“Some things I know and some things I don’t.” – John Monad

What I do know is that John from Cincinnati starts screening on Showcase this Monday at 8.30pm, around the time many of us here experience the earliest rumblings of our weekly granola cravings. This show has divided audiences, and my reaction to it is similarly mixed. I reckon there are some absolute gems here (some characters, lines, performances) but the overall “plot” will leave many unsatisfied.

Make up your own mind and deliver your verdict here.

The Herald Sun this week reported on Channel 9’s end of year line up, under the somewhat humorously banner: Nine’s Rating Charge. It referred to a mess of new Nine shows including the ridiculously over the top Damages, Burke’s Backyard Spring Special (I assume Nine are hoping Burke has somehow traversed the divide from old and past it to retro cool in his time away), Surprise, Surprise Gotcha (hohum, a celebrity prank show), The Singing Bee (karaoke) and a bunch of lifestyle rubbish including: Girl’s Of The Playboy Mansion (already screened on Pay TV), RFDS (about the Flying Doctors), The Gift (about organ donation), and Dirty Jobs (about crap jobs people do).

With the exception possibly of Damages that group has the freshness of week old garbage at best.

To borrow a bit of football parlance I think it’s about time Nine started ‘tanking’. 2007 is over, start thinking about 2008. In the meantime, try some different ideas, blood some new players.

Here are some things they could try:

*Give shows more than one of two eps to find their audience. ER has disappeared from our screens already. It was always going to struggle up against Californication.

*Weeds is funnier and more irreverent than Californication and could easily be just as much a hit here. Nine could give it a proper run, showing an entire series or two, unedited, in a consistent timeslot with a bit of promotion.

*Why not use the HBO output deal to give Flight Of The Conchords a run? (Same rules apply as for Weeds) Or the new relationship drama Tell Me You Love Me.

I know none of these ideas will help Nine win the rating the rating but neither will this steaming pile of guff they are serving us.

EDIT Channel 9 are apparently going to screen series two of Weeds from Oct 1st at 10:30pm… Whether this means consistent, unedited and promoted screens remains to be seen.

Tonight SBS are screening a repeat of Sunday night’s Big Love in the Friday night porn slot and have subtitled it Complete and Uncut. Are we to assume by this that the Sunday night eps are being cut? Very disappointing if they are. I can’t remember anything that would require cutting anyway, even at an 8:30 timeslot, but it was a while ago I watched them and maybe I just didn’t notice.

Also, Alias Season 5 finally makes it to our screens Sunday night. Better late than never I suppose. Worth keeping up with if you are a fan, especially towards the end of the series where things come together (although there is no certainty it will last that long on our screens).

I doubt we’re going to be able to cover this in much depth on the show this week so here are the nominations for all the categories in the 2007 Logies.

Continued inside »

Congratulations to Rove and the crew with last nights first show back pulling close to 1.7 million nationally, with 520,000 in Melbourne. Amazing figures.

I saw bits. It still just seemed like Rove to me, maybe a little less polished because of the time off.

What did other people think?

At the risk of exposing my monumentally daggy side. . . (please be gentle with me, fellow boxcutters) Peter Casey, co-creator of Frasier and also writer/producer of Cheers and Wings, was interviewed this morning on ABC Classic FM. The audio is available online for a fortnight.

So channel 10 didn’t have the guts to run with Celebrity Joker Poker for another week or two. If you were watching on Tuesday night, you’ll have noticed the triple helping of Futurama…

Interesting looking at some of 10’s figures from last night: Futurama – 8:30pm 0.70 million, The Wedge 0.69 million, Rove 0.75 million – all of which didn’t get near: ABC News, The Simpsons, The Bill or Ten News (I’m not sure if that’s late news or afternoon bulletin). You’d think they got the feeling they were going to lose at least another 100k on Joker Poker to pull it and I’d be curious to see if it fit their demographic.

BB

I’m guessing that, like most people on Sunday night, I set my alarm to wake me up in time for 3:25am just in time for kick-off in the world cup final. My calculations were based on all the other times that the SBS coverage began half an hour before the match.

Of course for the final they decided to change their behaviour and start an hour before the game. Ordinarily not a problem but that half an hour could have been spent with some precious sleep. The last thing I wanted to do was start falling asleep half way through the second half.

It’s not a huge complaint. A couple of cans of Pepsi Max got me through but only just.

Pull your socks up SBS (in 4 years).*

^{*Actually, SBS did a fine job and should be commended. I’m just so used to whinging about the state of television that it didn’t feel right to not be able to find anything wrong at all with their coverage.}

This media release just came through from Channel 9.

Nine Network chief executive Eddie McGuire tonight announced that the Nine Network had secured the Australian television exclusive interviews with Beaconsfield Mine survivors Todd Russell and Brant Webb.

Nine will on Sunday night at 8.30pm broadcast a special two-hour presentation featuring the rescued miners to be hosted by Tracy Grimshaw.

The Great Escape will see Russell and Webb talk for the first time of their remarkable two-week underground ordeal.

Todd Russell and Brant Webb – a television exclusive. Sunday 8.30pm on Nine.

So that answers that question.

Having just caught the end of The Simpsons Treehouse of Horror VI episode, with the segment where Homer goes 3D in Tron world and then gets sucked out into the real world, I was curious about where the Erotic Cakes shop was situated. Turns out it’s at 13567 Ventura Blvd – I assume that’s Hollywood, California.

Anyway, one of the pages that came up in the search results was IMDB’s Alternate Versions for The Simpsons. Many interesting differences in syndication and Australia and Canada there. But I’ve just been surprised by this note:

The DVD release of “The Complete First Season” has a slighty shorter version of the episode “The Telltale Head” than was originally telecast. Near the end of the network version of the episode when the mob is about to attack Bart and Homer, Bart makes a speech to the mob about “taking the town’s heritage for granted”, which finally convinces the mob to let them go. On the DVD release, however, this short speech is absent and it quickly jumps to the mob deciding to leave them alone — because it did not exist in the original reel of the episode that Groening and Brooks delivered to the Fox Network! The speech Bart made about the mob “taking the town’s heritage for granted” was the editorial creation of the network censors in compliance of the FCC’s 1989 ruling that every serial animated television show transmitted include at least 28 seconds of educational content.

I’d never heard of this ruling before and I wonder if it still applies? This could provide hours of trainspotting entertainment in any number of cartoons. Where’s the education in Family Guy? Or American Dad? And is that why we have the regular, “I guess we all learned a lesson here today…” lines at the end of South Park? Now that I think of it, I can’t remember many educational seconds in Ren and Stimpy… unless Powdered Toast Man’s speech about Vitamin F was actually true.

Fascinating.

BB