Chuck
by botherer on Sep.30, 2008, under Television
Oh happy day! My favourite show of last year, Chuck, is back. And it remains glorious.
It also remains critically ignored. Not a single Emmy nomination last year, while utter shit like Two And A Half Men appeared all over. But then in a year when the smug Mad Men beat Dexter, Damages and House for Best Drama, nothing should be too surprising. Anyhow, bitterness aside, join me in recognising the happiest writing and funniest performances on TV.
Season two opens with the most wonderful gag. The premise of the show… it’s unlikely. So Chuck, dangling from a high window as a thug demands to know who he is, is in a predicament. Explaining that all the secrets of all the governments have been accidentally downloaded into his brain and now he can identify every enemy agent, access all top secret data, and so on. The guy doesn’t believe him – it’s too silly an idea. The show knows it. The show doesn’t care.
The programme has a large capacity for spinning off unlikely spy stories, Chuck spotting something, or someone, which triggers the Intersect in his head and, with the FBI and CIA agents assigned to look after him, they fight crime. Well, Chuck hides from it and trips up. But there was always the weight of knowing that as soon as a replacement Intersect was created, it would mean FBI agent John Casey (Adam Baldwin – Jane from Firefly) has to kill him. It’s this theme that begins season two, with Casey’s conflict over killing Chuck playing the episode’s serious tones.
Chuck spends his regular life working in a Buy More – a perfect clone of Best Buy – a store so well realised by the show that it becomes hard to remember they’re not real. And that’s endemic throughout. So many programmes that attempt to be contemporary are of course the most embarrassing. But Chuck appears to have been made by people who’ve been outside. Which is bizarrely refreshing. Buy More’s tech team is called the Nerd Herd, and is staffed by people you believe have ever used a computer. In fact, it’s staffed by gamers, who reference real games from this decade. The latest episode has a wonderful callback to Morgan’s (Chuck’s best friend, and colleague at Buy More) plans for winning at multiplayer Call Of Duty 4. (Schematics on huge rolls of paper). Season one consistently namechecked the right games, in the right context.
There were so many fantastic jokes in just the one episode, from Casey’s target practise (a visual joke that can be done no justice in text) to Morgan’s amazingly delivered lines when he counsels Chuck. Yvonne Strahovski is brilliant again as Agent Walker, delivering some really stunning fight sequences. And Zachary Levi, Chuck, once more creates a character who is real, warm, frightened and brave.
NBC are clearly behind the show, trusting Levi as an anchor for their recent preview shows for the new season, and bringing it back post-strike without any cast changes or formula meddling. While it may once more be critically ignored because it’s a 42 minute comedy and critics are inexplicably confounded by this model, hopefully it will sit comfortably enough in the ratings to secure a full run. There’s nothing else that deserves to as much.
CBS Shows Hardcore Porn (Possibly Untrue)
by John Walker on Sep.30, 2008, under Television
I love September, and all the new TV shows starting. What a happy fun time. I shall do a rundown of what’s great, and what’s terrible, soon enough. But first, I think it’s important to share a picture from this week’s premier of Survivor, where CBS accidentally showed a Marcus Lehman’s winky on national television.
There are billions of versions of this pic about – apparently it’s the fourth most searched for thing on Google today, which is hilarious. But this is my very own snap. Mum and dad, you must be so proud.
The guy’s name is Lehman, so perhaps this is some sort of clever social satire about the evil banks being exposed? I imagine that’s definitely it.
Podcast Bonanza
by botherer on Sep.25, 2008, under The Rest
So after my quite impressive stupidity of announcing I’d never really taken any notice of podcasts, forgetting that I’ve been in a bunch of them, this week two more have come along.
Firstly, I took part in the most recent PC Gamer UK podcast, which you can read about here, and download the mp3 from here. It’s an hour with Editor Ross Atherton, Dep Ed Tim Edwards, Revs Ed Craig Pearson, and tiny, worthless freelancer, me. It’s quite a lot of fun when Ross isn’t going on about Empire Total War, and Tim isn’t listing things. Ha ha. Craig and I have a nice moment of channelling Collings & Herrin.
Secondly, and very excitingly, Rock, Paper, Shotgun has its first podcast up. The RPS Electronic Wireless Show: Episode 1 can be downloaded directly from here, and RSSd to from here.
The RPS one is of terrible audio quality. But that’s the thing about recording something for 45 minutes, and then discovering it sounds appalling – there’s not much you can do about it. So shut up and lump it, whining person. Next time we’ll be much better. But it’s a pretty good listen, for Kieron Gillen and me just rambling.
Dexter Pic For No Good Reason
by John Walker on Sep.25, 2008, under The Rest
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Bath Is A Bit On Fire
by John Walker on Sep.23, 2008, under Photos
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Collecting Collective Nouns
by botherer on Sep.20, 2008, under The Rest
It has come to the attention of comrade Kim and me that there is a woeful gap in the English language. We have plural nouns for most family relations, but for the connection between someone and their sibling’s children.
See, “siblings”, “children”, all taken care of. Parents, grandparents, cousins, all well and good. So what has happened to aunts and uncles, and nieces and nephews? I’ve got a niece and a nephew, but I’m a busy man, and I don’t have time to refer to both. I need a word to collect the two together in my modern, hectic lifestyle. And I need a word to allow me to stand together with my female counterparts.
