Category > tv
The small box that shows pictures and isn't a monitor
Slain
Buffy the Vampire Slayer, One of the only two shows that I follow semi-religously, has been staked. Season 7 will be the last. Rumours persist of a Faith spin-off series and the Giles spin-off, "Ripper", is written and just waiting for Joss (Currently still playing with Fireflys) and Anthony Head (Giles) to have time to make it. Rumours of another movie surfaced last year, but if (As the report suggests) Buffy 7 will end with a 5 episode story-arc finishing everything that may have fallen apart.
Those who spoke on this:
Defined No Subject
Due to a cascade of errors that would put the average farce to shame, all mail sent to anything@aquarionics.com has been failing to get though. The instructions to send anything important to aquarion@suespammers.org instead still stand. Lonecat’s diary redirection page will also be up shortly. Arn’t server moves fun?
This weekend we went up to see Supermouse & Pol for Red Nose Day where the entire living room was decorated with round, red fruit and sweets, and things in red pots, and Cherryade, Apple & Blackcurrent squash & Tizer. Generally a red theme to the festivities. It has been brought to my attention that various people from overseas will have little to no idea of this Red Nose Day thing, so I shall endevor to explain.
Comic Relief is a charity set up to do good things by silly means. That is, it raises money by things like Red Nose Day – which I’ll explain in a sec – and plows it back into things like building wells in Africa, or homeless shelters in the UK, or promoting understanding of Alzheimer’s, or helping people move out of slums in both places. It operates things both in the UK and Africa. Every two years since 1999 1989 (with the first in -98- +88+, they tried annually, but biannually works better) they hold “Red Nose Day”, which is basically a whole night of fundraising television being led up to by two months of prodding people to be sponsered to do silly things like bathe in custard, jump off towers (With bungee ropes), etc. Also, large companies do special things (Cake companies make special “Red Nose” cakes with 50p of the sale of each going to Comic Relief), and they sell Red Noses of a special design (This year they had hair, previous years have been squeaky, had arms, been tomatoes, turned yellow in heat, been furry, etc etc) all in the name of Cha-re-deee.
This year they had a fantastic parody of Harry Potter (On the trip up, Pol had mentioned that when film companies couldn’t get Alan Rickman they went for Jeremy Irons, so when the parody turned up with Snape being played by Irons, we all creased up laughing), another of Blankety Blank, and Reeves and Mortimer being desperatly, Desperatly unfunny. They raised over 35,000,000 for charity in that one night, which is a fuck of a lot, and they usually double the night’s total with the results of the sponsored stuff that goes on on the day itself, which will be a fuck of a fuck of a lot.
Then we slept, then we woke, then I helped with gardening, watched more TV, ate Pizza, watched Jonathan Creek, Slept, Did fencing (Of the “Help Pol with wooden boards” kind, rather than the “Hit people with swords” kind), where I found a fence-post with a core of solid diamond and demonstrated my inability to hit nails in with the aid of a hammer due to disposition to finding diamond-core of item I am hammering nails into. Then had pancakes, then went home.
A delightful and relaxing weekend, leading upto next week, wherein if we don’t find somewhere new to live we shall be more fucked than a very fucked thing.
Fuck.
Blast, I appear to have broken my giving up swearing for lent. Oh fuck it.
Those who spoke on this:
ccooke:
Almost right, except Comic Relief has been going since 19*8*8, not 1998. But hey, what’s ten years between friends? (I remember the first one when I was in middle school… eek. that’s a while back…)
Vision
Today is Eurovision.
What is Eurovision, I hear you ask. Aha, I answer, it is thusly:
The war is over. The tack has won. This is a celibrarion of the world’s greatest testiment to plastic music: Europop (Listen to that track over the remainder of this post. It’s by the Divine Comedy).
