I just said literally when I meant figuratively, like a crazy person

The culture wheel has turned since Runaways first appeared in comics form in 2002 wielding its open disdain for its own genre like an obnoxious teenager devoid of self-awareness in a bit of meta-commentary from creator Bryan K Vaughan that was sadly lost on the title's vocal online fanbase who - despite reading a superhero comic set in a superhero universe about people with superhero names and superpowers who fought supervillains - would regularly insist that "Runaways is not a superhero comic" even when the writer expressly wrote Spider-Man and Wolverine into the stories.  Runaways is a superhero comic, but part of its gag was that the characters didn't consider themselves superheroes despite doing all the things superheroes did, like fighting supervillains and vampires, traveling in time, battling shape-changing aliens, etc, and you would have to take an incredibly shallow surface reading of the material to not see any of this...
Anyway, the second season of Marvel's Runaways is not very good, which is my polite way of saying it is bad.
A below-average teen show with the word "Marvel's" bolted onto it, it's roughly 95% people talking or shouting at each other and then the other 5% is something happening in CGI or slow motion.  The straightforward originating premise of kids discovering their parents are supervillains so they Run Away from home has been convoluted with unnecessary backstories for characters who worked best as archetypes, an approach that just serves to reinforce that there are no new ideas in play*, and somehow, despite the sometimes-laughable lengths that the makers have gone to in order to divorce the show from anything vaguely superhero-y, the characters often just look outright ridiculous in a way they wouldn't if they were dressed in modern superhero outfits.
The superhero genre has been  rehabilitated since the Runaways comics first landed, and not only have all the things that made it unique since become standard, but we've had 7 years of a tv show about Green Arrow, which has spun off four years of the Flash, three years of Legends of Tomorrow, and will shortly be joined by a Batwoman series that will be showing alongside the third season of Supergirl, while in cinemas, Marvel have to date made 22 films and roughly 30 billion dollars, and spun off Agents of Shield, Daredevil, Jessica Jones, The Punisher, Iron Fist, Luke Cage, and Agent Carter tv shows.  This would, by any objective evaluation, be the absolute worst time to base a tv show on the idea that superheroes as a concept are stupid and lame - and yet here Runaways comes anyway, peddling its shame at its own genre like Smallville was still a thing.
And what's with the synthwave OST?

It's a genre utilised in evoking the 1980s, but how does that relate to a television show about the post-millennial generation?  I could postulate about how it might be a means to reference the decade that spawned the media which provided the inspiration for the original comics, or suggest that it's a means to channel the post-internet world where all media is available to be consumed at all times and thus genres become meaningless and children pine for the artifacts of cultures that lived and died before they were born but really, I think we all know that's a stretch and it's far more likely it's just a stylistic choice that has no meaning beyond its current and likely fleeting appeal, which is as goo a paradigm for this show as any.  I am implying that Runaways is bad television.
Let's face it, though: if it was good I wouldn't be watching it because I apparently only like dreadful tv.

It does, however, meet the high standards demanded of 13 year old television viewers - by which I mean characters occasionally say the word "hashtag" and the nerd character says something related to Star Wars - but I admire the show's commitment to the rejection of binaries both in its diverse casting, and in its firmly and oft-affirmed belief that the show doesn't have to suck or blow and can, in fact, do both at once.


* Worse still, existing characters from the comics are expanded upon to become what can only be described as racist stereotypes, with the most obvious example being all the black characters having links to gang culture and crime, or the only Asian characters facing off in a martial arts battle, or the only Latino character defeating an opponent by speaking Spanish - and no, I am not making that up.

