Archive for last week tonight with john oliver

August and September 2020

Posted in American TV (General), American TV Shows, Behind-The-Scenes, BiogTV, British Shows on American TV, Internet TV, Local TV, Reality TV, Reviews, TV Acting, TV advertising, TV channels, TV Criticism, TV Culture, TV History, TV News with tags , , , , , , , , , on November 13, 2020 by Tom Steward

New Blog 13.1

Star Trek: Enterprise really tests my rule about not skipping introductions.

Thanks for the offer, Bravo, but I’m probably not going to learn about Race in America from someone who thinks the Underground Railroad was a railroad.

I may not have learnt the truth about Brandi Glanville and Denise Richards from this season of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills but I now know that the Housewife safety words are “Bravo, Bravo, Bravo!”

Breaking News: TV show about humans in the grip of a deadly virus delayed due to humans in grip of a deadly virus.

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine’s prophecy record extends from The Good Friday Agreement to America’s reaction to COVID.

I had no idea that the “so much more” promised by HBO Max would be the Alan Partridge canon. And I’m not complaining.

In other news, Fox just sold their 20th Television.

If Black Mirror were cut-for-time and edited-for-TV, it would resemble The Twilight Zone reboot.

While we wax lyrical about how much television has improved, Captain Kirk is using self-knowledge of his latent racism to free himself from his captors in an episode of TV from 1966.

Some of the promises Nick Jnr. make about the educational value of their programming are just plain lies.

Black-ish had to go online to criticize Trump. Talk about giving your opponent home advantage.

To treat Gone With The Wind and Blazing Saddles as equally dangerous is a kind of racism in and of itself.

I don’t remember so many characters from the entertainment industry in previous iterations of The Twilight Zone.

New Blog 13.2

Video killed the lady Star Trek.

It’s only a matter of time before Trump calls on John Ratzenberger to defend his dismantling of the postal service.

How far away from the microphones do the Kratt Brothers have to stand when they record Wild Kratts?

How long will the proposed Netflix Shuffle Button last once we’ve all been cycled to late-period Steven Seagal movies?

Of all the John Oliver rants that could go viral, who knew it’d be the ones about the Gilmore Girls reboot and Danbury?

If Strange New Worlds doesn’t include a showdown between William Shatner and George Takei, I’m cancelling my latest free month of CBS All Access.

Boy Scout Child Abuse is not and will never be infomercial material.

Not content with foisting Australian cartoon dogs on us on weekday lunchtimes, Nick Jnr. now wants our children eating to the sound of animated British dirt bikes.

Airing between the years of 1999 and 2006, The West Wing was always key to encouraging responsible voting.

The design of the HBO Max app is based on the aesthetic principle of counter-intuition.

The Next Generation was Gene Roddenberry’s vision of heaven. We are living in his hell.

I’m looking forward to ABC’s uncut, commercial-free airing of Do The Right Thing when another African-American dies in their prime.

I know self-loathing is his thing but I’m saddened to hear John Oliver compare himself unfavorably to Rowan Atkinson as Zazu in The Lion King. I mean, I assume he’s right. I’m not watching that shit to find out. And it’s free on Disney Plus.

In Carol Baskin, Dancing With The Stars continues its policy of casting the refugees of doomed marriages.

New Blog 13.3

Erika Jayne’s Real Housewives of Beverly Hills Reunion Zoom video looks like a pigeon caught on CCTV.

Trump got confused while watching Short Treks because somebody told him he had a “series of minisodes.”

In the wake of African Americans being routinely murdered by the police, The Help is trending on Netflix and Amazon Prime’s “Black Stories” section is headed up by Space Jam.

The subtitled disclaimer on Luis Miguel: The Series disappears too quickly for me to be entirely sure, but I think we’re supposed to watch the show as if it were a dream.

I expect Lisa Rinna’s “Gaslighting” number to top the Christmas charts launch a nationwide Cabaret.

Mucho Mucho Amor: The Legend of Walter Mercado prompted G to wonder “Why isn’t he living in more splendor? He has the same air conditioner we do.”

Lower Decks proves that there is no Star Trek episode that cannot be spun off into a full series.

