October 10, 2007 3:24

JPTV: What I'm Watching Tonight

I'll be watching, like many of the rest of you, it seems, to see whether Pushing Daisies can live up to its pilot, and if the set designers have any new goodies to unveil from that big yard sale that Tim Burton apparently had. But I must also confess--actually, I already have--that I have not yet given up on Kid Nation.

To me, it's not about the drama of having kids survive in a hardscrabble environment; it's about the inherent drama of plopping a camera down in the middle of the world's most elaborate gifted-and-talented class. In which we ask, which is better training for life: being homeschooled or competing in beauty pageants? And what's to stop the kids from rejecting the capitalist merchant-worker reward system and establishing a socialist worker's collective? (For which task I nominate the Fidel Castro fan.) Am I all alone here?

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October 10, 2007 12:17

TV 101: They're Not TV Numbers. They're HBO Numbers.

John P. Johnson (2) / HBO

Afraid I'm not going to get around to a Tell Me You Love Me Watch this week--knee-deep in a deadline for TIME's "magazine," which is kind of like a large blog with staples in it. I'll try to catch up next week. In the meantime, here's the next-best thing: a post about ratings statistics!

Last week I (and a few of you) expressed surprise that HBO renewed TMYLM, with a Sunday-night viewing average of 910,000. (My surprise, at least, was pleasant.) Not long after I hit "post," I got an e-mail from HBO publicity contending that the show's cumulative audience--counting On Demand, DVR viewings and reruns during the week--was much bigger: 3.2 million.

I'm always skeptical when networks--HBO, Showtime, CNN, whoever--volunteer "cumulative" ratings (if I hold my arms up, I am cumulatively over 6 feet tall). But I asked HBO to offer the same stats for some other current HBO shows, for an apples-to-apples comparison. Here are the numbers (pardon my formatting ineptitude), and if nothing else, it's an interesting TV 101 insight into what HBO chooses to carry and why:

Big Love: 5.8 million (40% Sunday premiere / 60% other plays)
Entourage: 5.6 million (55/45)
The Wire: 4.4 million (40/60)
John from Cincinnati: 3.8 million (40/60)
TMYLM: 3.2 million (30/70)
Curb Your Enthusiam: 3.0 million (35/65)
Flight of the Conchords: 2.7 million (40/60)

Only 30% of TMYLM's viewers, according to HBO, watch the "live" debut. ("It's a show people want to watch privately, I imagine," the publicist theorized dryly. I also wonder if the fact that episodes air a week early On Demand encourages that format.)

JFC fans will note that your show was canned, with 600,000 more viewers. One possible reason: David Milch is a genius, and he notoriously spends like one--the show's production costs, and reported overruns, likely more than offset the edge in viewers over TMYLM, with all those economical interior sets. (And prosthetics aren't that expensive.)

And pay-cable networks program with different goals in mind: if you subscribe to watch only one show, your money still spends the same. So a show can justify itself by drawing the right audience--say, younger viewers for FOTC, or women for TMYLM (from the only female creator in HBO's historically Y-chromosome lineup). Arli$$ famously stayed on the air for years, with relatively few fans (none of them critics), because enough people told HBO they got the network for that show and nothing else. Go figure.

This concludes your Tell Me You Love Me post for the week. Sorry for the lack of nudity.

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October 10, 2007 9:00

Rate It! What's Your Fall Season List?

OK, we're into the third week of the fall season. It's decision time. It's TiVo-disk-space, evening-time allocation time. What new shows this fall are you actually still watching? Here's my list:

1. Pushing Daisies.* This gets an asterisk, as it has the advantage of having aired only its pilot.

2. Tell Me You Love Me. Not sure if this counts--since I've actually already watched the entire thing--but I'm listing it because (a) probably no one else will, and (b) this list is short enough as it is.

3. Aliens in America. But this may become one of those shows I admire more than I actually watch.

4. Chuck. See Aliens in America.

5. Reaper. And falling, after this week's episode. (Which was, more or less, last week's episode.)

5 1/2. Kid Nation. "1/2," because I fast-forwarded through half of it last week. I still have some interest, but this could drop off the list any minute.

