We're Not Who You Think We Are
OK, sure, everybody is all anticipatory for Apple’s upcoming iPhone, which is set to conquer the world in a few short weeks. And why not? It’s essentially got everything: web, email, text, music, and it runs fracking OS X, to boot. And yet, it’s not even out yet and Nokia has gone and potentially trumped it.
Because Nokia is adding a true killer app to one of their upcoming phones: the Lightning Detector!
[Read more…] about Better Than The iPhone: The Lightning Phone!
One of the more pleasant surprises about the fall schedule that NBC announced last week was that they had renewed the little-watched but critically-acclaimed show, Friday Night Lights. I will ignore the fact that they moved it to 9:00PM on Friday nights, which is when the people whom the show might appeal the most to — lovers of high school football — are at actual high school football games.
I’ve never seen Friday Night Lights, but I’d like to. We were totally overwhelmed with all of the new and returning shows last season, and the pilot didn’t grab us, so we didn’t follow through. That also happened with Ugly Betty, The Nine, The Knights of Prosperity, and er, um Heroes.
[Read more…] about A Small Piece of Advice For NBC Re: The “Friday Night Lights” DVD
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.
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.
While you were paying attention to the NBA for the first time since last year’s playoffs, here’s what we were looking at:
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:
[Read more…] about Medialoper’s Coverage of The News of India From Pasadena: May 11, 2007
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.
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 . . .
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.
[Read more…] about The Heroes Online Comics: A Web Extra Done Right
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?