Category Archives: Television

Brought to You by the Letter K

K StreetPolitics is one thing I can’t seem to get enough of these days, so I was happy to see the debut of Steven Soderbergh and George Clooney’s “K Street” earlier this week. Conceptually, this new ongoing series is something like a verité mockumentary, a kind of cross between the work of D.A. Pennebaker and Christopher Guest — I realize that putting it like that would seemingly confound distinction, but there’s not an easy way to describe the tone of a series that pits a small handful of fictional characters mingling and interacting with real-life politicians and Washington power brokers, and that is designed to be conceived, written, shot, edited and aired all within the span of a week. It’s a bold concept, and the result is generally worthwhile; “K Street” is by turns revealing and lightly comedic, but it also bears the creakiness of an improvised enterprise.

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Dem Dems, Round Two

Sharpton and Lieberman at the 2nd Democratic Presidential DebateA lot of my friends didn’t even realize the second Democratic Presidential Debate was being held this evening in Baltimore. In fact, I hadn’t thought that a second debate would even take place until Thu 25 Sep, owing to the fact that the schedule of debates on the Democratic National Committee’s Web site said as much. It took some hunting on the Web to find when exactly it would be aired and where I could watch it.

Conspiratorially speaking, there might be a case that there was deliberate lack of media attention paid to this event when you consider that it was sponsored by the Congressional Black Congress, and held on the grounds of the principally African-American Morgan State University. To be fair though, the debate isn’t even mentioned on the CBC’s official Congressional home page, nor on the CBC Foundation’s own Web site.

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That’s My Bush

D.C. 9/11: Time of CrisisThanks to the handy-dandy new DVR in my cable box, tonight I was able to watch Showtime’s dramatization of the Bush White House in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, “D.C. 9/11: Time of Crisis.” Oh man, this thing was a hoot. I would almost say that it’s a completely worthless, clumsy piece of right wing propaganda, to say nothing of its shallow command of scripting, acting, filmmaking and drama… But there is in fact some inherent value to be found in its jingoistic melodrama, and that is a level of camp not seen since the days when Adam West ran around Southern California in a pair of gray tights.

The script for this historical fiction is loaded with groaners so heavy with histrionics (and pock-marked with innumerable dramatic pauses that never seem to want to end) that the final result is gut-bustingly hilarious. Take, as but one example among dozens and dozens, this line uttered by Bush — who has been wildly reimagined as an heroically intelligent, even-handed and profound statesman — utters to the uncharacteristically reserved and deferential Cheney: “I’m going to need you at my side at all times… consigliere.” Truly, this is the stuff of drunken, riotous midnight movie screenings. Good job, Showtime!

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Time Is on My Side

Explorer 8000 DVRMy dog has a habit of demanding to go outside during the eighth inning of just about every afternoon ballgame I watch on TV, but during today’s Yankees-Red Sox match I had a solution that suited both man and beast: digital video recording. I pressed ‘Pause’ on the remote control, walked Mister President out to the dog park and let him run around for about fifteen minutes. When we got back to the house I pressed &#8216Play’ and watched Jorge Posada hit a crucial home run to win it for the Yankees with a final score of 10-7.

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I Knew Him When

Curb Your EnthusiasmAmong the nominees announced yesterday for the 55th Annual Emmy Awards was Jonathan Corn for “Outstanding Single-Camera Picture Editing for a Comedy Series.“ Specifically, the nomination singles out his work on the semi-infamous “Krazee Eyez Killa” episode of Larry David’s painfully hilarious HBO show “Curb Your Enthusiasm.” It was a brilliant episode, but the real reason I’m posting this here is that I’ve known Jonathan since the 8th grade, when we attended, first, junior high and, later on, high school together. I also saw him off with a books-on-tape copy of O.J. Simpson’s “I Want to Tell You” when he packed up his bags, left behind the East Coast and headed off to Hollywood in search of fame and fortune. Congratulations, Mr. Corn!

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Think Outside of the Idiot Box

TiVoFor the better part of two years, I’ve been debating whether I should buy myself a TiVo, and as a kind of corollary to that, whether I should subscribe to digital cable television. The first question I always ask myself in trying to resolve this debate is: how much more time am I willing to devote to watching television? The closest I can come to answering that is, “I probably can’t devote much more time, but I’d probably find some way to devote lots more time.” Which begins to explain why I neither own a TiVo nor subscribe to digital cable.

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Instant Gratification

iTunes 4Having now actually made two purchases at Apple’s iTunes Music Store, I can report that the service, once you get it running, is frighteningly easy to use. It took me a day or two to register with the store because the initial frenzy of its debut had Apple’s servers tied up in knots. But once I did, I found that downloading a song was really as simple as clicking on a single button. Dangerously simple.

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The One Where Chandler Goes to the White House

The West WingIf you’re familiar with the concept of ‘jumping the shark’, a kind of death watch for the creative plausibility of any given television show, then you might be tempted to say that NBC’s “The West Wing” has seen the aerial view of a fin. See, they’ve gone ahead and had Matthew Perry turn in a few guest appearances, which is just the oddest ploy to boost ratings that I can imagine, in spite of the continued success of “Friends.”

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Online Frontline

The venerable PBS documentary show “Frontline” is celebrating its twentieth season. To mark the occasion, its producers have made over a dozen full-length episodes available online. Each episode is available in six, stamp-sized QuickTime segments — it’s not exactly the broadband future we’ve been promised since the nineties, but it’s still a feat that public television can deliver content in this way, while the major networks continue to wait for who knows what.

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