I’ve still never seen an episode of American Idol, but its country cousin America’s Got Talent has been a frequent guest in the Thiel household this summer. I’m not addicted to it, but I generally find it entertaining. The judges–Howie Mandel, Sharon Osbourne and Piers Morgan (the resident rude Brit, aka The Guy Who Is Always the First to Press the Buzzer)–are a fizzy mixture, and the broad range of would-be talents give the whole thing a bit of a freakshow appeal.

Current king of the freaks is the self-styled “Prince Poppycock,” who, as Piers Morgan put it last night, manages to out-camp Freddie Mercury. And while there’s a certain “look at the train wreck” quality to his act, I have to admit that the guy puts on one hell of a spectacle. While I have to think that the Justin Bieber clone will likely win the competition, Monsieur Poppycock may give him a run for the title.

Dave TV America's Got Talent, Prince Poppycock

Jack Horkheimer, Star Hustler, is dead at the age of 72. I offered a few words about the public TV astronomy host at TV Worth Blogging.

Dave TV Jack Horkheimer, obituaries

WARNING: The following post is nothing but spoilers for the final episode of Lost. Turn back now, if ye wish to be unspoilt!

As the airdate of the Lost finale approached, I became concerned the series might end in one of two ways:

• Jack and Locke sitting alone on the beach, starting the Jacob/Man in Black cycle of violence all over again.
• A final title card replacing the word “Lost” with “Found.”

Fortunately, neither of these happened. In hindsight, the actual final shot (Jack’s eyeball closing for the last time) was just as obvious, but it hadn’t occurred to me.

While I wasn’t surprised that my wife and I reacted very differently to the episode, it seemed odd that I was less bothered by its focus on matters of emotion and spirituality rather than explanations of the nature and purpose of the Island. I think of myself as more skeptical about the possibility of life after death, and more likely to get caught up in niggling details like the experiments of the Dharama Initiative. Yet I felt generally satisfied by the conclusion whereas Vic was frustrated by what she felt was a cop-out.

That said, we both bawled uncontrollably. I think it was the dog. I was already tearing up during the final scene between Ben and Locke (yes, not Charlie and Claire or Sayid and Shannon, but Ben and Locke), then again during the last group hug. Yet, it was the shot of Vincent the dog sitting next to Jack to be with him as he died that sent both of us right over the precipice.

Emotionally, it all worked for me. I enjoyed that final opportunity to see (most) everyone together again, reconciling their “happy endings” in the so-called Sideways world with their memories of the friendship and love that developed during their stay on the Island. It felt earned. And after all the death on the show (by the end, they were down to about a dozen surviving characters, and that’s including Penny and Walt), it was comforting to have everyone back for a tearful curtain call.

I suppose that I wasn’t too bothered by the lack of hard explanations because I was already reconciled to my expectation that we’d already found out pretty much everything we were likely to learn about the Island, the Others and the Dharma folks. With the producers being coy about such simple details as the Man in Black’s name, I didn’t think it likely that they would offer a definitive answer about the Glowy Cave That Must Be Protected.

I’ll admit that I would’ve preferred that the final conflict not have come down to protecting a Mysterious Glowy Cave that had only been introduced two episodes ago. However, I can live with that. The Glowy Cave is clearly a MacGuffin; what it does is less important than how the characters react to it. Once you start down the path of explaining The Origin of the Glowy Cave, you’re entering Kingdom of the Crystal Skull territory. Maybe the glow represents immortality, absolute power or unlimited rice pudding. Maybe it’s the contents of Marsellus Wallace’s briefcase, or Repo Man’s trunk. I think that all you really need to know is that pulling the cork from the bottle is bad.

Besides, when the producers actually began to answer questions, the results could be rather clunky. Oh, hey, remember those mysterious whispers? They were the voices of those who had died on the Island yet hadn’t passed on! Do you feel better being told that?

