Tag Archives: TV

Siamese Friends

I have this great idea for a TV show, it’s called Siamese Friends, it’s about two friends that get in a terrible car accident. That’s going to play in the intro, every episode, just so you can really get a sense of how bad this crash was. Maybe both cars will explode, I have no idea, I’ll leave that up to the director, but in my script, that’s going to be a stage direction, or a note, “Bad car wreck!”

And then they’ll both wake up in the hospital, you won’t really see them, the camera will be positioned behind their beds, staring at the attending doctor. He’ll go into this speech, “Boys, I want to tell you how incredibly lucky you two are just to be alive. In my history as a medical practitioner, I’ve never seen two human beings sustain the kinds of injuries you two did.”

The camera will start to swing around, we’ll see the friends, they’ll be relieved. But then they’ll start to squirm a little. The doctor will continue, “However, when the paramedics brought you in, we had to operate extremely quickly. Both of your lives were on the line, and so the lead surgeon stitched you together, figuring that your tattered bodies might stand a better chance at survival if they were sewn together.”

“And it worked,” he’d continue, “But I’m afraid the process is completely irreversible. You’re both sharing several major organs, and your circulatory systems are almost totally fused.” And he’d continue on like that for a while, giving all sorts of medical-sounding explanations as to why they’re going to have to exist in this current state, a pair of conjoined friends.

Naturally, both of the guys are going to be devastated. Their lives are going to be forever altered. But that’s going to be the whole show. They’ll get an apartment together, and each week we’ll watch them try to pick up the pieces of something resembling a normal life.

Like maybe they’ll have two totally different jobs. One of them will be a really rich and powerful stockbroker, but the other guy might only work as a restaurant busboy. And so, thinking that they’ll still be able to sort of manage two separate lives, they’ll each take a stab at running two careers at the same time. That episode will culminate with the broker trying to conduct a business lunch at the same restaurant where the other friend happens to work. And so it’ll be back and forth, negotiating deals while clearing plates and pouring fresh water.

And then later that summer at the corporate picnic, they’ll both get in a really competitive potato sack race, or a three-legged race, I haven’t really planned out the specifics of where exactly these two guys are going to be stitched together. I guess it all depends on how much of a budget I’ll be working with, like if I’m operating on a shoestring, I guess I could just get an oversized sweatshirt and have them both fit inside. But if I have the special effects department at my disposal, I could CGI three legs, one torso, probably any type of attachment.

I don’t know why any of the networks haven’t responded to my emails. I’ve been watching TV lately and I think I speak for most everyone when I say that I’m not especially impressed with the fall lineup. The only thing that NBC had going for it was that show about the wheelchair cop, but that got cancelled after only two episodes. Come on, don’t you guys want to make some great TV? Let’s make Siamese Friends a reality.

Maybe sometime late in season seven, some foreign doctor will visit them, he’ll say that he has a new experimental surgery he wants to try out, “I can make you two separate again!” And they’ll consider it, at first glance, it’ll be everything that they’d ever hoped for. But by the end of that episode, they’ll realize that they love being attached, that what’s better than never being an arm’s length away from your best friend? So they’ll choose to stay conjoined. And that’ll be the last episode. Somebody’s got to help me make this happen. We’ll be rich.

I’ll take it!

When I moved into my new place, one of my cousins offered me one of his old TVs. I was like, “I’ll take it!” because it’s a really nice TV, much nicer than my old TV, that big boxy set. I remember when I bought it probably like fifteen years ago, I thought it was so cool, it was bigger than anything that I had owned before, it had a built-in VCR. But nobody uses VCRs anymore, and you walk into a house with an old boxy TV, well, it makes everything look a little dated.

“I’ll take it!” I said that again when one of my friends offered me another old TV. I say old, again, I really mean older. Older than his brand new TV which, Jesus, it’s so thin that, from a distance, from like across the room, you can’t even tell where the wallpaper ends and where the TV begins. Well, you can tell when it’s on, you can see the line around the TV. But I mean, think three dimensionally, it’s like this thing is a part of the wall.

