other shows

The Riches

Have I Got News for You

New Amsterdam

Bewitched

Filed under: tv

therapy

My work-study supervisor got me hooked on “In Treatment.” It is crazy!

Crazy-fun!

I’m on episode 36 now. There are 9 left in this season.

Crazy!

Filed under: tv

Or maybe I just want to read Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

I am still awake right now because I just watched two episodes of House on hulu.com. I don’t know how I got sucked in, I was supposed to dedicate this sad Friday night to homework…Well, I guess technically it *is* Saturday now. =P

I like House and watch it if I ever happen across it during those rare times I’m using the actual telly. On those occasions I usually miss the teaser, and now I realize that was a good thing, because that’s when a lot of gross, scary sickness-related stuff happens.

And then near the end of the second act there’s usually something gross going on too. That’s when I get sort of weak-kneed and nauseous and have to avert my eyes.

But, I love Hugh Laurie and Dr. Wilson. Maybe I should just suck it up and buy a season of Jeeves & Wooster like I’ve always wanted to. And…what, Dead Poet’s Society? Blegh. What else has Mr. R.S. Leonard done…

Filed under: tv

then again, it’s still in beta…

Only morbid curiosity made me sign up for an invite to hulu.com, whose name just reeks of eau de corporate office desperation, but after having checked it out for a bit (I consider this “research” for school), I’m surprised to find myself more impressed than contemptuous. The site loads quickly, and it’s clean and well-formed. I’ve grown used to how cluttered YouTube’s gotten, but I much appreciate minimalist design.

The content offerings are good if you need to catch up on the latest episodes of shows like “House” and “The Office” (i.e., NBC/Universal and Fox shows). Like, I’m super happy to find “30 Rock” on there, and ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT!!!! They also have old shows, like Bob Newhart and Woody Woodpecker. I wish they’d provide more episodes, though, rather than a partial selection. Maybe that will happen later. Unless they make us pay for those, which they very well might.

Hulu uses Flash-based video, of course, but the quality is noticeably better than what you’d find on YouTube or on those Daily Show clips on Comedy Central’s site. The video quality on Hulu is similar to what you’d find on the godawful NBC TV website proper (though I haven’t tried their proprietary player, just on principle), but Hulu’s UI is way, way better. They seem to have put a lot of effort into making the video player work smoothly and look nice, too.

For instance, the “seek” function is actually functional! The cursor is precise and it works without a hitch, which is so rare. Streaming is smooth, unlike that stoopid NBC site (yes I’m bitter). Videos even resume where you left off, if you clicked to watch something else or went to another website. I know they’re tracking our every move on the site for datamining purposes, but that is a given, and at least they’re giving us something useful out of it.

Also, you can pop out videos to resize them however you want: no longer the tyranny of “bad,” “tiny,” or “awful, blocky, full-screen.” The best size, though, is the default as displayed on the web page.

There are also buttons for feedback, writing a review, rating the episode, and sharing, and even one for learning details about the clip you’re viewing, which, if the info is incorrect, you can fix via the “feedback” button. The menus work similarly to most of the other video-sharing sites.

The coolest part about sharing a video (or embedding one) is that you can select a short clip from the video, and the way to do it is awesomely easy and intuitive. I only wish you could see thumbnails of the start and end points or something, rather than having to guess and click “preview” to check, which gets annoying pretty fast. I’d embed a video but it doesn’t seem to work anywhere right now. Here’s a video I’ve linked to on my tumbleblog, since WordPress doesn’t allow embedding.

Below the video are comments and “related” videos. The site is very easy to explore, with very few annoying things about the menu and navigation (just because Amazon uses ginormous hover-based nav menus doesn’t mean it’s cool).

Also, it’s free. The episode of “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” (featuring an impossibly beautiful Robert Redford) is as free as the latest episode of “My Name is Earl.”

