Intellevision by Rick McGinnis

TV can be a real drag sometimes

Rick McGinnis, Metro Canada — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 08:00:00 -0400

IT’S KIND OF OBVIOUS: You don’t need to be a TV critic to know that TV can be a bummer, but a new medical study quoted in a Los Angeles Times science story yesterday suggests that the condition might actually be chronic.

Researchers at Harvard Medical School and the University of Pittsburgh studied more than 4,000 adolescents and concluded that each additional daily hour of television increased the odds of becoming depressed increased by eight per cent, a result not matched by time spent with video games or the computer.

Now, there’s a lot wrong with this sort of study that’s plain even to the untrained eye, starting with the fact that the subjects were teenagers, who have a lot to be depressed about -- especially if you ask them. The study’s authors even admitted that the evidence linking TV to depression was, on the whole, largely circumstantial.

“It could be argued that people with the predilection for later development of depression also happen to have a predilection for watching lots of TV," said Dr. Brian Primack of the University of Pittsburgh’s Centre for Research on Health Care.

The Times article also noted that the study was conducted over seven years, from 1995 to 2002, which just happens to be precisely when The Drew Carey Show was in production. Draw your own conclusions, but I’m just putting it out there.

In other glaringly obvious news, the UK’s Daily Mail tabloid reported that a new Big Brother-style reality show featuring 20 boys and girls between eight and 12 has attracted controversy, as the kids, who spent two weeks together isolated in six stone cottages in Cornwall without their parents, began bullying and physically threatening each other.

It didn’t take long for the boys to descend into violence, with one boy attacking another with a garden rake, and a third pulling a knife. The girls just as quickly began taunting and intimidating each other, the older ones picking on the younger, and an 8-year-old was filmed sobbing and pleading for her parents to take her home.

One has to wonder why Channel Four, the producer, is hiring childless people to produce shows with kids, as any parent could have predicted this inevitable outcome. A crowded bunny hutch and a bag of starving ermines would have produced much the same result.

Giving the people what they want offers profits business wants

Rick McGinnis, Metro Canada — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 01:00:00 -0400

HARD TIMES: When it became apparent, sometime last fall, that we were headed for an extended spell of economic harrowing, the conventional wisdom was that, whatever happened to banks, auto manufacturers, airlines and luxury goods retailers, the entertainment industry would weather the storm.

The basic logic was minted during the Depression, when radio was king and movie theatres were filled every day with people looking to escape the grim world outside with bubbly musicals and screwball comedies set in high society at the top of double bills filled out with cartoons, newsreels and short subjects.

If anyone noticed that the world had changed a bit since the Roosevelt presidency, they didn’t bother saying anything. (And frankly, given the straining comparisons being made between the nascent Obama presidency and FDR, this cognitive fog is starting to look more willful than naïve.)

The “recession-proof” entertainment industry was debunked a bit by a Hollywood Reporter story this weekend that complicated the picture a bit. Some entertainment businesses are doing well – Netflix, for instance, with its move into video on demand subscriptions, and Amazon, thanks to a good holiday season. GameStop, a videogame retailer, has been doing booming business in used games, while Imax has predicted a profit that has done wonders for its stock, thanks to a switch from film to digital, the Imax version of summer blockbuster The Dark Knight, and a revamped business model that shares costs with its joint venture partners. On top of it all, it finally looks like TiVo – the proper noun, not the verb – is about to turn a profit.

Consumers are apparently hunkering down with entertainment options that either cut out costs built into manufacturing and shipping, or offer deep discounts, trends that are expected to continue. “It is possible that the recession could be accelerating the shift to digital,” an analyst from Barclay’s Capital told the Reporter.

It’s the people actually making the product – movie studios and record companies and media conglomerates heavily invested in expensive ventures like TV networks with their large capital footprints – who are suffering, it seems, an irony impossible back in the ‘30s, when the same people owned the content producers and the distribution systems. The biggest change is that audiences are now averse to being in one place at one time to enjoy one thing, and the people making money are the once letting them do that for the lowest price.

Now that's what I call outdated

Rick McGinnis, Metro Canada — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 01:00:00 -0400

NOW THAT’S WHAT I CALL HOPELESS: Simon Fuller, probably the most powerful producer on television today thanks to the success of the Idol franchise – well, everywhere but Canada, obviously – is shopping a new music show around to the networks, according to a Reuters story last week.

“This show will be nothing like American Idol and definitely won't be a spinoff," Fuller told Reuters. "It will be a new take on music programming.” What it will be, apparently, is a weekly music showcase based on Now That’s What I Call Music, a million-selling series of pop music compilations.

For those either too old to bother with top 40 pop collections – or too young to be bothered with something so 1985 as a package of pop hits collected on something as finite and retro as a CD – the Now franchise began in the UK in 1983, with a double-album (talk about your ancient history) that featured Phil Collins, Kajagoogoo, Culture Club and Men At Work, and became an unprecedented example of cooperation between three of the four major music conglomerates.

The series reached American shores in 1998, and it’s been going strong ever since, with franchises from Australia to Finland to Israel, and spin-offs covering everything from club and dance hits to country, jazz and Christmas tunes. On the surface, Fuller’s idea seems plausible, if hardly inspired, and he says that the title of the still-unnamed series will likely incorporate some reference to the Now brand.

What’s interesting is how, over 27 years since MTV debuted and wiped music and variety shows off network and regular broadcast television, Fuller sees an audience eager to see them return there. It’s not a stretch – it’s been years since MTV or its various sister channels featured music programming as anything but filler between reality programming, and with the end of Total Request Live, the cable network that could once describe itself as “Music Television” without irony has signaled that it’s not going back there.

There are those of us, however, who see the Now compilations as the sort of thing grandparents buy their tween grandchildren, who feign enthusiasm, as they’ve already downloaded anything worthwhile months ago. Audiences in high school and older have become so musically atomized that Fuller’s show will have to be literally everything to everyone – hardly a recipe for success on TV, where focusing down is the mantra for success.

Super Bowl still the big ticket

Rick McGinnis, Metro Canada — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 01:00:00 -0400

AD SPACE: The Super Bowl is one of the remaining real events on TV, something that has to be experienced in real time, preferably not alone. While primetime viewership erodes, an astounding 97 million U.S. viewers tuned into last year’s game, and NBC is counting on similar numbers for not just Sunday’s game, but the pre-game and half-time shows – and the commercials.

Super Bowl ad spots are premium products, and at least since Apple’s epochal 1984 ad launching the Macintosh computer with director Ridley Scott’s movie-quality visuals, Super Bowl commercials have been events. And for the most part, Canadians can’t see them.

Sim-subbing is the industry term for the pre-emption of the U.S. broadcast signal with the local one by cable and satellite providers, and it insures that Canadian viewers will only see the ads that CTV, the Super Bowl’s local broadcaster, has been paid to air. It’s standard industry practice, in effect whenever the same show airs simultaneously on both sides of the border, but there are some who say that it diminishes some of the game’s luster as an event.

“These ads are costly,” says Brian Steinberg, TV editor for Advertising Age magazine. “The production values add a couple of million dollars on top of the ad buy price … If you're a first timer or a small company who get into these things, they're probably blowing all of their marketing budget on one ad.”

With this kind of cash at stake, U.S. advertisers want to focus on their target market, says Steinberg. “I think the ads are aiming first at the US audience, and I don't think Canadians are the biggest users of GoDaddy, or these other one-shot ads.”

But Rick Brace, CTV’s president of Revenue, Business Planning and Sports, says that GoDaddy has bought time on his network’s broadcast, along with Nissan, Ford, Dodge, Kia, Labatt, Universal Studios and Pepsi, which has produced two spots especially for the Canadian market. While the buy-in for time on the Canadian broadcast isn’t as rich as the $3 million US NBC is asking for a 30-second spot – CTV won’t reveal what their spots cost, though Brace says “It's a premium product and we sell it as such,” – 4.2 million Canadian viewers did tune into last year’s game in English Canada, making it one of the top 4 TV events of the year.

