I’m shamelessly ripping off Ysh’s idea and format; I was going to comment on her post but I didn’t want to write a book-length comment.

So here’re the series recordings set up on our DVR.

Monday Night

Heroes — We still like this show and are puzzled by how many people don’t. Watching Hiro and Ando alone is worth it for me. And is Noah Bennett a good guy or a bad guy? What about Angela Petrolli? There’re enough mysteries and likable (and love-to-hate-able) characters to keep us tuning in.

The Big Bang Theory — Probably the single favorite show on the list. We laugh so hard that at times we have to hit the pause button to compose ourselves.

House — Had to buy a season pass from Amazon Video-on-Demand since its on at the same time as Heroes and Big Bang Theory. I’m interested to see how they portray life on the inside of a mental hospital.

Castle — I’m a huge Nathan Fillion fan. And the lady cop is strong enough to face off against him. Great show.

Tuesday Night

The Biggest Loser — Mostly watch this as a way to guilt myself into eating better and exercising more. It’s amazing what the human body is capable of, both good and bad.

Warehouse 13 — I forgot this one, now I’m coming back to add it. Fun cast, weird steampunk vibe. The titular Warehouse holds thousands of artifacts that hold weird special powers. Like Lewis Carroll’s Looking Glass or Tesla’s overcoat. Really fun show.

Wednesday Night

So You Think You Can Dance — It took Angela quite a while to get me to sit down and watch this show, since I thought it was all about street-dancing. I was totally wrong about that, and now I’m caught up in it. Some really great performances once the season gets cooking (auditions aren’t as interesting). And of course, hot girls and skimpy outfits is never a bad thing.

Glee — I can’t describe this in a way that’ll convince anyone to watch it. It’s about a High School Glee Club. And it’s awesome. Just try it.

Ghost Hunters — Can’t miss this one. I’m a firm believer in the paranormal, taken literally. I’m not saying a ‘ghost’ is the spirit of a dead person (nor am I saying it isn’t) but I’m saying there’s some under-explained energy sources floating around out there. Watching this troupe chase them down is fun, since I get a kick out of the team.

Destination Truth — Joshua Gates is a funny guy. I don’t ever expect him to find any of these creatures he’s hunting for, but I love watching him and his team heading to these remote places on a shoe-string budget. There’re some weird beliefs out there.

Thursday Night

Fringe — Season 1 was awesome with a great twist at the end. John Noble as Walter Bishop is brilliant. Creepy cases, weird happenings. Sign me up!

Friday Night

Stargate Universe — We’ll see. I’ve never been able to get into SG-1, but I loved Stargate Atlantis. So let’s see how this one goes.

Sanctuary — Love Amanda Tapping in this show. It’s kind of out there, but fun.

Saturday Night

Robin Hood — The last season of the BBC series. It’s a great Saturday night show. Not very deep, but fun to watch.

Sunday Night

Masterpiece — PBS wrapped Masterpiece Theater, Mystery and one other show into one rotating package composed of Masterpiece Classics, Masterpiece Mystery and Masterpiece Contemporary (I think?). Anyway, whatever they put on, I watch.

Then there’s new stuff that I’m not yet sure I’ll be able to fit in:

FastForward — I don’t know how they’ll keep this going, but I’m guessing it’ll be a good ride for a few weeks. Everyone on earth passes out for a couple of minutes and while passed out they all get a glimpse of the future. What happens next? We’ll have to tune in to find out.

Eastwick — Probably will suck, but I enjoyed the book, kind of enjoyed the movie. So we’ll see.

Cougar Town — Everyone needs a guilty pleasure. They had me at Courtney Cox in her underwear.

New Adventures of Old Christine — I hope this one is returning. Julia Louise Dreyfus, with Wanda Sykes as a wise-cracking sidekick, is irreverent and funny as hell. Not a lot of people I know watch this but it’s brilliant.

