Category Archives: Clan: McTiVo

So Glad We Had This Time Together

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…woke up to the sound of Carol Burnett’s voice on NPR this morning, which caused an instant and very pleasant flashback to our 70’s-era family/dining/TV room. Her variety show was always a favorite in our family, and even now I can remember many loud belly laughs caused by their particular brand of tongue-in-cheek sketch humor. We got hysterical most weeks watching that show; laughing helplessly at the famous “Went With The Wind” dress, but also at Tim Conway trying to close a door by sitting on its unusually large doorknb. Most of all, there was poor Harvey Korman, trying not to laugh and failing, every week.

It took forever to find a clip with most of the “doorknob” sketch on it; a nearly complete version of it was on a “Bust Ups and Bloopers” compilation DVD. The best part: Harvey pushes the door open with Tim still straddling the doorknob; his reaction is almost out of shot but you can see he wasn’t expecting the jolt he got.

Carol Burnett – Bust Ups, Bloopers & Blunders Finale HQ

Carol Burnett, Still Glad For ‘This Time Together’ : NPR

Carol Burnett was one of the original queens of TV comedy. Her long-running variety show, with its outrageous costumes and its uproariously unpredictable sketches, offered a warm brand of wackiness that parents would let their kids stay up late to watch. Now, in a new memoir, Burnett tells stories about what went on behind the scenes of The Carol Burnett Show — plus a few tales about what went down when she ventured out among the show’s fans.

The lingerie saleslady at Bergdorf Goodman, for instance, who cheerfully accepted a personal check without proper ID — but only after Burnett demonstrated her trademark Tarzan yell. Lacking options, needing stockings and seeing that the department wasn’t especially crowded, Burnett obliged.

“Right behind the saleslady, there was an exit door that burst open,” Burnett tells NPR’s Renee Montagne. “And in came a security guard with a gun pulled. I mean, we could have had our heads blown off.”

Taking One For The Team

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@NPR ‘s Linda Holmes watcthed the Super Bowl so I didn’t have to, and snarks bettter than I ever could.

Notable and Dubious Achievements From Super Bowl XLIV – Monkey See Blog : NPR.

It’s all over, and the New Orleans Saints — a team whose bags-over-the-head years I am not too old to remember — are the Super Bowl champions. Now that the big trophy has been handed out, let’s distribute some of the smaller ones.

Books | The Man With The Golden Torc

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The Man with the Golden Torc (Secret Histories, Book 1), by Simon Green

I’m about midway through this book, and although I’m enjoying it, it’s an exhausting read. I got on to it because of a review I ran across on NPR.org recently, which compared it favorably to the The Dresden Files) books by Jim Butcher. Both series feature male protagonists who walk between the mundane and magic worlds, but Green’s anti-ish hero, Eddie Drood, is British, somewhat of a Bond fan, and fully human and not really a magic user, although he has magic golden armor. Butcher’s guy, Harry Dresden, is a Chicago-based wizard who acts as a kind of magical private detective, and both have similar run-ins with witches, demons, murderers, and the undead. Drood is more like a secret agent-assassin, but in this first book, he’s chucked out of his large and influential family for some unknown reason, and is currently allied with old enemies in an attempt to survive and figure out why he’s become a shoot-on-sight target for everybody from his grandmother, the Matriarch, on down.

I liked the Dresden books at first, because I really liked The Dresden Files TV series with Paul Blackthorne (who takes amazing photos). But the books are quite a bit more violent and have more sex, naturally, than the old SciFi channel dared put on the screen. After about the 5th entry in the series, I was disinclined to read the next one, although my husband David has carried on with them as they come out.

I have hopes that these “Eddie Drood” books will continue to be enjoyable – like I said, “Torc” is pretty good so far, but exhausting. There’ve been a number of amazing battles, incredible escapes, and bizarre encounters all over and under modern London and the southwest of England… just in the first half of this book. It’s all a bit much of a muchness, but there’s enough interesting local color, intriguing character, and crackling dialogue to keep me turning pages. The sly nod-and-a-wink to the James Bond books (not to mention the fun magical gadgets and vehicles Drood uses in his escapes) are amusing, too.

