Today’s featured photographer is vonvon. Beautiful bridges and structures, with interesting plays of light. Check out his flickr site. Most of the other photos are from the HDR pool on flickr.
In this post I cover some upcoming TV shows through their leaked pilots. I cover Shark, The Nine and Jericho. I also have a few words to say about memediggers, Big Brother UK and Australia and more!
Index of this post
- Site news and Galactic Rim updates
- Memediggers and social bookmarking sites
- TV Pilot review: Shark
- TV Pilot review: The Nine and some minor digressions
- TV Pilot review: Jericho
- Big Brother UK and Australia
Site news and Galactic Rim updates
A great weekend is ending and a lot of things have been done and said. Right now, I’m still working on further chapters of my short speculative fiction story Galactic Rim. I will post another one tonight. I’ve also started writing another short story in the Galactic Rim universe [Ed. note: will be abbreviated to GR from now on]. Naturally, this story also ties in with Galactic Rim. I am getting some interesting responses about the stories, hope you enjoy them and thanks for all your comments and support.
I think that the index of each post is working well, I’ve tried it out and works good. Not like I expected, but still interesting.
I recently discovered Jessica Doyle’s blog through Chartreuse. I really like it and she lives in BC. Jessica is an artist, poet, illustrator and photographer. I’ll look forward to likeminding with her when I move to BC later this year.
I have also been uploading most of my photos to my Zooomr site, though a lot of them are private because I am archiving them in the original formats. I still have over 1.4 GB left before the end of the month.
Now let’s get on to the nitty gritty.
Memediggers and social bookmarking sites
A series of links on the more recent memediggers that have appeared in the blogosphere. Check out mashable’s article as well as 3spots in depth listing. There is also a recent article for beginners.
Shark
This is a new drama with James Woods and Jeri Ryan. I don’t know why there are so many American shows about lawyers, this is another one. The story unfolds after a top notch defense lawyer, taking million dollar retainers, defends a client that turns out to be a murderer. He gets disillusioned and decides to quit it all.
He gets approached by the Mayor to head up a new DA task force on High Profile Crimes. He pushes his rag tag band of ADAs to win his first case on the job and he feels a lot better.
His daughter elects to stay with him, because she feels that he needs her more than her mother, who is remarrying and moving to NYC.
That’s the recap of the pilot, nothing fancy or new. It’s just another law show that will get cancelled after a few months or at the end of the season. Why? Well it doesn’t bring anything new to the format, and the legions of fan that follow Law & Order (my mother-in-law calls it good old L&A) will not really want to follow this.
The networks try new law shows every season. Most of them do not work out. I think all of last season’s new law shows got axed pretty quickly. This will be no exception. The only difference between all the other show is that this one has some star power, with James Woods playing the title role. That might bring some fans to it, but in my opinion, it won’t last long. And I won’t watch it either, so there you go.
The Nine
One of the first 24 clones, this one has another Party of Five alumni Scott Wolf, best known as Bailey, in its ranks playing… You guessed it a doctor. Where do these guys come up with this stuff? To those of you unsure of the reference, Matthew Fox plays a doctor named Jack Shephard in Lost, is also a Party of Five alumni. I’ve never actually watched one episode of Party of Five. Honestly. I don’t even remember on which network that show was. Fox?
You ask me, what is a 24 clone? A 24 clone show is a show that is in or almost in real time, meaning that the season can be composed of only a day passing by, hence the name 24. Prison Break is the other successful 24 like show.
From what I’ve read, each episode of The Nine should be covering two real time hours, so the entire season would cover 52 hours. Actually this isn’t true. Not in the slightest. I think that the network tried to give it that spin but that doesn’t describe the show. The Nine tells the story of… You guessed it again, nine ordinary people caught in a bank robbery at First Fidelity Bank, from all walks of life. A doctor, his social worker girlfriend, the branch manager and his daughter, an DA and her annoying mother, a bank teller and her sister another bank teller, a washed out gambling addicted cop, a suicidal mid-life crisis man, security guards from what I have seen until now and probably a few others.
