I see that Dexter will be showing up on ITV later this month.

I can't believe that I'm going to find myself watching an ITV1 show every week…

Having plenty of time on their hands, Writers Guild of America members staged a mock debate in Washington:

"This strike is obviously difficult, because we're fighting just a very small number of very powerful media companies," Tim Carvell of "The Daily Show" said. "It's almost enough to make you wish there were an organization that could — I don't know, for want of a better word, 'legislate' restrictions on those companies and their ability to monopolize an industry."

"Well, who could do that?" asked Jason Ross, also of the "The Daily Show." "Who has that sort of power?"

"Beats me," Carvell said. [...]

[Via Amygdala]

Laurie Taylor profiles David Attenborough:

When I carried out some research a few years ago into what made Attenborough's programmes (Life on Earth, Life in the Freezer, The Private Life of Plants, The Life of Birds, The Living Planet) so popular with general viewers, I was told repeatedly that the "best thing" about them was not the wonders of the photography, or the insights into previously unknown worlds, but the feeling that Attenborough was genuinely excited about what he discovered. In a medium otherwise saturated with bogus enthusiasm, he was, I kept being told, the genuine article. He did what he did because he could do no other. He was, in common with such other stalwarts of popular science on television as Patrick Moore and Bill Oddie, that most admired of all British public figures, the passionate amateur.

But this is precisely the reason why some of his more high-minded critics find it easy to resist his charms. He may indeed be showing us some of the previously unseen wonders of nature, but does he need to do so in a manner that leans so heavily upon human analogies? Why can't we be allowed to appreciate the intrinsic interest of ant behaviour without being seduced into that appreciation by the suggestion that they are conducting the equivalent of "a cautious chat over the garden fence"? I've even heard extremely strict-minded academics complain that it is misleading or dangerously anthropomorphic to use such emotionally resonant terms as "child" or "mother" to describe the sights before our eyes. "They're not baby spiders," one academic explained to me with some exasperation. "They're young spiders." [...]

The entire article is well worth a read, a thoughtful tribute to one of the great educators of the last fifty years.

Several generations of schoolkids have been fortunate enough to have David Attenborough as our guide to the world around us. We'll only truly appreciate how good he was once he's retired, when the likes of Alan Titchmarsh are the public face of the Natural History unit.

Musically, I'm not terribly impressed with Mark Ronson's cover of Radiohead's Just. The video, on the other hand, is a wonderful 'tribute' to the original.

A nice use of split-screen to depict what happened as Oceanic Flight 815 crashed from the viewpoint of half a dozen different characters at once.

[See also 8:15.]

[Via Fimoculous]

Guillermo del Toro is being lined up to direct the two 'Hobbit' films.

There's no question del Toro has what it takes to make a good fantasy film, but part of me wonders why we need to return to Middle Earth at all. Will The Hobbit, a smaller and less epic story, get the audiences New Line is hoping for to return the cinema seven years after the release of The Return of the King?

(My customary pessimism about the prospects for belated prequels/sequels is kicking in big-time.)

[Via Ghost in the Machine]

It's that time of year again: the Web-Goddess Oscar Contest 2008 is under way.

Go and vote, and see if you can pick up the coveted Striking Writer Sock Monkey.

Fuck Planet Earth.

To quote one MetaFilter poster:

That was fucking hilarious. And fucking juvenile. And fucking awesome.

[Via MetaFilter]

Everything I Need to Know I Learned From Lost:

2) We never escape our past: TV shows, particularly in America, are notorious for showing how people overcome their past to forge a new future. I call ‘em “transcendence narratives”. Every happy ending – of the ex-con gone good or she who was lost now being found – always misses out on the hard stuff of rebuilding a life and the constant back-and-forth of ‘escaping your old self’. From Jack’s obsessiveness to Mr. Eko’s guilt to Sawyer’s emptiness after killing Locke’s father, no character gets a fresh start on the island. Even Locke, who miraculously walks again, struggles immensely with betrayal by his father. No-one just walks away from who they were – they only learn how to confront it or deal with it, and even then, it never fully goes away.

[...]

4) Evangeline Lily is ridiculously, insanely hot: Wait, what? How did that get in here?

[...]

[Via Fimoculous]

Worried by the failure of Friday Night Lights to build an audience, Virginia Heffernan wonders whether a modern TV show needs an internet fanbase to survive:

The fault of “Friday Night Lights” is extrinsic: the program has steadfastly refused to become a franchise. It is not and will never be “Heroes,” “Project Runway,” “The Hills” or Harry Potter. It generates no tabloid features, cartoons, trading cards, board games, action figures or vibrating brooms. There will be no “Friday Night Lights: Origins,” and no “FNL Touchdown” for PlayStation.

