Old TV?

So, this came along on twitter:

Me to my 12-yo: “How was the slumber party?”

12-yo: “Fine. But we wound up watching some really old, dumb TV show.”

Me: “What was it called?”
12-yo: “Friends, I think?”
Me: Forehead meets table. Cry-laughung, ensues.

— Jennifer Victor (@jennifernvictor) July 7, 2018

My first thought was, yeah, I have heard that Netflix has renewed interest in Friends.
My second thought was: hey, Friends is much further away from day's kids (first run was from 1994-2004) than damn near everything I watched when I was growing up in the early to mid 70s?:

• The Monkeys was on from 1966-68
• Star Trek was from 1966-69
• Hogan's Heroes, a personal fave, was from 1965-1971
• McHale's Navy was from 1962-66
• Gilligan's Island was 1964066
• Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea is from 1964-1968 (I just found its first season on DVDs, so looking forward to that bit of nostalgia.
• Dick Van Dyke was from 1961-1966.

Hmmm, I guess I didn't watch many 1950s TV shows deep into the 1970s (Mrs. Spew mentioned I love Lucy), but definitely early 1960s. To put it in some perspective, when Happy Days came out, it was closer to the 1950s than we are to when Friends came out in the mid 1990s.  Indeed, we are further away from Happy Days than the mid-70s was from the Great Depression. 

In short, we are getting old.  That whole stat of the Berlin Wall being down longer than it was up should give us a reality check, but we are much better at grasping the passage of other people's time (the history books we read and lessons we got in school) than time flying by in our lifetimes.

Why blog about this?  Because I watched way too much TV in my entire life the 1970s? That and because it helps put the passage of time in perspective.  As I am on the "wrong" side of 50, I could use that and also this bit of distraction sauce given the awful mess and regression that is 2018. 

Best TV of 2017

Time for a pre-Star Wars, pre-Korean War (part deux) distraction: what is the best stuff on TV in 2017?  I have been seeing some lists and hearing some podcasts.  It has been amazing year, and I am far behind in my tv watching due to the breadth and depth of peak tv.

My criteria are pretty simple: was it fun? did it move me?  Did I feel compelled to binge?  Modest spoilers below.

Consequences for Trumpers? Unlikely

Lots of uproar over Sean Spicer appearing at the Emmys.  I am of two minds on this: meh and duh.

Meh?  Because I don't mind comedy making fun of stuff, even recent stuff.  Does this normalize Spicer?  Seems to me he was as much or more the butt of the joke than being in on it.  If anything, it reminds us that he has been a lying sack of lies.  He was asked to lie on cue, and he did.  So what does that say?  I do think the pics of celebrities cozying up next to him is a wee bit more problematic, but I give comedy much license.  "Too soon?" is usually the question for something like this, not so much whether it is right or wrong to have a former administration official involved.  I'd have to check the old SNL of the mid 70s, but I am pretty sure a Watergate figure or two made the program. 

Duh?  The US (and Canadian) media give heaps and heaps of airtime to people who have done reprehensible things in the past, as long as it gives them the chance to fill bandwidth and get higher ratings: Oliver North, Henry Kissinger, Dick Cheney, and on and on.  Being a failure or being a liar or being a criminal does not disqualify.  I get frustrated by this often, but we should be used it by now. 

A second duh: who has paid a price for bad behavior in past administrations?  No one from the Bush Administration got punished for facilitating/ordering torture.  Only lower level folks and one relatively low ranking general got punished for Abu Ghraib.  Scooter Libby, who got jailed for outing Valerie Plame, had his sentence commuted.  We might as well prepare for Trump pardoning his family and some of his operatives....

Finally, I tend to think the folks who are the spokespeople will get a lighter treatment than those who actually make the decisions and those who implement them.  Could I imagine Jeff Sessions getting similar treatment?  Probably not but maybe.  While one can say that Spicer attempted to give cover to all the awful stuff that Trump did the first several months, he did it so very badly, I am not sure we can say he provided any cover at all.  Again, someone like Sessions or Pruitt or DeVos would not be invited or would have gotten a different reception.  Perhaps the actors recognize and empathize with another actor working from a piss poor script?

Anyhow, I was more offended last night by the playing off of Sterling Brown who was giving a kickass speech while Nicole Kidman and Reese Witherspoon got to have as much time as they wanted.  Is this about race or about movie star bias?  My guess is more the latter than the former, but not a good look.

Peak TV: Boon and Bane

There is so much good tv now that network executives and TV critics are complaining. The former because it is harder for the good but not great shows to stand out and also because it is harder to get talent (writers/actors) since they can be paid the same by Amazon, Netflix, Hulu, etc.  The latter?  Because they have to watch yet more stuff.

