race; but increasingly, remarks about breasts, scenes emphasizing breasts and even entire storylines about breasts are becoming commonplace on TV. Such a focus ignores intelligence, personality, charm, integrity and the entire host of human qualities, and essentially reduces women to objects valued only for their anatomy." Of course that doesn't stop the writer from going into exacting prurient detail about every specific incident, making sure to mention "the formerly clean" My Name Is Earl (which was also mentioned in the July 17^th column as the "increasingly raunchy" My Name Is Earl). In the current column, the writer is practically gloating over the failure of Swingtown in the ratings symbolized by the network decision to move the show to the Friday at 10 p.m. timeslot – "a day and time widely regarded within the entertainment industry as the Place Where Series Go To Die" (an assessment that ignores CBS's general success on that night, a success so great that CBS has been able to cancel shows that have won their time slot in the past two seasons: Close To Home and Moonlight) – and trumpets the decisions of major advertisers not to put commercials on the show. But yet again the writer lovingly delineates, in detail more graphic than anything actually seen on screen, the evil sexual misdeeds depicted on the show, and thoroughly doesn't get the nuances of the show, which as one of the writers pointed out included the fact that these people's actions have consequences that they don't foresee; not necessarily punishment but definitely consequences. But of course acknowledging that the show doesn't actually send "the messages Swingtown is sending to young viewers: marriage vows are meaningless; teachers kissing students is acceptable; and any kind of sex, with any number of people, has no consequences whatsoever." Nuance is lost on the PTC.

Finally (well not finally; there's a rather absurd study presented by the PTC on how TV is devaluing marital sex and emphasising premarital sex, extra-marital affairs, and perverted practices – of course being the PTC the methodology is incomprehensible and the study doesn't consider or worry about either context of nuance) we have the return of The Worst Show on Cable. For months, literally, the PTC was stuck calling a particular episode of Nip/Tuck the worst show on cable. Now they've gotten outraged by the latest episode of Saving Grace. Why? Well there's a "bigger picture" thing going on here which we'll get to but to illustrate the "big picture" badness they have to illustrate it with a specific incident. In this case it is a sex play scene in which Grace and her lover play with food. Of course the PTC lovingly describes the scene in explicit detail:

The episode opened with a shot of Ham's naked rear-end as he and Grace wake up on her living room floor, presumably after a night of drunken lovemaking. Grace tries to rouse Ham by smacking his buttocks, to which he mumbles, "Much harder." Grace obliges by licking a dirty fork clean and jabbing him with it. The couple then migrate to the kitchen, where Ham tells Grace that he has left his wife. Clearly upset, the commitment-phobic Grace sprays Ham with ketchup. Not to be outdone, Ham grabs Grace and shoves ice cubes down her panties. Grace responds by emptying a bottle of mustard on his chest. Clearly aroused, Grace straddles Ham, licks the condiments off of his body, and proclaims, "You taste like a corndog." Grace is then seen kneeling in front of Ham, licking the mustard and ketchup mixture off his abdomen. Ham reaches into the refrigerator and dumps milk all over her head. The couple finally collapse to the kitchen floor and began having sex. All of this occurred before the opening credits.

Now here's the big picture, in the words of the PTC itself: "Touted as a redemptive series chronicling a troubled female detective's struggle against her personal demons, the show's underlying positive themes are often undercut by over-the-top depictions of sex and drug use." So basically what the PTC is saying is that the eventual redemption of Grace Hanadarko's character is a "good" thing – a positive theme as they put it – but that theme is hurt by showing her the drug use, the alcohol abuse and the irresponsible sexual activities that are why she needs redemption. The thing is though, that if you simply say that Grace's activities are bad it doesn't have the impact of showing it. It's a standard dramatic maxim "show it, don't say it." But the PTC says "don't show it and don't even go into details in saying it." But of course it is perfectly alright for the PTC to show it – describe scenes in exquisite detail, and at least in the past show video clips of "bad" scenes from cable shows – rather than simply saying it – telling us that the show has explicit sex scenes and scenes of drug use. Anything is acceptable in their cause, the demand for cable choice. Cable choice is something that I agree with in principle but am realistic enough to understand that until every cable user has to use a specialized set-top box like the digital box I have on my TV. But even if you have cable choice available on your cable system, the fact that not every program on the cable channel represents "objectionable content." Do you throw out all of the "good" because of a little bit of the "bad?" (And by the way this description of "good" and "bad" is theirs not mine. Having seen several episodes of Saving Grace, my opinion is that the show is one of the better things on television, showing the complexities of a woman who seeks to escape the traumas in her life in a miasma of sensation – drugs, alcohol, and sex. The major question for me is not why she needs redemption but rather why God, through the mechanism of the angel Earl, has chosen to try to offer Grace the option of redemption. But then again I don't see things from the same obsessed single-minded perspective that the PTC adopts.)