Geography might mean a lot to a TV network, but it’s nearly irrelevant on the internet, and Brace says that most Super Bowl ads will be online within hours, even minutes, of their Sunday premiere. Steinberg says that for now, however, the broadcast event is still paramount. “They will be all over YouTube, but the biggest audience you'll get in one fell swoop will be on that TV screen ... It's nice to get some ancillary buzz, but the U.S. consumer base is their main customer.”

Pepsico Canada’s Super Bowl press release – with video – is here:
smr.newswire.ca/en/pepsico-beverages-canada/canadians-enjoy-the-super-bowl-and-the-ads-

Previous Super Bowl ads are archived here:
www.superbowl-ads.com

Oprah's cycle of binge and purge

Rick McGinnis, Metro Canada — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 08:00:00 -0400

FAT LIKE ME: Like NASCAR, Heroes and MTV “reality” shows like The Hills and The City, Oprah Winfrey is more interesting to write about than actually watch. This would explain the massive essay on Oprah’s latest crisis of self-image published this week in the New York Post.

At 2,173 words – the equivalent of a John Dos Passos novel in the cramped spaces of a modern tabloid newspaper – it sums up the cycle of binge and purge, both physical and emotional, throughout Oprah’s career, and its centrality to the phenomenon of what writer Maureen Callahan quite accurately calls “America's most prominent secular spiritual leader,” albeit one who, earlier this month, aired a confessional episode of her daytime talk show expressing her mortification that she’d ballooned back to more than 200 lbs.

Callahan interprets Oprah’s crisis as a metaphor for America’s economic crisis – “A nation that spends more money than it has may face a depression, much in the way that a person who consumes more calories than she expends might, too,” she writes – but this sociological party trick is getting a little tired by now.

Callahan wonders aloud whether Oprah’s success comes more from molding the culture to reflect herself or from being the quickest to react to its nascent trends. And while there’s nothing trailblazing about being an overweight American, there are few people who can enlist a support group as influential – or unusual – as Oprah’s.

Jennifer Harris, the author of The Oprah Phenomenon, wonders about how she’s “always said that you can't depend on others for your happiness, not letting others define you … Meanwhile she's surrounded by all these people telling her she needs to control her authentic self, as if it's an unruly child.” Callahan goes on to describe “the soldiers in Oprah's army of self-help: Dr. Phil McGraw, overweight author of diet books and unlicensed TV therapist; Eckhart Tolle, who speaks of the ‘pain body’ and charges $40-$150 a pop for lecture tickets … and Marianne Williamson, who had as a mentor a spirit named ‘Seth,’ channeled via a psychic.”

The good news is that, if you’re moved to explore this further, a book has recently been published – Oprah Winfrey And The Glamour Of Misery, by “Oprah scholar” Eva Illouz - and that hatchet-job biographer Kitty Kelley has a book on Oprah coming out next year, which promises to bring the sordid big time. Like a baseball stats book, these books are products of an ancillary industry that makes actually consuming a game or a show entirely beside the point.

The youth demographic is no longer the prize

Rick McGinnis, Metro Canada — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 01:00:00 -0400

TIME TO PANIC: We’ve passed the midpoint of the traditional TV season, and while the networks can conceal their growing anxiety behind the smokescreen of economic bad news, the fact is that things haven’t gone well, and now is the last moment for fixing it.

As long as the 18-49 demographic is still considered a mix of the football team, the cheerleading squad and the rich kid who lets you drive his BMW, there’s no consolation to be had from news that three of the four U.S. networks have lost a considerable chunk of these viewers – a 12 per cent drop from last year’s numbers for ABC and NBC, and a 14 per cent loss for Fox, according to a New York Times story.

Only CBS is weathering the demographic exodus, gaining in overall audience and only losing three per cent of the 18-49ers, but it has to be remembered that CBS - home of procedurals like Cold Case, Without a Trace, NCIS and the CSI franchise, reality stalwarts Survivor, Big Brother and The Amazing Race and top sitcom Two And A Half Men – is generally considered the house network for the Rogaine generation.

No one who knows the difference between The Shins and The Mars Volta watches CBS to begin with, and if youngsters keep abandoning the networks, we may finally see the emergence of a new consensus among marketing types that young people – probably the most likely to see their disposable income evaporate if the economic downturn continues – aren’t the holy grail of audiences anymore.

It may already be happening. The Times piece notes that network strategies aren’t looking that audacious – production teams with a proven track record are behind many of the new shows, many of which are spin-offs or forays into safe genres like procedurals. CBS is preparing a spin-off of NCIS, NBC has put Greg Daniels and Michael Schur of The Office in charge of Amy Poehler’s new sitcom, and is filling ER’s soon-to-be-vacant slot with Southland, a cop show set in L.A., at least until Jay Leno can take over the space next season.

A few of you might already have noticed that ads for adult incontinence pads and cures for male urinary irregularities have migrated from cable and late night to prime time. Look for more of the same, until the day when some network realizes that enough of their viewers have Alzheimer’s for them to just run the same episode of CSI every night.

Fox drops Ab Fab into Los Angeles

Rick McGinnis, Metro Canada — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 08:00:00 -0400

WHAT’S THE AMERICAN FOR ‘SWEETIE DARLING’?: Fox is apparently pressing ahead with an Americanized version of Absolutely Fabulous, the BBC comedy that debuted in 1992 and sporadically produced five seasons and several specials.

I’m a big fan of the original show, which was, at its best, one of the most caustic and inspired pieces of social satire put on television. I’m also no longer confident of my abilities to predict how well Americanizations of British shows will fare; I dismissed NBC’s version of The Office before it premiered, and despite a miserable false start, ABC’s Life On Mars turned out a lot better than my dire predictions.

While it’s good news that Jennifer Saunders, one of the stars and creators of the original, will be executive producing the show, there’s still a lot to be worried about with the Fox version, which has been given a pilot order according to Variety, and could hit the air by the fall.

WHAT COULD GO RIGHT: According to Variety, they’ve set the show in Los Angeles, which isn’t exactly the centre of the fashion industry in America, but that could work; anyone who’s watched a couple of seasons of Project Runway knows that the biggest loose cannons on the show are often products of L.A.’s fashion scene.

Anyone who’s spent time in the boutiques of Hollywood or Beverly Hills can tell you that L.A. has money and taste in inverse proportions – as little of the latter as they have much of the former. Last year the stores were filled with pricey versions of what heavy metal groupies were wearing in the mid-80s; it would be rich to see Fox’s version of Edina making her entrance swathed in the L.A.’s response to the original’s Christian Lacroix tat.

The city matches England’s abject celeb culture and exceeds it for flaky new age trends, so the writers shouldn’t have a problem mining their hometown for fecund material, and hopefully the casting director will be able to provide cameos and guest spots from celebrities on the A, B and Z lists willing to lampoon themselves.

WHAT COULD GO WRONG: For the life of me I can’t think of any Americans able to match Saunders’ or (especially) Joanna Lumley’s crucial roles in the show; even in England, it was hard to imagine anyone willing to humiliate themselves by embodying such grandly irredeemable characters. Faced with this obstacle, the writers and producers could scale back the show’s comic ambitions, at which point it’ll be dead in the water. I am, of course, happy to be proved wrong.

The Dark Knight inexplicably shunned by Academy

Rick McGinnis, Metro Canada — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 01:00:00 -0400

RED CARPET BLUES: The awards season culminates next month in the Oscars, the worst show ever that millions of people watch with what we can only assume is the hope that a celebrity will embarrass themselves with a blubbering acceptance speech that bares their pitiful insecurity for all the world to see.

Actually, the conventional wisdom is that people watch the interminable movie awards ceremony to see a film they enjoyed win, with the corollary effect that the highest-rated Oscars are the ones where a blockbuster like Titanic or a Lord Of The Rings film does a sweep. If this is true — and there’s more than enough evidence to assume that it is — then Marc Caro of the Chicago Tribune is right and ABC will be taking a bath on its broadcast this year.

