Five Star Trek captains all at once

Five Star Trek captains all at once

At Destination Star Trek in London in October all five captains from the Star Trek series, Kirk, Picard, Janeway, Cisco, and Archer will all be appearing together for the first time.  Tickets go on sale April 30^th and I imagine they will sell out quickly so if you’re a hard-core Trekkie I’m thinking this is not something that you want to miss.  Here’s a link to the official event:

http://www.startreklondon.com/

 

 

 

http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/04/16/uk-startrek-convention-idUSLNE83F01320120416

 

I want to fight William Shatner

I want to fight William Shatner

“I want to fight William Shatner” is one of my favorite lines from the movie Fight Club and I think shows how unbelievably iconic William Shatner has become in our culture.  Some of my first television memories are of sitting on the couch in my family’s living room watching Star Trek.  Perhaps for that reason, or because of his mannerisms William Shatner has always reminded me of my father.  Throughout my life William Shatner has been a fixture in my television life, first as Captain Kirk, then as I became fascinated with the Twilight Zone, he appeared in one of my absolute favorite episodes, Nightmare at 20,000 feet.  Once I was in high school Shatner spent time occasionally obstructing the view of Heather Locklear on TJ Hooker.  He re-emerged as the Star Trek franchise took off through movies and new series and of course in guest appearances on damn near everything on television.  He showed up in one of his funniest roles as the Big Giant Head on Third Rock from the Sun.  He also earned critical acclaim for roles on The Practice and Boston Legal.

Not only an actor, William Shatner also took on the music industry and has produced some of the most unforgettable renditions of classic tunes including Mr. Tambourine Man or his spoken word version of Rocket Man.

As he’s gotten older Shatner has become incredibly interesting to me and has definitely become someone I’d like to sit down and have a beer with sometime.  He has a farm in Kentucky and raises horses and seems to have reached a really calm and comfortable place in his life.  One of the most amazing things to me is the fact that he’s 81 years old and is still actively working.

The most amazing work Shatner has ever done in my opinion is his interview show, Shatner’s Raw Nerve.  I wrote a piece on the Raw Nerve a while back and if you get the opportunity to see it, check it out it’s really an amazing show, hell he made Tony Danza interesting.

So yes, if I could fight any celebrity, I would fight William Shatner or maybe we’d just get a beer and chat.

Greatest TV shows of all-time part II – crime dramas

Yes, I watch television.  I realize that kills all of my hippy credentials and makes me a brain-dead, uneducated member of the lower middle-class according to most intellectuals and liberals.  Yes, TV is evil, it will melt your brain and it has no redeeming qualities.  Well, as with anything else moderation in everything, and like there is shit art, shit movies and there is certainly shit TV.  But, like there are also paintings by Van Gogh, and movies like Citizen Kane, there is also great television.  I’m a frequent but pretty selective TV viewer and as such my friends who don’t “watch” TV or even own one, come to me for recommendations on series to watch on DVD or stream through Netflix.

So after several friends have made these types of inquiries I decided it was time to put together a list of what I consider the greatest TV shows of all time.  I’m going to do this in five parts.  In part I, I’ll talk about dramas, part II crime dramas, part III comedies, part IV science fiction, fantasy, horror and in part V the rest, the utterly unique, TV events and anything else.  For each part I’ll talk about both current TV shows as well as shows that are no longer on the air.

I can only evaluate shows that I’ve watched, there are some shows like 30 Rock that seem to get great press but I haven’t seen them so I can’t rate them.  Enjoy this is part 2, part 1 was on dramas.

For part 2, I address crime dramas, enjoy:

Crime Dramas - currently airing

1. Dexter – the first show that has ever made people cheer for a serial killer, magnificent.

2. Southland – an utterly fascinating of deep and rich characters, what seemed like a shame, being moved to TNT, has turned out to be a major plus, they can attack storylines with much more vigor.

The rest:

Law and Order – solid quality in almost all of its incarnations.