Various countries around “Europe” (Which includes Israel, for some reason) choose a song to enter in this great tournament. Some do it by saying “It’s This Song”, some – like the UK - do a popularity contest to see which is the crapest song and put it forward. On the night itself – Tonight, fact fans – the songs are performed (To several different definitions of “Live”) on stage by their creators. At half time there is a Thing, which could be anything, and has once given the world Riverdance. Be afraid of The Thing.
Anyway, when all the various people have strutted their funky stuff over the stage, they have the big vote thing where all the countries around the world give points to ten of the other countries (That is, they give ten points to the best, then nine eight seven etc. to the rest of the shortlist), the one with the most of the points at the end is the winner, and gets the chance to host the event next year.
Yay, woot, so far, so dandy.
The important point about Eutovision (Which has now been known as “A Song For Europe” for at least five years, but nobody noticed) is the songs, which are universally terrible and include things like last year’s Greek entry, which involved four greeks dressed in black cardboard boxes moving their arms at right angles and announcing that “Sagapo is the password” to a techo-style (Yet still bubbly europop) beat. It’s tacky, it’s terrible, it’s cheap (I swear that last year they were using Winamp pluggins on the back screens) and it’s incredibly fun all on it’s own.
Add in watching the subtitles – where the BBC Subtitling Dept. try in vain to transpose “Laa de la la la” for six lines without a spelling mistake – and the only Eurovision host that matters – Terry Wogan – and watching it with a group of friends, and it’s just fantastic.
Terry Wogan is a radio show host for BBC Radio 2, and for the whole of Eurovision he is the commontator. He sits in his box in London and makes sarcastic comments about the presenters, the songs, the Thing, and the entire Eurovision experience.
Eurovision is fun, tacky, pointless fluff. I wouldn’t miss it for anything.
Those who spoke on this:
Cathy:
You’re braver than I am… I’m hiding upstairs at the moment while my parents are watching it.
And I’m extremely worried that I know that the points system goes 12, 10, 9, 8… rather than 10 down to 1. I think I’ll stay in hiding.
Marco:
Actually, there isn’t a 9 points. The points are 1, 2, ... 7, 8, 10, and 12.
No, I didn’t know this by heart. I went and checked.
Jehanneton:
I watched it last night for the first time ever. Dear oh dear, there were some truly dreadful entries. Can I ask what rock the UK entry crawled out from under? They were so awful I don’t think they hit an on-key note in the entire song!
It was amusing, though. I enjoyed the Dutch performance, but I still can’t work out where I’ve heard that song (or it’s evolutionary predecessor) before- it bore a haunting familiarity to some 80’s tune.
Anyway, it was a fun way to spend a couple of hours and served as my introduction to Europop- well, the most recent since ABBA :-)
Viewometers
On the front page of Aquarionics there could be at any one time several little pictures with the names of TV programs or films or something in them. These are the Viewometers, and this is why they exist:
A little while ago, I made a concentrated effort to catch up with Buffy by borrowing nine boxes of VHSs from LadyLark. In order for interested people to keep track of where I was on these, the Buffometer was created, a ever-changing graphic that represented where I was.
A while later, it was updated for my following of Buffy Season 6 (For which I’ve given up until the DVDs come out) (The DVDs have now come out, and I’m now waiting ‘till I can afford the DVDs).
Later still, I designed one for my minor obsession with “24”, and then later for The West Wing. If these are increasing quickly, you can probably bet that I’m watching lots of DVDs (probably via Kazaa) which may be why there is a lack of other stuff being updated on the site. Mostly it’s a way of allowing the rest of the world to keep ever-increasingly detailed tabs on what I’m doing with my life, which – after all – is what the site is here for, isn’t it?
Review - The West Wing
Okay, take a painting.
It’s wonderful, a masterpiece. Every item has it’s perspective just right, the shading is perfect, and things that are misted are lightly fogged out. You don’t get details, but then, you don’t need details. It’s a beautiful painting.
The one beside it is the same, but better.
The third is just as beautiful as the first two, but occasionally the shading is a little off.
The forth makes up for the shading with wonderous colours, gorgeous shading, and generally being wonderful.
