Over the last few years, I’ve invested a lot of time in shows that, for one reason or another, just don’t work out. They get cancelled, they get so unimaginably stupid that even I stop watching, whatever.

But I haven’t read quite as good a takedown on both the mechanics of a bad show playing out the string and the mechanics of Internet Lovefest Guy commentary as the following magnificent paragraph from Todd VanDerWerff at The Onion AV Club, in his review of the penultimate episode of FlashForward:

FlashForward has been canceled. It is a dead show walking, playing out the string in hopes that it can pull enough of itself together that there will be that one guy in every comment thread on the Internet about great shows canceled too soon who will say, “HEY, YOU GUYS REMEMBER FLASHFORWARD? THAT WAS A GREAT SHOW, AND THE NETWORK TREATED IT SO BADLY, AND IT WOULD HAVE BEEN GREAT.” And, eventually, the number of people who are capable of successfully arguing with this guy that, no, FlashForward wasn’t all that great, and it received a gigantic marketing push from a network that gave it one of its best timeslots, and it debuted to an audience of some 12 million who mostly left because it WASN’T VERY GOOD, even with a mostly enjoyable pilot, will dwindle to nothing, but that ONE GUY, that ONE VOICE OF PASSION and LACK OF REASON, will be able to convince some poor souls that it IS worth checking out, and they’ll head on down to the Best Buy (or the post-apocalyptic variant thereof) and go all the way to the back of the TV on DVD section and find a DVD set on the bottom shelf of the last stand, covered in dust, and they’ll take it home, and they’ll pop it in the DVD player, and they’ll realize that guy was a fucking idiot.

Really, if you’re among the few people who’s been suffering along with me watching this stupidity, you should read VanDerWerff’s recap. FlashForward is a terrible show that could be criticized from a thousand angles, but it’s a rare treat to see someone take such a wide target and pinpoint with such surgical precision exactly what went wrong.

I’ve come down with a truly delightful stomach bug, so my ability to do pretty much anything beyond what I absolutely have to do is somewhat restrained.

Normally I’d have something much longer about the whole Jaypocalypse/Conandrum fiasco playing out in slow motion on NBC, but to be frank, I really don’t have the energy to write up my feelings on what is, at its heart, a battle for the future of television.

Instead, please enjoy this embed of last night’s Jimmy Kimmel show (no, really, it is quite funny). It’s an absolutely savage parody of Leno’s show, particularly in the way that he relies on the band to prop up every single limp joke.

Hopefully more to come when I feel a bit less like I’m in certain scenes from Parasites Lost.

I’m a little behind the times on this one, but while I was actually working for a couple of days last week (helping my union set up and tear down their holiday party), one of the oddest reality show concepts to actually make it to air got thrown at the screen last week.

I speak, of course, of ABC’s Conveyor Belt of Love (Variety’s photo illustration at that link is priceless). How does it work, you ask? According to The Hollywood Reporter:

“If a woman is interested in someone, that man will step aside and wait as the rest of the men go by.  But if another man comes by on the belt that seems better than that woman’s first choice, she can swap out the man waiting off of the belt as many times as she wants until the last man has passed by. If two or more of the women are interested in the same man, the tables turn and the man on the conveyor belt gets to choose which one he would like to wait for. After all 30 men have made it through the ‘Conveyor Belt of Love,’ each woman is left with her final choice as they embark on a date in the hope of finding a true connection.”

The description is pretty stupid, not to mention overly complicated to the point where my eyes glaze over about halfway through it. The trailer THR dug up looks infinitely stupider:

Something that explains a lot about the current state of the airwaves: Television executives watched that 86 second video and determined that, stretched out over an hour, it would be even better.

I would really like to know what kind of wonderful, powerful drugs these executives were on at the time so I can get some for myself. They are clearly the best drugs ever.

I’m up to my eyeballs in studying for the GRE – I take it Wednesday and I think I’m close to running through every goddamn GRE math prep question on the internet.

So, in lieu of an actual post, please enjoy this TV/Movies mashup Casey found that kind of melted my brain:

I’ll probably have something up on the 20th anniversary of the Berlin Wall coming down later this week – Today’s the actual anniversary but I just don’t have time to write up everything I’m thinking.

Until I was about 21, I thought I was going to be a rock star.

