In Which My Re-Watch of Battlestar: Galactica Doesn’t Go Well

The other night, guest blogger Jays and I whiled away a long wait at a metro station by chatting about about the problems with the new Battlestar: Galactica. I badgered him... I mean, gently encouraged him to write a post about it.

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I admit it. I tried. I really, really tried. I got lost on this series the first time through, but back then I was in grad school, I didn't have cable, there was always a bar that I could go to and get drunk at instead, etc. etc. So when the entire library of Battlestar: Galactica got placed on instant watch on Netflix (Qwickster?) I decided to give it another try. Maybe now with more bandwidth in my brain, the show would be able to impress me more than it did the first time around.

Spoiler alert: no.

The show played out almost exactly as I remembered it. The miniseries? Awesome. The first season? Tense, riveting, dramatic. The second season? Moody, exciting, compelling. The third season? Um. Wait, what? The fourth season? Double-you. Tee. Eff.

It's no small thing for a show to write itself into a corner. Sci-fi shows in particular tend to suffer from this problem because the desire to showcase all the beautiful world-building the creators have put so much thought into often manifests in more characters and more plotlines than we really need to see as viewers. Before long, we've got needlessly complicated character interactions and histories and way too many "surprise" twists that were dreamed up in order to give us the next big shock. *insert Lost-coughing here*

I was hoping that a re-watch of BSG would maybe help me to feel less cheated by the show, less let down. The first time around, all that promise that the show started with just seems to collapse under its own weight. I was hoping that this time the story would be different. Sadly, this was not the case. The beginning was still strong as ever, don't get me wrong. The sense of dread and hopelessness pervading the start of the show is still palpable in every scene. The actors conduct little mini master classes in how to effectively show terror and futility and exhaustion all in one whiz-bang fighter pilot scene after another and the "Cylon attack of the week" trope is surprisingly sparingly used.

It's all handled with such a deft touch that you really feel it when, out of nowhere, the show trades in its more subtle metaphors about survival and how humanity deals with tragedy with a big old message stick they repeatedly whup you upside your head with the moment the Cylons begin occupying Iraq…er, I mean New Caprica… in season three. From there, it quickly descends into this weird mess of gooey, schlocky twists where instead of acting the way they were written for two years, characters suddenly take on new identities to fit the ever-meandering plot. Starbuck is a prophet! Number Six is in love with Colonel Tigh! And Lee Adama lectures everyone about how moral and upstanding he is. A lot. By the time the "Final Five" Cylons are revealed, it's hard to even care about their identities anymore because who or what they are is no longer compelling thanks to all the inconsistency in the other characters.

(Sidebar – something that's always bugged me about calling them the "final" five - it seems like a strange misnomer for the show to refer to these as the last ones, rather than the first, since the show clearly establishes that they were, in fact, the original Cylons. Well, okay not the original ones – the original ones were apparently made by humans hundreds of thousands of years ago, only to have both races almost kill each other and then start again with a new batch of humans that made a new batch of Cylons, apparently without knowing that their progenitors had done the same thing, but our Final Five were really there even though they don't remember being there because of some trick of plotting and …do you see what I mean about needlessly complicated?

The one thing that I will give the show, having had the benefit of watching it all together and seeing the entire series as a whole, is that it did on occasion do its job in seeding a plotline or an important point early on that came back in a significant way later. In watching the show over four years, some of the revelations about characters came as a complete about-face, whereas watching it in a more compact format you can see that that reveal was, in fact, rather solidly foreshadowed. The revelation about the true nature of "HeadSix" and "HeadBaltar" is a good example of this. On the whole, unfortunately, you get the impression of a show that came out of the gate with a solid premise and a polished production and creative team that became so convinced of its greatness that it fell on its face, much like a freshman quarterback face-planting on the two yard line just seconds before the end of the Big Game.

It's a lot like this. Only with robots.

By all means, do feel free to watch the entire series online. Fans will still be excited by the all the epic epicness going on for much of it. And despite the loopy writing, the show still had a complement of high-caliber actors who were able to deliver some extremely strong performances. Just be skeptical of the creators' claims that the show would re-invent the sci-fi genre. While it may have given new shows a template to follow in terms of presenting a more realistic version of the sci-fi trope of living on a spaceship, let's hope that whatever models come after this one are able to improve on their predecessors' failings.

Space Nerds Rejoice! Cosmos is Returning!

In which guest blogger Jayowolf tries to pretend he is as nerdy as me. Bitch, please.