I’m using a new plugin to pull in Amazon images and links, Amazon Reloaded. I already had an Amazon Web Services (AWS) key, secret key, and affiliate code, and although the plugin page warns that it’s not tested with my version of WordPress, it works fine, although the formatting on the buttons is a little weird. The search function is a little odd, probably due to inconsistent tagging on Amazon’s end, and it does seem to be missing an essential part of the link, the author’s name. I had to go look it up for both books I linked. In practice, it blends pretty seamlessly with the WP Edit Post page – it’s loaded into the center column, and can be dragged and dropped right under the edit form.

Like this:

Amazon Reloaded

See how the one button is floating on top of part of the text? I’m using Firefox with WordPress, but it’s probably a minor formatting issue that will be corrected in a later version. However, an author link with the title would be really useful. I had to visit the book pages to verify the author’s names, shouldn’t have to do that since the point of the plugin is to work from within the WordPress editing interface.

I used to do Amazon links a lot more when this blog was created with Movable Type, but the plugin I used after switching to WordPress was a bit flaky, and stopped working altogether after an upgrade more than a year ago. I’d tried something with shortcodes, but hated the way the result looked in my posts, so I’m really happy to find Amazon Reloaded!

More Tepid Than Intrepid

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I’d like a mystery heroine to be less of a Mary Sue and more like Harriet Vane. Not like the protagonists in the first two “Aunt Dimity” novels. #fb
Amazon.com: Aunt Dimity’s Death (Aunt Dimity Mystery) (9780140178401): Nancy Atherton: Books

From Publishers Weekly

Despite its buoyant tone, this blend of fairy tale, ghost story, romance and mystery proves a disappointment. First novelist Atherton creates a potentially appealing heroine in bewitched and bewildered Lori Shepherd, but never places her in danger, thus sacrificing suspense. Recently divorced and newly bereaved by her beloved mother’s death, Lori is scraping by as an office temp in Boston when she receives a letter from a Boston law firm informing her of the death in England of Miss Dimity Westwood. Lori is shocked because she had thought adventurous Dimity was her mother’s fictional creation, the star of made-up bedtime stories. Courtly lawyer William Willis and his attentive son Bill inform Lori that Dimity left instructions that she and Bill go to her Cotswolds cottage to prepare a collection of “Aunt Dimity” stories for publication. They find the cottage haunted by the ghost of Dimity, who blocks their efforts to trace the secret of her WW II romance with a gallant flier. That all ends happily comes as a surprise to none but Lori.

I’d have to say that the review above, from the Amazon product page, is fair. Based on the other reader’s reviews, Atherton’s Aunt Dimity series is either loved or panned by mystery readers. I admit to giggling a few times as I read it, but also shook my head at how the main character came off as a total Mary Sue. It’s a wish-fulfillment story and then some; the setup is that all kinds of people have been conspiring to keep the protagonist, Lori Shepherd, in the dark about people who have her best interests at heart until long after they’re dead. She spends a lot of time grubbing around for answers when she’s been given the writer’s dream commission: free use of the most charming, yet cozily haunted cottage in the Costwolds while writing the foreword to a collection of “Aunt Dimity” stories culled from Dimity’s letters to Lori’s mother, to be published posthumously. And also, free use of a handsome young lawyer who seems to be unusually interested in her and the “Aunt Dimity” mythos. A childhood toy rabbit gets repaired, too, and is part of how Dimity communicates from beyond.

Although the story picks up a little once Lori gets to England and starts asking questions about Dimity Westwood, her mother’s wartime friend, it remains a frothy puff-piece to the end. There’s no physical danger or conflict to add suspense, and the romance is a big dud; William, the young lawyer (who lives at home with his stereotypically crusty father in their stereotypically grand Boston mansion), turns out to have known about Lori all her life, because he got his own version of “Aunt Dimity” stories as a lad. To him, she’s a dream girl, and he struggles with the reality of her as a defensive, cranky, wet mess. But still he loves her, as this is a Mary Sue story, and she must be loved no matter how unlovable she appears to be at the beginning of the book.