I've had it with you and your successful methods

The makers of Manifest try very hard to make a memorably terrible television series, but sadly it's just quite banal.  The concept is a hodge-podge of lazy tropes (the show is essentially a remake of The 4400), but it's with the use of the still-recent tragedy of  Flight 370 as a story engine that they betray the real lack of ideas or faith in their own creation, gambling as they are on free publicity from social media outrage - but for that to have materialised, the show would need to be significant, well-made or popular enough to justify confronting its opportunistic intrusion into the grief of those affected by the real-life tragedy it stripmines, but the show is none of those things.  Often-appalling dialogue aside, there's nothing worth noting, not even to single out for criticism, it's just a big dollop of tv landfill wherein nobody does their best.
Magnum PI may be familiar to anyone of a certain vintage, but to me it came far too early and it was only relatively recently I got to play catch-up.  While patchy in places, it's easy to see why it made a household name of lead actor Tom Selleck: the series follows the (mostly) neo-noir adventures of an ex-marine-turned private investigator employed as a live-in security consultant by a constantly-absent globetrotting pulp novelist, Magnum being a freeloading mooch of the kind beloved of 1980s popular culture, enjoying the trappings of a billionaire's private Hawaii estate without having to do very much in return, thus constantly enraging the estate's majordomo, Johnathan Higgins, an upright Englishman*.  The relationship between the pair was antagonistic on the surface, but they shared cross-generational experiences of national service to their respective countries, a commonality nuanced in how Magnum was a frontline veteran of Vietnam while Higgins was an advisor to the French during the Indochina War, their experiences overlapping but not identical.  This created an interesting dynamic that added to the eventually paternal relationship that formed between the two, but the new Magnum PI is... not as interesting.
Virtually identical to the producers' other contemporary action tv series such as MacGyver and Hawaii 5-0, there's little doubt that these series were made based on nothing but their branding, retaining the theme tunes**, character names and basic setups from the originals, but otherwise being the same anodyne mix of drama, comedy, and - for some reason - homophobia in every episode, so that creating the occasional off-the-reservation genre-straddling episode becomes all but impossible because every episode is the comedy episode, every episode is the pathos episode, every episode has some toxically-masculine over-muscled goon uncritically saluting the flag.  The new Magnum PI is offensively unchallenging, its scripts generated by some kind of algorithm wherein all elements for each episode are present and correct but Skynet is simply incapable of replicating human emotion or ever springing an actual surprise upon you.
Actually, tell a lie: I was genuinely surprised in one episode when Magnum and Rick inflicted homophobic taunting on TC for attending dance classes as a child that made me quite uncomfortable, but... well, I don't really want that kind of surprise, thanks.  Plus, aren't these war buddies or something?  Even the thick-as-pigshit Hawaii Five-0 has the male leads uncritically hugging each other in bromance moments.
Anyway, Magnum PI is not very good, so that must mean I'm sexist or racist because Magnum is played by an Eskimo and Higgins is Welsh now and there can be no other reason for me to be critical of something with a diverse cast.


* fun fact: John Hillerman, who played Higgins, also played Higgins' many siblings on the show, one of whom was a Texan whom Hillerman played with a broad cowboy twang, an Irishman played with a twee brogue - another brother was mentioned yet never portrayed in the show and was named Soo Ling.  I don't suppose we shall ever know why Hillerman declined to portray that one onscreen...
** albeit in drastically truncated form - such is the belief in the audience's attention span that Magnum's them tune is a mere 19 seconds long

My memories are a roadmap that leads to pain and boredom

God help me but I simply cannot stop watching The Mysteries Of Laura.
The clues - OH MY GOD THE CLUES - that the characters uncover and follow are amazing, like something from the old Batman show where they'd go "Who could be behind this dastardly deed?  Wait... this diabolical trap was sprung at sea... AND CATWOMAN BEGINS WITH A C!"  There's a hacker terrorising the precinct and they track him down by noticing that he spells things in a different way (IE: color/colour) as a foreign national might, so they go on "the internet" to look for someone making spelling mistakes and track down the hacker almost immediately - I mean literally within seconds of announcing this is their plan.  It is UHMAZING that anyone writes in such broad and, well... patronising strokes in this day and age when half of tv shows contain self-aware treatises on the craft of writing or at the very least commentary upon their own lack of originality.  There are actual cartoons for babies with better writing than The Mysteries Of Laura, so why can't I stop watching it?