This may sound like a blessing, but in a digital age a show cannot succeed without franchising. An author’s work can no longer exist in a vacuum, independent of hardy online extensions; indeed, a vascular system that pervades the Internet. Artists must now embrace the cultural theorists’ beloved model of the rhizome and think of their work as a horizontal stem for numberless roots and shoots — as many entry and exit points as fans can devise.

Personally, I enjoyed the first season of Friday Night Lights quite a bit when it ran on ITV4 last year. However, it seems to me that the "fault" of the show is not extrinsic at all.

For one thing, Friday Night Lights was essentially a character-led drama that relied upon viewers getting to know the characters. For another, it was easy to dismiss at first glance as a niche show – a teen show or a sports drama. In fact the adults – and especially the Best Married Couple On Television – got very nearly as many plotlines as the high school kids, and there was an average of maybe five minutes of on-field football action per episode. Finally, surely the fact is that most TV shows don't attract big online followings, particularly ones in real world settings. This is why the shows that do have a serious online following get stories written about them in the offline media. Heffernan touches on this last point later in her article:

Perhaps the characters’ motives and futures are too haphazard and lifelike to be guessed at by fans. Perhaps the “Friday Night Lights” narrative lacks a set of logical givens, the kind that are a staple of sci-fi and fantasy, which empower fans to speculate about outcomes.

Half the fun of a new science fiction or fantasy show is to try to figure out the world the writers have built, particularly in a show like Lost or Heroes where the very structure of the show makes it amply clear that there's a lot we don't know yet. Even in an SF show lacking a well-defined story arc, there's by definition work to be done unpicking the setting and theorising about what we haven't seen yet.

Good SF shows, the ones that will still have active fansites half a decade or more after they've gone off the air, will also have engaging characters and intriguing plots, but a lot of the initial attraction lies in inspecting the writers' worldbuilding.¹

In a show set in the 'real world' where most episodes began or ended with a high school football match and the real drama lay in interpersonal relationships, there wasn't as much scope for fans to erect an online encyclopaedia.

Perhaps the series is like fine embroidery or precise machinery: it extinguishes the desire in laypeople to try it themselves. It’s possible that “Friday Night Lights” even brings on museum fatigue, a sense of uselessness and enervation in the face of art that doesn’t need us.

Or perhaps it's just that a lot of perfectly decent TV fails to pick up the audience it deserves.

¹ One of the problems writers of SF shows face is that if their show is picked up and runs for a few seasons they'll find themselves filling in some of the gaps in their worldbuilding and discover that their most diehard fans would rather they'd not gone in that direction. See, for example, the number of fans of Babylon 5 who would much rather have seen the show end at season 4, episode 6 (but without that "Now get the hell out of our galaxy!" speech) or at the end of season 4. Or the number of Buffy fans who can't forgive Joss Whedon for seasons 6 and 7.

I was sceptical that Gene Hunt's return in Ashes to Ashes could possibly be as much fun as he was in Life on Mars. Repeating the 'modern day officer finds themselves in the past' formula seemed like a terrible idea.

I had to sign an embargo form, so I can’t tell you too much about the plot, but I can say that the first episode, as you would imagine, is a bit of scene-setter, explaining why Keeley Hawes' character (DI Alex Blake) gets back to 1981 and what she makes of her new surroundings. When I say surroundings, I mean shoulder pads, MASSIVE hair, strange, stripy shirts, white, grey and black colour schemes and stilettos. And when I say surroundings, I also mean… Gene Hunt.

As soon as Gene Hunt roars, "Right lads, let's fire up the Quattro" in his singularly leonine way, you know that you are on reassuringly familiar ground. He’s still the man, the sheriff, the gunslinger… and now London is his town. If anything, it looks as though Gene might have mellowed ever so slightly in this series – he seemed a little quieter, and a little more worn down by the constant battles he wages. This is just me speculating, but I wonder if all the feuding he did with Sam Tyler has affected him. Only time will tell. BUT, the classic one-liners are there, as is the everything-we-love-about-Gene-Hunt too.

Could it be that it's going to work out nicely after all? I'd dearly love to be proved wrong.

[Via feeling listless]

Idiomag attempts to generate a personalised online music magazine, based on information you enter about your favourite bands or (more intriguingly) on your profile at an online music profiling service like last.fm.

The site is quite attractive and easy to use, but I'm not sure it's all that useful. I fed it my last.fm account details and it produced a 'taster' intended to show what I could expect if I registered:

1. A Billboard magazine article about the 20th anniversary edition of U2's The Joshua Tree.
2. A review of last year's compilation album by Garbage.
3. A review of an album by an R&B artist I've never heard of by the name of Baby Boy Prince.
4. The Wikipedia article about industrial rock.

