The Vampire Diaries

So, the new review's up. You can watch it here.

This show, despite its early troubles, was saved almost entirely by something that gets overlooked in the performing arts pretty frequently: chemistry.

All three pairs of siblings started out with great chemistry, and that made The Vampire Diaries enjoyable to watch from the start. When the plot was bogged or MIA, I knew that I could count on the interactions of Stefan and Damon, Matt and Vicki, and Jeremy and Elena. They quickly gave the impression that they had known each other for years, that they knew each others tendencies and automatic responses, in short, that they were siblings.

Sounds elementary, no? And yet, a ton of television disregards this simple feature that enhances immersion and overall quality immensely. Heroes started out with no chemistry between its various families and it was painful to watch with few to no redeeming features. Stargate: Universe opened in medias res with characters that had been working together for years but acted and spoke as though they had just met, and its pacing and character development suffered for it.

There are a few points early in The Vampire Diaries where this chemistry really shines; early in the first episode when Elena follows Jeremy into the men's bathroom to see if he's been doing drugs; when Damon and Stefan imitate each other (which doubled as impressively funny, to boot); Matt's reactions to Vicki's priorities and her messing with Tyler and Jeremy.

They were little touches, but they kept me watching a show that I might have given up on otherwise. They also impressed me with the actors, none of whom I'd seen anywhere before, and most of whom I'll keep an eye out for, because I've seen that they can pin down an elusive and rare quality and bring it to life as few can.

From the Audience

The other day  my computer had a pretty thorough meltdown. It pitched a little fit and shut off and refused to find Windows when I turned it back on. That's happened before, and if I hit Ctrl+Alt+Delete enough times the little bastard usually decides that it's not worth the effort to keep my operating system from me and goes and retrieves Windows from... I don't know, time-out perhaps.

This time, though it didn't work. So I took my laptop to my resident computer guy (that would be Dad. Dude used to contract at Intel, so he gets all the computer-related bitching withing a mile radius), and he did some surgery and concluded that something on the motherboard had melted. Fortunately my hard-drive is just fine, so all of my writing and reviews and stock pictures and slides aren't lost they're just inaccessible. Until someone around here (four other computers in the house, surely someone is willing to let me tear apart their tower to replace their hard-drive with mine for long enough to retrieve a couple of massive folders. Surely) lends me (Dad) their tower for a bit.

So my review schedule is shelved for now. I'm trying to do what I can on the computer in the living room, but unless I revert to nocturnalism (which is looking better and better by the hour), I have to share it. I'm going to try to get White Collar out on time, but no guarantees.

Incidently, White Collar is terrible. More on that on Sunday (I hope), but yeah. Not great.

Seems to be a thing with these shows that could have been. Burn Notice could have been a modern day MacGyver, but is instead James Bond as done by Micheal Bay with worse writing. Heroes, could have been a fresh take on superheroes, but instead was just slow and painful. Stargate could have been an intense, psychology driven survival drama, but instead is shameless cashing in.

Speaking of Stargate, now that I'm a bit calmer, here's the comment I got on... whenever the hell that was. I'm going to outline my response paragraph by paragraph, rather than taking the whole thing on at once. And here we go.

Problems with your review are manifold, and almost all come down to your own unwillingness to watch the intervening series'. Now, you can critique the "big issues" exactly as you did without issue, as the ones you mentioned are all related to the mechanics of the show, for the record we disagree about the characters. However, your "quibbles" section is full of things which are either down to your own inadequacy(really, you can't keep track of nine characters?) or your own lack of knowledge about the franchise, but I'm in a nice mood so I'll help you out.

Points for the condescending tone. Also, the word manifold means "many and varied". You've got half of that down pat, but your complaints with me seem to all be "ignorance", which really isn't very varied. And why the hell are you telling me that you disagree about the characters in the same paragraph as you calling me "inadequate." Insults and legitimate opinions should never go together. And you can take your "nice mood" and shove it where-- oh, look another paragraph.

1. You can't apply Newtonian physics to a damn wormhole. In normal circumstances, a person entering a Stargate will exit with the same direction and velocity. However, while within the wormhole itself, a person is simply energy and an encoded data stream, so in the event other factors influence the gate at either end, or the wormhole itself, they can be literally thrown out of the exit aperture as a safety measure. For the record, this has been observed in each of the ten seasons of SG1, as well as the 5 seasons of Atlantis, and the TV movies.

