New Season TV Thoughts (No Spoilers)

So the new seasons are upon us and our PVR is literally bursting at the seams.

So far...

Chuck: Yet another loser gets his brain filled with military secrets type things.  Actually, he said brightly, I quite liked it.  Not the best of the bunch but worthy low rent trash to cover up for Psych being off air.

Reaper: Kevin Smith does TV????  OMG, OMG.  Yeah, it's good.  I liked this.   Loser working in a Home Depot type store finds out that his parents sold his soul to the devil.  The Devil, amazingly good performance her by Ray Wise, and it's good to see Tyler Labine working too.  Kid gets pressed into working to recover souls who've escaped from hell.  Pet peeve, it's apparently set in Seattle.  Yeah, right.

Life: Cop serves 12 years for a murder he didn't commit and rejoins the force when let go.  This was a real winner for me, good acting (yet another Brit in a lead role), great pilot.  This was a real Veronica Mars pilot because it has it all.  There's a real mystery here, who framed him, why did they do it, who can he trust etc...  Great supporting cast including Adam Arkin and a Bentley.   

Bad Writing and the passage of time....

I've done a little screen writing and it's tricky.  If I'd stuck with it 10 years ago rather than actually moving my career up a notch I might, even now, be eeking a small living as a freelancer.  The rejection letters I was getting were quite promising, or so people who had made it were telling me.  But frankly, it was also ruining TV for me.  Even now I'll spot setups, I'll pulled a pained expression and mutter at bad dialogue or the blindingly obvious mis-use of the 3 act (occasionally 5 act) structure.  The same goes for movies, which brings me onto today's pet peeve.

We rented "Knocked Up" last night.  It joins the list of recent movies we didn't make it all the way through including the excrabable "I think I Love My Wife".  The concept is high, geeky loser gets a hot women who is drunk pregnant.  That's pretty much all their seemed to be to the movie.  Katherine Heigl from Greys Anatomy plays the "hot woman", she's hot, that's ok.  Suspending my disbelief that even monsterously drunk she'd have slept with the male lead.  Sorry, just not going to happen that way.  What I couldn't handle is the complete lack of any motivations for the character to actually have the baby.  There's absolutely no character development or explanation that this career TV woman who just got her big break is going to actually have the kid.  Nothing, zip, just a straight forward acceptance that she has no choice...

Another major problem I have is with writers, who are probably my age now, late 30s being about the age to be a hot young writer (unless you're in your early 40s) writing dialogue for much younger characters which shows a complete disregard for the passage of time.  The group of "24ish" losers are discussing something in terms of "Doc Brown" moments and explain to the woman that this is about "cranking up the Delorean to 88" and changing something you did wrong.

Back to the Future???  Dude, BTTF was on cinema release in 1985!  In other words, while they were babies.  The 3rd movie would have been around the time they were 6 or 7.  People my age think in those terms because the movies hit us in our teens, canvassing the guys that I work with who are roughly 27 and I get blank looks when I talk like that.  "Back to the Future?  Oh year, that's that movie with the guy who got parkinsons isn't it?"  

This happens in Grey's Anatomy too (which brings us nicely around to Heigl again) - there's a scene where Grey (the really rather annoying Ellen Pompeo) is looking for a new housemate but rules out a candidate because the woman didn't know who Spandau Ballet were.  Hmm... so Grey is meant to be a surgical intern, she'll have done a medical degree, qualified and moved into surgery.  All her co workers and co-interns are in the late 20s, which would be about the right age.  Why does she have the musical tastes of a woman 10 years older than she is?  A mystery no doubt.  I don't pretend to understand the taste in modern popular beat combos of the youth of today, but at least I'm not writing about and missing an entire generation of 90s music.

A quick IMDBing and I notice that Ms Pompeo appears to actually be from 1969 and therefore about a decade older than Ms Heigl.  I thought the make up looked a little strained.   Anyway, I digress, I need to go and watch the Grey's spin off "Private Practise" where at least the lead actress, the astonishingly beuatiful Kate Walsh (born 1967) is at least playing her age.

So, screen writers and others, when writing about popular culture filtered through the eyes of your characters - please remember that you maybe 30,40,50 (whatever) but your character isn't.  Even in science fiction you can't suspend disbelief if you're watching something where the cultural development appears to have stopped about the time the writer left university... 

Yet more WTF moments from Living in America

1. Baggers at Super Markets.

PLEASE STOP. NOW.

2. Thunderstorm simultations over the grocery counter.

I don't like picking up wet produce and trying to get it into a plastic bag.  It's icky and the water hides crap quality.  Stop it now.