12 posts tagged “television”

What was the last episode about?  The sword of Damocles. Very well done, indeed.

So I think that Heroes star Peter Petrelli is dead. If you don't watch Heroes you have no idea what I'm talking about and you missed a great show that premiered last fall. You should catch up this summer or when it's released on DVD.

Anyway, I think Peter Petrelli is dead for the same reason that J K Rowling had to kill off Dumbledore at the end of book six of the Harry Potter series. Dumbledore had to exit the scene before the last book because he was a fair opponent for Voldemort. That's not dramatic. If Voldemort is to be defeated, he has to be defeated by Harry Potter.

The Peter Petrelli situation is similar. Peter becomes more and more powerful over time, and eventually he would become too powerful to write interesting stories about. So he has to be dead*. There is no other way. Sylar had to die for the same reason, and yeah, I think he's dead too.

* He could also turn evil, but since Peter is utterly noble, that's not in the cards.

Last night's episode of The Sopranos featured Yeats' The Second Coming. Obviously the tone of the poem mirrored AJ's own feelings of impending doom, but what does the poem portend for the show?  Only two episodes left.

I've been watching Lost from the beginning, but I'm kind of wishing they'd wrap things up.  Turns out, that won't be happening anytime soon. The creators of the show have signed on for three more seasons, albeit of only 16 episodes each. That means we won't find out the fate of our favorite (and least favorite) castaways until the spring of 2010.  I'll probably just be reading the recaps on Television Without Pity by then.

Last night on Lost, the evil Mr. Widmore taunted Desmond with a drink of 60 year old whisky, telling him that one sip cost more than Desmond could make in a month. So I wondered, is old whisky really quite that expensive? The answer is that it's probably not that expensive, but it's pretty darn expensive. We turn to the Macallan vintages FAQ:

Some of these Macallan vintages seem very expensive compared with vintage releases from other distilleries; why?
The prices charged for these Macallan vintages reflect both their scarcity and the vintage year in which they were distilled. They also reflect the extraordinary prestige of The Macallan, which is regarded around the world as one of the greatest single malts. It has been referred to as, "The Petrus of the whisky world", "the Dom Perignon of Scotch" among other and many great accolades.

Will these vintages appreciate in value?
You have to be cautious with any prediction of future value, but it is true to say that The Macallan is regarded as the most collectable of all single malts, and that bottles at auction have seen a steady appreciation in value over the years. For example, a Macallan bottled for the Royal Marriage of Charles and Diana in 1981 was then retailed for £40. It now fetches £350 at auction. A bottle of The Macallan 1926 (bottled in 1986 as a 60 yo) sold for £6,375 at auction in 1991; in May 2002, another bottle of 1926 achieved the world record price for a bottle of single malt, £20,150!

You can purchase a bottle of Macallan 30 year old for £295.00.

The other question you have to ask is whether Macallan 1926 is any good?  Whisky magazine says it's good, but at those prices I'd expect something life changing. 

This post brought to you by a Google search for "whisky 60 year old".

Animal Planet's Meerkat Manor is one of my favorite shows. It's the "story" of a clan of meerkats who live in the Kalarhi desert. The thing that separates it from every other show about wildlife is the writing. Rather than treating it as a clinical examination of a highly organized group of small mammals, the writers anthropomorphize the animals and provide narration that ascribes human motivations and emotions to everything the animals do. It requires suspension of disbelief, but if you can give yourself over to it, it's a lot of fun. (You really have to watch it for yourself to get what I mean.)

Everything that's good about Meerkat Manor is what's bad about modern sportscasting. This weekend I watched a football game, and the color commentator felt it necessary to describe the players the way Sean Astin describes the meerkats. No play is just a play. Every tackle, turnover, completion, and score is an event in the opera that is college football. A running back runs into a tackler whose helmet dislodges the ball, creating a turnover. Freak occurence in the course of a football game? No. Incredible act of leadership by a player who's ready to step up for a team that has lacked leadership all year. Long completion on third down. Nice pass to an open receiver? No. Evidence that the quarterback's mental defect that prevents him from performing as he should may soon be a thing of the past.

Perhaps this is what most sports fans want, but it just annoys me. It's fine for meerkats where everyone can see that it's obviously absurd, but it seems idiotic when the subjects of the commentary are human beings.

It's hard to believe that last night we may have seen the last of Deadwood, the best television show ever. There were things I loved about this episode (and season), and other things, not so much. The good stuff first.

The final line of the show was perfect. Not only a musing by Al, but a statement from David Milch to the audience. He never intended to give us the happy ending. Perfectly done.

