DSP's TV Thread (with J.E. Magee) [OT]

by **MarkdlV** » Fri Mar 09, 2007 11:01:38

BigEd76 wrote:hey, I said BLEEP this time

seriously, it sucks that millions of people are subjected to listening to him every damn week....

Change. The. Channel.

by **MarkdlV** » Fri Mar 09, 2007 11:03:08

PSUPhilliesPhan wrote:What are peoples thoughts on Jericho this week? Very blah episode overall, I am really bored already with the Roger storyline. The ending was very interesting. Did she not kill Hawkins because she liked him?

I have been disappointed in Jericho's return. The only interesting plotline at this point is Hawkins. Otherwise it is, Let's see what peril we can throw Jake into. And the Roger thing is beyond boring. It was much more interesting when you saw the entire town trying to survive.

I think the show would be much better if it weren't on CBS.

by **VoxOrion** » Fri Mar 09, 2007 12:26:00

I've been watching Jericho (haven't seen this weeks episode yet), but it feels a lot like Surface or Prison Break - it's okay to watch if you have an hour to kill, but it's not that great and won't ever get better.

by **MarkdlV** » Fri Mar 09, 2007 12:44:29

At least Prison Break has embraced the concept that it is a bad show and just goes crazy with all their storylines. Jericho seems to want to try and appeal to both the sci-fi/thriller crowd and the people that want to see a relationship drama. And they are starting to lose me with the relationship drama portion.

by **VoxOrion** » Fri Mar 09, 2007 13:10:12

While I realize Lost and 24 (I don't watch it, so I'm guessing) have a "crisis of the week" paradigm, they're clever enough to conceal it. Jericho is a little too ham-fisted.

I really liked Prison Break last year, for all its silliness - but after seeing the first five or six episodes this season, I bailed on it. Can't be bothered.

by **MrsVox** » Fri Mar 09, 2007 13:28:49

The first Jericho episode after the break was great, and the one after was OK, but this week's was a snooze. I found the turn that they are taking with Hawkins too confusing.

by **VoxOrion** » Sun Mar 11, 2007 13:48:21

Okay, I just finished listening to the commentary for last week's Battlestar Galactica.

First: Ron Moore's wife is a zero, I can't believe he's such a dope letting her be involved with the commentary.

The rest: They didn't originally intend to off Starbuck, this was just going to be this season's abuse Kara storyline. The idea to off her came out of those meetings, and they all started falling in love with the idea. He says that Starbuck has always had a deathwish, and that someone like her can only go on so long rejecting "the dark" - he implies that suicide is the only way for a character like her to go out, and that they all felt it was time to deal with it.

He also says that this event really signals, for him, the beginning of the third act of the series. He doesn't say how much longer or anything like that, but he knows for sure that this is the first page in that direction (thank God he has a direction). He also said they were all really surprised to realize how well her death, unplanned as it was, complimented the overall grand storyline.

One more: When Olmos destroys the ship at the end, it wasn't scripted - he was just in the moment and doing what he thought Adama would do. It turns out the model is a museum quality piece that costs in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. He had no idea. It was insured.

Also for what it's worth - I'm reading that the last arc starting tonight returns BSG to it's respect-worthy glory.

I can't get over, while listening to the commentary, how obvious it is that they destroyed themselves this season. They had this big story-arc that the last five episodes were supposed to be planting the seeds for that they scrapped. Some of the earlier ones were even filmed and re-compiled with new scenes to gut the Sagetaran storyline - others were written last minute to fill holes and were never planned (like that well done but silly union episode).

Supposedly tonight the series gets back on track with it's always intended goal for the season (the middle of which has been almost completely erased). Lets hope so.

by **The Red Tornado** » Sun Mar 11, 2007 13:52:58

VoxOrion wrote:One more: When Olmos destroys the ship at the end, it wasn't scripted - he was just in the moment and doing what he thought Adama would do. It turns out the model is a museum quality piece that costs in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. He had no idea. It was insured.

Wouldnt it have been funny if they messed up the shot when he destroys the ship?

by **VoxOrion** » Sun Mar 11, 2007 13:56:34

Moore made it sound like the set people were having heart attacks left and right during filming, and were trying not to disrupt shooting.

