Jim Connelly

No Crying for The Death of Veronica Mars

May 17, 2007 by Jim Connelly

Just after the turn of the century the old WB was one of the favorite networks in our household. Loads of shows that seemed bogus & cheesy on paper (vampire slayers, mother-daughter best friends, brain surgeon opening a family practice) ended up working amazingly well on the screen. Probably because they were writer-driven shows that had interesting points of view and created fun places to inhabit.

Veronica Mars was one of those type of shows, and it wasn’t even a WB show, but somehow made it on to UPN, which was only ever on our radar so that we could curse the perenially underperforming Enterprise. But Rob Thomas had an specific universe that he wanted his teenage girl detective (see how cheesy those words sound?) to inhabit, and Kristen Bell led a cast that played that world out to a T, which was why it really felt like a WB show. And was a natural to go to the WB’s postdecessor (new word!), The CW.

So Veronica had an all-time-great first season, a not-as-great second season, and a pretty good third season. But nobody could get past the premise and it never caught on beyond its cult. And, today, it was finally and officially canceled.

When Is FREE Video-on-Demand Not Free?

May 16, 2007 by Jim Connelly

ABC and Cox Cable are trying an experiment in Orange County this fall. They are going to give subscribers of the service the ability to watch some of ABC’s big hit shows — Grey’s Anatomy, Lost, Ugly Betty and Desperate Housewives — anytime that they wish. So far, so good.

And, furthermore, they are offering these shows for FREE. Uh-oh. That’s a bit of a red flag. Because we all know that there ain’t no such thing. If you’re not giving money, then you’re giving time.

In this case, FREE means that the on-demand shows have commercials. Which is fair: so did the original broadcasts. But what it also means is that Cox and ABC are disabling the fast-forward button so I can’t zip through the commercials. And that’s where I get off of the bus with this particular idea.

The Weekly ‘Loper – May 13, 2007

May 13, 2007 by Jim Connelly

While you were paying attention to the NBA for the first time since last year’s playoffs, here’s what we were looking at:

Helpful Advice On Adding Value To Downloadable Media – Pay attention to what consumers did with and about their music prior to digitalization, and give them the opportunity to be able to do the same things with downloads.
My Problem With The Pew High-Tech Survey – On the other hand, the years don’t seem to be as long as they used to seem.
Newspaper Freak-Out: Publishers and Journalists Need Remedial Training In New Media – Except that they’d rather pretend like it’s going away in a few years.
Politics In Second Life: Camping On a Nude Beach Waiting For Something Interesting To Happen – Our man in Second Life, Ronin Kurosawa, is finding out that maybe there could be more going on.
Rhino What I Like – What I like about those Rhino reissues is when Tim makes burns copies for me of the ones that I wouldn’t have purchased anyway.
Medialoper’s Coverage of The News of India From Pasadena: May 11, 2007 – Most people are aghast at that guy who wants to outsource the coverage of Pasadena’s City Council, but we think that it’s a great idea.

Medialoper’s Coverage of The News of India From Pasadena: May 11, 2007

May 11, 2007 by Jim Connelly

Recently, there was an article in the LA Times about the fact that a website called Pasadena Now that was going to outsource its coverage of Pasadena to writers in India.

The Indian writers would watch Web coverage of the Pasadena City Council meetings and then write up stories about those meetings. The City Council gets comprehensive coverage, and Pasadena Now editor saves money because he gets two writers for under $20,000 per year total. Everybody wins!

Then I thought, well, if someone in India can use the Web to cover News of Pasadena, then why not the other way around? Why I can’t I use the Web to cover the News of India while sitting here in Pasadena? And, BTW, I’m doing it for free, so beat that, Mr. Pasadena Now Editor!!

So without any further ado, we present the first of Medialoper’s Coverage of the News of India From Pasadena:

Priorities

May 8, 2007 by Jim Connelly

It’s 9:15 Pacific Daylight Time, and as I write this, I’m watching the fire right now, the fire that you all will be reading about in the morning. It’s located smack dab in the the middle of Los Angeles, between the Hollywood sign and the Griffith Park Observatory.

And yet, only one Network channel is interrupting their programming to cover it: KTLA, the CW. Which is how we even knew about it: we were watching one of the last two episodes of Gilmore Girls. That was how we knew the fire that had started in the mid-afternoon had flared up from minor annoyance — stupid ashes falling on our heads as we were walking from our cars and the whole apartment smelling like smoke — to potentially major disaster. Hopefully it won’t be.

[Read more…] about Priorities

My Problem With The Pew High-Tech Survey

May 8, 2007 by Jim Connelly

A lot of hay was made yesterday about a wide-reaching survey released yesterday by the Pew Internet and American Life Project. For example, one of the things that got serious play was that about half of the people out there still don’t live their lives around high-tech products.

Instead, I guess, they are living their lives around such mundane things as their jobs, their churches, their families and so forth. Then the survey broke down the actual users into sub-groups, and explained various things about the sub-groups. It was all very interesting and informative, and then I got to the very end . . .

The Heroes Online Comics: A Web Extra Done Right

May 3, 2007 by Jim Connelly

So this is how it is with Heroes right now: I TiVo the show on Monday night; spend all day Tuesday desperately trying to avoid spoilers (one co-worker made fun of me by emailing the following: “Mr. Muggles is the mastermind behind everything”); Tuesday night Rox and I watch it after dinner; and on Wednesday I check out various online deconstructions: TWoP, Sepinwall, Poniewozik , EW, etc.

This isn’t so different than my current pattern with a lot of other shows — TiVo, watch, deconstruct — except that Heroes also has something else that I check out on Wednesdays — the online comics on NBC.com.

Why Even Bother Trying New Shows on FOX?

May 1, 2007 by Jim Connelly

So, last week, after just four episodes, FOX canceled Drive, which was just good enough and fun enough for me to overlook all of the implausibilities that lurked beneath the surface.

Because Nathan Fillion has built up such a reservoir of goodwill with me and was so immediately likable in this show, I was willing to let it unfold and see if there was any good mythology there. But the ratings just weren’t there, I guess, and so FOX wasn’t.

My question is this, if FOX isn’t going to give any of their new scripted shows a chance, why should I? And, more importantly, was the cancellation of Drive a self-fulfilling prophecy: that people stayed away in, ahem, droves because they figured that it was going to be cancelled anyway?

Why an Amazon DRM-Free Music Store Would Be a Game-Changer

April 24, 2007 by Jim Connelly

There are stories everywhere about Amazon launching a music store, as soon as next month, that would feature unprotected downloadable music.

If true, and we should point out that the stories about Amazon launching a music download service have been around for over a year now, it would be the biggest thing in digital music since the iPod, and maybe even more important than iTunes. It would also make Kirk seem scarily prescient, as he predicted this exact thing back in January.

That’s What I Like: Fantasy Baseball

April 20, 2007 by Jim Connelly

So, I was reading this King Kaufman column in Salon last Monday. He was talking about ESPN’s broadcast on Jackie Robinson Day, and was relating a story that Henry Aaron was telling a story about playing second base against Robinson and — wait a second, Hank Aaron played second base?

That was Kaufman’s reaction, and mine as well, but for totally different reasons. He was just interested in it as a baseball historian, and so looked it up. And sure enough, Aaron played games as a second-bagger for the Braves as late as the mid-1960’s.

Me, all I can think is this: Hank Aaron had fantasy eligibility at 2B! How cool would that have been for my fantasy baseball team!