The fifth picture is like the first two, except where once there was fine watercolours, light fogging of the things you don’t need, and smudges of colour, someone is outlining every item in thick black marker pen.
And that is my opinion of the fifth series of The West Wing. So far.
Those who spoke on this:
Wolf/Weaver:
Good to hear!
I’m trying to grab .Torrents of the episodes whenever I find them. Glad I’m not downloading them in vain.
Aquarion:
That’s not a good review :-)
All the subtlty of previous WW seasons has been lost. They have entire kissing scenes, for example. Demands of explicit announcing relationships. It’s really not good
concurerer:
I agree. This season is lacking the grace of the sorkin years. I appreciate the MS story line (personal connection), though it is quite an accurate portrayal of this disease, it is disheartening to see it presented so brash. I’ll still watch it, but when you start seeing ringers (eg. Alan Alda and Jimmy Smitts)... it is time to shoot the horse, its dead.
Winging it
In a hardly unexpected deviation from normal fan behaviour, people who used to run a West Wing fan site are now running Don’t Save Our Show, a petition to NBC to cancel The West Wing after this series.
I agree with them.
Since Season 4, which ended on a dramatic high, the episodes are dry, stale, overdramatic and predictable, and encapsulated to the point where a “four episode story arc” is merely a return to what Sorkin did over an entire series, except not as good. And the direction, lifted from the ER school of shakeycam work for the first half of the season, just gave me a headache.
They’re going to do it, too. Or, rather, The West Wing probably won’t get another season. Since the beginning of March they’ve delayed three weeks (Patterned, so there’ve been two weeks of episodes, followed by one week of nothing) which is hardly condusive to following the storyline.
The first four seasons were wonderful. It deserves better than this.
Eurovision
As I speak, they are web-broadcasting the Eurovision Song Contest. Technology being used for evil…
A new TV program
The premise is quite simple.
We take Suvivor, Big Brother, Shattered, Matchmaker, ‘I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here’ and we put them on one after the other spread across ITV, Channel 4 and Channel Five.
Every couple of weeks, one of the shows has to be nominated to be taken off the air and put out of it’s misery on live TV, by rounding up the creators of the series and shooting them.
Eventually, there will only be on series left, and the producers will recieve £1,000,000 each on the provision they never produce another ‘Reality TV’ program as long as they live.
If they refuse this option, they will be dunked into a vat of battery acid.
If they accept, they will be given the chance to use it to pay the legal bills when they are charged with crimes against humanity.
Not that I dislike Reality TV.
Or anything.
Lovefilm
I really, really like LoveFilm
The premise is this: You pay them 15 a month (Except the first month, which is free) and choose DVDs. They send you the first three you ask for. You watch them and send them back, and each time you send one back, they send you the next in your queue. The subs include postage each way, so returning them is just dump in enveloper, dump in postbox.
But the two best things, and the reason why they’ve completely replaced all use of Blockbuster, are these:
- You keep them as long as you like
- They have Series DVDs.
That is, They have Every Film Ever, as always, but they also have Futurama, X-Files, Simpsons, Firefly and Buffy. All these series you might want to watch, but don’t really need to own. The ones that no DVD rental store ever carries, and you can rent them one DVD at a time, and watch them over forever.
By default, you get a two week trial for signing up, but you can double that by using a referral code (Like FR25) and whoever referred you (Nicholas at Aquarionics dot com) and the referer gets a free month too, which is nice.
Those who spoke on this:
stephen:
In Ireland, we have video rental places. Honestly, it’s just like _so_ last century. Downloaded movies are better quality, er, I’m told…
Nick:
The only trouble with the series rentals, of course, is that you never, ever get sent them in the right order, which means you can’t put more than three series discs in your queue at once and still be sure of being able to watch them in the right order.
It would be helpful if it knew which DVDs were parts of series and didn’t send you part 3 unless you’d already been sent part 2, for instance.
