ABC will air Paradise, which bowed in January on its sister platform Hulu, over eight Mondays starting tonight at 10 p.m. ET.
I’m not sure I recommend it even to those who love everything in the pilot because,
for me, it all falls apart too much as the season concludes.
ABC finally canceled Marvel’s Agent Carter last week. The short-run winter series, which spelled the fall and spring halves of Agents of SHIELD these past two years, had been a ratings disappointment. Once star Hayley Atwell was cast by the network in a potential regular-season legal drama, now picked up to series, writing met wall.
You can’t entirely blame ABC, who clearly wants to be in business with Atwell.
SHIELD itself hasn’t exactly been a ratings bonanza — due in part to ongoing identity crises, tensions between Marvel’s film and television enterprises that leave the big-screen blockbusters bereft of nearly any reference to (and, thus, what should be no-brainer promotion of) the show, and the general demands that “peak TV” has put on viewers’ time. I’ve enjoyed both SHIELD and Carter, however, even as what they do well makes my frustration over what they could be doing better all the greater.
Photo crop of Howard Cosell and Gabe Kaplan at the first BOTNS © 1976 ABC.
I was checking TV listings to see when the Home-Run Derby would begin on ESPN tomorrow night and discovered that at the same time, 8-10 p.m. EDT, ESPN Classic
will be showing an episode — or maybe a greatest-hits package — of Battle of the Network Stars. This made me unreasonably happy. After I punched in the channel number on my remote, however, I got a message saying that I don’t have something called Sports Pass. This made me unreasonably sad. Just not quite sad enough to subscribe to Sports Pass.
After this preamble comes another batch of my Twitter postlets. [see below]
They’re very possibly the last batch for a little while. I’ve decided to step away from
that game and reassess, because it’s just too much of a time suck. Nice as it was to dip further back into the crazy, crowded, colorful pool that is the comics world in all of its increasingly splintered splendor, I spent far more energy and hours following conversations and links and stuff than I should have given that my real aim was to get back in touch with a bunch of folks; Twitter was supposed to be merely one means to that end, and instead it greatly curtailed the pursuit of other means.
I saw a headline that mistakenly omitted a space between the fourth and fifth words
in the bowdlerized title of the new ABC comedy Don’t Trust the B---- in Apartment 23.
My immediate reaction was that I would totally be curious about a show called Don’t Trust the Bitchin’ Apartment 23.
Why not? Is the place haunted? Could it have some sort of weird Lost mystery going on? Does it trap you in the 1980s? Maybe it’s actually a sentient traveling location like Danny the Street from Grant Morrison’s Doom Patrol (which had the added curiosity of being a cross-dressing sentient traveling location). Does it come with a secret walk-in fridge stocked with beer like in those Heineken commercials — or, being Apartment 23, perhaps cans of Dr. Pepper — but they’re dosed, and the furniture takes crude photos with you after you pass out?
I need to know how simultaneously rad and dangerous Apartment 23 is that we should not trust it despite its bitchin’ nature.
This post has been brought to you by the number 23 and the letter B.
Related: Coin Drop • A-Ha Moment • Cold Beans
I’m sure that the world doesn’t need another Oscars analysis. And while that hasn’t stopped me the past couple of years, real-life concerns have me too distracted right now to forge ahead with any prolonged insight; neither my head nor my heart is in the game.
Billy Crystal’s return as host was more triumphant in terms of his professionalism
than of rollicking humor, which may be what the doctor ordered. There was some good, yet not much bad or ugly — mostly things were perfectly fine but unremarkable, unless that was just my personal mood — and it’s the controversy, the unexpected, the WTF moments where quick-minded emcees (with backstage writers at the ready for good measure) like Crystal shine. I noticed and appreciated his ease at moving the show along, perhaps due to the particular contrast with recent hosts, while at the same time wishing for wittier material.
My dislikes, although they were mild, include...
You don’t have to be a Mac user to appreciate this snow leopard.
But you do need some way of glomming onto cyberspace to watch 6ABC’s video of
the newborn cub at The Cape May County Park & Zoo in Cape May Court House, New Jersey. It was born in May to 8-year-old mama snow leopard Himani and 11-year-old papa Vijay, almost exactly a year after Himani gave birth to twin boys Sabu and Kaba. Just last month, The Philadelphia Zoo’s 3-year-old snow leopard Maya gave birth to a pair of cubs by 5-year-old Amga, video and photos of whom are also online. [Update: All but the zoo home-page links have gone bad.]
Related: Sweet 16 • Brew Ha-Ha • Ducks Uncovered
I’m about to call a moratorium on posts beyond what’s in the pipeline because there’s so. much. to write. The 11 o’clock edition of Action News tonight, however, ran a story that just screams to be blogged on, both for what it said and for what it left out.
Screencap © 2011 ABC/WPVI-TV Philadelphia.
The main thing that I was surprised anchor Jim Gardner didn’t mention during the story was that today was the birthday of John James Audubon — which I’ll admit I only knew thanks to the day’s Google logo.