The Twilight Zone writers should talk to each other before they commit fingers to keys.

Has there ever been a hit show that survived the loss of its star for more than two subsequent seasons?

The Walking Dead is Dead.

September 8 is Star Trek Day. Except for viewers in Canada.

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Acts of Television

Posted in American TV (General), American TV Shows, Behind-The-Scenes, TV channels, TV News with tags , , , , , , , , on November 24, 2015 by Tom Steward

In the week following terrorist attacks on Paris, Beirut and Lebanon, the response of American television to these events is of little importance. But this is a blog about American television and so that’s what I’m going to talk about. To make this blog about the attacks – as if that had been its dormant purpose all along – would do a severe injustice to what is a complex geo-political situation. Sometimes I wish American television knew its limitations as well as I do. News and current affairs programs obviously must deal with what has happened – unfortunately for those of us who don’t think that refugees are responsible for the crimes of their persecutors – but TV entertainment doesn’t necessarily have to engage unless the latter’s remit crosses over into the former’s. Nonetheless, all entertainment programming, at least that which has been made since the attacks, seems to have an unwritten obligation to comment on the human tragedy. This sounds like an altogether good thing, suggesting that the genre isn’t as trivial as we suspected, but what it actually discovers is that entertainment formats are simply not equipped to handle this level of political discourse. Many of the results have been frankly insulting.

paris

Jean Oliver!

Take, for instance, Chris Hardwick’s gabbled epilogue of pseudo-Churchillian platitudes no doubt compiled from a graphic novel about Dunkirk in the closing moments of AMC’s Talking Dead, a post-show discussion of The Walking Dead. This resembled one of those rushed disclaimers at the end of pharmaceutical commercials. For events of this magnitude, you either have time to talk about them or you don’t. I’m all in favour – as my younger self would not have been – of cancelling scheduled shows in favour of extended news coverage, though this is one of the few times that a 24-hour news cycle is justified in my view. TNT made the decision to postpone the broadcast of an episode of Sean Bean vehicle Legends set in Paris, which though it may appear overly-sensitive also takes into account the fact that a terrorist act is represented. CBS’ Supergirl and NCIS: Los Angeles also shelved episodes that involved bombings and terrorists. Networks tend to err on the side of caution in these instances, reducing TV to a set of trending keywords and then disseminating entire programs that use them incidentally. It’s one of the few occasions that networks admit outright that their programming is not socially responsible.

Some responses were more judicious. As you might expect from our ironic culture of news, parodies of broadcast journalism did far better than the real thing in their treatment of the attacks. Last Week Tonight with John Oliver kept the talk of war cultural, badgering ISIS into taking on the global leaders of art, food and music with their apocalyptic asceticism. While this is one of the few shows on TV that had the time and scope to offer a full account of the attacks and their significance, the suddenness of the events and their proximity to airtime meant that the program was safer – and more effective – to be as schoolboy as possible in its response, exploiting the other boutique quality of HBO: Obscenity. While broader as befits its appeal, The Late Show with Stephen Colbert adopted a similar tact, leaving it to New Orleans-based house jazz band Jean Baptiste and Stay Human to pay tribute to the French origins of their musical culture. Colbert has always played both sides of the American political sphere and, whether scheduled or not, the pairing of Bill Maher and Medal of Honor recipient Flobert Groberg kept the extremists on both sides at bay.

Vive la Rat!

Vive la Rat!

But what made Colbert’s response particularly powerful was its self-reflexive commentary on how to respond to events such as these. There was an affectionate poke at the tweeters who had the combination of compassion and ignorance that makes watching Ratatouille an act of solidarity with the French and a behind-the-scenes glimpse at the dilemma over whether to keep the booking of feline circus act The Acro-Cats on the first show since the attacks. Since taking over from Letterman at CBS, Colbert has made himself a defender of both American high culture and light entertainment, and so the ISIS attacks were a real (surely unwanted) test of his mettle in his dual function as cultural commentator and ringmaster, which he passed with high-flying colours. Colbert is unusually thoughtful for a talk show host, Oliver a journalistic powerhouse. It’s the ones who think they’re being thoughtful through acknowledgment that are the problem.

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