Seinfeld Win

So Sky Atlantic are reshowing Seinfeld from the pilot.


This is brilliant news as I dipped in and out of it from around season five onwards and didn't get into it in a big way until about season 8. And it seems to be a show that's rarely repeated in the UK.


So, I look forward to months and months of Jerry, George, Elaine and Kramer. Mostly George though, as he's surely one of the funniest characters in sitcom history.

Hammer Time

Another day, another movie starring someone from “Game of Thrones”. After seeing Cersei Lannister in “The Broken” earlier this week it was now the turn of Petyr “LittleFinger” Baelish (Aidan Gillen) to star in low budget Hammer Horror “Wake Wood”.

Gillen and his wife have recently lost their daughter in an animal attack, and relocate to start their lives over in the country village of Wake Wood. However, it’s not long before they discover that the villagers know a way to bring the dead back to life for a short period of time...

So far, so “Pet Cemetery”. And unfortunately the problem with that comparison is that the film never gets anywhere near as good as the book that the central conceit is based on. Gillen is good, as is Eva Birthistle playing his wife, and it’s always good to see Timothy Spall popping up. But ultimately, this isn’t great.

On a side note, “Game of Thrones”, which is still for my mind the best TV series of the year, is being repeated on Sky Atlantic from Sunday. Definitely worth a watch if you missed it first time around.

The Trans-Atlantic Scheduling Conflict

The other day I was talking about Dexter, and I mentioned the (frankly insane) amount of time that it takes some UK TV channels to show American imports. This was something that was fine in the eighties and nineties, because back then, UK fans didn’t really know what was going on with US television anyway, and regardless, there was no other way for them to watch the show, short of having a friend or relative in America video (yes, how dated is this reference now) the show for them, then air mail it over. Even then, it would only work if you had one of those funky VCRs that played both British and American video tapes.

Then came the internet, to be specific dial up internet, giving us Brits access to amazon.com and playusa.com, where, if you had a multi-regional DVD player, you could buy exorbitantly priced American DVDs of your favourites shows, pay the ridiculous shipping charges, and then be ahead of all of your friends whilst they waited months and months for Channel 4 or the BBC to show episodes that had aired in America up to a year before.

But then came illegal downloading and streaming, which was a game changer for the more forward thinking of TV companies. People were no longer content to be months and months behind their American cousins when it came to their favourite shows, and rather than waiting for TV companies to pull their finger out and air the show, they’d just watch it directly online. Sky found a way around this by showing LOST just days after it was aired in the US, ending with them simulcasting the final episode at the same time that it was shown in America. Now Sky Atlantic airs shows like Game of Thrones and Entourage the day after they’re shown in the states, making downloading them illegally impossible to justify. Paramount has followed suit with South Park, and Sky1 looks to be doing the same with Glee.

Not that I ever would justify it. To make it clear, I’m not condoning people downloading things illegally, I’m saying that I understand why they do it. If they pay for a channel like FX, and FX are showing Dexter in six months, why not just download it now? They would have watched it in six months anyway and they’re still paying for the channel, so in theory there are no losers, right? Wrong. And this is what really annoys me about the channels that are stuck in the nineties when it comes to US scheduling; the more people that watch a show when it’s on television, the better the ratings are, and the better the ratings are, the better the advertising revenue is. The more advertising revenue there is, theoretically, the more that channel can invest in shows. And that’s what I don’t understand about TV schedulers. Love or hate internet streaming/downloading, it’s a fact of modern existence. You can’t just close your eyes and wish it wasn’t there. The quicker they air their US imports, the more viewers that they’ll have, and ergo, the more they can charge for advertising slots.

Now I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t know anything about the practicalities of scheduling, but surely, even if there’s a greater cost to air a show within a week of it broadcasting in the US, that money can be recouped by increased advertising revenue? Maybe I’m just being too logical about it.

Ultimately though, whilst FX holds the rights to True Blood, Burn Notice and Dexter, UK viewers will remain a season behind their American counterparts. I have no idea what Comedy Central is doing with 30 Rock and The US Office, but their scheduling is so all over the place that perhaps they’ve shown the new series of these but just buried them in a midnight slot. God knows, now they’ve bought the rights to Friends that’s all we can expect from them every evening from 6 until 10. Which is their prerogative. I don’t own Comedy Central or FX, and if their owners think the delay appropriate (or more realistically cost effective), who am I to argue? I’m not a TV executive, and so I’m not qualified to make those decisions. Unfortunately though, whilst they are scheduling in this way, I fear that illegal downloading will only become more prevalent.  And downloading TV shows is a gateway crime, which leads to illegal music and film downloads. And sadly, a lot of it could be avoided by smarter scheduling.

But then again, that’s just my opinion.