I work from home most days so I end up watching a lot of television, mostly because I can't write with music playing and I have the same problem with total silence. Hey, its sounds good, right? Look, I like television. I like it a lot. I won't apologize for it. It's my favorite entertainment medium.

It's time to celebrate it! Each week I am going to bring you the most notable things that I saw on television from the past seven days. Of course, this will be a lot more interesting once the new fall season begins, but the summer offers its own brand of programming that I find just as enjoyable and fun and interesting.

Let's get to it!

(Be warned, there may or may not be spoilers ahead!)

Monday

Jon and Kate Plus 8
"Turning 5 and The Future!" and "Houses and Big Changes"

"Ohmygodthebignewsistonight!"

At this point it's no secret what the big news was. Look, I don't even watch this show and I knew what the news was going to be before I turned this blasted show on. I'm not really all that interested in this show or these people, but the hype for these episodes was every where on Monday, so I tuned in. For some goddamn reason I tuned in. For two hours.

I don't know a lot, but here's what I do know. Jon is a broken man. A broken, broken man. Look, most of this crap Jon and Kate brought on themselves when they agreed to do a reality show about their life with eight kids (a set of twins and a set of sextuplets), but I do sympathize with the idea that when they agreed to do this show they havd no idea just how much of an American cultural phenomenon it would become and that their lives would be forever fucked. I mean, there are a million of these shows on basic cable and, you know, you don't see the Little People on the news and in all the tabloids.

You could tell tonight that Jon was just done with it all. He has been broken by the show.

Also, his wife...

All I know of these people is what I've seen on Talk Soup and when I hang out with my mom and/or sister and it's a holiday and there's like a marathon or something. I've seen maybe ten episodes before this point.

Oh, and in case you've been living undr a rock... the news? Yeah, Jon and Kate are getting a divorce. And they next day TLC announced that the show was "temporarily" halting production.

Tuesday

Better Off Ted
"You Are The Boss of Me"

This farcical office comedy snuck its way onto the Tv schedule late last season and right into my TV-loving heart.

And now, with zero fanfare or marketing, it's back for the summer with six new episodes. The zero fanfare or marketing would explain why I was among the less than 2 million people who watched this episode. Thankfully, Better Off Ted has already been renewed for next season.

Ted is the project manager at a gigantic multinational corporation called Veridian Dynamics. They seemingly have their fingers in very pot from weapons for the government, to cowless beef, to uncomfortable office chairs (so you'll concentrate on your work and not how good your chair feels) to a chip that is implanted in the brain to make you think that everything you eat tastes sweet. Played by Jay Harrington, Ted is a peppier version of Mad Men's Don Draper, and the super competent and sane center who holds the research and development division together.

The thing that really works about Better Off Ted, besides the sharp writing and cast, is the total commital to farce while simultaneously crafting pointed examinations of modern office life. This week's show was all about the dangers of becoming friends with your boss. It was also about a Medieval Fight Club in Veridian Dynamics' basement that consisted of a complex hierarchal system and authentic weapons and costumes.

Better Off Ted is smart and funny and ambitious and it's probably doomed.

Wednesday



The Philanthropist
"Pilot"

The newest series from Berry Levinson and Tom Fontana (he wrote this episode) is a decided departure from previous series of theirs like Homicide and Oz, two of my favorite all-time series. While those two shows dealt with the gritty underbelly of urban crime and incarceration, The Philanthropist is more of an action adventure series, albeit a socially conscious action adventure series.

The impossibly roguish and charming James Purefoy plays Teddy Rist, an up-from-his-boot-straps billionaire titan of industry who has a sudden case of conscience developmentus while in Africa negotiating an oil deal. A hurricane hits the region that he's in and he witnesses first hand the devestation and destruction brought down upon people whose lives are already hard enough. Finding his life full of new meaning, he uses his money and force of will to help those in need (in this case, an African village in desperate need of vaccines). All of this might seem rather conventional, but James Purefoy's Teddy Rist is a hero with a heart, it's just not entirely gold. He may have decided that he wants to dedicate his life to helping people, but it doesn't mean that he's not still an at times an arrogant ass who enjoys the finer things in life and is not above using his heroic tale of helping Afriucan children to get hot bartenders into bed.  A series like this rests entirely on the shoulders of its lead actor, and as he proved in the excellent HBO series Rome, James Purefoy excels at playing a not-so-good guy that you can't help but want to like and root for.

And hell, the final scene in which Teddy finds the young boy in the village whom he had previously rescued during the hurricane -- the young boy who had personified and humanized the suffering in Africa in Teddy's mind -- got me, and got me good.