Polly:
Lovefilm are REALLY bad – they have sent me 1 disc from my top 10 since I joined several months ago. Every other disc has been from waaaaay down the list, and they even don’t send me my FastTrak discs – they just keep sending the stuff at the bottom of the list!
loosey:
I have been with Lovefilm for 2 years. The service was excellent to begin with, for the first few months, with fast turnaround, and prompt email replies when I requested titles not stocked. Then I noticed that I was never sent any of the first 15 titles in my queue. After a year of waiting for these titles (which were by then available in shops for sale at a discount) I asked Lovefilm why I hade not yet been sent these titles. They vowed to improve my service, sent a couple of those titles, and then back to titles lower down on my list.
When I saw Lovefilm had taken over Screenselect, I decided to see if new customers were being given preferential treatment. I signed up on the free 10 dvd deal with Screen select and, whaddya know? The 10 titles I’d waited for for a year (such as Constant Gardener, Goodnight & Good Luck, Walk the Line) all arrived straight away.
Moral of the story. Lovefilm now have too many customers, not enough dvds, and I’m looking for a new dvd postal rental company. So much for loyalty!!
Vaneet:
Believe me. This company is in a mess. Reason being that they have got a good way of making x-tra money from customers without customers knowing it which according to me is cheap and frustrating. Its in the allocation process. Somehow, they deliberately delay the allocation process of DVD’s for more than 36 hrs minimum with a blame excuse and apologies having more than 30 titles in the rental queue. On calling their customer support number at 0870 609 5384, and after waiting for more than 9 minutes, the systems are usually not available and guess what. They give you the same answer. Apologies. Which i guess is a smart way of making money by delaying the customer decision of cancelling the membership and not posting them dvd. This i experienced first had in which i emailed them thrice in 2 months about the delay and got email reply back for apologies and repeated assurance to fixing the dvd allocation issue. But here i am, back to square one. That when i was revealed that Lovefilm has not more than 8-10 copies of the hit movies which keeps their capital cost down but is a problem when you have more than 30 customers every day wanting same title at any given time. This further has impact because of high turnaround of DVD’s and their wear and tear. What is frustrating is to see yourself getting stuck with such cheap tricks with a phoney company. My membership details are available at below number.
Vaneet
07745852668
Domino Rally II - Cruise Control
A couple of years ago we had a minor problem with Dominos Pizza, and since then we have not ordered from Dominos.
Well, we probably have, to be honest, but not in the last couple of years. More because Lights Pizza (near Letchworth. Good pizzas, and we’re getting to the “It’s us” “It’ll be there in an hour” stage) is better, and we didn’t do pizza as often in Reading. (Thats it! I can blame the breakdown of our relationship on not having a sufficient community area in which to eat food and watch movies! I can stop angsting now!) but today is the first time since that point I can remember ordering from Dominos.
I ordered from the website at 18:15. It was on my doorstep by 18:35.
Colour me impressed.
Nice pizza, too.
I also finally got around to watching Breakfast at Tiffany’s which Lovefilm (Tell ‘em nicholas at aquarionics sent you) sent me for free for converting people to them. It’s a wonderful film, and everyone should see it at some point.
Mostly, though, I’m catching up on five years backlog of CSI. Why didn’t anyone tell me how good this show was?
Those who spoke on this:
Jason:
You put up with waiting an /hour/ for a pizza? Wow.
Kian Ryan:
Have you not got around to installing that site to site pizza transporter yet?
Get with the times. woosh
/me drinks Dew.
Dungeons, Dragons, Bananaguards and other random things
So, recently then.
Last week I passed my driving theory test. This was cool, but not unexpected (I passed it first time around, though that was before Hazard Perception.). Hazard Perception is a video based test of your reactions to events, you have to click the mouse when you see a hazard, again every time it gets worse.
It’s much like Grand Theft Auto, really, except with clicking on the pedestrians rather than running them down in cold blood. Close enough.
