ROBERT BRIAN TAYLOR

Reboot Court: The Evil Dead

2012-01-04T17:54:00.001-05:00

Note: This is the first in a potential series that I pitched to a website or two a few months back, but so far, no one has bit. In the meantime, I figured I'd publish it here and perhaps even write some more in the not-too-distant future. So, without further adieu, welcome to Reboot Court, where we drag an upcoming film remake in front of the judge -- that would be me -- and determine whether or not a do-over is a good idea. Court is now in session ...

The original film:The Evil Dead (d. Sam Raimi, 1981)

The story: Agroup of college students are partying it up at an isolated cabin when theyaccidentally resurrect a plethora of demonic spirits, which then go on akilling spree. Only one man can turn the tide: Bruce Campbell’s iconic AshleyJ. Williams. Also, there’s tree rape.

Existingpermutations: Two sequels -- EvilDead II (1987) and Army of Darkness(1992)

Proposed newincarnation: Sounds like a reboot, though it could slip into requelterritory if Campbell reprises his role as Ash. The new film is expected to be released in 2013.

Argument for: The Evil Dead and its two sequelscomprise one of the cherished horror series of all time, though unlike mosthorror franchises spawned in the ’80s, this one never ran itself into theground with umpteen sequels. Plus, it’s been nearly two decades (!) since Army of Darkness hit theaters, so it’snot like we’re beating a dead(ite) horse here. The earlier films were made on ashoestring budget, and it could be interesting to see what kind of crazinessRaimi and company would put on screen with a bigger wad of dough. The sequelsveered off into extreme horror/comedy hybrid territory, so it might be nice forthe series to return to its straight-horror roots. Seeing The Chin portray Ashone more time, even in just a short cameo, would be a giftlong hoped for.

Argument against:The cabin in the woods scenario has pretty much been done to death at thispoint. (In fact, a flick called Cabin inthe Woods, which apparently goes all meta on the concept, opensthis April.) Raimi doesn’t intend to get behind the camera for the new Evil Dead, passing the reins on to Federico Alvarez, who’s only directed a few shorts (including this much-heralded one). Alvarez may make a competent feature director, but thesefilms were distinctly Raimi’s. So if Sam is only producing and not shooting it,what’s the point? Many think the low-budget charm of the original three filmsonly contributes to their greatness and that a bigger budget would just fuckthings up. Tree rape isn’t going to fly in today’s mainstream cinema, and it’sgoing to be awfully hard to top it in terms of shock value. Lastly, making anew Evil Dead movie without BruceCampbell or Ash at the center of it? Uh, yeah, good luck with that.

The verdict: Not sogroovy. A legitimate Evil Dead 4 withan aging Campbell fighting the deadites one more time could work. (Or it couldbe the Crystal Skull of horror, but younever know until you try.) However, areboot with only peripheral involvement by Raimi and Campbell sounds likesomething the Book of the Dead should have warned about.

Bob's 2012 Movie Journal

2012-01-03T00:08:00.000-05:00

I had a lot of fun keeping a movie journal last year, so I figure why not do it again for 2012? Every film I see for the first time this year will be logged, rated and written about. Sometimes I'll write a little; occasionally I'll write a lot. Depends on the movie. And I plan on seeing a lot of them this year. As always, ratings are based on a one-through-five-star scale with no halfsies.

1/23 Super (2010) ★★★★: What is it with the violent, girly sidekick always stealing the show in this recent rash of "real-life superhero" movies? First Chloe Moretz runs away with Kick-Ass, and now Ellen Page completely owns every single second she appears in Super. It's nearly a trend. Past that, it may not be fair to compare the two movies, as they're more similar in concept than execution. Kick-Ass comes across as just an amped-up, somewhat loopy version of a mainstream superhero film compared to Super's low-budget, ultra-violent, darkly comedic take. A harsh revenge fantasy that can be both shocking and hysterical, Super struggles to balance its various tones early on, but things start to mesh once Page's Boltgirl joins Rainn Wilson's Crimson Bolt in his quest to fight crime and save his drug-addled wife from the dealer she ran away with. Writer/director James Gunn also made the delightfully crazy Slither. That film is better than this one, but Super still helps prove that we need Gunn making more movies more often.

1/16 Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory (2011) ★★★★: The fact that Purgatory is the third film in this series yet still packed with brand-new evidence that illustrates how badly the investigation into and trial against the West Memphis Three were bungled is astounding. As they have twice before, documentary filmmakers Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky document the triple-murder case in incredible, riveting detail. They don't exactly come at the material from an unbiased angle anymore, but, honestly, how could anyone at this point?

1/13 Moneyball (2011) ★★★★: Not exactly the full truth -- I'm pretty sure the names Tim Hudson, Barry Zito and Mark Mulder are never spoken during the film -- but still a movie that's pretty much impossible for any baseball geek (which I am) not to enjoy.

1/8 The Book of Eli (2010) ★: Two hours of warmed-over post-apocalyptic cliches slathered in a dollop of hokey, faith-is-all-you-need spiritualism. And then there's a twist ending that the movie comes nowhere close to selling.

1/7 War Horse (2011) ★★★: The film is pretty and plenty well put together, but it didn't really connect with me on any kind of emotional level. Maybe it's because I'm not much of an animal person. Or maybe it's because there are no human characters worth getting attached to. I seriously couldn't tell you a single characteristic about the human lead other than he really liked his horse.

1/7 Mission: Impossible -- Ghost Protocol (2011) ★★★★★: The most fun and thrilling action movie I've seen in a good, long while. While most series are running on fumes by part four, the Mission: Impossible franchise is somehow just hitting its stride. With J.J. Abrams (who directed the very good M:I-III) still on as a producer and Pixar whiz Brad Bird making his live-action directorial debut, it seems Tom Cruise has finally found the right combination of people to unlock this property's full potential. The set pieces are amazing, including the jaw-dropper in, around and on Dubai's Burj Khalifa and a very clever prison break that opens the film. Simon Pegg is hilarious. Jeremy Renner gets to be funny, too, as well as appropriately bad-ass. The surprise cameos near the end allow this installment to warmly acknowledge the films that came before without overly relying on them. I know it's this series' M.O. to rijigger the cast and bring on a new director with each film, but I'm pretty sure no one will complain if Bird and this exact same team return for M:I-5. I certainly won't.

1/5 Green Lantern (2011) ★: It's somewhat ludicrous the things we film geeks obsess over before a film's release. With Green Lantern, all I heard about in the months leading up to the movie's release was how silly and fake the CGI suit looked. I'm sure there are pages upon pages of nervous message-board posts about it floating around the Net. As it turns out, the suit is just fine. Actually, it's better than fine. It's downright nifty. Too bad then the rest of the film is a complete and total train wreck. It's like the filmmakers took a bunch of bullet points from the comic's mythology and strung them together haphazardly without bothering to craft a functioning story. I could make a laundry list of things wrong with Green Lantern, both big and small. In fact, why don't I just go ahead and do that? Deep breath ... ready? ... here we go: Hal Jordan's character arc is murky and uninteresting; the emotional triangle linking Hal, Carol and Hector should have been more carefully set up earlier in the film in order for it to resonate more effectively later on; it's not always clear early in the movie when Hal has the ring with him and whether he's wearing it or has it stuffed in a pocket; there's a bunch of weird cross-cutting -- like between Hal taking the oath and Hector being infected -- that only serves to weaken the impact of the individual events; Hal only acts like a superhero for about 10 minutes of the movie (okay, 15 tops); there's a decided lack of money shots (when Carol throws Hal the ring near the end, I would have slowed that shit down and milked it for all it was worth); way too much time and energy is spent explaining Parallax's origin; characters enter and exit the story seemingly on a whim; etc.; etc.; and so on and so on. Green Lantern fans deserved better. Ryan Reynolds, who I like a lot and tries his best here, deserved better. Just a massive disappointment.

1/2 Machete (2010) ★★: There are sights worth seeing here -- Machete rappelling down a building using some bloke's intestines; Machete "steering" a car by twisting the blade embedded in the driver's back; Michelle Rodriguez's stomach -- but they're surrounded by so much embarrassing nonsense that the movie is ultimately not worth it. Also, Jessica Alba gives what may be the worst "let's go to war!" motivational speech in film history.

Read my Spider-Man essay for free

2011-11-03T11:47:00.000-04:00

Smart Pop is making "Raimi vs. Bendis," a Spider-Man essay I contributed to the book Webslinger, free to read up until Wednesday Nov. 9! I wrote this piece, which compares film director Sam Raimi's take on the wallcrawler to Brian Michael Bendis's version of the character, between Spider-Man 2 and 3. (Had it come after 3, it likely would have been weighed even more strongly in Bendis's favor.)

Reviewing what's new on TV

2011-10-31T01:17:00.003-04:00

I've spent the last month tackling some of the fall's new shows over at Guy.com. So in case you missed them, go check out my reviews of Homeland, Terra Nova, Person of Interest and Ringer. Spoiler alert: Homeland is by far the best of the bunch.

Read my Batman essay for free

2011-07-27T10:26:00.001-04:00

"Keeping It Real in Gotham," a Batman essay I wrote for BenBella Books' Smart Pop line, is now free to read online and will continue to be until Wednesday, August 3. Go check it out as you try to calculate how many days are left until The Dark Knight Rises opens.

Photo Dump - Cape May, NJ

2011-07-01T15:17:00.002-04:00

Spent a week in Cape May, NJ last month. Here's the photographic evidence:

Photo Dump - 5/16/11

2011-05-16T19:00:00.013-04:00

I've been taking more and more photos lately. A few with the ol' SLR. More with my newish iPhone 4. I thought I'd start throwing some of the more interesting ones up here. (Just click on them for big versions.)

Opening Day at PNC Park in April.

My first favorite baseball player.

At the Carnegie Museum of Natural History.

Seen near Youngstown, Ohio. My question is: Did it fall just like this, or was it propped up after the fact?

A sign at a Wellsburg, West Virginia park and playground that I can't believe is even necessary.

Guess who's writing about TV again? Hint: It's me.

2011-03-10T13:59:00.004-05:00

I've been hinting for a while now that I'd soon be writing about television again on a regular basis, and today "soon" finally arrived with the launch of Guy.com, a sweet new lifestyles/pop-culture site from some of the people who run net-movie-behemoth Chud.com. The plan is for me to write a new column that will go up every Monday. Each will include a Ready Your DVR sidebar pointing you to the week's most interesting TV programming.

Taylor on TV ended nearly three years ago, and it's nice to once again have an outlet to write about what I still consider the best kind of filmed storytelling: serialized television. This column won't be the same as the last one. After all, I'll be writing for a bitchin' lifestyles website, not some stodgy newspaper. Expect a wider range of topics, a renewed focus on shows outside the Nielsen top twenty, a bit more snark, a few four-letter words and instant feedback from me for those who comment on my posts.

My first two Guy.com posts are already up: a review of the new FOX cop drama The Chicago Code and a look at HBO's most exciting schedule in years. None of these columns will appear at this blog, but I'll be linking to them from my twitter feed when new ones get posted. Hopefully, you all will stop by Guy.com to check out not only my pieces, but all the excellent content my fellow writers are turning in.

If I were writing the new Superman ...

2011-03-01T00:14:00.007-05:00

For some reason, Warner Bros. let David Goyer pen the new Superman flick instead of me. (I know, right? What's that about?) Anyway, if only I'd gotten a crack, this would be my opening ...

INT. OLD-FASHIONED MOVIE THEATER

The red velvet curtains covering the screen open up to the left and right, revealing the screen behind. Flickering onto it are black and white images of a sleek and modern version of America's greatest city. We PUSH INTO the screen, which floods with color revealing ...

EXT. METROPOLIS -- DAY

... Metropolis in all its glory. The camera SWOOPS through skyscrapers that glitter in the afternoon sun, WHIZZES by The Daily Planet topped by its giant spinning globe, then DROPS down to the streets below. Traffic and people snake in all directions. A newspaper blows by with a headline that reads, "SUPERMAN SAVES 10 FROM BURNING FACTORY." We now ZOOM IN on to the ground floor of a towering glass cathedral. A sign over the entrance reads, "METROPOLIS BIOSCIENCE." The camera RISES up the shimmering outer wall before SETTLING IN on section of the building around the 20th floor. The camera slowly PULLS BACK. A bird flies by. A few car horns HONK in the distance. All is calm. Until ...

CRASH!

A 400-pound ALIEN BEAST flies backward out of the skyscraper, sending glass shards in all directions. Clutching at air and SCREAMING in a horrible alien tongue, the beast falls to the street below, just missing a passing taxi and smashing the concrete to rubble. Smoke pours through the hole left in the skyscraper clouding what lies behind ... until a shape takes form in the haze. The shape of a man.

Superman emerges from the destruction. He flies upright with his head held high and his toes pointed downward. His hands are curled into fists. He glances down below to survey the damage. Seeing that no citizens were injured in the beast's fall, he takes steadying breath, readying himself for this battle's final round. Then, in a flash of red, he's soaring to the street below. The beast pushes itself upright and raises its spiked arms to block. Superman pulls back a fist to strike.

The two collide.

Bob's 2011 Movie Journal

2011-01-16T14:06:00.067-05:00

Sad to say, this blog has gone untended for a couple of years now. I continue to write about poker at Three Rivers Poker. And it looks like I'll soon be writing regularly about TV again for a brand new entertainment/lifestyle site that will launch in the coming weeks. But it's been a good long while since I felt compelled to write anything significant for this site right here -- my original personal blog. I think I've found a way to fill that void.

Annoyingly, Netflix dropped its social-networking features last year, meaning I can no longer my share thoughts on recently watched movies through the site. So I've decided to do that here instead in one regularly updated post. This post. Every movie I watch for the first time in 2011 will be cataloged right here. I'll give a rating and write a few comments about each film. Most of movies on the list will end up being slightly older films I watch via Netflix, but I'll see a handful at the theater this year and I'll include them as well.

By December 31st, I should have a nice little movie journal completed. It'll largely be for myself. But for anyone who stumbles across this site, either by checking in on me or finding it through my other writing, I hope it's worth a minute or two of your time. And comments are welcome. All right, enough preamble. Let's get to the movies. All ratings are based on a one-through-five-star scale with three stars being average and no half stars.

12/30 Super 8 (2011) ★★★★: J.J. Abrams' homage to early Spielberg is a film of halves. The first half is stronger than the second half. The coming-of-age half is better than the scary-alien-movie half. As a result, the movie as a whole is a little disjointed. But it's so brilliantly shot and edited -- and the performances of the film's child stars are so endearing -- that I was quite happy to be taken on this ride despite the bumps. Bonus fact: Super 8 was shot in West Virginia about 15 minutes from where I grew up. The steel mill used in some exterior shots is the actual mill where my father still works to this day.

12/28 Hard Candy (2005) ★★★: Honestly, the story didn't do a lot for me. Motivations are muddled and/or purposefully left vague, and the castration sequence goes on for far too long considering the whole thing is a bit of sleight of hand. But Hard Candy is still worth a watch thanks to a fierce performance by Ellen Page, who must have been a revelation had this been the first movie you'd seen her in.

12/13 Catfish (2010) ★★★: A tough one to write about, especially in the confines of this little journal. It really needs a longer post. If you're not familiar with it, Catfish is a documentary about the online relationships that Niv -- a 20-something New York photographer -- builds with an eight-year-old Michigan artist, her mother and her attractive 19-year-old sister. Niv falls for the older sister and begins making plans to meet with the family in real life ... and then things start to unravel. Believe it or not, it turns out not everything you read on Facebook is necessarily true. Now here's where things get tricky. I said Catfish was a documentary, and its directors, Niv's brother and a friend, continue to claim that it is. But others aren't so sure, and suspicions continue to mount that at least part of the film was staged. Setting aside the doc's authenticity for a moment, the movie is an interesting look at the nature of our online selves and how easy it can be to warp the truth in today's digital world. Not exactly unexplored topics, but Catfish comes at it from some unique angles, including one of deep sadness. For that, it's worth seeing. Yet I felt there were problems with the film's narrative that kept it from really being great. For example, once Niv starts to suspect that this family is deceiving him in some way, why does he never wonder for what reason? Wouldn't he be worried that some kind of con was about to be pulled on him, and wouldn't that concern be represented in the film in some way? Instead, Niv and the filmmakers almost joyfully go about disentangling the lies, before hopping in the car and heading west to fully unravel the mystery, apparently for the good of the film. Now, if parts of Catfish are fake or were restaged to alter the story, that could explain this narrative hole -- it's just bad writing! -- and I'd be keen to dock the movie for it. Whereas, if the film is 100 percent real, it's harder to gripe about how Niv reacts to things, even though it would amplify the strangeness of some of those reactions. And then that leads to the discussion about whether it should even matter if the movie is a true documentary or not. Should not a film stand on its own merits and the effect it has on the viewer, regardless of whether it's a work of fiction, of fact, or something in between? See what I mean? A lot to ponder. Setting aside all of that for now, Catfish is a twisty tale that proves to be more emotional and multidimensional than you'd think a movie about people lying about themselves on the Internet could be. Real or not, and despite some of its structural oddness, you've got to give it props for that.

12/10 The American (2010) ★★★: A sturdy production of an oft-told tale -- the assassin doing one last job and discovering that retiring might not be so easy. George Clooney is rock solid, as always, and the Italian hill town that provides the film's setting is gorgeous. Still, I like my hit-man travelogues to be a little more lively. Speaking of which, it might be time to go ahead and buy In Bruges on Blu.

12/3 The Muppets (2011) ★★★★: The sad fact is it's never going to be 100 percent the same without Jim Henson. Even still, I'd rather live in a world where the Muppets are active and relevant than one where they're not. So good on Jason Segel and company for making such a funny and respectful film. Also, Jack Black is so entertaining here that I'm going to officially forgive him for the last half decade.

12/2 127 Hours (2010) ★★★: Danny Boyle again, so of course it's showy and kinetic despite being entirely about a guy helplessly stuck in a crack in the Earth. Still, this one often feels more like the result of a cinematic dare than a story that just had to be told.

11/30 Black Swan (2010) ★★★★: The line between undisputed genius and pretentious bullshit shouldn't necessarily be a fine one, but when director Darren Aronofsky walks it, it's as thin as a razor's edge. Up to this point, however, it's been the whole of his career threatening to tip a specific direction, with individual films lodged firmly on one side or the other. (The Wrestler -- a masterpiece. The Fountain -- overwrought nonsense.) Black Swan is the first of his projects that could honestly support both sides of the argument. It is certainly pretentious. After all, this is a movie about mental illness and sexual awakening and the ungodly pressures we face from both internal and external forces, all set in the world of professional ballet. At least, I think it's about all of those things, but it's hard to tell since those subjects are dealt with in oblique and often disturbing ways. Hell, "pretentious" might not even be strong enough a word. But, at the same time, you can't just dismiss the film because of it. A lot of that has to do with how great Natalie Portman is here, playing a character you'd think would be out of her wheelhouse but clearly isn't. Black Swan is also stunningly shot and gets a lot of mileage out of its horror-movie veneer. Parts of this movie are deeply unsettling, and Aronofsky has way too much fun making every mirror that comes into frame an item of potential dread. So perhaps then this film is the perfect representation of Aronofsky the filmmaker -- a beautiful, grandiose mind-fuck that probably tries too hard to be cerebral but ultimately makes for a riveting experience.

11/25 Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides (2011) ★★: What was twice enthralling (Curse of the Black Pearl, Dead Man's Chest) before turning creaky and bloated (At World's End) has now become boringly paint-by-numbers. Not a single new character proves effective, and a few are outright detestable. (I'm looking at you, preacher boy and mermaid girl.) Ian McShane's Blackbeard gets a nice introduction but is given nothing to do after. That's not the script's only sin. Why is it that so much of the plot hinges on a prophecy we never see given? Truth be told, I couldn't even figure out where it came from. It might have made sense to make the prophecy the opening scene, rather than the stuff with the Spaniards. Depressing thought: One more sequel like this and there will be more bad movies in this franchise than good ones.

11/18 X-Men: First Class (2011) ★★★★:With Bryan Singer back in the fold in a producing capacity and Matthew Vaughn behind the camera, the X-Men franchise regains a lot of its luster. While not at the level of X2, First Class is a huge upgrade over The Last Stand and Wolverine. Then again, I could film myself running around my back yard with kitchen knives clenched between my fingers and that would be an improvement over Wolverine. So maybe that's not exactly high praise. But Michael Fassbender makes a badass Magneto, the story moves at a good clip and by the film's end I was ready for more X films rather than wishing the franchise would die already. Just don't try to mentally resolve all the wacky continuity holes that are piling up in this series. You will go mad.

11/5 Thor (2011) ★★★★: Way more entertaining than I guessed it would be and a significant step up from Marvel's other big summer movie this year. (Yeah, I know Thor preceded Captain America is theaters, but I actually saw the latter first.) All the credit in the world to director Kenneth Branagh, who seamlessly blends this film's two disparate halves -- the epic fantasy stuff and the lighter fish-out-of-water tale -- into a cohesive and enjoyable experience.

11/2 Pearl Jam Twenty (2011) ★★★★: I bought a copy of Ten, Pearl Jam's first album, not long after it came out during my senior year of high school. I got it in Morgantown, WV (where I would go to college a year later) at a little bong-and-record store called The Discount Den. That's the same place I later stood in line at at midnight to pick up Vs. and Vitalogy on day one. I eventually graduated from college but I never quit buying Pearl Jam albums. Still haven't. That band and their music has been a constant part of my adult life, and each album, each song, each show I attended has the ability to instantly pull me back to a specific moment in time. I imagine there's quite a bit of people my age that feel similarly. If you're one of them, do yourself a favor and watch Cameron Crowe's expansive, loving documentary of the band's first twenty years.

10/16 The Big Lebowski (1998) ★★★★: Yeah, I know. What do you want from me? I've got no excuse. (By the way, despite hearing so much about Lebowski over the years, I never realized how much of the film was carried by John Goodman. The guy is hilarious here.)

10/1 The Expendables (2010) ★★: There's just enough inspired mayhem early on to get you interested, but then the film goes limp about halfway through. The plot holes grow bigger. (How in the world did they get the plane anywhere near that island the second time?) Instead of creating in-film rivalries between characters, Sylvester Stallone, as co-writer and director, matches up combatants seemingly on a whim. (Time for Hero C to fight Villain B!) It's strange -- the louder the movie gets, the blander it is. Plus, that last little Dolph Lundgren bit is colossally stupid.

9/15 Superheroes (2011) ★★★★: A fantastic documentary on real-life superheroes -- those guys and gals who dress up in costume (sometimes elaborate, often ridiculous) to patrol their city streets determined to fight crime. It's a phenomenon that can come across as hilarious, pathetic or inspiring -- sometimes all at once -- and director Mike Barnett manages to capture all sides in his film.

9/14 Splice (2009) ★★: For whatever reason, I went into this movie expecting a straight-forward horror film. (I'm sure it was probably sold that way when it hit theaters.) But it's not that at all. It's certainly not the least bit scary. It's more of a sci-fi morality tale -- one that I didn't find particular gripping. I never really had a firm grasp on the motivations behind either of the lead characters (two scientists played by Adrien Brody and Sarah Polley). An impressive level of sympathy is built up for the partially human creature they create -- some excellent makeup and effects-work help in that regard -- but then the creature's arc is almost totally undermined by an endgame twist that seems to exist just to set up the final scene. An odd little movie that just doesn't hold together very well.

9/6 Predators (2010) ★★: It feels like an honest-to-god Predator sequel, which I appreciate ... but just not a very good one. The film's biggest mistake: Killing off Laurence Fishburne so soon (especially after his fantastically badass introduction), while conversely devoting way too much screen time to Topher Grace's ineffective character. The big twist with the latter is a snooze, especially since you spend the whole movie waiting for the ridiculously telegraphed return of the poison-laced blade. A Predator movie that wastes precious endgame minutes with humans fighting each other is a sign of the filmmakers missing the point.

9/2 True Grit (2010) ★★★★: If the Coens directed Jeff Bridges to scratch his balls for two hours and Roger Deakins shot it, it would likely turn out to be at least a three-star film. Mattie's river crossing is one of the most jubilant and thrilling sequences I've seen in a good while.

8/26 The Captains (2011) ★★★: William Shatner goes around interviewing all the other actors who have sat in the Star Trek captain's chair in this documentary, and the results are worth watching, even if you're only a casual Trekkie. It's interesting how different they all are: Kate Mulgrew is so self-serious. Scott Bakula is casually affable. Meanwhile, Avery Brooks seems to operate on an entirely separate plane of reality from the rest of us. The best stuff, though, comes from Shatner's conversations with Patrick Stewart. I'd be more than happy to spend a couple of hours watching just those two shoot the shit.

7/22 Captain America: The First Avenger (2011) ★★★: There's nothing egregiously wrong with this take on the Marvel Comics titan, but the movie is ultimately forgettable. I had fun with the first half, but the plot never picks up any steam as it goes along, leading to a limp, underwhelming climax. The truth is Captain America might just be a little too straight-laced to carry his own movie. I figure he'll work better as a character when he can be bounced off Tony Stark and company.

7/16 Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 (2011) ★★★★★: As a fan of the books, I could nitpick it. Too many important characters die off camera. And Molly Weasley's big moment in the final battle comes off a little flat. But those missteps are far outnumbered by the things David Yates and crew get right. Harry's return to Hogwarts, Neville's heroics, Snape's memories, Harry's forest reunion -- all perfect or nearly so. What an astonishing film experience this entire series turned out to be. No, the movies won't replace the books. But I think they'll live along right beside them for a long, long time.

7/15 Batman: Under the Red Hood (2010) ★★★: These recent Warner Bros. Animation adaptions of popular DC comics stories have all been pretty solid, and this one is no exception. In fact, it's an improvement over the comic arc it's based on. One caveat: I'm not a fan of the Joker's design here, nor of John Di Maggio's vocal performance. Wade Williams does a great Black Mask, though.

7/13 Smokin' Aces (2006) ★: You'd think a movie about a bunch of people trying to kill Jeremy Piven would be a more enjoyable experience.

7/5 Cars 2 (2011) ★★★: It's nowhere near top-shelf Pixar, but I'm not sure it deserves the piling on it's gotten, either. Seeing classic spy-film tropes retrofitted for this universe is fun, and the movie is unsurprisingly gorgeous to look at. The first Cars is no masterpiece, but I really don't see how this one can be declared significantly worse than the original. It's a solid sequel in Pixar's most kid-oriented series.

6/30 Tron: Legacy (2010) ★★: The night before viewing this, I watched the original Tron for the first time in more than two decades. Enjoyed it as a kid but wasn't sure what to expect from it so many years later. I discovered that while the first half-hour is kind of a disaster, the movie plays pretty well after that. The story is slow and occasionally awkward, but it's also appealingly weird. I found myself absorbed into the universe, ancient special effects be damned. It's depressing then that Legacy does little to update that universe for modern-day viewers. Sure, the effects have come a long way in almost thirty years. (Although, truth be told, I'm not in love with some of the production design here. No digital world should have this much glass.) But the often vague story meanders along as if action/adventure movies haven't advanced at all since 1982. Disney had the opportunity here to take a property that was once revolutionary and make it so again. They blew it.

6/4 Slumdog Millionaire (2008) ★★★★: In the hands of most directors, I think this could have easily come across as too hokey or too clever for its own good. Danny Boyle is not most directors. Gorgeously shot; breathtakingly edited.

6/2 Winter's Bone (2010) ★★★: It seems to me that critics will sometimes fall head over heels for a movie, regardless of dramatic achievement, just because it strips away the makeup, the lighting, the fancy sets, and turns an honest eye toward some under-explored portion of the real world. Winter's Bone is one of those movies. And while the grimy mountain universe this film inhabits is interesting enough to make it worth an hour and forty minutes of your time, the story being told is much too inert and meandering to deserve the praise that was heaped on it upon release. With all that said, John Hawkes is indeed great here. No big surprise, as he usually is.