New Poll - Who Do You Think Should Win The Emmy For Outstanding Actor In A Drama?

The Nominees:

• Gabriel Byrne (In Treatment)
  
• Bryan Cranston (Breaking Bad)
  
• Jon Hamm (Mad Men)
  
• Michael C. Hall (Dexter)
  
• James Spader (Boston Legal)
  
• Hugh Laurie (House)
  

A six horse race – something I'd like to see more of from the Emmys because there are too many programming sources to make an Oscar like restriction to five entries per category – and this category is the one where we really see the sudden dominance of cable. In my mind there are five great performances here (I'll give you three guesses which one I think doesn't belong; first two don't count) and while I have my favourites I can any one of those five winning. I just wouldn't like it to be the sixth one.

Remember, I'd like you to vote for who should win, not who you think will win, and don't be influenced by my opinions.

Poll Result - Who Do You Think Should Win The Emmy For Outstanding Actress In A Drama?

I'm a little late on this one. I essentially forgot all about writing this poll on Friday, because there were a bunch of other things that came up not restricted to trying to keep up with the Olympics (and that's more complicated than you can possibly imagine). I wanted to compare the coverage by CBC and NBC but I only managed to catch the NBC coverage. I'll get something out eventually though I'm not sure when. But suffice it to say that Friday was essentially a mess. In terms of getting things done.

And so to the poll results. We had eight votes cast – one today I think. Tied with no votes are Glenn Close and Holly Hunter. In third place with one vote (12.5%) is Kyra Sedgwick from The Closer. In second place, with two votes (25%) is Sally Field of Brothers and Sisters. The winner is Mariska Hargitay of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit with five votes (62.5%).

Okay, I guess I don't get this one. I mean maybe it's because I don't watch SVU, but I guess I find it really difficult to see here performance equated with what Glenn Close and Holly Hunter have been doing. I mean I've seen Hunter's work at least, and in Grace Hanadarko she has created a dark, tormented and self-destructive character who is compelling at the same time that she is vaguely REPULSIVE. You probably wouldn't want to spend much time with Grace in the real world unless you were getting in her pants (which seem to have an "all-access pass" provision) but at the same time she seems compelling to watch, at least for me. In her own way the character is as compelling as Dennis Leary's Tommy Gavin in Rescue Me. I haven't seen Glenn Close or Sally Field for that matter, and the episodes of Kyra Sedgwick's The Closer that I've seen are older, but I have to say that I have difficulty seeing Hargitay as anything but the least in this category, but to paraphrase someon (the L'il Abner comic strip?) "you has spoken" and Hargitay it is.

New poll up in the morning.

What’s On My iPod

I haven't been posting much of late. I'm not going to say that it's because of my iPod Shuffle because it isn't. There are ... issues. And no, I'm not going to go into details. Suffice it to say that younger brother loves the HD TV for ball games and there always seems to be a ball game, and now that he's back with the City he's working conventional hours. I hope I might be able to at least see the opening ceremonies of the Olympics on the big screen but for just about everything else I'm stuck with my 25" CRT.