I have also accidentally bought a copy of “Regina’s Song”, the latest non-fantasy books by the Eddings’. I haven’t read it but I nevertheless own it, as the library fines are about to exceed the worth of the book. Taking it back now would mean paying them to take it away.
Isn’t Dr Who good? Yes. It is good. The tardis is apparently powered by a bicycle pump, which was something of a suprise.
This weekend was LC’s birthday, so we wandered down to Wagamama’s (which is a Tradition) and then to see Mitch Benn (which isn’t, but will be). She has written more on this day. And yes, I bought her a BananaGuard for her birthday.
Yesterday we finished the weekend on a low note with the Dungeons and Dragons Movie, which is an incredibly, amazingly terrible movie. It’s got The Bloke Who Played Jimmy In The New Adventures Of Superman (Jimmy mk 2, anyway) staring as a chaotic neutral thief who eventually duel-classes as a mage, his friend Snails who doesn’t really level up ever, and a Miss-Jones-You’re-Beautiful type female mage. Jeremy Irons (The thinking economist’s Alan Rickman) is the Lawful Evil Bad Guy, someone else is the Slightly More Evil, But Possibly Less Evil Chaotic Neutral minion, and a whole host of people you’ve not heard of. Oh, and Richard O’Brian as a crazy person who has a maze. Again.
We spent the entire movie eating chineefoo and discussing how each character had rolled in char-gen. Irons got a fairly high Charisma, for example, and Jimmy2 apparently took an extra level in swordplay when he leveled up near the end…
It’s terrible, but fun in a ‘My god, it’s full of cliches!’ type way. Perfect D&D, really. And there’s going to be a sequel, which I await with…
...fear.
Those who spoke on this:
Moth:
I can’t believe… I can’t believe you actually worked out the character classes and alignments for the people in Dungeons and Dragons! And you just skipped over Thora “My agent! I must kill my agent” Birch being in there. And a Wayans, of some description. To say that it starred Jeremy Irons and Jimmy Mk 2 from Lois & Clarke and nobody else is somewhat misleading.
Not that I would want anyone to watch it to find out. Folks, we suffered that so you don’t have to.
Kathy:
in other news the doctor is haveing far more fun persuading that big blue box of fun to move… one suspects the time wars made time travel about as simple and relaxing as trying to drive into scotland in a moris minor during a strmin winter after severe mudslides…
just a thought from the way tardis is bouncing all over those conduity things in flight, when it used to be the case that it sedately span across, allowing the Doctor a chance for a nice cup of tea and a relax in transit so to speak.
Much fun _
jester:
Watching a thing about movie effect which covered D&D.
Apparently, due to being on location in Eastern Europe they couldn’t make the axes in the maze out of lightweight materials and had to use wood and steel.
Yep, they actually built the real things, and came very close to getting the actor with them.
Add that to the propane flames and you might think the director had something against actors.
Dr Wh
So, being a Bad and Evil person, and being in London on Saturday, I got a friend to record Dr Who for me, and I downloaded it on Sunday.
Monday I got my DVD software to write a copy of the downloaded file as a Real DVD.
This evening we watched it.
What we didn’t know was that 85% of the way though the download atoll crashed, and the download stopped. So the file isn’t complete and the episode just stopped right at the height of the climaxing scene.
By this method, we have achived the number one wet dream of every single Dr Who fan accross the world with regards to this series, and got a two part Dr Who story. To Be Continued Tomorrow, when the file’s downloaded.
Arse.
Who hell he
Wow. That was neat
Movies
Today we went to see The Libertine (Which I could fill my sig file with quotes from, and may indeed do so) and Harry Potter V – The Empire Stikes Back in which David Tennant is a crazed lunatic.
In other, related news, The preview of the Dr Who Christmas Special – which was shown during Children in Need, has been put online by the BBC
I, Hardwired
I have now watched I, Robot.
As a sci-fi movie, it is not awful, although it contains a few points where my brain was attempting to knock on the door of my subconscious pointing out a number of reasonably large plot holes. Will Smith is good in it, Wash is good as the robot, and the actiony bits are nicely done.
