Remains of the Day

Malcolm Gladwell on The Colbert Report

Here's the interview. Gladwell tolerates Colbert's usual constructed preening with a bemused detachment.

Old interview with David Simon

An old but good interview with David Simon (The Wire) in The Believer.

Another reason the show may feel different than a lot of television: our model is not quite so Shakespearean as other high-end HBO fare. The Sopranos and Deadwood—two shows that I do admire—offer a good deal of Macbeth or Richard III or Hamlet in their focus on the angst and machinations of the central characters (Tony Soprano, Al Swearengen). Much of our modern theater seems rooted in the Shakespearean discovery of the modern mind. We’re stealing instead from an earlier, less-traveled construct—the Greeks—lifting our thematic stance wholesale from Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides to create doomed and fated protagonists who confront a rigged game and their own mortality. The modern mind—particularly those of us in the West—finds such fatalism ancient and discomfiting, I think. We are a pretty self-actualized, self-worshipping crowd of postmoderns and the idea that for all of our wherewithal and discretionary income and leisure, we’re still fated by indifferent gods, feels to us antiquated and superstitious. We don’t accept our gods on such terms anymore; by and large, with the exception of the fundamentalists among us, we don’t even grant Yahweh himself that kind of unbridled, interventionist authority.

But instead of the old gods, The Wire is a Greek tragedy in which the postmodern institutions are the Olympian forces. It’s the police department, or the drug economy, or the political structures, or the school administration, or the macroeconomic forces that are throwing the lightning bolts and hitting people in the ass for no decent reason. In much of television, and in a good deal of our stage drama, individuals are often portrayed as rising above institutions to achieve catharsis. In this drama, the institutions always prove larger, and those characters with hubris enough to challenge the postmodern construct of American empire are invariably mocked, marginalized, or crushed. Greek tragedy for the new millennium, so to speak. Because so much of television is about providing catharsis and redemption and the triumph of character, a drama in which postmodern institutions trump individuality and morality and justice seems different in some ways, I think.

***

My standard for verisimilitude is simple and I came to it when I started to write prose narrative: fuck the average reader. I was always told to write for the average reader in my newspaper life. The average reader, as they meant it, was some suburban white subscriber with two-point-whatever kids and three-point-whatever cars and a dog and a cat and lawn furniture. He knows nothing and he needs everything explained to him right away, so that exposition becomes this incredible, story-killing burden. Fuck him. Fuck him to hell.

***

There are two ways of traveling. One is with a tour guide, who takes you to the crap everyone sees. You take a snapshot and move on, experiencing nothing beyond a crude visual and the retention of a few facts. The other way to travel requires more time—hence the need for this kind of viewing to be a long-form series or miniseries, in this bad metaphor—but if you stay in one place, say, if you put up your bag and go down to the local pub or shebeen and you play the fool a bit and make some friends and open yourself up to a new place and new time and new people, soon you have a sense of another world entirely. We’re after this: Making television into that kind of travel, intellectually. Bringing those pieces of America that are obscured or ignored or otherwise segregated from the ordinary and effectively arguing their relevance and existence to ordinary Americans. Saying, in effect, This is part of the country you have made. This too is who we are and what we have built. Think again, motherfuckers.

West Wing, the real world edition

In the TV show The West Wing, Leo McGarry, an old friend of Josh Lyman, asks Josh to go listen to a man speak. McGarry wants Lyman to help this man run for the Presidency. Lyman is skeptical, but he treks out to a VFW hall in New Hampshire and listens to this candidate speaking to a hostile crowd. And when he hears the man speak, this man named Jed Bartlet, he is converted.

From Chapter 1 of Newsweek's Secrets of the 2008 Campaign:

Barack Obama had a gift, and he knew it. He had a way of making very smart, very accomplished people feel virtuous just by wanting to help Barack Obama. It had happened at Harvard Law School in the mid-1980s, at a time when the school was embroiled in fights over political correctness. He had won one of the truly plum prizes of overachievement at Harvard: he had been voted president of the law review, the first African-American ever so honored. Though his politics were conventionally (if not stridently) liberal, even the conservatives voted for him. Obama was a good listener, attentive and empathetic, and his powerful mind could turn disjointed screeds into reasoned consensus, but his appeal lay in something deeper. He was a black man who had moved beyond racial politics and narrowly defined interest groups. He seemed indifferent to, if not scornful of, the politics of identity and grievance. He showed no sense of entitlement or resentment. Obama had a way of transcending ambition, though he himself was ambitious as hell. In the grasping race for status and achievement—a competition that can seem like blood lust at a place like Harvard—Obama could make hypersuccessful meritocrats pause and remember a time (part mythical perhaps, but still beckoning) when service to others was more important than serving oneself.

Gregory Craig, a lawyer in Washington, D.C., was one of those Americans who wanted to believe again. Craig was not exactly an ordinary citizen—he had served and worked with the powerful all his life, as an aide to Sen. Edward Kennedy in the 1980s, as chief of policy planning at the State Department in the Clinton administration and as a lawyer hired to represent President Clinton at his impeachment trial in the U.S. Senate in 1999. He had seen the imperfections of the mighty, up close and personal, and by and large accepted human frailty. But, like a lot of Americans, he was tired of partisan bickering and yearned for someone who could rise above politics as usual. A 63-year-old baby boomer, Craig wanted to recapture the youthful idealism that he had experienced as a student at Harvard in the 1960s and later at Yale Law School, where his friends included Bill Clinton and Hillary Rodham. In the late fall of 2003, he was invited to hear a young state senator from Illinois who was running for the U.S. Senate. Craig was immediately taken with Barack Obama. "He spoke 20 to 30 minutes, and I found him to be funny, smart and very knowledgeable for a state senator," Craig recalled. Craig was so visibly impressed that his host that evening, the longtime Washington mover and shaker Vernon Jordan, teased him, saying, "Greg has just fallen in love."

