The new promo for Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey certainly makes me excited to see this show. With it hosted by Neil Degrasse Tyson, who I have enjoyed for a while when I have seen him on TV, it should hopefully be a good adventure. The FOX network is certainly not the kind of network I would have expected to air this type of TV show, but from the previews, I have seen it seems likes they might be on the right track so far.
Tag Archives: TV
Great ‘The Americans’ Season 2 promo
This is a great promo for the second season of the FX show The Americans. If you are not familiar with the show it is about two Soviet spies posing as a married American couple in the 1980’s. The first season of the The Americans provided enough good episodes to make me want to keep watching the show. It will be interesting to see how they do with season 2 of the The Americans.
The music they picked for the promo is very fitting, with it being Sting’s 1980’s song “Russians”. What I also like about the promo is that it is different because they have the two main actors from the show, Keri Russell and Matthew Rhys, contorting into positions that eventually form the symbol of the Soviet Union hammer and sickle. Overall, with the music and the actors, it is just a different style of promo for a new TV season that certainly made me more interested for season 2.
Here are the lyrics they use from his song “Russians”:
In Europe and America, there’s a growing feeling of hysteria
Mr. Reagan says we will protect you I don’t subscribe to this point of view
Believe me when I say to you I hope the Russians love their children too
If you are curious to hear the whole Sting song “Russians” here is a link to a YouTube video of the song.
Marvel’s ‘Agent Carter’ Books Hayley Atwell & Writers
I am quite glad to see that ABC & Marvel continue working on the possibility of an Agent Carter TV show. Beyond the movement on the series I am very glad that they have Hayley Atwell coming back for it. I quite enjoyed her in the first Captain America movie and the Marvel one-shot of Agent Carter that came out on the Iron Man 3 DVD/Blu-Ray. The potential TV series just would not be the same without her, since she played the part so well.
ABC’s “Captain America” spinoff “Agent Carter” is gaining momentum, landing commitments from Hayley Atwell, who played the World War II government agent in the movie, and showrunners Tara Butters and Michele Fazekas.
via ABC’s ‘Agent Carter’ Books Hayley Atwell, and ‘Resurrection’ Duo as Showrunners – TheWrap.
Below is a short clip for Marvel one-shot of Agent Carter
AMC’s ‘Turn’ Spy Drama TV trailer.
AMC’s new TV show Turn based during the American Revolutionary period interests me mainly because I have always enjoyed that period of history. The American Revolution era period of roughly 1760-1800 has been an era of history that I love to study and learn more about. The TV show is about the Culper Spy ring that came about during the war and was very helpful to George Washington as he fought the British.
The TV show premieres Sunday, April 6th.
Kevin Spacey On The Future Of TV
Kevin Spacey gave a speech at Guardian Edinburgh International Television Festival recently and he made some great points on the future of not just TV but filmed entertainment in general be it TV, Film or web/computer based of some form.
“Clearly the success of the Netflix model, releasing the entire season of House of Cards at once, proved one thing: The audience wants the control. They want the freedom. If they want to binge as they’ve been doing on House of Cards and lots of other shows, we should let them binge. I can’t tell you how many people have stopped me on the street and said, ‘Thank you, you sucked three days out of my life.”
This shift of the audience having now at least some control over their viewerships of TV has certainly been growing since the advent of the VCR. It has really taken off in the last decade with the invention of the DVR/Tivo and the prevalence of websites and digital stores like Netflix, Hulu, iTunes, and Amazon Instant. Count me among the people that is grateful to have this control over our media and when we watch it. Another quote from Spacey that follows along from the quote above.
“And through this new form of distribution, we have demonstrated that we have learned the lesson that the music industry didn’t learn: Give people what they want, when they want it, in the form they want it in, at a reasonable price, and they’ll more likely pay for it rather than steal it. Well, some will still steal it, but I think we can take a bite out of piracy.”
While I would say TV has certainly made some good strides in this area, they still have areas to improve on making content reasonable priced and easy to access all the time and if they can make it better it I think it could be even more successful. If you remove more of the restrictions on media on where people can play it or when they can see by enforcing viewing videos say of not posting a new episode on Hulu until 8 days have passed, those are the type of things I think can improve viewership and likely at least to a degree decrease piracy.
Here is a trimmed down video of Spacey’s speech that has some of the highlights. Below the cut is the full longer speech.