Don’t get me wrong, his old TV is nice, the one he gave me, it’s really nice. It’s a flat screen, it’s big. Like I said, it’s much better than anything I was watching before. Did I mention my old TV? How the red, yellow, and white cables were on the front of the set? Who designed it that way? It’s like, if I wanted to hook up my XBOX, first, I had to buy a converter, because this thing didn’t support HDTV, and then I had to run the cables all the way to the front, they were just dangling there, totally in the way.

This new TV, my friend’s old TV, it was pretty thin, I mean, you could totally see it from the other side of the room, maybe it was even a little heavy, like, when I told you about my friend’s new TV being indistinguishable from the surface of the wall, this one, it was like people would say, “How is that thing hanging on the wall? It looks way too heavy to be held up by … by what? What’s supporting that thing? Did you use a stud finder? Because I’d be worried about that thing crashing down, taking a chunk out of the drywall.”

It’s not brand new, no, but it’s still a nice TV. People can have TVs that look five years old. But I couldn’t help myself, that’s why I said, “Yes, I’ll take it!” when I saw this ad on craigslist, under the “free” section, for a “moderately used” fifty-six inch plasma. Now that’s what I’m talking about. Again, a clear border, definitely some heft to it, but fifty-six inches? That’s much bigger than anything that I was watching before. I figure, any issues that I might run into with it looking old, slightly used, whatever, it’s all overshadowed by how big this thing is.

But three TVs? I’ll admit, it’s a little much. I don’t have three bedrooms, I don’t even have three rooms period. Only one cable box. And that free TV from the Internet, I guess I should have plugged it in and hooked it up to something before I went out and bought that stud finder, that huge metal brace that I nailed to the wall to support those fifty-six inches. It works, yes, but everything’s just green and red. I can’t figure it out. What happens to a TV where it can only show things in green and red?

And I was all worried about my place looking old with one old big TV, well, nothing makes a place look more cluttered than having three TVs sort of hanging haphazardly at random spots throughout the house. I look like I’m running some side-of-the-road electronics shop. I took one down, but the hardware made such a mess of the drywall, like you could clearly tell that a TV had been hanging there. And I’m supposed to paint the wall now? Patch up those holes? I could have just bought a new TV, a brand new flat screen TV. They’re not that expensive. Or the first one, the one my cousin gave me. That should have been fine. I couldn’t resist though, someone says to me, “Hey man, you want a free …” and I’m just like, “I’ll take it! Send it over! I’ll take it!”

I’m half man, half Game of Thrones

I’ve never watched Game of Thrones, but it’s no secret that it’s an enormously popular show. I’m reluctant to get into it, for a number of reasons. I’ll probably cave eventually, and once I become part of the George R. R. Martin-verse, I’m sure I’ll be defending and championing it as vociferously as everybody that I know. But until then, it’s kind of nice to be in the dark, to not know why everyone else is talking about it, what the reason is behind all of the excitement.

And it kind of allows my mind to wander in ways that wouldn’t be possible if I were to be in on the action. For example, while I don’t watch the show, while I haven’t read any of the books, I still have the tiniest idea of what’s going on. Through overhearing snippets of other people’s conversations, from catching thirty-second glimpses of the show while picking stuff up at my brother’s place, to witnessing the barrage of billboards and online advertising getting everybody all pumped up for season three, I think that I have somewhat of an idea of what’s going on.

So with this extremely limited knowledge, I’ve pieced together a synopsis of what I think is happening so far. Years from now, when I finally decide to sit down and watch, I’m assuming I’ll be underwhelmed and unsurprised, seeing as how I’m pretty sure that all of the stuff I see in my head is probably exactly what’s going on in the show.

Let’s start from season one. When the show was in production, I remember reading some article about George R. R. Martin in the New Yorker. It told about this fictitious continent filled with kings and a vast library full of different characters. Once season one aired, I remember seeing this short clip of some albino lady standing in a field, naked, with a little dragon crawling over her body, and a whole field of men bowing down before her.