The biggest downside is (surprise!) the ads. They’re about what you’d expect, appearing during act breaks like regular commercials, but that doesn’t make them any less obnoxious. But since they’re there, I wish they’d have different ads during each break, rather than, like, the same screechy Saturn commercial all three times.

Still. I was ready to heap scorn on this venture, but I can’t. Lame name aside, I like!

update: omg what is with those INTRUSIVE ads that appear above the player menu and COVER UP THE VIDEO??? BAD, hulu, BAD!!!

Filed under: tv, video, web2.0

treasure hunt!

The Hollywood Video in Cerritos is going out of business, apparently, and so they’re liquidating their entire DVD inventory. I went there today and it was still quietly chaotic, even though about half the shelves were already empty.

After looking at all the movies, I picked out a few classic ones but then realized I could get TV shows, one disc at a time. This has always been a big thing of mine, because there are a few shows where I love an individual episode but don’t feel like shelling out lots of money to get the whole season or series. Shows like Extras, The X-Files, or Frasier. I’ve always wished I could just buy single episodes and make, like, a mix DVD of personal favorites.

Short of that, being able to buy individual discs seemed like a good enough deal. I couldn’t find any discs from those shows that I wanted, but! I sniffed out a disc of Millennium, that other show by Chris Carter. And it had the one with the episode written by Darin Morgan, “Jose Chung’s Doomsday Defense.” Which is the only episode of Millennium I find worth watching.So I didnt’ have to buy the rest of that depressing show. And it was only $3! Score!

Filed under: tv

oh, LA

I turned on the TV to watch more Food Network this afternoon (and oh my goodness, how sick am I of that darn channel?!? A lot.) but the TV was tuned to Comedy Central, and a movie was just about to start, so I watched the credits, and how surprised was I to see Royce Hall on the screen? Or one of those main quad buildings on campus, anyway.

The movie was National Lampoon’s Van Wilder, so I didn’t stay long on the channel, but I was kinda thrown off for the rest of the day.

Filed under: tv

the gays ruled today

Man, you know you’ve gone all nerdy when you forget what for most people would’ve been the highlight of the day: last night, while driving to Hollywood for the SMPTE thing, my ride and I almost ran over Sean Hayes as he was crossing Santa Monica Blvd in Hollywood. He had a baseball cap on, and he was totally jaywalking in heavy traffic, but he just ran across and waved thank-you to all the cars that didn’t hit him. Including us, yay us! He looked pretty good! Kinda nicely filled out, and younger-looking. I do believe that’s like, the only honest-to-God celebrity sighting I’ve had my entire life. And it took only 25 years!

Then, today in TV class someone gave a presentation on something about the gaze (cf Laura Mulvey) and the gays, and she showed clips from Will & Grace and Queer as Folk.

And then for our real TV screening later on we watched an episode of Dynasty, where one of the subplots is about the tycoon’s gay son, because he just punched a guy and they were both gay, and that was a Bad Thing in the 80s. We also watched Pee Wee’s Playhouse, which was great, but not (really) gay, and a bit of Hard Copy. And Hee Haw. We also watched a clip from “Written on the Wind,” which is a Douglas Sirk melodrama (and is thus totally awesome) starring Rock Hudson and Robert Stack.

And then for Restoration class we watched “The Times of Harvey Milk.” Which was really sad.

I’m so ready for a change of theme now. There’s still 2 hours to go before the Daily Show, though, and I’m kinda Food Network’d out. But! Here is a video of a crazy lady who taught her cat how to use a fork. Which is not in the genre of “gay,” so much as it is in the genre of “totally f’ing scary.”

Filed under: tv

more school drivel

Wednesdays are the worst, and yesterday was no exception. The simple fact is that 8 hours of class in a day is no fun, especially when one class is really 5 hours long, but split by a 3-hour “break” during which one has to frantically compose a prospectus, finish off a dossier write-up, do research on one’s papers, polish off a few more work-study hours, or meet with professors.

