Recently in Television Category

NOTE: This entry has been updated to clarify the beneficiary of the Texas Film Hall of Fame Awards and to complete a sentence I, uh, forgot to finish last night.

So I'm a little behind in my blogging... Well, I have an excuse or two. First of all, I have a new gig! That's right, the Rabbi has gone and gotten hisself some legitimate employment. Or at least some legitimate part time employment with a really cool start up. It's a company called Cinelan and we're a short film distribution and syndication company. Check out the website and you'll see what I mean. It's really cool!

The other reason is that I went and got myself sick with the influenza. That's right. The good money I paid for a flu shot this year did me diddly since I went and got sick, anyway. Not only that, but I got sick at the exact worst time. Smack dab in the middle of SXSW. Lovely. Thanks are due, however, to my angels of mercy Mike Tully and Agnes Varnum, who both came by with soup and medicines!

Add to that getting stuck overnight in Fort Worth on the way down due to snow in Dallas and this has been a rocky trip. (Stay tuned for pix of the rattlesnake cakes that SXSW Film Festival producer Matt Dentler and I ate, though!)

Not only that, I am trying to get my apartment in shape to be sold. HUGE job. So to paraphrase Crash Davis, I'm dealing with a lot of shit!

Due to the aforementioned snow, I missed what was apparently a pretty amazing party at Lance Armstrong's house. This, I was not happy about. It was a pre-party for the Texas Film Hall of Fame awards ceremony, which I was able to attend the following night and it was a dandy of a night. An annual benefit for the Austin Film Society (and not an official SXSW do), the cocktails, dinner, ceremony and auction are held each year at Austin Studios, a couple of miles north of the downtown Austin area. This year's honorees were ZZ Top, Morgan Fairchild, Mike Judge, Jayne Mansfield (accepted by her daughter, Mariska Hargitay) and Urban Cowboy (accepted by Deborah Winger) and the night was hosted by non other that former CBS anchor and new legend (and born/bred Texan) Dan Rather. He's way cool!

The evening went far more smoothly than most events of this size and it was actually pretty fun. Not only that, they served their pre-show cocktails in actual glassware, something some film companies should think about (I'm looking at you, Miramax!).

Here, John Person and Eugene Hernandez have a chat before the ceremony. That's variety.com managing editor Michael Jones' hand on the left.

Mariska Hargitay's speech in honor of her late mother was genuinely touching and towards the end she teared up pretty good. So did I.

More pix after the jump.

First there came "I'm fucking Matt Damon" and it was funny and we laughed. And now? Jimmy has gotten his revenge and what sweet, sweet comedy revenge it is. Sure, the song's not as catchy, but this one's got Huey Lewis and Harrison Ford!

Oh. My. God.
Jane Fonda says a very bad word.....

And the remix....

Ok, so Matt Damn crossed a picket line and that's fucked, but DAMN, if this isn't funny. I mean, "Let's put that guitar down and go fuck Matt Damon."

My bad. This was filmed pre-strike.

Larry Miller (10 Things I Hate About You) has a new piece at The Huffington Post about the WGA strike and it's pretty fantastic. It puts the issues into simple and concise terms and engaging imagery (do screenplays really equal commodes, Mr. Meyer?).

"There Is Power In A Union"
by Billy Bragg

There is power in a factory, power in the land
Power in the hand of the worker
But it all amounts to nothing if together we don't stand
There is power in a Union

Now the lessons of the past were all learned with workers blood
The mistakes of the bosses we must pay for
From the cities and the farmlands to trenches full of mud
War has always been the bosses way, sir

The Union forever, defending our rights
Down with the blackleg, all workers unite
With our brothers and our sisters from many far-off lands
There is power in a Union

Now I long for the morning that they realise
Brutality and unjust laws cannot defeat us
But who'll defend the workers who cannot organise
When the bosses send their lackeys out to cheat us?

Money speaks for money, the Devil for his own
Who comes to speak for the skin and the bone?
What a comfort for the widow,a light to the child
There is power in a Union

The Union forever, defending our rights
Down with the blackleg, all workers unite
With our brothers and our sisters together we will stand
There is power in a Union

Usually, there is along, overblown awards show with famous presenters, "comedy bits" and my favorite, drunk presenters and winners (they've all been drinking for hours). However, due to the WGA strike, we've been spared the chaff and are given a short 1 hour press conference. Strikes me as not exactly a made for TV moment, but well, we'll see, won't we?

I'm not sure there's going to be a lot to blgo about, but for what it's worth, I'll be here!

Live Blog Follows.....:

I can't be certain, but I'm pretty sure Joe Strummer is turning in his grave. He's pissed and he's pissed at Nissan. You see, I finally got around to watching the "Heroes" season premiere last night and it was the Nissan show, complete with the fantastic Clash cover of Toots and the Maytals' "Pressure Drop." Don't get me wrong. I've recently made my peace with the odd product placement. (What a coincidence, Claire got a Nissan Rogue for her birthday!) They help expensive TV series defray the cost of production, thus possibly helping to keep quality programming with marginal ratings on the air. But Joe Strummer and The Clash being used to hawk an automobile? Unless the rights money went to charity, this is just wrong. The only thing worse than a sellout is a posthumous one where the artist has no say in the matter.

So...Fuck You, Nissan!

Ask Roger Catlin. he agrees with me. As does James Poniewozick in his review of the "Heroes" episode, and he phrases it brilliantly, to wit: "The Nissan Rogue commercial with the Clash version of Pressure Drop? Killed a teensy bit of my soul."