Now, I'm not a physicist, but why can't you apply Newtonian physics to wormholes? Oh, right, wormholes are unproven. Still, that doesn't mean that you can abandon physics just because half the situation is hypothetical. And further, Meta is Bad, remember? Dude, I don't care if there was an ad in the paper explaining the physics of this show, if there's a logical discrepinsy that isn't covered in the show, it could light itself on fire and tango in my front yard and I still wouldn't care.

2. FTL is explained in the series as one of several standard sci-fi variations based on vague real science hypotheses. Hyperspace is the most common, in the case of the Destiny, it would be appear to be some variation on the Alcubierre drive.

Meta is Bad.

3. Your argument about the ship's longevity is entirely dependent on knowledge of what materials were used in its construction, which we as viewers do not have. Considering the knowledge we have from earlier series'(which you couldn't be arsed to watch), Ancient technology is extremely advanced, one would assume their materials sciences would be as well.

Meta is Bad.

4. Your complaint about the Ancients is, once again, down to your own lack of knowledge rather than a flaw in the program(seriously, you couldn't even waste ten minutes reading the Stargate entry on wikipedia?); Stargate uses the "humanity was seeded by aliens" trope, those aliens being the Ancients who built Destiny. The entire five-season run of the Atlantis series was based on this very premise.


Boy are you proving my point. New audience remember? Not everyone who watches Universe is going to have watched fifteen previous seasons of material! It must be accessible to everyone, elsewise someone is falling down on the job.

5. Stores of food? Seriously? You missed the part of the show which explained the concept of Destiny entirely then, you know, where the Ancients would 'gate into the ship with all the necessary supplies to set themselves up. Including food.

Yeah, that was a dumb complaint... but then it was also part of a list of other spectacularly petty gripes that weren't picked on by Fanboy Prime over here.

6. I'm going in order along with the video, so this is really a repeat, but: Alcubierre drives circumvent special relativity.

Meta is Bad. Also bad, is justification from other shows. The premise is universal, but everything else is, and should stay, compartmentalized.

7. While I agree with you that cutting the "stargate trip" CGI was a bad thing, the irony is this was done by the producers in order to please viewers such as yourself - non-fans who don't have the patience or inclination to understand the lore.

Oh, Gods, a cogent statement! Cutting the trip was a good idea, but they didn't cut it out every time, so it looks sloppy.

8. You're even going to get on top of the episodic cliffhangers? Really? I'm not trying to come off as offensive, but have you watched any sci-fi dramas before? It's pretty much an integral part of the format.

Dude, what kind of a sci-fi fan are you if you make a blanket statement that precludes the greatest sci-fi drama of all time: Babylon 5? And yeah, I was offended.

9. And the time travel. I had a suspicion you would have a crack at that episode after the first minute of your video. Again, watch the preceding series'.

"Everything else is, and should stay, compartmentalized." Just... stop talking. You're done. Just... no. Oh, shit, there's more.

I know I'm coming off as a dick, but SG:U gets a lot of crap, and I really rather enjoy it. Most the points people make I can agree to disagree, but fully half your review is predicated on problems which aren't really problems if you've watched the previous shows, or can muster the energy to type "Stargate" into Wikipedia.

Aaaand we're back to the condescension. Okay, being a fan does not, not, make you entitled. It just doesn't. Further, after watching seventeen hours of show, writing nineteen hundred words, making a hundred seventy six slides, and recording ten minutes of audio (heavily cut down), no I didn't "have the energy" to do some arbitrary research on something only tangentally related to the review! Maybe, SG: U gets a lot of crap because it's not a good show. Just a suggestion.

Would you review Return of the King without having seen Fellowship and Two Towers? If you did, would you base that review in large part on quibbles which would be solved by seeing them?

That's not even a relevant analogy. Apples and oranges there, bud. Or rather, books and television. Different mediums, is my point, and you can't make the standards there linear enough to cross-review.


I know I spoke at length on this last time, but I've since done some stewing, and what is the internet for if not spewing my opinions?


Ooh! Ooh! Also! This... guy on That Guy With the Glasses is featuring part of my Eastwick video in his Forum Feature segment. I'll put up a link here as soon as I have it. Let's just say that if he pans me unfairly I'm'a review his stuff and see what he makes of it.


In other, other news (This one's getting a tad long, so I'll keep it short), I saw Dr. Horrible's Sing-a-Long Blog the other day, and I would love, love, to review it. Sadly, it's technically outside of my purview, being an internet series, not a television series. So I'm'a leave this one up to ya'll. Review Dr. Horrible, yay or nay?