A popular speculation in the early seasons of Lost was the castaways were dead and the Island was Purgatory. (After all, that’s Twilight Zone twist ending #2, right next to “It was Earth all along!”)  This was flatly denied by producers Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof. Yet…that’s precisely what the Island was for characters such as Michael. And, while I take the show at its word that the events on the Island “really happened,” the Sideways world which dominated so much of this final season turned out to be itself a transitional afterlife.

Like the Glowy Cave, it’s best not to get too bogged down in the nature of the Sideways world. Was it the product of the atomic explosion that concluded Season Five? A gift from Hurley in his new, semi-omnipotent role? Whatever. It’s clearly not too bad a Purgatory, given that one can realize their rock n’ roll dreams and/or get it on with Rebecca Mader therein. And let’s not think too much about an afterlife in which people can be murdered again, or give birth to the same children a second time.

Already, the concluding minutes are being wildly misinterpreted. I read a couple of reviews that suggest that the entire story is Jack’s hallucination just before his post-plane crash death, even though 1) that would be an unforgivable cheat, 2) the show definitively states otherwise, and 3) he’s wearing different clothes.

Similarly, there are some who feel the views of the airplane wreckage over the closing credits are intended to suggest that there were never any survivors in the first place. I’ll be honest, I don’t know the point of those shots, but I’m going to take it on faith that the explanation given within the show is the explanation. Everyone died…eventually. Whether it was sooner or later, for a time they all wound up in the same metaphysical place. There’s enough wiggle room so that if you absolutely want to turn it into something less satisfying, you can do it.

For my own part, I’m content. There was enough there there. And I’m ready to move on.

Dave TV big hug, Lost, reviews

The TV gods giveth, the TV gods taketh away. On the same day that V was renewed, it was announced that Heroes will not be coming back. Despite the latter’s weak ratings, it was widely anticipated that NBC would give the show a final, shortened season to wrap up any dangling plot threads.

It may be difficult to recall, but there was once a time when Heroes was the golden child of serialized drama. Its premiere season coincided with the period in which Lost was foundering. While Lost was relating the infamous tale of Jack’s tattoos, Heroes barreled ahead with big revelations and jaw-dropping cliffhangers. (Remember cheerleader Claire waking up in the middle of her own autopsy?) Back then, I referred to Heroes as “the show on which shit actually happens.”

And then it all went downhill. Fast.

As brilliant as was most of that first season, it was hard not to feel disappointed by the finale. The long-promised showdown at Kirby Plaza fizzled. What should have been a Superman II-level donnybrook between two immensely powerful characters became a few perfunctory punches.

Yet I think if Heroes had stopped there, it would still be well-regarded overall. Unfortunately, there were three more seasons.

What happened? Well, for one, it turned out that the writers only had one story in them. The Company is bad! The Company is necessary! Everyone should have powers! No one should have powers! I’ve seen the future and New York City is destroyed!

Another major problem was that the series had three characters who were theoretically unstoppable. Hiro had total mastery over time and space. Syler had dozens of stolen abilities. And by the end of the first season, Peter could mimic the powers of virtually every hero and villain.

This, of course, could not stand. So Hiro was lost in time, Syler lost his powers and Peter lost his memory. Then they all got better. Then Hiro and Peter lost their own powers. Then they got them back…but not as good. Then Hiro got cancer. Then he got better. Then Syler was good. Then he was evil. And then good again.

By the conclusion of the fourth season, it was very difficult to care. Yet I stuck with the show to its bitter end. Vic says that it was because I’m a completist. I can’t disagree.

While I’m kinda sorry that Heroes didn’t get its victory lap, it’s not as if its cancellation wasn’t well-earned.

I’ve still got the first season on DVD. One of these days it’ll be fun to pop those discs into my player and relive the days when “Save the cheerleader, save the world” seemed like it meant something.

Dave TV cheerleader, Heroes, wasted potential

The hounds of hell have been loosed this morning: Lost fans are furious that last night’s episode was sullied when ABC  superimposed a graphic counting down to the return of the alien invasion series V .

