{"id":17282,"date":"2015-09-15T12:20:53","date_gmt":"2015-09-15T19:20:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/?p=17282"},"modified":"2015-09-18T12:05:52","modified_gmt":"2015-09-18T19:05:52","slug":"tuesday-tube-report","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/?p=17282","title":{"rendered":"Tuesday Tube Report"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a title=\"bread gloves\" href=\"https:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/halfmind\/21443850445\/in\/dateposted-public\/\" data-flickr-embed=\"true\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\" alignleft\" src=\"https:\/\/farm1.staticflickr.com\/622\/21443850445_fb77fa4f30_m.jpg\" alt=\"bread gloves\" width=\"225\" height=\"225\" \/><\/a><script src=\"\/\/embedr.flickr.com\/assets\/client-code.js\" async=\"\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script>Look, I don&#8217;t have to explain myself or justify my choices, so save your &#8220;I quit watching that after the first episode&#8221; cracks for someone who&#8217;ll be impressed by your brilliance and discretion, all right? I will admit, however, that I&#8217;ve fallen into some lazy habits when it comes to watching TV, because I&#8217;ve been watching\u00a0<em>The Strain<\/em>, <em>Extant<\/em>, and <em>Under the Dome<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>I enjoyed the first book of\u00a0Guillermo\u00a0del Toro&#8217;s\u00a0<em>The Strain<\/em> trilogy but found\u00a0the second one so\u00a0full of illogical non-sequiturs I struggled to finish it. I\u00a0never got around to reading the third. My reaction to the TV series has been\u00a0about the same. We&#8217;re in season two now, with one or two episodes to go, and I no longer care very much what happens (although I&#8217;m still DVR&#8217;ing it and will probably stay with it through the season finale). You want a good vampire story? Go read Bram Stoker&#8217;s <em>Dracula<\/em>. I don&#8217;t know if there&#8217;s a faithful movie or TV version of that, but if you tell me there is, I&#8217;ll watch it.<\/p>\n<p>The TV series <em>Extant<\/em>, with Halle Berry as half-alien astronaut Molly Wood, hasn&#8217;t been half bad. I&#8217;m glad the director killed off Molly&#8217;s unlikable, wooden husband John (played by\u00a0<span class=\"itemprop\">Goran Visnjic) and replaced him with a more raffish and lively character named JD (Jeffrey Dean Morgan). My only quibble is that humanics shouldn&#8217;t be spelled\u00a0humanichs, because when you see it in print it looks like something you&#8217;d cough up. I caught up with\u00a0the season two finale last night and plan to be there for\u00a0season three if the series is\u00a0renewed.<\/span><\/p>\n<p>Why am I\u00a0still watching\u00a0<em>Under the Dome<\/em>? That is truly a question for the ages.\u00a0Early in season one the storyline veered away from the novel by Stephen King; by\u00a0now there&#8217;s no resemblance at all. As far as I can tell, new episodes are written over three-martini lunches on the day they are to air, containing\u00a0curveball after curveball, making it impossible to guess where the story might go next. And yet I watched every episode, up to and including\u00a0the season three finale, which promised a fourth season to come. If the series is renewed, I&#8217;ll probably give it a pass.<\/p>\n<p>What else? In a week or two I&#8217;ll start taping Trevor Noah&#8217;s <em>The Daily Show<\/em>, just to see how he does. I haven&#8217;t been recording Larry Wilmore&#8217;s <em>The Nightly Show<\/em>, but I do watch it when I&#8217;m up late.<\/p>\n<p>MSNBC has gone full corporate, to the point where I wonder if Chris Hayes and Rachel Maddow any longer have editorial control over their nightly news hours. I&#8217;m pretty sure Chris has been forced into all-Trump-all-the-time mode by his overlords, but when it comes to Rachel, I&#8217;m beginning to suspect her heart&#8217;s always been in the minutia of presidential election horse races, because that&#8217;s almost all she reports on any more, and she genuinely seems to love her some Trump. Last night Chris Hayes\u00a0cut away to a Donald Trump speech in Dallas, airing it in its entirety, labeling it &#8220;breaking news.&#8221; Yes, breaking news. What, you don&#8217;t believe me?<\/p>\n<p><a title=\"IMG_1811\" href=\"https:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/halfmind\/21444812695\/in\/dateposted-public\/\" data-flickr-embed=\"true\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\" aligncenter\" src=\"https:\/\/farm1.staticflickr.com\/728\/21444812695_0f2ca0f343_z.jpg\" alt=\"IMG_1811\" width=\"640\" height=\"343\" \/><\/a><script src=\"\/\/embedr.flickr.com\/assets\/client-code.js\" async=\"\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script><\/p>\n<p>Breaking news would be Donald Trump dropping trou\u00a0at the next debate and mooning the other GOP candidates. Fuck you, MSNBC.<\/p>\n<p>Which brings me to Stephen Colbert and <em>The Late Show<\/em>. The first episodes were to air during our recent road trip, so I asked Polly, who stayed home to house-sit, to tape them. I watched the first two when I got home. Then I deleted the others and canceled the series recording. It&#8217;s not that I&#8217;ve turned against\u00a0Stephen Colbert, as I <a href=\"http:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/?p=13560\">turned against\u00a0Jon Stewart<\/a>, it&#8217;s that he&#8217;s now hosting\u00a0just another\u00a0look-alike\u00a0late-night talk show with the obligatory\u00a0opening monolog, glitzy band, and celebrity guests.<\/p>\n<p>The &#8220;real Stephen,&#8221; it turns out, is very like the Stephen who parodied Bill O&#8217;Reilly on his old show, no longer in character but still witty, insightful, and clever.\u00a0He&#8217;ll probably carry the\u00a0new gig\u00a0off because his stage presence is so large, but he&#8217;s stuck with this\u00a0sacred cow of a network talk show format.\u00a0I hate to see him locked into being just like every other late night talk show host.<\/p>\n<p>I don&#8217;t tape\u00a0<em>Last Week Tonight with John Oliver<\/em>, because HBO tapes\u00a0it\u00a0for me.\u00a0I watch the show, not on a regular schedule\u00a0but when I get around to it. What John Oliver is doing so successfully &#8212; satirizing the news and highlighting important issues that are being ignored by everyone else &#8212;\u00a0is what I wish\u00a0Stephen Colbert would do, not as a character\u00a0but as himself,\u00a0possibly in an hour-long format, not the half-hour he had before. And boy would I love to see him as a moderator at one of the presidential candidate debates!<\/p>\n<p>Wow! My IQ has dropped 20 points in the course of writing this post.\u00a0That&#8217;s what watching TV &#8212; or even writing about it &#8212; will do to you.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Look, I don&#8217;t have to explain myself or justify my choices, so save your &#8220;I quit watching that after the first episode&#8221; cracks for someone who&#8217;ll be impressed by your brilliance and discretion, all right? I will admit, however, that I&#8217;ve fallen into some lazy habits when it comes to watching TV, because I&#8217;ve been [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,16,30,414],"tags":[1953,1951,1954,137,296,140,153,1950,1952],"class_list":["post-17282","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-consumerism","category-media","category-reviews","category-tv","tag-chris-hayes","tag-extant","tag-john-oliver","tag-jon-stewart","tag-msnbc","tag-rachel-maddow","tag-stephen-colbert","tag-the-strain","tag-under-the-dome"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17282","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=17282"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17282\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17355,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17282\/revisions\/17355"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=17282"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=17282"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=17282"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}