WTF?

The TV was on this afternoon. I guess it was one of our time-shift channels because all the ads were for Toronto and Mississauga.  The ad I happened to catch was for a Toronto TV station’s morning show.  The tag line was “Like the morning paper without all that annoying reading.”

What sort of moronic message is that to give to kids, or to anyone for that matter? That reading is a chore? An annoyance?

Jesus God Almighty, it just makes me mad!

 

“The Middle” Is The 99% …

… and “Modern Family” is the planet-chewing 1%.

I don’t write much about TV these days.  I don’t watch that much other than Knowledge and Sports.  However, I really like “The Middle” (and so I watch it), and my wife likes “Modern Family” (and so I get to see it.)  And thus here I am writing about them.

They are both thirty-minute networks sitcoms featuring colourful families and big TV stars (Patricia Heaton in “The Middle” and Ed O’Neill in “Modern Family“) and both began in 2009. However, if you haven’t watched it, you may not even be aware of “The Middle” but most of us could hardly miss the hullabaloo as “Modern Family” wins award after award year after year.

“Modern Family” receives accolades for dealing sympathetically with a gay couple, an older Anglo man married to a younger Hispanic woman, and vicious sibling rivalry. Each of these three families is, at least, middle class and the Ed O’Neill family can hardly be anything but rich.  The dialog is said to be modern and important but it sounds stylised and almost theatrical to me.

“Modern Family” definitely represents the 1% where most people don’t seem to have to work that hard, where a household can spend thousands of dollars on a Halloween house party and the “problems” are about relationships and a sort of metaphysical angst.

On the other hand, “The Middle” is about real people.  It is about a working class couple who cannot make ends meet with two full-time jobs and they have three kids each of whom is as dysfunctional as we can imagine our teenaged kids to be.

“The Middle” represents the 99% of us who have to run fast just to stay in the same rotten groove.  The language is down to earth and the problems involve money (usually the lack of it), the disappointments of childhood, and the quotidian efforts to keep all the patched appliances working. The dialog is genuinely funny and none of the characters is a pastiche.

“Modern Family” is the banker getting billion-dollar bonuses for conceptualizing, while “The Middle” is a hard-rock miner getting by on minimum wage.

 

 

Honesty Or Just Bad Service?

I booked a support call to Shaw TV today. They always give you the option of hanging on or having a call-back. I chose the call-back.  The message from the call-back system was that they would call me back after at least four hours.  I know that’s really bad service, but does their honesty about the delay make it better?  I don’t think so.

While I am at it, let me also complain about a form of negative-billing-via-inconvenience that they practice.  You can go on line to Shaw and ADD any TV/cable service you want. But you cannot DELETE a service on line; for that you have to use the perilous telephone support system.  I’m sure that does deter some people, to the advantage of the company.

Generally I am quite satisfied with Shaw, but these particular things are really annoying!

The Beatles’ First US Tour

On February 7, 1964 — exactly fifty years to the day after Charlie Chaplin unleashed the Little Tramp to conquer the world — the Beatles arrived in New York and the next British Invasion was officially launched.

Their first appearance was on the “Ed Sullivan Show” two days later, and their first US concert, at the Coliseum in Washington DC was on the 11th. A few more shows and they were back in England on the 22nd; just two weeks and the Beatle’s first US tour was over. But it sure left its mark.

It Must Be An Age Thing

I can still be a competitive SOB, especially when it comes to things like “Jeopardy.”  I aim to get every question right and though I never make that level of perfection, I usually get pretty close and can get most upset when I miss one.

Tonight there was a question about TV trivia and the answer was “Buffy The Vampire Slayer” and I found myself saying out loud: “I’m really glad I didn’t know that!”

Now I am at peace about the whole thing.

32 Years Have Passed Since …

… the “Dukes of Hazzard” appeared on US TV. I was alerted to the fact that today is the anniversary of the show’s premiere in 1979 by an email from a friend; and it sure made me think.

It made me think that my generation simply gave up and allowed the current world to be; it made me think that I’m not convinced we have progressed — changed, yes, but progressed? — since the “Dukes of Hazzard.”

I’ll have to write more about this, but I definitely have a sense of disappointment in what we didn’t do over the last thirty or forty years.

The Lingering Death of Video Stores

The video rental store — one or more of which has probably been a fixture in your main street — is coming to the end of its relatively short life; after their emergence in the early 1970s, it is hard to see them surviving much into the next decade.  They have been overwhelmed by Netflix and video-on-demand-on-TV and all those movies now available through the internet.

