Yikes!

Slinging My TV to the Office

I love gadgets. Maybe not as much as Dan (seeing as I don't own a magnifying eyeball doohicky), but more than most.

My new favorite gadget -- which I finally took the time to hook up last night -- is my Slingbox AV, which I bought on woot.com a few weeks ago.

This little box is amazing. You hook it up to your cable box, and it "slings" the signal to any computer with an internet connection. It comes with a nifty IR blaster that lets you control the cable, too. Basically, you end up with a window on your computer screen that shows the feed from your cable, along with a virtual remote (that looks just like your real remote). It works as if you're sitting right in front of your TV. Amazing.

Now I can watch anything on my DVR from anywhere in the world on my laptop, which will make traveling a heck of a lot easier.

Also, I can watch quality reruns from the office.

Adventures in Television

I watch a lot of TV, but nowadays the DVR allows me to watch only those shows that I really like. In the summertime, that's limited to only three or four shows. I rarely deviate from this pattern. Learning to like a new show takes far too much energy.

But recently, my TV reality received a dose of fresh air... if only for one night.

First of all, I DVRd an episode of this new Celebrity Family Feud show. It's basically the same old family feud, except for the set is a little more electronic, Al Roker is the host, and they have celebrities on the show instead of Sadie. On each episode, they have two initial matches, then the winners of those matches face each other, and then the winner of that match gets to play the bonus round. All the prizes go to charity.

Round one was the cast of the Office against a bunch of people from American Gladiators. It was relatively uneventful, and not as funny as I'd hoped (though it turns out that Meredith is actually kinda hot in real life, where she's an actress named Kate Flannery).

Round two was where it got strange. It was the Hickey family versus some random people from Camden County. Let me clarify. This was not half the cast of My Name is Earl against the other half of the cast of My Name is Earl. This was half the cast of My Name is Earl in character as Earl, Randy, Joy, Crabman (his nametag actually said "Crabman") and Catalina against some random recurring guest stars, including the dude from Son of the Beach (who was the team captain), the daytime hooker, the gay guy, and the foreign guy with the accent. They were all in full costume and none of them broke character.

Now, the Office characters weren't in character. Sure... Creed, Phyllis, and Oscar went by the names Creed, Phyllis, and Oscar. But that's because those are their real names. They still acted considerably more normal than their Dunder-Mifflin personalities (well, maybe not Creed). And Kate Flannery was on the show as Kate (not Meredith) and Brian Baumgartner was himself (not Kevin). And Al Roker was always Al Roker (or, as Randy called him, "Mr. Roper. No deal!").

So the whole thing was totally ridiculous. In character, none of the Earl folks did very well. Some examples:

Category: We asked a hundred people to name a famous Jessica...
Tim Stack: Jessica Tandy
Roker: I woulda gone with Jessica Rabbit.
Stack: No... Jessica Tandy. She was hot in 1929.
Roker: You sure?
Stack: If you'd seen Tandy in '29...

Category: Something women wear that's uncomfortable...
Joy: (while wearing giant lucite heels) Nipple... (BUZZZZZZZ)
Roker: I don't even want to know...

Category: Something that gets louder as it gets older...
Earl: My mustache.
Roker: Your mustache?
Earl: We talk to each other.

The crazy thing is that the Camdenites -- the random character actors who appear once in a while on the show -- actually beat the Hickeys (the actual stars who NBC probably wanted to see playing in the next round), so they went to the finals against the actors from the Office. It was surreal. A bunch of random bit role playing actors competing on a television game show in character against the cast of a television show (that blurs the lines of reality enough that some the actors use their real names for their characters, and the charity they played for was located in Scranton) who were surprisingly not in character, with Al Roker trying to make sense of the whole thing.

Of course, the cast of the Office won out on Oscar's sudden-death victory, and then Oscar and Brian won 50 grand for some dinky charity in Scranton, PA that will probably now have to hang their names of the wall for being their biggest donors of all time.

(I'd like to briefly interrupt this blog post to point out the following: If you go to IMDB.com, and you click to view a trailer for an upcoming movie, they make you watch an ad before they'll show you the trailer. Isn't a trailer already an ad? Did I just watch an ad so that I could watch another ad?)

After Family Feud, I watched a new episode of Alton Brown's Good Eats. Frequent readers of this space probably know that, culinarily speaking, I pretty much worship the ground he walks on. I've watched many Good Eats episodes (the ones on leeks, beets, and onion soup, to name a few) about a hundred times. When Sara and I were registering for kitchen-related wedding gifts, I had to consult AB's book every time Sara suggested registering for some gadget or other.

So this new episode of Good Eats was about canned tuna. And I hated it. AB didn't make a single thing that I would want to eat. And he poo-pooed plain-old canned tuna (which I happen to love) in favor of the pouched stuff or this fancy canned tuna crap from Spain. Blekh. This, of course, was a first. I don't think I've ever seen the guy cook something in which I was totally uninterested, and in this one episode he did it several times.