Sons of Anarchy – I’ve only seen the first season but it was spectacular.

Breaking Bad – the first season was one of the best ever on TV, slowed down a bit since then but still very good.

The Mentalist – Patrick Jane is a truly wonderful character.

Harry’s Law – Kathy Bates every week, doesn’t get much better than that, a really new series but so far it’s been awesome.

Criminal Minds – right there, it was hard for me not to include it in the top tier.

 

Programs off-air – Crime Dramas

1.  Deadwood – hard to purely call this a crime drama, but a category had to be found and wherever it fell and it is truly one of the best shows to ever be on television, truly a shame it never got to run its full course with the final season as planned.

2.  Homicide Life on the Street – great characters, great stories an amazing combination of well done TV and gritty hard crime drama.

3.  The Wire – every bit as good as Homicide with better production value, but Homicide did it first.

Hill Street Blues – to my mind the crime drama that started them all and for folks my age probably true, for those who are my senior a definite nod to Police Woman, Perry Mason, Kojack and the Streets of San Francisco

NYPD Blue -  this show is to younger viewers what Hill Street Blues was to me.

Life on Mars (British version) – part crime drama, part science fiction, part medical drama a really amazing show with an incredible cast, skip the ripoff American version, it’s only highlight was including Gretchen Mol, one of the great overlooked actresses and beauties of our time, in case she’s reading this Gretchen will you marry me? 

The Shield – many people will have this higher and I really couldn’t argue with them,  it was a spectacular show

Oz – totally unique, amazing cast and maybe the most disturbing show ever on TV

The Sopranos – a weekly dose of the mob for years, fantastic but I’m sorry but the series ending takes it out of the top 3.

LA Law – the original slick lawyer show.

Wild Wild West – Like Life on Mars, or Deadwood, hard to know what to categorize this as but a black and white TV show that had to be on this list.

Greatest TV shows of all time

Yes, I watch television.  I realize that kills all of my hippy credentials and makes me a brain-dead, uneducated member of the lower middle-class according to most intellectuals and liberals.  Yes, TV is evil, it will melt your brain and it has no redeeming qualities.  Well, as with anything else moderation in everything, and like there is shit art, shit movies and there is certainly shit TV.  But, like there are also paintings by Van Gogh, and movies like Citizen Kane, there is also great television.  I’m a frequent but pretty selective TV viewer and as such my friends who don’t “watch” TV or even own one, come to me for recommendations on series to watch on DVD or stream through Netflix.

So after several friends have made these types of inquiries I decided it was time to put together a list of what I consider the greatest TV shows of all time.  I’m going to do this in five parts.  In part I, I’ll talk about dramas, part II crime dramas, part III comedies, part IV science fiction, fantasy, horror and in part V the rest, the utterly unique, TV events and anything else.  For each part I’ll talk about both current TV shows as well as shows that are no longer on the air.

I can only evaluate shows that I’ve watched, there are some shows like 30 Rock that seem to get great press but I haven’t seen them so I can’t rate them.  Enjoy.

Part I

 

TV shows currently on

Dramas

1.  Treme – is an HBO program that focuses on people in New Orleans, and inevitably the fallout from Katrina.  The show is especially good because of its willingness to take risks, for the multiple layers it operates on and finally for the music.  Probably the best soundtrack of any show ever on television.

2.  House – the most recent of the great television hospital shows.  The main reason this show is so good is because of Hugh Laurie’s magnificent acting ability.  The show’s main theme the relationship triangle between three characters has undergone a surprising amount of evolution.  Doesn’t hurt that they work an attractive woman into the cast every season.

3.  Mad Men – what makes Mad Men so special is that the show so full-on confronts the injustices of the 60’s while still pulling off an entertaining and classy visage.  The show is full of really pretty people (see January Jones & Jon Hamm) and a lot of them are playing really horrible people.  Complexity with a shallow veneer makes for great TV.