From the Fanboys

Universe is garnering some pretty substantial hate. It got me my first dislike, and an impressively negative comment here. I've got to admit, I'm a tad confused.

Part of the point of not watching the other Stargates first was to give the opinion of a newcomer to the franchise. The other part of the point was that the other shows are dead, and so are no longer relevant. Yes, I've done dead shows before, but never irrelevant shows. Eastwick was good but cancelled prematurely, Numb3rs was said to have done well with one of my personal pet peeves so deserved a look, and Heroes had a great, original concept that went horribly wrong and is fun to hate. The other Stargates can make no such claims, or at least, no one has made me aware of them, and I don't want to have to plow through, what, ten? seasons of something else just to be able to make my review of Universe knowledgeable. Further, as I said earlier, I shouldn't have to.

You can make a decent case for books having must-read-to-understand predecessors, and you can argue that Star Wars Ep. 6 wouldn't be as good if you don't watch Ep.s 4 & 5, but can you say the same of television serieses?

I don't think so. Partly it's, as I've said before, that there's so much more to a television series. Watching a single season takes eighteen hours (if it's a full season. Summer shows have half seasons), so to punish new viewers for not having watched all umpty-whatever seasons of the show that came previously isn't fair, nor is it reasonable, nor is it sound business practice. You don't ever, ever alienate prospective customers! Yet, the producers and writers of these shows seem to assume that it's just fine to do so. It's not.

And the fanboys happily perpetrate that idea: That if you haven't seen everything that came before, your opinion doesn't matter.

Nice, try, bud. But I write for a living. I don't critique professionally, but I do write professionally, and I know what it is that makes my reviews worth it. I put considerable time and effort into making these reviews good and relevant, and I won't sink more just to assuage my ignorance, when it's my blank slate, critical eye, and high expectations that make me good at this. If your argument against me boils down to "Compromise your opinions by reading about the other shows," then you are just as unreasonable as those TV producers who are stingy with their exposition.

-Gets off soapbox-

Feeling a Little Off

It's so strange not to have anything to post tomorrow (today, technically, but I haven't been to bed yet so it's still Saturday, damnit). After two months of posting every week, I feel like I've failed or something, even though this week off was scheduled.

And then not doing anything tomorrow is also a tad bizarre, as not having the kind of job that requires my attendance on certain days means that I also have only the weekends I give myself. I usually work on Sundays.

-Sigh-

And the poll for the video to post tomorrow? By a resounding majority of one (1) vote, Heroes: The All Bad All the Time Edition won. So I'm just calling the whole thing off. I know that it was a silly little idea and everything, but I had hoped for a much better reaction.

So yeah. Stargate: Universe is next week. After that's Burn Notice.

Review Talk

I don't usually talk about the critiques themselves here. In fact, I try to avoid talking about the critiques at all, as I feel it makes me look like I don't have anything better to do than stalk YouTube and hit F5 every thirty seconds just in case there's Another View. 'Cause, you know, I would never do anything like that.

But three days ago I posted The Mentalist and I did my usual rounds of Facebook and The Escapist and then walked away from the computer for awhile. Okay, I went to sleep, but point is, I didn't stalk it. And then it got sixty four views in twelve hours. For scale, even Heroes: The All Bad All the Time Edition, my most watched video to date, took a week to hit sixty five.

I know it's not crazy-viral or anything, but for me, that's a lot of views, really fast. Well, yesterday The Mentalist passed 100 views and as of writing is sitting pretty at 107.

And it's freaking me out.

I mean, yes I know that for my videos to become popular, people actually have to watch them, and yes I've been getting steadily more views as I keep doing this, and yes the fall premiers are coming up so searches are up, but damn, ya'll.

So, yeah. Thanks, Everyone Who Watches My Videos.

Oh! And since I'm taking this week off to start a rolling schedule, I shall link a the video that's selected by The Audience. There's a poll here if you want to vote, or just comment with your choice from the list below and I'll add the results together. I really don't expect to get a whole shit-ton of results, but The Mentalist has surprised me this week, and ya'll might as well.

Criminal Minds
Glee
Castle
Eastwick
Numb3rs
Heroes: The Good Stuff Edition
Heroes: The All Bad All the Time Edition
The Mentalist

Make your choice!

