As if there were any doubt that Battlestar Galactica is the best show on television, last week’s episode provides the following mountain of irrefutable evidence:

• Col. Tighe having to kill his wife even after it’s clear she did it all for him
• Galactica doing the atmospheric drop to deploy the Vipers and then jumping at the last second
• Pegasus arriving to find Galactica under heavy fire from no fewer than four Cylon base stars
• Starbuck going back to get her daughter, finally giving in and telling her Cylon captor that she loves him, then killing him in front of the little girl, only to find out that the whole thing was a trick
• The destruction of the Pegasus, along with two of the base stars
• Adama getting carried around on the shoulders of the crew and cheered, while Tighe, miserable, slinks off in the background

For my money, this episode was one of the best the show has done. As I had predicted, they wrapped up the New Caprica sub-plot fairly quickly, but they did it in a way that didn’t seem like a rush or a hack. In addition, they wrote themselves out of the “Starbuck has a daughter” storyline, which is fortunate, since history clearly demonstrates that no TV series can survive the sudden arrival of a little kid as a major character.

It will be interesting to see where they go from here. As a friend of mine pointed out a few days ago, they have effectively rebooted the series. However, I would imagine there will be at least a couple of episodes dealing with the fall-out and recriminations from the time spent on New Caprica. Given that the series is all about the conflict between the characters’ best intensions and the uglier parts of human nature, I’d be surprised if there weren’t going to be a lot of infighting among the crew and colonists over who collaborated with the Cylons.

The Starbuck/Apollo relationship would seem to be ripe for new strife, given that each is now married to someone else. While Apollo and whatshername (Dualla?) seem to have a reasonably decent relationship, Starbuck and the dumb jock guy were clearly having issues prior to her getting disappeared by the Cylons.

On a final note, I have read rumors that NBC (who owns the Sci-Fi Channel) might be picking up BSG as a mid-season replacement. It’s hard to think of anything worse that could happen to the show, aside from outright cancellation. One imagines that NBC would be somewhat more sensitive about storylines and subject matter, especially given that the New Caprica story has been about the boldest critique of the Iraq invasion/occupation as has been offered anywhere on TV. I’d also point out that what amount to excellent ratings on Sci-Fi is grounds for being moved to Saturday night and then dropped from NBC.

Sure, this has been a lot of space to devote to a series about people flying around on spaceships, but I would remind you of my original thesis: BEST SHOW ON TELEVISION.

Despite my better judgement, I’m still watching Jericho. It’s entirely silly, but something about it is holding my attention—perhaps the aforementioned morbid fascination with anything involving a mushroom cloud.

The show is competently produced, and the acting is fairly decent. What bothers me, though, is that the good townsfolk of Jericho just don’t seem to be taking the news of nuclear attack all that seriously.

Sure, there was the sort-of riot at the gas station in the first episode, and they’ve had their fair share of “Whatever will we do now?” moments. There was even the fall-out scare from the second episode. However, none of these mini-crises seemed particularly challenging or out of the ordinary—the mayor easily averted the riot with an inspiring “Let’s all work together” speech, and the fall-out emergency was eclipsed by the mine cave-in and the escaped convicts at the farmhouse.

Moments of high drama, to be sure, but we’re talking about nuclear war here, people. Multiple warheads have apparently struck cities across the country, and yet the town of Jericho has time for the community barbeque, the plot still focuses on the intrigues of the local teenagers, and no one seems to think that driving around 6 mpg SUVs and pickup trucks might not be the best idea when gas is running low.

Two other aspects of the story strike me as problematic. First, where are the other people? Kansas is not exactly densely populated, but if they could see the mushroom cloud from Denver just over the horizon, there have got to be other towns nearby. Second, why is the only black guy in town being played up as the shady, suspicious character?

I’m willing to let these questions slide for the time being in hopes that the writers have some answers in the wings.

At the opposite end of the spectrum, I recently watched Threads (Wikipedia link). Produced by the BBC in 1984, the movie tells the story of two families in Sheffield, England during the run-up to and aftermath of nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union.

It may come as no surprise that Threads provides an entirely depiction of nuclear war than Jericho. Part of the reason is a practical one—in Threads, a bomb strikes an RAF base near Sheffield, and an airburst goes off overhead, so the characters start off in a much worse situation than their counterparts in Kansas. However, even that storytelling decision is illustrative of the difference in tone between the two productions.

