Get in the Ring

If I may gloat just a little bit, although I was off by a season, I was correct way back in January of last year when I predicted that the first significant mention of sport on Mad Men was going to be one of the Clay/Ali vs. Liston fights. It wasn't the centerpiece of last night's episode, and it wasn't really used to broach the subject of race as I predicted it might be, but it was definitely a big part of the episode. I'm so used to big fights and sporting events taking place on a weekend that I was confused when everyone came back into the office the day after the fight. I wouldn't expect Mad Men to screw up such a easily verifiable piece of period detail, and they were correct of course. The fight in question took place on May 25th, 1965, which was a Tuesday, in Lewiston, Maine. If boxing continues its seemingly inexorable decline in popularity, perhaps there will someday be another heavyweight title fight on a weeknight in central Maine.

Spring Break!

I've been enjoying the new TV show Modern Family. It's no Arrested Development, nor does it try to be, but it's still very funny. This week's episode ("Truth Be Told") was one of the best and it featured Judy Greer (Kitty from Arrested Development), who once again demonstrated her mastery of the the crazy, sex-starved woman role.

I also really enjoyed this spoof of CNN's The Situation Room from last weekend's Saturday Night Live. I never intentionally watch CNN, but every time I happen to catch it, it seems like all they're doing is reading viewer e-mails without any sort of commentary. This spoof takes that sort of behavior to its logical extreme.

Governor Roger Sterling

Is it just me, or do Florida Governor Charlie Crist and actor John Slatterly of Mad Men fame look the same (at least, in profile)?

For what it's worth, Roger would probably be pretty good at politics, but if the writers decide to have him run for election and win, it would completely ruin his character since he'd no longer be able to just say whatever he felt like saying all the time.

Fantasy Island

On the recommendation of a friend, I started following Rainn Wilson's Twitter feed recently. Normally, I don't have any interest in celebrity self-promotion, but Wilson's Twitter is often interesting, funny, or poignant. I loved this tweet from yesterday where he solicits advice for his upcoming fantasy football draft. It seems that the staff of The Office has an "office" fantasy football league. I'm not sure if they formed the league because they enjoy fantasy football or it's some sort of method acting technique they use to get into their average office worker characters, but either way, I love it.

Sporting Chance

I realize that season 3 of Mad Men isn't really on anyone's radar screen yet (and yes, it looks like season 3 is happening), but I wanted to go on record with this observation now, since I haven't heard anyone say anything about it yet. I find it really interesting that the show has never dealt with professional sports in any way. No one has ever left work early to go to the ballgame (I guess they're too busy having affairs) and there has never been any idle chatter around the water cooler about last night's game or last week's fight. I'm sure that this is deliberate (since every freakin' detail of the show is deliberate) and I'm guessing it is pretty accurate since professional sports weren't as a big of a deal back then and they were probably a bit too gauche for Sterling-Cooper men anyway, but if nothing else, Mad Men is about how the times, they are a-changin', so I'm guessing the subject is eventually going to be broached. I predict that they're going to go for a two-fer and cover race and sport at the same time with a story that includes one of the Cassius Clay/Muhammad Ali vs. Sonny Liston fights.

New Zealand. Like Lord of the Rings

The Flight of the Conchords season 2 media blitz began in earnest todaty, with this spot on NPR and this interview with the A.V. Club. I'm still working through season 1 on DVD and don't have HBO, so I don't know when and if I'll get a chance to check out season 2. I like the show, but so far, I've liked the acting more than the music. Don't get me wrong, the videos are great and lyrics are hilarious, it's just that parody songs don't reach their full comedic potential until you have a chance to reference them in everyday life, and I haven't reach that point quite yet.

College Humor

B.J. Novak (a/k/a Ryan Howard a/k/a "The Temp") was in town on Friday doing stand-up so we went and checked it out. The show was at Providence College so the audience was at least 95% college students. I still can't get over how young college students are these days, but it's nice to know that they enjoy the humor of The Office even if they haven't entered the workaday world yet.

We hit YouTube before the show to look for some examples of Novak's stand-up routine to decide if it was any good. As usual, YouTube delivered. Here's a couple of clips that we watched - both of which were included in his show on Friday.

Novak is pretty funny on stage. His humor is mostly observational and pretty nerdy, so it's right up my alley. He did bits about how pandas are endangered due to their aversion to mating(that's not the whole story, but it certainly doesn't help) and how everyone who appears in porn films is considered a porn "star". While I may never have technically told any jokes based on those ideas, I've certainly thought about it before, so we definitely have similar senses of humor.