There are some rather engaging ancillary characters who become Lori’s fast friends; they’re almost like human agents of Dimity Westwood’s, after her death. Before she died, the husband restored the cottage to a lavish degree, and the wife redesigned the back gardens into a most un-English paradise. They’re the most fully realized of all the characters, and in fact the second book in the volume I bought concerns their first meeting, and their odd experiences in a Cornish chapel. They never actually meet Dimity in the flesh in that novel, but she’s seemingly just offstage in London.

Somehow, Dimity Westwood controls everything in the first book from beyond the grave, making astonishing repairs, moving things along, locking doors to unwanted intruders, and even communicating with Lori via a ghostly journal that writes itself and answers questions. The only mystery is what it was that broke Dimity’s heart and caused a breakdown during WWII, because she refused to talk about it to her best friend, Lori’s mother, and still refused to answer questions about it via the journal.

It’s all ridiculous and silly, and I was more than disappointed; I was irritated that someone could write something like this (and a number of twee-sounding sequel installments) and get published without resorting to fan-fiction websites and Lulu.com.

I originally started this post in August, and eventually finished the second book sometime in September. I actually liked that book better than the first one; more after the “jump” as I’m not going to put this all on the front page.

Continue reading →

Stargate Universe Rates Pretty High, Actually

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Enjoyed Friday’s episode of #SGU, not just because I’m a fangirl. Plenty of nuance, a lot of trudging across White Sands, but they’re in survival mode, people! And what about that shuttle?

Syfy continues ratings roll: Stargate Universe averages 2.35 million in premiere – TV Ratings, Nielsen Ratings, Television Show Ratings | TVbytheNumbers.com

Edgier and younger in tone, SGU takes the franchise in a dynamic new direction, appealing to longtime Stargate fans and first-time viewers alike. The two-part premiere of Universe was directed by Andy Mikita (Stargate Atlantis, Stargate SG-1) and lensed by Rohn Schmidt (The Shield, The Mist). The series also stars Alaina Huffman, Louis Ferreira, Elyse Levesque, David Blue, Jamil Walker Smith and Brian J. Smith.

SGU follows a band of soldiers, scientists and civilians, who must fend for themselves as they are forced through a Stargate when their hidden base comes under attack. The desperate survivors emerge aboard an ancient ship, which is locked on an unknown course and unable to return to Earth. Faced with meeting the most basic needs of food, water and air, the group must unlock the secrets of the ship’s Stargate to survive. The danger, adventure and hope they find on board the Destiny will reveal the heroes and villains among them.

My husband David and I were, like a lot of Stargate: SG1 fans, kind of late to the party. The original TV series, itself a spinoff from a movie staring Kurt Russell, started out life on Showtime but we were not subscribers to that cable service. Fortunately, it started showing reruns after about the first season or two on the SciFi network, and then they started running several episodes at a time on “Stargate Mondays.” Eventually, the show moved to SciFi itself, and we were soon caught up on all the old seasons and waiting impatiently for new episodes to air.

When Stargate: Atlantis premiered, we liked it a lot, and thus when first SG1 and then Atlantis were eventually canceled, we were saddened and perplexed. Sure, we could see why after a lengthy and very successful run, it was time to wrap up SG1 so that the cast could move on to new projects. But we couldn’t see why Atlantis was being cancelled when it was only a few seasons into what could have been just as long a run, and felt kind of resentful that a whole new series, Stargate: Universe, was immediately announced. What? No more Dr. McCrankypants and his amusing fear of citrus products?

However, in spite of our reluctance to get sucked in to yet another SciFi/SyFy show that inevitably gets canceled by beancounters, we watched last week’s premiere of “Universe.” I’m glad to see that the ratings were good, because I think it has a lot of potential  – not just as “a sci-fi show” but as “a drama set in space with character-driven plots and lots of potential conflict/problem resolution stories.”

