Category Archives: Entertainment

August 25, 2013 · 17:32

Pawns

In a great many things, I’m pretty much a “middle-of-the-road” guy. I believe in moderation, common sense, and personal responsibility. I’m a pragmatist.

Take television, for example. It’s often fashionable in certain circles that I frequent to pooh-pooh television as garbage, the lowest common denominator, something for the common folk to watch, something that’s beneath anyone with advanced sensibilities. I think that’s bullshit.

Television, without a doubt, has a tremendous amount of absolute garbage on it. “Honey Boo-Boo” is my vision of hell, just about anything on MTV is stupid enough to make you weep for humanity, and I don’t even want to start on soap operas or the tabloid shows that obsess over the Kardashians and the teeny bopper celebrity de jour.

I think the vast, overwhelming majority of “reality TV” falls into the category of “utter tripe” – but then there are “Mythbusters” and “Dirty Jobs” and “NOVA”.

The classic sitcom is terrible, with fake laugh tracks, stale jokes, and stereotypical characters – but then there’s “M*A*S*H” and “Big Bang Theory” and “Modern Family”.

The cookie-cutter cop shows are a dime a dozen, most of them “ripped from today’s headlines” or “mismatched buddy cop” variants – but then there’s “NYPD Blue”.

These days there are also horribly crappy shows made for the cable networks, like “Sharknado” and “Jackass” – but you also get “Breaking Bad”, “Game Of Thrones”, “Homeland”, “The Big C”, and so on.

Television and Twitter have a lot in common. It’s probably accurate for both to say that they are 98% or more total slime, stupidity, and infantile drivel. But that other couple of percent can be pretty amazing at times.

What the “TV is beneath me, I never watch it” argument misses is that YOU GET TO CHOOSE. You get to make intelligent and informed decisions if you so choose. No one’s holding a gun to your head to make you watch “Maury” or “TMZ Live”. There isn’t going to be a quiz tomorrow at a police checkpoint where you have to prove that you watched “The Bachelorette” finale. You’re not going to be a social pariah if you’re not up to date on the latest plot twist on “Days Of Our Lives”.

By being elitist, you’re denying yourself the potential to enjoy some truly marvelous storytelling and entertainment. By being elitist, you’re telling me that you’re not capable of making intelligent decisions on your own, so you’re going to cower behind a facade of fake intellectual superiority. By being elitist, you’re throwing the baby out with the bathwater, and then being stupid enough to be proud of it.

If you’re one of those elitists, what do you do for entertainment besides watch TV? Read books? Watch movies? Listen to music? Is every book, movie, and composition out there a gem, or do you get to pick the ones you want and ignore the ones that you don’t like? Or are you so busy in your life that you don’t have time for entertainment? If so, you have my sympathies, but you’re not living, you’re just existing. (And what are you doing reading this?)

So, in summary, I like to watch certain television shows that I really like and enjoy. Only now, I can’t watch some shows and events that I like due to circumstances that are completely beyond my control. And it’s really starting to get on my nerves.

In our part of Los Angeles, the cable TV monopoly has been granted to Time Warner Cable. As you may have heard, TWC and the CBS network are at war over how much TWC pays to CBS to re-transmit CBS shows to customers like me. As this has escalated, TWC has taken CBS (and all of its affiliated networks such as Showtime and the Smithsonian Channel) off of its cable systems in New York City, Dallas, and Los Angeles.

TWC, of course, is blaming CBS. “CBS is making outrageous demands for the right to continue carrying their channels.” We just got our TWC bill this month. With our full package of programming and internet access our bill is over $200 a month. TWC gave us a $3.67 credit for having Showtime pulled. WOWSERS! (And by “wowsers” what I mean is “What A Crock!!”)