6. Gossip Girl. In theory, I'm still interested in this soap... in practice, last week's episode is still unwatched on my TiVo.

And that's it. I'm not counting shows that--like Dirty Sexy Money and Bionic Woman--I'll keep up with for now, for professional reasons. And which of these shows would I watch every single week, if I didn't write about TV for a living? The top two, maybe. Nothing else compelling enough to break my existing network and cable habits.

Your turn. You don't have to annotate your list (I did because, eh, that's what I do). Maybe we'll make this a weekly thing and see how your lists evolve over the fall. (Maybe Women's Murder Club and Viva Laughlin will make your lists, except that they won't.) I have a feeling these lists could start getting really short, really fast.

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October 10, 2007 7:00

The Morning After: Military Time

Robert Voets/CBS

Do any Tuned Inlanders watch NCIS or The Unit? Have we ever discussed NCIS or The Unit? Should I be watching NCIS or The Unit? (I was briefly interested in the latter, mostly for employing Scott Foley, but lost interest upon seeing there was so little staccato swearing for a David Mamet show.)

Thoughts on that or any other Tuesday-night programming welcomed. Such as: Is A Shot at Love with Tila Tequila the most important moment in the history of Internet-TV convergence?

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October 9, 2007 1:00

Hurts So Good: Honoring TV's Best Torture

BOB D'AMICO / ABC

We can finally say that there is, indeed, an award for everything: on Oct. 15 the organization Human Rights First will award the first Award for Excellence in Television, presented by Sam Waterston. And by "excellence," they mean "excellence in depicting torture." (I'm picturing a statuette of a little gold man doubled over in pain.)

As you may have guessed from the group's name, there's a serious intent behind the award. Says the group: "On many TV shows today"—read: 24—"torture is portrayed the same way every time. The hero stabs, punches, shoots, chokes or otherwise abuses a suspect who had been unwilling to talk. Seconds after the abuse begins the captive invariably reveals critical secrets."

This award is designed to honor "realistic depictions of torture and interrogation," so it makes sense that Lost (think Sayid) and The Shield were nominated. Beyond that, it gets dicey. The group commends The Closer and Criminal Minds for their depictions of interrogation without the use of torture. (Which are, of course, entirely realistic. Most crimes in real life are solved in 44 minutes, through overacting.)

An episode of Boston Legal is also nominated, apparently for the show's reliable supplying of progressive esprits d'escalier. If the group wanted to go that route, though, why not nominate satires as well? There are topical episodes of South Park, Family Guy and American Dad that are easily sharper than Alan Shore's weekly bloviations. Also, where's Sleeper Cell?

Judge for yourself, though; the nominees are here. If nothing else, it's fitting that the award is bringing up torture for discussion on a day when the Supreme Court is refusing to hear about it. In the meantime, may I suggest a snazzier name? Ladies and gentlemen, I give you... the first annual Torties!

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October 9, 2007 11:15

Will Your TV Go on Strike?

Good primer in today's Variety about the impact of a possible Hollywood writers' strike after the Guild contract expires at the end of the month. (In an extremely small nutshell, the writers are looking for a bigger share of revenue from all those non-TV ways in which you've been watching TV--downloads, DVDs and so on.) Says Variety, it's looking more like a matter of when than if, but the when involves several possibilities, each of which would hit the networks in a different way. Should writers walk out in November, crippling February sweeps? Wait until January, which would hurt spring TV and pilot season? Or hold off until June, when the actors' and directors' contracts run out? (Unlikely, says Variety.)

The strike would affect movies as well as TV, but no one watches them anymore, right? When and if there's a strike, the likely TV effects include:

* Late night will be among the earliest genres hit. The last strike, in 1988, took Carson and Letterman off the air, and of course today there are all the more shows on the line. Then...

* Scripted shows would peter out, though not immediately--with a strike in mind, networks and studios have tried to cram in as much production as possible. Still, a November strike should deplete the networks' stores by very early next year. Hence...