She’s definitely an alien. From a world at least three thousand light years away, she crash landed to shake up whatever they call this version of Middle Earth. Maybe this little baby dragon – he’s actually a cyborg, but you can’t see any of his robot parts – he’s going to one day grow up to be big enough to destroy any one, or all of the kingdoms. And so this alien lady appears and everybody has to kneel down before her, lest she direct the baby dragon’s future robotic wrath at them.

Season two. I wasn’t really paying attention to anything Game of Thrones related during season two. I did however, manage to catch about thirty seconds of an episode while I was waiting for my order at the pizza place. At first I thought it was the Lord of the Rings. I thought it was that guy who gets killed after killing like thirty-five orcs. But then the pizza guy was like, “I just love Game of Thrones,” and so I figured out my mistake.

In the clip, one of the kings executed some guy for desertion, then immediately went over to his little son and asked, “You understand why I had to do that, right?” and the kid totally didn’t understand, he was just staring at this litter of puppies. “Can I keep them daddy, can I? Can I?” and then the king was like, “Only if you walk and feed them yourself!” It was a little boring, actually. It reminded me more of an episode of Full House than an epic fantasy series. Also, right before that deserter was executed, he started babbling about something winter related, a white-walker, or a snow-giant or something from the north. “Nonsense,” the king said, “we haven’t seen those winter guys in over a thousand years.”

Cut to season three, currently airing. There was a ton of buildup this year in terms of marketing campaigns and billboards and magazine advertisements. It was definitely some very aggressive marketing. Most of the billboards didn’t say anything, they just showed various characters, one at a time, half of their faces were regular, but the other half were blue. Interesting. Then I saw some other ad and it said, “Winter is coming.”

So that’s where we’re at now. Putting two and two together, I’ll surmise that everybody’s scared of these snow people that the deserter was talking about earlier. The alien robot queen, she’s probably their messiah, destined to bring destruction to the kingdoms. But she’ll fall for humanity, maybe develop a romance with some human. The king is still a huge asshole who executed one of his own men without listening to him, without believing that he actually did see a winter-walker, and that mistake is going to bite him in the ass. Or it would, but there’s a twist: based on those half-regular, half-blue billboards, I can only assume that everybody turns out to be from the north, that the enemy that they dreaded was within themselves all along. And then the robot dragon self-destructs and blows up the whole planet. Deep.

I probably nailed it, although as of yet I have no way of knowing. While I’m at it, here’s my prediction for Iron Man 3. Tony Stark is at the pinnacle of his career. Just when it seems nothing can go wrong, it all goes wrong. Really wrong. The bad guy shows up. He hits Tony where it hurts, hard. Really hard. Tony almost dies. You see his chest-light start to flicker. But he makes it. The chest-light is brighter than ever. And then he beats the bad guy. Roll the credits. But don’t leave yet! There’s a clue at the very end. Did you see that guy? Did you see what he said? Did you get it? Did you understand? Yeah, me neither, but Iron Man 4 looks like it’s going to be fucking sick.

Thanks a lot TV

Sometimes I feel like I’ve watched so much TV in my life that I’ve done irreparable damage, to my DNA, like I’ve corrupted the very core of who I am, or who I would have been had I not spent so much time in front of the television. One particular way in which I can measure how my soul has been diminished is my reaction to real life tragedy. TV, especially the reruns that I grew up with, has desensitized me. I’m incapable of feeling any sincere amount of empathy when horrible things happen to those around me.

Right before my grandfather died, he was diagnosed with macular degeneration, fated to slowly going blind, unable to see the world in which he was soon no longer to be a part of. Everybody took the news really hard. All of my aunts and uncles and cousins got together, to be close, to mourn the closing of a chapter in our family’s history. People put on a brave face, but there was definitely an underlying sorrow, thinking about my once active grandfather, now no longer able to drive anywhere, soon he wouldn’t be able see anything at all.