Rules of Engagement — Not sure if this one is coming back either. Cast is composed of 1 married couple (Patrick Warburton, who I always love, and Meghan Price, ditto), an engaged couple (I don’t know who the actors are, sorry) and the aging bachelor (David Spade). Happily Spade is more the butt of jokes than anything, or else he’d ruin it. 3 ways of looking at relationships wrapped up in a 30-minute sitcom. Good stuff.

Whew! I’m sure I missed something, but that’s a long enough list.

I interupt this gaming blog to talk for a minute about TV, and in particular Joss Whedon’s new show, Dollhouse. Warning: The post contains broad spoilers of the first 3 episodes.

Now I’m just an ordinary viewer watching the show as it airs. I haven’t had any sneak peeks or read any spoiler sites or anything like that, and I’m going to share some assumptions here. I may well be proven wrong. but I’m willing to risk it.

So first of all, I’m enjoying the show so far, and hope that it makes it for a long run. But if you don’t like it, I can respect that. Everyone has different tastes, and in particular this show lacks the humor that most Whedon shows contain, which might put off some Whedonverse fans.

What I don’t get, though, is that section of the audience that seems to actively hate the show. Not only do they not want to watch it, they want it to go away; they don’t want anyone else watching it, either. 

That puzzled me so much that I’ve been trying to understand why. Most of the hate seems to surround the way women are treated in the show. One comment I read said “Every time Echo sleeps with a guy, I feel like she is being raped.” A few other comments reflect the same feelings to a greater or lesser extent; that what happens to the “dolls” here is really uncomfortable, and most of them that we’ve seen so far have been women. 

I don’t disagree with these feelings.

But I think what these viewers don’t understand is that Dollhouse HQ (the organization) are -not- the good guys here. They are at best morally ambiguous, and more likely just plain evil (that remains to be seen). The fact that Echo does some good while she is out on a mission is more or less a side-effect of what the company does. We see the ‘good’ missions but the bread & butter of the firm seems to be prostituting these “dolls” to the filthy rich. Yes, it’s dehumanizing, criminal and uncomfortable. That’s the whole point. We’re supposed to hate Dollhouse HQ and want it to be brought down!

My guess is that Echo is going to be the rogue agent that eventually hooks up with Alpha to try to tear down Dollhouse the Organization.  She’ll have help from Dr. Saunders (Amy Acker’s character) and the protection of Langton, her handler. The “good guys” in the show are Ballard (the cop trying to expose Dollhouse), Echo as she starts to retain her memories, and Boyd Langton. Maybe Sierra as well?  

I just think the viewers who actively hate the show somehow think we’re supposed to be rooting for Dollhouse HQ and that seems like a vile thing to ask us to do, and so they attack Whedon and the show. But that, to a certain extent, exposes the problem with TV these days. No one has any patience. Everything has to be explained in the first episode or else people form assumptions that they are unwilling to let go of. If you watch the way most of the Dollhouse staff treat the “dolls” it is really clear that these are bad, or at least heartless, people. I guess Whedon needed to spell that out in the first 5 minutes of episode 1 in order to avoid offending viewers?

I wonder if these same people wanted The Sopranos taken off the air? Probably not, because it was immediately clear that the Soprano characters were criminals and so viewers knew what to expect. 

Dollhouse has the potential to be a pretty complex show. Imagine Echo, having her memories wiped over and over, but learning somehow to hang on to some piece of herself, and struggling to figure out what’s happening to her and how to escape. Imagine Langton growing more and more attached to her and trying to operate from the inside to help her, while Ballard gets closer and closer to the truth. There’s a lot of good material to mine here, if viewers give it a chance.

But I don’t think they will. Which is a damned shame.

Hadn’t heard boo about this movie until Neil Gaiman asked the twitterverse to spread the trailer around. So spread it I shall. Looks pretty awesome to me!

I’ll beg your pardon while I ramble. This has been a strange weekend for me, full of things ending.

My EQ2 subscription ends this week. Realistically I do most of my gaming on weekends, so it feels like EQ2 is done for me, for now. I do hope to come back to it soon, though.