Nominations for the Oscars were announced yesterday, and conspicuously absent was The Dark Knight, a film whose massive box office clearly inspired reverse esteem in the Academy’s voters. Only a posthumous nod for Heath Ledger’s Joker as Best Supporting Actor put The Dark Knight in any of the top categories, though it’s well-represented in the technical categories (art direction, cinematography, sound mixing and editing), when viewers usually get their pizza delivery.

Continuing a trend that’s dominated the Oscars for a few years now, the films with the most high-profile nominations are either critical duds, box office underperformers — or both.

“The Reader is a best picture (and director) nominee, and The Dark Knight is not,” writes Caro with obvious disbelief. “Yes, the highbrow Holocaust film with lukewarm reviews is in the game!”

Even the best song category won’t pull in viewers, as voters swatted away the chance to have Bruce Springsteen, Miley Cyrus, Beyoncé or even Clint Eastwood perform in favour of Peter Gabriel doing the credits song from Wall-E (i.e. the cue to head for the exits) and no less than two songs from Slumdog Millionaire, which will at least mean some Bollywood production values. It’s at times like this that network executives outdo Hugo Chavez in their contempt for fickle, ungovernable democracy.

Arrested Development film 'more hypothetical than people think'

Rick McGinnis, Metro Canada — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 08:00:00 -0400

HOPE SPRINGS ETERNAL: “We’ve been covering rumours of an Arrested Development movie for nearly a year now,” writes Brian Jacks on MTV’s Movies Blog, before going on to dish up the latest news — or non-news, as it may be — about the unmade film that no one seriously expects to see.

Movie versions of cancelled TV series are basically the production house version of “I’ll call you” — an insincere promise made during a moment of weakness, meant to paper over the awkwardness of telling people that one day, hopefully sooner than they think, it’ll be time to move on.

Movie versions of everything from The Sopranos, Rome and Deadwood to The Riches and Jericho have been talked about, sometimes with a straight face — HBO has a seasoned Lothario’s propensity for the empty gesture — but they’ve only rarely materialized; Joss Whedon’s Serenity, based on his short-lived Firefly series, and the epic Sex And The City film are the most recent examples, and I don’t think anyone will seriously suggest that the reputation of the originals was in any way enhanced by their movie reprises.

Talk of an Arrested Development film has been going on since before the last episode aired almost two years ago. Several of the key cast members have made enthusiastic noises about doing a film, but the notable holdout has been rumoured to be Michael Cera, whose career has taken off since the show left the air.

Interviewed at Sundance, Cera denied that he was the holdout to MTV, but did say that he has yet to see a script and that the movie may be “more hypothetical than people think.” By now, fans of the show should probably start admitting that the moment is past, and that by the time this chimera could actually materialize in the theatres, it’ll be the equivalent of a Freaks And Geeks movie. (Which, come to think of it, is what nearly every Judd Apatow film so far has been.)

I KNOW I PROMISED, BUT: Now that creator Matt Weiner has been resigned to the show for two more episodes, I think it’s time I broke my vow not to talk about Mad Men until the third season begins —sometime in July, according to the New York Post. And that would be all I’ve got, right now. Yup, that’s it. Nothing more. You can stop reading now.

TV losing its grip on major events

Rick McGinnis, Metro Canada — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 08:00:00 -0400

THE ELECTRONIC HEARTH DIMS? The coverage of Barack Obama’s inauguration Tuesday was as uninteresting as it was overwrought, but the best thing I read about the event was written by Eric Deggans of the St. Petersburg Times on his blog.

With the Super Bowl in two weeks, it’s worth noting that there aren’t a lot of events that can guarantee the networks massive numbers any more. Football’s biggest game is one, a big deal reality competition show like Idol is another, and a presidential inauguration is still in the running, especially when it’s freighted with so much “history,” as we’ve been so persistently reminded.

A major disaster or news event also counts, but I can remember a day when the list was longer, and included the network TV debut of a blockbuster film, or the final episode of a much-loved TV show, all of which seemed to empty the streets, malls, bars and movie theatres. Hell, I remember when the world seemed to stand still for the funeral of Lyndon Johnson, in the midst of Watergate’s political and social turmoil.

Deggans wonders just how much longer we’ll find ourselves gathered, alone or in a group, in front of the TV as part of some communal ritual of witnessing: “In today's super-fragmented media environment,” he writes, “little beyond American Idol and the Super Bowl can draw us together around TV's electronic hearth. Once upon a time, everyone could remember where they were when news broke that President Kennedy was shot or Saigon had fallen. These days, when even the selection of a vice-president is announced by text message, that memory is gone, swallowed by technology's new ability to bring us instant reporting from just about anywhere to wherever.”

For previous generations, Deggans cites the moon landing as a magnet that drew them to the TV, to which I’d add John F. Kennedy’s assassination and funeral, while before that TV and radio competed as the focus of the public witness. He recalls where he was when the Challenger space shuttle exploded (I was a fresh college drop-out, watching the news on the TV sets in the electronics department at the Simpsons store where I was working), and the 9/11 attacks (in bed talking wedding plans with the woman who’s now my wife.)

Technology moves fast - eight years ago, I would have doubted that my VCR would be gathering dust, replaced by a pumped-up cable box that recorded shows at the touch of a button, or that my CD collection would have been distilled into a hard drive on the top of my computer with a whopping terabyte of memory. As the viewing experience atomizes and the generations accustomed to ritual witnessing move on, that communal sense of a moment will dissolve, as news – and “history” – becomes more commonplace, like text crawl running at the bottom of our screens.

Lost in the plot

Rick McGinnis, Metro Canada — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 01:00:00 -0400

MOST SUITABLE TITLE EVER: Ten years ago, when I bought the first new television I’d ever owned after almost twenty years of not watching any TV at all, I found myself sucked into the rush of episodic shows and long-running storylines when I was overcome with a brief but intense addiction to Coronation Street.

I hadn’t a clue who the characters were, but there was something compelling about their banal but vivid lives that had me watching every day for a month, at which point the addiction suddenly left me. It took a bit longer to shake my fascination with syndicated episodes of Designing Women, but that’s a topic for a different day.

A pair of stories on the return of Lost this week underlined how the show’s wild tangle of plotlines has become taxing for all but the most dedicated of viewers. A story on scifiwire.com revealing that season five will see the series go into “answer mode” underlined this problem while featuring teasers like “viewers will see more of Jin (Daniel Dae Kim), who is a series regular this year, though his character apparently perished last year when the freighter exploded. The producers wouldn't say how and under what circumstances viewers will see Jin.”

A New York Times story echoed the confusion experienced by anyone new to the show, or at the disadvantage of missing a few episodes: “What ever happened to the four-toed statue? Why do some inhabitants of the island never seem to age? What is the Smoke Monster?”

The Times piece profiles Gregg Nations, the script supervisor and co-producer tasked with the job of “untangling the seemingly impenetrable mass of plotlines that have become addictive to some viewers of the show and alienating to others.” At this point I’m glad to know that someone is doing this job, though it’s probably too late for someone, like myself, who tuned out halfway through season one.

Shows as labyrinthine as Lost guarantee that they’ll have fewer, not more, viewers than the number that tuned in at the start, and the three million that have been shed since the first season proves this. It’s the ratings equivalent of a Shaker colony, committed but unable to reproduce, and it’s hard to see how network TV will encourage it as audiences and ad dollars continue to dwindle.

The case for a season cap on television

Rick McGinnis, Metro Canada — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 01:00:00 -0400

THE GEEK GARAGE SALE: So were you shocked by Friday’s return of Battlestar Galactica? Thrilled, bummed out, disappointed, confused? It’s one down, nine to go – not including The Plan, the Edward James Olmos-directed movie, due to air after the final episode, which is actually set sometime during the first season, so it doesn’t really count toward the show’s finale. And then there’s Caprica, the prequel series scheduled to debut next year, but let’s not get ahead of – or behind, as the case may be - ourselves.

