media

With the demise of the Sopranos, West Wing, and Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, and with the interminably long hiatus of Friday Night Lights, the best show on television right now is Rescue Me. It has been months since the last episode aired and I had been anxiously awaiting the season premiere last night. Black billboards featuring only a Pink-Floyd-esque, stretched-neck-and-screaming Denis Leary profile started appearing in LA a few weeks ago, captioned with a very simple “rescue me” and “06-13-07″. All day yesterday I was excited to see what was going to happen. (Last season, of course, ended with a dramatic cliff-hanger.)

Now understand this: I have three televisions, two TiVo boxes, and a DirecTV HD DVR. These three machines have yet to fail me in 3+ years. Any time a show was missed, it was always entirely my fault for not double-checking the priorities. I knew that “Rescue Me” was set to ultra-high priority on the two TiVos and I — incorrectly — thought that I had told the DirecTV DVR to record it as well. But it was not to be. I forgot that the (absolutely horrible) software on the DirecTV DVR wouldn’t let me schedule a season pass for the show when I tried a few weeks ago. There wasn’t a new episode set to air in the near future so I couldn’t program it. So that system recorded Mythbusters and Modern Marvels instead. The two TiVo boxes were set to record Rescue Me on the FXP (the Pacific feed of the FXNetwork) channel at 10pm Pacific time. Unfortunately DirecTV dropped FXP and replaced it with the regular, East-coast feed of FX, so not only was the show airing at 7pm Pacific instead of 10pm, but it was now on channel 248 instead of channel 78. So one TiVo recorded Girls Next Door and the other one recorded what was probably its 3000th episode of Law & Order.

So now I have to wait for FX to replay the premiere on Friday night. All three DVRs are set to record it. Damn.

Are you wondering what media I consumed this weekend? I knew you were. And so I shall tell you.

• Heat ****
• Sopranos *****
• Oh the Glory of It All, by Sean Wilsey ****½
• Oceans 13 ***½
• John from Cincinnati ***½
• A Prairie Home Companion, featuring Martin Sheen, Randy Newman, and Paula Poundstone (live at The Greek) ******
• Saturday Night Live (rerun) ***½
• SNL Tribute: Chris Farley ****

Warning: Post Contains Spoilers

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My Five Eight Favorite NPR Names

1. Cokie Roberts
2. Nina Totenberg
3. Mandalit del Barco
4. Korva Coleman
5. Nora Raum
6. Corey Flintoff
7. Liane Hansen
8. Sylvia Poggioli

Just how long, do you think, until OscarTorrents gets slammed by Hollywood? They’re making it a snap to download all of this year’s Oscar-nominated films. Stuck somewhere without internet access? There’s a company named FON that’s giving away wifi routers in the hopes of blanketing the country with free wireless internet access. Already own one of the DVDs? LifeHacker has instructions that show you how to load a DVD onto your video iPod. Hell, don’t stop there! Why not host your own radio show — for free, of course — to discuss the films? You could also write about them if you want. Then use some free software to convert your text to a PDF document. Welcome to 2007!

Now … where’s my damn jetpack?

Where does the year go? This one is almost over so it’s time to start doing some wrap-ups. Thanks to TiVo I have gotten to watch a ton of the tube this year, and there has been some excellent stuff to see. Here’s my picks for the top ten shows of 2006. Feel free to argue, but remember that I’m always right.

Wife Swap / Desperate Housewives (ABC)

Don’t vomit just yet. If you haven’t given either of these shows a chance, I’m telling you that you’re missing some of the best “scream at the television” action there is. Both shows are essentially hour-long exercises in watching women act like complete and total retards. There has not been a Wife Swap yet that didn’t have me at some point shaking my head and wondering seriously about the viability of our species. Are there really moms this stupid on our planet? And I am completely done with any Terry Hatcher plotline they can throw at me, but otherwise Desperate Housewives is seriously embarrassing, addictive fun. It’s a bummer that they killed the slutty-hot ex-lover in the supermarket fiasco.

Grey’s Anatomy (ABC)

Now that E.R. has finally gone off the … what? It’s still on? When will that show die? Good Lord! It jumped the shark ten years ago! Grey’s Anatomy may never achieve the excellence of the first two seasons of E.R., but McDreamy and McSteamy and the gang are way more fun than even the Clooney days of NBC’s doctor show were. The writers got us to care about Meredith’s slutty little existence and — with the exception of one exploding-man episode — have been able to avoid the repeated helicopter-train-earthquake-stuck-in-Africa “must see” hijinks of E.R. We all feel bad about Denny, but Alex is a good guy at heart, right?

