I'm So Out Of TV Touch.

This morning I came across an article about how the show SMILF, seen on the Showtime channel in the US, has been cancelled amidst allegations of misconduct against the creator and talk of questionable activities on the set.

Seeing the article was the first time I'd heard of the show.  To be fair it apparently aired in Canada on Crave, a service I don't have.  But it made me think about how much TV has changed.  I can remember a time when CBC and CTV were Canada's TV networks, and the US networks were NBC, CBS, and ABC.  So it was a lot easier to know what was actually airing.  These days you have who knows how many networks and speciality channels, and the streaming services like Netflix are producing their own material.  It's gotten to a point where you probably need to be a professional, or an obsessive TV junkie, to know and keep track of what's going on.

In my case it doesn't help that I don't really watch dramatic TV anymore.  I just can't seem to hook on to any series.  I thought I might watch Magnum PI to some extent, but a couple episodes was all I got around to.  A couple of years ago I had the idea that I would just pick one show and watch the whole season of it.  I may have to consider doing that again next fall.

They Went There.

I hadn't been planning to watch it, but CTV happened to play the opening episode of The Rookie last night, so I decided to take a look.  The series stars Nathan Fillion as John Nolan, a 40 year old LAPD rookie.  He decides to join the force after intervening in a bank robbery in his small town, putting his life at risk in the process.  It seems to me that would be a red flag for any recruiter.  In any case he's assigned to the Wilshire patrol area, much to the discontent of his watch commander, Sergeant Wade Grey(Richard T. Jones).  Grey accuses Nolan of suffering from a midlife crisis.  And it's not hard to think he's right, especially given that Nolan is romantically involved with fellow rookie Lucy Chen(Canadian Idol season 3 winner/Dark Matter regular Melissa O'Neill), who is not surprisingly considerably younger than he is.  Yep, they went for the cliché.  We also go to cliché land with the third rookie, Jackson West(Titus Makin), the son of a veteran LA cop, whose first experience under fire may be an indication he's not up to the job.

We do have a surprisingly heavy regular female cast here.  Afton Williamson plays Talia Bishop, Nolan's training officer.  She has a friendly rivalry with West's training officer Angela Lopez(Alyssa Diaz), both women hoping to make detective.  Mercedes Mason plays Captain Zoe Andersen,  commanding officer of the various main characters.  Rounding out the regular cast is Chen's training officer Tim Bradford(Eric Winter), who comes across as a bad cop.  We learn he has a troubled wife he's estranged from, leading to the obvious question of whether he's nasty because of her problems, or  her problems are because he's nasty.

This being 2018 they've decided to use some footage from the perspectives of police car video cameras and officer body cameras.  Whether they'll keep this up as the series continues is an obvious question.  It no doubt complicates filming, and some viewers may not like the jiggling perspective of the body camera footage, which seems to be done using actual body cameras.

Will the show succeed?  Given that it's still a "cop on the beat" show, despite the hook of a 40 year old rookie, it will have to convince viewers that it's not just more of the same.

Part of what led me to watch is that it was immediately preceded by Magnum PI.  After watching the pilot I missed the following episodes, so it was time to give it another shot.  I'm still not convinced about Jay Hernandez.  I also found it odd that we have another episode with a kid in it.  The best part of the episode was a cameo appearance by Cyndi Lauper as a low rent defense lawyer.

Magnum Redux.

Tonight was the debut of the 21st Century version of Magnum PI  As someone who watched the original when it was new I have mixed feelings.  On the one hand they definitely had some hints of the old show that people who saw it will recognise, including TC's Hughes 500D(as it was in those days) helicopter in its familiar striped paint job, the Ferrari 308 GTS Magnum drives in part of the episode, and Zeus and Apollo.  On the other hand there have been changes given the contemporary setting, such as that Magnum and his buddies are now vets of Iraq instead of Vietnam, and that Higgins is a woman this time around.  The latter is sure to upset some old fans, but it doesn't bug me much.  But it looks like they might be setting up a romance between Higgins and Magnum, which would be pretty cliché.

