gwyn: (nikita fatale sinecure)
Wow, feeling really crappy lately, and today was really, really bad. Trying to focus on other stuff. Like!

Day 10 - A show you thought you wouldn't like but ended up loving

I could actually say this about at least 60 percent of the shows I watch -- I go through all the sources for fall/spring/summer previews, whatever, and make notes about which shows sound like possibilities for me. I usually give them two to three episodes to grab me. Only a few I hate so much I can't watch more than one of. But when both La Femme Nikita and Buffy came on the air at the same time, I expected the worst. I'd loved both the movies they were based on, and so my dismay at what they sounded like as TV programs was pretty high. But Buffy had Anthony Stewart Head in it -- whereas LFN had nothing I knew of going for it. I watched the first couple episodes, found it lacking, didn't like the idea of Nikita as a big blond innocent Amazon type, and Bob had been changed into a Michael, though I did think he was pretty hot (just not Tcheky Karyo). Then [personal profile] talking_sock posted about it, and I thought, wow, I should give it a second chance because it sounds better than I remembered, the way she described it. And late at night they showed the episode "War," which just... someone wrote to my kinks in that one. Oh, they so wrote to my kinks, with Nikita besting bad guys in her birthday suit, torture and getting shot, double crosses and lies, and a hugely emotional scene when Michael and Nikita are being held captive in cages and he confesses feelings for her, and then there was the ending, with poor tortured Michael whispering to unconscious shot and tortured Nikita that not everything was a lie, and I died. Died, I tell you. I have made... how many vids in it? I don't think I can even count. I never get tired of it. Some of the technology in real life is catching up to the madeup stuff in the show. And Roy Dupuis still has the best man pain of anyone out there. I don't love the idea of the new show they're doing for it this fall on CW. But hey, you never know.

(I tried to find a clip online of the cage scene that made me fall so hard, but apparently LFN fans, true to their feral natures, don't have many clips on YouTube at all. They were always the least media-savvy fans I've ever known. But you can watch full episodes at the WB's web site.)

Day 11 - A show that disappointed you

I'm one of those idiots who will stick with a show no matter how much it disappoints me. I've abandoned only a few shows in my time -- it's just really hard for me to stop watching something if I've ever been invested in it at some point. Walk away and cut my losses? So not me. But I did with Heroes. I don't know anything that's ever come out of the starting gate so strong, and failed so badly by the second furlong. And weirdly, it wasn't the second season where it started; for me, it was the first season finale, when they clearly let Sylar go so they could use him again, despite the fact that he'd become such a joke villain by then. And there were other failings in that episode (a lot centered around Ali Larter), but the penultimate episode was fabulous. If they could have left it there, or kept that style of storytelling, maybe they could have kept it together. I think Kring was a lot like Chris Carter, in that he didn't understand what it was he'd done right in the first season, so he could never replicate it. Bringing Bryan Fuller back didn't help, and I abandoned it by the end of second season. There were some fine moments in season 2, but when they killed Nathan and replaced him with the pointless Sylar, I was gone. And now it's gone, because apparently a lot of people are like me, and were disappointed too.
gwyn: (8ball wizzicons)
Yesterday started off very badly when Brent told me that the thing I'd driven all around town to find was the wrong thing. I even endured a bunch of guys at the hardware store laughing about me when they thought I wasn't there, because of my inability to remember the name of what I wanted. Then it just went downhill from there. The fabricator installer guys arrived with the soapstone when Brent was out, and before they got started, I heard them talking about the sink. Turned out to have two major cracks in it. So no countertops. I told them I really needed to wait for Brent to get back so he could tell me what to do, and in that time, they discovered that the swanky Eurostyle faucet wouldn't fit in the alotted space because the single handle lever goes forward and backward for cold and hot. No room in the back.

So they had to call the project manager and everybody else. it's a good thing I'm on vacation, since we spent the next hour and a half discussing it. I told them even if we could get a different sink (out of the question, since the fabricators cut the slabs based on that model), it wasn't a go for me because that was the first thing I picked out and built everything else around. But I have had these fixtures for months now, and I told them all I was really pissed that I was going to have go find and wait for a new faucet because somewhere along the line, someone didn't do their job. I think the fabricators cracked the sink, since they took it for measuring and I guess all that bumping around didn't do it any favors, but there's no way to tell. I was just angry. At best, I might get the countertops by end of week, but at this point, I'm not holding my breath.