Word also came down this weekend that Matt Weiner has finally signed a contract that puts him at the helm of two more seasons of Mad Men, which will hopefully be as far as he’s willing to take the show. I’ve been gritting my teeth hoping that Ronald Moore and the rest of Galactica’s creators wouldn’t make that often invisible slip into hokey junk before wrapping up the series, and now I’ve got to worry that Weiner will pull off a decent denouement for his show and avoid the temptation to keep a steady gig. I’d like to think that both shows, in the end, will underline the case for limiting the lifespan of a TV series to four seasons at the absolute maximum, though in a perfect world two seasons should be enough.

Fans who, like grieving relatives or the lovelorn, can’t let go, were probably bleeding their bank accounts this weekend at the auction of the show’s costumes, props, sets and design drawings held in Pasadena, Calif., where you could pick up a Cylon Resurrection Tub (lot 799, estimated at US$2,500-$3,500), a full-sized Viper (lot 347; $50,000-$60,000) or Adama’s desk and accessories (lot 752; $6,000-$8,000.) The budget-conscious could settle for the pen Gaeta used to stab Baltar (lot 441; $400-$600, complete with dried stage blood), while you’ll be a star at the next comic con with either an unnamed Viper pilot uniform (four lots from small to XL; $2,000-$3,000) or Kara Starbuck’s flight suit (lot 111; $10,000-$15,000.)

The real prize, however, was probably the red backless dress worn by Number Six, played by ex-model Tricia Helfer (lot 260; $10,000-$12,000), and probably only suitable for a very lean size one who’s been spending a fair bit of time in the gym. Or a very willowy and extravagant transvestite whose tastes run to Darth Vader and not Marlene Dietrich.

Battlestar Galactica's swan song

Rick McGinnis, Metro Canada — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 08:00:00 -0400

BACK TO GEEK HEAVEN: This Sunday sees the return of Battlestar Galactica on Space for its final half-season, and where I live, the anticipation is greater than any fan fervour about 24 or Lost or Mad Men, which says something about my friends, I’m sure.

If you’re a fan, I don’t need to tell you where things were as the first half of season four ended last June. The surviving humans -- allied with the rebel Cylons -- had finally made it to Earth, albeit the nuclear wasteland edition of Earth so beloved of sci-fi writers on a dystopia trip. Hardcore fans have probably already watched the 10 webisodes featuring the Felix Gaeta and Boomer Cylon characters doing what’s basically Hitchcock’s Lifeboat in space, which act as a bridge between the two halves of the season and set up one of the big conflicts for the show’s endgame.

A quick run through the season 4.0 box set just released by Universal is probably worthwhile, if only for hints, revealed in the bonus features, that at least the first half of the final episodes will play out like Ten Little Indians. Cast members, some of them much-loved, will start dying off, some at their own hands in the fog of despair that overcomes the survivors with their discovery of the fate of the Earth.

Like so much sci-fi, there’s a lot about Galactica that doesn’t bear too much scrutiny – the condition of post-apocalyptic Earth, and the clues it contains about the former lives of the final five Cylons are more than a bit implausible, to say the least. And like much of the genre today, there’s a magpie quality about the situations and scenes; watch for Edward James Olmos doing Martin Sheen in the first 10 minutes of Apocalypse Now, right down to the drunken mirror smashing, but without the naked Tai Chi (thank God for small mercies.)

The remarkable thing about Galactica at this point is how many characters and storylines are being pushed to the front of the plot with a clarity of focus almost entirely missing from Lost or 24; perhaps it’ll finally pick up a few awards for this accomplishment once it’s safely off the air and Emmy voters feel moved to overcome their aversion to sci-fi.

Get it on, bang a gong

Rick McGinnis, Metro Canada — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 00:27:58 -0400

I’M WITH STUPID: There might be something in the social and cultural air that will explain the return of The Gong Show, but I’m actually a little afraid to bother tracking it down. The original show debuted on NBC, while the new show is a product of Sony Pictures Television and Adam Sandler’s Happy Madison productions, and airs on the Comedy Network starting tonight.

All I do know is that the original show, featuring host and producer Chuck Barris, hit the air in 1976, when I was 12 years old, and unemployment was hovering around eight per cent in the U.S. (It was 7.2 per cent last month, so draw your own conclusions; all I know is that the last thing we need right now is a return to toe socks and double live albums.)

The original was a hit, especially during its second season, when it ran in what was once known as the “after school” slot at 4 p.m. and featured guest judges that included Steve Martin, David Letterman, Jamie Farr and now-a-footnote Jaye P. Morgan. It made “celebrities” out of Gene Gene The Dancing Machine and The Unknown Comic, and gave child actress Andrea McArdle the national exposure that got her cast as Annie on Broadway.

The new judges include Andy Dick, a Sopranos cast member and Brian Posehn from the Sarah Silverman Program, who had the one really great line of the first show: “I had to give him a good score because he reminds me of my dungeon master.” And for fans of the original show, it got the ball rolling with an act that shamelessly echoes The Popsicle Twins, the act that supposedly killed the original show. You felt like a moron when you watched the original show; you do with the new version, though since so much TV today evokes the same feeling, you’ll probably hardly notice.

Ray Romano's return part of emerging TV schedule

Rick McGinnis, Metro Canada — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 08:00:00 -0400

WHAT’S NEXT: The next few months in TV are starting to take vague shape with a few announcements from networks, including the return of Ray Romano to prime time in a “dramedy” exploring the midlife crisis of a group of forty-something buddies.

The show, titled Men Of A Certain Age, was greenlit for an initial 10 episodes by TNT according to a story in the Hollywood Reporter, and will also star Andre Braugher (star of Gideon’s Crossing, a shortlived spin-off of The Practice) and Scott Bakula. Think Bromance with a lot of prostate jokes.

Fox will be bringing back ‘Til Death with a full 22-episode order for next season, a surprise revival of the sitcom that will bring the show’s total to more than 80 episodes – enough to bring it to syndication, according to a TVGuide.com story, though only seven of the current season’s episodes aired when it disappeared from the air in October.

Which reminds us of the rule that the only thing about Fox you can trust is its unpredictability. Cancelling Prison Break at the end of the current season is hardly unexpected, however – the show long ago exhausted its premise, which was never more than miniseries-sized. “The show is just played out," Fox entertainment president Kevin Reilly told the Hollywood Reporter. "Creatively everybody feels enough stories have been told ... we want to finish strong and not just gimp-out next season.”

Reilly did say that a few extra episodes could be shot to pad out the four remaining set to air. The network has a new animated comedy from Arrested Development creator Mitch Hurwitz, Sit Down, Shut Up, ready to take over King Of The Hill’s Sunday evening slot when that show leaves the air in April. There are also high hopes that they can make Friday night a testosterone-friendly one when they pair up Joss Whedon’s troubled Dollhouse with Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles.

It might just work, if Reilly can convince Whedon’s geeky fan base that going out on Friday night is for jocks, or break their TiVos if they insist on having a social life.

Will the "age of Obama" really neuter 24?

Rick McGinnis, Metro Canada — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 22:23:54 -0400

IT’S BEEN A LONG, LONG TIME: Back when the last episode of 24's sixth season aired, subprime mortgages were a good thing, and Barack Obama was the underdog candidate in the Democratic primaries, expected to lose gracefully to Hillary Clinton.

But the way some TV critics have been writing about the return of 24 in the midst of a very different time, you’d think that, sometime in the interim, gravity had been repealed and an extra day had been added to the week. “Can Jack Bauer make it in the age of Obama?” asked the New York Times last week.

Two days later they told readers that, as ethical dilemmas about torture persist in the first four hours of the new season, the spirit of soon-to-be-former U.S. Vice-President Dick Cheney “is staying on in spirit on the new season of 24.” Tim Goodman of the San Francisco Chronicle went one step further, insisting in a review that the imminent Obama presidency had made 24 “pointless.”

