Grid Effect

Basketball consumed all of our time and interest last night. Unless you find our trip to the gym and subsequent shower nudged between work and tourney watching to be riveting prose, I’m afraid we have nothing really worth contributing from our personal lives. So, we had to go hunting. Ladies and gentlemen, here is approximately your forty-third batch of links from this website in the short calendar year.

So, Prison Break is now beheading characters during contract disputes, then finding loopholes to return the character once the actor’s negotiations are completed. Man, that is an entirely plateau of leverage. Can you imagine if this were physically possible, how many series producers would take this route with contract renewals, “Well Rainn Wilson, don’t get us wrong, we would like to have you back. We really would. But right now Dwight Schrute’s head is rolling past the Chili’s and is about to exit Scranton if you fail to except this offer. So (leans in dramatically), what will it be?”
Anyhow, the narrative of the series will be that it was someone else’s head that was liberated from his/her body (gasp). Brilliant. I think its been made abundantly clear, but I can’t form into words how much I despise this show. They’re now stealing from middle-tier South Park episodes.

There’s only one way for the Schrute Buck to increase in value.

Lord help us, there is talks of a Hills movie. For those who don’t know, The Hills is a reality series following the grand tradition of MTV shows that celebrates vapid, entitled late teens to mid-twenties girls. My question is, what would the time frame be on a movie like this? I know it’s probably predominately scripted in the first place, but if it takes the better part of a year to fill 100 minutes of screentime, then maybe MTV could find better personalities to make television and (apparently) movies about. There are enough stints of dead silence on one of these episodes that I would feel like I was watching an Antonioni film if it wasn’t for the noticeable overtones of idiocy implicit in every one of them.

Kyle Chandler has joined the echo chamber, and is confident in FNL’s return. We wonder how he’ll take to the new management style.

Hal Holbrook, reprising his role from The Sopranos (not really), will yet again play a terminally ill patient. But this time it will be on ER and probably played a little more melodramatically as well.

Speaking of The Sopranos, David Chase was honored by the WGA with a lifetime achievement award. I guess they felt he needed at least one more honoring, just for good measure. All the while David Simon sits at home with an empty mantle. This could explain Simon’s newspaper plot in his final Wire season, maybe this is all just sour grapes that regardless of his substantial contributions to whatever field he is in, he is always overlooked. I’m kidding, of course. But it would be quite ironic if some sort of tape leaked with him lamenting the lack of an Emmy nomination.

Speaking of Mr. Simon, here’s a trailer for his HBO miniseries slated for July. We were going to watch anyways, but with Tobias Beecher and Ziggy Sobotka carrying much of the acting burden, we’ll gladly do David Simon’s bidding and hammer it down your throats.

Tina Fey wants everyone whose ever been on television or in a tabloid to make a cameo on 30 Rock. Have you been on your local affiliate catching a foul ball at a minor league baseball game or at a cookout performing the heimlich on a relative? Then give Ms. Fey a call, she can probably find time to squeeze you into an episode.

That’s it for a dreadful week in episodic television. We’re going to be honest, we probably won’t be setting the world on fire next week either.