What with the newborn taking up much of my days, I didn't have too much time to watch TV this summer. I did catch a few shows, however.
Ninja Warrior. This is my new favorite show to truly zone out to. It's an obstacle course competition program from Japan called Sasuke, repackaged by the G4 network for an American audience. This YouTube video -- featuring my favorite Ninja Warrior competitor, fisherman Makoto Nagano -- should provide you with a decent taste of the show. Wikipedia has more information than you probably want to know about the program. Time/place: G4, all hours of the day (but officially 6pm & 10pm ET).
Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader? See Idiocracy. See also Miss Teen South Carolina. I couldn't click away fast enough. Time/place: not even gonna tell you.
Deadwood, season one. Finally got around to checking this out after many recommendations from friends. Big fan so far, through 10 episodes. Gem Saloon owner Al Swearengen is one of the best TV characters in recent memory. Aside from the obvious -- Wild Bill, Calamity Jane, and Deadwood itself -- I was surprised to learn that many of the characters, events, and establishments in the show actually existed and took place, including Swearengen, E.B., and the Gem. I imagine there's an extensive discussion on the web somewhere about how much the show deviates from recorded history, but I'm staying away for now for fear of spoilers, having already made the mistake of learning of Wild Bill's story arc in a book about the Wild West. Time/place: HBO2 is currently rerunning season one at 8pm ET. Also available on DVD, anytime.
The Wire, seasons one, two, and three. Everyone dogs on season two of The Wire (relatively speaking), but after a second viewing, it's right up there with one and three for me. Collectively the best program ever shown on TV, case closed, next topic, I'm not even gonna discuss that with you. G.O.A.T. However, up for debate: despite being everyone's favorite character on the show (but not mine), Omar Little is actually the least realistic character on a show defined by its realism. A gay thief/killer/felon who doesn't swear and adheres to a personal code of conduct? Come on! Time/place: BET is showing episodes of season three on Thursdays at 9:30pm ET, but edited for content and with commercials. Which is like viewing Titian's nudes with all the naughty bits pixelated out and a "Sponsored by AXE Deodorant Body Spray" banner draped over it. Just get the DVDs...beg, borrow, or steal if you have to.
Planet Earth. A highly recommended nature series that originally aired on the BBC in early 2006 (with David Attenborough narrating) and jumped to the Discovery Channel earlier this year (with Sigourney Weaver narrating). We caught several episodes on Discovery HD, which is a spectacular way to watch the series. My favorite scenes depicted the symbiotic relationships that develop in the wild: snakes and fish hunting together, dolphins and birds herding fish, spiders diving for prey trapped by pitcher plants. NY Times review, Washington Post review, detailed Wikipedia entry. Time/place: Not on TV in the US anymore, as far as I know. Your best bet is on DVD or, if you have an HD player, get the full effect on HD DVD or Blu-ray. Get the Attenborough-narrated version if you can. Oh, it looks like there's a few highly pixelated complete episodes of Planet Earth on Google Video...get 'em before they get taken down.
Show creator David Simon talks with author Nick Hornby (High Fidelity, etc.) in the The August 2007 issue of The Believer. The entire interview isn't available online but one of the three best bits is:
My standard for verisimilitude is simple and I came to it when I started to write prose narrative: fuck the average reader. I was always told to write for the average reader in my newspaper life. The average reader, as they meant it, was some suburban white subscriber with two-point-whatever kids and three-point-whatever cars and a dog and a cat and lawn furniture. He knows nothing and he needs everything explained to him right away, so that exposition becomes this incredible, story-killing burden. Fuck him. Fuck him to hell.
Simon goes on to talk about the overarching theme of The Wire: the exploration of the postmodern American city and the struggle of the individual against the city's institutions. Many of his thoughts on that particular subject are contained in this Dec 2006 interview at Slate. But in talking with Hornby, Simon draws a parallel between these city institutions and the Greek gods:
Another reason the show may feel different than a lot of television: our model is not quite so Shakespearian as other high-end HBO fare. The Sopranos and Deadwood -- two shows that I do admire -- offer a good deal of Macbeth or Richard III or Hamlet in their focus on the angst and machinations of their central characters (Tony Soprano, Al Swearingen). Much of our modern theatre seems rooted in the Shakespearian discovery of the modern mind. We're stealing instead from an earlier, less-traveled construct -- the Greeks -- lifting our thematic stance wholesale from Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides to create doomed and fated protagonists who confront a rigged game and their own mortality.
But instead of the old gods, The Wire is a Greek tragedy in which the postmodern institutions are the Olympian forces. It's the police department, or the drug economy, or the political structures, or the school administration, or the macroeconomics forces that are throwing the lightning bolts and hitting people in the ass for no reason. In much of television, and in a good deal of our stage drama, individuals are often portrayed as rising above institutions to achieve catharsis. In this drama, the institutions always prove larger, and those characters with hubris enough to challenge the postmodern construct of American empire are invariably mocked, marginalized, or crushed. Greek tragedy for the new millenium, so to speak.
The NY Times still deals in the Shakespearian and tells us the story of Donnie Andrews and Fran Boyd (thx, nirav), whom Simon and The Wire co-creator Edward Burns introduced to each other. Andrews was the inspiration for the popular Omar Little character on the show and Boyd was depicted in a previous Simon/Burns collaboration called The Corner. The Times also has their wedding announcement.