4/16 Scream 4 (2011) ★★★: My expectations weren't exactly high, but they were indeed met. It helps that I've always had a soft spot for this series. (Well, the first two installments, anyway.) I think it's the guess-the-killer nature of the plotting that always wins me over. I love a good whodunit, and Scream 4 delivers well enough in that department. (The big reveal came as a surprise to me and yet made sense in the context of the movie.) Some other positives: I'm always entertained by Courteney Cox in "exasperated bitch" mode, which she's locked into here. And the series' patented meta-ness is clever more often than not without being overused. There's one exception to that: The whole subplot about the new killer/killers filming the murders to make his/her/their own movie could have been drastically improved upon. That aspect of the killings shouldn't have been revealed or even hinted at until Cox discovered the webcam. The drama of that moment was completely deflated by having the film-club geeks theorize exactly what was happening earlier in the film. Also, considering the recent trend of "found footage" horror films, I'm surprised that the movie didn't explicitly state that that was what Ghostface was hoping to achieve: The first real found footage movie. As for the blood on display, I'm not really a "kill junkie," but the deaths in Scream 4 do grow a bit monotonous. It's all pretty much knife-work; nothing as creative as Rose McGowan getting crushed in the garage door the original. Long story short: It's much better than Scream 3, and more entertaining than any fourth film of a slasher franchise has a right to be. For horror fans, that might be enough.

4/2 The Fighter (2010) ★★★★: I almost want to slam it for its happy Hollywood ending, but I guess the facts are the facts, and this one apparently sticks fairly close to the true story. Mark Wahlberg's range as an actor has never been terribly wide, and he's usually awful when he tries to go outside of it. But his role here as Micky Ward, a soft-spoken boxer held back by his family, is thankfully right in his wheelhouse. Christian Bale's Oscar for playing Dicky Eklund, Ward's crack-addicted half-brother, was well deserved. Amy Adams is also quite good, though I think the screenplay lets her down some. She plays Ward's girlfriend, and the status of their relationship (at different points of the movie they're either together or apart) always seems dependent on where the script needs them to be rather than springing naturally from a believable romantic narrative. I like some of this film's little details: Dicky's son punching a locker in imitation of one of his father's emotional outbursts. And the look on a ring girl, just after she trips climbing into the ring, that says she'd rather be anywhere else in the world right now.

3/26 Up In the Air (2009) ★★★★: A bit too predictable and not as deep as I imagine its biggest supporters proclaim it to be. Still, I laughed pretty much every time I was supposed to, and the cast is aces from George Clooney all the way down to J.K. Simmons, who absolutely kills in his one scene.

3/12 The Social Network (2010) ★★★★: A revolution of cinema? Nah. Continued proof that Aaron Sorkin should be celebrated as a national fucking treasure? Yep.

2/16 Beowulf (2007) ★★: While I can appreciate the unrelenting brutality of the film, there's little else going on here, and even all the hacking and slashing grows stale after a while. (Plus the pacing is a mess. Plus the final battle against the dragon is underwhelming.) I continue to wonder what the point is to director Robert Zemeckis's motion-capture obsession. The CGI world of Beowulf rarely enthralls, and the rubbery sheen coating monster, man and everything else in the movie often proves distracting. I just really wish Zemeckis would return to live-action filmmaking.

2/2 Zodiac (2007) ★★★★★: The film is drawn out and methodical ... the perfect way to tell a story about a series of murders and subsequent investigation that were the same. The word "epic" is usually used when talking about space opera or high fantasy, but it also fits here, no minor feat for what is essentially a crime drama. Director David Fincher expertly handles three lead characters, a slew of supporting roles, a handful of murder suspects, several scenes of incredible dread, a long passage of time and an ending that may be too fuzzy for some yet too direct for others. For a while, you wonder if Jake Gyllenhaal's newspaper cartoonist is worth so much screen time, but once obsession grips him -- and likely you, too -- you understand it was necessary. Robert Downey Jr. is kind of just doing his rakish, too-cool-for-school schtick here. (Although, as usual, he's really, really good at it.) But Gyllenhall gives one of his better performances, and Mark Ruffalo is nothing short of awesome. So awesome, in fact, I think I'm finally starting to understand why hardcore film buffs like the guy so damn much.

1/31 This Film Is Not Yet Rated (2006) ★★★: I assume this doc would be a revelation for anyone who was totally unaware of how biased and unjust the MPAA (the mostly secret organization that rates movies) can be. In my case, it was mostly preaching to the choir. Large sections are bogged down by a focus on private investigators trying to dig up the names of the ratings board members, who aren't as much as a problem as the system in general. And most of the real condemning information -- the church is involved! studio and theater execs determine whether or not a film wins an appeal! -- is saved for the very end. The best parts of the film are those that point out, frame by frame, the MPAA's relentless hypocrisy. Excessive violence is fine; pubic hair not so much. Straight sex is much more acceptable than gay sex. And so on, and so on. I certainly wouldn't have minded if director Kirby Dick had rubbed just how arbitrary the system is in the organization's face a little more.

1/29 The Town (2010) ★★★★: It took all of two movies for Ben Affleck to become one of my favorite directors working today. For the record, Gone Baby Gone is the better, more challenging film. But The Town is a sturdy genre piece that's a hell of a lot of fun for grown-ups. Loved the old-school car chase in the middle. Affleck sure knows how to put those Beantown alleys to good use.

1/22 The A-Team (2010) ★★★: The giddy mayhem on display is infectious ... for the first hour, anyway. Then you start to realize that there's not much else here. It also doesn't help that the movie's final action sequence is its most convoluted and least exciting. The cast is lively -- especially Bradley Cooper and Patrick Wilson -- but some of those tacked-on character arcs are laughably bad. (I'm looking at you, B.A.'s self-help book.)

1/15 Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (2010) ★★★★: Clever and fun, though not the modern-day classic some make it out to be. That's partially because Mary Elizabeth Winstead is too wooden as Ramona. It's a problem when the romantic center of your movie is the least captivating girl in a movie full of captivating girls. (Seriously, how much does Kim rock with the little that actress is given to do?!) Luckily, the rest of the cast is so good, and the visuals so enthralling, that it ends up being a minor weakness rather than a major one.

1/7 For Your Consideration (2006) ★★★: Not nearly as winning as A Mighty Wind or Best in Show but still amusing. Ricky Gervais is much welcome once he shows up.

1/6 Hot Tub Time Machine (2010) ★★★: The actors are game, and there are definitely enough laughs to mildly recommend this. But the script badly needed another pass taken on it. At first, you're under the impression that John Cusack's high school girlfriend was "the good one that got away." But then that's quickly tossed aside in favor of cute-as-hell, mid-to-late-twentyish music reporter Lizzy Caplan, who for some bizarre reason repeatedly flirts with a teen-aged Cusack. Also, how in the hell was Clark Duke ever born if Rob Corddry didn't get with Duke's mother until the group's second go-round through the space-time continuum? I know it's a comedy first and foremost, but it helps when your plotting is just a little coherent. There's a reason why movies such as Back to the Future and Groundhog Day are classics. They're hilarious, but the intricate storytelling also holds up under scrutiny.

1/4 Let the Right One In (2008) ★★★★★: Probably my favorite horror film since Dawn of the Dead '04. It's in turn thrilling, harrowing and exhilarating. I haven't decided if I even want to watch Let Me In, the American remake. Not sure what the point would be.

Fantasy Hurler is no more

2010-10-01T01:08:00.001-04:00

I've decided to close up shop on Fantasy Hurler, the fantasy baseball blog I've run for the last four seasons. The decision to shutter the site did not come easily, but I think it's ultimately for the best. Hopefully, I'll have new projects to announce soon. I may even start writing here regularly again. But, in the meantime, check out my goodbye post at Fantasy Hurler.

Halo: Reach snapshots

2010-09-20T17:28:00.005-04:00

Remember how much fun it was to take in-game snapshots of the action in Halo 3? Well, Halo: Reach is out, so it's time to do it again! Here's me wreaking havoc in both team-based (wearing blue) and solo (gold) multiplayer ...

Launching RBT Art

2010-07-06T08:21:00.012-04:00

Not too long ago, I discovered an app called Brushes that allows you to compose complex and varied digital art. I downloaded it and started screwing around. I don't claim the results to be great art. But I'm having a blast "painting" and figure all art is worth sharing. Rather than just post stuff here, I decided to give my pieces they're own little home. Hence ... RBT Art. It's only purpose might be as a creative outlet for me. But if you spend a few minutes perusing and see something you like, all the better.

Three samples of what you'll find there (and how cool Brushes is, even for a rank amateur like me):

Should the All-Star Game count?

2010-03-27T09:26:00.004-04:00

Throughout this summer, Around the Horn Baseball, one of Fantasy Hurler's sister sites, is running a series of arguments called The Great Bloguin Baseball Debate. The series features a bevy of Bloguin network baseball writers examining both sides of hot-button topics and classic hardball arguments. This week, it was my turn to step up to the podium, where I was tasked with convincing the masses that the MLB All-Star Game should indeed have meaning, that it should be more than an exhibition. An excerpt:

Having the All-Star Game determine home-field advantage is not only more fair than saying, "Well, it's the American League's turn this year," but it also ensures that outcome of the game matters once more. Players may never again play the game with the passion that they once did, but at least MLB execs realize the All-Star Game would be better served if they cared a little. With the new rule, they're forced to.

To read my full argument, along with i94 Sports' Rex Jaybels counter-argument, please click right here. If you're a baseball fan and you enjoyed this one, spend some time perusing the other articles in the series. Bloguin writers have worked really hard on these, and the end results have made for some excellent reads.

Three of my essays now available digitally

2010-03-11T21:28:00.004-05:00

You can now buy digital versions of all three of the essays I've written for Smart Pop Books at the publisher's revamped website.

Raimi vs. Bendis: Reimagining Spider-Man and The Captain May Wear the Tight Pants, but It's the Gals Who Make Serenity Soar can be purchased individually or as part of their respective e-book. Keeping It Real in Gotham, for the moment, is full e-book only.

Just click on the above links to go to each essay's respective page, where you can also leave a comment and recommend the essay via your fave social-networking site.

Smart Pop notes

2009-09-02T22:55:00.004-04:00

Happened upon another positive Batman Unauthorized review from last year, courtesy of Ink 19. They write:

This book comes highly recommended, and the collection of essays is successful because the writers expertly and passionately present fresh ideas about the Dark Knight and highlight how he's changed with the times -- a perfectly imperfect hero for our society.

BenBella Books is going to relaunch their Smart Pop website this fall, and word is past essays will be available digitally for individual purchase. I've signed some paperwork for it, so at least one of the three I've written for them should be offered.

At long last, the Cup returns to Pittsburgh

2009-06-13T00:05:00.012-04:00

I'm officially Twittering

2009-06-07T22:56:00.002-04:00

These days, who isn't? You can find me right here.

The "Lost" finale was a little meh

2009-05-14T12:11:00.004-04:00

Am I the only one in the entire universe who was underwhelmed by last night's Lost season-ender? This was the last season (not series) finale of Lost ever! Their final chance to leave our jaws dropped, shocked at what we'd just seen, dying to know what's coming next! Instead, they gave us a fade to white that made me do little more than shrug. No big reveal. No scintillating tease as to what's coming next.

Plus, I'm not buying the Jacob reveal. All the crazy, scary stuff that happened in the cabin -- that was just Ben knowingly talking to an empty chair, followed by a little unexplained mayhem? Kind of lame.

The twist with Locke was nice, but the payoff sucked because the character now posing as Locke is someone we never knew existed until the beginning of the same exact episode. Again, I was less than thrilled.

The scene with Rose and Bernard was all kinds of wonderful, though.

Who wants to hear me on the radio?

2009-03-23T00:55:00.002-04:00

Internet radio that is!

If you're reading this right now, you possibly already know that I run a fantasy baseball blog called Fantasy Hurler.

Because of that site, I got invited to talk fantasy baseball on the FantasyPros911 Internet radio show on Sunday. The show was originally broadcast live last night, but you can listen to it now by clicking right here and streaming it on your PC. There's also a link there to get it through iTunes. Or, if you go to this page and find the 3/22 show under On Demand Episodes, you can directly download the show in MP3 form.

So you're interested at all in baseball or what I'm up to these days, check it out. Oh, and if I sound nervous (and I'm pretty sure I do), remember to cut me some slack. It's been a good long while since I've done any type of radio.

Neil Patrick Harris has a great sense of humor

2009-01-16T23:42:00.000-05:00

Screw Tina Fey as Sarah Palin. THIS is the funniest thing I've seen on SNL all season ...

Fantasy Hurler 2.0 launches

2009-01-13T12:42:00.003-05:00

For the last two years I've run a fantasy baseball blog called Fantasy Hurler, something I've done for fun. When I started, I just figured that I talk so much about fantasy baseball as it is, I might as well write about it, too. I brought some other writers on, and last summer, somewhat surprisingly, the thing started picking up a little bit of steam. We had regular readers, a tiny trickle of advertising revenue. And now this year, an opportunity came along to relaunch the site with a whole new look, as part of a new sports blog network called Bloguin. So, to get to the point, Fantasy Hurler 2.0 launched this week, and I thought anyone stopping by here might be interested in checking out it out now. Our new and permanent address:

www.fantasyhurler.com

The new version of the site's still in its infancy. Nobody's using the forum yet. I need to get my other writers posting again. And readership won't start rising again until leagues open in February. But I'm gearing up for the new season and hopefully things will be hoppin' at the site soon. Consider this my invite to stop by the site at anytime and see what we're up to.

Another nice "Batman Unauthorized" review

2008-10-18T21:26:00.000-04:00

This one from The Christian Manifesto, of all places. From their review:

Robert Brian Taylor’s “Keeping It Real In Gotham” is the first essay in the title and all other titles really hinge on this one. Here, Taylor talks about the difficulties of transferring Batman from the printed page to the big screen.

Gems are shiny and good, right?

2008-09-28T10:01:00.003-04:00

World Famous Comics reviewed Batman Unauthorized this summer and was nice enough to label my essay, which does indeed take "the comics and movies to task for epically stupid developments," as one of the book's gems. As a whole, they give the book a three out of five on the Tony scale. (When you click on the link, you'll need to scroll down a bit to read the review.)

Still writing about baseball

2008-09-09T20:53:00.004-04:00

Fantasy Baseball Generals has been running an excellent series of articles detailing the top five fantasy stories from every Major League team this season. They asked yours truly to contribute Pittsburgh's top five, which you can read in all its glory RIGHT HERE.

Remember, if you're interested in baseball and, for some reason, find yourself caring about what I'm up to, you can always visit Fantasy Hurler, the fantasy-baseball blog I've run for two seasons now.

Groucho Reviews likes Batman Unauthorized

2008-08-10T23:38:00.004-04:00

I found this comprehensive and very favorable review of Batman Unauthorized today. Groucho Reviews calls it "essential reading on the modern myth of Batman, its meaning, and its enduring hold on the American imagination," as well as name drops yours truly. Can't beat that.

Yes, I am still among the living

2008-08-10T11:53:00.007-04:00

So, uh, yeah. I haven't blogged here forever. For anyone who's been stopping by, sorry 'bout that. I have been doing a fair amount of writing, but it's all been over at Fantasy Hurler and Three Rivers Poker, or me tooling around on various fiction projects that aren't worth talking about yet. Plus, there have been vacations, my summer job working for Major League Baseball, figuring out how to communicate with a two-year-old, etc., etc.

It's too bad I haven't taken the time to write because there have been things to talk about. Anyone who's seen The Dark Knight and Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog knows we were treated to two supreme entertainments this summer. I've decided that Joss Whedon and Chris Nolan should be crowned kings of Hollywood, with free rein to write/film/produce whatever they want. (Actually, thanks to TDK's box office, Nolan might actually have that power now.)

I've also read good stuff (Batman: The Long Halloween) and played good stuff (Civilization: Revolution). Hell, I even finally finished Y: The Last Man, tackling the final 10 issues over a two-day stretch last week. (Standing O for you, Mr. Vaughn.) Obviously, I've been playing lot of catch-up since my TV column was axed. That's the one good thing to come from it -- I no longer have to waste time subjecting myself to the Swingtowns and Wipeouts of the world just to have something to write about every week. In fact, I'm only watching three shows this summer: Season four of Weeds (started out sucky, has gotten a whole lot better), season one of Secret Diary of a Call Girl (started out sucky, has gotten a whole lot better) and season two of Burn Notice (is never sucky, always rocks).

So there, at long last ... that's what I've been up to recently. I'll try not to let too much time pass before blogging here again.

You've got to be kidding me

2008-06-18T16:37:00.005-04:00

My Xbox 360 crapped out on me for the second time in four months today. I was playing some GTA IV, when the game went out and my system flashed a quick message about cleaning the disc and trying again. I ignored it, figuring that some dust must have glommed onto the disc, and turned the 360 off. A few hours later, I fired it back up to play again, except this time, it wouldn't acknowledge that GTA IV was even in the machine. So I tried another game ... which also didn't work. I stuck a DVD in ... which too didn't register. A bit of research showed that my 360 suffers from the "open tray" error, named as such because my Xbox tells me I have an open tray even though I damn well know there's a disc sitting in it.

So I called Microsoft customer service to see what they could do about it. They broke the news that they could fix the console but it would cost me $99 because the three-month extended warrenty I got after having my console fixed for the Red Ring of Death expired on Saturday. Are you fucking kidding me?

So now I'm back to having no Xbox 360. It's unplugged, sitting on my kitchen table, while I decide whether I want to pay to fix the cheap, sloppily made, hurried-to-market piece of shit. I guess I'll have to, considering the money I have invested in games for the thing. Next generation, though, I'll seriously consider avoiding Microsoft altogether. It's just not worth the hassle when your machine eventually breaks ... and then breaks again.

Addicted to the Electone on YouTube

2008-06-06T11:01:00.005-04:00

When I was a kid I took piano lessons for several years -- learned how to read sheet music, played in a few recitals, all that jazz. But in high school, I switched to guitar, which I thought was the "cooler" instrument and the one that hung from the neck of my musical heroes, including Tom Petty and Bruce Springsteen. I've played the six-string recreationally ever since, though recently I've gotten the urge to tackle piano again. The big problem there is I don't think I can fit one in my house, so I've been considering buying a keyboard. Something cheap, I figure. Doesn't need to be a professional model. Just something to fool around with.

Then I accidentally discovered the Yahama Electone while screwing around on YouTube the other day, and I've decided I must have one. Never mind that I couldn't possibly play it with the skill that the folks in the videos below display. (Or, let's face it, 1/20th of said skill.) But just the fact that these people can do these things with an Electone makes me want to have one in my living room. Sadly it seems Yahoo doesn't sell them in America; they can only be imported. Which also likely means they're expensive as hell. (I haven't researched cost yet 'cause I want to let the dream live a little longer.)

Anyway, check these out. And, yes, the fact that I'm a film-music junkie is helping to feed my Electone addiction.

TAYLOR ON TV: Signing Off

2008-05-19T22:28:00.000-04:00

I’ve endured many unfortunate cancellations during the five years I’ve written this column – Angel, Deadwood, Veronica Mars and Invasion, to name a few. Unfortunately, I’m now facing one I won’t be able to get past – my own.

Yes, fellow couch potatoes, the Herald’s Powers That Be have decided to force Taylor on TV into an early retirement. No hard feelings here. At its inception, this column was really just a happy accident. Back when I worked as editor of the Lake Wylie Pilot, I was out wining and dining with a group of newspaper people that included the then-publisher of the Herald. She overhead me talking passionately about some TV show or other and offered me my own column. How could I say no?

My first Taylor on TV was a massive piece on the series finale of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, still my all-time favorite television show. Between then and now, I watched a whole lot of good stuff that I felt privileged to write about in this very spot: The debut of Lost, and then, after its disappointing second season, its glorious season-three rebirth. Jack Bauer kicking terrorist butt season after season on 24. Shane murdering Lem and betraying Mackey on The Shield. Veronica Mars catching Lilly’s killer.

While writing this column I saw the beautiful beginning of Pushing Daisies and the sad, touching finale of Six Feet Under. I became smitten with that wonderfully snappy Gilmore Girls dialogue and enthralled by the dizzying lunacy of 30 Rock. Like everyone else, I was tuned in when Tony Soprano and family sat down to eat those onion rings.

Would I have seen all of these things if I wasn’t writing this column? Tough to say. But there’s little question that knowing I had to turn in one of these babies every week drove me to search out good TV storytelling in places I might not have otherwise looked. (Places like the USA network, which has me hooked on Burn Notice, and Showtime, where Weeds is a personal fave.)

I want to thank you, the reader, for both your attention and feedback over the last five years. Whether you e-mailed with a question, to thank me for introducing you to your latest TV addiction or even to inform me of just how wrong I got it in a recent column, I appreciated the fact that you took the time to read Taylor on TV and drop me a line.

Of course, just because I’m not writing about TV anymore doesn’t mean I won’t be watching it. The upcoming season looks particularly promising with new shows from Alias creator J.J. Abrams and Buffy guru Joss Whedon coming this fall or shortly thereafter. (And, yes, I find it disturbingly ironic that Joss finally gets a new show on the air and I won’t be here to talk about it. That’s just not fair at all.)

I still believe that the best storytelling in the world is done by TV writers, producers, directors and actors. They get all the benefits of cinema but with a much larger canvas to create on. There’s nothing more satisfying than watching a group of sophisticated characters evolve naturally over the course of many seasons, regardless of whether they change for the better or worse, come together or grow apart. Well, actually, there might be one thing more satisfying -- when you get to not only watch, but to write about it, too.

You guys have been great. Thanks again for reading. Now go find something good on TV to watch.

originally published in the May 9th, 2008 edition of The Herald

TAYLOR ON TV: Don't Jeer the "Reaper"

2008-05-10T13:27:00.001-04:00

No word yet on whether the CW will renew Reaper for a second season, but I’m really hoping they do. The horror-comedy hybrid was labeled early on a spiritual successor to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and though the show never lived up to that promise, it’s improved enough in its second half to convince me that the show could really hit its stride in year two. (Much like Buffy did, by the way.)

The biggest reason for Reaper’s recent winning streak is that the writers have cut back on the repetitive demon-of-the-week tales to stress a larger mythology being woven from episode to episode. Last fall, every episode of Reaper was exactly the same: A demon wielding some unique power escapes from hell. The Devil tasks 21-year-old slacker Sam (Brett Harrison), whose soul was sold into servitude by his parents before he was born, with capturing the demon. Sam’s even-bigger-slacker buddies, Sock and Ben, come along for the ride. The good guys win, and the soul is dropped off at the local DMV to be returned to the underworld were it belongs.

But Reaper’s writers have recently pulled back the curtain to reveal more of the interesting universe these characters inhabit. We’ve found out that not all demons are pure evil. In fact, some – like Sam’s gay neighbors Tony and Steve – are pleasant conversationalists, excellent cooks and all-around nice guys. They even attend AA-like meetings to suppress their uglier demonic urges. Additionally, Tony’s leading a resistance to overthrow the Devil – a power play that unfortunately gets Steve killed and catches Sam in the middle. That’s all Sam needs. He’s already got enough problems trying to hold down both a normal job and awesome girlfriend while still working as Satan’s bounty hunter.

The complexity is appreciated. Reaper has never had a problem with the “comedy” half of its genre. (Tyler Labine remains a hoot as the overenthusiastic Sock.) But for the “horror” half to work, the show must present Sam with tougher moral decisions than how best to kill that week’s escaped demon. Lucky then that Ray Wise’s Lucifer is slowly turning from just sleazy to downright sinister. When Sam promises the Devil a favor in return for his girlfriend’s protection, the Devil doesn’t take long to call it in by asking Sam to betray the people who trust him.

The next hurdle for Reaper writers to jump is to get a grip on their show’s wonky continuity. When we first met Steve and Tony, we saw them sandblasting their demon horns down so they can pass as human. But later we learned they can just morph from demon to human form and back. And while the contract that gives Sam’s eternal soul to the Devil was made out to be ironclad in early episodes, a group of genial demons recently revealed that they could break Sam’s contract with a quick and simple sacrifice. (Sam, of course, refused, but still …)

Maybe the writers just need a little more time to effectively lay out all the rules of the Reaper universe. (Or, more likely, to figure out for themselves what exactly those rules are.) It’s unlikely that Reaper will ever take a leap into Buffy-sized greatness, but this strange yet amusing little show deserves better than to be forgotten after a single season. We’ll soon find out if the CW agrees.

originally published in the May 2nd, 2008 edition of The Herald

Some unhappy news

2008-05-04T00:20:00.006-04:00

On Friday I got word that the Herald is discontinuing Taylor on TV, the column I've written for that newspaper for about a half decade now. It seems I fell victim to the dreaded budget cuts. Those who know the industry may wonder how I lasted this long.

Still, the axe swung without warning, and I'm obviously depressed by the news. (As I'm not working on any other commissioned piece right now, this is the first time in a long, long time that I'm not actively writing something that I know I'll be paid for ... and that's a shitty feeling.)

I will be penning a farewell column to my readers that will run in the Herald next Friday and be reprinted here shortly thereafter. In the meantime, let me thank the folks who have regularly read my column right here at this blog. I know there are a few of you out there. I truly appreciate the attention and feedback you gave. I didn't make much money writing this column, but that didn't really matter since I had so much fun doing it. Hopefully, you enjoyed reading it.

Of course, just because no one's paying me to write at the moment doesn't mean I won't be writing. Hopefully, I can put this new free time to good use. I'll continue to update this blog, so always feel free to swing by and see what I'm up to. Before long, perhaps I'll have better news to share.

TAYLOR ON TV: The problem with "Earl"

2008-05-04T00:03:00.004-04:00

NBC’s lone weekly bright spot – its Thursday-night comedy lineup – is beginning to noticeably dim. The Office isn’t quite as sharp as it once was, and Scrubs will reportedly jump to ABC next fall for its final season. But right now the bigger problem is the collapse of My Name is Earl, which I called one of TV’s best comedies when in first debuted in 2005.

Back then, Earl proved unique amongst TV sitcoms with its jokes (of both the ridiculous and sly varieties) and colorful supporting cast all orbiting Earl’s quest for karmic forgiveness, which served as the show’s linchpin. Recently, however, Earl himself has been pushed to the side of his own series, which has, if not jumped the shark, then at least run off the rails.

Season three opened where season two left off – with Earl in prison for a crime he did not commit. Most shows would have made their lead a free man again by the end of the first half hour, but Earl’s writers took a chance by leaving him behind bars for a whopping 10 episodes – which turned out to be about five too many. (The characters in Earl work better when they’re at each other’s throats, not separated by prison walls.)

The writers’ strike hit when Earl was finally sprung from the slammer, and fans must have been looking forward to new episodes that would feature the gang all back together. But in the first post-strike episode, Earl was hit by a car and left in a coma, and three episodes later (including an hour-long), he’s still unresponsive.

That doesn’t mean Jason Lee gets a few weeks off from work. Earl still shows up in flashbacks and has been living a dream life (literally) inside his own head where he’s married to new crush Billie (Alyssa Milano) and everyone behaves as if they’re in a classic TV comedy. (Earl’s coma-dream even has its own opening credits and laugh track.) At best, the old-fashioned sitcom device could have mildly amused for one half-hour episode, but the writers thought it wise to stretch it for 90 minutes over two weeks. Terrible decision, especially considering Billie’s a new character we’ve barely gotten to know in the non-coma Earl world. And that’s not the only time the Earl brain trust has stretched a gimmick too far. One episode spoofing COPS was fine, thank you. The second? Overkill (and slightly painful to watch).

Earl’s writers have dropped the ball in other areas, too. One of the best twists the show had taken recently was the role reversal undergone by Randy and Catalina. Whereas Randy had always pined hopelessly for Catalina, it was revealed last season that, after a surprising sexual encounter, Catalina now yearns for Randy. But as soon as the twist came, the entire plotline was dropped. Disappointingly, Randy and Catalina have barely shared a scene together this year.

Can Earl recover? Maybe. The cast remains strong, and each episode still features a handful of great exchanges between its characters. I particular liked this bit from a recent flashback episode.

Earl walks up to Crabman and, under his breath, says, “We need something.”

Crabman immediately responds, “You need weed.”

Earl: “How’d you know?”