It was quite interesting to me to see how in the 3rd part of “Air,” (the first two parts were the 2-hour premiere last week) there was a lot of fragmentation, lack of group cohesion, and out-and-out dislike between characters. Not only that, but there’s likely to be a lot more shades of grey as far as individual versions of the truth and the current situation is at any one moment. As in, Rush orders Sgt. Greer to do something drastic, and immediately afterward, declares that Greer did this horrible thing (before it was clear that Greer would actually be around to explain his actions). When Greer showed up, that sets up a bit of an awkward moment later for Dr. Rush if questions are asked. It’ll be interesting to see if that bit of business shows up later as an example of the untrustworthiness of Dr. Rush, who continues to present an almost mystical, supremely confident public face, with a side of “how dare you!” when challenged. Yet when he’s alone, that’s when his defenses are down… and you wonder if he’s really a megalo-maniac, or just a garden-variety suicidal maniac.

It’s hard to write ambiguity, and shifting loyalties, and group dynamics that lack clear focus or strong leadership. That’s why it will be interesting to see how things develop in the weeks to come. Clearly, their first priority for survival was Air; next week seems to be about power reserves, light, and the lack of it.

Also, there is that matter of the shuttle that took off shortly after the ship went back into FTL (faster than light) drive; there were 2 people that went through the desert planet’s gate to some other planet that they thought offered a better chance of survival. Are they lost forever? Did someone (most likely Eli, who tried desperately to herd cats on the planet) go back to try to find the others?

Yes, it looks and feels a little like Battlestar Galactica (a show I never watched, although David hung in there with it). It doesn’t SOUND like BSG though, thank God; I couldn’t get past the whammity-bammity wardrumming on Galactica and the soundtrack for SGU sounds much more orchestral, yet without the synthesizers favored in the previous shows. To my ear, the music is more sonorous, melodic, and a little more melancholy than either Stargate series ever was, and the cinematography up to now has been either claustrophobia-inducing, or opened wide up, emphasising the hugeness of, yes, the universe compared to the puny humans now marooned on a derelict ship.  As in – the opening shot shows empty space, and the ship materializes (slows from faster-than-light speed) far, far away from the camera’s point of view. How lonely, and how beautiful, and how mysterious. We remarked at the time that we thought the ship was coming alive, attempting to prepare for its long-awaited guests, as the interior lights were coming on as the Icarus ring was connecting. Also, it was a little like “light the lights, show’s about to begin.”

It doesn’t look or feel like either of the previous Stargate series, which isn’t necessarily bad or wrong; just different. Maybe I should make a quick list of attributes for each series as I currently see them, to illustrate the differences…

stargate_cast

Stargate: SG1

  • Utilitarian, military-industrial look, with cinematography to match
  • Military bases have lots of concrete and battleship grey paint/colored graphics
  • Alien planets have “trees, lots of trees” and otherwise look like Vancouver’s Sydney Park
  • Aliens are little nekkid grey men, or humanoid with glowing eyes and weird voices.
  • Stargates look “ancient” and have moving parts and a revolving inner ring to dial
  • Everything looks well-used, but is clean and in good repair
  • Blue and white accent lights generally, with lots of gold and flaming braziers on Goa’uld ships
  • Music by Joel Goldsmith was symphonic, synthesized, and capable of many moods
  • Personality of the show is more masculine than feminine (military, weapons, blowin’ stuff up)

Stargate: Atlantis

  • Graceful, curvilinear sets with Frank Lloyd Wright-like decor, brushed steel and teal blue
  • Military bases (on alien planets) more corroded, clearly damaged in incessant warfare
  • Alien planets still tend to be forested, but more remote in feel (farther from Vancouver?)
  • Aliens are either replicants, or badass insecto-humanoid Space Vampires! With weird voices! Flee!
  • Stargates don’t need no stinkin’ revolving inner wheel, just light up and go! Also: In space!
  • Everything looks brand new and works perfectly yet mysteriously
  • Lighting is bright and clean, again with lots of teal blue with neon-like accents
  • Music is similar to SG1’s but more delicate, ie., less heroic adventure and more lyrical aspiration
  • Personality of the show is more feminine than masculine (female leaders, design, Teyla’s pregnancy)