 

Beyond the crime dramas we’ll discuss later, no other current dramas stand out.

TV Shows – Off-air

Dramas

1.  Six Feet Under – complicated, intense, incredibly funny, sad, openly weird and openly gay characters.  A series set around a funeral business and it was quite simply some of the best TV ever done with an exceptional series ending.

2.  St. Elsewhere – The greatest hospital show ever created, cast included Denzel Washington, Howie Mandel, Ed Begley Jr., Stephen Furst, Mark Harmon and Christina Pickles.  This show was intense, afraid of facing nothing and did it all way back in 1982.

3.  The West Wing – The show that brought us Martin Sheen as the president, an incredible cast, resurrected  Rob Lowe’s career and taught us all the meaning of the expression POTUS.  This is the gold standard for a political drama and has set an incredibly high bar.

ER early seasons – early on a great hospital show with a phenomenal cast including George Clooney, Anthony Edwards and Julianna Margulies.

Friday Night Lights – a truly great show about high school and Texas football, Minka Kelly’s big break

Moonlighting – Bruce Willis, with hair and Cybil Shepard need I say more

Kung Fu – ok they screwed Bruce Lee on the casting but America’s introduction to Kung Fu and Taoism

Northern Exposure – the first of the quirky, complicated and truly interesting dramas

Joan of Arcadia – Amber Tamblyn’s first vehicle and a really fascinating and interesting show that almost nobody saw.

William Shatner’s Raw Nerve

I was just watching an episode of Shatner’s Raw Nerve.  Shatner is a really fascinating guy to me.  We all know him as Captain Kirk and as the actor that played him; this stilted speaking ladies man who had turbulent relationships with his costars.  This stands in contrast to his performance in one of the most famous Twilight Zone episodes, Nightmare at 20,000 feet where he plays an utterly freaked out airline passenger.  Shatner has never seemed to get much credit for his acting ability, has garnered much ridicule and fascination for his singing, and rarely is mentioned as a business man.

It is well known that he took stock instead of cash when he started doing Priceline commercials ten years ago and has reportedly made $600 million for his work, pretty smart.  Not to mention those commercials are totally fun, self-effacing and obviously quite effective.  I love the one where the evil Kirk, I mean Shatner shows up.

However, I think the best work Shatner has ever done is his interview show, Shatner’s Raw Nerve.   This is the best interview show on television by far, from the intimate setting, to the “S” shaped couch and the conversational nature of the interviews.  In this format Shatner quickly gets to the core of folks.  In one moment in the Gene Simmons episode, Simmons recalls a moment as his mother applies to enter the United States and he stops, tears in his eyes like he’s been hit in the face with a board.  A really intensely personal and revealing moment with the Kiss guitarist.  This is Shatner’s genius in this show, somehow he’s able to cut past the bullshit of celebrity and get to the heart of people, and it is absolutely fascinating television.  The only complaint I have is that I wish the show was an hour instead of thirty minutes. 

I hyper-linked to the show above but here again is the link to the website, check it out, it’s certainly worth the time  http://www.biography.com/shatner/

Charlie Sheen a true American

Ok, so everyone has an opinion about Charlie Sheen and the television show Two and a Half Men.  Personally, I enjoy the show, it has solid writing and a great cast and it makes me laugh.  It’s brain candy, stupid jokes, pretty girls and a lot of clichés, a pretty typical sitcom.  I’ve actually been taken to task by several women for even watching the show as Charlie Sheen is a horrible man who treats women terribly.  In fact I don’t disagree with them, Charlie Sheen is not going to win any awards as a humanitarian, not sure any of the women he’s been with would either.  However, I have a problem with selective morality particularly as it applies to entertainment.  We have killers in the NFL, there are at least a couple who have vehicular manslaughter records.  We have numerous incidents of athletes, actors, musicians, ets…who have domestic violence, physical abuse and other records.  Hell, even Willie Nelson has been busted numerous times for marijuana possession and Tommy Chong went to federal prison for selling bongs.  So my question to everyone criticizing Charlie Sheens employment on a television show is how moral do you have to be to be an entertainer?

