I Believe Two Things

I’m finally watching The Middleman: a delightfully campy take on the Doctor Who premise, with a style vaguely reminiscent of Rocky and Bullwinkle and 180 words per minute of dialog (at least in the one random sample I took).

Like The Doctor (or Batman, if you prefer), The Middleman relies on gadgets and training to fight evil rather than any mysterious superpower.  Where The Doctor uses psychic paper The Middleman has a box of fake IDs, and a 1968 Ford Fairlane 500 replaces the TARDIS, but fans of Doctor Who will recognize the basic setup: a mysterious expert in all things paranormal, supernatural, and “juxtaterrestrial” teams up with a seemingly average sidekick to save the world repeatedly.

My favorite line so far comes from the pilot episode:

Middleman: If there’s one thing I hate more than scientists trying to take over the world it’s scientists who twist innocent primates with computer-enhanced mind control to live out their sick and perverted fantasies of criminal power.

…

Wendy:  Is it true what you said?  That if there’s one thing you hate more than scientists trying to take over the world it’s scientists who twist innocent primates with computer-enhanced mind control to live out their sick and perverted fantasies of criminal power?

The Middleman: Why would I lie about that?

Wendy: It’s a very specific thing to hate.

Unfortunately, watching this show has left me with a strangely strong compulsion to start wearing an Eisenhower jacket everywhere (as does the title character).  That’s probably not wise.

Ellen DeGeneres instructed the people of Boston to gather at Marsh Chapel at Boston University yesterday, hinting that tickets to the Red Sox playoff game were at stake.  I walked past the event on my way to Star Market and heard her give these instructions (via satellite from California):

Each of you have to pick an Aerosmith song title and you dress up as that Aerosmith song title.  You can use props.  You can use costumes.  I’ll be judging you on your creativity.  You have 15 minutes.  Go.

Fortunately, as several people have now commented, nobody chose to appear as Janie’s Got a Gun.

Surprisingly, Dude (Looks Like a Lady), Pink, and Love in an Elevator were all doubly represented, while some seemingly obvious choices got overlooked entirely.  Could nobody put together a Kings and Queens ensemble, for example?

An attractive if conceited young lady might also have attempted to be Beyond Beautiful or Drop Dead Gorgeous with no costume at all, claiming to have already met the title’s key descriptors.

You can watch the video on Ellen’s website to see the results for yourself.

A colleague recently recommended the show Airline, and I nearly watched the entire first season in a single sitting.  It’s a lot like Cops, but instead of filming police officers as they perform their duties, Airline films customer service agents for Southwest Airlines in several of their focus airports.

It’s good television for the same reasons Cops is.  First, we’re watching professionals do their jobs well.  Whereas frequent travelers dread the rare events that happen once in a hundred trips, crews see that many flights every day, virtually guaranteeing mayhem.

Second, many of the people they encounter are complete idiots.  Some are perfectly pleasant travelers and some are passengers subjected to genuine wrongs that need to be righted, but others are outright jerks who just need to be barred from society.  (My favorite so far is the woman who berated the baggage office staff after she failed to recognize her own bag on the carousel.)

Naturally, most encounters on the show result in the passenger threatening to sue the airline, call the police, or at a minimum to “never fly Southwest again!”  It’s practically a mantra.  After just 20 minutes of watching ticketing agents get berated for enforcing perfectly reasonable policies, I wanted to run over to the airport just to stand patiently in a line like a civilized adult.  “You lost my bag?  How unfortunate!  Could you please call me when it arrives so that I may pick it up?  Thank you!” I’d say, for example.

What bothers me most is that in several episodes it’s clear that a single supervisor can spend much of her day interacting with a single problematic customer.  Southwest must necessarily employ an army of staff solely to handle this minority of passengers — and it’s absolutely the right thing to do, since without such an army the rest of us would be stuck in line behind them.

What I like best is this exchange between an unjustifiably irate passenger and a customer service agent, which occurs repeatedly:

Angry Passenger:  I want to see a manager.
Manager:  I am the manager, and I’m the one telling you you’ve missed your flight.

Southwest agreeing to feature in the show is an interesting gamble.  Their logo is in virtually every shot, since it covers their planes, uniforms, and even airport walls.  Their name is mentioned constantly in natural conversation.  Even their routes get some discussion as passengers mention their various destinations.  However, the routine flights and happy passengers that surely comprise most of their operation don’t get much screen time.  We only see the people so unhappy with their experience they leave swearing off the airline for life.

I say it worked in their favor.  Southwest will begin service to Boston’s Logan International Airport on August 16th, and even after seeing six hours of air travel nightmares, I’d like to give them a try.

Only the first season of Airline is out on DVD, but Netflix has it available to “Watch Instantly.”