For me, peak TV is boon and bane.  As a TV addict, it is great since there is so much good stuff on to enjoy.  For instance, iZombie is simply delightful--fun, fun TV with some heart.  Jessica Jones and Daredevil show that a comic book tv series is pretty superior to comic book movies because one can really get a character arc.

But, of course, the problem is that I cannot watch everything.  I have noticed that I am becoming more accepting of that fundamental Steve problem: being left out.  I always hated feeling like I was missing out on stuff--as the youngest child, for instance.  Damn near pathological, as I used to go through my twitter feed from when I was sleeping to make sure I didn't miss anything.  Anyhow, I am working on it.  Declining to watch all of the great TV programs is part of this acceptance.

So, what do I choose?  Aside from the limits imposed by FX not being on my satellite system, I tend to choose not to watch that which is really dark or really slow.  With peak TV, I can choose great fun stuff and leave the morose to others.  So, yes, I have not watched the Leftovers.  I stopped watching the Knick.  Oh, and I am too cheap to pay for Amazon Prime.

What does this mean?  It means I am way behind on catching up on The Shield--still in season 5.  I am behind on a bunch of Netflix, but did enjoy the third episode of Master of None.  It means that I will not start digging into Fargo, Season 1, until my daughter has time to share it with me.  Oh, and our Wire project (her a newbie, me for the second time) is still stuck in season 2.

Anyhow, too much TV is a good problem.  Hopefully, it will continue when my daughter looks for jobs in the content creation business (tv or movies). 

Schumer Continues to Rock

One of the hidden benefits of travel from Canada is not being restricted by Canadian content restrictions:

Inside Amy Schumer
Get More: Comedy Central,Funny Videos,Funny TV Shows

Amy Schumer doth rock.

Marvel Forever! DC Sometimes

I have long been a Marvel fan, and only rarely read DC comics.  The Marvel movies have utterly dominated the DC ones in my mind.  The latter go for darkness for darkness sake just a bit much.

But the CW's televised versions of DC shows definitely dominate Marvel's:





Just more fun, more interesting stakes than Agent of Shield.  Agent Carter was great but too short.

Of course, if the rest of the Netflix Marvel is as good as the first five episodes of Daredevil, we may see a new winner in comics fight club.  We definitely live in a golden age of superhero stuff in the movies and on TV.  And for that, I am grateful.

Justified Binge-ing

Every year around this time, I binge on Justified, a TV show based on Elmore Leonard characters.  The acting, dialogue and all the rest is quite good.  It is not quite Breaking Bad/Mad Men/The Wire great, but it is a heap of fun.  I don't get FX on my Canadian satellite dish, so I have to wait until the previous season comes out on DVD, which, nicely enough, is right before Winterfest.  So, I get the disks as a gift and spend part of the holiday binge-ing on the season. 

I have just a few thoughts after the break:

Six Seasons, Please?

The fans of Community are just about as deranged as its creator, Dan Harmon:

HIMYM Ending, alternatively

This is how it should have ended

How I Met Your Spoiler

HIMYM ended tonight with a thud:

When A Show Betrays

This is about How I Met Your Mother, spoilers ensue:

Super Bowl Ads Are Super This Year

This year, I missed the ads for two reasons: the usual one of Canadian feeds being denied the juicy goodness of new ads with heaps of production values; and a new one--poker during the game! 

Thanks to the internet, I got to see some of them, and here is my completely unnecessary take:

As a child of the 1970's and 1980's, how could I not love this ad:




My fave:


Why? Because not only does it celebrate THE fundamental American value--that we are all immigrants (except for the Native Americans) and that ours is a civic nationalism (most of the time), but also because it caused heaps of xenophobes to out themselves as the dumbasses that they are.  The United States is not perfect, but it remains the draw for so many people seeking a better life. And that says something, even in these polarized days.  Also, it shows that Coke understands demographics better than the Republican Party.  Woot!

And speaking of cuteness triumphing over racism, I gotta say woot! to this as well:



I love that the Super Bowl is displaying American capitalism at its best.  Turns out racism might just be a bad strategy and celebrating diversity might be a winning one.

Greatest TV Openings: Desperate NY Apartment Hunting Edition

Adam Scott has done the world a huge favor by re-making classic openings of TV shows.  This time, he chose one of my all-time favorite short-lived TV shows: Bosum Buddies.  Tom Hanks and Peter Scolari were so very good and had such great chemistry that it did not need the cross-dressing stuff (which they tended to dump later on).  The intro combines Billy Joel with a variety of short bits displaying the talents and timing these guys had.  Turns out that Adam Scott and Paul Ruud were up to the task:


My wife probably liked the show simply because it is one of the very few to capture semi-realistically the challenges of finding an affordable place in NY (unlike, say, Friends).

