Tag: Television

The Game is the Game, Always.

“For some cold-ass crook gangstaz, y’all carried it like Republicans and s**t.” Haven’t watched this yet, as volume is a consideration at work (and sad to read in the comments that the Slim Charles classic, “If it’s a lie, then we fight on that lie,” didn’t make the cut.) Nonetheless, by way of a friend, 100 great quotes from The Wire, distilled into 10 minutes. All in the game, you know.

Kenny wasn’t like the other kids.

“Van Toffler, the president of MTV Networks, said on Monday, ‘Ken was a great guy. His personality really brought “Remote Control” to life, as well as a new style of programming for MTV. We were really flying by the seat of of our pants then, and Ken was the reason it worked.’” R.I.P. Ken Ober, 1957-2009. Well, that’s surprising — and depressing — news.

The Great Equalizer.

“That integrity shone through in the roles he played. I can’t ever remember, in all the productions he undertook, anyone having a bad word to say about him and he never had anything bad to say about anyone else either.” Sgt. Howie (and TV’s The Equalizer) finally had his appointment with the Wicker Man: R.I.P. Edward Woodward, 1930-2009.

The Office, I’mma Let You Finish, But…

“The Simpsons is quite simply one of the best TV shows of all time. When people nitpick and say, ‘That wasn’t a very good season’, I want to go, “No, it wasn’t the best season. But it was still the best thing on TV that year”. It’s wickedly satirical, they take on everything and they nail it so that you can never go there again. It’s the only thing I’m a real nerd over.” In The Guardian, Ricky Gervais professes his love for Springfield.

Welcome to the Team.

Some of Summer 2009’s new faces get their first Hollywood marching orders: Sharlto Copley of District 9 will play “Howling Mad” Murdock in Joe Carnahan’s totally unnecessary movie version of The A-Team. He joins Liam Neeson (Hannibal), Bradley Cooper (Face), Quinton “Rampage” Jackson (B.A.) and Jessica Biel. And Inglourious Basterds‘s Christoph Waltz replaces Nicolas Cage as the Big Bad in Michel Gondry’s The Green Hornet, joining Seth Rogen (Hornet), Jay Chou (Kato), Cameron Diaz, Edward James Olmos, David Harbour, and Tom Wilkinson.

Neither flick sounds all that memorable, but, after The Science of Sleep, Dave Chappelle’s Block Party, and particularly Eternal Sunshine, Gondry still has a lifetime pass in this corner.

The Boys are Back in Town.

“A more interesting measure of the show’s impact is the fact that its title has become a kind of shorthand: you can now talk about a Mad Men skirt or lampshade or pickup line where once you might have used ‘space age’ or ‘Kennedy era’ or ‘Neanderthal.’ But while the show, like its subject, has many surface pleasures–period design, period bad behavior (if you like high modernism, narrow lapels, bullet bras, smoking, heavy drinking at lunch, good hotel sex, and bad office sex, this is the series for you)–at its core Mad Men is a moving and sometimes profound meditation on the deceptive allure of surface, and on the deeper mysteries of identity. The dialogue is almost invariably witty, but the silences, of which there are many, speak loudest.“

It’s that time of year again: As seen pretty much everywhere of late — the quote above is via Bruce Handy at Vanity Fair — AMC’s Mad Men returns for Season 3 this Sunday.

AMC’s got Braaaaaains.

“This is not about zombies popping out of closets. This is a story about survival, and the dynamics of what happens when a group is forced to survive under these circumstances. The world (in ‘Walking Dead‘) is portrayed in a smart, sophisticated way.” Don Draper and Walt White, meet the Zombie Apocalypse: Apparently, AMC is close to contracting Frank Darabont to oversee, and Gale Ann Hurd to produce, a television series from Robert Kirkman’s The Walking Dead. Clever, clever — I’d watch it. (And let’s hope they use the most recent mathematical modeling to keep things on the up-and-up.)

The Angel, the Sidekick, and the King of Pop.






“Although this is an extremely difficult time for her family and friends, we take comfort in the beautiful times that we shared with Farrah over the years and the knowledge that her life brought joy to so many people around the world.” Farrah Fawcett, 1947-2009.

Also leaving us of late, Ed McMahon, 1923-2009. “‘Quit? Oh, I’ll never quit,’ he told Entertainment Weekly in 2005. ‘This is what I do. If I’m in a wheelchair, I can still do radio. I tell everyone that there is only one way that I’m going to go. I’ll be on TV, we’ll be going to a commercial break, and I’ll look dead into the camera and say, “They’ll be back. I won’t.” And that will be it.’“

Update: “‘Michael Jackson made culture accept a person of color,’ the Rev. Al Sharpton said. ‘To say an “icon” would only give these young people in Harlem a fraction of what he was. He was a historic figure that people will measure music and the industry by.‘” Michael Jackson, 1958-2009.