I just finished an extraordinary late-70s TV show, The Sandbaggers. It’s British spy TV. While the show name-checks James Bond frequently the soul of it is more of a Le Carré thing. Intelligence as a series of dismal political battles between underpaid civil servants at the home office. Occasional forays into the field where everything is squalid or ambiguous and nothing grand is ever achieved.

The show hangs on Roy Marsden’s performance as Burnside, the Director of Operations at a British intelligence agency. The titular Sandbaggers are field agents, vaguely like the Bond 00 agents, but there’s never any swashbuckling action or romance. Occasional gritty affairs and some grim minor violence, all done on a low budget and with precious few location shots. If you ever enjoyed Blake’s 7 or early Doctor Who the low production values will be familiar. So will the excellent quality of the writing and characters, there’s a lot of complexity and subtlety and more than a few surprises.

Mostly the show has aged well. It’s firmly set in late Cold War, there’s no hint of the extraordinary transition that happens in the 80s as the Soviet Union fell apart. Unfortunately the show is unimaginatively sexist with a lot of “men hitting on women in the workplace” nonsense. There’s one good female character in part of the show and Burnside’s secretaries are both good actresses with some sharp writing. But it feels dated even for its time.

I appreciated watching something at a slower and more thoughtful pace. I think the show is ripe for a reboot. Keep it set in the Cold War with roughly the same stories. But update the show: write better women and modernize the production. Then branch out and tell some new stories in Asia or South America or Africa.

You can watch a licensed copy in the US on britbox.

Together at last!

Here he comes.
Here comes Speed Racer.
He’s a demon on wheels.
He’s a demon.
And he’s going to be chasing after someone.

Remember when TV was intelligent? I just finished watching the 1979 TV version of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, the BBC’s masterful adaptation of John le Carré’s best spy novel. Such brilliant TV. Slow, deliberate. I particularly like how none of the ensemble cast are particularly attractive or pleasant, a bunch of middle aged doughy miserable men. Who are all fantastic actors playing nuanced roles, a real joy to watch. While the 2011 film was good, the TV show is great, and I highly recommend watching it if you can get your hands on it.

Naturally, Alec Guinness starring as Smiley owns the show. Hell of a performance, so much so that the actor somewhat stole character away from the author. But what a richly written character. A central conceit is that Smiley’s wife Ann sleeps around with other men, and all his colleagues know it, and he’s by turns humiliated, resigned, and accepting of his fate as a cuckold. Such misery! It’s delicious.

All of le Carré’s spy novels have misery at the center. They’re documents from the end of the British Empire, from when noble men with good intentions are plagued by bureaucracy, indecision, doubt, ambiguity. It all reminds me of a brilliant analysis on Bond and Bourne a Metafilter commenter made. James Bond was the product of the optimistic 50s and 60s, Jason Bourne is a product of the pessimistic individualistic 80s and 90s. Tinker, Tailor is another thing, the decrepit outcome of a crumbling English foreign service. It is well suited to a long, careful BBC treatment.

Sex House is must-watch Youtube from The Onion. It’s a parody of vapid reality TV like Big Brother or Jersey Shore: film a bunch of wacky people living together in a house and see what craziness ensues! Only this house is not benign, there’s a pall of a Cube horror over the sexy hijinks.

Each episode is about 8 minutes, there have been seven so far. The first couple are hysterical but seem a little dumb. Stick with it, for it goes to a far darker place.

Like most of my nerd friends I watched the exciting landing of the Mars Curiosity rover. What a show! Amazing tension, engineers accomplishing amazing things together, and it all worked! But I didn’t watch it on TV, I couldn’t. NASA TV did have it but Comcast in SF doesn’t carry that channel.

Instead I watched it as Internet video on my Xbox; Microsoft did an awesome job covering the event. Great picture on my big screen TV, Ken and me together on the couch with a glass of wine in hand. There were lots of other Internet viewing options; I had my iPad+AppleTV with UStream as a backup.

I also followed along on Twitter, the outpouring of excitement and joy from my friends was excellent commentary. NASA’s official Curiosity Rover account is good; charming and full of useful info. They did a great job posting instant photos. But even better than the official PR account was flight director Bobak Ferdowsi’s twitter (aka mohawk guy). I was watching him on TV while he was live tweeting the landing he was flight directing. Honest, personal stuff. Really great.