Josh joins the campaign, Jed Bartlet becomes President of the United States, and Josh is appointed deputy chief of staff.

Netflix Instant Play finally available for Macs

Via Microsoft Silverlight. Rolls out tomorrow and requires Intel-chipped Macs.

This isn't just a hulu hoop, it's the circle of life

One more season of Mad Men done tonight, and we settle in for another long wait for the next season, keeping our fingers crossed that Matthew Weiner will be back.

Jon Hamm hosted SNL yesterday, and to nobody's surprise participated in a Mad Men segment. The best bit was the moment spoofing Don Draper's legendary pitches, which are my favorite part of Mad Men. Here it is, complete with music lifted straight from the Kodak Carousel pitch from the final episode of season one.

Negative ads, a long and distinguished history

If you think today's political ads are negative, check out some historical political tv ads. Here, for example, is perhaps the most famous ad of all time, the Daisy Girl ad, created by the ad agency DDB and run just once on TV by Lyndon B. Johnson against Barry Goldwater.

LBJ crushed Goldwater in the election.

Of course, while McCain hasn't shown an ad with Obama flying a plane into the Empire State Building, we still have a week and a half to go and McCain just had his worst polling day yet. If the McCain campaign goes that route, I suggest Obama run an ad of McCain wandering around the White House in his pajamas, drooling and mumbling incoherently, while elsewhere Palin stands in her enormous walk-in closet flipping through one of several hundred designer suits mumbling, "Ooh, you betcha!"

Stephen Colbert to appear in Amazing Spider-Man #573

I didn't even realize that Stephen Colbert is running for President in the Marvel Universe, but now he's making his first appearance in Amazing Spider-Man #573.

There will be a variant cover featuring Colbert swinging through the city with Spider-Man in tow (as seen to the left).

This is sure to get play on The Colbert Report, and I'll try to remember to link to the clip once it appears on Hulu.

In the meantime, I'm surprised by how many serial comic books are still in circulation. I suppose they serve the same purpose as patent applications, allowing Marvel to license properties out for movies and toys. The stories themselves matter little now, which is ironic since Hollywood turns to comic books for story franchises. Comic book characters are like pre-existing concepts which, in their built-in awareness, offset enough marketing spend to justify hanging just about any plot on them.

The Wire, the complete series, on Blu-Ray

On Dec 9, the complete run of The Wire, all five seasons, comes out on Blu-Ray. Those of you who watched The Wire don't need my endorsement. Those who haven't and own a Blu-Ray player? Treat yourself to a holiday gift of the best television series, or telenovel, ever.

It's called a carousel

My favorite moment from season 1 of Mad Men is in the last episode: Don Draper's presentation of an ad idea to Kodak for its new slide projector.

"It let's us travel the way a child travels. Around and around and back home again, to a place we know we are loved."

Joan Holloway

Any guy who watches Mad Men will understand why I share this clip of Christina Hendricks of Mad Men, better known as Joan Holloway. I don't know how accurate Mad Men is, but if it is, they don't make office managers like they used to.

Taco truck, where art thou? Also, some Hulu updates

We launched a bunch of new features to Hulu at around midnight, debugged for a while, and then just before 3am the late night crew here hopped into cars and rushed over to hit our late night go-to spot, the taco truck near Vons in West Los Angeles. Taco trucks do a poor job of branding. They have no names, only locations, and they are all referred to just by the generic name of their classification: taco truck.

That truck typically operates from 10pm to 3am, but on this night, it was not there. You know the economy is bad when even the taco trucks are impacted.

So we went to Izzy's Deli in Santa Monica and celebrated our labors until 4 in the morning.

Some of the new things you'll find on Hulu:

• Discussion boards
• Channels, including new ones like anime (Naruto or Mushi-Shi, anyone? Death Note?) and Food and Leisure (Giada!)
• Improved queue management, including the option to separate out subscription alerts from expiration alerts
• Show recommendations - at the bottom of each show page, we recommend other shows you might like based on what people are viewing.
• New TV and Movies homepage layouts

There are other subtle changes, some of which you may notice as you browse around the site.

Two other cool Hulu news bits: the latest issue of Wired magazine has an article on us, and Tina Fey mentioned Hulu when accepting the Emmy for 30 Rock as best comedy series on Sunday night. It's probably the closest I'll ever come to having Tina Fey say my name. Good enough.

Okay, I will go collapse now.

Chairlift gets uplift

[via Buzzfeed] Every time a new iPod is introduced, Apple features it in a commercial set with music from some obscure indie band that rides the publicity to newfound fame.

The lucky winner this time around? Chairlift.

View the new iPod nano ad.

Mad Men's one mistake

From Panopticist: Mad Men gets all the details right--except one:

...everything is of a piece: The art direction is so immersive that there are no clangy wrong notes to distract you from the rich psychological world the characters inhabit.

Until the show ends, that is. When the last frame flickers off the screen and the credits start to roll, careful observers—okay, just the font freaks—will notice a curious thing: The end credits are set not in the iconic sans serif used in the opening-credits sequence, and not in, say, Helvetica, which was designed in 1957 and became popular soon thereafter, but in Arial, the controversial Helvetica knockoff that Monotype cobbled together in the late 1980s to avoid paying license fees on Helvetica.

Thanks mainly to Microsoft, which has bundled Arial with every version of Windows since version 3.1, this “shameless impostor” has become one of the most widely used fonts in the world, if not the most widely used. No respectable designer would ever choose to use Arial, except in small sizes on the web, where its ubiquity must be catered to. The use of Arial indicates that Mad Men’s designers, so fussy about everything else, don’t consider the closing credits to be worthy of their oversight.

Going back to your old documents and finding Arial in them is like seeing your horrific hairdo in that high school yearbook photo.