There are three independent video stores still operating on Commercial Drive here in Vancouver, but I expect them all to become coffee bars or schwarma cafes within the next year or so.

While Blockbuster only went bankrupt last month, Wayne Huizenga who built the company in its “blockbuster” days saw the writing on the wall and sold out for billions in the late 1990s.   Now, the Wall Street Journal formally issues the burial notice.

I disagree with some of the comments on the WSJ piece:  I do not expect bookstores to go the same way anytime soon.  A VCR or CD case, no matter how attractive the images, does not have the appeal of a book; they are very different items in how they feel, how they work and how people feel about them.  I’m sure that books will go on for a long while yet, regardless of the growing popularity of the Kindle and its clones.  But video rentals, their time has already come and gone.

A Cultural Shift Of Serious Proportions

Business Insider has the fascinating details about a major cultural shift in North America that is happening today: the demise of the soap opera in the face of competition from social networking and community gaming.

On October 5, 2009, CBS canceled “Guiding Light,” the longest running television drama in history, which began in 1952. This September, CBS will air the last episode of “As The World Turns,” the Proctor & Gamble production that has been running for more than 50 years. What’s more, ad dollars allocated to soaps fell nearly 30 percent from 2005 to 2009, and then fell another 20 percent in the first half of 2010.

So, why is all of this happening?

The television media has argued that the death of soap operas is the result of both women entering the workforce in increased numbers and the popularity of reality shows, the latter of which provides an alternate means to achieving the emotional gratification originally delivered by soap operas. I would, however, propose an alternate reading of events.

My belief is that viewers have abandoned daytime programming en masse because they’ve found more compelling content online, particularly social games of the Farmville, ZooWorld and Restaurant City variety. Furthermore, if things continue down the path they are on, social gaming will kill daytime television altogether.

I am not a devotee of soap operas.  Because my wife always watches “General Hospital” every day, I have vicariously (while doing something else) become an expert in the comings and goings in Port Charles.  I have also written in a previous post about soap operas how I came to admire their craft, at least.  But I don’t really known about the business.  It does seem reasonable — based on my own empirical sources of evidence — that the interwebs have stolen time from TV generally. And the advertising dollar collapse shows that this particular marketplace is in serious trouble.

Soap operas successfully fought off challenges from other levels of TV-watching (the introduction of cable, of Pay-TV, of video-on-demand, for example), and they flourished during the Bingo explosion of the 1980s and early 1990s.  But Farmville and Facebook and Twitter are proving to be a much harder set of competition.

I’m not one to stand in the way of “progress” solely for the sake of nostalgia. But I do have to wonder what the economy is going to do with the tens of thousands of actors, technicians and other creative personnel that will have to be absorbed if daytime TV disappears.

Censorship Is Censorship

I have lately been bombarded with emails telling me to sign a petition that asks the CRTC to disallow a Fox News-style TV station from operating in Canada. Whenever I go on Twitter, Margaret Atwood and others are tweeting along the same lines.

I dislike Fox News hate-mongers as much as the next person with at least half a brain but I hate censorship even more. I happen to believe the average Canadian is intelligent enough to know what the “Change Channel” button on their remote is for.  There is no need for these “liberals” to try to impose their censorship on the rest of us like some nanny.

The Hubris of Actors

Earlier today on Twitter, Ice-T and some others were bitching about being hassled by police for minor offences, mostly auto-related. Ice-T wrote:

“We interrupt this program with a special bulletin: America is now under martial law. All constitutional rights have been suspended!”

I tweeted him that if — and I emphasized “if” — the cops were following the law then it wasn’t the cops he should be complaining about but rather the politicians who made the bad laws. He wrote back, I kid you not:

“From playing a Cop on SVU for 10 years I understand the difference between a real CRIME and just fucking with someone because you can….”

Well, I sure hope he looks to Hugh Laurie to do his next brain surgery because although he’s not a doctor he does play one on TV, and that should be enough, right?

Sad Ending For A King

David Case in the New York Times has an excellent and well-balanced article about what will soon be the end of the career of Larry King.  It will be hard, even for those of who no longer watch him, to imagine TV or at least CNN without him. But his time has passed, for sure, even though the network claims not to believe it.

