SmartRemarks

Up front: I liked it.

Sunday’s final episode of Lost, that is… a show I’ve been watching with fascination for five years now. (No, not six… I missed S1 when it aired, but got hooked by the DVDs.)

That’s not to say that I found it completely satisfying, especially on an intellectual level. But clearly the show was shooting for emotional catharsis in the finale, more than anything else, and on those terms it succeeded very effectively. It was true to the characters we’ve come to know and care about, hitting emotional beats that almost brought tears to my eyes more than once. And it didn’t do that by resorting to cheap sentimentality; it was well-earned sentiment. As a viewer, one had to have been following along with these characters through years of travail, had to understand who they were, what they’d experienced, what kind of redemption they’d been seeking, in order for those moments to work. When everything is weighed in the balance, I think that this will go down as one of the most ambitious, and artistically successful, shows in television history.

[Spoilers below.]

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Tags: Carlton Cuse, Damon Lindelof, Lost, television, writers

Yes, I know that it was broadcast months ago… but I’ve been following BSG on DVD, and the second half of season four was just recently released. I watched it over the last week or so, culminating in the extended, nearly three-hour version of the finale just a couple of nights ago.

I discovered my reactions were somewhat mixed. I had gone out of my way to avoid spoilers, but fair warning: the commentary below is chock full of ‘em!…

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Tags: Battlestar Galactica, television

And the mantra became, “June 12 is the new February 17.” After all the preliminary publicity, it was somewhat annoying to have the conversion from analog to digital TV broadcasting delayed four extra months. But I can see the logic of doing it after the main television viewing season was over… and as it happens, complications along the way have shown that not just viewers but quite a few broadcasters needed the extra time to get their technological ducks in a row.

Offhand, you wouldn’t think I’d be terribly concerned about the switch. I have an HDTV and a DVR with an ATSC (i.e., digital) tuner, so what’s the difference, right?

But as I’ve written before, there are complicating factors… for me and lots of other people. Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: digital transition, DVRs, television, TVGOS

Joss Whedon’s new TV series Dollhouse got off to an uneven start, as I wrote shortly after the premiere. The show’s quixotic concept seemed promising but underdeveloped, and the Fox network had reportedly interfered with the show creatively. The first few episodes seemed like a very slow build, focusing on the kind of “engagement of the week” stories the network wanted rather than more sophisticated, long-term storytelling. Whether the show would surmount those obstacles seemed uncertain.

But Whedon promised from the start that the back half of the 13-episode season would turn toward more provocative, less predictable storytelling, along the lines he and his writing team had originally envisioned… and he wasn’t wrong. Over the last few weeks, the show has delivered in spades, stepping up to a much higher level.

The sixth episode, “Man on the Street,” was a strong harbinger of the shift in direction, fleshing out the concept and the character ensemble, and answering some nagging questions. But the really dramatic turning point was the ninth episode, “Spy in the House of Love,” which aired on April 10. 

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Tags: Dollhouse, Joss Whedon, television

In my personal opinion, naturally. YMMV. If this were in any way authoritative, it would have been carved in stone by a finger of flame.

But I have been pondering, of late, the sort of things I like to read and watch, and I find myself mulling over some commonalities. There seem to be four recurring characteristics that mark a piece of fiction for me as enjoyable, memorable, and (if it’s in serial form) worthy of further attention. None of these by itself is either necessary or sufficient to make a story effective, but the presence of at least two of them is usually enough to pique my curiosity, and the presence of three or four almost guarantees that I’ll become a fan.

What are these oh-so-crucial characteristics?…

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Tags: Aaron Sorkin, books, continuity, genre, humor, John LeCarré, Joss Whedon, Lost, Mark Twain, movies, Star Trek, television, Watchmen

Joss Whedon has a loyal and richly deserved fan following. There aren’t really a lot of “household name” television writers (Aaron Sorkin? Joe Straczynski? Maybe Gene Roddenberry, back in the day?), but he’s one. His following, built up over years of memorable work on Buffy, Angel, and Firefly, guarantees that any new project he does will attract attention. And right now (unlike any other big-name writer who springs to mind) he has a new project on the air.

What a fan following doesn’t guarantee is renatings high enough to make a show a hit, as Fox’s ignominious treatment of Firefly demonstrated. And as Fox is also the network that’s broadcasting Whedon’s new show Dollhouse—and that decided to bury it in a Friday night timeslot, among other questionable decisions—the fate of this new series is no sure thing.

