Monday’s new episode of Chuck, which originally served as the 13-episode finale before NBC extended the episode order for the season, ended in a rather climactic moment that will forever change the way the show works. I’m not talking about the fact that Chuck finally killed someone. I think that was well played and an inevitable step for Chuck, something that logically had to be the way Chuck’s arc from Intersect 2.0 to full-fledged agent. What I’m talking about was Chuck and Sarah’s happy ending in Paris.

There are a few ways this plays out but here’s the most likely: the show will continue to introduce arbitrary conflicts for their relationship, despite having concretely established their long-simmering love, which results in them defaulting to their on-again/off-again status.

The major conflict they put up for Chuck and Sarah’s love the last few episodes was that Chuck was now a killer and not the man she fell in love with which, admittedly, is a somewhat reasonable conflict¹ but that’s over with now. I’m not saying a different and compelling reason for them to fall out of love couldn’t be concocted by the writers, but I think any long-term relationship drama at this point would be laziness on the part of the writers.

It’s easy for the show to return to its status quo, because that’s what the writers have been doing for years; it’s much harder to take their relationship as a given and move on. I hope this is the path the show follows for the six episode run it has coming up and for the next season if it gets renewed². Will that happen? Probably not, but a man can dream can’t he?

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1. Though not nearly as much as the show would have you believe, seeing as Sarah was supposedly falling for Shaw as her love for Chuck wavered and Shaw is a ruthless killer when he needs to be; he even shot himself! [↩]
2. fingers crossed [↩]

It’s funny that I came upon this video today, less than a week after ‘rebranding’ my blog to celebrate to awesomeness of everything.

I don’t listen to Insane Clown Posse, and the whole Juggalo sub-culture is in turns baffling and terrifying, but you can’t deny that they’re right about this one. The world is amazing, even before we look at the stupendous ways we have shaped the world around us.

I’ll let Devin Faraci, finish off my thoughts on this:

So much of what is around us is incredible and beautiful and transcendent… but it’s funny to hear a couple of idiots in clown paint who can’t rap and who love the word ‘motherfucker’ telling you this essential, wonderful truth.

My blog has always been multidisciplinary. It once carried the subtitle ‘a place where everything matters.’ Now, I’m shifting away from the rather generic name “blair mitchelmore’s blog” in support of that: welcome to Everything Is Amazing.

Granted, Louis CK’s opinions are slightly less optimistic, but I think that sentiment is worth carrying with you every day. Like David Foster Wallace’s advice to constantly remind yourself that ‘this is water’ it’s something that reminds you of the dangers of succumbing to the status quo.

We’re living in an awesome world, but we’re missing some awe.

I haven’t been blogging as much recently, partly because I’ve been working to read more — I’m a little more than a third of the way through The Stand right now — but another reason is because I’ve been busy tinkering with the back-side of the blog. Specifically, I’ve been writing a new theme.

The purpose is of course to attempt to describe the sentiment of my blog more clearly through its appearance. I’m not a designer, but I think the new look accomplishes that, at least for me. More importantly than that, it was an attempt to take a project from start to finish, something that the string of flights of fancy I’ve abandoned over the years indicates is not something I do very often. Even more importantly than that, it was a chance to see if I could do the whole web-designer thing; I know that I’ll never be a real web-designer — I don’t have the eye for it — but having some sense of aesthetic appeal is useful in my field. And even more importantly than that, it was a chance for me to practice what I preach; I’ve been espousing HTML5 and its semantic goodies for a while, and there are new features of CSS that I think are fantastic that I’ve always wanted to exploit, so this was a chance to work with both of those things.

A consequence of this, is that my new design isn’t supported by IE¹. If you’re viewing this page in IE, it might look like I’m still using the WordPress theme vostok which I’ve been using for quite some time now — if I did my job correctly — and that’s because I special cased you fools so you wouldn’t have to witness the horror that is the new design sans awesomeness. That said, I’ve tested the new design in IE9 and it looks almost perfect so when that one comes out, you’ll be able to appreciate the new design. For the rest of you, I’d like to discuss briefly a few of the features of the new blog I like. Geekery follows.

