Category: Television

Although every generation gets the Bruce Campbell hero it needs, he will have some big shoes to fill when he hosts Ripley’s Believe It Or Not!

Best known for the “Evil Dead” franchise and USA’s “Burn Notice” — not to mention his bestselling autobiography, “If Chins Could Kill: Confessions of a B-Movie Actor” — he is now hosting the latest installment of “Ripley’s” (Sundays at 9 p.m. on the Travel Channel).

“I thought ‘Ripley’s’ was a good fit for me because the people who follow what I do, they like stuff on the edge, and that’s what ‘Ripley’s’ is,” says Campbell, 60, on the phone from his home in the self-proclaimed “wilds of Oregon.”

. . . .

“They’ve been around for 100 years, so everyone’s heard of them,” says Campbell. “In my formative years, there was always some form of Ripley’s book or publication [in the house]. I still have the red, cloth-bound Ripley’s book that I had in my living room. It had all these crazy illustrations of people doing amazing things.”

I mean, I can still hear Jack Palance from the 1980s ABC version of the show saying, “Believe it…or not.” Where the “or not” sounded like a threat, and you’d better believe it if you know what’s good for you.

Someone is unhappy with how Game of Thrones is turning out:

Where to begin with “The Bells,” an absolute disaster of an episode that exhibited every bad habit the series’ writers have ever had? They threw out their own rule book (suddenly the scorpions don’t work and Drogon can burn everything?) to pursue gross spectacle.

Character and substance were left by the wayside so that the plot could go where the writers wanted. The pace was rushed in the beginning, painfully lagging by the end. The script created plot devices and conflicts out of thin air (no really, when were the bells ever so important?), relished in violence and let a main character survive beyond any reasonable odds.

Yeah, kinda like they did with Lost. The show’s writers were making it all up as they went with no end in sight, and then when they had to wrap it up, they did so with a truncated season that didn’t answer most of the questions from the bulk of the series and instead created a new series of mysteries and questions in the last series, questions that viewers were not invested in, that they could wrap up.

Badly.

So you won’t have to wonder if I watch multi-season narratives like this. I don’t. Because they’ll botch it.

UPDATE: Ace agrees about Game of Thrones and also brings up Lost.

I just ordered the first season of Magnum, p.i. from Amazon on these little silver discs to watch with my children between James Bond films.

Why Magnum, p.i.? Three things recently:

• I saw someone post on Facebook that there’s a reboot in the works or on television. Hey, it worked for Hawaii Five-O. The person on Facebook was less sanguine about this particular reboot, though.
• On Sunday mornings, one of the local radio stations plays a repackaged version of the “American Top 40” radio programs from the 1980s with Casey Kasem. One recent Sunday, they played Mike Post’s theme song for this program, which charted in 1982.
• I was in my children’s room collecting laundry, and on the wall I espied some framed tiger photos, one of which came from my Aunt Dale, who collected tiger pictures and items. She was fond of the mustachioed PIs of eighties television, including Tom Selleck as Magnum and Lee Horsley as Matt Houston, both of whom she would say curled her toes.

Clearly, the universe compelled me to get this show and watch it.

But I’m not sure I’m going to expose my children to the last season.

Today, as I was leaving the YMCA, I looked down and saw a toddler’s spoon lying in the parking lot.

Then, I went to Sam’s Club, where I saw a plastic spoon lying in the parking lot as well.

Clearly, these are signs that I will binge watch Sonny Spoon sometime soon.

I must have been the only one who liked this show when it aired, since it lasted only fifteen episodes. But it’s the character I associate with Mario Van Peebles, not Kane from The Highlander III.

Where war on Canada begins. What is ‘Jeopardy’?:

For reasons that have yet to be fully explained, the producers of the “Jeopardy!” game show last week banned Canadian contestants. As someone who spent two years as a resident of Canada and one year working on the radio with the late Art Fleming, the first and greatest host of “Jeopardy!” I feel uniquely qualified to over-analyze this.