In my defence, I just don't care

It's probably a bad sign when I laugh at the introduction of every character on a show, be it hunky white boys with impossible hairstyles that retain that stiff, erect and proud profile no matter what gymnastics are undertaken by their stunt doubles, or laconic, complicated black guys who smolder their way through the scene of a homicide while explaining to their captain - who looks like she's twenty and a model - that women cannot understand him and he can never be close to them.  Then a geeky spectacles-wearing dude is introduced as the "best friend" of the hot redhead (black eyebrows) lead character and really, at that point you're not waiting to see how this relationship unfolds, you're just waiting to see how the show explains to you that he has the hots for her but it is not reciprocated because you have seen this in every other show and you are getting it now, too.  She says "how can you not notice that someone so close to you has the hots for you?" and the guy strokes his chin and looks her in the eye and says "HOW INDEED" okay maybe that is not exactly how it plays out but believe me, I am not paraphrasing things quite as much as you may suspect.
Also, in a show that is clearly populated by twenty-somethings (and their thirty-something parents), much is made of the fact that the lead character is just turning 18 (an actual line from the character: "I'm turning 18, it's not like I'm setting off on some epic journey"), which for some reason struck me as odd that the forces of evil and magic in general would have the age requirement for giving legal consent to sexual intercourse in North America as their barometer of whether someone had "come of age" or not.  There's actually a deep and rich mythology surrounding the ascent to womanhood in magical cultures... I'm sure some of that will come up in the course of later episodes.
"Sorry I'm late, the captain has got me on those demonic murders" "literally my brain is about to explode!" - actual lines of dialogue from this show, FYI.
This all might give the impression that Shadowhunters is some kind of metatextual hoot at the very least, but that would be a misleading impression to give you as such a thing would require a level of self-awareness the show doesn't have.  Shadowhunters is not self-aware - if it was, at some point a character would stop and announce "the world I am in is a load of turgid shit" - no, Shadowhunters is just shit.  Shit that I honestly believe has had creative input from 12 year old girls, because it is like something my niece would create during that strange period where she stopped drawing her graphic novel opus Poo Robots and started saying "I like Gerard Way's music" unironically while plastering her bedroom wall with pictures of hairless androgynes she insisted had deep creative insights to impart to the culture.
I mean, don't get me wrong, I'm not being hostile towards Shadowhunters here, I totally understand there are many demands placed upon a creative  production from various quarters over a relatively short space of time.  Buffy was a great show in its day, but there's no law or anything that says that a show has to have a coherent creative vision and tangible purpose or themes, that was just something Joss Whedon brought to the table after years of honing his craft and learning to work within the demands and confines of television production to deliver the best possible product - it's unfair to expect the same dedication to storytelling and the inherent belief that the audience is not composed of drooling simpletons of a modern production team who construct their narratives purely by stringing scenes from other tv shows and films together and who maybe get genuine input from the higher-ups a few times a day along the lines of "more twenty-something models taking their shirts off" or "less talk" or "something from the Billboard charts from a month ago" or "he talks for a long time in this scene, can he have his shirt off?"  The demands of television are different now than they were in the late 1990s when kids could pay attention for 40 minutes, as now kids have one eye on their phones while they're watching stuff, so they probably won't notice your clever use of sound or your inventive nonlinear plot structure or your subtle character study, so you're better off if a song they might like suddenly plays or someone takes their shirt off as that way there's a good chance you'll get their attention away from the Twitter and the Instagrams for a minute - of course, if you've abandoned all pretense of substance as Shadowhunters does quite early in proceedings, there's the obvious question of what they're actually going to see when they do look away from the Twitter and the Instagrams for a moment and what great insight or original turn you have to offer, but there's probably a good chance they're on the Twitter and the Instagrams in the first place because they're a moron, so all they need is the music and the shirt coming off and you can call it a day knowing you did your best as a creative entity and your audience likely got the show they deserved - the dumb fuckers.
Strange but true: like Buffy, Shadowhunters is based on a movie that did a major belly-flop in cinemas, and I recall this only because I thought it was funny that I couldn't even make it to the end of the trailer, never mind watching the actual film.  I made it to the end of the first episode of Shadowhunters, though, and if you don't fancy your chances of doing the same, someone has handily done a supercut of all the plot scenes of the episode on Youtube that clocks in at just over 19 minutes - for some reason they've animated it, made it in 1998 and called it Invasion America, but trust me, apart from a gender-swapped lead character it's the exact same fucking story.