It’s nice that the network is supportive of a talent that helped build its identity, but is this really how CNN wants this all to play out? It’s not as if the idea that Mr. King’s reign might end came out of nowhere. He has always been a bit of a cartoon, but a willing one, and he made for good television as he wobbled his way toward greater truths using a regular-guy approach to inordinately famous or newsworthy people. Not any more.  On Thursday night, he took on BP’s Congressional testimony with four highly politicized commentators and failed to tame the lions. Each segment ended in unwatchable cross-talk. Earlier in the week, he stepped up on the gulf story by interviewing Sammy Kershaw, a country singer and candidate for lieutenant governor of Louisiana, but seemed powerless as Mr. Kershaw kidnapped the show by reading a windy infomercial about the glories of gulf seafood from notes scribbled on a piece of paper.

In the same week, his show tacked to the tabloid side of the news, with interviews of the family of the slain Peruvian woman, a death for which Joran van der Sloot has been charged. Mr. Van der Sloot is a suspect in the earlier, much followed disappearance of the Alabama teenager Natalee Holloway in Aruba. The interview was a weave of long pauses and odd pivots — “How well did you know your sister-in-law?” — that looked and sounded more like cable access than the work of a cable powerhouse.

That’s kind of sad.  Case has an excellent idea about how this should play out:

Why not announce a yearlong victory lap for Mr. King? You could probably count on both Obamas, both Clintons, both George Bushes, both Martha and Jon Stewart, with maybe some Tiger, a little Oprah, all stopping by for some much deserved ring-kissing.  The 25th anniversary week proved that Mr. King can still move the ratings with aggressive booking, and meanwhile CNN could negotiate with Mr. King to free up some nights for a kind of bake-off, a rolling audition of hopefuls.

Sounds like a plan to me.

Important News

… and while I’m up and about and looking around, I’m glad to see that the world is still full of important — neh, vital — news.  Such as Subway changing the way they put cheese on their sandwiches!

I’ll be watching them closely next time I get a 6″ Italian BMT with extra cheese.  And I’m also glad to have found out that Charlie Sheen’s jail time for domestic violence will not affect the schedule of “Two and a Half Men“.  I mean, really: Now I can sleep nights without worrying about that.

And Big Al and Tipper Gore splitting up!  What a shocker.

Sheesh!  If the news is always this busy, I just don’t know that I can keep up.  Thanks to Consumerist for the Subway piece, Deadline for Charlie Sheen, NYT for all the Gore that’s fit to print.

What’s The Big Deal With 3-D?

There is an interesting piece in the New York Times today about the campaigns being prepared by television manufacturers to sell us on the expensive idea of 3-D on TV.  Samsung alone will spend $100 million this year on marketing it to us.

TV manufacturers are betting on 3-D. There are forecasts that consumers will buy 3.5 million to 4 million such sets, or about 10 percent of all United States television sales, this year. But that may be optimistic. Different and incompatible technologies mean that one maker’s glasses, for example, cannot be used on another’s television model. “The glasses go for a premium — around $150 — which means it’s costly, for example, to have a few people over for a Super Bowl party, unless it’s ‘bring your own compatible spectacles,’ ” said Ross Rubin, an analyst for NPD Group, a market research firm.

This is all such nonsense! I see in 3-D all the time, it is the natural way of seeing for human beings — and we do it without having to resort to fancy glasses.  Why would I want to pay extra for what is normal?    For me, one of the aesthetics of watching television or film or even fine art is that 2-D is NOT normal, and the skill is in translating a regular 3-D world into the artistic constraints of 2-D.

I’ll stick with the unreality of movies and TV and paintings, thanks very much.

Cricket As Post-Modern Consumerism

Many people in the Americas believe that cricket is a complex old-fashioned game, probably more suitable to English village greens than modern stadia. That is primarily because the same many people in the Americas are mislead by their media and have no idea that, across the world, cricket is second only to football (soccer) in its popularity. A lot of this has to do with India, where cricket is the national sport, and the television audience is almost four times the size of the US market.

Moreover, cricket has changed with the times, developing new forms that have created additional waves of popularity and television opportunity. Fans can now select from traditional 4- and 5-day matches, matches that take about 8 hours to complete, and matches that are over in three hours. Or they can watch all three; most do. Cricket has found a way to triple its audience.

