Bat­tlestar Galactica

Another of the final episode of BSG airs tonight and I just can’t seem to get excited about it. Mostly because I don’t know which BSG I’m going to get. Is it going to be the excit­ing space adven­ture thrill ride from sea­son 1 or am I going to get the melo­dra­matic day­time tele­vi­sion space-opera the we’ve been see­ing way too much of. BSG was arguably once the most inno­v­a­tive, enter­tain­ing show on tele­vi­sion. It kept me tuned in by hav­ing cap­ti­vat­ing sto­ries and tak­ing great risks like rein­vent­ing Star­buck as a woman.  It brought the Sci Fi chan­nel to the fore­front of must-see-television with it’s docu-style cam­era work and rel­e­vant sto­ry­lines. BSG was a deep and nuanced alle­gory for what our nation was going through and how we deal with tragedy. The memo­r­ial wall of pic­tures was straight out of New York ala 911. BSG tack­led hard top­ics like can there be jus­ti­fi­ca­tion for tor­ture and intern­ment camps. If you’re a cylon, can you be held in cap­tiv­ity indef­i­nitely with­out trial? It was top­i­cal, rel­e­vant, and riveting.

Now it’s just a crappy soap opera set in space. More than that, it seems like BSG has lost its sense of pur­pose. Who am I sup­pose to be root­ing for? The cylons to break away and start a pure 13th colony? There’s no focus. The writ­ers strike really screwed them and every­thing in the new sea­son seems like an after thought. Every episode use to revolve around avoid­ing the cylons and sav­ing the human race. Now we get episodes that go on for an hour with just 1 plot point; where actors over act and char­ac­ters just talk and talk and talk. The prob­lem got really notice­able when they increased their num­ber of episodes to 22 and had to include a bunch of filler episodes. It’s like the writ­ers put it on cruise con­trol and just started steal­ing sto­ries lines from Days of our Lives. The mother of your child is really the daugh­ter of your long dead wife kind of stuff. Even worse, they’ve started ruin­ing all of my favorite characters.

Adama use to be the anti-hero we all wanted. Will­ing to make the hard deci­sions, he was a rebel who stuck to his old school prin­ci­ples and wouldn’t allow his ship to be weak­ened by tech­nol­ogy like the rest of the fleet. He was the kind of dili­gent cap­tain that we wouldn’t mind tak­ing orders from. Pres­i­dent Roslin was a wor­thy adver­sary who wouldn’t let her lack of expe­ri­ence stop her from jump­ing in the ring with the big dogs. Now Adama is a love struck pla­cat­ing pansy who’s let­ting his staff tell him to put cylon tech­nol­ogy all over his ship. And the Pres­i­dent is a new age spine­less lackey with no focus and no pur­pose who just wants to coast by to the end of her days doing as lit­tle work as pos­si­ble. To me, it seems that the char­ac­ter arcs of Adama and Roslin are actu­ally an alle­gory for the show and the show’s writ­ers.

Either way, my DVR will be the true gauge of how dis­ap­pointed I am with the show. I have already stopped record­ing Heroes and even with their big mar­ket­ing push dur­ing the Super­bowl, I still haven’t gone back. I will most likely stick with BSG because there’s only a few episodes left but, man …hope­fully these two char­ac­ters pull out of their slump in the last few episodes and hope­fully the writ­ers do the same.

So with­out fur­ther ado, here is my list of why BSG is really a soap opera in disguise:

5. Sworn ene­mies have became friends to fight against a for­mer friend but now are on the verge of becom­ing ene­mies once again. That doesn’t even make sense when I write it. All this melo­dra­matic flip-flopping, they’re try­ing to make the char­ac­ter lay­ered and deep but I just want cops and rob­bers, cow­boys and Indi­ans, good guys and bad guys. I want some­one I can root for. This goes the other way too, Boomer is now an ally?

Boomer

4. He’s really not your son, just another totally unmo­ti­vated rev­e­la­tion used to free Tyrol up to leave with the other cylons.

Galen Tyrol

3. Head trauma reveal­ing long lost mem­o­ries that affect the lives and beliefs of the characters.

Samuel Anders

2. Using a loose set of unmo­ti­vated cir­cum­stan­tial coin­ci­dences to bring back a dead char­ac­ter so that they can become the new con­niv­ing bad guy. This is like CLASSIC Soap Opera. “Ellen’s not really dead.  She’s come back by some strange twist of chance to be the new antagonist.”

