RETURN OF CAPTAIN TIGHTPANTS

In case you missed these few seconds of shiny.



And it was just the beginning of the geeks reference bonanza...

MAYBE JUST A LITTLE BLEACH

I noted that White Collar did pretty well last week. USA owns Fridays pretty consistently, so not entirely a surprise.

I also noted that I quite liked it.

I also noted some people who don't get the core concept behind pretty much any USA show. They are fun. And those "some people" just took the show much more seriously than the show takes itself.

There was one point consistently made. That the prison break was unbelievable. And it was. It had holes you could drive a prison transpo bus through. When I watched it, I was happy to overlook it, but there's a part of me that tends to think "why do I need to overlook it?"

Would it be so hard to have simply written a jail break that could withstand a little more scrutiny than a cursory glance.

The facts as they were:

Awesome criminal dude Neal Caffrey broke out of a Super Max prison by shaving his beard while hiding in a staff bathroom and putting on an incomplete guard uniform that he ordered on the internet. He restriped a key card using the record head on a tape recorder. He walked out the front door.

It's important because it shows Neal's intelligence and ingenuity. The record head thing...I don't know if it works, I don't care. It sounds good. If I were writing it, though, I'd probably feel compelled to research illicit methods of restriping* and maybe try to do it myself. Fun for me, but sucking the fun out of the script.

My problem is the beard, which he'd only had for a matter of weeks and the internet guard uniform order. Also, the prison depicted is very considerably nothing like a Super Max. Not even in the same cell block.

So no one was supposed to remember what Neal looked like before he grew his thin, scraggly beard? And the Super Max, of all prisons, is the only one that doesn't open the inmates' packages?

As a criminal genius, how hard would it have been for him to maybe concoct some kind of hair dye MacGyver style and perhaps even create one of the cop mustaches that law enforcement types have out of stuff scavanged from the barber shop? He could even change his skin tone with some kind of goop he made with common prisonhold materials...and internet research, if you like. That's much more likely to actually work than relying on the guards looking him right in the face and not remembering that he looked like that two months ago.

And I'll believe that he managed to get into the locker room or bribe/blackmail a guard before the whole internet order thing.

You still get the ingenuity and the cool factor of walking out the front door. And you can do it in the same space of time that the original escape was depicted in.

Also, I think I'd avoid further examination as to the plausibility of such an escape by not actually mentioning the security level of the prison in question (especially if the location doesn't match the concept). That just invites skepticism.

All I'm saying is I hate it when shows cut corners when they really don't have to. Why open yourself to criticism. Especially in a pilot, the only episode not written in the crunch of a season full of production.

All this is a minor detail. As I said, it's a fun show. I like the characters. I like the It Takes A Thief premise. I'll be watching it every week...right after I watch Dollhouse.

* I'm probably going to do that anyway.

FRninGE

A lovely collision of two of my favorite things: Nine Inch Nails and weird television. Mister Reznor has recorded a special version of "Zero Sum" from his concept album Year Zero (which in itself has been on a slow track at becoming weird television) for a Fringe promo.



Not just that, but the rewritten lyrics are actually lines of William Bell's. Nimoy/Reznor mashup for the win!

Wait, it gets better...if you're as geeky as me. When Year Zero was first coming out, there was a big ARG (which I've previously written about here) and part of it was leaking the songs prior to release. If you ran the noise bursts at the end of the songs through a spectrograph, it would reveal images relating to the storyline. Thus has Reznor been up to his sneakiness by embedding a Fringe glyph into the new version. As I don't imagine mast people have access to spectrothingy software, it is included below.

Pretty.

Lastly,...

From EW:

After Fox’s marketing department showed the Fringe producers a version of the promo that used “Zero-Sum,” series exec producer Jeff Pinkner simply asked a nearby Reznor acquaintance - that’d be co-creator J.J. Abrams - if the NIN musician might be interested in a collaboration. One email later, Reznor was on the case. “We offered him compensation, and he said, ‘No, no, I just want to have fun and be part of something cool,’” says Pinkner, adding: “How often do you get the chance to work with somebody like that?”

Yeah, so...umm...how can I get word to Reznor that I need a 15-30 second theme song for the Mastermind web series (which should be going into production within the next week and a half or so, barring swine flu, water main breakage and random mutation). No compensation, but it's something fun and cool.

