TV update
Following the TV recommendations from a few days ago, it turns out that Mythbusters was a repeat and Crossing Jordan is still as crappy (sorry) as it used to be, except now it seems to be missing perhaps its best actor, Ken Howard (how this will affect the “mythology” episodes about Jordan’s mom is unclear.) At least it’s on twice a week now, though (Sundays and Fridays), so you can at least see more of it. And it still, of course, has Jill Hennessy, the reason I watch the show, as I mentioned on the discussion page. As much as I want her to be, however, she’s still not a very good actress. Not Elisabeth Röhm-bad, mind you, but not very good.
Alias was good, though. If I felt guilty about my pleasures, this would be near the top of the list. By almost every metric I should hate this show. My brother and I have talked about this. “It should suck,” as he says, “but it just doesn’t.” I will complain about the horrible, embarassing, complete sell-out product placement in the episode, however. They’ve always had a sweetheart deal with Nokia, it seems, and I’m fine with that: the copyrighted “Nokia tune” plays every time Sydney’s phone rings. But this time was an order of magnitude worse. The agents were pursuing villains through a parking garage. The latter jumped in a Mustang to speed off, and our heroes have to nick a car to follow. They have a split second to decide, and Sydney hollers (yes, hollers) “the F150!” Not “that one!”, not “the truck!”, not even “the Ford!”, but “the F150!” Then they cut to a close-up shot of the logo on the vehicle’s side and hold that for a bit. The heroes begin to drive (no indication of whether the keys were in the car or whether they hot-wired it in approximately 0.3 seconds) but, Oh No!, the truck is boxed in. That’s fine, “the F150″ pushes the other cars out of the way, then races down the helix of the parking garage, cornering at speed, and generally looking like a car commercial. When the villains get away (not due to a failure of “the F150″, but because they tried to go out an entrance and were gracious enough not to want to push the innocent occupants of the other car into traffic), we cut to commercial. There is a still graphic on the screen and a voiceover says, as if we hadn’t gathered, “Alias is brought to you by the new F150.” And then — wait for it — there’s a commercial for “the F150″. Presumably this technique is used to combat TiVo users, and presumably we will see this more and more of this as time goes by, but let me state for the record that this sucks.
Not Crossing Jordan-sucks, mind you, but it sucks.
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