When I was done suffering through Alton Brown talking to a guy in a tuna costume, I headed over to live TV to catch a few minutes of Conan.

I don't watch so much late-nite TV these days, mostly because the little TV watching time I have is usually right around when Leno/Letterman and Conan are on, and I almost always dedicate that time to whatever's on the DVR. So it's been awhile since I've been exposed to Conan's unique brand of absurdist humor. And I was pleasantly surprised by how good he was.

First of all, there was a bit where he talked about Kirstie Alley wishing she had Twix bars for fingers... so she could eat them. Then he had Selma Blair, on. He kind of had to hold her hand through the whole interview, because she's dreadfully not funny. She tried really hard to get a laugh from the audience, even going so far as to talk about the color of her nipples, and then the color of Conan's nipples. The audience took it as the cheap attempt that it was. But Conan was brilliant, and he had me laughing out loud several times in 20 minutes or so.

So maybe I should be watching more TV.

Not-So-Top Chef

[If you haven't watched last night's Top Chef, don't read the following. Blah Blah Blah. Spoiler Alert. Blah Blah Blah. I hate Lisa. Blah Blah Blah. Don't read on if you don't want to read about what happened. And I hate Lisa. Blah Blah Blah. Ok. You've been warned.]

A couple of weeks ago, Ben wrote this:

We can't catch a break here! Dale gets sent packing, and Lisa is still on this show?!?!?!?! I don't get it. She SUCKS! Dale was kind of a dick, but I liked him pretty much all season. Probably because he didn't like Lisa.

So my favorite chef on the show gets sent home.. basically because he took the fall for his team being crappy. And crappy Lisa lives to see another day.

Then, last week Lisa got saved because Spike was apparently tricked into using crappy scallops. So crappy Lisa lives to see another day.

Then, this week, Lisa gets saved because...

Who the hell knows? She should have gone home weeks ago. She sucks. She's a crappy cook. She doesn't deserve to hold Stephanie's or Richard's oven mitts (or Antonia's or Dale's or Spike's or Andrew's, for that matter). Week after week she annoys everyone, criticizes people who are smarter and better than her, and makes crappy food. But again, crappy Lisa lives to see another day.

Why is she still on this goddamn show?

Basically, there are three chefs who would have made far better finalists, but somehow Lisa tripped her way in. She's up for elimination three weeks in a row, and three weeks in a row the better chef gets sent home. For managing a crappy team. For cooking scallops. And for undercooking beans. Lisa is the freakin' luckiest Top Chef contestant ever. Collichio and Padma and Gayle should be ashamed. They should be very ashamed. If Antonia really was that bad, they shoulda just sent both of them home and let it be a one-on-one finale, like it was in the first two seasons. Stephanie versus Richard straight up would be plenty interesting. Who the heck needs Lisa mucking this up and taking up precious screen time? Who wants to see her crappy, ugly food anyway?

Lisa blows. Send her home.

By the way... my predictions: My heart wants Stephanie to win, but if I were putting money down, I'm afraid to say that my money's on Richard.

Of course, both of them are better than Lisa. Both of them could cook boogers and it would be better than anything Lisa makes.

Blogging Elsewhere

It's been a while since I've posted much here.

But Ben posted my entire analysis of last night's ep of Top Chef over on his blog.

So you can read it there.

quarterlife or 1/4life

I watched quarterlife on NBC the other night (actually, I downloaded it to my iPod and watched it at the gym... but now that the writers are getting paid for that, I figure it's pretty much the same thing).

I didn't hate it, and I didn't love it either. It was fine, I guess. I think it has some potential.

I was stumbling through IMDB this morning, and I came across this. It's a listing for a show called ¼life. Same writers, director, producers, creators. Just a different show, that apparently didn't air. The cast is different, but the general plot is the same (and the names of some of the characters are the same).

One difference: the show took place in Chicago. The new version of quarterlife now takes place in LA. I don't have a problem with shows being set in LA. I live in LA, I was born in LA, I grew up in LA. I like recognizing places I know (like in the pilot of quarterlife, when the characters filmed a TV commercial at the Toyota/Scion dealership where I took Dan to buy his car). At the same time, I think people are kind of sick of shows about the lives of 20-somethings in Los Angeles. Chicago would have made the show a lot more interesting.Joel Grishaver

jetblue rocks

I'm sitting on a plane about to take off, and I'm watching the Bears game. This is awesome. Of course, it would be more awesome if the Bears didn't suck. But it's still awesome.

Less Ryan. More Kevin.

Slate has an article today on "What's wrong with The Office and how to fix it." I don't agree with a good number of the author's assertions, but he makes some points worthy of response:

1. "...the first few episodes of the show's fourth season have been slack and unsteady..."