The law was made for man, not man for the law

Sweet shimmering cripes, but my blog posting sure does take a hit when I'm not doing stuff for other people.  Luckily I have that Comicsy store to keep feeding books that no-one will ever buy, so there's no reason not to finish up a few projects laying around which I never put the finishing touches on for silly reasons like not being able to use my hands... hahaha, oh lordy but that was just an awful, awful time.
Been catching up with my Hawaii Five-0 viewing with the tail end of season five, and the sudden introduction of Kono's super-hot mum is hilarious for many reasons, but mainly for the fact that they clearly wanted to cast a younger woman so that she could look good in a bikini in the flashbacks and her grey hair in the present-day sequences is thus fried comedy gold that tanks even the most remote possibility of pathos.  My first reaction to giving Kono a solo episode to herself was understandably "WHY?" but then five seasons in and I still forget she's actually in this show most episodes, so some spotlight time is probably overdue - if only to take screentime away from McGarrit's dull girlfriend and her ongoing commitment issues... with actually starring in Hawaii Five-0.  We lost Lauren German for this?  Fuck you, McGarrit's dull girlfriend - piss off to whatever failed pilots you've been shooting and let my show move on to other characters.
It's hard to articulate my problems with Sense8, as unoriginality isn't really that big a sin when it comes to genre telly, but my overriding impression of it is of watching a movie-within-a-movie, like in that film Bowfinger, when we - the audience in the real world - can tell that the fictional film inside the film is terrible, but the people in the film watching the film in the film think it's great.  I think that Sense8 is aimed at that audience - an entirely fictional one that has never seen another sci-fi show, particularly not the crowded post-Heroes "disparate group thrown together" sub-genre of "not-superheroes" superhero television.  The only people I can see really enjoying Sense8 are professional critics used to turning off their memory of other, better shows so that they can make an objective evaluation that is largely unnecessary in this day and age when everything that isn't cross-referenced by its audience with similarities to other things is probably being sold on being a repackaging of something else by the makers "it's like The Matrix meets Heroes only with all the fun and joy removed" oh wait that would just make it Alphas, wouldn't it?  Well anyway, my general opinion is that Sense8 is not very good on top of having a stupid fucking name.

No water, no sitting - and don't think you can sneak in a lean, either

Just catching up on last week's episode of rich white reactionary pro-fascism conservative superhero drama Arrow, and it's always amusing to see the rich white American view of addiction recovery, unironically dependent as it is upon surrender to the idea of a need outside the individual's ability to control - "I NEED A MEETING" these soul-less characters announce in word and action with not a hint of self-awareness.  I suppose that television shows like Intervention are to blame for this, as they really reinforce the idea that recovery is not something that can be done with privacy or dignity, but I think the episode accidentally got that much correct because, strange but true I have had dealings with what passes for addiction recovery groups here in Northern Ireland, and it's always hilarious and saddening in equal measure to see so many people coping or "getting better" by replacing one addiction with a more socially-acceptable alternative like gambling, tobacco, caffeine, religion, and even the co-dependant rituals of AA groups themselves, and they so clearly use these things as a crutch that were I a dumber bastard than I am I would almost go so far as to suggest that it looks to me like they weren't getting better at all.
Anyway, of Arrow: the actress Katie Cassidy does some hilariously unconvincing drunk acting in this, but her face looks odd in the show lately, like she's had some work done or something, which for some reason involved giving her oddly-elongated features so there's probably a really obvious joke about her walking into a bar in an episode and being asked why she has a long face, or at the very least she can play Celine Dion in a biopic - but what she can't play is a convincing... hmm... I want to say "drunk" or "drug addict" but I have this really weird conviction that these two things aren't actually synonymous conditions, unlike what the show itself seems to be telling me with its absolute view of addiction as a digital state - if you're addicted to drugs, you are also an alcoholic.
Also Michael "Why, Black Dynamite?  WHY?" Jai White is in the episode as a man with three knives sticking out of his wrist, so it's good to know episode writer Mark Guggenheim isn't done writing awful Wolverine stories just yet.