I'm not quite convinced about Jay Hernandez, the new Magnum, just yet.  To me he doesn't seem to have the charisma that Tom Selleck did pretty much from the start of the original series.  It will be interesting to see if that changes as the series progresses and we get more familiar with the new version.  Perdita Weeks will probably have an easier time of things as Higgins, since she won't face the kind of direct comparisons any male actor would to John Hillerman from the original.  But it remains to be seen how their versions of Magnum and Higgins  will play off against each other. 

One critique I have is the obvious use of CGI in some places.  They probably didn't want to boost their budget by doing certain scenes with practical effects, but they just didn't seem right for this show. 

Will the series succeed?  The revived Hawaii Five-0 has had a successful run, so it's possible.  But revived series have also flopped, like the new version of Ironside a few years back. 

Unhappy Breakaway Day 2018.

Once again September 13th has come.  This is the 19th anniversary of the Moon being blown out of Earth orbit in at least one universe.  It's hard to imagine that it will be 20 years since 1999 next year.  I'm thinking that I'll sit down one of these days and binge watch the whole of the first season.

It's Sad I Was Right.

Back in 2013 I posted about seeing a piece of fanart for the DC Comics character Starfire on Deviantart.  I thought the artist made her look African American, and speculated what might happen if someone like Beyoncé was cast in the role.  5 years later a live action TV version of Teen Titans is on the way, with Anna Diop cast as Starfire.  The result?  A bunch of racist dumbasses complaining Starfire isn't black.  Well, yeah, but she's an alien.  So if you're going to go in that direction no Earth woman should be playing her period.  Which would make it damn difficult to have a live action Starfire at all.

Amazing.

A Fight Network ad break that doesn't include a Dr. Ho pain relief ad.

Yes, I've been watching Fight Network a lot the last while.

I Want A Cut!

This fall we've seen a couple of revivals of old TV series.  Back from the '70s is S.W.A.T.  The series has done well enough that it's been given a full season of episodes by CBS.  So if there's a market for '70s revivals here's my suggestion: Quincy, M.E., with Gilbert Gottfried as Quincy.  If you've ever seen the original you might guess why.  So if you read this, Gilbert, and go for it I want  a cut of the profits.

The Look Is Gone.

The other night I saw a drawing of a character that reminded me of Christina Applegate.  So I ended up looking at a few clips of Married With Children(or Married...with Children as some sources render it) on YouTube.  One thing that struck me was how it was a multi camera show filmed to video, a format that has disappeared from sitcoms, and the rest of North American scripted TV as well, other than the remaining US soaps.  In the '80s it was incredibly common, but looking at those clips in 2017 it was just one of the things that made them look dated.  Current productions all look like they're filmed now, whatever the actual equipment used to capture them is.   But I'm kind of surprised that I didn't notice the change, even though it happened a good while ago already.

Of course filming to video isn't completely gone.  It's still very common for reality TV, and shows like Saturday Night Live.   It still works for those formats, giving them the appearance of happening as we watch them.  I suppose sooner or later someone will try it with a sitcom again, but it will probably be used deliberately to make it look like a '70s or '80s sitcom.

Too Much TV.

I watched way too much TV Friday.  Three and a half baseball games, Bellator, parts of a CFL game, and a bit of news.  I haven't got a clue how much actual watching time it was, but it was too much.

Breakaway Day Greetings!

Yep,  another September 13th has rolled around, and as tradition here we acknowledge that today is Breakaway Day.  The big news in the Space: 1999 fandom this year was of course the death of Martin Landau on July 15th.  Hopefully the rest of the cast is around for many years to come.

