Category: TV
Direct Beam Comms #23
TV
The Grinder
The first season, and ultimately what’ll turn out to be its last season, of the FOX TV series The Grinder ended last week. This series started off as a kind’a wacky show about two brothers, one a successful small town lawyer (Fred Savage) who up until that point’s greatest accomplishment was having a “protected left turn” installed in their town and the other brother (Rob Lowe) who’s returned home after playing the character of “Mitch Grinder” on a fictional long-running show-with-the-show that’s like a legal version of CSI that’s also called The Grinder, who now wants to work at the family law firm since he considers his run on his The Grinder as being just as good as law school.
At first The Grinder was enjoyable but it started being a bit too formulaic. That formula was the firm would take on a case, brother Stewart (Savage) wouldn’t want Mitch to be a part of the case because of his lack of real world experience, but in the end Mitch by using his experiences on his The Grinder would be able to figure out a way to win the case.
Which was fine except that it started getting a bit old.
As the series progressed, though, the real The Grinder started to evolve away from that simple premise and started making fun of procedural cop and lawyer shows that are everywhere these days. When The Grinder moved to this it became much more enjoyable and many times more entertaining.
Under this premise I could’ve seen this show going for a few years, but alas FOX announced this week that the first season of The Grinder would also be its last when they announced the cancellation of this series.
Overall: C+, first half: C-, last half: B.
Movies
Captain America: Civil War
The first Captain America movie was released five years ago and was good. It starts off as an origin story of the character where puny Steve Rogers (Chris Evans) goes from literal 90 pound weakling to strapping super-soldier Captain America via an experiment, then tells of Cap and his team’s adventures during WW2 against Hydra and the Red Skull. That movie did a good job of introducing the character and ultimately taking him from the 1940s to present day by the end of the film. What I didn’t expect was that a side character in that movie, Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan), would go onto play such a pivotal role in future Captain America movies.
Frozen and brought back to life much like Captain America, instead of waking to our modern world like Cap did, Bucky woke in a Soviet facility where he was turned into the “Winter Soldier.” A state sponsored assassin who was put on ice in between missions and would become the main baddie of the second Captain America: The Winter Solider movie.
And while I thought both the original Captain America: The First Avenger and Winter Soldier were good, I must say I really liked the third Captain America: Civil War movie a lot, and much of that is because of things like Bucky’s story.
This latest Captain America film bumps Bucky from nemesis to ally of Cap as Bucky struggles to regain his lost memories stolen from him in the process of becoming the Winter Soldier. Bucky’s main problem is that everyone’s looking for him because of a bombing that injured many and killed the King of Wakana. Cap, looking to help his friend, goes on the run with Bucky to try and track down the real bomber and clear Bucky’s name.
Except that with Cap, Bucky and the Falcon (Anthony Mackie) on the run means that Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) and the rest of the Avengers must go after them since the Avengers are now under the control of the United Nations as a sort of state-sponsored super-hero team.
What I liked most about all this was that none of the characters in Civil War were in the wrong with their beliefs. There’s a legitimate argument to be made that superheroes like Iron Man and Captain America need to be controlled by someone, lest they grow too powerful and decide to control us. And there’s also a good argument to be made that no one should be in control of an organization like the Avengers since they’d be in charge of the most powerful weapons on the planet.
I think Tony Stark makes his point here with Avenger the Scarlett Witch (Elizabeth Olsen) who can do all sorts of weird things like control minds and use force-fields who’s staying in the US at an Avengers compound, “They generally don’t let foreign WMDs into the country.”
So it’s hard to root for any character here; is Tony too proud to admit that Cap might be right, that they’re doing a good enough job on their own and don’t need overseers or is Cap too proud to see that sometimes a lot of innocent people are hurt and die when the Avengers go into battle.
Or maybe bother Tony and Cap are both right and wrong at the same time?
All of which makes for a very compelling story. And this mixed with amazing action scenes where we see super-powered characters fighting each other in spectacular ways makes for a great film.