Impatience with ‘How I Met Your Mother’
One of the creators of the TV show ‘How I Met Your Mother’ Carter Bays in a recent interview talks about fans impatience at not yet meeting the mother referenced in the title. In the question before this Bays talks about the last girl Ted dates before meeting the mother.
Is she actually the last girlfriend? We’ve seen him try to do that before and it doesn’t go anywhere.
Bays: I know, but this will be the one that tops all of those. … I know people are impatient and we appreciated the impatience. I would contend that most people who watch the show watch it this way. We’re not trying to jerk anyone around, but if the series has a point, it’s not about the destination, but the journey. It’s about these five friends. We’re not making ‘Mad About You’. It’s not ‘How I Romanced Your Mother’, which would be a great show and there have been great iterations of that, but that’s not the show we’re doing. I appreciate people’s frustrations and would maybe ask them to forget the show’s title. If we had called it ‘Ted and His Buddies’ or something, maybe there’d be fewer complaints.
For me I have been impatient with the show really in the last two years. I have felt like they simply have not given fans enough clues or hints towards the mother to help tide us over until they finally decide to reveal her.
Also some of the reason I have had less patience with the show is that simply I have not enjoyed the journey as Bays referenced above as much as in earlier seasons. Maybe not a surprise since when I have felt this it has been during seasons 7 and the current season 8. It is an older show which is not a surprise that it gets harder to continue having good story lines after so many seasons. Maybe if I was still enjoying the journey I would not be as impatient as I am now about who the mother is.
The follow-up question to what I posted above touches on the connecting issue I have with the show:
Does that imply that we won’t see the courtship of the mother?
Bays: I still can’t say. [Laughs] But we’re going to start, I’m sure, frustrating a large segment of the viewership by answering a couple of small questions this season here and there before getting to the big shebang. We will get a couple more glimpses of her this year.
Personally I don’t to really want to for the first time meet the mother in the series finale and then have the show end. I can accept Bays saying that it is the journey to meeting the mother, but at some point I want to met her and get to know her for more than one episode. I feel like they could give new life to the show if they introduce the mother as a new full-time cast member and stop stalling.
As the show now stands I am really only continuing to watch because I have been a fan from the start. For me the show has fallen from a must see show or one that I want to catch up on if I miss an episode to not really caring if I miss a new episode now.
Edit: Of course tonight’s (12/17) two new episodes were good after I wrote this post in which I pored cold water on the quality of the show. Will see if they can keep it up, which I hope they can.
Netflix deal with Warner Bros. includes delay in queues & why it is misguided.
Under a new deal between the two companies, Netflix users won’t just have to wait 56 days to rent Warner Bros. movies on DVD. They’ll have to wait 28 days to add the movies to their queues.
As part of the Warner’s continuing effort to boost its DVD, Blu-ray, and video-on-demand business, the studio’s new deal with Netflix throws up a new roadblock for people willing to wait and get the movie as part of their monthly subscription.
via Netflix deal with Warner Bros. includes delay in queues – latimes.com.
Making people wait to just add it to their queues on Netflix, just another example of why people dislike Hollywood entertainment companies sometimes.
I totally agree with Marco Arment (creator of Instapaper) on what this delay means for me in practice.
If I’m adding a movie to my Netflix queue, I’ve already decided not to buy the DVD. I’m adding it because it looks mildly interesting and I’d like to watch it sometime. If I can’t add it to Netflix, I’ll just forget about it and probably never see it.
via Netflix deal with Warner Bros. includes delay in queues – Marco.org.
To further echo that, If I am looking to rent a movie it is likely one that I did not have enough interest to see in the theater itself. That means I am not real interested in buying it before I have seen it, so I will wait to rent it.
The point that MG Siegler makes below is very pausbile I think in the long term.
I hope we all realize where this eventually leads: the banning of movie rentals entirely.
via parislemon • A 28-Day Window Before You Can Even *Think* About Renting A Movie.
That leads into my final point, that making it harder for consumers to access and enjoy the movie and TV studio’s content does not help in the fight against piracy. I am not advocating piracy here in response to this, but the harder companies make it or more barriers the companies put up to access their content, they should not be surprised if people turn to other means. In that sense this issue is just another facet of the fight over SOPA/Protect IP, if companies offered easier ways to pay at fair prices to let us use their content, company likely would see more people take advantage of those opportunities. One example is the iTunes music store.