The price of self-indulgence was clearly presented. Revenge is the ultimate self-indulgence, and when Trixie shot Hearst, somebody had to pay. As it turns out, we're not always the ones who suffer the consequences of our actions, sometimes other people do instead. How much does Al love Trixie? Enough to let her go and enough to kill an innocent in her place.

Many Deadwood fans must be mad that Hearst never got his comeuppance, but that was the entire point of his presence on the show. Hearst was not a character as much as a force of nature. The point of his presence in camp was that he was a problem that could only be coped with, not solved. The finale made this perfectly clear. Gerald McRaney gave the performance of a lifetime as Hearst, and was maybe as good in his own way as Ian McShane was as Al.

In a season where we saw too little of EB, he was restored to his former stature last night. His taking Hearst's place on the "balcony" of the hotel immediately after Hearst's exit was perfect.

Charlie Utter at his finest. Standing up to Hearst's thugs at the voting line, and then providing wise counsel and comfort to Bullock at the end.

Some things I didn't like:

We didn't get to see much from several characters, which is just the nature of wrapping everything up in an hour. No Doc, very little Alma.

Lots of loose threads that were not tied up well. In the end, I didn't get the point of the various intrigues we saw within the acting troupe. What did that all lead to?

Something felt unfinished with Cy Tolliver as well.

I liked that both sides moved all of their forces into town (Hawkeye's motley crew and Wu's Chinese workers all armed for combat) but that the show didn't end with the shootout at the OK Corral.

In the end, I think the only wise thing to do is to watch the whole season again, or perhaps the whole series starting with season one.

A few years ago I could have never imagined myself saying this, but today I think that television is better than the movies. In part, I've come to this conclusion through my Netflix subscription. I've been watching more movies for the past year or two, and I find nearly all of them disappointing. Most comedies aren't funny. Most dramas aren't interesting. Most thrillers aren't thrilling.

Then I contrast that with the quality of the television shows I've been watching over the past few years. The Sopranos, Deadwood, Arrested Development, Sleeper Cell, Lost, My Name Is Earl ... the list goes on and on. And there are other shows that I watch that don't approach that level of quality but that are still more entertaining than most movies. 

I like Deadwood, so let's use it as an example. From week to week, the writers manage to mix in humor, drama, action, and fantastic storytelling. The cast is absolutely incredible. Ian McShane is better than any actor I've seen in a movie in recent years. Any episode of Deadwood is better than every movie I've watched this year.

On the comedy side, nothing I've seen in a theater makes me laugh the way Arrested Development did. To go with a head to head comparison, Steve Carell is probably three times as funny on "The Office" as he was in the dreadful "40 Year Old Virgin." And the US version of "The Office," while good, is about half as good as the UK version was.

Is anybody else seeing the same thing? Has television gotten that much better or have movies gotten that much worse?

There are many things I love about the show Deadwood. (Heck, I think it's just about the best TV show ever.) My favorite thing about it, though, is that if two actors do well in their scenes together, they start getting more scenes. My favorite example is the continuing scenes featuring Wu and Al, working past their language barrier.  I never get tired of hearing Wu refer to Al as "Swegin".  There are plenty of others as well. Who would have predicted in the first season that E.B. and Richardson would provide ongoing comic relief, or that Richardson would turn out to be such an endearing oaf? Then there's Cy Tolliver's right hand men, Conn and Leon. Any scene featuring those two works to comic perfection. There are many other examples as well.

It takes a trully brilliant creative team for a show to pick up so well on the strengths of the cast and feature them the way that Deadwood does. I'll miss it when it's gone.

So last week I watched the new HBO show Lucky Louie, a  four camera sitcom about a guy who's married and has a kid, and the travails of day to day life. Because it's on HBO, they can swear all they want. The strike against the show going in is that the show about the beleaguered dad has been done a million times before. The mark in its favor is that HBO is great, right? As it turns out, the show is absolutely awful. Terrible. Worst show ever.

Well, last night I see the star of the show, Louis C.K. on the Daily Show, and he's hilarious in his interview with Jon Stewart, so I'm going to give his atrocious sitcom another shot. But if it's as bad as last week, he's cut off.

On a related note, watching this show made me very happy that Showtime and HBO passed on the incredibly hilarious Arrested Development. There's something about the restrictions that the FCC places on  network shows that adds to the potential for humor. The writers rise to the challenge of being dirty within the confines of the rules, and getting to say "Oh no they didn't!" to yourself when they sneak something particularly ribald past the censors is part of the fun. Arrested Development was excellent in this regard, and removing those restrictions by moving to cable would have killed a lot of the fun, I think.