Jericho uses the nuclear attack as a device to get the story rolling. It is present in the background, but could just as well be swapped out for any other kind of disaster, natural or otherwise. One gets the impression that everything will be okay if the good townsfolk come together, and if Skeet Ulrich is left to do his heroic best. Threads, on the other hand, is all about the nuclear war, and from the start, there seems to be little doubt that it will end badly for everyone involved. Furthermore, there is little hope that any of the characters can pull it together—panic, squabbling, and selfishness doom any attempts to survive in the bleak aftermath of the attack.

Therein lies the main problem with Jericho: it doesn’t take its subject matter seriously. While understandable, given that more than ten years stand between us and a time when the Soviets had thousands of missiles pointed at us and could fire them at any moment, this frivilousness is disappointing, and rather scary.

Having watched the fourth episode of Aaron Sorkin’s Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, I am rapidly coming to a conclusion about the show.

I just don’t care.

As I’ve said before, the premise isn’t particularly compelling. While there may be plenty of intensity in the world of TV production, it just doesn’t support the level of drama and import for which the show is clearly reaching.

The bigger problem, though, is that many of the characters aren’t interesting. Most of the actors on the show-within-the-show are interchangeable, making the scenes of extended witty banter between them tedious. A few of the main characters have potential, but due to the large cast and the fact that each episode is centered around a single episode of the titular show, there’s no time to really explore any of them.

Then there’s the relationship between Matt (Matthew Perry’s character), and Harriet, the “Christian” gadfly on the show’s cast. The premier made references to them having just broken up, and we are now to believe that they are still desperately in love with one another but can’t figure out a way to make it work, him being a liberal Hollywood writer and her being a small-town Christian.

Ah, the star-crossed lovers.

First, the Harriet character is worse than useless. It’s as though the actual liberal Hollywood writers sat around and decided that to confound expectations, they were going to put <gasp!> a conservative Christian character on the show. However, not knowing any real conservative Christians, they went with the hip, funky, quirky Hollywood version and ended up with a completely unbelievable character. Are we seriously to believe that someone from an SNL-like comedy show would be a regular guest on The 700 Club? Or that someone with a best-selling Christian rock record (as this character apparently has) would have any of her fanbase left after appearing in the much-discussed but never actually seen fictional sketch “Crazy Christians”?

It makes little sense that such a character would be involved with Studio 60, and, given what we’ve seen so far, it makes even less sense that Matthew Perry’s character would be so in love with her. Judging from what we’ve been told, she is apparently such a brilliant talent that his heart goes all a-flutter whenever she is on stage. However, since all we’ve seen of her on stage is a passable Juliette Lewis impersonation and the “Weekend Update” knock-off sketch, that’s a tough claim to buy.

That, in the end, is the root of the Studio 60′s problems—it’s not believable. The characters aren’t engaging, the story is weak, and the technical execution isn’t even all that great. I’ll give this show maybe one or two more episodes, solely out of loyalty to The West Wing and the hope that maybe they’ll put it together, but I’m not particularly confident.

With the end of West Wing, the unfortunate cancellation of Invasion after only one season, and the fact that 24 won’t be starting up again until January, I came into the fall TV season on the lookout for new and possibly interesting series.

Since I don’t have the option of flipping through channels until I find something that strikes my fancy, this process is a bit more complicated. However, armed with the Internets, Bittorrent, and my trusty RSS Feed plugin for Azureus, I’ve managed to stumble across a couple of new shows that are keeping my attention.

First, there is the aforementioned Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. The third episode was an improvement over the first two, but I’m still not sure about this show. The problems with the show are several. First, the music is just really, really bad—too many scenes are overrun by the soundtrack insisting that This Is A Poignant/Dramatic Moment, or This Is The Scene Where Everyone Works Together To Get The Job Done. Second, a number of the characters just aren’t very interesting. Finally, I stand by my original complaint that the speechifying and rhetoric of Sorkin’s dialogue just doesn’t work all that well when the characters uttering it are involved in the production of aTV show.