So, having picked up the four top artists from my profile, idiomag came up with two reviews of old material re-released last year, one article picked up because the artist's name overlaps somewhat with that of Prince Rogers Nelson, and a Wikipedia article about the genre in which my number four artist works. Not a very inspiring taster.

In fairness, it probably didn't help that with Garbage on hiatus and U2 between albums there's not much new material to be found about them online right now. If I'd trialled the service when the bands were releasing new material, doing interviews and so on it's quite possible that I'd have found myself reading articles that told me something I didn't know. The sampler might do better to concentrate on showing the user more extensive information about two acts, to give a better taste of how the service will work when an act is doing the rounds of the media.

Alternatively, the taster could have been more interesting if it had covered, say, four artists from my top 20, or six acts scattered throughout my top 50 with at least one from between 40 and 50. I assume the strategy is to show potential users articles about their very favourite artists as this'll help encourage them to sign up, but if your musical tastes are as mainstream as mine then this seems to just pick up rather dull, not especially timely content. Perhaps this is a sign that the service is better suited to people whose tastes are more obscure, who may appreciate the service as a way to locate information about their favourite artists, or perhaps it's just that you need to use it over time with a greater range of artists to get the full benefit.

It's not a bad concept, but I don't think the taster does it any favours.

[Via Fabric of Folly, via city of sound]

Three seasons of Lost recapped in 8 minutes and 15 seconds. Almost enough to get me interested in season 4.

[Via VideoSift]

David Lynch is right.

[Via kottke.org]

Juno director Jason Reitman takes a critical look at the celebrity sex tape:

“One Night in Paris” – A one-act Pinteresque evening with a reprobate and a lithe hotel-heiress told mostly in first person. Plot centers around the discovery of a video camera and its various uses. Excessive use of night vision plays up the voyeuristic quality. Think – Blair Witch Project

[...]

Collin Ferrel Short Film - The poorest of these films is sadly the Collin Ferrell tape. This is mostly due to the fact that it almost seems as though it were intended for public viewing. I say this because it seems like a “production”. There are angles, edits, and worst of all… Acting.  And this is to say bad acting. One would think that Collin Ferrell, star of Stephen Spielberg’s Minority Report and Terrence Malick’s The New World would at least offer a hint of naturalism. Instead, he is all over the place.

NB: although there are no images from the tapes in Reitman's review, the descriptions of the tapes' content may render the linked article NSFW. As always, if in doubt view it away from the workplace.

[Via Fimoculous]

Seeing this clip from Vampire Circus brought back fond memories of the BBC's late night horror double-bills back in the mid-1970s. Let's just say that Vampire Circus made a big impression on me as a 13 year-old: a fine example of public service broadcasting in action.

[Note to self: set up a reminder in MyDigiguide to make sure I don't miss Vampire Circus next time it shows up on TV.]

[Via MetaFilter]

DymaxionWorldJohn provides the most succinct account I've seen in a while of why the music industry as we know it is doomed.

[Via Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal]

Henry Selick's stop-motion adaptation of Neil Gaiman's Coraline is still a year away from release, but Gaiman has put up a sneak preview consisting of about 30 seconds of footage. Looks quite promising.

Checking the film's IMDB entry, I see that They Might Be Giants are doing the film's soundtrack. Sounds like a match made in heaven.

Possibly the least seasonal music imaginable: the Nine Inch Noëls.

[Via GromBlog]

Joss Whedon on the writers' strike:

Reporters are funny people. At least, some of the New York Times reporters are. Their story on the strike was the most dispiriting and inaccurate that I read. But it also contained one of my favorite phrases of the month.

“All the trappings of a union protest were there… …But instead of hard hats and work boots, those at the barricades wore arty glasses and fancy scarves.”

Oh my God. Arty glasses and fancy scarves. That is so cute! My head is aflame with images of writers in ruffled collars, silk pantaloons and ribbons upon their buckled shoes. A towering powdered wig upon David Fury’s head, and Drew Goddard in his yellow stockings (cross-gartered, needless to say). Such popinjays, we! The entire writers’ guild as Leslie Howard in The Scarlet Pimpernel. Delicious.

[...]

“The trappings of a union protest…” You see how that works? Since we aren’t real workers, this isn’t a real union issue. (We’re just a guild!) And that’s where all my ‘what is a writer’ rambling becomes important. Because this IS a union issue, one that will affect not just artists but every member of a community that could find itself at the mercy of a machine that absolutely and unhesitatingly would dismantle every union, remove every benefit, turn every worker into a cowed wage-slave in the singular pursuit of profit. (There is a machine. Its program is ‘profit’. This is not a myth.) This is about a fair wage for our work. No different than any other union. The teamsters have recognized the importance of this strike, for which I’m deeply grateful. Hopefully the Times will too.

[Via Amygdala]