CBS, of course, is blaming TWC. “Time Warner Cable has dropped CBS, you’re at risk of missing the NFL, US Open, and the new TV season on CBS.” I can’t even watch the shows online since my internet access is through TWC and CBS has “retaliated” by cutting off access to customers who access the internet through TWC. “Time Warner Cable Customers: Content Not Available”

The FCC and other regulatory agencies, of course, are doing absolutely nothing. Anyone who expected our “leaders” to “lead” should put on their dunce caps, go sit in the corner, and think about that for a while.

As someone who simply wants to watch football or the morning news or a favorite TV show, I DON’T CARE. I’m blaming EVERYONE. I don’t believe that CBS is trying to save me, the customer, from the big, bad, monopolistic cable oligarchy. I don’t believe that TWC is trying to protect my interest and keep my bill down.

(For one thing, if either CBS or TWC gave even the slightest sliver of a rat’s ass about me as a consumer, they would offer a la carte options so that I don’t have to pay for fifty-seven different shopping channels that I’ve never watched for a single second, or eighty-three Spanish channels when I don’t speak a word of Spanish. Does anyone see that happening any time in the next thousand years? Yeah, me neither.)

I’m really getting fed up with being a pawn, caught in the middle of a pissing contest between two multi-billion dollar multi-national conglomerates. I’m even more fed up with the constant smarmy, self-serving, “we’re doing it for you” bullshit from both sides. I don’t believe it, they don’t believe it, and no one else believes it. It’s worse than the propaganda spit out by political campaigns these days.

It would be such a relief if one of the CEO’s would get up to the podium and just say, “Yeah, we’re screwing you over. Tough shit, we don’t care. We know that you’ll come back and throw money at us when it’s over. This whole thing is nothing but an infantile contest to see who has the biggest dick and make a lot of lawyers rich. Please drop your pants, grab your ankles, and smile.”

Freakin’ idiots!

I just wish that we weren’t the bigger freakin’ idiots when we do exactly what the expect us to do. I wish there were another option other than using the “off” switch.

I wish there was a way to stop being a pawn.

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Filed under Death Of Common Sense, Entertainment, Freakin' Idiots!

August 11, 2013 · 14:17

Albums To Listen To Any Time

A few days ago I wrote about movies that I could watch at the drop of a hat, even if I just happened to flip by it on cable, already half over. Thinking about music along similar lines, what albums are there that you can listen to any time, cover to cover?

I’m setting the bar high here. I’m not talking about albums that are OK, with three or four songs that became singles and you can sing along with, grouped with eight or nine other songs that you couldn’t care less about. For example, I like Brad Paisley a LOT, and his “American Saturday Night” album has seven songs in my “Favorites” play list. But that’s out of fifteen tracks. It’s a favorite album, a really great album – but it doesn’t make this list.

I’m talking about the albums where every single song (except for maybe one) is just freakin’ great, to the point where it should be a felony to listen to the songs out of order or in any way other than as an album because they just fit perfectly and when you hear one song finish you just know how it naturally leads into in the next song.

It’s not just a collection of songs – it’s an ALBUM! (No “Greatest Hits” or compilation albums allowed, that’s cheating.)

Yeah, I might have a few of those that I can think of. In no particular order, having flipped through the tens of thousands of songs (literally) filling my iTunes, I would offer these as fitting the bill:

  • End Of The Innocence (Don Henley)
  • Invisible Touch (Genesis)
  • We Can’t Dance (Genesis)
  • Tumbleweed Connection (Elton John)
  • Madman Across The Water (Elton John)
  • Flag (Yello)
  • Breakfast In America (Supertramp)
  • Hotel California (Eagles)
  • Bridge Over Troubled Water (Simon & Garfunkel)
  • Dark Side Of The Moon (Pink Floyd)
  • Theatre Is Evil (Amanda Palmer & The Grand Theft Orchestra)
  • Fly (Dixie Chicks)
  • Wide Open Spaces (Dixie Chicks)
  • Fragile (Yes)
  • Every Good Boy Deserves Favour (Moody Blues)
  • Oxygene (Jean Michel Jarre)
  • Chronologie (Jean Michel Jarre)
  • Rendezvous (Jean Michel Jarre)
  • Abraxas (Santana)
  • “Woodstock” (Soundtrack)
  • “LoTR: Return Of The King” (Soundtrack)
  • Tommy (The Who)
  • Chicago Transit Authority (Chicago)
  • Chicago II (Chicago)
  • Chicago III (Chicago)
  • Graceland (Paul Simon)
  • Violator (Depeche Mode)
  • Life In The Foodchain (Tonio K)
  • Fresh Horses (Garth Brooks)
  • Who Needs Pictures? (Brad Paisley)
  • Part II (Brad Paisley)
  • Mud On The Tires (Brad Paisley)
  • Aqualung (Jethro Tull)
  • Thick As A Brick (Jethro Tull)
  • Diva (Anne Lennox)
  • Bat Out Of Hell (Meat Loaf)
  • Jesus Christ Superstar (OCR – Andrew Lloyd Webber)
  • Phantom Of The Opera (OCR – Andrew Lloyd Webber)
  • Les Miserables (Complete Symphonic Recording)
  • Hybrid Theory (Linkin Park)
  • Meteora (Linkin Park)
  • Fogarty’s Cove (Stan Rogers)
  • Northwest Passage (Stan Rogers)
  • IV (Led Zeppelin)
  • Crosby, Stills & Nash (Crosby, Stills & Nash)
  • Jagged Little Pill (Alanis Morissette)
  • Divine Intervention (Julia Ecklar)

Most of those are mainstream albums (well, OK, extra points if you recognize Yello or Tonio K, but if you don’t recognize Amanda Palmer, you must be new here and should click on that link ASAP), but my non-fannish readers may not recognize Julia Ecklar.

Remind me to talk about filk music one of these days…

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Filed under Entertainment, Music

August 4, 2013 · 18:24

Movies To Watch At The Drop Of A Hat

There was a lazy spot in the middle of the afternoon after I watched the Angels foolishly for the fourth game in two weeks blow a lead in the 9th inning and lose. (In my humble opinion, this is no way to win a pennant.) I wasn’t quite ready to start thinking again nor was I ready to have my intelligence insulted by 90% of what’s on television. I went to the guide information on the television to see if there was something that fit the bill for that in-between area.

The MGM HD movie channel was about a half-hour into “The Adventures Of Buckaroo Banzai Across The 8th Dimension“, which I consider to be a classic. It doesn’t matter if I come in somewhere in the middle, I can watch it any time. If I’m doing something else I can have it on in the background as noise. If I’m looking to just chill out I can sit and watch it in its entirety or from where I found it.

In thinking about it I started compiling a list of similar movies. Favorites that you’ve seen a zillion times and can watch at the drop of a hat. I’m sure everyone’s got a few of them. For me, off the top of my head and in no particular order, my list would include (in addition to “Bucaroo Banzai”):

  • The Princess Bride
  • Animal House
  • The Blues Brothers
  • Ferris Bueller’s Day Off
  • Alien or Aliens
  • Woodstock
  • Any of the three original “Star Wars” films
  • Any of the “Lord Of The Rings” films (not “The Hobbit”)
  • Apocalypse Now
  • The Shining
  • The Godfather or The Godfather Part 2
  • Harvey
  • Field Of Dreams
  • Bull Durham
  • Major League
  • The Great Escape
  • The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance
  • Groundhog Day
  • How To Train Your Dragon
  • Terminator 2: Judgement Day
  • Anything by Monty Python
  • A Fish Called Wanda
  • Full Metal Jacket
  • Blade Runner
  • Bridge On The River Kwai
  • Mr. Smith Goes To Washington
  • Amadeus
  • 2001: A Space Odyssey or 2010

How about you? What personal classic of yours am I overlooking? What might I have not seen that in your humble opinion I must see immediately if not sooner? Put your suggestions in the comments below!