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As strange as it sounds, Fox announced plans last week to order 13 new episodes of the classic science program Cosmos. Only they want Seth MacFarlane to take over for the show’s original progenitor/talking head Carl Sagan. Wait, what?

It’s true, Carl Sagan and Seth MacFarlane don’t really occupy the same space. One man is a progressive visionary who’s ideas about using television to explain his wonky and sometimes almost un-relatable brain works all the while to some wicked cheesy music. The other is Carl Sagan. [rimshot – hooray for cheap jokes!] But in this case, MacFarlane has been pretty enthusiastic about taking on the classic early 1980s science miniseries about the creation of the universe and what it means for mankind. Per his statement to the New York Times:

“We’re obsessed with angels and vampires and whatnot,” Mr. MacFarlane, 37, said in a telephone interview, “when there are many more exciting and very real and much more spectacular things to be excited about, that are right in our own planetary backyard.”

Unconfirmed early production stills suggest a more whimsical approach to the show this time around

Full confession, I was a huge fan of the original Cosmos series. It’s pretty much what got me interested in science fiction and shows and movies about space travel to begin with. The miniseries used what was, at the time, cutting edge special effects to show just how massive the universe was and in the process how utterly fantastic creation could actually be. It truly exemplified the adage about truth being stranger than fiction by illustrating very clearly and concisely how incredible the universe is and how limited our knowledge of it can be. And while the special effects really, really don’t hold up (not to mention the music), I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t excited to see this series updated.

Seriously. It was mostly just Carl Sagan on a Barcalounger that was supposed to be flying through space.

The thing about the original series, however, isn’t that it was Carl Sagan being his nerdy, astronomical self and just assuming that the rest of the country was as interested in pulsars and quasars as he was. Cosmos was made in the late 1970s and aired in 1980, at exactly the same time the world was staring down the very real possibility of an escalating Cold War that could turn into nuclear holocaust pretty quick. Cosmos was very intentionally made to try to help pull the world back from that brink – Sagan’s idea was that if humanity could get a clearer view of where we fit into the entirety of existence, it might help cooler heads to take their fingers off those red buttons. Science is sometimes rightfully accused of being obtuse and inaccessible, but this show was science at its most beautiful; used not just to inform, but to move.

Cosmos was unabashedly optimistic, despite all the immediate evidence in the world at that time pointing to a particularly pessimistic future. If that sounds like a similar environment to what we’re experiencing now, I suspect that may be part of the motivation for bringing the series back.

Done correctly, programs like Cosmos can literally remake how we think of ourselves and the universe we live in. At a time when it doesn’t feel like the world is on the right track, it is the ultimate way to encourage a view of the bigger picture. There is no stronger argument for creative thinking then allowing people to really wonder at how vast yet interconnected the universe is. More importantly, at least from my memory, it is also a powerful way to encourage people to think differently. If there’s a stronger way to tell a young kid that the universe is vast and limited only by his young perception of it and thereby encourage him not to just follow the path in front of him but look for others as well, I don’t know what it is.

Television’s Favorite Gingers: Special Birthday Edition!

Guest blogger Jayowolf is back again, with more gingery goodness!

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If you listened at all to public radio last week, you likely noticed amongst all the talk from the nation's elitist cultured chattering classes that Lucille Ball's 100th birthday was August 6th. The Queen of both comedy and "B" movies (seriously, she was an early scream queen in the Fay Wray tradition) left an impact on entertainment that we're still feeling today.

It's hard to overstate how significant Ball's career was. Most of modern television only operates the way it does because of her ideas for how to film a television show in a way that would be seen as new and different. I Love Lucy was the first show ever to end its run at the top of the Nielsen ratings. It was also the first show to provide a profitable business model for running a show in syndication, proving that re-runs of a show could still generate money. It was the first one shot on 35mm film, the first to use the now-standard three-camera set up, and the first one ever (yes, EVER) filmed in front of a live studio audience, establishing the gold standard for sit-coms for the next 50 years.

Much is made today about cracks in the glass ceiling and it's frankly kind of shocking to realize how many of those cracks were first made by Ball. She was the first woman to run a studio independently. Even though she initially partnered with her husband, Desi Arnaz, once they divorced she not only bought out his stake in the production company but remained as studio head. Every time a modern female producer steps into her office and contemplates the pile of scripts in front of her, she is really only echoing what Lucille Ball accomplished 50 years earlier.

Also, she's hiding chocolates in her mouth. Because that's what women do.

