July 21, 2008
Televisualist: Soccer, Bea, and De Lancie
Each week, Torontoist examines the upcoming TV listings and makes note of programs that are entertaining, informative, and of quality. Or, alternately, none of those. The result: Televisualist.
Monday
ABC reality shows traditionally have the shittiest prizes at the end (witness The Bachelor, where the winning girl gets to be some dickhead's pump-chump for three weeks until he dumps her for a Finnish supermodel), but High School Musical: Get In The Picture takes that to a new low: the winner gets to be in a music video that plays over the end credits of High School Musical 3. Woo-hoo. (8 p.m.)
Things You Have No Idea Why The History Channel Is Playing Them, Volume XVII: The Saint, the 1997 Val Kilmer action thriller featuring a roguish freelance spy involved in a deadly Russian caper involving fusion energy. Because as we all know, in 1997 Russia started up its first fusion energy plants, ending the world energy crisis before it ever even began. History, bitches! (9 p.m.)
Tuesday
MuchMoreMusic airs The Twenty Studliest Musicians Over 40. Original title: Pretending Our Original Demographic Still Watches Our Channel And Has A Sex Drive. (8 p.m.)
Tonight, on a new episode of Wide Angle, exploring the concept of individual carbon cap-and-trade as applied to Indonesian rainforests. Sounds interesting. (PBS, 10 p.m.)
Wednesday
It is not often one says "hey, a good episode of Star Trek: Voyager." In fact one barely ever says those words together in exactly that order. But "Q2" is actually a good episode of Voyager, because it has John De Lancie as Q in it, and Q makes all things better. Or destroys them. (Space, 8 p.m.)
The Simpsons rerun of the week: "Homer's Enemy," AKA "the one with Frank Grimes." Often considered to be the high point from where the show started steadily traveling downhill by cynics; even fans who think the show rebounded in later seasons admit that this episode marks the start of the descent into the valley. Which does not make it not funny as hell, of course, but the beginning of the show's open recognition of Homer's essentially selfish, dangerous nature is... ominous. (CFMT, 10 p.m.)
Thursday
Tonight is the Major League Soccer all-star exhibition game, with a twist! The twist is that instead of having forming two teams to play one another, the MLS all-stars will form one team and play against... West Ham United, who have not won the FA cup since 1980. Didja ever suspect that maybe, just maybe, the Euros don't take that MLS seriously yet? (CBC, 7 p.m.)
No, Televisualist has not said anything yet about Greatest American Dog. It is a reality show about frigging dogs. Humans on reality shows are at least there on a voluntary basis. Enough said. (E!, 8 p.m.)
Oh my god, G4TV has live, continuous coverage of the San Diego Comic Con. I am trying hard to think of things that need to be televised less and I am failing. And I'm a nerd, people. Regular schmoes would likely be even less kind. (All day.)
Friday
Tonight on Biography: Bea Arthur. Come on, you know you've got to watch that. (City, 8 p.m.)
Unintentional comedy alert: Hometown Legend airs on Family Channel. The unintentional comedy portion is that this movie stars Terry "John Locke on Lost" O'Quinn as a football coach who comes out of retirement to coach high school football. Pretending that his inspirational football coach is John Locke makes this an entirely different movie. One that is entertaining! If you are slightly drunk, anyhow. (9 p.m.)
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I was one of those people who was misled when MMM started by thinking they were going to show more adult-oriented pop, rock and RB videos. Boy, was I wrong. I've since cancelled both MMM and MuchMusic. I do miss the days when video channels showed videos instead of bad reality programs. If they ever started showing them again, who knows I might even subscribe.
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In the early days, MMM used to show the occasional music-themed movie (La Bamba, Selena, that sort of stuff). Over the years the channel slowly began showing more borderline movies, which had little to do with music, but had musicians in them (ex. Will Smith in Enemy of the State). And then The Surreal Life and its heathen spawn came around. I'm happy I only have a handful of channels (even then, most of their programming sucks).
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Apparently the West Ham fans travel far and wide to support their team, according to Metro Morning's sports reporter. There were brawls when they played Ohio. Should be interesting to watch what's going on in the stands if not the field, Thursday.
Also, in my dreams, political conventions where they elect a new party leader are held in the same complex as a gigantic comic conventions, at the same time. The confusion and shame and anger and hilarity [not to mention the fights and sex] would be worthy of live television coverage.
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History Channel is an Alliance Atlantis operation--same as Showcase.
I've noticed a downhill slide of both those channels and the National Geographic, too.
Remember when--nightly--there'd be a good film
on Showcase at 10pm? Now where are they?
About the only good programming on Showcase are
repeats from CBC: Da Vinci and Intelligence.
I wonder if the Asper influence is working its
way into the scheduling.
I hardly watch any of their channels anymore
And what about you?
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...and Rogers has managed to make a mess of the Biography Channel with repeats of the same cycle of biographies, inserting non-sequitur short features on somebody else in the middle of a show, along with those useless "CEO" bits with penny-stock company execs shilling for someone to invest in their company. And to top it off, running a biography of Bill Gates from 1996! Didn't A&E produce thousands of these shows?
On the bright side, Christopher Lloyd is guest-starring on Law & Order: Criminal Intent this week. "Great Scott!!!"
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Wherever CanWest or Rogers get involved in television programming, a race to the bottom of the barrel is sure to follow.
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Yes, almost all of those "speciality" channels have kind of lost their focus. If they can't provide the programming they promised, then they should have their licences revoked.
Showcase started by offering us "What the world is watching". Now, they're only giving us non-stop Alliance Atlantis programming. I rarely watch anymore.
The only channel I consistently tune into is BBC Canada (an Alliance Atlantis partnership) and even that runs repeats of Holmes on Homes and Junk Brothers. What, five channels showing this stuff isn't enough?
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The worst has to be APTN, formerly Aboriginal People's Television Network. They used to be 100% dedicated to aboriginal programming from around the world. Now they just play whatever movies they can afford.
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>Yes, almost all of those "speciality" channels have kind of lost their focus. If they can't provide the programming they promised, then they should have their licences revoked.
yea it seems these TV stations use the 'specialty' thing to get a license then disregard it to do what they wanted to do in the first place.