I was reading the last issue of EGM this weekend. There’s nothing really special about it, but knowing its the last one, reading the articles and knowing the writer had no idea he was about to be jobless, lends a sad sheen to the mag.

Angela and I have been watching an old Irish TV series, Ballykissangel, for the past few weeks. I’d seen the first couple seasons before, years ago when it played on PBS. There are six seasons in all, and yesteraday we finished the 6th. It’s a very good-hearted show. Ballykissangel is the name of a village, and even though characters come and go from season to season, the village remains and feels like the main character. Anyway, its done now, and the last season was filmed in 2001 (I believe) so not much chance of any more of it. What added to the sadness there was knowing that some characters left the show because the actors playing them passed away (Birdie Sweeny – Eamon, and Tony Doyle – Brian Quigley). Tony Doyle’s daughter actually played a part in the last season, and you can see a lot of her dad in her face, which in some ways added to the melancholy of it being the last we’ll see of this little village and the characters that hang out in Fitzgerald’s pub.

And today I watched the series finale of Stargate: Atlantis. I *loved* that show. Which is a totally separate issue from saying it’s a great show, because it isn’t. It was just a fun, entertaining sci-fi series with a cast of characters that felt like a family in a lot of ways. I’d *guess* that behind the scenes, the actors got along pretty well because there was always a feeling of  camaraderie when you watched. I love sci-fi and have since I was a kid. And I’ve noted in myself that I’m drawn to these shows that have a ‘family’ of characters that get along and don’t have a lot of interpersonal conflict. My own family life was pretty “lite” and I think in some small way I make these tv-show families my own. (I’m sure that’s not healthy, but oh well.) There’s no “bad guy” in the core cast of Atlantis, and very little friction between Atlantis team members. Every crew member is more or less a sci-fi cliche, but I’m just not bothered by that.

As to the finale itself, it was overly ambitious. It felt like they’d planned for a two-hour finale and had to whittle it down to an hour, because they stuffed a *lot* of stuff into that hour, to the point where it felt kind of disjointed and rushed. Not one of their best episodes, but I do enjoy when the writers of a series know they’re writing a finale (remember the last scene of Joss Whedon’s Angel? “I don’t know about you guys, but I’m going to slay a dragon.”) and can leave us with a poignant moment to remember the cast by.

So farewell EQ2 and Ballyk and EGM and Stargate: Atlantis.  Thanks for all the enjoyment you’ve brought me over the years. And in the case of EQ2…hope to see you again soon!

Tonight it’ll be the season finale of Sanctuary (hoping that one gets renewed) and then the conclusion of Tess of the D’Urbervilles on Masterpiece. More endings!

Just not feeling like gaming today, for some reason… this upcoming work week is going to be kind of brutal and I think I’m just recharging by watching lots of tv…

PS3Fanboy has a post up about PlayOn, software that you run on a Windows XP or Vista machine (no Mac OS X or Linux support, at least for now) that allows you to stream Hulu content to your PS3 or XBox360. The software is in beta and PS3F reports some clunkiness, but that’s what betas are for, right?

Netflix support is planned for later on down the road, which is probably of more interest to PS3 owners, since the 360 will be getting Netflix integration on the dashboard this fall. Me, I’ll stick to my Roku box for Netflix, which rocks.

Sign up and download the PlayOn software, and let me know how it works for you!

The Industry Standard brings us an article about QTV:

QTV by BroadQ uses a $30 piece of software to repurpose a PS2 as a digital media set-top for a TV or home theater. All users have to do is pop the DVD into their PS2, turn it on, and they are ready to either stream local network content or Internet shows like Revision3’s Digg Reel without leaving their sofas.

Brilliant idea. I’m going to be on the lookout for a copy of this software, and in the meanwhile I’ll dig out and dust off my old PS2.

I can’t in all honesty say that Eureka (Tuesday nights, Sci-Fi Channel) is a great show. But it’s just silly and geeky enough that I really enjoy it.

