The LXD and the Onlne Cheat Machine

Hulu's having a rough time right now. The amount of new material that's available on all 37,029 channels is thin enough in early July under any circumstances, and what little is there is delayed and unavailable, sometimes for weeks at a time. Then there's this whole "Hulu Plus" thing which -- in spite of Hulu's half-hearted marketing efforts -- implies that all the really GOOD stuff is now going to be hidden behind a $9.99/month firewall. Pretty difficult sale when you've already acclimated your zillions of audience to unlimited free watching, AND you seem to be offering next to nothing for the $120/year (the same shows only more of them, no really decent original content you can't find elsewhere, no real sense of curating or inter-mediation ... AND you get to keep watching the ads!  Yay!).

And now there's LXD. 

Look, we have nothing against dance shows. More power to 'em. But if they're all that popular to begin with, why do they have to be disguised as a superhero web series?  

Even a fairly careful viewing of the LXD promos on Hulu and the episodes themselves make you think this is a professionally produced (if shallow) knock-off of Heroes or X-Men. This "legion" of "extraordinary young people" finding each other and fighting against an "uprising of evil."  Lots of black leather and dangerous looks. And at least two of the jumping jacks in the promo shot (see above) look like they're flying. It's so convincing, in fact, that you don't really know until the last word of the mysterious narrator's opening speech: "A Legion ... of Extraordinary ... Dancers."  "What?" you say, and whack the side of your laptop.  "Extraordinary What?" And the story that follows: a young boy who suddenly jumps and turns like a demon, a flash-forward to his high school years, where he abruptly blossoms in a rave-level dance-off ... it's dark comic-book stuff, except he's dancing instead of bursting into flame or shooting power-beams out his eyes. All to disguise some really very good, very flashy, dancing.  (And there's even a weird and funny cameo by one of the guys from Stars' recently canceled Party Down that's worth the 15-minute investment all by itself.)

Hulu ... don't do this. It already looks like you're pulling a bait-and-switch with Hulu Plus. You're already pawning off old (and often canceled) BBC shows and long-dead off-network series because you can't get much of anything else at the moment.  Don't make matters worse by confusing dance fans and disappointing f&sf fans with something like LXD. Puh-leeze. 

 

It Would Be Easy to Say "The Gates" Sucks ... TOO Easy

We are not difficult to please. Truly we aren't. We just ask that the premises of Rush-y TV shows make a teeny, tiny, even microscopic amount of sense before the producers and networks spend skillions of dollars to foist them on the general public.

We're sure all the people involved with The Gates are perfectly nice and dedicated and hard-working. Rhona Mitra is hot, Ron Grillo of Prison Break is earnest, and we will watch Chandra West do pretty much anything any time ... but the sad fact is, the premise of this "daylight horror" series makes absolutely no sense, and the net result is a mishmosh of uninvolving and whiny pseudo-sinister that should've been titled Transylvania 90210.

The Gates is a gated community, lovely and tranquil in a Desperate Housewives kind'a way. It has its share of coy beauties (of both sexes), hormonal teens, and behind-closed-doors secret liaisons, but here's the kicker: many of the long-time residents are actually vampires. Or werewolves. Or shapeshifters. Or witches. Or succubi. Or other supernaturalish creatures n human form, hiding in plain sight (and quite comfortably, too, thank you).

As a fifty-word pitch, that might seem almost interesting.  Almost. To some. But as even the pilot episode shows, you think about it for five extra seconds and the concepts begins to crack and crumble like an overbaked snickernoodle. 

Why, for instance, would creatures that have no real connection to each other-- in fact, seem to have some inborn interracial enmity -- congregate in one li'l town, no matter how luxurious it might be? In rival city-states, maybe, but chockablock side-by-side in the same neighborhood? They don't even like each other. What's more, why would creatures who had spent generations running and hiding from the rest of civilization make themselves such an easy target by clumping together?  Better to be the only vampire (lycanthrope, succubus, whatever) in town, eh?  And assuming, for the moment, there was some really good reason to be there in the first place, why the HELL would you put yourself in a community that's completely covered in closed-circuit security cameras that record your every (evil) move?  Aren't you trying to hide? And worst of all -- why employ a local police department that ISN'T in on the secret?  The guy who created this Subivision of the Damned did it specifically to provide a 'safe place' for the weird among us -- he says so, straight up, in the first episode. So what actually create and pay your own do-it-hourself Van Helsings ... and give them guns?? 

It don't make a lick o' sense.

Really: a gated community being taken over by supernatural beasties, maybe. King made it work with a small New England town, way back when in 'Salem's Lot, and Fido and Shawn of the Dead did it with zombies, but only for laughs. Twilight? Uh .. okay. Yeah, sure. Maybe this whole idea, wth all the pretty young people doing kissy-face across the faerie subcultures, owes more to Stephane Meyer than Stephen King.  But at base? It's just a bad idea, even for a summer show.

