Category: On TV

Things on TV

A New Story of a Man and His Car

In the past few years, there has been a trend within popular culture to revisit the past. To be honest, the trend has always been around, but it’s taken on a sense of urgency to the point where re-made versions of TV shows and movies have been shoved down the throats of viewing audiences with a limited amount of respect to the source material.

Last night, I caught the latest in the parade of re-makes, NBC’s updated version of Knight Rider. Considering the fairly predictable plot and inconsistencies with the original version, the show was actually watchable.

My biggest problem with the show was the voice of KITT. I was expecting to hear Will Arnett, which I had originally thought was a bad casting choice, but actually warmed up to. However, because of a non-complete clause, Arnett was replaced by Chris Knight himself, Val Kilmer. I didn’t think Kilmer was a bad choice, but at times, his voice had zero personality.

My other main problem was a scene which showed an instance in which the original KITT as superior to the new version. In last night’s movie, the bad guys hack into KITT, leading to the computer’s deactivation so Mike Traceur (pronounced Tracer, son of Michael Knight) can catch up to them using the car. Well, new KITT is not indestructible because the computer controls self-repairing nanotechnology, which means when the computer’s off, KITT can get scratched. Original recipe KITT had some type of molecular bonding which didn’t need a computer. Still, the nanobots in new KITT can also change the color of the paint, which is a good feature.

Despite my complaints, the show contained a decent serving of car chases and action. And the picture quality looked great–even more than usual fare on HD.

Seems like NBC is going to make this into a series for next season. As long as it isn’t up against Lost, I may watch.

King Tom

The Taste of Bauer

Those wacky Brits will drink anything.

From remote.lohudblogs.com:

if you travel to Britain, you can buy “24 CTU,” “a new citrus-flavored stimulation drink brand,” according to this report.

It’s from Cott Corp., “one of the world’s largest non-alcoholic beverage companies” offers the drink in both regular and diet, natch.

When I think 24, I really don’t think citrus flavoring. Maybe something more along the lines of Dr. Pepper with a touch of gunpowder. And what’s with the diet version of the drink? The last thing Jack Bauer needs is a drink with fewer calories and less sugar.

While I’m on the topic of 24, I read recently that the next season probably won’t air until January aught-nine. And at this point, I can’t really say that I care too much about that one way or the other. I was really disappointed with last season, and while I’d like to see the show return to its former glory, I don’t really expect that to happen.

I think that in the past few seasons, the show killed off too many fan-favorite characters, non-fan-favorite presidents and introduced way too many plot twists at the expense of future seasons. Even some things done storywise last year felt like they were re-hashes of previous years. And it’s hard to imagine them coming up with anything new.

Another reason I don’t think the show will return to its former levels of awesomeness is recent departure of co-creator Joel Surnow. I don’t know too much about what goes on behind the scenes of the show, but when you have one of the people responsible for the show’s early success leaving, that doesn’t seem like it could be a good thing.

Oh well, at least we have memories of Jack’s awesomeness.

King Tom

Meanwhile, Back on the Island

After eight months, Lost is back and the King is content.

My mind is still buzzing from this episode (not to mention the drink or two I had with dinner prior to the clip show) and that’s a good thing. Tonight’s episode of Lost, The Beginning of the End brought multiple storylines together, advanced the occurences on the Island and went back to the future to show us the reprecussions of the choices made during tonight’s events.

The only thing The Beginning of the End didn’t do was answer questions about the mythology of the show, which I didn’t mind too much because of (a) my state of mind and (b) the fact that Lost is back on the air. Continue reading “Meanwhile, Back on the Island” →

King Tom

T-Minus One Day and Counting

The long-awaited season four premiere of Lost is tomorrow. Naturally, the King is excited.

Lately, I’ve been doing a lot of reading about the show- not so much spoilers, but there’s been a lot of press about the show itself. Partly because the season three finale left everyone wanting more, partly because of the writers strike and partly because ABC is marketing the show smartly for once. My point is, there’s been a lot written lately about Lost. And one particular blog entry has addressed a long-standing pet peeve of mine. Alan Sepinwall, TV critic for the Star-Ledger writes about a Q-n-A session with Lost co-creator Damon Lindelof:

QUESTION: Question for the producers and I guess maybe for Matthew [Fox]. I’m wondering why whenever Jack is placed in a position where he can ask things of The Others, he always asks such terrible questions? I mean asking Juliet what she and Ben talked about doesn’t seem that useful either to him or to us.

DAMON LINDELOF: Since Matthew is not responsible for what Jack says, he has to unfortunately in some cases execute our best version of it. As writers, the questions that the characters are asking on the show is always a slippery slope. We find ourselves saying, “We’d be asking much better questions, too.” Unfortunately, if Jack asked the questions that we wanted him to, The Others would answer none of them. So you would just have him asking a string of questions with Michael [Emerson] sort of looking back at him stoically, which probably would not be that interesting to watch. He asks the questions that at least he has an opportunity of getting an answer out of them.