Straight off the bat, my initial impressions of the show are quite positive. Interesting pacing and good edition and this show stand out a bit. However, this only last for the first twenty minutes; the rest of the pilot settles itself on the aftermath of the hostage taking and how the survivors are going to live with it.
The two bank robbers behave like idiots. They are totally unprepared; they go into the bank amateur style. But I guess that isn’t the purpose of the story, only the premise.
A quick digression here; one of the best bank heist scenes I have ever seen on film is in the movie Heat, with Robert DeNiro, Al Pacino and Val Kilmer. They come out guns blazing, getting almost caught, but they were prepared, almost military style. They all had AR-15 with about 60 clips each, probably, and empty them all out in a controlled fashion to engineer their daring escape. If you didn’t know, that movie Heat was a remake of another American movie, not that successful. That movie with Ronin and a few other of the genre are the peak of the bank heist movies. Even if Ronin isn’t about a bank heist, it’s still a heist.
I talked about Hugh Jackman in my last post, didn’t I? Well I forgot to mention that the Aussie is also playing in Woody Allen’s latest movie, Scoop. Scarlett Johanson is also in it, again. She was in his last movie as well, Match Point. I wonder if this one will be as dark as the previous one. My favorite Woody Allen movie, you all probably have a different one, and at times I have other ones as well, is Deconstructing Harry, from 1997. When Robin Williams became fuzzy because he was unfocused, well that was the best.
But I digress; let’s get back to the subject at hand, the TV pilot of The Nine. My theory on this is that these pilots are leaked on purpose so that the studios can judge the buzz of the show. Seriously, I have seen the pilots for The Nine (ABC), Secrets of a small town (ABC), Heroes (NBC), Shark (CBS), Traveler (ABC), Palms (CW) and Jericho (CBS). I will see this week Runaway (CW, merged network of the WB and UPN) and probably a few others.
Shrewd execs would leak the shows, and monitor the blogosphere for opinions using a firm specializing in either guerrilla marketing or viral marketing. As demonstrated in this post, a few calls here and there by the execs in question, would be enough to seed the buzz and get a good idea on how the show could fare. With my latest studies and articles of viral marketing on ViralOne, I am sure this is what happened. A similar technique was used to seed the buzz on House MD with Hugh Laurie a few years ago, only this time they included actual DVDs of the pilot in entertainment rags.
So the story picks up 52 hours later where all the hostages are considered suspects by the police, “where their lives are going to be irreversibly connected for ever”. Yeah, right. From what I can see, some romances have shattered, new ones will emerge and someone has developed Stockholm syndrome.
I thought the show was supposed to be 24 like. It looks more like a soap opera setting than anything else. I guess they want to keep the viewers watching to find out what exactly happened during the 52 hours of the hostage taking, but I find this a moot point. There isn’t that much of a mystery, the pilot gives too much information.
What might save this show is the stellar cast, from Kim Raver (24), John Billingsley (Star Trek: Enterprise) and a few other good actors.
Jericho (CBS)
This is the story of a nuclear device detonating in Denver. We discover later on that Atlanta was also attacked. This is the story on how the small town of Jericho copes with the nuclear attacks. Skeet Ulrich plays in this series as well as a few other minor stars.
One of the more interesting factoids of nuclear explosions is that an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) is generated during the explosion and can reach out to over 1000 miles of the detonation point. The characteristics of a EMP is that most electronic devices, if unshielded, are fried. Cell phone towers become useless as well as all communications infrastructure. The premise makes me think a bit about Jeremiah.
Big Brother UK
The housemates are in the midst of a best friend task. The housemates have paired up with their “best friends” in the house, unaware that there will be a double eviction on Friday and both best friends of a pair will be evicted. Pete’s song about Richard was quite good, it showed that he is a musician at heart.
Big Brother Australia
In a surprise double eviction, Claire and Krystal were evicted from BBAU. This comes as a surprise because the intruders Max and Chris are still in the house and will be eligible to win BBAU, though the odds are for either Camilla, David or Jamie winning the show. Centrebet odds put David 1st, followed closely by Jamie and Camilla.
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