When [It] Strikes Me

It’s Pilot season in America. There certainly seems to be more shows that at least have the potential to be intriguing. There’s the can’t miss in HBO’s Boardwalk Empire, the LOST clone in NBC’s The Event, the waiting-to-see-if-it-can-deliver in AMC’s The Walking Dead and a host of other intriguing new shows. I may not drop thoughts on all of them, but I will try to give my initial thoughts on some of those that catch my eye. On Tuesday, I reviewed NBC’s The Event. Today is NBC’s Indian sitcom, Outsourced.

Outsourced will hopefully be cancelled quickly and buried alongside the E.T. Atari games in the desert.

• Monday: The Event (NBC)
• Wednesday: Undercovers (NBC)
• Thursday: My Generation (ABC)
• Thursday: Outsourced (NBC)

This will be nice, short and sweet. Despite knowing there would be a high likelihood that I would find the show Outsourced offensive, I bit the bullet and watched NBC’s latest addition to its Thursday sitcom, fest. The basic premise is a remake of the Josh Hamilton movie of the same name. The difference is that, for all the manners in which the film Outsourced was, at times, charming and lighthearted, the television series is stale and almost purely offensive.

Click on through for more. Read more…

If you have a chance to see them, definitely take it.

This past Saturday some friends and I dropped on down to Mercury Lounge on East Houston in Manhattan for an early show by Fitz & the Tantrums.  The band, fronted by Michael Fitzpatrick and Noelle Scaggs has been burning up my iPod of late and was featured in a player post linked here.

Needless to say, I knew I was going to love the music, but I was bringing along two newbies as well.  The sound is relatively unique and hasn’t gone mainstream yet.  It is somewhat of a revisit to 50s soul music, but with a decidedly modern hipster vibe.  While I normally want to punch most things hipster, that’s not the case for Fitz & the Tantrums.

The show was sold out, but the venue was not so crowded as to make the concert uncomfortable or getting drinks impossible.  In fact, the only complaint could be some issues with the bass levels and our choosing to stand too close a bank of speakers.  It took a good day for my right ear to clear up fully.

All in all, the show was outstanding and the crowd was lively.  The band played near studio quality tunes, true to the CD and the only real hiccup is when Scaggs fell off the stage into the crowd.  After getting up with little more than her pride hurt, she claimed her tussle with gravity was a failed stage dive with nobody catching.  As a note, I’m not sure being found unworthy in a trust fall is any less embarrassing than catching an edge of the stage.

All in all, I could not recommend the show more highly.  This is an opportunity to catch a rising artist before they hit it big.

Some additional thoughts and videos from the performance after the jump. Read more…

Spangler, Roy and Bloom met on their surveillance of Will and Katherine, and attempted to discern if there paranoia had merit.

Although I’m apprehensive about its somewhat slow pace, I still think Rubicon has what it takes to grow into a real winner and a hit. As such, I’m putting some faith in it and am anointing it with instant recap status.  To read prior Quick Hits for the show, click here on my posts tagged #Rubicon.  Here are my Quick Hits for Episode 1.10, “In Whom We Trust.”

I stated in my review of episode 9 that the addition of Annie Parisse was a genius stroke and really worked.  I hadn’t really wondered as to the probability of Andy being a spy or anything other than what she says she is/was. A friend expressed that he thought she was suspect and a little too perfect / trusting. I think that there are certain characteristics which don’t really add up about her reaction to Will’s activities – in fact, it wasn’t really until this episode’s sister call fallout that you had her acting in any way normal – e.g., her expression that she was happy he had a gun, instead of being weirded out by the paranoid guy she assumes is lying about being a spy and even his name… and who shows up with a concealed firearm.

In this episode, we see a more honest character in Andy. She chats with her sister about Will and playfully owns up to that. She also gets peeved when he withdraws and then tries to steal her phone to see who she’s been calling. The only unnatural thing about it was the fact that she didn’t throw him out. And the only real bullshit comment she made was the suggestion that she had three-way calling in high school.

Anyways, I’ve been swamped at work, so I’m going to jump right into the quick hits, after the check. Read more…

It’s Pilot season in America. There certainly seems to be more shows that at least have the potential to be intriguing. There’s the can’t miss in HBO’s Boardwalk Empire, the LOST clone in NBC’s The Event, the waiting-to-see-if-it-can-deliver in AMC’s The Walking Dead and a host of other intriguing new shows. I may not drop thoughts on all of them, but I will try to give my initial thoughts on some of those that catch my eye. On Tuesday, I reviewed NBC’s The Event. Today is NBC’s spy series, Undercovers.

• Monday Nights: The Event (NBC)
• Wednesday Nights: Undercovers (NBC)
• Thursday Nights: My Generation (ABC)

My Generation debuted last night and was, quite simply, great.

Sometimes it’s hard to project the performance of a show out from its pilot. Often this is because a pilot is produced with significantly more elbow grease and attention to detail than a standard episode will receive in its normal course. Other times it is because you’re not sure how characters will play out over the course of a series run, as opposed to in the short term.