Read the rest of this article

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1. And all the multitudes rejoiced. [↩]

Phil Plait isn’t strictly speaking a political blogger, but the far right wing of the republican party can’t help trying to ruin the nation by perverting scientific fact at every opportunity. Because of this, Dr. Plait sometimes comments on such lunacy. In a follow up he responded to a group of, of all people, McCarthy apologists:

To the commenters on my original post and elsewhere defending McCarthy because there were in fact communists in America: shame on you. Seriously, shame on you. What McCarthy did — and yes, it was a witch hunt — was directly opposed to all the ideals of this nation: free speech, liberty, presumed innocence until proven guilty, and many more. He was only able to ferret out a handful of so-called communists, but even if he had been 100% successful in his efforts what he did was an abomination for anyone in this country, let alone a seated Senator in the United States Congress. He engendered fear and suspicion, a paranoia and chilling climate from which it took years to recover. He betrayed precisely what he claimed to be trying to protect, and will stand as an object lesson for future generations on what happens when our system fails so utterly.

That’s something to remember when we hear republicans talking about the supposed efficacy of “enhanced interrogation methods.” Whether they are effective or not, they are fundamentally opposed to the core tenets of the nation. Whether the Geneva conventions exist or are signed or are relevant to the conversation at all, the acts alone so grossly degrade humanity that to defend them in any context, with any level of success, is truly horrid.

NBC has been having a bad streak these last few years. I like some of their content but they’ve had real trouble building up a solid night of television to compete with the former glory that is Must See TV on Thursday Night. But their current Thursday night comedy line-up is the strongest night of comedy on television, and on a good night — which is most nights, actually — could probably stand up to its ancestor, the original Thursday night of comedies.

There was a great video getting sent around the blogosphere earlier today — which has since lamentably been made private by its uploader — with a young kid learning about homosexuals and just sort of going ‘oh, ok’ and reacting the way children do to any new fact they encounter. It’s a wonderful example of the ease with which children can ‘get’ homosexuality.

But it’s also a lesson, I think, that the sorts of awkward things we try to avoid talking about with our kids, things like sexuality and homosexuality and racism, are exactly the sorts of things they need to learn when they’re young. Whether we like it or not, it’s very hard to break the prejudices of our youth. Growing up in a family that eschews acknowledgment of homosexuals will betray an implicit otherness to children. But talking about these things in a straight-forward manner, invariably works.

A few years ago, at the dinner table with my dad, my sister, and her daughter we were having a conversation and homosexuals came up. My niece asked what that was and I explained it very matter-of-factly as my sister and father looked on with shock. After I finished my explanation, she got a look on her face that meant she thought it was weird that some men like men the way most men like women, but once she knew it wasn’t a soul shattering experience.

It’s not that the new generations are inherently more accepting, the conversations are just happening earlier.

To me — maybe not to anyone else, but to me — there are two distinct kinds of memories, only one of which I really think of as a memory. When someone asks me if I remember something I generally reply in the negative unless I remember it in that one particular way. These two ways are: Plain Old Memories and Remembered Facts.

Plain Old Memories are things you can re-experience in your mind, maybe even evoke the scents and sensations of the moment. The tentative hold before you approach for your first kiss, the first time a girl you like smiles back at you, that night you started at a basement party and wound up dancing naked in the fountain. These memories are much less reliable than Remembered Facts, they’re so rooted in emotion and passion that over time they become little more than the emotions of the moment with a few sprinkled images and a healthy imagination to fill in the rest, but they’re so much more human than that second form of memory.

Remembered Facts are things you know happened to you, but they feel distant, like facts from a table you had to memorize at some point. As an example, at my fourth birthday party I had pizza. Something didn’t sit well and I got sick from it. I didn’t eat pizza again until I was in grade 6. I’m sure there was a point when that event felt real to me, but at this point I simply know that it happened. I know that it happened in exactly the same way that I know that World War 2 happened. I can attach emotion to it, but the emotion will never come from it. There’s an immutable distance to it. Do you remember it? No. You know it happened, but you don’t really remember it.

I always tell people I have a terrible memory and this is what I mean. So much of my youth is obscured by veil of abstraction, a dehumanizing wall that lets me know things happened but never re-experience the urgency of them. I know that many things have happened to me. But I don’t remember them in the way I think most people remember their personal histories.

