kottke.org posts about TV
The creator of Mad Men, Matthew Weiner, has signed a deal with his distribution company to do the show for at least two more years.
Pact will keep Weiner at the helm of “Mad Men” for the next two seasons. It also covers TV development and includes a component for Weiner to develop a feature project for Lionsgate. There’s no specific idea on the table for the feature, but it won’t be “Mad Men” on the bigscreen, Weiner and Lionsgate execs said.
Praise be. (via fimoculous)
The Ravens are looking good in the playoffs but Mark Lamster imagines a football team made up of characters from The Wire. The most inspired choices:
Offensive Coordinator: Lester Freamon
FB: Thomas Hauk
MLB: Wee-Bey Brice
MLB: Cheese Wagstaff
Kicker: Ziggy Sobotka
Fan club president: Roland Pryzbylewski
I didn’t watch a lot of TV last year but Todd VanDerWerff’s review of 2008’s television season makes me feel like I did.
I mean, not ALL television was bleak — Mad Men ignored the industry-wide memo and gave us one of the best seasons of television ever, while Lost and Battlestar Galactica each hit new creative highs — but the fact that The Wire and The Shield both wrapped up, with BSG and Lost soon to follow, made things SEEM that much bleaker.
I especially liked his definition of “socks folding TV”:
A good socks-folding show is one that you can sort of pay attention to and enjoy. It’s generally well-crafted, but not especially ambitious.
My all-time fave socks folding show is Star Trek: TNG. Even if you fold only when Troi is chattering away pointlessly, you can get a whole basket of clothes done before the second commercial.
A five-minute rap video that summarizes all five seasons of The Wire.
Police chief, yeah, his rank is proper
‘Cause of the window, he starts a war with Frank Sobotka.
MIA’s Paper Planes is still my favorite Wire-inspired song, but this is pretty sweet. (thx, about 2000 people)
Opening theme to 3-2-1 Contact. This was the soundtrack to my tween and early teen years.
Photos of the abandoned soundstage for The Wire.
So I found out yesterday that the soundstage for “The Wire” still existed. I wasted no time in visiting it and was there almost less than 24 hours. It’s one of my favorite TV shows ever and I had to see this before everyone ruined it. The building is also scheduled for demolition and they are going to build a super market on it.
(thx, hurty)
Have you noticed that people like watching TV programs which take place on islands? It’s true! Some of the most popular shows in history are set on islands. Perhaps it’s the warm weather, laid-back island living, the friendly people, the azure seas, and palm trees that attract viewers. Who can really say? Here are some popular TV programs that take place or are filmed on islands.
Survivor
Lost
The Cosby Show
Friends
Mad Men
Law & Order
I Love Lucy
30 Rock
Seinfeld
All in the Family
The Daily Show
The Colbert Report
Countdown with Keith Olbermann
NBC Nightly News
Good Morning America
Update: Oh, man, I forgot Fawlty Towers, The Office, and Monty Python’s Flying Circus! (thx, martin)
Four months before the opening of The Empire Strikes Back, Luke Skywalker, C-3PO, R2-D2, and Chewbacca appeared as the special guest stars on The Muppet Show. Mark Hamill’s first line as Skywalker is:
It seems we’ve landed on some sort of comedy variety show planet.
…and it goes downhill from there. The whole show is available on YouTube in three parts:
The appearance was probably orchestrated as a promotional crossover. Frank Oz voiced Yoda in Empire and was a lead puppeteer for The Muppet Show, performing Missy Piggy and Fozzie, among others.
An interview with a translator about the difficulty of dubbing The Wire into German.
To bring over the style of the speech out of the slums or ghettos, we haven’t used very exact, grammatically correct German. Nobody says “Wegen des Fahrrads” (because of the bikes), rather “wegen dem Fahrrads” (‘cause of them bikes), for example there we use wrong German. Here and there we’ve used other phrases, sometimes with an English or American sentence structure.
The interview itself was translated from German to English. (via panopticist)
According to IMDB and Wikipedia (here too), Richard Belzer has appeared as Detective John Munch on ten different television shows, more than any other character on television. An exhaustive John Munch viewing would include shows from the following programs:
Homicide: Life on the Street
Law & Order
X-Files
Law & Order: Special Victims Unit
The Beat
Law & Order: Trial By Jury
Arrested Development
Paris enquêtes criminelles (aka Law & Order: Paris)**
The Wire
Sesame Street
Belzer surpassed John Ratzenberger and George Wendt, who played barflies Cliff Clavin and Norm Peterson in six different series: Cheers, St. Elsewhere, The Tortellie, Wings, The Simpsons, and Frasier. (Ratzenberger apparently enjoys continuity; he’s done a voice in every single Pixar movie, nine in all.) Munch/Belzer have been prolific in the matrimonial arena as well. Between the two, they’ve been married seven times (Munch:4 and Belzer: 3).
** It’s unclear from the sources that I read if Munch has appeared on this show or will appear in the future.
Update: Two more things. The Munch character was inspired by real-life Baltimore homicide detective Jay Landsman…who both inspired another character on The Wire (named Jay Landsman) and appears in The Wire as a police lieutenant. All three — Munch, the fake Landsman, and the real Landsman — appeared in a fifth season episode called Took. Oh, and Munch, like many other television characters, is a figment of an autistic kid’s fertile imagination. (thx, scott & logan)
Locations of interest in New New York (with photos), the setting for the events of Futurama in the year 3000. Includes Citihall, Taco Bellevue Hospital, Little Bitaly, the Metropolitan House of Opera, Original Cosmic Ray’s Pizza, and Commander Riker’s Island Jail. (thx, anthony)
In a segment for the upcoming Deadwood DVD box set, series creator David Milch talks about the abrupt end of the show and some of the plans he’d had for season four:
Milch does say that he had hoped to introduce a couple of new characters in the never-made fourth season, one of which was based on the sojourning father of John D. Rockefeller who passed himself off as a medicine man who was both a fraud (dispensing mostly alcohol as medicine) and bigamist. He’d be accompanied by a native medicine man whose tactictics were about the same. As it was it could only introduce a bit of their stories in season three.
Milch also says that he’s currently working on another show for HBO about New York City police in the 70s called Last of the Ninth. (via house next door)
If you can stomach more than 30 seconds of it, here’s Snoop Dogg on Martha Stewart making cognac mashed potatoes. Here’s part 2, in which Snoop and Martha compare posses — bodyguards in Snoop’s case and personal assistants for Martha. One of commenters on YouTube correctly notes that Stewart has spent more time in jail than Snoop.
A Matter of Loaf and Death, the Wallace and Gromit short formerly known as Trouble At’ Mill, will be shown on the Beeb in the UK at the end of December.
In this new masterpiece viewers will catch up with Wallace and Gromit who have opened a new bakery — Top Bun — and business is booming, not least because a deadly Cereal Killer is targeting all the bakers in town so competition is drying up. Gromit is worried that they may be the next victims but Wallace couldn’t care — he’s fallen head over heels in love with Piella Bakewell, former star of the Bake-O-Lite bread commercials. So Gromit is left to run things on his own when he’d much rather be getting better acquainted with Piella’s lovely pet poodle Fluffles.
Rumor is that a US showing will soon follow.
Newer posts
Older posts
Socials & More