I do love my iPod, but there are things that I hate about the Shuffle. The big thing is that there isn't a screen which has an impact that I'll explain in a moment. It's not the capacity – I got the 2 Gig – it's that the Shuffle is smaller than the screens on either the Nano or the Classic, let alone the Touch (and the iPhone). Now when most people think of the screen on an iPod what they're concerned about is watching movies, TV shows, Video Podcasts, and probably YouTube videos. But for me the thing that I'd like to do, and which is possible on an iPod with a screen, is to go through a list of what I've got on the iPod and pick out what I want to hear rather than hitting the Forward or Backward buttons on the ring. That's truly inconvenient when you have something that has a definite order in which it should be listen to. I'm thinking of some podcasts and old radio shows, which appear with the most recently released item first. Annoying as all hell.

So here I am on the third paragraph, so I suppose it's time to tell you what's on the iPod. Well, what there isn't is music. I want to rip some music from some CDs I have but I haven't gotten around to that yet, and I don't have an iTunes account. So basically what I have on the gadget is free material, which is to say podcasts. The podcasts really fall into three or four different topics. First up is some tech related podcasts. They're all from Leo Laporte's TWiT network: This Week in Tech, The Tech Guy, and Windows Weekly. The reason for these shows is that I was a long time follower of Leo Laporte when he was on TechTV, and later when he had his revived Call For Help (which became The Lab with Leo) on G4-TechTV Canada. The latter show suffered because it was an advice show where people got the answers a month or more after they got the question. I loved the show (past tense - Rogers, which owned the Canadian version of the show, pulled the plug on it) but that sort of annoyed me. The Tech Guy and the Windows Weekly podcasts are really useful for someone interested in tech, and This Week In Tech (which I'm listening to as I type this) is a great gathering of friends to talk about tech news stories.

The next class of podcasts are podcasts about DC Comics. DC has its own "official" podcast which is really recordings of panels at various cons. There's been a huge influx of new posts following the San Diego Comic-Con, some of it fascinating, some of it totally irrelevant to anything that I'm interested in, so at least I'll know what not to get next time around. The other podcast is the Raging Bullets podcast. The podcast itself is great, but the damned thing is incredibly long...and most of the time it's just two guys talking. Most of the episodes have been two hours long and the last two episodes were five and six hours long respectively. Let's just admit that this is shocking and leave it at that.

Then there are the TV related podcasts. Marc Berman's Programming Insider podcast has what is almost an industry insider's feel about it. Berman does the Programming Insider column for Media Week which is indispensible for coverage of the previous day's ratings. The podcast is an extension of that but with added news and even commentary on shows. Compared to Raging Bullets, Marc's podcast is mercifully short – usually about ten minuteslong – though by now I've practically memorised his ad for Programming Partners and their new syndicated talk show Marie featuring Marie Osmond and debuting in September 2009. Still, once you get past the ads, Marc has an informative podcast. Sure he has opinions, some of which don't agree with mine (he says he refuses to watch Greatest American Dog because he can't bear to see an innocent dog evicted from a reality show) but that's part of why I subscribe. Then there's the podcast from The TV Addict featuring Daniel and his sidekick Ariel. Not as professional as Berman's podcast there's a lot of back and forth between the two...some of it even relating to TV shows. And it's Canadian which is always nice. It's a better podcast than I think I could have put together. Speaking of Canadian, there's also a podcast from the Canadian science fiction channel Space: The Imagination Station. There's discussion of shows on the network and interviews from actors on the network's shows, including Battlestar Galactica.

The biggest group of podcasts by far on the Shuffle are Old Time Radio podcasts from something called Humphrey/Camardella productions. They have a large number of podcasts from a variety of genres – westerns, thrillers, mysteries, comedies, suspense and the like. There are also a couple of podcasts from them on specific shows. There's a series of podcasts for The Adventures of Superman and another for The Jack Benny Program. The latter has shows going back to his time on the Canada Dry Ginger Ale show. Of course I'm not sure of the rights situation for some of the material that Humphrey/Camardella is presenting. Indeed the Superman podcast hasn't been updated since May, and there's only been one episode of the Jack Benny material added since May as well. Their other podcasts are updated two or even three times a week.