   This may be true of last week's episode, in which the launch party ridiculousness went on and on and on. But I think the season premiere was tightly written, well-paced, and perfectly performed. Period. The epsode in-between was okay. Not the best Office ep ever, but totally funny and very watchable.

2. PB & J are a disappointment for those of us who saw the couple as a worthy successor to Ross and Rachel, NBC's will-they-or-won't-they couple of yore. But their relationship is also a bad sign for the show. Jim and Pam's thwarted love gave The Office a narrative arc that transcended the episode-to-episode hijinks of the other Dunderheads. Pam and Jim provided emotional ballast for a show that has always been in danger of keeling over into the absurd. Now, especially with these first episodes running to the hour, the show feels adrift and, at times, pointless.

   This is ludicrous. I've actually been thinking that the writers have managed to deal with the Pam-Jim storyline in a way that doesn't mess up what makes their relationship great.

   Furthermore, let's not forget something: The silly flirting that made the first three seasons good had to stop. Viewers had been pushed right to the end of their suspension of disbelief. At a certain point, Pam and Jim had to get together, for two reasons. First, it was clear that they were teetering on the brink, and a couple can't do that for long before taking action. Any loner and it would have felt like the writers were stringing along the flirtation just to keep that dramatic/nervous/comic energy going. Second, Pam and Jim are the only cool and relatively normal people at The Dund. I mean that they are people that the viewer can actually personally relate to, as opposed to the exaggerated caricatures of everyone else. Viewers relate to the obnoxious, egotistical boss who tries to hard, but no one has a boss as obnoxious and self-centered as Michael. The same goes for Dwight, Angela, Kevin, Kelly, Creed, etc. When you have an environment like that, the two normal people -- that is, the two people who aren't caricatures -- are gonna eventually be together. (It occurs to me that Oscar is also pretty normal. It's just that Pam's not his type, and I don't think he's Jim's.)

3. One bright spot lies in the emerging love triangle between Dwight, Angela, and Andy.

   I don't know that I'd call this a "bright spot" yet. So far, its had one insanely funny moment ("Take a Chance on Me," accompanied by the phones), but the rest of this plot line has been mostly very creepy. I think my "ick" factor may come into play here.

4. A newly bestubbled, technobabbling Ryan is hogging screen time, and it's ruining the show.

   I agree 100%. Less Ryan. More Kevin.

Tonight is the last "supersized" Office, and then we return to half-hour episodes. We'll see if this guy is right soon enough.

"I'm not SUPERstitious, but I am stitious."

I watched The Office and Earl last night. I haven't had a chance to see my other Thursday night favorites (ER and CSI) yet, but they're waiting on the DVR. My takes:

1. My Name is Earl was good, though not necessarily excellent. Sara says that she misses the original pace of the show, when Earl would cross one thing off of his list in each episode. I think I agree with her.

Nevertheless, the episode showed hints of brilliance.

The show's willingness to mess with the opening sequence (in a previous season, they did an episode where the opened each segment with a different character doing the opening monologue bit and announcing, "My name is Joy," or "My name is Darnell," or whatever, and last night, the show opened with, "My Name is Inmate 28301-016") is refreshing and funny. It's evidence of the irreverence that makes the show good.

Earl joining the white-supremacist and old-guy gangs was excellent. So was Randy showing up and asking questions off of flash cards. Randy as lovable moron is hilarious, mostly because Ethan Suplee is brilliant. I think the writers have to be careful not to take this too far... It's hard to believe that the guy doesn't know how to cross the street but he does know how to drive a car. I don't need this show to be über-realistic, but I do need to be able to maintain my suspension of disbelief.

The poster on the wall was a funny way to write Giovanni Ribisi off the series (for now, anyways... I guess he had other projects to work on), but I would have enjoyed it if they took the Shawshank Redemption joke a little further. Ribisi standing in a drainage ditch yelling at lightning would have been great, or at least Earl throwing a rock through the poster.

Joy calling Randy "big-headed hillbilly Linus" was great. So was her stained-glass Earl (Darnell: "It looks just like Earl would look if he were made of glass."). Jaime Pressly is great on the show, and she deserved her Emmy. I think it should be noted, however, that when she's given too much screen time on her own, Joy gets grating and annoying. Her comedic pairing with Darnell gets better and better as the show progresses. At this point, their contrast makes for perfection.