And one reason why the omission is surprising is that the story was about some
ducks hatching outside a fast-food restaurant across the bridge from Philadelphia in Camden County. In case you didn’t know: Audubon, born Jean-Jacques Audubon in France, was a renowned ornithologist — Hello! — who became an American citizen right here in Philly during the War of 1812.
The Oscars brain-trust was ostensibly going for a fresher, younger feel in tapping James Franco and Anne Hathaway to host the 83rd annual ceremony. So naturally the big hits in the Kodak Theatre on Sunday night included 62-year-old repeat emcee Billy Crystal, a frisky but stroke-impaired 94-year-old Kirk Douglas, 73-year-old Original Screenplay winner David Seidler, the 1953 avatar of the late Bob Hope, and James Franco’s grandmother.
James Franco’s Grandmother is my new band name, by the way.
I watched the premiere of The Gates last Sunday, and caught up with the off-season repeats of The Vampire Diaries as well.
The Gates, which airs Sundays at 10 p.m. ET on ABC, barely kept me locked in. As a guilty pleasure to screen on a hot, lazy night, well, it’s more guilty than pleasure — not quite the melodramatic mash-up of Twilight and Desperate Housewives those making it might have hoped for, but probably engaging enough to keep anyone who enjoyed Eastwick coming back for its limited run.
Promo images and logo © 2010 ABC Studios composited by BSL.
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I was right — about the wrong thing.
The series finale of Lost, a two-hour-plus final chapter long known to have been titled...
… revealed that the so-called flashsideways scenes threaded throughout this season took place not in an alternate timeline, a theory that I espoused in my first ‘Lost’ in Thought post in February, nor in an altered version of the original timeline, as I theorized earlier this month, but in the afterlife. The storylines that many viewers expected to be the result in some way of the EM/Jughead Incident turned out to be utterly, well, incidental to the narrative of the series — except insofar as they reaffirmed how bound together these characters were and granted them a rather happy ending.
Well, I guess my episode analyses are going to mirror one another to a degree, the
way this season of Lost is at times mirroring itself, and the first season, and the series to date.
Screencap © 2010 ABC Studios.
I’ll have no individual writeup here of last week’s episode, “What They Died For”, in advance of tonight’s two-part series finale, “The End” — just as there was no writeup of the first individual hour of the season, “What Kate Does”, following the one for the two-part season premiere, “LA X”. My laptop has started acting hinky again, the Internet connection has been at a crawl, and I’ve come down with a cold.
Season 6 ends tonight and thus so does Lost as a whole. Its finale begins at 9 p.m.
ET on ABC, following a two-hour series retrospective at 7, and runs until 11:30; then, after the local news, the one-hour Jimmy Kimmel Live: Aloha to ‘Lost’ comes on at 12:05 a.m. with cast members and creative staff. That’s all true for the USA, at least. What reminds me of viewers outside our borders is that also immediately following the finale will be a live online chat at the CTV website [bad link] featuring my friend and Finding ‘Lost’ author / Nik at Nite blogmistress Nikki Stafford. My plan is to kick back and enjoy the last Lost as much as possible as television, ideally after catching up with comments from my clique at Nik at Nite and Jeff Jensen’s Totally ‘Lost’ insights for Entertainment Weekly [bad link].
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Okay. I’ve been working on a theory for a while now about the alternate timeline on Lost. At heart it’s not all that complicated (really), but I had written it up as part of a post on other general musings that in typical fashion for me keeps getting longer and revised and left fallow and revised again thanks to my intermittent concentration as
the show keeps marching on.
Screencap © 2010 ABC Studios.
The gist of things is that the apparent flashes to a new reality we’ve been seeing are
not actually flashing sideways — or diagonally, i.e. one universe over plus several years back — but rather flashing back to the selfsame universe where all the events we’ve seen to date have taken place. It’s just that in the wake of “The Incident” there’s been some very considerable course-correction.
I recall hearing at Nik at Nite that in an interview or podcast, around the time of Desmond’s head trip in Season 3’s “Flashes Before Your Eyes” and his subsequent attempts to save Charlie’s life based on visions of his death, the producers said there was only one timeline on Lost. When Mrs. Hawking appeared to Desmond during that episode’s funky flashback narrative, she explained that the universe had a way of course-correcting to what should happen, a nice way of allowing for both free will and destiny. This was illustrated by Charlie ultimately dying no matter what Desmond did, although there’s also a convincing argument to be made that Desmond’s actions in warding Charlie away from the previous would-be deaths course-corrected Charlie’s path not to a substitute death but to the one he was “supposed” to have; we’ll never know, presumably, who’d have performed Charlie’s actions at the Looking-Glass station and died his heroic if somewhat senseless death had Charlie died earlier in the jungle
or in the ocean or at Claire’s tent.
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So the ballyhooed face-off between Avatar and The Hurt Locker — two very different movies about soldiers dealing with crucial, only-man-for-the-job missions — finally came to a head last night at The 82nd Annual Academy Awards.