And all I could think of was, well, the Fonz went blind on an episode of Happy Days. I forget the specifics, but I think something happened where Potsy smacked Fonzie in the head with a frying pan, and for the rest of the episode, he couldn’t see a thing. Doctors told Mr. Fonzerelli that, unfortunately, the damage was permanent, that he’d just have to get used to being blind, for the rest of his life. The word forever was tossed around at least five times.

Everybody tried to act upbeat while the Fonz wallowed in self-loathing. He tried showing up at that burger joint hoping everything would be the same, until he went over to where he thought the jukebox was, to try that trick where he’d save a quarter by hitting the machine and it would just start playing. But he was blind, so he accidentally hit Ralph in the stomach. Things got quiet before Ralph tried to break the awkward silence by making some jukebox sound effects.

But the Fonz was pissed. Everything wasn’t the same. His life as he knew it was over. Or was it? It wasn’t. It turns out that the doctor was reading somebody else’s test results, that Fonzie’s blindness would only be temporary. I wonder how the other patient reacted to the doctor’s mix-up, “I’m sorry sir, I know I told you that you’d be back to normal in no time, but it turns out I made a mistake. You’ll be blind forever.”

What, were they really going to make the Fonz blind in every subsequent episode of Happy Days? No, the Fonz was blind, for a minute, he dealt with it, or didn’t deal with it, but it doesn’t matter, because stuff like that never really happens on TV anyway. And I watched tons of crap like this growing up. So I couldn’t help not feeling bad for my grandfather, because even though everybody kept stressing that macular degeneration was incurable, I just kept waiting for that doctor to show up, “Sorry for the misunderstanding, folks,” my grandfather would be like, “Hey Doc. No problem. Aaaay.”

It’s like my grandmother. She spent a good chunk of her life in a wheelchair thanks to multiple sclerosis. Again, that’s a really serious condition, and I’m sure it was the cause of a significant amount of pain and suffering. But as hard as I tried to face my grandmother’s reality, I could never shake that episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation where Lieutenant Worf got crushed by a giant shipping container in Cargo Bay Two.

An accident like that would have killed a mere human, but Worf’s a Klingon, and Klingons are tough, so he survived. But he didn’t make it out totally unscathed: his spine looked more like a jigsaw puzzle now, and he was left a quadriplegic. The honor bound security chief was devastated. His life as he knew it was gone forever. What of his duties on the Enterprise? Over.

The Klingon code of honor didn’t help much either. Apparently disabled Klingons are expected to commit ritualistic suicide. Only Worf couldn’t move his hands, so he asked Commander Riker to do it for him. But do the twenty-forth century ethics of the United Federation of Planets allow for assisted suicide? And what of Worf’s young son Alexander? So many hard questions. So much irreversible loss.

Luckily, right after Worf chose to stick it out, to give life a chance, Doctor Crusher heard of this brand new experimental Klingon spine restoring operation. It had never been tried out before, but it just might work. What followed was a pretty suspenseful five-minute surgery scene and, guess what? It worked. Worf was back to normal. Was it too much to expect something like this in real life? Why couldn’t doctors come up with an experimental MS procedure for my grandmother? Why are you doing this to me, TV?

Do television shows think they’re teaching audiences a lesson by having their characters overcome impossible situations? Are we supposed to learn from their experiences dealing very briefly with chronic disease and permanent disability? No, we’re all getting ruined, our ability to cope with trauma eroded by cheap writing and loose plot holes.

Charles in Charge gets hit in the head and instead of suffering brain damage turns into a badass biker named Chaz. Michelle Tanner comes down with amnesia, but don’t worry, Uncle Jessie and the gang help jog her memory with a best-of Full House video montage. This is the fantasy world in which our generation grew up, where all tumors wind up being benign, and where all cancer scares are inevitably the mistaken results of some radiologist made at the beginning of the episode. Thanks a lot TV.