Crabman: “It’s usually what’s going on when a bunch of white people walk right up to me and start whispering.”

Ah, that Crabman. Wise beyond his years and still Earl’s secret weapon. Right now, the show could use more of him, less gimmicks … and more of the group dynamic (with Earl at the center) that made it so irresistible in the first place.

originally published in the April 25th, 2008 edition of The Herald

TAYLOR ON TV: "The Riches" live and let lie

2008-05-02T16:00:00.000-04:00

The tagline for FOX’s House is “Everybody Lies,” but the two-word slogan would make a better fit with sister network FX’s The Riches, now in the middle of a ridiculously good second season that cements it as TV’s most underrated series.

“[Lying] eats up your soul and it destroys you and it destroys everyone around who you love,” said a tear-streaked Dahlia Malloy in a recent episode. And Dahlia (Minnie Driver) would know, as season two has her family of gypsy con artists still assuming the life of the Riches, a wealthy, upstanding family apparently living the American dream behind the fences of a posh gated community. Appearances can be deceiving though, and Dahlia and her husband Wayne (Eddie Izzard) are struggling to keep their con going until Wayne, who fakes being a lawyer by day, cashes in on $13 million from a shady New Orleans real-estate deal.

As the Riches, they’re fighting homeowners’ association rent-a-cops and a nosy private investigator. As the Malloys, they must contend with Dale, Dahlia’s sociopathic cousin who has discovered their secret and wants in on the action, and the rest of their Irish Traveller clan who are none too happy that the Malloys abandoned them for a better life.

But most of all, they battle themselves, as the lies they tell to the world and each other build up around them like bricks forming a prison cell. Dale killed a man who was onto the Malloys’ secret and Wayne helped to cover it up, a fact he’s not sharing with the rest of his family. Meanwhile, in an attempt to atone for her sins, and without telling her husband, Dahlia turned herself into the police for parole violation and was forced into a crummy job at a fish market. They refuse to abandon their long con because, at its end, they know they’ll have the money to leave all these nasty untruths behind. But, ironically, they need to tell bigger and bolder lies to keep up the charade.

It also doesn’t help that the Riches are slowly turning into the people they started out only pretending to be. For daughter Di Di, that’s not such a bad thing. She likes attending a real school and making normal friends. But it’s torture for Cael, who hates what his family has become and misses the freedom that’s inherent to the Traveller lifestyle. And Wayne is learning that working as a corporate lawyer requires just as much lying, or perhaps even more so, as being a con artist. When he discovers that his get-rich-quick real-estate deal takes advantage of thousands of New Orleans residents left poor and homeless after Hurricane Katrina, he begins to wonder if the $13 million is even worth all the harm that could be done.

Driver was deservedly nominated for an Emmy for her work on The Riches last season, and she continues to astound this year. Dahlia is on the fringes of a breakdown this season, covering up her old lies with new ones in a hopeless quest for a simpler, guilt-free life, and Driver deftly conveys Dahlia’s emotional despair. Izzard’s job is easier -- he just gets more frazzled the deeper the mess Wayne finds himself in – but he’s still incredibly entertaining in the part and can meet the challenge when a tender moment arises.

The writers’ strike resulted in a shortened second season of The Riches, so the show’s going to be leaving us much too quickly. If you haven’t been watching, do yourself a favor and buy, rent or borrow the DVDs when you get a chance. FX is known for its layered, challenging dramas, and The Riches should only add to that reputation. Whether Wayne and Dahlia can get away with stealing the American dream without losing their souls in the process is not yet known. Hopefully, FX keeps The Riches on the air long enough for them (and us) to find out.

originally published in the April 18th, 2008 edition of The Herald

TAYLOR ON TV: Everything old is new again at NBC

2008-04-23T23:30:00.000-04:00

Every May, I write two columns where I break down the network “upfronts,” presentations made to advertisers where the networks unveil their shows coming this fall. NBC, however, decided to get the jump on everyone by announcing their upcoming schedule last week. They’re calling it a new kind of year-round programming, but it’s really just the same staggered schedule that several networks have been using for a few years now. The prestige shows and most promising newcomers premiere in the fall, then another batch of freshman series debut after the holidays, and finally a glut of reality series flood the network during the summer. The end result is less reruns and multiple shows sharing time slots over the course of 12 months.

First, let’s go through what got renewed. Chuck and Life, which were enjoying mildly successful first years before being cut down by the writers’ strike, will be back, along with the midseason replacement Lipstick Jungle. Of course, Heroes, ER and the two Law & Orders (original and SVU) are on the schedule, as well as comedies The Office, My Name is Earl and 30 Rock. (Scrubs is gone, but apparently ABC will be picking it up for another season.) Reality is NBC’s go-to genre these days, so new installments of Celebrity Apprentice (ugh), The Biggest Loser and Deal or No Deal are also coming … and that’s not even counting the summer onslaught, which includes the likes of America’s Got Talent and Last Comic Standing.

Still, there are a fair amount of time slots open for new series, and NBC looks to fill most of them by reinventing, retelling and repurposing stories we’ve already seen before. For starters, the two-hour Knight Rider movie that aired in February will become a full series. In the grand scheme of needless franchise reinventions, the 2008 version of Knight Rider was better than NBC's lame Bionic Woman reboot but nowhere near as good as FOX’s Terminator: Sarah Connor Chronicles.

There’s also Merlin, yet another trip to Camelot; a new take on Robinson Crusoe, the original island-castaway drama; and Kings, which is a modern-day retelling of the Biblical tale of King David. (Although this one stars Deadwood’s Ian McShane, and any show bringing McShane back to TV in a starring role is worth a look.)

In addition to all the remakes, we’ve got one high-profile spinoff coming. No information has been released about what’s commonly being referred to as The Office II, but the NBC press release confirms that it’s from the producers of the U.S. original and states that it will “follow another comic journey, complete with new faces and new locations, but with the same unique sense of humor.”

It’s hard to judge with NBC being so purposefully vague, but I’ll admit to being initially put off by the concept of another half hour of Office-related shenanigans each week. Before the writers’ strike, The Office seemed like it might be inching past its comedy expiration date, partly due to those ill-advised hour-long episodes. The Office spinoff is scheduled to air after the original next winter – will that conjure up a similar sense of overkill? If anything I’d have preferred the producers focus on reining in the more outlandish plotlines that have turned The Office too silly. Now I’m concerned things will only grow more needlessly zany as the writers try to fill two shows instead of one.

originally published in the April 11th, 2008 edition of The Herald

Making sense of difficulty levels in videogames

2008-04-22T15:45:00.002-04:00

Back in simpler times, videogames had one difficulty level -- the one the game offered right out of the box. Character health, enemy health, number of enemies and all the things that determine how hard a game is were balanced to give the gamer a sizable challenge. After all, what fun is a videogame that you can blow through with little to no trouble? It's the challenge games offer that sets them apart from other forms of entertainment. Conversely, if a game proves too difficult, bordering on the impossible, you'd be more apt to chuck your cartridge our a nearby window than actually finish the thing. (Just ask anyone who played the original Ninja Gaiden on the NES.) So a game developer's goal was to make the prospect of finishing their game daunting but not hopeless.

Those were good days. Recently, the concept of videogame difficulty has gotten ridiculously muddled, especially since many of today's games offer up a variety of difficulty levels before you ever kill your first enemy. Call of Duty 4, one of 2007's best-selling games, gives you the choice of a whopping four difficulty settings (Recruit, Regular, Hardened and Veteran). Mass Effect initially offers three difficulty settings (Casual, Normal, Veteran), while two more (Hardcore, Insanity) can be unlocked.

I recently started playing BioShock, the Xbox 360 sci-fi/horror game that earned a slew of industry accolades at the end of last year. When I started a new game, I was presented with three difficulty levels: Easy, Medium and Hard. In addition, each came with a little description. I chose Medium because, as always, I want a decent challenge, although my guess is that the Hard setting is insanely difficult -- a common occurrence with hardcore difficulty levels in games these days (such as Legendary difficulty in the Halo games or Veteran difficulty in the Call of Duty series).

But that's part of the problem right there: I'm guessing that Medium will give me the challenge I want. I can't know for sure, especially since Easy, Medium and Hard difficulties vary from title to title. BioShock at least gives you the option of changing the difficulty at any point during the game -- a nice touch that many games don't offer. A few months ago, I started playing the Wii's Metroid Prime 3 on Normal difficulty. (Whenever a game offers a Normal or Regular setting I usually pick that one, assuming that's the level of difficulty recommended by the developer.) Unfortunately, it ended up being far too easy for my taste. After about an hour or two of playing, I actually restarted the game using the harder-but-not-nearly-impossible Veteran difficulty.

It turns out that Metroid Prime 3's difficulty settings skew easier than their respective Call of Duty counterparts. (Perhaps because the Wii is a system positioned for younger gamers?) Metroid's Normal difficulty is much easier than Call of Duty 4's Regular difficulty. But how am I to know that beforehand? I guess that's why some developers, like BioShock's 2K Boston, will offer descriptions for each difficulty, which can help but don't totally solve the problem.

Additionally, some games now offer settings independent from difficulty levels that further cloud the issue. For example, I'm choosing to play BioShock with the vita-chambers turned off. Vita-chambers are these regeneration tubes that always revive your character when you're killed in the game. (However, enemies in the game remain however badly injured you left them.) In essence, you could kill every enemy in the game using nothing but a wrench -- the game's weakest weapon -- as long as you had the time to whack away while continually respawning in a nearby vita-chamber. To me, that would take any and all challenge out of the game: A complaint that 2K Boston must have heard loud and clear because while the "turn off vita-chambers" option wasn't initially offered to BioShock players, it was included in a later patch for the game. But now I worry. Since I turned the vita-chambers off, will that make the Medium level too difficult? Since the difficulty levels were set by programmers who took the vita-chambers into consideration, will disabling the chambers warp the entire difficulty system? See why multiple difficulty levels make my head hurt? Don't even get me started on games that automatically adjust the difficulty based on how well you're playing.

The truth is, I understand why many of today's developers offer several ways to play a game. More people play videogames now than at any point in the history of the medium. We've got young players, old players, seasoned players, new players ... and my mom deciding to give the Wii a try. Developers want their games to appeal to as many people as possible, so they offer multiple difficulty levels to make everyone happy. I get that, even if I don't like it.

I also think there's a tendency now for developers to focus more on the story of a game than the challenge it offers, which is a much more dangerous habit. I'm pretty sure BioShock's developers created the vita-chambers because they help the player get through the story without having things like enemies and bosses and dying get in the way. That's when a game stops being a game and starts being an interactive movie. And that just doesn't work for me at all.

Gamers should want that challenge. Again, it's what makes videogames unique. Plus, there's nothing better than that rush you get when you finally take down a particularly nasty boss after 15 attempts. So I'm going to keep wishing for a return to a world without difficulty levels, a world where videogames don't ask you how easy you want things to be right out of the box. Sadly, those days are probably long gone. But a gamer can dream, right?

TAYLOR ON TV: "Jezebel," "Miss Guided" gone in a flash

2008-04-22T15:33:00.004-04:00

So did you catch The Return of Jezebel James, the new series from Gilmore Girls creator Amy Sherman-Palladino? Probably not … especially if you blinked. The FOX comedy lasted only eight days before the network viciously swung the cancellation axe.

Not that the show had much of a chance anyway. It was originally given a 13-episode order, which was then reduced to seven. Several possible premiere dates were rumored, including a plum time slot after American Idol, before FOX dumped Jezebel on Friday nights (and even burned off two of the seven episodes produced on the evening of its debut).

Truth be told, the show wasn’t very good anyway. (At least, the three episodes that aired weren’t.) Sherman-Palladino’s patented lightning-fast, quip-heavy dialogue never sounded natural coming out of the mouths of stars Parker Posey and Lauren Ambrose, both of whom have done superior work in the past. The grating, migraine-inducing laugh track didn’t help much either.

Still, I’m always shocked when a network reads the scripts, okays the casting, sees the pilot, greenlights the show … and then gives it essentially no chance to succeed. Obviously, somebody at the network agreed with me that Jezebel kind of stunk. But you’ve already committed to it up to this point. Why not air the seven episodes you paid for and see if it finds an audience? (And, in turn, we can see if the series improves over the course of its run.)

Sherman-Palladino has a fair amount of pull in the TV biz, so perhaps FOX execs gave her free rein to produce any kind of show she wanted and then, once they realized they didn’t like what she came up with, had no choice but to bury the show on Fridays and quickly cancel it once the low ratings came in. But that’s a really bad business plan, too. Why bother wooing proven, high-profile talent to your network if you’re not fully prepared to back the show they give you? You’d be better off sanctioning pilots from a bunch of up-and-coming writers and producers, then just picking the ones you actually like.

A similar thing happened with Miss Guided over on ABC. That show starred the lovely and funny Judy Greer as a former teenage wallflower who returns to her high school to work as the guidance counselor. Miss Guided wasn’t great either, although, thanks mostly to Greer, it did qualify as an amusing time-passer. (ABC certainly has worse sitcoms on their schedule. The unkillable According to Jim comes to mind.) Yet, the network blazed through the seven produced episodes of Miss Guided as fast as it possibly could. It aired the debut episode on March 18th, the second and third episodes two days later, then two more episodes a week after that.

That’s not letting a show find an audience. That’s getting it quickly on and off the schedule so execs can wash their hands of it while still giving the appearance that they gave it a fair shot (and picking up a sliver of ad revenue along the way). This kind of scheduling actually doubly annoys since I hate it when networks schedule back-to-back episodes of the same comedy. Sitcoms work best in half-hour doses. That’s why they’re, you know, A HALF HOUR.

The final two episodes of Miss Guided were broadcast last night, a mere 16 days after it first aired. Did you give it a chance and watch … or did you blink?

originally published in the April 4th, 2008 edition of The Herald

TAYLOR ON TV: Singing the praises of Brooke and Cook

2008-04-06T20:44:00.002-04:00

The last time I wrote extensively about American Idol was in May of 2005, when I lamented the lack of any real talent on the show. That was the season of Carrie Underwood and a bunch of others whose names you can’t possibly remember now (and with good reason). Seasons five and six were equally forgettable, with the same divas in training, karaoke-pop singers and rocker wannabes littering the final 12. Season seven figured to be more of the same, but with the writers’ strike forcing most hit TV series off the air, what choice did we have but to continue watching America’s biggest reality spectacle?

And then something miraculous happened. Actually, two somethings. They go by the names of Brooke White and David Cook. And to be honest, I really don’t care if either wins the Idol crown. You know why? ’Cause they’re too damn good for the show in the first place.

Brooke, in particular, brings to that stage a level of musicianship more stunningly assured than Idol watchers have ever seen before. That’s not to say she’s the all-time best Idol singer. Nobody’s going to try to argue that she has more range than Kelly Clarkson. But music – real music, passionate music – isn’t about how many octaves you can cover. It’s about singing with emotion and warmth and a sense of purpose. (Even if that purpose is only to spread some joy around the room.) Brooke understands this. I love the fact that at the official American Idol website, in her bio, she lists her musical influences as “the GOOD stuff – James Taylor, Carole King, Fleetwood Mac, Elton John, Stevie Wonder, Eagles …” She’s right – that is the good stuff. And I adore the way she capitalizes “GOOD,” as if to say, “Not the crappy, technically-impressive-but-emotionless pop that you usually see performed on this very show.” Brooke White is the first contestant in Idol history that I would actually go to a concert venue and plunk down some of my own hard-earned cash to see.

David Cook hasn’t quite reached that status yet, although he is, by far, the best rock singer that’s ever been on Idol. (Yes, way better than Chris Daughtry, who was and continues to be an overrated Nickelback Jr.) He probably gets too much credit for those clever arrangements of Lionel Richie’s Hello and Michael Jackson’s Billie Jean (the latter of which was first done by Soundgarden’s Chris Cornell), but he sure did sell them with his expressive, powerhouse voice. I’ve talked before about how rockers have it rough on Idol. Even if they win, they risk throwing away whatever street cred they possess. Still, Daughtry’s at least proved that Idol rockers can sell albums, and I have little doubt that a Cook-fronted band could achieve even more success.

As for who will win Idol this year, it already seems down to Brooke and the two Davids – Cook and Archuleta. There’s no doubt Archuleta can sing, but his performances are often bland and uninspiring. Like so many on Idol, he seems more suited for Broadway or a Disney musical. Then again, I always suspect that Idol’s voting audience is made up entirely of 14-year-old girls and 45-year-old woman, all of whom are easily won over by Archuleta’s boyish, squeaky-clean appeal.

If Archuleta does win, I doubt that Brooke and David Cook will be all that upset. Nor should they be. American Idol winners often can’t carry a career past the show. (What’s Taylor Hicks doing these days?) But with the immense talent those two have, they should do just fine.

originally published in the March 28th, 2008 edition of The Herald

TAYLOR ON TV: Something Borrowed, Something New in "Amsterdam"

2008-03-29T08:59:00.004-04:00

What is it with immortals that they all want to fight crime for a living? Usually, it’s those pesky vampire do-gooders who take to the streets at night just to make them safer for the rest of us. (Look no further than Moonlight, Angel, Forever Knight and seemingly every vampire show ever bloody well made.) At least John Amsterdam, the 300-and-some-year-old protagonist of FOX’s midseason series New Amsterdam, doesn’t count himself among the pointy-toothed undead. Amsterdam is a different kind of immortal – a regular guy given eternal life in 1642 by a Native-American girl whose own life he saved.

Also, credit Amsterdam for not becoming a homicide detective until the 21st century. Through flashbacks, we know that John, who doesn’t grow old but changes jobs and identities every 10 years or so, has worked as a lawyer, furniture maker, carriage driver and soldier before giving the policeman’s badge a try. Unfortunately, a majority of the show takes place in present day, meaning New Amsterdam (airing Mondays at 9 p.m.) is one of those high-concept fantasy series hung on the frame of a low-concept procedural.

In 2008, Amsterdam (the destined-to-be-misspelled Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) and his partner Eva (the almost-as-tricky Zuleikha Robinson) spend their days solving New York City murders. Amsterdam’s pretty darn good at his job, considering he’s studied the human condition for a few centuries and knows the Big Apple better than the rest of its citizens (some of whom have only lived there for a measly half-century). Their cases are boring CSI retreads, and the killer can usually be fingered by the home viewer long before Amsterdam arrives at the solution.

Still, if you can look past the rote detective work, there are some things at play that make New Amsterdam an interesting addition to the immortal-crime-fighter genre. As is the norm with the gift of immortality, Amsterdam’s comes with a catch. If he can locate his true love and their “souls are wed,” he will turn mortal once more. It’s a loophole Amsterdam hopes to exploit because he feels only death can give time value. (“To die is what makes life worth living,” he says.) Plus, he’s kind of a romantic, having racked up quite a few dalliances (and marriages and kids) over the years looking for his soul mate.

Where New Amsterdam’s writers really prove their smarts is in making that soul mate an actual, definable person – not some vague, off-camera presence. In the show’s first episode, Amsterdam suffers a heart attack at the subway station and assumes his true love must have been nearby. He becomes obsessed with tracking down the woman who temporarily felled him and grows to believe that she’s Sara Dillane (Alexie Gilmore), a local doctor who’s attractive, separated from her husband and intrigued by Amsterdam’s strange hospital test results.

Coster-Waldau infuses Amsterdam with a heaping of quirky charm. He’s borderline goofy in the way he aggressively courts Sara and casually remarks about things he saw 200 years ago (knowing nobody’s going to believe him). He shares his secret with his senior-citizen-age bartender son and cleverly names his dogs by how many pets have come before. (His new pooch goes by “36.”) Immortal crime fighters are often morose, broody individuals, but not John. He smiles a lot and actually seems to have enjoyed his long, eclectic life, which strangely puts his character at odds with the grisly murders the show dumps on him (and us) each week. It’s almost like New Amsterdam is two different series – one that you’ve seen a million times before and one that you’d like to see a little more of.

There’s certainly evidence that it could transcend its procedural trappings and evolve into a drama worth watching, if only the writers would lay off the Joe Friday stuff once in a while. Of course, FOX will also need to give the show time to find its footing, something that network isn’t always wont to do. New Amsterdam won’t have the lifespan of the character it’s named for, but a full second season wouldn’t be such a terrible thing.

originally published in the March 21st, 2008 edition of The Herald

TAYLOR ON TV: It's No Longer Cheesy Being Green

2008-03-23T23:54:00.006-04:00

Without a doubt, the biggest TV surprise so far this year is just how good FOX’s Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles got by the end of its strike-shortened first season that wrapped up last week. I gave it a pretty favorable review following its first three episodes, but the series really blossomed during its last five hours, which featured some of the best science-fiction storytelling TV has to offer.

And the most shocking thing about Chronicles is that much of its heart ended up being provided by the most unlikely source – Brian Austin Green. Yes, the same Brian Austin Green who used to play David Silver on Beverly Hills, 90210. Yes, the same Brian Austin Green who, after 90120, declared himself a rapper and toured the country as a Vanilla Ice wannabe. You would not expect Green to reappear as a semi-regular on one of FOX’s big-ticket shows. And you certainly wouldn’t think he’d be any good in it.

And, shockingly, amazingly, you’d be wrong. In Chronicles, Green plays Derek Reese, brother to Kyle Reese, the time traveler from the original Terminator movie who was sent back in time to protect Sarah Connor and ended up impregnating her. Derek’s been sent back in time, too, on a mission to destroy the computer network that will one day turn on humanity unless the timeline is altered. But his mission takes on added meaning when he joins forces with Sarah and her son John, who Derek never realized was his nephew until meeting up with him in the past.

Now, I’m not about to anoint Green the next Olivier. I doubt he’ll be expecting an Emmy anytime soon for his work on Chronicles. But the guy got a good part to play here and he ran with it. Green’s Derek is alternately tough and gritty (when battling evil terminator robots), blustery and paranoid (when warning Sarah about placing too much trust in the supposed good-girl terminatrix Cameron), and quietly emotional (when taking John to a park where the kid versions of Derek and John’s father happily pass ball, unaware of the terrible future that awaits them). I’m really hoping FOX renews Chronicles for a second season to air this fall, and the promise of Derek playing a larger role in the series is a big reason why.

Green’s surprisingly deft work on Chronicles got me thinking about other actors who have surprised me with strong work after I’d already written them off. I doubt anyone expected much from the cast of Wings when it went off the air, but rather than fade into obscurity, three of its leads – Tim Daly, Steven Weber and Tony Shalhoub – have become primetime MVPs. I still miss Weber’s smarmy network exec with a heart from Aaron Sorkin’s failed Studio 60 from the Sunset Strip.

Actually, Sorkin has a good eye for uncovering hidden reservoirs of acting prowess. As far as I was concerned, Bradley Whitford was nothing but the wormy guy in junk comedies like Revenge of the Nerds II and Billy Madison until Sorkin gave him the plum part of Deputy Chief of Staff Josh Lyman in The West Wing. (I wasn’t aware of the Juilliard training until later.) Now I’ll watch pretty much anything Whitford does.

Other actors who have given performances I didn’t know they had in them include Kevin Nealon, who was bland and boring on Saturday Night Live but displays perfect comic timing on Weeds; Neil Patrick Harris, the child actor who grew to become a comedy dynamo on How I Met Your Mother; Ed O’Neill, the one-time Al Bundy who now brings a heavy dose of gravitas to any show lucky enough to snag him (John from Cincinnati most recently); and Jaime Pressley, who seemed doomed to a career of appearing naked in direct-to-video trash but now rightfully has an Emmy for her hilarious work on My Name is Earl.

Those are the ones off the top of my head, anyway. How about you guys? What TV actors have blown you away when you never saw it coming? E-mail me (or comment at the bottom of this very post) and let me know. If I get enough responses, I’ll print them in a future column.

originally published in the March 14th, 2008 edition of The Herald

TAYLOR ON TV: "Saturday" Slump

2008-03-15T23:45:00.004-04:00

The people who make Saturday Night Live always get ticked off when some TV writer declares the show to be no longer relevant (let alone funny). What’s that old headline joke? Oh, yeah -- “Saturday Night Dead.” This TV writer will not get caught in that trap because I’ve watched SNL long enough to know better. When times are bad and riotous sketches hard to come by, the show always finds a way to rise again, like some great comedy phoenix. SNL is cyclical in that way. So even though it has veered far off course the last few seasons, I won’t dare read any last rites.

Still, I might as well ask: why is it taking so damn long for the show to get good again? By my count, Saturday Night Live hasn’t been consistently funny since the 2001-02 season, which happened to be Will Ferrell’s last. (They still haven’t effectively replaced the big guy, who, like Eddie Murphy, was one of the those Not Ready for Prime Time Players you could build an entire show around.) Three years ago, SNL got a much-needed infusion of talented new cast members – Bill Hader and the great Kristen Wiig, among them – but it seems like the writers still haven’t found the best way to utilize them.

Coming off the writers’ strike, in the midst of a crazy election year, Saturday Night Live now has the chance to rediscover its footing. The show has always done well lampooning the Presidential candidates. (The words “strategery” and “lockbox” still make me laugh.) Yet, sadly, the first two post-strike episodes were just as dour as the ones that aired last fall. Fred Armisen won the Who-Gets-to-Play-Obama sweepstakes, yet his impression of the Illinois senator amounts to little more than filling his sentences with weird vocal pauses. (He’s Obama … not Shatner or Walken.) The real Obama’s defining characteristic is his unbridled charisma, but Armisen’s Obama is a total stiff.

Both episodes opened with debate spoofs that mocked the press for coddling Obama while coming down hard on Hillary. The second time around, I figured they’d jump on that whole “denounce/reject” exchange the candidates had regarding Louis Farrakhan’s endorsement of Obama. That seemed ripe for spoofing. Instead, SNL writers made the strange decision to basically retell the same joke from the week before.

Of course, at least there was a joke. Both weeks, the remaining minutes were filled with the usual glut of drawn-out, borderline-painful sketches that practically dare the viewer not to hit the fast-forward button on their TiVo remote. There was an ill-advised parody of a movie no one’s seen (The Other Boleyn Girl). The Tina Fey-hosted episode featured not one, but two spoofs of easy-target reality shows (VH1’s Rock of Love II and NBC’s own Celebrity Apprentice). Weekend Update remains chuckle-worthy but seems outdated in the Daily Show era. Special election-season guest stars were trotted out. Mike Huckabee was funny. Hillary and Rudy Giuliani weren’t. The only sketch I really laughed at loud at was the Peter Pan bit, which featured Hader as beleaguered Captain Hook depressed over the fact that a bunch of 12-year-old boys keep besting his worthless crew. That was somewhat inspired … and also buried at the end of the episode. Isn’t the good stuff supposed to go up front?

There’s no doubt Saturday Night Live can still can still leave its mark on the pop-culture zeitgeist. Witness the YouTube success of the Lazy Sunday and Dick in a Box digital shorts. But, as always, it’s the live sketches and memorable characters that make or break the show. And, right now, SNL isn’t giving us much worth talking about. Not that I’m worried. Again, I feel confident the show will rediscover its voice (and its sense of humor), just as it has time and time before. Just don’t ask me when.

originally published in the March 7th, 2008 edition of The Herald

TAYLOR ON TV: The Strike is Over ... So Now What?

2008-03-11T16:03:00.003-04:00

On Tuesday, Hollywood writers officially voted to approve their new contract, closing the book on the strike that pretty much ruined TV (but gave us a lot to talk about) over the last four months. With that thankfully behind us, the question becomes – now what?

For starters, most of television’s established hits are going back into production on a handful of new episodes to close out this season. Expect first runs of, among others, Grey’s Anatomy, Desperate Housewives, House, Ugly Betty, Law & Order, NBC’s Thursday night comedies (except for maybe Scrubs but more on that in a minute) and all three CSIs to start airing sometime in April. The now-showing fourth season of Lost will take a short break after its Thursday, March 20th episode but will return on April 24th (though it will be moved back an hour, from 9 to 10 p.m. to make room for Grey’s).