I like this future where events are edited in diverse ways and broadcast via hundreds of different Internet outlets. Between the no-TV Mars landing and the NBCFail Olympics we have two demonstrations that we don’t really need TV networks mediating live events. We’ve got a better way.

Is 2012 the last time the Summer Olympics will primarily be a television event? Will the Internet finally take over?

On my desktop I’m flipping between Archery, Fencing, and Judo streaming live from NBC’s excellent live streaming site. Fourteen live sports; some fully produced, some unenhanced, all with decent camera work and live editing and 1080p streaming. And all enhanced by tweet streams, and articles, and background stories, and blessedly free of the inane chatter of sports personalities and stupid tape delays. If I missed something there’s archive; full events, highlights, analysis, whatever I want online. I can also watch live video with NBC’s iPad app or use the tablet to get extra info while watching the TV. It’s all pretty great, I don’t even mind having NBC as the intermediary.

What’s missing from all this Internet viewing is the sense of a TV event, the whole family gathered around the electronic hearth watching something together. There’s still no great solution for playing Internet video on the big TV. It’s sort of doable as a hack but Internet-on-TV isn’t a mainstream thing, so it’s not a real product. Will it be by 2016? I sure hope so.

But streaming the video is easy; the real problem is producing an event for Internet. The main program needs to be edited, boiling down 100 hours of a day’s events to a 3 hour program. But it also needs to preserve some of the liveness and variety that is the hallmark of web surfing. And then mix that together with Twitter so I can share the experience in real time with folks all over the world. Tall order.

It’ll be interesting to see what emerges out of this year’s Olympics as media producers figure out how to integrate the Internet into event programming. I’m impressed with what NBC is delivering online this year but it feels transitional, like the very beginnings of something new.

Ken and I have been really enjoying watching True Blood, Alan Ball’s new vampire serial on HBO. It’s fantastic: ridiculous, over the top, and excitingly garish. Everything a vampire show should be. The premise is that vampires have come out of the coffin and walk among us. Good vampires mainstream and drink synthetic blood, but there’s bad evil vampires who hang out in Shreveport nightclubs and feed off of human groupie fangbangers. Our hero is human but telepathic and she makes friends with the misunderstood vampire who comes to their little town. She’s a great character, very girly and innocent but also strong and smart.

A big part of the pleasure in the show is the small swamp town Louisiana setting. A town just big enough to have a fascinating ensemble cast but still be seriously backwards kay-zhawn. I particularly like the assortment of accents the voice coaches assembled: young Southern belle, aging Southern belle, New Orleans sophisticate, Atlanta sophisticate, gutter swamp Cajun, proud young black woman, crazy black mama, queeny-but-tough black gay guy, dumb redneck white hick. All living in the same town, and that’s not counting the gentleman Civil War vampire, the creepy Boris Karloffs, and whatever weird-ass verbal tic sheriff J.F. Sebastian has. The characters and setting are great for someone like me who grew up with the mythology of the South.

Alan Ball also wrote a lot of Six Feet Under. But where that show was sympathetic and mature and subtle, True Blood is outrageous caricature and silly vampire genre stuff. With some Civil War nostalgia and commentary on civil rights thrown in the mix. All done incredibly well and very fun to watch. Recommended.

For a decade now people have been babbling about “digital convergence”. The typical vision involves some proprietary set-top box from your company name here and the grandiose plan to be unify radio, TV, and Internet in one market-dominating service. That hasn’t happened, but it turns out digital convergence is already here in our living rooms and no one has quite noticed yet. The driving factor isn’t the consumer electronics manufacturers or the cable companies. It’s Internet services like Amazon Unbox, Netflix, iTunes, and Youtube. Youtube is now a full-fledged content provider on both Tivo and AppleTV. I can watch Youtube on my TV just like I watch Comcast. There’s plenty of random things to browse and search as well as actual edited programming with YouTube’s Featured Videos. YouTube on Tivo is great for bored channel surfing, particularly since you can quickly bounce around related videos. The video quality is atrocious, of course, but it starts playing fast and it feels like watching TV, not browsing the web.