Speaking of action, Civil War and previous Winter Soldier do an interesting thing with their big action set pieces — they start small and slowly build big. Be it Cap’s elevator fight in Winter Soldier that starts with Cap vs a few and turns into an all-out brawl that evolves to Cap vs a jet on his motorcycle or in Civil War that starts with Cap and Bucky confronting each other, turns to Cap and Bucky fighting a German SWAT team and ends up on the roads with Cap and Bucky racing cars and being chased by the likes of the Black Panther.
This slow build is something I don’t see a lot of other comic book movies using, but it seems like they should be when they all seem to be trying to copy the Marvel style of films.
I really have to nit-pick to find anything in Civil War that I didn’t care for. And I’m one who’s the first to pounce on story elements that don’t make sense or characters who change at the whim of story beats. That stuff simply isn’t present in Civil War. It’s a solid movie from beginning to end, does a great job of introducing new characters like Black Panther (Chadwick Boseman) to a new Spider-Man (Tom Holland), has an interesting story interspersed with action scenes that actually drive the story rather than just featuring characters punching one and other in the fact — and does it all without missing a beat.
Grade: A
The Reading List
Trapped on Tape: 10 Great Horror Movies that are Only on VHS
This week in pop-culture history
- 1971: Escape from the Planet of the Apes opens.
- 1982: Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior opens in the US.
Robotech (1985) TV series opening credits
Direct Beam Comms #22
Term of the week
Gunpla: Stands for “Gundam Plastic Model.”
TV
Doctor Who 1996 TV movie
Comparatively, the mid–1990s weren’t great when it came to sci-fi. Sure,TV series like Star Trek and The X-Files and other sci-fi shows thrived, but for the most part sci-fi films and TV were a niche market at best. Back then, there were a very few successful comic book movies and in fact, most comic titles aired as after school cartoons and not as films. And even what’s now one of the world’s most popular TV series Doctor Who’s original run was cancelled in 1989 and was then considered decidedly uncool.
Yet “uncool” or not in 1996 FOX TV decided to create and air a made for TV reboot movie of Doctor Who.
Starring Paul McGann as the Doctor, Eric Roberts as the Master and Daphne Ashbrook as Dr. Grace Holloway, this new Doctor Who was a continuation of the old but tweaked a bit for American audiences. Gone was the UK setting for a Canada doubling as the US and really the only English “thing” in the show that previously was defined by its “Englishness” was the Doctor himself.
At the time I remember FOX heavily promoting the show and it seemed like they were hoping they might have a hit on their hands that they could then spin out to a new Doctor Who TV series. Maybe it was because FOX was just beginning to ride the wave of The X-Files mania that was starting to grip the nation that they thought that reviving a cult British classic TV series might lead to winning ratings.
And the spring of 1996 I was extremely excited about the prospect that Doctor Who might be returning to TV screens. I was a Doctor Who fanatic as a kid thanks to my friend Cameron but had drifted away from the show in my teenage years. (Though I might be mis-remembering this as I’m not quite sure just when our local PBS station stopped airing episode of Doctor Who.)
But watching the 1996 Doctor Who movie was a disappointment. It was Doctor Who and it felt like an honest attempt at translating something that was so different than the average TV series into something more palatable for American audiences. But something was just missing from the 1996 Doctor Who. The ratings for the TV movie were poor and that was that. It would be nearly a decade before the relaunch of the now mega-popular Doctor Who TV series that would return the series to prominence.
One thing about the 1996 Doctor Who that I appreciate — it might have failed but it’s never been ignored by the most recent incarnation of the show. The movie was celebrated a few years ago during the series 50th anniversary and McGann has appeared as the Doctor in a flashback episode of the current series and has voiced the Doctor in a series of audiobooks too.
Oddly enough, just after the 1996 Doctor Who movie aired sci-fi was about to become huge with the likes of mega-blockbusters Independence Day and The Matrix. I kind’a wonder if the 1996 reboot Doctor Who had been released more around the time of those movies if it would have found more of an audience on TV?
Movies
Dune (1984)
I rewatched the movie Dune a few weeks back — theatrical, not the extended cut thank you — and noticed that several of the actors in the movie went onto star in various sci-fi/genera TV series in the 1980s/early 1990s.