A few new series that had their freshman year interrupted by the strike will also soon return, among them Gossip Girl and Moonlight, but for the most part, first-year shows are either being canceled (say goodbye to Journeyman, Bionic Woman and K-Ville) or held back until next fall when they can be relaunched. In that regard, maybe the strike wasn’t too bad a thing after all, since the season’s two best new shows, Chuck and Pushing Daisies, will be given a second chance to attract bigger audiences than they pulled in the first time around. (Other new series coming back this fall include Dirty Sexy Money and Life.)

Sadly, it’s not all smiles now that the strike is over, especially for fans of those few shows that had their schedules torn asunder by the work stoppage. NBC has canceled the veteran drama Las Vegas, even though the final episode shot was the first part of an intended two-hour story, complete with a “To be continued …” at the end. Now fans of the show are left with an eternal cliffhanger that will likely never be resolved.

Jack Bauer will be back to save America once again, but 24 fans are going to have to wait a really, really long time to see it. Season eight, which was slated to start airing this past January, will be delayed a full year -- all the way till January 2009. I applaud FOX for their decision to complete a full season and to, as usual, air it uninterrupted. Reportedly, the network was considering running a strike-shortened 12-episode season this fall, but, to me, that doesn’t make much sense for a show that’s very name evokes its real-time, 24-hours-in-24-episodes format. Still, that’s a long time to wait for more Jack adventures.

Then there’s Scrubs, NBC’s endlessly underrated and under-watched cult comedy that had its final season brutally cut down by the strike. Right now, five episodes shot before the strike remain and are scheduled to air in April. Word is that ABC/Disney, which produces the show, has given the go-ahead for filming four to six additional episodes that will wrap up the series and give it the happy ending it deserves. However, NBC, which broadcasts the show, hasn’t committed to airing anything past the five episodes already in the can. Scrubs creator Bill Lawrence told TV Guide that the worst-case scenario is those final episodes bypassing NBC and going straight to DVD. So Scrubs fans should eventually learn the fates of J.D., Elliot and the gang. They just might need an assist from Netflix to do so.

originally published in the February 29th, 2008 edition of The Herald

Oh, how I hate you, Red Ring of Death

2008-03-08T21:39:00.003-05:00

For some reason, I never thought it would happen to me. Even with some estimating that the Xbox 360 failure rate (at least, for the early models) sits at somewhere around 35 percent, I still assumed I would be spared the dreaded Red Ring of Death. After all, I'm not one to hold all-night gaming sessions anymore. An hour or so of Call of Duty 4 or BioShock before I turn in for the night is plenty. My console was in little danger of overheating.

And yet Friday morning, after my daughter and I crawled out of bed, I put the new Flogging Molly CD into my 360 for a listen. (Yeah, I play Flogging Molly for my daughter -- what's it to ya?!) But after a moment or two, I realized the music never started. I hunched down in front of my entertainment center to see what the problem was, only to feel my stomach drop when I saw the red glow emanating from behind the diffused glass door that shields my Xbox sits. It seems not even I could escape the red ring.

So next week, the console goes off for repair, while I sit home, unable to play Mass Effect or Halo 3 or Carcassonne for a few weeks. Hell, I can't even watch any movies since my 360 doubles as my DVD player. (And my daughter and I were all set to watch Cars tomorrow. Bummer.) Of course, the Wii still works. I've been meaning to finish Metroid Prime 3. And although I was going to take a pass on Super Smash Bros. Brawl, it now might be upgraded to must-buy status.

"Batman Unauthorized" comes out today

2008-03-01T18:03:00.005-05:00

Batman Unauthorized, BenBella's Smart Pop book on the Dark Knight that features my essay, "Keeping It Real in Gotham," was officially released today. You may be able to find it at your local Barnes & Noble or Borders, but if not, you can always order it from Amazon right here.

My piece details why Batman's pulp-noir universe is best served by leaving any and all supernatural bullshit out of it. I talk about how several of the Batman movies have fucked this up. (A Catwoman who literally has nine live? No, thanks.) I complain about how Batman's rogues' gallery is less interesting the more fantastical it becomes. And I bitch-slap DC for not only bringing Jason Todd back to life, but for using alternate dimensions and other sci-fi hokem to explain his resurrection.

If you're a Bat-fan, the whole thing makes for a good read while we all wait for The Dark Knight to open. Long-time Batman writer Denny O'Neil edited the book, which also features essays by people way more notable than I, including Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Mike W. Barr, Chris Roberson and Lou Anders.

TAYLOR ON TV: "Eli" Panning

2008-03-01T17:50:00.003-05:00

It’s pretty easy to find yourself rooting for Eli Stone, both the man and the show, because Jonny Lee Miller is so ridiculously appealing as the titular hero of ABC’s new legal drama. Miller’s last job was playing a charisma-free thief in the 2006 CBS flop Smith, where he gave no indication he could pull off a character like Eli, a corporate lawyer who’s leveled, but also set free, by a health crisis that turns into a spiritual awakening.

But Miller overflows with charm here. Too bad the rest of the show, which airs Thursdays at 10, can’t seem to properly gel around him. Eli Stone has a great life. He’s a fast-rising attorney in a San Francisco law firm that defends large companies in multimillion-dollar lawsuits. He’s engaged to Taylor (Natasha Henstridge), a successful, statuesque lawyer whose father just happens to be Eli’s boss (Victor Garber). Everything’s going swimmingly … at least until George Michael shows up one day singing his hit song Faith for an audience of one: Eli.

It turns out the artist formerly know as half of Wham! isn’t real. He’s a hallucination, the first of many Eli is about to have thanks to a recently discovered brain aneurysm. The condition is inoperable, as well as genetic. When Eli was growing up, his father also suffered from similar visions, although the family always assumed it was a result of his alcoholism.

The aneurysm isn’t all bad, though. Eli’s vivid hallucinations often carry some kind of message meant to guide Eli toward leading a more productive existence. His “allegedly mystical, allegedly Chinese” acupuncturist (James Saito) suggests that Eli may be a modern-day prophet destined to use his courtroom prowess for good instead of evil. (Time to stop defending corporate fat cats and start suing the pants off them.)

It’s clear that the show’s writers favor the prophet theory, as opposed to Eli just being one sick dude, since his visions are tidy, easy-to-decipher guideposts that include important information he could not possibly have known in advance. In one episode, Eli hallucinates that he’s an Army soldier on the front lines charged with saving a Private Swain, who is later revealed to be the wife of a man Eli’s fiancée is representing in a child-custody case. Eli has no choice but to follow his vision and go against his fiancée in court. As always, things work out for the best in the end thanks to Eli’s intervention.

In concept, it’s a fine twist on the courtroom drama, especially since creators Greg Berlanti and Marc Guggenheim wisely refuse to let the show get too serious for its own good. Although there is the occasional war zone, Eli’s visions more often resemble a Broadway show, complete with full choirs and staged choreography. And Miller plays Eli not with insanity in his eye, but a groovy kind of go-with-the-flow optimism. (Watching him joyfully lip-synch along to Faith in the pilot was a blast.)

Unfortunately, the supporting cast is bland and uninspiring. Loretta Devine has just two settings as Eli’s secretary: breathless and manic. Henstridge has but one setting: frigid. (Thankfully it looks like Eli and Taylor may soon be going their separate ways. But what did he ever see in her in the first place?) We all know Garber’s a talented guy, but he isn’t given much to do here except to throw puzzled glances at Eli (barring, of course, that welcome little song-and-dance number in episode two).

And here’s another issue: the courtroom scenes are uniformly boring, which is a big problem if your show’s supposed to be a legal drama. Berlanti and Guggenheim have their talents, but mimicking the best of David E. Kelley isn’t one of them.

Eli Stone also occasionally employs flashbacks to Eli’s childhood which confuse more than they enlighten. Why is it that Eli can’t remember key moments from his life, like that his father once fired a gun in the house and let Eli take the fall for it, until his acupuncturist draws them out of him? He has repressed memories on top of the hallucinations? That seems like one contrivance too many for a series full of them, and it makes it hard to show faith in Eli Stone the series, even if Eli Stone the character is hipper than George Michael, circa 1987.

originally published in the February 22nd, 2008 edition of The Herald

TAYLOR ON TV: Things on TV That Make Me Happy and Thus Better the World (Part V)

2008-02-27T22:22:00.004-05:00

By my count, it’s been more than a year since we last had a rip-roaring installment of “Things on TV That Make Me Happy and Thus Better the World.” And I can’t think of a more apt time to talk about the simple joys television offers, especially since the writers’ strike is now officially over. (By all means, take a moment to celebrate. Go on, get your “woohoos!” out.) The writers’ union voted on Tuesday to end the strike, which had stopped production on all scripted television -- also known as good television -- back in November. Everyone went back to work on Wednesday, and production should resume shortly on hit series such as Lost, CSI and Desperate Housewives. (Successful freshman shows, including Pushing Daisies, Chuck and Dirty Sexy Money will be relaunched next fall.)

True, the writers will still have to ratify their new contract by the end of the month, but with more than 90 percent voting to go back to work this week, that looks to be a formality at this point. Bottom line: Your favorite shows are coming back soon, people. I know we’re all thankful.
Of course, there are other things to be thankful for in TV land, things that have demanded I appreciate the pictures beaming through my 46-inch widescreen even during the dark days of the strike. Among them …

Fake TV feuds. With their writers striking, the late night talk shows have had to get creative to fill up air time over the last month or so. And no less than four of them have gone the “fake feud” route, with hilarious results. First, NBC’s Conan O’Brien and Comedy Central’s Stephen Colbert were embroiled in a war of words after both took credit for Mike Huckabee’s early victory in the Iowa caucus. The verbal feud escalated on an almost daily basis until Colbert and his Comedy Central cohort Jon Stewart crashed O’Brien’s show to have at it once and for all. What followed was a Three-Stooges-inspired smack down, a battle for the ages, with the three talk-show giants wailing on each other in a backstage battle royal. The cartoon violence that ensued would make Itchy and Scratchy proud.

Meanwhile, over on Jimmy Kimmel, the host’s ongoing fake feud with Matt Damon rose to new heights when Kimmel’s girlfriend, comedienne Sarah Silverman, brought to the show a new music video where she sings about … well, uh, how can I put this? … about being intimate with Matt Damon behind Kimmel’s back. Damon himself appears in the decidedly R-rated video, which has since become a YouTube sensation. If you don’t mind the raunch, be sure to check it out. The good-sported Damon is a total riot in Silverman’s naughty, musical confession.

Lost’s new cast members. Is everyone else as relieved as I am that Lost is back on TV and picking up right where last season’s brilliant finale left off? Even more assuring is the fact that the show’s four new cast members seem like they’ll fit right in. That hasn’t always been the case with the island drama. (I still posit that the introduction of “the Tailies” in season two was the worst decision Lost’s writers have made to this point. Yes, even worse than the creation of Nikki and Paulo.) But this quartet of new folk, who have come to the island under the pretense of rescuing the survivors of Oceanic Flight 815 but clearly have ulterior motives, promise to help expand Lost’s dense mythology in exciting new directions.

Instruments on American Idol. Granted, it was only for one round, but kudos to the Idol producers for letting those who made it to Hollywood show off more than just their vocal skills this past week. Contestants battling to make the final 24 were allowed to play guitar, keyboard or even drums while singing. The extra effort didn’t always impress the judges, but a few talented Idol hopefuls proved to be more than just a pretty voice. Brooke White absolutely rocks on the keys.

originally published in the February 15th, 2008 edition of The Herald

Concerning talking cars and such ...

2008-02-21T15:54:00.004-05:00

I watched that new Knight Rider TV movie/back-door pilot today. In the grand scheme of needless franchise reinventions, it was a shitload better than NBC's Bionic Woman reboot but nowhere near as good as FOX's Terminator: Sarah Connor Chronicles. Still, I actually liked the cast, and if NBC picks it up as a fall series (which TV Guide seems to think they will), I'd probably watch the first few eps.

TAYLOR ON TV: "Break" Up

2008-02-16T10:09:00.004-05:00

Prison Break, I wish I knew how to quit you.

I really, truly do. It’s not like I have all the free time in the world, where I can commit 60 minutes every week to any old show that comes along. I certainly can’t agree to stick with a series ad infinitum just because it entertained me back in its early days, when a show about a drawn-out, high-stakes prison break can seem so wonderfully inventive.

Indeed, your first season proved to be rollicking entertainment, chock-full of interesting characters and eyebrow-raising plot twists that made it clear the writers were flying by the seat of their pants. That last part didn’t bother me so much back then, maybe because FOX was often pairing you with 24, which never met a plot hole it couldn’t ignore. Remember when you closed out a season-one episode with a couple of Scofield’s toes placed snugly between a pair of gardening shears and we all wondered how he’d talk himself out of that one? Oh, what a treat when, one week later, we realized there was no escape for Scofield’s piggies. Snip. And a guilty pleasure was born.

That first season ended with all of your main characters escaping from Fox River Prison, and I figured that would be our swan song as well. Why would I want to watch a show called Prison Break when, you know, everyone had already done broke out? Ooh, but then you ditched the annoying lawyer girl and added the beguiling William Fitchner to your troupe for season two, casting him as rogue FBI agent Alex Mahone, out to hunt down Scofield and his fellow escapees, and I found that I couldn’t abandon you. Your sophomore season started out like a needless but still-pretty-entertaining sequel to the original Prison Break. (Think Die Hard 2.) But as the season went on, I began to grow weary of your antics. The ridiculous conspiracies involving the shadowy “Company” grew more and more preposterous, while your characters devolved into cartoon versions of their season-one selves. Everyone’s favorite psychotic hillbilly, T-Bag, became almost downright lovable. (Almost.)

Season two ended with The Company having Scofield thrown into some nasty, scary Panamanian prison where, in season three, he’d have to assemble yet another high-concept breakout plan, but this time with no full-body tattoos to help him. (Coincidentally and hilariously, T-Bag, Mahone and all of our old friends wound up there, too!) Against my better judgment, I tuned in last fall to see where this story would go. Call it morbid curiosity. Turns out, Scofield’s there to rescue some guy named Whistler, who’s privy to some top-secret information that the Company wants real, real bad.

Boy, it didn’t take long to realize you were a mere shadow of your former self. (Think every Die Hard movie after Die Hard 2.) New characters, such as incarcerated drug king Lechero, were stereotypes straight from every awful prison movie ever made, and most episodes were heavily padded with long shots of the various cast members starring ominously at each other from across the prison yard. (Seriously, it should be a drinking game. Every time two Prison Break characters scheme quietly in a corner while a third watches on suspiciously, drink a shot. Participants should expect to be unconscious by the second commercial break.)

Plot lines have grown more and more ludicrous. I don’t understand why the Company wants to break Whistler out of prison when all they need from him is some coordinates he’s got stashed in some bird-watching book. Company operatives are allowed to visit Whistler, so why not just ask him through the prison fence? Why not kidnap his girlfriend right from the beginning and make Whistler talk, rather than going through the whole rigmarole with Scofield and a complicated breakout?

But I’ve given up trying to figure you out. It makes my head hurt. Truth be told, I only kept watching past the holidays because the writers’ strike has made quality television hard to come by. Alas, Prison Break, I think you’ve had your last reprieve. Two episodes remain in this strike-shortened season. I’ll watch, but then I really think I must abandon you once and for all.

Please don’t make this harder than it already is. Don’t come back next fall promising exciting new twists and flashing intriguing new cast members. I can’t do it anymore. Just let me walk away, Prison Break. Please, just let me go.

originally published in the February 8th, 2008 edition of The Herald

Announcing ThreeRiversPoker.com

2008-02-14T22:56:00.011-05:00

You may not have noticed, but I occasionally toss in a post about poker at this blog. I've been calling, raising and folding since I was a kid. We used to sit around my grandparents' kitchen table playing seven-card stud with this frayed box of plastic chips they must have bought before I was born.

I started playing for real money in high school, after seeing the Mel Gibson version of Maverick in theaters. (Most people will tell you it was Rounders that got them either into cards or back into cards. For me, it was Maverick ... although that's just between us, okay?) In those days, it was dealer's choice, anything goes. We played poker variants like queen and what follows, king little, baseball, criss-cross -- absolutely ridiculous stuff. Still, by that time, I was winning more than I was losing.

We continued playing on through college, though all those wild-card games eventually faded away. We started playing hold'em with some regularity. Then the poker boom hit: the World Series on ESPN, the WPT, Chris Moneymaker. It was nice that I already knew how to play and had a semi-regular game. But now more people wanted in it. Fine by me.

There were poker trips to Vegas and Atlantic City in my late 20s and early 30s, and then last fall -- finally! -- table games went live not far from where I call home. In West Virginia, poker rooms opened at Wheeling Island and Mountaineer, two racetrack/casinos less than an hour's drive from my home in the Pittsburgh suburbs. I don't play nearly as much as some do; about every three weeks or so I'll head over for a full day's worth of poker. But, boy, it's nice to have some $1-$2 no-limit available any time I want the action.

And I must not be the only one who thinks so. The Wheeling Island poker room is packed by early afternoon almost every day. The waiting lists at night regularly stretch 30-people deep. Because of all the interest in local poker, and because I was already posting here on the subject, I decided to start a poker blog. So allow me to officially announce ThreeRiversPoker.com -- a poker blog for players from Pittsburgh and the entire tri-state area.

This blog won't be as comprehensive, or updated nearly as much, as my other big online endeavor -- FantasyHurler.com. But from now on, I will post my poker musings at Three Rivers Poker instead of here at my personal site. I'll also use it to post Wheeling Island and Mountaineer news, rumors, schedules, etc., as well as information about legislation that could legalize table games in Pennsylvania. The goal is to make it the Net's best online resource for poker players in the Pittsburgh area. If that includes you, be sure to check it out. And, hey, maybe I'll bump into you at the tables one day.

TAYLOR ON TV: Respecting History

2008-02-14T22:45:00.003-05:00

One of the good things about the writers’ strike is that it has forced me to expand my TV horizons. And, by coincidence, an HD feed of the History Channel was added to my cable lineup around the same time many of my favorite shows started running out of new episodes. So I started watching, and within a few weeks I was hooked on the channel’s quirky lineup of shows, the best of which offer a new and unique way to view the world we live in.

The first series that caught my attention was The Universe, a fascinating ongoing series that details everything we know and a bunch of stuff we suspect about the things that lie beyond our tiny planet. You name it, The Universe has it covered -- distant planets, black holes, other galaxies, dark matter and so on. The show is basically a mishmash of astral photographs, fancy computer graphics and talking heads of the scientist variety, but the end result is never less than fascinating. I highly recommend season one’s finale – a two-hour look at the big bang -- which provides a detailed outline of how astrophysicists believe the universe came to be.

Rather than gazing to the heavens, Cities of the Underworld, another History Channel series, is focused on the opposite direction – down below your feet. Grizzled yet excitable host Don Wildman has yet to meet a tunnel, sewer, cavern or crypt that he doesn’t love. And down he goes, with camera crews in tow, to ancient labyrinths and enormous caverns you wouldn’t believe still exist underneath cities around the world. Wildman breathlessly details the fates of ancient civilizations whose secrets were long thought buried, only to be rediscovered in these underground repositories. Cities of the Underworld is big on secret societies, too – episodes I’ve seen dealt heavily with the Knights Templar and the Freemasons -- giving the whole thing a brain-tickling, Da Vinci Code vibe.

Both Universe and Cities have new seasons airing now. Keep an eye on your digital channel guide; History repeats them a lot, so you have plenty of chances to watch. While you’re doing that also watch out for a rebroadcast of Life After People, a two-hour documentary first shown last week that theorizes what will happen to the planet once humans are gone. Let me tell you, never have I been more giddy to find out what’s going to happen after my entire race has been wiped out. (Short answer: Dogs and cats will run amok, wildlife will reclaim the cities, and only the Great Wall of China, the Great Pyramids of Egypt and, just maybe, Mount Rushmore will remain standing.) My favorite tidbit from the show: Because of its proximity to the almost-indestructible Hoover Dam, Las Vegas would likely be home to the last bit of artificial light in the world after people go the way of the dinosaur.

Now that I’m hooked, I feel the need to check out all of the History Channel’s lineup of original series. Ancient Discoveries promises to show how engineers of past civilizations were already daydreaming about modern man’s greatest inventions. And UFO Files and MonsterQuest may very well be farfetched, but if aliens and Bigfoot are tackled with the same scientific enthusiasm that Wildman employs when he goes spelunking, count me in.

originally published in the February 1st, 2008 edition of The Herald

TAYLOR ON TV: Welcome Back, Connor

2008-02-01T14:12:00.001-05:00

Arnold always says he’ll be back, but for once the big guy was wrong. The esteemed California governor is nowhere to be seen in Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, the first small-screen installment of the popular movie franchise.

Funny thing is, he’s not really missed. At first glance, Chronicles is a big, silly science-fiction show stuffed with fancy laser guns, killer robots running amok and the occasional space-time paradox – all conventions of the genre. Ah, but look closer and you’ll find this Terminator is deeper than it first appears. In episode three, a picked-on teen girl commits suicide by throwing herself off her high school roof, and young John Connor (Thomas Dekker) – as always, still hunted by Terminators sent from the future – struggles with the fact that he cannot yet help his fellow man the way he is someday destined to. (Having one’s picture splashed all over the TV news wouldn’t be prudent for a boy in hiding.) Meanwhile mom Sarah (Lena Headey) labors over whether it’s worth taking a few innocent lives today if it could help prevent the apocalypse of tomorrow. And good-girl terminatrix Cameron (Summer Glau), a machine masquerading as a smokin’ hot high-schooler, ponders the meaning of humanity as hints flow that this terminator is somehow different than those that have come before. Heck, the show even teases that we may be in store for some human-on-robot lovin’, if all those glances John throws Cameron’s way are any indication. Subversive!

Yes, fellow TV watchers, a cure for the writers’ strike blues has finally arrived. The Sarah Connor Chronicles, airing Monday nights at 9 p.m. on FOX, is better than it has any right to be. That’s not to say it’s perfect. Scenes that show a surprising amount of emotional heft (like Sarah searching for a way to prevent her eventual death by cancer, as detailed in Terminator 3) are tempered by moments of utter stupidity. During one gunfight, Sarah successfully takes cover behind a shoddy-looking but apparently bullet-proof Barcalounger. Later on, an evil terminator makes a cross-city trip to find his detached head. (How could he see where he was going?) The show’s writers are also over reliant on dream sequences; both the first and third episodes open with one.

Still, I can’t help but to like a show that not only pays constant fan service to those who love the Terminator movies (dogs can still sense the robots; at one point Sarah and John use the last name Reese) while daring to explore new ground for the franchise. Headey doesn’t look like she could kick as much butt as Linda Hamilton’s super-buff Sarah from Terminator 2, but she does convey a steely resolve, with the appropriate touch of paranoia. In FOX’s never-should-have-been-canceled sci-fi/western Firefly, Glau’s psychic teen sported a childlike innocence so inhumanly pure that it carried with it a sense of danger. A similar characterization is ported to Cameron with good effect. Dekker’s John was a bit of a blank early on, but the high-school-suicide thing makes a good case that his role will be appropriately expanded.

Chronicles also features a Sarah Connor-obsessed FBI agent (Richard T. Jones) who is beginning to suspect that the woman’s rants about murderous robots might not be so crazy after all and a group of mysterious freedom fighters sent from the future on a mission to stop the approaching robot-human war before it ever begins. There are a lot of balls being juggled here, and Chronicles surprisingly keeps most of them in the air. (Although the writers should probably drop Sarah’s ex-fiancé ASAP; no good can come from that character, even though I get that he’s supposed to symbolize John’s yearning to be part of a normal family.) The whole series is blanketed by a haze of sadness – war is coming, peaceful living isn’t possible, that cancer may not be preventable – which allows Chronicles to stand out from other genre shows.

Long story short: No Arnold? No problem!

originally published in the January 25th, 2008 edition of The Herald

Boy, am I an idiot

2008-01-29T10:29:00.000-05:00

Recently, I was looking back through some earlier posts at this blog and came across this one from 2005, where I proudly declare that "even if [the Nintendo Wii] is much, much cooler than it appears at first glance, there's no way the general public is ever gonna accept it. It's just too damn weird. The best-case scenario here is that the hardcore gamers come to appreciate it."

Wow. That may very well be the most incorrect, bone-headed, in-retrospect-absurd statement I've ever made in print. When the next generation of consoles gets here, someone remind me not to do any prognosticatin'. I'd hate to make a fool of myself again.

But isn't the monster still hungry?

2008-01-26T08:27:00.001-05:00

Cloverfield is a good idea impressively realized: A gigantic monster attacks New York City, and the movie purports to be recovered camcorder footage from the event. For the most part, it's exciting and inventive. And though I had heard complaints about the acting from people who'd seen it, I thought the 20-somethings at the center of the movie seemed suitably scared shitless.

What Cloverfield is missing is a hefty set of balls. You see, the flick is largely bloodless. (Uh, serious spoilers coming.) The monster only eats one poor bastard during the course of the movie, and it happens to be the guy holding the camera, which means you don't really get to see the attack. The monster leans down to bite; cut to shaky cam and screaming. (For reference, the T-Rex chomping down on that dude on the toilet in Jurassic Park is more impressive.) There's another scene where a girl seemingly mutates and then explodes after being bitten by one of the little monsters that run around in the movie, but that takes place behind a shaded screen leaving most everything but the blood splatter to the imagination.

I guess I just wanted more money shots. By the end of the film, you get to see plenty of the monster, but most of the time it's just walking around New York while the military drops bombs on it from overhead. In fact, two of our six main characters (a whopping 33 percent) are killed not by the monster, but by the frickin' Army. Not cool. It's a monster movie. The monster should have all the fun.

TAYLOR ON TV: Questioning reality

2008-01-26T08:24:00.000-05:00

Reality TV has me confused. You see, I am forced to watch it, as I owe the Herald some 50-odd columns per year, and thanks to the writers’ strike, reality shows now make up 90-odd percent of the networks’ primetime schedules. So these days the goal is to click around with an open mind. Yet the more I watch, the more perplexed I become.

For starters, what is the point of NBC’s Celebrity Apprentice? I actually enjoyed the Donald Trump series early in its run. The show’s Survivor-gone-corporate setup once featured memorable contestants, unique challenges and an honest endgame – when all was said and done, one of these people would go work for Trump. The show doubled as one big job interview, and the contestants played the game like their corporate future depended on the outcome. It was about as close to riveting as you can get in the reality genre.

But Celebrity Apprentice effectively eliminates the “job interview” aspect of the show, in essence cutting the thing that made it watchable in the first place. This new Apprentice has 14 C-level (or worse) celebrities competing for a $250,000 donation to the charity of their choice. With a few of the contestants, I could possibly be talked into believing they signed up to earn some money for a good cause. But for the most part, it’s obvious these folks just wanted to jump on the celebreality bandwagon and extend their waning fame for a little longer.

The end result is a bunch of has-beens mugging for the cameras and acting as the public expects them too – Gene Simmons wears sunglasses while indoors! Omarosa is a huge pain in the butt! – while Trump goes through the motions of circus ringleader. And, having given up on The Apprentice after season three, I’m not sure when Trump boardroom lackeys George and Carolyn stopped appearing, but they were much more entertaining than Trump’s daughter, Ivanka. Is there a worse kind of nepotism than the reality TV kind, blatantly broadcast for the world to see? The ratings for Celebrity Apprentice have been surprisingly solid. Is that because the strike has temporarily killed scripted television, or does the American public really enjoy this nonsense?

I’m confused by other things, too. What’s the deal with the various events in NBC’s American Gladiators when, in the end, it just comes down to a single obstacle course race? Oh, I know one contestant gets an early jump in the race based on how they performed in earlier events, but the time differential always seems negligible. I’m pretty certain the guy or gal who triumphs in the end would win no matter when they start, even if it’s a few seconds behind their competitor.

Speaking of American Gladiators, weren’t the gladiators themselves informed of the rules before the show started filming? Didn’t they practice? In one episode during the Joust – the event where contestant and gladiator try to knock each other off a raised platform using oversized Q-tips -- the gladiator twice stepped onto his opponent’s platform, which is a Gladiators no-no. The contestant won by default, a pretty boring outcome for a show that so desperately wants to be bigger, faster and more extreme than the old, syndicated American Gladiators. (Actually, it’s just a lot louder.)

