Archive for the ‘TV’ Category

September 27th, 2008 speechless

this country is fucked.

July 2nd, 2008 conspiracy and sabotage

My favorite reality TV show of all time has been The Mole, ever since I first saw it on TV back in 2001. Back then, the first season was on. Even though the show returned for an even better second season, the show was canceled afterwards. The reason was simple: the show is too cerebral and intriguing for your average reality TV crowd. A pedestrian viewer tuning in by chance would have been confused and bored.

But to my pleasant surprise, the show has returned this summer. For many reasons, this revival will never be as good as the original seasons. (One of the most important reasons is that Anderson Cooper is no longer hosting the show. Anderson’s delivery and demeanor brought a sort-of posterity to the show that played well with the spy-thriller look and feel of the show.)

But despite inherent flaws, the show seems to be holding up well. Episode 5 last Monday was the best so far. I was concerned that the games this season were not as intriguing or cerebral and too physical, but the games on this last episode seemed to return to the tried-and-true formula for the games on the Mole: force the players to trust each other to win money. Of course they can’t, because one of the players is secretly the Mole, hired by the producers to sabotage the game.

At the end of each episode, the players take a quiz, and a typical question reads like: “What color shirt was The Mole wearing yesterday?” or “What year did The Mole graduate from college?”. This forces the players to not only try to figure out who is the mole, but also to be extremely observant. The lowest-scoring player is executed from the game. The thing I really like about this game is that your fate is entirely in your own hands – no popularity contests and no luck. It’s purely a game of keen observation.

One thing that I have not enjoyed about this season is all the fighting. The original seasons always had everyone getting along well. It seems that the producers hired more colorful personalities this time around, perhaps to boost ratings. But this sort of bickering and fighting doesn’t suit this show very well. The show used to have more of a very cool and thrilling spy-mystery sort of vibe. It’s still got some of that, but all the fighting seems to be destroying that mood.

Either way, the season seems to be getting better, so I will keep watching. A surprise appearance by a past season Mole or Anderson Cooper would be really awesome.

April 12th, 2007 purgatory? nah…

Recently, I have been  obsessed with the ABC TV show Lost. The amount of intricacies and complexities in the plot is something that, I don’ think, has ever been attempted before on TV. And inevitably, the ratings for the show will fall downward because it is hard to pick up new audience in the middle of season 3 – there is too much back story at this point. And indeed, the rating has fallen for Lost this season. But the show has been getting better and better from my standpoint. I am entirely amazed at the ability of this show to stay fresh AND well-written at this point in the series. One only has to look to shows like 24 to see that a good show can suffer from bad writing in later seasons. (That’s not to say that Lost has had its share of bad lines.)

The recent episode, Expose, was a testament to the genius of the writers. They clearly tried something different. The look and feel of the episode was completely different from any previous ones. As far as I can tell, it was an hommage to old pulp-TV, like Baywatch and Charlie’s Angels. The fact that a show, with a well-established style and history, is willing to be even remotely creative at this stage in the game is unheard-of.

When I compare how this season is going right now to how the previous ones went, it is obvious that the plot is advancing at a much faster rate. First, we have really exciting new developments like the possibility of time travel and leadership change at the beach camp. Then there are the monumental series questions that have been being answered left and right this season- How did Locked get in the wheelchair? Are Jack and Claire really related? Does Sawyer have a baby? Why are The Others taking the kids? It is obvious, if you actually watch the show carefully, that the writers are not making it up as they go along. It would be impossible to accomplish what they have done with the story at this point without carefully planning.

I am excited as ever for this season’s finale. More curious is where the show will go next season. There are rumors floating around that by the end of this season, most of the mysteries surrounding The Others will have been solved and Dharma Initiative at least partially explained. If they introduce a whole new element to the island’s mythology that we have not seen before, I think that might be the jumping the shark moment for Lost. I hope they stick to the mysteries that’s been established so far.