A fresh take on reality programming

From one of the sites in my blogroll, This Blog Sits At The, a fresh look at the qualities of reality TV.

Reality programming is instructive. Pam and I watch Project Runway. I see a new design come down the runway, I take my money and I place my bet. Out loud, so that Pam can hear, I say what I think. And eventually I discover whether my judgment bore any resemblance to the experts who eventually hold forth.

It's clear that some education is taking place. My judgments diverge less and less. This means that this kind of reality programming is actually making me a more discerning observer of the world of fashion. It is helping me internalize my own modest mastery of the code.

...

Reality programming is not just cheap TV, it is responsive TV. Surely, one of the most sensible way for the programming executive to get back in touch with contemporary culture is to turn the show offer to untrained actors who have no choice but to live on screen, in the process importing aspects of contemporary culture that would otherwise have to be bagged and tagged and brought kicking and screaming into the studio and prime time. Reality programming is contemporary culture on tap. It is by no means a "raw feed." That is YouTube's job. But it is fresher than anything many executives could hope to manage by their own efforts. In effect, reality programming is "stealing signals" from an ambient culture, helping TV remain in orbit. (Mixed metaphor alert. Darn it, too late.)

This is an era in which we are inclined to issue lots of brave talk about cocreation, open source, and dynamic institutions. We speak of breaking down the citadel that separate the corporation from the real world. Well, this is actually what it looks like (for certain purposes). And funny old TV may in fact be one of the first meaning makers to figure out how we solve this particularly thorny problem. This, in turn, would make reality programming not the end of civilization as we know it, but a test case in what comes next.

What I find fascinating about reality programming are people who are addicted to the shows yet love to watch them just to tear down the participants. There is something bizarre in that ironic, conflicted behavior. Not that schadenfreude doesn't exist, but there is no greater charity you can contribute to a reality program participant than your eyeballs to their ratings.

Speaking of reality programming, Hulu now has the first episode of Architecture School.

TDS on the Olympics

Nothing like The Daily Show to put Olympics controversies in perspective.

Already, problems with Olympics broadcasting

I was so excited for this year's Olympics because for the first time, 2,200 hours were going to be put online at NBCOlympics.com. DirecTV has some 6 or 7 channels dedicated to the Olympics. It didn't seem possible that the problems with the last Olympics would recur, namely that anyone who is on the Internet would find out results before they were shown somewhere.

Alas, that idea of maximizing audience via an artificially enforced notion of primetime still haunts us. If you want to watch Michael Phelps compete in events, you don't get to see them live, at least not on the West Coast in any legal fashion. I logged into ESPN this morning and there on the front page were the results of Phelps' first heat of the 400 IM Medley (which I won't share here). In fact, the result is even listed on the homepage of NBCOlympics.com. But the network is trying to still aggregate an audience for TV, so marquee events like that are not shown online, they are only shown on TV on a delayed schedule. In this case, the heats are shown at 3:30 to 4:30pm PST.

The final is at 5pm PST, but on the west coast they are going to delay coverage until 8pm PST, so for three hours the East Coast and Midwest in the U.S. will know the results, while the PST folks will have to detach all electronic devices and live in willful ignorance of the sports world if they wish to have any suspense when watching the main events on TV.

The revolution will be tape-delayed. Sigh.

Bernie Mac dead

Just 50 years old. People still die from pneumonia?

Mad Men Illustrated

Robot Chicken: Star Wars

All four chapters of Robot Chicken: Star Wars are online at Adult Swim. For all Star Wars fans, this is essential viewing. You will laugh. You will cry (from laughing so much). And it is better than Cats.

Did you hear me? Essential viewing. Go now. Leave. Go watch it.

Wachovia savings commercial

Hazel directed, Raza co-directed and animated, and Chris shot this entry for a Wachovia TV commercial contest around savings (all classmates of mine from film school). Check it out and vote.

Mad Men

Watching Mad Men gives me an irresistible urge to smoke herbal cigarettes (yes, that's what they're smoking instead of actual cigarettes, something I learned from the recent NYTimes Magazine profile).

The show is packed with smart, if stylized, dialogue. I wonder if ad agency employees watch the show with the same concealed pride with which invesmtent bankers watch American Psycho.

Dream portrait assignment

If I were Annie Leibovitz, or Richard Avedon, or some other photographer to the stars, and I was offered the opportunity to shoot any TV characters, I'd want to photograph Jamie Hector, Gbenga Akinnagbe, and Felicia Pearson, AKA Marlo Stanfield, Chris Partlow, and Snoop from The Wire.

Just three fantastic faces.

R.I.P. Tim Russert

I read the news as I was waiting to board my flight to Chicago today, and it felt as if a beloved uncle had passed away.

The truth tickles

Jon Stewart contemplates Obama's health record.

As Chris Rock said about McCain, "How can you make decisions about the future if you aren't going to be there?"

More Stewart..."Nobody joins the Marines because they think they're going to fight fire monsters."

The media writes that young people get more of their news from The Daily Show than regular news channels, and the note that with a tone of disapproval, but who keeps the politicians more honest than the court jester? The Daily Show is our news outlet of choice because it, more than any other news show, says what we think, and does it with style and humor.

Go Speed Racer

One of the catchier theme songs around...

The first season is up at Hulu, with the rest following closely behind, all 52 or so episodes. I have fond memories of watching this some lazy summer afternoons as a child. At an early age, I had gadget envy, what with the Mach 5 having a bunch of buttons on its steering wheel, each of which would activate some whiz-bang function.

Hulu also now has Versus' weekly cycling recap show Cyclysm Sundays. Now that I'm felled by my torn Achilles tendon, watching or hearing about any sport is like grapefruit juice in my eye, but I do have fond memories of cycling as the sport that brought me back to a mental and physical whole after blowing out my knee back in 1998.