ABC’s My Generation is a bit different from either of those two scenarios. Getting out of the way immediately that I thought the pilot was great, I think competent writing and production will allow the characters to work long term and that there’s no immediate concern regarding production value and attention. The one point of caution is whether or not it is a series concept that can function over the long haul. Perhaps it is aspirational to think long haul on a pilot that was panned by more critics than it was hailed by, but like the New York Times, I found My Generation to be a unique spin on a familiar concept and I found it to be the pilot with the best potential so far this season.

I do wonder whether or not it’s going to last and be able to fulfill that potential. It’s the type of show that probably won’t find a Network audience and therefore belongs on cable. It’s not fast moving, action packed or sexy. It’s about people, their expectations and their failures. In other words, it chronicles life.

I’ve stated before that the four core concepts that I look for in a show are a) a solid score, b) production value, c) a solid cast and d) a plot with something to draw you in. That formula works in the context of a big production. That’s not what My Generation is all about. This show is a bit different in that it will be entirely character driven, but will rely on the side items in important, but secondary, ways.

More thoughts and my quick hits, after the bounce. Read more…

It’s Pilot season in America. There certainly seems to be more shows that at least have the potential to be intriguing. There’s the can’t miss in HBO’s Boardwalk Empire, the LOST clone in NBC’s The Event, the waiting-to-see-if-it-can-deliver in AMC’s The Walking Dead and a host of other intriguing new shows. I may not drop thoughts on all of them, but I will try to give my initial thoughts on some of those that catch my eye. On Tuesday, I reviewed NBC’s The Event. Today is NBC’s spy series, Undercovers.

• Monday Nights: The Event (NBC)
• Wednesday Nights: Undercovers (NBC)

While The Event was marketed directly as a LOST clone, Undercovers isn’t really promoted as a direct draw on a prior show.  That said, it has a feel that draws directly off of two recent shows: the currently running Chuck and the since departed Alias.

Relative newcomers Boris Kodjoe and Gugu Mbatha-Raw star in and carry Undercovers quite effectively.

Undercovers is the latest draw from the team over at Bad Robot (JJ Abram’s production company that produced such smash hits as Alias, LOST, Cloverfield and Star Trek).  The basic plot line is part Mr. & Mrs. Smith, brought to the small screen.  Steven and Samantha are married former CIA agents who left the life in order to run a catering company and have a quiet marriage.  The gag about Samantha’s sister trying to add pork to the menu at an Orthodox Jewish wedding aside, the pilot script isn’t weighed down by anything unnecessary.  This show knows what it is and what it has to rely on: light-hearted spy action and sexiness.

The show has no pretenses for higher level, deep plot lines.  While LOST is the standard bearer there, even Alias extended down the rabbit hole with the Rambaldi story arcs.  No such worries here.  Yes, there are going to be overriding story arcs over the entirety of the show’s run — e.g., the handlers indicate that Sam and Steve might not really be working for the CIA, a plot line run through with Alias and also the unaffiliated Rubicon (click here for my Rubicon posts).  Yet this seems secondary to the real point of the show.

We’re likely to get self contained story lines as the focal point with a hefty dose of Q style spy tech, well constructed action sequences, and light hearted banter between the show’s stars, who are a ridiculously good looking couple in a Zoolander kind of way.

Click on through for some quick hits. Read more…

Although I’m apprehensive about its somewhat slow pace, I still think Rubicon has what it takes to grow into a real winner and a hit. As such, I’m putting some faith in it and am anointing it with instant recap status.  To read prior Quick Hits for the show, click here on my posts tagged #Rubicon.  Here are my Quick Hits for Episode 1.09, “No Honesty in Men.”

The AMC website was light on still images from this episode, so I lead with the credits screenshot, again.

It’s been nine episodes now and for the first time since the pilot, we’ve seen a flicker of a personal life for Will Travers.  That glimpse coincides with what was by far the best episode of the show to date.  In the pilot, we had David imploring Will to escape his job and the life of an analyst.  Yet it had been revealed that he had become an introvert after losing his wife and daughter in the September 11th attacks. Since that time, there’s been zero implication of a social life or really any life outside of work for him.

This lack of a life was despite the fact that Travers struggled most with being unable to “take his job home with him”. He couldn’t talk about what he does with anyone. The reality is that he didn’t have anyone to tell about it, even if he wanted to. While Truxton Spangler spoke of the separation of church and state, analogizing that separation to the need to keep professional and personal lives separate, for Will such a wall was entirely aspirational. Or perhaps he needed the wall in order to allow a personal life to regrow. He had retreated from life into his job, and it had taken and possessed him.

Click through for some quick hits. Read more…

If Calvin and Hobbes is my favorite print cartoon (and it is), then its online counterpart is xkcd.  The brainchild of former NASA robotics engineer Randall Munroe, it is a webcomic that mixes romance, sarcasm, math, and language.  Most of all, it speaks to the sense of humor of the internet and geek culture in general.  Some of it is obscure and flies over my head, but a good number of the comics just hit home and tickle the funny bone.  And, in the case of my favorite all-time comic ever (Spirit, featured in this post), tugs at the heart-strings.

xkcd also features a great online store with some cool posters, pins and apparel.  I rock the “Science: It Works….” t-shirt in my wardrobe (though it admittedly gets less use than it should).  Munroe operates under a solid creative commons license, so I’m hosting several of my favorite comics here, though I encourage everyone to visit xkcd.com and to buy the xkcd: volume 0 book on Amazon.

