Category: Television

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.

Take Convoy and mix it with Every Which Way But Loose and you’ve got:

(Source: A conversation where my beautiful wife asked me what films Kris Kristofferson had been in, other than Millennium, to which I replied Convoy and A Star Is Born, but naturally she’d never heard of those and only responded, “Oh, THAT guy!” when I mentioned Blade II. But that’s another story.)

As I mentioned, I’ve been recording episodes of the sitcom Whitney because I think Whitney is cute. So I’ve given it two episodes, and Meh.

It didn’t help Whitney‘s case at all that I watched four episodes of The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show on VHS in between the pilot and the second episode I watched (“Two Broke-Up Guys”, actually the sixth episode, which indicates I did not set my DVR to record all of the episodes) of the more modern sitcom. The differences are startling.

The modern comedy, including the Seinfeld seasons I previously reviewed, starts with a situational premise. The two Whitney episodes deal with 1)A wedding leads Whitney to try to spice up her relationship with her longterm live-in boyfriend, and 6)A friend of Whitney’s boyfriend ends their friendship because he thinks Whitney has influenced the boyfriend too much.

With those overarching situations, we then get to individual scenes that rely on the characters’ caricatured behavior and the other characters reactions to it. Also, the humor is pretty sexual in nature, as Whitney spices up her relationship by dressing as a naughty nurse and sending her boyfriend to the hospital, et cetera.

By contrast, the George Burns and Gracie Allen Show starts out with a situation–a card game, a visit from a friend or relative with some active children who stymie George as he tries to write a speech. Then we get individual scenes that rely on Gracie saying silly things and the other characters react to it. Then, in the middle, the pitchman comes into the scene and tells the characters present about Carnation Evaporated Milk.

You know, the structure isn’t that much different. I guess the difference really lies in the humor. The old Burns and Allen show places a lot of stock in wordplay and the occasional straight-up gag as Burns addresses the audience. Burns and Allen got their starts in vaudeville, early movies, and radio, so they have to be staccato.

Or maybe it’s that’ I’m an old man, even older than I was when I watched the first two seasons of Seinfeld last year, and comedy set in a city (Chicago, of all places) with young, unmarried people doesn’t speak to me. An older married couple (in their middle 50s in the 1950s, no less) who love each other and live in the suburbs, I like.

So I think I’ll dustbin the rest of the Whitney and find more grainy, clever comedy that makes my wife laugh.

After reading The Seinfeld Universe, I saw the first two seasons available on DVD for $1.50. I bought them, of course, and now I’ve watched them.

The first two seasons of Seinfeld (and The Seinfeld Chronicles, as it was originally known) ran roughly during my first year of college, including the first summer I spent back in Milwaukee. I pretty much lit out for my birthplace the Monday after my graduation from the high school in House Springs, Missouri. Which will explain why I didn’t see them when they first aired: I was too busy with my first job (working almost full time while shirking my first year of school en route to losing a full ride scholarship at Marquette), trying to learn piano and writing a song for a Southern belle who only mocked me for it, growing a mullet that started pretty much from my not getting a haircut for a long time, shirking actual classes by hiding in the Memorial Library and getting busted occasionally by the Pop Cop because I realized I could find a book about anything there, and cruising the streets and highways of Wisconsin (and occasionally Illinois to go to Barnaby’s in Schaumburg because we’d once gone there to bring back a pizza on a bet) while wailing out the hits of Icehouse and Bad English with Chris and Deb (who is my first girlfriend, except she was 34 when I was 20).

Anyway.

The first two seasons are a total of 16 episodes, 8 “hours” of television (minus commercial time). Good for a one-a-night sort of viewing, or a one-every-couple-nights viewing pattern if that’s your pleasure (it was mine, sort of).