“If there's audacity in hope and nationwide belief in the necessity of change, nobody sent the memo to producers of 24,” Goodman writes. “This is a series where presidential assassinations were the norm and presidents were corrupt or evil (if they weren't, then they were assassinated). Cynicism about politics and especially the presidency are the currency of 24 - beyond the whole terrorist bogeyman conceit. Hey, they brought back Almeida, why not dig up Dick Nixon, too?”

Goodman, only slightly more than his contemporaries, is being unconvincingly naïve. What no one can be bothered recalling is that 24 was written and conceived at the end of the Clinton presidency, after Waco, Vince Foster, Bosnia, Kosovo and the “Wag the Dog” missile attacks on Sudan, though it had the bitter luck to premiere just two months after 9/11.

Goodman ignores The Manchurian Candidate and Seven Days In May, and seems to think that cynicism and political paranoia were legislated into existence by John Ashcroft. At a time when Zimbabwe is printing $50-billion notes and butchery continues in Sudan despite years of pleas for intervention, 24 is asking us to imagine a rogue African regime covertly attacking the U.S. to prevent military intervention in a genodice; it is, to be sure, the purest of fantasies.

Underdog breaks Guiness record at Global's '24' publicity stunt

Rick McGinnis, Metro Canada — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 01:00:00 -0400

ALL NIGHT LONG: The event runners watching the security monitors at Toronto's Yorkdale shopping mall earlier this week had a running bet that Ryan Grech, a 23-year-old from Mississauga who confessed to me that “I don't really watch TV that much, to be honest,” wouldn’t last the first two days of the 24 marathon.

Global’s publicity stunt for the return of 24 to the air after a year and a half was inspired – a challenge where nine fans of the show had to stay glued to all six seasons of the show for as long as they could stay awake. Whoever remained alert after 70 hours would break a Guinness record for continuous TV viewing – a record that got extended by an hour last week when someone in Baltimore managed to break the existing record by an hour.

“As I started I didn’t think I was going to last,” Grech told me yesterday, after breaking the new record by a further hour on Friday and winning $24,000, a Sharp Blu-ray player, two LCD TVs and the La-Z-Boy chair he was sitting in. “Twenty-four hours felt so far away that I didn't think I would make it. I wasn't one of the favourites, that's for sure, but I was able to conserve my energy.”

“I had a game plan from the beginning. I looked at the food that they were serving and I'd say 'Well, if I eat this I'm going to have to use the washroom.' I pretty much just shut down my body for three days, and ate a lot of fruits and vegetables and a lot of water. As the competition went on I knew I got stronger.”

The continuing adventures of Jack Bauer, which returned to the air last night with the first half of a four-hour premiere full of the usual conspiracies, catastrophes and character U-turns, is the only show Grech says he watches. The marathon seemed like “a great opportunity to start the year off well,” said Grech, while he waits for an opening at a fire department in Ontario. “24 was just a show that something caught me very early on,” he says. “I set that hour to watch every week, but other than that I'm pretty active - I go out a lot, I play sports.”

The argument for a fourth American Idol judge

Rick McGinnis, Metro Canada — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 08:00:00 -0400

ONE THING LEADS TO ANOTHER: This week’s TV news contains a string of items that seem to effortlessly segue into each other, so who am I to be an obstacle to such elegance? First off is a Variety story on the latest feint by NBC at pretending it’s a network that cares about programming, a drama about a man on his way to rock bottom who starts hearing music in his head that provides a clue to the direction he should be taking, at which point a new piece of music takes its place.

“I was trying to find a way to combine TV and music in an organic way," said writer and creator Jared Bush. "What we come to realize in the show is this guy has been given an opportunity to start his life over, and this music will help him find a way to become truly happy.”

The show – which gives an explicit shout-out to the music supervisor who’ll have to dig up and clear the tunes for the storyline – has been given the simple but straightforward title Soundtrack, and actually sounds like a half-decent idea ...

QUITE UNLIKE... Dancing To The Music In My Head is the new EP by Sanjaya Malakar, which has just been released. Does anyone remember Sanjaya Malakar? Two years is a long time in American Idol terms, and it’s hard not to look back on the more-hair-than-voice season six contestant as a symbol of our onetime irrational exuberance, like easy mortgages and high- risk mutual funds.

WHICH BRINGS ME TO... Former Idol executive producer Nigel Lythgoe, expressing his disapproval of the addition of a fourth judge to the Idol panel this season. “At this stage when we have this dysfunctional family of Ryan, Randy, Paula and Simon,” Lythgoe told the National Ledger web site, describing his reaction to the casting of songwriter Kara DioGuardi. “You introduce someone else into that and it's like bringing a daughter-in-law into the family. You don't know if she's going to get in the way. Hopefully, she'll stand her ground, and she'll have relevant things to say.”

“It's something that I fought for a number of years simply because once you've been told you suck by one judge, you don't need to hear it from another three," Lythgoe said. I would disagree; if something or someone sucks, you can’t say it enough times, usually because you’re dealing with gargantuan self-esteem that begs to be nuked. And thus we have a Sanjaya record, two years after the fact; I rest my case.

Lesson not learned: Industry blinded by fancy tech

Rick McGinnis, Metro Canada — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 08:00:00 -0400

THERE IS SOMETHING WRONG WITH YOUR SET: There are some deep and serious changes happening to the way people watch TV, changes that are beyond the control of the people who make and broadcast the shows.

The essence of the change is choice, as viewers demand more of it in their selection of shows to watch, and in the technology they use to help expand their choices beyond what’s offered by the networks, and when. The industry seems to sense that technology is playing a part, but if two recent stories are any indicator, they’re acting true to form and missing the plot entirely.

The Los Angeles Times reported that the Consumer Electronics Show running this week in Las Vegas will showcase 3-D TV technology from companies like Panasonic, Samsung and Texas Instruments, hoping to bring into the home the new 3-D technologies behind limited release versions of movies like Bolt, Beowulf, and Journey To The Center Of The Earth.

3-D’s first heyday in the Fifties produced more kitsch than art. It’s a legacy that comes bundled with every pair of 3-D glasses, as acknowledged by a Texas Instruments executive who told the Times that “unlike earlier attempts, it's not just gimmick to try to sell a bad horror movie.”

It’s those glasses, however – so easy to lose or break – that are probably 3-D’s biggest obstacle. Take it from me, nobody wears glasses because they want to, and they’re a constant reminder of the novelty aspect of 3-D, and the goofy and abject relationship a viewer is forced to adopt with the technology. Even though Philips has announced a glasses-free 3-D display, the question no one has been able to answer is why, particularly, viewers will respond more to 3-D imagery as opposed to better stories, or simple access to more shows.

Then there’s the news in Broadcasting & Cable magazine that this month will see the debut of HD Seinfeld episodes from CBS. Once again, no one has bothered to explain why being able to pick out the pattern on Kramer’s Hawaiian shirts will enhance the show’s comedy. It’s the same mistake the music industry made in the Nineties, assuming that consumers wanted higher fidelity -- pushing formats like SACD, while consumers opted for MP3s that could be downloaded in minutes or seconds. It looks like the industry will chase the wild goose again, pushing high tech formats while its audience is happily watching lo-fi avi files on their laptops.

The monster that came down from The Hills

Rick McGinnis, Metro Canada — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 08:00:00 -0400

DOWN FROM THE HILLS: MTV’s “reality” TV sensation The Hills is like baseball to me – fun to read about, fascinating in theory, but utterly unwatchable. I’ve had a fair bit of sport making fun of the show since it debuted more than two and a half years ago, but I’ve been forced to admit that there’s something about it that keeps me coming back to the phenomenon whenever I read another feature on the show or its largely interchangeable “stars.”