My favorite so far is this excerpt of a piece by the TV writer for the Boston Globe:

How wrong is that? Very wrong. For one thing, Lost fans are Lost fans — that is, we are focused intensely on our complicated show, which we’ve been waiting a week to see, and which is in its final stretch, and we don’t tend to want interruption or distraction. If I had been watching, say, CSI, I might have been annoyed, but not quite offended. But don’t mess with the Lost.

Now there’s some fan entitlement for you. Lost and its followers are so special that the realities of the 21st century television industry shouldn’t apply to them. Not like the hoi polloi that watch CSI.

To be clear, I love Lost, and I dislike the proliferation of promotional graphics cluttering up the screen. However…

TV viewers lost the war against promotional bugs years ago. In the age of DVRs and functionally infinite entertainment choices, the best time to catch your attention isn’t during the commercial breaks that you skip over, it’s during the show that you’re watching. You’re never again going to have the unspoiled viewing experience of olden days, certainly not from free, over-the-air TV.

The implication that Lost is a rare and beautiful flower deserving of special care is absurd. It’s a TV show from a network that not only wants you to watch this show, but the next show as well. (And, as Lost will be off the air forever in a little more than two months’ time, it’s more important than ever for ABC to get you on the hook for the next serialized sci-fi drama.)

As bugs go, it was relatively small. With the exception of the countdown itself, it wasn’t moving. That’s a vast improvement over the ones that take up a quarter of the screen, pinwheeling and whizbanging like the Fourth of July. Or my own personal pet peeve: the ones in which characters walk into the picture and stare at you. If only they were all as easy to ignore as was that simple letter “V.”

That said, there was one scene during which the V bug briefly became a legitimate issue. Sun–a Korean-born character who last night temporarily lost the ability to speak English due to a severe bout of plotcontrivitis–was forced to communicate with Jack through handwritten notes. Her “dialogue” was briefly obscured by the logo. That’s unfortunate. But even then, it was entirely possible to infer what she’d written through Jack’s spoken reply. That’s what I had to do, as I was watching Lost on Dish Network, which “center cuts” all 16:9 programming to fit a 4:3 screen.

I may not like promotional bugs, but they’re far less disruptive than losing 25% of the picture.

Dave TV fanboy entitlement, Lost, V

Last Monday night saw the premiere of A Cappella BEATdown — LIVE!* It was by far the biggest thing I’ve produced for WILL since my late and unlamented weekly movie review series Critics’ Choice went off the air in 2002. And a typical Critics’ episode had nothing on a live, three-hour music competition and pledge-o-tainment show featuring nearly 100 young singers!

On the whole, it went very well. There were no major technical kerfuffles**, all of the groups wound up where they needed to be when they needed to be there, and the music sounded great. Really, we have a lot for which to be proud.

However, me being me, it’s hard not to overemphasize the things that went wrong. We had the wrong phone number up for the first couple of songs. The ringing phones proved to be too loud to peaceably coexist with the music. Midway through the production, we mysteriously went from being three minutes ahead to ten minutes behind my carefully-planned timetable. And, as we had set our online poll to automatically shut off a few minutes after the final group originally had been scheduled to perform, I frantically tried to reach our IT staff to extend the deadline.

None of that compared, however, to my sudden realization that the online poll had been utterly compromised. I’d been refreshing the results on my laptop, and with about a half hour to go, I found that one of the groups suddenly shot from fifty or so votes to more than a thousand! The website began to bog down as the total kept climbing: 1,500…1,800…2,100! It was clear that the we were being spammed.

Now, we had set up the poll to discourage multiple votes, but had been advised not to limit it to one per IP address as doing so could disallow some legitimate participation. Instead, we had a cookie-based restriction. I knew that there’d be ways around it–for example, one could cast a vote in each different browser–but I thought that the relatively short time window and low stakes of the competition might be enough to keep someone from trying to be tricky.

Ding dong, I was wrong.

