They say the first step is admitting you have a problem.  Lady and gentleman who read my blog, I have a problem.  I watch way too much television.  Case and point:  I visited Hulu.com as I often do when I have other things I should be doing and decided to give the pilot episode of SyFy’s Haven a look-see.

I like Stephen King.  I like Maine in theory.  And while waiting for Fringe to return in the fall, I could use something reminiscent of The X-Files and every other crime fighting science fiction show ever.   Plus, Haven has that one actor from Six Feet Under and 24 with the great goatee that I saw in Santa Monica the other weekend.  Consider me sold.

Ten minutes into the pilot, our fish out of water FBI agent is having a somewhat heated conversation with the local police chief because this murder just isn’t making any sense.  That’s when I recognize the police chief.  He’s the actor who played the coroner and title character in the Canadian crime show Da Vinci’s Inquest.

He’s a little grayer and puffier than when I last saw him bucking the system and fighting for his dead victims in Vancouver, but it’s definitely him.  Although I lived in Canada for several years, the only reason I know and love Da Vinci’s Inquest is because my Canadian grandmother stumbled across it at 4pm everyday on A&E.  The show was amazing, and not just because in Canada, the coroners are a cross between a homicide detective, American coroners who conduct autopsies, and judges who get to hold their own trials otherwise known as inquests.  Every episode was reminiscent of Homicide:  Life on the Street or Law & Order in it’s prime when Sam Waterson aka A.D.A. Jack McCoy played the system anyway he could to get justice.  And Da Vinci himself was a brilliant alcoholic misanthrope who could banter up and down a scene with his teenage daughter.  Anyway, the show was amazing until Da Vinci got into politics, but back to the point– this actor my grandma loves shows up in the middle of a crime scene on this new show Haven.

I immediately call my grandpa’s cell phone, and when he answers and explains that they’re out to lunch with some visiting family, I assure him it’s an emergency and I need to talk to Grandma now.  Very confused and a little concerned, she takes the phone, and I start heatedly describing to her what I’ve just witnessed.  Da Vinci is on a new show that they absolutely have to start watching immediately, like during lunch if possible.  You see, not only do I watch too much television, but I know far too much about other people’s viewing habits.  I know that my grandparents love procedurals, but especially the kind that are a little tongue in cheek and on the quirky side.  Haven is set in Maine with an absurd recurring cast of locals and the occasional death or dismemberment is seen as puzzling and troubling rather than earth shattering, and that’s perfect as they really enjoy something with a body count and a sense of humor a la the long dead Nash Bridges or more recently Castle.

Doesn’t get much better than Don Johnson and Cheech

Except for maybe Nathon Fillion and… can we replace her with Cheech?

Grandpa also has a thing for young, pretty professional woman who are too smart and too sarcastic for their own good.  This describes the blonde protagonist in Haven to a tee.  And Grandma loves paranormal undertones, but nothing as frustrating or vague as the supernatural on a show like Lost.  The strange phenomenon in Haven have a logical and clear if still fantastical explanation by every episode’s end.  PLUS, there’s a recurring role played by Da Vinci!  If the start of a television show tailor made for them isn’t an emergency, I don’t know what is!!!!

Grandma laughed, explained to visiting family what my call was about, and handed the phone back to Grandpa.  Grandpa laughed and asked me to email him the name of the show and when it aired so he could record it on his DVR.   A few days later, he emailed me back to say they loved it.  Just as I was starting to feel proud of my recommendation, my television viewing prowess, it hit me.  I watch way too much damn television.

no comments | posted in TV

My obsession with Greek started out as a day long marathon on some random Canadian channel when there was thirteen inches of snow on the ground and nothing outside my apartment worth wading through the weather for anyway.  Growing up, I completely missed out on the WB’s golden era, and maybe I’m just making up for lost time with these crazy college kids and their beer pong, but as overthinking often follows obsession, I’m pretty sure there’s more to it than that.

(more…)

2 comments | posted in TV

For the past five weeks, Sundays have been Spielberg Nights with an hour and a half of Taken, the 2002 miniseries about alien abductions as experienced by three families over three generations, followed by The Pacific, the unflinching WWII miniseries set on islands I haven’t had to pronounce since AP U.S. History.  While Taken started out incredibly strong, the transition from the fifties and into the eighties has been rough in such a way that begs this question: With multi-strand, multi-generational stories, do they feel convoluted because they’re rushed or do they feel rushed because they’re convoluted? (more…)

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I have a minor obsession with Jaime Oliver’s Food Revolution.  The first thing I do on Saturdays is make a pot of coffee, head to hulu.com, and watch the newest episode.  Over a homemade nachos and Castle Crashers, I was singing the show’s praises to my friend Amanda when she criticized the program for being incredibly exploitative.  She cites the episode where Jamie is appalled when elementary age school children can’t name their vegetables, and her point was that children that age are still learning to put names to all kinds of concepts and objects.  Was he in fact being exploitative?   Am I a fan of one of those reality television shows that entertain their audiences at the expense of the their subjects? (more…)

4 comments | posted in TV

The original Parenthood with Diane Wiest, Tom Hulce, a young Martha Plimpton, younger Joaquin Phoenix, and Steve Martin is one of my favorites.  It used to be on TBS or TNT or one of those other cable channels that was around before cable channels were ubiquitous, and it always sucked me in.  Even before I understood exactly what the photos Diane Wiest’s character developed showed her daughter doing with Keanu Reeves, I found it hysterical, heartbreaking and totally honest.  The new NBC series is getting there with the hysterical and the heartbreaking, but they often miss the mark in the honesty department.