Of course it's not just the cast that is ageing.  The fandom itself is ageing.  Most people who are fans were fans when the series first aired in the '70s.  Even younger fans, who caught on to the show via reruns in the '80s and '90s aren't that young either.  I'm sure the occasional newcomer picks up on the series, but it doesn't have the same kind of footprint as other older fandoms, and a new TV series or movie is increasingly unlikely.  So, barring some surprise, the fandom is slowly going to decline as the years go on.

Goodbye, Mr. Barnsley.

Sad news to report.  Greg Barnsley has died at 83.  Anyone who watched Saskatoon TV prior to 1992 will be familiar with Barnsley.  One of the original on air personalities at CFQC TV Barnsley appeared in various roles for the station, including weatherman on CFQC's news broadcasts and host of Kingo Bingo.  In 2014 the newly renovated CFQC studio was named the Greg Barnsley Studio in his honor. 

You can hear Barnsley's distinctive voice in the following 1984 documentary.

Maybe I Shouldn't.

Recently I stumbled across the Stingray Retro channel on my cable box.  All they do is play old videos from the '80s and '90s, with the occasional early 2000s vid thrown in for variety.  But I'm starting to wonder if I should be watching it.  I'll be sitting there, see a video from the '80s, and suddenly find myself filled with a mix of nostalgia and melancholy.  I remember a bunch of those videos, having watched them when I was a teenager, and it just reminds me the late '80s were 30 years ago already.  It's also sad seeing someone like Michael Hutchence, knowing he died too young.

One thing that's odd is the poor quality of some of the oldest videos.  They look like they were taken off someone's old VHS cassettes.  Did they come out of the vault at Muchmusic or something? 

Breakaway+17+40.

Once more it's September 13th, and as is tradition here on the blog we commemorate Breakaway Day.  On this day in 1999 the Moon was blown out of Earth orbit by a massive explosion of nuclear waste on the far side.  By an unknown process this led to the Moon being flung across the Universe, taking with it the crew of Moonbase Alpha.

The title to this post is a callback to last year's Breakaway Day post.  This year is the 40th anniversary of the second and final season of Space: 1999.  CBC in Canada aired the first episode of year 2, "The Metamorph," on Saturday, September 18, 1976.  I remember CBC advertising the upcoming season with a clip from "The Metamorph" some time before that date, although I can't remember how far beforehand it was. 

The second season did well enough that further episodes were considered, but ultimately series producers ITC/ATV decided that the lack of a major US network order didn't make future episodes viable. 

An Odd Desire.

For some reason this morning I got the urge to hear the Three's Company theme.  I did see multiple episodes of it when it ran, but it wasn't exactly a favourite of mine. 



The show was a big hit in the '70s and '80s, but by today's standards the premise seems a bit weird.  A man pretends to be gay so he can share a Santa Monica apartment with two women, because the landlord doesn't approve of co-ed living arrangements.  If it had been set in a small town in a more conservative part of the country it would have seemed a bit more believable, but in a city in Los Angeles County? Not to me at least. 

Breakaway+16+40.

Another year has gone by, and once more it's Breakaway Day.  On this day 16 years ago a massive explosion of Nuclear Disposal Area 2, on the Moon's far side, sent the Moon out of Earth's orbit, flinging it into deep space.  For the survivors on Moonbase Alpha it was the beginning of a journey across the Universe.

In our world this year also marks the fortieth anniversary of Space: 1999 hitting TV screens in the UK and elsewhere.  For those of us who saw the show when it was new it's weird to think we first saw it that long ago.  At the time it was the only new science fiction TV series set in space, its contemporaries such as The Six Million Dollar Man and The Invisible Man being set primarily or entirely on Earth. 

Space: 1999 was created in an era when the possibilities for manned space exploration seemed huge.  Men had landed on the Moon, Skylab was active, and plans were in the works for the joint Soviet-American Apollo-Soyuz mission.  So it's no surprise that the series envisioned manned spaceflights to the outer Solar System in the mid '80s and '90s, and a manned base on the Moon.  Years later Gerry Anderson would admit he was overly optimistic in setting the show in 1999, but everyone else was thinking the same kind of things as well.  Of course we would have a base on the Moon soon.  Unfortunately for everyone space travel in the real world proved a lot more complicated than it did on TV.