With only minutes left until the announcement of the winner, that left me with a dilemma. Should I honor the obvious fraud? There was no time to sift through the votes and remove the duplicates. And as the online poll displayed the current results after a ballot was registered, the group in question could see that they had “won” that vote.

We did have one out, which was that we had deliberately kept the online poll separate from the phone-in poll. We knew that it would be faster to make a web vote than to call the pledge line. (Indeed, while we logged 766 phone calls that night, we had 5,003 online ballots.) And in the case that the “winners” of the two polls disagreed, our judges would break the tie.

Unfortunately, my wife Vicky–whom I’d drafted as the queen of the phone poll–was having a hell of a time tabulating the results. Meanwhile, our host began to vamp as everyone waited for the verdict.

I conferred with the judges, who agreed that the leader of the phone vote (a very talented Hindi group named Chai-Town) should be the overall champion. I scurried off to tell the production staff to bring the singers into the studio…but neglected to give the nod to our host, who kept tap-dancing away.

The eventual announcement of the winner was awkward and quite possibly a bit confusing for our audience as Chai-Town seemingly came out of nowhere.

In the days that followed, we were able to extract the online poll log and pull out the duplicate votes. We found that while the more than 2,100 bogus ballots for one group was the most egregious example, most of the teams benefited from the spamming of the server. Two other groups received in excess of 500 duplicate votes.***

Once the duplicates were deleted, we were down to 983 ballots. Happily, we discovered that Chai-Town won the web poll as well as the phone poll and the judges’ vote! Potential crisis averted!

The muddled conclusion of the show and the middling results–only $3,395 raised during three hours of airtime–left me unable for a time to consider what I and my coworkers had managed to pull off. Yet, I have to admit to myself that it was one of our more ambitious productions. We had our first online poll, a live web stream with somewhere between 300-500 distinct viewers, plus Facebook updates leading up to (and even during) the program. Everyone seemed to have a good time, and most of the folks I talked to said that they really enjoyed the show. Most important to me, we got nearly 100 young people into our studio. Presumably even more watched and participated. I’d wager that for many of them, it was their first exposure to WILL-TV in a long time.

It may be some time before I can bring myself to watch my DVD copy–especially those last few minutes of tap-dancing–but in the end I expect that I’ll feel pretty good about the experience and even ready to try it again, WILL willing.

*The exclamation point was part of the title so that you knew how excited to be about it.

**An actual industry term. Look it up.

***Just to be clear, we’re not suggesting that the contestants themselves were cheating. Several someones appeared to be doing so on their behalf, and quite likely without their knowledge.

Dave TV a Cappella Beatdown, David Thiel Superstar, WILL-TV

The last few weeks of work have been crazy busy. For one, WILL has never said “no” to a meeting. There are days during which I’m either in a meeting, preparing for a meeting or scheduling my own meeting. Yes, I am part of the problem.

Most of the meetings I’ve scheduled have had to do with my upcoming music competition/fundraising program, A Cappella BEATdown – LIVE! We’re a little more than two weeks to air. I know this because I had my first anxiety dream about it this week.

Actually, it’s coming together well, even if we did wind up with more a cappella groups than I’d wanted. With eight sets of contestants, the show has bloated from its original two hour footprint to two forty-five. Yet I look at the photos of the competitors and I get excited; it’s going to be great to have 90+ talented young people in the building. There’s a fair amount of diversity, including two Hindi groups, two high school groups (from the same school, so there’s rivalry potential) and two different universities represented.

This sort of thing seems made for viral marketing, so I’m dipping my toe into that area. My Facebook fan page went live yesterday, and there’s a nifty print-and-post flyer on the WILL website. I really wish that I had about two more weeks to do a proper job with the marketing, but it’s at least a bit more ambitious than usual for us.

I never thought that I’d one day see myself producing a musical competition, but in one sense this is exactly the sort of thing I love most in the world: putting on a show!