I’ll give Sheen points for one thing, he doesn’t care, he understands that no matter how much of a mess he is, he’s worth money to the networks.  Also, really, the networks are surprised Charlie Sheen went off the rails?  It’s not like he wasn’t already a confirmed psycho, porn star loving, drunk and drug addict before they hired, hell it’s why the hired him.  Because in case you have never seen the show, he plays an immature, prostitute using drunk on the show.  So I’ve got no sympathy for the rich Charlie Sheen or the even richer networks, they should both just shut up and entertain me.  At some level Charlie Sheen is just a typical American, he’s doing what he can get away with and as long as you are pretty and successful people will forgive you so he’s going to keep on doing it.

Closing Sesame Street to make room for Limbaugh’s fat ass!

 Now I know what my conservative friends are going to jump on, hey, Limbaugh is on the radio and Sesame Street is on TV.   Yes, I know this, but I have to wonder if the Republicans would be going after Sesame Street if the show was full of little white kids who didn’t recycle or try and learn about different cultures and instead went out shooting in Alaska.  Maybe the real issue with PBS is that shows like NOVA talk about actual science and dare to discuss the concept of evolution.   Or maybe that PBS has actually dared in the past to show foreign TV like Doctor Who or Monty Python.  And to I have to say anything other than Masterpiece Theater?  

I know the argument on the other side, TV shouldn’t be subsidized, the problem is if we don’t subsidize TV, apparently we end up with the Kardashians, rich wives TV, Jersey Shore and bullshit science shows that are more entertainment than science.  Hell we should support PBS for no other reason than the fact that  it is Snooki free. 

When I was younger there were two multi-part shows that had a major impact on me.  The first was Carl Sagan’s Cosmos, it was awe inspiring, an amazing series that brought the universe into my living room and did so with accurate and fascinating science.  The other was Ken Burn’s Civil War, using pictures, letters and interviews with history legends like Shelby Foote the show gave an in depth history lesson to the causes and actions of the civil war.  There were no re-enactments, no blood, no lurid sex scenes so let’s face it; it would have never been green lit for commercial TV.  The idea that we can’t subsidize this sort of television, when we subsidize the oil industry is just criminal.

Insensitive Groupon Tibet Super Bowl Ad

As a Steeler fan I was very interested in the game, but heh, who doesn’t like a good Super Bowl ad?  There were a number of good commercials, I really dug the little kid Star Wars VW add.  There were several other ads that I really liked, and I was really surprised at how few Budweiser ads there were, although it was basically a Bud sponsored Super Bowl.  However, there was one ad I really didn’t like:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pOwJOcp-Mxk&feature=youtu.be

There are several reasons I really didn’t like this commercial from Groupon, first it’s really crass.  I mean has the United States become so numb to the rest of the world’s issues that we’ll make fun of a country and a people who were taken over by force 60 years ago to advertise a product?  And sure, this is probably just someone at the company and ad agency making a really stupid decision.  I doubt they meant to show a complete disregard for the suffering of the Tibetan people.  Having been in Tibet 5 years ago and having made friends with some of the people and also having seen up close the life they live and the issues they face, I guess this hits me a bit harder than most.

A second troubling issue with this commercial is how much we disrespect the Buddhist Religion.  Using the Portola Palace, the exiled home of the Dalai Lama, in a commercial and then making fun of the suffering of his people is an insult to Tibetan Buddhism.  Imagine slapping the Vatican in a Pizza Hut commercial and remarking hey the pontiff hates gays but makes a hell of a pizza!  I double Americans, especially Catholics, would be all that thrilled with the ad.

However, having read many of the writings of his holiness the Dalai Lama, I have a feeling I know what he will say.  More than likely he will remark on the inappropriateness of the ad, and then forgive them for being insensitive, that may be what makes it all that much worse.

