Where's The Clicker?

Last night I had a first bite out of a new series that I just heard about the other day – The Hour from BBC2.  Usually I don’t pay too much attention to Dramas coming out of the BBC, but this one got recommended by a friend of Diana and the premise seemed interesting, so I gave it a try.    It gave me a double interest to me because Dominic West was cast in it, who many people will know as McNulty from The Wire, one of my favorite shows.

The show is set in the 60s, which puts it into a kind of past-examining set which includes Ashes to Ashes, Life on Mars, and Mad Men.  The setting makes it a little bit more compelling to me for some reason, and I can’t really explain why.  It’s doubly navel-gazing because it is actually set within the BBC of that era.  The setting is nostalgic and everything looks old, including the clothes and the technology, which has phones satisfyingly ringing in the background and operators connecting calls.  It also takes advantage of the fact that everyone and their mother smoked like a chimney in those times, and practically every character lights up at least once on-screen.

It revolves around journalists which are trying to start a new news show which will be a news magazine similar to something like 60 Minutes.  Hard hitting journalism and interest stories.  Our protagonist is Freddie Lyon, played expertly by Ben Whishaw, who was working on newsreels of the time and unhappy with his assignments and the stories that ended up on the line.  His second, and obvious crush, is Bel Rowley, which is a career woman in times where there are precious few people in the business it seems.  She is promoted to be a producer, which is an uncommon role for a woman of the times, which is something that we’re reminded of about 20 times in the first half of the show.  At least we will know what one of the conflicts of the show will work from.  Dominic West ends up playing the face of the new show, which is an understated character, but he plays the handsome man well across from Freddie, who wanted to be in front of the camera but just doesn’t apparently have a face for television.

At first, this looks like a pretty simple style piece which you could describe as “Mad Men in the UK”, but it quickly adds some interesting conspiratorial elements to the story line as two characters die off in strange circumstances in the first episode.  Freddie picks up on it through what seems to coincidentally be a friend and debutante, who tips Freddie off after the mysterious cover up of a murder by the police.   It’s not a crime drama, which makes this story line more interesting because the main investigator has other motivations as the journalist.  This plot line helps set the show apart and drives my motivation to watch the following episodes by a lot.  It also helps that a mysterious character played by Burn Gorman (previously Owen from Torchwood) is involved with the show, fulfilling my “Ooh! It’s That Guy!” quotient.

Overall, I would say that The Hour is a worthy addition to the BBC and something which I will be looking forward to watching every week.  I recommended you check it out.  There are a lot of good story lines to be developed here, and I hope that it goes in interesting ways with both the setting including the events of the time period, the undercurrent of a long-running missing romance, and the conspiratorial plot as well.

from the Smallville episode Patriot

I love the Superman mythos, from its comic book origins to its modern, more emo incarnation. Something about it reassures me that nice, patriotic boys can be on the side of good rather than on the side of the Republicans.  When it’s good, it’s really good – so good I almost don’t miss Michael Rosenbaum – but when it’s bad, it makes me feel like I’m reading  a soiled comic book I found in a frat boy’s bathroom.

The episode Patriot covers some good stuff – who really defines Truth, Justice and the American way in a day and age when the American military higher-ups have gone off the rails in the worst way possible? Why do civilians having power – as  the democratic system is intended to allow – scare the living shit out of those intended to protect and steward that power?

The subplot – Lois and Clark developing their new in-the-know dynamic – suffered however, from the presence of multiple superheroes and the Smallville writing that inevitably comes with that. It’s the comic book conundrum. Some episodes, especially those with multiple superheroes (!!!) are written from a moving-comic-book style. Unfortunately, that makes these the most difficult to watch because the dialogue sounds like someone reading out loud from a comic book. The last time a word bubble worked well for a television show, VH1 still showed mostly videos, too.

