tv: Dawson's Creek

Been watching Dawson's Creek.  I watched some of the show Don't Trust the B.. whatever it's called, and I decided that James Van Der Beak is the only funny part of that show.  They're always talking about Dawson's Creek on that show.  I also remember, the day after Dawson's Creek premiered, in my high school Chemestery class a bunch of my classmates were excitedly discussed it.  My parents didn't get the tv channel for it so I've never watched an episode until now.  Here's what a 30 year old thinks...

Honestly, the show is pretty mediocre.  The soundtrack is like a pop radio station of every single from the 90s.  Somehow they managed to pick the most annoying song for the opening credits.  Mostly the music annoys me.  It's a lot of girly emo songs.

The characters tend to speak in uncomfortably long sentences.  The producers emphasize expressive dialogue over expressive acting.  Though the acting isn't bad.  But the dialogue can feel stretched and forced.  And it sounds nothing like the way high schoolers speak, but maybe that's intentional.

Dawson's blond neighbor/girlfriend can be cute, but she's always on the verge of crying.  She reminds me of Meredith from Grey's Anatomy.  So I don't like her.  Every time Katie Holmes is on the screen I try to watch for her smiling or talking out of the left side of her mouth.  What was a slight quirk at this stage in her career would eventually blossom into a facial tick that ruined scenes of the Dark Knight.  Dawson himself is a bit annoying.  He spends more of his awake time talking than anyone I've known.  Constantly explaining things: how he feels, why movies are great, more of how he feels.  He never shuts up.  And his endless narration of nice-guy self reflection makes me want to punch him.  Pacy Pacie, whatever, is the most entertaining character.  Maybe the only believable one so far.  After lying to his lady-teacher about his brother being gay, and then sitting jealously at the same table while the brother asks the teacher on a date, his malicious smirk when he realized that his teacher was about to tell his brother "I know you're gay" was very well done.  Though that student/teacher romance plot was stupid.

How did the boyfriend manage to drive from New York City down to the bottom of North Carolina in 3.5 hours?  Maybe they had more relaxed speed limits and less traffic back then.

The show is easy to watch while doing something else and it's occasionally interesting.  For a show to watch while reading I'd give it a 8/10.  If you had to just sit and watch it with a child though, uh, 4/10.  (You could do worse for forced viewing.  You might be forced to watch a bunch of Dora the Explorer.  That would be downright painful.)

On rewatching Seinfeld

Often I rewatch episodes of Seinfeld.  It's a very rewatchable show.  The only problem with rewatching it is that many times just reading the episode title alone is enough to evoke the entire storyline in your memory.  For example: the episode "The Chinese Restaurant."  Just from the title you remember "Oh, that was the time everyone got stuck in a Chinese restaurant waiting for a table before a movie, and George is trying to call some girl but gets in a conflict with other people using the pay phone, and Elaine gets really hungry so Jerry bets her she won't take food off someone else's table."  I don't recall Kramar playing much of a role in that one.  It's not a bad episode, but it's so distinctly memorable.  No point in rewatching that one.

On the other hand, today I have a great moment when I watched the episode "the Robbery" and discovered that it's the one when Jerry and George argue about who should get a fancy new apartment.  I had naturally thought that this plot line was from the episode "The Apartment."  So if not that, then what really happens in the episode "the Apartment"?  A new adventure awaits!

tv: Justified

I'm lending Justified to Dave so I've been rewatching a few episodes while I have them out.

It's like the show takes place in a fantasy land.  The women are either very attractive or very unattractive.  The men are either slick and cool or total backwoods hillbilly crooks.  Either way, everyone is quite talkative.

I guess it's like the characters of The Dukes of Hazzard, fleshed out into three dimensions, and then thrown into a slightly more grimey and serious crime plot.  It still retains a zainy atmosphere somehow though.  And it is hilarious.  Maybe more like Disney's Apple Dumpling Gang than the Dukes of Hazzard.  Or how I remember the Apple Dumpling Gang from when I watched it as a child. 9.5/10.

Tv: King of the Nerds

I've watched 5 episodes of King of the Nerds now.  Over all: thumbs down.

First off, the nerdy kids are all too different.  Some are smart about a science, some know way too much about comics, and some just play video games.  There's also one guy who designs roleplaying games, which I didn't even know was something you could consider a skillset.  (What, no grammar nerds? No history re-enactment nerds?  No strategy gamers?) 

How can you throw all these people into a contest and give them all equal-ish chances to succeed?  You can't really, so each contest is shamelessly geared towards one or two people on each team.  For the team contests, that kinda works, and then for the individual faceoffs they make it totally, totally random.  There was one about remotely driving golf carts, and one about answering trivia but then throwing a huge dice down a hill.  They're either random or contrived by the writers to cater to a particular player.  But I guess it has to seem that way.  One of the comic book expert girls was sent to a comic book trivia round, but the questions were too obscure even for her.  (They were quite obscure.) Meanwhile her competetor had only read wikipedia articles online for a couple hours to prepare, but a couple of the questions came straight from her reading.

The strongest and the weakest player of a losing team are sent into a "nerd-off" where the loser is disqualified.  (Weakest is determined by the worst performance, and then the team votes for who else to send.  This results in the strongest player because everyone votes for whoever the think is the biggest threat.)  But the nerdoff is generally random stuff, so the strongest players were quickly disqualified.  By the fourth episode only the unskilled nerds were left.  (There was one hacker guy too, but I think they all must have known that there would be no computers-related challenges because nobody cared at all.  He had to try to sell himself as a problem solver.)

Among the contestants there was almost no drama or scheming.  At one point one guy told a girl that he wouldn't vote her off, but then he did.  Whoa!  She felt betrayed and cried a couple times, then he agreed to let her slap him and that settled things. (Every girl on this show cries and takes the competitions personally at some point. I wonder if nerd girls are more emotional or insecure than other girls.)

The first few episodes were the hardest to watch because the nerds have to justify their presence in the house, which means bragging about themselves.  For some of them it is very sad.  If the entire focus of your young adulthood has been video games or comic books, I can't help but think that you're wasting your life.  You don't have video games, you have nothing.  It's not something to be proud of.  It evokes mixed emotions when they announce that the next contest is going to be about comics, and the comicbook experts celebrate.

I'm sure there's worse stuff on TV but I'm still done watching this.