Until I was 28, I thought I was going to make movies and TV for a living.

Until I was ____, I thought I was going to be a professional computer nerd.

—

Life has taken a lot of twists and turns for me since the writers’ strike of 2007-2008. Since that strike began on November 5, 2007, I have spent almost twelve of these last 24 months unemployed.

Part of that was the strike. Part of that was my decision to move into the production line and out of working directly for producers, which is an inherently more volatile career path.

But much of it has been the way the bottom has absolutely fallen out of filming in L.A. The combination of the strike starting a rearrangement of the way the business works and the economy in general going down the tubes has contributed to a precipitous drop in filming here. There’s just no work.

I realized a couple months ago as I was making my bajillionth phone call looking for work that I have not received one phone call back since June. June was also my last interview, for a job I had locked down until an actor decided to put in a good word for his niece, and then she had it locked down.

I’ve offered to take PA jobs again, but they’re not looking to take someone with as much experience in higher-up jobs as I have. In some cases, they think it’s because I think I’m above the scut work (which I don’t, I wouldn’t be applying for a PA job if I did), and in some cases, it seems they think I’ll outshine them (with the people who are insecure enough to actually worry about this, that might be a more valid concern).

Everywhere I look in terms of what my skills can get me in the entertainment business, I either see jobs that are so severely overworked and underpaid that I would rather work at Starbucks again than take them, because at least at Starbucks I would get health insurance, or nothing at all.

And frankly, the way things are going right now with the economy and the out-of-state filming incentives and the studios and networks freaking the fuck out about every last penny, I don’t see that scenario changing in the next 18-24 months at the absolute earliest.

Sometimes, you just wake up and realize that the universe is trying to tell you something. And the universe is telling me it’s time to do something else with my life.

—

And now, a brief comic interlude:

Click to enlarge.

From Amazing Super Powers.

—

I’ve always been a pop-culture nerd, but I wasn’t a serious computer nerd until the last 3-4 years. I learned some HTML programming in college, and really enjoyed it, but the complete time-sink that is working in entertainment pulled me off the track that would have kept me learning more about programming.

While the primary technical things that I’ve done in the last few years have involved technical troubleshooting and working as an ad-hoc IT Guy, what I really want to learn about is how to make computers do what I want them to.

And to do that, I need to learn how to program. I need to learn about architecture and C++ and the vagaries of programming for different platforms. I really want to learn how to take some ideas I have for programs and turn them into reality, from start to finish.

This, however, will require a fair amount of school. Right now I’m on step 0.1, taking some very basic classes at the community college level, trying to figure out exactly where my interests take me in terms of how I want to program.

My ultimate goal is a Masters’ in Computer Science. I’m in the middle of a choose-your-own-adventure bit of figuring out how that’s going to happen, but I do know that I’m sure as shit not going back to school just to get a second Bachelor’s.

I’m putting together an application to Stanford to start next fall, since a) they have an extraordinarily strong program and b) they are one of the only well-respected Graduate-level CS programs that will actually accept people who don’t have a CS undergrad background as long as they’re willing to learn.

It’s an extremely competitive program, so I have a fairly comprehensive backup plan standing by. I’ll get into it at some point down the road if need be.

If I do somehow manage to get into Stanford, however, I expect to hear a lot of this [note: mp3 link].

—

I’ve talked to a fair number of you guys about all this in differing degrees of depth, but I felt like I really needed to try and bring everything together in one place, almost more for my own purposes than to try and clarify it for everyone else.

I certainly won’t say I’m never working in entertainment again. If someone offered me a job right now that would help me keep my union health insurance even a bit longer, I’d take it in a second. But I don’t see my future in production anymore, and that’s where things have changed.

This is a path that’s been slowly coalescing over the last few months, and has picked up a lot of steam since about Labor day, when I finally accepted that I probably wouldn’t work in entertainment for much of the rest of the year.

It took a long time for the pieces to come together well enough for me to see them, but once they did, my way forward became much, much clearer. I’ve got a plan, or really a bunch of plans all leading in the same direction.

Now all I have to do is try and figure out how to get there from here.

The rather brilliant Hank Steuver, kicking off his hilarious review of new daytime talk show The Wendy Williams Show:

What should be on television in the middle of the day? What should fill the space between all those commercials for personal-injury attorneys, cures for urinary-tract infections and the promises of vo-tech schooling? Should anything be on? (Is “off” an option anymore, even in hospitals?)

