TV | Idle Musings

Posts Categorized TV

New HBO Series True Blood Trailer

In TV, Video on Aug-18-2008 with
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An Interview With Anthony Bourdain

In Food, TV on Apr-13-2008 with
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As a serious foodie I’m always on the outlook for new cooking shows, books, recipes, equipment, you name it. I first found Anthony Bourdain years ago and thought he was a total tool, until I read his autobiography, Kitchen Confidential: Adventures In The Culinary Underbelly. It was quickly clear that underneath his chain smoking, foul mouth TV persona there was an intelligent man that lived to eat and cook (I can respect that).

His two year old show on the Travel Channel, No Reservations has quickly become one of my favorite food shows. The A.V. Club has a nice wide-ranging interview with Anthony. One of my favorite exchanges:

AVC: Have you eaten anything particularly disgusting in the last few episodes you’ve shot for No Reservations? Anything that’s more disgusting than the still-beating heart of a cobra, say?

AB: Well, last season, the Namibian warthog experience was as bad as it’s ever been.

AVC: Was that the anus that you ate?

AB: You know, pick a part. It was all equally full of sand and crap in every mouthful. And it just had this permeating odor of burning reflux.

AVC: You once said that the most disgusting thing you’ve ever eaten was a Chicken McNugget. Do you think the warthog asshole was worse than that?

AB: Given the choice between reliving the warthog experience and eating a McNugget, I’m surely eating the McNugget. But at least I knew what the warthog was. Whereas with the McNugget, I think that’s still an open question. Scientists are still wondering.

Or maybe even better you have this little aside:

AVC: Are you a fan of modern music?

AB: Some. I’m hardly up to date, but there are bands that have been around for the last 10 or 15 years that I really like. Anybody from the last couple of years? No. But I’m a huge Brian Jonestown Massacre fan. I’m glad that the Chili Peppers still have work. Pearl Jam. I love Queens Of The Stone Age, who just did a show with us, Anthony Bourdain’s Holiday Special.

AVC: Was that envisioned as being something like those old Andy Williams holiday specials?

AB: That’s exactly what we were going for. Like with Bing Crosby standing around a cheesy set with fake snow in the background, and suddenly the doorbell rings. “Hey, look. Its my next-door neighbor David Bowie!” And just like that, they’d sing Christmas carols. We wore ugly Christmas sweaters, I cooked a Martha Stewart-style turkey dinner, and [QOTSA] provided a lot of music and performed. When you see those sweaters that they wore—which are truly the most terrifying things I have ever laid eyes on—you know that this is a band with a sense of humor.

To promote the premiere of Lost Season 4 in Europe a number of Dharma Initiative boxes have been placed throughout Lisbon. Question, what the heck is in them? Io9 ponders:

A polar bear? Walt? (Maybe Walt.) Boxes of Dharma coke and Dharma cereal? We don’t know for sure, but Lost fans in Lisbon were psyched to see artifacts from their favorite TV show appear on their doorsteps in real life.

I generally find most guerrilla marketing actives pure junk, but this is creative to say the least.

CNN Beats FOX News In Key Demographic

In Links, Media, TV on Apr-1-2008 with
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The New York Times reports today:

The political season continues to be very good to CNN, which will officially announce on Tuesday that for the first time since 2001, it managed to beat the Fox News Channel in prime time for one quarter of the year in the category of news viewers most desirable to advertisers, according to Nielsen. Thanks to its debate coverage and heavy focus on the presidential primaries, CNN’s ratings in prime time for viewers 25 to 54 were up 90 percent, to an average of 453,000 for the first quarter of 2008. That was enough to edge past the perennial leader, Fox, which had 438,000 viewers, up 12 percent from last year.

Frontline: Bush’s War Initial Thoughts

In Culture, Media, Politics, TV on Mar-26-2008 with
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Over the past two nights PBS’s Frontline has highlighted (yet again) why it is the best show on television with their two-part special on how the Iraq war began and how it has been fought, both on the ground and at the top-tiers of our government.

I think Davenetics sums up the program pretty well with this:

It really was a perfect storm of bad judgment, malicious intent, a power structure out of balance, a weak Natl Sec Adviser, a marginalized secretary of state, an all-powerful veep, a lazy Congress, and outplayed British PM, a foolishly managed French foreign policy, an ignored military leadership, an Oedipal complex hall of fame President, and a media that focused on Rumsfeld’s funny press conference delivery instead of highlighting the fact that he was wrong, horribly wrong, on just about any point that mattered.

You can view the entire documentary here as well as dive into a number of interactive features.

Frontline: Bush’s War Initial Thoughts

In Culture, Media, Politics, TV on Mar-26-2008 with
no comments

I think Davenetics sums up the program pretty well with this:

It really was a perfect storm of bad judgment, malicious intent, a power structure out of balance, a weak Natl Sec Adviser, a marginalized secretary of state, an all-powerful veep, a lazy Congress, and outplayed British PM, a foolishly managed French foreign policy, an ignored military leadership, an Oedipal complex hall of fame President, and a media that focused on Rumsfeld’s funny press conference delivery instead of highlighting the fact that he was wrong, horribly wrong, on just about any point that mattered.

You can view the entire documentary here as well as dive into a number of interactive features.

Do Not Adjust Your Set

In Culture, TV, Technology on Mar-23-2008 with
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Andrew Sullivan, who usually contains his writing to the political spectrum, has an interesting article the Sunday Times about the accelerating fusion of the Web and television:

As TV and the Internet converge into something generically known as broadband, the distinctions between the two will soon become nugatory from a consumer point of view. But will this resulting hybrid be more like TV, plus interactivity; or more like the Internet, plus TV? The distinction will be worth billions to whoever gets there first and organizes this mess in a fashion that’s satisfying for consumers. The networks and cable companies, therefore, will need to move quickly to find a way to package the different streams—professional and user-made, broadcast and Internet—into a huge, interactive library, all easily and pleasingly accessible on demand and portable to whatever device people are overpaying for at that moment.

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