The most modern of these types of cricket is called 20/20, especially as formatted under the professional Indian Premier League (IPL) which introduced cheerleaders to cricket. The eight franchises in the IPL cost hundreds of millions of dollars.  Players are literally bought and sold on televised auctions before each season and the best cricketers in the world command multi-million dollar contracts for an 8-week gig. This is huge money and the League fetishizes that money, making sure that Bollywood royalty and industrial billionaires are featured visitors to the games.  Matches take about three hours and the crowds at the arenas for the first three seasons were extraordinary even though the TV treats the games as prime time spectacles.

Moreover — and the point of this post — the League flourishes because of the wild generosity of advertizers and the looseness of the IPL rules on what can be placed on a uniform, on a pitch or on equipment. I was reminded of this by a great article on cricinfo by Rahul Bhattacharya.

Watching the IPL is like encountering one of those post-modern narratives that seeks to satirise consumerism. Surely, one thinks, this must be a critique of the contemporary world and [Commissioner] Lalit Modi not its marketing whiz but its artistic seer.

The player outfits look like a collage of flyers. Excluding the team crest, they wear two logos on the front, two on the “non-leading arm”, two on the “leading arm”, and a big one at the back. The trousers sport a logo on each leg. The helmets and caps have one at the rear and another on the side. The umpires are similarly draped, though they haven’t such a variety.

The beautiful baize of the field is defaced by anywhere between five and eight giant logos, one or two on the straights, and the remaining square. Inside the advertising boundary boards, the boundary triangles carry branding. So do the sightscreens; so do the stumps. The fibreglass of the dugouts is tattooed in logos. There is a blimp in the sky. A giant screen constantly fizzes with advertisements. The banners in the crowd can be sponsored (“Cheer your Citi”).

Watching on the telly one sometimes loses a horizontal quarter to ads, sometimes a vertical quarter, sometimes both together. Along the bottom, there are text promos the whole while.  As many viewers have noted with horror, this season features ads between not just overs but between deliveries, cunningly zooming in and out of the giant screen sometimes. Besides, there are two “strategic time-outs”. These provide 10 minutes of pure, cricket-free ads. These have been sold to Maxx Mobile: perhaps the first instance, as somebody said, of a sponsored ad-break.

Bhattacharya notes that most Indians are not participants in sports and are simply consumers.  They treat cricket on TV in the same way as they treat the popular saas-bahu, family soap operas — they will watch whichever seems to be most exciting at that moment, and huge sums of money are exciting.  In India, money “is the parameter to judge a profession, a work of art, a life … It empowers and it attracts power.”

The 20/20 form within a small high-talent league system is the most likely type of cricket to break through in the North American market.  It may take advertizers and networks some time to catch up to Indian expertise in its exploitation.

In 1950, Television Already Revealed As Evil

As I have written elsewhere, I am currently researching a history of Commercial Drive.  In the midst of that research I have found an editorial in the Highland Echo, Commercial Drive’s local paper, that takes a prescient view of television.  They describe it as:

… just one more of the influences currently being brought to bear on the American people to render them incapable of independent thought and independent decisions.”

Not much to add to that really.  The date of the editorial?  30th November, 1950.

Sumo Glee!

Two things I really love — Glee and sumo — in one beautiful video!  Some days are just better than others.

Good stuff, Fox!

It is good to see that Akebono has shed several hundred pounds since his dohyo days.

A Deadly Few Days

Ed McMahon, Farrah Fawcett, Michael Jackson and John Houghtaling, the inventor of the vibrating bed — all dead in less than a week. Almost makes you want to stay sober.

Of course there won’t be any black humour about Jackson’s death.  Vitiligo saw to that.

The Worst Person In The World

Keith Olbermann of MSNBC, who certainly used to have some value as a commentator, has become the Bill O’Reilly of the liberal Democrats; an extremist, a clown, a caricature of his earlier self.  His ungainly performances are all the more stark coming as they do between the generally sensible Chris Matthews and the excellent Rachel Maddow, both of whom represent similar constituencies.

Olbermann has a segment on his show called “The Worst Person In The World.”  This is used to bash his regular targets at Murdoch and FoxNews companies.  Tonight’s “Worst Person In The World” was Cynthia Davis, a Missouri Republican, who had the temerity to espouse a libertarian/anarchist position on funding food for poor children.  She suggested that it is not government’s role to feed families with taxpayer dollars (isn’t that role of churches and charities and community?), that poor families could be given help in learning how to prepare economical nutritious meals, that parents should spend less on candies and ice cream and meals out.