Can you imagine some idiot squealing "OHHH NOOO" while he's being all emotional?

by **pacino** » Sun Mar 11, 2007 13:59:20

Apparently this lady hated that Starbuck is dead:

Let's back up a little, for those of you who haven't spent the past week throwing tantrums in Television Without Pity forums and calling Ronald D. Moore at home, threatening to take out his knees with a baseball bat, Tonya Harding style. Kara Thrace, aka Starbuck, played by Katee Sackhoff, was until last Sunday night one of the more compelling and charismatic lead characters on "Battlestar Galactica." Starbuck was the best fighter pilot by far on Galactica -- imagine that, a woman, the best pilot of all! -- but not only that, she was tough, bossy, sexually fickle, emotionally remote and self-destructive. As a male character, not so interesting, but as Salon's Laura Miller elucidated so eloquently back in 2005, watching Starbuck drink and play cards and get violent and boozy was always entertaining and slightly surreal. Despite a few obnoxiously soapy recent episodes, in which Starbuck and her true love/pal/rival Apollo revealed the stinky crevices of their love/hate relationship, Starbuck has generally provided "Battlestar" with some of its more provocative plots.

Yes, it goes without saying that we should be appalled that in 2007, Starbuck is one of the only overconfident, unapologetic heroines to ever grace the small screen. Let's just consider a handful of contemporary female TV characters: Meredith Grey of "Grey's Anatomy," Ally McBeal Deux (Kitty) of "Brothers & Sisters," Cheerleader Claire of "Heroes," Cheerleader Lyla of "Friday Night Lights," Harriet of "Studio 60," Simpering Susan of "Desperate Housewives" -- some of them smart, some charming, some confident. But look at how they all roll their eyes and pout and fret and giggle under pressure. Look at how they wring their hands and second-guess themselves and weep and then turn on their feminine wiles like one of "Charlie's Angels" to solve any problem. Why? Why is it so important that female characters be jittery and emotionally fragile, as if their femininity depended on lots of coy eye batting and neurotic bottom-lip biting? Are male TV writers really so unimaginative and/or threatened that they dream only of nonthreatening, impish kitty cats? OK, not every one of those characters is a limp little goo-goo-eyed rag doll, but can you or can't you picture every last one biting her bottom lip?
So why kill off one of the only brazen, swaggering female characters on TV? Why? Why Starbuck? Why now? Someone please explain to me why Starbuck needs to kick the bucket at this point. Sure, there's all this talk of her destiny from Leoben, the abusive daddy of the Cylon species. But is Starbuck really the appropriate character to transform into a mystical figure in colonial mythology? How stupid is Kara going to look, that perpetual smirk pasted on her face, clothed in glowing white robes, pointing the way to Earth? Didn't it seem like they were going to cast Chief Tyrol as the savior, back when he was walking around that temple, mesmerized by the place his parents talked about when he was a boy? And then, when he seemed to have marital problems and almost floated off into space with Callie? If not Chief, then why not someone exceptionally dull, like Apollo's wife, Dee?

Needless to say(but I'm going to say it anyway), I disagree with her entire premise. Starbuck was NOT some great character that still needed to be explored for the good of the show. She was done. They developed her about as much as they could, and then some. And the soapy parts of her storyline started to overshadow her as a pilot, so much so that it derailed the show for about 5 or 6 episodes this season. I think the episode was a fitting end to a fragile, macho persona...going down in flames and finally at peace with it.

And now we can get back to, you know, the overarcing story of the show (survival of the species, finding Earth, you know all that stuff that was put on hold while we learned that Starbuck's mommy was mean and that she loved and hated Apollo).

by **VoxOrion** » Sun Mar 11, 2007 14:03:03

Right on, paccy.

Why keep her - just because she's a strong female characterTM? Why do people expect writers to do public service instead of telling their story? The entire "imagine this woman Woman WOMAN" response comes off the reaction and desire of a true simpleton.

by **pacino** » Sun Mar 11, 2007 14:10:16

The thing that I didn't undertsand about her point of view is that Starbuck is decidedly NOT strong. She's strong physically, yes, and the front she puts on is strong...but she has so many demons and was on the verge of breakdown throughout the entire series. The amount of machismo she emitted was a front for something: fragility.

by **The Red Tornado** » Sun Mar 11, 2007 14:11:10

Am I the only one that thinks she'll be back in some capacity?

by **pacino** » Sun Mar 11, 2007 14:17:01

I guess the cylons could have gotten her, or she could've been a cylon(but I though it was said she wasn't?), but I hope not.