We’re halfway there. The collective noun for niece/nephew is now ready to be unveiled. Trumpets please:
Neblings.
“Too much like nibblings,” suggests Kim.
“Not enough like nibblings!” I reply. And it is decided.
But there has yet to be progress on the aunt/uncle front. For that, I call for your help, mysterious hundred or so people who read this. It doesn’t have to be an elegant and catchy portmanteau like my genius offering above. But it has to be perfect. Quickly now, there’s a language to improve.
Best Thing I’ve Heard In Forever
by botherer on Sep.19, 2008, under The Rest
Psyched
by botherer on Sep.09, 2008, under Television
My latest TV post is up on Giant Realm. This time I desperately try to get people to watch Psych. I expect USA to see an astonishing spike in ratings this Friday, and look forward to the resulting credit.
It begins:
Meanwhile, this is the funniest thing I’ve ever seen in over 300 years:
A Very Long Story About Thursday And Friday
by John Walker on Sep.09, 2008, under Rants
Thursday night wasn’t good to me. I’d been remarkably lucky on Wednesday, flying to Seattle, going straight into the developer’s offices after getting off the plane, then wandering the town finding somewhere to eat, and heading to bed by 10.30pm (6.30am in my head). The likelihood of the first night in America is waking up around 5am, because your brain, as tired as it might be, is certain it’s 1pm and it’s ludicrous that you’re still in bed. Wednesday night/Thursday morning I woke up at 3.30am and was a bit disappointed. Then fell back asleep until my alarm woke me up at 8.30. Amazing – 10 hours sleep.
So Thursday was spent in the offices, followed by dinner with a few lovely people who worked there, and then back to my hotel. I had a lot to write before my flight home, leaving from the hotel at 4pm Friday. 4000 words needed to be written, and I had figured I’d do some Thursday night, and as much as possible on Friday. But getting back to the hotel Thursday evening, I was already exhausted, and went to bed at 10.30pm again. I set my alarm nice and early so Friday could be all work, and fell asleep by about 11. And then woke up at 1.30am. I rolled back over to go to sleep, but that didn’t happen.
BBC Blyton Blither
by John Walker on Sep.08, 2008, under Rants
Obviously the standard of journalism on the BBC News website has never been that stellar, but at least once a week you’ll find a piece that’s just so awful you rightly become more suspect about everything else they publish. While it’s tempting to forgive them due to their current campaign to sneak in many naughtily ambiguous headlines, and increasingly irreverent captions, it doesn’t quite address the rubbish that gets slung up in response to half-interesting stories. For instance, this drivel about Enid Blyton.
Blyton was an absolutely fascinating woman – a terrible, noxious individual whose spite was targeted against anyone who might cross her path, including one of her own daughters. She was intriguing tabloid fodder in a pre-tabloid age, who was also generating children’s books at a rate of one per fortnight.
Pullman’s comments in the BBC piece are absolutely spot-on – she was a terrible writer with no skill for prose – but for one thing. Not only did she write books that compelled her target audience to keep turning the pages to find out what would happen next as Pullman says, but she captured a spirit of adventure like no one else. Not out of great crafting, but I suspect because of the lack of it. There was something pragmatic about her delivery, where elaboration on a description would be a waste of time when she could be moving on to the next incident. It makes the books laughable to read as an adult, but for a kid it was perfect. Who cares what kind of blue the sea was. It was blue, and the children were going to swim in it, inevitably discovering a cave and overhearing a conversation between some smugglers. Pullman’s an interesting example – his books are beautiful. Compellingly crafted and riveting. But that was for me as an adult. I’m fairly sure as a kid I’d have been horribly bored by his descriptions of Oxford, just waiting for a bear or witch to finally show up.
The BBC story came about because of the publication of The Famous Five’s Survival Guide, which they describe as, “a reunion of sorts for the four young sleuths and Timmy the dog.” A reunion “after a 45-year hiatus.” And this is why I’m cross. Certainly this is not a matter of great import, but it’s absolutely empirical proof that not a glimmer of fact checking is perfectly acceptable at the site, no one needing to bother to researching a story before writing it. Exactly how hard would it be to have looked on Amazon for Famous Five books, to instantly discover that there were many of them written in the 1980s? Er, not very hard at all.
Or to remember that there was a TV series made of the Blyton books in 1978? And another one made in 1996?
Oh, and what about the choose your own adventure Famous Five books? Were they written in the last 45 years? All fourteen of them. Oh yes, that would be during their terribly unpopular 1980s. A hard decade for the five of them.
The piece is just one man’s poor memory of things he might have read about the books. It’s a mess of ignorance, published on one of the world’s most popular and trusted news sources. Of course it doesn’t matter a great deal in this isolated case – it’s about that dreadful old racist’s storybooks getting another reinvention. But it would be nice if the person employed to write it knew that it was “another”. Or had bothered to check. I mean, I got all the way through this without having to check Wikipedia, but for hoping to find a link for the choose your owns at the end there. Had the BBC stumbled upon this little known site, they might have spotted them too.
Poor.