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-

Stargate: Universe

Once again there are some things from my notes that didn't make it into the video. I'm not going to run through all of them, but I said something that may require more explanation than I gave it.

Stargate: Universe should not be a scifi show. It just shouldn't. There are certain expectations that come with a scifi: Aliens, space battles, new frontiers and discovery. SG: U manages two of those without effort, but the aliens and space battles have to be sort of forced in. Further (and it feels truly strange to write this) it seems like SG: U is going for a more realistic approach to aliens. They encounter more small, non-sentient things than they do sentients, and one of those aliens is a microbe. Seems fine... until I remember that it's still nothing close to proportional. They shouldn't have encountered five non-sentients to one sentient. To even pass as believable (again, a bizarre thing to say about a science fiction program), I'd expect a ratio or more like ten to one. Or fifteen. True realism would require something like five thousand to one, but reality is unrealistic.

They try to justify it with some nonsense about how the sentient aliens they meet have been tracking the ancient alien ship that our heroes are on, but it's just that. Nonsense.

Now if you look at it as a survival drama, where these people have to make do with what they have and what they can scavenge, constantly threatened by the decrepit craft more than by natural predators, it's suddenly a much better show. Now imagine if the writers had gone that route and written less about the Earth military, and more about the opposing factions on the ship; if they'd really gotten into the psychology and the stress of survival. Definitely wouldn't be an action heavy show, but it would have the capacity to be a much greater experience.

Will never happen, of course. Television shows are empty entertainment with no capacity to teach us or move us.

But it could have been. And that fact is more frustrating than SG: U's blandness.

Stargate: Uninteresting

I've been making slides for the Stargate review all day and I can honestly say that I will be thrilled to see the end of this. I wrote the script for this one and then didn't even look at it for almost a week. I'd focused my ire on Burn Notice, so by the time I got back to Stargate, I'd forgotten exactly how much I hate it.

Well, I've been reminded. I've been reminded all damn day.

There's a problem inherent to the slideshow-style video that I make: I have to illustrate everything. That doesn't sound like that big a deal, but then you try and illustrate a sentence like, "What this means for Stargate: Universe is that it's contractually obligated to look like the next installment of a science fiction epic," and it quickly becomes apparent that this isn't as easy as I'd like it to be.

Now, granted, for some videos I haven't even tried. Heroes and The All Bad All the Time Edition most notably, though I blame those on illness and massive amounts of medication, because I can. Point is, though, it's not easy. And to make matters worse, I have a lot to say about SG: U so the script is longer, and I'm anxious to continue the trend I started with The Mentalist and have better videos. I decided to make videos instead of written reviews so that they would be more interesting to the viewer, and having a seven minute video with only thirty images is a pretty fair cop out.

I'm sure that when I started writing this I had a destination or a point in mind. I don't anymore. Sorry 'bout that.

Also, Burn Notice is coming along nicely. Still tongue-shreddingly bad, but fun to watch... with other people. Because misery loves company.

Change of Plans

Okay, I was going to cut down the Glee review to a submittable length. And I even made all the slides for the new script (118, by the way. That's about six hours of work, right there). And now I've decided not to do Glee.

Part of it is my concern that a Glee review won't be considered relevant enough. Part of it is that I don't want to be disqualified just because I started with material that wasn't original to the contest. Mostly though, it's that Burn Notice is shaping up to be awesome.

Not the show. The show is... well, you'll have to watch the video. I'll link to the site after I submit, but I can't post it as a review until after the contest, so there may be a blank week in my schedule. I'll try to do another in time, but no guarantees.

Also, I have a Twitter now (which seems like a terrible idea now that I've already done it, but I'll forgive myself later when I'm not feeling quite so betrayed... by myself. Good Gods I'm screwed up), so if you care about the random humor that comes from watching bad TV at two in the morning, I'm OpinionCritic, but only because "Opinionated" was taken and "OpinionatedCritic" has too many letters. I got as far as "OpinionatedCrit" but that just sounds like I'm judgmental about my Nat 20s.

Torn

So The Escapist as a video competition. The prize: a contract.

That's kind of a big deal, and I was all psyched and everything, but then I was flipping through the rules and saw the maximum video length. Five minutes.

Ouch.

My videos run seven to eight minutes, and I go at a decent clip. So I talked around and settled on Glee for some serious pruning. I figure that it's old enough that there will be things that my more developed critical eye can see. And I cut it down by three hundred words. And then I ran a test-read, and even going at ludicrous speed, it was still too long. So I cut out another two hundred words.

I'm still going to have to go pretty quick, but if I cut it down any further I'm going to lose content instead of just gags. This scares me. I don't want to sacrifice the integrity of my product just to fit it into an arbitrary timeline, but at the same time I really want that contract.


I'm gratified to see that the judging for the contract will be done by the moderators instead of by popular opinion, because I believe that my videos have merit, but I really don't think that they're terribly entertaining.

So I guess we'll see, huh?

Oh, and I know that the entries have to be unique to the contest. I have to remake my Glee video from scratch, though, so it is completely new. It's sort of a... version 2.0.

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!