Click on through to see Part 6. Read more…

Follow NDGT at @NeilTyson on Twitter.

Earlier today I noted a few tweets from America’s astrophysicist, Neil DeGrasse Tyson.  NDGT has been excited over a spectacular night for viewing Jupiter both tonight (Tuesday) and tomorrow (Wednesday).

Well, as I was walking home amongst the stop lights, the red was emphatically stated with the LED flashes and the red planet glaring down at me.  I was discussing recently how amazing it is that New York’s air quality has improved so much that you can now actually see the stars on a regular basis.  When I was growing up, the incinerator smoke and smog choked out the stars.  No more.  Now we get a real light show and never more so than tonight with Jupiter’s stark clarity and brightness.

OK, so the Leonid meteor shower may be better, but this night still has me yearning for a telescope (and rural living).

Click on through to see a couple of photos I snapped.  Note that you can actually see the red tint of the planet.  Read more…

It’s Pilot season in America. There certainly seems to be more shows that at least have the potential to be intriguing. There’s the can’t miss in HBO’s Boardwalk Empire, the LOST clone in NBC’s The Event, the waiting-to-see-if-it-can-deliver in AMC’s The Walking Dead and a host of other intriguing new shows.  I may not drop thoughts on all of them, but I will try to give my initial thoughts on some of those that catch my eye.  First up is the first off the DVR, NBC’s The Event.

NBC apparently does not make their production stills available for download. Boo on them. The art in this post will suffer a bit.

The Event mimicked LOST in many ways, to the point that it even was blatantly marketed as a potential successor.  That will grasp the eyes of LOST fanatics with suddenly an extra hour of time each week, particularly when the show is granted at least some street cred with positive buzz.  But that buzz and intentional comparison also carries with it the heavy burden of expectation.  If you don’t deliver, you’re going to know it pretty quickly — as was the case for The Nine and FlashForward, the last two shows that filed miserably in assuming the throne of TV’s top network blockbuster.

As a LOST junkie, I somewhat knew what I wanted to see in this pilot.  First and foremost, you need a solid score.  Series creator Nick Wauters turned that task over to Scott Starrett, a virtual unknown to mainstream productions whose IMDB credits reflect a show called Drop Dead Diva and a movie called Slutty Summer.  If you couldn’t tell, I’m not exactly overwhelmed with confidence.  While Starrett fails to deliver on an epic scale in the way that Michael Giacchino did for LOST or Bear McCreary did for Battlestar Galactica, he does manage to build the appropriate adrenaline during the more action packed scenes.  The scoring during the more dramatic or dialogue is somewhat empty and overall it’s a bit lacking in imagination.  I was not terribly impressed on this level.

Click through for more thoughts. Read more…

Although I’m apprehensive about its somewhat slow pace, I still think Rubicon has what it takes to grow into a real winner and a hit. As such, I’m putting some faith in it and am anointing it with instant recap status.  To read prior Quick Hits for the show, click here on my posts tagged #Rubicon.  Here are my Quick Hits for Episode 1.08, “Caught in the Suck.”

The return of Ed Bancroft was a welcome one in Rubicon's eighth episode.

Another week without time to really spend on TV.  Caught up a bit this weekend and took a brief break from trying to figure out the baseball season.  Not going to spend too much time on this past week’s episode, “Caught in the Suck.”

What I will give Rubicon credit for is that it most certainly has discipline.  You can somewhat tell that the producers had a clearly defined skeleton for the conspiracy and how they wanted to lay it out.  It was largely piecemeal at first and, in that structure, it risked having trouble catching on and holding onto audience.  My brother, for example, abandoned the show quite quickly with the lack of any visible path or hint of action.  Taking to the show really was a leap of faith on the part of anyone who chose to become dedicated to it.  Of course, AMC has earned some goodwill with their successes on Mad Men and Breaking Bad.  Add in a solid cast and the promise of a grand plan, and there was some reason to look forward to it developing.

But therein lies the rub; the producers discipline has been strict.  Although they almost certainly went with a few tweaks after the pilot aired and feedback was received (e.g., ditching the idea of Katherine having kids), there’s been a near remarkable steadfastness and lack of panic on the part of producers.  Yes, the marketing side has been atwitter with trying to thieve Mad Men viewers.  And they’ve really been pushing their somewhat frail website.  But the storyline’s stress free canter continues unabated.  And even after we’ve received some of the most significant revelations to date in episode seven, it’s still hard to grasp what we’re actually looking at.  We’ve gotten a few of the sections of the jigsaw puzzle connected, but the portrait being painted remains far from focus.

Some quick hits, after the jump. Read more…