Welcome to the occasional pop culture revue. No Conspiracy Theories today.
So, TV. It’s a companion of sorts; not as exciting or entertaining as the FHG but, well, it fills a certain pop culture-sized gap in my pysche. And TV has suddenly got a lot better with ‘Lost’ being back; I watched the opening episode of season four last night and, once again, I’m hooked.
‘Lost’ hasn’t done particularly well with the audience appreciation, recently; the people who lauded its inventiveness in season one seemed to want, in season two, a show that ‘matured’ and calmed down to become either a standard drama or go full tilt with the SF angle. For me, though, the show has just got better and better, with stories that wow you or make you think the show is going in a direction opposite to that which it is, every episode satisfies. Indeed, I was indignant when ‘The Beginning of the End’ ended after a mere forty-two minutes. I need my bites to be bigger.
When not watching ‘Lost’ I do find myself watching other delights like ‘Pushing Daisies’ (ignore the Herald review, which I won’t link to; the show has legs a-plenty), ‘Torchwood’ (season two is better than season one, but season one wasn’t particularly good…) and, yes, ‘Stargate: Atlantis’ (which is actually quite good; you’re probably just prejudiced because MacGyver used to be in it).
Of course, a lot of my favourite TV scheduling is getting nipped in the bud because of Big Business. Over in the States the Writers Guild of America is striking because the production companies don’t want to give writers an residues on internet revenues for the shows guild members have written for. That’s the reason why Jon Stewart and Steven Colbert have been less funny recently; they are doing their shows unscripted. It’s the reason why ‘Pushing Daisies’ will end after episode eight here without any real sense of conclusion.
If there was going to be any talk of conspiracies it would be here that a wise and assiduous writer would mention that this isn’t really conspiratorial behaviour at all but rather an good example of Chomsky’s notion of institutions acting in conspiracy-like ways whilst not actually conspiring.
And now for some more ‘Torchwood.’ Who knew that Cardiff was the centre of the bisexual revolution?
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Pop culture revues will be infrequent. We return now to more standard programming.