MASTERMIND SCREENPLAY - PAGE 14




• EXT. SKANKYTOWN - DAY
  
• A big concrete block of a strip joint. Sign promises sports television and an all-you-can-eat lunch buffet.
  
• INT. SKANKYTOWN - DAY
  
• Sparsely populated with somewhat icky PATRONS and the STRIPPERS not good enough for the night shifts. Delgado sits at the stage eating lunch, staring up at either the a stripper with track marks or at the Cubs/Dodgers game. Possibly both.
  
• BRAD (O.S.)
  
• If you were anybody else, I’d say you were a rude, stuck-up asshole.
  
• DELGADO
  
• I am.
  
• BRAD (30s, FBI poster boy) takes a seat beside Delgado.
  
• BRAD
  
• We were having cake. Big “Congrats, Brad” on it and you walk out and come here. Real d-bag move, Tony.
  
• Delgado nods. He takes out a fold of singles. Delgado reaches out and pushes it down.
  
• DELGADO
  
• Don’t. Then she’ll never leave.
  
• Brad takes the advice.
  
• BRAD
  
• You think it should have been you getting the A.D. gig instead getting this close to a four-bagger?
  
• Holds his fingers imperceptibly close together.
  
• DELGADO
  
• Don’t you?
  
• BRAD
  
• Yeah. I do. Mastermind aside, you are one bad-ass G-man.
  
• Brad snags a french fry.
  
• BRAD (CONT’D)
  
• Them using that Mastermind crap against you, that was bullshit.
  
• DELGADO
  
• They said I was casting a bad light on the Bureau. That I basically planned the Lavulite job for him. That I failed to-- Masterschmuck saved me from his bomb because he thinks it’s better to have me chase him than not.
  
• BRAD
  
• None of the rest of us could even keep up with that comic-book reject.
  
• (bites off some fry)
  
• Oh my God, this...really good.
  
• DELGADO
  
• I don’t come here for the talent.

DISTURBING

GOODNESS GRACIOUS

DOLLHOUSE: "Belle Chose"

Written by Tim Minear

Production Script

here

WHERE THE TRUTH LIES

Consider these poorly thought out comparisons.

NOTE TO COMIC GEEKS: Well be using the classically remembered version of Superman, not Superman as he exactly is today, married to Lois and having had his origin retconned every five years for the last two and a half decades.

• Baby Kal-El was rocketed from Krypton and his dead parents and landed in a rurual area and raised by the people that lived there. Baby Don Draper was raced from his dead parent to a rural area and raised by the people who live there.

• Clark Kent lives has a secret identity. Don Draper has a secret identity.

• Both have alliterative names.

• Both are dishonest with their women.

• Supes is weakened by Kryptonite and cannot see through lead. Don is weakened by drugs and cannot see past pussy.

• Clark can leap tall buildings. Don does this:

And Jon Hamm would make a kick ass Superman.

And Warners, letting anyone other than Grant Morrison write the next movie is autofail. All-Star Superman is exhibit A. It's the only workable update of Superman into the modern world without having to jettison who and what Superman is in the process. Which is exactly what every director who's come in contact with the character in the last 15 years has said before fucking it up (either on film or thankfully before it got on film).

SICK AS A SWINE

The past week, phlegm has been backed up into my brain. A most unwelcome congestion (though I'm hard-pressed to think of a welcome congestion, in fact I'm hard-pressed to think at all).

I will now do nothing but simply list everything I've watched in my delapidated state (not including freshly aired new stuff (i.e. Flash Forward, Glee, Good Wife, etc. - I watched all that too, some of it twice or more) just the DVDs).

Dollhouse

Man On The Street
Echoes
Needs
Spy in the House of Love
Haunted
Briar Rose
Omega
Epitaph One

Homicide: Life on the Street ( I suppose I was on a little Reed Diamond kick)

Kellerman, P.I. (1)
Kellerman, P.I. (2)
Shades of Gray
Bones of Contention
The Same Coin
Homicide.com
A Case of Do or Die
Sideshow (2)

The Middleman

The Pilot Episode Sanction
The Accidental Occidental Conception
The Sino-Mexican Revelation
The Manicoid Teleportation Conundrum

Doctor Who

The Deadly Assassin

Dexter

It's Alive!
Waiting to Exhale
An Inconvenient Lie
See-Through
The Dark Defender