One of the knocks on the series concept, according to the book The Seinfeld Universe, was that the book was too Jewish and too New York. Twenty years later, I’d say the show was a bit urban for my taste, but I’m entering middle age now and live not in the suburbs, but in the areas where the suburbs will be in twenty years. The exurbs. Almost rural. So the show is a little outside my sweet spot of relatability. Also, I’ve been married my entire thirties, so I don’t know I relate to thirty-somethings having the problems I had when I was twenty-five. I’d probably make the same criticism of a number of other programs, but I don’t watch most sitcoms. Bloody heck, the only television show I’ve watched from the recent past is Human Target (although I’m recording Whitney because they played the ads enough during football and I think Whitney’s cute, but whether I watch them depends on two factors: one, whether I get around to seeing them before my DVR’s non-moving parts stop non-moving and two, whether my beautiful wife reads this review and reacts to the “Whitney is cute” thing enough to make me guiltily erase the shows unseen–although in my defense, I’d like to say I thought Whitney Houston was cute back in the day, too–come to think of that, my defense is further excavation). Half-hour sitcoms have lost a lot since Sledge Hammer!.

The shows were amusing, and they were not “about nothing” as they claimed. They had their conceits and their topical humor built on those conceits. They were about something, but not something I can relate to A)twenty years later, B)older than the characters, and C)more Midwesternly stablely married than the characters.

I only had one belly laugh in the whole collection, and that was in a moment of physical humor. The rest amused me, but it did not Touch My Life as it did so many people in the 1990s. As did Friends, apparently. Maybe we’re older and wiser now, but do sitcoms today touch us like they did in those days (purportedly)? Watercooler and Internet talk these days focuses on really intriguey dramas. Well, that’s the zeitgeist now, I guess.

Do I recommend it? If you can find it for $1.50 without shipping and handling, hey, why not?

Books mentioned in this review:

Apparently, Jason Bateman tweeted:

It’s true. We will do 10 episodes and the movie. Probably shoot them all together next summer for a release in early ’13. VERY excited!

I responded:

Thank goodness! I was very distraught when “It’s Your Move” ended abruptly.

It’s Your Move, as you know, was Jason Bateman’s first sitcom. Well, he had been on Silver Spoons and Little House on the Prairie, but It’s Your Move was his first starring vehicle. It only lasted a season.

Sometimes, one might confuse Jason Bateman with Jerry O’Connell (or one might think someone else might). Jerry O’Connell’s big breakout was My Secret Identity, which ran several seasons in syndication.

Of course, my wife is not familiar with such things; her English teacher mother did not let her watch television. Whereas I was a latchkey kid living either in a trailer park or in a valley off of a dirt road, consigned to whatever snow-occluded broadcast television could reach me.

I hope this will become relevant sometime in a Jeopardy! taping.

Watson, essentially a big fast Google search engine, beat some former Jeopardy! champions. I haven’t written much on it, but I would like to point out an advantage Watson had over the other players: Telepathy.

When a human gets a Jeopardy! answer, he or she reads it and/or hears Alex Trebek speak it. That information passes through the varied input devices and requires interpretation and consideration even before moving onto higher order data processing.

Watson received the clues via telepathy:

On “Jeopardy!” when a new clue is given, it pops up on screen visible to all. (Watson gets the text electronically at the same moment.) But contestants are not allowed to hit the buzzer until the host is finished reading the question aloud; on average, it takes the host about six or seven seconds to read the clue.

The correct text just appears in the search box and Watson clicks “Go.” Imagine the difference between reading this sentence and submitting a SQL query. One is faster than the other, yes?

Forget the buzzer time. I don’t think it’s a fair match until the computer has to optically scan or audiologically receive the question. Just like the humans.

Is it just me, or do most of the contestants on Jeopardy! these days fall into the following professions:

• Teacher/Professor
• Graduate student
• Attorney
• Public advocate of some sort
• Non-profit employee of some sort

I really started noticing this trend when I started saying, “Get a real job!” to the television whenever contestants are announced in these professions.

Is it just me? If not, what does this mean and why do I think I won’t like it?

You know what I think is funny? Making up Lost spoileresque questions and adding them to comment threads on Facebook and whatnot.

Questions and comments like:

• The return of Walt and Michael was way overdue!
• Who built the statue of Vincent the dog on the Island, and why does it have octagons in the base motif?
• When Walt becomes the new Jacob, will Aaron be the new black smoke?

Come on, with the absurd turns of events throughout the run of the show, surely you can devise some spoilers that will anger your friends for tipping them off to things that never happen. Leave your best in the comments below. No actual spoilers, please, since that’s no fun at all.