Nobody Knows Anything

Welcome to Diane Patterson's eclectic blog about what strikes her fancy

The Tonight Show

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I have been enjoying this NBC/”Tonight Show”/Jay&Conan nonsense as much as anyone over the past week—mostly due to the sincere snarkery of TV critics like Alan Sepinwall, Mo Ryan, and Tim Goodman, as they tweeted the best lines and gossip as overheard at the Television Critics Association meeting—but I admit to being flabbergasted that late night is still this big a deal. Seriously, paying Conan O’Brien forty million dollars to go away, when few people were even aware he was there?

Of course, this is the same network that’s pissing two hundred million dollars down the Olympic hole, so what do they know?

(When it’s quite clear that I could run a television network better than these bozos can…it’s safe to say, “You’re doing it wrong.”)

It’s hard to remember (or to believe), but here’s why “The Tonight Show” with Johnny Carson was such a big deal: That’s the show where you got to see the stars. If you wanted to see a star chatting and “letting loose” with a host who made them feel at home and let them talk a bit, you watched “The Tonight Show.”

We didn’t have TV and internet 24/7 filling endless hours with minutiae of the stars’ lives, with the reality shows letting us in on every little goddamn minute of these people’s days. Yes, there were supermarket tabloids, but news channels barely existed in 1992, when Carson quit. Now when anything having to do with a celebrity happens, we get endless blathering coverage, filling air time, hoping against hope that they will get the money shot of someone overdosing or whatever. And if you want to watch something at 11:30pm, how many choices do you have now? Answer: lots.

Johnny Carson was an amazing host, and here’s what he did that I’ve seen rarely since: he listened. Letterman never listens to the guest; he’s on to the next scripted question while the star is still babbling their scripted answer to the last one. I don’t know if Craig Ferguson listens, although he seems like he might. Jay Leno certainly never listens (to anyone, if these stories burbling out are correct).

We have endless talk and columns and blog entries (hey there) about this segment of TV history that has, frankly, passed. Except for the part about them having even more hours that they need to fill, and they can’t fill them all with obvious infomercials.

All I’m wondering is, if they can afford forty million dollars to make Conan go away, how much money is every hour of broadcast TV worth? And could they start coughing up some more public-interest programming as part of the price?

Filed Under: TV

57 channels? Not even.

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We made a couple of changes to our life when we moved out of our house and into this rental house. For one thing, we moved from a 2800 square foot house without a garage to a 2200 sq. ft. house with a garage, so we took a hard look at many of the things we owned and either said, “Bye,” or “Into a box in the garage you go.” (All of our books? Packed away. ALL. Except the kids’, who have been insistent that their books needed to be liberated, and so they were.)

Another thing was that we got rid of was the satellite TV.

And despite going with Comcast for our internet connection, we didn’t pick up cable. We have no direct connection to the wide world of television out there. I suppose we might be able to get “over the air” broadcasts (are those still happening even?), but we haven’t tried.

One night back at our house I found Darin in the TV room watching some movie and I asked what it was. “I don’t even know,” he said. “It was just on.”

“That is a silly reason to watch something.”

“Yeah, it is.”

Did we need all of these movie channels? We rarely watched stuff off of them. Did we need the 100s of basic cable channels? Not much. We thought about how we were spending $90 a month on satellite—that’s $1080 a year!—on stuff we just never watched.

And things we did want to watch… Well, there was always iTunes. We’d gotten into the habit last year of just buying “Lost” on iTunes every week, because for some reason the ABC-HD feed in our area kept messing up the transmission. Or our satellite dish was pointed the wrong way, but only on Wednesday nights.

$1080 divided by $30 (avg. cost of iTunes subscription?) equals 36 shows a year. I would be amazed if all of us watched 36 separate series a year. Here’s what I’ll be watching:

  • Lost: Final season. SOB.
  • Dollhouse: The name “Joss Whedon” buys a lot. The logic gaps are sometimes infuriating and Eliza Dushku is not exactly right for this material. But it’s okay.
  • Community: So far this has been hilarious. “Sharks, pencils, and Ben Affleck.” Good times.
  • The Simpsons: Yes. Still.
  • 30 Rock: When it’s good, it’s great, and when it’s not, it’s still okay.
  • Chuck: Of course! Even if it’s on NBC!
  • Dexter: A little Michael C. Hall covers up many storytelling weaknesses.

Darin also watches Mad Men (which I personally can’t stand), The Office, and Big Bang Theory (which I’ve enjoyed the few times I’ve seen, but I have a hard time loving sitcoms, despite having three of them in my above list).

I want to watch National Parks (which Nina said KQED is streaming? Let’s get that computer hooked up to the TV, people just discovered iTunes is carrying this one!).

We find series, by the way, following the advice of our most trusted TV critics: Alan Sepinwall (who as every “Chuck” fan knows, is DA MAN) and Ken Tucker (whose in-print stuff for EW is better than his blog, but never mind that). See? Critics are worthwhile, people.

So far it’s worked out great: we have stuff on the Apple TV we want to watch, we can store the old shows (or watch them on the computer, or on our iPhones, or whatever without too much hassle), and we don’t have the lure of just anything being on. Darin has been reading The Lord of the Rings to the kids, and as soon as they finished “The Fellowship of the Ring” we rented the movie. Simple.

What we’re missing out on: Food Network shows. My daughter misses her daily dose of Bobby Flay. Perhaps Food Network will figure out a way to deal with this.

Even if we do end up paying more than $1080 a year—I’m going to try to mark the various series subscriptions in Quicken to keep track of how much we end up spending—on the whole this system is a much better TV experience than watching cable/satellite. No commercials to fast-forward through! No endless promos for other shows! No teasers ruining the entire show before we see it!