You damned Vulcans and your defined parameters!

Bitten is so bad that when terrorists commit their next atrocity upon the United States, the angry ghost of Jerry Falwell will rise from his grave and say that alongside Paganism, abortion, feminism and being gay, Bitten was why America had it coming.  He will, of course, be utterly wrong.  About the first four.
I don't even know where to start, but probably the lecturer who gets his Jungian theory wrong is as good a place as any (because the scene comes early in the show).  Basically he talks at length about how the concept of the anima and the animus* sound a bit like "animal" so that's the same thing as being about werewolves.  When the lecturer who looks like a male model speaks, the only reaction shots we see are from groups of attractive young women sitting together in the audience.  It generally manages to go downhill from there - and fair play that must have taken some effort - but before we get to that point we also open on a sex scene - the very first thing we see in the very first episode is the female lead riding cowgirl on an anonymous rod, then making excuses to rush outside to turn into a werewolf because apparently she forgot this was something she does.
Basically, Bitten is not a show for feminists, and I don't mean that it has an unhealthy male gaze, I mean that for a show that lingers on them as sexual creatures it does not actually seem to like women very much.  There's a sub-genre in horror that creates an equation between the female menstrual cycle and lycanthropy, and Bitten is an unfortunate addition to exploring this "curse" analogy subconsciously rather than as text, with a character trying to distance herself from her natural "cycles" and being punished for it by turning into a raging bunny-killing monster, and let me be very clear about this: the character actually kills a bunny after turning into a  menstrual rage monster, this happens in the pre-credits sequence moments after the sex scene and the character's stripping in a dirty alleyway.
Oh, and a guy tells a woman she's a slut in the first couple of minutes of the show.  That may also be an indicator of troubling subtext, along with the unsurprising failure of the Bechdel Test in an almost suicidally-spectacular fashion - women don't just talk about men when they're alone, they talk about the fantastic sex they have with those men, even though one of the two women in the conversation is the man's sister.  What the heck that is about I cannot fathom, but I am beginning to have an inkling why the writers might have been thinking about psychiatry lately.

I also managed to check out the Carrie remake for some reason, as I didn't even like the original as I just found it unpleasant more than scary.  The remake is largely a bit of a hoot in hystericalising things while also trying to make it seem like maybe kids aren't inherently evil so much as they are careless and occasionally insensitive - it's a bizarre flip-flop act to be sure, and sort of falls apart later when we get to scenes that take a clear delight in the suffering and murder of children, but up until then, the overblown nature of it was kind of entertaining, if potentially grating to those not inclined to indulge it.




* In Jungian philosophy, the anima and animus are the complimentary "masculine" or "feminine" elements of the human psyche.  Put simply, the animus is the masculine element of the female psyche, while the anima is the feminine element of the male - the writers of Bitten somehow manage to get these two mixed up, and also somehow manage to think that what Jung meant was that everyone is secretly the Hulk.

This is my German pill - in case they release the bombs or I'm ever abandoned in space

 So what other unpopular tv shows can I tell you that I think are great?  I have been watching Karl Urban's new televisual vehicle Almost Human, though that seems to be popular enough to survive without my seal of approval, strange though that concept may be.  Just as well, really, because despite enjoying it, I will admit that it is pretty bad.  There's this bit where the villain stops in the middle of a violent kidnapping attempt on a busy street and delivers a bad guy lecture to the guy he's kidnapping about his (the villain's) plan to kill a load of cops and blow up their police station.  Oddly, this very public act is his undoing when some cops look at a recording of the event.  It's that kind of show.