Last, another good new add: the 2008 National Heads-Up Poker Championship. Hulu now has all the full episodes of this year's tournament. This episode has Phil Ivey heads up against Johnny Chan.

Smoking

David Sedaris on smoking in this week's New Yorker.

When I started smoking myself, I realized that a lit cigarette acted as a kind of beacon, drawing in any freeloader who happened to see or smell it. It was like standing on a street corner and jiggling a palmful of quarters. “Spare change?” someone might ask. And what could you say?

...

Given my reputation as a strident non-smoker, it was funny how quickly I took to cigarettes. It was as if my life were a play, and the prop mistress had finally showed up. Suddenly there were packs to unwrap, matches to strike, ashtrays to fill and then empty. My hands were at one with their labor, the way a cook’s might be, or a knitter’s.

Speaking of smoking, season one of Mad Men comes out on DVD July 1. I've tried to kick the DVD-buying habit this past year, but hot diggity that is some tempting product packaging.

Disappointing that the Blu-Ray box art for the same box set is purely conventional.

Recommended

Chris Rock's latest standup tour - Last night I caught Chris Rock's latest standup show with some coworkers. I have to let it soak in over a few weeks (during which I will dutifully, as a male, repeat his jokes to many of my coworkers and friends with a substantially substandard delivery that will deflate 85% of the humor of the routines), but with the performance fresh in my mind I'm convinced it's his best standup performance yet. I was in tears a couple of times. The Presidential election, race relations, differences between men and women, marriage, sex, steroids...he ranged over all the topics I was hoping he'd hit. If he's coming to your town, get yourself a ticket.

There's nothing like seeing good standup live; you can watch the inevitable HBO special, but you won't have the energy from thousands of people laughing to feed off of (the flipside is probably also true, that seeing bad standup live is exponentially more uncomfortable than seeing it on TV).

I last saw him live in Seattle some four years ago, during his Never Scared tour. Of all the standup comedians I've seen live (not a huge list, but includes folks like Dennis Miller, Seinfeld, Russell Peters), Chris Rock is my favorite. I saw Seinfeld twice in a four year span, and he repeated a great deal of his material. Though Rock covers similar themes in each show, I've never heard him use the same joke twice.

***

Lays ketchup flavored potato chips - one of my coworkers brought a bag back from Toronto. Apparently this flavor is a specialty north of the border. In America we love ketchup with our french fries, so why hasn't this flavor of chips caught on here? Whatever the reason, to satiate my fix I may have to resort to bidding on eBay.

***

State of Play - the British just seem to be able to crank out great political thrillers and police procedurals (I'm still a huge fan of Spooks, or MI-5 as they rebrand it for BBC America). This six-part miniseries stars the always fantastic Bill Nighy and a young Kelly MacDonald and James McAvoy, to name a few actors more recognized this side of the pond. It starts, as these things often do, with a dead body. When the press, government, industry, and police all tug on the thread, the plot unravels at a healthy clip.

Feed Our Kids Well?

The long lost first episode of The Dana Carvey Show is now available on Hulu, featuring, yes, the infamous "Bill Clinton breastfeeding puppies" sketch. Timely satire, perhaps, given this election season?

In one of those inadvertent and bizarre coincidences, the ad campaign on this skit happened to be Ragu's Feed Our Kids Well campaign, leading to the the unplanned visual convergence below (click for a larger view; you won't fully understand unless you've seen the skit).

The Office and 30 Rock, back

Last night, The Office and 30 Rock came back from the writer's strike with new episodes. And laughter rang through the kingdom.

The Office - "Dinner Party"

30 Rock - "MILF Island"

What do you see?

One of yesterday's hot Internet stories was this photo from the White House website which appeared to show Dick Cheney leering at a nude female sunbather.

In a bit of PR control, and perhaps as evidence that we see what we want to see, the powers that be released a larger version of the photo which reveals that the reflection in his sunglasses was nothing more than a hand holding a fishing rod. [via popurls]

***

A plug to watch Arrested Development on Hulu via Airbag's Longboard: "Thanks to Hulu, the world no longer has an excuse for not watching Arrested Development. Sometimes the Internet just gives and gives and gives."

Another fun place I found a Hulu embedded video: in Sasha Frere-Jones New Yorker blog.

***

PicLens, a cool browser plugin I often use to show people photos on Flickr, has a beta version that supports YouTube video browsing in Firefox, including Firefox 3b5, and IE. I couldn't get any videos to actually start playing, but I saw it working in a demo. Select a video and it starts playing right there within PicLens' 3-D wall.

Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip on Hulu

If you missed Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip the first time around, when it aired on TV, or, if you're like me and never caught up with the accumulated episodes on his DVR before having to return it to DirecTV, you can now catch up on every episode on Hulu, starting with this one...

Iran So Far

Who's the Star?

In this week's New Yorker, Joan Acocella surveys Dancing with the Stars.

What can you learn from “Dancing with the Stars”? First, the difference between a dancer and a non-dancer. The people who partner the stars on the show are not just professional ballroom dancers; in their field they are bigger stars than their partners are in their fields. I don’t know why they’re up there, dragging those klutzes around—the pay must be good—but when you watch them dancing with non-professionals you will see what makes a person a dancer. Contrary to widespread belief, the main difference is not in the feet but in the upper body—the neck, the shoulders, the arms, which are stiff in the amateur and relaxed and eloquent in the professional. The other giveaway is in “line.” You may think you don’t know what that is, but, as with consonance in music, you do know. It is the carriage of the body in a way that seems harmonious and natural, as opposed to awkward and forced. Poor Monica Seles, with every step she took, ended in a position that no human being has ever willingly assumed. She was eliminated in the first round.

Bad Idea Jeans

An old classic.