Dave TV a Cappella Beatdown, WILL-TV

It’s been a week of downs and ups which climaxed in Thursday’s workplace massacre. Nine of my coworkers received termination notices. While I’m grateful to still find myself drawing a paycheck, it’s hard to feel too happy about it.

Meanwhile, Vic’s annual heart checkup on Friday turned out okay. I didn’t expect otherwise, but it’s still nice to get confirmation.

All of this is my way of saying that I valued a good laugh this week, and one of the best came from this week’s Modern Family, the Thiel household’s new favorite comedy. While I love the entire cast–especially the oddly mature kid Manny–I have to say that I find myself identifying with Phil, the childlike, overeager husband.

Here’s a good bit from Wednesday’s episode, in which Phil and his wife Claire try to spice up their life with a bit of role-play. “Pretty kitty has nails.”

Dave TV jackpot, Julie Bowen, Modern Family

Lost is back for its sixth and final season, and if last night’s premiere was any indication, it should be one helluva plane ride.

(MASSIVE SPOILERS AHEAD!)

As I–and apparently, many others–suspected, this year the show has abandoned its flashbacks and flash-forwards for flashes-sideways into a reality in which the Oceanic flight never crashed. It seems that last year’s season-ending atomic explosion didn’t alter history as Jack and friends had hoped, but rather created a parallel track. Yet this new timeline is not the one we saw in the pilot episode; while many of the expected players were aboard that fateful flight, others were conspicuously absent. And there are other changes both big (the shattered Island at the bottom of the ocean) and small (Sun never learned English?). Now our cast of characters simultaneously exist in two states. It’s Schrödinger’s Plane Crash.

I’m glad to see the show finally pay off the cryptic yet obviously important backgammon scene from the pilot, in which Locke explained the game as “Two players. Two sides. One is light, one is dark.” At the time I’d thought it was setting up a schism between Jack’s group and a rival bunch of survivors to be led by Locke. Which, in a sense, it did, except that Locke isn’t Locke, but rather Jacob’s mysterious opponent. Who, by the way, is also the smoke monster. And has been conning Ben for at least half a season. Obviously the game continues, but the pawns are only beginning to catch on.

I find it a bit odd that a show that seemed so grounded in sci-fi last season has taken such a hard left back into supernatural territory. I don’t have a problem with it; it’s not like there haven’t been ghosts and similarly inexplicable phenomena since the first season. It’s just that now we’ve got healing pools, angry island gods and jungle temples. (I like that pretty much every review of last night’s show references Indiana Jones in discussing the now-revealed Temple, as if one hundred years of stories about hidden jungle civilizations only go back to 1981.)

It’s great to see a show that had foundered so badly back in season three right itself and become more satisfying than ever. I’m very much looking forward to seeing where this journey leads.

Dave TV Lost

I haven’t written anything about the recent salvos of the Late Night TV Wars. That’s partially because I’ve been very busy, and mostly because they’ve been so thoroughly covered elsewhere.

Oddly, while I consider myself on “Team Conan” in the current feud over The Tonight Show, he’s really my third choice for what to watch in that time slot. Second is David Letterman, of whom I’ve been a fan since he first sat in Johnny Carson’s chair.

Truth to tell, these days I’m a Colbert watcher. If Stephen’s in reruns, I flip to Letterman. And as much as I personally like Conan (who, I remind you, wrote the classic “Marge vs. the Monorail” episode for The Simpsons), the truth is that I was much more likely to see him at 11:35 pm. And even that’s in question now, as I’ve really taken to Craig Ferguson.

So, even though I think Jay Leno should’ve gracefully bowed out, I admit that I really have no horse in that race. Which is not gonna stop me from posting this clip from last night’s Late Show, in which Letterman eviscerates his former pal Leno.

Updated: Taiwanese TV explains the Late Night Wars via goofy computer animation and superhero metaphors! I really need to start watching more Taiwanese TV.

Dave TV Conan O'Brien, David Letterman, Jay Leno, smackdown