One doesn’t have to agree with her position (though I do) to recognize it as a reasoned political opinion, an opinion allowed under the Freedom of Thought and Speech that the liberal left likes to hoist on a pedestal whenever they are attacked.  But Olbermann doesn’t see it that way.  He doesn’t agree with her, she used an unfortunate phrase (“hunger as motivator”), and so she has to become an object of ridicule.  His intolerance was rank and smelled to high heaven.

To me, this knee-jerk hypocrisy helps elevate Olbermann himself closer than Davis to the position of “Worst Person In The World.”

The Art of TV Rep

A long, long time ago, I was a member of a repertory theatre company in London.  We alternated with one of two plays each evening, and one or the other for a matinee on Saturdays.  Every four weeks or so we changed the plays.   That meant in any particular week, each actor/crew member was performing two full plays and was rehearsing two others.  It was a tough slog and I didn’t last long as an actor.  I just couldn’t retain that many lines and still keep them straight.  Hold that thought.

Meanwhile, my Bride is addicted to the soap opera “General Hospital“.  It is a love affair that long predates her infatuation with yours truly.  I generally don’t get to see it because I’m at work when it is on.  But when I am at home, like this week, “General Hospital” is not something I can easily avoid.  Like many, I have had a very low opinion of soap operas.  But why exactly?  Is it a class thing? I don’t really know.

What I do know, is that I have come to respect the repertory actors who inhabit these shows.  Soap operas don’t have the budgets for special effects or location shooting.  They are dialog-driven, with more than forty minutes of speech delivered every day, five days a week, 50 or so weeks every year.  These things tend to have large ensemble casts (contrast them with primetime comdedies or dramas), but still the burden on each actor is impressive.  It so far exceeds the number of lines I had to learn on the stage each week, that I cannot but be impressed.

And a surprising number of the actors make a great effort in their characterizations.  They are hamstrung by the contrived nature of much of the dialog, by the budget/production limitations that keep each scene in a single place, and by the limited number of locations that be created.  But they keep at it.  These, just like the actors who fill out the #2 and #3 touring companies across the continent, are true artisans of the acting craft, excellent workaday actors.

Did this post have a point?  Does it need to?

Vancouver Through Mediated Eyes

For twenty years and more, Vancouver has been a major film-making centre.  In particular, we are well-known for the numbers of “cult” TV series that have used our city and its environs as their own — “Smallville“, for example, “MacGyver“, “Battlestar Galactica” and, most especially, “X-Files“.  So well known that fans of the shows make pilgrimages to Vancouver to see the locations live.

In a fascinating essay entitled “Everywhere and nowhere: Vancouver, fan pilgrimage and the urban imaginary“, Will Brooker notes that the average tourist will enjoy our art deco Marine Building as an architectural jewel, while one fan tourist will see the building as the “Daily Planet” office from “Smallville“, and another will recognize it as where X-Filer Scully chased her sister’s assassin.

Our Colosseum-inspired Public Library is Metropolis Courthouse in “Smallville“, but for the visiting “Battlestar” fan it will be on the planet Caprica.

The premise of the article is that Vancouver is so popular a location that, in post-modern imagery, it has become “flat” and thus amenable to

“dress-up and disguise, and in turn the pilgrims who recognize and remember its disguises – seeing the Marine Building doubled as the Daily Planet building, for instance – experience the city not as the dully unremarkable subtopia of Relph’s account or as the postmodern ‘scamscape’ Soja cautions against in Californian suburbs, but as several impossible cities laid over the real in a liberating geography.”

Brooker notes that Vancouver’s position in fandom is entirely different than, say, Graceland or Coronation Street, where imaginations are limited to a single appreciation.  The fan visiting Vancouver invariably finds multiple meanings because “more than most sites of fan pilgrimage, they evoke other imaginary maps  that have to be held in a double, triple, multiple vision alongside the real.”  Clearly we are in the the “postmodern realm of simulation and pastiche”.  However,

“Vancouver is a slightly different case to the more obvious simulation cities and suburbs. Unlike theme-park worlds, its other-directedness and points of connection are visible only to those pilgrims with specialist knowledge and fan investment. The passages to other worlds – the Marine Building as part of Scully’s Washington DC, the cathedral as a route to Mulder’s Iowa – are hidden to the non-fan.”

Those of us who live here generally experience neither the “dully unremarkable suptopia”, nor Soja’s “scamscape”.  But each of us can feel the thrill of the fan when we see a recognizably Vancouver building standing in for someplace else.