And finally, some news about season five. Sadly, instead of 12 or 13 episodes, the final season of the show will only consist of 10 episodes. The shooting of the final episode wrapped on September 1 and the season will premiere on Jan 6, 2008 (both facts courtesy of a Washington Post article about the end of the show). The season 4 DVD should be out a month or two before that. Two actors from Homicide: Life on the Street (based on a book by, you guessed it, David Simon) will appear in the final season: Clark Johnson (who also directed the final episode) and Richard Belzer, who will reprise his Homicide role as Detective John Munch.
Here's a fun rumor. I heard that the staff of the Daily Show and Colbert Report upload the shows to YouTube as soon as they can after the shows air and then the next day, lawyers from Comedy Central hit YouTube with takedown requests for the uploaded shows. Which makes total sense...sort of. The people making the shows want them to be seen while the lawyers want to ensure that people are paying to see them. It's a crazy media world we live in.
Last Saturday, Justin Timberlake and Andy Samberg collaborated on a music video for a new holiday gift idea: Dick in the Box. If you haven't seen the video yet, go now and then come back...it's pretty funny and you won't understand the rest of this if you haven't seen it. So go!
You back? So, my favorite part of the song is the instructions and yesterday while we were alternating between watching the video like 50 times and assembling some IKEA furniture for the office, I had the obvious idea. Ikea instructions for making Dick in a Box:
More Dick in a Box: Mr. and Mrs. Potatohead version, Line Rider version, some guy dancing in his living room with a box fastened to his crotch with a belt version, and a this is either brilliant or completely stupid (DURRR! DURRR!) video response.
A few years ago, I wrote about the potential hazards of watching time-shifted entertainment. Meg and I were watching a Red Sox-Yankees playoff game on TiVo and were about 20 minutes behind realtime events when Meg's phone rang:
She picked it up and looked at it, distracted by the game and unsure of what to do with it. I immediately realized it was her parents, calling with word of the completed game.
"No, no, don't answer it!" I yelled. "It's your parents! They're calling from the future!"
In promoting season four of The Wire, HBO sent out screener DVDs of the entire season to reviewers. By mid-October, some enterprising person ripped those DVDs and made all season 4 episodes available online, more than a month before the final episode was to be shown on TV. Unfortunately, those early viewers did some Googling about upcoming plot points which ended up in the referer logs of Heaven and Here, a popular blog about The Wire. (Note: if you haven't watched all of season 4, DON'T CLICK THROUGH to Heaven and Here...major spoilers!!) A spoiler-free excerpt:
Finally, I would like to say a few words on spoilers, On-Demand, and the concept of the collective. My big spoiler moment came about halfway through the season, which is rather a lucky break for me considering how much material I have been traversing each week related to the show. It was in the search terms for this very site, and it came in just three words: "[redacted]" It's the image you see for a second, recognize that you don't want to see, and quickly turn away from but can never even hope to forget. [...] I was able to avoid other spoilers, which again is kind of miraculous, but that note rang in my head all season, and it also had to be this ugly secret i kept while discussing the show here and with friends.
Who says time travel hasn't been invented yet?
I posted a link to this earlier, but after watching the first two hours earlier this evening, I must strongly caution against missing Eyes on the Prize on PBS this month. Using nothing more than archival film footage, on-camera interviews, period music, and a narrator's voiceover, the stories of Emmitt Till, the Montgomery bus boycott, and the desegregation of southern schools riveted me to the couch like few viewing experiences have. As compelling as the history of the civil rights movement in America is, the production of the film deserves some of the credit for its power. To hear the stories of these momentous events told by the participants themselves, without embellishment, is quite extraordinary. From a media perspective, watching Eyes on the Prize gives me hope that we can survive the era of the crescendoing musical scores and 20-cuts-per-minute editing and still tell powerful, engaging stories without worrying about window dressing. I won't soon forget the calm determination in the look and voice of Moses Wright or Mississippi governor Ross Barnett thundering away about segregation.
(For me, Eyes is also a nice companion piece to my twin obsessions of late, The Wire and The Blind Side, both of which deal with contemporary race relations in their own way. The PBS web site for the film lists dozens of resources for further exploration of the topic...does anyone have any specific recommendations for books about the civil rights movement? Lemme know.)
Update: Thanks for the recommendations, everyone...I posted a listing of them here.
Season four of The Wire just started, but I've got a season five wishlist item to share. I'd love to see an entire season that flashes back to Stringer Bell and Avon Barksdale establishng their operation, say 5-6 years before the start of season one. Maybe we'd also get to see McNulty's days in the Western with Bunny, Daniels' dark days, Bubs getting hooked on the junk, some backstory on The Greek, a bit of the Sobotka clan, and more Omar (there's never enough Omar). This isn't unprecendented; The Godfather: Part II followed the first movie's saga of an aging gangster and his three sons with a look at how Vito Corleone's operation came to be. With the way they've handled The Wire so far, I think the show's creators could pull off something similar in effect and acclaim.
(Now that I think about it, they're sort of doing that this season anyway. Marlo is kind of a young Avon and in the young school kids, we get a look at drug dealers in the making. Not related at all, but the best line of the series so far is from Clay Davis in the second episode of the 4th season: "Sheeeeeeeeeeeeeiiiiiiiiiiiiit." Laughed my ass off.)
I didn't see this one in the FAQ, so I'll ask the question here: Can someone explain to me why the just-released Series3 TiVo (aka TiVo HD) costs $800? (!!) I've been waiting for this damn thing for months/years now, but I just can't justify spending that much money when Time Warner's (admittedly inferior in many ways) HD DVR is $7/mo. Hell, we only get ~12 HD channels in this backwater burg anyway, so downgrading to a regular cable box and hooking up the old TiVo is an option as well.