Okay, there is one thing I’m not confused about: Does FOX’s upcoming The Moment of Truth, where contestants must give honest answers to horrible, personal questions or risk being outed by a lie-detector test, signal that reality television is about to sink to a heretofore unthinkable level of shamelessness? Answer: Yes. Yes, it does.

originally published in the January 18th, 2008 edition of The Herald

Rest in peace, Heath Ledger

2008-01-22T17:47:00.001-05:00

Being that I'm possibly the biggest A Knight's Tale fan on the planet, and that I'm so looking forward to The Dark Knight that I watch the trailer almost daily, I can't imagine a more sad, tragic, fucked up bit of news than this. You will be missed, Heath.

You know you're getting old when ...

2008-01-21T15:23:00.000-05:00

I swear, all the songs I'm buying off iTunes these days are songs I discovered in commercials. A few minutes ago, I spent 99 cents on a gorgeous little ditty called The Part Where You Go by a band called Hem that was featured in a Liberty Mutual (!) commercial. Big insurance companies are EVIL, for crying out loud, yet it seems they're now responsible introducing me to new music the same way MTV did when I was a wee lad. It makes me wonder if it is I who am doomed or the world at large.

TAYLOR ON TV: Late night talk returns

2008-01-17T18:23:00.000-05:00

On his first day back at work since the start of the writers’ strike, Dave Letterman opened his show with Rockettes-style dancers parading around the studio while holding “On Strike” signs, a not-so-subtle reminder of why all the late-night talk shows had been in reruns since November.

Even after the dancers exited the stage, there were continual mentions of the ongoing strike – a Top Ten list featuring demands of striking writers (“Number 1: Producers must immediately remove their heads from their asses”), jokes about the strike (“It’s a very complicated issue: writers are sick and tired of having to buy their own pencils”), and Dave’s ever-present strike beard, which made the guy look a good 10 years older.

Despite all the strike talk, that first Letterman show was business as usual since Dave’s production company acquiesced to the writers’ demands and made a side deal with the guild that would allow Letterman’s writers (as well as Craig Ferguson’s) to return to work. With the writers back, Dave’s show remains unchanged. There are Top Ten lists, jokes aplenty and a steady stream of A-list guests who don’t have to worry about crossing a picket line to appear on the show.

Dave and Craig have it easy right now. Jay, Conan, Jimmy and the Comedy Central boys, Jon and Stephen, aren’t so lucky. Unlike Dave, they don’t own their own shows, so they’ve been forced to return to the airwaves without their striking writers. In some cases, it’s a show killer. The first two episodes of The Daily Show have been borderline disasters, with Jon Stewart appearing much too jittery and manic without the smooth, topical jokes of his writers to guide him. He seems to know this. Maybe that’s why they’re now calling it A Daily Show and not THE Daily Show.

Leno’s Tonight Show has never been my late-night talker of choice, but the show seems even more forced now with Leno giving an underwhelming self-written monologue – still telling Lewinsky jokes, Jay? -- before moving on to lame time-killers (Q&As with the audience) and lamer guests.

Conan, however, is, if not thriving thanks to the strike, at least making the best of it. By chucking most of his monologue and the other scripted bits, Conan’s show has gotten back to the loony, anything-goes feel that served the show so well when it debuted. In his first few hours back, Conan wasted air time by showing clips of his office staff playing the videogame Rock Band and seeing how long he could spin his wedding ring on his desk.

“Again!” an audience member yelled after that little stunt.

“Trust me,” Conan replied, laughing, “there’s time to do it again.”

A later episode featured a lengthy prerecorded bit where Conan hid in the shadows while NBC pages toured fans around the set, only to jump out and surprise the crap out of everyone at just the right moment. Then he’d mock the pages for getting their Conan trivia wrong. Funny stuff.

Back over on Comedy Central, it turns out that, thanks to Stephen Colbert’s faux-conservative-blowhard persona, The Colbert Report is far more strike-resistant than The Daily Show. Watching Colbert ask why his blank teleprompter isn’t pulling thoughts directly from his brain and turning them into words -- just as it always has -- is a hoot. Clips from past episodes and an extra guest per half-hour are helping to pad The Report, but as long as Colbert sticks to his shtick, the show entertains more often than not.

All of the talk-show hosts are using their air time to promote the writers’ cause and bash the studio execs who are currently refusing to negotiate. Ferguson insisted that Hollywood producers have no sense of humor and no soul. A recent Letterman joke concluded with a graphic calling the studio producers “cowards, cutthroats and weasels since 1982.”

Early on in his first show back, Conan said, “I believe what [the writers are] asking for is fair. We desperately need them.” Then he cut to a “Strike Beard Moment,” which featured ridiculous close-ups and slow pans of Conan’s own patchy facial growth. I must admit, it made me laugh. Apparently, some late-night hosts need their writers back more desperately than others.

originally published in the January 11th, 2008 edition of The Herald

TAYLOR ON TV: Scripted series not gone yet

2008-01-09T19:29:00.000-05:00

In most years, January brings with it the return of all your favorite TV shows that took a breather during the holiday season. This year is a different story thanks to the writers’ strike, which halted production on all scripted series in November. Many shows have already exhausted their supply of new episodes, while some others, like House and Chuck, only have a few original hours left to air before they go dark (or turn into continual reruns).

What’s it mean for viewers? For one, the reality shows are coming. Who can avoid those ubiquitous NBC ads promising the earth-shattering return of American Gladiators? (And, sadly, that looks like one of the more tempting reality offerings headed our way.) Luckily, there’s not yet a need to lock your remote control away in some dusty crate up in your attic. Thanks to the traditional network practice of holding certain shows to use as midseason replacements for canceled fall shows, a smattering of new and returning scripted series will begin airing this January and early February.

The best of the bunch is Lost, which originally moved to a winter launch so ABC could follow the 24 model by airing the entire season nonstop. Because of the strike, only eight episodes were filmed instead of the planned 16, but Lost fans will take what they can get, especially considering their minds must still be dizzied from last season’s brain-shattering cliffhanger, which gave a glimpse of Jack and Kate’s post-island future. Word has it that the new season will continue down that path, providing more flash-forwards detailing what happened after six of the castaways made it back home. The new season of Lost moves to Thursday night and kicks off Jan. 31 at 9 p.m.

Also returning to the schedule after taking the autumn off is CBS’s post-nuclear-war drama Jericho, which was renewed only after fans of the show convinced execs to give the show another chance by sending them 20 tons of peanuts. Fans should cherish these seven episodes, beginning Feb. 12, since no amount of nuts will save Jericho if ratings stall again.

I can hardly believe it’s been a whopping 12 years since I last regularly watched NBC’s Law & Order, now back on Wednesday nights for its 18th (!) season. Maybe it’s worth checking out again, all these years later, especially since it’s almost a new show now with a bunch of new cast members. Both Jeremy Sisto and Linus Roache have been ported over from last season’s failed Kidnapped to try again here. I’m a long-time Sisto admirer – man, that dude was great as crazy Billy on Six Feet Under – so I’m thinking what better time to jump back on the Law & Order bandwagon than now?

Other returning series include CBS’s The New Adventures of Old Christine (Feb. 4), NBC’s Medium (this Monday) and HBO’s The Wire (this Sunday). As for newly premiering series, they look a little more dubious. No surprise there, since midseason replacement shows are usually up for a fall debut but then deemed either not yet ready or just not good enough.

Honestly, I probably wouldn’t be interested in watching Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, a small-screen spinoff of the Arnold Schwarzenegger franchise (minus the Arnold, of course), but with the writers’ strike, this might be the most intriguing new series we get for a while. Chronicles, which premieres Jan. 13, replaces Linda Hamilton with Lena Headey in the title role. Firefly’s Summer Glau plays one of the many different Terminators, both good and evil, that are expected to show up. The Terminator films thrived on larger-than-life, big-screen action sequences. We’ll see how the TV show fares with, presumably, less of a budget for making stuff go boom.

Elsewhere, we get not one, but two Sex and the City clones: NBC’s Lipstick Jungle, from Candace Bushnell (whose writing Sex was based on), and ABC’s Cashmere Mafia, from Darren Star (who produced Sex). I guess they say go with what works, huh? Cashmere debuts this week, Jungle on Feb. 7. If you’re into tales of New York gals living the high life, I’d suggest waiting for the real deal: the Sex and the City movie coming this May.

Other scripted series debuting in the coming weeks include ABC’s Eli Stone, an offbeat drama concerning a lawyer who has a spiritual awakening after singer George Michael appears to him in a hallucination, and CBS’s Welcome to the Captain, a sitcom about a low-rent Hollywood apartment building and the kooky folks who live there. Yeah, I’m thinking the same thing: With concepts like those, maybe a little American Gladiators isn’t such a bad thing after all.

originally published in the January 4th, 2008 edition of The Herald

A flopped set vs. the flush

2008-01-07T23:20:00.002-05:00

I played $1-$2 no-limit hold 'em at the Wheeling Island poker room on Sunday and, on one hand, was holding pocket 5s when the flop came 2-5-7, all diamonds. I made a pot-sized bet of $17, and this older fella sitting at the other end of the table raised it up to $50. Now, I know this guy flopped a flush. He'd been playing ultra-conservative all afternoon. I probably should have folded, especially since I quickly decided that if I called and missed making a boat or quads on the turn, I would muck. That left me one chance at seven outs. Thing is, I was dealt a shitload of low pocket pairs yesterday, but this was the first time I actually flopped a set with them. I wanted to take a shot, so I called.

The turn paired the deuce. I checked to the raiser, thinking he'd make at least another $50 bet. He pushed all-in for about $130. I couldn't get my chips in and my cards turned up fast enough. He disgustedly tossed his two diamonds into the muck.

Now, what's interesting is that my buddy, a pretty darn good poker player, says I probably shouldn't have called the raise after the flop -- not because of my low odds (about 34 percent if I stay to the end) -- but because even if I do hit, I shouldn't get paid off on it. There is some truth in that. A skilled player holding that flush would have to be concerned once the board pairs after I call a $33 re-raise. Still, most of these guys playing $1-$2 over in Wheeling are far from skilled, and I could sense that this guy was already counting his pot, his brain having effectively shut down once he flopped the flush. I guessed correctly that he wasn't going to slow down even if the board paired on the turn. (Hence my check after boating up.) And it all worked out in the end. Nice when that happens.

By the way, later on that same day, the only guy at the table with a bigger chip stack than me (about $650 compared to $450) raised pre-flop to $15 when I was holding pocket kings. I made it $50 straight, hoping he'd just go away. I didn't want to go up against a stack that big. He called. Flop came jack-9-garbage with two spades. Without missing a beat, he went all-in. What a ballsy bet! I thought I probably ... maybe ... possibly ... had him. (Or did he flop a set of jacks? He was a very solid player. Would he have called a re-raise of that size with jacks?) I showed him my kings before folding, telling him that I didn't want to leave a loser that day. He smiled and flipped over Ace-King of spades. Had I called, I would have been the favorite from there ... but not by much. Probably better just to get the hell away from that and go home happy.

TAYLOR ON TV: The Best TV Moments of 2007

2007-12-27T13:16:00.000-05:00

Depending on how long the writers’ strike lasts, we may not have too many great TV moments to look forward to in 2008. But at least we can wistfully recall the great showdowns, character bits and cliffhangers of the last 12 months that made our favorite shows so memorable. As always, you’ll find no stale “10 Best Shows” here, just my list of the 10 Best TV Moments of 2007 …

1. Lost flash-forwards. It was the biggest mind-blower on a show that is built to consistently blow one’s mind. ABC’s Lost went on a roll in the latter half of season three, giving us the best batch of episodes the show had produced since season one. The two-hour finale featured a thrilling confrontation between the castaways and the nefarious Others, while what we all assumed to be that episode’s flashback story showed us a bearded Jack addicted to drugs and considering suicide. Depressed and frantic, he made a phone call asking a mystery woman to meet him at the airport. It was like having a surge of electricity channeled through your body when you realized that the woman was, in fact, Kate and it wasn’t the past we were seeing – it was the future. At least two of our castaways had escaped the island, although Jack clearly believed their true destiny had gotten away from them. “We have to go back!” Jack screamed at Kate in the closing seconds, and though many more cliffhangers are surely in store for Lost fans, I can’t imagine any surpassing this one for surprise and ingenuity.

2. The Sopranos cuts to black. Some hated the final minutes of HBO’s The Sopranos. Others (like me) loved them. One thing’s for certain: You were talking about them … and probably still are. Has there ever been a more debated scene in TV history? Sitting down in a nondescript diner, Tony fires up some Journey on the tabletop jukebox. Carmela slides in the booth across from him while a waitress brings coffee to a shady-looking guy in a ball cap sitting on the other side of the aisle. A.J. enters with a proclamation of, “Mmm, onion rings.” Another stranger sitting at the counter throws repeated, ominous glances at Tony. Outside, Meadow has parallel-parking troubles. Tony notices counter guy get up to go to the bathroom. The bell over the diner’s front door dings, Tony looks up and BAM. Blackness and silence. There are so many things I love about this scene: Tony’s facial expression when Carmela says that Meadow’s at the hospital to switch birth control. Tony and A.J. coming to some kind of unspoken understanding of each other. The ratcheting of the tension to almost unbearable levels as the music grows louder and Tony’s worst fear – that he and his family could be whacked while eating onion rings -- are cleverly imbued on the viewer. It was the perfect finale for a brilliant series that always refused to conform to any rules of television.

3. Standoff at the Bennet home on Heroes. The NBC superhero drama had its highs and lows in ’07, but the show was at its best during the blistering Company Man episode that alternated looks at Horned-Rimmed Glasses Man’s mysterious past with a present-day standoff between HRG (real name: Noah Bennet), his regenerating daughter Claire, mind reader Matt, and about-to-go-nuclear Ted. The ultra-tense showdown reached boiling point when, to protect them all from an increasingly unstable Ted, Noah mentally ordered Matt to shoot Claire. (He knew that her healing powers would counteract the bullet wound.) Matt did as told, but Ted grew increasingly angry once Claire was revealed to be still among the living and an old associate of Noah’s shady government agency arrived on scene intending to shoot to kill. Ted lost control, set fire to the house and was on the verge of detonation before an unkillable Claire, skin singed to the bone, walked through the inferno to stick Ted with a tranquilizer dart. Heroes’ writers have yet to again pit its characters so cleverly against one another.

4. Agrestic burns on Weeds. Season three of the Showtime comedy ended with all the same shots of suburbia that make up the opening credits each week. The theme song, Little Boxes, was replayed, too. One big difference – this time, everything was burning, as a California wildfire swept through the cookie-cutter houses that widowed mother/drug dealer Nancy Botwin and her associates called home. Nancy’s life had been reduced to ashes both figuratively and literally by the end of the season, and we last see her fleeing the flames on a pricey Segway scooter. The dichotomy of Nancy’s idyllic-on-the-outside life with the real dangers brought on by her unorthodox profession had never been made clearer.

5. Morning breaks on Pushing Daisies. Honestly, this season’s best new show offers up one or two memorable moments every week, but the most touching was when sisters Vivian and Lily Charles, also known as the one-time synchronized swimming sensation the Darling Mermaid Darlings, finally push through their enduring depression and anxiety disorders to return to the swimming pool once more. What prompted such a breakthrough? Song, of course. Characters deciding to belt out a tune is a semi-regular occurrence on this ABC charmer, and Vivian’s rendition of Morning Has Broken was indeed a beautiful thing.

6. Jack launches some fireworks on 30 Rock. The hilarious Tina Fey comedy has a knack for finding the absurdist comedy in serious subject matter. This was no better demonstrated than when blowhard TV exec Jack Donaghy, feeling threatened by a corporate rival, planned an extravagant New York fireworks display that NBC could broadcast to the world. Too bad the resulting spectacular looked like a faithful recreation of 9/11, with the colorful explosions enveloping Rockefeller Center. Fey’s Liz Lemon and her fellow New Yorkers could only watch in shocked (and quite funny) disbelief.

7. The South Park boys save Imaginationland. Who would have thought that in its 11th season (a full ten years after the show’s Comedy Central debut), creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone would send Stan, Kyle and Cartman on their most deranged, most inventive and most enjoyable adventure of all. It took three full episodes to tell the story of Imaginationland, a place where Gandalf, Charlie Brown, Count Chocula and all the inventions of human imagination reside. When terrorists attacked Imaginationland, destroying the wall that separates the good imaginary characters from the evil ones, it was up to our heroes to set things right before the U.S. military nuked the place. Every frame from these episodes was jam-packed with pop-culture references and callbacks to previous South Park episodes. (ManBearPig lives!) The Imaginationland trilogy proved to be South Park at its subversive best. (Oh, and since I’m cheating a little here, I’ll give my favorite moment from the three episodes: When an Imaginationland-stranded Butters laments that he should be home in school but instead has found himself on the outs with Luke Skywalker and Popeye.)

8. Pam grows a backbone on The Office. The Beach Games episode of NBC’s The Office, where Michael and the gang head to Lake Scranton to compete in a series of Survivor-like challenges, was one of the show’s funniest. But it was Pam’s hot-coal walk and subsequent heartfelt speech that stuck in your mind long after the show had ended. Pam’s usually the quiet one, always bottling her feelings up inside. But after lambasting her co-workers for skipping her art show, she turns to Jim and says, “I called off my wedding because of you. And now we're not even friends. And things are just, like, weird between us … and that sucks. And I miss you.” It was the beginning of a whole new Pam, one who would eventually and finally get her man.

9. Patty gets murderous on Damages. FX’s little-watched legal thriller wins the award for most underrated show this year but thankfully has been picked up for two more seasons. Fans must be thrilled, especially after the season-one finale’s big twist -- that Glenn Close’s powerful New York litigator Patty Hewes had indeed ordered the murder of Ellen Parsons, her former protégé. The fact that Ellen deduced this treachery on her own and will now work with the FBI to bring Patty down from the inside should make for a great season two.

10. House hires his new team. Leave it to Dr. Gregory House to transform the hiring process into a full-blown fake reality show with competitive challenges and elimination ceremonies. It was such fun watching the good doctor whittle down the large field of candidates to a final group of four on the hit FOX medical drama. In the end, faced with only a pair of available slots, House passed on the bright, beautiful and unnamed “Thirteen” and instead chose the two guys, Taub and Kutner. Of course, he did so knowing that a flustered Cuddy would then demand that he hire Thirteen anyway, and House got all three of the new staff members he wanted. It’s always such a joy seeing House manipulate his way to happiness. (Well, as close to happiness as he can get.)

originally published in the December 21st, 2007 edition of The Herald

TAYLOR ON TV: Television under the tree

2007-12-22T13:15:00.000-05:00

Still trying to finish your Christmas shopping? If so, maybe you’re considering some TV on DVD for your sister, uncle, brother-in-law or Secret Santa. Hey, it’s certainly not a terrible idea. Full-season sets are cheaper than ever, and with no end to the writers’ strike in sight, there’s going to be a shortage of quality entertainment coming through your cable box starting next month. We all might want to think about picking up a season or two of that well-liked series we missed the first time around.

With that in mind, this column will serve as your guide to TV-on-DVD shopping this holiday. Now, I could just list the sets I’d consider worth buying, but where’s the fun in that? (Plus, your sister might not have the same taste in TV as me.) So, instead, I’m going to run through the TV-on-DVD best sellers at Amazon.com and offer up my thoughts on each. These are the sets people are buying en masse this Christmas:

1. The Extended Edition of High School Musical 2 isn’t just the #1 selling TV-based DVD at the very moment I write this, it’s the #1 selling DVD overall (topping the latest Harry Potter movie). That’s not surprising considering the gazillions of tweens who tune in to watch the smash movie musical every time the Disney Channel airs it, which is all the frickin’ time. My guess is, if you have a 12-year-old girl in the house, not buying Musical is out of the question.

2. The second most popular TV-on-DVD set is the Discovery Channel/BBC documentary Planet Earth. Those of you who caught it on television know just how breathtaking this series’ images can be, and I’d consider the DVD set a must buy for any nature lover in your family. One note: While the regular edition is #8 overall at Amazon, the HD-DVD version sits down at #15. Hi-def was invented for shows like Planet Earth, and if your gift recipient has an HD-DVD player, that’s the one to get.

3. The brilliant third season of ABC’s Lost is an absolute steal for $39. After a lackluster sophomore year, the mystery-fueled island drama rebounded with a vengeance thanks to these 23 episodes. There’s not a bad apple in the bunch; yes, even that Twilight Zone-esque episode that, uh, dealt with unwanted island newcomers Nikki and Paulo made for a riveting hour of television. Buy this for anyone who appreciates great storytelling. Just make sure they’ve already seen seasons one and two. Otherwise they’ll be lost themselves.

4. HBO’s towering Band of Brothers miniseries still sells like mad six years after it first aired. And why wouldn’t it? The 1,047 customers who have awarded it a five-star review average are not wrong. Still my all-time favorite TV mini.

5. The World War II theme continues with Ken Burns’ The War. I haven’t seen this critically lauded documentary, but Burns’ docs are usually immaculately produced.

6. High School Musical: Encore Edition. Hmm, maybe you need it because your daughter’s first copy of the original Musical has been brutally scratched up thanks to too many slumber-party trips.

7. The sixth season of 24 may be selling well but was a disappointment for all but the most forgiving of fans. For Jack Bauer completists only.

8. Not a lot of laughs to be had on this list … until you get to season three of The Office which has more than enough to make up for it. The perfect gift for any member of your family who goes to work in an office each day. The episode where Michael takes the gang to the beach for a game of Survivor is a highlight, but more on that next week in my Ten Best TV Moments of 2007 list (hint, hint).

9. Huzzah! New Futurama adventures are here with Bender’s Big Score, a long four years after FOX cancelled the hilarious sci-fi cartoon. The 88-minute Score hasn’t even aired on TV yet, although it will be broken up into individual episodes for Comedy Central next year. But right now DVD is the only way to see this thing. I have it at the top of my Netflix queue, but the online rental site is telling me I’ve got a “very long wait” before Bender’s Big Score shows up in my mailbox. Anybody want to buy me a Christmas present?

10. Battlestar Galactica: Razor, the spinoff telefilm of the cult Sci Fi Network series, leaked to the Internet this fall, was broadcast on TV in late November and then released on DVD a mere 10 days later. So everyone has had plenty of chances to see it, although it looks like most Battlestar fans consider their collections incomplete without it.

originally published in the December 14th, 2007 edition of The Herald

TAYLOR ON TV: Boast of Christmas Past

2007-12-17T20:10:00.000-05:00

There are a couple of reasons I’ve been watching the usual bunch of Christmas specials more often this year than the last few. The biggest is that my 16-month-old daughter has discovered the television and while my wife and I limit her viewing as much as possible, we figure a bit of A Charlie Brown Christmas here, a sample of Rudolph there won’t hurt her. Plus, she just loves Snoopy. How can I say no?

I’m also finding there’s a lot less in my DVR to watch these days, thanks in part to the writers’ strike. The last new The Office was weeks ago. Heroes finished up its shortened season on Monday. There are a few new Houses yet to air, but FOX is stockpiling them for next year. I figure I might as well watch Santa Claus is Comin’ to Town.

Heck, I even watched Shrek the Halls a brand-new Christmas special starring Mike Myers’ lovable green ogre. And why not? The Shrek movies are harmless, mildly entertaining family fare, and ABC had the full voice cast, including Myers and Eddie Murphy, on board for the special. Unfortunately, the thing turned out to be a noisy, humorless affair. Instead of filling my heart with Christmas spirit, it filled my head with a nauseous aching.

Shrek the Halls did get me to wondering, however: Why do any and all new Christmas specials end up stinking as bad as two-week-old eggnog? Every year, the networks will debut one or two new holiday tales, hoping to birth a new classic. Inevitably, they are almost immediately forgotten. Does anyone flip the calendar to December and start wondering when Olive, the Other Reindeer will air? Of course not. We want to watch Charlie Brown and The Grinch and all the enduring holiday masterpieces. Are we to assume that that they will serve as definitive Christmas viewing from now until the end of time, proving unassailable against all comers?

I first considered that maybe it wasn’t about quality. Perhaps we all just want to feel young again by watching the Christmas specials we grew up with. And since affection for particular specials is often passed down from parent to child, each generation ends up cherishing the same material as the last.

Then again, maybe they just don’t make ’em like they used to. Many of the newer holiday specials are spinoffs of already successful properties, like Shrek or the Rugrats, and lack the creative spark of Twas the Night Before Christmas or Emmet Otter’s Jugband Christmas. Also, most of the classic specials are based upon timeless holiday themes, from Charlie Brown’s spiritual rumination on the real meaning of Christmas to The Grinch’s warnings that Christmas should not be defined by materialistic desires. (“It came without ribbons! It came without tags! It came without packages, boxes or bags!”) By comparison, the lesson to be learned from Shrek the Halls seemed to be that family should always be welcome at Christmastime, even if they destroy your house while visiting.

So I, like everyone else, will stick to the oldies but goodies. Christmas just isn’t Christmas without those Whos down in Whoville, the Burgermeister Meisterburger and Charlie Brown’s sad little tree. The holidays wouldn’t be half as jolly without them.

originally published in the December 7th, 2007 edition of The Herald

Must acquire headpiece

2007-12-11T21:36:00.001-05:00

So now that West Virginia casinos have poker rooms, I'm in the market for a card guard to take with me when I play. (A card guard is similar to a small paperweight, and you place one on your hole cards when you intend to play them. It prevents them from being accidentally flipped over or mucked.) I figured I'd get something cheap yet geeky, so I was checking out things like this and this. But then I stumbled across this ... which, technically, could be used as a card guard. And now I think I must have it. Insane, I know.

TAYLOR ON TV: Flower Power

2007-12-08T12:22:00.001-05:00

There are people who will tell you that ABC’s Pushing Daisies is too cutesy for its own good. They’ll say it’s cloying and corny. Do not, I repeat, do not listen to these people. It’s true that Daisies is whimsical, romantic and sentimental. It wears its oversized heart on its Day-Glo sleeve. It’s a pop-up book come to life. It’s also the best new show on TV this season.

Pushing Daisies (airing Wednesdays at 8 p.m.) is not a show that fits easily into a genre. The best I can do is call it a dark comic fairy tale crime procedural. Yet I get goose bumps each week when Daisies’ unseen narrator begins to break down the plot by boisterously proclaiming: “The facts were these …” Those must now be my four favorite words spoken on television.

The narrator tells of the adventures of Ned the Pie Maker (Lee Pace), a likable chap born with a very strange gift. When Ned touches a dead person or dog or strawberry, it will return to life. If he touches them again, they are dead once more. Two catches come with this gift. If Ned leaves a revived being alive for longer than a minute, something else must die to take its place. Also, when Ned touches a once-dead person that second time, they remain deceased forever. His gift is a one-time-per-person kind of deal.

That last rule is a bit of a pain, especially since Ned once reanimated his lifelong love and soul mate Charlotte “Chuck” Charles (Anna Friel) and now the two may never again know the feeling of touching, hugging, kissing. Still, this does not stop their undying devotion to one another, and when the two aren’t making lovey-dovey eyes at each other, they bake pies and solve mysteries with their private-detective buddy, the excellently named Emerson Cod (Chi McBride).

“Wait, what?” you ask. “Solve mysteries?” You see, whenever a body that suffered an unexplained death comes into the local morgue, Ned momentarily revives the corpse and the trio get 60 seconds to ask the dearly departed who killed him or her. Sometimes they get a straight answer, sometimes not. But Ned and Emerson always leave with enough information to begin cracking the case. The mysteries, which are of the most bizarre and colorful sort – one week, a scratch-’n’-sniff book served as the murder weapon, provide a sort of self-contained story for each episode.

