Domestic Psychology

Dear Terra Nova,

// November 21st, 2011 // No Comments » // television

Let’s be honest. You are not going to be back next season. Terra Nova was a fun concept that was executed like the original Land of the Lost. As your audience is not single digit age, filled with 90% sugar cereal and sitting six inches from the television screen, you seriously underwhelmed everyone. Accept the impending bulldozing of your set and act accordingly.

Don’t even attempt to continue the long term story arc. Kill a main character or three every episode. Draw smiley faces in your digital backdrops. Put saddles on the raptors. Use the awful excuse for future medicine to create zombies. Have the cast of Glee be guest stars and feed them to the dinosaurs who are enraged by AutoTune.

Let Terra Nova go down in a blistering blaze of awfulness that can never be equalled. In doing so, you could be immortalized in pop culture vocabulary more prominently than jumping the shark. Aren’t dinosaurs just land sharks without a sense of humor?

Have fun storming’ the past.

Cathy

Pop culture rambling

// August 8th, 2011 // 2 Comments » // television

Alphas is very much an X-Men and Heroes blend, but their ‘big bad’ this season makes them a different flavor than their influences. As much as I love what they are doing, most people won’t. The first tweet I saw this morning referenced teachers complaining about spectrum students in their classroom. Our state defunded an Autism service provider and said schools should be the providers of the many treatments used to help Autistic children. The comments on newspaper articles about special needs children are vile. Having been personally told by teachers and parents that they think our children should be in institutions, I am fully aware that most people without a spectrum child in their family would like our children out of sight AND out of mind. This bodes poorly for the NT population’s acceptance of the Alphas characters and storyline. Regrettably, I expect Alphas to be a one or two season series. Before they disappear, I would love to know if one of the Alphas writers has a spectrum child because, as the magic 8-ball says, all signs point to yes.

Someone needs to explain to *Eureka‘s Henry that you aren’t borrowing something when you know you are going to break it. Henry owes some children a new baseball bat. Make that bat with Beverly’s bones so that her character will quit coming back to ruin the fun of the sheriff’s physical comedy.

I am sure that the Comic-Con incident with Wil Wheaton was entirely the fault of the stalker/fan, but I can’t help but notice the similarities in Mr. Wheaton’s Eureka character and his Big Bang character. Is playing a jerk his way of countering his true nature or is it revealing his deep desire to be a giant pita?

I’m enjoying the political backdrop and guest stars on this season’s Torchwood. Last week, I saw each of the characters being placed in dangerous situations and knew somebody wouldn’t survive. What happened was still horrible. Torchwood’s tagline should be Gwen’s quote, “It only ever gets worse.” The writers seem to have forgotten who Jack is and they have been giving him awkward and out of character dialogue. I may still be mad at Jack for not telling Ianto that he loves him, but I want the Jack that we know and love back this season.

I understand that Mad Men is AMC’s primary source of ratings and expenses, but I will be very disappointed if AMC can’t scrape together the budget to let Breaking Bad finish putting all the dominos in place for Walter’s complete transformation from caring teacher to Midas who destroys to feed his greed. Then, let the dominos fall to end the series.

SyFy + Monday night = Good tv

*Aaaaand SyFy cancelled Eureka. I guess they needed another time slot for wrestling.

squirrel in the kudzu

// March 6th, 2011 // No Comments » // home, television

Doug knows that the quickest way to make me quit whining is to distract me. His distraction for my kudzu project complaining is project detail discussions. I don’t mind this particular distraction. The decade of ducks as a bathroom theme has ended and we have a new theme that is going to require a lot more effort to pull together. While the end result will be worth it, getting there is making this project akin to sweating blood.

“That is funny, but it doesn’t go with the theme.”
“Sure it does. It’s just a parallel universe connection to our theme.”
“No. It would look like a haunted house bathroom. Besides, that hand is a plot hole.”
“You know you like the idea.”
“I’ll think about it.”

Teachers vs Wall Street

// March 4th, 2011 // No Comments » // school, television

Watch the entire episode, including guest Diane Ravitch here.

Today’s schedule

// May 23rd, 2010 // 3 Comments » // television

Channel 431 aka ABC
7-9 pm LOST recap show
9-11:30 pm LOST series finale
11:30-12:05 weeping and/or gnashing teeth
12:05-1:05 am Jimmy Kimmel’s Aloha to LOST

Breaking Bad and other stuff

// April 12th, 2010 // 2 Comments » // people, television

If you spend an hour talking to anyone who works in social services, the subject of meth will somehow work its’ way into the conversation. Between that and the presence of meth in the local news, I imagine that I am surrounded by meth labs, dealers and users who are still functioning well enough to blend. They are in our families, offices and neighborhoods. We just don’t know it yet. It’s not just who are they that is bewildering. Part of me is curious how people collect the ingredients to make meth when I can buy alcohol easier than I can buy Sudafed. I am equally mystified that chemistry is being successfully accomplished in a state with an average ACT score of 21 and a 71% graduation rate. The media’s focus on mobile meth labs makes me wonder why there aren’t cars and vans exploding on the Interstate daily.

If I really wanted to understand, I would use my Google-Fu to find answers. Maybe I like being clueless enough about the seriousness of it to be able to say “meth lab blowing up” every time I hear a loud boom in the neighborhood. Maybe I don’t want another thing to worry about. I only know that I am content knowing that I don’t know. For now.