Now if Darin would just hook up our DVD player so I could restart the Netflix subscription, that’d be good. Of course, what he really wants to do is get a PS3 “so we can watch Blu-ray disks.” Uh huh. I am the kind of “stupid wife” who “believes that.” My friend Otto also recommends hooking up a Mac mini, so as to use Hulu on the TV. But we don’t have a Mac mini. Maybe the kids will sacrifice their iMac for the cause…. HAHAHAHA. Just kidding.

Since sitting in front of the TV and just watching what’s on is not my idea of a good time, this setup is working perfectly for me. If I want to sit around and stare at a screen for hours to waste time…I’ll use my iPhone to play games, thanks.

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We also gave up our home phone in the move. Yes, it’s true: Darin and I no longer share a phone. But everyone knows that to contact him you call his cell phone, and having the answering machine at home mostly served as a vehicle for frustration for me (since he never listened to messages). Now I get everything on my phone and it’s much easier for me to stay on top of calls I need to return and messages I need to deal with.

Dang. We really are living in the future.

Updates: me, movies, and how much Lost rocks

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In no particular order:

  • Much to my own amazement, since my decision not to drink alcohol because it’s interfering with my exercise plan, I have not in fact had any alcohol. There was one night I actually wanted to have a cocktail, but we didn’t have a lot of time and I did have to work out the next day, so I passed. Saying no to margaritas at La Fiesta is pretty goshdarned hard, though. They make a very tasty, and very deadly, margarita.

  • I know I need to post some pix of My! Amazing! Transformation!â„¢. I need to get batteries for my camera. How lame of an excuse is that? And yet: oh so true.

  • My guilty pleasure these days: SecretTweet. I have no idea if these are real or not, but unless they start mentioning space aliens or something, they could be. This is the kind of thing that makes me appreciate my own life more.

  • Movies we’ve seen recently:
    • Sin Nombre: I don’t know the provenance behind this movie. I was looking for something to see and I used the Rotten Tomatoes score to come up with one. It’s a film in Spanish with subtitles about a family trying to get to US from Honduras, and a boy who’s part of a violent, territorial Mexican gang, how they meet, and what happens. The simplicity of the storylines and the tightness of the focus on the story I think shows it’s clearly a first film by a young writer/director, but he’s a very talented writer/director who is interested in issues that have no easy and clean solutions.

    • Adventureland: It’s a very sweet look at summer 1987 after a kid graduates from college before he starts grad school. I’m kind of disturbed that 1987 = historical flick though. I liked it, but it was a small movie. I’m also kind of tired of movies in which everyone’s shared experience is one that I have nothing in common with. At least it’s not as bad as when I watch a high school movie and might as well be watching an artifact from a lost African culture for all I have in common with it.

    • Sunshine Cleaning: An interesting indie film that suffered from one too few passes on the script. Yes, the scriptwriter is saying this. There was some really good material in here, but it needed…I don’t know. Some kind of oomph. And less randomness.

    • I Love You Man: Paul Rudd is every girl’s fantasy boyfriend—the fantasy boyfriend you could bring home to mother. (You save the other fantasy boyfriend for…well…you know.) It was definitely an enjoyable flick, and I remember very, very little about it, other than they didn’t do the obvious (and so overdone) thing of having Rudd’s character end up in a fracas with another woman, leading his girlfriend to draw the wrong conclusions! which I was definitely expecting.

    • Monsters vs. Aliens: Jesus, does Pixar make it look easy, and then everyone else makes it look so hard. I don’t even remember that much about MvA, other than I was impressed that Hugh Laurie can do yet another accent that isn’t his normal voice. Such a great title though. Man, such a great title.

  • There are simply no words to describe how much “Lost” has rocked since they, in the words of Entertainment Weekly, decided to “let the freak flag fly.” You know none of the actors signed up to be part of a sci-fi/ancient Egyptians/ghosts/assassins/time travel/comedy/romance/action/adventure spectacular, and you know just as hard that the writers/creators could give a flying fuck what the actors signed up for. They have an end date! They don’t have to spin this out forever! Let’s ROCK this town!

  • Darin says the official “Lost” podcast by Damon and Carleton is Teh Awesum, so you should listen to that. (I have zero time to listen to anything, I’m finding, so I have not added it to any of my iPods, but I laugh like a hyena when Darin recounts the latest one.)

  • And, as always: Actors, there are no small parts, only small actors. Michael Emerson signed for two or maybe three episodes. And he took over the entire damn series. You can do it, folks.
  • I thought “The Unusuals,” a new cop show on ABC, was going to be about a precinct of detectives in NYC who have very strange, minor superpowers. I like my idea for the show much better than theirs: It turns out to be a very boring police procedural about a bunch of cops Who Are Quirky. We took it off the list of stuff to be recorded during the first half hour.

  • I was mostly satisfied by the “Battlestar Galactica” finale—so long as they ended without Galactica, say, plunging into a nearby sun with everyone on board I was going to be okay. (The show was so dark for the last half season I honestly didn’t know what they were going to do.) As Ted Tally says, you have to give your audience a little glimmer of hope at the end. Just a tad. I think the BSG guys didn’t have as tight a grip on their stuff as the Lost guys do, but there was still so much wonderful stuff in there over 4 years I don’t care. (For example: if you’re going to start every episode with the statement that the Cylons have a plan, get a kilo of cocaine, lock all the writers in a room for the weekend, and figure out that damn plan before you go Season 2, okay? Remember that for next time.)