"He That Believeth In Me"

I've had so little free time recently that I haven't been able to try out Battlestar Galactica. Season 1 is bubbling up in my Netflix queue, but I've had the same three discs at home for a month now, the weight of the carrying costs outweighed by the (a) ambition, (b) guilt, (c) busy schedule, (d) all of the above (Ikiru? Berlin Alexanderplatz? Anyone?)

But I know how passionate the fans are and wonder if I shouldn't be trying to catch up with a greater sense of urgency. Season 4 tipped off last night...

What the...?

Bizarre moment from the minisode of the pilot of Sheena. It's hard to go wrong with a man in a gorilla suit.

***

Kanye West launches a travel site: Kanye Travel Ventures. It's not clear to me what the Kanye twist on this is, but then I could never figure out what Paul Newman had to do with tomato sauce either. [via Thrillist]

Odds and Ends

Oh, I'll just set aside my $80 for this now.

Kevin Love, making like Lebron James in that Powerade commercial.

Friday Night Lights greenlit for Season 3, but only in a unique deal in which it airs on DirecTV first, starting in October, then moves over to NBC in 2009?

Howard Shore scoring, Guillermo del Toro directing...The Hobbit sounds promising.

The sometimes bizarre effects of scarcity: a used copy of the CD of the score to The Transformers is running, at a minimum, $89.99 on Amazon.com.

South Park online

Every episode of South Park ever, online to stream for free. The amount of time a lot of people can spend online just went up a lot.

EW

Entertainment Weekly has an article on Hulu in today's issue. Online at EW.com, Ken Tucker created a list of 10 videos, personal picks, discovered as he surfed Hulu over a work week. It's a good list that I'll have to work my way through sometime (yes, as with being a film student and having no time to watch movies, working at Hulu leaves you with little time to watch much TV, except in your spare time, on Hulu).

Always exciting to be in a magazine that is such a pop culture touchstone, but especially exciting for Christina, our fearless PR leader.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Happy day! Hulu added all of Season 2 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, maybe my favorite of all the seasons of the show. If you've never watched the show, you can catch up on the short 12 episode season 1 on Hulu and flow right into the full 22 episode second season.

The show's sophomore season is a television classic built on so many of the series' best romances: Buffy and Angel's tragic love affair, the beauty and the geek pairing of Cordelia and Xander, the odd couple of Willow and Oz, and even one between Watcher Giles and Jenny Calendar. As so many shows are working hard to crank out new episodes in the wake of the strike settlement, I can't think of too many better ways to fill your TV void.

Tracy

SNL offers a counterpoint to Tina Fey's unabashed support for HRC.

Hulu launches

Around 1:45AM this morning, Hulu shed the covers of private beta and opened to the public. Anyone in the U.S. can now come to our site and watch any of our videos for free. No special software needed other than a web browser, Flash player, and an internet connection. PC, Mac, Linux users, we support all of you.

We've all substituted caffeinated beverages for sleep for days now, and this morning I came into work with my t-shirt on backwards. Coherence is going to be a bit of a reach.

We have increased our content lineup significantly. Among my favorites:

• Every episode ever of Arrested Development, all 52 of them.
• The Big Lebowski. Dude.
• The Lonely Goatherd from The Sound of Music, and the other musical numbers you'd expect from there: Sixteen Going on Seventeen, Maria, Do Re Mi, Edelweiss, My Favorite Things, So Long, Farewell, and The Hills Are Alive. Pauline Kael may not be a fan, but it's the music of my childhood.
• Kagemusha . Yeah, the Akira Kurosawa classic!
• The top 10 moves of February from the NBA. Warning: more than a few ankles are broken in this one. And here's that crazy Chris Paul dribble move from the All-Star Game, in which he fakes a crossover and snaps the ball back to himself with backspin, goes by the defender, and dishes to the trailer for the dunk. Chris Paul is crazy good.
• "Down by the River" from SNL, featuring Chris Farley. I miss that guy, and I miss his show.
• "Ultimate Power in the Universe" from Family Guy: Blue Harvest. Watching for free is a great way to try out shows you've heard of but missed out on the first time around, and Family Guy has been that show for me, the one that Hulu got me hooked on.

People love to associate Hulu with big media because of some of our investors, but Hulu is a startup through and through (look at the team photo below, taken at around 1:50 this morning--I don't think we look big media, do you?). It's the smallest company I've ever worked at if you don't count the lemonade stand I ran one summer day when I was about 8. Smaller than Amazon.com was when I worked there. We have our initial investments from which to run our company, but we're not going to be spending it on big parties with models walking around holding trays of saffron baby lamb chops. No, our pre-launch evening meal for everyone pulling an all-nighter was some 100 tacos from a local taco truck here in Santa Monica, at the extravagant cost of $1.25 per taco. Our biggest spend that night, out of our own pockets, was to raise $160 among the team to dare one of our star programmers Andrew to drink two cups of salsa, one red hot, one green, in 30 seconds. Andrew woke this morning $160 richer, though I'd venture to guess he paid the price sometime during the day.

A small group of people, a little family, work night and day (sometimes more night than day) to put this site together from scratch. Some of the user e-mails I've read make the easy assumption that we're an ignorant, uncaring media behemoth, but we do care, perhaps too much for our own peace of mind. Between Eric, Betina, and myself, we've read well over 10,000 e-mails since we went into our private beta, and rather than go the form e-mail response route, we've tried to respond personally to every e-mail we can. We're gratified by the compliments, and we agonize over the angry e-mails, even the inaccurate and/or profane ones.

We do want to be able to distribute our content internationally. We do want to offer more episodes of every show on our site. We do want more varied ad creative so that we don't have to watch the same ad spots over and over. We do want closed-captioning on every video on our site. And we do want to do it legally, in a way that compensates the creative people all the way back at the start of the food chain. Not a day goes by that we don't wish we could just accelerate the future with a snap of our fingers and have everyone in the world streaming HD content to their plasma TV's.