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I recently got back into the 90s Disney cartoon Gargoyles in a big way, and it made me sad for my sister’s generation.  She’s twelve going on thirty or thirteen, depending on whether or not the menagerie of animals she keeps in her room woke her up too early.  We’re just over a generation apart, and the kids’ television landscape couldn’t be more different.  I watched Ren & Stimpy, Roundhouse, Rugrats, Are You Afraid of the Dark?, and Clarissa Explains It All.   None of them starred a tweener who was obsessed with fame.  None of them were about being the most popular kids in school.  Those statements are a lot harder to make about any four shows on Nick or Disney right now, and you can add Cartoon Network to the list when you’re talking about shows geared toward young girls.

Out of all the shows airing new episodes on the Disney channel, only three don’t have anything to do with being rich or famous.  One of those three, Wizards of Waverly Place, almost doesn’t count because the Disney channel is ardently launching the actress playing the main character’s (Selena Gomez) singing career.  Then there’s Nickelodeon, where both of its new live action shows are about teenagers becoming pop stars, VicTORIous, a pop star’s younger sister Tori goes to a performing art school where she feels like she doesn’t fit in,  and Big Time Rush, a boy band that moves from Minnesota or Montana or Kansas or somewhere to Hollywood.  Both networks still have a few animated series’ free of autotune, but not nearly as many as they did in the mid 90s. (more…)

2 comments | posted in TV

I’ve started contributing to two amazing websites out here in the interwebs.  In alphabetical order they are…

All Things Fangirl

Pop Culture Nerd

Over at the Nerd, I’ll be writing about what promises to be a short but sweet season of Big Love and with the Fangirls, I’ll gush about games, comics, and my Nintendo DS.

These two sites are awesome.  Read them.  The end.

no comments | posted in Comics, Games, TV, Writing

From what I’ve been hearing and reading over the past few days, the general reaction to the pilot episode of this re-boot is “Meh.”  I’m not saying I agree exactly, especially because I feel like the last ten or fifteen minutes really redeemed a lot of the episode’s early clunkiness, but I do think this hour of television was full of missed opportunities.

For one, I think that instead of resorting to cliches to quickly communicate characters and their relationships–the working single mom who’s teenage son blames her for driving his dad away because she wasn’t around, the guy trying to propose to his fiance while running from his dark past, the smarmy politician/journalist looking out for number one–they could have simply taken their time.  This is a show where aliens from another planet park their massive hover craft over every major city on earth and plan to gain the trust of earthlings through miracle cures and insane technology only to blow us to bits with their floating ball machine guns thingies.  If the script does a good job of introducing and setting all that up, we’ll tune in for a few weeks to learn who these people are.  (more…)

2 comments | posted in TV

If you’ve seen at least one episode of Grey’s Anatomy than you know that she is obsessed with major, invasive, near impossible surgeries.  In a pinch, major surgery with little risk involved will do.  Hell, if she really needs a fix, minor surgery can tide her over.  The woman is obsessed with cutting and does nothing to hide it.

Though her need is more animalistic than financial, Dr. Yang is one of the reasons healthcare is so damned expensive.  In fact, so are nearly all the doctors at Seattle Grace and Princeton Plainsborough.   But Cristina Yang is probably the worst.  She could care less about interacting with the patients or the quality of life she’s given them once they leave her care.   For her, it’s all about getting them under the knife, and making incisions and stitches very few others can make. (more…)

2 comments | posted in TV

For my thesis senior year, I wrote a spec script for one of the twenty medical procedurals on television.  (The value of my degree is plummeting as I type this.)  I read medical journals, called physicians, and even ventured into the library to flip through medical books.  I overshot a little.  My mother is a physician who can’t take more than twenty minutes of any medical show, but she suffered through a few episodes of the one I was spec-ing.  When I called it at 5am, having been up all night trying to figure out how to make a renal failure joke, she told me that these shows got the medical stuff right about 30% of the time.  In her professional medical opinion, I needed to go to bed.

So even though they’re only right about medical stuff 30% of the time according to the experts, House’s portrayal of a video game designer in the episode “Epic Fail” was exactly that.  The video game industry isn’t exactly transparent, so it’s not as if every viewer was shaking their head throughout the episode, but it would have been nice if they’d at least talked to someone who made games.  A ten minute conversation, fifteen tops, and they could have gotten it at least 30% right. (more…)

4 comments | posted in Games, TV