Film and Television
Battlestar Craptica
It happens on even the best shows and, on Friday night, it happened to BATTLESTAR GALACTICA. They had a truly awful episode. Flat, obvious, speechy, boring and illogical. For those of you who saw it, I had one big question while I was watching the episode: how did Buckshot or the Cylons know where the
Galactica was? And if they knew, why didn’t they send three or four Basestars there to blast it out of space? Wouldn’t that have been a better plan?
The only nice bit was the implication that Balter is having a menage-a-trois with two Cylon women. I wish we could have seen that episode instead.
UPDATE: I’m not alone. TV Critic Alan Sepinwall agrees with me.
Okay, I’m starting to get just a little bit
concerned about the post-exodus portion of the season. The virus
two-parter had some interesting moments and ideas but never quite
clicked, and "Hero" felt like a mess from start to finish.
Casino Royale
I just got back from the first show (yes, I am a geek). I enjoyed the movie, I liked Daniel Craig a lot and there are some fantastic action sequences… but it isn’t a James Bond movie. It’s not your father’s James Bond or even your grandfather’s James Bond. Sure, there are Aston Martins and casinos and exotic locales and villians with scars near their eyes. But something was missing. Maybe for the better. (Though it could also have missed about twenty minutes, the film goes on way too long).
The producers weren’t kidding when they said they were reinventing Bond (unlike, say, their attempt with LIVING DAYLIGHTS). This truly is a new interpretation, clearly one that’s heavily influenced by the Jason Bourne movies… with a touch of DIE HARD’s John McClaine thrown in for good measure. But if they are jettisoning so much from the old intepretation, the few
hangers-on (the women who swoon at his glance, the scar-faced villains
and Aston Martins) should be scrapped, too.
This Bond is basically Connery’s take on the character as a ruthless assassin, a working-class "blunt instrument" in a tuxedo. In fact, you could say that Daniel Craig is dramatizing the formative days of Connery’s 007. If so, then the next film will be a James Bond film. At least more so than this one was… or so they seem to be hinting at the end.
Hasselhoffed
My boxed set of the real first season episodes of BAYWATCH arrived from the UK this weekend. I’d forgotten how good the production values were and how truly awful the writing was (and yes, I am talking about my own scripts). The theme song from the first season was Peter Cetera’s "Save Me," and the title sequence was carefully cut to match the song. Cetera’s song is gone and some awful crap by Kim Carnes has been slapped on in its place. The problem isn’t so much the song, but the fact that the moves in the song don’t match the edits in the main title sequence so it feels out-of-sync, like dubbed dialgoue that doesn’t follow the movements of the actors’ lips. What I don’t get is why they couldn’t substitute "Save Me" with the "I’ll Be There" theme from the syndicated seasons…
Serial Killers
The big media story lately is the death of all the new serialized dramas the networks have launched over the past two years in an attempt to captue the success of LOST, DESPERATE HOUSEWIVES and 24. Basically, nobody seems to have the time, energy, or trust to commit to a deep, lasting and meantingful relationship with more than one or two of these series. After the death of shows like SURFACE, KIDNAPPED, REUNION, THIEF, INVASION, SMITH, and the anemic ratings of VANISHED, THREE DEGREES and THE NINE, The New York Times reports that the networks are finally getting the hint:
In every television season
some new lesson about the American audience is imparted. This season’s
lesson was clear within the first weeks of the fall: you can ask people
to commit only so many hours to intense, dark, intricately constructed
serialized dramas, to sign huge chunks of their lives away to follow
every minuscule plot development and character tic both on the air and
on Internet sites crowded with similarly addicted fanatics.“The message we received was that people have strains on their
lives,” said Kevin Reilly, the president of NBC Entertainment. “People
are saying, ‘I’ve got my handful of shows like this, and I don’t want
more.’ ”[…]Dana Walden, president of the 20th Century Fox Television studio,
said: “What the audience seems to be saying is: ‘Enough. We can’t get
involved with more of these.’ ”Logically this result should have been expected. But logic often
runs aground in the offices of television executives who endlessly try
to anticipate the future by repeating the past. Or, as Preston Beckman,
executive vice president for entertainment for the Fox network, put it,
“In this business we always overcompensate.”
Even LOST is feeling the heat. The Los Angeles Times notes that CRIMINAL MINDS, which is in the same time slot, is drawing almost as may viewers these days.
…conventional wisdom would dictate that "Criminal Minds," now in its
second season, should be moldering on TV’s rubbish heap. So why
is the series growing into a bona-fide hit that last week delivered its
most-watched episode ever, with 16.8 million total viewers, just a
shade behind the still-formidable "Lost" (17.1 million), according to
Nielsen Media Research?
"This was the year of serialized dramas trying to recapture lightning in a bottle the way
that ‘Desperate Housewives,’ ‘Lost,’ ’24’ and ‘Grey’s Anatomy’ did,"
said John Rash, director of broadcast negotiations for
Minneapolis-based ad firm Campbell-Mithun. "But almost all of them were
rejected by the audience."The growth of "Criminal Minds" is
maybe the most convincing proof that not everyone wants to be chained
to a dense, character-packed drama that unspools like a Dickensian
novel. And even those who do have their limits. There is a reason why
formula sells, why genres become generic in the first place.
Baywatch Confusion
All 22 episodes of the original, first season of BAYWATCH, which aired on NBC, is coming out on DVD on Monday in England. A first season boxed set of BAYWATCH episodes is also coming out on the same day on these shores… only they are entirely different episodes. Confused? I know I was.
The first season that’s coming out on DVD here is actually season two, the first
syndicated season of the show. The U.S. boxed set reportedly has two episodes from the real first season, which they are calling "the lost pilot season." If that wasn’t bad enough, the episodes in the U.S. are also missing the original score. What were they thinking? The only reason I care at all about this debacle is because I wrote a bunch of first season BAYWATCH episodes on NBC and, as bad as they were, I wouldn’t mind having them on DVD… so I had to shell out $65 to get the Brit version which, by the way, will only work on a multi-standard player or on your computer.
Persuaders still Persuasive
Way back in June 2005, it was announced that Ben Stiller and British comic Steve Coogan were teaming up for a feature film revival of the flop 70s TV series THE PERSUADERS. Apparently, that project has dissolved, because this week Variety reports that the project is now being developed by producer Ashok Amritraj and ANGER MANAGEMENT screenwriter David Dorfman. There was no mention of either Stiller or Coogan’s involvement. If they are gone, it makes the reasoning behind mounting this TV revival a real head-scratcher.
THE PERSUADERS starred Roger Moore and Tony Curtis as two fun-loving playboys in Europe who were drafted by a retired judge to solve crimes. The series was produced in England and only lasted a season. But the reruns have a cult following in the UK and France which, apparently, Amritraj thinks is enough to prop up a "tent pole action comedy." But does anyone besides me and a handful of other TV geek still remember the show?