After yesterday’s comments on some NBC shows, I thought I’d share some thoughts on this season’s FOX shows. Hopefully, I won’t have to be as hard on the FOX Broadcasting company as I was on NBC!
Fringe
This is the best new show of the season, bar none. The show is from J. J. Abrams (the guy who created Lost) and has a distinct “Lost” feel to it (more on that later). The use of John Noble as Dr. Walter Bishop was a great casting decision. Noble plays the sometimes crazy, but always intelligent Dr. Bishop better than anyone else could. He has that unique range in his acting where he can be completely serious or an absolute nut job. Good casting.
What is less pleasing about the show is the interplay between Dr. Bishop and his son Peter Bishop, played by Joshua Jackson. Peter Bishop is supposed to be this low-level playboy turned into entrepreneur turned into businessman or something. His character is supposed to have an air of arrogance about him and Jackson does a good job of bringing that out in his acting. But the writers have Peter constantly annoyed and aggravated at his father and it gets very old, very quick. In fact, I think it got old around the second or third episode.
Anna Torv is Agent Olivia Dunham, a member of the FBI who is charged with investigating events that may be part of “The Pattern.” Sound cryptic yet? Thank you, Mr. Abrams, for bringing some of your Lost thoughts over to Fringe! But that’s part of the problem with this show. And this is definitely an unfair statement, but knowing that J. J. Abrams is behind this show is scary because Abrams has a history of leaving shows and projects half finished. Case in point - Lost. As soon as he left Lost, it began to go downhill. I hope he sticks with Fringe because if he leaves, then this complex show might be doomed.
For now, though, I recommend checking out Fringe or at least DVR’ing it for future viewing. Oh, and BIG kudos go out to the FOX team for bringing us this show with limited commercial interruptions. As the show cuts to commercial, the viewers are told “Fringe will return in __ seconds.” The blank space is either 60 or 90. Imagine that - a great television show with limited commercial interruptions!
House
If Fringe is the best new show on television, the House has to be the best returning show on television. Since I started watching this show last year I’ve been hooked. It’s awesome! So far this season Dr. House, played by Hugh Laurie, has had to face his step father’s death and almost losing his best friend Dr. Wilson. The writers for this show are doing a great job of pushing along the basic storyline of Dr. House being a complete asshole to his co-workers and his patients, yet maintaining a certain air of super intelligence and coolness while doing so.
The latest episode saw “Thirteen” getting fired and rehired by House (and some explicit, yet enjoyable, scenes of Thirteen hooking up with another lady). The games that House plays with his employees and co-workers has been given a nice kick in the ass this season by the introduction of Lucas Douglas (played by Michael Weston) - a private investigator hired by House to spy on everyone.
Douglas does a good job of matching wits with House in the early episodes of this season. He and House become friends and Douglas becomes the doctor’s “on-call” personal investigator. The interaction between the two is fun to watch because it is written very much like a big brother/little brother relationship.
If you haven’t yet gotten hooked on House, then now would be a good time to start. This show is great!
It’s been a while since I offered some random thoughts on the current state of television, so here we go! Hopefully my rantings make sense to the rest of you like they make sense to me!
The Biggest Loser: Families
For some reason I’m not getting as into this season of The Biggest Loser as I was into the last two seasons. Part of the problem is the contestants on the show. I just don’t care about their successes and failures like I cared about the contestants on the last two seasons. The concept of this season - that families would be competing on the show and that the trainers picked out their own trainees - was a novel one. For my television habits, though, it’s just not working.
Although a large part of the problem is NBC (and this is a recurring problem that you’ll see below). NBC is a great example of a company that is run by people who work with numbers and look only at the bottom line (which, by the way, currently sucks for parent company, GE). You can tell that no one at NBC is watching The Biggest Loser because there is NO way that a competent executive would allow the show to be broadcast the way it is. What does that mean? Well, every single time the show cuts to a commercial it is at a crucial point in the drama being told (whether that drama be real or made up). You can’t do that EVERY single time! Once in a while, you have to give your audience a bone and give them the payoff right there.