TiVo's next priciest box is the 180-hour Series2 for $130.1 What's in that box that's worth the extra $670? Is it the dual HD tuners? The THX? (Maybe Lucas charges exorbitant sums of money for THX certification?) The extra hard drive space for the additional 170 hours of programming? The CableCard inputs? The backlit remote? What?
[1] Although the Series2's service fee is $20/mo versus $13/mo for the Series3, based on a 1-year contract. On a three-year contract, the S2's service drops to $17/mo while the S# would still be $13/mo. Over three years, that brings the total price of the S3 to
~$1270 compared to ~$740 for the S2, a difference of $530. ↩
It's difficult to talk about The Wire without wanting to reveal all sorts of plot details, character developments, and other spoilers, so instead I'll tell you how excited I am about the season four premiere tonight on HBO. (It's been available on HBO On Demand for a week or so now, but I've been out of the country so Meg and I are watching it tonight the old fashioned way: live.) Before we left for Austria, we burned through all 37 hours of the first three seasons in about four weeks, and in my opinion, The Wire is one of the very best television shows ever.
Despite being critically acclaimed, The Wire is also unfortunately one of HBO's less appreciated shows audience-wise. So, a little plug: get the season one DVDs from Netflix (or Amazon), park your ass in front of the television, and watch it. All the seasons tend to start a little slow but stick with it and ye shall be rewarded. (I was almost bored watching the first 3-4 episodes of season three, but the the payoff in the later episodes...oh man.) Alright, get to it.
Just finished watching the final episode of Six Feet Under. Don't worry, there's no spoilers here in case you've got it TiVoed for later viewing. The show ended in a good way, I think, a sad happy ending true to the show's focus. Poignant, I think they call it. SFU always did poignancy rather well in a medium possessing little patience for it. Many people will probably disagree that it ended well, that it wasn't Six Feet Under enough for them, but it's difficult to do a "normal" show as a finale; that approach would have failed in a different way.
But what do I know? I've seen every single episode of the show, many of them twice, and at this point I'm not sure how much objectivity I have in talking about it. Somewhere along the way, Six Feet Under became a soap opera for me. In many ways, this is the viewer's goal in seeking out entertainment, to stop the analysis of everything and just let go and enjoy the experience. To relax. As some have argued, the show may have gone downhill after the first two seasons, but I don't regret not noticing those flaws and just enjoying the ride.
Hey folks at PBS, I hear you're having funding problems. Might I suggest taking a spin around the Web to find content released under a Creative Commons license that you can broadcast for free? The Creative Commons site has a content search engine, as does Yahoo!
It doesn't look like there's a whole lot of video just yet, but Jason Scott has just released his 5 1/2 hour-long documentary series on BBS technology and culture under a Creative Commons license. The series is not going to cost any money to acquire beyond the $50 the 3-DVD set costs and from what I hear, it's an interesting and professionally produced view of a topic that many in your potential audience might be interested in watching.
And perhaps it's time to make the Public Broadcasting Service into just that...media by the people, for the people. A nationwide public access channel that draws the best citizen content from around the country and (this is the important bit) is edited into PBS programming. Or at least take a few hours out of the week for this...I don't want to see Frontline, Sesame Street, Nova, or Newshour with Jim Lehrer taken off the air, but giving the Make magazine gadgeteers a half-hour a week to geek out about hacking stuff seems reasonable. The overall result may feel less professional but a lot more participatory.
Since giving up cable TV three months ago, I've gotten into the habit of watching old episodes of Doctor Who on my computer. They're cheesy as all hell, but I still love them, especially the Tom Baker-era ones. When my sister and I were growing up, we'd watch them on the local PBS station on the weekends with my dad. They were usually shown on Saturday nights or at noon on Sundays. We'd have popcorn with the late-night viewings and lunch (usually hotdish or tuna hotdish**) with the Sunday afternoon ones. Occasionally they'd have Doctor Who marathons with several episodes back-to-back over the course of the day...loved those. We also had several dozen complete episodes on videotape to watch when PBS pre-empted them with something else.
It's hard to tell how much of my current affection for Doctor Who I owe to those weekends with my dad & sister and how much is due to the show itself. Not that it matters much...I just watch and enjoy and think about those good childhood memories with the Doctor.
** Hotdish, the food of my people, was also our shorthand for my dad's hamburger hotdish (hamburger + tomato sauce + macaroni + spices + (optional) onions & mushrooms). Tuna hotdish was basically canned tuna + Campbell's cream of something (mushroom?) soup + macaroni shells + S&P + a bit of grated cheese on top. Hotdish purists might argue that these dishes were not hotdishes at all because they were prepared on the stovetop and not baked in the oven, but who are they to mess with my fond childhood memories?
After I posted about the DVD for season one of Doogie Howser, M.D. being the worst DVD release ever last week, a reader emailed me the following:
Remember how each episode of Doogie Howser ended with him typing a diary entry into his PC?
So ... he had an electronic journal that was read by millions. Not a particularly conventional distribution medium, but wouldn't that technically make him the first, if not among the first, blogger?
Awesome! Doogie, you trailblazer, I'm sorry I bashed you.
Update: I've gotten two emails about prior art on this. Pete asks if Mr. Belvedere would count since he wrote in a journal during every show, and J. Curtis believes that Captain Kirk was one of the first audio bloggers (or perhaps podcasters?) for doing his captain's log each episode.