10 Reasons Why to Read A Game of Thrones & First 14 Minutes of Premiere Episode
This great article lays out in more detail why people should read George R.R. Martin’s A Game of Thrones than I did in my review of the book. I think a lot of these reasons will also relate to why people should also watch the HBO series that is premiering on Sunday, April 17th. Here is an excerpt of one of the points that I liked a lot.
#8 The Story Is Driven by Realistic Human Conflicts
Martin has said that the series’ central struggle for power — the titular game of thrones played by various important people we meet — was inspired by England’s real-world War of the Roses, with its complex web of family loyalties and regional rivalries and so on. In terms of narrative fiction, I think the closest comparison is The Godfather and The Godfather Part II. A Game of Thrones combines the first film’s story of rival families violently jockeying for supremacy amid all sorts of complex conspiracies and alliances with the second film’s story of the very serious, very smart leader of one of those families trying to uncover the origin of a plot against him and his. The point is that we’re very far from rote Joseph Campbell hero’s-journey fantasy storytelling, with some dude learning it’s his destiny to defeat the Dark Lord. If you’re sick of that sort of thing, you’ll find a lot more to hook you here. This goes double if you’re the sort of person who’s ever enjoyed fictional or non-fictional war epic’s or gangster stories. “The Sopranos with swords” really is a pretty dead-on way to describe what’s going on here.
via 10 Reasons Why You Should Read George R.R. Martin’s A Game of Thrones – Topless Robot
Yesterday HBO, showed the first 14 minutes of the premiere episode of Game of THrones, and as I have been with everything I have seen so far, the chunk we saw last night was just great. I simply can’t wait until it premieres in less than two weeks now.
New Game of Thrones video & updates
This last Sunday, HBO premiered an inside look at the upcoming Game Of Thrones TV show before the season finale of Boardwalk Empire. Game of Thrones is premiering in April of 2011 on HBO.
After watching the Inside Game of Thrones feature, I have to say that I am still quite impressed with what I have seen from the HBO show and what I have read about how they are adapting George R.R. Martin’s book. From what I have seen it seems like it is shaping up to be a great show.
Also about two weeks ago or so, Entertainment Weekly had a feature on Game of Thrones with some great pictures and a on the set report. Here are two links to the coverage, which includes some great pictures from the show. HBO – Making Game of Thrones – High-Resolution EW Photos. & Exclusive: On the set of ‘Game of Thrones’ | Inside TV | EW.com.
Young Adama Battlestar Spinoff movie, series possible
Today the Syfy channel announced a new movie/pilot for the latest Battlestar Galactica spinoff. To start out it will be a 2 hour tv movie and possibly series if it goes well. From what I have initially heard about the movie/pilot it certainly sounds interesting and has piqued my interest.
The basic premise is centered around William Adama as a young rookie fighter pilot during the original Cylon War. Below are a few quotes from Mark Stern, Syfy’s executive vice president of original programming.
Its an opportunity to see them before they were famous,” Stern said of Blood & Chrome, which takes place roughly 20 years after the events of Caprica and about 40 years before the events of BSG. “Heres the Battlestar Galactica as a brand-new, shiny ship — well, not shiny, but as a new ship that had just been commissioned. What was that like?”
“This is very much an action-adventure, war series,” Stern said. “This is definitely dealing with people who are fighting the fight. … As you hope ‘Battlestar’ would do, it kind of comments on that process a little bit… but not in a preachy way, not in an issues-oriented way, not in a hitting-you-over-the-head way. Really, the fabric and the canvas of the series are people in the fight and what they grapple with when it comes to each other and what they grapple with when it comes to the enemy they’re fighting.”
If it is handled right, I would enjoy seeing more of the original Cylon War and all that is involved and of course learn more about William Adama before he was captain of the Battlestar Galactica. From the linked article the earliest that the 2 hour pilot would air is late 2011, but possibly spring of 2012.
Below is the offical description given by the SyFy channel:
Battlestar Galactica: Blood & Chrome takes place in the 10th year of the first Cylon war. As the battle between humans and their creation, a sentient robotic race, rages across the 12 colonial worlds, a brash rookie viper pilot enters the fray. Ensign William Adama, barely in his 20’s and a recent Academy graduate, finds himself assigned to the newest battlestar in the Colonial fleet… the Galactica. The talented but hot-headed risk-taker soon finds himself leading a dangerous top secret mission that, if successful, will turn the tide of the decade long war in favor of the desperate fleet.