And the show keeps rolling on, a juggernaut in spite of my agonized curiosity, “the No. 1 cable program among the 12-to-34-year-old demographic,” according to a recent New York Magazine article on The City, the Hills spin-off currently filming in New York City, which promotes one Whitney Port from secondary character to heroine. The New York piece allows itself the customary moment of confusion about its reality credentials, opening on a Manhattan street corner outside a club where Port is about to show up to hang out with her “friends.”

Four cameras are tasked with documenting her arrival, and bystanders have been coached by the show’s producers to look casual. In the club, what transpires hardly seems the stuff of high drama: “The girls drink, the boys drink, the girls giggle, the boys giggle—then, eventually, there’s a flurry of air-kisses and everyone leaves. No tears, no explosive catfights, no misty epiphanies about frayed friendships, not even the vacant pouts that serve as the main form of communication on The Hills.” The magic happens, as anyone who’s watched the show knows, in the editing suite.

A Hills spin-off was increasingly essential for MTV, apparently, since it was becoming harder to edit the product endorsements, paid nightclub appearances and speaking engagements out of Hills star Lauren Conrad’s life, and Port’s life was still roughly “real” enough to make her a decent subject – at least for now. Still, Port already has a clothing line to push, and the cast of pretty young people populating The City don’t bother pretending that they aren’t without ambitions.

Within the social circles that populate the show, “everyone I know suddenly wants to get on that show, or have their own show, or pretend to have a show in order to get on another show,” said Sean Glass, an aspiring filmmaker who recently sold his own Hills/City-like “reality” show to ABC. Olivia Palermo turned down a part on Glass’ show when offered a role on The City, and told MTV’s producers that she wanted to be on TV “because I want to be a brand.” Who, I ask, wouldn’t be fascinated by this?

New Year's wishes for the boob tube

Rick McGinnis, Metro Canada — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 05:00:00 -0400

TRYING TO LOOK ON THE BRIGHT SIDE: Another year has begun, and the paucity of TV news means lots of retrospective and anticipatory themes from columnists, so why should I be any different? Alan Sepinwall of the New Jersey Star-Ledger took time to take Shonda Rhimes, Tim Kring, the writers on House, Amy Sherman-Palladino and Jeff Zucker to task for, respectively, this season of Grey’s Anatomy, this season of Heroes, the character of Remy “Thirteen” Hadley, The Return Of Jezebel James and the decision to abandon the 10 p.m. weekday time slot to Jay Leno’s new show.

Over at TelevisionWithoutPity.com, Angel Cohn fervently wished for more Simon on American Idol, more fun on Heroes, a less annoying Pam on The Office, some real A-list stars on Dancing With The Stars, and some personality for Anna Torv’s Olivia on Fringe. Reading over her list made me wonder a) that Fringe didn’t get cancelled after three episodes, and b) that TV columnists sure watch a hell of a lot of TV.

Zap2It.com’s TV critic Rick Porter made nine resolutions for the industry, wishing that CBS could wean itself off of police procedurals, that Fox could come up with a good comedy that wasn’t a cartoon, that HBO can make a break from “the dense, somber shows the channel has tried out in the past couple years” (I disagree, but whatever) and that NBC can “rediscover its soul,” instead of programming based on profit margins from mediocre but mysteriously profitable shows. Good luck on that one.

Porter also wishes that Battlestar Galactica, about to head into the last half of its farewell season, will get a bit more respect from the industry. “None of the show's fine ensemble of actors has ever sniffed an Emmy or Golden Globe nomination,” Porter writes, “and it counts no series honors and only a couple of writing and directing Emmy nods.”

I’d second that, especially since Galactica is a prime example of exactly the sort of show no major network or “quality cable” outlet like HBO would ever get behind, despite the fact that shows like Galactica are probably the future of TV – genre-defying, intensely addictive, and wildly influential for at least the next few years. Beyond that, the only thing I’m hoping to see in the new year is a new series of Metalocalypse and those overdue Mary Tyler Moore Show box sets.

Even plucky Fox is feeling the hurt for next season

Rick McGinnis, Metro Canada — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 05:00:00 -0400

FOX ON THE RUN: While no one really holds out a lot of hope for the original Big Three networks, the conventional wisdom is that Fox, the upstart that made the Three into Four, will be agile enough to weather both the economic downturn and the harrowing changes happening in the way we watch TV. (Harrowing, of course, if you’re a broadcast network.)

Or maybe not. The network is looking uncharacteristically slow with the barrage of new and controversial ideas that have always been its trademark. In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, Fox Entertainment Chairman Peter Liguori and President Kevin Reilly (ex-NBC) talked up their midwinter lineup with less than scintillating results.

“In terms of making tweaks to, let's call it the Top 36,” Liguori said of American Idol, returning for its eighth season, “it's a little bit of going back to the future. We've done that in the past, and it really has worked. It somewhat heightens the drama around those Hollywood episodes.” Somewhat? One hopes so.

“By nature, this show has a particular kind of audience,” Reilly said of Dollhouse, a new sci-fi thriller from Buffy creator Joss Whedon, which the network has slotted into the black hole of Friday night. “That's just what Joss does.” Sounds like someone’s got their expectations on the low side, don’t you think?

It’s not all dismal, though – according to the Hollywood Reporter, Fox is developing a comic drama about a quartet of female werewolves in New York City. It’s being written by Michael Dougherty, whose writing credits include Superman Returns and the second X-Men film.

The title? Bitches. Good old Fox.

Giving kudos to the most male TV show ever made

Rick McGinnis, Metro Canada — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 05:00:00 -0400

FAST AND DANGEROUS: My Christmas gift to myself this year was pneumonia, which laid me up for almost a week before Christmas, as the holidays surged around the watery, antibiotics-induced bubble that settled in around me.

Much as I wanted to, I couldn’t sleep all day, so I ended up with a mug of tea under a blanket in my office, picking my way through the stacks of promo DVDs I get sent practically every day – unlabelled screeners in plain white sleeves, tucked into a press kit or a few photocopied sheets of press release.

If I were a really conscientious TV columnist – and had an Einsteinian dispensation that let me pack limitless, sleep-free hours into every day – I’d watch every one of them, but for the most part they either end up going straight into the garbage, or reside in a purgatorial pile on either side of my desk, set aside with vague intentions of making time, having aroused a shadow of interest after a cursory glance at the title and the PR bumf.

There were discs going back almost three years near the bottom of the pile, a few of them probably deserving a couple of hundred words, but let’s not start the new year off with regrets. One thing that did perk me up was a BBC advance screener for Jeremy Clarkson’s Heaven And Hell, which came out in 2007, and featured the host of the long-running auto freak show celebrating cars like the Ferrari Enzo and the Aston-Martin V8 Vantage, and bemoaning the very existence of automotive horrorshows like the Citroen 2CV and the Triumph TR7.

I’m not a car guy – I don’t even have a license – but Top Gear is the greatest car show ever made, which makes Clarkson the greatest car show host in history. Arrogant yet affable, he’s unapologetic about the palpable joy of driving a really great car really, really fast, and the show is probably the most male TV series ever made. Just tune in to BBC Canada if you’re doubtful, or catch the numerous clips on YouTube, if you’re cheap.

Which made me wonder about the fate of the U.S. version, which was announced with great fanfare by NBC early this year, with Adam Carolla in Clarkson’s shoes. A quick Google revealed that the network gave the show a pass after viewing the pilot, making the excuse that the failure of Knight Rider had given them cold feet about car shows.

The good news is that they’ve let the BBC take the show elsewhere – hopefully to a cable network that isn’t beholden to car ads, though to be frank, they should just subtitle Clarkson for the benefit of the accent-challenged and let the British show become the natural hit it should be here.

