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Now that President Obama gave the State of the Union address, the host chair of the Tonight Show is settled, Chuck premiered and Steve Jobs announced Apple’s new iPad, the Internets can finally fully devote attention to preparing for the most important media event EVER: the final season of Lost.
The Chicago Tribune’s Maureen Ryan interviews showrunners Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof in an epic three part interview.
As only he can, ALOTT5MA’s Isaac Spaceman recaps to this point: Welcome to the Hanso Island Resort and Spa
I’ve been re-watching season one, and I’m amazed at how different the show has become since then. Initially, this was a show about the characters who crashed on Craphole Island. As important as the various situations they encountered was how their reaction to those situations is affected by (or how the crash has forced them to reconsider) their actions in their lives before the crash. Since then, it’s gone on to be a time-bending show that’s grown in scope and added new characters with a connection to the island, who were not on Oceanic Flight 815 (and generally more compelling than many of the original characters.)
What most of the shows that have since attempted to be the next Lost seem to have forgotten is that Lost’s mythology is something that was introduced gradually over the course of the first two seasons. The first season was all about the characters from the crash; each episode focused on one character. If the show didn’t evolve from the first season, it would have become stagnant (like the early part of season 3.) If it started as the mythology-heavy show of later seasons, it may not have been around long enough to explore the mythology.
But over 5 seasons, the show has asked so many questions, that the final season will probably answer some questions that shouldn’t be answered and leave others open.
Myles McNutt, Cultural Learnings, The Scourge of Fandom: Why Lost Owes Us Nothing, “I tend to view fans who are basically threatening Lindelof and Cuse that they have to answer particular questions as the scourge of fandom. Lost is a show that very much invites fans to make their own theories, and I like that Lindelof and Cuse respect the audience enough to inspire their obsession. That’s why I find it disrespectful for fans to then take their theories and push them back on Lindelof and Cuse, as if the reason Lost’s mysteries exist is for us to solve them and then force the show to adhere to our ideas.”
James Poniewozik, Time: Tuned In Blog, My Favorite Episodes, and Yours
While Lindelof and Cuse expect to bring a satisfying conclusion that will end this show, Disney may want to do more with the franchise than just sell Dharma jumpsuits. What happens then? AfterLost? Lost: The Next Generation? Michael Schneider, Variety, Is ‘Lost’ here to stay?
Finally, Lost recapped by an extended Italian family:

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“I’ll be honest, I was a bit nervous before playing this show,” said Julian Casablancas from the stage Thursday at Terminal 5 before thanking the packed house again for the warm reception. Artists gain and lose popularity fast in music, so it may not have been too crazy for him to think people might not care about him or his old band The Strokes that much anymore. But an excited Terminal 5 audience dispelled any doubt. Perhaps music tastes can change, but New Yorker’s always welcome back one of their own.
Doors opened at 8 PM and by 9 PM opener Tanlines was keeping the growing crowd well entertained, mostly with their intense on-stage gyrations. Tweaking computers and keyboards they presented an aggressive dance sound. In contrast, Telepathe, who followed, emitted an intense racket that sounded like a wash of sound rather than finely crafted music. The duo’s similar sounding voices and monotonous songs barely excited the crowd, and a few of their offerrings ended with just a spattering of applause. The group looked a little dejected as they left the stage, but after 35 minutes of without much musical or visual excitement (they barely tried to engage the crowd), it was hard to feel guilty about the audience’s poor reaction.
The reaction was much different when the lights went down for the headliner. With his backing band hitting the stage first, Julian Casablancas strolled out in a slim black leather outfit to the jubilation of everyone in Terminal 5. Although it’s only been a few years since The Strokes played New York, the excitement of the moment was palpable, as was the moment when he began singing in his distinctive croon.
The band started off with “Ludlow Street,” one of the album’s slower tracks, and though it lacked some of the old world instrumentation of the recorded version, it came across well, as did the next song, the more up-tempo “River of Brakelights.” Casablancas took the chance to talk to the crowd a bit, spouting out a stream of expletive-laden thanks-yous to everyone for the warm reception. The casual banter would continue throughout the night, and flew off into such side roads as Casablanca’s admiration of Alicia Key’s contribution to Jay-Z’s “Empire State of Mind” (he would later sing a snippet of it as a ten-second final song of the night, backed only by drums).
Launching into single “11th Dimension,” the band was fully warmed up and the crowd was soon bopping up and down. Every once in a while throughout the night (in “River of Brakelights” and Left and Right in the Dark,” for example), the band hit a chugging groove and Casablancas voice hit that sweet spot towards the higher, more desperate part of his range. The effect recalled what was so great about the Strokes, and the crowd reacted as you would have expected (see the video below). But the other sounds Casablancas has explored proved popular as well. The crowd sang along with “Out of the Blue” and “Left and Right in the Dark.” Casablancas and company played a new, untitled song which felt energetic and a lot more raw than the album material.
Reports from L.A. told of an elaborate stage show, but there were no visuals or fancy costumes at this gig, just the band and Casablancas with minimal lighting effects. Still, the crowd ate it up, especially in the encore when Casablancas and his keyboard player came out to play a stripped-down “I’ll Do Anything Once,” a Strokes b-side (which he announced as a cover). A bigger surprise was the inclusion of the Kings of Leon song “Velvet Snow,” though admittedly it was one of the weaker songs of the night. Still, the singer seems happy to playing live in NY again, whether this solo tour is a diversion before a Strokes reunion or a long term gig.