After the show, he did a short Q&A session. The Office spoiler alert: Kevin is going to shoot up the office (with sexy results) before turning the gun on himself in the season finale. Just kidding - no juicy Office gossip was revealed. Although, he didn't say anything about Kevin not shooting up the office in the season finale...

It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World

I normally don't pay much attention to the Emmys in particular and award shows in general, but I was pleased to hear that one my favorite shows, Mad Men, won the big prize last night. If you haven't been watching, you should tune in. If not for its richly developed characters and intricate plot lines, then for the influence it will soon have over everything that you wear.

The Gay Nineties

I finally got around to checking out Hulu. It's pretty cool and all, but that's not why I'm mentioning it here. I wound up watching a recent episode of The Simpsons that essentially rewrote the entire history of the series. It was kind of shocking, though I've been paying so little attention to The Simpsons lately that perhaps this kind of stuff is happening on weekly basis now. In case you don't feel like watching the episode, it's a flashback to Homer and Marge's post-high school courtship, during the early 1990s. The Simpsons has often taken a fairly laid-back approach to geography and the passage of time, and the show has even pointed out its own inconsistencies for a laugh a few times, but as far as I know, the show had always treated the past as a fixed point a time. I guess that's no longer the case. I'm not angry or anything, the Simpsons is still one of the all-time great TV shows, even if it's gotten a bit long in the tooth as of late. Still, it is a little disappointing that they felt the need to upend the entire Simpsons space-time continuum just to cram in a few lame jokes about grunge rock, political correctness, and Bill Clinton.

I Want My TVP

I recently came across this Vandermark 5 music video on last.fm. I'm not joking when I call it a music video, it's not just footage of them playing in concert, it's got multiple camera angles, close-ups, and all sorts of post-production touches.

As far as I can tell, it was aired on TVP Kultura, a Polish arts and culture television station. I never imagined that I would ever be envious of Polish television. If they had programming like this in Poland 100 years ago, perhaps my great-grandparents never would have emigrated to the US.

My Giant

I just finished watching the first season of Human Giant, MTV's newish sketch comedy show. I had never heard of the show until I read this AV Club review. I haven't watched MTV intentionally in at least 10 years so I was kind of skeptical, but I gave it a chance and I'm glad that I did. It's pretty funny stuff. The sketches are all pretty short, but I think that's a good thing. Sketch comedy is so hit-or-miss that it's better to end a good skit early than let a bad one drag on. The sketches are more conceptual than SNL and a lot more absurd, so I definitely appreciated that. With a three-man cast and not a lot in the way of production values, it's a lot more raw than other sketch comedy shows. The humor isn't all that insightful. They occasionally take shots at pop culture and current events, but it's mostly three guys performing reductio ad absurdum on everyday situations.

You're Under Arrest

I finally finished watching Arrested Development. Every episode from every season from start to finish, in chronological order. Arrested Development is a show that either you've never heard of or you've seen every episode multiple times. I'm proud to consider myself a member of that second group. It's a little late in the game for me to declare the show's brilliance. I'm still not sure why I didn't get into this show when it was on the air. I do remember watching a few episodes early on and thinking that it was pretty good, but I never really gave it much of a chance. In all fairness, Arrested Development is a lot easier to enjoy on DVD. Still, I think that it has a lot to do with the fact that until very recently, I assumed that every show on TV was junk until presented with massive amounts of evidence to the contrary. I don't know if TV has gotten a lot better, or I've recently entered the sweet spot of the network's primary demographic target, but today I feel like there are more good shows on network/basic cable/premium cable TV than I could ever hope to watch on a regular basis, and I certainly didn't feel that way as recently as a year or two ago.

I enjoyed the first two seasons of Arrested Development more than the third, though I'm sure that the third season could have been as good if it was given a full run of episodes. Like most viewers, I was initially drawn to arguably the two most outrageous characters, Gob and Tobias, but I think that in the end, my favorite character was George Michael. What can I say, he reminds me of myself at that age, to a certain extent. The reason Arrested Development is so funny (and the reason it did so poorly in the ratings) is the continuous structure of its narrative. Unlike most sitcoms, which have an implicit reset back to normal at the end of every episode, Arrested Development continued every absurd plot detail from episode to episode (and from season to season). The writers not only made each episode of the show more ridiculous than a typical sitcom, they did so knowing that they were going to have to sustain nearly every single plotline throughout the life of the series. I'm sure that had the show continued on, it would've eventually collapsed under the weight of itself, so in some ways, it's good that it had an abbreviated life, but I think that it still could have continued at a very high level of quality and humor for one or two more seasons.