To be sure, the show is built around a concept that can’t easily be summed up in a ten-second spot. The idea is that a very secretive organization exists, the “Dollhouse,” that maintains a roster of peopleensam (“dolls”) who have been wiped of their own memories and personalities. Any of these people can be rendered “Active” by being programmed with a different set of memories and abilities, customized to meet the needs or desires of the organization’s super-rich clients. For the duration of an engagement, the doll literally becomes an expert hostage negotiatior, or dream date, or whatever the case may be… anyone or anything… but in the aftermath retains no memory of the engagement, supposedly resulting in perfect confidentiality. The dolls have all voluntarily contracted to let their bodies be used like this for five years, after which they will (allegedly) be restored and released. There’s a full staff (technical, medical, etc.) managing the Dollhouse’s central facility, including “Handlers” who serve as remote bodyguards for each Active doll. Meanwhile, off on the fringes, there’s an FBI agent who has been spending more than a year investigating elusive leads about the Dollhouse, seeking to expose it and bring it down. Oh, and as it happens the programming technique isn’t quite flawless… some dolls retain fragmentary memories, and at least one has escaped the Dollhouse under violent circumstances and gone rogue.

Got all that?  Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: Dollhouse, genre, Joss Whedon, television

It’s a nice refreshing tingly feeling, isn’t it, to watch a president who clearly not only understands complex economic concepts, but is even capable of boiling them down into simplified versions for the press? (Even if he’s occasionally visibly frustrated by the need to do so.) Bush always came across as just barely in command of the PowerPoint version of reality some adviser had walked him through, and painfully incapable of going into greater depth about anything.

The corporate media, of course (at least so far as I saw on NBC), was preoccupied with the fleeting meme that strategically speaking, Obama should have done this a week ago. That, however, utterly misses every point worth getting.

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Tags: economy, media, Obama, television

It’s been far longer than I intended since my last post. Sometimes time just runs away from you. So let me just toss off a few ideas that have crossed my mind in recent days, and get caught up…

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First off:  the wrangling in Washington over the new “economic stimulus package” has been interesting to watch. Obama has gone out of his way to be as “post-partisan” as promised, extending an olive branch to Republicans the likes of which Dems never saw under eight years of Bush, wining and dining them, inviting input… and in response they basically gave him the finger. (Although, anxious not to alienate a public who likes him, they tried to shift their ire toward the Democratic leadership.) And the usual suspects in the punditocracy backed them up.

Basically, the GOP’s goal right now seems to be to shrink the stimulus bill down to something so small and weak that it won’t be effective… and then to blame their opponents for its ineffectiveness. All while the country at large continues to suffer, of course.

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Tags: Battlestar Galactica, Congress, Dan DiDio, DC Comics, economy, Final Crisis, House of Representatives, Illinois, Legion, Obama, Republicans, Senate, super-heroes, television, Tom Geoghegan, unemployment

In front of a movie a couple of weeks ago, one of the now-ubiquitous ads to which the captive audience was subjected was for the fifth season premiere of Lost, which aired tonight. I recall thinking that the scope and tone and visual style of the show seemed remarkably well suited to the big screen.

At the same time, though, the show offers something more than any single two-hour movie. My posts about comics should certainly make it clear that I enjoy serial fiction… such a format is really the only way something as episodic as television (or comics) can approach the depth and texture of a novel. Moreover, I’ve written before about how much I enjoy intelligent, imaginative science fiction, which Lost certainly offers in spades.

And for the record, I’m also a sucker for a good predestination-paradox time travel story. So, as of tonight, I’m more hooked than ever.

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Tags: Lost, television, time travel

Remember not long ago I threatened to write about the process of (re)configuring my home theater equipment?

What, you thought I was kidding?…

What’s frustrating is this:  my girlfriend and I have a system we’re perfectly happy with. Nothing terribly high-end, but carefully researched and assembled. DVD players and recorder and a nice surround-sound setup. In particular, we watch high-definition (HD) signals on an HDTV, aided by a HD DVR. It all works and does what we want. And yet… even though we don’t watch any analog programming, I find that we’re going to be affected by the long-delayed but now impending switch to all-digital broadcasting on February 17th.

A little backstory:

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Tags: customer service, DVRs, internet, television, TVGOS