"The history of a TV series, like the history of a nation or an art movement, falls into four periods," writes Robert Fulford in the National Post, "primitive, classic, baroque and decadent."
For example: Without A Trace. (Hat tip: Arts & Letters Daily.)
For reasons he can't begin to justify or explain (and yet somehow does), Reihan Salam at The American Scene stayed up incredibly late Tuesday night to write a column -- and he wound up watching all 20 installments of the WB's new web series, Rockville, CA.
"Wow," he writes. "That's really embarrassing."
And how. I haven't seen the show, but Reihan's post -- which is really quite long -- delves into the particulars of what sounds like a uniquely irritating program. On the upside, it has Veronica Mars and Freaks and Geeks-ties, so I'm sure it will make Nathan happy.
So I saw this fan trailer for “Green Lantern” on YouTube, which is basically an “Oh, Nathan Fillion, you’re so heroic!” love letter, and to each their own, but man, oh man, please do not make “Green Lantern” as the cult of Hal Jordan’s personality.
Comic movies as origin stories are played out and boring, and I really think any Green Lantern movie should take a cue from J.J. Abrams’ rebooting of the “Star Trek” franchise, toss all eleventy-billion decades of backstory out the window — fanboys, simply knowing all this minutiae is reward enough — and make a straight-up action flick. Call it “Lantern Corps” And make it thusly:
Hal Jordan (Dennis Quaid) and Guy Gardner (Bruce Campbell, playing the comic relief for sure) are tasked with training Earth’s two newest Lanterns, Kyle Rainer (Josh Hartnett) and Jon Stewart (Tristan Wilds). Kyle is, of course, an artiste and super-sensitive and oh, how he sees Hal Jordan as a respected father figure. Jon is straight out of the stint in the Marine Corps he planned on using to pay for architecture school. He is not so jazzed to be a Lantern, and unfortunately, Hal doesn’t know how to get through to him.
Even more unfortunately, Hal doesn’t get a chance to figure it out, because Sinestro (Clive Owen) kills him. All the new recruits know is that Sinestro was the guy who trained Hal. And if Hal couldn’t take his old teacher what chance do they — incompletely trained by the perpetually hung-over Guy — stand?
And so the movie unfolds. Extraterrestrial Lanterns come in to help out (including Kilowogg, as played by Duane Johnson), Kyle keeps his girlfriend from getting stuffed in a fridge, Jon eventually comes around because he’s secretly one hell of a guy, there’s a big battle with Sinestro, and at the very end — we have two new Earth Lanterns who have managed to hold off Sinestro Corps. Perhaps there’s an Easter egg at the very end of the movie where we see both Lanterns walking into a Justice League meeting.
(The sequel gets called “Green Lantern” and it tracks Kyle and John’s falling out. But I’m getting ahead of myself.)
My main point here: a movie is not a comic book. It’s not a validation of years of fandom and storytelling, it’s not a multimillion-dollar valentine to the fewer than one million people who read comics in the U.S., it’s not a chance for the self-reinforcing nature of fandom to impose its taste on a wider audience. It’s not repeating the same old story over and over again. A movie is a chance to pick up some of the best beloved aspects of a story from another medium, and to make them dance within the confines of a finite running time, gilded by the sheer gigantic scope of special effects.
So let go of the past. You have nothing to lose but your inherently contradictory continuity.
Last night's exhilarating, ambitious season finale of Fringe plunged the show headlong into fantastical territory, after a season of gingerly dipping its toes into that end of the pool. Viewers as a whole supposedly don't like the sort of straight-up science fiction the Fringe finale embraced, as evidenced by the fan-lamented apparent death of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles and the low ratings suffered by Joss Whedon's Dollhouse.
One of the joys of Hulu is discovering shows you might never have given a shot on broadcast television. (You hear that, networks?) I loved Mitchell Hurwitz's Arrested Development, but early news of Hurwitz's new series, Sit Down, Shut Up, left me lukewarm at best. Reuniting Arrested alums Jason Bateman, Will Arnett, and Henry Winkler -- and adding the likes of perky, Muppetish Broadway pixie Kristin Chenoweth -- sounded interesting enough. But an animated sitcom about disaffected high school teachers, based on a live-action show from Australia, and featuring smugly jokey names like "Larry Littlejunk" and "Miracle Grohe"? Yeah, not exactly burying the needle on my potential laugh-o-meter.
The answer most readers here might offer would be along the lines of: "Yes. Duh." But Peter Lawler at No Left Turns raises the question -- pointing to an essay by Mark Shiffman that argues the negative -- and the discussions in the comments sections of both sites are spirited and interesting. 
