TV

TDTVS Redux

Well it is happening again, we are catching up to the episode of The West Wing Weekly that Hrishi & Josh discussing. They posted 5.09: Abu El Banat last Wednesday and we have now finished 5.06: Disaster Relief. We have been watching an episode a night and they are covering an episode a week, so it was inevitable that we would. There is no way we would start over again for a third time, so we have decided to just watch one episode a week. Each new podcast episode is released on Wednesday, so we are going to watch our The West Wing TV episode on Tuesday night.

If we do that, what are we going to watch the other six nights a week? There are very few TV shows that we both enjoy and wouldn’t mind watching all over again. And it would be nice if there was a podcast for the show to listen to the following day to mirror The West Wing experience. Then, in an brilliant bit of internet serendipity, I happen on an article about Evangeline Lilly talking about being cornered into filming a nude scene on the TV show LOST. She had given an interview discussing it on a podcast called The Lost Boys. Ooh, ooh, LOST was a show we really liked back in the day.

We are going to rewatch TDTVS. Thursday night we watched Episode 1.01: The Pilot – Part 1. Friday we listened to its corresponding The Lost Boys podcast episode. Hmmm, this is not as satisfying as The West Wing Weekly podcast. The premise is cool, it is one fellow’s 1st time watching the show and the other’s 7th time, but I’m betting it is a language thing, these guys are speaking English. They are in England, so it is the King’s English and one is slightly harder to understand than the other. Both of their voices are kind of similar too, so that doesn’t help either. We have now watched the first 6 episodes of LOST and still only listened to just the one of the podcast. We should probably try at least one or two more episodes of the podcast before giving up entirely. Maybe tomorrow.

Previously on The West Wing

Just the title of this post has been sitting in the drafts folder since January 9th of this year. This not too long after Donna and I decided that maybe we should give one of our favorite TV shows a re-watch. The phrase comes from the intro of the show before it shows little snippets of past episodes to foreshadow what is coming up and to perhaps remind you of characters or events that will be featured in this show that you might have forgotten.

The phrase also perfectly fits our desire to go back to, even if fictional, a less calamitous presidential administration. We wanted a version of the goings on in The West Wing of the White House that seemed to be filled with smart caring people that selfishly wanted to serve in government to better the lives of everyone in the country, not just the top one percent.

We have been watching an episode a day, with the exception of a couple of two-part episodes we watched back to back, and are now two-thirds of the way through season 4. We are a little more than halfway through the, 155 episode, seven season run.

So, after gathering dust in the drafts folder for the last 2-1/2 months, why have I decided to flesh out the post you ask. Good question. I have been having trouble finding a book I want to read the whole way through and after my failed attempt at audio books I started to widen my passive entertainment search and opted to try some podcasts. Wow, there are as many of these things as there are books and finding one I’m interested in is actually harder than finding a book that works for me. For one here is the whole voice issue, with a book, it is my voice, which I really like1, while with a podcast not only does the subject have to be interesting, but the person(s) have to sound pleasant to me.

Sunday I found a perfect one that will keep myself (and Donna) entertained for a good while, it is called the The West Wing Weekly. Once a week the two hosts watch an episode of the TV show the West Wing and talk about it. One voice is Hrishikesh Hirway a musician and composer, and the second is Josh Molina who played the character Will Bailey on the show from 2002-2006. Because of the continued popularity of The West Wing and possibly because of Mr. Molina’s showbiz connections they will occasionally have actors from the show on as guests.

They are doing one episode per week and started doing the podcast 2 years ago. The trouble with this is that the latest show they did a podcast for, 4-17: Red Haven’s on Fire, is exactly the same episode as Donna and I watched last night2, so we are now perfectly in sync. But with the differing time tables we will be soon be long ahead of the podcast. By the time we have wrapped up watching the entire seven season run of the show the podcast will only five episodes into season five.