I’ve been blogging too much about television recently and what’s worse I’ve been holding back in some respects. The problem is my relentless viewing habits. Aside from the dozens of currently active television shows I watch, many of which I fully accept are probably not worth keeping up with, I also have a nasty habit of watching old shows, some because of some cultural importance they hold and others because I watched them in my youth and I want to revisit them.

I’m currently in the process of watching Quantum Leap — a show that desperately needs a modern more serialized remake, which I totally want to write — but once that’s done, I think I’m going to take a break from these sorts of marathon viewings of television shows. I need to invest in some non-televisual thoughts.

Of course, in the meantime, all these episodes of Quantum Leap are still going to have to be watched, and I’ll probably have to write about at least a few of them before everything is said and done.

I just now watched the first episode of a new series from the guys that made Entourage, How to Make it in America, and the thing that was most remarkable about it was how listless the episode was as a whole and how that reflects on one of the potential pitfalls of the way subscription television channels like HBO produce their shows.

How to Make it in America sort of stumbles through its first episode, meekly establishing character relationships and not doing much in terms of plot. Another recent HBO show to behave this way for the first half of its season was Bored to Death, which eventually made its way toward an interesting story, so I don’t doubt that How to Make it in America could become interesting before the season is out, but the problem is that these shows aren’t using the guaranteed full season to heighten the drama, but instead as an excuse to not start strong.

Network television has many flaws, but pilot episodes are not among them. Grabbing the audience quickly was never the problem, it was maintaining that audience, and the show’s quality, as the season progressed.

Now, obviously, not every story leaps from the gate, but I also think it’s reasonable to expect a television show to produce compelling episodes that service the overall arc while retaining value when viewed independently. I guess what I’m trying to get across here is that there’s a difference between a slow burn and wasting time, and an increasing number of shows on HBO and its ilk are relying on the confusion between the two to evade tight storytelling.

Tonight’s NBC comedies were so good, I thought I’d write about them. I love all these shows so much, and yet that rarely gets an outlet here. Let’s change that.

30 Rock was the weakest half-hour of NBC’s two hour comedy block. That’s less a knock on 30 Rock than it is praising the other shows. In fact, this was also one of the best episodes of 30 Rock this year, which also means it’s one of the best of the last two years.

The addition of Elizabeth Banks went over much better than the addition of Julianne Moore. The fact that she didn’t have to do a bad Boston accent helped with that, but Banks seems a better fit to the show, with a stronger history in comedy. I hope she’s back for a few more episodes before the inevitably send her packing.

Jenna’s subplot is slightly more entertaining than usual, but only slightly. It’s surprisingly hard to lampoon an absurd celebrity self-centered actor without it getting dull and repetitive fairly quickly.

Liz’s search for someone to pick her up from oral surgery was a fun way of exploring Valentine’s Day, though they went a little too on the nose with the multiple explicit comparisons to the search for a Valentine’s Day date.

But I’m willing to ignore any and all issues I have with that particular plot because of the closing scene with all of Liz’s ex-boyfriends as Jamaican nurses. I think I could watch that forever.

Good cap to the night, and a sign that maybe the writer’s have found their groove again.

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Some nice things in this episode:

• Despite their overuse of the card, Liz’s complete obliviousness to existence of front clasp bras was pretty great.
• ‘My stepson is my cyber-husband’
• What was up with that weird pause over the Julia Roberts line? Was that a jab at side-swipe comedy?
• http://jdlutz.com/karen/proof/
• ‘Prime Minister Wen wants a weak Yuan, do we?’
• ‘We’ll be right back after this ad aimed at the elderly.’
• ‘It’s one of those kids from Glee isn’t it?!’
• ‘One time, I ran over an old lady in Arizona and just kept driving!’
• ‘She was on Maxim’s ‘I’d Rape That’ 100′
• ‘Otherwise known as Jane Sadwoman.’
• ‘Don Cheadle on a bed of rice!’

Tonight’s NBC comedies were so good, I thought I’d write about them. I love all these shows so much, and yet that rarely gets an outlet here. Let’s change that.

As I just said in my post about tonight’s episode of Parks and Recreation, The Office lives through the eccentricities of their characters. They keep the characters well-grounded but everyone’s a little… more than you’d expect in real life.

