Grid Effect

With virtually nothing worth discussing on the front end of the week, we’re going to move a weekly links segment up to Tuesday’s. Not to say we didn’t watch anything last night. We tried to stomach Chuck again, and while this series has its strong points (they’re all tonal, bringing in a certain kind of audience that doesn’t really have a nitch yet), the characters and dialog kind of embody everything we’ve come to dislike about modern broadcast network television. It feels like in every review or every recap I read about the series, the writer concedes that he or she is willfully overlooking something they find lazy, simple and cliche. And between five different reviews, they’re will be seven different complaints. This is not the making of quality television, as far as I can tell. With only forty some minutes of airtime an episode, what’s left that we can all agree on?

Anyhow, I flipped off halfway through to watch a horrendous Monday night game with significant fantasy implications, and went to bed pretending I never wasted the half-hour of my life. Onto the links…

Some woman from one of the CSI’s is leaving the series. And our immediate reaction is to ask what’s the consequence of this? Is there any actor on any CSI that isn’t expendable? Aren’t they just like Law and Order’s but with less substance and more flare? Also, I’m sure this woman will never regret this decision. People working on Jerry Bruckhiemer projects always have a fountain of offers afterwards.

Since he generally gives the funniest Daily Show interviews, Brian Williams hosting SNL will mark the first time we’ve watched the full hour and a half in about seven or eight years.

Jon Cryer wants respect for his commercially successful yet critically decimated series. Believing that Two and a Half Men offers more than most critics give it credit for, but are unfairly persecuted for being “old school”. To which I would reply, “Dude, it’s not that you’re ‘old school’, it’s that every single joke is founded on Charlie Sheen being a swinging bachelor and your character being a dependent yet cerebral putz. After a while, the jokes become bland and the situations uncomfortable. So honestly, enjoy your commercial success, rake in your doe, and try to do something more spiritually and artistically rewarding after your run is over”.

Here is a long, long descriptive piece from the New Yorker outlining David Simon’s next project (I suppose after the Iraq project?) in which he details the plight of the post-Katrina New Orleans musician. Damn, will this guy conjure up a premise I won’t find fascinating? Speaking of The Wire…

The next season promises to be as engaging as ever, according to this report. If that doesn’t get you excited for the upcoming season slated to start airing in January, then maybe this teaser will.

Expect to see more of this in January.

One would think that for as great of a stretch HBO had in the late 90’s through the earlier part of the decade, that if David Chase sent a pilot script from one of his writers to the network heads, they would have the foresight to at least give it a read. Well, one would be wrong.

CBS’s Women’s Murder Club destroyed Friday Night Lights in the ratings. Which is kind of ironic, because people probably tune into WMC for strong female leads. We haven’t bothered to tune into the series or anything, but we can imagine that the four leads in it are nothing short of caricatures (akin to that of any other criminal investigation show), while the actresses occupying FNL offer realistic depictions of strong women. Even with the asinine murder plot (Of course, I might have my own biases, this is what I wrote about WMC before an episode even aired). But, I can’t imagine anyone is actually surprised by this development. CBS beat NBC in a ratings grab? Shocking.

Read this article, then explain to me why, even if you have only one hour a week available to watch television, you haven’t been watching Mad Men? This series is versatile enough to appeal to any potential viewer.

It appears the ever looming writers strike might lead to networks airing reruns of better television then what they were initially producing. Question is, is it even worth FOX’s time to run It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia? What with all the required censoring that would come along with it. Each episode would have about fifteen minutes of airtime. More commercials!

Maxim magazine, never one afraid to lower the bar, has named Jenna Fischer the “hottest” divorcee. Congrats, Jen. It’s almost like The Brother’s Solomon never happened.

Finally, even with its fledgling ratings and influence on pop-culture, Survivor is still the most DVR’d series with 2.1 million viewers. I can’t think of a logical reason for this, but am certain it has something to do with Jean-Robert never wearing a shirt.

That’s probably it for today, see you tomorrow with a Mad Men recap most likely.