Tag Archive for: TV

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The Tori Paradox

Everyone knows what a Saved by the Bell geek I am. If you didn’t know that then did you really know me? I mean, come on. As much as I love the show there are a few things that bug me. The biggest thing is when the tough biker chick Tori came on the show and Kelly and Jessie disappeared. Now, the story behind the switch is that NBC wanted more episodes after the final season was filmed. Tiffany Thiessen and Elizabeth Berkley, who played Kelly and Jessie, already committed to other things and didn’t want to film any more episodes. So what did the network do? They filmed additional episodes with a new girl, Tori, didn’t explain what happened to Jessie or Kelly, and stuck them in the middle of the last season. So in the last season we see Jessie and Kelly, then Tori, then Jessie and Kelly are back in time for graduation. This bugs me because there was no explanation and these episodes were clearly inferior. Then I started thinking, is an explanation really necessary?

I think back at my life. There are definitely times in my life when the friends I hung out with every day suddenly disappeared and I was no longer with them. Then all of the sudden, they’d be back in my life. This happened a lot in college, with both college friends and high school friends. The people I met while I was in college never knew my high school friends and I rarely, if ever, talked about my high school friends, just as the gang never talked about Jessie and Kelly when Tori came around. Then after college I started hanging out with some of my high school friends and some of my college friends disappeared. True, they were still in the same school on Saved by the Bell, but think about high school for a minute. It wasn’t that long ago. Weren’t there times when you stopped hanging with particular people, for no particular reason, then started hanging with them again? Maybe it was a busy semester for them, or you. Think about the people you’ve lost contact with and then later became best friends again. They are your Tori. Or you are theirs. Either way, while completely inferior to previous and later episodes, the Tori episodes actually do make sense. Even though Saved by the Bell is nowhere near real, that’s one part that is. Everyone has been a Tori or had Tori friends. You can sit there and watch episodes with Tori and not wonder where Kelly and Jessie are, just as you don’t always wonder where your lost friends went. So, no longer will I judge these episodes for the wool that NBC tried to pull over my eyes. I will judge them based on how good they actually were, which, except for the school song episode, they pretty much sucked.

The George Lopez Show

Lately I’ve been unable to sleep. I find myself watching old sitcoms late at night to try and lull me to sleep. It usually starts with Home Improvement and then I either listen to music or find something else to watch. Lately, I’ve just kept the channel wherever it was and watched what came on after Home Improvement. That would be the George Lopez Show.

I never watched this show when it was on in prime time. In fact, I don’t ever remember seeing it advertised at all. I mean, I remember hearing he had a show and I knew it was on ABC, but I never saw one advertisement for it or any promotion whatsoever. It seems like ABC treated it as filling their quota of minorities on TV and didn’t actually care if people watched it. That’s a shame. I’ve watched a few episodes and it is very funny. I have no idea how long it was on the air but I’m sure it probably wasn’t long enough. The characters on the show are great, George himself is funny, and it’s just a funny family sitcom. It’s a shame it wasn’t on a different network. I can’t tell you a sitcom I’ve watched on ABC in the last 10 years. They don’t have a record of the best sitcoms. Hour-long dramas and shows like Lost, yeah, but sitcoms seem to be dead on arrival there.

Anyway, if you’ve never watched the show and find yourself with some free time and notice it’s on, do yourself a favor and watch it. It’s surprisingly good.

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TBS: Very Annoying

There are a few shows I watch on TBS. I missed an episode of one of them. Luckily, at TBS.com you can watch episodes for free. Or not. I go there to catch up on a missed episode and guess what. We’re sorry, you must have Microsoft Windows to watch this video. Wtf? Seriously. Aren’t we at a point where specific operating systems shouldn’t be a requirement to watch a video on the internet? It’s not like my MacBook is a new invention and Macs haven’t been around for a while. They have. And their market share is growing. Rapidly. Support other operating systems so you don’t alienate users. I know I’ll never be going back to their website again. That’s a shame, because I could have generated them revenue by visiting to watch videos. Now if I miss episodes, I’ll have to find some other way to watch them.

Now if I could just get Adobe to allow for the most recent flash to be on the Wii so I can watch Hulu, I’d be happy. Not the Wii’s fault. Not Hulu’s fault. It’s all on Adobe.

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Special Guest Stars

Do you ever watch television and in the credits you see Special Guest Star and then the person’s name? Then after all they list all of the special guest stars they list the people that are Guest Starring. My question is, when you’re an actor, when do you go from being a “guest star” to a “special guest star?” Is there like a check list worked into the SAG contracts? “Once the actor has met these qualifications they move from Guest Starring to Special Guest Star. Do actors aspire to make this leap? Is there a pay increase with this change in title, and if so, is it a percentage, or how is that worked out? I get that the actors that are deemed special are usually more well-known, but I can’t help but wonder, who makes the decision on when you can make the switch. Who decides that you are now mainstream enough to be classified as special? One person may be more well know to some than others. In fact, I know I’ve seen television shows where the special guest stars weren’t all that famous, but had been around (Hollywood, the producers, directors, or writers of the show) long enough to be deemed special. It’s things like this that keep me up at night (not really).

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Santos and Obama

I’ve been noticing a lot of similarities between Congressman Matt Santos from TV’s The West Wing and Senator Barack Obama and have been wanting to write about it. The similarities between the two candidates are uncanny. They both have to overcome race issues, take on prominent Democratic frontrunners, and a moderate Republican. Even in the TV show, the Democrats were torn all the way up to the National Convention when Santos was finally declared the official nominee. Is that going to happen with Mr. Obama and Hillary Clinton? Time will tell. My sister sent me a link to this video and I realized I wasn’t just reaching with these thoughts. Santos was based on Obama and his Senate campaign.

If you want to see the similarities between Santos and Obama explained check out this video.