But there is so much more going on with Daisies than a weekly whodunit. There’s the even-more-awesomely named Olive Snook (Kristin Chenowith), another employee of the pie shop who has a not-so-secret crush on Ned and will occasionally break into song. With Chenowith’s Broadway-honed pipes, you won’t mind. There’s also the saga of the Darling Mermaid Darlings, two former synchronized swimmers named Lily (Swoosie Kurtz) and Vivian (Ellen Greene) who are slowly emerging from the depression that enveloped them when they learned of their niece Chuck’s apparent death. (Helping matters: The secretly alive Chuck anonymously sends them pies loaded with homeopathic mood enhancers.)

Production values on Pushing Daisies are through the roof. The sets are stylish and eye-popping. The soundtrack soars at all the appropriate moments. The moments of comedy are dark as a blackberry and never in short supply. McBride, who always elevates any series he’s in, is good for three or four laugh-out-loud zingers every week.

Pushing Daisies was created by a very talented man named Bryan Fuller, who’s worked on a number of sharp, inventive shows over the last few years, including Heroes, Wonderfalls and Dead Like Me. Pushing Daisies feels like the series he’s been building up to, his masterwork, something that can continue to evolve and delight for years to come. All the proper ingredients are here: A killer concept that craftily mixes genres, a distinctive look that’s unlike anything else on TV and a nimble cast that seems more than up to the challenge of bringing such a unique world to life.

originally published in the November 30th, 2007 edition of The Herald

Now playing: Carcassonne

2007-11-30T15:24:00.001-05:00

So a while back, a videogame version of this European tile-based board game called Carcassonne went up on Xbox Live. The concept, where players try to both build a medieval-esque map and conquer it at the same time, intrigued me enough to where I downloaded the demo. Unfortunately, the demo only lets you play through the opening rounds of a game, and I never got a good enough feel if it was strategic enough for my liking (as opposed to relying too much on luck -- the draw of the tiles). So I never sprung for the full version.

Lo and behold, Xbox Live's fifth anniversary was a few weeks back, and Microsoft honored the occasion by offering up Carcassonne for free to all Xbox Live members. Zero dollars was a much fairer price for a game I still wasn't sure was worth playing, so I downloaded. And now I'm obsessed with the fucking thing. Luck does play its part, but there are many nuances to playing Carcassonne that demand strategic thinking. I'm 11-10 in ranked games right now, but I chalk some of those early losses up to getting a grasp on the game, including the tricky post-game scoring where field control becomes very important.

The game is so addicting that I find myself recently playing it online more than Halo 3 and NHL 08 (the games that had been consuming most of my playing time of late). I usually fit three or four games in before bed and a couple in the afternoon during my daughter's nap. I swear I have even started dreaming in Carcassonne, which gives me bad flashbacks to dreaming in Tetris during the Game Boy's heyday.

TAYLOR ON TV: Will the strike affect your favorite shows?

2007-11-28T19:21:00.000-05:00

First, the good news. The currently striking writers’ union and the AMPTP (that’s the group that represents the studios and networks) have agreed to resume negotiations on Monday. If we’re lucky, the AMPTP will come prepared to offer a better deal to TV and movie writers, who are seeking a larger cut from DVD and online sales of their work.

Still, while the two sides negotiate, the strike will continue, and more and more of your favorite shows are shutting down production every day. If the two sides can’t come to an agreement soon, TV fans better ready themselves for disappointment down the road. Among the doomsday scenarios slowly taking shape are …

-- Scrubs might never actually end. At least, not properly. The cast and crew of the NBC hospital comedy came into this season with the luxury of knowing it’s the last year for J.D. and crew. The characters are slowly being pushed toward a season finale that will wrap up many of the show’s longtime questions. Will J.D. finally earn Dr. Cox’s respect and admiration? Will Elliott and J.D. end up as lovers or friends? What the heck is that janitor’s name anyway? Unfortunately only 12 of the 18 episodes scheduled for this season have been completed, with the other six caught in limbo while the strike continues. If it drags on for months, those last half-dozen episodes might not be filmed and those questions may never be answered. Scrubs has been one of TV’s most original comedies during the last seven years and deserves a showy sendoff, not a slow fadeout.

-- The Sci Fi Channel’s much-loved Battlestar Galactica is in a similar situation, with a handful of episodes for its final season not yet written. In a recent blog, executive producer Ronald D. Moore wrote, “I refuse to believe that we won’t finish, that we won’t be back to film our final stories, but I know and accept there is that possibility … Galactica’s coming back, I frakking promise you that. But I am ready to put the rest of the story on the table and take the risk that I’ll never be able to tell it, in support of this strike.” Moore seems to contradict himself a few times there, but Galactica fans – and they are legion – must be terrified of even the thought that the show might not go out on its own terms.

-- Terrorists can’t stop Jack Bauer, but a writers’ strike sure can. The seventh season of 24 was all set to go this January, with an online preview hinting that a rebirth is coming after the disappointment of season six. CTU is gone, and Jack’s next bad day apparently starts with his brutal methods being questioned by a House subcommittee. Oh, and Tony Almeida’s back from the dead! (And, for now, a bad guy!!) Unfortunately, the new season has been indefinitely postponed until the strike is resolved. Honestly, it’s a smart move by FOX. The heavily serialized 24 works best when it runs every single week, no exceptions. Airing the eight hours that were completed before the strike and then going on hiatus would kill the show’s momentum. Still, the wait may turn excruciating for fans hoping that season seven will be a return to form for Jack and company. (I know my fingers are crossed.)

-- Your favorite new shows might air a little longer thanks to the strike … or they could be canceled because of it. How a lengthy strike would affect freshman series is a bit complex and could vary wildly from show to show. In normal, non-strike years, when a network cancels a TV show, that show is usually yanked off the air immediately. That’s why when you buy a DVD of a series canceled in the middle of a season, it will often include episodes never originally broadcast. If the strike continues, however, networks will need as much original programming as they can muster. So with a low-rated show like NBC’s Journeyman or FOX’s K-Ville, the network will likely air all episodes produced, giving fans more hours to watch and nonfans more chances to find the show. On the flip side, however, shows with so-so ratings, like ABC’s Dirty Sexy Money, may be more prone to cancellation than they otherwise would be because of the strike. Once all episodes are aired for a borderline show, the network might choose to cancel it outright rather than keep contracts active for actors and producers who can’t show up for work because no scripts are written. It’s a dicey situation for all new series, and the strike may end up playing a huge part in determining which ones will live on for season two.

originally published in the November 23rd, 2007 edition of The Herald

My essay kicks off "Batman Unauthorized"

2007-11-27T10:09:00.001-05:00

A typeset proof of Batman Unauthorized showed up in my inbox yesterday, and I was pleasantly surprised to see that my essay, titled "Keeping it Real in Gotham," is first out of the gate as you read the book. (Well, after the introduction, anyway.) And what a thrill to read the kind foreword to my piece by former Batman editor Denny O'Neil, who calls my essay "a thoughtful, interesting look at pop culture and a good introduction to everything that follows it." Man, I love writing these essays for BenBella. Remember, Batman Unauthorized will be released in March.

TAYLOR ON TV: The writers are right to strike

2007-11-25T10:06:00.000-05:00

Sometime soon, you’re going to snuggle into your couch to watch your favorite television show and realize that episode is a repeat. The next week will be a repeat too. And the week after that. Then your show will probably disappear off the schedule altogether, replaced by some brain-dead reality series.

This is the future we TV viewers have ahead of us unless the writers’ strike that has brought the Hollywood machine to a virtual halt can be quickly resolved. Unfortunately, no end to that strike, which started two Mondays ago, seems near. You can blame the studios and networks for that. Sure, this column has made the corporations that control Hollywood (and the execs who run them) out to be the bad guy before. They’ve canceled our favorite new shows without giving them any real chance to find an audience. And they’ve jumped on various bandwagons – reality shows are hot! game shows are hot! – instead of seeking out original, inspired story ideas. But those things pale in comparison to how badly the studios are treating the writers who pen our favorite shows and want fair compensation in return.

The strike boils down to this: Currently, writers earn the ridiculously low amount of four cents in residuals every time you buy a DVD of a movie or TV show they wrote. They earn nothing when their work is streamed with ads over the Internet – zilch, zip, nada. In contract negotiations, the writers’ union has asked for an increase from four to eight cents in DVD residuals and 2.5 percent of the gross profit earned from new media, which includes online streaming as well as movies and television purchased from sites like iTunes.

The studios, greedy corporations that they are (or, at the least, holdings of even-more-greedy media conglomerates), have kindly replied, “No, thank you. We’d rather keep not paying you.” They’re playing dumb when it comes to the Internet, saying that no business model exists which proves money can be made from new media. That’s ridiculously shortsighted, as most agree that in the not-too-distance future TV fans will stream their favorite shows from the Internet into the computer/TV hybrid that will sit in every living room. The potential for online profit is off the chart. TV writers, knowing they fouled up when they agreed to such a low cut of home-video sales at the dawn of VHS, don’t want to make the same mistake now.

And who can blame them? Keep in mind that while there are wealthy superstar scribes out there, many TV writers earn significantly less than six-digit salaries. (I keeping reading that the average is somewhere around $70,000 per year, which won’t get you very far in Los Angeles or New York, where virtually all TV writers must live.) In addition, turnover on TV writing staffs is high, and residuals are what pay the bills when writers are between projects. Not only do writers deserve payment when their work is sold over the Net, many of them actually need it.

And still the studios say no, hoping we at home holding the remote controls of America don’t realize the obvious: that without talented writers, TV would seriously suck. It’s the writers who create that wonderfully zippy banter shared by Dr. House and Dr. Cuddy. It’s the writers who concoct the mind-blowing plot twists that make Lost such an exhilarating crowd-pleaser. It’s the writers who put Jack Bauer in such unbearably tense situations that you find yourself clenching your sweaty palms in the comfort of your own home. Do I want them to get properly paid for entertaining me so much? You’re damn right I do.

Sadly, talks between the two sides have broken off, and it looks like TV viewers better settle in for a long, dark winter. With certain dramas, there are enough completed scripts for the networks to film and parcel out new episodes into next year, but such a stockpile doesn’t exist for every show. Last night’s The Office was the final episode written and filmed before the strike, so if you’re a fan of Jim and Pam, you’re already out of luck. And unless the studios have a change of heart and agree to pay writers what they’re worth, the answer to that age-old question “What’s on TV tonight?” is going to get awfully depressing awfully fast.

originally published in the November 16th, 2007 edition of The Herald

TAYLOR ON TV: "Woman" troubles

2007-11-15T21:17:00.001-05:00

On screen, NBC’s Bionic Woman is a haphazard mess of a show, which is not much of a surprise considering what’s been happening off screen with this update of the ’70s Lindsay Wagner series. A string of show runners and producers have already come and gone, as the network has been searching desperately for someone with an actual creative vision for the project. No luck yet, as continuity issues and jerky tonal changes continue to plague Bionic Woman.

In the ’07 version, Michelle Ryan plays Jaime Sommers, a 24-year-old bartender who gets a $50 million makeover after almost dying in a terrible car crash. Cutting-edge surgeons give her the bionic works: two new legs, an arm, an eye and an ear, all upgrades over her original body parts. Sommers can now outrun speeding cars, hear a conversation three blocks away and punch terrorists through solid wall.

Well, sometimes she can. The nature of Jaime’s skill set is one of Bionic Woman’s many inconsistencies. In the pilot, she holds her own in a fight (her first one!) against Sarah Corvus (Katee Sackhoff), another bionic woman possessing the same super strength and reflexes as Jaime. Then, in later episodes, Jaime gets roughed up by regular old bad guys, who should have been easy pickings.

Jaime and Sarah were both turned bionic by the Burket Group, a mysterious underground organization on a mission to save the world. Jaime is their reluctant field operative, and one of the things Bionic Woman does right is establish a contentious relationship between Jaime and Burket leader Jonas Bledsoe (the always welcome Miguel Ferrer). Bledsoe considers Jaime’s new body to be his property and sees no problem with constantly surveilling her using the video feed streaming from her own bionic eye. Much to Jaime’s chagrin, you give up your right to privacy once you go bionic.

Still, she has bigger problems to deal with, most notably the fact that the Burket Group’s technology is suspect. Sarah Corvus’s deteriorating bionic system has driven her mad, and Jaime recently discovered that her own tech upgrades have a lifespan of five years. When her bionics go, so does she. It’s a nice little twist that was unceremoniously revealed halfway through a recent episode. The writers should have used it as an end-of-episode cliffhanger since Bionic Woman is in serious need of some dramatic oomph.

It also could use a more striking leading actress, though that ship has already sailed. The show is firmly rooted in the girl-kicking-butt genre, but Ryan doesn’t have the presence to stand alongside TV heroine all-stars like Jennifer Garner and Sarah Michelle Gellar. (That’s Sydney Bristow and Buffy Summers to you.)

Ryan’s Jaime is kind of a bore. In fact, she’s the second most interesting bionic woman on the show. Sackhoff, already a fanboy favorite thanks to her work on Battlestar Galactica, is way more fun to watch as Jaime’s evil opposite. It’s a treat to hear her say things like, “I’m cutting away all the parts of me that are weak,” when discussing her continued bionic self-modifications.

The rest of the show’s supporting players are largely useless. Besides for Ferrer, the Burket Group’s employees are a bunch of stiffs. And Jaime is saddled with a teenaged sister (Lucy Hale) who we’re told is a brilliant computer hacker, though Hale’s flawless, magazine-ready facial features would be more at home on The CW’s Gossip Girl than here. Actually, little sis’s computer prowess has been M.I.A. since the pilot. Maybe it’s being dropped altogether.

Who knows with this show? Characters often end an episode in one situation, only to reappear somewhere else entirely the next week. Whoever’s in charge of Bionic Woman at the moment would be wise to follow Sarah Corvus’s advice and start cutting off the parts of the show that are weak. It’ll amount to a hefty bit of cutting, but this is a series, after all, about a girl who’s more computer than flesh. Maybe a system reboot is in order.

originally published in the November 9th, 2007 edition of The Herald

More Halo 3 screenshots

2007-11-09T18:34:00.000-05:00

TAYLOR ON TV: "Heroes" is in need of one

2007-11-07T19:25:00.000-05:00

Heroes needs a hero of its own … and quick! The NBC hit wrapped up its terrific freshman year with a so-so finale that most people wrote off as a temporary misstep. Now, however, it appears to have been a sign of bad things to come, as Heroes has fluttered between average and unwatchable in season two’s early goings.

The new characters are all duds, but the biggest problem has been the near universal reboot that is affecting many of the show’s primary players. Claire’s back navigating the high-school social scene, testing her healing abilities and trying to lay low. Multi-powered Peter has amnesia and once again is trying to make sense of the strange things he can do. The evil Sylar’s gifts have been stripped from him, so he’s back to square one, craving the powers of others once more. Last season, the writers carefully introduced us to each character separately and then slowly nudged them toward each other, finally putting them all together in New York for the big finish. The puzzling decision to immediately break everyone up again is not only bizarre, it’s irritating to no end.

Worse yet, the predicaments Heroes creator Tim Kring and his staff have dreamed up for their characters are boring, ridiculous or both. The biggest offender is the whole Peter-in-Ireland saga, a plotline with more holes than a roomful of Sylar victims (and their heads). There was absolutely no real reason -- not one that made sense anyway -- for those mobsters to take Peter under their wing, and even less reason for Peter to want to be there. Second prize, if you want to call it that, goes to Hiro, who’s been stuck in ancient Japan, helping legendary Samurai Takezo Kensei live up to his billing and hiding little messages in the hilt of Kensei’s sword so buddy Ando can find them in the future. Question: If Hiro can travel through time, can’t he pop back into the present, fill Ando in himself, and then travel back to the same time and place he left? Quantum physics aside, Hiro is also saddled with a drab romance where, via narration, he tells us he’s in love with a beautiful princess, who’s meant for Kensei, though almost no time is spent actually showing why he loves her.

The whole show has just turned so … unpleasant. Yeah, that’s the right word. Can Heroes be saved? Maybe. There were signs of improvement with the last two episodes. The revelation that a future plague, probably related to the mysterious virus affecting some of the heroes, will wipe out 93 percent of the world’s population unless Peter and the gang stop it provides a unified direction for the show’s disparate story threads. (Although it would have been better if details of the possible plague would have come from Monday’s episode instead of the “Next week on Heroes” teaser that followed. The only thing the actual episode showed was an evacuated Times Square.) It was also nice to see Noah Bennett (a.k.a. Horned-Rimmed Glasses Man) rediscover his dark side when he whacked a former Company mentor to cover his tracks this week.

Still, I no longer trust Kring and his writers, and part of me worries that it was former scribe Bryan Fuller, now shepherding his own baby -- ABC’s delightful Pushing Daisies, who made Heroes such a blast to watch last year. The talented Fuller was responsible for Company Man, the tension-packed episode from season one (you know, the Horned-Rimmed Glasses Man vs. Mind-reader Matt vs. Nuclear Ted showdown) that remains the show’s high-water mark. Someone else in that writers’ room needs to step up their game. Or maybe Kring should bring in new people with fresh ideas. The show is called Heroes, right? There are plenty of talented comic-book writers out there who would love a primetime gig. This show could really use some of them right now.

originally published in the November 2nd, 2007 edition of The Herald

TAYLOR ON TV: "Back" a relic of sitcom conventions past

2007-11-04T09:00:00.000-05:00

FOX’s Back to You, starring TV comedy all-stars Kelsey Grammer and Patricia Heaton, was supposed to mark the triumphant return of the classic sitcom. Let’s run down the list: Standard three-camera setup. Check. Laugh track. Check. Easy jokes that are set up and knocked down before quickly moving on to the next gag. Check. At the start of an episode, a disembodied voice even likes to tell you that Back to You is filmed in front of a live studio audience. Yes, all the tired sitcom prerequisite are here ... which just maybe explains why Back to You is so incredibly boring. If anything, the show proves that you can’t go back again.

The standard sitcom formula that worked so well from the dawn of television up until Friends and Seinfeld is officially dead, killed by The Office and Arrested Development and Scrubs and Weeds and every great half-hour comedy of the last five years that offered something different. Grammer and Heaton have dug up the body, but rot has clearly set in. No more laughs to find here.

It must be time to forever close the book on the classic sitcom formula because if the people responsible for Back to You (Wednesday nights at 8) can’t make it work anymore, then nobody can. The executive producers are James Burrows, Christopher Lloyd and Steven Levitan. If you don’t know their names, you certainly know their work: Cheers, Frasier and Will & Grace are just three shows these guys have had their fingers in. With them behind the camera and Grammer and Heaton in front, there’s no reason Back to You can’t entertain a little.

And yet it doesn’t, despite a workable sitcom concept. Grammer plays Chuck Darling, a blowhard TV news anchor who, after being fired from his high-profile Los Angeles job, returns to the comparatively small Pittsburgh market. Back at home, he’s forced to co-anchor with Heaton’s Kelly Carr, whom during the ’90s he shared a news desk and, on one occasion, a bed with. Slumming it Pennsylvania, with a spotlight-stealing co-anchor at his side, doesn’t sit well with Chuck; though that’s the least of his concerns when he finds out that his tryst with Kelly resulted in a daughter he never knew he had.

It’s a fine setup unfortunately buried under a tower of workplace sitcom clichés we’ve seen a million times before. The news station is staffed with a sexpot weather girl, a nerdy news director and a kooky sportscaster (a character not even the great Fred Willard can save). There are jokes about sex, bad driving and dead goldfish, yet no matter the topic, the same static blandness permeates every scene.

Perhaps you’ve heard tell of ABC’s infamous Cavemen, a new comedy based on those ubiquitous Geico ads. Cavemen is about as bad as advertised, but in truth, I’d rather spend a half-hour with it than watching Grammer and Heaton sling the same reheated sitcom barbs back and forth at each other. At least the people responsible for Cavemen know that in 2007 new rules apply for TV comedy. A unique story, an interesting visual style and a complete lack of respect for classic sitcom rules are mandatory when creating a comedy that can wow in modern times.

Currently there are only two traditional sitcoms on TV that I can think to mildly recommend: CBS’s Two and a Half Men and How I Met Your Mother. Although even Mother, the better of the two, is slightly subverted by its our-entire-show-is-a-flashback hook. Neither is in the same league as a 30 Rock or Curb Your Enthusiasm. Back to You isn’t even in the same world. It’s a relic of the past, redressed for the present but stale through and through.

originally published in the October 26th, 2007 edition of The Herald

Best Halloween treat ever

2007-10-31T23:22:00.000-04:00

A new Joss Whedon show is on the way! Starring Faith herself, Eliza Dushku, no less! Holy CRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAP! Must ... not ... pass out ... from excitement. Kristin's got the scoop.

Ryan Adams at Carnegie Music Hall in Pittsburgh

2007-10-30T12:20:00.000-04:00

For those who think Ryan Adams doesn't have a sense of humor, at one point during tonight's show, in between songs, Ryan jumped down off the stage, plopped down in an empty seat four rows back and started loudly demanding that the band play Cuts Like a Knife.

That was just one of the highlights from Ryan and the Cardinals' two-hour-plus show last night at the Carnegie Music Hall. The set list was strong. Three of my all-time-fave Ryan songs were played: Come Pick Me Up, Let It Ride and an awesome, slowed-down, piano-driven Halloweenhead.

For those who like the pre-Cardinals stuff, he also played To Be Young, Bartering Lines, Shakedown on 9th Street, When the Stars Go Blue and The Rescue Blues.

Two of the best tunes off Jacksonville City Nights made the cut: A Kiss Before I Go and The End. (He should have played My Heart is Broken for the trifecta.)

The crowd dynamic was interesting. Early on, we had a few assholes loudly and obnoxiously demanding that Ryan's vocals be turned up, which made everyone else quite apprehensive. (Lots of nervous shushes ... as if to say, "Shh! Please, PLEASE, for the love of god, don't piss off Ryan!") Interestingly, the same thing happened the last time I saw him. The vocals do sometimes get lost amidst all the jangling, charging guitar on the harder songs, but it is a rock show after all. Ninety percent of the time I could hear Ryan quite clearly.

Ryan barely addressed the crowd at all. He did comment on how excellent he thought Carnegie Music Hall was as a concert venue. But he talked to his drummer more than he talked to us.

The Cardinals' new guitar player, Neal Casal, is amazing, and the vocal harmonies he and Ryan put together are quite stunning. (Casal's actually been with the band for a while now, but he hadn't yet joined when I saw them in May 2005.)

Ryan was as quirky as usual. At one point, he stared at the setlist taped to the floor at his feet for a good two minutes before Neal walked over and pointed out exactly where they were supposed to be. Laughs were had by all.

TAYLOR ON TV: And the geeks shall inherit Monday nights

2007-10-24T19:31:00.000-04:00

Heroes proved to be NBC’s biggest new hit in years last season, so the network decided to surround the show this fall with two other geek-friendly series that would appeal to the same audience. The one that precedes Heroes on Monday – the twisty spy comedy Chuck – makes it seem like a good plan.

Chuck starts out with a ludicrous premise: A 20-something slacker (Zachary Levi) working as a computer repairman at a Best Buy-esque electronics store becomes a government priority when the United States’ biggest secrets are accidentally downloaded into his brain. Two agents are immediately assigned to Chuck. Sarah Walker (Yvonne Strahovski) is a super-hot CIA spy who goes undercover as Chuck’s girlfriend. John Casey (Adam Baldwin) is a muscle-headed NSA agent who becomes the most out-of-place employee at Chuck’s store. Neither of them can just kill Chuck, since the computer that once held the information now stuck in his head has been destroyed. Instead, Chuck is reluctantly pulled into a life of espionage where his talent for immediately ID’ing a wanted assassin in a crowded room comes in handy. All nervous ticks and stutter, Chuck is the anti-James Bond.

Still, he slowly learns to appreciate his new double life, especially when it comes to Sarah, who he quickly develops a crush on. And one of the smart things Chuck’s writers have done is tease that Sarah, weary with the spy game, could see herself happily retiring to Chuck’s boring old life. With merely a glance, Strahovski makes you believe that a sexy super spy could fall for an everyday schmo like Chuck. Baldwin, meanwhile, lives up to the small-screen MVP status he earned playing tough guys with fierce comic timing in shows like Firefly. Though some supporting characters seem needless and flat – including Chuck’s best bud Morgan and his sister Ellie – the show’s three leads are never less than marvelous.

One could nitpick Chuck to death. The fight scenes are a bit pedestrian, and the exact nature of Chuck’s new secret-filled brain is hazy at best. (My guess is the writers want it that way so they can work Chuck into crazy new plotlines as needed.) But, ultimately, the show is a blast to watch.

Can’t say the same for Journeyman, a more traditional sci-fi show that follows Heroes. Journeyman is essentially a Quantum Leap ripoff with less of a special-effects budget (even though flashy time-travel effects must be much cheaper now than when Sam Beckett zipped from decade to decade). Rome’s Kevin McKidd plays Dan Vassar, a San Francisco newspaper reporter who begins jumping around the space-time continuum against his will.

The logic of these jumps is confusing to Dan as well as the viewer. A sudden headache leads to a faint blue ripple, a fade to white and – bam! – Dan finds himself stuck in the past. (In case you’re not sure when, a pop song from that year will always be on hand to help.) In each episode, he stumbles across somebody who needs help and lends a quick hand before being pulled unceremoniously back to present day. Just one trip is never enough, however, and whatever unseen force is guiding Dan’s journeys pulls him back in time again and again, giving him the ability to track a person through the various stages of their life. Dan’s visits to the past all turn into complicated Rube Goldberg contraptions where Dan delivers a baby girl on an airplane in the 1970s so that the child will grow up and, at Dan’s urging, attempt to reconcile with her leukemia-stricken father but then discover that her bone marrow is instead a match with another patient who will lead humanitarian missions into Darfur. Got it?

The ridiculous part of Journeyman is that people in the past never seem to mind Dan’s incessant meddling. That girl born on the airplane has a heart-to-heart conversation with her long-lost dad while Dan, who she’s known for all of minutes, is standing right there, yet she doesn’t seem to care.

I also don’t understand why, in another episode, Dan time-travels to stop a guy from committing suicide when, later on the show, he must prevent the same dude from murdering his wife and son. Wouldn’t fate have been better served if Dan would have just let the guy kill himself?

There’s some other weird stuff going on in Journeyman. An ex-fiancée who Dan thought was dead can travel through time too. You’d think she’d be eager to help Dan figure out what the heck’s going on, but she’d rather just offer up some cryptic advice for the beginning time-traveler. McKidd has a befuddled charm to him, but that’s not nearly enough to save this show from drowning in a sea of warmed-over sci-fi clichés. As time-travel shows go, Journeyman takes a quantum leap all right – a quantum leap backward.

originally published in the October 19th, 2007 edition of The Herald

Halo 3 snapshots

2007-10-18T00:31:00.000-04:00

So Halo 3 has this awesome feature where you can save film clips and snapshots from campaign, co-op and multiplayer modes. Over the last few days I've grown quite addicted to trying to pull the best photos from my adventures in the game. Some of my faves ...

Bookgasm gives "Webslinger" a shout out

2007-10-17T23:07:00.000-04:00

If you click here and scroll down a bit, you'll find a nice little mention I received in a July post at Bookgasm, which recommended Webslinger for all who "go nuts for Marvel's multiple monthly titles." Thanks, Bookgasm!

TAYLOR ON TV: One "Nation" underwhelms

2007-10-17T19:11:00.000-04:00

There are times when CBS’s Kid Nation almost becomes the inspired reality show I hoped it would be when I called it one of my most anticipated fall shows a few weeks back. Many of the kids are supremely likable, making this the most appealing reality-show cast around. And certain segments of the show are charged with an infectious energy, the kind you can only generate by taking a bunch of preteens and shipping them off to live together with nary an authority figure in sight. There is a lot of screaming on Kid Nation, but it’s the good kind – innocent and happy and free.

Unfortunate then that the Kid Nation producers have diluted the strength of the series by forcing Survivor-esque reality-show conventions on it. Kid Nation takes 40 kids ages eight through 14 and sends them to a deserted Arizona ghost town for 40 days with instructions to build their own parent-free society. It’s a cool concept, assuming you’re not turned off by the controversial decision to turn the daily lives of children into entertainment. (I’m not; their parents signed a lengthy waiver. Plus, most of the kids seem more than happy to be there.)