Thursday

Clockers

Earlier in the week I finished reading Clockers, the Richard Price novel. I wanted to see how Spike Lee's adaptation compared so I watced that instead of anything on television.

As is always the case, the book was better than the movie. I usually enjoy Spike Lee's films, but I think that in this case there was no way that the film wasn't going to suffer in comparison to the book. Clockers the book was a densely layered duel narrative that followed a drug dealer and a homicide cop in New Jersey and the murder that ties them together. Clockers the film moved the action to Brooklyn and focused mainly on the drug dealer's side of the story. It was okay.

Friday

I didn't actually watch any television. On Friday nights I play in an adult men's soccer league and I had a particularly rough match and I came home and passed out afterward.

Saturday

Harper's Island
"Splash"

Harper's Island is a terrible show and I love every minute of it.

The story goes like this, on a small island off the coast of Seattle, a marriage is about to take place. The daughter of a wealthy real estate magnate (whose family would summer on the island) is about to become the wife of a poor local boy. As the wedding party and guests arrive on the island, they start getting murdered. Actually, the murders start on the ferry ride over from Seattle, but who's counting? You see, the island has a murderous history, many years ago when the main characters were but teenagers, a man named John Wakefield went on a killing spree whose victims included the wife of the sheriff whose daughter Abby is the childhood best friend of the groom. She left Harper's Island shortly after the murders and hasn't been back since. And now she's back for the wedding and the killings have begun again.

One of the things that I like best about this show is that it's a grand experiment by CBS. It's not a series that is meant to last five years. It's a summer murder mystery with a beginning, a middle and an end. I love when the big networks experiment with formats that break from their usual routines. I love series that you have to invest your time in. And I love a good mystery. So of course, Harper's Island was a dismal failure. It debuted to a respectable if not very spectacular 10.21 million viewers, and this week's episode drew 3.53 million viewers. Don't expect many more summer mystery series from CBS any time soon.

And its really too bad, because the big networks need to figure out new ways to present television to the masses because as they continue to hemorrhage viewers for any shows that aren't talent competitions or don't involve C and D-level celebrities attempting to dance, the future of scripted television begins to look seriously bleak.

The only thing I can fault in Harper's Island is casting a recognizable character actor like Callum Keith Rennie as the big bad, John Wakefield. Every time they would show a newspaper clipping featuring a photograph of the supposedly dead Wakefield I would know that it was only a matter of time before he showed up in the flesh, which he did at the end of last week's episode. You don't pay a guy like that to just use his image. It took a bit of the mystery out of things knowing that eventually Wakefield was going to pop back up.

Tonight's episode featured a couple of really good moments as well as a whole host of stupid (but awesome) moments that I have come to love on this show. Let's get the stupid (but awesome) ones out of the way. One of the great things about this show is that the characters are so ridiculously dumb that it's great fun to get into it and yell at them on my TV. Way back in the beginning as members of the wedding party began to get murdered -- and no one had yet discovered that murders were occurring -- no one seemed ot notice when key members of the wedding party were going missing. Or when they did notice that, say, one of the bride's best friends wasn't at the bridal shower, they didn't seem to care. Tonight, there were many scenes of the few remaining living characters (I think we're down to six) standing around in the open talking, just one week after Wakefield was shooting people with a high powered rifle. Great stuff.  But this episode actually featured a really nice and emotional scene as the other couple on the show (besides the main the two people getting married) found themselves trapped by Wakefield on a small bridge. The guy, who previously had been portrayed as a stereotypical wussy Brit among the manly men American dudes, gave his life to protect the girl he loved. And the girl, finding herself unable to escape, decided to jump from the bridge rather than give Wakefield the satisfaction of stabbing her to death with the giant harpoon-like blade thing he carries around. It was really sweet and sad and touching.

Honestly, this show is so much fun to watch, it's so bad it's good television of the highest order. The two hour finale is in two weeks and I couldn't be more excited slash sad to see it go.

Sunday

Champion's Cup Final - USA vs. Brazil

Man, what a gut punch that was. After upsetting the number one ranked team in the world (Spain), the huge underdog United States team took it to the powerhouse Brazil team and went into the locker room at halftime with a 2-0 lead. And then it all fell apart in the second half. Brazil came out in the second half playing like a team possessed. They scored within the first minute of the second half and the momentum immediately shifted. I went from elation at the thought of the USA possibly winning a big time FIFA tournament (and beating Brazil to do it) to feeling quite certain that it was only a matter of time. And it was. Brazil scored twice more after that (possibly three times) and it was all over. Brazil 3, USA 2.

Article Tags

Write a Response