Stargate Universe

  • Darker, grungier, angular, with an early Art Deco look with a side of Steampunk (on the ship Destiny)
  • Military bases are either simpler (Icarus) or dark and cramped (Pentagon command center)
  • Alien planets? Thus far, stunning sand dunes location at White Sands, NM. Next week, trees?
  • Aliens: Unknown. Possible alien entity resembling a whirlwind on the gypsum planet.
  • Stargates we’ve seen either light up, or ring revolves on a base. Bonus: steaming exhaust vents!
  • Everything looks about to fall apart, is decayed, rusting, or barely working but capable of repair
  • Lighting: much darker, shaky handheld camera work, battery powered lights. Kino cams!
  • Music: Still Joel Goldsmith, sounds more like a chamber orchestra than synths, moody and dark.
  • Personality: Fragmented, chaotic, and fraught with interpersonal conflict and hidden agendas.

Stargate Universe

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Bring on the rampant pantslessness, #SGU, and also the gritty, dark, but beautiful effects. @moryan has her take on the premiere, and I have mine on my blog.

The Watcher: Desperate survivors get lost in ‘Stargate Universe’

I’ve now seen five hours of the show and still don’t feel all that invested in the the fate of 1st Lt. Matthew Scott (Brian J. Smith). Theoretically, I should — he’s one of the show’s lead characters.

Two characters do stand out (more on that below), but the rest of “Universe” feels like an awkward mishmash of genres and tones. Though I had been cautiously looking forward to another iteration of the “Stargate” franchise, at this point I’m not sure its creators are taking Scott and his fellow survivors anywhere interesting.

This drama, which follows a group of soldiers, scientists and civilians stranded on an alien ship very far from Earth, is supposed to be the “edgier” “Stargate” TV series (that’s Syfy’s word, not mine). It would allegedly be more like “Battlestar Galactica” than “Stargate SG-1,” which, at its best, had an team of exceedingly watchable characters take on any number of alien threats armed with advanced weapons, acerbic humor and a great deal of pluck.

My husband David and I liked the show (AKA #SGU) a lot better than the Chicago Tribune’s TV critic Maureen Ryan ( @moryan ) did. She’s usually right on the money on her likes and dislikes when it comes to science fiction/genre shows, but we’re willing to go along for the ride for quite a bit longer yet. I think that Mo’s criticism is meant in the right way though – she’s interested in shows being as good as they possibly can be, and it’s not doing anyone any good if a premise is just being milked for advertising dollars, rather than going out to the edge and doing something new, creative, and worth watching.

We’re a little more emotionally invested in the show than Mo is, though. We liked it rather a lot, really…

Especially after the bit early on where the Eli character, a fanboy/gamer who introduces himself as “the contest winner,” is reluctant to sign a non-disclosure agreement.

Gen. “Jack” O’Neill and a Dr. Nicholas Rush show up at Eli’s house, the morning after he solved a mathematical proof written in an alien language in a video game called “Prometheus.” He asks what will happen if he refuses. “Then we’ll beam you up to our spaceship,” replies O’Neill evenly. Eli shuts the door in their faces. My husband and I laughed, and said “They can do that, you know,” as Eli trudges upstairs and out of sight. “Boooozzzzh!” I said, imitating the sound the Asgard teleporation effect made on previous Stargate shows, and within a half-second, a bright flash of light from upstairs and the familar sound proved me right: they beamed Eli up to the ship so he could sign the NDU from a better informed point of view. We howled with laughter; we loved it and it was clearly comic relief as it was a flashback, after a decidedly grimmer, yet darkly beautiful opening sequence.