Having loved Firefly so entirely that I’ve watched the entire fourteen-episode run about eight times in a row, I thought I’d try another highly-recommended seven-year-old show with a somewhat longer production run.  I’m speaking, of course, of the five season run of The Wire.

I’m only three episodes in and the jury’s still out, but I already love the star drug dealer’s tutorial on how to play chess:

Now look, check it, it’s simple, it’s simple. See this? This the kingpin. A’ight? And he the man. You get the other dude’s king, you got the game, but he trying to get your king too, so you gotta protect it. Now the king, he move one space any direction he damn choose, ’cause he’s the king. Like this, this, this, a’ight? But he ain’t got no hustle.

…

This the queen. She smart, she fierce. She move any way she want, as far as she want. And she is the “go get shit done” piece.

I listened attentively every time someone recommended that I watch Firefly, and then practiced the fine art of procrastination in never watching it. The series ended over six years ago, but I’ve finally caught up now.

Wow!

Among my favorite quotes from the entire fourteen-episode run:

If you take sexual advantage of her, you’re going to burn in a very special level of hell — a level they reserve for child molesters and people who talk at the theater.

A close second, from the same episode:

My days of not taking you seriously are sure coming to a middle.

I found Serenity (the followup movie) somewhat underwhelming.  It seemed to seek a plot great enough to commit to the big screen, when the episodic plots of the television show were a far better fit for the characters.

But even if Serenity were entirely lifeless (which it’s not), Firefly would still have been fantastic enough to compensate.  I will now immediately buy my own set of DVDs, and if only someone made a Firefly tee shirt I’d buy that too.

FedEx just earned huge points for their commercial on Hulu.  We see what appears to be a FedEx commercial playing, but it’s clearly on fast forward, complete with the wavy lines and faint squealing reminiscent of VCR tapes.  The narrator says:

Instead of our commercial, go ahead and watch your video now.  We understand.  Your time is valuable.

The line reads:

This content brought to you faster by FedEx.

The ad runs for a short ten seconds.  Whether it’s really shorter than usual ads or just feels shorter, FedEx succeeds entirely.

After an unfortunate experience with a particular FedEx agent around Christmas that drove me to their competitors, I will now absolutely be doing my shipping with them, if only to reward them for the brilliant marketing.

Incidentally, it doesn’t appear possible to deliberately watch a commercial over again on Hulu.  Perhaps they didn’t think anyone would ever want to.

I imagine this is what reCAPTCHA images would look like on Scrubs:

Scrubs reCAPTCHA?

From the voice of “Hey!  Girl’s name!” comes:

JD: So this intern that you mentioned earlier; I’m sure eventually he turned into a pretty amazing doctor, didn’t he?

Dr. Cox: Actually it was a she.

JD: It wasn’t me?

Dr. Cox: No, no.  It was you.  It was you.

Scrubs is back!  (And I’m only three episodes behind, thanks to ABC’s unfortunate policy of making people download completely pointless software to watch videos on their website — a policy that makes us hate them with the white hot intensity of a thousand suns.  That’s right ABC.  Flash is your friend.)

In the Doctor Who episode Silence in the Library, The Doctor takes Donna to the 51st century where humans have built a library “so big it doesn’t need a name” — an entire planet filled with books.   Throughout the episode, he finds himself checking The Library’s computer system via a terminal that looks suspiciously familiar:

A 51st Century Keyboard

That’s right, it’s Apple’s current model of wireless keyboard, which I was touching with my own hand at the very moment the image came on the screen.  Apple’s design is so flawless that it will last fully 3,000 years.

I switched on the television briefly this morning and discovered a game show called Cash Cab on the Discovery Channel.

Someone hails an ordinary-looking cab in Manhattan (branded with the Taxi and Limousine Commission markings), announces their destination, and then unexpectedly becomes a contestant.  They win money (starting at $50) for each correct answer to a trivia question.  After three wrong answers, they’re kicked out of the cab wherever they happen to be.

Although I groaned upon seeing the name, the premise is surprisingly appealing upon further consideration, if for no reason other than that cab rides are not otherwise particularly exciting.  It also adds some interesting arbitrary influences into the game that traditional game shows don’t have.

For example, the length of a round depends mostly on where the passengers asked to go — which they did before they knew they were on a game show.  It’s then influenced by traffic density, traffic control, and other road conditions.  For example, when stuck at a red light, contestants might be given a “red light challenge.”

The screening process to find “worthy” contestants (done on most shows) is also eliminated.  Whoever happens to hail the cab is a candidate.  Certainly the producers only pick interesting rounds to air on the show, but that means a lot of people are playing (and even, perhaps, winning) whom we do not see.

On the other hand, having now watched one episode of the show I have no intention of trying to watch any more.  This sounds like an interesting game to play in a taxi, but not a particularly interesting show to watch on television.