YouTube isn’t the only Internet service I can watch on my TV. Amazon’s Unbox is also on Tivo with online rentals available for download right next to recording off the cable. Netflix is about to stream to the Xbox 360 if you haven’t gotten around to spending $100 on a Roku player yet. Of course iTunes delivers TV and movies to AppleTV.

Internet companies are now making the end-run around cable and satellite distribution that’s been predicted for years. If you have fast Internet in your home you can get something to watch Internet video for very cheap. The big sticking point is quality; streaming HD is still generally unavailable. The same A/V setups that can stream low-res content from the Internet are mostly being bought by people to play HD content, and watching a crappy 80 kbytes/sec YouTube video blown up to 1920p is a bad experience. Internet HD is doable; decent quality 720p AVI files are about 200kbytes/sec, within reach of home broadband. But it’s a significant expense to provide that bandwidth to hundreds of thousands of customers. Also, I imagine content owners are loathe to license HD copies of their video for streaming. So traditional cable and satellite video distribution isn’t doomed quite yet.

It’s been 24 hours since the Olympics opening ceremony. NBC started the broadcast early and I missed the fancy drums. So I went online to watch the part I missed. You know, go to Youtube and watch a crappy FLV version of the opening ceremony, broken up into easily sharable, easily linkable three minute segments.

Nope! Near as I can tell, there’s no legitimate way to share a video experience of the Olympics online. Google’s got Youtube locked down quite tightly, even if you fiddle your cookies. The NBC and Olympics sites seem to not have the video, although the sites are so awful I could have just not found it. I even checked Hulu, which apparently thinks Jimmy Carter’s boycott in 1980 is the most relevant result for a search on “Olympics”.

Of course there are torrents available; 5 gigs for a 720p copy, probably blissfully free of the American announcer stupidly bleating colour commentary. But that’s a lot of effort to watch three minutes of video. And it’s not really sharable with your friends.

So great job, Olympics copyright holders! You’ve made your production irrelevant to the Internet.

I wanted to enjoy the new TV season of nerdy shows, I really did. But there’s not a lot to love here.

The first season of Heroes was great fun, I even managed to get Ken to watch it despite his aversion to nerd TV. The fresh naive characters and the pleasure of self discovery were great. Sure, there was some scary bad stuff, but mostly it was joy to watch people learn their powers. Particularly Hiro. By contrast the second season is one giant bummer reel, lots of depression and scary crap and no joy. Hiro, the most fun character, is exiled to some stupid feudal Japan adventure that seems entirely irrelevant. The new character Monica is the only breath of pleasure in the new season, but then she’s mostly about troubles, too.

But if Heroes is midly dissatisfying, the new Bionic Woman is horrible. There was some hope that Eick could use his Battlestar Galactica magic to retread another cheesy old scifi show. But terrible casting and stupid plots (Islamic terrorists in Paraguay? Really?) make for awful TV. The one clever thing in the game is an undercurrent of feminism and body ownership; if they can ever elevate that theme beyond an occasional throwaway line it might be sorta interesting. But first they need to fire their lead actor.

At least I still have Mad Men. The third season of Prison Break is sort of working, too.

AMC’s new TV series Mad Men is completely fantastic. It’s a period ensemble drama about a Madison Avenue advertising agency in 1960. It first sounded a bit dumb, but it’s beautiful and brilliantly written and terrific television.

The period setting is amazingly well executed. 1960 is just far enough back to be somewhat mythical while still familiar. And because that era has generally been neglected it’s fertile ground for a new drama. Incredible costumes, hair styles and furnishings make the show beautiful. And the writers’ delicious indulgence in forbidden things like sex and drinking at the office, smoking, and awkward racist jokes is both uncomfortable and slightly wistful.

And the writing is intelligent, not the stupid pandering that passes for most TV. For example, the centerpiece of the third episode is a suburban kid’s birthday party. The desparation and discomfort of the parents is just devastating, but it’s not thrown in your face so much as exposed through a series of vignettes. Great storytelling.

I’m not much of a sports fan. But I’ve watched a couple of World Cup games in the past few days and find it makes for compelling television. Why? Because they play uninterrupted. 45 minutes of game, 15 minutes halftime, 45 minutes of game. No delays for substitutions, no TV timeouts, even an injury only delays play for about 60 seconds. So you get a constant flow of sport rather than 3 minutes of play punctuated by 3 minutes of filler and commercials. Much more enjoyable than American football or basketball.