That was precisely the issue that bothered me most about the first three-quarters of last season. Too many Lostie and Other moments with zero questioning or information sharing. I understand what Damon’s saying- that Ben wouldn’t tell Jack anything. But even if they had set that up early on, with Ben telling Jack that he’s not going to answer his questions, that would have helped a lot.

And one other thing–I watched the re-run of last year’s season finale and realized something. I wasn’t a fan of the ‘how Jack got his tatoos’ episode. But in a way, that flashback set up the premise of the season finale. Because we were shown that Jack went to Thailand and didn’t have a good time, the opening shot of a dissheveled Jack on an airplane seemed plausible. And therefore, made (me at least think) it possible that the rest of the episode’s flash—-s were after the Jack in Thailand episode.

Oh well, enough talk about the past. The future is tomorrow.

King Tom

It begins again

Over the past few weeks, ABC has released specially-produced LOST clips, or Missing Pieces, to maintain excitement about the show, despite the most unreasonable hiatus in TV history. The clips have shown parts of the series storyline that, to this point, have remained unexplored.

With Season Four of Lost starting this Thursday, today’s release was the last of the series. And it’s pretty damn good. Don’t worry- there aren’t any spoilers about the new season. Linkage courtesy of DarkUFO:

Thursday can’t get here fast enough.

King Tom

Another one jumps the shark

My one-time favorite cable channel is now, for the most part useless to me.

Whenever nothing else was going on, I could always turn VH1 Classic on in the background and listen/watch as they played video-centered shows all day long.

But that’s gradually been changing. They cancelled/disappeared their request show, started playing This Is Spinal Tap 108 times a month and then devoted a show to interviews from 60 Minutes. But then last night, while checking out their program schedule, in the hopes that they’d gone back to their roots for one night, I was astonished to see that after playing Spinal Tap, their feature movie for the night was Ghostbusters.

Ghostbusters is one of the greatest movies of all time. But it has no connection to the world of music. Unless you count Huey Lewis suing Ray Parker Jr. for ripping off ‘I Want a New Drug.’

So now, it looks like if I want to watch bad music videos, I have to tune into VH1 Classic in the middle of the night. Or not go to work.

King Tom1 Comment

It's an Illusion, Michael

I was surprised to recently read that NBC is reviving Knight Rider as a made-for-tv movie, hopefully to be a stepping stone to a new TV series featuring a talking car.

For me, this is great news, as I was a huge fan of the show and one of my major complaints currently is that I can’t find any re-runs of the show on cable.

They’re making some changes to the show. KITT will be some type of Ford Mustang. The Hoff won’t be the star, but rather, the show will be based on the adventures of Michael Knight’s son. But the most surprising change is the voice of KITT, this man:

From two wheels to four wheels.

According to aintitcoolnews.com, Will Arnett will be the new voice of KITT. I’m a fan of Will Arnett. I think he’s been great in Arrested Development, Blades of Steel and his appearances on Late Night. But it’s just weird to think of him as KITT.

Then again, I’ve been wrong before about casting choices.

King Tom

Network Monkeys Do Good

This will hurt my credibility as a Lost fan, but I haven’t been a fan of the show since the beginning.

I started watching in the summer of ’05- before the second season, when djl made me a dvd of the first season. The reason I didn’t watch from the beginning was because I thought Lost would just be an updated version of Gilligan’s Island.

Well, according to a new article in Chicago Magazine, that’s almost what it was.

To summarize the article, in the summer of ’03, the real Lloyd Braun (head of the ABC network, not the aide to David Dinkins, gum middleman and computer salesman) came up with an idea about a show that was basically “Cast Away: the Series.” The show ended up in the hands of Aaron Spelling’s production company, where it was given to a writer named Jeffrey Leiber.

Lieber imagined something like Lord of the Flies—a “realistic show about a society putting itself back together after a catastrophe.” In roughly a week’s time, he concocted a general story line centered on what happens to a few dozen plane-crash survivors when they are stuck on a far-off Pacific island. The show, as Lieber saw it, would focus heavily on eight to ten main characters.

To give you more of an idea what the show involved, from a documentary on the Lost S1 DVD:

And in the initial pilot script, the time period, in the pilot alone, went over like six weeks or something. So, kind of by the end of the pilot, they were already like coconut-bowling and living in hutches and that kind of thing.

The show went through development, but Lloyd (Serenity Now!) Braun didn’t like the angle the show was taking.

Braun decided to give the project J. J. Abrams … [and Damon Lindelof] came back with a far-out idea to get around the show’s limitations: What if the island were a character—a supernatural place where strange things happened? Braun loved it.

And things took off from there. The Chicago Magazine article explains that Leiber still receives royalties from ‘creating’ the original script. And after the expensive pilot was filmed, Braun was fired from his post at ABC.

But at least the show wasn’t about cast aways going cocount bowling.

King Tom