Still, yesterday was interesting because several people from the UCLA Archive came to listen to us present our film dossiers in Restoration class. They had a lot of great feedback, and I wish we had more sessions like that, from people who actually, like, do the work we spend so much time discussing. We’ve been getting more visits from such people, which is nice, but really, they should’ve been doing so all year long.

Also, we watched TV in TV class (surprise) – yesterday’s shows were “Mary Tyler Moore,” “Maude,” “Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman,” and “The Richard Pryor Show,” each of which was awesome in its own special way (the third one especially). All are 70s shows: Norman Lear, “relevance,” and “quality” with the MTM kitten. It’s so great to finally watch these shows instead of just reading about them (though we have plenty of that, too – yesterday the prof told us we “only” have to do two of the 3 readings she originally assigned for next week, but what do you know, the second of the two is almost half of a book).

Then today I watched some more TV for my paper – “Cooking with Corris,” an old local TV cooking show that was fracking boring, and then “Saucepans for the Single Girl,” which is pretty fun. It’s about a girl who pretends she doesn’t know how to cook but has to learn, one recipe at a time (out of her mother’s index card catalog), so that she can snag a man. I’d watched the two episodes the archive owns before, but wanted to re-watch because I hadn’t known who Tommy Smothers was the first time around. This time, it was a bit funnier because I knew the context. He “teaches” her how to make a PB&J sandwich. The second episode had a female guest star who was supposed to teach the single girl how to make seafood curry, but almost from the beginning it becomes pretty clear that the guest star has barely ever even seen a kitchen before, and knows even less about how to make a curry.

Finally, I watched “Color Adjustment” by Marlon Riggs, which was a small experience in itself. Like, watching it made me come a bit closer to understanding what it must’ve been like for African American people to watch television the way they did, yet at the same time I felt almost complicit, or guilty in some way. And I’m not even white! =P

I think tomorrow I will go back to the Museum of Television & Radio in Beverly Hills to watch some more Julia Child shows. Last time I went I found a seminar on the Food Network. Now I know the truth about Alton Brown.

Filed under: school, tv

what am i, a farmer?

In the midst of doing ‘research’ for one of my classes this quarter, I’ve found myself hooked on “30 Rock,” the show run by Tina Fey, and yes, the one with Alec Baldwin. Whatever. He may suck as a human being, but he’s totally got acting skillz, and is absolutely the STAR of this series. Every scene with him is hilarious. I also love the character Kenneth, for whom the description “pathologically chipper” is dead-on.

And hey, what do you know, NBC has decided to stream all 21 episodes of the show, in their entirety, in medium-quality flash video! You don’t even have to wait for the DVDs!

Highly recommended. It’s no “Arrested Development,” but it’s still pretty fun. I’m definitely screwed this quarter.

Filed under: tv, video

this is totally fair use

This is hilarious and awesome, and not just because my studies are directly related: I mean, read the opening to this article:

The question probably never occurred to viewers in the 1970s and 1980s, but suddenly it is highly relevant: exactly how much worthwhile entertainment content was there in shows like “Charlie’s Angels,” “T. J. Hooker,” and “Starsky and Hutch”?

The Sony Corporation and its production studio, Sony Pictures Television, which controls the rights to those and many other relics of a distant era of television, have come up with an answer to that question: three and a half to five minutes.

Sony’s (yeah, boo, moving on) trying to make money off of their aged holdings by repurposing them as ‘minisodes.’ It makes perfect sense in lots of ways, the very least of which is the horribly slow pace of old TV shows and the need to tighten it up for modern viewers (I think that book by that one guy…..Everything Bad is Good for You is totally right, and that human brains today are trained to be more sophisticated in the way they process information than they were even just a few decades ago).

Ok, I really have to include the end as well:

Sony is even making a mini-version of “Ricki Lake,” one of its syndicated talk shows. “It’s great,” Mr. Mosko said. “The people get introduced, there’s a big fight, then they come together, and cry and hug. You get everything in five minutes.”

Filed under: tv