Author: Bert Ehrmann

Dangerous Universe has been Bert’s web playground since 1998 when personal web sites were a rarity rather than the norm.

2013 Fall TV Update

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The fall TV season is now in full swing and I can finally declare that overall it’s uneven at best. It’s true that many of the more interesting series don’t premiere until much later in the season but from what I’ve seen this fall I’ve been underwhelmed.

Here’s essentially every series I’m currently watching, or have recently watched:

The cast of The Goldbergs
The cast of The Goldbergs

The good:

Making Monsters (Travel Channel): I so love this show about Distortions Unlimited, a company that makes and sells horror items for Halloween and horror attractions. It’s a good representation of the realities of working in a creative industry where there’s always another pressing deadline and projects get changed and changed and changed right up until the very end.

The Goldbergs (ABC): This is a enjoyable comedy about the 1980s that’s highly watchable. I just wished the series creators didn’t have to add the Modern Family “awwwwwwww” moment that closes out the end of each episode here too.

American Horror Story (FX): The first season of American Horror was brilliant and the second started off pretty awful but turned into something decent. The third season, titled Coven, had me hooked from the first scene. But we’re just one episode in so it’s tough to know if in the end this series will be as good as the start.

Community (Syndicated on Comedy Central): It’s amazing how much I look forward to Community, especially since Comedy Central airs four episodes each Friday night in order from the beginning of the series.

The blah:

Stephen Merchant in Hello Ladies
Stephen Merchant in Hello Ladies

Hello Ladies (HBO): Stephen Merchant’s series about a hapless man looking for love in image obsessed Los Angeles is interesting and it uses many of the cringe-worthy storytelling devices Merchant helped create in the UK version of The Office. But where The Office had a lot of heart and some relatable characters, for the most part Hello Ladies has neither.

Agents of SHIELD (ABC): The first episode of SHIELD was interesting enough that it had me wondering if this show might be working on more than one level? Two more episodes in and I can say that SHIELD is strictly a one level series. It’s action adventure premise is more akin to 1980s shows like The A-Team or Riptide rather than having any nuance. If you want to see baddies get their lights punched out by the good-guys on a weekly basis, and there’s nothing wrong with that, then Agents of SHIELD is for you.

The uninteresting:

Brooklyn Nine-Nine (Fox): This series “feels” a lot like Parks and Recreation. And while a lot of people like Parks and Recreation, I’m not a fan and I gave up on Brooklyn Nine-Nine two weeks in.

Eastbound & Down (HBO): I’ve only kind’a sort’a liked Eastbound since it premiered back in ’09. And four seasons in I’m finding the Kenny Powers (Danny McBride) character a bit more grating than usual and am just about ready to give up on it.

Lost Doctor Who episodes featuring William Hartnell found in Africa

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A GROUP of diehard Doctor Who fans has discovered more than 100 long-lost episodes of the popular BBC program gathering dust in Africa.

The episodes from the 1960s, which feature the first two doctors William Hartnell and Patrick Troughton, were feared vanished after the British broadcaster sold a stack of its old tapes and lost or wiped the originals.

But after months of sleuthing the tapes have turned up at the Ethiopian Radio and Television Agency, which purchased them years ago…

Read the whole story here.

Jack Ryan, hasn’t the position of Jason Bourne already been filled?

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Jack Ryan, motorcycle rider and @ss kicker
Jack Ryan, motorcycle rider and @ss kicker

After watching the trailer for Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit I have to wonder about the direction of the Jack Ryan franchise? In the previous four films, the Jack Ryan character was an everyman* who spent his days as a CIA analyst/history teacher and was not a person of action. But when Ryan was thrust into situations like trying to stop WWIII when the captain of a Soviet nuclear missile sub wanted to defect or saving British Royals from terrorists he wasn’t afraid to step up and take risks in order to do the right thing.

And I’ve always thought that’s the appeal of the Jack Ryan character; if an everyman* like him could find the courage to step up, then maybe just about anyone could step up too?

With the new Chris Pine Shadow Recruit Jack Ryan, the character has been morphed to a head-kicking ace-shot super-secret-agent who is part James Bond, Jason Bourne and Ethan Hunt. In fact, watching the trailer I’m not sure there was any substantial difference between Ryan and Bond and Bourne and Hunt. They’re all just on the human side of super-human who are action first, second and last.