The irony of watching Ball's signature character, the somewhat hapless and zany housewife Lucy Ricardo, is that most of what the character was guilty of doing the actress behind it was pulling off amazingly. For every joke about how horrible Lucy the character was with money, Lucy the woman was running one of America's most profitable institutions. Desilu Productions is responsible for some of the most popular and profitable sitcoms in TV history, including The Dick Van Dyke Show, The Andy Griffith Show, and My Three Sons.

They also didn't stop at sitcoms. Do your television tastes skew more toward the thrilling action adventure hour? Desilu was the producer for Mission: Impossible. For your language requirement in college, did you study Klingon? Thank Desilu; they produced Star Trek when no one else would take the show. Also get help – no one needs to be fluent in Klingon.

Finally, this. Just because.

But because the Network giveth and the Network taketh away, it's also fair to credit Ball with being the first network axman. Under her leadership, Desilu only produced shows that she believed would capture long-term interest from an American audience. Which means the shows that weren't performing up to her standards ran serious risk of being cancelled perhaps quicker than they would be under other production companies. Every "brilliant but cancelled" show that you've complained about/missed/blogged ad nauseum over owes part of its death, at least spiritually, to Ball's keen sense of giving the public what it wanted over taking too many artistic chances.

Ball was fond of saying that you couldn't teach someone comedy; it was something that a person either had or lacked. The jury is still out on whether or not the same is true for business and executive acumen (rumor has it both our current president and the guy who had the job before him both have differing opinions on the subject) but Lucille Ball's success in both arenas certainly suggests that she pretty much always had the upper hand with us, even if her characters made us believe otherwise.

James Bond: “You’re Doing It Wrong”

Guest Blogger Jays on his favorite cartoon of the moment (borderline NSFW). Filing this under the "cartoon roundup" because... well, because I can.

xoxo
Monkey Sri

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I don't have a lot of appointment television shows – the rise of online reruns and DVRs has pretty much killed my need to build any kind of a schedule around what's on TV. That said, every now and again a good show crops up that resets that particular urge. The latest example of this for me is Archer.

Sexy, sexy explosions!

Archer is an animated comedy on FX about the missions of the International Secret Intelligence Service (ISIS), specifically agency super spy Sterling Archer. In addition to the rogues gallery of soviet-era ne'er-do-wells and the occasional modern day terrorist, Archer must also contend with his chief rival at the office (and ex-girlfriend) Lana Kane, a variety of office pencil-pushers more concerned with bureaucracy then saving the world, and his boss who also happens to be his inattentive, abrasive and over-sexed alcoholic mother, Malory Archer.

Archer combines the visual style of the 1960s James Bond movies with modern technology (GPS, cell phones) and conventions (the staff is forced to endure sensitivity training) to frankly hilarious result. It's sort of like what would happen if Mad Men took itself less seriously and featured more espionage and stereotypical eastern European super villains. You know, aside from Betty Draper. <Rimshot> In tone, it's a spiritual successor to Arrested Development, both for its irreverent sense of humor and its casting; Arrested Development alums Jessica Walter, Judy Greer and Jeffrey Tambor all play lead characters.

The title character himself is played with dripping nonchalance by H. Jon Benjamin, who also voices the lead in Bob's Burgers. Sterling Archer is renowned as the most dangerous spy in the business, despite being only moderately bright and way more concerned with his own hedonism than with anything else. He also has the unfortunate distinction of having the least threatening codename in the world, "Duchess". We later learn this was the name of his mother's favorite dog. Additional leads are played by Aisha Tyler as Lana Kane, top female agent and light years more competent than Archer but still not as highly recognized as him, and Chris Parnell as nerdy Cyril Figgis, the ISIS Comptroller and Lana's new boyfriend.

The show takes every trope of a classic spy movie and runs so far with it that it ends up in another genre. The James Bond references are intentionally mashed into the more modern dysfunctional family sitcom. And like its predecessors from that oeuvre, the show doesn't shy away from visual sight gags that are intentionally suggestive. The show has yet to meet an entendre that it couldn't double or triple.

Yup. That Photo of Malory and her dog is referencing exactly what you think it is.

Where the show's standard stock in trade really is, however, is the sex. There's no shortage of people talking about it, people having it and people doing weird things with it. Secretary Cheryl makes no secret of the fact that she enjoys asphyxiation and is often drawn with red finger marks around her neck that go uncommented on by her uncomfortable coworkers. HR Director Pam states on many occasions that her goal is to get one of her coworkers to sleep with her and she's not terribly particular on which one. And it's the rare episode that goes by without someone mentioning Sterling Archer's repeated prostitute addiction, courtesy of lines like these:

Archer: Oh my God, Cyril, you killed my hooker!
Cyril: Call girl! She was a call girl!
Archer: No, Cyril – when they're dead, they're just hookers.

