I just saw a little bit of Grey's Anatomy

I'm over at my folk's house, using up some of their internet in one room while my mom watches her stories in the next. At one point I hear some hushed, feathery college folk music soundtracking a white dude and a white lady using vocabularies to talk about the subtle complexities of their vague emotional uniqueness, and how to feel about how it is to feel something about somebody somewhere, and other bullshit faux problems that people without problems create for themselves. Holy shit, it's Dawson's Creek! Mom, what the hell are you doing watching Dawson's Creek?

Nope, Mom says. It's Grey's Anatomy. But six and one half dozen, y'know?

Now, I never watched more than two minutes of Dawson's Creek, and I've now seen about fifteen seconds of Grey's Anatomy, and I'm not saying anything, I'm just saying, y'know? But here's my point, anyone who is more familiar with these shows and this type of show than I am:

People who were in high school when they were watching Dawson's Creek are probably just now getting out of med school, or some other grad school, or they're some other kind of young professional, and they still want to watch Dawson's Creek but pretend they're grown ups (like they were doing when they were watching Dawson's Creek).

Quite naturally I don't care in the slightest to investigate this line of thinking any further, but does that sound reasonable to anyone else? No? Well fuck you, I'm gonna download 30 Rock.

Sincerely,

A white dude without any real problems

P.S.-- Sorry I haven't been writing much lately; don't have a lot to say but mostly I've been really busy. My band just came out with a new album and we're playing a show at a museum this weekend, and also I am in a play opening a week from today, and then there's all this other stuff that the internet doesn't really need to hear about

P.P.S.-- My mom seems to kind of hate Grey's Anatomy; she's snarking at it pretty hard from the other room. It's good to know where I get this stuff.

More fun with public access TV clips

This is one of the primary reasons why the internet exists: to showcase the most embarrassing thing a person ever did in their life to the entire world, completely devoid of context.

Public Access Television

I missed the "Golden Age of Public Access Television" (if there ever was such a thing), so I can't say that I've watched too much of it. The little I have been exposed to gives me the impression that it's about 90% bargain basement televangelists too broke-ass to hook up with the big-haired grin monsters on the Trinity Broadcasting Network, with the rest divided between prerecorded town hall meetings, Spanish-language hip-hop shows that can't get over the Green Screen effect, and college courses with a beardy professor talking to a half-empty room and a single camera.

Apparently it wasn't always like this. Apparently, back in "the day" you could catch all sorts of crazy shit that slipped through the cracks, things that weren't entertaining on the same level of other television programs so much as they were fascinating on the level of "what is this and why was this made." There is a lot of that sort of thing to be found in the world of low-budget video'd what-the-fucklery today, of course; that's about 90% of YouTube videos right there. But the difference is, with YouTube you've pretty much got to be looking for something to find it, or at least looking for something similar, and there's probably going to be a description next to it, and people commenting below to give it clarity, and a list of related videos to further frame it. In other words, even the most random and bizarre YouTube video is basically dripping with context. And as I've said before, context ruins everything.

Honestly, is homemade pseudo-Dada too much to ask for on the public airwaves in the 21st century? Basically I just wish I could have been aimlessly flipping through channels at two AM in a random bout of insomnia 20 years ago and come across something utterly bizarre and inexplicable, something untainted by logic or reason that would shake me out of my fog and then make me wonder for the rest of my days what on earth I had seen. Something like this:



If you're wondering? Yes, I did write this whole post just to have a reason to share that clip. The more I watch it the happier it makes me. I'm starting to worry myself.

Joe Mathlete presents FAMILY GUY: DETRACTOR'S CUT

(Much thanks to my friend Jonathan for inspiring this)

Presenting for your edification: Family Guy season 6 episode 16, minus every instance it resorted to one of the program's Five Pillars of Lazy Post-Simpsons Hack Bullshit (see: the last thing I wrote). I searched at random for something from the most recent season and went with the first episode I came across, ensuring that the show would have a fair shot at giving me it's best work, or at least its most average and representative. This also ensured that I would only have to watch one episode of Family Guy.

I was able to shave a full ten minutes off the episode's runtime without removing anything that had remotely to do with the actual plot of the show. It takes a couple of minutes for the episode to really lean hard on the cheap hack copouts that are Family Guy's bread and butter; keep your eyes peeled and see if you can spot every time I had to cut something. If every example is correctly pointed out, there's probably a prize or something.

I'm proud at how much this improves the show. Watch it quick, before someone on the internet or from 20th Century Fox says I'm not allowed to do this and it gets taken down.

I'm taking a short break for a few days or so... When I get back: words!

The Family Guy is terrible, and laziness is ruining comedy

I've said it before (and so has South Park, and so has probably The Simpsons, and I'm guessing other people who write about stuff they hate), but let's summarize:

1. In a comedy show, the majority of jokes ought to have at least some tangential relation to what is going on in the story. An occasional non-sequitur aside here and there can add an absurdist dimension to an already strong piece, but Family Guy writers just let their gag idea notepads shit into each and every script in order to bloat episodes to their full, required 23-minute lengths. It's boring and amateurish.