An acquaintance of mine is doing some documentary work for the History Channel. One of the channel's guidelines for their documentaries is that they don't generally allow the use of female narrators...men only. The History Channel's audience is mostly men and they want to continue to target only men. No rationale was given, but I would imagine the reason is that history narrated by men seems more authoritative to other men.
Which makes sense (in a screwy sort of way) but is also infuriating because how can women ever be considered authoritative if *the* channel all about history never gives a woman a shot? I remember watching Frontier House and thinking initially that the woman narrator was not such a good choice (probably due to years of conditioning listening to men describe WWII battles), but after about 30 minutes, I forgot all about it and ended up really enjoying her narration.
Update: I talked to another person who's involved in making documentary films (not specifically for the History Channel) and they said that men are more often used as narrators than women in historical documentaries across the board; it's not just the History Channel. Authority is part of the issue, but in the narrative context, men are perceived as gender neutral, while women are perceived as female. Since the narrator is supposed to be anonymous and not perceived by the audience as a person, the more general neutral the better. So, not the History Channel's fault and probably an issue that requires a gender studies degree to even begin to unpack and something I'm not going to touch with 8 or 9 ten-foot poles.
Things may be a little quieter around here in the short term as I deal with some stuff going on in the real world. One of the reasons for the silence is that my legal difficulties with Sony about the whole Ken Jennings thing have yet to be resolved. I can't say too much about it (soon perhaps), but it sure has had a chilling effect on my enthusiasm for continuing to maintain kottke.org. As an individual weblogger with relatively limited financial and legal resources, I worry about whether I can continue to post things (legal or not) that may upset large companies and result in lawsuits that they can afford and I cannot. The NY Times can risk upsetting large companies in the course of their journalistic duties because they are a large company themselves, they know their rights, and they have a dedicated legal team to deal with stuff like this. In the current legal climate, it may be that the whole "are blogs journalism?" debate is moot until bloggers have access to a level of legal resources similar to what large companies have. I'm certainly thinking very seriously about whether I can keep this site going in this kind of environment.
Update: Thanks for all the support everyone...I've gotten many nice emails and various offers of assistance. Several people have asked if they can help monetarily, which I very much appreciate, but the process is not quite to that point yet (and might never reach it) and I don't want to be responsible for refunds or anything like that. But again, I appreciate the support.
Note: I've been contacted by a lawyer representing Sony and they have asked me to remove the audio clip. Sorry.
[Warning, spoilers.] Here's a two-minute audio clip of Final Jeopardy from Ken Jennings' Jeopardy loss (due to air Nov 30). If you don't want to listen, here are the details (highlight the redacted text to read):
[Update: I deleted the description of the audio clip after Sony "requested" that I do so. You may be interested in reading this article in the Washington Post instead. This is really a irritating situation, but I don't have the time, energy, or the access to legal counsel that a large newspaper does and am therefore just basically just rolling over. Sorry.]
The original tips I got from Phillip (1, 2) ended up being pretty accurate. Some of the details were a little off and/or paraphrased (he got the number in the answer as well as the woman's name wrong), but it was mostly correct.
Final update: My legal difficulties with Sony are still unresolved but since the episode has now aired, here are the results of Ken's final appearance:
Final Jeopardy category was Business and Industry. Answer: Most of this firm's 70,000 seasonal white-collar employees work only 4 months a year. Nancy Zerg provided the correct question, "What is H&R Block?" which gave her $14,401, one dollar more than Ken. Ken answered incorrectly: "What is FedEx?" and ended up with $8,799 for a total of $2,522,700 over his 75-day run.
Set your TiVos and VCRs...it looks like Ken Jennings will finally lose on Jeopardy on Tuesday, November 30. His 72nd appearance aired yesterday (he won another $50,000), the 73rd will be today, and his final win will come on Monday. As reported here back in September, Jennings loses his 75th game after winning $2.5 million. No one from the show has confirmed this, so it may be wrong**, but we'll find out on Tuesday. (If it ends up being wrong, I will commit seppuku by falling on my TiVo remote for my role in misleading everyone.)
** Just to be more specific, I have recently received confirmation from a very reliable source that Ken has indeed lost, but that source didn't confirm (or deny) the specific timing.
[Potential Jeopardy spoilers] Ken Jennings is still ruling the airwaves on Jeopardy...he won his 69th game yesterday and has amassed a little over $2.3 million in winnings. As reported here in September, Ken's run is due to end after his 74th win. His 70th show is tonight, followed by two weeks of the college tournament ending on Nov 23. Assuming that Jeopardy does not air on Wed-Fri due to the Thanksgiving holiday** and returns to a normal schedule the next week, his final win will occur on Thu, Dec 2 and he will finally lose on Fri, Dec 3.
** If Jeopardy shows are aired over Thanksgiving, his 75th show will air on Tue, Nov 30 instead. That's the earliest the show would air if you're determined not to miss it. I'm sure we'll know more about the exact scheduling as the end of the month approaches and I'll let you know when I know.
Warning: spoilers. Well, since it's all over the news today (there's an AP story that was picked up by just about everyone -- USA Today, SF Gate, Miami Herald, Washington Post -- but no love to kottke.org for breaking the story...TV Week is getting all the credit), there's no further harm in revealing that Ken Jennings does in fact lose on Jeopardy at some point in the near future.
But there's more. Super-tipster Phillip has graciously provided us with the Final Jeopardy answer and question from Ken's final show. If you'd like to know what it is, highlight the redacted text below:
Subject: Companies and Corporations. The Answer: This company has a workforce of 17000 people, whose average working year is only 4 months long.