Also, I like Audi TTs, and it appears that in the future, everyone drives Audi TTs.
Also, in the future there will be robots.
As an Asimov story it provides weight to my Hollywood Is An Environmentalist Conspiracy argument, which I will expand in Pareidol at a later date.
(I have a week’s worth of Pareidol ready, and a further week scripted, and two weeks after that plotted. Go go gadget Aquarion)
I also watched Heist this week, which was a movie far too interested in the twists and turns of its plot and not enough in the details of the plot itself. I assume it resolves eventually, but my rented DVD crapped out four minutes before the end, leaving the plot unfinished.
Not, incidentally, a problem I, Robot would have suffered from, apparently the entire population of LA worked on it.
The credits, however, were at least shorter than the trailers at the start. Also, it forces you to watch not only the Movie Studio Idents, but that bloody “Piracy Is A Crime” thing. Argh. I’m willing to bet that every single movie pirate in existence strips that. Those watching pirated videos will never see it, like the people who will never be troubled by copy protection because they use pirated games, it’s inconveniencing the wrong people entirely.
(The reason for the title is that what became “I, Robot” was originally a film called “Hardwired” and that and the rights to I, Robot got mooshed together as an, I quote, theoretical tenth story to the original book. The More You Know. (Swooshing star))
Other things I’m watching right now (This Entry Brought To You By Lovefilm and the number 3) is mostly Las Vegas, because I caught an episode while staying with my parents a little while ago and liked the look of it. It’s reasonably mindless and action packed, and has Nikki Cox, which is something of an advantage.
Beyond that I’m mostly writing Pareidol, playing Oblivion and occasionally coding Breakfast. Oh, and LARP. Life continues.
Also, via Miss Maluple herself, Shiny Happy Monsters, which is greatness.
Attachments
Game show
Yesterday, due to a fuckup, I broke my ability to remove cash from my bank account, so no LARP, no alcohol and nothing this Friday night. Except…
I applied for tickets though Hat Trick for a pilot of a newsy/satire type show with Sir Trevor McDonald, partly because the concept interested me, but a lot because everyone who went got first dibs at the hotly contested tickets for the Have I Got News For You new series next month. Anyway. (There has been an hour gap between the writing of those two full stops. Damn Wikipedia and its crackpot organisation).
Anyway, due to the fact they have moved the South Bank, Waterloo Station, the London Eye, the National Theatre and possibly London itself since I last went there, I eventually got to the London Studios in time to be second to last in the queue, and along with the last 30 people didn’t get in. Instead we were invited to go see the filming a new Quiz show from the people who invented Deal or No Deal called “The Rest Of Your Life”.
The concept of the game is this:
A couple are the contestants. There is an arrangement of 11 spaces, each has a Red light (3) or a White light (8) by it. One of the contestants – we shall call them Mark – picks the numbers, while the other – who we will call Mary – wanders from space to space. Mark picks a number; Mary walks to it; there is a period of built tension as the host (Nicky Campbell in this case) asks them if they’re perfectly sure, possibly goes for an ad break, still perfectly sure, asks the audience, phones a friend etc; Light is revealed to be red or white. If it’s white you get +1, red you get -1. Reveal all the reds and it’s game over. After you get to +4, you can choose to jump to round two, or keep going and risk losing it. You can’t skip unless you’re last draw was a white.
At the start they draw one of three possible amounts of money. For the first part of the show their score is this amount × their score as above, so you might get out of round one with £100. In the second half you have 15 spaces (4 red, 11 white), but this time the steps are time (1 month, 2 months, 3, 6, 1 year, 2 years, 5, 10, 20, Rest of your life) which represent how long you will get monthly cheques for the amount you won in round one. There are complications around this.