- Kyle MacLachlan (Paul Atreides) – Played Special Agent Dale Cooper in Twin Peaks that was co-created by David Lynch who also directed Dune.
- Dean Stockwell (Doctor Wellington Yueh) – Co-starred as Al Calavicci in the series Quantum Leap.
- Patrick Steward (Gurney Halleck) – Starred as Captain Jean-Luc Picard over 176 episodes and four movies of Star Trek: The Next Generation.
Toys
Alien Warrior Dron ARTFX+ Statue
This statue, which retails for $80, can hang off the walls of its diorama and upside down on its base via magnets. (Space Marines not included.)
The reading list
The day we discovered our parents were Russian spies
This week in pop-culture history
- 1973: Soylent Green opens in theaters
- 1994: The TV mini-series The Stand premiers.
- 1996: The TV movie Doctor Who airs on Fox.
Screaming for attention: 400 TV shows and counting
Late last year researches at FX Networks found that there were more than 400 scripted TV shows in 2015. Not 400 HOURS of scripted shows, but 400 DIFFERENT shows. Let that sink in for a minute. If there’s 400 scripted shows and each show has on average 10 episodes, some would have more and some less, that’s something like around 4,000 hours of NEW TV produced last year. To put that number in perspective, with that amount of content you could watch nothing but new TV shows 24 hours a day from December to mid-June.
And that’s not including news programs and game shows and variety shows and reality and TV movies either. That’s 4,000 hours of scripted dramas and comedies.
Part of why there’s so much “stuff” out there is that every channel wants to have a hit series that draws in viewers, which might turn a channel very few are watching, and therefor getting less ad dollars, into something many are watching and talking about and getting lots of ad dollars. Case in point AMC. A decade ago AMC aired classic movies, hence the name; American Movie Classics. Then in 2007 they launched Mad Men to great acclaim and have since launched other popular series like Breaking Bad and The Walking Dead. Before, AMC was a channel that hardly anyone watched. Now, AMC is one of the most watched spots on TV and one that now makes a lot of money.
And with viewers “cutting the cord” as it were online services are also trying to get in with scripted shows too. Netflix and Amazon have have been creating series specifically for their service for a few years now and now other platforms like Hulu and YouTube are getting in on the game too with content of their own.
I watch a lot of TV, probably too much. And even with my prodigious TV habit I couldn’t watch everything last year that I probably would have in years past. For example, the series Humans on AMC looked interesting enough but I had too many things to watch at that time and never got around to it. And with a show like Jessica Jones on Netflix I did watch the first episode but when it didn’t immediately connect with me I moved onto something else.
Now I’m not saying that I’ll won’t go back and try and watch Jessica Jones or Humans again this summer when there used to be fewer new things to on, but I can’t guarantee it since nowadays there are just as many new and interesting series premiering during the summer as there are in the fall/winter months.
New shows last summer like Halt and Catch Fire, True Detective and The Carmichael Show, all of which I enjoyed a great deal, took whatever time I would normally have to checkout things I’d missed during the fall and instead put the focus on them. In fact, the only show I did catchup on last summer was Fargo, and that was only because a friend highly recommended it.
Which makes me wonder, what am I all missing? Years ago I was only ever able to get into The Wire when I caught up with it after HBO aired the first few seasons before the start of the third. Up until then I’d watch a few episodes at the start of each new season and give up. It was only because I had the time to catch up on it that I was able to be sucked in by that wonderful show.
But the last few years that really hasn’t been happening for me. I tell myself that I need to watch the latest season of House of Cards or Justified or Maron and something else new will appear on my pop-culture radar and I find myself putting off things for one more season.
I suppose the solution to all this is to count my blessings, too much of a good thing is better than nothing, and wait for the day that the eventual collapse of all this good stuff which is inevitable. There’s no way that all the networks and cable channels and online services can be pouring BILLIONS into these new shows with all expected to make back any money.
Maybe what I need to do is to get a colossal DVR and record EVERYTHING I might be interested in when the day comes after the pop-culture collapse when the only thing on to watch are reruns of The Big Bang Theory and episodes of Redneck/Swamp-Truckers/Fishermen/Miners/Pawn on The Discovery Channel.