Next on the list is Kidnapped, which I’ll admit I started watching based solely on the critical hype preceding its premier. Three episodes in, it’s not terrible, but it’s not great, and the jury is still out on whether I’ll keep watching. They’re clearly trying for the 24-style edge-of-your seat momentum, but where 24 throws twists and turns at the viewer so quickly that there’s no time to realize a lot of them don’t make sense, Kidnapped’s slower pace leaves lulls for exactly these sorts of thoughts.

Jericho has been moderately interesting as well, although a bit cheesey at times. Having grown up in the Eighties with the ever-present fear that the U.S. and the Soviet Union would nuke each other, I think I’m somewhat hard-wired to get sucked into any TV show or movie that features mushroom clouds. As such, this show gets a lot of mileage out of the “What if?” questions it inspires. Thus far, such interest has been enough to allow me to overlook the silly “We can get through this if we all work together” speeches of the premier, as well as the somewhat contrived hostage crisis that dominated the second episode.

Last on the list of new shows I’ve been watching is Heroes. So far, this is the one I like the best. While the “ordinary people get strange super powers” story is not particularly original, the way in which this show presents it is interesting, and most of the characters are pretty engaging. Part of what has been occasionally frustrating about watching so many new shows at once is having to deal with so much exposition and character introduction. At the same time, seeing how the different writers handle this rather challenging task has been sort of fun, especially when t’s done well, as it has been so far with Heroes. That’s no small feat, either, as this show has a lot of characters.

I will be surprised if, at the end of the season, I’m still watching all of these shows. I’ll be even more surprised if all of them are still on the air. While I’m tempted to go on more about each one now, it’s probably better if I leave it at this, and address more specific stuff in individual posts once I’ve taken in a few more episodes of each one.

After all, I was ready to give up on Battlestar Galactica after the first three episodes of Season 1, so who knows where all of this will end up.

I got around to watching the premier of Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip a few nights ago. It’s Aaron Sorkin’s new series, and it revolves around the producers and crew of a Saturday Night Live-type show.

The West Wing similarities are evident from the start. Where West Wing had the white-on-black title card for each episode, Studio 60 has the same thing (even down to the same font), but for each chapter of the episode. The new series also has the same rapid back-and-forth dialogue, and the constantly-moving camera work, and the expressionistic lighting.

Bradley Whitford (Josh Lymon on West Wing) leads the cast of Studio 60 with Matthew Perry. While I can’t remember their characters’ names, Josh and Chandler work well together in the first episode, and the rest of the cast turns in good performances as well.

The premier lays the groundwork for the series by having Josh and Chandler take over as producer of the eponymous show when the old producer (played by Judd Hirsch) is fired over an on-air rant. The obvious Network analogies are repeatedly acknowledged by everyone involved, almost to the point of overdoing it. By the end of the show, though, the focus is more on the characters’ personal interactions than the larger issues of media culture that are hinted at initially.

Having watched West Wing repeatedly, it’s hard to say how this show compares. It didn’t suck me in the way West Wing does, but I don’t think that show did at first, either. My main complaint is that where West Wing had interesting characters dealing with large, weighty issues like government policy and international relations, Studio 60 has interesting characters dealing with… a TV show.

It’s hard to imagine how Sorkin and crew will manage to keep the stories interesting and meaningful over time, but I’m willing to give it a chance.

I started watching the first two acts of Spike Lee’s Hurricane Katrina documentary When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts last night.

While I only got to the end of the Act I (due to it being past my bedtime), it is quite good so far. There is nothing particularly ground-breaking in terms of style—interview clips interspersed with contemporary and historical film and video footage, with music playing quietly in the background—but Lee seems to be piecing together a fairly compelling story of a bad natural disaster that turned into a tragedy of epic proportions due to mismanagement and poor planning by a variety of parties.

Some of the people interviewed are big names (the mayor, the governor, Sean Penn, Harry Belafonte, etc.), but the majority are normal people, residents of New Orleans who either chose to stay behind or were forced to stay due to circumstances beyond their control. I was somewhat bothered at first by the amount of time devoted to various citizens espousing theories that levees had been deliberately blown up, flooding the poor parts of town to save the wealthier areas. However, Lee follows up these interviews with others debunking this particular conspiracy theory, so I’m willing to chalk it up to covering all points of view.