* American Idol will be even more of a steamroller than it already was. The 1988 strike launched a wave of primetime newsmagazines; this time, the space-fillers will probably be reality shows, both those already in the works and others being ordered up in case of emergency. And, hey, why not a fourth or fifth night of audition shows? Conversely...

* The cancellation guillotine may start choppin' early. It could be more cost-effective to shut down marginal series altogether than to bring them back again. But...

* There's always outsourcing! There is talk that networks may strike deals to air foreign shows to air during the strike gap, which may not be a bad thing. Why have NBC remake The IT Crowd when we can go to the source? Finally...

* Things could get hairy for shows like 24 and Lost, which don't have much margin for error in a schedule that crams them into the last half of the season without weeks off. Let's hope the Smoke Monster can write.

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October 9, 2007 9:04

Heroes Watch: Kiss of Death

SPOILER ALERT: Before you read this post, open the hilt of the samurai sword I've placed in your desk drawer. Boy, was it hard getting that thing past security!

NBC Photo: Chris Haston

So, Nikki Reed's loss was Missy Peregrym's gain was Candice Wilmer's loss. Peregrym (the original illusionist-villainess Candice on Heroes) was cast over the summer to replace Reed on Reaper, leaving a gap in the Candice department. Not the worst of casting problems, you'd think, since the character was by definition able to make herself look like anyone. (Note to actresses: avoid roles like this. Zero contract-negotiation leverage.)

But Candice lasted all of one episode in her re-shifted form, killed by the still-alive Sylar (a "surprise" NBC blew weeks ago in the promos) in a vain attempt to steal her power. This after not only saving his life but offering him a twins fantasy! The ingrate!

All in all, an episode full of kisses and foreboding. Peter, having proved his worth to the Fake Irish in the robbery of one of those sports books they're so fond of in fake Ireland, kissed Little Miss Fake Ireland as we watched the tattoo briefly shift into the shape of the Squiggly Thingy of Death. Claire, meanwhile, was swept literally off her feet by Flyboy, who smooched her before revealing that he had once been captured, and marked on the neck, by a man who answers to the description of HRG. Which kiss was later echoed in the painting, predicting HRG's violent death, that Isaac left behind after his death. (He just keeps churning out posthumous work. Dude's the Tupac of the psychic art world.)

A lot of balls in the air here--I counted seven storylines treated in this episode, and I may have missed one--and while we can complain about the show having re-dispersed the heroes for no discernable reason, what's done is done. At this point, I'm going to try to suspend judgment until we have a better sense of how these balls are going to collide and carom off one another.

But it's as good a time as any to poll you on the various plot threads: which ones do you care about? Which ones can you do without? And does adding Nichelle Nichols to the Nikki/Micah storyline redeem that one for you? I don't know, but seeing as how the Star Trek franchise is getting Zachary Quinto, it seems like more than a fair trade.

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October 9, 2007 7:30

The Morning After: Fear Rode the Tricycle

Monty Brinton/CBS

Your open invitation to weigh in on last night's Chuck, Journeyman, Boondocks, or what have you.

Or How I Met Your Mother, which, while I'm not sure I have a full-fledged Watch in me, was back in top form even though the episode did nothing to advance the whole meeting-your-mother business. But as an episode of How I Met Those Two Sorority Sisters I'll Tell You About Some Day When You're Older, I'll take it. Bonus points for indulging a generation of young men's Winnie Cooper fantasies with the Danica McKellar casting. And for pairing her with Busy Phillips, who I believe has now guested on every show on television. They don't call her Busy for nothing!

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October 8, 2007 4:53

JPTV: What I'm Watching Tonight

I liked The Boondocks when it first came out on Adult Swim; then time wore on, my TiVo backlog built up and the show went off the air, by my recollection, for 47 years. Season 2 starts tonight, and I'm curious to see whether its mix of anime, pop-culture parody and racial pissed-offness holds up. (Tonight's episode addresses, among other issues, movie piracy and lynching.) The episode's apparently also streaming online, which fact I would attempt to verify if my computer did not explode every time I tried to watch it. Speaking of which, I need to catch up on Lucy, Daughter of the Devil. Any Adult Swim fans in the audience?