The whole thing was instantly sullied, however, when the children were separated into four “districts” (aka tribes) and told they would compete against other districts in a series of “showdowns” (aka challenges). Town life is broken down into four jobs: The Upper Class, which don’t have to do squat; the Merchants, who run the town’s root beer bar and general store; the Cooks, in charge of all kitchen matters; and the Laborers, who are stuck fetching water and cleaning outhouses. Each district has a leader who sits on the Town Council, and the district that wins the most recent challenge gets to live the good life of the Upper Class for a few days. The team finishing second are the Merchants, and so on down the line. Essentially, creating a society in Kid Nation is more about winning challenges than kids working together and making their own decisions.

There’s an overriding sense of fakeness with the series as well – not with the kids, most of whom seem quite genuine, but with the entire premise of the show. Bonanza City is obviously a set, not some leftover pioneer village. And you’ve got to snicker at the “Pioneer Journal,” left to the Town Council by a Bonanza City settler circa 1885. I never realized they had laser printers that could slickly reproduce old-timey fonts in the late 19th century. The journal is another example of the Kid Nation producers pushing the show in the direction they want it to go. The kids didn’t themselves decide that the town needed a curfew. The journal told them.

Still, there are things to enjoy here. Though the show qualifies as a disappointment, I’d still rather watch Kid Nation than a tired Survivor, Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader? or any of those guess-the-song-lyric series. A few of the kids seem to be stereotyped by the editing (i.e. Greg the Bully, Taylor the prima donna), but most of them are warmly portrayed as funny, smart, lively kids. Jared, the curly-haired, raspy-voiced 11-year-old, is a total riot and single-handedly good for more quality one liners than you’ll find in an entire episode of Cavemen.

The children are never voted out on Kid Nation (thankfully – that would be crossing the line), but they can choose to leave on their own if they prefer. That, in itself, is something you’d never see on an adult reality series, stuffed as they are with struggling actors and camera hogs. Up through episode three, only two kids have decided to walk away. The rest look like they’re all having too much fun to leave. If only they’d rally together, burn that stupid journal and start ignoring all the rules set in place by the Kid Nation producers. (Suggested ultimatum: “Hey, you’ve got no show without us. So take a hike and leave only your cameramen behind!”) Now that would be a reality show worth watching.

originally published in the October 12th, 2007 edition of The Herald

TAYLOR ON TV: Bored on the bayou

2007-10-14T12:42:00.000-04:00

Name a cop show cliché, any cop show cliché. Chances are you’ll find it in K-Ville, FOX’s New Orleans-based police drama that wants to say something profound about the city post-Katrina but ends up being a loud, stupid throwback to buddy-cop shows of the past.

K-Ville, airing Mondays at 9 p.m., stars Anthony Anderson as Marlin Boulet, a veteran officer the writers want you to think is New Orleans through and through. (Although the best way they can convince you of this is by letting us know that gumbo is his favorite food.) He stuck by his city through Katrina and remains passionate about seeing the neighborhoods he protects rebuilt and repopulated. Trouble is he has a new partner, Trevor Cobb (Cole Hauser), and there’s not much time for humanitarian projects when the two find themselves embroiled in one ridiculous criminal plot after another.

Only three episodes in and K-Ville already seems unlikely to break free of its rigidly established formula. Someone gets murdered, and Boulet and Cobb are on the case. They find a clue, something that seems ridiculously made up, like a broken fingernail with a specific flower painted on it. There’s a shootout, which leads to another clue, then a car chase or a second shootout. Blam! Blam! Blam! Sixty minutes are almost up, so they bag their bad guy.

Despite all the sleuthing and shooting, the duo still find time to argue with their oafish police chief, who, of course, they call “Cap,” and say things like, “Here’s to a long partnership. Don’t let me get shot.” Didn’t this stuff go out of style with the last Lethal Weapon sequel?

Dare to peek beyond the generic, cop-show structure and things get worse. Boulet and Cobb both have detailed back stories which don’t do their characters any favors. Boulet’s wife, unsure New Orleans will ever be the same after the flood, would prefer they pack up and leave town with their daughter. Except in the episodes when she really doesn’t seem to mind. Her underdeveloped character is anything but consistent. Cobb, meanwhile, is an ex-con whose criminal record was washed away by Katrina. Devastated that he allowed his cell mate to drown when the waters came, he decides to start a new life by upholding the law instead of breaking it. To convey that he used to be a bad dude, Cobb glowers a lot. His entire back story is ridiculously farfetched.

K-Ville wants to be topical. Boulet’s neighbor says she bought her new car with FEMA checks. Hollowed out houses, destroyed by the hurricane, are a recurring setting. And among the groups swept up into Boulet and Cobb’s investigations are a city revitalization task force and environmentalists who want to turn washed-away neighborhoods into greenspace. But it all just seems like lip service to try and convince the viewer that K-Ville is deeper than the average cop show. Bulletin: It’s not.

Anderson is one of those actors who can be stunningly powerful if the dramatic material is up to snuff (see season four of The Shield), but in lighter fair, he tends to come across as loud and obnoxious. Unfortunately, it’s the later version of Anderson who shows up the most in K-Ville. In an early episode, a character sadly remarks that New Orleans isn’t the same place as it was before Katrina. “It will be if we fight for it,” Boulet replies. A noble sentiment. But the flesh and blood citizens of New Orleans who share it deserve a better show to represent them. K-Ville would like to be an inspirational tale of rebirth, if only the shaky-cam gunfights and warmed-over buddy-cop theatrics would stop getting in the way.

originally published in the October 5th, 2007 edition of The Herald

TAYLOR ON TV: Warning! Your neighbor could be a reality TV star

2007-10-03T22:49:00.000-04:00

The advent of reality TV probably wasn’t what Andy Warhol was talking about when he predicted that, in the future, everyone would be famous for 15 minutes. But it does seem like it is Survivor, American Idol and their ilk that have proven Warhol one heck of a prognosticator. Reality TV continues to dominate the airwaves, so at what point have we all either been on a reality show, or been neighbors with someone on a reality show, or gone to the same gym as someone on a reality show?

At first, I was shocked when I found out Tega Cay resident Leslie Nease, who I worked with a bit during my tenure as editor of the Lake Wylie Pilot, was going to be a contestant on Survivor: China, the 15th season of the reality TV giant. I don’t know Leslie well, mind you. She was a freelancer, and we pretty much only communicated via e-mail. Plus, it’s been more than three years since I held that post. Still, it was definitely a “Holy crap!” moment when I realized someone from Tega Cay got cast on Survivor and that I knew who it was.

Then I started thinking: Perhaps it really isn’t that surprising. Counting the 16 contestants featured on Survivor: China, 239 people total have tried to outwit, outplay and outlast their competition. Okay, still not a lot when you consider the 300 million or so folks populating this country. But let’s throw in everybody from The Amazing Race, Big Brother, The Apprentice, Deal or No Deal, American Idol, The Bachelor and Beauty and the Geek. Now how many do we have? Certainly more than 1,000. And that list only includes successful primetime network reality shows currently in production! My mind can’t handle the numbers once we factor in the Blind Dates and Pirate Masters of the world. Wasn’t it only a matter of time before one of our own popped up on TV?

And if reality TV doesn’t make your neighbor famous, there’s always the Internet and YouTube. You know that Chris Crocker guy from the “Leave-Britney-alone!” YouTube video that was all the rage earlier this month? Yeah, he has a TV development deal now. Warhol’s quarter-hour spotlight is ever-searching, and it’s little wonder that it finally shone on someone from our neck of the woods.

That’s not to take anything away from Leslie. One, I salute her unwavering determination for getting on the show. She applied 11 times before Survivor producers finally selected her as a contestant. Two, it’s nice to see Survivor still makes room for real people who live somewhere other than New York or Los Angeles. Don’t be fooled whenever a reality show lists some pretty young thing as a bartender or student. He or she is an actor, first and foremost, and reality shows are filled with them. Leslie, it seems, wanted to be on Survivor for the once-in-a-lifetime experience, not to bolster her Hollywood résumé.

Of course, now the question is: How long will her torch remain lit? Leslie is sworn to secrecy. Based on this season’s first episode (which is all I’ve seen at press time), if I could pass a little message back in time to Leslie while Survivor: China was still filming, it would be, “Ix-nay on the eligion-ray.” Flaunting your belief in a higher power is fine when winning a Grammy or the Super Bowl, but it usually doesn’t go over too well when trapped in the middle of the jungle with 15 strangers.

Leslie hasn’t helped her chances for winning that million bucks by refusing to take part in a welcoming ceremony at a Buddhist temple. And then there is also the matter of her saying, “I’m not a religious person but I have a relationship with Jesus Christ.” I know that little declaration is quite the topic of discussion on my Herald colleague Shannon Greene’s online Survivor blog. As it should be. It’s akin to saying, “I’m not a gambling man, but I did take the Panthers, Steelers and Patriots this weekend, plus the under in the Jets-Buffalo game, and I put an extra $50 on tails for the Falcons-Texans coin flip.”

Ah, but perhaps Leslie has other goals in mind than just winning the game. Not the way I’d play it, but I’m not the one on TV every Thursday night. I hope Leslie sticks around a while. Though it may be more common now than before the reality TV boom, it’s still pretty darn cool to see someone I know on TV.

originally published in the September 28th, 2007 edition of The Herald

TAYLOR ON TV: "Reaper," "Daisies" among promising fall shows

2007-10-03T22:44:00.000-04:00

The fall TV season is here, so why am I not happier? I’ll tell you why. It’s because some of my favorite shows have either been canceled (Veronica Mars, Studio 60) or had their starts pushed back until early next year (Lost).The loss would be easier to take if the networks were rolling out a slate of promising new shows over the next few weeks. Unfortunately, most of the new TV series about to clutter the networks’ schedules don’t sound all that interesting. A sitcom based on those Geico cavemen ads? Ugh. A Grey’s Anatomy spinoff? Blech. A Sex and the City clone with four guys instead of gals? No, thanks.

That’s not to say there aren’t a few shows out there that are promising a spark of wit, a hint of true creativity (a TV rarity). It probably shocks you as much as it does me that the freshman series I’m most looking forward this fall is airing on The CW, of all places. Reaper tells the story of Sam (Brett Harrison), a 21-year-old slacker who, on his birthday, discovers his parents sold his soul to the Devil before he was born. Satan, played by Laura Palmer’s daddy himself – Ray Wise, doesn’t want to torture Sam or anything awful like that. (Well, not if he doesn’t have to, anyway.) He just wants Sam to work as his own personal bounty hunter on Earth, rounding up all the evil souls that have escaped hell and fled to the mortal coil. Sam reluctantly takes the job and recruits his slacker buddies (including Tyler Labine from Invasion) to give him a hand. Now that, my friends, sounds like a TV show! I haven’t seen the pilot, but the early buzz is that the show successfully melds a variety of genres to create an entertaining comic fantasy. I’ll be tuning in for sure when Reaper premieres on Tuesday, Sept. 25 at 9 p.m.

Think that concept is out there? Well, get a load of ABC’s Pushing Daisies, which features a guy named Ned (Lee Pace) who can bring dead people back to life with only a touch. There is a catch: If he touches them a second time, they perish once more, this time for good. That’s not too much of a problem when he’s reviving murder victims just to ask who killed them. (He passes along the info to his private-investigator buddy.) But it becomes a bigger issue when he resurrects the love of his life, who sadly he can never so much as lay a finger on. The show sounds heavy, but with Barry Sonnenfeld, the director of Men in Black and The Addams Family movie, as one of its guiding forces, you can expect a jaunty, madcap tone. Premiering Wednesday, Oct. 3 at 8 p.m., Pushing Daisies could be too flighty for its own good – a problem the quickly-canceled cult favorite Wonderfalls also had a few years back. Maybe ABC will give Pushing Daisies enough time to do its inventive concept justice.

There is one other series I find myself drawn to, and it’s, surprisingly, a reality show. CBS’s Kid Nation has whipped up a storm of controversy over the last few weeks, as you would expect from a show that deposits a bunch of 8 to 15-year-olds in a deserted mining town so they can create their own adult-free society. Ignoring the controversy, which stems from accusations that child labor laws were broken and that some of the children were slightly injured during filming, you must admit it’s a fascinating experiment in reality TV – to see how much better these flesh-and-blood kids fare over their fictional Lord of the Flies counterparts. While adults always come across as fake show boaters in the reality genre, kids, I suspect, would be more immune to the cameras and more apt to just act themselves. Yes, I too have concerns about the precedent being set when a network offers up the lives of children for our viewing pleasure, but I highly doubt the kids were ever in any real danger. Do you really think CBS would be stupid enough to let the set of Kid Nation turn into anything other than a super-cool summer camp with cameras? Anyway, the cast’s parents all signed a massive contract before their children were permitted to take part in the show. So if it’s okay with the parents and okay with the kids, then I suppose it’s okay with me. Kid Nation already debuted earlier this week, after this column’s deadline. New episodes will air Wednesdays at 8 p.m.

originally published in the September 21st, 2007 edition of The Herald

Turns out I was foiled, not spoiled

2007-09-24T23:23:00.000-04:00

Remember this big ol' rant from two months back? Well, even though the emotion remains valid, as there were people out there who did have Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows cruelly spoiled for them, in the end, I was not one of them. The supposed spoiler that set me off that day -- "Bellatrix kills Ron" -- turned out not to be a spoiler at all, but rather a foiler, a fake bit of information intending to annoy without actually being correct. So I got a bonus surprise from Deathly Hallows: Ron actually lives!

So, yeah, it took me two months, but I finally finished Hallows. Whaddya want? I've been kind of busy lately. I thought the first third of the book was dandy, the middle third fairly boring (way too much camping in the woods and arguing about what to do next), and the final third the most fulfilling, most exciting, most wonderful 250 pages of fiction I have read in my entire life. God, what a perfect ending to such a marvelous series. I wanted to stand up and cheer six or seven different times during the Battle of Hogwarts. J.K. Rowling did something that many a storyteller cannot -- she ended her epic tale in a way that completely paid off everything that happened in the thousands of preceding pages. I can't wait to someday read these book to my daughter.

TAYLOR ON TV: 2007 Emmy predictions

2007-09-19T19:45:00.000-04:00

The Emmys have never really been worth watching for the actual awards. As you must know, they usually nominate the wrong people and then choose the wrong winner from the nominees. Still, the show itself can be entertaining, especially when the producers pick a good host. (Conan O’Brien has killed at this thing a couple of times.) This year, however, the Emmy ringleader is none other than Ryan Seacrest. Ugh. And here I thought we’d be free of him until American Idol starts back up in January. I predict plenty of Simon Cowell jokes this Sunday at 8 p.m. on FOX. Oh, and since I’m making predictions …

Outstanding Drama Series—the nominees, Grey’s Anatomy, House, The Sopranos, Heroes and Boston Legal

Should Win: The Sopranos because it secured its considerable legacy with a better-than-solid final season and a brilliant last two episodes. People are still talking about that abrupt cut to black at the very end.

Will Win: The only real competition The Sopranos has is Grey’s Anatomy, and even people who like that show will admit it had a down year. There’s almost no way the Academy won’t give Tony and company the big award.

Outstanding Comedy Series—Entourage, 30 Rock, The Office, Scrubs and Two and a Half Men

Should Win: I laughed louder and more often at 30 Rock this year than I have during any comedy’s first season in recent memory. Tina Fey and her writing staff – the real one, not the fake one on the show -- must be the wittiest bunch of people on the planet. Heck, I’d give them the Emmy just for Jack Donaghy’s televised fireworks special gone oh-so-wrong.

Will Win: 30 Rock has some support. (See: Fey and Alec Baldwin’s acting nominations.) But my guess is The Office will repeat last year’s victory since even more of its actors were nominated this time around.

Outstanding Lead Actor, Drama—James Gandolfini, The Sopranos; Denis Leary, Rescue Me; Hugh Laurie, House; James Spader, Boston Legal and Kiefer Sutherland, 24

Should Win: Hugh Laurie because I demand that he wins this award before House grows old and stale. Although Gandolfini brilliantly played one of TV’s all-time-best characters till the very end. So I won’t be too upset when …

Will Win: … James Gandolfini wins for the fifth time! (What, do you want to be the one to tell him he’s won too darn much already?! I don’t.) Kiefer won in ’06, but that was coming off a great season. This year, he’s coming off a miserable season.

Outstanding Lead Actress, Drama—Kyra Sedgwick, The Closer; Edie Falco, The Sopranos; Mariska Hargitay, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit; Minnie Driver, The Riches; Sally Field, Brothers & Sisters and Patricia Arquette, Medium

Should Win: Minnie Driver was a movie actress I never really cared for who came to TV and blew me through the back wall of my living room. That’s how wonderful she was on FX’s gypsies-done-good drama. If I could magically pick any one winner from this year’s Emmys, I’d pick Minnie.

Will Win: Hargitay won last year; Arquette the year before that. Neither was all that deserving. It’s probably a close three-way race between Sedgwick, Field and Falco. Field is largely credited with holding the sprawling Brothers & Sisters together, and Sedgwick ably anchors cable’s most-watched series. But I bet Edie Falco gets caught up in a Sopranos sweep and wins in this category for the fourth time.

Outstanding Lead Actor, Comedy—Alec Baldwin, 30 Rock; Ricky Gervais, Extras; Tony Shalhoub, Monk; Steve Carell, The Office and Charlie Sheen, Two and a Half Men

Should Win: All five are quite good at bringing the funny, but Alec Baldwin was THE reason to watch 30 Rock early on when the show struggled to find its footing. And he got even better when the rest of the show developed into an awesome ensemble comedy around him.

Will Win: Baldwin used to be a movie star. Emmy voters love movie stars. And he may even get some sympathy votes for that whole dustup involving the harsh voice message he left for his daughter that was leaked to the press. (I know I was on his side there, anyhow.)

Outstanding Lead Actress, Comedy—America Ferrera, Ugly Betty; Tina Fey, 30 Rock; Julia Louis-Dreyfus, The New Adventures of Old Christine; Felicity Huffman, Desperate Housewives and Mary-Louise Parker, Weeds

Should Win: I would have zero problem with a win for Fey, but Mary-Louise Parker needs to be recognized for her stunning work, both heartfelt and hilarious, on Showtime’s mom-selling-pot comedy.

Will Win: America Ferrera for effectively centering Betty’s loopily farfetched, pastel-colored world. She’s quite good with that “What-am-I-doing-working-with-these-people?” exasperation.

Outstanding Supporting Actor, Drama—William Shatner, Boston Legal; Michael Emerson, Lost; Michael Imperioli, The Sopranos; T.R. Knight, Grey’s Anatomy; Terry O’Quinn, Lost and Masi Oka, Heroes

Should Win: Masi Oka was the reason I started loving Heroes, but Lost owes its amazing season-three resurgence to Michael Emerson and Elizabeth Mitchell, who played chief Others Ben and Juliet. Mitchell was somehow not even nominated, so we Emmy voters should apologize by giving Emerson the trophy.

Will Win: Masi Oka because he looks like a member of Best Buy’s Geek Squad but convinced everybody that he could be a badass Samurai from the future.

Outstanding Supporting Actress, Drama—Lorraine Bracco, The Sopranos; Sandra Oh, Grey’s Anatomy; Chandra Wilson, Grey’s Anatomy; Katherine Heigl, Grey’s Anatomy; Aida Turturro, The Sopranos; and Rachel Griffiths, Brothers & Sisters

Should Win: Rachel Griffiths is the best thing about the wildly uneven Brothers & Sisters, so I’d award the Emmy to her over any of the Grey’s chicks.

Will Win: I thought Sandra Oh would win this last year, and she didn’t. Bet she gets it this year though.

Outstanding Supporting Actor, Comedy—Kevin Dillon, Entourage; Jeremy Piven, Entourage; Neil Patrick Harris, How I Met Your Mother; Jon Cryer, Two and a Half Men and Rainn Wilson, The Office.

Should Win: It’s great to see Dillon nominated, even if he was more amusing in Entourage’s earlier seasons. Meanwhile, Harris and Wilson remain two of the funniest people on TV. If forced to choose, I’d award Neil Patrick Harris since he’s more integral to the success of his show.

Will Win: Piven won last year, but I can’t see him repeating. Hmm, maybe Jon Cryer since this is his second straight nomination and Men is such a steady performer in drawing laughs and good ratings.

Outstanding Supporting Actress, Comedy—Conchata Ferrell, Two and a Half Men; Jenna Fischer, The Office; Jaime Pressly, My Name is Earl; Elizabeth Perkins, Weeds; Holland Taylor, Two and a Half Men and Vanessa Williams, Ugly Betty.

Should Win: Jaime Pressly since she should have won last year for her hilarious redneck antics on Earl, but Megan Mullally robbed her. (Can I break here to mention how happy I am that Will & Grace isn’t on anymore so that show’s overrated actors can’t clog up the comedy categories?) I’d also have no problem with Fischer winning, if only for that wonderful Survivor-themed episode where Pam decided to take control of her life rather than watch it go by.

Will Win: Vanessa Williams is too over the top on Ugly Betty for my taste, but the Academy loves that stuff. Witness recent wins by William Shatner and James Spader.

originally published in the September 14th, 2007 edition of The Herald

TAYLOR ON TV: NBC and iTunes part ways

2007-09-19T19:39:00.000-04:00

If you’re someone who likes to download episodes of your favorite shows from iTunes, your choices just became much more limited. NBC has decided against renewing its contract with Apple, meaning new episodes of The Office and Heroes won’t be available over the popular online service this fall.

The interesting part is why these two have gone their separate ways. Apple says it’s because NBC intended to double the wholesale price for each show, which, in turn, would force them to raise their download fees from $1.99 to $4.99 per episode. NBC insists that’s untrue and that they only wanted to offer the buyer more flexibility by packaging shows together. Who knows which side is lying? I’d guess NBC since network execs are notoriously excellent fibbers. Although, admittedly, that “packaging shows together” nonsense sounds just like something a network would come up with. Buy two episodes of Heroes and get for free a bonus episode of some crappy drama that will be canceled in six weeks!

If Apple is telling the truth, then they’re wise to hold their ground. Nobody should agree to pay $4.99 for a single episode of a TV show that you need to download because you accidentally erased it from your DVR. (I’m convinced that’s the scenario that leads to a majority of iTunes downloads. It definitely led to me buying an episode of House last season.)

You can buy season one of Heroes from Amazon.com right now for $39.99. That breaks down to $1.74 per episode, plus all the bonus content which, for the sake of the math, we’ll label as free. A $3-plus increase just to watch a show in a more timely fashion (and on your iPod, no less) seems a bit much.

Side note: Why do HBO series cost so dang much on DVD? I wouldn’t mind owning all three 12-episode seasons of Deadwood. But not at a cost of $67 per set. That’s just shy of $5.60 per episode. Ludicrous!

Back to my point. The $2-per-episode pricing scheme for digital downloads has essentially become the industry standard. That’s also the cost of an episode of Family Guy or CSI via Xbox Live, Microsoft’s downloading service for its Xbox 360 videogame machine. Although, annoyingly, you sometimes have to pay twice as much for a high-definition presentation of a show. We could also wonder why hour-long and half-hour shows cost the same amount, but down that road lies madness.

My cable bill is a biggie, about $140 a month. (That covers my HD, DVR, premium movie channels, everything.) If I applied the $2 pricing scheme to my cable and assumed that half the shows I watch are hour-longs and half are 30 minutes, then I would need to watch exactly 1.7 hours of TV per day to be paying $2 per show. Well, sad as it may be, I watch way more than 1.7 hours of TV per day. Which means that my cable company sells me shows for significantly less than $2 per episode.

Still, two bucks seems a reasonable fee for watching a show ad-free that you could have watched courtesy of your home cable package but for some reason didn’t. Five bucks – not so much. That would be better labeled a rip-off. So here’s hoping the networks don’t start getting greedy on us. And if they do, I’ll assume you all are smart enough to kindly pass.

originally published in the September 7th, 2007 edition of The Herald

TAYLOR ON TV: Showtime is the new HBO

2007-09-12T22:15:00.000-04:00

I think it’s time we all just admit that Showtime has finally and completely out-HBO’d HBO. I can’t say the precise moment it happened. Possibly when HBO announced that Deadwood wouldn’t be coming back for a fourth season, effectively ending the run of the best new show HBO had debuted since Six Feet Under. Or maybe it was that abrupt cut to black at the end of the final episode of The Sopranos. The Jersey mob saga was the biggest rated and most loved of HBO originals, and the hole it left behind is too big for any three shows to fill.

Don’t get me wrong. HBO’s legacy as an originator of brilliant, edgy series that forced the rest of TV to raise their game is secure. In addition to those already mentioned, the network gave us Sex and the City, The Larry Sanders Show and Oz during the last 15 years. Even the network’s cult successes later became pop-culture landmarks. Da Ali G Show begat Borat. Mr. Show led to Tenacious D and Arrested Development. But this is all in the past. The present at HBO is a depressing place.

Big Love is now the network’s big show, but it’s not nearly good enough to be a centerpiece for the network. Entourage remains entertaining but no longer feels fresh. Ari’s incessant screaming is now the TV equivalent of comfort food. The highly praised but little-watched The Wire is about to enter its final season. John from Cincinatti wiped out. Flight of the Conchords was just renewed for a second season despite the fact that the public has barely heard of it. Carnivale was enthralling but lasted only two seasons before cancellation, as did Rome. HBO has a habit of greenlighting ridiculously expensive shows that it can’t afford to keep on the air when their ratings are only decent. End result: the network doesn’t broadcast much worth talking about anymore.

Showtime, meanwhile, has picked up the slack. The third season of Weeds (Mondays, 10 p.m.) launched three weeks back, and so far the Mary Louise-Parker pot comedy is drawing its biggest audience ever. And with good reason. This hilariously loopy show is better than ever, eviscerating modern suburbia, drug culture and the gangsta lifestyle all on a weekly basis. And the more cast members the show takes on, the better it gets. My favorite bit character this season has got to be Marvin, the laid-back and chatty right-hand man to the villainous street thug, U-Turn. Right now, Weeds is the best show going on ANY pay-cable channel.

Following it on Mondays is the new David Duchovny vehicle, Californication, a racy, frantic comedy that casts the former X-Files charmer as a womanizing, down-on-his-luck writer trying to win the mother of his daughter back. The show isn’t a full-blown success, at least not right out of the box. Episodes don’t flow narratively so much as they bounce around from one outrageous setup to the next. Duchovny beds his ex’s fiancé’s daughter, who likes to throw punches during sex. Duchovny gets caught having sex with a random woman in his ex’s bedroom … and proceeds to vomit on a pricey painting. In case you couldn’t tell, there’s a lot of sex in this show. (Probably too much, in fact.) Yet Duchovny is undoubtedly fun to watch, and the nifty premise allows plenty of room for growth. At the least, Californication is a nice little companion piece for Weeds. When was the last time HBO had a good companion piece for any of its hit shows?

And it’s not just the Monday-night comedies Showtime has going for it. The critical smash Dexter returns for its second season next month and will bring with it more buzz than any new HBO show has mustered in some time. Ironic that it stars David C. Hall, once an HBO poster boy for his turn on Six Feet Under. Historical drama The Tudors will be back in 2008, and unlike with HBO’s Rome, Showtime is hopeful that its audience will grow. (HBO had already canceled Rome by the time its second season started. I, like many, decided not to watch because, really, what would be the point?)

HBO won’t take Showtime’s assault of their turf lying down, although I’ve yet to hear of anything in the pipeline that sounds super promising. Six Feet Under creator Alan Ball has a vampire drama on the way. An adaptation of the cult comic book Preacher is also in the works. Unfortunately for HBO, both will be tough sells. There is one project that is reason for excitement – The Pacific, a pseudo-sequel to Band of Brothers, one of television’s all-time-great miniseries. Like Brothers, The Pacific will be produced by Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks, but this time they’ll focus on World War II’s Pacific Theater instead of the European. If only half as powerful as its predecessor, The Pacific would still be can’t-miss TV.