Act I ends with the hurricane having passed and the flood waters advancing through the city, driving survivors out of their homes in search of higher ground, with particular attention paid to the early informal rescue efforts and the convergence of people on the already crowded convention center.

It is at this stage in the story when one begins to get a sense of how senseless and unnecessary much of the suffering and loss was, highlighted by the choice clip of President Bush uttering the now-famous “Nobody ever expected the levees to break” quote. The fact is, plenty of people predicted that the levees would break or be otherwise breached (much, I might add, as many people predicted that terrorists might fly planes into buildings…). Throughout Act I, Lee keeps the focus firmly on peoples’ personal experience of Katrina, but the larger political and cultural aspects of the story keep bobbing to the surface.

I’m not sure when I will get to Acts II-IV, as the copy I got has some sound-sync problems and an annoying Emergency Alert System test that keeps popping up. Hopefully, I’ll find another copy soon.

Perhaps I have lost my tolerance for cable news channels over the last few years, but I can’t help but be astounded by the sheer volume of coverage devoted to the story of this guy who has confessed to killing Jon-Benet Ramsey, to say nothing of the nature of said coverage.

This story was completely ridiculous when it first hit the airwaves ten years ago. Yes, it’s a tragedy that someone was murdered, but one can’t help but despair at the fact that thousands of hours are devoted to discussing the death of a rich, blond-haired, white girl, while countless poor, non-white murder victims get little more than a notice on the local police blotter.

Then, just to add insult to injury, there was the creepy child beauty-pageant aspect of the story. Here we have a weirdo subculture wherein parents who teeter on the very edge of sanity dress their children up as glamorous (but tiny) adults and parade them around rented hotels ballrooms, competing with one another to see who can sing the best show tunes and make all of us normal people feel the most uncomfortable.

No way that can go wrong.

Now, just as the whole hoopla had died down (because of, you know—war and terrorism and global warming and recession and stuff), it’s splashed all over the headlines once again. On Thursday of last week, I paid a rare visit to the homepage of CNN, where I found the entire left half of the page devoted to BREAKING NEWS about the killer’s confessions (none of which had apparently changed in the slightest since they had started beating the story to death 24 hours previously). Meanwhile, hidden amongst a list of other news items displayed in tiny print on the other side of the page was the headline “Federal judge declares President’s wiretapping program unconstitutional.”

I have heard the argument that sensational junk news stories like this one are drummed up and promoted by the media to keep the public distracted from the real problems. I don’t buy it. People genuinely seem to want this kind of news. Why worry ourselves with complicated and depressing conundrums such as the war in Iraq or international relations when we can satisfy our need for simple answers with engaging plotlines such as “Beautiful princess killed by creepy monster,” and then see the creepy monster brought to justice for a reassuring conclusion?

At the beginning of the season, I predicted (not here) that the big thing for the season finale would be the arrival of Zod. With Lionel’s not-so-cryptic warning at the end of the second-to-last episode that “Zod is coming,” it looked like my prediction was correct.

Sure enough, last week’s season finale ended with Clark stuck in the Phantom Zone and Zod on the loose, wreaking havoc on Earth.

And gosh, how not exciting it all was.

For the most part, I have enjoyed the series’ focus on the friendship/conflict between Clark and Lex, as it has kept Lex from turning into the stereotypical one-dimensional comic book villain. However, making Lex the physical vessel for the disembodied Zod is taking that focus one step too far. Instead of the big, epic conflict with an otherwordly supervillain, we’re right back to Clark and Lex fighting over the now almosty entirely useless Lana.

My initial reaction to Fox News commentator Tony Snow being named as the new White House Press Secretary was, “And that’s different from being a Fox News commentator how?”

However, the good people at ThinkProgress.org have been hard at work compiling a couple of Greatest Hits lists for the administration’s latest hire, both of which are worth a read:

• Tony Snow On President Bush
• Tony Snow On The Issues

As far as the President goes, Mr. Snow’s general feeling seems to be that he is a moron who isn’t conservative enough (“On the policy side, he has become a classical dime-store Democrat”). Nonetheless, principles rarely having been something to stop a conservative pundit from accepting a wad of cash from this administration, he’s now their public face.

I really have to wonder if this is just one more move on the part of the White House to insult, belittle, and otherwise marginalize the press corps.