The Philosophy of Game Shows: Jeopardy and the Quiz Show Phenomenon

By msarko on 9/1/10 10:29pm
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One of the more memorable episodes of the original Twilight Zone is "Mr. Dingle, The Strong". In it, a couple curious Martians grant a sad-sack salesman superhuman strength, if only as a social experiment. The titular Mr. Dingle quickly goes about abusing his new power and showing off for fun and profit. The Martians deem the entire human race incapable of handling such responsibility, but before they depart they fill Dingle's head with an encyclopedic intellect. The lesson of this episode of the traditionally moralistic show is that brains are better than brawn, even if they're less outwardly impressive. The evolution of the American game show went through a similar process, though it ultimately settled on a deceptively populist point of view, rather than completely embracing the elitism inherent to knowledge-for-money arrangements.



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Catching Up: Firefly- Heart of Gold

By msarko on 8/31/10 7:53pm
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Chronologically speaking, "Heart of Gold" was the last episode of Firefly ever aired. It premiered on August 18th, 2003, the last of three episodes relegated to three distant summer slots after the show was canceled. Of all the summer episodes, or really of any episode in the series, "Heart of Gold" is the one that really should have been swept under the rug. Though it's the weakest hour of Firefly by far, I'm still glad it exists. From the removed, academic perspective of the series in retrospect, it's important to see what Firefly could have been, what it was arguably perceived to be by many of its initial viewers: A campy, hokey pulp show as forgettable as any other cut-rate action series.



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Weeds: A Yippity Sippity

By cobwebsandstrange on 8/31/10 7:18pm
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Well, it’d be hard after just the third episode of Weeds this season to condemn the entire thing. But that’s kinda how I feel. Has anyone laughed aloud at anything this season? Probably not. Is the plot line going anywhere? Don’t think so.

So, why keep watching?

Even the best shows wind up petering out. Seinfeld’s last episode was one of the worst things ever televised. But was the rest of its ninth season entertaining. Sure. Let’s hope that these first few installments into the Weeds canon are simply working on setting something interesting up.

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Mad Men: Waldorf Stories

By cobwebsandstrange on 8/30/10 7:38pm
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 Adding new characters to a successful television show is usually a sign of bad things on the horizon. With Mad Men, though, it’s usually an omen of dramatic changes – well, unless the new character is some random broad Don’s began toying with. With introduction of Lane Pryce, the show spun off into a completely new direction. So, we’ll see what happens with the introduction of Roger’s wife’s cousin into office life.

Aside from that weird out cropping of marrying a women thirty to forty years your junior, Roger and Don were necessitated to take a meeting while horrendously drunk. After winning an award for an ad – one which Peggy actually lays claim to – Life cereal execs show up and require being appeased.

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The Philosophy of Game Shows: Deal or No Deal

By msarko on 8/30/10 6:31pm
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Game shows are perhaps the most fascinating programs on television. Though they're designed to feel like inconsequential filler entertainment (an idea reinforced by their relative absence during primetime), they say more about society and indeed about human nature than any other type of show. They reflect the values of the culture around them, they bring in viewers with vicarious thrills and the fantasy of glittering success beyond imagination. Game shows are surreal, grotesque and irresistibly appealing. There's a strand of philosophy underneath their many layers of flash, an unmistakable needle of truth in a haystack of glitz and absurdity. No game show in recent memory has exemplified this more than Deal or No Deal.



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Futurama: "Lrrreconcilable Ndndifferences"

By MichaelP03 on 8/29/10 11:33pm
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Lrrr, the fearless and terrifying leader of the planet Omricon Persei 8, has a problem - his wife thinks he's useless. To shut her up once and for all, he leads an invasion of planet Earth, but declaring the conquest of the planet during a Comic-Con convention is probably not the best way to subjugate a planet full of nerds. Emasculated, he turns to the Planet Express crew for help, and the results turn out a little better than anyone expected - for Lrrr, anyway. Everybody else wishes he and Ndnd would patch up their "Lrrreconcilable Ndndifferences" and go home in the 11th episode of Season 6 of Futurama, and the 99th episode of the show produced and broadcast.

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Rubicon: Look to the Ant

By msarko on 8/29/10 11:28pm
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When I first started covering Rubicon I complained about the mundane dramas the show intersperses between bits of espionage and intrigue. My problem with those threads wasn't that they were poorly executed, just that it looked like the series was going to let them dangle without really relating back to its central themes. Perhaps that was the original plan, but now Rubicon is doing a much better job applying the little human quirks and weaknesses of its central cast to something larger and more meaningful. It still feels like three different shows running at the same time, though I'm warming to the idea of watching each of them.



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Catching Up: Mad Men- The Wheel

By msarko on 8/26/10 8:19pm
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The Season 1 finale of Mad Men is a pretty heartbreaking hour of television. Behind every personal triumph there's something deeper and darker waiting for each character, which puts a fine point on the show's running theme of the hard reality behind glamor and success. Mad Men is a show about a lost lifestyle, a period in our culture that broke down and transformed. More specifically, it's the story of why that lifestyle disappeared. Past all the fancy hotels, liquor-fueled brainstorming sessions and sexy after-hours parties, Mad Men is a deeply moralistic show. The way the Madison Avenue set conducted their lives, this show suggests, led to their downfall.



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Fall 2010 TV Preview: Cable, Part 2

By msarko on 8/26/10 2:46am
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Though cable has a well-earned reputation as the place where more risky, genre-specific shows thrive, that doesn't mean that cable stations don't follow the same self-preservation instincts as the networks. Over the past decade a lot of the heavy hitters have more or less figured out what works for them, so they're mostly filling the 2010/2011 season with familiar, though not necessarily boring, material.



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Catching Up: Firefly- The Message

By msarko on 8/24/10 7:29pm
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"The Message" is the last episode of Firefly ever committed to film, a fact that lends an extra bit of gravity to its melancholy tone. Joss Whedon and Tim Minear were the two chiefly responsible for the episode and those two tend to make a pretty stunning team. Dramatically, it's the strongest episode in the series, giving at least one memorable scene to each of the principle players and showing just how tight Firefly's approach to episodic television could be. Not that many people got to see it the first time it went to air, getting stuffed into a slot in the middle of July long after the series had been canceled.



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