Hard to believe Ken couldn't guess that one. I'll have the correct question for you tomorrow. [I've been asked to hold off posting the question for now...sorry! I'm not trying to be a tease, honest.]
Update: Still more information about Ken's final show from our man Phillip, who will pretty much be the first one in line if kottke.org ever starts handing out knighthoods. Sayeth Phillip:
"As well, you can also post that Ken Jennings got the two Daily Doubles in Double Jeopardy during his losing game. In both, he bet $4000 and lost both. Had he not bet so high or had he won at least 1 (I hear he has a propensity to lose a lot at the Daily Doubles) then he would still be champion today."
"The champ who beat him is named Sharon and she is from Ventura, CA. As far as I remember she won $14,401. which was $1 more than Ken had before he revealed his losing answer to Final Jeopardy. Ken ended up having less than $10000 after losing."
Stick that in your pipe and smoke it, TVWeek!
Update: Posted some information about the airdate of Ken's loss.
Warning: spoilers. I received a tip about Ken Jennings this morning which I have pasted below in black-on-black text. If you don't want to spoil your enjoyment of Jeopardy for the next few days/weeks, don't read it. If you want to read it, just highlight the text in your browser. Those reading the site in newsreaders, you'll just have to close your eyes or something. So here's the scoop:
"I was at the taping today of Jeopardy. He lost during his 75th game and eventually won 74 games. He ended up with 2.5M. He got a standing ovation by the crowd. I asked the studio if this was supposed to be a secret but they said we could spread the news. Spread the news. The show should air around the end of October."
Don't know how accurate this is because it's uncorroborated, so grain of salt, etc. Thanks to Phillip for the tip.
Update: I've got independent corroboration from another reader on the above news, so I consider it to be correct. Thx Carol. TV Week and Newsday are reporting it as well. But you heard it here first, baby!
Update #2: Posted some information about the airdate of Ken's loss.
Until this evening, I'd never actually seen any of Ken Jennings' 30+ appearances on Jeopardy. Now that I have, I sincerely believe that he cannot be beat. The man is a frigging machine. Unbelievable. I'm beginning to think this is actually plausible.
The NY Times announced today that TiVo will be introducing some new features to their service, allowing people to watch content from the Internet on their TiVo. As with Apple's AirTunes & AirPort Express, Slim Devices' Squeezebox, and networked DVD players, the idea behind the new TiVo is that people should be able to play their media, independent of file format, source, or delivery mechanism, on the device or through the interface of their choosing.
Many companies seem to be heading in this general direction, generating lots of buzz about convergence or whatever it's called these days, and I guess it is exciting, but I can't help but feel that TiVo in particular is missing (and has been missing for a couple of years now) an opportunity to expand upon their core business in a more meaningful way for their customers.
First off, TiVo still does not allow you to view or modify your To-Do list over the Web. The TiVo Web Project fills this need for hardcore TiVo hackers, but a consumer-friendly version is needed. I should be able to everything I can do while sitting on the couch in front of the TiVo (short of watching programs) over the Web. And you can imagine other ways in which you could talk to your TiVo: SMS messages from your phone or IM from your computer to the TiVo message center ("hey lazyass, before you watch that six feet under, go pickup groceries for dinner") for starters.
Along with that, TiVo should provide recommendations about what I should watch, displayed both online and on the Tivo. The current recommendations suck, especially if you consider the massive amounts of data that TiVo gathers on their users' viewing habits. They can do better than a list of 50 shows that are vaguely related to ones you may have watched before. Take a page from Amazon's book. When a user views a particular show's details, offer a short list of similar shows ("people who watched this show also watched..."). Break them down by category into recommendations for sports, for movies, for whatever. Along with the collaboratively filtered recommendations, TiVo should publish lists of new and notable shows, categorized appropriately. TiVo has largely abstracted away the idea of television channels and networks and turned the TV experience into watching one big TiVo Channel. With so many shows available on this huge channel, they need to give each of their users many ways to compile their own personal channel.
Above all, television is a social experience for many people. Even if you don't watch sporting events, reality TV, game shows, or even Sesame Street with friends or family, yelling, joking, and laughing at the TV and each other, chances are you're going to talk about it at work or school the next day. Or, TiVo willing, on TiVo's Web site. TiVo needs to more effectively harness the views and opinions of their customers and push them back out to everyone. Create a community...not people interested in TiVo but people interested in watching television. Think Television Without Pity. Or, again, Amazon with their user reviews. Let people share their television watchlists with others, like Apple or Mixmatcher do with music playlists. The social software / online community space is ripe with ideas that could be applied to TiVo and their users.
Last week's season finale of The West Wing was on smack dab in the middle of game 6 of the Timberwolves/Kings series. I opted to watch the game instead of the Wing. Of course, since NBC wants to make their media artificially scarce, the episode wasn't replayed later in the evening nor will it until later in the summer (if you haven't seen it, it's new to you!). This weekend, I found a torrent for the finale...without commercials and in letterbox no less. A couple hours of downloading later and voila, my own personal rerun.
My dream of distributing couch potato behavior has been realized by Simon Thornton: Sending Live Television Via iChat. Simon says:
However, if you just so happen to be someone that has purchased an analogue video -> DV (firewire) converter box in the past, such as the Formac Studio, you might be suprised to learn that when it's plugged in it is presented to the Mac (and specifically the iChat application) as a perfectly valid firewire input device. In other, shorter, easier, words: you can use your converter box to stream live video from something - oooh, let's just say your Sky Digibox for example - to someone else using iChat anywhere else in the world. If you happened to have one of the outputs of your Sky box (it has two) connected up to the inputs of your converter box, you might see how this could work.