As you might expect, they beamed Eli up all right; in front of a great big picture window.

Yeah, lots of SF shows cut to the chase by beaming some reluctant yokel up to the ship; it’s become a kind of signature move. I laughed (or gasped sympathetically) when they did it on Star Trek: Next Generation, and I laughed this time, too.

The basic premise of the show is that there’s a strange Stargate on a distant planet that apparently draws its power directly from the planetary core, and is capable of dialing a unique 9-character address. An entire command team, Project Icarus, has been on the planet for 2 years, working on building a base and getting the stargate working.

Clearly, they think it’s someplace important to go – but wait, there’s more! When they went to Pegasus, sure, there was a lot of Ancient technology to discover and adapt, but there were also a galaxyful of bad-ass, life-force-sucking space vampires.

Wouldn’t it be a good idea to go somewhere unimaginably far, far, away and encounter new lifeforms, and new civilizations, and an infinite number of new, immeasurably more bad-ass, bad-ass enemies? Oh, well, sure it would! Let me stuff a few cans of tuna in my go-bag, and where do I sign?

Since the previous series, Atlantis, was based in a different galaxy and required 8-character addresses to get back to the Milky Way galaxy, the idea is that calling a 9-digit number is super-duper extra special. So all of a sudden, after years of work, some gamer kid solves the power calculation problem that was inserted into a video game, and he’s taken on a space ship to go to this planet and actually aid in getting it working. But it doesn’t work, exactly, during the test, and then the planet is attacked by some leftover bad guys from the previous series and the kid and the scientist desperately try to solve the power calculation so they can dial the gate and evacuate everyone from the planet, which is being bombarded. And they do, but the scientist thinks the gate is too powerful to dial Earth, something I actually doubt; I think he was desperate to go to the 9-character address for reasons of his own, and could actually have gotten them all safely to some destination other than Earth. He happens to bring some communications technology with him through to the other side, and soon enough claims to have talked to O’Neill and to have been put in charge.

Meanwhile, Eli finds some floaty ball things left over from that time Luke was first learning to use the light sabre (no wait, wrong universe) and starts video blogging. In the meantime, a pretty girl is nice to him, and he solves a couple more problems and is picked for the official first exploration team because he’s already made a habit of pulling their asses out of the fire, according to the injured commander. He’s a schlub, but he gets a wardrobe upgrade and no longer has to beg for pants. His life is unexpectedly better than you’d think for a kid who’s lost in space with a bunch of strangers on a starship that’s about to fall to bits at the speed of light.

Okay, that’s a lot of wish-fulfillment wankery to get through, but the Eli character is clearly a fan surrogate, and he’s actually pretty funny and not without a certain ursine charm. Yet wouldn’t it have made just as much sense to just use his solution and go on with the Icarus project in secret? The whole reason they didn’t, is so there’s a character whose function is to look around him in awe and wonder. Also, he’s the “fixer” dude who taught himself to read or decode the alien language, sort of, as a part of the process of solving the in-game puzzle.

Other characters, as Maureen Ryan mentions, are various kinds of functionaries. Rush is enigmatic and obviously not telling everything he knows or suspects, and he’s not very trustworthy if you ask me (and he seems to be grieving for lost love when he’s not creepily ordering people around). The military types are a mixed bag; the commander is injured and possibly an epileptic, his next in command is your obligatory Hot Guy In Uniform literally caught with his pants down (though he’s only a lieutenant, so he’s young enough to clearly wish his commander weren’t half-dead). There’s a crazy sergeant (mentioned by Ryan in her review) who’s either a psychopath, or a rebel. There’s a couple of cooks who’ll probably turn out to have some other useful skills, there’s a Senator’s daughter (obviously potential love interest), there’s a medic who tried desperately to save a dying doctor so she wouldn’t be the only one with medical training…

Sure, it’s contrived. Sure, it’s derivative. But one of the problems I had when Stargate: Atlantis first premiered was that they get to Atlantis, and it’s this pristine, brand new wonderland that’s been sitting on the bottom of an ocean for millennia. There were lots of cool toys, and they all worked, although they had the annoying problem with lack of power. I wasn’t invested in all the new people then, but I was put off by all the shiny. And now, I miss McKay and Sheppard and everyone else. This is a much more random group of people, with a lot more potential for conflict and interesting character development, so I’m quite willing to suspend disbelief even as I’m aware that it’s yet another “deus ex machinae” kind of show (those Ancients were pretty clever to seed the Universe with gates on habitable worlds, etc. etc.).