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I have just about 9,000 songs (35GB) in my iTunes library, and I listen to music the entire time I’m in the office every day. I live and die by my smart playlists. I’ve seen more than a few tutorials lately about how to utilize this iTunes feature, so I thought I’d toss my hat in the ring with a few tips on how to make Apple’s killer app work better. Here are five tips to keeping your daily listening enjoyable.

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You’d have to look far and wide to find an actor involved in more projects lately than Alec Baldwin. He’s currently starring in 30 Rock on NBC and this weekend I saw him in two major motion pictures: The Departed and Running with Scissors. I like Alec Baldwin. I really do. His choices baffle me, though. Sometimes he picks pure winners and sometimes he picks dogs.

30 Rock is a perfectly mediocre television show. Tina Fey is a comic genius and the show’s concept is interesting. I’ve only seen one episode, but I don’t think I’m jumping the gun to say that this isn’t exactly a comedy on the same level as Seinfeld or even Everybody Loves Raymond. It’s a decent television show, though, and Baldwin’s character is wonderfully strange and stupid. He’s brought to the show by NBC executives to hawk the G.E. Trivection Oven, an experiment in product-placement which cannot possibly be real, but apparently is. On a five-star scale, this show gets exactly two and a half stars. I doubt it will last two seasons, but it’s not a bad show.

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Anybody out there notice a trend? It seems like the quality of shows has suddenly gotten much better in the last two or three years. My TiVo runneth over. That’s how I can tell. I can’t remember a time since the early 90s when there were so many really, really good shows on the tube. I’m glad that I have DirecTV now — getting the major networks affiliates from different regions means I can catch the East coast feeds for some, so I can TiVo shows that are supposed to be airing in the same time slot. Here’s a quick list of some of the shows that have me hooked right now.

• Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip
• Friday Night Lights
• Entourage
• Rescue Me
• Law & Order
• Dexter
• Six Degrees
• Scrubs
• Boston Legal
• The Office
• Grey’s Anatomy

The only two positive things I can say about Failure to Launch are that it was not quite as bad as A Historyof Violence and that it had a decent soundtrack. (And, of course, for some reason that soundtrack is not available at Amazon or on iTunes.)

Let me put it this way: Terry Bradshaw did the best acting in the film. McConaughey plays the exact same character he’s played in every role he’s ever had. Parker spent the majority of the film being very loud and looking very old.

Let me put it another way: There is a 3+ minute scene in which a couple of the supporting cast members — the “subploteers” — perform CPR / mouth-to-mouth to revive a bird they shot with a BB gun.

The only reason I can’t say that this film was worse than A History of Violence is because at no point did it attempt to pretend that it was a good movie. I can’t imagine that anyone involved with this waste of time even remotely thought they were producing a good movie, and it shows.

If you have a choice between catching a Saved by the Bell marathon on cable and going to see this flick, go with Screech.

On Tuesday I attended a panel at the SXSW Day Stage titled “Democratization of the Moving Image” featuring Andrew Baron (AB) and Amanda Congdon (AC) of rocketboom. I’ve been downloading the show ever since TiVo recommended it to me, and I love it, so it was great to get to see these two explain their philosophy, the development of the “show”, and what they think about it.

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Tonight was the premiere of the final season of one of my favorite shows — Six Feet Under, on HBO. It’s really brilliant, this show. I can’t get over how every episode is just so freaking fantastic. I’m going to be a bit sad when it’s gone.

I have been thinking a lot lately about how I used to never watch television. For the first twenty-five years of my life, if you had asked me, I would have said that I didn’t consider myself a tv-watcher, even that I didn’t really like tv (except for football, of course). In the last five or six years, though, I’ve become addicted to quite a few shows: Law & Order, West Wing, CSI: Miami, the Sopranos … I honestly think that some of the best production/writing/acting in media is on these shows, but I am also wondering if it’s really TV that’s getting better or if it’s just that I am getting older.

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This list of my favorite books has been floating around my site for about a decade now … Originally I had it prefaced with:

“This is my list of the all-time best books ever written. If you get a chance, read at least one of these before you die. The WWW is great fun, TV is great, the radio is always playing, but nothing compares to a good book. Please, do yourself a favor, read. I’ll add more as I come across them, but the truly great are rare.”

I’ll revise that now to simply say that it’s a list of what were my favorite books in the 90s. Some of them I still consider faves. YMMV.
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This is the sort of thing that makes me glad I have TiVo. The Discovery Channel is starting a new series: Deadliest Catch, about Alaskan deep-sea crab fishing. The tagline is $140,000 for 5 days’ work is a job some men would die for. And some do. (I’ll ignore the dangling preposition.) How can that not spark your interest?