• 30Aug 06

  Fall Season

  It just occurred to me that the new TV season is beginning and I need to adjust my TiVo season pass settings accordingly. After perusing the schedule, maybe not so much as I thought. There just aren't many network shows worth watching these days. I can't think of a single new show debuting this fall that I am at all interested in. Except maybe a few to see how bad they can be. But the networks aren't even producing bad TV like they used to. Remember "Homeboys in Outer Space?" Now that was some bad TV.

  Anyway, the full list: "Gilmore Girls," "Veronica Mars," "How I Met Your Mother," "Everybody Hates Chris," "South Park," "The Simpsons," "Family Guy," "House," and "Bones."

  Now that soccer season has started I officially watch more channels in the 400s on my digital cable box than in the 000s.

  • Posted Aug 30, 2006 6:52 am PT
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• 2Aug 06

  Indeed

  Just a quick message to say I'm still alive. I'm always worried that if I neglect this site for too long I will lose my points, or my reviews will all disappear, or my rad banner will go away. That last one would be a tough blow. I love my rad banner.

  Here's what I have been watching lately: "Frasier" reruns...good show, there are way more episodes I haven't seen than I originally thought. It did run for 11 years, so it stands somewhat to reason. The show uses guest stars really well. Everyone from "Cheers" at one point another stopped by. Elvis Costello was on in one very funny episode where he had to sing and play deliberately badly. I just watched one today with Stephen Root and Todd Louiso as a very bizarre father and son combo. David Hyde Pierce is awesome. I know I've said it before, but I'll say it again: I would go gay for DHP.

  I watched a bunch of "Futurama" episodes the last few days. The whole first volume and I'm working on the second. Getting your arm cut off and then beating someone with it is very cool. I'm now watching the original "Star Trek" episode "Amok Time" on which much of the "Futurama" episode "Why Must I Be a Crustacean in Love?" is based.

  While I was on vacation in Chicago a few weeks ago I bought and really enjoyed the "Undeclared" DVD set. When I got back to Colorado I bought "Freaks and Geeks." I had kind of avoided buying that set for the longest time because I heard SO many good things about the show that I thought it couldn't possibly do anything but disappoint. Well...I enjoyed watching it. I didn't think it was as funny or as consistent as the relatively unheralded "Undeclared." I thought the two leads were the worst things about the show. If I had made it, I would have kept out the relatively conventionally attractive TV kid main characters and given more time to the far more realistic nerds played by Samm Levine and Martin Starr and the group of freaks led by Seth Rogen and Jason Segel.

  How about Jason Segel? I had no idea when "How I Met Your Mother" started that the goofy guy who played Marshall was the same fellow who played the memorable psycho boyfriend character Eric on "Undeclared." I still wish "Mother" was a little better written considering how much acting talent the show has. It did seem to pick up at the end of the season. I am looking forward to a DVD release. They seem to show something like five commercial breaks during every CBS comedy now, which makes it difficult for shows to build momentum. Maybe there will be some longer cuts of episodes too.

  Still, when you list the actors and actresses Aly Hannigan has been paired with on her TV shows, you get a pretty nice list. Seth Green. Amber Benson. Iyari Limon (who I always thought did a good job with a thankless role in the seventh season of "Buffy"). And now Jason Segel. I hope I'm not spoiling things for anyone by mentioning that Hannigan and Segel's characters broke up in the "How I Met Your Mother" season finale. I can't wait to see whom they pair her up with next. I wonder if David Hyde Pierce is available.

  My other new discovery is the cable comedy "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia." You should check this show out. It's about horrible, horrible people who make the "Seinfeld" gang look cuddly and charitable. It's very funny, and the most foul-mouthed basic cable show I've ever seen. Sometimes swearing is gratuitous but on this show it's very funny.

  • Posted Aug 2, 2006 11:25 pm PT
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• 20Jun 06

  "South Park" and Stealth Conservatism

  When I was in high school, my friends and I anticipated each episode of "South Park" with an intensity on the level of a new Star Wars movie or seeing a naked girl. "South Park" at age 17 was transgressive. It made jokes about things my crew would joke about, but only after looking around cautiously to make sure no authority figures were anywhere within shouting distance. We used to get together in my friend John's basement for every new episode and scream laughing, falling over each other in waves of mirth. I remember distinctly screaming so hard at the "special bus" joke in "An Elephant Makes Love to a Pig" that my chest hurt for days afterward.

  Anyway, a lot of time has passed since that first season. I remember getting into a preview screening of the South Park movie during college in San Francisco and enjoying it, but feeling a little disturbed that the majority of those in attendance were 12- and 13-year-old boys dressed from head to toe in "SP" merchandise. With the [adult swim] lineup of shows on Cartoon Network, not to mention "Family Guy" on Fox, "South Park" doesn't seem nearly as singular or shocking as it did back in the day. Compared to the cerebral, almost Dadaist nature of "Aqua Teen Hunger Force" and other shows of its ilk, the sledgehammer approach of "South Park" seems a little inelegant. A little last-millennium.

