2 posts tagged “tv”
This morning, my husband came across a scintillating article on the widespread use of hand sanitizer by poltical candidates. Is it good hygiene, or a contemptuous disgust for the germy little people they're shaking hands with? My husband referred to it as a "Bart's People" story, which made me laugh. And then I realized that particular episode of The Simpsons will be included on the 9th season box set that comes out in December.
The Simpsons used to be one of my favorite shows, second only perhaps to Buffy. But I honestly haven't watched a new episode in about two years. I had become so disillusioned with the show that I found it upsetting to watch subpar episode after subpar episode, especially as the later episodes began to dominate the syndication special to the exclusion of seasons 6 and 7. The last episode that made me laugh at all was the "Land of the Jockeys" episode, and that was simply because of the sheer awful ridiculousness of it all.
Season 9 is really the show's last gasp at relevance. It is thoroughly uneven, with one brilliant episode ("The City of New York vs. Homer Simpson"), a number of episodes with hilarious parts that peter out towards the end ("This Little Wiggy", though it's redeemed by the last minute appearance of the pyromaniac leprechaun, and "Trash of the Titans", which thoroughly wastes Steve Martin), and some real stinkers (...gonna use oil-based paint cuz the wood is piiine!). So it's not an immediate must-buy for me as the last 8 seasons have been. And that makes me sad. But it's going on my wishlist, where it will linger until someone either decides to buy it FOR me, or I break down and realize that my desire to see the Canyonero ad whenever I want overrides my dislike of the rest of that episode (the one where Krusty becomes an alterna-comic and hangs out with Janeane Garofalo -- god, that could have been so good).
Season 10 was my first year in college, and I watched it pretty much every week with everyone else on my floor in our RH's apartment. I'm looking through the episode guide now and I don't see a single good episode. The only funny line that's even popping out to me right now is from the Mark Hamill episode: "Guys and Dolls, we're just a bunch of crazy guys and dolls, oh yeah yeah yeah yeah guys and dolls..." And that's not even that funny. *sigh* At least season 11 has the Tomacco episode. Season 12 has Comic Book Guy's bootleg tape of Mr. Rogers drunk. ("What do you mean I can't take off my sweater? I'm HOT!") In season 12 there's literally only one episode I can remember at all (the one where they go to Brazil), and after that I honestly don't think I'd seen any until this year's Halloween episode, which I saw on YouTube and didn't laugh at once. Not ONCE. So sad.
There was also a clip from the Simpsons movie on a DVD we recently rented. It was very, very random and not particularly funny (Hower gets attacked by his sled dogs). I'm expecting this movie to be worse than the Dark Crystal sequel, which I'm pretty depressed about, too.
So the Question of the Day is about the TV shows I plan to watch in this upcoming season. I have to say, there are a number of shows that I read about in the Entertainment Weekly Fall TV Preview issue that looked pretty interesting. But, of course, I will never watch them as I don't have a TV with anything resembling reception. Well, that's not completely true -- we get Fox pretty clear. But in general, all of my TV watching either comes in the form of DVDs or downloads.
I planned to download Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip from iTunes, only to find that it wasn't being carried, which surprised me. So I downloaded a torrent and am planning to watch it tonight. I regularly download The Office and Lost from iTunes, which has worked out quite nicely. I'm excited for the new Comedy Central cartoon Freak Show, created by David Cross and Jon Benjamin, which I'm assuming will be on iTunes. Basically, iTunes is my best friend. It's cheaper than getting cable and just sitting around frying my brain for hours on end. This way, I can actively support quality shows. You can also subscribe and get a month of The Daily Show for $9.99. I download torrents of Veronica Mars, from a super-secret LJ community that I won't identify in case it were to get shut down. But if that were on iTunes, I'd pay for it. I make up for my illegal downloading by purchasing the DVDs when they come out, though.
TV on DVD is my big fascination (and largest recreational expenditure). I think it's an amazing new form of media distribution: utterly genius. In the last month or so I've bought season 8 of The Simpsons, season 2 of Veronica Mars, season 2 of The Office (even though I already purchased the individual episodes on iTunes -- I love the show THAT MUCH), and season 2 of Fraggle Rock. I'm gearing up to buy season 5 of Kids in the Hall, season 7 of Seinfeld, and volume 4 of Family Guy, not to mention the upcoming box set of old Sesame Street episodes and the long-awaited season 2 of Twin Peaks. The Twin Peaks release is still a rumor, and I doubt it's actually going to happen this fall, but that's what's been floating around. Much like the constant rumors about The State box set. I actually already have season 2 of Twin Peaks, but it's a crappy Spanish region 2 bootleg copy that I payed far too much for on eBay. Other bootleg TV shows I have include My So-Called Life (which was released in 2001 but quickly fell out of print and is ludicrously expensive to get a legit copy of), Sifl and Olly, The Jim Henson Hour, a couple episodes of Muppet Babies, and the mid-80s soap-opera parody miniseries Fresno (best thing EVAR). And, of course, I still await the eventual release of Daria, so I can get my Trent fix.
The problem with Daria, and The State, and the delayed-but-definitely-coming season 2 of The Muppet Show, is that they all have a ton of background music that the studios (MTV/Viacom and Disney, respectively) don't have the rights to distribute on video/DVD. When the music was licensed for the TV show, no one was expecting for there to be a market for TV on video. And then DVD came out, and it became possible to put an entire season of a show on 4 discs -- super cheap to manufacture, too. But because the licensing contracts didn't have home video distribution rights written into them, the studios have to go back and sign new contracts for every song. And a lot of the time, the artists (or their publishing companies, or labels, or whoever) want a lot more money for the rights to the song than the studios are willing to pay. The first season of The Muppet Show was very nearly complete -- they only had to cut about 4 songs, which for a 24-episode season that's made up pretty much ENTIRELY of songs that aren't in the public domain is pretty impressive. Unfortunately, the sketch with Vincent Price singing "You Got a Friend" was one of the missing pieces, but I found it on YouTube.
The second season is taking so long to come out because Disney really seems committed to getting the rights to as much content as they possibly can, which takes a while to finagle legally. Thomas Lennon of The State mentioned recently (at ComicCon, I think, which...why was Tom Lennon at ComicCon?) that MTV has rescored all of The State episodes so that it can finally be released, but that's still merely a rumor.
Working at Kim's, I learned a lot about all of this stuff, which was really helpful to be able to explain to customers why such-and-such show wasn't available. And Kim's has a fantastic TV on DVD rental section, although it's gone to shit since I left and am not there to pester the buyer to get every random show I could think of. What's the good of only having season 4 of The Fresh Prince of Bel Air? I'm a total completist, so things like that bug me a lot. There are plenty of shows at Kim's that I've been meaning to rent forever. Foremost on the list is Battlestar Galactica, but also Grey's Anatomy, Nip/Tuck and The L Word. My friend Ryan loves both The Wire and Deadwood, but I just haven't been able to get into either of them -- though admittedly I only watched the beginning of the first episodes of both of them.
