The Dinosaur is gone

So, credit where it's due on Terra Nova. I was worried that the pet dinosaur was going to become a regular feature, but they've got rid of it now. True, there's still lot's of boring stuff with the family going on...this week, the teenage girl couldn't do her homework (the horror!) so she went on a trading mission to get a new battery so that she could. It's like the "Sawyer needs glasses" episode of LOST. Just creating something remotely amusing to keep characters occupied.


Conversely, the main storyline where they discovered the Sixer spy was the most interesting thing that's happened so far in the season. Added to that, Lucas going back through the portal to wreak havok and the season finale is shaping up to be a good ride.


We'll see next week I guess. 

Jumping the dinosaur

Oh "Terra Nova", you were doing so well. Whilst somewhat lighter (and more family orientated) than "LOST", you had enough mystery to keep me going. As well as Papa Dragon...the only good thing from "Avatar". I was hoping that you had the potential to get darker as the season went on. 


But then you've gone and given the annoying little girl a pet dinosaur. What is this, an eighties cartoon? No-one wants to see Godzuki on this show!


Fingers crossed the dinosaur gets killed in the next episode. But not before mauling to death the youngest daughter.


Now THAT would be dark. 

Jurassic Classic

So I was fairly ambivalent about "Terra Nova". On the one hand it was billed as LOST meets Jurassic Park, which are two things I like. On the other it did look a bit like Dinotopia, and it had the guy from the pretty dire American remake of "Life on Mars" in the lead. The good news is he's much better in this.

I've now watched four episodes, and whilst I'm a little concerned they're going to drag out the overarching story for an extremely protracted length of time, so far it's interesting enough to keep me involved.

Sure, the guy from Avatar is playing a nicer version of his character from Avatar. Sure the fact it's got kids and teenagers in it means it could be a little too "family" and not edgy enough. Sure the teenage boy's love interest is INCREDIBLY annoying. But it's got charm (and CGI Dinosaurs) so I'll stick with it for a bit.

Plus on a personal note, I think all of the British characters are actually played by Brits, which I always prefer.

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.

Rebooting the past

As I’ve ranted about before, it seems that Hollywood are so completely out of original ideas that they need to keep rehashing old ones to try and maintain a grip on their audience. This seems to be especially prevalent in television at the moment.

It’s not always bad. The new Battlestar Galactica was a well constructed, multi-layed series, with complex characters and gripping storylines. To my mind one of the best television shows of the last ten years. But for every Battlestar Galactica there’s a V or a Bionic Woman or a Hawaii Five-O.

Actually, I’m being harsh. I quite enjoy the new Hawaii Five-O, and consider it one of my guilty pleasures. What I like about it is that it’s trash, that knows it’s trash. It doesn’t pretend to be anything else. Which is my problem with shows like Blue Bloods, which pretends to be high brow but is really just trash.

The other thing Hawaii Five-O has going for it is the cast. Despite Alex O’Loughlin being the world’s least expressive human, the show has Scott Caan who’s entertaining, Grace Park who seems to have the Midas Touch for reboots (see BSG again) and Daniel Dae Kim who, after Lost, must have instructed his agent that he only wanted jobs that were based in Hawaii.

I don’t have anything against reboots per-se. Hawaii Five-O, V, BSG et al were all decades old by the time they got rebooted. It’s when they start tossing around ideas like rebooting Buffy (which is apparently on the cards) that I get a bit twitchy.

Which brings me to the hideous trailer I saw the other day for the new Teen Wolf reboot. Now they’re p*ssing me off. Taking a beloved film from my childhood (my God it’s got Michael J Fox in it…the gold standard of eighties fare) and Twilight-ing it to appeal to a tweenie audience. The thought of it makes me physically sick. OK maybe mot physically sick, but close.

I’ll give it the benefit of the doubt though and won’t pass judgement until I’ve seen the first episode myself.

Expect a rant though.