Without enough knowledge to pick at the inaccuracies, I find Breaking Bad a bizarrely fascinating show to watch. Meth is a major character on the show, but it is really a show about people falling down and the consequences of their choices. The characters’ choices ripple across everything and everyone that they touch. The free-fall of their lives from the moment the lead character first stepped off the cliff is like a train wreck that can’t be stopped. If the series happened in reverse, the characters would be vile, but the writers have carefully crafted frail, anti-heroes. At the end of last season, I said that the main character’s wife would have to become bad in order to survive. This season, she is tumbling down a mountain of her own, but she is also climbing to the top of the fire ant hill that is her life. It’s not pretty, but it’s good television.

It’s a lot more fun to watch pretend characters answer the “what’s the price for your soul” question than to see it happening in the real world. Too many bloggers with opinions and ideas grew weary of being hungry and declared themselves social media gurus. Instead of original ideas, those gurus now sell unicorn poo and publish freelance articles in the newspaper for their clients. Too many well-intentioned politicians find themselves strangled by the tightrope of doing what it takes to stay in office under the premise of making up for it with other legislation. Ultimately, we learn that we don’t have one Indecent Proposal pricetag, but a cafe menu of soapboxes that we are are willing to climb down and leave empty for someone else.

lost in translation

// March 14th, 2010 // No Comments » // people, teenagers, television

When the familiar name and face took the stage in the intimate auditorium, I felt a rush of fan-girl adrenalin. I clicked to his IMDB profile and tried to silently explain the significance of the speaker to the 13-y-o. The 13-y-o looked blankly at the credits that meant nothing to him. I clicked to the celebrity’s Wiki page. The 13-y-o was visibly confused. Half the adults in the audience spent the next fifteen minutes trying to get a picture of the speaker. When he left the stage, a few brave souls shook his hand and tried to glean more words from the man whose life experiences make him a Superhero to middle-aged hippies. I nudged the 13-y-o outside to talk about the significance of the speaker.

Have you ever tried explaining a television celebrity to a child who only watches TV on the DVR or DVD? “The whole family would watch him every Sunday night.” “Why?” Doug and I spontaneously sang the commercial for the show’s sponsor. The 13-y-o looked at us like we were in need of medication. “He did it before all the guys on The Discovery Channel.” “I thought that guy died.” We attempted to describe a world without Internet, where other countries might as well have been other planets. “Seeing things that you had only read about felt magical.” “Didn’t books have pictures back then?” We tried to explain philanthropy. “So, the guy who was talking has lots of money?” “No. He has no money. He gives his time and talents.” “What?”

Eventually, we thought that the 13-y-o had a vague idea who the evening’s speaker was, even if he didn’t understand why we were so enamored of the man who looks like a movie star, but lives like a monk. “Tell your grandparents who you heard speak tonight.” “Oh, uh, I saw some guy named Stan who used to wrestle alligators and now he flies planes.”

Just one LOST thought

// February 17th, 2010 // 4 Comments » // television

Jacob and unLocke are the ones who are LOST.

signed, Captain Obvious

// February 17th, 2010 // 1 Comment » // politics, television

Dear <- insert name of politician here ->,

Do not go on <- insert name of entertainment program here ->. The publicity you get will not help you. There really is such a thing as bad publicity. The show’s host will mercilessly mock you and everyone watching will laugh. I will laugh at you, instead of with you. Carefully edited clips will saturate the web as your name becomes synonymous with clowns or worse. That is not going to help your career.

Every time that I laugh at your appearance on that show, I also feel a pain in my stomach. A pain of disappointment. I don’t want to dismiss you as a politician. I want to believe that no matter what letter is after your name, you take your work seriously. I want to believe that even when I disagree with your political decisions, you are acting with the best interests of all your constituents in mind. I want, no, I need to respect you as a politician and a person.

Have too much dignity and self respect to subject yourself to interviews by comedians. Every minute spent fixing your makeup and bantering for the live audience’s giggles is time that should have been spent working to make a difference. Please do not appear on <- insert name of entertainment program here -> while the working poor are paying your salary. Get back to work on the job you were elected to do.

LOST thoughts (part MDCXLVIII)

// February 16th, 2010 // No Comments » // television

I need to scribble my current LOST thoughts so that I can see how far, far off I am after tonight’s show. They center around an idea that Barry suggested. What if, chosen souls don’t die when their bodies die on Lost Island/ancient floating Tardis. Those souls/ghosts are the whispers that are infrequently heard on the island. They are capable of claiming the bodies of the deceased who, I guess, don’t rank high enough to have their souls become immortal. When Ben’s others burned their dead, it was to prevent the bodies from being claimed. When Jacob was murdered without any struggle, it was with the knowledge that he was only losing a body. The man in black lost his body quite some time ago and has been borrowing bodies the duration of the series. This could make the “help me” figure in the ash cabin, Locke’s soul. It would also explain why Claire is the new CFL. What is the title was not about the plane crash survivors being LOST, but the souls who have LOST their bodies?

The problems with this theory are that the souls don’t seem to be loyal to Jacob. Does Jacob bring people to the island because he wants their bodies while unLocke/MIB claims their souls? Wouldn’t immortal souls win over frail bodies every time? Is Crazy Australian Claire’s body inhabited by the one soul who isn’t loyal to anyone? Why did it seem like Ben could control Smokey when Smokey is clearly not following anyone’s orders? Is there more than one Smokey? The first episode, the crash survivors stood on the beach and looked left, right, left as they tracked Smokey’s movements. Were they watching two? Is the controllable one a collective of all the wandering souls on the island? Is the parallel reality something that was created by the explosion or is it just to bug everyone who wants all the action and answers to be ON the island? When unLocke/MIB says he wants to go home, does he mean a place or a time, because I’m voting for the latter.

How can I even claim to have a working theory when all I really have are questions to disprove my own theories?