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

Professional oxygen-consumer Kevin Smith has turned his attention from his own enormous girth to his terrible movies. Inspired by savage reviews of Cop Out, he went on an Everclear-fueled Twitter rant against film critics in which he declared, “You wanna enjoy movies again? Stop reading about them & just go to the movies. It’s improved film/movie appreciation immensely for me.” He then threatened that critics would no longer be able to see his work unless they paid like everyone else.*

Then there’s this:

“Like, why am I giving an arbitrary 500 people power over what I do at all, let alone for free? Next flick, I’d rather pick 500 randoms from Twitter feed & let THEM see it for free in advance, then post THEIR opinions, good AND bad. Same difference. Why’s their opinion more valid?”

Since then, others have adroitly taken Smith to task for both his turn-off-your-brain argument and his suggestion that any random mouth-breather with a dial-up connection is equivalent to someone who has spent decades examining the history of cinema. They recalled that Smith himself was once championed by critics as he emerged on the indie-film scene.

Now, I’ve certainly had my own issues with critics, notably Roger Ebert. But my recent frustration with Roger’s output isn’t an indictment of film criticism. If anything, I’m acknowledging the importance of champions such as Ebert to both moviegoers and the industry itself.

In the Internet Age, it’s never been more true that “everyone’s a critic.” It takes nothing more than a Blogger account to declare one’s self an authority. Heck, if you dig deeply enough into Rotten Tomatoes, you’ll even find me listed as a critic thanks to a few pieces I wrote on the old Usenet group rec.arts.movies.reviews.

Goodness knows that I’ve enjoyed my share of lightweight flicks. Nothing revs my motor quite like cleverly-produced schlock. I will gladly defend the likes of Starship Troopers. Yet I won’t pretend that my opinion carries the same weight as Kenneth Turan, nor should it.

*Threat, or promise?

Dave Movies internet b.s., Kevin Smith

Tina Fey got glammed up* for an Esquire photo shoot, and had this to say:

“The idea of the photo shoot is something like my wild night out. The irony being that I don’t do that. I got an e-mail [from Esquire] with a list of the potential setups, and my e-mail back was like, Well, I need to decline being handcuffed to a bed. I won’t straddle anyone. I won’t make out with a cop. There are certain things, I totally get them as a premise. And they’re all good fun, and if I were a young single model, they would be appropriate, but, you know, I’m a mom. And my kid’s going to find this someday. I don’t want to be handcuffed to a bed in Esquire. What are you nuts? I’m not going to make out with a cop that I’m handcuffed to. I got to get my kid into kindergarten. I guess that’s more of a Montessori way of learning, when they handcuff you to things.”

And THIS, in a nutshell, is my objection to people having babies. As my friend Dave put it:

Parenthood. It makes funny people less funny.

Also less likely to be photographed handcuffed to a bed.

*Really, Tina, after fifty or so sexed-up magazine photo spreads it’s okay to just go ahead and admit that you’re hot.

Dave Tina Fey handcuffs, parenthood, Tina Fey

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

Make. It. Stop.

Dave Movies Alice in Wonderland, Johnny Depp, pissing on childhood, Tim Burton