Fantastic. No wonder the entertainment companies want all sorts of DRM built into everything.
The NY Times ran another of those fawning TiVo articles yesterday about how everyone who has one loves it like a member of the family. An excerpt:
Mr. Smith has since replaced his older TiVo model with three ReplayTV units. The new units allow him to stream programs from one to the other. After recording a program in his darkened home theater room, he transfers it to his brighter living room area, where he can watch while doing other things. Mr. Smith has been so taken with the technology that he has persuaded five of his friends to buy a recorder, he said.
The devices not only allow users to watch shows at any time, but they also introduce them to obscure programs that they might not otherwise find. Before Dr. Everett, the Michigan ophthalmologist, and his wife take a trip, he enters the destination on their TiVo "wish list," to automatically record travelogues about the area.
Having used a TiVo myself for almost four years and wondering how I'd ever live watch TV without it, I can fully identify with the TiVolutionaries featured in stories like these. However, I wonder if there are people for whom TiVo was not a life-changing experience. They've got to be out there, unwritten about in major national newspapers; the appeal of TiVo can't be that universal. So, I know this is probably a long shot, given that I'm largely preaching to the converted here on kottke.org, but does anyone out there not like their TiVo? And if so, are you crazy why? (No "I dont watch TV so why would I love TiVo" stories please.)
Nice fluffy article in the NY Times about the design process that led to the TiVo remote control, complete with a thumbs-up (bing!) from usability quote-whore Jakob Nielsen. I like TiVo and all, but why does tech journalism have to be so soft all the time?
The TiVo remote has a really huge, much-discussed design flaw, namely that you cannot tell which end to point at the TV unless you look at the remote or take a few seconds to feel for the buttons in your hand (if the room is dark). I've been using TiVo for almost 4 years now and while I've learned to look at the remote before I pick it up, the symmetry problem still gets me more than it should.
Here's another pitch that the Times let sail by in the article: "TiVo holds four design patents on the remote's basic shape and key layout." Say what? Trademark maybe, but how do you patent the shape of a remote control? By now, this question has a fairly pat and dissatisfying answer ("well, the busted and overworked patent system let us so we did"), but I'm tired of seeing patents like this given credibility by being mentioned in big newspapers.
Update: Neil sent me a link to the USPTO's guidelines for granting design patents. Here's their definition of design:
A design consists of the visual ornamental characteristics embodied in, or applied to, an article of manufacture.
If businesses buying design don't have any idea what design is, I guess you can't expect the US gov't to have any better understanding.
Did anyone else watch The Simple Life? I just got done with it, and it wasn't half bad. There's debate about how real it actually is (did Paris really not know what Wal-Mart was or was she just kidding around?), but I don't think that actually matters too much. Either way Paris and Nicole will do whatever they want, setting up a "conflict" between the girls and the family: those who can and will do anything without fear of consequences vs. people who can't because of the consequences. Class clash, culture clash. Reminds me a bit of Frontier House and the Clune's difficulty in honestly dealing with the situation into which they were placed (and had agreed upon).
One of my favorite books, The Elegant Universe by Brian Greene, is being turned into a three part NOVA special to be aired on PBS in late October & early November. Here's what I wrote about the book back in April 2001:
The Elegant Universe (paperback version) is easily the most accessible book on modern (and postmodern?) physics I have ever encountered. The examples, metaphors, and analogies Brian Greene uses to explain the concepts of general relativity and quantum mechanics, both of which are extremely complicated and difficult to understand (even for physicists), can be understood by anyone with a bit of curiosity and determination. Even when he attempts to explain superstring theory, which combines and greatly magnifies the complexity of relativity and quantum mechanics, he lays everything out for the reader, explaining, restating, and then restating again in plain English the most difficult concepts in physics. Highly recommended.
I'm quite looking forward to the PBS series.
So, when I fix it so I can control my TiVo via the web and buy an Apple iSight camera & point it at the television, I can watch Junkyard Wars and Family Guy at work via iChat AV, right?
Also, at next year's O'Reilly Etech conference, someone** will do something with iSight/iChat AV that will allow people attending one panel to tune into the other two concurrent panels (much like Hydra let people textally eavesdrop on concurrent panels last year). The really cool thing? The organizers of the conference won't have to do anything to make this happen, aside from providing the wireless network. No setting up a streaming, teleconferencing, blah-de-blah server, no renting of video cameras or microphones, no A/V people. Just give people a medium for communication & collaboration and they'll figure it out for themselves.
** Here's a suggestion: a presenter could mic him/herself, make the audio available over iChat AV, and make the presentation available on the web so that anyone who has iChat can follow along from anywhere in the conference area. Add in real-time stenography with Hydra and you can enjoy the conference entirely from the bar or one of the sofas in the lobby.
My viewing frequency of Iron Chef has
waned since moving to NYC, mainly because I've seen many, if not most, of
the shows. Plus, there's only so many times you can watch Chen cook shark
fin. To fill the void, I've been watching Monster Garage and Junkyard Wars,
both of which are like Iron Chef with power tools & ratchets.
I'm especially keen on Junkyard Wars because it reminds me of working in the
garage with my dad as a kid. Fixing cars mostly, but also pretty much
anything that needed fixing. Dad's garage worked a lot like the show; he had
a vague idea about what he wanted to accomplish, I was there to help with
the scavenging, and there was a garage full of junk with which to complete
the task. Unlike the show, we were only competing with ourselves and several
trips to the nearest hardware store for supplies were usually necessary.