We've gven it two episodes.  That's enough.

 

I Have a Poltergeist in my Pants!

Alex Day Rocks. Pure and simple. This younger feller with the British accent is a musician, a humorist, and a critic (though we doubt he'd call himself anythng but a musician) who's a bit o' the ol' celebrity over there on the YouTubes. He's been 'reviewing,' for lack of a better term, Twilight, one chapter at a time, for the first fifteen Chapter, with such cheerful disdain that you can't help liking the guy and agreeing with him -- the book sucks, and not in a good way! -- and he's recently branched out into extremely short (and very helpful) explanations of everything for the last episode of Lost to the "hung parliament" of British politics, using nothing more than his own considerable wit and, when forced to it, Post-It Notes.

His recent scan of a British tabloid we'd never heard of, Pick Me Up, is little more than a recitation of ths remarkable publicaton's headlines, done with Alex' trademarked gentle sarcasm. But he hasinadvertangly stumbled on of the great headlines (pick-up lines, ejaculations, excuses, epiphanies) in the English language: "I have a poltergeist in my pants!"

Damn, if only we had thought of that response any number of times over the last fifty years.  Life would be so different ...

At any rate: visit Alex Day, subscribe, enjoy.  In that order ... and that's an order!

 

Everything Old is New Again -- like MST3K and Sliders?

It's the collision of "summer doldrums" and "200 channels and nothing to watch:" Hulu, the primary source of watch-TV-on-the-web these days, has so little to recommend on its daily updated home page that it is reaching into the dim, cult-ridden past ... for episodes of Mystery Science Theater 3000 and -- of all things -- Sliders.

Skip the fact that they show a picture of Joel and linked up new episodes starring Mike; skip the fact that MST3K's Satellite of Love (love those initials!) stopped broadcasting years ago. More importantly, it illustrates (rather painfully) Hulu's increasingly restricted access to really interesting new stuff, and points out the  weird the decisions of individual networks re: access have become. 

Just as an example: USA Network is now holding new first-run episodes of Burn Notice for eight days after broadcast -- now, when there's virtually no new product available; when many of the new summer shows, anywhere on the dial, aren't showing up until after the Fourth of July.  There are gazillions of viewers out there -- even folks who've never watched BN -- who would be glad to watch it (and its advertisements) right now, just 'cause there's nothing else out there at all.  Hell, there are TV addicts who would kick a puppy for just one hour of original programming at this point, and these guys are sitting on their new stuff?  People, people! We're starving out here!  They're making us watch long-dead Jerry O'Connell series that were lame when they were new!  Jerry O'Connell, damn it!  Come on!

(And for those who'd like to see MST3Kish product that was created in, like, this century, try Cinematic Titanic, where Joel and Trace and Mary Jo and others are hanging, or Rifftrax, where Mike and Kevin and Bill are doing SOL-like audio riffs to play with current movies (their recent commentary on The Dark Knight was worth every penny of the low, low $3.99 download price, and ever so much more!)

As for Jerry O'Connell .. please, people. Please. Can't we just have a tiny little helping of Burn Notice before it gets all stale and icky? Please?

 

Batman? Superman? Equals? REALLY?

It's really been the dirty little secret of the DCU for, like, ever: could Bruce and Clark really be friends? A regular guy with a flying rodent fixation and an alien so powerful he can barely pretend to be human?

The guys over at College Humor get it.  They have reeled out the most honest speculation about The Friendship That Could Never Be. All we have to do is witness, brethren and sistren. Witness. And it also makes persistent fun of the climactic line of The Dark Knight that, frankly, honestly, we never really understood in the first place.

Okay, I forget now: can you guys breathe in outer space?  Or not?

 

Leverage is back, better than ever

Leverage is back, finally ... and better than ever.  Seriously. Yeah, when Sophie (Gina Bellman) went off to have her real, live baby, the show quickly lost its center and its sense of humor; you got the sense (especially in the two-part finale) that they knew that, and basically vamped the second half of the season  until Sophie could return, better than ever. (You can't blame them for trying, but adding Seven of Nine -- excuse us, Jeri Ryan -- didn't work. At all.)

Judging by the opening two episodes, just recently revealed on TNT, the Leverage folks have found their feet again, and all is well.  Sophie's back, the capers are as absurd and exciting as once they were, and everybody gets to do all sorts of stupid accents, just like the good old days. It's like a nice little glass of champagne every Tuesday night, at least for a few weeks.  Enjoy!

 

The Scooby-Gilligan Connection REVEALED!