Pimps, rehab and cocaine all part of packed network schedules

Rick McGinnis, Metro Canada — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 05:00:00 -0400

THE FUTURE: Perhaps expecting that more people will be staying home to weather the economic storm anticipated in 2009, some of the networks are ramping up production on new shows to debut in the next 12 months. First there are the midseason premieres lined up and waiting to air starting in the new year – besides the return of Idol, Lost and 24, and cable hits like Nip/Tuck and Damages, there are new shows like The Beast on A&E, TNT’s Trust Me, set in the advertising world, and United States Of Tara on Showtime, starring Toni Collette.

There are the supersized episodes of Celebrity Apprentice in March, and a deluge of reality shows coming from MTV – 16 in total, according to a Variety story, from producers such as Sean Combs, Matt Stone & Trey Parker, Donald Trump and Nick Lachey. Oxygen has a dancing-plus-fitness reality title called Dance Your Ass Off, VH1 has Sober House, a Celebrity Rehab spin-off with Andy Dick and Rodney King, and Starz has Party Down, a comedy about a bunch of wannabes working for an L.A. catering company from Veronica Mars creator Rob Thomas.

HBO looks like they’re doubling down, after a post-Sopranos ratings slump and an executive shake up, with new shows announced every day. There’s two comedies – How To Make It In America and Bored To Death, starring Jason Schwartzman – and Cocaine Cowboys, a fictionalized remake of the 2006 documentary about the blow trade in Miami. It’s a big deal piece of work, with Jerry Bruckheimer and Michael Bay teamed up for what looks like a quality cable mash-up of Miami Vice and Scarface.

On the other coast, HBO is turning another documentary – 1999’s American Pimp – into Gentlemen Of Leisure, the story of a pimp in his 40s trying to get out of the business. It’s set in Oakland, but the city’s mayor has no intention of letting it get filmed there. “While the mayor understands that there are certain benefits to having a major film project in our city, he is not willing to support this project at this time,” mayor Ron Dellums’ chief of staff told the Mercury News. “The people of Oakland have come too far to have our city's name trampled upon in the name of entertainment.”

Finally, there’s Hung, a new show from The Riches creator Dmitry Lipkin, and starring Thomas Jane as a high school basketball coach who tries to ride out economic hard times his sole physical asset – the nature of which should be obvious from the show’s title. “It has its sexual moments, but the show is very much about what's happening in the country, how people are trying to survive using what God had given them,” Lipkin told the Hollywood Reporter.

Television's perfect boys' night in

Rick McGinnis, Metro Canada — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 05:00:00 -0400

BRUTAL: I can no longer give a convincing impression of someone whose world has been transformed by Jay Leno on prime time, and there’s only so much I can say about Canadian Idol’s yearlong “rest” without bursting into this disturbing giggle, so I thought I’d take a moment to talk about the second season of my favourite show, now on DVD just in time for Christmas.

You don’t have to have grown up in a working class suburb in the ‘70s to love heavy metal, but it certainly helps, and as far as I can tell, metal fans generally love Metalocalypse, even though it viciously satirizes everything they hold dear. If you haven’t managed to catch its brief appearances on Teletoon’s adult-only Detour programming block, the premise is simple enough – Dethklok is the biggest band in the world, growing from the 13th to the 7th-largest economy in the world over the course of the show’s two seasons. Try to imagine, say, that Slayer or Cannibal Corpse could cause international riots, or prompt debates at the United Nations.

The band – a mix of American and Scandinavian louts – are morons, and when they aren’t endlessly debating how to do the most metal thing, they’re unsuccessfully dealing with their intimacy issues, or the fact that they’re lousy at doing anything that doesn’t involve double-kick triplets or singing about flesh-eating zombies.

Not that the world needed such a thing, but Metalocalypse is probably the perfect take on metal’s essence – morbid and epic megalomaniac teenage boy fantasies alongside tawdry, lower-middle-class anxieties, executed with plenty of metal’s graphic flourishes: skulls and swords and bat’s wings, and skulls with bat’s wings, and swords with skulls, and bat’s wings on swords. You get the picture.

Season two follows where season one left off – with the band staggering one step closer to the Armageddon predicted in the show’s title, and the shadowy conspirators of The Tribunal monitoring them for their own vague reasons. And then there’s the band, with their pitiful solo projects, family problems, and momentary obsessions with hallucinogenic drugs known only to Amazon tribes, which inspires a brief tribute to Werner Herzog’s 1982 film Fitzcarraldo.

The show is at its best when little or nothing is going on but the sorts of digressive, numbskull conversations most men have had a few hundred of in their lives, enlivened by a few moments of incredibly graphic violence. Basically, it’s like spending a night in front of an Xbox with a bunch of boys – teenage or older – ungoverned by female influences, if only for a few precious hours.

Canadian Idol judge Zack Werner on show's hiatus: 'It's the worst possible message'

Rick McGinnis, Metro Canada — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 05:00:00 -0400

WHAT HAPPENED?: Whether you’re a fan of Canadian Idol or not – and I have always been firmly in the latter camp – you can’t help but wonder just why a national network would put on hiatus a show that they’d spent six seasons trumpeting as a ratings triumph and a cultural landmark that only they could have made happen.

The only thing that’s clear right now is that CTV didn’t want the news of the show’s one-year “rest” to break as quickly as it did this week, but a groundswell of online buzz fed by the grumbling that happens when you pink-slip hundreds of cast and crew – aided in perhaps the smallest way by my own inquiries on Tuesday – forced them to make a curt but definitive statement. I still needed answers, however, so I called up Zack Werner, the only Idol personality who has, so far, made any public statements on the news.

After giving me some grief for my anti-Idol statements, Werner said that while he’s not privy to the budgets or decisions made at CTV or by Insight, Idol’s production company, “I do know that every year when we go to renew our deal with the show we're always told that the show is prohibitively expensive and Canadian advertisers are always a hard sell to get them to put any money into a Canadian property. And that given the dearth of automobile advertising that's going to go on in the future, that the sales team at CTV came back to the powers that be and told them that they couldn't make their nut.”

Werner says that one of the reasons they were given for the network’s belt-tightening was the cost of their Olympic commitments. “They paid $100 million for the Olympics, at a time when the economy looked booming, and now they've got to sell the advertising for that,” he said, which quickly led to a discussion of just how CTV will replace Idol in their schedule. “It begs the question - so you're going to put on a less expensive show where advertisers pay less money on slots on shows that are going to have fewer viewers?

“And you're going to pay the license fee, which they're going to have to pay to Fremantle (Idol’s parent company) whether they do the show or not. So the combination of paying the license fee and putting on cheaper programming and selling the advertising for less makes more economic sense than putting on our show - I think that begs some questions, don't you?”

At the risk of sounding altruistic – “because I’m not the most altruistic person in the world” – Werner wonders what message is being sent to the “thousands of kids who, at a time when the economy is selling them a picture that the future is bleak, if you ever needed a dream, and a dream that gave you a chance to compete for it becoming a reality, and understanding what it means to work hard and have an option, now is the time when we need a show like this.

“Unfortunately, it's the worst possible message they could be sending out.”

CTV to put Canadian Idol into hibernation

Rick McGinnis, Metro Canada — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 05:00:00 -0400

I’M JUST SAYIN’: Yesterday began with an anonymous reader sending me an e-mail asking how I felt, now that my recent prediction - that one major Canadian network would probably always have an edge over its competition as long as it has two big reality franchises in its schedule – was obviously stale-dated, now that said major network was cancelling one of the shows.

After a quick Google and a check through the rest of my inbox, I wrote back and asked just what the hell they were talking about – this would be big news, and there wasn’t a sign of it anywhere. It was true, they replied – cast and crew of the show had been pink-slipped just before the holidays. A further Google revealed the likely source – an item on the votefortheworst.com web site, claiming that Canadian Idol was “cancelled, over, kaput, done.”

I put a call in to a CTV publicist, who claimed that this was the first he’d heard of it. I asked him to “either confirm or deny” the story, rather relishing using those words as they were meant to be used for the first time in my whole career as a journalist. Wisely, he declined to do either, and said that he’d try to get someone from programming for me to talk to, though he wasn’t making any promises.