And then there's the bondage, which occurs more often than you'd think…

There is actually a point to this scene, but it doesn't end up where you want it to.

Just finishing its second season, Archer has officially been renewed for season three, which will begin next year. Season one is available for instant watch on Netflix.

Gingers II: The Revenging

Seth Green

Gillian Anderson isn't the only television ginger with the ability to call up a rabidly excitable fan-base at a moment's notice. Noted ginger Seth Green is easily as accomplished as Ms. Anderson, even if his career choices have been more along the lines of body humor and melodrama to her English drawing rooms and corsets. Sidebar: Seth Green actually once guest starred on a very early episode of The X-Files, cementing the linkage between these two actors in a Kevin Bacon kind of way. You can see a shot of him in all his early 90s glory illustrating how the UFO his character saw resembled a hamburger here.

Green is probably most known for his role as Oz, the ironically calm werewolf on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, although savvy television watchers in the know will also recognize him as the voice of Chris Griffin on Family Guy. As Oz, Green got to play to every musically-inclined nerd-girl's fantasy as the guitar player for cool, hip in-show band Dingoes Ate My Baby who just also happens to be a werewolf and dates a witch. He's considerably less accomplished as Chris Griffin, and yet the character still somehow manages to come off more respectable than his sister, Meg.

Approximately 93% of all Seth Green's time is spent being this cool.

Where he really earned our love, however, is in his work on the terminally awesome shows Greg the Bunny and Robot Chicken. The former was sort of an adult version of the muppet show – Greg, the titular bunny, was a struggling entertainer who also happened to be a puppet. In the show, puppets were treated as though they were real, although second-class minority citizens. The show moved back and forth between being truly edgy (Greg loses his virginity as a result of prison sex after mistakenly being arrested for being a pedophile) and trying to maintain a network television audience without paying a bajillion dollars in FCC fines. Robot Chicken, likewise, is an unorthodox attempt to mix stop-motion animation with sketch comedy. And a lot of Star Wars jokes. Further proving his dominance over television and nerd-life, Robot Chicken was for a long while the highest rated show on Cartoon Network's Adult Swim and the second-highest for the network in general. The only show that was ranked higher? Family Guy.

The really creepity thing about Seth Green, though, is how much he comes off as a cool guy. As unabashed in his nerdiness as he is about his small stature, he easily fits the mold of that friend that would just be cool to hang with. And probably watch a lot of TV together.

Seriously. He's wee. That's his wife and that image isn't photoshopped.

Love to the Gingers

Please find below yet another ginger fan-service post by our own guest blogger, Jason (aka Jayowolf, cause apparently animal nicknames are becoming a thing). If you are a lover of gingers, as so many of us at TV Sluts are, feel free to suggest your favorite fiery-headed fox for adoration and squee.

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Not long ago, I wrote a post here that someone in my life called "gushingly" positive about Christina Hendricks. The word "gushingly" was used with that same kind of faux constructive praise, sort of like the tone of voice you use when you're trying to find something nice to say about the business contractor who just sold your house out from under you.

Now, I don't think I'm being too unfair in saying that part of the bite to the word had something to do with jealousy. And while there are probably a number of things that could have inspired said emotion, I'm going to go for the most obvious one, or at least the one that I want to believe is most true:

HOLY F*#KING SH!T CHRISTINA HENDRICKS IS A REDHEAD!!!

Don't hide from the truth, dear readers – in one way or another we're all a little intrigued by the coppertops in our lives. To that end, I offer what will hopefully become an ongoing feature on this blog – Television's Favorite Gingers.

Just in time for the New Year!

Gillian Anderson

Long before Christina Hendricks fled the sci-fi world for period dramas, Gillian Anderson had that territory mapped, charted and sold to Rand-McNally. Easily the world's sexiest doctor-cum-scientist-turned-FBI agent (granted, it's a small pool), Anderson skeptic-ed her way into our nerdy hearts as Special Agent Dana Scully from The X-Files.

While she could easily have become a staple of Comic-Con and other social-skill challenged gatherings, she skewed classy instead and opted for "serious" roles in adaptations of Dickens' Bleak House and Wharton's House of Mirth. Basically lots of time spent in corsets and drawing rooms without having to ever look at a surgical scalpel again.

Yeah, Gill – We thought the X-Files 2 script
was a little suspicious, too.