Apparently I wasn’t the only one who didn’t like the ad and it’s getting more dislikes than likes on YouTube:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/02/06/groupon-tibet-super-bowl_n_819353.html

Now I’m not a great fan of the idea of political correctness, but we can have a little sensitivity can’t we?

Twisted Christmas: Really?!

Ok, so I’m far from being a prude and you’ve all read about my feelings about the holiday but really, I mean really?!  Is this the first commercial you should see on Christmas morning?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N7oMY6sC7wQ

To my surprise, I’m defending Sarah Palin

So apparently Sarah Palin shot a caribou on her reality show.  Unfortunately I haven’t seen the episode so I can’t speak to the manner in which former governor Palin carried herself but that doesn’t seem to be the issue that is getting headlines.  She seems to have been taken to task for the brutal concept of hunting, her response was basically that if you are wearing leather shoes, or sitting on a leather couch or eating a hamburger you’re being hypocritical for criticizing someone for hunting.  I have to agree with Sarah Palin, yes, I said it, I agree with Sarah Palin.  Now Aaron Sorkin took umbrage with former Governor Palin’s response and has said he’s ok with eating meat or wearing a leather belt but isn’t up for torturing animals.  You can see his comments at the link below:

http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/tv/2010/12/09/2010-12-09_aaron_sorkin_sarah_palins_alaska_is_a_snuff_film_and_exalaska_governor_is_derang.html

Now just by using his own words Aaron Sorkin is a giant hypocrite, unless of course the cows killed to make his burger, or his belt were gently lulled to sleep and somehow humanely killed.  Maybe Aaron Sorkin doesn’t actually know how cows are killed in the slaughterhouses, on the off-chance he’s reading this article, I’ve provided some information at the following link, fair warning, PETA freaks probably shouldn’t click on this link, it will be too much for your delicate constitutions:

http://www.fao.org/docrep/003/x6909e/x6909e09.htm

Dear Mr. Sorkin, as you can see on the link they fire a bolt into the cow’s head and then cut an artery and bleed it to death.  I realize in your eyes this is radically different from firing a bullet into the heart and then bleeding the animal, but I have trouble seeing the difference.  Oh wait, that’s it, the animal shot during hunting was living wild and free, the cow was restrained in a metal box and was assassinated. 

Now, I’m a carnivore and a hunter, I wear leather and I try in my life not to be a hypocrite.  If you are going to eat meat and wear leather, actually if you are going to eat at all you must recognize that we kill to live.  Yes, even PETA freaks, vegetarians and vegans, we all kill to eat.  We kill and eat plants and animals, the only people who don’t kill to eat would be someone who is fruitivorous and I don’t think I’ve ever met a fruitivore.

On top of that we all kill everyday, we destroy bacteria and viruses, we even step on bugs.  So let’s get off the hunter’s backs, what they do is more honest than what the rest of us can claim, they actually know where some of their food comes from.  Now to be clear, I’m talking about hunters who eat what they kill, not sport hunters who waste what they kill, which is a very small part of the hunting population.  As a matter of fact the Lyme Disease epidemic in this country:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyme_disease

is related to increasing deer populations which correlates with a reduction in hunting in this country.  Activists have succeeded in making hunting unpopular, but every action has consequences so the idea that stopping hunting has nothing but good implications is truly faulty.  PETA the largest hypocritical organization on Earth next to perhaps McDonalds, has been one of the groups who has actively tried to end hunting in America.  I’d have some respect for them if it wasn’t for the fact that PETA themselves actually kills animals, you can see more at the Newsweek link below:

http://www.newsweek.com/2008/04/27/peta-and-euthanasia.html

So let’s recap, Sarah Palin good, PETA bad, well at least on this issue, my conservative friends shouldn’t get too excited this is far from me endorsing little miss I can see Russia for president.