And that means no plumbers till next week, or tile guy, or whatever... I knew it was too good to be true that I'd have it finished by my birthday. I went out today and when i came home it looked like Brent had been here at some point with the new sink. Otherwise nothing is happening. We decided to put the faucet in sideways. It's not ideal, and it doesn't look nearly as cool and swanky, but at least I don't have to wait another couple weeks for a special order faucet or whatever.

I thought Heroes might make up for the disappointment and frustration. Boy, was I wrong. I hate shows that are predicated on people being stupid. Notice I said people being stupid, not occasionally doing something stupid. Because there is a big difference between people making occasional huge to minor blunders in favor of plot development (Buffy, for example), and people habitually acting and thinking stupid. And everything in Heroes lately is happening because of the latter. Last year, I wrote about the difficulty of dramatic irony in the show in this post, and it feels even more relevant to me now, because we're not simply having to deal with knowing what is happening that other characters don't, we're also having to watch this all being done by stupid people being stupid over and over and over and none of them ever learning from their mistakes. I don't know if I can watch this show anymore after this "season" wrap-up, whenever the writers' strike ends. I don't know if Tim Kring really does see what's wrong, or if it was too late for him to fix things, or what, but... I'm sorry. My tolerance for stupid people is already quite low, and this borders on... humiliation. People should be humiliated to be this cretinous. I'm humiliated for them.

And I was disappointed this weekend by BSG: Razor. I can't even necessarily say why. I just found it really unsatisfactory and that Sci-Fi thinks that's enough to tide fans over until their absurd restart date of April 2008... sorry, asshats, ya lost me. I may have to get my Roslin and Adama fixes from fanfic if this keeps up.
gwyn: (mack daddy)
I have had to accept, especially since I got the TiVo a number of years ago, that there's just no way I can watch as much of the new shows to test them out as I would like -- so I whittle down my list more and more each fall and attempt to pick what I think will a) be worth my time, or at least be semi-interesting, and b) last longer than 4 eps. I still haven't mastered the art of b) yet. And I still have too much TV on my TiVo, which, now that I'm watching a soap again and have an addiction to HGTV, has become quite unmanageable. This year, I've got about five new shows on the season pass list, and I still can't keep up, between my older series (Heroes, Numb3rs, The Unit -- what can I say? Hot men, bad TV, and so on) and the new stuff.

I adored Chuck, but couldn't watch it after the first episode, because they teasingly showed it on every network NBC owns for only the pilot, no other episodes, and NBC's player works so suckily on my Mac I haven't tried to watch them online. But at some point, I will catch up. Because Adam Baldwin in a Best Buy-type-store polo shirt? Won't ever not be funny.

Speaking of losers who are funny, Reaper )

Life )

Journeyman )

Pushing Daisies )

Moonlight )

Bionic Woman )

And then there are the returning shows, though mostly what I could say about those is that there are fetching new hair styles on both the Unit and Numb3rs for a few people, and Don has standup hair again, thank god, though Charlie's facial hair scares me a bit. They are still silly and I like them, but I'd rather watch Reaper than the Unit, for however long that lasts. The big two, for me, though, are Heroes and Dexter. I haven't had the chance to watch more than the first two eps of second season Dexter so I'm behind in that respect, but...

Dexter )

Heroes )

Prison Break )
gwyn: (supergenius sdwolfpup)
In which I actually talk about something besides my stupid personal life for a change.

A couple weeks ago, I watched Heroes with [livejournal.com profile] mlyn, and griped a lot about how poorly they use dramatic irony on the show, particularly with regard to Mohinder, who is quite possibly one of the prettiest men on the planet but who is also, as they're writing it right now, the dumbest.

Dramatic irony is one of those things that, when used well, can engage an audience of readers, playgoers, movie-watchers, book-readers, etc. The problem is, it's often not done well, and it's especially poorly employed on weekly TV series, where it can frustrate the hell out of audiences when they're forced week after week to see things the other characters aren't getting.

I see a lot of misuse of the term in my job, where writers often think it means just really intense irony, but it does have a specific definition. Dramatic irony:
occurs when a character onstage is ignorant, but the audience watching knows his or her eventual fate, as in Shakespeare’s play Romeo and Juliet.

This is really just a fancy way of saying the audience knows what's going on, but the characters onstage (film, page, whatever) don't.

Cut for Heroes spoilers up through recent eps, and Dexter S1 )

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