I wouldn't actually mind hte latter...it would show how close to humans they actually are.

by **The Red Tornado** » Sun Mar 11, 2007 14:18:50

It just seems like theyve been setting up the whole "chosen one" and teh eye of jupiter thing with her for the whole season for it to end so abruptly like that.

by **VoxOrion** » Sun Mar 11, 2007 14:25:09

Moore's spin is that even in death her chosen one status will make sense. He didn't discuss her being a Cylon at all, but I don't suppose he would. I'm pretty confident we won't see her again this season.

Oh - that was the other thing Moore said - Starbuck has never "been there" when important people in her life died - her mom, Kat, Lee's brother. I forget what the significance of that was, other than to point out that she's a sad sack that was inevitably going to surrender to suicide.

by **dajafi** » Sun Mar 11, 2007 14:57:33

My brother's statement on Starbuck: "She's going to wake up in a tub of goo." Of course he's also playing with the theory that the Cylons won the first war, wiped out the human race and repopulated the Colonies with, effectively, billions and billions of sleeper agents, most of whom they killed in the attack. I don't buy it at all, but it's interesting.

pacino, completely agree. Seems to me the truly post-feminist stance is, honestly, not to give much thought about the fact that a complicated-yet-kick-ass protagonist happens to be a chick.

I also don't get all the hate for Dee.

I downloaded the commentary from last week, but haven't listened yet.

by **Wizlah** » Sun Mar 11, 2007 19:00:48

so, I'm going to wander completely away from paranoia and robots (and would you believe I've not seen a complete series of BSG yet? I caught one or two episodes of the first series and couldn't really get into it. My arse is sore with kicking myself) and say I just saw the first part of a very thought-provoking documentary called The Trap: What Happened to Our Dreams of Freedom.

I say this only because it was on BBC 2, so is likely to get sold abroad, and is very much in the same territory as The Fog of War - ideas of the 40s and 50s ground in the ideas of rational behaviour and systems and how they come to be applied within modern western society. It focuses on the cold war, Nash's Equilibrium, game theory and how this fed into late 50s/early 60s development of rational economic man, then switches to RD Laing and his use of game theory to assess families and society, then back to Buchanan and Public choice, then back to Laing, his views on psychiatry as a system and the assault on Psychiatry, then on to Margaret Thatcher and the privatisation of the National Health Service. It's directed by a guy called Adam Curtis

And yeah, I know that all sounds really dry, but we're all baseball fans here, and as such we live by measurable outputs in terms of stats, because we cannot model/predict what goes on inside the average players head. I remember the first time I read about game theory at college, my first thought was its applicability to the duel between pitcher and hitter. It's a fascinating overview of those ideas. You may not agree with the theme of the documentary (I do, myself) that some of the assumptions at the base of these models are fundamentally flawed, but it still makes compelling viewing - the interviews used are very concise and to the point - they really don't make the likes of Hayek, Buchanan, even Laing come across as whackos, even though the director disagrees with many of their points of view - and the director has a great grasp of the use of footage to make his point.

Plus at one point he slipped in the music from Assault on Precinct 13 and I nearly wet myself laughing.

And the more I think about it, it's maybe not that removed from Cylons and paranoia. I dunno. If you get the chance to see it, I don't think you'll be disappointed.

by **dsp** » Sun Mar 11, 2007 19:02:17

some notes from variety:

30 rock and friday night lights look good, studio 60 is toast.
maybe one of either medium or crossing jordan, not both.
abc will probably give scrubs its last season if nbc doesnt pick it up
one of law and order and law and order ci is gone
no word on what about brian, six degrees has a chance in its new timeslot
knights of prosperity is probably getting another shot, they think its their office
jerichos ratings need to go to fall numbers when idol goes away or else its done
old christine knocks out the class if it does better in the 830 timeslot
rules of engagement looks good
close to home still undecided
standoff has a shot in their friday slot

looks good. 30 rock, fnl and kights are great. they deserve second shots.

by **Laexile** » Sun Mar 11, 2007 20:18:32

dsp wrote:looks good. 30 rock, fnl and knights are great. they deserve second shots.

I hope you're right.

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DSP's TV Thread (with J.E. Magee) [OT]