All the available genres nearly died or migrated to niche networks — game shows, sitcom reruns, soaps, cooking demonstrations, local chatter. What programming remains will make you thank your lucky stars that you aren’t infirm or underemployed. The sound of a television turned on at high noon is the sound of utter human defeat. (The drone never ceases with the ads: bad credit, bad floors, bad living.)

As someone who is under-to-unemployed and on occasion turns on live TV in the middle of the day: Ye gods, is he ever right.

Recently, I have:

• Turned 28, to relatively little fanfare. Which is probably appropriate, because it’s not a terribly significant birthday. Drinks at the friendly local “We have a ton of awesome beer” establishment were fun, though.
   
• Found a surprisingly viable backup employment plan if I can’t get on anything for the fall season (which I’ll go into at some point later on if/when it happens). But the good news is that I am relatively confident that I will not be boiling my own shoes for dinner. At least not until after Thanksgiving.
   
• Had my phone deteriorate to the point where it’s going to take a lot of restraint for me to not smash the thing with a ballpeen hammer between now and next Friday when I get the new iPhone. Thankfully I have kept a dedicated phone replacement fund and have decided to say “Screw unemployment!” and just get the damn new one.
   
• Gotten new neighbors after 5 months of the apartment next door being empty because the landlord refused to face reality about the way rents are falling around here. They seem nice, but their cigarette smoke seeps into my apartment on occasion, and they let their cats roam about, which tends to freak Chaplin out in the middle of the night from time to time.
   
• Broke down and finally gotten myself the “Hooray, I lost 80lbs!” reward I’d been planning to get for months: An iPod shuffle/waterproof headset combo which will keep me entertained while swimming long distances. I’m now doing 2 miles with no problem, and I’m considering bumping up to 4km when I can get away with it.
   
• Watched an absolute fuckton of TV. Rewatched entire 4th season of BSG, now working through Netflix discs of Big Bang Theory (more geekily amusing than I recalled it being, since I dropped it after the pilot) and re-watching Band of Brothers, probably going to go through all of Deadwood next.
   
• Received a sternly worded letter from the landlord to the entire building that the toilets are ONLY for disposal of human waste and toilet paper. I’m not sure whether or not I want to hear the story behind that one.
   
• Have fought the good fight against my body’s natural instinct to stay awake ridiculously late and then get up mid-morning. Generally won, though this week I’ve mostly lost (as evidenced by the timestamp on this post).

There’s an amusing article up at the Washington Post, wherein the author points out all the hilariously inaccurate and wholly fabricated locations that 24 has used during its first season set in my ridiculous hometown of Washington D.C.

The traditional, “In what universe can you get from the White House to Foxhall Road in five minutes?” complaint rears its head. This is familiar to those of us in L.A. who laugh our asses off at the thought of getting from downtown to Burbank in ten minutes in the middle of rush hour traffic.

I will grant you, the “bad guys scuba diving up to the White House” was pretty damn ridiculous, since unless the entire swamp that sits beneath the city instantly liquefies, there will be no bad guys scuba diving up to the White House.

The geographic monkeying is still not as bad as it is on some shows, like when Bones relocated Arlington Cemetery to the other side of the Potomac for their pilot.

But 24 is at least somewhat plausible in its D.C.-ness. I’ve actually been pretty impressed the way that the squat parts of L.A.’s downtown have stood in for D.C.’s legislatively height-challenged buildings.

There’s definitely aspects of it that are unrealistic, but really, there are aspects of every show in which you have to suspend your disbelief. Longtime 24 viewers with any knowledge of L.A. geography whatsoever know that the Time-Traffic Continuum is never, has never been, and never will be respected by the show.

And now, those with that same knowledge of D.C. are learning that for themselves.

It takes a lot to make me stop watching a show. Evidence: I have watched every single episode of ER since its premiere. IN FUCKING 1994.

But I’m with Alan Sepinwall on this one: Heroes has lost me for good, and not because of anything in particular, but because of the sum total of its stupidity.

I was trying to explain why I still like Lost but am deleting my Heroes season pass to a friend, since both shows are often horrifically confusing and unnecessarily convoluted. It comes down to this: Motivation.

