It's Television: Dissected
TV News, Reviews and Interviews
Dave Lawson is in the studio to discuss the Whitney Cummings related sitcoms, 2 Broke Girls and Whitney.
Also, John and Brett speak to Christos Tsiolkas about the TV adaptation of his controversial novel, The Slap.
Continue reading “Ep 282: Christos Tsiolkas” »
Rick Kalowski is the executive producer and one of the three writer/creators of At Home With Julia. We spoke to him about the controversy the show caused but also look at the intentions and decisions behind making the show itself.
Glenn Peters is in the co-host seat and we talk about the Boxcutters Rule of Three and question its validity. That segment may also constitute a review of Hart of Dixie, although I wouldn’t bank on it.
Continue reading “Ep 281: At Home With Julia” »
You’ve heard us talk about the Bazura Project. Maybe you saw their show on Channel 31. Maybe you remember when we last had Lee Zachariah and Shannon Marinko on the show back in 2009. Well, now you get to hear all about how they got to do their own show on ABC2 and maybe finally be in contention for a Logie.
In further investigation of How We Watch, John went into a cinema to watch some Doctor Who.
Continue reading “Ep 280: The Bazura Project” »
The Chaser has a new show called The Hamster Wheel. Josh spoke to Chas Licciardello about causing offence and becoming more mature. The interview is tasteful but may contain references to jokes about incest.
We preview some shows in the new US Fall season, go through some Letters to Boxcutters and give you all the News you want.
Continue reading “Ep 279: Chas Licciardello” »
Tonight, at the Melbourne Fringe Festival, our very own Toby Halligan presents his brand new stand-up comedy show.
It’s like a whole 55 minutes of Trotters about his life and Australian politics, with heaps of jokes and LIVE FACIAL EXPRESSIONS.
If you missed Toby’s hit debut solo season at MICF earlier this year, don’t miss this for two reasons: 1) It’s potentially 10% cheaper than the Comedy Festival show* and 2) The Baillieu govt might make it retrospectively compulsory so it’s best to be on the safe side.
Two for one offers are available for the 23rd September and 1st October! CHEAP!
Here’s some details:
Venue
Fringe Hub – Son of Loft, Lithuanian Club
44 Errol St
North Melbourne
Time
9.00pm, Sun 8.00pm (55min)
Tickets
Full Price: $ 18.00
Concession: $ 14.00
Tuesday: $ 14.00
Group: $ 14.00 (per person for 4 people)
*compared to Friday and Saturday nights.
For a group of people who don’t really follow sport all that much, we really do talk about its coverage a lot on Boxcutters. One of the reasons we do this is because sport, traditionally, leads the way in terms of pushing the technology of television.
Optus has a service called “TV Now” that works as a kind of mobile phone PVR for its customers. At the end of last month, the AFL and NRL started questioning the copyright issues related to the service.
Of course, what the two football codes were always worried about was how Optus’s service would affect its deal with Telstra.
Now that question will be for the Federal Court to decide, as Boxcutters friend and Age journo, Lucy Battersby reports:
The Federal Court will tomorrow hold a hearing on a request by Optus to restrain the AFL and NRL from suing it for breach of copyright for its TV Now service, which was launched on July 19. The service allows Optus phone and internet customers to watch AFL games on an effective delay of as little as two minutes.
It could prove to be an important test case for content rights in the era of internet television and multimedia devices.
This is a tough one for TV fans. The Telstra deal was vital for the promotion of portable TV viewing. That is, it was vital until TV Now came out.
The concept of TV Now is nothing short of brilliant and hindsight tells us it was bound to happen. Telstra may have used bad judgement but, more realistically, may have just been unlucky: Bad judgement because it did not do due diligence in researching technologies that would undermine its deal and unlucky because Optus chose this moment to remember that telecommunications is a competitive industry.
What is most confusing here is that the AFL and NRL are defending Telstra in a copyright claim rather than supporting the idea that their games will become available to an even wider audience.
If TV Now is stopped in its tracks, it will not be because Telstra made a bad deal and failed to remember caveat emptor. It will be because AFL and NRL are monsters of greed that don’t care about their fans or the games they represent. As such, it will be a loss to sport and television.
(Yes, we are aware that the title of this post might be a little too dramatic. -Ed.)
Six years ago, three guys thought it would be a good idea to start a podcast about television. Back then, only 28 people in the world knew what a podcast was. Now it’s at least twice that.
We brought everyone into the studio to help celebrate. We take a trip down memory lane to when we were six years old. What are our great childhood television memories? How has that shaped our viewing today?
It’s a very special episode of Boxcutters that no person who was ever a child should miss.
Continue reading “Ep 278: Now We Are Six” »
The Australian Media Diary rumour blog reports (or alleges, they’re not clear on that), that friend of Boxcutters, James Talia, has resigned from Channel Nine news.
The Channel Nine news website still lists him as a reporter but it also lists his age as 34 (he was born in 1975) and has not changed the name of one of their reporters who married and took her husband’s name (or so we understand). It also still features a page for reporter Amy Parks, who moved to Channel Seven in 2009.
We wish James the best of luck with whatever his future has in store for him.
Aside: Punctuation pedants will enjoy the line in the Jacqueline Freegard bio page that lists her outside interests as spending time with “Jack Russell Hugo”. Is that three people, one person or a dog? (Yes, I had a lot of fun looking at the Channel Nine News website.)
Jess Harris and Josh Schmidt are the creators and stars of the new ABC2 comedy, twentysomething. This is a show they previously filmed for Channel 31 in Melbourne with almost no budget. Now the ABC has remade it, kind of.
Courteney Hocking is our co-host and she tells us how she watches TV with more updates from listeners.
Josh gives us his first impressions of life with Fetch TV.
Continue reading “Ep 277: twentysomething” »
Last week I stared into the depths of human inanity and saw what I can only assume was propagandist displays promoting misogyny.
Yes, I watched Four Weddings. Actually, to be correct, I watched it twice. Once was the UK version on a channel I barely knew existed: Lifestyle You. The other was the Australian version on Channel 7.
The premise is to take four of the whingiest, most self-centred and borderline pathological brides-to-be available and send them to each other’s weddings to judge and score them.
At the end of the show, the bride with the highest score wins a trip to the cheapest international destination without a current civil war (or an annulment to equal or lesser value).
If you’re thinking: Hang on, is this really a show in which four women get to judge each other’s celebration of love and commitment, taking something personal, making it public and then metaphorically beating it until it metaphorically bleeds all over the hired, starched, linen chair covers? You’re right.
I’ve always had a problem with the concept of “Reality Television”. It’s always been either documentary or game show to me. Reality has nothing to do with it. Four Weddings, for all its glimpses into other people’s wedding receptions, is just a very boring and low-stakes game show. The only attempt at entertainment value comes from how horrible any of the women can be about other women’s dreams.
Men are either forgotten in the entire process or made to look like useless appendages who have added nothing to the concept of the celebration. So maybe it’s not just misogyny. Maybe it’s an exercise in full-blown misanthropy.
Nobody leaves Four Weddings with their dignity. As soon as people opened their personal dreams to the concept of performance and competition, they sold the specialness of their day and will need to wear that as a memory of their lives together for as long as that lasts.
Forget Wipeout. Four Weddings is the show that brings us closer to Stephen King’s Running Man than ever before. It’s not car crash TV. It’s the mass-slaughter of societal decency.
Is that too dramatic?
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