Tonight’s episode was more grounded than usual in that its main plot was about a real world eventuality of acquisitions like the one the office experienced recently. Specifically, the redundancy that is the co-manager position. Basically, one of them needs to go back to Sales. Luckily for whoever that is, Sabre has no cap on commissions. Jim and Michael are both famously good salesmen either of whom could make more money in Sales so we end up with a fun situation where they’re both fighting to be demoted.

It’s great though how quickly Michael falls out of love with the idea of doing the actual work of becoming a salesman again. It took less than a day without an assistant and a big desk and the snacks for Michael to stop caring about the boost in his paycheque.

That storyline is fun, but most of the comedy actually comes from the more extreme absurdities of the office’s staff. And really, that mostly comes down to Erin and Andy, both of whom are so strange that you a) can’t wait to see them as a couple and b) can’t help but think they’re more real than any of the other people on the show. That said, as bizarre as those two are, I can’t help but root for them.

The Office is past its prime, but thanks to the time the writers invested into the characters early on it’s still one of the best comedies on television right now.

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Some nice things in this episode:

• The Olympics cold-open was great.
• Words to live by: ‘I have this thing about men cutting or threatening to cut my throat. Don’t try to cut my throat.’
• Erin and Andy’s traffic jam riff was an example of one of those great moments the show does that are so much like something you would do but seem so bizarre when someone else does it.
• Dwight and Ryan’s evil cabal is great. As are the Lord of the Rings references.
• I was almost certain that Dwight hadn’t actually seen Saw until he mentioned legs getting cut off.
• Erin’s smile of pride over Andy’s crotch getting thoroughly sniffed by those massive dogs.
• Erin doesn’t know Peanuts? Again, so weird it has to be real.
• ‘I can’t even go near a cigarette now without thinking of a penis. And vice versa.’
• Oscar’s reading an old issue of The Atlantic, I think the December issue.
• Apparently, The Office has an unspoken rule of not casting known faces for guest spots until this Kathy Bates guest spot, but I think it works since she’s playing a larger than life character.
• ‘It’s not because of the smell, I’m just expecting a nosebleed.’
• I feel like Pam’s reaction to Andy saying his office-mates are his closest friends, is a little much. It’s not like she’s got a bustling social life outside of the office.

Tonight’s NBC comedies were so good, I thought I’d write about them. I love all these shows so much, and yet that rarely gets an outlet here. Let’s change that.

Parks and Recreation has been so much better this year on every level that it’s not surprising it’s not a rating winner, but if this season gets any word of mouth at all, those ratings should start shooting up.

Since this episode was all about Valentine’s Day, it makes sense that it was all about romances.

Ann and Mark’s relationship was a bit of a shock at first but it’s grown on me, primarily because it’s never been the main story of any episode. And it makes it a lot easier to like Mark, who was a bit of a cad and a bunch of a douche last season. It doesn’t seem like this relationship is destined to be long-lived, though. Ann’s comments during her talking head scene sharply demonstrated that a really normal relationship can also mean a really uninteresting relationship. Nonetheless, this little relationship has done quite a bit of heavy lifting by making Mark more likable and by bringing Ann closer to the office environment.

Leslie and Justin’s relationship had a great path and the way it ended, while keeping Justin totally likable, was kind of scary for its intelligence. From the first time we saw Justin he’d been a storyteller, and making that the key thing that makes Leslie realize they’re not right for each other is one of those story touches that less capable shows would screw up.

Tom’s awkward attempts to woo his ex-wife are sweet and very fitting a person as bizarre as Tom Haverford. They didn’t end well, but they continued the work of making Tom empathetic after a season of him mostly being the weirdo. What makes this show interesting is that they’re putting the work in to make all their characters relatable and realistic. Not that The Office is a grab-bag of slapstick tomfoolery but its main comic sources are drawn a bit broader than real life; Parks and Recreation hopes to mine the world of humour and pathos that exists on the other edge of the line, skirting realism in a way that you would think would make the comedy harder to come by, but this show makes it look easy.

One of the most impressive developments of this season is the stealth romance of April and Andy. The undefined age difference aside, their flirtations — and Andy’s obliviousness to it all — are one of the more romantic story lines they’ve weaved into this season while still remaining wildly funny. And of course, it’s led to whole new avenues for April. She’s still basically that deadpan sardonic ironic apathetic chick, but the glimmer in her eye when she dotes on Andy is opening her up to the world beyond the ’15 layers of irony’ her boyfriend (and his boyfriend) revel in.