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In the New York Times today, Bill Carter finds NBC Sports chairman Dick Ebersol clearly on Team Jay, saying,
“What this is really all about is an astounding failure by Conan.” Executive Leaps to Leno’s Defense.
But how much of Conan’s woes at the Tonight Show are caused by the creative failure of the Jay Leno Show at 10 PM?
Tucked away in this story from Joe Adalian at The Wrap is the one fact that I’ve been looking for, that Conan’s Tonight Show is actually outperforming Leno’s Tonight Show, when you account for the massive fall-off of lead-in: Ebersol: Conan ‘Chicken-Hearted, Gutless’ | The Wrap: “O’Brien’s down from the Leno era in the adults 18-49, losing Leno’s 15 percent advantage over Letterman. But local news numbers have dropped between 20 and 30 percent since Leno shifted to 10, which means O’Brien is actually not dropping as much as his lead-in.”
Even though Leno hosted the Tonight Show on a low-rated network last year, NBC’s slightly more creatively interesting 2008-09 schedule provided a much stronger lead-in to the late local news and The Tonight Show than the 5 night per week black hole of suck that is the Jay Leno Show.
But why do we care so much about The Tonight Show?
Firstly, it is the most established late night show and during the Carson era, it was the only late night talk show that mattered. Viewers have a relationship as much with the tradition and establishment of a show. Millions of Americans find something comforting about routine and being able to watch The Tonight Show while settling in to sleep. And given Leno’s popularity, we can only assume that for many people funny isn’t a necessary component of a comedy show.
Secondly, even though NBC is by far the least popular network of the four, it may still be the one with which television viewers have the most personal connection. NBC has a much more specific nexus with its location at 30 Rockefeller Center. Because The Today Show, NBC Nightly News, Channel 4 News, Saturday Night Live, Late Night and (fictionally) 30 Rock are all based there, there’s a feeling that NBC is an actual location with physical place and staff that all works together rather than a bunch of shows that happen to occupy the same frequency allocation on a transmitter. Secondly, more of its shows are long-running brands that have maintained the same core identity for so long that they have become institutions. Meet The Press is the longest running television show in worldwide broadcasting history, having been on the air continually since 1947. The Today Show has been on since 1952. The Tonight Show has aired continually since 1954. Saturday Night Live has aired since 1975 and Late Night since 1982. Only in two areas (evening news on CBS) and newsmagazine (60 Minutes)) do any of its competitors have longer running institutions than NBC.
Conan put his talk show up for sale on Craigslist.
What happened the last time NBC threatened to replace a Tonight Show host with another host from its network? In 1992, Bill Carter reported for the New York Times, Jay Leno Criticizes NBC On ‘Tonight’ Cliffhanger. We all know how that turned out.
It seems that Jimmy Kimmel is not a Leno fan. He did his Tuesday night show as Leno and then went direct as a guest on Leno’s show:

Myles McNutt, Cultural Learnings, Betrayal at NBC, Colon, What REALLY happened with my Late Night Show, Question Mark, by Conan O’Brien
Anne Helen Petersen, celebrity gossip, academic style, Team Conan: Nice Guys Finish First. Okay, well, kinda.
Lawrence Ebert, IP Biz, “The Tonight Show” controversy: do trademarks have a temporal dimension?. I’d say that since it has always aired after the late local news, The Tonight Show has come to mean NBC’s leadoff flagship and least-late of its late night shows.
James Poniewozik, Time Tuned In, Jay Leno: Seabiscuit or War Admiral

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With tonight’s debut of Community, NBC may now have their first Thursday comedy block where all four shows are actually worth watching. Perhaps without a huge dominant hit like Seinfeld, Friends, Cheers or Cosby, they can’t rely on sandwiching a piece of crap show between two big hits.
Or, at least, they will when 30 Rock comes back in place of the pointless, but not completely meritless SNL Weekend Update Thursday. The cold open, which imagined Michelle Bachman, Joe Wilson and assorted Republican crazies planning a group protest of the President’s speech to the joint session of Congress, but deciding to back out while Wilson took a bathroom break, was a relatively clever take on the meme, even though it may already be played out.
But with The Daily Show and the Colbert Report doing more incisive and edgier topical comedy every night, Weekend Update Thursday looks like the second rate fake newscast that it is. Even Amy Poehler can’t save this from being nothing more than an obviously cheap space filler until 30 Rock returns.
Amy Poehler’s other half-hour in Parks and Recreation, however, was funnier and had more of a sharp comedic point. Tonight’s episode, which dealt with backlash from a conservative activist when Poehler’s Leslie Knope married two penguins at the Pawnee Zoo without realizing they were both male penguins, kept Leslie from being too unsympathetic and oblivious.
Community may be the best comedy pilot I’ve seen in a while. I’m somewhat disappointed to understand that John Oliver won’t be a regular, as his character was consistently hilarious against McHale’s.

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Ahh, fall. The time of new beginnings. The new school year is picking up, 5770 is nearly upon us, and the new shows are coming back to TV in advance of the new TV season. So I’m going to attempt to get back into music/tv/pop culture blogging as a way of refreshing my writing chops, which have withered terribly recently. And hopefully being creatively wordier about other pop culture will get me over the writer’s block I’ve been having finishing the demos for untitled Andrew solo musical project 2008 2009.
This week, we start with some overviews of what’s in the TiVo and recent playlists. But first, here’s some of the blogging context that I’m drawing from for this revival of the site, meaning that I’ll skim through most of these feeds on most days:
A List of Things Thrown Five Minutes Ago – A mix of pop culture, filtered through some of the smartest bloggers and commenters on the web.
What’s Alan Watching – Sepinwall is the dean of the television blogosphere, starting with his own incisive analysis and continuing with the insightful and generally exceptionally well-behaved commentariat.
Tuned In – Time’s James Poniewozik covers not only narrative television, but also news TV.
Ken Levine – TV comedy writer. A couple of the shows he worked on were little ones, like MASH and Cheers.
The AV Club – TV and music covered extensively and thoroughly.
Ear Farm – The indie music scene in NYC and beyond. Although they try not to self-promote on the site, editors Matt and Mike are in two of Brooklyn’s finest bands: Goes Cube (Matt) and Mancino (Mike). I burned out on most of the music blogs I had followed, but Ear Farm is the one indie I keep in the mix.
Well, that and all of the various blogs from NPR – All Songs Considered, Monitor Mix, A Blog Supreme and Monkey See.
You can find me short-form blogging over at Twitter and a mix of short and long at andrewraff.com.