  Those who have stuck with the show, however, and obviously there are plenty who have as it's still going strong in its tenth season, have noticed somewhat of a renaissance in its last few seasons. "South Park" can still be shocking to a level that makes you want to shower afterwards. In one Season 9 episode a character's parents kill a woman to feed to their son, whom they have chained in the basement under the misapprehension that he is a zombie. And let's not even talk about the episode with all of the graphic live-action sex-change operation footage. However, the reason that "South Park" has gone from my favorite show in 1997 to entirely off of my radar by 2002 to one of my favorites again in 2006 is something you'd never expect.

  This is the most politically conservative fictional show on television.

  Well, maybe not the most, I don't watch "Seventh Heaven." But in the old-line, Adam Smith, The Economist sense, "South Park" has gone from cheerfully nihilistic entertainment to a sharp, angry little show with a perspective and an agenda. It's hard to believe it runs on the same network as the celebrated liberal self-congratulation-fest "Daily Show." If you can look past the extreme devices they use to get their points across, Trey Parker and Matt Stone have grown increasingly unafraid about using their late-night cartoon as a bully pulpit. When they were younger, their only real mission was to offend the widest cross-section of Americans possible. Now they have an ideology, which grows more and more clear and coherent with each passing season of their show. And almost every time "South Park" really takes a stand on an issue, the position Parker and Stone take is a right-wing one.

  That's not to say they're neo-cons. Indeed, it's extreme distaste for the Bush administration that could be viewed as the motivator for "South Park"'s ever-mounting didactic streak. George Bush's Republican party isn't at all conservative in the classic sense. Authoritarian, interventionist, bigoted, and hypocritical, but not conservative. Perhaps the most obvious change in "South Park" over the years is the show's evolving take on religion. Parker and Stone have gotten a lot of publicity over the years for dedicating entire episodes to ridiculing Catholicism, Judaism, Mormonism, and Scientology. But to read "South Park" as anti-religious would be incorrect. The episode "All About Mormons" makes a lot of jokes at the expense of Joseph Smith and the state of Utah, but it ends with a Mormon character telling Cartman, Stan, and Kyle that ultimately, his family is happy, loving, and well-adjusted thanks to their faith, and who are they to question it?

  Parker and Stone have an equally ambiguous view on the war in Iraq. Saddam Hussein has been a recurring character on their show since the very beginning, and their feature Team America: World Police was a critique of U.S. militarism that spent as much time skewering Hollywood liberals as Washington warmongerers. The episode "I'm a Little Bit Country" equates the current struggle against terrorism with the Revolutionary War and comes to the conclusion that the world needs America to be unafraid to assert its superiority, military and otherwise.

  "South Park" is unflagging in its support for traditional strict-constructionist values like separation of church and state, individual responsibility, and freedom of speech. But it's not a libertarian show by any stretch of the word. The show's most persistently recurring message is that more than anything, attentive, loving parents and common sense are what's needed to raise kids properly. (Of course, it's all proof by negative example, since every adult in South Park is completely devoid of intelligence.) Parker and Stone don't want kids to use drugs, but they want parents to be honest about the reasons. They're rabidly anti-union. They're multiculturalists, gently pro-globalization and pro-immigration, but with a healthy distrust of the ugly American tendency towards unilateralism. For the most part, their political philosophy could be summarized as "if the government can't even get the small things right, it should be trusted with as few big things as possible." This is old-line European conservatism almost to the letter.

  And all of this has passed largely without notice, certainly most among the circle of stoned college kids who have every "South Park" episode stored on their hard drives. The current American political atmosphere has been reduced to Bush's apologists on one side and the cult of Bush hate on the other. The current Republican inner circle has been amazingly effective at seizing control of the perception of the party's message and mission. The coming primary season may well be uglier and more historically significant than the 2008 general election. Will the actually conservative conservatives win control of their party back, or will the born-agains, queer-haters, and xenophobes continue subverting the good name of the Republican Party? Probably the latter. Which is not to say you shouldn't donate some money to John McCain's campaign if you get the chance.

  Meanwhile Comedy Central recently broadcast "ManBearPig," a knives-out attack on Al Gore and his global warming disinformation campaign, that was perhaps the most undiluted right-wing "South Park" yet. (Also one of the funniest in years.) It's the kids who watch "South Park," who either vote Democrat automatically because they hate Bush uncritically or (more likely) don't vote at all, who ought to be forming the voting bloc that could wrest the Republicans once and for all out of the hands of the oil companies and Jesus freaks. I bet there's a surprising number of twentysomething Americans who, sure, are for marijuana decriminalization and gay marriage, but also are alarmed by a country where their parents can't stay in marriages, teachers' unions are conspiring to prevent at-risk kids from getting educations, and there's no middle ground for a national security policy that still has a very real terrorist threat with which to contend.

  Can "South Park" mobilize those voters? Well, we came of age under the dishonest, do-nothing legacy of Bill Clinton and gave up on politics altogether under the anti-meritocratic, anti-freedom, anti-multicultural Bush Evil Empire. We might be a lost cause. But at least in one very unlikely place some creative and funny guys are making sure that a third side of the story is being recorded.

  • Posted Jun 20, 2006 4:06 am PT
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