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October 8, 2007 2:43

Friday Night Lights Watch: Water Under the Bridge?

SPOILER ALERT: Don't read this post until you've watched the latest Friday Night Lights, and checked outside your house for skunks.

NBC Photo: Bill Records

The first thing that worried me about the new episode of FNL was not the controversial Landry-kills-Tyra's-stalker scene (which still sounds like a parody even as I type it, as if I were writing about "the Simpsons episode where Milhouse kills Nelson"). It was the opening scene, with all those slow-mo scenes by the pool and Get It On (Bang a Gong) playing. It was all, "Hot girls! Rock and roll! Don't believe what you've heard, folks--FNL is all good times! Bang a gong, baby!"

But, you know, whatever. I can't begrudge the occasional T&A; scene in the service of FNL any more than I could a phony topless car wash to raise money for a fire department. Also, a later episode won me back musically by playing Big Star's September Gurls, a soundtrack choice emotionally perfect for this bittersweet show. What is FNL if not the TV equivalent of Big Star: alternative Southern rock?

Up to those disconcerting last few minutes, a welcome episode of a much-missed show. How perfect that Lyla should find Jesus--in that lovely baptism scene--and that her first project should be Riggins, whom she offers temptation, judgment and redemption in one blemish-free package? How affecting and yet funny the scenes with Buddy Garrity, losing it upon finding his estranged wife taking up with a health-food-store operating vegan, the dramatic equivalent of the kind of supercilious Texas hippie Hank Hill would offer an ass-kicking in King of the Hill? (He is not going to turn my children into communists!")

And though it almost goes without saying that each bit between Coach and Tami is flawless--her raw, brave emotion as she struggles to hold it together, his rock-jawed determination to make the impossible separation work out--I was actually most impressed this week with the scene in which Julie told Eric why she was no longer feeling it for Matt Saracen. It was that rarest of things on a teen drama: a teen girl breaking up with her boyfriend not for any melodramatic reason but simply because she's freaking 16--restless and not ready to settle down and not wanting to become like Mom and Dad. It was just life, which is what FNL specializes in.

Which brings us to death. On the one hand, yeah, I wish they didn't go there. The Tyra-rapist storyline frankly was over the top when they introduced it last season, and I didn't like the idea then of bringing her and Landry together by having him rescue a straight-out-of-Lifetime-Network woman-in-peril. That said, I didn't think the killing, or dumping the body off the bridge, was out of character: it was the sort of thing that someone, particularly a high-school kid, might do in a confusing, terrifying, adrenaline-rush situation with no good resolution and no time to think things through.

Actually, in a way, that's the problem: no one knows what they'd do in a fight-or-flight confrontation like that, so when you put characters in one, it becomes a kind of wild-card situation. It's like asking how you would psychologically, realistically respond if you were abducted by aliens or forced to perform an exorcism; the situation is so outside the realm of ordinary experience that character becomes beside the point.

I've seen the following two episodes, however, and while I don't want to spoil them in advance, I do think that Tyra and Landry's dealing with the aftermath is entirely in character. FNL is, after all, finally much more a character show than a plot show, and it's at least better that it a storyline should become implausible than that the characters themselves should become implausible.

My big worry about the stalker's death, actually, is practical. However it plays out in the long run, it has at least temporarily tarnished the critical and fan buzz on the show--namely, that it was as close as network TV dramas get to flawless. Yeah, yeah, I know, that and 50 cents, etc., but in fact is, that kind of buzz can make the difference in keeping a show that's on the bubble alive. If the storyline continues to have negative fallout, it becomes less embarrassing for NBC to cancel FNL: they can always say, well, the ratings are off and the fans are staring to turn on it, so...

Fortunately, the ratings aren't off, so far: the season 2 debut tied CBS's Moonlight for 1st place in viewers 18 to 49. Let's hope they stay up, though, or what looked like a gimmick to give FNL broader commercial appeal could end up being the worst commercial move the show could have made.

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