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The Twitters and the internets were all abuzz yesterday with shock and horror that Fox was going to again cut short the run of a brilliant Joss Whedon series and would be slicing away a bit of the souls of Joss’s fans. Fortunately, that’s not quite the case. Unlike with Firefly, Fox aired all of Dollhouse in the correct order. Unfortunately, part of the reason that the situations are different is that Dollhouse is not as fun or enjoyable of a series as the space-western hybrid. Dollhouse did become compelling with the recent episodes “Man on the Street” and “Needs,” but without the same immediacy and fun that kicked off Firefly.
So, what’s happening? Fox interprets the terms of the contract as their 13 episode order including the unaired pilot, while the production company made 13 episodes (exclusive of the original pilot) for the DVD distribution. See Sepinwall’s summary to understand where everything stands.
This sounds like it comes down to a contractual and bargaining issue between the network and the studio, more than a premature cancellation (ala Firefly, Pushing Daisies, etc.) If Fox does renew Dollhouse, I’m sure that “Epitaph One” will air at some point before the start of season 2. Or perhaps the brisk DVD sales of the show (for fans to watch the epitaph) will encourage the network to pick up the show for a second season.
Given that episode 12 is titled “Omega” and episode 13 “Epitaph One,” it seems that there won’t be many plot threads left dangling after episode 12, or cliffhangers that will be resolved in episode 13. The characters may be able to react to the events in the last act of episode 12.
Even if Dollhouse ends with this one 13 part story, does that make it a failure?
I think that single season 13-episode series (longer than a miniseries, shorter than a multi-season 22 episode series) can be great artistically. Lots of room for character building, but not too much time to get sidetracked and diverted from telling a single story. What if Whedon had the opportunity to tell a story every year for a few years in 13-episode chunks, with each year being a completely different story/series? I’d very excited to see what Whedon or one of the HBO Davids (Simon, Chase, Milch) could do with that type of creative concept.
To a large degree, David Simon’s HBO projects have all been in this style. The Corner and Generation Kill were mini-series. Season One of The Wire was essentially one story told from beginning to end (but did create a world that was opened up and explored in depth in the following four seasons, which were slightly less self-contained.)
Kings, which has been interesting, if not compelling viewing, will likely end up as a single 13 episode series (as NBC burns off the remaining episodes to lower ratings on Saturday night). How it stands on its own as a story remains to be seen, but this could be a model worth pursuing, at least from the creative perspective.

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While the Oscars prepare to celebrate the year’s best in films, it’s a reminder of the limits of the medium.
Brian Lowry, Variety, TV has the advantage in storytelling: “There are obvious parallels between ‘Mad Men’ — the AMC series that keeps amassing accolades despite what star Jon Hamm aptly referred to during the Screen Actors Guild awards as ‘dozens’ of viewers — and ‘Revolutionary Road,’ the star-driven movie that generated mixed critical response and largely missed out on major Oscar recognition. Yet in the differences resides a clue as to episodic TV’s advantage in tackling character-driven material.”
Willing Davidson, Slate.com, Great Book, Bad Movie “Why does Hollywood take our favorite novels and turn them into crap? …Three of the films that will be feted come Oscar night are based on recognizable literature. And while The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and The Reader are definitely terrible movies, Revolutionary Road is both the worst movie I saw this year and one of the best novels I’ve read.”
Film is an ideal medium for certain types of ideas, but not the complex storytelling with which television and novels engage their audiences. A serial television show usually has 13 or 22 hours per season to tell a story. In 13 hours, it’s much easier to engage with the characters than in the 2 to 3 hours of a film.
Fortunately, television auteurs now have the ambition to tackle visually complex and ambitious endeavors. HDTV has also helped to make the medium more engaging, dynamic and cinematic. While film may remain the more commercially successful medium, television may be joining literature as a more creatively successful medium.