I recently binged my way through.... The Crown Season 5 on Netflix: Diana's interview, Prince Charles' breakdancing, and more. (slate.com) It was very well done. As the show moves through the decades, the cast keeps changing. So for example the part of Queen Elizabeth II was played by Claire Foy when she was a young woman, seasons 1-2, by Olivia Colman at greater age (seasons 3-4), and now by Imelda Staunton in season 5. Staunton is best known, or has been best known until now, as one of the great villainesses of the Harry Potter books, Dolores Umbridge. Staunton has not dislodged Colman as my personal favorite of the Elizabeths here. It was Colman who played off against Margaret Thatcher (Gillian Anderson) in some epic scenes, and against the younger version of Diana, Princess of Wales (as played by in season 4 by Emma Corrin). Those three actresses had a great dynamic triangle going in that fourth season. The fifth? Thatcher is gone. Neither John Major n...
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I've finally been watching episodes of Schitt's Creek in recent days. This is amazing -- it's been a "thing" for six years, it includes two of my favorite comedians, but only now am I catching up with it. Well ... better late than never, and this gives me something for an election day post that has nothing to do with the election, which is a plus. The two great comedians at the heart of the show are: Catherine O'Hara as Moira Rose, and Eugene Levy -- pictured here -- as her husband, Johnny Rose. They were both in the ensemble that put together SCTV in the old days, a sketch comedy show of utter brilliance. I remember especially O'Hara's Margaret Meehan, a quiz show contestant who would ALWAYS hit the buzzer before the question was complete, answering the fragment she had heard and losing the points to the embarrassment of her teammates. Eugene Levy was the game show contestant in that same bit, named "Alex Trebel." (Hmmm -- wonder if the ...
Yesterday we discussed how HOMELAND ended. Today I want to comment on the philosophical implications of it. I hereby repeat my SPOILER ALERT. Although the spoilers will be less blatant in this discussion than they were in yesterday's, I'M NOT GOING TO TRY TO DANCE AROUND THE ENDING. The writers characteristically make the stakes very high, so that we can be routing for Carrie even as we recoil at the awfulness of some of the things she has to do. For a moment, we may even suspect that she has killed Saul. (She hasn't, but she lies both to his sister and in effect to us about this.) The Evil of Two Lessers The implicit ethical point is that if one is trying to prevent something as awful as a nuclear exchange, anything less awful than that is permitted. But of course this raises the issue of whether such consequentialist thinking is what got the world into such a state. Carrie and Saul had a good deal to do, in the world of the series, with shaping the relations ...
HOMELAND is a television series that ran on SHOWTIME from 2011 until this year. The series is centered by the character of Carrie Mathison, (played by Claire Danes), a CIA agent engaged in various covert activities while struggling with the bureaucracy around her and the bipolar disorder within her. Sometimes the bipolar disorder became a critical plot point. She apparently found that going off her meds allowed her to figure things out -- to think more clearly and get a jump on whatever external threats she faced -- so long as she didn't stay off her meds for too long. That was not an element in the way in which the series came to its end, though. The writers apparently found no use for it in their final twists and turns. SPOILER ALERT: IF YOU HAVEN'T SEEN THE FINAL EPISODE, AND YOU PLAN TO, READ NO FURTHER. As this final episode begins, the US and Pakistan are on the verge of a nuclear exchange. The US President -- who got that office because he was vice president w...
Greetings, fellow humans, from the Bay State, aka Massachusetts. I open that way because I'm about to describe a commercial paid for by the state government here, to promote its lottery. That is: to get people to buy the tickets and in most cases lose money. It is a commercial that seems normal enough inside these state boundaries but outside of them, to our fellow humans, would likely seem very strange indeed. Other states advertise their lotteries by playing up what the potential winners of the lottery can gain -- the new house! the '60s muscle car! -- the chance to tell your boss where he can shove his next quarterly review! All of that. In Massachusetts, though, we are treated to TV commercials in which workers using forklifts create a sort of sculpture with the use of $1 billion in cash. (No I didn't get a good luck at the denominations.) There is a voice-over saying words to this effect (I misquote from memory, but this is the gist of it) -- "This is th...
I'm thinking today about the HGTV program, "Love it or list it." In each episode, a designer (Hilary) and a real estate expert (David) offer competing solutions to the move-or-stay issue of a couple with gripes about their abode. The couple (and sometimes children) is presumably out, and staying at a hotel while Hilary and her team gut their house and re-work it to spec so the owners will 'love it' again and want to stay. If they don't want to stay after all ... well, at the worst Hilary's work will have improved its value, so they can list the property, get more money from it than they otherwise would have, and buy the nice new home that David has found for them. I find the economics of Hilary's work intriguing. David's search for a new dream home is a distraction at best. Near the end of each show, the hosts present four numbers. The fascinating one, the one NOT on the list, is what I think of as "value added," and one gets it ...
One of science fiction's greats passed away late last month. I refer of course to Harlan Ellison, the author of Web of the City (1958), Spider Kiss (1961), and A Boy and His Dog (1969). But Ellison worked best in forms that were not book length. Among his many published collections of short stories, Stalking the Nightmare (1982), Angry Candy (1988) and Mind Fields (1994). No, that isn't a photo of Ellison I've attached here. I'll tell you who the b-and-w photo is of in due course. Ellison was probably best known, though, for having written the screenplay for the greatest episode of the original Star Trek, "City on the Edge of Forever." Or, rather, he wrote the first draft of the screenplay. My understanding is that Roddenberry re-wrote it quite radically, in ways to which Ellison was never reconciled. Well, that's show biz. The basic plot involves a time machine that sends Captain Kirk back to the year 1930, a soup kitchen in Depression-stri...
