Letters to the Editor
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I miss the first Bionic Woman...
Lindsey Wagner singing "Feelings" (Jaime must go undercover at a beauty pageant emceed by bad guy Bert Parks). Oscar Goldman. Fembots. Sigh...
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Nothing Beats Orson Welles
His "Nostradamus: The Man Who Saw Tomorrow" was the perfect blend of schlock and dramatic intoning of doom. I saw it in sixth grade and was highly entertained and just a little bit worried. Fortunately, Teddy Kennedy didn't get the nomination for President in 1984, which blew one of the main predictions out of the water. I kept wondering about the "Man in the Blue Turban" though.
If you're wondering why I was watching such things in class, I had an "art" teacher that was a little off. She believed in Nostradamus, that UPC codes were the Mark of the Beast, and if the Equal Rights Amendment were passed we'd all have to have unisex showers and bathrooms. By the end of the year I'd learned a lot, but not about art.
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"I bet?" All right, Havrilesky, I'll do your research...again.
The dialog on the original Bionic Woman was just as cheesy. However, it was cheesy for a different reason. There was not a history of strong, athletic, heroic action-adventure females on televison. Jamie Summers was credited with being the pioneer there, although that may only be for American television; the female parters of the British show The Avengers, especially Diana Rigg's Mrs. Emma Peel, probably deserve the honor for English-language heroines.
In the case of Lindsay Wagner's character, the producers wanted to make sure she didn't seem as "dikey" as Mrs. Peel (who herself was considerably softened when her dominatrix-looking leather suit became overly popular). That's why she was a little-kid substitute teacher and always dressed very feminine; grey denim outfits would have been more practical for a real secret agent, but she ended up dressed in girly-girl clothes and doing feminine things like taking part in beauty pageants.
So her dialog was mostly aw-shucks just-a-country-girl stuff, despite her past as a tennis pro, which would normally make her more cosmopolitan. And that was approximately as corny as the stuff in the current show, which attempts the kind of clipped and tight dialog of an action movie, but somehow gets the originality clipped along with the length of sentences.
Next time, you might consider cracking a book or something.
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Dead-on, Heather, if you'll pardon the pun.
As disappointing as "Bionic Woman" has been, what an unexpected delight it was to flip channels the other night and find myself watching "Pushing Daisies," which is truly a romp.
...but I too will be delighted if they never, ever sing another They Might Be Giants song.
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Bionic Woman
Bionic Woman certainly sucks, she is certainly a crappy secret agent. Her agency sucks, hey kill him if you have too. Gee thanks, I'm forced to work for you, now I may have to kill people from time to time, super. Now there is a CIA love interest, whom she shows her super bionic powers to even though they are like totally top secret. Oh puke.
Pushing Daisies is indeed awesome, I love the colors, the set design, the costumes, the bee hive on the roof was amazing. I'm grateful it's been picked up for a full season as I thought it would tank being too weird for most people, at least the ones I talk to. I found the story of Ned and his dog very touching! Though I find They MIght Be Giants amusing, the musical interludes are pretty much the only part of the show I wish would go away.
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Addressed to a man, or a boy
Okay Tomreedtoon,
here's the thing, every time Heather Havrilesky writes another article you are almost always one of the first ten responses and are always pissed off. It's become your equivalent of shouting "first"to the world!What the fuck is your deal? It's television, it's a comic interpretation of often badly written crap that people watch to generally zone out. That's it!! Television while sometimes inspiring will always remain a fun medium to express the human condition (no matter what that may be). It may explore complex problems or it may feature Jim Belushi, doesn't matter!! It's television. This is a great writer whose services you are not required to pay for, who merely writes quirky little observations, who entertains. It's like writing angry letters to NBC cause you didn't think Jay Leno's featured comedian was incredibly entertaining. STOP this, get a life. Go ahead insult me. You're an idiot. You continually insult the outlet for regular people to express themselves upon the internet, you abuse it with your supposedly pithy comments. You supposedly write literate commentary on a supposedly incompetent writer. This is how you spend your life? Honestly I couldn't give a shit about the original "Bionic Woman" series as I hadn't been born when it aired and even if I had I wouldn't care. Television is television, how many times must I repeat this? Now go, I'm sure you have to egg Big Bird because he doesn't show his hatred of George Bush enough to da youngsters. You've become the equivalent of an angry old man, stuck inside the house, writing angry letters to the editors of his local newspaper because a word was misspelled on page 8. Calm down, nothing is worth this aggravation unless it causes physical harm to actual humans. But you complain about a report about tv? Call Inside Edition, tell them they're doing a bad job, leave Heather alone. Are you just trying to prove you exist by opening a yap and spewing a meaningless diatribe?
Heather, don't know if you read these letters, but great article. Thank you.
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Appointment TV, sorta
The phrase has lost relevance in the DVR age, when you watch everything 20 minutes late so you can kill the commercials, except maybe for stuff like Showtime's "Dexter."
But Pushing Daisies has made it onto our "record" list, which is pretty small. I'll probably forget names and am too lazy to look 'em up... but this is Bryan Fuller, who did the unforgivably cancelled Dead Like Me, also Wonderfalls, which had its moments. One of Wonderfalls' most memorable characters was the suspicious brother... played by Lee Pace, Ned in Daisies. It's great to see him back on the flat screen again. And Jim Dale is the charming narrator. I just ordered the Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone audiobook simply because he reads it, and I think it'd be nice to drop off to sleep with him reading a simple story in my ears.
Let's hope it keeps its pace and finds its audience. I suspect the dialog goes by way too fast for Joe Remote. Oh, and a weird juxtaposition results from watching Daisies at the same time you've finally bought and are re-watching Carnivale... the whole touching thing comes into play with both, and BF and I find ourselves joking about one show while watching the other. If this gets cancelled, I'm giving up on series TV and will just start buying DVD sets when the first several seasons are out.
I could do without the musical numbers, too, but if we gotta have 'em, TMBG is FINE with me.