In a strange sort of way these Old Time Radio shows are relevant to TV today. Oh, to be sure the subject matter is different, but some of the trends and concerns resonate today. In some ways we're in the realm of "everything old is new again," even though we seem to regard these things as bad. Take reality shows. The grand daddy of reality shows – not the competition ones but the ones that purport to show "real people and real events" – is probably FOX's series Cops. It debuted in 1989 and has been running ever since, despite an effort by FOX to kill it and its partner on the night America's Most Wanted. Well, what would you say about a show that followed real life cops on patrol one night and we heard the cops doing their job. It sounds exactly like Cops but in fact it was a 1954 radio show called Nightwatch. In fact we even got to hear the cops violating a suspect's civil rights when they forced entry into a car without a warrant because they suspect the owner of using the demon marijuana – which as we all know is a gateway drug to heroin. Or so they said on Nightwatch.

How about this one: a show where contestants are sent out tasks which are supposed to earn them prizes but have a surprise twist that the contestant isn't aware of, and which tend to involve people who don't even know they're part of the gag. Sound like a great idea for a reality competition? Maybe, but if anyone tried it they'd have to make sure that copyright on People Are Funny isn't owned by anyone. Indeed the threat of "non-scripted" programming isn't even new. The legendary Fred Allen's show was knocked of the air in part by a game show hosted by Bert Parks called Stop the Music in which people were called at home were called to participate. Naturally if they were listening to Fred Allen they couldn't answer the questions on Bert Parks's show. Of course not many thought about the odds of being called by Parks, though Allen offered $5,000 to any person listening to his show that was called by Parks – he never had to pay up.

And then there are "product placements." Reading comments from professional critics and bloggers alike, you'd think that product placement was both new and a huge threat to the "sanctity" of television. And while it's true that the practice today is more blatant than it has been at times in the past, it is hardly new. There was always a big box of Kellogg's Corn Flakes in the kitchen of the Clampett mansion in The Beverly Hillbillies, and most shows had a credit acknowledging that a specific car company provided the cars for show. And of course in an era when shows were sold to single sponsors, it was quite common for the shows to include mentions of the product in the episode. Desi Arnaz was particularly adept at this sort of thing. Not only did the Ricardos and Mertzes stop smoking Philip Morris Cigarettes when the company stopped sponsoring the show, but Ricky Ricardo extolled the virtues of the new 1955 Pontiac convertible that they'd be driving to California in Season Four to Fred Mertz. But the practice wasn't even new then. Radio shows like Fibber McGee And Molly and the various incarnations of The Jack Benny Program thoroughly integrated their commercials into the actual shows with their commercial announcers, like Harlow "Waxy" Wilcox (for Johnson's Glow Coat), and Don Wilson actually becoming members of the show's cast. In the case of Jack Benny's shows this integration of product announcements into the actual show goes back at least as far as 1933 and '34 when the show was sponsored by Chevrolet. And there was always the way that Benny greeted his audience when he was sponsored by a particular desert from General Foods – "Jell-o again, this is Jack Benny talking."

One thing – and this really has nothing to do with any other show than the Jack Benny material – is just how long it took for Jack Benny to develop his on-air persona. Listening to the material that is available in these podcasts from the beginning (they have a couple of Canada Dry shows, and what seems to be most of the Chevrolet shows before he went to Jell-o, and up to late 1936 and the miserly persona hasn't really come into play. To be sure there's reference to Jack's ego, and to a lesser extent his bad violin playing (but even that isn't being pushed too strongly). Most of the people were in place with the exceptions of Mel Blanc and Eddie "Rochester" Anderson (and Dennis Day but Kenny Baker had the same personality that would later be adapted for Day). But maybe this does relate to TV today insofar as it represents something that doesn't really happen anymore. The show adapted, and more importantly had time to adapt. To be sure this may be that the immense popularity of the show allowed Benny and his writers to develop new ideas, and it may be that this option to change and adapt was restricted to the largely extinct comedy-variety type show. What I know is that most TV shows today, be they dramas or sitcoms, are remarkably static. Cast members may come and go but the premise of the show stays the same, and for the most part there isn't a growth or development in the characters.

So that's my rambling account of what's on my iPod. Maybe it give you a bit of an idea about me and my tastes, to the point where you can offer some suggestions about what I'd like, or maybe it will give you a few ideas.