Characters on Lost have either had slowly evolving motivations or still are motivated by many of the same things that they were at the outset of the show. Most of the characters on Heroes seem to be motivated by whatever fits the plot that “chapter”, or even that week.

It becomes impossible to care who’s doing what or why when a character’s motivation can change so frequently and so capriciously, and you find yourself wondering why the hell you’re still watching this show in the first place.

It says a lot about how wrong you’ve gone when an unemployed person with nothing but time to kill decides that watching your show is not worth her time.

Credit to Sars of Tomato Nation for coining the phrase “DVR Break-Up“. Brilliant in its simplification of the process of deleting all recorded episodes of a show, then torpedoing the season pass. Amusing that she inaugurated it with Heroes six months ago, because she does not posess the patience (read: stupidity) that I do.

Spoilers for the last couple episodes of Grey’s Anatomy and The L Word, in the unlikely event that anyone who gives half a shit about either show hasn’t either seen the episodes or heard about them.

There are many shows that, for whatever reason, have their characters do things that are either entirely out of character, wholly implausible, or both. Usually this reason is that the writers have run out of ideas, but sometimes they’re just weird.

The question becomes: How do you address this within the show? Two shows I watch have pulled really odd and implausible plot twists out of their asses, and have gone with entirely different tacks in terms of how the other characters react to the weirdness.

Grey’s Anatomy has had Katherine Heigl’s character, Izzie, fucking the ghost of her dead ex-boyfriend. Like, having actual sex with a ghost. No other characters find out about it for a couple episodes, and when Izzie’s actual living, breathing, boyfriend, Alex, finds out about it, his reaction is roughly, “Whatever.”

The whole fucking-a-ghost thing is weird and implausible enough on its own, but for Alex to not really have a reaction to it made it that much stupider. As a doctor, he should at least be concerned about someone having massive hallucinations. As her boyfriend, he should really be concerned that she’s cheating on him with said hallucinations.

The whole thing’s just been handled atrociously, and what’s worse is that it’s STILL dragging out. There was some resolution in the last episode (apparently, Dead Boyfriend came back to tell Izzie that she’s sick, but he wasn’t an omniscient enough ghost to actually tell her what she has), but there’s still a lot of unraveling that arc has to do.

Meanwhile, The L Word, usually a show I still watch because it’s grown so cartoonishly bad it’s actually funny, actually handled an out-of-character moment for two of its characters really, really well.

Jenny is the resident flake/screenwriter, Shane is the resident seductress/slut. The characters have been good friends for several seasons, but apparently Jenny decided she was in love with Shane, and at the end of the episode two Sundays ago, declared said love.

Shane reacted to this by sleeping with her, eliciting a collective, “What the FUCK?!” from the lesbians and friends of lesbians who still watch this show, because such a pairing really makes no sense for either character. Even in a show infamous for lack of continuity and character inconsistency, this stood out as really bizarre.

But the payoff to the hookup that happens in the first few minutes of the next episode made me completely ignore its irrationality. Alice, a friend of both Jenny and Shane, comes over the morning after the ridiculous hookup, and has an awesome moment of revelation where she realizes Jenny and Shane had sex.

The camera pushes in on her face like in a Hitchcock movie where someone’s just realized they know who the killer is. Due credit to Leisha Hailey, who plays Alice: The way her facial expression morphs into a truly horrified grimace as the camera pushes in is absolutely hysterical.

Alice immediately excuses herself to use the restroom, and sends out a freaked-out mass text to all their mutual friends. The montage of reactions (one person falls off a treadmill, one person busts out laughing in the middle of a meeting, one person even gives an out loud, “What the fuck?”) is truly the best sequence they’ve done in years.

And why was this so funny? Because they took the bomb they just dropped on the audience and showed that even within the show, people were completely flummoxed and thrown by the development, just as much as the audience was. They effectively told the audience, “We know what we’re doing is insane. Stick with us on this one,” by making every other character in the show a proxy for the audience’s reaction.

Now I will grant the Grey’s folks one thing: They have to fill 22 episodes, where as the L Word writers only had to fill 8 episodes for their truncated final season. Part of the reason the L Word writers may have moved to address the issue so quickly was that they really didn’t have time not to.

Whatever the reason, it’s a fascinating contrast in how writers approach plotlines that take both the characters and the audience out of their comfort zones.