Ellen Tigh

…and the num­ber 1 rea­son that BSG is a Soap Opera

1. The mother of your unborn child is really your daugh­ter. ” Really! REALLY! ?!?! Your daugh­ter is hav­ing your baby? I almost turned off the television.

Saul Tigh

Besides get­ting rid of the expo­si­tion, expo­si­tion, and more expo­si­tion which is an inte­gral ele­ment of soap operas, BSG is going the have to fix its sto­ry­lines to keep me tun­ing in. Noth­ing hap­pens any­more. Char­ac­ters just talk and emote. Where did all the plot points go? For that mat­ter, where did all the action go? I haven’t seen a real dradis con­tact in so long. Well, I guess that’s it. Read, enjoy, comment.

From the SNL comic duo Chris Par­nell and Andy Sam­berg that brought you Lazy Sun­day and Dick in a Box comes Jizz in My Pants.

This song par­ody …songody? …par­o­dong? This par­o­dong aired on Decem­ber 6, 2008 and although as funny if not more than the other two shorts, Jizz in My Pants still has not gained enough trac­tion to receive the title of “viral”. I would argue that this has to do with Hulu’s clamp­ing down on their videos being dis­trib­uted through YouTube. Lazy Sun­day and Dick in a Box did so much to bring buzz back to the long stale Sat­ur­day Night Live that if the execs over at NBC took their heads out of their asses for one minute, they’d real­ize that YouTube does more help than harm. I’m not even sure the above Hulu embed will still work by the time you guys are read­ing this. Hulu has been so incon­sis­tent with their video libraries it’s ridicu­lous, one week a clip is up the other week it’s gone. Now they’ve even pulled out from Boxee.

The whole viral phe­non­menon will not work if view­ers feel like they are being tricked by NBC into being pawns for NBC’s over­all mar­ket­ing strat­egy.  There is a cer­tain unspo­ken trust between sender and receiver; and as alruis­tic web denizens, we would rather not pass along unwanted adver­tiz­ing to friends who trust us to not lit­ter their inboxes with spam.

America’s Best Dance Crew

With only 2 more episodes left in America’s Best Dance Crew, who will be crowned Sea­son 3’s win­ner. I think it should be Quest Crew. They’ve been con­sis­tently clean, cre­ative with their rou­tines, and given over­all the­atri­cal per­for­mances. You could, for the most part, take them straight from the stage after one week of prac­tice and put them in a music video.

The ques­tion is, will Amer­ica vote for another Asian crew to be the win­ner. We’ve been buck­ing stereo­types for two sea­son with Jab­baWac­k­eeZ and a major­ity of Super Cr3w being of Asian descent. Now Quest Crew is claw­ing at a three-peat. They’re prob­a­bly the most sex­ual of the three crews and I for one am proud to have that type of rep­re­sen­ta­tion in main­stream media. It’s a hell of a lot bet­ter than those androg­y­nous clog­gers. But don’t even get me started on them.

It will be inter­est­ing to see if Amer­ica and the pro­duc­ers of ABDC let Asians dom­i­nate in an arena where main­stream Amer­ica prob­a­bly never knew we even had a pres­ence. But hip-hop danc­ing flows strong in our blood and is huge all over Asia. Japan­ese dancers are so ded­i­cated, they take the train in from the sub­urbs into Tokyo every night and prac­tice rou­tines using their reflec­tions in shiny sky­scraper win­dows. The trains stop at 1am so the B-boys and girls just prac­tice all night until the trains start again. Check out Planet B-Boy if you need fur­ther proof.

As a real­ity tele­vi­sion pro­ducer, I find it hard to watch real­ity tele­vi­sion with­out a cer­tain amount of cyn­i­cism. For that rea­son, I rarely watch real­ity shows. Short of Top Chef and Project Run­way, I stay away from most real­ity and have never even watched a full episode of that Amer­i­can tele­vi­sion main­stay Amer­i­can Idol. But some­thing about ABDC has kept me tun­ing in. There’s a lot of pas­sion in these crews and their desire to win shows. It’s the same for­mula as Project Run­way and Top Chef. You take gen­uine peo­ple with an uncom­pro­mis­able amount of deter­mi­na­tion and spirit, and you just let the camera’s roll. So you can bet, I’ll be watch­ing the finals and root­ing for Quest Crew.