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Filed under Entertainment, LA Angels

July 15, 2013 · 22:39

Jenny, Jenny, Who Can We Turn To?

The producers of ABC’s “The View” have decided that their latest hostess on their afternoon talk show will be Jenny McCarthy.

Ms. McCarthy has a couple of notable highlights to her career. She was a Playboy centerfold in 1993 and later Playmate of the Year. She has done some modeling. She has had some roles in some truly forgettable films and won a couple of Razzie Awards for them. She played a recurring character, a ditzy, buxom, blonde, on “Two & A Half Men”. (What a stretch of her acting chops!)

And she has become quite the spokesperson campaigning against childhood vaccinations, loudly and proudly pushing the completely false and discredited notion that vaccines cause autism.

Why is she now a hostess on a daily, mid-afternoon talk show aimed at the stay-at-home mom demographic? Her track record shows that she meets the definition of “pretty” used by Hugh Hefner and the mythical Charlie Harper. And…

That’s it. There is no second qualification that I can see.

But she is passionate, if ignorant and terribly misguided, about telling other parents to NOT let their pediatricians give their kids immunizations for measles, polio, chickenpox, diphtheria, hepatitis, flu, mumps, pertussis, rubella, tetanus, and so on.

Others have been making a fuss over this far more eloquently than I can. For example:

  • The James Randi Educational Foundation in 2008 gave Ms. McCarthy a Pigasus Award for contributions to pseudoscience.
  • Phil Plait (“The Bad Astronomer”) has a great article on his Slate blog here.
  • Time magazine’s television critic James Poniewozik has an excellent article here.
  • The Anti-Vaccine Body Count is keeping score.
  • Google “Jenny McCarthy Vaccine” and just watch all of the news articles pop up.

Parents get to make choices every day on how their kids are going to be raised, and with a very few exceptions that’s the way it’s supposed to be and has to be. (Sorry, those exceptions – if you’re raising your toddlers with rattlesnakes as babysitters, for example, that’s probably over the line in my book.) Parents should always be trying to do their best to make informed decisions on behalf of their children, not just following anyone blindly.

But too many people can’t or won’t make a distinction between a medical expert that they see in the flesh every few months and a “celebrity” they see sitting next to Barbara Walters on an “entertainment” show every day. They take that celebrity’s word as fact, when it’s really 100% opinion, and an opinion that’s been repeatedly proven to be horribly, dangerously wrong.

In this case it’s even worse, because it’s not just the anti-vaxxers’ children who are going to get sick. When they get sick they spread the disease to others. Google for articles about the upswing in measles and whooping cough caused by the failure of parents to immunize in the past couple of decades, even though these diseases are almost entirely preventable. Judge for yourself the damage that has already been done throughout society by these misguided, inaccurate, discredited campaigns of fear and ignorance.

Do you think that having tens of thousands of kids with preventable diseases every year is helping to drive down the cost of health care for you and me and everyone else?

Who do you want to listen to when making life and death decisions for your children. Your doctor, who went to eight or ten years of medical school and is backed by tens of thousands of researchers and decades of data and clinical trials?

Or Miss October 1993?

What’s that old song by Tommy Tutone? “Jenny, I got your number… 8-6-7-5-3-0-9”

We always thought it was a phone number. Maybe it’s the number of children who are going to suffer and possibly die from completely preventable diseases now that ABC has given Jenny a pulpit.

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Filed under Death Of Common Sense, Entertainment, Freakin' Idiots!, Health

May 31, 2013 · 20:22

Please Listen To This Woman (NSFW)

I would like to talk to you about a woman for whom I have a tremendous deal of respect and admiration, Amanda Palmer.