I was a regular Rube Goldberg in my scavenging duties. My dad would tell me
that we needed to put this doowacky together with this other conifter, and I
would scoot off to all corners of the garage, returning with six different
widgets and a plan for utilizing them all in an intricate process to
accomplish the goal. I would own at Junkyard Wars.
My favorite story about Dad's garage happened when I was in high school. I
mentioned to my dad that my friend Ken was having some car trouble. My dad
suggested he bring the car over and Ken showed up some days later with his
blue Ford Tempo. After listening to the engine & transmission and
peering under the hood, he decided the problem lay with the
bendix. Disappearing into the garage, he emerged a few minutes later
carrying said bendix, not something usually found in your typical garage. "I
knew I had a Ford bendix in there somewhere," he said. A couple hours of
labor later, and damned if the weird noise and transmission problems weren't
completely fixed. He probably even had a few bendixes leftover in that
garage somewhere for use on some future ailing Ford.
When we moved to NYC, we traded in our Netflix subscription for HBO and started watching Six Feet Under at the beginning of its third season. I liked the show right away, not only because the writing and acting are so good, but also because it made me uncomfortable (in a good way). I couldn't quite figure out the reason for that discomfort until last night's show. It's the tension between the public and private, introverted and extroverted, the quiet and loud...and it's so well done. Watching the characters who vent their energy by yelling or crying interact with those that keep their problems more hidden is fascinating and is rarely seen on TV or even in the movies. Great stuff.
A company named SearchKing is suing Google. Oddly, this reminds me of that Simpsons episode where Barney becomes The Plow King and starts taking Homer's plow business away from him.
Our household was all abuzz last night for the season premiere of The West Wing. At two hours, the episode was a little long and not as neatly packaged as the show usually is. A bit disappointing, but still the best thing on network TV. My questions to you are: 1) what did you think?; and 2) where's the best place online to discuss episodes after the fact? I'm normally not a big fan of the TV watercooler conversation, but The West Wing has enough going on that I wouldn't mind a little post-episode discussion each week.
News flash! Jennifer Aniston can actually act. I really enjoyed her performance in Office Space, but I thought it was just a one time thing. She was the best thing about The Good Girl, which sounds like a backhanded compliment but isn't. The movie was a little uneven here and there (although I can't pinpoint why), but Aniston's performance tied it all together for me. With strong performances in Office Space, The Good Girl, and The Iron Giant, she needs to stop doing shark-jumped sitcoms (next week, on a very special episode of Friends: Rachel marries Ross's 5 year-old son and then leaves him for Joey's monkey) and focus on movies full time. With the right role, she could probably win an Oscar. (After all, if Halle Berry can win one...)
Moby and Eminem got into a bit of a scuffle (photo) during the MTV Video Music Awards last night. Eminem got booed by the crowd for referring to Moby as a girl and then made a remark in Moby's direction about hitting a man with glasses. Jeering, posing, and hand gestures followed.
Apparently, the feud started at the 2001 Grammys when Moby spoke out against Eminem's misogynistic lyrics and homophobia. Eminem didn't like that too much, so he wrote Moby into "Without Me", the first single off of his latest album:
"And Moby? You can get stomped by Obie
You thirty-six year old baldheaded fag, blow me
You don't know me, you're too old, let go
It's over, nobody listens to techno"
I care little for this goofy "feud" and even less about Eminem, but it's fun to hear what Moby had to say about last night in his weblog. He's also posted some pictures from the night's festivities, including shots of the Hilton sisters, Kelly Osbourne, The White Stripes, The Strokes, and assorted revelers.
Many 21 year-olds think they have the world all figured out, but few make the mistake of writing it all down for public consumption (or perhaps many do these days). Debra Pickett interviews first time author and The Sopranos actress Jamie-Lynn Sigler about her book Wise Girl:
"Sigler just moved in with her boyfriend of one year, 31-year-old A.J. Discala. In addition to sharing her Trump Tower apartment, Discala is also Sigler's manager.
"'A manager controls so much of your life,' Sigler says, her brown eyes sparkling, 'that it's just wonderful to know the person has nothing but good intentions for you.'
"I ask if it makes her nervous, the old Hollywood stereotype of the manager dating the starlet and, well, you know, not exactly doing what's in her best interest.
"'Oh, no,' she says. 'We just look at it as a wonderful thing.'
"Besides, she says, they're not like other show business couples.
"An awkward pause descends on our table, hovering just over our half-eaten lunches. She is pitying my cynical singledom, and I am worrying about her future.
"Then I notice she's wearing really cute sandals, and we decide to talk about those instead."
From the archives of the New Yorker comes an article by E.B. White on an early demonstration of television: "...and finally a telecast moving picture of television. This was where we began to crack up nervously. Try and appreciate our situation: we were in a dark room looking into a television set at a television set which was showing a picture of a moving picture."
I'm trying to appreciate the mind-bending experienced by that audience, but in the postmodern rip-mix-burn world I live in, the above sounds perfectly normal.
I enjoyed 1900 House, but not nearly as much as I'm enjoying Frontier House after seeing the first episode. I know this makes me a bad person, but I laughed my ass off at the karmic payback that the cream-puff, richy-rich Clunes were getting in the second half of the show. They are horrible, horrible people, and I hope they get the consumption and die out on the frontier. (I don't really mean that. I hope they get scarlet fever and die out on the frontier.)