We have been going back through some of the earlier episodes of the podcast to listen to some of the TV show’s stars guest appearances and then binge listened to the first few of the first season’s shows. I think now we are at the point where we might just jump back to season one of the TV show, starting over, so we can watch an episode and then right afterwards listen to the relating podcast.

I Just Want To Remember How It Was

I was a big fan of the X-Files from back in the day. My interest dipped sharply in 2000 when Season 8 started without Mulder. But, I hung in sporadically because I still enjoyed the format of the mystery/monster of the week. While I didn’t care for the UFO mythology shows anymore, they had come completely nonsensical by then, it was still better than TV than any “reality show” clogging the airways. Of the 19 shows in season 9, I probably watched all of 5. Including the tiresome show finale which really soured me on the franchise.

So needless to say, I wasn’t too thrilled when they dragged the show out of retirement in 2016 for a 6 show special event miniseries. And I was not disappointed, it was pretty bad, expect for maybe one show, “Mulder & Scully Meet the Were-Monster” and that was merely alright.

April 2017 rolls around and Fox decides that they can milk the dead cow once more and produce 10 episodes for an eleventh season in early 2018. So, like a moth to a flame on January 3rd I tuned into Fox to watch the first new episode. Can you say hot mess? The Cigarette Smoking man was still alive? Wasn’t he killed in a helicopter rocket attack back at the end of season 9? I didn’t even make it to the series title sequence, I turned it off.

I recorded the show anyway figuring I’d gather all ten shows and maybe binge watch them, so once I got going I would get into them. After about 3 weeks, there was nothing else to watch, so I tried to re-watch the first show again. This time I got past the intro and maybe 10 more minutes in before giving up in disgust.

When I learned the fourth week’s episode had been written by Darin Morgan, I decided that I was going to watch that particular show. Mr. Morgan has written 5 other X-Files episodes, 2 of which are among my top 5 favorites (Clyde Bruckman’s Final Repose and Jose Chung’s ‘From Outer Space’), 2 are in the top 20 (Humbug and War of the Coprophages) and the 5th was the only barely watchable episode from season 10 (Mulder & Scully Meet the Were-Monster.)

Well, unfortunately, The Lost Art of Forehead Sweat was a lot more like the last one Mr. Morgan wrote and not the other four. Even though there are 6 more episodes left in this season, this is the last one I am going to bother to watch.

At the end, Scully and Mulder are sitting together on a couch (in his place I guess) and they are about to dig into a batch of Goop-O ABC (think Jell-O 123) that Scully remembers fondly from her childhood. She had molded it in Mulder’s fake Sasquatch footprint maker because that was all she could find. As Scully scoops up a spoonful and brings it towards her mouth, she pauses, shakes her head, puts the spoon down and says, “I just want to remember how it was. I just want to remember how it all was.” Fade to black.

A pitch perfect ending for me to go out on. And apparently for the actress who plays Agent Dana Scully, Gillian Anderson, to go out on too, because at the very end of last year she announced flat out that she was through playing the character.

If Fox wants a season 12 of The X-Files it will have to be without the two of us.

HDTV not HGTV

About a month ago I wrote about my cable company trying to cheat me out of $2.99 a month for a stupid digital adapter box that I didn’t need. I managed to get them to stop charging me the money because one or two adapters were supposed to be free.

I also hoped that in the end I wouldn’t need it. You know what they say about hope? “Hope in one hand & bleep in the other.” By the end of the month all the HD versions of the regular channels disappeared and if you wanted to watch the lo-def versions you needed the adapter. This is no good. Once your eyes have feasted on tasty 16:9 crystal clear images, you just can’t go back to a 4:3 fuzzy-wuzzy picture.

Not wanting to give AtlanticBB the satisfaction I hoped maybe a newer amplified Mohu Leaf would pull in all the local channels unlike the regular Leaf we tried 5 years ago. This way we would keep the high-speed internet and drop the TV portion of the bill. Well you know what they say about hope? Unlike 5 years ago with the non-amplified Leaf, this time we got the local Fox affiliate great, but NBC was nowhere to be found. To top it off ABC worked well only most of the time.