(A brief warning for those who might be offended or bothered by strong language and/or nudity. As much as I love Ms. Palmer and her art and music, she won’t be your cup of tea. Whatever else can be said about her, terms like “shy”, “proper”, “modest”, or “conservative” aren’t used. You’ve been fairly cautioned.)

If you know of her and her music and her Kickstarter project of a year ago and her February 2013 TED talk, then you may love her art as much as I do. In that case, perhaps you can pass this article on to others as a quick primer to her art. It’s possible that you’re familiar with her and hate her guts and now think that I’m a freakin’ idiot and you never want to speak to me or read my work again. That’s OK. (Bye!) Or perhaps you just don’t care but you’re tired of me proselytizing and sending you links to her videos, and that’s OK too.

She’s not a middle-of-the-road personality. Commonly known as “AFP” for “Amanda Fucking Palmer”, she tends to have people either love her or hate her. I am quite obviously in the former group, and proud of it.

For those of you who don’t know her, she’s a musician and artist. She was a singer in the Dresden Dolls alternative rock duo in the mid-2000’s. She was and is a performance artist. She’s a writer, a poet, a lecturer, and so much more. She’s also now married to one of my favorite authors, Neil Gaiman, and that just makes her even more cool and special.

In May, 2012 she used Kickstarter to raise funds for her new album, “Theatre Is Evil”, raising $1,192,793 after setting an initial goal of $100,000. It’s still one of the handful of most successful Kickstarter campaigns ever. (That album, by the way, is fantastic.)

Over the past couple of years AFP has been a pioneering genius in using online social media (Twitter, forums, blogs, YouTube, email, Tumblr) to break the conventional model for how music and art is exchanged between the artist and the audience. (Which I realize is like describing the Golden Gate at sunset with the fog rolling in as “a bridge”.)

Listen to what she has to say.

Listen to her talks, play her music, read her poetry.

You may be awestruck, you may be infuriated, you may be overwhelmed.

I seriously doubt that you’ll be bored.

AFP’s art, music, words, and thoughts will make you think. They’ll make you care. They’ll make you pay attention. It’s quite likely they’ll sometimes make you cry.

Today I just was able to watch her latest video, a 34-minute speech she gave at The Muse 2013 in early May. This talk is wonderful. Watch it here.

In February she gave an astonishing TED talk in Long Beach. Listening to it is one of the most wonderful thirteen minutes you can spend and one of the best TED talks ever. Watch it here.

I said there were songs and music videos? Yeah, some of the best I’ve ever seen. These are all from the “Theatre Is Evil” album with the Grand Theft Orchestra. If you like them, just check out her site or Vimeo or YouTube for many others. (I will also point out that the links below are for the full, unedited, versions of the video – if you want to see versions with edited and censored language and images, you can find them on YouTube for most songs.)

“Want It Back” is very Not-Safe-For-Work (NSFW) but has excellent stop-motion animation & it’s a great song. After I got hooked on AFP’s work about eight or nine months ago I realized that I had already seen this video, not realizing who did it, just that it was an amazing video and song and I really wanted to find the artist. Now we know! Watch it here.

“Do It With A Rock Star” is also NSFW, a good rocking song and a great, fun video! Watch it here.

“The Killing Type” video doesn’t contain any nudity or actual violence, but it’s an extremely powerful song and video with lots of blood, so be forewarned. I like it a lot. Watch it here.

“The Bed Song” video is completely safe for work, but it may well rip your guts out & leave you in tears. A gut wrenching, emotional song with an excellent video, it’s her best yet! Watch it here.

If you like any or all of this, look for other videos, concerts, clips, music, and so on. She’s everywhere! (Much like Chicken Man.)

I hope you find her as inspiring, moving, and motivational as I do!

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Filed under Art, Entertainment, Music, Writing

May 26, 2013 · 21:56

Odds & Sods For Sunday, May 26th

2013-05-26 Proof Of Life

 

Item The First. The “proof of life” photo shown above proves that the birthday balloon still lives! Good thing, too, since I hear there’s an upcoming helium shortage. Soon the remaining He in this balloon could be worth a small fortune. (A very, VERY small fortune.)