Regular TV is the worst

I look around at the world, specifically, my world, more specifically, all of the advertisements around the city for the fall lineup of brand new TV shows, and I’ve come to realize that I posses what has to be a superhuman ability to look at just one billboard for a new program before being immediately able to tell whether or not it’s going to make it through even just one season. This power has to be worth something. I feel like the TV execs should be paying me lots of money to save them lots of money. I’m like a guy who can see a train wreck coming, but as of yet, I’ve just stood idly by and done nothing to stop the destruction.

Maybe you need some convincing. Well, my proof is going to be up for interpretation anyway. And since I’m just starting to see the advertisements for this fall, I can’t really point to a ton of this season’s new releases. But, today for example, I saw this billboard for a new show called Park Ave 666. I’ll bet any one of you a solid hundred bucks that this show doesn’t make it to seasons two. What’s it about? I have no idea. Here’s what I do know.

It’s on either ABC, CBS, or NBC. It doesn’t really matter, they’re all basically the same exact network. I see one of their logos and it automatically registers in my head as “regular TV,” like not-cable, like it’s more than likely to be terrible. But it would be unfair and not really that sensational if I were just writing off every single major network TV show. They do something cool every now and then. I’m trying to think of one. I mean, Lost was popular, right? Heroes, while it expanded too rapidly into a red giant of lame disappointment and bloat, it was pretty intense for at least two seasons.

But Park Ave 666, I know it’s on regular TV. The billboard showed some old rich guy giving a devilish smile to the city. How do I know he’s rich? The title has Park Ave in it, and he’s wearing a suit, so I’m pretty sure he’s rich. Why would I describe the guy’s smile as devilish? Because of the 666 part. Without having read anything about the show at all, I’m assuming it’s about the devil living as a really rich person in some penthouse on Park Ave. It sounds awful. And even if I’ve gotten it wrong, the premise of the show, it doesn’t matter, it’s too late. Everybody else is probably already thinking the same thing, and so the advertisers, the marketing gurus or whatever, they’ve failed to make this show even worth trying out. I give it six months.

This is the problem with awful TV shows. They’re usually just copying something that’s already popular and then dumbing it down for regular TV. In the above case, there’s the blatant rip-off of the Devil’s Advocate. But whereas that movie was original, engaging, over-acted, sure, but still pretty original, I can guarantee this TV show is going to have more to do with generic soap-opera non-drama than anything to do with the devil or anything resembling an interesting story.

Everything is ripped off, and it never works. Remember all of the billboards for ABC’s Pan-Am last year? It’s four ladies, and they’re wearing 1960s stewardess outfits, and it’s an airline that doesn’t exist anymore. Could they have made it any more obvious that they were trying to rip off Mad Men? And Mad Men, a show about absolutely nothing other than cool costumes, booze, cigarettes, and non-characters doing non-action and having non-conversations, only marginally works because they were the first show to do it. I can just picture the genius green-lighting team at ABC. “Well, the 60s are huge right now. I’m thinking Mad Men, but let’s focus on the women. And also, stewardesses. And also, I’m terrible at my job.”

There’s a lot of good stuff on TV. But the other ninety-five percent makes me physically sick. What I don’t get is, it’s not like I’m even being controversial here or going against the grain. I’m not even talking about my own personal likes and dislikes. You notice I’m not talking about shows like Gossip Girl or Glee, shows I could never see myself watching, but that I can at least see how they attract viewers and stay on the air for longer than a year. I’ve never met one person that watched Kings or Ringer or Pan Am or any of the other non-shows that perennially sprout and die like weeds.

Can’t the networks just put together a couple of focus groups before they start throwing money at shows that’ll never make it further than a year? No, it’s much easier to look at already successful programs and put together a proposal, something like, “Well, Breaking Bad has never been more popular. So I’m thinking a show about a woman. And she’s bipolar. Right? OK, so she starts making heroin to pay for her bipolar meds. Cool? Terrific! OK, this show’s going to be on channel seven though, so nothing too explicit. And no syringes. The sponsor’s said no syringes. I don’t know, think of something. I don’t know, we’ll call it Shooting Up, or Nodding Off, or Nobody’s Watching. It’s going to be a smash hit!”