Advertising as something other than advertising (a non-exhaustive list): historic 1950s-era advertisement for Shasta Cola, AdCritic to charge for looking at TV ads, movie trailers as entertainment, vintage television commercials collected for entertainment and historic purposes, the Smithsonian has a set of Burma Shave signs. With apologies to Arthur Clarke, perhaps the sign of any sufficiently advanced society is its ability to make advertising indistinguishable from traditionally-accepted forms of creative output.
On the plus side, this type of culture provides us with products like The Osbournes. If the swirl of culture occasionally coalesces to form nuggets of goodness like this documentary sitcom about an aged hard rock star and his family, we're going to be fine.
Brian writes: "I read your post about having a monkey help you use your computer, thought of Homer and decided I had to give you a helper monkey."
(This was unexpected: A Google search for Homer turns up a bunch of links on the Greek poet and an Alaskan town of that name, but nothing on Homer Simpson, which is odd because this is the Internet, the place of a billion and one Simpsons references.)
American Love Stories on the PBS Web site is worth a look. I especially enjoyed this story about a Jewish woman, her black husband, and her mother's gradual acceptance of him and their children.
File this under "results-oriented hacking". Rather than just hack into a teevee production company's computer system just to say he did it, Abe hacked into it to get onto MTV's Road Rules and score with one of his fellow cast members. Very interesting.
I really enjoy the PBS program Antiques Roadshow. For those not familiar with the show, it features experts appraising antique items that ordinary people bring in. During each appraisal, the owner and the audience learn a little bit about the item and the history surrounding it. Then comes the payoff: the expert tells the shocked owner how much their item might bring at auction. It's like a history lesson with prizes.
I saw South Park last night. I spent 30 minutes laughing and an hour trying to figure out what the hell was going on.
A fan site: The Futurama Outlet. Episode guides and all sorts of other stuff. A worthy companion to The Simpsons Archive.
Simply Porn got some play on ZDTV's Silicon Spin today....in a roundabout sort of way. If you want, you can even watch the entire show via RealVideo....or fast forward to 23:45 for the good stuff.
The local PBS station has started airing episodes of Doctor Who again. I couldn't be happier. As a kid, I would stay up late on Friday and Saturday nights to watch the adventures of the Doctor and his companions in his Tardis. My favorite Doctor? The 4th, of course, with the 3rd close behind. As for a favorite episode....they were all pretty good. Well, except for the last couple of seasons, when the show got a little too 80s.
Have you seen that Kodak Advantix commercial on the TV? I can't remember what the commercial is all about (lots of yellow?), but the music is quite - as the kids would say - bumpin'. Does anyone know the techno tune playing in that ad? Mail me: jason@kottke.org.
James Lileks over at the Star Tribune writes about those annoying severe weather warnings during tv shows. I couldn't agree more. Some of the persistant warning garbage they put up on the screen is akin to having your microwave continue to beep loudly even after you've removed the food from it. A small scrolling bit of text (and no sound!) at the bottom of the screen every once in a while is sufficient. Anything more ruins the viewing experience.
The season finale of Law and Order was pretty good. Benjamin Bratt was on for the last time. Everyone cried. And McCoy didn't get the sack...that Adam is a real softie.
NBC is cancelling Homicide: Life on the Street. :( I wish another network would pick it up...it's one of the best written shows on tv...ever. I believe the last episode is on next week. Well, at least Law and Order is still on.
Well, it's official...Futurama is pretty damn good. The writing is sharp, lots of good jokes, the animation is excellent, and for the geeks out there, oodles of computer/sci-fi references.
Well, just like everyone in the US (and probably the rest of the world as well), I'm trying to make sense out of the happenings in Colorado. I can't seem to do it. "Senseless" is an overused word, especially by the television media, but in this case, it seems to fit pretty well.
We humans are a weird bunch...the best goods and the worst bads all in one freaky package.
Evidently, NBC runs older episodes of SNL an hour or two after the regular episodes on Saturday night. I saw the last 30 minutes of a circa 1990 show hosted by Mel Gibson. All my favorites were present: Carvey, Lovitz, Hartman, and Dennis Miller. Ahhh...takes me back to high school.
The first episode of Futurama was pretty good. Of course, it'll take a while for the new show to get established, but the writing is sharp and the animation is way better than that of the Simpsons.
The Late Late Show with Craig Kilborn debuts on March 30, right after Letterman. Will Daily Show fans flock to the old host, or did they just like the show and not the host?
Where the heck did VH1 come from all of a sudden? "Behind the Music" and "Where Are They Now?" are really neat shows. Is it that I'm getting older and moving from MTV's demographic to VH1's? Or is it just that VH1 is just getting more interesting while revealing what we should have known all along: that MTV is too mainstream and "hip" to be timely and relevent.
Oh well....neither one of them plays music videos anymore. Is that good or bad?
Also, while we're on the subject of MTV, they should sell their Real World and Road Rules shows to HBO or Skinemax. Instead of a bunch of people getting on each other's nerves, they could have a bunch of people just plain gettin' it on. Now that's a show.
Thursday nights aren't what they used to be. Since Seinfeld is gone and I stopped watching ER, I don't watch TV on Thursday nights anymore. No Cheers. No Cosby Show. No Family Ties. No Night Court. Not even a Different World (ah, Jasmine Guy, where are ye now?). A long tradition is over. Must See TV is no more. Long live Fox Sunday nights.
Except for That 70's Show.