Giving up, I called Atlantic Broadband and asked what do I have to do to get local channels in high definition. Right now we are paying $132 for the Limited TV package and the 125Mb internet, but if I wanted to drop the internet down to 100Mb we could get the “Essentials Package” which would be the Limited TV in HD and they’ll toss in HBO and EPIX for $95…for the first 2 years, then it goes up $5 bucks a month until it gets back to $130ish…at which time we will no doubt have to call and beg for a lower rate for a different package.

Our appointment was scheduled for 2:30 to 5:30pm yesterday and I certainly hoped whoever showed up to do the work would be better than the last time these chuckle-heads had to come into our house. This time, like a Vegas slot machine paying out a few coins, hope won.

Al was pleasant, competent, and went above and beyond. The only possible bad thing I could say about our hour and forty-five minutes together is he reeked of cigarette smoke when you got near him. Because our signal strength was only marginally acceptable he went outside and climbed the pole across the street. From up there he removed a couple of old filters (that are no longer used anyway.) He also ran a ground wire from the new splitter he put on the house to the ground on the electric meter instead of the ground stake (which is not to code) that Mutt and Jeff didn’t fix 4-1/2 years ago. He then made up a couple of new RG-6 coax lines to replace my interior runs, just because.

We have the same channels as we did before, only now in glorious HD. We now also have 5 channels of HBO and 4 of Epix which we will probably hardly ever watch, but I left them in lineup of channels that we will scan through while surfing using the remote, so who knows.

Somewhere along the line when I was telling Donna what we were getting HDTV, either I mis-spoke or she mis-heard, so she was disappointed when I told her we don’t get HGTV even though everytime we are in a hotel room in which that channel is available, she will invariably remark, “I’ve already seen this one.”

Shouting At The TV

Growing up I remember my mom watching the network evening news and getting so upset at whatever was happening in the country and world that she would literally shout out her disgust at Chet Huntley or David Brinkley or both. I remember thinking what good does that do?

Donna likes to watch the network evening news, so if I’m in the room, by proxy I do too. We watch ABC because she liked to watch Diane Sawyer when she was the anchor, but we are still watching ABC long after she is gone. Diane used to always start the program by saying, “BREAKING NEWS!” even though it was only breaking if you didn’t have access to a 24hr news channel or the internet. I think the breaking news qualifier for them could be added if it happened since their broadcast ended the night before.

When David Muir took over I was hoping that he would drop the charade, but no, he’s even amped it up a notch. Plus he has continued the ridiculous “the Index” feature, 4 or 5 stories hyped at every chance during the first 20 minutes of the broadcast. They are the television version of clickbait, eight to ten word headlines that make you want to find out what they are about. They are saved until near the end and you get one 10 second Index item followed by a minute and half of commercials for prescription drugs your insurance won’t cover the cost of. Then another tidbit and another 2 minutes of commercials, rinse and repeat until it is time to see what the daily lottery numbers are.

It used to be just watch the show and listen with 1/4 of our concentration letting the news wash over us, but since what’s his name took over the news cycle over a year ago, that has been impossible. We don’t shout at the TV, but Donna has taken to sighing a lot and I cussing non-verbally in my mind. Now that the hirsute yellow-fin tuna has taken office Donna’s sighing is becoming words of disbelief and I’ve started muttering incoherently. It is only a matter of time until one of us turns into my mother and starts shouting at the TV.

I’m here to tell you, it won’t be me. From now on if I join her on the couch anytime between 6:30 and 7:00 PM I will have my headphones on listening to Radio Paradise and staring at my Kindle.

More Mixed Emotions

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0R1WiuzIQbM

A different look promo, perhaps trying to capture a younger hipper graphic novel reading audience as opposed to us old-timers who were X-Fans from the beginning.

Started up, went down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 06/25/15: 97