The White House press corp dinner this year had Stephen Colbert speak. It’s always an irreverent and casual event, but this year Colbert delivers some real zingers. It’s the first time I’ve ever seen someone be directly critical of the Bush Administration in their faces. And he’s funny, so he gets away with it. But despite digs at Bush, Cheney, at al the best remarks are for the press corps itself:

What are you thinking, reporting on N.S.A. wiretapping or secret prisons in Eastern Europe? Those things are secret for a very important reason, they’re superdepressing. And if that’s your goal, well, misery accomplished. ...

Let’s review the rules. Here’s how it works. The president makes decisions, he’s the decider. The press secretary announces those decisions, and you people of the press type those decisions down. Make, announce, type. Put them through a spell check and go home. Get to know your family again. Make love to your wife. Write that novel you got kicking around in your head. You know, the one about the intrepid Washington reporter with the courage to stand up to the administration. You know, fiction.

Video here, 26 megs and 15 minutes. You can stop at 07:30 though, it goes to a stupid canned clip that never gets better.

Showtime’s got great shows this year; first Weeds and now Sleeper Cell. On the surface it’s a spinning-plates anti-terrorist drama in the vein of 24. Which makes for fun TV. But Sleeper Cell has more depth than that, particularly in the subtlety of the characterizations.

The script borrows from recent history to build a motley crew of terrorists intent on carrying jihad to America. Blake Shields is great as the unfortunate John Walker Lindh type. Alex Nesic is fun as the French Islamic radical who enjoys hookers and strippers. Both good guys and bad are drawn with complexities and imperfections that make the story compelling.

But the real standout is Michael Ealy. Mild spoiler, highlight to read: He does a great job as the conflicted undercover agent. By making our hero himself be a Muslim the show gives a much more nuanced story than the usual “kill the Muslim terrorists” shtick. He’s also a fantastic actor, and quite handsome, so it all makes for good entertainment.

The show just finished its 10 hour miniseries run, but Showtime promises a rebroadcast January 10. And it looks like a DVD release is planned, too.

There’s a great feeling of accomplishment at the end of May, at the end of the mainstream TV season. All these shows finished! If by “accomplishment” you mean “done sitting on my butt passively starting at mindless entertainment”. But I’m done with The Amazing Race, and Survivor, and Desperate Housewives, and Lost, and 24. That was five hours a week, heavy responsibility.

The Battlestar Galactica remake finished on the SciFi channel, and I have to say it was great. I loved the original show as a little kid, but it’s unwatchably cheesy now. The new show somehow is also cheesy, yet somehow uses that cheesiness without being obnoxiously hipster ironic. Instead it’s gritty, sexy, clever, and fun.

My favourite part of the show is the grimy sexiness of it all, overlayed with the anachronism. Everytime Starbuck lights up a cigar on the hangar deck next to the fuel depots I smile. It’s absurd and yet so TV-realistic. But then that’s all tempered with the religious stuff, which seems both hokey and moving at the same time.

The best improvement over the original show is Gaius Baltar, who manages to be evil, batshit crazy, and sympathetic all at once. He’s a center of the sexy, too.

I love The Amazing Race. Like Survivor, it’s a well edited show. And even more than Survivor, it enables us to indulge our base desire to watch people in all their awfulness.

This season has been blessed with a truly hideous couple, Jonathan and Victoria. They’re billed as “entrepreneurs”, always a bad sign. Jonathan is actively abusive, belittling and physically hurting his wife. And Victoria is whiny and useless, although she gives the abuse right back. It’s hideous and hysterical and entertaining all at once.

Of course these portrayals are fiction. The situation is artificial and the reality is heavily filtered through the editing process. Only it turns out that in real life, they’re just as awful! Yes, Jonathan and Victoria have a web site. And while they were nasty and mean on the show, in real life they’re SoCal nightmares.

Jonathan runs a day spa that “creates the physical manifestation of an epiphany”. But really he’s a film maker. Victoria is a Playboy model (NSFW). But really she’s an artist, making paintings of Beanie Babies. From the bios we learn that Jonathan’s favourite colours are “wheat and hunter green” and the question he’s asked most is “are you really 42 or 24?”. Victoria’s ideal date is “sushi, sex, and starbucks” and thinks “the secret to success is always choosing the same thing”. Remember, they chose to write these things about themselves. No editors.