It’s quite interesting really, though it’s not more than picking random numbers. There is some limited strategy – most on the “Stick or twist” level – and a smattering of spousal trust (In the Complications referred to above), but mostly it was a matter of watching how people reacted and behaved in these conditions. Also, the end game got really interesting, but I can’t tell you why until they broadcast it (and I don’t know when they will). But it involves the end game (Where they have to pick from red and white lights) and an audience member called Roxanne…
It was fun, and kind of mindless, and the warm-up comedian was great in a kind of bad way (“My butcher asked me if I wanted a bet about whether I could grab the meat off the hooks, but I refused, the steaks were too high”), but worth an otherwise deathly dull Friday night.
Dr Who Fans Phrasebook
“Jon Pertwee”
An actor who – at the time he was cast in Doctor Who – was chiefly known for his comic characterisations with wide popular appeal. A masterstroke of casting which reinvigorated the show.
“Catherine Tate”
An actress who – at the time she was cast in Doctor Who – was chiefly known for her comic characterisations with wide popular appeal. A mistake of quite apocalyptic proportions that will, I predict, kill off the show for good.
Those who spoke on this:
Rainbow
This Skittles advert is downright creepy (Via Helljack)
Those who spoke on this:
Those who spoke on this:
Murk:
I wonder if Statler and Waldorf will stumble across some of the seedier videos on the net….
E.g. Family Guy
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=an0rXtt01rU
‘Two Hot Girl ‘ did their amusing take on this ‘phenomenon’.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=user&v=0q8LNwL6CWs
Brandie Halls:
I love the muppets. It would be nice if Disney is going to do a new show with them on youtube. My younger brother and sister love to watch them too. Thanks for the ‘heads up’.
Brandie
Dr Saxe:
You have to love anything that the Muppet’s get their hands into. As far as Disney having a sense of humor, I wouldn’t want to place a bet on that one!
Respectfully,
Dr Saxe
The Next Wing
SAN DIEGO—On day two of the 2008 San Diego SorCon, the biggest Aaron Sorkin convention in the world, screenwriter and producer Aaron Sorkin revealed plans for his next project, an animated continuation of his most popular franchise, The West Wing.
Those who spoke on this:
Murk:
OOohh, Don’t you dare get recovering West Wing addicts hopes up like that by linking to the onion…..
I had a 10 second chill down my spine then, following by a sudden urge for violence….
I know exactly what I wanted to see in season 8, it wasn’t this:
http://www.murky.org/blg/west-wing-the-nightmare/
and that all got taken away. sniff.
West Wing Season 8
I missed this the first time around.
Did you know that when the West Wing writers were looking for a candidate to base Matt Santos on, they went for a young politician – not even a senator yet?
(From The Guardian, Feb 2008)
This includes some of the speeches:
But it doesn’t end there. The model for Josh Lyman was, apparently, a man I’d never heard of called Rahm Emanuel. Who is apparently the model for Lyman. And he’s been tipped to be Obama’s chief of staff, which is what Lyman ended up as.
Life imitating art.
(Sorry Murky, another false alarm)
Those who spoke on this:
Murk:
Yep, knew that – they writers followed Obama. McCain (pre election, at least) was also a reasonable match for McCain in terms of where he is in the party.
I’m just waiting for Obama to ask McCain to serve as an advisor….
Jen:
What a great show the West Wing was I always loved coming home to watch the new episodes!
anon:
like larp then ;).
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Corinne:
Didn’t you know?
Aquarion:
I knew in that I’d heard the rumours (like everyone else), but this is the first time it’s actually been confirmed definate and in public, AFAIK.
dearg:
I think it’s good in that they’re killing it before it becomes just an empty shell, an undead TV show, but will be sad to see it finish.
I’ll be interested to see if the new spin-offs will be better than Angel, though. Angel has a good theme tune, but I never cared what happened to the characters, none of them ever compelled me to watch it. Whereas, in Buffy, there was Buffy, and Willow, to some extent Xander (how will he put his foot in his mouth this time?), Giles’ character is well acted. In Angel, they could (for me) have been replaced with cardboard cut-outs. Angel was a Buffy character who just moped about. A spin-off about Angelus would have been more interesting…