Grid Effect

Don’t get me wrong, it’s always a slow television month, even Friday Night Lights is done until January. Speaking of which, maybe it’s because we watched the episode at 4:30 am on Friday night, but the series has reached its melodramatic tipping point for us, despite the enjoyment of the Street plot. But back on course, the strike isn’t helping the annual dry spell. Nip Tuck should still be around, and we have the final two Survivor episodes on the upcoming Thursday and Sunday. Other than that, we are plum out of material.

The problem at large, the strike, has reached a boiling point and the studios have discontinued talks with the union. So if you’re wondering why we never followed through with some links last Friday, it’s the same reason we’re at a loss today: ain’t shit going on. And we haven’t watched enough television recently to fill it with anything worthwhile. Our Weeds DVD’s came in through Netflix on Saturday, but priorities are priorities, and we had to watch the NFL and make sure that we finished in the money yesterday, and as of now we have yet to view a single episode.

Given the already bitchy tone of this post, we figured why not make it a weekly feature to voice our dissent (i.e. complain) about some idiosyncrasy of the current television landscape. They are plentiful and glaring, so it seems like something easy to discuss for such a slow day/week/month.

This might be somewhat self-serving, but TV critics getting advance copies of the upcoming Wire season really draws my ire. Fuck you, critics. Sure, maybe they write for newspapers with decades worth of prestige and respectability and more than 17 people read their daily work, but we write a foul-mouthed, occasionally coherent blog. Where’s our advanced copies?

Four of these five are dead, and the fifth is in prison for the rest of his life, we had to wait through the harsh winters then to find this out too.

You think those seventeen people don’t need some influence to tune in? For a series as entrenched in modest ratings as The Wire is, one would think they’d be clamoring for every audience member they can get. What do you mean that we have no governing body holding us responsible should we leak anything? Those people in Alabama who own this blog that I’ve never seen and only occasionally hear from would pin my nuts to the wall from a thousand miles away. Outrageous, I tell ya.

What does a television critic need advance copies for anyhow? To develop an insightful, thoughtful response to an episode when it airs? Where I come from we have a term we apply to that and I’m sure you’re familiar with it: cheating. That’s right, cheating. A real recapper/reviewer would watch the episode the night before he plans to respond to it, then throw something together in the early hours at work. Fuck this “I need a month’s time to piece together what I just saw so my readers will get something out of what their paying for” bullshit. It’s for the birds.

If someone wants to draw our readership, they’ll write a review while the episode is airing, then release their work no more than an hour after the episode finishes. Now that, my friends, is what journalism is all about: knee-jerk reactions and unfounded claims. Why does this meet the standard of news journalism and not television journalism? Perhaps this upcoming season of The Wire will answer that for us.

Back with more later, should we stumble across anything of substance.