2. When something goes on too long, it goes on too long. Extending an out-of-nowhere awkward pause does not automatically equal humor. Family Guy didn't write the book on this sort of device in animation, but they highlighted every page of the book and consult it multiple times per tired, hackneyed episode.

3. Ditto unnecessary repetition to highlight/belabor a dumb gag.

4. Inserting a celebrity or stereotype (or reference to such) into a scene for no reason, then letting them do or say something for an extended period of time, not to propel the action along but rather derail it to highlight how silly said celebrity/stereotype is (or how silly the reference is)? Hack City USA. There's enough ADD going off with all the "that reminds me of the time when..." bullshit (see #1), but sometimes even when Family Guy manages to avoid cutting away from a scene, it still can't focus to save its goddamn life.

5. Somewhere around the fifteenth year of Saturday Night Live, television show parodies (either fabricated shows or spoofs of existing programing) became essentially the most creatively bankrupt, butt-lazy form of cheap-laugh comedy premise, especially when they are segued into via "some people are sitting on a couch watching television."

None of these points in particular are unpardonable offenses; when used sparingly and creatively as part of shows or movies or whatever that are grounded in things like strong writing, originality and a cohesive plot (yeah, remember those?), that's no problem. When you use them as the basic formula for a highly popular and long-running television series, when you run them into the ground until a nation of dim college students and uncreative stoners are programed to mistake an endless parade of disjointed pop culture references for legitimate humor, when you've done all you can to ruin modern comedy through your lazy hackery and Marmadukian formula-abuse (that's right, I went there)...

When you're a show that was fresh and original for precisely one season, devolved into self-parody after two, was canceled after three, then saw its DVD sales and rerun-fueled contract renewal as a mandate to make your empty, half-assed bullshit the gold standard and make an entire generation of misguided attention span-deprived MTV casualties nullify the value of content and rape Dada's corpse (I am looking at you, Adult Swim, and with some notable exceptions your programming is on extraordinarily thin ice)...

When you've made a boilerplate formula out of left-field randomness...

Jesus, I'm too defeated to even finish that thought.

(I will say that I find Lois kind of attractive... I find it's best not to think about it.)

Fan letter to Alec Baldwin

Dear Alec Baldwin,

I have not seen many of your movies, and those that I have seen I'm pretty sure I have mostly hated or at least didn't like (except for the salesmen movie where you were mean to Jack Lemmon), but I saw your TV show the other night and thought it was funny. Are they going to cancel it? I hope not.

What is Tina Fey like in real life? Are those glasses fake, like Lisa Loeb, or real, like Daria from MTV? Can you ask her if she will be my girlfriend, or at least have sex with me? (If she asks, I am very very attractive, and also charming and intelligent). I would write her directly, but that sort of thing never works with celebrities, in case you were ever thinking about trying it.

Thank you in advance for your help.

Your pal,

Joe Mathlete

P.S.-- You probably shouldn't have yelled at your daughter, but then again, kids can be dicks sometimes so she probably deserved it.

P.P.S.-- Your hair makes me uncomfortable.

Arrested Development

Like hopefully every single one of you who ever watched it, I am an enormous fan of the late, lamented Arrested Development. Much has been written about the show's brilliance and the criminality of its cancellation(s), so I'll just say that it was a neat show that I wish they were still making.

Thanks to the wonderful technological advancement that is the DVD (which stands for Digital Viewable Dvd), I've watched the show over and over again since its untimely demise, sometimes with a good friend of mine whose enthusiasm for television (especially television on Digital Viewable Dvds) dwarfs mine exponentially. This friend (let's call him "Chester") is a man of strong opinions, opinions which often run somewhat counter to mine. Over time, Chester and I have engaged in a number of arguments over the show: which season was the best, which cast member was the most talented, would they really have been able to keep the momentum going through a fourth season and beyond, would Jason Bateman ever find work again, etc.

One such argument revolved around the actress Alia Shawkat, who played Maeby Funke (main character Michael Bluth's jaded and machiavellian niece). Essentially, we both found her attractive, but I thought she looked too young and too close to the age of the character she was portraying until season three. Chester disagreed, saying that she was hot from the get-go. Either way, we both felt a little bit weird that we were attracted to someone who was supposed to be in high school, and on top of that highly discouraged that we found it so weird that we were attracted to someone who was supposed to be in high school, those days seeming not all that long behind us. It was our first encounter with feeling like dirty old men, and the true sadness came from the fact that we knew it would not be the last.

Then, several months ago, Chester and I had the idea to look Alia Shawkat up on IMDB and see if that would make us feel better (Linda Cardellini, who played Lindsay Weir on Freaks and Geeks, was like 25 or something when that show came out).

It was a very bad idea. Turns out she was, at that time, 17 and a half.

Which meant she was around 13 when Arrested Development started filming.

Which meant that both Chester and myself were thought sex criminals.

Moral: IMDB is terrible.