From the Audience

Now that The Mentalist is ready to go I can slow down a touch and talk about something that's been bugging me since it came up. This is a comment that I got on my second Heroes critique:

"your review was pretty good and well tought out. But it was very subjective, which is fine considering your review title." -- wasalp


I could rag on the lack of a fifth-grade level editing skill, or the spelling, punctuation, grammar, word choice, and clause placement mistakes. It would be mean of me, and probably pointless, but I could. Instead though, there's a concept here that deserves some thought: the idea that subjective reviews are a problem.


Quite simply, no review is objective. Part of objectivity is the ability to quantify, or assign a number to, the object being reviewed. And while, yes, you can give any feature of anything a numerical score, you have to do so arbitrarily, so that number has no meaning to anyone but you. Bit of a waste then, huh? And that's assuming that your perception of the object being reviewed isn't filtered through your experiences, opinions, and prejudices. If it isn't, then we've got bigger problems than subjective reviews because you are a robot.


So, since no review can possible be objective, why is subjectivity a problem? It seems to me that since objective reviews don't exist, if we bitch about the subjective ones, what have we left? Nothing.


And if you think about it, every time someone expresses their opinion, that's a review. "Hey, you went to see Scott Pilgrim last week, right? Whatja think?" "Oh, it's awesome you should totally check it out!"


Review!


Not a great one to be sure, but a review nonetheless. And that's really what professional written reviews are about. Not just the opinions, but also the reasons behind them. What's good and why. What sucks on a saguaro and why. So when we read reviews, we're not looking for opinions, we're looking for someone else to justify our opinions.


Ponder that one.

The Last Heroes

Here you go, this week's video. Have at, please comment, all that jazz.

I am more than happy to answer any question you have about things I may not have covered as well as I thought I did, as long as you get them to me. Guessing is fun, but I've failed every mind reading course I've ever taken, so send me an email or something, ja?

Edited to add: And for the last time, speaking quickly and being acerbic does not make me a Yahtzee rip-off. Forty percent dick jokes would do that.

From the Audience

Way back in my Numb3rs review thread that I posted to The Escapist, there was some discussion about Castle. A viewer expressed disbelief that I'd actually liked Castle, to which someone (who I can't assume actually watched my review) responded:


"Castle's main problem is the cops. Nathan Fillion's character is great, the scenes with his mother and daughter are great, and the core concept is sound. Then they bring in the annoying female lead and her comic-relief friends and ruin the whole thing. The writing team on Castle need to take a long, hard look at The Mentalist to learn how to write Comedy Male Lead and Serious Cop Lead."  --sosolidshoe (emphasis added)


I responded to that thread, but I think there's a concept here that deserves some thought. Sosolidshoe has implied that Castle would be better if it were more like The Mentalist. But they're different shows. Now, I haven't actually watched any of The Mentalist yet, so this is pure pre-review speculation, but it seems to me that the more one show is like another, the worse off it is. After all, they have to share an audience, so wouldn't it be prudent to be as different a cop show as possible in order to attract people that the other show doesn't?


That's the entire point of the gimmick. All procedurals have them to avoid being completely generic, some fail, but most do alright in that regard. And I'm sure this will earn me the ire of the Internet, but I actually hate procedurals. If I judge them by the standards of character shows, some can do alright, but procedurals are massively overdone and some just have to reach so far in order to provide a unique gimmick that my suspension of disbelief has fallen right from the start. Like Numb3rs. And White Collar (which I also have not yet seen, but it looks like a pile of shit with a side of fries, so I despair of the day when it comes up on my list).


And the Heroes: TABAtTE is ready to post tomorrow morning, so in response to sosolidshoe, next week's critique will be on The Mentalist. I just hope it's not as agonizing as Heroes.


Edited to add: Oh yeah, it's 9/11. It's not that I don't care... well okay, it is that I don't care. Living in the past never helped anyone, the dead are still dead, and we're still locked in a pointless war with a concept. Can't fight a concept, and it was a major conceit to even try. You can say that makes me un-American. I can say, "Bite me."

Angry Reviews

Getting mad is fun. It's a fact. I'm not entirely sure why it is that people enjoy being angry so much, but we do. And that's part of the fun of being a critic as well. The desire to rail against inferior quality becomes almost a professional right when we can say, "I'm just the critic, you can't be angry at me." There're two problems with that sentiment, though, one of which I will probably never touch on.

The other, though, is what I've been fighting with all day. You see, I sat down to write the script for H:TABAtTE, and I couldn't do it. Oh, I'd pound out a paragraph or two, and then I'd catch myself just ranting about some personal pet peeve of mine. Some of them even made it into the review, albeit heavily edited.