The erstwhile Witchblade also attempted to create a moving-comic-book feel in its episodes, but wisely abandoned the format for actual television after its pilot. Smallville, on the other hand, slips into it every time extra super heroes show up (you can almost hear the fanboy squee coming from the writer’s room.) At least someone hates Ollie (the Green Arrow.) They write him mostly like he’s for television.

Since this is meant to be a blog about consuming media, especially Television, I thought it might be interesting to see how we consume regularly.



Starting from the top, we have the TV – this is a 42″ LCD LED TV, specifically the VIZIO M420NV which was just purchased recently.  It does full HD (1080p) and it looks really great when playing HD content.  It also has a bunch of options for inputs, which lets us connect all of the equipment that you see below.  Not everything below the TV is used for playing videos, but it all plays at least a part in getting TV to our big screen.

On the shelf below the TV, the blue blinking lights on the far left are on the wireless network router, a D-Link DIR-825 which is basically the top of the line at the moment, doing everything under the sun including both 2.4GHz and 5.2GHz at the same time.  Since I’m pretty savvy about tinkering with my tools, I have DD-WRT installed on it so I have so many more knobs and things to twiddle with. Under the wireless router is the cable modem which provides the internet connection for the house.  We pay for slightly more expensive internet which makes it a little easier since it’s a pretty technologically-enabled house.  All in all, I’m pretty happy with the network setup.

Going to the right, the next thing is the XBMC box, a re-purposed Dell laptop which has a broken screen.  It’s plugged into the TV via VGA cable and the regular headphone jack.  It connects to the server in the other room which stores all of the TV that is not played on the TiVo or DVD.  XBMC is set up with the Fanart skin and also can connect to Youtube, Vimeo and Apple Trailers for some of our internet fix.  I try to keep the XBMC updated to the most recent version, and tweak the fanart to my liking occasionally.  Eventually I will want to start archiving some of the DVD series that we have onto the server, so that they are accessible from the XBMC as well.  The laptop has a IR reciever connected which was bought off of eBay for about $20 with a remote, but I programmed the receiver to work with the “universal” remote that came with the TV.

Next to the right is a Wii.  I play some games, but not that much.  The primary use that it gets nowadays is playing the Netflix channel, which gives us even more access to movies and TV shows from the past as well as some of the BBC shows that we missed the first time around or the back catalog Doctor Who that we somehow haven’t bought on DVD yet.  We pay for the cheapest option which includes unlimited streaming, which currently gives us one DVD at the house as well.  Right now the DVD that has been connected to that account has been sitting for about 3 months.  We’re much more enamored with the streaming.  The Wii is connected via normal RCA video cable and a stereo RCA cable pair.  It’s not as good as I’d like but the Wii doesn’t do HD.

Continuing on to the right one more time, there’s a Dual Tuner TiVo.  This is what got us hooked on watching all the TV that we ever wanted, since it’s a S2 model with dual tuners, we could record two channels at once which is adequate most of the time.  It’s getting less and less use lately, since we moved to the XBMC setup and TiVo doesn’t do HD at all.  We have pyTivo running on the media server in order to play any of the media that we have available on the server on the TiVo, but most of that gets played through XBMC nowadays.  The TiVo is connected to the TV via a coax cable, just like before. It’s possible but not likely that we might upgrade it to a HD TiVo in the future.  I’d like to remove the monthly ding to the credit card anyway.

The cables that are hanging next to the TiVo used to be connected to the DVD player, but it died a untimely death recently.  It might get replaced by a Blu-Ray player in the near future.

Hiding behind the TV is the collection of DVDs, which have been removed from the cases and placed in a kind of plastic DVD sleeve holding system that I stumbled across at Target one day.  The sleeves hold two discs, plus the art and liner notes from a case.  It collapsed the whole collection of DVDs which took up a whole shelf into a single shoebox, which was pleasing.

So that’s the setup that we have now.  If we upgrade anything, I’m sure I’ll be gushing about the new toy around here.