It's easy to bash big media and claim to be forced to resort to piracy, and it is absolutely the right of users to write in with their honest feedback. It's the most useful kind. But it's far harder to try to fix the problems. It's easy to open up your blog editor and rip the movie you just saw. It's exponentially harder to go out and make a movie. It's easy to laugh at some startup you read about in the news because the business plan sounds terrible. It's much harder to start a company yourself.

We're working here to try to fix the industry from within. We want to be able to watch all our favorite videos however we want, just like you. We're building this service to be one we want to use. We're not anywhere near the finish line. It always feels like the to-do list outweighs the completed side of the ledger. But if it didn't, then it wouldn't be that interesting a challenge, and most of us probably wouldn't be here.

Check out our site, and if you don't mind, help spread the word. The more users we can rally to our cause, the quicker we can transform things for the better.

Cheers!

Hey, it's Julie Taylor

I'm not sure why I didn't notice this before, but the person asking the question in the (in)famous Miss South Carolina clip from the Miss Teen USA competition is Aimee Teegarden.

Friday Night Lights was a really good book, a good movie, and it's a great TV series, too, though admittedly I've only been able to watch 7 episodes here on Hulu, 15 minutes here and there over lunch at the desk.

With shows like Arrested Development and Friday Night Lights, what's the truth? Do devoted fans overestimate the mass appeal of the show, or is it really, as fans claim, misguided marketing strategies on the part of the studio. If Friday Night Lights aired on a better night, not Friday night, would it grab a wider audience? How could Arrested Development have been saved?

The economics of more niche TV series and movies still seem prohibitive for creators. Talking to many producers of indie films, even finding a niche audience on DVD doesn't help many of them to recoup production costs.

Lower production costs, remove some layers of middleman marketing and replace with more efficient marketing channels (read: the Internet), lower distribution costs (again, the Internet), bump some of the revenue streams forward in time (overlap windows like DVD and theatrical/first run TV broadcast), and I hope the ecosystem is more friendly to shows like this.

As for Friday Night Lights, if you don't already watch it, the best way for me to support it is to try and hook you. Here are the first three episodes from season one.

Ah, Jack

With the writer's strike over, here's hoping Alec, er, Jack, is soon to be back.

State of the arts

Bryan Caplan on Tyler Cowen on the state of the arts:

From the standpoint of the consumer, the supply of great art has clearly never been better. And even from the standpoint of the producer, it is easy to argue that, overall, this is the best of times.

From Caplan's five points on why that is:

5. One of Tyler's best points: The past often looks better than the present if you compare the best to the best. There is no living composer as great as Bach. Nevertheless, the present looks much better than the past if you compare the fifth-best to the fifth-best. Who even wants to listen to the fifth-best Baroque composer? But the fifth-best punk rock band (say, the Dead Kennedys) is excellent.

That's almost certainly true for television. In music, thought CD sales are down, distribution via the Internet means I can more easily discover new music than in the days when radio was my primary means of exposure.

I'm less certain about the quality of movies overall, but there's no doubt that accessing classic movies via DVD and services like Netflix has broadened my viewing canvas in a huge way.

Jon Stewart, Stephan Colbert, and Conan O'Brien

Here's the clip from Monday's Conan O'Brien, the last in the Stewart-Colbert-O'Brien feud series that spanned the three talk shows.

Sexual Harrassment and You

Super Bowl ads

Wow, what an upset! Tom Brady can take solace in being one of the few people in the world for whom this ad is not aspirational.

I also have some Hulu invites to give out, so leave a comment with your e-mail address if you're interested in one but haven't gotten in yet.

Liftoff

Tonight's episode of Mythbusters settled, among other things, that long-standing Internet debate about whether or not an airplane on a conveyor belt moving backwards (like a treadmill) at a speed equal to the airplane's normal ground speed during takeoff would lift off or not.

The answer? The plane does take off. The thurst of the airplane engines acts on air, not on the ground through the wheels.

Technorati Tags: mythbusters, science, tv

Conan O'Brien playing Rock Band

Since I got my repaired guitar for Rock Band (looks like there was a design flaw that they've since corrected in other shipments, thankfully), it's the only game I spend any time playing. When I hear a song that's in Rock Band come on the radio, my ears try to pick out the guitar or drum line, and I visualize the notes in the guitar line scrolling down towards me as in the videogame. It really does engage you with music in a very deep way. It's the same bond I feel with classical pieces I played when I was in the violin section of various youth orchestras.

I'm not the only one who feels that way. In just two months since Rock Band launched, players have purchased more than 2.5 million new songs to add to their game libraries! I'm responsible for at least a good 10 to 12 of those song purchases. $1.99 for a song I can play forever in the game seems entirely reasonable to me. I would love to see them allow third parties to offer songs for the game, though, as the trickle of 3 new songs a week already feels paltry (though they added some Oasis songs this week--can't wait to try my hand at those!).

This past weekend, the morning after one particular late-night Rock Band session, I found a notice hanging on my front door for a Community Violation. The box for "loud music" was checked off. At first I was perturbed, but then a certain sense of pride took hold as I realized I was still young enough to keep the neighbors up.

My one and primary complaint is that stand-alone guitars are still not available for the game, so you can't play with a full four piece band. Unless you invite over a Rock Band-playing friend who plays it on the same console as you do and is willing to bring over their guitar, you're limited to playing either guitar or bass but not both. That guitars from one game, like Guitar Hero, don't work with other games, like Rock Band, is extremely disappointing as they all use the same basic control scheme.

My only guess on this is that they rushed the game out for the holidays and couldn't ramp up production in time to have stand-alone guitars available. Forecasting in the gaming industry seems dodgy, at best. You'd think after so many years that the Nintendo Wii would be readily available, but no.

