Of course there is the obligatory Save This Show campaign, but I'm well beyond believing in the power of such efforts (and in fact gave up on them after the Save Twin Peaks assault was so casually ignored a decade ago), and if I did believe in them I would contribute my energy to any of the other victims first: Farscape was the best and most original SF series ever produced, Futurama as well loved as The Simpsons to everyone I know, and Firefly the most promising series of the last few years.
Perhaps its time to just stop hoping for quality SF television and settle for the Saturday afternoon crap or nothing at all.
I was actually getting close to dumping HBO in favor of Showtime too (now that the Sopranos season 4 has ended and the new season of Jeremiah is to begin). No longer! F you guys! O yeah!
Speaking of the Sopranos, everybody knows by now that the season finale sucked. If it had been placed elsewhere in the season, it would have been perfectly fine, perhaps above-average, but to end with this is to invite only disappointment. We are all truly truly disappointed.
Edie Falco did an excellent job with this script: her acting was believable, and I don't think Meryl Streep (or whomever is presently considered the great female lead) could have done it better. But I just wasn't all that interested in the story. Domestic problems don't tend to make engaging entertainment--people have enough of their own.
The quick introduction of the seaside house felt like a thematic kludge, present only as an admittedly nice countersubject to the marriage. This could have been planned ahead--placing it just one or two episodes prior could have set it up and still allowed the conflict over backing out of the deal to buy it. But anyway.
What bugs me most (and this is certainly not a fault belonging to the Sopranos in particular) is the way all the plot arcs were left hovering in mid-air, even ones from the previous season (the Russians). This is unsatisfying. It may be "realistic" but nobody really wants realism, especially not now when there's too much realism going on in the news (and some day I need to write up my theory about the fluctuating level of realism in the news--that would be cool). But anyway.
Oh and...
Hi it's me i'm back, the central scrutinizer. Now that I'm red-shifting back into idleness, my work finished, my time freed, I can return to the more important things in the universe: books, games, television, and goofing off. Let me try to catch up on the time I've skipped:
Christmas
This was the first white Christmas in my recent memory. It seemed like it ought to be special so I tried to let it seem special as I stood on the porch of my parents' house and watched the snow drift down from the black sky through vague spheres of light cast by lampposts and porchlights (ah well); I tried to feel something more than I felt, wanting to feel thankful or meditative or at least sentimental about anything at all but came up with nothing. So sad for me!
Thanksgiving
From the perspective of last November Mondays, Thanksgiving is like the solid ground just beyond a finish line, and the preceding three days like the final sprint. (This is to people with jobs anyway, the wretched mass of most of them.) It represents four days off to most people, the first two of which one can happily forget about one's job, and focus instead on food, television, and how irritating the relatives are.
Halloween
Missed it again! I hate you all so much!
More Teevee: 24
I just watched the first eight episodes of season 2 of Fox's show 24, and surprisingly this season has not been the pale shadow of the last one that I (and all) expected. It manages to involve most of the same characters without seeming too kludged, doesn't go too far over the top in trying to outdo its predecessor (the assassination plot of season 1 has become a nuclear bomb threat here, so the behavior of the characters is permitted to extend to whatever extremes the writers can dream up--and they've been happily dreaming quite a bit), and, unlike the great majority of its peers in TV and cinema, 24:2 actually features Middle Eastern terrorists instead of the standard Russian, Croatian, Irish, or German. (Strange how being realistic has come to mimic being bold--strange and sad.)
Most impressive to me has been a theme questioning what we as individuals might be willing to do in order to protect the faceless masses. Near the start, Protag does something which, under normal circumstances, would have seemed grossly extreme, and we as the audience are as shocked by it as the in-show witnesses. Protag says something about being willing to do what needs to be done, implying that individual acts and individual lives don't mean what they did if those acts and lives are able to help stop the impending holocaust. Obviously he's correct if he's taking the correct step in attempting to avert the disaster; but what if he's wrong? Where is the boundary where he's gone too far?
And--a-and--that's all.