Anderson was labeled at the time the "thinking man's sex symbol", a phrase that kind of carries all the same bite as the aforementioned "gushing" when you really think about it. In any case, it may have contributed a little bit to her publicity off-camera. Although far from the train wrecks of today's modern pop culture starlets, Anderson was noted for purposefully cultivating a far raunchier image of herself in real life than she portrayed on television.

This actually was probably a smart, not to mention lucrative, move considering the last thing a serious actor wants is to be typecast. By being unafraid of showing herself as the opposite of the staid, buttoned up Agent Scully, she was also able to stick to being identified as an actress and not just the former star of The X-Files.

Also? This. Just because.

And yes, we know she isn't a natural redhead. It was out of a bottle. That why this is called "Television's Favorite Gingers" and not "Real Life's Favorite Gingers Because a Bunch of Killjoy Nitpicks Had to Get All Wicked on Our Asses."

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Next time: "As unabashed in his nerdiness as he is about his small stature, he easily fits the mold of that friend that would just be cool to hang with."

Does She Come With the Dream House Playset?

The good people from the late Dollhouse have come back together (if only briefly) to give us a bit more from that world. Sorta. Cast and crew recently filmed a video for the song “Remains,”which fans of the show will remember as the song used in the final scenes of the first season finale episode, “Epitaph One.”

While clearly not an exact slice of the Dollhouse universe, despite the presence of a few alums, the video is pretty in keeping with the themes of the show. Where Dollhouse was always metaphorically about disposable people, this video just takes the metaphor and makes it literal.



Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZNtORr6RsJ4

There are two glaring conclusions that we can draw from this semi-addition to the Whedonverse: first, even in an alternate version of Los Angeles, Topher is still a dick. Second, Holy Great Muppity Odin is Maurissa Tancharoen ever tiny! She literally fits in a box!

This Just In! News-y Update!

This timely post is brought to you by our guest blogger, Jason.

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In an attempt to actually write something relevant instead of just retrospective, your TV Blog contributors have just learned of potentially amazing news that we feel compelled to share with the world. Michael Ausiello is reporting that NBC is rebooting classic 1960s comedy show The Munsters.

The original cast, including Betty Draper. 'Cause you know…scary.

While we're only lukewarm on reboot attempts (I'm looking at you, V), this has the potential for being awesome for one reason: the show is being written and produced by Bryan Fuller, he of the Pushing Daisies fame.

For those who didn't have Nick at Nite as a kid, The Munsters was a sit-com about your average, hard-working middle class family. Who are dead. Well, kind of. The main characters were all monster movie mainstays who somehow got together, formed a family and had to live together. So it's like what would happen if the cast of True Blood went on a reality show.

So to recap, Bryan Fuller writing a show about monsters and fiends living together that is not-so-subtly subverting the nuclear family trope of most sitcoms? Oh, I am so going to watch the HELL out of that show. (See what I did there?)

Is She a Marilyn, a Jackie, or a Saffron?

Thanks to our constant friend and sometimes contributor, Jason, for the following post!

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It's always cool to see someone going back to their roots. This is especially true for someone who started off in humble beginnings before making it big. The latest to rep the "still showing you some love" philosophy? The always stunning Christina Hendricks, who got her first big start in a sci-fi show before jumping to the big leagues. (Read: show that wasn't canceled by a stupid network that may or may not rhyme with "sox" after only half a season.)

While the world has come to know and love her, some in more clandestine ways than others, as Joan from AMC's Mad Men, those of us in the geekier trades have always known Hendricks as Saffron/Yolanda/Brigitt, the sorta-wife of Malcolm Reynolds from Firefly. Joan, Sterling-Cooper's resident queen bee of the office girls, is easily one of the highlights of the show and Hendricks' newly-minted star status supports that.

Insert your own joke about "support" here.

In Firefly, Hendricks' recurring character was a con-artist who took on a variety of docile, dormant personalities in order to marry unsuspecting men, only to swindle them out of their money, valuables and presumably self-respect. Not so much a black widow as an old-school femme fatale, she showed her acting chops by playing a variety of manipulative emotional states and yet still managing to be a pretty fully fleshed-out character.

Yes, I'm a dude. Emphasis on "fleshed".

Ms. Hendricks has since left the world of space ships and special effects mostly behind in favor of up-dos and 1960s secretarial pools, but she recently reprised her sci-fi turn in the new music video for Broken Bells' "The Ghost Inside", playing an android girl who makes some hard choices to achieve her dream. Catch the frankly pretty cool and surprisingly emo-free video here (Ed also, below).