The 2009-10 TV season will probably be remembered as the year the network sitcom returned to top prominence. CBS had top rated sitcoms with Two and a Half Men and Big Bang Theory while Modern Family on ABC was a hit with the coveted 18-49 age demographic. And while sitcoms on NBC didn’t do as well ratings-wise, 30 Rock, The Office and Community were all critical darlings.
While the sitcom made a grand return the network drama faltered. Most of the highly rated dramas were standard (read boring) procedural shows like NCIS and The Mentalist while not one of the interesting looking new dramas from last season including V and FlashForward fared well. V will (barely) return for a second season while FlashForward was cancelled.
Which begs the question; which network shows look interesting this upcoming season?
I think now, looking back, we did not fight the enemy; we fought ourselves. The enemy was in us. The war is over for me now, but it will always be there, the rest of my days. As I'm sure Elias will be, fighting with Barnes for what Rhah called "possession of my soul." There are times since, I've felt like a child, born of those two fathers. But be that as it may, those of us who did make it have an obligation to build again. To teach to others what we know, and to try with what's left of our lives to find a goodness and a meaning to this life.
The most talked about and critically acclaimed movie this summer is Christopher Nolan's Inception. While I greatly enjoyed that film, I was a bit disappointed that while Nolan injected the film with a lot of great ideas the overall story was none-the-less paper thin. But, regardless of what I thought of the movie, Inception is just the latest in a long line of movies to focus on dreams/dreaming.
The fourth season of the most critically acclaimed drama on TV, Mad Men, returned to AMC a few weeks back. I've been a huge supporter of the series since it debuted and have consistently called it the one of the best series on TV. But the fourth season of any TV series is unusually important for the long-term viability of a show.
At last! Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez' B-movie double feature will finally be re-released in a special edition Blu-ray set this October!
In an early announcement to retailers, Vivendi is working on 'Grindhouse: Special Edition' for a Blu-ray release on October 5.
I had a conversation with a friend a few weeks back about his experience with the movie Splice (2010). He said that the trailer for the film made Splice out to be a combination of films like Alien (1979) and Frankenstein (1931) when in fact though the movie did share certain elements with those films Splice was something wholly different.
I've always felt that the mantra of the movie marketing exec is to sell whatever film they're charged with selling at all costs. Which sometimes means that these execs have to make a tough decision; should they try and sell the public a finial finished film as-is, which the exec might not think the movie-going audience is interested in, or should they try and sell the film as something different, something they THINK this audience might want to see? Here's just a few examples I found of movie trailers created by movie marketing execs aren't exactly selling the same movie as the finished film.
If you'd asked at the end of the '90s, I suspect people would have guessed future comedies would be more in the mold of Friends or Seinfeld or even Everybody Loves Raymond—and, OK, some of them still are. But I think we have to look at Freaks and Undeclared now as the TV equivalent of Big Star or The Velvet Underground: shows that were so influential among their successors that it will someday be hard to remember that they weren't popular in their own time.