Also watching Tim Allen's Last Man Standing, which has me genuinely flummoxed.  In its first season it was a show about a right wing idiot forced to adopt to the modern world when he realises that the only male heir he has is the infant son of one of his teenage daughters, and despite Allen's off-screen status as a card-carrying Republican gun owner, the character he played was presented as admirable only in that he was willing to change as he accepted that the world he lived in was more complicated than the one he thought or hoped he lived in.  In the second season... not so much.  Once the show was confirmed to be returning, changes were made in the format to introduce a "hippy liberal" character who often espoused straw man versions of left-leaning notions about renewable energy, vegetarianism, unions, and so on, and Tim Allen's character would take every opportunity to correct his thinking with hard facts or sometimes even a stern lecture, sometimes with the aid of other cast members.  Coincidentally, one cast member took off when these changes were to be introduced.  Odd, that.
Where I'm flummoxed is what the show is trying to achieve here: on one hand it's clearly a vehicle for anti-liberal sentiments railing against multiculturalism and universal health care among other things, but on the other hand expressing these sentiments in the blunt and occasionally disingenuous manner the show does just reinforces the first season's characterisation of the protagonist as an arrogant, privileged white male who's lost touch with the vast majority of the rest of the country but believes otherwise because a small minority have chosen to publicly support him.  it would be easy to attribute this to Tim Allen's wanting the character to reflect his own views and thus be a vehicle for his own comedy material at regular intervals in the show, but then why is there no reliable foil or dissenting voice?  Even bad comedy pokes fun at itself, mocks its own tropes or breaks down its characters, and though Allen has made some comedic offerings that are of questionable quality, he does at least have enough experience in the world of scripted comedy to know how these things work and it's odd that something so family-oriented and middle of the road should excise such a balancing element in the hope of creating an Ali G whose central purpose is to pull a fast one on middle America.
So I'm flummoxed because I can't decide if Tim Allen wants me to laugh at his monstrous creation by design or if it's just happening by accident while he fellates his own political beliefs.  In my defence, when he devotes screen-time to footage of lemmings so he can call them "Obama voters" while opining "maybe they think universal health care is at the bottom of that cliff" at the same time he is showing footage of Karl Marx, Allen doesn't exactly make it easy to call.

It's called "being nice" dammit

Smash wrapped up its second and final season in good form - if you haven't been to Smash, it is basically Glee meets Fame, with roughly 60 percent of the songs being created for the show by Broadway composers, with the odd MOR cover to keep the lovers of wordless montages of the cast happy.  It started well before it trailed off a bit towards the end of the first season to the point I don't think I watched the last few episodes, then got a second wind in the latter half of season two when it became less about the quest for fame and the struggle to put on a show that dominated the first 1.5 seasons and more about straight-up bitching and backstabbing behind the scenes of multiple stage musicals and became Dynasty with big band songs and wailing that sounds like it could be a Glee cover of something except that it's actually an original composition.  I wouldn't have missed the show if it had been cancelled at the end of the first season, but like I say, by the end there it was good stuff and I think I now probably prefer the cast version of Under Pressure performed at the opening of the series finale to the real thing - sacrilege to some, I'm sure, but the cast of Smash to my knowledge didn't break a trade boycott with an oppressive racist regime to line their own pockets, so I feel justified in making the admittance.
Speaking of which, I see Brian May is still trying to repay that karmic debt:

Your mother is a spy and a woman - she will know.

I have a backlog of things that have to go up on the blog - even my virtual living space is a cluttered mess right now.  In the meantime, I gotta post something, prove I'm still alive, and in that spirit, I'll metaphorically hold up today's paper by recounting the last episode of telly I watched, which was DaVinci's Demons, some sort of historical revisionism thing where they try really hard to turn the Maestro into an action hero to the extent they portray him as a womaniser and that whole gay thing was naught but the underhanded slander of his - oddly effeminate - enemies.  Haha - you probably think I'm making this up - but no, this is really a television show made in 2013.
Also Defiance, a tv show made to tie into a videogame in yet another attempt by SyFy to achieve ephemeral relevance on the smallest amount of money possible, not realising that the last time they did this and succeeded they ran frightened from the influx of fans and cancelled the show that was successful.  This is also what they did the time before that, and the time before that.  Success frightens and confuses science fiction people, best to just keep airing reruns of Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, if only because that show is fantastic.