Plus, when the show comes back from commercial the viewer is treated to some 30 - 60 seconds of pre-commercial break content before getting to new content. What an insult! This is what you get when you combine “big television corporation” think with a “make more money” mindset.
Crusoe
This is a new show on NBC that follows the “new” adventures of Robinson Crusoe on his deserted island. For those of you that don’t know the story of Robinson Crusoe, it’s the story of a traveling merchant/businessman who is shipwrecked on an abandoned island. While on the island, he befriends a “savage” who is then named “Friday” - the day of the week he was saved by Crusoe. Think Lost and Gilligan’s Island, but starting in literary format almost three hundred years ago.
The first episode showed Crusoe defending his island against both pirates and corrupt Spanish prison guards - both groups which eventually wind up looking for buried treasure. Not a bad plot for a two-hour series premier. I thought the first episode was fun to watch and had the beginnings of a great show. Then the second episode came on…guh.
For some reason Friday and Crusoe spar over meaningless issues. Then we find out that there is a burial ground hidden within a mountain on the island - too Lost-esque for my liking. And not just too Lost-esque, but like a low-end version of Lost being pushed by a corporate powerhouse. Part of this show is also Crusoe’s constant flashbacks to what his life was like off of the island. Those flashbacks worked well in the first episode, but became burdensome in the second episode. Combine this with the fact that NBC doesn’t know how to go into a commercial break and you have the makings of an uncomfortable viewing situation for the people at home.
Finally, the preview for next week’s episode teased whether this would be the week that Crusoe gets off the island. So is this going to be the theme of the show each week? I hope not because that type of plot has no legs. Want proof? The preview suggested that a ship was coming to the island and this may be Crusoe’s chance to get off. Bleh. Wasn’t that the plot of the first episode? Let’s hope NBC doesn’t kill off what could be a good show here.
More thoughts on this season’s television shows coming soon!
This movie was given to me by a client. He received a few copies of the movie gratis from a friend and thought it a good idea to pass those copies along. Unfortunately, it took me a while to get around to watching this movie and frankly, there is nothing ground-breaking about The 11th Hour.
First of all, this is actually a documentary so calling it a movie is really not correct. And as a documentary I found it more alarmist than anything else. The visuals used to augment the information that the speakers are giving the viewers are skewed to show situations that frighten and alarm. I was sad to see this because instead of showing the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina when talking about global warming, I think showing more shots of melting mountain tops and glaciers breaking up would be more effective. The bulk of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina came from a bungled local and state government response as well as the levies breaking. But hey - I guess if you’re trying to sell your position you have to use the visuals that work.
Most of the information in the documentary is nothing new. Everyone knows that the human race has had an impact on the planet and that our waste products are negative to the environment. Thankfully, more people have become aware of this fact and are working voraciously to lower their personal imprints on the planet either through recycling more, using sustainable items, and working to conserve their use of resources. That’s all and great. But documentaries like The 11th Hour work against these positive trends by yelling that the sky is falling.
I admire Leonardo DiCaprio, the documentary’s narrator, but he should continue to be in the business of helping out the underprivileged by using his notoriety and money in conjunction with already established organizations. Going out and producing this documentary did not do much to help “turn the tide” in the battle against pollution. In fact, it might have hurt the progressing trend of environmental sustainability in some areas. For example, one commentator refers to the human race as a sickness on the planet earth; he talks about how we are creating a crust or a shell on the actual earth itself and we are poisoning it. Yeah…THAT’s how you rally support.
Another commentator says that the biggest weapon of mass destruction is the huge power amassed by corporations. In other words, corporations are the biggest weapons of mass destruction on the planet. Not only is this intellectually insulting, but the underlying meaning will be lost on most of the public due to the outrage associated with the comment. An unfortunate way to go about the business of changing minds.
It’s not that I didn’t like this documentary, but I thought that it did much less to advance environmentally friendly ideas than Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth. Plus, the documentary is more of a beginner’s guide to some of these issues than anything else. If you’re into alarmist documentaries or just looking into the whole environmentally sustainable issue, then you may want to look at this documentary if you have some time. If you don’t fall into one of those categories, don’t worry about seeing this one.
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