Running up to last Tuesday’s season opener, there was a campaign sponsored by Degree For Men, promoting Eureka via a bunch of crazy “new inventions” that might have been created by the denizens of the show. They were actually pretty amusing and had strong branding from both show and deodorant.

Now, in the past I’ve griped loudly about product placements in television shows. Smallville, for instance, is notorious for this, with some really cringe-worthy placements over the years. But a lot of shows do it. So when I was watching the first new Eureka of the new season, and the crew was walking through a room filled with boxes with “Degree for Men” labels plastered on the outside, I was drawing breath for a total, full-on rant about how horrible it was. And at that moment, main character Sheriff Carter pointed at the boxes and said “What’s all this?” and the new head of the research lab said brightly “Oh! It’s our first sponsor. It’s very exciting!!” and all the rant went out of me and I found myself laughing out loud. I mean, if you’re going to do a product placement, that seemed like the way to do it. It was funny, and broke the ’4th wall’ enough to offer viewers a wink and a nod. Yeah, they know we hate this stuff, but they gotta pay the bills.

One other neat Eureka note. They had a banner advertising the Twitter account: http://www.twitter.com/_S_A_R_A_H_. What’s fun is that whomever is monitoring that account is answering in the personal of the show’s “Smart House” SARAH. Pretty funny stuff, and another nice nod to us geeks who enjoy the show.

Sorry to keep going on about this show, but its so good I’d hate for any of my readers to miss it.

http://www.drhorrible.com

The third and final part is now posted, and the whole shebang is only up until sometime Sunday (tomorrow).

Joss Whedon fans, don’t miss it!

So Dr. Horrible’s Sing-A-Long Blog has launched at http://www.drhorrible.com/

Thus far, 2 out of 3 parts are posted, with the third going live Saturday the 19th. They’ll only be online for free until the 20th, after which you’ll be able to buy them from iTunes or order a DVD (details to be released at Comiccon).

So far, absolutely hysterical. I’ll definitely be getting the DVD version.

The New York Times has a piece on Amazon’s new TV & movie streaming service (to replace Amazon Unbox): Amazon Plans an Online Store for Movies and TV Shows.

Of note is this quote: It has struck a deal with Sony Electronics to place its Internet video store on the Sony Bravia line of high-definition TVs..

So two days after Sony announces their TV & Movie download service for the Playstation 3, Amazon announces a partnership of sorts with Sony Consumer Electronics for a competing service.

Granted the audience for Bravia TVs is much broader than that of the PS3, but you can access the PSN store from a computer. Why not stream that content to a Bravia TV?

It just seems like Sony is working against itself yet again.

Quick post for now, since I’m at work, but the first trailer for Joss Whedon’s new web-show, Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog is up:

Teaser from Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog on Vimeo.

Netflix users, just in case it got caught in a spam filter or something, Netflix sent out an email saying that it would be eliminating the “Profile” feature. This feature allowed you to have several queues per account. So if you have kids, you might have 1 queue with kid’s movies and another with stuff for the parents. Each queue worked individually, and you’d assign a number of disks to each queue. In my case, I had a “Series” queue where I put all the TV shows I rent, in sequence, and then a Movie queue for movies. I tend to watch movies only on weekends, but watch TV on DVD every day.

Anyway, it was a great organizational tool, and now its going away. Netflix isn’t saying why. Maybe they’re just trying to convince us to re-evaluate our memberships?

Here’s the email in full:

Important News Regarding Netflix Profiles

Dear Peter,

We wanted to let you know we will be eliminating Profiles, the feature that allowed you to set up separate DVD Queues under one account, effective September 1, 2008.

Each additional Profile Queue will be unavailable after September 1, 2008. Before then, we recommend you consolidate any of your Profile Queues to your main account Queue or print them out.

While it may be disappointing to see Profiles go away, this change will help us continue to improve the Netflix website for all our customers.

If you have any questions, please go to http://www.netflix.com/Help?p_faqid=3962 or call us anytime at 1 (888) 638-3549. We apologize for any inconvenience.