Item The Second. Step one of the remodel went unexpectedly well yesterday as the top layer of wallpaper pulled right off, leaving the room’s walls fuzzy and white. This was misleading, a treacherous and evil turn of events designed to give us false hopes so that our souls could be all the more crushed later, as anyone who has ever stripped wallpaper knows. The fuzzy and white layer was the second ply of the wallpaper and the wallpaper glue. We’ve experimented for a while now and it seems that this backing/glue layer was designed in Hell. The backing layer comes off pretty well with some chemical gunk that we got at the hardware store. That leaves the glue, which easily gets wet with simple water, but just turns into goo which smears and sticks and does just about everything in the world except come off the wall. Unless of course it has a chance to get stuck on you or your clothes, at which point it will come off the clothes and onto you, making you curse. Scraping off the glue is going to be a long, tedious, painstaking, annoying process.

Item The Third. So that the weekend isn’t all work and no play, Ronnie and I went to see “Star Trek – Into Darkness” and “Iron Man 3” today, both in 3-D. I enjoyed them both a great deal, especially “Star Trek”. No spoilers, but I will be glad to discuss likes and dislikes with folks by email, phone, text, or other channels of communication.

Item The Fourth. The sticky glue & wallpaper paste from Hell doesn’t have a strong scent, but the scent it has tends to seep into the skin of my hands a bit after a while, and I’m realizing tonight that the smell is triggering some old and not very pleasant memories from when I was a teenager and my family lived in and remodeled a very large house in Vermont. I did a lot of wallpaper stripping in that house, and the constant, faint smell of wallpaper paste might not be good for my mood. I think we’ll have to overwhelm it and bury it under other, more pleasant smells in order to trigger other, more pleasant memories. Baking cookies comes to mind. Does chocolate have a strong smell? How about BBQ? It is Memorial Day tomorrow, that will fit right in. How about margaritas? Wallpaper paste removal might be MUCH easier with the smell of fresh margaritas in the air… Just sayin’!

Item The Fifth. I did not buy a new Jaguar F-series the other day. (DUH! If I had the resources to buy a new top of the line Jaguar, I would pay someone else to remodel my house!)

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Filed under Castle Willett, Entertainment, Odds & Sods, Science Fiction

May 25, 2013 · 21:34

The Emperor Has No Clothes!!

For the past week, the New York Times has been tweeting away about a series of interviews they’ve featured this week with the cast of “Arrested Development”:

2013-05-25 NYT Capture

The Los Angeles Times has been running articles all week about publicity stunts and other carryings on regarding the return of “Arrested Development” to the air:

2013-05-20 LAT Capture

Even my beloved LA Kings are getting in on the frenzy (OK, so it’s a show biz town, but geez!):

2013-05-18 LA Kings Capture

I remember “Arrested Development“. When it came out every critic on the face of the planet was wetting their pants with excitement about it. It was to be the funniest, wittiest, most clever, well written, well acted, high concept, side-splittingly funny show ever dreamed of. IGN even declared it the funniest show of all time.

IT SUCKED!!

We bought into the hype and watched it at first, watched for a couple of months, figuring out that it must be at least decent to get such an instantaneous cult following in the critics’ ranks. And we found that it was a stupid show. Lame. It made no sense. It wasn’t funny, clever, cute, or amusing. It had a little bit of “odd and quirky” maybe, the way some 5th grader’s first three-act play is odd and quirky, but unless the 5th grader is named Shakespeare, you still need only to smile and think it’s wonderful if you’re the playwright’s parents.

WHAT IN THE HELL DO PEOPLE SEE IN THIS SHOW?

“Arrested Development” was on Fox for three years, got six Emmy Awards, one Golden Globe Award, and a small but loyal cult following. What it didn’t ever get were ratings that didn’t suck.