Apparently, the reason for the ban on Canadians (except for Alex Trebek, the pride of Sudbury, Ontario, who usurped Art Fleming’s throne and whose name Art could barely bring himself to utter) has something to do with Canada’s new digital privacy laws.

The producers fear that the questionnaire that would-be contestants have to fill out might somehow violate the new law, possibly costing the show a $10 million fine. Even with the Canadian dollar (unfortunately named the “loonie” for the bird that graces the coin) now worth 72.6 cents U.S., a $7,260,000 fine is nothing to sneeze at.

Of course, this is part of fomenting the anti-Canadian sentiment we’ll want before the invasion.

Canadians are not like you and me. They eat poutine.

A couple years ago, I got swept up in the Downton Abbey mania, and by “got swept up in,” I mean my beautiful wife and I had gotten a Roku and were looking for something to watch on Amazon Prime when we agreed on this British program because so many other people were watching it and because my wife likes British accents.

But I gave up on it after a couple of seasons for a couple of reasons which I’ll go into below the fold. Be advised, there are spoilers below.
Continue reading “Why I Gave Up On Downton Abbey” →

So I’m prone to bouts of picking new geek-friendly shows on television and recording them for my later viewing. How later? Sometimes years later. I’m only a year late on Sleepy Hollow. And I won’t be getting any further behind.

Okay, it’s a story about a man who’s been under a spell for a couple hundred years; Ichabod Crane, instead of the slightly philandering bookish dandy from the story is a spy for George Washington and an action hero. He awakens to head off the apocalypse when the headless horseman and other horsemen from the book of Revelation are trying to get a foothold in our world. So it calls for a certain suspension of disbelief. It’s our world, but strange things are happening in it. I can suspend disbelief.

But there are a number of things about the real world that the series gets wrong that sticks in my craw, and I can’t let them go.

I can forgive that the deputy he partners with has the high rank of lieutenant just so he can call her leftenant.

The commingling of the sheriff’s department and the village police force, though. They share office space, okay, that happens. But when the sheriff is killed in the pilot, all of a sudden, the sheriff’s deputies are getting ordered around by The Captain. Presumably of the village police. Which is a different police force, so he would not be able to give orders. And the sheriff’s dead, and no one gets appointed to act as sheriff and there’s no talk about who might stand for election for sheriff or if there’s a need for a special election. It’s not germane to the plots of the stories, but it’s how things are done.

And there’s the last episode I started, “John Doe” (episode 5) where the lost colony of Roanoke is found hidden away but all infected with a medieval plague that slips into our world, and Crane shows signs of it while outside an isolation ward with the head of the CDC task force assigned to monitor or whatever the plague, and they dramatically haul Crane off for isolation, but not everyone else in the room who has been exposed to Crane while he was symptomatic. That bothered me because it’s not the way that should have been handled, and also because my confidence in our CDC these days is that they might actually handle it that way.

But the thing that just absolutely killed it for me was the way this. We come out of commercial break often to an establishing shot showing a sign with Sleepy Hollow on it and the population:

And someone immediately slaps a hand on the table and exclaims, “It’s a small town!”

144,000 people is not a small town. It’s a small city. Probably with bike paths and sushi joints. A small town is 5,000 or less. Even the Census Bureau tries to convince us that towns of 10,000 or more are urban areas. But the writers of Sleepy Hollow want us to think a city is a small town. Where are those writers from? New York City? Mexico City? Shanghai? Sleepy Hollow lies 30 miles from New York City. Do you know what’s 30 miles from a real small town? Another small town.

Bonus disgust every time the leftenant deputy sheriff is the one doing the exclaiming about the small town. Because her jurisdiction is not the town, it’s Westchester County.

The series provided so many groaners that I couldn’t get past them. Especially the small town thing. So I had to give it up.