Midnight Train to Georgia

I'm not a huge musical person, but I'm a sucker for musical spoofs. Someone randomly breaks out in song unexpectedly in a movie or TV show, I will laugh. From last night's 30 Rock:

The Wire

I'm late to The Wire, but damn, how good was season 2, which I just finished watching? Now in its fifth and final season, I'm happy to report that all the reports of its greatness are all true. Best show on TV by a comfortable margin. I'm just blown away.

Technorati Tags: hbo, dvd, television, thewire

E. Pluribus Wiggum

In this election season, a very timely episode of The Simpsons.

Firefly

At the end of last week, we added every episode of Firefly to Hulu. Watching all fourteen episodes and then topping it off with the feature film Serenity would be a satisfying way to spend part of your holiday break. The movie can be watched without having seen the TV show, but it packs a much greater emotional punch if you watch the TV run first. Here are the first two episodes:

Garkel

Working at Hulu allowed me to finally catch up on some of the first season of 30 Rock, a show so many people had recommended to me but which first year film school didn't allow time for. Tracy Morgan? Alec Baldwin doing comedy? I'm not sure why I waited so long.

Well played, Garkel.

Jack Bauer Eats

A bunch of my classmates helped clip content this summer at Hulu. One of the funniest clips, which Mira cut and which just crossed my desk randomly one morning, was titled simply "Jack Bauer Eats."

One: cut a hole in the...oh, you know

A quick little test for work, and also a chance to revisit a classic.

More HD from DirecTV

DirecTV launched 21 new HD channels yesterday:

• A&E (Channel 265)
• Animal Planet (Channel 282)
• Big Ten Network (Channel 220)
• CNN (Channel 202)
• The Discovery Channel (Channel 278)
• The History Channel (Channel 269)
• The Movie Channel East (Channel 544)
• NFL Network (Channel 212)
• Showtime West (Channel 540)
• Showtime too (Channel 538)
• The Smithsonian Channel (Channel 267)
• The Science Channel (Channel 284)
• Starz Comedy (Channel 519)
• Starz East (Channel 522)
• Starz West (Channel 540)
• Starz Edge (Channel 520)
• Starz Kids and Family (Channel 518)
• TBS (Channel 247)
• TLC (Channel 280)
• Versus / The Golf Channel (Channel 604)
• The Weather Channel (Channel 362)

More are coming in October and by year's end, including FX, NBA TV, The Food Network, Cartoon Network, Bravo, MTV, VH1, and Tennis Channel. Good times. I chose an apartment on the inside of my complex just so I could get a DirecTV satellite pointed the right way out my balcony.

Technorati Tags: HD, DirecTV, tv

Abracadabra...uh, open sesame...uh, hocus pocus

Last night, I got home from work around 1 in the morning and pulled up to the electronic gate to my parking garage and pressed my remote key fob button. Nothing happened. I waved it out the window, then got out of the car and walked up to the gate, pressing the key fob near any place I thought the sensor might reside. No luck.

One car pulled up behind me, then another, and soon a few others. We all stood outside our cars, pressing our key fobs. In our neighborhood, there wasn't any street parking, so we were stuck. It was 1 in the morning, I was dead tired, and I was not a happy camper (though if my key fob was out of order then I was on the verge of being literally an unhappy camper).

So I turned my attention to the exit gate, just next to the entrance. That was one of those gates that opened as soon as you pulled up to it. The sensor for that was a bit further inside the garage, but by sticking my tennis racket through the gate I could just reach far enough to trip it and open the gate. I managed to lean my tennis racket against the sensor and then directed traffic through the exit like John McClane waving the planes home at the end of Die Hard 2.

A different discontent plagued me in the nanosecond before I passed out. The security in our parking garage is not good, not good at all.

***

Kanye vs. 50 Cent, as judged by Amazon Sales Rank: Decision to Kanye. Critic's average judgment? The same. From guns to lyrics to now sales...hip-hop conflicts are progressing to more civilized playing fields.

***

Jon Stewart will host the Oscars in February. He seemed a bit nervous to start the last time (even the coolest customer can experience some jitters in the face of so much star power), but he loosened up by the end of the ceremony. I think the second time will be the charm.

***

My favorite Microsoft application was always Excel. I spent a good portion of my early career in that application building massive models, writing macros in VBA, pushing it to its limits. It didn't always keep up--I always had problems getting linked workbooks to update and calculate quickly, and sharing workbooks among my team never worked quite as we wanted to--but of the Office suite, it's always been king.

I hate Powerpoint, and Word's formatting quirks always drove me batty. So when Apple came out with Keynote, and then Pages, I was willing to switch over. I haven't yet, but only because I don't use Word or Powerpoint anymore. All my writing now is done in a plain text editor, e-mail client, script formatting software, or with an actual pen and notebook. As for Powerpoint, I haven't had to make one of those in years, hallelujah.

But I was curious about Numbers, the new spreadsheet app in iWork 08, so I fired it up, imported an Excel spreadsheet, and gave it a whirl. I attempted to update the spreadsheet

Though I like a lot of the interface decisions made in Numbers, I will remain, for the time being, an Excel guy. And it isn't because Number lacks advanced features like pivot tables. My main complaint with Numbers is that it's not keyboard friendly. You have to use the mouse to do so many things that Excel allows you to do without leaving the keyboard. Mousing around a spreadsheet is just counter to my working style.

Numbers might be the "spreadsheet for the rest of us," but I guess that makes me one of Them.

***

George Saunders appears on David Letterman.

***

Looks like I won't be seeing The White Stripes in concert after all. Disappointing.

***

Patriots fined and penalized for videotaping NY Jets defensive signals. Outside of the Bears, the Patriots were once one of the few teams I rooted for because they seemed to win by being smarter than their opponents. Outside of Tom Brady, they didn't have too many marquee names, and they didn't have a crazy financial advantage like teams like the Yankees or Red Sox because of the NFL salary cap. They were the Oakland A's of the NFL.