I would love some time to find the actual ratings numbers. I want to see where ratings of “Arrested Development” (on Fox for three freakin’ years) compare to the ratings of “Firefly” on Fox (for the eleven freakin’ episodes it lasted). If you know what I mean.

WHAT WAS FOX THINKING? WERE THE PROGRAMMING PEOPLE THERE ON DRUGS?!

And here we are, six years after “Arrested Development” was so mercifully put out of our misery and suddenly it’s back for a much-delayed fourth season?

This has got to be a bad practical joke. We hear about the ultra-rich in this country, were 0.1% of the population controls 99% of the wealth or some stupid thing. Well, this is what they’re doing with all of that money. It’s like Don Ameche and Ralph Bellamy in “Trading Places“, messing with people’s lives just ’cause they can. They’re bored and have billions to burn. Only instead of messing with just Eddie Murphy and Dan Aykroyd, the folks behind “Arrested Development” are screwing with the whole planet, just to see how many folks they can get to blindly go along with the herd, pretending that this hopeless piece of idiocy is really prime comedy.

I hate to be the innocent kid out there spreading the word about the emperor’s current state of undress, but I’m not drinking the Kool-Aid on this one.

If you think that I’m really not getting it and you can explain why this show really is on the short list for the funniest show ever made, please explain it to me in the comments. (I won’t hold my breath.)

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May 10, 2013 · 20:41

Farewell, Favorite Television Show!

Today NBC announced that they are cancelling “Go On”, or at least they’re not picking it up for a second year, which is the same thing.

I don’t watch a ton of television since I find most of it to be stupid, boring, stupid, annoying, formulaic  stupid, predictable, stupid, derivative, and oh yeah, stupid. (Well, at least not programmed network television – I do watch a fair amount of sports.) But that’s not to say that I don’t like to be entertained. I just prefer shows that don’t cater to the lowest common denominator and have some originality. Is it too much to ask that a comedy actually be funny?

“Go On” was my favorite new show of the year. It was witty, funny, intelligent, poignant, a bit different, had great writing and acting — and of course it was probably doomed from the outset because of it. I love shows that in one episode can have you laughing your ass off and five minutes later have you reaching for the tissues. “Go On” could do that almost every week.

But NBC, the network that’s currently ranked number five of the four major US television networks (nope, that’s NOT a typo, NBC’s not only behind CBS, ABC, and Fox, but also behind Telemundo in the ratings race), took this funny and intelligent show and put it on an erratic and irregular schedule. At times it was off the air completely for weeks and weeks at a time. Then they started moving it around the schedule, to different nights and times. Then they complained about the ratings. (Sound familiar “Serenity” fans?)

Despite that, “Go On” got respectable reviews from the critics and had a loyal following. Finally, let’s face it, on a network which is in freefall, where almost all of the shows have truly abysmal ratings, being “just so-so” should start to look pretty good in comparison. After all, back a couple of decades ago, a show called “M*A*S*H” didn’t get very good ratings at all the first two years (another smart, multi-dimensional show that could have you laughing and crying in the same episode), but it turned out OK in the end. Regardless of all of that logic,  since February “Go On” has been listed in the industry news as a “bubble” show for renewal.

Today the axe fell. Now “Go On” is history, thanks to the incomprehensible “logic” used by NBC programming executives. What will they replace this witty, smart, and unique show with next year? Another cop show that’s just like the dozens and dozens of identical cop shows out there? Another reality show that’s just like the dozens and dozens of identical reality shows out there? Another mindless sitcom with a wall-to-wall laugh track (and no real laughs) that’s just like the dozens and dozens of identical mindless sitcoms with wall-to-wall laugh tracks… You get the idea.

Freakin’ idiots! Keep up the good work, NBC! I’m sure if you keep on this track you’ll be #6 in the ratings soon, and the #7 position isn’t out of your reach!

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