You see, I could write a six page rant on the myriad problems with Heroes, bust out a video and call it a day. I could, but that wouldn't be much of a critique, would it? In order to call myself a critique, I need to be able to point out the good as well as the bad with a show, and usually that's not a problem, but with this one I'd divided it up so that any good I speak on this week will be suspiciously out of place. In order to call myself a critic, I need to make legitimate points with my criticism. And that's really hard.

It's difficult to set aside personal feelings in favor of a review unbiased, and every time I'd catch myself slipping into the tone of voice in which I discuss inferior subjects around the house, I had to stop writing. Like I said, I could write unGodly amounts about how much I hate Heroes, but it wouldn't be a critique. If I want to get nasty emails from fanboys, I'll post on a fansite.

I don't think I succeeded as well as I'd like to've in setting aside my preferences for a show. Next time I need to separate a show into multiple videos, I'll divide it differently. But in the meantime, I've got a script excise the bile from.

PS. Here's a little gem from my housemate: "You have these thoughtful, interesting opinions, and they go on YouTube and get maybe a hundred views. I get a 'Funny Cat Video' and it's got twenty thousand."

I chalk it up to Sturgeon's Law + People Are Pack Animals + Laughing Creates Endorphins = Instant Popularity.

Discuss.

Shameless Self-Promotion

The internal debate entitled "What the Hell am I Going to Put in My First Post" rages on, which isn't terribly surprising, since this blogging idea occurred to me perhaps ten minutes ago for the sole purpose of giving my review series more exposure. Oh, and also for some clarification of points I don't get to explain very well in the video due to time constraints. However, I don't tend to get much feedback, so maybe a format that encourages commenting will help? I dunno, let's see.

-Half an hour of browser flash games later-

So I was cruising the Escapist User Reviews forums today, and I noticed that I seem to be the only person reviewing television shows. I checked the index and there were only a handful of entries for tv shows (that aren't anime) and the most recent of them went up in May. This got me to thinking... why the hell is this such a niche thing? If there's a demand for critiques of other entertainment media, surely there's a demand for tv show critiques, too. Running under the assumption that there is, why don't more people review tv?

I speculated in my first Heroes video that part of the problem is the sheer quantity of stuff to pore through. I still think that's the case, but it does need to be qualified, as video game reviewers generally have fifteen to twenty hours (maybe not "generally" so much as "hopefully") of material to work through and criticize. Television on the other hand... well, if it's an hour long episode, then there's about forty-two minutes of actual show in it. Typical seasons have twenty-four episodes. Which means that a single season is eighteen hours of material that's created over a period of seven or eight months.

That usually (again, "hopefully") means that the show will evolve. Especially in the first season, which is why I always start with the first season of a show, since it's important to be aware of where a show started when you start tearing it apart. It's a great thing when shows evolve; in the first season, shows need to accustom themselves to their tools, so it's necessary that they stay out of strict episode formulas to fully explore the possibilities with their budget, crew, writers and actors. Later seasons, though, should evolve to avoid treading old ground. That's the whole reason that shows with a conflict-of-the-week have over-arcing storylines: without story arcs they get a little stale. And by "a little" I mean "stale enough bounce when thrown down on the counter in frustration because someone finished the peanut butter and put the jar back in the cabinet."

However, that kind of evolution makes a show difficult to summarize into an eight minute video. Premises are easily summarized into a sentence or two, but every statement that I could make about characters or inter-play or subtext (with I generally stay away from because nothing spells doom better than criticizing something so purely subjective as subtext) can be refuted with an example from any number of episodes or scenes that just don't fit the tone of the rest of the show. As happens pretty frequently with shows that have writing teams or cyclic directors. There's never a single person on which to blame a great wrong. Which is probably for the best considering the number of people that would leap to write terrible things in their livejournal.

You know, I think the primary deterrent is the quantity of material to look at when critiquing television. I mean, I watch these shows for ten to twelve hours a day and I can't ever just sit back and enjoy them. Even shows I love must be painstakingly picked apart for flaws that I then must weigh based on egregiousness. I know that it looks like fun, but it actually is work. I was rather surprised, since I'd set myself a schedule of one video a week and now I'm looking at that going "What the fucking hell was I thinking?"

Well, I could ramble in this vein for some time yet but I think I'm'a watch some more Heroes instead. If you watch my videos and have some feedback for me, feel free to comment here, or send me an email at opinionatedtvATyahooDOTcom.

And on Sunday the video for "Heroes, the All Bad, All the Time Edition" goes up on YouTube.