Professors and TV: the Challenge

Today, Russell Johnson died.  He was the Professor on Gilligan's Island.  Dan Drezner pondered if there has been a positively depicted prof on TV since.  Yes, but the pickings are slim.  It was fun to watch the nominations on twitter, but most were either PhDs who had not taught much (President Bartlett) or teachers who were not professors. When we have to settle for Big Bang Theory, which gets so much wrong about academia (the episodes about hiring, tenure and such cause me physical pain), then things are pretty sad.

Why is this the case?  One could argue that prof-ing is just not that interesting to outside observers unless one adds more than a hint of sex.  So, damn near every professorial appearance in TV and in movies involves profs bedding their students or vice versa.  While such stuff does happen (as I have ranted about elsewhere), it is not as prevalent as TV/movies would have folks believe.  So, it gets wildly exaggerated, but other than that one element, profs are temporary experts who show up, offer some expertise and then move on.  Except for animated shows (see the list).

The only times where universities and colleges appear on TV is when the high school kids graduate and then they need to all move to the same post-secondary institution (Buffy, for example).  Unless there is some good slaying to be had, there is simply not going to be much interest in professors, I guess.

So, let me change Dan's game slightly: can you come up with plots/stories/characters based in colleges/universities that do not involve either profs having sex with students or professors being evil (not that there is anything wrong with that)?  To be clear, I am asking not just for movies and tv shows that actually exist, but what kinds of plots/characters/stories can you come up with that would be worth a TV show or movie?  A bit easier today with the niche-ization of TV.  You don't have to get a huge audience, just one that can beat ... Killer Women. 

Cold Possible War Reminds Me of Cold War Possible War

Whenever folks start to raise the possibility of combat in the Arctic, all I can think of is this cheesy 1982 television movie: World War III [See here for short NY review]. I mentioned it last night on twitter, and folks were surprised not to have seen it.  Of course, they didn't, it was a one time mini-series.  But it made an impression, burned into my head, so that many of the images in the trailer resonate today.

I forgot that Boomer of the original Battlestar Galatica was in it, but it looks like he gets killed early.  [No, I am not posting Spoiler for something that is more than thirty years old].  But David Soul facing down the sympathetic Soviet officer while the apparatchik's back home refuse to back down in this game of chicken served cold?  That I remember.  I also remember the ending--WWIII.  Ooops.



I had forgotten that there had been a break down in civil-military relations on the Soviet side, and I had also forgotten that random Colonel (in this case, Soul) got to speak on the phone with the President (Rock Hudson!).  So much cheesy goodness in a 2 minute trailer.  It is not worth the 200 minutes, however.  I can assure you of that.

Anyhow, that is the flashback TV tale of the weekend.

When Is PD Not Prisoners' Dilemma

When the dilemma is about a prison instead?  See below the break for Walking Dead spoilers as zombies smell bad enough even before they spoil:

Voting Rules and Perverse Outcomes: Understanding the Emmys

First, to be clear, I didn't watch much of the Emmys as my priority was, naturally and logically, watching the penultimate episode of Breaking Bad.

Second, I have no real knowledge of how the voting works for the Emmys.  This is all just ruthless speculation.

Third, I have not worked on voting rules in over a decade.

Fourth, I am just trying to avoid grading.

Ok, with those caveats out of the way, let me explain the importance of the "drunk frat brother" voter here.  When you have more than two candidates running for one spot and the winner is the one that gets a bare plurality of votes, then you can get strange outcomes, like Jesse the Body Ventura becoming Governor of Minnesota with 37% of the vote.  In many-sided elections, really small swings can matter a great deal, leading to outcomes where 2/3's of the electorate may have voted for someone other than the winner.  I saw that in Montreal, where a three sided race left the tarnished incumbent in power with just a bit more than one third of the vote with the majority of the city voting for two other candidates.

With the Emmys, I think what happens is that voters have to choose among five or six or even seven candidates, which means that someone could with just more than 20% of the vote, 17% of the vote or even 14%.....

So, what this means is that vote-splitting can lead to an unlikely outcome, such as Jeff Daniels winning Best Actor in a Drama when very few people consider that role to be deserving of an award, especially when Bryan Cranston is having an amazing run, where Jon Hamm still has not won for great performances, and so on.  This is probably one of the best examples of the least popular candidate winning because of votes being split among the more favored candidates, including Damian Lewis and Kevin Spacey as well.