As with everything else fandoms for television have changed a lot in that forty years.  It's funny to think of how fandom then was pretty much entirely based around printed material, including whatever licensed material was released in connection with a series, articles in commercial publications and newspapers, and fan publications exchanged between local fans or sent by mail.   By modern standards the amount available was generally quite limited, and it often took weeks or even months for news to reach fans.  Things like fan art and fanfiction existed, but distribution was limited to the small publishing runs of whatever fan publication it was submitted to. 

I watched "Breakaway" tonight on a Sony Walkman.  No, the tiny screen isn't an optimal way to watch a TV episode, but it seemed appropriate to watch it on something that would have seemed amazingly high tech and exciting to the 8 year old version of me who watched the series in 1975 and 1976, a gizmo that could have been lifted right from the set of the show itself.  (Well, perhaps if it was beige plastic, not the lovely wine colour mine is.)  Even being able to watch an episode whenever you want would have seemed exciting in an era before people owned VCRs to record things, and before commercially released TV episodes existed.  That's of course one of the greatest changes from the mid '70s, the instant access to programs and information we have.  And of course it's something that isn't reflected at all in the series. But hey, most other science fiction of the '70s didn't get it right either.

It Won't Work.

For some reason I've seen a lot of ads online today for the latest season of Mr. D.  Sorry, CBC, but I won't be watching.  Seriously, does anyone actually think Gerry Dee is funny?  I guess someone does, or CBC wouldn't have given him a TV show.

Forever The Same.

I caught the premiere of ABC's new series Forever tonight.  Honestly they're going to need a lot of work to make this one differ much from previous shows about immortals.  It already looks like it will contain the classic elements, namely the hero getting badly mangled or killed each episode, and the inevitable flashbacks to his past.  You'd think someone could do something different with the concept, like say have it revolve around those who have just become immortal and all the things they go through as they slowly realise what it all really means.  Of course there's a good chance it will get six episodes and be cancelled. 

Addenda:  Oops, I didn't know this show has been on the air for a while.  This shows you how much attention I pay to network TV these days.

Thanks, Glen.

Although he died Friday it only became public yesterday that veteran TV writer and producer Glen A. Larson died Friday.  If you watched any amount of US made TV programming in the '70s and '80s there's a good chance you were a regular viewer of a series Larson had a hand in.  His entertainment career began in 1956 when he was a member of the vocal group the Four Preps, whose 3 gold records were written by Larson.  Larson moved on to the TV business, working for Quinn Martin Productions before going out on his own.  His work ranged over a variety of genres, from the crusading coroner Quincy, ME, to the space drama of Battlestar Galactica.  The latter was Larson's most personal project, one he began work on in 1968, and had elements based on his Mormon faith.

Unlike some of his contemporaries Larson proved unable to sustain his success, with his projects after the mid '80s being largely unsuccessful, or rehashes of his earlier work.  He had no real involvement in the 2003 remake of Galactica, and work on a big screen continuation of the original with Bryan Fisher circa 2010 stalled.  It was often suggested during the height of his career that Larson's projects were too often attempts to cash in on trends, or had elements taken from other works.  However valid such criticisms might be Larson had a lot of influence on American TV while he was successful, and his work continues to have influence.

I'll Pass.

I just saw an ad on Spike for a new show, Gym Rescue.  Sorry, Spike folks, but even having Randy Couture in this won't make me watch it.  I can't imagine there's enough differences between gyms to make it watchable more than once, and I'm not convinced even one episode will be interesting.  I suspect this will last as long as last year's Car Lot Rescue did. Bar Rescue works because bars are all different enough to interest viewers.

Watch It Now!

Before Big Brother declares it doubleplusungood!.



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