But my favorite has to be Dead Spot on the Web who in his post entitled "Well Done, Nissan" writes:
"In less than an hour, you managed to make sure that I will never, ever buy one of your cars for as long as I live. That's like some kind of land speed record, but for assholes."

Well, it turns out that the Bionic Woman pilot that's floating around out there may just be the wrong one, in that sections of it have been re-cast or re-shot or both. Even if this turns out to be true, I loved what I saw and assuming they don't all of a sudden turn her into a 12 year-old girl or a 78 year-old grandmother, I am reasonably confident that NBC has another hit on their hands!

More on what I thought of some other pilots in the coming days.

Ah, leaks! What would a journalist be without them? Well, each year it seems that more and more of the new season TV pilots get leaked on to the 'net and while I deplore piracy, I do believe that leaking TV shows on to the 'Net may only serve to drive viewers to a show. What do I mean by that? Well, if enough intrepid bloggers watch a show a month or two in advance of its airing and then write about how cool it is, it starts buzz and thereby drives eyeballs to the airing of the premiere. Whatever you may believe, the number of people who can actually navigate Bittorrent and download a show is still relatively small, so most people are not downloading the pilots. Many people are still without DVRs, even. And before you cry "Snakes on a plane!" let me point out to you that the studio behind that bomb misread all the buzz flying around the web. They bought into the "any publicity is good publicity" canard and thought that all of the blogs "dedicated" to the film meant that B.O. would be high. Guess again. We were laughing at the film, not with it and word is, you had to actually be high to like the film.

I have managed to get copies of a few of the upcoming season's pilots and will endeavor to let you know how cool or, well, not cool they are. As I've said, I suspect that these particular pilots have been officially unofficially released in order to create buzz, but if that's the case, I am more than happy to indulge. I mean, what might have happened to Threshold, Invasion, Surface, Eyes and dozens of other quality shows, if they'd only been "leaked" to the blogosphere? Maybe nothing different, but maybe, just maybe they'd have earned a few extra tenths of a rating point on their debut and carried some more viewers over and survived. The truth is, most of these particular shows are getting very high positives in advance of their airings.

At any rate, watch this space for some (always spoiler-free) thoughts on NBC's Bionic Woman and Chuck (anyone remember Jake 2.0?), ABC's Pushing Daisies, FOX's The Sarah Connor Chronicles (which apparently doesn't start until Spring '08), the CW's Reaper and Showtime's Californication and the new season of Weeds.

The film blogosphere is abuzz today with the news that legendary filmmaker Ingmar Bergman has passed away at the age of 89 and rightly so. I have to admit that I don't have much to add. I am hardly an expert on the man and his work, though I do tend to use him as proof that Buffy the Vampire Slayer was a much cooler show than some people give it credit, to wit: In an episode where Buffy was going up against a monster that might possibly be Death itself, her friend Xander remarks: "And if he asks you to play chess, don't. The guy's, like, a whiz." Get it?

No, I'd rather post a little bit about Tom Snyder who passed away on Sunday at the age of 71, due to complications from Leukemia. A newsman and raconteur, Snyder loved the broadcast business and was a news anchor, correspondent and most famously, a talk show host on both NBC and later, CBS. From 1972-1983 he was the host of Tomorrow, which aired after The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. This was a legendary show in which the unapologetically un-hip Snyder interviewed everyone from Muhammad Ali to Howard Cosell to Charles Manson to, in one excruciating interview, a petulant John Lydon (formerly Johnny Rotten). U2's first appearance on American TV was on Tomorrow, as was John Lennon's last TV interview. Constantly surrounded by cigarette smoke and reveling in his deep-throated laugh, Tom was unlike anyone else on the tube.

Here's a great tribute segment with clips from Elton John, Cosell, Ali and others.

Planet Earth
Narrated by David Attenborough
Produced by Alastair Fothergill
I don't think there are enough superlatives in the English language to fully convey how mind-blowingly cool the BBC series Planet Earth is. I am only 4 episodes in and already I know that as far as nature docs go, this is the ne plus ultra of the genre. Even when viewing the standard resolution DVDs (as opposed to the HD DVD or Blu-Ray editions, also available) on a 27-inch TV, you are bombarded with such astonishing image and sound (Dolby 5.1 stereo) as to make it very difficult not to watch all 11 50-minute episodes, plus the 150-minute extra series all in one go. Of course, that would mean 700 minutes of continuous viewing. But hell, that's only just under 12 hours. Why not?

For the new NBC show "Age of Love": Women compete for love.

Erm, what? Like "love" is something you can win?

Reality shows are retarded.

So, let's just assume that the folks in Hollywood decide to make a film version of "The Rockford Files." Not a crazy idea. How's this for casting? In the role of Jim Rockford, made popular by James Garner:

We have "Bones," "Angel" and "Buffy" star, David Boreanaz:

Maybe he's a little young, but like I said, just an idea.

These are the things I think of when I'm watching the Sleuth channel....

Have you ever noticed that when a character in movies and TV shows has a list of suspects or is searching a series of rooms or dead bodies for a gun or a bomb, it's always the third one?

Ok, so from the beginning of the show, winners have been allowed to go on and on, thanking lawyers & agents, sons & daughters, directors & producers and co-stars & fellow nominees. That's fine. Some were funny, some were touching and some were fatuous, but not once did the director of the telecast play someone off. That is until Peter Morgan, winner for best screenplay - motion picture for The Queen dared open his speech with a mention of the effect that a mass, spontaneous peaceful protest by 2.2 million Londoners had in 1997. He spoke for about 40 seconds and all of a sudden, he mentions that he's being asked to wrap it up.

That's bullshit and shame on you, Golden Globes.