It seems to me that by making Ryan an action star there’s a possibility that he’ll get lost in all the clutter of those other characters who are all but alike. In fact, I was struck by just how much Pine as Ryan looked like Tom Cruise as Ethan Hunt in the first Mission Impossible movie. I wonder if this is intentional?

I understand that the modern movie tastes today are different than the were 20+ years ago when the Jack Ryan character was introduced in The Hunt for Red October, I just wonder if it’s tastes that should be dictating the direction of movies rather than film makers striving to deliver something different and interesting?

Besides, we already have perfectly good James Bonds and Jason Bournes and Ethan Hunts, do we really need another?

*An everyman who just happened to look like Alec Baldwin, Harrison Ford or Ben Affleck.

The Online TV Revolution

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When I first started writing this column nearly a decade ago, legally watching TV shows online wasn’t possible. Slowly, over the years, that started to change and TV series that had already aired on traditional channels became available on iTunes and then Netflix and Amazon in a kind of online syndicated format.

But this year Netflix and Amazon* started something new; they debuted new series on their platforms that skipped the traditional networks altogether. While there’s nothing new about original content online, what’s different here is the amount of money being invested in these series, the quality of the shows and the names involved with them.

Kevin Spacey and Robin Wright in House of Cards
Kevin Spacey and Robin Wright in House of Cards

Debuting last February on Netflix was House of Cards. Starring Kevin Spacey, Robin Wright and Kate Mara and co-produced by David Fincher, Netflix reportedly spent $100 million+ to acquire two seasons of this series. In Cards, Spacey plays U.S. Representative Frank Underwood who craves political power and will stop at nothing as he claws his way towards a future in the oval office. Wright plays his wife Claire and Mara an up and coming reporter whom Frank doles out information to, helping his cause and helping her career.

The case of Arrested Development
The case of Arrested Development

After a long absence from TV, in May the fourth season of Arrested Development became available on Netflix. Bridging the seven year gap since Arrested last aired on Fox, the new Arrested presented the Bluth family in a new light and in a new decade. While they once were a family in charge of a successful and profitable construction company, the Bluth Company collapsed in the great recession leaving the family in disarray.

I’m a huge fan of Arrested and though some thought the Netflix series wasn’t as good as when it was on Fox since they were formatted differently — the fourth season played out like one long story with episodes leading into one and other, referencing other episodes, overlapping at points — I liked it a lot.

The cast of Orange is the New Black
The cast of Orange is the New Black

In July one of my favorite shows of the year Orange is the New Black  premiered also on Netflix. Created by Jenji Kohan (Weeds), this series follows character Piper Chapman (Taylor Schilling), a woman sentenced to 15 months in prison for carrying a suitcase full of drug money through an airport a decade before the start of the show. Things go from bad to worse for Chapman as she has to kisses her upper-middle class existence goodbye and experiences a culture-shock at the prison gates. Inside, she must deal with all sorts of different types of people in her new surroundings and finds out that her ex-lesbian lover (Laura Prepon) who got her into the drug trade is also serving time there too.

It’s the series with the most heart of just about any show I’ve ever seen and is unlike anything else out there. And I can’t think of another series that has a mostly female cast and is a drama rather than a soap opera.

While these new Netflix shows do have all the trappings of traditional TV — they run either 30 minutes or an hour depending on the format, all have opening and closing credits and run 13-15 episodes, about the same as traditional TV — there is one important difference here. All episodes of Netflix shows are available on the premiere date. Meaning that while some viewers will watch all of the fourth season of Arrested in a single weekend others, read me, spent more than a week working my way through it. And with a series like Orange I decided to watch no more than two episodes a week, meaning that it took me a few months to get through it.

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Along with these series both Netflix and Amazon have more series from dramas to comedies and even animated series in the works too from creators like Chris Carter of The X-Files and the Worchowski siblings of The Matrix.

My one question to Netflix on all this is how long can they keep paying creators like Spacey and Fincher hundreds of millions of bucks for series and still charge a flat rate of just $8 per month for all you can stream to its subscribers? It’ll be interesting if this cost rises sooner…or later. Visit me online at DangerousUniverse.com.

*So far, Amazon has aired a few pilot episodes for series, but hasn’t yet debuted a full-fledged series on their platform, though several are scheduled.