2. Things The Office got right:

• Including almost every character in the episode. We missed the gang at Dunder-Miff all summer, and getting to see everyone again was like coming home after a vacation. Creed got lines, Oscar got lines, Angela got her own plot line, Darryl and Pam are co-religionists, and the whole-ep revolved around Meredith. Each time we saw a character for the first time, my face lit up.
• Pam and Jim. They didn't make Pam-Jim the center of the episode, and they didn't play the kiss as this giant dramatic moment with exciting music and all that crap. Using Kevin to vocalize what's going through the audience's minds was brilliant. Making their characters respond to their kiss in instant replay was brilliant. Not messing with their flirtatious friendship while at work was brilliant. The subtlety of the whole thing was brilliant. Their relationship played as being sweet and innocent and beautiful without being nauseating. Brilliant.
• The perfect dose of Andy. Enough to get across that he's still the same old Andy, but not so much that you wanted to strangle him. The whole nipple gag was laugh-out-loud funny.
• Dwight and the cat. You know putting Angela's live cat in the freezer is exactly what Dwight Schroot would really do. Perfect.
• The entire race sequence. From the big check and the stripper nurse (and the T-shirts, which I expect to see on NBC.com any second now) and the pasta to Michael barfing, the whole 5k part of the episode had me cracking up. Andy drafting behind Kevin, the guys driving to get a drink then meeting up at the end, and Toby taking it all too seriously was all comedic genius. Toby's character is exceptionally written. On one hand, he's Michael's arch-enemy, the only voice of adult sanity at D-M. On the other hand, he has that small bit of Michael in him that pops out once in awhile, like when he was genuinely upset that he didn't get a robe, or when he took the race seriously.

That's all for now. Stay tuned for my thoughts on ER and CSI once I've had a chance to see 'em.

The New Season So Far

My stream-of-conscsiousness take on the shows I've watched so far:

1. The Heroes premiere showed some serious promise for a good season. First of all, Stephen Tobolowsky is the hardest working man in Hollywood. There is apparently an unwritten rule in Hollywood that if your show has been on the air for more than 27 episodes, your are contractually obligated to hire this guy to play some bit part. Also, he was once in a band with Stevie Ray Vaughn. For that reason, I think he's a bad-ass addition to the show. I am concerned, however, at the consequences his gold spoon thing may have on the economy. I mean... can the international gold market withstand a massive influx of solid gold spoons? Won't the price of gold just plunge through the basement?

At the moment, I think the Hiro-meets-British-drunk-Samurai is kind of boring. I think Hiro is better with Ando to play off of.

The scene where Claire climbs to the top of the cheer tower and chooses not to jump off was written brilliantly. You so want her to do a quadruple backflip with a double McTwsist and a triple salchow* just to show up the dumb cheerleaders, but she holds off and you totally feel her pain of going from being the cool cheerleader in school who can also walk through fire to being the girl that nobody knows. So far I think the guy who's stalking her (and is also a Hero, surprise-sur-fucking-prise) is lame -- a little too teenage heart-throb for me.

The highlight of the show for me was seeing Nathan as Ron Burgundy. It would have been awesome if he was drinking milk in those scenes. You know the Parkman-Mohinder-Bennett thing is gonna blow up in all their faces. And its gonna be lame when it does. The Molly stuff is fine with me for now. It's gonna be fun seeing grandma Petrelli get slaughtered. I can't wait to see ikkiN and Micah. The blogosphere says that the the Irish guy who found Peter in the shipping container also has Powers. (He can squirt Guinness out his pores at unsuspecting bad guys, apparently. Also, he can dance like a leprechaun.) I think the case might be getting too big, so they're gonna kill some people. I'm guessing Mohinder is a goner before the mid-season break, or maybe Bennett.

2. I like this "Chuck" show. It seems to me to be (a) a tongue-in-cheek homage to the spy genre; (b) a quirky character-driven ensemble show á la Ed (my favorite show about the lawyer in the bowling alley starring JD's older brother); (c) a lame-ass boy-meets-girl relationship show; (d) a slapstick physical comedy show; (e) a potato julienner. I think it has the potential to mix those ingredients to make a funny show. It could be lame, however. I like Chuck's sister and her "awesome" brother, playing beautiful-and-shallow people who work in a hospital (which I expect they'll play as a dig at Gay's Anatomy, which makes me happy, because I like it when people make fun of that ridiculously stupid show). I hate the guy who plays Chuck's best friend. If he stays on the show, it will not succeed, no matter how good the rest of it is.

3. Bionic Woman put me to sleep after about eight minutes. No thanks.

4. I want nothing to do with this Journeyman show. Quantum Leap was enough for me, thanks.

5. Things on the DVR waiting to be watched: CSI Miami and NY, L&O SVU, Gossip Girl. Things I'm looking forward to (but probably won't like): Pushing Daisies, Dirty Sexy Money.

6. I would rather eat my own barf off the floor of the Palm restaurant than watch Private Practice.

7. America's Fattest Fatty cracks me up. Sara's addicted, so I'm watching it.

I'm gearing up for Office and Earl, and you know I'm excited for ER, CSI, and (eventually, when it comes back) Scrubs.

Dan and I Made This Movie