But I don't mean to speak of thirty year-old plots, unconvincing effects, wooden acting and embarrassing dialog, I was supposed to be talking about Defiance... oh whoopsy, I don't suppose anyone will believe that was an accident so moving on, I enjoy Defiance regardless, as it's pretty much identical to Terra Nova in setup, only it seems to know what it's doing with itself, being very akin to Buck in its execution but with lots of references to hookers and space drugs because, you know, this is much more mature and gritty and stuff, and will really convince women to watch the show rather than dismissing it offhand as camp geek shite that oozes the impression that all involved couldn't do better in their respective jobs, so now they are here making television for shut-ins who like to wank off to images of sexy alien girls.

ONWARD - to the micro brew pizzatorium!

I started into watching Space Precinct again last week after giving up on the dreadfully dull Walking Dead halfway through an episode - to narrow it down for you, it was that one where they just talked in circles at each other for what felt like forever in between some splatter effects.  The last of the big model-based sci-fi shows, I honestly struggle to see why Space Precinct is considered any worse than UFO or Space 1999 bar the lack of any really innovative plots, and it's arguably helped by the actor-y bits being stuffed with bad writing that is indistinguishable from latter-day parody of sci-fi and/or cop shows to the point I think a tight edit of the average episode could enable it to masquerade as a half hour comedy, or Charlie Brooker could just bung his name on it as is and people would be none the wiser.  Until they started laughing.
Once you settle into the flow of things, though, there's the odd decent episode in there even if a lot of it is completely barmy and illogical in that way Gerry Anderson's live action shows usually were, but it sticks to it's schtick of cop show tropes in a sci-fi setting doggedly even when it makes no internal sense: like the two-part finale being a traditional "end of the world" sci-fi plot the lead coppers have to foil and their captain says "Do you buy this man's story about intergalactic conspiracies?" and their captain is a effin' alien with eyes on stalks and he's looking out the window of his office in a space station at the time - I mean, I'm not reading this scene wrong, am I?  In this context this character cannot simply say "intergalactic conspiracy" as a baseline mark for something only a nutjob would believe, because from his point of view as an alien who is also a policeman who works in space, he is just talking about organised crime.
Some of the high-concept episodes are remarkably well-paced, and the viewer reaches the same conclusion at the same time as the characters do, despite being aware of sci-fi cliche in a way the characters are not - in the time travel episode, for instance, there's no hint of time travel or even time travel tropes until relatively late in the episode, and the episode with a cloning subplot has a similar eureka moment for genre-savvy viewer and stock genre character even if it does leave you with an unfortunate moment of fridge logic when you cotton that three babies are murdered during the course of the story and no-one seems to care.
I do love the theme - maybe not as iconic as UFO or Space 1999's opening fanfares, but it's hysterical and screeching when sci-fi tv themes at the time - and since - were ponderous orchestral arrangements, and married to the patented Century 21 THIS EPISODE montage of all the action scenes from the upcoming slice of retro-futurist cheese in the title credits that is so damn good that it was one of many things Battlestar Galactica stole in its entirety without an ounce of shame - and who can blame them?

Punches are not hugs

Having taken a respite from blogging thanks to Vista finally making good on its daily promise to kill itself and take my pc with it, I've got a bit bored so have gone back to doodling on the laptop.  The steam-powered laptop that sounds like a plane and which runs on GOD DAMN IT Vista.