- The Netflix Team

I was reading Paul Stamatiou’s site for TechDispenser yesterday and he posted a review of the Vudu online movie rental service. Something about this gadget has gotten under my skin and I’m on a quest to slay it…enough so that I went back today and posted comments with my concerns.

This isn’t the first time I’ve commented about the unit. I posted this at Jaded’s Pub earlier this month:

——
Following up on the discussion we were having in the hi-def movie thread, there’s a new product called Vudu hitting the market soon. It’s a $400 box that has 5000 ‘movie stubs’ pre-loaded onto it. You hook it to the net and and pay per movie to watch. The ‘stub’ will start playing immediately with the rest of the movie downloading in the background, hopefully faster than you’re watching.

The movies aren’t high def, but the unit is supposed to upscale if you have an HDTV. It is capable of high def movies but they’re still negotiating the rights. You need a cable modem or better to use it. DSL isn’t fast enough, they say.

NY Times article: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/06/technology/circuits/06pogue.html

You *can* buy the movie for “$15-$20″ or rent it from $2-$4 (after which you have 24 hours to watch it).

The rig uses peer-to-peer with other Vudu users. NY Times seems to consider this to be a “cool feature” but to me it’s a drawback. I don’t need my ISP barking at me because I’m uploading huge files to random strangers. And I know when I use bittorrent (at least) it sucks down every byte of bandwidth. Heaven forbid the (internet) phone should ring because I can’t use Vonage and do a P2P bittorrent transfer at the same time.

NY Times seems really bullish on this product. Me, I’m not seeing it. $400 to pay full price for movies that I could play on any of my existing DVD players?
—–
[source]

I still don’t get it. People think shelling out $400 to buy a piece of hardware that lets you buy more things from the people you bought the hardware from is a good deal? I mean, I get the whole ‘razors and razorblades’ thing, but $400 doesn’t feel like a bargain price for this piece of hardware. They aren’t subsidizing the cost of the thing to get it into your living room. And they’re using the bandwidth you pay for in order to service their other customers!

I really hope this gadget/service flames out, because it sets all sorts of bad precedents.

There’s a new product called Vudu hitting the market soon. It’s a $400 box that has 5000 ‘movie stubs’ pre-loaded onto it. You hook it to the net (a wired connection is suggested) and, pick your movie and either rent ($2-$4) or buy ($15-20) it. The ‘stub’ will start playing immediately with the rest of the movie downloading in the background, hopefully faster than you’re watching. If you choose the rental option you have 24 hours to watch your film after you’ve paid.

The movies aren’t high def, but the unit is supposed to upscale if you have an HDTV. It is capable of high def movies but they’re still negotiating the rights and expect to ‘turn on’ this feature in the near future. However, the unit has a puny 250 gig hard drive. How many high def movies are going to fit on that? There’s a USB port that’ll eventually let you add an external drive, but that’s going to add to the cost of ownership.

You need a cable modem or better to use it. DSL isn’t fast enough, they say. And remember, they suggest a wired connection, so get ready to run ethernet to the living room…

NY Times article with all the details

The rig uses peer-to-peer with other Vudu users. NY Times seems to consider this to be a “cool feature” but to me it’s a drawback. I don’t need my ISP barking at me because I’m uploading huge files to random strangers. And I know when I use bittorrent (at least) it sucks down every byte of bandwidth. Heaven forbid the (internet) phone should ring because I can’t use Vonage and do a P2P bittorrent transfer at the same time.

NY Times seems really bullish on this product. Me, I’m not seeing it. $400 to pay full price for movies that I could play on any of my existing DVD players? Granted you don’t have to go to the store…but that’s not enough of a boon to offset the drawbacks, at least to me.

How about for you?

When I saw the first episode of The Guild I was tickled but wary… it was very, very funny and I’m scared to say I could relate to it almost too well. But was it a flash in the pan? Well Episode 2 is out, and it’s just as funny.

You can go to YouTube to watch them but I’m going to tempt you here and now…

Episode 1

Episode 2