My God, it's true. It's true: Scooby-Doo is just a rip-off of Dobie Gillis, with a big damn dog attached!

Bizarre, isn't it, that Gillis is long-dead, and that its only break-out star, Bob Denver as the "beatnik" Maynard G. Krebs (hey, remember beatniks?  No, um, no, neither do we!), went on to ultracult status as Gilligan of the infamous Island ... but that a Saturday morning cartoon version of it has actually outlived its original "inspiration," to use the term loosely, by decades -- by lifetimes. Check it out:

• Fred = Dobie, the painfully good-looking, over-groomed and shallow pretty-boy
• Velma = Zelda (how could we not see this?), the spunky but bespectacled brainiac
• Daphne = Thalia Meninger, the gorgeous if not overly intelligent blonde (My God, that was Tuesday Weld, back in the day. And now that we think about it, Warren Beatty was a regular on that show to. Warren friggin' Beatty, man!)
• Shaggy = Maynard, right down to the cracked voice and the scraggly goatee.

Dobie was only on for four years, from '59 to '63. It was six years later, when damn near everyone had forgotten about the show entirely, that Fred Silverman and the Hanna Barbera people ripped it off, part and parcel, to bring the Scoobs to life.

Damn. There's not only nothing new under the sun now; there wasn't anything new under the sun fifty years ago.

Oh, and there's a new Scooby-Doo animated feature coming out soon, and going straight to Cartoon Network.  Just so's you know.

 

Worst Robot Swordfight EVER!

We don't often steal from Attack of the Show, since they generally cover different stuff than we do ... but this time they uncovered this increasingly popular YouTube vid before we did, so ... kudos to them. But it is SO Rush-y: not just a sword fight, not just a robot swordfght, but possibly the worst robot sword fight ever filme, with dialoge that gives new meaning to the term "cheesy."  

Sit back and enjoy. Your robot sword fight perceptions will never be the same.

 

Fall TV: Here comes the new shows, just like the old shows

When it comes to the Rush stuff -- thrillers, fantasy, sf, etc. -- the new TV season (being gradually revealed this week by the various nets) is giving us very little to love, and even less that you could call 'new.'

Lost and latecomer FlashForward disappear, but here comes The Event, a big, vague, multi-thread show about a "regular guy" who discovers a "massive conspiracy that not even the President knows about."  Look for lots of ambiguous pronouncements and significant looks between characters that no one understands.

Heroes finally shuffles off -- Go with god, zombie-show! -- and here comes No Ordinary Family, about a superhero family starring Michael Chiklis of The Shield and The Fantastic Four. Been there, done that, too.

Then there are the spin-offs of Criminal Minds and Law and Order (even though NBC canceled the original Law and Order in the same corporate breath). Not to mention -- please! -- new shows about rogue attorneys fightin' for the people, and rogue doctors fightin' for their patients, and another set of shows from Bruckheimer and Abrams and on and on.

And where do we sign up to be Alex O'Laughlin? The barely recognizable star of Moonlight, the failed vampire cop show, and Three Rivers, the failed ensemble medical show, and The Back-Up Plan, the failed Jennifer Lopez romantic comedy career-revival film, gets another chance, yet again, in the CBS reboot of Hawaii Five-O.  Let's think about that: Doe-eyed, slim little Alex O'Laughlin as granite-jawed, "Book 'em, Dano!" Steve McGarret.

We give it six weeks.

Only two new shows on the horizon offer any glimmer of hope, and mostly because we don't know much about them yet: a reboot of La Femme Nikita, this time called simply Nikita, starring Maggie Q and produced by McQ and the guys from Chuck, and Steven Spielberg's much-mused-about hard-sf mid-seasoner Terra Nova, over on FOX. Not that Steve has had great luck with breaking into TV, but please, God, anything. We're talkin' port in a storm time here.

Let's just cling to the fact that Human Target and Stargate: Universe will both be back and new episodes of Leverage and Burn Notice are just weeks away. It's not so much the long, hot summer that worries us; it's the bleak midwinter. Or even the soggy fall.

 

Fox Gets It Right Twice: Human Target & Lie to Me Renewed

Let's face it: when it comes to smart action/adventure or thrillers on network TV, the pickin's are mighty slim. That's why it's especially good news that FOX has renewed the fledgling butt-kicker Human Target for a second year, and given Tim Roth a third year to be all sarcastic and omniscient on the underrated Lie to Me.

You have to wonder if FOX made the move because they've lost 24, their only reliable action show, and their other series with high cult potential have either been axed already, like Dollhouse, or are lying there twitching like Fringe (a musical episode already? Really?) But whatever the reasoning, welcome back Christopher Chance (now we'll get to see the second half of that cliffhanger!) and House-like Dr. Lightman.