The same could have occurred with Best Actress in a Drama but Claire Danes was viewed by most as the favored candidate.  To be clear, it is the best single episode since that is all that the voters have to watch, so Danes may not have been consistent (I don't know, haven't seen season two), but one could easily imagine her having the best episode.  I cannot say the same about Jeff Daniels having any episode better than the best that Cranston, Hamm, Lewis and Spacey delivered.

Best Supporting Actor in a Drama?  Breaking Bad dudes split their votes, and other folks split between Peter Dinklage and Mandy Patinkin.  Bobby Cannavale might have been swell, but better than these other folks?  Again, no way.

Since we cannot have a series of runoff votes, the solution would be to have a system where people get to vote their preferences, and once their candidate is eliminated, their second preferences get added to the surviving candidates and so on until someone gets a majority.  Such electoral systems do exist (in Sri Lanka), so why not with the Emmys and Oscars?  Because it would require folks in Hollywood to think a bit more, I guess.

The Walking Prisoner's Dilemma

Last night, the Walking Dead embraced the prison the crew has been inhabiting for some time by simulating the Prisoner's Dilemma. 


Spoilers below

Belated Thoughts on Homeland, Season 1

Yep, a year late, but worth the wait. While we get most American programs up here, not all Showtime and few FX shows are shown when they are in US.  So, I have to either hope that they eventually show up or get the DVDs.  So, I am fully invested, for instance, in Justified. 

So, a few thoughts on Homeland beyond the break.

The New TV Season and International Relations

I have been asked by some of my twitter friends (followers makes me sound like a cult leader) followers about my take on the new TV season, especially Revolution and Last Resort.  These shows have the most obvious relevance for those who study ethnic conflict and international relations (Kate and Ben, too, have much IR content but that is a post for another day). 

I will not discuss Revolution here much since Dan Drezner already took it apart quite brutally.  Bikes!  and Steam!  What were they thinking?  The big point is that sword play is fun, but is fifteen years enough for so many folks to develop excellent swordship?  Where is Arya when we need her?  Of course, in any survival of the fittest, we only see now the folks who managed to succeed, at least those with the swords and bows.  Would the US subdivide into different militias so quickly?  The question, as always, is does the military hold together?  Because if guns still work (and they do), then the US army would still have heaps of guns and heaps of bullets.  Of course, much of the army would be stranded overseas until people figured out sailboats and such.... (yes, the British lady could go back to the UK as long as she was willing to sail/row/steam there). 
      The big question now is insurgency--whether the rebels (who use the US flag, hee, hee) and the militia (the government) behave as we have seen in the study of civil war.  Indiscriminate violence is unwise, but discriminate violence can make a great deal of sense.  So, it may be that Giancarlo Esposito's craziness is crafty and not destructive ... thus far.

Speaking of craziness, Last Resort cited Reagan (when it should have cited Nixon)--that deterrence only works when the leader is just a bit whacky.  This is quite the old conventional wisdom about nuclear deterrence--that if the Soviets already hit Europe, would a sane American president then use nuclear weapons, knowing that Chicago and Boston were next?  Nixon, more than Reagan (as far as I can recall), deliberated over the messaging to Moscow.  Will the Captain of the US Colorado, played by the wonderful Andre Braugher, use nukes against DC?  Well, a near miss (and was he so sure that there were no ships 200 miles from DC?) was good enough?  I don't know--I might think that the near miss signals weakness and not strength.  At least, the show answered my wife's first question quite quickly--why no US effort to blast the boat?  Deterrence.... for now. 
   The next issue is civil-military relations: who is commanding the boat to fire upon Pakistan?  Using an alternative comm network (Antarctica?  Really?) undermined the orders, raising questions, so the sub checked DC and saw no crisis there.  Again, the classic question in any situation is: will the folks who have the guns use them or not?  Turns out the Admiral's daughter was pretty willing, but so were other elements of the crew that were not on the Captain's side?  Distrust should continue to be the theme of the season--the chief of the boat, our favorite Terminator Robert Patrick, should not be trusted anytime soon.  So, the good bit here is that once the Captain questions orders, his authority is splintered in the boat.  Resolving that should take time and effort.
   The third issue is how to run the island with a criminal gang taking US ship-folks hostage?  Depends on how loyal the SEALs are, but they are likely to see the criminals as worthy of being squelched regardless of how they feel about the Captain.  If they support the gangsters, then the show will lack just a bit of realism (well, you know...).  So, this show is pretty complicated and thus far takes those complications seriously.  Still not sure I buy the DC angles of things--that the contractor could confront an admiral so quickly, and that the contractor would be so attractive either.  But that is Hollywood.

I will continue to watch both as I am a sucker for swordplay and subs.  How about you?