Another trawl through the web came up empty – no press release from CTV, no brief from the Canadian Press, but just before noon, a new thread had opened up on CTV’s own web site forum titled “no more Canadian Idol,” and in just over two hours, the sadly inevitable post blaming Steven Harper was up, followed by a quote vaguely attributed to Idol judge Zack Werner lamenting that “after 6 years the economy has come crashing down on idol. strange that ctv has sponsers for a show on which we watch american kids seek fame and fortune by singing but not enuff sponsers for our own.”

Reactions on CTV’s forum ranged from skeptical to hysterical, but by 2 p.m. there was a Facebook group devoted to saving the show, and further rumours were circulating between the Facebook site, CTV’s forum and VFTW that another network had come to a deal with FremantleMedia and Insight Productions, the show’s international and local producers, to take it over. With only two private major networks in the whole country, that would mean Global was being as conspicuously silent as CTV.

As I write this, the “Save Idol” Facebook site has 80 members, my e-mail source has gone silent, and CTV has finally come back with a terse message that “as a result of the current economic climate, production of Canadian Idol will rest for the 2009 broadcast year,” though they retain the rights to the show. And that was the day that was.

Plenty of helpful advice for the network TV patient

Rick McGinnis, Metro Canada — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 05:00:00 -0400

HELP FOR THE HOPELESS: Network TV has finally shown signs of admitting it's in trouble, and there's no shortage of helpful bystanders willing to offer their opinions on how it can get up off the ground - including yours truly.

Just after NBC announced last week that they'd be turning over the weeknight 10 p.m. slot to Jay Leno, the New York Times business section ran a little analysis of what the news meant - at least if you'd ever spent time sitting in an executive suite in Hollywood or New York.

"The whole nature of TV has become a lot more viewer-friendly,” Robert C. Wright, a former chairman of NBC Universal, told the Times. "There are more opportunities than ever before for people to watch a program that they’re interested in."

"There’s no way to schedule around DVR viewing,” said Dawn Ostroff, CW’s president of entertainment. “You have to assume that a good number of viewers are going to wind up watching the content in a different way."

The 10 p.m. slot, the home to superannuated procedurals and mediocre news magazines for too long, has become the Siberia of prime time, and a no-go zone for younger viewers, though how Leno's new show is going to bring them back remains to be seen.

In the Boston Globe, TV critic Matthew Gilbert published nine suggestions for how the networks could compete with cable and become relevant again, including more finite runs on series to prevent staleness, more incentive for marquee comedians like Will Ferrell to shift from movies back to TV, perhaps with a show based on current affairs, fewer awards shows, commercials, and irritating onscreen graphics, and a comedy series based on reality television.

The last one is a great idea, and it frankly boggles the mind why no one has tried it yet. As Gilbert points out, "It's time for the networks to acknowledge - and celebrate, and exploit - the fact that we all know about just how fake reality shows are." Amen to that, brother.

Gilbert also wishes the networks would curb their enthusiasm for procedurals, but considering that they remain popular - as he himself points out, CBS' The Mentalist is one of the few real hits this season - and a favorite of the demographically-derided but cash-rich older viewer, I can't imagine he'll get his wish.

Hugh Jackman's Oscar hosting gig shuffles the deck

Rick McGinnis, Metro Canada — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 05:00:00 -0400

AND THE WINNER IS: After years of labouring to produce the least watchable two-plus hours of television a top-flight group of industry professionals can put together with the biggest stars in the business at their fingertips, the people behind the Oscars have decided to do an about-face on their longstanding policy on hosts and hire a movie star whose biggest role is in a comic book franchise, and whose latest big-budget epic flopped in theatres.

There will be no Billy Crystal or Steve Martin or Whoopi Goldberg striving but failing to goose some pacing into the glamourous torpor that is the Academy Awards this February. After rumours of a big change in the works, the show’s producers announced that Hugh Jackman would be their choice to host the 81st Academy Awards.

“He also has style, elegance and a sense of occasion," the show’s producers, Bill Condon and Laurence Mark said in a joint statement on Friday. "Hugh is the ideal choice to host a celebration of the year's movies — and to have fun doing it.”

Jackman had better also have a cattle prod to move along long-winded winners and one hand on the volume knob of the space-time continuum to quicken the show’s pace as it inevitably bogs down along the time-honoured Via Dolorosa of musical numbers, awards presentations and forelock-tugging tributes to the industry’s long-expired golden age.

NOTHING TO GIVE: The people behind American Idol have decided to forget about the show’s charitable fundraiser, Idol Gives Back, for at least this upcoming season, apparently concerned that viewers would be clutching their pocket books tighter during a recession.

“There will be no Idol Gives Back,” was the curt summation in an internal memo issued after a meeting of Fox’s programming council, and leaked on mjsbigblog.com, an unofficial Idol web site, last week.

Also rumoured was fewer open-call audition episodes, the return of Wild Card Week, and more Hollywood semi-finals, in addition to an expansion of the finalists to 36 from 24, and more behind-the-scenes footage of the contestants, injecting more reality and less talent show into Idol.

These are probably all good, but cancelling Idol Gives Back looks like a short-sighted mistake. Considering the astronomical salaries earned by key judges and producers – never mind Simon Cowell’s US$30 million, it looks like Paula Abdul might be getting a raise to $10 million – the charity fundraiser gave everyone involved, as well as a raft of celebrity guest stars, a chance to attempt a convincing impersonation of philanthropy. No one thinks that they’ll be suffering too much during the recession, so nixing Idol Gives Back will probably just play out as a squandering of badly-needed goodwill.

Reaching out for metaphors that just aren't there

Rick McGinnis, Metro Canada — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 05:00:00 -0400

SOMETIMES AN ÉCLAIR IS JUST AN ÉCLAIR: There’s a theory making the rounds that the current economic downturn is a good thing in disguise – that being shocked out of the complacent habits of prosperity and the social status quo is the ultimate form of “creative destruction,” burning away out-of-date ideas and habits and forcing us to look at the world in a whole new way.

Sometimes, however, it’s just an invitation for increasingly tenuous and absurd lunges at social diagnosis, such as a piece in Tina Brown’s Daily Beast current affairs web magazine this week by writer and comic Jessi Klein. The subject at hand is Oprah Winfrey’s recent weight gain, the subject of an apparently anguished confession in the recent issue of Winfrey’s O magazine, which Klein sees as a physical reflection of the subprime mortgage meltdown and credit crunch behind our current economic insecurity.

“Oprah concludes that her latest chub-battle has led her to adjust her weight objective,” Klein writes. “She’s no longer striving to be thin, she says, but simply to balance health with giving herself ‘the love and care’ she needs. So 2009 finds Oprah and the rest of the country adjusting to a new resolve. None of us, no matter what the size of our wallets, can be perfect. But when we waver from our budgets, we’ll be downsizing our indulgences. For Oprah, that might mean a cookie instead of a whole cake; for the rest of us, perhaps a movie instead of an Escalade.”

It’s at times like this that the tantalizing lure of metaphor – for writers especially – looks like epistemological crack, cheap, addictive and damaging. Oprah’s weight gain is to be understood as one woman’s caloric interpretation of social insecurity seeking solace in materialism; it’s a sophomoric equation at best, one best discarded with undergrad English Lit essays.

It’s hard to compare the extra time Oprah might have spent at the snack table backstage with credit card debt and defaulted mortgages; Oprah paid for the food she’s eaten, after all, and her decision to supersize herself by 40 lbs. wasn’t facilitated by governments and banks underwriting fatty foods, and won’t end in seizure and public auction of her waistline.

Klein seems to think that the cure for our widespread economic bingeing should be the prohibition of Escalades and “cashmere-iPoddy things that should have been off limits,” and quotes Oprah’s assessment that her overindulgence was “a love issue.” Whatever imprudence might have motivated so much bad debt, love probably had less to do with it than woeful incomprehension of the concept of interest and the seriousness of the due date at the top of a bill.