I have been watching:
The Carrie Diaries, a prequel series to Sex And The City, which you may or may not be aware of seeing as it's a pretty old show now, but from what I could tell it was a New York-based sex drama about three whores and their mother, begging the question "why is a teen drama the natural follow-up to that?"  I think we're supposed to mock the reasoning that led to this show's creation and then ask "who is the intended audience for this?" but let's face it, it's a teen drama that sexualises children and that needs no justification to programme-makers because they know exactly who its audience is - everybody.  From Home and Away to Hollyoaks to 90210 to Secret Life of the American Teenager, kids shagging is what people want to watch at the end of a day spent frothing themselves into a fury at the latest pedo-scares in the news and I am, of course, postulating what I hope is an amusing contradiction and not actually suggesting that there are people who spend all their day merely being angry at the existence of pedophiles and imagining what they get up to, as not even Daily Mail writers do that - I picture them fantasising what pedophiles get up to at most takes up their morning, and then after lunch they fantasise about immigrants, maybe squeezing in the odd payment to someone to say they've fed crack cocaine to their 17 children or have only come to the UK to sell babies to pimps because unlike the workshy unemployed sponging benefits from hard working taxpayers, Daily Mail journalists actually put some effort into their day.
Anyway - The Carrie Diaries' biggest problem for me is arguably Anna Sophia Robb, who is supposed to grow up to look like Sarah Jessica Parker, which pretty much blows the series finale as we know it now has to end with some kind of disfiguring car or horse-trampling accident, but she also ruins it because when the Rock goes to the trouble of saving your ass, the least you can do is make good use of the second chance he's bought you and not make bad television.  Shows like this fascinate me because they're basically the same thing as, say... Gidget, which is not the first female-fronted teen romance "dramedy" but it's a nice handy yardstick seeing as it was made in the 1960s (the Sandra Dee film version even earlier in 1959) with the attendant moral standards of the time, and the aspirational ideal of the lead female in Gidget is to eventually kiss Moondoggy on the lips, while her modern counterpart Carrie constantly writes in her diary of  how she secretly longs for a good fisting while a bus full of special needs orphans watch - the end goals are different and reflect the times in which these shows came to be, but they are still essentially the same show*, and therein lies the problem because some yearnings are universal experiences and work as the focus of teen dramas even in the 1960s, so you don't really need sexy sex to spice up proceedings as long as the emotions at the center of the writing ring true with experience and aren't - for instance - simply recycling the work of other shows and movies and filtering them through the arbitrary mandates of producers to create an uninteresting work of homogenised telefeces whose primary audience lies in a no-man's land demographic where the terminally bored, the moronic, and those who just aren't paying attention at all overlap to create whatever audience share this horse-trampling of a show ends up with.



* And when I say the same show, I mean "dramedy centering on a widowed father-daughter relationship, sister problems, school stuff and major hobby of main character" pretty much covers both of them.

only they who love without desire shall have power granted them in their darkest hour

Watching: Strike Back, which was a pleasantly thick-headed series once, before they went and revamped it as a juvenile misogynist fantasy. Love the Irish accents, though!
Star Trek - because somehow I have never seen the entirety of Spock's Brain, widely regarded as one of the worst episodes of sci-fi television ever made and yet clearly nothing of the sort.
Don't get me wrong, it is not good, but then again it's not that episode of Voyager where Tom Paris drives his space car really fast and then turns into a manatee, either - which is literally what happens in the episode, prompting the actor who played Paris to go on record as saying "When I first read that script, I couldn't believe they were going to shoot it." and this was coming from a guy who starred in the Masters of the Universe movie and regrets nothing. Nor is it that episode of Deep Space Nine where they do the traditional (and slightly creepy) sci-fi story about a young female character being artificially aged into a buxon type, and instead of thinking up a technobabble reason for such a thing to happen the writers just have her fall into a magic tree. Nor is it that episode of Flash Gordon where... well, it's not an episode of Flash Gordon. Anyhoo, I enjoyed it, especially the remote controlled Spock and the kinky caveman "they bring pain... AND DELIGHT."

Wednesday 30th September 2009

Recommended bad TV for the season: Trauma, which I prefer to call EXPLOSION DOCTORS because I don't believe in overcomplicated product descriptions, CSI: Miami, because I now believe they're doing it on purpose, and NCIS: Las Vegas, because Linda Hunt and Chris O'Donnel. I'd usually give 90210 a nod except it seems to be veering wildly at the minute between too fluffy or mean-spirited and hasn't managed to make the balancing act convincing thus far, while Melrose Place seems a bit too average and I was kind of hoping for something really trashy. Mercy and the Good Wife seem passable entertainment to pad out the C5 midweek schedule in the near future, but aren't bad enough to be unmissable.