Recently in Patterns. Category
I have been watching a lot of Trio TV recently. It's a really good example of a channel that is only available on digital cable and why these new channels provide redemption for the higher cost of digital cable. Trio tagline is "Pop, Culture, TV" but it's not pop culture in a way that E! is or what might come to mind when you think about the phrase pop culture. Trio seems to be mining the dregs of pop culture for us and finding stuff that is hard to find or that was originally looked over. Trio shows episodes of NBC era Dave Letterman, the entertaining EGG! the Art Show, they have a series called Brilliant but Cancelled that every night shows a series that was quickly lost and forgotten but is really a gem.
I have been watching their 9 Sharp series which focuses on one of my favorite formats that tv takes on, the medium length documentary. Recently I have seen shows such as Boys Alone and Girls Alone which were separate one hour shows where a group of ten boys (and ten girls separately) all eleven years old were left in a big house all by themselves for five full days. The shows were both really interesting, mildly disturbing, and a really solid study of social interactions and dynamics of young people, and the two show display differences at how the genders deal with one another and with an unsupervised news situation.
I also saw a show called Bike Like You Mean It that was about the biking culture in Austin, Texas. It was a really well made documentary showing the struggles in one community of biking activists versus some government offices (texas department of transportation), against some forms of public opinion ("this is texas and you can't take our trucks from us"), against the police (illegal arrests and harrassment)l, and against one another (the more radical critical mass dudes vs. the less confrontation texas bicycle alliance). It also showed some wonderful projects such as the The Yellow Bike Project, a bicycle circus, and some other cool stuff. The feeling I was left with was that this was a really goof example of one communities cycling community achievements and struggles and that surely would be echoed similarly in many towns across the country.
Another interesting documentary I saw watching 9 Sharp on Trio TV was called Culture Jamming about the act of culture jamming, which I interpreted as changing the context of advertising, and retail in the public space with some sort of subversive act (changing advertising, guerilla theatre, etc.). The most interesting group that they focused on was the BLF (Billboard Liberation Front) based out of the San Francisco Bay Area that has been changing advertising on billboards for over twenty years. It's really bold action. Billboards are huge, and illegally changing their content takes some serious homework, guts, and stealth.
Finally, Trio has a new series called Parking Lot which was created and produced by the same folks who made the cult classic short film in 1986, Heavy Metal Parking Lot. The show is a study of fanaticism and a half hour episode will visit three different events and interview some of the folks attending. An example would be one episode visited a 50 Cent show, a Yanni show, and a WWE event. The show is really intense and dark at times due to the somewhat delusional vibe the fanatics can tend to give off, but it remains pretty entertaining. Trio has been airing Heavy Metal Parking Lot as somewhat of a primer for the new Parking Lot series, and it is really a fun documentary. It's so cliche, but it is shocking to think that the scenes represented in that film were from 1986, when I was alive. It just seems so alien, but needless to say, there are some real characters with some amazing lines in Heavy Metal Parking Lot.
Trio TV offering up solid stuff.
Being mostly trapped in doors for 5 days meant a lot of the boob tube, and what my friends whom I was trapped with and I mostly watched was very mild reality shows. We found that the really light fare felt good, and kept the spirits high while the stir crazy demons tried to mess with us. The wonderful late afternoon/early evening one two punch of Switched and Knock First on ABC Family is really nice. So mild. Not much to either show, but well produced, just interesting enough, and never that crummy. Wow, ringing endorsement.
We also did mega marathons of both Curb Your Enthusiasm (which just started its new season, but I haven't watched the new episode yet) and Mr. Show (which is so hit or miss, alternating between painfully smart and funny to just bland and weak). Curb is what it is. You will either like it or hate it. I find it to be the show that feels like real life and the real life stuff that can drive you crazy.
On January 1, Comedy Central just lost all of their rights to their Saturday Night Live reruns (to E!, Entertainment Television), which is a pretty big deal for that network because they used them for multiple hours everyday for many many years. Over a 4 day span near Christmas they hosted a Top 100 episodes ever countdown, which I thought was a really classy way for them to end their relationship with that show (they could have just sorta let it fade away without any sort of fanfare). To fill the void they purchased rerun rights to Mad TV. Now, let me state that I have never been a fan of Mad TV, but I turned it on today thinking "Let me give it a shot." It was awful; terrible; some of the worst comedy my eyes have ever witnessed. I like Comedy Central as a network, but I hope they don't show that garbage too much.
Spot the marginalized minorities!
My two big finds for the week are Airline and The Real World San Diego. Airline is a really fun little reality show about working in the Airline industry. Maybe it's just me, but I find dealing with rough customers, and other sorta workaday problems to be fascinating to watch. The Real World San Diego premier episode was trashy and exploitive and very entertaining. Seems like a good cast with lots of terribl(y)e things to watch coming up.
DVD is changing the way we watch television. You can miss shows now on important shows because most likely they will be released on DVD. Also, TiVO and ReplayTV have made the ritual completely different as well. I believe both DVD and Digital Video Recorders (TiVo, etc.) have made TV more important and more viable as an art form and hopefully will allow less monotony and more risk taking television.
I recently watched the entire series Sports Night on DVD. I ripped through it so quickly. The show was created and written by Aaron Sorkin who has since gone to create The West Wing. The show was critically hailed, but never received good ratings. The show was pure quality. It is set within a sports network and their nightly sports news broadcast. The characters are all really well rounded, the plots are well put together and interesting, and the show is at times very funny. It had me hooked for days and it gave me a lot of input into Sorkin. I strongly recommend Sports Nights and watching TV shows on DVD.