Archive for the ‘Television’ Category
Monday night miscellany, part 4
In which I really mean it when I say I’m going to be (relatively) brief:
— As a left-handed person, I was morbidly fascinated to see a throwaway paragraph in a review of a book on left-handedness with a theory on the origins of the southpaw-dom that I hadn’t heard before. There are, researchers say, odd connections between left-handedness and twins:
Not only is left-handedness twice as common among twins as among regular siblings, but left-handers are twice as likely as right-handers to produce twins.This eerie link lies at the heart of another modern theory: … that “being a monozygotic [from the same zygote, or "identical"] twin is a precondition of being left-handed.” In other words, only someone who has had a twin in utero can be truly left-handed. The twins are mirror images of one another; one is left-handed, and the other right-handed. Of course, left-handedness doesn’t require that one ultimately be born with a twin. If only one fetus results at the end of term, that means the other died in the womb and was absorbed by the mother: a “vanishing twin.”
In other words, if you’re a lefty and don’t have a twin, it means you DID in the womb — but your twin embryo didn’t make it. Plenty of fertilized embryos don’t make it through the early stages of pregnancy, for whatever reasons, though scientists don’t know exactly how common this is. As the book (summarized by the reviewer) notes, there’s major reasons to doubt this hypothesis and a very real lack of evidence to back it up.
But in the absence of conclusive evidence one way or the other, I may run with this: being a lefty means I had an identical twin for a few days or weeks until he fell off the mortal coil. OR WAS PUSHED… (Hat tip to Andrew Sullivan.)
“Arrested Development” fans protest series changes
Fans of the cult classic television show “Arrested Development” went from ecstasy to agony Monday when series creator Mitch Hurwitz announced the revived show would have some significant changes from the original version many people came to love.
Among the changes for the upcoming TV season and movie include a laugh track, the addition of a new, computer-animated character, and a political subplot where eldest Bluth son Gob tries to persuade the U.S. Senate to get the American Federation of Trade to lift an embargo on Iraq.
“Arrested Development was a classic for its time, but technology has advanced since then and it’s time to take full advantage of what’s out there,” Hurwitz said. “This is the version of Arrested Development I always wanted to make but was never able to.”
Particularly galling for fans is the decision to introduce the Loose Seal as a fully animated additional character to the show. The CGI character’s bumbling exploits are designed to create comedy, and to drive home the point Hurwitz gave the Seal a goofy accent from voice actor Ahmed Best.
Game of Thrones Spin-Off Showcase
Spin-off. Is there any word more thrilling to the human soul?
Not long ago, the HBO network approached the producers of “Game of Thrones” with a simple request: 35 new shows to fill a few holes in their programming lineup. That’s a pretty daunting task. And the producers weren’t up to it. Instead, they churned out 12 “Game of Thrones” spinoffs, transferring already-popular characters into new locales and situations.
Here’s what’ll be soon coming to a pay cable station near you:
A story about a boy who hated stories (“Game of Thrones” mid-season analysis)
The Iron Throne. ("Game of Thrones" promotional image.)
Adapting a beloved work of literature for the screen can be a dicey prospect in the best of times. When you’re dealing with a television adaptation of a book written in part as a deliberate revolt against the constraints of television dramas, the pitfalls are quite evident. And that’s the precise challenge that HBO gave itself when it decided to turn George R.R. Martin’s fantasy series “A Song of Ice and Fire” into an epic miniseries.
Some of my friends, fans of Martin’s books, have found it difficult to accept the production, for not living up to their vision of the books. To them I say, you are entitled to your opinion, but you are nuts.
Others (even professional critics for august newspapers) have dismissed “Game of Thrones” based largely on an antipathy for the fantasy genre that Martin’s books and HBO’s adaptation loosely inhabit. Nothing can please everyone, but hopefully most people are capable of recognizing exceptional works regardless of genre classification. I’ve got minimal desire to read romance novels, but having read it I appreciate that “Pride and Prejudice” is an enjoyable masterwork. Maybe “A Song of Ice and Fire” isn’t on the level of Austen, or the doyen of fantasy literature, Tolkien (though some have argued it is) but the critical consensus seems that Martin’s intricate plotting and complex characterization far outclasses many of the mass-market series filling the fantasy and science fiction sections of libraries and bookstores.
Silence will fall — cleverly
The venerable but spry British science fiction television series “Doctor Who” has returned for another season — and judging by the opening pair of episodes, it’s going to be a doozy. Not, however, a doozy for the uninitiated.
The man responsible for the current season of Doctor Who is Steven Moffat, a British writer behind such British series as “Press Gang,” “Joking Apart” and “Coupling.” I haven’t seen any of them. What I have seen of him is his work as a writer and producer on Doctor Who, and the three-part “Sherlock” series he co-created (with another Doctor Who writer, Mark Gatiss). And from that corpus, the one thing you can say about Moffat is that he’s clever.
Even coming from me, “clever” isn’t an unambiguous compliment. It’s not the same as intelligent, though Moffat is that most of the time, too. By clever I mean that Moffat’s a fan of intricate plots, twists you don’t see coming but which in hindsight were telegraphed well in advance, writing that makes the audience scramble to catch up. You can see why he’s such a good fit for a modern-day revival of Sherlock Holmes, since Arthur Conan Doyle’s mysteries featured all those elements.
In Doctor Who, though, Moffat gets all the tools of science fiction to play with — and science fiction is even better territory than detective fiction for someone who wants to be clever.
April is the coolest month
With all due respect, T.S. Elliott didn’t know what he was talking about. Not only is April the month of my birth, the first month of consistent spring weather and the long-overdue return of baseball, but this particular April has a number of media releases I’m eagerly anticipating.
First up is the introduction of the HBO television series “Game of Thrones,” based on George R.R. Martin’s fantasy book. Martin’s been called the “American Tolkien,” but it might be more telling to call him a 21st-century Tolkien (for all that the first book was published in 1996). Plenty of people have noted the rise over the past decade of dark, morally ambiguous stories against the simpler morality plays of the past, and compared to Tolkien’s heroic magnum opus, Martin oozes dark and morally ambiguous. I won’t spoil anything for the uninitiated, but over his sprawling series, good people do terrible things, bad people do virtuous things, and success one day is no proof against the sudden reversal the next. And for all that Martin’s work is ostensibly fantasy, it’s light on magic and elves and heavy on the mud and muck of late-medieval Europe — the real Europe, and not the idealized Renaissance Faire version.