I'm working (too slowly) on a review of a book that takes an international comparative approach to copyright law. I'll record a point here that intrigues me, but that probably won't get into my review. In the European Union, it seems there is now a significant difference at law between the music that is playing in the dentist's office when patients are in the chair undergoing the rigors of examination or repair work on the one hand, and the screening of television programs in the waiting room of a rehab facility as a diversion for patients. I had never given any thought to copyright in either context before, so this is all new to me. It is not so much that there IS a difference that interests me, but how that difference is justified. As EU directives put the point, a copyright owner has a right to control when his/her/its property will be "communicated to the public." Although this is not the sole consideration, a court is more likely to find a com...
Three days ago I mentioned an episode of The Jeffersons in which the etymology of the word "sincere" was discussed. I thought for a bit that I had tracked down the ep and that it was Season 2, Episode 4, "Harry and Daphne," which aired on October 4, 1975. Alas, though, I had focused on the wrong culprit. Harry never there discusses Daphne's sincerity at all, and the only etymological discussion involves the name Keller (which we're told means "cellar," -- big whoop.) If any reader of this blog can help me identify the episode where Harry or someone else DOES discuss "sincerity," I will be grateful.
The cozy home sat at odds to the primary compass points. The front of the building faced northeast, so its corners (and the corners of each of the rooms) faced off to the various proper compass points. There stood a large television stand in the eastern corner with an even larger (though thin) television stretching out of the edges of both sides of it. One of those "big screen" teevees that really ought to be hanging on a wall but isn't. Two chairs to the right of the television, framing an electric fireplace with a mantle of seasonal decorations. To the right of THAT, on the northern corner, a very plush older Easy Chair with a wooden level on the side to lean it back or stand it up again. What should be the wall on the northwestern side of the room is mostly a doorway to the dining room. The contents of THAT we leave out of account for now. To the right of the wide door, an abstract painting. To the left, the thermostat (actually two thermostats, of different vi...
It is a venerable television trope: a reporter (invariably a man) standing in the midst of a storm, while a camera guy presumably films him from inside a van. We see the force of the wind because our intrepid reporter is either leaning with it or leaning into it at an ever-sharpening angle. We see from his wary glances about that projectiles are a danger in a hurricane (who would've thought). Is this entertainment, public service, actual news, or something else? My own impression is that our intrepid reporter in such footage is there to put a "human face" on the news. The faces of the victims of the damage it does will be on the front pages in following days -- the newly homeless, shocked to discover that standard homeowners' insurance is not generally hurricane or flood insurance, along with photos of people grieving for their dead, or suffering from injuries. We'll see all of them in due course. But for that moment, our intrepid reporter is still the huma...
I write today in the line of my Jamesian interest in the varieties of religious experience. Terry Heaton, once executive producer at the Christian Broadcasting Network, the man responsible for getting Pat Robertson's The 700 Club on the air throughout the 1980s and early '90s, has a new book out. I haven't read it (and don't plan to) so I speak here only from mediating sources. But the book seems to be a memoir, a reflection, and at least in some part a recantation. It is called The Gospel of the Self: How Jesus Joined the GOP. There's an interview of Heaton on Vox. After discussing one of the editing decisions on which Robertson overruled him, Heaton says: "I knew that Pat’s rationale for all of this is that you don’t want to do anything on TV that will interfere with anybody’s faith. But I think you can take that to an extreme — and that’s what we did. We always showed people getting healed, overcoming the odds. The strong impression that the vi...
Donald Trump's election as President of the United States in November 2016 may have changed the nature of the political game in several ways, not least by its demotion of the importance of Big Money. Big Money is receding from the scene, leaving a vacuum, and Big Data is poised to fill that space. The people who worry about Big Money in politics - as well as the people who shrug and accept it - have agreed in recent decades that the key connection between such money on the one hand and electoral success on the other is advertising: especially broadcast advertising Yet the Hillary Clinton campaign spent a good deal more than Trump's campaign did on advertising. In the first two months of general election political advertising (mid-June to mid-August), her campaign spent $61 million on broadcast ads, while allied independent groups spent another $43 million in her cause. Trump's campaign didn't spend a dime on broadcast ads during that period, and its independent...
I love Shark Tank. I think I've mentioned that before, even on this blog. Indeed, now that I've checked ... I wrote a post here that discussed the structure of the show. Today, I'll say something about the personalities. Kevin O'Leary is the hostile stereotype of a capitalist, come to life and played at least somewhat for laughs. When Kevin decides that he has no use for a particular entrepreneur, he says "you';re dead to me." Not "I'm out" (the phrasing shared by all the other sharks in the same situation) but "you're dead to me." Yet there is sometimes a "tough love" aspect to Kevin's snarkiness. I remember an episode in which two young men, who could not or would not offer many business plan specifics, were trying to sell equity in their computer password-protection system. Kevin (and Mark Cuban as well, IIRC) were interrupting them with hostile or sarcastic seeming questions. The two ladies on the panel, ...