But it’s only a mini-series. If HBO wants to reclaim the pay-cable crown, it needs new, buzz-worthy, Emmy-quality original series. They may never replace The Sopranos. But how about finding something as darkly comedic as Six Feet Under? How about cooking up a new comedy that people will actually talk about the next morning? If Showtime is doing that right now, there’s no reason HBO can’t do it again.

originally published in the August 31st, 2007 edition of The Herald

TAYLOR ON TV: Getting my G4 on

2007-09-05T19:22:00.000-04:00

Here’s something that caught me off guard while flipping channels this summer: I found myself watching a lot of G4, the one-time video-game channel that tried (with disastrous results) to remake itself as a destination for twenty-something guys a few years back.

Artifacts from that failure remain. For some reason, G4 continues to rerun episodes of The Man Show at night. Immature, syndicated garbage like Cheaters and COPS also remain inexplicably on the schedule. And just so you know, I will never forgive Comcast, which owns G4, for buying up the similarly themed but far superior TechTV and then canceling 95 percent of the programming that came with it. That wasn’t a merger; it was an execution.

Despite all that, G4 has recently become a channel I instinctively flip to during the evening if I’m in the mood for some casual viewing. Airing at 6 p.m. is Ninja Warrior, this crazy Japanese import where people run through three stages of super-intensive obstacle courses. If you ever watched Spike TV’s Most Extreme Elimination Challenge, it’s quite similar to that. But MXC, as it was abbreviated, was played for laughs and included jokey English overdubs that turned it into a parody of the Japanese-obstacle-course genre. (You didn’t know that was a genre, did you? It is.)

Warrior, however, is serious business with ridiculously tough challenges that are too taxing for all but the most gifted of athletes to conquer. It’s not even really a race since only a few contestants are able to complete all three stages. And you will occasionally see a recognizable American face braving the Warrior course. The other day I watched Olympic gymnast Paul Hamm give it a shot. Ninja Warrior is great fun, so much so that some lucky American Ninja wannabe recently won a trip to Japan to compete as part of a contest thrown by the other good reason to watch G4 these days -- Attack of the Show.

Show is the channel’s 7:00 news magazine that focuses on all things tech and pop culture. Hosts Kevin Pereira and Olivia Munn, along with a group of regular contributors, spend an hour each day discussing the hottest cellphones, MP3 players, DVDs, video games and all the other stuff we geeks spend our hard-earned money on. Pereira is good natured and self-deprecating; Munn is cute and a little goofy. Together, they can somehow make a conversation about the new iPhone supremely entertaining.

Even better, G4 recently started expanding Attack of the Show for select events, offering live coverage of such pop-culture hotbeds as the San Diego Comic-Con, the comic-book convention where movie studios hype their future blockbusters, and E3, the year’s most important video-game expo. These special live broadcasts still need some work. Did the network really need to cut to commercial smack dab in the middle of E3 presentations from Microsoft, Nintendo and Sony? But for those of us who have only been able to follow these events in years past via Internet blogs, the G4 coverage was like being awarded an all-access pass to something you’ve only read about and never gotten to see before.

So maybe, just maybe, G4 is a network worth considering again. Two shows alone don’t make a success story, and Ninja Warrior is a gimmicky series that might have a short life span in this country. (I have a feeling I’m going to be sick of it before too long.) But if the network can create more shows like Attack which dive right into the parts of pop culture that the mainstream media usually ignores, G4 might be known as something other than the channel that killed TechTV.

originally published in the August 24th, 2007 edition of The Herald

TAYLOR ON TV: Close rules again on FX's "Damages"

2007-08-25T18:03:00.000-04:00

New York attorney Patty Hewes is a perfectly tailored character for Glenn Close. She’s got the same ferocious intelligence as the steely police captain Close played so expertly during season four of The Shield, but Hewes also possesses the lethal viciousness that is present in the most famous of the actress’s movie roles. (Think Fatal Attraction or Dangerous Liaisons or, heck, even the live-action 101 Dalmatians.) In FX’s highly promoted summer thriller “Damages” (Tuesdays at 10 p.m.), Hewes will do whatever’s necessary to win her case, be it ordering the murder of a family pet to convince a potential witness to testify or sabotaging the credibility of that same witness just to ensure her clients won’t settle before she gets her big day in court.

She’s a manipulative, conniving, cutthroat bi—

Well, you know the word for it. And Close plays her with a smirk on her face and a twinkle in her eye. It was smart for FX to build a show around her playing a character like this. She’s a joy to watch.

As for the rest of the show … well … it’s okay. Let’s put it this way: there’s certainly nothing wrong with it. Damages is your typical legal thriller, filled with surprise witnesses, fiery depositions and other standard courtroom maneuvers. Hewes and her new, doe-eyed protégé, Ellen Parsons (Rose Byrne), are engaged in a pricey class-action lawsuit against Arthur Frobisher (Ted Danson), a millionaire CEO who is accused of bailing on his own company at the expense of his employees just to further line his pockets.

Damages is also a murder mystery, since the show uses glimpses of the future as a framing device. We know that six months after Ellen joins Patty’s firm, she ends up bloody and half-naked on a New York City street while her fiancé lays dead in a bathtub. The cops suspect Ellen is the killer. Somewhere between point A and point B, things went very, very wrong for Ellen and her friends. That’s what getting mixed up with Patty Hewes can lead to.

It’s all interesting enough to make you want to tune in each week, although none of it should be labeled as inspired storytelling. The first episode contained two big plot twists – one I guessed in advance, one I didn’t. I figure that’s about how things will play out the rest of the season; sometimes viewers will be ahead of the show, sometimes not. And while Byrne seems much too innocent to have even made it through law school, the rest of the cast are matched nicely to their roles. Danson, silver-haired and cocky, makes a great villain. (Although something tells me he might not be as guilty as the show would have you believe.) The underrated Tate Donovan is good too as one of Hewes’s lackeys.

Ultimately, though, Damages is all about Close. Recently her character has taken on some unfortunate subplots. Her rift with her rebellious teenage son is an obvious attempt to shed more light on her character, but it distracts from the more interesting goings-on. Who knows if the writers will be able to come up with enough twists and turns to keep this thing interesting for 13 full episodes? And if not, they won’t just be letting down the people watching. They’ll be letting Close down too.

originally published in the August 17th, 2007 edition of The Herald

Hey, I know that chick!

2007-08-20T22:12:00.000-04:00

In its earlier seasons, I was a Survivor junkie. Never missed an episode. Somewhere along the line, I lost interest, probably because the various game patterns (i.e. one group, usually of the same age or gender, forms an alliance to eliminate everyone else ... until the outcast alliance member decides to switch sides) started to grow repetitive. Still, I found myself perusing the Survivor website after CBS announced the cast for the show's fall installment this week, and as I was flipping through their bios, I noticed that one of the contestants was from Tega Cay, South Carolina.

That caught my interest because I used to live in Fort Mill, which is mere minutes away from Tega Cay, and actually edited two different weekly newspapers earlier this decade that included Tega Cay in their coverage area. So I checked woman's name -- Leslie Nease. Hey, I know that name. How do I know that name? She looks familiar too. I ran a quick Internet search and quickly found my answer. Leslie used to write a fitness column for the Lake Wylie Pilot during the short time I was the editor there. It was a freelance, once-a-month kind of thing, so I likely only talked to her in person a couple of times. Further Googling showed that she continued writing that column until earlier this year, when she quit to focus on her radio talk show, which airs on a Charlotte Christian station.

I may try to interview her for my TV column when she gets back. (Would she be back already? Hmm, I'm not sure how far in advance Survivor is taped.) Or maybe the Herald's A&E news writers already have that covered. Such an interesting thing, though, to realize you know somebody who's about to be on one of TV's reality behemoths. Perhaps I'll tune into Survivor again this fall to see how she does.

TAYLOR ON TV: "Mad Men" full of style but light on drama

2007-08-15T20:08:00.000-04:00

More than anything else, AMC’s new original series Mad Men (Thursdays, 10 p.m.) is about a moment in time, as the show gorgeously recreates the dawn of the 1960s in New York City. The advertising execs the show centers on wear crisp suits and neatly cropped hair. Their secretaries flash their ankles and cinch their dresses tightly at the hip, hoping to catch a young ad man’s eye. The housewives call in to ask what their men would like for dinner and worry about the value of their homes now that a divorcee with two kids has moved into the neighborhood. Everyone smokes all the time, even the doctors.

The ’60s have only just arrived, so the hippie movement is a few years down the road, although Volkswagen Beetles are gaining in popularity thanks to a series of quirky magazine ads. Seeing a psychiatrist will draw ridicule and walking for pleasure and exercise is unheard of. Casual references are made to a young presidential hopeful by the name of Richard Nixon. Further establishing that this is a showy period piece, Mad Men winks at the viewer with little jokes about what technology was available then and what is still to come. A seasoned secretary warns the new girl not to be intimidated by the “complicated” electric typewriter. Aerosol cans are the big new thing. And after a colleague is caught stealing a printed report, a man accuses, “It’s not like there’s some magical machine that makes identical copies of things.” He’s right. Not until Xerox introduced it a few years later.

So much of Mad Men is about the setting, it’s unfortunate that the show’s many characters are far less defined. At the front is Don Draper (Jon Hamm), a self-aware advertising genius who prefers not to mix his personal life with work, even if his junior execs are always yammering away about their wives, their girlfriends or the cute new secretary they’re trying to bed. Don’s got a wife and two kids, and unbeknownst to everyone else, a regular fling on the side. She’s an artist named Midge (Standoff’s Rosemarie DeWitt), the kind of free-thinking woman who won’t become more prevalent until the women’s lib movement picks up steam later in the decade. Strangely, though, Don most fancies Rachel Menken (Maggie Siff), the female head of a local department store who employs Don’s agency. For some reason, Don is reluctant to enter a relationship with Rachel because he’s married, despite the fact he’s done exactly that with Midge. The viewer ends up being as confused about Don’s personal life as his co-workers are.

Hamm does well enough with what little the writers give him, and at the least, he certainly looks the part. His broad shoulders and square jaw make him appear like something some ad axec actually did dream up in the late ’50s to sell perfume. The rest of the cast plays mostly one-dimensional characters. Vincent Kartheiser (all grown up since his days as Connor on Angel) is Pete, the lecherous young exec nobody really likes. January Jones plays Don’s buttoned-up wife, whose hands have mysteriously begun to go numb. At least 10 other characters are awarded decent amounts of screen time, but they’re even less interesting. And the dialogue is much too stiff for a show about guys who supposedly have a way with words.

Ultimately, Mad Men suffers from the same thing that can kill an advertisement: It’s boring. There are a bunch of little storylines woven through all that cigarette smoke – Is Don’s wife’s condition medical or psychological? Will new secretary Peggy learn to seriously regret the one-night stand she had with Pete? – but none come close to engaging the mind the way Mad Men’s costume and set designers capture the eye.

originally published in the August 10th, 2007 edition of The Herald

And if you want proof about how fake "Man vs. Wild" is ...

2007-08-15T15:43:00.001-04:00

Look no further.

I don't know Butchie instead

2007-08-14T13:28:00.000-04:00

HBO canceled John From Cincinnati today, less than a full 24 hours after the airing of the first (and only) season finale, and I'm totally bummed about it. This show's bizarre storyline about a surfing family who meet God (well, maybe he was God) was nearly impenetrable -- as I wrote a few weeks back -- but by last night's wrap-up, David Milch's strange journey proved to be one worth taking and I was more than ready for season two. Surely, I'm going to miss these actors in these parts, especially Dayton Callie as the tattooed yet thoughtful Steady Freddie and Ed O'Neill as bird-loving Bill Jacks ("Jesus Christ! JESUS CHRIST!").

It's interesting. I've been watching FX's Damages the last few days, preparing to write a column about it this week. It's a good show. Well acted, cleverly constructed. And yet I find myself completely unchallenged by it. It's not much different from a John Grisham novel. Damages is safe television, competent but uninspiring. I trade it in a second for more John From Cincinnati.

TAYLOR ON TV: Wait ... people actually thought "Man vs. Wild" was real?!

2007-08-09T11:57:00.000-04:00

When watching Man vs. Wild, one of Discovery Channel’s supposed real-life survivor shows, it takes about 30 minutes max to realize how incredibly fake the whole thing is. After all, how much tension can you build around a dangerous river crossing – the currents! the alligators! – when Wild star Bear Grylls’s camera crew has already crossed safely to the other side and is filming him follow?

Still, some viewers were shocked when The Times of London recently exposed a slew of behind-the-scenes cheats that Grylls uses to make his adventures, usually comprised of Bear having to survive for a few days in some harsh environment using (in theory) nothing but his own wits and whatever the land provides, seem more dangerous than advertised. According to the Times, Grylls routinely stays in posh hotels when it appears on the show that he’s camping in the wilderness, and he once had horses brought in on a trailer even though what viewers saw was Grylls wrangling them in the wild. Since the Times article was published, even more claims of Man vs. Wild fakery have been laid, including one that a bear threatening one of Grylls’s campsites was actually a colleague in a furry suit.

Hilarious, right? Apparently not to Discovery, which is now re-evaluating the series after the Times article prompted an investigation by Channel 4, the English network that televises Man vs. Wild. A statement from Discovery reads: “Discovery Communications has learned that isolated elements of the Man vs. Wild show in some episodes were not natural to the environment, and that for health and safety concerns the crew and host received some survival assistance while in the field.” I’ve never heard a four-star hotel referred to as “survival assistance” before, but hey, however Discovery wants to spin it.

Aren’t we finally at the point where TV watchers are savvy enough to never entirely trust what they’re seeing when it comes to any type of reality-based show? Man vs. Wild should keep its fans, despite these recent revelations, because its fans probably never took the whole show at face value anyway. Whether Grylls is sleeping at a nearby hotel or not, he’s still munching on snake heads during the day. That reminds me – Man vs. Wild is not for the squeamish. Every episode I’ve seen has had Grylls dining on some poor animal – snakes, turtles, whatever’s handy that is high in protein. Not that I’m going to go all PETA on you, but it does seem a bit needless when the cameraman and boom mike operator are probably eating bologna sandwiches just a few feet away.

Personally, I’ve always been more partial to Survivorman, another Discovery series that’s essentially the same show as Man vs. Wild but for one key difference: Survivorman star Les Stroud goes on his adventures alone, filming himself along the way. Stroud reportedly lugs 50 pounds of camera equipment around with him wherever he goes and then sets up his own shots, making his extreme adventures that much more difficult. Now that’s a man!

Still, I wouldn’t consider Survivorman a full-on documentary either. Trekking out by his lonesome surely means that Stroud cuts less corners than Grylls does. But while Stroud may film his own series, he doesn’t edit it. You can be sure his post-production crew favors high drama over the mundaneness of reality. Feel no shame in enjoying any of these adventure shows, but always be wary about believing everything you see.

originally published in the August 3rd, 2007 edition of The Herald

TAYLOR ON TV: Emmy noms confound, as usual

2007-08-04T11:59:00.000-04:00

With great fanfare, Emmy nominations were revealed last week, and as is the norm with the Emmys, you’ve got to take the little bit of good news with a whole lot of the bad. First, the stuff that actually makes some sense …

After a ridiculous oversight last year, Hugh Laurie received a best dramatic actor nomination for his exceptional work portraying TV’s most all-around-entertaining character on FOX’s House. I’d further guess that Laurie could go from not-even-nominated to Emmy winner, except for the fact that James Gandolfini is in his category and I expect Emmy voters to shower The Sopranos with awards now that it has ended. (The HBO mob drama earned 15 nominations, more than any other show.)

Also receiving a lot of love was 30 Rock, the freshman NBC comedy that started weakly, quickly got better and ended up being the funniest show on TV. It was nominated for Best TV Comedy, and stars Tina Fey and Alec Baldwin were both nominated in the lead acting categories. Happily, Baldwin goes up against Ricky Gervais, who earned a nom based on the six hilarious episodes of Extras that aired on HBO this year.

Others getting much deserved nominations were Minnie Driver in the dramatic Lead Actress category for her hilarious and touching work on FX’s The Riches; dramatic Supporting Actor contestants Masi Oki (Hiro on, uh, Heroes) and Michael Emerson (Ben on Lost); and their comedy counterparts, Neil Patrick Harris (Barney on How I Met Your Mother) and Rainn Wilson (Dwight on The Office). All of them were so terribly worthy.

That’s about where the good news ends, however. Although the above nominations are commendable, a majority of this year’s Emmy nominations were passed out to the old mainstream standbys that the voters bestow favor on every year. There’s Boston Legal, nominated again for Best Drama, Best Actor (James Spader) and Best Supporting Actor (William Shatner), even though no one technically acts on that show anymore. They just ham their way from scene to scene.

Grey’s Anatomy earned another bushel full of noms, even though the best drama that show offered last season happened off set. Meanwhile, The Shield, otherwise known as the best show on TV, gets nothing. Deadwood’s Ian McShane, who I still say gave one of the greatest performances in TV history as Al Swearengen, didn’t get a nom. Of course, Deadwood ended its third and final season last summer, and though it still qualified, with Emmy voters it’s often out of sight, out of mind. (HBO’s highly regarded The Wire was left out in the cold again too.)

Even though Lost’s Emerson was nominated, the other Other, Elizabeth Mitchell, who plays Juliet, was somehow not. Mitchell’s brilliant performance certainly wasn’t the only reason that Lost had a massive creative resurgence this year, but it might have been the biggest. How she didn’t get nominated is a mystery that would do the island proud.

Remember a couple of columns back when I said NBC will likely be using its many Emmy nominations to promote Friday Night Lights this fall? Well, strike that. The Texas football drama only picked up two noms, neither of them in a major category. Even having seen just three episodes, I know that Connie Britton was robbed. (Especially considering the wooden Patricia Arquette was nominated for Medium again.) Heck, the sole reason NBC reviewed Lights for a second season was because of the critical acclaim. In football parlance, the lack of Emmy support can best be described as an interception returned for a touchdown.

Of course, it is the Emmy Awards, where even the most obvious nominees are often inexplicably ignored. (Did you know John C. McGinley has NEVER been nominated for playing the wonderfully acerbic Dr. Perry Cox on Scrubs?) The only thing you can do is sit and home and root loudly for those few who actually deserve it. Does anyone else want one of my “Go Minnie!” signs?

originally published in the July 27th, 2007 edition of The Herald

TAYLOR ON TV: USA's new spy show is worth a "Notice"

2007-07-27T21:36:00.000-04:00

More than once I’ve heard the USA network’s new spy show Burn Notice be compared to MacGyver, the fondly remembered ’80s actioner where Richard Dean Anderson would always get the drop on the bad guys with some duct tape, a ball-point pen and a length of string. And why not? Notice’s chief protagonist, Michael Westen (Jeffrey Donovan), also has a penchant for carrying around duct tape and prefers to outsmart the villains rather than shoot them. And just as MacGyver did in the better early seasons, Donovan enthusiastically narrates his own adventures, doling out handy tips along the way, like how to build a homemade surveillance bug using cellphone parts.

Most importantly, Burn Notice, like MacGyver before it, is an awful lot of fun without making the viewer work very hard. Plots are simple; the characters few. It’s the perfect show for USA, fitting nicely alongside the network’s other breezy detective comedies like Monk and Psych.

Here, Michael is a United States government spy who receives a "burn notice" -- spy-speak for his walking papers. His contacts are cut off, his assets frozen, and he’s dropped in Miami with a stern warning not to leave the city. Michael immediately sets out to find out why he was fired, and it appears that his investigation will form a loose mythology to blanket the entire series. But individual episodes mostly focus on Michael taking on local detective-type work just to make ends meet now that he’s broke, homeless and stuck in Florida.

He still has a few friends. His former girlfriend Fiona (Gabrielle Anwar), an ex-IRA operative with a thing for heavy explosions, wants back into Michael’s life. There’s also Sam (cult movie icon Bruce Campbell), a retired spy who was a superstar of the intelligence community during the Cold War but now prefers to suntan at the beach all day with a cocktail in each hand. Together, the trio use their considerable skills at espionage and combat tactics to fight the comparatively low-wattage crooks of Miami.

While Michael has an easy enough time intimidating drug dealers and muscle-headed bodyguards, he has a rougher go of it dealing with his mother (Sharon Gless), a widowed hypochondriac thrilled that her boy has finally come back home (even if it is under such dubious circumstances).

That’s pretty much the whole show laid bare. There have been hints dropped about a vast conspiracy behind Michael’s dismissal, but they’ve been little more than a tease. The weekly cases that Michael solves -- the mafia targeting a single mother and her teenaged daughter, a man framed for an art heist -- are so lightweight they almost float right on out of the show, but a variety of stylistic tricks help keep you entertained. Burn Notice utilizes freeze frames, skipped frames and funky on-screen identifiers to distinguish that week’s supporting players, like "Barry the Launderer" and "Quentin the Con Artist."

And while Anwar and Gless are somewhat bland, the show’s leading men more than make up for it. Donovan is quirky and cool as the secret agent man out of everyone else’s league. And Campbell, the one time Adventures of Brisco County, Jr. star, does what he’s always done best -- hams it up for the camera so much that you just can’t help but love the guy.

Burn Notice is far from the deepest spy show you’ve ever seen. Don’t tune in expecting the byzantine plot complexities of Alias. But it does have that same scruffy charm that kept MacGyver on the air for eight seasons. Maybe the secret is the duct tape …

originally published in the July 20th, 2007 edition of The Herald

Come on. I'll buy you a drink. You know, a drink?

2007-07-26T21:49:00.002-04:00

Holy crap, does Marion Ravenw-- uh, I mean Karen Allen look great.

Between Indy IV and The Dark Knight, next summer could easily make us forget all about this summer's disappointments.

(What disappointments, you ask? Oh, just this one and this one and this one.)

The Batman book unveiled

2007-07-19T22:29:00.001-04:00

The book of Batman essays I have a piece featured in has a name and a cover. Batman Unauthorized: Vigilantes, Jokers and Heroes in Gotham City will be released on March 1, 2008. You can pre-order it from amazon.com right here.

TAYLOR ON TV: Cable networks own the summer

2007-07-19T22:13:00.000-04:00

How are you spending your days this summer? Are you outside, congregating with all things natural and enjoying the warm weather? Or are you flopped on your coach, flipping through channels as the air conditioner runs on high? If it’s the latter, I’d bet you’re ignoring the broadcast networks and instead watching cable.

And, honestly, why wouldn’t you? Cable is clearly where it’s at this summer, with a slew of high-profile cable channels offering original, compelling dramas and comedies while NBC, CBS and the like trot out the usual reality nonsense like America’s Got Talent and Big Brother 8 (yawn).

TNT’s The Closer is a certified smash in its third season. The Kyra Sedgwick-led police drama is pulling in more than seven million viewers a week, a number that places it among the broadcast network’s biggest summer hits. Not as big for the network is Heartland, the new Treat Williams medical drama, but it still drew a respectable 3.4 million last week. And beginning July 18, TNT adds another female cop to its force when Saving Grace, starring Holly Hunter as a detective with an honest-to-God guardian angel, premieres.

TNT execs clearly want to usurp FX as the place to go for cable’s best dramas. They’ll have their work cut out for them, as FX readies Damages for a July 24 bow. If you’re currently watching Rescue Me, then you’ve already seen the previews with a scenery-chomping Glenn Close as a tough-as-nails lawyer going after a surprisingly evil Ted Danson. Rose Byrne plays the novice lawyer tragically caught in the middle. Close was fantastic on The Shield a few seasons back, so Damages is definitely on my summer must-see list.

Elsewhere, Lifetimes has Army Wives, which scored the highest premiere ratings in that network’s history. USA is still doing the quirky drama thing, adding Burn Notice, about an American spy who must stoop to working as a lowly private eye when he gets fired, to its schedule alongside Monk and Psych (both back for new seasons). Notice is pulling in almost four million viewers weekly. (Stay tuned for an in-depth review, coming to this spot very soon.) Even the teen sci-fi series Kyle XY is receiving good ratings and press for the little-thought-about ABC Family channel. Cable networks have certainly found a winning formula by airing the kinds of series during the summer that broadcast networks have shied away from ever since Survivor scored big back in 2000.

Pay cable isn’t fooling around either. HBO now has John From Cincinnati, Flight of the Conchords and a new season of Entourage all pleasing their respective fans. And Showtime is bringing David Duchovny back to TV for Californication, premiering August 13. Judging by the late-night, R-rated commercials I’ve seen, Californication is going to be racy, risky and hilarious. Duchovny plays a washed-up novelist and out-of-control hedonist who decides that, to get his hectic life straightened out, he must win back his ex-wife. It’s role perfectly suited for Duchovny, an actor who TV has greatly missed ever since The X-Files signed off. Better yet, the show will be paired with Mary-Louise Parker’s brilliant stoners-in-suburbia comedy Weeds, returning for a third season.

So, as you can see, there’s plenty to watch if your ideal summer evening involves a cool drink, the remote control and somewhere comfy to prop your feet. Just don’t get addicted to too many of these shows. They could end up consuming most of your free time, and after all, it’s not a bad idea to head outdoors for a nice walk once in a while.

originally published in the July 13th, 2007 edition of The Herald

Concerning Harry Potter spoilers (and the assholes who post them)

2007-07-19T18:39:00.000-04:00

Well, I suppose it was bound to happen. Today, I was perusing a video-game blog, reading an article that had absolutely nothing to do with any facet of the Harry Potter franchise. I finished the article then glanced at the first few reader comments beneath, and there it was: A succinct three-word spoiler concerning Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, to be released this Saturday but leaked all over the Net earlier this week. It was a variation of the "Snape kills Dumbledore" spoiler that pissed so many off the last time around but with new names at the start and finish.

I have no doubt that it's real. Snapshots of every page from the new novel are in circulation, and brats like the one who spoiled me are now gleefully trying to ruin it for everybody. God, I hate these fuckers. Like this asshole, who told USA Today: "I am a bored, sadistic loser who doesn't play sports, have a job or have a girlfriend, so I posted Harry Potter spoilers. It was fun for myself at the expense of others."

Yeah, nice rationalization there, you little prick. As if it's the jock football player with your dream girl at his side who is made to suffer when you spoil a Harry Potter book. Here's a tip: Those guys don't read books, especially not ones with a spectacled boy holding a magic wand on the cover. So not only are you a prick, you're really fucking stupid as well.

So now a key piece of endgame information has been ruined for me two days before the book even officially comes out. To be honest, I pretty much expected it. Has there ever been a more anticipated release of any form of story-based entertainment in my lifetime? Probably not. The Deathly Hallows launch is a full-blown circus, and all circuses tend to draw the hecklers from their caves. Plus, there's the fact that I'm a slow reader these days. No all-night reading sessions planned for me this weekend. I will probably take a good week or two working my way through the book. To stay spoiler-free for that long would probably require nothing less than a total media blackout while locking myself in the basement.

Still, it's annoying as hell to stumble across a major spoiler in such an unexpected place. I've always gone out of my way to avoid spoilers. I remember when Buffy the Vampire Slayer was still on, I'd read Herc's episode previews over at Ain't It Cool News but would always avoid the invisotext spoilers and Talkback comments until after the show was over. I think knowing what happens in advance does indeed damage a good story by sucking all the surprise from it. But I've never had a problem with those who choose to gorge on spoilers themselves. Hey, if the info's out there and you just can't resist -- have at it. All I ask is that the spoiler talk be kept in a designated, labeled forum that us spoilerphobes can actively avoid. Don't be an assclown by randomly posting huge spoilers around the Internet just to nail the unsuspecting.

As a side note, you know who really must have it rough? Harry Potter fans who also happen to be forum moderators for any kind of pop-culture website. I feel for those guys and girls who absolutely can't avoid being spoiled this week thanks to jerkoffs posting Potter spoilers anywhere and everywhere. Indeed, the spoiler I happened upon was removed by a moderator within minutes of me seeing it.

Anyway, I'll buy Deathly Hallows on Saturday, and I'm sure there will be plenty of pleasures to be had in reading it. You know what they say: It's not the ending that's most important, rather the journey to get there. Through the course of six books, J.K. Rowling has been one hell of a tour guide. I'm still jazzed for one more jaunt through the Potter universe, even if I already know one of the more unfortunate destinations at the end of the trip.