This is the joy of reality TV: you can’t make this stuff up. On the TV show they’re awful and abusive, caricatures of aggressive entrepreneurship. And on their web site they’re awful and self indulgent, caricatures of SoCal sybarisis. I give them credit, they’ve constructed an amazing image.

I’d thought Queer Eye for the Straight Guy had passed entirely into irrelevance, but the third season premier for Ray S. (ep. 153) was excellent and heartbreaking. The episode is about a 37 year old soldier about to be shipped out to Iraq. The Fab 5 swoop in to lift him and his woman out of their bleak apartment lives, help them quickly get married, and set up Ray’s wife for the year and a half he’s about to be gone.

Queer Eye is usually a silly show, with howlingly bad fashions (from both sides), Rip Taylor dialogue, trivial consumer indulgences, and some sappy sentimentality that doesn’t work. But here we have a guy who’s about to go to Iraq, some truly generous and thoughtful gifts, and an emotional honesty that’s rare on TV. Maybe the show has some life in it yet.

It seems appropriate that the show was not overtly political. There’s one small “gays in the military” joke, but no comments about what’s going on in Iraq, just lots of sympathy for the situation the soldier is in. But you can’t watch the human scale of this, this poor guy being taken away to fight a disastrous war started under false pretenses, and not get angry. At least, I couldn’t. But the Queer Eye team was smart and stayed away from that. Let their viewers draw their own conclusions.

You must watch the Brini Maxwell show on the Style network. It’s an absolutely fabulous home style and cooking show, in the genre of poor Martha Stewart’s show only much, much more fun. Miss Maxwell started on New York Public Access in 1998 but vaulted to cable recently. Her advice show is witty but practical, harkening back to the comforting homemaking style of the 1960s.

See a video sample or enjoy her tips on making art with pills. For yet more, see her LiveJournal fan community.

Robert Smigel is one of the most brilliant people writing comedy for TV, and he’s about to get a DVD release. The Best of Triumph the Insult Comic Dog is due out August 10. You probably know Smigel’s stuff: The Ambiguously Gay Duo, or The video of Triumph at the Star Wars opening, or the show that was too brilliant to live: TV Funhouse. All hysterically funny.

PS: I love that the #2 result on an Amazon search for [triumph insult] is The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Just after the pooping dog puppet.

The end of 24 this season was sucky.

Guyelle’s wife is now officially the worst 24 character ever. She’s on screen for, what, 45 seconds? She’s in the office for a total of 15 minutes. Her husband dies a few hours earlier, we’re in the midst of a bioterrorism crisis at CTU, but she has to clean out his office right now. It only takes 10 minutes to pack his stuff, but that’s just enough time for her to create another Plot Twist. Deus ex vidua.

They don’t wrap up the interesting side stories. Will anything redeem Chloe O’Brian, the person so awful she doesn’t even have her own fan web page? And what about Jack’s junk habit? It sure would have been a better ending to have Jack go back to his SUV to be alone with a nice syringe full of smack.

The best thing about the show was Chase and the axe. Kim abandoned her last amputee boyfriend. Poor Chase.

Fox’s new ‘reality’ show, The Simple Life, is unwatchably offensive. I had some hope: fish out of water is a good formula, I find Paris Hilton strangely compelling, and it’s always fun to laugh at rich airheads. But the show is just mean. It’s not making fun of the rich girls who volunteered to be in the show; the butt of the joke is hard working people in rural Arkansas.

Watch Paris and Nicole show up an hour late to milk the cows and spill the milk everywhere. That’s OK, they’ll just ‘work’ at the fast food place tomorrow! Watch the well-meaning Sonic manager try to train the rich girls for a wage slave job. Watch the rich girls ridicule the job behind the manager’s back. That’s OK, they’ll just ‘work’ somewhere else tomorrow, and after the show is over they’ll go back to being rich.

After ‘the girls’ are back in their vapid lives the farmer is still going to be working his ass off trying to make a living with dairy cows and the fast food manager is still going to be working as hard as she can at $7 an hour to make ends meet. And that’s going to be the rest of their lives. Rather than sympathizing with the hard and honourable realities of being lower middle class in rural America, the show turns it all into a cheap disrespectful joke.