With the ship in Stargate: Universe, they’ve got an old “bucket” that still mostly works, but it’s been damaged over the years. I’m pretty sure that there’s plenty they don’t know about what it’s for and what it’s mission really is; I’m betting that it was always designed to carry groups of Ring-building colonizers to more and more distant planets, but also designed to travel empty between galaxies. We were kicking around the idea of whether the ship will have a personality, with the likelihood of it possessing an artificial intelligence pretty much a foregone conclusion. I’m hoping they go more for a Moya-like self-awareness (although the ship is clearly not an organism) rather than a non-substantiaL humanoid (as in Andromeda).

David’s sort of hoping there’s no Pilot. I’m pretty much hoping there’s no hologram.

Children of Earth Day Three

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We’ve really, really been riveted by Torchwood’s 5 part miniseries this week. Today’s the day when the creepiness ramps up even more. Meanwhile, our surviving heroes have to start from scratch, because their cool underground lair got blowed up on Monday.

Torchwood: Children of Earth – BBC America

The Captain Jack Harkness character is immortal, and one thing I’d wondered about was what would happen if he was blown to smithereens. We found out on Day Two – this was one of those nagging questions that always bothered Highlander fans, too. Jack faces some of the same issues as a classic Highlander immortal character, too. We found out he has relatives, and has to deal with losing them as they age and die. Interesting.

Need to concentrate now, as the team does an inventory on how they save the world with pocket lint.

Warehouse 13: But Do They Have Data?

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TV roundup: Every sci-fi and fantasy show to watch this summer | SCI FI Wire

Warehouse 13, Syfy. Premieres July 7 at 9 p.m.
This new dramedy from the reinvented Syfy follows the adventures of two Secret Service agents, Pete (Eddie McClintock) and Myka (Joanne Kelly), who end up tracking down mysterious artifacts for the super-secret government facility known as Warehouse 13. Saul Rubinek plays the Warehouse’s quirky caretaker, Artie. The premiere kicks off with a two-hour pilot and is from executive producers Jack Kenny and David Simkins. Thirteen episodes have been ordered.

Poor Saul Rubinek. He seems to be typecast as the guy who likes to collect weird alien artifacts.

Chuck Versus The Critic

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@moryan celebrates the awesome news from this weekend that #Chuck was renewed. Everybody take a bow who helped #savechuck

Awesome news: ‘Chuck’ to return for a third season | The Watcher

But as you’ve seen as you read all the stories above, there’s a catch to the “Chuck” renewal. To ensure another season, “Chuck” will have to cut its budget (as is apparently the case with “Dollhouse,” which is also coming back). The show will have to let go a couple of writers, and some actors who were series regulars in Season 2 may only be recurring guest stars in Season 3.

I absolutely don’t want to lose the Buy More mayhem from the show (and I’ve not seen any reports that that will necessarily be the case). And the writing on the show was so good in Season 2 that the thought of losing any ace “Chuck” scribes is a tough development to ponder.

Yeah, there are times when shows catch lightning in a bottle (a phrase beloved of an acquaintance of mine who worked on such a show years ago), and if you let too many of your bugs out of the bottle to save on costs, the show no longer has the same sparkle. So it’s great that Chuck was renewed, but I’m sorry to hear that it came at the expense of one or more supporting roles, and some writing talent. It seems that part of any show’s success comes from the collaborative effort, whether it’s in front of the camera, or behind it.