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Some nice things in this episode:

• ‘It makes The Notebook look like Saw 5.’
• ‘I’m gonna call him poo-pa.’
• Leslie: ‘Think of it this way: these songs are exactly like the songs you usually except instead of modern rock, they’re old jazzy standards from the 40′s.’
  Andy: ‘OK, yeah, you got a point.’
• ‘I never had a chance to get a girl a cliched Valentine’s Day gift before so… I got you all of them.’
• Mark in a tuxedo and red bow tie. Adorbs.
• A timely joke: ‘Stay away from John Mayer.’
• ‘I’m gonna throw up real quick and then we can leave!’
• The people on the show seem to be acknowledging the camera a little more in the recent episodes, I like it so far I just hope they don’t over-do it.
• ‘Uhh… I mean, that sucked, didn’t it?’
• Guitarist: ‘Maybe if you sang it like Louis Armstrong.’
  Andy: ‘Maybe yeah, I mean here’s the thing though… who is that?’
• ‘If I’m not mistaken, that was the old lady version of flashing.’
• Andy is too quotable.

Tonight’s NBC comedies were so good, I thought I’d write about them. I love all these shows so much, and yet that rarely gets an outlet here. Let’s change that.

Community explored the politics of the drunk dial tonight. Britta’s slick veneer of disinterest in Jeff was shattered by the power of alcohol. As easy as it would be for the show to use a moment like this to ruin Jeff’s existing relationship, with his hot former statistics professor¹, while advancing the Will-They-Won’t-They narrative, maybe even getting another kiss out of the potential couple, Community doesn’t hit those sorts of lobs.

Community has shown itself to be a shrewd observer of the classic tropes of television. Even when it follows these tropes, it subverts them as it did expertly in this episode. With some sharp writing, it managed to strengthen Jeff’s current relationship and deepen Jeff and Britta’s friendship while keeping the door open for a genuine romance further down the road. Also, they got Britta into this dress.

Chevy Chase in a pantsuit was nice too I guess.

So far this year, Community’s been remarkably consistent for a new series. I can’t think of a demonstrably weak episode and none of the characters feel like the unwanted step-children of the writers. Earlier this week Dan Harmon, creator of Community, tweeted:

I’d start phoning it in if it weren’t for the fear that nobody would know the difference.

To which I say, if he were phoning it in we’d know. Oh, how we’d know.

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Some nice things in this episode:

• Annie clapping along with Senor Chang’s Spanish chicken dance.
• Abed’s inability to recall television minutiae while hungover.
• Britta in that dress. I mean, wow.
• ‘Wassup’
• BCI
• ‘I’m Abed, I never watch TV.’
• Cupid Being. Not only blind, but dizzy and belligerent.
• ‘He’s a young The Asian Guy from Lost’
• ‘One Papa John’s commercial, and he thinks he’s Christian Bale.’
• The Breakfast Club montage homage would have gone completely over my head if I hadn’t watch this video earlier this week.
• Troy’s got mad Booty Quake skills.

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1. It has to be said that the women on this show are, quite possibly, too hot. [↩]

I have a problem with follow through, it seems. A while back, I wrote a post claiming that Heroes wasn’t as bad this year. And I’ve been silent on the subject since, even though anyone watching the show knows that whatever faint silhouette of potential improvements the show dangled earlier this year have disappeared, which might make you think I still think Heroes is improving. That’s a mistake.

Heroes is without a doubt the worst show I watch right now. I say that as a regular watcher of Smallville, a show that should have been thrown off the air a few years ago. This season started with some promise, but it quickly evapourated; characters returned to their most annoying of ways, plots twisted and turned aimlessly and lifelessly, and the desperation of the writers fouled every frame of the season.

NBC has yet to renew Heroes for the new year, and I hope it doesn’t. Some people are talking about giving the writers one more season to wrap up the show, but not only do I have no faith in the writers to actually accomplish that goal, I also think there’s really nothing left for the characters to do, they’ve spent four seasons repeating the same arcs over and over.

The general ineptitude of the writers makes me think they stumbled upon winning characters four years ago and don’t know how to make those characters grow and so they try to duplicate the characteristics that first made them popular with horrible results.

Heroes is a sickening festering wound on television, one that it beyond repair or recovery and it must be excised before it can do more damage.