I suspect that the advantage they gathered from videotaping opponent signals is overstated (as is the case with many forms of cheating in sports), but what's disappointing is the hubris and stupidity/arrogance represented by the videotaping scheme. They were playing a team coached by one of their ex assistant coaches; how did they think they were going to get away with it?And anyone watching the two teams would think it ridiculous that the Patriots had to resort to such scheming to defeat the Jets.

If Mangini was part of such a practice when he was with the Patriots, and if he was indeed the one who snitched his ex-team out, then there's a beautiful tragic resonance to the sequence of events. Every one involved with the scheme is getting what they deserve: Mangini is seen as a rat, Belichick (never a warm fuzzy personality to begin with) is seen as a win at all costs Nixon of the NFL, and the Patriots now will never get the full credit they deserve for their accomplishments.

People are always going to be jealous of and resent perennial winners, but it certainly helps the cause to have ammunition. Brady fathering children out of wedlock and dating supermodels, Harrison using HGH, Belichick and staff using videotape surveillance...it's more than enough.

As a sidenote, a cyclist caught using HGH nowadays is looking at a minimum of a year's suspension and a lifetime of disgrace. A pro football player caught using steroids or HGH gets a four game suspension and then is back on the field, or in the case of Shawn Merriman, on to the Pro Bowl or Nike television commercials.

The NFL has been rocked by all sorts of scandal for a year straight now, from Michael Vick to HGH to PatriotsGate to the revolving convict lineup on the Bengals to who knows what else, and you know what? The league is as popular as ever. The NFL is so popular that it doesn't seem to absorb any economic penalty from scandal. Perhaps because of the violent nature of the game, fans seem far more tolerant of steroid use in the NFL than in other sports.

The last part of summer

Big day today - the first 25 Red cameras shipped. From Jim Jannard:

Just so you know, I am here at 1:09am with the RED team personally reviewing each camera of the 1st 25. We are calibrating each camera and my job is to check the files in RED Alert! that Jarred is shooting. We are shooting ISO 320, 1000 and 2000. There are about 20 people here getting ready for tomorrow. It really is a memorable night. About a year and a half ago this was just a dream. Tonight the dream has become a reality.

I want to thank all those that believed in RED from the beginning.

Jim

And all around the world, high end digital video camera profit margins shrink.

***

Dancing with the Stars…it’s a lot about the casting. I’ve only ever seen clips, but the talent they’ve convinced to grasp at that last of their 15 minutes of fame has been impressive. Among the cast for the upcoming season:

• Mark Cuban
• Floyd Mayweather Jr.
• Wayne Newton
• Scary Spice (Melanie Brown)
• Helio Castroneves
• Jenni Garth
• Josie Maran
• Marie Osmond
• Jane Seymour

Mark Cuban isn't making some last clutch at fame, I think it's more about brand bolstering for him. Generating constant publicity for himself is just part of who he is. Mayweather is in the tail of his career, and I'm surprised to see him on the list. The The rest all make sense.

***

Farecast lauches hotel search in beta. It’s both similar and different to their airfare service which lets you know whether fares are likely to go up or down and thus whether to buy now or wait. Their hotel service, called Hotel Rate Key, lets you know whether a hotel’s rates are a bargain or not relative to that hotel’s historical rates.

***

What the residents of Dunder Mifflin did on their summer vacation:

***

Tom Wolfe reviews Entourage

But there is hope in this moxie wasteland of moviemakers. Johnny Drama draws not my ire. Here is the bravado-laden torch of the past, its fire fueled by protein shakes and casting off the nearly forgotten aroma of desire. His ginseng-toned body twisting and gyrating with anxiety and self-doubt, he’s a New Age Neal Cassady, passed up here for a Lifetime movie, there for a Hallmark Channel special—the Houghton Mifflin and HarperCollins of the television world. Johnny Drama is no mere muzzled bus driver, however. He is a symbol of irony, that word now recognized only by the literati. Played by Kevin Dillon, Sancho Panza to real-life brother Matt, this role oozes the true Hollywood pathos of silver-screen heartbreak. If watch Entourage you must, then watch it for Drama.

***

Indexed - lots of fun. I have a hard time picking my favorite.

***

Gorilla movie - [via Daring Fireball via Fresh Signals via AdFreak]

Two posts that seem like action and reaction

Time on the internet to surpass time watching TV for the average US household. I passed that point long ago.

TorrentSpy blocks US searches.

And so it ends

Tim Goodman, speculating on the finale of The Sopranos, wrote:

And Tony's fate is still undecided.

Is that such a bad thing? The static, Chase-esque, unrequited climax always seemed romantic -- have the series end with nothing happening, as if the camera shut off while filming, as if Tony and his two families went on with their lives, but our little glimpse ended.

Goodman goes on to change speculate on a number of other possible endings, but if he'd just ended his article there, that would be a pretty good call.

That will go down as one of the more famous cuts to black in editing history. That entire last scene was just an editing tour de force.

Technorati Tags: sopranos, tv

Showdown Sunday

Federer vs. Nadal on the terre battu. Tony Soprano vs. Phil Leotardo on the New Jersey soil.

It's also the day I have to face down my movie and wrangle it into a screenable form for the last week of school, but for the two showdowns noted above, I'll be glued to the screen.

Technorati Tags: sopranos, tennis, tv

Memorial Day weekend

I am really sick: eyes watering, nose running, throat burning. My sinuses and chest are so congested I feel like I'm breathing through one of those coffee straws. A lot of people at school seem to be sick; one professor just canceled a class tomorrow morning. It's odd to see a cold seize hold around school when the weather is 70 degrees and sunny every day